Showing It How It Is

David Williamson is a great of Australian theatre, his 1971 play The Removalists a benchmark work that saw suburban Australian culture put under the microscope for perhaps the first time on stage. What emerged was a confronting commentary on the darker currents that underpin the Aussie myth of larrikinism, domestic violence and police corruption.

In the midst of directing Toby Schmitz's I Want To Sleep With Tom Stoppard last year, Leland Kean found himself playing the larrikin one night, and “over a few cans” he was soon discussing the work of Williamson with an old friend, the playwright's son Rory. What emerged was Kean's desire to direct Williamson's working-class wonder.

“David came along and saw …Stoppard and we kind of sat down and had a chat afterwards,” Kean explains the next serendipitous step that led to his programming of The Removalists in the Tamarama Rock Surfers 2013 program. “You know a lot of the issues in The Removalists are things that I've experienced in my own life; the elements of domestic violence and police brutality are both things that have personally affected my family and affected me in stages of my life. And in the conversation that I had with David we got talking about how rates of domestic violence are on the rise, that a lot of the issues that he was addressing in 1971 are as relevant if not more relevant today, 40 years after the play was written.”

In continued dialogue with Williamson, Kean uncovered the uncomfortable realisation that far from being resolved, these issues that first graced Australian stages in the 1970's analysis of suburbia in Australia, of the Australian male, that culture and the ideas of misogyny were as troubling as ever. Kean resolved not to contemporise the production, but to set it in period.

“Seeing what happened last year – the shock jocks, the Prime Minister and the misogyny speech, what we saw during Mardi Gras this year with a number of brutal police actions on people watching the parade – what I wanted to put on stage was something that was really set in the period that audiences could come to and sit and watch and go, 'Oh, haven't we moved on? Haven't we got more civilised than we were in 1971?'And then to go, 'Well no, we haven't'.

“On the face value things have changed, equality has changed, the position of women has changed, but if you look at some of the things that have happened, particularly on a political level, you scratch under the surface and you see that these issues are still there, they are as relevant and as problematic in our suburbs today as what they were in '71. It was about setting it then and getting that echo on the audience, 40 years later these things are still here,” says Kean.

This year also marks a shift for TRS, no longer in residence at The Old Fitz and programming for just one venue. For Kean, the company's artistic director, The Removalists was not only a chance to show the script's resonance with social issues, but also to celebrate the lineage that inspired the company.

“TRS are so committed to new Australian work and new Australian voices and putting that work on stage so it was really nice to give a bit of a nod historically to one of our most iconic playwrights in that period of time that produced what ultimately the Rock Surfers are kind of the end result of, that energy that came out of the '70s.”