2013: Mrs Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw

Mrs Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw.  Sydney Theatre Company directed by Sarah Giles, Wharf 1 February 19 – April 6 and July 4-20, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 27 (matinee)

Mr Praed (pronounced 'prayed') - gentleman caller

 All photos by Brett Boardman

Frank Gardner - the son next door

Rev Samuel Gardner - the father next door

An innocent introduction: Mrs Warren, Crofts, Vivie Warren

Sir George Crofts (who ought to be kicked),  Vivie

Decision

Reconciliation?

Truth

Reality

This is a brilliant production which makes me acutely aware of the skills of the author, the cast and designers.  It is especially a triumph for Sarah Giles in her first mainstage production for Sydney Theatre Company.

The actors played exquisitely. While it is understandable, especially because of her final-scene speech and exit, that Helen Thomson receives star recognition as Mrs Warren, which she absolutely deserves, every other actor – Lizzie Schebesta (Vivie Warren), Simon Burke (Praed), Eamon Farren (Frank Gardner), Drew Forsythe (Rev Samuel Gardner) and Martin Jacobs (Sir George Crofts) – matched her precision of expression and language.  This is a perfect team for a play which still rings true after 120 years.

The basic designs for set and costumes seem to be based on the photos of the 1902 production by the Theatre of the New Lyric Club, when the official censor finally agreed – to a private club production, as Shaw wrote, “at last, after a delay of only eight years”.  (These photos appear in the 1912 Constable publication.)

But how clever and effective it was to make the garden backdrop into a curtain representing a full-height manicured hedge, and to change scenes using a slow-revolving stage which gave us not just a sense of time passing, but time to absorb the effects of the scene just ended.  So we were treated to the preservation of the period to which the play belongs, in a frame of modern staging technique.

Despite my long association with the work of Bernard Shaw I had never seen Mrs Warren’s Profession on stage and had wondered how it would work to construct the set as Shaw described it in considerable realistic detail.  The creative team of Renée Mulder (designer), with lighting designer Nigel Levings and composer/sound designer Max Lyandvert took the key elements from Shaw, playing with them in the open space of the Wharf 1 theatre and, in doing so, illuminated the relationships between characters more clearly, I believe, than Shaw’s original description would have allowed.

Finally I must explain my enthusiasm for the quality of expression and language in this production.  As Alex Lalak states, in one of the excellent essays in the program, “For George Bernard Shaw, the most important things in life were words.”  For many directors and actors over the past century, Shaw’s words have seemed a bête noir.  There are just so many of them!  So much philosophy!  How do we act these words?

The answer is to understand that Shaw was using words to both express ideas (of the characters) and expose the relationships between the characters, within a frame of social criticism.  Each laugh makes us think; each word tells us how the speaker is thinking and how the receiver of the words is thinking – and feeling – in response.

This is complex work for each actor.  This is not ordinary “naturalism”, where a Stanislavsky-style technique of recalled feelings can work.  This is writing by an author who is in charge of the effects on us in the audience – on both our thoughts and our feelings.  Shaw wrote, in “The Author’s Apology” for Mrs Warren’s Profession, “Give me the critic who has just rushed from my play to declare furiously that Sir George Crofts ought to be kicked.”

And, indeed, this was exactly the effect that these actors and this director achieved for this critic, at least.  Further than this, I felt proud that we have in the Sydney Theatre Company practitioners who do such good service to one of the greatest dramatic writers in English since William Shakespeare. 

And if you would like to know the source of the director’s note that Shaw stole the play from the famous actress with whom he had worked on Ibsen’s plays, check out A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama: 1880 – 2005 edited by Mary Luckhurst: “A New Woman Drama” and Mrs Daintree’s Daughter by Janet Achurch – who was a remarkable woman indeed.



© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Henry 4 adapted by John Bell

David Whitney as Henry IV

Arky Michael, Felix Joseps, Yalin Ozucelik, Matthew Moore, John Bell, Terry Bader, Wendy Strehlow

Jason Klarwein as Hotspur, Matthew Moor as Prince Hal

John Bell as Fir John Falstaff

Matthew Moore as Prince Hal

Yalin Ozucelik, Matthew Moore, John Bell, Felix Joseps, Wendy Strehlow, Terry Bader, Arky Michael

All photos by Lisa Tomasetti

Henry 4 adapted by John Bell from Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 by William Shakespeare.  Bell Shakespeare Company, co-directed by John Bell and Damien Ryan, at Canberra Playhouse, February 26 – March 9, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 26

If this version of the Henry IV plays were a game of soccer (I’ve read that the Romans brought football to Britain, and it has flourished there ever since), I think the score would be Sir John Falstaff 7, Prince Hal 2.  Or maybe, sympathy for The People 5, appreciation of The Royals 0.

John Bell has selected material, directed the action and played the role himself so that the play seems to owe too much to Falstaff’s grandiose sense of his own importance.

This is not to say that Bell’s interpretation of Falstaff is at fault: in fact, I would say it is probably the best I can recall.  We see the full flowering of Falstaff, the con man, who uses all and sundry for his own benefit – and finally faces his justified come-uppance as the new king rejects his fawning attempt to gain high office. 

But the focus on the ordinary people weakened the importance – and the audience’s understanding – of the internecine warfare among the nobility, which in the end was Shakespeare’s real concern. 

It is the speech by Rumour, “painted full of tongues” – which opens The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth – which links the two parts.  The whole society is torn apart by Rumour which “is a pipe / Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, / And of so easy and so plain a stop / That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, / The still-discordant wavering multitude, / Can play upon it.”

I can see Bell’s intention and some reasoning behind the setting of the play in a kind of modern England torn by the social strife of the recent riots, but Shakespeare set his play at a specific point in history, some 200 years before his own time, as a warning, I suggest, to those taking revenge on the basis of the rumour mill.  It’s probably more appropriate to see the parallel with our current parliament and the upcoming election, than to see much connection with the street-level destructive behaviour of the modern riots, just because Shakespeare used low-life scenes as comic contrast.

The most significant failure, to me, of this production was that the playing of Prince Hal lost the charisma, intelligence and strategic thinking which is central to his character.  Either Matthew Moore was not up to the part – and indeed much of his dialogue was not even to be clearly heard – or it was not considered necessary in the play’s direction to make sure that his words came through to us not as mere banter or drug-induced mish-mash. 

For example, when his father is ill, Hal says to Poins “By this hand, though thinkest me as far in the devil’s book as thou and Falstaff for obduracy and persistency: let the end try the man.  But I tell thee my heart bleeds inwardly that my father is so sick; and keeping such vile company as thou art hath in reason taken from me all ostentation of sorrow.”  He goes on to make clear that he has to think strategically about how “every man would think me an hypocrite indeed”. 

I can only fairly report that none of this text was delivered powerfully, so that we would understand how it could be that this apparently dissolute young man could turn around when necessary to defeat the Percy opposition, could face up to the responsibility his father’s illness and subsequent demise would place upon him, and show the kind of strength of character that would be seen by his brother John of Lancaster, now the Lord Chief Justice, when he says, as the play concludes, “I like this fair proceeding of the king’s. / He hath intent his wonted followers / Shall all be very well provided for; / But all are banish’d till their conversations / Appear more wise and modest to the world.”

Where was this strength of character and Hal’s ability to see through the “devil’s book” of Poins and Falstaff, while also understanding their humanity, which takes him on to become the Henry the Fifth of Agincourt?  I’m afraid it just wasn’t there. 

So, despite the success of the playing of Falstaff, the failure of Prince Hal to score left me disappointed with Henry 4.
 
© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Our Lady by the Beach over the Sea by Joe Woodward

Our Lady by the Beach over the Sea written and directed by Joe Woodward.  Shadow House Pits at the Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, February 20 – March 2, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
20 February

This is a new play of the many shadows of regret.  Through a number of his productions, Woodward has created his own genre of imagist theatre, where characters’ psychological shadows – in the Jungian sense – become physically represented.  What interests him is the interplay between the ordinary “external reality” and the fantasy “internal reality” as people live at once in the present and the past.

The central character, Jay, an old man apparently in a nursing home, is confronted – perhaps in either or both realities – with the woman who, at the age of 16, was for Jay the goddess of youth, Hebe.  Her real name is Em, perhaps Emma, and it appears in the final scene that she has sent her daughter, Nim, to find Jay – and to tell him that she, Em, will kill him.

I interpret this to mean that because Jay failed to turn his youthful infatuation into a permanent ideal love relationship, his memory – now obsessive fantasy – of what should have been, will be, in ordinary language, “the death of him”.

In disciplined and skilled performances, Em and Jay are played as externally realistic characters by Trish Kelly and Oliver Baudert, while Kat Bramston plays the fantasy “Young Em” as well as the externally real Nim.  Then there are a male shadow and a female shadow, Lycius and Lamia, from the poem Lamia by John Keats, who are also named Lucas and Mia, played by Andrew Eddy and Lucy Matthews.

The mood of this piece, rather more than in previous Woodward works, is melancholy – perfectly appropriate for Jay’s fixation on Keats’ poetry, since Keats’ source for the story of Lycius and Lamia was Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

For me there is an odd, though interesting, disjunction between the intention of imagist theatre – to build an identification in the audience’s feelings with those of the characters – with the reality that the images become mysteries that demand intellectual interpretation by the audience: thus preventing the viewer from responding emotionally while they try to work out what’s going on and what it all means.

I couldn’t understand much of the beginning scene or two, and only towards the very end found myself working out the probable story of Jay’s mental life – too late to identify with him, despite my being of his age (and even going through my own version of infatuation with a goddess in the nineteen sixties as he did – even on the occasional beach, indeed!)

Part of the problem is, I think – based on my own experiments in the past – that the imagist technique is rather cartoon-like in effect.  It’s often better for creating humorous effects, as in fact happened on a few occasions in this show, but too easily becomes tedious or confusing.

The only escape I can suggest is to write heightened poetic language for all the characters throughout the play, to provide an emotional “spine” to hang the living body on.  In Our Lady by the Beach over the Sea this was only done when Keats’ or Yeats’ poetry was being quoted, although the device of the video of the surf on the beach, reflected in the mirrors behind the action, worked in a limited way.  If the surf had changed at significant times from calm to storm, the image would have had more effect.

The music, by Damien Foley, was also quite effective in this way at times, but needed a lot more variety to push the drama along – like a good movie soundtrack, rather than an accompaniment.

So my conclusion is that Woodward has made an original and serious work in Our Lady by the Beach over the Sea, interesting for its ideas and imagist concept, but not entirely successful as a unified theatrical experience for the audience.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: The Secret River adapted by Andrew Bovell

 The Secret River adapted by Andrew Bovell from the novel by Kate Grenville.  Sydney Theatre Company directed by Neil Armfield at Canberra Playhouse, February 14-17, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 14

It’s difficult to write about a play when the depth of sadness in it leaves me in silence.

This – me: my place.  These are the final words of the tragedy that was, and still is, the dispossession and mass murder of Aboriginal people throughout Australia.  The sadness of The Secret River is that the invaders were themselves the dispossessed of London, saved from the gallows only by being transported for life.  Their only hope of survival was a ticket-of-leave and a plot of land – Aboriginal land.

My feelings turn even darker when I think that only yesterday – 200 years from the arrival the fictional William Thornhill and the real Solomon Wiseman on the Hawkesbury River – has our Parliament passed an Act of Recognition saying that in law the Aboriginal people were the First People of this land.  I noticed when the camera scanned the House of Representatives while the Prime Minister spoke, and the Leader of the Opposition spoke, giving bi-partisan support, the Opposition benches were almost empty.  How sad that those Members could not turn up and show real respect on such an occasion.

The tragedy, I’m afraid, is not over yet.

I was hoping from the pen of Andrew Bovell and the directing of Neil Armfield that Kate Grenville’s novel would be more focussed on stage; while perhaps its more epic nature as a novel tended towards diffusion.  Though at interval I felt unsettled because I could not feel sure of how things were progressing dramatically, the second half put everything together.

What Bovell has done is to concentrate on the essence of the novel.  The stage play doesn’t allow us to escape from the immediacy of the situation; while when reading we can stop and distance ourselves a little from our feelings.

The casting is excellent throughout, but I have to say that Ursula Yovich was quite extraordinary in her role of narrator, and her singing at the very end drove the tragic feeling into our very souls.  The whole audience remained silent in the stillness which is the mark of great theatre, and then responded especially, I thought, to the hope for the future that the curtain call represented, as the cast – themselves in reality from both sides of the divide in the play – were united in the success of the performance.

Set model for The Secret River

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: It’s Culture, Stupid! by Leigh Tabrett / National Arts Summit 2013. Comment article.

It’s Culture, Stupid!  Reflections of an arts bureaucrat by Leigh Tabrett is Currency House’s quarterly essay in the Platform Papers series for February 2013, serendipitously contemporaneously launched the day after the National Arts Summit 2013, which was held at Llewellyn Hall, ANU School of Music, Canberra on 12 February, ably MC’d by ABC ClassicFM stalwart, Christopher Lawrence.

Commentator: Frank McKone

“It’s my job, and it matters!”

With an efficiency dividend in mind, in this election year, I thought it best to consider both of these together since so much of Tabrett’s analysis has bearing on what was said by the Federal Minister for the Arts, Peter Garrett and the other speakers –

Robyn Archer (Creative Director of the Centenary of Canberra);
David Throsby (Professor of Economics at Macquarie University);
Lisa Colley (heading up business advisory services through the Enterprise Connect Creative     Industries Innovation Centre);
Hugh Mackay (well-known social commentator, former Deputy Chair of the Australia Council and inaugural Chair of the Australian Capital Territory Community Inclusion Board);
Don Aitkin (historian and political scientist, Foundation Chair of the Australian Research Council, former Vice-Chancellor of University of Canberra, and currently Chair of the ACT Cultural Facilities Corporation and the National Capital Authority);
Monica Penders (Director of ScreenACT);
Richard Gill (cuurently Artistic Director of the Education Program for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and Founding Music Director and Conductor Emeritus of Victorian Opera among many posts in a long and distinguished career);
Claudia Visca (Professor of Voice, University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, Austria);
Deborah Stone (Editor of artsHub Australia);
Julie Dyson (National Director of AusDance).

There was even a poem about a magnificent fart by Les Murray, Australia’s larger than life most ascerbic poet of the small indignities of human existence.

We needed the laugh, when, for example, the people near me were aghast as a music teacher in a Canberra Government high school explained that her budget to run a music department including two bands, with all the purchases and maintenance of instruments (including one instrument needing $300 for repairs) for 35 students was $1000.  I remember my budget for some 120 drama students, including managing a studio space and a 250 seat theatre was $4 per student per year – and then only after I put on a typical drama queen tantrum in the school’s finance committee.

It seemed to me, at this Arts Summit, that nearly 20 years since my retirement from that fray, little has changed.  Robyn Archer, as only she can do, made a rousing speech about courage in the face of the natural fear of performing, the inspiration “in a miraculous way” of the arts, and how they drive us to the great moral, ethical questions.

But I thought, in the whole morning’s talk, it was Deborah Stone’s report of the artsHub’s National Arts Survey that brought us to the greatest question, encapsulated in the quote from the practising artists, of whom, according to Don Aitkin, 99.9% “do something else for a living”.  They say:

“It’s my job, and it matters!”

The question is “What can we do about the community attitude in this country which accords the artist such a low status – despite the fact that everyone benefits from what artists do, from the design of the clothes you wear to the heights of the Opera House; despite the fact that participating in creative arts literally makes sad people happier (and even alleviates pain in hospital patients); despite the fact that the arts industry is economically huge.”

This was the issue that was clear from all the speakers.  But I thought another key concern was not articulated at the Summit.

Minister Garrett touched briefly on how the arts can be a medium for cross-cultural understanding, but did not develop the point that for a multicultural society to be successful, the arts – that is, all people having the opportunity and support for actively creating and appreciating arts – are essential.  Our multicultural success, which we love to pat ourselves on the back about, is under pressure from right-wing forces.  If multiculturalism gets no further than the Multicultural Festival we have just had over the last weekend in Canberra – largely still just a folkloric affair – then watch out for the next Cronulla Riot, and the continuing horrifying rate of deaths of Aboriginal people in jail.

Though one has to be cynical about political leadership, we can only hope that the Minister’s insistence that the combination of the Gonski reforms in education – to give every child fair resources across the country – and the full implementation of the new National Curriculum, in which every child will have continuing arts education (with a little help from our friend, the National Broadband Network), will make the difference for the next generation.  So long as the State Governments, who are constitutionally responsible for schools, he pointed out, come to the party.

Which, of course, raises the question of the other party who might win the next election in September.

And even then will we ever reach the stage, described by Richard Gill, of Finland?  There, he says, only those in tertiary music schools who are not good enough to be selected  as teachers, are then diverted into training as performers.  Imagine what that does to the status of arts teachers.  And down the track what it would do to the status of artists in the community.

Which brings me to the practical conclusions reached by Leigh Tabrett in It’s Culture, Stupid!  Reflections of an arts bureaucrat.

This is about the development of the National Cultural Policy.  She writes: “Unfortunately, our political system tends to put a very limited life on any policy developed by a single government.  I will try to suggest some mechanisms which might be more enduring than such a policy, and which might provide a basis from which national, state and local policy can be developed, and collaboration across levels of government can take place.”

To move towards a culture which is not so stupid, Tabrett suggests what we can do.  Check out www.currencyhouse.org.au for the full story.  I hope all political parties will have the sense to take up these suggestions:

 A nationally agreed statement on the importance of culture and the purpose of public investment in culture.

And then, agreed statements on

 Support for both makers and consumers;
 A framework on the scope of arts and culture;
 An accord between the Australia Council and the States [and Territories];
 A change of focus in support for organisations;
 New ways of using funds, and new sources of funds;
 If we really want ‘whole of government’ involvement;
 And finally – A language of cultural value.

However ‘bureaucratic’ these sound, Tabrett, former Deputy Director-General of Arts Queensland from 2005 to 2012 explains what was not discussed or very much thought about at the National Arts Summit: that bureaucrats must work from policy documents which political institutions (in other words, politicians in parliaments) agree on.

We can only hope that the commonsense of a bureaucrat combined with the perspectives – and factual information – of the National Arts Summit speakers can be put together by a Federal Arts Minister who has himself (he told us so) had the experience of starting in his church choir, moving on to the folk scene and then becoming a successful (though probably still not very rich) pop-rock singer who presented himself as a person of conscience and concern for our relations with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the environment.

And before September, if possible.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Out of the Cabinet Shortis & Simpson

Out of the Cabinet  Shortis & Simpson at Speakers Corner, National Archives of Australia, February 2 and 3, 2013, 11am and 2pm.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 2

I trust this review of John Shortis’s work will not have the same dire consequences as the execrable review in Sydney of The Boiling Frog, for which John wrote the music at the original Nimrod Theatre in 1984.  He now claims that he was the cause not only of the failure of that anti-nuclear show, but also of director John Bell’s moving on, ultimately to form Bell Shakespeare, and of Nimrod moving from Nimrod Street, and its demise, to ultimately become Belvoir Theatre.

On the other hand, despite everything, in that same year, the destitute John had to be driven to work by Moya, his new employer, and love blossomed in her car, ultimately to form Shortis & Simpson, our very own and obviously much-loved at the National Archives, Canberran satirical duo.

So I suppose, objectively speaking, that John’s loss in 1984 was everyone else’s gain.  Artistically even for him, I’m sure – though he pointed out that in that year a musician’s income on average was $5000.  And it’s still the same today – for two of us, said Moya.

Over the several years that Shortis & Simpson have sung the history of the years past as the Cabinet documents are made public, one performance has grown to four.  The enthusiasm, nods of recognition, and a vote of at least 10 on the worm, evident in the applause today, showed why.

Of course the real purpose of our coming together at the National Archives of Australia was to hear Dr Jim Stokes tell the story of Government in 1984-85.  On the nuclear issue, with New Zealand denying access to US ships, since the US would not “confirm or deny” that they might be carrying nuclear weapons, and the French blowing up atolls in the Pacific, the Boiling Frog story is nothing compared with Malcolm Fraser, before the 1983 election, having secretly agreed to let the US test MX missiles – to hit the ocean about 220 kilometres east of Tasmania – while Bob Hawke managed to get the message through to Ronald Reagan that, however important the ANZUS Treaty was, public opinion might be difficult to manage if the MX test went ahead.

The test was shelved – and I found myself wondering what would have happened if an MX had fallen a little bit short and hit New Zealand.  Indeed, was the planned test meant to threaten David Lange, the NZ PM?

No wonder we needed Shortis & Simpson!

They lightened our day with clever humour, lyrics and music, but with the right degree of ‘edge’ – or more often the left – for this politically savvy audience.  They gave us the social life of those days through the popular music and songs, with I think the most amazing performance by Moya, from Leonard Cohen’s gutter-level gravelly voice to the high point of Madonna (that was after she had been rejected by Richard Attenborough when she auditioned for A Chorus Line).  And, especially for me whose hearing has never easily picked up pop song lyrics, I heard every word.  Now I know the rest of the lines of “Girls just wanna have fun!” – wonderful!


© Frank McKone, Canberra