Maggie Stone probably reads the Daily Telegraph. She’s a regular, working Aussie, which means she has a job processing small loans, eats Maccas at her desk, loves a drink, and is a racist. Played by Eliza Logan in the Darlinghurst Theatre Co staging of Caleb Lewis’s 2013 play, she’s flinty, pessimistic and witty. But she’s still racist.
When she denies a man (Thuso Lekwape) the funds that could free him from a loan shark – and that she had clearance to approve – because he is black, and she is a racist, the worst happens. He is killed.
When his wife Amath (Branden Christine) arrives in Maggie’s office by chance, her family newly diminished but still in financial crisis, Maggie is shaken enough by the consequences of her actions to have a change of heart.
Soon, she is entrenched in the life of Amath and her family, a bumbling white saviour learning growth and change as she tries to help out. This in itself, that Maggie believes she must save the family, is still racist – she denies Amath and her teenage son (Lekwape again) the agency to make their own change and own choices. She’s there paying off the woman who complains about Benny’s violent behavior; she’s there trying to tell Amath how to handle her new life. She’s a well-intentioned bulldozer.
Logan cuts a sympathetic figure as Stone, sparking pleasingly against the rest of the cast – her showdowns with the piously racist, self-styled hero Georgina (Anna Lee), Amath’s ‘friend’ from church is a highlight. But it’s all a bit hypocritical.
Lewis’s script trades in clichés and the tugging of heartstrings. It’s clear that the play possesses genuine desire to speak out against racism and to prove that people can change. But the story is the story of a racist, told through the lens of a racist, and is constructed through racist acts much more than it is through the story of the Deng family.
The Dengs, along with the Syrian owner of a local convenience store (Kate Bookallil), serve largely as props to support Maggie’s growth, rather than being active participants in the plot. Christine, Lekwape, and Bookallil give killer performances, and their stories are vastly more interesting than Maggie’s, but we see them only in glimpses, unfortunately. Amath is the character that seems most deserving of the spotlight, rich and layered, but we must follow Maggie instead.
To its credit, the play is interested in exposing the idea that charity often comes with strings attached; that well-meaning helpers are often acting out of self-interest. But it clings to a white perspective which, in 2018, feels dated.
This production, helmed with a no-nonsense, compassionate approach by Sandra Eldridge, strives for balance. When the Dengs are onstage, she places them at the centre – and when that can’t practically be done, she keeps them lit to keep them in our minds (lights by Matt Cox). Their emotions and responses to Maggie’s help – or hurt – aren’t truncated as they might have been by scripted scene changes; rather than disappearing offstage, Eldridge ensures that they are given extra moments during transitions to extend their reactions – pushing their points of view further forward. This helps, a little, to offset the white-saviour tendencies of the script. The play makes a martyr of Maggie, but Eldridge (along with cultural advisor and assistant producer Moreblessing Marturure and dialect coach and cultural consultant Deng Deng) has attempted to course-correct and make the playing space more equitable.
Sallyanne Facer’s set is evocative in its concept – a shipping container backdrop and a map-like floor – but the demarcated spaces of office, homes, shops and hospitals are less clear; there is an LED sign that tells us, thankfully, where we are.
There were tears and hand-slapping applause on opening night; Maggie Stone is engineered to elicit these reactions. But the best solution to the white supremacy of our stages is not to program plays by white men about the racism of white women, relegating non-white characters to supporting roles, beefing up the storyline of the white protagonist on her personal journey.
Still, it’s easy to understand the impetus behind staging – and paying to see – this play. It’s a fraught time, a racist time: in Australia right now, black and Muslim immigrants are targeted in hate crimes, accused of gang warfare, and denied basic humanity by many white Australians, particularly those in power. This play is an easy, passive outlet to protest this ugly public truth. For some, that will be enough.