2020: Anthem by Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas and Irine Vela.

Anthem written by Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas and Irine Vela. 

Arts Centre Melbourne and Performing Lines at Sydney Festival 2020, Roslyn Packer Theatre January 15-19, 2020.

Uncensored by Andrew Bovell
Terror by Patricia Cornelius
7-Eleven and Chemist Warehouse, a love story by Melissa Reeves
Brothers and Sisters by Christos Tsiolkas
Resistance by Irine Vela

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 17

Director – Susie Dee; Designer – Marg Horwell; Lighting Designer – Paul Jackson; Composer, Music Director and Sound Designer – Irine Vela; Movement Consultant – Natalie Cursio.

Aboriginal Cultural Dramaturg – Bryan Andy
Creative Producer (2016-March 2019) – Daniel Clarke

Characters from Anthem
https://www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/event-archive/2019/miaf/anthem

 Cast (alphabetical order):
Maude Davey, Reef Ireland, Ruci Kaisila, Thuso Lekwape, Amanda Ma, Maria Mercedes, Tony Nikolakopoulos, Eryn Jean Norvill, Sahil Saluja, Osamah Sami, Eva Seymour, Carly Sheppard

Musicians
Jenny M. Thomas (violin), Dan Witton (cello)

Anthem consists of five scenes with linked characters, bookended by two, unknown to each other, on their way to the airport when a political protest holds up their train.  They are in France.  He is apparently Black African Middle-class returning to Melbourne, of working class origin but now educated and successful in business.  His views are centre right conservative. Brexit for him is about economics and Britain’s trading position. She is  apparently White Middle-class, with centre-left small-L liberal views.  Brexit for her is about racism and anti-immigration attitudes to which she strongly objects – on the way accusing him of racism. 

They discuss – argue about – current issues before fading above the mainstage action, largely on Melbourne suburban trains, with one at a 7-Eleven store and another in a company office (not 7-Eleven nor Chemist Warehouse).  The five scenes run for two hours (with a 20 minute interval), until Ruci Kaisila as an Aboriginal beggar who has observed and sung at significant points (did I hear “We are One, We Are Australian”?  I certainly heard “I still call Australia home”), sings the anthem, "Amazing Grace".

At this point, the two waiting on their train in France reappear, in a flashback, without having reached any clear political consensus, and are pleased that their train begins to move again.

But is Australia’s train going anywhere?

The black man returning from education in France turns out to be the youngest of four siblings, who resent his having left them behind in poverty.  Among the others appears to be a young unmarried/divorced mother with a six-year old son who bangs his head against the doors on a train when he is being taken by court order to stay with his violent father.  His mother is a “rough white Aussie” who believes the country “belongs to us”, but can also understand Greek, when a Greek couple complain to each other about the woman’s behaviour.  Remember when Melbourne was known as the largest Greek city outside Greece itself?

One of her brothers appears to be of “Middle-Eastern appearance” and takes a relatively benign approach.  But the last brother, seemingly white Irish-Anglo Australian, surely would have used his bounding aggro energy violently in the Cronulla riots if he had not been a Melbournian from the outer suburban fringe instead.

Interestingly, since the Sydney Theatre Company will soon be presenting Dario Fo’s “No Pay, No Way”, the thread running through Anthem is about workers not being paid (and trying to use a starting gun to threaten to kill to get the money they are owed); beggars asking for money without success, and even refusing (and being told by others to refuse) to take money which is not genuinely offered; and a middle-class woman left homeless (by a husband taking a new young wife) trying to sponge off her previous Asian cleaning woman who was never properly paid. 

The black son of the family (presumably with diverse parents) offers $30,000 to his siblings, which his sister is inclined to accept until his violent Aussie, Aussie, Aussie brother forces the educated successful black brother out of the proudly poor family who refuse to accept charity.

For the older generation like me, who still remember the Sydney Communist New Theatre production of The Good Soldier Schweik, it’s good to see true agit prop theatre again.  Unfortunately I missed the Melbourne Workers Theatre’s Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? 20 years ago, when these five writers had first been brought together, then under director Julian Meyrick (whose Platform Paper “The Retreat of our National Drama” was reviewed on this blog May 15, 2014).

The style of presentation of Anthem is true expressionist agit prop – that is ‘agitation propaganda’.  Moveable rostra are shifted around to represent being on a train or street or office – no naturalism here.  The musicians play on stage, in amongst the action.  The action and spoken word is upfront – forthright in the extreme.  The lighting is full on and or full off.  The character of the Aboriginal beggar is directly out of the tradition of the Narrator in The Threepenny Opera who sings “Mack the Knife”.

But Anthem is perhaps even more bleak than the ending of The Threepenny Opera, when the Narrator sings (Hugh MacDiarmid translation):

Now we’ve got our happy ending
Everything is on the mend
Yes, the man with lots of money
He can buy a happy end!

There are some men live in darkness
While the rest have light for free
You can spot those in the limelight
Those in darkness you don’t see.

How ironic is it that an Aboriginal sings Amazing Grace as the ethnically (non-Indigenous) mixed Australian family tears down the Australian flag (which still includes the Union Jack – perhaps for not much longer) in a state of political frustration?

What train are we on?  Let alone where is it going?  This is a thinking person’s theatre show which should not be missed (especially by those who need to see it most).

Frank McKone's reviews also can be seen at www.ccc-canberracriticscircle.blogspot.com

2020: The Aspie Hour - Sydney Festival

The Aspie Hour.  Created, written and performed by Sophie Smyth and Ryan Smedley.

Director and Dramaturg – Fiona Scott-Norman
Musical Director and Pianist – Rainer Pollard

Sydney Festival 2020 at Carriageworks, Bay 20  January 14-18, 2020.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 15

What on earth is an Aspie?  If you’re on the spectrum, you may be thinking is this what normal people call a joke, until Sophie explains that it’s a short-cut word for a person who has Asperger’s Syndrome.

Fortunately I have known someone with Asperger’s over many years.  He would probably not think being called an Aspie was funny.  It’s no joke when you don’t understand how to initiate a conversation, say.  Or realise that what someone said was meant to be a joke, or it was an innuendo and actually meant something quite different from what the words said.  My friend’s an expert computer programmer.

Sophie explained, for example, that “come up and have a cup of tea” means “sex”.

The Aspie Hour is a very pleasant entertainment.  Because they each have an obsession with musicals, but not the same sort of musicals, they demonstrate their tendency to concentrate on informative details and a strictly logical approach by performing songs from an enormously wide range of musicals, mainly with their own words.

Ryan prefaces his song and dance routines with proof of his factual knowledge by having members of the audience call out a year date, like 1955, 1984 and three others last night.  He immediately tells us which musical that year was the most popular, or which in his view was the best, even though his choice may not have won awards.  And I am sure that he knew his facts.

His songs tell the story of a visit to New York, the source of more musicals than anywhere else in the world (he claims).  The essence of his song and dance act is about what he had to learn about social contacts in order to travel by himself to achieve his dream – to see a musical each night for 20 nights and meet famous musical performers.  And, I guess from his show, he learnt song and dance skills from his obervations.

Sophie took a different line, focussed on the elements of what makes up a musical, from the intro dance number, through the I want solo to the grand finale, which has nothing much to do with the rest of the plot.  She explained what we needed to know about each element before she sang, perfectly in style, each type of number.

For me, Sophie gets a special award for “Over the Rainbow”: “If little blue birds can fly, fly over the rainbow, why, then oh why, can’t I?”  This was a moment of tender appreciation by us all, through quiet tears for an Aspie’s frustration and at the same time recognition in the strength and quality of her performance that indeed, she can fly over her rainbow.

As they have written, “The purpose of this show is to relate ourselves to the audience, asking ‘have you had an experience like this?  We’re not all that different.”  How true, and how enjoyable.

Sophie Smyth and Ryan Smedley
in The Aspie Hour
Photo supplied

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: I'm a Phoenix, Bitch by Bryony Kimmings

I’m a Phoenix, Bitch.  Conceived, written and performed by Bryony Kimmings (UK).  Sydney Festival 2020, at Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, January 14-17 2020.

Co-commissioned by Battersea Arts Centre, Arts Centre Melbourne, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts and supported by Latitude Festival.  Supported by the British Council and Arts Council England using public funding.  In association with Avalon Management.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 14

Directors – Kirsty Housley and Bryony Kimmings

Art Director – David Curtis-Ring; Projection Designer – Will Duke; Composer – Tom Parkinson; Sound Designer – Lewis Gibson; Lighting Designer – Johanne Jensen; Dramaturgical Support – Nina Steiger; Choreography and Rehearsal Direction – Sarah Blanc; Makeup Design – Guy Common.

“Performing on stage is always a risk (break a leg!), but the greatest risk – to your sanity, if not in failing your audience – is to turn your own life into a public performance, and then perform it yourself.”  In quite recent times I have coined the term “Personal Theatre” for this kind of work.

Two especially powerful pieces were RED by Liz Lea  (reviewed here March 9, 2018), a dance work expressing her pain and determination to keep performing while suffering ever-continuing endometriosis; and Ghenoa Gela’s experience of shock in finding her personal salvation in re-connecting with her traditional culture through dance on her first visit to her mother’s home island Erub in the Torres Strait, after being born and brought up in Rockhampton.  My Urrwai is reviewed here January 21, 2018.

Based on dance with some story-telling, these were demanding and impressive works, though relatively straightforward theatrically.  I’m a Phoenix, Bitch is centred on Bryony Kimmings’ experience of her psychosis arising from the sudden onset in her baby son of ‘Infantile Spasms’, seemingly life threatening: the beginning of epilepsy. 

Her creating this work for performance arises from the principle of cognitive behavioural therapy – that is, learning to objectify frightening mental experiences and recognise reality through the process of telling others.  So I’m a Phoenix, Bitch begins rather as if Bryony is a stand-up comedian setting up a relationship directly with us, her audience, through humour, about sex, marriage and childbirth.

But as her child is in hospital and her husband has moved out, she finds herself left alone in what was meant to be the ideal little family cottage on an isolated hilltop in the country – fearing for her child’s life.  Her experience is expressed on stage in acting and singing, in a complex set design using live and recorded video, a model of the house, a representation of the hill and the flooded stream that prevents her from obtaining help, with sound miked so that her inner voice sounds male threatening her female self, and a surround soundscape creating her emotions in us as we watch her despair.

The real life experience took place over a two year period, which Bryony structured to make this work in 2018 after a highly successful career following a degree in Modern Drama from Brunel University in 2003, creating multi-platform art works.
[  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryony_Kimmings  ]

In the title she becomes a phoenix in the sense that she learns that even the worst that can happen is just bad luck, and that we must not feel guilty for what, in reality, we cannot control.  As she finally drives away from the house – now rented by another family and no longer haunting Bryony – she tells us 

“And I watched the cottage disappear out of sight in my rear-view mirror.  And for a moment I felt like I was in a film.  But then I stopped doing that.  Because I wasn’t.  This was real fucking life.”

Black out.
And to tremendous applause and a great sense of relief, Bryony takes a bow and takes us back to something like the comedian she had appeared to be at first.  But we now know, “it’s time to love the new Bryony now.  She has sharper edges, she laughs a little less, she is scarred.  But she is who you will need in the next flood.”

I’m a Phoenix, Bitch is an important work of art because it is a story of real experience which becomes a meaningful metaphor for us each to interpret in our own lives.  Though more complex in the form of its expression, this is what Bryony Kimmings’ work has in common with those other works of “Personal Theatre” by Ghenoa Gela and Liz Lea.  They take the risk which is theatre; they succeed through genuine art.

And I note that these works are by women.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan, performed by Steve Rodgers

Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan, with original performer and co-writer Jonny Donahue.  Belvoir, Sydney, January 11-26 2020.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 12

Director – Kate Champion; Set and Costume Designer – Isabel Hudson; Lighting Designer – Amelia Lever-Davidson; Sound Designer – Steve Francis


Performed by Steve Rodgers (Co-Director)

The ethics of reviewing require the disclosure of potential bias.  The travel writer reveals the company that paid for their travel and accommodation at the holiday destination.  In my case, I have reviewed Steve Rodgers’s work as writer, director or performer a number of times (on this blog) with the note that he was once a student of mine.

The standing ovation he received last night at Belvoir for his solo performance as Narrator, and as co-director with Kate Champion, of Every Brilliant Thing requires me to explain in more detail why I was affected by the nature of this play, and by Steve Rodger’s interpretation of it, in a particular way, the same but different from other audience members.

I went to see the play cold.  That is, I had not been aware of its performance history, including the nomination of Jonny Donahue for several awards following his five months’ showing off-Broadway, also screened as an HBO World of Wonder Special.  My travel plans last year meant I missed the opportunity to see Kate Mulvaney’s performance; nor was I aware that Kate Champion and Steve Rodgers were the directors at that time.  I had not been aware either, of Joyce Morgan’s review in the Sydney Morning Herald (March 17, 2019), nor of any other reviews or commentary.  I had not known that a few clicks into Youtube would show me different stage designs, different actors in the Narrator role on stage and in rehearsal; even interviews with the author and company directors.

Steve Rodgers explaining her task to audience member,
Every Brilliant Thing, January 11 2020
Photo: Brett Boardman

I knew nothing, except that Belvoir advertised this return season, with a smiling photo of Steve Rodgers, as “BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!” – and not even did I know anything about the content of the play, imagining it to have some reference, perhaps, to My Brilliant Career! 

So I was surprised to be greeted warmly, with a huge hug, by one-time student Steve on the stairs to Belvoir Upstairs, who gave me and my wife a slip of paper numbered 717.  “When you hear me say seven hundred and seventeen, you must read out loud what it says,” he told us.  It read “Nina Simones Voice” (without the apostrophe, the old teacher in me noticed).

“I am reviewing,” I told him.  “Well, then I’d better be good!” he replied, as he moved on and we entered the auditorium to find our seats, kindly provided by Kabuku Public Relations at the usual Row E 25/26.  But instead of the usual centrally-situated view of the acting space taking up the corner of the old tomato sauce factory floor, on the far side was a complete reproduction of the seating on our side.  Theatre completely in-the-round – as I had seen at Belvoir only once before, for Life of Galileo last year (reviewed here August 10, 2019).

Steve Rodgers, a quiet moment in role
Every Brilliant Thing, January 11 2020
Photo: Brett Boardman

 Then what happened stunned me.  I watched my student Steve doing what I had taught him to do in the Drama Room at Hawker College back in 1987.  Suddenly my reviewer’s mortar board hat was perched precariously on my drama teacher’s skin, now even more bald, but still firmly attached.  To review is to write about drama; to teach and learn drama is to simply “Do It” – as one educational drama professional association had named their journal in the 1970s.

Over their two-year course in Years 11/12, I had not run theatre skills training classes, not academic literary or theatre history studies, or even staging theatre productions as my central approach.  Taking up from English educational drama traditions for younger students, particularly of Dorothy Heathcote and Brian Way, and combining those with my experiences, particularly in Sydney with Margaret Barr and Richard Wherrett and strongly influenced by Rex Cramphorn, I focussed my teaching on participation and learning leadership through whole group improvisation.

Classes contained students, mixing those in Year 11 and Year 12, at anywhere from Unit 1 to Unit 6 level of experience.  The basic method was for me, or for a student, or for a small group, to provide a point of stimulation to begin a “workshop”.  This could be as simple as having a person stand in a spotlight.  Others might respond by asking that person a question.  Bit by bit as they answer, that person and everyone in the class find themselves creating roles which determine action, and a drama results.

Among my favourites was one which turned out to be an upperclass garden party, in which I became the silent garden gnome, thoroughly soaked when someone turned the watering system on as a lark, and finally being “accidentally” knocked over.  I was able surruptitiously to escape by unobtrusively rolling into the non-acting space behind the drama room’s surrounding black curtains.

The principal stimulating device in Belvoir’s Every Brilliant Thing was more sophisticated but still very simple: Steve Rodgers (in my terms as last night’s workshop leader) meeting and greeting participants on the stairway, giving some of them mysterious cards with numbers and words to say, coming in with everyone, explaining their tasks to some people with cards – and then, after walking around a little in the central acting space, just quietly standing still (without even a spotlight), looking thoughtful, perhaps a bit worried, until everyone has realised he is there and gone quiet.

Steve learned to do this in Year 12, became a leader in whole-group improvisations which could often become intense dramas (and played a very humorous God Hephaistos in a student written, directed and managed production), before attending my Audition Training extra-curricular class and attaining a place as today’s program records at Theatre Nepean at Western Sydney University.

And then what was so brilliant for me, perhaps even more than for the upstanding, cheering audience at the end of the one millionth Every Brilliant Thing, was how wonderfully well Steve Rodgers melded the written script with his selection of audience members, shifting so easily in and out of his role as the son of a woman who killed herself “in a masculine way” and his role as improvisation workshop leader.

The result is, as Duncan Macmillan clearly hoped for his play, an educational drama of the very best quality.  [  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEbv1bGZhX0  ]  

The humbling thing for me was to see a student so overwhelmingly surpass his teacher in such a magnificent performance – my personal millionth and one Brilliant Thing.

Audience member in role as "Sam" proposing marriage
to Steve Rodgers in role as Narrator
Every Brilliant Thing, January 11 2020
Photo: Brett Boardman

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: The Little Mermaid - Ickle Pickle Productions

The Little Mermaid.  Music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman and Glenn Slater, book by Doug Wright, based on the Hans Christian Andersen story and the Disney film produced by Howard Ashman and John Musker and written by John Musker and Ron Clements.

Ickle Pickle Productions, produced by Justin Watson.  Belconnen Community Theatre, January 10-25, 2020.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 10

Director – Jordan Best; Musical Director – Adam Bluhm; Choreographer – Jodi Hammond.

Costume Designer – Fiona Leach; Makeup Design – Eryn Marshall; Set Designer – Ian Croker; Lighting – Sidestage Productions; Music Sequencing – Smilin’ James Aspland



When you go to see The Little Mermaid, make sure you pack your sense of humour.  Jordan Best and her team’s design and direction have set the tone exactly right.  Everyone on stage – and I think there were 40! – understood and thoroughly enjoyed the fun side of such an unlikely seaside story.  Don’t miss, for example, the array of complex characters among the wonderfully sweet-singing but terribly bitchy Mersisters.

Turning a cartoon, essentially made for very young children – almost at Sesame Street age level – into a stage show suited for 10-year-olds and up, is a risky venture.  As a movie, the close-ups of the character’s faces – especially, say, of the way Ariel’s eyes can take over the whole screen – or the way the moving image of life under the sea can be fascinating to watch just for its colour and variety, Disney’s The Little Mermaid is an attractive fairy-story fantasy.  We get the point of the story, but it presents a ‘lite’ version.

Ickle Pickle give us the grown-up version in which the Ariel’s teenage need to escape her royal father’s assumption – that he must control her life to protect his daughter – becomes a serious theme, even if it means she must accept the risks of becoming her own woman.  Emily Pogson successfully makes Ariel’s constricted life as a princess believable.  The risk for Jordan Best here is that the movie’s light quality (which is what makes it such a longstanding favourite) could become too dark and heavy.  (I almost began to think, when Samuel Dietz’s character Grimsby announces at the end “After all, I do believe in royalty”, of Prince Harry and his love for Meghan.)

The great success of Best’s directing is to find the right spot, where the characters are played with a clear sense of not taking themselves too seriously – in fact the whole production in its stage design, lighting effects, humorous choreography, costuming and makeup, and often arch singing, play with the truth that theatre is just an illusion.

And to bring this all together on such a small stage with such a large group of so many young performers (but not forgetting the adults, Michael Jordan playing King Triton and especially Janie Lawson playing Ursula as almost a spoof of Shakespeare's Oberon and Titania) is a logistical and artistic achievement in its own right.

Enjoy!


© Frank McKone, Canberra