Exploring Man's Heart Of Darkness In The Theatre Of War

The Age

Thursday July 17, 2008

Greg Burchall

A play by the VCA's head of drama continues a fruitful collaboration, writes Greg Burchall.

THE horror. The horror. Richard Murphet bursts out of the tangled jungle of a gruelling rehearsal to find volunteer students stuffing envelopes to help publicise his own "big work show".

"I yell 'I hate theatre! Don't do it!' and they just laugh," he says.

As the head of the Victorian College of the Arts drama school, Murphet allows that he's "in battle mode" a lot of the time but says it's important for his students to see their chief go through the agony of creating something from scratch.

"There is pressure and I can tear my hair out and the work is important to me, but at the end of the day, we're not in Ethiopia," he says.

Or Vietnam.

The dread of being part of that nation's internecine war kept a young Murphet awake at night: join the Quakers? Go to jail? What would he do if he were conscripted?

Then he was.

"I knew I couldn't go, could not handle killing people, so I acted my way through my physical, but some big, tough sergeant knew it was an act and said: 'We don't want your f---ing kind in the army anyway' - so I was so damned lucky," he says. "But it's a sliding door thing: what if that had been my path?"

It's a dormant aspect of Murphet's life that has resurfaced since he began looking for a hook for the much-anticipated companion piece to his 2003 collaboration with Leisa Shelton, The Inhabited Woman.

In The Inhabited Man, which opened last night, Murphet is again working with Shelton, and like the earlier work, it explores the brain and psyche of somebody who lives in our time. It uses all theatrical devices at the duo's disposal - dialogue, movement, film clips and a soundtrack including original songs and those of David Bowie and Leonard Cohen.

The man in question is a Vietnam War veteran, a loner who's lost a leg, a wife, a son and a major organ. He works as a security guard at an anonymous motel.

There's also a couple whose presence and motives put him on edge. He feels it in his bones. It's in his nostrils. The old instincts kick in.

"He can't handle this," says Murphet. "He can't move forward without dealing with the past."

Woman - initiated by Shelton - explored similar tensions between past, present and tomorrow - in particular, the family-versus-career pressures that still bedevil a contemporary feminist woman.

Then it was Murphet's turn to ask what it was that inhabited him.

"It's a big work for me because of that," he says. "I'm trying to say something about what it is for me to be a man and what it feels like to be a man.

"The warrior archetype is a really key one for men and I have an empathy for those who have been in that warrior/protector role and then have to switch to being a father and lover and how all three things can get in the way of each other."

Murphet would love to present the two shows as a double-bill but has had to make do with development money for Man from the Arts Centre's Full Tilt program and funds from the Australia Council.

"The crazy thing with the funding bodies that we're stuck with at the moment is that you can't get money to remount a production," he says.

"They obviously have to make choices because there's not enough money to go around but it's a pity, I think, that you never get a chance to develop a work beyond that first grab, to make it richer and deeper."

The writer-director is more than happy, however, with casting Merfyn Owen as The Man. "He's a big, tough actor who refuses to move ahead unless he knows why he's doing what he's doing," he says.

"Merfyn's full of pain and anger himself, so he's perfect for it. I always had him in mind - I didn't want an 'actor', I wanted someone who could really embody it and that's what Merfyn does, he's right in there.

"That's probably why he doesn't get much work because directors find him really difficult."

Murphet insists he's not a difficult director; he's one who likes actors who are creative and make suggestions, rather than stand around waiting to be told where to go.

"I love that because it means we're engaged in this co-journey towards some unknown thing rather than me having all the answers in my head, because frankly I don't," he says.

Aside from taking time out in the early 1980s to run his own theatre company, Murphet has been involved with the VCA for 25 years. He continues to create his own work, the past 10 years in collaboration with Shelton (Dolores in the Department Store, Howard Barker's Wounds to the Face) and has mounted exchange productions with Flemish and Dutch companies, but the VCA keeps him inspired.

"I say I'm in battle mode a lot of the time, but I'm not actually having to (shoot) into someone's face. That's what freaked me out about Vietnam, that I'd have to kill people. I didn't want to have to go through the kind of brainwashing that would harden me to it.

"Melbourne's lucky to have this place - virtually all the independent theatre scene is made up of people who went through here.

"If they have Hollywood in their eyes it'll be kicked out of them very soon if they only want to sit and wait for the agent to ring. We train them to be creative, to make work for themselves."

The Inhabited Man, at Space 28, VCA, Dodd Street, Southbank, until July 26.

LINK

? www.theartscentre.com.au

? www.vca.unimelb.edu.au

© 2008 The Age

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