Fame: The Musical. Conceived by David De Silva, book by Jose Fernandez, lyrics by Jacques Levy, music by Steve Margoshes. G-String Productions at The Street Theatre June 27-? 8pm.
The 4 actors I think would have passed in Fame School are Renay Hart as Mabel Washington, Carrol Oormilla as Miss Sherman, Roxane Ruse as Serena Katz and Jessica Taylor as Carmen Diaz. Now I've offended the other 26, let me say that this production of a peculiarly difficult example of musical theatre rocks and rolls along very nicely. On opening night the actors had a strong sense of working together and the orchestra was excellent (plus terrific drumming by Olivia Harkin as Grace 'Lambchops' Lamb) and a good time was had by all on and off the stage.
Fame is, of course, a nightmare for non- or semi-professionals because the student characters are supposed to be young, full of themselves and untrained, but the acting, singing, dancing and musicianship required to create these characters on stage convincingly has to be top-notch. In addition, the script focusses too briefly on too many characters, so making each character stand out requires a high degree of stage presence. This is the quality that each of my 'cum laude' actors had: you felt you had to watch them.
Musical theatre has begun to take its own place in theatre training in recent times. As standards inevitably rise, community based companies like G-String will need to work at higher level skills on stage and improving technical standards. In this show dance and choreography needed to be much more vibrant and original. I hope real New Yorkers close their eyes for the Dancin' on the Sidewalk number. Not all the singing was strong and precisely pitched, and only some numbers were arranged with really dramatic harmonies and cross-rhythms which are essential to American culture. Sound quality has to be a problem when every actor and musician is miked and there is no way enough money for top of the line equipment. Fortunately Chris Neal did well to listen to the flat quality in the first half and get much better definition of the voices for the second half on opening night.
But ignore my quibbles: go for Fame and enjoy.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 28 June 2002
Wednesday, 26 June 2002
2002: 2 Pianos 4 Hands - A Play on Music by Ted Dykstra & Richard Greenblatt.
2 Pianos 4 Hands - A Play on Music by Ted Dykstra & Richard Greenblatt. Directed by Ted Dykstra. Associate Director (Australia), David Lynch. StageWorks in association with Black Swan Theatre. Canberra Playhouse June 25-29 8pm.
This is an autobiographical story of the failure of Canadians Dykstra and Greenblatt to become the great world-renowned pianists that their fathers planned for them. Fortunately the authors have a largely comic view of their lives, becoming successful actors and directors, including playing themselves in this 90 minute two hander.
For the Australian tour, the only two actors who were available and could match the piano playing skills required were Edward Simpson, playing Ted, and Jonathan Gavin as Richard. Both are excellent. Producer Tony Reagan is still keeping his fingers crossed against sickness and accident after 2 years with the show.
2 Pianos is like a concert production of a play. 2 grand pianos are the focus of a simple set with 2 back lit screens. All the characters - Ted, Richard, their parents, and a myriad of piano teachers and examiners - are played by the actor-pianists in an episodic series of vignettes, smoothly strung together without the need for scene or costume changing. Each scene has its appropriate solo and duo piano performance with Bach before and after a bewildering array of classical and pop pieces.
While the characters were still young children, the mixed music somehow reminded me of the comic orchestral concerts put on by Gerard Hoffnung (many decades ago). I began to think that music as the light fantastic was as much as the show would offer. But when it came to the scenes in which each young man, at the age of 17 or so, was confronted by the truth that though they were talented they simply were not going to make it as concert pianists, I certainly felt for them - and wondered about the rights of well-meaning pushy fathers - at least for a few minutes before light-heartedness took over once more.
Though not a great play, 2 Pianos is a neatly constructed musical comedy of a quite different kind, with instant identification for anyone who has faced an audition and, like most of us, failed to become world-renowned.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
This is an autobiographical story of the failure of Canadians Dykstra and Greenblatt to become the great world-renowned pianists that their fathers planned for them. Fortunately the authors have a largely comic view of their lives, becoming successful actors and directors, including playing themselves in this 90 minute two hander.
For the Australian tour, the only two actors who were available and could match the piano playing skills required were Edward Simpson, playing Ted, and Jonathan Gavin as Richard. Both are excellent. Producer Tony Reagan is still keeping his fingers crossed against sickness and accident after 2 years with the show.
2 Pianos is like a concert production of a play. 2 grand pianos are the focus of a simple set with 2 back lit screens. All the characters - Ted, Richard, their parents, and a myriad of piano teachers and examiners - are played by the actor-pianists in an episodic series of vignettes, smoothly strung together without the need for scene or costume changing. Each scene has its appropriate solo and duo piano performance with Bach before and after a bewildering array of classical and pop pieces.
While the characters were still young children, the mixed music somehow reminded me of the comic orchestral concerts put on by Gerard Hoffnung (many decades ago). I began to think that music as the light fantastic was as much as the show would offer. But when it came to the scenes in which each young man, at the age of 17 or so, was confronted by the truth that though they were talented they simply were not going to make it as concert pianists, I certainly felt for them - and wondered about the rights of well-meaning pushy fathers - at least for a few minutes before light-heartedness took over once more.
Though not a great play, 2 Pianos is a neatly constructed musical comedy of a quite different kind, with instant identification for anyone who has faced an audition and, like most of us, failed to become world-renowned.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 20 June 2002
2002: One God, Two Salesmen & Three Humans
One God, Two Salesmen & Three Humans. Opiate Productions at The Street Theatre Studio, June 20-29.
Such a rebellious name for such a tame little group of amateur thespians. Opiate - another new theatre group which Canberra seems to spawn every week or two - claim that in November they will put on The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. Well, they are going to need a lot more theatrical guts and basic skills by then than they presented last Thursday.
The show is in a cabaret format with pre-recorded music (Dave Brubeck, for some odd reason) in between items. There were 3 short plays - Business Lunch by Sean Slater, We Can Get Them For You Wholesale by Neil Gaiman and Man & God, Having a Few Beers & Talking Things Over by Jeffery Scott. I'm guessing that they are all British undergraduate revue items, played here quite nicely. Very pleasantly, in fact. So agreeably indeed that I would like to coin the term Theatre of Innocence for this production.
Though Wholesale was quite a clever script, following the logic of larger sales being cheaper per unit, applied by a company offering to dispose of mammals, including people (finally costing nothing per unit to kill all the world's population), overall rather than an opiate night much of it was soporific. Even live music filling a 30 minute interval in a 90 minute show, quite tunefully done by a group of young men currently called King Prawn & The Seafood Gang - but apparently called something else last week (an in-joke for 2 people in the audience) - only kept me awake because I had a second coffee while they sang.
I suppose I should not expect too much from a group who describe themselves as "a bunch of thespians who like a few laughs, some pretty lights and a good show", but then I only got a few laughs, the lights were very basic, and the show was mildly so-so. Perhaps it's nice not to have to face confrontational theatre, but I would like young bloods to challenge me a little. I shudder when I think of the upcoming Pinter.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Such a rebellious name for such a tame little group of amateur thespians. Opiate - another new theatre group which Canberra seems to spawn every week or two - claim that in November they will put on The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. Well, they are going to need a lot more theatrical guts and basic skills by then than they presented last Thursday.
The show is in a cabaret format with pre-recorded music (Dave Brubeck, for some odd reason) in between items. There were 3 short plays - Business Lunch by Sean Slater, We Can Get Them For You Wholesale by Neil Gaiman and Man & God, Having a Few Beers & Talking Things Over by Jeffery Scott. I'm guessing that they are all British undergraduate revue items, played here quite nicely. Very pleasantly, in fact. So agreeably indeed that I would like to coin the term Theatre of Innocence for this production.
Though Wholesale was quite a clever script, following the logic of larger sales being cheaper per unit, applied by a company offering to dispose of mammals, including people (finally costing nothing per unit to kill all the world's population), overall rather than an opiate night much of it was soporific. Even live music filling a 30 minute interval in a 90 minute show, quite tunefully done by a group of young men currently called King Prawn & The Seafood Gang - but apparently called something else last week (an in-joke for 2 people in the audience) - only kept me awake because I had a second coffee while they sang.
I suppose I should not expect too much from a group who describe themselves as "a bunch of thespians who like a few laughs, some pretty lights and a good show", but then I only got a few laughs, the lights were very basic, and the show was mildly so-so. Perhaps it's nice not to have to face confrontational theatre, but I would like young bloods to challenge me a little. I shudder when I think of the upcoming Pinter.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
2002: The Learning Curve by John Foulcher
The Learning Curve based on the poetry collection by John Foulcher. Huitker Movement Theatre (HMT) directed by George Huitker at Theatre 3, June 19-30. Bookings: 6257 1950.
I felt thoroughly immersed in a Barrier Reef night of the big spawn watching this group movement imagist representation of Foulcher's new book of verse, launched just before the show opened last Wednesday. 41 sticky and confrontational poems narrate the life, death and resurrection of a Catholic secondary school, all in 90 minutes.
Life is sex and sexuality, in action and in denial. Death is not only of natural causes, but sometimes the result of human neglect and macho stupidity. As a cynical atheist from way back, I really had to wonder why anyone bothers about God's intentions any more in the face of the fact of our animal nature and the regular tragedy of death.
I noted that a joke by one teacher about leaving the Church and going over to the Anglicans received a roar of laughter. Huitker, Foulcher and HMT cast, crew and front-of-house are closely connected with Radford College. Does this mean that the school represented on stage is a satire at one remove from the daily experiences of staff and students in this apparently upright College, with its neat uniforms and landscaped grounds next door to the University? I just wondered.
From a theatrical viewpoint, Huitker's work in choreographing the movement and creating imagery seems to me too constrained by the need to maintain the narrative. Perhaps he should now move out into a wider theatrical scene. His work is interesting, often original, but needs more discipline of form if it is to match the best professional work we nowadays often see around Australia.
For example, I would love to see Huitker spend some time with, say, Bangarra Dance Company: then I think we would see a shift into stronger allegorical and interpretative movement, where narrative and emotional messages meld. In The Learning Curve it is Foulcher's writing which holds the piece together, and the performance is well worth seeing as a result. But there is more to come from HMT, I hope.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
I felt thoroughly immersed in a Barrier Reef night of the big spawn watching this group movement imagist representation of Foulcher's new book of verse, launched just before the show opened last Wednesday. 41 sticky and confrontational poems narrate the life, death and resurrection of a Catholic secondary school, all in 90 minutes.
Life is sex and sexuality, in action and in denial. Death is not only of natural causes, but sometimes the result of human neglect and macho stupidity. As a cynical atheist from way back, I really had to wonder why anyone bothers about God's intentions any more in the face of the fact of our animal nature and the regular tragedy of death.
I noted that a joke by one teacher about leaving the Church and going over to the Anglicans received a roar of laughter. Huitker, Foulcher and HMT cast, crew and front-of-house are closely connected with Radford College. Does this mean that the school represented on stage is a satire at one remove from the daily experiences of staff and students in this apparently upright College, with its neat uniforms and landscaped grounds next door to the University? I just wondered.
From a theatrical viewpoint, Huitker's work in choreographing the movement and creating imagery seems to me too constrained by the need to maintain the narrative. Perhaps he should now move out into a wider theatrical scene. His work is interesting, often original, but needs more discipline of form if it is to match the best professional work we nowadays often see around Australia.
For example, I would love to see Huitker spend some time with, say, Bangarra Dance Company: then I think we would see a shift into stronger allegorical and interpretative movement, where narrative and emotional messages meld. In The Learning Curve it is Foulcher's writing which holds the piece together, and the performance is well worth seeing as a result. But there is more to come from HMT, I hope.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Saturday, 15 June 2002
2002: 28th Old Time Music Hall 2002
THEATRE BY FRANK McKONE (DINKUS)
28th Old Time Music Hall 2002. Canberra Repertory at The Playhouse, June 13-22, 8pm.
Director Cathie Clelland and choreographer Katelyn Keys have dragged this show into the modern world this year - a bit of a worry because it might go on for another 28 years.
Music Hall is an annual ritual which at times in the past has been both a pale imitation of the original specifically English genre, and also too close to the sexism and sentimentality of a century ago. This year's show deftly fillets the sexist bones from the traditional material, and surprisingly achieves genuine sentiment. A highlight is the presentation of the song Broken Doll by Julie McElhone Hayes as a puppet. "You made me think you loved me in return: / Don't tell me you were fooling after all! / For if you turn away, you'll be sorry some day / You left behind a broken doll" was so quietly and poignantly sung, with strings attached, that no man in the audience could sit there unashamed.
It was good to see the multicultural section - an ethnic Aussie dance scene, The Snake Gully Swagger, with embarrassing reminders for me of the Tibooburra Hospital Ball circa 1963, where the band consisted of piano, trumpet and drums and every dance was played in 3/4 time. The sense of fun, irony and even true satire has filled in all the gaps of Music Hall as I've experienced it before, and indeed the rendition late in the show of musical director Andrew Kay's The Bliss of the Backyard Burkes showed that satirical commentary on our present lives is more than acceptable in this almost ceremonial event. The representation of Parliament House as the one feature which broke the prime rule of Marion and Walter that nothing should be built on hills, topped by an amazing tableau revealing a definitely loopy National Museum drew perhaps the most enthusiastic response of the audience on Friday.
The band has also expanded: piano, piano and drums. But unlike my Tibooburra friends, Pauline Sweeney, Andrew Kay and Dick Cutler are wonderful musicians and have the acoustics of the Playhouse completely under control. Even through my ageing tinnitus I could hear every singer clearly.
An excellent entertainment this year, already well-booked for the season.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
28th Old Time Music Hall 2002. Canberra Repertory at The Playhouse, June 13-22, 8pm.
Director Cathie Clelland and choreographer Katelyn Keys have dragged this show into the modern world this year - a bit of a worry because it might go on for another 28 years.
Music Hall is an annual ritual which at times in the past has been both a pale imitation of the original specifically English genre, and also too close to the sexism and sentimentality of a century ago. This year's show deftly fillets the sexist bones from the traditional material, and surprisingly achieves genuine sentiment. A highlight is the presentation of the song Broken Doll by Julie McElhone Hayes as a puppet. "You made me think you loved me in return: / Don't tell me you were fooling after all! / For if you turn away, you'll be sorry some day / You left behind a broken doll" was so quietly and poignantly sung, with strings attached, that no man in the audience could sit there unashamed.
It was good to see the multicultural section - an ethnic Aussie dance scene, The Snake Gully Swagger, with embarrassing reminders for me of the Tibooburra Hospital Ball circa 1963, where the band consisted of piano, trumpet and drums and every dance was played in 3/4 time. The sense of fun, irony and even true satire has filled in all the gaps of Music Hall as I've experienced it before, and indeed the rendition late in the show of musical director Andrew Kay's The Bliss of the Backyard Burkes showed that satirical commentary on our present lives is more than acceptable in this almost ceremonial event. The representation of Parliament House as the one feature which broke the prime rule of Marion and Walter that nothing should be built on hills, topped by an amazing tableau revealing a definitely loopy National Museum drew perhaps the most enthusiastic response of the audience on Friday.
The band has also expanded: piano, piano and drums. But unlike my Tibooburra friends, Pauline Sweeney, Andrew Kay and Dick Cutler are wonderful musicians and have the acoustics of the Playhouse completely under control. Even through my ageing tinnitus I could hear every singer clearly.
An excellent entertainment this year, already well-booked for the season.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 26 April 2002
2002: Adult Child/Dead Child by Claire Dowie.
Adult Child/Dead Child by Claire Dowie. Performed by Alexis Beebe, directed by Herman Pretorius. Street Theatre Studio April 25 - May 4, 8.30pm.
I'm glad the writer was originally a stand-up comedian: otherwise Adult Child/Dead Child might have remained just a worthy monologue. Actually, the title should be A Dog Called Benjie. It is only at the point of comic self-realisation near the end that the play becomes genuinely theatrical.
This is not a criticism of this production. The writing creates an effect as if the actor is miming the character as she tells her story. This is reinforced by occasional disembodied voice-over repeats of lines reflecting on the child's experience, later picked up by the child as she gains adulthood.
There is a cleverness in this structure, but it is not truly dramatic until the connection is made between the three Benjies: two dogs and an imaginary friend. At this point we stop watching a rather polemical piece about the mistreatment of a child growing up with dissociative identity disorder (DID) and suddenly find ourselves relating to a real character who has found a way to cope in a world which surrounds her with fear.
The skill in Beebe's acting is in her ability to extract every nuance out of the lines, and especially the repeats of the lines. The mood changes with each attempt on the child's part to take control of her situation, and each consequent knockdown. She achieves a nice sense of the changes through childhood and teenage years, and the extra layer of awareness which adulthood provides.
Clinical psychologist Dr Ross Wilkinson seems to make an excuse in the program notes: "one does not necessarily expect a scientifically accurate portrayal of psychological disorders" in a play. However, my concern is more that a monologue restricts us to the character's perceptions of the truth. She leaves us inclined to blame her parents for causing her psychological problem, yet in adulthood she understands she needs drugs to keep her mental state stable. Which are we to believe - nature or nurture? I think a much more complex drama is required to deal properly with this material.
But Beebe's performance is well worth 80 minutes of your time.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
I'm glad the writer was originally a stand-up comedian: otherwise Adult Child/Dead Child might have remained just a worthy monologue. Actually, the title should be A Dog Called Benjie. It is only at the point of comic self-realisation near the end that the play becomes genuinely theatrical.
This is not a criticism of this production. The writing creates an effect as if the actor is miming the character as she tells her story. This is reinforced by occasional disembodied voice-over repeats of lines reflecting on the child's experience, later picked up by the child as she gains adulthood.
There is a cleverness in this structure, but it is not truly dramatic until the connection is made between the three Benjies: two dogs and an imaginary friend. At this point we stop watching a rather polemical piece about the mistreatment of a child growing up with dissociative identity disorder (DID) and suddenly find ourselves relating to a real character who has found a way to cope in a world which surrounds her with fear.
The skill in Beebe's acting is in her ability to extract every nuance out of the lines, and especially the repeats of the lines. The mood changes with each attempt on the child's part to take control of her situation, and each consequent knockdown. She achieves a nice sense of the changes through childhood and teenage years, and the extra layer of awareness which adulthood provides.
Clinical psychologist Dr Ross Wilkinson seems to make an excuse in the program notes: "one does not necessarily expect a scientifically accurate portrayal of psychological disorders" in a play. However, my concern is more that a monologue restricts us to the character's perceptions of the truth. She leaves us inclined to blame her parents for causing her psychological problem, yet in adulthood she understands she needs drugs to keep her mental state stable. Which are we to believe - nature or nurture? I think a much more complex drama is required to deal properly with this material.
But Beebe's performance is well worth 80 minutes of your time.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 12 April 2002
2002: Raining Talent. Free-Rain Theatre Company. Feature article.
Raining Talent. Free-Rain Theatre Company in association with 19th Hole Productions. Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, April 11-13.
Since its inception Anne Somes' Free-Rain has emphasised productions of well-known plays involving young people as actors and technicians, in recent times usually directed by her daughter, Kelly. Putting on Equus (Peter Shaffer) or Glengarry Glen Ross (David Mamet) has distinguished Free-Rain from other groups like Canberra Youth Theatre, whose work is more usually group devised, or amateur entertainment groups like Supa.
In Raining Talent, Anne Somes is putting her money, with some support from an artsACT grant, into work which looks more like Youth Theatre. The show is a collection of short scripted and choreographed pieces which allow a range of young people between 10 and 21 years of age to display their talents.
Though the material does not make for a thematically cohesive show, the set design by Kelly Somes and choreography by UWS Nepean graduate Kiri Morcombe is stylish and provides a visual frame which holds together well. Individual performances were all up to standard for the age group and levels of experience.
Is there a place for this kind of production from Free-Rain? Somes' position is that she is continuing a mentoring tradition which, for her, began when Jigsaw Theatre Company - the fully professional theatre-in-education team which has now grown into a wide ranging national production company under Greg Lissaman - provided space, technical assistance and administrative help to Free-Rain at the now defunct Currong Theatre.
This backing helped Somes' work become more firmly established and has led to an association with the Canberra Theatre Centre, with technical and administrative support strongly encouraged by David Whitney and his staff. Somes talks of having a "community conscience", looking for opportunities to assist young people to move out of their school environments into the wider world of theatre - and so she has picked up 19th Hole Productions, the ex-Canberra College group led by Soren Jensen.
So Free-Rain's theatrical niche does provide a slightly different experience, complementing Youth Theatre, Tuggeranong Community Arts and the others. Opportunities for young theatricals in Canberra abound.
Free-Rain's next production is Hotel Sorrento by Hannie Rayson, directed by Kelly Somes in August.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Since its inception Anne Somes' Free-Rain has emphasised productions of well-known plays involving young people as actors and technicians, in recent times usually directed by her daughter, Kelly. Putting on Equus (Peter Shaffer) or Glengarry Glen Ross (David Mamet) has distinguished Free-Rain from other groups like Canberra Youth Theatre, whose work is more usually group devised, or amateur entertainment groups like Supa.
In Raining Talent, Anne Somes is putting her money, with some support from an artsACT grant, into work which looks more like Youth Theatre. The show is a collection of short scripted and choreographed pieces which allow a range of young people between 10 and 21 years of age to display their talents.
Though the material does not make for a thematically cohesive show, the set design by Kelly Somes and choreography by UWS Nepean graduate Kiri Morcombe is stylish and provides a visual frame which holds together well. Individual performances were all up to standard for the age group and levels of experience.
Is there a place for this kind of production from Free-Rain? Somes' position is that she is continuing a mentoring tradition which, for her, began when Jigsaw Theatre Company - the fully professional theatre-in-education team which has now grown into a wide ranging national production company under Greg Lissaman - provided space, technical assistance and administrative help to Free-Rain at the now defunct Currong Theatre.
This backing helped Somes' work become more firmly established and has led to an association with the Canberra Theatre Centre, with technical and administrative support strongly encouraged by David Whitney and his staff. Somes talks of having a "community conscience", looking for opportunities to assist young people to move out of their school environments into the wider world of theatre - and so she has picked up 19th Hole Productions, the ex-Canberra College group led by Soren Jensen.
So Free-Rain's theatrical niche does provide a slightly different experience, complementing Youth Theatre, Tuggeranong Community Arts and the others. Opportunities for young theatricals in Canberra abound.
Free-Rain's next production is Hotel Sorrento by Hannie Rayson, directed by Kelly Somes in August.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Saturday, 6 April 2002
2002: The Dreamers by Jack Davis
The Dreamers by Jack Davis. Directed by Wesley Enoch. Starring Rachael Mazza and Kevin Smith. Company B Belvoir at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, March 27 - April 21 8pm.
Reviewing The Price (Ensemble Theatre, Sydney) recently, I lamented the lack of an Australian Arthur Miller. This production of The Dreamers (1982) has put me to shame. Noongar Aboriginal writer Jack Davis (1917-2000) proves to be our equivalent of Miller, Tennessee Williams and the seminal Irish playwright J.M.Synge all rolled into one.
Belvoir B's 2002 program is, I think, the most worth subscribing to within easy reach of Canberra: to come are David Hare, Patrick White, Sam Shepard and new Sydney writer Valentina Levkowicz. There is still time to catch The Dreamers.
Enoch notes "The chance to return to such classic Indigenous plays, as The Dreamers, helps us see what the future can be. They become the measure by which we mark how much we've grown or not. These plays are our history, a written and spoken account of our world. We sit and watch our aunts and cousins and uncles and grandparents played out through these characters on stage, not always how we would want ourselves portrayed but with honesty - warts and all. How else can we change?" With advice from the respected Noongar theatre artist Lynette Narkle, Enoch has created a fitting memorial to the passing of Jack Davis, who wrote and then played the original Uncle Worru 20 years ago.
Here we see the sad ending of an honorable everyman under pressure from insensitive society, just like Willy Loman in Miller's Death of a Salesman - and with just as much power in Dolly's final speech as in Linda Loman's last lament. Rachael Mazza brings out Dolly's all-enduring strength, her humour, and her understanding of reality as if such acting is simple to achieve. But we all had tears welling as she carried in Uncle Worru's shoes to symbolically pass on to the next generation. And I have to say I found Kevin Smith's Uncle Worru much more endearing than the salesman in Miller's play.
Then this production shows a play of memories, so much like Williams' The Glass Menagerie - with characters' evocative speeches half out of the frame of the play, yet within it and reflecting on it - that the effect on me was quite eerie. Encompassing all is music and dance of the dreaming, so strongly reminiscent of Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows and the sense that the ancient spirits are drawing the old man away. Uncle Worru, like Deirdre, teaches us to "draw a little back with the squabbling of fools when I am broken up with misery" and can equally say "I have put away sorrow like a shoe that is worn out and muddy, for it is I have had a life that will be envied by great companies."
To create an Indigenous play so meaningful across ancient and modern cultures is a great wonder. I respect the earlier generation of Jack Davis's era who often had to relearn their own languages and teach themselves the ways of non-indigenous theatre; and now the generation of thoroughly professional performers represented in this production of The Dreamers, where truth is experienced as it should be in the theatre.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewing The Price (Ensemble Theatre, Sydney) recently, I lamented the lack of an Australian Arthur Miller. This production of The Dreamers (1982) has put me to shame. Noongar Aboriginal writer Jack Davis (1917-2000) proves to be our equivalent of Miller, Tennessee Williams and the seminal Irish playwright J.M.Synge all rolled into one.
Belvoir B's 2002 program is, I think, the most worth subscribing to within easy reach of Canberra: to come are David Hare, Patrick White, Sam Shepard and new Sydney writer Valentina Levkowicz. There is still time to catch The Dreamers.
Enoch notes "The chance to return to such classic Indigenous plays, as The Dreamers, helps us see what the future can be. They become the measure by which we mark how much we've grown or not. These plays are our history, a written and spoken account of our world. We sit and watch our aunts and cousins and uncles and grandparents played out through these characters on stage, not always how we would want ourselves portrayed but with honesty - warts and all. How else can we change?" With advice from the respected Noongar theatre artist Lynette Narkle, Enoch has created a fitting memorial to the passing of Jack Davis, who wrote and then played the original Uncle Worru 20 years ago.
Here we see the sad ending of an honorable everyman under pressure from insensitive society, just like Willy Loman in Miller's Death of a Salesman - and with just as much power in Dolly's final speech as in Linda Loman's last lament. Rachael Mazza brings out Dolly's all-enduring strength, her humour, and her understanding of reality as if such acting is simple to achieve. But we all had tears welling as she carried in Uncle Worru's shoes to symbolically pass on to the next generation. And I have to say I found Kevin Smith's Uncle Worru much more endearing than the salesman in Miller's play.
Then this production shows a play of memories, so much like Williams' The Glass Menagerie - with characters' evocative speeches half out of the frame of the play, yet within it and reflecting on it - that the effect on me was quite eerie. Encompassing all is music and dance of the dreaming, so strongly reminiscent of Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows and the sense that the ancient spirits are drawing the old man away. Uncle Worru, like Deirdre, teaches us to "draw a little back with the squabbling of fools when I am broken up with misery" and can equally say "I have put away sorrow like a shoe that is worn out and muddy, for it is I have had a life that will be envied by great companies."
To create an Indigenous play so meaningful across ancient and modern cultures is a great wonder. I respect the earlier generation of Jack Davis's era who often had to relearn their own languages and teach themselves the ways of non-indigenous theatre; and now the generation of thoroughly professional performers represented in this production of The Dreamers, where truth is experienced as it should be in the theatre.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Saturday, 2 March 2002
2002: Raising the Curtain: Performance in Cultural Institutions. Feature article.
Enlightening or embarrassing? This is what the London Science Museum wondered, back in 1993, about putting theatre performances into its exhibits.
Their evaluation showed embarrassment certainly was not an issue. 95% of visitors thought drama in the museum was a good idea. 90% felt actors made exhibits more memorable. 93% agreed that actors tell more than labels. Enlightenment clearly shone through.
Raising the Curtain: Performance in Cultural Institutions, recently held at the National Museum of Australia (NMA), was Australia's first national conference. 3 exciting, inspiring days brought together museum performers - actors, musicians, storytellers, puppeteers, directors and writers - with museum staff from all over Australia - among others, Sovereign Hill, Old Melbourne Gaol, Powerhouse, Historic Houses, even Melbourne Zoo and, of course, Old Parliament House, Questacon and NMA in Canberra.
Talk and performances were given focus by Catherine Hughes, of Boston's Museum of Science and IMTAL (International Museum Theatre Alliance), who began her keynote speech as Mary Anning (who discovered the first complete fossil remains of an icthyosaur at the age of 11 in the year 1812) and ended the conference with a lecture and workshop on how to evaluate the successes - or failures - of performance programs in museums. People will flock to a show with Titanic in the title, she explained, but how do you present the drama to make people face up to the unpleasant facts of the human errors in sinking the unsinkable. She played a very observant, humorous crab for this purpose, but how do you find out what the audience learned from the play? And was it what you hoped they would learn?
I'll get back to that later, but in the meantime how do you deal with a slight figure in an orange boiler suit and spacesuit-looking hat who asks you about the audition? Audition?? I thought I was attending a session on "Structuring a performance program". Well, said Robert Bunzli (Performance Manager, The Excited Particles, Questacon), the audition was yesterday. Ooops! But I've come all the way from Perth and I was sure it's still Thursday. OK, said soft-hearted Robert, I'll give you five minutes to explain, in your own words, Newton's Laws of Motion.
So we learned that if you stand a cow on the stage it will stay there forever if you don't do anything to it. But if you kick the cow into the audience, not counting gravity and air resistance, it will go on in a straight line forever unless something stops it - like that lady. And if you pretend to be a space ship, and the orange person tries to repair you but drifts away, and she's forgotten to attach herself with a rope, then she can throw her hammer away from the space ship and this will make her drift back towards it again.
So the slight orange person got the job as an Excited Particle, and our evaluation was excellent. And in similar vein we found out about "What's happening in Australia"; "Why do we use performance and how does this add value to the visitor experience:perspectives from cultural institutions"; "Who are the audiences we are trying to reach with performance? What is the nature of the experience for these audiences?"; and "What models have been used for performance partnerships? How are they formed and what are the benefits for each party?" and so on.
Put theatrical people together with these typecast conference topics, and you'd be amazed at the laughter, especially from Canberra Youth Theatre's Linda McHugh. Watch a professional performer, a top-class administrator, and a brilliant academic, all rolled in one Catherine Hughes, and you know this was a rare conference, where you actually learned new techniques for qualitative evaluation (Personal Meaning Mapping by John Falk) which shows you short-term and long-term change in people's understanding before and after the museum visit.
Why all this structuring, evaluation and even name definition (like don't say "theatre" - say "performance" so musicians are not left out; or "cultural institution - ugh!")? Well, museums have a long history of continual diversification, from basically natural history in the nineteenth century, adding technology and science in the first half of the twentieth, and social history in the last 25 years. In Canada they call theirs the Museum of Civilisation. So now we have museums with multifaceted all-encompassing exhibits, and lots of specialist museums in places like old gaols or historic houses. All of which can benefit powerfully from integrating performances into their exhibitions, without embarrassment and lots more enlightenment.
It all costs pots of money, expenditure which needs justification. Performance in museums enhances the visitor's experience - it's money better spent than merely static or even electronic displays. The living performer makes the difference, as proper evaluations show.
Before long there will be IMTAL Australia (we'll host the 2005 International Conference). Go to www.mos.org/imtal if you want to keep up with international developments (that's at the Museum of Science website in Boston). If you really want to know about qualitative evaluation (you could use Personal Meaning Mapping for almost any kind of learning program) go to Dr. John Falk, Director, Institute for Learning Innovation, Annapolis, MD USA
www.iinet.org/communicating/aam2000/falktransform.html. And at the National Museum of Australia contact Daina Harvey d.harvey@nma.gov.au or phone 6208 5000.
Raising the Curtain: Performance in Cultural Institutions, February 28 - March 2 2002, was hosted by the National Museum of Australia, Old Parliament House, Questacon and The University of Western Sydney School of Contemporary Arts.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Their evaluation showed embarrassment certainly was not an issue. 95% of visitors thought drama in the museum was a good idea. 90% felt actors made exhibits more memorable. 93% agreed that actors tell more than labels. Enlightenment clearly shone through.
Raising the Curtain: Performance in Cultural Institutions, recently held at the National Museum of Australia (NMA), was Australia's first national conference. 3 exciting, inspiring days brought together museum performers - actors, musicians, storytellers, puppeteers, directors and writers - with museum staff from all over Australia - among others, Sovereign Hill, Old Melbourne Gaol, Powerhouse, Historic Houses, even Melbourne Zoo and, of course, Old Parliament House, Questacon and NMA in Canberra.
Talk and performances were given focus by Catherine Hughes, of Boston's Museum of Science and IMTAL (International Museum Theatre Alliance), who began her keynote speech as Mary Anning (who discovered the first complete fossil remains of an icthyosaur at the age of 11 in the year 1812) and ended the conference with a lecture and workshop on how to evaluate the successes - or failures - of performance programs in museums. People will flock to a show with Titanic in the title, she explained, but how do you present the drama to make people face up to the unpleasant facts of the human errors in sinking the unsinkable. She played a very observant, humorous crab for this purpose, but how do you find out what the audience learned from the play? And was it what you hoped they would learn?
I'll get back to that later, but in the meantime how do you deal with a slight figure in an orange boiler suit and spacesuit-looking hat who asks you about the audition? Audition?? I thought I was attending a session on "Structuring a performance program". Well, said Robert Bunzli (Performance Manager, The Excited Particles, Questacon), the audition was yesterday. Ooops! But I've come all the way from Perth and I was sure it's still Thursday. OK, said soft-hearted Robert, I'll give you five minutes to explain, in your own words, Newton's Laws of Motion.
So we learned that if you stand a cow on the stage it will stay there forever if you don't do anything to it. But if you kick the cow into the audience, not counting gravity and air resistance, it will go on in a straight line forever unless something stops it - like that lady. And if you pretend to be a space ship, and the orange person tries to repair you but drifts away, and she's forgotten to attach herself with a rope, then she can throw her hammer away from the space ship and this will make her drift back towards it again.
So the slight orange person got the job as an Excited Particle, and our evaluation was excellent. And in similar vein we found out about "What's happening in Australia"; "Why do we use performance and how does this add value to the visitor experience:perspectives from cultural institutions"; "Who are the audiences we are trying to reach with performance? What is the nature of the experience for these audiences?"; and "What models have been used for performance partnerships? How are they formed and what are the benefits for each party?" and so on.
Put theatrical people together with these typecast conference topics, and you'd be amazed at the laughter, especially from Canberra Youth Theatre's Linda McHugh. Watch a professional performer, a top-class administrator, and a brilliant academic, all rolled in one Catherine Hughes, and you know this was a rare conference, where you actually learned new techniques for qualitative evaluation (Personal Meaning Mapping by John Falk) which shows you short-term and long-term change in people's understanding before and after the museum visit.
Why all this structuring, evaluation and even name definition (like don't say "theatre" - say "performance" so musicians are not left out; or "cultural institution - ugh!")? Well, museums have a long history of continual diversification, from basically natural history in the nineteenth century, adding technology and science in the first half of the twentieth, and social history in the last 25 years. In Canada they call theirs the Museum of Civilisation. So now we have museums with multifaceted all-encompassing exhibits, and lots of specialist museums in places like old gaols or historic houses. All of which can benefit powerfully from integrating performances into their exhibitions, without embarrassment and lots more enlightenment.
It all costs pots of money, expenditure which needs justification. Performance in museums enhances the visitor's experience - it's money better spent than merely static or even electronic displays. The living performer makes the difference, as proper evaluations show.
Before long there will be IMTAL Australia (we'll host the 2005 International Conference). Go to www.mos.org/imtal if you want to keep up with international developments (that's at the Museum of Science website in Boston). If you really want to know about qualitative evaluation (you could use Personal Meaning Mapping for almost any kind of learning program) go to Dr. John Falk, Director, Institute for Learning Innovation, Annapolis, MD USA
www.iinet.org/communicating/aam2000/falktransform.html. And at the National Museum of Australia contact Daina Harvey d.harvey@nma.gov.au or phone 6208 5000.
Raising the Curtain: Performance in Cultural Institutions, February 28 - March 2 2002, was hosted by the National Museum of Australia, Old Parliament House, Questacon and The University of Western Sydney School of Contemporary Arts.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 27 February 2002
2002: Catherine Hughes, founder of the International Museum Theatre Alliance. News article
Catherine Hughes, Science Theatre Coordinator at the Boston Science Museum USA and founder of the International Museum Theatre Alliance (IMTA) arrived in Canberra yesterday (Wednesday 27/2/02). She is the keynote speaker at the National Forum on Performance in Cultural Institutions being held at the National Museum of Australia (NMA) from today (Thursday 28/2/02) until Saturday (2/3/02), jointly hosted by NMA and the School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney.
The Forum is a "self-examination" by museums across Australia of why theatrical performances should be used, what audiences learn from seeing them, and issues about performances such as censorship by funding bodies and sponsors. Institutions represented include Powerhouse Museum (Sydney), Questacon (Canberra), Historic Houses Trust NSW, Old Parliament House, Melbourne Museum and Australian National Maritime Museum, as well as NMA.
Hughes' main theme, based on research into neuroscience and the role of emotions and storytelling in memory and learning, is that theatre-in-education performances should be the core of a museum. Actors may represent conflicting viewpoints relating to museum exhibits, making theatre a "forum for debate, discussion and provocation: a safe place to examine difficult topics." This is in keeping with the new developments in museums, such as NMA whose charter emphasises showing Australian people past and present in the Australian environment.
Featured in the National Forum are well-known local performers John Shortis and Moya Simpson, The Jigsaw Company, Canberra Youth Theatre and Questacon's performance team Excited Particles, as well as CommonGround, Circus Solarus, Epoch Creations and others from interstate.
A key issue for the Forum will be the proper training of theatre professionals for museum performance. Hughes states the need for specialist high quality university courses as strands in drama-in-education and theatre training, to ensure "a more powerful learning experience."
Contact Daina Harvey at NMA for more information.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
The Forum is a "self-examination" by museums across Australia of why theatrical performances should be used, what audiences learn from seeing them, and issues about performances such as censorship by funding bodies and sponsors. Institutions represented include Powerhouse Museum (Sydney), Questacon (Canberra), Historic Houses Trust NSW, Old Parliament House, Melbourne Museum and Australian National Maritime Museum, as well as NMA.
Hughes' main theme, based on research into neuroscience and the role of emotions and storytelling in memory and learning, is that theatre-in-education performances should be the core of a museum. Actors may represent conflicting viewpoints relating to museum exhibits, making theatre a "forum for debate, discussion and provocation: a safe place to examine difficult topics." This is in keeping with the new developments in museums, such as NMA whose charter emphasises showing Australian people past and present in the Australian environment.
Featured in the National Forum are well-known local performers John Shortis and Moya Simpson, The Jigsaw Company, Canberra Youth Theatre and Questacon's performance team Excited Particles, as well as CommonGround, Circus Solarus, Epoch Creations and others from interstate.
A key issue for the Forum will be the proper training of theatre professionals for museum performance. Hughes states the need for specialist high quality university courses as strands in drama-in-education and theatre training, to ensure "a more powerful learning experience."
Contact Daina Harvey at NMA for more information.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 26 February 2002
2002: Museums: Panacea or Provocateur. Feature article
I went along to the panel discussion Museums: Panacea or Provocateur at the National Museum of Australia last Tuesday looking for controversy. Here were Elaine Gurian, former deputy director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Richard West, director of the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian, and our own Dawn Casey, director of NMA. Surely from this mix of Jewish, Cheyenne and Aboriginal, provocation would be the order of the day.
I copped it, from Ms Gurian, who complained that the media only look for the bad news, when there is also small news, big news and especially good news which is news too. This arose from the case of the Enola Gay exhibition which, the Smithsonian was told, should be a celebration, not the horrible truth they had planned on showing. I suppose celebrating dropping an atom bomb on thousands of people is like celebrating the more recent September 11 suicide hi-jack bombs, which also became part of the discussion.
This led to good news indeed: how museums in USA "thought for the first time" that this event "had something to do with them". Gurian explained, as examples, how NY citizens went to see the Islam collection at the Metropolitan and children's museums took on a counselling role, seeing these as a good sign "even if the numbers were small" of change in museums away from places of the fusty dead towards what West called "civic spaces".
Somehow the panacea and the provocative merged into the idea of museums as a safe means for all to "engage in broader discourse", as "forums" which to be effective "need to be inclusive so that everybody should feel safe because this enlarges discourse". The Americans were so nice about it all, even though as West, the Cheyenne lawyer, had previously mentioned, the Bush administration could have consulted the Native Americans "who have a great deal of experience of being attacked in their own homeland." And so our Dawn stirred things up by bringing the issue home: "Some people would argue that this (the NMA) is not a safe place" because they find some exhibits disturbing, or believe the truth is not being told.
The philosophical theme settled on the museum - as educational, entertaining, multilayered rather than linear, catering for all communities and differing world views - as an institution whose object is to open minds, not to be a provocateur for its own sake. As more countries become multicultural, each cultural community needs "a place to stand". Geoffrey Blainey and John Mulvaney were mentioned as reaching agreement that the National Museum of Australia should not give coverage to communities according to how long they had been here, but each should have their own exhibitions. Otherwise, by my calculations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders would have 99.6% of the Museum or 99.75%, according to which theory you follow: 45,000 or 80,000 years in Australia.
It was Casey who was upfront: "If we didn't offend anyone, we would be a very bland museum indeed"; and it was an astute questioner who recalled how public perception is still stereotyped, represented by the Prime Minister exclaiming at the opening of NMA "It's not at all like a museum!", which she thought was a "very positive view - for him."
Led by the ABC's Michelle Rayner (hear the full thing on Hindsight, Radio National 2pm Sunday March 13) the discussion ranged over how a "collection" has to be redefined according to who is the authority and who is responsible. When Hopi people came to see their objects in the National Museum of the American Indian, they took the opportunity to ceremonially scatter pollen and seeds, while according to West, two conservators fainted at the thought of mice in "their" exhibit.
In the end this slight representative of the media found the session rather more bland than he had hoped for. As Ms Rayner concluded, it's an "ongoing debate" - except that all three speakers agreed with each other on almost every point. If only there had been someone to stand up for the musty and fusty, for the old-style "cool" museum rather the "hot" modern monstrosity, to defend the ancient and bent researchers of the past who, like some librarians I have known who wouldn't let you touch the books, were described by Mr West as "too proprietary".
So, let the revolution roll on. I wonder if the Prime Minister will go back to see how they treat the Tampa and the "children overboard" episode (as part of the great migration story according to Dawn Casey). And I wonder how they will exhibit the Governor General, the Queen and the special CHOGM goblets. I think I could get quite excited by a "hot" museum, after all.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
I copped it, from Ms Gurian, who complained that the media only look for the bad news, when there is also small news, big news and especially good news which is news too. This arose from the case of the Enola Gay exhibition which, the Smithsonian was told, should be a celebration, not the horrible truth they had planned on showing. I suppose celebrating dropping an atom bomb on thousands of people is like celebrating the more recent September 11 suicide hi-jack bombs, which also became part of the discussion.
This led to good news indeed: how museums in USA "thought for the first time" that this event "had something to do with them". Gurian explained, as examples, how NY citizens went to see the Islam collection at the Metropolitan and children's museums took on a counselling role, seeing these as a good sign "even if the numbers were small" of change in museums away from places of the fusty dead towards what West called "civic spaces".
Somehow the panacea and the provocative merged into the idea of museums as a safe means for all to "engage in broader discourse", as "forums" which to be effective "need to be inclusive so that everybody should feel safe because this enlarges discourse". The Americans were so nice about it all, even though as West, the Cheyenne lawyer, had previously mentioned, the Bush administration could have consulted the Native Americans "who have a great deal of experience of being attacked in their own homeland." And so our Dawn stirred things up by bringing the issue home: "Some people would argue that this (the NMA) is not a safe place" because they find some exhibits disturbing, or believe the truth is not being told.
The philosophical theme settled on the museum - as educational, entertaining, multilayered rather than linear, catering for all communities and differing world views - as an institution whose object is to open minds, not to be a provocateur for its own sake. As more countries become multicultural, each cultural community needs "a place to stand". Geoffrey Blainey and John Mulvaney were mentioned as reaching agreement that the National Museum of Australia should not give coverage to communities according to how long they had been here, but each should have their own exhibitions. Otherwise, by my calculations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders would have 99.6% of the Museum or 99.75%, according to which theory you follow: 45,000 or 80,000 years in Australia.
It was Casey who was upfront: "If we didn't offend anyone, we would be a very bland museum indeed"; and it was an astute questioner who recalled how public perception is still stereotyped, represented by the Prime Minister exclaiming at the opening of NMA "It's not at all like a museum!", which she thought was a "very positive view - for him."
Led by the ABC's Michelle Rayner (hear the full thing on Hindsight, Radio National 2pm Sunday March 13) the discussion ranged over how a "collection" has to be redefined according to who is the authority and who is responsible. When Hopi people came to see their objects in the National Museum of the American Indian, they took the opportunity to ceremonially scatter pollen and seeds, while according to West, two conservators fainted at the thought of mice in "their" exhibit.
In the end this slight representative of the media found the session rather more bland than he had hoped for. As Ms Rayner concluded, it's an "ongoing debate" - except that all three speakers agreed with each other on almost every point. If only there had been someone to stand up for the musty and fusty, for the old-style "cool" museum rather the "hot" modern monstrosity, to defend the ancient and bent researchers of the past who, like some librarians I have known who wouldn't let you touch the books, were described by Mr West as "too proprietary".
So, let the revolution roll on. I wonder if the Prime Minister will go back to see how they treat the Tampa and the "children overboard" episode (as part of the great migration story according to Dawn Casey). And I wonder how they will exhibit the Governor General, the Queen and the special CHOGM goblets. I think I could get quite excited by a "hot" museum, after all.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 13 February 2002
2002: Your Slip is Showing by Christa de Jager and Liliana Bogatko
Your Slip is Showing by Christa de Jager and Liliana Bogatko. Empty Spaces Theatre Company at The Street Theatre Studio February 12-14 7pm. 2002 National Multicultural Festival.
What a little surprise! - a kind of light version of Waiting for Godot from a women's perspective with a reverse twist at the end. Called "uniquely weird" in the program, sometimes absurdly opaque like Beckett's play, here are an ex-South African and an ex-Pole waiting for a dream which they can't define.
Is "Mr Man" - in European seductive mode, or as tough Boer macho, or even as Aussie cork-hatted beery couch potato Norm - the dream come true? Well no, not really - just as Pozzo and Lucky can never be Godot, who, as the little boy tells Estragon and Vladimir, will not come today.
But our women tonight, reduced to their underwear by Mr Man's mean saxophone, hear the wind in the fog, and find the gates of emigration and immigration. Only when they understand that they cannot know where they are going, do they pass through the final gate to independence from Mr Man, shuffling him off to a lonely dim spotlight for his last expiration on the sax. Godot comes for these women: maybe this is what Australia offers? The Lucky Country indeed!
Dirk Zeylmans van Emmichoven - Mr Man - of Dutch-Indonesian origin, says nothing except through mime and his saxophone. His improvisations would do Clinton proud in his relations with Monica, and are certainly a gem to watch and hear. Bogatko is beguiling, extracting a virtual cheer from the opening night audience especially for her vacuum cleaning climactic. While de Jager, always with proper reservations, held the play together thematically with a kind of lean strength.
Termed a "workshopped play", without a separate director, Your Slip is Showing is the first production for this new local company. If a Multicultural Festival draws such people out of our community to explore their experiences in such interesting ways, then it has fulfilled a valuable role. I look forward to more work from Empty Spaces. To rephrase Peter Brook: A woman walks across this empty space whilst someone is watching her, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
What a little surprise! - a kind of light version of Waiting for Godot from a women's perspective with a reverse twist at the end. Called "uniquely weird" in the program, sometimes absurdly opaque like Beckett's play, here are an ex-South African and an ex-Pole waiting for a dream which they can't define.
Is "Mr Man" - in European seductive mode, or as tough Boer macho, or even as Aussie cork-hatted beery couch potato Norm - the dream come true? Well no, not really - just as Pozzo and Lucky can never be Godot, who, as the little boy tells Estragon and Vladimir, will not come today.
But our women tonight, reduced to their underwear by Mr Man's mean saxophone, hear the wind in the fog, and find the gates of emigration and immigration. Only when they understand that they cannot know where they are going, do they pass through the final gate to independence from Mr Man, shuffling him off to a lonely dim spotlight for his last expiration on the sax. Godot comes for these women: maybe this is what Australia offers? The Lucky Country indeed!
Dirk Zeylmans van Emmichoven - Mr Man - of Dutch-Indonesian origin, says nothing except through mime and his saxophone. His improvisations would do Clinton proud in his relations with Monica, and are certainly a gem to watch and hear. Bogatko is beguiling, extracting a virtual cheer from the opening night audience especially for her vacuum cleaning climactic. While de Jager, always with proper reservations, held the play together thematically with a kind of lean strength.
Termed a "workshopped play", without a separate director, Your Slip is Showing is the first production for this new local company. If a Multicultural Festival draws such people out of our community to explore their experiences in such interesting ways, then it has fulfilled a valuable role. I look forward to more work from Empty Spaces. To rephrase Peter Brook: A woman walks across this empty space whilst someone is watching her, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
2002: Flowers Aren't Enough by Naomi Ackerman
Flowers Aren't Enough written and performed by Naomi Ackerman. 2002 National Multicultural Festival at The Street Theatre Studio February 12-14 8pm.
Naomi Ackerman, as an experienced professional actor, was engaged by the Jerusalem Ministry of Welfare to research, write and perform a theatre-in-education piece dealing with domestic violence and abuse. Flowers Aren't Enough weaves together elements of true stories of women in refuges in Israel into the fictional Michal's story of her ideals of love and marriage destroyed by a lover and husband for whom power over her is a social necessity. Verbal put downs, anger and steadily escalating physical violence are played out between bouts of apparently real contrition, promises never to do such things to her again, and loving behaviour which leave her feeling guilty, powerless and finally suicidal.
Only at this point is her plight made visible to her parents, and only because her husband leaves her alone in the hospital for ten days, is she able to think clearly: he has no right to take her life; she has no right to take her life; and she has every right to seek professional help and to escape the cycle of violence imposed on her.
Ackerman's script and her performance of it is rivetting for all its 50 minutes, but she makes it clear, coming back on stage out of character, that the follow-up discussion of the issues in the story is the most important part of the evening. Certainly on opening night there was no limit except time constraints to the questions. In her answers, Ackerman was able to draw on her experiences in performing some 400 times, to women's groups, police, prisoners, high school students in Israel (where she stated that dealing with men's use of violence for power is an "interesting issue"), in USA, in India and now in Australia, with her current tour to take in Hong Kong, New Zealand, Hawaii and North America.
She has found everywhere the same conflict over the assumption of power by men over women, with different responses in different cultures, according to the opportunities for women and men to seek professional help, and for women to leave abusive situations. Her work is a powerful and sobering message: respect requires restraint from violence, physical and especially verbal, for "words can destroy your soul".
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Naomi Ackerman, as an experienced professional actor, was engaged by the Jerusalem Ministry of Welfare to research, write and perform a theatre-in-education piece dealing with domestic violence and abuse. Flowers Aren't Enough weaves together elements of true stories of women in refuges in Israel into the fictional Michal's story of her ideals of love and marriage destroyed by a lover and husband for whom power over her is a social necessity. Verbal put downs, anger and steadily escalating physical violence are played out between bouts of apparently real contrition, promises never to do such things to her again, and loving behaviour which leave her feeling guilty, powerless and finally suicidal.
Only at this point is her plight made visible to her parents, and only because her husband leaves her alone in the hospital for ten days, is she able to think clearly: he has no right to take her life; she has no right to take her life; and she has every right to seek professional help and to escape the cycle of violence imposed on her.
Ackerman's script and her performance of it is rivetting for all its 50 minutes, but she makes it clear, coming back on stage out of character, that the follow-up discussion of the issues in the story is the most important part of the evening. Certainly on opening night there was no limit except time constraints to the questions. In her answers, Ackerman was able to draw on her experiences in performing some 400 times, to women's groups, police, prisoners, high school students in Israel (where she stated that dealing with men's use of violence for power is an "interesting issue"), in USA, in India and now in Australia, with her current tour to take in Hong Kong, New Zealand, Hawaii and North America.
She has found everywhere the same conflict over the assumption of power by men over women, with different responses in different cultures, according to the opportunities for women and men to seek professional help, and for women to leave abusive situations. Her work is a powerful and sobering message: respect requires restraint from violence, physical and especially verbal, for "words can destroy your soul".
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 31 January 2002
2002: A Tribute to Black by Tara Mocktari
A Tribute to Black by Tara Mocktari. 19th Hole Theatre Productions at Tuggeranong Community Arts Centre January 30 - February 2, 7.30pm.
Canberra's colleges' drama programs continue to spawn intelligent and interesting little theatre groups among their ex-students, some of which - like Project Theatre 20 years ago - briefly flare and fizz, while some - such as the Acting Company - seem to become part of the furniture. This is the second production of 19th Hole, who are mainly from Canberra College, Woden Campus: a group of actors, technicians and musicians now mostly students at uni, but who still give thanks to their previous teachers, including Richard Manning.
Talking to Manning, himself a product of Hawker College in the late 1970s, made me aware of this theatrical niche, different from Youth Theatre, or REP, or the amateur groups like Phoenix Players, or being in the ANU Theatre course; and different of course from professional training courses away from Canberra. These are brave young people, like Bohemian Productions reviewed last week and still showing at The Street, who raise their own funds, manage their own affairs and take real risks to present work they feel is worthwhile.
Mocktari's play explores a philosophical idea - that black, being the absence of colour, represents the space in the universe which is open to infinite possibilities; and that love is the energy which can play upon the negatives, our usual experience of the black in our lives, and help us find the positives. She writes in her program notes of "the beautiful blackness that surrounds each of [the characters'] lives and brings matters to terms at their own pace".
The work combines an excellent live band, Crevona, with video, recorded soundscape, separated spotlighting of action in the audience space as well as on stage, and a mix of performance styles - largely presentational, but with some direct address, some more expressionist, snippets of apparent naturalism, and even a very funny cabaret dance routine. There are also drama workshop nightmare figures with uv lighted white masks a la Phillipe Genty.
This could be a fragmented mess, but gradually things defrag in a quite moving way. A worthwhile project indeed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Canberra's colleges' drama programs continue to spawn intelligent and interesting little theatre groups among their ex-students, some of which - like Project Theatre 20 years ago - briefly flare and fizz, while some - such as the Acting Company - seem to become part of the furniture. This is the second production of 19th Hole, who are mainly from Canberra College, Woden Campus: a group of actors, technicians and musicians now mostly students at uni, but who still give thanks to their previous teachers, including Richard Manning.
Talking to Manning, himself a product of Hawker College in the late 1970s, made me aware of this theatrical niche, different from Youth Theatre, or REP, or the amateur groups like Phoenix Players, or being in the ANU Theatre course; and different of course from professional training courses away from Canberra. These are brave young people, like Bohemian Productions reviewed last week and still showing at The Street, who raise their own funds, manage their own affairs and take real risks to present work they feel is worthwhile.
Mocktari's play explores a philosophical idea - that black, being the absence of colour, represents the space in the universe which is open to infinite possibilities; and that love is the energy which can play upon the negatives, our usual experience of the black in our lives, and help us find the positives. She writes in her program notes of "the beautiful blackness that surrounds each of [the characters'] lives and brings matters to terms at their own pace".
The work combines an excellent live band, Crevona, with video, recorded soundscape, separated spotlighting of action in the audience space as well as on stage, and a mix of performance styles - largely presentational, but with some direct address, some more expressionist, snippets of apparent naturalism, and even a very funny cabaret dance routine. There are also drama workshop nightmare figures with uv lighted white masks a la Phillipe Genty.
This could be a fragmented mess, but gradually things defrag in a quite moving way. A worthwhile project indeed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 23 January 2002
2002: Bonesyard by Stuart Roberts and One For The Road by Harold Pinter
Bonesyard by Stuart Roberts and One For The Road by Harold Pinter. Bohemian Productions directed by Nick Johnson, at The Street Theatre Studio. January 23 - February 2, Wednesday to Saturday, 8pm.
"We want you to leave this play feeling raw and hateful, as if you've peeled a scab prematurely" is an invitation sorely missed in most evenings at the theatre. Being an "innovative young theatre company" makes such demands an obligation on company and audience, perhaps, but I'm not sure that Bonesyard came up to scratch.
On the other hand, Pinter's masterful theatre of menace in One For The Road - with all its overtones for politics from our Minister for Immigration's wonderful twisting of the Woomera reality in absolutely legalistic terms to all the extremities of absolutist autocrats like Suharto, the Taliban, Pol Pot, Saddam and many others (you can decide where to place Saudi Arabia, Israel, Yasser Arafat or George Bush on this sliding scale) - lived up to the promise. George Huitker as Nicolas, the interrogator, nicely underplayed the role, exactly as real interrogators do and we certainly felt raw and hateful in sympathy with Victor (Arran McKenna), his wife Gila (Claire Bocking) and son Nicky (Simon Read).
In Bonesyard, only Gina Guirguis spoke with the clarity of diction the script needed - and created a well-rounded character - while the three men (David Finnigan as Will, Jack Lloyd as Ferguson and Ben Hamey as Parker) need to develop precision in their acting.
The script is a quite interesting idea - a rather ghoulish fascination with people being murdered and their bodies being sold for medical experimentation, Mary the whore being the unwitting victim on this occasion who realises what is happening only after she has been poisoned and it is too late. Ferguson the surgeon is the ringleader, in a setting that seemed to be England 200 years ago. The script probably needs tightening, cf Pinter, but the presentation of the male characters also needed better direction.
It's good to see groups like Bohemians take the theatrical reins into their own hands, but I look forward to their writing a program which avoids weak "humour": it diminishes the work they present on stage, especially Pinter.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
"We want you to leave this play feeling raw and hateful, as if you've peeled a scab prematurely" is an invitation sorely missed in most evenings at the theatre. Being an "innovative young theatre company" makes such demands an obligation on company and audience, perhaps, but I'm not sure that Bonesyard came up to scratch.
On the other hand, Pinter's masterful theatre of menace in One For The Road - with all its overtones for politics from our Minister for Immigration's wonderful twisting of the Woomera reality in absolutely legalistic terms to all the extremities of absolutist autocrats like Suharto, the Taliban, Pol Pot, Saddam and many others (you can decide where to place Saudi Arabia, Israel, Yasser Arafat or George Bush on this sliding scale) - lived up to the promise. George Huitker as Nicolas, the interrogator, nicely underplayed the role, exactly as real interrogators do and we certainly felt raw and hateful in sympathy with Victor (Arran McKenna), his wife Gila (Claire Bocking) and son Nicky (Simon Read).
In Bonesyard, only Gina Guirguis spoke with the clarity of diction the script needed - and created a well-rounded character - while the three men (David Finnigan as Will, Jack Lloyd as Ferguson and Ben Hamey as Parker) need to develop precision in their acting.
The script is a quite interesting idea - a rather ghoulish fascination with people being murdered and their bodies being sold for medical experimentation, Mary the whore being the unwitting victim on this occasion who realises what is happening only after she has been poisoned and it is too late. Ferguson the surgeon is the ringleader, in a setting that seemed to be England 200 years ago. The script probably needs tightening, cf Pinter, but the presentation of the male characters also needed better direction.
It's good to see groups like Bohemians take the theatrical reins into their own hands, but I look forward to their writing a program which avoids weak "humour": it diminishes the work they present on stage, especially Pinter.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 18 January 2002
2002: Oliver! by Lionel Bart
Oliver! by Lionel Bart. Alpha Theatre directed by Cathie Clelland. Choreographer: Belynda Buck. Musical Director: Pam Connor. ANU Arts Centre January 18 - 27, 7pm.
Probably I was the only person at opening night over the age of 10 who had never seen Oliver!, though I knew all the songs out of context. In context, some seemed a bit odd, and I faced the question about how turning Dickens into a musical makes his stories of social class division even more sentimental than his original novels. Like Dickens, Bart knew he had to keep up the entertainment level, so it was hard to feel the depth of anger we should at Nancy's murder.
However, Clelland's direction achieved perhaps as much as the script allows. Her casting was excellent, especially of Jordan Prosser as Oliver, Linda Francis as Nancy, Tony Falla as Fagin and, in a small but effective role, Anna Wise as Mrs Bedwin. Musicality in their singing and clarity in their acting stood out in these performers, but there was also great strength in chorus and smaller singing roles, coming together particularly well in "Who Will Buy?"
Obviously an important feature of a musical is the quality of the orchestra which Pam Connor directed with energy and strong rhythmic effect, carrying the action along on stage. All sections of the orchestra sounded good, except for some lack of tuning in the strings. However, John Ma's solo violin for Fagin's reconsidering of his situation was spot on.
Good music without movement would still make a fatally flawed show, and Belynda Buck missed no opportunities to choreograph every head and arm gesture, with lots of group and individual dance steps which, though they looked to me more colonial than mid-nineteenth century London, kept my attention throughout. Especially impressive was how the younger children enjoyed their movement, every one thoroughly engaged in the performance. In Brian Sudding and Cherylynn Holmes' excellent set, and wearing Rosemary Synnott's thoroughly colourful costumes, all the set-piece numbers received justified applause.
An effective Alpha production, the show gained strength in the second half. Everyone clapped along with the curtain call reprises - but I still kept wondering why Nancy had ever loved Bill Sykes.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Probably I was the only person at opening night over the age of 10 who had never seen Oliver!, though I knew all the songs out of context. In context, some seemed a bit odd, and I faced the question about how turning Dickens into a musical makes his stories of social class division even more sentimental than his original novels. Like Dickens, Bart knew he had to keep up the entertainment level, so it was hard to feel the depth of anger we should at Nancy's murder.
However, Clelland's direction achieved perhaps as much as the script allows. Her casting was excellent, especially of Jordan Prosser as Oliver, Linda Francis as Nancy, Tony Falla as Fagin and, in a small but effective role, Anna Wise as Mrs Bedwin. Musicality in their singing and clarity in their acting stood out in these performers, but there was also great strength in chorus and smaller singing roles, coming together particularly well in "Who Will Buy?"
Obviously an important feature of a musical is the quality of the orchestra which Pam Connor directed with energy and strong rhythmic effect, carrying the action along on stage. All sections of the orchestra sounded good, except for some lack of tuning in the strings. However, John Ma's solo violin for Fagin's reconsidering of his situation was spot on.
Good music without movement would still make a fatally flawed show, and Belynda Buck missed no opportunities to choreograph every head and arm gesture, with lots of group and individual dance steps which, though they looked to me more colonial than mid-nineteenth century London, kept my attention throughout. Especially impressive was how the younger children enjoyed their movement, every one thoroughly engaged in the performance. In Brian Sudding and Cherylynn Holmes' excellent set, and wearing Rosemary Synnott's thoroughly colourful costumes, all the set-piece numbers received justified applause.
An effective Alpha production, the show gained strength in the second half. Everyone clapped along with the curtain call reprises - but I still kept wondering why Nancy had ever loved Bill Sykes.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 16 January 2002
2002: The Price by Arthur Miller
The Price by Arthur Miller. Daniel Mitchell, Toni Scanlan, Warren Mitchell, Henri Szeps directed by Sandra Bates. Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, November 8 2001 - January 19.
If you assumed that any play at the Ensemble starring this cast would be a near-perfect production, you'd be right. I squeezed in to the matinee in the last week of the run, and arrived to a justifiable "House Full" sign - through to closing night.
To say The Price is classic Arthur Miller is to dismiss too easily his creation of characters whose complexity is rooted in both their natural personality differences and their familial relationships. To see Henri Szeps as elder brother Walter in tears of apparent self-recognition, frustrated at not being able to explain to younger brother Victor why he hadn't provided the cash for Victor's university education, despite his own success as a surgeon, while he had to admit to failure as a father and husband - and to see this a few short metres away in the intimate Ensemble setting - is an unforgettable experience.
Though Hayes Gordon, the founder of the Ensemble, is no longer with us, his exacting theatrical spirit lives on. Since he introduced in-the-round staging to Sydney more than 30 years ago, the fly-on-the-wall effect for the audience is still as strong. Watching invisibly in such close proximity creates a fascinating double-effect: your emotions are directly engaged in Walter's tears, yet concurrently your capacity for objective observation is not diminished. Walter's tears may be real, yet are also disingenuous: he can only offer Victor a superficial, basically commercial, proposition - a measure of why he failed Victor in the first place 28 years in the past.
Sandra Bates' direction has allowed the actors all the silences they need for us to sense and contemplate such detail in all four characters, and all four actors waste no opportunity. I wish, I wish, we had an Australian Arthur Miller to reveal such characters in our cultural context, but I fear our fascination with "physical" theatre (which I love too) leaves a space to be filled. It's not just warmth of feeling we miss, but the analysis of family, social, political and economic relations which are all built in to Miller's characters.
Did I say a "near-perfect" production? Let's just say perfect and be done with it.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
If you assumed that any play at the Ensemble starring this cast would be a near-perfect production, you'd be right. I squeezed in to the matinee in the last week of the run, and arrived to a justifiable "House Full" sign - through to closing night.
To say The Price is classic Arthur Miller is to dismiss too easily his creation of characters whose complexity is rooted in both their natural personality differences and their familial relationships. To see Henri Szeps as elder brother Walter in tears of apparent self-recognition, frustrated at not being able to explain to younger brother Victor why he hadn't provided the cash for Victor's university education, despite his own success as a surgeon, while he had to admit to failure as a father and husband - and to see this a few short metres away in the intimate Ensemble setting - is an unforgettable experience.
Though Hayes Gordon, the founder of the Ensemble, is no longer with us, his exacting theatrical spirit lives on. Since he introduced in-the-round staging to Sydney more than 30 years ago, the fly-on-the-wall effect for the audience is still as strong. Watching invisibly in such close proximity creates a fascinating double-effect: your emotions are directly engaged in Walter's tears, yet concurrently your capacity for objective observation is not diminished. Walter's tears may be real, yet are also disingenuous: he can only offer Victor a superficial, basically commercial, proposition - a measure of why he failed Victor in the first place 28 years in the past.
Sandra Bates' direction has allowed the actors all the silences they need for us to sense and contemplate such detail in all four characters, and all four actors waste no opportunity. I wish, I wish, we had an Australian Arthur Miller to reveal such characters in our cultural context, but I fear our fascination with "physical" theatre (which I love too) leaves a space to be filled. It's not just warmth of feeling we miss, but the analysis of family, social, political and economic relations which are all built in to Miller's characters.
Did I say a "near-perfect" production? Let's just say perfect and be done with it.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 21 December 2001
2001: The Heart of the Black Sea - An Oceanfaring Kabaret
The Heart of the Black Sea - An Oceanfaring Kabaret. Songs and lyrics by Mikel Simic. Orchestration: Ben O'Loghlin. Set design: Peter Mumford. Lighting design: Ivan Smith. Street Theatre, December 20-22.
Art cabaret in the European style might, at first blush, seem out of place in our bush capital. But in Mikel Simic's creative hands, the Heart of the Black Sea is a surprising, quirky, fascinating blend of Eastern and Western European traditions, drawing on Russian folk tales, Transylvanian pseudo-Gothic mythology and Brechtian social commentary.
Musically, many of the numbers have the contrapuntal and deliberately unfinished lines of the cabaret of Kurt Weill, but the harshness of the German form is rounded out by Magyar rhythms and Slavic harmonies. With trombone (Michael Bailey), trumpet/flugelhorn (Lou Horwood), euphonium (Lucien McGuiness) and Phil Moriarty, as The Great Muldavio on clarinet, we have all the elements of the traditional circus band and sad clown. Then across the stage the violas (Orson and Larissa Sutherland), violin (Anna Thompson) and cello (Kaija Upenieks) form a modern art quartet. And on stage, with the clarinet, Ben O'Loghlin on double bass, Pip Branson on violin and Mikel Simic on piano accordion form a cafe band of magnificent Romany romance, The Black Sea Gentlemen. O'Loghlin's orchestration ties this remarkable diversity into a wonderful unity of sound.
Dramatically, each number is a scene in episodic form, not linked by an obvious plot or the driving socio-logic of a Brecht, but by feeling. Reversals of our expectations are built into the lyrics, a commentary on the way we live our lives, taking us from ironic humour and gruesome imagery into the sadness of trapped love. Especially the final song, "The Carnival Goes On" seemed to offer some hope until we realise that the carnival has indeed gone on - and we are left, bereft, wondering how we are to cope.
This is strong stuff for cabaret - very satisfying original theatre - and matched in performance quality by Simic as Mikelangelo, Anna Simic (Anna Conda, the Snake Woman) and Undine Sellbach (Undine the Mermaid Tealady), in a cleverly designed set and great mood lighting.
Special appreciation must go to Pip Branson for his bravery in filling in so well for his brother David: The Heart of the Black Sea is a fitting memorial. I can only hope its shortened season can be followed by a revival in the fullness of time.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Art cabaret in the European style might, at first blush, seem out of place in our bush capital. But in Mikel Simic's creative hands, the Heart of the Black Sea is a surprising, quirky, fascinating blend of Eastern and Western European traditions, drawing on Russian folk tales, Transylvanian pseudo-Gothic mythology and Brechtian social commentary.
Musically, many of the numbers have the contrapuntal and deliberately unfinished lines of the cabaret of Kurt Weill, but the harshness of the German form is rounded out by Magyar rhythms and Slavic harmonies. With trombone (Michael Bailey), trumpet/flugelhorn (Lou Horwood), euphonium (Lucien McGuiness) and Phil Moriarty, as The Great Muldavio on clarinet, we have all the elements of the traditional circus band and sad clown. Then across the stage the violas (Orson and Larissa Sutherland), violin (Anna Thompson) and cello (Kaija Upenieks) form a modern art quartet. And on stage, with the clarinet, Ben O'Loghlin on double bass, Pip Branson on violin and Mikel Simic on piano accordion form a cafe band of magnificent Romany romance, The Black Sea Gentlemen. O'Loghlin's orchestration ties this remarkable diversity into a wonderful unity of sound.
Dramatically, each number is a scene in episodic form, not linked by an obvious plot or the driving socio-logic of a Brecht, but by feeling. Reversals of our expectations are built into the lyrics, a commentary on the way we live our lives, taking us from ironic humour and gruesome imagery into the sadness of trapped love. Especially the final song, "The Carnival Goes On" seemed to offer some hope until we realise that the carnival has indeed gone on - and we are left, bereft, wondering how we are to cope.
This is strong stuff for cabaret - very satisfying original theatre - and matched in performance quality by Simic as Mikelangelo, Anna Simic (Anna Conda, the Snake Woman) and Undine Sellbach (Undine the Mermaid Tealady), in a cleverly designed set and great mood lighting.
Special appreciation must go to Pip Branson for his bravery in filling in so well for his brother David: The Heart of the Black Sea is a fitting memorial. I can only hope its shortened season can be followed by a revival in the fullness of time.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 18 December 2001
2001: The Monkey Show. Installation by Elizabeth Paterson
The Monkey Show. Installation by Elizabeth Paterson at Canberra Museum and Gallery until January 27, 2002. Visible day or night in Gallery 4 at CMAG entrance.
Liz Paterson has a long tradition as a fabric artist exploring the relationship in theatrical performance between the performer and her costume and set. Often the costume might become a character in its own right. Aspects of the costume or set then become symbolic of aspects of the character manipulated by an inner spirit - the hidden or partially hidden performer.
In this installation we see a set peopled by South American-looking monkeys, some wearing parrot costumes a little bit like rosellas but perhaps also South American. One wears a Father Christmas costume, appearing and disappearing down and up a colonial style plastered chimney.
Two wear nothing - one absolutely relaxed and comfortable in an extensive armchair; the other at the window looking out and away from the scene, as if stuck on a bland island, seeking fulfilment elsewhere.
Sailing boats cruise in through colonial French windows, airborne with clouds for sails - new arrivals expectant with ideals, perhaps.
A series of early model utes pass the scene as if on a hillside track. At random, one stops, for a sandwich, I wonder: maybe the insignificant driver stares at the view.
A river flows from a second French window, raising itself up like a serpent, becoming an old-fashioned ear trumpet. The comfortable monkey may be listening; or on the other hand may not be listening. Who can tell?
Trees, of no particular species, larger in the foreground, diminishing in the distance, lead into the fireplace beneath Monkey Santa's chimney. Is this a foreboding image of a charcoal factory?
The citation claims that "The Monkey Show alludes to Western culture's long fascination with the exotic and its relevance to the way that Australia has been perceived and how Australians perceive the world today." Maybe it does, but whatever perceptions you have are entirely your own. What you find in the images and what they symbolise may "allude" to bigger thoughts, and perhaps that's all you can expect from this kind of work. It's not a grand work of art (perhaps that's one image of Australia) and it's all made of cardboard, papier mache and bits of wire (that sounds like Australia, too).
Although I can't be sure I understand what meaning was intended, the images leave me less relaxed and comfortable than the monkey in the armchair, and feeling more like the monkey on the edge looking for something new. See what you think.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Liz Paterson has a long tradition as a fabric artist exploring the relationship in theatrical performance between the performer and her costume and set. Often the costume might become a character in its own right. Aspects of the costume or set then become symbolic of aspects of the character manipulated by an inner spirit - the hidden or partially hidden performer.
In this installation we see a set peopled by South American-looking monkeys, some wearing parrot costumes a little bit like rosellas but perhaps also South American. One wears a Father Christmas costume, appearing and disappearing down and up a colonial style plastered chimney.
Two wear nothing - one absolutely relaxed and comfortable in an extensive armchair; the other at the window looking out and away from the scene, as if stuck on a bland island, seeking fulfilment elsewhere.
Sailing boats cruise in through colonial French windows, airborne with clouds for sails - new arrivals expectant with ideals, perhaps.
A series of early model utes pass the scene as if on a hillside track. At random, one stops, for a sandwich, I wonder: maybe the insignificant driver stares at the view.
A river flows from a second French window, raising itself up like a serpent, becoming an old-fashioned ear trumpet. The comfortable monkey may be listening; or on the other hand may not be listening. Who can tell?
Trees, of no particular species, larger in the foreground, diminishing in the distance, lead into the fireplace beneath Monkey Santa's chimney. Is this a foreboding image of a charcoal factory?
The citation claims that "The Monkey Show alludes to Western culture's long fascination with the exotic and its relevance to the way that Australia has been perceived and how Australians perceive the world today." Maybe it does, but whatever perceptions you have are entirely your own. What you find in the images and what they symbolise may "allude" to bigger thoughts, and perhaps that's all you can expect from this kind of work. It's not a grand work of art (perhaps that's one image of Australia) and it's all made of cardboard, papier mache and bits of wire (that sounds like Australia, too).
Although I can't be sure I understand what meaning was intended, the images leave me less relaxed and comfortable than the monkey in the armchair, and feeling more like the monkey on the edge looking for something new. See what you think.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 26 November 2001
2001: The Long Time 'til Tea by Greg Lissaman
The Long Time 'til Tea written and directed by Greg Lissaman. Jigsaw Theatre Company November 20 - December 1.
"I liked all of it" said one 4-year-old to her parent at the end, though there were many who didn't want to see the "crab" again when the puppets were revealed after the show.
In fact there were times when the long time felt a bit too long for me and by the end I concluded that though there is nothing wrong in the educational principles (encouraging the children's imagination of shapes and colours), something is missing in The Long Time 'til Tea compared with Jigsaw's previous early-childhood winner, The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate. Unfortunately, too, I couldn't forget Geoffrey Rush, Deborah Mailman et al playing 5-year-olds in David Holman's Small Poppies. Rush's entirely imaginary dog grabbed kids and adults in the audience by the throat emotionally in a way that carved foam puppets could never match.
The Long Time is a nice whimsy and excellent "black theatre" puppetry manipulated by Rachael Whitworth, with more than competent technical design and operation by Catherine Wright, but too often John Hunt (entertaining himself in his backyard after school until teatime) seemed to be twiddling his thumbs rather than getting on with the action.
What's missing is a really strong sense of journey to discovery (the key to both those other plays) to give shape to the on-stage child's imagination and the off-stage childrens' understanding. The concept of filling in time is too amorphous, I think too adult, for 4 - 6 year olds. This was why many of them failed to realise that it wasn't a crab that young Peter had to confront in the tunnel he had floated into on his washing basket boat, but a termite. I won't try to explain, but the point is that the young audience's imaginations were more logical in developing the story in their heads than the adults' idea of children's imaginations which led from a boat in the sky to meeting a termite underground.
So, although the season is already booked, and I'm sure the children will enjoy, I think the script needs more development before it deserves a wider exposure.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
"I liked all of it" said one 4-year-old to her parent at the end, though there were many who didn't want to see the "crab" again when the puppets were revealed after the show.
In fact there were times when the long time felt a bit too long for me and by the end I concluded that though there is nothing wrong in the educational principles (encouraging the children's imagination of shapes and colours), something is missing in The Long Time 'til Tea compared with Jigsaw's previous early-childhood winner, The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate. Unfortunately, too, I couldn't forget Geoffrey Rush, Deborah Mailman et al playing 5-year-olds in David Holman's Small Poppies. Rush's entirely imaginary dog grabbed kids and adults in the audience by the throat emotionally in a way that carved foam puppets could never match.
The Long Time is a nice whimsy and excellent "black theatre" puppetry manipulated by Rachael Whitworth, with more than competent technical design and operation by Catherine Wright, but too often John Hunt (entertaining himself in his backyard after school until teatime) seemed to be twiddling his thumbs rather than getting on with the action.
What's missing is a really strong sense of journey to discovery (the key to both those other plays) to give shape to the on-stage child's imagination and the off-stage childrens' understanding. The concept of filling in time is too amorphous, I think too adult, for 4 - 6 year olds. This was why many of them failed to realise that it wasn't a crab that young Peter had to confront in the tunnel he had floated into on his washing basket boat, but a termite. I won't try to explain, but the point is that the young audience's imaginations were more logical in developing the story in their heads than the adults' idea of children's imaginations which led from a boat in the sky to meeting a termite underground.
So, although the season is already booked, and I'm sure the children will enjoy, I think the script needs more development before it deserves a wider exposure.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 31 October 2001
2001: Solid by Ningali Lawford, Kelton Pell, Phil Thomson.
Solid. A Black N'2 production for Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre by Ningali Lawford, Kelton Pell, Phil Thomson. Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, October 30 - November 3, 8pm.
"How would you like your tea? Black n'2 like you and me." At this point, the end of Solid, Graham settles down to learn his Noongar language from his Nan in Busselton, south of Perth. In Perth he had been "lost in life", facing loss of country, culture and language with no hope, no apparent way forward. Like refugees everywhere he tried to escape - north - with no clear destination. How could he face his Nan when he had not prevented his heroin-using brother from killing himself; when he was himself using alcohol and speed; when he could not care for wife and children; when no-one would employ him?
Meet Carol from Wankatjunka community in the Kimberley, destined for a traditional arranged marriage. She escaped south to Perth, got herself an education and a job. In the Aboriginal support agency, usually she's the only one actually at work - and it's her reports and submissions that get the funding: for other people's projects, of course, but at least it's a real job. She must go back, though, for her grandfather's funeral, and face the possibility of punishment for not fulfilling her marriage commitment.
Carol faces up to her traditional responsibility, and becomes the model for Graham to face his Nan in a play which reveals the truth about the cultures of the real Kimberley woman, Ningali Lawford, and the real Noongar man, Kelton Pell, two people as different culturally as the English and the French. After all you wouldn't catch an Englishman eating snails, would you?
With Graham, we can learn to see the emu in the dark spaces between the stars in the Milky Way, which bright lights and pollution had hidden from Noongar memory. With whimsy, humour and an ability to capture emotional tension in the turn of a word, Lawford and Pell show us human complexity, and human possibilities, as understandable in Wankatjunka as in Noongar country, in Canberra, or anywhere. This play is about country - our country - seen from the inside. All Australians will savour this cup of tea.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
"How would you like your tea? Black n'2 like you and me." At this point, the end of Solid, Graham settles down to learn his Noongar language from his Nan in Busselton, south of Perth. In Perth he had been "lost in life", facing loss of country, culture and language with no hope, no apparent way forward. Like refugees everywhere he tried to escape - north - with no clear destination. How could he face his Nan when he had not prevented his heroin-using brother from killing himself; when he was himself using alcohol and speed; when he could not care for wife and children; when no-one would employ him?
Meet Carol from Wankatjunka community in the Kimberley, destined for a traditional arranged marriage. She escaped south to Perth, got herself an education and a job. In the Aboriginal support agency, usually she's the only one actually at work - and it's her reports and submissions that get the funding: for other people's projects, of course, but at least it's a real job. She must go back, though, for her grandfather's funeral, and face the possibility of punishment for not fulfilling her marriage commitment.
Carol faces up to her traditional responsibility, and becomes the model for Graham to face his Nan in a play which reveals the truth about the cultures of the real Kimberley woman, Ningali Lawford, and the real Noongar man, Kelton Pell, two people as different culturally as the English and the French. After all you wouldn't catch an Englishman eating snails, would you?
With Graham, we can learn to see the emu in the dark spaces between the stars in the Milky Way, which bright lights and pollution had hidden from Noongar memory. With whimsy, humour and an ability to capture emotional tension in the turn of a word, Lawford and Pell show us human complexity, and human possibilities, as understandable in Wankatjunka as in Noongar country, in Canberra, or anywhere. This play is about country - our country - seen from the inside. All Australians will savour this cup of tea.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 25 October 2001
2001: Who Cares If I Care?
Who Cares If I Care? by Hidden Corners International, directed by Robin Davidson. Gorman House C Block October 25-27, 7.30pm.
When young people perform I usually look for their sincerity, knowing that for untrained actors it is hard not to pretend to act, rather than really act. If a performance can move me to laughter and tears, make me face reality, and yet still celebrate life, then I know I am not watching a pretence.
Hidden Corners International is a big name for a small group of teenagers who through force of circumstance must care for others - maybe a sick parent, a disabled sibling. Mary Gays from Marymead, aware of the tensions and pressures affecting young carers, asked Robin Davidson to run workshops in creative writing and drama from which grew Who Cares If I Care?, a remarkably strong piece of theatre following George's story dealing with her father's sudden hospitalisation with a brain tumour (while her mother had died when George was young); Kevin's story with a mother who only appears on the end of a phone line while he has to cope with a schizophrenic younger brother; and Claire's story of how angry she becomes with her mother who is disabled with multiple sclerosis.
You can see where the tears come from, but these young people facing such adult responsibilities show us humour with a telling ironic edge, fear without sentimentality, and a wonderful sense of achievement in their lives. The play itself is an achievement of which they can all be proud. The sincerity of their performances, grounded in their real life experiences, has left me wondering how I would cope in their circumstance. It makes me concerned that, though this group have had such a great opportunity in creating and presenting their play, there must be many young - and older - carers who are not given the support they need. Politicians please take note.
Particularly I was worried by the humorous but unpleasant vignettes of a counsellor so concerned with his own childish obsession that he couldn't even listen to his clients' stories, let alone help them. If you would like to help, especially to send Hidden Corners to a Young Carers Festival in UK next year, which makes them International, email Mary Gays at mds@marymead.org.au .
© Frank McKone, Canberra
When young people perform I usually look for their sincerity, knowing that for untrained actors it is hard not to pretend to act, rather than really act. If a performance can move me to laughter and tears, make me face reality, and yet still celebrate life, then I know I am not watching a pretence.
Hidden Corners International is a big name for a small group of teenagers who through force of circumstance must care for others - maybe a sick parent, a disabled sibling. Mary Gays from Marymead, aware of the tensions and pressures affecting young carers, asked Robin Davidson to run workshops in creative writing and drama from which grew Who Cares If I Care?, a remarkably strong piece of theatre following George's story dealing with her father's sudden hospitalisation with a brain tumour (while her mother had died when George was young); Kevin's story with a mother who only appears on the end of a phone line while he has to cope with a schizophrenic younger brother; and Claire's story of how angry she becomes with her mother who is disabled with multiple sclerosis.
You can see where the tears come from, but these young people facing such adult responsibilities show us humour with a telling ironic edge, fear without sentimentality, and a wonderful sense of achievement in their lives. The play itself is an achievement of which they can all be proud. The sincerity of their performances, grounded in their real life experiences, has left me wondering how I would cope in their circumstance. It makes me concerned that, though this group have had such a great opportunity in creating and presenting their play, there must be many young - and older - carers who are not given the support they need. Politicians please take note.
Particularly I was worried by the humorous but unpleasant vignettes of a counsellor so concerned with his own childish obsession that he couldn't even listen to his clients' stories, let alone help them. If you would like to help, especially to send Hidden Corners to a Young Carers Festival in UK next year, which makes them International, email Mary Gays at mds@marymead.org.au .
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Saturday, 20 October 2001
2001: Time Control by Canberra Youth Theatre Company
Time Control by Canberra Youth Theatre Company. Artistic Director: Estelle Muspratt. Workshop Directors: Barbra Barnett, Liliana Bogatko, Emma Bossard, Robin Davidson, Matthew Marshall, Alannah Pentony, Murphy People, Natalie Power, Kelly Somes, Karen Yaldren. October 3-20.
The most important image for me of this presentation of a mythic narrative in 6 chapters, each workshopped independently by Youth Theatre's 8-12, 12-15 and 15-24 year old groups, was a month's worth of applause last Saturday at sundown, and the immediate formation of groups of parents, friends and the actors and crew all talking excitedly about the experience of Time Control.
Each chapter was created in a style belonging to its workshop group. Often work which was focussed on scripted speech seemed to me too melodramatic to sustain the possible depths of the story of Old Timers who are running out of dreams and so devise a Dream Link where they can steal the dreams of the New Timers, making them effectively the Old Timers' slaves. From here a kind of Dr Who story centred on the Supreme Dreamer, the only New Timer who was not affected by the Dream Link, and who devised the way to destroy it.
Chapter 3 was perhaps the most theatrical, with its use of movement and circus, but it was also the least easy to follow in terms of the narrative. The Grand Finale, Chapter 6 at Weston Park, devised by the older group but using all 74 young actors, told its story clearly, taking the audience around from site to site, and with the use of fire the final battle and ceremony of destruction of the Dream Link was quite strong dramatically.
In the end, however, the point is the value of young people devising their own theatre, experiencing how their ideas can be given expression, how to work together, and how much satisfaction there is in completing a project, even knowing that the next project can be even better. Youth Theatre have put together in Time Control a celebration of community, in the long tradition of Canberra groups from Blue Folk to Splinters and CIA.
Authoritarianism, violence, fire and death may seem a lot for young people to bear, even in a theatrical myth - but we only have to look to our Old Timer politicians to see how we all need to retain our dreams.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
The most important image for me of this presentation of a mythic narrative in 6 chapters, each workshopped independently by Youth Theatre's 8-12, 12-15 and 15-24 year old groups, was a month's worth of applause last Saturday at sundown, and the immediate formation of groups of parents, friends and the actors and crew all talking excitedly about the experience of Time Control.
Each chapter was created in a style belonging to its workshop group. Often work which was focussed on scripted speech seemed to me too melodramatic to sustain the possible depths of the story of Old Timers who are running out of dreams and so devise a Dream Link where they can steal the dreams of the New Timers, making them effectively the Old Timers' slaves. From here a kind of Dr Who story centred on the Supreme Dreamer, the only New Timer who was not affected by the Dream Link, and who devised the way to destroy it.
Chapter 3 was perhaps the most theatrical, with its use of movement and circus, but it was also the least easy to follow in terms of the narrative. The Grand Finale, Chapter 6 at Weston Park, devised by the older group but using all 74 young actors, told its story clearly, taking the audience around from site to site, and with the use of fire the final battle and ceremony of destruction of the Dream Link was quite strong dramatically.
In the end, however, the point is the value of young people devising their own theatre, experiencing how their ideas can be given expression, how to work together, and how much satisfaction there is in completing a project, even knowing that the next project can be even better. Youth Theatre have put together in Time Control a celebration of community, in the long tradition of Canberra groups from Blue Folk to Splinters and CIA.
Authoritarianism, violence, fire and death may seem a lot for young people to bear, even in a theatrical myth - but we only have to look to our Old Timer politicians to see how we all need to retain our dreams.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Saturday, 13 October 2001
2001: Shake. Canberra Youth Theatre
Shake. Canberra Youth Theatre directed by Linda McHugh at Tracking Kultja, National Museum of Australia, First Australians Gallery. October 13-14 and Wednesday October 17, 10 am, 12 noon, 2 pm.
Earlier in the year I wrote about museum theatre - theatre in a museum, that is - at NMA. I hoped that there would be more. Well, there is, and there will be, and there should be, if we take CYT's Shake as a guide.
Daina Harvey from NMA has just returned from a conference of the International Museum Theatre Alliance and is enthused now to use actors to present real characters from our history to bring NMA's exhibits even more to life. In the meantime she helped lead a small group around the opening performance on Saturday of CYT's "street" theatre in 5 vignettes.
Shake runs like a small creek, beginning at a high waterfall of sounds - The Australian Declaration Towards Aboriginal Reconciliation. Then a small eddying pool of movement - Land and Spirit. In a quiet perhaps rainforested section of still water we heard Childhood Stories and saw figures of childhood, labelled like trees in a national park. Water then fell in thin strands in among the audience, with the words of laws about the "Protector of Aborigines" on a teletype ticker tape passing through people's fingers and before their eyes.
On reaching the point where the creek should shake hands with the sea, coming together was as turbulent as peaceful, raising Questions and Answers. Here the non-indigenous people, stood in line, asleep, head on the next person's shoulder. Then one stirs and calls "Wake up!" to the next and so on down the line, until the last says "Sorry", and the word flows back up the line. Isn't reconciliation easy, hey?
But when the indigenous people cry "Wake up!", the one on the end lies dead. There is silence and grieving. To achieve such a powerful and telling image in the Museum, in the First Australians Gallery, cannot fail to wake us, to make us realise past failings and how much must be done to turn the Australian Declaration Towards Aboriginal Reconciliation from easy words into hard reality.
Catch it Wednesday if you can.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Earlier in the year I wrote about museum theatre - theatre in a museum, that is - at NMA. I hoped that there would be more. Well, there is, and there will be, and there should be, if we take CYT's Shake as a guide.
Daina Harvey from NMA has just returned from a conference of the International Museum Theatre Alliance and is enthused now to use actors to present real characters from our history to bring NMA's exhibits even more to life. In the meantime she helped lead a small group around the opening performance on Saturday of CYT's "street" theatre in 5 vignettes.
Shake runs like a small creek, beginning at a high waterfall of sounds - The Australian Declaration Towards Aboriginal Reconciliation. Then a small eddying pool of movement - Land and Spirit. In a quiet perhaps rainforested section of still water we heard Childhood Stories and saw figures of childhood, labelled like trees in a national park. Water then fell in thin strands in among the audience, with the words of laws about the "Protector of Aborigines" on a teletype ticker tape passing through people's fingers and before their eyes.
On reaching the point where the creek should shake hands with the sea, coming together was as turbulent as peaceful, raising Questions and Answers. Here the non-indigenous people, stood in line, asleep, head on the next person's shoulder. Then one stirs and calls "Wake up!" to the next and so on down the line, until the last says "Sorry", and the word flows back up the line. Isn't reconciliation easy, hey?
But when the indigenous people cry "Wake up!", the one on the end lies dead. There is silence and grieving. To achieve such a powerful and telling image in the Museum, in the First Australians Gallery, cannot fail to wake us, to make us realise past failings and how much must be done to turn the Australian Declaration Towards Aboriginal Reconciliation from easy words into hard reality.
Catch it Wednesday if you can.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 5 October 2001
2001: Demons by Wayne Macauley
Demons by Wayne Macauley, directed by David Branson. A FoCA work in progress. Street Theatre October 5-7, 8.10 pm.
A Festival of Contemporary Arts is only well served when original ideas are tried out. I saw preview night of Demons, but here is a work using a spare but quite intense script, group movement work, imagery on video screens and projections, which takes what to many of us might be Russian 19th Century romanticism (Devils by Dostoevsky) and applies its psychology of the human capacity for self-defeat to characters taking part in S11 demonstrations against globalisation.
The work has been developed so far mainly in Melbourne, but it was artsACT which came up with enough funds for a short workshop and rehearsal period for this production, which is planned to be an early stage of a fully developed work for the Melbourne Festival in a year's time. Hopefully funding will be found for this, because the dramatic structure is largely in place and the theme is certainly relevant.
We begin outside (bring something warm for the first 20 minutes) with a rehearsal by Albert Camus of his 1960 version of Dostoevsky, recreating the exaggerated emotions of romantic drama. An actor, committed to his art, argues the toss with the director and walks out. Camus drives away. And the director takes us to a BBQ where S11 protestors are relaxing after a demo, and where an activist, committed to action, creates a disturbance and perhaps a death.
By now we in the audience are disturbed, feeling uncomfortable, but we are taken into the warmth of the Foyer, into the Theatre, where we are told we are safe, though eerie figures - our mental demons - are outside the windows. We complete the circle out the back of the theatre to our starting point seeing a modern death and a Dostoevsky death on the way, to discover that Camus' play is off because he has been killed in a car smash. We end as uncomfortable as we began.
For an old peacenik like me, it's disturbing to think that Dostoevsky's tragic flaw view of humanity might be right. Making us uncomfortable is a legitimate role for theatre, and Demons certainly has potential.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
A Festival of Contemporary Arts is only well served when original ideas are tried out. I saw preview night of Demons, but here is a work using a spare but quite intense script, group movement work, imagery on video screens and projections, which takes what to many of us might be Russian 19th Century romanticism (Devils by Dostoevsky) and applies its psychology of the human capacity for self-defeat to characters taking part in S11 demonstrations against globalisation.
The work has been developed so far mainly in Melbourne, but it was artsACT which came up with enough funds for a short workshop and rehearsal period for this production, which is planned to be an early stage of a fully developed work for the Melbourne Festival in a year's time. Hopefully funding will be found for this, because the dramatic structure is largely in place and the theme is certainly relevant.
We begin outside (bring something warm for the first 20 minutes) with a rehearsal by Albert Camus of his 1960 version of Dostoevsky, recreating the exaggerated emotions of romantic drama. An actor, committed to his art, argues the toss with the director and walks out. Camus drives away. And the director takes us to a BBQ where S11 protestors are relaxing after a demo, and where an activist, committed to action, creates a disturbance and perhaps a death.
By now we in the audience are disturbed, feeling uncomfortable, but we are taken into the warmth of the Foyer, into the Theatre, where we are told we are safe, though eerie figures - our mental demons - are outside the windows. We complete the circle out the back of the theatre to our starting point seeing a modern death and a Dostoevsky death on the way, to discover that Camus' play is off because he has been killed in a car smash. We end as uncomfortable as we began.
For an old peacenik like me, it's disturbing to think that Dostoevsky's tragic flaw view of humanity might be right. Making us uncomfortable is a legitimate role for theatre, and Demons certainly has potential.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 3 October 2001
2001: Via Dolorosa by David Hare
Via Dolorosa by David Hare, performed by Patrick Dickson. Directed by Moira Blumenthal at Tuggeranong Arts Centre, October 3-6.
I have had occasions in my teaching past when a top-class student, on whose assignment I had written Excellent A++, would approach me crestfallen. "You haven't told me why! You wrote such a long comment on Jane's, and she only got B. I need to know what you really thought about my work."
It was difficult to know how to tell such a student that her work outstretched my capacity to criticise, even constructively. David Hare's play about Palestine and Israel is in this class. I find it hard to imagine how he could have gathered so much detail from questioning and listening to so many people, holding the diversity of conflicting beliefs in his head all together, and shaping the experience of his travels into a kind of documentary drama in which he makes himself the central character on stage.
And then the writing is so good that an excellent actor like Patrick Dickson has no trouble convincing us that he is David Hare the playwright, who acts out for us politicians, theatre directors, taxi drivers, British Council "minders", US and Canadian Jewish settlers, Palestinian intellectuals with the dramatist's tendency to satirise, and his sense of despair. Using a simple set and easy transitions in lighting and sound, Dickson's timing was excellent, framing the visit to a country where political argument is rife - and 100,000 have died since the Oslo peace agreement - between the quiet bookends of Hampstead Heath, in a country where political argument seems to have lost its point.
Prime Minister Blair follows the popularity, Hare says, but he doesn't tell us what he really thinks. "Send your Blair over here, please" cries a Jewish or Palestinian from the back of the crowd in a land where everyone knows what everyone thinks, and divisions between the religious and the secular, between the principled and the corrupt, between those who see the truth and those who hypocritically refuse to look, not only divide Palestinian from Israeli, but Palestinian from Palestinian and Israeli from Israeli. And Christian from Christian.
Via Dolorosa has humour, weighs all sides equally in the scales of justice, engages our passions yet leaves us to think more clearly than we might expect since September 11: Excellent A++.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
I have had occasions in my teaching past when a top-class student, on whose assignment I had written Excellent A++, would approach me crestfallen. "You haven't told me why! You wrote such a long comment on Jane's, and she only got B. I need to know what you really thought about my work."
It was difficult to know how to tell such a student that her work outstretched my capacity to criticise, even constructively. David Hare's play about Palestine and Israel is in this class. I find it hard to imagine how he could have gathered so much detail from questioning and listening to so many people, holding the diversity of conflicting beliefs in his head all together, and shaping the experience of his travels into a kind of documentary drama in which he makes himself the central character on stage.
And then the writing is so good that an excellent actor like Patrick Dickson has no trouble convincing us that he is David Hare the playwright, who acts out for us politicians, theatre directors, taxi drivers, British Council "minders", US and Canadian Jewish settlers, Palestinian intellectuals with the dramatist's tendency to satirise, and his sense of despair. Using a simple set and easy transitions in lighting and sound, Dickson's timing was excellent, framing the visit to a country where political argument is rife - and 100,000 have died since the Oslo peace agreement - between the quiet bookends of Hampstead Heath, in a country where political argument seems to have lost its point.
Prime Minister Blair follows the popularity, Hare says, but he doesn't tell us what he really thinks. "Send your Blair over here, please" cries a Jewish or Palestinian from the back of the crowd in a land where everyone knows what everyone thinks, and divisions between the religious and the secular, between the principled and the corrupt, between those who see the truth and those who hypocritically refuse to look, not only divide Palestinian from Israeli, but Palestinian from Palestinian and Israeli from Israeli. And Christian from Christian.
Via Dolorosa has humour, weighs all sides equally in the scales of justice, engages our passions yet leaves us to think more clearly than we might expect since September 11: Excellent A++.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 2 October 2001
2001: Canberra Youth Theatre - 21C Happenings. Feature article.
Watch out for young artists all over town for the next 4 weeks.
Canberra Youth Theatre kicks off with Time Control Chapter 1 (Gorman House 6 pm Wednesday October 3). The very young can Write Your Own Adventure with Jackie French (at National Museum 11 am Thursday October 4). Philosophy with bubbles is at Currong Theatre in The Clockwork Divide. And this week also sees young filmmakers on the Big Screen in Garema Place (Friday and Saturday 8.30 pm); Time Control Chapter 2 on Saturday; and Demons exploring Dostoyevski Thursday to Sunday at The Street 8 pm.
In following weeks CYT's Time Control goes through all 6 chapters; the ACT Writers Centre shows 8 - 14 year olds how to illustrate stories at the National Museum; art installations by Ken Lee will appear somewhere yet to be announced; the Choreographic Centre's youth will take a Quantum Leap into Transdance 3091 at The Street. At Tuggeranong Arts Centre, NUTS will show Picasso and Einstein being intuitive in Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin; at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Manuka (and on a nature strip in your suburb soon) Daniel Maginnity's Urbane Mosaics will materialise; and Canberra College photographers will be Extraordinary at Gorman House.
And where else but North Canberra Bowling Club would you expect to see a four-piece funk band called Baron Samadhi and Others? Dickson College goes Train Surfing at Currong Theatre; and ACT Playgroups have a big festival at Corroboree Park, Ainslie 10 am - 2 pm October 23.
And that's not all: there's the Tuggeranong Rotary Youth Arts Awards; Theatre in Decay from Melbourne Kissing the Ground Goodbye; Canberra College being Artrageous; Marymead with Who Cares If I Care?; Famillease directed by Eulea Kiraly; Ethnic Schools Languages Day; Silhouettes for massed recorders and prerecorded tape; and maybe a couple of other things which aren't yet finalised.
Checkout the Canberra Youth Theatre Company's web site for details. They did all the work drawing together 21C Happenings, to show the whole city what the youth of Canberra are doing this October. www.cytc.net will get you there.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Canberra Youth Theatre kicks off with Time Control Chapter 1 (Gorman House 6 pm Wednesday October 3). The very young can Write Your Own Adventure with Jackie French (at National Museum 11 am Thursday October 4). Philosophy with bubbles is at Currong Theatre in The Clockwork Divide. And this week also sees young filmmakers on the Big Screen in Garema Place (Friday and Saturday 8.30 pm); Time Control Chapter 2 on Saturday; and Demons exploring Dostoyevski Thursday to Sunday at The Street 8 pm.
In following weeks CYT's Time Control goes through all 6 chapters; the ACT Writers Centre shows 8 - 14 year olds how to illustrate stories at the National Museum; art installations by Ken Lee will appear somewhere yet to be announced; the Choreographic Centre's youth will take a Quantum Leap into Transdance 3091 at The Street. At Tuggeranong Arts Centre, NUTS will show Picasso and Einstein being intuitive in Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin; at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Manuka (and on a nature strip in your suburb soon) Daniel Maginnity's Urbane Mosaics will materialise; and Canberra College photographers will be Extraordinary at Gorman House.
And where else but North Canberra Bowling Club would you expect to see a four-piece funk band called Baron Samadhi and Others? Dickson College goes Train Surfing at Currong Theatre; and ACT Playgroups have a big festival at Corroboree Park, Ainslie 10 am - 2 pm October 23.
And that's not all: there's the Tuggeranong Rotary Youth Arts Awards; Theatre in Decay from Melbourne Kissing the Ground Goodbye; Canberra College being Artrageous; Marymead with Who Cares If I Care?; Famillease directed by Eulea Kiraly; Ethnic Schools Languages Day; Silhouettes for massed recorders and prerecorded tape; and maybe a couple of other things which aren't yet finalised.
Checkout the Canberra Youth Theatre Company's web site for details. They did all the work drawing together 21C Happenings, to show the whole city what the youth of Canberra are doing this October. www.cytc.net will get you there.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 28 September 2001
2001: Sydney Theatre Company 2002 program. Feature article.
Sydney Theatre Company has announced its 2002 program: a diverse collection including European and American classics, new Australian works, tragedy, comedy and mystery. Maybe mayhem in the real world creates the conditions for expansion in the illusory world of theatre.
Robyn Nevin not only presides over all as Artistic Director, but she also acts - as the fading Southern Belle Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, directed by Jennifer Flowers - and directs: Hanging Man by Andrew Upton, a new study of Australian identity as the three sons of a legendary Australian painter come home for the funeral; and a new adaptation by STC's resident writer Beatrix Christian of A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen.
The choice of Nevin to run STC seems to work in all directions. After a strong showing this year, she announces not only 3 "artform development" productions in the Wharf 2 Blueprints season: Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman's The Seven Stages of Grieving (Aug-Sep), Benjamin Winspear's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth (May-Jun), and the Australian premiere of David Tushingham's translation of Mr Kolpert by David Gieselmann (Feb); but also 11 mainstage productions, plus the presentation of Theatre de Soleil showing The Flood Drummers by Helene Cixous in the Sydney Festival (Jan); and the construction of a new theatre at Walsh Bay for 2003, with expanded commercial opportunities for the company; and the news that private sector support is growing to the point that in 2002 more funds will come from private sources than from Government for the first time in STC's history.
Even the website (www.sydneytheatre.com.au) is expanding, though chunks of it are still under construction at this stage. But you can now book tickets directly.
Productions are: A Man With Five Children by Nick Enright, a drama starring Steve Bisley (Jan-Feb); The Lady in the Van by British writer Alan Bennett, a poignant comedy starring Ruth Cracknell (Jan-Mar); A Doll's House by Ibsen who wrote "For me it has been a question of human rights ... my task has been the portrayal of human beings", starring Miranda Otto(Mar-Apr); Soulmates by David Williamson, a new comedy in "a world where, highbrow and lowbrow, the prizes of critical acclaim and literary immortality provoke greed, envy and competitive passions", starring Amanda Muggleton (Apr-Jun); the Australian premiere of Copenhagen by British playwright Michael Frayn, a play about loyalty in Nazi-occupied Denmark - to family, country and science's quest for knowledge - starring Colin Friels, John Gaden, Jane Harders (May-Jun).
And for the second half of the year: Volpone by Ben Jonson, the classic comedy of avarice, starring Barry Otto (Jun-Jul); The Virgin Mim, a new play by Tony McNamara commissioned by STC, a "tidal wave of comic mayhem" about a reconstructed virgin (Aug-Sep); Hanging Man by Andrew Upton (Aug-Oct); Life is a Dream by 17th Century Spanish writer Pedro Calderon de la Barca, a classic poetic study of a woman disguised as a man who falls in love with a prince who believes he's a slave (Sep-Oct); the 20th Century American classic The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, "an exquisite hymn to lost love and our need to believe in possibility", starring Robyn Nevin (Oct-Dec); Great Expectations by Charles Dickens adapted by Simon Phillips, a Melbourne Theatre Company production starring Angela Punch McGregor (Oct-Dec).
There is also the Sydney Theatre Company Education Program which includes Schoolsdays at mainstage productions, the Blueprints production of Macbeth, the Theatre-In-Practice program for teachers and students to access the professional resources and skills of STC, and the STC-The Sydney Morning Herald Young Playwrights' Award. Email education@sydneytheatre.com.au or phone the Education Manager (02) 9250 1700.
And finally, the Patrick White Playwrights' Award is a national competition which aims to encourage and reward the creation of new writing for the theatre of highest quality. The inaugural award, launched in July 2000, was shared by Bette Guy (The Other Side of the Lake), Ailsa Piper (Small Mercies) and Ben Ellis (Who Are You, Mr James?). The award is part of the STC Writer's Program which in 2002 has spawned The Virgin Mim, Hanging Man and the adaptations of Life is a Dream, A Doll's House and Macbeth.
What we are seeing from the Sydney Theatre Company is an integrated and well-directed offering to the whole community. The 2002 program is an intelligent mix which should make for an exciting theatrical year in Sydney.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Robyn Nevin not only presides over all as Artistic Director, but she also acts - as the fading Southern Belle Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, directed by Jennifer Flowers - and directs: Hanging Man by Andrew Upton, a new study of Australian identity as the three sons of a legendary Australian painter come home for the funeral; and a new adaptation by STC's resident writer Beatrix Christian of A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen.
The choice of Nevin to run STC seems to work in all directions. After a strong showing this year, she announces not only 3 "artform development" productions in the Wharf 2 Blueprints season: Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman's The Seven Stages of Grieving (Aug-Sep), Benjamin Winspear's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth (May-Jun), and the Australian premiere of David Tushingham's translation of Mr Kolpert by David Gieselmann (Feb); but also 11 mainstage productions, plus the presentation of Theatre de Soleil showing The Flood Drummers by Helene Cixous in the Sydney Festival (Jan); and the construction of a new theatre at Walsh Bay for 2003, with expanded commercial opportunities for the company; and the news that private sector support is growing to the point that in 2002 more funds will come from private sources than from Government for the first time in STC's history.
Even the website (www.sydneytheatre.com.au) is expanding, though chunks of it are still under construction at this stage. But you can now book tickets directly.
Productions are: A Man With Five Children by Nick Enright, a drama starring Steve Bisley (Jan-Feb); The Lady in the Van by British writer Alan Bennett, a poignant comedy starring Ruth Cracknell (Jan-Mar); A Doll's House by Ibsen who wrote "For me it has been a question of human rights ... my task has been the portrayal of human beings", starring Miranda Otto(Mar-Apr); Soulmates by David Williamson, a new comedy in "a world where, highbrow and lowbrow, the prizes of critical acclaim and literary immortality provoke greed, envy and competitive passions", starring Amanda Muggleton (Apr-Jun); the Australian premiere of Copenhagen by British playwright Michael Frayn, a play about loyalty in Nazi-occupied Denmark - to family, country and science's quest for knowledge - starring Colin Friels, John Gaden, Jane Harders (May-Jun).
And for the second half of the year: Volpone by Ben Jonson, the classic comedy of avarice, starring Barry Otto (Jun-Jul); The Virgin Mim, a new play by Tony McNamara commissioned by STC, a "tidal wave of comic mayhem" about a reconstructed virgin (Aug-Sep); Hanging Man by Andrew Upton (Aug-Oct); Life is a Dream by 17th Century Spanish writer Pedro Calderon de la Barca, a classic poetic study of a woman disguised as a man who falls in love with a prince who believes he's a slave (Sep-Oct); the 20th Century American classic The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, "an exquisite hymn to lost love and our need to believe in possibility", starring Robyn Nevin (Oct-Dec); Great Expectations by Charles Dickens adapted by Simon Phillips, a Melbourne Theatre Company production starring Angela Punch McGregor (Oct-Dec).
There is also the Sydney Theatre Company Education Program which includes Schoolsdays at mainstage productions, the Blueprints production of Macbeth, the Theatre-In-Practice program for teachers and students to access the professional resources and skills of STC, and the STC-The Sydney Morning Herald Young Playwrights' Award. Email education@sydneytheatre.com.au or phone the Education Manager (02) 9250 1700.
And finally, the Patrick White Playwrights' Award is a national competition which aims to encourage and reward the creation of new writing for the theatre of highest quality. The inaugural award, launched in July 2000, was shared by Bette Guy (The Other Side of the Lake), Ailsa Piper (Small Mercies) and Ben Ellis (Who Are You, Mr James?). The award is part of the STC Writer's Program which in 2002 has spawned The Virgin Mim, Hanging Man and the adaptations of Life is a Dream, A Doll's House and Macbeth.
What we are seeing from the Sydney Theatre Company is an integrated and well-directed offering to the whole community. The 2002 program is an intelligent mix which should make for an exciting theatrical year in Sydney.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 26 September 2001
2001: Eat Your Young
Eat Your Young. Arena Theatre Company directed by Rosemary Myers. The Playhouse September 25-29.
Post post-modern multimedia theatre for young people (15-19). Non-linear narrative. Techno decibel enlargement paralleling visual blasts on multichannel screens and speakers. Amazing stuff - but is it enuff?
Interesting that the printed program separates the live actors from the filmed actors, and again from the writer and technical production people - because Myers before the show explained how all the sound, imagery, lighting and design engineers were integrated into the workshops with actors and writer from the beginning to create a new theatrical form.
She also connected multimedia theatre to Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, which has recently developed to include "spiritual intelligence" - the human ability to experience the wonder of the universe (and usually invent a religion to explain it).
This spirit is the core of great art - when I become engrossed in the theatrical fiction which reflects on and helps me encompass the universe - but Eat Your Young did not do it for me. Perhaps teenagers are used to disjointed images coming at them from all directions at once and so do not seek any clear resolution - maybe all they need is stacks of questions - but I found the techno gadgetry becoming too fascinating to focus on the live characters' personal experiences.
The issues surrounding children placed in "care" which alienates them and compromises the adults charged with responsibility for them are certainly raised loudly in this production, and I imagine would stimulate a great deal of discussion in schools and youth groups - but loudly is not necessarily clearly, at least in this case.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I fear that the non-sequitur imagery of the video clip is the modern popular development of the theatrical absurdism which became established after the terrible experience of World War II. Absurdist plays like Waiting for Godot said to a small coterie of adult theatre goers 40 years ago that there is no meaning in life. Now Eat Your Young takes the message to the young, and I am not sure they are resilient enough. Will they see through the techno imagery of September 11 in New York? Will this show help them do that? Amazing stuff - raising dust (like Ionesco's Rhinoceros) - but for me it's not enuff.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Post post-modern multimedia theatre for young people (15-19). Non-linear narrative. Techno decibel enlargement paralleling visual blasts on multichannel screens and speakers. Amazing stuff - but is it enuff?
Interesting that the printed program separates the live actors from the filmed actors, and again from the writer and technical production people - because Myers before the show explained how all the sound, imagery, lighting and design engineers were integrated into the workshops with actors and writer from the beginning to create a new theatrical form.
She also connected multimedia theatre to Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, which has recently developed to include "spiritual intelligence" - the human ability to experience the wonder of the universe (and usually invent a religion to explain it).
This spirit is the core of great art - when I become engrossed in the theatrical fiction which reflects on and helps me encompass the universe - but Eat Your Young did not do it for me. Perhaps teenagers are used to disjointed images coming at them from all directions at once and so do not seek any clear resolution - maybe all they need is stacks of questions - but I found the techno gadgetry becoming too fascinating to focus on the live characters' personal experiences.
The issues surrounding children placed in "care" which alienates them and compromises the adults charged with responsibility for them are certainly raised loudly in this production, and I imagine would stimulate a great deal of discussion in schools and youth groups - but loudly is not necessarily clearly, at least in this case.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I fear that the non-sequitur imagery of the video clip is the modern popular development of the theatrical absurdism which became established after the terrible experience of World War II. Absurdist plays like Waiting for Godot said to a small coterie of adult theatre goers 40 years ago that there is no meaning in life. Now Eat Your Young takes the message to the young, and I am not sure they are resilient enough. Will they see through the techno imagery of September 11 in New York? Will this show help them do that? Amazing stuff - raising dust (like Ionesco's Rhinoceros) - but for me it's not enuff.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 23 September 2001
2001: Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed - Dear Sun
Dear Sun. An adaptation of the letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed edited by Janine Burke. Melbourne Theatre Company directed by Sioban Tuke at the James O Fairfax Theatre, National Gallery of Australia, Sunday September 23.
In a setting that could be called Still Life in Artist's Studio, among seemingly breeze-scattered sheets of partially drawn-upon paper and deeply red delicious apples spilled from a country wicker basket, three performers were held in situ. The only movement was the bowing arm and slightly bowing body of Associate Principal Cellist of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Sarah Morse; the rising into the spotlights of Rosalind Hammond as Joy Hester and Catherine Wilkin as Sunday Reed; their occasional use respectively of a kitchen chair and a 1950's Scandinavian style sunroom armchair; Hester's hand movements describing lines drawn in a letter or two; and the looks that pass between these two extraordinary women as if their letters were a face-to-face conversation.
This was all I needed to become entirely engrossed in their lives, and the terribly foreboding death of Joy Hester. There was a great tension between watching a theatrical performance yet knowing that each letter was real. I could not avoid feeling Hester's conflict over her new love and her responsibility for the child she left in the Reeds' care; the terror of Hodgkin's Disease and Hester's determination to be true to her feelings which she believed kept her alive for 10 years more than doctors predicted; the confusion over whether Sweeney should be adopted by Sunday and John Reed, against the possibility that his father Albert Tucker would demand his return to his care alone; the ill-feeling that seem to grow between the two women as words written at a distance for so many years failed to pass on true meaning, until they met again in the final dreadful year.
And the sadness of Hester's death was reinforced by large projections of her works, related to the people and experiences in her letters and poems, showing the variety and depths of feeling she created with no more than the necessary lines and shadings, while she continued to believe that she was not a major figure.
This performance illuminated my understanding of the art of Joy Hester, and I wonder if a film could be (or has been) made as a permanent record.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
In a setting that could be called Still Life in Artist's Studio, among seemingly breeze-scattered sheets of partially drawn-upon paper and deeply red delicious apples spilled from a country wicker basket, three performers were held in situ. The only movement was the bowing arm and slightly bowing body of Associate Principal Cellist of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Sarah Morse; the rising into the spotlights of Rosalind Hammond as Joy Hester and Catherine Wilkin as Sunday Reed; their occasional use respectively of a kitchen chair and a 1950's Scandinavian style sunroom armchair; Hester's hand movements describing lines drawn in a letter or two; and the looks that pass between these two extraordinary women as if their letters were a face-to-face conversation.
This was all I needed to become entirely engrossed in their lives, and the terribly foreboding death of Joy Hester. There was a great tension between watching a theatrical performance yet knowing that each letter was real. I could not avoid feeling Hester's conflict over her new love and her responsibility for the child she left in the Reeds' care; the terror of Hodgkin's Disease and Hester's determination to be true to her feelings which she believed kept her alive for 10 years more than doctors predicted; the confusion over whether Sweeney should be adopted by Sunday and John Reed, against the possibility that his father Albert Tucker would demand his return to his care alone; the ill-feeling that seem to grow between the two women as words written at a distance for so many years failed to pass on true meaning, until they met again in the final dreadful year.
And the sadness of Hester's death was reinforced by large projections of her works, related to the people and experiences in her letters and poems, showing the variety and depths of feeling she created with no more than the necessary lines and shadings, while she continued to believe that she was not a major figure.
This performance illuminated my understanding of the art of Joy Hester, and I wonder if a film could be (or has been) made as a permanent record.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 17 September 2001
2001: The Clockwork Divide
The Clockwork Divide by Blaide Lallemand and Conan the Bubbleman. Music composed by Simon Linke. Festival of Contemporary Arts: Currong Theatre September 27-29, October 4-6, 7pm.
Lallemand is a student of sculpture who has contrasted the ways Aristotle and St Augustine viewed time, with reference to the French philosopher of intuition and 1927 Nobel prizewinner for literature, Henri Bergson. Her work begins with Aristotelian time in linear form, with 3 long pendulums swinging to clockwork music, constraining the movements of her 3 performers: Conan O'Brien, Caroline Huf and herself.
Change in the movement and music takes place in minimalist steps until bubble-making fluid runs down the pendulum strings, into the containers which form the weights. Each pendulum is a double fishing line, which when separated becomes the perimeter of a soap bubble - a flat vertical membrane until moved in air, sometimes with a performer's breath to assist. At times the membrane reflects light, almost hiding a performer from the audience; at others a performer is reflected and distorted. Large unpredictably shaped bubbles form, link performers and burst. A hand slowly moves through the membrane without breaking it.
And so we see time as an original experience of the moment, no longer part of a linear progression; we interpret each image in its own right for its own sake; and we cannot know when an apparently solid form will burst.
Bergson's ideas of "creative evolution" are problematical as New Age adherents use him unreasonably to criticise modern science, but as a source of art he has served Lallemand very well. This is a highly original development of fluid material to form abstract images (O'Brien had to experiment with a new formula to create a strong enough bubble membrane). I certainly felt the immediacy of communication with something universal outside the limits of time, which St Augustine tried to articulate. And, after all, this is what all art is about.
It was interesting, though, to note the need for theatrical closure as we witnessed an effective climax and denouement. Aha, I thought. Unity of action in space and time: we've come full circle back to linearity. So Aristotle wins out in the end. What philosophy from a soap bubble!
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Lallemand is a student of sculpture who has contrasted the ways Aristotle and St Augustine viewed time, with reference to the French philosopher of intuition and 1927 Nobel prizewinner for literature, Henri Bergson. Her work begins with Aristotelian time in linear form, with 3 long pendulums swinging to clockwork music, constraining the movements of her 3 performers: Conan O'Brien, Caroline Huf and herself.
Change in the movement and music takes place in minimalist steps until bubble-making fluid runs down the pendulum strings, into the containers which form the weights. Each pendulum is a double fishing line, which when separated becomes the perimeter of a soap bubble - a flat vertical membrane until moved in air, sometimes with a performer's breath to assist. At times the membrane reflects light, almost hiding a performer from the audience; at others a performer is reflected and distorted. Large unpredictably shaped bubbles form, link performers and burst. A hand slowly moves through the membrane without breaking it.
And so we see time as an original experience of the moment, no longer part of a linear progression; we interpret each image in its own right for its own sake; and we cannot know when an apparently solid form will burst.
Bergson's ideas of "creative evolution" are problematical as New Age adherents use him unreasonably to criticise modern science, but as a source of art he has served Lallemand very well. This is a highly original development of fluid material to form abstract images (O'Brien had to experiment with a new formula to create a strong enough bubble membrane). I certainly felt the immediacy of communication with something universal outside the limits of time, which St Augustine tried to articulate. And, after all, this is what all art is about.
It was interesting, though, to note the need for theatrical closure as we witnessed an effective climax and denouement. Aha, I thought. Unity of action in space and time: we've come full circle back to linearity. So Aristotle wins out in the end. What philosophy from a soap bubble!
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 6 September 2001
2001: Eulea Kiraly - feature article
Eulea Kiraly, Theatre Program Director, Tuggeranong Arts Centre.
Sounds simple enough - just another dogsbody arts practitioner. Well, not quite. Since she and her colleagues, the whole Drama Department, resigned from a well-known school back in 1989 when the principal banned a stage production shortly before opening night, Ms Kiraly has become a central figure in Canberra theatre. Only this year however - since she left the Rolls-Royce company (yes, the one which made the cars, or in her case the aeroplane engines) - is she properly recognised as the professional independent theatre director she has long known she needed to be.
Knowing the continual flow of her work directing productions and play readings over many years, I was amused and not a little amazed to imagine her in straight skirts and shoulder pads 9 to 5 as an executive assistant to an aeroplane engine. But this turned out to be the last of a long line of part-time jobs, a "proper day job, nothing to do with real life". Real life began, significantly, on April 1 as Eulea Kiraly, Community Theatre Director, gained employment for 2.5 days per week funded by artsACT, 0.5 days from Healthpact and, from July 1, the rest of the 7 days per week (or more if she fails the executive time management test) at Tuggeranong, funded by Urban Services.
Urban Services? I hear you cry. What are they doing funding a theatre program? The answer reveals the complexity behind the theatre scene in this city.
When I began teaching drama 30 years ago, the wisdom was that in "primitive" societies drama was an integral part of ordinary life, but in "sophisticated" societies - beginning with the Ancient Greeks - drama became separated from ordinary life, as plays were written to reflect on society: and thus began Theatre.
Well, I guess I have to treat Canberra as an example of a modern sophisticated society - yet in the last 30 years "community" theatre has regained status. The Australia Council, for example, has a Major Performing Arts Board, but also a Board for Community Cultural Development which funds theatre work.
The distinction on the ground in Canberra has long been between "community" and "professional" theatre. We have never succeeded in maintaining for long a professional theatre company, yet there are professional productions and much community theatre. Local professional productions attract very small audiences in competition with Sydney only 3 hours away, or imports to the Playhouse.
And then there are amateur companies, which are not community theatres. So we have among others Canberra Rep (amateur, sometimes with pro input, and essentially social rather than community); Free Rain (amateur, but offering opportunities for young people to work on pro style productions); Women on a Shoestring (pro, yet with community theatre themes); Elbow (pro, but so small it almost looks like a community theatre).
And now Urban Services and Health seem to have picked up on the 1980's idea of the "healthy city" in which the arts are re-integrated with daily life. Healthpact has supported work at The Street Theatre for several years, and Urban Services' recently introduced Community Renewal Program supports projects from the Narrabundah community garden to the Tuggeranong theatre program, in recognition that where local people are engaged in professionally managed creative activities, the community benefits from a sense of cohesion, stability and purpose: the heart which Canberra is supposed not to have.
Eulea Kiraly's work is to create theatre in, with and for the community.
At Tuggeranong, following work with Maude Clark of Melbourne's Somebody's Daughter Theatre earlier in the year, her Thursday evening group of some 28 people - indigenous and multicultural, from teenage to senior - are working on "Fam-ill-ease", expected to open on October 26.
A play by Jay Bannister working with the Karralaika drug rehabilitation community and WIREDD (Womens Information Referral and Education on Drugs and Dependency), "White Track Miracle", will be presented as a reading at CMAG Theatre 8pm September 29 in the upcoming Festival of Contemporary Arts (FOCA). This script has already been critically evaluated by the National Playwrights Centre: Bannister and Kiraly plan to take it on to full production after further development work.
Also for FOCA Kiraly plays her dogsbody role as the organiser of the Australian premiere of David Hare's "Via Dolorosa", with Sydney director Moira Blumenthal, at Tuggeranong October 3-6. Performed by Patrick Dickson, the play is about "the volatile passions of faith" set in Israel and Palestine.
In December there will be a reading of a new play, "Coming to Canberra", by Sri Lankan-Australian Siri Ipalawatte, directed by Kiraly for the Canberra Multicultural Theatre Association.
And, finally, Kiraly is working with "Alphabet Soup", a women's group on a long-term theatrical exploration of their experiences living in the Allawa, Bega and Currong Flats, ranging from the 1950's memories of the Snowy Mountains Scheme era, through the public servant period, to inner city life today. Though no date has been set, this work will be performed, probably within the context of the ABC Flats.
So this is Eulea Kiraly, Canberra's Rolls-Royce of integrated community theatre. She can be contacted at TCA on 6293 1443 or by email: eulea@spirit.com.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sounds simple enough - just another dogsbody arts practitioner. Well, not quite. Since she and her colleagues, the whole Drama Department, resigned from a well-known school back in 1989 when the principal banned a stage production shortly before opening night, Ms Kiraly has become a central figure in Canberra theatre. Only this year however - since she left the Rolls-Royce company (yes, the one which made the cars, or in her case the aeroplane engines) - is she properly recognised as the professional independent theatre director she has long known she needed to be.
Knowing the continual flow of her work directing productions and play readings over many years, I was amused and not a little amazed to imagine her in straight skirts and shoulder pads 9 to 5 as an executive assistant to an aeroplane engine. But this turned out to be the last of a long line of part-time jobs, a "proper day job, nothing to do with real life". Real life began, significantly, on April 1 as Eulea Kiraly, Community Theatre Director, gained employment for 2.5 days per week funded by artsACT, 0.5 days from Healthpact and, from July 1, the rest of the 7 days per week (or more if she fails the executive time management test) at Tuggeranong, funded by Urban Services.
Urban Services? I hear you cry. What are they doing funding a theatre program? The answer reveals the complexity behind the theatre scene in this city.
When I began teaching drama 30 years ago, the wisdom was that in "primitive" societies drama was an integral part of ordinary life, but in "sophisticated" societies - beginning with the Ancient Greeks - drama became separated from ordinary life, as plays were written to reflect on society: and thus began Theatre.
Well, I guess I have to treat Canberra as an example of a modern sophisticated society - yet in the last 30 years "community" theatre has regained status. The Australia Council, for example, has a Major Performing Arts Board, but also a Board for Community Cultural Development which funds theatre work.
The distinction on the ground in Canberra has long been between "community" and "professional" theatre. We have never succeeded in maintaining for long a professional theatre company, yet there are professional productions and much community theatre. Local professional productions attract very small audiences in competition with Sydney only 3 hours away, or imports to the Playhouse.
And then there are amateur companies, which are not community theatres. So we have among others Canberra Rep (amateur, sometimes with pro input, and essentially social rather than community); Free Rain (amateur, but offering opportunities for young people to work on pro style productions); Women on a Shoestring (pro, yet with community theatre themes); Elbow (pro, but so small it almost looks like a community theatre).
And now Urban Services and Health seem to have picked up on the 1980's idea of the "healthy city" in which the arts are re-integrated with daily life. Healthpact has supported work at The Street Theatre for several years, and Urban Services' recently introduced Community Renewal Program supports projects from the Narrabundah community garden to the Tuggeranong theatre program, in recognition that where local people are engaged in professionally managed creative activities, the community benefits from a sense of cohesion, stability and purpose: the heart which Canberra is supposed not to have.
Eulea Kiraly's work is to create theatre in, with and for the community.
At Tuggeranong, following work with Maude Clark of Melbourne's Somebody's Daughter Theatre earlier in the year, her Thursday evening group of some 28 people - indigenous and multicultural, from teenage to senior - are working on "Fam-ill-ease", expected to open on October 26.
A play by Jay Bannister working with the Karralaika drug rehabilitation community and WIREDD (Womens Information Referral and Education on Drugs and Dependency), "White Track Miracle", will be presented as a reading at CMAG Theatre 8pm September 29 in the upcoming Festival of Contemporary Arts (FOCA). This script has already been critically evaluated by the National Playwrights Centre: Bannister and Kiraly plan to take it on to full production after further development work.
Also for FOCA Kiraly plays her dogsbody role as the organiser of the Australian premiere of David Hare's "Via Dolorosa", with Sydney director Moira Blumenthal, at Tuggeranong October 3-6. Performed by Patrick Dickson, the play is about "the volatile passions of faith" set in Israel and Palestine.
In December there will be a reading of a new play, "Coming to Canberra", by Sri Lankan-Australian Siri Ipalawatte, directed by Kiraly for the Canberra Multicultural Theatre Association.
And, finally, Kiraly is working with "Alphabet Soup", a women's group on a long-term theatrical exploration of their experiences living in the Allawa, Bega and Currong Flats, ranging from the 1950's memories of the Snowy Mountains Scheme era, through the public servant period, to inner city life today. Though no date has been set, this work will be performed, probably within the context of the ABC Flats.
So this is Eulea Kiraly, Canberra's Rolls-Royce of integrated community theatre. She can be contacted at TCA on 6293 1443 or by email: eulea@spirit.com.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 2 September 2001
2001: Tuggeranong Community Arts Association Open Day. Feature article.
Tuggeranong Community Arts Association Open Day, Saturday September 1.
Maybe it seemed a gamble a decade or so ago to force the Canberra Casino to compensate the community for the privilege of profiteering from people's weakness in imagining winning an easy wealth from blackjack.
Political imagination worked wonders a year or two later to split the ACT into 3 electorates before the money was pigeonholed, so it became politically correct to spend some in Belconnen (Murranji Theatre at Hawker College), some at CIT Woden (recording studio) and most in Nappy Valley: the Tuggeranong Arts Centre.
It wasn't Black Jack but Domenic Mico, the now famous Festival Director, who had become Tuggeranong's Community Arts Officer in 1992 - with the gall to follow through the construction of an oddly exciting building by architect May Flannery in pursuit of a brilliant vision of community and professional arts working together, despite rumblings from many that the money should have gone to Civic.
Mico moved on to one festival after another and back again, and Evol McLeod became the General Manager who has made the vision brighter in reality than anyone could imagine when the angles and planes of architecture were bare of technical equipment. But the art of the architect worked to create light and air, with stunning lakeside views, which have stimulated excitement in the artists, the administrators, the Tuggeranong community and especially the young people - no longer in nappies but finishing college, like the cast of Lockie Leonard Scumbuster, adapted by Messengers Project Officer Garry Fry from the novel by Tim Winton.
The Messengers Project is just one of many at TCA. It's about helping young people to be resilient in the face of the pressures of hormones and society which lead so many to depression and even suicide. Josh Broomfield, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Tess MacDonald and Matt Friend - all previous Drama students with Fry at Lake Tuggeranong College - have stayed together after Year 12 to perform Winton's vigorous take on environmental pollution, with resilience as its theme, in primary and high schools. The show is an energetic piece of theatre-in-education which works at both the intellectual level on the environment issue, while middle school students especially also pick up on how Lockie's friend Egg's problems affect him. In post-show discussion they find themselves focussed invariably on positive suggestions for resolution. Winton/Fry's art and the youth of these performers works well indeed.
Open Day saw some 16 activities, among which were the Pet Parade judged by ALP MP Annette Ellis (Most Theatrical Pet was a ferret) and the Official Opening of the Shorelines Public Art Project by Lib ACT Minister for the Arts and Other Things, Brendan Smyth. Shorelines is a mosaic footpath with street banners and flags by the lake, leading to the Arts Centre, aiming to reflect the cultural identity of Tuggeranong. The Minister claimed to be a local identity and thanked all the dozens of people involved in the project, including the Australia Council and ACT Urban Services for funds and construction work.
ALP MLA Bill Wood, who hopes to be Minister for Education after the October 20 election, was there and says he will want the Arts in his portfolio rather than with Other Things. Domenic Mico couldn't not be there especially since he seeks election as a Democrat with a strong arts agenda: he is rethinking the way the Arts should be placed as the key to cultural and community renewal.
Just the buzz on Open Day was enough to justify that decade-old gamble. Imagination is certainly a winner at the TCA.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
Maybe it seemed a gamble a decade or so ago to force the Canberra Casino to compensate the community for the privilege of profiteering from people's weakness in imagining winning an easy wealth from blackjack.
Political imagination worked wonders a year or two later to split the ACT into 3 electorates before the money was pigeonholed, so it became politically correct to spend some in Belconnen (Murranji Theatre at Hawker College), some at CIT Woden (recording studio) and most in Nappy Valley: the Tuggeranong Arts Centre.
It wasn't Black Jack but Domenic Mico, the now famous Festival Director, who had become Tuggeranong's Community Arts Officer in 1992 - with the gall to follow through the construction of an oddly exciting building by architect May Flannery in pursuit of a brilliant vision of community and professional arts working together, despite rumblings from many that the money should have gone to Civic.
Mico moved on to one festival after another and back again, and Evol McLeod became the General Manager who has made the vision brighter in reality than anyone could imagine when the angles and planes of architecture were bare of technical equipment. But the art of the architect worked to create light and air, with stunning lakeside views, which have stimulated excitement in the artists, the administrators, the Tuggeranong community and especially the young people - no longer in nappies but finishing college, like the cast of Lockie Leonard Scumbuster, adapted by Messengers Project Officer Garry Fry from the novel by Tim Winton.
The Messengers Project is just one of many at TCA. It's about helping young people to be resilient in the face of the pressures of hormones and society which lead so many to depression and even suicide. Josh Broomfield, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Tess MacDonald and Matt Friend - all previous Drama students with Fry at Lake Tuggeranong College - have stayed together after Year 12 to perform Winton's vigorous take on environmental pollution, with resilience as its theme, in primary and high schools. The show is an energetic piece of theatre-in-education which works at both the intellectual level on the environment issue, while middle school students especially also pick up on how Lockie's friend Egg's problems affect him. In post-show discussion they find themselves focussed invariably on positive suggestions for resolution. Winton/Fry's art and the youth of these performers works well indeed.
Open Day saw some 16 activities, among which were the Pet Parade judged by ALP MP Annette Ellis (Most Theatrical Pet was a ferret) and the Official Opening of the Shorelines Public Art Project by Lib ACT Minister for the Arts and Other Things, Brendan Smyth. Shorelines is a mosaic footpath with street banners and flags by the lake, leading to the Arts Centre, aiming to reflect the cultural identity of Tuggeranong. The Minister claimed to be a local identity and thanked all the dozens of people involved in the project, including the Australia Council and ACT Urban Services for funds and construction work.
ALP MLA Bill Wood, who hopes to be Minister for Education after the October 20 election, was there and says he will want the Arts in his portfolio rather than with Other Things. Domenic Mico couldn't not be there especially since he seeks election as a Democrat with a strong arts agenda: he is rethinking the way the Arts should be placed as the key to cultural and community renewal.
Just the buzz on Open Day was enough to justify that decade-old gamble. Imagination is certainly a winner at the TCA.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 15 June 2001
2001: The Old Time Music Hall 2001
The Old Time Music Hall 2001. Canberra Repertory at The Playhouse, June 14-23.
Ritual theatre, as this has surely become after 27 seasons, has a role to play which I am sure some sociologist from ANU could tease out for us. Something about preserving continuity in the face of constant change, maintaining the power of the mythic, bonding particular social groupings. But since some would say this analysis is not my task here, I'll leave theory to others, except to say that this year's show is much less Howard-esque (I'm nodding towards Ian Warden) than the last one I saw 5 years ago.
The difference is partly in a more sophisticated production - better choice of numbers and acts, excellent choreography (simple in style but just right for each situation), equally good costumes and backdrops, all directed with clarity by Cathie Clelland. The quality that really lifts the show, however, is the satirical humour - not present in every item (Pennies From Heaven was too gawky for me), but brilliant in numbers like the two emus and a sort of lizard tap-dancing to an almost monotone regular-rhythm primary school version of My Country by Dorothea Mackellar.
It is nice, too, to see Federation put in its place - Canberra - by working out of the old song "Come, Josephine, in my flying machine ... Oh, let's spoon in a hot air balloon" into the new song written by Musical Maestro Dr Andrew Kay called Fed-air-ation: "When people say, What's good about Canberra? we say, hot air!"
Original English Music Hall was so popular for so long because comedians and singers caught the changing moods of the ordinary people of that nation, and it is interesting to see how in this show it is the mostly quite absurd numbers that make fun of Australian attitudes which move the audience to cheers.
Unfair as it is to select individuals from an all-round excellent cast, I'm going to give guernseys to Lesley Smith and Julie McElhone as the best actors this year. And the best icon is clearly Rosemary Hyde, unable to direct this time, whose image revealed at the end raises the roof. Ritual theatre, indeed, and nicely done.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
Ritual theatre, as this has surely become after 27 seasons, has a role to play which I am sure some sociologist from ANU could tease out for us. Something about preserving continuity in the face of constant change, maintaining the power of the mythic, bonding particular social groupings. But since some would say this analysis is not my task here, I'll leave theory to others, except to say that this year's show is much less Howard-esque (I'm nodding towards Ian Warden) than the last one I saw 5 years ago.
The difference is partly in a more sophisticated production - better choice of numbers and acts, excellent choreography (simple in style but just right for each situation), equally good costumes and backdrops, all directed with clarity by Cathie Clelland. The quality that really lifts the show, however, is the satirical humour - not present in every item (Pennies From Heaven was too gawky for me), but brilliant in numbers like the two emus and a sort of lizard tap-dancing to an almost monotone regular-rhythm primary school version of My Country by Dorothea Mackellar.
It is nice, too, to see Federation put in its place - Canberra - by working out of the old song "Come, Josephine, in my flying machine ... Oh, let's spoon in a hot air balloon" into the new song written by Musical Maestro Dr Andrew Kay called Fed-air-ation: "When people say, What's good about Canberra? we say, hot air!"
Original English Music Hall was so popular for so long because comedians and singers caught the changing moods of the ordinary people of that nation, and it is interesting to see how in this show it is the mostly quite absurd numbers that make fun of Australian attitudes which move the audience to cheers.
Unfair as it is to select individuals from an all-round excellent cast, I'm going to give guernseys to Lesley Smith and Julie McElhone as the best actors this year. And the best icon is clearly Rosemary Hyde, unable to direct this time, whose image revealed at the end raises the roof. Ritual theatre, indeed, and nicely done.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
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