2023: The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson

 

The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, October 20 – November 25, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 28

Creatives:
Director – Rachel Chant
Set & Costume Designer – Veronique Benett; Lighting Designer – Kelsey Lee
Composer & Sound Designer – David Bergman;
Dialect Coach – Linda Nicholls-Gidley
Intimacy, Movement & Fight Director – Nigel Poulton
Stage Manager – Lauren Tulloh; Asst. Stage Manager – Alexis Worthing
Costume Supervisor – Renata Beslik; Wig Stylist – Lauren Proietti
Costume Maker – Margaret Gill
Production Secondment – Lara Kyriazis

Cast:
Mary – Michala Banas; Teresa – Jo Downing; Catherine – Madeleine Jones
Mike – Johnny Nasser; Frank – Thomas Campbell
Vi – Nicole da Silva


Because I found myself feeling uncomfortable laughing at the dysfunctional behaviour of the three sisters preparing for their mother’s funeral, I have broken my standard rule of not reading other reviews before writing my own, about a play I haven’t previously known about.

So I read Chris Wiegand’s review of the 2021 revival of Shelagh Stephenson’s 1996 The Memory of Water, staged at the same Hampstead Theatre, London, where it had opened originally before becoming famous – at
www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/sep/12/the-memory-of-water-review-shelagh-stephenson-hampstead-theatre

Wiegand wrote that the sisters’ “transgressions [from a standard Sudden Death Etiquette guide] make Stephenson’s play sound like a farce. But it precariously balances riotous humour with pathos”.

I agreed on this point, which is essentially about the script-writing by Stephenson causing my discomfort.  It’s certainly not about the quality of the actors’ performances, or about the wonderful set design of the old lady’s bedroom full of all the stuff she would never throw away.

Weigand’s next point is also about the script: “However, much of the play’s humour seems frozen in time too, with flat routines about vitamin fads, leaves on railway lines and colonic irrigation. Although dope and whiskey are passed around, the comedy never achieves a true headiness and the sisters’ quips and snipes don’t always sting as they should.”  And like him I felt at the end that “It’s the play’s melancholia that lingers in the memory rather than the comedy.”

And yet the author, about “the first stage play I ever wrote” and quoted in her Writer’s Note in Ensemble’s program, says “What I’ve learnt is that the human desire – in fact need – to laugh together, in a darkened theatre, is universal and very strong.”

This has made me wonder if I had seen this excellent performance in a conventional darkened theatre, where the action is set at an emotional distance from my seat hidden in the dark, I would have safely laughed at these characters’ unreal behaviour.

But in Hayes Gordon’s intimate in-the-round theatre, we are not safely in the dark.  The beauty of The Ensemble is, it is exactly that: we and the actors are an ensemble together, and we – watching – are not emotionally separated.  We feel we are in the room with the sisters Mary, Teresa and Catherine.  The great moment of truth was when Mike burst through the window out of the snow storm.  We were literally as shocked as the women in our bedroom were.  In a conventional theatre we would have laughed.  In The Ensemble, my wife screamed, grabbed my hand and held on until it became clear that Mike was known to Mary, that the weather outside really was freezing, and that the doorbell wasn’t working.  Only then could we sit back to see what would happen next.

An important aspect of the play is that the sisters’ mother, Vi, though in her coffin, appears to Mary as if she is real.  They argue about Mary’s treatment as a child, and about what happened to the child Mary had, aged fourteen.

In a proscenium style theatre, I could sit back and accept this as a theatrical device to raise such issues.  Their conflict might even seem funny.  

But in The Ensemble, like Mary, we see Vi as real – even if we know that she must be really in Mary’s imagination.  Yet Vi knows things about what happened that Mary didn’t.  At this point, as the play ended, I found myself not wanting to break out into clapping and cheering – though the actors deserved it – because I was suddenly realising that for Mary this play is a tragedy, made worse when Mike makes it clear that he will not leave his wife to marry her.

The question that hung over my mind while I knew I should clap was, Who was the father of Mary’s son Patrick?  With her mother’s insistence that she make herself attractive to men, at 14, was the father a man who had burst into her bedroom like we had seen Mike do?  Was it a man who had taken advantage of Vi’s failure to tell her daughter what she needed to know about sex?  Worst of all, may it have been Mary’s own father?  One of Mary’s jibes at Catherine had been how she found herself stuck with Frank – a man just like their father.

So, discomforted though I may have been seeing The Memory of Water in Ensemble’s intimate setting, on reflection I see the play as more tragedy than comedy.  And perhaps I may have missed that level of empathy if I had seen it in a conventional theatre.

Only your seeing this production of The Memory of Water at The Ensemble will answer that question for you.
 
Photos by Prudence Upton

The three sisters dressing up in their mother's fancy clothes
in The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson
Ensemble Theatre 2023

Michala Banas, Nicole da Silva
as Mary and her now dead mother Vi
in The Memory of Water
Ensemble Theatre 2023

 

Mike's entry from the snowstorm

 

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Wharf Revue - Pride in Prejudice

 

 

The Wharf Revue: Pride in Prejudice. Presented by Canberra Theatre Centre and Soft Tread Enterprises, The Playhouse October 24 – November 5, 2023.

Created and Written by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott

Performed by Jonathan Biggins, Mandy Bishop, Drew Forsythe, David Whitney with Andrew Worboys

Directed by Jonathan Biggins and Drew Forsythe
Musical Direction by Andrew Warboys
Lighting Design by Matt Cox, Video Design by Todd Decker
Sound and Video Systems Design by Cameron Smith Costume
Design by Hazel and Scott Fisher
Photography by Ashley de Prazer
Production photos by Vishal Pandey


Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 26




This year’s Wharf Revue, Pride in Prejudice, has left me in two minds.  

Entering the theatre, I was – and still am – scared to death about our dark future in the hands of such an array of iniquitous political figures world wide, incapable of reasonable behaviour.  

Leaving the theatre, I am full of joy to see such intelligence, humour and brilliance in performance of such finely-tuned satire that hope for our future shines forth.  

Holding both sets of feelings in mind at once is indescribable.  But knowing that there are such creative and perceptive people on stage, thoroughly appreciated by whole audiences, brightens the darkness of off-stage reality.  Satire is not escapist theatre: in laughing at these exaggerated representations of those in political power, we better understand them.

I have reviewed most of the Wharf Revues since 2010 and once again I have to say this year’s show is their best.  There’s hope indeed for humanity when Jonathan Biggins was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2021 Queen's Birthday Honours, following the 2019 Sydney Theatre Awards, when the Wharf Revue team received a special award for ‘services to laughter, satire and sanity above and beyond the call of duty”.

It was in the 18th Century in the time of the French Revolution and Jane Austen novels that satirical political cartooning, led by James Gillray, set the scene for Pride in Prejudice.  Here’s Gillray’s ‘The Plum Pudding in Danger’ showing the British PM Pitt and Napoleon dividing the world.

Every scene in this Wharf Revue is an equivalent cartoon of the highest standard in character acting, singing, dancing, and musicianship – plus quite extraordinary video and sound quality.  

Among so many scenes in 105 minutes, one of the most telling is King Charles’ dream in which Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Elizabeth I, and Princess Diana make his life a nightmare where he exclaims in horror “Whose dream am I in?”

Queen Elizabeth II expresses some criticisms that perhaps Charles III thought she might have had,
while Queen Elizabeth I listens in, later giving some family management advice.

Starting from arguments in the Bennet family between Elizabeth and her mother about the qualities of Mr Darcy is a brilliant opening move into a startling series of scenes from David Marr meeting an artificially intelligent Darlek who knows she has no empathy, to a powerful but incomprehensible Russian Opera, highlighting Mussorgsky’s music.

David Marr and the AI Darlek

Russian Operatic Generals

 

But it is the final scene, concerning The Voice, which takes us out of the satiric frame (which earlier had shown us the Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton: "Will you always say No?" "Yes") into the true cutting edge where laughter is no longer possible.  Pride in Prejudice is not merely a witty title.  It means what it says.

Mr 'No'

 

And Mandy Bishop’s voice from Darlek to Sussan Ley as night club singer and to the top in opera is a special treat.

 

Playschool: Jacquie Lambie and David Pocock demonstrate
the Pillars of Democracy for children's television.

 

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Rockspeare Henry VI Part 1 (or Rockspeare 1H6) - Lexi Sekuless Productions

 

 

Rockspeare Henry VI Part 1 (or Rockspeare 1H6) written by William Shakespeare, adapted by Lexi Sekuless Productions, at The Mill Theatre, Dairy Road, Canberra October 18 – November 4, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 19

Production Team:

Director & Verse Nurse – Lexi Sekuless
Composer & Sound Designer – Andre Pinzon
Costume Designer – Tania Jobson
Asst to Costume Designer & Specialised Props – Zelda Trichard
Set Designer – Kathleen Kershaw
Movement Directors – Annette Sharp & Timmy Sekuless
Lighting Designer – Stefan Wronski
Photographer – Daniel Abroguena

Cast:
Suffolk – Sarah Nathan-Trusdale; Gloucester – Kate Blackhurst
Warwick/Basset – Maxine Beaumont; York – Heidi Silberman
Dauphin (Queen) – Rachel Howard; Joan of Arc – Alana Denham-Preston
King Henry VI/Young Talbot/Warder – Chips Jin
Talbot/Margaret – Stefanie Lekkas; Mortimer – Sarah Carroll
Reignier/Burgundy/Vernon – Emily O’Mahoney
Contingency – Tracy Noble & Elaine Noon



The tiny Mill Theatre, within the newly developing Dairy Road complex – “fostering the emergence of an intentional and caring community” – reminds me of attending the only slightly larger Théâtre de la Huchette on the Left Bank in Paris, where Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice chauve) and The Lesson (La leçon) has been playing continuously since 1957. https://www.theatre-huchette.com/en/the-ionesco-show

It’s the boldness, the sense of of an original approach, and a small audience seeking something different that makes the link for me back to my visit in 1976.  Will The Mill keep going as long?  Sekuless plans, as I understand from her rivetting program (you’ll see what I mean when you get one), to go for four years  after 1H6 with, I guess, at least 2H6 and 3H6.  Might they then, in the order Shakespeare wrote them, backtrack and do J, and then on for R3, R2, 1H4, 2H4, H5, and H8?  

Shakespeare wrote King John and Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3 in barely three years, 1590-92, still a young writer in his twenties.  You only need to read the plot summaries at https://www.bardweb.net/plays/timeline.html to see that these plays are political narratives rather than in-depth character studies.

Sekuless has picked up the energy, the rhythm and added a modern soundscape, to make something original in form – an often forceful telling of the stories about the death of Henry V, the political wilderness left in place for his young son in England and in France, and the turmoil of conflicting power-figures settling into the Wars of the Roses.  The first episode is about Can England keep France? against the spiritual and physical power of Joan of Arc; and who genuinely supports the new king – the red or the white, or someone like his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, with a broader view of what’s best for the country?

Instead of interminable speeches and arguments, which, as Verse Nurse, Sekuless has considerably trimmed, this play is all action.  Speeches in forceful pentameters are thrown at each other, wars in France are fought in dance-form, deaths are points of stillness and fear for what comes next, and decisions are reached – compromises – with a waving away of hands, eyebrows raising, and hummphs of disgust.

It certainly helps to read the plot summary and notes in the program, but even then don’t imagine you will follow the precise twists and turns in dance, in character and argument.  In the end it’s the total picture which is the key.

And, despite the title Rockspeare, don’t expect to rock’n’roll.  The music and soundscape is evocative in its own special way.

In the end, the question is, What’s it all about?  It’s about the last week in Australia and on the world stage. If Albanese is the new king, then Yes23 is the White Rose or Uluru Faction (York in Henry’s day), while No is the Red Rose or Dutton faction (Lancaster in Henry’s day).  If Joe Biden is the king without enough power, then Israel is White Rose and Hamas is Red Rose, with unpredictable supporters hanging about, and a political marriage unlikely.

In other words, what Shakespeare saw in his history from Ascension Day 27 May 1199 when King John ascended the English throne, to Henry VI’s death 21 May 1471, having "lost his wits, his two kingdoms and his only son" and possibly killed on the orders of King Edward IV, was little different from what’s happening in the world today.  Lexi Sekuless and The Mill team show us Part 1 of a dance of death, ending with King Edward, speaking of Margaret, “daughter to Reignier; afterwards married to King Henry”:

Away with her, and waft her hence to France.
And now what rests but that we spend the time
With stately triumphs, mirthful comic shows,
Such as befits the pleasure of the court?
Sound drums and trumpets! Farewell sour annoy!
For here, I hope, begins our lasting joy.   [Exeunt]

That’s the end of Part 3 – in four years’ time.  Don’t miss!  There’s La leçon yet to be learnt.

Scenes from Rockspeare Henry VI Part 1
Lexy Sekuless Productions, Mill Theatre 2023

 

 

 ©Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Twelfth Night; or What You Will by William Shakespeare - Bell Shakespeare

 

 

Twelfth Night; or What You Will by William Shakespeare.  Bell Shakespeare at Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse, October 13 – 21, 2023.  Saturday at 1pm, 7pm; Sunday 4pm; Tuesday/Wednesday 6.30pm; Thursday/Friday 7pm; Saturday 1pm, 7pm.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Opening Night, Canberra

Cast:

Malvolia – Jane Montgomery Griffiths               Toby Belch – Keith Agius
Sebastian / Viola – Isabel Burton                        Viola – Alfie Gledhill
Maria – Amy Hack                                              Orsino – Garth Holcombe
Andrew Aguecheek/Captain – Mike Howlett    Feste – Tomáš Kantor
Antonio – Chrissy Mae                                        Olivia – Ursula Mills

Creatives:

Director – Heather Fairbairn
Set & Costume Designer – Charles Davis          Lighting Designer – Verity Hampson           Composer – Sarah Blasko                                   Sound Designer – David Bergman
Sound Associate – Daniel Herten                       Choreographer – Elle Evangelista
Voice Coach – Jack Starkey-Gill                         Fight & Intimacy Director – Nigel Poulton       

Mike Howlett (Andrew Aguecheek), Jane Montgomery Griffiths (Malvolia), Amy Hack (Maria)

Bell Shakespeare have made the most exhilarating, imaginative, highly original interpretation of William Shakespeare’s  most often performed play, Twelfth Night.  Whatever else you have to do this week, make sure you don’t miss What You Will, and find out what Will really meant.

What he didn’t mean is the Canberra Times headline “The rom-com that never gets old”          London, Christmas holidays 1600-01, population 200,000, was half the size of Canberra today but as politically aware as we are.  The progressive Queen supported theatre arts while the 'no' voting Puritans did their best to shut theatres down.  The story of the rich rabble-rousers Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek, via the incisive wit of the servant woman Maria, making such nasty fun of the puritanical Malvolio was chosen by Elizabeth and her Court for Christmas entertainment, rather than Ben Jonson’s satire of his theatre colleagues, The Poetaster.

Jonson was lampooning other playwrights but “he could not shove Will in with the rest of the poetasters.  He was too big for easy lampooning.  Moreover, Ben – as he acknowledged later in print – could not deny Will’s free and open nature, his lack of niggling jealousy.  In spite of everything, they were friends.”  Sounds a bit like what perhaps goes on off-stage among the many theatre groups in Canberra! (Shakespeare by Anthony Burgess: Jonathan Cape 1970 pp179-80).

And now, Bell’s director Heather Fairbairn has brilliantly taken Shakespeare an extra step forward in time.  Making Malvolio into a woman, Malvolia, makes the comedy even funnier – very much in keeping with Will’s love of word play and sexual confusion – so we now have Viola, Olivia and Malvolia.  There’s the ‘com’.  

But Shakespeare’s ‘rom’ in this play was never sentimentally romantic, and as Fairbairn has pointed out, all parts were acted by men and boys (who were given special apprenticeship training to play women).  The Poetaster was about these boys and women’s parts.  Thomas Dekker attacked Ben Jonson back, with a play called Satiromastix, or The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet.  This is the social context of William Shakespeare that Heather Fairbairn has understood – centuries before what we call naturalism on stage was invented by Henrik Ibsen (in A Doll’s House, 1879).

So the treatment of Malvolia, handcuffed and imprisoned in darkness, has a new unromantic meaning in our ‘MeToo’ world – about the far too common violence against women and the political issue of women’s empowerment.  It’s both horrifying and powerful in the finale of Bell Shakespeare’s production to see Malvolia rise from the dark into the light.  The audience on opening night cheered to see her resurrection.  And applauded, in my view, one of the best Bell Shakespeare productions ever.

 

Garth Holcombe (Orsino), Alfie Gledhill (Viola)

Mike Howlett (Andrew Aguecheek), Keith Agius (Toby Belch), Amy Hack (Maria)

 I say this because the originality in casting was wonderfully backed by an over-the-top style of acting, in absolutely extraordinary costumes, even more extravagant than Shakespeare himself could ever have imagined – but if he could be here in modern times he would surely be as enthusiastic about Charles Davis’ designs as the whole cast obviously are about performing in them.

As he would be too, about the characterisation of the Fool, Feste – the wildest philosopher, singer and disturber of our understanding of truth & falsity I have ever come across.

The amazing thing about this production is that there are so many angles of thought it generates – for us, as I’m sure it was for Will Shakespeare ‘celebrating’ Christmas (you’ll notice, by the way, that God never gets a mention in any of his plays – damned by the Puritans).

It’s not just about the stupidity of love (‘rom’) or the funny side of ruining other people’s reputations (‘com’), or the personal and political effects of women’s roles in a patriarchal society, but – via  Feste and the entire impossibility of completely indistinguable brother/sister twins – even about the Donald Trumpian / social media post-truth world issues where conspiracies are taken to be real, logic need not be followed, and Me-Me is the only guideline.  

Shakespeare understood this in the absurdity of the first lines by Duke Orsino, not so much in “If music be the food of love, play on” (though some have noted the whole play begins with an uncertainty in the word “If”), but in his demand:

“Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”

And if you want to go further, though Shakespeare wouldn’t have seen this before the industrial revolution, you can see today the result of such desire in the demand for ever increasing ‘economic productivity’, ‘profit-making’, and ‘development’ causing us to sicken and die from fossil fuel use and the resultant climate change.

Ursula Mills (Olivia), Isabel Burton (Sebastian), Tomáš Kantor (Feste), Chrissy Mae (Antonio)
Garth Holcombe (Orsino), Alfie Gledhill (Viola)

And that’s not even mentioning the issue of war, which in Twelfth Night appears in the story of Antonio, the rescuer of Sebastian from the shipwreck which begins the play.  He is afraid to go ashore because previously he had captained his ship in war against Illyria.
“I have many enemies in Orsino’s court,
Else would I very shortly see thee there.” (Act II, Scene 1)

And then, indeed, in Act III Scene 4, he is recognised:
Second Officer:  Antonio, I arrest thee at the suit
                           Of Count Orsino.
Antonio:                                          You do mistake me, sir
First Officer:      No, sir, no jot: I know your favour well,
                           Though now you have no sea-cap on your head.
                           Take him away: he knows I know him well.
Antonio:             I must obey. 
[To Viola, who he mistakes for Sebastian]
                                                This comes with seeking you;
                           But there’s no remedy: I shall answer it.
                           What will you do, now my necessity
                           Makes me to ask you for my purse? [which he had given to Sebastian]
                                                                                     It grieves me
                           Much more for what I cannot do for you
                           Than what befalls myself.  You stand amazed;
                           But be of comfort.
Second Officer:                                 Come, sir, away.
Antonio:            I must entreat of you some of that money.
Viola:                What money, sir? [She offers to lend him some, but Antonio thinks she is Sebastian refusing to give his money back]

They argue vociferously until the officers finally drag him away.

In the text, Act V, Scene I, when Antonio is under guard, and Sebastian and Viola appear at last together, there is no stage instruction.  In Fairbairn’s production, Orsino quietly unlocks Antonio’s handcuffs; but despite his earlier explanation to Orsino how he had rescued Sebastian, but “I confess, on base and ground enough, Orsino’s enemy”, it seems to me that Shakespeare left him to be Orsino’s prisoner with no softening for his good deeds.

As Feste sings finally, Shakespeare was not under any illusions about reality.  His Malvolio “hath been most notoriously abused” says Olivia, and the Duke orders “Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace”; but what peace can there be for Heather Fairbairn’s Malvolia?  As little, I suspect, as for Will Shakespeare’s Antonio.

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.

I think Will means the simple truth is, however much you enjoy the Bell Shakespeare play as I did, that in the end, “The rain it raineth every day”.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: West Side Story - Dramatic Productions + Canberra CityNews

 

 West Side Story – based on a conception of Jerome Robbins.  Dramatic Productions at Gunghalin College Theatre October 6 – 21, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 6

“Dramatic Productions is dedicated to delivering the highest quality locally produced community theatre in an environment of respect, integrity and positivity.”
https://www.dramaticproductions.com.au/about

It was a surprise, then, for a professional critic to have attached to his complimentary ticket a page full of instructions, mainly about the wording we must use when referring to individual cast members (for example, their correct pronouns; the correct spelling of their names; and referring to them in the same way as they are described in their biographies published in the program).  

 I have since been informed, following research after the publication of the Addendum below,  that the director's name was falsified with a completely fictional CV published in the program.  In these circumstances, my original review is now deleted, except for my comments on the Producer, Richard Block's intentions, as follows:

It concludes rather mysteriously, “The show addresses racial tension.  To avoid this being present in media discussion surrounding the show, we ask that reviewers and media writers aim to cover both sides of the story and cast to avoid cultural bias.”

Apart from the condescending nature of these instructions, seeming to assume that I might denigrate an actor or criticise the casting on the basis of their ethnicity, I am at a loss to understand what “to cover both sides of the story and cast to avoid cultural bias” means......

What is meant by “both sides”, and what is “the story”?  Apparently the Dramatic Productions founder and managing director, Richard Block, writing in his Letter From The Producer, is afraid, because of “seeing various companies around the country cancel their productions, due to a back-lash from the community regarding casting”, since he has chosen to go to and to effusively thank “all the community and performance groups and Embassies who helped us when we were seeking our [diverse multicultural] cast.”  

Does he mean by issuing these instructions that he cannot trust us critics to have “respect, integrity and positivity”?  Yet these, with honesty, truth-telling, and encouragement of the appreciation of the arts, are central to a critic’s aims.  Of course, in modern times, cross-cultural and cross-gender casting is an important part of making new theatre.  

Addendum from Canberra CityNews

Canberra CityNews
 Sunday, October 8, 2023


Reviewers attending the musical “West Side Story” have been issued with a set of “guidelines”, which looked like an effort to pre-empt and restrict negative comment, a clear attempt at media manipulation, writes a furious “CityNews” arts editor HELEN MUSA.

THE reviewing profession in Canberra appears to be under siege, with the latest attack coming in the form of extraordinary document given to selected reviewers attending “West Side Story” at Gungahlin Theatre on Friday night.

The lengthy document, a list of “guidelines” to reviewers, included the following: to refer to cast members using their “correct” pronouns; to avoid grouping the actors by ethnicity while at the same time referring to the actors’ country of origin or heritage; to spell names according to the program; to use the “respectful, gender, neutral term ‘Latinx’”; to comment on artistic choices as having been made by the “collective creative team” rather than individuals; and to avoid cultural bias.

Obviously under such conditions, “CityNews” and other reviewing outlets with professional journalists will not review “West Side Story”.

In a long career reviewing theatre, this is the first time I have ever seen such a missive. It comes in the context of the company’s experiment in casting the famous musical’s Puerto Rican characters with purely Latino artists from the Canberra community.


Given the danger that the experiment would not succeed, the “guidelines” looked like an effort to pre-empt and restrict negative comment, a clear attempt at media manipulation.

Canberra’s reviewers are not known for prejudiced, racist or ethnically-based comment, so the exercise seemed misjudged.

In what producer Richard Block later said had been an error caused by haste, the “guidelines” were handed to some reviewers and journalists, but not others.

He said they had been printed and released at the request of the creative team.

This latest check on media freedom follows the Canberra Times’ recent decision to abandon commissioning specialist arts critics on the doubtful basis that Canberrans prefer previews to reviews.

Once again, the Canberra public loses out, not having access to a seasoned assessment which might help them decide whether or not to attend a production costing $37 to $45 for a seat.

Helen Musa OAM, is the arts editor of “CityNews” and founding convener of the Canberra Critics’ Circle.

Note: At 2pm Sunday 8 October 2023 I received the following from Helen Musa:

Dear reviewers of musicals.

The producer of West Side Story, Richard Block, has now removed the "guidelines" as a condition of reviewing.  But the reviewing should be done not on the basis of Friday night's emotionally charged scenario but by attending another performance of your choice.
 

I record this situation here as a record for future reference, in the event of this company or others taking this unacceptable approach, which included publishing false information to the general public in its program, for which donations were requested at reception on the night.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Rosieville by Mary Rachel Brown

 

 

Rosieville by Mary Rachel Brown.  Canberra Youth Theatre at The Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, September 29 – October 8, 2023.  Published by Currency Press, including play text and program.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 4

Performed by

Imogen Bigsby-Chamberlin as Rose
Oscar Abraham as Xavier; Amy Crawford as Liz
Richard Manning as Alan; Disa Swifte as Anika
Callum Doherty as Ben
Clare Imlach as Pigeon / Cindy

Creatives:
Director – Luke Rogers
Set & Costume Designer – Aislinn King; Lighting Designer – Ethan Hamill
Sound Designer & Composer – Patrick Haesler
Assistant Director – Emily Austin; Stage Manager – Rhiley Winnett
Assistant Stage Manager – Hannah McGuinness


Youth Theatre Director, Luke Rogers, writes “I invited Mary to write a play for Canberra Youth Theatre that wrestled with the complexities of what young people were feeling amongst all of this chaos."

Watching the explosive exaggerated presentation style of this production of Rosieville was not an enjoyable experience.  For most of the 70 minutes I was struggling to understand what on earth was going on.  I obviously couldn’t take Pigeon to be real, especially since they (pronoun as in the script) told Rose at the very beginning “I’m your subconscious”.  

Then, when I read the script, I could see that my confusion about what was meant to seem real is what Mary Rachel Brown was writing about.  The characters of Rose (aged 11), and her brother Xavier (14) do not understand the confusion their mother Liz (37) is experiencing as her marriage is falling apart.  Will their father ever come back?  How come her hairdresser, Cindy (20), looks like Pigeon, who I thought existed only in Rose’s imagination?  Is the whole play what she imagines?

And that’s only the Livingston family in Button Place.  Next door Alan Sayed (64) seems to be dying with some level of dementia, leaving his daughter Anika (18) – her mother is never mentioned, I think – to maybe form a relationship with her next-door neighbour Ben Spiteri (17), whose family otherwise doesn’t appear.

And the whole mash-up of relationships is dominated by Alan’s obsessive fixation on his homing pigeons, trusting that his favourite will find her way home (because they always do however lost they may be on the way). Is she Alan’s and Anika’s missing wife and mother? And then there’s Alan’s other insistence on getting Xavier to succeed in flying more than 50 metres in a revival of the 1980’s Birdman Rally – in a kind of replacement for Xavier’s losing his father.

At the end Rosie announces that Alan died four days ago.  But Alan is there, raises his wings, and says “Welcome to the jungle.”

No wonder I’m confused while watching the play.  But by reading the script I can see that what Brown intended was for the audience to experience what it is like for people when life’s exigencies just happen, with no apparent rhyme or reason.  But at least Rose has come to love her Pigeon and can speak rationally:

Sunset and sunrise just keep turning up.  It just keeps happening, day upon day, and night upon night, constantly turning over and making this heartbreaking, strange, wonderful, terrible, boring, surprising, scary, horrendous, disappointing, joyous, amazing thing called your one and only life.

This, I guess, is Mary Rachel Brown’s message for the youth of today – writing in her Playwright’s Note “I grew up in the birthplace of this play and went to Canberra Youth Theatre; in so many respects, this work feels like a homecoming.  I wish I could have told my sixteen-year-old self this would happen.”

I think now that I would have directed the play more ‘softly’, less explosively, because I would want the audience to feel more empathy with Rose.  The characters of Pigeon / Cindy (specified by Brown to be played by the same actor) were too exaggerated (sometimes just laughable) from the beginning to make the ending of Rosieville work better emotionally.


©Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Pacific Mother - film documentary

 

 

Pacific Mother - https://thefoyer.demand.film at Palace Electric, Canberra. One-off event 6.30pm, October 3, 2023.

Year: 2023. Duration: 88 minutes. Genre: Documentary - Health & Wellbeing.
Writer Director: Katherine McRae.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Supplied:

Fresh from winning Best Feature at the Doc Edge Film Festival, the documentary Pacific Mother had its Australian premiere in Sydney at the Ritz Cinema, Randwick last week to a packed audience. In attendance was the film’s director Katherine McRae and Birth Time co-director Zoe Naylor who hosted an exclusive Q&A.

Pacific Mother is based around Sachiko Fukumoto, a Japanese champion free diver and actress who is married to fellow-free diving champ William Trubridge. It’s an extension to the ultra-short doco Water Baby, which showed Fukumoto’s giving birth at home in a tub in New Zealand – Trubridge’s home country. The film follows Fukumoto as she travels Japan, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Hawaii, New Zealand, interviewing midwives as well as pregnant women who want a divorce from the maternity ward.

Pacific Mother is playing in select cinemas across Australia and NZ now. In order for each screening to go ahead the minimum ticket threshold must be met, so please reserve tickets before each event deadline.

Director Katherine McRae
www.facebook.com/pacificmotherfilm/videos/our-director-katherine-mcrae-on-how-pacific-mother-came-to-be-we-were-blown-away/1222331551568092  

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Sachiko Fukumoto’s story of searching for – and finding – the right way for her to have her first baby is simply fascinating.  She is literally and metaphorically a deep sea diver.  Without pretension, we discover and learn with her what she discovers.

From Sachiko’s lived experience, director Katherine McRae has made Pacific Mother, an extraordinarily important documentary loaded with mental hyperlinks to real people’s lives, from the immediate and personal to universal truths.

Sex education for boys
Sex education for girls
Sexualism and violence against women
Empowerment
Human kindness
Medicalisation of birthing
Indigenous knowledge and colonialism
Cross-cultural understanding
The future of humanity

I wish I had been able to see the live births of babies in this intimate detail when I was aged 15.  Of course, in 1956, these images would have been banned as pornography – but I had already a hidden collection of photos of nude women from certain magazines, which stimulated my thoughts and other things without  having a clue of what it meant to be a girl who could have a baby.

Sex education had never been more than diagrams showing the physical differences between male and female – but had never included the existence of a clitoris.  Only when I read Germaine Greer and the Kama Sutra in the 1970s could I begin to realise my lack of understanding, in practical and emotional terms.

The positive relationships we see in Pacific Mother between the women and their men are still, I believe, a revelation that boys need as much today at age 15 as I needed 70 years ago.  

And for girls, this upfront showing of what it is really like to be pregnant and to give birth is a revelation of a different kind.  It is natural for a woman to have a baby, not a fearful medical procedure.  The women’s strength of purpose, physical and emotional, and of their achievement surely can only give girls seeing this documentary the confidence to make their own decisions about having sex: to take charge of their lives.

But, of course, boys have to become men who recognise that having sex is a responsibility, a matter of mutual respect, and not a conquest.  And girls must learn to choose carefully and wisely, and not be ‘bowled over’ by superficial fashion.

If every sex education course included showing Pacific Mother with extensive discussion especially of the importance of women’s autonomy which shines forth from the film, there would be a massive reduction of male sexual violence in the next generation.  I’m not, now in my old age, too idealistic – but surely it is not too much to hope that we can improve on these figures: “On average, one woman a week is murdered by her current or former partner. In the year 2021/22, 5606 women (average of 15 women/day) were hospitalised due to family and domestic violence”.
https://www.ourwatch.org.au/quick-facts/

And then, on a broader and more political scale, decision makers in government will find from Pacific Mother the reasons why the assumption that birth should only take place in a hospital as a starting point is no more than an industrial-style reaction to the fear of women dying in childbirth.  

Medical support is necessary when things are going wrong, like preeclampsia (which caused one of my daughters to need a caesarian section), but a properly funded midwifery system across the country would mean the end of my experience in the 1960s of a strict hospitalisation regime – which included my not being allowed to be with my wife, because I might faint or slip on a wet floor!; and included her being kept from her baby according to a rigid feeding schedule – and would now mean continuing post-natal recovery support, according to the traditional cultural and personal individual wishes of the new mother.  Aotearoa New Zealand seems the most progressive in this story.

In many cases in the film, for example from Japan, Cook Islands, Tahiti, Hawaii, colonisation has meant the imposition of those ‘Western’ medical assumptions overriding local midwifery traditions and reducing mothers to becoming hospital patients with no rights rather than having the human right to take responsibility and enjoy the success of having a baby on their own terms.

I spoke to two experienced midwives (I was the only male in the audience on this occasion) and found that the colonisation of Australia has had that same effect on our First Nations women, as well as affecting women from other cultures in our migrant population.

So I see Pacific Mother as far more than a political cry for the right to home births.  The personal stories in the film are about kindness, human rights to autonomy, the building of people’s self-confidence in a socially supportive society, and the true meaning of equality for women and for people from all the cultures in what we proudly call our multicultural society.  And it is a shout out to men to find new attitudes and learn to come together in mateship with strong women.

It’s time to vote yes in all sorts of ways for a better future.  See Pacific Mother and find a new understanding.

© Frank McKone, Canberra