Troilus & Cressida - Daramalan Theatre Company

 

 

 Troilus & Cressida by William Shakespeare.  Adapted by Tony Allan; directed by Joe Woodward; original music by Jo Philp.  Daramalan College Theatre Company, at McCowage Hall, Dickson, Canberra.  April 22-29 2023.

Commentary by Frank McKone

In the best theatre education tradition, these senior secondary students are established as a complete company, covering front of house, backstage and onstage – with input from professionals on occasion.

There are times in the learning process when facing up to a challenge beyond expectations is a valuable exercise.  Staging Troilus & Cressida fits the bill.  The Daramalan group are not the first to find Shakespeare’s 1602 play a bit of a mystery.

As Wikipedia records “Troilus And Cressida; Or, Truth Found Too Late is a 1679 tragedy by the English writer John Dryden. It was first staged by the Duke's Company at the Dorset Garden Theatre in London. It was a reworking of William Shakespeare's 1602 play Troilus and Cressida, set during the Trojan Wars. In acknowledgement of this Dryden has the prologue spoken by Shakespeare's ghost, defending the alterations made to the play.”  It has been categorised as a Shakespeare ‘problem play’, and this may have been the first attempt after, it appears, only one performance in 1602/3.

But in more recent times “it has become increasingly popular. Peter Holland of Cambridge University attributes this to the work's relevance at times of impending war: William Poel's 1912 production served as a warning as the Great Powers of Europe armed themselves for conflict and Michael Macowan's modern dress production of 1938 at the Westminster Theatre coincided with the Munich crisis. In the international production at the Swan Theatre, Stratford, of August 2012, the depiction of Thersites as a wounded war veteran, and the manner in which the Myrmidons killed Hector, "resonat[ed] with […] the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."  

Today, considering Russia’s attempt to take control of Ukraine and other examples of warfare, Troilus & Cressida, with its combination of the politics which ended with the killing Hector by Achilles and the frustrated love story of the Trojan prince Troilus and the Trojan Cressida – whose father (Calchas) defects to the Greeks – is highly relevant.  Calchas persuades the Greeks to exchange the captured Trojan commander Antenor, for his daughter, so that he might be reunited with her. Troilus sees her at a distance, appearing to break her promise that even in the Greek camp, she will remain true to him.  In fact the man Troilus sees has engineered  the situation against her wishes; but Troilus is left believing an untruth, and never sees Cressida again.

In politics and in this personal romance, trust, faith in promises, and truth are the central issues of the play.  Much of the time the action is delayed, while characters argue about these issues in Shakespeare’s often philosophical and poetic language, based on Homer’s The Iliad – until finally Achilles does kill Hector.

Though this made the pacing of the student’s production slow, the success is not so much to be compared with what a fully professional company might do, as to be seen in the clear sense of achievement with which the cast were justifiably satisfied in the preview performance I observed.  And I have no doubt the experience and the learning about performing and social relationships will continue to grow over the five days of the show’s run.


For further study, read
Shakespeare’s Iliad: Homeric Themes In Troilus And Cressida
John L. Penwill
Text of the H.W. Allen Memorial Lecture
Ormond College, 19 September 2006

Available at https://classicsvic.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/penwillvol19.pdf


© Frank McKone, Canberra

Canberra Circus Festival 2023

 

 

Canberra Circus Festival 2023, April 18th – 23rd,

at The May Wirth Big Top on Chifley Community Oval & Warehouse Circus, Maclaurin Cres, Chifley,  9.30am – 9.30pm each day.

Details at www.canberracircusfestival.com.au

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Tuesday April 18

SHOWS

    THE GREAT BIG CIRCUS GALA(H)
    BIG TOPS AND TINY TOTS
    CAB SUAVE
    DR HUBBLE'S BUBBLES
    HER MAJESTY'S SECRET CIRCUS
    INTERLOPER
    OAT MILK & HONEY
    PARTY POOPER
    SUITCASE CIRCUS
    THE RIDICULOUS SHOW
    SIDESHOW SELF-INDULGENCE
    INTERNATIONAL STREET CIRCUS SHOWS

I begin at the Festival’s Opening Night with very good news.  

Warehouse executive director Aleshia Johnson explained that it takes up to 18 months to organise a circus festival which is as much a training week for Canberra’s young performers as an entertainment week for the general public, bringing in a wide range of professional modern circus teams from around the world.

Aleshia credits her artistic director Tom Davis as the driving force who established the Canberra Circus Festival last year and again this year, in the hope for a long-term future.  The ACT Minister for the Arts, Tara Cheyne, who opened the Festival, has made it clear that the government funding which helped make it happen this time, will be available in future.

So Warehouse Youth Circus, with its 33-year history of providing training and performance experience, now plans a permanent, but biannual, Canberra Circus Festival, from 2025, after a pause to recover next year with more time to plan and organise.


I thought perhaps the Great Big Circus Gala(h) night might be renamed The Great Big Circus Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo night as I watched the first group of young women performers doing the same kind of fantastic aerial gymnastics as the birds love to do.  Of course, they didn’t leave the floor covered with broken bits – and they did things, while suspended, like scaringly balancing on top of each other, which I haven’t seen the cockies do.

The purpose of the opening evening was to show the range of circus work covered by the festival.  Seven youth performances, groups and individuals, showed not just the circus skills, but how modern circus is educational as well as entertaining.

I saw each piece as representing important thoughts about our way of life.  The larger group items became metaphors about the individual working to be a reliable and competent member of a social group in creating something of value.  The pair and solo items, of course, have the same effect but focus on individuality and originality of skills.

I found myself coming up with a word or two for each item: hanging about; gymnastic communication; illuminated juggling; throwing themselves around; comic stillness; body image not a problem; and, from the older group’s “Sunny”, the key word was trust.

An essential element that I saw in these items – and from among the audience who included a large proportion of young people and parents involved in the circus community – is how young women gain self-confidence and a powerful sense of self-worth in their involvement in circus.  This was clear not only from achieving the physical skills but from their participation as equals in planning and designing performances.

The Gala(h) night then showed two of today’s established performers, alumni from previous training at Warehouse, Jack Wild and Jake Silvestro.  As the MC, Master Showman Shep Huntly put it, they “validated their life choices”.

Two fiery professional pieces were presented to end the evening: a Sideshow performance with angle grinder by Canberran Sian Brigid, and juggling with flaming torches by Americans Maya McCoy & Brent McCoy of Her Majesty’s Secret Circus “with a licence to thrill”.  In a sense you could say the Great Big Circus Gala(h) night was a taster from go to wow of the Canberra Circus Festival shows and training workshops over the rest of this week.

When Warehouse Circus began, around 1990, as a drama teacher I was pleased to see them grow from the history of modern circus (the circus where the humans are the only animals) which had such strong beginnings, largely in Melbourne.  

My elder brother had made me a pair of stilts, so I was hooked from the age of eight, but never had the opportunity for proper training.  But when I started Canberra’s first high school Drama (not reading plays in English) classes at Ginninderra High in 1974, Year 8 was soon engaged in devising and performing circus to take to the local Holt Primary.  Only at floor level, and largely rope whirling and clowning.  Neither school exists now, but not through any fault of mine, I trust.

At that same time “Circus Oz was the amalgamation of two already well-known groups: the New Ensemble Circus, a continuation of the New Circus, established in Adelaide in 1973; and the Soapbox Circus, a roadshow set up by the Australian Performing Group in 1976.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circus_Oz

Then “The Flying Fruit Fly Circus was one of the productions of the Murray River Performing Group, initially an ensemble of nine artists, set up mostly by graduates of the Victorian College of the Arts Drama School. The group began full-time operations in 1979, the International Year of the Child.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Fruit_Fly_Circus 

And, as Amy Martin reported in The Canberra Times (April 18, 2023) about Suitcase Circus, one of the companies in the Festival, "the majority of performers have a Bachelor of Circus Arts".

And so the history goes.  Warehouse Circus and Canberra Circus Festival are in the place where they belong.  Enjoy, and appreciate.

 

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Macbeth - Bell Shakespeare

 

 

Image: Pierre Toussant

Macbeth by William Shakespeare.  Bell Shakespeare at Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse, April 14 – 22, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Opening Night, April 15



I wish I had been stage manager for Bell Shakespeare’s Macbeth last night.  After the cast was still receiving such continuing enthusiastic applause for their second curtain call appearance, I would have, in all modesty, have kept the stage lights up and sent them out again for what I am sure would have become a standing ovation – richly deserved.

Originality of direction by Peter Evans and especially by Nigel Poulton as Movement, Fight and Intimacy Director gave all the actors the opportunity to extend themselves beyond expectations.  Here was a story of a relationship between a man and a woman, each with such delusions of grandeur and such degree of intensity that disaster could be the only result – for themselves and for the whole nation.

Jessica Tovey and Hazem Shammas bring out, with amazing depth of characterisation, all our fears of autocratic rule, which we see being played out in many countries today, not least in Russia.  William Shakespeare lived in such times, writing his Scottish play soon after the death of Elizabeth I and the (fortunately peaceful) takeover of England by James VI of Scotland in 1603.  He may have left us the King James Bible, but Brexit shows his political legacy may not last much longer.

What I loved about this Macbeth was the return to the principle of The Empty Space (Peter Brook).  There was no need to move realistic-looking sets of castle interiors as the play travels to and from Inverness to Dunsinane.  There was no need even for the very successful Sydney Theatre Company use of live video.  In a set simply surrounded by full length drapes, and Max Lyandvert’s sung music and sound, and dressed in Anna Tregloan’s costumes invoking the period between World Wars I and II, the cast were choreographed in movement and still positions, dance-like, to create images to reinforce the mood of the moment; beginning, of course, with the three witches who may or may not be figments of Macbeth’s imagination; and wonderfully supported by Damien Cooper’s lighting in mysterious mist and whole fog dropping down out of what could only be a Scottish gloomy sky.

This is the best of truly exciting theatre, topped by Hazem Shammas’ exquisite detail in physical action, facial expression and voice as Macbeth’s “milk of human kindness” turns into the horror of the murder of Macduff’s wife and children and his own death at the hands of a man “not of woman born”.

All this while, so carefully directed with what I’m sure must have been concentrated input from Abbie-lee Lewis and James Evans as Associate Director and Dramaturg, Shakespeare’s language in all its originality and poetry is spoken so well, with absolute clarity and force.  It was a joy to listen to, even while realising the perfidy, conspiracy and deliberate misinformation being perpetrated.

Here in Canberra the show runs until April 22 after selling out at the Opera House in Sydney through March.  If you can’t get in here, it will be worth flying to Melbourne Arts Centre for the run there from April 27 to May 14 (despite the carbon dioxide fog which smothers the stage and at least up to Row D, where I was lucky to be seated, in the final scene).  

Hazem Shammas and Jessica Tovey
as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth
Bell Shakespeare 2023
Photo: Brett Boardman

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Choir Boys by Tarell Alvin McCraney

 

Choir Boy by Tarell Alvin McCraney.  Riverside’s National Theatre of Parramatta at Canberra Theatre Centre, March 29 – April 2, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 1

Directed by Dino Dimitriadis and Zindzi Okenyo
Musical Director: Allen René Louis
Executive Producer: Joanne Kee; Co-Executive Producer: Craig McMaster
Producer: Daniel Cottier
Set realisation: PaperJam Productions
Costume Designer: Rita Naidu
Lighting Designer: Karen Norris; Sound Designer: Brendon Boney
Choreographer: Tarik Frimpong

Associate Musical Director Zara Stanton; Dialect Coach Angela Sullen
Intimacy Director Cessalee Stovall; Casting Director Rhys Velasquez
Creative Futures: Assistant Director Masego Pitso
Stage Manager Adrienne Patterson; Company Manager Jen Jackson
Assistant Stage Manager Alice Cavanagh
Production Manager Daniel Potter; Production Associate Hannah Crane
Lighting Realisation (tour): Sammy Reid
Social and Community Engagement  AJ Lamarque and Arran Munro

Cast:
Darron Hayes
Gareth (Gaz) Dutlow
Robert Harrell
Abu Kebe
Tawanda Muzenda
Quinton Rofail Rich
Tony Sheldon
Theo Williams
Zarif


I think that I have never seen a play as intimate as Choir Boy has been – for me, at any rate.

Tarell Alvin McCraney is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. He is the chair of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble. He co-wrote the 2016 film Moonlight, based on his own play, for which he received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. [Wikipedia]

In his program note he writes: In 2007, I began writing Choir Boy. I completed a degree that year and believed I would never be in a formal school setting as a student again. My education about the world, its joy and cruelty, were far from over, but I was reflecting a great deal about the education system in my home country, state, city, and even neighborhood. What were the pieces of history, the modes of story telling, and the unspeakable and yet powerfully legible lessons, passed on to me in that 20-year period?

What was I to do it with it?

The history and modes of story-telling at my all boys’ English grammar school  were entirely different from that of his American all boys’ high school.  We sang Anglican hymns each Monday morning in an otherwise secular Enlightenment setting; his Afro-American choir boys sang spirituals in an intensely religious setting encapsulated in the words ‘trust and obey’ – which did not only apply to Jesus.

It was the Spiritual Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long ways from home which connected with me, having never forgotten the rendition by Odetta in her 1960 Odetta at Carnegie Hall album.  By then I was well-settled in Australia, but the feeling was there even as I was completing my degree just like Tarell McCraney in 2007.

I need to say at this point, as a matter of simple fact with no moral judgement, that I was never attracted to another boy as happens in Chorus Boy, though I was ‘unmanly’ and known as 'Muscles' because I didn’t have any.  In this play McCraney opens up the boys’ confusions about their relationships, about being a ‘true man’, mixed in with their need for mothers and security, as well as the history of their forebears’ slavery – which I had come to understand from Odetta’s singing the song which played a powerful role in the movement for racial equality in USA.

Disturbingly, I note that the Pew Research centre reported in 2019 that More than four-in-ten Americans say the country still has work to do to give black people equal rights with whites. Blacks, in particular, are skeptical that black people will ever have equal rights in this country. 

www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/views-of-racial-inequality

The story-telling in Choir Boys is superbly done.  Though as Tarell did, Pharus does succeed in graduating, there is a sense of foreboding as the play ends.  But surely we can hope that we will Vote Yes for our First Nations to at least have a Voice in our Constitution.  Choir Boys raises this sort of question and exposes hypocrisy in education and politics.

In other words this is a play for which the National Theatre of Parramatta, a city central to Australia’s multicultural way of life, must be congratulated.  The design, directing, singing and choreography are inspiring to watch, to respond to with humour and depth of feeling, and to think about on reflection.

This is the answer to the author’s question, What was I to do with it?  Riverside’s National Theatre has done it absolute justice.

© Frank McKone, Canberra