Every Base Covered, an anthology of short plays by Sam Floyd. Freshly Ground Theatre at QL2 Theatre, Gorman House Arts Centre, May 20-30 Wednesdays to Saturdays, 8pm. Bookings 0450 067 322.
9 plays in 75 minutes sounds like at least a half-marathon, but in Floyd's capable hands we arrive at the end laughing and not a bit breathless, with Every Base Covered. The Ten Minute Play is now quite an established artform as a result of the Short+Sweet Festival competitions which grew from the Sydney Festival Fringe nearly ten years ago. Included in this program are two of Floyd's successes – The Disclaimer, a winner in the 2008 Canberra One Act Play Festival, and Imaginary Break-up which reached the finals in the Eltham Theatre Ten Minute Play Festival in Melbourne.
Each play is a – usually absurd – solution to a What if question. What if a café customer exposes his interest only in the waitress to the exclusion of all other norms of behaviour? What if a suicide negotiator actually thinks the jumper should jump? What would you sing if you had only a tiny ukelele left in the whole world? What if a girl ignores you after she has asked you for three drinks? What if you are the girl? What if you find yourself with a guitar instead of a ukelele after all? What if people could be persuaded to waive their right to sue for compensation for their death, when the cause of everyone's death is their birth? What if the girl you imagine you love is really imaginary and then wants to break up the relationship? What if the girl in the red polka dot dress you have just run over is the wrong one, because you don't know if the dress was supposed to be white with red dots or red with white dots?
Tight scripting is complemented by an appropriately economical staging and acting style, performed by only four actors. After a year of working together, I suspect the time is approaching for Freshly Ground Theatre, and Sam Floyd in particular, to take on bigger things. They have clearly built an audience among their 20-something peer group and could think now of moving beyond the limited QL2 into pubs and clubs, and eventually on to the main stage. Floyd reminds me of other local successes, such as Queanbeyan's Tommy Murphy, first mentioned in The Canberra Times in 2005 and now a published Sydney playwright. Let's see Freshly Ground seek new pastures.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 20 May 2009
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
2009: A Stretch of the Imagination by Jack Hibberd
A Stretch of the Imagination by Jack Hibberd. Performed by John Wood, directed by Denis Moore for HIT Productions at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, Tuesday May 5 to Friday May 8, 8.00pm, Saturday May 9, 2.00pm & 8.00pm. Bookings: 6298 0290
This may sound picky, but this production has a running time of 110 minutes, including interval, according to the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne where it will be seen later in May on its round Australia tour. Maybe at The Q the interval was half an hour longer, but I don't think so.
So it wasn't just my imagination that was, legitimately, stretched by Jack Hibberd. The play consists of a series of vignettes, scenes from Monk O'Neill's apocryphal reminiscences, punctuated by his little rituals on his "penultimate" day, which turns out to be his last. Wood played for and got the laughs, but kept the pace too even and the transitions from scene to scene too deliberate. The result stretched my patience, when what I hoped for was a kind of wild unpredictability, a sense of Monk's imagination breaking out of all ordinary bounds, building to the fantastic but quite beautiful imagery of the final sunset which heralds his inevitable end.
Perhaps, too, Moore's direction, in asking for a great deal of physical playing out of Monk's stories, led to slowing down and weakening the emotional effects over the whole length of the play, despite the success of individual scenes. In some other productions of this recognised classic, the words have been more central, allowing the resonance of Hibberd's language to stir up images and feelings directly in the minds of the audience, rather as Barry Humphries does with his Sandy Stone character, who hardly moves within the confines of his decrepit armchair.
Monk needs to move to carry out his present-time activities, but seemed to me to become too much of a show-off miming and acting out the stories of his past. I felt less empathy than I wanted to feel, and so less of the sadness underlying his outward bravado came through than I think Monk O'Neill deserves.
Of course, this was my reaction, but Hibberd's character and script still have a great deal to say to us about what it is to be a certain kind of Australian. Monk's larrikin no bullshit manner and language cannot fail to make us laugh. And, however picky I am after the event, I certainly enjoyed the awfulness of Monk O'Neill on opening night at The Q, and laughed along with the rest of a highly enthusiastic audience.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
This may sound picky, but this production has a running time of 110 minutes, including interval, according to the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne where it will be seen later in May on its round Australia tour. Maybe at The Q the interval was half an hour longer, but I don't think so.
So it wasn't just my imagination that was, legitimately, stretched by Jack Hibberd. The play consists of a series of vignettes, scenes from Monk O'Neill's apocryphal reminiscences, punctuated by his little rituals on his "penultimate" day, which turns out to be his last. Wood played for and got the laughs, but kept the pace too even and the transitions from scene to scene too deliberate. The result stretched my patience, when what I hoped for was a kind of wild unpredictability, a sense of Monk's imagination breaking out of all ordinary bounds, building to the fantastic but quite beautiful imagery of the final sunset which heralds his inevitable end.
Perhaps, too, Moore's direction, in asking for a great deal of physical playing out of Monk's stories, led to slowing down and weakening the emotional effects over the whole length of the play, despite the success of individual scenes. In some other productions of this recognised classic, the words have been more central, allowing the resonance of Hibberd's language to stir up images and feelings directly in the minds of the audience, rather as Barry Humphries does with his Sandy Stone character, who hardly moves within the confines of his decrepit armchair.
Monk needs to move to carry out his present-time activities, but seemed to me to become too much of a show-off miming and acting out the stories of his past. I felt less empathy than I wanted to feel, and so less of the sadness underlying his outward bravado came through than I think Monk O'Neill deserves.
Of course, this was my reaction, but Hibberd's character and script still have a great deal to say to us about what it is to be a certain kind of Australian. Monk's larrikin no bullshit manner and language cannot fail to make us laugh. And, however picky I am after the event, I certainly enjoyed the awfulness of Monk O'Neill on opening night at The Q, and laughed along with the rest of a highly enthusiastic audience.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
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