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
Thursday, 22 February 2007
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
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