NORM and AHMED and ROOTED TEACHER's NOTES
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NORM AND AHMED and ROOTED BY ALEX BUZO TEACHER’S NOTES BY TERRY STURM CURRENCY PRESS STUDY GUIDE The performing arts publisher www.currency.com.au Alex Buzo’s NORM AND AHMED AND ROOTED by Terry Sturm . Introducing the plays 1 2. The critics’ views 1 3. Questions for discussion 1 4. Further reading 1. Introducing the plays written according to this naturalistic formula— according, that is, to criteria which make Norm and Ahmed and Rooted (first performed verisimilitude (the naturalness with which real in 1968 and 1969) are the two earliest plays of a life is represented on stage) the dominant aim playwright who has established himself as one of a play’s action, characterisation and speech, of the most gifted of that younger generation of and of its set design, lighting and costuming. Australian writers attracted to the theatre in the One of Australia’s best known plays, Ray Lawler’s late 1960s and 1970s. Alexander Buzo has now had Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), was a a dozen plays—on a wide range of contemporary major achievement in this mode, and it remains themes—performed by the main professional important in the work of dramatists like David companies and little theatres throughout Williamson. Australia, and many of them have been performed Our habit of thinking about and judging outside Australia (in England and the United plays in such terms is so ingrained that it may States) as well. seem difficult, if not self-evidently absurd, to Yet his work has not been without its think about them in any other terms. Yet a detractors. His verbal flair and comic vitality, and moment’s reflection about drama—about any his capacity for sharply-edged social comment, art—might make us aware that this is a very have been generally acknowledged; but he partial, incomplete view of the range of effects has also been criticised as deficient in skills of which many different kinds of drama have construction and characterisation. The ending achieved in the past, and continue to achieve, of Norm and Ahmed, for example—on which so through methods that are not tied to the literal much of the play’s effect depends—has been or documentary representation of reality at seen as arbitrary, insufficiently motivated by all. Some of the main theatrical conventions of anything that occurs earlier in the play. And Shakespearean drama—the playing of female Bentley, the protagonist of Rooted, has been seen roles by boy-actors, the use of poetry and the as an inadequate characterisation. A more realistic habit of having the actors address the audience presentation, it has been argued, might have through soliloquies—are quite implausible, made him less helpless and passive, less willing to according to real-life criteria. The use of a chorus acquiesce in his own humiliation and defeat. in the great Greek tragedies, both to comment Criticisms like these are based on the on and add emotional depth to the main action, assumption that Buzo is striving after realism in is also a non-realistic or stylised device in such his plays, and failing to achieve it. If they were plays. In twentieth century painting, to take correct, the plays would indeed be badly flawed. an example from a very different art form, the It may be, however, that the assumption itself representational aesthetic has been almost is wrong. A great deal of fine drama has been wholly eclipsed by forms of painting ranging from Currency Press S t u d y G u i d e 1 AL E X B U ZO’ S NORM AND AHMED A N D R O O T E D 1 b y T e r r y S t u r m various distortions of reality, to pure abstraction, throughout its history has provided dramatists in which no ‘real world’ is recognisable at all. with a medium for serious statements about Alexander Buzo has on occasion disassociated life. The spectacle of people behaving absurdly himself from readings and productions of his or irrationally, even as we laugh at it, invites us plays which interpret them primarily as literal to ponder the gap between the way the world is, representations of reality, insisting that they and the way we would like it to be—to reflect are not ‘documentaries’, but ‘works of fiction... on the human capacity for self-deception, or on intended to work on the audience’s imagination’. social abuses and evils. The eighteenth-century Rejecting the labels of realist or social realist, writer Horace Walpole once wrote, in a famous he has related his drama to a general impulse, definition, that ‘This world is a comedy to those in modern theatre, away from the conventional that think, a tragedy to those that feel’. Buzo’s means by which naturalism structured its plays also generate this thought-provoking apparently plausible, life-like actions: quality of detachment, forcing us to think about I would like to think that we are moving away the predicaments of his characters, and to ponder from the well-plotted, well-made exposition- the issues which his comic mode of presenting climax-denouement kind of form into a new them raises. His plays do not offer us exact and freer style where the structure of a play reproductions or reflections of our society, but is dictated by the energies of what is being imaginatively heightened images of our social expressed. behaviour, using effects of surprise and shock to Comic techniques and effects are important force us into disturbing recognitions. in the ‘freer style’ Buzo develops in plays like Norm and Ahmed and Rooted. His imagination Norm and Ahmed draws on many traditional comic methods of Norm and Ahmed is a particularly good example of deforming or transforming the real world, and Buzo’s desire to move away from ‘the well-plotted, on recent techniques of the absurd, to produce well-made exposition-climax-denouement his characteristic effects of surprise, humour and kind of form into a new and freer style’. In this shock: exaggeration of speech or behaviour; an one-actor there is no plot, in any conventional emphasis on the character type, rather than on sense, and very little action until the explosive the individual, defined by some mannerism or moment of physical violence on which the play obsession irrationally pursued (Norm and all the concludes. This is not to say that the play lacks characters of Rooted are comic characters in this a structure. Its basic aim is to create suspense sense); and an emphasis, in the structuring of his about Norm’s motivations, to intensify the plays, on comic or bizarre contrasts between one audience’s uneasiness about how the encounter scene or incident and the next, between types between Norm and Ahmed will end—playing of language, and between different characters. on the humour of the situation but increasingly (Simmo and Hammo in Rooted, and Norm and undermining it in a pattern which might best be Ahmed are examples of characters deliberately described as a rhythm of alternately heightened contrasted in this way.) Comedy achieves its and relaxed tensions, as we follow the ebb and effects precisely through its ways of disrupting flow of the emotional undercurrents between the what we might normally expect to happen or to two characters. be said, in a particular situation. Effects of these These transitions of mood and feeling are kinds, throughout Buzo’s plays, are complemented crucial in the developing momentum of the by his interest in introducing unusual visual or play. An atmosphere of uncertainty is created audio-visual images into his plays: the use of right at the beginning—well before anything is Sandy’s voice in the tape-recorder in Rooted, or actually said—simply through the oddness of the odd setting—the scaffolding, white fence and Norm’s behaviour: his restless movements in a wire mesh of the construction site—in Norm and strange setting at an unusual hour (midnight) Ahmed. and, especially, his puzzling action in throwing his We need also to remember, in considering the cigarette away and putting another in his mouth, comic elements in Buzo’s drama, that comedy unlit, as the stranger approaches. There are 2 Currency Press S t u d y G u i d e 1 AL E X B U ZO’ S NORM AND AHMED A N D R O O T E D 1 b y T e r r y S t u r m several other moments, spaced throughout the in a documentary, but to create imaginative play prior to its climax, in which significant action patterns in order to emphasise comic or triggers a shift in mood—in each case injecting disturbing contrasts and ironies. uncertainty into the play and intensifying our One of the major ironies in the play, for sense of menacing suspense. For example, as the example, is that Ahmed, the foreigner, speaks initial tensions of the encounter relax, there is from Norm’s point of view in better English a sudden shift (p. 9), when Norm abruptly turns than that of the average Australian: a brand of on Ahmed, re-enacting in fantasy his violent cultivated, literary English which for Norm is a treatment of the German prisoner-of-war. Almost deeply threatening sign of superior education, immediately afterwards Norm offers Ahmed a status and intelligence. Norm’s pause, in the cigarette, apparently as a gesture of apology, following exchange, introduces this kind of lighting it for him with his own cigarette lighter. undercurrent into the play: But this apparently innocent recovery of good AHMED: One always experiences difficulties when humour is a profoundly unsettling moment for one is seeking to adjust to an alien environment.