How We Beat the Favourite
Horse-breaker, mounted policeman,
pub-fighter, Virgil lover, member of parliament,
bankrupt: these are some of the faces of Adam Lindsay Gordon
explored in this funny and moving play on the life of Australia's
national poet.
Adam Lindsay Gordon was arguably
Australia's first national poet, and in 1934 was immortalised by
the placing of his bust in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.
His poem, "The Sick Stockrider", was the forerunner of the
hosts of bush ballads that followed from the pens of Banjo
Patterson, Henry Lawson, and many others.
In this 50-minute one-person play, we
deal with Gordon's life from the time of his exile to Australia in
1853 until his tragic suicide seventeen years later. Gordon
was a womaniser, drinker, poet, and completely enamoured with
outdoor sport. He was one of the finest horsemen ever to
live in Australia. His mad leap over a fence onto the edge
of a sheer precipice near the Blue Lake in Mount Gambier is
legendary, and is still remembered by a plaque at the spot.
The play opens on Gordon's voyage to
Australia. He paces the deck, lamenting his exile by his
father, and cursing his isolation from the thing he holds most
dear, a good steeplechaser. In subsequent scenes, we see
Gordon as a horse-breaker, mounted policeman, receiving news of
the death of his father, pub-fighter, lover of Virgil, country
squire, suitor, jockey, member of parliament, and bankrupt.
The short scenes, a mixture of the funny and moving, are linked
by the pulsing rhythm of "How We Beat The Favourite",
Gordon's popular ballad describing one of his beloved
steeplechases.
As the play progresses, Gordon's
alternating fits of melancholy and euphoria become more extreme.
Following his financial ruin, the rejection of his work by the
critics, the death of his baby daughter, and a bad fall from a
horse that ends his riding career, he takes his own life with a
service rifle behind Brighton Beach in 1870. He was
thirty-six years old.
How We Beat the Favourite was
directed by Allen Lyne and starred Rob McPherson in a premiere
performance at the Weimar Room, Adelaide in 2002.
This play is one of the four
scripts contained in the Anthology. To discuss
performance issues, please email me