2022: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, adapted by Kip Williams

 

 

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, adapted and directed by Kip Williams.  Sydney Theatre Company at Roslyn Packer Theatre, March 28 – May 7, 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 31

Eryn Jean Norvill as Dorian Gray
in the garden of the artist, Basil Hallward, in Chapter 1
of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
perhaps when he was painting the portrait

 

Performed by Eryn Jean Norvill

Alternate Performer – Nikki Shiels

Adapter & Director – Kip Williams
Designer – Marg Horwell
Lighting Designer – Nick Schlieper
Composer & Sound Designer – Clemence Williams
Video Designer – David Bergman
Dramaturg & Creative Associate – Eryn Jean Norvill
Production Dramaturg – Paige Rattray
Assistant Director – Ian Michael
Original Voice & Text Coach – Danielle Roffe
Additional Voice & Text Coach – Leith McPherson

A backstage, often on stage, crew of  26 in stage managing, wardrobe, lighting, sound, video, and staging.

Photos by Daniel Boud

Eryn Jean Norvill as the story teller
in The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

Sydney Theatre Company has outdone itself in Kip William’s extraordinary, excitingly modern, adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.  The story, virtually verbatim from Oscar Wilde’s late 19th Century novel, is told by an amazingly adaptable Eryn Jean Norvill in living video combining social media artificial intelligence tech with unfiltered acting before our very eyes.

To appreciate this theatrical innovation, here is what Wilde’s text explains about the history of art.

“The first [stage] is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me.”  This is Basil Hallward, the painter of the picture of Dorian Gray, speaking to Lord Henry Wotton, Chapter 1. “It [the woodland landscape he would not sell] is one of the best things I have ever done. And why is it so? Because, while I was painting it, Dorian Gray sat beside me. Some subtle influence passed from him to me, and for the first time in my life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I had always looked for and always missed.”

As a young man myself, it was Oscar Wilde beside me that opened up “the wonder”, as Basil says, of “an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently.”  It made me become my kind of teacher.

His next response to Lord Henry’s “Then why won’t you exhibit [Dorian Gray’s] portrait?” explains: “An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.”  This idea defined for me my role as an ‘enabler’ in the teaching art, not an ‘instructor’.

It is inevitable, I guess, that some would see what Oscar Wilde is writing about is homosexual love, (explored explicitly in a recent work by Canberra playwright  David Atfield, Chiaroscuro, where he imagines that Michelangelo Merisi (Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi) da Caravaggio may have been homosexual [reviewed on this blog November 25, 2021].  

Yet it was Wilde’s Preface to his novel, about the nature of arts criticism that became the focus of my interest – though right now I may have fallen into his trap: “…the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.”  But it is the impact on each of us, personally, that makes both the original novel, published 20 July 1890, and Williams’ stage adaptation which premiered in Covid-19 times, 28 November 2020, of such great significance.

Filtered selfie - Eryn Jean Norvill

Eryn Jean Norvill as "Juliet"

Eryn Jean Norvill as beautiful but self-centred Dorian Gray

Eryn Jean Norvill as adult Dorian Gray

Eryn Jean Norvill becomes the best teacher imaginable in this “entirely new mode of style” conceived by Sydney Theatre Company’s artistic director Kip Williams, designed by Marg Horwell with Norvill not only as performer but also as dramaturg and creative associate. The essential art of theatre is to tell stories.  Norvill is re-telling Oscar Wilde’s morality tale of The Picture of Dorian Gray as a teacher would to children, or rather as she would to today’s “young adults”, say 16 - 24.  There were many of them in the audience last night, ready to instantly cheer their teacher on.

Weirdly the biggest cheer came when the show had to be stopped for some ten minutes because the complexities of linking all the live and recorded video had got out of sync.  The young ones cheered when it stopped and cheered massively as Norvill reappeared – recorded on video, or was she live?  It was often hard to know the difference.

That question of how do we know what reality is in an Instagram world is the essence of this new mode.  Kip Williams, of course, has been working towards exploring live video for some years now, with his greatest success previously, in my view, in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer – not surprisingly with Eryn Jean Norvill as Catherine Holly  [see my February 2015 review at https://ccc-canberracriticscircle.blogspot.com/search?q=Suddenly+Last+Summer ].  This was one reason I was determined, after four Covid-19 ruined attempts, to see her work again.

The conceit, an old-fashioned literary term for device, thought up by Oscar Wilde, is to imagine one’s picture taken in one’s beautiful youth giving one Dorian Gray the freedom to remain forever the self-centred monster that a teenager can be while only his picture grows old.  It leads, of course, to social disaster as Dorian has no compunction about promising love and marriage to an attractive actress, but then rejecting her in no uncertain terms because she “can’t act” (Juliet in Shakespeare’s play).  She commits suicide and her brother pursues Gray to kill him.  By his late 30s Gray has killed the artist, Basil Hallward, killed the brother and destroyed the painting in a state of mental collapse.

Of course, when reading the novel, you never see the picture, just as Basil said you wouldn’t.  On stage the show is full of pictures as Eryn tells her story, taking on all the roles – even including apparently herself as the story-writer himself – but we still never see the painting.  That is the measure of the originality in this theatrical work of art – that the actor never reveals herself to us: “An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.”

Eryn Jean Norvill as Dorian Gray when young

But what this Picture of Dorian Gray shows is how ugly his picture becomes, because of never growing up out of self-indulgence, having no compunction about being “honest” without any sense of the consequences for other people’s feelings.  His “honesty” makes him dictatorial – and finally self-destructive as well as creating ruination all around.

It’s at this point that suddenly the message coming home to us after 130 years from Oscar Wilde – the man who was jailed for being gay – is how the belief in one’s own “freedom” from constraint, if never moderated by understanding and empathy, makes civilised life impossible.  And we see this being played out at this very moment, all the way from Covid-19 conspiracies against reasonable government to the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin.

And so, as Basil Hallward the artist hopes in Chapter 1, “the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me”, what it has now become for all the creative team at Sydney Theatre Company: the work of art which makes us “see things differently” and  “think of them differently.”

And I noticed at the end, as the last picture of Eryn Jean Norvill as Dorian Gray switched off and the theatre went black, there was that silent pause before a kind of measured applause that says to me that people knew they had seen and valued a great work of art.  Here was “the wonder I had always looked for and always missed.”

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2022: Mother & Son by Geoffrey Atherden

 

 

Mother & Son by Geoffrey Atherden.  Jally Entertainment at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 29 – April 3, 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 29

Director - Aarne Neeme
Set Design & Construction - John Bailey
Photography -Tyson Lloyd Films
SKYPE Video - Drew Muir - Qframe
Recordings -Tom Johnson - Jampot Studios
Artwork - Design Central
Lighting - Michael Kilfoy
Sound - John Bailey
Stage Manager - Nathan Cox

Cast:
Maggie Beare - Julie McGregor
Arthur Beare - Christopher Truswell
Robert Beare - John Rush
Liz Beare/Monica - Alli Pope
Anita - Kate Cullen
Steve - Nathan Cox
Bronte - Sienna Rose
Jarrod - Jasper McRitchie
Voice Overs:
Christina McRitchie
Brandt McRitchie
Nathan Cox


I was surprised – noting that Aarne Neeme was the director – to be disappointed in the opening night performance of Mother & Son in Queanbeyan, the last town on the company’s extensive tour.  Perhaps the small audience, still I suspect Covid-affected, was disappointing for the actors.

The key to Geoffrey Atherden’s success, in both the original tv series (Ruth Cracknell and Garry McDonald) and this stage adaptation he made in 2015 (with Noeline Brown and Darren Gilshenan) was the depth of humanity in his characters, however frustrating they may be to each other.

In this production, only at the very end of the final scene did Julie McGregor and Christopher Truswell get the right feelings through to us in the audience.  Alli Pope and McGregor got it right for the short scene between Monica and Maggie; and the children on Skype, Sienna Rose and Jasper McRitchie, were good in those recorded scenes.

Otherwise it felt to me that I was watching artificial grass grow instead of real grass growing which my imagination could mow to the right length and put the clippings in the compost bin for the future.  Essentially the acting of both Arthur and his unlikely dentist brother Robert was superficial, without developing our empathy, or sympathy, or even laughter.  I must be honest and report that I seriously considered leaving at interval, except that I should not then have fulfilled my professional responsibilities.

Technically too there were problems, particularly with volume levels for the voice-overs which need to grab our attention as the set is changed between scenes.  Though I knew the play from 2015, the source of comedy in the voice-overs was largely lost for me this time.

And finally, the one scene which caused guffaws all around the audience in 2015, fell completely flat last night, when Steve assessing Maggie for an aged-care package asks:

Aged Care Assessment Test Question: Mrs Beare.  Can you tell me who the Prime Minister is?
Mrs Beare:  Is he still there?
Tester:  I’m not sure.  I think so.  Can you tell me his name?
Mrs Beare: flaps her hands in a gesture of faint despair, and changes the subject, as the Canberra audience erupts in raucous laughter.

Mrs Beare passed with flying colours.  [ search on this blog: Mother and Son 2015, February 4 ]

Perhaps in the Tony Abbott era the cast improvised to make this the joke of the night, so I was waiting to see if Scott Morrison would get similar treatment.  

But last night there really were no guffaws, very few empathetic laughs.  Perhaps the most successful performance, as I read Atherden’s writing, was from Kate Cullen as Arthur’s woman-friend and potential marriage partner, Anita.  She created the right relationship between her character and Julie McGregor’s Maggie, and even managed to make Truswell’s Arthur more realistically human, allowing us to better accept his rapprochement with his frustrating mother at the end.  Alli Pope’s basically blunt Liz was effective in itself, but still limited as a characterisation; not surprising perhaps when her husband – John Rush’s Robert Beare – was simply a caricature leaving little for any of the other actors to work on to find the depth of feeling and meaning Atherden’s writing can provide.

The best I could hope for is that even in this short season the show will settle in and find the proper style Mother & Son really needs.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2022: Australia in 50 Plays by Julian Meyrick

 

 

Julian Meyrick
Photo: Christopher Deere

Australia in 50 Plays by Julian Meyrick.  Currency Press, Sydney, March 2022.
Media Contact: Martin Portus, Phone 0401 360 806 mportus2@tpg.com.au

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Julian Meyrick has written an academic work of great importance.  He helps us understand our own culture in a quite unusual way.  I need to begin a little differently in order to explain.

I am sorry.  Sorry that I have not read, and certainly not seen, more than a limited number of the 50 plays Meyrick has selected.  And sorry, therefore, that reviews I have written in the past twenty years, the period covered in his last two chapters out of eight, have not been informed as they might have been – even should have been.  I may even apologise for referencing the English and the Irish – Shakespeare and Shaw – so much when considering the Australians – say, David Williamson and Nakkiah Lui.

My natural assumptions about the theatre canon were established at Sydney University, where in 1960 I failed 3rd Year English.  The crucial question was asked about the future of poetic verse-drama.  I wrote that Christopher Fry, T S Eliot and Douglas Stewart were already out of date, so it had no future.  This was a sociological argument, I was told, not the required literary argument.  Fail!  

I reckon, though, I failed too because I dared to mention Fire on the Snow by the Australian, Douglas Stewart.  I knew it was daring to do so, because in those three years’ formal education it was made clear that Australia had no literature worth academic study.  In 1961 I wrote favourably of Murder in the Cathedral, mentioned no Australian writers, and passed my Bachelors Degree.  My Masters Degree, as you would expect, was a study of Bernard Shaw.

I start with this personal anecdote because Julian Meyrick makes sure we understand how his personal experiences as a theatre practitioner underpins his need to explain why he should open up our cultural knowledge and his reasons for choosing these particular 50 plays, written since Australia became a legal entity by the passing of  the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (UK), s. 9 by the British Parliament; Ratified: 6 July 1900; Date effective: 1 January 1901.

My time at Sydney University becomes relevant when I find that Douglas Stewart’s verse dramas created, even more than they reflected, crucial changes in our culture, well before Ray Lawler wrote The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, first performed at the Union Theatre in Melbourne on 28 November 1955: “While the Doll’s status as a cultural catalyst is important, the environment that conditioned its production and reception was the achievement of prior artists. The Doll may look like the start of the Australian drama narrative, but it is the middle of it, the reward for the steady creative toil of post-federation theatre. Borrowing the observation of Indigenous artist Gordon Bennett, by the 1950s, Australian drama had enough of a past to conceive a future. That this past was—and remains—largely unacknowledged, reflects the difficulty Australia has of owning its past generally. In my Conclusion I consider how our negative view of nationhood is preventing proper understanding of the role and value of Australian drama.”

The Contents page of Australia in 50 Plays is the work of a stirrer [my comments]:

Chapter 1. 1901–1914: Ozziewood [not exactly Hollywood]
Chapter 2. 1915–1929: Unknown knowns [not admitting what we don’t want to think about]
Chapter 3. 1930–1945: The real Australia [really?]
Chapter 4. 1945–1960: A step change [waving; not drowning]
Chapter 5. 1961–1975: Not better, just different [just so]
Chapter 6. 1976–1990: The compelling mood darkens [what Lucky Country?]
Chapter 7. 1991–2005: The End (yet the persistence) of History [to the Right or to the Left?]
Chapter 8. 2006–2020: The return of the nation [Black is the New White]
Conclusion "…the historically indisputable fact that drama is a serious mode of inquiry on a par with academic research…"

But this is the sort of stirring the pot that nowadays I find in The Saturday Paper.  Meyrick’s work combines details of information that are alluded to, but often not made explicit by others, with carefully thought-through critical analysis.  New lights are shone from different angles than I expected.  Academic history becomes a personal conversation.  It’s as if I am watching a play, hearing what the characters say, picking up the nuances behind their words and actions, even in the silences.  And thinking and feeling what I might say or do in response.

“There is something deeply dispiriting about the absence of women from key roles in Australian theatre as it ‘professionalised’” he says in Chapter 4, and I’m thinking but there are all those plays he’s told me about in the first half of that century written and directed and presented in theatres led by women – some even Communists, what’s more.  So what happened to the women after World War II?  

What happened to playwrights “such as Betty Roland, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Hilda Bull, Henrietta Drake-Brockman and Dymphna Cusack, and directors like May Hollingworth (the Metropolitan Theatre), Doris Fitton (the Independent Theatre, Catherine Duncan (the New Theatre) and Barbara Sisley (La Boite) [who] are the prophets and pathfinders of Australian Drama, their creative and management talents transforming it into a serious cultural force”?  

Of course I’ve never forgotten One Day of the Year (the first professional season was in April 1961 at the Palace Theatre in Sydney as I was repeating 3rd Year uni) – but it was written by a bloke. Alan Seymour.  But then, at its debut on 20 July 1960 as an amateur production by the Adelaide Theatre Group, Jean Marshall, the Director, and those involved in the Adelaide production had received death threats – as did Seymour when I saw it.  So at least Alan Seymour was my kind of bloke.

And Julian Meyrick is certainly my kind of academic historian, writing the right stuff for anyone active and even merely interested in theatre – Australian or of any other kind.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2022: Nearer the Gods by David Williamson

 

 

Nearer the Gods by David Williamson.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, March 4 – April 23, 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 16

Director – Janine Watson; Assistant Director – Rachel Chant

Cast:
Violette Ayad
Jemwel Danao
Rowan Davie
Gareth Davies
Sean O'Shea
Sam O'Sullivan
Shan-Ree Tan

Understudies: Lloyd Allison-Young; Claudia Ware


Set & Costume Designer - Hugh O'Connor; Associate Set & Costume Designer - Veronique Benett; Lighting Designer - Matt Cox; Composer & Sound Designer - Clare Hennessy

If William Shakespeare in 1600 could present plays based upon what research he had available about historical figures – Richard III, Henry IV and Henry V – whose influence was still highly significant after a century or two, why should David Williamson not do the same for Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley today?

At least Williamson will not face questions of political bias as we have seen about Shakespeare’s representation of King Richard, say – but maybe some will have concerns about matters of Faith in God denied by those who believe in Universal Force of Gravity.

Nearer the Gods is a different kind of play from Williamson’s more usual comedies of middle-class manners.  It reminds me, though, of his Heretic – in which Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman argue about the truth of their research into South Sea Islands’ culture.

In Nearer the Gods it is womaniser King Charles II who would love to escape his kingly responsibilities and travel to the South Seas with Edmond Halley chasing comets – not for the astronomical observations but for the ‘dusky’ ladies to add to his collection of Nell Gwynns.  Did I say Nearer the Gods is not a comedy?  But there is much arch humour here in the story of The Royal Society  which was founded in 1660 to bring together leading scientific minds of the day, and how “In the end it fell to two of history’s great heroes, Edmond Halley and his wife Mary to sort the mess out” of Isaac Newton’s on-the-spectrum personality and Robert Hooke’s revengeful paranoia.  

However important to Shakespeare were those kings from whom his Queen Elizabeth was descended, nothing matches the importance of the calculus, the inverse square law and the theory of the universal force of gravity to our world today.  But when it came to publishing Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica without what Hooke completely unreasonably demanded as his due recognition as the ‘father’ of Newton’s mathematics, King Charles – in Williamson’s play at least – had to point out that the Royal Society was, after all, ‘My’ Society and he wanted the book without further delay – finally in 1687.

Does this make Williamson a modern Shakespeare?  I think it does.  As we still remember that Mark Antony said “Lend me your ears” we will not forget what Edmond really did say about Isaac: “Nearer the gods no mortal may approach” because, as Williamson puts it in his Writer’s Note, “Isaac Newton gave the world the greatest leap in knowledge we’ve ever been gifted.”

David Williamson’s gift to us is to bring these historical mathematicians, mysterious to most of us, to life by focussing on Mary’s need for faith in her God and Edmond’s coming to understand how we all need our own faith in ourselves and in each other, because we are mortal.  That is the universal gravity that keeps us together.  

This is the level, or perhaps the depth, which takes Nearer the Gods, his fourth-last play, written in 2018 approaching the 80 years he reached as this production was about to open, into a greater realm, where our personal experience of love is equally as important as our intellectual understanding of the forces of the universe.  Science and the Arts come together in an extraordinary way in Nearer The Gods by David Williamson.

The style of the production is new too, for Williamson.  Short snappy scenes make it clear from the beginning that this is a play, a designed piece of theatre.  A fully costumed 17th Century figure tells us in the first minute that the actors will not be dressed in his finery, but in ordinary modern dress.  

After a flash of disappointment, I felt as soon as the very next encounter of characters was underway that I understood the purpose: to take us out of being fascinated by the fakery of extravagant costumery immediately into the presentation of the relationships in our own language.  Oddly enough, Shakespeare had done the same in his day and age.  

One term often used to describe the bard’s performance style is ‘presentational’.  Yet Williamson’s skills did not mean falling into something like Brechtian distancing effect.  We were kept on the outside as observers of the action, yet were quickly engaged in recognising the feelings of each character and why they reacted as they did – and this became the ever-shifting platform on which the story was laid out.  We even applauded when Newton was at last accepted into the Royal Society (1672)

The stylistic approach made great demands on all the actors, where timing and detailed expression in voice and movement had to dovetail perfectly, even as several actors played more than one role.  Just as timing is essential in comedy, Williamson makes the comedic method work here for a serious purpose.

Ending with the announcement of the resolution of Mary and Edmond’s likely marital trials and tribulations as it actually happened in history – in 54 years of marriage, it was a relief to know the fictional was factual.   

In other words, Nearer the Gods is an original work in the proper sense, and no-one but David Williamson can claim to be the father of its combinations and commutations.  Not to be missed.

©AZ QUOTES

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2022: LESS by Australian Dance Party

 

 

Photo by Lorna Sim

LESS – Australian Dance Party at LESS Pavilion, Canberra. March 4th , 5th , 10th , 11th  and 12th. Enlighten Festival; The BOLD Festival.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 12

Directed by Alison Plevey in collaboration with dancers Ryan Stone, Ashlee Bye, Levente Szabo, Jake Silvestro and Patricia Hayes-Cavanagh.
Sound design by Alex Voorhoeve with live instrumentation by Liam Budge (vocals) and John Mackey (sax).
Lighting Design by Dynamic AV.
Costume Design by Aislinn King.



Though I am old and no longer anywhere near as bold as so many of the workshop participants and performers in Liz Lea’s week-long BOLD Festival, I will boldly write that there definitely should be more of LESS.

For those old enough to remember Graham Jones’ Kinetic Energy Dance Company, in its early days in the 1970s, when his company “became famous for its site-specific events for tertiary institutions, in cafeterias, libraries, quadrangles etc.”, Australian Dance Party’s very site-specific exploration of the new sculpture, LESS Pavilion, at the Dairy Road precinct adjacent to the Jerrabomberra Wetlands has a déjà vu effect.

Alison Plevey’s style may be rather different from Graham Jones’, with his Ballet Rambert experience, but the scene-shifting in response to the different elements of the built environment is in this tradition.  In creating the work, improvisation on location must surely be central to ADP’s process as it was for Kinetic Energy’s.  

LESS begins with a kind of almost formal invocation adagio in water, recognising its place underlying the land.  From walking in still water, shallow and almost representing Biblical walking on water, reactions form – from humour to intense dislike and even fear – to the splashing nature of the medium, as well as recognition of our need for life-giving water.  Accompanied by a miked amplified voice – musical at first through to all kinds of mouth noises – seemingly improvised live, the dance of life spreads into the structure of the LESS Pavilion at ground level until there is excitement running up around the circular ramp into the upper level among the ever-rising pillars.  

A point is reached when it seems that all possible moods and responses in movement have been explored – and quietness and stillness reign again.  And our applause becomes our response.

Photos: Frank McKone, taken during the performance by phone along with many other audience members.

ADP's LESS on water 1

ADP's LESS on water 2

ADP's LESS on built structure - lower level

ADP's LESS on built structure - upper level

“Commissioned by Molonglo Group from Chilean architects Pezo von Ellrichshausen (Mauricio Pezo and Sofia Von Ellrichshausen), the LESS Pavilion pays homage to Canberra’s brutalist architectural roots as well as the feel of ancient temples and structures.”  The dance and sound effects in its times of frustration and fear certainly felt brutalist but perhaps the message for us Canberrans is to learn to accept the contrasting elements of lived reality even when things seem to be the same-old same-old.  The interest lay in the moments of change and the appearance of the unexpected.

Australian Dance Party’s LESS, then, is an interesting work in the tradition of site-specific modern dance.  The water provided reflection both in reality and of the spirit of the place.  The Pavilion as a sculpture – as Alison Plevey said, with no intended purpose – was given a purpose by providing the place and the spaces for the art of dance, surrounded by the recorded soundscape by Alex Voorhoeve, and led emotionally by Liam Budge (vocals) and John Mackey (sax).

The result was more a kind of meditation on the nature of things – natural and built – rather than a narrative in the ordinary sense.  Interesting indeed.

See: http://www.kineticenergytheatre.org/history
https://australiandance.party/the-party/  

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2022: Ruthless! the musical

 

 Ruthless! Book and Lyrics by Joel Paley; Music by Marvin Laird.  Echo Theatre at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, February 24 – March 12, 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 2

Director – Jordan Best; Musical Director – Nicholas Griffin; Choreographer – Jacquelyn Richards; Assistant Director – Joel Horwood

Piano 1 – Nicholas Griffin; Piano 2 – Sharon Robinson

Set Design – Ian Croker; Costume Design – Anna Senior; Lighting Design – Linda Buck

Jenna Roberts as Judy Denmark; Jessy Heath as Tina Denmark; Dee Farnell as Sylvia St. Croix; Tracy Noble as Myrna Thorn; Janie Lawson as Lita Encore; Eryn Marshall as Louise / Eve



The title “Ruthless!” is an amusing pun on the name of a character ‘Ruth de la Croix’, an ambitious Hollywood star who appears to have committed suicide, years ago, after receiving a withering crit published by ‘Lita Encore’, who appears – in this very funny satirical musical comedy – insistently singing “I hate musicals!”.  

In a twist of who is who, and who is the mother and daughter of whom – worthy of Shakespeare’s twins in The Comedy of Errors – it turns out that there is more to Ruth than we expect, however ruthless she is – like all the women in this play.  In the end the daughter ‘Tina’ of the daughter ‘Judy’ of the Ruth-less ‘Ruth’ is surrounded by dead bodies – even of her entirely innocent father ‘Fred’(Jim Adamik) – as  she ends the play absolutely sure she is on her way to stardom in Hollywood.  Is it talent for star performing, or merely talent for being ruthless to the point of murdering her Grade 3 school-play lead-part rival, that she has inherited?

We, in the audience, of course cannot  help but laugh at the absurdity and cheer her on, despite the blackness of the comedy.

This production of Ruthless! – the stage mother of all musicals is top quality in all departments – casting; directing; musicianship; choreography; stage, costume, lighting and sound design.  I can only assume the small audience on Wednesday was because of the continuing effects of Covid Omicron on theatre attendance generally.  This show deserves a full house every night.  

After the show, you might like to consider its implications, in our times all these years since Ruthless! won the 1993 New York Outer Critics Circle Award for Off-Broadway Musical.  

Maybe you might wonder about a spoof musical written by two men asking us to laugh at women who insist upon being ruthless to get to the top.  It has been suggested to me, by a thoughtful woman (who also enjoyed the show), that if all these characters were men we would not laugh.

Laughter, she suggested, is the result of contrasting expectations.  Women are not expected to be ruthless, so we find it funny when they behave in this way – especially when taken to the extreme as in this play, ending with murders all round.

But, she suggested, men are commonly expected to indulge in such ruthless behaviour.  I suggest we see this right now exemplified in the extreme by Vladimir Putin.  You may think of less extreme examples – perhaps in relation particularly to some men’s treatment of women, as well as of each other.  If a new Ruthless! consisted of all male characters with the same script, would it be funny – if written by two men; or if it were written by two women?

Maybe you might think that times have changed since the 1990s.  Would anyone write this script today?  Jordan Best, in her Director’s Notes, writes “The more time I spent with it, the more I fell in love with it.  The story is an unhinged joy, the songs are complex, clever and catchy, the lyrics are funny, and the characters are magnificent, grotesque and colourful.  It appealed to the same completely unsubtle directorial spark in me that makes me love playwrights like Moliere and Wilde.  The broad brushstrokes, the caricatures, the coarse humour and the slapstick all come together to give us the belly laugh we so sorely need right now.”

I found myself exactly in this mood when watching Jordan Best’s Ruthless!, performed by a cast that thoroughly understood and demonstrated that complexity, cleverness and catchy quality in every character.  

Though it was a little too loud for my hearing aids (needing a larger audience to absorb the sound, I suspect), I find myself quite unlike Janie Lawson’s grimly critical ‘Lita Encore’: this is a musical I certainly do not hate!  Encore!

Jenna Roberts as Judy Denmark; Dee Farnell as Sylvia St. Croix
Jessy Heath as Tina Denmark

Tracy Noble as Myrna Thorn; Eryn Marshall as Louise (as Pippi Longstocking)
Janie Lawson as Lita Encore

© Frank McKone, Canberra