Winnie the Pooh by A.A.Milne, a Garry Ginivan Attraction at Canberra Theatre April 27-28.
For me, this Pooh was a slick lick at the money honey pot, not the whimsical hums of Pooh that I remember from my tiny days. If there is anything we should keep from our erstwhile colonial masters, it should be not just the words of A.A.Milne but the sense of gentle humour, irony and comradeship which are exemplified in the Rescue of Piglet from a Wetting. What we got was a tightly timed performance which seemed to be controlled by a pre-recorded tape.
The effect was exemplified when I heard a parent explain to her 3-year-old after the show, "A movie's on a big screen. This was a play." It was hard to tell the difference. Of course, when Pooh says to Owl, "Eeyore's lost his tail, hasn't he children?", all the children yelled "Yes!" but the show had a mechanical feel instead of the warmth of real contact between the actors and the children that performers like Monica Trapaga achieve.
It is disappointing indeed to find myself so critical, because the costumes and set were excellent (based on the original E.H.Shepherd illustrations, not the Disney abominations), the singing was harmonious and the basics of the characters were strong, especially Tom Blair's Eeyore. The attraction of the Bear with Very Little Brain is so powerful that Canberra Theatre was full at the opening performance. Michael Lindner gave a generally sympathetic portrayal of Pooh, except that he fell occasionally into the trap of getting a laugh by making Pooh just a little too stupid.
The English pantomime tradition, perhaps, led to Christopher Robin being played by a woman, Laura Hamilton, who was a clear and precise actor - yet I felt that Christopher Robin being a boy is a strong point in favour of helping males appreciate sensitivity to emotions. Little boys in this audience probably missed the point.
The program reveals that three prominent songs have both words and music by Julian Slade, rather than being originals by Milne and H.Fraser-Simson. These were what Pooh might call bumptious songs - not his style at all. And one small girl near me wanted to go home when Tigger appeared in unimpressive pin stripes. Tigger has to be orange with big stripes, she informed her mother. So there! And, in Australia indeed, where were Kanga and Roo?
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 27 April 2000
Monday, 17 April 2000
2000: Within the Walls Exhibition - The Garden by Estelle Muspratt. Short feature article.
King's Hall in Old Parliament House has echoed to many a political intrigue in the past, but rarely to such an affecting moment as when students from Narrabundah College sang In This Heart by Sinead O'Connor to conclude The Garden, a 50 minute play about the children taken to the Theresienstadt Ghetto 1941 - 1945.
Some 140,000 Jews were transported to this holding camp near Prague which the German SS falsely represented as a 'model Jewish settlement': most inmates were sent on to their deaths in places like Auschwitz, while 33,500 died in Theresienstadt. Of 10,500 children under 15, only a few hundred survived.
In A Glance and a Kiss, one inmate, Jiri Pribramsky, wrote:
Kiss me...
So I might forget
The meadows between woods
and the purple heather
And everything else that
used to move me.
It's an awful irony that Within the Walls, the exhibition of the history of the Theresienstadt Ghetto, brought to Old Parliament House from the Sydney Jewish Museum, is so moving to us looking back after nearly 60 years.
Estelle Muspratt, a young Canberra actor, director and writer, created The Garden - a brief image of life in the ghetto of death - through workshops with the Narrabundah drama students, whose ownership is measured by the final script being directed by a student: Anna Nekvapil. Muspratt had considered a range of possible themes, and was struck by the parallels between the false picture of the Jewish ghetto presented by the German government and the placement of Aboriginal people in missions during the same period of history in this country. However, though she writes "I am not Jewish and I cannot even begin to tell this story with a whole element of truth", she felt even less that she had any right, being non-indigenous, to attempt to tell the Australian story.
In the end her play represents an indictment of all oppression, especially in the story of the special performance in the ghetto for the International Red Cross, to deceive the world about conditions there: all the performers, including the children in the choir, were killed. One of Muspratt's characters, realising it was "all a lie" cries out "Forgive us God, for we know not what we do!" Yet as Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel wrote to the President of the Sydney Jewish Museum from Prague on December 10, 1998 - the 50th Anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights - "[The Theresienstadt story]is not merely a history of suffering and oppression, but a testimony of human strength."
Within the Walls continues until July 30, including The Garden and painting workshops for children till Wednesday this week; a series of public lectures through May and June; Brundibar in late May, a children's opera originally performed in Theresienstadt in 1943; the Sydney Jewish Choral Society in mid-June; and the Emanuel Quintet in mid-July. Ring 6270 8222 for details and bookings.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Some 140,000 Jews were transported to this holding camp near Prague which the German SS falsely represented as a 'model Jewish settlement': most inmates were sent on to their deaths in places like Auschwitz, while 33,500 died in Theresienstadt. Of 10,500 children under 15, only a few hundred survived.
In A Glance and a Kiss, one inmate, Jiri Pribramsky, wrote:
Kiss me...
So I might forget
The meadows between woods
and the purple heather
And everything else that
used to move me.
It's an awful irony that Within the Walls, the exhibition of the history of the Theresienstadt Ghetto, brought to Old Parliament House from the Sydney Jewish Museum, is so moving to us looking back after nearly 60 years.
Estelle Muspratt, a young Canberra actor, director and writer, created The Garden - a brief image of life in the ghetto of death - through workshops with the Narrabundah drama students, whose ownership is measured by the final script being directed by a student: Anna Nekvapil. Muspratt had considered a range of possible themes, and was struck by the parallels between the false picture of the Jewish ghetto presented by the German government and the placement of Aboriginal people in missions during the same period of history in this country. However, though she writes "I am not Jewish and I cannot even begin to tell this story with a whole element of truth", she felt even less that she had any right, being non-indigenous, to attempt to tell the Australian story.
In the end her play represents an indictment of all oppression, especially in the story of the special performance in the ghetto for the International Red Cross, to deceive the world about conditions there: all the performers, including the children in the choir, were killed. One of Muspratt's characters, realising it was "all a lie" cries out "Forgive us God, for we know not what we do!" Yet as Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel wrote to the President of the Sydney Jewish Museum from Prague on December 10, 1998 - the 50th Anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights - "[The Theresienstadt story]is not merely a history of suffering and oppression, but a testimony of human strength."
Within the Walls continues until July 30, including The Garden and painting workshops for children till Wednesday this week; a series of public lectures through May and June; Brundibar in late May, a children's opera originally performed in Theresienstadt in 1943; the Sydney Jewish Choral Society in mid-June; and the Emanuel Quintet in mid-July. Ring 6270 8222 for details and bookings.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 2 April 2000
2000: Troy's House by Tommy Murphy. Preview feature article.
Queanbeyan playwright Tommy Murphy gave himself seven years to become a "theatre professional" when he spoke philosophically to The Canberra Times over chips and gravy in the Central Café back in 1998.
Already the Cultural Centre Queanbeyan (CCQ) protégé had had a successful production of his first play For God, Queen and Country, directed by Garry Fry, after winning the Sydney Theatre Company 1997 Young Playwright award, which also took him to the Australian National Playwrights Conference as a youth observer. With introductions from CCQ Director Gunnar Isaacson, Murphy had met with enthusiastic responses from film and theatre people in Scandinavia and New York. As Young Shakespearean Actor of the Year 1997, he mixed with other young award winners from around the world in an intensive two-week training session at the Globe Theatre, London, in the northern summer of 1998.
Murphy's second play, Troy's House, has progressed from a fascinating 1998 draft with gravy stains into a wild sort of satire of modern teenage angst, set in Canberra, "a suburban town that as far as I can see is an ideal setting for a romantic sexy story." "I am never entirely happy with the show," says Murphy, now a mature 20-year-old. "It's an encouraging discontent that excites me about the next night's run and the next project." It's his drive to keep working and re-working the play that has taken him through a production last year at Sydney University which was picked up by the Australian Theatre for Young People for a season at The Wharf Studio 1, followed by an offer from Tamarama Rock Surfers artistic director Jeremy Cumpston to include Troy's House in this year's Theatre Hydra Season at the Old Fitzroy Hotel.
But discontent rules. Faced with moving into the real world of Sydney pub theatre, though "I had made close friendships [and] had a cast with whom I was very happy ... I decided that I should open auditions for all the roles, to reconsider my direction and interpretation as well as providing fresh ideas from a new cast and to test myself and the script."
The new production, currently (till April 8)in Sydney and coming to the Queanbeyan Bicentennial Centre April 13-15, has been compared with the Australian icon film Muriel's Wedding for its zany picture of suburban dysfunction. The connection with the film is close, perhaps, because Gabby Millgate - who played Muriel's sister - fell in love with the role of Troy's mother Diane and now has the part. Lucy Wirth, the original Diane, now plays Felicity, the main character in the play whose experiences become much more surreal than anything in Muriel's Wedding. Her alter ego, Teree (Anna Barry) takes her on what Murphy calls "a tour from a point of view accelerated 1000 years. She reminds Felicity that human history can remember a lot of unremarkable people."
His character Felicity's anxiety about whether she will be remembered shouldn't be a worry for her author, judging by Murphy's progress so far. His next project is under way, a script being developed with his film-maker elder brother Marty, which remains a mystery at this early stage. It's unlikely that the return of Queanbeyan's ex-patriot will be forgotten, though how the transition will work from the tiny claustrophobic stage and close-encounter audience of the Old Fitzroy Hotel to the clean cool aircraft hangar of the Bicentennial Centre will be a wonder to behold.
Maybe the School of Arts Café should consider a shift from cabaret to what one Sydney reviewer, Colin Rose, delightedly described as "an obscene, trash-talking send-up of dead-end youth and their blighted existence in the nation's capital." Changing the menu to suit might be a problem, however.
Murphy's 1998 seven-year program seems a mite pessimistic now, after only two years running with Troy's House and his theatre group Your Mum already with money in the bank. The Queanbeyan season is a credit to the CCQ and Gunnar Isaacson's work in encouraging young people to make their own way in theatre and media. We will keep watching Murphy's progress.
Your Mum presents Troy's House by Tommy Murphy. Bicentennial Centre, Queanbeyan, Thurs April 13 - Sat April 15, 8pm. Thursday Matinee 12 noon. Bookings: 6298 0298.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Already the Cultural Centre Queanbeyan (CCQ) protégé had had a successful production of his first play For God, Queen and Country, directed by Garry Fry, after winning the Sydney Theatre Company 1997 Young Playwright award, which also took him to the Australian National Playwrights Conference as a youth observer. With introductions from CCQ Director Gunnar Isaacson, Murphy had met with enthusiastic responses from film and theatre people in Scandinavia and New York. As Young Shakespearean Actor of the Year 1997, he mixed with other young award winners from around the world in an intensive two-week training session at the Globe Theatre, London, in the northern summer of 1998.
Murphy's second play, Troy's House, has progressed from a fascinating 1998 draft with gravy stains into a wild sort of satire of modern teenage angst, set in Canberra, "a suburban town that as far as I can see is an ideal setting for a romantic sexy story." "I am never entirely happy with the show," says Murphy, now a mature 20-year-old. "It's an encouraging discontent that excites me about the next night's run and the next project." It's his drive to keep working and re-working the play that has taken him through a production last year at Sydney University which was picked up by the Australian Theatre for Young People for a season at The Wharf Studio 1, followed by an offer from Tamarama Rock Surfers artistic director Jeremy Cumpston to include Troy's House in this year's Theatre Hydra Season at the Old Fitzroy Hotel.
But discontent rules. Faced with moving into the real world of Sydney pub theatre, though "I had made close friendships [and] had a cast with whom I was very happy ... I decided that I should open auditions for all the roles, to reconsider my direction and interpretation as well as providing fresh ideas from a new cast and to test myself and the script."
The new production, currently (till April 8)in Sydney and coming to the Queanbeyan Bicentennial Centre April 13-15, has been compared with the Australian icon film Muriel's Wedding for its zany picture of suburban dysfunction. The connection with the film is close, perhaps, because Gabby Millgate - who played Muriel's sister - fell in love with the role of Troy's mother Diane and now has the part. Lucy Wirth, the original Diane, now plays Felicity, the main character in the play whose experiences become much more surreal than anything in Muriel's Wedding. Her alter ego, Teree (Anna Barry) takes her on what Murphy calls "a tour from a point of view accelerated 1000 years. She reminds Felicity that human history can remember a lot of unremarkable people."
His character Felicity's anxiety about whether she will be remembered shouldn't be a worry for her author, judging by Murphy's progress so far. His next project is under way, a script being developed with his film-maker elder brother Marty, which remains a mystery at this early stage. It's unlikely that the return of Queanbeyan's ex-patriot will be forgotten, though how the transition will work from the tiny claustrophobic stage and close-encounter audience of the Old Fitzroy Hotel to the clean cool aircraft hangar of the Bicentennial Centre will be a wonder to behold.
Maybe the School of Arts Café should consider a shift from cabaret to what one Sydney reviewer, Colin Rose, delightedly described as "an obscene, trash-talking send-up of dead-end youth and their blighted existence in the nation's capital." Changing the menu to suit might be a problem, however.
Murphy's 1998 seven-year program seems a mite pessimistic now, after only two years running with Troy's House and his theatre group Your Mum already with money in the bank. The Queanbeyan season is a credit to the CCQ and Gunnar Isaacson's work in encouraging young people to make their own way in theatre and media. We will keep watching Murphy's progress.
Your Mum presents Troy's House by Tommy Murphy. Bicentennial Centre, Queanbeyan, Thurs April 13 - Sat April 15, 8pm. Thursday Matinee 12 noon. Bookings: 6298 0298.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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