"All I want is to chronicle the last screams of a dying world," says Yael Stone's Louise in the last Act of Belvoir's new production of Stephen Sewell's early play The Blind Giant Is Dancing. And so says the play, an exploration of the end of an economic and political era, and the start of a new one (our current one), the spectre of late capitalism leaking into the functioning of our political system.
It's a distinctly Australian play, unapologetically so, set in 1980s Australia against a backdrop of music from Blondie and perfectly naff costumes, designed by Dale Ferguson. Following Allen Fitzgerald (Dan Spielman), a social economist, as he is corrupted by power, the play moves relentlessly forward towards economic neoliberalism, as the 'country blows away' in a time of crippling drought, the characters (Allen included) and their fiercely held principles disintegrating, shifting and changing as capitalism does. It's a story about power, sex, greed, love, individualism — but it also sparkles with a sense of possibility, an alternative offered by an equally problematic socialism, by feminism, collectivism, social change and union activism. While cynical there is also a small undercurrent of hope, best presented on stage by the change in Allen's brother Bruce, a worker empowered (Andrew Henry).
This production has been brought to the stage by the keen, unwavering eye of new Artistic Director Eamon Flack, as assisted by the production design of Ferguson — a pixelated screen angled centre stage, able to provide setting, flashing up our location, able to become a wall, a barrier. It's sparse but also apt — the focus here is on the ensemble, the rapidfire dialogue, relationships coming together and disentangling concurrently. Spielman and Stone engage in the fiercest arguments, emotion and the pressure of a progressive lifestyle against old social values coming to a head, and their dynamic makes the play intensely watchable, as does that between Spielman and Zahra Newman as journalist Rose Draper, and between Spielman and Geoff Morrell as Allen's political rival Michael Wells.
The Blind Giant Is Dancing is an electric, unmissable piece of theatre.
