Has Australia reached peak Brett Whiteley? There’ve been a bunch of decent books written about him – including recently Ashleigh Wilson’s excellent 2016 biography, Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing – and a 2017 documentary called Whiteley. There are currently major ticketed exhibitions of his work in both Sydney and Melbourne, and a major new Australian opera about his life will premiere in Sydney later this year.
Not bad for an Australian artist who died in 1992.
There’s no doubt that his story is a fascinating one – he was Australia’s only genuine rockstar artist, with the vision and chops to back up that reputation – but it’s now very well known. To justify telling it again at this point in time, surely you need to bring something new to the table, or dig more deeply into the creative partnership he had with his wife Wendy.
Kim Carpenter’s Brett and Wendy: A Love Story Bound By Art has an “in” for Whiteley’s story that’s at least novel: Carpenter’s distinctive visual style, combining dialogue with dance, physical theatre and projections. Arguably, this is the best theatrical approach for telling the story of an artist who kept fracturing and restructuring the world around him in his own visual language.
There are moments when Carpenter – alongside choreographer Lucas Jervies and composer and live drummer Peter Kennard – translates Whiteley’s painting and his inspirations into something dynamic and theatrical. The staging is mostly smart and beautiful to look at – set in a white artist's studio – but occasionally the movement feels a little cliché and overwrought; in one sequence, Whiteley’s inspiration comes to life in the form of dancers encircling him. It’s an effective translation of the act of painting, but a movement where the dancers grab his arm and help guide a brushstroke is a little on the nose.
The storytelling elements are less confident; the script either needs to be fleshed out significantly or stripped back to something more abstract. Carpenter – who is director, creator and designer – says he created the script “like a collage”, using interviews, books, conversations, observations and personal experiences. The disparate parts of that collage never quite come together into a satisfying whole; it’s never clear if we’re hearing the story of his relationship with Wendy, his relationship with art, or his relationship with drugs. Telling the complete story of those three tempestuous relationships over the course of a 70-minute, movement-driven work – while covering off all the important biographical facts – is a bit of a stretch.
The production also leans into plenty of clichés about male genius and, despite being called Brett and Wendy, is really entirely about Brett. None of the other characters are more than a sketch; the women around him are mostly there to narrate or remind the audience that he really is a “genius”.
And for once, it would be exciting to learn something about Wendy Whiteley that isn’t framed in reference to Brett. That she was “his equal” or “at least as a good a drawer as Brett” doesn’t really cut it. It would also be nice to be shown that she’s very intelligent, rather than just told as much.
There are some talented performers here – dancer Dean Elliott, in particular, is a perfect curious, prodigiously talented ratbag as young Brett – but most struggle with the text’s indecisiveness. Paul Gleeson plays the older Brett but doesn’t quite manage to find a consistent arc, and Leeanna Walsman’s Wendy leans a little too heavily on the trademark headscarf to get the character across.
It’s difficult to be bored by the production – seeing these creative ways of rendering Whiteley’s work and life in a theatrical setting is a sure thrill – but it’s going to need to sharpen its dramatic structure if it’s to have a life beyond Sydney Festival.