Jack Charles Versus The Crown ILBIJERRI Theatre Company (Melbourne, Australia). A Remarquable Performance.
Photographer Bindi Cole
At one point in this remarkable show about his own life as a damaged Indigenous person in Australia and the collective experience of colonized Aboriginal people almost anywhere, Jack Charles sings the 1957 Connie Francis hit Who’s Sorry Now?
It seems an odd choice, this very white song by a very white singer from a very white time in America. Charles, backed by the tight, three-piece band that plays on and off through the show, sings the song in a jaunty, absolutely straight fashion, so while you know it’s meant to be ironic (after all, how sorry are we really about our treatment of Indigenous peoples?), his delivery leaves the import entirely up to us. Heck, he may even be singing the song, one of several in the show, just because he likes it.
It’s a sly bit of performing, the kind of thing the 72-year-old Charles slips now and then into his compelling account of being a member of the Stolen Generation who was torn from his mother as an infant to become a ward of the state, spent years as the sole Indigenous person in a boys’ school, wound up as an adult who ricocheted between a career on stage and in film and a life as a junkie, cat burglar and repeat prisoner, and finally broke free of drugs and crime to live a fulfilling life.
Charles’ show, which he co-wrote with John Romeril, opens with a video from Bastardy, the 2009 documentary about him, playing on a raised surface. As we watch the filmed Charles nonchalantly shoot up heroin – the clip is followed by mug shots and a list of his offences including the theft of a pair of Gucci sunglasses — the present-day Charles, an accomplished potter, bends over a wheel fashioning a small pot.
The juxtaposition of a life badly off-course and the physical presence of a man serenely creating something beautiful is powerful. It also embodies the many juxtapositions of the show and his life: an Indigenous man who’s an outcast in his own land; the attempt to banish existential pain by damaging oneself with drugs (“If this is harmful, bring on the hurt, please,” he says after shooting up in the film clip); the conversational, sometimes very funny manner in which Charles delivers his story and the fact that he suffered so badly from abuse as a child that he was later diagnosed with PTSD.
Much of Charles’ story rings uncomfortably true for us in Canada and the show is part of the NAC’s focus on Indigenous storytelling and reconciliation during January and February. In fact, Charles briefly but pointedly makes the Canadian link in his line, apparently adjusted for his tour to Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver, “like your Residential schools, I grew up ignorant of my Aboriginal heritage.” It’s a stinging moment for Canadian audiences.
Directed by Rachael Maza, Charles packs a lot into his 75-minute show including a sketch of the history of Australian Aboriginal theatre and film performance of which he was a prime mover. A man with a self-deprecating but proud sense of himself, he shifts toward the end of the show from addressing us to addressing an off-stage court as he appeals to the judges that his criminal record be expunged. Like the rest of the show, his appeal is delivered in a spirit of reconciliation rooted in an awareness of reality: “I live in hope we are works in progress,” he tells the judges at one point, “hope” being the operative word.
One’s fingers remain crossed.
Continues only until Jan. 16. Tickets: NAC box office, Ticketmaster outlets, 1-888-991-2787, nac-cna.ca
Published in the Ottawa Citizen, Friday, January 15, 2015
Jack Charles V The Crown
ILBIJERRI Theatre Company (Melbourne, Australia)
NAC Studio