User:Rolandroc/Now You Can Eat Father Christmas

ROLAND ROCCHICCIOLI in his own, rivetting story, of a woman's struggle for survival…and the child who watched it

The most surprising - and one of the most disturbing - plays of 2003, Roland Rocchiccioli's NOW YOU CAN EAT FATHER CHRISTMAS is returning to Melbourne. Written by, and starring, Roland Rocchiccioli, and directed by Jennifer Hagan, NOW YOU CAN EAT FATHER CHRISTMAS opened at Chapel Off Chapel, Prahran on October 19. It played previously at the Athenaeum Theatre, Collins Street Melbourne for a season in 2001.

‘The circumstances under which I grew up are so far removed from life today I can hardly believe it happened. It sometimes seems like it was another life, in another land. Yet it did, and the events, some of which were devastating, remain crystal clear. For all that, I wouldn't have missed it for all the gold in Kalgoorlie!’

Part autobiography and part biography, the play stunned more than several thousand theatregoers who saw it during its nine week season at the Athenaeum 11. It revealed a Rocchiccioli no one knew. The eloquent and elegant man about town, the comic actor on The Footy Show's House of Bulger emerges in this play as a man who has survived a harrowing and often heart-rending upbringing in a succession of Outback shanty towns. An early life that would crush most of us.

Yet the enduring theme of NOW YOU CAN EAT FATHER CHRISTMAS is inspirational. At its core is the true story of Roland and his mother Beria, struggling in poverty in a dying goldfields town in outback Western Australia. Beria wwas born in 1911 and for the last years of her life, lived with Roland in Melbourne. Beria lived an almost unrelentingly bruising life. Rocchiccioli's tour de force telling of it, had audiences laughing with her, and brushing aside tears as the lights went up for interval. By the play's end they were on their feet applauding an uplifting and unforgettable 90 minutes.

'The mother's tale is extraordinary,' said The Age. 'Rocchiccioli is the "Ronnie" in the background glimpsed as a startled onlooker [of]…the details of Beria's hard life, from the many beatings she endured to her learning to perform abortions on herself, but never a note of self-pity is sounded.'

'Her story proceeds in … a stream of neighbours, men, occasional friends, and the little boy who longed to be able to eat the sugar Father Christmas that always sat on the top of the cake.

'In the end we have witnessed an act of love on the part of that son.'

Rocchiccioli plays himself as he is today and 30 other characters including his mother and himself as a child, and the action of the play takes place in a painstaking re-creation of the kitchen he 'lived-in' as a child.

'The kitchen was in fact one of many - all identical, with the same furniture - that Beria and I lived in. The various homes, in the north-eastern goldfields of the West were mostly sweltering tin or Hessian dwellings, but the kitchen always was the same. You can see it on stage - and in reality, in Gwalia, now a ghost town.

'Gwalia died when the Sons of Gwalia mine closed down in 1963 and many of the townspeople just packed up and moved on. My father was one of them and he left everything - including the kitchen sink and the kitchen furniture. Forty years on it's still in the same place, even the lino. Strangely, the old washhouse and the dunny are gone!'

Writing the play, he says, 'was interesting. On the one hand it is a fascinating and heart-rending story of a woman and her survival struggle: complex, brutal, pathetic, determined and humorous. But it's also about shattered child/parent relationships compounded by painful and emotional circumstances.

'As I wrote the play I was fascinated by what I discovered about those distant times and conditions. The circumstances under which I grew up are so far removed from life today I can hardly believe it happened. Yet they did, and the events, some of which were devastating, remain crystal clear. I wouldn't have missed it for all the gold in Kalgoorlie!'

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A trained dancer, his first role was playing the front-end of Mavis, the dancing horse, in pantomime at the Playhouse Theatre in Perth. Almost four later decades he played Joffa, a janitor at Bulger General Hospital, in The House of Bulger, The Footy Show's satirical soap.

In the years between, my work and television interviews have introduced me to: The King Of Greece, Tom Cruise, Dame Barbara Cartland (I stayed often with her), Yvonne De Carlo, Janet Leigh, Angie Dickinson, Phyllis Diller (she always cooks for me), Sir Alec Guinness, Sir John Gielgud, David Linley (son of Princess Margaret - he came to lunch clutching a bottle of Brown Bros White), Lord Snowdon, Debbie Reynolds (a very close friend), Ingrid Bergman, Jackie Collins (she became a friend), Zsa Zsa Gabor (another friend), Shirley Bassey, Mia Farrow, Anthony Perkins, Doris Day, Gordon Jackson (a close friend), Gordon Chater (we talked most days on the phone), Sean Connery, Glenda Jackson (the only woman  in the world who terrifies me), Leo McKern (he did his drunk impersonation every night in the theatre), Patrick MacNee (the original star of The Avengers), West End producer Bill Kenwright (he became a friend after “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat”), Googie Withers and John MacCallum (we did six plays together), and the late Frank Thring  (from and about whom I have an endless list of stories).

JENNIFER HAGAN Jennifer Hagan is among Australian theatre's most respected identities, establishing herself first, an actress in scores of productions for such companies as STC, MTC, Nimrod, the Old Tote, Marion Street and the STCSA, and since 1990 as a director of productions such as Six Degrees of Separation, Daylight Saving, Salt, Love Child, Last of the Red Hot Lovers, and, most recently, with Jacki Weaver, The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead.