2014: The Government Inspector by Simon Stone with Emily Barclay

The Government Inspector by Simon Stone with Emily Barclay; devised by the cast featuring a short musical by Stefan Gregory; inspired by Nikolai Gogol.  At The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre, May 28-31, 2014.

Dear Mr Stone and Company,

Thank you for your invitation to the National Commission of Audit to inspect your operation. 

To place our conclusions in an appropriate context, we refer you to those of our Terms of Reference relevant to your situation, as follows:

http://www.ncoa.gov.au/docs/NCA_TERMS_OF_REFERENCE.pdf

Scope:

In relation to activities performed, the Commission is asked to identify:

–whether there remains a compelling case for the activity to continue to be
undertaken; and
–if so, whether there is a strong case for continued direct involvement of
government, or whether the activity could be undertaken more efficiently by the
private sector, the not for profit sector, the States, or local government.
  

Efficiency and effectiveness of expenditure

The Commission is asked to report on efficiencies and savings to improve the
effectiveness of, and value for money from, all expenditure, including:

–options for greater efficiencies such as:
:increasing contestability of services;
:adoption of new technologies in service delivery;
:consolidation of agencies and boards;
:rationalising the service delivery footprint to ensure better, more productive
and efficient services for stakeholders;
:flattening organisational structures and streamlining lines of responsibility
and accountability;
:consolidating support functions into a single agency; and
:privatisation of assets.
–potential improvements to productivity, service quality, and value for money
across the public sector, including better delivery of services to the regions; and
–anything that is reasonably necessary or desirable to improve the efficiency and effectiveness generally.

To save the Commission's time and expense, following is a brief Executive Summary of our Conclusions.

We recommend a revolving door structure and note that your operation in this regard is highly efficient.  We note that only on rare occasions have you flattened organisational structures, and consideration could be given to furthering this objective, in comparison, for example, to the complete flattening achieved in the Perplex operation (audited 10 April 2014).  We were suitably impressed by the almost continous contestability of services in your operation, to the point of saving on staffing via departures and death.  More productive and efficient services were evident in the high degree of multitasking in your staff.  The public sector has expressed its satisfaction with your operational service quality, including effective delivery of services, and the strategic planning of touring to regions including Uzbekistan.

Your operation began well in the matter of rationalisation of the service footprint, represented by a single pair of shoes, though there was some concern that the footprint became somewhat out-of-hand in an all-singing all-dancing finale.  Propriety and approbrium were issues at several points of the progression of the operation, leading some stakeholders to question whether there had been sufficient privatisation of some of the staff’s assets.

On the whole, the Commission has concluded that there remains a compelling case for the activity to continue to be undertaken, and that there is a strong case for continued direct involvement of the Australian Government, in partnership with the private sector, the not for profit sector, the States, and local government.

Signed

Frank McKone
Critically certified
29 May 2014

Operational staff in operation
Not necessarily Left to Right
In alphabetical order:
Fayssal Bazzi, Mitchell Butel, Gareth Davies, Robert Menzies, Zahra Newman, Eryn-Jean Norvill, Greg Stone

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Mojo by Jez Butterworth.

Photo: Brett Boardman

Mojo by Jez Butterworth.  Sydney Theatre Company directed by Iain Sinclair, designed by Pip Runciman (set), David Fleischer (costume), Nicholas Rayment (lighting) and Steve Francis (sound).  At Wharf 1, May 17 – July 5, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 28

For many decades since the 1950s we have seen a bowdlerised and often quite sentimental view of British small-time criminal life on our tv screens.  Even the picture on the program cover, in a kind-of modern 'mod' style, makes the characters in Mojo seem rather attractive.

Over those same decades, the British stage has had Harold Pinter’s plays to take us into something more like the reality of the culture of menace in the lives of a certain stream of the lower class for whom graft and trickery provided what they saw as the only way up in the world.

Yet I had not been aware of the next generation of writers like Pinter, represented here by Butterworth in his first play, from 1995.  It was picked up immediately for the Royal Court’s main stage, making Butterworth the only first-time playwright to have this honour since John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956.  It’s no wonder that the younger Butterworth ended up a close friend of the older Pinter.  Mojo is as perceptive and subtle in reproducing the relationships between those controlling  (or wanting to control) a cheap ‘night club’ as, say, the story behind The Birthday Party.

But, perhaps beyond Pinter’s achievement, Butterworth takes us back to John Osborne’s time, and shows us the contrast between Osborne’s intellectuals messing up their middle-class lives and the seriously dangerous lives of the lower classes at the time of new possibilities of rock’n’roll.  Black humour and the rhythms of Cockney language make us laugh in the midst of social and personal tragedy.  There is no sentimentality here.

For Butterworth to write this, looking back 40 years, was remarkable, but for Iain Sinclair to create such an accurate sense of that 1950s period another 20 years later is even more so, in my eyes.  I can say this because as a young teenager in London I was brought up to be conscious of those parts of the city which were no go for our kind of family.  I knew about the Teddy Boys and was well aware of the danger.  Fortunately I had arrived in Australia by the time rock around the clock had chimed, and only had to learn about avoiding the sly grog merchants of Sydney’s Kings Cross, rather than  the extension of the violence of the early 50s Teddy Boys into the amphetamine trade and the night club music scene.

In the program there are a series of photos of 1950s street scenes, from the Mary Evans Picture Library, which I cannot reproduce here for copyright reasons, showing both the poverty of the parts of London where the Teddy Boys were active and the attitude they displayed.  For this production, not all the costumes are accurate copies of those of the day but are designed to give us the feel of characters using a kind of natty formality of dress and hair style to make themselves seem further up the social scale than they really were.  The 'duck's arse' or duck's tail hair style was a special feature  - very nicely done.

Josh McConville, Lindsay Farris, Ben O'Toole

Eamon Farren, Josh McConville

Alon Ilsar, Lindsay Farris

Lindsay Farris

Photos © Brett Boardman 2014

Stills cannot show perhaps the most remarkable feature of the acting.  The style of movement and the tonalities of voice took me straight back to my teenage days.



I had wondered before seeing the show whether the past would be a different country, perhaps not really relevant for 2014 – but the story in the news this very week of the murder of a methamphetamine carrier, perhaps by previously corrupt coppers, in the Sydney suburb of Padstow gives Mojo all the significance it needs.

Technically and acting-wise, this is another highly successful Sydney Theatre Company production, well worth the trip since it’s unlikely to come to Iain Sinclair’s one time home town, Canberra.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Love Letters by A.R.Gurney

Hannah Waterman, Huw Higginson

Love Letters by A.R.Gurney.  Produced by Christine Harris & HIT Productions.  Directed by Denny Lawrence; designer, Jacob Battista; lighting designer, Jason Bovaird.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, May 21 – 24, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 22

The American President Abraham Lincoln wrote: “Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.”  Love Letters is a quintessentially American play: of Americans, by an American, for Americans.

This production of Love Letters, directed by an Australian, acted by Britons (recently settled in Australia), and presented for Australians, seems to me to miss a key element of American culture: the sentimental nature of the American dream.

A. R. Gurney knew the weakness of his culture, as have all the great American playwrights from Eugene O’Neill onwards.  That’s why his story of the born-rich Melissa Gardner and the self-made ironically-named Andrew Makepeace Lad III turns out to be a tragedy.

Let me make it clear that Hannah Waterman and Huw Higginson understood and created the characters’ deep sense of failure, to the point of still being tearful even as they acknowledged our applause in recognition of their quality acting.

But Denny Lawrence’s approach to directing the play left us feeling that there was something missing.  It began, I think, with the set and lighting design.

Hannah Waterman & Huw Higginson in Love Letters by A.R.Gurney (Photo: Belinda Strodder)

The shiny see-through brightly lit lecterns at which the actors stood, facing front until the very end, with the backdrop of an upright backlit screen in the centre behind them, produced a sense of formality which was at odds with the nature of the letters being written and received by Melissa and Andy throughout their lives from primary school in 1937 to Melissa’s suicide some 50 years later.

Despite the fences and finally the insurmountable barriers – like a thicket of thorns which grows continually wider and higher between them, from their childhood social class division and then the requirements of her life as an artist (whose function is to buck convention) and his as a rising star through Yale, service in the navy, prominence as a lawyer and election as a liberal Republican Senator (whose function is to build on conventions) – in their letters they are their real selves.

Perhaps the most telling, and amusing, episode occurs when Andy’s secretary sends out the standard overblown self-congratulatory Christmas letter from his family (on this occasion written by Andrew, though usually written by his wife Jane), with glowing stories about their three sons’ successes.  Melissa tears into Andy in reply, and he is remorseful in response, telling her the truth about his sons’ bad behaviour.  Maybe we, not just Americans, have received – and perhaps even written – such awful Christmas letters.

Hannah Waterman as Melissa Gardner

Huw Higginson as Andrew Makepeace Lad III

Photos: Belinda Strodder



















However the clue to what I think was wrong about the directing is in the letters Andy writes from very early on, even while they were still teenagers, worrying about whether Melissa is OK.  “Are you in trouble?” he writes much later as he realises that her marriage to Darwin, of Wall Street, is just not right for her.  Then there are the intermittent lengthy periods with no communication from her, when his letters become panicky about what’s happening to her.  To me this says that the formal setting of hard, sharp, angular, well-lit edges has to go.  And even more so when she manages to persuade him, and he succeeds in consummating the relationship – unfortunately in the lead-up to his crucial re-election.

Andy may be writing from the office of Andrew Makepeace Lad III, but only his absolutely trustworthy confidential personal secretary is in the know and protects his privacy.  He is not writing while standing at a public lectern.  Melissa is writing in darker and darker places as time goes along, even when she has an exhibition of her paintings – a complete disaster in her eyes.  Andy might be capable of presenting himself at a public event – even speaking at a lectern – despite what’s really happening in his personal life; but not Melissa.

Only after reaching this conclusion did I have a look at YouTube.  It would have been cheating otherwise, since I have never seen a production of Love Letters before. 

At http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Pd_Z6ExxE  I found Cleo Holladay and Rex Partington in an excerpt “from A.R. Gurney's Pulitzer Prize winning play.”  You can’t trust YouTube, of course.  Gurney was a finalist for a Pulitzer, but never won.  However the setting and the stage relationship between the actors demonstrates my concern about Lawrence’s production.

Cleo Holladay & Rex Partington (YouTube screenshot)

Partington has Melissa and Andy seated at the same table, side by side and visibly close.  The letters are an animated conversation between the two, as if there is no physical or time separation.  There is no sense of formality or distance.  In Lawrence’s setting I quite liked the backlit screen changing as the seasons changed, and even becoming a stained glass window for Melissa’s funeral, but a softer and more intimate setting would have allowed his actors much more freedom of expression, as they ‘wrote’ and as they ‘read’ each other's letters.

Then the innocent comedy of their young selves would have felt insecure – to us watching, as well as to the actors playing the roles – and the dark shadows would gradually overwhelm Melissa and Andy, and be felt by the audience, until the inevitability of her death could take on the same kind of significance as in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. 

Then we would have seen a truly American play – emotionally sentimental, but through the playwright’s eyes, a damnation of the American Dream.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: The 13-Storey Treehouse by Richard Tulloch

 The 13-Storey Treehouse by Richard Tulloch.  Adapted from the book by Andy Griffiths and illustrated by Terry Denton.  Presented by CDP Theatre Producers, directed by Julian Louis. Set and costumes designed by Mark Thompson, lighting designed by Nicholas Higgins, sound by Jeremy Silver.
Canberra Theatre Centre, May 15-17, 2014.  60 minutes, no interval.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Bamboozled!  Frantic!  Nervous about catnaries.  Anxious about not being prepared.  Is this a rehearsal or the real thing?

Writing a play about writing a play about a book which is about writing a book is no easy task.  No wonder we were all a bit bamboozled – just the right word, said my assistant reviewer, Stevie, aged 8.  He also had to explain ‘catnaries’ to me, and why Andy and Terry were nervous about how Jill might feel about her favourite cat being painted yellow and turning into a canary – especially when it flew away!

Arriving at the theatre half an hour early proved that I am the last person in Canberra to know about things like catnaries, and what happens when your sea monkey turns into a mermaid, which turns into a monster when you marry her.  The queue to have books signed by the real Andy Griffiths after the previous performance still snaked 80 metres along outside the theatre.  By the time our performance had finished, that queue had dissipated, but the foyer was immediately refilled with the next contingent.  ‘Popular’ was my assistant reviewer’s word for it.  We didn’t have another hour or more to spare, so Stevie had to miss his signature moment.  Can I get one by email?

‘Emotional’ was Stevie’s other word for the play.  This surprised me a bit, until I thought things through.  The characters were frantic (and therefore very funny), but there were times when laughter was not the emotion of the moment.  There were significant silences, such as when Terry and Andy realised that what they had said might really have upset Stage Manager Val.  It was a mark of the quality of the writing – of the play in this case rather than the book – to sense the change in the audience’s feelings as they swung from irrepressible laughter to sympathy for Val and empathy with Andy and Terry.

There was a point where Terry and/or Andy (who reminded me of Rosencrantz and/or Guildersten) said to no-one in particular that this play (the play they were trying to write) wasn’t just entertaining but educational as well.  My assistant Stevie, well within the show’s intended age bracket 6 to 12, didn’t exactly pick up on this line.  But he had picked up on ‘emotional’.

Thinking about this, I found I had some concern about the celebrity status of the author of the book.  Where was the author of the play?  There should have been a queue for Richard Tulloch to sign everyone’s copy of the script.  It’s his imagination which has turned Andy Griffiths’ and Terry Denton’s imagination into an even better education (as well as more subtle entertainment) than the original book.  The play educates the audience about the value and nature of theatre at the same time as informing them of cultural icons, as well as introducing some adult jokes (in the book) such as “That’s not a knife.  This is a knife!”  We adults fully appreciated the place of ‘luminous’ Cate Blanchett, ‘tough’ Russell Crowe, not so tough Geoffrey Rush and beautiful Nicole Kidman – and the youngsters got to hear their names (except Crocodile Dundee’s Paul Hogan, who is perhaps persona non grata nowadays).

The most important aspect of Tulloch’s work was his playing with the relationship between the actors and the audience.  He draws from the pantomime tradition in some ways, where the actors speak directly to the audience, but takes this to a possibly new level for children’s theatre especially in the character of Val, who of course is not in the book.  She is the Stage Manager, inveigled by Andy and Terry to play all the other roles in their story (since they thought this was only going to be a scriptwriting session (and, so they said, Cate, Russell, Geoffrey and Nicole couldn’t be there).

The essential message of the play (as it is in the book) is to use your imagination.  We see Eliza Logan playing Val playing next-door neighbour Jill, or Bill the Postman, or Mermaidia (as a seductive mermaid who transmogrifies into a husband eating monster), and returning to Val in between times, as well as appearing as herself in the curtain call.  Watching Eliza use her imagination right before our very eyes is a lesson in itself.

In addition to the excellent performances of the three main actors Andrew Johnston as Andy, Matthew Lilley as Terry and Eliza Logan as Stage Manager Val, two crew members played essential roles handling props and scenery as part of the action.  We didn’t see the real stage manager, Vanessa Wright, but her deputy and assistant stage managers, Sally Reid and Holly Neil, kept the action flowing smoothly, working closely with the actors in a set as frenetic in construction as one would expect from the drawings in the original book.

Compared with the original book, which was about writing a book, there were two differences which I appreciated.  I’m backed up in this by my assistant reviewer Stevie.

On stage the wonderful set design included a seriously more realistic massive eye and stomping foot (which gruesomely squashes Bark the Dog) of the gorilla who tries to shake down the 13-storey treehouse.  The original drawings are simply not so scary – but a bit more scary is good in the theatre.

The other is a more subtle change by Richard Tulloch, which makes the ending work dramatically (whereas the ending of the book is a bit weak, I think).  Mr Big Nose in the book is Andy’s and Terry’s publisher, very angry because they forget to finish the book on time.  At the end, though he publishes the book, he remains a distant and rather unpleasant character.  But when Mr Big Nose appears on the projector screen from his smart phone in the play, he is demanding but not as nasty.  At the end, now the play is finished, as Terry and Andy are worried that everything has gone wrong, Mr Big Nose phones in to say how good the play has turned out.

This is not just a happy ending (which after all it should be for a comedy), but it makes the point that imagination may take you to all sorts of unexpected and apparently disastrous places on the way, but in the end that’s how making a book happens – or even making a play about making a play about making a book about making a book.  So thank you to Andy and Terry, and Richard, and Andrew and Matthew and Eliza and Vanessa and Sally and Holly and Julian and Mark and Nicholas and Jeremy, and CDP for presenting Richard’s play of Andy and Terry’s book.

Eliza Logan playing Stage Manager Val playing Mermaidia

Andrew Johnston as Andy

Matthew Lilley as Terry

Photos by Branco Gaica




© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: The Retreat of our National Drama by Julian Meyrick

The Retreat of our National Drama by Julian Meyrick.  Platform Papers No.39 published by Currency House.  Launched by Miriam Margoyles at the Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, May 15, 2014.

Currency House with Theatre Network Victoria will also stage a public debate with Julian Meyrick, playwright Lally Katz, and Katharine Brisbane at the Auspicious Arts Incubator, Upstairs, 228 Bank Street, South Melbourne, Tuesday May 20, 2014, 5.30pm.  Free, but must book on http://www.trybooking.com/ESOJ .

Enquiries about obtaining a PDF or paperback copy of the paper: Martin Portus mportus@optusnet.com.au or phone 0401 360 806.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 16

Meyrick is incisive in documenting the ‘retreat’ of original Australian plays in the production schedules of Australian theatre companies.

I should begin, then, by inspecting my own schedule of theatre criticism.  My critical writing is in no way comprehensive, of course, but may reveal biases that would interest Meyrick, and perhaps the rest of us – including me.

Meyrick looks at five categories of plays: Australian New; Australian Recent; Australian Classic (productions of established playwright’s work); and Overseas Classics (essentially presentations or adaptations of British, European and American plays or novels); Overseas Recent.

Here’s my record since I began regularly reviewing in 1996.  I’ve included Overseas Popular (often musicals or light comedies), while local bands (such as Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, or Monica Trapaga) go into New Australian, and children’s shows may go into New Australian (The Jigsaw Company, for example) or Overseas Popular (like Dora the Explorer) as appropriate.  I also include ‘Recently New’ in New Australian, because Meyrick writes about first and second tier theatre companies in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, while most of our local Canberra groups presenting theatre would have to be classed third tier, picking up scripts from other Australian small companies as well as writing their own.  My Overseas Classics includes more serious recent work.

New Australian    Australian Classics    Overseas Classics    Overseas Popular
       199                            26                            158                             43
       47%                           6%                           37%                           10%

Meyrick’s numbers are put together in graph form on Page 27, with breakdowns for Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company, Belvoir Theatre, and Playbox/Malthouse, all from 1987 to 2013.

Over my period from 1996 the major difference in our numbers, though, is in the split between productions of new and established Australian work.  In the first and second tier companies Meyrick has recorded an average close to 20% of new work, and rather more than 20% of Australian classics, while my figures show 47% and 6% respectively.

This comes about from the fact that I am based in Canberra, with occasional excursions mainly to Sydney, and Canberra / Queanbeyan has a history of growing seedlings (like Elbow Theatre where STC director Iain Sinclair began, Canberra Youth Theatre where Tommy Murphy’s first play For God, Queen and Country was staged, Bohemians (or Boho), Everyman Theatre, Freshly Ground Theatre and many others over the years) often staging original works.

What Meyrick is concerned about is not just these numbers – showing how we have gone from an almost complete dominance of overseas theatre before the 1930s – but that in this last decade or two, a culture has developed in the main state theatre companies of making blockbuster adaptations of overseas classics with highly visible top quality actors, and emphasising directors who seem almost like the old-style actor-managers of the Nineteenth Century.  He fears that we are losing our grip on an independent Australian theatre culture which began with the Pioneer Players (Katharine Susannah Pritchard, Vance Palmer and Louis Esson) in a Melbourne season in 1923 (which was totally ignored by reviewers); began to blossom with Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll as the bookmark point in the 1950s; and came on to a fair flowering with the New Wave from the 1960s.

His paper says to me that even despite a colourful display through the second half of the last century, we are now in danger of reviving the cultural cringe of the past just when we are at the point where we have new writers bursting out all over – but not getting first productions in the major theatres, nor continuing productions which can establish a good writers’ body of work.

Meyrick specifically criticises the treatment of Hannie Rayson as an example.

The value of Meyrick’s paper, to my mind, shows in his analysis of why adapting classical dramas is attractive to directors and audiences (their dramatic structure is proven, requiring less work than developing new plays); in his factual information about our theatre history; and in his conclusion that, if we are to grow our culture up to full maturity – flowering and fruiting – we need a “national theatre along the lines of the National Theatre of Scotland, one that is non-building-based and focussed on the commissioning, development and production of new stage work through the existing theatre company network.”

Significantly for us, the Canberra Critics, he suggests “An NTA [National Theatre of Australia] could base itself in Canberra and be federally funded, thereby avoiding the perception of Sydney/Melbourne bias and the fractious politicking that comes with variable state support.  It would unite three specialisms represented by three kinds of organisation.  It would be partly a playwright development agency, like Playwriting Australia or Playworks.  It would be partly a producing entity, like the state theatres and second-tier companies.  And it would be partly a touring intelligence, like Performing Lines and Playing Australia.  Again it would not supplant these bodies but add capacity as a partner organisation drawing on their separate spheres of operation.”

Remember the good old days when the annual National Playwrights’ Conference took place at ANU?  (I do because I managed to get a script workshopped there – in 1981!)

It is not parochial on my part to support this idea – and I encourage you to read Meyrick’s paper in full to see why.  My records show that new writing is, and has long been, a key element in Canberra’s theatre culture, all the way from Ickle Pickle children’s theatre to The Jigsaw Company, from the work of Carol Woodrow to The Hive at The Street Theatre.  There have been several attempts to establish a permanent professional theatre company in Canberra – Woodrow’s Canberra Theatre Company was a high point – but as The Street shows us under Carolyn Stacey’s direction, we are very good at coordinating the development of new work.

We already have the basis for Meyrick’s concept of a National Theatre of Australia, especially as we have strong local government support in ArtsACT.

Let’s do it!


A useful more detailed summary of the paper is by Deborah Stone in ArtsHub at

http://www.artshub.com.au/news-article/features/all-arts/australian-product-missing-from-our-theatres-243655

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: 1984 adapted from the novel by George Orwell,

1984 adapted from the novel by George Orwell, by Nelle Lee and Nick Skubij.  shake & stir youth theatre company, directed by Michael Futcher at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre Wednesday 30 April, 8.00pm, Thursday 1 May, 10.30am & 8.00pm, Friday 2 May, 10.30am & 8.00pm, Saturday 3 May, 2.00pm & 8.00pm, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 2

Terrifying & depressing is how I found this production by shake & stir.

If you dress this man in a business suit:

O'Brien in 1984

it’s amazing how much he looks just like this man:

Donald Rumsfeld - one-time US Secretary for Defense

One image from the show that I can’t get out of my head is O’Brien / Donald Rumsfeld watching impassively as his underlings waterboard Winston Smith.  1948 to 1984 is nothing on 1984 to 2004 or 2014. 

Although Michael Futcher has kept to a 1948 style for the set and costumes, it seems to me that Orwell was not out of touch – just his timing needs adjusting.  I remember 1984 (the real one, not the novel) with some hope when our Prime Minister offered us the promise that ‘no child will be living in poverty by the year 2000’.  Some hope!

To the group of Year 12 Advanced English students who stayed for a Q&A, it was David Whitney who thought that what is even more frightening than Orwell’s prediction of a future of dictatorship, is to know that his prediction of future total tracking of information on all citizens and the use of manipulative psychological torture has become true of modern democracies.  Depressing indeed!

I checked out what Donald Rumsfeld is up to now.  Here it is at http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/04/15/donald-rumsfeld-to-irs-my-taxes-are-a-known-unknown/ .

To escape depression, after a walk with views along the beautiful Brindabella Mountain range, I realised that there is hope in the quality of the work by this youth theatre team.  The relationship between Nelle Lee as Julia and Bryan Probets as Winston formed the dramatic thread of the show, both actors capturing the beginnings of attraction under the duress of the industrial workplace, bombarded constantly with official announcements of glorious achievements, the need to love Big Brother, and the injunctions against sexual behaviour.

Lee played Julia’s positive leadership in the developing relationship – in the forest hideaway and the rented room in the antique shop – so tenderly and with such a feeling of excitement in finding real love that we, watching, were moved despite our doubts, just as Winston was.  It was the strength of the acting here that made their discovery, arrest and the three stages of Winston’s torture that we witness, to the point where he is forced to betray Julia, so awful.  When they at last meet again, in the factory canteen, and both know that each had betrayed the other, and in doing so had betrayed their love for each other, our sense of loss is palpable as we  realise that our own love is fragile; always at risk of manipulation.

Then David Whitney’s O’Brien becomes spotlighted by our horror at his capacity to so absolutely, coldly, calculatingly twist Winston’s reality.  Whitney spoke in the Q&A of Orwell’s interest in language, and once again I could not escape the image of Rumsfeld, who even now is twisting words about his tax as if he is the victim of other people’s incompetence.  Unbelievable!

So, for a youth theatre company, is this 1984 an important, worthwhile and theatrically valid project?  Absolutely!  No weasel words from me.

© Frank McKone, Canberra