2019: The Torrents by Oriel Gray

Program Cover
Celia Pacquola as Oriel Gray

      Oriel Gray
https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A10651
This image has been sourced from Doollee.com


The Torrents by Oriel Gray.  Co-Production Black Swan State Theatre, Perth WA, and Sydney Theatre Company, at Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, July 18 – August 24, 2019.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 24

Photos by Philip Gostelow

Cast and Creatives

Claire Watson’s directing presents us with a tantalising light-hearted comedy of manners in which a ‘New Woman’ brings sense and sensibility to the self-destructing chaos of the male-dominated conventions of her time.  The Torrens is tightly intelligent – a play of ideas, played out in comic form.

Where have I come across this before?  In theatre, in plays by George Bernard Shaw like Mrs Warren’s Profession and Major Barbara; in David Williamson’s Dead White Males and the more recent When Dad Married Fury; all looking back, of course, to Aristophanes and Shakespeare.  Yet here is one that I had not known about before.

Why not, when in 1955 it was joint winner of the Playwrights' Advisory Board Competition with Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler?  In this production of The Torrents,  Celia Pacquola, comedian, provides us with a Puckish prologue, not so much along the lines of ‘Think but this, that you have slumbered here while these visions did appear” while The Doll has appeared in every school classroom and in thousands of productions.  She insults us by assuming that we haven’t read the program (who ever does?), and finally admits that The Torrens has had only one professional production – before this one, of course! – in Adelaide in 1996.

As Jenny Milford, writing her application to become a journalist in the 1890s with her presumed male initials J.G., we see Pacquola in a remarkably straight role as a woman of practical intelligence and humorous perspicacity who runs rings around the men – except for the young copy boy Bernie, played sympathetically by Rob Johnson, who carefully avoids allowing slapstick to make the role less important than I’m sure Oriel Gray intended.  He represents the young generation, learning fast about the changing role of women; just as we see beginning to happen for the other woman in the play, Gwynne.  One lunch with feminist Jenny, and Gwynne will not marry for money: only for love.

The production is carried off with panache – made especially enjoyable by the skilful acting and directing at the perfect level of comedy without falling into the trap of farce, nor the opposite trap of post-modern absurdism.  The 1950s script has a kind of innocence about its use of stock funny characters which could seem out of kilter with the serious issues in a genuinely independent woman’s life.  But this production gets the balance right.

The Torrens, as good as Summer of the Seventeenth Doll though it may be, is not up to Pygmalion or the best of David Williamson, but certainly deserves many more productions of this quality.  It definitely should be in all those classrooms where Pearl and Bubba are regularly studied, because Jenny Milford is a character who does not brook sentimentality, either about herself as a person and certainly not about how she is treated as a woman.  She is a person to be respected in her own right, and should be as much a centre of discussion by young people today as at any time in the past.

Among the other characters, the interest centres on the editor of the Koolgalla Argus, Rufus Torrent, and his relationships with his journalist son, Ben, and the paper’s owner, John Mason, for whom profitability takes precedence over originality and even truth.  I have to disclose my bias when saying I was pleased to see my one-time student, Steve Rodgers, allow Mason’s hard-line character just enough self-doubt to save him from being pure Rupert Murdoch; while also equally praising Tony Cogin and Ben Davies for revealing their human common sense as Pacquola’s Jenny made good sense against Mason’s prejudice and obstinacy.

The one character under written by Oriel Gray, I think, is Kingsley, the proponent of a water supply for an agricultural future for the dying gold mining industry of Koolgalla (i.e. Coolgardie/Kalgoorlie in real life).  Luke Carroll did his best and gave Kingsley our sympathy, but he remained a one-note character dependent on Jenny Milford’s capacity and generosity.  Perhaps Gray should have taken Kingsley to the point of suicide, as really happened in the model for his character – Charles O’Connor, whose 530-kilometre-long pipeline Eastern Goldfields Water Supply Scheme in Western Australia was finally completed, but only after his death.  Maybe Gray could not see how to put that story into her comedy.

Bringing Oriel Gray to the stage today – and including the program which we all should indeed read for its history of Pioneering Female Journalists of Australia, Alexina Wildman (1867-1896), Stella Allen (1871-1962), Leontine Cooper (1837-1903) and Louisa Lawson (1848-1920); and remembering her work performing and writing at the Australian Communist Party’s New Theatre, which took her on to becoming “the first paid playwright-in-residence in an Australian theatre” writing the Party’s weekly radio segment on station 2KY – is an important project for modern Australian theatre, especially for national status companies like Sydney Theatre Company.

On my arrival in this country in 1955, the theatres I found as my theatre interest grew were Doris Fitton’s middle class Independent in North Sydney, the Genesians doing Shakespeare (I remember Poor Tom in King Lear presented with Christian sympathy), the Elizabethan Theatre Trust showing the American Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and the New Theatre.  Their production of The Good Soldier Schweik, adapted from the anti-war novel by Jaroslav Hasek, was a high point of political satire as the birthday lottery system sent 18-year-olds to war in Vietnam in 1967.  What better introduction to my new land could I have had?  How good was that!

The essay in the program for The Torrents, “Oriel Gray, New Theatre and ‘the new woman’” is powerful history to follow her light-hearted comedy.  Enjoy the play, and read the program!

Steve Rodgers and Gareth Davies
as
Koolgalla Argus owner John Manson and Ben Torrent

Emily Rose Brennan
as
Gwynne, socialite engaged to marry Ben Torrent

Luke Carroll
as
Kingsley, contributor to Koolgalla Argus
on water supply scheme

Celia Pacquola and Tony Cogin
as
J.G. (Jenny) Milford and Koolgalla Argus editor Rufus Torrent

Sam Longley, Geoff Kelso and Rob Johnson
as Koolgalla Argus staff
Jock McDonald (manager), Christy (print compositor) and Bernie (copy boy)

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2019: A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller

A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller.  Red Line Productions at Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, July 24 – August 24, 2019.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 24

Director – Iain Sinclair; Set Designer – Jonathan Hindmarsh; Costume Designer – Martelle Hunt; Lighting Designer – Matt Cox, Associate – James Wallis;  Sound Designer – Clemence Williams, Associate – Dana Spence; Dialect Coach – Nick Curnow; Fight Director – Scott Witt

Eddie Carbone – Anthony Gooley; Catherine – Zoe Terakes; Beatrice – Janine Watson; Louis & Various – Giles Gartrell-Mills; Marco – David Soncin; Rodolpho – Scott Lee; Alfieri – David Lynch

David Lynch as Alfieri
A View from the Bridge

Photos by Prudence Upton

You know when you’ve got your Arthur Miller right when, at the final blackout, a deep overwhelming silence fills the theatre full with a feeling of loss and an awful sense of waste.

Though the characters are fictional and the setting is not yours personally, you know the tragedy is real.  Director Iain Sinclair and his team of actors and designers have achieved perfection in their A View from the Bridge.

An absent friend, the founder of the Ensemble Theatre, Hayes Gordon, must never be forgotten for his creation of this little theatre-in-the-round – so appropriately in this boatshed on the Kirribilli wharf, which I so often look down on from the over-arching Sydney Harbour Bridge, before eating at the migrant Italian Kirribilli Village Café. 

It may be a lot more up-market than “the scene in the docks of Red Hook, a working-class part of Brooklyn” but I’ll bet there are stories about escaping to freedom in a new country, about cultural conflict, about the tentacles of family obligations – and there’ll be lawyers like Alfieri, sincerely trying to help prevent the worst from happening in the face of legal, social and political reality; maybe often working pro bono for Amnesty International. 

I feel self-conscious – as a migrant myself who still remembers struggling through unpleasantly officious customs on Pyrmont 13 wharf in 1955, the year Miller wrote A View from the Bridge – knowing how lucky I have been to enjoy the kind of life that Catherine and Rodolpho hope for, and even Beatrice can imagine for them, but will never happen now that her husband Eddie Carbone could never let his niece have her freedom; and is now dead by the hand of her cousin, Marco, in a fight for honour.

I have often wondered how Arthur Miller, born in 1915 in Harlem, NY, with such a British sounding name, could identify so closely with Italian dockworkers and the fears of migrating illegally.  But his own parents ‘of Polish and Jewish descent’ may well have faced the same kinds of desires and fears – and then “lost their successful coat manufacturing business in the Wall Street Crash of 1929”, and “had to move from Manhattan to Flatbush, Brooklyn”, which looks down on Red Hook. 
[ https://www.biography.com/writer/arthur-miller ]

Obviously, the anti-immigration politics of our day make this play even more significant, perhaps, than in 1955.

So let’s look at how Sinclair and Co broke the rules to make this work so telling.  Iain Sinclair is not the first to do something like what Laura Barnett describes in her review in The Guardian (April 13, 2014): Here, in his first production for London's Young Vic, Van Hove turns his talent for reappraisal to Arthur Miller's claustrophobic 1955 tale of a Brooklyn longshoreman, Eddie Carbone, and his obsession with his niece, Catherine. The effect is startling.

The most daring decision taken by Van Hove and his designer, Jan Versweyveld, is to dispense with Miller's precise stage directions (this was a playwright whose notes to his actors and directors were often as poignant and exacting as his dialogue). The production opens not on a Red Hook tenement, but with a stark black box that lifts to reveal a bare thrust stage, bordered by a low Perspex wall.

But in the Ensemble Theatre, with “two lighting effects, two props [and] one chair”, we are not outside peering in at  a stark black box.  We are in-the-round, in the box, with Alfieri surreptitiously watching us from near A15 as we dribble down to fill the few rows of seats in this compact 200 seat space:

As we hushed seemingly to no obvious signal, Alfieri took the chair towards centre and began to speak to us.  In B26 it seemed he spoke directly to me.  I remained, attention locked in, for 2 hours without interval.  People usually quote Peter Brook’s The Empty Space at this point, but Iain Sinclair, referring to Jerzy Grotowski, writes “We created a show firmly in the ‘poor theatre’ aesthetic following Lope de Vega’s dictum that all great theatre needs is actors, a stage and some passion”.

And passion is what we got:

Anthony Gooley as Eddie Carbone

Janine Watson as Beatrice

Scott Lee as Rodolpho, David Soncin as Marco

Zoe Terakes as Catherine, with Anthony Gooley

Anthony Gooley and Janine Watson

Zoe Terakes as Catherine with Scott Lee as Rodolpho
Anthony Gooley and Janine Watson

Zoe Terakes and Scott Lee

Giles Gartrell-Mills as Louis, with Anthony Gooley as Eddie Carbone

L:R Scott Lee, Janine Watson, David Soncin, Zoe Terakes, Anthony Gooley
as
Rodolpho, Beatrice, Marco, Catherine, Eddie Carbone
A View from the Bridge

You have until August 24 to see A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller at Ensemble Theatre, Sydney.

David Lynch as Alfieri
A View from the Bridge

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2019: 30 Years of Sixty Five Thousand by Bangarra

30 Years of Sixty-Five Thousand:
Unaipon – Choreographer: Frances Rings
Stamping Ground – Choreographer: Jiří Kylián
To Make Fire – Choreographers: Stephen Page and Elma Kris

Bangarra Dance Theatre – Artistic Director Stephen Page – at Canberra Theatre Centre, July 18-20, 2019.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 18








Bangarra has made a celebration of their first thirty years into an inspiring work in three parts.  Stephen Page makes two crucial points, quoted by Andrew Brown (Canberra Times 19 July 2019):  “…we’re not art for art’s sake”; “we wanted to have strong pieces that show the spirit of character of the company.”

And what a positive spirit that is in these young First Australians, going forward, in the context of the political culture of our ‘elders’ among Second Australians going backwards.  Bangarra’s work is art for all our sakes,  demonstrating and engaging us in an ancient ideal – unity in diversity.

We explore the philosophical thoughts of David Unaipon of the Ngarrindjeri people.  Featured on our $50 note, son of James and Nymbulda Ngunaitponi (Anglicised as Unaipon), born at Macleay Point near Tailem Bend on the Murray River as it turns towards the Coorong, in 1872, Unaipon was the antithesis of the common belief among colonial Australians that the Aboriginal race would soon die out.  He treated his traditional religious beliefs as equivalent to the Christianity of his mission education, saying "...in Christ Jesus colour and racial distinctions disappear..."; he was a ‘deputationer’ for the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association, set up in South Australia in 1858 and still active until 2001, seeking self-determination for his people; and continued to work on his inventions, especially of devices based on centrifugal rotary motion, until his death in 1967. 

In dance, Unaipon’s words and the sounds of both his mechanical and bush environments provide the spirit of movement integrating the old and the new, the traditional style with modern, representing the reconciliation of cultures that his life was all about.

This work is Part One of a great work in three parts.  It introduces us to unity in practice, though if we know the detail we can find at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Unaipon , we should remember that he was never able to afford to get any of his provisional patents fully patented, so never received financial return even for his main invention which became “the basis of modern mechanical sheep shears” from 1910.

Part Two, Stamping Ground, takes us to Groote Eylandt, the big island ironically named by the Dutchman Abel Tasman 375 years ago in 1644.  The irony is that Jiří Kylián, though not Dutch himself, visited the Warnindhilyagwa people in 1980, observed their dancing, made a video – part of which we viewed to introduce Stamping Ground – and then made his own dance with the Nederlands Danstheater.  He made it clear his work was not imitative because that would be to appropriate dance that belonged to the Warnindhilyagwa.  He was so affected – ‘overwhelmed’ he said – by their dance that he created his own from his inspiration in response.  This work was first performed in Europe in 1983. 

Now it is the first work by a non-Indigenous choreographer presented by Bangarra’s all-Indigenous company. This has taken Bangarra to a new stage of its spiritual life, linking together through Kylián the oldest continuing culture in the world with, we could say, the youngest – 65,000 years old (might be still contentious but certainly 50,000) with, we might say, 400 back to Tasman, or 2500 back to the time of Ancient Greek theatre.

The performance of Stamping Ground was fascinating for the quality of the dancing, but as well to see the differences between and the points of blending with the traditional dance movements we had seen in the video as the Bangarra dancers took hold of modern European culture.

Then Part Three, To Make Fire, put together as an ongoing story of ‘memorable moments’ from Bangarra’s performing history covering many cultures from different parts of the country. Beginning with scenes from Mathinna of the adoption in Tasmania of the young girl Lowreene by the Governor John Franklin and his wife Jane in 1837 (Muttonbird, People, Adoption), the story moved to the Torres Strait Islands people and their spirits for the four winds Zey, Kuki, Naygay and Sager.  Clan provided a conclusion with aspects of cultural life now in Dots, Wiradjuri, Young Man, Promise, and the full company performing Hope.

One might imagine such an apparently disparate array of episodes might seem disjointed, but absolutely not so.  Stephen Page has made a new work out of old, a work which is art in its own right, yet is not art just for art’s sake; a work with tremendous spirit, positive promise and hope. 

Bangarra looks forward, never backward – and I can only hope that now that we have significant Indigenous people in the Australian Parliament – Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, Shadow Minister Linda Burney and Senator Patrick Dodson – that the cultural strength of Bangarra becomes the underpinning it deserves to be for reconciliation and full recognition of the First Peoples of Australia by the Second and the many more recent Peoples, including me, who make up my country today.

© Frank McKone, Canberra