A Gum Tree on summer Road Review by Will Winter

This review contains discussions of suicide, homophobia, and childhood sexual assault.

A Gum Tree on Summer Road, which was performed at Qtopia’s Loading Dock from the 15th to 19th of September, was a flagellating hour of theatre. It claimed to be a compilation of real issues facing rural Australians, though it was unclear from the marketing or production itself whether the writer was from this community or working from gathered testimony. The play featured four actors and flipped through a series of vignettes about rural male life, the audience braced for an emotionally heavy story about brotherhood, friendship, and men’s mental health.

Over the course of the show, we followed the characters from childhood to young adulthood: one was a farmer with a gambling issue struggling to pay rent, one was falling behind at uni while his brother rotted in jail, one was socially isolated and humiliated by his lack of romantic history, and one was struggling to reconcile his complex family ties. Every character, at some point, had a spotlight put on them, and a ticking sound was overlaid as they built up to a yell of pure frustration and anguish. These yells, though, were momentary, lasting for a single second or two; rather than letting steam out of the kettle, they kept the plot gruelling and torturous in depicting the discomfort of these lived realities.

The script was poorly signposted, with each actor performing two (or more) roles throughout the show, but without any clear indication as to when these characters were switched or storylines interweaved. The lack of temporal specificity was confusing, and it severely reduced the impact of assumedly important scenes (including a dangerous fire that the boys struggled to put out, and when a character died by suicide but returned to the stage several scenes later).

There were fundamentally two key issues with the staging of A Gum Tree on Summer Road. The first was the choice of venue. Qtopia, a storied and vital LGBTQ+ history museum and performance space in Sydney, entails the assumption that any show programmed there would have a decent grapple on queer life and stories. A Gum Tree featured a quite poorly-handled plotline regarding homophobia, with two of the male characters alluding to an incident on a previous night in which one ‘made a move’ on the other (although which one instigated was up for debate).

The plotline resulted in one of them being cut off from his friends for fear of being reputationally destroyed in the town. The same actor who played the role of the alleged homosexual also played a character who earlier admitted to being sexually abused by his uncle as a child (or perhaps this was a different character, I still am not sure).

Regardless of if it was the same role, the order this information was revealed in felt like the show was potentially implying that this character’s gay urges were in some way linked to his childhood sexual abuse, While this is assuredly a false read of the writer’s intention, the fact I even considered this a possibility was a problem, and dangerous for any audience not keenly aware of how such rhetoric can be deeply offensive and socially destructive for queer communities. Not to blame a production for its viewership, but on the night I attended the row behind me was a group of young straight men who seemed visibly uncomfortable with the queer historical content at Qtopia, and after the show I heard them refer to one of the actors as ‘the gay one’. I did not feel these attitudes were at home in the venue, or capable of thoughtfully filling in the subtextual gaps left by the script.

More telling, though, was the show’s use of content warnings. At the start of the play, a listicle was produced detailing discussions of men’s mental health, violence, suicide, and addiction. In the above plotline, two of the actors used the f-slur three times. Deciding what to include in content warnings can be a tricky conversation for companies, but the choice to include such a comprehensive list and not include one for homophobic slurs or queerphobia was unnecessarily uncomfortable, especially at a queer venue.

The second key problem, though, was a question of audience. Who was this for, exactly? If this was to ingratiate an audience of cityfolk who don’t understand the raw rub of rural living, it certainly succeeded in painting outback Australia as a place of inevitable misery and despair. Were these characters perhaps meant to be sympathetic to the women and genderqueer folk who find themselves victims of patriarchal violence and femicide? That feels like an inappropriate goal.

Or perhaps this was designed to tour around the country, and to be seen by the communities it aimed to depict. However, using this production as a mirror for the internal anguish and potently violent anger coursing through the veins of our rural men would, I imagine, simply make them stew in the hopelessness of modernity.

The incel movement and alt-right thrives because men are taught to believe the world is against them, and that the feminist movement had (or has) specific goals to eradicate masculinity in the world. With no vision for how to overcome these bone-deep issues of gambling addiction, alcoholism, and violence that men are so susceptible to, the play failed to truly humanise the victims of these diseases, simply keeping them as caricatures of government ads. For a play steeped in content warnings and social messaging around mental health, not providing any sort of light at the end of the tunnel was a dark choice.

Late in the play, one of the characters discussed a drought in the farmland, and asked ‘how is Australia meant to survive this? How are our boys meant to survive this?’ It was a profound question, one the show was too distracted from to attempt to answer. Masculinity at the best of times is a scourge on our society and on our men, and I’m not one to defend it as a concept, but I was shocked the play took no strides to depict any sort of functioning or healthy masculine relations.

Where was the gentle camaraderie between friends at the pub, encouraging each other to talk about their lives or maybe let the drinks rest after the next round? Where were the baby steps for these men beginning to learn to communicate their feelings? Where were the hard conversations after one of their friends died by suicide about whether the other men had experienced those thoughts before?

Calling a show ‘raw’ doesn’t justify leaving your audience in a pool of sweat. Discomfort theatre can be profound and thought-provoking, but A Gum Tree on Summer Road was a scream without catharsis. As a production so keenly aware of how men’s mental health remains undiscussed, it provided no resolution for men who struggle, simply depicting their variety of structural and personal stresses bluntly on stage.

Representation is not an inherent good, it must come attached with action. Depicting real conversations about a path forward would have provided tools of language and emotional truth to the audience A Gum Tree claimed to care about. Instead, the show mourned. Maybe there is no hope for men. That’s the only takeaway about modern gender politics I think an audience would gather from the show, and it’s a blithely pessimistic and outright harmful one.

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Will Winter attended A Gum Tree on a Summer Road at Qtopia Sydney on Friday 18 September.