Wake in Fright’s bravura finds new currency

If you only know Wake in Fright from its screen adaptations, Kenneth Cook’s original novel is a shockingly modern thing.

Zahra Newman in Wake in Fright. Picture: Pia Johnson.

If you know Wake in Fright only from its screen adaptations, Kenneth Cook’s original novel is a shockingly modern thing. It has none of the malevolence that defines the 1971 movie and 2017 miniseries remake. Instead, there is a pervasive sense of moral anxiety.

John Grant — the educated, worldly and oh-so-superior graduate teacher at a one-room school a thousand clicks west of Sydney — finds his civility is a veneer.

Grant is undone by the kindness of strangers and his own terrible lusts. The strangers wine him, dine him and bed him in the best little place in the world: the Yabba. All it will cost him is submission: the defeat of his aspirations and individuality.

Declan Greene’s remix of the story plays fast and loose with the decades, mixing student loans with pounds and shillings; the beer is in pints and the temperature is in Celsius. It’s an adaptation heavily influenced by turn-of-the-millennium music and video. Darude’s Sandstorm plays, pre-show. Greene references the chase scene in the video for the platinum-selling 1999 single and the image of the city boy running down a dusty road, rifle in hand, from the miniseries. The spotlit rape scene in this production is pure Aphex Twin. Or, rather, Chris Cunningham’s videos of Windowlicker and Come to Daddy. And when actress Zahra Newman gobs the microphone, we can’t help but think of Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O trying to swallow hers.

Zahra Newman in Wake in Fright. Picture: Pia Johnson

Grant’s gambling and drinking spree is rendered as nightclub dance. He’s a rutting Dionysus on MDMA.

Like a great music video, Greene’s production is a multifaceted work of art in its own right, an aural and visual fantasia responding to another work of art.

Even as it runs the musical gamut from B to B flat — from mystical hurdy-gurdy drone to the blare of a vuvuzela — the original music, by Melbourne audiovisual duo Friendships, is compelling. And impelling.

Greene literally loses the plot in the final third of the show, but it’s anchored by the solo performer and co-creator Newman.

Her lived experience of being an outsider in Australia — with her “modern skin” and hard-to-place trans-Pacific accent — gives the production a grandeur and an unassailable authority. Just as Grant risked making mortal enemies when he mocked the Yabba, Newman tells of an encounter with an Uber driver from Broken Hill who bristled and then froze when his (young, female, coloured) passenger dared to talk about children sick from lead poisoning.

Newman acts with extraordinary verve and agility, a thousand expressions at her beck and call. I try to be as sparing as possible with the word bravura, but Newman’s acting is a definition of it.

Wake in Fright by Declan Greene. A Malthouse Theatre production. Beckett Theatre, Melbourne, June 26. Tickets: $72. Bookings [phone] or online. Duration: 70min, no interval. Until July 14.