The Bones Love Gringo

The Bones Love Gringo
Lady Muck
45Downstairs
Already over, if you didn’t see it, you missed out buddy…

I doubt this review will do the guys at Lady Muck much good seeing as how their season’s already well and truly over, but maybe, just maybe, if they’re looking for quotes to put on their next press release, they can come to good old Danny and put up a television is furniture word or two. After all, to the best of director Sarah McCusker’s knowledge, no single other review dragged themselves out of the arts center to see the show and that’s a real shame.

The political imperative behind a David Hicks in Guantanamo play now that he’s out and home and being harassed by Today Tonight is questionable. Given the premise of the piece, two hapless aussies (and I use the term advisedly) blunder about Cuba ostensibly trying to rescue Hicks from captivity seems just that little bit empty when he’s just not there anymore. For the first third, as we’re introduced the comically mismatched characters, the buffoonish Australians, the suave and sexy Cubans, I debated whether there was any point at all in staging this work now and not four years ago when the subject matter was at least topical. However, the longer I watched and let my natural critical instincts relax, the more I reluctantly began to like the characters and care about the story, the more the pathetic ones desperate fantasy of a Cuban life and family seemed so much more vital, the more the stupid ones fantasy of heros and villains seemed more tragic. About half way through it dawned on me with the breaking light that shines only on the very stupid, that this was not a play about David Hicks at all – this was a very clever farce on the Western world’s idealization of the other, as represented by Cuba, communism and the salsa. All the things we think we are not, we think they are. We can’t dance but we think they can dance, we can’t kiss but we think they can kiss, we don’t know how to live but we think they know how to live. What we’re missing is of course that there is no us an them. We’re all just us, we have similar problems and desires affected by our situation. We have our fantasies about them as equally they have their fantasies about us, rich Americans with their furniture stores in Ohio of where ever it was, and that both our fantasies are born of the desire to escape – neatly bringing us back to Hicks.

I longed for the hero to break into Gitmo and discover an empty cell and I sort of got my wish. I wont say more incase it gets remounted, it damn well deserves a remount.

Tom Maclachlan, the writer, worryingly notes that the idea for the play came to him while being interrogated by Cuban lieutenant in Guantanamo bay. The thought of pie eyed Australians brimming full of their right on political outrage who swarming the shores of cuba and demanding to see David makes my skin crawl. Political naiveté at it’s best really, but then I fear I’m one of those folks who thinks political demonstration should be well orchestrated and on a massive and thought out scale to affect any real change. We’ve been conditioned as a society to see anything else as little better than university student posturing (largely cause in the end that’s what a lot of it turns out to be.)

But I digress. Maclachlan has an eye for the ironic and a promising command of the dramatic and these are infinitely more important tools to the playwright than his ideology. However, McCusker’s direction was the must see element of the piece. Practically no set or props or anything fancy, just the beautiful brickwork of the stunning fortyfivedownstairs downstairs theatre, lit amazingly and using every inch of the playing space. It really was a great piece of work, tucked away in the fringe, and it deserved a hell of a lot more reviewers than good ol danny.

Danny Episode