Anne Tenney and Graeme McRae . Photo: John Marmaras
“This time last year, I was plotting a murder.” As opening lines go, this one is hard to beat. It is spoken by David Holthouse (Graeme McRae), the protagonist in Stalking the Bogeyman, who goes on to tell us the true story of retaliation against a sexual assault that happened 25 years previously, when the victim was a seven-year-old child.
There has been so much attention given to the crime of sexual assault in recent years and one of the scarier aspects of this particular story is just how common, how commonplace, how violent and how invisible such assaults are. How the assailants blend in to the background. This, after all, is the tale of everyday folk and a child is raped while his caring parents are playing cribbage in another room. Unbelievable? Sadly, no.
Stalking the Bogeyman was written by David Holthouse and Markus Potter (with additional writing by Shane Ziegler, Shane Stokes and Santino Fontana) in 2004. This is its Australian premiere.
Noel Hodda and Deborah Jones as mum and dad. Photo: John Marmaras
The play depicts David and his parents, the Bogeyman (Radek Jonak) – unnamed, but a 17-year-old ‘supercool’ jock – and his unknowing parents, and other sundry characters including Coach Billy, an older pedophile who preys on the kids he coaches.
David’s assault takes place in the home of family friends, the adults upstairs socialising and oblivious to what is going on in the den. In what we know now to be standard form, little David is too scared and ashamed to out his rapist.
Adult David gets on with his life as best he can; the Bogeyman gets off scot-free. Except. When David, now a journalist and living far from his parents’ home, finds out his Bogeyman is living in the same city, he feels the need for revenge and/or to stop him molesting other kids. His plan for the perfect murder is meticulous.
Those are the bare outlines. What you get in Stalking the Bogeyman is the raw emotion imparted from the victim, whose whole life has been skewed from a rape at the age of seven. The secrecy, the shame, the fear, the worry that somehow the crime will become part of him, that as ‘damaged goods’ he will be seen as a pariah not a victim.
It’s a very moving, very personal and powerful account and Graeme McRae as a wounded but empathetic David holds our attention from that opening line to the very last line. The ensemble cast– Deborah Jones, Noel Hodda, Anne Tenney and Alexander Palacio – are uniformly excellent and the whole production, under Neil Gooding’s direction, is tight and compelling.
Stalking the Bogeyman is at The Old Fitz Theatre, Woolloomooloo until June 23.
