Queensland Theatre Company and Playbox: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Michael Gow

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, written and directed by Michael Gow. From the novel by Henry Handel Richardson. Queensland Theatre Company and Playbox, in association with the Brisbane and Melbourne Festivals. At the Brisbane Powerhouse until October 5. Then the Malthouse, South Melbourne, October 12-26, 2002.

According to Bruce Steele, a key member of the research team behind Monash University's Henry Handel Richardson Project, Mrs Ethel Robertson insisted -- on her death bed -- that her real name be removed from the proposed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. Removed, even, from the contract, which was signed in February 1946, a month before her death. (MGM proposed screen hunks Greer Garson and Gregory Peck as Mary and Richard Mahony.)

"Henry Handel Richardson" was far more than a pseudonym. It was more like an alter-ego. Or a 'nomme de guerre' at the very least. One academic goes as far as calling H.H.R. Ethel's incubus. I can't describe what that particular variety of evil spirit does to sleeping women in a family newspaper... trust me. (It's not at all clear if we are meant to imagine HHR sleeping with Ethel, or HHR being Ethel's marauding Mr Hyde.)

Young Ettie, reputedly, was incensed with the lazy but rife sentiment of the day that women's writing was both different to -- and inherently less worthy than -- "serious" men's writing. But it seems safe to presume that the autobiographical nature of her writings, and the fictional appropriation of the lives of her parents in particular, necessitated the distance that a new name -- a new authorial voice -- could provide.

The three novels that make up The Fortunes of Richard Mahony could hardly be less thinly-veiled as biography. Ethel was born in Melbourne, in 1870. Like Richard Mahony, Walter Richardson was an Edinburgh-educated Irish doctor who met and married Ethel's English mother, Mary Bailey, in the Victorian goldfields.

Henry Handel Richardson's trilogy follows the erratic fortunes and grimly fluctuating mental health of Mahony, from shopkeeper in a goldfield settlement near Ballarat, through the establishing of his medical practice in Australia and spectacular financial speculation, to bankruptcy and insanity. Both real Mary and fictional Mary work, for a time, as postmistresses: Mary Richardson (nee Bailey) works to support her young children after Walter's death; Mary Mahony works to support herself after her deranged husband burns what few shares and assets they have left. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ettie casts herself as a boy in Fortunes.)

It's clear from HHR's letters and overtly autobiographical writings that she both favoured her father and thought Richard to be the more sympathetic character in Fortunes. But, as Germaine Greer argues so eloquently with regard to The Getting of Wisdom, HHR has been radically wrong before in assessing her own work. Unwittingly, perhaps, HHR has made the patient and long-suffering Mary Mahony into a wonderfully fleshy and utterly admirable character. She's indomitable -- unassailable even -- rather than being a Thomas Hardy-esque doltish stoic.

And, while HHR gives us some profound insights into the increasing paranoia and decline of Mahony's mind, he is an aggravating and unlikable monomaniac who treats his family like pets. He is a man incapable of taking advice from his loved-ones. And markedly less likely to take advice from a woman. Any woman.

Michael Gow's mammoth production of Fortunes, remarkably, preserves the exasperating complexity of Richard and Mary's relationship. His casting is crucial. Neil Pigot has a voice that inspires confidence, even when his body language and all of his actions belie that confidence. In a pivotal scene drawn from the centre novel, The Way Home, Richard learns that his oldest (and he imagines his closest) friend has made a pass at Mary. "You must tell me," Richard says to his wife when she hesitates to tell him what has happened. And Pigot's voice -- rich and almost serpentine in its timbre -- is irresistible. How can Mary not answer? Even if we know, instinctively, that he won't cope with the facts.

If anything, Anne Browning is even stronger as Mary. While maintaining an air of utter astonishment with the events that befall her, with glittering exhausted eyes, Browning never lets us underestimate Mary. It's all suggestion. It's so subtle that it might not be convincing -- or sufficient -- in a shorter play. It's also very much to do with husbanding energy in a role that is both huge and weighted towards the latter scenes. Mary's confrontation with Richard's lawyer, when she is determined to secure her husband's release from an asylum, seems to save the best for last. After almost three hours, Browning opens up her second carburettor. Dramatic fuel, and the air in the theatre between stage and audience, vaporise. It's as if, at last, the drama has begun.

But just as Pigot embodies the duality of Mahony, his gentleness and his short-fuse, Browning embodies Mary's ignorance of her own strength. It's a brave tactic by any actor to spend the bulk of the evening persuading us that she has limits, then blasting them away before our eyes.

Rumours were circulating prior to the premiere of this play that Gow had re-set Fortunes in an asylum from Ultima Thule, the final novel of the trilogy, and that the past was enacted in flashbacks by the inmates of the asylum, like Cosi or yet another Aussie Marat/Sade. [The full title of Peter Weiss's play says it all: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.]

Each of the nine panels in Robert Kemp's set has a heavy door with a barred window, the performers are got up in grey face (not quite white face, but ashen), and some of the acting is annoyingly sylised -- trivialised really -- as if the work of the mentally disturbed, but there is little cause to question Gow's dedication to telling the story. The whole damn story.

Sensibly, Gow hides a few theatrical Easter Eggs in his script amply rewarding those who have actually read all 800 pages, reminding us of the vast sweep and metrical precision of HHR's composition. And, I must say, Gow's deviations from the chronology of the novel result in a couple of the most lively and exciting moments. But, on the whole, Gow's direction is more impressive than his writing. He could easily cut a fifth of the words, which would give him more scope to increase the dynamic range. As it stands, there is so much territory to cover, that slowing things down and beefing things up are unaffordable luxuries.

But, hey, for all of its longwindedness, Fortunes has few longueurs. And despite its occasional and glib descents into Dickensian bilge, the production has a fistful of quite remarkable theatrical images: an unfingered accordion expanded and compressed evokes the rasping breath of dying men is one of the best. Gow has not distilled a simple moral, or a defining metaphor, from the landscape of Fortunes, but he engages his audience. And that, finally, justifies the immense exertion of time and energy. Theirs and ours.


This review was published in the September 14-15 2002 edition of the Australian Financial Review.