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