22 January - 1 February 2025
Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 24
Creatives & Company
Playwright: Peter Wilkins
Coach: Julia Grace
Players performing: Rhys Hekimian, Chips Jin, Alana Denham-Preston, Heidi Silberman, Timmy Sekuless, Maxine Beaumont, Rachel Pengilly, Martin Everett
Workshop support players: Kate Blackhurst, Rachel Howard, Sarah Nathan-Truesdale, Wynter Grainger, Phoebe Silberman
Photographer: Daniel Abroguena
Major partner: Elite Event Technology
Principal Sponsor: Willard Public Affairs
The Chalk Pit – “A true tale of ambition, corruption, murder and betrayal, documenting the rise and fall of the Hon. Thomas John Ley” is presented by Lexi Sekuless “in a stripped back format called An Actor's Investigation. This is reflected in a lower ticket price. This performance will be quite different from your usual night at the theatre. Each day from 10am, actors will work full time with renowned coach, Julia Grace (Melbourne Theatre Company), to pull apart the circumstances and characters and prepare to present a simple but powerful version of this story for the public at 730pm that evening.”
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I have mentioned before how the atmosphere of Canberra’s Mill Theatre reminds me of my seeing La Leçon in the Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris where, of the young writer Eugene Ionesco, Jacques Lemarchand wrote in 1952, in Le Figaro littéraire, “Within its small walls the Théâtre de la Huchette has what it takes to blow away all other Théâtres in Paris.… When we have grown old we will be proud to have attended performances of La Cantatrice Chauve and La Leçon.” www.theatre-huchette.com/en/the-ionesco-show
I sense in Sekuless’s manner of working something similar to this: “In the backroom of a café on the boulevard Saint-Michel a group of actors seated around a table roar with laughter. Nicholas Bataille, a young director, reads aloud the first scenes of a play by the young playwright Eugene Ionesco.” Following each night’s script-in-hand exploration of The Chalk Pit, Lexi and her actors gather together in the foyer to talk with audience members.
This is creative theatre production in a community setting, which I am sure fits admirably into this writer’s career – Peter Wilkins’s work in Canberra began as artistic director of The Jigsaw Company, a specialist in educational theatre. And there’s plenty to learn from in The Chalk Pit.
I am, of course, stretching connections too far – but in 1948 as Ionesco was getting on his way to showing in fictional characters the breakdown of marriage relationships and the rise of dictatorship, Wilkins shows us the true story of the bombastic, coercive controller, Australian Member of Parliament and corrupt businessman, the Hon. Thomas John Ley, a migrant from England as a child who ended up back ‘home’, found guilty of murder in the chalk pit, sentenced to be executed – but finally commuted to life in an insane asylum, where he died in 1947.
Ionesco couldn’t have imagined a life in his time to be really so absurd. It’s likely that Ley actually caused, in Mafia style, four or five deaths – and fortunately failed to become Prime Minister.
Ley’s life story is long and complicated, but The Mill’s Actor’s Investigation, working as a team of ever-changing true-life characters, have brought the focus clearly on Ley’s marriage and extra-marriage behaviour. The effects on the two women make The Chalk Pit a human story of the kind still played out in daily news stories; while on the political side the awful misuse of power around the world is as obvious today as it was to the young Ionesco after the two World Wars – in which the Hon Ley loudly demanded sending Australians as cannon-fodder in support of the British Empire.
The Chalk Pit is a great example of creative theatre work, in writing and production, especially in the context of Canberra, the Nation’s Capital – which our current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, says today (Canberra Times Page 4, Saturday 25th January) is “a fantastic place to live”.
