Hannie Rayson’s new play, Two Brothers, offers a bleak vision of a post-9/11 Australia in which political expediency, packaged and pitched as national security, has triumphed over moral decency and basic human rights.
The eponymous brothers are James ‘Eggs’ Benedict (Garry McDonald) and Tom Benedict (Nicholas Eadie), both members of a privileged class who were educated at an exclusive Melbourne private school.
But there the similarities end. Eggs has become Minister for Home Security, on the fast track to becoming the next Prime Minister; Tom is holding down a $60,000-a-year job as head of an Australian aid agency. Remind you of anyone?
Into the brothers’ lives comes Hazem Al Ayad (Rodney Afif), an Iraqi who is the sole survivor of an Indonesian fishing boat that sank near Ashmore Reef on Christmas Day, killing 250 men, women and children refugees, including Hazem’s wife and children.
There’s plenty of bad blood between Eggs and Tom, and when Tom (who takes on Hazem’s case for legal asylum) slowly learns the truth about the boat’s sinking, and his brother’s (hence, the government’s) complicity in it, that blood begins to boil.
Two Brothers is a fast-paced play that shifts frequently through many scenes, due in great part to the highly effective revolving set created by designer Stephen Curtis.
Hannie Rayson’s satirical script is charged (and sometimes, perhaps, overcharged) with wit and verbal gags that provide comic relief from the play’s dark themes.
In addition to the nationally prominent names dropped into the dialogue, Melbourne theatre-goers on opening night heard local in-jokes that will presumably be adapted for Sydney audiences when the play moves there later this month.
The plot is tightly structured in the first act, which ends with a powerful atmosphere of suspense engendered by the device of a ringing mobile telephone (a prop used to humorous effect elsewhere in the play).
The second act careens towards farce, which perhaps is the playwright’s intent, as the events it portrays so closely mirror those which actually surrounded the Tampa incident and the sinking of the SIEV?X in 2001, in which 353 asylum seekers drowned.
The inevitable showdown between Eggs and Tom touches upon, but could have more fully explored, the hatred, treachery, jealousy, lies and deceit that can poison families. No one is left undamaged: Eggs’s son Lachlan (Ben Lawson), a naval officer and would-be whistleblower, cannot in the end choose truth over familial loyalty; Tom’s son Harry (Hamish Michael), a victim of his drug