Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated and
directed by Iain Sinclair. Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1, August 5 –
September 11, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 8
Perhaps
you expect me to write about Lorca, but this is more than adequately
done in the program. No, it is Iain Sinclair I must write about.
Thanks,
Iain, for the poetry, the myth-making, for revivifying my memories of
Lorca. Thanks especially for Leah Purcell in the central role of The
Mother. “I believe very strongly in the Aboriginal spirituality. I
believe in my ancestors and I believe that they have given me my ability
to be a storyteller, a song woman, a performer.” (ABC TV Australian Story 2002)
The
first Act is the story leading to The Mother’s only surviving son, The
Groom (Kenneth Spiteri), marrying The Bride (Sophie Ross) who rides off
on The Horse with her first love, now married Leonardo (Yalin Ozucelik)
before the wedding reception has ended.
Act 2 is the
search for the eloping couple in the forest. The Groom and Leonardo
stab each other to death, while The Bride, still a virgin, returns,
expecting retribution and death. But it is men who kill, not women, and
the play ends leaving The Wife of Leonardo (Zindzi Okenyo), The Bride
and The Mother all tragically bereft with no future beyond the “thick
walls” of their peasant farmhouses.
The story has the epic proportions of Greek tragedy, and has a parallel in the Aboriginal story of the Two Wise Men and the Seven Sisters (A creation story from the WONG-GU-THA, people of the desert near Ooldea, South Australia, as told by Josie Boyle http://www.kitezh.com/sevensisters/7sisters.htm#A12 ).
It
has the metaphorical and sexual implications of blood, reminiscent of D
H Lawrence. It has the eerie faerie presence of death like the Irish
playwright J M Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Deirdre of the Sorrows.
Lorca was clearly conscious of being one among the artists of his time,
writing in 1933 of “Duende … This ‘mysterious force that everyone feels
and no philosopher has explained’ is, in sum, the spirit of the earth,
the same duende that scorched Nietzche’s heart as he searched for its
outer form on the Rialto Bridge and in Bizet’s music, without finding
it, and without seeing that the duende he pursued had leapt from the
Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz and the headless Dionysiac
scream of Silverio’s siguiriya.”
So, true to Lorca’s art, Iain Sinclair’s production of Blood Wedding
is not a dramatic retelling of the plot but an original creation of the
mystery in the translation from the Spanish into Australian English, in
the imagery of the Andalucian peasant farmers, in their music, rhythm
and dance, and in the mysterious spirit figures of the forest. The play
takes on the mantle of all the ancient rituals of death and
transfiguration, written only a few short years before Lorca’s own
execution in 1936 by fascists as Franco’s regime re-established
dictatorship after a brief period of a democratic Spanish republic.
Go
to this production not as a spectator but to absorb all the feelings –
of terror, of joy, of tragedy – that Sinclair makes available to you.
You may come away from Leah Purcell’s final scene shaken, out of
complacency and into new understanding of the human condition. Thanks,
Iain Sinclair, for making my kind of theatre.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 8 August 2011
Saturday, 6 August 2011
2011: Life x 3 by Yasmina Reza
Life x 3 by Yasmina Reza. Canberra Repertory directed by Garry Fry. Theatre 3, August 5-20.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 6
It was interesting to find, even in a translation by noted British writer Christopher Hampton, how very French this play is. Though at first blush it seems naturalistic, before long it becomes reminiscent of French-style absurdism in the manner of Eugene Ionesco. It’s a comedy of the human condition, epitomised by drunk Ines in Act 2 insisting to her astronomer husband, “We are not insignificant!”
Reza’s writing is demanding. The same scene is played three times: a couple arrive for dinner with another couple, a day early. Their hosts are completely unprepared. Each replay is not an exact replica, because each of the four characters start from and end up at different points in trajectories which their personalities could have followed.
Scene 1 and Scene 2 end in emotional disaster. In Scene 3 the characters make valiant attempts to be more civilised and reach what, at least superficially, seems an OK compromise. After Scene 1, a psychologist friend was ready to be called in for marriage counselling. By the end of the play, she thought she wouldn’t be needed.
For the actors, Peter Holland (Henri, whose academic career makes demands he is afraid he cannot meet), Megs Skillicorn (Henri’s wife Sonia, who has a law degree but works for a finance company), Sam Hanna-Morrow (Hubert, a successful academic who delights in putting Henri down while flirting with Sonia) and Debbie Newboult (Hubert’s wife Ines, faced with a husband she depends on for his social status) and for the director there is a great deal of fine detail to be worked through as each character is interpreted surprisingly differently in each appearance.
In the program notes, we are reminded that Garry Fry developed Replay Theatre in educational settings, in which “Actors explore themes with short semi-improvised plays derived from interaction with a target group; eg, homeless young people. During replay of scenes, audiences are invited to change the action according to how they think these life situations could be improved.”
It seems to me that Fry’s highly successful community work over many years has provided him with the skill in Reza’s version of Replay to direct his cast to seek the nuances of characterisation needed here, and each actor has succeeded well.
I was particularly impressed by Debbie Newboult’s work: she added an extra dimension in her strong stage presence.
Life x 3 is very appropriate for a Canberra audience. Academics audibly cringed at times when they were not laughing in recognition of their experiences, while couples who have tried to bring up children were equally amused in a squirmy sort of way, as Henri and Sonia’s 6 year old (Michael Spong’s voice off-stage) made demand after demand when he should have been asleep.
The play, and this production of it, is both enjoyable and worthwhile.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 6
It was interesting to find, even in a translation by noted British writer Christopher Hampton, how very French this play is. Though at first blush it seems naturalistic, before long it becomes reminiscent of French-style absurdism in the manner of Eugene Ionesco. It’s a comedy of the human condition, epitomised by drunk Ines in Act 2 insisting to her astronomer husband, “We are not insignificant!”
Reza’s writing is demanding. The same scene is played three times: a couple arrive for dinner with another couple, a day early. Their hosts are completely unprepared. Each replay is not an exact replica, because each of the four characters start from and end up at different points in trajectories which their personalities could have followed.
Scene 1 and Scene 2 end in emotional disaster. In Scene 3 the characters make valiant attempts to be more civilised and reach what, at least superficially, seems an OK compromise. After Scene 1, a psychologist friend was ready to be called in for marriage counselling. By the end of the play, she thought she wouldn’t be needed.
For the actors, Peter Holland (Henri, whose academic career makes demands he is afraid he cannot meet), Megs Skillicorn (Henri’s wife Sonia, who has a law degree but works for a finance company), Sam Hanna-Morrow (Hubert, a successful academic who delights in putting Henri down while flirting with Sonia) and Debbie Newboult (Hubert’s wife Ines, faced with a husband she depends on for his social status) and for the director there is a great deal of fine detail to be worked through as each character is interpreted surprisingly differently in each appearance.
In the program notes, we are reminded that Garry Fry developed Replay Theatre in educational settings, in which “Actors explore themes with short semi-improvised plays derived from interaction with a target group; eg, homeless young people. During replay of scenes, audiences are invited to change the action according to how they think these life situations could be improved.”
It seems to me that Fry’s highly successful community work over many years has provided him with the skill in Reza’s version of Replay to direct his cast to seek the nuances of characterisation needed here, and each actor has succeeded well.
I was particularly impressed by Debbie Newboult’s work: she added an extra dimension in her strong stage presence.
Life x 3 is very appropriate for a Canberra audience. Academics audibly cringed at times when they were not laughing in recognition of their experiences, while couples who have tried to bring up children were equally amused in a squirmy sort of way, as Henri and Sonia’s 6 year old (Michael Spong’s voice off-stage) made demand after demand when he should have been asleep.
The play, and this production of it, is both enjoyable and worthwhile.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 2 August 2011
2011: Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, adapted by Peter Evans
and Kate Mulvaney for touring by Bell Shakespeare. Canberra Theatre
Centre, The Playhouse, August 2-13, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
2 August
Shakespeare is as constant as the Northern Star, and this production proves it.
Working in generic modern dress, Peter Evans directs this neatly trimmed adaptation so that we see, by implication, the effects not so much of the non-violent Julia Gillard removal of Kevin Rudd (despite the usual claims of political stabbing-in-the-back) but more closely what the effects of Tony Abbott and the Barnaby Joyce Tea Party are likely to be.
The question for me about Julius Caesar has always been what to do with the second half. Up to the murder and Antony’s ears speech there’s no problem with dramatic tension – in fact, up to Cinna’s mistaken slaughter by the maddened crowd. But armies wandering around Philippi – all a bit ho-hum.
But not in this production. The touring company has grown from Bell Shakespeare’s education component. With only ten actors to do all the parts and everything else from set manoeuvering to an amazing scaffold construction, the old theatrical dictum that constraints lead to discipline is played out before our very eyes. I trust they had the correct rigger’s tickets!
They certainly had the right stylistic ticket. Combining acting the text with fully developed Stanislavski intentions with a choreographed design in movement, set within a Brechtian conception to alienate us from sentimental emotion was exactly right for this play.
Actors came on stage, then signalled the moment that they walked into the acting space, and out again. So simple – but so effective. Actors could switch roles when they spoke through a standing microphone; or could make part of a private conversation suddenly public.
The result was a close-knit ensemble of performers each equally playing their parts in a complex jigsaw puzzle. Placing the interval at precisely the halfway point, freezing the action as the first murderous blows were happening, gave us the motivation to return after champagne and coffee to find out how everything would fit together after this.
And what an ending. “Hold then my sword, and turn away thy face, While I do run upon it …. Caesar, now be still: I kill’d not thee with half so good a will.” Fade to black. None of Shakespeare’s “Who is this man” etc etc. We don’t need to see Brutus fall. We know what he will do and our imaginations fill in the blank, in silence. This is real theatre, leaving the audience to applaud in a peculiarly muted kind of way, even through two curtain calls. There is a humility here, on the part of the performers and flowing over the audience, in recognising what Shakespeare has done.
He has shown us the inevitable unintended consequences of extreme destructive political action. In Shakespeare’s day, Anthony Burgess suggests, the 1599 banning – indeed the burning “in good Nazi style” – of books about English history gave Will good reason to turn to more ancient times for a cautionary tale. Then ironically, only 23 years after his death, republicans murdered a king in England. They did things in reverse, having the civil war first, then executing the king, with Oliver Cromwell the “Lord Protector” in Parliament until he died in 1658. The monarchy was restored (and Cromwell’s body was dug up, hung in chains and beheaded) – and it must be said in the following century a compromise was reached to begin the establishment of today’s limited monarchy.
As I write, I am reading Jack Waterford in today’s Canberra Times (The Tony Abbott Tea Party, August 3, 2011 p.11). Of the US Tea Party, he writes “For this anti-party, the mission is not seeking the best possible outcome in the circumstances, but resistance and purity….For Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott must seem much the same. As she complains, he simply won’t accept the verdict of the umpire – the electorate – last year. He acts as if he was cheated from his rightful place at the head of government…. Like the Tea Party his campaigning style has been focused on the extremes and on massive oversimplification.”
Waterford concludes, though, that if Gillard can get the carbon tax up and running, as she has the power to do with a majority in both houses, “There’s a very good chance that this would expose Abbott’s hollowness, his opportunism, and even some of the extremism of his remarks. Tea Parties, as with their American predecessor Know-Nothing Parties, never win." http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/waterford-the-tony-abbott-tea-party/2246566.aspx
Just as Cassius and even the honest patriot Brutus could never win. And just consider the parlous state the Roman polity ended up in, as Antony worked to make Octavius become the emperor Augustus. What damage will the Tea Parties inflict on us all?
So, in my view, Shakespeare’s star still shines, lighting up our understanding, and I thank Bell Shakespeare for it.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
2 August
Shakespeare is as constant as the Northern Star, and this production proves it.
Working in generic modern dress, Peter Evans directs this neatly trimmed adaptation so that we see, by implication, the effects not so much of the non-violent Julia Gillard removal of Kevin Rudd (despite the usual claims of political stabbing-in-the-back) but more closely what the effects of Tony Abbott and the Barnaby Joyce Tea Party are likely to be.
The question for me about Julius Caesar has always been what to do with the second half. Up to the murder and Antony’s ears speech there’s no problem with dramatic tension – in fact, up to Cinna’s mistaken slaughter by the maddened crowd. But armies wandering around Philippi – all a bit ho-hum.
But not in this production. The touring company has grown from Bell Shakespeare’s education component. With only ten actors to do all the parts and everything else from set manoeuvering to an amazing scaffold construction, the old theatrical dictum that constraints lead to discipline is played out before our very eyes. I trust they had the correct rigger’s tickets!
They certainly had the right stylistic ticket. Combining acting the text with fully developed Stanislavski intentions with a choreographed design in movement, set within a Brechtian conception to alienate us from sentimental emotion was exactly right for this play.
Actors came on stage, then signalled the moment that they walked into the acting space, and out again. So simple – but so effective. Actors could switch roles when they spoke through a standing microphone; or could make part of a private conversation suddenly public.
The result was a close-knit ensemble of performers each equally playing their parts in a complex jigsaw puzzle. Placing the interval at precisely the halfway point, freezing the action as the first murderous blows were happening, gave us the motivation to return after champagne and coffee to find out how everything would fit together after this.
And what an ending. “Hold then my sword, and turn away thy face, While I do run upon it …. Caesar, now be still: I kill’d not thee with half so good a will.” Fade to black. None of Shakespeare’s “Who is this man” etc etc. We don’t need to see Brutus fall. We know what he will do and our imaginations fill in the blank, in silence. This is real theatre, leaving the audience to applaud in a peculiarly muted kind of way, even through two curtain calls. There is a humility here, on the part of the performers and flowing over the audience, in recognising what Shakespeare has done.
He has shown us the inevitable unintended consequences of extreme destructive political action. In Shakespeare’s day, Anthony Burgess suggests, the 1599 banning – indeed the burning “in good Nazi style” – of books about English history gave Will good reason to turn to more ancient times for a cautionary tale. Then ironically, only 23 years after his death, republicans murdered a king in England. They did things in reverse, having the civil war first, then executing the king, with Oliver Cromwell the “Lord Protector” in Parliament until he died in 1658. The monarchy was restored (and Cromwell’s body was dug up, hung in chains and beheaded) – and it must be said in the following century a compromise was reached to begin the establishment of today’s limited monarchy.
As I write, I am reading Jack Waterford in today’s Canberra Times (The Tony Abbott Tea Party, August 3, 2011 p.11). Of the US Tea Party, he writes “For this anti-party, the mission is not seeking the best possible outcome in the circumstances, but resistance and purity….For Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott must seem much the same. As she complains, he simply won’t accept the verdict of the umpire – the electorate – last year. He acts as if he was cheated from his rightful place at the head of government…. Like the Tea Party his campaigning style has been focused on the extremes and on massive oversimplification.”
Waterford concludes, though, that if Gillard can get the carbon tax up and running, as she has the power to do with a majority in both houses, “There’s a very good chance that this would expose Abbott’s hollowness, his opportunism, and even some of the extremism of his remarks. Tea Parties, as with their American predecessor Know-Nothing Parties, never win." http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/waterford-the-tony-abbott-tea-party/2246566.aspx
Just as Cassius and even the honest patriot Brutus could never win. And just consider the parlous state the Roman polity ended up in, as Antony worked to make Octavius become the emperor Augustus. What damage will the Tea Parties inflict on us all?
So, in my view, Shakespeare’s star still shines, lighting up our understanding, and I thank Bell Shakespeare for it.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 20 July 2011
2011: The Gruffalo’s Child by Julia Donaldson
The Gruffalo’s Child by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Axel
Scheffler, adapted for stage by Tall Stories Theatre Company (UK).
Christine Dunstan Productions at Canberra Theatre July 20-23, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 20
The costumes by Matthew Aberline for the Mouse (Crystal Hegedis), the Gruffalo’s Child (Chandel Brandimarti), the Gruffalo, the Snake, the Owl and the Fox (Stephen Anderson) in this musical version of The Gruffalo’s Child say a great deal to me about the business of adapting The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo’s Child for the stage. What is gained and what is lost?
I began my quest because my resident Gruffalo expert, who will soon turn six, was clearly disappointed that the Mouse’s nut ‘as big as a boulder’ did not appear on stage. Why not? I thought to myself.
Every quest entails a series of adventures. First, the energy, professional skills and discipline of the performers was exciting, as a good adventure should be. Then those costumes – so much more colourful, and just plain interesting than the pictures in the books. More about this later. The tulgey wood landscape was an adventure in itself, again with twisted emotional effects that were never in the books’ very ordinary pine forests. And the sound track was as whimsical and fun as the books, though the children in the audience, of course, would not have recognised the musical references behind the songs.
Probably most of the children wouldn’t have noticed the missing nut-boulder, since they were obviously thoroughly engaged by the show. When I wondered why my little expert had, I took my quest onto YouTube and found a home-made video of a reading of The Gruffalo’s Child at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27TO94H3Fr8.
Then I realised how the full moon shadow of the Mouse with her nut as big as a boulder on her shoulder made her appear to the Gruffalo’s Child as such a huge monster – even huger than her Gruffalo father – that it was no wonder that the little Gruff forgot her stick and skidded home faster than the Snake, the Owl and the Fox had scarpered from the fearful Gruffalo that they had never even seen.
Though this bit of the book was lost, it was Aberline’s costume for the Fox that highlighted the gains. Each of the characters on stage were fully developed – within a pantomime tradition – which for me made the stage production greater than the sum of its book bits. The Fox as the ultimate salesman, and the style of the music and song lyrics, suddenly struck home. Here was Macheath from The Threepenny Opera, though fortunately short of the full Mack the Knife. Even the music reminded me of Kurt Weill and the clipped phrasing of Bertolt Brecht.
So my quest completed successfully, I could praise both the Tall Stories Theatre Company for the script and the Dunstan team for its interpretation – though in the Australian context I have some doubts about educating our children with the European concerns about fear of the ‘deep dark wood’. Our bush, admittedly, has snakes worth fearing, but no imaginary gruffalos – just wombats, koalas, wallabies, and, unfortunately, plagues of mice and foxes which are feral But it was nice to see on stage what a good father the Gruffalo was, and how bravely Little Gruff went out to find her truth.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 20
The costumes by Matthew Aberline for the Mouse (Crystal Hegedis), the Gruffalo’s Child (Chandel Brandimarti), the Gruffalo, the Snake, the Owl and the Fox (Stephen Anderson) in this musical version of The Gruffalo’s Child say a great deal to me about the business of adapting The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo’s Child for the stage. What is gained and what is lost?
I began my quest because my resident Gruffalo expert, who will soon turn six, was clearly disappointed that the Mouse’s nut ‘as big as a boulder’ did not appear on stage. Why not? I thought to myself.
Every quest entails a series of adventures. First, the energy, professional skills and discipline of the performers was exciting, as a good adventure should be. Then those costumes – so much more colourful, and just plain interesting than the pictures in the books. More about this later. The tulgey wood landscape was an adventure in itself, again with twisted emotional effects that were never in the books’ very ordinary pine forests. And the sound track was as whimsical and fun as the books, though the children in the audience, of course, would not have recognised the musical references behind the songs.
Probably most of the children wouldn’t have noticed the missing nut-boulder, since they were obviously thoroughly engaged by the show. When I wondered why my little expert had, I took my quest onto YouTube and found a home-made video of a reading of The Gruffalo’s Child at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27TO94H3Fr8.
Then I realised how the full moon shadow of the Mouse with her nut as big as a boulder on her shoulder made her appear to the Gruffalo’s Child as such a huge monster – even huger than her Gruffalo father – that it was no wonder that the little Gruff forgot her stick and skidded home faster than the Snake, the Owl and the Fox had scarpered from the fearful Gruffalo that they had never even seen.
Though this bit of the book was lost, it was Aberline’s costume for the Fox that highlighted the gains. Each of the characters on stage were fully developed – within a pantomime tradition – which for me made the stage production greater than the sum of its book bits. The Fox as the ultimate salesman, and the style of the music and song lyrics, suddenly struck home. Here was Macheath from The Threepenny Opera, though fortunately short of the full Mack the Knife. Even the music reminded me of Kurt Weill and the clipped phrasing of Bertolt Brecht.
So my quest completed successfully, I could praise both the Tall Stories Theatre Company for the script and the Dunstan team for its interpretation – though in the Australian context I have some doubts about educating our children with the European concerns about fear of the ‘deep dark wood’. Our bush, admittedly, has snakes worth fearing, but no imaginary gruffalos – just wombats, koalas, wallabies, and, unfortunately, plagues of mice and foxes which are feral But it was nice to see on stage what a good father the Gruffalo was, and how bravely Little Gruff went out to find her truth.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 30 June 2011
2011: EnTrance created and performed by Yumi Umiumare
EnTrance created and performed by Yumi Umiumare at The Street Theatre, Canberra. June 30 – July 2, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 30
Under the spotlight: Yumi Umiumare
MiNDFOOD talks to Yumi Umiumare as she prepares for her solo performance "EnTrance" at [this] year’s Oz Asia Festival.
Aug 03, 2009
“This is my first time performing a full-length solo show where I incorporate all the elements of my art. There are short segments for each style and towards the end I perform a Butoh segment with my face painted white, so it is like I am returning to my roots.”
“I first came to Melbourne in 1991 with the Butoh company Dai Rakuda Kan, which is the oldest Butoh company in Japan. We were invited to perform for the Melbourne International Arts Festival. I met a lot of people in the arts community at the time and started visiting regularly between 1991 and 1993. I moved permanently in 1993.
I lived in Tyoko before and while it is an exciting and stimulating city it is also very busy. In Melbourne there is more space, more of your own space. I found artists have more freedom to develop their own style and ideas.”
“For EnTrance I’m working with media artist Bambang Nurcahyadi, installation artist Naomi Ota and sound designer Ian Kitney, so while I was initially scared about doing a solo performance I realized the other artists were supporting me.”
I’ve chosen these quotes from this interview two years ago because I think they help us to understand Umiumare’s work. A friend commented after the show, “She’s a work of art.” I agree, and so felt I needed to know something about her, particularly why she had moved from Tokyo to Australia, as well as knowing something about the Japanese radical dance form, butoh.
First though, she had no need to be scared tonight. Her focus, discipline and originality held the audience for 75 minutes, confirming the reputation she brings from 20 years’ worth of stage and film work in this country. I have seen her only twice before, in Ngapartji Ngapartji at Belvoir Street in 2008 and in The Burlesque Hour in 2009 here at The Street. There could not have been a greater contrast between her gentle role in the story of Pitjantjatjara man, Trevor Jamieson, and her frantic satirical mime of frustrated glass-ceiling shattering modern womanhood in Burlesque.
EnTrance begins seemingly at peace in a garden with her cat, but quickly leads to the horror of living at the mercy of a huge city, which I have taken to be Tokyo. Experiences there include seeing her mother’s face as she leaves her son, “Yumi’s” brother, in hospital to die. The character, of course, may not actually be Yumi, but the identification with the mother’s feelings, expressed in butoh style, seems terribly real. Who would want to keep living, if you can call it that, in such a city?
Butoh developed as a response to the occupation of Japan after World War II and it seems to have become a tradition for its practitioners to leave the city to, in a sense, return to the origins of Japanese culture in the country. As I thought about this and recalled the final scene of EnTrance, a connection seemed to form – or what Yumi has called a ‘chain’. She writes, “In EnTrance, each section is interconnected through a ‘chained world’ in which a new world opens up, one to the other.”
As she moves into the ‘pure’ butoh style, naked and whitened with rice flour, the screen behind shows a body of water on which her image floats and in which it is reflected – in the tradition of “the two worlds of Life and Death” described as “two shores; one is ‘the near shore’ (the world of the living), and the other is ‘the far shore (world of after-death)”. But this water is an Australian billabong, with old gum trees on the banks and Australian birds calling.
In that final scene there is a feeling of freedom, perhaps as Yumi Umiumare experienced in moving permanently to Australia, and in the ending, represented in the form of the overwhelming light described by those who have had a near-death experience, there is a sense of satisfaction, of completion. So for me at least, EnTrance is a work of art by an artist at work, successfully achieving what she describes as “the moment of transformation where the spirit and the body are propelled into another world or existence”. Which is, of course, the nature of true theatre.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 30
Under the spotlight: Yumi Umiumare
MiNDFOOD talks to Yumi Umiumare as she prepares for her solo performance "EnTrance" at [this] year’s Oz Asia Festival.
Aug 03, 2009
“This is my first time performing a full-length solo show where I incorporate all the elements of my art. There are short segments for each style and towards the end I perform a Butoh segment with my face painted white, so it is like I am returning to my roots.”
“I first came to Melbourne in 1991 with the Butoh company Dai Rakuda Kan, which is the oldest Butoh company in Japan. We were invited to perform for the Melbourne International Arts Festival. I met a lot of people in the arts community at the time and started visiting regularly between 1991 and 1993. I moved permanently in 1993.
I lived in Tyoko before and while it is an exciting and stimulating city it is also very busy. In Melbourne there is more space, more of your own space. I found artists have more freedom to develop their own style and ideas.”
“For EnTrance I’m working with media artist Bambang Nurcahyadi, installation artist Naomi Ota and sound designer Ian Kitney, so while I was initially scared about doing a solo performance I realized the other artists were supporting me.”
I’ve chosen these quotes from this interview two years ago because I think they help us to understand Umiumare’s work. A friend commented after the show, “She’s a work of art.” I agree, and so felt I needed to know something about her, particularly why she had moved from Tokyo to Australia, as well as knowing something about the Japanese radical dance form, butoh.
First though, she had no need to be scared tonight. Her focus, discipline and originality held the audience for 75 minutes, confirming the reputation she brings from 20 years’ worth of stage and film work in this country. I have seen her only twice before, in Ngapartji Ngapartji at Belvoir Street in 2008 and in The Burlesque Hour in 2009 here at The Street. There could not have been a greater contrast between her gentle role in the story of Pitjantjatjara man, Trevor Jamieson, and her frantic satirical mime of frustrated glass-ceiling shattering modern womanhood in Burlesque.
EnTrance begins seemingly at peace in a garden with her cat, but quickly leads to the horror of living at the mercy of a huge city, which I have taken to be Tokyo. Experiences there include seeing her mother’s face as she leaves her son, “Yumi’s” brother, in hospital to die. The character, of course, may not actually be Yumi, but the identification with the mother’s feelings, expressed in butoh style, seems terribly real. Who would want to keep living, if you can call it that, in such a city?
Butoh developed as a response to the occupation of Japan after World War II and it seems to have become a tradition for its practitioners to leave the city to, in a sense, return to the origins of Japanese culture in the country. As I thought about this and recalled the final scene of EnTrance, a connection seemed to form – or what Yumi has called a ‘chain’. She writes, “In EnTrance, each section is interconnected through a ‘chained world’ in which a new world opens up, one to the other.”
As she moves into the ‘pure’ butoh style, naked and whitened with rice flour, the screen behind shows a body of water on which her image floats and in which it is reflected – in the tradition of “the two worlds of Life and Death” described as “two shores; one is ‘the near shore’ (the world of the living), and the other is ‘the far shore (world of after-death)”. But this water is an Australian billabong, with old gum trees on the banks and Australian birds calling.
In that final scene there is a feeling of freedom, perhaps as Yumi Umiumare experienced in moving permanently to Australia, and in the ending, represented in the form of the overwhelming light described by those who have had a near-death experience, there is a sense of satisfaction, of completion. So for me at least, EnTrance is a work of art by an artist at work, successfully achieving what she describes as “the moment of transformation where the spirit and the body are propelled into another world or existence”. Which is, of course, the nature of true theatre.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
2011: Turns by Reg Livermore
Turns by Reg Livermore, with Nancye Hayes and piano
accompaniment by Vincent Colagiuri. Christine Dunstan Productions
directed by Tom Healey at Canberra Playhouse, June 21-25 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
The story of Turns – a pantomime with a twist – is entirely fictional. Gladys Moncrieff, Australia’s ‘Queen of Song’ is claimed to be the mother of Nancye Hayes’ character, Marjorie Joy. Marjorie’s son, Alistair Moncrieff, claims his mother shot Gladys on stage as she opened wide to sing high C. In case you want to know, the real Gladys Moncrieff had no children and died in hospital in 1976 at the age of 83, having retired from the stage with her husband Tom Moore to the Isle of Capri in 1968.
Livermore’s author’s note says ‘Turns is a broad reflection on show business, matters of identity, of family and dependency, of the memory, and the commonality of an experience that lies ahead for most of us.’ This refers, presumably, not to death, since that lies ahead for all of us, but to dementia – although European studies show incident rates of 2.5 per 1000 at age 65, growing to 85.6 per 1000 at age 90. In other words most of us will not suffer from dementia, but 95 year old Marjorie Joy certainly does, and I begin to suspect that her son Alistair (who I suppose is about the same age as me and Reg Livermore) is headed in the same direction.
I should calm any fears by noting that on stage and at the pre-show talk hosted by Helen Musa on June 21, neither Reg (72) nor Nancye (67) showed the slightest signs of any forms of dementia that I could detect – but of course that may merely reflect my own shortcomings now I am 70. What I do know is that there is no way I could hoof, sing, mime, speak, shout, and hold an audience with anything like the verve and discipline of these two. Or remember my lines. So I’ll stick to criticism, thank you very much.
I guess what Livermore, as author, has shown is that not only is theatre all a matter of illusion, but that life itself is largely illusory. When we see Alistair attempting to cope with caring for his impossible mother, he appears to be normal. He feels duty bound even while her behaviour is frustrating. We find her funny even as we sympathise with him.
When Alistair speaks to us after his mother’s death, we begin by assuming that he is normal, but the twist is that he reveals to us his own need for illusion to sustain a sense of personal integrity. Like his mother, he must use dress-ups as a way to create a life for himself. We are back in the world of theatre, where fiction can be made to seem real, even including a story about the death of Gladys Moncrieff.
What does it all mean? Well, I suggest that Hayes and Livermore, who have both been named among Australia’s Top 100 Entertainers of the 20th Century, in the musical theatre tradition, can be seen as the children of Gladys Moncrieff. Hayes’ career began as a dancer in the JC Williamson 1961 production of My Fair Lady, while Livermore’s got under way at the Phillip Street Theatre in 1957. I had arrived in Australia in 1955 and was certainly made well aware of the Queen of Song – though I have to admit that my 1957 highlight was Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, sitting up in the Gods at the Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown. Gladys Moncrieff was a pleasant radio voice for me, but one who didn’t often make it among AE Floyd’s Music Lovers’ Hour on the ABC each week. Maybe even then I was too pretentious for my own good.
So I guess I have to conclude that although Turns and Reg Livermore as a writer can’t match O’Neill and Long Day’s Journey, this is an entertainment with something more than mere enjoyment – a ‘broad reflection on show business’ as the author has claimed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
The story of Turns – a pantomime with a twist – is entirely fictional. Gladys Moncrieff, Australia’s ‘Queen of Song’ is claimed to be the mother of Nancye Hayes’ character, Marjorie Joy. Marjorie’s son, Alistair Moncrieff, claims his mother shot Gladys on stage as she opened wide to sing high C. In case you want to know, the real Gladys Moncrieff had no children and died in hospital in 1976 at the age of 83, having retired from the stage with her husband Tom Moore to the Isle of Capri in 1968.
Livermore’s author’s note says ‘Turns is a broad reflection on show business, matters of identity, of family and dependency, of the memory, and the commonality of an experience that lies ahead for most of us.’ This refers, presumably, not to death, since that lies ahead for all of us, but to dementia – although European studies show incident rates of 2.5 per 1000 at age 65, growing to 85.6 per 1000 at age 90. In other words most of us will not suffer from dementia, but 95 year old Marjorie Joy certainly does, and I begin to suspect that her son Alistair (who I suppose is about the same age as me and Reg Livermore) is headed in the same direction.
I should calm any fears by noting that on stage and at the pre-show talk hosted by Helen Musa on June 21, neither Reg (72) nor Nancye (67) showed the slightest signs of any forms of dementia that I could detect – but of course that may merely reflect my own shortcomings now I am 70. What I do know is that there is no way I could hoof, sing, mime, speak, shout, and hold an audience with anything like the verve and discipline of these two. Or remember my lines. So I’ll stick to criticism, thank you very much.
I guess what Livermore, as author, has shown is that not only is theatre all a matter of illusion, but that life itself is largely illusory. When we see Alistair attempting to cope with caring for his impossible mother, he appears to be normal. He feels duty bound even while her behaviour is frustrating. We find her funny even as we sympathise with him.
When Alistair speaks to us after his mother’s death, we begin by assuming that he is normal, but the twist is that he reveals to us his own need for illusion to sustain a sense of personal integrity. Like his mother, he must use dress-ups as a way to create a life for himself. We are back in the world of theatre, where fiction can be made to seem real, even including a story about the death of Gladys Moncrieff.
What does it all mean? Well, I suggest that Hayes and Livermore, who have both been named among Australia’s Top 100 Entertainers of the 20th Century, in the musical theatre tradition, can be seen as the children of Gladys Moncrieff. Hayes’ career began as a dancer in the JC Williamson 1961 production of My Fair Lady, while Livermore’s got under way at the Phillip Street Theatre in 1957. I had arrived in Australia in 1955 and was certainly made well aware of the Queen of Song – though I have to admit that my 1957 highlight was Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, sitting up in the Gods at the Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown. Gladys Moncrieff was a pleasant radio voice for me, but one who didn’t often make it among AE Floyd’s Music Lovers’ Hour on the ABC each week. Maybe even then I was too pretentious for my own good.
So I guess I have to conclude that although Turns and Reg Livermore as a writer can’t match O’Neill and Long Day’s Journey, this is an entertainment with something more than mere enjoyment – a ‘broad reflection on show business’ as the author has claimed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
2011: In the Next Room or the vibrator play by Sarah Ruhl
In the Next Room or the vibrator play by Sarah Ruhl. Sydney Theatre Company at Canberra Playhouse, directed by Pamela Rabe. June 8-11, 2011
Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 8
Only two years after its first production at Berkeley Rep, it’s good to see Sydney put on a play described by one of its first commentators (Rachel Swan in the East Bay Express) as ‘a pretty progressive play, even by 2009 standards’. I am sure that most of the Canberra audience last night was much more sophisticated than I am, and their delight in this rare kind of comedy suggests they are pretty progressive too. At interval a friend asked if I had “learnt anything new”. It was a trap question, of course, so I mumbled vaguely rather than reveal my ignorance.
I’ll return later to the play and its writer, because there’s lots there to think about.
But I want to begin by praising Pamela Rabe, and her cast Jacqueline McKenzie (Catherine Givings – the vibrator’s wife), David Roberts (Dr Givings – the vibrator), Helen Thomson (Sabrina Daldry – the first to be vibrated), Marshall Napier (Mr Daldry – her non-vibrant husband), Mandy McElhinney (Annie – the vibrator’s assistant and a vibrator in her own right), Sara Zwangobani (Elizabeth – the wet nurse who understands) and Josh McConville (Leo Irving – the artist and the second to be vibrated).
Equally praiseworthy is the designer, Tracy Grant Lord and her team led by Hartley T A Kemp (Lighting Designer), Iain Grandage (Composer/Sound Designer), Laura A. Proietti (Wigs, Hair & Make Up Supervisor), and Charmian Gradwell (Voice & Text Coach). A large part of the particular success of this production was how the set, costumes, hair-dos, lights and sound gave the actors exactly the environment to allow their characters to spark.
And spark they certainly did, in more ways than one. Being a bit too much like Dr Givings myself, I loved the moment when he sees that Mrs Daldry needs an extra boost, turns the vibrator up to maximum and blows every Edison light in the house. Isn’t it great to be a technician?
Each actor had strengths with no noticeable weak points, so none can be honestly awarded more praise than any other in such a tight ensemble, but there were special moments for me.
One was the depth of character expressed by Sara Zwangobani as Elizabeth announces her decision to leave Catherine’s employ as a wet nurse – such bitterness held in check by her maturity of understanding took this role far beyond a matter of simple racist discrimination. Her speech opened up the whole issue of universal human rights.
At the other end of the scale was the brief exit of Marshall Napier’s Mr Daldry as he realises that he has to walk out to see Catherine’s garden and leave her and his wife alone together. Perhaps he is mainly responding to Catherine’s vivacity, but he also recognises Sabrina’s new-found sense of authority. Probably he can’t explain to himself why he should go, but he knows he must.
These are only two examples which show why I am so pleased to see a modern play offer the actors the opportunity for such finesse. This brings me to the play itself.
One commentator mentioned that the set is deliberately similar to that of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and I found myself thinking of another playwright also influenced by Ibsen: George Bernard Shaw, still famous in the popular mind today for Pygmalion and its musical version My Fair Lady. Shaw was a progressive playwright in his day. He didn’t mention vibrators but he wrote about attitudes towards women’s sexuality in 1892 only a decade or so after the technically advanced Americans in Ruhl’s play were discovering how to treat hysteria with ‘paroxysms’. In Mrs Warren’s Profession Shaw wrote a comedy about Mrs Warren’s Cambridge educated daughter being horrified to find that her mother financed her daughter’s education by running a brothel.
Mrs Warren’s Profession was banned by the Lord Chamberlain because of its ‘frank discussion and portrayal of prostitution’, getting its first production after 10 years in the members-only New Lyric Club in 1902 and waiting for its first public performance in London until 1925. Interestingly, ‘it had a performance in New York, this time on a public stage in 1905, [which] was interrupted by the police who arrested the cast and crew, although it appears only the house manager of the theatre was actually charged.[citation needed] The play has been revived on Broadway five times since, most recently in 2010.’ [Wikipedia accessed 9 June 2011]
Well, how does Ruhl compare to Shaw? First, however progressive she may be, it seems that the re-enactment of orgasms on stage has not caused the arrest of the cast and crew, despite present-day public concerns about pornography. Maybe this is because Ruhl has set her play in the prudish Victorian era in the past (now 130 years ago), whereas Shaw’s play was set in his own time – the actual prudish Victorian era. In the official 1912 Constable edition, Shaw’s preface, called The Author’s Apology, made no apology at all for refusing to write a conventional sentimental romantic comedy and having his characters speak and behave as real people would.
Ruhl, in re-creating the language of the past era, has written at least as cleverly as the famous wordsmith Shaw. Her comedy grows from the fact that her characters avoid direct description, yet we know today exactly what they mean. Shaw’s comedy drew on characters saying exactly what they mean in a society that wishes they didn’t. The one quote, of course, which has come down to us from Shaw is Eliza’s innocent exclamation in Pygmalion: ‘Not bloody likely.’
So one thing I learnt from In the Next Room or the vibrator play is that Sarah Ruhl well deserves the prizes she has been awarded (Glickman Prize and finalist for Pulizter Prize), and that she is writing in a tradition which I find thoroughly satisfying.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 8
Only two years after its first production at Berkeley Rep, it’s good to see Sydney put on a play described by one of its first commentators (Rachel Swan in the East Bay Express) as ‘a pretty progressive play, even by 2009 standards’. I am sure that most of the Canberra audience last night was much more sophisticated than I am, and their delight in this rare kind of comedy suggests they are pretty progressive too. At interval a friend asked if I had “learnt anything new”. It was a trap question, of course, so I mumbled vaguely rather than reveal my ignorance.
I’ll return later to the play and its writer, because there’s lots there to think about.
But I want to begin by praising Pamela Rabe, and her cast Jacqueline McKenzie (Catherine Givings – the vibrator’s wife), David Roberts (Dr Givings – the vibrator), Helen Thomson (Sabrina Daldry – the first to be vibrated), Marshall Napier (Mr Daldry – her non-vibrant husband), Mandy McElhinney (Annie – the vibrator’s assistant and a vibrator in her own right), Sara Zwangobani (Elizabeth – the wet nurse who understands) and Josh McConville (Leo Irving – the artist and the second to be vibrated).
Equally praiseworthy is the designer, Tracy Grant Lord and her team led by Hartley T A Kemp (Lighting Designer), Iain Grandage (Composer/Sound Designer), Laura A. Proietti (Wigs, Hair & Make Up Supervisor), and Charmian Gradwell (Voice & Text Coach). A large part of the particular success of this production was how the set, costumes, hair-dos, lights and sound gave the actors exactly the environment to allow their characters to spark.
And spark they certainly did, in more ways than one. Being a bit too much like Dr Givings myself, I loved the moment when he sees that Mrs Daldry needs an extra boost, turns the vibrator up to maximum and blows every Edison light in the house. Isn’t it great to be a technician?
Each actor had strengths with no noticeable weak points, so none can be honestly awarded more praise than any other in such a tight ensemble, but there were special moments for me.
One was the depth of character expressed by Sara Zwangobani as Elizabeth announces her decision to leave Catherine’s employ as a wet nurse – such bitterness held in check by her maturity of understanding took this role far beyond a matter of simple racist discrimination. Her speech opened up the whole issue of universal human rights.
At the other end of the scale was the brief exit of Marshall Napier’s Mr Daldry as he realises that he has to walk out to see Catherine’s garden and leave her and his wife alone together. Perhaps he is mainly responding to Catherine’s vivacity, but he also recognises Sabrina’s new-found sense of authority. Probably he can’t explain to himself why he should go, but he knows he must.
These are only two examples which show why I am so pleased to see a modern play offer the actors the opportunity for such finesse. This brings me to the play itself.
One commentator mentioned that the set is deliberately similar to that of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and I found myself thinking of another playwright also influenced by Ibsen: George Bernard Shaw, still famous in the popular mind today for Pygmalion and its musical version My Fair Lady. Shaw was a progressive playwright in his day. He didn’t mention vibrators but he wrote about attitudes towards women’s sexuality in 1892 only a decade or so after the technically advanced Americans in Ruhl’s play were discovering how to treat hysteria with ‘paroxysms’. In Mrs Warren’s Profession Shaw wrote a comedy about Mrs Warren’s Cambridge educated daughter being horrified to find that her mother financed her daughter’s education by running a brothel.
Mrs Warren’s Profession was banned by the Lord Chamberlain because of its ‘frank discussion and portrayal of prostitution’, getting its first production after 10 years in the members-only New Lyric Club in 1902 and waiting for its first public performance in London until 1925. Interestingly, ‘it had a performance in New York, this time on a public stage in 1905, [which] was interrupted by the police who arrested the cast and crew, although it appears only the house manager of the theatre was actually charged.[citation needed] The play has been revived on Broadway five times since, most recently in 2010.’ [Wikipedia accessed 9 June 2011]
Well, how does Ruhl compare to Shaw? First, however progressive she may be, it seems that the re-enactment of orgasms on stage has not caused the arrest of the cast and crew, despite present-day public concerns about pornography. Maybe this is because Ruhl has set her play in the prudish Victorian era in the past (now 130 years ago), whereas Shaw’s play was set in his own time – the actual prudish Victorian era. In the official 1912 Constable edition, Shaw’s preface, called The Author’s Apology, made no apology at all for refusing to write a conventional sentimental romantic comedy and having his characters speak and behave as real people would.
Ruhl, in re-creating the language of the past era, has written at least as cleverly as the famous wordsmith Shaw. Her comedy grows from the fact that her characters avoid direct description, yet we know today exactly what they mean. Shaw’s comedy drew on characters saying exactly what they mean in a society that wishes they didn’t. The one quote, of course, which has come down to us from Shaw is Eliza’s innocent exclamation in Pygmalion: ‘Not bloody likely.’
So one thing I learnt from In the Next Room or the vibrator play is that Sarah Ruhl well deserves the prizes she has been awarded (Glickman Prize and finalist for Pulizter Prize), and that she is writing in a tradition which I find thoroughly satisfying.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Saturday, 4 June 2011
2011: Magpie Blues by Ursula Yovich
Ursula Yovich: Magpie Blues at The Street Theatre, June 4 2011
Reviewed by Frank McKone
Even though, on her only Canberra performance, Ursula Yovich’s voice was badly affected by a dry throat, she began with something like a Bessie Smith quality of sound that made it clear why she calls this a Blues show. Maybe she also felt a bit blue since this was the very last performance of Magpie Blues after some two years, culminating at the Sydney Opera House in May.
Her voice problems seemed to shake her confidence, making her forget her lines on quite a few occasions, and so I’m not in a position to confirm or deny the strongly positive reviews she has previously received.
I found myself making comparisons and concluding that the show needs a good writer. Other reviewers were keen on the lack of artifice in her telling of her life story, but for me her work was nowhere near the storytelling standard of David Page’s Page 8. Page, of course, had the guidance of Louis Nowra to give the narrative structure, while Yovich relies too much on chronological anecdotes. I felt I wanted the songs to do more of the driving along of the drama, instead of seeming to be illustrations – though the more powerful of these were generally those composed by Yovich herself, rather than the covers of songs she had picked up along the way.
It seemed to me there were two themes. One was about her getting into WAAPA. Her story included just a humorous few words about swimming a croc-infested flood to get to the airport from Maningrida. I wanted to know much more about how she got such a voice, and how this White side of her parentage and experience linked up with the Black side. She sang in her mother’s Brada language, but the form of the music was much more like American ballad than Maningrida song.
This was the second theme – I guess the main theme from Yovich’s point of view. It was about her parents’ breaking up when Ursula was eight and her consequent loss of proper understanding of her Aboriginal language, culture and status. She ended Magpie Blues with Over the Rainbow, her white culture song, asking poignantly “Why can’t I?”. And yet the success of this work, including at the Darwin Festival, the Dreaming Festival in Queensland and the Garma Festival in Arnhem Land, as well as her acting and singing successes in London, New York and Sydney, seem to say that she can.
I guess if the performance I saw had hung together properly, the depth of emotion in her story would have been the focus as other reviewers have said. But perhaps it is time now to bring this show to an end, and maybe work up a more substantial piece in the future using, I would hope, a song cycle of Yovich’s original compositions.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
Even though, on her only Canberra performance, Ursula Yovich’s voice was badly affected by a dry throat, she began with something like a Bessie Smith quality of sound that made it clear why she calls this a Blues show. Maybe she also felt a bit blue since this was the very last performance of Magpie Blues after some two years, culminating at the Sydney Opera House in May.
Her voice problems seemed to shake her confidence, making her forget her lines on quite a few occasions, and so I’m not in a position to confirm or deny the strongly positive reviews she has previously received.
I found myself making comparisons and concluding that the show needs a good writer. Other reviewers were keen on the lack of artifice in her telling of her life story, but for me her work was nowhere near the storytelling standard of David Page’s Page 8. Page, of course, had the guidance of Louis Nowra to give the narrative structure, while Yovich relies too much on chronological anecdotes. I felt I wanted the songs to do more of the driving along of the drama, instead of seeming to be illustrations – though the more powerful of these were generally those composed by Yovich herself, rather than the covers of songs she had picked up along the way.
It seemed to me there were two themes. One was about her getting into WAAPA. Her story included just a humorous few words about swimming a croc-infested flood to get to the airport from Maningrida. I wanted to know much more about how she got such a voice, and how this White side of her parentage and experience linked up with the Black side. She sang in her mother’s Brada language, but the form of the music was much more like American ballad than Maningrida song.
This was the second theme – I guess the main theme from Yovich’s point of view. It was about her parents’ breaking up when Ursula was eight and her consequent loss of proper understanding of her Aboriginal language, culture and status. She ended Magpie Blues with Over the Rainbow, her white culture song, asking poignantly “Why can’t I?”. And yet the success of this work, including at the Darwin Festival, the Dreaming Festival in Queensland and the Garma Festival in Arnhem Land, as well as her acting and singing successes in London, New York and Sydney, seem to say that she can.
I guess if the performance I saw had hung together properly, the depth of emotion in her story would have been the focus as other reviewers have said. But perhaps it is time now to bring this show to an end, and maybe work up a more substantial piece in the future using, I would hope, a song cycle of Yovich’s original compositions.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 25 May 2011
2011: I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright
I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright. Performed by Robert Jarman. Tasmanian Theatre Company at The Street 2, May 18-28 2011.Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 25
Charlotte von Mahsldorf, 1994
http://en.wikipedia.org
Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berfelde, replied Ich bin meine eigene Frau to Mrs Gretchen Berfelde when she asked her cross-dressing son “Don’t you think it’s time to get married?”
It has been used as the title for a German language film (Rosa von Praunheim, 1992) and a play (Peter Süß, 2006). Though “I am my own wife” is the translation which has been used by Doug Wright for this play, it may also be translated as “I am my own woman.” Seeing Robert Jarman’s performance I think I prefer “woman” to “wife”. It’s Charlotte’s independence – as a person facing the forces of humiliation throughout her life from her Nazi father, through the SS, the East German Stasi, to neo-Nazi skinheads and her treatment as a celebrity transvestite in later life – that forms the central thread of this production.
The final twist – not represented in the play – is that her family refused to accept "Ich bin meine eigene Frau - Charlotte von Mahlsdorf - 18. März 1928 - 30. April 2002" as the inscription on a memorial at the Gründerzeit Museum which she founded. Despite money for the memorial being raised in a public appeal, the inscription reads "Lothar Berfelde, 1928 - 2002, genannt Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Dem Museumsgründer zur Erinnerung" – Lothar Berfelde, 1928 - 2002, known as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. In memory of the (male) founder of the museum – denying her courage in public as a transvestite and exposing the persecution of homosexuals in the Third Reich and in Communist East Germany.
Wright’s play is a potential nightmare for the solo actor who plays not only Charlotte, but some 40 characters, including Wright himself in the process of interviewing and corresponding with Charlotte from 1993 until her death. Jarman successfully carries off the transitions between one character and another, almost entirely in the one costume representing Charlotte in black dress, headscarf, heeled shoes and a row of pearls. His skill is not only in mime as he speaks to a space as one character and then turns to reply from the other direction, but in representing each character’s specific body movement, facial expression and especially voice – both in accent and tonal quality in English and in German.
It took me a little while to get used to what seemed to be a rather slow beginning, but it was the right approach not to hurry us. It wasn’t long before Charlotte, Wright and each of the lesser characters seemed real, and at curtain call there was a genuine sense of appreciation from the audience for the quality of Jarman’s work.
His acting was supported by a touring set which seemed huge in the Street 2 Studio – achieving exactly what was required to establish the Museum location. The properties department excelled in providing full-scale items like the horn phonograph with original Edison cylinders and especially in the beautiful small-scale replicas of items from the Museum revealed one by one from a silk-lined padded display box. On the technical side, the lighting was evocative and precisely designed and managed for each situation and mood, while the audio was particularly effective when, for example, we seemed to hear original 1890’s wax cylinders being played on the phonograph which morphed into surround sound.
I particularly appreciated Lotte Lenya singing Pirate Jenny from The Threepenny Opera and other Weill / Brecht songs as background sound, placing Charlotte and her story into the context of criticism of authoritarianism and corruption. I might have added:
VOICE:
What keeps a man alive?
CHORUS AND MACHEATH:
What keeps a man alive if not the hours
He spends devouring, tearing, killing all that he can?
That’s how man lives his life, he has the power
To make himself forget that he’s a man.
I can only say finally that the value of the play in exposing the awful nature of the regimes Charlotte managed to survive through, and the warning her experiences provide for us – that civil society is a delicate flower which can all too easily be turned into a grisly thistle by the violent and power-hungry – was well-matched by the quality of this production.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 23 May 2011
2011: Statespeare – Studying Shakespeare Suckeths by Nelle Lee
Statespeare – Studying Shakespeare Suckeths by Nelle Lee (& William Shakespeare). shake&stir theatre co at Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, May 23-24 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 23
The context for this review needs to be made clear, as follows:
http://www.ourbrisbane.com/businesses/1691434.shake-stir-theatre-co
From an educational point of view there are positives and negatives in this show. As a production put on for the general public rather than in a school context, there are different positives and negatives. In Queanbeyan it was presented for the general public without its theatre-in-education purpose being made explicit. At the same time quite a large proportion of the opening night crowd were young and possibly students.
The Q publicity says it is a “fast-paced, hilarious and eye-opening experience for all theatre lovers.” The performance is certainly fast and physical – a positive, though I did hear some middle-aged people comment that they hadn’t been able to pick up all the dialogue. As a later than middle-age person I had the same problem, but it was obvious from the laughter of recognition from the young people that they had no difficulty following every nuance of the latest patois. No-one seemed to lose concentration listening to the Shakespeare and following the action.
It’s on the issues of being “hilarious” and “eye-opening” that the divide between the educational and potentially general audience purposes pops up. The script is clever. It was obvious that the two pairs of teenage drama students (played by Ross Balbuziente who also directed, Nelle Lee, Judy Hainsworth and Nick Skubij) were parallel to Benedick, Beatrice, Claudio and Hero who I had just seen in Bell Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. They bicker, joke, play and expose themselves to emotional risks as they try out possible scenes from different Shakespeare plays to present for drama class assessment. Unintended revelations stop the fun but in the end conflicts are resolved and love is confirmed. Out of my ex-drama teacher role, it was all just too predictable.
There were quite hilarious moments, such as the matter of Macbeth’s nipples which Lady Macbeth sexily pinches. There was even a rather shocked laugh when Macbeth pinches her nipple in return. I thought this represented a highlight of reality about the young characters’ relationships. But as a play for an adult general audience, only Jay, written and played by Nelle Lee, approached the kind of complexity and depth of character needed. The other three characters, all played with professional clarity, were too close to the sorts of conventional stereotypes seen in something like High School Musical or Fame. Lachlan is the standard nerd boy, Nerys the standard nerd girl, and Rob the standard girl-mad boy. Jay is much more complicated, rejecting the conventional tall poppies Lachlan and Nerys but showing real originality and maturity in how she plays with the Shakespeare, even though Rob is her man in the end. I think Shakespeare had the same problem in Much Ado – Claudio and Hero never match Beatrice and Benedick – but Statespeare needs much stronger characters and a darker side to work as an adult drama, particularly because the teenagers do perform scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. The acting here is very good, but Shakespeare’s characters stand out as real against even Jay, and especially against Rob, Nerys and Lachlan. Shakespeare is the writer who is an eye-opener, not Nelle Lee, yet.
Back in my ex-drama teacher’s role, I might still question whether school students deserve better characterisation and complexity of relationships (I don’t remember a real Lachlan, Nerys or Rob among my 20 years’ worth of senior drama students). But the educational purpose surely focussed on exposing students, probably in about Year 10, to Shakespeare’s work in a form that they would find enjoyable. This works.
From a Year 10 perspective, the play makes fun of the Year 12 drama students but also shows them growing up. It also shows professional actors playing Shakespeare in a variety of ways which demonstrates very clearly how theatre is action, not just boring old-fashioned words. Even the similarities to High School Musical work here to tune into ordinary students doing Shakespeare in an English class.
The up-to-date dialogue between the characters outside the Shakespeare scenes obviously kept up the interest of the younger members of The Q audience, and, I suspect, the hilarity and the eye-opening among Year 10s would be highly emotional. I can see how easily students would be drawn into talk about Jay, about how the characters’ relationships in real life today are like Shakespeare’s experiences 400 years ago. Probably the key to this talk would be the murder of Desdemona scene, played “straight” with a submissive Desdemona accepting death and then, by Jay, as a woman pissed off by Othello’s cruelty who storms off in a flurry of swearing.
This also opens up for drama students the real work of experimenting with different ways of presenting scenes, not just in Shakespeare but in any drama. The trick at high school is to start where the students are – perhaps at High School Musical – and shift them up towards adulthood. An important point in Statespeare is that the apparently corny drama teacher who does an audience warm-up at the beginning deliberately leaves her students to get on with the work on their own. Of course, in fact, she has already done lots of guiding and setting up expectations, for these Year 12s over perhaps several years, and she knows that to put the less academic (even anti-academic) pair in with the nerds and leave them to discover how to come up with the goods will force the conventional to become more original. Though not many of the Year 10s will recognise this aspect of the play, there is a message there for the teachers who supervise them.
So my conclusion is that shake & stir theatre can justifiably build a reputation performing this entertaining and engaging work for the general public, but I hope this doesn’t mean they reduce their school-based performances where the work is of most value.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 23
The context for this review needs to be made clear, as follows:
http://www.ourbrisbane.com/businesses/1691434.shake-stir-theatre-co
From an educational point of view there are positives and negatives in this show. As a production put on for the general public rather than in a school context, there are different positives and negatives. In Queanbeyan it was presented for the general public without its theatre-in-education purpose being made explicit. At the same time quite a large proportion of the opening night crowd were young and possibly students.
The Q publicity says it is a “fast-paced, hilarious and eye-opening experience for all theatre lovers.” The performance is certainly fast and physical – a positive, though I did hear some middle-aged people comment that they hadn’t been able to pick up all the dialogue. As a later than middle-age person I had the same problem, but it was obvious from the laughter of recognition from the young people that they had no difficulty following every nuance of the latest patois. No-one seemed to lose concentration listening to the Shakespeare and following the action.
It’s on the issues of being “hilarious” and “eye-opening” that the divide between the educational and potentially general audience purposes pops up. The script is clever. It was obvious that the two pairs of teenage drama students (played by Ross Balbuziente who also directed, Nelle Lee, Judy Hainsworth and Nick Skubij) were parallel to Benedick, Beatrice, Claudio and Hero who I had just seen in Bell Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. They bicker, joke, play and expose themselves to emotional risks as they try out possible scenes from different Shakespeare plays to present for drama class assessment. Unintended revelations stop the fun but in the end conflicts are resolved and love is confirmed. Out of my ex-drama teacher role, it was all just too predictable.
There were quite hilarious moments, such as the matter of Macbeth’s nipples which Lady Macbeth sexily pinches. There was even a rather shocked laugh when Macbeth pinches her nipple in return. I thought this represented a highlight of reality about the young characters’ relationships. But as a play for an adult general audience, only Jay, written and played by Nelle Lee, approached the kind of complexity and depth of character needed. The other three characters, all played with professional clarity, were too close to the sorts of conventional stereotypes seen in something like High School Musical or Fame. Lachlan is the standard nerd boy, Nerys the standard nerd girl, and Rob the standard girl-mad boy. Jay is much more complicated, rejecting the conventional tall poppies Lachlan and Nerys but showing real originality and maturity in how she plays with the Shakespeare, even though Rob is her man in the end. I think Shakespeare had the same problem in Much Ado – Claudio and Hero never match Beatrice and Benedick – but Statespeare needs much stronger characters and a darker side to work as an adult drama, particularly because the teenagers do perform scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. The acting here is very good, but Shakespeare’s characters stand out as real against even Jay, and especially against Rob, Nerys and Lachlan. Shakespeare is the writer who is an eye-opener, not Nelle Lee, yet.
Back in my ex-drama teacher’s role, I might still question whether school students deserve better characterisation and complexity of relationships (I don’t remember a real Lachlan, Nerys or Rob among my 20 years’ worth of senior drama students). But the educational purpose surely focussed on exposing students, probably in about Year 10, to Shakespeare’s work in a form that they would find enjoyable. This works.
From a Year 10 perspective, the play makes fun of the Year 12 drama students but also shows them growing up. It also shows professional actors playing Shakespeare in a variety of ways which demonstrates very clearly how theatre is action, not just boring old-fashioned words. Even the similarities to High School Musical work here to tune into ordinary students doing Shakespeare in an English class.
The up-to-date dialogue between the characters outside the Shakespeare scenes obviously kept up the interest of the younger members of The Q audience, and, I suspect, the hilarity and the eye-opening among Year 10s would be highly emotional. I can see how easily students would be drawn into talk about Jay, about how the characters’ relationships in real life today are like Shakespeare’s experiences 400 years ago. Probably the key to this talk would be the murder of Desdemona scene, played “straight” with a submissive Desdemona accepting death and then, by Jay, as a woman pissed off by Othello’s cruelty who storms off in a flurry of swearing.
This also opens up for drama students the real work of experimenting with different ways of presenting scenes, not just in Shakespeare but in any drama. The trick at high school is to start where the students are – perhaps at High School Musical – and shift them up towards adulthood. An important point in Statespeare is that the apparently corny drama teacher who does an audience warm-up at the beginning deliberately leaves her students to get on with the work on their own. Of course, in fact, she has already done lots of guiding and setting up expectations, for these Year 12s over perhaps several years, and she knows that to put the less academic (even anti-academic) pair in with the nerds and leave them to discover how to come up with the goods will force the conventional to become more original. Though not many of the Year 10s will recognise this aspect of the play, there is a message there for the teachers who supervise them.
So my conclusion is that shake & stir theatre can justifiably build a reputation performing this entertaining and engaging work for the general public, but I hope this doesn’t mean they reduce their school-based performances where the work is of most value.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 20 May 2011
2011: Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare. Bell Shakespeare at Canberra Playhouse, May 20 to June 4 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 20
Usually I write immediately after seeing a show, but this performance (following a five week season at Sydney Opera House) caught me a bit by surprise. I decided to give myself a day to think a bit longer before writing, since Bell has treated Canberra, as they traditionally do, to a run of a reasonable length for this city of 330,000 people.
I have always been amazed at the emergence of Shakespeare the writer, with such wit, humour, sense of tragedy and ability to stage everything from naturalistic speech to ceremonial ritual – all in one play. In his early thirties, living in a society riven by religious conflict and controlled by monarchs who had, and used, power over people’s life and death, William Shakespeare’s brilliance stands out against, above and beyond those who destroy rather than create. Much Ado is certainly not about nothing.
My surprise – not at all an unpleasant one – began to strike me early on, when Benedick’s facility with a stand-up comedian’s flow of words was not less in understanding than Beatrice’s sharpness of riposte. This Benedick was not even just the equal of this Beatrice, but had far more humanity than she could muster. Hallo, I began to think, is this because Blazey Best was overplaying her role and becoming too much the shrew? Is Toby Schmitz simply the better actor?
Or was something going on here to turn my previous view of this play on its head? Beatrice had always seemed to me to be a modern feminist – a woman of natural maturity in contrast to the incapacities of men of her age, and a significant role model for the easily infatuated Hero. For me, she did go to an ideological extreme in demanding that Benedick kill Claudio, but in realising this when Don John’s evil perfidy is revealed, she understood that she should back down and accept Benedick for the honest man he is, even if he might not be all that exciting.
But in John Bell’s interpretation, the play belongs to Schmitz’s Benedick. He becomes the central character through whose eyes we see the issues. As he bit by bit realises the truth about his own feelings, not only for Beatrice but about all the other players, and sees that Beatrice has not the strength of character that she pretends to have, it is he, Benedick, who sees the danger and rescues her from the likely dire results of her immaturity. He does indeed challenge Claudio, but takes his time to check things out and go through the proper motions of agreeing on a time and place for the action. Why does he not challenge and kill Claudio as soon as he meets up with him? Or even stab him without warning? To do so would be as thoughtless as Beatrice’s demand.
Unfortunately, for me, the quality of Schmitz’s performance made Best’s performance of Beatrice seem a bit too mundane – except, ironically, for the scene in which she makes her demand of Benedick. Though what Beatrice expects Benedick to do is, in today’s terms, unacceptable, Blazey Best came up to Toby Schmitz in the making of it. “If I were a man…” showed a Beatrice absolutely equal to the man Schmitz had created in his Benedick. And so I could be satisfied that their marriage was right, but probably with Benedick offering more to Beatrice than she might at first realise she needs. This left me with the question, was Best’s performance exactly right for John Bell’s interpretation, or was the sharpness of her delivery a simplification, a lesser quality in her acting?
I can only recommend, dear reader, that you make sure you see Much Ado About Nothing to make up your own mind. Of course, I wouldn’t do this unless the rest of the cast are up to your expectations. Caparisons are unfair, but I have to mention Max Gillies as Dogberry – malapropisms galore, and wonderfully impressed. Design, movement and music all combine to make something a lot more than mere RomCom, with an especially cleverly staged ending. Not to be missed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 20
Usually I write immediately after seeing a show, but this performance (following a five week season at Sydney Opera House) caught me a bit by surprise. I decided to give myself a day to think a bit longer before writing, since Bell has treated Canberra, as they traditionally do, to a run of a reasonable length for this city of 330,000 people.
I have always been amazed at the emergence of Shakespeare the writer, with such wit, humour, sense of tragedy and ability to stage everything from naturalistic speech to ceremonial ritual – all in one play. In his early thirties, living in a society riven by religious conflict and controlled by monarchs who had, and used, power over people’s life and death, William Shakespeare’s brilliance stands out against, above and beyond those who destroy rather than create. Much Ado is certainly not about nothing.
My surprise – not at all an unpleasant one – began to strike me early on, when Benedick’s facility with a stand-up comedian’s flow of words was not less in understanding than Beatrice’s sharpness of riposte. This Benedick was not even just the equal of this Beatrice, but had far more humanity than she could muster. Hallo, I began to think, is this because Blazey Best was overplaying her role and becoming too much the shrew? Is Toby Schmitz simply the better actor?
Or was something going on here to turn my previous view of this play on its head? Beatrice had always seemed to me to be a modern feminist – a woman of natural maturity in contrast to the incapacities of men of her age, and a significant role model for the easily infatuated Hero. For me, she did go to an ideological extreme in demanding that Benedick kill Claudio, but in realising this when Don John’s evil perfidy is revealed, she understood that she should back down and accept Benedick for the honest man he is, even if he might not be all that exciting.
But in John Bell’s interpretation, the play belongs to Schmitz’s Benedick. He becomes the central character through whose eyes we see the issues. As he bit by bit realises the truth about his own feelings, not only for Beatrice but about all the other players, and sees that Beatrice has not the strength of character that she pretends to have, it is he, Benedick, who sees the danger and rescues her from the likely dire results of her immaturity. He does indeed challenge Claudio, but takes his time to check things out and go through the proper motions of agreeing on a time and place for the action. Why does he not challenge and kill Claudio as soon as he meets up with him? Or even stab him without warning? To do so would be as thoughtless as Beatrice’s demand.
Unfortunately, for me, the quality of Schmitz’s performance made Best’s performance of Beatrice seem a bit too mundane – except, ironically, for the scene in which she makes her demand of Benedick. Though what Beatrice expects Benedick to do is, in today’s terms, unacceptable, Blazey Best came up to Toby Schmitz in the making of it. “If I were a man…” showed a Beatrice absolutely equal to the man Schmitz had created in his Benedick. And so I could be satisfied that their marriage was right, but probably with Benedick offering more to Beatrice than she might at first realise she needs. This left me with the question, was Best’s performance exactly right for John Bell’s interpretation, or was the sharpness of her delivery a simplification, a lesser quality in her acting?
I can only recommend, dear reader, that you make sure you see Much Ado About Nothing to make up your own mind. Of course, I wouldn’t do this unless the rest of the cast are up to your expectations. Caparisons are unfair, but I have to mention Max Gillies as Dogberry – malapropisms galore, and wonderfully impressed. Design, movement and music all combine to make something a lot more than mere RomCom, with an especially cleverly staged ending. Not to be missed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
2011: The Night Zoo by Michael Barlow
The Night Zoo written and directed by Michael Barlow, designed
by Iona McAuley, music composed by Lee Buddle. Spare Parts Puppet
Theatre at The Street Theatre, April 26-30, 2011 (Wednesday – Saturday
10am and 2pm).
Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 26
I had always thought of the company name, Spare Parts, as a whimsical joke, perhaps even a little sad originally when financial support was a struggle. Perhaps it still is. But this production, skilfully performed by Katya Shevtsov and Jacob Lehrer (who were ‘phantasmagorical’ according to my five-year-old companion), was spare in the sense of being ‘poor theatre’. Less complexity on stage meant more opportunity for our imaginations to fill in the links which create the theatrical illusion.
The story is traditional in form. Jamie cannot have pets in the high rise flat where she lives, dreams of the animals in the zoo who at first take no notice of her, but dreams again of becoming friends and playing with them. Later in the park with her parents she plays with a dog who has no home, and her parents agree to let her keep him as a pet. There is, of course romance and some sentimentality, since it seems that the parents will be breaking the no-pet rule, but for young isolated children the purpose is to encourage forming positive relationships. Jamie’s dream not only stimulates enjoyment and empathy with the animals, but also changes her parents’ standard ‘sorry, but no’ approach to realising that their lonely child needs a companion.
Some of the stage ‘business’ which might have made the production less spare if it had all been physically represented, such as the time and locality transitions, were neatly done by video projection. The result was a layering of dramatic frames from two-dimensional story-book format to three-dimensional ‘reality’. The mode-shifting involved the performers acting as people, in costume as animals and as puppeteers, with transitions from one kind of role to another smoothly done.
Though from the children’s point of view The Night Zoo is engaging and directly accessible – apparently simple – the show is a nice example of modern performance puppetry – not so simple as it looks.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 26
I had always thought of the company name, Spare Parts, as a whimsical joke, perhaps even a little sad originally when financial support was a struggle. Perhaps it still is. But this production, skilfully performed by Katya Shevtsov and Jacob Lehrer (who were ‘phantasmagorical’ according to my five-year-old companion), was spare in the sense of being ‘poor theatre’. Less complexity on stage meant more opportunity for our imaginations to fill in the links which create the theatrical illusion.
The story is traditional in form. Jamie cannot have pets in the high rise flat where she lives, dreams of the animals in the zoo who at first take no notice of her, but dreams again of becoming friends and playing with them. Later in the park with her parents she plays with a dog who has no home, and her parents agree to let her keep him as a pet. There is, of course romance and some sentimentality, since it seems that the parents will be breaking the no-pet rule, but for young isolated children the purpose is to encourage forming positive relationships. Jamie’s dream not only stimulates enjoyment and empathy with the animals, but also changes her parents’ standard ‘sorry, but no’ approach to realising that their lonely child needs a companion.
Some of the stage ‘business’ which might have made the production less spare if it had all been physically represented, such as the time and locality transitions, were neatly done by video projection. The result was a layering of dramatic frames from two-dimensional story-book format to three-dimensional ‘reality’. The mode-shifting involved the performers acting as people, in costume as animals and as puppeteers, with transitions from one kind of role to another smoothly done.
Though from the children’s point of view The Night Zoo is engaging and directly accessible – apparently simple – the show is a nice example of modern performance puppetry – not so simple as it looks.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
2011: Geese by Joe Woodward
Geese written and directed by Joe Woodward. Shadow House PITS
at Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, April 26, 8pm and April
28-29, 1pm, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 26
While I drove home from Geese in the middle lane equidistant from either verge on a dark section of three-lane freeway, a stationary white car appeared to my left. As the image grew I could see its bonnet was up like a wing suspended. Then I made out a dark formally dressed figure peering into the black hole seeming to be attempting to manipulate something impossible to see. All four emergency lights were flashing. As the image faded into my left rear vision mirror I found myself contemplating this person’s belief in do-it-yourself action without even tools, light or working clothes. Why not just wait patiently for Road Service to arrive? I thought.
Before my thought was finished, in my right peripheral vision movement caught my eye. An athletic figure in white was running, as if in training for some long-distance event, against the flow of traffic on the very edge of the right lane, on a right-hand bend. I was thankful to be in the middle lane as he disappeared in my right rear vision mirror, and could only hope that drivers in the right lane would miss him as he would appear suddenly to them out of the darkness, just in front of them, unexpectedly to their right.
Then it struck me that Joe Woodward had at last succeeded in making me understand Antonin Artaud. The images held briefly in my headlights were not part of my life as far as those other figures are concerned, but because I saw them they are now in my memory and I have pejorative thoughts and fears about them. I impose my conventions and expectations upon them.
Artaud’s conceit that we are only free when we escape from the hell of convention is not a philosophy to which I can subscribe. In Woodward’s previous works that I have seen, it seems to me that he wanted to embrace Artaud’s position, but the result was that what appeared on stage remained hidden in an impenetrable cloud of mystery, becoming sound and fury apparently signifying not very much.
Though in Geese many long speeches are soporific as characters expound their particular philosophical positions, in the end there is a structured storyline. There is a young girl who saw and briefly spoke to a disturbed man at a railway station in the beginning. When she reappears at the end, she switches on a radio news broadcast which neither she nor the others she meets listen to, but we hear as background noise words like Libya, Yemen and Syria. Suddenly the ‘Artaud’ characters’ views in the possible memories of the disturbed man, and his possible experiences, become relevant today. How much conflict, death, destruction and madness is the result of people’s obsessive insistence on carrying out the dictates of conventions like religious beliefs, unbending political positions – even perhaps being totally enamoured, speaking only in French, of the theatre of Antonin Artaud.
Geese is for the most part too heavy (rather than weighty) theatrically for my liking, but now it is openly about Artaud, the cloud of mystery comes but also goes, and the ending makes a valuable observation about the real world. “No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell” according to Antonin Artaud, but perhaps Geese is a step in the right direction for Woodward.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 26
While I drove home from Geese in the middle lane equidistant from either verge on a dark section of three-lane freeway, a stationary white car appeared to my left. As the image grew I could see its bonnet was up like a wing suspended. Then I made out a dark formally dressed figure peering into the black hole seeming to be attempting to manipulate something impossible to see. All four emergency lights were flashing. As the image faded into my left rear vision mirror I found myself contemplating this person’s belief in do-it-yourself action without even tools, light or working clothes. Why not just wait patiently for Road Service to arrive? I thought.
Before my thought was finished, in my right peripheral vision movement caught my eye. An athletic figure in white was running, as if in training for some long-distance event, against the flow of traffic on the very edge of the right lane, on a right-hand bend. I was thankful to be in the middle lane as he disappeared in my right rear vision mirror, and could only hope that drivers in the right lane would miss him as he would appear suddenly to them out of the darkness, just in front of them, unexpectedly to their right.
Then it struck me that Joe Woodward had at last succeeded in making me understand Antonin Artaud. The images held briefly in my headlights were not part of my life as far as those other figures are concerned, but because I saw them they are now in my memory and I have pejorative thoughts and fears about them. I impose my conventions and expectations upon them.
Artaud’s conceit that we are only free when we escape from the hell of convention is not a philosophy to which I can subscribe. In Woodward’s previous works that I have seen, it seems to me that he wanted to embrace Artaud’s position, but the result was that what appeared on stage remained hidden in an impenetrable cloud of mystery, becoming sound and fury apparently signifying not very much.
Though in Geese many long speeches are soporific as characters expound their particular philosophical positions, in the end there is a structured storyline. There is a young girl who saw and briefly spoke to a disturbed man at a railway station in the beginning. When she reappears at the end, she switches on a radio news broadcast which neither she nor the others she meets listen to, but we hear as background noise words like Libya, Yemen and Syria. Suddenly the ‘Artaud’ characters’ views in the possible memories of the disturbed man, and his possible experiences, become relevant today. How much conflict, death, destruction and madness is the result of people’s obsessive insistence on carrying out the dictates of conventions like religious beliefs, unbending political positions – even perhaps being totally enamoured, speaking only in French, of the theatre of Antonin Artaud.
Geese is for the most part too heavy (rather than weighty) theatrically for my liking, but now it is openly about Artaud, the cloud of mystery comes but also goes, and the ending makes a valuable observation about the real world. “No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell” according to Antonin Artaud, but perhaps Geese is a step in the right direction for Woodward.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 14 April 2011
2011: The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik – Deep Sea Explorer byTim Watts
The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik – Deep Sea Explorer written and performed byTim Watts. Perth Theatre Company and Weeping Spoon Productions at The Street Two, April 12-16, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 14
RomTragCom for young adults is how I saw Alvin Sputnik. But the primary age brother and sister sitting in front of me, after a little anxiety at early death and fright at the loud demand to be a superhero, settled in to the whimsy and said it was “great” at the end. My (older) generation responded empathetically to the death and perhaps expected more depth of feeling to focus Alvin’s search for his wife’s soul.
For the modern-style bright young things who composed most of those present, Watts’ shifting relationship with his audience – from technician to puppetry and mime artist, computer graphics artist to singer-songwriter, in-role narrator to in-role character, actor keeping to pre-programmed visuals and sound to actor interacting with the audience and thanking them after a second round of applause – was the kind of spark of originality they look for in theatre. For this generation, mode shifting is a natural part of technological life.
The romance of this story lies in Alvin’s response to the untimely death of his soulmate. He is attracted to the idea of heroically acting, even to the point of accepting the possibility of his own death, to save the world from environmental destruction. Global warming is taken to an extreme – the world is completely inundated as the seas rise even above the peak of Everest – and so Alvin must dive beyond the drowned remains of civilisation in the hope of entering the hollow core of the earth where the environment is said to be perfect for human life.
Though his wife’s death was tragic, there is unexpected comedy in his adventures, during which he sees, or fancies that he sees his wife’s soul, a soft luminosity which he follows until he sees, or fancies he sees the beauty of the inner core – except that, as he had been warned, his oxygen is on the point of exhaustion and the entrance is through a violent volcano which kills him. Only then can his soul meet with his wife’s, and the luminous images mingle, looking like dividing cells reuniting. The world has not been saved, but their love is undying.
What I found fascinating was to see how Watts’ design produced a distancing effect which allowed him to present to his own age group a romance without sentimentality, with light touches of comedy, which is a tragedy not because of the protagonists’ deaths but because of the implication that we humans have failed to sustain the earth.
This is a small step into a new form of mixed-media theatre which, I expect, foreshadows greater works to come.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 14
RomTragCom for young adults is how I saw Alvin Sputnik. But the primary age brother and sister sitting in front of me, after a little anxiety at early death and fright at the loud demand to be a superhero, settled in to the whimsy and said it was “great” at the end. My (older) generation responded empathetically to the death and perhaps expected more depth of feeling to focus Alvin’s search for his wife’s soul.
For the modern-style bright young things who composed most of those present, Watts’ shifting relationship with his audience – from technician to puppetry and mime artist, computer graphics artist to singer-songwriter, in-role narrator to in-role character, actor keeping to pre-programmed visuals and sound to actor interacting with the audience and thanking them after a second round of applause – was the kind of spark of originality they look for in theatre. For this generation, mode shifting is a natural part of technological life.
The romance of this story lies in Alvin’s response to the untimely death of his soulmate. He is attracted to the idea of heroically acting, even to the point of accepting the possibility of his own death, to save the world from environmental destruction. Global warming is taken to an extreme – the world is completely inundated as the seas rise even above the peak of Everest – and so Alvin must dive beyond the drowned remains of civilisation in the hope of entering the hollow core of the earth where the environment is said to be perfect for human life.
Though his wife’s death was tragic, there is unexpected comedy in his adventures, during which he sees, or fancies that he sees his wife’s soul, a soft luminosity which he follows until he sees, or fancies he sees the beauty of the inner core – except that, as he had been warned, his oxygen is on the point of exhaustion and the entrance is through a violent volcano which kills him. Only then can his soul meet with his wife’s, and the luminous images mingle, looking like dividing cells reuniting. The world has not been saved, but their love is undying.
What I found fascinating was to see how Watts’ design produced a distancing effect which allowed him to present to his own age group a romance without sentimentality, with light touches of comedy, which is a tragedy not because of the protagonists’ deaths but because of the implication that we humans have failed to sustain the earth.
This is a small step into a new form of mixed-media theatre which, I expect, foreshadows greater works to come.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
2011: The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart / Da Ponte
The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart / Da Ponte. Co-Opera
directed by Tessa Bremner, Musical Director Brian Chatterton at The
Street Theatre, Canberra, March 29-30, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 29
“Co-Opera was formed in 1990 with the express purpose of presenting opera in new and imaginative ways….” Their aim is admirably achieved in this production of Figaro, passing through Canberra on its east coast 30 performance tour from Adelaide to Port Douglas.
The singing and acting was excellent throughout, though I make no bones about being home-town biassed in praising the performance of Karen Fitz-Gibbon. She has just last year completed her Honours year at the Australian National University School of Music, and her Susanna was close to perfect. Hers is the central role in Bremner’s approach to Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto: Fitz-Gibbon’s timing and characterisation made the whole play work dramatically.
Now, of course, I’m forced to admit that Tessa Bremner is a one-time Canberra Critics’ Circle Award winner – for a production of Amadeus. All I can say is that it is good to see that our award predicted continuing success, especially since the value of critics is being questioned in the blogosphere. (Follow this up in the current Currency House Platform Papers No. 27, April 2011: HELLO WORLD! Promoting the Arts on the Web by Robert Reid, and Alison Croggon’s blog ‘The return of the amateur critic’ at http://www.abc.net,au/unleashed/20038.html)
My reason for mentioning Bremner is that she was a successful stage play director who clearly sees this opera production not as a series of platforms for singers but as a drama of plot, thinking characters and emotion. She has integrated all these elements into the wonderful effects that Mozart’s music creates, and presented the work on a smallish scale so that her audience can all feel personally part of the theatrical illusion. The result is that all the social criticism inherent in the original libretto is made apparent.
And, it is important to say, Bremner is served very well by a small band, in this case spread across the auditorium floor in front of Row A, conducted in the traditional way by Chatterton at the continuo.
My only thought about the originality of the show concerns the following WikiLeak – sorry, Wikipedia entry: “It was Mozart who originally selected Beaumarchais' play and brought it to Da Ponte, who turned it into a libretto in six weeks, rewriting it in poetic Italian and removing all of the original's political references. In particular, Da Ponte replaced Figaro's climactic speech against inherited nobility with an equally angry aria against unfaithful wives. Contrary to the popular myth, the libretto was approved by the Emperor, Joseph II, before any music was written by Mozart.”
Watching the performance it is obvious that Joseph II didn’t realise that the satire was too subtle for all the political references to be removed, fortunately for us for it is indeed the way that the servants Figaro and Susanna treat their ‘noble’ bosses that makes the show relevant today (as of course it was especially when Beaumarchais’ original play was banned in France in the mid-1770s). What Co-Opera might have done is to reinstate Beaumarchais’ ‘climactic speech against inherited nobility’, which could be done especially because Da Ponte’s Italian has already been translated into English for most of this production.
For me, Figaro’s tirade against unfaithful wives seemed very much out of place against the self-confidence and sensibility of the women, who take such a modern approach to the practicalities of dealing with rampant males. Though it is true that at this point Figaro has misunderstood what Susanna has done, the good humour and loving nature of their relationship from the beginning is far too easily blighted in his attack. It would make much more sense for him to take the nobility to task as they deserve at this point, and as Beaumarchais intended.
Otherwise originality was to the fore. The use of Germanic English for all of the skulduggery and Romance Italian for the love songs was a beautiful way to make even more of the music than Mozart’s Austrian audience would have heard. The costumes, with beehive head-dresses, exaggerated commedia make-up and a dress sense appropriate for each class of character made for the intelligent comedy that this opera is. At the same time the use of clear plastic costume overlays, dressing room walls and ‘mirrors’ was an exciting modern touch which worked very well to make the meaning of the play transparent.
I wish this production well on its journey travelling north.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 29
“Co-Opera was formed in 1990 with the express purpose of presenting opera in new and imaginative ways….” Their aim is admirably achieved in this production of Figaro, passing through Canberra on its east coast 30 performance tour from Adelaide to Port Douglas.
The singing and acting was excellent throughout, though I make no bones about being home-town biassed in praising the performance of Karen Fitz-Gibbon. She has just last year completed her Honours year at the Australian National University School of Music, and her Susanna was close to perfect. Hers is the central role in Bremner’s approach to Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto: Fitz-Gibbon’s timing and characterisation made the whole play work dramatically.
Now, of course, I’m forced to admit that Tessa Bremner is a one-time Canberra Critics’ Circle Award winner – for a production of Amadeus. All I can say is that it is good to see that our award predicted continuing success, especially since the value of critics is being questioned in the blogosphere. (Follow this up in the current Currency House Platform Papers No. 27, April 2011: HELLO WORLD! Promoting the Arts on the Web by Robert Reid, and Alison Croggon’s blog ‘The return of the amateur critic’ at http://www.abc.net,au/unleashed/20038.html)
My reason for mentioning Bremner is that she was a successful stage play director who clearly sees this opera production not as a series of platforms for singers but as a drama of plot, thinking characters and emotion. She has integrated all these elements into the wonderful effects that Mozart’s music creates, and presented the work on a smallish scale so that her audience can all feel personally part of the theatrical illusion. The result is that all the social criticism inherent in the original libretto is made apparent.
And, it is important to say, Bremner is served very well by a small band, in this case spread across the auditorium floor in front of Row A, conducted in the traditional way by Chatterton at the continuo.
My only thought about the originality of the show concerns the following WikiLeak – sorry, Wikipedia entry: “It was Mozart who originally selected Beaumarchais' play and brought it to Da Ponte, who turned it into a libretto in six weeks, rewriting it in poetic Italian and removing all of the original's political references. In particular, Da Ponte replaced Figaro's climactic speech against inherited nobility with an equally angry aria against unfaithful wives. Contrary to the popular myth, the libretto was approved by the Emperor, Joseph II, before any music was written by Mozart.”
Watching the performance it is obvious that Joseph II didn’t realise that the satire was too subtle for all the political references to be removed, fortunately for us for it is indeed the way that the servants Figaro and Susanna treat their ‘noble’ bosses that makes the show relevant today (as of course it was especially when Beaumarchais’ original play was banned in France in the mid-1770s). What Co-Opera might have done is to reinstate Beaumarchais’ ‘climactic speech against inherited nobility’, which could be done especially because Da Ponte’s Italian has already been translated into English for most of this production.
For me, Figaro’s tirade against unfaithful wives seemed very much out of place against the self-confidence and sensibility of the women, who take such a modern approach to the practicalities of dealing with rampant males. Though it is true that at this point Figaro has misunderstood what Susanna has done, the good humour and loving nature of their relationship from the beginning is far too easily blighted in his attack. It would make much more sense for him to take the nobility to task as they deserve at this point, and as Beaumarchais intended.
Otherwise originality was to the fore. The use of Germanic English for all of the skulduggery and Romance Italian for the love songs was a beautiful way to make even more of the music than Mozart’s Austrian audience would have heard. The costumes, with beehive head-dresses, exaggerated commedia make-up and a dress sense appropriate for each class of character made for the intelligent comedy that this opera is. At the same time the use of clear plastic costume overlays, dressing room walls and ‘mirrors’ was an exciting modern touch which worked very well to make the meaning of the play transparent.
I wish this production well on its journey travelling north.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 13 March 2011
2011: A Chatroom of Critics with Mark Shenton
A Chatroom of Critics with Mark Shenton, at ACT Writers’ Centre, March 13, 2011
An Unreview by Frank McKone
Mark Shenton is a full-time theatre critic and journalist, writing a weekly review column for the Sunday Express and daily blog for The Stage. He has hosted regular platforms at the National Theatre, including an onstage interview with Stephen Sondheim. He has written liner notes for a number of original cast albums, including the West End recording of Chicago. Mark was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, came to London when he was 16 and has never looked back. He read law at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and now lives in Borough, five minutes from the South Bank
guardian.co.uk (accessed 13 March 2011)
Mark is also Chair of the Drama Section of The Critics’ Circle, based in London but with members from all over the UK. He has a special passion for cabaret, in common with Canberra’s Bill Stephens who invited him to call in for an informal chat with the Canberra Critics’ Circle en his route between Melbourne and Sydney.
Though we reviewers give awards to the best artists, which means in London that the Drama Awards are presented in a major theatre and attract “everyone” in the theatre industry, there was consensus that the best critics, whoever they are, should not receive awards. This is why my report of a very entertaining couple of hours is not a review.
In fact it became clear that critics may not receive any rewards in the near future. Mark commented on the decline in newspaper sales as blogging and tweeting become the new outlets for critical commentary. Unless the Murdoch paywall approach is taken up by many other publishers, who will pay professional critics to blog?
Indeed, what is a professional critic? To be accepted as a member of The Critics’ Circle you must have a history of paid-for reviews over at least the previous two years. But when even a London newspaper reviewer writes, as Mark reported to us, about “blacking up” Iago in an argument against “political correctness”, I had to wonder who killed Othello? As newspapers struggle financially who will they pay to write reviews? Not the writers with experience and detailed knowledge of their specialist art forms, apparently.
Should reviews be mere entertainments? And therefore short? Of course not, but we discussed the difficult skill of writing briefly to the point, rather than boringly too long. Which means I will cut the several dozen other topics we discussed, even though this is an Unreview, and thank Mark Shenton for giving us a sense of what it is like to be a freelance reviewer in a city where 55 new shows opened in January, a low season in London’s theatrical year.
The success of this evening suggests finding further visitors for future Canberra Critics’ Circle self-improvement occasions. Please contact Helen Musa at CityNews with ideas: helen@citynews.com.au .
To catch up with Mark Shenton, check his blog in The Stage at
http://blogs.thestage.co.uk/shenton/2011/03/oz-connections/index.html
© Frank McKone, Canberra
An Unreview by Frank McKone
Mark Shenton is a full-time theatre critic and journalist, writing a weekly review column for the Sunday Express and daily blog for The Stage. He has hosted regular platforms at the National Theatre, including an onstage interview with Stephen Sondheim. He has written liner notes for a number of original cast albums, including the West End recording of Chicago. Mark was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, came to London when he was 16 and has never looked back. He read law at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and now lives in Borough, five minutes from the South Bank
guardian.co.uk (accessed 13 March 2011)
Mark is also Chair of the Drama Section of The Critics’ Circle, based in London but with members from all over the UK. He has a special passion for cabaret, in common with Canberra’s Bill Stephens who invited him to call in for an informal chat with the Canberra Critics’ Circle en his route between Melbourne and Sydney.
Though we reviewers give awards to the best artists, which means in London that the Drama Awards are presented in a major theatre and attract “everyone” in the theatre industry, there was consensus that the best critics, whoever they are, should not receive awards. This is why my report of a very entertaining couple of hours is not a review.
In fact it became clear that critics may not receive any rewards in the near future. Mark commented on the decline in newspaper sales as blogging and tweeting become the new outlets for critical commentary. Unless the Murdoch paywall approach is taken up by many other publishers, who will pay professional critics to blog?
Indeed, what is a professional critic? To be accepted as a member of The Critics’ Circle you must have a history of paid-for reviews over at least the previous two years. But when even a London newspaper reviewer writes, as Mark reported to us, about “blacking up” Iago in an argument against “political correctness”, I had to wonder who killed Othello? As newspapers struggle financially who will they pay to write reviews? Not the writers with experience and detailed knowledge of their specialist art forms, apparently.
Should reviews be mere entertainments? And therefore short? Of course not, but we discussed the difficult skill of writing briefly to the point, rather than boringly too long. Which means I will cut the several dozen other topics we discussed, even though this is an Unreview, and thank Mark Shenton for giving us a sense of what it is like to be a freelance reviewer in a city where 55 new shows opened in January, a low season in London’s theatrical year.
The success of this evening suggests finding further visitors for future Canberra Critics’ Circle self-improvement occasions. Please contact Helen Musa at CityNews with ideas: helen@citynews.com.au .
To catch up with Mark Shenton, check his blog in The Stage at
http://blogs.thestage.co.uk/shenton/2011/03/oz-connections/index.html
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 10 March 2011
2011: Tuesdays with Morrie by Jeffrey Hatcher and Mitch Albom
Tuesdays with Morrie by Jeffrey Hatcher and Mitch Albom.
Ensemble Theatre directed by Mark Kilmurry at The Q, Queanbeyan
Performing Arts Centre, March 10-12, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 10
I have to eat humble pie tonight. Each of us responds to what we see from our own different perspectives.
Watching this play in my role as theatre critic, I saw a predictable moralistic sentimental story using the death of Professor Morrie Schwartz from Lou Gehrig’s disease as a contrived device, sugar-coated with carefully managed laughs.
I also saw a production highly skilfully designed, directed and acted. Daniel Mitchell faced a difficult task to avoid over-playing the Professor, but maintained a disciplined balance between making the inevitable one-liners into cartoon jokes and playing the physical horror of the disease for the horror rather than empathy. Glenn Hazeldine, as Mitch Albom, who wrote the original story that the play was developed from, had to switch regularly between playing Mitch as if in a realistic relationship with Morrie – every Tuesday – and playing Albom, the narrator of his story. By using stylised posture, movement and voice, Hazeldine clearly delineated each role. What otherwise might have been a repetitive series of question and answer in a lesser actor became a dramatic dialectic, giving the play more appearance of depth than the content of the text deserves.
However, for most of the audience – senior students from the two Canberra Grammar Schools – my perspective was well outside of the range of their radar. Their attention was focussed in the immediate heat of the emotion, not the distant cool of criticism. They were bubbling with excitement in the foyer beforehand anticipating seeing Sydney actors perform the play they had been working on. The actors’ skills did not disappoint. The young absorbed the performance as if it were music, directly responding with laughter, shock and tears, as well as a resounding standing ovation for the actors at curtain call. For them this was great theatre, and who am I to deny their experience?
Like Mitch, who failed to “keep in touch” with his favourite professor for 16 years, I have not taught College students for 16 years and realised tonight how much I have become out of touch with the immediacy of people’s feelings at that transition from teenage to adulthood. Tuesdays with Morrie may not be my play, but this production certainly made it this audience’s dramatic experience. The Q is to be congratulated for including it in this year’s program, and I hope it foreshadows more Ensemble productions in future.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 10
I have to eat humble pie tonight. Each of us responds to what we see from our own different perspectives.
Watching this play in my role as theatre critic, I saw a predictable moralistic sentimental story using the death of Professor Morrie Schwartz from Lou Gehrig’s disease as a contrived device, sugar-coated with carefully managed laughs.
I also saw a production highly skilfully designed, directed and acted. Daniel Mitchell faced a difficult task to avoid over-playing the Professor, but maintained a disciplined balance between making the inevitable one-liners into cartoon jokes and playing the physical horror of the disease for the horror rather than empathy. Glenn Hazeldine, as Mitch Albom, who wrote the original story that the play was developed from, had to switch regularly between playing Mitch as if in a realistic relationship with Morrie – every Tuesday – and playing Albom, the narrator of his story. By using stylised posture, movement and voice, Hazeldine clearly delineated each role. What otherwise might have been a repetitive series of question and answer in a lesser actor became a dramatic dialectic, giving the play more appearance of depth than the content of the text deserves.
However, for most of the audience – senior students from the two Canberra Grammar Schools – my perspective was well outside of the range of their radar. Their attention was focussed in the immediate heat of the emotion, not the distant cool of criticism. They were bubbling with excitement in the foyer beforehand anticipating seeing Sydney actors perform the play they had been working on. The actors’ skills did not disappoint. The young absorbed the performance as if it were music, directly responding with laughter, shock and tears, as well as a resounding standing ovation for the actors at curtain call. For them this was great theatre, and who am I to deny their experience?
Like Mitch, who failed to “keep in touch” with his favourite professor for 16 years, I have not taught College students for 16 years and realised tonight how much I have become out of touch with the immediacy of people’s feelings at that transition from teenage to adulthood. Tuesdays with Morrie may not be my play, but this production certainly made it this audience’s dramatic experience. The Q is to be congratulated for including it in this year’s program, and I hope it foreshadows more Ensemble productions in future.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 4 March 2011
2011: My Imaginary Family by Grahame Bond
My Imaginary Family written and performed by Grahame Bond. Directed by Maurice Murphy at The Street Theatre, March 4 – 26, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 4
After he presented the eulogy at his mother’s funeral, Bond says, his doctor approached him saying, “I think you need help.” Bond’s unspoken response, he tells us, was to reject criticism, as if the doctor were about to be a critic of his performance. In fact, it was an offer of grief counselling, which Bond accepted and found of great value.
This story, about his real family – not the family of imaginary characters he has created as a writer-performer – makes my task as a critic of his show one of a delicate balance. For the creator of characters, like Aunty Jack and Kev Kavanagh, to perform himself is like jumping off a real cliff and trusting that his imagination will make him fly. It’s a risk that most actors only take in the company of a Michael Parkinson. In this single hander, Bond plays himself, tells stories about himself, sings songs he wrote (often in company with Rory O’Donahue and Jim Burnett), moving in and out of roles he created, while also filling the Parkinson “interviewer” role of linking us watching with the person being “interviewed.”
Being Grahame Bond also inevitably meant a tendency to interact directly with his audience, so I was not surprised that keeping all these balls juggling in the intimate space of The Street 2 led him to lose his scripted lines at one point early in the show. This was, I believe, the very first performance, and trajectories came into better unison as the 90 minute show progressed. There were strong moments of both satire and emotion, both integrated in the horrifying highlight story of the 1980 New Year’s Eve at the Opera House.
For my generation whose adult lives have run alongside Grahame Bond’s, the stories behind the creation of Aunty Jack et al are of genuine interest. I was always aware of the satire, but the characters and style seemed to appear out of thin air with Thin Arthur around 1970. There was nothing quite like them in the Australian tradition, yet Aunty Jack, Flash Nick from Jindavick and Wollongong the Brave were as Australian as all get out. Perhaps they were parallel to the British Not the Nine O’Clock News, Monty Python, and The Goodies, and indeed Bond did take his work to London Weekend Television in Not the Aunty Jack Show.
I’m not sure what young people today will make of My Imaginary Family but it runs through the Canberra Festival and bookings are already going well. It will be a good test for “The stories of a ‘Jack of all Trades’ and the backing songs of his life.”
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 4
After he presented the eulogy at his mother’s funeral, Bond says, his doctor approached him saying, “I think you need help.” Bond’s unspoken response, he tells us, was to reject criticism, as if the doctor were about to be a critic of his performance. In fact, it was an offer of grief counselling, which Bond accepted and found of great value.
This story, about his real family – not the family of imaginary characters he has created as a writer-performer – makes my task as a critic of his show one of a delicate balance. For the creator of characters, like Aunty Jack and Kev Kavanagh, to perform himself is like jumping off a real cliff and trusting that his imagination will make him fly. It’s a risk that most actors only take in the company of a Michael Parkinson. In this single hander, Bond plays himself, tells stories about himself, sings songs he wrote (often in company with Rory O’Donahue and Jim Burnett), moving in and out of roles he created, while also filling the Parkinson “interviewer” role of linking us watching with the person being “interviewed.”
Being Grahame Bond also inevitably meant a tendency to interact directly with his audience, so I was not surprised that keeping all these balls juggling in the intimate space of The Street 2 led him to lose his scripted lines at one point early in the show. This was, I believe, the very first performance, and trajectories came into better unison as the 90 minute show progressed. There were strong moments of both satire and emotion, both integrated in the horrifying highlight story of the 1980 New Year’s Eve at the Opera House.
For my generation whose adult lives have run alongside Grahame Bond’s, the stories behind the creation of Aunty Jack et al are of genuine interest. I was always aware of the satire, but the characters and style seemed to appear out of thin air with Thin Arthur around 1970. There was nothing quite like them in the Australian tradition, yet Aunty Jack, Flash Nick from Jindavick and Wollongong the Brave were as Australian as all get out. Perhaps they were parallel to the British Not the Nine O’Clock News, Monty Python, and The Goodies, and indeed Bond did take his work to London Weekend Television in Not the Aunty Jack Show.
I’m not sure what young people today will make of My Imaginary Family but it runs through the Canberra Festival and bookings are already going well. It will be a good test for “The stories of a ‘Jack of all Trades’ and the backing songs of his life.”
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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