2016: All My Love by Anne Brooksbank

All My Love by Anne Brooksbank.  Produced by Christine Harris and HIT Productions; directed by Denny Lawrence; Set Design and Lighting Design by Jacob Battista; Costume Design by Sophie Woodward; Sound Design by Chris Hubbard; Composer – Jack Ellis.

Henry Lawson – Dion Mills
Mary Gilmore – Kim Denman

At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, February 24-27, 2016.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 26

When I landed in Australia in 1955, there were no Aussie Aussies, no “mates” of the modern spurious kind, no ockers, and they weren’t laid back, but were generally good blokes who were still occasionally known as cobbers.  Of course, I was a socialist, so in no time at all I discovered Henry Lawson.  But it wasn’t just the politics I found.  There, in ‘Reedy River’, this 14-year-old heard the song of the bush and life worth living:

Ten miles down Reedy River
    One Sunday afternoon,
I rode with Mary Campbell
     To that broad, bright lagoon;
We left our horses grazing
     Till shadows climbed the peak,
And strolled beneath the sheoaks
      On the banks of Rocky Creek.

I was done for: been a bushwalker ever since and could never get the image of Mary Campbell out of my mind.  But who was the real Mary Campbell?  I may have just found out.

Mary Jean Cameron was born in 1865 and probably met Henry Lawson when he was 23 and she 25.  Her father worked on bush properties around Wagga, Coolamon, Junee and West Wyalong.  She became an assistant teacher at Silverton, near Broken Hill, for the two years before she moved to Sydney to live with her mother – and met Harry Lawson, as she called him.

My fate took me to teach in Broken Hill for my first three years, often driving through those places on my way to and from Sydney.  There has to be a spiritual connection, surely?

Anne Brooksbank published her novel  All My Love, in 1991, about the relationship between  Dame Mary Gilmore, née Cameron, (1865-1962) and Henry Lawson (1867-1922).  In 1983 the ANU’s Australian Dictionary of Biography stated:

“Her relationship with Henry Lawson probably began in 1890: in 1923 she recalled that ‘It was a strange meeting that between young Lawson and me.  I had come down permanently to the city from Silverton’.  Her account of an unofficial engagement and Lawson’s wish to marry her at the time of his brief trip to Western Australia (May-September 1890) could be accurate regarding dates, but there is no corroborative evidence.  There was clearly, however, a close relationship betwen them in 1890-95, but it was broken by his frequent absences from Sydney.  Mary’s later comments on his career were always somewhat proprietorial but the extent of her influence on his literary talents and her contribution to his literary education remain unsubstantiated.”

Though he was two years younger, by 1890 Henry was already well known for published poems such as ‘Faces in the Street’, ‘Andy’s Gone with Cattle’ and ‘The Watch on the Kerb’, and it’s interesting to note that his Dictionary of Biography entry covering the 1890-95 period doesn’t mention Mary Gilmore – but does record the publication of ‘The Drover’s Wife’ in 1892 and the major short story collection While the Billy Boils in 1896, saying “It remains one of the great classics of Australian literature”.

In the writing of the playscript, as described in the synopsis for the production at Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, the big question – how much is fiction, and how much fact? – is put to rest:

"At the urging of Henry Lawson’s mother Louisa (a famed early feminist), Henry becomes a guide to the young Mary Gilmore, who arrives in Sydney from the country. What follows is a story of a friendship destined for true love and preparation for a likely marriage. Sadly the partnership is thwarted by a deception.

Henry: And if it wasn’t for the letters...
Mary: Ah yes, the letters.
Henry: You’d have waited for me till I came back?
Mary: I wrote to you that I would.
Henry: And I replied that my lover’s heart leapt so I thought it’d never settle back.
Mary: Do you think your mother kept that letter or threw it away?
Henry: Do you wish you’d seen it?

The theft of their love letters by Henry’s mother is not revealed for years to come, by which time their lives have moved in separate directions. But the love remained and is the essence of their story. Their letters to each other form the heart of the play. These letters are on record and have not been altered (other than shortened) although much of the dialogue contained in the script between the characters is surmise."

This is the central shock in the play, as we realise – at the same moment that Henry and Mary realise  – that while Henry was in WA and Mary had taken a room in his mother’s house – and was doing much of the housekeeping work for the busy suffragette – Louisa must have been reading Mary’s letters before they should have been posted for Henry to pick up when he could get into Albany.  Then when letters from Henry arrived, Louisa kept those addressed to her and, presumably, destroyed those addressed to Mary – after reading them, of course.  The evidence was scant, but Henry’s younger sister, Gert, had seen a letter addressed to Mary, but it could not be found when they had searched the house.

The beauty of the play as directed, designed and acted is that it exemplifies the best in theatre – the simple approach.  There are three modes of presentation: each character speaking aloud their letters to the other; dialogue between them when they could be together (in Sydney, London and Bombay); and when Mary speaks directly to the audience as narrator looking back after Henry has died.  The setting has just a small desk and chair stage right, a settee and small table stage left, and upstage centre a rostrum backed by a screen on which significant black-and-white photos are projected to illustrate a location or event.  The stage is kept dim, with specific soft spotlights as needed.  So simple, but so effective – including off-stage gentle, but again significant, piano music.

After recently seeing such ‘modern’ style productions as STC’s The Golden Age and  Belvoir’s The Blind Giant is Dancing, however  ‘big’ and ‘theatrical’, it was so good to come down to earth in The Q to a deeply felt drama of the lives of these two people, done without fanfare.  The acting by Kim Denman and Dion Mills is superb.

Congratulations to the team at The Q and Christine Harris for bringing this play on tour.  We see our real history, not of Aussie Aussies, not ockers, not laid-backs, but of basically good people, cobbers in their own ways, whose lives came together and diverged.  As Anne Brooksbank’s husband Bob Ellis might say, “And so it goes.”

To conclude, and noting that it was probably unlikely that the Mary Campbell of ‘Reedy River’ was a reference to Mary Cameron, since I think the poem was written before Henry met the real Mary, I would like to suggest that Dame Mary Gilmore, awarded this accolade by King George VI in 1937, was perhaps a more understanding feminist than poor Henry Lawson’s ideologically driven but seemingly terribly jealous mother.  Here is Mary’s poem, which may or may not have been in response to the image of Mary Campbell of ‘Reedy River’.


Eve- Song
by Dame Mary Gilmore

I span and Eve span
A thread to bind the heart of man;
But the heart of man was a wandering thing
That came and went with little to bring:
Nothing he minded what we made,
As here he loitered, and there he stayed.

I span and Eve span
A thread to bind the heart of man;
But the more we span the more we found
It wasn't his heart but ours we bound.
For children gathered about our knees:
The thread was a chain that stole our ease.
And one of us learned in our children's eyes
That more than man was love and prize.
But deep in the heart of one of us lay
A root of loss and hidden dismay.

He said he was strong. He had no strength
But that which comes of breadth and length.
He said he was fond. But his fondness proved
The flame of an hour when he was moved.
He said he was true. His truth was but
A door that winds could open and shut.

And yet, and yet, as he came back,
Wandering in from the outward track,
We held our arms, and gave him our breast,
As a pillowing place for his head to rest.

I span and Eve span,
A thread to bind the heart of man!



©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: The Blind Giant is Dancing by Stephen Sewell

Dan Spielman as Allen Fitzgerald
Photo: Brett Boardman

The Blind Giant is Dancing by Stephen Sewell.  Belvoir directed by Eamon Flack, Belvoir St Theatre Upstairs, February 13 – March 20, 2016.

Set and Costume Designer – Dale Ferguson; Lighting Designer – Verity Hampson; Composer and Sound Designer – Steve Toulmin; Fight Choreographer – Scott Witt.

Cast
Michael Denkha – Mr Carew; Ivan Donato – Ramon Gris; Andrew Henry – Bruce Fitzgerald; Emma Jackson – Janice / Jane / Robin; Russell Kiefel – Doug Fitzgerald / Sir Leslie Harris; Genevieve Lemon – Eileen Fitzgerald; Geoff Morrell – Michael Wells; Zahra Newman – Rose Draper; Dan Spielman – Allen Fitzgerald; Yael Stone – Louise Kraus; Ben Wood – Bob Lang

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 20


I can’t complain any more about mainstream theatres failing to revive significant Australian plays.  This year we have already seen STC’s The Golden Age by Louis Nowra, and now The Blind Giant is Dancing, Stephen Sewell’s 1983 cynical play about political corruption from an ideological Marxist point of view.

When I saw the original version in Sydney, soon after its first production by the State Theatre of South Australia in Adelaide, I found it tedious in the extreme, so un-invigorating that I wanted to leave at the second interval of a three-hour polemic.

This time around I have a different response.  But first, a little background will help our understanding.

The “Blind Giant” is Capitalism, “Dancing” to a new tune in 1983, as the incoming Australian Labor Party government began the process of “freeing the market” (that is, the money market) from the old government controls, such as determining the exchange rate of the Australian dollar and setting import limits to “protect” Australian manufacturing and primary industries.

Behind Sewell’s Giant is the theory of the late 18th Century / early 19th Century German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, commonly known as the Hegelian Dialectic (look up www.marxist.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/easy.htm for Hegel for Beginners).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took up the idea of historical change via “thesis”, “antithesis” and “synthesis” to mean that each politico-economic system (currently Capitalism) inevitably contains within it “the seeds of its own destruction”.  In the play, the Chilean democrat, Ramon Gris, had fought against the dictator Pinochet, and – in 1983 – thinks “The [Australian] people are feeling their power for the first time” and expects street protests and a revolution.  The audience in 2016 laughed.

Allen Fitzgerald, lapsed Catholic, now atheist Marxist, replies: “The people are corrupt...they’ve lived too long on the crumbs of crime and genocide; they’ve learnt too well to obey their masters and deliver up their children!  They have no shame, no pride, no vision.  They’re dead!” 

Ramon and others in the play see him as going mad, but the “seed” of Capitalism’s destruction is the “corruption” of the people as they come to accept the corrupt nature of politics as inevitable.  I’m not sure how the audience in 2016 took this, considering the concern often expressed nowadays that people no longer trust any politicians.  They weren’t laughing, though, when Fitzgerald spoke.  Nor had they earlier in the play, when Fitzgerald said “Australia will never be the same again.”

Though I thought in the 1980s that The Blind Giant was a political diatribe, cynical because Fitzgerald, just as the pigs in Animal Farm become the same as the humans, turns himself into the same kind of politician as the corrupt Michael Wells he defeats; that its Marxism was pretentious; and that Sewell’s attempts to present a human face through Allen Fitzgerald’s wife and family only produced cardboard cutouts – now Australia is not the same as it was and I must ask, has the play survived?

Well, I think it has for two reasons.

In the 2016 Edition, the script has fortunately not been “updated”.  1983 is still the setting (Allen’s younger brother Bruce Fitzgerald is just about to begin to learn how to use a computer, and the phones are all on fixed landlines with no “smarts”), so now the play is all the better for our being able to look back in history to the post-Vietnam war, Thatcherite and Reagonomics period when Marxism seemed a justifiable fashion – especially among theatrical intellectuals.  I recall British tertiary drama teachers at conferences justifying their right to expound, if not impose, their political views in training high school teachers as necessary for the revolution.

And I think the modern approach to directing and design, used so effectively by Eamon Flack, Dale Ferguson, Verity Hampson and Steve Toulmin, has made the action fast moving in three dimensions around a centrally placed see-through electronic screen, cleverly lit from behind and in front, or itself showing text in brilliant silver, punctutated with explosive sound and blackouts, and incorporating a highly dramatic winched rig to display the industrial accidents faced by the steel-workers. 

Although the play is still about ideas rather than building true in-depth emotion, (despite the terrific work particularly by Yael Stone as Louise Kraus, Allen Fitzgerald’s determinedly independent wife and by Russell Kiefel as Allen's father, Doug), the directing in this design makes the story and the ideas clear to me now – and interesting to follow even for 2 hours 45 minutes (including 2 intervals), rather than becoming a boring 2-dimensional show as I remember the production of 30 years ago.

It’s a bit ironic to realise that the original production was designed by the recent Platform Paper author, Stephen Curtis (The Designer: Decorator or Dramaturg? reviewed on this blog February 10, 2016 ).  Maybe it’s just me that’s changed – for the better, I hope.



All photos by Brett Boardman

The set in action

Dan Spielman as Allen Fitzgerald (behind)
Michael Denkha as Mr Carew, Geoff Morrell as Michael Wells

Dan Spielman as Allen Fitzgerald, Yael Stone as Louise Kraus

Dan Spielman as Allen Fitzgerald, Geoff Morrell as Michael Wells

Genevieve Lemon as Eileen Fitzgerald, Yael Stone as Louise Kraus

Andrew Henry as Bruce Fitzgerald

Genevieve Lemon as Eileen and Russell Kiefel as Doug Fitzgerald

Dan Spielman and Yael Stone
as Allen and Louise

Dan Spielman and Zahra Newman
as Allen Fitzgerald and Rose Draper

Ivan Donato as Ramon Gris
Dan Spielman as Allen Fitzgerald

Yael Stone and Dan Spielman
as Louise and Allen

Russell Kiefel and Dan Spielman
as Doug Fitzgerald and his son Allen

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Uni Pub Comedy featuring Jeff Green. Comedy ACT

Uni Pub Comedy featuring Jeff Green.  Comedy ACT produced by David Graham, Punch Line punchline@comedyact.com.au, at Uni Pub, cnr London Circuit and University Avenue, Canberra, February 19, 2016.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Jeff Geen appeared as the third ‘headline’ act, following Tony Martin and Tom Gleeson (January 15 and January 22), in a Summer Season, to be followed by Andrew Barnett (Civic Pub, March 2), Qintessential: Giggles in the Garden (Sculpture Garden Restaurant, National Gallery of Australia, March 3), Hannah Gadsby (Questacon, March 4 and 5), and Open Mic @ The Front (The Front Gallery and Cafe, March 10), all leading to the Canberra Comedy Festival, Tuesday to Sunday, March 15-20.

Whoever said bureaucratic Canberra, Australia’s Capital City, doesn’t have a heart?  At least it’s got a bellyful of laughs!

Though Jeff Green was billed as the headline last night, the program began with Greg Kimball as an MC who – before, between and after five other performers – proved himself to be as good a raconteur as you could expect from being born and bred in Charnwood.  His stories of family-work life balance, now that he’s breeding the next generation, worked a treat.

In the first half we heard Danny Bensley, Tony Bradford and Franz Kilgore Trout (Riley Bell) to prepare us for the headline event.  As it turned out, though, Jeff Green was seriously challenged as leader of the pack by Canberra’s own (well, he went to ANU for three years) Wil Anderson, who ducked around for a beer after his own show at the Courtyard Studio.

Such is life, but I ended more gripped by Riley Bell’s Franz Kilgore Trout as a truly post-modern artist with political overtones (especially regarding Malcolm Turningbull) and by the differential biceps of Wil Anderson’s sojourn at the gym, than by any of the other three performers.

Although everyone on stage was seriously funny, and the audience was ready to see all the innuendos (sometimes even before the speaker), and so the evening as a whole was entirely enjoyable, I found myself thinking back to my childhood of British BBC comedy, which began with Arthur Askey (look up British Pathe arthur-askey-3 for the Bee Story).

Though many of his jokes were apocryphal, there was a bright energy about him, on film and radio, which was irresistible. Last night it was Bell and Andersen who had that level of energy, and took us each into their particular world of absurdity.  Though it was true that Jeff Green was more accomplished than Bensley and Bradford, there was a degree of predictability, including old-fashioned jokes about the relationship between the sexes, which might easily have pre-dated Arthur Askey.

The interesting thing about the evening, for which I guess David Graham was responsible, was that each half had a dramatic structure.  For me this was a reminder of the next phase of my childhood comedy experience – the Goon Show, in which characters tell us a story, with its up and downs and climactic point – like any good drama.  By selecting the performers for last night’s show in the order of good, better best for each half, the drama of the night was shaped, and the laughter took on the shape to match.  It’s hard to know whether Wil Anderson’s appearance was entirely fortuitous, but he certainly added a great climax to Jeff Green’s ups and downs – including falling off the stage and recovering brilliantly.

If you were there last night, I have no doubt you’ll be itching to get to next month’s Comedy Festival.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: 4000 Miles by Amy Herzog

4000 Miles by Amy Herzog.  Presented by Critical Stages, Catnip Productions and Mophead Productions, produced by Cat Dibley, at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Ventre, February 11-13, 2016.

Director – Anthony Skuse; Set and Costume Designer – Hugh O’Connor; Associate Lighting Designer – Alexander Berlage; Associate Sound Designer – Alistair Wallace.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 11
 Cast
Diana McLean – Vera Joseph
Stephen Multari – Leo-Joseph-Connell
Aileen Huynh – Amanda and Lily (?)
Eloise Snape – Bec (?)

Americans describe this Pulitzer Prize nominated play as a heart-warming comedy-drama.  It’s a bit ironic that for me, not yet quite as old as 91-year-old Vera but with some of the same memory recall problems, this presentation became a bit of a mystery.

But first, the important thing to say is that the performances, the set design and costuming, the choice of recordings between scenes, and the lighting were all very effectively done.  First night in a new venue on tour can have its problems, but not in The Q’s theatre (which, after the recent showing of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, always feels “just right”).

Diana McLean presents Vera Joseph, Leo’s grandmother with the right tendency to talk too much, after ten years living alone in her New York apartment since her husband, Joe, died.  21-year-old Leo, who has unexpectedly arrived at 3am, with his bike (and in the proper lycra riding costume) has dipped his rear wheel in the Pacific in Seattle, but has stopped in briefly (and unsatisfactorily) at his girlfriend Bec’s apartment, and not yet dipped his front wheel into the Atlantic to complete the ritual.

Stephen Multari’s lean, muscular build makes him the perfect bike rider, but Leo clearly has problems relating emotionally.  Gradually Vera’s role as grandmother – as Leo breaks up with Bec, tries out with drunken pick-up Amanda and finally skypes his adopted sister Lily to apologise for his past behaviour – helps him to pull the strands of his life together into the beginnings of a sense of direction.  He goes for an interview as a mountain guide, and at the end of the play is about to leave for work in Colorado.

The set design, with Vera’s old-fashioned but comfortable furniture and decorations centre-stage, is simple.  But, as if it were perhaps a serviced apartment, appropriate for a 91-year-old, the two young women fetch and carry props as needed to and from Vera and Leo, except for the scenes in which they appear as Bec, Amanda or Lily.  The effect is that the whole cast is kept together on stage, rather than splitting into two central actors and two minor players.  The feeling, as a result, is much warmer and integrated, linked together as well by well-chosen popular music and songs as illustrations of the mood on stage as the short scenes change over the three or four week period covered by the play.

Anthony Skuse’s Director’s Note would like to make this play rather more significant than it deserves, by writing: “As in the plays of Arthur Miller and Tony Kushner [Angels in America], Herzog’s family drama can be understood within a wider historical context.” 

The Miller play (which I once directed) that might seem close to 4000 Miles in form is All My Sons, but Miller focussed the quite static action in Joe Keller’s backyard to make the family and neighbourly interactions all lead to the revelation of the bigger issue of corruption in a world of capitalist profit-taking (which resulted in Joe Keller causing the death of his own son – representing all our sons killed in war).

In Herzog’s play, the issue of left and right politics is revealed only through Vera’s peripheral talk about the the family’s Marxist past, Leo’s discovering her husband’s published book on the subject and, from an American perspective, the underlying implication that it was not surprising that a Jewish family would have been Marxist.  The young women in these later times assume that means they were Communist.

The big difference between Miller and Herzog is that in his play the big issue drives the family tragedy; in hers the tragedy for Leo is the accidental death of his riding mate, Micah, riding ahead of Leo, when a passing truck trailer breaks away and rolls on top of him.  There is drama in Leo’s telling of the story of this event to his grandmother – and Multari does the speech proud as an actor – but in the end the play remains more warm-hearted comedy and much less drama (certainly not tragedy) than anything written by Miller.

What is especially pleasing about the presentation of 4000 Miles (presumably the ocean to ocean distance from Seattle to New York) is the cooperative venture between the now well-established and reputable touring company, Critical Stages, and the newly developed initiatives by quite recently graduated actors – Mutari and Snape’s Mophead Productions – and the move from acting into producing by Cat Dibley in Catnip Productions.  Aileen Huynh graduated from WAAPA in 2010, Hugh O’Connor from NIDA in 2013 and Alistair Wallace from The Actors Centre in 2010.  This is a good sign for the future of Australian Theatre – something to do with innovation and being agile.

However, despite the quality of the production, at this point my up-front question marks raise their heads and shake a little.  With my septuagenarian memory in tow, I looked at the program for the names of the characters and cast.  The cast are listed – but not the characters, nor who played them.  I apologise if I have not guessed correctly.

I think for this play, too, because the complexities of Leo Joseph-Connell’s family connections only become apparent in bits and pieces of talk, mainly by Vera, I was not sure of remembering how the bits fitted together, nor the names of characters – like Leo’s mother Jane and his riding-mate Micah, nor of Micah’s girlfriend mentioned by Bec – who didn’t appear on stage.

Fortunately I found a very useful link to the American Conservatory Theater:
http://www.act-sf.org/content/dam/act/education_department/words_on_plays/4000%20Miles%20Words%20on%20Plays%20%282013%29.pdf

The American Conservatory Theatre document also includes a handy synopsis (though I still don’t know Micah’s girlfriend’s name – was it Ali?)

But not to worry – the play is worth watching and the performance very good.


©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: THE DESIGNER: Decorator or Dramaturg? Platform Papers No. 46

THE DESIGNER: Decorator or Dramaturg? by Stephen Curtis. Platform Papers No. 46 February 2016: Currency House.

SYDNEY: Launch of THE DESIGNER by director Neil Armfield (Secret River), with Stephen Curtis in conversation with critic Martin Portus. When: 6pm, Monday 15 February 2016 Where: Eternity Playhouse, 39 Burton St Darlinghurst All welcome. Free. Essential to book on info@currencyhouse.org.au 

ADELAIDE: Launch of THE DESIGNER by playwright Andrew Bovell (Secret River), with Stephen Curtis in conversation with scholar/director Julian Meyrick. When: 6pm, Tuesday 23 February 2016 Where: State Library of South Australia, North Terrace All welcome. Free. Essential to book on info@currencyhouse.org.au

A pdf of Currency House’s Platform Paper 46 available on media request: media enquiries to Martin Portus at mportus@optusnet.com.au
Available for sale at www.currencyhouse.org.au or in bookshops from 1 February.


Commentary by Frank McKone
February 9

Having read Stephen Curtis’ Paper, it’s an enormous disappointment that I am unable to be present at the launch in Sydney next Monday.  His Paper is at once thoroughly erudite and highly engaging.  His relationship with director Neil Armfield while working on The Secret River (now in its second run at Sydney Theatre Company, Roslyn Packer Theatre until February 20) forms a fascinating case study in Chapter 8: A Designer at Work.  To see them together would complete the theme of the written words: “When people see the design they can see what the production is going to be.” 

When I look back to my review of the first run of The Secret River (which I saw at the Canberra Playhouse, February 14-17, 2013), I am now thoroughly ashamed to note that I did not make any reference to the set or costume design, or even name the designers.  Curtis’ conclusion summarises my failure.  I wrote about “the pen of Andrew Bovell and the directing of Neil Armfield”, and how “The casting is excellent throughout, but I have to say that Ursula Yovich was quite extraordinary in her role of narrator, and her singing at the very end drove the tragic feeling into our very souls.”  But nothing about the stage design which is essential to creating the right theatrical space for me to have that experience.

Curtis writes: Our practice today is a synthesis of the design legacy of our last century of Australian design.  Today and beyond, the mercurial designer brings together all aspects of our role: as artisan and technician in command of our craft; designer as artist with the expressive power to communicate; occasionally designer as auteur with the vision to command; designer as accomplished and professional image-maker who knows how to keep a hundred balls in the air and get the show on; designer as experimenter testing new ways of connecting with our audience; designer as manager holding together the fine detail and the big picture; designer as dramaturg interrogating meaning, and yes, as ‘decorator’ orchestrating the aesthetic values of the production; and as collaborator and ‘wicked‘ theatre-maker. The designer is all of these.See what we do. We are here to help spark that awakening.

I was, of course, warned early in the Paper’s Introduction: "An overview of contemporary Australian theatre writing in newspapers, blogs, radio interviews and journals reveals how little our arts journalists see. While now the design will usually be mentioned, it is almost always in terms of aesthetics; only occasionally will it be discussed in terms of how it works, even less often in terms of how it feels, and rarely if ever in terms of how it contributes to the production’s meaning."


So, suitably castigated, I followed Curtis’ story through

1: The Evolution Of The Designer: From Decorator To Dramaturg?
“No, this Platform Paper is not a whinge about how bad things are for Australian performance designers.  Our position—as costume and set designers, lighting and sound designers—is on the whole a good-news story....”

2: Design Experimentation
“In contemporary theatre practice this disdain for aesthetic, ‘decorative’ values, if not universally held, is deeply entrenched....”

3: The Artist-Designer
“The next era of Australian theatre and design—from the 1920s to the 1950s—is fascinating: three decades and three waves of revolutionary theatre thinking brought to Australia by theatre-makers returning from abroad and post-war refugees emigrating from Eastern Europe [who] broke the hegemony of the big commercial producers to make room for home-grown theatrical talent. These were the ground breakers, the artist-designers....”

4: The Standardbearers: The Professional Designer
“It was up to the next wave of designers, from the 1950s through to the last decades of the last century to bring a new coherence of conception to the Australian stage....”

5: The Dream, Not The Drawing Room
“The designers of this next wave in the early 1970s were the iconoclasts, rejecting the realist orthodoxy and all of its values of descriptive, literal design....”

6: The Collaborators
“Design was driven conceptually, fired by an unequivocal desire to communicate to the audience the ideas of the production and its very particular interpretation. It was design as grand metaphor.... With theatre reverberating with all this change it was the next wave of designers, of which I was part—the designercollaborators— that was to make collaboration the centre of our practice....”

7: The Next Wave
“The role of the designer has become increasingly more professional and disciplined in contemporary theatre practice. And discipline is the operative word: directors, performers, producers and our audience can rely on their designer....”

8: A Designer At Work
“There is no template in designing. But there is a process, and as an insight into our dramaturgical role and how designers work I would like to share part of my process as set designer on the Sydney Theatre Company’s The Secret River....”

9: Design Value
“The whole design process—from first meeting to opening night on a production of the scale of The Secret River would typically take a set or costume designer twelve to fourteen weeks fulltime, or a designer responsible for both costumes and sets seventeen to twenty weeks....”

And so now I have absolutely no excuse.  Stephen Curtis has given us critics plenty of material from historical and current practice to be able to see a production as well as watch it, and to look for the elements in design which we think suit or fail to suit the nature of the play. 

In my own defence, I can give an example.  I wrote of Sydney Theatre Company’s recent King Lear: “Being mythic does not imply that the setting must be in an ancient past, nor limited to any time or place.  [Set Designer] Robert Cousins has understood this so well that clothing may be modern, words may be amplified with modern technology, nakedness may be explicit as it can at last be on a modern stage, rain may be real water, swords may be no more than short knives; and all may be presented for the first half in black empty space foreboding awful things to come, yet turn white in an even more frightening open space than before.  Every element in costumes, props, becomes significant and imbued with meaning in a weird way.  Every detail stands out in our minds because there are no boundaries which allow us to sit back satisfied.”

Even so, when I spoke to musician and author Peter Best, the brilliant stage and film composer, in the foyer following his Goldilocks and the Three Bears, he had quite definitely disliked the design and stylistic intention of King Lear.  Where the ‘empty space’ (Curtis makes a point of clarifying what Peter Brook actually meant) made me feel for Lear, however foolish, and made me see what Shakespeare meant in writing the play, Best found himself coldly cut out of empathetic feeling.  I think he saw the design as having taken over the production, becoming a visual end in itself, creating no more than an intellectual idea about the play.

The importance of Stephen Curtis’ essay is not that we should all learn to love stage designers, but that by coming to understand the complexity and diversity of approaches in our Australian tradition, we are given a new breadth of language to use in our criticisms.  This is why I am more than glad to have read Platform Paper 46, and why I am very disappointed that I will not be there to witness the long-term collaborators – director Neil Armfield and designer Stephen Curtis – in action in Sydney on February 15 (nor indeed the author/adaptor Andrew Bovell with Curtis in Adelaide on February 23). 

If you are able, please book with Currency House at info@currencyhouse.org.au – and write your comments here as you see fit.

©Frank McKone, Canberra