2006: Seasons of Keene - I Alone by Daniel Keene

Seasons of Keene - I Alone.  Two monologues by Daniel Keene: Kaddish performed by Peter Damien Hayes and The Rain performed by Liliana Bogatko, directed by Ben Drysdale for National Multicultural Fringe.  The Street Theatre Studio February 16-18, 7.30pm.

    Theatre comes in all shapes and sizes.  This production is quite tiny, lasting not much more than 30 minutes, but delicately done.  Like Bach's well-tempered klavier, these monologues are short exercises which test the actor and have an extra layer of depth than the ordinary five-finger exercise.

    In Kaddish an old man speaks about his life with a woman who has died. Gradually, we realise that his emotion is building, that he is not able to contain his grief, until his story leads to an image - of a stuck pig - and in describing the scene to us he is at last able to find relief in a kind of scream. 

    Hayes created the character for us in his stilted movement around his room with no more than a bed and a chair.  The result, in some 10 minutes, was quite electric, and sad.

    Bogatko, in her longer The Rain, used movement to less effect, creating an old woman but not a very specific character.  This piece relies on the story she tells of being a mere bystander given things by people in long lines being put on trains, and how she kept them, completely filling her house, waiting for the people to return and claim their belongings.  Which they never do.

    The Rain, I feel, needed to have more story-telling devices added to this old woman's voice to create in us more variety of responses.  On the other hand, the piece makes its point as the picture of the people sent to the gas chambers becomes clear.  With this production successfully complete, Drysdale might now consider a larger night of Keene theatre.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: What's Goin' On? by John Barresi

What's Goin' On? written and performed by John Barresi.  National Multicultural Festival at Tradesmen's Union Club, Dickson, February 13-15, 7.45 for 8pm start.  Bookings: 6162 5656

    Barresi's performance dominates as uncle (famous comedian), mother (deli-cafe owner), father (builder) and grandfather (escapee from the nursing home) of Luigi Lambrusco, overshadowing James Liotta (Luigi) and Michelle Galati as Karen Brown in this comedy of an Italian-Australian romance succeeding against all the traditional family objections.  I would like to see the script give the young lovers more to counterbalance the star's roles.

    Each of Barresi's characters are truly awful caricatures, played right over the top with sexual innuendo, Italian-English language jokes, exaggerated costumes, extreme stereotypes, and bodily movements no Anglo-Saxon could look at without shame.  The result is very funny, whatever your cultural background (to quote, "Ca-tholic, Muslimite or P...P...Prostitute"), though especially so for the Australians of Mediterranean background who were there on opening night at The Tradies.  Multiculturalism was the message on stage and was the order of the day among the audience.  With supper at interval, the show is a good community event for everyone.

    The Tradies are to be congratulated on sponsoring this show and providing a new venue for the National Multicultural Festival for the next three years.  It is a trial venture for the Club and, with a full house on opening and few tickets left for the season, should be a great success.  Though technician Tania Lentini had to contend with radio microphone problems on first night, these will be fixed with time, and the venue is intimate enough for voices to carry in any case.

    If Luigi and Karen were written as commedia dell'arte characters, the play would become more consistently funny - in the real Italian tradition.  The second half already points the way, as the audience reaction showed.  It's a good night out now, but it could be much better.

   
   
© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: La Guerra by Teatro del Mundo. Preview feature article.

"Caudillo de España por la gracia de Dios" (The Leader of Spain by the grace of God).  This was the title Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco y Bahamonde gave himself when in 1939 he established himself dictator of Spain, alongside Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany.  Young Australians today probably think of Hitler and Mussolini as figures of ancient history.  They were defeated in 1945.  But General Franco was never defeated and relinquished his power only when he died in 1975 - just 31 years ago.

    Teatro del Mundo is an Adelaide based theatre aiming to make the Spanish experience as real and personal for the rest of the world as it is for their Spanish background members.  How should they do it, and why?

    For the National Multicultural Festival they are performing La Guerra (The War).  Why? - Because the story of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930's, the attempt led by the Communist Party to defeat Franco's rise to power, is as relevant today as we face the problem of the use of the military for political purposes.  For the young people who are not aware of General Franco, the Communists may also seem an unimportant part of history - almost a joke, since it all collapsed so quickly 15 years ago.  But many young people from countries around the world, including Australia, went to fight alongside the Communists in Spain to try to bring democracy to a country ruled for centuries by kings and queens, and now under threat from an upstart army officer.

    Telling the story as a history text is not enough to make us understand how the Spanish people feel, but Spanish dance - flamenco - is dramatic and powerful.  So Liana Vargas plays the role of Dolores Ibarruri, the chief propagandist for the Communist Party, who directly confronts General Franco.  Ibarruri leads a band of Revolutionary Women (Las Mujeres Libres - Anna Ovanesyan, Lucinna Chua and Natalie Quici) in her famous speech "No pasaran" (They shall not pass).  Vargas explains "I have taken traditional flamenco and extended its potential, explored its pain and its ability to convey human emotion.  It make so much sense to tell this story through flamenco."  The dance can be imagined as Ibarruri says "It's better to die on your feet than live on your knees."

    But this drama is much more than the just a picture of Franco as cruel tyranny in a dramatic dance with Ibarruri, the pride of Spain.  There is a special irony in Chris Shepherd's role, consistent with the flamenco tradition, of the poetic nature of the male dancer, and the connection with the sensitivity and grace of the toreador, the bull fighter, when he delivers the famous poem by Federico Garcia Lorca "A las cinco de le tarde" (At five in the afternoon).

    "Now the dove and the leopard wrestle / at five in the afternoon. / And a thigh with a desolated horn / at five in the afternoon / ... And the bull alone with a high heart! / At five in the afternoon / ... Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon! / It was five by all the clocks! / It was five in the shade of the afternoon!"

    Should we feel only sympathy for the killed bullfighter, or pride in the success of the harrassed bull?  What is the right way to feel in a civil war - did the Communists, however romantic their fight, get what they deserved? Did Lorca, the poet who represented all the hopes and fears of the Spanish people - "Tell the moon to come, for I do not want to see the blood of Ignacio on the sand" - deserve to be dragged into a field in 1936 by Franco's soldiers, shot dead and tossed into an unmarked grave?

    Teatro del Mundo's Flamenco Quartet - guitarist Aloysius Leeson, cantaor (singer) Mari Olivares, violinist Andi Aldam and percussionist Shaun Doddy - have searched for the balance between the traditional flamenco improvisation and the written word and score, creating highly orchestrated music of many layers and subtle innuendo.  Vargas says "The sound of La Guerra is as impressive as its subject matter.  It drives us to fever pitch."

    The work is placed in context by a montage of original propaganda posters and images from the Civil War, complementing the dance, spoken word, song and live music.  Established in 2000 with an Arts South Australia development grant, Teatro del Mundo has previously presented La Guerra to full houses at the Adelaide Fringe and South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festivals in 2004. 

    Liana Vargas will also conduct open flamenco dance workshops February 18-19, for beginners to advanced dance students.

La Guerra
Teatro del Mundo
The Street Theatre Studio
Thursday to Saturday February 16-18, 8pm
Tickets: full $35; concessions and Festival card holders $30
Bookings: The Street Theatre 6247 1223

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: "Judith as she was" by Jolanta Juszkiewicz. Preview feature article.

Kropka Theatre, founded by Jolanta Juszkiewicz in Sydney in 1997, has a special place in the Australian theatre scene.  Though Judith as she was is to be performed as part of the National Multicultural Festival, Kropka is not a theatre of migrant experience, though that is an important role to have in a country full of immigrants - we will see an example in My Of Course Life this coming week. 

It is not a theatre of our modern Australian identity, which we have seen this week in Drifting.  It is not European theatre transposed to the colonies, though some readers may remember an early Kropka production in the 1999 Multicultural Festival called Grushenka, directed by Rodney Fisher, and based on the character in Dostoyevski's The Brothers Karamazov.

Juszkiewicz instead is a migrant, from Poland, who explores the emotions and ideas which are essential to her life as a person living in Australia - indeed, as an Australian - seeking to create what she describes as "poetic-metaphorical theatre, where the main attention is devoted to the psychologically exact, emotional and plastic acting, the special and unique usage of the scene properties which gets a multi-layer meaning in the play."  Judith as she was has an interesting background indeed.

First, why was the story of Judith chosen?  Readers will surely know the famous, rather grisly, early 17th  Century series of paintings of Judith Beheading Holofernes by one of the few Renaissance woman artists, Artemisia Gentileschi. Was Judith a cold-hearted spy who seduced the general, Holofernes, who threatened to destroy the outnumbered Jewish forces?  Was she, mythical or not, a great hero who saved her nation? 

While Juszkiewicz was having a coffee break in rehearsals for her previous work Convict Women - Lifetime Exile, in a hall belonging to the Catholic Church, the resident priest raised the issue which became her central concern.  Is it right or wrong to kill in the name of the Lord, in the cause of justice?

Gradually the importance of Judith's story seeped into the deeper recesses of her thinking, and Juszkiewicz found herself wanting to explore Judith as a normal woman.  She, according to the text in the Apocrypha - the hidden books of the Old Testament - was a widow, who had not borne a child.  Her brother-in-law had the right to take her as his wife, but, perhaps because she was childless and so of less interest to him, gave her time to make her own decision.  Why did she decide to approach the enemy?  How did she feel when surrounded by enemy soldiers?  Was she attracted to the great General Holofernes, and he to her?  Did she do what she knew she had to do, despite her feelings?  In her later life was she sure that she had done the right thing?

In the meantime, Juszkiewicz was thinking, how important is the message in this myth for the modern world of terrorists who do indeed kill in the name of the Lord, in the cause of justice as they see it?  If Judith was a terrorist, how do normal people do these things?

Then add to our story theatre director Anatoly Frusin, born in Ukraine, converted to Judaism when young and living in Israel, leaving his non-Jewish mother in New Zealand to become a NIDA graduate, working often with Neil Armfield at Company B and Opera Australia.  For him, his mother's decision to become Jewish in the belief that it would make his life easier in the Jewish community has emotional resonances, in odd ways, with the story of Judith.  And so, as Juszkiewicz worked out how to express the feelings of a normal woman, Judith, with a terrible responsibility, Frusin became not so much her director but her enabler, the person who helped her find the forms and images on stage to create Judith's story and its metaphorical meaning - the outside but committed observer who could provide the critical view she needed.

    And so was born and grew Judith as she was.  Juszkiewicz is influenced by the Polish-Jewish Bruno Schulz, writer of "poetic and fantastic short stories [in which] small details of ordinary reality become powerful and protean forces of beauty", who was shot by a Gestapo officer in 1942 on the street of his beloved home town, Drohobycz.  Though she believes her Judith justifies her action in killing Holofernes, accepting that it was the will of the Lord, her play raises for us all the ultimate questions of justice and death.

Judith as she was devised and performed by Jolanta Juszkiewicz
Kropka Theatre, Sydney, directed by Anatoly Frusin
The Street Theatre Studio
Sunday to Tuesday February 12-14, 7pm
Tickets: $23 full, $18 concession, $20 group
Bookings: The Street Theatre 9247 1223

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: The Chairs by Eugene Ionesco. Preview feature article.

It's a little disconcerting to hear from the director of The Chairs for the National Multicultural Festival, Chris Simion, "I hate Ionesco". 

What can she mean? Eugene Ionesco, who wrote the play in 1952, is after all Romania's most famous playwright, though he did from his mid-twenties live and work in France. Simion is among Romania's busiest directors, concentrating on The Chairs twice a day in Bucharest and having previously taken the production to India for the Francophone Festival in 2004.

    According to Simion, a founder of the Compania de teatru "D'AYA" as an experimental student theatre group in 1999, "D'aya" means "just like that" and "is a simple name for simple theatre".  The Chairs may seem simple, but there's a lot more to it than a superficial view might suggest.  Considering Simion's success over the years, taking the company to theatre festivals in Egypt and Italy, her dislike of Ionesco must surely be disingenuous.

    In The Chairs, an old couple decide they would like to pass on to humanity what they have learned in their long lives. They invite a vast crowd of people, none of whom come.  All the Old Man (Ioana Marchidan) and the Old Woman (Adriana Trandafir) can do is speak to a vast array of empty chairs. 

So demoralised that they can't go on living, the old couple leave the revelation of their message to an Orator they have hired (Gabriel Fatu) - but he turns out to be deaf-mute.  Well, maybe such a black view of the very ordinary lives we mostly lead is enough to hate Ionesco for.  But does this mean his play is too horrible to watch?

On the contrary, there is a special fascination in the old couple's dilemma.  Rather than depending on speech, Daya Theatre have devised a "modern and a new interpretation" based in movement and comedy which means the "end of our performance is not a conclusion.  It's a choice."

What we can expect to see is strong theatre from that part of the world, the eastern end of Old Europe, where cultural diversity has been both a blessing and a cause of conflict for so long, and so has a tradition of art in all forms which entertains while exposing realities.  It is this tradition which gives depth to what at first seems simple.

For the actors, then, there is a deep satisfaction in presenting The Chairs.  Trandafir says "my role in the play is based upon movement and so it was difficult to assume it at my age.  But I believed in this work and I made it.  Now I'm happy."  Fatu explains "In our performance the director's vision surpasses the one of the author, giving an open end to the play".

And so, we can reinterpret Simion's concern about Ionesco.  When he was writing in the years soon after World War II, at the time when the proliferation of nuclear weapons was the order of the day, it was not surprising that his play had a doomsday feeling about it.  Politically, Romania and its neighbours were oppressive and dangerous places for original thinkers and activists.  For the new generation of the 1990s Ionesco's cynicism and the philosophy of absurdism - that life actually has no purpose despite what we would like to believe - must have been something to hate.  How else could things change for the better?

The irony is, of course, that Simion admits that Ionesco's "vision of life is real".  She at the same time proves him wrong in the very creation of art on stage, performing his play with a new purpose which inspires the actors, and will surely inspire us in the audience. 

This is the special value of our National Multicultural Festival, growing, once again under Dominic Mico's direction, far beyond a folkloric celebration.  The Embassy of Romania is doing our community a great service by presenting work which gives us an insight into their culture's serious theatrical life.

Daya Theatre's intentions are to show the nature of society in an educational light. It might surprise some people to know that Daya's performances in India were part of a cultural agreement between Romania and India from 1957.  1999 was the beginning of an explosion in cultural exchanges of all kinds from handicrafts, photographic exhibitions, art competitions, dance performances, an Indian feature film shot in Romania, books about India published in Romanian, through to occasions such as when Zubin Mehta conducted the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Orchestra at the annual George Enescu International Music Festival in Bucharest.  The new century seems to be celebrating cultural diversity, pointing towards a more hopeful world.

Despite the director's throwaway line, I suspect we will not hate Ionesco, but find we appreciate and respect him in The Chairs.
The Chairs by Eugene Ionesco
Daya Theatre Company, Romania
Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre
Tuesday to Thursday February 14-16, 7.30pm
Tickets: $32 full, $28 concession and Festival card holders, $10 students
Bookings: Canberra Ticketing 6275 2700

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: How to Cheat Friends and Incriminate People by Nicholas J Johnson. Preview feature article.

If you meet a neatly dressed, unassuming, absolutely ordinary married man in his 30s, beware.  Check that his name is not Doc Johnson, Nick the Greek, Mystic Nick or His Holiness Nicholas J Johnson, Third Incarnation of Goddess Gelar.  If it is any of these, or even plain Nicholas J Johnson, then watch your watch in case it disappears as happened once to an FBI agent at a social function, right here in Canberra.

    The FBI man protested far too much about his importance, so Nick Johnson, Entertainer Extraordinaire, nicked his watch.  45 minutes later, surrounded by all and sundry, Johnson innocently approached our FBI friend.  "I think, maybe, this watch is yours?" said he, to its owner's fury and everyone else's titters.

    Johnson has been a traditional clown, working professionally in circus and character roles for 8 years, and is well-known as a children's entertainer (laugh@funnybones.com.au).  But his work has shifted, especially through his less generally known employment by corporate organisations, away from the clown role towards a kind of Rod Quantok (Australia You're Standing In It, Bus, Son of Bus and Cap'n Snooze ads) with the extra skills of a magician.

    How to Cheat Friends and Incriminate People is his first straight stage show, at The Street Theatre, February 22 to 25.  "Straight" might not be the best description, but Johnson sees himself rather more like a stand-up comedian than clown.  He objects to the idea that he is an "artist", but is happy to be an "entertainer".  But in my view, after an hour and a half's solid talk, there's more to this performer than meets the eye (or often doesn't when the sleight of hand gets out of hand).

    Young Nicholas began his illusionist career at the age of 10, but I found it significant that his first straight acting role was in acclaimed Canberra director Carol Woodrow's 1994 production of Six Characters in Search of an Author.  At 14, Johnson played The Boy, who is killed backstage, presumably murdered, in a play deliberately designed so that the audience would believe that the death was real.  Luigi Pirandello, in 1921, was probably the first playwright to so directly challenge his audience's belief in the "boundary between illusion and reality, truth and make-believe, on the stage as well as in daily life" as theatre commentator Martin Esslin puts it.

Johnson tried out for straight actor training after leaving Hawker College but found the audition process "ridiculous" and saw the tertiary course as creating theatre "workhorses and mechanics".  So, seeking freedom of thought and action, in addition to an Arts degree in Sociology, English, Drama and Philosophy he studied the arts of all kinds of con artists, including professional card sharps, pickpockets, the sellers of spurious potions, the purveyors of spiritual guff, mystics who manipulate in darkened seances, as well as expanding his repertoire of standard magician's tricks.

So you will be entertained by, and be fooled by Doc Johnson, the Snake Oil merchant and his Memory Tonic, the Gambler Nick the Greek, Mystic Nick the Medium (who works in the "dark" with the lights on) and the ultimate Guru His Holiness etc etc etc who will prove to you that he is divine.  The entertainment comes with biting satire.  One wonders how the psychic cards will stack up among the myriad memory training courses and spiritual experience lectures that regularly manifest themselves in our halls and meeting rooms like carpet sales at the Albert Hall.

I wondered if Johnson had been able to keep his wife in the manner to which she was previously accustomed, and she claimed he does as well financially as other middle class professionals.  He says that he does not take corporate work where he disagrees with the company's message - though one tobacco company which remains nameless fooled him by employing him under a spurious company name.  So as an illusionist he is not entirely perfect.  However I lost 3 times in a row in the gambling game he showed me.

    He also does not use "blue" material - "I don't need to" - but he was a successful security guard at a bomb data conference surrounded by the world's uniformed police.  It was here he beat a Canadian Mountie (who I suppose was dressed in red) at three card monte using tricks he learnt from a Sydney casino card sharp.

    Of course, Nicholas J Johnson is really plain Nicholas.  He put the J in to distinguish himself from the other 2 Nicholas Johnsons in Canberra, and to give him credibility with Americans, especially FBI agents.

How to Cheat Friends and Incriminate People
Nicholas J Johnson at The Street Theatre
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday February 22 - 25 7pm; and
Friday and Saturday February 24 - 25 9pm
All Tickets $15.  Bookings: 6247 1223

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: All-Mother by barb barnett and Matt Marshall

All-Mother devised by barb barnett, written by Matt Marshall, directed by Scott Wright.  Serious Theatre at The  Street Theatre January 25 to February 4, 8pm.  Bookings 6247 1223.

    All-Mother is a fantasy, quite fascinating for its unlikely origins in bureaucratic Canberra where the myth of Lilith seems a little out of kilter with our daily experience.  Maybe our built environment, however much we like to call it a bush capital, makes people feel the need for a story which somehow links our ever conflicting emotions, especially in our sexual relationships, to an explanatory point of origin. 

barb barnett has chosen to work over several years on the apocryphal story of Lilith, of whom you may not have heard.  In the Bible, God apparently creates people twice.  In Genesis Chapter 1 Verse 27 "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."  But in Chapter 2 Verse 7 "God formed man of the dust of the ground" and in Verses 21/22 "he took one of [Adam's] ribs ... and made he a woman."  Confusion reigned until the 11th Century when a Hebrew text claimed that the Verse 7 woman was Lilith, Adam's first wife - who argued with him on the grounds that they were created equal - while the Verse 22 woman was the well-known Eve, who could never claim to be equal in origin to Adam.

All-Mother presents us with Punch and Judy representing Adam and Eve, while Lilith, played by barnett, is shown in scenes in which she clashes with Eve, her story going backwards to the point of her creation.  In this version of the myth, which corresponds more with Bernard Shaw's Back to Methusaleh, Lilith is the original creation - the mother of Adam and all human life ever since.  Her retreat backwards is perhaps justified when we see Punch and Judy traditionally bashing each other, until they both die, return as ghosts and continue arguing about whether they are in heaven or hell.

    The on-stage puppetry, the scenery, lighting and sound track are excellent, in keeping with Scott Wright's day job as director of Erth-Visual and Physical Inc who brought Gondwana to the National Museum recently.  I found the mythical scenes rather slow, trying too hard to be "significant", but All-Mother is unusual theatre, if not entirely successful.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: Chronicles - A Lamentation by Teatr Piesn Kozla

 Sydney Festival: Chronicles - A Lamentation.  Teatr Piesn Kozla (Poland) directed by Grzegorz Bral at The Playhouse, Sydney Opera House until January 25 9.45pm and Riverside Theatre, Parramatta January 27-28 8pm.

    This is a 45 minute example of intense ritualistic theatre, fascinating for its voice and movement work, but ultimately failing, in my view, to take the audience to new levels of understanding. 

Bral and his co-founder of Teatr Piesn Kozla, Anna Zubrzycki, who is a central performer in Chronicles, have long taught and directed in the workshop tradition known best in this country through the Theatre Laboratory run by Jerzy Grotowski in the later decades of last century. They concentrate, always with high moral principle, on research into ancient and fading traditions and present their findings as re-created myth.  In this case, they have taken the polyphonic harmonies and women's ululations of laments sung in Epiros, nowadays on the Greek - Albanian border, as their base.  They have then used the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to show a man's battle with the Great Goddess, and his search for immortality. 

Rapidly spoken poetic language, almost continuous choral singing which sounded to me most like Polish - Russian style, highly choreographed mimetic movement which never quite becomes dance, all done with great skill and precision, still did not convey to me any clear idea of the purpose of the work.  According to the program notes we are supposed to reach  "the deep understanding which accompanies [the] acceptance" of "death, the ultimate finality in human life, the futility of escape."  Because the work, however sincere in concept, does not have a strong dramatic structure, I found the point of the ending - where all 7 performers, for no apparent reason, singing, exited upstage left, continued singing for a minute or so off stage until their voices faded into nothing - escaped me.

If I hadn't seen the publicity I would never have known that Rafal Habel was Gilgamesh, Marcin Rudy his battle companion Enkidu, and Christopher Sivertsen a Shaman, or that Anne Zubrzycki was The Wild Cow - Mother of Gilgamesh, Anna Krotoska was the Goddess Ishtar, Maria Sendow was Death and Ian Morgan was The Immortal, Utnapishti.  Crossing cultures is never easy - perhaps knowledge of Polish would have helped - but even after reading the program again following the performance I find it difficult to identify these characters.  Even less could I identify with them.  Unfortunately, moral principle is not enough to make great theatre.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: Bright Abyss by James Thierree

Sydney Festival: Bright Abyss created and directed by James Thierree, at Theatre Royal January 8-22 and 24-29, 8pm.

    Brought up by his parents, Jean-Baptiste Thierree and Victoria Thierree Chaplin, from the age of 4 on tour with Le Cirque Imaginaire and Le Cirque Invisible, James Thierree has what one might call circus cred.  He's still only 32, with acrobatic and dance skills which put any Olympic "artistic" gymnast to shame.

I saw his first creation, The Junebug Symphony, 3 years ago and enjoyed it as entertainment, but Bright Abyss successfully sets sail into the blue yonder.  There is a story, told in wonderful images, rather like Shakespeare's The Tempest.  It begins with a great wind, full of foreboding, threatening to destroy the lives of the five characters on their journey.  90 minutes later all have resolved the tangle of relationships which hold them back, often very funny to watch as well as exciting, sometimes frightening, sometimes touchingly sad.  Finally they learn to go with the wind in a most beautiful scene with spinnaker billowing into the future.

Circus, dance and mime work was so impressive that a full house last Thursday applauded scene after scene, rising to a crescendo with 3 curtain calls.  Thierree's directing made what might have been a series of circus-style acts into a work of strong dramatic structure which drew the audience into the lives of those on stage and reflected on our own experience - and gave hope that, working together, we may survive the abyss and find our way in some kind of harmony.

There was applause too for the performers indvidually, each with their own special skills and personality.  Thierree is a marvellous mime, the still young Raphaelle Boitel - now just 22 - a seemingly jointless contortionist, Niklas Ek a true dancer (from the Royal Ballet Stockholm and the Nederlands Dans Theater), Brazilian capoeira dancer and tumbler Thiago Martins and the always surprising soprano and pianist Uma Ysamat from Spain.

Together they made a great celebration of performance, entertainment and life, deserving every handclap, cheer and whistle. 

Book at Festival Ticketek 02 9266 4890 or www.sydneyfestival.org.au

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: All Wear Bowlers and The Tiger Lillies

Sydney Festival: All Wear Bowlers and The Tiger Lillies at The Studio, Sydney Opera House, until Saturday January 21.

    These are two of the 7 "cutting-edge works from the ridiculous to the sublime" in the About an Hour program.  I can see why festival director Fergus Linehan chose the British "art" cabaret The Tiger Lillies because of their cult reputation overseas.  I found them shallow - ridiculous.

    But All Wear Bowlers by Philadelphians Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford was close to sublime.

    The Lillies' Masturbation Jim song was rated his favourite by one 30-ish groupie I overheard, but to compare such work with Weill and Brecht, or to pretend that it's a satire of that tradition, as the publicity does, is just not on.  Falsetto singing about killing babies - and bashing drums with dolls - is weak undergraduate humour - quite puerile.

    The claim that All Wear Bowlers has "the pathos of Laurel and Hardy, the desolate humour of Samuel Beckett" and, I would add, the skill of Charlie Chaplin and the imagination of Woody Allen, is all true.

    Two silent movie bowler hatted tramps fall off the film screen, as in The Rose of Cairo, onto the stage where they have no choice but to entertain us.  Their clowning in a state of steadily increasing disorientation takes us along with them until we realise that, like them, we all wear the clown's bowler hat.

    Sobelle and Lyford trained with vaudeville consultant David Shiner of Cirque du Soleil, and the quality in their timing and characterisations shines through.  They made fun of pretentious art - "all those layers" - then through our laughter gave us true art with many levels of meaning.

    I saw Bowlers first on Wednesday evening - a pity perhaps, because their sublimity only served to highlight the pretentiousness of the Tiger Lillies an hour later.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: Shout! by John-Michael Howson, David Mitchell and Melvyn Morrow

Shout! by John-Michael Howson, David Mitchell and Melvyn Morrow.  G-String Productions at The Street Theatre, directed by Rod and Liz Beaver, January 6-14 8pm.

    I found this production of Johnny O'Keefe's life story strangely disappointing. 

    The first half seems to intend to be a celebration of his early years to 1960 - when he suffered severe injuries in a car accident - but instead of the great burst of excitement that I was expecting as the King of Australian Rock 'n' Roll swung into action, there was a rather flat series of short scenes. Each had its song, but the build up of dramatic tension was missing.

    I looked then for the real guts of O'Keefe's life to spill out as his mental stability was seriously affected not only by the road accident, but especially by the drug induced death of the manager he so much believed in, Lee Gordon, in 1963, his inability to keep his marriage together, his fightback to success on occasions like the Sunbury Festival in 1973, and finally his early death from alcohol and prescription drug poisoning in 1978.  Some scenes in the second half had dramatic strength - especially the Kings Cross party scene - but still there wasn't the sense of foreboding that his life story required.

    Then, literally at last, the show returned to the 1959 hit Shout! and a celebration burst out from the stage and engulfed the audience - as it should have at the beginning.

    Musicality was not the problem, either from the band or the singers.  I haven't seen any previous production, but the dialogue seemed minimal to me, to the point that no real characters became established, except the awful conniving Lee Gordon.  O'Keefe's songs were used to illustrate the story, but they were not the type of songs to carry the drama without rounded characters to sing them.  After the show I remember best Pat Gallagher as Lee Gordon and Tony Maxfield as Marianne, O'Keefe's first wife.  Rod Beaver made JO'K memorable only in the final song.

    Costumes and dance steps were a problem for me too.  I couldn't see the detailed research needed to clearly identify each change in style belonging to the dates of the original performances, and Beaver was dressed entirely unlike the mod suits and ties which O'Keefe wore most of his career.  Maybe I expect too much, but I have seen better G-String productions.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: Phoenix Players' Charlotte's Web - Some Musical! Preview feature article.

Charlotte's Web, EB White's famous children's story, is a romance about a piglet, Wilbur, saved from the farmer's axe by a spider, Charlotte.  It's also about death and a kind of resurrection.  When Charlotte dies, Wilbur makes sure her 514 babies are safely hatched.

    At first blush this hardly sounds like musical material for the school holidays but, says John Alsford, have no worries.  Alsford is this summer's director for Phoenix Players of Charlotte's Web - Some Musical!  He has created a show which is an entertainment for young and old, and - in the Phoenix community theatre tradition - a wonderful experience for the 27 children and grown-ups in the cast.

    In 1952 New Yorker Elwyn Brooks White published the original Charlotte's Web, promptly dubbed by the US Children's Literature Association "The best American children's book of the past two hundred years", and praised by one critic for its "liveliness and felicity, tenderness and unexpectedness, grace and humor and praise of life".  Alsford has aimed to bring all this to the stage through music, dance and song in an Australian style.  The core directing team - Alsford, musical director Susan Davenport and choreographer Elissa Singer - have re-worked the American script, giving their show a local feel, especially in the humour, which counter-balances some of the sentimentality which can be attached to a story of American farm life.

    Alsford sees working on the musical as a maypole dance.  The music is the strong central fixed point, interpreted in the dance and the songs, holding the dialogue and storyline together.  This is the opposite to many productions where the music is an add-on to the storyline, but the advantage is that from the beginning of rehearsals 4 months ago all the children and adults on stage have been actively working together, especially to create the dance sequences.  This has also allowed Alsford, now a veteran of 12 years' work with Phoenix (a veteran indeed of Blue Folk where he was first directed by Dominic Mico in 1979) to focus on helping his young choreographer, 16-year-old Elissa Singer, to find ways of translating her original dance ideas into movement sequences which can work successfully for performers of different ages and experience.

    This approach is just what Charlotte's Web and Phoenix Players need.  Like Warehouse Circus and other Canberra community theatres, Phoenix brings together diverse, especially young people and, in Alsford's words, "corrupts the kids into theatre - where they gain so much confidence, friends for life, and have such fun".  He cites his own daughter, Annie, now a respected drama teacher in country NSW, as proof - and her one-time college boyfriend, Mark Truebridge. His career began as stage manager when Alsford directed Peter Pan at Hawker College, and today is a NIDA graduate, currently lighting director for opera houses in France and Germany.

Learning friendship and trust, and tolerance of difference, is the universal theme of Charlotte's Web.  When speaking of the animal and even insect characters, Alsford points out that they are "invisible" to the adult humans.  "They're like barmaids and hairdressers - like people who just do their job."  Like himself, in fact, in his day job as Commonwealth driver.  EB White makes the invisible non-entities of farm life into characters with the same humanity as the humans - oddly similar in idea to George Orwell's Animal Farm.  White's animals, too, are aware of the conspiracy against them.  Wilbur, the new piglet, is naïve as Sheep says "But you know why they want to make you fat and tender, don't you?"  Fern, the farmer's young daughter is equally unaware.  For children watching, it is through Fern's and Wilbur's awakening that they may come to understand what intolerance of difference means to the victims. 

When presented as a musical, with both entertainment and new understanding in mind, this production reinforces feelings of community not just in the abstract but right before us on stage by one of our Canberra well-established community theatre groups, Phoenix Players. 

Charlotte's Web - Some Musical! adapted by Joseph Robinette; music and lyrics by Charles Strouse; based on the story by EB White
Phoenix Players at Theatre 3, Ellery Cres., Acton
January 13 - 28
Evenings 7.30pm Fri 13, Sat 14, Thurs 19, Fri 20, Sat 21, Fri 27, Sat 28
Matinees 2.30pm Wed 18, Sat 21, Sun 22, Wed 25, Sat 28
Australia Day Thurs 26 at 11am and 3pm
Bookings: Ph 6257 1950

   
© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: Exhibition - National Treasures from Australia's Great Libraries

National Treasures from Australia's Great Libraries at National Library of Australia December 3 2005 - February 12 2006, 9am - 5pm (closed Christmas Day).

    This is a Magic Pudding of an exhibition.  You know what's in the recipe? - lots of amazing tastes, unexpected traditional threepenny pieces (genuine silver, of course), mixed for four years with tremendous enthusiasm and skill, bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside (more like a living yeast than a Tardis) and, finally, a texture, structure and shape better than anything Normal Lindsay imagined.

    The only problem is time.  It will run away with you, as a good Magic Pudding should.  I would allow a couple of hours, lunch to chew 22 times per mouthful and digest, and then you could still go back for another hour or so for a second helping to discover nuts and raisins you missed the first time around.  What's more, all this is free (except lunch since, as we know, there's no such thing) because "Australia's libraries have a responsibility to collect, preserve and make accessible Australia's documentary heritage in a wide variety of forms" including exhibitions of national treasures.  Our first was in Hobart in 1858, then Melbourne in 1861, and then the first great Australian treasures exhibition organised by the Victorian Fine Arts Commission at the Melbourne Public Library in 1869.

    As curator Margaret Dent says, a library collection is great for finding things you want, but "how do you find something you're not looking for?"  Maybe you expect to see Don Bradman's favourite cricket bat and Ned Kelly's helmet made from ploughshares to armour (rather than swords to ploughshares), but the threepenny bits will set you thinking.  Look at the first diagram describing the Southern Cross ("this crosse is so fayre and bewtiful"), not on Peter Lalor's flag but in a letter from Andrea Corsali in 1516 to Giuliano de Medici (translated from Italian into English by Richard Eden in 1555), and the yeasty possibilites begin to grow.  Modern Australia might well have been Italian, or Dutch, or French.  Or Aboriginal. 

Did Indigenous people see a cross in this star formation?  Or did it take European Christians to perceive that image?  And should it have been such a cross to bear for Indigenous people?  British Lord Morton, President of the Royal Society, hoped not in 1768 when he advised Captain James Cook "No European Nation has the right to occupy any part of their country (meaning newly discovered lands), or settle among them without their voluntary consent.  Conquest over such people can give no just title; because they could never be the aggressors."  Eddie Mabo's papers are set next to Lord Morton's advice, not far from the secret instructions Cook received from King George III to claim the new continent for England.  The Royal Society organised Cook's trip, but the Government provided the funds - and it took more than 200 years until Mabo exposed the fraud.  Eddie Mabo's papers were placed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2001, perhaps ironically along with Cook's Endeavour Journal.

 This is just one thought bubble to grow from a page of a letter.  On November 6, 1942, a German U-boat sank the City of Cairo in the South Atlantic.  Of 17 people in Lifeboat No 4, only Margaret Gordon (whose husband drowned in a second torpedo attack) and Third Officer Whyte survived, sailing 3200 kms before rescue by a Brazilian minesweeper.  Whyte was torpedoed and died returning from America to England. Gordon recorded the names and addresses on a page of her diary of her six European companions, and only that page survived.  Margaret remarried, and as Margaret Ingham retired from the State Library of Victoria in 1980 as one of Australia's foremost experts on children's literature, establishing the 80,000 book Children's Research Collection. She never spoke of her ordeal, but wrote to inform the families of the dead.  Mrs Solomon wrote that Gordon's letter "has gone on to [her son's] wife - who will keep it to read to little Nigel when old enough to understand".

These National Treasures touch the personal lives of people in our past, stirring up stories and thoughts which are real for us now.  Even the suet in the Pudding - like the awful story of murderer Frederick Deeming - helps bind together our understanding.  Take your time, because I've only touched on two of many, many fascinating stories of ordinary bits of paper, a helmet, a bat, Bourke and Wills' gun and whip, the model Holden I drove in 1964, a quilt made by Aboriginal children (anonymous) in 1845 and pictures drawn by Aboriginal children (with their traditional names) in 1940, the first order book for Hills Hoists and so much more.  In fact the original Magic Pudding illustrations are about the last thing you'll see near the exit.  Before you have lunch, and go back for a second helping.  That's what I intend to do.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams

Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams.  Papermoon, directed by Geoffrey Borny, at ANU Arts Centre December 1 - 10.

    Tennessee Williams knew personally the fear, perhaps our worst fear, of losing your mind - of not knowing what is real and what is not.  In 1943 his parents authorised a prefrontal lobotomy on his older sister Rose.  In Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Catharine Holly (Lainie Hart) is threatened with this very treatment because, Mrs Venable (Naone Carrel) says, she "babbles".  Like Rose had, maybe.

    Dr Cukrowicz (Alex Sangston), though compromised by needing funding for his research work from Mrs Venable, finds a way to test Catharine's story in a long intense hypnosis session.  If Catharine speaks the truth, denying Mrs Venable's apocryphal belief that Catharine caused the death of her son Sebastian, the doctor cannot in conscience perform a lobotomy.  Dr Cukrowicz concludes that we should consider that she is speaking the truth - but how do we know?

    What Williams has done is to make us experience what it is like to be unsure of the truth, as a person on the verge of insanity is.  To do this he uses long monologues by Mrs Venable and Catharine which are major achievements for Carrel and Hart, and for director Borny.  The play focusses on the storytelling and requires close attention to the words, the pauses, the images and the implications.  This is not an easy ride, but well worth our effort.  The deliberate slow pacing may be too difficult for some, but let the words and the feelings wash over you.  The experience is not pleasant, but revealing, as we should expect from great works of art.

    What this production does, appropriately for its university context, is to make the careful construction of the art apparent to us. The dead Sebastian's jungle garden, like Williams' dialogue, is designed in every detail to seem real, and so the set cleverly complements the structure of the play.  It becomes both an intellectual and emotional quest for the nature of truth - a satisfying result.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: A Slice of Saturday Night by The Heather Brothers

A Slice of Saturday Night. Music and lyrics by The Heather Brothers (Lea, Neil & John).  G String Productions at Teatro Vivaldi, directed by Rod and Liz Beaver.  Choreography by Jordan Kelly and Susan Miller.  Band: Stuart King, Ben Braithwaite and Munro Melano.  November 16 - December 3, 6.30pm for dinner and show.  Bookings 3257 2718.

    Double degustation, double delight.  You only have till Saturday to book in to a show with excellent tastes.

    You can look up that big word later, but know right now that it wasn't just the gourmet dips, fetta cheese and leek filos, zucchini and herb dumplings and roasted tomato, eggplant and goat's cheese stack for entree which heralded Vivaldi's delightful mains and sweets.  Equally stunning was the quality of the slices, almost anatomical cross-sections, of Saturday Night at the Club A-Go-Go circa 1964. 

    Written in the late 1980s, this soft-satirical musical looks back with no regrets, in fact rather nostalgically, at what was probably the Heather Brothers' youthful experience of sexual awakening.  There are some very funny songs, with references musical and lyrical to all the pop names of that time - including the prediction by the club manager, Eric 'rubber legs' DeVere (played very well by Peter Brady as a Bill Haley look-alike) that it would be the "Whiff" Cliff (Richards) who would survive the Beatles, The Animals and all the rest.  How awfully true.

    The delight in G String's production is that the musicianship, band and singers, was spot on throughout.  Not a note out of place whether in a tear-jerker ballad, soft-porn rock, Beach Boys spoof, or an almost but not quite early Joan Baez (made sentimental) imitation folk revival song. 

And that's not all. The choreography was tight in design and performance, artistically exact for the period, while fitting precisely up to 14 movers and shakers on the restaurant stage.  The ensemble playing of the main boy-girl roles was so well balanced that it is unfair to pick one or two above the rest.  I think each audience member would have picked their own favourites.  Mine would be the couple Rebecca Franks (Sharon) and Will Huang (Rick) for voices and stage presence - and Craig Francis (Gary) especially for the premature ejaculation song.

As Eric asks, who in their right mind would want to be 17 again?  But it's terrific fun watching.  And watch for Queenie van de Zandt and Amanda Muggleton at Vivaldi's in December.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: The Three Scrooges - Comedy Christmas Cabaret.

 The Three Scrooges - Comedy Christmas Cabaret.  Shortis, Simpson and Casey directed by Carissa Campbell.  The Street Theatre Studio November 24 - December 10, 8.30pm.  Bookings: 6247 1223

    Pssssst....  I won't reveal my source but I've just had a leak.  The trouble is if I tell you about it the law will get me.  I'll disappear for two weeks and then I won't even be able to tell you I disappeared for another two years.  Sedition, I guess, would be the charge.  But no-one would ever know, including me.

    Maybe I can get around the problem by telling you that this is a terrible show.  It's funny, for a start.  Even worse, it's satirical.  It even makes fun of the actual words spoken by our great leader of the free world and his little mate.  And the music ... well, I can only say it is dreadfully so well done that you might be inveigled into enjoying the art and not realising that this is really the work of the devil.  Comedy Christmas Cabaret indeed!

    Don't be fooled.  The worst part is that the now traditional John Shortis and Moya Simpson combination has been horribly enlivened by the voice and keyboard playing that only seems to come from heaven, though it actually comes from Peter J. Casey.  If you thought Shortis and Simpson were unbearable last year, this combination is impossible now.  It's surely the fault of the faceless Carissa Campbell.  Only she could have choreographed the excellent Dance of the Latham Diaries - probably the only part of the show which might pass muster at ASIS.

    But I have to be careful not to reveal that, though this is perhaps the most irreligious Christmas show one can imagine, Shortis's solo about what has happened to Christmas in our globalised economy is even sadder this year.  Of course no-one can accept without a groan the disgusting representation of royalty, especially of Princess Di whose fashion photos were all over the Canberra Times front page on opening night.  But the implied relationship between Princess Mary and her boy child suggested some higher understanding.

    All in all, I can't say this was a great night out.  That was just a leak, and the perpetrator will be brought to justice.  I think I might just disappear at this point,  and don't let yourself be seen at The Street, or you might never be seen again either.  Bye-ee!

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: Deckchairs by Jean McConnell

Shoppers, Doggies, Dancers and Cruise Missile from Deckchairs by Jean McConnell.  HIT Productions at Tuggeranong Arts Centre, October 18 and 19.

    Sitting relaxed at Tuggeranong By The Sea, watching the deckchairs for entertainment was about as exciting as you might expect.  Because of the neat directing by Gary Down and fine performances from stalwart sisters Joan Sydney and Maggie King, maybe a bit more than you would have bargained for.

    Jean McConnell is an English writer for television, radio and stage.  The format for the 12 20 minute playlets in Deckchairs is a variation of a long tradition of English "characters" just talking, more or less to each other.  In this case they are sitting in deckchairs, on a promenade or, in Cruise Missile, on a cruise ship.  Unlike Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, which are ascerbic revelations of the sad, even tragic, inner lives of English suburbanites, previously presented by HIT Productions at TCA, McConnell's women are more comic in tone. 

    The result is an entertaining evening which the Canberra audience thoroughly enjoyed, yet I found the themes, like the upper and lower class dog owners who end up growling at each other, a bit too predictable.   When I think back to the masters of this form, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (in, say, the 1960s Dagenham Dialogues in which 'Pete', as a confident but ill-informed bore, held forth to 'Dud', a scruffy, even less informed Herbert), I realise that Jean McConnell, writing Deckchairs in the decade since 1995, misses the absurdity of Pete and Dud which her characters need to lift them beyond quite funny but ultimately rather shallow images of English life.  Tuggeranong certainly seemed rather far-flung from her world, yet could seem closer to Dagenham.

    On the other hand, O'Connell has a good ear for the language of her characters, and the Australian sisters were very skilled not only in accents and comic timing, but especially in the right phrasing and intonation for each class of character.  The conniving "shoppers" were perfectly matched in speech, the dog owners' manners and language matched their very funny hand-puppet dogs (wild bitzer and snooty pug), and especially interesting were the 'A' Deck single-cabin wealthy-but-genuine woman and the contrasting below-decks shared-cabin know-it-all "cruise missile" who got her come-uppance to great applause to end the evening's show.

    So, in the English tradition, a bit of a curate's egg.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: International Museum Theatre Alliance Conference 2005

MUSEUM EVENTS BY FRANK McKONE
   
Welcome to the International Museum Theatre Alliance Conference 2005.  The world has moved on from the museum theatre of old - like, let's do Shakespeare exactly the way he did it, even though The Globe burned down 400 years ago, and nowadays we can put LED stars in the firmament.  Shakespeare didn't even know about museums, which really only became big in the 1800s.  I was sitting in the studio of a big one, the National Museum of Australia, surrounded by digital video equipment, lights, cameras and action.  A jigsaw blade had just appeared through the blackened door into the bio box and was cutting out a neat rectangle for a vision panel.  It had to be in place before the speeches were to start at 9.40am.

Meanwhile, next door in the Temporary Gallery, conference delegates were watching Gondwana, the live action puppetry performance by ERTH, true to the most recent scientific research, which had drawn full houses throughout the school holidays with life size dinosaurs, growing plants, insects and even an early mammal from deep time when Australia, Africa, India, South America and Antarctica were all joined in the super-continent Gondwanaland.  This is museum theatre today.

Then, here the delegates entered, not exactly the conventional bunch of bureaucrats and backroom boffins that you might associate with a museum.  At this, the first IMTAL Conference in the southern hemisphere, there was a definite atmosphere of bubbling excitement.  Craddock Morton, NMA director, dared to admit that he had been a skeptic about museum theatre (boo, hiss from the crowd), but now he had become a convert (claps and cheers).  All power to your arms, he concluded.  Louise Douglas, general manager public programs, conducted a pre-curtain call of the backstage team from NMA, Questacon, National Gallery, War Memorial, Old Parliament House, to enthusiastic applause.

First keynote speaker, theatrical icon Robyn Archer, noted that whooping and laughter was not common to other conference audiences she had spoken to.  Before long, though, she was challenging museums and museum theatre practitioners.  Quoting Bertolt Brecht and using powerful examples from her recent worldwide experiences from Buenos Aires, Teheran, Britain and many other places, she said that, in a society of a widening gap between rich and poor, theatre must "test ourselves and our moral stance" which it can do without putting our loved ones at actual risk.  Brecht wrote that our fates are "knotted and cast by men" and theatre is about "teaching [the audience] the great art of living together".

The challenge, Archer said, is that it's easy to create a shallow entertainment, even if it might illustrate a museum exhibit.  But "all theatre makers should aspire to the best", she said, and in doing so she challenged museums to take the kinds of risk that, I wonder, may not be acceptable to conservative administrators or the politicians behind them.  In response to a question about Minister for Education Brendan Nelson, Archer's view was that "Cultural institutions remain the only places for the reclamation of democracy" in societies where only stories like Simpson and his donkey are to be told, or you won't get your grant next year.

Catherine Hughes, founder of IMTAL, presented research information from her doctoral studies at Ohio University which backs Archer's position.  Empathy for characters, though vicarious, sets off processes in the brain like those from real experience.  These hormonal and neuronal activities - emotional arousal - enhance long-term memory.  After a play about the human genome project, 87% of students were able to articulate how the genome project might impact on their lives - a 59% increase on a pre-performance study.  In other research, students remembered detailed information from a theatre-in-education performance 7 months later.

Hughes' message was "Activate the amygdala; resonate with [the audience's] lives; shape performances with surprises".  This means presenting unexpected viewpoints, like making the murderer of South American rainforest activist Chico Mendez the main character who justifies his action - "just clearing the frontier, just like you [Americans] did".  Most important for museums and the issue of truth, Hughes concluded, "Address difficult and controversial subject matter."

Proof of her point followed as Anne E Stewart of the Victorian Storytelling Guild presented the story of the death of her brother Tony Stewart in Balibo in 1975 in "East Timor: Grief: Personal to Public - Telling the Story". Her family's tragedy becomes an uplifting story of her other  brother Paul, who began the band Painters and Dockers, and now teamed up with East Timorese refugee Gil Santos to form The Dili Allstars.  Their latest CD documents the killing of the Balibo 5 and is a powerful anti-war musical statement in the local language.  Delegates had no difficulty feeling empathy, recognising the resonance, being surprised by the serendipity of the Stewart family's story.  I'm sure they will not forget.

This article is just a look into a 4-day conference.  I cannot let you go without hearing something from Professor Sam H. Ham, director of the Centre for Training and Outreach, University of Idaho, and an expert in the psychology of audiences.  He suggested 3 aims for museum theatre - acquisition of new factual knowledge, entertainment and holding attention, heightened "awareness". 

To achieve heightened awareness he described a choice of 3 roads.  The Teacher Tell Paradigm "if they know what we know, then they too will care as we care".  Research shows that this approach may increase factual knowledge, but does not change awareness.  The Infotainment Paradigm "if we can just keep people entertained long enough something good is bound to happen and they'll end up being changed for the better" is no more successful at creating awareness, though positive feedback may appear convincing.

Only the Meaning Making Paradigm works.  "If you can get visitors thinking ... they'll make their own connections, and if they make their own connections, it's possible they'll be able to care" about what has been presented.  "The main thing [museum] interpretation should try to accomplish is getting people to make their own themes inside their own heads".  Then "it must (Italics on) matter (Italics off) to the audience.  As Robyn Archer / Bertolt Brecht said, making meaning is teaching "the great art of living together".

Extending Our Reach: 4th Biennial IMTAL Conference at National Museum of Australia October 13-16.
Go to     www.nma.gov.au/events/major_events/2005_imtal_conference/
    www.anne-e-stewart.com

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: Bam! by Warehouse Circus

Bam!  Warehouse Circus directed by Jeremy Davies, Pablo Latona and Kylie O'Keeffe.  The Street Theatre, September 29 - October 8, 8pm.  Bookings: 6247 1223.

    Joyous celebration - that's the only way to describe Bam! 

    When I was 10 I loved balancing sticks and twirling ropes, and even made my own stilts.  I just wish there had been a Warehouse Circus handy.  I would have learned to juggle and uni-cycle, though I doubt I would ever have become as adept at tumbling as this Warehouse team.

    But I hope I would have learned the tremendous sense of community and humour which oozes out of these young people.  I last reviewed their work 3 years ago, enthusiastically, when original member Skye Morton had returned, after a professional performing career, to direct.  Now, the 3 artistic directors, all Warehouse trained, are following through a commitment to the younger members - and the development shows.

    Bam! is a nicely structured show, using music (and other sound effects) largely attributable to Pablo Latona, to underpin the action.  O'Keeffe's set design (Skye Morton is now responsible for "rigging" and "lugging") and lighting by Chris Neal turn movement sequences into small dramas an extra step beyond the immediate tension of successfully demonstrating a physical skill.  Much of the show is dance rather than gymnastics, but not the cold kind of competition in showing off skills which we see in the Olympics. 

Warehouse have created original music and use circus-style movement to open up our emotional responses, especially in a scene using 4 black boxes, each inhabited by a young woman.  All are dressed the same, contortions - in slow motion - are in unison, but slight differences in action create individuality despite apparent conformity.
   
    The result is a show in the tradition of modern Australian circus - think of Circus Oz - melding music, action, humour and theatrical design in a quite original way.  The mood is often underplayed, almost contemplative, rather than bold and brassy like traditional circus, and the effect is to draw the audience in to feeling at one with the performers.  The first night crowd showed themselves warmly appreciative in the finale and curtain-call.  This was community - Canberra's soul - in action.

    Warehouse Circus provides training and performance opportunities for young people aged 8-25 years.  Contact manager@warehousecircus.org.au (Tel: 6287 3968 Mobile: 0415 357 859).
   
© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: Gondwana: A Live Journey Through Time by ERTH

Gondwana: A Live Journey Through Time.  ERTH Visual and Physical Theatre at the National Museum of Australia directed by Scott Wright. September 24 - October 9 (except Mondays), 11am and 2pm (and 6pm Friday September 30, Saturday October 1).  Bookings: Phone NMA Freecall 1800 558 670; Details: www.nma.gov.au/events/major_events/gondwana/

    Apart from Grand Finals, do not miss Gondwana.  It's a fascinating live theatre museum exhibition which takes you back into "deep time" when Australia, New Zealand, Africa, India and South America were all joined to Antarctica - one huge continent we call Gondwana.

ERTH's genuinely life-size dinosaurs are just amazing.  They move like the real thing, far better than Walking with Dinosaurs, thanks to one-time Canberran puppeteers adviser Peter Wilson and technician Bryony Anderson.  Just you wait for the big one at the end.

The voice-over parts of the soundtrack are a bit acoustically-challenged, being mixed in with very large sounds of ancient evolution, but don't worry.  The story is easy to follow in the action and projections, and you get a very informative sheet to go with the show so you can accurately answer the children's inevitable questions.

If you really want the details, seek out the books by ERTH's palaeontology adviser, Dr Mary White: The Greening of Gondwana, After the Greening, and Listen ... Our Land is Crying.  This show is the first of three which will cover the time up to the dinosaurs, time after the dinosaurs, and the present time and future of Australia.

If for nothing else, you must see the imaginative, beautiful landscape of Gondwana in the time when moss, ferns, and cycads were as tall as today's trees.  After the show you can see how ERTH make whole forests grow, collapse and grow again.

This is excellent theatre in the service of a great museum, where you should also visit the related displays: Platypus and Diprotodon (Tangled Destinies), Emu and Ochre (First Australians) and the Gondwana Plants (in the entrance hall), including Wollemi Pines.  The science is accurate and the drama is engaging, from the goggle-eyed youngsters to very impressed adults I saw on opening day.  A full house, by the way, so book early.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: Phantasmagoria by David Ruby Howe and Tomas Watson

Phantasmagoria by David Ruby Howe and Tomas Watson.  Five Skinny White Guys at The Street Theatre Studio August 24-27, 7.30pm.

    The story of the weird ship Phantasmagoria takes on possible meanings of Titanic proportions in this light-hearted revue-style presentation.  Canberra is renowned for spawning new young theatre groups like coral on the Barrier Reef, without even the requirement of the right tide and full moon, and there is something vaguely Tempest-like in this first production by former Dickson College drama students.  Not quite up to Shakespeare yet, but time may tell.

    From the point of view of the opening night audience largely of friends and relations, the array of definitely abnormal characters combined with an acting style which satirised American sitcoms created bursts of laughter and a sense of anticipation that something seriously risque would appear before our very eyes.  An oft-used technique was the long pause which, in the sitcom, would be filled with meaningful glances.  Here, an existential blank would fail to fill the space as characters were too weird to understand such subtlety.

    I found unfortunately, as in the sitcoms, that the pacing was often excruciatingly slow, especially in the first half in which all the main characters were introduced in short apparently unrelated scenes.  The second half picked up on board Phantasmagoria when the story line became something of a plot.

    It's an achievement to have produced close to 2 hours' entertainment, if still raw in form.  Though not the "innovative comedy" their promotion material claims, there are many touches of originality which these writers can build on and I can see some potential theatrical careers in the offing.

    The four (yes, four) Five Skinny White Guys and the other 13 who performed, designed and operated backstage should certainly take the risk again and push their envelope further into the abyss of absurdity next time.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: President Wilson in Paris by Ron Blair

President Wilson in Paris by Ron Blair.  HIT Productions at Tuggeranong Arts Centre August 16-17.

    The Lesson by Ionesco, The Maids by Genet, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Albee - President Wilson by Ron Blair.  I don't think so.

    But, even if the play doesn't have the sophistication of its forebears, it could have been a much more entertaining night out than I saw on Tuesday.  Described by the Victorian Department of Education (Senior Drama playlist) as an "absurdist comedy thriller", I saw a mild attempt at psycho-realism, some funny bits (mainly in the second half), and nothing very thrilling.  Billed also as "in the style of Hitchcock", this production just did not rise to the required level of horror.

    What a shame, when the actors - especially Henri Szeps (President Wilson) and Deborah Kennedy (Edith Wilson) - are very well-known and highly professional, as is the director, Jennifer Hagan.  In fact I thought relative newcomer Henry Nixon (down and out actor, amateur burglar and Wilson's adviser Colonel House) was the most consistent performer.

    Though it was clever to update the political references and the setting with some nice one-liners, the production needed to go well over the top to highlight the absurdity, create an increasing sense of madness at which we might laugh until we are brought up with shock at the finality of death.  Or, we could have been treated to a rising sense of ghoulish foreboding - with laughs to temporarily break the tension - as we watch Nixon's character writhe until he is finally put out of his misery.

    Either way would have required a bond between the actors, particularly between Szeps and Kennedy as psychopathic husband and wife, which just was not there on the night.  Lines were even fluffed, timing was rarely right, the flow of the play broke too often into little eddies which could be mildly interesting in themselves but were not joined to form a mighty river. 

And so, having gone to see one of the minor icons of Australian theatre, performed by class actors including Henri Szeps who has major icon status, I was disappointed.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: Sharon, Keep Your Hair On! by Gillian Rubinstein

Sharon, Keep Your Hair On! based on books by Gillian Rubinstein.  Patch Theatre directed by Dave Brown at The Playhouse, August 3-6, 6.30pm (1 hour)

    Patch Theatre tells 3 stories in this production - Sharon Keep Your Hair On!, Hooray for the Kafe Karaoke, and Prue Theroux, the Cool Librarian.  The performers are multi-talented singers, musicians, multi-media technicians and communicators with young children (and their parents) in the foyer as well as on stage. 

    Yet despite the high level of professionalism and sophistication, and a genuine educational purpose, I found myself feeling lukewarm - not fully engaged by the performers. Checking around the audience I noticed this was also true of many of the children.  I can certainly recommend the show as an entertainment, with nicely done ironic jokes that most of the children would have missed but their parents enjoyed.  I can recommend it for its inclusiveness of diverse ways of living and its emphasis on reading books.  These strengths come, of course, from Rubinstein's writing.

    I can say I thoroughly enjoyed the energy, timing and terrific musical skills, particularly in the singing of the three women, Astrid Pill, Libby O'Donovan and Catherine Oates.  So why was I not completely satisfied?

    Patch Theatre claims to "create theatre experiences to fuel children's imaginative engagement to feed and enrich their creative play", but their show is so tight and professionally slick that the audience participation became slotted in to the predetermined schedule.  There was not the time or dramatic space allowed for responses from the children to grow, so that the children might feel they were in charge and leading the creativity.  Some parents may remember Monica Trapaga's shows where the littlies and lots of bigger people would be singing and dancing to Monica's encouragement.  I think those children learned more about experiencing live theatre than in Patch's show, because Trapaga worked with her audience rather than worked her audience.  Patch demonstrated theatre to the children; Trapaga had the children play for her.

    My reservations should not hold you back from seeing Sharon, Keep Your Hair On!  The stories are fun, with good intentions.  The show certainly brings the books to life, and should encourage the children to read.  Though I did notice singing along with "I love karaoke" was one of the most enthusiastic episodes, but hardly a time of quiet reflective contemplation with a good book.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: The Girl Who Lived by Adam Loughlin and Paul Quinn

The Girl Who Lived by Adam Loughlin and Paul Quinn.  Bridging the Gap Youth Productions at The Street Theatre until Saturday, 12 noon and 8pm. 1 hour 50 minutes, no interval.

    We are often told that youth are less politically committed today, but this group from Wollongong stands tall for human rights.  They tell the story of the Holocaust, saying it must not remain a footnote in history, just an entry in an encyclopaedia with dates and numbers "but not our voices". 

The Girl Who Lived is an often powerful and confrontational production by 50 young people aged 14 to 21.  The voices of the victims, of the ordinary people persuaded into hatred by propaganda and fear-mongering, and of the perpetrators of torture and industrial-scale mass murder are loud and clear.  So too is the message.  The world must never again "stand by, and watch" as we did then and since in Cambodia, Kosovo, Rwanda ....

    Performers on stage, though not professionals, are totally committed and tightly focussed.  They present an excellent example to the large numbers of teenagers in our school and college drama courses.  Though it may be short notice, every local drama student should endeavour to get to The Street Theatre this week.

    The video production, sound track, set design and technical production are all excellent quality.  Definitely professional standard, and especially effective on The Street's main stage.  Some scenes on stage could be trimmed, but the multi-media is spot on.

    The unnamed girl in the title was found by an SS guard.  She alone survived the gas, was taken out by the guard whose superiors ordered him to shoot her, which he did.  He recorded the event in his diary.  Lest we forget.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: National Institute of Dramatic Art public workshop. Feature article

NIDA - the National Institute of Dramatic Art - comes to Canberra for a week of workshops July 11 - 17. This year they are offering a mix of short courses in the Open Program. 

You don't need to be an experienced actor or to have any special qualifications, but you do need some attitudes.  Like, be prepared to enjoy yourself while you are working hard.  And be ready to learn new and different ways of preparing yourself for a role, letting your imagination work for you, and expressing your character in action.

2 courses are for 12 - 15 years: Acting for Stage and Screen and Acting to Camera.  Shakespeare Made Easy is for anyone 15 years and over.  For 16 years and over, the choices are Acting, Building a Character, Screen Acting, Auditions and Screen Tests, Acting Intensive, Directing Intensive. 

For details check the NIDA website at www.nida.edu.au/short_courses/open/national.

To find out what it will be like I spoke to tutor Simon Bossell.  I last saw him as the young man playing opposite Ruth Cracknell in the quirky road movie Spider and Rose.  He is one of a large team of NIDA tutors which includes Jennifer Hagan (a famous and early NIDA graduate), Sam Worthington (of Water Rats, Backberner, Blue Heelers, Getting Square and Somersault), Nicholas Bishop (currently playing Detective Peter Baker in Home and Away), Nathaniel Dean (AFI Best Supporting Actor in Walking on Water), Katrina Campbell (All Saints and McLeod's Daughters), Gerard Sont (Double Dare, and the ABCTV's Antenna) and Edith Podesta (Sydney stage director and performer at Belvoir St and Sydney Festival).

The list of NIDA graduates is full of the famous from Cate Blanchett, Judy Davis, Steve Bisley to Miranda Otto.  Bossell explained that the short courses will give students a taste of the professional training actors receive at NIDA, but I wanted to know more.  He is a film and a stage actor.  What do you have to learn, and is acting very different on screen compared with on stage?

The difference is about "filling the space" on stage and "pulling it all back" for the camera.  Although stage acting means "finding natural ways of amplifying" and film work means "most of the technique is contained" mainly in your face and hands, both kinds of acting are the same when it comes to your imagination - what's going on in your head.  Bossell was taught by the famous director and teacher Lindy Davies, and described one of her methods he still uses, called "dropping in", which he says is particularly useful for classical theatre, such as his performances for Bell Shakespeare, Sydney Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre Company in A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, Titus Andronicus and A Winter's Tale.

First you prepare by going through the script, finding all the images you can see in the words and relating these pictures in your mind to your personal experiences, so they become your images.  When you read and rehearse the lines, you "breathe in" each image and then "breathe out" the line as you speak it.  Using your breath in this way makes the images real in your imagination so that as you speak the line, you appear to someone watching as if you are the real character.  Going with the images, of course, are the thoughts which come to mind.  As you work to find the character, you focus on these thoughts, and allow yourself to react and to act outwardly in response. 

Working to the camera means you keep your concentration on thinking the thoughts, letting them strike you - this is what is meant by "being in the moment".  The expression on your face, where your eyes focus, how you speak and how you move follows naturally, and will often surprise you.  This is what the camera records.  Some directors want their actors to be self-sufficient, while others take their actors through a process as they film each scene to help create the illusion of real characters on film.

Working on stage means learning to keep focussed on the images and thoughts while making the action and speech fill the space in a theatre.  Bossell says many actors find this difficult.  It's easy to forget the thoughts and get involved in the big movements and voice, but the trick is that it is really the thoughts and the emotions they create which the audience responds to.  What's in the head is what fills the space, not the obvious actions.

So what you can expect from NIDA classes is much more than fun.  The work will be satisfying as you learn to take the first steps in professional training - a taste of what is to come if you decide acting is for you.

NIDA Open Program:
July 11-15 Acting, Acting for Stage and Screen, Building a Character, Screen Acting
July 12-14 Auditions and Screen Tests
July 16-17 Acting Intensive, Acting to Camera, Directing Intensive, Shakespeare Made Easy
Venue: Daramalan College
Information and Bookings:
Phone: (02) 9697 7626
Email: open@nida.edu.au
Website: www.nida.edu.au/short_courses/open/national

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: The Inside Story: Writers, Manuscripts and the Creative Process. Feature article.

Last Saturday at the National Library a remarkable celebration took place - The Inside Story: Writers, Manuscripts and the Creative Process. 

"It's too close for me, too small and too big ... I need to go away." These were the prophetic lines spoken by Peter, the new schoolteacher in a small country town in A Spring Song, the most successful play by Sydney writer Ray Mathew, presented by Twelfth Night Theatre Company in Brisbane in 1958.

Mathew really meant Australia. And leave he did, in 1960 - never to return. After a brief sojourn in Italy and some years in London (where A Spring Song appeared at The Mermaid in 1964), Mathew moved to New York with a friend's introduction to wealthy engineer and businessman Paul Kollsman and his wife, Eva, who became firm friends and literary patrons.  Though he continued to write with a distinctive Australian voice (poetry, plays, novels, art criticisms) without ever becoming a household name, his body of work was significant enough for the National Library to begin archiving his papers in 1977.  After his death in 2002, Eva Kollsman donated more of Mathew's papers, will make a generous bequest to the Library and has begun already with a major donation for this symposium to discuss the cultural heritage value of original manuscripts and the need to collect and preserve writers' original works - the reason for celebration.

But there was also reason for sadness, for among the prominent writers invited to talk to a full house about their fears and delights in having their manuscripts, diaries, notebooks, hard disks and CDs collected by the Library, Alex Buzo's serious ill health prevented him travelling to Canberra.  We wish him well.

John Kinsella has a poem archived which is notable for a mysteriously overlaid policeman's boot print.  Chris Mansell explained how preserving her drafts "keeps the writer honest because you can't deny who you are".  Jack Hibberd's manuscripts are the result of mental fermentation.  He claimed he could put them in order from the tea, coffee, wine and port stains, while guaranteeing there were no stains of self-abuse on his writing.  Discussion before morning tea went to "metatextualising" (which none claimed to be guilty of) - that is, the "really unhealthy" practice of writing for the archivist, with only an eye on posterity.

At the other end of the day, scholar-archivist Susan Woodburn walked us through the Library's 13 kilometres of manuscripts and history since the Commonwealth Literary Fund of 1940, when grants were made by a parliamentary committee on which sat both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.  Henry Handel Richardson's was the first individual collection in 1946.  Woodburn concluded that the archive can "convey immortality - your corpus, if not your hand, will be resurrected."  This referred to her gruesome discovery in a cardboard box behind a curtain on a window ledge in the manuscript room of a cast of the hand of Henry Lawson.

Other writers, researchers and biographers like Michael McGirr, Nadia Wheatley, Tom Shapcott, Adrian Caesar and Lenore Coltheart agonised over ethical issues, sometimes feeling they were invading the privacy of the people whose papers they studied.  But they noted that the discoveries of "who wrote what and when" (in the case of George Johnston and Charmian Clift), how "voice creates character, then character creates plot" (in the changes Mark Twain made as he wrote the first words spoken by Aunt Polly in Tom Sawyer), or how only her letters and diaries can tell us not who Jessie Street was but who she is ("the only Jessie Street I - Coltheart - will ever know") keep the public debate and the people from the past alive.

All speakers were received enthusiastically throughout the day, leading to Philip Mead's talking of the manuscript room as "the book of revelations" and Robyn Holmes' demonstrating on screen how original music scores can not only be seen but heard online.  But the grandest applause of the day went to old stager Bob Ellis, whose speech was a great example of the writer's art, taking the day's theme into a piece of writing well worthy of archiving.

Ellis told a story starting from Dickens who "believed a writer was also a citizen, with a citizen's obligations to report social evils to the authorities, to make corruption known, and bureaucratic folly lampooned and so reduced". 

He proposed that the True Life of John Howard is an Australian story that needs to be told, since "despite 30 years of fame we know almost nothing about him".  Did he approve the sending of an envelope containing white powder to the Indonesian Embassy?  "He, the Prime Minister, and Alexander Downer were beating the story up when nobody else was too fussed about it ... and for a few crucial days the Wood kidnapping, the Corby sentence, the Leong injustice, the Rau injustice, the Chinese defectors, the coming massacres of whales by Japan, the Georgiou uprising, the Vanstone tailspin, the desecrated heroes' bones dug up to build a carpark on Gallipoli, and all the other instances of his cowardice were, as they say, 'overshadowed' by six or seven ounces of skilfully targeted Johnson & Johnson's talcum powder... If I'm wrong, let him take the lie detector test, or say why he won't."

The story ended "It is only by telling all without flinching ... can you illuminate an epoch, or portray a man ... Only by putting yourself, and him, and what Shakespeare called the very age and body of the time at risk, in peril, can you ever find, and know, and tell, the one thing that it is our obligation to tell: the truth." 

This was truly a celebration of writers, manuscripts and the creative process, for which we must thank Eva Kollsman and her friendship for Ray Mathew, home at last in the archives at NLA.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: Loot by Joe Orton

Loot by Joe Orton.  ARTS Theatre Company directed by Adam Maher at ANU Arts Centre DramaLab Studio, June 17 - 25.

    Loot is a hoot, with mystery, satire and police corruption to boot.  And a real dead body.  Kerrie Roberts as the ex-Mrs McLeavy deserves the best of applause for her lifeless flexibility flat out in her coffin, upside down in what was once her wardrobe, strapped up as a taylor's dummy, dragged off stage by her feet, stripped down - so we believe - thankfully behind a screen, re-dressed and returned to her coffin, to the immortal retort that Mr McLeavy had no justifable complaint about this treatment since she began the day dead and was just as dead at the end.

    Living actors came off almost second-best in the face of such competition, but Lucy Goleby as the murdering nurse Fay and Steven Kennedy as Truscott, the most devious detective in the corruption business, stood out as exponents of the Orton style.  British farce has a long history, but Orton invented black farce which twists and turns until logic takes bizarre directions.  Especially neat is McLeavy's gormless son Hal (Michael Beard), the bank robber's off-sider, who always tells the truth and is therefore believed to be lying, ironically by the protector of the law, Truscott, who nevers tells the truth.  The art lies in creating an impossible storyline which has its own line of logic, drawing us in to suspending our disbelief.

    Adam Maher's direction keeps up a cracking pace, sometimes a little too fast and tight for the DramaLab's bouncing acoustics, at least in the upper half of the seating.  But, jokes aside, this production works very well because all the visuals are right and the timing of the action is excellent.

    The program is well worth the cost for the background to the play and the author.  Laughing at Orton's theatre takes a turn for the worse when one is reminded of his awful death, only the year after this play was written, murdered by his partner Kenneth Halliwell because he was jealous of Joe's success.  Black farce indeed.

    ARTS Theatre continues to produce theatre with a purpose, stylish without pretension, and therefore worth seeing.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: Old Time Music Hall

 Old Time Music Hall.  Canberra Repertory directed by Rosemary Hyde at The Playhouse, June 16-25, 8pm

    The 31st Old Time Music Hall is traditional.  There are no surprises, but plenty of good performances.  Though an old friend, who has seen many of these annual celebrations of an almost antique kind of theatre, thought that this year's fare was less varied than the best, I came away satisfied, if not satiated. 

    Master of Ceremonies Russell Brown, in his 30th performance in this role, took a little while to warm up on opening night, but I felt this was not a disadvantage.  It gave the show less of an over-the-top feeling than I've had in some previous years, giving time for the evening to find its feet with more surety and even a little subtlety.  Brown's jokes were as execrable as ever.  One was even excretable, which got the biggest laugh and loudest groan.

    The cast has an excellent team feeling, each person working well when in unison and with humorously played individual characters in group and solo sections.  The traditional male Harmony Quartet became an octet, which allowed an excellent range of voices and variety of attitudes to come to the fore.  Among soloists, I thought Sheena Smith, Jamie Swann and Helen Perris stood out not just for their singing voices but for the warmth of their communication with the audience, and their ability to play the comic and the straight.

    As always, Jeanette Brown's expertise as Manager of Wardrobe shines through every costume.  Pauline Sweeney, pianiste extraordinaire, percussionist Ron Tito and Andrew Kay, for the 30th time directing the music from his piano, form a wonderful team who keep the show moving along in tune with the singers and dancers.  Their work is certainly no less vibrant this year. 

    This is the first year I have seen choreographer Anne Supple's work.  The measure of quality is the variety of dance, the suitability for the numbers and the confidence of the dancers - the whole cast.  The women's tap dancing with farming tools in Run, Rabbit, Run was a particular delight.  On all three points the choreography measures up, and with the music makes the show so coherent that two hours and a half pass very smoothly and pleasantly. 

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: Interview with Alana Valentine. Feature article.

Did you think "Shirley" as I did when I read the name "Valentine"?  Remember the housewife who breaks out of domestic boredom, goes on a permanent holiday to Greece and resumes her maiden name?  Her British suburban husband Mr Bradshaw comes to find her to take her home, but passes without recognising his wife, at her table outside the taverna at the edge of the sea.  "I'm Shirley Valentine.  I'll never be Shirley Bradshaw again."

I didn't ask Alana Valentine the origin of her name.  She is certainly not fictional, but like Willy Russell's Shirley, this Valentine seeks what she calls "magical reality".  Not on a Greek island, however enticing that may be, but through her writing - short stories, poetry, drama for radio, television, film and especially for the stage.  Living in inner-Sydney Redfern, her grandfather a fervent supporter of the Rabbitohs, Valentine didn't wait or deny herself like Shirley, but started young with a BA Communications at UTS in 1982, became a script editor for Grundy Television, wrote some 16 ABC radio programs, 5 film scripts, speeches for Judi Connelli and Max Gillies, 18 playscripts, gained a Grad Dip in Museum Studies (with Merit) at Sydney University in 2001 and in 2004 wrote Episode 89 of McLeod's Daughters, for Millenium Television.

Rather surprised, I wondered why McLeod's Daughters?  After all I remembered Mary Rachel Brown's very affecting performance of Valentine's Radio Silence under the vast wings of G for George at the Australian War Memorial soon after Episode 89 appeared.  Did Valentine need the money?  No, it wasn't the money.  It was to learn the craft of writing to a strict formula with the characters and their way of speaking and acting already decided.  You need this, she explained, to get more work as a television writer.

But what about the sentimentality? I asked.  We discussed craft and content, sentiment rather than sentimental, practicality and the writer's voice, theatre and community - her "magical reality".  What about her current Canberra play, Butterfly Dandy?  Her $20,000 grant from the NSW Ministry for the Arts researching and writing a verbatim theatre piece Parramatta Girls, for Belvoir Street's Company B, about the Parramatta Girls Home and its past residents?  Or Run Rabbit Run retelling South's Rugby League fight for survival, or Savage Grace about a deeply religious man who falls in love with a younger man, "drawn together by sexual passion and driven apart by professional ethics"?  The accolades are there from a NSW Premier's Literary Award in 1989, through a Shakespeare Globe Theatre Writer's Fellowship, a Rodney Seaborn Playwrights' Award, an AWGIE from the Australian Writers' Guild, a Churchill Fellowship, an Australian National Playwrights' Centre Award.  I felt exhausted just talking to her.

Writing to a formula is not Valentine's style.  "Each play is a puzzle to solve.  You solve that puzzle in a different way," she says.  The text is "just one more brush" to add to set, costume, lights and all the other theatrical devices.  She might begin writing with an idea like exploring euthanasia (in Savage Grace), or material from a commission like cross-dressing women performers of 1900 (researched by Julie McElhone who performs in Butterfly Dandy), or making a museum exhibit come alive (in The Prospectors, originally for the Australian National Maritime Museum).  Then she has to find the drama in a character, pair or group who have to face up to a problem and, in trying to solve it, come to a different understanding of themselves.  And they need to be in Australia because that connects them to our community. 

The prospectors of the Gold Rush exhibit are an experienced Californian miner and a young Australian new-chum who gets taken up in the Eureka Stockade, against the American's advice.  Designed for 13 year-olds, the play is about friendship: "Do I do those things because my friend does it?"  Or should I not follow my American friend's opinions? 

In Butterfly Dandy, based on real-life women performers' experiences, Valentine's character Mirabella Martin is talked into performing in a man's costume because it is the 1905 fashion, though she has to struggle with her feelings to do it.  But with her stage success, she finds her feelings change from limited to liberated woman - with significant resonances for us in 2005.  This is not only a "delightful and very funny cabaret" but has been written strictly in the tradition of the Women on a Shoestring Theatre Company.  It is a perfect example of Valentine's central diamond of reality in a magical theatrical setting.  Her art is to make the magic reveal the reality to which we all can respond.

In doing so, Valentine also shows the way for new Australian theatre, drawing audiences like South's Rugby fans to the theatre and into a sense of community.  Live theatre is certainly not dead, according to this Valentine, and it's even better than escape to a Greek island.

© Frank McKone, Canberra