Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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by Jack Charles & John Romeril, directed by Rachael Maza
ILBIJERRI Theatre Company, BerkeleyStreet Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
March 29-April 8, 2017
Jack Charles: “I live in hope we are works in progress”
Opening Canadian Stage’s Spotlight Australia festival is Jack Charles v the Crown, an autobiographical performance work by Jack Charles, an Aboriginal actor well-known in Australia from his work in theatre and film. The piece that premiered in Melbourne in 2010 has toured Australia and has since visited London, Dublin, Ottawa and New York. The show gives audiences the chance to learn the life story a truly remarkable man – a charismatic, white-maned, white-bearded, 73-year-old queer actor and singer, reformed cat-burglar and drug addict and Aboriginal activist. The show also provides uncomfortable echoes of the way Canada, with a similar assumption of the white man’s superiority, has treated its own indigenous people
The show begins with clips from a 2009 documentary about Charles called Bastardy, which shows him shooting up heroin while it lists items stolen during some of the 22 times his was arrested for burglary and imprisoned. Meanwhile, below the jagged screen of Emily Barrie’s combined bandstand, workshop and living room of a set, Charles sits at a potter’s wheel and creates a vase while we watch. Simultaneously, we see both the low point in his life on film and his reformation live before us, his self-destructiveness in the past and his ability to create now.
Charles was part of what is known as the “Stolen Generation”. He was taken away from his mother when three months old, told later he was an orphan and raised by a white family. When he was old enough, he was sent to a Salvation Army School where he was the only black student. Though the young Charles is smiling in the many projected photos he shows us, during his time there he was physically and sexually abused. After graduation he was placed with another white family. While staying with them he happened to glimpse the first other black people in his life. He met with them and they took him to a meeting place for “blackfellas”, as Charles calls them, and discovers that some of them knew he had twelve brothers and sisters and who his birth mother was. Upon reporting this exciting news to his adoptive mother, Charles was sent to a centre for juvenile delinquents, the first of his many incarcerations.
We don’t really learn how Charles got his start in singing, theatre or movies. He appeared in the 1978 film The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, one of the premiere films of the Australian New Wave of the 1970s and ‘80s. We also don’t really learn how Charles drifted into drug addiction except that it had something to do with the availability of drugs in the entertainment world. His descent into burglary was to get money to pay for his habit.
Instead of a recital of these details, Charles and co-author John Romeril focus on the psychological and spiritual damage done to Aboriginal children by the government policy of assimilation through forced adoption begun as early as the 19th century with the Aboriginal Protection Act 1869. Though Charles is now a Koori tribal elder, he grew up with no knowledge of his real family or of his spiritual and cultural heritage. Much later when he was sent for psychiatric evaluation, he was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The piece which has begun with a look back at Charles’s life and included songs sung with a tight three-member band changes after a slow, jazzy musical interlude to the court case of the title. It is an idealized presentation of what Charles would say to the judges of the Supreme Court of Australia to argue that his criminal record be expunged. In his eloquent speech Charles begins with the practical matter that his record prevents him from travelling to certain countries, like Great Britain, where what he has to say would be valuable for people to hear. He moves on to the fact that he has paid his debt to society through imprisonment, but beyond that reformed his life and has helped others reform theirs. He notes that in “whitefella” law a person remains tainted by a crime even after they have atoned for it, whereas in “blackfella” law once a law-breaker has undergone exile and atoned for a crime he is fully re-admitted to society.
This leads him to the most fundamental question of what right British law has over “blackfellas” anyway. Charles refers to a British document from 1838, proclaiming the insidious doctrine of terra nullius (“land owned by no one”) that states that since the Aboriginals have no laws of their own, they can have no claim to the land. Thus, Aboriginals were regarded as trespassers on their own land and any rebellion was regarded as treason against the State.
Jack Charles v the Crown thus provides an invaluable overview from one remarkable individual into institutionalized racism as seen from both a personal perspective and an historical perspective along with insight into the damage to personal and cultural values that such racism inflicts on both the victims and the victimizers.
Yet the piece is also optimistic and that optimism is embodied in the initial image we see of Charles creating art out of earth in potting. Charles’s hands form a shape out of a ball of earth, but as the wheel turns that shape may take one shape but can also be re-formed. Charles’s life-enhancing view is that people’s minds are still as malleable as clay and can with enough exposure to songs, stories and images be reshaped. His tale of how he reformed his life is also a tale of how the story of his his life can re-form the audience.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jack Charles; Jack Charles and band. ©2015 Bindi Cole.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2017-03-31
Jack Charles v the Crown