The Sketch: Olivier of Adelaide keen to stage political knifing

Christopher Pyne in question time.

It’s not just anyone who could turn the sound and fury of question time into an episode of Breaking Bard — but then Christopher Pyne isn’t just anyone.

Like confusion making his masterpiece, he recited a list of themes (aspiration, co-operation with business, and so on) then asked, “Does it sound a bit familiar?” With the stage thus set, Pyne leapt upon it.

“It is all contained in this speech,” he declaimed, hoisting aloft a copy of Anthony Albanese’s much-discussed oration. “This is the bloodied dagger, Mr Speaker, the bloodied dagger masquerading as a speech from the member for Grayndler, plunged into the chest of the Leader of the Opposition.”

Admittedly Pyne held the printout not so much like a weapon tendered as evidence in a murder trial, but like a black polythene bag dangling fragrantly from a dog-walker’s hand.

And yet the Shakespearean vision was irresistible: Pyne driven by the prophecy of Macbeth’s witches, hallucinating the regicidal blade. Close your eyes and hear it in his tones: “Is this a dagger which I see before me? The handle toward my hand?”

Had he followed the Scottish play’s script, MacPyne would have soon been confronted with a troubling possibility: “Or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”

Well, it can’t have been that — it was so nippy in Canberra yesterday some of the frost adorning lawns in the morning was still there in the afternoon.

“I see thee still,” MacPyne would have continued, “and on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, which was not so before.”

(He seemed less likely to be thinking about Brutus’s line to Antony: “I, that did love Caesar when I struck him.”)

The Bard homage was less obvious as Pyne painted this fanciful portrait of Albanese: “Using the traditional tactics of the guerilla jungle warrior, appearing and then disappearing again. It is OK, we’re not going to let him disappear from view, we are going to make sure the member for Grayndler stays front and centre like a ninja warrior.” Crouching tiger, unhidden Albo.

But eventually, the call of the Bard reasserted itself.

“I think it is going to be a long and cold winter for the member for Grayndler,” Pyne told the house, surely bearing in mind Richard III’s reminder even a winter of discontent can be made glorious summer.

Alas, like many of Shakespeare’s characters, Pyne’s time was brutally finite. “And I table this speech,” he concluded with a flourish. “This bloodied dagger masquerading as an address.”

Or as Macbeth would have put it: “I go, and it is done.”

Then, like an Adelaide Olivier, Pyne exited stage right.