2023: Benefactors by Michael Frayn

 

 Benefactors by Michael Frayn.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, June 16 – July 22, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 24

Director – Mark Kilmurry
Assistant Director – Margaret Thanos
Set & Costume Designer – Nick Fry
Lighting Designer – Matt Cox
Sound Designer – David Grigg
Dialect Coach - Linda Nicholls-Gidley
Hair Stylist – Lindsey Chapman


Cast:
Jane – Emma Palmer        David – Gareth Davies
Sheila – Megan Drury        Colin – Matt Minto

Photos by Prudence Upton

David enthuses about skyscrapers

L-R: Megan Drury, Matt Minto, Gareth Davies, Emma Palmer
as Sheila, Colin, David and Jane
in Benefactors by Michael Frayn, Ensemble Theatre 2023
Photo: Prudence Upton

Like theatres everywhere, Ensemble nowadays asks for donations: This year, we’re celebrating an amazing 65 years. Your support is key to our ongoing success, creating exceptional theatre that you have come to expect from Ensemble.

As Wikipedia informs us: It is Australia's longest continuously running professional theatre group, having given its first performance in Cammeray Children's Library on 11 May 1958. It relocated to the current premises in the old boatshed on the shore of Careening Cove in 1960.

As theatre enthusiast, drama teacher and reviewer I have watched the inspirational leadership of founder Hayes Gordon, then Sandra Bates from 1986 – while Hayes continued to run the Ensemble Studios acting school until his death in 1999 – and then Sandra’s protégé Mark Kilmurry since her retirement in 2015.

I am certain this production of Benefactors would make Hayes and Sandra proud.  Mark’s directing of the actors’ characterisations show all the essential elements of Hayes’ instructive approach to Stanislavsky and method acting (Acting and Performing 1992), and of Sandra’s precision of style, which are the core of great theatre.  The Ensemble remains a small, personal, human theatre which fulfils the social import expressed in the song by Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly, From Little Things Big Things Grow.

This is exactly how Michael Frayn’s play works.  David is an architect, but the twist is that in the end it’s the big things – like what the community really want – that make his ambition to build 50-storey skyscrapers for housing people, come to nought.  But David is really a very nice man, while his nemesis, Colin, who leads the anti-skyscraper campaign, is worse than unlikeable.  No wonder Sheila, Colin’s wife, is in love with David; while David’s wife Jane has to admit she has just a touch of the dark side, like Colin – but only just enough for her to turn out to be the only practical one of the four.  

The great thing about Kilmurry choosing this play – and working so well with such finely-tuned actors – is that Frayn writes with a surprising yet satisfying combination of a depth of concern for his characters with a great sense of humour.  Time and again, we find ourselves laughing while recognising how real these characters’ thoughts and feelings are – in ourselves.  Each character at different points of conflict tells us directly, individually, how they remember what really happened so that we are not always on the outside looking on, but every now and then take part in the story, as if we had met Jane, Sheila, Colin or David over coffee, at least as acquaintances if not exactly friends.

This device, time-shifting, brings out the clever side of Michael Frayn – and it works a treat.

And then, in addition, here is a play, written in 1984 but, through the characters’ reminiscences about what had actually happened back in the 1960s, reflecting on the very issues – social housing, homelessness, the inflating costs of houses, and the inability of the well-enough off to understand – which London was facing then and we face again today.  

Matt Minto as Colin in anti-skyscraper campaign mode
Megan Drury as Sheila, reading report
in Benefactors, Ensemble 2023

So, in my view, you have no excuse for not going to Kirribilli to see Benefactors in the Ensemble boatshed.  Or perhaps Jordan Best, at The Q, that also quite small if not quite as intimate theatre in Queanbeyan, might make an arrangement with Mark Kilmurry.  I’m sure it would work very well there.

Megan Drury and Emma Palmer
as Sheila and Jane
in Benefactors, Ensemble 2023

 

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: The Poison of Poligamy

 

 

The Poison of Polygamy by Anchuli Felicia King, based on the novel by Wong Shee Ping, translated by Ely Finch.  
Presented by Sydney Theatre Company and La Boite Theatre (Brisbane) at Wharf 1, June 8 – July 15 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 14

Creatives:
Director - Courtney Stewart
Designer - James Lew
Lighting Designer - Ben Hughes
Stage Manager - Kat O'halloran
Composer - Matt Hsu’s Obscure Orchestra
Sound Designer - Guy Webster
Costume Coordinator - Scott Fisher
Fight & Intimacy Director - Nigel Poulton
Choreographer - Deborah Brown
Hair, Wig & Make-Up Supervisor - Lauren A. Proietti
Voice Coach - Melissa Agnew
Lighting Supervisor - Jesse Greig
Dance Captain - Anna Yen
Lighting Programmer - Corinne Fish           
Sound Realiser - Zac Saric    
Lighting Operator - Cameron Menzies
Cultural Consultant - Institute For Australian And Chinese Arts And Culture
Rehearsal Photographer - Csquare Media
Co-Producer La Boite Theatre


Cast:
Ching / Villager 1 - Ray Chong Nee           
Mrs Lui / Mrs Ching - Hsin-Ju Ely
Chan / Ma’s Cousin / Villager 2 - Silvan Rus
The Preacher / Sleep-Sick - Shan-Ree Tan
Ma - Merlynn Tong
Tsiu Hei - Kimie Tsukakoshi
Villager 3 / Sleep-Sick’s Mother / Ma’s Mother / Ms Lin - Anna Yen
Doctor Ng / Pan / Song - Gareth Yuen

“Originality” is a reviewer’s first Key Performance Indicator (KPI), and I must begin by saying I have never seen a play anything like this.  That makes it intriguing to say the least.  

Who on earth is this Chinese God-praising Christian Preacher, appearing in the fog of thunderous lightning who tells us all about such an odd collection of gold-miners and small business-men types who metaphorically and financially treat Australia as a gold-digger’s paradise because it is a rule-of-law democracy as opposed to a hide-bound rule-bound polygamous country – China.

Whoops!  Is this meant to be China and Australia now or when?  Women’s rights – and powers – as concubines – and men’s dictatorial behaviours – and failures in the smoke of opium (looking remarkably like vaping) – seem to be back in the 1850s goldrush days.  But there’s surely stuff in this story-telling with modern political implications.  Just think of the Australian parliament struggling with sexual behaviour claims and counterclaims right now.

And, as my wife pointedly argued, there something Shakespearean about all this.  Like Hamlet, say, there’s a family history about fathers, mother and son – and the possibility of an Ophelia – written in Australia, but playing out there and in China instead of in England and Denmark (think Rosencrantz and Golden – sorry Guildernstern are Dead).  You might feel a bit like R & G in Tom Stoppard’s ‘absurdist, existential tragicomedy’, wondering if anyone knows what’s going on at times.

But don’t worry – just go with the flow and you’ll be surprised at the intrigue.  And some sadness.  Even some funny bits.  And a great sense of celebration by women in the end.  

So I can’t call The Poison of Polygamy a ‘Great Play’ in the ordinary sense.  But it’s fascinating when you think of the cultural mix which Australia has become and where the Chinese diaspora comes into the picture.

Who was the original story-teller, the actual Chinese Christian preacher who wrote the novel in serial form, published in high-flown Literary Chinese in Melbourne, as a serial in the Chinese Times in 1909-10?  The details are at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poison_of_Polygamy and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wong_Shee_Ping

Wong Shee Ping was never a gold-digger but arrived in Melbourne in 1908 where his brother ran a Chinese restaurant.  Finding out about his journalist role and his political activities and the fact that “His father had business interests in Australia, including a gold mine in Ballarat, and spent extended periods of time away while Wong and his siblings remained in Guangdong with their mother” gives us a new understanding of the story he wrote, and Anchuli Felicia King’s interpretation of its significance today.

Perhaps Sun Yat-sen read Wong’s story.  Like this Christian, Sun Yat-sen opposed the rule of the Qing emperors. Leading the Revolutionary Alliance to remove the last emporer Aisin-Gioro Puyi, who had become emperor at the age of two in 1908, Sun Yat-sen was elected as provisional president of the Republic of China, forcing Puyi to abdicate on 12 February 1912.

Wong Shee Ping set up the Young China League in Melbourne in 1911, travelled to South Australia and Western Australia preaching, became the editor of the Chinese Times in 1914, edited the Chinese Republic News in Sydney 1919-20, revived the Chinese Times in Melbourne and married there in 1923.  He returned to China in 1924, representing Australia at the first national conference of the Kuomintang – the governing party, finally defeated by Mao Tse-tung in 1949 and then taking over Taiwan – a  year after Wong Shee Ping died. San Yat-sen had made him a member of the Central Propaganda Committee.  He became involved with the Hong Kong Morning Post and “later in the 1920s he held various provincial posts in the Republican Government of China, and was a member of its Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission”.

However, maybe consistently with his The Poison of Polygamy story, “he was survived by a wife and child” when he died in Kaiping in 1948, while “it is not known whether he intended to return to Australia, or whether he kept in touch with his [Melbourne] wife Cissie after his departure” in 1924.

So here is a novel and a play linked to a fascinating part of Australian multicultural history, by a man whose significance to Chinese Australians was pretty much unknown until his novel, originally published anonymously, was brought to light by historians Mei-fen Kuo and Michael Williams, translated by Ely Finch and published by Sydney University Press in 2019.

What a story!  It runs for another month until July 15 2023.  Try not to miss it.

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: New Platform Papers - Diversity and Inclusion - Building the Good Life in Australia

 

 

Authors: Morwenna Collett and Jeremy Neideck

Diversity and Inclusion - Building the Good Life in Australia
Issue No. 5  The New Platform Papers, Currency House June 14, 2023
Edited by Harriet Parsons

Jeremy Neideck
Queer(y)ing the Australian Way of Life

 
Morwenna Collett
More Risk, More Play: Creating an Inclusive Culture

Media Contact: Martin Portus  mportus@icloud.com


Review by Frank McKone

This essay will be published in Volume 3 of the New Platform Papers in December.
Currency House books are available for sale through our distributors, Currency Press. You can temporarily download a free copy of this paper from the Currency House website. Pdfs of all our papers are available through your library or you can buy them from Informit RMIT.
Currency House is a not-for-profit organisation.

___________________________________________________________________________

To begin, readers need to understand the terminology currently in use in the world of diversity and inclusion:

“In this issue, we have avoided italics, bold and centred text as much as possible in order to make the text accessible for readers with vision impairment.

Terminology:

Deaf and d/Deaf:
Deaf is capitalised when referring to members of the Deaf community (typically Auslan users), and d/Deaf is used as a wider term that also encompasses people who may be deaf but do not consider themselves to be members of the Deaf community.

BIPOC: Black, Indigenous, people of colour.

CALD: Culturally and linguistically diverse.

Cisgender or cis: A person whose gender identity aligns with their identified sex at
birth.”

“Ultimately,” explains editor Harriet Parsons, the daughter of the founders of Currency Press, Philip Parsons and Katharine Brisbane, “access and its associated values of diversity, equity and inclusion, are about ending discrimination by examining very closely the way we treat each other in all of our relationships.”

Jeremy Neideck introduces an intellectual framework for thinking about those relationships in this way:

“One way to think about the good life is that it is a combination of the moral, the intimate and the economic, underpinned by the principles of enduring reciprocity that hold people together in relationships as couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets and businesses.

“When conditions are such that these relationships begin to fracture and fail, cruel optimism seduces us into attaching ourselves to myths and fantasies that are harmful or even impossible to achieve.”

For an historical perspective, Neideck quotes “George Caiger, in 1953 (in "The Australian Way of Life"). He described Australia as a nation of people who were ‘engaged in remoulding an inherited tradition in a fresh environment’, a people yearning for a greatness but frustrated by an ‘insistence on equality and uniformity’, whose society was dependent on the ‘heavy domestic demands upon the womenfolk’ and who demonstrated ‘a kind of good-humoured casualness towards other peoples except where economic interests are affected’".

By the 2010s, in Queensland, “queer world-building became a cherished part of this
independent theatre boom that was described by Hannah Brown as the ‘new new wave’".

But still today, referencing Julianne Schultz in "The Idea of Australia: The Search for the Soul of the Nation": “For those who find themselves queer in Australia and at odds with the ‘unexamined and unlovely’ aspects of nationhood, no amount of speculative isolation and cauterisation will make their lives commensurable with an environment soaked in cis-straight fantasies”.

Neideck’s essay from here takes up many of his personal experiences as a performer and creator, saying

 “I am sick of worried straight people. Sick of the blatantly queer-phobic delusion spouted by right-wing ideologues, that gays are grooming children by reading them stories in drag. Sick of the subtle handwringing of left-leaning Gen Xers who fret about how they could possibly talk to and about trans and gender non-conforming Zoomers. Sick of watching a screenplay about the bent nature of queer love and relationships die the death of a thousand straight cuts at the hands of executives who lack the imagination to invest in anything that contradicts the cis straight fantasy of the hero’s journey.”

Yet he takes up the positive possibilities of “Nationhood as Creative Practice”, with studies of three practitioners, Justin Talplacido Shoulder with a project of transformation; doyenne of Brisbane’s queer club performance scene, Sarah Stafford; and Wiradjuri dancer Joel Bray – writing in a highly original style and format, a demonstration in itself of being at odds, certainly with the conventional traditions of an academic paper.

Australia, he concludes, is a work in progress “steeped in mythologies. Some of these mythologies nourish the people living here and help them to sustain their communities, and some of them are frustrating, if not downright destructive: terra nullius, the Aussie battler, the migrant threat, the idea of progress itself… All of these myths ignore and deny the complexity, diversity and contingency of human experience. But I think that we might have a chance of breaking the shackles of cruel optimism that bind us to the cis-straight fantasy if we pay keen attention to those artists who are devoting their lives to the project of nationhood as creative practice. If art shapes the way we perceive reality, then it is artists who are shaping the world that we live in.”

Well worth a read.

Morwenna Collett adds some terminology: “Diversity and ADEI (Access, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) are used interchangeably throughout this paper. The collective term ADEI is explained in detail within the essay.”

“I write as a proud disabled woman and an experienced practitioner. I have worked in
the arts and for arts funding bodies all my adult life. That’s taken some doing and I
acknowledge my good fortune in being able to do it when the barriers for many others are too high.”

Collett’s essay is written in a more conventional form than Neideck’s, but in "The Case for ADEI" takes on the same kinds of issues, seeking to work for the better across all the variety.  

“Across Australian society, we’ve got a lot of ‘isms’ relating to marginalisation, and sometimes it can feel like these are growing rather than shrinking. Forms of discrimination which are currently alive and well include racism, ableism, ageism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, intersex discrimination, social stigma and many others. Put simply, difference is not something everyone is comfortable with, and some may view diversity as ‘background noise’ rather than an issue that is genuinely important.”

“Ultimately, ADEI is about ending discrimination by finding its root causes in the way we treat each other,”  and quotes “Kimberlé Crenshaw [who] coined the term ‘intersectionality’ to describe how the various aspects of a person’s identity may expose them to multiple forms of marginalisation.”

Collett’s concern is with the decision-makers, planners and organisers of others with less power.  The task seems daunting but she sees information and determination will bring about change, and so her detailed sections are

Case Study: Spotlight on Disability

Why Bother: Reasons to be Inclusive

Who Cares: Who Does ADEI Affect? – Artists; Administration; Staff, Volunteers and other Stakeholders.

The Global Context: How Does Australia Stack Up?

Carrots and Sticks: Encouraging ADEI Success

Quotas and Targets

Why It’s Hard: Challenges and Failures

What Does It Actually Look Like? Doing the Work

What’s Next

“It’s 2033, a decade from now. Australia looks different. We have our First Aboriginal Prime Minister, and she’s a woman. Creative Australia is run by a person of colour. 30% of our National Performing Arts Partnership Organisations have a CEO, AD and/or Chair who is from an under-represented group, and a few are on Fair Notice for failing to meet their diversity and inclusion KPIs. The fourth iteration of the ‘Towards Equity’ report shows that we’ve at least doubled all statistics since 2020. Our small to medium sector is continuing to push boundaries and program ground-breaking diverse work—and it’s accessible. Most festivals have stopped presenting work in physically inaccessible sites and are regularly providing major commissions to diverse artists. Diverse artists, arts workers and leaders are supported across all parts of the arts ecology. Pathways to training and employment have opened up. It’s exciting, and the art is good. No, it’s better than that: it’s great.

“That’s what it could look like if we all got to work on building an inclusive future for
our Australian arts and culture sector right now.”

And, entirely in keeping with Jeremy Neideck “Queer(y)ing the Australian Way of Life”, Morwenna Collett concludes “The arts and culture have the power to change hearts and minds and drive societal change. To ensure that Australia’s future is an inclusive one, let’s lead with diverse (and great!) art”, with “More Risk, More Play: Creating an Inclusive Culture”.

Putting the two together in this New Platform Paper makes a powerful read to put into practice.  Well worth it!

Driftwood the Musical

 

 Driftwood the Musical.  Original stage play by Jane Bodie, based on the memoir Driftwood – Escape and Survival Through Art by Eva de Jong-Duldig (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2017).

Presented by Umbrella Foundation at Eternity Theatre, Sydney June 7 – 18, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 11

Producer and Creator – Tania de Jong
Director – Gary Abrahams
Producer – Craig Donnell
Composer, Lyricist, Arranger & Musical Director – Anthony Barnhill
Set Designer – Jacob Battista; Costume Designer – Kim Bishop
Lighting Designer – Harrie Hogan; AV Designer – Justin Gardam
Sound Designer – Marcello Lo Ricco; Choreographer – Sophie Loughran
Music Director (Sydney) – David Gardos
Stage Manager – Tiff Lane

Cast
Tania de Jong – Slawa; Anton Berezin – Karl;
Bridget Costello – Eva; Michaela Burger – Rella
Nelson Gardner – Ignaz, Marcel, Gauleiter, Patent Attorneys & more

Musicians (Sydney)
David Gardos - Piano; Michelle O’Young – Violinist; Rachel Valentine – Cellist

In a story parallel to Stories from the Violins of Hope (reviewed here also June 11 2023), Eva de Jong-Duldig’s Jewish parents escaped from Germany just before WW II began, not to Palestine but via Switzerland and various parts of the world, ending up interned as ‘enemy aliens’ at Tatura, a camp near Shepparton which operated from 1939 to 1947.

Eva was only months old when her father entered a professional tennis competition in Switzerland, beginning a series of complex and often fraught steps of temporary arrangements, finally settling in Melbourne where Slawa’s drawings and paintings with Karl’s sculptural art works are now displayed in the Duldig Studio, managed by Eva’s daughter Tania de Jong AM.

Eva also became a tennis player who reached the first rounds at Wimbledon: In 1961 Duldig played women' singles at Wimbledon, representing Australia, and defeated West German Renate Ostermann in Round 1, and Robin Blakelock of Great Britain in Round 2, while losing to #8 seed American Karen Hantze in Round 3.  The musical includes her clash with the insulting Ostermann – the unknown Australian yelling back in perfect German.

The strong relationship between Eva and her father is the force behind her discovering a mass of documents and letters from the war-time period, finally meeting with her mother’s sister Rella in Paris after Wimbledon, and leading to the writing of her memoir, the stage play by Jane Bodie and the musical in which her daughter plays her mother.  

In keeping with my experience in this week, which I have called the Art of Human Kindness in the Face of Human Perfidy week, the producer Craig Donnell makes the point in the extensive program of Driftwood.  Julie Andrews once said, “The arts make a bridge across this world in ways that nothing else can”.  Simon Wiesenthal cautioned us, “there is no denying that Hitler and Stalin [I suggest Putin] are alive today…they are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible their resurrection”.

And indeed Driftwood the Musical is a serious genuine work of art, working like a traditional opera where the audience feels naturally ready to applaud after each aria and set piece; yet not avoiding the complexities of the story, nor the key issues of the often problematic relationships between Eva’s parents and between her mother and her aunt.

I have to say, on a lighter note, that when I first heard of this new Australian musical Driftwood, I assumed it would be a beyond the bush romance.  But the only connection was when Karl tried to assuage Slawa’s unenthusastic reaction to Australia by praising the gum trees and the stars.  Far more important was that in time, despite the horrors of the war at home, they were able to recover their own art work – at her sister’s expense – and find the freedom and opportunity here to make art anew.

Though in the end Rella’s husband Marcel would not come, though Slawa and Karl offered every help, should they feel guilty for having made their escape?  There is the dilemma that refugees the world over face, knowing so many others are left behind.  But at least through our art we are better able to understand what happened and why people made the decisions they did – and the risks they could see had to be taken, such as Karl leaving his wife with babe in arms to go to Switzerland with no more than hope that he could find a way to get them out.  Which he did – even if in reality all we can do is celebrate his luck.

Just as we celebrate Slawa’s invention of the folding umbrella in 1929!  Despite the Germans denying her the right to her royalties, since after all she was a Jew.  “We all need shelter” became the key line from this most unusual musical.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Stories from the Violins of Hope

 

 

 Stories from the Violins of Hope by Lisa Rosenbaum and Ronda Spinak. Presented by Moira Blumenthal Productions and Shalom at Bondi Pavilion Theatre, Sydney, May 31 – June 18 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 11

Written by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum & Ronda Spinak
Musical curation by Dr Noreen Green, Artistic Director and Conductor of the
Los Angeles Jewish Symphony

Cast
Barry French as Amnon Weinstein with Laurence Coy, Lloyd Allison-Young, Sophie Gregg and Kate Bookallil

Musicians
Pianist
Dr Noreen Green (performing on all dates EXCEPT 13 to 18 June)
Violinist
Ben Adler (performing on all dates EXCEPT the 1, 2, 3, 4 and 11 June)
Swing Violinist - Leo Novikov; Swing Pianist - Ben Burton

Creatives
Director - Moira Blumenthal
Set Designer - Tom Bannerman; Costume Designer - Andrea Tan
Lighting Designer - Martin Kinnane; Sound Designer - Aaron Robuck

Production
Production Manager - Helena Gonzalez
Stage Manager - Kirsty Walker
Rehearsal Stage Manager - Aaron Robuck

____________________________________________________________________________

For me this week has become the Art of Human Kindness in the Face of Human Perfidy week. Thursday June 8 took me to the community of Gander, Newfoundland, Canada, for Come From Away; Sunday June 11 at 2pm took me to Tel Aviv, to the Violins of Hope workshop of Amnon Weinstein; then also on Sunday June 11 at 6pm at Eternity Theatre I was transported to Eastern Europe and finally Australia by Driftwood, The Musical – in my next review.

To appreciate the Stories from the Violins of Hope – true stories, as are those in Come From Away and Driftwood – the history of collecting the violins is the central thread of the play:

In the 1980s, Amnon Weinstein, a second-generation violin maker in Tel Aviv, Israel, was asked to restore an old violin. The instrument was in poor condition but had an incredible past: the man who brought him the violin had been interned in a concentration camp, and he played it as he was sent to the gas chamber. This man survived only because his captors assigned him to the camp’s orchestra. After the liberation of the concentration camp, the man put the violin away. He had not played it since.

“I opened the violin case,” Weinstein recalls, “and inside there were ashes.”

He was horrified, as the ashes were very likely the incinerated remains of concentration camp victims. Almost 400 members of his own extended family had died in the Holocaust. To handle an instrument that had witnessed such destruction was too much for Weinstein.

“I could not,” he says. “I could not.”

In 1999, Weinstein decided he was ready. He put out a call for other violins which had survived the Holocaust like the one he’d put away so many years ago, and so began the Violins of Hope. Since then, Amnon and his son Avshalom have received more than 70 instruments, and have devoted countless hours to the lovingly detailed and careful restoration of each one. This exhibition will share the story of Amnon and Avshalom Weinstein and the violin workshop in Tel Aviv where the Violins of Hope journey began.

www.numulosgatos.org/violinsofhope-virtual

The play begins as young Amnon is watching an American Western movie with his father – who reacts visibly, on their weekly cinema trips, to the gun shots, but makes the crucial point: the good guy always wins.

Amnon himself only ever knew living in Palestine, later in the newly established Israel.  He discovers the story of his parents leaving Germany in 1938 especially because his mother saw going to Palestine as going to their true homeland.  Jews, of course, were already being rounded up and placed in ghettos, so his father saw an opportunity to take his expertise repairing violins – as it turned out ironically mostly German - to Palestine.

Perhaps the most awful part of Amnon’s story is how letters from his parents’ families stopped coming soon after WW II began, but in Palestine there was no news until the end of the war to explain what had happened.  His father had kept hidden the German violins, but Amnon had not understood why.

In a similar story-telling form as in Come From Away, the five actors play out scenes from the family history from Amnon’s parents’ generation through to his own and the beginning of the next.  The essential dramatic conflict is about the rejection and finally acceptance of the truth – that the art in making, playing and repairing the violins is central to their German and Jewish traditions.

Only, as his history records, in 1999, 60 years after his parents left Germany, could Amnon Weinstein find the way to show that art is our universal hope, bringing out our sense of community.

The effect, especially in the small theatre in the Bondi Pavilion, was moving, taking us from a confusion of feelings to a satisfying sense of resolution – of a new direction for the future.

Finding myself engaged in the Jewish experience, afterwards on reflection I wondered about how the Violins of Hope fit in to the politics of Israel today.  

There is an awful irony that the longstanding discrimination against the Jews in Europe (which even William Shakespeare recognised in his The Merchant of Venice more than 400 years ago), taken to such an extreme beyond understanding by Adolf Hitler (in the spurious name of the National Socialist Workers of Germany), generated the United Nations' response in setting up Israel to replace the British colonial state of Arab Palestine to provide the homeland that Amnon Weinstein’s mother had hoped for.

I hope that the Violins of Hope warmth of understanding can come together with the Ouds of Hope before too long:

 By Mutaz Awad - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114516356 

© Frank McKone, Canberra

The Waltz by David Cole

 

 

The Waltz by David Cole.  Presented in the Q The Locals series at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, June 9-10, 2023.
First performed at Goulburn Performing Arts Centre, October 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 9

Writer – David Cole   
Director – Jock McLean; Original Director – Dave Letch
Production Manager – Sarah Harris
Lighting – Blake Selmes; Sound – David Cole

Performers:
Pauline Mullen (Irene) and Martin Saunders (Alf)

From Goulburn PAC: In Memorium David Letch

The Waltz is a celebration of life as two people in their 70s meet on a park bench at Bondi. They rediscover their connection from the 1960s, as members of the radical group The Push. They help each other take back control of their increasingly regulated lives. The Waltz has made audiences laugh and cry. It is full of wit, humor, and music. The Waltz has toured villages in Southern NSW in 2022, courtesy of funding from Create NSW.

The premiere season of the play was directed by the late, great David Letch, who tragically passed away recently.  Letch also fell in love with the characters.  He said "The play is about life and never letting your inner child die.  You're never too old to grow and have fun".
David lived by that adage himself and we offer this very special performance in his memory.
www.goulburnpost.com.au/story/7927909/playing-out-the-waltz-of-life-on-the-big-stage-in-tribute-to-director/

Author David Cole is quoted in advertising for a presentation of The Waltz at a vineyard: “I was spending a bit of time in Sydney in 2015, and I came across a number of ‘golden oldies’ in the pools around Bondi, and they were really grabbing life by the throat,” he explained.

“At the same time, I was also reading a book which was all about these people who were flouting authority back in the 50s and early 60s.”
www.centennialvineyardsrestaurant.com.au/specialeventsproducts/thewaltz

Being now 82 – apparently some ten years older than Irene and Alf in The Waltz – I view David Cole’s play with some reservations.  Like the fictional Alf, but in reality, I in 1958 was active politically in the Sydney University Labour Club, a little on the sidelines of The Push.  

In about 1960, I left as the Labour Club split between those specifically wedded to the Australian Labor Party, and others who moved to the Communist Party of Australia.  I moved on to a-political bushwalking after attending a heavily ideological CPA lecture, while also attaching myself to the Push-related Realist Writers with plans to write a great Australian novel.  

Though I was not among those recorded in Wikipedia: Well known associates of the Push include Richard Appleton, Jim Baker, Lex Banning, Eva Cox, Robyn Davidson, Margaret Fink, John Flaus, Germaine Greer, George Molnar, Robert Hughes, Harry Hooton, Clive James, Sasha Soldatow, David Makinson, Jill "Blue" Neville, Paddy McGuinness, Frank Moorhouse, David Perry, Lillian Roxon and Darcy Waters. From 1961 to 1962, poet Les Murray resided in Brian Jenkins's Push household at Glen Street, Milsons Point, I had been to school with David Makinson, but found my free-thinking and sexually diverse interests nearer to the University from the Downtown Push in a group house in Glebe.  Drinking took place at the Forest Lodge pub.

My first problem with The Waltz is that the old-age characters of Irene and Alf just do not feel like Push characters.  They are both written with traits superficially related to David Cole’s ideas of how they would have been radicals in his conventional picture of the ‘conservative’ 1950s, but there is no depth to how they might have grown out of the real political and social movements of that time.

The question of how, in old age, we deal with the business of how we should die is, of course, very relevant now, particularly as our states and territories grapple with our right to voluntary assisted dying, but the presentation of these characters never engaged realistically or believably with the feelings of despair at losing control, when realising how close one’s death is, can be generated.

And then I must say that the plot, with its twist at the end of dying without the intended assistance, was predictable and even almost comic.  Alf’s often quite extraordinary mannerisms, and the brief indications in Irene of the fear of her doctor’s prediction of death within a year, were not written, or played, with the sensitivity of feelings we needed to have sympathy, let alone true empathy, for these characters.

I must also say that on the night here in Queanbeyan it was not true that The Waltz has made audiences laugh and cry.  There was laughter at some of Alf’s attempts to at first avoid and later make connection with Irene, and there was respect for each character’s straight talk, as if to us directly.  But I didn’t notice people in tears.

I conclude, then, that the idea of The Waltz had great possibilities, but despite the claims for its success elsewhere, the play needs a great deal more rethinking and redevelopment before it might make people now understand the people of The Push and genuinely feel with them the loss that death will bring them – and us all.

Of course, though, it is important to note that Q The Locals is a very worthwhile program for generating new theatre by local writers and production teams, and bringing them to the general public.

And just some finer historical points.

Much of the music in the sound track was not of the kind popular with Push members, except perhaps the Beatles’ ironic Will you still love me / When I’m 64?

Also mentioned were many real names as Irene recognised Alf’s fictional painted and sketched portraits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Push , and one famous news event:

The Bogle–Chandler case refers to the mysterious deaths of Gilbert Bogle and Margaret Chandler on the banks of the Lane Cove River in Sydney, Australia on 1 January 1963. The case became famous because of the circumstances in which the bodies were found and because the cause of death could not be established. In 2006 a filmmaker discovered evidence to suggest the cause of death was hydrogen sulphide gas. In the early hours of 1 January an eruption of gas from the polluted river bed may have occurred, causing the noxious fumes to pool in deadly quantities in the grove. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogle%E2%80%93Chandler_case

I knew Gilbert Bogle briefly from a political social event around 1960, and heard of his and Margaret’s deaths shortly before my departure from Sydney to teach in Broken Hill and begin my amateur acting and directing ‘career’ with Broken Hill Rep.  
See www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/1541 for details.

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

Come From Away

 

 

Come From Away    Book - Music & Lyrics by Irene Sankoff and David Hein.  Produced by Junkyard Dog Productions / Rodney Rigby.  
Canberra Theatre Centre June 8 – July 9, 2023. https://comefromaway.com.au/tickets/canberra/  

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Thursday June 8

Cast:

Kyle Brown  - Bob & Others; Zoe Gertz - Beverley & Others
Manon Gunderson-Briggs - Janice & Others; Douglas Hansell - Kevin T & Others
Kat Harrison - Bonnie & Others; Joe Kosky - Oz & Others
Phillip Lowe - Nick & Others; Joseph Naim - Kevin J & Others
Sarah Nairne - Hannah & Others; Natalie O’Donnell - Diane & Others
Emma Powell - Beulah & Others; David Silvestri - Claude & Others

Jeremy Carver-James – Standby; Kaya Byrne - Standby & Dance Captain
Noni McCallum – Standby; Michael Lee Porter - Standby
Angela Scundi – Standby; Jasmine Vaughns - Standby

Australian Cast of Come From Away
Photo: Jeff Busby

Band:

Michael Tyack AM - Musical Director, Keyboard, Harmonium & Accordion
Nigel Ubrihien – Associate Musical Director, Keyboard, Harmonium & Accordion
Seb Bartels - Mandolin, Acoustic Guitar & Bouzouki
Bryn Bowen - Drums & Percussion
Jess Ciampa - Bodhrán & Percussion
Tina Harris - Electric & Acoustic Bass
Tim Hartwig - Electric, Acoustic & Nylon Guitars
Matthew Horsley - Whistles, Irish Flute & Uilleann Pipes
Xani Kolac - Fiddle

Photos by Jeff Busby

 _______________________________________________________________________________

On Thursday this week I saw the musical Come From Away.  On Sunday next, June 11, I shall see Stories from the Violins of Hope.  Each is a work of theatre art reflecting a dreadful reality.

In response to the awful inhumanity of September 11, 2001, perpetrated by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, the Come From Away story, by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, – of how the Newfoundland people offered “a safe harbour in a world thrown into chaos for the 7,000 airline stranded  passengers from around the globe” – shows wonderful humanity.

Stories from the Violins of Hope by Lisa Rosenbaum and Ronda Spinak, in response to the awful inhumanity perpetrated by Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers' Party, is about how “The Holocaust had silenced them …until an extraordinary violin-maker brought their voices back to life, and to the world” in another show of wonderful humanity.  

What a week of inspiring theatre for me.

What a week of frantic effort for the small community around the airfield at Gander, in their part of Canada’s Operation Yellow Ribbon, as, at 09.26 am Tuesday “The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration made the decision to shut down its airspace forcing over 4,000 planes to land at the nearest airport.  Inbound flights from Europe are diverted to Canada” and by 4.30 pm “A total of 38 planes have landed in Gander carrying 6,579 passengers and crew.”

In bringing Come From Away to Australia, the authors quote Dorothea Mackellar on Australia – “her beauty and her terror” – and Newfoundlander Yva Momiatiuk on her homeland known as The Rock in the Atlantic Ocean – “this marvellous terrible place”.  “Both understand how darkness and light can live side by side.  And these days, when the world often feels so dark, stories of kindness and community are what help us remember the light.”

And this is exactly what the production of Come From Away achieves.

The words spoken and sung in this tightly written libretto are all taken directly from the people at home on The Rock and  from the ‘from aways’ during a month of interviews on the tenth anniversary in 2011.  

The music, in the folk-music style of the island, very much derived from Irish reel and story-telling traditions, is upbeat and strongly rhythmical throughout the show’s 100 minutes.  The changing moods, between individual characters and for the community as a whole, from the fears of the aways, the frustrations of the locals setting up accommodation and food supplies, through the horror of realising what had happened in New York, to the building of new relationships in sympathy – all are built into the rhythm in the music and choreography in such a way that we are swept along for the five days from the first news, the arrivals and until the leaving.

From the first scene of table and chairs in a meeting room (and the issue of who has a seat and a say at the decision-making table), the choreographed movement of the furniture as the characters morphed from homers and awayers in pubs and planes – and even for caring for the cat and  the pregnant bonobo chimpanzee – was done with such precision that it was simply a marvel to watch.

Though we can never forget the terrible sadness for the mother of a New York firefighter, unable to find out what happened to him until finally learning of his death after returning to her home, we are glad to know Newfoundlander Beulah’s continuing friendship was a great comfort.  

The last song in the story makes the point stand out.  Something’s Missing – not just within the events and these particular people’s stories, but in the culture of us human beings that allows some people to do such heinous things as Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler did – leaving unforgiveable legacies that we see still today in Afghanistan where the Taliban are back in power, and in the never-ending Israel-Palestine conflict in the Middle East.

But the beautiful thing is that in our art we can create such a tremendous celebration of the best of human culture.  This is how the audience at Canberra Theatre responded in their instant standing ovation for the actors – a great welcome to these Come From Aways to our capital city – and then their enthusiastic cheerful clapping along with the band for many more minutes of Newfoundland sound.

What a night we had!

Come From Away Band
Photo: Jeff Busby

And, thinking now of the Come From Away Jewish-style Prayer

 Make me a channel of your peace.
Where there’s despair in life, let me bring hope
Where there is darkness, only light
And where there’s sadness, ever joy.

I look forward to the Jewish experience in Stories from the Violins of Hope at Bondi Pavilion, Sydney, Sunday June 11 to Sunday June 18.
www.shalom.edu.au/event/stories-from-the-violins-of-hope/

COME FROM AWAY
CREATIVES

Irene Sankoff and David Hein - Book, Music & Lyrics
Christopher Ashley – Director; Kelly Devine - Musical Staging
Ian Eisendrath - Musical Supervisor, Musical Arrangements
Beowulf Boritt - Scenic Designer; Toni-Leslie James - Costume Designer
Howell Binkley - Lighting Designer; Gareth Owen - Sound Design
David Brian Brown - Hair Design; August Eriksmoen - Orchestrations
Michael Tyack AM - Musical Director; Lauren Wiley - Casting Director
Telsey & Company: Rachel Hoffman C.S.A - Casting U.S.
Joel Goldes - Dialect Coach; Michael Rubinoff - Creative Consultant
Daniel Goldstein - Associate Director; Richard J. Hinds - Associate Choreographer
Michael Ralph - Resident Director and Choreographer
Warren Letton - Lighting Programmer; Hugh Hamilton - Associate Lighting Designer
Russell Godwin -Associate Sound Designer; David Letch - Associate Sound Designer
Matthew Armentrout - Associate Wig Designer; Brian Downie - Technical Director
David Worthy - Production Manager and Head Mechanist
Alchemy Production Group - General Manager U.S.
Newtheatricals - General Manager Australia
Junkyard Dog Productions – Producer; Rodney Rigby - Producer

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

Garry Starr Performs Everything

 

Garry Starr Performs Everything - Damien Warren-Smith.  Presented by Milke at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, June 3 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Producer Milke - Laura Milke Garner
Performer/Creator – Damien Warren-Smith

Director – Cal McCrystal.

WINNER - Emerging Artist, Adelaide Fringe 2018 Weekly
WINNER - Tour Ready Award, Adelaide Fringe 2018
WINNER - Best Comedy, Manchester Fringe 2018
WINNER - Best Physical Theatre & Circus, Sydney Fringe 2022

You would think by now, on tour in prestigious Queanbeyan (Australia), Garry Elizabeth Starr could not still be the “disgraced actor” who “has decided that the performing arts are dying and he is just the man to save them” after such a history of being a WINNER – and having just flashed his Greece Lightning at this year’s even more prestigious Melbourne Comedy Festival, where he performed “all of Greek mythology in order to save his Hellenic homeland from economic ruin” – also a WINNER Best in Fest 2022 Gothenburg Fringe.

But believing “theatre is dying” and having struggled for much of his life to stick at anything” (except slapstick, as he demonstrated with five audience members tonight), “Garry is our only hope”.  He succeeds in brilliantly saving at least 13 kinds of theatre from themselves, making them all the butt of uproarious laughter – very much in the literal sense.  I suggest, though, that he should not endeavour to tour Uganda right now.

To write a series of spoilers about how Garry Starr treats genres like Romantic Comedy, the latest European minimalist theatre focussing on the emotions by stripping out the dialogue or, say, the Australian penchant for physical theatre, would be unethical in a review, since it is the element of the unexpected that makes the show work so well.  And, in any case, his extensive employment of members of the audience relies on the real actor behind the character having improvisation skills extraordinaire – as Warren-Smith has to the umpth degree.

His disciplined skills as a performer showed particularly in the segment on Japanese Noh and Butoh.  His satire of the Butoh Body on the Edge of Crisis (see the trailer at www.imdb.com/title/tt1826625/?ref_=vp_vi_tt_p  of the Michael Blackwood 1990 production) required the very skills he makes fun of; just as true as for his Cirque du Nouveau sequence.

However much a continuing failure Garry Starr is, is the measure of the continuing and I suspect developing success Damien Warren-Smith is.

The trip all the way to Queanbeyan was well worth it – especially for the Royal Hotel special offer of a free glass of house beer or wine with dinner before the show.  No joke!

© Frank McKone, Canberra