Codgers by Don Reid. A Steady Lad and Christine Dunstan
production, directed by Wayne Harrison at Queanbeyan Performing Arts
Centre, The Q, March 24-27, 2010
Even though the
performances by a cast of luminaries like Ron Haddrick and Shane
Porteous made for an enjoyable evening, the play is too lightweight for
the themes the author introduces: racial and social prejudice, fear of
change, the legacy of The Great War and the Second World War, what it
means to be Australian.
The good idea behind the comedy
is undermined by crude sexual innuendo, fart jokes and, most
unfortunately, by the completely gratuitous use of a device – the sudden
death of the youngest “codger” – to bring the play to a sentimental
end. Harrison obviously worked hard to produce laughs from “business”
like expressions of the men’s faces as they were put through their
physical exercises, and the actors played the clown for everything it
was worth. But nothing could cover up the basic superficiality of the
characters and the relationships between them.
If it
had been played as a true stylised farce, with speed and rapid pacing,
it may have worked better. The mawkish sentiment and the unrealistic
conflicts might then have become integrated into a consistent work, all
of which could be taken as an ironic comic commentary on a certain kind
of older Anglo-Australian male. In this production, stylisation was
used to begin the play and to introduce some scenes, while slapstick
took over in many scenes and in others we were expected to take
characters and their reactions for real. This mix doesn’t hang
together.
In the end, having done their best with a
script which needs much more original use of language, a set of more
complex characters and a less predictable plot, and working very well as
an ensemble, the cast save the play. It reminded me of a rather
old-fashioned theatre-in-education piece about multicultural harmony (it
was Harmony Day last Sunday) – not for children, but rather for men in
their second childhood. At my age, 69, I found I felt quite out of
touch with the world of these “codgers”. If there was a point where I
felt at home, it was in the character (and the portrayal by Jon Lam) of
Stanley Chang. He made the evening worthwhile for me.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
Thursday, 18 March 2010
2010: Toy Symphony by Michael Gow
Toy Symphony by Michael Gow. Queensland Theatre Company and
State Theatre Company of South Australia, directed by Geordie Brookman
at Canberra Theatre Playhouse, March 16-20 2010. Reviewed March 18.
First the play. Going along with my critic’s monocle firmly screwed in my eye socket was a big mistake. When Alexander the Great conquered the stage as well as the world, I knew the game was up. Michael Gow could see right through me. He’s not the one with the writer’s …., er, um, what? What about me? Leave me alone, Michael, please, stop invading my space.
So when I got home I read Scientific American from cover to cover, but stuff about dark matter didn’t help, especially the article called The Brain’s Dark Energy. “Mysterious brain activity holds clues to disorders and maybe even to consciousness.” I needed sleep. And it came, supported by an after-image of Barbara Lowing’s broad-hipped brilliant yellow dress as Mrs Walkham, Roland Hemming’s warm and perspicacious teacher. I felt just like Chris Pitman looked, scared as the young Roland of his head full of rough-and-tumble images made real, and so grateful for Mrs Walkham’s offer of pencil and paper. Write it all down, she advised, and it will go away. And I slept, but now I must write it down. Just let me put my 3-D glasses on. Thank you.
So, the production. The play is about the nature of playwrighting. When I previously read commentary about what the play is about, my preconceptions leapt in: self-indulgence, incestuous writing about writing, capital R Romanticism (if serious), capital F Farce (if not).
But no, Toy Symphony is capital O Original. It impresses me in the same way as Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age did – as a new direction in Australian theatre. It excites me like Andrew Bovell’s Holy Day, or Richard Frankland’s Conversations with the Dead. But it sets an additional challenge. Because it is about theatre, the acting style and set design must make this theatre on the night into a symbol of theatre in any time and place. It’s a bit like Chorus Line being about auditioning for a chorus line, except that Gow works far deeper into the complexity of Roland Hemming’s psychology, builds in theatrical elements which demonstrate how theatre works, and places the Sydney suburb of Como into its real social, historical and even literary context.
Who would have thought the Woronora River had glinted in the eyes of Henry Lawson, Mary Gilmore and D.H.Lawrence? Or that Lake Como in Italy was a reminder of home for the Italians who built the railway? Facts and imagination are all intertwined in Roland’s mind, as a child and adult, but how can everything be linked on stage with the clarity which his psychologist Nina (Lizzy Falkland) knows he needs?
The central device is Roland’s rediscovery, in his dead mother’s box of papers, of the play he wrote at the age of 12, which he believed had been destroyed by a vicious school principal and was never staged. One suspects that the young Michael Gow had something like this experience. The set ostensibly is a simple box – an office for the psychologist, or for the principal, or a classroom for Class 5A, or a hospital corridor, or even a seafront walkway where Anton Chekov takes an evening constitutional.
But the box is full of tricks. It’s a three dimensional jack-in-the-box sort of set, where Roland’s characters can enter and exit in highly surprising ways, even reaching the heights of a rocket ship exploding in space. The set demonstrates that theatre is imaginative play, just as real and funny and sad for the adult audience as for the young child. Gow creates the mental gymnastics of Roland’s imagination, and designers Jonathon Oxlade, Nigel Levings (lighting), and Brett Collery (sound) make Roland’s internal world manifest in wood, colour, light and shade, sound and silence.
Director Geordie Brookman takes up the same jack-in-the-box style in the way lines are delivered, actors set body positions, bodies move in the space (Scott Witt consultant), voices are accented (Melissa Agnew consultant), with costume and make-up almost clown-like. But when we see the adult Roland speaking in gaps, looking down and only fleetingly directly at others, moving away from risk, hiding exposed against a blank wall, we feel with him the depth of his childhood experiences. Theatre plays with him as much as he plays with theatre. Only after his rocketship explodes do we see him, visibly in posture and voice, come to a sensible understanding of himself as Chekov quietly and politely walks past.
The actors, Lizzy Falkland, Daniel Mulvihill and Ed Wightman, play a constantly surprising array of roles as Roland remembers his past and experiences his present, while only Mrs Walkham remains a stable point of reference for him. All have clearly understood the discipline and skills needed to exhibit a child’s imaginative play. There is a comic book element which when played in concrete form before our very eyes reveals that being a writer, a playwright especially, is to lead a life of terror.
I would like to thank Michael Gow for his bravery in deciding to stop managing theatre and to go back to creating it despite the risk. The risk was well worth taking. And having written, now once more I shall sleep.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
First the play. Going along with my critic’s monocle firmly screwed in my eye socket was a big mistake. When Alexander the Great conquered the stage as well as the world, I knew the game was up. Michael Gow could see right through me. He’s not the one with the writer’s …., er, um, what? What about me? Leave me alone, Michael, please, stop invading my space.
So when I got home I read Scientific American from cover to cover, but stuff about dark matter didn’t help, especially the article called The Brain’s Dark Energy. “Mysterious brain activity holds clues to disorders and maybe even to consciousness.” I needed sleep. And it came, supported by an after-image of Barbara Lowing’s broad-hipped brilliant yellow dress as Mrs Walkham, Roland Hemming’s warm and perspicacious teacher. I felt just like Chris Pitman looked, scared as the young Roland of his head full of rough-and-tumble images made real, and so grateful for Mrs Walkham’s offer of pencil and paper. Write it all down, she advised, and it will go away. And I slept, but now I must write it down. Just let me put my 3-D glasses on. Thank you.
So, the production. The play is about the nature of playwrighting. When I previously read commentary about what the play is about, my preconceptions leapt in: self-indulgence, incestuous writing about writing, capital R Romanticism (if serious), capital F Farce (if not).
But no, Toy Symphony is capital O Original. It impresses me in the same way as Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age did – as a new direction in Australian theatre. It excites me like Andrew Bovell’s Holy Day, or Richard Frankland’s Conversations with the Dead. But it sets an additional challenge. Because it is about theatre, the acting style and set design must make this theatre on the night into a symbol of theatre in any time and place. It’s a bit like Chorus Line being about auditioning for a chorus line, except that Gow works far deeper into the complexity of Roland Hemming’s psychology, builds in theatrical elements which demonstrate how theatre works, and places the Sydney suburb of Como into its real social, historical and even literary context.
Who would have thought the Woronora River had glinted in the eyes of Henry Lawson, Mary Gilmore and D.H.Lawrence? Or that Lake Como in Italy was a reminder of home for the Italians who built the railway? Facts and imagination are all intertwined in Roland’s mind, as a child and adult, but how can everything be linked on stage with the clarity which his psychologist Nina (Lizzy Falkland) knows he needs?
The central device is Roland’s rediscovery, in his dead mother’s box of papers, of the play he wrote at the age of 12, which he believed had been destroyed by a vicious school principal and was never staged. One suspects that the young Michael Gow had something like this experience. The set ostensibly is a simple box – an office for the psychologist, or for the principal, or a classroom for Class 5A, or a hospital corridor, or even a seafront walkway where Anton Chekov takes an evening constitutional.
But the box is full of tricks. It’s a three dimensional jack-in-the-box sort of set, where Roland’s characters can enter and exit in highly surprising ways, even reaching the heights of a rocket ship exploding in space. The set demonstrates that theatre is imaginative play, just as real and funny and sad for the adult audience as for the young child. Gow creates the mental gymnastics of Roland’s imagination, and designers Jonathon Oxlade, Nigel Levings (lighting), and Brett Collery (sound) make Roland’s internal world manifest in wood, colour, light and shade, sound and silence.
Director Geordie Brookman takes up the same jack-in-the-box style in the way lines are delivered, actors set body positions, bodies move in the space (Scott Witt consultant), voices are accented (Melissa Agnew consultant), with costume and make-up almost clown-like. But when we see the adult Roland speaking in gaps, looking down and only fleetingly directly at others, moving away from risk, hiding exposed against a blank wall, we feel with him the depth of his childhood experiences. Theatre plays with him as much as he plays with theatre. Only after his rocketship explodes do we see him, visibly in posture and voice, come to a sensible understanding of himself as Chekov quietly and politely walks past.
The actors, Lizzy Falkland, Daniel Mulvihill and Ed Wightman, play a constantly surprising array of roles as Roland remembers his past and experiences his present, while only Mrs Walkham remains a stable point of reference for him. All have clearly understood the discipline and skills needed to exhibit a child’s imaginative play. There is a comic book element which when played in concrete form before our very eyes reveals that being a writer, a playwright especially, is to lead a life of terror.
I would like to thank Michael Gow for his bravery in deciding to stop managing theatre and to go back to creating it despite the risk. The risk was well worth taking. And having written, now once more I shall sleep.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
2010: The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh
The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh. Sydney
Theatre Company, directed by Cristabel Sved. Wharf 2, February 22 –
March 13, 2010. Reviewed March 9.
When I first saw The Beauty Queen of Leenane (STC, reviewed in The Canberra Times, August 16, 2000) I found it difficult to believe in the daughter Maureen. It had seemed to me that the play was too neatly constructed, that Maureen’s sexual delusions were a gratuitous device on the playwright’s part, and “too much is made of the traditional comic Irish loquaciousness”.
In this production Mandy McElhinney makes Maureen’s sexual need explicit, showing how the dominance of her mother (which her sisters refuse to accept) results in this daughter’s extremes of behaviour in the real world and of fantasy in her inner world. I guess it’s this quality of clarity that we should expect of the Sydney Theatre Company, making the travelling time and expense worthwhile.
There are references in the dialogue to Australian soaps on the “telly”, like Neighbours and Home and Away, the only entertainment available for these people stuck in poverty on a hill surrounded by mud in Leenane, a village with no part to play in a modern economy. These shows in fantasy at least open up the possibility of somewhere else to go, out of the rain, into sunshine forever. Ironically though, for Australians, they are also seen as cultural invaders, destroying the true Irish traditions.
But I found myself being reminded of Mother and Son, where the surface humour relied on the underlying determination of the aged to keep control of their lives. I even wondered if Garry McDonald might not have felt rather like Maureen after his “mother” Ruth Cracknell died in 2002. Did it mean relief and freedom from his role, or entrenched depression knowing that reality is insubstantial and unreliable? In other words, I found more depth and complexity in this production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane than I had seen previously.
Some commentators, including this director in her program note, think McDonagh, “a 2nd generation Irishman living in England … parodies, exaggerates and toys with ‘Irishness’ through his ‘outsider’s’ gaze”. But I have to say, at least in this production, that Cristabel Sved has made the play come close to the best of Irish plays, JM Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. McDonagh’s Maureen and Pato cannot quite match Pegeen and Christy, but his play is not a parody, even though Maureen uses a poker and Christy a loy. Both plays call a spade a spade, and this is the value of this STC production.
It is still true that we are left with somewhat sentimental sadness at the conclusion of Beauty Queen, as Maureen becomes so much like her mother. Playboy is much tougher on us, because we know that Pegeen knows she must face the real world alone, while Maureen can retreat into delusion.
However, I can confidently conclude that STC has made a justifiable success of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, with performances fully booked at the end of its run. With the key players Judi Farr, Mandy McElhinney and the always spot-on Darren Gilshenan, as well as a very effective relative newcomer Eamon Farren, success is not surprising but gratefully appreciated.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
When I first saw The Beauty Queen of Leenane (STC, reviewed in The Canberra Times, August 16, 2000) I found it difficult to believe in the daughter Maureen. It had seemed to me that the play was too neatly constructed, that Maureen’s sexual delusions were a gratuitous device on the playwright’s part, and “too much is made of the traditional comic Irish loquaciousness”.
In this production Mandy McElhinney makes Maureen’s sexual need explicit, showing how the dominance of her mother (which her sisters refuse to accept) results in this daughter’s extremes of behaviour in the real world and of fantasy in her inner world. I guess it’s this quality of clarity that we should expect of the Sydney Theatre Company, making the travelling time and expense worthwhile.
There are references in the dialogue to Australian soaps on the “telly”, like Neighbours and Home and Away, the only entertainment available for these people stuck in poverty on a hill surrounded by mud in Leenane, a village with no part to play in a modern economy. These shows in fantasy at least open up the possibility of somewhere else to go, out of the rain, into sunshine forever. Ironically though, for Australians, they are also seen as cultural invaders, destroying the true Irish traditions.
But I found myself being reminded of Mother and Son, where the surface humour relied on the underlying determination of the aged to keep control of their lives. I even wondered if Garry McDonald might not have felt rather like Maureen after his “mother” Ruth Cracknell died in 2002. Did it mean relief and freedom from his role, or entrenched depression knowing that reality is insubstantial and unreliable? In other words, I found more depth and complexity in this production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane than I had seen previously.
Some commentators, including this director in her program note, think McDonagh, “a 2nd generation Irishman living in England … parodies, exaggerates and toys with ‘Irishness’ through his ‘outsider’s’ gaze”. But I have to say, at least in this production, that Cristabel Sved has made the play come close to the best of Irish plays, JM Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. McDonagh’s Maureen and Pato cannot quite match Pegeen and Christy, but his play is not a parody, even though Maureen uses a poker and Christy a loy. Both plays call a spade a spade, and this is the value of this STC production.
It is still true that we are left with somewhat sentimental sadness at the conclusion of Beauty Queen, as Maureen becomes so much like her mother. Playboy is much tougher on us, because we know that Pegeen knows she must face the real world alone, while Maureen can retreat into delusion.
However, I can confidently conclude that STC has made a justifiable success of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, with performances fully booked at the end of its run. With the key players Judi Farr, Mandy McElhinney and the always spot-on Darren Gilshenan, as well as a very effective relative newcomer Eamon Farren, success is not surprising but gratefully appreciated.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
2010: Ninety by Joanna Murray-Smith
Ninety by Joanna Murray-Smith. Directed by Sandra Bates,
Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, February 4 – April 3, 2010. Reviewed Tuesday
March 9.
The three theatres I visited on this trip to Sydney have quite different atmospheres and clientele.
B Sharp means what it says. Be ready to be bluntly confronted Downstairs at Belvoir St by pointed expertise.
Wharf 2 is like a well-bred show pony. Its audiences expect nothing less than the professional best, and all the jumps are cleared.
The Ensemble …? Well, it’s North Shore, suspended over gently lapping sailing boat water, moored in a bay of quietude. It’s about humanity, intimacy, warmth of feeling, and sense of local community. It still belongs to its audience as it has since Hayes Gordon set up Australia’s first theatre-in-the-round in the Kirribilli boatshed just 50 years ago.
Kate Raison and Brian Meegan could have performed Ninety as technically well in a bigger space, but even in Wharf 2 they would not have seemingly looked us directly in the eyes and we would not have seen our reflections in theirs. If Ninety were done in a proscenium, end-on or even side-on theatre like Belvoir Downstairs, it would seem no better than a slick David Williamson comedy from the days before his community conferencing trilogy.
In the round, even in the three-quarters round as The Ensemble is nowadays, Joanna Murray-Smith’s ninety minutes of post-ex-marital experience is quite rivetting. It’s the right play for this theatre.
It’s always a good drama exercise to place an external limitation on what may happen. There is no plot to Ninety except for Isabel’s intention. She knows her ex-husband William so much better than the young actress he is about to marry, from the time of her inveigling him into her bed in the beginning, through their young couple financial struggles, his becoming successful and finally rich-and-famous, with the memories joyful and tragic of their only daughter who died so young.
Isabel has phoned him and persuaded William to see her before he is off to Paris for the wedding – just as she had phoned him in the beginning. He can only afford 90 minutes of his time. The play lasts exactly 90 minutes. Will Isabel break through to William’s real feelings in this short time? Will he change his mind about marrying again? Does she really expect him to come back to her? Would she really want him to?
Of course, I cannot reveal such mysteries. But I can say that, though the details of these two people’s lives are so different from my own, almost everything that was spoken and left unspoken rang silent bells within me. If one can say there is no plot in this play, there is a fiendish plot at work to make us in the audience recognise ourselves as we are and as we have been. If you are up for it, there is still time to make a booking. 02 9929 0644 or www.ensemble.com.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
The three theatres I visited on this trip to Sydney have quite different atmospheres and clientele.
B Sharp means what it says. Be ready to be bluntly confronted Downstairs at Belvoir St by pointed expertise.
Wharf 2 is like a well-bred show pony. Its audiences expect nothing less than the professional best, and all the jumps are cleared.
The Ensemble …? Well, it’s North Shore, suspended over gently lapping sailing boat water, moored in a bay of quietude. It’s about humanity, intimacy, warmth of feeling, and sense of local community. It still belongs to its audience as it has since Hayes Gordon set up Australia’s first theatre-in-the-round in the Kirribilli boatshed just 50 years ago.
Kate Raison and Brian Meegan could have performed Ninety as technically well in a bigger space, but even in Wharf 2 they would not have seemingly looked us directly in the eyes and we would not have seen our reflections in theirs. If Ninety were done in a proscenium, end-on or even side-on theatre like Belvoir Downstairs, it would seem no better than a slick David Williamson comedy from the days before his community conferencing trilogy.
In the round, even in the three-quarters round as The Ensemble is nowadays, Joanna Murray-Smith’s ninety minutes of post-ex-marital experience is quite rivetting. It’s the right play for this theatre.
It’s always a good drama exercise to place an external limitation on what may happen. There is no plot to Ninety except for Isabel’s intention. She knows her ex-husband William so much better than the young actress he is about to marry, from the time of her inveigling him into her bed in the beginning, through their young couple financial struggles, his becoming successful and finally rich-and-famous, with the memories joyful and tragic of their only daughter who died so young.
Isabel has phoned him and persuaded William to see her before he is off to Paris for the wedding – just as she had phoned him in the beginning. He can only afford 90 minutes of his time. The play lasts exactly 90 minutes. Will Isabel break through to William’s real feelings in this short time? Will he change his mind about marrying again? Does she really expect him to come back to her? Would she really want him to?
Of course, I cannot reveal such mysteries. But I can say that, though the details of these two people’s lives are so different from my own, almost everything that was spoken and left unspoken rang silent bells within me. If one can say there is no plot in this play, there is a fiendish plot at work to make us in the audience recognise ourselves as we are and as we have been. If you are up for it, there is still time to make a booking. 02 9929 0644 or www.ensemble.com.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
2010: Sydney Theatre Company Education Program 2010. Feature article.
Sydney Theatre Company Education Program 2010.
March 9, 2010.
Today I saw a schools performance of The Beauty Queen of Leenane (reviewed separately), and discovered the extensive and varied educational program offered by the Sydney Theatre Company.
Current Education Manager, Naomi Edwards, has told me that the appointment of Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton has meant a stronger emphasis on programming beyond the immediate and upfront productions. Funding for the Company is managed through the Sydney Theatre Foundation, and the first move has been to take a position out of Box Office to create a Schools Liaison post.
The new development also means establishing separate funding for the Education Program, seeking new donors for STC Ed, whose Patrons are Ian and Min Darling, Simon and Catriona Mordant, and the Caledonia Foundation in addition to the Sydney Theatre Foundation, supported further by the Girgensohn Foundation and the Gonski Foundation. Edwards reports that donors from businesses and the general public are now coming on board with enthusiasm.
Though some parts of the program, such as touring productions and workshops to regional areas, are done in partnership with the NSW Department of Education and Training, teachers and students from Canberra can take part in a very wide range of activities.
STC Ed productions this year, following The Beauty Queen of Leenane, are Nyuntu Ngali (You We Two) by Scott Rankin (presented by Windmill and Big hART), Burnt by Tom Lycos and Stefo Nantsou (Zeal Theatre, commissioned by STC to present issues about drought), Mr Freezy by Hamish Fletcher, Chris Kohn, Tamara Rewse and Sam Routledge (an Arena Theatre production for young children), The Comedy of Errors by Shakespeare (STC Residents directed by Charmian Gradwell).
There are workshops for teachers and students: School Drama professional development for primary school teachers in association with the University of Sydney; Teacher Workshop Program one day workshops on practical techniques and strategies - Verbatim Theatre with Alana Valentine, Shakespeare with Charmian Gradwell and Naomi Edwards, Commedia Dell’Arte with Darren Gilshenan, and Using Drama Across the Primary Curriculum with Professor Robyn Ewing.
For students: Group Devised Performance Workshop with Zeal Theatre; Brecht Workshop with Shannon Murphy; Tragedy Workshop with Naomi Edwards; and the Young Playwrights’ Residency.
For young children there is also the Actor On A Box daytime storytelling program.
And there are schools days available for all the main stage STC productions of Stockholm, Vs Macbeth, Honour, Oresteia, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Tusk Tusk, August: Osage County, The Trial, Our Town, The Wharf Revue, True West, Uncle Vanya, and The Grenade. There are some seats allocated in the $10 Access Ticket program to help students who can’t afford full price to attend.
Contact details: Naomi Edwards, Acting Education Manager, 02 9250 1726
Toni Murphy, Education Coordinator, 02 9250 1795
Georgia Thorne, Schools Liaison Officer, 02 9250 1778
Email: education@sydneytheatre.com.au
Web: sydneytheatre.com.au/stced
© Frank McKone, Canberra
March 9, 2010.
Today I saw a schools performance of The Beauty Queen of Leenane (reviewed separately), and discovered the extensive and varied educational program offered by the Sydney Theatre Company.
Current Education Manager, Naomi Edwards, has told me that the appointment of Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton has meant a stronger emphasis on programming beyond the immediate and upfront productions. Funding for the Company is managed through the Sydney Theatre Foundation, and the first move has been to take a position out of Box Office to create a Schools Liaison post.
The new development also means establishing separate funding for the Education Program, seeking new donors for STC Ed, whose Patrons are Ian and Min Darling, Simon and Catriona Mordant, and the Caledonia Foundation in addition to the Sydney Theatre Foundation, supported further by the Girgensohn Foundation and the Gonski Foundation. Edwards reports that donors from businesses and the general public are now coming on board with enthusiasm.
Though some parts of the program, such as touring productions and workshops to regional areas, are done in partnership with the NSW Department of Education and Training, teachers and students from Canberra can take part in a very wide range of activities.
STC Ed productions this year, following The Beauty Queen of Leenane, are Nyuntu Ngali (You We Two) by Scott Rankin (presented by Windmill and Big hART), Burnt by Tom Lycos and Stefo Nantsou (Zeal Theatre, commissioned by STC to present issues about drought), Mr Freezy by Hamish Fletcher, Chris Kohn, Tamara Rewse and Sam Routledge (an Arena Theatre production for young children), The Comedy of Errors by Shakespeare (STC Residents directed by Charmian Gradwell).
There are workshops for teachers and students: School Drama professional development for primary school teachers in association with the University of Sydney; Teacher Workshop Program one day workshops on practical techniques and strategies - Verbatim Theatre with Alana Valentine, Shakespeare with Charmian Gradwell and Naomi Edwards, Commedia Dell’Arte with Darren Gilshenan, and Using Drama Across the Primary Curriculum with Professor Robyn Ewing.
For students: Group Devised Performance Workshop with Zeal Theatre; Brecht Workshop with Shannon Murphy; Tragedy Workshop with Naomi Edwards; and the Young Playwrights’ Residency.
For young children there is also the Actor On A Box daytime storytelling program.
And there are schools days available for all the main stage STC productions of Stockholm, Vs Macbeth, Honour, Oresteia, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Tusk Tusk, August: Osage County, The Trial, Our Town, The Wharf Revue, True West, Uncle Vanya, and The Grenade. There are some seats allocated in the $10 Access Ticket program to help students who can’t afford full price to attend.
Contact details: Naomi Edwards, Acting Education Manager, 02 9250 1726
Toni Murphy, Education Coordinator, 02 9250 1795
Georgia Thorne, Schools Liaison Officer, 02 9250 1778
Email: education@sydneytheatre.com.au
Web: sydneytheatre.com.au/stced
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 7 March 2010
2010: Bent by Martin Sherman
Bent by Martin Sherman. Focus Theatre in association with B
Sharp. Downstairs at Belvoir St, Sydney, February 18 to March 14, 2010.
Reviewed Sunday March 7.
This play is well-known for introducing audiences in many countries, since its original production in London in 1979, to the fact that the Nazi holocaust was not only a tragedy for Jews. There is only brief mention of the black triangles (the symbol for "asocials") or green triangles (the symbol for professional criminals) which were used to identify Romani people, but one step down below those with yellow stars, on the lowest rung of the heirarchy in the concentration camps, were the bearers of pink triangles. Bent is called ‘iconic’ by B Sharp because it has become a symbol of the rights of gay people, and this production is presented in conjunction with Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
The story follows the life of Max from his young adult days in 1933 Berlin, when high level political figures tolerated homosexuality, through a long period on the run after Hitler had these key figures killed, during which Max attempted to do deals via a gay uncle (who outwardly lived a standard married life while paying for ‘boys’ on the side) to escape to Amsterdam with his lover, Rudy. The Gestapo catches them living among unemployed people in a forest camp, and real disaster sets in.
On the train to the concentration camp, the SS guards set up a situation where Max is forced to kill Rudy and then to rape a young girl’s body in order to prove he is not homosexual. It’s a ‘deal’ that saves Max’s life at the time, and he is classed as a Jew instead. But later in the camp a deal to get medicine for Horst, classed as homosexual only because he had signed a petition supporting gay rights, goes awry, and Max is forced to watch while the SS give Horst the choice of electrocution on the perimeter fence or being shot if he refuses. Horst is shot, but Max is then ordered to dump the body in the nearby mass grave.
Max does as he is ordered, but finally cannot face his feeling of guilt for still surviving. He takes Horst’s ‘pyjama’ top, with its pink triangle, changes out of his own with its yellow star, and electrocutes himself on the fence.
The play has it weaknesses, not because these things might not have really happened in Nazi Germany, but because it is an unrelenting slide into absolute disaster, with not any sign of hope. This is, of course, a truth about the holocaust, but the play is less than it could have been because the German soldiers are shown only as cardboard cut-outs, as automatons. Sherman’s message comes through loud and clear, and this was probably the right thing to do in 1979 at a time when the public had still never been made aware of what had happened in the 1930s and ’40s. Now I think we need a greater playwright to round out the picture. Though some men were in tears when I saw this production, it was too easy to see the story as a contrivance rather than a complete representation of truth.
The reason this production had an emotional impact was careful attention to detail in the acting, and the effective set design which visually took us from an innocent down at heel but homely apartment to an open unprotected park bench and forest, on to a cold unfurnished railway van, and finally into the summer heat and winter freeze of a yard made of white stone, hemmed in from above by an oppressive representation of the electric fence. The playscript made it difficult to maintain momentum through the long second half where the characters continually move rocks from one place to another, but the imagery in the set design held the action together.
Yet the real strength of emotion came from the surround soundtrack, especially of marching soldiers, steam trains, the rumble of rolling stock, and uplifting military music which built an all-encompassing tension, made all the more horrifying at the point of each torture or death at first off stage and then in full view.
Overall, for me this was a satisfying performance of the play, while its neatly structured plot led me to want to see the issue of the treatment of gays as just one example with much wider implications. The crux of the story is that authoritarian control encourages the people who work as enforcers to go to extremes, placing their victims in impossible situations which become a choice between personal survival or self-destruction to save their souls. Max starts out believing it is right for him to do anything to survive, but in the end must commit suicide in the name of truth.
So I would like more complexity in this drama, so that the play might not be ‘iconic’ of one particular issue, but become more powerful as a symbol of what is wrong with human behaviour that lets us so often go along with, and too often actively participate in, humiliating and killing other people. This is not just the drama of the holocaust of 70 years ago, but is being played out all around us today as it has been for thousands of years. However, whereas Bent remains implacably without hope, I think, alongside the terror, we have gradually established a place for human rights since the Nazi era. We should not let the past horror stymie positive action for the future.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
This play is well-known for introducing audiences in many countries, since its original production in London in 1979, to the fact that the Nazi holocaust was not only a tragedy for Jews. There is only brief mention of the black triangles (the symbol for "asocials") or green triangles (the symbol for professional criminals) which were used to identify Romani people, but one step down below those with yellow stars, on the lowest rung of the heirarchy in the concentration camps, were the bearers of pink triangles. Bent is called ‘iconic’ by B Sharp because it has become a symbol of the rights of gay people, and this production is presented in conjunction with Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
The story follows the life of Max from his young adult days in 1933 Berlin, when high level political figures tolerated homosexuality, through a long period on the run after Hitler had these key figures killed, during which Max attempted to do deals via a gay uncle (who outwardly lived a standard married life while paying for ‘boys’ on the side) to escape to Amsterdam with his lover, Rudy. The Gestapo catches them living among unemployed people in a forest camp, and real disaster sets in.
On the train to the concentration camp, the SS guards set up a situation where Max is forced to kill Rudy and then to rape a young girl’s body in order to prove he is not homosexual. It’s a ‘deal’ that saves Max’s life at the time, and he is classed as a Jew instead. But later in the camp a deal to get medicine for Horst, classed as homosexual only because he had signed a petition supporting gay rights, goes awry, and Max is forced to watch while the SS give Horst the choice of electrocution on the perimeter fence or being shot if he refuses. Horst is shot, but Max is then ordered to dump the body in the nearby mass grave.
Max does as he is ordered, but finally cannot face his feeling of guilt for still surviving. He takes Horst’s ‘pyjama’ top, with its pink triangle, changes out of his own with its yellow star, and electrocutes himself on the fence.
The play has it weaknesses, not because these things might not have really happened in Nazi Germany, but because it is an unrelenting slide into absolute disaster, with not any sign of hope. This is, of course, a truth about the holocaust, but the play is less than it could have been because the German soldiers are shown only as cardboard cut-outs, as automatons. Sherman’s message comes through loud and clear, and this was probably the right thing to do in 1979 at a time when the public had still never been made aware of what had happened in the 1930s and ’40s. Now I think we need a greater playwright to round out the picture. Though some men were in tears when I saw this production, it was too easy to see the story as a contrivance rather than a complete representation of truth.
The reason this production had an emotional impact was careful attention to detail in the acting, and the effective set design which visually took us from an innocent down at heel but homely apartment to an open unprotected park bench and forest, on to a cold unfurnished railway van, and finally into the summer heat and winter freeze of a yard made of white stone, hemmed in from above by an oppressive representation of the electric fence. The playscript made it difficult to maintain momentum through the long second half where the characters continually move rocks from one place to another, but the imagery in the set design held the action together.
Yet the real strength of emotion came from the surround soundtrack, especially of marching soldiers, steam trains, the rumble of rolling stock, and uplifting military music which built an all-encompassing tension, made all the more horrifying at the point of each torture or death at first off stage and then in full view.
Overall, for me this was a satisfying performance of the play, while its neatly structured plot led me to want to see the issue of the treatment of gays as just one example with much wider implications. The crux of the story is that authoritarian control encourages the people who work as enforcers to go to extremes, placing their victims in impossible situations which become a choice between personal survival or self-destruction to save their souls. Max starts out believing it is right for him to do anything to survive, but in the end must commit suicide in the name of truth.
So I would like more complexity in this drama, so that the play might not be ‘iconic’ of one particular issue, but become more powerful as a symbol of what is wrong with human behaviour that lets us so often go along with, and too often actively participate in, humiliating and killing other people. This is not just the drama of the holocaust of 70 years ago, but is being played out all around us today as it has been for thousands of years. However, whereas Bent remains implacably without hope, I think, alongside the terror, we have gradually established a place for human rights since the Nazi era. We should not let the past horror stymie positive action for the future.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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