At some point in the lower middle …
I’ve always been uncomfortable watching older people dance. I was sitting at the bar at my work Christmas party and turned around to see all of the polite ladies form the finance department breaking it down on the dance floor. They were middle aged and polite and had good jobs and were, in every sense of the word, professionals. We worked in an office and they were my superiors and I usually had to run things by them.
I think I was uncomfortable for two reasons. Firstly, I didn’t want to lose my job. Secondly, we don’t see ourselves as people who dance. In Australia our narratives are writ large across our landscape … and it’s understandable why, we have a beautiful, desolate, freeing but dangerous world with which to project our anxieties on. Our stories, therefore, have become grand stories that grapple with our identity as somewhat of a frontier nation. But what of the domestic? Where so much of our identity, and our crises, have been tied to the land, it often feels as though the stories about suburban struggle (the single people in bars, the bad dancers among us) are absent from our national image.
I turned to my co-worker told her how weird it was and she laughed and said, “oh, this happens all the time in Europe. Italy, Germany, Spain, France, you know … just because you’re older, it doesn’t mean you stop having fun. You get divorced and you’re 40? You hit the town,” she said. “Life’s too short. In Australia, it’s not like that. It’s almost like you die when you hit a certain age.”
“What age is that?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but you die at some point in the lower middle.”
Andrew Bovell’s After Dinner is a study of Australian repression. As we watch Monika, Dympie, Paula, Gordon and Stephen converge on the pub on a Friday night in 1988 looking for love, sex or just something to connect with, they are each held back by their inability or unwillingness to communicate. To understand. To articulate how they feel and what they want. The 80’s were a time where the free love and radicalisation of the 60’s and 70’s gave way to the rise of an increasingly conservative middle class. Free love became a fear of AIDS, and the punishment of those who seemed responsible. Punk became electro-pop. Weed became cocaine.
Corey McMahon’s 2018 production, for as 80’s at it is, is a study of middle class anxiety, of slow death. We chat to him about how much, and how little, has changed. In between After Dinner and jetting overseas to work on another show, we had a brief chance to sit down and chat about the play, what it means and how laughing might just help us avoid that hazardous patch in the middle.
How is After Dinner still relevant in 2018?
All five of those characters are looking for some way to connect on a really human, real, level. They all converge on that pub wanting to make a connection with someone but what stops them, I think, are those universal insecurities that we have. That fear of rejection and revealing our true selves, and I think that’s writ-large with Dympie who is a grotesque version of that. Her insecurity is so great that she has to control very aspect of the evening and she’s terrified of ever stepping out of those boundaries. And what does that mean if she does? As Paula says, she might have someone speak to her, and look at her, and touch her … and there’s risk and shame associated with that for her, and probably for a lot of people.
And you see it in the men in the play: these are two adults who are completely unable to communicate emotionally. The two characters need to talk about their feelings but they just don’t have the tools to do that because they’re stunted by this really strange idea of maleness that we have in this country. We’re all talking a lot about men and masculinity, lately … There is something about that classic Australian male character, where we don’t really talk about our feelings and we refer to things only in terms of rhetoric and as that shifts there are a lot people who are really struggling with that. And that idea of maleness still has a real grip on the way men see themselves. You see it in the play but I don’t think too much has changed. We’re still grappling with that. That tension between the ideal of the real man and what it actually means to be a man is a huge part of this play. It’s a huge part of the conversation in Australia now.
These characters are all at a crossroads in their life, where something has to give. So I think that’s how you meet these people, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in 1988 or 2018, whether you go to a pub and sit in a pub bistro or you connect with people on Tinder or on Grindr or on something else; we as humans want to connect. Humans aren’t solitary creatures, we all want to be with someone and have relationships. We’re programmed to connect with each other; we’re not designed to be by ourselves. But that’s not always easy.
Andy Warhol wrote that sex is just nostalgia and that ‘fantasy love is much better than reality love’. So often desire is anticipatory, it’s an image of sex and love rather than the act or experience of loving. How does After Dinner negotiate these ideas?
It’s weird because there’s this conservatism that’s such a huge part of our culture but at the same time, our culture is really highly sexualised. There’s a version of ourselves that we’re told we should be. We should be confident and affluent and physically perfect and shit-hot in bed, and that’s unattainable. Most of us aren’t like that and I think we all know that deep down, and so … you know, when you go online and you use apps people are controlling the way they are perceived and you see this curated, perfected version of them which isn’t actually real. And you could argue that it was the case in 1988. The form through which we viewed ourselves and the way it looked was different, but it was the same idea.
So there’s a tension between being this ideal version of ourselves and our authentic selves. I think that’s a big part of what this play is about. And through that tension, there is a lot of internalised shame around sex and wanting to be sexual, and wanting something more and that effects how we express ourselves. You think, I am not good enough for that, I am not perfect, I don’t deserve that. After Dinner really tries to tease out those anxieties.
But the play, in and amongst all of this, is incredibly funny. Talk us through where the humour comes from.
What the play allows us to do is sit in the dark and watch stuff that we immediately relate to and laugh at ourselves. And for some people- that’s too much. And to be honest, as the season has gone on I’ve noticed that younger audiences are slower to come to the play in terms of their response to it and I think that’s because we’re slowly, maybe, losing the ability to laugh at ourselves. Because everything is now … because we have to be really careful. And rightly so, we have to be careful about what we say and who we say it too- and we should be, we should be mindful about what we’re putting out into the world- but I think After Dinner is different.
I think the play is funny because it’s true. The laughter allows us to empathise with the characters because they’re like us. And if the play was a drama and was just about these people in their, I don’t know, mid-thirties being unable to fund love and just trying to hold on and make their way through the world, it would be really confronting. And it is confronting. But the laughter lets us off the hook a little bit; it allows us to stay with those characters and see them and understand them and not just feel.
Being from and about the 80’s, the play says and does things we’d never say or do now. The characters behave in a way that is unthinkable … but I still think it speaks to the culture now. There are parts of Australia that still think and act that way. If we don’t talk about the unpleasant parts of ourselves, nothing changes. We don’t recognise it as being ill or wrong and then change accordingly. After Dinner is very funny, but really very serious as well.
