Comedy hints at the tragedy beneath [REVIEW]

THE Little Dog Laughed. By Douglas Carter Beane. Queensland Theatre Company. Cremorne Theatre, Brisbane. February 11. DOUGLAS Carter Beane's The Little Dog Laughed is a comedy about truth and its consequences. Set mainly in New York, the story follows film star Mitchell Green's developing relationship with Alex, a rentboy he calls one night while drunk and lonely in a hotel room. Scenes in which Mitchell and Alex test the strength of something they seem to have found together are punctuated by monologues from Mitchell's agent Diane and Alex's ex-girlfriend Ellen. We start to see glimpses of their separate lives, what their shared life might look like and, eventually, a crisis that brings all four characters together in the pursuit of a somewhat conflicted set of ideas about what happiness is and what it takes to be happy.

Lessons on sin and forgiveness : a crisis in the Roman Catholic Church

One of the greatest challenges facing the Roman Catholic Church (the Church) across the world continues to be found in addressing complaints of child sexual abuse (csa) by clergy. The list of Catholic clergy in Australia who have been criminally processed for sexual offences against children is disturbingly long. As disturbing as this list is, more disturbing are the accounts of clergy who have not been criminally prosecuted, but protected within the cloister of the Church. It is increasingly recognised that the significant difficulty with child sexual abuse in Catholic Churches, in particular, has not been the presence of perpetrators but the response of Church leadership to allegations of csa by clergy. Those who have faced criminal charges have often done so due to the resilience of victim/survivors and not because of the support of Church structures or culture. The Church has been slow to come to terms with the realities of the perpetration of csa by its clergy and even slower to recognise the need to prioritise victims in any effective, just response. The church has been slowest of all recognising that there are significant cultural and discursive challenges to confront in addressing the management of csa by clergy. There is, however, progressive recognition of the role that discursive constructs of forgiveness have played in perpetuating the crises and ultimately in perpetuating abuse. The institutional praxis of forgiveness can be demonstrated not only in the Church, but in lessons learned from use of forgiveness as an institutional response to mass violations of human rights. This paper explores the juncture between criminality, church culture and forgiveness in responding to csa by clergy.

Tragedy and assimilation : reciprocity between surface and subject

Here we unveil a tragic triptych of three Australian women painfully painted onto the walls of interior surfaces. The woman at the centre of the triptych is Florence Broadhurst whose tragic death still remains a mystery. To the right is Australian skin illustrator Emma Hack who recreates Broadhurst’s wallpapers, mimicking their colourful patterns onto live models. Hack perfectly assimilates the models’ body into the wallpaper, camouflaging bodies except for small hints at something more in the foreground. In the process of Hack’s images, the models become statues, standing painfully still holding their breath for minutes at a time. The third woman, to the left of the triptych, is the fictional character Candy from the 2006 Australian film Candy. Candy’s traumatic struggle with addiction ends with her conveying her pain in a poem she writes on the walls of her home; culminating her tragic story into a disturbed domestic wall surface. This research tries to understand this relationship with the surface through tragedy as a reciprocal agreement between surface and subject and not a permanent transference between one state and another. What the surface provides in times of personal struggle and turmoil is a method for us to come to terms with out material existence.

Tragedy and assimilation: Occupying the patterned surface

This chapter draws on biographical data about two notable pattern designers of wall surfaces in the interior. Both had personal histories of multiple careers and geographical locations and both their lives ended in mysterious circumstances. One of the pattern designers, Jim Thompson, disappeared in the Malaysian highlands in 1967 and was never found. The other, Florence Broadhurst, was brutally murdered in 1977; her case remains unsolved. This chapter theorizes that the patterned surface attracted Broadhurst and Thompson as a space to occupy and record their divergent pasts, and questions what it is to lose oneself in the surface of the interior, to find freedom (or slavery) in the abdication of control. This notion is further evidenced in creative works, including the Australian film Candy and the work by skin illustrator Emma Hack. What is it to work with the self as a two-dimensional representation in the outside world? Occupying the surface suggests a reflexive relationship with identity, that makes-over and re-shapes truths, lies and re-constructions. The chapter reminds us that the surface is never in stasis.