Outlawed at the National Museum of Australia. Adults $8, Concession $6, Children $5, Families $16. Until April 26, 2004 (closed Christmas Day).
This is a massive exhibition - a real stage coach in the middle makes you realise how big, clumsy and heavy history can be - so be prepared to spend lots of time. I found 2 hours was not enough. You certainly get your money's worth, but it is a good investment to also buy the catalogue, even for $20, because it gives you an excellent guide to how you might think through all the detailed information, images and artefacts and put together your own idea of the place of outlaws in human history.
At the end you can literally make up your own mind by choosing, say, our own Ned Kelly or Mexico's revolutionary bandit Pancho Villa, logging in to consider the evidence for and against, and deciding on a guilty or not guilty verdict. The question is, should every terrorist be condemned for breaking the "sanctity of law and order", or is the law sometimes on the sanctimonious side, like the law that condemned Robin Hood for killing a deer because all the deer in the forest were the King's deer.
The next question is, even when some outlaws really were robbers and killers without any obvious justification, why do so many - like Australian bushrangers, or the "respected merchant revealed as Ishikawa Goemon, renowned thief" and executed in Japan, 1594 - become treated as heroes?
The exhibition presents the historical record in a visually almost overwhelming way. Large film screens show snippets of movies, touch-screens abound, you can make your own video acting with Jesse James on a railcar rooftop, hooves and gunshots surround you. At the very end you can play a brand new Robin Hood playstation game which is not available in games stores yet. You see the real guns, real costumes worn in films, real photos of outlaws - dead and alive, the real armour that Joe Byrne wore in the Kelly gang's final battle at Glenrowan, real death masks and even the real head of a Chinese outlaw from only 90 years ago which was hung on the wall after his execution as a warning to others.
It takes a while to work out the floor plan of all this excitement. I found this confusing until a kind staff helper explained it to me. Maybe the Museum should give people a map. You begin by finding out what an outlaw is: a person who is classed as outside the law. Dr Madden, speaking in the Victorian Parliament in 1878 about a law about outlaws said, "Under this Bill a person may stalk them; he may steal upon them and shoot them down as he would shoot a kangaroo..."
Then by following around the outside circuit of the exhibition you walk through the typical life of an outlaw: what starts them off (like Phoolan Devi's gang rape and torture by higher caste men); how they confront the forces of the government; what they gain or fail to gain from being an outlaw; and how they come usually to a grisly end. Not every outlaw is represented in each of these sections, especially the more ancient cases, depending on how much historical evidence there is available. Up above the entrances to each section, made to look like engravings in gaps through stone walls, you will find title words like "Confrontation", but there is so much to see and hear on either side and to walk around that you can easily miss the signposts.
In the central area you will find the "studio" where stacks of multimedia screens show the outlaws represented in fictional film and documentaries, and where you can make your own video acting alongside the outlaws. You don't have to speak Japanese to be seen with Ishikawa Goemon, but I guess it might help!
The studio also includes the major exhibits on Goemon and the American woman outlaw Belle Starr, so they have less about them in the outer circuit. Above everything there are screens virtually on the ceiling with lengthy sections of fictional movies, so you can see why I felt slightly overwhelmed. However, I noticed the young people present seemed not to be fazed in the slightest, so maybe I'm just getting a little old and jaded. One 10-year-old thoroughly enjoyed leaping from one carriage top to the next with Jesse James.
Some people have fussed about the Museum seeming to support revolution, but this is nonsense. Outlawed shows the good and the bad of those both outside and inside the law, and leaves us to consider the rights and wrongs. Because some outlaws saw themselves as doing some kind of good, and some were seen after their deaths in this way, I guess that's why they have become heroes. The National Museum doesn't push a viewpoint. The evidence is there for everyone to make up their own mind. This is as it should be.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 19 December 2003
Sunday, 14 December 2003
2003: Good Day, Mr.Courbet adapted by Peter Wilkins
Good Day, Mr.Courbet adapted and directed by Peter Wilkins from Good Day Monsieur Courbet - The Letters of Gustave Courbet selected and translated by Petra ten-Doesschate-Chu. The Acting Company at the James O. Fairfax Theatre, National Gallery of Australia. Thursdays, December 11 and 18 6pm; Sundays, December 14 and 21 2pm.
If you have to miss this well-worthwhile production, commissioned by the NGA to accompany its current major exhibition French Paintings from the Musee Fabre, Montpellier (November 7, 2003 - February 15, 2004) I'm sure it will be because there are only two more performances scheduled in a busy week leading up to Christmas. You will have noticed the whole season of 4 performances only by close reading of the NGA's summer program. There has not been the general publicity of this production which it deserves, both in its own right and as a very important part of the exhibition.
I and a few others in the know were there on Sunday and I was not surprised that well-known thoroughly professional actor Phil Roberts, as Mr.Courbet, fluffed some lines and took some time to establish his character. With so much research to do for so little reward and with a tiny audience in a quite large theatre, anyone would find the task somewhat confidence-shaking. Gustave Courbet is a major-scale character to more than match his paintings. Roberts has the measure of the man, but it would be good to see the performances continue throughout the run of the exhibition.
Peter Wilkins has built a well justified reputation with his previous productions of the letters of Arthur Streeton and Claude Monet, but this show has the additional quality of placing Courbet in the political history of France. The radical painter who broke down the old Academy rules was also the fighter for democracy. Though jailed and dying a man broken by successive governments, Courbet, forgotten in standard histories, left the twin legacies of realism which became the now so popular impressionism, and the demand for freedom and democracy which we now take for granted. More than a peek into the artist's personality, Good Day Mr. Courbet shows us, as Courbet himself wrote, "not only a painter, but a human being".
© Frank McKone, Canberra
If you have to miss this well-worthwhile production, commissioned by the NGA to accompany its current major exhibition French Paintings from the Musee Fabre, Montpellier (November 7, 2003 - February 15, 2004) I'm sure it will be because there are only two more performances scheduled in a busy week leading up to Christmas. You will have noticed the whole season of 4 performances only by close reading of the NGA's summer program. There has not been the general publicity of this production which it deserves, both in its own right and as a very important part of the exhibition.
I and a few others in the know were there on Sunday and I was not surprised that well-known thoroughly professional actor Phil Roberts, as Mr.Courbet, fluffed some lines and took some time to establish his character. With so much research to do for so little reward and with a tiny audience in a quite large theatre, anyone would find the task somewhat confidence-shaking. Gustave Courbet is a major-scale character to more than match his paintings. Roberts has the measure of the man, but it would be good to see the performances continue throughout the run of the exhibition.
Peter Wilkins has built a well justified reputation with his previous productions of the letters of Arthur Streeton and Claude Monet, but this show has the additional quality of placing Courbet in the political history of France. The radical painter who broke down the old Academy rules was also the fighter for democracy. Though jailed and dying a man broken by successive governments, Courbet, forgotten in standard histories, left the twin legacies of realism which became the now so popular impressionism, and the demand for freedom and democracy which we now take for granted. More than a peek into the artist's personality, Good Day Mr. Courbet shows us, as Courbet himself wrote, "not only a painter, but a human being".
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 5 December 2003
2003: Are You Being Served? by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft
Are You Being Served? by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft. Tempo Theatre at Belconnen Community Centre December 4-6, 10-13 8pm (Matinees December 6 and 13, 2pm). Bookings: ANU Ticketing 6125 5491.
The actors have done well in re-creating the characters from this once popular British television series. Although their main task was to imitate rather than create original roles, everyone had clearly defined their character's mannerisms, foibles and attitudes and successfully produced consistent figures in three dimensions. Their hard work was evident and well appreciated by the audience.
The result is quite enjoyable light entertainment despite weaknesses in direction and design. Director Kim Wilson had to also fill in as Mr Rumbold at the late stages when the original actor dropped out -- an unfortunate but common experience in amateur companies -- and may therefore not have been able to polish the speed and pacing up to what is required for British farce. However the show should pick up on these points, especially for the night when, I am told, a large contingent of employees from our very own Grace Bros will be on hand. Not that I can imagine such non-politically correct behaviour in the Belconnen Mall establishment!
Wilson noted in the program he "found [the script] had its challenges to bring it to the medium of live theatre". These challenges were not well solved. We sat in silence facing a blank curtain for some minutes before a brief and indistinct recording of the TV intro faded into morning greetings as characters appeared on the shop floor from the lift. All too slow on stage, though it had worked on the screen with close-ups of facial expressions and rapid cut aways. We needed bright music like Rule Brittania before and between acts. If the opening had been of the characters rehearsing their German slap-thigh dance, action and laughs would have got the show moving at once and warmed the audience up. The actual dance later in the first act certainly got a good reaction, and could have been used again at the end for the curtain call. Then we could all have marched out to Rule Brittania.
Simple theatrical devices like these would make this show more lively and more fun.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
The actors have done well in re-creating the characters from this once popular British television series. Although their main task was to imitate rather than create original roles, everyone had clearly defined their character's mannerisms, foibles and attitudes and successfully produced consistent figures in three dimensions. Their hard work was evident and well appreciated by the audience.
The result is quite enjoyable light entertainment despite weaknesses in direction and design. Director Kim Wilson had to also fill in as Mr Rumbold at the late stages when the original actor dropped out -- an unfortunate but common experience in amateur companies -- and may therefore not have been able to polish the speed and pacing up to what is required for British farce. However the show should pick up on these points, especially for the night when, I am told, a large contingent of employees from our very own Grace Bros will be on hand. Not that I can imagine such non-politically correct behaviour in the Belconnen Mall establishment!
Wilson noted in the program he "found [the script] had its challenges to bring it to the medium of live theatre". These challenges were not well solved. We sat in silence facing a blank curtain for some minutes before a brief and indistinct recording of the TV intro faded into morning greetings as characters appeared on the shop floor from the lift. All too slow on stage, though it had worked on the screen with close-ups of facial expressions and rapid cut aways. We needed bright music like Rule Brittania before and between acts. If the opening had been of the characters rehearsing their German slap-thigh dance, action and laughs would have got the show moving at once and warmed the audience up. The actual dance later in the first act certainly got a good reaction, and could have been used again at the end for the curtain call. Then we could all have marched out to Rule Brittania.
Simple theatrical devices like these would make this show more lively and more fun.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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