2025: Spit, the movie

 

 

 Spit – Screen Australia. Exclusively in cinemas 6 March, 2025.

Previewed by Frank McKone
February 23


Director:     Jonathan Teplitzky
Writers:      Christopher Nyst
Producer:    Greg Duffy  Trish Lake  Felicity Mcvay  David Wenham
Dir. of Photography:     Garry Phillips
Editor:         Nick Meyers
Production Designer:     Nicholas McCallum

Production Completion:     2024
Genre:     Comedy, Crime, Drama
Production Company: Tracking Films Pty Ltd


Cast:
 David Wenham     Helen Thomson     David Field     David Roberts
Gary Sweet     Arlo Green     Pallavi Sharda     Ayik Daniel Chut Deng
Sam and Teagan Rybka     Sami Afuni

Screen Australia: When ex-junkie, Johnny (Spit) Spitieri, flies into Australia on a false passport, he is locked up in an Immigration Detention Centre . The authorities want to know who he is, and where he's been. But so does gangster Chicka Martin, and his crooked cop mate, Arne Deviers, who are hot on Spit’s trail, and the Independent Public Integrity Commission is convinced the bumbling amnesiac is really an unlikely criminal mastermind. As Johnny talks up a storm without saying anything at all, he makes new friends amongst the detainees, and teaches them his version of mateship, and what it means to be truly Australian.
https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/the-screen-guide/t/spit-2024/41963

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Exhilarated!  That’s how you will feel.  As Shakespeare might say: A most serious comedy, the funniest awful crime movie, and a moving drama extraordinaire all in one.  Spit is all about, and about all, humanity.  It’s art not for the sake of art.  It’s art which revives our faith in humanity, despite our worldly worries.

Like all the best Shakespearean comedies, all the confusion ends with a magnificent dance.

Another word you should use is rambunctious, or its synonyms like boisterous, unrestrained, irrepressible, exuberant, uproarious.  It’s not often that a cinema audience applauds with such enthusiasm at the end of a movie.

And again afterwards, when we were lucky enough to have David Wenham here in Canberra in person, speaking about his experiences in making the film, reviving his character in the 2003 comedy Gettin' Square.  

Unfortunately I never saw that film, but ABC Radio  National says “The film became a cult hit, partly because of Wenham's mesmerising performance as the mullet-headed Spit. Two decades on, Spit is the star once more”.   Wenham spoke with sincere respect of the importance and quality of the performances of the immigrant actors.  And he explained that Christopher Nyst, who wrote both films, is a criminal lawyer and knows these characters well.

It’s not unreasonable to class this film as Shakespearian.  It’s a comedy with depth of social understanding – and very specifically Australian.  No-one here should miss it; and I think I can guarantee it will travel internationally to acclaim – and to lighten our world-wide woes.

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BTW The only problem I had with Spit was the title caused an email to be treated as spam!

And check out the Funeral Parlour women as a contrasting image:

Image from
Spit
Screen Australia, 2024-25

 

 ©Frank McKone, Canberra

2025: Hub Fest 2025 by ACT Hub

 

 

Hub Fest Play Festival.  ACT Hub at Causeway Hall, Kingston, Canberra.  February 16 – 22, 2025.
Hub Fest was devised by Lachlan Houen for ACT Hub

The Bestiary - An Interlude by Hannah Tonks
The Forsaken by Oliver Kuskie

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Feb 16



The two plays in this first Hub Fest are interesting, having in common serious criticisms of today’s social culture presented in short-form theatre.  The Bestiary is an Orwellian satire in 30 minutes of the world’s shifting towards authoritarianism at government level.  The Forsaken shows the breakdown of social norms at the personal level.

In theatrical terms, The Bestiary’s half-hour is more successful than The Forsaken’s 70 minutes.  

In both plays characters make a series of polemical statements which slow down the drama.  

In The Bestiary, the statements made by the rebellious terrorist artists serve to increase the dramatic tension about what they will do with the focus character: the hypocritical woman Minister for Aesthetics.  Their punishment – making her create a work of art – then results in her execution because she has broken the very law she is responsible for.  Just as she had had Wolf executed.  The shame is that Wolf’s partner, in bringing the Minister to justice, is herself shot by the firing squad as well.

In The Forsaken, the social issue about the isolation of the elderly and the impossibility of this old man’s ever being able to do anything practical about the family violence (on one side of his thin walled flat) or about the poverty-driven drug-driven theft and profiteering by the flat-sharing young (on the other side) is as powerful a theme as the issue of the need for government support of creative artistic freedom in The Bestiary.

But sitting listening to the old man’s recording of his frustrations, though very well performed, and faithful to my own feelings (like him I am in my 80s), started to feel a bit interminable.  The breaking away to the short scenes in the other flats – in the foreground on stage – took the dramatic action away from that central character.  We saw what was happening and understood his frustration and even fears, but there needed to be much more emotional interaction beyond just the peripatetic popping-in by the wild-haired young man from the share flat, before the effective scene with the wife from the family side.

Perhaps, as The Bestiary showed, maybe 40 minutes of intense interactions could have got the message through more strongly.

In the end, of course, the value of ACT Hub’s Hub Fest is exactly this – that for a small price you can make such comparisons and appreciate the creativity of the theatre arts, without being executed!

See https://www.acthub.com.au/production/hub-fest-play-festival

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2025: Aria by David Williamson

 

 

Aria by David Williamson.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney. January 24 – March 15, 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 1

Creatives

Playwright: David Williamson
Director: Janine Watson;  Assistant Director: Anna Houston
Set & Costume Designer: Rose Montgomery
Lighting Designer: Matt Cox
Composer & Sound Designer: David Bergman
Operatic Voice Coach: Donna Balson
Intimacy Coordinator: Chloë Dallimore

 Cast
Monique - Tracy Mann

Her sons:
Charlie - Rowan Davie         Liam - Jack Starkey-Gill             Daniel - Sam O’Sullivan

Their wives:
Midge - Tamara Lee Bailey   Chrissy - Suzannah McDonald   Judy - Danielle King         
     
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David Williamson is only just a year younger than me, so when I say Aria is as good as the best of the old David Williamson, you know what I mean.  It’s full of the rapid and incisive repartee of Don’s Party but with the social and political world brought up to date.

And of course it’s funny, with his traditional one-liners – often causing us to universally groan while we laugh – and yet it’s a comedy, though never black, which brings out the honest reality to the third generation of this middle class family.  

Way back in The Department (1975) as the play ends Owen announces “It’s a girl” to add to his “four bloody boys already.”  And goes on “Boys are okay when they’re little, but by the time they’re about six they’re testing themselves out against you all the time.  I haven’t got the energy to cope with another.”  

And I hear Chrissy, the wife of Monique’s son, the ambitious never-at-home politician Liam, being accused of not disciplining her children and – in our social media world – in tears of frustration because they take no notice and just answer her back.  She wanted to be a teacher.  I hear the very same story from teachers today, in classrooms full of devices.

The beauty of Williamson’s writing is how we even end up feeling sorry for the deluded over-the-top capitalist Monique, singing Mozart's Queen’s aria which never made her the Maria Callas she believed she should have been, except that love, for her three boys, got in the way.

Ensemble Theatre, of course, has done the right thing again by providing the best in directing, designing and coaching for, in my view, an extraordinary team of actors.  The force of their energy as a group enlivens everyone as if Hayes Gordon is still here in his wonderful in-the-round acting space (and I am old enough to have seen him there at work).  

But much more than that, even, is each actor’s terrific awareness of the meaning of every word in Williamson’s script – not merely in their character’s personality, but so clearly motivated as to why they speak (or don’t) in their relationships with the other characters – and even further bringing out the implications in the metaphors which Williamson leaves implicit.  

Aria is exciting theatre of the very best kind – and kindness is what we need so much more of today.  At 84 it makes me charged with hope again by such great work from a mere 83-year-old.

Please don’t miss it!

©Frank McKone, Canberra