Frozen: Let It Go

Ice by Louis Nowra

(Allen & Unwin) Pp. 322

In the 1880s British entrepreneurs Malcolm McEachern and Andrew McIlwraith tow an iceberg to Sydney and introduce locals to ice. It goes down a treat, but as the iceberg melts, the frozen body of a young sailor is found within it. Malcolm is lost in grief for the death of his wife, Ann, and he attempts to preserve her memory. A parallel story is narrated by a young man who takes over his partner’s research work (she was writing a biography of Malcolm McEachern) after she is frozen in a coma. Images and metaphors of arresting time resound throughout the novel.

Early Sydney comes alive through the impressions of the young men as they first arrive. It is a character in itself, defying description and confounding assumptions; full of possibilities as people flee the Old World and try to reinvent themselves in a land of opportunities. Malcolm is always chasing the latest business venture: he brings refrigerated meat from Australia to London, electricity to Melbourne and order to the Tokyo electric tram system. He is attracted to what he calls Australia’s “dirty prism of classless democratic optimism” which allowed him to succeed in business.

Malcolm is clearly a man’s man, dismissing women as inferior and the representation of women within the novel is astoundingly weak. Malcolm’s mother remarries and excludes him from her life, and his second wife, Mary, is unkindly portrayed as some sort of harpy, despite the fact that his treatment of her is appalling. He mourns his first wife, Ann, building her a mausoleum – a weird subterranean world of bottled embryos – and Mary disappears into the background to lead a separate life.

The telling of Malcolm’s story is full of things that biographers could not have known but must have imagined; as the tale proceeds the narrator becomes increasingly unreliable. Ann dies, which is convenient, because live women are so messy, and Malcolm is distraught, but is the narrator talking about himself or about Malcolm? “Until he’d married her he had been unloved and she had awoken love in him, as surely as if it were a delicious, sweet emerging from melting ice. She had given him a purpose, a sense that he was human and loving, but a callous God had snatched her away from him, scooped his insides out and rendered him hollow.”

The references to being frozen in form and time are both literal and metaphoric as the lines between subject and biographer blur. The frigid purity of ice is contrasted with the warm sensuality of the body. Malcolm makes a wax effigy of Ann and keeps it in his catacombs where he builds a room for her and visits her for necrophiliac purposes. “It was as if she was frozen, like the perfectly preserved American sailor excavated from the iceberg.” The similarities with the drug – “the drug that ruined your life and mine” – are not accidental.

Malcolm’s time is one of great change and discovery and he himself is a man of science and technology. The scientific developments of the age – X-rays; atoms; telephones; electricity – become confused with spiritualism and mesmerism because “The boundaries between the possible and impossible were quickly narrowing at an astonishing pace.” Mary believes that, “Scientists belong in the darkness of their laboratories, not in the bright light of society.” Darkness and secrecy, however, lead to obsession and madness, which will always be revealed when exposed to the light.

'Tell me a story'; 'I don't want to give you nightmares'

A Most Outrageous Humbug, Three Spoon Theatre
Downstage Theatre, 29 April – 7 May

The opening gambit of A Most Outrageous Humbug sets the scene for the entire play. Artfully designed piles of books and sombre mood lighting (Marcus McShane) form the backdrop to Edgar Allan Poe’s parents’, Elizabeth (Jean Sergent) and David (Adam Donald) ferocious and theatrical argument which ends in tears and blood.

Top hats, velvet waistcoats, silk cravats hoop skirts, and fortified corsets (gorgeously designed by Dawa Devereux) hint at the constriction of fierce passions. Meanwhile the scenario is underpinned by Tane Upjohn Beatson at the piano with its exposed hammers and strings playing dramatic, morose music. This promises to be an American Gothic Romance with dark undercurrents of violence and passion, and boy, does it deliver.

Told through a mix of Poe’s essays, poems and stories woven with imagined events, the play purports to be a biography of the man. As a lesson to anyone who ever wants to know how much of an author’s work is biographical – it’s simply impossible to know. Three Spoon Theatre under the direction of Charlotte Bradley have created a work which shows a man spiralling into madness and sabotaging his entire literary career, loosing himself in stories and wine. You might just as well worry about their state of mind.

Edgar Allan Poe became an orphan at two, the inference being he had no early stabilising factors in his life. Driven by thronging passion – ‘his ardour was matched only by his ambition’ – he hoped academia might rein in his wild excesses. We are told this by Thomas McGrath narrating as Poe from the sidelines, becoming increasingly involved in the action as the play progresses. The play both shows and tells with Ralph McCubbin Howell acting as Poe throughout.

Poe writes every moment available between his studies to the detriment of them both, and becomes romantically involved with Frances Osgood (Adrianne Roberts). His rival in love and literature is the ‘sweaty and creepy but persistent and rich’ Rufus Griswold (Ed Watson). Poe may be ‘talented and passionate’ but he also has a wild disregard for propriety reflected in his appearance. Howell plays him as explosive, which leaves him with nowhere to go as his tempo is feverish from the beginning.

The journey into madness is marked by a number of well-scripted scenes. There is a poetry reading between Poe and Griswold at which Griswold suggests ‘The ladies will enjoy our academic duelling’. There is Poe’s peculiarly abstract proposal to his 13-year-old cousin Virginia ‘Sissy’ Eliza Celmm (played with wide-eyed gaucheness by Alex Lodge) using his macabre stories as a form of courtship – ‘I liked your poetry better’. Sissy’s amusing wittering suits the young girl’s naivety, but her chilly defence is a little modern – ‘I may not be an adult, but at least I’m not a prat.’

There is the costume party book launch at which Elmira Shelton (Jean Sergent) dresses as the author – is it a sincere form of flattery or grist to his burgeoning paranoia? Meanwhile a mysterious hooded figure, seen only by Sissy, stalks the party, which cannot bode well. In orchestrated breaks from the party, guests partner up into formal dance and corpses return to life.

As Poe reads his stories we are frequently deceived into questioning what is reality and given unheralded glimpses into his manic mind. ‘What a gift to tap into the psyche of a blood-thirsty psycho so effortlessly’. He applies for an editing position only to be interviewed by characters from his short story Doctor Tarr (Adam Donald) and Professor Fether (Jean Sergent) in a show-stealing scene.

This is a brilliantly written script and hangs so tightly together that it is hard to believe it was devised collaboratively. The colours of red (the consumptive blood that claims so many characters) black (the raven feather; the relentless gloom) and white (the purity and innocence of Sissy; the bleached bones of his tales) are woven into the tapestry of the narrative. Death unifies all from his mother’s untimely demise to his own wrestling with himself (literally) in the final scene. It’s not exactly joyful, but it is triumphant, and a worthy inclusion in the Pick of the Fringe.