words romana dalgleish

A play in an insane asylum turns operatic and poignant

Say that a play involves Mozart’s Italian opera Cosi Fan Tutte and many people will sniff and tick it off as too highbrow. But set the same play in an Australian mental asylum to which a university student has come to direct the inmates in a play within the play, and things get decidedly more interesting – perhaps even as compelling as the famous Peter Weiss Marat Sade based on the same device of a play set in a play in a facility for the mentally derailed.

In the upcoming presentation of Australian Louis Nowra’s Cosi at the Fringe Theatre, the inhabitants of the asylum quickly take control of the student’s production, turning it into a take on Mozart’s opera – even though none of them can sing or speak Italian. Does that sound like the perfect setting for some irreverent, typically politically incorrect Australian humour? Wendy Herbert, the director, is aware that people tend to think ‘culture to most Australians is the stuff in yoghurt’, but insists that the play is not a lowbrow insensitive joke. For one thing, it is set during the protests against the Vietnam War, though the ideals and politics touched on are not the play’s focus. Much more, she says, ‘It is a story of compassion and kindness. It’s a play about hope, fear, love, priority and trust. If you have a heart and a brain and you live outside of a cave, then this play is for you.’

She is also quick to point out, ‘This is not a ‘gweilo’ play, any more than Journey to the West is only for a Chinese audience.’ It appeals, like most of the plays she chooses to direct, to the ‘larrikin in all of us’ perhaps because she herself has a more than a touch of that Australian description for a maverick within her. One of her first appearances in theatre itself set the scene for an impudent attitude to all things conventional. ‘I was a fairy in Dick Whittington and His Cat when I was 8. I fell down on stage in my ballet slippers and managed to bring the set down with me. It was a defining role.’ But now she prefers to work behind the action with performers who aren’t clumsy. ‘I try to cast intelligent, instinctive actors. That way they can be involved from the onset and can take responsibility for their performance,’ she says.

Cosi actors Kate Sullivan and Damian Coory are two such. They speak with great affection for the characters they play, believing that those characters have much to teach about what really matters in life. Kate Sullivan plays Cherri, an inmate with no social boundaries and a sex addiction. Although the actor doesn’t see many similarities between herself and her character on the surface at least, she feels they ‘are both passionate about getting what we want. Our wants may be different but the drive is strong.’ Cherri’s disturbing background and what Sullivan calls her ‘emotional deregulation’ fascinate the actor, whose mother works in mental health, and she is relishing the opportunity to play a character with no concept of social limits.

Damian Coory sees his character, Roy, as ‘delusional but hilarious… he’s a man who was abandoned to institutions by his parents and is mentally ill’. But that doesn’t stop him, says Coory, from having moments of profound clarity and deep insight into human nature: ‘Roy understands that music and beauty and art are much more important than rationality and the intellect,’ notes the actor. Coory is founder and managing director of Coory & Associates, a company that works in media and spokesperson training, crisis communications and issues management and, although he doesn’t really work with crises anymore, he confesses that when comparing work with the play, ‘let’s just say I have noticed a few similarities!’ And in what may be fair comment on our HK lifestyle, he also thinks the play is not unlike living and working in Hong Kong, although admitting he is thankful ‘it’s not heavy or preachy… it tells its tale through humour’.

Herbert echoes Coory’s sentiments when she says, ‘We already know these people. You have met them. You work with them; they are in your family. The fact that they have been diagnosed as mad only confirms what you know.’ She sees herself in all of the characters and confesses that if one were to approach her ex’s they would probably say she is sex-crazed, obsessive and potentially violent. But that doesn’t make people unattractive. Nowra, the director says, has written his characters ‘from a place of great love and respect, and in the end we are left feeling that anything is possible.’

Cosi runs at the Fringe Theater at the Fringe Club from 8pm, May 6-9, and at 2:30pm on May 9. Tickets $250 from HK Ticketing tel
31 288 288.