Plays

‘It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare’

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WHEN a middle-aged boy player returns to London’s Globe playhouse during a terrible revival of Romeo and Juliet, she sets off a chain of events as great as any of Shakespeare’s entertainments, revealing a love story that lay hidden for decades, just beneath the lines of the script.

Centuries later, an out-of-work Sydney actor connects the dots of this drama and is inspired to write a play, bringing him face to face with big life lessons in the art and politics of storytelling.

The lives of these two unconventional players collide in a journey from Australia to England, from drama school to the professional stage, from male to female, from failure to success and back again, exploring the untold story of those who created the complete works of William Shakespeare.

An extract from Merely Players: Acting like Shakespeare really matters.

“Masters, I have seen a man out of his clothes before, and not tried to make him mine.”

I go back to the place I have made for myself by the rack. Master Burbage sulks while the others begin to peel doublets over expanded bellies, revealing sweaty waists and backs. I notice Heminges undoing his hose on the other side of the rack, trying to conceal himself.

‘Masters, I have seen a man out of his clothes before, and not tried to make him mine, but if you’d be more comfortable hiding your glorious forms, I can wait upstairs,’ I say.

‘Nay, your place is down here with us. We’re not going to make a fuss about Master Tooley, now are we?’ Heminges asks.

Condell shakes his head.

‘Perchance you just sit by the steps and tell me if you can spot any printer’s boys in the crowd,’ Heminges adds.

‘You’re letting printers into the playhouse now?’ I ask, crossing to the stairs.

‘Much has changed since you were in the playhouse, Master Tooley. They’ll have real women playing soon enough,’ Condell says.

‘Don’t believe him, it will never happen,’ Master Burbage mutters into his lap.

‘And there’s never a rehearsal for the bit players, because there’s no lines apart from whatever you can drag up from within your receptacle,’ Condell adds, tapping the side of his head.

I search the ceiling by the stairs, where that larger crack allowed the light to fall onto my mirror when I arrived. Three steps up, the view of the stage reveals itself.

The sun has dipped below the highest gallery of the playhouse, where people sit talking and eating, some asleep against pillars or calling down to others in the pit.

I glance back into the darkness below, to see Condell rushing to get his wide arse back into a fresh pair of hose before I can see him.

‘It won’t be much of a play, without all the lines,’ I say, eyes back on the crowd.

‘We all know how the stories go, just follow the patterns,’ Condell says, ‘you enter, you wait and you listen, then you throw in a line or two which you think sounds right according to your part. Make it a rhyme, if you have the time. Keep it short, or have some sport … it doesn’t have to be Shakespeare.’

‘We don’t do too many old plays by Master Shakespeare,’ Heminges adds, emerging fully clothed from behind the rack, ‘not these days, because whenever we do, the printers send a pair of their pock-faced boys to sit up the back and scribble down our words as best they can. By the time they go to print with it, Will’s best poetry sounds like a madhouse ditty!’

Judging it safe to take my eyes from the stage, I say: ‘I might have been away from this playhouse for many years, Master Heminges, but I do recall you once had a grand plan to print all the plays of Master Shakespeare’s in the one book.’

“While you’re on the stage, duckie, perchance you work out what it is you did come back for.”

‘I did, but then one player of this playhouse took it upon himself to sell the contents of his receptacle to a printer, and when the little books of Master Shakespeare’s became so popular no printer was interested in paying for our plays anymore, they were only interested in stealing more of them. If I ever discover which player it was I’ll hang him by his balls from the top of this playhouse, but I could never catch him at it. I always thought it had to be a player who disappeared from our playhouse, and never dared show his face back here again,’ Heminges says.

I glance down at them, three pairs of eyes, looking into me.

Before I can say anything, a sudden round of trumpets announces the play. The crowd explodes into applause.

‘We’re off!’ Condell says.

‘No-one is listening to you prattle, Heminges, ready yourself,’ Burbage says.

‘I have, but where is my Lady Montague?’ Heminges asks, offering the hat and veil to me. I don them without thinking, and reach for the sliver of mirror in my basket, by the steps, the light from the stage falling across my aged face.

‘Oh dear … I am not ready for this,’ I say, pulling the veil tight and slipping it under my chin.

Heminges takes my arm in a strong grip. ‘You’ll soon be, duckie. A player who does not play has no place in a playhouse!’ he says, as we ascend into the light.

Performance rights for Merely Players are available via the ePlay rights page.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved

My Story, Rural Childhood

A Myall in my shoes

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A Writer on Australia’s Frontier Wars.

IT has taken me a lifetime to get back to Myall Creek, a typical watercourse that traverses a remote country road like thousands of others in NSW’s New England district.

Here, between the towns of Delungra and Bingara, a corrugated iron hall by a long-disused pair of tennis courts has been a place of dances, Christmas parties, cricket meets and a century of community gatherings.

As kids, me, my siblings and school friends played on iron swings that were already old by the time we clambered over them, while our parents enjoyed social tennis.

On the sidelines between one of those matches, my mother parked herself next to me on the swing in her tennis whites and told me a story. 

SWING
LIFE SWINGS The tennis courts at Myall Creek Hall (Photo: Michael Burge).

She gestured along the creek that snaked its way close to the shed, across a field dotted with pepper and willow trees, and whispered how, long ago, white settlers had driven Aboriginal people over the edge of the gully to their deaths.

The injustice in her tone got my attention, but also her reticence to tell me publicly. In all the years since, I have wondered if she’d been told about this crime, casually, over a lemon barley water on the other side of the court, when some long-term local updated this city girl on the region’s history.

Mum got essential details wrong at that first telling, but what she told me remains one of the most indelible events in Australia’s Frontier Wars – the Myall Creek Massacre.

Life took my family away from the New England region less than two years later. Over the decades, we drove across Myall Creek many times travelling to family events, never stopping.

“Now, the dead are ready to have us remember them.”

But the story of the massacre stayed with me, cropping up in school projects and writing efforts. Eventually, I did some research at Sydney’s Mitchell Library, and read for myself the newspaper accounts of the Myall Creek Massacre trials, replete with the often quoted, eye-popping racist responses from readers incensed at the white perpetrators being bought to justice.

The day I return with some of my family for the annual June Long Weekend Myall Creek Memorial, the paddocks around the hall are full of cars. 

I find my way back to the tennis courts, now covered by grass. The swings are still there. I spy the bridge over the creek, and the same gully my mother gestured to almost forty years ago.

By the time the crowd has moved up to the memorial site itself, it’s as though we cannot help but stand in racial groups. There is a hesitation about mingling. We don’t know anyone else. They don’t know us. We’ve all returned to Kamilaroi country because we remember.

Two Aboriginal men, helped by their kids, light a fire for a smoking ceremony. The sound of boomerangs being clapped together calls Aboriginal dancers into action. Smoke rises, wrapping around us, bringing us together.

SMOKE
WELCOME TO COUNTRY Smoking ceremony at the start of the Myall Creek Memorial (Photo: Michael Burge).

The air is heavy with a scent that wakes us into joining the respectful queue that forms at the head of the track leading into the memorial, and hands reach up to draw the white paint across our foreheads.

Now, the dead are ready to have us remember them.

The Myall Creek memorial is a short walk through scrubland typical of the region, with its basalt soils – chocolate-brown and ochre red – and the knee-deep sea of sandy coloured grass, lapping between stands of trees.

It’s also granite country. Small boulders lie everywhere, like markers, and as we walk, school students, some of them Aboriginal, read the plaques set into the stones while we progress.

Each tells part of the story of the killing of 28 unarmed Aboriginal women, children and old men in June, 1838. Most were felled by swords after being chained together, one chapter of the long conflict between European settlers and Aboriginal people.

The track leads us to the massacre site, a massive boulder set on the edge of a high place overlooking the remnant of the old Myall Creek Station.

In the distance, cattle feed and call. This was the land granted to squatter Henry Dangar, whose patch was eventually subdivided to create the nearby farm my parents worked in the late 1960s and 70s.

The familiarity of the farm noises comforts me, but when guest speaker Professor John Maynard speaks of the Aboriginal contribution to the wars Australia fought on foreign soil, his voice carries protest at the way Aboriginal history has been whitewashed. It’s a much-needed jolt of reality.

At the ceremony’s end, the next generation is encouraged never to forget the crime. Watching white and Aboriginal kids led by their elders, I am struck by what it must be like to not know about the Myall Creek Massacre.

Plenty of other massacres happened across Australia during the Frontier Wars – in other places, many more Aboriginal people were killed than at Myall Creek, in a variety of ways, from poisoning to shooting. Myall Creek stands out only because it was the first crime after which the bulk of the European killers were brought to justice.

Did the oral histories run deep amongst the white farmers because our ancestors were hanged for their crimes?

MYALL LEGENDS Elders and dignitaries at the memorial site (Photo: Michael Burge).
MYALL LEGENDS Elders and dignitaries at the memorial site (Photo: Michael Burge).

When American writer Bill Bryson came in search of the massacre site in the late 1990s, he found nothing.

By 2000, the place had been identified and marked. Occasional vandalism since has not dulled the growing spirit of reconciliation which will never be stymied by faceless racism. Now, a fundraising effort is behind a planned onsite education centre.

During the thoughtful walk back to the car, cautious divisions start falling away. We walk as one group. One people.

On the way to visit our old farm, we pause at a high point along the road where another farmhouse became derelict long ago. Very soon, other cars arrive, bearing various descendants of the other families who farmed down the same lane. They were all at the massacre memorial too.

Although we are all different ages, live across two states and our lives have followed varied pathways, one thing unites this group of relative strangers meeting on a tract of the Kamilaroi nation on this particular day – every one of us has always known about the Myall Creek Massacre.

This strong oral history has been handed down through generations and does not come with judgement, shame, or pity for white killers.

It comes with an unforgettable knowledge of what injustice really means in this country, and the desire to pass that message on.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

Books, LGBTIQ Equality

Lives at the crossroads

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A COLLECTION of ten stories, all variations on the same theme: hiding from the truth. 

The matron who interprets her sexual desire as physical pain, obsessed with one of her nurses to the point of stalking (‘Dirty Nurse’); the father who has liaisons with men at public toilets, and the kid who works out he knows the bloke (‘Last Job of the Day’).

The painter who is out but not too proud, and the Auschwitz survivor she must care for in her day job (‘All the Worst Jobs’). The mother who tries to find ‘the right girl’ for her son, only to come face-to-face with his male partner (‘Hilda’s Dance’).

The daughter who finds her gay uncle on Facebook and confronts her christian father about his homophobia in one insightful email (‘A Quick Fix’) …

Captured at the crossroads of their lives, these people face choices between extraordinary heroism and cowardice.

An extract of ‘Dirty Nurse’ from Closet His, Closet Hers.

The office was a reward for attaining the position of Night Supervisor by the age of thirty, the youngest promotion of its kind in the hospital’s history.BY the time Marilyn had her own office, it was much like her bedroom – isolated at the end of a verandah and damp, since Maintenance never finished the guttering.

There was no new uniform to expand into, only a chrome-plated badge which Marilyn ordered from the town jeweller and collected on her day off.

She was unprepared for the grizzly smile of the young man she’d been a year ahead of in school, who looked at her through the smoky glass of a recent refurbishment.

It was an unusual look which Marilyn did not recognise, and and read as a slight retardation.

He fetched her badge, which had been sent away for engraving, and proudly held it up for Marilyn in his gloved hand. She checked the spelling, retrieved her purse, and curtly said: “Yes please” to the plush velvet drawstring bag he proffered with his other hand.

‘You’ve done well,’ he said, ‘out of everyone we went to school with, you’ve done the best,’ he added, sniffing at the last minute, signalling that he didn’t much like taking on the family business that had been in town for sixty years.

Marilyn thought of something to say, but stifled it, then another thought popped into her head, and she left that alone too, game show-type retorts which she’d never used anywhere other than the hospital. All she could get out was: ‘Thank you, Brian Ward,’ as though naming him would thwart his unwelcome familiarity.

As she walked away he wondered how much arse any woman had a right to. Still, he thought, she’s more of a looker than Leanne. Leanne was his now ex-wife and the mother of their two children, who’d left for the city last weekend.

Mum had told Marilyn all about it, and she’d had it from Merle at the Bowling Club. Merle was Brian Ward’s godmother.

Driving home, Marilyn remembered what Brian’s look reminded her of. She put it right out of her mind, until at five past eight that evening it came back to her: the face of Pam Cooper, maybe ten years before, in the storeroom where they kept the cylinders of laughing gas.

While running her bath, Marilyn revived the tinny smell of the tanks as Pam handed them to her, only Pam was always slightly careless and had dropped one. It had fallen against a shelf, which twisted the tap and shot a spray of laughing gas over both of them.

“Marilyn had nearly slapped Mum for taking away that chance to hug Pam. Her hands had been so close to both women, but nobody wanted them.”

Pam broke into giggles first, in disbelief more than anything. She’d fallen to her knees, knew to turn the tap off, but hadn’t quite managed. Marilyn had tutted, put her tanks down, and went to help. By the time she turned to Pam the other woman was collapsed over a pile of sterile linen, gripped with silent mirth.

Marilyn hadn’t meant to giggle too, but the gas dragged it out of her. She shook her head, trying to be free of it, but Pam slapped both hands onto Marilyn’s leg in an innocent, jaunty motion which Marilyn recalled like a bolt of lightning running through a feather.

The two women fell about for only a minute, but in that minute Marilyn was touched more than she’d ever been in her entire childhood.

As Pam gathered her wits and stood, Marilyn saw her breasts in the shadow of her collar, right through the join of her bra to the top of her stomach.

The sight haunted her now, as she slid into the bath.

Pam had three kids to a real estate agent. They’d visited because Mum had it from Coral at cards that Pam was ‘going to leave That Man’, and Marilyn had told Mum to tell Coral to tell Pam she was ‘welcome anytime with the kiddies’.

Marilyn had to stop the kids dipping their bikkies in their tea. She’d told them it was ‘bad for their toothie-pegs’, but they still did it. She’d held the little girl and Dad and Mum had a boy each on their knees, but the little lady didn’t like Marilyn’s broad, hard lap.

Pam hadn’t worked since leaving the ward. She’d swapped starched uniforms for an array of stylish polyester outfits purchased during the abundant early years of her marriage.

Marilyn couldn’t get to the wedding because she’d made sure she was rostered on for a double shift to avoid seeing Pam walking down the aisle with That Man.

Around their dinner table, Marilyn waited for news of when Pam was leaving him, but the slightest mention of ‘things’ brought a tear to Pam’s eye, and before Marilyn could go for a hug Mum jumped up with one of her ‘don’t you worry now love’ consolations and Dad had taken the boys out the back to the shed. Marilyn was left to watch the little girl, who insisted on pulling at Marilyn’s shoelaces, the way Maggie had when she was a puppy.

Only Maggie was long dead. Mum hadn’t even given a cuddle or a kiss when they put the little dog in the ground inside an old floral pillowslip.

Marilyn had nearly slapped Mum for taking away that chance to hug Pam. Her hands had been so close to both women, but nobody wanted them. Not even the little girl had wanted them.

That was years ago now. Pam hadn’t left That Man. Marilyn sometimes saw the station wagon parked at the supermarket, and caught glimpses of Pam between the aisles, but her jealousy over that stolen hug always prevented her from saying hello.

So Marilyn slid her head into the searing heat of the bathwater, peeling off the memories she was sure would dissipate in the chilled air long before she surfaced.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.