Written in a predominantly TV-style realism, The Queen’s City of the South by Mark Salvestro is thoroughly engaging.
Set in contemporary Cooma, this play achieves a strong sense of place, always a real achievement in the dramatic form.
It also builds on some fascinating tensions, pitting city against country and the past against the future.
Director Ryan Whitworth-Jones elicits good performances from the three-strong cast.
Ryan (Salvestro) has returned to his home town from the Big Smoke, and is now well and truly out. Cooma seems to have embraced his very camp community radio program.
His close friend, Maggie (Kath Gordon), is a member of the local historical society. She’d love to relaunch the Festival of the Snows, the street parade that did so much to bring the multicultural town together when she was young.
Her historical passion is tied thematically to the arrival of an outsider, Lucas (Jack Calver), a man similarly intrigued by the past. Lucas is writing a book about his recently deceased grandfather. To his surprise, Lucas has discovered that his grandfather spent time in Cooma. To his greater surprise, he has also discovered his grandfather was gay.
Why Cooma? There’s no record his grandfather ever worked on the Snowy Mountains Scheme …. and then the penny drops: the gaol. After all, homosexual activity remained a criminal offence in this state until 1984 – and Cooma is where that particular set of “offenders” were sent. In the late 1950’s, the then Justice Minister proudly boasted that Cooma was “the only penal institution in the world, so far as is known, devoted specifically to the detention of homosexual offenders”. There’s even a strong suspicion that conversion therapy was practised, something no-one’s rushing to mention at the Cooma Visitors Centre.
Set in the present, the play doesn’t dig too far into what actually happened in the gaol, but rather focuses on contemporary responses to it. As such, it’s a vital interrogation of our relationship with the past. What do we choose to remember and what do we choose to forget? What conversations about the past are we allowed to have? Ryan is given a beautiful line in which he suggests that, in regards to homosexuality, the wider community is happy with gay camp but wants it without any gay trauma. In the varied response to the town’s history, the divide between the two gay men and the presumably straight Maggie is presented with beautiful subtlety and texture.
Our contemporary focus on political rights sometimes leaves little space for consideration of political process. But how is change to come about? You may be certain of what is just, but how do you make society follow suit? The current default position is to simply assert your vision repeatedly and aggressively. It’s a strategy more suited to the creation of division than progress.
Though the denouement is rather quick (not surprising considering the production’s already 100 minutes running time), it’s exciting to see modern Australian theatre with political maturity, a piece that suggests real change can happen, not when those who disagree with us are cast as immutable enemies, but when we seek ways in which people might work, and grow, together.
Paul Gilchrist
The Queen’s City of the South by Mark Salvestro
At The Loading Dock Theatre, Qtopia until 19 Oct
Image by Bojan Bozic
Theatre Red 