In a sense, they were. Based on their death masks, there was a definite physical resemblance between the two men – leading to a recent controversy surrounding whose skull has been on display at the gaol all these years – and both were media sensations in their day. Indeed, if Kelly’s notoriety established him as an antipodean Jesse James, Deeming was our own Jack the Ripper (at one point, he actually was implicated in the Whitechapel murders).
In Deeming’s case, a quick search for ‘windsor murder’ at the National Library of Australia’s Trove website will deliver numerous scans of breathless contemporary newspaper reportage. Two things you may take from these pieces are that Deeming was a man of many names (I particularly like ‘Dooming’), and that details of his life and crimes seemed to change by the edition.
So, who was Frederick Deeming? The following passage from the Australian Dictionary of Biography offers a glimpse:
On 22 September at St Anne’s, Rainhill, as Williams, ‘army inspector’, Deeming married Emily Lydia Mather and the wedding was followed by a lavish banquet. The couple left England, arriving in Melbourne in the Kaiser Wilhelm II on 15 December. Under the name of Druin he rented a brick cottage, which still stands, at 57 Andrew Street, Windsor, and there on or about Christmas Day he battered his wife round the head, cut her throat and buried her under the second bedroom hearthstone, cementing her body in with materials he had bought a week earlier. During January 1892, as Dawson, he auctioned his African effects and Emily Mather’s clothes, defrauded a jeweller, wrote to a matrimonial agency (as Duncan) seeking a wife, sailed to Sydney, and became engaged to Kate Rounsefell at Bathurst. He then departed to Western Australia, and, as Baron Swanston, sought work as a mining engineer.
Sounds like the plot to some macabre soap opera, doesn’t it? And therein lies the final parallel between our two villains: as one was immortalised in the first feature film ever made (The Story of the Kelly Gang, 1906), the other was the subject of the world’s first ‘reality show’ – Alfred Dampier’s constantly evolving, ripped-from-the-headlines (stage) melodrama, Wilful Murder (1892).
That play and its players are as much the subject of Frank Gauntlett’s Deeming. And Gauntlett’s play, too, focuses on the idea of Deeming’s fate being entwined with another’s – though in this case his other takes the form of the actor who knew him and played him in Murder, Alfred Harford. What if they’d changed places, Gauntlett asks, and it was Harford who went to the gallows? What if the actor playing a killer on stage was none other than Deeming himself?
It’s an absorbing concept, and written with delightful wit and Victorian ornateness. The script could be tightened and focused to give it a greater sense of tension, of dramatic momentum, but its laughs and chills are genuine and the blurring of the lines between fact and fantasy, theatre and reality, are skilfully handled.
For the most part, the cast do a stellar job here. Alex Hunt as actor/producer Alfred Dampier is big, bombastic, the kind of literate carnival showman one imagines in the theatre of that day, though it’s the shades of weariness, of vulnerability underpinning his performance that make it so compelling. Patrick Trumper’s Harford (playing Deeming) is creepily charismatic; as both actor and potential killer, you don’t want to take your eyes off him. Emily Stewart steals the show near the play’s end, but in general she could be bigger, more theatrical throughout, and I wonder if she isn’t slightly miscast in the role of Mrs Dampier? (If Deeming had been produced by Hammer Films in the 1970s, Diana Dors would have been first choice, to be sure).
The show’s lighting and sound design could be far more dynamic, but director Steven Hopley’s control of the space and Chantal Jim’s costumes are both excellent. Though unlikely to reach the same heights of success that Wilful Murder enjoyed back in 1892, if it, too, continues to evolve, this production of Deeming has the potential to become something really special.
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Steven Hopley in association with EMU Productions presents
Deeming
by Frank Gauntlett
Directed and produced by Steven Hopley
Assistant Direction by Lucy Bailes
Lighting design by Jerry Retford
Sound design by Paul McNally
Costume design by Chantal Jim
Graphic design by Emily Elise
Stage management by Melinda Latsos
Lighting and sound operation by Lauchlan Barns
Performed by Anthony Hunt, Emily Stewart and Patrick Trumper
King Street Theatre, Newtown
May 22 – June 3
