If I said a new play has just opened in Melbourne by one of Australia's best comic writers who produces a new piece nearly every year, you'd probably think David Williamson's Don Parties On. Wrong! I said one of Australia's BEST comic writers. Steven Dawson's gay themed comedies have the baroque excess of Restoration comedies. Ribald and irreverent they magnify the lustiness of the characters and parade them before an (providing they appreciate a good raunchy romp) audience. Mr Braithwaite Has a New Boy is no exception. With his trademark inclusion of occasional on-stage nudity and nearly constant, 'adult' language Dawson mixes the Pygmalion theme with Pretty Woman and adds the comic and dramatic tension of older men mentoring a younger men in Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane or Mordaunt Shairp's The Green Bay Tree to make one of his most elegant plays yet.
The understanding of a classic farce situation is all there. Like Alan Ayckbourn at his best Dawson plants a theme, idea or phrase and has it re-surface throughout the play to funny effect. Johnny’s insistence, for example, that he is not a prostitute but an ‘entertainment coordinator’ is taken by other characters and re-worked to new advantage each time. Dawson also delights in his own recurring dramatic devices too, namely gratuitous (as he puts it) nudity. In the opening scene a young man enters wearing only a towel which he removes and sits provocatively on the sofa slyly smiling - to us as much to himself - and alternates with covering and uncovering his penis. There was more teasing humour in those few seconds as he teased us with that strongest of ticket seller than all the self-conscious, full-frontal nudity the MTC has thrown at audiences in the last decade.
Half buried under a mountainous toupee Iain Murton is delightful as the prissy Braithwaite as he tries to turn Johnny into a genteel companion who doesn’t use the ‘f’ or ‘c’ words or sprawl naked on the sofa. As Johnny James Miller rattles of Dawson's outrageous, foulmouthed dialogue to Mr Braithwaite’s horror or provocatively poses – naked or near naked – in a wonderfully raunchy portrayal of the rent boy. Like a latter day Liza Doolittle, he is unable to self-censor in polite, or any, company, dropping expletives in front of Harold’s neighbor or brother-in-law but, again like Liza Doolittle, he grows fond and grateful toward his mentor despite the impossibility of fulfilling Harold’s proposal.
Nathan Butler pulls of a hat trick playing Braithwaite’s nosey and narcoleptic neighbour Edna, lecherous best friend Maurice and spiteful brother-in-law Edmond. Dawson doesn’t bury this impossible relationship with sentimentality but creates an endearing portrait of an odd couple. Perhaps frustrated by Harold’s constant reprimands for using bad language or letting his sweaty balls mark the sofa when he lounges around in the nude, Johnny reverts, sneaks out to see friends, a few client’s for old-times-sake, even steals money from Edna’s purse and samples her medications during one of her frequent black-outs.
The ending is hardly a surprise but Dawson resolves the two in an emotionally rewarding way without laying on the sentiment and then quickly ends the play, snapping us away from potential lugubriousness with a final, feline recurring device.
Mr Braithwaite Has a New Boy
written and directed by Steven Dawson
Harold Braithwaite - Iain Murton
Johnny – James Miller
Edna - Nathan Butler
Maurice – Nathan Butler
Edmond - Nathan Butler
Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre, Brunswick
14 January - 12 February 2010
Bookings: outcast.org.au
This is an expanded version of the review published in MCV