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Monsters and Morality...
That sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons supplement, doesn't it?
On Saturday night we saw the final performance of Robert Reid's new play "On the Production of Monsters." On Sunday, we saw the encore screening of the National Theatre's production of Frankenstein, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller.
I've been thinking about monsters ever since.
"On the Production of Monsters" is the story of a hipster-ish Northcote couple, Ben and Shari. Ben's supervisor at work emails him a image of a naked underage girl in a clumsy attempt at seduction. Through a series of mishaps, the image is forwarded on the press, and Ben finds himself hounded as a monstrous paedophile.
The play received glowing reviews from Crikey, The Herald Sun and Allison Croggan. And it deserves it: the dialogue is witty, the Melbourne setting lovingly evoked, Virginia Gay was fantastic as Shari, and the set was amazing: starting out as a bare catwalk, the actors pulled props up from the floor like a giant fold-out book.
And yet... Something didn't quite gel for me.
Halfway through the play, a PR agent decides to take on Ben's case and argue that the image is artistic, not pornographic. A judge eventually agrees, and Ben is, if not vindicated, at least forgotten by the press.
A lot of reviews of the play point out the similarities to the Bill Henson case from 2009. But to me those similarities are superficial.
Bill Henson took his photos of a nude adolescent. He was directly morally responsible for them, and so the question of art versus child porn is a direct judgement on his actions.
But in the play, Ben is innocent. He didn't create the image. He didn't even download it. He had no control over whether the image is art or child porn, and so it feels like deus ex machina when he is saved by a judge's decision.
Perhaps that is Reid's point: that sometimes our fates are tangential to our actions, that our comfortable little lives can be battered around by forces beyond our control. Perhaps. I still feel that the play raised a deep and important issue that it just wasn't built to discuss.
Frankenstein, on the other hand, is all about moral responsibility for one's actions. This post is already far too long, though. I'll cover that in part two.
But I want to point out two thing before I finish here:
First: I am 100% on the side of Bill Henson's work being art, and I was appalled at the time by both the media beat-up, and the philistine comments of our then-Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.
Second: I know the playwright Robert Reid socially, and I feel a bit weird being so critical of work by someone I'm kinda-sorta friends with. Add to that, none of the reviews I've read have raised concerns similar to mine. Not even the unflattering Cameron Woodhead review in The Age.
Perhaps the reason this itches at me like a mosquito bite is that the child porn debate felt like a sidetrack from Reid's portrayal of Ben and Shari's relationship. Warm, flawed, full of personal in-jokes and little arguments, it was a beautiful piece of writing.
I'm looking forward to more work from Reid.
That sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons supplement, doesn't it?
On Saturday night we saw the final performance of Robert Reid's new play "On the Production of Monsters." On Sunday, we saw the encore screening of the National Theatre's production of Frankenstein, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller.
I've been thinking about monsters ever since.
"On the Production of Monsters" is the story of a hipster-ish Northcote couple, Ben and Shari. Ben's supervisor at work emails him a image of a naked underage girl in a clumsy attempt at seduction. Through a series of mishaps, the image is forwarded on the press, and Ben finds himself hounded as a monstrous paedophile.
The play received glowing reviews from Crikey, The Herald Sun and Allison Croggan. And it deserves it: the dialogue is witty, the Melbourne setting lovingly evoked, Virginia Gay was fantastic as Shari, and the set was amazing: starting out as a bare catwalk, the actors pulled props up from the floor like a giant fold-out book.
And yet... Something didn't quite gel for me.
Halfway through the play, a PR agent decides to take on Ben's case and argue that the image is artistic, not pornographic. A judge eventually agrees, and Ben is, if not vindicated, at least forgotten by the press.
A lot of reviews of the play point out the similarities to the Bill Henson case from 2009. But to me those similarities are superficial.
Bill Henson took his photos of a nude adolescent. He was directly morally responsible for them, and so the question of art versus child porn is a direct judgement on his actions.
But in the play, Ben is innocent. He didn't create the image. He didn't even download it. He had no control over whether the image is art or child porn, and so it feels like deus ex machina when he is saved by a judge's decision.
Perhaps that is Reid's point: that sometimes our fates are tangential to our actions, that our comfortable little lives can be battered around by forces beyond our control. Perhaps. I still feel that the play raised a deep and important issue that it just wasn't built to discuss.
Frankenstein, on the other hand, is all about moral responsibility for one's actions. This post is already far too long, though. I'll cover that in part two.
But I want to point out two thing before I finish here:
First: I am 100% on the side of Bill Henson's work being art, and I was appalled at the time by both the media beat-up, and the philistine comments of our then-Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.
Second: I know the playwright Robert Reid socially, and I feel a bit weird being so critical of work by someone I'm kinda-sorta friends with. Add to that, none of the reviews I've read have raised concerns similar to mine. Not even the unflattering Cameron Woodhead review in The Age.
Perhaps the reason this itches at me like a mosquito bite is that the child porn debate felt like a sidetrack from Reid's portrayal of Ben and Shari's relationship. Warm, flawed, full of personal in-jokes and little arguments, it was a beautiful piece of writing.
I'm looking forward to more work from Reid.
