2017: My Fair Lady - Opera Australia

My Fair Lady adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s play and Gabriel Pascal’s motion picture Pygmalion.  Book and Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner; Music by Frederick Loewe

Presented by Opera Australia and John Frost with Elizabeth Williams, Benjamin Lowy and Adrian Salpeter, Jean Arnold, Beckett Swede, Just for Laughs Theatricals and Glass Half Full Productions at Capitol Theatre, Sydney August 24 – October 14, 2017,

Director – Julie Andrews; Set Design – Oliver Smith; Lighting Design – Richard Pilbrow; Costume Design – Cecil Beaton, and Recreation – John David Ridge; Sound Design – Michael Waters; Make-Up Design – Rick Sharp, and Wig and Hair Design – John Isaacs.

Musical Supervisor – Guy Simpson and Musical Director – Laura Tipoki with 23-piece orchestra: Associate Concertmaster, Leader – Huy Nguyen Bui; Deputy Concertmaster, Leader – Katherine Lukey.

Anna O'Byrne as Eliza Doolittle and Reg Livermore as Alfred P Doolittle

Cast

Professor Higgins – Charles Edwards; Eliza Doolittle – Anna O’Byrne;
Alfred P Doolittle – Reg Livermore; Mrs Higgins – Robyn Nevin;
Colonel Pickering – Tony Llewellyn-Jones; Mrs Pearce – Deirdre Rubenstein
Freddy Eynsford-Hill – Joel Parnis; Mrs Eynsford-Hill – Julia McRae
Zoltan Kaparthy – Glen Hogstrom; Mrs Hopkins – Octavia Barron Martin

Butler – Michael Hart; Servants – Josh Gates, Kate Maree Hoolihan, Vanessa Rosewarne, Greta Sherriff, Sophie Viskich

‘Loverly’ Cockneys – Daniel Belle, Mark Doggett, Mat Heyward, Glen Hogstrom

Others in Ensemble: Justin Anderson, Deborah Caddy, Elisa Colla, Rodney Dobson,Tom Handley, Georgina Hopson, Erin James, Hollie James, James Lee, Allyce Martins, Holly Meegan, Scott Morris, Meredith O’Reilly, Joshua Robson, David Sirianni, Paul Whiteley, Katherine Wiles, Don Winsor

Photos by Jeff Busby

Above L: Deirdre Rubenstein as Mrs Pearce
Above R: Tony Llewellyn-Jones as Colonel Pickering
Below: Anna O'Byrne as Eliza and Charles Edwards as Prof Higgins

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 30

First things first: Opera Australia’s Capitol Theatre production of My Fair Lady is brilliantly well done. 

Credit, of course, first goes to George Bernard Shaw for refusing to allow his 1914 play Pygmalion to be turned into a ‘light opera’. As Shaw told Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehar, “A Pygmalion operetta is quite out of the question … Pygmalion is my most steady source of income: it saved me from ruin during the war, and still brings in a substantial penny every week.” Having been burned before, Shaw swore he’d never “allow a comic opera to supplant it.”  [ 15 Loverly Facts About My Fair Lady by Mark Mancini at http://mentalfloss.com/article/76684/15-loverly-facts-about-my-fair-lady ]  The burning referred to Oscar Strauss’s 1908 too popular operetta The Chocolate Soldier adapted from Shaw’s 1894 play Arms and the Man.

Second, you have to admire Alan Jay Lerner for finding the right musician, Frederick Loewe, and both of them for not being afraid of Shaw’s dialogue-based in-depth characterisation, and for writing lyrics and music that strengthened especially Eliza, Professor Higgins and Alfred P Doolittle.

Anna O’Byrne, Charles Edwards and Reg Livermore were supernovas among all the other stars, including a wonderful Mrs Higgins from Robyn Nevin.  For some audiences, opera is more about sumptuous sets, costumes and singing than thoroughly good acting.  The standing ovation at Wednesday’s largely seniors matinee happened because it all came together: busloads of oldies were as excited as perhaps we (I’m one of them) are rather less often than we used to be, as the beautiful star-filled ceiling of the old Capitol Theatre faded before the stars on stage.

And indeed the sets on that grand revolve were stunning, like the costumes, make-up and props – while the orchestra under Guy Simpson played all the ‘highs and lows’ just right.  Christopher Gatelli’s choreography ranged from tremendous athleticism to the wonderfully ironic statue-like imagery of the Ascot horse race, accompanied by 3-dimensional sound.  Julie Andrews’ directing never missed a beat both in the musical and acting sense.

I could have danced all night, except that I wasn’t on a bus.  I was driving, stuck near the airport, as reported by Keely McDonough, The Daily Telegraph, August 30, 2017 7:06 pm: ... Traffic remains very sluggish on the M5 East in Sydney’s south west after an earlier crash [at 4.30pm just after the My Fair Lady matinee finished] involving a car, a truck and a motorcycle...caused a monster traffic jam with all westbound lanes blocked and traffic backed up for 10km.

So, after thinking about why I prefer not to live in Sydney, I had time to wonder about the ending of My Fair Lady.  I’ve reviewed productions of Pygmalion three times in the past twenty years, and never had doubts about Eliza’s future at the end of the play. 

MRS HIGGINS.  The carriage is waiting, Eliza.  Are you ready?
LIZA.  Quite.  Is the Professor coming?
MRS HIGGINS.  Certainly not.  He cant behave himself in church.  He makes remarks out loud all the time on the clergyman’s pronunciation.
LIZA.  Then I shall not see you again,  Professor.  Goodbye.

Does she mean what she says? Higgins orders “by the way, Eliza, order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you?” and “a pair of reindeer gloves number eights” and a tie.  “You can choose the colour.”

Shaw’s stage instruction is [His cheerful, careless, vigorous voice shews that he is incorrigible].

LIZA. [disdainfully] bluntly tells Higgins “Number eights are too small for you....You have three new ties....Colonel Pickering prefers double Gloucester to Stilton; and you don’t notice the difference.  I telephoned Mrs Pearce this morning not to forget the ham.  What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.  [She sweeps out].

When his mother suggests Eliza is fond of Colonel Pickering, Higgins ends the play:
“Pickering!  Nonsense: she’s going to marry Freddy.  Ha ha!  Freddy!!  Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!  [He roars with laughter as the play ends].

So why, in My Fair Lady, does Eliza reappear, standing quietly watching until Higgins turns and realises she is there?  This is definitely not Shaw’s ending.

I think there must have been considerable discussion for this Australian Opera production because Charles Edwards played the Higgins character exactly, maybe even more forcefully true to Shaw’s characterisation of this impossibly insensitive self-centred man. 

Just before the lights dimmed on that final image, Edwards turned his face away, towards the audience, and put his head down – to do what?  Hide Higgins' embarrassment, when he had never been embarrassed before?  Hide his tears, as he realised he has lost her forever?  As a kind of joke, pretending to be a little boy?

According to one of the many things written about the making of My Fair Lady, Rogers and Hammerstein gave up on the project when asked by Gabriel Pascal (with whom Shaw had collaborated for the 1938 Pygmalion film), because there was no obvious love interest.  I suspect Lerner and Loewe were pressured to have Eliza come back to Higgins to satisfy that sentimental demand – the exact opposite of Shaw’s view of such a relationship, as he explains in great and often humorous detail in a postscript following the text of the film version (published by Penguin in 1941):

“Eliza has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered, if not actually bullied and beaten....  No doubt there are slavish women as well as slavish men; and women, like men, [who] admire those that are stronger than themselves.  But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things....”

Though Higgins has said, when Eliza says “Yes, you turn round and make up to me now that I’m not afraid of you, and can do without you”, that “I like you like this...now youre a tower of strength: a consort battleship”, we must recognise Shaw’s perceptiveness.  This Higgins is the example of the despot Shaw quotes in the postscript: ‘When you go to women,’ says Nietzsche ‘take your whip with you.’

Considering Anna O’Byrne’s terrific feisty Eliza and Charles Edward’s completely intransigent Higgins, his head down at the end can mean no more than her reappearing will make his life hell if she stays.  Just read the rest of the postscript to Pygmalion, and you’ll see what I mean.

But dont (that’s Shaw’s spelling) refuse to see My Fair Lady on the grounds of some feminist principles.  Opera Australia have got it right as near as right can be.

Anna O'Byrne as Eliza Doolittle

Charles Edwards as Professor Higgins

Anna O'Byrne as Eliza Doolittle and Robyn Nevin as Mrs Higgins

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Darlinghurst Theatre Company

Posted - with permission - by Frank McKone

In the spirit of our Canberra Critics' Circle Conversations, here is a mission statement from Glen Terry, Executive Producer, Darlinghurst Theatre Company, Eternity Playhouse, Sydney:

From: Glenn Terry
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2017
Subject: Darlinghurst Theatre Company


Dear people on our Media Invitation list,

I have had the opportunity to meet some of you and avail you of our company’s work. Darlinghurst Theatre Company has evolved and developed so much over the last few years and the following will give you more of an understanding of our company and the context of our work.

As you are no doubt aware, independent artists including many established artists often work for little or no pay and often fund their own production costs. It’s an investment that many professional artists make in their own work but it puts significant pressure on artists’ practice and their lives.

MEEA Award for performers
Darlinghurst Theatre Company is committed and passionate about contributing to the sustainability of the theatre sector and has worked tirelessly towards this goal. At the Eternity Playhouse, Darlinghurst Theatre Company (DTC) has developed a unique and exemplary model for supporting independent artists’ work, whereby artists’ productions are fully funded and produced by DTC; including artists paid at award wages and industry rates.

A performer would commonly make somewhere between $0 to $1,000 for 8 weeks work in an independent profit share production for rehearsal and performances. With DTC a performer is paid the MEEA award and receives $10,323 including annual leave plus super for 8 weeks work. A production represents a significant investment in independent artists’ work by DTC.

Artistic Direction
Each production Director and their creative team become our artistic leaders.  At DTC my role as Executive Producer is to ensure the artistic integrity of our work and that each production’s thesis and vision is embraced and thoroughly explored.

Our artistic model seeks submissions of work from professional artists. We ensure that diverse voices and stories are represented on our stage. Our major productions are created by independent artists which increases mainstage opportunities in the sector. Productions are programmed through a peer selection process comprised of experienced and respected artists and practitioners led by myself as Executive Producer.

DTC is a unique professional company
DTC is a professional theatre company that sits between flagship theatre companies (e.g. Belvoir and STC) and independent theatres that work with independent artists and remunerate them through a profit-share model. This makes us unique – we operate as a professional theatre company but from a founding ethos of an independent theatre model.

DTC grew from a profit share model when it moved into the Eternity Playhouse: determined to pay award wages and to better support artists and their work. The DTC Board of Directors strongly stands by its position to pay award rates first and foremost to support a sustainable, healthy and viable arts sector.  MEAA, the artists’ union, supports this position and its view is that DTC has a responsibility to comply with industrial relations laws at the Eternity Playhouse and a responsibility to pay professional artists correctly.

DTC actively engages in discussion on topical and current issues.
DTC is committed to community and cultural engagement. This leads us to support and host events and public forums on important issues. Organisations in 2016 that we supported included ACON, Medecins Sans Frontiere, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, The University of NSW, City Talks/City of Sydney, Art Month, Australian Himalayan Foundation, Perspectives/Women in Design, Australian Writers Guild and Currency House. A milestone event in 2016 for DTC was our partnership with Women in Theatre and Screen to present their two-day Festival Fatale involving over 100 artists.

Here are some highlights of our company’s work at the Eternity Playhouse.

DTC milestones and achievements:
    DTC raised $690,000 for the Eternity Theatre fit-out and played an instrumental role in the development of the Eternity Playhouse, collaborating with the City of Sydney on the design of the venue.
    In 2013, DTC gifted the fit-out of our old venue at Potts Point to the City of Sydney valued at $500,000 - now the Hayes Theatre.
    In 2015, DTC became the first theatre company in Australia, working under an independent theatre model, to pay award wages and industry rates to all its artists.
    In 2016, DTC was the first theatre company in NSW to adopt a gender parity policy in the employment of artists.
    80,000 theatre patrons have attended our productions in the last 3½ years.
    In 2016, DTC launched Share the Love an access and equality initiative which provides free theatre tickets to people experiencing financial hardship.
    In 2016, to enhance our theatre going experience we opened our restaurant at the Eternity Playhouse.
    In 2017 we launched our exhibition space in the Eternity Playhouse foyer with visual art by Dr Ella Dreyfus in tandem with our production Kindertransport.
    In 2017 we will stage 211 professional theatre performances at the Eternity Playhouse which will employ 80 artists.

In 2018, DTC will celebrate its 25th birthday and the contributions it has made to the theatre sector. DTC founded and developed a number of initiatives into standalone incorporated companies which have had an impact on thousands of people.

From 2007 to 2012, DTC founded and developed Critical Stages, an initiative to tour outstanding independent theatre. During this time 120 independent artists were employed in DTC’s Critical Stages tours to over 90 towns across Australia playing to 80,000 attendees. Critical Stages continues to tour independent theatre across Australia.

From 2001 to 2010, DTC founded and developed Milk Crate Theatre, Australia’s first theatre company dedicated to homeless and disadvantaged people.

From 1992 to 2008, DTC founded and developed Darlo Drama, a community drama and performance school for adult amateurs. Now with its own premises on Oxford Street, Darlinghurst.

I feel very strongly about Darlinghurst Theatre Company’s ethos and our commitment to artists and the industry and I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you about its work and something of its history and to give you a better understanding for our work and remit.

All the best

Glenn


GLENN TERRY
Executive Producer

Darlinghurst Theatre Company, Eternity Playhouse
39 Burton St, Darlinghurst NSW 2010

T 02 9331 3107  E glenn@darlinghursttheatre.com

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: The Father by Florian Zeller

John Bell

Photography by Christine Messinesi and Philip Erbacher

The Father by Florian Zeller, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton.  Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1, August 24 – October 21, 2017.

Director – Damien Ryan; Designer – Alicia Clements; Lighting Designer – Rachel Burke; Composer and Sound Designer – Steve Francis

Cast:  André – John Bell; Anne – Anita Hegh; Laura – Faustina Agolley; Pierre – Marco Chiappi; Man – Glenn Hazeldine; Woman – Natasha Herbert

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 25

The concept behind this play is essentially simple.  Imagine what it will be like when you, if you are unlucky, reach a late stage of dementia where memory becomes completely unreliable but your feelings in reaction to others – who are by now caring for you full-time – are just as strong as ever, even though you are misinterpreting reality.  It’s even worse when you realise that you don’t actually understand things at all.

Then, at least in The Father, you end up in tears, crying for your mother to take you home.

Of course, especially for John Bell playing Anne’s father André, the short scenes are not so simple.  As he has said “I find this text particularly tricky to learn – and I think I speak for the other actors as well – because it’s very fractured and you need to make your own links between phrases.  It’s just short grabs of text, which are hard to learn.  It’s easy to learn a slab of Shakespeare, for instance, or Chekhov.  They write these long passages that have an internal logic, that might even rhyme.”

In fact all the other actors, and especially Anita Gegh as André’s only surviving daughter needing to get on with her own life, and of course John Bell himself, succeeded admirably with the disjointed language.  The fascinating thing about watching the play is that we found ourselves caught up in this mental state, and like André found it hard to know what the true story really was.

On the way to the theatre, I saw in Martin Place that the old traditional pavement message, Eternity, has now been changed to the word Empathy.  That’s what this play is really about.  There is no eternity – all our lives will end – but at least in our kind of society there is provision for empathy…well, there was for André in the full-care nursing home Anne had to admit him to.  The play ends where the author probably began constructing André’s mental world, with a professionally empathetic nurse cradling the crying old man in her arms.

In the Conversation with the Playwright, Florian Zeller, printed in the program (translated from the French by Marie Laubie and Carl Nilsson-Polias), the question is raised, saying “Some have compared the role of André in The Father to King Lear.  Is it, in the end, a tragic role in that sense?”

Zeller replies “It’s always perilous trying to sum things up in one word.  Still, I would say, ‘Yes, I think this is a tragic role’.  The play seems to me to be animated by a destination, its end, which is a tragic destination.” 

Though I recognise the awfulness of dementia, I have also seen the worth of an empathetic caring staff who managed my mother through some 5 years of demanding behaviour (going back to her working life when she ran the office and now expected to run the dementia unit), paranoia like André’s belief that his watch was stolen because he couldn’t find it, incomprehensible but highly imaginative flights of fantasy, and a complete inability to understand what was on the television screen.

At a week short of 93, my mother died peacefully, thanks to carers who were never punitive, nor full of sympathy, but had what I would call a practical empathy.  This is what I saw in the final scene of The Father – not a tragic but a positive end in the acceptance of reality.

And that makes this play worthwhile being produced by the Sydney Theatre Company, justifies the effort and the quality of the actors’ and creatives’ work, and certainly says you should take time out to see it – and help prepare for that time in your life.

Illustration by Nicholas Harding:
John Bell in rehearsal

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: HIR by Taylor Mac at Belvoir

Helen Thomson

HIR by Taylor Mac at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, August 16 – September 10, 2017.

Director – Anthea Williams; Set & Costume Designer – Michael Hankin; Composer & Sound Designer – Steve Toulmin; Lighting Designer – Sian James-Holland; Associate Artist – Lucky Price; Voice & Dialect Coach – Paige Walker; Movement Director – Scott Witt; Design Assistant – Jeremy Allen

Cast: Paige – Helen Thomson; Isaac – Michael Walley; Max – Kurt Pimblett; Arnold – Greg Stone

Photos by Brett Boardman

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 24

If I describe the household of father Arnold, mother Paige, elder son Isaac and younger trans sibling Max as dystopian, it would be true but would miss the point.  A golden veil of tinsel strips swept aside to reveal a lounge-room/kitchen in complete disarray.  The characters’ accents were absolutely definite: this is America.

As I watched a very funny but telling first act I had the weird feeling I was seeing a David Pope cartoon in action.  So often his picture (usually of the day’s Australian political news) is funny, yet always with a sense of foreboding.  If we were to see the image play out, surely funny would turn into disaster.  This is what happens in HIR.

Then I found the Pope cartoon to match:

[ http://www.smh.com.au/photogallery/federal-politics/cartoons/david-pope-20120214-1t3j0.html ]

This is the America who elected Donald Trump, whose Whitehouse daily falls apart as each new appointment takes off in their own direction, trying to escape impending disaster.

Paige’s home is in a poverty-stricken suburb built on a garbage dump.  There is no employment for Isaac, who has joined the Marines seeking some surety of existence and now arrives home after years of collecting dismembered body parts, having been discharged for drug use, to find his mother no longer cleans the house on principle as a feminist.  His once family-violent father is demented after a stroke brought on, his mother claims, because after the last time her husband raped her, she stood up to him and took control. 

His young ‘sister’ is now in the process of transitioning with hormones to becoming male, looking forward to surgery to increase the size of hir clitoris, and insisting on the correct pronouns to be used.  Hir mother actively supports the change.  She has sold the house to raise funds and support her venture organising a non-profit to return the suburb to its original natural condition.

Isaac attempts to put everything back in ‘order’ in military fashion, and the result is an explosion of emotional conflict.

All this can be presented with cartoon-style humour, in the same way that Jewish people satirise their foibles, or Aboriginal people create blak comedy, because the writer, Taylor Mac “started plotting my escape” from Stockton, California, which “held the honour of having the highest murder rate (per capita) in America…the second I developed a feminine walk and became conscious that I wasn’t like the other boys.”  Max – played by transgender actor Kurt Pimblett – in this play seeks to “survive and find community”, while it is important to acknowledge the valuable role in this production played by Associate Artist Lucky Price who “was identified female at birth  and at the age of 34 transitioned his gender in 2014 to male.”

But – as I imagined about David Pope’s cartoon – when the funny stuff gets to an extreme stage (as I think it will for Donald Trump), the explosion in HIR is a horribly tragic end.  Though Taylor Mac can write about hirself “We continually talk about how lucky we are that our queerness and our need to survive and find community gave us the extra bit of drive that was needed to get out of those homophobic and transphobic environments”, the end of his play leaves all four characters with literally nowhere to go, not only within the family where any remnants of personal relationships have been destroyed, but with no economic support in Donald Trump’s Great Again America.

At that moment of realisation, as the final blackout was about to happen, there was a great silence in the audience. 

I would have much preferred that depth of silence to have been held for much longer before bringing lights up and the cast on for curtain call, which induced the usual claps, cheers and whistles in the audience.  The quality of the writing, performances and design in this production certainly justified that highly positive response, but I needed more time to absorb and cope with the tragedy of our times which this excellent play exposes.

Michael Walley as Isaac, Greg Stone as Arnold, Helen Thomson as Paige
in HIR by Taylor Mac

Kurt Pimblett as Max
in HIR by Taylor Mac

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Lip Service by John Misto

Lip Service by John Misto at Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, August 17 – September 30, 2017.

Director – Nicole Buffini; Assistant Director – Shaun Rennie; Designer – Anna Gardner; Lighting – Christopher Page; Sound – Daryl Wallis; Wardrobe – Margaret Gill; Make-up – Peggy Carter; Dialect Coach – Nick Curnow

Cast: Patrick O’Higgins – Tim Draxl; Helena Rubinstein – Amanada Muggleton; Elizabeth Arden – Linden Wilkinson

Interesting art is often described as ‘edgy’.  John Misto’s Lip Service (first produced earlier this year as Madame Rubinstein at Park Theatre, London) sits on an interesting knife-edge between farce and love.

A huge amount has been written about Helena Rubinstein’s world-wide make-up empire, starting in Melbourne, Australia, in 1902; her life-long competition with Florence Nightingale Graham aka Elizabeth Arden; and with Charles Revson of Revlon fame.  An excellent place to grasp the impact of Rubinstein is to go to

http://mrmhadams.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/beauty-is-power-how-helena-rubinstein-with-elizabeth-arden-ans-madame-c-j-walker-improved-the-world-.html
and
http://thejewishmuseum.org/press/press-release/rubinstein-release

Misto makes Madame his central character, so well drawn by this performer that I entirely forgot she was the Amanda Muggleton I remember from Steaming, and her recent solo show, The Book Club.  Make-up, costume and her exquisite Polish-Jewish-New York accent and language mannerisms certainly created the picture of the eccentric Rubinstein, but it was the truth in Muggleton’s acting – in a large number of short cameo scenes – which captured my imagination.

The play has been written from the point of view of Patrick O’Higgins, usually described as her gay secretary-factotum, who in real life was a journalist on Flair magazine in New York when he met Helena Rubinstein by chance in 1955 and was employed by her for the final ten years of her life. I haven’t read his biography of his boss, but I imagine that some of Misto’s story comes from that work, and from O’Higgins’ niece, Marianne Hinton who “generously shared her memories and photographs of her uncle Patrick and was delighted with the play.

Tim Draxl’s characterisation task as an actor was made a little easier than the demands made on Muggleton, but their playing together was technically brilliant.  There was so much fun in the farcical side of Rubinstein’s treatment of O’Higgins that every scene extracted laughs all round the Ensemble’s intimate in-the-round theatre, that we were ready to accept the contrasting feelings of concern for Helena at the intimation of an attack at the end of Act 1; of understanding as ‘Irish’ (as she called Patrick) at last found a way to allow Helena to cry for the death of her son, Horace; and even of his sense of love for her, and loss, when she died – in 1965 in real life. 

Draxl’s final line, yelling at the illusion of Charles Revson, taking Helena’s part, got just the right level of laugh to relieve what might have been an overly sentimental death scene.  Good writing with precise acting brought us back from the edge. 

Elizabeth Arden’s role dramatically is written as the constant foil, because, as she probably was in real life, she may not have had the glorious self-centredness of Helen Rubinstein, but she was the more consistently successful businesswoman.  The ‘straight’ character might not have been as complicated to perform, but Linden Wilkinson provided the exact quantity and quality of contrast needed to make sure the dramatic tension – the source of our laughter – never fell away.

So why would an Australian write this sort-of comedy about these women?  Certainly to make the point about women living from the late 19th Century to the mid 1960s who made their way with great financial success in the men’s world of business.  Perhaps it was to show (though not directly said) that it was in Australia in the early 1900s that a woman had the sense of individual freedom and power to make the start that Helena did in Melbourne (in real life some sources say she made £12,000 in two years), while I wonder if the same might have been true for Florence Nightingale Graham in Canada.

If it was true that young women at the university in California where Rubinstein spoke when receiving an honorary degree objected to her success in making women want to wear make-up (and I have seen that change in attitude take place in my own daughters), then the play about the make-up business still has resonance.  This thematic issue was certainly played up in this production by showing the actual television adverts of the 1950s which began to rile women in the 1960s.

So the fun of this play which could feel a bit superficial, especially in the first half, is perhaps a mask for more significant thinking. 

And there was one issue which is raised early in brief, and then again more bluntly later, but without going into any depth.  This was about what happened to Helena when she stayed with her two uncles in a country town in Victoria for the year or so before she shifted to Melbourne.  She was around 20 at the time.  Wikipedia says she had a ‘falling out with her uncle’.  Her words in this play imply – that is, much more than suggest – that she was abused by at least one of these men.  Her relations with her husbands, her sons (especially with Horace, named after her own father), and with the gay Patrick, as we see them in the play, show a dark side to the strength of her independence as a woman.

Though it seems that the real Patrick O’Higgins wrote a humorous biography (having known her only in her later life) and John Misto seems to have picked up on that, perhaps there is a place for a play on the other side of the knife-edge, taking up what happened in Coleraine, Victoria, Australia.

Lip Service, then, is an interesting play, with a great production, in other words.

Photos by Prudence Upton

Tim Draxl as Patrick O'Higgins and Amanda Muggleton as Helena Rubinstein
in Lip Service by John Misto

Linden Wilkinson as Elizabeth Arden and Amanda Muggleton as Helena Rubinstein
in Lip Service by John Misto

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Town Folk in Queanbeyan

Town Folk: Community Comedy by Damian Callinan, with John Cherry – Film Maker and Zillah Morrow – Technical Management and Design.

Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, The Q, August 19, 2017.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Town Folk is a touring show, taking in local communities around Australia.  There is, and can only be, one performance in each town.  Callinan and his surprisingly small team research and make contact with a wide range of people in the chosen community, arriving some 3-5 days ahead of the show. 

There is no script.  The show is put together on the run as they film features which particularly distinguish the town in question, all done with a rumbustious humorous approach, even on matters of serious local controversy.  In the case of Queanbeyan, much of the film shown last night became a points-scoring competition between Queanbeyan Shire and Palerang Shire, recently merged by the New South Wales State Government against the wishes of many in both shires.

While Queanbeyan, for example, has a properly set-up sportsground with a large and even impressive seating facility – indeed, almost a stadium – the Palerang town of Bungendore has nothing but an open playing field with one tiny completely unimpressive exposed to the weather 3-tier seat for, maybe, 20 barrackers at best.  Queanbeyan 1, Palerang 0.

Over a good two hours, with interval for drinks, Damian Callinan shows his skills as an expert one-time drama teacher, improvising like mad and making it all work, with the participating audience in fits of laughter at every twist and turn in this outsider’s interpretation of their town.  There was not a dry eye in the house.

With too much to even begin to describe, I’ll limit myself to what I thought was a neat slogan for Queanbeyan, invented by an audience member doing homework in the interval.  Apart from the obvious two sided sign at the border with the Australian Capital Territory which, on one side says “Queanbeyan – Gateway to Canberra”, and on the other says “Canberra – Gateway to Queanbeyan”, I liked the more subtle “Queanbeyan – Best For Good Burgers” which could also read “Queanbeyan – Best for Good Burghers”.  This would need a Rodin statue, of course.

Damien Callinan, as I see him, is following in a comic tradition of his home town, Melbourne, which began in the 1970s with Rod Quantock’s stage shows at venues like The Last Laugh, his 1980s television show Australia – You’re Standing In It and his follow-up events variously known as Bus, Son of Tram or just Bus, where he took his audience literally on a bus and visited all sorts of public and private places unannounced, introducing “unsuspecting people to this idea that the world’s not such a frightening place and you can have fun with strangers”  [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Quantock ].

The best way to understand Callinan’s modus operandi is to go to his web page:

www.damiancallinan.com.au/


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Blue Love by Shaun Parker

Photo: Simon Wachter

Blue Love at Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse, August 16-17, 2017.
http://www.shaunparkercompany.com/shows/blue-love/

Director/Writer/Designer/Choreographer: Shaun Parker
Original Direction by Shaun Parker & Jo Stone
Dramaturg: Kate Champion (Founding Artistic Director of Force Majeure)
Performed by Shaun Parker, Lucia Mastrantone & Jo Stone





Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 17

When a show so cleverly satirises the criticism of art, what am I to write in response?  Can I just say, “Well done!” and be done with it?  Or better, “Extremely well done!!!”

Maybe a little verbal dancing will save my critical bacon.  The great writer on criticism, the poet TS Eliot, pointed out that “There are several forms which criticism might take; there is always a large proportion of criticism which is retrograde or irrelevant; there are always many writers who are qualified neither by knowledge of the past nor by awareness of the sensibility and the problems of the present.”

Am I so qualified?  I can’t dance like Glenn and Rhonda Flune.  Or sing mediaeval French folk songs like them.  With a bit of redevelopment of ancient experience, I might be able to act a bit like them, and fool my audience into not being sure if they are fictional or real.

I’m pretty sure I can’t write like Shaun Parker, even with the help of such a spot-on dramaturg as dance-drama expert Kate Champion.  My imagination is just not so wonderful.  I think I should accept Samuel Beckett’s criticism:

“VLADIMIR: Moron!
ESTRAGON: Vermin!
VLADIMIR: Abortion!
ESTRAGON: Morpion!
VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!
ESTRAGON: Curate!
VLADIMIR: Cretin!
ESTRAGON: (with finality). Crritic!
VLADIMIR: Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.”

But maybe that’s just my being qualified by knowledge of a past sensibility – 1960’s absurdism.  In modern times, Blue Love is remarkably original.  Yet I was reminded that it does have antecedents by the flyer, perhaps ironically left on my seat. 

“An acrobatic exploration of the place we call home.”  “Thought provoking...heart stopping.”  “The finest piece of circus I’ve ever seen.”  To which I would add, “The funniest piece of theatre I have seen for a very long time.”  But wait.  These paeans of praise are about Landscape with Monsters (not the ‘funniest’ bit), the show by Circa at the Canberra Theatre on 6-9 September.  Did the front-of-house staff realise these words are as true of Blue Love as we hope they will be of Landscape with Monsters.

And I’m sure I saw a line of history back to the original Circus Oz.  Shaun Parker’s sense of humour is wild in that same vein.

‘Home’ in Blue Love is Rhonda and Glenn’s home, which includes all of us visitors, welcomed with snacks and beers.  We are entertained by them for an hour or so, as they tell us the story of how they met, fell in love, married, bought their house, lost their first child, had two more.  We never quite get to the Darby and Joan stage, as ‘lurv’ seems to fall apart while we watch their home movies and listen to a startling sound mix of lines from just about every recorded love song of the past hundred years.  Even TS Eliot when writing the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1917 might have been thinking ahead to Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (even apparently under water in Blue Love).

To describe Shaun and Lucia’s choreography in words is impossible.  A Youtube virtual reality headset would be the only way.  As Eliot said about poetry: “It is not always true that a person who knows a good poem when he sees it can tell us why it is a good poem.  The experience of poetry, like any other experience, is only partially translatable into words."

So that’s it.  Good theatre can’t be translated into words.  You have to see it to believe it. Blue Love is an experience you should definitely not miss.  Because you will love it.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: The Inheritance by Greg Gould

The Inheritance by Greg Gould.  Budding Theatre at Belconnen Community Theatre, August 16-19, 2017.

Directed and designed by Cate Clelland; Lighting Designer – Andrew Snell; Costumes - The Cast

Cast:
The Three Daughters: Linda Chen – Gina Essington; Alexandra Howard – Amanda Essington; Jess Waterhouse – Emily Essington
The Parents: Victoria Hopkins – Dianna Essington; John Kelly – Lesley Archibald Essington
The Lawyer: Rob Defries – John Lauder.  Lawyer’s Clerk: Vivek Sharma – Paul
The Daughters when young: Erin Stiles – Young Gina; Martha Russell – Young Amanda; Vivien Murray – Young Emily

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 16
© Frank McKone, Canberra

Greg Gould has written a conventional morality play in a unusual style.

The story might seem a little reminiscent of Shakespeare’s King Lear, but is centred on the roles of the women in the family of a dominating man.  Gina is clearly Cordelia, Emily perhaps Goneril, Amanda would be Regan, the lawyer John is the sensible Kent, while Paul is Oswald the fop.  Les Essington, like Lear, has to learn the value of his youngest daughter’s integrity.  Dianna has no parallel in Shakespeare’s play, of course, since Lear’s wife is never even mentioned.

Gould’s story is less grand.  Les is a self-made wheeler and dealer, a billionaire in his robust sixties, who competed with Alan Bond to try for the America’s Cup, but who surprisingly dies while having sex with his young mistress (not a bimbo, but a biochemist).  Only a few months prior, he had made his lawyer redraft his will – apparently leaving Gina nothing.  But there is a twist: Gina accepts his decision, and his only gift – a ragged looking doll which he had refused to let her keep when she was a young child.

The set, an office to one side and a bathroom-toilet on the other, doesn’t change but the action takes place mainly in the lawyer’s office at the gathering of the widow and daughters for the reading of the will, or in the bathroom with Dianna refusing to come out of the toilet, interspersed with flashback scenes between Gina and her father.  In the final brief scene, we see Les reappear and drink a scotch with his lawyer – perhaps a flashback to when they met to change the will; or suggesting that Les is not actually dead (so the reading of the will is a ploy to bring his recalcitrant family together); or suggesting it is Les’ ghost celebrating in John’s imagination.

The writing of the dialogue is well done, capturing the different characters of the three daughters, the manic behaviour of their mother, and the good nature of the lawyer.  In the first scene with the youngsters, the playing is quite naturalistic (and the three young performers are very good), but after that I couldn’t be sure whether the exaggerated style in the acting was intended by the author; or whether Cate Clelland was using exaggeration as a device to make the script work.

On reflection I think it was the latter.  The script, if played straight, would become a melodrama, a typical moralistic tale.  Played this way, Paul’s character would be no more than a cardboard cutout of a servant.  But Vivek Sharma makes him into a highly over-the-top caricature of a gay man, almost to the point of a politically incorrect stereotype.  He does it very well, and gets plenty of laughs to balance the internecine verbal warfare between the three sisters and their mother.  The style of all four women, especially in Jess Waterhouse’s Emily, is exaggerated, not to the same degree but still enough to contrast with the very natural style used for John, who finally has to stand on his digs and bring the battles to a standstill so that the will can be read in something like the proper manner.

Going at it in this way meant, I think, that the issues – such as the rights and lack of power of women, and the acceptance or not of the right to be wealthy – became clarified.  If the style had been kept naturalistic all round, the play would seem to be no more than a very ordinary sentimental and unbelievable story.

This doesn’t mean that I can say it’s a great play.  It falls too much between the stools of satirical comedy and straight social commentary.  I think the model that Greg Gould could work towards is the tv show, The Family Law, where the comedy and social criticism sit more comfortably together.  Clelland has written in her Director’s Note of these characters that “Their immense wealth makes them larger than life and highly theatrical”, achieved very well by all the adult women performers, “but their problems make them believably human”.  Though the actors under Clelland’s direction achieved some moments where we could emotionally identify with those characters, the script will need more development to shift us more easily from one stool to another.

Clelland notes that she “would like to thank Greg for deciding to finish this play and for trusting us with taking it for its first run”, and I can certainly support her in this.

Victoria Hopkins as Dianna Essington

John Kelly as Les Essington

Photos by Reid Workman

Martha Russell as Young Amanda

Erin Stiles and Vivien Murray
as Young Gina and Young Emily

Alexandra Howard as Amanda Essington and
Linda Chen as Gina Essington

Linda Chen as Gina Essington and Jess Waterhouse as Emily Essington

Rob Defries as lawyer John Lauder

Vivek Sharma as Paul

2017: Belvoir announces new Executive Director

We are thrilled to announce the appointment of one of Australia’s most prominent and experienced arts administrators, to the position of Executive Director.

WHAT'S ON BUY TICKETS SUBSCRIBE DONATE BELVOIR ANNOUNCES NEW EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR We are thrilled to announce the appointment of Sue Donnelly, one of Australia’s most prominent and experienced arts administrators, to the position of Executive Director of Belvoir, recently vacated by Brenna Hobson. Sam Meers, Belvoir Chair, said today, “I’m thrilled to be announcing Sue Donnelly’s appointment as Executive Director and Co-CEO of Belvoir. Sue has been appointed after an extensive recruitment process that included interviews with an impressive short list of potential international and Australian candidates. The breadth and depth of Sue’s experience across the industry, and the esteem in which she is held by colleagues worldwide, make her the standout choice as our new Executive Director. We look forward to an exciting future under her joint leadership of the company with our Artistic Director, Eamon Flack.” Our Artistic Director Eamon Flack said of the appointment “This is very good news. Sue is an old friend of Belvoir’s, she knows the company from the inside and she’s very much at home with its idiosyncrasies. Her sense of the work we make and the kinds of risks this company is built on, is excellent. She knows what makes Belvoir special and she’ll fight the good fight. I’m particularly pleased because Sue was the acting General Manager when I joined Belvoir as the Literary Manager in 2006. She was tough-minded and kind-hearted then, and she is now. We’ll make a good odd couple, I think, in the best possible way. It’s terrific news.” READ MORE