2014: Unwrap Me presented by Budding Theatre

Unwrap Me presented by Budding Theatre (www.buddingtheatre.com/) at Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre December 18-20, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
December 18

In an enjoyable Christmas evening of 10 short plays, the appropriately named Kirsty Budding has presented work by 10 budding new, emerging, up and coming, or somewhat more emerged playwrights.  Based on the now well-established Short + Sweet concept, the writers’ brief was to begin with the stage direction: [A character] enters carrying a Christmas present.

During interval, an essential element of the Christmas theme of giving was a raffle of wine and a Christmas hamper donated by local businesses, and the auction of a framed Unwrap Me poster signed by all the 30 or more cast members, which on opening night sold for $100.  The money raised from box office and the auction was donated to Medecins Sans Frontieres and World Animal Protection.

In general the pieces were absurdist and humorous, reminding me of earlier times in Canberra watching Elbow Theatre, Bohemian Theatre or Freshly Ground Theatre, but without those groups' emphasis on being conscientiously avant garde.  Unwrap Me is relaxed fun.  Yet there were some pieces which, in about 10 minutes, developed substantial themes and characterisation.

The evening was never competitive – quite the opposite, in fact.  It was a Christmas celebration of minimalist staging – a desk, a sofa, a dead body in the empty space beside an ubiquitous Christmas Tree, enhanced by a very effective sound track collection of modern urban pop.  But here are my comments on each author’s approach, in order of presentation.

Tom Green’s The Christmas Pitch has Santa and his Elf off-sider present a bank manager with a business plan to spend $30 billion on giving away presents all over the world: not for profit but simply for the sake of doing good.  The idea is fun for ten minutes, but the script tails off rather than coming up with a good strong punch line.

The Cat and the Cigarette by Grace De Morgan turns the apparent gift of a possibly dead cat into a metaphor for the insecurity of being in love.  The end, though, from a serious point of view, is sentimental.  So it’s a clever idea, but we are not sure of how we are to take the humour.

Nigel Palfreman, in I ♥ Alex Solomon, takes up the theme of male sexual competition expressed in the gift that Alex gives Claire, and Paul’s angry jealousy.  The plot and dialogue have no subtlety, so we are not sure if we are to find the situation funny or to seriously take sides.  It certainly seemed a bleak view of Christmas cheer.

John Lombard’s The Holiday on December 25th is a very different kettle of fish.  What if, taking the view that gift-giving at Christmas and birthdays is just crass commercialism, you bring up your child so that she is not aware that these occasions are celebrated, or that they even exist to be celebrated?  What happens when, at the age of 25, your daughter Becky Givings, becomes suspicious about the total coverage of Christmas decorations, jingles and adverts and Mrs Givings is forced to come clean?  Very cleverly, Lombard’s script takes us through the funny side as we see Becky’s dawning recognition that her mother has deceived her, yet in the ten minutes allows us to accept their reconciliation.  Only then as Becky leaves happy and Mr Givings arrives, we get the punchline which brings Mr and Mrs back together.  He may not be happy with, but has to accept, his wife’s breaking of the secret about Christmas: “But it’s just as well she doesn’t know about birthdays!”

The strength in the writing here is in the genuine motivations of the characters, the humour we find in their dilemmas, and the recognition of an issue which many families take seriously. In ten minutes there is a complete dramatic structure built before our very eyes.

Christmas with Carroll is anything but a pleasant occasion for an uplifting song.  Youthful Carroll’s hatred of being obliged to attend the family Christmas with all the oldies turns into a story of revenge.  There is a logic to the plot which leads to more than just black humour.  The humour of degustation and disgust in this surprising play by Tahlee Fereday from Darwin is both excruciatingly funny and awful to watch as Carroll’s revenge bites back and spews forth – all over her.

Chris Naylor’s A Christmas Body, after interval, drinks and the auction had revived our equanimity, was a nice simple and pleasantly amusing episode.  The author’s interpretation of the injunction in the writers’ brief about carrying a Christmas present was a practical joke on us, as was the dead body’s behaviour a practical joke on his hosts at their Christmas dinner.  There are no other significant implications in this play, but we didn’t need depth at this point in the evening.

But we couldn’t relax for long.  Original Sinners by Kirsten Lovett from Queensland is a highly abstract meeting of a mystical Australian bush woman, which in Biblical terms might be Lilith (as in George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methusaleh), though here she is named Pandora (as in Pandora’s box, perhaps), with a man – a stranger in her desert country, dressed in a city-style business suit, perhaps referencing Cain who killed his brother Abel and representing criminality and corruption.  Perhaps, on this Christmas day, he seeks redemption and some kind of reconciliation and solace.  She will only tell her story if he repays her by telling his story.  They reach a kind of peace in the telling, as the image of their existence fades away.

For a ten minute piece, this is quite unusual and even disturbing, and suggests an interesting future for this new writer who grew up in Cairns.

Kirsty Budding herself wrote No Room at the Inn, which seems to be about the children of a kind of a dysfunctional Addams Family.  Will they all be allowed to go to the family gathering on Christmas Day?  James is gay, and will not go without his father’s acceptance of his love for Lucas.  Helen is thoroughly imbued with a kind of jealousy because James came out before she could make it clear that she is gay, too.  Gollum, hidden in the back room, is a kind of maniacal throwback to a mythical apelike state, who reveals three virtually naked young men in a procession from his room and off stage behind the Christmas tree.  The present which begins this mayhem is brought by Lucas for the unappreciative Helen – a large ball-shaped gift which is never revealed.

Somewhere in all this is an absurdist satire of the conventions of Christmas family gatherings – funny but weird.  I guess there would not be room for any of these children at their family’s “inn”.

Perhaps this play was the nearest to the early Bohemians (later Boho) Theatre style (www.bohointeractive.com/about/) .

The Price of Balloons is a much more conventional play by Disapol Savetsila from University of Wollongong.  A young woman’s father insists in giving her presents, while she knows that he is not well off.  She sells his latest gift (of a fascinating balloon which has several other inflated balloons inside) to a passer by who has forgotten to buy a gift for his daughter.  She negotiates a very high price as the passer by has no other chance to buy a gift before catching his train.  When her father returns she insists on giving him the money which he can’t afford not to take, though he is devastated by her selling of his gift.

We are left feeling in two minds about what she has done, and in empathy with the father’s dilemma.  The play leaves us forced to consider what is the true nature of a gift.

Finally, the evening ended with perhaps the best written script: Sexy Beth’s Giant Dildo Collection by Canberra-based Greg Gould.  His career so far has been almost entirely centred on writing ten-minute plays, performed in Australia and overseas, with considerable success in short play competitions including Short + Sweet here, in New Zealand and Dubai.

Beth and Dale are moving into an upstairs flat.  Dale labels the biggest box of their belongings “Sexy Beth’s Giant Dildo Collection”, to Beth’s horror since her father has carried it up when he arrived unexpectedly to help.  She fears that her father, who she believes is already unhappy with her relationship with Dale, will think of her as sexually depraved.  She sees herself and her family as conventionally nice.  Dale’s joke may divide her from her family.

However when she leaves Dale to face her father, it turns out that he regales Dale with his stories of the “free love” period of his life in the 1960s, leaving the young Dale amazed, but now able to relieve Beth’s anxiety and finish the play on a positive note.

The quality of the writing is in the immediately established genuineness of the feelings and motivations of each of the characters, our easy acceptance of the situation as it seems to trend in its different directions, and our recognition of the issue of generational differences.  In its ten minutes, we see that instant judgement and assumptions are a danger we should be careful to avoid.

Reviewing 10 plays in one evening is quite a task, but well worth doing in this case because I think Budding Theatre is a valuable new development in Canberra.  Unwrap Me has drawn writers and actors from Canberra, Sydney, Adelaide, Darwin, Cairns, Wollongong, Goulburn, with experience and training backgrounds around Australia and overseas.  Budding’s idea to take the Short + Sweet (and the school level Fast + Fresh) competition into a non-competitive evening show has worked well, with an enthusiastic response from the audience on opening night.  There’s at least an annual event for Christmas in the making, and perhaps for other significant times in the year.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Philip Parsons Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights

by Frank McKone

Formerly known as the Young Playwright’s Award, the 2014 NSW Philip Parsons Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights, made possible by the generous support of Arts NSW, was awarded on the occasion of the 2014 NSW Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture, Upstairs Theatre, Belvoir Street, Sydney on 30 November 2014.

Past winners include Zoë Coombs Marr (Is this Thing On?), Kit Brookman (Small and Tired), Brendan Cowell (Ruben Guthrie) and Kate Mulvany (The Seed).

Julia-Rose Lewis was selected for her play Samson from a short list which also included Jessica Bellamy (Shabbat Dinner), Christopher Bryant (The Mutant Man), Philip Kavanagh (Jesikah), Phil Spencr (You and Whose Army?) and Chris Summers (King Arthur).

The award is given to an outstanding playwright who is in their first eight years of professional practice, and the winner receives a writer’s commission and creative development of their play by Belvoir.

[Lewis’s] play Samson generated buzz at the PWA National Play Festival after its selection in their National Script Workshop after some development with La Boite Theatre Company’s Playwright-in-residence program. Lally Katz is mentoring her as part of the Australia Council’s JUMP Mentorship Program and she’s currently completing her Masters in Fine Arts (Playwriting) at NIDA. She’s written for productions and readings with Griffin, The Australian Theatre For Young People (atyp), La Boite, The Brisbane Powerhouse, The Rock Surfers Theatre Co. Hothouse Theatre Company, Grin & Tonic. Julia’s monologue This Feral Life has been produced for both stage and as a short film.
http://camerons.dreamhosters.com/julia-rose-lewis-joins-the-agency/

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Parsons Memorial Lecture

Ralph Myers
(this is not his daggy shirt)

Ralph Myers The Artistic Director: on the way to extinction?
2014 NSW Parsons Memorial Lecture, Upstairs Theatre, Belvoir, Sydney, 30 November 2014.

by Frank McKone

Is Ralph Myers a ‘suit’?  That is the relevant question. 

His answer is emphatically, ‘No’.  Since his first meeting with the best of Australia’s theatre artistic directors, when he became AD of Belvoir in 2009, at which only he and Circus Oz’s Mike Finch did not wear a suit, he claims to have remained what he always was as an artist – a set and costume designer.

He even wore the same daggy shirt, jeans and Volleys to deliver his Memorial Lecture.  Though, as I recall, Philip Parsons would have dressed a little more nattily, I suspect that he would be concerned like Myers about the changing relationships between Artistic Directors and General Managers that we have seen in our theatres since his passing. 

Not only have GMs become CEOs, but we now see EPs – Executive Producers who supposedly combine the artistic dreamer (that’s what a real AD is) with the competitive business person (which is what a CEO really is).   The impossibility of integrating the two in one person, Myers explained, is because the manager wants everything to be done with a steady hand, while successful theatre needs a ‘violently shaking fist’.

In less dramatic terms, an artistic director must be ‘cultural and specific’, not ‘managerial and generic’. 

In his own case at Belvoir Street, he and Brenna Hobson, titled ‘Executive Director’, work as ‘equal co-directors’.  That means much argy-bargy as each fights for what they need.  Artistic directors, Myers says, are our cultural leaders, different from managers – whose task is to make things happen.  It’s a ‘ying / yang’ that’s necessary, which requires two people.  It can’t happen in one executive producer.

Myers sees two themes to explain what is happening. 

The Australian tall poppy syndrome has a long history, which he illustrated in the way the Griffins were treated after winning the Canberra design competition, repeated in Utzon’s experience as winner of the Sydney Opera House competition, and currently demonstrated by the fact that all the conductors of the major Australian orchestras are FIFO from overseas. 

Despite the case of the ‘bloke from Wollongong’ so successfully directing the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Myers sees an Australian ‘unwillingness to be led by artists’.  Selecting the Griffins and Utzon showed ‘great vision’, but snatching away their chance – perhaps their right – to take their designs through to physical completion, placing the work in the hands of, effectively, mere managers has left us with flawed results.  There is a deep sense of insecurity here, where artists cannot be trusted.

In more recent times, as funding has shifted from government towards private sponsorship and philanthropy, the old insecurity shows in the composition of boards.  It was the Nugent report which pushed towards more ‘responsibility’ – which in practice has meant arts bodies becoming more ‘corporate’.

Only Circus Oz still has more than two artists on the board.  Boards, says Myers, appoint business people who appoint more business people like themselves.  They can be ‘trusted’ in matters of profit & loss, reading balance sheets and behaving prudently.  These are, ironically, ‘white, middle-class men like me’.  “I,” says Myers with unerring bravery, “should be replaced with someone more interesting.”

Apart from maintaining the separation and difference between the artistic director (who should have the final say) and the managerial director, Myers proposes three practical actions:

1. Board membership should be 50% artists.
2. Artistic directors should be appointed for short-term tenures without the option for rolling over – say 5 years max.
3. Boards should delegate the appointment of artistic directors to an independent expert panel of artists.

In keeping with his proposal, Myers has already announced his leaving Belvoir in 2015.

But to end on a positive note, in discussion of the apparent conflict of interest between artistic vibrancy and economic viability, Ralph Myers became suitably emotional.  The suits’ concept of artistic vibrancy is alien to the artists’ concept.  What is artistic quality?  It’s when a show ‘takes off and starts to sell’.  This is not always predictable, but at this point you can feel the energy coming off the stage and being returned by the audience, in a virtuous circle.

Yet it must be a worry that if artistic directors like Ralph Myers are extinguished in favour of good management: this will extinguish theatre and nothing will be left worth managing.

My report is necessarily limited in scope, but the full transcript of the lecture is available here http://belvoir.com.au/news/artistic-director-way-extinction/

The Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture is supported by Arts NSW and Currency House.

Recent relevant Platform Papers published by Currency House and previously appearing on this blog are:

Take Me to Your Leader by Wesley Enoch
The Retreat of our National Drama by Julian Meyrick

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Education and the Arts. Platform Papers No 41

Education and the Arts by Meg Upton, with Naomi Edwards.  Platform Papers No 41, November 2014: Currency House, Sydney.

Commentary by Frank McKone

Think of education as a living cell within the body politic.  The impermeable outer membrane of the cell has bas-relief oddly shaped indentations.  To access the inner cell, for good health – as Upton and Edwards intend – or for ill – as Donnelly and Wiltshire are bent on – a mirrored matching convoluted ‘key’ must insert itself.  Only then can the positive protein or the destructive virus make changes from within the cell.

Education and the Arts was already going to print when the recommendations of the
Review of the National Curriculum (August 2014) began to surface.  “What is of concern,” wrote Upton and Edwards, “is the growing sense that arts education for Australian children will become ‘optional’ as opposed to mandated."

The problem for Upton and Edwards is that they have not been given the key which has been handed on a silver platter by the Abbott government to Dr Donnelly and Professor Wiltshire, neither of whom show the slightest understanding of the nature of arts education, let alone its importance in a modern education system.

Here’s a quote:

The Reviewers heard substantial evidence that content was added to the curriculum to appease stakeholders, which has led to an overcrowded curriculum.  Such inclusions pay homage to the very evident inclusive development process undertaken by ACARA….

It was … apparent that many stakeholders believed the curriculum has far exceeded any nominal time allocations that curriculum writers may have been given.  One strongly argued reason was that this was due to the many compromises ACARA made to accommodate the very vocal advocacies of some groups about the essential nature of content relating to their discipline.  The arts curriculum was particularly singled out in this regard. [My emphasis]
Executive Summary (p2/3)

There is a long history behind such snide language as ‘appease stakeholders’ who are ‘very vocal’ advocates, as you may see in the writings of Donnelly since he escaped from teaching to set himself up as an education ‘expert’.  There’s an interesting profile of both Donnelly and Wiltshire on the SBS website at

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/01/10/national-curriculum-review-who-kevin-donnelly

Of course, Upton and Edwards know the needs of the education cell: to have the arts placed on an equal footing in the curriculum, and indeed the teachers and government representatives across the nation have already recognised that need in the Australian Curriculum:

“An education rich in the Arts maximises opportunities for learners to engage with innovative thinkers and leaders and to experience the Arts both as audience members and as artists. Such an education is vital to students’ success as individuals and as members of society, emphasising not only creativity and imagination, but also the values of cultural understanding and social harmony that the Arts can engender
(National Education and the Arts Statement, 2007).” See

http://www.acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/Shape_of_the_Australian_Curriculum_the_arts_-_Compressed.pdf

A teacher quoted by Upton and Edwards, who are active in bringing live theatre to school students, brings their work into focus:

If there were no education programs, I could still take students to the theatre; but what I love about education programs in theatre companies is that they offer experiential learning; students learn through doing and it emphasises their emotional engagement in the form.

A source who once worked on a committee headed up by Donnelly (when he claims to have personally written John Howard’s education policy) has told me that he simply could not appreciate such feelings.  And indeed  it is clear from the Review that Donnelly and Wiltshire have produced, that the language changes as the Departmental team of four have had to try to find the appropriate words that can be seriously published at this level of importance.  Read the Review while imagining yourself in that committee room as it was put together and you’ll see what I mean.

Here’s a bit that won’t please Upton and Edwards (or the rest of us):

The impact the bloated size of the Australian Curriculum was having on a school’s ability to offer a school-based curriculum was regularly brought to the attention of the Reviewers. So much mandatory content is included that some argued it was taking up more than the total teaching time available in a school year. This is having an impact on the amount of time available for co-curricular offerings…
Executive Summary (p5)

“Co-curricular offerings” include the arts, according to this Review, so education programs in theatre companies may as well give up the ghost.

If this quote was written by Donnelly / Wiltshire, then you can see in the next – the conclusion to Chapter One: The Australian Curriculum and the purpose of education – where the departmental team have done their best to write a proper paragraph or two:

“... the Australian Curriculum represents a compromise where a number of conflicting models of curriculum exist side by side and where, in an attempt to meet the demands of all the key players, rigour, balance and standards are weakened. The need to ensure that all involved would commit to a national curriculum has also led to a consensus model of decision-making and an overcrowded curriculum that has weakened the process of developing the Australian Curriculum. Yates, Woelert, O’Connor and Millar describe this as follows:

One particular issue is a new form of content cramming (even though the ACARA website cites an explicit guideline that this should not happen). Here the public circulation of documents and the search for a reasonable degree of consensus around the country tends to lead to things being added (especially history) rather than taken away.
 
  Yates, L, Woelert, P, O’Connor K & Millar V 2013, ‘Building and managing knowledge: Physics and history and the discipline rationales in school curriculum reform’, paper prepared for the Australian Association for Research in Education 2013 Conference.

“Evidence of this can be found in the way the Australian Curriculum burgeoned from the initial four subjects to embracing the entire Foundation to Year 10 curriculum in eight learning areas, as the various stakeholder experts and subject associations argued that their particular subject or area of learning should not be left out.

As a result, while the Australian Curriculum privileges a combination of a utilitarian, a 21st century, a personalised learning and an equity and social justice view of the curriculum and the purpose of education, it undervalues introducing students to the conversation represented by ‘our best validated knowledge and artistic achievements’.

The Australian Curriculum being implemented across the Australian states and territories also fails to do full justice to the Melbourne Declaration’s belief that the curriculum has a vital role to play in the moral, spiritual and aesthetic development and wellbeing of young Australians.”

Have a look closely and you’ll see that Donnelly / Wiltshire are what I would call ‘museum’ thinkers.  Anything like actually doing the arts is, as Donnelly has often literally complained, ‘left-wing’.  After all it means children will be creating new cultural artefacts, being critical of their own creations, as well as learning where their culture fits into the past – which is also always open to critical thinking.  Not for Donnelly, who already apparently knows the accepted canon of ‘our best validated knowledge and artistic achievements’ and is confident he understands what should be ‘the moral, spiritual and aesthetic development and wellbeing of young Australians’.

With his virus key in Donnelly's hand, all the attempts not only by Meg Upton and Naomi Edwards, but of all those hundreds of people who have produced the as yet incomplete and not yet fully implemented Australian Curriculum will be defeated.  Those of us who have worked since the mid-1970s to get drama, dance, and media arts into the curriculum alongside the earlier successes of visual art and music will now have to overcome the Donnelly virus from within.

But I fear that this Federal government’s attitudes and funding will leave the ‘co-curricular’ activities of institutions like the theatre companies with no protein key to activate.  The full title of this Platform Paper is Education and The Arts: Creativity in the promised new order.  I fear this will be another broken promise in the body politic.  My thanks to Upton and Edwards for an excellent paper; but my commiserations for the future they may never see.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Highway of Lost Hearts, Food and The Dream. Feature article.

Highway of Lost Hearts written and performed by Mary Anne Butler.  An Art Back NT, Arts Development and Touring Production, directed by Lee Lewis.  Dramaturgy by Peter Matheson and Lee Lewis.  At The Street Theatre, Canberra, August 26-30, 2014.

Food by Steve Rodgers (writer/co-director ) and Kate Champion (co-director).  Co-produced by Force Majeure and Belvoir, at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, August 27-30, 2014.

The Dream written by William Shakespeare, adapted from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and directed by Peter Evans.  Bell Shakespeare at Canberra Theatre Playhouse August 30 – September 13, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 30

This week has become a demonstration of today in Australian theatre, confirming or challenging the views of Professor Julian Meyrick and Noonuccal Nuugi playwright and director Wesley Enoch in their Platform Papers The Retreat of Our National Drama and Take Me to Your Leader (Canberra Critics’ Circle blog, 15 May 2014 and 8 August 2014 respectively). 

Both Food and Highway of Lost Hearts are quintessentially Australian, while The Dream is a modern re-working of a European classic.

Butler works on a tiny scale out of Darwin, and appears in the tiny Street Theatre 2, with a solo piece from the heart. 

Rodgers’ play began, already in the margins of the new mainstream, Downstairs at Belvoir, Sydney, two years ago (previously reviewed on this blog 29 April 2012).  Wednesday this week at The Q was the hundredth performance.  Is it on its way to becoming an Australian classic? 

Bell Shakespeare is surely in the old mainstream, but feels the need to shake up Shakespeare.  The Dream was first developed in Bell’s education program for young people, with such success that it has now grown up, opening tonight on the mainstage in Canberra.

Do they all have their place?  Is it a level playing field?  Should the new mainstream resources go into more Rodgers and Butlers, rather than more of the Macbeths and Tartuffes that have been the stars of the last few weeks in Sydney?

Is this a conundrum I see before me?

While there are issues to be discussed, the quality of these three shows and their theatrical value has made this week an excellent reminder of how good Australian theatre can be.  Each play is distinctly different in content, yet surprisingly similar in what Peter Evans termed the ‘conceit’ in the writing, and equally successful in creating a sense of community in the theatre.  I would call each production a performance with the audience, not one for an audience.

I suspect that this directness of contact, and lack of pretension about performing, is a natural Australian characteristic.  We recognise Australian actors, even in films made in America, because of this quality.

The keyword for this week is heart. 

Mary Anne Butler searches for her own heart after the loss of her friend, drowned in Darwin harbour.  As she travels through the heart of Australia, 3000 kilometres south to Port Augusta plus 2000 kilometres east to Sydney, bits of her heart jump back into place as she experiences truths – good and bad, some fearful, some full of human warmth – until she accepts reality and finds peace.

Steve Rodgers’ two sisters, the elder Elma (now played by Mel King) and the younger Nancy (Emma Jackson) have broken hearts, bit by bit revealing the history of Nancy’s teenage gang-rape and Elma’s guilt.  Their ‘highway of lost hearts’ takes them to a takeaway pie shop in a small country town.  Their hearts are put back together by Turkish kitchen hand Hakan (Fayssal Bazzi), stopping over on his own international highway.  As he departs, all three – like Mary Anne, on the beach with her dog in Sydney – have accepted reality, both bad and good, and know there can be peace.

Shakespeare’s four lovers Helena (Nikki Shiels), Hermia (Lucy Honigman), Demetrius (Johnny Carr) and Lysander (Gareth Reeves) take a highway less travelled, through a European wood full of dangers – bears, lions and wolves – and mysterious forces – the spirits Oberon (Ray Chong Nee), Titania (Janine Watson) and Puck (Julie Forsyth).  On a parallel track is Nick Bottom, the weaver (Richard Piper), with a sense of his own importance to match that of the most self-centred young lovers.   For all five, their road is as rocky as Mary Anne’s, Elma’s, Nancy’s and Hakan’s, through their midsummer madness, and like those others they reach an acceptance of reality and a time of peace in their hearts.

The key to the issues raised by Julian Meyrick and Wesley Enoch lies in the theatrical style and the relationship between the actors and our audiences which make these three productions real and heartfelt.  Our tradition of theatre being made physical makes a solid ground on which directors Lee Lewis, Kate Champion and Peter Evans firmly sit.  Whether small and independent, middling mainstage or long-established theatre company, it is the choreography of movement which holds the text together and gives it meaning. 

Bell Shakespeare has captured, I imagine, the very sense of theatricality that Shakespeare achieved for the groundlings of his day.  The Chamberlain’s Men, when Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the age of 31, probably had about as much security as Mary Anne Butler or Steve Rodgers, at a similar age and stage.  The Swan theatre had just been built in 1594, but according to Amanda Mabillard in Shakespeare's Theatres: The Swan, Shakespeare Online, 20 August 2000 http://www.shakespeare-online.com/theatres/therose.html  The Swan has a rather bleak history after 1597, when the staging of plays gave way to a variety of other activities such as amateur poetry readings, and swashbuckling competitions.  Some other sources say that the Government closed all theatres in 1597, presumably because of their bawdy productions.

Considering our current and future government, independent and less than mainstage companies, who can’t command the level of sponsorship that Bell Shakespeare has achieved, may have to face new highways of lost hearts.  This is the point about leadership from government and community culture that concerns Wesley Enoch.

But I have to say that Bell’s The Dream is a challenge to the even bigger mainstage companies that Meyrick criticises, such as Sydney Theatre Company.  As my review of their Macbeth suggests (Canberra Critics’ Circle 13 August 2014), emphasising star actors and star directors who seem to experiment for experiment’s sake should not be the way to go.  Using the attraction of the European (and American) classics as bait for audiences on a commercial basis, and thus taking the bulk of government subsidy through popularity, leaves the development and maintenance of good Australian work somewhere on that highway of lost hearts.

The Dream does not fall into the error of STC’s Macbeth.  Peter Evans understood that Shakespeare, in this play, deliberately made the nature of acting and the actors’ relationship with their audience an overarching theme which supported the story of lovers, amateur actors, kings and queens, and faery forces.  By beginning with the eight actors as the ‘rude mechanicals’ who turn into all those other characters, and return to acting out their farcical Pyramus and Thisbe story at the end, Evans has integrated Shakespeare’s intention with the action, brought the audience into the actors’ world, and put all of us in the position of the characters on stage.  Peace and understanding is the result.  The positive feeling was palpable at the curtain call, in the foyer and in the drinks and nibblies speeches after the show.

The same was true after Food and Highway of Lost Hearts.  It was not the feeling after STC's Macbeth.  But where does the money go?  Where is the level playing space?  Where is the leadership which will make Food or Highway of Lost Hearts the classics they deserve to become?

Mary Anne Butler
Photography: Street Theatre

Fayssal Bazzi (Hakan), Mel King (Elma)                               Mel King (Elma), Emma Jackson (Nancy)
Photos: Heidrun Löhr

The Lovers L to R: Nikki Shiels (Helena), Johnny Carr (Demetrius), Lucy Honigman (Hermia), Gareth Reeves (Lysander)

Ray Chong Nee (Oberon), Julie Forsyth (Puck)

L to R: Ray Chong Nee (Thisbe), Johhny Carr (Wall), Janine Watson (Quince), Richard Piper (Bottom), Lucy Honigman (Lion), Nikki Shiels (Moon)
The Dream Photos: Lisa Tomasetti

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

L to R: Yalin Ozucelik (John Worthing J.P.), Rory Walker (Rev Chasuble), Lucy Fry (Cecily Cardew),
Anna Steen (Hon.Gwendolen Fairfax), Nancye Hayes (Lady Bracknell), Nathan O'Keefe (Algernon Moncrieff).
Off stage: Caroline Mignone (Miss Prism)

Caroline Mignone (Miss Prism), Rory Walker (Rev Chasuble)

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.  State Theatre Company of South Australia, directed by Geordie Brookman.  Designer: Ailsa Paterson; Lighting: Gavin Norris; Composer: Stuart Day; Hair, Make-up and Wardrobe: Jana DeBiasi.  At Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse, August 18-23, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 19

An enjoyable, if conventional, production of Wilde’s highly amusing comedy of manners, this production stands out for the stage design and a clever approach to stylising the acting.

The set, made by the Company’s workshop for touring, has its own circular curtain which defines the acting space for whatever stage the performers find themselves on.  It’s simple in concept but, with a minimum of props, furniture and suspended lights, and sections of curtain with different decoration, the mood, location of the scenes and the historical period are quickly and smoothly suggested as the butler draws the curtain around.

As the design takes us out of the convention of a naturalistic box set, it follows that the acting includes choreographed movement which takes on a life of its own.  The humour of the play is already built in to Wilde’s one-liners and highly unlikely plot, while, under this director and I suspect his assistant director Yasmin Gurreeboo,  physical actions are used to define each of the characters and how they relate to the others, adding substantially to the comedy.  Perhaps for the first time I was able to see Wilde’s work in the context of English absurdism, which for me goes back to Laurence Sterne’s 18th Century novel Tristram Shandy and on through the university traditions which spawned shows like The Goodies and Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  I could almost see John Cleese’s funny walks and Faulty Towers in the making.

Instead of finding myself wondering if Wilde should be compared with his more or less contemporary Bernard Shaw, this production made it clear that Earnest is nearer to farce than Shaw’s comedies of social analysis, and that this is not a bad thing.  The basic structure of the play is not too far from a Feydeau farce, though Wilde’s servant class do not much more than roll their eyes at their ‘betters’, rather than undermine them.  Wilde focusses on and exposes the human foibles of the upper class without pontificating.  The fun of doing this is what has kept this play alive well into its second century, even in ‘classless’ Australia.  We may not have too many real Lady Bracknells in Canberra, but we surely have plenty of micro-managerial operators, and plenty of young people falling in love with superficial features in the opposite sex and bonding or arguing immediately they meet with others of the same sex.

The performers – Nancye Hayes (Lady Bracknell), Lucy Fry (Cecily Cardew), Nathan O’Keefe (Algernon Moncrieff), Yalin Ozucelik (John Worthing), Anna Steen (Gwendolen Fairfax), Caroline Mignone (Miss Prism) and Rory Walker (butlers Lane and Merriman, and Rev Chasuble) – were all up to the professional mark required, as we expect nowadays from the mainstage companies, both as individuals and as a close-knit ensemble.  The result was a very satisfying presentation of a favourite English classic.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Tartuffe, the Hypocrite by Molière

Tartuffe

Sketches by Anna Cordingley

 Photos: Lisa Tomasetti

                    L to R: Robert Jago (Cléante), Kate Mulvaney Dorine), Helen Dallimore (Elmire), Charlie Garber (Damis), Geraldine Hakewill (Mariane), Jennifer Hagan (Madame Pernelle)

  
 

Sean O'Shea (Orgon), Geraldine Hakewill (Mariane), Kate Mulvaney (Dorine)

Tartuffe, the Hypocrite by Molière.  A new version by Justin Fleming, directed by Peter Evans.  Designer: Anna Cordingley; Lighting: Paul Jackson; Composer: Kelly Ryall; Movement: Scott Witt.  Bell Shakespeare, Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, July 26 – August 23, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 13

In the light of recent developments, where a politician appears to have special relations with Chaser dogs, cartoons are defended by Leaks and Popes, and bigots are politically correct (or very nearly), Molière’s introduction to his 1664-69 play Tartuffe should bring a smile to all our two-faces: If the function of comedy is to correct men’s vices, I do not see why any should be exempt...  It is a vigorous blow to vices to expose them to public laughter.

The very public laughter from the mixed matinee audience when I saw the show, in the company of a never cross section of a model modern audience – from teenage school groups to staid ancients like me – proved the author’s point magnificently.  But when you consider that Molière’s central character appears as a pillar of the Church, deliberately using his position for his own personal satisfaction – sexual and financial – then it may not be long before we see writer Justin Fleming, director Peter Evans and even the institution of Bell Shakespeare itself brought before a certain Royal Commission for Institutional Perversion of Youth.

After all, that’s what happened to Molière, to quote from Melissa Lesnie’s most informative article published in the Program: By the time the final, heavily revised version of Molière’s most controversial comédie made it to the boards in 1669, the playwright’s name would be forever tied up with Tartuffe’s, linked with anti-clerical sentiment and what was deemed morally depraved theatre.  Schoolgirls and schoolboys in Catholic school uniforms (and some were there on Wednesday) beware: Fleming has written a new version which seems to me to reinstate everything sexual that the original author was forced to ‘heavily revise’.  It is not Tartuffe’s financial greed and gluttony which makes the play salacious and open to Church attack.  It’s his twisted and devious sexual demands that threaten his author.

Fleming, Evans and Bell are as brave in modern times as Molière was in his.  Whereas, Lesnie writes Paradoxically, in making the play more acceptable to religious dévots, Molière managed to transform it into a reactionary critique not only of hyprocisy, but also of the very censorship to which it was subjected, the Bell Shakespeare team have allowed themselves every modern licence, to the point where some of those schoolgirls’ reactions behind me made it very clear that they expected, excited in their trepidation,  that Tartuffe (Leon Ford) would actually expose Elmire’s private parts in the scene of his seduction exposé.  Fortunately Helen Dallimore maintained her privacy, in a very funny scene where she, now hidden from the audience on a huge turned-around sofa, apparently with no chance of escaping Tartuffe as Ford dropped his daks and leapt with amazing athleticism over the sofa’s back ... only to arise face to face with Orgon, Elmire’s husband, who is now finally disabused of Tartuffe’s manipulative ‘humility’.

It may be an old slapstick device, but it works.

It is, of course, the Maid Dorine, inevitably pronounced in Australian as ‘Doreen’, with the blunt wit of the old commedia traditional servant, who runs rings around the stupidities of the upper-class men.  Here’s her description of Tartuffe:

True, it is something altogether scandalous
A stranger in the house with no idea how to handle us;
He arrives with no shoes, his clothes not worth a cracker,
No sooner in the door, than he starts to wag his clacker.

At once you can see what Fleming is doing – taking the original French and turning it into racy rhyming English.  Kate Mulvaney’s Dorine has a complete set of movement and gestures to go with her words that turns her into a very funny annoying bane of Sean O’Shea’s Orgon’s life, as he does all he can to maintain control of his wayward family.  But Dorine is not just wonderfully funny: without her perspicacity, Tartuffe would have had his way without real opposition.

Yet Fleming is actually doing far more with the language than meets the ear and eye.  He’s a serious classics academic, no less.  (He will now sue me under Section 18C for ‘insulting’ him!)  But there it is: the rhyming patterns are as complex as anything Shakespeare wrote, while the choice of words is as bawdy as in Aristophenes’ Lysistrata.  I think, in precise Australian (watch for the one about a man bringing his sausage, but the woman doesn’t have to cook his steak) Fleming has done what Molière would be proud of: shown that Tartuffe, written by a rouseabout bloke of the theatre, is a work of art of classic proportions, and an example to us all.

Everybody, from Jennifer Hagan’s overbearing grandmother figure as Madame Pernelle to the teenage lovers Mariane (Geraldine Hakewill) and Valère (Tom Hobbs) have the timing and the precision of movement and rhythm exactly right for a true comédie.

Finally, indeed at the very end, when it seems that Orgon has no way to recover his property from the nefarious Tartuffe (whose name, so Melissa Lesnie tells us, is derived from the Italian word for ‘that pungent fungus buried deep in the ground’: a truffle), Fleming comes up with his cleverest twist.  A figure rises from the depths to explain that only one person has the power to save Orgon, despite his foolishness.  In the original play, this figure is an official of the king, the name of whom is not mentioned but was Louis XIV.  It must have galled Molière to conclude his play by giving the king not only a sense of morality but also the ultimate say (unless he hoped his audience would see through his rigidly smiling mask to the reality of political power). 

Referring to Tartuffe the official says:

Ce monarque, en un mot, a vers vous détesté
Sa lâche ingratitude et sa déloyauté

In Fleming’s version, it is not an autocratic king, however morally inclined, but the Author himself – also not named, but in other words Molière – who cannot allow perfidy to win the day.  What lesson indeed would we learn if hypocrisy rules?  So, it is the Author who reveals Tartuffe’s criminal past, who is horrified at his ingratitude and disloyalty, who forgives Orgon for his ineptitude, and tears up the contract he had signed passing all his estate over to Tartuffe, and sends Tartuffe and his odious agent down into what looks like a fiery hell.

The family – now rather like Pirandello’s six characters having found their author – are grateful not to the temporal power of a monarch but for the omnipotence of the artist and the power of art.

A great ending to a magnificent comedy.

Robert Jago, Charlie Garber, Geraldine Hakewill, Helen Dallimore, Kate Mulvaney

Leon Ford (Tartuffe), Helen Dallimore (Elmire)

"Jesus wants to be your friend"

Kate Mulvaney, Geraldine Hakewill, Tom Hobbs, Sean O'Shea, Helen Dallimore, Jennifer Hagan, Robert Jago

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

What the audience sees

Hugo Weaving as Macbeth

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The witches tell Macbeth that he cannot be defeated until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, nor by a man of woman born.  Chaos reigns behind him.

Kate Box, Robert Menzies, Hugo Weaving, Ivan Donato














Macduff, Banquo, Rosse, Malcolm, support King Duncan
Kate Box, Paula Arundell, Robert Menzies
Eden Falk, John Gaden

Melita Jurisic as Lady Macbeth, Hugo Weaving as Macbeth

Hugo Weaving

Eden Falk as Fleance, Paula Arundell as Banquo
are about to be attacked by Macbeth's thugs

Paula Arundell as Lady Macduff and Hugo Weaving as Macbeth

All photos © Brett Boardman

Macbeth by William Shakespeare.  Sydney Theatre Company: director, Kip Williams; designer, Alice Babidge; lighting designer, Nick Schlieper; composer and sound designer, Max Lyandvert.  At Sydney Theatre July 21 – September 27, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 12

This staging of Macbeth is brilliant but flawed.  Macbeth himself is brilliant but flawed: that’s why the play is a tragedy.  Hugo Weaving, who plays Macbeth, is brilliant, but not flawed.  Overall the production is not a tragedy, but rather like Macbeth’s character, it contains conflicting elements.

Shakespeare, as Weaving so magnificently demonstrates, gives us a clear and detailed understanding of the character who is determined to be king at any cost, and therefore believes what his witches and ghosts would have him believe.  Unable to recognise that these are the figments of his wishful thinking, not solid truths, the gap between the extremity of his actions and his underlying guilt widens until he is mentally torn apart.

This constitutes the brilliance of this production, where Weaving is thoroughly supported by all the ensemble of actors: Paula Arundell (Banquo / Lady Macduff); Kate Box (Macduff / Witch); Ivan Donato (Seyton / Witch); Eden Falk (Malcolm / Fleance / Apparition); John Gaden (Duncan / Old Man / Young Macduff / Apparition); Melita Jurisic (Lady Macbeth / Bloody Captain / Apparition); Robert Menzies (Witch / Rosse / Porter).

The cast list and their characters may give you some surprises, and some clue as to what I see as a flaw in the direction, which results in some design issues (though Alice Babidge creates some highly successful solutions).

The conceit (using the term as in John Donne’s poems, for the sake of some reference to Shakespeare’s period) seems to be that a group of actors have come together to explore the nature of this play, Macbeth.  For some reason unknown to those of us who have been invited to watch this improvisation / workshop, it happens that there are only eight actors, only three of whom are women.  It might be thought that, gender balance being an important concern in modern times, the parts might be passed around so that everyone has a fair go at significant roles.

Because we audience are backstage rather than frontstage, we find ourselves looking down onto an extended apron from temporary bleacher seats set up on the stage.  We are not comfortable.  It could be said to be true that I sat on the edge of my seat for two hours, but mostly not because of the emotional impact of the show.  It was to stop my circulation being cut off by the edge of the seat.

I thought for some time that this was a device to tell me that Macbeth is an unsettling play, but as time went along it was the quality of the acting by Hugo Weaving of Macbeth and Melita Jurisic of Lady Macbeth that told me this.  It was her mad scene and his response to her breakdown that made me forget that damn’d seat.

The point is that on the one hand we seemed to be watching actors acting a play – very Brechtian in concept I suppose – but in some scenes we seemed to watching a play as if it were ‘real’.  Our ‘distance’ was deliberately maintained until after Duncan’s murder (for example, as witches dunked their faces in a plastic bowl of water to represent their cauldron, or death was represented by splashing fake blood onto Duncan’s face, among many other such devices).  Then the acting area was engulfed in stage fog for the porter’s ‘knock, knock, knock, who’s there’ scene, as if the group of actors around the long table had been whisked away and we were now transported to Shakespeare’s mediaeval castle.

Of course, this illusion of reality was still surrounded by all the backstage lights, an impressive sound track, and the fake smoke, so the Brechtian insistence on us knowing we were watching a play was not broken.  But from then on we were switched on and off from one ‘reality’ – the actors’ improvisation around Shakespeare’s words, in rehearsal clothes with bits of costumes added where they thought necessary – to the other apparent reality of scenes like Macbeth seeing Banquo’s ghost, or persuading thugs to kill Banquo and Fleance, while at the end there was a weird mix of Macbeth with a hugely long sword being defeated by a female Macduff by her words and a splash of fake blood.

I had read in a newspaper interview that the placing of the audience on the stage, and the action taking place in the auditorium would be a ‘surprise’.  I suppose, as a one-time drama teacher and observer of theatre since the 1960s, I might be expected to not be surprised by such playing around with convention.  I certainly didn’t notice anyone else being surprised the night I saw the show.  Some laughed rather nervously as they had to ask others to stand on tiptoe so they could be squeezed past to get to seats, along rows set far too close for comfort.

For the convention of a play (Macbeth) within a play (of actors rehearsing or workshopping), looking down onto the apron with the empty seats in the auditorium rising on the other side, and some of the action being played among those seats, worked quite well.  Macduff and Malcolm were in England up in about Row J while Macbeth was pacing about in Scotland on the apron below them, where he had just killed Lady Macduff and her young son, played by the same John Gaden in modern casual dress who had recently been Duncan alive and dead, and later was an old man fearful for the future of Scotland.

But the breaking in and out of this convention, despite the power of the acting, left me unsettled.  Was I supposed to be focussing on, and being appreciative of the actors’ skills in clarifying Shakespeare’s text, which was certainly very well done; or was I supposed to be absorbed in the story and the interplay of Shakespeare’s characters, and the implications for life today (just as he was using past history to imply concerns about the abuse of power in his own day)?

In the end I have to conclude that this production of Macbeth is an interesting but not entirely original experiment.  For me the experimentation, though cleverly and skilfully done by the actors and designers, got in the way of the absorption in the drama, which I think was what Shakespeare was on about.

Hugo Weaving as Macbeth waiting for Macduff for the final battle

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Take Me to Your Leader by Wesley Enoch

Take Me to Your Leader by Wesley Enoch.  Platform Papers No. 40, August 2014, published by Currency House, Sydney.

Commentary by Frank McKone
August 8

Wesley Enoch’s subtitle is The dilemma of cultural leadership.  Let me begin by pointing out that Wesley is a cultural leader in his own right.  He should be formally recognised.  We have the right government at this very moment to do this.

Just as in England we have Sir Paul McCartney et al, PM Tony Abbott can have His Excellency, General the Honourable Sir Peter Cosgrove AK MC (Retd) dub Sir Nick Cave, Dame Cate Blanchett and Sir Wesley Enoch, as well as all those others that Wesley nominates, including: “filmmaker Gillian Armstrong AM, novelist Thea Astley AO, novelist Rodney Hall, designer Jennifer Kee, ABC broadcaster Jill Kitson, Indigenous teacher and performer Michael Leslie, choreographer Graeme Murphy AM, cartoonist Bruce Petty, arts czar Leo Schofield AM and academic Peter Spearritt”.  This was the team that wrote “the first ever national cultural policy, called Creative Nation” for Paul Keating in 1994.

Among other “elders of the theatre [who] are often forgotten, thrown on the scrap heap of natural attrition and fashion [are] the rare few [who] seem to float above it all – Robyn Archer, John Bell, Wendy Blacklock, Carol Burns, Peter Carroll, John Gaden, Roger Hodgman, Liz Jones, Robyn Nevin, George Whaley; but for every person remembered there are untold casts of forgotten.”

But is this European style what Australian leadership is all about – a sort of cultural popularity contest where the monarch picks the winners?  Is it what this “Nunuccal Nuugi man from Stradbroke Island” really wants?  Is it appropriate?  At the risk of offending the Australian Indigenous “race” under Section 18C, this one-time £10 Pom says I don’t think so.

Nor does Wesley, of course.  He’s far more polite than Sir Paul McC, as I suspect are all those others Wesley mentions (though I’m not so sure about my suggestion, Sir Nick).

So let’s get down to the business of Enoch’s argument.  Talking of theatre, his artistic milieu, he claims essentially that the history of government support for the arts, largely through the Australia Council, has ended up undermining the creative energy which we saw taking the lead – despite lack of support – during the 1960s and 1970s.  “In the 1970s with the establishment of the Australia Council we saw the formalising of funding support and the growth of some kind of official culture.  Funding provided a framework within which to experiment and explore ideas that examined Australian life and reflect our own aspirations.  The question today is whether the idea of state-sanctioned culture has led to the taming and silencing of the rambunctious, dissenting mob that ruled our performing arts for over two centuries.  In the search for the approval of the public purse have we lost our wit and charm, the art of surviving through persuasion, our critical purpose and our taste for the popular?” [Enoch’s emphasis]

In particular, Enoch notes, “After the stock market crash of the late 80s a new type of economic speak crept into the cultural language....We started to see papers on economic impact and multipliers, and we moved from an artistic community to an industry.”  In 1993, when the Drama Committee of the Australia Council, which included Wesley Enoch, divvied up the money according to the old criteria – diversity, gender representation, Indigenous arts, young people and Australian content, and the overarching ‘excellence’ – “All hell broke loose.”

The committee had found “that the larger theatre companies did not comply with the criteria.  Their lack of cultural diversity, gender representation and Australian content was very clear....Most of the large theatre companies received decreases in funding of around $500,000.  This freed up resources to support a range of other activities across the country.”

Then, writes Enoch, “The boards and artistic directors of the larger theatre companies went direct to government to have the Australia Council return the money that had been taken from them.  This was the beginning of the MOB (Major Organisations Board), an unfortunate acronym that soon changed to MPAB (Major Performing Arts Board).  This Board removed almost all artistic and cultural leadership criteria from the assessment of these privileged companies.”  Only “the overarching criterion of excellence remained unchallenged” and the “larger companies exited the general application process and the dollars they had been receiving from the Drama Committee went with them.”

Enoch sees cultural leadership as much more than putting on ‘excellent’ productions.  He writes, “Artists, by their very nature, are rogues and philosophers – instinctual, naughty, vibrant, edgy, fringe-dwellers who use their wits to survive in a world that pressures its citizens into many shades of conformity.”  And, in a brief reference to his own culture which I would love to know much more about, he states, “For thousands of years in this country there has been a balance between the sacred and the profane in performance.  Lewd, sexually explicit dances sat side by side with the most profoundly-felt ceremonies.”

So is there a way we can get back, at least to the kind of leadership we once had from another list of names: Jennifer Blocksidge, Rex Cramphorn, Jack Davis, Alma De Groen, Max Gillies, Louis Nowra, John Romeril, Stephen Sewell, Brian Syron, Rod Wissler and even the still popular David Williamson?  But, Enoch asks, “would a vocal critic like Stephen Sewell ever get produced on our mainstages these days?  Would any radical voice find access to the resources of the larger companies and if so under what conditions?  It is interesting to remember a time when Neil Armfield, Gale Edwards, Dorothy Hewett, Stephen Page, Geoffrey Rush, David Williamson, were radical and new and the systems that were in their infancy supported them to grow into national and international figures.”

I sense that in his conclusion, Wesley Enoch does not agree with previous Platform Papers contributors, Peter Tregear in Enlightenment or Entitlement and Julian Meyrick in The Retreat of our National Drama (reviewed on this blog February and May 2014 respectively).

Opposing Tregear, he writes “The apprenticeship is a long-established trade practice in other fields but has been abandoned by theatre and the responsibility surrendered to the tertiary education sector.  But the university structure, with its emphasis on academic excellence and compliance is an inappropriate place for a budding actor or entrepreneur to learn the practicalities and opportunities of theatre life.”

Enoch doesn’t mention Meyrick, but perhaps the two could meet in the foyer of Meyrick’s proposed National Theatre (which I proposed could be established in Canberra).  The National Theatre would be entirely focussed on producing new and classic Australian work, would not be a university institution, and would operate as a guild, with its practising performers, writers, directors, designers, technicians and managers mentoring apprentices in each field.

Productions by the National Theatre would not take place only in Canberra, of course.  The leadership it offers must be seen around the country.  The model I see for this in  today’s theatre world, perhaps, is the way Bell Shakespeare is based in Sydney, opens shows in other cities, tours, and offers both mainstage and educational productions.  We have some of the management structure already in place in Playing Australia.

All we need is someone like Wesley Enoch to be the artistic director.  Not Sir Wesley.  Just the Wesley from Stradbroke Island who writes “In Aboriginal society, I was taught, everyone dances and sings and paints and tells stories.  You have to, the arts are the way you understand the world.  If you don’t sing and paint and dance and tell stories you have no way of connecting with your family, your landscape, your history, your religion, your survival.  Everybody does it and understands the power of culture.”

And the Wesley Enoch who worried about accepting sponsorship from a sandmining company – the one which works on his traditional country, Stradbroke Island.  “On one hand the money could facilitate the project’s realization and enable its artists to reach their potential.  On the other, there are deep cultural and spiritual issues connected to the exploitation and extraction of the Land.  I talked with my father and other elders.  Their advice was to accept the money and use it to promote the stories, people and spiritual and cultural values that the project was attempting to celebrate.  I should also use what skills I had to speak up about the issues that were important to me.  So in the end I decided to accept the money of the sand mining company.”

The project was the play Black Diggers, reviewed on this blog January 19, 2014.

Enoch lays out his sponsorship options, saying “I don’t believe in such a thing as ‘clean money’.

1. Boycott or deny participation as artist or
sponsor/donor;

2. Accept support from the sponsor; but at the same
time create a critical environment within the
work or in a discussion about the work that
promoted alternative views to those of the donor;

3. Adopt a ‘it has nothing to do with me I just
make the Art’ position.

He concludes:  “The only way to really promote debate is to be part of it; and to engage through your work.  That is why my preference is Option 2.”

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Circa “S” directed by Yaron Lifschitz

Circa “S” directed by Yaron Lifschitz.  Technical / lighting director: Jason Organ; costumes designer: Libby McDonnell; music composed by Kimmo Pohjonen and Samuli Kosminen (Copyright Control/ TEOSTO) performed by: Kronos Quartet / Kimmo Pohjonen / Samuli Kosminen from the album Uniko courtesy of Hoedown Arts, Helsinki; additional music and sound composed by Purcell, Viñao, Múm and the cast: Nathan Boyle, Jessica Connell, Gerramy Marsden, Daniel O’Brien, Brittanie Portelli, Kimberley Rossi, Duncan West.

Canberra Theatre Centre, August 6-9, 2014
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 6

In recent times I have seen Circus Oz: From the Ground Up (Australian Indigenous reconciliation theme on a building site); Okham’s Razor: Arc, Memento Mori & Every Action… (UK aerial dances); Circolombia: Urban (city street life in Colombia); and now Circa’s S (Australian work by Yaron Lifschitz “of philosophical and poetic depth from the traditional languages of circus”).  All are examples of what is now being termed ‘contemporary circus’.

This genre is generally to be supposed to have been begun by Canada’s Cirque du Soleil and, according to Wikipedia was self-described as a "dramatic mix of circus arts and street entertainment". It is the largest theatrical producer in the world. Based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and located in the inner-city area of Saint-Michel, it was founded in Baie-Saint-Paul in 1984 by two former street performers, Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix.  But Circus Oz claims that Circus Oz was founded in 1978 as an amalgamation of two already successful Australian groups, Soapbox Circus and the New Circus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirque_du_Soleil
http://www.circusoz.com/circus-oz/history.html

The entertainment value of contemporary circus has made it a world-wide phenomenon, so the first quality to look for is the performers’ skills.  The ensemble performing S are perhaps the best I’ve seen, not just because they perform each movement, on the floor or in the air, with more precision than I’ve seen from many Olympic gymnastic contenders, but especially because of the complex shifting required from one movement to the next in a highly detailed choreography, and because of the timing of the movement to create the mood changes of the piece.

S is different from the other three companies' work.  Though closest to Okham’s Razor is style, S is not about telling stories.  Okham’s Razor’s works that I saw were like three visual video artworks, using a storyline as the basis for each relatively short piece.  S is one complete dance over 85 minutes, not structured around a storyline but as a work of changing moods as the figures experience a kind of lifetime.  The images are not obvious, as if representing the reality of a life, but are highly abstract.  The qualities of the physical movement as ‘scenes’ progress alter the mood on stage just as they do in modern dance.  The work becomes a metaphor which we interpret through the feelings created in us.  In other words, S is, as director Lifschitz hoped, a poetic work spoken in the language of circus.

Though life begins, as a figure is drawn upwards from the floor by a suspended glowing light (a ‘star’ perhaps), and life ends as the star, and the figure beneath, descends and dims to dark, the feeling of joy in life and satisfaction in so skilfully creating a life well-lived flowed off the stage for a warmth of applause and appreciation beyond what one might expect of a mere entertainment.

Circa’s S has taken ‘contemporary’ circus to a new level of artistry, and establishes the company firmly in the forefront of what is now a genre almost 40 years old.  It, I think, takes its place alongside the new developments in dance-drama, or dance-theatre, that we see in the work of Kate Champion’s Force Majeure Dance Company in linking with actors and playwrights, such as in Food by Steve Rodgers.  These new forms of stage work make Australian theatre an exciting place to be.

© Frank McKone, Canberra