Australian writer to debut new play

Australian writer to debut new play

By Deborah Cameron

JAKARTA (JP): With the New Zealand ambassador as the leading man, the Australian ambassador's wife as the leading lady and a string of embassy officials and amateur actors making up a scratch cast, the only thing that's certain about the Jakarta performance of Alex Buzo's latest play, is that it will be a lot of fun.

Buzo, an Australian playwright and writer, in residence at the University of Indonesia, is staging, directing and giving wardrobe advice to a cast that has had to juggle rehearsal times and cast meetings round replying to faxes from head office and trailing after visiting VIP's.

Next Tuesday, when the curtain goes up at the Australian Embassy Theaterette, it will be the first time that many of them have trod the boards.

For Buzo, taking a breather over a cool glass of water at the embassy snack bar, it has been a matter of shedding an uptight Sydney demeanor and getting into "Jakarta mode". Don't fret, he tells himself.

Buzo's play is called Pacific Union and is set in 1945, at the United Nations conference on International Organization in San Francisco. The key character in his play is H.V. (Doc) Evatt, the then Australian Minister for External Affairs and Attorney General, who was a representative at the conference and came to be a dominant figure at its debates.

"Evatt emerged as the champion of the smaller nations in this, his finest hour," Buzo writes in the author's notes on the play.

Indonesia, which did not declare its independence until later that year, was not represented at the San Francisco conference. However, Buzo believes that the outcome of the meeting sowed the seeds for the Non-Aligned Movement in which Indonesia has since been a principal player.

Buzo, whose past plays have dealt with the themes of young societies in such places as Australia, Fiji, Indonesia and New Zealand, grapples in Pacific Union with the tensions of the infant United Nations.

In 1987 Buzo wrote Makassar Reef, a play set in Ujungpandang, which was the first Australian play to be set in Indonesia. And, with a brief passage written in bahasa Indonesia, was the first time that the Indonesian language was heard on the Australian stage.

Buzo has had a lifelong interest in Indonesia since, as a boy, he read an atlas and became fascinated by the archipelago.

He quickly agreed to become the writer in residence at the University of Indonesia after an approach by the Australian Council and the Australia-Indonesia Institute, and has been in Jakarta for about six weeks.

At the university he has lectured students in the faculty of Australian Studies, where one of his plays, Coralie Lansdowne Says No has been on the syllabus for two years.

But one of the big highlights of his visit is the staging of Pacific Union, which, even with its scratch cast of enthusiastic amateurs, is something of a world premier, as the play is not set to open in Australia until later this year.