Proud

When we enter the theatre that sentimental and self-serving song, ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ is playing – setting up the question, what is home these days?

Jack (James Starbuck) is a naïve young man in the suburbs.  He is our Narrator, and he brings all other characters to life in this monologue.

Jack looks up to his older brother George.  Both revere their grandfather, Poppy, a WWII veteran who – for undisclosed reasons – never wears his medals and keeps his service revolver in a locked shed...  Dad cleared out, but the brothers are happy growing up and they love playing ‘soldiers’. 

Then something unthinkable happens: George marries Jenny, a ‘migrant’ (ethnicity unspecified) and the wedding happens in George and Jack’s – and Poppy’s – back yard!  The bride’s ethnic family crowd into the space.  Surprisingly, this is the first time Jack, Poppy, and George and Jack’s mother (a shadowy figure) have met Jenny...  Racist Poppy takes George aside and tells him off – and a disorientating chasm opens between the previously loving brothers.  Not surprisingly, George – always characterised by Jack as solid, calm and rational - stays away.  Jack is isolated, lonely.  Everything’s changed.  Who’s to blame?  Her!  It’s all her fault.

So begins Jack’s slide into the embrace of the ’Proud Brothers’ – a neo-Nazi, White Supremacist, Australia First group, now frequently on our streets, draped in Australian flags.  But possibly - and unfortunately – if the slide feels easy, it’s because playwright James Watson withholds some of Jack’s explanatory character traits (his childhood was not so happy) until Jack is well and truly in the foetid embrace of the Proud Brothers, especially their charismatic leader – who supplies simple answers to Jack’s confusion – as well as sensing that Jack is someone he can use. 

The writing here is on the money: Watson shows the manipulations and misdirection that fascists play on to exacerbate rage – false answers to real problems.  Like how ‘they’ are taking ‘our’ country from us.  That rings a bell with Jack: Jenny took his brother away from him...    

These transitions and interactions are a real challenge for James Starbuck – and he handles them well.  As Proud is a monologue, Starbuck must play the increasingly febrile Jack and, say, the confident authoritarian fascist.  Starbuck plays Jack as an initially aw shucks seemingly appealing young bloke, but the catch is that he can seem suddenly merely stupid.  That’s not especially interesting or engaging.  What Jack’s really mourning is the incomprehensible loss of his brother to The Other but that seems – in the place where it comes in the monologue – not enough.

In other words, Watson has the forces at play in his grasp, but he structures them in such a way as to weaken tension.  He wants, I assume, to show us how a nice boy can become a fascist – something like what Sartre more subtly did in Childhood of an Anti-Semite.  Jack’s becoming a fascist might much better be a pay-off if the factors underlying it were set up earlier – just as hints. 

By the end, as Watson pushes Jack to murderous rage and possible insanity, it feels contrived.  Watson wants to warn us about the appeal of fascist ideology – that’s obviously a legitimate and good intention – but to do that, the text needs some cause-and-effect restructure and a greater emphasis on the role of Poppy, say, (why does he never wear his medals?  Shame?) – or the absent father – and even to the extent of trapping us into almost agreeing with the fascist leader.  The One Nation vote is increasing.  Proud is a passionate and deeply serious play but it needs to dramatise why at greater depth.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Emelia Williams