2021: The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

 

 

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov.  Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, May 29 – June 27, 2021.

Director and Adaptor EAMON FLACK
Set & Costume Designer ROMANIE HARPER
Lighting Designer NICK SCHLIEPER
Composer & Sound Designer STEFAN GREGORY
Choreographer ELLE EVANGELISTA
Intimacy Coordinator CHLOË DALLIMORE
Movement/Fight Director NIGEL POULTON
Voice Coach DANIELLE ROFFE
Assistant Director CLAUDIA OSBORNE
Stage Manager KHYM SCOTT
Assistant Stage Manager JESSIE BYRNE
Photos by Brett Boardman

Previewed by Frank McKone
May 29


When you see Eamon Flack’s presentation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, don’t expect a museum exhibit of decaying Russia in 1904.  Remember that, sadly, Chekhov was very disappointed with the first production:

It opened at the Moscow Art Theatre on 17 January 1904 in a production directed by Konstantin Stanislavski. Chekhov described the play as a comedy, with some elements of farce, though Stanislavski treated it as a tragedy. Since its first production, directors have contended with its dual nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cherry_Orchard

This Belvoir production is nothing like the usual approach in what has become one of the most popular plays for amateur companies.  A nice example is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI9x6b8Vdow recorded at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, Illinois, on October 17 & 18, 2013.

Flack has “set our production not in Russia but in ‘Rushia’, and not in 1904 but ‘now’, which is a time somewhere between the last and the next hundred years.”  As the cast shows, this means in a multicultural society which could be modern Australia – or the world.

Well before his time, facing dying from tuberculosis, Chekhov saw the absurdity of people who believe that life should and would go on forever ‘as we know it’.  His comedy is black – terribly funny.  In this, surely the most highly energetic production imaginable, you’ll be surprised – and thoroughly engaged – by the wild choreography of movement, the frantic singing and dancing, the extremes of laughter and tears.  After all, this is the end of these characters’ world as they think they know it.

But Flack has also “contended with its dual nature”.  He has not fallen into Stanislavski’s trap.  To drag acting out of 19th Century melodrama, Stanislavski has been essential for showing us how to make acting ‘realistic’, developing his theory and practice from about the time he directed The Cherry Orchard, seeking to express directly the tragedy.

Flack has understood Chekhov’s desire to show the tragedy obliquely by emphasising the absurdity of the character’s behaviour.  So the audience ends up laughing at them – but bit by bit realising we are losing our personal cherry orchards every day.

This is an exciting presentation of The Cherry Orchard to watch, and thoughtful on reflection – and highly recommended.

The Cast in rehearsal for The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
Belvoir 2021
L-R: SARAH MEACHAM as Dunyasha; MANDELA MATHIA as Lopahkin;
CHARLES WU as Yasha; NADIE KAMMALLAWEERA as Varya; PAMELA RABE as Ranevskaya; PRISCILLA DOUEIHY as Petya; KEITH ROBINSON as Gaev; PETER CARROLL as Firs;
KIRSTY MARILLIER as Anya
Not in photo: LUCIA MASTRANTONE as Charlotta; JOSH PRICE as Pishchick;
JACK SCOTT as Yepikhodov

Note for Chekhov enthusiasts: The original cast list in The Portable Chekhov (Penguin/Viking 1947)

Lubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya, a landowner [Pamela Rabe]

Anya, her seventeen-year-old daughter [Kirsty Marillier]

Varya, her adopted daughter, twenty-two years old [Nadie Kammallaweera]

Leonid Andreyevich Gayev, Mme. Ranevskaya's brother [Keith Robinson]

Yermolay Alexeyevich Lopahin, a merchant [Mandela Mathia]

Pyotr Sergeyevich Trofimov, a student [Priscilla Doueihy as "Petya"]

Simeonov-Pishchik, a landowner [Josh Price]

Charlotta Ivanovna, a governess [Lucia Mastrantone]

Semyon Yepihodov, a clerk [Jack Scott]

Dunyasha, a maid [Sarah Meacham]

Firs (pronounced fierce), a man-servant aged eighty-seven [Peter Carroll]

Yasha, a young valet [Charles Wu]

A Tramp, Stationmaster, Post Office Clerk, Guests, Servants.

The action takes place on Mme. Ranevskaya's estate.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: The 7 Stages of Grieving by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman

 

 

Program Cover
Elaine Crombie
 The 7 Stages of Grieving
Sydney Theatre Company 2021

The 7 Stages of Grieving by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman.  Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1, May 21 – June 19, and at Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse, June 23-26.

First premiered at Metro Arts, Brisbane, 1 September 1995.  Now with additional material by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman 2008 and Shari Sebbens and Elaine Crombie 2021.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 29

Performed by Elaine Crombie as The Woman
Director – Shari Sebbens; Designer – Elizabeth Gadsby; Lighting & AV Designer – Verity Hampson; Composer & Sound Designer – Steve Francis; Assistant Director – Ian Michael; Stage Manager – Todd Eichorn

Elaine Crombie as The Woman
The 7 Stages of Grieving
Photo: Joseph Mayers

 

Elaine Crombie’s performance of The Woman in The 7 Stages of Grieving is at once terrifying and glorious.  This is an acting role which does not provide her with the personal distancing an actor can normally use to protect herself emotionally.  She represents her personal reality of survival after 233 years of violent oppression by an inhumane colonial society – our Australia.

“We can’t go back now.  To go back is to deny our humanity.”  

She means reconciliation now, no more WRECK ON SILLY NATION, the joke which flashes on the screen behind her.  Should we laugh?  Of course not.  But in her dignity and strength of character and purpose, the humour central to her Indigeneity, she gives us permission to see the joke.  And we laughed, with her.

The Woman is not a character in a play.  She is Elaine Crombie investing in our education, offering us a new understanding.  Asking us now not merely to act in conventional sympathy, but to take practical action politically to achieve proper recognition of the justice of self-determination for First Nations people in Australia, whose continuing culture is now known to be at least some 65,000 years old – twice as old as the broken history of the European invaders in 1788.

The addition this year of 7 Acts of Reconciliation starts with An Act to Lift the Age of Imprisonment so that 10 and 12 year old children, whose families need help and support, will no longer be jailed – as they are now, for example in one of her stories, for swearing at police who are applying racial profiling and violently arresting them for minor offences as if they are adult criminals.

Then there is her own story of accidentally locking her keys in her car.  Police will not believe it is her car, as she tries the door.  This is no joke.  No-one laughed.

She names a clutch of offending politicians, from Peter Dutton to Pauline Hanson.  For me, the most upsetting is Malcolm Turnbull – the apparently moderate – who instantly dismissed the Uluru Statement from the Heart.  What an absolute insult!

I can only conclude as director Shari Sebbens ends her program note for this, the fourth production by the Sydney Theatre Company since 1995:

“To me this play feels eternal,
which makes me so happy.

But also, this play feels eternal
And that makes me furious.”

Don’t miss Elaine Crombie in The 7 Stages of Grieving, in Sydney and soon in Canberra.  Don’t lose your fury, but please, to keep your balance, also enjoy this picture of the happy team working on the production:

Photo: Joseph Mayers

And consider the story of the play in the Writers’ Note:  “In many ways it is not a play that is to be slavishly reproduced but is an invitation to be remade with every passing year.  We once entered 7 Stages into a playwriting award and were rejected as they said it was not a play but more a ‘blueprint for a production’.

So here, for contrast, are Deborah Mailman in the role in 2002, Ursula Yovich in 2006 and Lisa Flanagan in 2008.

Photos by Tracey Schramm

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: The Twins - Truer than Fiction by Sarah Butler, Ian Darling and Greg Fleet

 

 

The Twins by Sarah Butler, Ian Darling and Greg Fleet.  Shark Island Institute and The ArtsLab Kangaroo Valley at Canberra Theatre Centre, Courtyard Studio, May 3 – 6, 2021

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 3

Directors: Terry Serio and Sarah Butler
Producer: Mary Macrae

Designer – Sarah Butler; Lighting Designer – Morgan Moroney; Voice & Acting Coach – Terry Serio; Additional Accent Vocal Coach – Jillian O’Dowd; Production Assistant – Alisha Manning

Ian Darling and Greg Fleet
in The Twins - Truer than Fiction

Photo: Lisa Tomasetti

Ian Darling, “an award-winning documentary filmmaker, who returns to the stage for the first time in 40 years”,  and Greg Fleet “an award-winning actor, comedian, playwright and author” are apparently preparing to rehearse the roles they played together at school all those years ago – the twin sons of Ægeon, who is a wealthy merchant from Syracuse,  in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors; both of whom are known as Antipholus.

In Act I, the racist Duke of Ephesus demands:
“Well, Syracusian, say in brief the cause
Why thou departedst from thy native home,
And for what cause thou camest to Ephesus.”

Ægeon, explains the long and complicated story in which he adopts a pair of twins from a poor family (each become known as Dromio) and how by accidents at sea on his “prosperous voyages”, he and his wife, each with one son and his attendant, become separated.  So we end up with Antipholus (and Dromio) of Syracuse, at the age of 18, going off to search for their twins Antipholus (and Dromio).  As we find out much later, they are in Ephesus, where the Duke, though sympathetic, has just jailed their father, after

“Five summers have I spent [searching] in furthest Greece,
Roaming clean through the bounds of Asia,
And, coasting homeward, came to Ephesus
Hopeless to find, yet loth to leave unsought.”

But, in keeping with the Australian government, that’s the law, says the Duke : “Which princes, would they, may not disannul.” I have to do this to you: “Yet I will favour thee in what I can.”  Refugees still effectively held in Papua New Guinea and Australians trapped by Covid in India will surely understand.

The Twins is an 80 minute journey of discovery about what actually happened to Ian and Greg when they were separated after school.  They never get around to performing more than a few snippets of Shakespeare’s play – mainly bits of their “father’s” speech.  This becomes significant because both of them seem to have been unduly influenced by their real fathers’ expectations and lifestyle.  

Perhaps the most interesting issue that divides them, as they argue about what they think they remember, is that Ian comes from a wealthy family who buys his private education, while Greg from a poor and dysfunctional family seems to have got to Geelong Grammar on a scholarship.  Ian, it seems, was the real Antipholus, while Greg was really a Dromio.

I have in mind that Act II of The Twins might be to work up a piece from the Shakespeare.  Perhaps we could see the two families, based upon Ægeon’s emphasis on his loving wife with a strong sense of responsibility equal or more than his own, compared and contrasted with the Dromios’ mother who, says Ægeon, was

“A meaner woman [who] was delivered
[in the same inn where his wife became
A joyful mother of two goodly sons]
Of such a burden, male twins, both alike.
Those, for their parents were exceeding poor,
I bought, and brought up to attend my sons.

In other words the “meaner” woman had no option but to sell her children.

This story is relevant to Ian’s life because he says that he feels guilty for being so wealthy.  Has he, in real life, come to understand and live up to the goodness of his Shakespearean father and mother?  Antipholus of Syracuse is certainly rather like the stockbroker Ian says he became, but Shakespeare gives a different view of family life in Act II Scene I in the house of Antipholus of Ephesus, where Dromio is treated in the worst way as a slave; and bites back magnificently.

So, though the stories of Ian Darling’s and Greg Fleet’s adult lives are interesting, and their playing of themselves raises questions about the nature of being an actor, I felt they could have written a play incorporating what they have learned from playing Shakespeare with such a strength of mutual connection at the age of 16.

They write in the program “We have coined the term ‘theatre verite’ to describe this piece because it is a play, first and foremost, but the characters are real people and are also played by themselves.”  I have several times recently reviewed what I have termed “Personal Theatre”.  John Bell’s One Man In His Time takes up the Shakespeare theme, of course, but I think Stop Girl by Sally Sara has been the most powerful, alongside My Urrwai by Ghenoa Gela and Red by Liz Lea.

The Twins is given a structure, which raises social issues, making the play more significant than two guys nattering about their lives.  They begin and end with stylised statements that “I am a man” and “I am a white man”, implying that they recognise, for example, that they are not women and not diverse.  They also focus often on the question of being truthful and trustworthy, because being an actor can mean hiding the truth, and social prejudice can raise its head.  That raised for me the question that, having written this play and continuing to perform it, have they not changed simply as a result of this experience, especially working together after so many years apart?  Maybe the script will have to keep changing.

John Bell pointed out that you can only trust an actor to the extent that you know they are pretending.

So, though The Twins is not “great theatre”, it certainly can stimulate a lot of ideas.

Greg Fleet and Ian Darling
in The Comedy of Errors
Geelong Grammar 1978

© Frank McKone, Canberra