2023: Amadeus by Peter Shaffer

 

 

Amadeus by Peter Shaffer.  Canberra REP Theatre July 27 – August 12, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Opening Night July 28

CREDITS

Director • Cate Clelland
Assistant Director • Ian Hart; Assistant to the Director • Rosemary Gibbons

Stage Manager • Ewan; Stage Crew • Kristen Seal

Set Designer • Cate Clelland; Set Coordinator • Russell Brown OAM
Set Construction & Painting • Russell Brown OAM, Gordon Dickens, Andrew Kay, John Klingberg, Brian Moir, Eric Turner; Properties • Brenton Warren

Costume Designer • Deborah Huff-Horwood
Wardrobe Coordinator • Jeanette Brown OAM
Costume Makers • Cheryll Bowyer, Jeanette Brown OAM, Suzan Cooper, Anne Dickens, Helen Drum, Ros Engledow, Rosemary Gibbons, Rhana Good, Deborah Huff-Horwood, Jenny Kemp, Ann Moloney, Kristen Seal, Anna Senior OAM, Anne Turner, Joan White
Lighting Designer • Nathan Sciberras; Lighting Operators • Leeann Galloway, Deanna Gifford, Leanne van der Merwe, Ashley Pope
Sound Designer • Neville Pye; Fortepiano recordings • Christine Faron, Justin Mullins
Ghosts of the Future original composition • Ewan
Sound Operators • Leo Mansur, Lawrence Mays, Neville Pye, Disa Swifte

CAST

Antonio Salieri • Jim Adamik
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart • Jack Shanahan
Constanze Weber, wife to Mozart • Sienna Curnow
Joseph II, Emperor of Austria • Neil McLeod
Count Johann Killian von Strack • David H Bennett
Count Franz Orsini-Rosenberg • Tony Falla
Baron Gottfried van Swieten • Ian Russell
The 'Venticelli' • Michael J. Smith, Justice-Noah Malfitano
Katherina Cavalieri • Harriet Allen

Citizens of Vienna • Charlotte Edlington, Grace Jasinski
Blair Liu, Kelly McInnes, John Whinfield, Joan White
 
The list is long, emphasising the value of having our Canberra Repertory Theatre Society, putting on such a quality production of Amadeus 'loved by God' – Peter Shaffer’s historical fiction study of what may have been the relationship between two composers: Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, (actually baptized without ‘Amadeus’), born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, died December 5, 1791, Vienna; and Antonio Salieri, born August 18, 1750, Legnago, Republic of Venice, died May 7, 1825, Vienna.

Just their names suggest fascinating differences between an over-the-top bumptious scatter-brain child prodigy German and a standard career oriented God-bothering Italian court composer – or at least that’s how Shaffer’s Salieri sees Mozart.  

His problem was true to history.  Though Salieri’s operas were solidly supported in official European circles in his lifetime, Shaffer says Salieri knew in his heart that Mozart’s upstart brilliance was God-given.  The point was that Salieri lived long enough after Mozart’s early 1791 death to see that brilliance grow into the musical force that we understand still today; while Salieri’s music was already outshone, even by Rossini(!), by 1825.

But the play is not simply a story of 18th Century court intrigue and competition between composers.  Jim Adamik creates perhaps his best in-depth character yet, in a tour de force charismatic presentation of Salieri.  The production depends on his commanding leadership in the role, and he leads with an assured strength – making us able to believe, in a truly empathetic way, in the sense of injustice and confusion in Salieri’s mind.  God should have known better, and made sure his work would shine eternally, rather than Mozart’s – yet he could not avoid the truth.  Though he was duplicitous in keeping up his social standing at court, we can almost feel sorry for him.

And herein is the strength of Shaffer’s play.  The truth is the truth, whatever else we personally would like it to be.  If only people in power around the world today could accept that, we might even save the Earth, from ourselves.

Canberra REP has done us proud, in Cate Clelland’s directing and in everyone’s obvious enthusiasm in the often amusing yet telling acting style, the set design (including terrific backdrop photos), the music recording, lighting and sound, with special mention of Jack Shanahan and Sienna Curnow in their wonderfully uninhibited playing of Mozart and his wife Constanze, as well for the amazing beautiful 18th Century costumes and hairstyling.

Here’s another REP production not to be missed.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: On the Beach by Nevil Shute, adapted by Tommy Murphy

 

 

On the Beach - by Nevil Shute, adapted for the stage by Tommy Murphy
Sydney Theatre Company at Roslyn Packer Theatre, July 18 – August 12, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 24


Director: Kip Williams
Set Designer: Michael Hankin; Costume Designer: Mel Page
Lighting Designer: Damien Cooper; Composer: Grace Ferguson
Sound Designer: Jessica Dunn; Dramaturg: Ruth Little
Associate Costume Designer: Emma White; Assistant Director: Kenneth Moraleda
Fight & Movement Director: Nigel Poulton; Intimacy Coordinator: Chloë Dallimore
Voice & Accent Coach: Jennifer White

With
Matthew Backer, Tony Cogin, Michelle Lim Davidson, Emma Diaz, Vanessa Downing, Tai Hara, Genevieve Lee, Ben O’Toole, Contessa Treffone, Kiki Wales, Elijah Williams, Alan Zhu

Opening scene
radiation cloud backdrop

 

Mary is planting daffodils.
 
“They should be flowering by the end of August,” Mary said.  “Of course, they won’t be much this year, but they should be lovely next year and the year after. They sort of multiply, you know.”

Moira says:

“Well, of course it’s sensible to put them in.  You’ll see them anyway, and you’ll sort of feel you’ve done something.”

Mary looked at her gratefully.  “Well, that’s what I think.  I mean, I couldn’t bear to – to just stop doing things and do nothing.  You might as well die now and get it over.”

Page 191 On the Beach by Nevil Shute, 1957, available at
www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20131214

In 1961, as the Cuban crisis was developing, I remember talking with my newly arrived English Literature lecturer at Sydney University, Peter Davison – later to become a renowned expert on George Orwell and his novel of the future 1984, and writing in 2020
“starting to teach ‘Scholarship’ to the fourth-year honours class immediately (in which Germaine Greer and Clive James, both far more intellectually distinguished than their alleged teacher, loomed large)”
https://orwellsociety.com/peter-davison-3-meetings-with-remarkable-minds  – about where we would go west of the Blue Mountains to avoid the atom bomb which we seriously expected could be dropped on Sydney.

This novel in its time and Murphy’s stage adaptation in our time is no joke.  By 1963 I was teaching in the Far West at Broken Hill.  

Vladimir Putin has placed his stock of nuclear missiles in Belorus; his mercenaries are training very close to the border with Poland, now patrolled by Polish forces; Ukraine will not give in; and China is vacillating (Shute had China and Russia bombing NATO).  Why would a nuclear World War III  as Shute predicted in 1957 to have happened by 1963, not be in the offing now?  Fortunately for Peter Davison, Germaine Greer, Clive James and me, John F Kennedy ‘quarantined’ Cuba to keep the Russian missiles out and Nikita Khrushchev reached a compromise, as Wikipedia records:

After several days of tense negotiations, an agreement was reached between Kennedy and Khrushchev: publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement to not invade Cuba again. Secretly, the United States agreed with the Soviets that it would dismantle all of the Jupiter MRBMs which had been deployed to Turkey against the Soviet Union. There has been debate on whether or not Italy was included in the agreement as well. While the Soviets dismantled their missiles, some Soviet bombers remained in Cuba, and the United States kept the naval quarantine in place until November 20, 1962.

In Shute’s novel, the radiation cloud resulting from massive numbers of bombs deployed in his WW III in the northern hemisphere, gradually floats south of the equator.  Mary’s flowers may bloom by the end of August, but the (AUKUS?) submarine surveying the radiation’s progress reckons no-one in Melbourne will be alive to see them by the end of September.  As radiation sickness takes hold, the novel ends as people take pills to ease the pain of dying.

The periscope used under water for safety from radiation cloud
searching for living human activity on sea and onshore

Tommy Murphy has made the dialogue in the play true to the words spoken in the novel,  maintaining the characters as Shute imagined them and tells the story in Melbourne and on the submarine on its impossibly hopeful journeys, switching back and forth in a series of scenes.

Michael Hankin has created a stage design of great flexibility, representing the ever-threatening cloud in a fine white all-encompassing floating material – until the very end.

What would Peter and Mary’s baby daughter, Jennifer, see if it were possible for her to have grown up?  Mary had planted a tree with those flowers.  In Murphy’s final scene a teenage Jennifer slowly approaches, circles and touches the now grown up tree.  We all know that if she were real, she would be entirely alone on the whole of the earth.

The novel’s end is uncompromisingly bleak as Moira, on the beach, “put the tablets in her mouth and swallowed them down with a mouthful of brandy, sitting behind the wheel of her big car.”

The play, however,  leaves us with just a faint hope that we, meaning all of us the whole world over, will not let our children be left alone to die.  It’s a worry, of course, that burning fossil fuels and overheating the earth may cause our demise instead.

But an important aspect of Tommy Murphy’s adaptation is that he allows Kip Williams, as Director, to expand and develop the humour and strength of the characters – especially and very effectively in the women.  The novel is written in a plain narrative style, recording what a character does and what they say.  Shute’s language is descriptive but quite unemotional in effect – I suppose because his purpose in writing is essentially polemical, about the issue.

Williams has turned this into a slightly over-the top style, which to my mind works well to make us understand the anxiety which underlies these characters’ words and behaviour.  

And so I find the staging of On the Beach, while staying true to the novelist’s intention, brings out better our feelings about the stupidity of warfare and the absolute insanity of ultimate war with nuclear weapons.  Not to be missed.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Good Works by Nick Enright

 

 Good Works by Nick Enright. Lexi Sekuless Productions at Mill Theatre, Dairy Road, Canberra, July 21 – August 12, 2023

Book at https://events.humanitix.com/good-works-july-2023-theatre-at-dairy-road

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 21

Production Team

Playwright: Nick Enright
Director: Julian Meyrick; Designer: Kathleen Kershaw
Sound Designer: Damien Ashcroft; Lighting Designer: Jennifer Wright
Choreographer: Belynda Buck; Stage Manager: Jess Morris

Cast

Tim/Eddie: Oliver Bailey; Shane/Neil: Martin Everett; Rita: Adele Querol
Mary Margaret: Lexi Sekuless;
Alan/Brother Clement/Barry/Mr Donovan: Neil Pigot
Mother John/Mrs Kennedy/Mrs Donovan: Helen McFarlane

I find the layout of Mill Theatre difficult for sight-lines, especially from the longer side back row, even with an empty up-aisle in front,                                                                           

My seat: back row 5 from left

because the entrances/exits are a bit like watching a tennis match from the sideline.

However, Kathleen Kershaw and Belynda Buck successfully choreographed the six performers, playing in short scenes with their characters constantly shifting their ages, in this play which spans 60 years, leaping back and forth between the 1920s, ’50s and ’80s, telling the tangled story of two Australian Irish Catholic families.

Next time I think I’ll try a front row end or side seat next to the entrance – I suppose what would be downstage left, in a conventional setup.  From there I would have easily seen where the switch-blade knife was hidden ‘under the house’ behind that end of the piano, and had a full view of all the action, including on the floor far downstage right

And there, I wouldn’t have been quite so close to the sound and violence of the strop, banged horribly by Neil Pigot as Brother Clement, on the aisle step just in front of me, while Oliver Bailey as Tim cried out “I can’t” hop.

But I must say, Martin Everett’s Shane, stabbing the Brother, and Tim’s kicking to complete the murder, was a truly shocking sight down that empty up-aisle.

I believe the last time Good Works was presented, directed for Darlinghurst Theatre Copmany at Eternity Theatre, Sydney by Canberra Critics’ Award winner Iain Sinclair (BA Hons Australian National University) was in 2015, when Daily Review’s Ben Neutze remarked “Good Works is a beautiful play. Let’s hope it’s not another 20 years before it’s revived again.”  So it is pleasing to see Canberra’s Lexi Sekuless Productions coming in early after 8 years, and working with the highly regarded theatre historian Julian Meyrick as director.

Canberra Weekly [  https://canberraweekly.com.au/mill-theatre-leads-revival-of-aussie-stories-in-canberra  ]  reports Meyrick as saying Enright possesses the special ability of being a male playwright who could capture convincing women, something that only someone who cares about women could do. The female characters in the play followed the same timeline and arc as Meyrick’s mother.

“Nick would have grown up in this time and so when you read the play, you’re aware of a number of factors. One is the kind of Catholicism and the wowserism of Australia at the time; the second is the way the small communities cook up and the way they gossip; and then the third is this kind of yearning for something different, the beginnings of a kind of a desire to be freer.”

And as I remember Nick Enright, his interest – and concerns – about young people were clear from his play and film Black Rock about the murder of teenage girl Leigh Leigh, as well as his work in setting up the original Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP) with director David Berthold.  His later 1999 work Spurboard was presented at Wharf 2 with “16 young actors and a professional support team working in association with Pulse 10, which is STC's youth and education wing
[ https://frankmckone2.blogspot.com/1999/10/1999-spurboard-by-nick-enright-preview.html ] - Canberra Times), while his influence has gone on to the theatre industry more widely, for example at the 2018 Industry Forum held at the ATYP Young People and The Arts: The child as cultural citizen
[ https://frankmckone2.blogspot.com/2018/06/2018-young-people-and-arts-child-as.html ]

It’s awful to remember that Enright contracted melanoma cancer about 1988, around the same time as I did, but surgery was kind to me; while after 15 years in remission Nick died at 52 in 2003.  So for me this production of Good Works is in memory of Nick Enright OAM.  The Sydney Morning Herald published a tribute on 25 March 2023:

Writer and teacher, died 20 years ago on March the 30th, 2003. He was a man of singular grace, intelligence and charm.

As long as memory, itself a dying thing, survives, we hold dear our friendship with him and regret his early leaving.

~JH & RB
https://tributes.smh.com.au/obituaries/474871/nick-enright/?r=https://tributes.smh.com.au/obituaries/smh-au

Good Works, with Meyrick’s directing and an excellent cast, works very well in this small theatre space.  From an actor’s point of view the switching of costumes is nothing compared with reappearing every few minutes at a different stage, from maybe 5-year-old to grandparent, of the same character, let alone as a different character as the men and Helen McFarlane are required to do.   Would it have been better to use more actors?  Eight men and five women?

It is true that I found myself sometimes having to stop to think about who were the characters on stage at that moment, but the play often moved on so quickly, leaving me to realise that I did not need to remember every detail about everyone because what the play as a whole was really about was impressionistic.

With its ironic title, the play was not  specifically about this or that character, nor even about this or that particular family, but about the nature of the culture of the society to which these families belonged.  Does this society work?  Does it work well?  Is it true to our real society?  Or some part of it?

This production works better with fewer actors in a kind of maelstrom of flurries with occasional moments of seemingly unlikely stillness, especially in this small space.  Interestingly, on that point, in a more conventional small in-the-round theatre, such as my favourite Ensemble Theatre in Sydney, warmth, connection and intimacy give the drama strength.  In the rectangular flat space of the Mill Theatre, empathy and identifying with the characters is not the point.  It’s almost Brechtian in keeping our minds working as we put together, as far as we can, the unexpected bits and pieces of these families’ lives.

The result, in my view, is a play which encapsulates the thinking of the author about at least this part of Australian life – apparently informed by Enright’s experience growing up in the country industrial coal mining town, Maitland, where St Joseph’s was established in 1835 and Case 43 of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse says it all:
https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/case-studies/case-study-43-catholic-church-authorities-maitland-newcastle

Good Works indeed!

 

The cast in rehearsal for Good Works by Nick Enright
Lexi Sekuless Productions, 2023

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Yuldea - Bangarra Dance Theatre

 

 

 Yuldea – Bangarra Dance Theatre at Canberra Theatre Centre July 20 – 22, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

CREDITS

Choreographer – Frances Rings and the dancers of Bangarra Dance Theatre
Set Designer – Elizabeth Gadsby; Costume Designer – Jennifer Irwin
Lighting Designer – Karen Norris; Composer – Leon Rodgers
Guest Composers – Electric Fields
Miming Cultural Consultant – Clem Lawrie

BANGARRA DANCERS

Rikki Mason          Ryan Pearson                      Lillian Banks
Bradley Smith       Courtney Radford              Kallum Goolagong
Kassidy Waters     Kiarn Doyle                         Maddison Paluch
Daniel Mateo         Emily Flannery                   Janaya Lamb
Jesse Murray         Chantelle Lee Lockhart     James Boyd
Lucy May               Amberlilly Gordon    

Program Note:
Yuldea reflects the truth-telling of the Indigenous experience in Australia and
reminds us that there are two stories to the making of this country. Yooldil Kapi
is the traditional name for a permanent waterhole situated on the traditional lands
of the Kokatha people. It is recognised as one of the most important Aboriginal
sites in Australia. With the federation of our nation, Yuldea, and cultural life
would forever be changed. The precious permanent water source became highly
sought after by the explorers and settlers, and then used for the creation of the
Trans-Australian railway line. For many Anangu, it was a site of first contact and
a dramatic change to their traditional existence. People were displaced and
forced to leave their ancestral home.
[see https://kokatha.com.au for more]

________________________________________________________________________________

Frances Rings’ and the Company’s choreography has grown from within the story of the essential water, stolen from the people who had learned to understand their place and how to live with confidence on their Country.  It becomes a story of Biblical proportions of a free and independent people facing the pestilence of invasion by the locusts under the Crown, of their determination to survive near destruction, and to regain their rightful standing under the arch of reconciliation.

Yuldea is an outstanding work of dance-theatre, as powerful visually in the set design as in the sound and music; in the symbolism of imagery in costume design; in the emotional quality of the dance, in group, pair and individual scenes.  Yuldea is a great poem of the past, present and future which looks forward with confidence for new understanding across the cultural divide of colonialism.

Frances Rings, now Artistic Director of Bangarra, following the 33 year leadership of Stephen Page, has created a mature work for the Company, grounded in her personal history as she explains: Within my family lineage lies the stories of forefathers and mothers who lived a dynamic sophisticated desert life, leaving their imprint scattered throughout Country like memories suspended in time.  Their lives were forever changed by the impact of colonial progress….The story of Yuldea asks us to look beyond the narrative of our Nation’s modernisation to reconcile fraught history, and to affirm a future that no longer hides behind its truths but grows because of them.

In the introductory Welcome to Ngunnawal Country, where Canberra Theatre is situated, two things were made clear.  The traditional First Nations Welcome is an invitation to all with good intentions based on respect.  For the upcoming referendum on a constitutional Indigenous Voice to Parliament, each one of us should inform ourselves and vote as we see fit in good conscience.

I must say I hope the success of the great work of art,Yuldea, presages another – political – positive success this year.

Photos: Kate Longley

 

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Lucie in the Sky

 

 Lucie in the Sky for Uncharted Territory by Australasian Dance Collective.

Canberra Theatre Centre, The Playhouse July 14-15, 2023


Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 14

Creatives:

Concept and Creation - Amy Hollingsworth
Choreography - Amy Hollingsworth in collaboration with the
ADC company artists:
Dramaturg and Rehearsal Direction - Gabrielle Nankivell
Lighting Design - Alexander Berlage
Music Composition and Sound Design - Wil Hughes
Costume Design - Harriet Oxley
Drone Choreography – Amy Hollingsworth and Verity Studios
Drone Programming - Verity Studios
Technical Advisor - Dr Catherine Ball
Creative Development contributors - Jack Ziesing, Lonii Garnons-Williams, Tyrel
Dulvarie, Josie Weise and Jag Popham

Cast:

The Friend – Lucie (Drone)
The Jester – Skip (Drone)
The Caregiver - Chimene Steele-Prior
The Leader – M (Drone)
The Artist - Lilly King
The Innocent - Chase Clegg-Robinson
The Sage – Rue (Drone)
The Seeker - Jack Lister
The Magician - Harrison Elliott
The Rebel – Red (Drone)
The Warrior - Taiga Kita-Leong

Director’s Note
“Lucie In the Sky is the culmination of that dreaming – we have utilised complex coding and incredibly precise crafting of flight patterns and emotional context to create a work that has coaxed the ‘Pixar effect’ out of animation and into real life, finding joy, grief, rage and empathy appearing in our cast of humans and drones.”

With all the respect I can muster I have to report that Lucie in the Sky achieves very little dramatically either in real life or in the ‘Pixar effect’.  

It also fails entirely to create the essential understanding about human responsibility in coding Artificial Intelligence.  Humans program drones.  

The drones in the show appear to have autonomy, and appear to us to have emotions, but only because of the way the human actors react to the drones to create in us, watching, the idea that they have an emotional inter-relationship.  Only humans can act; drones can only do what they have been coded to do.

I’m not qualified to write critically of the originality of the dancers’ choreography, nor of the technical quality of what to me looked like extraordinary athletic flexibility, but I have no doubt that the dancers are top performers.

But, considering the director’s intentions, which she explained before the performance and followed up in the after-show symposium, it is an extraordinary mistaken concept to define the characters according to a selection from Karl Jung’s 12 ‘Archetypes’.  

If, as we were roundly told in the symposium, our world is already run by AI Coders and we must be advanced in our education of children to make sure they keep up with the new as they take over running the world in the coming decade, how could anyone go back to the antiquated and thoroughly discounted imaginary psychological categories that Jung invented early in the last century.

So instead of showing us, surrounded by an enormously over-the-top ‘Pixar’ soundtrack, the life of humans from lots of activity, through individual experiences, to a death with a drone looking sadly on, leaving us to imagine that cybernetics can be kindly, maybe a modern dance company should tell us a story of what drones are really used for – like accurately bombing people half a world away from the coder operator.

And I hope that the symposium speakers really meant that our children need to be taught the ethics of coding for Artificial Intelligence – for example to help correct our industrial and agricultural misbehaviour which may yet make our planet uninhabitable.

In that dance, the drones help the humans with positive hope for the future, rather than just sadly watch them die.

A drone's view of the cast of
Lucie in the Sky
Canberra Theatre Centre

 

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Finale by Tracy Bourne

 

 

Finale by Tracy Bourne. Presented by Tracy Bourne and Arts Capital with the support of the ACT Government at Ainslie Arts Centre, July 12-15, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 13

Creative Team:
Performer: Moya Simpson
Pianist: John Black
Percussionist: Jonathan “Jonesy” Jones
Director: Tracy Bourne
Designer: Nyx Matthews
Lighting Designer: James Tighe
Sound Design: Ben Marston
Lighting Operator: John Carberry
Poster Design: Mel Stanger (The Changesmiths)
Assistants: Emma English, Liliane Alblas

Songs, in order of appearance are:
I started a joke (1968) Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb
Is that all there is? (1966) Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
I’ll never get out of this world alive (1952) Fred Rose and Hank Williams
God’s away on Business (2002) Tom Waits
Go to hell (1967) Morris Bailey, Jr
I wish I knew how it would feel to be free (1963) Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas
The Mercy Seat (1994) Nick Cave and Mick Harvey
Sing (2006) Amanda Palmer

I was quite drawn in by this elderly woman, about my own age (82) constantly fussing about forgetting what she knew she had planned to do next, apologising to us profusely because she wanted to keep us happy.

Standing back a little, having seen Shortis & Simpson since their first political cabaret show Shortis & Curlies (John Shortis, Moya Simpson, Andrew Bissett, June 1996) at the then Queanbeyan School of Arts Café, I saw Moya’s solo singing, dancing, and acting (in a standup comedian sort of way) as the central performer in a 90 minute show, as a development which gave her the opportunity to successfully pull together her range of voice and characterisation skills in a concentrated work.

Yet in the end ‘the play’s the thing’, as Hamlet said.  Approaching my own finale not too far away, I have some mixed feelings about Finale.  This is not surprising when you read the writer’s note (in the QR Code on-line Program):

Finale is about the uncertainty and the joy of live performance. It’s also about ageing, working out what you want to say, and carrying on even when it feels as if everything is falling apart. In Finale, the performer does her best to keep the show rolling along. She brings out all of her best songs and dances, but nothing goes right. She persists, as we all do, with a fragile mix of hope and denial – until she can no longer avoid her inevitable finale.

The structure of the drama is not so much like a play with a clear line of direction, but more like an exploration of an amorphous collection of bits and pieces – in fact rather like a drama workshop in the vein of the group improvisations I once used as a teaching device, where students would respond to a beginning stimulus, being ‘themselves’ creating ‘characters’ with stories and motivations – leading to a ‘warm-down’ and group oral reflection on what happened and what they felt they learned.

Was I watching and responding to Moya Simpson?  Or an un-named character, who kept slipping into other roles – an artist who wasn’t a ‘regular type of artist’, back to ‘Moya’ finding someone to play the piano and drums, singing songs in character, and ‘Moya’ again rearranging the audience out of their seats and onto the stage; and ending as a character in palliative care, clearly about to die, who morphs back into ‘Moya’ getting us to sing because it’s the only thing left to do.

Though I sang along, not too ostentatiously, I thought afterwards of being Bottom facing up to the Fairies:

…But I
will not stir from this place, do what they can:
I will walk up and down here, and I will sing,
That they shall hear I am not afraid.  [Sings]

And then there were the songs ‘Moya’ chose to sing, in the accents of the composers, full of social criticism and political attack – like God’s away on Business which sounds very like Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.  Was this Tracy Bourne challenging the conventions of art?  I can go along with that.

So, theatrically Finale is a bit messy, which some may appreciate as ‘experimental’, but others may just find disturbing, as I discovered in conversations on the night.  

Anyway, I guess Moya’s performance leaves me not afraid to keep singing while I can.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Assembly for the Future, Canberra

 

 

Assembly for the Future by The Things We Did, produced by Not Yet It’s Difficult. An Uncharted Territory Event: Canberra producer Kiri Morcombe.  At Marie Reay Teaching Centre, Australian National University, July 11, 2023.


Reviewed by Frank McKone

“Assembly for the Future is a series of participatory gatherings in which the public create new visions for futures that may be realistic, idealistic or utterly fanciful.”
www.thethingswedidnext.org/assembly-for-the-future

Those who attended the sixth Assembly for the Future were surely not aware of the next event of this kind which will be at the Canberra Theatre Centre, August 8: An Evening with the Late John Cleese.  Cleese will report  “on his experiences in the afterlife, and what the audience can expect when they get there (announced in Private Capital, Canberra Times July 12, 2023: Ron Cerabona)

What we participated in was a rather less fanciful consideration of what our future might be like 6 years ahead, in 2029.  The Things We Did is co-created by Alex Kelly & David Pledger and produced by Not Yet It’s Difficult, and Assemblies began in 2020 with

Beyond Whiteness – the Rise of New Power
The Last Disabled Oracle
Somewhere, Everywhere, Right Here

followed in 2022 with

Live from Planet City 2029
Live from Blakfullas University 2029

For Uncharted Territory, the standard – even, can I say, old-fashioned – conference format was set up: Keynote Speaker; two 7 minute speakers in reply; then break-up into tables of about 6 for discussion, with each Table Moderator reporting with table-sized butcher’s paper to the whole group at the end.  

There was no attempt to finalise a consensus view of the gathering, leaving ideas to float in the expectation that innovators and creators from the sciences and the arts would produce new works in response.

In a sense then, like the John Cleese show, we were participating in a fiction beginning with  “a provocation from 2029, [by] First Speaker Bhiamie Williamson - a Euahlayi man from north-west New South Wales with family ties to north-west Queensland – [who mapped] how we have faced the threats of climate change through Indigenous land justice and embedding Caring-for-Country within the national psyche while drawing from Indigenous masculinities to reshape social attitudes more broadly.”

In an unpleasant challenge, I guess, for this kind of Canberra audience, Bhiamie in 2029 presented himself as the first member of the newly formed First Nations Party, following the unsuccessful referendum of October 2023, to be elected to the Senate.  His provocative offering was (will be?) his maiden speech in Parliament.  

Though the first other speaker, interdisciplinary artist and researcher, Erica Seccombe took a highly positive view of his 'success', creative technologist, Keir Winesmith took a critical position, pointing out that rather than Bhiamie’s election being the result of a new development in Indigenous Intelligence, it was in fact the First Nations Party’s use of Artificial Intelligence in the election process that had won the day for them.


Table Moderators were

 Roboticist Damith Herath
 Musician & Environmentalist Tim Hollo
 Dancer-Performance Maker Alison Plevey
 Multidisciplinary artist Anna Raupach
 Activist & Researcher Felicity Ruby
 Artist-Curator Nina Sellars
 Writer & Tsunami scientist Kaya Wilson
 Barkindji artist and poet Barrina South

Since, on my table, the moderator was the Roboticist, it was perhaps not surprising that the possibility was raised that AI could be instructed to run the world for us and then could perhaps decide – since AI has no emotional intelligence – on rational grounds to remove the totally destructive free-market oriented humans entirely in order to save the Earth.

On the other hand, others on my table and on most other tables, remained hopeful that through managing capitalism, including by instituting a simple feature such as positively underpinning of society by Universal Basic Income – without the negativity of the concept of ‘welfare’ – and limiting house ownership to only one per person, that in the face of the threat of runaway global warming, collaboration and cooperation will win the day – though hardly in just six years, by 2029, to be honest.

Maybe, John Cleese will find such a fantasy world in his afterlife.  I’m planning to find out in August – or more seriously in October.


https://unchartedterritory.com.au/program

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Home, I'm Darling by Laura Wade

 

 

Home, I’m Darling by Laura Wade.  Canberra REP Theatre, Naoné Carrel auditorium,  June 22 – July 8, 2023.
Book online at
http://canberrarep.org.au/content/book-online-choose-performance?ID=HD23

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 30

CAST
Judy — Karina Hudson
Johnny — Ryan Street
Fran — Natalie Waldron
Marcus — Terry Johnson
Sylvia — Adele Lewin
Alex — Kayla Ciceran

CREATIVES
Director • Alexander Pelvin
Assistant Director • Antonia Kitzel

Stage Managers • Ann-Maree Hatch, Paul Jackson
Assistant Stage Managers • Anne Gallen, Maggie Hawkins, Mae Schembri

Choreography • Annette Sharp, Madelyn White

Set Designer • Andrew Kay
Set Coordinators • Russell Brown OAM, Andrew Kay
Set Construction & Painting • Russell Brown OAM, Gordon Dickens, Rob de Fries, Rosemary Gibbons, Wolf Hecker, Andrew Kay, John Klingberg, Brian Moir
Set Dressing & Properties • Gail Cantle, Anne Gallen, Antonia Kitzel

Costume Designer • Helen Drum
Wardrobe Assistants • Jeanette Brown OAM, Ros Engledow, Rosemary Gibbons, Suzanne Hecker, Antonia Kitzel, Joan White

Lighting Designer • Stephen Still
Lighting Operators • Leeann Galloway, Deanna Gifford, Ashley Pope, Stephen Still

Sound Designer • Justin Mullins
Sound Operators • Justin Mullins, Disa Swifte


I think we have to call Home, I’m Darling a romantic comedy because, even though our laughter is quite often caused by shock as well as by empathetic recognition, in the end the twisted title comes true.  Karina Hudson’s Judy and Ryan Street’s Johnny happily find romance and respect in their marriage once again, and we laugh with them as we applaud a very well designed, directed and acted production.

The play is a cleverly written interplay between the two couples – Judy and Johnny; Fran and Marcus – in their mid-30s, without children; contrasting with Judy’s mother, Sylvia, and Johnny’s boss, Alex (assumed by Judy to be a man).

Set in the author’s UK in the 2010s, we look back through social and even political life to Sylvia’s experience of marriage as a woman in the 1980s; and further back to Judy’s romantic fixation on the 1950s.  ‘Rock Hudson’ and ‘Doris Day’ epitomise life of that time for her, along with songs like "Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White" by Perez Prado.  The value and importance of the play, including less than funny matters like sexual harassment in the work place, are revealed to us as we see Judy’s change in her understanding of herself.

The play is not only fascinating on that mental appreciation level:  the set design, the costumes and the choreography of how a feminist woman, who chooses to be a 1950s-style housewife, moves – “I have the choice,” she insists – is a wonder to be seen.  Andrew Kay and Russell Brown, Helen Drum, with Annette Sharp and Madelyn White all deserve Oscars in their own right.  As do the scene shifters (moving to those 1950s Harry Belafonte rhythms in bow tie and cocktail dress) like shadows of a formal past of butlers and maids.  

Canberra REP has a long history of top-class productions, and I was more than pleased to find myself comparing this play and the quality of the performances with my recent viewing of the 1984 play Benefactors, directed by Mark Kilmurry at Ensemble Theatre in Sydney (on this blog and at www.frankmckone2.blogspot.com  June 24, 2023).  

There I wrote that the “directing of the actors’ characterisations show all the essential elements of Hayes Gordon’s instructive approach to Stanislavsky and method acting (Acting and Performing 1992)”; and I can now write the same of Alexandra Pelvin’s work with equal success for each of her actors.

Oddly enough the plays themselves have a similar device – going backwards and forwards in time – in Michael Frayn’s case from the 1980s to the 1960s.  Perhaps there’s a kind of English osmosis across time happening between Michael Frayn, now aged 89, and Laura Wade aged 46.  

As REP’s director Pelvin writes: “Laura Wade’s Olivier Award-winning satire has a lot to say about the complexity of women’s choices in the modern era, the pressures of modern life, and the desire to find a modicum of control in an unpredictable world” so could I write of Benefactors: “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.”

And Mark Kilmurry could surely have said, as Alexandra Pelvin does in her Program Note, the play “is peopled with beautifully written characters, skillfully brought to life by my clever and capable cast.  It was a joy working with such a focused, kind, and hilarious group of actors.”  With special praise for Ryan Street covering with such short notice for the original Johnny, Tom May, who we hope has recovered well from illness.

So, from every point of view, Canberra REP’s production of Home, I’m Darling is not to be missed.

Ryan Street, left, and Karina Hudson
in Home, I'm Darling by Laura Wade.
Canberra Repertory Theatre, 2023
Picture by Eve Murray and Alex Fitzgerald
The Canberra Times

© Frank McKone, Canberra