Thursday 25 November 2021

2021: Chiaroscuro by David Atfield

 

 

Chiaroscuro by David Atfield.  Canberra Theatre, Courtyard Studio, November 25-27 2021

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 25

Writer & Director David Atfield
Designer Rose Montgomery
Lightning Designer Gillian Schwab
Intimacy Choreographer Liz Lea
Design Assistant Imogen Keen
Company and Stage Manager Anni Doyle Wawrzynczak

Cast:
Caravaggio Mark Salvestro
Gregorio Shae Kelly

David Atfield is not the first to imagine that Michelangelo Merisi (Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi) da Caravaggio may have been homosexual.  In the 1986 movie Caravaggio (1h 29 min  18+), directed by Derek Jarman, “The volatile life of the eponymous 17th-century painter is gorgeously re-imagined through his brilliant, near-blasphemous paintings and flirtations with the underworld. With Tilda Swinton, Sean Bean, Robbie Coltrane, Michael Gough, and Nigel Terry in the title role.
https://www.amazon.com/Caravaggio-Noam-Almaz/dp/B00241VL42  ]

At https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/books/reviews/caravaggio990711.htm Richard E. Spears wrote in 1999:
Fascination with Caravaggio's art and life is at an historic high, to judge from the quantity of writings about him, not just exhibition catalogues and scholarly studies but plays, mystery stories, novels and Derek Jarman's boldly homoerotic film, "Caravaggio." For the past year alone I count at least 25 new titles, including a thesis on "The Life and Legend of Caravaggio Interpreted through Fiction and Film."

But Atfield has made a work of art about a work of art: The Raising of Lazarus.

Michelangelo’s model for Lazarus, Gregorio, thinks that can’t be the artist’s real name because Michelangelo, who painted the Sistine Chapel, “has been dead for fifty years”.  Gregorio makes most of his money from being a “whore” for gentlemen.  He (and we) soon discover that this Michelangelo makes money being contracted by rich gentlemen to paint Biblical scenes which they donate to churches.  Though he’s not exactly a gentleman, a sexual relationship with Gregorio develops because, to the artist, his model is “beautiful”.

For Gregorio the money-making becomes problematic.  He reaches a point where he refuses to be paid for the work as a model; but does that mean Michelangelo should pay him for sex?  Or is there a sincere love between them – a ‘connection’, as Gregorio says?

Shae Kelly as Gregorio; Mark Salvestro as Caravaggio

So, from this angle, the play sheds light in our time on a broader question than just the acceptance of homosexuality, but even to the legal and political issue of the nature of consent.  When they both drink too much, jealousy and misunderstandings become violent.  Michelangelo might well have killed Gregorio  - reminding me of Kenneth Halliwell’s murder of the playwright Joe Orton; and of the women killed at the rate of one a week in Australia by men.

Atfield could have written a very good play about these real life matters, but this play is about the shades of light for which Caravaggio was so famous, and which shifted arts practice.  It was said that a Caravaggio painting was like a poem.  A poem uses words as the painter brushes on the colour – Caravaggio was said not to draw but only to work directly with the brush.  The imaginative use of words in poetry creates images and meanings out of the ordinary; while a whole poem can become a metaphor which changes the reader’s perception of the ordinary.

So a shift comes about in Chiaroscuro as Caravaggio works at re-creating the here-and-now Gregorio into Lazarus – what does the image of Lazarus mean?  Lazarus who has died and four days later is miraculously brought back to life by Jesus.  When Michelangelo killed his friend/rival, why did this innocent not see the wonder of heaven as he died?  Michelangelo saw only terror in his victim’s eyes.  Did Lazarus see nothingness as he died the first time?  What does he mean to hold his hand up towards Christ – seeking to return to the here-and-now because there is no heaven; or to warn us all not to believe in Jesus’ words?

Then the painter, Caravaggio, sees Gregorio in a new light.  He becomes Lazarus insisting on partaking in life, in the ordinary world, not even on the outer in the way Caravaggio is as the painter – as the artist.  At the point when Caravaggio knows how to finish the painting of “The Raising of Lazarus”, Gregorio leaves him for real life.  And Caravaggio knows that after death, as Lazarus knows, there is absolutely nothing.

And in writing this play, David Atfield shows the meaning of Caravaggio’s painting as a marker in history of the beginning of disbelief in religion – while we see the raising of religion, a new Lazarus, in our Parliament this very week, with MPs arguing futilely about ‘religious protection’ and ‘religious discrimination’, to allow religious institutions to discriminate against homosexuals.  We heard, as the play was ending on Thursday evening, from a Christian gay woman teacher who has been dismissed by a Christian school just because she is gay.  Check out Q&A on ABC TV, November 25, 2021.

Chiaroscuro, a play of the light and the dark, is a work of art; a poem in 70 minutes; a Caravaggio of his time and ours.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Monday 22 November 2021

2021: New Platform Papers Vol 1

 

 

New Platform Papers No 1, Currency House, November 2021.
Contact: Martin Portus
Phone 0401 360 806
mportus2@tpg.com.au

Preview by Frank McKone

The Platform Papers series published by Currency House, previously directed by Katharine Brisbane, is taking a new approach, under the new General Editor, theatre director and academic Julian Meyrick

Katharine provides in her Christmas Greetings an outline of changes, especially in the status of women, that have taken place over the two decades of her leadership in setting up Currency House, following her stepping down as publisher of Currency Press.

Rather than each Platform Paper being an essay by a single expert contributor, this New Platform Paper contains five papers, with additional material:

No 1. Imagination, the Arts and Economics  
Introduction: A Snail May Put His Horns Out, Harriet Parsons  
Models, Uncertainty and Imagination in Economics, Richard Bronk  
What’s Wrong with Cannibalism? Jonathan Biggins and John Quiggin  
You Can Sing (Averagely)! Astrid Jorgensen  
Afterword: Looking Back and Looking Forwards, Ian Maxwell

Rather than offer a summary of the complex arguments and practical experiences presented by such a variety show of commentators, here is a selection of quotes which hopefully will stir your social, political and artistic interests and knowledge.

Julian Meyrick explains:

The first issue of the New Platform Papers published in this volume arose out of an event which will be central to the series from now on, an annual Authors’ Convention. The Convention itself was the initiative of my colleague, the new Director of Currency House and Katharine’s daughter, Harriet Parsons. A brilliant addition to our activities, the Convention is a two-day public gathering where we invite the authors of Platform Papers to come together to reflect on a given theme.


Harriet Parsons (Wurundjeri country)
Introduction: A Snail May Put His Horns Out


We have to decide what changes we are willing to make if we are to plan a route, not just out of the pandemic, but off the dangerous course we have been following for the past forty years. The arts may seem an unlikely point man for this operation. We have become more like a snail than a butterfly, withdrawn inside the protection of its shell, but as the eighteenth-century radical Thomas Spence once wrote, ‘a snail may put his horns out’.

 
This first volume of the New Platform Papers is devoted to exploring how our imaginations became captives of the ‘dismal science’, and the role the arts can play in leading the way out.


Richard Bronk (United Kingdom)
Models, Uncertainty and Imagination in Economics


The coordination properties of models and their associated narratives—their tendency when internalised to frame expectations and influence behaviour and outcomes—makes them an instrument of corporate or government power. And this power may—initially at least—be in inverse proportion to the degree of humility with which the narrative or model is promulgated.


The poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, underlined the role of imagination in sympathy and therefore morality in his Defence of Poetry:
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of the moral good is the imagination—and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.

 
Such sympathetic identification with the plight of others is often seen as the quintessential opposite of the narrow self-interest of homo economicus.
…we all have no choice but to imagine the future, interpret the creative interpretations that others place on their predicaments, and invent new ways of making sense of our own.

Jonathan Biggins and John Quiggin (Awabakal and Worimi country / Turrbal and Jagera country)
What’s Wrong with Cannibalism?


Jonathan Swift’s essay A Modest Proposal was prompted by the British national debt crisis of 1729. Having offered conventional solutions in a number of essays, he turned to satire in frustration, proposing that landlords eat the children of their poor tenants:
I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children …

 
Swift’s A Modest Proposal seems, yes, a ludicrous idea, but then look at Airbnb, where you monetise your family home. The home was the sacred hearth of the family. But then someone came up with the idea of selling part of it to strangers on a nightly basis. We recently toured to Orange in regional New South Wales. It has 364 Airbnbs, but no-one can rent a house there.


At an artistic level, much of our cultural policy is now being dictated by social media platforms, and artists are increasingly self-censoring. We were recently told not to portray non-Caucasian characters in the Wharf Revue. We were portraying Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un, two of the most powerful people in the world. I find it extraordinary that satirists are now being told who they can and can’t offend. I would have thought the point was to offend everybody.


Harriet Parsons asks:  So is the universal basic income the answer for the arts?
JQ:  I’m certainly a proponent of a version of the universal basic income, which is the level of income guarantee, which would include a basic living standard for artists engaged in creative work. It differs in the sense that you don’t give it to Gina Rinehart and try to extract it back through taxes, you only expand the provision of basic incomes. But that would provide a basic income to anybody who wanted to apply themselves to creative work. That is something we could and should do.

Astrid Jorgensen (Turrbal and Jagera country)
You Can Sing (Averagely)!


I could not wrap my head around the fact that teenagers were spending every second of their lives consumed by music while simultaneously proclaiming to hate Music, the subject. They would walk into the classroom with their favourite singer blasting in their headphones, then take the headphones out, slump in their chair and despise singing with me for 50 minutes. I started to worry that I was ruining music-making for children, which was a heavy burden to bear.


[Astrid left school teaching to set up the well-known Pub Choir, which in the pandemic lockdowns became Couch Choir online, attracting participants from all over the world.]


But there was one thing still bothering me. None of these choirs reflected me in any way. Each of my seven choirs were either made up of kids forced to sing by their parents, or were mostly white, semi-retirees. There is nothing unpleasant about working with either group. But as a 20-something Asian woman myself, it was confusing to me that none of my peers wanted to sing.

So in 2017, after years of friends declining to sing with me, I wrote a list. On it, I put every excuse I’d ever heard about what stopped somebody from joining a choir:
Auditions
Time commitment
Having to compete/perform
Reading sheet music
Unfamiliar repertoire

General choir lameness
Having a bad singing voice
.


I determined to solve all of these roadblocks. Thus, Pub Choir was born.
Not always in a pub, the trademarked name, Pub Choir, describes my musical act. It’s a ticketed show during which I transform an audience—any audience—into a functional choir.


I believe that Pub Choir gives people the opportunity to embrace and value mediocrity and truly, madly, deeply embrace their averageness. There is a freedom in a crowd where you are genuinely unimportant. Nobody believes that they have become a better singer at Pub Choir. They just feel less afraid to share whatever horrible voice they have. If one person forgets what to sing, someone nearby will remember. Some people sing flat, some sing sharp, some sing too early, some too late and the overall effect is a rich, full, electrifying average. Our audiences reclaim music-making back into their lives, realising that singing belonged to them all along.


The diversity within Couch Choir participants was remarkable. In one song we had 5,000 participants from 45 countries. We received submissions from places we had never considered visiting, like Kazakhstan and Norway. People sent videos from their farms, their wheelchairs, from houseboats, using sign language. They were younger, older, more colourful. Couch Choir was the distillation of what I had always hoped Pub Choir would be: regular, diverse people feeling personally empowered to contribute to the whole.


Sure, it’s not peer-reviewed research, it’s just 613 people who chose to participate. But when 100 per cent of them self-report that their mental health is improved by joining in, it’s worth taking note. Singing—even online—made them feel happier, more connected and more hopeful. And they thought it was an experience worth fighting for. Art has always been more than just entertainment or a distraction. Art can heal us.

Ian Maxwell (Cadigal and Darramuragal country)
Afterword: Looking Back and Looking Forwards


Exhaustion, then, is integral to the [arts] field at the best of times. In the context of the acute crisis of the current Covid-19 epidemic, the arts eat their young…. [leading to] three questions, which were put to the Convention for further discussion. Four key themes emerged. First, the proposition that art and culture are fundamental to the sustainability of society; second, that those engaged in the fields of art and culture do not have the capital to support them; third, that the arts are exhausted; and fourth, that its professionals have been pitted against each other in the competition for resources, with the result that the sector has become fragmented and unable to advocate for its interests as a whole.


Ambiguity is the strength of art, as well as its weakness. Historically—indeed from Plato onwards—the protean, make-believe, liminal nature of theatre—and the recent genres that take up the even more equivocal trope of ‘performance’—has generated profound anxiety and moral panics.


Our challenge is to resist reprising old arguments that belong to the past, and instead peer through the lens of new experiences with the eye of imagination. That, I hope, is the project Currency House has set before us, and towards which the inaugural Convention of 2021 has made the critical first step.

For interviews, review or purchase, please contact Martin Portus.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Monday 15 November 2021

2021: Norm and Ahmed by Alex Buzo

 

 


Norm and Ahmed by Alex Buzo.  Riverside Theatre, Parramatta (Sydney), November 15 – 20, 2021.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 15

Cast
Laurence Coy as Norm
Rajan Velu as Ahmed

Creative Team
Production Director – Aarne Neeme
Associate Director – Terence Clarke
Lighting Designer – Lucia Haddad
Stage Manager & Production Manager – Emma Paterson
Producers – Grant Dodwell, Peter Hiscock & Raj Sidhu
Associate Producers – Lucy Clements & Emma Wright
Publicity – Sean Landis
Photographer – Becky Matthews



Norm and Ahmed at Riverside still stirs the melting pot after 50 years.

A CONTROVERSIAL BEGINNING
When nascent playwright Alex Buzo returned to his Sydney flat from the pub late one
night in 1969, the phone rang. It was the artistic director of a Queensland theatre
company. The Vice Squad were threatening to have one of the actors in “Norm and
Ahmed” arrested for using obscene language. The next night, the actor was arrested
and charged, as were others involved in productions around the country, igniting a
much-publicised campaign against censorship that spanned three states and ended in
the Supreme Court in 1970. In a 2005 television interview, Buzo said:
 

“my aim as a writer was to put Australian drama on the front page. I didn't anticipate this
sort of front page treatment but, I thought it did have a good result in the sense that
people knew that Australian drama was alive and well, whereas up until that point it had
no publicity whatsoever...I'd be disappointed if people didn't think the play had
something to say about racism and generational envy...it is a literary play, it is an art play,
it's meant to be humorous and imaginative, it's meant to have other things going for it
other than the final two words.”
 
Emma Buzo [ https://www.alexbuzo.com.au/downloads/files/NormTeaching09.pdf ]

In her 2009 Teaching Notes, Emma Buzo also records:
When it was produced in Sydney in 2007, director Aarne Neeme set the action in the
present day, merely changing Norm from a WWII veteran to a Vietnam veteran and giving Ahmed a backpack instead of a briefcase.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Laurence Coy as Norm
Rajan Velu as Ahmed

In 2010, Norm and Ahmed became a Higher School Certificate study text.  Last night there clearly were students making up a fair proportion of the audience, so my focus is on the production as a “literary play…an art play”.  But it’s still a play of theatrical impact.

It’s fair to refer back to the original production which I saw at the Old Tote at University of New South Wales, which I believe police attended with a threat of possible arrest for foul language (unless my octogenarian memory has confused me with the Queensland episode).  It’s the power of the drama in the real world which is my concern.

I hadn’t seen the play since 1968, so I was surprised to hear Norm’s story of fighting in Vietnam.  In 1968 it was obvious that Norm was bull-shitting in calling himself a “Rat of Tobruk”, pretending to the naïve Pakistani student that he, Norm, had such iconic standing in Australia’s history.  When this speech was about Vietnam, although Norm was obviously and improperly boasting, because the play (in 2021) is clearly set in the past, it seemed he could have been there with such aggressively awful racist views.  He simply became a rat.

Go to Trove in the National Library to find the digital copy of the original script to see, and understand the difference between World War II and the Vietnam War.  Young people last night could have treated Norm as genuine, even though he ended up boasting a bit too much.

On this point and elsewhere in Coy’s performance of Norm, it was too often possible for us in the audience to find some sympathy for Norm.  In Ron Hadrick’s day as Norm, the serious foreboding menace from the very beginning, asking Ahmed for a light – after just having stamped his own cigarette out – was unrelenting.  In this presentation, for example, Norm could have been genuine in suggesting Ahmed go to a club to mix socially.  In fact, of course, he knew he was very deliberately suggesting Ahmed go into a terrible threatening situation.

Now I come to the literary-art play question.  In 1968 it was obvious that Alex Buzo, and surely Ron Hadrick, were under the influence – for the right reason – of the great British playwright Harold Pinter.  Wikipedia records:

The Birthday Party (1957) is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter. It is one of his best-known and most frequently performed plays.

In the setting of a rundown seaside boarding house, a little birthday party is turned into a nightmare when two sinister strangers arrive unexpectedly. The play has been classified as a comedy of menace, characterised by Pinteresque elements such as ambiguous identity, confusions of time and place, and dark political symbolism.


The essence of Pinter’s dramatic technique was to build in pause…after pause…after pause.  In the often long pauses, the audience hears what’s been said and then goes on to imagine what the meaning is supposed to be, coming from the speaker who paused, and being understood – or not – by the person spoken to.  The effect, even though the characters do nothing physical to attack each other, is a building sense of menace until violence is inevitable.

In Laurence Coy’s presentation of Norm, he was too voluble, the lines coming without the building up of threatening pauses – in which the audience bit by bit feel they have to be on Ahmed’s side, even though on the surface Norm has done little (beyond a few little things) which are seriously violent.  Until the last line, where the foul language and violent action come together.

I noticed that the running time last night was quite a bit shorter than I was expecting.  I think the full use of Pinteresque pauses would have added maybe ten minutes to the 45 minutes the play ran.  Whether this was a directorial matter, or a first night effect for the actors, I can’t say.  Of course, the acting in itself was excellent – but I have to say violence at the end in 1968 was a huge frightening shock.

This Norm and Ahmed is certainly well worth seeing because the play is still relevant – perhaps even more so compared with 50 years ago as our multicultural society has become more complex and issues of individual rights are prominent on social media as well as in daily life.  The line which highlights racism comes when Norm taunts Ahmed, saying he isn’t really black, but could get on well in this country because he might – just – pass as white!

Norm and Ahmed by Alex Buzo: Norm's claim to be
"one of the rats of Tobruk"
Digitised original script at Trove, National Library, Australia
https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-37314951/view?partId=nla.obj-37314967 



© Frank McKone, Canberra

Saturday 13 November 2021

2021: The Wharf Revue: Can of Worms

 

 


Wharf Revue: Can of Worms by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott presented by Soft Tread at Canberra Theatre November 8-20, 2021

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 14


    Writers: Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Philip Scott
    Co-Directors: Jonathan Biggins and Drew Forsythe
    Musical Director: Philip Scott
    Lighting Designer: Matt Cox
    Video and Sound Designer: David Bergman
    A Soft Tread production
    Performed by Jonathan Biggins, Mandy Bishop, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott


I quote Pauline Hanson, at least according to Drew Forsythe in this Can of Worms: “We must get back to our roots!”  That’s exactly what the born again Wharf Revue team have done, to great acclaim from an audience of Ken Behrens.  I’m sure that’s how Amanda Bishop’s Jacinda Adern would pronounce it.

The essence of great satire is to observe the public face of people in power, filter out the cover-up, and exaggerate the core of truth.  It’s hard work for the writers and actors; it’s fun to watch; but beyond making us laugh – in top quality performers – there’s a level of understanding.  For the audience this may be (1) enlightening as a critical judgement; (2) excruciating, even embarrassing for the politician – when we may laugh feeling as if perhaps we shouldn’t; and (3) occasionally even heartwarming, when we laugh with the character rather than at them.

In Can of Worms, Amanda Bishop achieved levels (1) and (2) in her portrayals of Michaela Cash and Jacqui Lambie and (3) for Jacinda Adern.  But perhaps the most remarkable achievement in this year’s Wharf Revue is Drew Forsythe’s levels (1), (2) and (3) all in the one characterisation of The Queen, as she approaches 70 years on the throne – the longest reigning monarch in British history.

I’ve reviewed The Wharf Revue often over the past ten years.  In recent years it was beginning to turn into a more ‘slick’ presentation, mainly in the use of multimedia and even to some degree in the acting style.  Can of Worms is straightforward, you could even say old-fashioned, satirical revue – and it works a treat.

Open the Can of Worms for yourself as it tours here in Canberra and out of our bubble to the rest of the real world.  All praise to the longstanding team of Phil Scott, Drew Forsythe, Jonathan Biggins and Amanda Bishop for striking out on their own from the Mother Wharf at the Sydney Theatre Company.  May their wharves flourish forever.

© Frank McKone, Canberra