Free-to-air TV highlight: Australian drama pushes the boundaries
F-----G ADELAIDE ★★★★½
Series premiere, Sunday 9.25pm, Seven
It's no coincidence that Pamela Rabe, the esteemed thespian cast as the matriarch in web-friendly art house series F-----g Adelaide, beat network television stars to win the 2018 outstanding actress Logie for her role in another provocative drama, Showcase's Wentworth. In the era of subscription networks and digital television, Australian drama need no longer play it safe.
"Certainly, the whole independent and HBO movement and subscription television producing arm has released a lot of constraints on what is possible on our small screens," says Rabe, on the phone from London where she is making appearances for Wentworth fans.
Simultaneously screening on iView as part of the June/July "Drama Binge", the six 15-minute episodes of F-----g Adelaide will be broadcast in pairs. These cinematic vignettes paint an intimate portrait of a family whose members are in various stages of flux, if not actual crisis.
The brainchild of Sophie Hyde (whose 2014 film, 52 Tuesdays, won three AWGIE awards), the series is a hauntingly funny portrayal of the fluidity of family memories, and of how siblings have a tendency to remain to each other forever adolescent. Matthew Cormack's piercingly sharp script is enhanced by Mario Spate's bespoke soundtrack that echoes poignant lines.
"The collaboration [between Hyde and director Bryan Mason] is contained," Rabe explains. "You're not having to incorporate a lot of cooks telling you how it would be better, what the network would prefer, how to read your audience. It's a microcosm for what is happening everywhere in this world of digital delivery of content. It's becoming more and more possible for small pods of creativity to do their own thing and put it out there."
Rabe's character, Maude, is something of an enigma, seen variously through the eyes of her children, gay musician Eli (Brendan Maclean), fragile artist Kitty (Tilda Cobham-Hervey, 52 Tuesdays), overseas aid worker Emma (Kate Box, Rake), and her grandchild, Cleo (Audrey Mason-Hyde). By the final shocking episode, comprised mostly of an unusually long single take, the players and audience are left wondering who Maude really is.
"Many of us have a person like that in our lives. There is something about the self-obsession of each of these characters that is not unlike how we all pass our time on this planet, in that we are the centre of our own universe. Inadvertently, things happen that irrevocably change our path and we realise we weren't looking necessarily in the right direction."
Despite the melancholic undertones and bitterness at the heart of the story, the atmosphere on set was one of laughter and fun, bolstered by homemade cakes and scones, courtesy of Hyde's mother. For Rabe, it was a joy to experience Adelaide as a creative hub of its own.
"People are starting to realise they've got what they need to feed their talent where they are. I wonder whether that's the knock-on effect of all those Adelaide festivals, where children are being nurtured on cutting-edge and international artists. It makes me wonder what the next generation of Tasmanians are going to be doing, surrounded by things like David Walsh's MONA. It's a really interesting time."
A time when she believes the proposed privatisation of the national broadcaster would be "devastating".
"It should not happen. It's short-sighted. There's been a strangling by stealth over the last few years. Many of us mourn the death of ABC's spoken word drama and poetry and prose productions. People still come up to me on the street and talk about books that I've read for the ABC. Just because something has a niche audience doesn't mean that it doesn't have a ripple-on effect on culture as a whole."