The Vapour Trail

As soon as I found out that the Queensland State Archives are located near a station called Fruitgrove in a suburb called Runcorn, I knew getting there would turn out badly. Suburbs are only given such halycon semi-pastoral names when they consist of ugly greenfields-style developments, roaring roadways without footpaths, and scraggling stretches of bush overgrown with bulldozers and weeds. I walked along a seemingly interminable stretch of this bucolic countryside when the taxi arranged by the Archives failed to met the long-delayed train I had caught, cursing Brisbane’s public transport services and humidity.

Roadside in Runcorn

That prelude to the State Archives was a fitting one, really, which are full of bureaucratic detritus in spite of their lovely and cheery staff. The Archives are simply stuffed with details of lives overrun by regulations and governmental intervention, some of it well-meaning in a kind of paving-the-road-to-hell way, some of it more obviously infused with animus. I leafed disconsolately through files compiled by police devoted to the eradication of larrikinism and to preventing theatres from spoiling citizens’ peaceful observance of the Sabbath day. I looked at letters from doctors about prostitutes incarcerated in Brisbane’s turn-of-the-century Lock Hospital; in particular, their loathsome habit of talking through the fence to larrikins in the street outside.

The whole thing was depressing, I have to say. And it ended, of course, with another trip though Fruitgrove, past verdant Sunnybank and Fairfield, chastened by the thought of all those broken lives and landscapes not my own.

A few hours after five Melbourne girls were arrested for vagrancy in late March 1928, the head-line of Melbourne’s Truth broadcast their misdeeds: ‘White Girls with Negro Lovers. Flappers, Wine, Cocaine and Revels. Raid Discloses Wild Scene of Abandon‘.

On the Sunday before this, the young women had been hauled out of a couple of apartments in Nicholson Street, East Melbourne, and taken to the local police lock-up around 4am. Both Truth reporters and the police had been watching them for hours before the raid took place, dancing and drinking before unshuttered windows with the African-American members of Sonny Clay’s jazz band. The scenes they had been forced to witness were so shocking, wrote the Truth, that they ‘cannot be described’.

When the five girls were brought to trial, more than seven hundred members of the Melbourne public tried to cram into the City Court. Plenty of those who tried to muscle their way in were turned away on account of the crush. Before this gawping throng, the girls were led into the dock: Ivy Day, Nora McKay, Dorothy Davis, Edna Langdon, and Irene Davis (not in fact their real names). Two wore dark goggles. The others faced the crowd bare-faced and ashamed.

So far as the press was concerned, the five girls on trial were  ‘flappers’: the visible face of that jazz-addicted, dance-obsessed, cocktail-guzzling girl-multitude which acted as the focus for so much public angst at the time. Nostalgic reminiscences of the 1920s now tend to render this girl-multitude uniformly glamorous, as if they were all Irene Castles or racy Maud Allens cast in the elegant silver lucency of 1920s photography:

Maud Allen, c/o Arts Alive

According to the Truth, however, the reality was more mundane. The Melbourne flappers on trial might have been ‘drawn from an average gathering of shop girls and clerks… so far as outward appearance was concerned’. And more to the point, only one of them was comfortably off. The rest led lives of scrimping economy to pay for their Jazz-Age lifestyle.

Since the girls had been charged with ‘having no visible means of support’, their defence rested on proving that they had some means at the time of their arrest. Because of this, their testimony involved details of their work and wages, giving us a glimpse into the daily lives and income of the 1920s modern girl. Ivy Day, apparently, was a 22 year old nursemaid who lived in with a family in St Kilda and earned 30 shillings a week. Dorothy Davis had once been a waitress at the Coo-ee Cafe on the corner of Bourke and Exhibition Streets in Melbourne. At the time of her arrest, she had been earning a pound a week to cook breakfast and tea for Sonny Clay’s musicians, and sharing a room in Fitzroy with Nora McKay.

Nora McKay was the only girl with some income: she was a dressmaker who earned 2 pounds 13/6 a week, with an interest in her dead father’s estate which covered her rent and food. The Truth ensured that this ‘tall pale girl’ was more humiliated than any of the others. It published details from her diary, seized by police during the Nicholson Street raid. The diary contained an admission of a number of abortions, the Truth alleged. It also described the birth and adoption out of a baby girl, of amours with a local man, and of McKay’s ardour for the Sonny Clay musician (‘I love this black man…’).

Towards the end of the hearing, one of the five girls, Ivy Day, broke down uncontrollably and had to be escorted from the courtroom. Shortly after this, all five had their charges thrown out. It was apparent that none of them had actually been vagrants; the whole thing (as everyone would have known from the start) had been motivated by concerns about their sexuality rather than their means of support. ‘Because there is no Act which makes it an offence for a white girl to associate with a coloured person, police were powerless to convict the girls’, the Truth lamented. Readers need not despair of this, however: ‘…a move is now on foot to frame an Act which will give the police such power’.

References

Truth, 31 March 1928.

See other references listed in this post on the Australian tour of Sonny Clay’s Coloured Idea.

Ben Johnson’s The Alchemist is based on the cruellest of premises and shouldn’t in fact be a fun play at all. It’s raison d’être is to reveal the stupidity of a succession of hopeless cases who allow themselves to be gulled by Subtle and Face, two conniving conmen, and their sluttish collaborator, Doll Common. That the play continues to be performed centuries after it was first staged in 1610 is testament to its mischievous humour, which lends a seamy glamour and hard-edged geniality to the otherwise depressing glimpse it offers into humankind.

You can’t stage The Alchemist successfully without a love of the raffish, and without a blend of waggishness and rapid-fire comic timing. That is why, to be honest, I had my doubts about John Bell’s direction of the play currently showing at Brisbane’s Playhouse Theatre. The Bell Shakespeare Company does bloody and tragic successfully, but what about boisterous and cheeky?

I am pleased to say that this latest take on The Alchemist delivers the goods. It doesn’t top the Neil Armfield version I saw more than a decade ago with Geoffrey Rush and Hugo Weaving in Sydney. It started a mite slow, and never got up quite the head of steam of that other production. But it still heated up quickly, and in the last half really got cooking in a happily madcap and laugh-out-loud way.

Almost all of the cast in Bell’s version is fabulous, not least Andrew Tighe as Face and Patrick Dickson (pictured above) who plays the cynical Subtle with an admirable lightness of touch. For me, Sandro Colarelli as Surly – the one character who sees through the leading pair’s various dishonesties - surprisingly stole the show. Colarelli played Surly with just the right mix of pomposity and silliness: an unexpected treat. But there were plenty of other great characterisations to choose from – all of them, in fact, except Georgina Syme’s Doll Common (all slouchy gesture and no heart) and Tribulation Wholesome, the greedy Puritan, a bit-part in any case (played by Peter Kowitz with a not terribly convincing American accent).

Perhaps the cleverest thing about Bell’s rendition of this play is the way he detaches it from any particular historical period, with dress-styles grabbed from a hotchpotch of eras. Thus Scott Witt’s hilarious Kastril appears as a would-be home-boy, a sort of ocker Ali G in pimpin’ fur and laughable bling. The wonderful David Whitney as Lord Epicure Mammon is resplendent in velvet frock-coat and wig reminiscent of Regency debauchery. And Face is a captain in vaguely Napoleonic attire who switches to a servant in rubbery apron from an indeterminate age.

This transhistoricality was a natty way to emphasise the motley improvisational skill of the central fraudsters, I thought. And it also brought home the sheer longevity and continuing relevance of the swindler-dupe phenomenon portrayed in the play. Over all the years since Johnson wrote The Alchemist, his exposé of gullibility and cunning has indeed remained painfully keen. And keen it still is now,  in these scam-ridden times, and this rollicking Brisbane production of the play.

Verdict: Go see it while it lasts!

The Alchemist is a collaboration between the Bell Shakespeare and Queensland Theatre Company, and plays at the Brisbane Playhouse between February 23 and March 13.