2021: Stop Girl by Sally Sara

 

 

 Stop Girl by Sally Sara.  Belvoir Theatre, Sydney, March 20 – April 25, 2021.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 28

Director – Anne-Louise Sarks
Set Designer – Robert Cousins
Costume Designer – Mel Page
Lighting Designer – Paul Jackson
Composer & Sound Designer – Stefan Gregory
Associate Composer – Hamed Sadeghi
Movement Director – Nigel Poulton
Video Deviser & Cinematographer – Jack Saltmiras
Video Content Creator & Systems – Susie Henderson

Cast:
Suzie (Foreign Correspondent Reporter) – Sheridan Harbridge
Bec (Feature Writer) – Amber McMahon
Atal (Afghani Asylum Seeker) – Mansoor Noor
Marg (Suzie’s Mother) – Toni Scanlon
Psychologist – Deborah Galanos
AV Actors – Hilal Tawakal; Aqsa Tawakal; Aisha Tawakal; Najiullah

“Connecting is never a mistake”.  Coming to understand what this means for Suzie, returning home to Australia after a year reporting on the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, is the key that unlocks this important, at times horrifying, drama.

Though the play ends with a kind of resolution for Suzie, I was taken by surprise to find how shaken I was when walking away from the theatre into the normal Sydney evening buzz.  I had, following my usual principle, deliberately not researched the writing of the play or other reviews – and felt a heightened concern for Sally Sara, clearly represented on stage by 'Suzie'.

Two other women, who have created theatre about their own lived experience – in  their cases performed by themselves – came to mind from my previous reviews.  In 2018 I saw Red by Liz Lea, a dancer who suffers from essentially untreatable endometriosis; and My Urrwai by Torres Strait Islander Ghenoa Gela, returning to her home island after growing up in Brisbane.  I wrote of their work “which seems to me to be a new original and significant form, which I’ll call Theatre of the Personal Self.”

Though Sally Sara has made her experience into a play performed by others, Suzie’s response emotionally must surely be as close to Sally’s as theirs was to Liz and Ghenoa.  They took us into their confidence through a combination of words, music and dance.  

Sara’s piece is superficially a more conventional series of short realistic scenes, backed by sound effects, video and sharp lighting jumps from bright light to absolute dark.  Our feelings become those of Suzie / Sally.  We feel with her and for her, and fear that we can so easily make those kinds of mistakes ourselves.  Have we always properly respected other people, in life and in death?

There is an irony here in my being a reviewer of another person’s sense of shame, almost in parallel with her being a reporter filming, asking intrusive questions, and sending back to ABC TV her live reports on people as they are injured and killed.  Keeping her distance emotionally, choosing her shots and her words to fit the expectations and conventions of “objective” reporting is a requirement of success as a professional journalist.  And, indeed, Sally Sara is one of our most respected journalists.

It’s scary, then, as her play shows, that maintaining the proper professional approach can turn into a case of post traumatic stress disorder.  But what can a PTSD counsellor advise when she – despite having seen the Foreign Correspondent reports on TV –  could not possibly imagine the horrors of what Suzie/Sally has actually seen, and done, or not done, in Afghanistan – and in Sierra Leone, and in so many other places fraught with war and poverty?

Suzie has at least her long-term friend Bec, her assistant/translator Atal, and finally her mother to make connection with.  Watching that story play out is what makes the drama work on stage.  I’m left just hoping that Sally is OK – perhaps the writing of the play is proof of that.

But the awful feeling of despair remains in the title, spoken in his language and translated by Atal, by a father walking away from his wife because she has just borne a daughter, who is therefore worthless to him.  “Stop girl!”  

Sheridan Harbridge’s tour de force performance of Sally Sara’s 'Suzie' puts that man and that culture, wherever and in whatever degree, to shame.

Sheridan Harbridge in Stop Girl by Sally Sara
as Suzie, on location in Afghanistan
Photo: Brett Boardman

 

 

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: The Beauty Thief by Rebus Theatre

 

 

The Beauty Thief: Reflections on a fairytale, by thespians with differing abilities. Rebus Theatre, at Belconnen Community Theatre, March 26-28, 2021

Directors – Robin Davidson and Sammy Moynihan
Music Composition and Performance – Marlené Claudine Radice
Lighting Design – Ali Clinch; Costume Design – Victoria “Fi” Hopkins
Stage Management – Dr Anni Doyle Wawrzynczak
Music Operation – Melissa Gryglewski; Photography – Joachim Ellenreider
Projection Operation – Nicole Seifert
Video Documentation – James Matthews

Cast:

Louise Ellery, Lucy Raffaele, Simone Georgia Bartram, Peter Rosini,
Joel Swadling, Grant McLindon, Kimberley Adams

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 26


To make a drama is to make meaning from an “insubstantial pageant” – for those who perform and those who observe.  

In many ways The Beauty Thief reminded me of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where Prospero speaks of the insubstantial pageant fading, and says

 “…These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.”

Rebus describes itself as a “mixed ability company using theatre for social change…[looking] at issues surrounding the challenges faced by people with a Disability, Mental Illness or lived experience of any type of marginalisation, inviting the audience to help us find the solutions.”  

By taking elements of several European traditional fairytales – a king, a queen, their baby girl, a jealous wicked witch, a woodsman with his axe, a wolf, a thief who would be king, a crowd of village women – as director Robin Davidson describes of the group “We found characters, tried out scenes and wove together a story.  We never talked much about what the story meant, only asked – what would this character do?  What is an interesting next scene?  And yet we happened upon a story that resonated, that had something to say, about beauty, about power.”

What it said to me was that people of “mixed” abilities have their own beauty – and aren’t we all mixed in our abilities in our different ways?  And about power, it said we all must not let jealousy and cronyism rule our lives; but we must take responsibility for ourselves and towards everyone else, joining together in community – and not take the easy way out of relying totally on a leader, even if they are genuinely empathetic.

That seems a pretty substantial achievement in making this drama, when director Sammy Moynihan says “As directors, Robin and I simply elevated the existing magic of the cast to shape a performance-ready piece of theatre.  This was also a beautiful experience, floating through the chaos of it all and being guided by the cast as much as we guided them…a testament to collaboration, fearless expression and the joys of embracing the beautiful unknown.”

The process is there in the product, so watching is not about following an exciting pre-determined page-turner.  You will need patience, allowing yourself time to absorb the sounds, the colours, the movements, the unexpected laughs, the spoken and the unspoken, while you wait with a sense of mystery.

And in the end, there is a political message for you to interpret in your own way: something about democracy and leadership came to my mind, seeing our Parliament House here in Canberra “floating through the chaos of it all” with its chorus of women standing up for power as the play’s final text slide advises.

I think these Rebus actors’ spirits will never melt away.  

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: Platform Paper No 63 - Review

 

 

Katharine Brisbane
by courtesy Currency House

On the Lessons of History by Katharine Brisbane: Platform Paper No 63, Currency House, Sydney, March 2021

Reviewed by Frank McKone


Only once in these 82 pages did I catch a glimpse of the daunting task that Katharine Brisbane has undertaken, having just turned 89 years this January, when she admitted ‘trudging’ through the previous 62 Platform Papers.  You will not ‘trudge’ through No 63, so skilfully written by the eminent theatre critic I well remember from the early 1960s.

Yet it is true that the content of the history of the arts, especially the performing arts, from  PP1 ‘Our ABC’—A Dying Culture? (Martin Harrison 2004) to PP62 Performing Arts Markets and their Conundrums, (Justin Macdonnell 2020), still leaves me to hope as Katharine writes: “My hope is that, as we come out of this dark period in our history, Australia might take the lead in the challenge to make the world a kinder, more inclusive place than it has been. By living too fast we have come too quickly to the end of the road. ‘A Change for the Better’ is the Platform Papers’ motto.  All we need is the courage to make it.”

From the creation of the Australia Council for Arts in the mid-1970s through social, economic, political and even viral changes in all directions, for better and for worse, artists and those of us – that means all of us – who need the arts, still need courage and hope to make that change.  

Brisbane selects from a wide range of the topics covered in Platform Papers (the complete list is in the Endnotes) to reveal thematic developments in the history, beginning with why the Papers were needed.  

“In the 1970s, arts support expanded under the aegis of the Australia Council, and by the 1980s artists and arts organisations were largely dependent on regular government grants, but when funding began to contract in the 1990s, this dependence made  practitioners fearful of speaking out….So in 2001 my colleagues and I began a monthly discussion club in Sydney and called it Currency House. We became a not-for-profit affiliate of Currency Press, which also gave us a home.”  

Currency Press, the major publisher of original Australian plays, of course, had been founded in 1971 by Katharine Brisbane, then national theatre critic for The Australian, and her late husband Philip Parsons, a lecturer in Drama at UNSW who worked passionately to bridge the gap between the university and the profession.  [ www.currency.com.au/about-us/ ]  These quarterly essays, “dedicated to the working life” of artists were a natural development and Brisbane’s analysis makes essential reading – as much for me to understand what was happening when I was teaching and reviewing drama from the mid-1970s, as it does for younger and future practitioners.

Her Introduction provides an effective overview of the whole 50 years, before delving into detail, where Brisbane’s journalist origins show through.  From 1. The Genesis of the Papers, through 2. Coordinating the Voices, to 3. Division and Cultural Unity we read the stories of the many real life characters and their reflections at their times of writing, as well as Brisbane’s headlined commentary to tie the complexity of history together.  Readability is the keyword; incisive observation is the result.  Understanding flows naturally.

Still hoping, as I am too, trudging along some nine years behind Katharine Brisbane as I turned 80 this January, it concerns me that it is true that we still need to push on with such courage; that we still feel that our ways of life, changing as they have and always will, do not yet integrate the arts into our political culture as they should always have been integrated.  

Facing up to that truth is what Platform Papers are all about – including No 63.  Yet this history has another lesson, about the complexity of culture rather than simplistic responses such as mine.  

In our newly electric world wide web, the effects of which Brisbane deals with in considerable depth, it is interesting to note that, in our green-hydrogen fuel cell, the current flows from the positive to the negative – on the way powering the motors of industry, including the Arts.  In history generally, out of the dark periods the arts grow in new directions, in new forms.  

In my youth, from my beginnings in the UK just after the early flurry of shots at the Battle of Britain, I found myself studying at the University of Sydney in 1960, not Australian Literature but the culture of Europe expressed by Eugene Ionesco turning all but one naïve recalcitrant into green rhinoceroses.  How would anyone imagine that Absurdism could become the key to British culture from Ionesco and Beckett, through to The Goon Show and on to Monty Python’s Flying Circus?  Yet it was the right artistic response to surviving World War II.

Today, as Brisbane notes also, since the dark days of colonialism, in a very messy process specific to Australia, since the beginning of the Black Theatre in Redfern in 1973 (I was firmly told not to make suggestions because I was white), First Nations’ artistic expression in literature, film and on stage now has a powerful presence, established and growing, in today’s Australian culture.

I once attended a drama teachers’ inservice class conducted by Wesley Enoch in Canberra (when he and I were much younger), and have not forgotten his spirit of respect which unobtrusively filled the space that day.  It is a great honour that he will launch Platform Paper No 63 in ten days’ time on March 24, 2021 at that very University of Sydney which did not teach Australian Literature 60 years ago.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Platform Paper No 63 - Media Release

 
MEDIA RELEASE                                        Wednesday, 10 March 2020

Currency House, Sydney.  Media enquiries to Martin Portus on mportus2@tpg.com.au or +61 (0)401 360 806

Posted by Frank McKone

LESSONS OF HISTORY FOR THE ARTS


As artists and companies emerge from the COVID crisis, veteran theatre critic and publisher Katharine Brisbane AM delivers a landmark new Platform Paper defining the major issues and disruptions facing Australian arts and culture this century.  

On the Lessons of History reviews the challenges raised by the leading artists and cultural experts who authored 62 diverse Platform Papers published by Brisbane and Currency House since 2004.  

Her provocative response will be launched by departing Sydney Festival director Wesley Enoch at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney at 5.30pm on Wednesday, 24 March.  

These writers have raised concerns and given insights into work practices, censorship, copyright, public policy, export, finance, environmental sustainability, welfare, indigenous work, diversity and all genres of the performing arts including film, television and ever-expanding digital media. All express the need for change.

“Currency House was conceived out of a conviction that the arts are fundamental to a civil society; that a society that does not value its own arts is a nation alienated from its own culture,” says Brisbane, aged 89.  

“But the survival of our artists – and many of our public institutions – is now more precarious.  This exploration left me with a major question. Why, when the Government set up a system to support the creative arts, was funding directed at the product rather than the creator?”   

Diversity, she says, has been weakened by hyper-division into art forms, major and minor arts organisations and by a new entrepreneurialism which encourages competition over collaboration.  

Brisbane reflects on Papers by Robyn Archer, Andrew Bovell, Alison Croggon, Kim Dalton, Wesley Enoch, Jane Harrison, Lindy Hume, Lee Lewis, Lex Marinos, Chris Mead, Leigh Tabrett, Lyndon Terracini, David Throsby and others.  

The March 24 launch will introduce the new Director of Currency House, Dr Harriet Parsons, who succeeds her mother, Katharine, who has retired as its founding Chair. Julian Meyrick, theatre director and Professor of Creative Arts at Griffith University, will also speak as its new general editor.

Following On the Lessons of History, a two-day convention in July is inviting all authors to debate how to create a paradigm shift in Australia’s view of the arts. It will be hosted by the School of Literature, Arts and Media at the University of Sydney, a proud sponsor of Platform Papers.  

The next Paper No.64, Changing Tack, by arts consultant Dr Jo Caust will chart this new direction in November.  


Platform Paper No.63 is for sale on currency.com.au  Enquiries 02 9319 4953     
 

2021: Outdated by Mark Kilmurry

 

Rachel Gordon and Yalin Ozucelik

 Outdated written and directed by Mark Kilmurry.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, March 5 – April 17, 2021.

Previewed by Frank McKone
March 7

Cast: Rachel Gordon as Olivia and Yalin Ozucelik as Matt

Designers: Set & Costume – Simon Greer; Lighting – Kelsey Lee; Sound – David Grigg


Outdated is very much up-to-date.  A romantic comedy for our times, beautifully executed by Yalin Ozucelik and Rachel Gordon in a two-hander which requires absolute precision timing and detailed movement.  

It is not entirely laugh-out-loud because, as Shakespeare might have put it, the course of true dating on this fictional (I assume) You+Me app never did run smooth.  Both Matt and Olivia reveal their middle-age insecurities in a highly amusing somewhat satirical exposé of those who daily change their profiles to attract new dates: including one who lied about how old he was online to Olivia, but turned out when she met his family to be another ten years older even than that.  Rachel captures Olivia’s mixed feelings perfectly; as does Yalin when he finds that Matt has accidentally seemed to unfeelingly leave Olivia at the worst moment.

I’ve used the actors’ first names here because the quality of their dialogue and action immediately made me feel that I knew them personally.  The writing is especially interesting because Mark Kilmurry has the characters say out loud their internal self-critical dialogue, almost as if they are speaking to us directly, in amongst their actions and what they say to, and privately about, each other.  The resulting blurring of the ‘fourth wall’ draws us in, and we find ourselves often laughing along with Olivia and Matt even as they are making us laugh at them.

The title Outdated could have several meanings – perhaps even that dating online is a risk or even a kind of scam which people seeking to resolve previously failed relationships should not trust.  Perhaps we should not accept a romantic ending.  But for this couple a kind of inevitability grows, through all their vicissitudes.  

In my ‘I know all about theatre history’ mode, I thought of Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and how Raina comes to realise that Captain Bluntschli, the chocolate soldier, is the right man for her; not the superficial conventional sword-waving Sergius she is expected to marry.  And then I thought of friends, in their 40s like Olivia and Matt, whose online dating has turned out to be the right thing for them.

Arms and the Man has been a popular success now for one hundred and twenty-seven years.  Here’s to the future for not so Outdated romance and comedy.  And make a note for yourself as you book at https://www.ensemble.com.au/shows/outdated/ .  Mark Kilmurry ends his program note : “And special thanks to my wife Jacqui for the idea of a jogging scene – she was right.”  My wife Meg was also right when she said this is the funniest scene.  Going to the Ensemble is like being with family – not to be missed.

 

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: Lamb by Jane Bodie

 

 

Emily Goddard as Kathleen, Darcy Kent as Patrick and Brigid Gallacher as Annie

Lamb by Janie Brodie, Music and Lyrics by Mark Seymour.  Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre (Melbourne) and Critical Stages Touring at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 4-6 2021.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 4

Directed by Julian Meyrick

Music and Lyrics: Mark Seymour and the Undertow, Hunters and Collectors
Dramaturgs: Ella Caldwell and Iain Sinclair
Set and Costume Designer: Greg Clarke
Lighting Designer: Efterpi Soropos
Assistant Lighting Designer: Jacob Shears
Sound and AV Designer: Justin Gardam

Cast: (in order of appearance)
Darcy Kent – Patrick / Frank
Brigid Gallacher – Annie / Mary
Emily Goddard - Kathleen



This is a play about coming, going, and staying, not necessarily always in that order, from one generation to the next.  

Mary and Frank have three children: Patrick, Annie and Kathleen.  The structure of the plot in time-shifted scenes is intriguing.  Like the characters, as they work out what they understand to be truths past and present, we find ourselves putting the pieces of their puzzle together – and unexpectedly picturing the parallel puzzles in our own lives.  Lamb, for us, is like going on an uncharted bushwalk without a map or compass (and certainly no GPS).  Yet, mysteriously, we manage in the end to reach a place where we no longer feel lost.

On stage everything seems small scale, yet the implications about how relationships start, how children are born, and how families form are of great importance.  This play, including especially the songs, is an original work of art – Australian in attitude to life; universal in empathetic understanding.

The performances are outstanding.  Emily Goddard’s representation of Kathleen’s mental disability calls upon our sympathies but keeps our sentimentality at bay.  Brigid Gallacher’s Annie is clearly Mary’s daughter, not just in her recognition of her agency as a woman but as much in her rationality and common sense.  And she sings like her father had.  While Darcy Kent shows the subtle development from a father whose emotional sensitivity is his strength, yet leads to incapacity to cope; to a son who successfully finds his way by drawing upon both his mother and his father – even though he can never quite sing as well as Frank had.

The quality of performance is, of course, also an indication of the clarity of Julian Meyrick’s direction, and is supported by strong designs of lighting, sound, set and costumes.  

The presentation of such original Australian work, local and on tour, has long been a feature of The Q – a tradition that those of us in “the big smoke” of Canberra next door thoroughly appreciate.  Even the Lonsdale Street vegans who would feel sick at the smell of cooking lamb.  See the play if you possibly can in this very short season, and you’ll understand my meaning.



© Frank McKone, Canberra