Hitting a child, is it ever justified? Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas stirred up a hornet’s nest when he set his novel, The Slap, around that very question. And the debate is set to flare again now that it’s been turned into an eight-part TV series.
Playing the pivotal role of Hector, at whose 40th birthday party the fateful slap occurs, is Jonathan LaPagtia, the real life the father of seven-year-old Tilly. So, you have to ask: could he ever slap her?
“Never”, says LaPaglia. “But in The Slap, it’s an extreme situation. You have to ask yourself – would you step in if a child was out of control”?
The hook with The Slap, first published in Australia in 2008, is that you can’t help but take sides. When Hector’s cousin Harry snaps and disciplines three-year-old brat-from-hell Hugo, there will be some who feel like cheering him on. Equally, there will be others as horrified as Hugo’s still breast-feeding mum, Rosie, played in the TV version by former Home and Away favourite Melissa George. She splits a close-knit circle of family and friends down the middle by pressing assault charges against Harry.
“There’s definitely a divide in reactions”, says LaPaglia. “For some people it’s a generation divide, older people are fine with it because that’s how they were brought up. But to my generation [he’s 42] it’s less acceptable. But men and women, parents and non-parents, the divides go every which way”.
He’s quick to point out The Slap is not just about one strike. Tsiolkas skilfully spins out that one incident into an exploration of sexuality, race, cultural divides, the cracks that appear when you reach your forties and more besides.
One issue that hit close to home for LaPaglia was The Slap’s setting amid Melbourne’s Greek community, a milieu which brings the issue of cultural identity into sharp focus. LaPaglia, son of an Italian father and Dutch mother, had first-hand experience to draw on.
“It was a big thing when I was growing up”, he says. “When I was at school you had to choose, there was a lot of pressure to assimilate”.
One sticking point for some critics of the original novel was the suspicion of misogyny in its relationships but LaPaglia has little truck with that. “To me, it’s an accurate portrayal of these people”, he says. “The misogyny thing comes down to the sex scenes but a lot of them are raw fantasy.
Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/tv/879695-jonathan-la-paglia-the-slap-isnt-misogynistic-its-a-portrayal-of-people#ixzz1bsfwRVll
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