At Dinner by Rebecca Duke

 

Thea Jade as Anna
in At Dinner by Rebecca Duke
ACT Hub, 2023

At Dinner by Rebecca Duke.  ACT Hub at Causeway Hall, Kingston, Canberra, February 9-11, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 9

At Dinner – or rather “at DINNER” – could be called "The Cancelling Game" or perhaps the more sophisticated "Dangerous Liaison".

It’s frightening to realise, watching this play written and directed today by such young people, that nothing has changed in my 82 years.  Anna and Eden are ‘right’ for each other because they both enjoy, as a skilled game, manipulating others’ assumptions that people are normally honest.  

But then, as IMDB online reminds us, in the popular TV series, Dangerous Liaisons, “A pair of scheming ex-lovers attempt to exploit others by using the power of seduction. TV adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' classic 18th Century novel 'Les Liaison Dangereuses'. 

So Rebecca Duke and Holly Johnson are in good artistic company with Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The School for Scandal 1777) and you could say even William Shakespeare in The Comedy of Errors.  

Obviously my ideals about how modern people should behave online and at dinner are simply naïve.  And that’s no joke.  As the company describes their play:

After some months apart, a young couple go out to dinner at a restaurant. At first, Anna appears to be stuck in a dead end relationship with her high-school boyfriend Eden.  As the night progresses, however, it becomes increasingly clear that Eden is out-matched by Anna and tangled up in a situation over which he has little control.

'At Dinner' is a serious, funny, and twisted examination of modern love.

The writing and the directing are a great example of the ‘less is more’ rule.  Thea Jade does an exquisite performance of every little nuance of Anna’s expressions and mannerisms which she uses to undermine the expectations of both Eden and the waitress, Pearl – giving Timothy Cusack and Nakiya Xyrakis every opportunity to read things the wrong way, which they succeed in doing very well.

This quality in the acting makes the play pass on a message at a different level for denizens of the digital world of the web: live performance is real – you can never trust TikTok, nor even what you see on any screen, where editing and post-production rule the roost.  But when Nakiya fell down and Thea and Tim rushed to help her, I instantly felt for her and them – and then in a minute realised this was written in the script.  Only live theatre can do this, (though I was always a bit concerned about Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello).

For me at least, then, At Dinner in barely an hour offers much that is “serious, funny, and twisted”, and is well worth recommending.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Little Explorers' Days at Questacon

 

 

Questacon Little Explorers’ Days.  National Science and Technology Centre, Canberra. February 8, 9, 10 2023. www.questacon.edu.au

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 8

Like Dr Who’s Telephone Box, Questacon is huge on the inside.  It’s a relatively small building between the Australian National Library, the Australian National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Australia and the High Court of Australia.  

Maybe Einstein could see a case of relativity in this universe.  It’s certainly a prestigious position for STEM education to be in.  That’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, of course – and Questacon is absolutely chockfull of hands-on experiential learning, though I was a little concerned for the 4 year old as the Tesla coil Faraday caged lightning exploded on its 15-minute deadline.  She hid behind her loving mother’s skirts and was not too frightened, I hope.

But the Questacon Tardis really runs on STEAM – Science, Technology, Engineering, ARTS and Mathematics.  Its 170 seat theatre plays 3 shows every day of the year except Christmas Day – 364 x 3 x 170 = 300,000 according to what BJ Anyos, the Early Learning Coordinator in the Learning Experience Team told me.  Even if it should be 185,640, that’s still probably the largest audience reach per annum of any theatre in the country, as she claimed.

Today, with parents and carers and their 0 to 6 years children (yes, there were some 0’s), I watched Mutti, a plant-eating Muttaburrasaurus, (puppeteered by Dan Power) learn to be brave  - with the help of a hundred or so little dinosaurs – rather than be scared of a meat-eating Australovenator (Brent Brosnan).  We all had to run away very fast together from the billabong, leaving our footprints to record a fossil stampede.  We were gobblers, bug-suckers, or slow-moving yawners with appropriate hand actions, even while we were stamping our feet hard and fast.

As palaeontologists, of course, we had to practise pronouncing Muttaburrasaurus.

Out of the theatre, perhaps in recognition of our DNA, strings of littlies explored the spiral of galleries beginning in Gallery 1 Robots and Artificial Intelligence.  Hold a lever down outside the glass to lift the other end up inside, and a robotic jointed arm with an eye sees what you have done, and (gently but firmly) reaches out and pushes the inner end down again.  Though very littlies basically absorb the experience, as they grow older – and become grown-ups – even such a simple device asks questions, like does the robot have feelings and (I thought) how do I feel about the robot and AI?

There are hours’ worth of activities in the main 5 galleries.  Some are about engineering and spatial learning around fitting what appear to be impossible shapes together; some involve a staff teacher, such as one I saw doing practical mixing of liquids of different colours.  As the children chose and helped with the mixing, they were being asked to predict what colours would result and to work out how to create the colours they wanted.  Here was the Arts again in a lab setting.

My three hours’ exploring with the littlies left me thoroughly impressed with the originality of the Questacon team in their approach to experiential learning, and with the obvious engagement of children and their accompanying adults throughout.

And I remembered how the use of theatre and games in museums had really got under way in Australia some twenty years ago, when Questacon started the Excited Particles performance team, and in March 2002 the first Australian national conference Raising the Curtain: Performance in Cultural Institutions took place at the National Museum of Australia, on the other side of Lake Burley Griffin, inspired especially by Catherine Hughes, of Boston's Museum of Science and IMTAL (International Museum Theatre Alliance), who began her keynote speech as Mary Anning (who discovered the first complete fossil remains of an icthyosaur at the age of 11 in the year 1812) and ended the conference with a lecture and workshop on how to evaluate the successes - or failures - of performance programs in museums.

For more detail, go to my review of that conference at

https://frankmckone2.blogspot.com/search?q=Excited+Particles

Twenty years later, Questacon has fulfilled the promise of Catherine Hughes’ inspiration to the Nth Degree.

© Frank McKone, Canberra