Sydney Opera House Studio, June 17
7/10
Jonny Hawkins first blazed on to the Sydney stage in 2021, playing the finely drawn, elderly Kings Cross eccentric Maureen, in the self-penned Maureen: Harbinger of Death, for one-actor. Five years later, and Hawkins has a new character to inhabit: now he is Bev, an owner-driver long-haul truckie, with the last word in mullets, wrap-around sunnies, blue singlets, stubbies and Blundstones – the polar opposite Maureen in every way.
But two things are the same as with Maureen: a rigour in the play’s development – Hawkins even obtained a truck licence to research the work – and Nell Ranney’s involvement as director and co-conceptualist. Isabel Hudson’s set, meanwhile, is a semi-trailer that fills the stage – big enough for Bev to be in or on, and we, the audience, become a hitchhiker whom Bev picks up, bound for Alice Springs.
At the outset, Bev reenacts Steven Spielberg’s Duel with a Nissan Skyline that dares to overtake him when he’s doing 150kph. The cheek. From then on, the play (again, like Maureen) is a series of vignettes, anecdotes and real-time events that take us deep into Bev’s world. I worked for a decade with long-haul truckies, and if there was a commonality (beyond the blue singlets and stubbies), it was a sense of the loner and outsider: someone who wouldn’t fit in any job where another was looking over your shoulder and giving orders.
Hawkins makes Bev rounded and real, both with a detailed performance and in the writing. He has estranged partners and sons (the latter to his frustration), and a mouth that’s mostly foul, casually racist and occasionally given to spoonerisms. He certainly has a sense of humour, and even of irony, relating that a schoolteacher once told him he’d never make a living looking out a window.
Although his truck is his best friend, the road is unending, with every load waiting to be delivered; every empty truck waiting to be filled. “I’m like that Greek guy pushing shit uphill,” he says. “Syphilis.” The longest anecdote is about witnessing a car accident in which a mother dies, her young son survives, and Bev is first on the scene. It’s equally graphic and moving, and you feel the room tighten.
Where Hawkins and Ranney have slipped a little compared with Maureen is that they let Bev become too lucid. Perhaps he would make a sizable detour to watch the sun rise over Uluru, but his rapturous response seems expressed more in Hawkins’ words than his own, as is the case when he becomes overly didactic, even if the sentiments, themselves are Bev’s.
Nonetheless, for all its quirkiness, faultlines and the tenuous way it’s hinged together, the work is worthy of a place in the ever-expanding pantheon of one-actor shows assailing Sydney this year, and Hawkins is certainly an actor and writer of admirable range and commitment.
Until June 20.