Known for the annual satirical Wharf Revue, Jonathan Biggins’s The Gospel According to Paul is a well crafted and fascinating look at one of the titans of Australian politics. A personally divisive figure, Keating is presented in a deliberately sympathetic light. While attempts to humanise the former Prime Minister were overshadowed, Biggins nailed Keating’s presence and was able to explore the strange vacuum former leaders find themselves in when their time in public office ends.
Keating was immediately revealed to be a Sydney man through and through in the opening minutes of the show. When asking audience members in the front row where they were from, Wollongong and Ipswich were not the answers he wanted to hear.
One man shows are notoriously hard to pull off. What Biggins was able to do from the start was capture Keating’s infamous arrogance—not many characters on stage would insult members of the audience. Keating recalls that his hero, former NSW Premier Jack Lang, told him to be “a conscript of history.” Keating on stage was not so much a conscript but a conductor, pulling down a projector screen to give him visual aids as he lectured the audience.
From campaigning to crush his left faction opponent to win preselection in the seat of Blaxland in the 1968 election, branch stacking along the way, to fighting Bob Hawke twice to wrestle away the party leadership in 1991, the right faction operator from Bankstown was depicted as merciless.
Biggins, through describing Keating’s Catholic background, highlighted how socially conservative the Labor party used to be. “Mass and masonic handshakes,” was how he described his political rituals.
The audience was unsurprisingly sympathetic and filled with Labor faithful. Every time a Liberal’s name was mentioned, from John Howard to Scott Morrison, audible boo’s could be heard—at points it felt like the two minutes hate. I was the youngest person I could see, many around me likely grew up voting for the Hawke Keating government.
Even though he never went to university, Biggins empathised how much of a policy wonk the former PM was. He insisted on going over budgets and mentioning the expenditure review committee, bragging how he read every line. The show, with limited success, used dance numbers to try and spice up his economic reform agenda, but the audience was nonetheless left with the sense Keating knew his stuff.
The apolitical was certainly a side note. Biggins varied the pace well, pausing the Canberra drama to discuss Keating’s love of classical music and the voice of Tom Jones. We learn that he met his wife on a flight and that “federal politics is no business for a family man.” These moments made Keating a more complete character but were often small pauses in an addictive drive to succeed—a conception that was surely deliberate.
Perhaps the most interesting question the show asks is how does a former leader fade into the shadows. While preaching the benefits of his policies for the ‘95%’, Keating stands, physically, in another world. Keating’s office had classical columns flanking a mahogany desk with expensive landscape paintings hanging on the walls. The setting accused the former PM of a great crime in modern politics, being ‘out of touch’.
Despite all his digs at modern politics, Keating clearly still craves to get out of his office and back into the discussion. He picks up the phone for an ABC radio interview only to hear he has been bumped for an opposition policy announcement. Even though he looms large as a presence, Biggins suggests he has very little influence—something Keating is uncomfortable with.
Whether you blame Keating for the rising tide of neo-liberalism or laud him as a reformer, something about Biggins’s performance is a reminder politicians like Keating are largely a thing of the past. Unlike most these days on both sides who propose small changes to large problems to avoid scare campaigns, with Keating it was always clear where he stood.
His criticism of Albo during the show certainly rings true, “A reformer is not a machine in a Pilates studio.”
The Gospel According to Paul is currently playing at the Sydney Opera House until 23 June 2024.
