2015: Festival of Museum Theatre: Come Alive 2015

Festival of Museum Theatre: Come Alive 2015.  Artistic Director – Peter Wilkins.  Participating schools – Orana Steiner School, Daramalan College, St Francis Xavier College, Calwell High School Dance, Canberra College, Namadgi School, Telopea School, Canberra College Dance, Marist College, and Bateman’s Bay High School.

James O Fairfax Theatre, National Gallery of Australia, October 26 – November 1 2015.

by Frank McKone
October 31

In conjunction with the International Museum Theatre Alliance (IMTAL), Come Alive! has been presented each year since 2010, mainly at the National Museum of Australia, on occasion at the interactive science museum Questacon, and this year jointly by the National Gallery of Australia and the National Portrait Gallery.

The essence of Wilkins’ approach is simple in concept, highly effective in results.  I saw only two of the ten shows today, Light by Daramalan College and Lina by Orana Steiner School.  Having reviewed Come Alive! previously in 2012 and 2013 I can confidently say that the promise of developing a tradition and improvement in the two aspects of the program – understanding of the process of presenting theatre and appreciation of culture – has been very well fulfilled. 

Light took the work of James Turrell, represented in the NGA by Skyspace and Perceptual Cell and by his recent James Turrell: A Retrospective extended exhibition.  Lina was inspired by four Australian paintings from the 1940s Heide modernist group – The Red Hat by Jock Frater and Lina Bryans’ Nina Christiansen, The babe is wise, and Yellow portrait.

The basic principle of Wilkins’ method is that the student group in each school, with no more than minimal assistance from a teacher, will choose their subject from the museum / gallery display, undertake detailed research and create a theatre performance of about 20 minutes to express their new understanding.

Light became a kind of ‘abstract’ theatre, in which figures in white tops moved slowly together and apart, front lit by moving spotlights while live video showed them via changing differently manipulated images on a rear screen, as individuals spoke sections of poems referring to light, with backing group vocal sounds sometimes in harmony and sometimes quite discordant in effect.  The sound became like light, played as if it were light of different intensities and colour.  The piece concluded with a twist on the Dylan Thomas injunction – going ‘into the dying light’ as the stage lights faded before a silent bow (while we in the audience clapped gently).

Lina showed us, partly in mime or briefly frozen tableaus, and using spoken material from critical writing, personal letters and interviews, twelve of the artists and others associated with the Heide group: Lina Bryans and her relationships with William ‘Jock’ Frater, Ian Fairweather, Alex Jelinek, Nina and Clem Christiansen, novelist and critic Jean Campbell, Joy Hester, Albert Tucker, John Brack, Winifred Frater and Alan Sumner.  Despite the fractious nature of these diverse relationships, out of which came such an immense change in Australian painting and sculpture, the students found a peaceful ending in the interview with Lina, in her old age, married to Alex and content to look back with a degree of equanimity.

Each show, though completely different in stylistic approach, showed the same commitment, enthusiasm for research, originality in devising how to present the material, and remarkable maturity in dealing with ideas like Turrell’s ‘wordless thought’ in his work which has ‘no object, no image and no focus’; or with the contrasting and often conflicting philosophies of art, and the often explosive feelings (or especially in Ian Fairweather’s case, the depths of depression) generated between the artists of the Heide group. 

On my visit I was fortunate to hear some of the delegates from the International Museum Theatre Alliance (Asia/Pacific) conference currently being held in Canberra, whose questions of the two casts in a Q&A session brought out highly articulate expressions of delight at what they had achieved on stage.

To quote from my first encounter with museum theatre in 2001: "Banging a visitor over the head with a message will only serve to concuss their mind, not expand it." - Catherine Hughes, Boston Museum of Science, [then] Executive Director of the International Museum Theatre Alliance (IMTAL).  This was on the occasion of only the second IMTAL conference.  If you would like to follow up information on museum theatre, you could well begin here:
 http://www.recollections.nma.gov.au/shared/libraries/attachments/imtal_2005_bibliography/files/11890/IMTAL2005_biblio.pdf

Further reading will take you to the psychology researcher from Harvard University, Howard Gardner (of Multiple Intelligences fame) who was probably the main stimulator of thinking about ‘museum education’ – that is taking students out of their isolated classrooms and stimulating their intelligences beyond the conventional numerical and verbal aspects, which effectively are the only sources of measurement in IQ tests. 

Peter Wilkins’ work in Come Alive! is a major contribution, serving not to ‘concuss their mind’, but ‘expand it’ for all the students who take part, especially because they become responsible, to themselves, for both observing and choosing from the cultural artefacts in the museums, and then for discovering and putting into practice the theatrical form which will convey their ‘excitement’, as one student said today, of finding out so much from ‘reading in the National Library’.  This is what we might call ‘wholistic’ education, the value of which cannot be over-estimated.

I now have a much better understanding of James Turrell, and learned a great deal more than I had known before about the Heide modern art movement.

And, finally, I must thank the teachers who will surely have worked overtime and inevitably had much more than ‘minimal’ input to their students’ success in this year’s Come Alive! : Jana Watson, Joe Woodward, Douglas Amarfio, Kym Degenhart, Ian Walker, Stephanie Ikin, Jessica Dixon, Sharon McCutcheon, Susan Johnson and Carla Weijer.  And the staff of NGA and NPG for their technical and administrative work – and their commitment to education.




© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: The Art of Teaching Nothing by Kirsty Budding

The Art of Teaching Nothing by Kirsty Budding.  Free Rain Theatre Company: directed and designed by Cate Clelland; lighting and sound by Joel Edmondson; costumes by Fiona Leach.  Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, October 22-25, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 25

This is a new locally written play about which I find myself in several minds.  It’s certainly about the business of being a teacher, set definitively in the government school system as opposed to any private school.  And clearly in the Canberra jurisdiction.

Its title has an element of foreboding which comes to fruition in the final scenes.

But it’s the author’s intention in writing the play that is not clear to me. 

Some parts are farcical – and there’s nothing wrong with farce which is funny for the sake of being funny.  That’s a well established theatre genre.

Some parts are comedy with ironic material as, for example, an incompetent Level 2 English Faculty head Clara (Elaine Noon) who has had a longstanding sexual relationship with the Principal Julian (Rob De Fries) finds herself promoted even further above her level of incompetency into a sinecure administrative position in Head Office.  There are several other similar situations as the play progresses.  The complete nonentity Deputy Principal George (Arran McKenna) is used as a comic foil in most situations.

Some scenes, though, are anything but comedy.  A particularly nasty one is where the woman Head of Student Services, Bronwyn (Emma Wood) – in charge of everything, especially staffing (Human Resources) – and the newly promoted woman Level 2 English Faculty head, Steph (Marti Ibrahim) attack the recently appointed young woman teacher, Lucy (Glynis Stokes) on personal grounds such as her youth and beauty.  It isn’t that this couldn’t happen when jealousy raises its ugly head, but the intensity and viciousness of the scene was quite out of line with both the comedy and sometimes farce of most other scenes.  I found that scene actually quite shocking, and wasn’t at all sure of how I was meant to take it.

Then again, there are quite sweet scenes. Lucy explains her background relationship with her now dead father.  The art teacher Paul (Brendan Kelly) has a similar kind of story to tell about his mother, and about his father – the Principal who has employed his son despite his having falsified  teaching qualifications.  At these points the theatrical form is anything but comedy, certainly not farce: here it strikes home as straightforward realism.  The character of the PE teacher Ray (John Kelly) seems to exist in this realist frame throughout the play, while it’s hard to place the elderly maths teacher Mary (Liz Bradley) who dies on the job.  Realistic, comic commentary, or farce?  I’m not sure.

However, finally we find that we have been taken in because these apparently genuine characters, except perhaps Ray and the now dead Mary, turn out to be frauds like all the rest.  The key point in the story is about who put the blog online which exposes the corruption of the Principal and indeed the whole process of employment and promotion.  The play becomes a whodunnit, and the answer is that the new young genuine idealistic teacher Lucy uses a bright student, Beth (Sophie Hopkins) to do the dirty work.  And even worse, Beth and Lucy turn out to be sisters.

At this point I either have to see the play as a clever piece of extreme absurdism, or perhaps it is a deeply cynical piece saying that teaching is essentially nothing more than an entirely selfish power play.  The art, indeed, of teaching absolutely nothing.  And then its deliberate setting in the government school system makes me wonder about the author’s politics, particularly in our local jurisdiction.  Am I to lightly pass off the evening’s entertainment as a bit of enjoyable fun, or should I take up the issues seriously?

One way of thinking about this is to do a thought experiment.  Imagine if this play were designed, directed and performed by, say Belvoir or Sydney Theatre Company?  Imagine then that it might be done with the absurdism of, say, Eugene Ionesco in mind.  Rhinoceros comes to mind.  Deputy Principal George in this play has a flying shark to entertain the students.  Maybe, parallel to Rhinoceros, people turn into sharks, going green and floating about – except perhaps for the Artist, Paul, who refuses.  He has done the right thing by Lucy after all, just as Berenger does his best to save Daisy.  Paul almost gives in and accepts the corruption, but perhaps like Berenger his last line should be “I’m not capitulating!”

I can see such a possibility, but it would mean much more work on the script and its style of presentation for The Art of Teaching Nothing to educate us about conformity and corruption as Ionesco achieved.  That’s a worthy aim for Kirsty Budding.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Company by Stephen Sondheim

Company Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.  Everyman Theatre, Canberra.  Director – Jordan Best; Musical Director – Tim Hansen; Choreographer – James Batchelor; Set Designer –Michael Sparks; Lighting Designer – Kelly McGannon; Sound – Steve Allsop; Technical Manager – Hamish McConchie (Eclipse Lighting and Sound).  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre October 16-24, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 16

Highly skilled, entertaining, and quite original in style, this production of a 1970 musical “comedy” succeeds despite the unlikely nature of Sondheim’s writing. 

The casting has brought together singers who can act and actors who can sing from among the best musical theatre performers in Canberra-Queanbeyan.  They, the chorus (named The Vocal Minority), and the nine-piece orchestra handle the quirky music beautifully –if that’s the right language to describe Sondheim.

The mood was upbeat throughout on opening night with a very responsive audience, even if somewhat biassed towards friends and family on stage.  For me this is an important value of our local theatre: our performers include many with professional training and experience, while we still have the ‘feel’ of a country town without the pretensions of the big-city-slickers.

The success of the show depends on Jordan Best’s may-I-say-it? Australian approach.  It’s all very well for the Americans to take Sondheim’s representations of heterosexual marriage seriously and therefore Bobby becomes a sentimental figure “poor baby”.  Best has said, let’s not bullshit – this is comedy, so it’s got to be funny.  She has kept the show absolutely New York America, but exaggerated the way all of these characters behave, including Bobby, to get as near as Sondheim’s lyrics and dialogue allow to satire.

It can’t work all the time, considering the quote from Dr Duncan Driver’s very informative article on the history of the show, where Sondheim said “Broadway theater has been for many years supported by upper-middle-class people with upper-middle-class problems.  These people really want to escape that world when they go to the theatre, and then here we are with Company talking about how we’re going to bring it right back in their faces.”

What pretentious bullshit!  Perhaps the nearest to ‘in their faces’ – which means satire for Jordan Best – is the Ladies for Lunch scene, where Joanne does her serious best to race off Bobby: but he won’t smoke her cigarette!  Well done Karen Vickery in this role.  And well done Jarrad West, whose Bobby was a very knowing 35-year-old, rather than some kind of innocent booby as he appears in some other productions, available on YouTube.

If you dislike my argument, consider that the well-known popular play in Australia in 1971 was David Williamson’s Don’s Party.  If you want to think of Company as the equivalent of a musical Don’s Party, have a good look at the depth of character in the marriage relationships in Williamson’s writing.  Sondheim’s characters are shallow cardboard cutouts in comparison.

Four images stand out for me from Best’s Company: Ladies for Lunch for satire; the karate scene for great slapstick comedy by Jordan Best herself as Sarah; the I’m (Not) Getting Married Today scene for frantic comedy by Phillipa Murphy as Susan; and the story of the butterfly for beautiful timing by Amy Dunham as April.

So whatever Stephen Sondheim thought he was doing, our Everyman Theatre production has picked up the good bits, made fun at every opportunity and avoided the American tendency for sentimentality.  It’s still an odd ending, as Bobby (on the third, or is it fourth, version of his 35th birthday party) simply stays away until the company have decided not to wait, leaving him to his quiet life in his favourite apartment.  I’m not sure what Sondheim meant this to mean, but in this lively show of terrific singing and playing, it doesn’t matter.

It’s just a good way to finish, with the mysterious “But Alone, Is Alone.  Not Alive”.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Photos by Daniel Boud

Hamlet by William Shakespeare.  Bell Shakespeare directed by Damien Ryan, at Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse October 13-24, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 14

Designed by Alicia Clements; Design Assistant – Elizabeth Gadsby; Lighting – Matt Cox; Composer and Sound – Steve Francis; Fight and Movement and Assistant Director – Nigel Poulton.

Cast:
Hamlet – Scott Sheridan (understudy for Josh McConville)    Ophelia – Matilda Ridgway
Claudius/Ghost – Sean O’Shea                Gertrude – Doris Younane
Horatio – Ivan Donato            Laertes/Franciso/Guilderstern – Michael Wahr
Polonius/Gravedigger/Norwegian Captain – Philip Dodd
Reynaldo/Rosencrantz/Osric/Gravedigger – Robin Goldsworthy
Marcellus/Voltemand/Player Queen – Julia Ohannessian
Bernardo/Cornelia/Player King/Fortinbras – Catherine Terracini

There are many ways to go with Hamlet – brooding, pusillanimous, unable to take action, unsympatico are common approaches.  But not this Hamlet by Scott Sheridan, who has stood in magnificently for the injured Josh McConville.

This Hamlet is a study of how the personal is political, and how the political destroys the personal.  Literally, as all the key players are dead by the end of the play.  In the play’s the thing speech at the end of the first half, we are suitably warned that Hamlet may catch the conscience of all of us.  And indeed, as Horatio says, so shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, of accidental judgements, casual slaughters, of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, and, in this upshot, purposes mistook fall’n on the inventors’ heads.

In any audience, in Shakespeare’s dreadful time of autocratic rule as much as in today’s rule by even the best examples of representative democracy, who can say they are completely innocent of every one of these kinds of acts?  Accidental judgements with unintended consequences are, I suppose, probably unavoidable, even if we have not personally been caught up in worse policy decisions.  A Canberra audience with a good smattering of government officials might well want to exclaim, as King Claudius does, Give me some light: away! when the players hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature.

But this Hamlet is a study in action.  Sheridan captures the energy of the intellectual Hamlet.  He is not constrained by weakness but by the strength of his questioning, of his demand to know and understand the truth.  As anyone would do, he seeks out information, he tries to set up situations to test what he thinks may be true, and he makes, among his worst accidental judgements, the decision to save Ophelia even from himself – with the most horrific of unintended consequences.

The result of Damien Ryan’s directorial approach is a production of Hamlet in which there is such high definition and clarity of meaning that I find myself struggling to remember any previous performance of this play.  Every character, even the infamous Rosencrantz and Guilderstern, is sharply drawn by their clear intentions, reactions and responses.  Every actor deserved the three curtain calls, while the extra applause for Scott Sheridan was not just for his willingness to stand in for such a part at such short notice, but for the consistency which he gave to such an inconsistent character.

We felt for Matilda Ridgway’s Ophelia, treated so abominably by her father and so apparently incomprehensibly by Hamlet.  Though we understood Philip Dodd’s Polonius’ position as intelligence gatherer for his political master, it was hard to accept how he played that role against his own bright and upbeat daughter, against his very proper son Laertes (played precisely by Michael Wahr) at university in Paris, and of course against the very prince who by all rights should have been King Hamlet of Denmark, with Queen Ophelia by his side.

So there it is: how politics and subterfuge destroys the personal.  And proof that the play is the thing that is the mirror up to nature.  Shakespeare’s subtlety and complexity is matched by the quality of the acting, in a set design, lighting design and sound design which works perfectly.  Voice, spoken and in song, is especially intriguing for its modern Australian natural cadences – a touch which opens up early 17th Century Shakespeare to our culture in the 21st.

Try not to miss Bell Shakespeare’s Hamlet while it is here in Canberra, but otherwise make sure you see it in Sydney, October 27 to December 6 at the Opera House Playhouse.

Matilda Ridgway as Ophelia - bright and upbeat

Robin Goldsworthy as Reynaldo and Philip Dodd as Polonius
- intelligence gathering

Matilda Ridgway (Ophelia) sees
Doris Younane (Gertrude) and Sean O'Shea (King Claudius)

Josh McConville as Hamlet, Sean O'Shea as King Claudius
And am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage?

Matilda Ridgway (Ophelia) and Josh McConville (Hamlet)
You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate
our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved you not.

Josh McConville as Hamlet
Now, mother, what's the matter?

Catherine Terracini as Bernardo, Matilda Ridgway as Ophelia
Ivan Donato as Horatio, Michael Wahr as Laertes, Doris Younane as Gertrude
There's rosemary, that's for remembrance

Robin Goldsworthy as Gravedigger, Ivan Donato as Horatio,
Philip Dodd as Gravedigger, Josh McConville as Hamlet
This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Soul of Fire by Susanne F Wolf.

Maxi Blaha as Bertha von Suttner
Photo by Peter Rigaud

Soul of Fire by Susanne F Wolf.  Presented by The Street in association with the Austrian Embassy, Canberra, at The Street Two, 8pm October 2-4, 2015, plus German language performance 4pm October 4.

Performed by Maxi Blaha as Bertha von Suttner with live guitarist, Georg Buxhofer. 
Director - Alexander Hauer; designer - Hannes Kaufmann; production, idea - Maxi Blaha; costumes - Moana Stemberger.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 2

In 1889, Bertha von Suttner had published her anti-war novel Lay Down Your Arms. After that, she was drawn into the international peace movement. She undoubtedly exercised considerable influence on Alfred Nobel, whom she had known since 1876, when he later decided to include the Peace Prize as one of the five prizes mentioned in his will. In 1905, she was awarded the [fifth] Peace Prize, the first woman to receive such a distinction. Her supporters strongly felt that the prize had come too late, since she had had such an influence on Nobel.

"The Nobel Peace Prize 1901-2000". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 2 Oct 2015. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/themes/peace/lundestad-review/index.html

For a more detailed biography see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_von_Suttner

Bertha von Suttner 1873, aged 30

 Susanne Wolf’s 55 minute monologue is written in the first-person as Bertha, born in 1843, covering from her childhood as Countess Kinsky of Austrian parents in Prague to her death in 1914, only two months before the World War began which she had so desperately tried to prevent.

The writing is daunting for an actor, not just in presenting a complex life story as a consistent character developing from a child to a feisty septuagenarian, but finding a suitable style and manner in performance.  Maxi Blaha succeeds in revealing to us both the public and private sides of a woman of great significance in the history of the peace movement, without pretension yet with a sense of great respect.

Incorporated into the performance is beautiful delicate guitar music which Georg Buxhofner plays as if it were improvised in unison with the mood of the story’s episodes and Bertha’s ever-changing feelings.  Silences, on the part of the guitar and the actor, often make us listen more deeply.  The performers’ respect for their subject is passed over to us, watching from the future.

The setting is simple.  Dark curtaining, information panels in German and English, a plush chair in the centre which might have come from an upper-class residence.  A museum exhibit, which is inhabited by the guitarist, with a small-scale amplifier, seated partly facing away from the audience, playing softly, slow notes, perhaps wistful.  The living exhibit enters from the shadow, peruses some printed sheets which she scatters around her as she sits.  Her mother calls, the child Bertha responds, and bit by bit we see and hear figures from her life speaking and see her responding, as well as see her taking the initiative, speaking privately and publicly.

Bertha von Suttner 1896

There are some significant episodes – when she is 30 and falls truly in love with Arthur von Suttner, when she speaks and writes to Alfred Nobel, when she is published in the Neue Freie Presse, when she discovers her husband’s dalliance with his young niece, when her husband dies, when she is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, when she reaches her end.  She hands out her major speech, and we read:

Hence it is necessary that wherever proponents of peace exist, they confess themselves publically as such and work for the cause to the best of their ability.  My challenge goes out to all those who wish to join us: send in your name and address.

If ever there was a theatre presentation relevant in our times, that speech says it all.  Though perhaps the strict social hierarchy of European nations which she had to face may have levelled somewhat, many of the conflicts in countries she mentions, from Russia to the Balkans and across Europe, worsened in the century following her death, and now are in contention again through North Africa and the Middle East.  Just today there are reports of the rise of the “Freedom” party on the far right of politics in Bertha’s home country – Austria – as the masses try to escape from the South to the North, from the East to the West.  The Austro-Hungarian  and the Ottoman Empires might as well still be here.

But at least Bertha’s work, along with that of other Nobel Peace Prize winners and of untold unsung activists, has maintained the Peace Movement, and led to the tentative beginnings of world-wide political negotiations instead of an automatic recourse to war, in the United Nations Organisation after the worst paroxysm in World War II.  We may have a long way yet to go, but without Bertha von Suttner’s words of 1891:

Would it not be simpler to lay down the fuses voluntarily, in other words to disarm?  To apply international law – merge the divided groups in a single group and found a union of the civilised nations of Europe!  Tiny is the minority that still wishes for war.  Immeasurably vast are the masses who yearn for peace – not a truce maintained out of fear but a secure and guaranteed peace.

we would not have come as far as we have.

Soul of Fire  is a message of hope, common sense and reason, presented in a performance of dignity and respect.

Bertha von Suttner 1906
Nobel Peace Prize 1905

© Frank McKone, Canberra