2010: King Lear by William Shakespeare

King Lear by William Shakespeare.  Bell Shakespeare Company directed by Marion Potts at The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre April 15 – May 1, 2010.

If there is one thing King Lear makes clear, it is that kings can’t expect to comfortably retire on a super pension, even if it is backed by 100 knights. What about an actor/director?  John Bell’s constitution is more than impressive.  It’s amazing to me that he can go on putting out such energy night after night (and present himself for the public at the opening night cast party).  Can he keep going?

Considering the historical significance of this play and this production, there is as much to say about Marion Potts’ directing, the design and execution, as there is about the acting.  In King Lear and The Tempest, though their earthly political plots look superficially familiar, Shakespeare took flight creatively into an ethereal theatre of symbolism.

Because this production marks the 20th anniversary of the Bell Shakespeare Company as well as the year in which John Bell turns three score and ten (and the $15 Anniversary Edition Souvenir Program includes a Wesfarmers advert titled “Presenting the Extraordinary”), I cannot avoid the question, does Bell Shakespeare reach the heights of William Shakespeare?

BHPBilliton quotes Ben Johnson: He was not of an age, but for all time.  They go on “This comment was made about Shakespeare but we think it also holds true for John Bell.”  It’s nice of the biggest mining company in the world to pay for the privilege of saying so, but I think it’s not entirely true.  John, indeed,  has placed himself in a more realistic relationship with William in his note as Artistic Director, writing "It is incontestable that, to some extent, Shakespeare invented us; and through constant engagement with his work, we go on re-inventing ourselves."

So, to the performance I saw on April 16, 2010 just ten days short of William’s 446th birthday. 

The beginning was extraordinary as a circular white curtain rose to reveal the Lear family isolated in an island of light.  Off to the side, but made visible, the instruments of emotion interplayed with the action of the sculptural figures in the centre of our attention.  Here was King Lear prefiguring The Tempest.  Shakespeare’s words were as clear as we might expect from Bell, and the scene was set for “Nothing will come of nothing.”  Much, in theatre, will come of simplicity.  The open stage with no more than a central raised revolve, with light and sound, was all that was needed.  Stage design held the play in place.

For this we must thank Marion Potts, designer Dale Ferguson, lighting designer Nick Schlieper, sound designer Stefan Gregory, and composer Bree van Reyk: seen and heard, even though largely mysterious to us spectators. 

But the edge was taken off the imaginative intensity, at various points and in various ways.  I found it difficult to feel the purity of truth in the naïve Cordelia, dressed as she was in a mess of clothing, in which she reappeared, with the addition of a cloak, years later as the mature Queen of France.  She needed clean lines, simple in style in Scene 1 to contrast with her overblown sisters, an idealistic 15 year old who naturally would entrance the King of France, with or without a dowry.  As grown-up strategic leader of the rescue invasion, she should more than match her sisters for wealth in a costume of plain elegance. 

Cordelia was always my favourite Shakespeare character, and I was disappointed, even though I could not fault the quality of any of the acting.  The characters seemed to be speaking just as themselves, even when speaking directly to the audience.  Whatever they symbolise, there was never a hint of “speaking Shakespeare”.  Perhaps the audience responded to three actors in particular (though their parts also help) – Peter Carroll as The Fool, Tim Walter as Edmund and Leah Purcell as Regan, especially when she makes her move on Edmund.  So spiteful towards her rival, her sister Goneril , a ferocious Jane Montgomery Griffiths.

The speed and ease of entrances and exits made the set work wonderfully.  The transitions from scene to scene are so often a major point of weakness in other productions, but never in Bell Shakespeare.  However, I was surprised that the on-stage musical instruments disappeared after interval and sound became distant and only electronic.  It was an emotional loss, especially because in the first half, characters used the instruments to comment on themselves.  It was an imaginative master stroke, for example, to have Lear strike a cymbal and use his stick to strike an inferior character.

But the major disappointment for me was the staging of the ending of the play.  Why were Lear and Cordelia left grovelling on the floor downstage left, where I could not see them except by wriggling about trying to peer between the audience’s heads in front of me?  Why were they not taken to the central circle?  Why didn’t the ending reprise the opening, with Lear and Cordelia isolated on the island, delicately enclosed again in the white curtain while Kent and Edgar spoke the words which reinforced what Cordelia had said in Scene 1?  Am I being too obvious?  Shouldn’t the symbolism be made this clear?

And, returning at last to the constitution of John Bell, I have found, over perhaps the last ten years or so, that the quality of his voice has often become restricted to a flat, rather thin sounding tone.  This could work, for example, when he played Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, but it left me cold in King Lear.  On the night, there was much strength and range of tone in Scene 1, but by the storm scene I lost feeling for this huge old man facing up to the elements as if he might defeat whatever they could throw at him, and in the final scene I could not feel the loss that this father felt, realising that his failing was the cause of his true daughter’s death.

Perhaps it is the clarity of meaning which John Bell has brought to the performance of Shakespeare, (which I still remember being impressed by when I first saw him in a tent in Adelaide in 1964, and still today is a great achievement), that has taken the focus off the creation of emotion in those of us watching.  So I conclude that this production is in many ways a very good presentation of  King Lear, but it does not reach the heady heights of Shakespeare’s imagination.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: The Age I’m In Dance Theatre by Force Majeure

The Age I’m In  Dance Theatre by Force Majeure directed by Kate Champion.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre April 16-17, 2010.

It’s a great thrill to see work of this quality at The Q.  Congratulations to program manager Stephen Pike for including The Age I’m In in his Simply Irresistible 2010 season.  This show simply is.

Kate Champion’s Force Majeure won ‘Outstanding Performance by a Company’ for The Age I'm In at the 2009 Australian Dance Awards, so it’s a special coup for Queanbeyan.  What I found most impressive was the natural way that diverse elements – pure dance, creative movement, mime, spoken word – are integrated with the physical space, recorded sound and music, lighting and finally back projection and portable video screens.  Making a focussed artistic work using all these devices turns what, in principle is a simple or even ordinary idea – showing the experience of being different at different ages – into a higher form of art.

The video screens are the most extraordinary.  It was hard to imagine how the images could appear so precisely in time with the action, while the effect of the picture on the screen often being an image of the part of the person who is behind the screen was quite unnerving, though one could not look away.  This is a new way of interpreting the idea of mask,  using sophisticated technology. 

Yet it is the oldest form of expression, bodily movement and dance, which remains the core of the work, a commentary in action on the words spoken by Australians in real life interviews, about generational differences, family relationships, disability, ageing, drugs, sex, money, class, body image and even rock’n’roll.  There is humour, sympathy, empathy and real concern, but there is also resilience, hope and success. 

All in 90 minutes, through 26 scenes.  There is Robyn, a woman played by both Veronica Neave and Vincent Crowley; a little boy Jack by Byron Perry and Kirstie McCracken; Tracey by Ingrid Weistfelt; Dan by Josh Mu; Sam the air guitarist by Samuel Brent; and Grandparents and Grandaughter Tilly Cobham-Hervey, Brian Harrison and Penny Everingham.  Some performers originally trained in dance, while others as actors, all working together in ever changing roles and moods.

Kate Champion has put together a team of great strength behind the scenes: Geoff Cobham (designer), Roz Hervey (artistic associate), Max Lyandvert (composer), Bruce McKinven (costume designer), Mark Blackwell (sound editor), Tony Melov (audiovisual producer), Neil Jensen (audiovisual designer), and finally William Yang, the photographer whose show My Generation opened the National Portrait Gallery in December 2008. 

Unfortunately you will have missed the Queanbeyan presentation by the time you read this, and will have to chase the show to Wagga Wagga, Griffith and Newcastle or to Brisbane’s Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts on May 4 – 5.  I would book now.  There should be spare planes to fly there while the Iceland volcano keeps erupting.

For the full touring schedule, check out http://www.forcemajeure.com.au/Resources/RoadworkPerformanceSchedule.pdf

and if you are a technical buff, have a look at http://forcemajeure.com.au/Resources/The Age I'm In - Technical Specifications Regional.pdf  for the touring specifications – just fascinating.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: Ich Bin Faust by Joe Woodward

Ich Bin Faust written and directed by Joe Woodward, Coordinator of Creative Arts and Theatre, Daramalan College, Canberra.  Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, April 6-10, 2010, 8pm.

The first purpose of this production is to extend the theatre experience of a group of senior secondary students who last year presented a group devised performance based on their studies of the Faust story, mainly derived from Marlowe and Goethe.

This script, written by Woodward but with considerable workshop input from his students, is also intended to develop the students’ thinking about the relevance of the Faustian theme to present day life.  The plot follows what happens to a drama group who previously worked on a piece about Faust, starting from the cast party, reaching the end of their schooling and meeting up again four years later.  Characters in this story parallel characters in the Faustian dramas.  Is it possible not to sell one’s soul to the devil in the modern world of “I am”?

I guess there is also a desire to demonstrate what the students can do theatrically, and raise issues about the transition into adulthood for an audience of parents and student peers.

It’s not my place to write competitive reviews of individual performances, but it is fair to say that the group standard was very much what I would expect from a seriously committed Year 12 drama class.  I certainly saw some potential tertiary theatre studies students.

It took me quite some time to feel involved in the drama, so I have some doubts about the script writing.  It is true that the characters begin as youngish, a bit immature, almost “typical” dramaheads and grow into young adults, but the slow pace and background broken-up video images and sound track, combined with short duo scenes interspersed with drama workshoppy group movement segments made it difficult for me to find focus in the first half.  Only in the more substantial mother-daughter scene did things start to fall into place, and in the later sections the metaphorical use of masks and devil characters worked effectively, reaching a strong emotional ending which made the ethic of being principled in life rather than self-indulgent come to the fore.

As an educational exercise, the work is obviously well worthwhile.  Using the Large Hadron Collider as a focus for the range of questions around science and religion, life and death, and ethical principles certainly works for young people just reaching adulthood, as they search to establish their own identities and philosophies to carry them through an uncertain future.  The script, in a nice piece of irony, was written before the Collider actually proved to work, only a few days ago, without causing us all to be sucked into a black hole.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: Codgers by Don Reid

Codgers by Don Reid. A Steady Lad and Christine Dunstan production, directed by Wayne Harrison at Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, The Q, March 24-27, 2010

Even though the performances by a cast of luminaries like Ron Haddrick and Shane Porteous made for an enjoyable evening, the play is too lightweight for the themes the author introduces: racial and social prejudice, fear of change, the legacy of The Great War and the Second World War, what it means to be Australian.

The good idea behind the comedy is undermined by crude sexual innuendo, fart jokes and, most unfortunately, by the completely gratuitous use of a device – the sudden death of the youngest “codger” – to bring the play to a sentimental end. Harrison obviously worked hard to produce laughs from “business” like expressions of the men’s faces as they were put through their physical exercises, and the actors played the clown for everything it was worth. But nothing could cover up the basic superficiality of the characters and the relationships between them.

If it had been played as a true stylised farce, with speed and rapid pacing, it may have worked better. The mawkish sentiment and the unrealistic conflicts might then have become integrated into a consistent work, all of which could be taken as an ironic comic commentary on a certain kind of older Anglo-Australian male. In this production, stylisation was used to begin the play and to introduce some scenes, while slapstick took over in many scenes and in others we were expected to take characters and their reactions for real. This mix doesn’t hang together.

In the end, having done their best with a script which needs much more original use of language, a set of more complex characters and a less predictable plot, and working very well as an ensemble, the cast save the play. It reminded me of a rather old-fashioned theatre-in-education piece about multicultural harmony (it was Harmony Day last Sunday) – not for children, but rather for men in their second childhood. At my age, 69, I found I felt quite out of touch with the world of these “codgers”. If there was a point where I felt at home, it was in the character (and the portrayal by Jon Lam) of Stanley Chang. He made the evening worthwhile for me.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: Toy Symphony by Michael Gow

Toy Symphony by Michael Gow. Queensland Theatre Company and State Theatre Company of South Australia, directed by Geordie Brookman at Canberra Theatre Playhouse, March 16-20 2010. Reviewed March 18.

First the play. Going along with my critic’s monocle firmly screwed in my eye socket was a big mistake. When Alexander the Great conquered the stage as well as the world, I knew the game was up. Michael Gow could see right through me. He’s not the one with the writer’s …., er, um, what? What about me? Leave me alone, Michael, please, stop invading my space.

So when I got home I read Scientific American from cover to cover, but stuff about dark matter didn’t help, especially the article called The Brain’s Dark Energy. “Mysterious brain activity holds clues to disorders and maybe even to consciousness.” I needed sleep. And it came, supported by an after-image of Barbara Lowing’s broad-hipped brilliant yellow dress as Mrs Walkham, Roland Hemming’s warm and perspicacious teacher. I felt just like Chris Pitman looked, scared as the young Roland of his head full of rough-and-tumble images made real, and so grateful for Mrs Walkham’s offer of pencil and paper. Write it all down, she advised, and it will go away. And I slept, but now I must write it down. Just let me put my 3-D glasses on. Thank you.

So, the production. The play is about the nature of playwrighting. When I previously read commentary about what the play is about, my preconceptions leapt in: self-indulgence, incestuous writing about writing, capital R Romanticism (if serious), capital F Farce (if not).

But no, Toy Symphony is capital O Original. It impresses me in the same way as Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age did – as a new direction in Australian theatre. It excites me like Andrew Bovell’s Holy Day, or Richard Frankland’s Conversations with the Dead. But it sets an additional challenge. Because it is about theatre, the acting style and set design must make this theatre on the night into a symbol of theatre in any time and place. It’s a bit like Chorus Line being about auditioning for a chorus line, except that Gow works far deeper into the complexity of Roland Hemming’s psychology, builds in theatrical elements which demonstrate how theatre works, and places the Sydney suburb of Como into its real social, historical and even literary context.

Who would have thought the Woronora River had glinted in the eyes of Henry Lawson, Mary Gilmore and D.H.Lawrence? Or that Lake Como in Italy was a reminder of home for the Italians who built the railway? Facts and imagination are all intertwined in Roland’s mind, as a child and adult, but how can everything be linked on stage with the clarity which his psychologist Nina (Lizzy Falkland) knows he needs?

The central device is Roland’s rediscovery, in his dead mother’s box of papers, of the play he wrote at the age of 12, which he believed had been destroyed by a vicious school principal and was never staged. One suspects that the young Michael Gow had something like this experience. The set ostensibly is a simple box – an office for the psychologist, or for the principal, or a classroom for Class 5A, or a hospital corridor, or even a seafront walkway where Anton Chekov takes an evening constitutional.

But the box is full of tricks. It’s a three dimensional jack-in-the-box sort of set, where Roland’s characters can enter and exit in highly surprising ways, even reaching the heights of a rocket ship exploding in space. The set demonstrates that theatre is imaginative play, just as real and funny and sad for the adult audience as for the young child. Gow creates the mental gymnastics of Roland’s imagination, and designers Jonathon Oxlade, Nigel Levings (lighting), and Brett Collery (sound) make Roland’s internal world manifest in wood, colour, light and shade, sound and silence.

Director Geordie Brookman takes up the same jack-in-the-box style in the way lines are delivered, actors set body positions, bodies move in the space (Scott Witt consultant), voices are accented (Melissa Agnew consultant), with costume and make-up almost clown-like. But when we see the adult Roland speaking in gaps, looking down and only fleetingly directly at others, moving away from risk, hiding exposed against a blank wall, we feel with him the depth of his childhood experiences. Theatre plays with him as much as he plays with theatre. Only after his rocketship explodes do we see him, visibly in posture and voice, come to a sensible understanding of himself as Chekov quietly and politely walks past.

The actors, Lizzy Falkland, Daniel Mulvihill and Ed Wightman, play a constantly surprising array of roles as Roland remembers his past and experiences his present, while only Mrs Walkham remains a stable point of reference for him. All have clearly understood the discipline and skills needed to exhibit a child’s imaginative play. There is a comic book element which when played in concrete form before our very eyes reveals that being a writer, a playwright especially, is to lead a life of terror.

I would like to thank Michael Gow for his bravery in deciding to stop managing theatre and to go back to creating it despite the risk. The risk was well worth taking. And having written, now once more I shall sleep.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh

The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh.  Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Cristabel Sved.  Wharf 2, February 22 – March 13, 2010.  Reviewed March 9.

When I first saw The Beauty Queen of Leenane (STC, reviewed in The Canberra Times, August 16, 2000) I found it difficult to believe in the daughter Maureen.  It had seemed to me that the play was too neatly constructed, that Maureen’s sexual delusions were a gratuitous device on the playwright’s part, and “too much is made of the traditional comic Irish loquaciousness”.

In this production Mandy McElhinney makes Maureen’s sexual need explicit, showing how the dominance of her mother (which her sisters refuse to accept) results in this daughter’s extremes of behaviour in the real world and of fantasy in her inner world.  I guess it’s this quality of clarity that we should expect of the Sydney Theatre Company, making the travelling time and expense worthwhile.

There are references in the dialogue to Australian soaps on the “telly”, like Neighbours and Home and Away, the only entertainment available for these people stuck in poverty on a hill surrounded by mud in Leenane, a village with no part to play in a modern economy.  These shows in fantasy at least open up the possibility of somewhere else to go, out of the rain, into sunshine forever.   Ironically though, for Australians, they are also seen as cultural invaders, destroying the true Irish traditions.

But I found myself being reminded of Mother and Son, where the surface humour relied on the underlying determination of the aged to keep control of their lives.  I even wondered if Garry McDonald might not have felt rather like Maureen after his “mother” Ruth Cracknell died in 2002.  Did it mean relief and freedom from his role, or entrenched depression knowing that reality is insubstantial and unreliable?  In other words, I found more depth and complexity in this production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane than I had seen previously.

Some commentators, including this director in her program note, think McDonagh, “a 2nd generation Irishman living in England … parodies, exaggerates and toys with ‘Irishness’ through his ‘outsider’s’ gaze”.  But I have to say, at least in this production, that Cristabel Sved has made the play come close to the best of Irish plays, JM Synge’s Playboy of the Western World.  McDonagh’s Maureen and Pato cannot quite match Pegeen and Christy, but his play is not a parody, even though Maureen uses a poker and Christy a loy.  Both plays call a spade a spade, and this is the value of this STC production.

It is still true that we are left with somewhat sentimental sadness at the conclusion of Beauty Queen, as Maureen becomes so much like her mother.  Playboy is much tougher on us, because we know that Pegeen knows she must face the real world alone, while Maureen can retreat into delusion.

However, I can confidently conclude that STC has made a justifiable success of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, with performances fully booked at the end of its run.  With the key players Judi Farr, Mandy McElhinney and the always spot-on Darren Gilshenan, as well as a very effective relative newcomer Eamon Farren, success is not surprising but gratefully appreciated.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: Ninety by Joanna Murray-Smith

Ninety by Joanna Murray-Smith.  Directed by Sandra Bates, Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, February 4 – April 3, 2010.  Reviewed Tuesday March 9.

The three theatres I visited on this trip to Sydney have quite different atmospheres and clientele.

B Sharp means what it says.  Be ready to be bluntly confronted Downstairs at Belvoir St by pointed expertise.

Wharf 2 is like a well-bred show pony.  Its audiences expect nothing less than the professional best, and all the jumps are cleared.

The Ensemble …?  Well, it’s North Shore, suspended over gently lapping sailing boat water, moored in a bay of quietude.  It’s about humanity, intimacy, warmth of feeling, and sense of local community.  It still belongs to its audience as it has since Hayes Gordon set up Australia’s first theatre-in-the-round in the Kirribilli boatshed just 50 years ago.

Kate Raison and Brian Meegan could have performed Ninety as technically well in a bigger space, but even in Wharf 2 they would not have seemingly looked us directly in the eyes and we would not have seen our reflections in theirs.  If Ninety were done in a proscenium, end-on or even side-on theatre like Belvoir Downstairs, it would seem no better than a slick David Williamson comedy from the days before his community conferencing trilogy.

In the round, even in the three-quarters round as The Ensemble is nowadays,  Joanna Murray-Smith’s ninety minutes of post-ex-marital experience is quite rivetting.  It’s the right play for this theatre.

It’s always a good drama exercise to place an external limitation on what may happen.  There is no plot to Ninety except for Isabel’s intention.  She knows her ex-husband William so much better than the young actress he is about to marry, from the time of her inveigling him into her bed in the beginning, through their young couple financial struggles, his becoming successful and finally rich-and-famous, with the memories joyful and tragic of their only daughter who died so young. 

Isabel has phoned him and persuaded William to see her before he is off to Paris for the wedding – just as she had phoned him in the beginning.  He can only afford 90 minutes of his time.  The play lasts exactly 90 minutes.  Will Isabel break through to William’s real feelings in this short time?  Will he change his mind about marrying again?  Does she really expect him to come back to her?  Would she really want him to?

Of course, I cannot reveal such mysteries.  But I can say that, though the details of these two people’s lives are so different from my own, almost everything that was spoken and left unspoken rang silent bells within me.  If one can say there is no plot in this play, there is a fiendish plot at work to make us in the audience recognise ourselves as we are and as we have been.  If you are up for it, there is still time to make a booking.  02 9929 0644 or www.ensemble.com.au

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: Sydney Theatre Company Education Program 2010. Feature article.

Sydney Theatre Company Education Program 2010. 

March 9, 2010.

Today I saw a schools performance of The Beauty Queen of Leenane (reviewed separately), and discovered the extensive and varied educational program offered by the Sydney Theatre Company.

Current Education Manager, Naomi Edwards, has told me that the appointment of Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton has meant a stronger emphasis on programming beyond the immediate and upfront productions.  Funding for the Company is managed through the Sydney Theatre Foundation, and the first move has been to take a position out of Box Office to create a Schools Liaison post.

The new development also means establishing separate funding for the Education Program, seeking new donors for STC Ed, whose Patrons are Ian and Min Darling, Simon and Catriona Mordant, and the Caledonia Foundation in addition to the Sydney Theatre Foundation, supported further by the Girgensohn Foundation and the Gonski Foundation.  Edwards reports that donors from businesses and the general public are now coming on board with enthusiasm.

Though some parts of the program, such as touring productions and workshops to regional areas, are done in partnership with the NSW Department of Education and Training, teachers and students from Canberra can take part in a very wide range of activities.

STC Ed productions this year, following The Beauty Queen of Leenane, are Nyuntu Ngali (You We Two) by Scott Rankin (presented by Windmill and Big hART), Burnt by Tom Lycos and Stefo Nantsou (Zeal Theatre, commissioned by STC to present issues about drought), Mr Freezy by Hamish Fletcher, Chris Kohn, Tamara Rewse and Sam Routledge (an Arena Theatre production for young children), The Comedy of Errors by Shakespeare (STC Residents directed by Charmian Gradwell).

There are workshops for teachers and students: School Drama professional development for primary school teachers in association with the University of Sydney; Teacher Workshop Program one day workshops on practical techniques and strategies - Verbatim Theatre with Alana Valentine, Shakespeare with Charmian Gradwell and Naomi Edwards, Commedia Dell’Arte with Darren Gilshenan, and Using Drama Across the Primary Curriculum with Professor Robyn Ewing.

For students: Group Devised Performance Workshop with Zeal Theatre; Brecht Workshop with Shannon Murphy; Tragedy Workshop with Naomi Edwards; and the Young Playwrights’ Residency.

For young children there is also the Actor On A Box daytime storytelling program. 

And there are schools days available for all the main stage STC productions of Stockholm, Vs Macbeth, Honour, Oresteia, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Tusk Tusk, August: Osage County, The Trial, Our Town, The Wharf Revue, True West, Uncle Vanya, and The Grenade.  There are some seats allocated in the $10 Access Ticket program to help students who can’t afford full price to attend.

Contact details:  Naomi Edwards, Acting Education Manager, 02 9250 1726
        Toni Murphy, Education Coordinator, 02 9250 1795
        Georgia Thorne, Schools Liaison Officer, 02 9250 1778
    Email: education@sydneytheatre.com.au
    Web: sydneytheatre.com.au/stced

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: Bent by Martin Sherman

Bent by Martin Sherman.  Focus Theatre in association with B Sharp.  Downstairs at Belvoir St, Sydney, February 18 to March 14, 2010. Reviewed Sunday March 7.

This play is well-known for introducing audiences in many countries, since its original production in London in 1979, to the fact that the Nazi holocaust was not only a tragedy for Jews. There is only brief mention of the black triangles (the symbol for "asocials") or green triangles (the symbol for professional criminals) which were used to identify Romani people, but one step down below those with yellow stars, on the lowest rung of the heirarchy in the concentration camps, were the bearers of pink triangles.  Bent is called ‘iconic’ by B Sharp because it has become a symbol of the rights of gay people, and this production is presented in conjunction with Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

The story follows the life of Max from his young adult days in 1933 Berlin, when high level political figures tolerated homosexuality, through a long period on the run after Hitler had these key figures killed, during which Max attempted to do deals via a gay uncle (who outwardly lived a standard married life while paying for ‘boys’ on the side) to escape to Amsterdam with his lover, Rudy.  The Gestapo catches them living among unemployed people in a forest camp, and real disaster sets in.

On the train to the concentration camp, the SS guards set up a situation where Max is forced to kill Rudy and then to rape a young girl’s body in order to prove he is not homosexual.  It’s a ‘deal’ that saves Max’s life at the time, and he is classed as a Jew instead.  But later in the camp a deal to get medicine for Horst, classed as homosexual only because he had signed a petition supporting gay rights, goes awry, and Max is forced to watch while the SS give Horst the choice of electrocution on the perimeter fence or being shot if he refuses.  Horst is shot, but Max is then ordered to dump the body in the nearby mass grave. 

Max does as he is ordered, but finally cannot face his feeling of guilt for still surviving.  He takes Horst’s ‘pyjama’ top, with its pink triangle, changes out of his own with its yellow star, and electrocutes himself on the fence.

The play has it weaknesses, not because these things might not have really happened in Nazi Germany, but because it is an unrelenting slide into absolute disaster, with not any sign of hope.  This is, of course, a truth about the holocaust, but the play is less than it could have been because the German soldiers are shown only as cardboard cut-outs, as automatons.  Sherman’s message comes through loud and clear, and this was probably the right thing to do in 1979 at a time when the public had still never been made aware of what had happened in the 1930s and ’40s.  Now I think we need a greater playwright to round out the picture.  Though some men were in tears when I saw this production, it was too easy to see the story as a contrivance rather than a complete representation of truth.

The reason this production had an emotional impact was careful attention to detail in the acting, and the effective set design which visually took us from an innocent down at heel but homely apartment to an open unprotected park bench and forest, on to a cold unfurnished railway van, and finally into the summer heat and winter freeze of a yard made of white stone, hemmed in from above by an oppressive representation of the electric fence.  The playscript made it difficult to maintain momentum through the long second half where the characters continually move rocks from one place to another, but the imagery in the set design held the action together.

Yet the real strength of emotion came from the surround soundtrack, especially of marching soldiers, steam trains, the rumble of rolling stock, and uplifting military music which built an all-encompassing tension, made all the more horrifying at the point of each torture or death at first off stage and then in full view.

Overall, for me this was a satisfying performance of the play, while its neatly structured plot led me to want to see the issue of the treatment of gays as just one example with much wider implications.  The crux of the story is that authoritarian control encourages the people who work as enforcers to go to extremes, placing their victims in impossible situations which become a choice between personal survival or self-destruction to save their souls.  Max starts out believing it is right for him to do anything to survive, but in the end must commit suicide in the name of truth. 

So I would like more complexity in this drama, so that the play might not be ‘iconic’ of one particular issue, but become more powerful as a symbol of what is wrong with human behaviour that lets us so often go along with, and too often actively participate in, humiliating and killing other people.  This is not just the drama of the holocaust of 70 years ago, but is being played out all around us today as it has been for thousands of years.  However, whereas Bent remains implacably without hope, I think, alongside the terror, we have gradually established a place for human rights since the Nazi era.  We should not let the past horror stymie positive action for the future.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: Kelly Somes. Feature article on becoming a theatre director.

Following the success of Lloyd Beckmann, Beekeeper (reviewed by Peter Wilkins in The Canberra Times and by me on this blogspot), I thought to open up our critics’ blog to more than our standard reviews.  Readers may like to know something of the people behind the scenes.  What is the life of a professional artist like?

I should begin by revealing some personal interest in Kelly Somes, since she attended my audition training class in Year 12, 1995. What happened to the quiet, unassuming girl whose first role was as a witch, in Year 7?  Well, Kelly became one of the best examples of my advice to take time before making the decision to audition for professional training.  At 18 anyone over 30 seems already over the hill, but now Kelly sees herself as one of the young ones just beginning to establish herself professionally.

The steps she took on the way, her decisions, are of course unique.  What I noted, though, is that at every point she focussed on how she understood herself at that time.  This is not a story of unmitigated ambition, of determination to win out at all costs, of  achieving predetermined goals.  It’s a much gentler story than the world’s go-getters would understand.  As she spoke it seemed to me that she put into practice what Laertes struggled with – “This above all: to thine own self be true.”  Polonius may have been pompous and overbearing but this advice, taken with common sense, is worthwhile.

Kelly did not rush into auditions but enrolled in Arts/Law at ANU.  However, she found that Theatre Studies was a continuing interest, leading her to drop Law in favour of an Honours in Theatre.  In Years 11/12 she had experienced acting and directing, indeed she had directed some work while still in junior high school.  For her the undergraduate work, directing short pieces with her student colleagues and then directing a full length play for her Honours was to me an interesting example of the education process – spiralling round the same kind of work but at a new and more mature level each time around.  It was pleasing, though a little humbling for me to hear her praise for the quality of her university teachers, Geoffrey Borny, Tony Turner and Cathy Clelland.  Yet, with a degree and now a clear interest in directing rather than acting, where would she go?

To support herself had to be the immediate answer, so for three years she worked in Canberra, as much as possible in theatre.  Administration work paid her way, while directing in the family theatre company, Free-Rain, continued to build her experience. My review in The Canberra Times of her 2002 production of Hotel Sorrento (by Hannie Rayson) reveals an aspect of Kelly’s interests which she had to face when she made the decision to apply for the directing course at Victorian College for the Arts (VCA) in Melbourne. 

I wrote "Somes claims to have set the play in its period, when Margaret Thatcher was still in power in Britain: a point which is important to the politics of the play.  At the same time, though, to deal with the family's memories and emotional conflicts, she has seen the characters as costumed figures against a blank background, making the whole set white except for the symbolic painting of 'Hotel Sorrento' (in which all of the older generation pictured have now died).  Though this is ostensibly a good idea, the contrast in the first act between scenes in British London and the Australian beach village of Sorrento is not made as obvious as the drama demands.  Or, on the other hand, a much more stylised set, using perhaps something like a Whiteley painting as a model, might have given the design the visual life it needs."

In her VCA interview she was asked why she had not applied for animateur training rather than directing, since she had a clear interest in design.  But by this time, and confirmed as she progressed through her VCA training, her deepest interest was working directly with people within the settings she could imagine.  Perhaps the central question she resolved during her time at VCA was whether she should centre her work on text or action.  I am not surprised, since Lindy Davies was Head of the School of Drama, that Kelly now sees movement as the core of her work, both as the underpinning of text and as a ‘text’ in its own right which the audience can read.

It was this understanding which gave strength to the production of Lloyd Beckmann, Beekeeper which had stirred me to find out how Kelly had got to this point.  And where to now? 

Kelly Somes now works in Melbourne as a freelance director, concentrating on newly written work and on women’s theatre.  Some work is with cooperatives, where pay is equally shared, and some is by invitation to take paid work as director or dramaturg.  She spoke of having to learn how to promote herself and her work, having to become objective about her strengths and weaknesses, and especially of “opening up yourself to critical comment from new people, not just the trusted people you already know” and learning to make “judgements about other people who might be the right people to judge you”.

There is still a quietness, an unassuming quality in Kelly Somes, and I suspect a satisfying career ahead of her.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: Lloyd Beckmann, Beekeeper by Tim Stitz and Kelly Somes

Lloyd Beckmann, Beekeeper by Tim Stitz and Kelly Somes.  Directed by Kelly Somes. Two Blue Cherries & Soulart Productions in association with Free-Rain Theatre Company at The Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, February 18-21, 2010, 7.30pm.
I can only hope that my grandson, who will be 25 when I am ninety, will present as warm, delightful and down-to-earth a homage for me as Tim Stitz has done for his grandfather, Lloyd Beckmann.  Beekeeper could easily have been a merely personal, sentimental memoir of the hard life of an Aussie battler.  But Somes’ direction with lighting by Bronwyn Pringle and sound by Liz Stringer and Neddwellyn Jones keeps the sentiment inside a clear boundary of reality.

The result is a 70 minute performance by Stitz which has more significance than the merely personal.

At first the character of Lloyd Beckmann could have easily seem to have been lifted out of a Steele Rudd Dad and Dave sequence, as he told us of the hilarious details of the sex-life of a queen bee.  It was Beckmann’s old-fashioned Australian accent that centred our focus on the character, and made me think of On Our Selection. Arthur Hoey Davis, the real “Steele Rudd”, interestingly enough, based his stories on his father’s bush farming experience at Emu Creek, Queensland, not too far from where Beckmann lived most of his life.  Davis’s publications made humorous bush characters highly popular from their beginning in The Bulletin in 1895 through to the 1940s, especially through the 1920s and 30s as Beckmann was growing up.

But once we moved indoors, into Beckmann’s granny flat, filled with family photos, furniture collected over the years, but missing his wife, now “up the hill”, we gradually came to understand that the humour of Beckmann’s character as he genuinely wanted to entertain us, his guests, was covering up the many disappointments in his life.  At fleeting moments, his grandson Tim, would appear in a change of accent to modern Melbourne, and we then also began to understand that this show is a brave act on the part of Tim Stitz.

At the end, as Beckmann lays out the implements, boots and white overalls of the beekeeper on the floor between us in the intimate setting of the granny flat, and places the broad-brimmed bush hat with its surrounding veil at its head, suddenly all the totemic images of old Australia, the workers in the bush, immigrants, farmers, miners and soldiers, are blended into a feeling that with Lloyd Beckmann’s passing that Australia will be no more than a memory.

Tim Stitz allows us into his memorial for the past in a quite remarkable way, and leaves us to wonder what we are gaining or losing as we move on into the new world order of the 21st Century.

Lloyd Beckmann, Beekeeper is planned to go on tour through regional centres as well as major cities.  I wish the company well in this venture, which is in itself part of a long tradition of travelling showmen who have maintained the links across this wide brown land.  In this way the grandson pays homage to the grandfather, the present recognises its roots in the past.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: Pennies from Kevin – The Wharf Revue

Pennies from Kevin – The Wharf Revue by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott, with Virginia Gay.  Sydney Theatre Company at The Playhouse, Canberra, February 9-13 and March 11-13, 2010
What diversity of talent these four thrust before us.  They sing, play and dance in every popular style since the 1930s, but the most surprising and fascinatingly funny is to watch the Colliery Brass Band perform the opening bars of 2001: A Space Odyssey with trumpets, trombone, euphonium and drum.  They are the only four left in the band, of course, now that the rest are unemployed or working in “renewables”.

It’s amazing how there can seem to be some kind of logic in a story beginning in the Lower Chamber, Hogwart House, Kirribilli, rollicking through amongst other wonders the Independents of the Upper Chamber, the Democrats in Heaven, Michelle in the White House, Bob Ellis at 3am, up against the Wall in Palestine, and La dolce vita with Amanda V.

Berlusconi, Ratzinger and Vanstone is a combination of horror and laughter not to be missed.

It seems weird to write a serious review of such a riot of a revue, but I think it should be done.  The question is raised in my mind, is it a farcical parody or worthwhile satire?  To use the kind of wordsmithery Bob Ellis might employ, is it nobler in the mind to let fly the outrageous slings and arrows of political criticism, or to take arms against the oppressor’s wrongs, the proud man’s contumely? 

The high point of satire in the show, I think, is the scene entitled “Master Robert Ellis” (so like the real thing in some hidden Hogwart chamber in nightgown and candle that I found it hard to recognise which actor played the role).  Every nuance of Ellis’ shuffle, moody hesitation and originality of language is recreated, but this would still be only parody (and therefore insulting) if it were not for the wit in what he says.  We laugh not only because he sounds like Bob Ellis speaking, but because what he says is as politically pin-pricking as the real Bob is.  And it is not insulting to feel a certain sadness in the character who still wants to pretend he had an affair with Jackie Weaver, because there is a depth of feeling in the real Bob Ellis, a sadness in his integrity as he pinpoints our failings.  He reminds me, as his character in Pennies from Kevin does, of Pooh’s friend Eeyore.

 
To write and perform at this level, interpolated with pure slapstick for light relief, is to make a show which is far better than parody, and therefore worthwhile.  To come away laughing is one thing, but to see what is worth laughing at makes this show more than pennies, from Heaven or Kevin.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: La traviata by Giuseppe Verdi

La traviata by Giuseppe Verdi, libretto by Francesco Maria Piave.  Opera Australia, Sydney Opera House February 1 – March 29 2010
I am not qualified to make critical judgements of the musicianship in this production,  which is directed by Elijah Moshinsky and features Elvira Fatykhova as Violetta and Aldo Di Toro as Alfredo.  However the full house on opening night applauded very enthusiastically after every aria and other set pieces.

Musically, I like what I like, and to hear Verdi’s music on this grand scale is a special experience.  But this was the first opportunity for me see the whole play, rather than hear parts sung in isolation, on recordings.  Theatrically, this presentation more than met my expectations.

In La dame aux camélias, the Dumas fils novel and play which were the source of the plot, Marguerite’s words define the central concern of the drama: “Whatever she may do, a fallen woman can never redeem herself!”  Though Alfredo loves Violetta truly and his father (Jonathan Summers) finally understands that she is worthy in herself, and is not to be treated simply as a fly in the ointment of his family’s reputation, tuberculosis is the device the author uses to avoid facing up to the final solution.  If she had not died, what would have become of her?

There has long been a trend in theatre to find a different setting for previous centuries’ plays to “update” them for a modern audience.  Last year I thought this had not worked for the production of Don Giovanni and some commentators have been concerned about this year’s Tosca.  This La traviata was set in its mid-19th Century Parisian high society context. Ironically Verdi had insisted on present-day costuming, but the Venice opera house overrode his wishes with a setting around 1700 instead of 1850.  Michael Yeargan’s sets and Peter J Hall’s costumes have done the right thing by Verdi, and by the modern audience. 

The effect, as I saw it, was that for us in modern Australia the “fallen woman” issue is a thing of the past, but the social pressures on Violetta and Alfredo and their emotional responses become metaphorical, symbolic of the determination of people of our generation to be independent of traditional family strictures and to find our own way in the world.  What for Verdi was a realistic story, for us is a timeless fairy story. 

The result was that the singers could freeze while the audience applauded, holding the emotion of the moment, and then pick up the thread to take us into the next phase.  The chorus could be wonderfully choreographed in group movement and dance on a crowded stage, almost like an Ancient Greek chorus providing context and commentary on the actions of the protagonists. 

Let’s not turn tuberculosis into breast cancer and dress Violetta in jeans.  Let’s be true to Verdi’s original conception, as this production is, so we can take what we need from his art.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Two reviews - standard newspaper style and magazine style.

Two reviews - standard newspaper style and magazine style.  Comments invited.

1.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare.  Schaubühne Berlin directed by Thomas Ostermeier.  Sydney Festival at the Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay, January 8-16, 2010.  In German with surtitles.

Mud, mud, (in-)glorious mud.  What a difference from Australia’s own Hamlet on Ice or the British traditional Laurence Olivier film that my generation was brought up on.  This Hamlet really is mad, with lucid moments, in grief at the death of his father. Madder as he realises what his mother has done and what women may do under a man’s control.  Mad with anger and thoughts of revenge against his uncle, the murderer.  Mad with fear that he may destroy the innocent Ophelia, with regret that he has killed her father, assuming Polonius to be King Claudius behind the arras.  Mad at himself for not knowing how to take action, when, or what to do.

When the end comes, alone in the mud of the graveyard, we understand what “The rest is silence” means.  At last, his death is a relief for Hamlet, and felt by the audience to be a kind of triumph.  As the stage switched to black, in silence, the applause exploded, calling the cast back 5 times when I was there to express appreciation for the artistry of this production.

A surprising feature of this adaptation, which includes occasional modern language, topical references and even improvisation as Hamlet directly addresses his audience (characters in the play and us in the auditorium) is the humour.  Shakespeare built this in to the gravedigger and Polonius, but Ostermeier and the translator Marius von Mayenburg have dared to show how watching a mad person is often very funny.  The mood switches from zany wild clowning to humour which suddenly becomes very black, and again to terrible feelings of complete breakdown.  Though Lars Eidinger as Hamlet has received most publicity, all the cast are entirely in control of their work in this highly expressionistic mode.  Judith Rosmair’s scene as the broken Ophelia, hardly able to articulate her words, was just extraordinary.  How different in style from the past is this performance, but how true it seems to be to Shakespeare’s intentions.

To bring, or not to bring this production to Australia may once have been the question, but the Schaubühne company prove the answer to be absolutely in the positive. 

2.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare.  Schaubühne Berlin directed by Thomas Ostermeier.  Sydney Festival at the Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay, January 8-16, 2010.  In German with surtitles.

The essential question of any theatre production is Hamlet’s: to be, or not to be.  The answer for Schaubühne is about whether their adaptation can be seen as true to Shakespeare’s intentions, as well as create a genuine response from a modern audience.  Being chosen for the Sydney Festival also raises the question of translation from Berlin to Australia, Sydney in particular.

The answer is in the positive on all three counts, in my view, but you need to know more.  Taking the last first, Lars Eidinger, playing Hamlet, is quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, saying that his use of improvised dialogue directly to the audience and of the humour in this version has a quite different effect in Berlin than in Sydney.  In Germany he does not talk directly to those watching, and he thought people there laughed only to show themselves to be with it.  In Sydney, the laughter is a genuine response, and it was clear to me (on Tuesday January 12) that the enjoyment of the business of theatre flowed fast between audience and actors, however fashionably dressed up Sydney people can be.  Eidinger talked of “insight”, and I agree that Sydney audiences have a sophisticated appreciation of theatre which has grown over the past several decades.  (Aside: see SMH Letters to the Editor, Friday January 15, for a contrasting view.) Translating the words and the action from Berlin to Sydney has been not just successful, but has brought out the best at both ends.

Oddly perhaps, I thought the surtitles showing Shakespeare’s original text was a brilliant Brechtian idea.  We picked up the feeling from the sound of the German, the physical action and the live camera images while we also saw the words.  I don’t know if the result was deliberate, but the ‘literalisation’ created exactly the right degree of ‘alienation effect’, allowing us to be both participants in the emotion and observers understanding the significance of the ideas.  Perhaps in Berlin they should perform in English with surtitles in German, although I was conscious that the rhythm and cadences of Shakespeare’s language do not translate well into a different set of words and sentence structures.

This production takes literally Shakespeare’s emphasis on earth and nature, as against the unnatural and dysfunctional.  The main part of the stage, thrust towards the audience, is covered in soil which, when wetted by characters holding garden hoses to represent Danish rain, turns into slippery mud.  What this material actually is I don’t know, considering that actors buried their faces in it and apparently were still able to breathe, but the symbolic import was very clear.  Earth, and nature, are unforgiving rather than being the sort of ideal harmonious environment that has become the fashionable view since the Romantics held sway. 

Hamlet is shown to be justifiably mad, in the sense that although he knows he is behaving madly, everything that has happened around his father’s death and what happens as the play progresses goes against any possibility of his being able to direct events or control his life.  This version concentrates on his personal and the local political life, leaving out Shakespeare’s wider political concerns about the forthcoming invasion by Fortinbras from Poland, except at the very end when we hear the drums of the approaching army to heighten the tension as all but Horatio die.  I thought it would have been better to have left even this reference out, because the collapse of Denmark’s ruling elite was obvious enough in any case. 

Shakespeare himself may well have not used all the material he wrote.  I suspect the final gathering together of the whole script, I think in 1604, was probably in defence against others pinching his script – perhaps an early attempt at proving copyright ownership – but the result is more than four hours long and loses focus when what’s going on outside Denmark has to be covered. 

So I conclude that the Schaubühne company have been true to Shakespeare’s central concerns.  They also come from a long tradition, in my view beginning essentially from Erwin Piscator’s productions from the 1920s, of using expressionist techniques to open up theatre to the expansion of ideas in some degree in contrast to the ‘naturalism’ of the late 19th Century (which is still popular today). Schaubühne began in 1962, only a few years before Piscator died (still directing theatre in Berlin after his sojourn in the US during the Nazi period), and it seems to me they have continued and developed that tradition, which is much more in tune with Shakespeare’s ‘presentational’ theatre than with naturalism.  This explains why this production is far superior to the ‘psychological angst’ versions that we have become familiar with (and also shows that Freud in his use of both the Oedipus and the Hamlet dramas got things out of kilter).

I think Schaubühne got the art into kilter, however much Hamlet’s world falls apart.  This is why the audience responded so well when I saw the play, their applause bringing the cast back on stage five times for bows.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: Not Axel Harrison by Sam Floyd.

Not Axel Harrison by Sam Floyd.  Freshly Ground Theatre at The Street Two, November 26 – December 5 2009 (excluding Sundays and Mondays) at 8pm.   
Freshly Ground Theatre has carved a small but attractive niche in Canberra’s theatrical architecture.  The company is the vehicle for the writer Sam Floyd, whose work continues to show flair in this, their third, production. 

Not Axel Harrison is a parody of the gangster movie genre in which the hit man Axel Harrison (Tom Watson) is killed by his intended victim,Chris, a non-violent florist (Chris Brain) who disguises himself as Harrison not only to avoid detection as a murderer but to escape the attention of the gangster loan-shark Poncioni (David MacNamara)to whom he owes a large sum, which is why Poncioni had sent Harrison.

At this point the plot, involving the non-appearing Bruce (apparently already killed by Harrison), the dim-witted bodyguard Val (Adam Salter), Poncioni’s sexy aggressive daughter Donna (Becky Bergman), Micky the Mule (Jack Dyball), and the corrupt cop in Poncioni’s pocket, Spiegel (Daniel McCusker), follows a constantly twisted line of logic which should not be revealed here: better to see the play and be surprised.  Suffice to say, farce is the order of the day.

The performances varied in strength, with the commendations going to McNamara and Salter.  But the generation X, Y or Z audience was not looking for highly polished acting from a cast of their peers.  It was the dialogue and plot which carried the laughs, making for a successful light entertainment.

Floyd’s work has antecedents in Joe Orton’s Loot and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound.  Both those writers had the advantage of being able to participate in the British repertory and university traditions in their day.  Freshly Ground’s niche is in this mould, but Canberra cannot boast the equivalent of the Cambridge University Footlights, the progenitor of much zany British comedy since the 1960s.

Maybe this is the time for Floyd and those around him to take up where Elbow Theatre left off and build our own Capital new wave of original young writers.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: Porcelain by Chay Yew.

Porcelain by Chay Yew. 

Director: Beng Oh.  Lighting Designer: Nick Merrylees.  Cast: Keith Brockett (John Lee); Colin MacPherson (Voice One/Dr Worthing); Nicholas Barker-Pendree (Voice Two/Mr Lee); Paul David-Goddard (Voice Three/Alan White); Leon Dürr (Voice Four/William Hope).

At The Street Theatre Studio, Canberra, 3-7 November 2009 (original production at La Mama, Melbourne, 2008)

This production of Porcelain, about a gay relationship which turns sour and results in a tragic death, was presented at The Street in its most spare form.  Just five plain chairs, John Lee in the centre surrounded by red paper cranes more of which he continues to make throughout the play.

This was Chay Yew’s first play, from 1993. His imagery is strongly reminiscent of Kathryn Schultz Miller’s A Thousand Cranes, a play for children which tells the true and poignant story of Sadako Saki’s battle against radiation sickness after the Hiroshima bomb and the tradition of folding origami miniatures according to which if a sick person folds a thousand cranes, the gods will grant her a wish and make her healthy. Is John Lee sick?  Can, or should, the prison psychiatrist find him unfit to plead on a murder charge?

But it is the dialogue which still brings the horror to life.  All five actors are seated with little movement except on one occasion when John Lee is caressed by his lover.  Now I am reminded of that other play for voices, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.  Though famous as a BBC radio play, its first performance was recorded by five actors standing on stage at the 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association, Manhattan, in 1953.  As the Reverend Eli Jenkins, Thomas made the only movement, stepping forward to declaim his morning prayer.  Porcelain and Under Milk Wood are entirely different plays, yet the quality of the interplay between the voices is the strength in both cases, and it is to Beng Ho’s credit that he maintains that focus, avoiding the temptation to represent action physically.  As is often the case in good theatre, less is more.

Especially well done in the performance I saw was the exposure of the conflicts and compromises made in the dialogue between the television interviewer and the prison psychiatrist, all happening on the sidelines of the real story of what John Lee did and why.  Not only is the play worth seeing for its only too human story, but this production successfully worked our feelings and our intellects in coming to terms with the complexities of destructive relationships.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: Wil Anderson's Wilosophy

Wil Anderson's Wilosophy.  Stand-up comedy, with Justin Hamilton, at The Playhouse, October 29-31.

It's hard to put your finger on Wil Anderson's G-spot.  He claims that God has hidden it.  As a warm-up (I suppose you could say foreplay) Justin Hamilton is good, yet he doesn't have Anderson's touch.  Just as well.  You wouldn't want the intro to outshine the main act.  But Hamilton deserves credit for a professional act as well as an award for bravery.

It's the risk-taking that makes Anderson stand out.  Not just by saying out loud words that confront even audience members less than half my age. Not only by satirising politicians, religious ideologues, and office workers probably like most people in the Canberra audience. Not even by accompanying his words with quite extraordinary physical actions and facial expressions.

What's exciting is how he interacts with his audience, often leading him into potential black holes which he amazingly escapes from, like a kind of mentally gymnastic Houdini.  He is more than a skilled stand-up comic.  He has enough art to play with the artform.

Then, in addition, there is a carefully constructed plan to each of the items of social criticism which constitute his "Wilosophy".  Issues of the day are exposed as arguments, presented by characters we know from television and the press, including himself.  The core of the humour is not from the occasional slapstick interjection, but from showing up public figures' lack of logic. 

And, finally, Anderson brings a quality of human kindness into this critical mass, in his warm story of a Down Syndrome children's concert.  If you missed him in Canberra last week, or in Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne and Edinburgh during the last year, you can fly down south to Wrest Point Entertainment Centre in Hobart on Friday October 6 for a one-night stand.  Why not?

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: The Christian Brothers by Ron Blair

The Christian Brothers by Ron Blair.  Performed by Bill Boyd, directed by Geoffrey Borny.  Presented by Tuggeranong Arts Centre, Thursdays to Saturdays October 15-24, 8pm.  Matinees: Friday 16th, Thursday 22nd, Friday 23rd at 10am.  Bookings: 6293 1443.

At its first production, 34 years ago, The Christian Brothers could easily be seen as an indictment of the Catholic Church.  Today, the play remains a classic because Blair's writing reveals far more.  The original message is not lost, as ex-Catholic school men in the audience showed by their reactions at the special preview last Wednesday.  But the theme as we see it now is not about the Catholic faith, nor about a particular religious faith, not even about religious faith at all. 

Geoffrey Borny had the good sense, as we would expect from someone of his professional standing and experience, to allow Bill Boyd time to let Blair's words seem to slip out of the mouth of The Brother, as if by accident rather than deliberate intention.  Even though Boyd is not a great actor – I found myself imagining Geoffrey Rush in the role – the effect is powerful as we, being addressed as if in his class, gradually realise that this teacher is at breaking point.  It is both frightening and sad.

The Brother's breakdown turns on the same issue we all face in the modern world, and indeed in times past as well as presumably in the future.  How could it be, for example, that reconciliation with indigenous people was pushed aside in political power play in 2000 and still struggles to revive 10 years later?  How could it be that people invented completely unsustainable forms of financial investment for their immediate gain but inevitably for longer term collapse?  What has happened to moral integrity in a world replete with intellectual knowledge and technical capacity?  As Borny notes, The Brother asks the question "What does it profit my pupils to pass exams in such subjects as Mathematics, English or History, if they suffer the loss of their immortal souls?" 

At the end, as he paints a representation of bars of a tiny prison cell, we know that The Brother's loss of religious faith represents the bigger loss in us all of sincerity and ethical purpose.  It's a credit to Tuggeranong Arts Centre that they offer strong theatre of this kind.  Take the opportunity to see it.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: Baby Boomer Blues by Alan Becher

Note [to subeditor at the Canberra Times]: keep ampersands in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice – this was the original film title.

    
Baby Boomer Blues by Alan Becher.  Perth Theatre Company at The Q Theatre, Queanbeyan until July 2.  Bookings: www.theq.net.au

What a funny play!  Amanda Crewes's Carol, who has been 39 for the last 5 years, bounces on and off Greg McNeill's 53 year-old Bob, so there's lots of funny ha-ha.  This makes for an enjoyable evening.  Certainly on opening night last Friday, baby boomers laughed and occasionally shuddered, as they recognised in themselves Bob having gone to the kitchen, and come out again without doing what he had gone there to do. This was not a senior moment, he claimed.  But they all knew better. Viagra gets a mention, too. I'm sure they well remembered the 1969 film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, completely unknown to Gens X, Y or Z.

Bob is a traditional Australian joker – really quite old-fashioned, covering up his insecurities, more conservative than he thinks he is, not really quite up with his own generation (despite saying how great the Woodstock movie was) and needing to find something important to do with his life after years of disillusionment.  It's hard at first to imagine why Carol became his third wife some time before she was 39.  Perhaps it was his air of vulnerability that attracted her, and indeed it is through her efforts that their marriage does not fall apart, and Bob does make a real decision.

Dealing with these complexities of character and subtleties in the relationship is where Becher's writing is funny peculiar.  Through the first half and some way into the second the play seems to be no more than light comedy, full of jokes and banter, even in argument scenes.  Then suddenly the atmosphere changes and we are expected to take Bob and Carol's conflict very seriously.  It switches again as they perform in the holiday island entertainment, and again as they go to volunteer their services in a good cause. 

So the play turns out to be one of good intentions, a kind of romantic comedy with satirical possibilities, but too contrived for me to accept as a top quality work.  Fortunately, Crewes and McNeill are up to the challenge, keeping the energy up, making the most of good timing and providing a neat night's entertainment.  





©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: BELONGING: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century. By John McCallum. Book review reproduced as published in the Canberra Times.

BELONGING: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century. By John McCallum.  Currency Press. 484pp. $49.95.

Reviewer: FRANK McKONE


It was Hannie Rayson who wrote Life After George and the well-known play and film Hotel Sorrento, each a powerful drama of conflicting relationships. But did you know she also wrote "a wild, rather elaborately plotted, satirical farce" – Competitive Tenderness – in which "Dawn Snow, a Thatcherite character who claims to have made her name reforming the Ugandan police service, is appointed CEO of the city of Greater Burke . . .    There is a lot of mad business with a savage pit-bull terrier, owned by Dawn, and lots of running in and out of doors and hiding in cupboards.  It all ends in chaos, but with Dawn rising". 


Not quite the Rayson I thought I knew.  McCallum surprises on many occasions from 1912 (Louis Esson's The Time is Not Yet Ripe and the first stage version of Steele Rudd's On Our Selection) to the State Theatre Company of South Australia's 2004 adaptation of Robert Dessaix's novel, Night Letters, in which "all the characters were on stage, occupying the same space, but in different stories".  As Robert, dying of an AIDS-related illness, sat writing his letters home from "Europe, with its crowded corruption, petty restrictions and suffocating past" he was "framed as if in a painting, and . . . the characters from his past moved with and around him.  In the theatre ghosts are never ethereal, they are always present, bodies on stage".


McCallum is a Sydney-based academic, senior lecturer in the School of English, Media & Performing Arts at University of NSW, and also a long-standing and highly respected theatre reviewer for The Australian newspaper.  I think I found the awful Performance Studies word "trope" only twice in over 400 pages.  The rigour of his research is exemplary and he is not afraid to write in a clear, imaginative style befitting the directness of Australian theatrical playwriting and stage production.


The distinction between plays being written and plays being staged is of key importance to McCallum's purpose.  He begins by pointing out that "For much of the twentieth century, Australian drama had very little to do with Australian theatre – local plays were not often performed".  At the same time, by examining the storylines, theatrical styles, writers' themes and intentions, even of playscripts some of which were never performed, McCallum successfully develops the through-line of our culture: we are always concerned with the way we belong to our country.


Each phase, like a century-long 16-Act drama, represents a change in point of view, often opposing the previous period while growing from it, sometimes diverging into previously unexplored directions.  At first sight Australian drama might look like it all ends in chaos, lots of running in and out of doors and hiding in cupboards.  But Dawn does rise as we have gone from separating ourselves from our colonial European crowded corruption, petty restrictions and suffocating past, establishing our own voice in the 1950s and '60s, waving not drowning in The New Wave, finding ourselves in the global scene, and diversifying our playwriting among all the kinds of intellectual, social and personal communities that are the Australian reality.

Chapter headings, like "Bush and city", "The new internationalism", "Immigrants and exiles", "Aboriginal theatre", may seem ordinary enough, but the excitement is in the detail.  As McCallum describes each play, from a list 51 pages long, in the context of its time and place, with just enough larger analysis but never too much, gradually it dawns upon the reader what belonging is all about.  It's not about sentimental flag-waving patriotism, not about believing in myths of heroism or defeat, ideals or failures.  Belonging is about accepting, exploring, critically examining, appreciating and enjoying our place in the world just as we are.


The book has an important role as a compendium of Australian drama.  It's a book to search through for the many plays which should be revived.  It will be good, for example, to see Bran Nue Day again soon, hopefully with the same positive energy and humour on film as it had on stage.  It's a book in which to fill in gaps between plays you have seen, read or read about, and so to understand, for example, the full impact of a playwright like Nick Enright. 


And, much more than a compendium, it's a book written with feeling.  However much we may fear for the future of our theatre, McCallum uses Dessaix's Night Letters to ground us in his conclusion.  "At the end [Robert] returns home.  He is dying.  [His partner] Peter is preparing for a new life without him, but they are both still looking for an exultation based on being there in a place.  Of belonging."



Frank McKone is a retired drama teacher and an occasional theatre reviewer for The Canberra Times.  He is author of FIRST AUDITION How to get into drama school.  Currency Press 2002.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: Agamemnon by Aeschylus, adapted and directed by Rachel Hogan

Agamemnon by Aeschylus, adapted and directed by Rachel Hogan.  WeThree at Belconnen Theatre, Belconnen Community Centre, June 10-13, 17-20 8pm and at Carey's Cave, Wee Jasper, June 14, 5pm (dinner and show packages available – bookings for this performance essential).  Bookings: 6251 2981

2467 years ago, only 52 years after the last tyrant was expelled from ancient Athens by the new rich middle class, Aeschylus presented this play about the legendary King of Argos, Agamemnon, returning home after 10 years away, finally destroying the city of Troy where his brother's beautiful wife, also his wife's sister, Helen, had been seduced by the Trojan, Paris.  In the often messy transition to democracy from dictatorships, just as we are watching in Indonesia and South Africa today, it is important to remind people of the horrors of the past.

Rachel Hogan's adaptation focusses on the personal experience of Queen Clytemnestra, played with clarity and understanding by Jenna Arnold, left "unmanned", learning to rule in her husband's place, speaking with a confidence he cannot accept on his return, and taking revenge on him for his past sacrifice of her daughter, Iphigenia, and now bringing home the Trojan king's young daughter, Cassandra.

Taking the place of the original chorus, a Wise Woman speaks to the audience directly in modern language as narrator and commentator, as well as speaking to her Queen as an observant and questioning commoner.  Diane Heather, using a torch to shine a light on us as if from the past, takes a critical view of our lack of understanding, explains what we need to know, and leads us into the action.  The writing of this role is well done, and Heather's characterisation is strong.  Alexandra Howard, an up and coming young actor to watch, demands our sympathy for the abused Cassandra, "inspired to speak of her own sufferings".

Bart Black's performance of Agamemnon needs more of a Shakespearean sense of his own majesty.  In the original text he is more of a politician rather than just a rough soldier.  Perhaps Hogan cut too much here.  But the women are the central focus as they should be, while the set design, use of masks, music and movement take us back to the images and ritual of ancient Greek theatre.  The play works well at Belconnen Theatre, and should be a special experience in Carey's Cave.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: Walk the Fence by Felicity Bott and Kate Shearer. Review Version 1

Walk the Fence.  Theatre-in-Education co-created and directed by Felicity Bott (Buzz Dance Theatre, Perth) and Kate Shearer (Jigsaw Theatre Company, Canberra)for Early Childhood age group.  Composer, Melanie Robinson. Installation and costumes, Kaoru Alfonso. Lighting, Alex Sciberras.  Courtyard Studio at Canberra Theatre, June 3-13, 10am and 12.30pm.  Bookings: Canberra Ticketing 6275 2700 or www.canberratheatrecentre.com.au

   
Buzz and Jigsaw, with actor/dancers Keira Mason-Hill (Rachel) and Chris Palframan (Pole, Mr Troublesome, Maggie and Brick)have created a work which excited, moved and educated all the Year 1 and 2 boys and girls I sat among on Wednesday. 

Teaching emotional intelligence to 4-8 year-olds means engaging the childrens' emotions first to put them in the right state of mind to learn the lesson – just what theatre is designed to do, and done beautifully in this production.  The lesson for Rachel is "Breathe 1, breathe 2, breathe 3 (to slow down and lower your anger), shake yourself, run about and dance, then use your words to tell your feelings – because I am the boss of me." 

But I am angry and breathing hard because I am told that the ACT Department of Education no longer gives any funds to support Jigsaw Theatre Company – despite 35 years' top-class work making it arguably the nation's premier theatre-in-education team.  Jigsaw walks the fence even more on their tiptoes than the young girl Rachel in the show who has to learn to cope with her parents' separation and moving away from her street.

Rachel's story, danced exquisitely by Mason-Hill, with expert help from highly gymnastic actor Palframan,reaches a positive conclusion.  I asked a neighbouring 6 year-old boy was he sorry or happy for Rachel.  Happy in the end, he said, and clearly understood how good it was for Rachel to learn to ground herself in reality, feeling OK on the ground instead of only up on walls and fences.

The show is a wonderful example of how movement is the basis of feeling in theatre, as it is in putting emotional intelligence into practice.  All the right principles of educational drama are played out through Rachel's journey from anger, which puts her in "time-out" without resolution, to working through to acceptance and even excitement at the prospect of change.

So while parents and teachers can, indeed should, give their children the experience of Jigsaw's work under the Department of Education's Key Learning Areas of The Arts and Health, the Company has to face the divorce of education from the arts.  ArtsACT is the only local parent providing alimony, with encouragement from a supportive aunt at the Australia Council.  There is enough to pay for artistic direction and administration, but absent parent ACT Department of Education needs to pay their share to cover costs of mounting shows.  After all, this is not box office commercial theatre.  Teaching emotional development in early childhood is essential to our community's well-being, but where's the right response from our government to support Jigsaw's literally heart-warming work?

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: Walk the Fence by Felicity Bott and Kate Shearer. Review Version 2

Walk the Fence.  Co-created and directed by Felicity Bott (Buzz Dance Theatre, Perth) and Kate Shearer (Jigsaw Theatre Company, Canberra).  Composer, Melanie Robinson. Installation and costumes, Kaoru Alfonso. Lighting, Alex Sciberras.  Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre, June 3-13, 10am and 12.30pm.  Bookings: Canberra Ticketing 6275 2700 or www.canberratheatrecentre.com.au

   
In the foyer, Walk the Fence begins as the children receive tickets which tell them the number of the house they will visit in Rachel's street.  Theatre staff check with the teachers and parents to keep friendship groups together.  The Year 1 and 2 children I observed were excited, with anticipation building, ready to be part of the show.

Keira Mason-Hill presented Rachel, whose parents have separated, as a very angry child, unable to do her schoolwork properly, especially because her mother is about to move.  "This is my street," says Rachel.  "I don't want to go." Her fear of the unknown is represented in a common children's game of never touching the ground.  Somehow, though, she must become grounded in reality, to learn to accept the change in her life without losing her sense of self worth.  Mason-Hill is a modern dance artist as well as actor who creates Rachel's feelings wonderfully in exquisite lightness of movement.  This is an education in theatre of the best kind for the young children who responded with no hesitation to the subtle moods as well as the plot.

This involves Chris Palframan, an actor and gymnast, playing a tall Pole on sprung stilts; a letterbox in which Rachel finds Mr Troublesome, the school principal to whom her mother writes about her; Maggie, a magpie who swoops all over the stage on roller skates; and finally Brick, the wall who teaches Rachel to work through her emotions with "breathe 1, breathe 2, breathe 3, (to slow down and lower her anger), shake yourself, run about and dance, then use your words to tell your feelings."  Finally remember "I am the boss of my feelings".  This becomes an audience participation game, and the lesson is learnt.

It worked well with the 6 year-old boys sitting with me in house number 1A, who also wanted to know how Palframan learned to walk, run and jump on sprung stilts.  I asked, did you feel sorry for Rachel, or happy?  Happy in the end, they said, revealing to me that they understood her feelings. In the modern world, helping young children to develop their emotional intelligence is crucial for the well-being of our community, and Walk the Fence is designed to fit directly into the school curriculum in the Key Learning Areas of The Arts and Health, and particularly the Essential Learning Areas 4 (to act with integrity and regard for others) and 14 (to manage self and relationships).

It was humbling to hear from Kate Shearer after the show, however, that Jigsaw receives funding from ArtsACT and the Australia Council – enough to pay for artistic direction and administration – but that the longstanding commitment of funding from the ACT Department of Education, in Jigsaw's contract since the 1970s, is no longer provided.  This leaves Jigsaw struggling to mount the very shows that our children desperately need.  I can only hope departmental officers realise how they are making the Jigsaw Theatre Company walk even more on tiptoes on the fence than Rachel, and see their way to reinstate funding.  The quality, artistically and educationally, of Walk the Fence justifies my feeling sorry now, but I would like to be happy in the end.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: Every Base Covered by Sam Floyd

Every Base Covered, an anthology of short plays by Sam Floyd.  Freshly Ground Theatre at QL2 Theatre, Gorman House Arts Centre, May 20-30 Wednesdays to Saturdays, 8pm.  Bookings 0450 067 322.

9 plays in 75 minutes sounds like at least a half-marathon, but in Floyd's capable hands we arrive at the end laughing and not a bit breathless, with Every Base Covered.  The Ten Minute Play is now quite an established artform as a result of the Short+Sweet Festival competitions which grew from the Sydney Festival Fringe nearly ten years ago.  Included in this program are two of Floyd's successes – The Disclaimer, a winner in the 2008 Canberra One Act Play Festival, and Imaginary Break-up which reached the finals in the Eltham Theatre Ten Minute Play Festival in Melbourne.

Each play is a – usually absurd – solution to a What if question.  What if a café customer exposes his interest only in the waitress to the exclusion of all other norms of behaviour?  What if a suicide negotiator actually thinks the jumper should jump?  What would you sing if you had only a tiny ukelele left in the whole world?  What if a girl ignores you after she has asked you for three drinks?  What if you are the girl?  What if you find yourself with a guitar instead of a ukelele after all?  What if people could be persuaded to waive their right to sue for compensation for their death, when the cause of everyone's death is their birth?  What if the girl you imagine you love is really imaginary and then wants to break up the relationship?  What if the girl in the red polka dot dress you have just run over is the wrong one, because you don't know if the dress was supposed to be white with red dots or red with white dots?

Tight scripting is complemented by an appropriately economical staging and acting style, performed by only four actors.  After a year of working together, I suspect the time is approaching for Freshly Ground Theatre, and Sam Floyd in particular, to take on bigger things.  They have clearly built an audience among their 20-something peer group and could think now of moving beyond the limited QL2 into pubs and clubs, and eventually on to the main stage.  Floyd reminds me of other local successes, such as Queanbeyan's Tommy Murphy, first mentioned in The Canberra Times in 2005 and now a published Sydney playwright.  Let's see Freshly Ground seek new pastures.



   

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: A Stretch of the Imagination by Jack Hibberd

A Stretch of the Imagination by Jack Hibberd.  Performed by John Wood, directed by Denis Moore for HIT Productions at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, Tuesday May 5 to Friday May 8, 8.00pm, Saturday May 9, 2.00pm & 8.00pm. Bookings: 6298 0290

This may sound picky, but this production has a running time of 110 minutes, including interval, according to the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne where it will be seen later in May on its round Australia tour.  Maybe at The Q the interval was half an hour longer, but I don't think so. 

So it wasn't just my imagination that was, legitimately, stretched by Jack Hibberd.  The play consists of a series of vignettes, scenes from Monk O'Neill's apocryphal reminiscences, punctuated by his little rituals on his "penultimate" day, which turns out to be his last.  Wood played for and got the laughs, but kept the pace too even and the transitions from scene to scene too deliberate.  The result stretched my patience, when what I hoped for was a kind of wild unpredictability, a sense of Monk's imagination breaking out of all ordinary bounds, building to the fantastic but quite beautiful imagery of the final sunset which heralds his inevitable end.

Perhaps, too, Moore's direction, in asking for a great deal of physical playing out of Monk's stories, led to slowing down and weakening the emotional effects over the whole length of the play, despite the success of individual scenes. In some other productions of this recognised classic, the words have been more central, allowing the resonance of Hibberd's language to stir up images and feelings directly in the minds of the audience, rather as Barry Humphries does with his Sandy Stone character, who hardly moves within the confines of his decrepit armchair. 

Monk needs to move to carry out his present-time activities, but seemed to me to become too much of a show-off miming and acting out the stories of his past.  I felt less empathy than I wanted to feel, and so less of the sadness underlying his outward bravado came through than I think Monk O'Neill deserves.

Of course, this was my reaction, but Hibberd's character and script still have a great deal to say to us about what it is to be a certain kind of Australian.  Monk's larrikin no bullshit manner and language cannot fail to make us laugh.  And, however picky I am after the event, I certainly enjoyed the awfulness of Monk O'Neill on opening night at The Q, and laughed along with the rest of a highly enthusiastic audience. 

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: Teuila Postcards by Lisa Fa'alafi, Efeso Fa'anana and Leah Shelton

Teuila Postcards by Lisa Fa'alafi, Efeso Fa'anana and Leah Shelton.  Polytoxic Dance Company at The Street Theatre, April 7-8.

I must begin by saying what a shame it is that you may have missed Teuila Postcards.  The theatre was not much more than half full on opening night, but a two night stand is not enough to build the audience this company deserves.  If you can make it to the Opera House, you can catch them in Sydney April 29 to May 2.

If there is anything we learnt from Coming of Age in Samoa - or rather from Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth - it was the fun the young women had making up witty stories of sexual licentiousness. It is not hard to see where this show comes from, taking tourist stereotypes of the Polynesian island resort experience for a hip-hopping rock'n'roll ride set against inventive background reality checks.  The missionary position gets the serve it deserves, but all done with such a light touch that even Samoans who are sticklers for convention appreciate the traditional humour.  Needless to say, the young Islanders in the audience were beside themselves with excited identification and laughter, adding to the enjoyment of those of us who were not fluent in Samoan language.  We didn't need to be to understand the dance, but I'm sure there were finer points to the jokes for those in the know.

Fa'alafi and Fa'anana are Samoan Australians involved in a wide range of performance and design work, based in Brisbane, working with Shelton who is also an actor, dancer, choreographer and designer, with a specialist background in the Japanese performance training method of Tadashi Suzuki.  The result is a fast-moving constantly surprising mix of dance forms, music styles, costumes, and visual effects which packed so much into one hour that time seemed to be stretched by half as much again, yet without one flagging moment.  The fun made the work appear to be easy, but the detail in the dance, voice, mime and timing across such a range of styles revealed the professional quality of training and experience which underpinned the entertainment.

This work and this company also showed the value of Civic's The Street Theatre as a place for welding community arts and top-class theatre.  With new developments under way at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre and the establishment of the Belconnen Arts Centre, we will soon have the right spread of performance spaces for this kind of original work.  Teuila Postcards could be taken as in memory of Jan Wawrzynczak who did so much, working out of the Belconnen Community Centre, to support the Pacific Islander arts community in Canberra. Polytoxic is just the kind of off-beat title he would have appreciated, just as we have enjoyed the Polytoxic Dance Company.  Send us more Postcards, please. 

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: Guys and Dolls by Frank Loesser

Guys and Dolls by Frank Loesser.  Free-Rain Theatre Company directed by Anne Somes, music directed by Lucy Bermingham, choreography by Annette Sharpe. Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, February 13-28. Bookings: 6298 0290.

As Sky Masterson tells Sarah, it's all about chemistry.  Yes, indeed.  Despite each of the elements working well enough in their own terms - excellent singing, good orchestra, neat choreography, symbolic backdrop, great costumes, reasonable lighting - there was not much fizz in the reactions, especially in the first half on opening night.

Georgia Pike stood out as Miss Adelaide because she knew how to play out to the auditorium and respond to the audience's reactions.  Sarah Darnley-Stuart as the the missionary Sarah Brown was almost as strong, and for me the highlight of the whole show was their duet Marry the Man Today, which brings the story to a conclusion after "umpteen" years.

So what was missing?  Guys and Dolls, and the Damon Runyon stories the play is derived from, is a weirdly whimsical approach to what people nowadays like to call the underbelly of city life.  It trivialises reality with romance.

Runyon's The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown was written in 1933, the year Hitler gained power.  Perhaps escapism was needed then in the face of criminality and looming dictatorship, and still had its place in this 1950 musical as the Cold War and McCarthyism took hold.  Today, I think, Guys and Dolls needs a cartoon style much more delineated than Somes achieved in this production, to break out of the 1950s mould. 

I felt too much of this show was imitative rather than newly created, and that was why the chemicals just bubbled along rather than exploding as they should. Sinatra, now known as the apologist for the Mafia, is not here any longer to flash his blue eyes in apparent innocence.  We call everyone "guys" now, there are no "dolls", and soppy men are not dragged into marriage by desperate women.  Find a modern purpose for playing Guys and Dolls with a new view of its old-time attitudes, and then there will be real chemistry.    

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: The Burlesque Hour by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith

The Burlesque Hour written and directed by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith.  The Street Theatre, February 10-14, 8pm.  Bookings 6247 1223.

The best burlesque is satirical and therefore both entertaining and thought-provoking.  Traditionally it was witty and risque, humorous and titillating.  The best of The Burlesque Hour lives up to traditional expectations, going even further to satisfy us in modern times.

The main device is each woman in turn, and one man, performing against the background of a soundtrack using songs like Let Go by Frou Frou, Everybody Wants to Touch Me as performed by Deborah Conway, or Total Eclipse of the Heart in the manner of Bonnie Tyler - 14 items altogether, many of them in the altogether, by four actors, Moira Finucane, Azaria Universe, Yumi Umiumare and the not so token man Paul Cordeiro.

Movement, costume (and the removal of costume), and props are used to create highly unusual symbolic meanings, ranging from the funny but obvious through the funny and quite unexpected, to the not so funny and very pointed.  It would not be fair of me to describe examples, since that would undermine the surprise element which is essential to this kind of show.  Suffice to say that one involves an animal in a role reversal, another is about drinking red soup sloppily, another about the female capacity to produce milk, and another about the tension of maintaining appearances. 

This last, called Mouth Piece, and her later act beginning in a huge mediaeval martial kimono, for me showed Yumi Umiumare's extra level of skill and depth of interpretation, taking these points in The Burlesque Hour beyond the clever and effective into the realm of a higher theatrical art. 

On a practical note, you can see more from the bleachers than from the cabaret style tables near and on the stage, be prepared for some liquid being splashed about in addition to your own wine or beer, and, if you are old and have tinnitus like me, take ear plugs to dampen the amplification.  Oh, and if you are lucky, you'll get to eat a strawberry in the Swedish manner.  Enjoy.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2009: In Cold Light by Duncan Ley

In Cold Light by Duncan Ley.  Everyman Theatre directed by Duncan Driver at Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, February 4-7 at 8pm, matinee Saturday February 7 at 2pm.  Bookings: 6298 0290.

This is an excellent new production of Ley's twist on how to get into heaven without lying.  For The Q, In Cold Light is a strong beginning to its 2009 program  a quality production of a locally written play which has stood the test of time since its original performance almost six years ago.

The story of how and why Father Christian Lamori (Jarrad West) finally reveals the truth could be thought of as a mystery play in the mediaeval tradition, while it is also a study of the process of interrogation  highly relevant in our present-day world.  The form of the play places it into a modern genre begun by Franz Kafka in his novel The Trial (1925), which was made into a film directed by Orson Wells (1962) and remade by David Hugh Jones with a script by Harold Pinter as recently as 1993. 

The essence of this type of drama is that the character being interrogated seems to us watching not to be in a position to understand why they are accused. Though we begin by empathising with the apparent victim, we gradually find ourselves appreciating the interrogator's position.  In Ley's version we even discover who The Inspector (played by the author) represents in the final scene, though in other playwrights' work, especially in absurdist plays such as Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson or Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, we are left at the end in the same limbo as the characters, still unable to fathom the truth.

Ley's Inspector plays as much with our assumptions about what we accept as truth as he does with Father Christian's beliefs.  The script has been re-worked for a film version and for this stage version since its first appearance, making for greater depth of character and tighter drama, with an ending - reminiscent of Ionesco and Beckett - which is entirely logical yet with a surprisingly unexpected touch of humour. 

The twists and turns of the interrogation keep our attention focussed throughout the 90 minutes of In Cold Light.  It is good to see a local actor/writer working the drama with such confidence in this play which deserves a much longer season.

 
©Frank McKone, Canberra