It’s one of our greatest roles – and it was written by a 23-year-old

A young Simon Burke saw the poster for Nimrod Theatre Company’s The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin, showing a boy smoking a cigarette, and wondered why he hadn’t been cast in the role. He’d recently done Nimrod’s Kookaburra with The Elocution’s director Richard Wherrett, and had since been a prince in the tower in Richard III. How could he be overlooked?

What the young Simon didn’t know was that, despite the poster, there was no role for a teenaged boy; Steve J. Spears’ groundbreaking play required just one middle-aged man, played, in its 1976 premiere, by Gordon Chater.

Now 50 years on, and in the same Downstairs Theatre at Belvoir, Burke is playing the larger-than-life Robert O’Brien, an elocution teacher who is a closeted gay man and transvestite at a time when homosexuality was a crime. Director Declan Greene (Griffin Theatre Company’s artistic director) believes that with a sense of danger re-emerging for queer people, “it felt a really interesting time to pick up the play and re-examine it”.

Greene also sees the play as part of a particular cultural moment in Australia when such queer-oriented entertainments as The Rocky Horror Show, starring Reg Livermore, and Livermore’s own Betty Blokk Buster Follies made flamboyant splashes on Australian stages, as did provocative rock band Skyhooks, whose music the play references.

Both Burke and Greene count O’Brien among Australian theatre’s greatest roles. “And it’s written by a 23-year-old straight guy!” exclaims Burke. “In terms of the experience of the life that he’s investigating and portraying, you look at the writing and the vernacular, and every line is filled with so much possibility of how to play that. It’s like Mozart writing symphonies when he’s seven.”

Being Burke’s largest ever role, it required some changes to his preparation habits. “I hate to come to rehearsal knowing the script,” he says, explaining he doesn’t want to pre-empt the work of directors and other actors. “I usually carry a script until the fourth week – longer than anyone else,” he continues. “Even if I know my lines, it’s some kind of security blanket.

“Then I realised, about three or four weeks before rehearsals, that this wasn’t going to cut it. So I tried to get down as much of it as possible. I didn’t go out Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve. I was just studying it.”

With that work done, Burke and Greene settled into an intense collaboration, including devising backstories for the unseen, unheard characters with whom O’Brien converses.

“It’s been really fun,” says Greene. “In Gordon Chater’s autobiography, he talks about the demands that he made before he started rehearsing it. He said to Richard Wherrett that he would come in completely off book on the first day, but he also wanted every single prop and costume on stage, right from the beginning of the process.

“Reading that, I went, ‘There’s a sense in that.’ So we’ve tried to have everything Simon needs on the floor from day one of rehearsal because there’s a complex choreography that goes along with the text, with countless props.”

Greene has loved the play since his teens and, after working with Burke in 2017, knew he’d found “the dexterity, theatre-making craft, charisma and all the things that you need to tackle this huge role”.

He proposed it to Burke with no immediate urgency, but subsequently, when it twigged that the play’s 50th anniversary would coincide with Griffin’s residency in the Downstairs Theatre, the case for doing it became unassailable.