2023: A Christmas Carol staged by Shake&Stir

 

 

 

 A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Shake&Stir.  At Canberra Theatre, December 19-24, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
December 20

Adaptor Nelle Lee
Director Michael Futcher
Designer Josh McIntosh
Composer Salliana Campbell
Lighting Designer Jason Glenwright
Video Designer Craig Wilkinson
Sound Designer Guy Webster
Creative Producer Ross Balbuziente

Featuring Will Carseldine, Eugene Gilfedder, Nick James, Nelle Lee, Mia Milnes, Bryan Probets, Tabea Sitte, Nick Skubij, and Lucas Stibbard.



What a great joy and surprise it is to celebrate Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol with terrific modern technology creating such warmth of feeling.  By making the drama focus on Ebenezer’s experience with empathy for his mental turmoil, we no longer simply condemn him for being a scrooge.  

We find we can identify with him as he, by understanding his past, sees his present in a new light, as he imagines his future as it would be – unless he makes a change for the better: for others.  This is the Christmas Gift of Shake&Stir’s A Christmas Carol.

 According to Study.com, at the end of the novel, Scrooge “gives money to the poor, spends Christmas with his nephew and his family, and then gives Bob Cratchit a raise. Scrooge lives the rest of his life with the joy of Christmas in his heart.”  

When you read this, you might take it with a grain of salt, thinking that Dickens was being a bit naïve, or too idealistic; or worse, being satirical.  This is because what you read is description of the Scrooge character from an outside perspective.

What Shake&Stir have done is to take you inside.  Like Ebenezer – through the powerful use of an amazing set design, lights, sound and hologram projections – you feel afraid, then defiant with sarcastic humour; but finally as you realise what your self-centred attitude has cost you, and what it has done to others, you find relief in making the change, from taking to giving.  Giving to others is better for yourself as well as for them.  Giving, in all sorts of ways, is good for us all.  

In the final moments of the play, we feel with Ebenezer Scrooge because we know now he is not against us – even though we know from his experience, and our own, that we will have to work in practical ways to make the good happen, and keep happening.

If that’s an ideal, then so be it.  In facing up to the world we see around us, I thank Shake&Stir for their sincerity, and the power of their art.

A Christmas Carol hologram image
Shake&Stir, 2023

Still from the trailer A Christmas Carol
Shake&Stir, 2023

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: People You May Know - Lucid Theatre Company

 

 

People You May Know by Lucid Theatre Company, at Canberra Theatre Centre, Courtyard Studio, December 14-16 2023.

A group of our 2022 Emerge Company, Ashleigh Butler, Jessi Gooding, Quinn Goodwin and Thea Jade, are putting what they learned into practice, redeveloping the material they devised back then to form the basis of their debut production. They've enlisted a crop of fellow-emerging artists from the Canberra Youth Theatre community, including Emerge Company 2023's Matt White, who will be making his directorial debut!

And if you're 18–25 and want to follow in their footsteps, enrolments are open for Emerge Company 2024... 😎
https://canberrayouththeatre.com.au/emerging/emerge/
________________________________________________________________________________

People You May Know is like democracy – as Abraham Lincoln might have said, it’s a play of these (20 year-old) people, by these (20 year-old) people, and for the 20 year-old people who nearly filled the Courtyard Studio on opening night.  

It is also a kind of satirical comedy about which Winston Churchill would have unfairly said, like democracy, it’s terribly messy and seems to be the worst form of theatre except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Being surrounded by all these 1-score people, you perhaps can imagine my trepidation at 4-score years and 3 (that's my Shakespeare reference), pretending I can critically evaluate a play from an online world, where all social communication since birth requires the internet.  When the internet crashes, this is disaster.  Mostly for me a confusing disaster; while being very funny and clearly deserving the huge celebratory curtain call from everybody else for this brand-new Lucid Theatre Company's inaugural production.

Though it seemed as if it had been created along the lines that I might have used in teaching drama through large-group improvisation, it came together enough to open up some serious experiential learning.  The class instruction might have been “you have 90 minutes for this workshop; you begin with a party and end with a party a week or two later – start improvising when I click my fingers”.

Looking back to when I was 20 at university like these characters, communication was immediately personal, or by tentative telephone calls to the person you might be falling in love with, and by letters with anxious time-gaps waiting for replies.  The failure of the internet in this play, meaning the inability to have immediate communications, and the lacking in experience of how to manage without knowing what was happening (and not being able to submit your essay on time) still left these characters with the apprehensions and misapprehensions, the same fantasies, and the same possibilities for jealousy as for me 60 years ago.

But the over-excitement and instant judgemental responses which today’s social media generates as TikTok is flooded with photos and videos, sent with or without permissions and consent, is really the serious point of this play.  Life at 20 was never meant to be easy, as even Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago; but at least in my day it happened at a slower and perhaps more manageable pace.

So People You May Know – or maybe don’t know as well as you thought – is an interesting piece of what I would call exploratory social drama, and bodes well for the future of Lucid Theatre.

 ©Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Midnight Murder at Hamlington Hall - Ensemble Theatre

 

 

Midnight Murder at Hamlington Hall by Mark Kilmurry and Jamie Oxenbould.  World Premiere.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, December 1 2023 – January 14 2024.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
December 9

Creatives
Playwrights: Mark Kilmurry & Jamie Oxenbould
Director: Mark Kilmurry
Assistant Director/Choreographer: Emma Canalese
Set & Costume Designer: Simon Greer
Lighting Designer: Verity Hampson
Composer & Sound Designer: Daryl Wallis
Stage Manager: Erin Shaw
Assistant Stage Manager: Christopher Starnawski
Special Observer: Toby Blome; Costume Supervisor: Sara Kolijn
Stage Management Secondment: Bernadett Lorincz
Costume Observer: Katie Fitchett

Cast
Sam O’Sullivan: Shane
Jamie Oxenbould: Barney
Ariadne Sgouros: Karen
Eloise Snape: Phillipa
Tallulah Pickard: Voice Of Niece



I absolutely enjoyed the uninhibited fun of the Ensemble’s skilled professionals creating the gormless committed amateurs of the Middling Cove Amateur Theatre Company getting themselves together and finally succeeding – with the help of a suspicious member of the audience – in presenting the funniest spoof of Agatha Christie in Mark Kilmurry and Jamie Oxenbould’s Midnight Murder at Hamlington Hall.

More than a mere Summer Holidays Entertainment, its mad-cap quality reaches a stage of absurdity which brings up – watch out for the vomit which plays an important role – a lot of unexpected thinking after the laughing.

Stop reading now to avoid the spoiler.

Jamie Oxenbould as 'Barney'
in Midnight Murder at Hamlington Hall
Photo: Prudence Upton

 

On the long drive home (for me from Sydney to Canberra, after our tasty ham and turkey at Ensemble’s in-house Bayley’s Bistro), I began to wonder if part of the spoof of a suburban middle-class amateur group was a fun reflection on The Ensemble itself, surely rescued (as it really was) by the top-class professional Hayes Gordon way back in the 1950s.  

Mind you, Oxenbould’s over-the-top I-am-the-great-actor Barney, though he ‘taught’ instant acting to the recruit from the audience, was absolutely nothing like the Hayes Gordon I remember meeting in the 1960s.  But I suspect that Hayes’ method of teaching his approach to the Stanislavsky technique (not the psychologically risky Method Acting he had experienced in USA before his move to Australia in 1952) was a solid support for the acting skills the whole cast display today.

That’s the positive thinking.

But a more disturbing thought was, in a world bearing down upon us as it is politically in awful warfare, socially on the un-manageable internet, and physically as we overheat the earth, is it fair to have a twinge of guilt about enjoying simple laughter among a North Shore theatre audience who can (like me) afford to be there financially and in safety?

Or is it important to recognise theatre like this, of this quality, as proof of the best side of humanity?  Proof that we can see ourselves as we really are – and indeed even make fun of ourselves – and that this is our best hope for the future?

I think it is that hope which keeps the old boatshed in the middling cove at Careening Cove, Kirribilli, going – Australia’s longest continuously running professional theatre – in the tradition set by directors over the years: Hayes Gordon, Sandra Bates and Mark Kilmurry.

Enjoy.

Ariadne Sgouros, Eloise Snape, Sam O'Sullivan, Jamie Oxenbould
in Midnight Murder at Hamlington Hall, Ensemble Theatre
Photo: Prudence Upton

©Frank McKone, Canberra