THE AUSTRALIAN: Lasseter’s Reef gets a good shine
An article by Chris Boyd, The Australian
We do love our bullshit artists in Australia, don’t we? Lewis Lasseter was one of our greatest. Had he grown up in a less secular country, “Possum” Lasseter might have led a new religion rather than an expedition nor-west of nowhere. In the darkest days of the Depression, an unusually well-equipped posse set out from Alice Springs searching for the reef of gold Lasseter claimed to have found in 1897, or 1911 — depending on who he was chatting up.
More Walter Mitty than Don Quixote, Lasseter apparently was incapable of telling the same story twice. The Australian Dictionary of Biography calls him “a poseur who had little regard for the truth”. Friends and colleagues called him a crank, a humbug and “most eccentric”.
In The Great Australian Play, Kim Ho plays as fast and loose with narrative mode and dramatic structure as Lasseter did with facts. Ho has penned a brainstorming, barnstorming suite of firecracker scenes rather than a coherent and well-made play, but there’s much more to the mess than meets the eye.
Winner of the 2017 Patrick White Playwrights Award, Ho cleverly splices White’s most famous protagonist, Johann Voss, into Lasseter’s story, and there’s much hand-wringing among the performers as to whether the Prussian explorer would be a Nazi in 1930.
This is the other helix in Ho’s play: a group of contemporary artists shape the Lasseter story before our eyes, preparing to pitch it to producers without knowing what form it should take. Stage or screen? Large screen or small? Self-contained or franchise? It’s a delightful glimpse into a divided, overdriven and fertile mind.
The scenes that any sane creative team would have cut — for length as much as clarity — are precisely the ones that shine the brightest in this production by Sydney’s Montague Basement, directed with elan by Saro Lusty-Cavallari. They mostly centre on a bit-part character named Geb (Jessa Koncic) and her ambiguous and occasionally terrifying alter-ego The Fidgeter.
Koncic, Sermsah bin Saad (Lasseter), Daniel Fischer (Lasseter’s pilot Coote), Tamara Lee Bailey (expedition leader Fred Blakeley) and Sarah Fitzgerald bring so much personality to the stage we’re happy to ignore just how indulgent, mental and arse-numbingly prolix the show is.
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