Art mirroring reality or reality aping art?
Where does one begin and the other end?
Should art lead or follow?
Without reality there is no art, but art is not merely the factotum of reality.
What elevates art is imagination and in DEEMING playwright Frank Gauntlett imagines how the concept of “reality entertainment” has been with us much longer than the advent of Big Brother, Survivor and My Kitchen Rules.
One hundred and twenty years ago, Frederick Bailey Deeming would have been deemed fit for fronting up to the Old Bailey for sundry unseemly crimes – not the least mass murder, a regular Sweeney Todd, a Deeming barbarian of fleet feet stalking the streets of Antipodes.
Actor manager Alfred Dampier, in cahoots with thespian Alfred Harford, conspires to create a Reality Theatre, called ‘Wilful Murder!’ to cash in on the public thrall that the murder has cast over the play going populace.
The show is a palpable hit but success breeds excess, and so, with surfeit, the lines between fact and fantasy, blur into bloody bombast.
Unlike the play within the play, I doubt this production of DEEMING will be the hit it should be.
The two male leads, Anthony Hunt and Patrick Trumper as the Alfreds Dampier and Halford respectively, are terrific: princes of the proscenium, this pair, playing the Victoriana with vaudevillian vigour. For some reason, Emily Stewart, as Dampier’s wife and showbiz partner, feels like a third wheel. Either the director has failed to tell her she is in a play not a video, or she has wilfully murdered her own role and thus committed stage suicide.
I must give her the benefit of the doubt as I saw no directorial hand at work here.
A director was credited, but the program contained neither biography nor note.
Make of that what you will. The lighting was fanny by gaslight, but often you could see sweet fanny all, so what was the point?
I hope this play is picked up by a producer who shows as much imagination as the script and its two male players.
Frank Gauntlett’s DEEMING opened at the King Street theatre, corner King and Bray Street, Newtown on Wenesday May 23 and runs until Sunday June 3, 2012.
© Richard Cotter
29th May, 2012.
Tags: Sydney Theatre Reviews- DEEMING, King Street Theatre Newtown, Frank Gauntlett, Anthony Hunt, Patrick Trumper, Emily Stewart, Sydney Arts Guide, Richard Cotter.
