2018: Dark Emu by Bangarra Dance Theatre

Dark Emu.  Bangarra Dance Theatre at Canberra Theatre Centre, July 26 – July 28, 2018.

Artistic Director – Stephen Page; Costume Designer – Jennifer Irwin; Lighting Designer – Sian James-Holland; Cultural Consultant – Yuin/Biripi Nation Woman, Lynne Thomas; Set Designer – Jacob Nash; Dramaturg – Alana Valentine; Composer – Steve Francis; Language Consultant – Yuin knowledge holder, Warren Foster.

Choreographers: Stephen Page, Daniel Riley, Yolande Brown, and the dancers of Bangarra Dance Theatre.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 26

To say Bangarra’s Dark Emu is just wonderful is not enough.  I felt a great sense of wonder growing from the first appearance of the people – our First People – heads and then lifted arms, hands exploring space, whole bodies stretching, twisting, turning in a new land.

By the end it was a great wonder, expressed in glorious, powerfully appreciative applause from the full house, for the ingenuity, determination and resilience in the people’s survival – throughout the ages long before as well as since 1770.

In this beautifully abstracted dance-drama, the enclosure of the people by invaders’ fences and cultural tie-downs is just the latest brief time of struggle compared with the aeons of learning to manage growth in this land of fire and flood.

The people win through as they always have.  In the final image, a reprise, we return to the land of the beginning.  The dancers leave the scene, heads high.  The wonder of their living is complete.  This is their land still, and ever will be.

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After how I felt and what I thought, there’s much more to be said about this production.  I am not formally qualified to judge dance technique in any detail, but I saw here a unified style clearly deeply engaged in traditional dance forms yet developed into highly emotive modern dance.  That in itself dramatically represents the theme of the work.

The energy of the drama is driven by extraordinary surround sound, tremendous visuals (the fire scene was frightening while unavoidably beautiful) – the whole combined with the most original costuming of the dancers becoming a great example of the effective integration of technology in the work, moving us along through 16 scenes in 70 minutes.

The modern qualities (and top-class quality) of the staging enhances the point of the story – First Peoples belong to the ancient past yet live essentially in our world today – still exploring new ways to express their continuing culture.

There is the wonder indeed, working from the study done by Bunurong/Tasmanian Bruce Pascoe in his book – essential reading – Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (Magabala Books, 2014).  This work – both the book and the dance-drama – changes all our understanding of rhe past towards a better future.  More than wonderful – just outstanding.

 Photos by Daniel Boud

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2018: Bliss by Peter Carey, adapted for stage by Tom Wright

Toby Truslove as Harry Joy
in Bliss
Photography by Pia Johnson

Bliss by Peter Carey.  Adapted for the stage by Tom Wright.  Belvoir & Malthouse Theatre at Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, June 9 – July 15, 2018.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 14

Cast: Marco Chiappi (Alex Duvall and others); Mark Coles Smith (Joel Davis and others);  Will McDonald  (David Joy and others); Amber McMahon (Bettina Joy and others);  Charlotte Nicdao (Lucy Joy and others);   Susan Prior (Alice Dalton and others); Anna Samson (Honey Barbara and others);  Toby Truslove (Harry Joy)

Bliss is an unreal play.  If you are my age, which is about the same age as Peter Carey, who was about the same as Harry Joy was when Peter Carey published his first and I think best novel in 1981, then you know what I mean when I say the novel, and even more this stage adaptation is ‘unreal’.  A bit later in time (‘unreal’ was first recorded in 1965) Harry Joy’s daughter Lucy might have said ‘gas’.

Nowadays, ‘cool’ doesn’t cut it  This show is full on.  I can’t say, don’t miss it – because you already have in Sydney.  And in Melbourne too (May 4 – June 2).  What a bummer!

Charlotte Nicdao as Lucy Joy, Anna Samson as Honey Barbara, Toby Truslove as Harry Joy
in Bliss

So, why would you want to see a show about a weird kind of 1970’s adman, sort of naïve about making money (reminds me of the 2007 Mad Men tv series set in the 1960s).  But Harry Joy dies three times, by my count. 

Nearly, when he has his heart attack and wakes up in what he thinks is hell – that is his old life.  More metaphorically when his wife Bettina (now the kids are grown up) turns out to be better at running a business than he had ever been, and drags him back into advertising.  That’s when the image of Honey Barbara draws him away to the rainforest.

And finally for real, when the gum tree he had planted in his blissful forest retreat drops a branch on him in old age while he works in his garden.

It’s all about Australia, you see.  Or perhaps you don’t – yet.  It’s certainly all about Peter Carey, who escaped from a 20 year career in advertising  (and mainly short story writing) until his The Fat Man in History got him noticed (1974) and Bliss made him a celebrity.  So why since 1990 has he lived in New York?  Not the seductive rainforest like Harry Joy?

I guess this is the Australian bit.  Harry Joy’s retreat to the world of nature is actually unreal.  His being recognised by Honey Barbara at the climactic point in the play as essentially honest in his naif kind of way, and so she loves him for genuinely being himself – this is the quality of being Australian.  Even though the gum tree, being equally itself, drops a branch and kills you.

And as for the work of adapting the novel by Tom Wright, directing by Matthew Lutton, designing by Marg Howell (Set & Costume), Paul Jackson (Lighting), Stefan Gregory (Composer and Sound), and all the cast – it is exactly this Australian quality that makes this production unreal. It has life, energy and honesty.  And, for us, even though we know about widow-maker gum trees, we leave the theatre on a high note.

The story is about truth in art.  This production of Bliss is truly art.

Charlotte Nicdao as Lucy Joy, Amber McMahon as Bettina Joy, Anna Samson as Honey Barbara
in Bliss

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2018: The Man in the Attic by Timothy Daly

The Man in the Attic by Timothy Daly.  Shalom & Moira Blumenthal Productions at Eternity Theatre, Darlinghurst, Sydney July 4-22 2018.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 14

Director – Moira Blumenthal; Set & Costume Designer – Hugh O’Connor; Lighting Designer – Emma Lockhart-Wilson; Sound Designer – Tegan Nichols;

Cast:  Barry French – The Jew; Danielle King – The Wife; Gus Murray – The Husband; Colleen Cook – The Neighbour


Shalom Theatre, in conjunction with Moira Blumenthal Productions, stages a professional production each year, “telling universal stories which reflect the history, culture and identity of Jewish life.” 

Timothy Daly has written “I first came across the story of The Man in the Attic over a decade ago, in a book of German radio plays, which made the briefest of references to a newspaper clipping of the trial of a couple who were accused of keeping a Jewish man ignorant of the fact that World War II had ended…. I needed access to the records of the actual court case. (The un-named couple were apparently taken to court over the deception.) All attempts to locate the transcript failed, not least because it took place in a rural area whose court appeared no longer to exist.”

So “in the absence of the full historical record, some of the play had to be re-imagined and even re-invented. As a simple example, to this day, I do not know the name of the Unknown Jew who is the hero of my play. But, in a strange way, it did not matter.”

The Man in the Attic, then, indeed reflects “the history, culture and identity of Jewish life”, but is a story of much wider significance.  In the German tradition, for example, the story of why the anti-Semitic husband kept the man in his attic, despite the risk – in order to make money on the illegal black market in the chaos of 1945 – was a parallel to the fictional story that Bertolt Brecht had written in 1939, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, set in the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th Century. 

And, I imagine, in the current chaos of refugees doing their best to escape – often with the worst results in detention centres around the world, not to mention boatloads drowned – there are many making money on the side.  We might see The Wife who rescued the man hiding in the woods, in this play, as a ‘bleeding heart’ – as Peter Dutton, Minister for Border Security would say – but her Husband turns out to be Dutton’s other bete noir: a ‘people smuggler’ of a particularly nasty kind.  He uses sex with the Party woman next door who might reveal his business to authorities, and finally kills her when he can steal her ill-gotten gold – for the money and also to permanently protect his business.

The Wife, of course, has to go along with her husband and even compromise herself by telling lies to the The Jew, since the reason she found him in the first place was she was searching for wild fruit in the forest when she had no money and the shops, even if she could have paid, had been bombed by the Allies.  Even after Hitler’s death (which the German radio announced as a glorious sacrifice) and the Americans appeared with pictures of the Holocaust, these villagers had to keep the expert watchmaker in their attic working.

What actually happened in real life is not clear, but Timothy Daly finally allows The Wife’s conscience to get the better of her, and she releases The Jew while her Husband is away ‘on business’.  The play does not suggest how The Jew might have got on even when freed.  I can only add a personal touch.  I am named after my uncle who was captured early in the War, but who fortunately returned to England in 1945.  He walked from Poland to Holland to get home, but would never say anything about what he saw on the way.

So, though I cannot say that Daly’s scriptwriting is of Brechtian quality, the set design, costuming, lighting and especially sound are effectively done, and the acting and directing competent.  The result is a production which should be seen because it reveals how terrible are the effects of big power play in human society on the lives of ordinary people.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2018: Switzerland by Joanna Murray-Smith

Switzerland by Joanna Murray-Smith.  Pigeonhole Theatre at Canberra Theatre Centre, Courtyard Studio, July 3-14, 2018.

Director – Jordan Best; Designer – Michael Sparks; Lighting Designer – Cynthia Jolley Rogers; Props – Yanina Clifton; Composer – Matthew Webster.

Performed by

Karen Vickery – Patricia Highsmith
Lachlan Ruffy – Edward Ridgeway

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 4

Karen Vickery and Lachlan Ruffy
as Patricia Highsmith and Edward Ridgeway
in Switzerland by Joanna Murray-Smith
Photo: David James McCarthy

Joanna Murray-Smith has written a quite remarkable play.  Not only does Switzerland play cleverly and wittingly with the genre of murder mystery, the form for which Patrica Highsmith is famous when creating the character Ripley in The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), and, of course, the form which made Agatha Christie compulsory reading in my mother’s generation.

In this play, Murray-Smith has created two characters – one based on Patricia Highsmith (1921 – 1995) and the other presumably entirely fictional Edward Ridgeway, supposedly sent from Highsmith’s New York publisher to her retreat in Switzerland to persuade her to write one more Mr Ripley novel before she dies.

Pigeonhole’s direction, design and casting are all up to the standard well-established since their original offering (Playhouse Creatures by April de Angelis, reviewed on this blog March 2016) – with the added intensity of a demanding confrontational two-act two-hander.  Our attention never wavered, watching Karen Vickery’s aggression and Lachlan Ruffy’s determination.

Two aspects of this play interested me - Murray-Smith’s inventive twist of the murder mystery convention and her interpretation of the psychology of Patrica Highsmith.  The central twist is that Edward Ridgeway, in standing up to Highsmith’s contumely, morphs into the character she had created.  He becomes Mr Ripley and murders his creator.  So she dies before writing the last Mr Ripley novel, after all.  Or did the real Highsmith complete the work, Ripley Under Water (published 1991), and then was metaphorically murdered when she died in 1995?

It is Murray-Smith’s interpretation of what this means that fascinates me.  At this point I have not read all the research material that I assume Murray-Smith has (you can start at https://www.biography.com/people/patricia-highsmith-121715 ), but I wonder why Murray-Smith’s Highsmith insists on her lesbian sexuality, and for the right of women to be equal and independent against society’s patriarchal forces, yet at the end of the play appears to have fallen for Edward Ridgeway / Mr Ripley – and he for her – making their encounter apparently essentially sexual rather than professionally platonic, in an all-encompassing kiss.  After which, as she turns away in contemplation of the experience, he kills her with her favourite knife, which he had given her, taken down from the display of guns, swords and knives which cover the wall of her writing space.  (The other play you might like to consider at this point is Le Leçon by Eugene Ionesco).

Is she simply thanking Ripley / Ridgeway for her writing success?  Is she denying her lesbian nature?  Are we to take this as a political statement in support of sexual difference and the right to individuality; or are we to think Murray-Smith sees Highsmith as psychologically disturbed – that her writing and creating fictional characters is/was more real than reality?

Could it even mean that Murray-Smith herself is concerned about her own psychological state as a writer?  Or that all creatives live in “a world of their own”, as Murray-Smith’s Patricia Highsmith says she does?

And does this make Switzerland and its author something unusual and even “great” in Australian writing? 

I leave that consideration for my readers, but in my view Joanna Murray-Smith wittingly challenges patriarchal society in Switzerland.







© Frank McKone, Canberra