Wouldn’t the world be a boring place if the truth was always clear cut?

We need people like Louis de Rougemont – a real life 19th century adventurer/self promoter who was very so very much larger than life. We also need writers like Pulitzer prize winning dramatist Donald Margulies who saw the potential in de Rougemont’s story and his storytelling, and turns it into something profound.

This whiskered Nick Blake looks like he’s just walked off a Vaudevillian stage, and I can’t help thinking de Rougemont would approve of this charming and nuanced portrayal – a beguiling blend of bluster and pathos. We follow him from his incarceration as a sickly child to his being washed up on an island after a shipwreck, to his return to “civilization” where he went from zero to hero to zero.

Darlene Mohekey is a real gem as one of de Rougemont’s able assistants. She was a wonderful talent for accents and puts it to great use here with a series of awesome portrayals of everyone from kids to pirate captains to dusky maidens. She is a gorgeous singer to boot. Jackson Coe is equally multi-gifted as actor and musician.

This is “poor theatre” at its best. The lighting is a series of ordinary lamps controlled by the cast, a pile of books, a typewriter, a gramophone and some steps pretty much all the props required to tell an epic tale. Peter Hambleton puts his training at London’s Globe Theatre, and his terrific trio, to good use, using their many acting and physical attributes to good use.

Coe’s dreadlocks and Mohekey’s sublime voice give him all kinds of options to put his own stamp on Margulies’ script.

Even so, the first half (it’s around 90 minutes without a break) drags in places, particularly when de Rougemont helps two other castaways return to their aboriginal settlement. When this becomes more than “an entertainment” is when he returns to England and his story is at first embraced by the public then dissected by his critics. This is when things really get interesting and make this a piece of theatre that will lodge in your memory.
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All stories, true or false, are embellished, and the taller the story that is claimed to be true the harder it is to believe because, as H.L. Menken pointed out, you know that you would lie if you were telling the story. And back in the 1890s Louis de Rougemont had a very tall story to tell which he claimed was true.

Louis (Nick Blake) bounces onto an almost bare, bleak stage and invites the audience with the exuberance and bonhomie of a Music Hall chairman to enter The Temple of Imagination. He is referring, like Shakespeare, to the fact that we have to piece out his theatrical imperfections with our thoughts.

Most of the fun of this entertainment is how three actors (helped out occasionally by stage manager Miriam Sobey) tell this tale of a shipwreck and Rougemont’s survival on a desert island with his dog Bruno and eventually some off-course Aborigines, one of whom he marries, before he returns 30-odd years later to England.  

They tell it with minimum props and a lighting rig that is made up almost entirely of small desk lamps and which the actors operate as they do the record player for the musical effects. A standard lamp lights up the beauties of the coral reefs, a cello creates a feeling of nausea, the human voice provides many of the sound effects, and at one point two of the actors’ hair is used to picture the unkempt Rougemont after years of living in the wild.

Jackson Coe, using his dreadlocks to great effect, plays not only a variety of musical instruments but also the faithful but cautious and occasionally jealous Bruno with canine fidelity as well as appearing as an unbelievably tall Queen Victoria and a long-suffering turtle.

His delightful performance is matched by Darlene Mohekey as Rougemont’s mother, an old sea-dog who’s after pearls, the Aboriginal wife, an Aussie bushman, and lots of other roles. But it is the range of her voice that is startling and here it is used to great effect.

Nick Blake plays Rougemont with theatrical flourish, physicality, breezy optimism and a deprecating comic manner that never let up so that the adventures come across as Boy’s Own adventures that deserve to be true because the teller so desperately wants them to be.

Whether the story is true or not seems in the end irrelevant. What is important is the ‘play’ factor: the theatrical fun and the enjoyment of a tall tale, albeit an old-fashioned one. Youngsters would enjoy it if they know these days about shipwrecks and desert islands.
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A tenuous connection with New Zealand, where our intrepid yarn-spinner may have spent a year, allows one of Circa’s many posters for Shipwrecked! An Entertainment – the amazing adventures of Louis de Rougement (as told by himself), to promote him as “NZ’s Biggest Liar”.

To touch on the actual historical context, this much is true (I think): Swiss born and raised Henri Louis Grin (1847-1921), learned English as a footman and valet in London then migrated to Western Australia as its governor’s butler before becoming master and owner of a pearl cutter which went missing somewhere to the north of Australia in 1877.

Twenty years later he surfaced as a spiritualist in New Zealand before working his passage back to England where, in 1898, as Louis de Rougemont, he sold his incredible story to Wide World Magazine, which serialised it, making him rich and a sought-after celebrity speaker … (For more actual truth, see his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.)

His amazing adventures, and something of de Rougemont’s dénouement, have now been dramatised by prolific American playwright Donald Marguiles* with the avowed aim of “[capturing] the attention of the hidden child in everyone in my audience.” Leaving special effects and spectacle to the big and small screens, he opts for simple storytelling.

Director Peter Hambleton and designer Andrew Foster honour this intention with a very low-tech production on a bare stage lit only by bed lamps, switched on and off by the three actors who stimulate our imaginations splendidly with found props and the simplest of theatrical devices.

Intriguingly, in his thoroughly engaging embodiment of this consummate storyteller, Nick Blake makes no attempt to invent the accent de Rougemont may have acquired over half a century of itinerant adventuring, opting instead for the rich, relaxed tones of his own charming voice.  

We are asked to believe that Blake’s de Rougement has only just enlisted the services of Darlene Mohekey and Jackson Coe to help spin his yarn but they quickly get the hang of it and contribute with gusto.

An array of musical instruments, played with alacrity under the musical direction of composer Gareth Farr, also produce strange sound effects and serve as all manner of things to illustrate the ten chapters’ weird and wonderful warp and weft.
From a sickly childhood nourished by classical adventure stories read by his doting mother, a teenaged Louis sets forth, is robbed, and accepts a job on a pearler that takes him to the Coral Sea, and subjects him to an encounter with a giant octopus, a wondrous underwater experience, a storm, a whirlpool and the shipwreck of the title.

Marooned on a sandy oasis with only the sea captain’s dog Bruno for company, the highlight of his solitude is to ride giant sea turtles like ponies in the bay. His isolation ends with the arrival of an old aboriginal man, his daughter Yamba and her much younger brother …

If the giant octopus and sea turtles haven’t stretched your credulity, his utterly inauthentic understanding and depiction of aboriginal culture will (his furphies include cannibalism and inter-tribal warfare), with flying wombats added for good measure.** Nevertheless romance blossoms, children are born – named Blanche and Gladys, would you believe – and a vain attempt is made to return with his family to England by sea, before he makes the journey alone.

Just as I’m wondering if there is a larger purpose to the fabulist storytelling which, while it would have excited and astounded the Victorians, can only finally seem quaint to us, social commentary enriches the plot. The pastoral land of his childhood is now overcome with the industrial revolution, and the way he is treated by scientists and a fickle public raises the question of who the true cannibals are. And what, we may well ask, has changed in the century since?  

Nick Blake pitches his performance perfectly for the intimate Circa Two space, attracting our total empathy – despite de Rougement’s flaws – as the world turns against him. He is so fluid, fluent and friendly with it, it is all too easy to take his work for granted. Bravo.

Jackson Coe takes the ‘own voice’ option too – apart from the ooga-booga native talk and a broad Aussie prospector – as he sketches in a multitude of roles, including an endearing Bruno. He proves equally adept on a range of musical instruments and his dreadlocks are used to excellent effect.

Darlene Mohekey, by contrast, displays a rich array of accents and broad character voices with unforced style and great comic timing, bringing just enough depth to the mother and Yamba (the only roles that allow for more than broad brush strokes).

Stage manager Miriam Sobey keeps it all going behind the scenes and ‘guest stars’ as the octopus.

The simple yet effective art of storytelling is reignited and it all makes for a most entertaining 90 minutes as we weather out the winter and look forward to spring.
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*Doollee list some 40 titles. His latest play, Time Stands Still, about journalists covering the war in Iraq and the ‘compassion fatigue’ of those who consume their stories, opened on Broadway earlier this year.

**A blogged review of Rod Howard’s book, The Fabulist, suggests Marguiles has sanitised the original story, in which Yamba “ate her baby so that she had enough breast milk to suckle a sick de Rougemont back to health.”
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