2017: Platform Paper No 50, Currency House.

Restless Giant: Changing Cultural Values in Regional Australia by Lindy Hume.  Platform Paper No 50, Currency House, February 2017.

Commentary by Frank McKone
February 23


“The Regional Australia Institute, the Canberra-based independent research and advocacy body for regional Australia, uses the following definition in which Darwin and Hobart would count as regional centres:

"Regional Australia includes all of the towns, small cities and areas that lie beyond the major capital cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Canberra).

"This definition will not satisfy everyone it seeks to encompass”, writes Lindy Hume.

I suppose I’m pleased that Canberra is nowadays a “major” capital city rather than the “regional centre” which was how it looked to me from my acting/directing role in distant Broken Hill Repertory Theatre, with Canberra Repertory Theatre and Canberra Philharmonic Society vaguely in my sights in 1965.  So I went to Sydney for a bit of academic study, then moved out of Sydney to the Wyong Drama Group 1967 to 1973. 

Finally arriving in Canberra revealed, in 1974, Reid House from which new theatre alongside Rep and Philo (including Tertiary Accredited Drama in the secondary school system by 1976) grew into a myriad of often short-lived companies and the complex scaffolding of today, incorporating Queanbeyan’s The Q and all the participants in the annual CAT Awards from an ever-increasing region.  This year the CATs were awarded in Dubbo, some 400 kilometres away, and the company has dropped its original title – Canberra Area Theatre awards – in favour of just plain CATs.  With an 800 kilometre diameter, surely this makes Canberra and its region “major”, now.  With the blessing of T S Eliot no doubt.

But there’s still a difference between Canberra and the others: Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.  Though our population is reaching towards 400,000, we still do not have the same kind of top quality tertiary level drama or dance training institutions here (despite many valiant attempts) – and even the School of Music has struggled, in my view ever since it was taken over by the Australian National University.  Nor do we have a long-term full-time fully professional theatre company, despite the past successes of the now-defunct theatre-in-education The Jigsaw Company (1976 – 2014) among several others with shorter lives, such as Women on a Shoestring and the recently formed Aspen Island Theatre Company.   Maybe Canberra fits somewhere between those other capitals and Hobart and Darwin.

Of course, in visual arts and literature, and even in movie-making in recent times, Canberra has been one of the giants, but our theatre is still very much in the restless stage.  Hume refers to Lyndon Terracini’s A Regional State of Mind—Making art outside Metropolitan Australia saying “it was, and ten years on is still, an inspiring and prescient read”.  Terracini “celebrated what is now widely known as the Culture of Place, and invited us to imagine a great Cultural Pyramid whose ‘summit’—Australia’s professional companies— is supported by a broad base, the grassroots community activity flourishing across regional and urban Australia. I revisit these concepts in the context of the new leadership, inspiration and innovation I see all around me, and the rise of a new, more assertive ‘regional state of mind’." 

And, in fact, we could easily say that Hobart and Darwin in some ways seem more assertive than Canberra.

But it’s also true that Hume notes the leadership and inspiration of one-time Canberrans, such as Elizabeth Rogers who was Director of Canberra Arts Marketing for more than six years and is now CEO of Regional Arts NSW, and Lyn Wallis who was Artistic Director of The Jigsaw Company for four years, and now runs HotHouse Theatre in Wodonga.  Also quoted is someone I might call a Canberra original restless giant: “Mikel Simic, better known as the flamboyant Mikelangelo of Black Sea Gentlemen fame, recently relocated from Melbourne to the high country outside Cooma:

“It’s not airy fairy to say that the natural environment changes the way you function as a human being, it has an effect on you as an artist. The river, the sky, are characters in my work, they’re more than just a background setting.”

Lindy Hume has also made the move from big city life as “one of Australia’s prolific festival and opera directors” to the far south coast near Cobargo, “where I served for several years as Chair of South East Arts”, saying “I wanted to write on this subject because I sense a moment of shimmering potential, an alignment of the great forces of Australia’s psyche—our regional and our city cultural identities. It’s a vast and challenging notion, and it’s thrilling to consider.”

It’s her enthusiasm for changing the perspective of artists (not only theatre practitioners who are her main interest) away from the conventions and expectations of artistic life in cities like Sydney or Melbourne that is the key to this Platform Paper.  The point was made by poets like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson more than 100 years ago and the distinction between the ‘big smoke’ and ‘the bush’ is still a standard concept in Australians’ thinking, even if we do use ‘metro’ and ‘regional’ instead. 

And I still find myself remembering, as I review shows in Sydney’s Roslyn Packer Theatre, at Belvoir, and even at the more local small theatres like Eternity Theatre in Darlinghurst or Ensemble Theatre in Kirribilli, the community spirit of searching all over town for the correct Japanese sword to use in Broken Hill Rep’s The Teahouse of the August Moon, and finding the exact model of Jeep way down in an open-cut mine (with a loose gear lever and no brakes – but I still drove it up and onto the stage).  While nowadays I’m impressed not only by the acoustics and sightlines of The Q in Queanbeyan, but also by the friendly, indeed homely atmosphere there, even compared with nearby Canberra.

In the end, Lindy Hume’s essay is not just a bureaucratic plea for better funding for the arts in regional areas (though she even manages to praise ex-Arts Minister Brandis:  “One of the most highly valued initiatives is the Federal Government’s Regional Arts Fund (RAF): $12.5m over four years targeted ‘to activities that will have long-term cultural, economic and social benefits.’ RAF is delivered on behalf of the Federal Ministry for the Arts by RAA and its member state organisations. Another is Catalyst, the controversial Brandis-created funding instrument, which has proven an unexpected boon to regional artists, with 37% of $23 million ($8.5 million) of total grant monies awarded to regional projects as at May 2016. Time will determine the impact and longevity of this new funding avenue.”)

The essence of her contribution is to say, of living in the country:

“It’s where I come for nourishment and escape from the ambient noise of the world. My experience, and that of many Australian artists in my community, reflects Don Watson’s, in his book The Bush: travels in the heart of Australia:

"As much as the grime, in the city there is the din of predictable opinion, especially one’s own opinion, which week by week, year by year, becomes a sort of metronome sounding at some distance from whatever remains of a sense of actual self.

“In summary, the diversity of my experience has created a framework for reflection. I write as an artistic director, an advocate for excellence in the arts in regional Australia, but primarily from the personal perspective of an artist who chooses to live and work in regional Australia. Mine is both a passionate appeal and a challenge, in this time of cultural flux, to explore the abundant possibilities of imagining our national cultural landscape in a different way, as an integrated metro-regional ecosystem that truly reflects the adventurous and enterprising contemporary identity of ‘the heart of Australia’.”

So perhaps that’s where Canberra fits: as a metro-regional or in the latest vernacular, announced at today’s launch, ‘hyper-local’ ecosystem reflecting the adventurous and enterprising contemporary identity of the heart of Australia.

I certainly hope so.  The launch here today, with Julian Hobba (Artistic Director, Aspen Island Theatre Company); Mikelangelo (alone, without the Black Sea Gentlemen); Kate Fielding  (Director, Regional Arts Australia); Karilyn Brown (Chief Executive Officer, Performing Lines - producers of new and transformative performance) joining Lindy Hume for a panel discussion, which went 45 minutes over the allotted time, was very encouraging.

Perhaps the essential theme was that ‘hyper-local’ means that excellent work should flow around the nation beyond its local place of generation, a new structural network of artistic creation rather than the pyramid of old.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: The Mystery of Love & Sex by Bathsheba Doran

The Mystery of Love & Sex by Bathsheba Doran.  Darlinghurst Theatre Company at Eternity Theatre, Sydney, February 10 – March 12, 2017.

Director – Anthony Skuse; Production Designer – Emma Vine; Lighting Designer – Verity Hampson; Sound Designer – Alistair Wallace.

Cast:  Contessa Treffone – Charlotte; Thuso Lekwape – Jonny; Deborah Galanos – Lucinda; Nicholas Papademetriou – Howard.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 19

The Mystery of Love and Sex is a romantic comedy, strictly following the traditional structure of girl meets boy, vicissitudes threaten the relationship, but love conquers all in the end.  With an interesting twist.

We see only four characters on stage. 

 New York Jew, Howard, with all the conventional mannerisms and mother fixation that Jewish men are all supposed to have.  He writes crime fiction for a living, in which the characters he creates break all the modern politically correct attitudes towards women, black people and homosexuals.  Father of Charlotte and subject of literary research by Jonny.
 Southern Belle, Lucinda, mother of Charlotte, who remembers exactly the last time – years ago – when she and Howard had sex, because he broke off part way through having forgotten a phone number to do with his writing career.  She now (Charlotte and Jonny are young adults in college) drinks and smokes, undermines Howard in public and wants to escape.
 Charlotte (white) and Jonny (black) became friends at the age of nine.  We see them at college age, and then in their mid-twenties, when the twist in their story becomes revealed and resolved behind the scenes at the marriage ceremony – in which Charlotte is marrying a woman and Jonny is in a regular relationship with a man.

So Jonny becomes Charlotte’s best man at the wedding, despite all the misunderstandings, including a physical fight between Howard and Jonny, when Jonny’s literary research is published online and reveals the nature of Howard’s fictional characters – implying that Howard is sexist, racist and homophobic.

Does it all work on stage? 

Not entirely for me, but this may be because I have just reviewed another unusual romantic comedy, the new play by David Williamson, Odd Man Out (on this blog February 9, 2017).  He, like Bathsheba Doran, has made his play about an issue of modern concern – the treatment of people with Asperger’s Syndrome – but whereas I could characterise Odd Man Out as an ‘empathetic comedy’ which brought me to tears, of both sympathy and joy in the resolution of the couple’s relationship, I didn’t have this kind of feeling at the end of The Mystery of Love & Sex.

I think Bathsheba Doran wanted me to feel this, about the mistreatment of both Charlotte and Jonny – even from when they were nine and other children rejected them as their sexual orientations became apparent (even if not to themselves until after they had time apart in their twenties).  I think the difference between the plays is in the writing of the dialogue and the intentions of the authors.

Williamson presented the surrounding family and friends of his woman character, Alice, as Doran did for Charlotte, and a stylised form of staging was used in both plays.  Both plays were also performed in small theatres – Eternity and the Ensemble – which made for direct close-up communication with the audiences, and characters in both plays on occasions spoke directly to us in telling the background story.

But Williamson kept our focus tightly on Alice and Ryan, gradually building our understanding of the issue and allowing us to identify strongly with the thoughts and feelings of both throughout the vicissitude phases of the relationship.  We wanted them to find a way to come together, even though when they finally achieved success we knew that the future would never be easy for them.

Charlotte’s and Jonny’s story became split too far into its several elements – Lucinda’s needs as a woman in a conventional heterosexual relationship; Howard’s seeing himself as a victim, being Jewish, similar in his mind to Jonny’s situation as a black man; Jonny’s understandable fear of coming out as a gay man, even to Charlotte when she wanted sex with him; Jonny’s determination to expose truth as an academic; Charlotte’s confusion about her feelings towards Jonny at the same time as feeling attraction and love for other women, as well as her need to be reconciled with her mother and father.

Though there were very funny scenes, especially centred on Howard’s Woody Allen-like constant need to explain everything, and the very cleverly performed nude scenes by Contessa Treffone and Thuso Lekwape, there were other scenes which dropped out of comedy into what we seemed to be expected to take as straight reality.  Howard’s and Jonny’s violence seemed quite outside either of their characters (even though in theory this might be explained by their internalised fears), while the bickering between Lucinda and Howard, for example, turned into a different side-story of their bitterness which also had to be resolved – at least to some degree in a sweet tickling episode between mother and daughter and by Howard's giving his daughter the perfect wedding dress – so that by the end of the play Charlotte's relationships with Lucinda and her father could both end on a positive note.

So the play ends up being too ‘bitty’, and the dialogue too often a kind of display – whereas Williamson kept to a single thread which allowed the dialogue to be felt more deeply.  Doran’s play kept me at a distance, while Williamson’s drew me in.

The symbolism of the off-level set and an upside down tree was right for this out-of-kilter play, and so was the choreographed style of acting.  Though Eternity is a great little theatre, reminiscent of The Q in Queanbeyan, its acoustics struggled a bit with the women’s high-pitched loud Southern accents bouncing around, while at the other end of the scale the soft rounded tones of the self-deprecating gay descendant of slaves – Jonny in much of the first act – could often be hard to follow.

So though I enjoyed the performance and certainly recommend this production and the play for presenting a different take on some of the mysteries of love and sex, perhaps because I am not an American I missed a quieter approach with more depth of humour that could bring out the emotions more fully.  Of course, Bathsheba Doran is not herself American, having grown up and been educated in Britain, but is now based in New York.  So for a different point of view than mine, please read the New York Times review by Charles Isherwood at

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/theater/review-the-mystery-of-love-and-sex-looks-at-identity-and-secrets-too.html?_r=0



© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín.  Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1, January 18 – February 25, 2017.

Director – Imara Savage;  Designer – Elizabeth Gadsby;  Lighting – Emma Valente;  Composer and Sound Design – Max Lyandvert.

Performed by Alison Whyte.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 9

I would not normally begin by mentioning that I was surprised when this expert and experienced actor lost her lines – three times by my count.  Perhaps it was just one of those nights that all actors fear, but I think there are deeper reasons in this play and its production.

The idea of Mary, the mother of Christ, telling her story of her son and what really happened when he was executed by the Romans (with the support of the Jewish Elders) is clearly a great beginning point for a significant play.  But in this production, Tóibín’s script makes Mary into a modern-sounding middle-class woman.

In addition, this over-grand set and sound design, encompassing a character speaking in an over-poetical style, at times declamatory, makes for inappropriate over-blown theatre.  Though a few young audience members felt the need to produce a whoop and whistle or two, because that is how all plays are to be concluded nowadays, most clapped without very much enthusiasm, as did I, even though I felt some chagrin considering the hard work that had gone into the acting.

The title – Testament – would have been enough for me to suggest the importance of what Mary has to say.  But opening to a cathedral-like backdrop behind Ms Whyte dressed up as a statue of Mary cradling a child, with a spinning halo of flashing lights in an apse sculptured by electric flickering candles made the subject of the play obvious – though, indeed, I was not able to be sure if this representation of the Virgin might not have meant to be satirical.

I thought not, though, when Ms Whyte divested herself in a literally off-hand manner – the plastic statue’s hands were left scattered on the stage floor along with the dress and the toy sheep which had seemed to be the Christ-child.  Now in bare feet, loose singlet top and gym pants, Mary tells us why the modern vinyl chair is forever not to be sat upon and will never be sat upon again, and we begin to understand that her son, never named except as ‘my son’, will never come back again.

There is also a large cardboard box, of the kind used for packing when moving house, with no apparent purpose until the end of the play, when Mary shows a momentary feeling for the rich gown her son had once worn, when he was speaking to the assembled crowds, as she stuffs the remains of her own statue into the box, tapes it up with very modern packing tape, to more or less kick it off-stage.

So, as you can imagine, the symbolism is very obvious, emphasised by blackouts between sections of her story, an ever-changing array of lighting effects (including one where we, in the audience, were blinded by massively bright floodlighting), and accompanied by sound effects, most of which seemed to purport to be background crowd noises – increasingly ugly as the crucifixion approached.

No wonder this Mary felt the need to declaim so much – to tell her story at us, rather than to and for us.  It felt to me as if she were in a court, defending what she knew to be the truth about what had really happened against some accusing lawyer.  But the problem for me was that this made me feel as if I were her accuser – as if I believed the story of the Virgin Mary as the Church, that is the Catholic Church, had made her appear to be.

So I got that point, but I missed the feeling – of sympathy and understanding for an ordinary woman from a struggling household wanting to do her best for her son, who turned out to be a charismatic con man instead of a sensible ordinary working man like his father.  Instead of staging her story in this way, I think Tóibín’s playscript – even despite the diverging complexities which would inevitably be confusing – would have worked far more powerfully without the theatricality.

I saw a woman going through a life in which her love for her child is tragically destroyed.  She has only an empty space and her memories.  I see her in a warm light, seated on a rough wooden bench, across from the other one – the  empty one – talking to us personally, as if privately, about her life and what happened to her son.  She wants us to believe her, not the gossip we may have heard or the stories made up by the people who were taken in by her son’s silliness.  Her story is mainly quiet explanation of what she knows to be the truth.

Though my production would give little work for a lighting designer and maybe for some sound at the beginning and the end, the stage designer would need only to ensure that this woman’s world was kept enclosed in that intimate little pool of light while the director would work closely and intensely with her actor on expressing each of the myriad feelings Mary experiences as she remembers, tells us and explains to us.  In keeping with much of Tóibín’s language, I hear an Irish accent and intonation patterns as she speaks. 

Then, I feel, with no grandiosity, no abrupt stops and starts, no blackouts, no alarums of lights and sound, there would be no lines lost in the 80 minutes of the telling of the Testament of Mary.  And there would be a silence of appreciation for the actor, and a silence of understanding of the reality of the life of Mary, mother of Jesus.



© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Odd Man Out by David Wlliamson

Lisa Gormley as Alice, Justin Stewart Cotta as Ryan

Odd Man Out by David Williamson at Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, January 19 – March 18, 2017.

Director – Mark Kilmurry; Designer – Anna Gardiner; Lighting – Christopher Page; Sound – Alistair Wallace; Wardrobe – Renata Beslik.

Cast
Emily/Polly – Gael Ballantyne; Ryan – Justin Stewart Cotta; Carla – Rachel Gordon; Alice – Lisa Gormley; Evan/Neville – Matt Minto; Gary/Police Officer – Bill Young.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 9


Odd Man Out is a romantic comedy about mirror neurons.  Alice has them in spades (she’s a remedial physiotherapist).  Ryan’s are missing in action (he’s a theoretical astro-physicist whose head is full of equations).

In this play David Williamson unexpectedly takes us in a new direction.  The depth of characterisation, the twists and turns of social implications, are more akin to his plays of restorative justice (or ‘diversionary conferencing’) such as in Face to Face, (reviewed in The Canberra Times, March 2000 and available at www.frankmckone2.blogspot.com) than to his more usual comedies based on upsetting social conventions, like Cruise Control as a recent example (reviewed on this blog April 2014).

The play is held together – on the immediate level, as well as at a deeper metaphorical level – by Alice speaking directly to the audience, requiring Lisa Gormley to switch our attention between “frames” in a way that I think Williamson has not previously achieved.  Think of Tom in A Glass Menagerie, except that Gormley makes Alice such a vivid attractive character that we sincerely experience her laughter and the sadness in equal measure.

The romance is not lost while the real difficulties of life for a high-achieving Asperger’s syndrome sufferer and his loving partner become clearer and clearer as the play progresses.  I had tears of tragedy through tears of joy at the end.  The theatrical experience felt light even while the future for Ryan and Alice will inevitably be tough going.

Justin Stewart Cotta caught the fine points of Ryan’s excitement and unexplainable frustrations perfectly, matching Gormley laugh for laugh, blow-up for blow-up, making the romance real.

This could not happen without Williamson’s top-class dialogue, including for the surrounding cameo roles, each precisely characterised just outside our expectations of mothers, fathers, girl friends and their boy friends.

But the stage design and directing did not miss a beat.  Simplicity and directness in the intimate space of the Ensemble Theatre was the exact approach to take, with sound built in to the needs, and no more than the needs of the script.  It’s so nice (in its archaic sense of ‘precise’ as well as being ‘pleasant’) to see a production done without pretension.

So, what are mirror neurons and why are they important to know about?  They were discovered only about a decade ago in the brains of macaque monkeys.  They – the  neurons – light up when the monkeys make an action, and also when the monkeys see another animal make the same action.

Maybe, if a person’s mirror neurons are not working properly, he (more commonly than she) will not be able to ‘see’ the meaning of another person’s facial expression or body language.  The result would be a social communication disaster.

In Odd Man Out, Ryan is near the extreme end of the spectrum.  Only with great effort and dedication can Alice, from the other end of the spectrum, help him cope, especially considering how he has been isolated, vilified and bullied throughout his childhood and previous attempts at relationships. 

The play may apparently be a romantic comedy, but in the end it is a plea for non-discrimination and help for all affected by autism and Asperger’s syndrome.  If the spectrum theory is true, as seems very likely, then remember we are all somewhere along the line from Alice to Ryan. 

Let’s call it empathetic comedy, and thank David Williamson for writing it.


© Frank McKone, Canberra