Customer Reviews

The Outside Story

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The Outside Story is a dance through the fraught and contested history of the Sydney Opera House, that prestige icon sometimes called the building of the century. Two women - one a naïve middle-aged student, one a questing unconfident academic - share in the detective work. Around them is a group of weather-beaten, battling romantic realists, their lives deeply marked by the old crisis on the building site.

They remember the architect Jørn Utzon's thwarted desire for an `honest building, a truthful building' made for a long future in a hopeful country. They remember how ambition was betrayed when the architect and his team sere forced from the site. There was a protest march, the media outcry, the huge meetings. Arguments were long and bitter; friends became enemies, and among architects, it was 'brother against brother...".

The story keeps its grip; old men old men remember as though it all happened yesterday. Some go on fighting their rearguard actions to the death. History knocks and demands to be answered; the rupture in the national icon goes deep. But this is a comedy; truth, however smothered and abused, in time comes limping out. For the scholars the puzzles are tangled with everyday chaos of living family, work and love lives, the limits of control. We follow them at close quarters as they deal with the memory and forgetting, secrets and lies, the confusions of the archive - and always, with themselves.

In The Outside Story, Sylvia Lawson brilliantly recreates a moment when wider conflicts found a focus in one symbolic place. This is a powerful and witty intellectual mystery that tracks the ambitions, politics and passions of a city. It is also a consummate meditation of a city's and a country's becoming.