ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Quite by coincidence, I’ve been chatting about theatre-fiction with Theresa, who’s just reviewed Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. The Players, a debut novel from WA author Deborah Pike, is theatre-fiction in five ‘acts’ over a ten year time frame: Rehearsal; Performance; New Roles; Foreign Selves and Real Selves.

This the blurb from Fremantle Press:

One hot summer, a group of university students gathers in an orchard to rehearse a play. Veronika is born for a life on the stage while Felix seizes his last chance for creative freedom. Sebastian woos Veronika, and Cassie longs for Sebastian. Josh and Gloria each carry a secret they are unable to share. Passion, rivalry, and enduring connections will bind the Players across years and continents, long after the final curtain falls and they leave university behind. From Perth to Paris, Cambridge, London, Berlin, and Dili the friends search for meaning in their careers and friendship, discover love, and endure heartbreak.

TBH this blurb doesn’t even hint at the riches in this novel.

Felix (who’s on exchange and is supposed to be studying something else) has made a choice of play that’s ambitious.  It’s The Marriage of Figaro, a comedy in five acts, written in 1778 by Pierre Beaumarchais. This subversive play was banned in pre-revolutionary France because of its focus on class tensions and the limitations of rank and privilege.  Most of us know this play better as Mozart’s 1786 opera, which was approved for performance in Vienna because its political intent was strategically sanitised by the Italian librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.  (Rulers in Europe and Britain were wary of anything inflammatory that might provoke copycat revolutions in this era). So the Da Ponte Figaro replaces the denunciation of inherited nobility with an aria about unfaithful wives.  (See A Guide to The Marriage of Figaro by Hannah Nepoliva at the BBC Classical Music magazine.)

Felix’s cast is a bunch of university students whose preoccupations (mirroring the mayhem in Figaro) are more often with each other than with realising the dramatic effects of a French play.  But like the dramatis personae of the play and the opera, they come from very different social backgrounds and ethnicities, which spark into assumptions, entitlements, misunderstandings, rejections, and betrayals.  And sometimes, intense discomfort:

Ah yes,  The Birthday party.  She’d felt like an imposter, smuggled in by Lucas to see the lives of the idle rich: the delicate glasses, the meticulously crafted morsels on silver trays.  Shiny people with neat edges and no stray threads, conversations trailing into nothing.  The birthday boy standing too close to too many women, a toothy smile on his face. (p.15)

At twenty, Veronika feels the chasm in so-called egalitarian Australian society:

She still found it hard to believe she was studying at university.  The only other person in her family to do so had been her great-grandfather, who had studied mathematics in Prague just before the century turned.  Her father was the son of Czech immigrants, had bought fifteen acres at the age of twenty-six, made a market farm in Mundaring in the Perth Hills.  Her mother, Angela, had grown up on a farm in the Avon Valley, and was then courted by Michal Vaček with baskets of apples and pears. […] …she’d never expected a daughter to study French, philosophy and literature.  It was, she’d said, a bit of a surprise, a lot of surprise really. (p.15)

The first disaster occurs when one of them persists with smoking in the university’s rehearsal space, and they get booted out, with very little time to find another venue.  Veronika, however, does a deal with her father, the orchardist whose parents fled communism in Bohemia: if the players will help with the harvest, they can do the play in the orchard.  This change of venue brings her back into contact with Joshua, who’s had a rough start in life and is therefore too easily dismissed as a rival by charming, handsome, rich, privileged Sebastian.  Who is, as we say in Australia, ‘up himself.’ That doesn’t stop Cassie from fancying him, even though he dismisses her too because she isn’t gorgeous like Veronika.  And while Veronika dallies with Sebastian, Joshua-on-the-rebound bonds with Gloria who’s still under the thumb of her mother Who Would Not Approve.

You get the drift. Everybody is in love with the wrong person, but this isn’t a silly romcom.

Despite #NoSpoilers changes in the cast, when the play is over, the future promised by a university education comes into play.  Veronika wangles a scholarship to study drama in Paris, Sebastian conforms to parental expectations in the UK, Felix struggles to adjust back home in Berlin, and Cassie turns out to have unexpected achievements, finding herself along the way. Gloria, by then a gifted teacher, decides to take her skills to Dili which is just recovering from the struggle for independence.  She hopes to find out what happened to her father who was in the resistance movement against Indonesian occupation.  (The only other novel I’ve read that’s set in East Timor is Nicholas Jose’s latest, The Idealist, (2023, see my review), and the scenes in The Players that are set in Dili have an authentic ambience as Gloria struggles to come to terms with the poverty and devastation of a society in transition.)

For any of us, those first few years after graduation bring challenges we weren’t expecting.  Ambition and idealism rub up against reality, and sometimes there is the awful realisation that all those years in study have led to a career that doesn’t suit. Or that you’re just not good enough.  Or that Australia, and the isolated state of WA in particular, doesn’t offer the opportunities to satisfy yearnings. Sometimes this period provokes breaking free from parental expectations.  It’s when adulthood really kicks in.

For Josh, an outsider who’s not part of this university group because of his past and his lack of education, an impulsive decision costs him dearly, not just in emotional terms, but also in money and the chance of restarting his future.

Behind the scenes there is a villain who, hoping for ill-deserved redemption, is pulling strings like a puppet master.  This is a reminder that WA at times in its recent history has been full of unethical people who made a lot of money, recalling Steve Hawke’s thoughtful 2023 novel, The Brothers Wolfe, also a novel featuring brothers whose choices result in vastly different opportunities in life, see my review.

The Players is an absorbing novel that held my attention throughout.

Author: Deborah Pike
Title: The Players
Publisher: Fremantle Press, 2024
Cover design: Nada Backovic
ISBN: 9781760993061, pbk., 400 pages
Review copy courtesy of Fremantle Press (due for release in April, but you can pre-order it, and it’s also available as an eBook).