Keating! the musical, which screened last night on ABC2, is about the worst theatrical performance I have seen. It is an absolute disgrace.
I don't mean the singing. After all, shouting rather than signing, and recitative rather than singing is not all that unusual nowadays. I have no pretensions to being a theatre critic, but I am sure the producers and actors could have no real objection to ''mediocre''.
No. Where they plumb the depths is in political knowledge, of which there is little evidence, in political analysis, where they are malevolently wrong, and in any sense of historical truth, which they have set aside.
One can only wonder from what depths of hatred does a work of this sort arise. There is something medieval about its bitterness. Josef Goebbels would have been proud to have created such distorted stereotypes.
But let me run through the plot. The hero, a wronged and tragic figure who saved Australia from an evil gnome called Bob Hawke, doughtily fought off a challenge from John Hewson, but is then brought down by an evil dwarf, portrayed as Quasimodo.
On the way through, Alexander Downer, dressed as FrankN'Furter from The Rocky Horror Show, is shown as effete. Downer, father of four children and with nothing in his private life to suggest he is anything other than as square as a butter-box, unwisely agreed to his wife's suggestion that he dress in net stockings to gain publicity for her favorite charity. Downer never attempted to weasel-word his way out of this difficulty. To do so would have been disloyal to Nicki.
The portrayal of John Hewson is just as scurvy. He lost the unlosable election because of political inexperience. But he has a sharp mind, and commands the sort of money in the private sector that others with big ideas can only dream about.
The black mark against Hawke's place in history arises from his dual role as president simultaneously of both the ACTU and the ALP. When Gough Whitlam might have expected support from the ALP president, his government, and the Australian economy, were being destroyed by a wages campaign led by the president of the ACTU.
But he did his best as prime minister, and it wasn't a bad best. He was brought down years later by a campaign of destabilisation mounted by Keating. He was, indeed, stabbed in the back, in the grand old ALP tradition.
Keating! the musical made mateship Howard's signature song, and the Quasimodo actor stomped through his lines, conveying the impression that Howard didn't really know what mateship was, and had him calling for Power. Prime Ministers must be able to exercise power, but what was pertinent about Howard was that he had worked out how that power should be used to effect reforms to the economy.
That was his special contribution to the study of Australian political life; that power could be used to give us all a better standard or living, and a country we could be proud of. But here in Keatingland we are not endeavouring to be fair, to be accurate, to be analytic or historic.
So what is Keating! about? Is it that Whitlam is now old, and that it is time to work the same magic, turning the base metal of his disastrous years in office into gold? Is Keating to be the new, iconic hero?
What would Bob Hawke think about that? Indeed, what would Kevin Rudd think about it? And how ironic it is that the Liberals are in the process of organising an orderly transition of leadership from Brendan Nelson to Peter Costello, along the lines of the transition by agreement from Bill Hayden to Bob Hawke. Not one like the brutal coup arranged by the stabber, Paul Keating, to serve his own ambitions.
But to return to the basic judgment that has to be made about Keating! the musical; its malevolence, and the hatred from which it arises, recalls Mayer's definition of the foundations on which democracy was built.
Mayer was a Dunera boy, interned here when his ship arrived with its cargo of Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany. For Mayer, the essential prerequisite for democracy was political apathy, that people should not care too much.
On that basis, Keating! the musical represents a threat to the foundations of democracy in Australia. Bad as it might be, unfounded as its depictions might be, Keating! the musical is no joke, and the question it invites must be taken seriously: where does all this hatred come from?
David Barnett is a Canberra writer.