Review: WATERSHED – ADELAIDE FESTIVAL 2022 at Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Saturday 5th March 2022.

Watershed, a twenty-second-century oratorio, is astounding. Commissioned by the Festival, and directed by Neil Armfield, it is at times exquisitely lovely and, at others, confronting and brutal.

Adelaide has waited fifty years for a chance, if not to heal, at least to join in an act of remembrance.

This is a resurrection of a man, a memory, a murder or manslaughter, a purging of universal grief or guilt. It is an expiation of communal guilt. Watershed was something Adelaide, some of Adelaide, desperately needed.

Let me say, right at the start, that this is a great achievement musically and dramatically, well deserving its standing ovation. Composer, Joe Twist's, experience in the liturgical music of the Mass, and his skill as a writer for voices, give the Adelaide Chamber Singers an immensely rewarding experience. Many of them stepped forward for brief solos and ensembles. Their artistic director, Christie Anderson, conducts the small orchestra as well. It's long overdue, this recognition of her skills.

This is the story. On the tenth of May, 1972, an Englishman recently appointed to the Law Department at Adelaide University was tossed into the River Torrens. It was a 'poofter bashing', a relatively common occurrence that he might have survived. He drowned.

In all probability, he was the victim of local policemen. Duncan was a Catholic. Baptism is one of the sacraments. What, apart from, of course, death, made this event so important in Adelaide and eventually sparked significant law reform? The libretto asks that question. He was white, educated, employed as a lecturer at the University. The one other thing, that brought him support came, it is alleged, from middle-aged Adelaide matrons who might disapprove of sodomy but disapprove even more strongly of the lack of hospitality. How could this be done to a visitor to Adelaide? Questions, questions. Did he hit his head? Did he somehow feel that he should, as a sinner, die? What were his last conscious thoughts? In this oratorio his last moments are lyrical. He didn't fight.

At the time, one of Adelaide's literary lions went into print, saying, essentially, if homosexuals wanted to seek their "masochistic martyrdom" on the banks of the Torrens, it was their fault if they got hurt. That phrase, 'masochistic martyrdom', has stayed with me.

The religious connotations, baptism, martyrdom, point to oratorio as the perfect memorial form. It's an Italian musical art form telling a sacred tale, often with the use of soloists and choir, with a narrator. The first oratorios had no theatrical trappings such as costumes and stage movement. That's how it was for a couple of centuries. Every performance of Messiah, the best known of the form, featured an orchestra in concert dress, a large or small choir, in concert dress, and four or five soloists, the men in evening dress and the women in evening dresses.

Things began to change slowly. In Saint Nicholas, by Benjamin Britten, the resurrected pickled boys appear, and process down the nave singing. It was A Child of Our Time, by Michael Tippett, that took the form of a secular meditation on tyranny. Tippett took a leaf from the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, arranging American spirituals to give community voice to the concerns of his libretto. Leonard Bernstein's Mass, a recent Festival attraction, is another example.

Only a couple of years ago Adelaide experienced Remembering Mathew Shepard, by Craig Hella Johnson, an oratorio about the murder of a young gay man, drawing on the same material as The Laramie Project. Musically eclectic and powerful, I had hoped it could be revived, but the pandemic struck.

Watershed is such a clever title. It's the American usage for what Europe calls a drainage basin. Water goes one way or the other. It's the word used in television to mark that point in the evening after which sensitive or confronting material can be shown, and before which there is the presumption that such things are not for innocent eyes and ears. That's certainly true of the explicit libretto, by Christos Tsiolkas and Alana Valentine, projected onto the backdrop. It has moments of great beauty, and moments of documentary narrative, written in unflinching vernacular. I've read the libretto, and could probably quote it for the purposes of review, but I hope it will be publicly available. The phrase 'Love is a cheesy melt', however, even if it's a euphemism, has no place in the work, or anywhere outside of a fast-food jingle.

There are four significant soloists who embody specific individuals. Mark Oates, his craft honed in music theatre, is both the self-denying Dr. Duncan, "I am not a homosexual". and Don Dunstan (Donald Allen Dunstan, Q.C. was the leader of the Labor Party, and was the Premier of South Australia twice, from June 1967 to April 1968, and from June 1970 to February 1979). This is one of his finest achievements.

Pelham Andrews has a voice of operatic timbre and intensity, the beauty of which is almost a distraction from the story he tells, but this story has operatic weight. The third soloist is Ainsley Melham, formerly of Hi-5 and with impressive music theatre credentials. He is a powerful narrative voice and, eventually, he sings. His character, he's a lost boy, one of the many young and, indeed, not so young men whose deaths have gone almost unregarded, unregretted.

The fourth soloist is mute, but ecstatic. Mason Kelly's aerial work is breathtaking as he embodies Duncan's spirit. Lowered from the sky to dance and fall in the strip of water at the front of the stage, his terror and torment will grip you. His shirt slips from his shoulders and, soaked in water, is both erotically charged and a poignant recall of his drowning death. His physical control is amazing. The final moments of his duet, with Melham as, entwined as lovers, they recline on the water's edge, are heartbreaking, and yet love affirming. Reconnected to his cable he rises gently, kisses his lover goodbye and enters heaven.

"The touch of your hand says you'll catch me if ever I fall. You say best when you say nothing at all."

His appearance in sparkly drag for the disco scene was a great surprise and, for me, that gay disco routine was the weak point in the show. It did, however, commemorate the flourishing of gay culture in the 1970s and counterbalanced the serious nature and depth of the story.

There is one incident that isn't mentioned. When the TV news crew arrived to cover the story, Duncan's body had been retrieved from the Torrens. Well, where's the news value in that? The investigating officers obligingly pushed Duncan back into the river and replayed the action with the camera rolling. One drowning not enough?

It's not just the death. A significant portion of the work focuses on the political manoeuvrings of the sixties and early seventies, Dunstan's early failure and eventual success, the work of Murray Hill and Peter Duncan, and others less known. Those early gay activists are celebrated. The fifty years of change that grew from that dreadful incident are marked. While Adelaide has had a reputation for social change and development since its founding, it's good that the slow acceptance of sexual diversity is noted.

Some gay men I know have wept fiercely at the experience of attending Watershed. I didn't. When it happened it was seismic for the city. I was new to Adelaide. Its impact for me at that time was muted.

I'd been in Australia for 19 months or so, finding my feet at Flinders University. I was in love with Michael. He wasn't in love with me. The only other homosexual I knew sang in the same choir as I did, the Flinders University Choral Society, known affectionately by its initials.

By sweet coincidence, he was at the matinee that I attended. Growing up in a society with no gay people and no old people, I had no positive role models. Frankie Howerd, the Carry On crew, and a few other theatricals. I didn't know about beats or the culture of anonymous sexual encounters. I didn't find out about 'poofter bashing' 'til one night in the car park of my favourite pub. I live with the memory of that, other violence, other betrayals. Do bashers ever repent? One policeman, Mick O'Shea, tried to blow that metaphorical whistle and ended up nowhere. The Torrens was Shit's Creek. No paddles. No lifebelts.

Fifty years on, there are many reminders of that night, not just a plaque by the Uni Footbridge. A dear friend's garden is maintained by one of the men thrown into the river that night. The two policemen indicted for the murder were classmates of someone I work with. It was Christian Brothers College, by the way.

The police still have Duncan's personal effects including his wristwatch, stopped at 11.07.

Sometimes I see a couple of men holding hands in the street. It's lovely that they feel they can do it. I don't often see a man and woman holding hands in public, to be honest. Now, a thousand flowers bloom, rainbows on everything and, if you don't have a special colour, mine's grey by the way, you can always add another initial. I asked Denis Altman, one evening, after he gave a speech at the Adelaide University, if it concerned him that he had an audience of the conversant, while younger members of our community of interest were partying on the other side of town, ignorant of his achievement and the achievements of others. "I wish them well", he said, "and I'm off to join them".

To post a comment, you must register and login.