2017: Still Life

Still Life by Dimitris Papaioannou (Greece – Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens) at Carriageworks Bay 17, January 27-29, 2017.

Visual Concept, Direction, Costume and Lighting Design – Dimitris Papaioannou
Sculpture Design and Set Painting – Nectarios Dionysatos; Sound Composition – Giwrgos Poulios

Performers: Kalliopi Simou; Pavlina Andriopoulou; Prokopis Agathokleous; Drossos Skotis; Michalis Theophanous; Costas Chrysafidis; Dimitris Papaioannou.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 28

Still Life: figure of Sisyphus

Going to the theatre, at least at Carriageworks, can be an emotional risk.  As I sat down in the 30+ degrees of the huge ex-railway workshop to think about Still Life, my mood was not helped when I overheard a terribly enthusiastic conversation involving a woman toting a laptop and headset, who may have been (or not) a party to this production – like Stage Manager, perhaps.  She wore a large transparent plastic earring inscribed with the words (at least on the side I could see) in pretty cursive script:  Fuck off.

Is this Life, still?  What sort of Life is this, anyway?

So, shocked out of my almost anger at what seemed another imported pretentious European bit of ‘high art’, about which I didn't dare interview this woman, I began to think a bit more rationally about this very Still Life, with it’s long, highly-interminably long, sequences.   Should I describe a bit, then analyse; or just let my feelings go?

It was like watching an early silent movie in slow motion.  You remain watching as an outsider because there's little to see which engages you, especially at this speed – just an occasional visual joke for a bit of a giggle.  So you keep watching, just in case.  But the several scenes have no reason to be connected together, at least as far as I could work out.

Well, after the end, on the long weekend train ride from Redfern to North Ryde, I imagined some possible meanings….but here’s what happened.

We weren’t allowed in until starting time, so didn’t realise that the man seated on the stage in a low spotlight, watching us, was performing.  I thought maybe he would remind us to switch off our mobiles.  Then, just as we were all settled (the large Bay 17 was about two thirds full), someone marched across the stage and performed an old circus clown’s trick.  He snatched the chair from under the seated man – who, of course, remained seated exactly as before, but without the chair.  This event had no connection to anything else that happened for the next hour and a half.

I had read the program, which seemed to say that the work was based on the Sisyphus myth – about the man condemned to pushing shit uphill forever.  So I thought I knew what the next scene was about, as a man dragged what turned out to be a wall, coated with bits of plaster which kept falling off, all the way from upstage centre to downstage centre.  He rested, holding up the leaning wall against his back – until it fell onto him and he began to bodily break through, by which time we realised that there was another man (or two) behind the wall.

Still Life: the women breaking through the plaster wall

Bits of the other man came through to the front, intertwined with bits of our original man, until it was hard to know which bit was which.  This sequence developed when a woman came through from behind, as bits of her undressed bits of the front man and re-dressed his in women’s gear.  This inter-twining looked as though it might go somewhere story-wise, especially when the two women broke through, but was so deliberately slowly done that it stopped being funny – but never became anything else.

I did start to think about women breaking through the glass ceiling, even though this was a plaster wall, but in the end the last man (or it may have been a woman) standing dragged the wall away, and that was that.

Still Life: Woman in the Wind

The next scene was a woman behind a transparent flexible pane, downstage centre. (Aha, I began to think – a glass wall, if not a ceiling).  But no.  Men came down, stood behind her and shook the flexible pane to make her long flowing dress shake about as if in a wind.  Each man moved her a little way upstage, and after a very long time when she reach fully upstage, she picked up the pane as the spotlight went off, and she went off.  And that was that.

After this were several more scenes: a man carrying and dropping rocks (which really did seem heavy, or was it just a sound track that made them loud when they hit the floor?).  Aha, I thought, here's good old Sisyphus.  But he just came and went, leaving bits of rock all over the place.  And that was that.

Up to now all the men had been dressed in suits, but next was a workman with a long-handled spade – which got used in other scenes from here on.  This man shovelled his own feet in a deft manoeuvre to keep walking towards downstage, and behind him was a woman carrying rocks (a bit smaller than in the previous scene), which she dropped one by one until suddenly dropping them all at once, so he had to shovel them aside. Apparently he was very sexy, so she dropped his daks and underpants so we saw his bare backside.  He leaned forward (facing upstage) while she climbed up (in bare feet) and balanced (she actually fell off first time – in the act, or not?) and so he carried her on his bare bum, oh so slowly, back upstage until they disappeared. And that was that.

That looked like the end of anything obviously to do with Sisyphus.  For the next very long time people (back in suits, I think) found the ends of very long strips of gaff tape stuck to the wooden stage floor, which made fingers-down-the-blackboard type noises with deeper echoes because the floor was made of hollow rostra boxes, as they spent a very long time ripping all these strips from straight and circular lines, knocking away bits of plaster and rocks as they went.  When that was finished, then that was that.

Then a man in a suit, with some help from another one, managed to balance on things like rather large bricks.  He was good, but when that was done, that was that. 

Still Life: Sunrise with Shovel

But then the shovel got used to push up as far as it could reach into the lower surface of the translucent huge balloon-like structure which had been hanging all the time from the stage roof, with dry ice mist making it look like a cloud.  When the bottom was pushed up, and a large circular Fresnel lamp lit up from upstage pointing just about horizontally at me in Row N, the whole filmy material floated, giving an impression very much like a sunset over water with a more orange light, and while the shovel man (in a suit, not a workman) and another sat down to watch on the stage (with their backs to us), the light changed and became a sunrise.

Visually, the effect was wonderful, but when it finished, that was that.  Until out of upstage gloom came a fully set-for-a-sumptuous-lunch table, moving very slowly downstage especially because the bottom of each leg was placed on the top of a man’s head – no hands (except that some changed, like soccer players coming on from the bench, and hands were used to make the transition).

This table was carried off the stage onto the auditorium floor, at which point chairs appeared and all the cast sat down to eat.  The audience was not invited – in fact we were completely ignored.  So a number of people decided this was the end and started leaving the theatre.  There was a little more action, but nothing significant, and so the audience decided it was time to clap.  So the performers got up and left via the stage wings, lights went down, we clapped more and the cast came out for a conventional ‘curtain’.

And that was that.

In my later wondering, I went back to the program.  It quotes Albert Camus referring to the Sisyphus myth, saying “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.  One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Then I thought, remembering the broken paving in the streets of a very poor-looking Athens when I was last there, perhaps all those broken rocks and plaster walls are meant to represent the Greek economy.  But then is the sumptuous lunch supposed to mean, like Camus’ Sisyphus, just be happy.  Or was the lunch entirely cynical, saying it’s OK for those who can afford lunch, and don’t pay their income tax, but be damned to the rest of the Sysiphuses, men and women, struggling forever with their rocks, walls and gaff tape.

The program also refers to Dimitris Papaioannou as “Rooted firmly in the fine arts” and becoming “more widely known as the creator of the Athens 2004 Olympic Ceremonies”.  So that’s that, then.  I wonder.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Ich Nibber Dibber

Ich Nibber Dibber by post.  Campbelltown Arts Centre, January 20, 21, 27, 28, 2017.

Post, Lead Artists – Mish Grigor, Zoë Coombs Marr and Natalie Rose

Designers: Lighting and Production Manager – Fausto Brusamolino; Set and Costume – Michael Hankin; Sound – James Brown
Dramaturg – Anne-Louise Sarks

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 27

Ich Nibber Dibber is a new genre which I term ‘sit-up comedy’, rather than old-hat standup.  Whether or not you could or should wash a hat, or throw it out when it gets too dirty and just get a new one, was quite an important issue.  As important as, if God is dead, as Nietzche said he was, now that Nietzche is also dead, how might he be feeling when he gets to heaven and finds that God isn’t dead after all?

The three women of the theatre company post spent their hour and ten, each perched up on a 2 metre post, draped in loose white material somewhere between a bedsheet and a wedding dress, and talked – regurgitating ten years’ worth of off-task banter from selfie videos actually recorded between their on-task writing sessions creating shows such as Oedipus Schmoedipus (reviewed on this blog January 25, 2014 and about to go on tour in South America!) and many others. 

I could also call it ‘reality theatre’, except that no-one got voted off.  This was because they laughed at each other as much as we laughed at (or rather, with) them, both during the performance and, for those of us who stayed, during the following Q&A session.

Their ten year odyssey began when Mish and Zoë were 18 and 19 and Nat was 43.  Burst of laughter.  23! says Natalie.  Fascinating how their manner of speaking, what my drama teacher called ‘acting acting’ – to prove that you know what you are doing – was just right for that young age, but gradually changed, to the almost subliminal background accompaniment of pop music to match the history, to the point where maturity raised the question of being over the hill (at 40! says Natalie, not 30!), looking down the barrel of middle-age and menopause.

What made me sit up, thinking back to my 1950s upbringing when women’s body parts were strictly never to be mentioned (still like Queen Victoria’s ankles in the nether regions), was the excruciating details provided of women’s internal bodily functions.  I know this is all cool, nowadays, because all the women around me (who constituted about 90% of the audience) were metaphorically tweeting LOVL – laughing out very loud!

The most excruciating image of giving birth, from Natalie – whose efforts were being videoed (you never know, we might be able to use this in a show), except that the computer had 1950s qualms (probably overheating) and switched itself off for the climactic moment – was when she described herself in the “push” phase as feeling like a Bodum coffee plunger (except that all the mucky stuff came out the bottom).  Bottoms and what come out of them also got a good run with repeats throughout the rapid fire talk.

One experience I missed back in 1972 was to read Ways of Seeing by John Berger.  The women’s talk included Mish looking up on her phone and quoting what he wrote about how women are always conscious of how they appear to others, to men and to other women, so they are always “seeing themselves” as if they are an art object.  This took the show out of continually divergent apparently silly but very funny talk for just a minute or so, but to me seemed to be the serious theme behind these women’s work.

Discussion in the Q&A gave them the opportunity to talk about how, as young actors still in youth theatre orbit, they had had to learn that they had no choice about being seen by their audience as female, and how, in accepting that fact, they could present women on stage in new ways.  Oedipus Schmoedipus was a great example, where blood all over them took on new meanings, especially for men in the audience, as well as confirming for women what they already knew.

This led as well to talk about the business of being actors and designing a performance of themselves changing over the ten years.  Although their actual talk as originally recorded seemed discontinuous, they found themselves editing out (though keeping the true timeline) and so realised that there is a story – a through line – about their developing maturity, in contrast to their other shows where absurdist discontinuity was the experimental theatre mode.

So once again the Sydney Festival has produced a winner, and a very interesting comparison about the perception of women to put alongside the very successful humorous and emotionally affecting transgender presentation from Canada: Tomboys Survival Guide (reviewed here January 26, 2017). 

Maybe I can retitle these women’s teenage-nonsense-German Ich Nibber Dibber as the Upfront Modern Women’s Comedy Better Than Survival Guide.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote

Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote and Band (Canada) at Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent, Meriton Festival Village, Hyde Park North, January 25-29, 2017.

Storyteller and Writer – Ivan Coyote; Bass Guitar – Pebbles Willekes; Drums – Sally Zori; Trumpet – Alison Gorman

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 26

Claire Cain Miller in the New York Times (June 8, 2015) has written: “The recent debate over public restroom access for transgender people has prompted some questions on just how big an issue this is — how many people are affected by such rules? The size of the transgender population is tricky to estimate….There are no national data, but two studies have tried to quantify or describe the transgender population in the United States.”
 
The results suggest that somewhere between 0.3% and 0.5% of the total population is transgender.

Ivan Coyote’s Tomboy Survival Guide is designed for these people and their parents, focussing on “misfits and boy-girls and butches and lady mechanics.  It’s a show for nelly boys and drama queens and anyone who ever put the camp in camping.”

In fact, I found his storytelling, set to a range of music from about the days of Cat Stevens’ Tea for Tillerman to today, and his direct talking to us, left me much more seriously affected than this comic description.  His sense of humour was a bright shield for what for so many is a tragedy underneath.

But, as he concluded, “our freedom depends on society changing, not us changing.”

This is because people may be born with physical sexual features along a spectrum.  Being between male/female may mean behaviours and feelings are different from assumed conventional norms.  What do you, as a parent, do when your very young daughter really does behave like a boy?

The story to demonstrate this was when Ivan’s favourite uncle visited when Ivan was four.  This happened in northern Canada, while the uncle was visiting from New Zealand, and explains why this uncle became Ivan’s favourite.

When Uncle knocked on the door, it was opened by Ivan (at that time having a girl’s name which was not revealed), standing with one hand behind her back.  Uncle shook her hand and introduced himself to “my niece”, who responded: “Do you want to see a dead gopher?”

Quick on the uptake uncle replied, “Only the last few days I’ve been thinking about seeing a dead gopher.”  At which point, Ivan produced his other hand, holding up a very flat, bloodied, road-killed small possum-sized gopher for inspection.

He said to us it took until he was 44 years old to become fully comfortable as transgender, even though his mother always fully supported him through difficult situations when he was a child.  One reason it took so long is simply that only quite recently have people begun to accept the fact of transgender, distinct from male or female.  In fact the Michigan Coalition to End Domestic and Sexual Violence (www.mcedsv.org)  gives this list: “lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, queer, heterosexual, or questioning. Trans: This term is used as an umbrella term and can include anyone who identifies as transgender, transgenderist, or transsexual. Transgender: This term has many definitions.”

The evidence that all four in the group are both trans and comfortable (at least as much as any of us might be) was the quality of the writing, humour, music and especially their singing a “hymn” to conclude the show which just about brought the Spiegeltent down.  This show is not complaint but a celebration with pride.  The cheers and standing ovation in return showed our pride in their work as performers as well as for their personal human qualities.

For me, the most important message was to standard men.  Don’t deny feminity in oneself; don’t get locked into ‘being a man’ with all its implied aggression and violence; treat women genuinely as equals.  And when your daughter wants to show you a dead gopher, accept the offer and, as Ivan’s mother finally did, let ‘her’ dress in corduroys instead of skirts.  And always support your children in what they know to be their true feelings.

And provide toilets so that any sex may safely use them.  Which was the case at the Sydney Festival, at least right next door to the Spiegeltent, where each toilet was a separate, private cubicle.  With a washroom open to all.  Well done, Sydney Festival.

It’s not easy, but it’s the change society must make.  Then the tomboys can do more than just survive.  They can thrive as Tomboy Survival Guide shows they can.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Huff by Cliff Cardinal

Huff by Cliff Cardinal.  Native Earth Performing Arts (Canada), at Seymour Centre, Reginald Theatre, January 24-28, 2017.

Playwright/Performer – Cliff Cardinal
Director/Dramaturg – Karin Randoja
Designers: Set and Costume – Jackie Chau; Lighting – Michelle Ramsay; Sound – Alex Williams
 
Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 25

Huff begins and ends with the actor’s head entirely encased in a transparent plastic bag: the very frightening possibility that all parents fear for their young child.  His hands are tied behind his back.  Within three minutes, he must persuade a member of the audience to rip the bag off and promise never to give it back, no matter what he says.

Is this theatre, where we come for entertainment, seated in comfort?  Or is this a threat in reality?

Fortunately the second audience member he selects satisfies him that she will not give the plastic bag back.  70 minutes later she is true to her promise – but he has more plastic bags in his pocket.  He gaff tapes a new one on, but at least this time his hands are free and at the last minute he rips the bag off, gasping.

But we know he might yet try again.

To have two couples at different times walk down the centre aisle in this very small theatre, almost to within touching distance of the solo performer, then turn and demonstrably make their exit, is some kind of measure of what you might expect from Huff.

Except that these people did not have the patience – even I felt I needed – to reach the point of understanding where this play would take me.  I came to Huff after having just seen Which Way Home (reviewed here January 22, 2017), by an Australian Indigenous writer and performer with such a different feeling and style.  Is it so different for this North American/Canadian Indigenous writer/performer?

Yet the social issues in both their families, and even their cultural traditions were not dissimilar.

‘Tash’ in Katie Beckett’s play grows up without a mother, with her single-parent father trying to cope with properly bringing up two sons and his daughter who needs his protection and guidance in the modern city world far away from his traditional country and spiritual guides: especially among the birds.

Soon after the second couple had left the audience in Cliff Cardinal’s play, we get the picture together of this teenage boy brought up on a Reservation, going to a Reservation school staffed by ‘whites’, brought up by a father – a traditional ‘warrior’ unable to cope with the inevitable frustrations of modern life – worse than faced by Tash’s Dad, who at least found work to support his family.

The boy’s mother had become an alcoholic to avoid her husband’s violence, and finally hanged herself in the forest.  His elder brother has just done the same.  He himself, now that his father has used his mother’s sister as a replacement and his guiding grandmother is no longer capable of keeping things together, is now fixated on suicide.

In this boy’s spirit world, will Trickster destroy him too, or can the calming ‘huff’ of Wind – the breath out, the exhalation of peace – keep him going?
 
How different is this story from those we often hear from many Aboriginal communities in this country, while we argue about celebrating Australia Day on the date when Captain Phillip stuck a flag in Eora country and declared ownership by the British Crown?

Why did those people walk out, I wonder?  I think perhaps because the structure of the play for the first half hour or more is ‘bitty’ in the extreme.  Cliff Cardinal plays all the characters, including Wind and Trickster, his mother, his aunt, his grandmother, his father, the uncomprehending school teacher, his brother and other ‘friends’, and a radio presenter from Shit Creek Radio reading the news – of the burning down of a motel, the setting alight of the forest, and the authority’s searching for the criminals.  But the news reader doesn’t know of the children’s plan to burn down the school – only not yet carried out because of the elder brother’s death.

It took me a while into the final stages of the performance to understand that this teenage style, over-the-top bravado skit format, was correct for the character of the young boy.  I had to go back to remember teaching Year 7.
 
That’s what makes this play so terrifying, to be made to understand why it is that so many young Indigenous children take their own lives.  And worse, because those people who walked out early missed the point – the reason for going to the theatre in the first place.  For me their leaving, and the manner of their leaving, was a question of respect – for the writer, the performer and the people Cliff Cardinal represents in this work.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Which Way Home by Katie Beckett

Which Way Home by Katie Beckett.  Ilbijerri Theatre Company co-presented with Belvoir, at Belvoir Street Theatre Downstairs, January 11-29, 2017.

Director – Rachael Maza
Set and Costume Designer – Emily Barrie; Lighting – Niklas Pajanti; Sound – Mark Coles Smith; Dramaturg – Jane Bodie
Performed by Katie Beckett and Tony Briggs

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 22

It’s so good to see such a modest, beautiful work of theatre art as Which Way Home, positive in feeling but without sentimentality, about finding the right final home for a young woman’s father – an Aboriginal man determined to fulfil his responsibilities as both mother and father after his wife’s early death.

This is a personal play.  It is a simple play.  Two people in a small space, defined by an intimate audience, with a few props indicating a journey.  On the wall behind them, a faint image of a road map.  On one side, hardly noticeable, a thin stream of sand falls as if out of the sky, creating a small growing pile – perhaps the sands of time.

This is not a political play – yet it has much to teach us about Aboriginal disadvantage, Aboriginal family culture, the need to be ‘on country’, and Aboriginal strength and resilience.  Tony Briggs performs ‘Dad’ with all the complexities – of humour combined with the need to protect, advise and sometimes direct his daughter as she grows up.  And accept her adult role in this journey.

Katie Beckett, in performing ‘Tash’ is more than an actor.   She has created this play from her own experience (her own mother died when she was five), and in following through with some two years’ development work led by Rachael Maza and Jane Bodie, Katie is  in herself the very example of strength and resilience.  In the words, and especially in the silences on stage, you feel the reality of her life and the truth of what she wrote in the program:

“After my Dad’s last heart attack … I was so scared of losing him that I wanted to give him something so he knows how special he is and what he means to me…he is my dad, my mum, and at times my best friend.  This is a story of unconditional love.”

For me, personally, the issue in the play of getting lost on the way from Ipswich, near Brisbane (where Dad had moved to find work when he married) to Dad’s home country near Goodooga is very understandable.  Tash, of course, has grown up to be a city person, depending on pre-planned organisation of activities and maps on her mobile phone.

I have often travelled and bushwalked in Central Queensland, and only recently followed some of the confusing routes referred to in the play.

Here’s a copy of my road map covering the most straightforward route - if you can work it out - about 750 kilometres from Brisbane to Goodooga.

Brisbane is the capital of Queensland on the east coast (upper right).
Goodooga is on the very edge of the map at bottom left.
Which Way Home Map 1

But Dad wants to go via Mungindi and Lightning Ridge.  So here’s another section of map for that area.

Goodooga is north-west (up and to the left) of Lightning Ridge
Mungindi is in Map 1, at the right end of the straight section of the NSW / Queensland border
just above the word 'Brisbane' in the caption.

If, like Tash, you thought it’s easy – just drive west – then you have another think coming. You want to go to Lightning Ridge to dig up opal and  make a fortune, and to meet up with the old-style country singers and storytellers.  I know because I and my wife did exactly that (not the fortune bit!).

But the back roads, and even the ‘main’ roads, may not be in good condition – they were flooded when I was last there – and being sure of your direction in flat country with brigalow scrub and no mobile phone signal can be just what the doctor didn’t order.

But Dad knows the traditional way – follow the finches.  That’s the Zebra finches who will always take you to water.  I know them from bushwalking in Central Australia.

But for me the moment of recognition that we were in Dad’s country in the play was when I heard the sound of the peaceful dove, such a small plump bird always pecking around the mulga or the spinifex  – just a few repeated notes that sound out across all that remote country of northern Australia.  Though I may not be Aboriginal, it’s the peaceful dove that tells me when I’m home.

And that’s where Tash’s Dad’s ashes belong.




© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Prize Fighter by Future D. Fidel

Prize Fighter by Future D. Fidel. Presented by Belvoir in association with Sydney Festival: La Boite Theatre Company and Brisbane Festival at Belvoir Street Theatre, January 6-22, 2017.

Director – Todd MacDonald
Dramaturg – Chris Kohn; Designer – Bill Haycock; Lighting Designer – David Walters;  Composer and Sound Designer – Felix Cross;  Movement and Fight Director – Nigel Poulton
Cast:
Pacharo Mzembe - Isa;  Zindzi Okenyo – Rita / Nyota / Sofia;  Thuso Lekwape – Kadogo / Tim; Margi Brown-Ash - Luke;  Gideon Mzembe – Moses / Matete / Jeff Wilkie;  Kenneth Ransom – Alaki / Old Man / Wayne Durain

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 21

I’m glad that Prize Fighter only ran for a little over an hour because the story is too horrific for longer exposure.
  
Future D. Fidel writes “The International Rescue Committee (IRC) has reported a death toll of 5.4 million Congolese since 1996.  That’s a quarter of Australia’s current population.  The war in Congo has created hundreds of child soldiers and resulted in a high level of rape of young and old women.  Prize Fighter is a mythical story inspired by personal experiences of these wars, and resonates around trauma from family loss and motivations of the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Fidel means his own personal experiences, forced to flee to Tanzania with some family members around 1997, learning later that his mother had been killed in Congo, fortunately re-united with his sister through Red Cross contact in 2002, and finally both accepted by Australia in 2005 after 8 years in a refugee camp.  Todd MacDonald in his Director’s Note writes: “Part of this work reflects Future’s story, his history.  Part is a fiction but the stories are real and everything in this work derived from real situations that Future experienced directly or indirectly.”

That the stories are real hits straight home as 10-year-old Isa (pronounced ‘Eesah’) sees his father Alaki shot dead, his sister Nyota raped and then shot to fall on her father’s body.  His brother Moses had already been sent to another village by his father, after teaching Isa the rudiments of boxing – to defend himself.  Isa has the choice of being killed at this point, or staying alive as a soldier for the very militia who murdered his father and sister, hoping he will find his brother some day.
 
Ironically in Australia he becomes a champion by having to learn “to box, not fight”; but we understand that his memories of what he has done and what was done to him in Congo are his driving force – until he learns of his brother’s recent death, kept secret from him until he has won the championship, and the money which he needed for his plan to bring Moses to safety here.

The basic set is a boxing ring, at Luke’s Gym, which transforms seamlessly into scenes in Congo, the refugee camp in Tanzania, even the interview with Australian Immigration officials, through to the championship fight, all done with cleverly managed lighting and sound design and costume changes.

The effect is at times and sometimes all at once exciting, terrifying and deeply depressing.  But theatrically spot on.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: The Encounter by Complicite (UK)

The Encounter, inspired by the book Amazon Dreaming by Petru Popescu.  Complicite (UK) at Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, January 18-28, 2017.

Director – Simon McBurney; Co-Director – Kirsty Housley
Performer – Richard Katz
Designer – Michael Levine; Sound – Gareth Fry with Pete Malkin; Lighting – Paul Anderson; Projection – Will Duke; Sound Supervisor – Guy Coletta; Sound Engineers – Amir Sherhan, Laura Hammond, Samantha Broomfield

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 21

It’s not possible to see and hear (in your stereo headset) The Encounter without your mind becoming absolutely engaged in philosophical questions about the nature of human culture.

The ‘performer’ demonstrates the sound equipment before the main story begins, to show us that we cannot actually know which is live through his microphone and which is recorded.  He develops this into an argument that all human cultures consist of memories which also cannot distinguish between what is (or was) real from fiction: that is, all cultures are based on story-telling.
 
The key issue in reviewing the story is that this philosophical position prevents us from making a distinction between knowledge gained via strict use of scientific method as against culturally held beliefs.  We may give respect to all the amazing variety of beliefs taken to be true in cultures past and present.  Does that imply that all such beliefs must have equal standing?  Is properly-done science to be taken as just the latest fashion in philosophical (which includes religious) beliefs in so-called ‘modern’ culture?

The question of the status of science becomes at one point a key concern for the central character in this memory story when he comes up against a rare Indigenous culture.

The story, told through our headsets while we watch Richard Katz apparently talking through various microphones and manipulating electronic equipment and other objects on stage (I began to suspect the whole thing is pre-recorded while he does an ‘air’ show), is based on Petru Popescu's being “mesmerised by Loren [McIntyre’s] accounts of being kidnapped by elusive tribes and of discovering the source of the giant [Amazon] river”.

The result is a highly sophisticated soundscape, cleverly made to take us imaginatively into three ‘times’:

With Loren, a real life National Geographic photographer, in 1969 attempting to prove to the outside world that a previously unknown tribe still existed in the forest (at least he thought it was untouched by grasping ‘modern’ hands);

And apparently with Katz telling us Loren’s story right now;

And apparently in Katz’s home studio a few years ago while looking after his young daughter who wants him to read her a story before she will go to sleep, at the same time as he is trying to put all the recordings together to make up the story which we are hearing about Loren.
 
Got that?

The problem philosophically for me is that the show concludes with a plea from the director, Simon McBurney, to save the Amazonian rainforest essentially only to preserve the Indigenous people in situ with their cultural beliefs.  The trouble is that we have already been alerted to not being able to know what is real and what is fiction – including McBurney’s letter being read to us in the audience, by the performer, Richard Katz.

Climate change was briefly referred to, so at least we might consider that current scientifically-strong argument for saving rainforest everywhere.  Thunder, lightning and flooding rainstorms apparently even saved Loren McIntyre, who miraculously escaped his kidnappers and the deaths they suffered by floating on an improvised raft without injury down the Mighty Amazon!  Can we believe this?

Well, apparently Popescu, after defecting to California from his position as Romania’s best-known novelist, on a trip to Amazonia met McIntyre “who shared his life story with the writer.”

Technically, the 3D audio is brilliantly done from the very beginning, with “If these voices are in the wrong ears, please turn your headset around” – not your ears – through to Katz’s position on stage in relation to a central microphone cum wifi system, sculptured to look like a head, being reflected in your ears in complete 3D.  So sounds as part of Loren’s story can seem to be heard from all around you, with lots of opportunities for unexpected shocks.  I’ve acknowledged the whole sound team for making all this work so well.

On the purely theatrical side, I think the telling of the main story could be cut by about 20 minutes.  I found myself becoming lost in the minutiae, quite often with my eyes closed rather than watching the performance, and waiting for the end – which ironically (and quite interestingly) turns out to be the beginning – the source of the Amazon seeming to represent the beginning of time and the origin of everything.  At least as the tribe concerned apparently thought about it.  A final philosophical twist.

So, my conclusion: hmmm….

The Encounter stage set while audience is taking their seats.
Central microphone stand with unit head-shaped

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Shadow House Party

Shadow House Party comprising

A KREWD Incarnate by KREWD ( founder – Bambi Valentine)
Trinculo’s Shadow by Joe Woodward (Shadow House PITS)
Ophelia’s Shadow by Lucy Matthews (Acoustic Theatre Troupe)

The Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, January 17 (preview) to 21, 2017.

Commentary by Frank McKone
January 17

KREWD and Acoustic Theatre Troupe are among the current regular reincarnations of young adult theatre companies, following a long tradition in Canberra; in these cases also incorporating rock music/theatre bands.

Usually, in the past, such groups were quite fiercely independent.  I recall, for example, Freshly Ground Theatre in 2009, Bohemian Productions around 2003, and even Elbow Theatre in 1998.  Canberra, being the city of transients, spawns new groups at the time of their young lives when the excitement of creating new work by and for their age group is a valuable contribution to our cultural life, and often triggers a career in the long-term.  Elbow’s Iain Sinclair is now an established regular director for the major companies in Sydney, just to select one example.

To keep a new small experimenting theatre group going for any length of time in Canberra is not easy financially, let alone for the other main reason – that people complete their studies here, or find employment in other places, and move on. 

It is therefore a good thing that Joe Woodward, with his strong interest in imagist and multimedia theatre, has stayed on teaching drama for so long here, after his early acting career at La Boite in Brisbane. 

While his Shadow House PITS theatre has over the years presented a number of original works, often derived from the concepts of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, on this occasion Shadow House PITS has assisted the two young companies by acting in the role of producer, arranging practical things like a venue and insurance cover.  He also provides a change in focus and depth of philosophic thinking for the second Act in this show, and a degree of mentoring and personal encouragement.

The result is a night of three quite different types of theatre, each with genuine intentions. 

In Act 2, Woodward’s “Trinculo” character finds himself thinking he is Marat about to be murdered by Charlotte Corday, and therefore (in an odd kind of way) analysing the nature of those individuals who believe they are born with a right to have power thrust upon them – up to and definitely including Donald Trump. 

The presentation of a demagogue’s type of speech (including recordings from Trump's election campaign) which Marat meditates aloud upon, and then invites members of the audience to join him around, on and even in his bath and raise questions for discussion, is a model of theatre which questions the relationship between actor (as himself acting a role), the role he acts, and the audience who participate in the act (partly as if relating to him, the actor, and partly to the character Marat), while the rest of us watch and react to a theatre experience.

A KREWD Incarnate in Act 1 has already begun something of this process, beginning with actors in character as humanoid animals, inviting us to join them in the acting space and act out our responses to them each individually during the half hour as we arrive before the second section of the work begins.  Here we remain as audience seeing the animals perform their routine roles (in both sections using very loud largely rap-based recorded music) as humans whose behaviours are socially determined.

I found the idea in theory interesting, but theatrically I needed a lot of patience to maintain the interest in practice.

Then I found the same problem with the final act, which was a very interesting work, in a kind of rock-opera form, beginning with the point in Hamlet where he discovers Ophelia is being buried and her brother Laertes confronts him, and then flashbacking to explore how Ophelia reached the point of suicide.  The effect was to make a new play in which Ophelia is the central character.

However I found that the work needs a great deal of trimming so that the drama moves along more grippingly.

But finally, a very important aspect of both companies’ work in Acts 1 and 3 was to demonstrate the strengths especially of the young women who have devised the material and perform, as singers, musicians, in movement and voice often with great power, confidence and authority.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: 6D (Twice as good as 3D) by The Listies

6D World Tour of Australia by The Listies. Who are wee?  Matthew Kelly and Richard Higgins.

Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, The Q Theatre, Thursday, January 12, 2017 – Saturday, January 14, 2017

Reviewed by Frank McKone [Sorry about the mess on this page, but this is sort of how the theatre looked by the end of the show]
January 13

“Stop Laughing – this is serious” is my trope today.  In my dinosaur days I would have said ‘theme’.  I bet ‘trope’ is not listed in The Listies’ recent Penguin publication: Ickypedia: A Dictionary of Disgusting New Words.  But it should be because, as my 1981 Macquarie Dictionary explains, ‘trope’ is no more than a smart-aleck rhetorical twist or ‘turn’ (Gk trópos), “a phrase, sentence, or verse formerly interpolated in a liturgical text [merely] to amplify or embellish”.

I think since 1981 ‘trope’ has splashed itself across the language like snot.  Here’s Rich
demonstrating spraying snot

all over Matt at first, but very soon afterwards all over the suitably disgusted LoL “Kidults” from age 4 months to about a million in the audience at The Q at 2pm last Friday.  The show began with snot, reprised snot near the end, and finished with high-powered leaf blowers unrolling and projecting 500 sheet rolls of toilet paper in festoons of metaphoric poo all over the audience.

It was impossible to stop laughing, but whatever happened to my serious theme?

Even in this photo, captioned The Least silly picture Rich and Matt have ever been in, snapped by Max Milne they don’t look very serious.

But their work as creators and performers is in fact highly skilled as theatre and highly educational about language – reading and writing.  If you would like to check through my 20 years of reviews of children’s theatre (at www.frankmckone2.blogspot.com) you’ll see that I have been crucially concerned about three kinds of shows.  There’s a sort of continuum from the worst end – shows at the children – through reasonable shows which are a bit condescending for the children, to the best educational learning about ideas – including about the nature of theatre itself – in shows which are with the children.

Richard Higgins and Matthew Kelly are right at the best end.  They teach about reading, writing, spelling and story-telling consummately, they link everything they say and do to the experiences of their – modern – audience (including transference between the physical world and the world of the internet), and they open up the process of acting (better than Brecht :-) so that the children absorb the difference between reality and fiction.

So now you can stop laughing: this is really serious, and a great achievement by The Listies in 6D which is Twice as Good as 3D.

2017: The Season by Nathan Maynard

The Season by Nathan Maynard.  Elder/Cultural Adviser: Jim Everett. 
Presented by Tasmania Performs and Sydney Opera House at Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, January 10-15, 2017

Creative Team:
Director – Isaac Drandic; Dramaturg – Peter Matheson; Designer – Richard Roberts; Lighting – Rachel Burke; Sound – Ben Grant
Cast:
Kelton Pell – Ben Duncan, head of the family; Tammy Anderson – Stella Duncan, family matriarch; Nazaree Dickerson – Lou Duncan, Ben and Stella’s daughter; Luke Carroll – Ritchie Duncan, Ben and Stella’s son; James Slee – Clay Duncan, Lou’s son; Lisa Maza – Auntie Marlene, Stella’s sister; Trevor Jamieson – Neil Watson, Ben’s arch rival / Senior Ranger Richard Hadgeman

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 12

This Sydney Festival has been a winner for me. My first three shows are highly valuable experiences, one French Canadian (Anthropologies Imaginaires), one European (Measure for Measure), both out of the box; and the third, Indigenous Australian – The Season : in its special way even more exciting.

I must first admit a potential bias on my part.  My parents were £10 Poms paid for by the Australian Government in the mid-1950s to increase the population and prevent Australia perishing.  Arriving as a young teenager I had no idea that the various Australian governments had been doing everything they could for almost 200 years to perish the original inhabitants.
 
My capacity to appreciate the continuing existence over thousands of years of Aboriginal mutton-birders on Dog Island near Flinders Island in Bass Strait, between Tasmania and the Mainland, with family names like Duncan and Watson, is inevitably limited.  Having just seen the other two plays (reviewed here January 10 and 11) directed my understanding further away, outside the culture of The Season.

So, simplistically, the annual mutton-birding season seemed to me like the gathering of a family at Christmas.  Will this year be peace and goodwill to all? How did things go last year?  What about next year?
 
At this level, these modern-day Aboriginal people have to deal with modern-day issues.   Lou’s son Clay has the same surname as his grandparents.  Ben and Stella live in Launceston in Tasmania.  Lou and Clay live in Melbourne.  Clay is fixated in the belief that his father will magically appear on the beach, and lights a fire to guide him in.  The wind gets up, the fire escapes – yet dealing as a family with such imminent danger sees them resolve differences.
 
We, watching, are relieved – but we can’t help but wonder what will happen next time.  The joint management of the national park means the Aboriginal ranger will have to insist on conservation and heritage rules being obeyed by people who have successfully managed their land in their traditional ways from time immemorial.

Sex, alcohol and strong personalities all play their roles.  Which sister rules the roost?  How can a Duncan love a Watson, especially that reprobate Neil?  How long can Ben keep up the workload in pulling up and preparing a commercial quantity of birds as age creeps on apace?  Can Ritchie be trusted to take the lead?  And can Stella honestly accept that her daughter will never fix Clay’s need for a father figure now that Lou has realised that she really is a lesbian?   That word ‘Gay’, Stella repeats over and over, trying to get used to the idea.

But there’s something about the atmosphere in this play, surely emanating directly from the life experience of the writer, from the Maynard family, which escapes me and my European assumptions.  There is a tremendous depth of humour built into even the most difficult points of transgression between family members.  This was not a matter of the play being a comedy (there’s my genre-ism surfacing awkwardly).  It’s not just a matter of how this particular family gets along.

The sense of humour is the core of culture.  Watching, from the outside as I inevitably must, I felt the wonder of these people who belong in that place.  Their humour shows how they belong.  And so the play is wonderfully funny.  Thousands of years’ worth of funny.

Then I think back to my European culture and feel the biting intellect of Shakespeare coming through that Measure for Measure, and the sharp satire of colonial academicalism in Gabriel Dharmoo’s Anthropological Imaginings – and I feel I’m missing something that happens in The Season. 

I can’t define what it is, but it’s exciting, and I feel tremendously grateful to the writer Nathan Maynard, the elders represented by Jim Everett, the designing and directing team, and all the actors who just blew our minds away.





© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare

Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare.  Cheek by Jowl (Exec Dir Eleanor Lang)  with Pushkin Theatre (Art Dir Evgeny Pisarev) (UK/Russia) at Roslyn Packer Theatre (home of Sydney Theatre Company), January 7-11, 2017.

Creative Team:
Director – Declan Donnellan; Designer – Nick Ormerod; Lighting – Sergey Skornetskiy; Composer – Pavel Akimkin; Choreographer – Irina Kashuba
Photos by Johan Persson

Cast:
Duke – Alexander Arsentyev; Isabella – Anna Khalilulina
Angelo – Andrei Kuzichev; Mariana / Mistress Overdone – Elmira Mirel
Claudio – Kiryl Dytsevich; Juliet / Francisca – Anastasia Lebedeva
Escalus – Iurii Rumiantcev; Lucio – Alexander Feklistov; Provost – Alexander Matrosov; Executioner – Ivan Litvinenko; Elbow – Nikolay Kislichenko; Barnadine – Igor Teplov; Pompey / Friar Peter – Alexey Rakhmanov
 
Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 11

I found myself unwilling to accept the style of this strongly Continental European theatrical form until perhaps halfway through its 110 uninterrupted minutes.  But the fault was mine.  Measure for Measure, indeed.

Shakespeare’s intellect is revealed in this production taking us far beyond what superficially seems to be a romance in which a moral dilemma is resolved to provide satisfaction all round – with three couples dancing happily: the put-upon Isabella with the Duke of reformed understanding; the illegitimate lovers Claudio and Juliet, and their baby; the Duke’s deputy, the unreconstructed patriarchal sexual predator, ironically named Angelo, with Mariana, the woman who secretly took Isabella’s place for Angelo to rape.

Using an expressionist approach drawn from the traditions established by such giants of European theatre as Bertolt Brecht and Jerzy Grotowski, the comedy of misplaced justice and governmental power becomes a forensic exposé, highly significant right now in Australian politics.  The dancing at the end is tinged with dark edges, even for the unmarried couple now with their child who have received proper justice.  What guarantee do even they have of genuine humane treatment as governments change?

Centrelink’s threatening form of letters making often untrue debt payment demands comes to mind, among other political issues this week.

By the time the play had ended I was thoroughly engaged among an audience giving rousing appreciative extended applause – at 4 in the afternoon, what’s more.

Reflecting on the experience, I see that it was the Brechtian ‘alienation effect’ that kept my empathy for the characters at bay.  This was done by the whole cast moving as a group in highly choreographed formations to different locations, even including from downstage left and right apparently inspecting us in the audience.  At points, one character would be left standing as the others moved on – the key figures of the Duke, the wealthy Escalus, the Friar Peter with a spare cloak for the Duke’s disguise, Angelo, and the unfortunate trainee nun Isabella, sister of Claudio, condemned to death for his illicit relationship with Juliet. And so our focus was heightened on the central characters in a complex legalistic moral argument, as Angelo tries to force himself upon Isabella, claiming that if she allows him to have his way, he will (acting on behalf of the disguised apparently absent Duke) let her brother live.

The clever aspect of the design and directing, as the Duke as Friar John watches events from the point of view of an ordinary citizen, was to maintain the focus objectively on the moral argument until the very end – the alienation effect – better even than Brecht himself had done.  For example, if there’s one scene you will remember from Mother Courage and her Children, it is Katrin being shot as she drums to alert the village below of an impending attack.  We identify purely emotionally with her and the villagers, and against the soldiers at this point.  The ‘alienation effect’, of thinking abstractly about the power situation, has flown away – and Katrin’s mother seems nothing but hard-hearted in the final scene.

I suspect, though I don’t think anyone can say how Shakespeare’s audience saw the original production of Measure for Measure, that he would be pleased to see how Declan Donnellan has kept us on the edge as the couples dance into the blackout.  Claudio and Juliet are engrossed in each other, but maybe not wanting to think about their future reality.  Marianne takes Angelo in hand and makes him dance, like the uncomprehending puppet he really is.  She wants him for her own purposes.  And the Duke’s insistent expectation that Isabella, the woman who has had to twist and turn against the forces of overwhelming power, will now easily marry him, leaves her in shock.  She hesitates to dance, and only does so on notice – though he doesn’t seem to notice her doubts.

The music is jolly, and we all found ourselves clapping in time and cheering for the third ‘curtain’ call – by then celebrating both the high quality of the acting and design, appreciating the practitioners at work – and recognising the intellectual stamina in maintaining a production to match Shakespeare’s best intentions.

Anna Khalilulina and Kiryl Dytsevich
as Isabella and her brother Claudio
in Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare
Cheek by Jowl with Pushkin Theatre Moscow

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Anthropologies Imaginaires by Gabriel Dharmoo

Anthropologies Imaginaires by Gabriel Dharmoo (Canada).  Sydney Festival at the Seymour Centre, Reginald Theatre, January 9-11, 13-15, 2017.

Script and Musical Composition: Gabriel Dharmoo
Voice and Performance: Gabriel Dharmoo
Video/Sound Collaborators: Ménad Kesraoui, Paul Neudorf, James O'Callaghan
Actors (on video) as "specialists": Alexandrine Agostini, Daniel Anez, Florence Blain Mbaye, Luc-Martial Dagenais and Catherine Lefrançois.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 10

How to describe this exhibition in the “Memory Museum” is my first challenge.  It’s essentially a soundscape which at first is intriguing, being created by a spotlit Dharmoo live on stage in front of a blank screen from which emanate mysterious background noises which may or may not be related to the live sounds.  Weird rather than dramatic at this stage.

The audience of about 40 sat waiting, politely, unsure how to respond.

Fortunately, completely serendipitously, I realised I had two anthropologists sitting next to me (from ANU and Macquarie Uni).  They had been talking of David Williamson’s Heretic, of Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman.  I had reviewed that play (Canberra Times: Sydney Theatre Company at the Canberra Theatre Centre, Wednesday June 12, 1996.  Directed by Wayne Harrison.  Available at www.frankmckone2.blogspot.com) and knew the arguments about anthropologists making ludicrous assumptions about “primitive” societies, and being taken for a ride by the not so naïve “subjects” they interviewed.

Dharmoo’s “exhibits” were “mouth sounds”, perhaps forms of music, perhaps proto-languages from a series of rare populations, each with a very odd name.  Real or fictional?  We could not be sure as apparently academic experts appeared on screen giving their interpretations of these societies based on their cultures as expressed in their sounds.

At last one drought-stricken society’s ceremonial singing under water (Dharmoo bubbling and spluttering with his face in a bowl of real water) gave the game away.  Our laughter took over and became the dominant feature of the drama from this point.  It was such fun be fooled so cleverly.  My anthropology neighbours laughed loudest.  Dharmoo finally, in his role as a charismatic “primitive” persuaded us to participate in a kind of part-singing/mouth-sound-making session.

Through the laughter a theme began to develop, which could be seen to diverge. On the one hand we found ourselves enjoying making fun of the pretensions of “Western” style anthropology – made even funnier for those who spoke French, though my academic neighbours said the subtitles were pretty good.  As we all knew, especially all the academics in this audience at Sydney University’s Seymour Centre, French speaking anthropologists are the most pretentious.  I gather, too, the joke is particularly humorous in Canada, at least in English speaking regions.

But a twist came when the names and qualifications of the “specialists” appeared on screen.  One was no better than the worst of all politicians – a seriously condescending and dour faced commentator earlier in the “exhibition”, she turned out to be the Minister for Assimilation.  The implications for Dharmoo’s home country, Canada, are hardly less damning than for any number of our politicians here in Australia when we consider the attempts to “breed out” Indigenous people and devalue their cultures over the past two or more centuries.  For me the laughter was brought to a sudden and upsetting halt at that point.
 
But it was this point that gave the drama strength.
 
Sound and video design and editing, and the acting on screen, matched the intensity and originality of Dharmoo’s performance, which was quite extraordinary, ranging from harmonic throat singing through to an amazing array of clicks, blurps, implosives and explosives, all accompanied by physical forms, movement and rhythms far beyond what I thought any normal person could be expected to display.

For my first show from the 2017 Sydney Festival, Anthropologies Imaginaires was a terrific lead-in – exactly why we should bring in acts from other cultures to show us new artistic possibilities.

© Frank McKone, Canberra