2007: National Folk Festival - feature article on Jared Wilkins and Dave O'Neill

The Board of the National Folk Festival is delighted to announce two new senior staff positions.  Jared Wilkins, Production Manager of the Festival for the last three years has been appointed Managing Director and Dave O’Neill, Program Manager in 2000 and 2006, is now the Festival’s Artistic Director.

Both jobs are full time, fixed term contract positions.  O’Neill, a music teacher and internationally acclaimed professional musician, a member of the Eric Bogle Band, has taken on an expanded role as artistic director.  Wilkins began 10 years ago as a volunteer, then volunteer coordinator.  I spoke to Wilkins as he stood in the middle of a paddock rapidly filling with tents as volunteers began arriving from all over Australia for the NFF, which will be opened on Thursday evening at 8pm by the Hon Barry Cohen, former Minister for the Arts in the Hawke Government.

1300 volunteers, grouped into teams managed by volunteer coordinators, work to a paid Volunteer Manager, one of only five paid staff in Wilkins’ office.  I wondered on the one hand if, since the National Folk Festival was permanently based in Canberra in the early 1990s, the new positions represented a corporatisation of the NFF.  On the other hand, here was the Managing Director in the field, literally, looking and sounding like just another groupie of the folk music community.  How does it all work?

Wilkins’ personal history goes a long way to answering this question.  Community, he says, is the key.  Even he, who attended Narrabundah College, and O’Neill who went to Narrabundah High School work together as members of the Canberra community.  Teaching, too, is a central component of their lives.  Kids, says Wilkins, usually fantasise about growing up to run away with the circus (perhaps this is the story of O’Neill’s life as a musician), but being brought up in the household of well-known drama and art identities, Peter and Lola Wilkins, saw their son run away from the circus to become a chemistry teacher at Marist Brothers in Canberra for three years.

It was a hard struggle for Wilkins to succeed in chemistry and maths through secondary school and university, but he came to understand how to crack the code of scientific language and to appreciate the challenge his students faced.  He clearly sees his managerial task in an educational light.

But he never really left the circus, working on events production at WOMADelaide, Adelaide Fringe and the real thing, Cirque du Soleil, to help pay his way through uni. The National Folk Festival had to become managed as a business to survive but, he says, the corporate-looking structure does not undermine the folk music community approach, even though there is great competition for places as performers.  2007 attracted 600 applications for 200 performing spots.

The way it works is that volunteers pay their own way to come from all over Australia, with even a few from overseas, because the quality of the program is guaranteed.  Yet the program is designed deliberately to cover the range from performers at the beginning of their careers to those at their peak, with a strong emphasis on teaching and encouraging the young.  The generations play and learn together so that the folk music community rolls on.  We can hope that the NFF 40-year generational report will be more positive than Peter Costello’s announcement last Monday.

Even the three-year contract arrangements for the Artistic Director and Managing Director jobs are planned with the intention that these roles will be passed on to new people to maintain an invigorating folk music culture over the years.  Each year, too, one of the states is the focus – this year Western Australia – so interest and personal involvement revolves around the country.  And, as we reported in the Canberra Times Panorama last weekend (Lusty Lyricism and Politics), a relevant theme is chosen each year which helps to give the content of the Festival a direction and social purpose.  For 2007 the Middle East is the focus.

Wilkins, says NFF Board President John Taylor, is “superbly able, committed and professional, and the Board has every confidence that the event will continue to prosper and grow under his leadership”.  Wilkins claims it’s all just a matter of “nuts and bolts” putting the Festival together, connecting all the parts, working out how “everything affects everything else”.

All 1300 volunteers come together because “folk music is the music of the folk”.  It’s all about community, the soul of the National Folk Festival, says the very model of a modern managing director, Jared Wilkins.

O’Neill’s understanding of the Festival’s program potential and his experience and personal status in the broader music industry is “enviable”, says John Taylor.  “We are truly fortunate to have two highly skilled professionals to fill these roles”. 



 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter

The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter, presented by the Frozen Shape Collective directed by Nick McCorriston at Belconnen Theatre March 28-31, 7.30pm

Frozen Shape Collective is the latest kaleidoscopic rearrangement of people most of whom were previously or are still associated with Bohemian Theatre, BKu and Opiate Productions which seem to have spun off each other over the past six years or so. 

I suggest this is the team to keep working together, because The Birthday Party is the most successful piece of work I recall seeing from these various groups. Part of the Wet Season (Wave Edge Theory), McCorriston has cast, directed, designed lights and sound (set design by Sudzset) with an excellent ear for Pinter’s language and eye for Pinter’s characters in this dreary British seaside boarding house setting.

Each actor – Robert Matthews (Petey Boles), Kerrie Roberts (Meg Boles), Matt Borneman (Stanley Webber, whose birthday is “celebrated”), Chris Rooks (Lulu), Pat Gordon (the hit man Seamus McCann) and Robert De Fries (the standover man Nat ‘Simey’ Goldberg) – has equally well understood that each Pinteresque pause is full of a character’s thinking.  Usually, what the hell can I say now to fill in this awkward silence, when I don’t actually know what’s going on.  Or in McCann and Goldberg, the pauses just let the creepy feeling sink in, to us in the audience as much as to the other characters.  Laughter happens – but it’s short-lived.

To pull this degree of subtlety off so that two hours (including only a short interval) passed without concern for time on opening night is a success that Frozen Shape are well justified in celebrating.  I was especially impressed that no character was allowed to become a minor role, compared with the central roles of Goldberg, McCann and Webber. 

Rooks’ Lulu, for example, was a clearly drawn character caught in Goldberg’s web for a one-night stand, who grew overnight to realise that such men are fatally dangerous.    De Fries gave us the charm of Goldberg as well as his menace, while Gordon’s McCann kept even Goldberg guessing, making this character much stronger and better balanced against Goldberg than in some other productions I have seen.

All in the ensemble gave equally, creating satisfying theatre which certainly justifies Belconnen Theatre’s efforts to encourage young serious theatre practitioners. Go to www.belcomserv.com.au/art/wet/ for more information.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: Falling in Love Again - Jennifer Ward-Lealand. Promo feature article.

It looked like a production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame on the stage of The Street Theatre.  Two garbage bins and a cute looking bucket between them.  But they were full of water, like all the theatre spotlights, the carpets, the seats.  Ceilings collapsed, one near the lower theatre door while the insurance assessor was standing close by.

This was the result of the storm on February 27.  Almost endgame for The Street, one might think, considering the cost of repairs, replacement of all those stage lights, relocating shows to other venues and loss of income from cancelled or postponed shows.

But the show goes on, starting this Friday with Auckland-based Jennifer Ward-Lealand, so revered in New Zealand that on April 4, we can reveal, she will receive an ONZM for her services to theatre.  Falling in Love Again is a tribute to the strength of character of the German cabaret singer, Marlene Dietrich, who “had the guts,” says Ward-Lealand, “to turn her back on her own country”.

Since her youth theatre days some 30 years ago, Ward-Lealand has been rewarded with critical accolades. As Agnes in Agnes of God (1985) she was “an electrifying combination of distracted guilt and vengeful rage.”  Her portrayal of Hedda Gabler (1986) captured “the audience’s undivided attention from the very first time she walks on stage.” In 2005, as Stevie in The Goat, she was “formidable”, and of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in 2006, the NZ Herald critic wrote “The delicate interactions between Viola and Olivia produces some wonderfully poignant moments, notably when Jennifer Ward-Lealand’s magisterial countess dissolves into a lovestruck teenager as she is captivated by the overpowering sweetness of Viola.”

For all these years Ward-Lealand has been more than a stalwart entertainer.  As she has found in researching Marlene Dietrich, theatre can change how one sees the world, not only for the audience but for the practitioner.  In 2002 she was approached to play the part of Dietrich in a play Marlene by British author Pam Gems, who has also written about Edith Piaf.  Despite her musical family background, Ward-Lealand was hesitant about taking the role, which included six Dietrich songs.

But when a friend, a specialist in European cabaret, gave her documents and recordings, she found herself becoming fascinated, especially by Dietrich’s role in World War 2 on the Allied side, persuading German troops through her cabaret songs to reject the Nazi government in favour of democracy.  Dietrich could, of course, have stayed in Germany and become equally famous and perhaps richer supporting her country’s war effort. 

What was it, I asked Ward-Lealand, that made Dietrich reject her strict conservative upbringing, and in the USA become a focus for displaced German Jews?  Theatre cabaret was the answer.  Through the 1920s and 1930s the cabaret was an open society, more European than national, a swinging lifestyle, and particularly for Dietrich a place where she associated personally with Jewish people.  She found in herself a “deep sense of outrage that she couldn’t easily run away from” at their treatment.

And, though Ward-Lealand has not been placed in such a testing situation, she too has found the theatre to be a “tolerant industry, where really nothing is shocking”.  In her career she feels she has been very fortunate to have played such an array of characters from Polly Peachum in Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, Janet in The New Rocky Horror Show and Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein to Anna in Old Times by Harold Pinter, the Young Girl in Yerma by Garcia Lorca and many, many others.  The key, she says, is the experience of taking these roles with directors you can respect, so that you learn to extend your understanding of the characters and change your own understanding of the world.

So when she performs in the role of Marlene Dietrich in Falling in Love Again, we will not see a singer imitating Dietrich.  Through 23 songs, including some Cole Porter, Piaf and others, we will become engaged in that gutsy character, created for us by Jennifer Ward-Lealand as much as a celebration of Dietrich’s contribution as an entertainment.  “I take my work very seriously” says Ward-Lealand, on stage and in Auckland theatre, film and television management boards.

One special program she has established is the Theatre Patrons program, which she says ten years ago she would not have had the guts to do.  The audiences need to “own” their theatre, and, I am sure, they are now thanking her with the honour of an ONZM.  “Like an OBE,” she explains, “but like you in Australia we have grown up now and have our own honours.”  And, I sense, it is growing up that she has done since those youth theatre days, and Marlene Dietrich did through her theatre cabaret experience.  We will see the mature performance on Friday night.

Falling in Love Again
Jennifer Ward-Lealand, with Grant Winterburn and Aaron Coddel
The Street Theatre Stage 1
Saturday March 30, 8.30pm
Tickets: $30
Bookings: 6247 1223


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: Jasan Mindmaster by Jasan Savage

    THEATRE BY FRANK McKONE
   
Jasan Mindmaster ESP Mindshow at UC Theatre, The Hub, University of Canberra.  March 23 and 24, 8pm; March 25, 5pm; March 30, 8pm, March 31 2pm and 8pm; April 1, 5pm

With a willing suspension of disbelief, Jasan Savage’s stage illusions are thoroughly enjoyable.

He claims not to be a magician, proving the point by demonstrating to us what he could not do because he is not a magician, except that in doing so he does the trick anyway, proving that he is an accomplished magician. This kind of gentle humour is the key to a pleasant evening of an old-fashioned kind.

Those of us who know Savage as the UC Theatre’s director, as many on opening did, were surprised to discover his talent as magician and mind-reader, though not so surprised at his deliberately execrable jokes.  In fact he began his career at the age of 18, worked with the famous The Great Franquin in the 1950s, and claims to hold the record for a solo artist in Australia by performing 65 straight weeks in Queensland, quoting a high recommendation from Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson “Your jaw will get sore from repeatedly hitting the floor.”

In my childhood days in the early 1950s there were performers like Jasan Mindmaster on television seemingly weekly in my native England, and I remember the sense of innocence, amazement and humour of those shows, unaware at that age of the Cold War and the growing threat of hot nuclear war.  This ESP Mindshow took me back to that atmosphere, now in an age of a war on terror.  The old tricks still work, as they have for centuries, taking our minds off harsh reality for an hour or two.

Savage does this particularly well by involving members of the audience throughout the show, in a completely non-threatening manner.  The only warning for children is the opening story – The Eye by Edgar Allan Poe – which might cause nightmares, but otherwise the show is fun, though you might need a guide to find The Hub in the half dark of the UC campus.    

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: Within by Elyse Horan

Within, incorporating Hamlet and Ophelia by Elyse Horan and Interior by Maurice Maeterlinck.  Directed by Elyse Horan at Belconnen Theatre, Belconnen Community Centre, March 14-16 at 7.30pm.

It is important to see this production in context.  Elyse Horan is a young writer and director who has put an interesting idea on stage, in what seems to me to be a self-training exercise.  Completing Year 12 Drama at Copland College last year, and with several years’ experience at Canberra Youth Theatre, she has taken up the offer of a short season at Belconnen Theatre.

Director of Belconnen Theatre, Jan Wawrzynczak, has developed his role as producer for the many young people in Belconnen who need a place to put on work as they move from College into the adult world of theatre.  Currently, Copland, Hawker and Radford Colleges have ex-students in the program, which gives them the theatre space free, with practical assistance and mentoring from Wawrzynczak.  Other groups are nominally charged a hire fee, but pay at the end of their season, with Wawrzynczak able to adjust his budget to support groups who make a loss.

In this context, Horan’s experiment is clever in concept.  Maeterlinck’s play is about a family unaware that their eldest daughter has been drowned.  An old man from the village must tell them, but we see him with the man who discovered her body, watching the contented family through a lighted window.  He does not know how to tell them, but in the end he must as the villagers bring the daughter’s body to the house. 

Horan has seen the daughter as Ophelia, and presents her imagined scene of the lovers at the point where Hamlet begins to go mad, leading to Ophelia’s drowning.  Though she has caught onto the idea of symbolism, which was Maeterlinck’s original contribution to theatre, Horan’s play is a mix of some effective realism with some juvenile black-costumed characters supposedly representing elements of Hamlet’s madness.  If she had worked in the same mode as Maeterlinck, perhaps with a chorus who describe for us what they see, objectively reporting as we watch Ophelia and Hamlet in action (and hear Shakespeare’s words), Horan might have produced a small masterpiece.

She has far to go as a writer yet, of course, and this is a worthwhile rite of passage. 

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: William Yang, photographer and storyteller, the current H.C.Coombs Creative Arts Fellow. Feature article.

See George Gittoes’ Portrait of William Yang at http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an12020150-1

Nugget Coombs instigated the Creative Arts Fellowships at ANU in 1965, when William Yang was metaphorically panning for gold as a young man growing up in Dimbulah, Far North Queensland. 

The ANU Research School of Humanities renamed the Fellowships in honour of Dr H.C.Coombs in 1996, the year before he died.  By then he would have known of the success of William Yang, photographer and storyteller, and would not be at all surprised to know that Yang is the current H.C.Coombs Creative Arts Fellow until the end of May. 

Nor would he mind extending the metaphor.  Yang’s nuggets have panned out with increasing purity over the decades.  He began as a Queensland University architecture student but discovered photography. Moving to Sydney in 1969, gold was revealed in the form of Rex Cramphorn, who became one of the most original theatre directors in Australia.  But working as a writer who watched the then experimental Performance Syndicate actors in improvisation workshops, turning out playscripts which were rarely performed, Yang found that “all that glisters is not gold” in the sense that he could not make a living this way.

He did get a brief cameo role in Syndicate’s only commercial production, The Legend of King O’Malley, and remains a friend of author Bob Ellis to this day.

By 1974, photography re-emerged from the gravel in the pan.  “I started photographing parties and I thought that real life threw up better situations than I could think up as a playwright” explained Yang to ABC TV presenter Stephen Feneley, on the occasion of a retrospective of his work at the State Library of New South Wales in 1998.  Yang seemed to me too quiet and contained to speak of “throwing up”, but maybe he meant tossing the pan around to remove the dross.

In a sense the period between 1974 and 1989 produced successful flashy stones as well as the less obvious genuine gold.  The parties Yang photographed often featured people who were celebrities in the social pages, so for some 15 years the man behind the camera made a living from the glossy magazines.  He could do this, he noted, “because I’m Chinese [and] people don’t notice me as much.  I mean, it’s a funny psychology, but I have felt that I’ve been more invisible than other photographers.”

During this time, Yang became a celebrity in his own right.  The Australian Centre for Photography began to bring photography “to people’s consciousness as an art form”.  Yang’s photographs exhibited there in 1977, titled Sydneyphiles, startled gallery viewers because of their unadorned, even raw depictions of social situations, being seen in a new light on a gallery wall rather than being flipped past in a magazine.  Many shots shocked people who had not seen such images of gay people before.  Yang noted how viewers used diversionary behaviour to deal with their shock.  “I think that there was a sort of prejudice against the gay images, which people couldn’t come out and say, ‘oh, we don’t like these gay images’.  Instead they said ‘oh, he uses flash.  What dreadful lighting’.  And so I think that they attacked me in that way.”

At home, where Yang likes to work surrounded by his own archive and equipment, away from the commercial, often black-and-white work, out of the public eye he found himself stirring a different pan, of his collection of colour slides.  Gold slowly appeared as he experimented with the idea of making short stories with the images.  This work reconnected Yang with theatre performance when he came out from behind the camera and presented nine photo-stories in the form of monologues and slide projections in the Downstairs Theatre at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre in 1989.

Audiences responded so well, especially to the stories centred on Yang’s family history, that he was able at last to drop commercial photography which had exhausted him by this time.  He realised that he had created a new genre, still unique world-wide, which integrates story-telling, images on up to seven projectors, and music.  The evolving form has produced a series of shows including Sadness (1992), Friends of Dorothy (1998), Blood Links (1999) which are largely autobiographical, followed by stories of other communities such as Aboriginal people of Enngonia and the German immigrants of South Australia in Shadows (2002) - which he performed in Canberra in May 2006 - and his first study of the “inner journey of the spirit” in Objects for Meditation at Sydney Opera House in 2005 and at the Melbourne International Arts Festival 2006.

It may seem an easy life, taking pictures and telling stories about them, but it can easily cost $50,000 to put a show together.  The Australia Council Theatre Board has been a regular contributor, with a range of other sponsors.  Sometimes individual audience members, from widely scattered locations as Yang tours Australia and internationally, may help with preparing the next show.  Sometimes it is a venue, knowing his audience drawing power, which provides support in kind.  Often it has been an arts festival which tops up the needed funds, and this was to have been the case with the Sydney Festival in January 2007.

Unfortunately, to Yang’s great disappointment, this sponsorship fell through.  His current work, China, could not be finished and his performance had to be cancelled.  However he was perhaps lucky that the ANU Creative Arts Fellowships rotate.  Visual artist one year, writer the next and this year a performing artist.  Working away from home is not necessarily easy for Yang but he is pleased to have been awarded the Fellowship not only because of the recognition of the quality of his art but also because his stipend will enable him to complete China and to begin work on his next show which has the working title My Generation.

China is about Yang’s experiences visiting China as he has done now over many years, learning more about Taoism which was introduced to him in his thirties by a Chinese teacher who told him “ 'You're ashamed of being Chinese’.  I had to admit that I was.  So that brought the change in me where I had to catch up on all those years and I researched the Chinese in Australia and I’ve told that story as the basis of a lot of my modern work.”

China will be performed in-house for ANU staff and students in March.  It takes the audience on to modern China and will be performed for the general public in Sydney at the new home of the Performance Space at Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh for a short season March 20-24 (performancespace.com.au).

My Generation, a study of Yang’s experiences in Sydney in the 1980s, will be staged in 2008.

Already he is finding his time at ANU is “terribly busy”.  Though he is not required to teach, he is giving some lectures, he finds that there are so many interesting people to talk to and who want to ask him about his work that he has to control his social life, he has taken on two students in apprenticeship roles, and he has to learn the processes needed to produce quality digital images from his collection of slides.

He is highly appreciative of the range of people with specialist expertise at ANU and especially gives thanks for having been taught how to set up and use the appropriate computer scanning program to create his images at professional quality.  He has also found a specialist player of the Chinese erhu, PhD student at the ANU School of Music, Nicholas Ng, one of the few players in Australia and who will perform with Yang in China. Yang has long collaborated closely with live musicians such as Colin Offord (Shadows), and he sees his interaction with arts people, technicians and social historians as an important aspect of his Fellowship. 

Gabriella Coslovich, writing about William Yang in The Age, quotes the Chinese Taoist sage Lao-tzu: “The master acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything” and I found an hour in conversation with Yang left me thinking about the nature of his art.  His images are of things as they are, but the music and the storytelling make the meaning of these pictures manifest.  I wondered if, to do this, he had to create a role for himself to perform.  He said, “No.  Like everyone I have a private and a public self” and it is his public self who tells the stories, not an acted character different from himself.

Hearing this, and observing the slight, perhaps wry smile which goes with his words, I felt that HC Coombs did the right thing back in 1965 to provide this gold nugget with a place to shine. 

“In 1989 I knew I was on to a good form,” Yang says, explaining that in one sense the series of images he shows look like raw film, yet the limitations created by the slide show format force the audience to “work a lot harder at one of my pieces than if they were watching a documentary film”.  The work “alludes to a novel, or an opera”.  Because it is a performance, and people pay to see it, there is a special commitment, more than walking around a gallery “speed viewing”.  People have to draw their own conclusions as the narrative progresses.  They have to make sense of it for themselves, and “they enjoy the challenge” says Creative Arts Fellow William Yang.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: A Local Man by Bob Ellis and Robin McLachlan. Promo feature article

This paper [The Canberra Times] reviewed the first public performance of A Local Man by Bob Ellis and Robin McLachlan in August 2004.  The production was for the small audience who could fit into the Ponton Theatre on the Bathurst Campus of Charles Sturt University. 

Though the script was simply subtitled “a new play about Ben Chifley” with the likelihood of some re-writing in mind and the performance by Tony Barry needing to settle down, even the try-out showed the play’s capacity to create an emotional response and we expressed the hope that it would tour Australia.

Tony Barry Enterprises and Keep Breathing Productions have kept the hope alive.  After a successful 6-week season at The Ensemble Theatre in Sydney last November-December, we shall have the opportunity to see what is now dubbed “an intimate portrait of a great Australian statesman” here at The Playhouse, March 7-11.

A Local Man is quite the oppposite of an historical tract, though the research behind the story is meticulous.  After losing to Robert Menzies in 1949 and 1951, Ben Chifley had to face up to losing his party leadership.  Ellis and McLachlan have imagined his last evening at home, writing his farewell speech.  The strength of the play is not so much about what he decides to say, but much more about his feelings, often hidden even from himself.  We see a man of integrity and discipline close to his final point of no return.  Tony Barry captures Chifley’s manner and mood, making this brief moment in his life into a time of tragic significance as we cannot help ourselves compare the past with the present.

Robin McLachlan is the historian half of the writing team and has kept a close eye on the production.  Since the Ensemble cut two major phone calls Chifley made as he wrote his final speech, McLachlan has had his say.  The production we will see, at 140 minutes including interval, is the complete script as published by Currency Press in 2005.

Well-known author Bob Ellis, whose theatre writing career goes back to the now legendary The Legend of King O’Malley which he co-authored with Michael Boddy, could probably only be trusted to give me a biassed assessment of the 2006 season of A Local Man.  But I checked the internet, as one does. 

Surely Fiona Prior, writing on the Henry Thornton website, which is so closely associated with the Institute of Public Affairs (“Australia’s leading free market think tank”) that you can log in for joint membership, must be an independent voice.  Well, she says of the night she saw it at The Ensemble, it was “almost full house.  This indicates the popularity of A Local Man and an interest by the audience – like my own – to acquire greater insight into the characters who formed Australia’s political history and present.”

Ellis told me “Bob Hawke wept on my shoulder” and “Bob Carr cried, perhaps the only time since his father’s funeral”.  He reported many others with similar feelings, saying how Chifley led “an exemplary  but forgotten life” and bemoaning “if only there were leaders like that now”.  Gough Whitlam was “very impressed” and when Barry Jones sat in on a seminar following a performance “he answered all the questions put to me”.

The explanation Ellis has for the impact of watching a defeated Prime Minister, all alone on a cold and stormy night in his small cottage in Bathurst (which you can visit today), writing what he expects to be his last speech to the next day’s Labor Party Conference (as it was), knowing his health may fail any time (as it did only three days later) is that Chifley spoke for the working class in an era when ordinary people’s talents were wasted.  Only the few were educated, only the wealthy had access to power.

Perhaps ironically, it is Fiona Prior who lists Chifley’s achievements.  “These included the Snowy Mountains Authority, the development of what we know as Qantas today, what we once knew as TAA airlines, The Joint Coal Board, The Stevedoring Commission, The National Shipping Line, restructuring and expansion of CSIRO, the Australian National University and he was acknowledged as the political father of the Holden car. He was trail-blazing in the development of Australia’s education, immigration, welfare and health sectors.  He was an innovative economist.  He steered Australia through a war, a depression and avoided massive war debt.”  That’s an economist speaking, and it’s quite a record.

Bob Ellis says, as we discuss the current Prime Minister’s understanding of history, John Howard’s motto is “Ignorance is strength” while Chifley took the opposite view that “Knowledge is power” and should be made available to everyone.

We may well expect to see tears at the Playhouse before the Ides of March.

A Local Man by Bob Ellis and Robin McLachlan
The Playhouse
Canberra Theatre Centre
Wednesday-Saturday March 7-10 at 8pm.  Sunday March 11 at 3pm

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: Alex Buzo – playwright: Celebration of his Life, Sydney.

Born on July 23, 1944, Alex Buzo – playwright, wordsmith, sports raconteur and humorous social commentator – suffered constant pain from the time his cancer was diagnosed in 2001 until his untimely death on August 16, 2006.

In 1971, his play Macquarie was Playtext No 1, opening the batting for the iconic publisher of Australian performing arts, Currency Press.  Katharine Brisbane, co-founder of Currency with her husband Philip Parsons, hosted a day-long celebration of Buzo’s life and work last Sunday February 18, which will be remembered as a special day for his immediate and extended theatre family.

We heard readings from a wide range of his works, all showing Buzo’s sensitivity and skill as a writer, yet for me a high point was when his daughter Laura described not only his dedication to his profession as he maintained his deadlines until just three weeks before he died, but especially how – once she had passed through her teenage years when her father, she thought, “just didn’t get it – about anything” – she discovered from his play Coralie Lansdowne Says No how much he really understood about women.  “Here you are,” she said to him in his last few days, “surrounded by one wife, three daughters and a female cat.”  He opened his eyes briefly.  “Unbelievable!” he exclaimed softly.

Buzo’s humanity and humility, balancing his determination and extraordinary control of words, came through every reading and every comment from those who had known and worked with him.  It was a very satisfying revelation for me to discover that the compassionate artist I had imagined him to be from reading and teaching his plays was real.

Currency Press offers much more than publishing.  From the homepage  www.currency.com.au links take you to upcoming public special events, the regular newsletter and features such as Author of the Month – currently Queanbeyan’s Tommy Murphy, whose early work was first noticed in The Canberra Times.

An unexpected Canberra connection began the Buzo celebration.  Ned Manning’s first play Us and Them was partly based on his teaching experience at Dickson High School (before it became the recently reprieved Dickson College).  I had not remembered that Manning, despite fair skin and blond hair, played the Pakistani Ahmed in Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed, directed by Pat Hutchinson with Colin Vaskess as Norm for Fortune Theatre, Canberra’s first attempt at a permanent professional theatre company.  Manning read from Buzo’s late very funny book on professional and social cricket, Legends of the Baggy Green.

Norm and Ahmed, infamous for being banned for obscene language in Queensland and Victoria, became a theme to follow through the day.  Manning became a cricketing partner with Buzo after playing Ahmed.  Buzo wrote about producing the play in Kuala Lumpur and Mumbai in “Wary Asians on a Theme” (a wordplay on “variations on a theme”) in Quadrant, November 2004, read for us by another daughter Emma, with Eliza Logan and Paul Wilson.  Another surprise was the unpublished update of the play, titled Normie and Tuan, read by Harold Hopkins as a Vietnam veteran and dark-skinned Craig Menaud as a young Malaysian studying communications at University of Technology, Sydney, but whose family had been anti-communists in Vietnam.

The original play was based on the real experience of a student friend of Buzo’s, harrassed on purely racist grounds in the 1960s.  Normie and Tuan showed the same racism, with the same dissembling Aussie behaviour in the more modern context, and an equally shocking end.  But the story of productions in Asia of Norm and Ahmed, with Muslim actors in the role of Ahmed was highly revealing.  Where, Buzo wrote, the Pakistani was seen by Australian audiences as the victim of undeserving, gratuitous racism, in Malaysia he became a hero, representing all those family members who had written home about their experiences as students in Australia - except among people of Chinese background who resented his hero status in a country where Malays were legally given employment and other advantages (while the police had to be paid a large “deposit”, only to be refunded if the play was not found to be offensive). 

In Mumbai, however, the Indians found Ahmed, a Pakistani, to be “beyond the pale”.  All these productions were successful in attracting audiences, but were controversial for very different reasons.  Cultural differences also confronted Buzo with the production in Asia of Coralie Lansdowne Says No.  Internal characterisation, going back to Ibsen’s works, was not understood and he wrote “the Norwegian sage’s revolution has not reached the East”.  I wondered, though, if simple action as a basis for drama is not as much the common understanding here as it is in Hong Kong.

At the end of the day, it was Bob Ellis who, saying Buzo was Australia’s modern Moliere and Sheridan, criticised the critics who had “slammed [the later] plays compared with Buzo’s energetic rival David Williamson”, while it was ironically the Sydney critic John McCallum who thought that Big River and Marginal Farm are rich plays in which the key characters reach a stage of “more than resignation, but of acceptance made in peace, though tinged with melancholy.”

With such an understanding of humanity I found myself agreeing with McCallum that Buzo “will be the one who will survive.”  The day was indeed a great celebration of Buzo’s life and work. 

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: After Agincourt by Peter Mottley

After Agincourt by Peter Mottley.  John Cuffe directed by Liz Bradley.  National Multicultural Festival at The Street Theatre Studio, February 12-17, 7.30pm   
   
Peter Mottley, much loved Oxford Theatre Guild writer and director for many years, died suddenly in August 2006.  How poorly served is his memory by actor John Cuffe.  Maybe it is a brave thing indeed to take on the performance of an hour long  monologue, but a professional actor should have had the wit to take his courage in both hands and refund patrons who are asked to pay $20 for such a shambles.

After perhaps five minutes, Cuffe fell into silence, tried repeating a line or two, broke out of role, apologised, called for the line and received a non-committal hard to hear reply.  Somewhat aggrieved, he demanded the line, only to be told by someone in the dark that she didn’t have a script.  So he told us he would back track a bit and start again, which he did until the next embarrassing silence.  He struggled on regardless, through perhaps a dozen such theatrical moments of death, so often repeating himself in attempts to find his place that it became impossible to know how much of what we heard were Mottley’s original words, how much we never heard at all, and how much was blather to fill in the spaces.

What a shame.  The speech, ostensibly by Shakespeare’s character Pistol seven years after Henry V foolishly fought the battle of Agincourt, is a great indictment of war.  Originally a radio play on BBC3 in 1988, it works not through a superficial reading of Pistol as a coarse cockney but by a flow of language and musicality which creates in one speech the whole range of emotions from comedy to tragedy.  Enough bits of Mottley’s writing escaped mangling to give the audience the basic idea, but as we all know, timing is everything in theatre. But much of the time I had to look elsewhere, hiding my head in shame.

Only afterwards was I further embarrassed to read in the program, over John Cuffe’s name, about Mottley’s death and that “to him these performances are respectfully dedicated”, and, as a final insult to the audience, “My apologies for any unintentional omissions”!  There is no other explanation.  So he knew he wasn’t up to the task.  So he shouldn’t have gone on stage.  Refund please.   


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: Two Meals from Manila: Manila Takeaway by Noonee Doronila and 'to heat you up and cool you down' by David Finnegan. Promo feature article.

Slavo:  Iniibig kita.  What does that mean?
Rosario:  I love you with all my heart and soul!

Love is the theme across interacting cultures in the two plays, Manila Takeaway by Noonee Doronila and to heat you up and cool you down by David Finnegan, which form a double bill under the title Two Meals from Manila. But there is more to look for in this National Multicultural Festival production than you might expect.

The love is not only between an immigrant Serb undergound miner in Mt Isa and a live-in nanny in Metro Manila, who meet first through agency-supplied photos.  Nor is it just an unexpected relationship in Manila’s gay and lesbian community.  It’s at least as much about a Filipina social worker’s love of Australia and her need to research and write a truthful drama, as it is about a young Anglo-Australian writer learning to love theatre in the Philippines.  Two Meals from Manila is symbolic of the very nature of multiculturalism.

A discussion of the word multicultural, now replaced by citizenship in the Department of Immigration’s title, revealed that though many migrants once found the word distasteful, they have now realised that it is the correct word for modern Australian culture.  Like a multi-tool, suggested Jan Wawrzynczak, manager of Belconnen Community Theatre, one tool can do what many other tools can do separately.  So multiculturalism is not assimilation into one culture, not integration, not mere cooperation.  It is indivisible yet multi-functional. 

Hazel Lim, the Filipina economist who plays Rosario, says she can only define Australian culture by what it is not, since the Australian way of life is made up of bits of many other cultures rather than being an original culture in its own right.  Only Aboriginal culture can claim that distinction.  This is why she loves Australia.  If she had to “integrate”, she would feel “alienated from me as I am”, yet as Wawrzynczak said, most migrants want to become a citizen as he has. 

Just as Rosario does, despite some of her friends’ terrible marriages to ocker Aussie dictators and the accidental death of her loving husband.  Yet there is the constant fear of deportation, like Vivian Solon.

Doronila writes within the long tradition of theatre of social justice, similar in the Philippines to another one-time Spanish (rather Portugese) colony, Brazil, where Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed is her model for Manila Takeaway. 

For Finnegan to discover the depth and intensity of Filipino theatre while on a 7-week residency with Tanghalang Pilipino Theatre at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines was a life-changing experience.  The workshop development and first production of to heat you up and cool you down was directed by Issa Lopez in the Chunky Far Flung Café in a street full of shoe shops.  The strong relationship between the director, the theatrical style and the local community, though different in its details, is being maintained in the production here, directed by Max Barker using a non-naturalistic style based in almost-choreographed improvisational physical theatre.

Quezon City’s shoe shops are more relevant than you might imagine.  Think of Imelda Marcos.  It was she who ordered the construction of the huge Cultural Centre of the Philippines as a façade to boost the nation’s reputation internationally, because she loved her country so much, she said. During construction an underground section collapsed, trapping some 180 workers.  Rather than slow the pace to rescue them, Imelda order them concreted in.  Ironically she also encouraged the arts – after all, what else happens in a cultural centre?

And so the Philippines Educational Theatre Association grew to greater prominence, as Filipino theatre always has during periods of repression.  PETA continues today, long after the demise of the Marcos regime, keeping Filipino social history alive with original plays about Indigenous people, slum dwellers, the disparity between rich and poor, and the power of the military who detain people at will.  Inconvenient artists and community lawyers still “disappear” in the Philippines.

The Two Meals from Manila are about love and interrelationships, between characters in the plays and between Australia and the Philippines at many levels.  Both plays are theatrically interesting visually and emotionally, and bring a new depth thematically to the Community Centre in Belconnen, just right for an International Multicultural Festival. 

Two Meals from Manila: Manila Takeaway and to heat you up and cool you down
International Multicultural Festival
Belconnen Theatre, Community Centre,
Swanson Cct, Belconnen
Thursday – Saturday February 15-17, 8pm
Bookings: at The Street Theatre 6247 1223
Tickets: full $23, concession $17   

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: Berthrand’s Toys by blackSKYwhite Theatre (Moscow). National Multicultural Festival feature article.

Multiculturalism is about understanding and appreciating the diversity of world cultures.  But the National Multicultural Festival is not only important to the citizens of Canberra. 

For Moscow’s Dimitry Aryupin, Marcella Soltan and Andrej Ivashnev, performing Berthrand’s Toys in Australia is one more adventure and learning experience for their independent theatre company blackSKYwhite.  Soltan and Aryupin go back a long way, starting up in 1988 amidst the massive social changes then under way in Russia, with no funding.  For almost 20 years “we earn money by performing and providing masterclasses around the world” using their returns for new productions. 

What is it about their work which makes their theatre sustainable?  What is Berthrand’s Toys about, winning the 2000 Edinburgh Festival ‘Fringe First’ and ‘Total Theatre’ awards?  And how did the audience in Indonesia respond? 

Eight years of struggle led to their first success. “Our first trip abroad – everything was surprising there – I was 37 and had never crossed the border of my country.  It was like a moon expedition, something very new and unpredictable.  Five years later there remained only four European countries we had not visited.” 

Aryupin explains that their success involves two main elements.  First there is the longstanding European tradition of the Auteur, much more than writer.  My French dictionary says “author, creator, maker, perpetrator, achiever, contriver, framer, informant, authority”.  The name that comes to my mind, because of his influence in Australia, is Poland’s Jerzy Grotowski.  Australians like Rex Cramphorn and film maker Paul Cox seem to me to fit the bill. 

The point Aryupin makes is that European theatre is never “based on traditional forms but [each auteur] starts from the very beginning – like our world itself [we] don’t stay on elephants and turtles – referring to Asian traditions – but [we] fly over the abyss.”  This constant search for originality is part of blackSKYwhite’s success.

Second, Aryupin’s work is about fundamental philosophic understanding of reality, but, he says, not with the German intellectual emphasis.  He remains true to his Russian culture, keeping in touch with people and their emotions, “going down to the layer of dreams, which is common to all homo sapiens, despite their knowledge and experience.”  Berthrand’s Toys has been described as a “danse macabre” about our fear of not knowing what reality is.  Not too different from Chekhov, I thought. 

In Indonesia he expected a negative reaction, in a Muslim country, to theatrical representations of clownish monsters, masked figures and the strong emotional effects in this production. To anyone who has seen wayang puppets, or Ranga the Witch, and knows how Indonesians have melded their ancient traditions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam into an open and democratic culture, it is not surprising that people responded to blackSKYwhite’s “disturbing, terrifying and poignant” performance, coming backstage to talk about their feelings.

But who is Berthrand and what are his “toys”?  Look up Sergeant Bertrand (spellings change as words float between languages) and your search engine will bring up necromancy, onanism and the real case of Bertrand who engaged in necrophagy.  In 1847 this otherwise apparently sane individual believed his condition was connected to being a werewolf. After one year’s imprisonment he disappeared into obscurity. One later description of his case says he was “named a monomaniac” because he concentrated on animals’ entrails.  His “focus on viscera, which is not a single object nor subjectivised, rather than a past-tense person-corpse, seems to change the inflection of the monomania beyond a perverse dialectic of subject/object.” 

I see Aryupin’s concern about Germanic intellectual analysis, as early Twentieth Century psychology took over from the werewolf theory.  Berthrand’s Toys concentrates on the way people like Bertrand use elements of their environment, including other people, as no more than toys for their own pleasure, however twisted or destructive the results may be. 

Experiencing something of the obsession and paranoia of such a character, mediated through the theatrical art, will certainly be challenging. Yet as in the Samuel Beckett season at the Sydney Festival, referring to another European auteur, Peter Brook, the Canberra Times reviewer noted “Beckett’s characters affirm life even as they seem to deny it.”

Berthrand’s Toys, of course, is not designed for children, but is certainly an important feature of the National Multicultural Festival, bringing in concentrated form both a Russian and European vision in a “magical, radical and abstract piece of dance-theatre … where fantastic music and lighting create a world of great truth and illusion.”

Berthrand’s Toys
National Multicultural Festival
Presented by the Embassy of Russia
Courtyard Studio
Canberra Theatre Centre
Tuesday February 6 to Friday February 9 at 7.30pm
Bookings: Canberra Ticketing 6275 2700
Tickets: $32 / $28 concessions and Festival Card holders
Link: canberratheatre.org.au 

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: The Shoemaker and the Elves by Peter Pinne and Don Battye

The Shoemaker and the Elves a children’s musical by Peter Pinne and Don Battye.  Directed by Nina Stevenson at The Vikings Club Auditorium, Erindale, until Friday January 19 at 11am.

When I was six, my first theatrical role was as an elf in The Elves and the Shoemaker which my teacher adapted from the original Grimm Brothers’ story. 

The shoemaker was poor simply because he was a shoemaker.  When he had only enough leather left for one pair, the hard-working selfless elves made many more shoes overnight than he could, helping him through a bad patch.  He and his wife wanted to thank them.  Watching one night they saw the elves had no clothes, so they made clothes for the elves who were happy to receive them.  From then on the shoemaker made ends meet, though still poor as shoemakers always were.

Pinne and Battye’s sentimental version pits the shoemaker Mr Buckle (Peter Fock) against the richest woman in town, Silver Sequin (Jennie Tonzing), also a shoemaker.  The elves (Meg Hobson, Tom Hobson, Charly Madden, Christopher Murphy, Lauren O’Flaherty, Grace Saunders and Paige Vaughan) depend on a benevolent whistle-blowing elf Slipper (Diana Tulip) to direct their magic.  Mr Buckle has no wife, but a daughter Carolinda (Maviel Tanevska) who is in love with the nice Jingles (Cameron Boxall) who works for Silver Sequin because he needs a job.

Silver Sequin glories in being nasty and has a nasty offsider called Nasty Neville (Bart Black).  Shoe purchasers are Lord Loppy (Scheyla Ahmadi Pour) and Dame Squeaky (Mariana Davila).  The elves’ magic shoes make people happy, even Silver Sequin in the end, and win the Shoemaker’s Award from the King (Hugh Stevenson) for Mr Buckle.

Though the production is quite well done (in an attractive set by Brian Sudding and supported by excellent musicians), this 1974 Australian “fun” version just doesn’t have the magic, or quite the same ethical message, as the original simple story I still remember after 60 years.  The first half is too slow (mainly the fault of the script, and at least one family went home at interval when I saw it), but the second succeeds in gathering some momentum for a cheerful ending, though still struggling for impact in such a large auditorium.      

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: Sydney Festival: First Love by Samuel Beckett

Sydney Festival: First Love by Samuel Beckett.  The Gate Theatre, Dublin, performed by Ralph Fiennes, directed by Michael Colgan, at Parade Theatre January 9-21, 7pm (1 hour)

We expect Ralph Fiennes to be outstanding, and he is.  He held the audience absolutely engrossed, not merely because of his reputation which silenced the crowd with respect even before the curtain rose on Thursday’s performance, but because he has complete mastery of technique.

Beckett’s language requires precise timing, often down to the pauses between syllables, and ever-changing rhythms as the character reveals his inner personality in the words he allows himself to speak out loud.  Fiennes, on a stage empty except for himself and a plain bench, never missed a beat.

Perhaps the greatest praise I overheard was the surprised comment “He makes it seem so easy.”  This was technique used with such refinement that an emotionally stunted character seems real.  Socially isolated, living rough, seeking silence, he begins “I associate my father’s death with my marriage” because from his father’s gravestone he calculates his age when a prostitute’s attentions result in the birth of his child (so she tells him), at which point he leaves the shelter she has provided him, unwilling to hear even a faint sound of crying. 

The set design by Eileen Diss added expertly to Beckett’s atmosphere.  The scrim backdrop evoked the fog of the canal-side location, through which the window of the prostitute’s room is dimly lit, representing the fog of his memory – perhaps more twisted fantasy than past reality.  Did he actually experience love?

Beckett’s characters are never very easy to get along with, but Fiennes and director Colgan reveal the humour in his lines, occasionally recognised by the character, often only understood by us as we compare his limitations with our normality.

However much Beckett’s view of humanity seems unnecessarily bitter and unpleasant, there is a harsh reality in his work.  Bringing the Gate Theatre production to the Sydney Festival is a triumph, but if you have not already obtained seats for this or the other plays in the Beckett season, you must remain disappointed, since I hear they are all fully booked.      

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Sydney Festival: Seemannslieder, Songs of Seamen by Cristoph Marthaler

Sydney Festival: Seemannslieder by Cristoph Marthaler.  NTGent and ZT Hollandia at Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay. January 10-13 at 8pm (2 hours 30 minutes,no interval).   www.sydneyfestival.org.au

I find it increasingly difficult to know if my criticisms of European theatre, brought here with outstanding recommendations, are justifiable.  This is the third Sydney Festival where I have felt a major European work based in movement, music and song has failed my theatrical test.  Seemanrnslieder (Dutch Flemish) is rather more successful than last year’s Chronicles – A Lamentation (Teatr Piesn Kozla from Poland) and streets ahead of Alibi (Damaged Goods from Belgium) in 2004, when about half the audience walked out long before its two hours came to a sudden stop.

Australian theatre likes to be taut, structured to take the audience on a journey, without discursive (or recursive) re-iteration of ideas, and with a theatrically definite ending, even if the theme is about, say, unresolvable loneliness. 

This is what Seemannslieder, Songs of Seamen, is about.  The women wait, their husbands and sons sometimes never returning.  Or when they do it is for a sudden sexual skirmish before they are off to sea again.  So the mood in the town represented here is tense with waiting, full of sexual tension which is cleverly expressed in the words of the sea songs, broken unpredictably by frantic activity or death. 

But despite Marthaler’s massive 25 year reputation in European music, opera and play productions, I had got the point, and sensed the poignancy, by the end of the first hour.  I politely waited through the next hour and a half, as did the rest of the polite Australian audience (except for one gentleman who finally had to duck out to the toilet ten minutes before the end), but nothing theatrically new happened.  At least the ending, a woman cradling the mask of her seaman in a soft spotlight while singing, music and surrounding lights quietly faded, was a proper conclusion. 

The acting/singing/gymnasts, and the pianists, were wonderfully good at what they were asked to do, and received due applause.  But, I thought, if you can’t make mood performance poetry create all that needs to be experienced in one hour, adding another hour and a half won’t help. 

I feel almost guilty for criticising such sincere and especially musically creative work, but perhaps that’s just my Australian cultural cringe. You’ll have to test out your own reaction (as well as test your bladder) rather than take my word as definitive.     

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: Sydney Festival: Small Metal Objects by Back to Back Theatre

Sydney Festival: Small Metal Objects by Back to Back Theatre, directed by Bruce Gladwin, at Customs House Square, Circular Quay.  January 8-13, 15-20, 22-25 at 5.30pm and January 11-12, 18-19, 22-25 at 7.30pm(one hour,no interval).  www.sydneyfestival.org.au

Strangely sad while terribly funny, Small Metal Objects is street theatre to die laughing for.  The plot taking place between the characters Steve (Simon Laherty), Greg (Allan Watt), Alan (Jim Russell) and Carolyn (Genevieve Morris) is probably based on a misunderstanding exacerbated particularly by Steve’s genuine but seemingly doomed attempt to become more self-aware and find a girlfriend who would be willing to move in with him.  Greg is always willing to help and will not leave Steve knowing he can’t really fend for himself, while corporate lawyer Alan and corporate psychologist Carolyn believe Greg and Steve can supply them with the illicit “gear” they need to entertain, in an hour’s time, a bunch of lawyers.

But the next layer of the plot is also based on misapprehension.  Only the audience, literally, sitting on the bleachers with their headphones on, can hear what the characters are saying, to each other and on their mobiles.  The passing crowd at Circular Quay can see the audience, may be aware that there is something going on between some people on the concourse, but with no knowledge that this is theatre being performed.  Many find the audience of great interest, especially when they laugh for apparently no reason.  Many take photos of the audience.

When two police officers (real, not actors) apparently innocently walked through, the audience erupted in laughter as the characters tried desperately to complete their “deal”.  One group of young men might have become a problem for Simon Laherty, standing stock still in deep thought and dressed in an old singlet looking very daggy.  Fortunately after some laughter at his (really Steve’s) expense, they moved along, only to find a woman standing still, talking on her mobile.  They began to be unpleasantly amused at her, when she had nothing to do with the theatre performance of which both she and the young men were unaware.  But in fact the police stayed handy, and fortunately nothing too untoward happened.        

The result was the best, even if potentially risky, street theatre I have ever seen.  For us with the headphones, amusement came from both the performers and their expert presentation, and from the reactions of the unaware passers by.  Yet concurrently we felt the sadness of people’s failure to communicate, sometimes through inability but often merely through incomprehensible circumstances.  I left theatrically satisfied, yet with socially problematical thoughts – rather like the character Steve.  You should certainly experience Small Metal Objects if you have the opportunity.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2007: Sydney Festival: La Clique

Sydney Festival: La Clique at the Famous Spiegeltent, Hyde Park North.  January 5-16, 18-28 9.30pm; January 23-24 7.30pm (2 hours with interval).  www.sydneyfestival.org.au

You may have dreamt of doing things so far out of the ordinary, explained Rubber Man Captain Frodo, that you have never dared to try.  But now you have seen the outlandish things we do for a living, dream on.

Well I, like most readers I imagine, never did run away and join the circus.  But one Canberran of my acquaintance, Michael Simic, aka Mikelangelo of the famed Black Sea Gentlemen, not only ran away to Melbourne but now leads in La Clique with his particular style of jaunty, naughty, funny songs of sex and violence.  La Clique is not cabaret-circus for the fainthearted, and certainly not for the young (under 18s not admitted).

There are no naked animals in this very intimate circus in the quite small Spiegeltent, but you can guess what will happen as magician Ursula Martinez makes her little red handkerchief disappear time and time again until there seems to be nowhere left for it to re-appear from but ….

The circus acts are real.  Captain Frodo is excruciating to watch getting his body parts through two tennis racket frames, Miss Behave swallows a sword far too long for my liking, while others make hula hoops do amazing things, or do trapeze tricks cleverly timed to music, or make neat comedy out of remarkable strength and balance, climaxing with the surprising David O’Mer’s bathtub gymnastics.

But the essence of the show is its continuous humour.  It’s a cavalcade of characters, clowns maybe but so skilful that sincere applause for their art goes hand in hand with constant laughter – always with them, never at them.  Two hours pass in no time.  The bubbling excitement in the crowd grows even during interval as the bar serves a treat, and at the end of the show the stage is cleared for more music, dance and action than anyone can poke a stick at.

I was reminded by La Clique of the zany strength of Circus Oz in its early days, but with a raunchy rather than almost old-fashioned “committed” social commentary.  Small scale and tightly constructed, this show is great festival material and should not be missed.        

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: An Australian Nativity Story by Kabu Okai-Davies. Promo feature article.

An Australian Nativity Story is a special presentation at Belconnen Community Church tonight and Canberra City Uniting Church on Christmas Eve.  The two churches have joined together for this multicultural musical and dramatic celebration written and directed by recent migrant to Australia, Kabu Okai-Davies.

Okai-Davies, originally from Ghana, lived in America for 18 years where he founded and directed the African Globe TheatreWorks Company.  He brings to this production his personal beliefs, as a Methodist in Ghana and being active in the St James African Methodist Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey, mixed with his extensive experience in community theatre as a writer and director.

He has taken the Black Nativity, written by the iconic African-American poet Langston Hughes, as a basis for writing scenes using Biblical text, workshopping with the church members, young and old, to find ways of re-working his ideas into an Australian context, re-writing the script and incorporating music and song from all the cultures represented in these churches.

A particular delight is a Christmas carol such as Silent Night sung by three Tongan women with the slow haunting harmonies and rhythms of their sea-going people.

Though the participants on stage are not experienced performers – indeed this is a celebration by church members for themselves as much as for the general public – the production process has been as much about learning theatre as about celebrating religious faith.  With Stopera stage manager Liz Topperwien as production manager, training has not only been in performing by Okai-Davies.  Stage Manager Nell Feneck has already been fingered by Topperwien to take over the whole production next year.

Okai-Davies has a grand vision, seeing the Bible as the source of drama, tragedy, comedy and satire which he plans to use for bigger and better celebrations of this kind as the years go by.  He sees An Australian Nativity Story as the beginning of a new tradition in a new theatrical genre which he calls Theatre of Faith.

However, this is not to be seen as limited to a particular sect or even a particular religion.  Okai-Davies explains that “entertainment transcends race, sex and all of humanity’s issues” bringing together people of all religions and cultures.  He starts from the Shakespearean quotation “If music be the food of love, play on” and reinterprets it to say “Music is the food of love, and let us all play together”.

This year’s small-scale work, which has been prepared in only one month, is planned to become a “mass ecumenical celebration” in Civic Square in the future.  Bringing people of all beliefs together in celebration is the “key to what Christianity is all about”, says Okai-Davies.      

In developing the characters in the spoken drama and the songs, the play takes Biblical figures, using text from a range of translations, and places them in a thematic structure so that they become symbols relevant to modern life rather than only representing the ancient past. 

And to make the point, the children in the workshop stage of production made it clear that the conventional blue with silver stars would not do in Australia.  So look for the green and gold!

An Australian Nativity Story
by Kabu Okai-Davies

Belconnen Community Church
93 Hennessy St, Belconnen
December 22, 7pm

Canberra City Uniting Church
69 Northborne Ave, Civic
December 24, 7pm

Donations: Adults $10, Children $5, Family $25

For further information: 6255 5532 or 0405 447 845

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: Kabu Okai-Davies - feature article

A new arrival on Canberra’s theatre scene is Kabu Okai-Davies. University studies in his home country, Ghana, began his interest in theatre.

In America from 1988, where he studied film, taught African film and theatre courses and became resident playwright at New York’s Ensemble Theatre Company, his major achievement before migrating here has been African Globe TheatreWorks, a company he formed originally in Newark, New Jersey, a city where he found African-Americans needed an outlet to celebrate their culture.

By 2002, his still struggling independent company had produced a long series of plays, often re-worked to suit his African-American performers and audience.  One critic commented “Though the playhouse’s seats are plastic, its productions are not.” 

The company was attracting considerable corporate sponsorship, and yet, says Okai-Davies, he became aware of a major shift in American attitudes as the Bush administration took over from the Clinton era, when the arts and community had been exciting arenas for him to work in.

Though he had become a ‘legal resident alien’, especially after the September 11 disaster he felt society becoming “too saturated with its own self, insular, parochial”.  He had to face the question, Have I finished here?

In Australia, he says in contrast, he has found new “exciting people who have a sense of natural friendliness” which was reinforced when he brought his African Globe TheatreWorks production of When a Man Loves a Woman by Solomon F Caudle to Canberra for the 2005 Multicultural Festival.

With his family now settled in, and after involvement backstage in local productions, his immediate venture this Christmas is An Australian Nativity for the Canberra City Uniting and Belconnen Community Churches, partly based on the Black Nativity by Langston Hughes, who was one of the most important writers and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, the African-American artistic movement in the 1920s that celebrated black life and culture.

In May 2007 at The Street Theatre, Okai-Davies will direct local writer Mark Taylor’s Young Followers, a play about bastardisation and the ‘accelerated deconstruction’ of officer cadets.

If all his plans come to fruition, a new organisation will form with a strong emphasis on multicultural theatre.  Multiculturalism is an Australian reality, he says.  Integration never works.  In the meantime he is taking a post-graduate course in Creative Writing at the University of Canberra with projects already in mind for at least the next three years.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: Red Riding Hood by Peter McDonald

Red Riding Hood, a pantomime by Peter McDonald.  Ickle Pickle Productions at Belconnen Community Centre Theatre December 14-22 3pm and 7pm, except Tuesday December 19 11am.  Bookings: 6247 1223.

Following last year’s Goldilocks success, director Justin Watson and writer Peter McDonald have conspired to produce the only version of Red Riding Hood to mention the corrupt failed company Enron which, news reports said, “lied about its profits and stands accused of a range of shady dealings, including concealing debts so they didn't show up in the company's accounts”.

But don’t worry, this is just a pantomime in the long tradition of humorous social commentary.  Even the younger audience members followed a very twisted plot in which Granny and the Wolf are business rivals.  They quickly learned when and how to call for the Good Fairy of Marketing, played nicely by Josie Dunham as a quite daffy character who finally brings a new cookie-making cooperative into being and marries off Granny Hood (Dave Smith as the panto dame) to Wolf Jackman (Peter Rousell) who baulks at wearing Granny’s skirt and shawl because he is a male wolf (while she gets hot under the collar in his oven). 

Red Riding Hood (Kat Brand) marries Martin from Accounts (Anna O’Leary), the 3 evil robotic blind mice (well-played mechanically by Grace Connelly, Rebecca de Costa and Clare Sheehan) are properly defeated by management consultants Michael Mouse (Jennifer Maclean), Stuart Mouse (Erin Cassidy) and Gerald Mouse (Irena Reedy).  While Wolf’s offsider Crookwell, played strongly by Jaime Isfahani, is left rather lonely, except that Santa appears to make everyone happy in the end.

You’ll have to see the show to appreciate McDonald’s Terry Pratchett-like mind, with any number of musical references and bits of other fairy stories built in.  It’s just as much fun for the adults as the children.

Directing, choreography and an intriguingly simple set change device all show the skills which we have come to expect from Ickle Pickle, resulting in excellent performances from all the young actors in an engaging production.  


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: The Moth Tree: An Awesome Adventure. Promo feature article - Canberra Youth Theatre

Opening December 5, Canberra Youth Theatre will present their end-of-year major production The Moth Tree: An Awesome Adventure at Gorman House Arts Centre.

16 students, ranging in age from 8 to 12, have worked since July with director Tim Hansen, Sydney writer Shiereen Magsalin, designer Hilary Talbot and combat trainer Elena Kirschbaum.  For these young people,learning how to create and present The Moth Tree has been an awesome adventure in its own right.

Hansen has tutored and directed at CYT for the past 4 years. With qualifications in theatre/media from Charles Sturt University, Bathurst and in music composition from ANU School of Music, he takes an interesting approach to the production process.  Through regular workshops, including weekend and week-long intensive sessions, he takes on board the students’ ideas, working with them to create theatrical “beats”, which he describes as major points of emphasis to form a dramatic “score”.

With this group, all of whom have shown great initiative, energy and determination, CYT has employed a young emerging writer in an interactive process – sometimes directly working with the students and their director, sometimes using email to pass on ideas and sections of script – to come up with a completed play.  The copyright is owned by CYT, so that the script will be available for other groups, but in the most important sense The Moth Tree is owned by all those involved.

Hansen and his student group have had the same kind of relationship with Talbot and Kirschbaum, with the result that there has been great excitement among the young people when a professional adult arrives to work with them.  In parallel with the way a director of a professional production might operate, the students create the vision and have the services of dramaturg, writer, stage manager, production manager, designer and trainer available to help them turn their ideas into theatrical reality.

This is surely a quality learning experience, with CYT’s aim, as Hansen puts it, “to create the next generation of theatre creators.”

The Moth Tree is a quest story in the tradition of ancient myth, especially appropriate for this age group.  Hansen’s adventure included its own challenges: cast members have sustained a broken thumb and 2 broken wrists.  Neither injury occurred at CYT, who say they are now considering asking parents to wrap their children in cotton wool between rehearsals.

The story that has evolved began from the significance of bogong moths.  Set, like Canberra, in a quiet part of the world is the city of Algoma.  In the surrounding countryside is an enchanted tree on which grow moths who protect the city, a haven of harmony and gentle joy.  But at the Festival, held every 10 years, the people discover the moths have disappeared.  The twins, Asha and Caleb, must find out what has happened, face up to the challenges of their quest, and hopefully return the city and all its people to the protection of the moths.

Wonderful trees, lit up internally, create a magic forest for the Awesome Adventure.  Every student has found their niche on stage among the huge number of characters they wrote about in their first exercise of imagination.  It produced a wad of papers at least half a metre thick, so Hansen says.  “A bit of every single one of these kids is in the script.” 

Live characters, puppets and, of course, beautiful moths abound.  Let the awesome adventure begin. 

The Moth Tree: An Awesome Adventure
Canberra Youth Theatre
December 5-12 at 7pm (matinee Saturday December 9, 2pm)
C Block Theatre
Gorman House Arts Centre, Braddon
Bookings and information: 6248 5057

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: I'll Be Back Before Midnight by Peter Colley

Ill Be Back Before Midnight by Peter Colley.  Canberra Rep directed by Walter Learning at Theatre 3, November 17 – December 9.  Bookings: 6247 1950
   
O what foul and fearful farce is this, what theatrical self-indulgence.  You will certainly scream and laugh in the same breath.  O horror – a play to be enjoyed!

Just the right illusion of reality in the midst of ludicrous twists of plot is achieved by all the actors.  Leah Baulch plays Jan, who knows she is sane after experiencing a nervous breakdown.  Ian Croker plays Farmer George, so warm-hearted, sympathetic and helpful, and – but I must not give the plot away.  Lucy Goleby’s Laura and Duncan Ley’s Greg are brother and sister of the most awful kind.  The trick is to make us suspend our disbelief to create feelings of terror, and then to suspend our belief to make us laugh.

Learning directed the original Rep production 20 years ago. I didn’t see it then, but I suspect that he has taught today’s actors perhaps even more skilfully than before.  Without the correct finesse in timing and emotional expression, all the technical tricks in the world would not make the play work.  But work it does.

You can’t help but be entertained by this spoof of an Agatha Christie, without a detective to help you work out the devious logic.  Every character did it, except the butler because there isn’t one.

For people who want a justification for going to the theatre, a bit of academic effort shows the play actually reveals how politicians and terrorists can tap into our fears so easily.  Remember the weapons of mass destruction which never existed, or how to respect women by killing them in a soccer stadium just before the afternoon game? 

Of course I’ll Be Back Before Midnight was never meant to bear responsibility for such heavy thoughts, so don’t worry, be happy and you will indeed have as the program advertises “A wonderful night of blood-curdling fun!”

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: Norm and Ahmed by Alex Buzo. Preview feature article.

The latest theatrical incarnation in Canberra – Australian Capital Theatre Inc – has a clever logo of its initials representing a figure standing in a spotlight. 

To find out about this new company I turned the spotlight onto Peter Copeman, co-director with Dione McAlary of their first production, Norm and Ahmed.  By Alex Buzo, who sadly died of cancer recently, the play was famously banned 40 years ago for its use of f*** on stage.  But the real controversy should have been about the traditional Australian racism seen in the character Norm against the Pakistani Ahmed.

Today, the theme of the play has become more terribly relevant than ever.  Copeman explains that this theatre is “of passion rather than profit” and that this production is a “toe in the water” in the hope that ACT Inc will continue “in and for the capital and for Australia”.  A community needs to be “telling its own stories to itself”, especially in a globalised world, where people “crave a sense of locality and local identity”.

Though he admits he hasn’t yet read In Good Company - A manual for producing independent theatre by Lyn Wallis (reviewed in The Canberra Times last March), where warnings abound about planning for sustainability, I discovered that Copeman’s range of experience should stand the company in good stead.  He began by training as a director at NIDA, has a masters degree in dramaturgy from Canada, became a writer largely through work in community theatre, particularly with Melbourne’s Jika Jika Theatre with Australia Council and Community Employment Program funding in the 1980s.

Learning discipline in writing came from an Australian Film and Television School course and 18 months writing television scripts for the second last series of Prisoner, including the first script with an Aboriginal woman’s role based on experiences at Fairlea Women’s Prison.

John Clark, recently retired director of NIDA, persuaded Copeman to accept an appointment as executive director of the Northern Territory Theatre Company in Darwin, the short-lived attempt by then Country Liberal Party Chief Minister Paul Everingham to set up a state theatre company to match the southern states.  A top-down decision, facing considerable hostility from the incumbent pro-am Darwin Theatre Group and funding cuts by the Federal Labour government meant pensioner concessions on buses were subsequently preferred over an expensive theatre company.  Not even its first year’s program could be completed.

In Brisbane, writing and teaching at Queensland University of Technology led to a production of Sinakulo, a play about Australian / Filipino relations, which received an AWGIE in 2003.  In Canberra since 2004, Copeman directed the registered vocational training course Theatre Arts Diploma in Entertainment for ANU Enterprises, which won an ACT Training Excellence Award for a training initiative while one student was named Vocational Student of the Year. 

The lack of a standard apprenticeship system in theatre, however, saw the course funding cut, so Copeman and graduate students tried in 2005 for a grant to re-present Sinakulo, working with Canberra’s Filipino community, but without success despite their previously successful production of House Arrest at Old Parliament House.  Though some of the original group have inevitably moved away from Canberra, ACT Inc is the result of an 18 month gestation period.

Relying entirely on private funds, Norm and Ahmed is a deliberate choice.  It has only two actors (Peter Fock and Ian Fallon).  Its presentation on the Kingston Foreshore of the Old Bus Depot Markets means no set building is required, since the architecture creates the right imagery as Buzo pictured his play.  Using a “found” space rather than a purpose built theatre is consistent with Copeman’s community theatre interests, while the play is an excellent example of telling our story to ourselves. 

With this theme in mind, Australian Capital Theatre Inc plans to follow on with other works of the Australian canon, as well as other Australian plays which may have had one professional run and then become forgotten, and may not have been published, yet should be seen again especially in the National Capital.

One concept of ACT Inc is to become an attraction for visitors to Canberra, from Australia and overseas, to see Australian culture in action, while our discussion also led to the need for unpublished scripts from around the country to be retrieved from people’s sheds, cardboard boxes and filing cabinets – even their hard drives – to be collected and archived in one place such as the National Library.  

In a previous article I have noted more than 70 theatre groups that of have come and mostly gone in Canberra over the past decade.  Perhaps ACT Inc will establish a niche and survive against all the odds. 

Norm and Ahmed by Alex Buzo
Australian Capital Theatre
Old Bus Depot Markets
Wentworth Ave (on the Kingston Foreshore)
Tuesday to Friday November 21 – December 1, 8.30pm
$16 / $12 / $10 groups of 10 or more
Bookings 0417 639 521

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: “Are You Being Served?” by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft. Preview feature article.

Who, we may well ask, is being served when Nina Stevenson as Mrs Slocum refers pointedly to her pussy in “Are Your Being Served?” at the Gallery Café, University of Canberra, opening this Friday?

Asking this of director Jasan Savage revealed much more than even he expected.  How is it possible that he has attracted full theatre-restaurant houses to some 45 shows of this kind over 9 years?  Who goes so far, usually finding themselves lost in the out-of-the-way confusion of UC buildings, to see old television favourites?  And who is Jasan Savage anyway?

Way back in the mists of time (the 1950s) Young Jasan began a quest to become a theatre designer.  The famous stage hypnotist The Great Franquin, after putting him under, invited Jay, as he became known, to be his advertising illustrator.  From Melbourne, Franquin took Jay all over Australia, New Zealand, and, on one trip, to 40 American cities in 40 days.  7 years later, when Franquin retired, having reached his target of amassing a million pounds, Betty Pounder of J C Williamson’s theatre pushed Jay into auditioning and his life as an actor began, taking him all over the world (except Russia, he says, regretfully).

For the past 10 years he has worked for University of Canberra Union (UCU) as director (which means doing absolutely everything) at the UCU Theatre in The Hub.  The first attempt at theatre-restaurant, in 1997, was The Diary of Adam and Eve, based on Mark Twain’s work, which was a surprising success.  Searching for other short plays suitable for a restaurant atmosphere revealed that many television comedy writers had adapted their work for stage.  Fawlty Towers was good but needed some changes for the local audience.  So Savage rang John Cleese’s agent in London, who passed the phone to Cleese himself.  “Do what you like with it,” he said!

And so followed Absolutely Fabulous, Dad’s Army, ‘Allo ‘Allo, The Vicar of Dibley, Black Adder, MASH, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as well as other non-tv scripts like Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels, short pieces by Chekhov (Chekhov’s Funniest), the Wizard of Oz. Even the Vampire Lesbians of Sodom brought in the crowds, averaging about 2600 per show.  That’s 117,000 bums on seats in 9 years.

The UCU theatre is dark nowadays, except for rehearsals and university lectures, as the restaurant stage dominates the work.  Do people just come for the food and wine?  “After all,” says Savage, “I’m just putting on pure entertainment.”  But discussion brings us round to the people who come.  “Mums and dads from Nappy Valley.  They bring the whole family, often ringing to ask if it’s too shocking for Grandma, and then bringing her too.”

Not quite the audience you would expect at a university venue?  No, the university people never come, but they are interested in the money the shows earn, even when it costs thousands of dollars to mount them.  Gradually we realise that Savage is doing something that theatre has always done – subverting people’s assumptions. 

A non-academic audience attends university without thinking “I’m going to university”.  But many also then come to other events at UC such as Stonefest.  It might be beneath the dignity of the academics to go to these plays, but they are an important bridge between the university and the surrounding society.

“I usually add in some tit jokes,” says Savage, to bring me back to earth.  But these scripts “are a bit like the Shakespearean stage where characters talk about what isn’t on stage - like Mrs Slocum’s pussy.  It’s about people using their imaginations.”  Then when I push further about why families of tv watchers come, Savage at last admits it’s quite different “to see Mrs Slocum in the flesh, talking about her pussy.”  They come to see the characters they know.  But they want to see them live on stage.  This is what theatre can do that television can never do.

So it will be a “screamingly funny night” - judging by the costume rehearsal - when the Grace Brothers staff go to Spain for a Christmas holiday in a non-star hotel which, they discover, hasn’t yet been built.  Tent hopping and mistaken identities follow naturally, and the innuendoes … well, say no more.

I’m thinking Canberra society is being surpisingly well served by Jason Savage and his small core of regular actors - Nina Stevenson, Dan Cole, Craig Marvell, Hugh Stevenson and John Rogers - as well as the many occasional performers.  UC Players’ dinner theatre is a quirky aberration in a city full of conventional expectations.  Light relief, yes - but a bit of the eccentricity which we can all enjoy and which so many of these plays represent.  A bit like Jasan Savage himself.

“Are You Being Served” by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft
UC Players at the Gallery Café
UCU Conference Centre
University of Canberra
Fridays and Saturdays November 17 – December 16
Show and 3 Course Dinner $60
Bookings essential: 6201 2645

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: Australian National Playwrights’ Centre is dead. Feature article.

Buried alongside its younger sister Playworks, the Australian National Playwrights’ Centre is dead.

    Deep sadness wells up within me, remembering my own rough and tumble treatment 25 years ago.  Every day for two weeks my script - the avant-garde play of 1981 according to ANPC founding member Katharine Brisbane - was tried and tested by top actors like Helen Morse, shredded by the famous Nimrod director Ken Horler, while I was personally advised by iconic writer Barry Oakley.  Every night I added, subtracted and reorganised ready for the next day’s flagellation. I’ll never forget the satisfaction I felt when the public reading created the exact feeling in the audience I had aimed for.

    Depression, unfortunately, did not a theatrical success make.  The Death of Willy died after one Sunday night reading at Anthill Theatre in Melbourne.  A man in a raincoat and I were the only audience.

    I apologise for this personal intrusion, but this was what the ANPC was about - bringing the reality of theatre production to bear on the work of new writers, as well as developing new works by established playwrights.  In my year I watched Dorothy Hewett receive the same kind of treatment.

    But can the Australia Council, by taking the money previously given to Playworks and ANPC to fund the new national script development organisation PlayWriting Australia, expect to ever engender the old excitement, tears and driving force?

Money isn’t everything, as politicians in power regularly tell the rest of us.   PlayWriting Australia will begin with $330,000, a little more than the defunct bodies received between them.  If you were to operate a business servicing a constant demand in every state and territory, plus running an annual two-week day-and-night practical development program employing the professionals needed to work with perhaps 20 new writers, how would you go with a budget of less than $150,000? 

ANPC director Mary-Anne Gifford told me this level of funding over the past few years has meant the annual Playwrights Conference was almost all that was left of the wide-ranging work which is needed to support new theatre across Australia.  How much should it be?  At least $500,000, preferably a million to cover the work of both ANPC and Playworks. 

Is our culture worth funding properly?  May-Brit Akerholt directed ANPC from 1992 to 2002, a powerhouse of energy, I remember, at conferences in those days held at ANU.  Canberra’s Carol Woodrow, with Timothy Daly, focussed on new script development for many years in special programs outside the annual conference.  Both are adamant that the Australia Council funding must be seen as an investment in this core support function. 

Akerholt’s key point is that innovation and risk-taking is essential.  The freedom to fail underpins the success of the ANPC and Playworks in getting scripts to professional production stage.  Woodrow notes that Tom Healey, 2006 Conference director, had to rely on workshop directors being offered free by the large established theatre companies.  Risky work is of less interest in these circumstances.  Even the name PlayWriting Australia smacks of bureaucratic fashion rather than challenging theatrical guts.

Up and coming young director, based at ANU Arts Centre, Rhys Holden organised the first Australian Theatre Directors’ Conference in September this year.  The university had to pick up the shortfall, though all staff were volunteers, the keynote speakers, including leading director Aubrey Mellor, were not paid apart from fares and accommodation while the other 80 participants paid their own way entirely.  Mellor said, “Over-worked and under-paid, we work in isolation in an atmosphere of general artistic timidity and in a climate where political passion is scorned, where writers lack ambition and where the media tends to see anything ‘Australian’ as box-office disaster.”  He also said of the annual Australian National Playwrights’ Conference, as Holden recalls, “As a director, if you’re not there you don’t exist on the Australian theatrical map.”

In Akerholt’s view, the one good thing is that the very well regarded playwright Michael Gow, currently artistic director of Queensland Theatre Company, has accepted the chair of the interim board of PlayWriting Australia.  His reputation was established when his play The Kid went on through the ANPC process to critical and commercial success, followed by the even more widely known Away.

I found myself in agreement when Gow told me that he has the same concerns.  The Australia Council, representing government, commissioned a report, saw that both ANPC and Playworks were struggling, and is acting as broker to ensure that support for new playwrights will continue.  The interim board has Council staff and facilities available to it until the end of the year, when the old bodies are finally wrapped up and PlayWriting Australia begins its independent incorporated existence.  Death and resurrection is an ancient theatrical theme.  (The new name, by the way, was decided by the interim board, not imposed from above.)

The call is out for an artistic director and administrator.  The first annual conference in July 2007 will accept some new plays for showcasing, but its main purpose will be to plan how to rejuvenate, reinvigorate and recreate the atmosphere, the excitement and the process that Gow remembers as such a positive force when he was the new kid on the block in 1982. 

Gow believes that there is political indifference, but the ball is still in play.  His aim is for “a bigger and better ball, and more fun to play with”.  More news early in the new year.

And, I was pleased to hear, with Gow’s fond memories and because a fixed place and time on everyone’s calendar is essential for success, PlayWriting Australia will return the annual playwrights’ conference to Canberra.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: The Tempest by William Shakespeare

The Tempest by William Shakespeare.  Bell Shakespeare Company directed by Peter Evans at The Playhouse, August 23 to September 2, 7.30pm.

The magic arts came to life in this production of The Tempest on opening night last Friday.  Our imagination was transported to a theatrical island, a small space within a confusing universe, where we were given the opportunity to come to grips with personal and political reality, just as Shakespeare intended.  Bell Shakespeare deserves our gratitude.

Evans has done the right thing by the play.  The acting is simple and sincere, taking place in a beautiful forest filled with ethereal music.  Designer Robert Kemp, composer Basil Hogios and the lighting designer, Canberran Mark Truebridge have created an environment exactly suited to the play’s moods.

Acting which looks so simple requires awesome technique.  The cast ranges from a Gonzalo played with great clarity by Ron Haddrick, who received an MBE in 1974 for his already longstanding services to the arts, to Saskia Smith, a recent NIDA graduate, whose characterisation and singing voice as the spirit Ariel focussed our attention on the theme of power, justice and freedom.

The drunkards Trinculo and Stephano (James Wardlaw and Tony Taylor) were very funny.  We felt for the honest King Alonso (Paul Bertram), and found the scheming Antonio and Sebastian (David Whitney and Andrew McDonell) hateful.  They were the cause of Prospero’s banishment and justifiable desire for revenge.

John Bell, starring as Prospero, has a harshness in his voice, a quality which has annoyed me in past productions.  But his ability to communicate Prospero’s feelings and thoughts, often with no more than a turn of his head, soon concentrated my mind on important matters.  Ferdinand and Miranda’s love, for example, so freshly played by Stephen Phillips and Freya Stafford.  Or dealing with Nathan Lovejoy’s high-energy Caliban, an angry slave who clearly deserved proper treatment. And finally in speaking directly to us, the audience, asking us to release him from his role, which we did with genuine and respectful applause for Bell and the whole company.

This is among the most satisfying performances of The Tempest I have seen.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: Black Coffee by Agatha Christie

Black Coffee by Agatha Christie.  Tempo Theatre directed by Jon Elphick at Belconnen Community Centre, August 3,4,5,9,10,11,12 at 7.30pm.  Matinees August 5,12 at 2pm.  Twilight show August 6 at 4pm.  Bookings: 6247 1223 (The Street is handling their bookings)


After writing several Hercule Poirot novels, Black Coffee was Agatha Christie’s first play, written in 1930.  Her works are still popular in television adaptations and particularly among amateur theatre companies.  This production is one in a series of Christie classics presented by Tempo.

The attraction of murder mysteries when cleverly constructed as Christie’s are is that any number of the characters have the motivation, while only one is guilty.  The enjoyment for the audience is not about becoming deeply involved with the characters’ feelings.  Their main concern is the intellectual exercise of solving the puzzle.

Elphick has understood this and has not asked his actors to play up the characters.  The focus is on what happens in the first act when the murder takes place, and then on following Poirot’s observations of details and his logical analysis.  I found this forensic approach more appealing than the overblown characterisation that Poirot appears to have been given by Francis L Sullivan, backed by Donald Wolfit as Captain Hastings, in the original production, which began the tradition of the “lovable” Poirot still seen in the television productions.

Although pacing was often rather slow on opening night, leaving gaps while we waited for the next move rather than developing suspicious tension, the actors – especially when led by Garry Robinson as Poirot in Acts 2 and 3 – held the plot together with appropriate characters, clear voices and definite action.  The set, lighting and particularly costumes were very good, despite the difficulties that often arise when setting up in this kind of theatre.

I thought the result overall was effective and stimulated some thoughts about the purpose of crime fiction – to reveal how the guilty may be trapped into telling the truth, while the not guilty are not necessarily as innocent as they may seem.

© Frank McKone, Canberra