Linda Cropper and Greg Stone in Australian Realness (photograph by Pia Johnson)

Melbourne-based writer Zoey Dawson’s skill lies in pulling apart form, in metatheatrical critique of the act of writing and storytelling. In The Unspoken Word Is Joe, she tore into the pretension of the play as personal therapy. In Conviction and Calamity, she unpacked traditional feminist narratives and championed female self-authorship. Tackling the cultural icon of the working-class bogan hero is an obvious next step. Her previous work adheres to a strong sense of rhythm: an initial satirical naturalism that stretches into surrealism, whose comedy ratchets to breaking point and then collapses. But even from the preset the production feels as though it’s fighting an uphill battle to generate the necessary energy to reach a crescendo. The first act feels as though it’s not quite sure whether it ought to be funny.

The production shifts gear with the arrival of the Hogans. Mum and Dad are solving their financial woes by renting the shed to a working-class family, to the horror of their children. Kerry and Gary (also Cropper and Stone), the bogan parents, are crass and flirtatious. Their dole-bludging son, Jason (de Vanny), arrives onstage to perform a tracksuit striptease, rat-tail flying. Partner immediately bonds with Gary, who’s just been kicked off the job site next door. As Daughter recoils in horror from Kerry’s description of her as a ‘carpet muncher’, Partner and Gary unite to lead a union rebellion and worker’s revolution.

With the entrance of this new family, the production shifts from the tropes of theatre to those of television. When Kerry erupts onstage, it’s to a raucous laugh track, which shifts the rules of engagement from an elegant middle-class play to a prime time sitcom, where the Hogans are situated as charming audience favourites. Several of these destabilising devices aren’t quite resolved. The potential of the canned laughter to heighten the surrealist crescendo of the play is never quite realised. Similarly, de Vanny and Stone’s father–son relationship conflicts are performed as absurd chase scenes, replete with sudden colour washes and daggy accompanying music. These moments of hypertheatricality aren’t tightly choreographed enough to convey their own dissonance.

The actors work hard within the constraints of the premise. Cropper is particularly adept at shifting between Mum’s bourgeois snootiness and Kerry’s brash, fanny-pack-wielding coarseness. In her writer’s notes, Dawson expresses a certain nostalgia for the uncomplicated bogan heroes of late-1990s pop culture, but the Hogans are so base, so crass, that they cease to retain humanity. The cultural cringe of characters like Kath and Kim and Dale Kerrigan relies on their familiarity, their recognisable flouting of social codes. The Hogans are caricatures of caricatures; there is no truth to them, and so they become mere clowns. We don’t recognise them.

Emily Goddard and Chanella Macri in Australian Realness (photo by Pia Johnson)

Only Partner, played by Chanella Macri, is a holistic character. She is the site of the production’s tensions around homophobia, race, and class. Dawson creates in her a sort of intersectional superhero – a lesbian, woman of colour, wharfie who sparks a revolution. Partner is the most interesting but the most underutilised character. The embodiment of Dawson’s call for a complicated engagement with the working class, she disappears halfway through the play.

By the time the production shifts to the present day, the structures of the set, the family, and the narrative have collapsed. The stage becomes a gallery space, then a projection space, and finally a black void. Daughter’s pregnancy, the representation of hope for the future, is lost. Her family doesn’t seem to notice anything wrong. It is a striking metaphor for the ways in which cultural codes and the comfort of things serve to cover a deep lack of certainty.

Throughout the production, the idea of art exploiting the working class is deeply embedded. As static art objects, the poor are fascinating, charming. They are not angry, unruly, or liable to revolt; they are captive. This exploitation is constantly identified in Australian Realness but never resolved. The working class exists onstage as photo subjects, sitcom buffoons, installation artworks, and mystical truth tellers, but these people are not protagonists. They are offstage, elsewhere, as our eyes remain on Daughter. Her descent into a nihilistic world where culture fails to overcome a paucity of meaning provides a representation of contemporary existential despair, but its relationship with class feels poorly teased out.

Linda Cropper in Australian Realness (photograph by Pia Johnson)

In her writer’s notes, Dawson describes the work as ‘a kind of revenge fantasy that came from seeing the working class locked out of the arts’. The 1997 setting means that the speculative union-led social breakdown loses the bite that a contemporary telling might have enabled. The production offers a form of cultural re-imagining, where the docile bogan cultural figure assumes power in a violent rebellion. In 2019, this form of utopian dreaming is full of the hollowness of hindsight. The year 1998 saw the simmering tensions of Partner’s workplace erupt into the Australian waterfront dispute, which ended not with the violent overthrow of late capitalism but with ongoing industrial issues and a long slide into union powerlessness. Dawson’s alternate history is toothless in its heroics; it hammers home everything that hasn’t changed. Her ‘revenge fantasy’ is imbued with despair.

Australian Realness ultimately struggles to create a nuanced engagement with its own subject matter. The production feels unsure of its agenda, unable to control its own rhythmic shifts. While the production offers some fascinating play with form, it feels as though Zoey Dawson’s text is consistently straining against Janice Muller’s direction. Dawson’s terrific facility with metatheatrics and formal breakdowns is dulled in a production whose tone never quite matches its content.

Australian Realness is written by Zoey Dawson and directed by Janice Muller. It is being produced by Malthouse Theatre at the Meryln August 16 to September 8 2019.