How could a Down Under ‘70’s playwright have been so
sophisticated? Maybe the question should be why Australia does
not produce more richly cerebral plays 25 years later.
The production of A Stretch of the Imagination
celebrates the silver anniversary of the play’s first
production at The Pram Factory in March 1972.
The play’s only character - irascible, crusty monk
O’Neill - is an elderly hermit. Peter Hosking’s body
contorts to portray the brassy vulgar and decrepit hobo who grows
tomatoes and chops down the only tree at his campsite. The next
moment he grows big-chested into the bombastic pretentious
man-about-town complaining bitterly to a waiter about every
possible aspect of his posh restaurant.
Our man Monk has been a "dux of classics at St
Xavier’s" at the turn of the century, cycled through
the French countryside on his Malvern Star in 1912, married three
times and all but raped by his best friend’s wife. His
monologue is a series of fantastic reminiscences, memories and
imagings comically juxtaposed with the immediate narrow
parameters of a hermit’s life. A philosopher, he is familiar
with the Greek classics, Baudelaire, Proust, and Homer. The next
second he is humping the air remembering a particular romantic
encounter.
Monk is perhaps as much a ‘90s man as he was a product of
the’70s.
If you never see another play this year, go and experience
this one and keep it as a yardstick