Review: MAX SAVAGE: ERN: AUSTRALIA'S GREATEST HOAX: ADELAIDE CABARET FESTIVAL 2021 at Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Friday 25th June 2021.

"What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?'' remarks Hamlet, as the first player weeps real tears over the fate of the mobled queen. "Mobled? That's good, mobled queen is good", opines Polonius. "What's Ern to him, or he to Ern?", I ask myself of Max Savage whose show, Ern: Australia's Greatest Hoax, was something to which I really looked forward. I'm better acquainted than many with the works of Ern. I rearranged stuff to be free for the evening.

What I got was nowhere near the celebration of the Ern Malley affair promised in the program or the publicity. Had I known, I'd have placed it a little further down my Festival priority list.

Savage has a powerful voice and stage presence, and a band containing Julian Ferraretto on violin and Adam Page on clarinet with a backline of Ross McHenry, Brenton Foster, Steve Neville, and Django Rowe. You could hardly get a better band on stage in Adelaide. I would have loved more Ferraretto. His golden bow can send music to the stratosphere.

What you get is something akin to a song cycle or even cantata, in which words and motifs return. There are lines about standing on the shore, and lying face down in the river, trying not to breathe. Those lines return. There was great sound. There was passion, even fury.

I kept listening for something that might recall the surreal writings of Ern Malley, or Harold Stewart and James Mcauley. "O Anopheles". I suspect, from the audience response, that quite a few of the older patrons had also come in the hope of insight into the great hoax.

While Max and the band are playing their hearts out, something quiet is happening at the side of the stage. Josh Baldwin, with broad brush strokes, paints the sky and then the land. There's a shoreline. That's a road. Towards the end of the show, he dabs in a horse. The horse with no name? Then he adds a rider. Is this Don Quixote sans Sancho Panza? Finally, he places the square helmet on the rider's shoulders. It's Nolan's Ned Kelly. Finally, a reference to the great age of Australian modernism, mid last century.

So how did this come about? Let's start at the very beginning, as a wise woman once suggested. In 1943 Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins, a publication of new Australian writing, received a letter containing works of modernist poetry from the estate of a man called Ern Malley, a working-class autodidact from Croydon, South Australia. He published them with great fanfare. He was even charged with publishing obscene material, though the prosecuting policeman famously didn't understand the words but knew they were filthy. It was a literary cause célèbre but was, in fact, a cruel and clever deception.

Two established Australian poets, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, created Malley's work to harpoon what they saw as the pretensions of modernist poetry. I don't know Stewart's work particularly well but I love McAuley. I can quote by heart the opening of his Missa Papae Marcelli, a tribute to the healing power of music. Maybe that was part of the point of the show. The Stewart/McAuley pastiche of modernism can't help but be intriguing and effective. Easy to see why Max Harris fell for the trick, hooked by lines, and sunk. Max Savage promised one thing and delivered another thing that worked well as what it was. Not what I wanted, not at all. As anything else, I'd have really enjoyed it.

The project is a Frank Ford Commission. Frank who fathered the Fringe and the Cabaret Festival left a generous bequest to support new work. Go to it, creatives of Adelaide but, please, make sure that what you create does what it says on the tin.