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Wednesday, November 13, 2002

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic

The final moment of Playhouse Rep's "Breaker Morant" is terrific, a startling image of imperial vanity and decay that fixes the play in the tides of history.

	"Breaker Morant" WHERE: Playhouse Rep Company at studio theater, Pittsburgh Playhouse of Point Park College, 222 Craft Ave., Oakland. WHEN: Through Nov. 24, then Dec. 4-8; 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. TICKETS: $18-$22; student/senior discounts; 412-621-4445.

It reverberates like that in Shelley's famous "Ozymandias," where a shattered monument in a desert proclaims with empty hauteur, "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" We understand Ozymandias' boast ironically: Even the mighty must eventually come to despair. Vanity, vanity and dust to dust.

Other empires could take note -- world powers that expect to wage war (past, present or future) entirely on their own terms, as though they were gods.

To match that cosmic theme and telling set, there is some strong acting and Robert A. Miller's capable direction. But they don't fully disguise a dramatic shortfall. Australian Kenneth Ross' 1978 script is like one of those History Channel docu-dramas, long on information and with touches of atmosphere but, since the whole story is pretty apparent from the start, static and short of actual drama.

The particular imperial vanity at the heart of "Breaker Morant" belongs to the British, on whose empire, from the vantage of 1902, the sun must have seemed never destined to set. The specific agent of this monstrous pride is Lord Kitchener, former butcher of Khartoum, then scourge of the Boers of South Africa, soon to be chief of the army in India and eventually one of the geniuses who administered the carnage of World War I.

"Breaker Morant" is about one of those small wartime incidents that encapsulate themes larger than just that war -- like My Lai, say. It is set during the Boer War (1899-1902), which, you may recall, was the occasion of British conquest of independent states founded by Dutch and German colonists who had fled British South Africa. A mainly Australian troop of irregular British commandos, though directed to fight Boer bands on their own terms, is caught with bloody hands in the glare of world publicity, and the British determine to punish them as a political sop to continental opinion.

Ross' courtroom drama focuses on the secret proceedings under which Lieutenants Harry "Breaker" Morant, Peter Handcock and George Witton are tried. The court, which accuses Morant and the others of breaking the rules of civilized warfare, refuses to hear evidence in their defense. British self-regard and contempt for its colonials runs thicker than blood, and hypocrisy runs thicker still.

Morant claims that everything they did was sanctioned by orders from Kitchener, who he insists should testify, but that mighty potentate has himself conveyed the decision to railroad these men. What is the cost of a few colonials in the defense of the empire?

With 17 male parts, "Breaker" allows Playhouse Rep to display one of its strengths, its acting company, which here runs (necessarily) deep in men -- so deep it can employ the consummate Heath Lamberts in a small supporting role.

Morant is an attractive central character, a craggy individualist, no better than he ought to be, and a Robert W. Service-like frontier poet to boot. David Cabot plays him as a stolid, solid hero and recites his poetry with the requisite distant gleam but doesn't give a full sense of the colorful figure from history.

Mark Staley and Michael Tornetta offer contrast as the enigmatic, macho Handcock (telling name) and tentative Witton. Phil Winters is impervious as the institutional hanging judge, and the capable John Amplas is surprisingly vague as the unwilling prosecutor -- a role playwright Ross could well have made more of.

The best performance comes from Christian Rummel as the inexperienced defense attorney, a mix of diffidence and self-assertion gradually emerging from uncertainty.

There are also strong appearances by, among others, Harry O'Toole, Joel Ripka and Vaughn Challingsworth. But sometimes, as when Kitchener (Ronald Siebert) confers with his aide (John Gresh), the talking heads tend toward self-parody, like a Monty Python script without the laughs. At such points, Ross' preponderance of exposition is his own worst enemy.

You may already know the story from Bruce Beresford's 1979 movie. The play sticks to the trial, but the treatment of Morant and his men had larger repercussions, becoming an Australian cause celebre and a symbolic prognosticator of Britain's eventual loss of empire.

This larger theme is left to Mayer's set and lighting, as lovingly conceptualized as an installation piece in a Carnegie International. Necessarily intimate in the small studio theater, the set doubles as holding cell and courtroom, but its walls suggest much more. Partly stucco, they are also made of floor-to-ceiling cubbyholes, which, under certain lighting, look like glass brick.

Other lighting brings out the oceans of paper with which they're stuffed -- the bureaucracy of war, detritus of empire and sterile sands of time, all suggested in one potent image. It is these walls, leaping into life, which assert their metaphoric power at the end of the play.