2016: The Beast by Eddie Perfect

The Beast by Eddie Perfect.  Presented by Ambassador Theatre Group Asia Pacific and Red Live at Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, July 27 – August 21, 2016.

Directed by Simon Phillips.

Designers: Set and Costume by Dale Ferguson; Lighting by Trent Suidgeest; Composer – Alan John.

Cast: Heidi Arena – Sue; Alison Bell – Marge; Christie Whelan Browne – Gen; Peter Houghton – Skipper / Mansitter / Vigeron / Farmer Brown; Rohan Nichol – Simon; Eddie Perfect – Baird; Toby Truslove – Rob.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 31

I shouldn’t read the Director’s Note before the show, especially when he writes of “acute social comedy” as if it’s a disease, and goes on to “add to it a sense of iconclastic extremity which puts [Eddie Perfect] in the company of Joe Orton, Martin McDonagh or even Ionesco.”  How pretentious!

Except that it’s sort of true.  The killing of the fatted calf, which provides the completely over the top funniest end of Act 1 of any play I’ve ever seen, does have a weird connection to Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.  In that play, everyone turns into green rhinoceroses, except Berenger who bravely stands against the trend.  “I am not capitulating!” are his last words.

The Beast also deals with conforming to norms, or refusing to do so, or being too weak not to, and there are political implications when it comes to the question of ethical farming, just as people turning into rhinoceroses represented those who had gone along with Nazism.  But Perfect’s play is more complicated than Ionesco’s as he brings three married couples together, exposing their middle-class predilections, hypocrises, secrets, and politically correct naivety.

Perfect’s work is also more absurd than Ionesco’s in the sense that Ionesco has a single through-line, even though it takes a little while to become apparent after the first rhinoceros inexplicably kicks up the dust in the French village square.  In The Beast there are bits of throughlines going all over the mental landscape until the very end, when Farmer Brown puts everything into its proper context and they all eat carrots.

The Beast is also equivalent to Rhinoceros in another way. Ionesco’s play is very specifically French, in location and culture.  Perfect is Melbourne through and  through and his play is specifically Australian, in location and culture.  Specificity is a strength in both plays, oddly enough, because it makes for universality of significance.  Even though extreme comic acting exaggerates characters, Perfect’s are each recognisably Australian, as Ionesco’s are French.  This works as in the dictum “act local, think global”.

I’m writing maybe a bit too globally here, but I can promise that even though I haven’t told you much about what actually happens in The Beast, that’s because it’s better for you not to know too much.  The comedy is over-the-top extremely funny because of the unpredictable surprises that Eddie has perfected as a stand-up comedian.  So get stuck into The Beast and you’ll see what I mean.

The Calf

Eating carrots

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Twelfth Night, or What You Will by William Shakespeare

In rehearsal L to R:
John Howard, Anita Hegh, Peter Carroll, Emele Ugavule, Nikki Shiels, Anthony Phelan, Lucia Mastrantone

Twelfth Night, or What You Will by William Shakespeare.  Belvoir, Sydney, July 27 – September 3, 2016.

Directed by Eamon Flack

Designers: Set by Michael Hankin; Costume by Stephen Curtis; Lighting by Nick Schlieper; Composer – Alan John; Sound by Caitlin Porter; Movement by Scott Witt.

Cast: Peter Carroll; Anita Hegh; John Howard; Lucia Mastrantone; Amber McMahon; Anthony Phelan; Keith Robinson; Damien Ryan; Nikki Shiels; Emele Ugavule.



Photography by Brett Boardman

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 31

For the first time, I feel I now understand Twelfth Night as a unified work.  I’ve tended before to think of the twins, disguises and love story as one element alongside the story of the drunkards and their malicious treatment of Malvolio.  Eamon Flack explains in his Director’s Note and achieves in action on stage a central focus on the observation that Feste, the professional Fool, discusses directly with us: that ‘what is, is not’.

This philosophical conundrum turns Shakespeare’s play into a mad metaphor for what was going on in his society, as the Puritans began to establish their influence (which later led to violent revolution, and the establishment of our modern representative democracy, no less); while we see the same nonsense happening today, such as having people stand for seats in Parliament or even for the Presidency of the United States while claiming they are not politicians.

Most of the time what Olivia calls ‘midsummer madness’ is tremendously funny to watch, and this production takes every opportunity to make us laugh at the enjoyment of acting the absurdities of the plot.  Yet, as the two look-alike brother and sister are seen by everyone together for the first time, laughter changed in tone as we saw a serious state of confusion take over all rational thought.  What they thought was, was not, and what they thought was not, now was.  Though fortunately quickly resolved by the right people kissing each other, the happy ending still had an edge – just a touch of insecurity about the nature of the human condition.

Theatrically this took the play to a higher level of excitement and satisfaction which grabbed the audience who clapped and cheered in sincere appreciation for a job enormously well done.

So having gone to the theatre with some doubts about watching just another Twelfth Night, I left with a joyful feeling and no doubts about this production.  Even any little worries about my human condition have faded into the mental background for now.  That’s the power of good quality art, which certainly is, rather than is not.  






©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Broken by Mary Anne Butler

Broken by Mary Anne Butler.  Darlinghurst Theatre Company at Eternity Playhouse, July 29 – August 28, 2016.

Directed by Shannon Murphy.

Designers: Production – Sophie Fletcher; Lighting – Ben Brockman; Composer and Sound – James Brown.

Cast: Ivan Donato – Ham; Sarah Enright – Mia; Rarriwuy Hick – Ash.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 30

The story of Broken is simple. 

Ash rolls her Troopie into scrub in Central Australia, at night. 

Ham, a mining engineer on his way home to his wife, Mia, near Alice Springs, sees the skid marks and the rolled vehicle, calls for an ambulance on his CB radio, rescues and comforts Ash for the hours it takes for the medical team to arrive.  He arrives home with Ash’s dog, killed in the crash, at dawn.

But the full story is much more complex.  It is revealed as each of the three describe what they feel, physically and mentally, from the moment of the crash through to the day a year later when Ash has recovered and goes to find Ham. 

The telling is done in about an hour over microphones incorporating sound effects made by the actors, and with a background distant soundscape.  The speaking is often quiet and intense.

The most fascinating aspect of the storytelling is how the three voices are separate strands which are woven together until their three stories become one.  The effect is mesmerising, especially because of the voicing skills that these three actors display.  And the writing slowly establishes not just a plot of what has happened but an interweaving of three personalities and how they deal with their experiences.

Broken could perhaps be performed on radio, but I found watching the physical process of the speaking and the making of the sound effects live took on a theatrical life of its own and intensified the emotional strength of the work.

I have also seen an earlier play by this author, Highway of Lost Hearts, (reviewed on this blog August 29, 2014) which she has adapted for radio, and her writing has now won significant awards.  Broken  confirms  Mary Anne Butler’s valued place as an Australian playwright finding new ways of telling our stories.






©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Betrayal by Harold Pinter

Guy Edmonds as Robert, Ursula Mills as Emma, Matthew Zeremes as Jerry

Betrayal by Harold Pinter.  Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli, July 16 – August 20, 2016.

Directed by Mark Kilmurry.
Designers: Set and Costumes by Anna Gardiner; Lighting by Christopher Page; AV by Tim Hope.

Performers: Guy Edmonds – Robert; Ursula Mills – Emma; Matthew Zeremes – Jerry.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 30

Harold is famous for the Pinter Pause, but the important question is What Happens when no-one is speaking because to do so might cause a speechless reaction?

The measure of the success of Kilmurry’s directing and, of course, the quality of the acting, lay for me in the reactions of the early middle-aged couple next to me.  They were about the age of the characters in the first scenes in 1977, and I suspect from overhearing some of their conversation that they were innocents in the woods of this kind of theatre.

They took their breaths in audibly at each moment of extreme embarrassment, laughed nervously as they began to cotton on to the layers on layers of betrayal.  Then there were silences of recognition as we finally watched Jerry’s drunken play for his best friend Robert’s wife, Emma, on their wedding day – way back in 1968.

Of course, they must have thought, all three really had known that they all had known in those earlier scenes, later dated, in the play.

Being at the Ensemble helped.  In another production of Betrayal, on an old-fashioned proscenium stage with a longish table in Jerry/Emma’s afternoons-affair flat (to display the tablecloth she bought in Venice with Robert), with a largish bar-counter for the pub scenes, as well as a round restaurant table and a full size bed for the Venice hotel and Robert/Emma’s newly-married bedroom, the play came over as very clever, almost too clever-clever.  The characters remained rather distant with all this clutter in a distant space.

In the close-up intimacy of the in-the-round small Ensemble, one felt with and for each of the three.  The reversal of time was not just a clever theatrical trick – it explained how the marriage of Robert and Emma could not continue, but also how Jerry was in the same boat – or fantasy gondola.

What I felt was really clever in this performance were the little signals. 

Jerry, later the writers’ agent, spoke poetically with real flair when drunk in 1968. Good writing on Pinter’s part, of course, but equally good acting by Matthew Zeremes.

Robert, the later hard-nosed book publisher, had always been tight and aggressive – even on the edge of violence, in playing squash and worse towards his wife.

Emma, who later escaped to run her own art gallery, was too easily taken in by these clever Oxbridge men and spent her life trying to maintain her personal strength and reasonable control of her life.

Three signals were given: when Robert made her afraid he would use violence (telling us that he really had even before Venice); when Emma briefly acted as a waitress clearing a restaurant table and then appeared in the flat with Jerry in the same apron-dress (which Jerry noted, showing how he was seeing her as a wife); and one which seemed to pass unnoticed when Jerry spoke to Emma but calling her Judith, his wife’s name.

It was this fine detail, and playing in a small space with minimal shifting of props as the scenes changed to the times and places projected on the wall, that made this production a success that I’m sure would have given even Pinter pause for thought.




©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Carmen by Georges Bizet, directed by John Bell

Carmen by Georges Bizet.  Libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy.  Opera Australia directed by John Bell.  Sydney Opera House, June 16 – August 12, 2016. 

Designers: Set by Michael Scott-Mitchell; Costumes by Teresa Negroponte; Lighting by Trent Suidgeest; Choreography by Kelley Abbey; Fight Choreography by Nigel Poulton.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 29

I wanted to see Carmen as directed by John Bell.  Could he, after such a wonderful Shakespeare’s The Tempest a year ago, strike the right note in this opera, which I have either thought of as an artificially ‘tragic’ love story or, as in one production I saw, a superficial concert of popular music.

Well, Carmen’s plot and libretto nowhere match Shakespeare, but Bell has done the trick.  Bizet’s music is far better than the libretto deserves.  Bell has clearly taken the music as his cue to finding the motivations for the characters and the emotional tone of each scene.  And so we are taken from the light to the dark; from the light-weight to the heavy.  His final scene entirely concentrates on José’s overwhelming obsession, stalking Carmen until he feels he has ‘no choice’ but to kill her. 

We only have to read the Canberra news of the recent axe murder to recognise the reality behind Bizet’s ‘romance’.  Awful though it is, Bell’s work shows how clearly this ultimate violence is never the woman’s fault.  Carmen demands her independence as all women should.  It’s the men who cannot accept women’s rights – as is too often still the situation in too many countries around the world today.

So, thank you, John Bell.  I’m glad I went to see your Carmen.

As the curtain dropped on José’s seeming attempt to rape the body, it was moot whether we should stay silent or applaud in the conventionally operatic manner.  We were not left long in suspense as the curtain rose for the call – and the applause was heartfelt and it seemed would never end in appreciation for the cast, the orchestra, the stage design: for a show that was never artifically tragic and certainly never a superficial concert.

Bell’s Director’s Note, handed out to everyone who had not spent $20 on the complete very glossy program, explains his reasoning for his updating elements of this 1875 original setting in Spain to a mythical Cuba with its down-at-heel buildings and motor vehicles - and also with the feel for the music, dance and colour of Havana.  Shifting to this imagined world of soldiers, villagers, popular heroes, criminals and rebels made me see Carmen not as some kind of romantic celebration of Spain, with Carmen an exponent of exciting flamenco. As the program explains, this became the de rigeur approach only in the 1890s, well after Bizet’s untimely death at the age of 36, only three months after Carmen opened.

But just think of what happened in the Spain of General Franco from the 1930s to his death so recently in 1975 to see how prescient were Bizet and his librettists; and then think of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan today.  Though Bell kept to the original story of gypsies fighting for their freedom in the mountains, and the fascination with bullfighting, in his setting the story becomes a modern metaphor for the struggle for genuine democracy and human rights over the forces of terror and dictatorship.  Think of Turkey and President Erdogan right now.

So thanks again, John Bell.

Jane Ede as Frasquita, Clémentine Margaine as Carmen, Margaret Trubiano as Mercedes

Clémentine Margain as Carmen

Natalie Aroyan as Micaëla

Michael Honeyman as bullfighter Escamillo

Village Scene

Clémentine as Carmen

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Our Land People Stories: Bangarra Dance Theatre

Our Land People Stories:  Bangarra Dance Theatre at Canberra Theatre Centre, July 28-30, 2016.
National Tour dedicated to David Page.

Choreographers:
Macq by Jasmin Sheppard  Music by David Page
Miyagan by Beau Dean Riley Smith and Daniel Riley  Music by Paul Mac
Nyapanyapa by Stephen Page  Music by Steve Francis
Sets designed by Jacob Nash
Costume Design by Jennifer Irwin
Lighting Design by Matt Cox

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 28

Bangarra belongs to this country in a way that I know I never fully can.  I arrived here a mere 61 years ago, invited by Australia’s non-Indigenous government as a £10 Pom with little knowledge of the country’s short history since 1788, and absolutely no idea of its true history since its First People began arriving after their long trip from Africa about 50,000 years ago.

Tonight I feel privileged to have been invited into our country by Bangarra, perhaps our only truly national theatre, whose work is as modern as today while it stretches our culture back in time, almost immemorial. 

While I might refer back to Shakespeare or Chaucer, or even with a lot of imagination back to Ancient Greece, a mere couple of thousand years, the three dances performed tonight take us first via Governor Macquarie’s declaration of war in the Appin massacre of 1816 in Jasmin Sheppard’s Macq.  Then we go on a great learning curve of understanding of the matrilineal totemic kinship system of the Wiradjuri nation still in place today right here surrounding Canberra, in the Riley family’s Miyagan.

Finally, after such powerful works by the younger choreographers, Bangarra’s Artistic Director since the company’s inception 25 years ago, Stephen Page, presents his new work derived from the art of Yolngu woman Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, in a creative exchange where her paintings are danced into our consciousness a world away from Yirrkala in far North-East Arnhem Land.  As Nyapanyapa pictures the changes over time of new experiences, such as the arrival of buffalo and the young generation’s modern music and dance, so she becomes the central figure in Stephen Page’s dances.  Like her, at my 75 years, I identify with the shock of sometimes frightening change.

But Macq brought me to tears as it made me think of the teenagers in the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Juvenile Detention centre, seen being violently ill-treated even to the point of torture on ABC TV’s Four Corners last Monday night.  The words spoken by the NT Chief Minister back in 2010 about putting juvenile ‘criminals’ in a ‘concrete hole’ and actions of the detention guards were no improvement on Governor Macquarie’s diary record of 1816 justifying killing all who failed to obey his soldiers’ orders.

Miyagan in contrast was a wonderful positive experience to watch, as the dancers played for real, in their very dancing, the theme of the work: ‘Wiradjuri culture, language and customs are alive; our heartbeat is resilient and strong’.

It’s that heartbeat, knowing that Bangarra dances are for real, danced with knowledge and understanding of their history and culture, that makes this company unique and essential for all of us Johnny-come-latelies to learn from.  May we learn to mind our ways.



©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Resident Alien by Tim Fountain

Resident Alien by Tim Fountain.  The Street in association with Cameron Lukey at The Street Theatre 2, July 27 – August 7, 2016.

Director – Gary Abrahams; Set Design – Romanie Harper; Lighting Design – Rob Sowinski; Sound Design – Daniel Nixon.
Performed by Paul Capsis

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 27

Paul Capsis is brave to present his re-creation of the ascerbic Quentin Crisp, the English epitome of the intellectual queer, late in his life holed up in a cluttered claustrophobic room in Manhattan: in United States’ terminology, a ‘resident alien’.  Crisp’s character, based on his life and writings, is alienated from any ‘ordinary’ kind of life: he even proposes a law to say everyone must die by the age of 60.  The punishment for not dying will be to keep on living!

Capsis keeps us on the edge of wanting to feel sorry for Crisp’s loneliness – for which Crisp would condemn us for insulting him – and valuing the stringent truths about the human condition which we avoid at our peril.  In the end, as he boils a potato and fries his last egg, almost grimly eating as his spotlight fades, we are left to understand that we each must die alone.  That’s the only reality.  Life is just a short interlude between birth and death.

We are aware of Capsis’ bravery in the long pauses between speaking, sometimes brief ironically amusing stories, sometimes a flurry of critical assertions, by a character with a whole raft of tiny physical actions.  This is an extraordinary representation of a clearly recognisable Quentin Crisp, showing both the outward public figure who appeared on television, published book reviews – the intellectual stirrer – alongside his underlying insecurities. 

Gary Abrahams’ directing must be given full credit here, as it must for the wonderfully/awfully grotty set design by Romanie Harper, the abstract half-threatening background sound by Daniel Nixon – fading and swelling with our feelings – and, especially I thought, for Rob Sowinski’s lighting which gave the small space a living dynamism as lights subtly took us to different places and different degrees of emphasis.

I’m pleased, too, that the show was in the small Street Theatre 2.  The intimacy of almost being in the room with Crisp gave the play strength which I wonder might be harder to achieve on a larger or especially a proscenium stage.  As a Street Contemporary Drama Presentation, Resident Alien is a great success.




©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Extinction by Hannie Rayson

Extinction by Hannie Rayson.  Red Stitch Actors Theatre and Geelong Performing Arts Centre production at Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse, July 20-23, 2016.

Director: Nadia Tass; Designers: Set – Shaun Gurton; Lighting, Photography and Video – David Parker; Sound and AV – Daniel Nixon; Costume – Sophie Woodward; Composer – Paul Grabowsky; Sound-system – Russell Goldsmith.

Cast: Brett Cousins – the veterinarian; Natasha Herbert – his sister, the academic ecologist; Ngaire Dawn Fair – his zoologist putative wife; Colin Lane – the ‘evil’ mining magnate.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 20


At first Hannie Rayson’s Extinction seems rather like a theatre-in-education exercise for adults.  This is not a bad thing.  It’s good to see a play raising the big issues of species extinction and climate change caused by human behaviour.  It’s also fascinating to see an ending in which at least the immediate future looks better for the animals in the forest (the Otway Ranges in Victoria) than for the other animals in the built environment of academia in Geelong (for non-Aussie readers, pronounced Jilóng).

This is where the design team have done an especially wonderful job.  The locations of the many short scenes shift rapidly from surrounding forest with complete sound-scape (the tangled shapes and colours of the Australian bush) to the straight-edged reflective glass and concrete of the modern university.  Minimal furniture is moved on and off in dim-outs, while the video on the cyclorama transports us from location to location.  On the screen the computer, phone and security-door images – all essential to modern academic research – allow us to appreciate what the characters are seeing on their touch screens.

For once, here was technology entirely and properly integrated into the stage text.  I assume that the published play will include the dvd ready for playing while you read, or for a later director to use in a new production.

Acting was excellent in a play where the characters are, in a sense, written from the outside in.  Each has a characteristic attitude towards those big issues which defines their behaviour.  An interesting contrast in recent Australian playwriting is Andrew Bovell in Things I Know To Be True (reviewed here June 9, 2016) where characters grow from the inside out.  Both ways of working can work equally well.

In Extinction the Vet operates on his sick or injured animals, from cows, cats and dogs to tiger quolls, according to the Hippocratic Oath – which he takes to include applying euthanasia when there is no chance of normal living without pain.

His sister, the academic Head of Ecology Research, cannot reasonably refuse tainted money to rehabilitate the forest habitat for her tiger quoll study (a parallel situation to Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara where an arms manufacturer will supply funds for the Salvation Army).

The Vet’s potential wife, a Santiago zoologist leading the quoll research, heart warmingly mothers every animal – her oath does not include euthanasia.

Into this triumvirate Rayson injects a locally-born and raised farmer’s son who has become a coal mining magnate, yet with fond memories of his grandfather who, expressing his love for nature, had logged the forest.  Today’s realist offers the money made from open-cut coal mining, which both destroys good agricultural land and continues to worsen climate warming, to fund the tiger quoll research.  He may be ‘evil’ but he is also surprisingly sexually attractive to both women.

The play could be comedy, but only in parts.  It could be tragedy, as it also is in part.  It could be a sentimental story of hope despite adversity.   There is hope, but not mawkish sentimentality.  It’s an interesting study of life in the face of certain death, far beyond an academic concern about the extinction of quolls. 

The Vet’s story contains a secret that I must not reveal here, at least while Extinction is still a new play.  You must see the show to catch my drift.  You should see this show in any case, for its challenging ideas – and not least for the quality of its design and execution.






©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Divenire - Melbourne Ballet Company

Divenire
“Divenire” by Simon Hoy, music by Ludovico Einaudi
“Zealots” by Timothy Harbour, music by John Adams
“Lucidity” by Simon Hoy, music by Ólafur Arnalds and Max Richter

Melbourne Ballet Company, directed by Simon Hoy; lighting designer – Craig Boyes; costume designer – Santha King.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, Friday July 8 and Saturday July 9, 2016.

Dancers: Kristy Denovan; Jo Lee; Chloe Henderon; Masha Peker; Francesca Giangrasso; Chloe Lauverjon; Alex Baden Bryce; Samual Harett; Charles Riddiford; Adam Thurlow.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 8

Watching modern abstract dance is parallel to viewing modern abstract painting.  The work does not incorporate pictures or storylines with obvious interpretations, yet affects us emotionally through the inter-relationships between colour and line.  The advantage of dance is that it is made up of a huge number of momentary images changing in time, relating to sound, rhythm and even rhyme – and not just in a single figure but often among several at the same time.  For me it is the dynamism of dance that makes an impact so much greater than a static painting can achieve.

Yet there is another line of response.  Over time as you study a painting, your imagination makes more connections, and so the impact of the painting grows and changes.  Dance is more ephemeral, relying on a review in hindsight to put together more thoughts and feelings.

These three works, under the overall title of Divenire, which means to ‘become’ in Italian, worked for me.  The first two, comprising the first half of the show, were light and enjoyable in mood, tuneful and upbeat like the music, while showing in subtle ways how complex our relationships are.  After interval, the mood changed to a dark colour, literally in the costumes and metaphorically in the movements and the clashing sound.  It was enough to say, don’t let yourself be too easily taken in.  Those complex relationships contain the possibility of disaster. 

So my advice is not to spend too much time studying the printed program – especially the description of “Lucidity”, giving definitions of ‘limpidity’, ‘pellucidity’, ‘clarity’ and ‘lucidity’.  It was interesting to know that this work was largely in response to Picasso’s famous war painting “Guernica”, but I don’t need intellectualised game-playing, like quoting Ayn Rand, of all people, on lucidity being “the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action.”

Let the dance do the talking in its own language.  That’s enough for me.



PS:  The printed sheet said there were four works, including something by Tim Podesta.  Perhaps touring has taken its toll, but this program of an hour’s worth of dancing with a 20 minute interval was successful as it stood.  



©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Stop the Votes, We Want To Get Off. Election Special by Shortis and Simpson

Stop the Votes, We Want To Get Off by Shortis and Simpson.  At Teatro Vivaldi, ANU, Canberra, July 2, 7pm and July 3, 2pm, 2016.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

John Shortis’ and Moya Simpson’s political satire over the years has been gentle, mostly funny and occasionally sad.  But one song in Stop the Votes, We Want To Get Off bucked the trend.

“Big Bad Mal”, written surprisingly from a right-wing perspective with an unusual level of bitterness, was introduced with the observation that a certain Doctor Brendan Nelson, on the occasion of Malcolm Turnbull’s first incarnation as Leader of the Liberal Party, over the dead body of Dr Nelson himself, had diagnosed Mansion Malcolm as suffering a ‘narcissistic personality disorder’.

As the election rolled on over into Sunday morning with too many seats undecided for either major party to claim victory, the contrast between the positivity of the speech by Australian Labor Party leader Bill Shorten and the vicious, ungratious and even manic, flailing attack speech by Turnbull demonstrated that Shortis and Simpson got it dead right.

Since my task here is to review John and Moya’s performance rather than Malcolm Turnbull’s, you can find their source in a 2015 Sydney Morning Herald article by Paul Sheehan at http://www.smh.com.au/comment/conservatives-fear-turnbull-is-a-narcissist-who-cannot-change-20150916-gjnusc.html .

The sad song was about live export of cattle and their recent treatment in a Vietnamese abbatoir.  The saddest part was that Moya only had to revive the song she had previously performed after the ABC TV Four Corners program exposed the same animal cruelty in Indonesia in 2011. 

Click on www.abc.net.au/4corners/special_eds/20110530/cattle/ , and then consider the laughs from the speech by the (perhaps) Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce (almost certainly re-elected in his New England seat) making a link between asylum seekers and live cattle.  After all, they’re all on boats.  Some get turned back, some drown at sea, some get slaughtered horribly in off-shore centres.

Stop the Votes, We Want To Get Off was actually a highly original pork barrel of laughs on election night, with a repeat performance this afternoon, Sunday July 3 at 2pm – except for the election itself, which it seems will be regurgitated with burps until all the pre-votes and postal votes are counted.  Don’t expect a result until at least Wednesday July 6, at which time ANU political historian Professor Nicholas Brown hopes for a ‘well-hung parliament’ in the House of Representatives, while we wait perhaps for some more days or even weeks until the preference votes for the Senate are all distributed.

The Professor’s lecture The History of the Double Dissolution was both entertaining and highly informative, following the pattern he has set in Shortis and Simpson’s annual shows at the National Archives when Cabinet Papers of earlier years are released for publication.

Professor Brown sat on a ‘table of experts’ with the cartoonist Geoff Pryor and ANU political scientist John Warhurst.  The evening was rather like watching reality tv live on stage, with songs interspersed with bits of the ABC TV live coverage between three song sets, bits recorded from the coverage between songs, other very funny video recordings (such as from Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell on the Electoral Commission’s How to Vote information), commentary from the experts’ table, karaoke singalongs, a quiz on Shorten and Turnbull in red, green and blue teams, and of course the real voting to see who would come in, who would stay, and who would be turfed out of the House. 

All this in the Teatro Vivaldi bar, with food and drink flowing, made for a terrific convivial party atmosphere.  Early on, I found myself thinking of David Williamson’s Don’s Party, written in 1971 about the 1969 election when Labor had high hopes but failed to turf out the Liberals.  Moya, speaking privately, hoped her party participants would not fall into depression and consequently indulge in drunken sexual hanky-panky as happens in that play (though I was a bit concerned about the part of her title We Want To Get Off).  And indeed, despite the obvious inclination of everyone I spoke to and overheard towards a new government, John and Moya kept the tone positive, bookended by their version of the awful Frank Sinatra:  “And now the end is near ... would we endure it all again?  We say, ‘No Way’”. 

All sang in uproarious unison by the end of the show (nearly 11pm), after the exhaustive Rhyming Bill song, the Carnaby Barnaby Street (with Sesame Street overtones) song, the Minority Salsa song and dance (in which Shortis danced marginally better than Shorten), the Section 57 Double Dissolution song, and on the international stage, the Hillaree, Hillarah – I’ve Got to Watch my Back song and the That’s Why the Donald is a Trump song.

The final accolade for Shortis and Simpson’s Stop the Votes, We Want To Get Off came direct from the (perhaps) Prime Minister himself: “There is a no more exciting time to be doing satire!”






©Frank McKone, Canberra