Queensland Theatre gets off on the wrong foot for season 2021

This play is so long that there were two intervals and if I hadn’t been reviewing it I would have left after the first, writes Phil Brown.

Queensland Theatre’s Our Town. Picture: Pia Johnson

Well that’s three hours of my life I will never get back. Three tedious hours of American twaddle served up as Queensland Theatre’s season opener. It left me with a question ringing in my ears as I ran from The Bille Brown Theatre ...why? WHY?!?!?!

Our Town by Thornton Wilder is an outdated and delusional fantasy of small town American life as it has almost certainly never existed. It’s riven with folksy and ostensibly loveable characters who are all crushing bores. I think we all need a bit of a reality check.

I mean if you were going to do a play about how small town America really is now you would have to have characters that included QAnon supporters, white supremacists, religious bigots and broken-down war veterans.

This version is directed by Queensland Theatre’s artistic director Lee Lewis and I know she has lived in the US and is obviously taken with the place but I think we need to move on from seeing the USA as some kind of paragon of democratic virtue. We now know it’s not and that it has a habit of seeing itself in unrealistic terms. Like in Thornton Wilder’s play.

Queensland Theatre’s artistic director Lee Lewis.

Our Town was written in 1938 and is described as “a metatheatrical three act play” that tells the story of the fictional American small town of Grover’s Corners between 1901 and 1913 through the everyday lives of its citizens.

Wilder sets the play in the actual theatre where it is being performed. The main character is the stage manager, a character that has been played in the past by none other than Paul Newman. In this instance it’s Queensland actor Jimi Bani and he’s the highlight of the play for me. He has a warm and convincing stage presence and I could listen to the cadence of his voice for hours. That’s lucky because I had to.

He directly addresses the audience, brings in guest lecturers, fields questions from the audience and fills in playing some of the roles. The play is performed without a set on a mostly bare stage and the actors help him bring the characters of the town to life.

It won a Pulitzer Prize and it’s a firm favourite in America but this is Australia and it’s largely irrelevant to us. And if I wanted a drama about the life of a small town I would go for Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.

So why are we starting our season with this dated American soap opera?

David Williamson was there on opening night last night and I reckon he would have had material in his notebook that would have been more compelling.

And to have to sit through three hours of this piffle! Who wants to sit in a theatre for that long in these COVID times?

There were two intervals and if I hadn’t been reviewing it I would have left after the first.

I ran into someone at that first interval who rolled his eyes and concurred with my assessment. Like me he was fast losing the will to live.

The best thing about Queensland Theatre’s production Our Town is the cast. Picture: Pia Johnson

Of course people have different views. I ran into someone in the second interval who loved it and was shocked that I didn’t. Apparently I have no heart.

But I just can’t see the point of doing this turgid play now, not when there are so many great Australian plays out there.

And it’s a shame to waste such a wonderful cast. It’s a who’s who of our theatre world. Bani out front supported by Libby Munro, Hugh Parker, Roxanne McDonald who is the comedic star of the piece, Andrew Buchanan and others. I mean these are some of our leading thespians.

It was also a treat to see musical theatre star Amy Lehpamer making her Queensland Theatre debut and wonderful that she got to sing a bit.

You can see that I’m grasping at straws, can’t you?

I will admit, however, that despite the first two acts being unremittingly twee, mawkish and downright boring the last act, which was about death was, ironically, a tad better. But even in their graves the characters were still banging on until the end when they were finally and thankfully all dead and the play was over. Hallelujah.

Our Town is on at the Bille Brown Theatre until February 27; queeslandtheatre.com.au