It was 1995 when Christos Tsiolkas published his debut novel Loaded, and while it mightn’t seem so long ago, in some respects it may as well have been another universe. It’s easy to fool ourselves that the past is just like us only with different tech and music, but whole modes of thinking have come and gone since then.
Ari is a young Greek Australian gay guy (although he’d reject almost all those identifiers) with too much energy and nowhere satisfying to put it. In a single summer’s day, he traverses the streets of Melbourne, trying to avoid familial pressures while getting high on drugs and anonymous sex. His nihilism – that very 90s middle finger to corporatisation and convention – is his only instrument, and if he uses it bluntly and to his own detriment, he is at least furiously committed. Tsiolkas managed to make his protagonist simultaneously frightening and soulful, an emblem of rage and resistance who’s also terribly exposed and vulnerable.
This stage adaptation sets the action in the present day – and while Tsiolkas and his collaborator Dan Giovannoni have no problem whatever with the updated cultural references (the music, the phones, the hook-up apps), they face a thornier issue with the sociology. Ari is no longer the son of first-generation migrants, with all the complexity and cultural pressure that implies. Those waves of European migration have largely been replaced by diasporas from Africa and the Middle East, people Ari doesn’t remotely identify with nor understand.
The monolithic fact of antecedence, the deadening effect of all that family history on the young, is a key theme in Tsiolkas’s work – but transposing Ari’s story from 1995 to 2023 lessens the impact somewhat. The character’s attitudes to his own sexuality, ethnicity and place in the world are suffused with the disaffected angst of generation X, and don’t generate the same amount of tension in a contemporary setting. The stakes are lower. Perhaps Ari is as much a product of pre-millennial Melbourne as Holden Caulfield is of late 40s New York.
Thankfully, the play doesn’t suffer too much as a result. Ari’s rebellion is less rooted in his family background, and his parents’ struggles to fit into a new society hardly register – but what remains undiminished, even feels wonderfully subversive all over again, is Ari’s fuck you to middle Australia, his explosion of the myth of belonging. He doesn’t just reject identity politics; he rejects the very idea of identity itself.
This results in some seriously germane and entertaining sprays on the soullessness of suburban Melbourne, the hypocrisy and smugness of the inner city, the blandification of our streets. Ari is a superb critic of the culture precisely because he sits outside it, taking potshots from the marginalia. As he tells us with a relish it’s hard to dismiss, “I’m not Australian, I’m not Greek, I’m not anything.”
Danny Ball is magnificent, in a role whose contours were defined by Alex Dimitriades in the 1998 film adaptation Head On. He is first and foremost sexy, a quality that Ari needs to have in spades – desirability is his currency and weapon, something that emanates from him as surely as his pheromones. Cocksure and charismatic, Ball bounds around the playing space like a pinball pinging off the edges of his world. His control of voice and character, that mercurial ability to inhabit the multitude of personas Ari meets on his journey, gives the work its colour and variability. And his quiet moments of pain, the longing under his braggadocio, are articulated with skill and poignancy.
Director Stephen Nicolazzo – who has long championed queer Australian work with his company Little Ones Theatre – adds considerable flair to the material, subtly shaping Ari’s passage through the underworld. He brings a lyricism to the piece, and moments of high romanticism that soften Tsiolkas and Giovannoni’s essentially brutalist vision. A scene where Johnny performs a drag act informed by his late mother’s love of Greek music is lush and gorgeous; it feels like a necessary bulwark against despair.
Nathan Burmeister’s set, with its judiciously employed revolve, cleverly and economically suggests the various subterranean pleasure houses Ari frequents, and Katie Sfetkidis’s lighting is suitably dingy and dank. Daniel Nixon’s sound design doesn’t slavishly recreate the songs that fill Ari’s life, opting for something more suggestive and atmospheric; his composition drives the narrative forward with swirling intensity.
Loaded is an adaptation haunted by its own past – something that sits uneasily on the shoulders of a character defined by an eternal present – and if it still thrums with dark energy, it also feels oddly nostalgic, even quaint. Ari’s obstinate refusal of community and connection, of identity and history, seems faintly avoidant where it was once vital. He still seduces, and he makes a thrilling journeyman into the underworld, but he never grows up. We have, and his petulance reads now like an indulgence of the distant past.
Loaded is on at the Malthouse Theatre until 3 June
