2014: Cruise Control by David Williamson

 Cruise Control written and directed by David Williamson.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, April 30 – June 14, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 30

Had a terrific night.  Warm welcome home for David W.  And what a cruise!  Not sure so much about the control bit yet, but after all that was just David having a bit of fun.  Of course he’s terribly up-to-date, so instead of putting on the old-style slide night of boring stills, he had a stack of Twitter-length YouTube movie clips – just sooo funny, you wouldn’t believe!

Cousin John B. was there – sat just near me in fact – so David made sure he got the Shakespearean shot in, of Richard (he’s the English dark-side-of-everything novelist, you know) putting down colonial Aussie Imogen when she thought his “vaulting ambition” was from Hamlet.  Vaulting was right, in the end, as it turned out – just like Macbeth.

I suppose a lot of us were in the business, being Opening Night and all, so it really did feel like family to see David’s son Felix pretending to be that awful Richard who was pretending to be the ants-pants of sexual predators.  He did it so awfully well, in a very English way, that in some clips we almost believed he was being honest.  No wonder we felt for poor old ex-Ascham private school girl Imogen when she was so nearly trapped.  Fancy – despite going to the most expensive school in the world (or at least Sydney), if she had known her Shakespeare she might have been done for.

Of course we knew her type – marrying a bra boy like Darren making his fortune selling surfboards to China.  He was a laugh when he wasn’t basically an embarrassment.  But then he could actually splash the Dom Perignon around, and actually knew how to protect his wife.

The other women were definitely in our circle – Richard’s wife, editor Fiona, and Silky, the casting agent.  But we knew for real, if we hadn’t worked it out at first, that David was just putting the whole show on, when Silky’s husband Sol turned out to actually be Henri Szeps in his seemingly inevitable role as a dentist (though acting a typical self-effacing New York Jew, he said he just fixed gums).

It got to be a bit of a selfie in the final clip, for there was David himself, playwright and his own director, smiling modestly back at us, hoping that we thought he had achieved what editor Fiona had advised Sol about his novel idea of Al Qaeda sleeper dentists causing mayhem.  Though it was a plot that grabbed attention, she pointed out that it also needed to be credible if he hoped to sell his story.

Well, I think David’s plot is not absolutely credible, but I can’t reveal why not, since that would tell you the ending which, as in any mystery story, must remain sacrosanct until you see it for yourself.

But I can certainly say that, perhaps surprisingly for such a literate Ensemble audience, we could identify with the motivations for all the cruisers’ actions, even those of the Maroubra surfer.  And I can also say that we could retreat to the bar feeling quite OK about people being left believing something that was not true if it meant that they were now in control and communal justice had been done.

In other words, David has shown that he hasn’t lost the Williamson touch.  Cruise Control is a ‘well-made play’ in the traditional sense.  He is in control of his theatrical form, comedy on the edge of farce in one direction, while reflecting enough of reality to bring to light questions for our consideration.

In particular the playing out of the fraught relationships between the three couples, the literary English, the sentimental American Jewish and the down-to-earth Australian, could easily have been let go into slapstick stereotyping.  This can get laughs, as we laughed early in the play, except that as characters come and go through the multiple entrances and exits we expect of a farce, each new interaction exposes enough complexity in each character for us to identify with them and to make more than superficial judgements about them.

Tieing the drama together is the motivation common to each couple.  The cruise will be the make or break point for the woman in each marriage.  Tieing the situation together is the character of the Filipino waiter, whose real name is Jesus.  On board the cruise ship he is known as Charlie.  Can his family stay together as he works eight months straight, has two months at home with children and wife, provides them with more money than anyone else in the village, sends his children for a good education, then goes away again for the next eight months?

At this point I can say that I think Williamson has achieved the dictum of his own character, the editor Fiona.  There is a level of credibility here, which makes for interesting but tough-minded acting work for the cast, to set the correct level.

Kenneth Moraleda as Charlie, who has a beautiful singing voice, provided a softness in his linking role which I’m not sure I’ve seen in any of Williamson’s earlier plays.  I generally have doubts about a writer directing his own work, but I sense that Moraleda’s gentle singing which opens the action became a point for Williamson as director to return to for each character, and each actor – Helen Dallimore as Imogen Brodie, Peter Phelps as Darren Brodie, Kate Fitzpatrick as Silky Wasserman, Henri Szeps as Sol Wasserman, and Michelle Doake as Fiona Manton – knew they could trust Williamson the writer to give them the opportunity for those softer moments which brought their characters to life; and each made the most of their opportunities.

The one character without such a moment is Richard Manton.  The solution for Felix Williamson was to establish moments – even in a kind of distant-gazing pose – which gave Richard a different kind of life.  His ‘softening’ became a threat, a manipulative lie rather than a truth with which we could empathise.  It says a great deal about professionalism in today’s Australian theatre that a father can so successfully direct his own son.

And there’s no doubt that the Ensemble Theatre has a family atmosphere for a new Williamson work which enhances this play about couples moving beyond their youthful expectations to the point, as Fiona says, where she has at last ‘grown up’.

Helen Dallimore, Peter Phelps as Imogen and Darren Brodie

Kate Fitzpatrick as Silky Wasserman, Kenneth Moraleda as Charlie

Kenneth Moraleda, Peter Phelps, Helen Dallimore

L to R: Peter Phelps, Michelle Doake, Helen Dallimore, Henri Szeps, Felix Williamson, Kate Fitzpatrick

Michelle Doake, Felix Williamson as Fiona and Richard Manton

Photos by Clare Hawley

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Reflections on Sacrifice, Loss & Futility

 

 The Girls in Grey by Carolyn Bock & Helen Hopkins.  The Shift Theatre (Melbourne), presented by Critical Stages, directed by Tom Healey (original direction by Karen Martin), set designed by Alex Hiller.
The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre Thursday April 24, 8.00pm, Friday April 25, 5.00pm, Saturday April 26, 2.00pm & 8.00pm, 2014.

Reflections on Sacrifice, Loss & Futility exhibition by Geoffrey Jones at Tuggeranong Community Arts Centre, April 24 to May 30, 2014.
Opening on Thursday 24 April at 6pm, with a speech by Mr Graham Walker, Canberra Times Senior Australian of the Year. Special event Saturday 26 April from 12- 4pm with an artist’s talk at 2pm.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 24

On the eve of Anzac Day I have been honoured to witness The Girls in Grey, complemented fortuitously by the artwork of Geoffrey Jones on exhibition at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre.

The Girls in Grey is a ceremonial ritual, using the words in highly personal letters written by Australian nurses sent to the front in World War I.  Geoffrey Jones, a Vietnam War veteran, reveals his personal history in Reflections on Sacrifice, Loss & Futility.  Both shows bring home to the viewer the change from a naive acceptance of  warfare to the realistic understanding that no-one should be expected to face such destruction – of physical and emotional life.

The honour I felt arose from the honesty with which the nurses and Jones spoke through art – his own in Jones’ case and in the scripting, stage design, directing and performing by the Shift Theatre team of the nurses’ words.

Jones’ paintings, photographic work and installations speak for themselves.  Some pieces from this exhibition have been acquired by the Australian War Memorial, for display there from 2015 after exhibition in Sydney.

Shift Theatre’s 70 minute performance could justifiably become an annual ritual on Anzac Day.  The joie de vivre of the nurses as they take the oath of service and find themselves as if on holiday in Egypt; their down-to-earth practicality as “their boys” are brought in; their humanity; their determination to do everything they can with inadequate resources; their realisation as the patients arrive in their thousands that the war is beyond all reason; and their experience of the deaths of their loved ones, including among their own colleagues – leads us to a powerful ceremony of placing the poppies gathered from the grim field of war into an array representing the graves in ordered lines in the war cemeteries around the world.

With this image before us, the reprise chorus of the nurses’ oath of service is more than ironic.  It reflects the respect we must have for all the women and men in war, the great sorrow we must feel for all this unnecessary sacrifice, and the all-encompassing hope we must maintain that humanity will some day reign: that conflict will be resolved without such destruction.

The script for The Girls in Grey  has drawn upon letters of many members of the Australian Army Nursing Service, to form three characters – the matron Grace (Carolyn Bock), Elsie (Samantha Murray) and Alice (Helen Hopkins) – with James O’Connell, in this season’s tour, playing at times a generalised soldier, and the three men in these women’s lives: Syd, Harry and Len (originally played by Lee Mason).

This trimming down was a very effective way of bringing the enormity of deaths and injuries down to the level of personal experience, when, as the War Memorial records, “From a population of fewer than five million, 416,809 men enlisted, of which over 60,000 were killed and 156,000 wounded, gassed, or taken prisoner.  http://www.awm.gov.au/atwar/ww1/

To present these characters over the five-year period of the war not only required a massive amount of research, but also a style of performance which could tell enough of the individual characters’ stories while keeping us aware of the wider context.  Tom Healey’s direction focusses on what some would call a ‘presentational’ style – a form of storytelling with some symbolic action, choreographed placing of figures, and shifting between individual and chorus voices.  The cast worked together so closely that in some highly significant moments they were able to maintain a lengthy silence or period of stillness, and then precisely time their next word or movement all together.  Using such good timing, and with a high degree of poetic expression, the mood of the piece began light, and then bit by bit drew us in to the darkness.

At the end, there was a feeling in the audience that we shouldn’t clap immediately, though there was no hesitation when the lights came up on stage for a curtain call.  I felt that I would have liked the final fade to black to have been held longer, and even perhaps for the curtain call to have been less cheerful.  The standard smiles and recognition of the stage crew broke the mood too quickly for me, personally.  But this should not be taken as a serious criticism of a valuable and successful theatrical work, which extended my appreciation of the role of the nurses in wartime, for which I thank Shift Theatre.

It was sadly enlightening to see the play and the art exhibition on this day.  As Geoffrey Jones has written (quoting George Orwell to summarise his inspiration: ‘If the war didn’t kill you, it was bound to start you thinking’), As an artist and former willing participant in one of these conflicts, I hope through this exhibition to encourage people to reflect upon Australia’s engagement in these costly and sometimes futile wars...The works question the apparent eagerness of Australia to become involved in overseas wars, and attempt to convey the enormous and terrible sacrifice and loss those wars incurred.

And, as Rauny Worm, CEO of Tuggeranong Arts Centre wrote – equally appropriate for The Girls in Grey – Reflections on Sacrifice, Loss & Futility “is sure to demonstrate the ability of art to act as a powerful tool for personal expression on important issues.”


© Frank McKone, Canberra

Geoffrey Jones: Poppies in Afghanistan

Vietnam veterans, artist Geoffrey Jones and CT Senior Australian of the Year, Graham Walker

2014: Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris - Review

 

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, directed by Tanya Goldberg, March 19 – April 19, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 19

An excellent production of an excellent play.  The website says it all:

ENSEMBLE THEATRE SEASON SOLD OUT
SEASON EXTENDED - EXTRA SHOWS NOW ON SALE!
WEDNESDAY 23 APRIL & THURSDAY 24 APRIL 8PM
THE CONCOURSE, CHATSWOOD
http://ensemble.com.au/whats-on/play/clybourne-park/

Is the popularity justified by quality?  I think it is.

The Ensemble has a long tradition, going back to its American founder, Hayes Gordon, of presenting successful up-to-date plays from the USA.  Clybourne Park fits the bill since its first production in 2010, having already won a Tony, a Pultizer, Olivier and Evening Standard awards. 

The basis of its success is the witty, often excruciatingly funny, exposé of the worst kind of NIMBYism which has property values and race in the mix.

Norris has skilfully put together, all in the same house, the story of social change in this fictional suburb of Chicago which has been true of central city areas across the US through the post-World War 2 to the present time.

Each of the seven actors has two roles – one in the mid-1950s, following the end of the Korean War in 1953, as ‘coloured’ people began to buy into middle-class white areas; the other in the late 20 noughties, by which time the house had a historical heritage value as the vanguard of the change to Afro-American middle-class ownership.

But there is also the ghostly presence in that house of the son of the earlier white owners, who had hanged himself in his upstairs bedroom because of guilt, apparently for having shot civilians during a clearing operation in Korea.

None of this sounds like material for a comedy.  Just imagine shifting the scene from Chicago to the more upmarket part of Moree, say, if the people from Toomelah had had the chance to buy in 1968, when they were still refused access to the swimming pool, and while the part played by Aboriginal men in Australia’s wars went not only unrecognised but officially denied.

In this play, Chicago has gone through and out the other side to the point where the now racially mixed community tries to decide what should be done to preserve, refurbish or update the house.  These people are two generations away from those in Act 1.  The measure of Norris’ success is that the funniest – and most excruciating scene – is when his characters in 2010 fire off racist jokes at each other.

This is the point at which, through comedy which satirises each character’s stance, we in the audience are forced, as we laugh, to recognise our own hypocritical attitudes – and it doesn’t take much thought to see the wider range of issues to which the laughter can be applied.

Of course, though, the sublety of Norris’ writing could be a disastrous and embarrassing flop on stage, if it were not directed and acted with detailed care to match.  Not only has Tanya Goldberg placed the characters precisely in their American setting – recognising that the drama must be played true to its locality to have global effect – but she and all the actors have understood the style needed.   Comedy requires a degree of exaggeration and pointed timing.  This makes the first act work.  Satire requires an extra fine control to turn comedy into inescapable self-recognition on our part.  This was achieved to a very high degree in the second act.

So my praise goes to all the cast: Paula Arundell (1950s Francine / 2010 Lena); Cleave Williams (Albert / Kevin); Richard Sydenham (Russ / Dan); Wendy Strehlow (Bev / Kathy); Briallen Clarke (Betsy / Lindsey; Nathan Lovejoy (Karl / Steve); and Thomas Campbell who played three roles – Jim / Tom, and Russ and Bev’s son Kenneth, in a kind of reprise which ends the play as he writes his suicide note.

This was a genuine Ensemble production.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Warts & All by Bruce Hoogendoorn

Warts & All written and directed by Bruce Hoogendoorn at the Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, April 2 – 12, Wed-Sat, 2014-04-12

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 11

The title, I guess, imposes on me a duty to reveal all about this new play by perhaps the most indie of independent operators in the Canberra theatre scene.  Hoogendoorn calls it a comedy, but though there were some laughs from the small and sympathetic audience, there were not enough for me to think ‘comedy’.

Why not?  After all, the central device is the ghost of an athletics coach, Ken, played with exactly the right Australian manner by Rob de Fries, who is mistaken for the ghost of his father, Ted.  Though ghosts can’t be real – can they? – this one’s piercing whistle and sudden appearance from Simon’s wardrobe was certainly quite frightening.  I had a bit of a nervous laugh until my willingness to suspend my disbelief got the better of me, and he turned into a nice bloke.

Then there was Oliver Baudert playing the elderly Alice.  He did it very well, but I have to say that I could not find a reason for this casting, except perhaps that if Alice had been played by a woman, the role of bitter division between her and her contemporary Margaret would not have been funny at all.  Helen Vaughan-Roberts played Margaret straight as a realistic character who engendered much empathy.

Playing realistically, as the two just-finished Year 12 grandchildren were played by Will Huang (Margaret’s Simon) and Adellene Fitzsimmons (Alice’s Kirsty), also meant occasions when comedy was not appropriate.  On the other hand the role of Dotty, counsellor and family historian, gave the best chance for the laughs you get from the people who put their foot in it – and Elaine Noon did this well.

So what’s my problem?  Bit by bit the mystery of Ted, on one side of the family, who had patriotically volunteered in World War 2 and died in Syria, and Alan, on the other side, who had stayed in the small black soil town somewhere not far from Toowoomba to keep the family shop running, began to be revealed.

When it came to connecting the dots about Alan feeling so guilty after Ted’s death that he smoked himself to a cancerous death at 50, and Alan and Margaret’s daughter drowning – in fact committing suicide – shortly after Ted’s death, and then the discovery that she had borne Ted’s son – that is, Ken – who had been adopted out and knew nothing of his real parents (and had recently died in a car smash), I realised that this story was not the proper material for a ghostly romantic comedy.  In fact I was glad that the lack of one-liner jokes meant there was not much laughter.

To have succeeded in making a comedy out of this story would have been bizarre, when the issues of patriotism and cowardice, out-of-wedlock birth and forced adoption, and decades-long internecine family bitterness are hardly laughing matters.

Oddly enough, in his ‘Playwright’s Notes’, writing about conflict in families, Hoogendoorn says: “no wonder playwrights have mined it in such beloved plays as The Glass Menagerie, Death of a Salesman, and more recently August: Osage County and Other Desert Cities.  And funnily enough, no one gets on very well in them.  If they did, they wouldn’t be such fascinating plays.”

Just so!  There may be humour in these works, but they are not comedies.  There are ironies (like in the title Other Desert Cities reviewed in the Guardian as “a tense family portrait ...Jon Robin Baitz's Christmas-set drama uses fractured nuclear families to examine the broken American psyche”) which Hoogendoorn hardly glimpses in this script.

Maybe it’s time for his next play (he’s up to 15 according to his website http://brucehoogendoorn.com/) to put genre and content appropriately together: on the topic of families, a truly absurdist take would be good (see my recent review of Perplex), or may be a realistic tragedy of misunderstanding and bitter division on the black soil plains as the younger generation feel the need, encouraged by a conservative government, to go to the Dawn Ceremony at Gallipoli in 2015.

Art is about finding the right form for what the artist needs to express.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Perplex by Marius von Mayenburg

Perplex by Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade.  Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Sarah Giles at Wharf 1,  April 4 – May 3, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 9

The theatrical form of Perplex is metacognitive farce.  The philosophical form is farcical metacognition.  If it had been written by Shakespeare, Hamlet would have been named Piglet, and his question would have been “To be, or not to be.  What is the question?”

If you feel perplexed so far, that’s great.  It’s also very funny – not what I’ve written, but what Marius von Mayenburg wrote, as translated wonderfully by Maja Zade.  If you thought philosophy was beyond your comprehension (that’s the meta-cognitive bit), you need never worry again.  Just Give Yourself to the Elk physically (you’ll be laughing with all your might) and intellectually, as you begin to understand that the universe really is absolutely unpredictable.  Not only does God, or any god, not exist, but – since everything we know consists of no more than a bunch of electrical pulses in our brains – even we don’t really exist.  Nor does the ‘fourth wall’ of stage performance.  Nor even the play itself, whose director has never shown up to rehearsal “since the beginning”.

It’s at this point, of course, that I go into analysis mode.  That’s what a critic has to do, otherwise I wouldn’t be a critic.

Should you see this play?  Absolutely, categorically and metacognitively.  To see the whole audience making their exit from the auditorium bubbling with excitement, laughing and babbling away (even at afternoon teatime on Wednesday) is proof Sarah Giles is still on top of the form she showed when directing Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession last year.

As for the cast, well, they come up to the mark brilliantly: Andrea Demetriades as Andrea, Glenn Hazeldine as Glenn, Rebecca Massey as Rebecca, and the occasionally nude Tim Walter as Tim.  As do the essential ‘creatives’: designer Renée  Mulder, lighting designer Benjamin Cisterne, and composer & sound designer Max Lyandvert.  If you ever dare to invite people to a ‘Come as...’ party, you could not do better than ask Mulder to design the costumes – the funniest I’ve seen on stage for many a long year.

It is true (I think, therefore I...) that some education in European theatrical tradition will make you more cognisant of some of ‘meta’ aspects of this work from Berlin. In his 30s, von Mayenburg, already with a lucky 13 plays behind him, wrote Perplex in 2010.  In only his second year of writing, according to Wikipedia, his Feuergesicht (1997) won him the Kleistförderpreis für junge Dramatiker and Preis der Frankfurter Autorenstiftung. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_von_Mayenburg)

By his 14th year, in play number 14, Perplex shows his confidence as he plays with the elements of absurdism, with semi-oblique references at least to Pirandello (1921), whose Six Characters are in Search of an Author, to Ionesco’s couple of strangers (Mr and Mrs Martin in The Bald Soprano 1948) who discover they not only know each other, but are actually married, to Stoppard’s Rozencrantz and Guildernstern (1966) trying to fathom out what’s going on in Hamlet and, according to Sydney Theatre Company’s blurb, to Nietzsche and Beckett.  The extra level beyond the ordinary is that von Mayenburg satirises his own place in the absurdist tradition, of which his characters are aware.  Even Pirandello’s characters knew they were in a play by Pirandello, but for von Mayenburg’s characters acting in his play is disastrous emotionally, as they realise that modern avant-garde German playwrights traditionally have to have the whole set collapse and cleared from the stage – I suppose for a neat and precisely tidy ending.

In fact, this isn’t what happens.  The stage is a mess at the end – another final twist in the logic of absurdism.  Funny though it is to watch, there really is a sense of sadness at humanity’s incapacity not only to understand our place in the universe, but even just to organise ourselves enough to maintain a little bit of equanimity in our lives.  I saw a touch of Brecht’s The Chalk Circle and The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, after the laughter had faded away.

L to R: Andrea Demetriades, Tim Walter, Rebecca Massey, Tim Walter, Glenn Hazeldine, Andrea Demetriades, Rebecca Massey, Glenn Hazeldine

Photos: Lisa Tomasetti

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Johnny Castellano is Mine by Emma Gibson

Johnny Castellano is Mine by Emma Gibson.  Presented by Canberra Youth Theatre and The Street Theatre, directed by Karla Conway; set and lighting designed by Samantha Pickering; sound design by Stephen Fitzgerald.  At Street Two, April 3 – 12, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 5

Watching this mystical piece somehow reminded me of reading an intense emotionally shaped short story – perhaps something like one of James Joyce’s Dubliners.  When I read a story in which at first I understand only fragments based upon the words and feelings which play on my imagination, I find myself slowly drawn into the experience almost of being someone else – their flashes of memories, their reactions to bits and pieces of actions, by themselves and others, their changing moods, their story through their own eyes.

In this theatre piece, Alice, played with considerable skill by dance-trained Alison Plevey, tells of her real or perhaps unreal relationship with Johnny Castellano, the spunk boy in her small-town high school, through a lifetime and death – all possibly pure imagination.  We not only hear her words, as if we were hearing that short story, but we see her representation in movement – not quite pure dance, yet never simple mime – of her actions, her moods and state of mind.  The performance takes place in an abstract setting of horizontal and vertical straight lines, in a central hollow open-sided cube and in hanging strip lights.  When these all hang in the vertical, death and final departure is imminent.  The sound track is essentially musique concrète.

The theatrical form, then, settles into what I would call abstract symbolism, but rather than alienating us from Alice’s story, we are slowly overwhelmed by an empathetic sense of doom.  I think it was this dark mood which reminded me of James Joyce’s work where snatches of ordinary reality come to symbolise powerful forces beyond our control.

So, in my view, Emma Gibson’s new work is unusual, original and absorbing, and she has been served very well indeed by Karla Conway  and her creative team in putting together the theatrical elements to make the story work on stage, including (I am guessing) choreography by Alison Plevey which is not explicitly acknowledged in the program.

Johnny Castellano is Mine is worth more than the hour it lasts on stage.  It lives on in one’s imagination as good theatre should.

© Frank McKone, Canberra