Robertson lays down the law
PERFORMANCE
Geoffrey Robertson: Dreaming Too Loud
4.5 stars
His Majesty’s Theatre
Review: Stephen Bevis
“I don’t sing, dance or tell jokes.”
Geoffrey Robertson may not quite be the showbiz triple-threat but he has a marvellous theatrical manner honed by decades as a barrister, orator and human rights advocate.
For almost three hours across two acts, wittily entitled Home and Away as a nod to his Australian origins, he treated a full house to thoughtful, informative and entertaining tales of history and from his own storied life and legal career - plus plenty of jokes thrown in for good measure.
On a set adorned with an armchair, mahogany desk and the “pantomime flummery” of his profession, Robertson riffed on Australian sacred sites, his Old Bailey mentor John Mortimer (of Rumpole fame), the perverse US military euphemisms for torture, the pointlessness of the death penalty and a new preamble for the Australian Constitution,
In the event of a mass extinction of the royal family, the QC and former ABC Hypotheticals host even made his own claim on the throne through his great, great grandmother, the illegitimate daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm, a cousin of Queen Victoria, secretly exiled to Australia in 1848.
Contrary to his opening line, he did make a song and dance, in his own erudite way, about absurd and terrifying acts of injustice, abuses of power and ideology, and the unsung Australian heroes overlooked by the myth-making of our national narrative.
As detailed in his recent book Dreaming Too Loud, which gives this show its name, he championed the stories of World War II fighter ace Sqn Ldr John Jackson, who led the air defence of Papua New Guinea, Glenrowan schoolteacher Tom Kernot, who risked his family’s life to stop colonial terrorist “Jihad” Ned Kelly killing 100 people on a train, and the first Australian expatriate Yemmerrawannie, who stayed in London after leaving Sydney with Governor Phillip.
Robertson related colourful yarns about the many celebrated scoundrels, truth-tellers and dissenters he has represented in his own career, from the Oz, Deep Throat and Sex Pistols obscenity trials of the 1970s to the deadly fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the persecution of Czech hero Vaclev Havel and the ongoing stoush involving Julian Assange.
Such is the breadth of Robertson’s ongoing work that this stage tour is squeezed between his case to reclaim the Elgin Marbles (assisted by Amal Clooney), lectures on the Armenian genocide and the defence of former Mauritius prime minister Navin Ramgoolam.
He said those in power would do well to remember advice from the great British historian AJP Taylor: “All change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no dissenters, we should still be living in caves.”
In a parting note, he asserted the primacy of law over the sword, if only on the basis that armies of lawyers are cheaper than armies.
