The glamorous stage design comprises multiple levels with a forward thrusting cabaret-style downstage, and upstage a current-affairs talk show-style leather swivel armchair.  Every surface is shiny black with little white lights highlighting each stair and platform’s edge, and lightly swaying plush red curtains projected upon the three large screens behind.  I assume it was designer John Verryt’s intention that his set should be black, white and red all over, at least to begin with. 

As with information through the media, the convoluted concept of David Williamson’s play has filtered through many channels to reach Q Theatre’s stage tonight.  Australia’s best-known playwright pens a script that claims to be written and performed by the world’s best-known media mogul Rupert Murdoch, in fact portrayed by Kiwi stage and screen legend Stuart Devenie as directed by Colin McColl.  This alleged Murdoch has employed a cast of six accomplished local actors to play out a plethora of pivotal, often colourful characters throughout the many decades of his life story cabaret exposé, plus one charismatic young actor (Damien Avery) to portray himself as he narrates.

McColl’s adroit direction provides optimum clarity within a wholly complex and relentlessly forward-moving tale.  The excellent ensemble cast comes to the party with myriad mostly exaggerated depictions of the people that played critical roles in the eponymous anti-hero’s journey from 50s Marxist Oxford slacker to modern day freemarket tycoon.  

Act one focuses on the systematic construction of Murdoch’s print empire spanning Australasia, the UK and the USA.  Act two shifts to Hollywood for the acquisition of 20^th Century Fox, Sky TV et al, tracking through to the latter-day phone-hacking scandal and its aftermath.  The more you know already, the easier it will be to keep track of the litany of characters and events as they play through, and to appreciate Rupert’s various offensive and/or defensive assertions around his motives and reasoning for his notoriously ruthless modus operandi.

With too many great turns to recall let alone recount, I note that the people he has been personally close to – such as his mother (Hera Dunleavy), first two wives Patricia and Anna (both Jennifer Ward-Lealand) and latest Wendi (JJ Fong) – while still somewhat broad are portrayed more sensitively than the derisive turns of lesser-favoured acquaintances, like purported political turncoats Gough Whitlam (Adam Gardiner) and Tony Blair (Steven Lovatt). 

Gardiner’s Kerry Packer is a grotesque favourite, along with his pair of gorilla-clown sons played by Lovatt and Arlo MacDiarmid.  Simon Prast has a similarly eclectic portfolio of parts, from crass bastards like rival publisher Rupert Henderson to upper-class snoots like Sir William Carr.  Dunleavey’s Margaret Thatcher is on the button and her tango with Murdoch deserves to become a worldwide meme.  Lovatt’s Reagan is less uncanny but nonetheless earns a delighted applause.

Obviously, everything hinges to a large degree on the performance of the man himself.  Again not so much a dedicated impersonation as such, Devenie carries the required ruthless arrogance and charming swagger, while comparatively baby-faced Avery is more of an egotistical idealisation.  The ‘real’ Rupert forgives himself for such liberties on the grounds that it’s “my story, told my way”.  Except of course, it isn’t: nothing is exactly, or at times even remotely, what we’re being told it is here, wherein lies the whole production’s conceptual genius. 

Production-wise it’s a veritable Hollywood-style variety show complete with intermittent Sinatra song-and-dance numbers, choreographed in classic glitzy cabaret style by Jeremy Birchall. 

Elizabeth Whiting’s snappy suits and various quick-change costumes, Phillip Dexter’s exemplary lighting and Thomas Press’s all-embracing soundscape blend seamlessly with Verryt’s tastefully glamorous set, while Tom Bogdanowicz’s AV display is crucial to the ongoing sense and flow of what is ultimately a remarkable work of meta-satire.  Jeff Bell’s outstanding cartoon caricatures of the most famous key players further punctuate the old bugger’s soapbox ego-trip. 

More than mere leftist corporate-bashing, Williamson’s play doesn’t pull punches but it does qualify them, so that it seems feasible that its real-life subject could possibly endorse the play in the form it’s presented, especially given the unflattering portrayals of his numerous enemies. 

Intrigued whether there has in fact been any response to Rupert from the man himself, or if he’s even seen it since it premiered in 2013, I searched online for any indication. It appears not, although his own Melbourne daily the Herald Sun halted publication of a review on the spurious grounds that the play’s subject is ‘too niche’ for its readership.  A number of other Murdoch-owned publications did run reviews however. 

I also happened upon a fascinating (non-Murdoch owned) Guardian report that many actors turned down the chance to play the lead on the West End stage for fear of his potential backlash.  The decisive issue there would of course be whether this play on the razzle dazzle of media hegemony poses any significant threat to his mighty empire and fortune. 

[See also today’s Sunday Star Times.] 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

It’s rare that a show about someone’s life is introduced by the main character as “a show about my life” but Rupert, a biography of media moghul Rupert Murdoch breaks many of the norms of theatre as he does the fourth wall. 

David Williamson’s Rupert encapsulates a multitude of genres – it’s a story, biography, cabaret, comedy, adventure, cartoon, love stories, political thriller and even a buddy movie about the older and cynical Murdoch juxtaposed against his younger brash and fearless self. [More]

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer