The Vicar of Dibley by Richard Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer, directed by Jasan Savage. UC Players at Gallery Café, University of Canberra Fridays and Saturdays November 16 December 15 (6.45pm dinner and show). Bookings essential 6201 2645.
The meal was tasty and very filling, while the show was like the curate’s egg - good in parts.
Act 1 between mains and dessert is The Easter Bunny (April 1996). Act 2 is the 1999 Christmas Day special. Translation from small screen to stage is not very successful, mainly because short scenes of dialogue with little physical action and almost no plot can work with Dawn French in close-up but have much less impact at even a short distance on a live stage.
Act 1 suffers particularly, except for Stella Wilkie’s performance of Letitia Cropley whose death was quite something to watch. Act 2 is more successful because it has a focus in the nativity play within the play, in which Tse Yee Tah made the farcical birth of Alice’s real baby during the performance of the “Greatest story ever told” very funny indeed.
Marie Carroll faced a difficult task in representing the Vicar Geraldine, as played by French until Geraldine’s marriage and final show only last Christmas to a TV audience in Britain of 11.4 million. She looked the part, made a fair fist of the character and held the action together as well as the script allowed, but neither she nor the cast in general could match the crisp timing of the television shows, especially enhanced by snappy editing. It would take a much more sophisticated technical setup than is possible in the UC Café to create that effect.
Among the other actors I thought Richard Anderson as the earthy farmer Owen Newitt was best, though none let the team down. Costumes were effective, though I was a little surprised at a sound track including American Gospel singing which to me was out of place compared with the deliberately very English church choral music used in the original TV shows.
In the end, for me, this is ethnic English material in the centuries-long tradition of poking fun at their institutions like the Church (Anglican, of course). The opening night audience had a social night out, quite enjoyed themselves, were generally old enough to recognise the 1990s references and appreciate passable representations of characters they knew. Otherwise, I would have preferred Australian material, but perhaps there is not enough on television to guarantee an audience.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 16 November 2007
Tuesday, 6 November 2007
2007: Talking Heads by Alan Bennett
Talking Heads by Alan Bennett: Her Big Chance performed by Sigrid Thornton and Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet performed by Brenda Blethyn. Directed by Braham Murray at Canberra Theatre, November 6-7.
Thornton and Blethyn deservedly attracted an almost full house in the big theatre on opening night. For me the most exciting aspect of the evening was watching these actors live on stage, after having seen them so much on film and television. Making these intimate 40 minute monologues communicate successfully across a large auditorium was hard work indeed, a challenge which both performers met more than admirably.
From the 1987 BBC TV Talking Heads 1 series, the bit-part but oh so professional actress, Lesley, is I think more difficult to play today than Miss Fozzard from the 1998 Talking Heads 2 series. Bennett was less forgiving, much less empathetic towards Lesley than Miss Fozzard, and I guess that the decade between writing these characters was a period of developing greater psychological insight and skill at integrating the dark and the comic line by line. The effect was that Her Big Chance seemed more dated, especially from a woman’s perspective, while Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet remained more universal despite the character belonging to the kind of old-fashioned British suburban culture which I can remember from my childhood there 60 years ago.
It was therefore a good decision to have Thornton play the first half, for which she received applause fully appreciative of her skill in bit by bit revealing the unwillingness of Lesley to recognise her limitations, or how she was actually being used by a sleazy team to make a soft-porn film in contrast to her image of herself as a proper actor. Thornton, of course, had to create Lesley, Lesley’s idea of the character Travis she plays in the film, and all the members of the film crew from the German director Gunther to the dogsbody roadie Scott, telling a story that possibly is all a lie, maybe entirely Lesley’s fantasy. There were laughs, but often Lesley’s shallow understanding made us laugh at her, putting her down rather than creating empathy for a sad soul.
In the second half, Blethyn’s Miss Fozzard was a laugh a minute, but we recognised her failings and appreciated that we, like her, often miss the point, don’t quite realise what’s really going on around us. And so we felt quite uplifted as Miss Fozzard, in a weird way, does find her feet in her relationship with a kinky chiropodist. This gave us an ending to the evening which was greeted with huge enthusiasm, with both performers, united on stage, receiving several curtain calls, followed by a long queue in the foyer for them to sign programs. This was excellent celebratory theatre.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thornton and Blethyn deservedly attracted an almost full house in the big theatre on opening night. For me the most exciting aspect of the evening was watching these actors live on stage, after having seen them so much on film and television. Making these intimate 40 minute monologues communicate successfully across a large auditorium was hard work indeed, a challenge which both performers met more than admirably.
From the 1987 BBC TV Talking Heads 1 series, the bit-part but oh so professional actress, Lesley, is I think more difficult to play today than Miss Fozzard from the 1998 Talking Heads 2 series. Bennett was less forgiving, much less empathetic towards Lesley than Miss Fozzard, and I guess that the decade between writing these characters was a period of developing greater psychological insight and skill at integrating the dark and the comic line by line. The effect was that Her Big Chance seemed more dated, especially from a woman’s perspective, while Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet remained more universal despite the character belonging to the kind of old-fashioned British suburban culture which I can remember from my childhood there 60 years ago.
It was therefore a good decision to have Thornton play the first half, for which she received applause fully appreciative of her skill in bit by bit revealing the unwillingness of Lesley to recognise her limitations, or how she was actually being used by a sleazy team to make a soft-porn film in contrast to her image of herself as a proper actor. Thornton, of course, had to create Lesley, Lesley’s idea of the character Travis she plays in the film, and all the members of the film crew from the German director Gunther to the dogsbody roadie Scott, telling a story that possibly is all a lie, maybe entirely Lesley’s fantasy. There were laughs, but often Lesley’s shallow understanding made us laugh at her, putting her down rather than creating empathy for a sad soul.
In the second half, Blethyn’s Miss Fozzard was a laugh a minute, but we recognised her failings and appreciated that we, like her, often miss the point, don’t quite realise what’s really going on around us. And so we felt quite uplifted as Miss Fozzard, in a weird way, does find her feet in her relationship with a kinky chiropodist. This gave us an ending to the evening which was greeted with huge enthusiasm, with both performers, united on stage, receiving several curtain calls, followed by a long queue in the foyer for them to sign programs. This was excellent celebratory theatre.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 1 November 2007
2007: Lovepuke by Duncan Sarkies
Lovepuke by Duncan Sarkies, directed by Naomi Brouwer for The Street Theatre and ANU Drama Department at The Street, November 1-3.
I thoroughly enjoyed this very stylish production of a highly stylised short satire on sex.
A lightweight piece from a literary standpoint, published in Sarkies’ native New Zealand in Eleven Young Playwrights (1994), Lovepuke shows its age and the youth of its writer at that time. The lavatory humour (the ‘puke’ side) and the sexual activities of the eight mixed pairs (the ‘love’ side) probably belong nowadays to a younger group than the early 20-somethings that seemed to be represented here. Still that didn’t stop an ageing fader like me recalling the twists and turns of youth.
But the play could have failed without a director and cast who so clearly understood a style which, if one is looking for a literary reference, has a distant cousin in Dario Fo and even a cousin once or twice removed in commedia. The detail of body language, facial expression and nicely exaggerated voices kept the drama alive. Every action and spoken line produced an ironic commentary on the conventions of love and the exchange of bodily fluids. Every actor played up the outward characteristics of each stock personality just enough to make us laugh at, but not too much so as to stop us from laughing with, the character.
Cast members Thomas Connell (Kevin), Byron Fay (Ivan), Cara Irvine (Louise), Jasmin Natterer (Hermione), Aaron Ridgway (Glen), John-Paul Santucci (Nathan), Virginia Savage (Marissa) and Carol Whitman (Janice) all deserve high praise. All current or recent ANU students, they have demonstrated the value of The Street Theatre’s partnership with the ANU Drama Department.
However, the season seems to me to have been too short. This production should be seen by college students as a model for drama students, as well as being great entertainment for the much larger number of young adults than could be accommodated in three nights in The Street Studio.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
I thoroughly enjoyed this very stylish production of a highly stylised short satire on sex.
A lightweight piece from a literary standpoint, published in Sarkies’ native New Zealand in Eleven Young Playwrights (1994), Lovepuke shows its age and the youth of its writer at that time. The lavatory humour (the ‘puke’ side) and the sexual activities of the eight mixed pairs (the ‘love’ side) probably belong nowadays to a younger group than the early 20-somethings that seemed to be represented here. Still that didn’t stop an ageing fader like me recalling the twists and turns of youth.
But the play could have failed without a director and cast who so clearly understood a style which, if one is looking for a literary reference, has a distant cousin in Dario Fo and even a cousin once or twice removed in commedia. The detail of body language, facial expression and nicely exaggerated voices kept the drama alive. Every action and spoken line produced an ironic commentary on the conventions of love and the exchange of bodily fluids. Every actor played up the outward characteristics of each stock personality just enough to make us laugh at, but not too much so as to stop us from laughing with, the character.
Cast members Thomas Connell (Kevin), Byron Fay (Ivan), Cara Irvine (Louise), Jasmin Natterer (Hermione), Aaron Ridgway (Glen), John-Paul Santucci (Nathan), Virginia Savage (Marissa) and Carol Whitman (Janice) all deserve high praise. All current or recent ANU students, they have demonstrated the value of The Street Theatre’s partnership with the ANU Drama Department.
However, the season seems to me to have been too short. This production should be seen by college students as a model for drama students, as well as being great entertainment for the much larger number of young adults than could be accommodated in three nights in The Street Studio.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
2007: Rod Quantock: The John Howard Farewell Party
Rod Quantock: The John Howard Farewell Party at The Street Theatre, October 16-21, 8.30pm
I’ll bet you have forgotten who wrote Under the Southern Stars to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory. She’s a rather large ex-Liberal Party minister currently resident in Italy, and Quantock will not let you forget her again.
You might also learn history far beyond the 47 required points for Years 9 and 10. Though esoteric, but not so tenuous as you might expect, there is a clear connection from the early German industrial revolution, the back-to-the-village Romantic backlash, Wagner who was Hitler’s favourite composer, through to the most dangerous Green fanatic Bob Brown, the love-child of Hitler and Eva Braun. Talking of schools, it’s also true that American students shoot each other because American teachers have not had chalk for 30 years, and that’s also the cause of the lack of discipline in our schools today.
Quantock claimed to have achieved a 5-star rating, not for the quality of his show but for using the least energy of any stand-up comedian by sitting down most of the time. However, since as a critic I should never accept a performer at face (or cheek) value, I disagree. Quantock’s laid-back manner rests not upon his backside but is kept in suspension by a constant flow of high level energy. Talking of energy, we need to keep selling our coal to China to pay for all the Australian men’s underpants produced only in that country, even though they will bring us to our knees when China activates its spy satellites, making them taller than us.
Talk is what Quantock does so well that we forget he is performing. Live in the theatre, he communicates directly with us as a real empathetic person, even though we remember him as Captain Snooze in a nightshirt.
The Party gets a look-in. The farewell to look forward to is when John Howard loses his seat but the Liberal Party wins the election. Try not to miss Rod Quantock. He is certainly the life of the party.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
I’ll bet you have forgotten who wrote Under the Southern Stars to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory. She’s a rather large ex-Liberal Party minister currently resident in Italy, and Quantock will not let you forget her again.
You might also learn history far beyond the 47 required points for Years 9 and 10. Though esoteric, but not so tenuous as you might expect, there is a clear connection from the early German industrial revolution, the back-to-the-village Romantic backlash, Wagner who was Hitler’s favourite composer, through to the most dangerous Green fanatic Bob Brown, the love-child of Hitler and Eva Braun. Talking of schools, it’s also true that American students shoot each other because American teachers have not had chalk for 30 years, and that’s also the cause of the lack of discipline in our schools today.
Quantock claimed to have achieved a 5-star rating, not for the quality of his show but for using the least energy of any stand-up comedian by sitting down most of the time. However, since as a critic I should never accept a performer at face (or cheek) value, I disagree. Quantock’s laid-back manner rests not upon his backside but is kept in suspension by a constant flow of high level energy. Talking of energy, we need to keep selling our coal to China to pay for all the Australian men’s underpants produced only in that country, even though they will bring us to our knees when China activates its spy satellites, making them taller than us.
Talk is what Quantock does so well that we forget he is performing. Live in the theatre, he communicates directly with us as a real empathetic person, even though we remember him as Captain Snooze in a nightshirt.
The Party gets a look-in. The farewell to look forward to is when John Howard loses his seat but the Liberal Party wins the election. Try not to miss Rod Quantock. He is certainly the life of the party.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 15 October 2007
2007: Fabulous Diva – A Tribute to Nina Simone
Fabulous Diva – A Tribute to Nina Simone, devised and performed by Ruth Rogers-Wright with pianist Mark Fitzgibbon (replacing the advertised program The Other Woman – The Life and Music of Nina Simone by Lisa Schouw). Cabaret Crème at The Street Theatre, Monday October 15.
Special credit must be given to Bill Stephens whose standing in the cabaret business enabled him to bring this show in from Melbourne on only two days’ notice following the sudden death of Lisa Schouw’s father.
Sadness at the unexpected news tinged the audience’s early response to Ruth Rogers-Wright’s selection of songs, verse and reminiscences of Nina Simone’s performances. But the show settled in quickly after her rendition of He Needs Me, and we were rewarded by an impression of Simone’s strength of personality, her concern for civil rights, and her style of singing.
The key to this Tribute was the distinction made by Rogers-Wright between a singer who might be a mere entertainer compared with Simone, an artist. The point is valid, but as the show progressed something seemed to me to be missing. On listening to some original Simone performances, I realised that Mark Fitzgibbon’s piano playing, though expert and interestingly complex in blues style, was too smooth. Rogers-Wright’s singing voice also, though catching the blue notes and soul feeling, rarely re-created the raw or even deliberately flat quality of sound that Simone often combined with crude-seeming rhythms. This was the strength which grabbed audiences in large venues and outdoor settings, while Rogers-Wright perhaps felt the need for softer tones in the small theatre setting at The Street.
Personally I found the balance between miked voice and grand piano needed better mixing to prevent the piano masking the lyrics. However, recognising the limitations imposed by working at such short notice, I felt satisfied to have gained an appreciation of Nina Simone’s artistic purpose through Ruth Rogers-Wright’s personal tribute to her work. The applause was warmly given, and I Loves You, Porgy was a memorable encore.
The final Cabaret Crème for the year will be Avigail Herman presenting Hey World, Here I Am – the Streisand Story on Monday November 19.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Special credit must be given to Bill Stephens whose standing in the cabaret business enabled him to bring this show in from Melbourne on only two days’ notice following the sudden death of Lisa Schouw’s father.
Sadness at the unexpected news tinged the audience’s early response to Ruth Rogers-Wright’s selection of songs, verse and reminiscences of Nina Simone’s performances. But the show settled in quickly after her rendition of He Needs Me, and we were rewarded by an impression of Simone’s strength of personality, her concern for civil rights, and her style of singing.
The key to this Tribute was the distinction made by Rogers-Wright between a singer who might be a mere entertainer compared with Simone, an artist. The point is valid, but as the show progressed something seemed to me to be missing. On listening to some original Simone performances, I realised that Mark Fitzgibbon’s piano playing, though expert and interestingly complex in blues style, was too smooth. Rogers-Wright’s singing voice also, though catching the blue notes and soul feeling, rarely re-created the raw or even deliberately flat quality of sound that Simone often combined with crude-seeming rhythms. This was the strength which grabbed audiences in large venues and outdoor settings, while Rogers-Wright perhaps felt the need for softer tones in the small theatre setting at The Street.
Personally I found the balance between miked voice and grand piano needed better mixing to prevent the piano masking the lyrics. However, recognising the limitations imposed by working at such short notice, I felt satisfied to have gained an appreciation of Nina Simone’s artistic purpose through Ruth Rogers-Wright’s personal tribute to her work. The applause was warmly given, and I Loves You, Porgy was a memorable encore.
The final Cabaret Crème for the year will be Avigail Herman presenting Hey World, Here I Am – the Streisand Story on Monday November 19.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 11 October 2007
2007: Wanderlust by Leigh Warren & Dancers
Wanderlust by Leigh Warren & Dancers, in association with Uno Man. The Playhouse, October 11 and 12.
Tabi ni yande
Yume wa kareno o
Kakemeguru
On a journey, ailing -
My dreams roam about
Over a withered moor.
According to Makoto Ueda, this was the last poem written by the master haiku poet Matsuo Basho shortly before his death in 1694.
I think “wanderlust” is too heavy a title, sounding too Germanic like something from Wagner, for a dance work inspired by the life of the Japanese poet who, says Ueda, developed the principle of "lightness", a dialectic transcendence of sabi. Sabi urges a person to detach themselves from worldly involvements; "lightness" makes it possible for them, after attaining that detachment, to return to the mundane world. Maybe Gustav Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) is the European equivalent.
However, what Leigh Warren’s team have achieved - himself and Uno Man (directors /choreographers), Tetsutoshi Tabata and Nic Mollison (visuals and lighting designers), India Flint (costumier), Stuart Day (composer) and dancers Deon Hastie, Mako Kawano, Jo Roads and Tomohiko Tsujimoto - is a remarkable work in which sound, movement and texture are displayed in a clean plain setting, illuminated both literally and metaphorically in ever-changing shapes, colours and intensities of light, according to the dreams which we may imagine to have roamed about Basho’s mind, not just on the travels he wrote about, such as in the most famous The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi), but throughout his life.
Especially I was impressed by the dancers’ lightness of touch in scenes representing great variations of mood, befitting the poet’s experiences. From floor to full stretch, from dazzling speed to deliberate measured pace, from tiny fingers vibrating to slow waves of total bodies rippling, all seemed as if without weight, abstracted, beyond the mundane: poetic. We Australians left the theatre, as we should, knowing Basho’s feeling when he wrote after his first journey in 1685:
Toshi kurenu
Kasa kite waraji
Hakinagara
Another year is gone -
A travel hat on my head,
Straw sandals on my feet.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tabi ni yande
Yume wa kareno o
Kakemeguru
On a journey, ailing -
My dreams roam about
Over a withered moor.
According to Makoto Ueda, this was the last poem written by the master haiku poet Matsuo Basho shortly before his death in 1694.
I think “wanderlust” is too heavy a title, sounding too Germanic like something from Wagner, for a dance work inspired by the life of the Japanese poet who, says Ueda, developed the principle of "lightness", a dialectic transcendence of sabi. Sabi urges a person to detach themselves from worldly involvements; "lightness" makes it possible for them, after attaining that detachment, to return to the mundane world. Maybe Gustav Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) is the European equivalent.
However, what Leigh Warren’s team have achieved - himself and Uno Man (directors /choreographers), Tetsutoshi Tabata and Nic Mollison (visuals and lighting designers), India Flint (costumier), Stuart Day (composer) and dancers Deon Hastie, Mako Kawano, Jo Roads and Tomohiko Tsujimoto - is a remarkable work in which sound, movement and texture are displayed in a clean plain setting, illuminated both literally and metaphorically in ever-changing shapes, colours and intensities of light, according to the dreams which we may imagine to have roamed about Basho’s mind, not just on the travels he wrote about, such as in the most famous The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi), but throughout his life.
Especially I was impressed by the dancers’ lightness of touch in scenes representing great variations of mood, befitting the poet’s experiences. From floor to full stretch, from dazzling speed to deliberate measured pace, from tiny fingers vibrating to slow waves of total bodies rippling, all seemed as if without weight, abstracted, beyond the mundane: poetic. We Australians left the theatre, as we should, knowing Basho’s feeling when he wrote after his first journey in 1685:
Toshi kurenu
Kasa kite waraji
Hakinagara
Another year is gone -
A travel hat on my head,
Straw sandals on my feet.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 2 October 2007
2007: Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire.
Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire. Ensemble Theatre directed by Sandra Bates at the Playhouse October 2-7. Bookings Canberra Ticketing 62750 2700.
Rabbit Hole must have been awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize because it is a feel-good play. When we think of the great American plays like O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Miller’s Death of a Salesman or Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, there simply is no comparison. Feel-good is just not the same as good, let alone great.
No-one could complain about the acting of any of the excellent cast, led by Georgie Parker and Mark Kilmurry, but the playscript is a contrived “well-made” play about an issue, coping with death, which must as quickly as possible in the last 15 minutes reach a happy resolution. On the way, the playwright has made obvious decisions like the first half must end with a massive emotional scene, while at predictable points the audience must be made to laugh (to relieve the tension, you know). The result is that the first half had to be fast-paced to cover for the lack of genuine emotional justification for the characters’ behaviour, while the second slowed a little (after an early gratuitous laugh) to lead us to a sentimental ending at which some audience members cried as they do watching a television soapie.
The play, and the excellent set, presents itself as naturalistic, but I can only say Lindsay-Abaire’s education at Sarah Lawrence College and the Juilliard School, New York, could not have included any study of the original master of naturalism, Henrik Ibsen. A Doll’s House runs rings around Rabbit Hole.
Fortunately the actors were good enough (even with some slightly wobbly American accents) to hold the play together despite its highly unrealistic elements like the appearance of the young driver who ran over Beccie and Howie’s 4-year-old son Danny. The issue of how people cope with such tragedies in an unforgiving universe is a worthwhile theme. It’s just disappointing that this playwright, prize-winner or not, does not give the actors a script with the depth of understanding they, and we, deserve.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Rabbit Hole must have been awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize because it is a feel-good play. When we think of the great American plays like O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Miller’s Death of a Salesman or Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, there simply is no comparison. Feel-good is just not the same as good, let alone great.
No-one could complain about the acting of any of the excellent cast, led by Georgie Parker and Mark Kilmurry, but the playscript is a contrived “well-made” play about an issue, coping with death, which must as quickly as possible in the last 15 minutes reach a happy resolution. On the way, the playwright has made obvious decisions like the first half must end with a massive emotional scene, while at predictable points the audience must be made to laugh (to relieve the tension, you know). The result is that the first half had to be fast-paced to cover for the lack of genuine emotional justification for the characters’ behaviour, while the second slowed a little (after an early gratuitous laugh) to lead us to a sentimental ending at which some audience members cried as they do watching a television soapie.
The play, and the excellent set, presents itself as naturalistic, but I can only say Lindsay-Abaire’s education at Sarah Lawrence College and the Juilliard School, New York, could not have included any study of the original master of naturalism, Henrik Ibsen. A Doll’s House runs rings around Rabbit Hole.
Fortunately the actors were good enough (even with some slightly wobbly American accents) to hold the play together despite its highly unrealistic elements like the appearance of the young driver who ran over Beccie and Howie’s 4-year-old son Danny. The issue of how people cope with such tragedies in an unforgiving universe is a worthwhile theme. It’s just disappointing that this playwright, prize-winner or not, does not give the actors a script with the depth of understanding they, and we, deserve.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Saturday, 29 September 2007
2007: High School Musical on Stage!
High School Musical on Stage! based on the Disney Channel movie by Peter Barsocchini and book by David Simpatico. Music adapted, arranged and produced by Bryan Louiselle. Directed by Berin Denham, music directed by Leisa Keen and dance choreographed by Jordan Kelly in the Big Top, Eddison Park, Woden, until October 13 at 7pm. Tickets (5 years and over) $40/pp. Group rate (10 or more) $35/pp. Tickets: ticketmaster.com.au
The success of this show depends first of all on recorded sound, supplied by Disney Theatricals, which took the local team three months to re-record incorporating voice-overs and cues for singers, dance numbers and lights. Though not credited in the program, the sound team’s final cut, run on a laptop, worked like a charm.
Second, though the show is an example of franchised American schmaltz, the directors achieved the right high-energy level, timing, dance work and harmony singing from a large cast ranging from young teenagers to adults to make it work on stage in its own right. In particular, last Saturday, the central couple of Troy and Gabriella played that night by Andy Burton and Jacinta Mai Le produced the kind of electricity needed to focus the production. They managed to make a sentimental story pleasantly romantic.
The theme of High School Musical is seductive for an old drama teacher like me. The basketball coach talks of teaching teamwork, commitment and self-confidence. The drama teacher explodes with “That’s exactly what I teach” and then loudly attacks the tradition of sport being funded way above the arts. Of course, it’s hard to reject the resolution of the conflicts with hugs all round between the Jocks, the Brainiacs, the Thespians and the Skater Dudes in the song We’re All In This Together, however unrealistic this may be.
“I didn’t lie. I improvised,” says the fly in the ointment Drama Club President Sharpay, perhaps better representing the way people in power continue to behave after high school. It seemed to me that Vanessa de Jager had some difficulty changing Sharpay from “I am the star” to “I’m sorry” in her final scene with Gabriella. However, it’s clear this group of thespians have learned teamwork, commitment and self-confidence, and their show is certainly worth seeing (so long as younger audience members don’t imagine high school is really like this, even in America).
© Frank McKone, Canberra
The success of this show depends first of all on recorded sound, supplied by Disney Theatricals, which took the local team three months to re-record incorporating voice-overs and cues for singers, dance numbers and lights. Though not credited in the program, the sound team’s final cut, run on a laptop, worked like a charm.
Second, though the show is an example of franchised American schmaltz, the directors achieved the right high-energy level, timing, dance work and harmony singing from a large cast ranging from young teenagers to adults to make it work on stage in its own right. In particular, last Saturday, the central couple of Troy and Gabriella played that night by Andy Burton and Jacinta Mai Le produced the kind of electricity needed to focus the production. They managed to make a sentimental story pleasantly romantic.
The theme of High School Musical is seductive for an old drama teacher like me. The basketball coach talks of teaching teamwork, commitment and self-confidence. The drama teacher explodes with “That’s exactly what I teach” and then loudly attacks the tradition of sport being funded way above the arts. Of course, it’s hard to reject the resolution of the conflicts with hugs all round between the Jocks, the Brainiacs, the Thespians and the Skater Dudes in the song We’re All In This Together, however unrealistic this may be.
“I didn’t lie. I improvised,” says the fly in the ointment Drama Club President Sharpay, perhaps better representing the way people in power continue to behave after high school. It seemed to me that Vanessa de Jager had some difficulty changing Sharpay from “I am the star” to “I’m sorry” in her final scene with Gabriella. However, it’s clear this group of thespians have learned teamwork, commitment and self-confidence, and their show is certainly worth seeing (so long as younger audience members don’t imagine high school is really like this, even in America).
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 17 September 2007
2007: Metrosexual by Matthew Robinson
Metrosexual written and performed by Matthew Robinson. Produced by Bill Stephens in the Cabaret Crème series at The Street Theatre, Monday September 17.
Bill Stephens continues to be the doyen of cabaret since the days of his famous Queanbeyan School of Arts Café, and still works to bring both top class performers and new promising talent to public attention.
Matthew Robinson is an actor, songwriter and pianist who, at 27, is building a career in musical and straight theatre, on stage and television. He has certainly been successful in performing and writing, perhaps especially in winning an $80,000 Pratt Prize for Music Theatre in 2004 to develop Metro Street, his first full length musical, to production stage.
However, the program of his original songs in Metrosexual is not as engaging or exciting as I had hoped. Robinson’s lyrics are interesting, giving us a new twist in close-up observation of modern metro life. I thought the best example was the love song which focusses on finding someone who can give him broadband, pay tv and other electronic consumer experiences, at a reasonable cost per month, of course. Many individual lines are effective, but there are other stronger more stylish metro-folk-funk writer-singers especially from Melbourne where Robinson is based.
The Street Theatre mainstage is quite unforgiving for a solo performer trying to work in an intimate cabaret format. Without food, drink and scattered tables there was not the ambience which Robinson might have exploited, particularly with a younger audience to whom he would speak directly. To a largely middle-aged group at the 8.30pm session I attended, his patter between songs seemed a bit shallow and predictable, without the warmth of personality of a more mature performer.
I also found his music rather repetitive in form, though interesting for his Mozartian off the keynote endings. None of the songs had melodies which were well distinguished from each other or remain in the memory for later enjoyment. I was left with an impression of talent which will need some more years to mature before it fulfills its promise.
Cabaret Crème will present Lisa Schouw’s Life and Music of Nina Simone on October 15 and The Streisand Story performed by Avigail Herman on November 19.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Bill Stephens continues to be the doyen of cabaret since the days of his famous Queanbeyan School of Arts Café, and still works to bring both top class performers and new promising talent to public attention.
Matthew Robinson is an actor, songwriter and pianist who, at 27, is building a career in musical and straight theatre, on stage and television. He has certainly been successful in performing and writing, perhaps especially in winning an $80,000 Pratt Prize for Music Theatre in 2004 to develop Metro Street, his first full length musical, to production stage.
However, the program of his original songs in Metrosexual is not as engaging or exciting as I had hoped. Robinson’s lyrics are interesting, giving us a new twist in close-up observation of modern metro life. I thought the best example was the love song which focusses on finding someone who can give him broadband, pay tv and other electronic consumer experiences, at a reasonable cost per month, of course. Many individual lines are effective, but there are other stronger more stylish metro-folk-funk writer-singers especially from Melbourne where Robinson is based.
The Street Theatre mainstage is quite unforgiving for a solo performer trying to work in an intimate cabaret format. Without food, drink and scattered tables there was not the ambience which Robinson might have exploited, particularly with a younger audience to whom he would speak directly. To a largely middle-aged group at the 8.30pm session I attended, his patter between songs seemed a bit shallow and predictable, without the warmth of personality of a more mature performer.
I also found his music rather repetitive in form, though interesting for his Mozartian off the keynote endings. None of the songs had melodies which were well distinguished from each other or remain in the memory for later enjoyment. I was left with an impression of talent which will need some more years to mature before it fulfills its promise.
Cabaret Crème will present Lisa Schouw’s Life and Music of Nina Simone on October 15 and The Streisand Story performed by Avigail Herman on November 19.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 12 September 2007
2007: The Landlords by Jordan Prosser and Sam Burns-Warr
The Landlords by Jordan Prosser and Sam Burns-Warr, presented by the Wave Edge Theory (WET) Season at Belconnen Theatre, Swanson St, Belconnen, September 12 and 14, 8pm
If this were 1947 instead of 2007, this play would have been named En Attendant Godot, written by a mature age but new author, Samuel Beckett, who went on to become a central figure in 20th Century theatre. At 40 years of age, after years in the French resistance, hiding in fear of arrest and torture, his characters wait for their Godot in a bleak formless landscape, symbolising the devastation and hopelessness at the end of World War.
60 years on, at the beginning of the new century, new young writers Prosser and Burns-Warr present an equally bleak view of our world, perhaps even less hopeful than before. Their characters, named Archimedes and Jesus Christ, are holed up in a hotel foyer with a toilet each and an unreliable electricity generator, living on Cheezels and Kit-Kats, knowing (or at least believing) they are the last people left alive on earth, on their last day of life.
Prosser and Burns-Warr do not yet have the mature writing skills that Beckett had, not the poetic and powerful use of language of Waiting for Godot, but they may well be on the way. This is the purpose of the WET Season, to give new young writers a place to present their work – a purpose successfully fulfilled in The Landlords. The figure of Death as a pizza delivery boy, perhaps a parallel to the Boy who brings the message that Godot won’t come today, is quite brilliant, though the symbolism needs to be worked through more clearly.
The horrifying thing is that Vladimir and Estragon in 1947 still believed in Godot despite everything, while Archy and JC have absolutely nothing left to hope for, not even a belief in an illusory God. What have we done, this play asks, that perhaps in the quite near future will bring human society to such an uninspiring end? Drama should confront us with such questions, and I hope that Prosser and Burns-Warr continue a productive theatrical partnership.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
If this were 1947 instead of 2007, this play would have been named En Attendant Godot, written by a mature age but new author, Samuel Beckett, who went on to become a central figure in 20th Century theatre. At 40 years of age, after years in the French resistance, hiding in fear of arrest and torture, his characters wait for their Godot in a bleak formless landscape, symbolising the devastation and hopelessness at the end of World War.
60 years on, at the beginning of the new century, new young writers Prosser and Burns-Warr present an equally bleak view of our world, perhaps even less hopeful than before. Their characters, named Archimedes and Jesus Christ, are holed up in a hotel foyer with a toilet each and an unreliable electricity generator, living on Cheezels and Kit-Kats, knowing (or at least believing) they are the last people left alive on earth, on their last day of life.
Prosser and Burns-Warr do not yet have the mature writing skills that Beckett had, not the poetic and powerful use of language of Waiting for Godot, but they may well be on the way. This is the purpose of the WET Season, to give new young writers a place to present their work – a purpose successfully fulfilled in The Landlords. The figure of Death as a pizza delivery boy, perhaps a parallel to the Boy who brings the message that Godot won’t come today, is quite brilliant, though the symbolism needs to be worked through more clearly.
The horrifying thing is that Vladimir and Estragon in 1947 still believed in Godot despite everything, while Archy and JC have absolutely nothing left to hope for, not even a belief in an illusory God. What have we done, this play asks, that perhaps in the quite near future will bring human society to such an uninspiring end? Drama should confront us with such questions, and I hope that Prosser and Burns-Warr continue a productive theatrical partnership.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 3 August 2007
2007: Rebecca, adapted for the stage by Clifford Williams
Rebecca, adapted for the stage by Clifford Williams from the novel by Daphne du Maurier. Tempo Theatre directed by Jon Elphick at Belconnen Theatre, August 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11 at 7.30pm; August 4, 9, 11 at 2pm; August 5 at 4pm. Bookings 6247 4456 or www.philo.org.au/rebecca
Daphne du Maurier may have been taken seriously by people in the 1930s who were easily titillated by the idea of murder among the upper classes, but Rebecca, at least in this adaptation for the stage, today is laughable. Instead of the ending, when Mrs Danvers gets her revenge, being a dramatic finale, the opening night audience could not help but laugh at Maxim de Winter’s line “Oh, the West Wing’s on fire” instantly accompanied by smoke, red floodlights and sound of an old-fashioned firebell.
I note that the 1938 novel is still in print, and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 movie is now a popular DVD. Clifford Williams is to blame for making Tempo Theatre’s task very difficult. Perhaps an option might have been to play it as a farce – that would have produced more lively theatre.
Within the attempt to play this post-neo-gothic romantic murder mystery as if it were a representation of reality, only two actors fully made the grade.
Cheryl Browne as the twisted Mrs Danvers actually made me feel creepy, and persuaded me that she believed what she said in her set speeches (the only decently written speeches in the script).
But the top award goes to Nikki Higgins as the young second Mrs de Winter. Despite having little to play with, or against, from the other actors (except John Rogers as the butler Frith), and generally slow pacing which killed the suspense, she looked and felt the part of the shy young working girl picked up by the indolent rich. Her difficult position in being brought up against the class-ridden rules of de Winter’s society was acted so well it reminded me of Princess Diana’s experience moving up into royalty. Suddenly I could see some relevance to modern times, and some connection to what du Maurier probably had in mind in her original novel.
It was Higgins’ performance in this central role which held the play together.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Daphne du Maurier may have been taken seriously by people in the 1930s who were easily titillated by the idea of murder among the upper classes, but Rebecca, at least in this adaptation for the stage, today is laughable. Instead of the ending, when Mrs Danvers gets her revenge, being a dramatic finale, the opening night audience could not help but laugh at Maxim de Winter’s line “Oh, the West Wing’s on fire” instantly accompanied by smoke, red floodlights and sound of an old-fashioned firebell.
I note that the 1938 novel is still in print, and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 movie is now a popular DVD. Clifford Williams is to blame for making Tempo Theatre’s task very difficult. Perhaps an option might have been to play it as a farce – that would have produced more lively theatre.
Within the attempt to play this post-neo-gothic romantic murder mystery as if it were a representation of reality, only two actors fully made the grade.
Cheryl Browne as the twisted Mrs Danvers actually made me feel creepy, and persuaded me that she believed what she said in her set speeches (the only decently written speeches in the script).
But the top award goes to Nikki Higgins as the young second Mrs de Winter. Despite having little to play with, or against, from the other actors (except John Rogers as the butler Frith), and generally slow pacing which killed the suspense, she looked and felt the part of the shy young working girl picked up by the indolent rich. Her difficult position in being brought up against the class-ridden rules of de Winter’s society was acted so well it reminded me of Princess Diana’s experience moving up into royalty. Suddenly I could see some relevance to modern times, and some connection to what du Maurier probably had in mind in her original novel.
It was Higgins’ performance in this central role which held the play together.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 20 April 2007
2007: Moonshadows: A tribute to Cat Stevens. Concept by Peter Cox
Moonshadows: A tribute to Cat Stevens. Concept by Peter Cox, starring Darren Coggan. Musical director Naomi Coggan. Produced by McPherson Ink at Canberra Playhouse, April 20 and 21.
Darren Coggan unplugged his guitar and left the stage, but appreciative applause would not let him “go, away, I know, I have to go”, as the real Cat Stevens had done, becoming Yusuf Islam in 1979. The theatre hushed as Coggan reappeared. "Thank you very much," he said.
Thank you from a single voice, sounding “miles from nowhere”, and as if the whole audience remembered the line from Longer Boats are Coming “just a flower I can help along”, a supportive murmur spread around for just one more song.
Coggan stars as narrator of the life story of Steven Demetre Georgiou, illustrating his significant experiences and spiritual searching through Cat Stevens’ songs. Coggan has found a quality of voice which is so close to the original that you would think it is Cat Stevens himself unless you are a bit too pedantic, like me, and play the original LPs like Tea for the Tillerman, Mona Bone Jakon and Teazle and the Firecat after the show.
The band and backing singers supporting Coggan, perhaps especially musical director Naomi Coggan on keyboard and piano, are impressive. Seeing a band play this music makes you realise how diverse and complex Cat Stevens’ compositions are. In this show, the effect is much bigger than the more intimate-sounding original recordings, but it works well because this is a show about Cat Stevens, not an attempt merely to reproduce him.
The commitment from writer Peter Cox is not just to the music, but to the message. When Georgiou, brought up in the anti-Turk tradition of Greek Cypriots of his time, finally finds in the Qur’an the central theme of peace and goodwill, of de-emphasising the superficiality of material wealth, we hear a message of just as much importance today as 30 years ago.
Moonshadows, thankfully, ends at this point, avoiding Yusuf Islam’s later unfortunate slip towards fundamentalism when he supported the fatwah against Salman Rushdie (though he claimed to have been misquoted). The result is an exciting concert and a dramatic narrative with a worthwhile theme - a success.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Darren Coggan unplugged his guitar and left the stage, but appreciative applause would not let him “go, away, I know, I have to go”, as the real Cat Stevens had done, becoming Yusuf Islam in 1979. The theatre hushed as Coggan reappeared. "Thank you very much," he said.
Thank you from a single voice, sounding “miles from nowhere”, and as if the whole audience remembered the line from Longer Boats are Coming “just a flower I can help along”, a supportive murmur spread around for just one more song.
Coggan stars as narrator of the life story of Steven Demetre Georgiou, illustrating his significant experiences and spiritual searching through Cat Stevens’ songs. Coggan has found a quality of voice which is so close to the original that you would think it is Cat Stevens himself unless you are a bit too pedantic, like me, and play the original LPs like Tea for the Tillerman, Mona Bone Jakon and Teazle and the Firecat after the show.
The band and backing singers supporting Coggan, perhaps especially musical director Naomi Coggan on keyboard and piano, are impressive. Seeing a band play this music makes you realise how diverse and complex Cat Stevens’ compositions are. In this show, the effect is much bigger than the more intimate-sounding original recordings, but it works well because this is a show about Cat Stevens, not an attempt merely to reproduce him.
The commitment from writer Peter Cox is not just to the music, but to the message. When Georgiou, brought up in the anti-Turk tradition of Greek Cypriots of his time, finally finds in the Qur’an the central theme of peace and goodwill, of de-emphasising the superficiality of material wealth, we hear a message of just as much importance today as 30 years ago.
Moonshadows, thankfully, ends at this point, avoiding Yusuf Islam’s later unfortunate slip towards fundamentalism when he supported the fatwah against Salman Rushdie (though he claimed to have been misquoted). The result is an exciting concert and a dramatic narrative with a worthwhile theme - a success.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 19 April 2007
2007: Eleven Year Itch - The Howard Years by Shortis and Simpson. Promo feature article.
Three months into his Canberra Times career, this very writer, reviewing John Shortis and Moya Simpson in June 1996, wrote “But maybe I expect too much of Queanbeyan: terror on Monaro Street is not something we can seriously contemplate” in response to the promise to “terrorise the audience” with satire.
Shortis & Curlies, with the late Andrew Bissett, at The School of Arts Cafe, presented by the now legendary Bill Stephens, was the first of the Shortis and Simpson series of satirical shows which have played (or maybe plagued, according to your political position) the Canberra region every year since. But not only did their career run parallel with mine. The much more illustrious comparison is with the grasp on government of PM John Howard, who has made the fear of terror real, even in Queanbeyan.
“Let the itch begin / Let us start from scratch” introduces Eleven Year Itch - The Howard Years, opening on May 3 at The Street Theatre.
The itch to write and sing satirical cabaret began in Sydney, when Stephens heard one of Shortis’ songs performed by Margaret Roadknight. Although Simpson was a also successful singer, it was not until 1995, when their children left home and gave them freedom, that the couple toured together in country regions. When their caravan reached Bungendore they stopped, and took up the School of Arts offer.
Eleven years on, looking back on both the political changes and their own creative development, audiences may be surprised to find themselves in a new theatrical world. The Street Theatre’s artistic director, Caroline Stacey, is working with Shortis and Simpson, building on and extending their talents. Eleven Year Itch is risky and demanding work, taking John Shortis out of the writer’s garrett, off the piano stool, and behind instruments we never knew he could play: ukulele, accordion, pedal organ, trombone among some others previously unknown to anyone.
Stacey’s expectations for the full depth of character which she brings fom directing plays and opera, is a new challenge for Moya Simpson. During rehearsal, as I watched, Simpson grew in one of her roles, as John Howard dreaming of waterfront reform (remember the black dogs in the night). Stacey also has expertise in European political cabaret, making each of her rehearsal notes hone both Simpson’s quality of voice and belief in her character’s desires. Just the first line “I’m down here, on the waterfront, in the full moonlight” suddenly became tragic (because we know the implications of his instructions to Peter Reith), romantic (in an irky sort of way), and horribly funny against Shortis’ French-style accordion playing.
The ACT Creative Arts Fellowship which Shortis received a year or so ago led him to the same conclusion as Stacey. When it comes to New York cabaret or European cabaret, though he likes both, it’s the European tradition which underpins political satire. After a reading of some new work last year, Eleven Year Itch is Shortis’s first full production which has grown out of the Fellowship study which took him back to Paris in 1880, through the Berlin cabaret which made Bertolt Brecht famous. This show also has ACT backing through a one-off project grant, which has enabled Shortis and Simpson to work with Stacey, produce good publicity material, and set up the studio at The Street in style.
The floorspace where the audience sits, quaffing as required, is decorated in the ornate way which, in the European tradition, makes the audience feel glamorous. But don’t imagine the action will remain neatly confined to a tiny stage in the corner - as you may have seen in the restaurant scene in the French film The Singer, where Alain Moreau (Gerard Depardieu) is ignored by the snooty clientele. Be prepared, if you please, for the karaoke.
Already bookings are coming on apace, so some people may have discovered that their tables are not numbered. They are named. After all, naming names is often what politics is about. You will soon be singing along with I Lunched With a Man Who Lunched With a Man Who Lunched at the Burke and Grill.
Mention of Labor allows us to make a note that, though project money from the ACT Government supports Eleven Year Itch, the satirical target is not just the incumbent Commonwealth Government. Shortis has written more than humorous songs linked in a revue format. Using some of his own songs from previous years, many new ones and a powerful lament for David Hicks written by Peter J Casey, for the first time Shortis’s script is more like a play, with sections delimited by the election years since 1996, and leading to a mystery ending. What will happen in 2007?
Of course the Coalition comes in for the stick it deserves, but the failure of Labor gets its just deserts too. Latham in the Aisles will be one song you won’t want to miss, whatever your personal preference. Shortis makes no bones about how he sees satire. A good politician is an oxymoron, he says. He looks for “things that are worth being scathing about”. No politician is safe because dishonesty, manipulation of other people, using politics for one’s personal advancement, and aiming only at winning rather than doing honourable things are all worth being scathing about.
Being satirical is about being even-handed, which some people see as being wishy-washy, but being scathing leaves its mark on both hands, right and left. It’s theatrically and politically risky (though not as much in Canberra 2007 as, say, in Berlin 1933), but, say Shortis, Simpson and Stacey, the risk must be taken. You’ve got to do it, they say, in theatre, just as you have to in politics. Otherwise nothing is achieved.
This leads our discussion to the awful realisation that, indeed, Prime Minister Howard has done exactly that - achieved. All of a sudden there are dark stories on all sides. We see Australian culture as an Othello. In destroying Othello, Iago achieves everything he desires, through manipulating people’s fears, setting up fictional lines of demarcation, and creating immense but unjustified jealousies. But Othello’s power was Iago’s original support. By succeeding in cutting down Othello, Iago only destroys himself. Is this the real story of the last eleven years? Is aggrandisement the itch at which politicians must scratch away, until our culture is undermined, to the detriment of us all?
This is the new Shortis and Simpson. You will find an edge to their work, even in songs you’ve heard before. Stacey’s view is that a culture only comes to maturity when an audience appreciates a satire even of itself. In the humour of political satire, dark though it may be when governments make life and death decisions, or light as we delve into the Prince of Dorkness himself, we find strength as a culture.
At the same time, as Shortis, Simpson and Stacey explore new ways to stretch their and our imaginations, they pull together the experience of theatre and the strands of history, at least of the last eleven years - the Howard Years.
Eleven Year Itch - The Howard YearsShortis and Simpson at The Street Theatre
Directed by Caroline Stacey.
May 3 May 19, 8.30pm
Matinee May 19, 2.30pm
Tickets: $30 full; $26 concession and groups.
Previews: May 1 and 2 $20
Bookings: 6247 1223
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Shortis & Curlies, with the late Andrew Bissett, at The School of Arts Cafe, presented by the now legendary Bill Stephens, was the first of the Shortis and Simpson series of satirical shows which have played (or maybe plagued, according to your political position) the Canberra region every year since. But not only did their career run parallel with mine. The much more illustrious comparison is with the grasp on government of PM John Howard, who has made the fear of terror real, even in Queanbeyan.
“Let the itch begin / Let us start from scratch” introduces Eleven Year Itch - The Howard Years, opening on May 3 at The Street Theatre.
The itch to write and sing satirical cabaret began in Sydney, when Stephens heard one of Shortis’ songs performed by Margaret Roadknight. Although Simpson was a also successful singer, it was not until 1995, when their children left home and gave them freedom, that the couple toured together in country regions. When their caravan reached Bungendore they stopped, and took up the School of Arts offer.
Eleven years on, looking back on both the political changes and their own creative development, audiences may be surprised to find themselves in a new theatrical world. The Street Theatre’s artistic director, Caroline Stacey, is working with Shortis and Simpson, building on and extending their talents. Eleven Year Itch is risky and demanding work, taking John Shortis out of the writer’s garrett, off the piano stool, and behind instruments we never knew he could play: ukulele, accordion, pedal organ, trombone among some others previously unknown to anyone.
Stacey’s expectations for the full depth of character which she brings fom directing plays and opera, is a new challenge for Moya Simpson. During rehearsal, as I watched, Simpson grew in one of her roles, as John Howard dreaming of waterfront reform (remember the black dogs in the night). Stacey also has expertise in European political cabaret, making each of her rehearsal notes hone both Simpson’s quality of voice and belief in her character’s desires. Just the first line “I’m down here, on the waterfront, in the full moonlight” suddenly became tragic (because we know the implications of his instructions to Peter Reith), romantic (in an irky sort of way), and horribly funny against Shortis’ French-style accordion playing.
The ACT Creative Arts Fellowship which Shortis received a year or so ago led him to the same conclusion as Stacey. When it comes to New York cabaret or European cabaret, though he likes both, it’s the European tradition which underpins political satire. After a reading of some new work last year, Eleven Year Itch is Shortis’s first full production which has grown out of the Fellowship study which took him back to Paris in 1880, through the Berlin cabaret which made Bertolt Brecht famous. This show also has ACT backing through a one-off project grant, which has enabled Shortis and Simpson to work with Stacey, produce good publicity material, and set up the studio at The Street in style.
The floorspace where the audience sits, quaffing as required, is decorated in the ornate way which, in the European tradition, makes the audience feel glamorous. But don’t imagine the action will remain neatly confined to a tiny stage in the corner - as you may have seen in the restaurant scene in the French film The Singer, where Alain Moreau (Gerard Depardieu) is ignored by the snooty clientele. Be prepared, if you please, for the karaoke.
Already bookings are coming on apace, so some people may have discovered that their tables are not numbered. They are named. After all, naming names is often what politics is about. You will soon be singing along with I Lunched With a Man Who Lunched With a Man Who Lunched at the Burke and Grill.
Mention of Labor allows us to make a note that, though project money from the ACT Government supports Eleven Year Itch, the satirical target is not just the incumbent Commonwealth Government. Shortis has written more than humorous songs linked in a revue format. Using some of his own songs from previous years, many new ones and a powerful lament for David Hicks written by Peter J Casey, for the first time Shortis’s script is more like a play, with sections delimited by the election years since 1996, and leading to a mystery ending. What will happen in 2007?
Of course the Coalition comes in for the stick it deserves, but the failure of Labor gets its just deserts too. Latham in the Aisles will be one song you won’t want to miss, whatever your personal preference. Shortis makes no bones about how he sees satire. A good politician is an oxymoron, he says. He looks for “things that are worth being scathing about”. No politician is safe because dishonesty, manipulation of other people, using politics for one’s personal advancement, and aiming only at winning rather than doing honourable things are all worth being scathing about.
Being satirical is about being even-handed, which some people see as being wishy-washy, but being scathing leaves its mark on both hands, right and left. It’s theatrically and politically risky (though not as much in Canberra 2007 as, say, in Berlin 1933), but, say Shortis, Simpson and Stacey, the risk must be taken. You’ve got to do it, they say, in theatre, just as you have to in politics. Otherwise nothing is achieved.
This leads our discussion to the awful realisation that, indeed, Prime Minister Howard has done exactly that - achieved. All of a sudden there are dark stories on all sides. We see Australian culture as an Othello. In destroying Othello, Iago achieves everything he desires, through manipulating people’s fears, setting up fictional lines of demarcation, and creating immense but unjustified jealousies. But Othello’s power was Iago’s original support. By succeeding in cutting down Othello, Iago only destroys himself. Is this the real story of the last eleven years? Is aggrandisement the itch at which politicians must scratch away, until our culture is undermined, to the detriment of us all?
This is the new Shortis and Simpson. You will find an edge to their work, even in songs you’ve heard before. Stacey’s view is that a culture only comes to maturity when an audience appreciates a satire even of itself. In the humour of political satire, dark though it may be when governments make life and death decisions, or light as we delve into the Prince of Dorkness himself, we find strength as a culture.
At the same time, as Shortis, Simpson and Stacey explore new ways to stretch their and our imaginations, they pull together the experience of theatre and the strands of history, at least of the last eleven years - the Howard Years.
Eleven Year Itch - The Howard YearsShortis and Simpson at The Street Theatre
Directed by Caroline Stacey.
May 3 May 19, 8.30pm
Matinee May 19, 2.30pm
Tickets: $30 full; $26 concession and groups.
Previews: May 1 and 2 $20
Bookings: 6247 1223
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 3 April 2007
National Folk Festival opening by Hon Barry Cohen
The Hon Barry Cohen, former Arts Minister in the Hawke Labor Government, said he was surprised and proud to be asked to open this year’s National Folk Festival last Thursday. Thoroughly in keeping with Australian folk culture, and in tune with his many books of anecdotes such as What About the Workers?, The Almost Complete Gough and From Whitlam to Winston, humour of an unofficial kind was the keynote of his official opening speech.
For NFF Board President, John Taylor, there was good reason to celebrate the publication 20 years ago this year of the report of the Committee of Inquiry into Folklife in Australia: Our Living Heritage, commissioned by Cohen. “It is a unique document with which any student of Australia’s rich and diverse cultural history should familiarise themselves … We have Barry to thank for having the vision to get this project started.”
Unfortunately one of his revealing anecdotes, a bit less than humorous but nonetheless of the blunt Australian kind, told in conversation with the Canberra Times, concerned later Prime Minister Keating and Minister for Education John Dawkins.
Cohen had done his research, personally observing the positive social impact of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington. The famous and continuing Centre's interests and practical work in cultural policy are “framed principally around local agency and cultural democracy in grassroots communities, and collaborative projects designed to foster self-representation.”
But Keating “wouldn’t have a bar of it” as year after year Cohen tried in Cabinet to implement the Inquiry’s recommendation to set up a Folklife Centre in Canberra. Dawkins put in the boot in the last budget before Keating’s fatal flaw election in 1996, using the favourite politician’s ploy by going for an inquiry. At this point in history a project delayed was a project as dead as a bloated wombat on a country road.
Mention of wombats introduces a different side of Barry Cohen, wildlife sanctuary endangered species breeder until, in 2005, age crept into the picture and he passed on this work to others. Environmental issues are an important theme in this year’s National Folk Festival with three interrelated themes.
Various performers present songs, poems and even narrative dances about water, in its many incarnations. But the flip side of the issue is the presentation, headed by Social History and Folklore Collector Rob Willis, of material from the National Library of Australia’s ongoing project on drought. Among presenters is Dr Graham Seal of Curtin University, WA, who had a major part to play in the Folklife inquiry back in 1987. Another is Sue Riley, a Centrelink Counsellor, addressing the human impact and social cost of continued drought. Willis can be contacted at rwillis@westserv.net.au if you have stories to add to the collection.
Alongside the NLA is the Climate Change Tent, where there are workshops, talks and films by a wide range of experts and commentators including Professor Will Steffen, director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU, the Fair Trade Society, Australian Greens economics researcher Richard Dennis and Bob Douglass, formerly head of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population at ANU who leads a Forum on Nature and Society at 3.30pm tomorrow.
Everyone can take part in the third aspect of cleaning up the National Folk Festival, called No Ifs, No Butts. Clean Up Australia says that 49% of rubbish around Australia consists of cigarette butts, so this year there are specially designed bins all over the Festival site, and special individual butt bins for smokers to carry with them, produced in a new partnership with the Butt Littering Trust.
Smoking is no joke, but jokes aside, the former Minister Cohen was clearly the right person to open this year’s Festival. He even had a very serious suggestion for how to set up a Folklife Centre for Australia. Why not, he said, make it part of the National Museum of Australia? Why not, indeed.
Cohen is nowadays deputy chair at Old Parliament House, and points out that the National Portrait Gallery began life in a space shared with OPH. Its success has won it the fame and consequent power to claim a new building in its own right. An Australian National Folklife Centre set up in a space at the National Museum will surely have a parallel history in the future, he says. Now that heritage and history are the regular subject of debate, on all sides of politics, it’s time for the move to be made.
Young people and more recent migrants need an active centre to discover our folk history, as happens in Washington, where the Smithsonian themes cover indigenous life, working life, regional folklife, and recent migrants’ life. Like the National Folk Festival, which Cohen calls Canberra’s best kept secret, the Smithsonian exhibits include a Guest State each year, and even a Guest Country for comparison. With the National Museum’s visitor drawing power based so strongly already on its cultural history and personal story exhibits, a National Folklife Centre should be a natural fit, like a stockman on his horse or a novelist from Brindabella writing My Brilliant Career.
National Folk Festival runs until late on Monday April 9 at Exhibition Park. Information at www.folkfestival.asn.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
For NFF Board President, John Taylor, there was good reason to celebrate the publication 20 years ago this year of the report of the Committee of Inquiry into Folklife in Australia: Our Living Heritage, commissioned by Cohen. “It is a unique document with which any student of Australia’s rich and diverse cultural history should familiarise themselves … We have Barry to thank for having the vision to get this project started.”
Unfortunately one of his revealing anecdotes, a bit less than humorous but nonetheless of the blunt Australian kind, told in conversation with the Canberra Times, concerned later Prime Minister Keating and Minister for Education John Dawkins.
Cohen had done his research, personally observing the positive social impact of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington. The famous and continuing Centre's interests and practical work in cultural policy are “framed principally around local agency and cultural democracy in grassroots communities, and collaborative projects designed to foster self-representation.”
But Keating “wouldn’t have a bar of it” as year after year Cohen tried in Cabinet to implement the Inquiry’s recommendation to set up a Folklife Centre in Canberra. Dawkins put in the boot in the last budget before Keating’s fatal flaw election in 1996, using the favourite politician’s ploy by going for an inquiry. At this point in history a project delayed was a project as dead as a bloated wombat on a country road.
Mention of wombats introduces a different side of Barry Cohen, wildlife sanctuary endangered species breeder until, in 2005, age crept into the picture and he passed on this work to others. Environmental issues are an important theme in this year’s National Folk Festival with three interrelated themes.
Various performers present songs, poems and even narrative dances about water, in its many incarnations. But the flip side of the issue is the presentation, headed by Social History and Folklore Collector Rob Willis, of material from the National Library of Australia’s ongoing project on drought. Among presenters is Dr Graham Seal of Curtin University, WA, who had a major part to play in the Folklife inquiry back in 1987. Another is Sue Riley, a Centrelink Counsellor, addressing the human impact and social cost of continued drought. Willis can be contacted at rwillis@westserv.net.au if you have stories to add to the collection.
Alongside the NLA is the Climate Change Tent, where there are workshops, talks and films by a wide range of experts and commentators including Professor Will Steffen, director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU, the Fair Trade Society, Australian Greens economics researcher Richard Dennis and Bob Douglass, formerly head of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population at ANU who leads a Forum on Nature and Society at 3.30pm tomorrow.
Everyone can take part in the third aspect of cleaning up the National Folk Festival, called No Ifs, No Butts. Clean Up Australia says that 49% of rubbish around Australia consists of cigarette butts, so this year there are specially designed bins all over the Festival site, and special individual butt bins for smokers to carry with them, produced in a new partnership with the Butt Littering Trust.
Smoking is no joke, but jokes aside, the former Minister Cohen was clearly the right person to open this year’s Festival. He even had a very serious suggestion for how to set up a Folklife Centre for Australia. Why not, he said, make it part of the National Museum of Australia? Why not, indeed.
Cohen is nowadays deputy chair at Old Parliament House, and points out that the National Portrait Gallery began life in a space shared with OPH. Its success has won it the fame and consequent power to claim a new building in its own right. An Australian National Folklife Centre set up in a space at the National Museum will surely have a parallel history in the future, he says. Now that heritage and history are the regular subject of debate, on all sides of politics, it’s time for the move to be made.
Young people and more recent migrants need an active centre to discover our folk history, as happens in Washington, where the Smithsonian themes cover indigenous life, working life, regional folklife, and recent migrants’ life. Like the National Folk Festival, which Cohen calls Canberra’s best kept secret, the Smithsonian exhibits include a Guest State each year, and even a Guest Country for comparison. With the National Museum’s visitor drawing power based so strongly already on its cultural history and personal story exhibits, a National Folklife Centre should be a natural fit, like a stockman on his horse or a novelist from Brindabella writing My Brilliant Career.
National Folk Festival runs until late on Monday April 9 at Exhibition Park. Information at www.folkfestival.asn.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 2 April 2007
2007: National Folk Festival - feature article on Jared Wilkins and Dave O'Neill
The Board of the National Folk Festival is delighted to announce two new senior staff positions. Jared Wilkins, Production Manager of the Festival for the last three years has been appointed Managing Director and Dave O’Neill, Program Manager in 2000 and 2006, is now the Festival’s Artistic Director.
Both jobs are full time, fixed term contract positions. O’Neill, a music teacher and internationally acclaimed professional musician, a member of the Eric Bogle Band, has taken on an expanded role as artistic director. Wilkins began 10 years ago as a volunteer, then volunteer coordinator. I spoke to Wilkins as he stood in the middle of a paddock rapidly filling with tents as volunteers began arriving from all over Australia for the NFF, which will be opened on Thursday evening at 8pm by the Hon Barry Cohen, former Minister for the Arts in the Hawke Government.
1300 volunteers, grouped into teams managed by volunteer coordinators, work to a paid Volunteer Manager, one of only five paid staff in Wilkins’ office. I wondered on the one hand if, since the National Folk Festival was permanently based in Canberra in the early 1990s, the new positions represented a corporatisation of the NFF. On the other hand, here was the Managing Director in the field, literally, looking and sounding like just another groupie of the folk music community. How does it all work?
Wilkins’ personal history goes a long way to answering this question. Community, he says, is the key. Even he, who attended Narrabundah College, and O’Neill who went to Narrabundah High School work together as members of the Canberra community. Teaching, too, is a central component of their lives. Kids, says Wilkins, usually fantasise about growing up to run away with the circus (perhaps this is the story of O’Neill’s life as a musician), but being brought up in the household of well-known drama and art identities, Peter and Lola Wilkins, saw their son run away from the circus to become a chemistry teacher at Marist Brothers in Canberra for three years.
It was a hard struggle for Wilkins to succeed in chemistry and maths through secondary school and university, but he came to understand how to crack the code of scientific language and to appreciate the challenge his students faced. He clearly sees his managerial task in an educational light.
But he never really left the circus, working on events production at WOMADelaide, Adelaide Fringe and the real thing, Cirque du Soleil, to help pay his way through uni. The National Folk Festival had to become managed as a business to survive but, he says, the corporate-looking structure does not undermine the folk music community approach, even though there is great competition for places as performers. 2007 attracted 600 applications for 200 performing spots.
The way it works is that volunteers pay their own way to come from all over Australia, with even a few from overseas, because the quality of the program is guaranteed. Yet the program is designed deliberately to cover the range from performers at the beginning of their careers to those at their peak, with a strong emphasis on teaching and encouraging the young. The generations play and learn together so that the folk music community rolls on. We can hope that the NFF 40-year generational report will be more positive than Peter Costello’s announcement last Monday.
Even the three-year contract arrangements for the Artistic Director and Managing Director jobs are planned with the intention that these roles will be passed on to new people to maintain an invigorating folk music culture over the years. Each year, too, one of the states is the focus – this year Western Australia – so interest and personal involvement revolves around the country. And, as we reported in the Canberra Times Panorama last weekend (Lusty Lyricism and Politics), a relevant theme is chosen each year which helps to give the content of the Festival a direction and social purpose. For 2007 the Middle East is the focus.
Wilkins, says NFF Board President John Taylor, is “superbly able, committed and professional, and the Board has every confidence that the event will continue to prosper and grow under his leadership”. Wilkins claims it’s all just a matter of “nuts and bolts” putting the Festival together, connecting all the parts, working out how “everything affects everything else”.
All 1300 volunteers come together because “folk music is the music of the folk”. It’s all about community, the soul of the National Folk Festival, says the very model of a modern managing director, Jared Wilkins.
O’Neill’s understanding of the Festival’s program potential and his experience and personal status in the broader music industry is “enviable”, says John Taylor. “We are truly fortunate to have two highly skilled professionals to fill these roles”.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Both jobs are full time, fixed term contract positions. O’Neill, a music teacher and internationally acclaimed professional musician, a member of the Eric Bogle Band, has taken on an expanded role as artistic director. Wilkins began 10 years ago as a volunteer, then volunteer coordinator. I spoke to Wilkins as he stood in the middle of a paddock rapidly filling with tents as volunteers began arriving from all over Australia for the NFF, which will be opened on Thursday evening at 8pm by the Hon Barry Cohen, former Minister for the Arts in the Hawke Government.
1300 volunteers, grouped into teams managed by volunteer coordinators, work to a paid Volunteer Manager, one of only five paid staff in Wilkins’ office. I wondered on the one hand if, since the National Folk Festival was permanently based in Canberra in the early 1990s, the new positions represented a corporatisation of the NFF. On the other hand, here was the Managing Director in the field, literally, looking and sounding like just another groupie of the folk music community. How does it all work?
Wilkins’ personal history goes a long way to answering this question. Community, he says, is the key. Even he, who attended Narrabundah College, and O’Neill who went to Narrabundah High School work together as members of the Canberra community. Teaching, too, is a central component of their lives. Kids, says Wilkins, usually fantasise about growing up to run away with the circus (perhaps this is the story of O’Neill’s life as a musician), but being brought up in the household of well-known drama and art identities, Peter and Lola Wilkins, saw their son run away from the circus to become a chemistry teacher at Marist Brothers in Canberra for three years.
It was a hard struggle for Wilkins to succeed in chemistry and maths through secondary school and university, but he came to understand how to crack the code of scientific language and to appreciate the challenge his students faced. He clearly sees his managerial task in an educational light.
But he never really left the circus, working on events production at WOMADelaide, Adelaide Fringe and the real thing, Cirque du Soleil, to help pay his way through uni. The National Folk Festival had to become managed as a business to survive but, he says, the corporate-looking structure does not undermine the folk music community approach, even though there is great competition for places as performers. 2007 attracted 600 applications for 200 performing spots.
The way it works is that volunteers pay their own way to come from all over Australia, with even a few from overseas, because the quality of the program is guaranteed. Yet the program is designed deliberately to cover the range from performers at the beginning of their careers to those at their peak, with a strong emphasis on teaching and encouraging the young. The generations play and learn together so that the folk music community rolls on. We can hope that the NFF 40-year generational report will be more positive than Peter Costello’s announcement last Monday.
Even the three-year contract arrangements for the Artistic Director and Managing Director jobs are planned with the intention that these roles will be passed on to new people to maintain an invigorating folk music culture over the years. Each year, too, one of the states is the focus – this year Western Australia – so interest and personal involvement revolves around the country. And, as we reported in the Canberra Times Panorama last weekend (Lusty Lyricism and Politics), a relevant theme is chosen each year which helps to give the content of the Festival a direction and social purpose. For 2007 the Middle East is the focus.
Wilkins, says NFF Board President John Taylor, is “superbly able, committed and professional, and the Board has every confidence that the event will continue to prosper and grow under his leadership”. Wilkins claims it’s all just a matter of “nuts and bolts” putting the Festival together, connecting all the parts, working out how “everything affects everything else”.
All 1300 volunteers come together because “folk music is the music of the folk”. It’s all about community, the soul of the National Folk Festival, says the very model of a modern managing director, Jared Wilkins.
O’Neill’s understanding of the Festival’s program potential and his experience and personal status in the broader music industry is “enviable”, says John Taylor. “We are truly fortunate to have two highly skilled professionals to fill these roles”.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 28 March 2007
2007: The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter
The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter, presented by the Frozen Shape Collective directed by Nick McCorriston at Belconnen Theatre March 28-31, 7.30pm
Frozen Shape Collective is the latest kaleidoscopic rearrangement of people most of whom were previously or are still associated with Bohemian Theatre, BKu and Opiate Productions which seem to have spun off each other over the past six years or so.
I suggest this is the team to keep working together, because The Birthday Party is the most successful piece of work I recall seeing from these various groups. Part of the Wet Season (Wave Edge Theory), McCorriston has cast, directed, designed lights and sound (set design by Sudzset) with an excellent ear for Pinter’s language and eye for Pinter’s characters in this dreary British seaside boarding house setting.
Each actor – Robert Matthews (Petey Boles), Kerrie Roberts (Meg Boles), Matt Borneman (Stanley Webber, whose birthday is “celebrated”), Chris Rooks (Lulu), Pat Gordon (the hit man Seamus McCann) and Robert De Fries (the standover man Nat ‘Simey’ Goldberg) – has equally well understood that each Pinteresque pause is full of a character’s thinking. Usually, what the hell can I say now to fill in this awkward silence, when I don’t actually know what’s going on. Or in McCann and Goldberg, the pauses just let the creepy feeling sink in, to us in the audience as much as to the other characters. Laughter happens – but it’s short-lived.
To pull this degree of subtlety off so that two hours (including only a short interval) passed without concern for time on opening night is a success that Frozen Shape are well justified in celebrating. I was especially impressed that no character was allowed to become a minor role, compared with the central roles of Goldberg, McCann and Webber.
Rooks’ Lulu, for example, was a clearly drawn character caught in Goldberg’s web for a one-night stand, who grew overnight to realise that such men are fatally dangerous. De Fries gave us the charm of Goldberg as well as his menace, while Gordon’s McCann kept even Goldberg guessing, making this character much stronger and better balanced against Goldberg than in some other productions I have seen.
All in the ensemble gave equally, creating satisfying theatre which certainly justifies Belconnen Theatre’s efforts to encourage young serious theatre practitioners. Go to www.belcomserv.com.au/art/wet/ for more information.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Frozen Shape Collective is the latest kaleidoscopic rearrangement of people most of whom were previously or are still associated with Bohemian Theatre, BKu and Opiate Productions which seem to have spun off each other over the past six years or so.
I suggest this is the team to keep working together, because The Birthday Party is the most successful piece of work I recall seeing from these various groups. Part of the Wet Season (Wave Edge Theory), McCorriston has cast, directed, designed lights and sound (set design by Sudzset) with an excellent ear for Pinter’s language and eye for Pinter’s characters in this dreary British seaside boarding house setting.
Each actor – Robert Matthews (Petey Boles), Kerrie Roberts (Meg Boles), Matt Borneman (Stanley Webber, whose birthday is “celebrated”), Chris Rooks (Lulu), Pat Gordon (the hit man Seamus McCann) and Robert De Fries (the standover man Nat ‘Simey’ Goldberg) – has equally well understood that each Pinteresque pause is full of a character’s thinking. Usually, what the hell can I say now to fill in this awkward silence, when I don’t actually know what’s going on. Or in McCann and Goldberg, the pauses just let the creepy feeling sink in, to us in the audience as much as to the other characters. Laughter happens – but it’s short-lived.
To pull this degree of subtlety off so that two hours (including only a short interval) passed without concern for time on opening night is a success that Frozen Shape are well justified in celebrating. I was especially impressed that no character was allowed to become a minor role, compared with the central roles of Goldberg, McCann and Webber.
Rooks’ Lulu, for example, was a clearly drawn character caught in Goldberg’s web for a one-night stand, who grew overnight to realise that such men are fatally dangerous. De Fries gave us the charm of Goldberg as well as his menace, while Gordon’s McCann kept even Goldberg guessing, making this character much stronger and better balanced against Goldberg than in some other productions I have seen.
All in the ensemble gave equally, creating satisfying theatre which certainly justifies Belconnen Theatre’s efforts to encourage young serious theatre practitioners. Go to www.belcomserv.com.au/art/wet/ for more information.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 26 March 2007
2007: Falling in Love Again - Jennifer Ward-Lealand. Promo feature article.
It looked like a production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame on the stage of The Street Theatre. Two garbage bins and a cute looking bucket between them. But they were full of water, like all the theatre spotlights, the carpets, the seats. Ceilings collapsed, one near the lower theatre door while the insurance assessor was standing close by.
This was the result of the storm on February 27. Almost endgame for The Street, one might think, considering the cost of repairs, replacement of all those stage lights, relocating shows to other venues and loss of income from cancelled or postponed shows.
But the show goes on, starting this Friday with Auckland-based Jennifer Ward-Lealand, so revered in New Zealand that on April 4, we can reveal, she will receive an ONZM for her services to theatre. Falling in Love Again is a tribute to the strength of character of the German cabaret singer, Marlene Dietrich, who “had the guts,” says Ward-Lealand, “to turn her back on her own country”.
Since her youth theatre days some 30 years ago, Ward-Lealand has been rewarded with critical accolades. As Agnes in Agnes of God (1985) she was “an electrifying combination of distracted guilt and vengeful rage.” Her portrayal of Hedda Gabler (1986) captured “the audience’s undivided attention from the very first time she walks on stage.” In 2005, as Stevie in The Goat, she was “formidable”, and of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in 2006, the NZ Herald critic wrote “The delicate interactions between Viola and Olivia produces some wonderfully poignant moments, notably when Jennifer Ward-Lealand’s magisterial countess dissolves into a lovestruck teenager as she is captivated by the overpowering sweetness of Viola.”
For all these years Ward-Lealand has been more than a stalwart entertainer. As she has found in researching Marlene Dietrich, theatre can change how one sees the world, not only for the audience but for the practitioner. In 2002 she was approached to play the part of Dietrich in a play Marlene by British author Pam Gems, who has also written about Edith Piaf. Despite her musical family background, Ward-Lealand was hesitant about taking the role, which included six Dietrich songs.
But when a friend, a specialist in European cabaret, gave her documents and recordings, she found herself becoming fascinated, especially by Dietrich’s role in World War 2 on the Allied side, persuading German troops through her cabaret songs to reject the Nazi government in favour of democracy. Dietrich could, of course, have stayed in Germany and become equally famous and perhaps richer supporting her country’s war effort.
What was it, I asked Ward-Lealand, that made Dietrich reject her strict conservative upbringing, and in the USA become a focus for displaced German Jews? Theatre cabaret was the answer. Through the 1920s and 1930s the cabaret was an open society, more European than national, a swinging lifestyle, and particularly for Dietrich a place where she associated personally with Jewish people. She found in herself a “deep sense of outrage that she couldn’t easily run away from” at their treatment.
And, though Ward-Lealand has not been placed in such a testing situation, she too has found the theatre to be a “tolerant industry, where really nothing is shocking”. In her career she feels she has been very fortunate to have played such an array of characters from Polly Peachum in Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, Janet in The New Rocky Horror Show and Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein to Anna in Old Times by Harold Pinter, the Young Girl in Yerma by Garcia Lorca and many, many others. The key, she says, is the experience of taking these roles with directors you can respect, so that you learn to extend your understanding of the characters and change your own understanding of the world.
So when she performs in the role of Marlene Dietrich in Falling in Love Again, we will not see a singer imitating Dietrich. Through 23 songs, including some Cole Porter, Piaf and others, we will become engaged in that gutsy character, created for us by Jennifer Ward-Lealand as much as a celebration of Dietrich’s contribution as an entertainment. “I take my work very seriously” says Ward-Lealand, on stage and in Auckland theatre, film and television management boards.
One special program she has established is the Theatre Patrons program, which she says ten years ago she would not have had the guts to do. The audiences need to “own” their theatre, and, I am sure, they are now thanking her with the honour of an ONZM. “Like an OBE,” she explains, “but like you in Australia we have grown up now and have our own honours.” And, I sense, it is growing up that she has done since those youth theatre days, and Marlene Dietrich did through her theatre cabaret experience. We will see the mature performance on Friday night.
Falling in Love Again
Jennifer Ward-Lealand, with Grant Winterburn and Aaron Coddel
The Street Theatre Stage 1
Saturday March 30, 8.30pm
Tickets: $30
Bookings: 6247 1223
© Frank McKone, Canberra
This was the result of the storm on February 27. Almost endgame for The Street, one might think, considering the cost of repairs, replacement of all those stage lights, relocating shows to other venues and loss of income from cancelled or postponed shows.
But the show goes on, starting this Friday with Auckland-based Jennifer Ward-Lealand, so revered in New Zealand that on April 4, we can reveal, she will receive an ONZM for her services to theatre. Falling in Love Again is a tribute to the strength of character of the German cabaret singer, Marlene Dietrich, who “had the guts,” says Ward-Lealand, “to turn her back on her own country”.
Since her youth theatre days some 30 years ago, Ward-Lealand has been rewarded with critical accolades. As Agnes in Agnes of God (1985) she was “an electrifying combination of distracted guilt and vengeful rage.” Her portrayal of Hedda Gabler (1986) captured “the audience’s undivided attention from the very first time she walks on stage.” In 2005, as Stevie in The Goat, she was “formidable”, and of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in 2006, the NZ Herald critic wrote “The delicate interactions between Viola and Olivia produces some wonderfully poignant moments, notably when Jennifer Ward-Lealand’s magisterial countess dissolves into a lovestruck teenager as she is captivated by the overpowering sweetness of Viola.”
For all these years Ward-Lealand has been more than a stalwart entertainer. As she has found in researching Marlene Dietrich, theatre can change how one sees the world, not only for the audience but for the practitioner. In 2002 she was approached to play the part of Dietrich in a play Marlene by British author Pam Gems, who has also written about Edith Piaf. Despite her musical family background, Ward-Lealand was hesitant about taking the role, which included six Dietrich songs.
But when a friend, a specialist in European cabaret, gave her documents and recordings, she found herself becoming fascinated, especially by Dietrich’s role in World War 2 on the Allied side, persuading German troops through her cabaret songs to reject the Nazi government in favour of democracy. Dietrich could, of course, have stayed in Germany and become equally famous and perhaps richer supporting her country’s war effort.
What was it, I asked Ward-Lealand, that made Dietrich reject her strict conservative upbringing, and in the USA become a focus for displaced German Jews? Theatre cabaret was the answer. Through the 1920s and 1930s the cabaret was an open society, more European than national, a swinging lifestyle, and particularly for Dietrich a place where she associated personally with Jewish people. She found in herself a “deep sense of outrage that she couldn’t easily run away from” at their treatment.
And, though Ward-Lealand has not been placed in such a testing situation, she too has found the theatre to be a “tolerant industry, where really nothing is shocking”. In her career she feels she has been very fortunate to have played such an array of characters from Polly Peachum in Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, Janet in The New Rocky Horror Show and Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein to Anna in Old Times by Harold Pinter, the Young Girl in Yerma by Garcia Lorca and many, many others. The key, she says, is the experience of taking these roles with directors you can respect, so that you learn to extend your understanding of the characters and change your own understanding of the world.
So when she performs in the role of Marlene Dietrich in Falling in Love Again, we will not see a singer imitating Dietrich. Through 23 songs, including some Cole Porter, Piaf and others, we will become engaged in that gutsy character, created for us by Jennifer Ward-Lealand as much as a celebration of Dietrich’s contribution as an entertainment. “I take my work very seriously” says Ward-Lealand, on stage and in Auckland theatre, film and television management boards.
One special program she has established is the Theatre Patrons program, which she says ten years ago she would not have had the guts to do. The audiences need to “own” their theatre, and, I am sure, they are now thanking her with the honour of an ONZM. “Like an OBE,” she explains, “but like you in Australia we have grown up now and have our own honours.” And, I sense, it is growing up that she has done since those youth theatre days, and Marlene Dietrich did through her theatre cabaret experience. We will see the mature performance on Friday night.
Falling in Love Again
Jennifer Ward-Lealand, with Grant Winterburn and Aaron Coddel
The Street Theatre Stage 1
Saturday March 30, 8.30pm
Tickets: $30
Bookings: 6247 1223
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 23 March 2007
2007: Jasan Mindmaster by Jasan Savage
THEATRE BY FRANK McKONE
Jasan Mindmaster ESP Mindshow at UC Theatre, The Hub, University of Canberra. March 23 and 24, 8pm; March 25, 5pm; March 30, 8pm, March 31 2pm and 8pm; April 1, 5pm
With a willing suspension of disbelief, Jasan Savage’s stage illusions are thoroughly enjoyable.
He claims not to be a magician, proving the point by demonstrating to us what he could not do because he is not a magician, except that in doing so he does the trick anyway, proving that he is an accomplished magician. This kind of gentle humour is the key to a pleasant evening of an old-fashioned kind.
Those of us who know Savage as the UC Theatre’s director, as many on opening did, were surprised to discover his talent as magician and mind-reader, though not so surprised at his deliberately execrable jokes. In fact he began his career at the age of 18, worked with the famous The Great Franquin in the 1950s, and claims to hold the record for a solo artist in Australia by performing 65 straight weeks in Queensland, quoting a high recommendation from Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson “Your jaw will get sore from repeatedly hitting the floor.”
In my childhood days in the early 1950s there were performers like Jasan Mindmaster on television seemingly weekly in my native England, and I remember the sense of innocence, amazement and humour of those shows, unaware at that age of the Cold War and the growing threat of hot nuclear war. This ESP Mindshow took me back to that atmosphere, now in an age of a war on terror. The old tricks still work, as they have for centuries, taking our minds off harsh reality for an hour or two.
Savage does this particularly well by involving members of the audience throughout the show, in a completely non-threatening manner. The only warning for children is the opening story – The Eye by Edgar Allan Poe – which might cause nightmares, but otherwise the show is fun, though you might need a guide to find The Hub in the half dark of the UC campus.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Jasan Mindmaster ESP Mindshow at UC Theatre, The Hub, University of Canberra. March 23 and 24, 8pm; March 25, 5pm; March 30, 8pm, March 31 2pm and 8pm; April 1, 5pm
With a willing suspension of disbelief, Jasan Savage’s stage illusions are thoroughly enjoyable.
He claims not to be a magician, proving the point by demonstrating to us what he could not do because he is not a magician, except that in doing so he does the trick anyway, proving that he is an accomplished magician. This kind of gentle humour is the key to a pleasant evening of an old-fashioned kind.
Those of us who know Savage as the UC Theatre’s director, as many on opening did, were surprised to discover his talent as magician and mind-reader, though not so surprised at his deliberately execrable jokes. In fact he began his career at the age of 18, worked with the famous The Great Franquin in the 1950s, and claims to hold the record for a solo artist in Australia by performing 65 straight weeks in Queensland, quoting a high recommendation from Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson “Your jaw will get sore from repeatedly hitting the floor.”
In my childhood days in the early 1950s there were performers like Jasan Mindmaster on television seemingly weekly in my native England, and I remember the sense of innocence, amazement and humour of those shows, unaware at that age of the Cold War and the growing threat of hot nuclear war. This ESP Mindshow took me back to that atmosphere, now in an age of a war on terror. The old tricks still work, as they have for centuries, taking our minds off harsh reality for an hour or two.
Savage does this particularly well by involving members of the audience throughout the show, in a completely non-threatening manner. The only warning for children is the opening story – The Eye by Edgar Allan Poe – which might cause nightmares, but otherwise the show is fun, though you might need a guide to find The Hub in the half dark of the UC campus.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 14 March 2007
2007: Within by Elyse Horan
Within, incorporating Hamlet and Ophelia by Elyse Horan and Interior by Maurice Maeterlinck. Directed by Elyse Horan at Belconnen Theatre, Belconnen Community Centre, March 14-16 at 7.30pm.
It is important to see this production in context. Elyse Horan is a young writer and director who has put an interesting idea on stage, in what seems to me to be a self-training exercise. Completing Year 12 Drama at Copland College last year, and with several years’ experience at Canberra Youth Theatre, she has taken up the offer of a short season at Belconnen Theatre.
Director of Belconnen Theatre, Jan Wawrzynczak, has developed his role as producer for the many young people in Belconnen who need a place to put on work as they move from College into the adult world of theatre. Currently, Copland, Hawker and Radford Colleges have ex-students in the program, which gives them the theatre space free, with practical assistance and mentoring from Wawrzynczak. Other groups are nominally charged a hire fee, but pay at the end of their season, with Wawrzynczak able to adjust his budget to support groups who make a loss.
In this context, Horan’s experiment is clever in concept. Maeterlinck’s play is about a family unaware that their eldest daughter has been drowned. An old man from the village must tell them, but we see him with the man who discovered her body, watching the contented family through a lighted window. He does not know how to tell them, but in the end he must as the villagers bring the daughter’s body to the house.
Horan has seen the daughter as Ophelia, and presents her imagined scene of the lovers at the point where Hamlet begins to go mad, leading to Ophelia’s drowning. Though she has caught onto the idea of symbolism, which was Maeterlinck’s original contribution to theatre, Horan’s play is a mix of some effective realism with some juvenile black-costumed characters supposedly representing elements of Hamlet’s madness. If she had worked in the same mode as Maeterlinck, perhaps with a chorus who describe for us what they see, objectively reporting as we watch Ophelia and Hamlet in action (and hear Shakespeare’s words), Horan might have produced a small masterpiece.
She has far to go as a writer yet, of course, and this is a worthwhile rite of passage.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
It is important to see this production in context. Elyse Horan is a young writer and director who has put an interesting idea on stage, in what seems to me to be a self-training exercise. Completing Year 12 Drama at Copland College last year, and with several years’ experience at Canberra Youth Theatre, she has taken up the offer of a short season at Belconnen Theatre.
Director of Belconnen Theatre, Jan Wawrzynczak, has developed his role as producer for the many young people in Belconnen who need a place to put on work as they move from College into the adult world of theatre. Currently, Copland, Hawker and Radford Colleges have ex-students in the program, which gives them the theatre space free, with practical assistance and mentoring from Wawrzynczak. Other groups are nominally charged a hire fee, but pay at the end of their season, with Wawrzynczak able to adjust his budget to support groups who make a loss.
In this context, Horan’s experiment is clever in concept. Maeterlinck’s play is about a family unaware that their eldest daughter has been drowned. An old man from the village must tell them, but we see him with the man who discovered her body, watching the contented family through a lighted window. He does not know how to tell them, but in the end he must as the villagers bring the daughter’s body to the house.
Horan has seen the daughter as Ophelia, and presents her imagined scene of the lovers at the point where Hamlet begins to go mad, leading to Ophelia’s drowning. Though she has caught onto the idea of symbolism, which was Maeterlinck’s original contribution to theatre, Horan’s play is a mix of some effective realism with some juvenile black-costumed characters supposedly representing elements of Hamlet’s madness. If she had worked in the same mode as Maeterlinck, perhaps with a chorus who describe for us what they see, objectively reporting as we watch Ophelia and Hamlet in action (and hear Shakespeare’s words), Horan might have produced a small masterpiece.
She has far to go as a writer yet, of course, and this is a worthwhile rite of passage.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 22 February 2007
2007: William Yang, photographer and storyteller, the current H.C.Coombs Creative Arts Fellow. Feature article.
See George Gittoes’ Portrait of William Yang at http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an12020150-1
Nugget Coombs instigated the Creative Arts Fellowships at ANU in 1965, when William Yang was metaphorically panning for gold as a young man growing up in Dimbulah, Far North Queensland.
The ANU Research School of Humanities renamed the Fellowships in honour of Dr H.C.Coombs in 1996, the year before he died. By then he would have known of the success of William Yang, photographer and storyteller, and would not be at all surprised to know that Yang is the current H.C.Coombs Creative Arts Fellow until the end of May.
Nor would he mind extending the metaphor. Yang’s nuggets have panned out with increasing purity over the decades. He began as a Queensland University architecture student but discovered photography. Moving to Sydney in 1969, gold was revealed in the form of Rex Cramphorn, who became one of the most original theatre directors in Australia. But working as a writer who watched the then experimental Performance Syndicate actors in improvisation workshops, turning out playscripts which were rarely performed, Yang found that “all that glisters is not gold” in the sense that he could not make a living this way.
He did get a brief cameo role in Syndicate’s only commercial production, The Legend of King O’Malley, and remains a friend of author Bob Ellis to this day.
By 1974, photography re-emerged from the gravel in the pan. “I started photographing parties and I thought that real life threw up better situations than I could think up as a playwright” explained Yang to ABC TV presenter Stephen Feneley, on the occasion of a retrospective of his work at the State Library of New South Wales in 1998. Yang seemed to me too quiet and contained to speak of “throwing up”, but maybe he meant tossing the pan around to remove the dross.
In a sense the period between 1974 and 1989 produced successful flashy stones as well as the less obvious genuine gold. The parties Yang photographed often featured people who were celebrities in the social pages, so for some 15 years the man behind the camera made a living from the glossy magazines. He could do this, he noted, “because I’m Chinese [and] people don’t notice me as much. I mean, it’s a funny psychology, but I have felt that I’ve been more invisible than other photographers.”
During this time, Yang became a celebrity in his own right. The Australian Centre for Photography began to bring photography “to people’s consciousness as an art form”. Yang’s photographs exhibited there in 1977, titled Sydneyphiles, startled gallery viewers because of their unadorned, even raw depictions of social situations, being seen in a new light on a gallery wall rather than being flipped past in a magazine. Many shots shocked people who had not seen such images of gay people before. Yang noted how viewers used diversionary behaviour to deal with their shock. “I think that there was a sort of prejudice against the gay images, which people couldn’t come out and say, ‘oh, we don’t like these gay images’. Instead they said ‘oh, he uses flash. What dreadful lighting’. And so I think that they attacked me in that way.”
At home, where Yang likes to work surrounded by his own archive and equipment, away from the commercial, often black-and-white work, out of the public eye he found himself stirring a different pan, of his collection of colour slides. Gold slowly appeared as he experimented with the idea of making short stories with the images. This work reconnected Yang with theatre performance when he came out from behind the camera and presented nine photo-stories in the form of monologues and slide projections in the Downstairs Theatre at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre in 1989.
Audiences responded so well, especially to the stories centred on Yang’s family history, that he was able at last to drop commercial photography which had exhausted him by this time. He realised that he had created a new genre, still unique world-wide, which integrates story-telling, images on up to seven projectors, and music. The evolving form has produced a series of shows including Sadness (1992), Friends of Dorothy (1998), Blood Links (1999) which are largely autobiographical, followed by stories of other communities such as Aboriginal people of Enngonia and the German immigrants of South Australia in Shadows (2002) - which he performed in Canberra in May 2006 - and his first study of the “inner journey of the spirit” in Objects for Meditation at Sydney Opera House in 2005 and at the Melbourne International Arts Festival 2006.
It may seem an easy life, taking pictures and telling stories about them, but it can easily cost $50,000 to put a show together. The Australia Council Theatre Board has been a regular contributor, with a range of other sponsors. Sometimes individual audience members, from widely scattered locations as Yang tours Australia and internationally, may help with preparing the next show. Sometimes it is a venue, knowing his audience drawing power, which provides support in kind. Often it has been an arts festival which tops up the needed funds, and this was to have been the case with the Sydney Festival in January 2007.
Unfortunately, to Yang’s great disappointment, this sponsorship fell through. His current work, China, could not be finished and his performance had to be cancelled. However he was perhaps lucky that the ANU Creative Arts Fellowships rotate. Visual artist one year, writer the next and this year a performing artist. Working away from home is not necessarily easy for Yang but he is pleased to have been awarded the Fellowship not only because of the recognition of the quality of his art but also because his stipend will enable him to complete China and to begin work on his next show which has the working title My Generation.
China is about Yang’s experiences visiting China as he has done now over many years, learning more about Taoism which was introduced to him in his thirties by a Chinese teacher who told him “ 'You're ashamed of being Chinese’. I had to admit that I was. So that brought the change in me where I had to catch up on all those years and I researched the Chinese in Australia and I’ve told that story as the basis of a lot of my modern work.”
China will be performed in-house for ANU staff and students in March. It takes the audience on to modern China and will be performed for the general public in Sydney at the new home of the Performance Space at Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh for a short season March 20-24 (performancespace.com.au).
My Generation, a study of Yang’s experiences in Sydney in the 1980s, will be staged in 2008.
Already he is finding his time at ANU is “terribly busy”. Though he is not required to teach, he is giving some lectures, he finds that there are so many interesting people to talk to and who want to ask him about his work that he has to control his social life, he has taken on two students in apprenticeship roles, and he has to learn the processes needed to produce quality digital images from his collection of slides.
He is highly appreciative of the range of people with specialist expertise at ANU and especially gives thanks for having been taught how to set up and use the appropriate computer scanning program to create his images at professional quality. He has also found a specialist player of the Chinese erhu, PhD student at the ANU School of Music, Nicholas Ng, one of the few players in Australia and who will perform with Yang in China. Yang has long collaborated closely with live musicians such as Colin Offord (Shadows), and he sees his interaction with arts people, technicians and social historians as an important aspect of his Fellowship.
Gabriella Coslovich, writing about William Yang in The Age, quotes the Chinese Taoist sage Lao-tzu: “The master acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything” and I found an hour in conversation with Yang left me thinking about the nature of his art. His images are of things as they are, but the music and the storytelling make the meaning of these pictures manifest. I wondered if, to do this, he had to create a role for himself to perform. He said, “No. Like everyone I have a private and a public self” and it is his public self who tells the stories, not an acted character different from himself.
Hearing this, and observing the slight, perhaps wry smile which goes with his words, I felt that HC Coombs did the right thing back in 1965 to provide this gold nugget with a place to shine.
“In 1989 I knew I was on to a good form,” Yang says, explaining that in one sense the series of images he shows look like raw film, yet the limitations created by the slide show format force the audience to “work a lot harder at one of my pieces than if they were watching a documentary film”. The work “alludes to a novel, or an opera”. Because it is a performance, and people pay to see it, there is a special commitment, more than walking around a gallery “speed viewing”. People have to draw their own conclusions as the narrative progresses. They have to make sense of it for themselves, and “they enjoy the challenge” says Creative Arts Fellow William Yang.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Nugget Coombs instigated the Creative Arts Fellowships at ANU in 1965, when William Yang was metaphorically panning for gold as a young man growing up in Dimbulah, Far North Queensland.
The ANU Research School of Humanities renamed the Fellowships in honour of Dr H.C.Coombs in 1996, the year before he died. By then he would have known of the success of William Yang, photographer and storyteller, and would not be at all surprised to know that Yang is the current H.C.Coombs Creative Arts Fellow until the end of May.
Nor would he mind extending the metaphor. Yang’s nuggets have panned out with increasing purity over the decades. He began as a Queensland University architecture student but discovered photography. Moving to Sydney in 1969, gold was revealed in the form of Rex Cramphorn, who became one of the most original theatre directors in Australia. But working as a writer who watched the then experimental Performance Syndicate actors in improvisation workshops, turning out playscripts which were rarely performed, Yang found that “all that glisters is not gold” in the sense that he could not make a living this way.
He did get a brief cameo role in Syndicate’s only commercial production, The Legend of King O’Malley, and remains a friend of author Bob Ellis to this day.
By 1974, photography re-emerged from the gravel in the pan. “I started photographing parties and I thought that real life threw up better situations than I could think up as a playwright” explained Yang to ABC TV presenter Stephen Feneley, on the occasion of a retrospective of his work at the State Library of New South Wales in 1998. Yang seemed to me too quiet and contained to speak of “throwing up”, but maybe he meant tossing the pan around to remove the dross.
In a sense the period between 1974 and 1989 produced successful flashy stones as well as the less obvious genuine gold. The parties Yang photographed often featured people who were celebrities in the social pages, so for some 15 years the man behind the camera made a living from the glossy magazines. He could do this, he noted, “because I’m Chinese [and] people don’t notice me as much. I mean, it’s a funny psychology, but I have felt that I’ve been more invisible than other photographers.”
During this time, Yang became a celebrity in his own right. The Australian Centre for Photography began to bring photography “to people’s consciousness as an art form”. Yang’s photographs exhibited there in 1977, titled Sydneyphiles, startled gallery viewers because of their unadorned, even raw depictions of social situations, being seen in a new light on a gallery wall rather than being flipped past in a magazine. Many shots shocked people who had not seen such images of gay people before. Yang noted how viewers used diversionary behaviour to deal with their shock. “I think that there was a sort of prejudice against the gay images, which people couldn’t come out and say, ‘oh, we don’t like these gay images’. Instead they said ‘oh, he uses flash. What dreadful lighting’. And so I think that they attacked me in that way.”
At home, where Yang likes to work surrounded by his own archive and equipment, away from the commercial, often black-and-white work, out of the public eye he found himself stirring a different pan, of his collection of colour slides. Gold slowly appeared as he experimented with the idea of making short stories with the images. This work reconnected Yang with theatre performance when he came out from behind the camera and presented nine photo-stories in the form of monologues and slide projections in the Downstairs Theatre at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre in 1989.
Audiences responded so well, especially to the stories centred on Yang’s family history, that he was able at last to drop commercial photography which had exhausted him by this time. He realised that he had created a new genre, still unique world-wide, which integrates story-telling, images on up to seven projectors, and music. The evolving form has produced a series of shows including Sadness (1992), Friends of Dorothy (1998), Blood Links (1999) which are largely autobiographical, followed by stories of other communities such as Aboriginal people of Enngonia and the German immigrants of South Australia in Shadows (2002) - which he performed in Canberra in May 2006 - and his first study of the “inner journey of the spirit” in Objects for Meditation at Sydney Opera House in 2005 and at the Melbourne International Arts Festival 2006.
It may seem an easy life, taking pictures and telling stories about them, but it can easily cost $50,000 to put a show together. The Australia Council Theatre Board has been a regular contributor, with a range of other sponsors. Sometimes individual audience members, from widely scattered locations as Yang tours Australia and internationally, may help with preparing the next show. Sometimes it is a venue, knowing his audience drawing power, which provides support in kind. Often it has been an arts festival which tops up the needed funds, and this was to have been the case with the Sydney Festival in January 2007.
Unfortunately, to Yang’s great disappointment, this sponsorship fell through. His current work, China, could not be finished and his performance had to be cancelled. However he was perhaps lucky that the ANU Creative Arts Fellowships rotate. Visual artist one year, writer the next and this year a performing artist. Working away from home is not necessarily easy for Yang but he is pleased to have been awarded the Fellowship not only because of the recognition of the quality of his art but also because his stipend will enable him to complete China and to begin work on his next show which has the working title My Generation.
China is about Yang’s experiences visiting China as he has done now over many years, learning more about Taoism which was introduced to him in his thirties by a Chinese teacher who told him “ 'You're ashamed of being Chinese’. I had to admit that I was. So that brought the change in me where I had to catch up on all those years and I researched the Chinese in Australia and I’ve told that story as the basis of a lot of my modern work.”
China will be performed in-house for ANU staff and students in March. It takes the audience on to modern China and will be performed for the general public in Sydney at the new home of the Performance Space at Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh for a short season March 20-24 (performancespace.com.au).
My Generation, a study of Yang’s experiences in Sydney in the 1980s, will be staged in 2008.
Already he is finding his time at ANU is “terribly busy”. Though he is not required to teach, he is giving some lectures, he finds that there are so many interesting people to talk to and who want to ask him about his work that he has to control his social life, he has taken on two students in apprenticeship roles, and he has to learn the processes needed to produce quality digital images from his collection of slides.
He is highly appreciative of the range of people with specialist expertise at ANU and especially gives thanks for having been taught how to set up and use the appropriate computer scanning program to create his images at professional quality. He has also found a specialist player of the Chinese erhu, PhD student at the ANU School of Music, Nicholas Ng, one of the few players in Australia and who will perform with Yang in China. Yang has long collaborated closely with live musicians such as Colin Offord (Shadows), and he sees his interaction with arts people, technicians and social historians as an important aspect of his Fellowship.
Gabriella Coslovich, writing about William Yang in The Age, quotes the Chinese Taoist sage Lao-tzu: “The master acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything” and I found an hour in conversation with Yang left me thinking about the nature of his art. His images are of things as they are, but the music and the storytelling make the meaning of these pictures manifest. I wondered if, to do this, he had to create a role for himself to perform. He said, “No. Like everyone I have a private and a public self” and it is his public self who tells the stories, not an acted character different from himself.
Hearing this, and observing the slight, perhaps wry smile which goes with his words, I felt that HC Coombs did the right thing back in 1965 to provide this gold nugget with a place to shine.
“In 1989 I knew I was on to a good form,” Yang says, explaining that in one sense the series of images he shows look like raw film, yet the limitations created by the slide show format force the audience to “work a lot harder at one of my pieces than if they were watching a documentary film”. The work “alludes to a novel, or an opera”. Because it is a performance, and people pay to see it, there is a special commitment, more than walking around a gallery “speed viewing”. People have to draw their own conclusions as the narrative progresses. They have to make sense of it for themselves, and “they enjoy the challenge” says Creative Arts Fellow William Yang.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 19 February 2007
2007: A Local Man by Bob Ellis and Robin McLachlan. Promo feature article
This paper [The Canberra Times] reviewed the first public performance of A Local Man by Bob Ellis and Robin McLachlan in August 2004. The production was for the small audience who could fit into the Ponton Theatre on the Bathurst Campus of Charles Sturt University.
Though the script was simply subtitled “a new play about Ben Chifley” with the likelihood of some re-writing in mind and the performance by Tony Barry needing to settle down, even the try-out showed the play’s capacity to create an emotional response and we expressed the hope that it would tour Australia.
Tony Barry Enterprises and Keep Breathing Productions have kept the hope alive. After a successful 6-week season at The Ensemble Theatre in Sydney last November-December, we shall have the opportunity to see what is now dubbed “an intimate portrait of a great Australian statesman” here at The Playhouse, March 7-11.
A Local Man is quite the oppposite of an historical tract, though the research behind the story is meticulous. After losing to Robert Menzies in 1949 and 1951, Ben Chifley had to face up to losing his party leadership. Ellis and McLachlan have imagined his last evening at home, writing his farewell speech. The strength of the play is not so much about what he decides to say, but much more about his feelings, often hidden even from himself. We see a man of integrity and discipline close to his final point of no return. Tony Barry captures Chifley’s manner and mood, making this brief moment in his life into a time of tragic significance as we cannot help ourselves compare the past with the present.
Robin McLachlan is the historian half of the writing team and has kept a close eye on the production. Since the Ensemble cut two major phone calls Chifley made as he wrote his final speech, McLachlan has had his say. The production we will see, at 140 minutes including interval, is the complete script as published by Currency Press in 2005.
Well-known author Bob Ellis, whose theatre writing career goes back to the now legendary The Legend of King O’Malley which he co-authored with Michael Boddy, could probably only be trusted to give me a biassed assessment of the 2006 season of A Local Man. But I checked the internet, as one does.
Surely Fiona Prior, writing on the Henry Thornton website, which is so closely associated with the Institute of Public Affairs (“Australia’s leading free market think tank”) that you can log in for joint membership, must be an independent voice. Well, she says of the night she saw it at The Ensemble, it was “almost full house. This indicates the popularity of A Local Man and an interest by the audience – like my own – to acquire greater insight into the characters who formed Australia’s political history and present.”
Ellis told me “Bob Hawke wept on my shoulder” and “Bob Carr cried, perhaps the only time since his father’s funeral”. He reported many others with similar feelings, saying how Chifley led “an exemplary but forgotten life” and bemoaning “if only there were leaders like that now”. Gough Whitlam was “very impressed” and when Barry Jones sat in on a seminar following a performance “he answered all the questions put to me”.
The explanation Ellis has for the impact of watching a defeated Prime Minister, all alone on a cold and stormy night in his small cottage in Bathurst (which you can visit today), writing what he expects to be his last speech to the next day’s Labor Party Conference (as it was), knowing his health may fail any time (as it did only three days later) is that Chifley spoke for the working class in an era when ordinary people’s talents were wasted. Only the few were educated, only the wealthy had access to power.
Perhaps ironically, it is Fiona Prior who lists Chifley’s achievements. “These included the Snowy Mountains Authority, the development of what we know as Qantas today, what we once knew as TAA airlines, The Joint Coal Board, The Stevedoring Commission, The National Shipping Line, restructuring and expansion of CSIRO, the Australian National University and he was acknowledged as the political father of the Holden car. He was trail-blazing in the development of Australia’s education, immigration, welfare and health sectors. He was an innovative economist. He steered Australia through a war, a depression and avoided massive war debt.” That’s an economist speaking, and it’s quite a record.
Bob Ellis says, as we discuss the current Prime Minister’s understanding of history, John Howard’s motto is “Ignorance is strength” while Chifley took the opposite view that “Knowledge is power” and should be made available to everyone.
We may well expect to see tears at the Playhouse before the Ides of March.
A Local Man by Bob Ellis and Robin McLachlan
The Playhouse
Canberra Theatre Centre
Wednesday-Saturday March 7-10 at 8pm. Sunday March 11 at 3pm
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Though the script was simply subtitled “a new play about Ben Chifley” with the likelihood of some re-writing in mind and the performance by Tony Barry needing to settle down, even the try-out showed the play’s capacity to create an emotional response and we expressed the hope that it would tour Australia.
Tony Barry Enterprises and Keep Breathing Productions have kept the hope alive. After a successful 6-week season at The Ensemble Theatre in Sydney last November-December, we shall have the opportunity to see what is now dubbed “an intimate portrait of a great Australian statesman” here at The Playhouse, March 7-11.
A Local Man is quite the oppposite of an historical tract, though the research behind the story is meticulous. After losing to Robert Menzies in 1949 and 1951, Ben Chifley had to face up to losing his party leadership. Ellis and McLachlan have imagined his last evening at home, writing his farewell speech. The strength of the play is not so much about what he decides to say, but much more about his feelings, often hidden even from himself. We see a man of integrity and discipline close to his final point of no return. Tony Barry captures Chifley’s manner and mood, making this brief moment in his life into a time of tragic significance as we cannot help ourselves compare the past with the present.
Robin McLachlan is the historian half of the writing team and has kept a close eye on the production. Since the Ensemble cut two major phone calls Chifley made as he wrote his final speech, McLachlan has had his say. The production we will see, at 140 minutes including interval, is the complete script as published by Currency Press in 2005.
Well-known author Bob Ellis, whose theatre writing career goes back to the now legendary The Legend of King O’Malley which he co-authored with Michael Boddy, could probably only be trusted to give me a biassed assessment of the 2006 season of A Local Man. But I checked the internet, as one does.
Surely Fiona Prior, writing on the Henry Thornton website, which is so closely associated with the Institute of Public Affairs (“Australia’s leading free market think tank”) that you can log in for joint membership, must be an independent voice. Well, she says of the night she saw it at The Ensemble, it was “almost full house. This indicates the popularity of A Local Man and an interest by the audience – like my own – to acquire greater insight into the characters who formed Australia’s political history and present.”
Ellis told me “Bob Hawke wept on my shoulder” and “Bob Carr cried, perhaps the only time since his father’s funeral”. He reported many others with similar feelings, saying how Chifley led “an exemplary but forgotten life” and bemoaning “if only there were leaders like that now”. Gough Whitlam was “very impressed” and when Barry Jones sat in on a seminar following a performance “he answered all the questions put to me”.
The explanation Ellis has for the impact of watching a defeated Prime Minister, all alone on a cold and stormy night in his small cottage in Bathurst (which you can visit today), writing what he expects to be his last speech to the next day’s Labor Party Conference (as it was), knowing his health may fail any time (as it did only three days later) is that Chifley spoke for the working class in an era when ordinary people’s talents were wasted. Only the few were educated, only the wealthy had access to power.
Perhaps ironically, it is Fiona Prior who lists Chifley’s achievements. “These included the Snowy Mountains Authority, the development of what we know as Qantas today, what we once knew as TAA airlines, The Joint Coal Board, The Stevedoring Commission, The National Shipping Line, restructuring and expansion of CSIRO, the Australian National University and he was acknowledged as the political father of the Holden car. He was trail-blazing in the development of Australia’s education, immigration, welfare and health sectors. He was an innovative economist. He steered Australia through a war, a depression and avoided massive war debt.” That’s an economist speaking, and it’s quite a record.
Bob Ellis says, as we discuss the current Prime Minister’s understanding of history, John Howard’s motto is “Ignorance is strength” while Chifley took the opposite view that “Knowledge is power” and should be made available to everyone.
We may well expect to see tears at the Playhouse before the Ides of March.
A Local Man by Bob Ellis and Robin McLachlan
The Playhouse
Canberra Theatre Centre
Wednesday-Saturday March 7-10 at 8pm. Sunday March 11 at 3pm
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 18 February 2007
2007: Alex Buzo – playwright: Celebration of his Life, Sydney.
Born on July 23, 1944, Alex Buzo – playwright, wordsmith, sports raconteur and humorous social commentator – suffered constant pain from the time his cancer was diagnosed in 2001 until his untimely death on August 16, 2006.
In 1971, his play Macquarie was Playtext No 1, opening the batting for the iconic publisher of Australian performing arts, Currency Press. Katharine Brisbane, co-founder of Currency with her husband Philip Parsons, hosted a day-long celebration of Buzo’s life and work last Sunday February 18, which will be remembered as a special day for his immediate and extended theatre family.
We heard readings from a wide range of his works, all showing Buzo’s sensitivity and skill as a writer, yet for me a high point was when his daughter Laura described not only his dedication to his profession as he maintained his deadlines until just three weeks before he died, but especially how – once she had passed through her teenage years when her father, she thought, “just didn’t get it – about anything” – she discovered from his play Coralie Lansdowne Says No how much he really understood about women. “Here you are,” she said to him in his last few days, “surrounded by one wife, three daughters and a female cat.” He opened his eyes briefly. “Unbelievable!” he exclaimed softly.
Buzo’s humanity and humility, balancing his determination and extraordinary control of words, came through every reading and every comment from those who had known and worked with him. It was a very satisfying revelation for me to discover that the compassionate artist I had imagined him to be from reading and teaching his plays was real.
Currency Press offers much more than publishing. From the homepage www.currency.com.au links take you to upcoming public special events, the regular newsletter and features such as Author of the Month – currently Queanbeyan’s Tommy Murphy, whose early work was first noticed in The Canberra Times.
An unexpected Canberra connection began the Buzo celebration. Ned Manning’s first play Us and Them was partly based on his teaching experience at Dickson High School (before it became the recently reprieved Dickson College). I had not remembered that Manning, despite fair skin and blond hair, played the Pakistani Ahmed in Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed, directed by Pat Hutchinson with Colin Vaskess as Norm for Fortune Theatre, Canberra’s first attempt at a permanent professional theatre company. Manning read from Buzo’s late very funny book on professional and social cricket, Legends of the Baggy Green.
Norm and Ahmed, infamous for being banned for obscene language in Queensland and Victoria, became a theme to follow through the day. Manning became a cricketing partner with Buzo after playing Ahmed. Buzo wrote about producing the play in Kuala Lumpur and Mumbai in “Wary Asians on a Theme” (a wordplay on “variations on a theme”) in Quadrant, November 2004, read for us by another daughter Emma, with Eliza Logan and Paul Wilson. Another surprise was the unpublished update of the play, titled Normie and Tuan, read by Harold Hopkins as a Vietnam veteran and dark-skinned Craig Menaud as a young Malaysian studying communications at University of Technology, Sydney, but whose family had been anti-communists in Vietnam.
The original play was based on the real experience of a student friend of Buzo’s, harrassed on purely racist grounds in the 1960s. Normie and Tuan showed the same racism, with the same dissembling Aussie behaviour in the more modern context, and an equally shocking end. But the story of productions in Asia of Norm and Ahmed, with Muslim actors in the role of Ahmed was highly revealing. Where, Buzo wrote, the Pakistani was seen by Australian audiences as the victim of undeserving, gratuitous racism, in Malaysia he became a hero, representing all those family members who had written home about their experiences as students in Australia - except among people of Chinese background who resented his hero status in a country where Malays were legally given employment and other advantages (while the police had to be paid a large “deposit”, only to be refunded if the play was not found to be offensive).
In Mumbai, however, the Indians found Ahmed, a Pakistani, to be “beyond the pale”. All these productions were successful in attracting audiences, but were controversial for very different reasons. Cultural differences also confronted Buzo with the production in Asia of Coralie Lansdowne Says No. Internal characterisation, going back to Ibsen’s works, was not understood and he wrote “the Norwegian sage’s revolution has not reached the East”. I wondered, though, if simple action as a basis for drama is not as much the common understanding here as it is in Hong Kong.
At the end of the day, it was Bob Ellis who, saying Buzo was Australia’s modern Moliere and Sheridan, criticised the critics who had “slammed [the later] plays compared with Buzo’s energetic rival David Williamson”, while it was ironically the Sydney critic John McCallum who thought that Big River and Marginal Farm are rich plays in which the key characters reach a stage of “more than resignation, but of acceptance made in peace, though tinged with melancholy.”
With such an understanding of humanity I found myself agreeing with McCallum that Buzo “will be the one who will survive.” The day was indeed a great celebration of Buzo’s life and work.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
In 1971, his play Macquarie was Playtext No 1, opening the batting for the iconic publisher of Australian performing arts, Currency Press. Katharine Brisbane, co-founder of Currency with her husband Philip Parsons, hosted a day-long celebration of Buzo’s life and work last Sunday February 18, which will be remembered as a special day for his immediate and extended theatre family.
We heard readings from a wide range of his works, all showing Buzo’s sensitivity and skill as a writer, yet for me a high point was when his daughter Laura described not only his dedication to his profession as he maintained his deadlines until just three weeks before he died, but especially how – once she had passed through her teenage years when her father, she thought, “just didn’t get it – about anything” – she discovered from his play Coralie Lansdowne Says No how much he really understood about women. “Here you are,” she said to him in his last few days, “surrounded by one wife, three daughters and a female cat.” He opened his eyes briefly. “Unbelievable!” he exclaimed softly.
Buzo’s humanity and humility, balancing his determination and extraordinary control of words, came through every reading and every comment from those who had known and worked with him. It was a very satisfying revelation for me to discover that the compassionate artist I had imagined him to be from reading and teaching his plays was real.
Currency Press offers much more than publishing. From the homepage www.currency.com.au links take you to upcoming public special events, the regular newsletter and features such as Author of the Month – currently Queanbeyan’s Tommy Murphy, whose early work was first noticed in The Canberra Times.
An unexpected Canberra connection began the Buzo celebration. Ned Manning’s first play Us and Them was partly based on his teaching experience at Dickson High School (before it became the recently reprieved Dickson College). I had not remembered that Manning, despite fair skin and blond hair, played the Pakistani Ahmed in Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed, directed by Pat Hutchinson with Colin Vaskess as Norm for Fortune Theatre, Canberra’s first attempt at a permanent professional theatre company. Manning read from Buzo’s late very funny book on professional and social cricket, Legends of the Baggy Green.
Norm and Ahmed, infamous for being banned for obscene language in Queensland and Victoria, became a theme to follow through the day. Manning became a cricketing partner with Buzo after playing Ahmed. Buzo wrote about producing the play in Kuala Lumpur and Mumbai in “Wary Asians on a Theme” (a wordplay on “variations on a theme”) in Quadrant, November 2004, read for us by another daughter Emma, with Eliza Logan and Paul Wilson. Another surprise was the unpublished update of the play, titled Normie and Tuan, read by Harold Hopkins as a Vietnam veteran and dark-skinned Craig Menaud as a young Malaysian studying communications at University of Technology, Sydney, but whose family had been anti-communists in Vietnam.
The original play was based on the real experience of a student friend of Buzo’s, harrassed on purely racist grounds in the 1960s. Normie and Tuan showed the same racism, with the same dissembling Aussie behaviour in the more modern context, and an equally shocking end. But the story of productions in Asia of Norm and Ahmed, with Muslim actors in the role of Ahmed was highly revealing. Where, Buzo wrote, the Pakistani was seen by Australian audiences as the victim of undeserving, gratuitous racism, in Malaysia he became a hero, representing all those family members who had written home about their experiences as students in Australia - except among people of Chinese background who resented his hero status in a country where Malays were legally given employment and other advantages (while the police had to be paid a large “deposit”, only to be refunded if the play was not found to be offensive).
In Mumbai, however, the Indians found Ahmed, a Pakistani, to be “beyond the pale”. All these productions were successful in attracting audiences, but were controversial for very different reasons. Cultural differences also confronted Buzo with the production in Asia of Coralie Lansdowne Says No. Internal characterisation, going back to Ibsen’s works, was not understood and he wrote “the Norwegian sage’s revolution has not reached the East”. I wondered, though, if simple action as a basis for drama is not as much the common understanding here as it is in Hong Kong.
At the end of the day, it was Bob Ellis who, saying Buzo was Australia’s modern Moliere and Sheridan, criticised the critics who had “slammed [the later] plays compared with Buzo’s energetic rival David Williamson”, while it was ironically the Sydney critic John McCallum who thought that Big River and Marginal Farm are rich plays in which the key characters reach a stage of “more than resignation, but of acceptance made in peace, though tinged with melancholy.”
With such an understanding of humanity I found myself agreeing with McCallum that Buzo “will be the one who will survive.” The day was indeed a great celebration of Buzo’s life and work.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 12 February 2007
2007: After Agincourt by Peter Mottley
After Agincourt by Peter Mottley. John Cuffe directed by Liz Bradley. National Multicultural Festival at The Street Theatre Studio, February 12-17, 7.30pm
Peter Mottley, much loved Oxford Theatre Guild writer and director for many years, died suddenly in August 2006. How poorly served is his memory by actor John Cuffe. Maybe it is a brave thing indeed to take on the performance of an hour long monologue, but a professional actor should have had the wit to take his courage in both hands and refund patrons who are asked to pay $20 for such a shambles.
After perhaps five minutes, Cuffe fell into silence, tried repeating a line or two, broke out of role, apologised, called for the line and received a non-committal hard to hear reply. Somewhat aggrieved, he demanded the line, only to be told by someone in the dark that she didn’t have a script. So he told us he would back track a bit and start again, which he did until the next embarrassing silence. He struggled on regardless, through perhaps a dozen such theatrical moments of death, so often repeating himself in attempts to find his place that it became impossible to know how much of what we heard were Mottley’s original words, how much we never heard at all, and how much was blather to fill in the spaces.
What a shame. The speech, ostensibly by Shakespeare’s character Pistol seven years after Henry V foolishly fought the battle of Agincourt, is a great indictment of war. Originally a radio play on BBC3 in 1988, it works not through a superficial reading of Pistol as a coarse cockney but by a flow of language and musicality which creates in one speech the whole range of emotions from comedy to tragedy. Enough bits of Mottley’s writing escaped mangling to give the audience the basic idea, but as we all know, timing is everything in theatre. But much of the time I had to look elsewhere, hiding my head in shame.
Only afterwards was I further embarrassed to read in the program, over John Cuffe’s name, about Mottley’s death and that “to him these performances are respectfully dedicated”, and, as a final insult to the audience, “My apologies for any unintentional omissions”! There is no other explanation. So he knew he wasn’t up to the task. So he shouldn’t have gone on stage. Refund please.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Peter Mottley, much loved Oxford Theatre Guild writer and director for many years, died suddenly in August 2006. How poorly served is his memory by actor John Cuffe. Maybe it is a brave thing indeed to take on the performance of an hour long monologue, but a professional actor should have had the wit to take his courage in both hands and refund patrons who are asked to pay $20 for such a shambles.
After perhaps five minutes, Cuffe fell into silence, tried repeating a line or two, broke out of role, apologised, called for the line and received a non-committal hard to hear reply. Somewhat aggrieved, he demanded the line, only to be told by someone in the dark that she didn’t have a script. So he told us he would back track a bit and start again, which he did until the next embarrassing silence. He struggled on regardless, through perhaps a dozen such theatrical moments of death, so often repeating himself in attempts to find his place that it became impossible to know how much of what we heard were Mottley’s original words, how much we never heard at all, and how much was blather to fill in the spaces.
What a shame. The speech, ostensibly by Shakespeare’s character Pistol seven years after Henry V foolishly fought the battle of Agincourt, is a great indictment of war. Originally a radio play on BBC3 in 1988, it works not through a superficial reading of Pistol as a coarse cockney but by a flow of language and musicality which creates in one speech the whole range of emotions from comedy to tragedy. Enough bits of Mottley’s writing escaped mangling to give the audience the basic idea, but as we all know, timing is everything in theatre. But much of the time I had to look elsewhere, hiding my head in shame.
Only afterwards was I further embarrassed to read in the program, over John Cuffe’s name, about Mottley’s death and that “to him these performances are respectfully dedicated”, and, as a final insult to the audience, “My apologies for any unintentional omissions”! There is no other explanation. So he knew he wasn’t up to the task. So he shouldn’t have gone on stage. Refund please.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 7 February 2007
2007: Two Meals from Manila: Manila Takeaway by Noonee Doronila and 'to heat you up and cool you down' by David Finnegan. Promo feature article.
Slavo: Iniibig kita. What does that mean?
Rosario: I love you with all my heart and soul!
Love is the theme across interacting cultures in the two plays, Manila Takeaway by Noonee Doronila and to heat you up and cool you down by David Finnegan, which form a double bill under the title Two Meals from Manila. But there is more to look for in this National Multicultural Festival production than you might expect.
The love is not only between an immigrant Serb undergound miner in Mt Isa and a live-in nanny in Metro Manila, who meet first through agency-supplied photos. Nor is it just an unexpected relationship in Manila’s gay and lesbian community. It’s at least as much about a Filipina social worker’s love of Australia and her need to research and write a truthful drama, as it is about a young Anglo-Australian writer learning to love theatre in the Philippines. Two Meals from Manila is symbolic of the very nature of multiculturalism.
A discussion of the word multicultural, now replaced by citizenship in the Department of Immigration’s title, revealed that though many migrants once found the word distasteful, they have now realised that it is the correct word for modern Australian culture. Like a multi-tool, suggested Jan Wawrzynczak, manager of Belconnen Community Theatre, one tool can do what many other tools can do separately. So multiculturalism is not assimilation into one culture, not integration, not mere cooperation. It is indivisible yet multi-functional.
Hazel Lim, the Filipina economist who plays Rosario, says she can only define Australian culture by what it is not, since the Australian way of life is made up of bits of many other cultures rather than being an original culture in its own right. Only Aboriginal culture can claim that distinction. This is why she loves Australia. If she had to “integrate”, she would feel “alienated from me as I am”, yet as Wawrzynczak said, most migrants want to become a citizen as he has.
Just as Rosario does, despite some of her friends’ terrible marriages to ocker Aussie dictators and the accidental death of her loving husband. Yet there is the constant fear of deportation, like Vivian Solon.
Doronila writes within the long tradition of theatre of social justice, similar in the Philippines to another one-time Spanish (rather Portugese) colony, Brazil, where Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed is her model for Manila Takeaway.
For Finnegan to discover the depth and intensity of Filipino theatre while on a 7-week residency with Tanghalang Pilipino Theatre at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines was a life-changing experience. The workshop development and first production of to heat you up and cool you down was directed by Issa Lopez in the Chunky Far Flung Café in a street full of shoe shops. The strong relationship between the director, the theatrical style and the local community, though different in its details, is being maintained in the production here, directed by Max Barker using a non-naturalistic style based in almost-choreographed improvisational physical theatre.
Quezon City’s shoe shops are more relevant than you might imagine. Think of Imelda Marcos. It was she who ordered the construction of the huge Cultural Centre of the Philippines as a façade to boost the nation’s reputation internationally, because she loved her country so much, she said. During construction an underground section collapsed, trapping some 180 workers. Rather than slow the pace to rescue them, Imelda order them concreted in. Ironically she also encouraged the arts – after all, what else happens in a cultural centre?
And so the Philippines Educational Theatre Association grew to greater prominence, as Filipino theatre always has during periods of repression. PETA continues today, long after the demise of the Marcos regime, keeping Filipino social history alive with original plays about Indigenous people, slum dwellers, the disparity between rich and poor, and the power of the military who detain people at will. Inconvenient artists and community lawyers still “disappear” in the Philippines.
The Two Meals from Manila are about love and interrelationships, between characters in the plays and between Australia and the Philippines at many levels. Both plays are theatrically interesting visually and emotionally, and bring a new depth thematically to the Community Centre in Belconnen, just right for an International Multicultural Festival.
Two Meals from Manila: Manila Takeaway and to heat you up and cool you down
International Multicultural Festival
Belconnen Theatre, Community Centre,
Swanson Cct, Belconnen
Thursday – Saturday February 15-17, 8pm
Bookings: at The Street Theatre 6247 1223
Tickets: full $23, concession $17
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Rosario: I love you with all my heart and soul!
Love is the theme across interacting cultures in the two plays, Manila Takeaway by Noonee Doronila and to heat you up and cool you down by David Finnegan, which form a double bill under the title Two Meals from Manila. But there is more to look for in this National Multicultural Festival production than you might expect.
The love is not only between an immigrant Serb undergound miner in Mt Isa and a live-in nanny in Metro Manila, who meet first through agency-supplied photos. Nor is it just an unexpected relationship in Manila’s gay and lesbian community. It’s at least as much about a Filipina social worker’s love of Australia and her need to research and write a truthful drama, as it is about a young Anglo-Australian writer learning to love theatre in the Philippines. Two Meals from Manila is symbolic of the very nature of multiculturalism.
A discussion of the word multicultural, now replaced by citizenship in the Department of Immigration’s title, revealed that though many migrants once found the word distasteful, they have now realised that it is the correct word for modern Australian culture. Like a multi-tool, suggested Jan Wawrzynczak, manager of Belconnen Community Theatre, one tool can do what many other tools can do separately. So multiculturalism is not assimilation into one culture, not integration, not mere cooperation. It is indivisible yet multi-functional.
Hazel Lim, the Filipina economist who plays Rosario, says she can only define Australian culture by what it is not, since the Australian way of life is made up of bits of many other cultures rather than being an original culture in its own right. Only Aboriginal culture can claim that distinction. This is why she loves Australia. If she had to “integrate”, she would feel “alienated from me as I am”, yet as Wawrzynczak said, most migrants want to become a citizen as he has.
Just as Rosario does, despite some of her friends’ terrible marriages to ocker Aussie dictators and the accidental death of her loving husband. Yet there is the constant fear of deportation, like Vivian Solon.
Doronila writes within the long tradition of theatre of social justice, similar in the Philippines to another one-time Spanish (rather Portugese) colony, Brazil, where Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed is her model for Manila Takeaway.
For Finnegan to discover the depth and intensity of Filipino theatre while on a 7-week residency with Tanghalang Pilipino Theatre at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines was a life-changing experience. The workshop development and first production of to heat you up and cool you down was directed by Issa Lopez in the Chunky Far Flung Café in a street full of shoe shops. The strong relationship between the director, the theatrical style and the local community, though different in its details, is being maintained in the production here, directed by Max Barker using a non-naturalistic style based in almost-choreographed improvisational physical theatre.
Quezon City’s shoe shops are more relevant than you might imagine. Think of Imelda Marcos. It was she who ordered the construction of the huge Cultural Centre of the Philippines as a façade to boost the nation’s reputation internationally, because she loved her country so much, she said. During construction an underground section collapsed, trapping some 180 workers. Rather than slow the pace to rescue them, Imelda order them concreted in. Ironically she also encouraged the arts – after all, what else happens in a cultural centre?
And so the Philippines Educational Theatre Association grew to greater prominence, as Filipino theatre always has during periods of repression. PETA continues today, long after the demise of the Marcos regime, keeping Filipino social history alive with original plays about Indigenous people, slum dwellers, the disparity between rich and poor, and the power of the military who detain people at will. Inconvenient artists and community lawyers still “disappear” in the Philippines.
The Two Meals from Manila are about love and interrelationships, between characters in the plays and between Australia and the Philippines at many levels. Both plays are theatrically interesting visually and emotionally, and bring a new depth thematically to the Community Centre in Belconnen, just right for an International Multicultural Festival.
Two Meals from Manila: Manila Takeaway and to heat you up and cool you down
International Multicultural Festival
Belconnen Theatre, Community Centre,
Swanson Cct, Belconnen
Thursday – Saturday February 15-17, 8pm
Bookings: at The Street Theatre 6247 1223
Tickets: full $23, concession $17
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 24 January 2007
2007: Berthrand’s Toys by blackSKYwhite Theatre (Moscow). National Multicultural Festival feature article.
Multiculturalism is about understanding and appreciating the diversity of world cultures. But the National Multicultural Festival is not only important to the citizens of Canberra.
For Moscow’s Dimitry Aryupin, Marcella Soltan and Andrej Ivashnev, performing Berthrand’s Toys in Australia is one more adventure and learning experience for their independent theatre company blackSKYwhite. Soltan and Aryupin go back a long way, starting up in 1988 amidst the massive social changes then under way in Russia, with no funding. For almost 20 years “we earn money by performing and providing masterclasses around the world” using their returns for new productions.
What is it about their work which makes their theatre sustainable? What is Berthrand’s Toys about, winning the 2000 Edinburgh Festival ‘Fringe First’ and ‘Total Theatre’ awards? And how did the audience in Indonesia respond?
Eight years of struggle led to their first success. “Our first trip abroad – everything was surprising there – I was 37 and had never crossed the border of my country. It was like a moon expedition, something very new and unpredictable. Five years later there remained only four European countries we had not visited.”
Aryupin explains that their success involves two main elements. First there is the longstanding European tradition of the Auteur, much more than writer. My French dictionary says “author, creator, maker, perpetrator, achiever, contriver, framer, informant, authority”. The name that comes to my mind, because of his influence in Australia, is Poland’s Jerzy Grotowski. Australians like Rex Cramphorn and film maker Paul Cox seem to me to fit the bill.
The point Aryupin makes is that European theatre is never “based on traditional forms but [each auteur] starts from the very beginning – like our world itself [we] don’t stay on elephants and turtles – referring to Asian traditions – but [we] fly over the abyss.” This constant search for originality is part of blackSKYwhite’s success.
Second, Aryupin’s work is about fundamental philosophic understanding of reality, but, he says, not with the German intellectual emphasis. He remains true to his Russian culture, keeping in touch with people and their emotions, “going down to the layer of dreams, which is common to all homo sapiens, despite their knowledge and experience.” Berthrand’s Toys has been described as a “danse macabre” about our fear of not knowing what reality is. Not too different from Chekhov, I thought.
In Indonesia he expected a negative reaction, in a Muslim country, to theatrical representations of clownish monsters, masked figures and the strong emotional effects in this production. To anyone who has seen wayang puppets, or Ranga the Witch, and knows how Indonesians have melded their ancient traditions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam into an open and democratic culture, it is not surprising that people responded to blackSKYwhite’s “disturbing, terrifying and poignant” performance, coming backstage to talk about their feelings.
But who is Berthrand and what are his “toys”? Look up Sergeant Bertrand (spellings change as words float between languages) and your search engine will bring up necromancy, onanism and the real case of Bertrand who engaged in necrophagy. In 1847 this otherwise apparently sane individual believed his condition was connected to being a werewolf. After one year’s imprisonment he disappeared into obscurity. One later description of his case says he was “named a monomaniac” because he concentrated on animals’ entrails. His “focus on viscera, which is not a single object nor subjectivised, rather than a past-tense person-corpse, seems to change the inflection of the monomania beyond a perverse dialectic of subject/object.”
I see Aryupin’s concern about Germanic intellectual analysis, as early Twentieth Century psychology took over from the werewolf theory. Berthrand’s Toys concentrates on the way people like Bertrand use elements of their environment, including other people, as no more than toys for their own pleasure, however twisted or destructive the results may be.
Experiencing something of the obsession and paranoia of such a character, mediated through the theatrical art, will certainly be challenging. Yet as in the Samuel Beckett season at the Sydney Festival, referring to another European auteur, Peter Brook, the Canberra Times reviewer noted “Beckett’s characters affirm life even as they seem to deny it.”
Berthrand’s Toys, of course, is not designed for children, but is certainly an important feature of the National Multicultural Festival, bringing in concentrated form both a Russian and European vision in a “magical, radical and abstract piece of dance-theatre … where fantastic music and lighting create a world of great truth and illusion.”
Berthrand’s Toys
National Multicultural Festival
Presented by the Embassy of Russia
Courtyard Studio
Canberra Theatre Centre
Tuesday February 6 to Friday February 9 at 7.30pm
Bookings: Canberra Ticketing 6275 2700
Tickets: $32 / $28 concessions and Festival Card holders
Link: canberratheatre.org.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
For Moscow’s Dimitry Aryupin, Marcella Soltan and Andrej Ivashnev, performing Berthrand’s Toys in Australia is one more adventure and learning experience for their independent theatre company blackSKYwhite. Soltan and Aryupin go back a long way, starting up in 1988 amidst the massive social changes then under way in Russia, with no funding. For almost 20 years “we earn money by performing and providing masterclasses around the world” using their returns for new productions.
What is it about their work which makes their theatre sustainable? What is Berthrand’s Toys about, winning the 2000 Edinburgh Festival ‘Fringe First’ and ‘Total Theatre’ awards? And how did the audience in Indonesia respond?
Eight years of struggle led to their first success. “Our first trip abroad – everything was surprising there – I was 37 and had never crossed the border of my country. It was like a moon expedition, something very new and unpredictable. Five years later there remained only four European countries we had not visited.”
Aryupin explains that their success involves two main elements. First there is the longstanding European tradition of the Auteur, much more than writer. My French dictionary says “author, creator, maker, perpetrator, achiever, contriver, framer, informant, authority”. The name that comes to my mind, because of his influence in Australia, is Poland’s Jerzy Grotowski. Australians like Rex Cramphorn and film maker Paul Cox seem to me to fit the bill.
The point Aryupin makes is that European theatre is never “based on traditional forms but [each auteur] starts from the very beginning – like our world itself [we] don’t stay on elephants and turtles – referring to Asian traditions – but [we] fly over the abyss.” This constant search for originality is part of blackSKYwhite’s success.
Second, Aryupin’s work is about fundamental philosophic understanding of reality, but, he says, not with the German intellectual emphasis. He remains true to his Russian culture, keeping in touch with people and their emotions, “going down to the layer of dreams, which is common to all homo sapiens, despite their knowledge and experience.” Berthrand’s Toys has been described as a “danse macabre” about our fear of not knowing what reality is. Not too different from Chekhov, I thought.
In Indonesia he expected a negative reaction, in a Muslim country, to theatrical representations of clownish monsters, masked figures and the strong emotional effects in this production. To anyone who has seen wayang puppets, or Ranga the Witch, and knows how Indonesians have melded their ancient traditions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam into an open and democratic culture, it is not surprising that people responded to blackSKYwhite’s “disturbing, terrifying and poignant” performance, coming backstage to talk about their feelings.
But who is Berthrand and what are his “toys”? Look up Sergeant Bertrand (spellings change as words float between languages) and your search engine will bring up necromancy, onanism and the real case of Bertrand who engaged in necrophagy. In 1847 this otherwise apparently sane individual believed his condition was connected to being a werewolf. After one year’s imprisonment he disappeared into obscurity. One later description of his case says he was “named a monomaniac” because he concentrated on animals’ entrails. His “focus on viscera, which is not a single object nor subjectivised, rather than a past-tense person-corpse, seems to change the inflection of the monomania beyond a perverse dialectic of subject/object.”
I see Aryupin’s concern about Germanic intellectual analysis, as early Twentieth Century psychology took over from the werewolf theory. Berthrand’s Toys concentrates on the way people like Bertrand use elements of their environment, including other people, as no more than toys for their own pleasure, however twisted or destructive the results may be.
Experiencing something of the obsession and paranoia of such a character, mediated through the theatrical art, will certainly be challenging. Yet as in the Samuel Beckett season at the Sydney Festival, referring to another European auteur, Peter Brook, the Canberra Times reviewer noted “Beckett’s characters affirm life even as they seem to deny it.”
Berthrand’s Toys, of course, is not designed for children, but is certainly an important feature of the National Multicultural Festival, bringing in concentrated form both a Russian and European vision in a “magical, radical and abstract piece of dance-theatre … where fantastic music and lighting create a world of great truth and illusion.”
Berthrand’s Toys
National Multicultural Festival
Presented by the Embassy of Russia
Courtyard Studio
Canberra Theatre Centre
Tuesday February 6 to Friday February 9 at 7.30pm
Bookings: Canberra Ticketing 6275 2700
Tickets: $32 / $28 concessions and Festival Card holders
Link: canberratheatre.org.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 14 January 2007
2007: The Shoemaker and the Elves by Peter Pinne and Don Battye
The Shoemaker and the Elves a children’s musical by Peter Pinne and Don Battye. Directed by Nina Stevenson at The Vikings Club Auditorium, Erindale, until Friday January 19 at 11am.
When I was six, my first theatrical role was as an elf in The Elves and the Shoemaker which my teacher adapted from the original Grimm Brothers’ story.
The shoemaker was poor simply because he was a shoemaker. When he had only enough leather left for one pair, the hard-working selfless elves made many more shoes overnight than he could, helping him through a bad patch. He and his wife wanted to thank them. Watching one night they saw the elves had no clothes, so they made clothes for the elves who were happy to receive them. From then on the shoemaker made ends meet, though still poor as shoemakers always were.
Pinne and Battye’s sentimental version pits the shoemaker Mr Buckle (Peter Fock) against the richest woman in town, Silver Sequin (Jennie Tonzing), also a shoemaker. The elves (Meg Hobson, Tom Hobson, Charly Madden, Christopher Murphy, Lauren O’Flaherty, Grace Saunders and Paige Vaughan) depend on a benevolent whistle-blowing elf Slipper (Diana Tulip) to direct their magic. Mr Buckle has no wife, but a daughter Carolinda (Maviel Tanevska) who is in love with the nice Jingles (Cameron Boxall) who works for Silver Sequin because he needs a job.
Silver Sequin glories in being nasty and has a nasty offsider called Nasty Neville (Bart Black). Shoe purchasers are Lord Loppy (Scheyla Ahmadi Pour) and Dame Squeaky (Mariana Davila). The elves’ magic shoes make people happy, even Silver Sequin in the end, and win the Shoemaker’s Award from the King (Hugh Stevenson) for Mr Buckle.
Though the production is quite well done (in an attractive set by Brian Sudding and supported by excellent musicians), this 1974 Australian “fun” version just doesn’t have the magic, or quite the same ethical message, as the original simple story I still remember after 60 years. The first half is too slow (mainly the fault of the script, and at least one family went home at interval when I saw it), but the second succeeds in gathering some momentum for a cheerful ending, though still struggling for impact in such a large auditorium.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
When I was six, my first theatrical role was as an elf in The Elves and the Shoemaker which my teacher adapted from the original Grimm Brothers’ story.
The shoemaker was poor simply because he was a shoemaker. When he had only enough leather left for one pair, the hard-working selfless elves made many more shoes overnight than he could, helping him through a bad patch. He and his wife wanted to thank them. Watching one night they saw the elves had no clothes, so they made clothes for the elves who were happy to receive them. From then on the shoemaker made ends meet, though still poor as shoemakers always were.
Pinne and Battye’s sentimental version pits the shoemaker Mr Buckle (Peter Fock) against the richest woman in town, Silver Sequin (Jennie Tonzing), also a shoemaker. The elves (Meg Hobson, Tom Hobson, Charly Madden, Christopher Murphy, Lauren O’Flaherty, Grace Saunders and Paige Vaughan) depend on a benevolent whistle-blowing elf Slipper (Diana Tulip) to direct their magic. Mr Buckle has no wife, but a daughter Carolinda (Maviel Tanevska) who is in love with the nice Jingles (Cameron Boxall) who works for Silver Sequin because he needs a job.
Silver Sequin glories in being nasty and has a nasty offsider called Nasty Neville (Bart Black). Shoe purchasers are Lord Loppy (Scheyla Ahmadi Pour) and Dame Squeaky (Mariana Davila). The elves’ magic shoes make people happy, even Silver Sequin in the end, and win the Shoemaker’s Award from the King (Hugh Stevenson) for Mr Buckle.
Though the production is quite well done (in an attractive set by Brian Sudding and supported by excellent musicians), this 1974 Australian “fun” version just doesn’t have the magic, or quite the same ethical message, as the original simple story I still remember after 60 years. The first half is too slow (mainly the fault of the script, and at least one family went home at interval when I saw it), but the second succeeds in gathering some momentum for a cheerful ending, though still struggling for impact in such a large auditorium.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 11 January 2007
2007: Sydney Festival: First Love by Samuel Beckett
Sydney Festival: First Love by Samuel Beckett. The Gate Theatre, Dublin, performed by Ralph Fiennes, directed by Michael Colgan, at Parade Theatre January 9-21, 7pm (1 hour)
We expect Ralph Fiennes to be outstanding, and he is. He held the audience absolutely engrossed, not merely because of his reputation which silenced the crowd with respect even before the curtain rose on Thursday’s performance, but because he has complete mastery of technique.
Beckett’s language requires precise timing, often down to the pauses between syllables, and ever-changing rhythms as the character reveals his inner personality in the words he allows himself to speak out loud. Fiennes, on a stage empty except for himself and a plain bench, never missed a beat.
Perhaps the greatest praise I overheard was the surprised comment “He makes it seem so easy.” This was technique used with such refinement that an emotionally stunted character seems real. Socially isolated, living rough, seeking silence, he begins “I associate my father’s death with my marriage” because from his father’s gravestone he calculates his age when a prostitute’s attentions result in the birth of his child (so she tells him), at which point he leaves the shelter she has provided him, unwilling to hear even a faint sound of crying.
The set design by Eileen Diss added expertly to Beckett’s atmosphere. The scrim backdrop evoked the fog of the canal-side location, through which the window of the prostitute’s room is dimly lit, representing the fog of his memory – perhaps more twisted fantasy than past reality. Did he actually experience love?
Beckett’s characters are never very easy to get along with, but Fiennes and director Colgan reveal the humour in his lines, occasionally recognised by the character, often only understood by us as we compare his limitations with our normality.
However much Beckett’s view of humanity seems unnecessarily bitter and unpleasant, there is a harsh reality in his work. Bringing the Gate Theatre production to the Sydney Festival is a triumph, but if you have not already obtained seats for this or the other plays in the Beckett season, you must remain disappointed, since I hear they are all fully booked.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
We expect Ralph Fiennes to be outstanding, and he is. He held the audience absolutely engrossed, not merely because of his reputation which silenced the crowd with respect even before the curtain rose on Thursday’s performance, but because he has complete mastery of technique.
Beckett’s language requires precise timing, often down to the pauses between syllables, and ever-changing rhythms as the character reveals his inner personality in the words he allows himself to speak out loud. Fiennes, on a stage empty except for himself and a plain bench, never missed a beat.
Perhaps the greatest praise I overheard was the surprised comment “He makes it seem so easy.” This was technique used with such refinement that an emotionally stunted character seems real. Socially isolated, living rough, seeking silence, he begins “I associate my father’s death with my marriage” because from his father’s gravestone he calculates his age when a prostitute’s attentions result in the birth of his child (so she tells him), at which point he leaves the shelter she has provided him, unwilling to hear even a faint sound of crying.
The set design by Eileen Diss added expertly to Beckett’s atmosphere. The scrim backdrop evoked the fog of the canal-side location, through which the window of the prostitute’s room is dimly lit, representing the fog of his memory – perhaps more twisted fantasy than past reality. Did he actually experience love?
Beckett’s characters are never very easy to get along with, but Fiennes and director Colgan reveal the humour in his lines, occasionally recognised by the character, often only understood by us as we compare his limitations with our normality.
However much Beckett’s view of humanity seems unnecessarily bitter and unpleasant, there is a harsh reality in his work. Bringing the Gate Theatre production to the Sydney Festival is a triumph, but if you have not already obtained seats for this or the other plays in the Beckett season, you must remain disappointed, since I hear they are all fully booked.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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