Clash Of Science And Religion When Life Replicates Art

The Age

Wednesday February 8, 2006

PENELOPE DEBELLE

PETER Goldsworthy's 1991 black comedy, Honk If You Are Jesus, was written just as IVF technology was being developed, before Jurassic Park theorised the resurrection of the dinosaur monster T-Rex from amberised DNA, and well before Dolly the cloned Scottish sheep was born.

Goldsworthy, an Adelaide author, poet, librettist and medical doctor, calculates the T-Rex oversight - he raised the possibility in the book then dismissed it - in his otherwise remarkably similar theory of DNA resurrection cost him about $300 million Hollywood dollars.

However, his book, still slowly selling around the world and recently translated into Dutch and German, survived the test of time and has been adapted into a play to be premiered by the State Theatre Company of SA at the Adelaide Arts Festival.

The detail of the technology might be out of date - international IVF pioneer Professor John Kerin, killed last month in a ride-on mower accident, was consultant to the project - but the collision between science and religion embodied in the concept of cloning remains real.

State Theatre Company assistant director Martin Laud Gray was offered any of Goldsworthy's works for the festival, including his short stories, but decided the bizarre and sharply told tale was the most compelling.

"It is really a very funny story, very irreverent, and seemed to put all the big sacred cows up on the gallery to be shot down," says Laud Gray. "What was also interesting to me was that something that was written 15 years ago was pretty much a prediction of what is kind of happening now.

"You know, we had the Raelian whacky religious group saying they had cloned a life then it all filtered away because it obviously didn't happen, and the Korean situation with the laboratory assistant whose eggs were seconded."

And the cultural imperatives for cloning in the community are very powerful, whether it be the old lady wanting to replicate a beloved cat or a grieving couple desperate to bring back a son or daughter. As Laud Gray says, who would have thought Dolly the sheep was possible 10 years ago?

Laud Gray says Kerin, to whom the show will be dedicated, had ethical questions about cloning and loved Goldsworthy's work. He was "a very ethical man" who thought that people who wanted to have children should be able to have them.

The play, which has as a backdrop a crystalline curtain of more than 6000 test-tubes, uses the humor of the book but its subject matter is dark, mixing the religious zeal of the naive American wife who moves to Queensland to set up a research lab with extreme genetic engineering. The lab begins trying to regenerate the Tasmanian tiger then escalates into an attempt to resurrect Christ.

In Goldsworthy's mind, these things are almost possible.

"I reckon it would be a good idea to bring back the Tasmanian tiger but I think the other way it's likely to happen is they will find a woolly mammoth somewhere with a frozen scrotum," says Goldsworthy.

"I read a piece in the '80s about how DNA is one of the most stable molecules around and how it would survive almost anything so I started thinking back then about bringing back Tasmanian tigers and dodos.

"Then I thought about bringing back St Nicholas from bone relics because it would be good to see what Santa Claus actually looked like and then it was just so obvious when I hit on Christ."

Honk If You Are Jesus, by the State Theatre Company of SA, is at the Odeon Theatre, Adelaide, from February 27 to March 18.

© 2006 The Age

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