The follies bizarre: Australia's political theatre.

THE HERO of a Stephen Sewell play, and clearly his creator's alter ego, says: "People change. I still hate the cunts, but I guess I just don't think killing them is the right answer any more." The victims of the character's loathing are conservatives, assorted non-Left dissidents, Green sceptics, individualists, and the sort of people who read Quadrant. In Australia's political theatre, in a theatrical landscape in which subsidised theatres are the ruling houses, Sewell is representative of a state-funded assault on the principle of tolerance in liberal democracy.

The current political theatre presents a mirror image of Australian society--everything in it is reversed and it only touches truth when all its pronouncements are mined about. In Sewell's play the character having second thoughts about killing us is named "to evoke America's own great liberal tradition", and facing death delivers a defence of Reason. Sewell typifies a harvest of state-supported playwrights more familiar with lecture theatres than real theatres.

Australian theatre is monopolised by the Left; a fact so taken for granted and so widely accepted that it elicits no comment. Also taken for granted is the absence of self-criticism--Left playwrights are licensed to be silly. Here is John Romeril, giving a prestigious lecture, just after the 1996 election (twelve years on it seems even more phony than it did then): "but I condemn utterly the opportunistic and Machiavellian behaviour of the Liberal Party, and not just in these past seven hellish weeks, but for decades".

The Left political plays are sucked into the educational marketplace and theft propaganda influences young minds. A recent leftist book on political theatre for the education market by Hilary Glow, entitled Power Plays: Australian Theatre and the Public Agenda (Currency Press) offers a background study. She talks of the Communist Party of Australia's New Theatre, and of playwrights like Communist Party member Mona Brand, without exploring the influence of communism, or even mentioning the word. In this theatre, as in the minds of its audience, the Left crimes of the twentieth century fade away in a general vagueness so that supporters of death and torture are depicted as benevolent progressives.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Western Left was overtaken by a variety of liberalism which may be called vanity-liberalism. You see the changeover in sensibility which occurred in the career of Gough Whitlam, the opportunist member for Werriwa, between the mid-1950s and 1975. You see the difference between Labor leaders Arthur Calwell and Paul Keating, and you cannot understand the modem Left playwrights without taking account of their moral vanity. Unembarrassed self-publicity is common. Stephen Sewell says this about himself: "I can't tell you how proud I am to be a member of Australian theatre which, of all the arts, has taken such a strong stance in support of peace, justice and freedom."

The reality is the mirror image. Theatre director Neil Armfield spoke to his "Dear Friends" when he gave the 1998 Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture, then approvingly described an historic moment of cruelty and arrogance:

 
   The saddest sight of all was the entire audience of the Australian 
   Reconciliation Convention turning its back on Howard when it became 
   clear that he wouldn't apologise on behalf of the Australian 
   Government for the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children. Who 
   will forget that image--one of the most chilling and memorable 
   events of our history. But Mr Howard reacted to his shame angrily, 
   like a child. Mr Howard, there is no gap. Use the love that lurks 
   inside your frightened body, the love you feel for young children, 
   for your parents, for your language and make the leap. Identify. 
   That's what you can get from the theatre. It teaches you how to 
   identify.