Lex Marinos, who stars in “Ghosts in the Scheme”… “It’s like a jigsaw prize puzzle and it’s much more interesting than a conventional play.” Photo by Wouter Van de Voorde
Not so anymore, for as the 65th anniversary of the first blast approaches, the importance of “The Scheme” in changing the face of Australia is increasingly recognised.
I’m talking to actor and dramaturg Lex Marinos, best-known to the general public as Bruno, the “wog” son-in-law in “Kingswood Country”, as the subject of a “Who Do You Think You Are?” episode, in which he discovered convict ancestry, and for his role in the TV version of “The Slap”.
Marinos proudly represents the quintessential “dago”, once the target of jokes and now at the centre of Australia’s narrative, documented in his 2014 autobiography, “Blood and Circuses”.
After a long career that began as a student in the fledgling School of Drama at the University of NSW, Marinos has now largely abandoned the conventional theatre to join forces with Scott Rankin, the director of Big hART Theatre, Australia’s leading arts and social-change company.
It’s not exactly as if he’s stepped on to the sidelines. Big hART gazumped most other theatres on the very day I spoke to Marinos by scoring $784,000 in the IMPACT Philanthropy Partnerships initiative.
“I don’t want to overblow my role in all of this, but the excellent training I got at UNSW meant that I emerged with a really good sense of dramaturgy,” Marinos tells me by phone from Cooma, where he’s rehearsing Big hART’s latest show “Ghosts in the Scheme”.
Forty-five years later he still believes that every play has its own characteristics, but he knows Rankin needs someone like him to bounce ideas off, to structure the work.
In the coming production, a Big hART, South East Arts and the Canberra Theatre and Cooma-Monaro Shire Council collaboration, Marinos and Rankin were faced with a rich mine of stories from people in the Cooma area who came to Australia to work on The Scheme.
“It’s like a jigsaw prize puzzle and it’s much more interesting than a conventional play,” he says.
Together they faced the challenge of putting together all the social history research into the Cooma community.
“Would we have one story, or would we have many? Those questions, that’s the process that I love,” Marinos says.
His fellow actors, he reports, often get “freaked out” as he and Rankin chop, change and continually ask, how do we get this to work? Some questions are answered through the music of Canberra artist Mikel Simic of Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, others through the visuals that conjure up recollections of those ghosts in The Scheme.
Cooma is cold, but Marinos is having a good time. They’re all staying in a beautiful house with real fires, and he loves working with his daughter Sophia, the company’s creative producer, though he’s used to that. The biggest treat is that he gets to act in a “ménage a trois” plot, with his wife Anne Grigg and one of his oldest mates, the actor Bruce Myles.
They play three people locked in an eternal triangle set against the background of The Scheme. Myles plays Morgan, an ageing photographer facing retirement and Grigg plays his wife of many years. Into the equation comes Greek Tony (Marinos), but he has a terminal illness.
After lunch, Marinos says, they’ll be integrating the community actors, five or six Cooma performers ranging from old-timers to more recent arrivals selected after workshops in the town.
“I think we’re pretty close to locking off the final script,” he says. “We’ve had about 16 or 17 drafts, but we’ve had such a huge amount of input from the band and the other actors…it will keep changing.”
World premiere season of “Ghosts in the Scheme”, The Playhouse, September 2-5, bookings to canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.
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