The Time is Not Yet Ripe

The Time is Not Yet Ripe
Louis Esson
Presented by Here Theatre at La Mama
Until 13th of September

If one listens too closely to the rhetoric and attends too many forums on the state of Australian theatre one could be forgiven for thinking that nobody ever set foot on stage in this country before The Legend of King O’Malley. The New Wave have become the old guard and our cultural amnesia has set comfortably in now at a blurry distance of roughly forty years.
Thankfully however there remains one or two who have done the set reading and Jane Woollard is clearly amongst them.

It’s a little uncharitable to the author to suggest that Woolard has unearthed Esson’s fine work but before Here theatre’s remarkable production of The Time is Not Yet Ripe, who would have done more than wonder for whom the Prize for Drama was named?

Yet, in 1920’s Melbourne, Esson and his Pioneer Players were the independent theatre movement of their day. At a time when little confidence was placed in the validity of the Australian writer, when few new Australian plays were being staged and fewer published, it fell to Esson with his friends Stewart Mackay and Vance Palmer to champion new Australian writing - would that we had a few more Essons and Palmers with us today.

A lively farcical satire on the nature of modern politics, The Time is Not Yet Ripe pits the daughter of the conservative Prime Minister and her lover, the dilettante radical socialist, against each other in a battle for the hearts, minds and votes of Australia and the electorate of Wombat. Writing nearly a hundred years ago, Esson displays a remarkably prescient understanding of Sound Bite politics. Notably, he also takes the same relatively easy way out as many of our modern political satirists, condemning all politicians as equally as bad as each other. It’s not hard to understand why of course; as doing so leaves the audience feeling like the writer has made a serious political point without actually having had to make one.

Woolard’s direction of the piece is energetic and lively and as the cast clearly have a ball we do too. Kurt Geyer is impressively pompous as Sir Joseph Quiverton, Prime Minister, Ming Zhu-Hii as the ditzy Doris Quiverton betrays a natural intelligence and charm that is perhaps less the characters and more her own and Grant Cartwright as the socialist Sydney Barrett is an hilariously foppish maverick intellectual who manages to passionately stand for absolutely nothing. Particular mention must also be made of Georgina Capper as the delightfully pinched Miss Perkins, secretary of the anti socialist league. Rarely has such a sour faced character been played so sweetly.

The Time is Not Yet Ripe was rightfully given the Green Room Award for Best Ensemble production in the independent theatre category when Here Theatre first staged it in 2006. Given Esson himself grew to dislike the play, erring in his career towards heavier fare, Here theatre’s production might well give him pause to reconsider. At the very least, the revival of this classic Australian play, more relevant now than ever, should be a demonstration to all of us that there was theatre in Australia before the doll.

Danny Episode