See the review in its original context here.
**** 4 STARS
IMPRISONMENT and modern drama have an intriguing relationship. Arguably the first audiences to ”get” Beckett’s Waiting for Godot were the inmates of San Quentin, in the famous 1957 jailhouse production. These men were living at the sharp end of the fiction that we’re all at liberty to act rationally in our own self-interest: they knew the ways in which we’re radically unfree.
Jim McNeil penned these two one-act plays in a Parramatta prison in the ’70s. They’re acts of translation, elegant attempts to show the outside world how the warped mores of prison life make perfect sense from the inside.
Malcolm Robertson’s production allows the playwright’s naturalism to sing, revelling in an Australian argot that now lives only in performance.
The title of The Chocolate Frog comes from rhyming slang for a criminal informant, and it pits the outside world and the inside against each other. A young, naive law student refused bail (Will Ewing) is thrust into a cell with two seasoned inmates (Luke McKenzie and Cain Thompson). The dialogue touches everything from Socratic argument to Kafka-esque show-trial, as views on ethics collide.
In The Old Familiar Juice, a fresh-faced boy (Thompson), an old man (Richard Bligh) and a long-term prisoner (McKenzie) share a cell. They plan a party to pass the time, but it is darkened by friction.
The acting is strong, brimming with humour and menace. The detail draws you in: the way McKenzie’s smile is tightened by depths of bitterness; or how Thompson is innocent, stance and gesture suggesting he’s unaware of his own attractiveness and the peril it places him in.
The McNeil Project does justice to this Australian prison poet. A generation later, his plays retain power to entertain and disturb.