2013: The Major Minor Party by Version 1.0

The Major Minor Party group devised by Version 1.0, presented by Canberra Theatre Centre and The Centenary of Canberra, at the Playhouse May 29 – June 1, 2013.

Performers: Drew Fairley, Irving Gregory, James Lugton, Jane Phegan, Kym Vercoe.
Dramaturgy: Chris Ryan, Dr Yana Taylor.  Creative Development: Dr David Williams.  Video: Sean Bacon.  Sound: Paul Prestipino.  Lighting: Frank Mainoo.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 29

http://www.versiononepointzero.com/index.php/about/more/micro_lecture_by_david_williams : Theorising practice and practising theory: making performance with version 1.0 : A micro-lecture by David Williams.

I was wondering on what basis I should judge The Major Minor Party, until I read David Williams’ “micro lecture”. He is “a founding member of version 1.0, and has co-devised and produced all of the company's work since 1998 [and] is currently an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, and has lectured in theatre at UWS and UNSW. He has scholarly articles published in Australasian Drama Studies, Performance Paradigm, and Research in Drama Education, and his writings about contemporary performance appear regularly in RealTime. David is on the Board of Arts on Tour, and is a member of Performance Space’s Arts Consultation Group.”

His lecture begins: “We (version 1.0) start a new work not knowing what it is.”  My review begins: “And they still don’t know.”

This wasn’t the case, as I recall, with their perhaps most famous work CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) (2004) when they ripped apart the children overboard issue with a surgeon’s precision.  This time their target – “Sex, Religion and The State” – is too broad, too diffuse.  It suffers from being too obviously group devised, needing, I suggest, the focus that a single writer might offer.

At the same time, the performances are very precisely acted, so the audience was kept firmly engaged throughout the 90 minute show.  Yet Williams’ words: What is the shared passion that brings us here together? Might passion be uncertain? Can I be passionate and uncertain at the same time? I don't know, but I'm thinking hard about it; if I think hard enough I can make it so, explain to me why I felt that the show was a bit thin, the content of too many items was not well developed, and the transitions between scenes left a sense of dramatic disunity.

The strongest scene, in fact, became almost a parody of Williams’ words about “sharing passion”.  As a sort of climax, the actors approach the audience – naming themselves with their real names and as members of Version One point Zero – exhorting us to join them and donate money.  Fortunately, before anyone actually hands up their credit card, the group impressively sings of the passion of Version 1.0, sounding very much like a Hillsong Church meeting, retreating slowly upstage.  As the singing fades, in a side conversation a member thinks out loud “If we were a church, we could claim tax exemption”, and another responds “So we should become a church instead of a party?” – and at last we saw real satire.

It just took too long to get there.

William’s lecture (which of course the audience is unaware of) gives the impression, quoting the inevitable Roland Barthes among several other theatre theorists, that this kind of group searching for what sound like “known knowns, unknown knowns and even unknown unknowns” is original, contemporary or experimental.

My experience and research suggests that Erwin Piscator began this kind of work in his Piscator-Bühne Studio in 1927 “to provide a framework within which the techniques of political theater could be explored and developed”.  (The Political Theatre – A History 1914-1929 by Erwin Piscator, Avon 1978; translated by Hugh Rorrison from Das Politische Theater Albert Schultz Verlag, Berlin, 1929).  And there were many group devised companies particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, including here in Canberra.

Which allows me to segue (I love that word) neatly into the relevance of the show to Canberra’s centenary.  The words of Lady Denman are quoted as bookends, but the content of the scenes (such as argument between Family First and the Australian Sex Party, and the connection between Cory Bernardi and right wing religion)  and the theme of the linking scenes (on voluntary euthanasia) had no special significance in the Canberra we live in, or on whether we have achieved the “beautiful city of our dreams”.

The issues were all about Federal Parliament and legislation, but even here there were opportunities to work in many more of the minor parties which were listed at the beginning of the show but forgotten about later.  In fact Canberra itself could have added much more spice with stories of the Sun-Ripened Tomato Party, the Party Party Party Party, and the infamous Dennis Stevenson who was elected for two terms when he opposed self-government, and then camped out in his Legislative Assembly office.

The intention of The Major Minor Party to raise the issue of religious influence in politics was clearly sincere, but I doubt this show will have the impact that CMI had without more focussed writing and stronger satire.




© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: HOW TO BE (or not to be) LOWER by Max Cullen

HOW TO BE (or not to be) LOWER written and performed by Max Cullen.  Directed by Caroline Stacey; scenic and visual design by Maragarita Georgiadis; lighting design by Nick Merrylees; sound design by Seth Edwards-Ellis.  The Street Theatre, Canberra, May 25 – June 1, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 25

There’s a lot in Max Cullen’s portrayal of Lennie Lower that’s a sad reflection on ‘traditional’ Australia.  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for me, I arrived in this godforsaken country in 1955, some eight years after Lennie Lower died.  I never heard anyone mention his name until I read the adverts for this show.  I was therefore naturally intrigued by the prospect of Max Cullen’s writing and performing How to be....

Unfortunately, I am now rather less intrigued by Lennie Lower than I thought I might be, though – fortunately – rather more intrigued by Max Cullen’s writing and performance (and by the directing and design).  Despite the fact that Lower’s famous novel Here’s Luck is apparently still in print, I can see why no-one ever told me to immerse myself in wit limited so much to obvious puns and occasional flashes of original word-play.

Cullen’s extensive research and collection of audio-visual materials certainly placed Lower into the context of the 1920s and 1930s in a jingoistic, maudlin, poverty-stricken Australia.  However, it would be interesting to see Barry Dicken’s Lonely Lennie Lower (1982) as a comparison.  Unfortunately, of course, I missed it then and the production 20 years later at Melbourne’s La Mama, where it was described as “the acclaimed Barry Dickins play Lennie Lower.... This tragic comedy based on the real life story of comic journalist Lennie Lower...the foremost comic journalist of the depression era, Lennie Lower, is alone, drunk and crying...Lower jokes and entertains as he reflects on life as a newspaper 'contributor' at a time when the term 'freelance' was as unheard of as 'politically correct'.”

Max Cullen’s performance shows Lower alone, drunk and trying to pull his fragmented mental life into some kind of line, through the constant need to spout out one-liners and puns – and Cullen’s skills as an actor are amply demonstrated – but I was left not being sure what Cullen, the writer, was aiming at.

In his version, it was hard to know whether we are to see the ‘play’ as being performed by Cullen or by Lower.  The script deliberately makes explicit the fact that we are seeing a ‘play’, but Cullen does not seem to come out of the character of Lower when making this point.

It’s also not clear how we are to respond to the stories that the character Lower tells.  Did Frank Packer really pay Lower £100 per week for his comic columns in the Daily Telegraph and the Women’s Weekly?  And if so, are we to take it as tragic that Lower appears to have drunk it all, when the average wage of the day was about £3?  Are we to see Lower as a significant writer brought down by the unedifying commercialism of the likes of Packer.  If you read just the beginning of Here’s Luck – which you can do at http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/lowerl.html#heresluck – you might see him as a much better writer than he appears in Cullen’s pastiche of snippets from Lower’s life.

On opening night, I thought it was interesting that the audience, though clearly committed to supporting Max Cullen – cheering him on as he first appeared – and though ready to laugh mildly at Lower’s puns, did not respond with great warmth to the play.  Perhaps this is, unfortunately for Cullen, because this was a Canberra audience with different expectations at The Street Theatre than, say, a Dubbo audience at the RSL might have.

I’m not sure, just as I wasn’t sure about the ending.  Surely it was Lennie Lower, not Max Cullen, who took such a diffident bow, but it seemed inconsistent with the character we had seen before – or were we to take it that it was an inconsequential ending to a life without real meaning.  But what, then, was the meaning of the digger’s hat spotlighted at the very end, rather than Cullen himself appearing out of character for a curtain call?  Especially when Lower had deserted from the armed forces on the three occasions he had enlisted, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography (at http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lower-leonard-waldemere-lennie-7251 ).

So I end up with mixed feelings, fortunate or unfortunate as that may be.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Prime Time produced by Shortis & Simpson

Prime Time produced by Shortis & Simpson, with the Worldly Goods Choir.  Director: Catherine Langman; music and lyrics by John Shortis; writer/dramaturg: John Romeril; set and costumes designer: Imogen Keen; audio visual production: Robert Bunzli and Evan Croker.  The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, May 23 – June 1, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

The trouble with history is that themes (or ‘tropes’, as they are termed nowadays) are only apparent in hindsight.  What happens in reality is mostly accidental.  Writing a show with 27 main characters, each one of whom is unpredictably replaced by the next, is true to history, but makes for somewhat disjointed drama.

The series of songs, from Julia Gillard to Edmund Barton, form the bones of a skeleton, for which John Romeril provides some ligaments via a story of a couple who married in the Rose Garden, while travelling when young, and years later have returned to find that Old Parliament House is now the Museum of Australian Democracy.  On tour, they discover not only stories about our Prime Ministers, but even something of their own histories.

Without this back story, the songs would make something like a revue rather than a drama with a spine, but I thought the ligaments and bones needed a lot more fleshing out to turn this show into a full living history.  Though Romeril’s writing is effective in creating the relationship between John Henry Stahl, of German origin, and Roberta Quinn, of Irish background, and these roles are played skilfully and sensitively by Nick Byrne and Kate Hosking, their fictional story remains peripheral to the non-fiction history.  Their story is not of sufficient significance to take the dramatic lead.  Perhaps something like a fictional Who Do You Think You Are? could connect characters in their family stories to the stories of the Prime Ministers.

The strength of Prime Time is in John Shortis’ songs, based on research which reveals events, characteristics and quirks of each of the PMs, though necessarily with a bit of a skip through the very short careers of Francis Forde (1945), Arthur Fadden (1941) and Earle Page (1939).  Of special note, in my view, were the letter written by Joe Lyons to his wife Edith about the horrific scenes he witnessed travelling around the nation in the Great Depression years, and the final scene showing Edmund Barton huddled over his billy and frypan, cooking all alone on a tiny kerosene stove in his attic room, while presiding over the first years of Parliament in Melbourne and establishing the administrative basics of the democracy of the ordinary people which we still enjoy.

And who will forget the women of the Worldly Goods Choir singing of the need for international arbitration in opposition to Billy Hughes’ attempts to introduce conscription in World War I – to send their sons to kill other mothers’ sons.

It was a successful idea, again from John Romeril, to play the history ‘in backwards chronology’ and to use the choir and the principal singers – Byrne, Hosking, Shortis and especially his partner Moya Simpson – as the electorate, rather like an Ancient Greek Chorus, and to have the married couple agreeing to differ in their political positions, based upon a true story of a couple married in the Rose Garden who presented their guests with T-shirts with Rudd on one side and Abbott on the other – which could be worn with whichever one you prefer to the front or back.

For me, the interest finally lay in appreciating something I hadn’t thought about directly before.  As the history moved back in time, the tendency of Shortis and Simpson to make fun of the political figures – for which they are justifiably famous in the Canberra cultural scene – changed to a more serious tone, as we faced up to World War II with John Curtin, the Depression with Joe Lyons, the despair of World War I and finally the demands made of Edmund Barton – “a  learned man with the unenviable task of leading a motley bunch of ambitious politicians, whom he named his Cabinet of Kings”.  Where is his kind of unassuming leadership now?  And what has happened to the sense of commitment to democratic government throughout the community?

This new venture of Shortis & Simpson once more stretches the boundaries of their work, both in a new strength in their musicianship - especially in suiting the music to the historical period of each PM -  and in taking on a study of more than a century of history – and in doing so making their mark in a significant way on our cultural understanding in the year of the Centenary of Canberra.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Frankenstein by Nick Dear

Frankenstein by Nick Dear.  An Ensemble Theatre production presented by The Street, Canberra, May 7-11, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 7

My favourite book right now is the 802 page work by Harvard Professor of Psychology, Steven Pinker – The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.  Having just seen Dear’s version of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel – and Lee Jones’ gripping performance of the ‘monster’ – I’m glad Pinker has the evidence to prove his case.  We might look back on ‘Gothic Horror’ as just another blood-curdling theatrical and literary genre, but there’s more to Shelley’s story than you might think.

But first, to this production.  What a knockout blow to modern sensibilities!  How should a Sensitive New Age Guy respond without getting snagged by his willingness to suspend his disbelief?  But snagged I certainly was by this sorry tale.  Except at the tail end, when it seemed to me it should have been set in Antarctica where the memory of Scott’s ill-fated expedition would have made Frankenstein’s monster’s mania for reaching the pole even more horrible. 

But then Dear is British, so I suppose Go North Young Man has to be the thing to do.

The set (and presumably costumes) by Simone Romaniuk, the on-stage amplified cello played by Heather Stratfold (music composed by Elena Kats-Chernin), the lighting by Nick Higgins, the soundscape by someone not mentioned, and the direction by Mark Kilmurry were all fascinating.  The core approach was highly stylised, in the visuals and the audio, and equally in the movement and acting by the cast: Katie Fitchett, Andrew Henry, Lee Jones, Brian Meegan, Michael Rebetzke, Michael Ross, Olivia Stambouliah.

(Despite being New Age, though, I do find it annoying when a company, especially and surprisingly the Ensemble, has minimum information about the cast only on the web.  I want a proper program, please.)

There was never any doubt that we were watching a carefully designed piece of theatre, yet despite the ‘alienation effect’, it was easy to be drawn into the emotional effect at the same time.  It was quite extraordinary to find myself ‘believing’ in these characters’ dilemmas from the capital 'R' Romantic past.

This is where Pinker sneaks back into the story.  In the half-century leading up to Mary Shelley’s writing, English language books published per decade rose from about 2000 to more than 7000 (after being zero in 1475).  In that same half-century, the abolition of judicial torture (that is, torture ordered by a court) spread rapidly throughout European countries, leaving – by Shelley’s time – only Spain, the Vatican, Portugal and Russia still officially torturing people.  Pinker does point out that England still executed people, but had introduced the more humane method of drop-hanging, which "instantly renders the victim unconscious”, in 1783, when public hangings were also abolished.  He goes on to say “The display of corpses on gibbets was abolished in 1834, and by 1861 England’s 222 capital offenses had been reduced to 4.”  One of Pinker’s arguments is that the spread of the printed word, and particularly the ability to read, combined with the rising popularity of fiction in the novel, was a real factor in changing attitudes against the acceptance of violence.

His study of the evolutionary background to human violence (this is a scientific work, not a New Age touchy-feely fuzzy waffly book) suddenly came to mind.  Frankenstein works because Shelley (and Dear) understood and have laid before us the very motivations that Pinker explains in neurological brain studies.  At the very time that attitudes were changing, Shelley got the story right.  This play is enlightening: in a couple of hours the artist in Shelley and Dear reveals directly what it has taken me several weeks of reading the scientist Pinker to understand.  And I’m still only on Page 603!  199 more to go!

© Frank McKone, Canberra