The Legend of King O’Malley – Don’t Look Away

Overview

The adage ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good story’ is an old one. But it is the exact opposite in The Legend of King O'Malley, as fallacy threatens to overshadow the true story of one of the kookiest characters in Australian political history.

The play was hugely influential when it was first staged in 1970. Originally directed by John Bell, written by Bob Ellis with Michael Boddy and starring Robyn Nevin, it's a decidedly off-kilter diversion from theatrical realism that made a huge impression at the time. It's now being revived by director Phil Rouse for Don’t Look Away, a company dedicated to digging up underappreciated works of Australian theatre from the past.

The play’s protagonist — King O’Malley, a Kansas insurance salesman turned bishop turned MP for Tasmania — is undoubtedly an improbable character. He is renowned not only for his contributions to Australia’s political development — as Minister for Home Affairs, he sank the first peg in the site that would become Canberra, he was instrumental in setting up the Commonwealth Bank and, adamant that American spellings would become the accepted norm, he infamously convinced the Labor Party to drop the ‘u’ — but also as a seller of pork pies.

Next to his nationality (in order to run for Parliament, O’Malley falsely claimed to have been born in Canada, a Commonwealth country), one of his best-known fabrications concerns his arrival in Australia. Suffering from advanced tuberculosis, he claimed to have been befriended by an Aboriginal man who took him to a cave and nursed him back to health. Historian David Headon said of O’Malley that "He was a showman … and he knew it and he exploited it for everything it was worth."

The rich subject matter was not enough for writers Boddy and Ellis, who chose to include a bizarre recurring plot in which O’Malley (James Cook) is plagued by a demon (Alex Duncan) to whom he has sold his soul. The device allows him to converse frankly and give voice to his internal moral struggle, but it is a seriously odd way to help an audience climb inside a character’s head.

Regardless, Rouse and cast have held nothing back in resurrecting O’Malley. The first half doesn’t quite make it over the line and, between an entire gospel choir feigning blindness and a spot of pantomime tuberculosis, feels like it could have been cut down considerably.

The second half, though, is a different beast entirely. And it is a beast; a feral and unrelenting satire which rips through Australia’s first parliament. Wild beasts in suits struggle to stand, cackling drunkenly as the earnest O’Malley seeks to join their ranks before falling foul of the petulant boy-king, Prime Minister Billy Hughes (an obnoxious and charged turn by Matt Hickey)

At its best, O’Malley is reminiscent of Keating: The Musical. Though a little rough around the edges, the energy output of the cast is staggering and infectious. No doubt O’Malley, a man careful to manage his own mythology in life, would have welcomed such a song and dance in his honour.