Breaker Morant by Kenneth G Ross.  Everyman Theatre, directed by Jarrad West at Canberra Theatre Centre, Courtyard Studio, March 21-31, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 31

Since there has been some mention in the press arguing the toss about the truth of the Breaker Morant story, I should begin by making it clear that I have not studied the history of the Boer War nor any details of the Court Martial and execution of Morant and Handcock.  I look at this play as an interpretation of history, just as Shakespeare’s history plays are.

This doesn’t mean that I think this play is up to Shakespeare’s standard, however.  It is almost entirely a courtroom scene with brief excursions to the defendants’ meetings with their defence lawyer, Major Thomas, and the prison cell housing Morant, Handcock and their co-accused, George Witton, who escaped the firing squad, and to Lord Kitchener’s office.

The Court is represented as a shambles because the accused refused to be subordinate, making it very difficult to avoid most of the play being a shouting match, without much opportunity for subtle emotional developments to be displayed.  The strongest scene – and the quietest – is near the end when Major Thomas confronts Colonel Hamilton to try to have the execution delayed to allow time to contact the Australian and British governments.  Kitchener has already signed the death warrants and left, leaving Hamilton to fob off Thomas.  Dr Duncan Driver played Thomas’s determination and frustration in the face of immutable forces very well indeed, while Colin Gray’s Hamilton was so cold that the atmosphere in the whole theatre silently froze.

Duncan Ley as Morant and Robert DeFries as Handcock successfully presented themselves as men of maturity and authority, but at the same time the script, I think, too often puts them out as too willing to interrupt the court proceedings with obscenities and open attacks on witnesses and the court itself.  It may be that this may have happened in the real court martial (suggesting that British law was falling apart in the wilds of Africa), but too much too often lessens the theatrical tension on stage.  I would have expected the President of the Court Martial to have taken action against them for contempt of court, but all he did was to keep saying he wouldn’t allow them to keep up their unacceptable behaviour.

Though I could see the justification for the director’s desire to make the story ‘timeless’ by using military costume from different eras, having a female prosecutor (Major Bolton played very well by Andrea Close), and removing references to specific dates, I found this distracting rather than making a strong point.  It might have been more bold to do as was done in Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus, and use a recent modern setting, in Iraq, say.  However, I think it would take much manipulation for this to work with this story, though perhaps the Bosnian war would have allowed for summary executions.  In the end keeping strictly to the historical period, when armies did as a matter of course execute their own, would have been the better way to go. 

This production of Breaker Morant, as I saw it, certainly made the point that the executions were politically motivated rather than justified in court, but the sympathy for Morant that was engendered in the film version in 1980 (which was entirely based on this playscript) was replaced by empathy with Major Thomas, who so valiantly tried and ultimately failed through no fault of his own.  It became his play, and in that way became a legal drama rather than a myth about a wronged Australian. 

I’m not sure if this was Jarrad West’s intention, but it still made this a worthwhile production to see.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Syncopation by Allan Knee

Emma Palmer                                                               Justin Cotta

Syncopation by Allan Knee, presented by Critical Stages and The Follies Company directed by Stephen Helper at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 27 to April 5, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 30

Noel Coward would have called this a ‘nice’ play.  It makes for an enjoyable evening, but it’s the dancing that gives it a feel-good quality despite a predictable, melodramatic and sentimental plot. 

Fortunately the dance work by Emma Palmer (Anna) and Justin Cotta (Henry) carried the day, while the quality of their acting kept our interest through a too long first half and another too long second half.  There was as much a sigh of relief at 10.40pm for the play having finally ended, as there was the inevitable sigh of satisfaction that at last these two determined ballroom dancers had reached the conclusion that they just belonged together.  Si-i-i-igh!

It’s amusing to see in one week two plays with the same basic romantic structure – Midsummer (reviewed March 28) and Syncopation – but with such different degrees of theatrical originality.  Syncopation has in the background something of the same issues of social class (in 1912 New York) as Midsummer (in modern Edinburgh), but the plot – will the seamstress marry the boring but conventional shopkeeper, the rich sophisticated but married man in the cape, or the dancing meatworker – is no more telling than the plot of Out in the Cold, Cold Snow, the well-known melodrama of the late 19th Century.

Considering that by 1912 Bernard Shaw had already written Major Barbara and was about to write Pygmalion and Heartbreak House and in America Eugene O’Neill was busy writing his first plays while convalescing from tuberculosis, I can only wonder where Knee is coming from.  It was nice to hear Anna tell a rather bemused Henry that she wanted women to be allowed to vote, and the idea of freedom from the conventional restraints is played out as the two come together and dance, but, for a 21st Century play, it’s all too predictable.  The characters are cyphers, carrying out the author’s predetermined construct.  Knee needs to study David Greig, the author of Midsummer, to see what I mean.

Certainly see the play, because the dancing is lovely and the sigh factor gets to you in the end.

But there are backstage questions that seem to need answering. 

One is about hype. “Syncopation is the only truly integrated play with dance in the world” says Stephen Helper on the website  http://www.syncopation.com.au/home.html . 

Sorry – not true.  Try Wallflowering by Peta Murray, a much better script than Syncopation, in my view, and an Australian play which travelled to England and the USA.  We saw a revival of this 1989 play, at Tuggeranong Arts Centre, starring Noeline Brown and Doug Scroope, in 2004.  Its original production, after a reading at Sydney Theatre Company, was by Carol Woodrow’s Canberra Theatre Company.

The other concern is about management. Critical Stages and The Follies Company did not supply The Q, at least until four days into the run when I saw Syncopation, with printed programs for the audience.  Some posters for the foyer had arrived, but even if all the audience had gathered around to read them, they might not have been clear about the names of the actors performing that night.  Now that I have searched the website, I see that the cast has changed over time.  The professionalism of Emma Palmer and Justin Cotta was exemplary on the night, with no indication of anything amiss, but if I were one of the actors I would not have been pleased.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Midsummer (a play with songs) by David Greig

Midsummer (a play with songs) by David Greig (writer/director) and Gordon McIntyre (songwriter).  Traverse Theatre Company, Edinburgh, at Canberra Theatre Centre, The Playhouse, March 28-31, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 28

What an interesting play!  It’s like pass the parcel: surprise after surprise at the unwrapping of each new layer, right until the very centre at the end.  Surely it’s a rom-trag?  But no – the last revelation is still to come.  Rom-com after all.

The play, its original structure, sparkling design and presentation by actors Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon, proves the truth of the announcement by the supposed (or is it real in Scotland?) parking ticket payment machine: CHANGE IS POSSIBLE.

The storyline, after all, is no different than Shakespeare’s tale of Beatrice and Benedick or Shaw’s of Bluntschli and Raina.  An unlikely couple meet in highly unprepossessing circumstances and find that love happens regardless of what they think they feel.  For Shakespeare it was all much ado about nothing – except that it was really about the nature of proper governance of the nation.  For Shaw it was really about the taking up of arms between nations.  For David Greig it is about the human disaster of modern urban consumer society.  Com though it might be for the characters as they “dance ere we are married’, give her hand “to my chocolate cream soldier” or board the ferry for Belgium, the fun of realising that love conquers all cannot completely hide the trag behind

My lord, your brother John is ta’en in flight / And brought with armed men back to Messina, or

Time’s up, Major.  You’ve managed those regiments so well that youre sure to be asked to get rid of some of the Infantry of the Teemok division, and

the need for Bob, at the age of 35, to have had to depend on being a criminal’s courier to survive in modern Edinburgh, the pointless lives of the youthful ‘Goths’, the irresponsibility of ‘nightlife’, and the sadness of Helena’s desire for a child and fear that at 35 she may be too late.  Using Bob’s ill-gotten gains to flee to Europe for a few weeks’ fun may not be all that it promises on the Monday after this midsummer’s wild weekend.  We can only hope that the parking machine is right, and change is possible after all.

So, if the plot is traditional, what makes this play original?  The answer is the same as it was for Much Ado About Nothing and Arms and the Man.  It’s in the language and the relationship set up between the characters and the audience.  Change in writing for theatre is possible.  It was Shakespeare who used the soliloquy as a device for a character to speak directly to the audience, it was Shaw who put the bluntness of Bluntschli on stage, and in the last century Brecht who had characters sing songs as singers rather than as the characters they otherwise were playing, while Tennessee Williams wrote characters who separately observed and commented on the action. 

Greig has taken this tradition a step beyond.  Bob and Helena switch moment by moment from being their own character to describing what the other was or is doing or playing out other characters in the other character’s life.  The play constantly shifts the ground beneath us, which is often funny even as it can make us feel insecure.

This is a new style of theatre suited to today’s 24/7 culture, but does not fall into the common trap of using technology just because it is there.  In fact the clever design, by Georgia McGuiness, uses perfectly old-fashioned visual and audio techniques, while the one more modern device which does the trick for the play is the simple continuous roll-along brightly-lit message from the ticket machine.  Change is possible, indeed, but is most effective when introduced sparingly and only to make a specific point.  The script is about a wildly out-of-control weekend, but is tightly written, giving the actors every opportunity to make the most of every minute.  As they do.

As always, discipline and being true to the right style is what makes theatre work.  It certainly does in Midsummer.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie

The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie presented by Queanbeyan City Council. Directed by Jordan Best at Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 7-24, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 7

This is a misconceived production of a play which, despite its 60 years of continuous performance in London, is essentially a farce. It certainly got some laughs on opening night, despite the director’s apparent intention from her Director’s Notes that we should have been scared and spooked by ‘a cracker of a mystery’.

Christie’s crime fiction consists of nothing but artifice – an artificial plot on which is hung artificial characters with motivations which have nothing to do with psychological truth. Her stories are interesting as games, working out possible directions to take in a maze which has already been predetermined by the designer. The more unexpected twists and turns in the design, the more fun it is to play the game. But that’s all there is to it.

Best, unfortunately, despite her professional training and previous excellent productions, has missed the point here. Naturalistic playing of these characters is boring because it is the wrong style for this type of play. The cast worked hard, but only Jim Adamik’s over-the-top Mr Paravicini and to some extent Brendan Kelly’s Christopher Wren had the exaggerated characteristics a farce requires.

The director’s decision to place the play in Australia (with such a blizzard in, presumably, Katoomba, that would cheer the cockles of a climate skeptic’s heart) compounded her problem. This play is quintessentially English, filled with stock characters, stock references to the weather and places like Majorca, and entirely in the style of English farces of its day, the 1950s before rock’n’roll, such as those by William Douglas Home who, like Agatha Christie, looked back with some kind of sentimental awe to the hey-day of English culture – the 1930s. Australia was never like this.

Mind you, it is true that my first acting role, in Australia in 1963, was as an upper-class twit in Home’s 1956 play The Reluctant Debutante. No-one, but no-one, would bother to present that even in a country town today, and presenting The Mousetrap could only work if it was made thoroughly absurdist – a spoof of the very crime fiction it represents. When you consider what we watch on tv nowadays – Silent Witness for example – the idea that we might be scared or spooked by the ‘horrors’ of The Mousetrap is the ultimate absurdity.

I would like to praise the set design (the indomitable Brian Sudding) and construction (Craig Francis and Ian Croker), except for one point – the door that should have creaked, didn’t. There was also a sound problem – almost inherent in the script – when the loud radio drowned out the characters’ voices. We needed to hear what they said because there were clues to the plot in their words.

So The Mousetrap is a disappointment, which is a pity because The Q has presented so much better local productions in recent times, and I hope will do so in the future.

© Frank McKone, Canberra