![]() ![]() 25 years after the war, Les still can’t cope with the Japanese he has joked his way through post-war life without ever managing to quell the ghosts of his dead comrades and the memory of his own suffering on the infamous railway. Romeril’s Les Harding is in the same ludicrous mould as Barry Humphries’s Les Patterson, but the playwright also grants him the terrible experience of the Thai-Burma railway camps, forcing his audiences to shift from laughter to dismay as this apparently stereotypical returned serviceman breaks down before our eyes. Yet they had undergone suffering we could not imagine. Often intolerant, they seemed xenophobic, ignorant and frequently drunken. They were our fathers, RSL members with patriarchal power, resisting social and political change. ![]() ![]() Romeril’s play uncomfortably recalls the ambivalent attitude of the post-war generation to the World War II veterans. I read Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North in the same week that I saw the Griffin Theatre production of John Romeril’s The Floating World, the classic 1975 play on the legacy of the Australian prisoner of war experience at the hands of the Japanese. ![]()
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