Benjamin Franklin’s Speech Review – Simon Burke is exceptional in this timely and quirky classic | stage

TThe play opens with Simon Burke’s bare bottom, facing the audience and jumping along in time with David Bowie’s Jean Genie. In this new production of an eccentric Australian classic, the actor plays 56-year-old elocution teacher Robert O’Brien dressed in stockings and suspenders, red in the face, fondling himself in front of a poster of Mick Jagger.

While teaching, O’Brien wears a dark green jacket, brown suit, and tie that blend in with his living room furniture; In private, with a cigarette in hand, he resembles Norma Desmond in a cloth hat and robe. Soon he will be searching for his sanity as the state insinuates he is abusing children without granting him a trial, and attacks his sexuality and gender expression.

When the late Adelaide-born solo actor Steve J. Spears’ play Benjamin Franklin’s Speech premiered in August 1976 at Sydney’s then Nimrod Theatre, it caused a sensation due to its full-frontal nudity and explorations of “effeminacy”.

Starring the late Gordon Chater and directed by the late Richard Whirrett, it toured Australia, London, San Francisco and New York, where it won three Obie Awards for Off-Broadway theatre. Fifty years later, this revival, directed by Declan Green, has returned home, presented by the Griffin Theater Company in their temporary 80-seat performance space in the basement of what was formerly the Nimrod Theater – now the Belvoir St Theatre.

The first two chapters are set in O’Brien’s living room – originally Toorak in Melbourne; Double Sidney Bay in this version – and we see him phoning his friend Bruce, a stockbroker and married father, and promising to go out in public, dressed together, as soon as he can get a break from treating young stutterers and stutterers at $8 per half hour.

One day Mrs. Franklin calls O’Brien and asks him to fix her son Benjamin’s stuttering. Giving the boy the namesake of one of the United States’ Founding Fathers seems intended to show O’Brien’s two-faced, feisty personality – “Guess what they called the kid?” he says to Bruce, before congratulating the mother on her “very creative” choice.

O’Brien describes Benjamin to Bruce as “this beautiful 12-year-old boy who moves like a prince with his long, dark, curly hair.” O’Brien, who was previously an actor, was planning to train Benjamin to become an actor, but he believes Benjamin wants to seduce him.

Benjamin is already sexually mature. O’Brien initially assumes the boy is sleeping with women. The boy admits that he was in fact having sex with a 16-year-old boy, and provides photographic evidence to O’Brien. Meanwhile, neighborhood watchmen learned that O’Brien was a “pervert”, seeing him wearing women’s clothing, and smashed his window.

O’Brien, of course, is no role model. He offers cigarettes to 12-year-old Benjamin; He jokes that he’ll shoot another kid: “There’s an awful lot of dead little girls buried in my basement who haven’t rehearsed the phrase ‘Naughty Nancy ate nine nice new cookies.'” However, he did not commit any crime, as he told Benjamin: “There is no way I could touch you… Try women. I was married to one of them. They are fun. They have tits. They are nice.”

Greene tightly directs the comedy and tension here, aided by sharp lighting and sound design. Burke brings extraordinary dramatic range and comedic skill, deploying a wide range of voices as O’Brien imitates his young children and their mothers, as he babbles and wails and mines the marrow of this character, haunted by her own Catholicism.

Benjamin Franklin’s speech is particularly timely, during the 48th anniversary of the Sydney Mardi Gras Festival, when LGBTQ+ rights are under attack globally. It is no coincidence that Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart is also receiving a major run in Sydney: a devastating polemic about young gay men in early 1980s New York facing death from a rampant disease later identified as HIV.

Both texts represent art, but they also offer renewed warnings of the political repression and social isolation that await communities whose identities have been marginalized and denied human rights. As The Normal Heart actor Mitchell Butel said during an artist talk this week, these are “scary times” for members of the LGBTQ+ community in the United States, and “it may not be long before we have similar battles.”

After O’Brien’s window was smashed, a police siren sounded and officers found O’Brien wearing a wig and dress, carrying a rifle for defense, and with photos burned in his trash can. The consequences are devastating. As I watched Burke play O’Brien facing threats to his safety, I thought about the anti-trans fervor by right-wing politicians, gender-critical feminists, and religious conservatives that fuels hate.

Yes, Spears’ skit uses some dated language: O’Brien jokingly calls himself “the transvestite terror of Double Bay,” while Bruce calls himself a “transvestite stockbroker” — a term that trans and gender diverse people don’t typically use to describe themselves anymore, and which is now generally viewed as inappropriate or derogatory. Yet, as a scintillating creation that speaks to us fifty years ago, O’Brien’s restricted freedoms feel contemporary, as the state stokes moral panic over his “way of dressing”; And the power of the government, legal systems, and mental health systems willing to believe he was a child abuser resonates today with the baseless conspiracy accusations of “grooming” hurled at LGBT people.

The final act features some very nice drama for Burke, as O’Brien struggles to save his mind so he can also save his soul. It’s gripping. Having captivated the audience with tight, complex comedy, the emotional hit continued.