“The Man”: A View from Within

Each Christmas Eve, I participate in an extended family fun run of about five kilometres in our local park. It is a handicap. As the most incompetent runner in the race, I start first and generally finish last. My wife, who is the handicapper, loves me not enough (or too much) to allow a different result.

What I have enjoyed over two decades of the Christmas run is that I get to watch the race from within. I am a fervent believer in spectatorship.

Taking part in the Banco Court performance of A Man for All Seasons was a similarly rewarding act of spectatorship from within.

Through three or four rehearsals over as many weeks, I get to watch a performance come to life. Actors, script, director, and producers are thrown together. Diffidently, we interact and something emerges that is new and more than the sum of our different parts.

The professional actors, Damien Cassidy (the Common Man) and Danny Murphy (Sir Thomas More) are a joy to watch in rehearsals for the restraint and subtlety by which they add colour and depth to their characters.

Our director, Christina Koch, also a professional, amazes as, with precious little pushing and prodding, she transforms the untheatrical space of the Banco Court and the way we fill it. The motley collection of solicitors, barristers and judges, some of whom are experienced amateurs amaze as well. Some, Justice White (bribing litigant, Catherine Anger) and Justice Daubney (the schemingly pragmatic Thomas Cromwell) present as natural thespians from their first reading of their first lines.

Others, myself playing Archbishop Cranmer included, also impress as, over the weeks, we find voices of which we were unaware, influenced and encouraged as we are by what is going on about us.

Watching the players unfold into their roles is endlessly fascinating. Even more fascination is provided as repeated readings allow deeper understanding of Robert Bolt’s beautiful piece of writing. Many of us love the play already, having studied it at school or university and we remember its respectful references to the importance of English law that each of us studied, albeit with differing levels of attention, at the same universities.

Bolt slices the human personality and re-presents it in pieces, albeit in well-rounded pieces of need and obsession that appear to be human beings. Thus, the Third Duke of Norfolk (played strongly by Justice Fryberg) lives on friendship; More’s wife, Alice (Erica Fryberg) believes in the primacy of family; Richard Rich (a morphing Stephen Hogg) craves respect; and Cranmer, like every fictional Catholic priest and English pastor in literature hungers after faith.

The Common Man just wants a quiet untroubled life.

Sir Thomas More, who on a first reading of A Man seems the simplest of characters, unravels as the most complex of Bolt’s creations. More displays, indeed, is the irony of how we define ourselves as people. We do this by believing in things outside ourselves. And the more passionate our belief in the external, the more we are ourself.

More believes in his king; in the law; in the church; and in his God and, by believing, becomes uniquely himself. They all let him down in their different ways but, by never ceasing to believe, More is Sir Thomas More and becomes the saint of the same name.

More is the ultimate spectator, the fan. Not the fan of a successful club like Manly or Manchester United but a hopeless club always facing relegation like West Ham United or always promising but never delivering like Richmond or Fremantle. The object of our love may be ill-deserving but that matters little. It is by our unremitting love that we are.

Chris, in her director’s notes, said the play was about love and, as in all else, she was right.

Taking part in the production was certainly about love. We all learned things about ourselves and each other that we knew not and we came together to create something terrific.

The audience that comes to the Banco Court in Law Week to watch a bunch of lawyers put on a real play come with low expectations. Their expectations were massively exceeded. It was not just, as the Chief Justice said at curtain call, that they were entertained and well at that. They saw something that was professional and that is the one thing they were not expecting. [1]

Stephen Keim

Clayfield

20 May 2012

Footnotes

1. Those of my colleagues whom I have not mentioned in the text, all of whom were also magnificent, are Ralph Devlin (King Henry); Richard Douglas (Cardinal Wolsey); Kristin Ramsey (More’s eldest daughter, Margaret); Stephen Mackie (who started it all and played Margaret’s husband, William Roper); John De Groot (an oily Spanish ambassador, Signor Chapuys), as well as Steve Mackie’s co-producer, Hana Tow, and stage manager, Hamish Clift.