Review: Norm and Ahmed

Norm and Ahmed by Alex Buzo
Old Fitzroy Theatre till Nov 2

This is the unedited full text version of The Daily Telegraph review

When Alex Buzo was interviewed by the ABC’s Virginia Trioli about the controversy his play Norm and Ahmed caused when first performed in 1968, he admitted that he “had actually been boasting in private that my aim as a writer was to put Australian drama on the front page. I didn't anticipate this sort of front page treatment…”

That front page treatment he refers to was a court case that went to the Supreme Court and then all the way to the High Court and it all revolved around the use of a two words right at the end of the play. Those words not only unravelled an entire plot but it also exposed the very essence of a racist underbelly that simmers within the Australian character.

The play opens and we find Norm (Laurence Coy) an average ocker bloke waiting for a bus. He’s had his fair share of ups and downs. He’s a Vietnam vet, he recently lost his wife and he’s feeling a bit lonely. He deliberately strikes up a conversation with Ahmed (Craig Menaud), a young Pakistani student studying history at the local university.

Norm in many ways could be considered the stereotype of an Australian bloke and it is with this quality that he draws Ahmed in and befriends him. They chat about the day-to-day and the domestic as well as the philosophical. But beneath the friendly is a tension and nervousness that guards both of them as Norm eagerly tries to keep Ahmed in conversation.

But Norm’s conversation is an example of bigotry dressed up in a falsehood of niceties. Griffin Foley, in his 1968 Daily Telegraph review said that Buzo’s play makes Australians “uneasy by demonstrating that some of our attitudes are shams”. Pauline Hanson, the Cronulla riots, Woomera, Villawood and children overboard show us that in forty years not much has changed.

As the conversation starts to reach the dramatic end, the Old Fitzroy theatre is overcome by a flash-flood with water pouring in from the ceiling. The audience retreats to higher ground and with the unique professionalism that can only be found in independent theatre, the two actors do not miss a beat, as they finish the play with the two words that have made this play one of the hallmark plays of Australian literature.