CMI stands for A Certain Maritime Incident. CMI is thus an acronym for a euphemism, since A Certain Maritime Incident was the official title of the Senate Children Overboard Inquiry. As anyone who has dealings with the public service knows, acronyms are a language all of their own.
CMI is the title of the "smash hit stage version" of the Children Overboard Inquiry, which ran to full houses in Sydney last April. Opening here on Tuesday at The Street Theatre, after a second run in Sydney, will be a newly polished and necessarily updated version, which picks up on today's political situation. Even though Senator John Faulkner, a major character in CMI, has resigned as Opposition Leader in the Senate, he still has a chance to re-open the inquiry before next July.
Though you will laugh often, for example at Jane Halton's detailed use of the analogy of the blind man and the elephant to explain how information may be transmitted or may fail to be transmitted along the appendages of the bureaucratic hierarchy, you will also be surprised and saddened to know that the text of the characters' dialogue has all been quoted verbatim from Hansard's 2200 pages of transcripts.
The theatre company version 1.0 (www.versiononepointzero.com) is a professional collective of some of Sydney's "leading contemporary performance makers", claiming to have seven senses of humour. It must have tested all seven to the limits during the 9 months it took to work through the records of the 15 days' inquiry, many of which went past midnight. This work was led by writer/performer David Williams and dramaturg Paul Dwyer, who distributed books of transcripts to group members, then led workshops during the process, gradually refining the themes and selecting the characters for 6 actors to perform.
The result is political theatre at its best. Though no previous theatrical knowledge is required, this work draws on the strengths of a century-long tradition of making theatre relevant to its time using documentary material. As in the work of the film maker Michael Moore in Farenheit/911, the reality of the situation is revealed directly from the source.
Theatre-buffs will be fascinated by how the actors play in character, but drop out at times as if it is almost too difficult to play the role. In doing so they comment upon the roles these public servants and politicians play in real life, often just by using gestures like raising an eyebrow or holding their head in their hands. As one commentator noted the "language laden with acronym takes on a dark irony. A PII (potential illegal immigrant) saved from drowning is still a SUNC (suspected unauthorised non-citizen)."
One feature of the show is the use of lie detetection software and computerised speech in a pleasant female American voice which we all recognise. Another unexpected speech is made by Peter Reith as a young child. How you will respond to these devices can only be tested by seeing the show.
Among the cast is the Canberra educated Deborah Pollard who went on from performing with Tempo, Rep, Youth Theatre, TAU and her Wollongong University degree to work with The Jigsaw Company under Stephen Champion in the 1980s. She has studied with Tadashi Suzuki in Japan and teaches the Suzuki Actor Training Method, has been Artistic Director of Salamanca Theatre Company, and has created many solo works in Sydney. Her career includes awards of a Churchill Fellowship, a Rex Cramphorn Scholarship and an Australia Council New Media Arts Fellowship.
Pollard explains that CMI is not emotive "refugee theatre". It is an unbiassed examination of the inquiry process, an important night out where theatre is a voice for the community. It is, she says, "not pure entertainment, but entertainment for the mind."
For bureaucrats at all levels, perhaps with special relevance for people in Defence, Prime Minister's and ministerial staffers, the show is almost obligatory. You may be quoted or know the truth behind the dialogue. Already one scene has been altered in the expectation of possible legal action.
For political activists, CMI may be extra support or criticism of your cause.
For theatre-goers it will be good to see intelligent entertainment of this kind in Canberra.
CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident)
The Street Theatre (Cnr Childers Street and University Avenue)
Tuesday October 19 - Saturday October 23, 8pm
Tickets $30 / $20
Bookings 6247 1223
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 13 October 2004
Monday, 11 October 2004
2004: Brecht at the ANU Drama Department. Feature article.
The announcement from the ANU Drama Department says 'papermoon' presents a 'moonlight' production The Good Person of Setzuan, a classic play by Bertolt Brecht. The season will run from Friday October 15 until Saturday October 23 at the Drama Studio, ANU Arts Centre.
All this mooning about has a story behind it from a deathbed bequest to a future professorship, intrigues in between, and the rise of the young turks. How does lecturer Cathy Clelland get to be directing The Good Person in addition to her day-job? How does head of department Tony Turner justify moonlighting? What value has there been in Moonlight putting on three Brecht plays this year?
To find the answer to the last question, go to the ANU Arts Centre at 8pm (or 2pm matinee on Saturday 23rd), but be aware that the Drama Studio has less than 80 seats and was close to full most nights for the previous Brecht productions. Tickets are $10 at the door.
The Edith Torey Bequest to ANU Drama has enabled a Chair to be advertised. More than 20 applicants are being considered from around the world for a professorship in Drama and New Media Arts, expected to be in place from the beginning of 2005. Since Turner has been Head, he has put a greater emphasis on practical work embedded within the drama courses. In the end, he believes, if there ever is to be a proper theatre training course in Canberra - rather than the current arrangement where drama is one course taken alongside maybe law, business management, or whatever - it should be in the Faculty of Arts with the same status, and working closely with, the School of Art and School of Music. Since those schools were brought into the Arts Faculty, there has been more cooperation with drama, as well as some new forms of confusion as the ANU Arts Centre venue is now managed by the School of Music.
To add intrigue, the technical theatre course privately run by AnuTech has no connection to the Drama Department, despite being on campus. May the new professor be the person to hang all this together. The young turks will surely be living in hope.
These are the Moonlighters, graduates of the drama course, who approached Turner with a need for a performance space and a different ethos from other groups such as Canberra Rep which they might have joined to gain performing experience. Clelland came up with Moonlight as an extension of the department's longstanding Papermoon theatre group. Turner came up with a small amount of money from the Torey Bequest, which specified drama education as its purpose.
This explains why, though the graduates are not students enrolled at ANU, their program is closely related to the undergraduate teaching program. Each year a major playwright will be chosen, with productions of up to 3 plays planned. Brecht was an obvious beginning point since his work is seminal to the development of theatre in the 20th Century, giving current undergraduates the chance to see complete works on stage in addition to their academic reading and the small-scale practical work available in the drama courses.
It also has given the graduates the opportunity to extend their previous experience into a more concentrated development program. The first 2 productions were entirely self-managed, though keeping in close contact with Turner and Clelland, while for The Good Person of Setzuan the usual sorts of disruptions to young turks' lives has placed Clelland in the director's role.
Probably this is a good thing, apart from Clelland's delight in working with enthusiasts who have done all the background study. She is putting into focus the issues about performing Brecht which have arisen in the earlier productions, particularly how to establish the style of his form of epic theatre and find the right relationship between the actor and audience. The legacy of Brecht has been to open up the nature of theatre to the audience while at the same time engaging them in the illusion of theatre. It has been very much in Australia that modern acting methods have grown from understanding Brecht, and why we produce so many actors who make it on the world stage.
Of Brecht's plays, The Good Person of Setzuan is one of the best to explore for actors and audience, and remains absolutely relevant in its theme for modern times. As Clelland says, it's still just as difficult for the individual to maintain a moral standard as it was at the time of writing in 1939, as Brecht, the left-wing German, was in Denmark waiting for visas to take his family to America. As it is when money and threats to security come into play. As it is today.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
All this mooning about has a story behind it from a deathbed bequest to a future professorship, intrigues in between, and the rise of the young turks. How does lecturer Cathy Clelland get to be directing The Good Person in addition to her day-job? How does head of department Tony Turner justify moonlighting? What value has there been in Moonlight putting on three Brecht plays this year?
To find the answer to the last question, go to the ANU Arts Centre at 8pm (or 2pm matinee on Saturday 23rd), but be aware that the Drama Studio has less than 80 seats and was close to full most nights for the previous Brecht productions. Tickets are $10 at the door.
The Edith Torey Bequest to ANU Drama has enabled a Chair to be advertised. More than 20 applicants are being considered from around the world for a professorship in Drama and New Media Arts, expected to be in place from the beginning of 2005. Since Turner has been Head, he has put a greater emphasis on practical work embedded within the drama courses. In the end, he believes, if there ever is to be a proper theatre training course in Canberra - rather than the current arrangement where drama is one course taken alongside maybe law, business management, or whatever - it should be in the Faculty of Arts with the same status, and working closely with, the School of Art and School of Music. Since those schools were brought into the Arts Faculty, there has been more cooperation with drama, as well as some new forms of confusion as the ANU Arts Centre venue is now managed by the School of Music.
To add intrigue, the technical theatre course privately run by AnuTech has no connection to the Drama Department, despite being on campus. May the new professor be the person to hang all this together. The young turks will surely be living in hope.
These are the Moonlighters, graduates of the drama course, who approached Turner with a need for a performance space and a different ethos from other groups such as Canberra Rep which they might have joined to gain performing experience. Clelland came up with Moonlight as an extension of the department's longstanding Papermoon theatre group. Turner came up with a small amount of money from the Torey Bequest, which specified drama education as its purpose.
This explains why, though the graduates are not students enrolled at ANU, their program is closely related to the undergraduate teaching program. Each year a major playwright will be chosen, with productions of up to 3 plays planned. Brecht was an obvious beginning point since his work is seminal to the development of theatre in the 20th Century, giving current undergraduates the chance to see complete works on stage in addition to their academic reading and the small-scale practical work available in the drama courses.
It also has given the graduates the opportunity to extend their previous experience into a more concentrated development program. The first 2 productions were entirely self-managed, though keeping in close contact with Turner and Clelland, while for The Good Person of Setzuan the usual sorts of disruptions to young turks' lives has placed Clelland in the director's role.
Probably this is a good thing, apart from Clelland's delight in working with enthusiasts who have done all the background study. She is putting into focus the issues about performing Brecht which have arisen in the earlier productions, particularly how to establish the style of his form of epic theatre and find the right relationship between the actor and audience. The legacy of Brecht has been to open up the nature of theatre to the audience while at the same time engaging them in the illusion of theatre. It has been very much in Australia that modern acting methods have grown from understanding Brecht, and why we produce so many actors who make it on the world stage.
Of Brecht's plays, The Good Person of Setzuan is one of the best to explore for actors and audience, and remains absolutely relevant in its theme for modern times. As Clelland says, it's still just as difficult for the individual to maintain a moral standard as it was at the time of writing in 1939, as Brecht, the left-wing German, was in Denmark waiting for visas to take his family to America. As it is when money and threats to security come into play. As it is today.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 7 October 2004
2004: Defending the Caveman by Rob Becker
Defending the Caveman by Rob Becker. Performed by Mark Mitchell. Directed by Wayne Harrison for the Ross Mollison Group, at the Playhouse, October 7 and 8.
When I read that Rob Becker was born and raised in California, in 1956, wrote Defending the Caveman over a three-year period from 1988 until 1991, during which time he "made an informal study of anthropology, prehistory, psychology, sociology and mythology, along with dramatic structure and playwriting", and is a stand-up comedian, I must say I entered the Playhouse fearful this play might be farcical.
But I was wrong. Mark Mitchell, in this Australianised version, warmly invited us in to enjoy the funny side of male-female sexual relations, dealing quite firmly with the view that though women come from Venus, men don't really come from the third-largest planet in the solar system despite, to use the now politically popular American term, often being called arseholes.
Mind you, I still don't trust this north American view of human prehistory, entirely based as it is in European cave paintings and pregnant Venus statuettes, and the assumption that all people used to live in nuclear families in caves while hunting and gathering. And the idea that only men ever hunted and women did all the gathering. The knowledge we now have from our part of the world shows the script up to be academically challenged.
Comedy, of course, can play with this kind of truth and yet still reveal truths about our foibles. The reactions of both women and men in the audience last Thursday - hooting with laughter, spontaneously applauding - were clearly responses to sensitive buttons being appropriately stimulated.
The strength of the play is the idea that the differences between the sexes, though based somewhere in evolution, are expressed today as cultural differences, which we can all learn to understand and appreciate, though this doesn't mean that either side should be forced to change their ways. Rather than extract the cheap laughs of a farce, this is genuine comedy with humour which helps to bring people together rather than drive them apart. With Mitchell's relaxed and expert performance, this made for a pleasant and worthwhile evening's entertainment.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
When I read that Rob Becker was born and raised in California, in 1956, wrote Defending the Caveman over a three-year period from 1988 until 1991, during which time he "made an informal study of anthropology, prehistory, psychology, sociology and mythology, along with dramatic structure and playwriting", and is a stand-up comedian, I must say I entered the Playhouse fearful this play might be farcical.
But I was wrong. Mark Mitchell, in this Australianised version, warmly invited us in to enjoy the funny side of male-female sexual relations, dealing quite firmly with the view that though women come from Venus, men don't really come from the third-largest planet in the solar system despite, to use the now politically popular American term, often being called arseholes.
Mind you, I still don't trust this north American view of human prehistory, entirely based as it is in European cave paintings and pregnant Venus statuettes, and the assumption that all people used to live in nuclear families in caves while hunting and gathering. And the idea that only men ever hunted and women did all the gathering. The knowledge we now have from our part of the world shows the script up to be academically challenged.
Comedy, of course, can play with this kind of truth and yet still reveal truths about our foibles. The reactions of both women and men in the audience last Thursday - hooting with laughter, spontaneously applauding - were clearly responses to sensitive buttons being appropriately stimulated.
The strength of the play is the idea that the differences between the sexes, though based somewhere in evolution, are expressed today as cultural differences, which we can all learn to understand and appreciate, though this doesn't mean that either side should be forced to change their ways. Rather than extract the cheap laughs of a farce, this is genuine comedy with humour which helps to bring people together rather than drive them apart. With Mitchell's relaxed and expert performance, this made for a pleasant and worthwhile evening's entertainment.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 6 October 2004
2004: The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan
The Lost Thing based on the book by Shaun Tan. Jigsaw Theatre Company directed by Greg Lissaman, designed by Richard Jeziomy. The Small Theatre, National Gallery of Australia. Thursday October 7: 10.30am, 3.45pm. Friday and Saturday October 8-9: 10.30am, 1pm, 3.45pm. Bookings: eventbookings@nga.gov.au or phone 6240 6504.
Whatever age you are you will be entranced by this latest Jigsaw production. Set for 8-13 year-olds, families at the opening performance from toddlers to rather more ancient people like me experienced 50 minutes of fascination.
Go to see it here before it moves on to the Sydney Festival and other places, especially because the architecture and art of the National Gallery are built into the show, and the Small Theatre allows for the complete theatre-in-the-round format which makes this combination of actors, puppets, complex set and electronic media work so well.
After the show, take the children (and yourself) on a journey around the gallery following The Lost Thing Children's Trail. Your Children's Festival map takes you to 12 strange and wonderful works of art, all representing the theme of the play. A young boy is fixated on collecting bottle tops, but on the beach discovers an amazing creature. Cleanliness is next to tidiness, say the beach inspectors, vacuuming the bottle tops, but at the end of the day the Lost Thing has nowhere to go.
For the toddlers the story of searching for the Lost Thing's home is dramatic enough, but for the 12 year-olds the multi-media is exciting, and there is an extra dimension. They can identify with the boy's sense of being just a bit different from everyone else, wondering about the nature of things, searching for where he belongs. For their parents there is a new understanding of how their children need to take off and find their own way. Beyond this level, the play is about the need for art and exploration in everyone's lives.
Very highly recommended. One mystery: see if you can work out where the live security cam is.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Whatever age you are you will be entranced by this latest Jigsaw production. Set for 8-13 year-olds, families at the opening performance from toddlers to rather more ancient people like me experienced 50 minutes of fascination.
Go to see it here before it moves on to the Sydney Festival and other places, especially because the architecture and art of the National Gallery are built into the show, and the Small Theatre allows for the complete theatre-in-the-round format which makes this combination of actors, puppets, complex set and electronic media work so well.
After the show, take the children (and yourself) on a journey around the gallery following The Lost Thing Children's Trail. Your Children's Festival map takes you to 12 strange and wonderful works of art, all representing the theme of the play. A young boy is fixated on collecting bottle tops, but on the beach discovers an amazing creature. Cleanliness is next to tidiness, say the beach inspectors, vacuuming the bottle tops, but at the end of the day the Lost Thing has nowhere to go.
For the toddlers the story of searching for the Lost Thing's home is dramatic enough, but for the 12 year-olds the multi-media is exciting, and there is an extra dimension. They can identify with the boy's sense of being just a bit different from everyone else, wondering about the nature of things, searching for where he belongs. For their parents there is a new understanding of how their children need to take off and find their own way. Beyond this level, the play is about the need for art and exploration in everyone's lives.
Very highly recommended. One mystery: see if you can work out where the live security cam is.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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