The Blind Giant is Dancing review: Tale of corruption a House of Cards for the stage

THE BLIND GIANT IS DANCING
Belvoir, February 17. Until March 20
★★★★

The nature, tone and subject of political debate has shifted profoundly since Stephen Sewell wrote The Blind Giant is Dancing and some elements of this 1983 drama have acquired a patina of nostalgia. Nevertheless, this blast from the past still resounds very powerfully.

Dan Spielman and Geoff Morrell in The Blind Giant Is Dancing.Credit: Brett Boardman Photography

While some references have lost their pungency, Sewell's story of political apostasy and the corrupting effects of power remains essentially timeless. References to Kissinger and Nixon, to the economist Piero Sraffa, to Pinochet and CIA plots mark the play as one of its time, but don't limit our engagement, any more than swordfights and talk of magic hamper our ability to be enthralled by Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Sewell's focus is Marxist economist and left faction mainspring Allen Fitzgerald (Dan Spielman, a former Macbeth, incidentally, having played the role for Bell Shakespeare in 2012). In short, the play charts Allen's rise to power and his abandonment of socialist and, eventually, all principles.

At the same time, Sewell asks us to consider the ways in which relationships between men and women, workers and bosses and fathers and sons are warped by what Allen eventually concedes to be, "the appalling beauty of capitalism … it creates the illusion of our freedom ... it makes us think we can change it or alter it – that we create it. But that's not true. It creates us. It makes our desires and our thoughts ... it employs us to maintain and expand itself."

Played before and occasionally behind a wall-sized pixilated screen that can be made glaringly solid or semi-translucent at the flick of a switch, Eamon Flack's spare production (designed by Dale Ferguson, who is also responsible for the sharply observed costumes) moves at an impressive clip.

Punctuation arrives in the form of composer Steve Toulmin's blaring interstitial fanfares and two short intervals, which break this near three-hour story into digestible chunks. Audiences accustomed to binge-watching House of Cards will find Blind Giant a not wholly alien experience.

There are times when Sewell's dialogue can feel capital-lettered or sound like courtroom cross-examination, but after a tentative start on opening night, all in Flack's 11-strong cast deliver it with nuanced feeling.

Supporting characters pop sharply into focus when called on: a shadowy American advisor, Carew (played by Michael Denkha); a cheerily loathsome banker Bob (Ben Woods); Allen's mother Eileen (Genevieve Lemon) and brother Bruce (Andrew Henry), a young steelworker who, up to this point, has lived quietly in the shadow of his father Doug, a reactionary salt-of-the-earth patriarch whom Russell Kiefel – a veteran of Neil Armfield's 1995 Blind Giant – plays superbly.

Ivan Donato is fiery and convincing as the shopfloor organiser Ramon, a Chilean exile. Zahra Newman ranges from professionally cool to dangerously compromised as a business journo drawn into a web of politics, criminality and sex. Geoff Morrell executes the role of Fitzgerald's nemesis, corrupt party secretary Michael Wells, perfectly.

Yael Stone develops an increasingly strong presence as Louise, Allen's activist wife and Spielman makes riveting theatre of Allen's slow corruption and transformation into the kind of power-for-power's sake political operator he once despised.