Sure, there was a bit of beating around the bonsai bush, but when the show hit the high points it was glorious.

McGuffin Park
Ensemble Theatre, October 24
Until November 23
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

Sam O’Sullivan’s new comedy has only to scratch at the veneer to lay bare the grubbiness of local government. But even as he satirises the inner workings of democracy, he’s championing a system threatened the world over by the politics of grievance, blame and hate.

“Democracy is a contradiction,” one of his characters declares. “It’s the agreement to live peacefully in constant conflict. To struggle, disagree and then ultimately to compromise.” It is the last part, the play observes, that we seem to have ever greater difficulty implementing.

The set-up is simple. The mayor of McGuffin, a rural Australian town, suddenly resigns from local politics and is replaced on the eight-person council by Banjo, a right-winger who came ninth in the previous election. Vying to become mayor are Fiona, an independent, and Jack, from an unspecified major party. Friends since childhood, they now must compete for majority support.

The interest lies not so much in the plot and characters as in the satire and how O’Sullivan presents his play, which, with its narration, self-commentary and puncturing of its own reality, is so overtly Brechtian that Brecht himself materialises to critique the action.

Five similarly attired actors play two dozen roles, often swapping within a scene via the quick change of a hat, scarf, tie or jacket (in addition to voice and manner). The effect is inherently comic, notably when Thomas Campbell repeatedly swaps between Banjo, with his loopy sovereign-citizen sect, and Bridget, a humourless, elderly councillor.

In Mark Kilmurry’s world-premiere production, Campbell joins Eloise Snape as Fiona, Shan-Ree Tan primarily as Jack, Jamie Oxenbould as a publican, football coach and Brecht, and Lizzie Schebesta as assorted characters including Dave, the bloodhound-like local newspaper editor. Sometimes the actors are also just themselves, addressing us in O’Sullivan’s words.

So the tone is in constant flux, and O’Sullivan may have been better putting all his eggs in the Brecht basket, rather than having a bet each way. The play is at its most entertaining when either being satirical or zany, so we feel we are privy to a monstrous in-joke.

When it suddenly erects a fourth wall and shoots for higher-stakes drama, as in the fraying and then fracturing of the friendship between Fiona and Jack, it’s less compelling, as if the characters prefer being types to being emotionally “real”. The best part of a town-hall debate between Fiona and Jack, for instance, comes when they suddenly flash back to an amusing and bruising classroom exchange decades before.

Oxenbould is in his element, winking at us and letting us in on the jokes, and revelling in Eric, the publican desperate to expand his establishment’s gambling capacity while also sitting on the council that must approve the proposal. And Campbell is spooky as well as funny when realising the MAGA-like Banjo, who runs a “survivalist” store full of surveillance cameras and hunting knives, and whom you can imagine selling firearms under the counter.

Simon Greer gives a more literal set than perhaps the play needed, but nails the right representation of a car journey, with just a steering wheel and a picture of a road on a hand-held screen: a joyously simple device after years of projections invading our stages. Jessica Dunn’s score, meanwhile, is adroitly sparse, but always telling when present.

Ultimately O’Sullivan’s message is optimistic: we can reclaim democracy as a triumphant form of compromise – although this optimism is tinged with heavy irony.