2012: Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo

Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo, directed by Anna Crawford.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, October 25 – December 1, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 31

Strange, but oddly fascinating (and often funny, but not always), until the end.

This makes for a confusing review, I guess, but despite enjoying the show and appreciating the excellent directing and acting by Sandy Gore (the mother, Suzanna, aka Susan), Catherine Moore (the daughter, Suzanna, aka, Suzy), Rupert Reid (the adopted son/brother, Max), Matthew Zeremes (Suzy’s husband, Andrew) and Anna Lise Phillips (the manipulator and/or truth teller, Becky Shaw), I came away with mixed feelings.

Suzy’s father has died, leaving a business in financial straits and perhaps having had a long-standing gay relationship with his off-stage incompetent accountant.  Susan has had (what appeared on stage) to be a mild form of MS apparently throughout her marriage, but now has an off-stage Lester as a carer, or maybe something more.  Max has grown up to be a proper professional money manager, and tries to provide for Suzy and Susan,  despite compromising emotional relations.  Andrew is entirely kind-hearted, tries to rescue Becky from self-harm, and sets her up to meet Max. 

This is, of course, a deliberately bowdlerised summary, so that when you see the show you will not be forewarned of the details of conflict and consequent laughter.  Suffice to say that Suzy was ‘very close to’ her father; Max’s father could or would not look after him after his wife had died; Susan dominates Suzy and Max, and probably her husband too; Andrew is out of touch with his parents; and Becky has lost communication with her parents after living with a middle-class black man.  The younger generation is all 20+ to 30+ existential angst, while the older generation – that is, Susan – is full of advice.

So you can see how the one-liners and sudden moments of shock-and-awe might generate laughter.  They certainly do, and did when I saw it in company with an audience mostly of my (now ancient, or at least as recently defined, elderly) generation.  Rousing applause, even whistles, at curtain call, enlivened the Ensemble no end.

But something was not quite right.  As I thought things through, I realised I had issues with the script.

The first problem was all these dead or no-longer-talking-to-their-adult-children fathers.  The psychological theory behind the play seemed too Oedipussian, too old fashioned Freudian for a 21st Century comedy.  Or does this just mean that this play, premiered at the 2008 Humana Festival of New American Plays, represents Americans as not yet so over Freud as the rest of us.  And maybe that’s just funny in itself.

Then I remembered I had reviewed another recent American play, Sex with Strangers by Laura Easson (October 3, 2012) and that they both have the same – dramatically speaking – ending.  I had thought that Easson’s leaving her protagonist standing, frozen, in the final spotlight and blackout, was a cop-out.  The author refused to finish the play, and the lack of tension at that final point took attention away from strong drama earlier in the play.

Now Gina Gionfriddo has done the same.  Andrew and Suzy say they will drive Becky away, leaving Susan and Max to have their last conflict ‘resolution’.  Becky has left or been thrown out of the car, and returns to wait for the early-morning train, in company with Max.  Susan imperiously leaves them to it.   Max and Becky stand facing each other at some distance – in every sense – and freeze.  The light is held on them briefly, and blackout.

Just as in Sex with Strangers, Becky Shaw is left unfinished.  I must say the questions left in our minds like, Does she infuriate him enough to make him kill her? or Do they make furious love? or about a dozen other questions I can think of, do lend this play a bit more gutsy feeling at the end compared with Sex with Strangers.

But maybe what’s going on here is that modern Americans are so unsure of their future that their playwrights can tell their stories only up to a certain point, and then just have to stop, freeze in the spotlight, and fade to blackout.  Is this the real angst behind the one-liner quips and the flashing retorts, however funny they seem at the time?

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Come Alive Festival of Museum Theatre

Come Alive Festival of Museum Theatre, at the National Museum of Australia, October 29 – November 2, 2012

by Frank McKone

This is the 3rd annual Come Alive week at the National Museum of Australia.

If the first performance, I Will Survive by senior students from Orana Steiner School, is anything to go by, the rest of the program involving St Francis Xavier College, Dickson College, Burgmann Anglican School, Gungahlin College, Merici College, Canberra College, St Clare’s College, and Narrabundah College, will show young people at their very best.

Over the three years more than 20 schools have participated in this Festival of Museum Theatre, coordinated – in his ‘retirement’ – by one-time Jigsaw Theatre Company director and long-time Narrabundah College drama teacher, Peter Wilkins, also well-known as a writer of reviews and articles on theatre for the Canberra Times.

Each group explores the National Museum for exhibits which stimulate research into history, out of which they make a stage show for public presentation.  In the process they not only learn history and how to put a play together; they develop confidence, learn how to work together as a group, and how valuable it is to connect with their community in performing their work.

All these elements were abundantly clear in I Will Survive, which started from the fascinating Lucille Balls dress, made by Ron Muncaster, featured in the Eternity Gallery.

The play presents the history, and the private and public controversies, behind the Sydney Mardi Gras and the changing attitudes towards gays and lesbians since the 1970s, including the violence of police action in the early period and the horrors and practicalities of dealing with AIDS.

This was 'poor' theatre in terms of the very basic facilities in the Vision Theatre at the National Museum, but in the Q&A session with the students after the Lucille Balls dress made its appearance in the context of a memorial to its original wearer, a wealth of learning for them was revealed, and continued as people, gay and straight, spoke from the audience.  This was theatre of real communication, not mere entertainment.

The National Museum of Australia has had a long association with the International Museum Theatre Alliance, which advocates for the importance of education taking place in museums using the theatre arts, based very much on the research by the well-known Harvard Professor of Psychology, Howard Gardner, famous for the Seven Intelligences.

Performances are at 12 noon and 6 pm each day.  For further information ring (02) 6208 5201 or email angela.casey@nma.gov.au .

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: The Tempest by William Shakespeare

The Tempest by William Shakespeare.  Daramalan College, Director Joe Woodward.  October 24-27, 2012-10-24

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 24

The purpose of this production is essentially for the education of the student participants, on stage, backstage, front of house and in the audience, working in a theatre production company format titled Daramalan Theatre Company.

Head teacher Joe Woodward (who also directs the independent theatre company, Shadow House Pits) operates as overall artistic director, with a range of others – among students and staff – taking on tasks such as Co-Director (for this production, Desiree Bandle), Dramaturg / Pronunciation Coach (Tony Allan), as well as all the necessary technical designers and operators.  I noticed two jobs I regard as essential for students to learn were missing from the program: publicity and accountant.

The theatre program “varies from group devised productions [to] classic and contemporary scripts, in-house scripted works and musicals”, providing students with a wide range of opportunities to gain experience and understanding of theatre, whether or not they go on stage in later life.

This production of The Tempest ticks all the educational boxes.  Characterisation is strong; speaking Shakesperian text varies in quality as I would expect, but is well backed-up by movement work and choral sections; and there is effective experimentation in reversing gender roles, where Prospero and Gonzalo become Prospera and Gonzala, Ariel is male rather than the more usual female (at least in post-17th Century productions), and Trinculo is female, making the Stephano, Trinculo, Caliban relationship rather different from the ordinary clown format.

Visually the costumes, set and lighting, like the sound effects and music, are a mixed conglomeration of some odd but many interesting ideas.  Yet this works well for the island full of weird spirits: The Tempest is a great vehicle for experimentation, for playing with possibilities.

The atmosphere in the final scenes, where Prospera leaves her magical powers to Caliban now that she has regained her rightful position as Duchess, and Caliban regains his position of power passed down from his mother, Sycorax, was well put together.  At this point the whole cast clearly felt at one with their audience – achieving this must be the key to a good educational experience, and it was achieved on opening night.  Well done.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Red Wharf: Beyond the Rings of Satire - The Wharf Revue

Red Wharf: Beyond the Rings of Satire  The Wharf Revue written by Drew Forsythe, Phillip Scott and Jonathan Biggins.  Sydney Theatre Company at The Playhouse, Canberra, October 23-27, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 23


It took me a little while to work out why this year’s Wharf Revue is so good.  It’s the satire, stupid.

There’s a new maturity in the writing and the performances this year.  The best comparison I can make is to say that scenes like Julia Poppins (Amanda Bishop),  Alan “James” Joyce (Josh Quong Tart), the world tour of Foreign Minister Bob Carr (Drew Forsythe), the Fall of the Garden of Earthly Delights (Phillip Scott and audiovisual creator David Bergman), and the Call of the Peter Slipper Handicap are as clever as good David Pope cartoons.

Rather than the show ‘lampooning’ politicians, as they have done in the past, this year characters have depth.  When Julia Poppins’ parrot-headed umbrella plays back Alan Jones’ recorded chaff-bag speech, and she says “Come on, Alan, can’t you do better than that?”, there is a sympathy with Julia in our knowledge of what Alan Jones did do “better than that”, without the need to make any direct reference to his died-of-shame speech.

Connecting Alan Joyce’s Irish accent and history to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a brilliant play on the struggles of the Qantas CEO to keep in control of life and delay his constantly impending demise.  He must just keep talking, however absurd – and very funny – it sounds.  Tart moved into James Joyce poetic territory so well that even a literate Canberra audience were at times silenced by the language as if they were hearing the real Finnegan – until the content of the words about Aer Lingus, British Airways or Emirates just broke everyone up.

The imagery, in the manner of a mediaeval tapestry, telling the story from the unspoiled Garden of Eden to the ruination of the earth by rampant humans applying their God-given free will, and sung by Scott, following the scene where "Cardinal Bolt" and "Sister Mirabella" condemn the global-warming scientist Flannery of Padua in line with the treatment of Galileo, is artistically and thematically way beyond lampoon.  This is Swiftian satire, wonderfully illustrated.

And then there is Bob Carr, imagining himself as a kind of Gulliver but discovering that he is rather Lilliputian in comparison to the condescending, but terribly polite power of Hillary Clinton.  Forsythe captures all of Carr’s little mannerisms of head, shoulder and facial movement to reveal the character’s inner fears; while Bishop has all the voice and confidence of the most significant woman in the world.

And lastly, but not leastly, among the many other effective scenes, I must make special mention of The Same Sex Marriage of Figaro, where the rearrangement of Mozart is brilliantly done, with singing up to operatic standard – a real measure of the theatrical skills of this company.

The whole show is unified by the story of the launch from Woomera of the ark of humanity – the last survivors taking the story of Earth out to the universe.  This takes the drama above and beyond the petty politics of the day – indeed, Beyond the Rings of Satire.  A great show, not to be missed.

PS

At http://www.yell.com/s/recording+services+sound-red+wharf+bay.html perhaps Sydney Theatre Company could record Red Wharf: Beyond the Rings of Satire for posterity.

Red Wharf Bay is in Wales, not too far from Dylan Thomas’s “Llareggub” (just a little more literary allusion which might suggest next election year’s show about milking the global village electorate, or trolls under the wharf, or something ....)


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Our Shadows Pass Only Once by David Temme

Our Shadows Pass Only Once by David Temme.  Produced by David Temme and Caroline Stacey. Directed by Andrew Holmes, lighting and set design by Gillian Schwab, sound design by Shoeb Ahmad, at The Street 2, Canberra, October 11-19, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

If this were a piece of music, it’s subtitle would be A tone poem for four voices.  The orchestral continuo is provided by Shoeb Ahmad’s electronic soundscape, foregrounded by a soprano (Sarah Nathan-Truesdale), a tenor (Josh Wiseman), a contralto (Caroline Simone O’Brien), and a baritone (Raoul Craemer).  The two higher voices represent a younger couple; the lower voices an older couple.

The essence of the interplay of voices is to show the stresses and strains of love – which binds, and in doing so pulls couples together while equally pushing them apart.  If Our Shadows Pass Only Once were presented on radio, the final sound would be footsteps and the opening and closing click of a door.

On stage, the visual “orchestration” consists of pale colours in the younger characters’ costumes, darker colours in the older, against black and white, in both the physical setting of chairs, walls and floor, and in the live camera projections, which often provided different angles from what we could see on the stage before us.  The movement “orchestration”, keeping pace with Ahmad’s slowly changing pitch, tone and timbre, consists of gradual rearrangement of position of characters, chairs and lighting which sometimes seem to represent physical relationships but as often emotional distances.

The author has called his work “abstract” but it is so only in the same sense that music may be called abstract.  It creates a continually changing sense of emotional engagement in us, and takes us through a wide range of feeling qualities, until the question is asked “How long can we go on doing this?”

The spell is broken, the characters walk, not quite together yet perhaps not entirely apart, to the rear door of the stage, push the release bar and exit – in the case of The Street 2, out into the open air as if into the city and its lights.  The coda is complete, and we are left with the experience of the music in our memory.

As theatre goes, Our Shadows is unusual but, for me at least, satisfying, so long as you attend to what you see, hear and feel as you would in a concert hall.

As a work in progress from The Hive, The Street’s development program for new writers, I judge it to be highly successful, in its own right as a complete work at this stage, and as a stepping off point for David Temme.  He can confidently move on to writing more new and exploratory theatre which I certainly will look forward to.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: From the Ground Up - Circus Oz

“For gorsake, stop laughing: this is serious!”

From the Ground Up Circus Oz at Canberra Theatre Centre, October 3-7, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 5

I have nothing to say about Circus Oz except that it’s just brilliant to see the irreverence, social conscience, performance skills, exciting acts and a sense of a community working together on stage and including us in the audience.

However biassed this may be, I have to say that where Cirque du Soleil is a spectacular arty construct, French cool style, From the Ground Up is no-bullshit Australian culture, which grabs our audience by the throat and makes us cheer the daredevils on, laugh, and be made aware of social justice all at once.  This is the art of Circus Oz.

“For gorsake, stop laughing: this is serious!”  is the caption of the famous cartoon by Stan Cross originally published 29 July, 1933.  An excellent reproduction is at http://www3.slv.vic.gov.au/latrobejournal/issue/latrobe-65/fig-latrobe-65-053a.html , showing two blokes high up on scaffolding.  One is holding on for dear life to a girder, while the other, as he falls off, has grabbed his mate’s legs and pulled down his trousers.  From the Ground Up is about the building site of the new Circus Oz home base in Melbourne, now under construction.  The circus acts take place on flying girders, dogman’s ropes and almost anything else you might find on a building site, but the site foreman nowadays is Ghenoa Gela, a Torres Strait Islander from Rockhampton, in character as Indie G (an Indie Genius Australian) – aka Fruit Ninja.

We laughed as we were divided into apples and mangoes by Indie G, but understood the serious message when the imagery grew into Australia as a fruit salad – each fruit different but all tasting great together.  The word ‘multiculturalism’ didn’t need to be spoken.

At http://www.circusoz.com/digitalAssets/1479_1234416397068_The%20History%20of%20Circus%20Oz.pdf you can read Jon Hawkes’ history.  My memories of the early shows agree entirely with Hawkes’ comment that “although Circus Oz may be one of the few surviving remnants of the seventies, the group continues to demonstrate that the values espoused then retain all their vigour and relevance now.”

Indeed, they do.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Sex with Strangers by Laura Eason

Fragments of literary aphorisms

Photos by Brett Boardman

 Sex with Strangers by Laura Eason.  Sydney Theatre Company directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, designed by Tracy Grant Lord, performed by Jacqueline McKenzie (Olivia) and Ryan Corr (Ethan) at Wharf 1, September 28 – November 24, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 3

I have absolutely no quarrel with the directing, design and acting of this new play from Chicago, while the theme – about the generational shift from ‘old-fashioned values’ (like having a printed book on your shelves) to today’s instant gratification and lack of privacy on the internet (and selling cheap e-books with no hard copy, never smelling of ‘library’) – is perfectly valid, worthwhile and up-to-date.

On these grounds I can genuinely encourage you to see Sex with Strangers.

But I do have a quibble with the author.  I present it here, on the blog, and if you wish, you are invited by her to ‘share your thoughts about the play with me, I’d love to hear them.  Through one of the miracles of our time, lauraeason@gmail.com will reach me in New York.  Call me old fashioned, but I still find that amazing.’

If I may use an Americanism, the play is just too ‘neat’.  I’ll explain more later, but you need to know something of the plot and dramatic structure first.

Each half has five scenes, each introduced with a projection on the backdrop of a quote from a different well-known writer, of the kind that both Olivia and Ethan would like to emulate.  Aphorisms include “The truth will set you free.  But not until it is finished with you” (David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest), or Anaïs Nin’s “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect”.  This is a technique made famous in American theatre by Tennessee Williams’ “Blue Roses” in The Glass Menagerie and more generally based on Brecht’s “literalisation of theatre” to cue the audience in to thinking at a “distance” about the scene they are about to witness.

Ryan Corr as Ethan      Jacqueline McKenzie as Olivia

Though Ethan (at 27) is a stranger to Olivia (in her mid- or maybe later-thirties) when he turns up in the middle of a snowstorm at the otherwise empty retreat where she is holed up trying to write,  he is connected by having had a teacher (as Olivia also is) who went to school with Olivia, and with whom he has become friends.  Olivia’s so far one and only novel could not find a publisher (print, of course) but her old friend had passed a copy to Ethan who has come to find Olivia with a proposition to publish both her first novel and the one she is just completing, for only 10% commission, on his website.  Ethan has already become famous for blogging a year’s sexual encounters with women, one night stands, whose comments and tweets add to his salacious descriptions, attracting sponsors wanting to invest in the e-book and upcoming film Sex with Strangers.

From here on the plot tangles in a way that requires a viewing, but suffice to say Olivia has sex with this stranger Ethan, scene after scene (off stage for the climactic bits, so they can change costumes) throughout the first half, which ends as Olivia, in horror, begins to read Ethan’s book.

After interval, Ethan assumes he has a long-term relationship going.  He publishes her new novel, and destroys her chance of success with a New York publisher famous for “22 Nobel Prize winning titles since their establishment in 1946”.  By the final scene, a year and a half later, she is contemplating marrying a nice teacher who wants children before it is too late for her, when Ethan, now an infamous celebrity, seeks reconciliation.

At last, in the final spotlight in Olivia’s doorway, my quibble comes to light.  She orders Ethan to leave, since she can’t stop herself wanting him sexually despite knowing she could never live with him.  As he leaves he tells her he will be waiting, apparently for ever, in the bar on the corner – his last attempt to manipulate her.  She goes to follow him, turns back, turns to go out again, then stands immobile in the doorway.  Lights fade.  The end.

This is just too neat – it’s a cop out on the part of the author, who leaves us feeling cheated.  We know, of course, that whichever choice Olivia makes will never be entirely satisfactory, but this turns the drama into no more than a superficial guessing game.  Around where I was sitting next to two very Sydney fashionable young women there was an audible exhalation of tension.  Some kind of denouement, I suppose, but I’m glad I wasn’t the actor left there, ghost-like, just fading away. 

As her character Olivia is unable to face up to the possibility of failure, as a writer, so Laura Eason fails to give us a satisfactory conclusion.  Olivia’s and Ethan’s vicious argument earlier in Act Two stands out as the strong point in the drama, while the ending is a let-down.

The issue for me is that the characters are finally seen as agents in a plot contrived to raise something of an intellectual conundrum.  Jocelyn Moorhouse has written in her notes that the drama “on the surface, seems like romantic comedy, but if you dig deeper you find it is about much more.”  Fortunately she took the opportunity to make the comedy work well, and had actors who could carry the script through effectively. 

I thank them for this, especially Jacqueline McKenzie for holding on professionally at the end, and leave you – after you have seen the show, of course – to email the author as you see fit.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Private Lives by Noël Coward

Zahra Newman (Amanda)  Toby Schmitz (Elyot)

Love or ...

Toby Truslove (Victor)  Eloise Mignon (Sibyl)
                  Mish Grigor (the maid Louise) not pictured                                                                                                           Mayhem!

Rehearsal photos by Brett Boardman

 Private Lives by Noël Coward.  Belvoir Upstairs directed and designed by Ralph Myers at Belvoir Street, Sydney, September 22 – November 11, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 2

Because I had time on my hands and no smoking in my eyes, I wrote a small poem as a mental preparation for reviewing Private Lives:

    At the Central end of Sydney city,
    Down at heel among the feet in
    High heeled glass slipper towers, is this
    Sophistication when viewed
    From my suburban bungalow
    On the outer edge
    Of the Bush Capital?

    Perhaps.  Perhaps not.

    But here’s the Belvoir B
    Company of players bravely
    Or Cowardly playing Noël.

    Perhaps.  Perhaps not.

    We shall see.  Are they still
    On the edge?  Like me?

    Perhaps….

As you can see, I had my doubts – about whether Noël Coward was the right sort of playwright for Belvoir, whether the play would be a piece of museum theatre (which I couldn’t imagine), or whether it could be “modernised” and whether it should be if it could.

Still with time to have coffee and cake before going in, I broke my usual rule and read the director’s notes before seeing his work.  It’s always better to judge first and then see what the director intended.  So I thought.

The stage was empty.  The set was a white wall with two white doors and a white double door between that might be a lift entry.

Aha! I thought.  Modern Minimalism – no Noël Coward high fashion here.

Oho! I remembered.  The last play I saw with a set like this was a blood-and-gore Greek Tragedy at the Wharf – was it The Trojan Women?

This was looking serious.

The trouble was that I had never thought of Coward as a serious contender in his era compared with, say, Eugene O’Neill or George Bernard Shaw.

Well, I needn’t have worried.  This Private Lives is not the slightest bit serious – just bloody (to quote Shaw) funny.

Instead of the false glamour of the 1930’s rich and famous, and the exposé of their superficiality – the interpretation you could look for in Coward’s day – this stripped down study of the destructive nature of love has taken us out of the conventional social criticism mode into the universal.  Just as the director promised in his notes.

Love conquers all because it has to – there is so much that needs to be conquered.  Like demeaning comments or jokes at other people’s expense.  Like Alan Jones, say.

Alan Jones, of course, is not funny – even when he tries to apologise, and then blames others for vilifying him – because he is real.

Coward’s characters become more and more funny, struggling against their own worst natures, until the play reaches a crescendo of laughing, clapping and cheering (on our part, not theirs) as the lights dim on the mayhem of a stage now totally full of clutter, physical and emotional – because we are safe in our seats watching what we know to be fiction.

Yet we also know even while we laugh that “tearing each other apart”, as Myers’ notes describe it, is real enough.

Maybe Alan Jones will understand this one day.

Perhaps.  Perhaps not.

So, yes, using a clearly defined modern acting style, in modern costumes, with modern accents in a modern set gives Coward a new edge.  There is a level of sophistication here which is central to Sydney, in the great tradition of Belvoir Street.  I saw it clearly from the Bush Capital, and it made the 300 km trip well worthwhile.

Or if that is a trip too far, you can wait for the Canberra Theatre season November 21-24.

© Frank McKone, Canberra