By arts editor Helen Musa

The underworld of Depression-era Sydney is the canvas that playwright-director Christopher Samuel Carroll has chosen for his latest theatre work, Crims, but he won’t be acting in it.

He sees the underworld of the era as a “wonderful canvas” for a theatrical work involving a great deal of physical theatre.

With just six handpicked performers whom he has encountered in different circumstances, the focus will be on a heightened physical style, something Carroll himself trained in at the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

The approach, he says, will be “wonderfully collaborative”, and because of the performers’ particular physical talents, he is confident they will manage the larger space at The Q, even though it is bigger than some venues he has worked in.

His multi-talented cast members are queer interdisciplinary artist Miriam Slater; actor, writer and physical comedian Marcel Cole; Jack Shanahan, whose stage credits include Equus and The Deep Blue Sea; Australian Dance Party member Gabriel Sinclair; Petronella van Tienen, who has toured nationally in The 91-Storey Treehouse, and Sri Lankan-born Canberra physical theatre performer, director and playwright Piumi Wijesundara.

The concept for the play, which will appear under the Q – The Locals program, came to Carroll when he saw some evocative mugshots at the Justice and Police Museum in Sydney. They were “so evocative, so descriptive, they painted a portrait to me of an incredible time in Darlinghurst and Surry Hills”.

Carroll is fascinated by the fact that, back in the 1920s, a sort of pseudoscience prevailed in which people believed there was actually a “criminal class” or a “criminal mind”.

Most dramatisations of these stories have focused on flamboyant crime bosses such as Tilley Devine and Kate Leigh and the razor gangs, but this show is about the people at the bottom of the pile, he says.

The colourful cast of characters includes cocaine kingpin “Greasy” Schultz, his treacherous right-hand man Harry Whitlow, Det-Sgt “Sniffer” Morley, sneak-thief Mavis Brewin, jailbird Lenny Boland, smooth-talking con-man Tib Draper, feared standover man “Cuff” Sacks, dunny man Orville Werner and his wife Moira, Truth tabloid journalist Nev Sutcliffe, street girl Gladys Howe and expert safe-breaker Percy Lippett.

“All the different characters in my play survived by their words and their fists, and living in the shadow of World War I in abject poverty, many people turned to crime.”

Carroll has created a rogues’ gallery of his own characters, following their intertwined stories.

Each chain of events leads to something else, so that the safecracker almost gets caught, only for it to turn out that the gangster owns the hotel he is robbing. The cocaine dealer is double-crossed by the safecracker, while the street girl and the journalist get too close to the action. 

There’s no message in it, he says, although, picking up on the current phenomenon of scamming, he feels the subject matter is not entirely lost in the past.

“It’s been great to play with, leading the audience this way and that,” he says, adding that he spent ages researching through Trove and could easily have written 10 plays from the material he found there. From a potential cast of thousands, however, he has narrowed it down to these particular characters.

A veteran of The Street Theatre’s production of Crime and Punishment, Carroll is quick to assure me that he is not writing a Russian novel. Rather, he is offering glimpses that reflect the community of the time. There are many stories to be told through the bodies of his actors, using simple props such as a chair in an evening of what he calls abstract expressive movement.

Carroll is dealing with a dark era, but this show is neither War and Peace nor Crime and Punishment. It is meant to be fun.

Crims, The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, November 19-22.

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