Friday 27 May 2022

2022: Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw - Tempo Theatre

 

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.  Tempo Theatre at Belconnen Community Centre Theatre, May 27 – June 4, 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 27

Creatives Team:
Director – Rachel Hogan
Lighting Design – Neville Pye; Sound Design – Angus Eckstein
Set Design – Rachel Hogan
Costumes – Rachel Hogan, Sandy Cassidy and Cast

Characters in Order of Appearance:
Suffragettes – Philippa Russell-Brown, Kathryn Holopainen
Clara Eynsford-Hill – Eilis French; Mrs Eynsford-Hill – Crystal Mahon
A Lady of the Night – Kah-mun Wong
Freddy Eynsford-Hill – Lucas Edmunds
Eliza Doolittle – Meaghan Stewart; ‘Kershaw’ Pickering – Thomas Cullen
Henry Higgins – Adam Salter; Mrs Pearce – Joan White
Alfred Doolittle – Peter Fock; Mrs Higgins – Elaine Noon;
Maid – Kathryn Holopainen

________________________________________________________________________________
Tempo Theatre sought out Rachel Hogan to direct, asking for a ‘light’ choice.

Considering what Bernard Shaw himself wrote in 1941, you may wonder about Tempo’s agreeing to do Pygmalion: I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play, both on stage and screen, all over Europe and North America as well as at home.  It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic.  It goes to prove my contention that great art can never be anything else.
[ Preface to Pygmalion, Penguin ]

You may have wondered, too, why Shaw gave it such an awful name, Pygmalion, instead of the oh-so attractive title My Fair Lady.  That Lerner and Loewe musical was staged in 1956, six years after Shaw died; and was made into the famous movie in 1964.  I have always felt that Shaw would have felt ambivalent about the ending of My Fair Lady, where Rex Harrison’s Professor Higgins  is almost avuncular and Julie Andrews’ Eliza reappears as if still wanting him after all, as he sits sadly hearing her recorded voice.

(I have written on this issue previously in my review of the Opera Australia production at https://frankmckone2.blogspot.com/search?q=My+Fair+Lady)

The famous British director Trevor Nunn had no doubts in his 2001 article in The Guardian, Poor Professor Higgins! In George Bernard Shaw's original play, Eliza and Henry don't even get it together. No wonder My Fair Lady is miles better than Pygmalion….But the real achievement of Lerner's adaptation is his insight that the story requires not one, not two, but three personal journeys. Doolittle is changed into a respectable member of the reviled middle classes; Eliza is changed into an new woman once her "guttersnipe" habits are expunged; but the third metamorphosis is of Professor Higgins, who is transformed finally and movingly from a man unable to express his feelings into a more complete emotional human being. Pygmalion is a collection of very brilliant theatrical and comic ideas, but My Fair Lady quite simply is a masterpiece.
[ https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2001/mar/14/artsfeatures.georgebernardshaw ]

Along with Rachel Hogan, and her excellent cast, including at least two drama teachers, I don’t agree with Trevor Nunn.  Rachel's production is lightly done, with a finesse that is entirely true to the original Shaw play, which he called – ironically – a ‘romantic’ comedy.   

If you want schmaltzy romance, choose My Fair Lady.  If you want the truth, go see Tempo’s Pygmalion, laugh at Adam Salter’s Henry Higgins (because you can’t laugh with him), and enjoy Meaghan Stewart’s irrepressible Eliza – and especially feel with her that tremendous sense of relief that in her determination to be her own person she has found a way to escape her arrogant, even violent, Pygmalion: the sculptor who stupidly falls in ‘love’ (i.e. lust) with his own creation.  Pig-malion, I would call Professor Henry Higgins.

“Tempo Theatre Inc. is a non-profit community theatre organisation proudly serving the Canberra region. We produce and promote live theatre, foster social interaction between people interested in theatre, and promote theatre skills development.”
[ https://tempotheatre.org.au/main/welcome.html ]

Tempo Theatre has served us very well indeed.

Now to the production itself.  

As a Londoner myself, whose grandfather was a true Cockney – born within the sound of Bow Bells (and whose grandmother was Welsh, like Eliza’s according to the phonetics professor) – I was impressed especially with the accuracy of the accents, though I did find the harshness of Peter Fock’s ‘undeserving poor’ voice in his first scene a little hard to follow.  He, and even Meaghan Stewart when in the gutter in the opening scene, could slow the pace to bring out more of the ‘knowing’ quality of the language – which Meaghan captured so beautifully in the ‘not bloody likely’ scene.  Cockney expression, often what I knew as a child as ‘chi-acking’, makes fun of the person being spoken to, while also being an in-joke that the listener – if a true denizen of Tottenham Court Road – appreciates.  (How Shaw, an Irishman, came to understand Cockney so well always amazed me.)

The details of the characterisations was the next element that made this production impressive.  The trick in Bernard Shaw’s writing is to play just enough ‘over-the-top’ in an expressionist style to bring out the subtlety of the comedy (this is Shaw being didactic) at the same time as formulating naturalistic characters which draw upon the audience’s empathetic feelings.  I call this acting both outwards and inwards at the same time.  It makes Shaw’s dialogue special.  Shakespeare did it so well using verse.  Shaw can be harder to fathom: many directors think his dialogue is boring!

Everyone in Hogan’s cast cottoned on wonderfully to Shaw’s intention, placing their character in their social class with just the right personality.  

I was pleased especially to see Elaine Noon’s Mrs Higgins take control of her scenes with the two childish ‘boys’ Henry and Kershaw Pickering; and a similar strength in Joan White’s Mrs Pearce – yet with the recognition of her place as a servant dependent for her income on her employer, the often irascible and childish Professor.  The change in Alfred Doolittle when he comes into the money – but with middle class morality obligations – is easily over-played too far.  Stanley Holloway could get away with this in the romantic My Fair Lady; but Peter Fock got it right as it should be for Pygmalion.  The Eynsford-Hill family also all kept that balance.  We could see them as a real family of individuals without the satire of their class taking over their scenes.

Playing Colonel Pickering as a younger character than is usually done, worked very well.  Thomas Cullen had the class behind him that placed him in Henry Higgins’ environment, while his less imposing figure yet with worldly experience made him able to play more equally with Eliza – allowing the scene in which she explains how important it was for her when he had called her ‘Miss Doolittle’ to have a greater impact for us, in our times where the issues of how men treat women, at all ages and levels of society even within our democratic Parliament, have become exposed so much more openly than in 1914.  Presenting Philippa Russel-Brown and Kathryn Holopainen as suffragettes with Votes for Women signs at Covent Garden made its political point clear – very suitable for Bernard Shaw’s didacticism.

Finally the details of the development in the characters of Eliza Doolittle and Professor Higgins and their fraught relationship were played out by Meaghan Stewart and Adam Salter with the exact balance needed between the acting outward and acting inward that makes this production a thoroughly satisfying success.

And I must conclude by saying that the staging and set design was thoughtfully done, keeping in mind Shaw’s stage instructions yet working very well in the limited space available on the Belconnen Community Centre’s stage.  And the thunder and lightning which begins the play were appropriately realistic.

Only being able to offer a one-week run is perhaps inevitable for an amateur company, but I must say the standard of this production makes me wish it could go on longer.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

Thursday 19 May 2022

2022: City of Gold by Meyne Wyatt

 

 

City of Gold by Meyne Wyatt.  Sydney Theatre Company and Black Swan State Theatre Company of West Australia at Wharf 1, Sydney, May 7 to June 11, 2022.

This production opened at the Heath Ledger Theatre, Perth WA, on 19th March 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 18

Director – Shari Sebbens; Designer – Tyler Hill; Design Consultant – ZoĆ« Atkinson
Lighting Designer – Verity Hampson; Composer & Sound Designer – Rachael Dease
Assistant Director – Daley Rangi; Video Designer – Michael Carmody
Fight Choreographer – Nastassja Kruger; Vocal Coach – Julia Moody
Lighting Associate – Jasmine Rysk

Performers:
Mateo Black – Mathew Cooper
Whitman/Andrews – St John Cowcher
Carina Black – Simone Detourbet
Cliffhanger – Ian Michael
Director/Simmonds/Acting Commander – Myles Pollard
Dad – Trevor Ryan
Breythe Black – Meyne Wyatt


The image of Meyne Wyatt, with no text, on the front cover of the program for City of Gold (above) says it all.  He is angry – both as an actor and in role as Breythe Black – because of the racist attitudes and deadly violence against Indigenous people in Australia.

His play begins with black satire as Breythe is required to play a token Aboriginal for a TV ad, presumably to present a politically correct face to sell the product on Australia Day.  Dressed only in a lap-lap, Breythe is queried by the film director.  He is a bit too white; maybe you need a blackface.  Justifiably, as the usual humiliating jokes sink in, Breythe walks away from the job – in ‘tinsel-town' Sydney – and has to return to his home town, Kalgoorlie WA – ironically known as the City of Gold.  

His success as an actor in the white world has meant he has missed his father’s death and must now front up to the funeral and face up to his aggressive brother Mateo and his self-sacrificing sister Carina – who is now left to look after their unwell mother and their intellectually disabled cousin ‘Cliffhanger’; and try to manage the family’s legal matters because their father’s cancer meant that he had not properly signed all the appropriate documents.

Act Two begins with Breythe – or is it Meyne – up on the verandah roof giving a pull-no-punches lengthy tirade directly at us, the white audience rich enough to go to the theatre to watch him perform.  Meyne, of course, is a very successful Indigenous actor.  Is he acting the role of Breythe, or is he not acting but confronting us in anger for real?  In the play, Breythe’s sister had addressed a street protest with an emotional and forceful speech in Kalgoorlie against the killings there. Now Breythe/Meyne addresses us with even more anger, where Carina had tried to be rational and hoped to calm the situation down.  The deaths are not just in distant Kalgoorlie, but so often in police custody all over the nation.

Is Meyne justified in breaking the fourth wall in this way?  Of course he is.  The Australian Institute of Criminology reported in December 2021:

In the 30 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the NDICP has recorded 489 Indigenous deaths in custody, including 320 in prison, 165 in police custody or custody-related operations and 4 in youth detention.

In 2020–21 there were 82 deaths in custody, 31 fewer than in 2019–20. The total included 15 Indigenous deaths and 67 non-Indigenous deaths.

In this period 66 of those deaths were in prison custody, 12 of these were of Indigenous people. Of the deaths for which manner of death was known, natural causes were the most common.

The other 16 deaths were in police custody. Three of these were of Indigenous people, and 13 were of non-Indigenous people.


Meyne’s play opened in Perth on March 19 this year.  On March 29 the National Indigenous Radio Service reported A young Noongar man has died in a Perth prison on Friday, marking the fifth Indigenous death in custody in Australia this year. “Preliminary reports indicate there are no suspicious circumstances,” the [official] statement said.  “In accordance with all deaths in custody, the WA Police Force will investigate and prepare a report for the state coroner.”

In his play, Meyne makes the opening scene almost funny – that is, we white well-off people could laugh a little, even though we might feel slightly embarrassed, as Breythe appears in his lap-lap and the camera crew arrive to film him.

But there is no laughter when the police are involved – in the play, or in reality.

This is a confronting, brave use of theatre which needs to be shown widely and, I hope, have the text become an essential study in high schools.

Publication Information:
Strawberry Hills, NSW. : Currency Press, in association with Griffin Theatre Company, 2019. ©2019.

Griffin Theatre at The Stables, in Sydney, has written: 

"Meyne Wyatt burst onto the acting scene in 2011’s Silent Disco at Griffin, going on to grace our screens (The Sapphires, Redfern Now, Mystery Road) and star on the Broadway stage (Peter Pan). Now he returns to the Stables as a playwright who is as courageous as he is merciless. It may be unclear where character ends and creator begins."


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2022: Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) by shake & stir

 

 

Jane Eyre – adapted from the novel by Charlotte Bronte by shake & stir theatre co (Queensland Performing Arts Centre) co-production with Canberra Theatre Centre, The Playhouse, May 17-21, 2022.


Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 17

Co-Adaptors: Nelle Lee and Nick Skubij
Director: Michael Futcher
Designer : Josh McIntosh
Composer: Sarah McLeod
Additional Music and Sound Designer: Guy Webster

Performed by Julian Garner, Nelle Lee, Jodie le Vesconte and Sarah McLeod
(Swings Maddison Burridge, Hilary Harrison, Nick James)

Image credits: Dylan Evans; David Fell

__________________________________________________________________
Recommended for ages 12+

Jane Eyre contains adult themes, simulated violence and supernatural elements and will feature strobe, loud music and fire/smoke/haze effects.

https://theatrenorth.com.au/jane-eyre

shake & stir have certainly lived up to their name.  I have never been quite so shaken in a theatre as I was by the fire burning down Mr Rochester’s three-storey mansion, by his mad wife.  I thought of all those theatres back to Shakespeare’s Globe burnt down by theatre companies doing things like firing a cannon as a special effect.  Luckily the Canberra Playhouse – and all the theatres on their tour so far – has survived.  shake & stir explain: “By working with the internationally-revered company, Live Element, we overcame these [live flame effects] challenges and received the expertise necessary to develop and implement a remarkable system that both serviced the play exceptionally well and wowed this audience.”

It certainly did.  

I was equally stirred by the emotional quality of the story, as created by Nelle Lee in the role of Jane, from a bright ten-year-old who questions with unerring common sense the attitudes of surrounding adults, especially concerning how girls should behave; through to a grown-up woman who has learned to develop her self-awareness, recognising the truth in her feelings for Rochester while maintaining her own independence as a person in her own right – so that she can decide to marry him in a true partnership.

Though I thought I knew Charlotte Bronte’s novel, this adaptation wowed me: this is not a ‘Gothic’ tale, but proof of Bronte’s understanding of what it meant to be a New Woman in her own time, the 1840s; and how essential it is to our understanding today of the proper place of women.  280 years later we are still struggling daily with the improper view that men are ‘naturally’ the decision-makers.  In this production Julian Garner’s embarrassingly awful budding Christian missionary, St. John Rivers, who would take Jane to India, encapsulates the very men we still see in politics, business and at all levels in society.  How thankful I felt when Jane simply said ‘No’ to that self-aggrandising man.

To know that this production has been made with support for its educational purpose from the Queensland state government is very welcome indeed.  Arts Queensland has recorded its positive response:

“While renowned for their ability to adapt classic literary material into high-quality accessible stage works, Jane Eyre was one of shake & stir’s most ambitious creative productions requiring the development of a play script, an original score of accompanying music and an imaginative set with touring capability.

Jane Eyre featured a cast of four Queensland artists – most playing more than one character – with music composed and performed by multi ARIA Award winner and The Superjesus frontwoman Sarah McLeod.”  With much more to read at
[ https://www.arts.qld.gov.au/case-studies/from-page-to-stage-shake-and-stirs-jane-eyre ]

This is a stunning production, the sixth by shake & stir I have reviewed and the best, especially for the originality of the staging, the use of live singing and piano playing by Sarah McLeod, and the lighting and sound effects – as well as the frightening flames!  Miss it, if you dare.

The young Jane Eyre comforting school friend Helen, dying of tuberculosis
Jane Eyre - shake & stir, 2002

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Friday 13 May 2022

2022: A Letter for Molly by Brittanie Shipway

 

 

A Letter for Molly by Brittanie Shipway.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney May 9 – June 4, 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Opening Night May 13

Creatives:
Director/Understudy:    Ursula Yovich; Assistant Director: Erin Taylor
Visual Art & Cultural Consultant
: Alison Williams
Set & Costume Designer
: Hugh O’Connor
Lighting Designer
: Kelsey Lee; Composer & Sound Designer: Brendon Boney
Video Designer
: Morgan Moroney
Stage Manager
: Lauren Tulloh; Assistant Stage Manager: Bronte Schuftan
Costume Supervisor
: Sara Kolijn; Workshop Dramaturg: Miranda Middleton
Technical Creative Intern
: Aroha Pehi; Movement Consultant: Scott Witt

Cast:
Miimi - Lisa Maza
Darlene/Nurse - Paula Nazarski
Linda/Receptionist - Nazaree Dickerson
Renee - Brittanie Shipway
Nick/Doctor/Photographer - Joel Granger
Understudy - Toby Blome

*In respect of Gumbaynggirr culture, characters are listed in order of Elder status.

Photos by Prudence Upton

The four women in the opening fire and smoking ceremony

A Letter for Molly is a heart-warming celebration of more than survival over four generations of Gumbayngirr women.  It is a truth-telling record of their lives as ordinary people since the 1960s – when Miimi forcefully tells her daughter Darlene never to say she is ‘Aboriginal’ but just ‘Australian’ – to  modern times when Renee is determined to become a successful Indigenous artist.  

Humour is central to their culture: their strength in difficult times, and the core strength of the theatre-work they have created.  If you want to find Gumbayngirr country, near Nambucca on the New South Wales north coast, just look for the Big Banana!

Each woman gives birth to a daughter – the source of love, loyalty, and struggle to survive as a single mother.  Despite a kind of recognition in the 1967 Referendum which gave the Federal Government constitutional power for the benefit of Aboriginal people; despite the Mabo decision which established land rights in the 1990s; and despite Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 national apology for the taking away of Aboriginal children by Federal and State Governments over the previous 100 years – the three events are made to form a background time-line in the audio soundtrack – the truth is that by Renee’s time the Gumbayngirr language is fading, even while traditions of spiritual connections remain.

Conventions and ways of living have changed, too.  In the play, time shifts back and forth and perhaps the funniest scene is when Renee, who shares a house with a gay man, Nick, in a genuine friendship without sex, takes a pregnancy test, the result of a brief fling elsewhere.

Brittanie Shipway and Joel Granger
as Renee and Nick
in A Letter for Molly

Renee succeeds as an artist after making a different decision about her personal life than her predecessors.  Her story of artistic creation, in an odd and unusual way, parallels the creation of this work of theatre art in which she appears.  

There is much to learn while you thoroughly enjoy the twists and turns of life with the Gumbayngirr people, received with great enthusiasm by the opening night audience with typical Ensemble warmth of feeling.  Not to be missed.

The family photo taken by Nick:
Miimi, seated (Lisa Maza)
L-R behind: Linda (Nazaree Dickerson); Darlene (Paula Nazarski); Renee (Brittanie Shipway)
in A Letter for Molly

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Thursday 12 May 2022

2022: Three Tall Women

 


 Three Tall Women by Edward Albee.  Chaika Theatre Co at ACT Hub, Kingston, Canberra, May 11 – 21, 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 12

Director – Sophie Benassi
Movement Director – Ylaria Rogers
Stage Manager – Sophia Carlton
Production Manager / Stage Manager Mentor – Bel Henderson
Set and Costume Designer – Sophie Benassi
Lighting Designer – Stephen Still
Sound Designer – Neville Pye
Show Photography – Jane Duong Photography

Cast:
Lainie Hart (Nurse / Woman at 52) , Blue Hyslop (non-speaking Son), Karen Vickery (Dying Woman / Woman at 90) and Natasha Vickery (Lawyer / Woman at 28)

To review this production of such a significant play I need to write almost separately about the production design and performance by Chaika from my criticism of the play itself.  Chaika writes in their program “Three Tall Women is a consummate play by Albee – compelling, witty and poignant in turns, a ‘pearl-handled dagger of a play’.”

I agree that it is a ‘dagger’, but will say further about my interpretation after saying that the design and performances are top class.  

Sophie Benassi has arranged the staging very well in the Causeway Hall, with the bedroom (for dying and dead bodies – and the visiting Son) behind and above the lounge room setting, for ‘conversation’ – with beautiful furniture, obviously made by the Woman’s ‘architect’ husband.  

The only fault – in the Hall – is that the seating is not fully raked as it needs to be so audience in every row can see over the people in front of them.  I hope The Hub, as it grows as a permanent theatre venue, will be able to fund flexible raked seating for different configurations.

All three actors captured the fine detail needed – in voice, and movement (from the stiffness of the very old to the eye-roll of the young) – to create marvellously defined characters.  In the first hour-long half, Karen Vickery as the near- and finally dying-old woman is a tour de force in her own right, in a semi-dementia role full of lapses of memory, of paranoia, and anger at her own lapses and those she perceives in others.

In the second half, Lainie Hart’s determination at 52 to be happy, and especially Natasha Vickery’s tears as, at 28, she is forced to contemplate her unlikely to be happy future, match Karen Vickery’s not-yet-dead all-knowing old woman.  This is ensemble playing at its best.

To see this production, therefore, is highly recommended.

But then, as Shakespeare wrote, “the play’s the thing…”
It’s often said that every play is autobiographical in some way.  It’s certainly true of Three Tall Women, as Albee said in several interviews.  His adoptive mother, Frances (he knew at the age of 6 that he had been adopted very soon after birth) was a shop assistant who married into the wealthy Albee theatre family to become described as a ‘socialite’.
[Read more at http://edwardalbeesociety.org/biography/ ]

Wikipedia records:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Albee  ]

Albee left home for good in his late teens [as does the Son in the play]. In a later interview, he said: "I never felt comfortable with the adoptive parents. I don't think they knew how to be parents. I probably didn't know how to be a son, either." In a 1994 interview, he said he left home at 18 because "[he] had to get out of that stultifying, suffocating environment." In 2008, he told interviewer Charlie Rose that he was "thrown out" because his parents wanted him to become a "corporate thug" and did not approve of his aspirations to become a writer.

At
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-1999-01-15-9901150716-story.html  ]

under the headline ALBEE'S MOTHER LIVES ON IN `TALL WOMEN'
Frank Rizzo; staff writer for the Hartford Courant, Jan 15, 1999 wrote:

“Some writers look back at their mothers with nostalgia, others with regret.

“Then there's Edward Albee, who looks back with his version of the truth, seeking neither forgiveness, understanding nor revenge.

"I had a subject I didn't want to write about until after she died," Albee says in a phone interview from his home in Florida. "That play obviously was coming together all my life. I think about my characters a long time before I trust them in my plays. I don't start writing them down until they have a life of their own. But [after her death], it was time to write it. Maybe I couldn't make it coherent until after she died."

Watching the play, particularly reacting to Karen Vickery’s full characterisation in Act 1, I could not help but see the play as revenge.  Albee’s mother died in 1989, when he was sixty-one, and no longer the absurdist play writer of his earlier years –  The Zoo Story (1959), The Sandbox, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962).  

Three Tall Women was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1994, perhaps because of the intensity of his representation of his mother as a superficial bigot, but I found the hour-long focus on her interminal reminiscences and flashes of entirely self-centred aggression dominated the scene, leaving the other two characters as no more than foils for her bitterness.  In the second half the three versions of his mother, as he imagined her at 28, 52 and around 90, at least formed a more balanced presentation of their characters.  He, himself, appears only at his mother’s death, with no dialogue; while she remembers him (apparently after her death) as kissing her forehead only for show, because the nurse and lawyer would have been watching.  

This ‘memory’ is Albee’s invention – and what a bitter invention it is, by a 62-year-old strictly homosexual man about a mother who, it seems from some of what she says in Act 1, must have rejected him at 18 partly because of his sexuality as virulently as he rejected the family and left home – which, in his play, she complains about.

I hoped, since I had not read or even known about this play before, that I could find intimations of future feminism in it.  After all I had always been impressed, since my teenage readings in the 1950s, by Bernard Shaw’s strong support in his dramas for independent women.  Perhaps I could interpret Albee’s mother’s bigotry, and acceptance that every man is a sexual predator, while also agreeing in Act 2 that women all gave in to male demands – as well as only having affairs themselves out of boredom and revenge for their husband’s dalliances – for financial support; perhaps I could think Albee was saying to women, don’t accept the roles imposed upon you.

But none of the three tall women that he creates in this play offers any hope of change.  At 28, when told by the other older versions of herself what will happen to her, all she can do is collapse into tears.  I can only conclude that Albee could not imagine anything like modern feminism – in 1990!

So while I take it for granted that these women directing and performing, having set up an independent theatre company, are doing what is perfectly normal – as well as at an entirely professional standard – I’m left to wonder about this play by a man full of bitterness.  The women’s performances were certainly compelling, but there is little wit and poignancy.  I didn’t see the pearl handle on this dagger of a play.  Just the dagger.


Karen Vickery, Lainie Hart and Natasha Vickery
in Three Tall Women by Edward Albee, Act 1
Chaika Theatre Co

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Wednesday 11 May 2022

2022: The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes

 


 The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes.  Back to Back Theatre at Canberra Theatre Centre, The Playhouse, May 11 – 13, 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 11

Authors                         Mark Deans, Michael Chan, Bruce Gladwin, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price, Sonia Teuben
Composition                 Luke Howard Trio – Daniel Farrugia, Luke Howard, Jonathon Zion
Performers                    Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price
Director                         Bruce Gladwin

Screen Design               Rhian Hinkley, lowercase
Lighting Design            Andrew Livingston, bluebottle
Costume Design           Shio Otani
Sound Design               Lachlan Carrick

For more details, go to https://backtobacktheatre.com/project/shadow/

________________________________________________________________________________

The title and the image above, used to advertise this Back to Back stage play, are deliberately mysterious.  You will actually see Simon Laherty, not in a singlet among African safari trophies, but in a business suit when he comes on to a stage, empty except for the couple, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price, who have set up a few seats for a community hall meeting.  

Scott has been trying to explain to Sarah about how to avoid sexual harassment in public situations, amusing the audience when describing when touching a crotch is inappropriate; and pointing out that it’s OK in your own bedroom, which is a private place.  

Simon’s task appears to be to announce who they are to us, the people attending this meeting, but nothing goes quite to plan.  Will Sarah do the introduction?  To make sure that her voice is heard?  While Scott is not as respectful in public as Simon wants them all to be, because he is so angry about the centuries and centuries of mistreatment of people with disabilities.  Because all three actually have speaking disabilities, everything they say is reproduced on a high screen by a voice recognition Artificial Intelligence program on a computer we later find is named Siri.

So what is this Shadow, what is it hunting, and how does what it planned to catch become the hunter instead?  It turns out to be a metaphor of a very philosophical kind.  It makes a very unusual kind of theatre – but as Sarah points out, they all think in different ways, challenging in one quite extensive interchange, for example, what it is to be ‘normal’ – when they are as normal as ‘normal’ people who think they are not normal.

Our response in the audience to the sense of humour subtly changes as the ‘meeting’ becomes a real meeting of minds.  Our laughter at ‘crotch’ jokes becomes a warm recognition of the reality of how these people on stage are treated by ‘normal’ people like us.  The form of theatre, where they are actors and we are audience, shifts.  These people are using their real names and are really unable to speak in standard forms of pronunciation.  We need Siri to translate what they say, just as they – and we – need to trust Siri to write on the screen what they mean to say.  

Ironically, for hearing impaired people “All Australian free-to-air broadcasters must provide closed captions on programs shown between 6:00am and midnight on their primary channel (for example: Nine, Seven, Ten, ABC1 and SBS1). News and current affairs programs must have captions at all times.”  But Sarah hates captions because they represent the divide between “able” and “disabled”.

The important, and original, idea in this play is that Siri, like those computers in Hollywood movies, with artificial intelligence will come to rule the world when she (she has a smooth kindly-sounding woman’s voice) becomes more intelligent than any one of us.  We will all be disabled then.  

How would you like that, eh?  That’s the challenge these actors who are not really acting present to us, who find ourselves taking part in a fictional community meeting.  Will we vote for all power to Siri?  Will we vote for all power to the ‘normals’?

If we can say that the value of theatre is that it can change the world, by creating in our imaginations a fiction that seems real, that gives us a new understanding, and that makes us re-think how we behave – then The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes is a great example of the best in theatre.  

It’s no wonder then, “The Norwegian Ministry of Culture has announced Australia's Back to Back Theatre as the 2022 recipient of the International Ibsen Award.

“Considered to be ‘the Nobel Prize for Theatre’, the International Ibsen Award is gifted every two years and comes with a $2.5 million Norwegian kroner (equivalent to almost $400,000 Australian Dollars) cash prize. It aims to honour an individual or company that has brought new artistic dimensions to the world of drama or theatre. Back to Back Theatre, a professional theatre company with an ensemble of actors with disabilities at its core, is the first Australian company to win this award.

“The Chair of the International Ibsen Award Committee Ingrid Lorentzen said: "We are proud to be able to honor an outstanding and unique theater company that asks questions of their audience, of society and of each other through groundbreaking productions. Back to Back's work is exciting, unsettling and thought-provoking. It inspires us to be better artists and better people.

"Back to Back gives voice to social and political issues, and their work is a relentlessly collective practice, where several creators, ideas and perspectives are always present and create a space for inclusion and opportunities. This is part of what makes their work so memorable and so important. Back to Back's work has inspired and moved each of us in the committee, and we look forward to presenting this well-earned award to this theatre company."

[ Reported by Stephi Wild, April 1, 2022 in Broadway World at
https://www.broadwayworld.com/norway/article/Back-to-Back-Theatre-Wins-2022-International-Ibsen-Award-20220401 ]

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

Tuesday 3 May 2022

2022: Still Unqualified by Genevieve Hegney and Catherine Moore

 

 

Still Unqualified by Genevieve Hegney and Catherine Moore.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, April 29 – June 4, 2022. Commissioned by Ensemble’s Literary Fund.


Reviewed by Frank McKone
Opening Night May 3

Cast
Joanne/Various: Genevieve Hegney
Felicity/Various: Catherine Moore
Creatives
Director: Janine Watson
Set & Costume Designer: Hugh O’connor
Lighting Designer: Kelsey Lee
Composer & Sound Designer: Daryl Wallis
Video Designer: Morgan Moroney
_________________________________________________________________________________


I picture these excellent comedy performers not exactly writing this play, but surely having as much fun taking on their basic characters – Genevieve as the more conventional, less risk-taking Joanne; Catherine as the often wildly inventive try-anything Felicity – and improvising the most unlikely jobs they might take on as completely unqualified service providers; as much fun as we had watching the end result.

I, unfortunately, never saw their original work Unqualified, presented at Ensemble in 2018 but it was obvious on opening night for Still Unqualified that most of the audience knew the sort of show to expect.  Here’s the basic picture:

Joanne: Genevieve Hegney and Felicity: Catherine Moore
in Unqualified (2018), Ensemble Theatre
Photo: Phil Erbacher
 

What we didn’t expect was a technical glitch in the software running the lighting, voice-overs and videos which turn this two-hander into a much bigger show than it, at first, seems.  The weird thing, to me, was that the glitch, and the ten minute wait to fix it, caused as much laughter in that reality as the fiction created before and after the break.  This audience felt thoroughly comfortable in the Ensemble, no matter what might happen.

Of course, for me to reveal details of the absurdities that create the comedy would be remiss.  Suffice to say that the unexpected scenes and fascinating angles that Joanne and Felicity took in dealing with each situation – as well as the range of other characters that Genevieve and Catherine played to link scenes – made for often excruciatingly funny comedy.  Satire played its part, surely, too.

I suspect that Still Unqualified completes our understanding of the relationship between these two, giving the fun a new value beyond mere (even when satisfying) enjoyment.  Joanne, in dire straits financially after her divorce, finds herself strengthened by Felicity’s diving in to unlikely possibilities; Felicity changes her understanding of herself through Joanne’s need to know about past truths.  When Felicity accidentally discovers and reveals a current truth, they find they have formed a family of their own.  Life, for which we are all unqualified, is absurdly amusing, even if at times risking fearful difficulties.  But in the end it is the warmth of our humanity that our laughter is all about.

Still Unqualified is a vision of the positive that makes life worth living – and well worth going to the theatre – at the Ensemble in its unlikely boatshed in Kirribilli.  As you will discover, it is a great Starry, Starry, Night out.


Joanne: Genevieve Hegney and Felicity: Catherine Moore
as art gallery guides in Still Unqualified

 
Joanne: Genevieve Hegney and Felicity: Catherine Moore
singing together in Still Unqualified, Ensemble Theatre
Photos: Prudence Upton

 © Frank McKone, Canberra