Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 44 No. 5. March 30 1981

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Macho confusion

Foreskin's Lament

The much-acclaimed Foreskin's Lament gets its impact from sound writing which enables it to take off as a play of ideas. Too few New Zealand plays to date have been able to achieve both these things; either they have been intellectually unsatisfying, or too theatrically or structurally weak to carry ideas. Not so with Foreskin's Lament - 1 rank it at the top with Jennifer Compton's Crossfire.

It is a play which, for once and for all, dispells the egalitarian myth - it affirms class differences in New Zealand and unashamedly looks at the bitterness which results from the differences. As Clean, an archetypal rugby player says to Moira, a lawyer, "The distance between me and you is a fucken world".

Like David Williamson's The Club, which has also been widely performed in New Zealand, Foreskin's Lament is set in a rugby environment, but McGee goes a step further and works in the physicality of the changing room rather than with the administrators in the clubroom. Seymour, or Foreskin, is a student who plays for his home team; he values both the more enlightened minds of the university, and what he believes is the more honest, down-to-earth, working-class mentality of the rugby players - that they are somehow more in contact with what it takes to be human. He says to Moira: "If you think they're pigs then you'd better look close and get used to the smell, because their smell is your smell", and of the university, "Sometimes up there I get the feeling that life itself is just an abstraction."

What are New Zealanders?

But by the end of the play, his belief in this myth has crumbled. He discovers that the nitty-gritty is a charade too, and the increasing chaos and violence in the last ten minutes of the play bring about the final disintegration of the myth, culminating in the smashing of a TV set showing a rugby game, and Foreskin launching into his climactic lament for the inadequacy of both the rugby and intellectual standpoints. Thus there is no resolution, and Foreskin's final question of "Whaddarya?" is to the audience - What are New Zealanders? Without the egalitarian myth to hide behind how can we have a national identity?

This ending is very theatrically powerful and is made all the more provocative by McGee's careful arguing of ideas throughout the play. He uses characters representing different social positions, (most obviously, Moira as the intellectual, Clean as the rugby man, and Foreskin caught between the two), and in the second act plays off these representatives against eachother. This is done unobtrusively by setting the conversations on a balcony outside an off-stage party. This enables him to group various individuals together for confrontation.

However, the characters are not merely types. Like Arthur Miller in Death of Salesman, McGee exposes characters enough to make us hate them, and then justifies them because they are human beings. Miller has Linda say of her husband: "I don't think he's a great man... He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being... Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person".

In the same way, it would be easy to despise the chauvinistic, animalistic, Clean, but McGee shows that he has been a victim, and Foreskin defends him against Moira in saying: "If you haven't had to wonder where your next buck is coming from, then you've missed out on the major preoccupation of the waking hours of the Western world."

BROMHEAD THE NEW IMAGE.....

Death of a Conformist

Less obviously, but also importantly, the play is about individualism, and its defeat. The team ethos is at the expense of the individual, so that Ken is expected to play for the sake of the team regardless of his injuries, and his eventual death is the sacrifice of an individual to the idea of the team. Foreskin loses in both the academic world where he finds it has all been said before ("What could I possibly say that was original"), and the rugby world where he is told he is too much of an individual and must conform. (This rugby phenomena has been satirically elevated to myth in Vincent O'Sullivans novel. Miracle). Also, the language and attitudes of the rugby world work against individuals in its terms of abuse against minorities, especially women, foreigners, and homosexuals, and its inability to see these people as people.

It is a pity that there are not more parts for women in Foreskin's Lament, but it is an excellent play which is funny as well as stimulating, and will be well worth seeing in its Wellington season. Hopefully the quality of its writing and content will provide a model for more and better New Zealand plays which are not afraid to deal with ideas.

Gay Cusack

Recommended text

Book

Anthology of Verse and Prose Vol. X.

Drawing of a Cheshire cat and Cheshire mouse

"I'm a Cheshire mouse."

What is this pretty book with the red cover I asked myself as I sniffed around in the Salient editor's office looking for the petty cash. A Lamda anthology of verse and prose, came answer. It is supposed to be being reviewed.

My curiosity was aroused; what the hell is a Lamda? Some obscure eastern religious sect perhaps? NO!!! Lamda is the 'London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art', and this is an anthology of pieces intended for use in examinations conducted by that organisation. It's an elocution book.

What are Enjambements?

Now elocution is, despite the ridicule with which most people speak of it, something of which many students have some experience; a quick scout round among my friends revealed that most of them at one stage or another had had something to do with speech and drama classes. Certainly the thought of 'speech and drama' brought many images crowding into this reviewer's head; competition festival mothers with bright red lipstick, loud voices, and precocious eight-year-old Oliviers and Glenda Jacksons; the sweat pouring off as I waited outside the Door of the Examining Room for the Examiner to summon me in to say my one or two prepared pieces and answer a few simple questions on enjambements, inflection, and the neutral vowel. It was really not so much a hobby as a way of life, and for all those hundreds of students who have been through the mill a glance through the Lamda anthology will probably provide quite a nostalgic experience.

A Source of Income

But the book is not really aimed at the reader so much as the serious teacher of speech and drama. I know of several

students at this university who find tutoring the offspring of latter-day Mrs Worthingtons to be quite a lucrative source of income. For them this book could be quite invaluable. It contains a good selection of verse and prose extracts graded for difficulty, beginning with a little number by 'Anon' for children and ending with a prose extract from Virginia Woolf. It could save a teacher a lot of time in fereting around in books looking for nice children's poems, and although it contains no drama extracts for 'character sketches', the prose pieces would be ideal for say a prepared reading class, or for training in sightreading. It is a damned nuisance having to hunt out short, self contained chunks of prose from novels, and this anthology provides a good number of them for the teacher.

Lamda do not, as far as I know, conduct examinations in New Zealand, but their centennary anthology is none the less a book which many teachers of speech might find a useful part of their bookshelf.

S.D.