Community counts the cost

THEATRE

Mechtron

By HELEN THOMSON

Perhaps nothing brings home the massive shift from public to private ownership that has taken place in recent time than the rows of townhouses where once stood our community's schools.

Melbourne's northern and western suburbs, such losses were particularly heavy, but if the community theatre piece, Mechtron, is anything to go by, Brunswick maintains its rage.

Across the road from the Brunswick town hall, festooned with banners that say "Jeff Don't Toll The Tulla", is the Mechanics Institute, established in 1868 to enhance the community's education. It is a fitting venue for a production that mourns the death of a local school, Koala Vale and predicts an educational future that is a frightening but perfectly logical extension of the push to privatise.

In 2004 there are no public schools, just private, fully electronic "learning centres", paid for with an edu-card, where money buy the points. Rejected students, that is poor ones, are permanently consigned to an underclass.

Some of them convert their resentment into crime and drug-taking, rapidly becoming street ferals.

The scene were a group of teenagers rob a more fortunate edu-card student of his laptop is not a glimpse of the future, but an already common phenomenon.

This is not professional theatre, despite the presence of several professnal actors, such as Anne Phelan and Nadja Kostich. It is occasionally clumsy, simply representational and frankly politically partisan. Yet the presence of real-life veterans from the barricades that were set up around schools such as Richmond High and Northlands, and their passionate concern for the future of children already socially disadvantaged, gives the production real power and conviction.

Playwright Stefo Nantsou stirred things up with his 1997 production of the Essentials, a-too-close-for-comfort piece about the dismantling of the ambulance service. In Mechtron, he counts up the human cost of school closures, the pain to teachers, parents and children, some of whose lives will never recover, just as the commumity will never regain those sites of communal life: "Take away the school, you take away the heart".

Anne Phelan is in her element as Lou Jade, Koala Vale's principal, bringing warmth and moral authority to the part. Nadja Kostich also shines in the role of Miss T, a first-generation migrant Australian who puts personal survival above principle, and finds there are ultimately no winners in the brutal new system where teachers become "learning navigators", seen only on-screen.

Michael Selman and Lily Nantsou are charmingly unpretentious as the younger children and Steve Payne is a suitably avuncular grandfather who is politicised by Koala Vale's closure. An audience favorite was Lorraine Johnson as Laura Jenson, a real-life veteran of Richmond High's picketing, a heroine in life as well as art.

The first half of Mechtron is endearingly familiar, a reminder of all of our early school days and their small rituals. That Koala Vale is a large family, dedicated to the welfare of its children, is made more important by the fact that so many of them have no intact families of their own. Some of the easily-forgotten victims of school closures, the caretakers, cleaners and secretaries who simply lost their jobs with little hope of another, are given sympathetic portraits in the play as well.

The second half depicts alienation in several forms, from the electronic processing of people to the defeated kids on the street. Nothing could more graphically demonstrate the inappropriateness of economic rationalist goals than this version of their "success" in the area of education.

Mechtron is community theatre at its best, at once a protest, an educative tool and a celebration of shared goals.

At the Mechanics Institute, Brunswick, until 23 August.

Learning to live in 2004: Nadja Kostich (Miss T) with Lily Nantsou, centre, and Michael Selman. Picture: SEBASTIAN COSTANZO