You know you’re alive with Simon Burke in full flight on stage in The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin
- Written by The Conversation
Premiering at Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre in 1976, steve j. spears’ The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin was met with critical acclaim, touring internationally, including Off Broadway where it won three Obie Awards.
Returning 50 years on for Griffin Theatre’s Mardi Gras show, I’m intrigued to consider the impact of a play with this much visibility, interrogating state-sanctioned violence against LGBTQIA+ people. To what degree did it build impetus towards the first Sydney gay pride march in 1978?
In this one-hander directed by Declan Greene, Simon Burke plays Robert O'Brien, a cross-dressing elocution teacher. Living in Double Bay, his flamboyant lifestyle receives suspicious attention from nosy neighbours. Other characters appear in the play as invisible people that Burke addresses just off stage, or over the telephone.
Benjamin Franklin turns out not to be a founding father of the United States, but a precocious student brought to O’Brien for elocution lessons. A 12-year-old prodigy with a grandiose name and a stutter, the child happens to be brilliant. He also happens to be gay, a discovery that shocks even O'Brien.
In no time, Benjamin is smoking during lessons and bringing O’Brien naked Polaroids of himself. O’Brien is clear: such photos put him in terrible danger. O'Brien is protecting himself, but he also takes Benjamin’s education seriously, and recognises the treacherous path ahead with such coquettish tendencies.
A series of incidents expose O'Brien’s cross-dressing to the community. The neighbourhood bristles and things escalate to rocks being thrown at his windows and police coming to raid his place. O'Brien sits inside burning Benjamin’s photos, but their remains are enough to put O'Brien in the psychiatric hospital Callan Park.
The play effectively creates a time when a person could be medically imprisoned on rumoured suspicions and flimsy evidence.
A formidable performance
O’Brien’s apartment is beautifully created in every nook and cranny of the tiny stage, wings used for his extensive bookshelves (design by Isabel Hudson). We learn much about the character as we settle, house lights still up.
Sound design by David Bergman forms transitions using low-frequency drones and glitchy screeches to move the register up into a high camp zone or down into the dark tale of false accusations of paedophilia. It’s affective and unsettling, capturing the emotional register of a system that can reject a person’s right to be themselves.
Burke gives a bold, brave performance, big enough to hold the brutality and atrocity at the centre of this play. He has a ball with the part, fleshing out the stage with every inch of his being turned up to ten.
He carries us with him, giving us permission to sit at the edge of history and peer down through the ugly lens it turns on our own times.
Burke takes us through the full gamut of this material. He starts with a gyrating seduction of Mick Jagger in poster form. He flips at the ring of his phone, placing a posh English accent on top of his Aussie drawl. He moves from high camp to poignant, with gestures and chuckles that become familiar, bringing us close to the character, a portrait painted with depth and pathos.
Retreating into his apartment as the heat on him increases, his limited personal space becomes claustrophobic. Having a single actor on stage heightens how isolating vilification is.
The extremes of this performance take their toll, and Burke finds on-stage moments to restore his energy, some of which are flat. There is room for more interiority in these moments. Burke’s O’Brien is richly complex, but the audience needs more quiet time with him, and those quiet moments need to feel like they could go somewhere unexpected.
An impressive young playwright
This play was a blockbuster in 1978, despite the playwright being just 23.
An accomplished dramatic work for someone so young, there remain fault lines in it that show his inexperience.
Most notably, the playfulness of the first half drops too suddenly, leaving the audience with none of that intimacy in the second half.
It has a logic: the medications O'Brien is given at Callan Park cut him off from himself. Without that well of selfhood, he’s got nothing. It’s a strong, but harsh theatrical choice. The transition is clunky and it feels dated, leaving the final act hollow. It rings true, but doesn’t carry us with it.
If the play had been based on an historical character, specificity would sharpen the tragedy. Making him fictional widens the lens to the broader phenomenon of state-sanctioned homophobic violence.
This production challenges us to consider how far we have and haven’t come in 50 short years.
The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin is at Belvoir Downstairs, Sydney, for Griffin Theatre, until March 29.
