drama
Thérèse Radic
Scott Rankin & Leah Purcell
Box the Pony
Hodder Headline Australia $19.95pb, 147pp
07336 1069 2
LEAH PURCELL HAS toured her one woman show, Box the Pony, around
the country to universal acclaim, and I am not quoting the
irritating publicity hype which unashamedly accompanies the
review copy of the text, which is co-authored with
writer/director, Scott Rankin. The pair are festival feature
players, Purcell as a mesmerising performer and Rankin as a maker
of deft community theatre. Purcell's song, 'Run Daisy Run', which
she sang in Brisbane's Street Arts' production of Through Murri
Eyes, is now the unofficial anthem of the stolen generation. Its
performance led to her being cast in Jimmy Chi's musical Bran Nue
Dae in 1993, to Sydney and television parts and, in 1997, to the
production of Box the Pony in the Sydney Opera House's Festival
of the Dreaming.
Purcell is an Aboriginal Australian with a Queensland mission
background. This is her story as told through her stage persona,
Steff. Between them Rankin and Purcell have pared it back to
theatrical essentials, crafting its language to fit the ear
unfamiliar with Aboriginal argot without sacrificing either the
blood red of the language or Purcell's quick-silver Murri-woman's
humour. Every word of it challenges both the performer and those
performed upon.
On stage this is confronting theatre, raw, direct, deceptively
and deliberately loose in form, repetitive in its returns to
select points of memory. shocking and necessary in what it
reveals and a kaleidoscope of characters -- eighteen in all,
counting the cows. As a text it loses both the colour of a
particular performer and the sound of the songs that are used as
bridges as well as commentary. Not even the extraordinary number
of murky photos of Purcell in action that sit opposite every page
of the text can fill in the blanks.
What remains is the powerful story of Steff, a survivor if ever
there was one. Steff is the youngest of seven children, her
mother an alcoholic black woman, her father a white man with a
white wife and family. She survives poverty, alcoholism,
violence, racism, the self-destructiveness of a dysfunctional
family, too-early motherhood, a stint at the slaughter-house, and
a suicide attempt, at last escaping to the big smoke and success
as an actor-singer-dancer. Ever the optimist, Steff has all the
makings of a Pollyanna. She is saved by the acerbic wit and
contempt for the melodramatic that lie at the core of the piece.
Just one example -- the Dickensian slaughter-house episode in
which Steff finds herself packing the newly butchered pony she
used to ride to freedom. The metaphor of boxing, at which Steff
is adept --there's a punching-bag on stage that has an all but
speaking role --and boxing up the days and dreams of freedom in
the packing room to which she has been condemned along with the
pony, create a dramatic minefield. Purcell and Rankin lay it down
carefully, neatly defuse its melodrama with wry laughter, then
reintroduce the still living horse in order to have it run
Steff's suicide car off the road to safety and a new found
freedom in flight of a different kind. Structural double-takes abound.
Reading a play is a special skill, akin to visualising a three-dimensional building from an architect's blue-print. Unlike the novel, it requires the reader to recreate and place the characters through language alone, without the prompt of description.