Email from Nicole Beyer
Theatre Network Australia
Posted by Frank McKone
Contact: nicole@tna.org.au
Dear colleagues,
As you will be aware, the
government has now banned events of more than 500 attendees and has made a firm
call for social distancing and self-isolation, in order to flatten the curve of
the COVID-19 virus.
TNA is aware of the impact this has on
our sector and we are hearing about the anxiety this is causing, especially
to independents who work project to project. The cancellation of events and
shows across the performing arts is a significant loss of work and income to an
already financially precarious sector.
In the TNA 2018 Independent Survey
Report – THIS IS HOW WE DO
IT: Working Trends of Independent Artists, Creatives, and Arts Workers in
Australia – it was shown that respondents worked an average of
8 projects across a year, half of which were paid below industry rates. So right
now, we are especially thinking of the independent artists, producers and
presenters who juggle multiple jobs and roles to make a living, and we are
concerned about those who are already marginalised and more vulnerable to the
impacts of the virus, such as Disabled and Deaf artists.
What TNA is
doing:
1. TNA, together with our
national colleagues are heading into a national industry roundtable with Paul
Fletcher, the Federal Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the
Arts advocating for an immediate and targeted assistance package for Australia’s
performing arts industry.
2. We are promoting the value
of the small to medium and independent sectors to the media, and urging stimulus
in multiple areas, including financial assistance for the sector's casual
workers, and an injection of funds to ensure that all 162 short-listed
organisations in the Australia Council's Four Year Funding round can be
supported in the next cycle, providing vital infrastructure to our sector as it
rebuilds over the medium term.
3. TNA has been speaking to
advisors of both major parties and the Greens to seek their support for an
assistance package.
4. Updating the TNA Resources
Page with relevant resources, links, and
plans from national and international colleagues.
What you can
do:
1. Log your loss of income
with I Lost My Gig Australia. This will support the combined efforts of our national
colleagues in advocating for an assistance package.
2. Join in Live Performance
Australia’s campaign #livesupport – All
industry workers are urged to record a short message and let the government know
about the impact of the shutdown on our industry.
3. Take the health and safety
of our community seriously, and practise social distancing, and self-isolation
if you are unwell to slow the spread COVID-19.
It is an incredibly stressful time
with the loss of work and income, and we also acknowledge how heart breaking it
is to have to cancel shows you’ve worked very hard to bring to life. But we
cannot emphasise how much more urgently we need to show care towards ourselves
and to each other.
Please feel free to contact us if
you need any further advice or information.
Nicole, Simone, Jamie, Rani and
Yuhui
Support Act
Wellbeing Helpline 1800 959 500 – a
free, confidential service, available 24/7 to anyone who works in the performing
arts. We are doing our very best to keep up with the additional demand, but
there may be a slight delay. If you or someone you know is at immediate
risk, please contact the Emergency Services on 000.
Phone Lifeline 13 11
14, Beyond Blue 1300 224 636 or click here for additional services.
Visit ‘Looking after your mental health during the coronavirus
outbreak’ from Beyond
Blue.
|
Monday, 16 March 2020
2020 Theatre Network Australia Covid-19 Response
Thursday, 12 March 2020
2020: Family Values by David Williamson
Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 11
Director – Lee Lewis; Dramaturg – Van Badham; Designer – Sophie Fletcher; Lighting Designer – Benjamin Brockman; Composer and Sound Designer – Steve Francis
Cast:
Belinda Giblin – Sue (Mrs Collins); Andrew McFarlane – Roger (Justice Collins ret.)
Danielle King – Lisa (elder sister); Jamie Oxenbould – Michael (middle brother); Ella Prince - Emily (younger sister)
Bishanyia Vincent – Noeline (Border Force naval commander; Emily’s partner); Sabryna Walters – Saba (Iranian refugee, in Australia for medical treatment; about to be sent back to Nauru)
Photos: Brett Boardman
In Family Values, David Williamson has written a masterwork.
The Griffin Theatre production, in design and quality acting, picks up and runs with every opportunity the script provides. It’s the Australian political satire I have been waiting for.
Going beyond satirical comedy, the Collins family “celebrating” Roger’s 70th birthday becomes a metaphor representing Australia, asking each of us what has happened to our humanitarian ideals. Have we let the Fair Go go? Can we bring it back … now … please!
Let me make it plain that my judgement on the quality of the play is not because I agree with Williamson’s stance on the issues. It is because the work shows such expert control of all the elements of great drama. This places David Williamson in the league alongside Shakespeare in his comedies like Much Ado About Nothing, George Bernard Shaw in his Major Barbara, and the serious drama of Henrik Ibsen in his An Enemy of the People. The other modern Australian playwright also of special note is Nakkiah Lui in her Black is the New White (reviewed here March 2018).
The essence of achieving maximum effect is economy and structural complexity made to seem simple. Though this may sound like the worst kind of public service doctrine, this is how it works:
Instead of his standard two-act play with interval (that is exposition followed by climax and denouement in the second half), Williamson has “gone modern” with a 90-minute tightly structured beginning-to-end story;
The story is apparently simple – Roger and Sue are waiting, bickering, for their children to arrive; Lisa explodes onto the scene with Saba, who uses an Anglo name as a cover; Michael belligerently arrives, and expounds on his religious conversion; Emily arrives hesitantly with her over-the-top partner Noeline; Saba’s illegal status is revealed; Sue concocts a solution to save Saba from being returned to Nauru.
The structure is spiral, reminding me of the image of a species’ genome, with its four letters of code interacting in unexpected and seemingly unpredictable ways, yet creating a complete life-form.
But in this species, which I could call Australianus politicus, there are seven code letters, each switching different sets of genes on or off. But genetic diversification is how the system learns and changes.
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| Andrew McFarlane as Roger |
Justice Collins begins with black-letter-law turned on. At the end he turns it off.
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| Danielle King as Lisa |
Lisa begins with risk-taking radical political activism, but finally accepts that there may be more subtle and softer ways of relating, even to authoritarian governments – and her brother and sister. Absolutist moral positions may be self-defeating.
 |
| Jamie Oxenbould as Michael |
Michael, too, discovers that though his obsessive behaviour may have given him purpose as a child, in adult life his new-found obsession with Pentacostal Christianity needs to be thought through carefully. Like his sister Lisa, he finds taking conventional absolutist positions fail when he has to test them in the face of the reality of Saba’s fate. Christian love is about compassion, never obsession.
 |
| Bishanyia Vincent and Ella Prince as Noeline and Emily |
Emily says “Never be the third child”, meaning that she began believing it was natural that she always would be dominated, not only by Lisa, Michael and her ex-husband, but now by Noeline in a gay relationship. By the end she has learned to stand up for herself, against Noeline’s black-letter-law view of their work for Border Force, and probably against their proposed marriage. Self-realisation is the gene she turns on.
Noeline’s “Commanding Officer” gene is highly active until her environment changes irrevocably. I’m not entirely sure at the end of the play whether her acceptance of the inevitable failure of the Border Force rules is a permanent switching off of that gene (when her Minister Mr Duck-it announces on Radio National that an un-named officer made a mistake, so he will treat Saba’s case as one-off, and allow her to stay). I guess Emily will have to make that judgement “going forward”.
 |
| Belinda Giblin as Sue |
It is Sue, who begins as mother-at-home to Roger’s man-always-at-work (until he retired and starts to get under her feet) whose practical management gene never changes. She has always had to understand how to keep everything working in the family. Saba is now in the family, and she works out what Justice Collins, ret. must say on national television about Saba’s case. She hates the phrase “going forward”, so tells him that “in the future” their marriage is over unless he does the morally right thing.
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| Sabryna Walters as Saba |
Saba’s switched-on gene is truth – the proper understanding of the core elements of Islam, the denying of women’s rights by the mullahs when they arrested her for protesting because they made it law that women could not practise medicine, after she already had top results in her first two years’ medical training. In her life-threatening escape, and despite her treatment by Australia, as morally evil as her treatment by Iran, her dream of life as a mother and a doctor – of compassion and science – remains undeterred.
Sabryna Walters’ performance of Saba’s major speech is quite extraordinary.
You may think from my description that this could not be a comedy. But that is where David Williamson’s imagination shines. He has written in a Playright’s Note:
From my earliest days as a playwright, as in Don’s Party and The Club, I’ve loved
to put people in the same room who are obliged to be together, but shouldn’t be
together, and don’t want to be together. Humans being humans, this inevitably
results in drama and comedy.
It was Don’s Party and The Club, both famous for their satire of politics in their own ways, that I first thought of, before reading this Note.
I think Family Values is more powerful and more comprehensive, and the comedy more telling. I am just a year older than David Williamson. I have been waiting for this play since The Coming of Stork in 1970. I have reviewed 12 of his plays in the past 24 years, including Don’s Party and Heretic in 1996, Face To Face in 2000, and what he claims will be his very last play, Crunch Time, in February 2020.
I find it hard to imagine Playwright David Williamson, retired.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 6 March 2020
2020: American Song by Joanna Murray-Smith
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| Image: Rob Blackburn Photography and Work Art Life Studios |
American Song by Joanna Murray-Smith. Presented by Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre & Critical Stages at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 5-7, 2020.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 5
Director: Tom Healey
Performed by: Joe Petruzzi
Set & Costume Design: Darryl Cordell
Lighting Design: Bronwyn Pringle
Composer & Sound Designer: Patrick Cronin
Joe Petruzzi, as Andy – a very much middle American who is well educated but is not a registered member of any political party – quietly tells us over 90 minutes his personal story as a family man living in a culture where having the right, and feeling the need, to protect his wife and son is a matter of practical reality.
He is building a dry-stone wall as he speaks, seeking in his own life and in the spirit of being American the strength of purpose represented in the larger foundation stones and the skill of finding and placing the smaller and often oddly-shaped higher layer stones in just the right way, ready for the final top layer of regularly shaped and evenly thin stones which complete a perfect wall which, he says, should last another 300 years.
By then, he expects, some minor movement in the weighty rocks may cause a need for a little adjustment, but essentially the wall is not so much a dividing force (as we might interpret the famous poem Mending Wall by the American Robert Frost), but a force for strength and stability in life.
Joanna Murray-Smith has written a powerful study of this American man, perhaps taking a risk as an Australian interrogating American culture. Petruzzi’s performance (he graduated from Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art and later trained in the HB New York studios) creates the illusion that this is a thoroughly American life on stage before us.
The reality of his and his family’s life, which as he says proves that we all have to accept that the past and the future do not exist – only the present – is terrifying because we can never know what will happen to us next. Nothing like that solid, so carefully constructed wall that will stand steady for 300 years.
The strength of this play, and particularly in Joe Petruzzo’s effective under-played tour-de-force performance, lies in the emotional impact on us – watching him build and waiting to see the next piece fall into place, or not, in his life story. We cannot help but feel empathy and sorrow, as much as joy and satisfaction as each stone materialises.
The simple open sky backdrop allows us to focus on the wall and Andy’s concentrated movement, while the American songs we hear to begin – which establish place and time for us – fade into a faint but somehow unnerving soundscape. Like the wall visually, it is the story which stands out in our listening.
Afterwards, we may reflect on our own experiences as family members, and perhaps wonder if our culture gives us the chance for a little more stability than the American – or not.
This is a sensitive and thoughtful work by Murray-Smith and should not be missed.
Though finishing very shortly at Queanbeyan, you may be able to catch it on tour at
5-7 March: Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre
10 March: Warrnambool, Lighthouse Theatre
12 March: Moonee Ponds, Clocktower Centre
14 March: Dandenong, Drum Theatre
18 March: Frankston, Frankston Arts Centre, The Cube
20-21 March: Brisbane, QUT Gardens Theatre
26-28 March: Sydney, Glen Street Theatre
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 4 March 2020
2020: Breaking the Castle by Peter Cook
Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 4
Cast:
Dave Smith – Peter Cook
Recorded Voices – PJ Williams; Lainie Hart
Creative team:
Director – Caroline Stacey
Dramaturge – Shelly Higgs
Production Design – Imogen Keen
Sound Design – Kimmo Vennonen
Lighting Design – Gerry Corcoran
It’s difficult to not believe that ‘David Smith’ is real, even though we are obviously watching a carefully constructed play. In the writing, directing, design work and acting, Peter Cook challenges us to suspend our disbelief.
Why? I think so that we come to see, as David does after successful rehabilitation, the beauty of a butterfly’s wings – and the difference between an honest friend and those who would prey upon one’s addiction. There is an irony in David’s discovery that he has to learn to believe in himself, which means accepting that he needs to learn – and working to understand his teacher’s technique. By the end of the play, he becomes a success, teaching through drama with disadvantaged young people.
We find a further layer of irony because ‘Dave Smith’ is an actor playing ‘himself’, played by Peter Cook playing…himself? Of course, we cannot really know, but the details of David’s drug-taking and rehab experience make one wonder if ‘research’ was the author’s only source. The significance of the title, “Breaking the Castle” is not revealed in the play, nor in Peter Cook’s program note: “I wrote this play as a testament to everyone who’s had to struggle with things unseen, which in a sense is all of us…explores all facets of life, from memory to childhood to grief to pursuing one’s passion in life.”
The ‘castle’ which ‘David’ ‘breaks’ perhaps represents each person’s experience of what was traumatic for them, and necessarily must remain private – and must be respected as such even by those who know the story. Yet, in a theatre, on a ‘stage’, ‘David’, now an ‘actor’ can act out to his fictional ‘audience’ – the role which we, Peter Cook’s real audience, play – to publicly reveal David’s childhood traumas which underly his drug addiction. From this we learn to respect other people’s privacy, even while we should help them to be brave about facing up to their damaging traumatic experiences.
And so, Peter Cook is right in concluding his note: “It’s theatre for everybody, no matter who you are or where you are from.” A brave piece of theatre, in fact.
Breaking The Castle was developed in 2019 through The Street’s First Seen: new works-in-progress program and further developed later in the year with dramaturgy support from Shelly Higgs. It is an excellent example of the developmental theatre work The Street continues to offer and will be shown at HotHouse Theatre in Albury-Wodonga after this Canberra season.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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