2012: When Dad Married Fury by David Williamson

When Dad Married Fury by David Williamson.  Directed by Sandra Bates.  Designer: Marissa Dale-Johnson; Lighting Designer: Peter Neufeld.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, May 9-June 16, 2012

Cheree Cassidy as Fury

and

Nick Tate as Alan (Dad)

Photos: Steve Lunam

Warren Jones, Lenore Smith, Jamie Oxenbould, Di Adams

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 10

The key to Williamson’s latest play, from which both the comedy and the philosophy grow, is about the irrational way we human animals are each capable of maintaining quite diverse and even opposite beliefs all at once. 

One would think from the simple rostra-block set, stage floor and backdrop completely covered in colourful banknotes, with a back projection in dangerous-looking red of a tumbling graph, that we would see another Williamson comedy, this time of money matters and manners.  And so we do, but, I think, with a new empathetic understanding.  I have often felt previously, except perhaps in Heretic and the trio of ‘Conferencing’ plays, that Williamson has stood strictly apart from his characters.  This is good for neat well-made plays which satirise social foibles, the success of which is obvious from Williamson’s long career.

When 'Dad' married 'Fury', however, his children’s monetary shock is to be expected, but the disjunctions of personal and political assumptions turn this into less satire and more substantial comedy.  It certainly makes a great evening out, and with a lasting effect.

The character, and the actor, who epitomises lasting effect is Cheree Cassidy playing Fury.  I won’t say too much about the plot, considering this is early in the first run of a new play, and surprise is an important element of its success on stage, but it’s hard to go past an anti-government American Tea Party profitable business woman who takes her religion seriously.  Her  belief in the ethics of Jesus brings what otherwise is no more than a cynical absurdist chaos to a satisfactory conclusion.

As a callow youth I wondered how Bernard Shaw could have written the characters of Major Barbara and Saint Joan with such sympathetic understanding when he was an avowed atheist, and now I see David Williamson, in his Fury, showing the same appreciation of his character’s sincerity.  As the play shows, and as Cheree Cassidy’s acting quality demonstrates, sincerity is nothing to do with simple determination.  It is about following through ethically, however surprising that may turn out to be even to yourself.

Sandra Bates’ directing of the play made for a too-slow beginning, in my view, although in an odd way the result of this was that the sudden surprise just before interval had maybe even more shock value than it might have had with a smoother start. 

The characters of Dad’s two sons were not immediately well established by Warren Jones (Ian) and Jamie Oxenbould (Ben) and so their wives, Sue – Lenore Smith – and Laura – Di Adams – seemed for too long to be cardboard cutouts of a financial lawyer and a social activist.  This was particularly unfortunate when Laura’s Mum, played by Lorraine Bayly, was left out, literally up against the wall, as Laura tried to help her mother through her father’s suicide.  We needed this scene to be played close up in the intimate almost in-the-round Ensemble Theatre to give Bayly the position of strength as a character which matches her role at the end.

When Dad  (Alan) appeared,  it took Nick Tate a little while to generate the required spark, but we had no doubt, theatrically at least, that we were in for an exciting ride from then on, even if we didn’t know where we were going.  Cheree Cassidy’s entrance jumped us up several staircases, laughing all the way while wondering if we might not fall off.  The quietness of the last scene then became not just a neat ending, but the right mood to give depth to the feeling that these characters, and maybe even ourselves, can be better people if we work to put ourselves together properly.

Conclusion?  David Williamson is still a force to be reckoned with and When Dad Married Fury is well worth seeing.  And it should be interesting to see what ‘lasting effect’ it might have if it plays in New York.

Di Adams and Lorraine Bayly

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Speaking in Tongues by Andrew Bovell

L-R Helen McFarlane as Sonja, Duncan Ley as Pete
Rob de Fries as Leon, Lainie Hart as Jane

Speaking in Tongues by Andrew Bovell.  Canberra Repertory Theatre directed by Ross McGregor, May 4-19, 2012

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 4

I’ve spent some time working out why this production is very good but not better.  Of course, Bovell’s writing is, in itself, quite fascinating and, I think, better in this original stage play than in the later adaptation as the film Lantana.  On stage the work is more focussed and concentrated, without the distractions of realistic filming.

From this thinking comes the explanation I’m looking for.  Ross McGregor, in an interview in the Canberra Times, said that his intention was to use only four actors, as was done in the original production (1996) and again in the 2011 revival at Griffin Theatre (at The Stables, Kings Cross, Sydney).  However, and I guess perhaps because Canberra Rep is a community theatre group, McGregor’s auditions attracted enough good actors for him to decide to use separate actors for the ‘extra’ parts in Act 2.

So we have the two married couples in Act 1 – Rob de Fries as Leon with Helen McFarlane as Sonja, and Lainie Hart as Jane with Duncan Ley as Pete.  Guess what happened from the picture above.  All were excellent in their roles, using the stylisation of the set, the symbolic use of dance and the techniques of storytelling to great effect.

In Act 2, Ley appears briefly as the innocent man in the bar whom Valerie – Bridgette Black – insanely screams at, while de Fries is in Leon’s professional role as the policeman who interviews Valerie’s husband John after she disappears.  John is played by Zach Raffan.  Jane and Pete’s next-door neighbour Nick, who threw the missing Valerie’s shoe into the vacant block opposite, is played by Sam Hannan-Morrow, under police interrogation.  The other two characters, originally from Leon’s story of the man, Neil, who left his brogue shoes on the beach before apparently drowning himself, and the girl he believed would marry him, Sarah, are played by Raoul Cramer and Eliza Bell.  To complete the plot, of course, Sarah is the patient with relationship problems being treated by clinical psychologist Valerie, who has her own psychological problem, being afraid of men because of childhood abuse – at least according to John.

If you consider the cast of Lantana, all 32 of them playing many roles that are not even mentioned in Speaking in Tongues, you can see that McGregor’s version of Act 2 is more like the film version, while Act 1 is played closer to Bovell’s original conception on stage.  Using only four actors, in Act 2 the story told by Leon to Sonja (about the story told to Leon by Neil when they met on the beach) and the story told by Jane to Pete (about what she saw Nick do and what she did in response) are explored and interpreted as if each of these four are trying to imagine what really happened. 

So, for example, we have an actor playing Leon, and Leon interviewing John.  After all, Leon has told Pete that he is a policeman, but is he really and does he actually interview John, or is it Pete who imagines Leon interviewing the husband of the woman who has disappeared (which apparently did really happen, because Pete has seen the newspaper report, not just heard about it in Jane’s story)?  Or again, perhaps Pete just imagines that the woman who screamed at him in the bar was the woman who disappeared.  There are questions of this kind about all the stories told in Act 2.

I wasn’t conscious of all this thinking while watching the play last night, but I felt that the intensity and the grip of the drama which was so strong in the first Act seemed to dissipate in the second.  And an odd thing was that when Ley appeared, and de Fries appeared, my attention was suddenly grabbed again.  And it was a disappointment that McFarlane and Hart only reappeared for the curtain call after such a strong showing in Act 1.

So, though I certainly recommend this production, with its interesting set design (you can watch the video of its development in the foyer during interval), I wonder if it might still have been better to have kept to Bovell’s original use of only four actors.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Food by Steve Rodgers

Emma Jackson as Nancy and Kate Box as Elma

Food by Steve Rodgers.  Directed by Kate Champion (Force Majeure) and Steve Rodgers at Belvoir Downstairs, Sydney, April 28 – May 20, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 29

Kate Champion - Co-director

Steve Rodgers - Writer and Co-director

Kate Box as Elma and Fayssal Bazzi as Hakan

Elma, of the sharp knives, looking into the eyes of Hakan, peripatetic Turk, as he looks into hers, making her decision to give him permission to kiss her, thinks aloud these words: Between the words!

This is the thematic climax of this new play, down-to-earth Australian in content, character and style.  It seems to me to settle into this century’s tradition set by Andrew Bovell and Christos Tsiolkas in its dialogue, yet takes off into the new form of dance theatre which Force Majeure has created.

The result is at times terrifying, funny and deeply saddening.  In this work, as in all good drama, it is what is happening, has happened and might happen, between the words, that catches our imagination and rings bells of truth about our lives.

Before going further, I should declare my potential for bias, since I taught Steve Rodgers drama in his senior secondary school years and trained him for the audition which took him to his tertiary training at University of Western Sydney, Nepean.

I also broke what I’m told is a cardinal rule for a critic, never to talk to the author or director after the show.  After 25 years I couldn’t miss the opportunity.  But I guarantee my reaction to the play, thoroughly confirmed by the excited response from the rest of the audience, was absolutely established in the last moment of silence before the lights came up for curtain call.

Because I have previously favourably reviewed two of Kate Champion’s works, The Age I’m In (2010) and Never Did Me Any Harm (Sydney Festival 2012) and seen the development from pure dance toward dance theatre, I wanted to ask Rodgers about the process he and Champion had gone through.  In this play I saw the choreographed movement working to reveal the feelings and meanings behind the everyday actions and words, integrating the text and plot in a new way.

Interestingly, Rodgers said that his original text was much longer, but as he and the actors worked with Champion, and she choreographed movement which ‘illustrated’ the text, it was often the case that the text should be cut and the movement stand in its own right.  In Never Did Me Any Harm which I saw only last January, words were used but seemed to me to be an expressive layer often exploding out from the feelings established in movement, which itself was choreographed closer to pure dance than in Food.  Now the words, movement and feelings come to us as a three-dimensional whole. 

It really is exciting to see new developments in theatrical form happening literally before my very eyes, only a metre or so from my front row seat.  It was also satisfying, talking about past times with Steve, to realise that he recognised the value of the educational drama processes of group improvisation, giving students the power to lead their own work, allowing creative writing to be assessed on the same terms as critical or analytic writing, and basing drama work on relationships in action rather than studying text isolated from action.

So what does happen in Food?  Elma (Kate Box) is in the kitchen of the small country town café she has set up with her sister Nancy (Emma Jackson).  The whole set is made up of pots and pans of every imaginable size.  Elma is already busy with the knives preparing for the men who will soon be there for breakfast, but Nancy is still in the shower, moving and singing to dance music.

At first she moves gently and in sync with the rhythm, but gradually becomes more and more agitated and out of time before at last coming out angrily responding to her sister’s increasingly autocratic demands.  Half-spoken words and looks – every turn of a face, twist of a wrist, sideways glance of an eye is choreographed, with the same kind of skill as in a traditional Indian dance – begin to reveal a dark family history for these two sisters.  It’s not my place to tell you of it here.  You need to experience the revelations for yourself.

The plot lightens when the sisters advertise for help, and Hakan (Fayssal Bazzi) steps off the bus. He’s a joker but essentially sincere, nothing like the Aussie boys and men who have wreaked havoc, physical and emotional, in the growing-up time of the two sisters.

He offers something that Nancy understands her elder sister needs.  He also is crucial in making the business grow, including indeed all of us in a kind of loaves-and-fishes audience participation.  I’ve seen real cooking on stage before, but this was a great degustation event not to be missed.

It was while celebrating the wonderful success that the scene is set for that kiss and more “between the words”.  Of course, Hakan has gone in the morning, knowing his role in Elma’s new understanding, and, I guess, recognising the conflict he would cause between the sisters if he stayed.  As they prepare the food for the coming day there is a brief mini-reprise of the tensions we saw at the beginning of the play, a sort of sadness at Hakan’s departure, then an understanding in their eye-contact, and a calm silence as they settle to the work and the lights dim to black.

The sensitivity and skills which each actor showed was quite extraordinary, supported in every detail by Anna Tregloan’s set and costume design, Martin Langthorne’s lighting and audio visual effects, and Ekrem Mülayim’s sound and music composition.  This production is literally and metaphorically a brilliant reflection of life in this country of contrasts of the best and the worst kind.  It is theatre you should not miss.

Kate Box

Emma Jackson

Fayssal Bazzi

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Let the Sunshine by David Williamson

Let the Sunshine by David Williamson.  Presented by Christine Harris & HIT Productions at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, directed by Denis Moore, April 26-29, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 26

This is a comedy of very good manners, on the part of the cast and crew especially. 

Even the characters finally work their way through their prejudices, self-centredness and argumentativeness to a neat rom-com happy ending, as the parents finally learn to accept the reality of their 30 and 33 year old children’s love of the “inward smile” kind.

What I liked about this production, reviving the success of the original 2009 Ensemble Theatre show, was the high energy level of all the performances, the nicely managed twists and turns and timing which showed excellent directing, the design of a simple set which kept the action constantly on its toes, and the live and recorded sound design.  Williamson’s best comedies of manners are traditionally ‘well-made plays’ and this production is well made on all fronts.

Reviving the play, and touring around the country, is also a well-worthwhile exercise. 

It reflects on the Great Financial Crisis which began in 2007, and looked forward to the likelihood of things getting worse rather than better.  In 2012 we can reach our own conclusions about Williamson’s perspicacity.

It also shows us the ‘issues’ of Gen X, Y or Z (wherever we are up to by now), especially letting us come to terms with the fact that while all things change, all things stay the same, as each new generation has to deal with its parents.  Both sides may look for rational and reasonable deals, but the human condition is not actually of that kind.  The best we can do is look for the kindness of the inward smile.

In other words, I was more than entertained by the comedy.  It was a satisfying night out at a serious level too, and makes me keen to see the next Williamson play in a couple of weeks’ time, When Dad Married Fury, which Sandra Bates is directing at The Ensemble.  The idea that Williamson’s move to Noosa was into retirement has been knocked on the head, especially as, in Let the Sunshine, he seems to reflect through film-maker Toby and his musician-turning-producer son Rick on something of his own experiences since the 1960s.

I have one gripe, though, about the Christine Harris & HIT management, as I did about the management of the previous The Q presentation I reviewed, Syncopation by Critical Stages & The Follies Company.  Can’t touring companies at least provide the audience with a record for them to take home of the cast and crew?  I think it’s an insult to the actors especially, and unfair in terms of their careers, as well as unfair to The Q, that I had to stand in front of a single poster, while others had to read over my shoulder, in order to write down the names of seriously praiseworthy theatre practitioners.

Here the actors are:  Toni Scanlan as the musician’s mother Ros, Dennis Coard as his father Toby, Peter Phelps as millionaire developer Ron, Alexandra Fowler as his big-spending wife Natasha.  Their daughter, feral lawyer and partner in love, Emma was played ferociously at first and warmly at last by Hannah Norris, and Ryan Hayward transformed from wafty musician to business-like husband Rick.

With director Denis Moore were Shaun Gurton (set design), Adrienne Chisholm (costumes – Ron’s changes got great laughs), Nick Merrylees (lighting – spot on) and Peter Farnan (sound).  But without a program, I haven’t all the pictures I would like to show here.  This is a shame.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Punch and the Magic Box by Hunky Dory Puppets

Punch and the Magic Box  Hunky Dory Puppets at Belconnen Arts Centre, Tuesday April 17, 2012, 3pm.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

What would you want a chainsaw for?  To open a milk carton, says Mr Punch.  But it makes such a mess.  I don’t know what to do.  What should I do with a chainsaw? 

The littlies say, Cut wood.  What kind of wood?  Tree wood, they say.  Like those trees outside my house?   Should I cut down the trees?  No, say the kids.

And so begins the lesson about our natural environment.  Despite Mrs Kangaroo’s objection that she needs the shade, Mr Punch is so excited to rev up his chainsaw that he cuts down the first two rather ordinary looking trees.  After all, Mrs Kangaroo could just wear a hat.  But when he comes to the big old tree with holes in it, leaves on it, and roots under it, Mrs Galah stops him because of her young babies in the hollow, Koala stops him because he only eats that kind of leaves, and Wombat stops him because he depends on eating those roots. 

On the way we learn that birds being born in tree hollows is just like children being born in hospital, koalas eating leaves is just like children eating leaves – like lettuce (I hope your parents give you lettuce to eat, says Koala), and wombats eating roots is just like children eating carrots (the littlies all liked carrots, just as Mr Punch did).  All through the story, Mr Punch asks the kids, Did you know that?  Yes – well you kids are really clever.  He finally puts his chainsaw away under his bed.

As Hunky Dory Puppets say on their website http://www.hunkydorypuppets.com.au/   The stories we use are devised to be educational, non-violent, positive and always have some kind of intrinsic environmental and people friendly flavour. 

In effect, Marcus and Carolyn Goddefroy apply the principle devised by the doyen of educational drama, Dorothy Heathcote, placing on the children – even 3 and 4 year olds – the ‘mantle of the expert’.  Mr Punch doesn’t know and the children tell him what to do, confirming them emotionally, and then extending their knowledge (about lettuce and carrots, for example).  And the children in the audience I observed certainly participated eagerly – though a couple of rather older kids saw through the device and sometimes deliberately challenged with the wrong answer. 

Typical! is what I would say, as a former teacher.  But Marcus, as Mr Punch, was never fazed, taking up the littlies’ responses and moving the story along.

As well as Carolyn and Marcus being puppeteers and puppet makers (of all kinds of puppets), and offering puppet making sessions for the children (at Belconnen Arts Centre this Thursday or by invitation: just email goddefroypuppets@gmail.com), Marcus is also a good magician and musician. 

As a lead-in, he involves the children in the action, in role as Hunky the Clown, giving the child volunteers the magic wand and incantations to make the tricks work, since Hunky causes failures because of his big red nose itching or sneezing.  He builds in constant surprises which keep the children on their toes.  With Marcus playing tin whistle, recorder, button and piano accordion, the magic introduces Dory with the dancing string puppets Angelina Angel (whose wings sprout so she can fly) and the rather thin, in fact skeletal, Pete the Pirate who hasn’t eaten for 300 years.  I hope you eat, says Hunky to the kids.

A community arts centre, I guess, has two key functions.  One is to provide exhibitions and performances which increase people’s appreciation of the arts, while the other is to engage people in the creation of art.  Hunky Dory Puppets covers the field in both directions.  It was good to see what they themselves call an ‘old-fashioned’ approach – not ‘slick’, not glossy, with all live music and sound effects, and with the traditional props and Punchinella style booth.  The children certainly didn’t need or miss the racy formula approach of shows like Dora the Explorer, for example, which are designed for massed audiences (and mass financial exploitation, I suspect).

Marcus and Carolyn Goddefroy are to be respected for their commitment to the small scale, personal and genuine concern for children, and their willingness to maintain ‘old-fashioned’ values in their work.  They work out of old European traditions, especially the Dutch, but apply them to themes suited to today’s children in New Zealand where they began their career, in country Queensland for some 17 years, and now in the ‘country’ city, Canberra.

Belconnen Arts Centre has a wide ranging program, but this is the only piece that involves chainsaws.  Coming up soon is everything from dance, kites, visuals, music (at Live@BAC on Fridays 5.30-7.00pm), and even the celebration of the winter solstice.  Go to

info@belconnenartscentre.com.au or ring +61 (0)2 6173 3300 for information
www.belconnenartscentre.com.au  for bookings

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Doubt: a parable by John Patrick Shanley

Cate Clelland


                

                                                                                                  




Hannah McCann                                                                                          Naoné Carrel

Doubt: a parable by John Patrick Shanley.  Free Rain Theatre Company, directed by Cate Clelland at the Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, April 13-29, 2012

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 13

It’s a great pleasure to see a risky piece of theatre done well.

You may ask why a Pultizer Prize winner (2005) could be called risky.  When it’s all about two people who have an argument.  You might think an argument would be dramatic, but not unless the characters come to a new understanding and change their position.  In this play only a side character, the young teacher Sister James (Hannah McCann), takes a step towards greater maturity, while the central characters – Sister Aloysius (Naoné Carrel) and Father Flynn (Jarrad West) - remain at the end as they were at the beginning.  The only other character – the mother of the Latino boy at the centre of the story, Mrs Ruiz (Ronnie Flor) – comes to the Principal’s office ready to breathe fire, and leaves in full flame. 

And what’s more challenging is that when we have watched the argument for 90 minutes, we can’t decide who won or what the truth was.  And even worse, there’s absolutely no action.  Just talk – even sermons!

The story behind the talk is quite simple.  The Principal expects the inexperienced teacher to tell her of anything she, the teacher, is not sure about.  The teacher reports that Father Flynn had taken a vulnerable recent arrival – the only boy in this Bronx school who was not Irish or Italian – for a private talk, and the boy had seemed disturbed when he returned to the classroom.  The Principal, suspicious that the boy had been molested, goes outside the rules – the Catholic ‘chain of command’ – which places men in charge of the women.  She confronts Father Flynn directly and uses subterfuge to put him in a position where he has no choice but to resign.  We learn, though, at the very end, that the Bishop not only did not accept the Principal’s accusation, but covered up by promoting Flynn to a higher position in another parish, with its school full of vulnerable boys.

So the story is, as the author has called it, a parable.  A very model of a post-modern parable in which nothing can be proven either way, yet we feel that the Principal was right to take action to protect her pupils despite her admitting finally that she had her doubts.  Any doubts we had about Father Flynn’s behaviour were swept aside by the Bishop’s promoting him – yet the truth could have been that the Bishop was correct to protect his subordinate’s career against unsubstantiated accusations.

So how was this production done well?  By focussing on simplicity, in the stage design and the acting.  By not being afraid to use disciplined silences to allow us to think through the implications of what was being said and how each character was reacting.  The drama was happening in our minds, established by the opening sermon where Father Flynn spoke directly to us in the congregation.  The writing is good, but quality presentation is needed to make it work on stage.

Each of the actors made sure that we were made aware of the motivation they had for saying what they did, for not saying what they might have, and for being silent when nothing might be said.  Each took up the challenge, and took us along with them. 

This made a highly satisfying piece of theatre, a great pleasure to experience, even though it revealed the awful side of the rigid male-dominated religious system.  Set in New York in the 1960s, shortly after the assassination of the Catholic President John F Kennedy, the play is not only still relevant today for the issue in the story (as we are now seeing in Victoria where a full inquiry into the abuse of children by priests is being seriously mooted), but is universal in its concern that we often cannot not take action despite never being able to prove the truth.

Cate Clelland and her team have taken the risk, kept their nerve throughout, focussed on the universal, and succeeded brilliantly.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

              Ronnie Flor                                                                                                                             Jarrad West

                                    

Breaker Morant by Kenneth G Ross.  Everyman Theatre, directed by Jarrad West at Canberra Theatre Centre, Courtyard Studio, March 21-31, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 31

Since there has been some mention in the press arguing the toss about the truth of the Breaker Morant story, I should begin by making it clear that I have not studied the history of the Boer War nor any details of the Court Martial and execution of Morant and Handcock.  I look at this play as an interpretation of history, just as Shakespeare’s history plays are.

This doesn’t mean that I think this play is up to Shakespeare’s standard, however.  It is almost entirely a courtroom scene with brief excursions to the defendants’ meetings with their defence lawyer, Major Thomas, and the prison cell housing Morant, Handcock and their co-accused, George Witton, who escaped the firing squad, and to Lord Kitchener’s office.

The Court is represented as a shambles because the accused refused to be subordinate, making it very difficult to avoid most of the play being a shouting match, without much opportunity for subtle emotional developments to be displayed.  The strongest scene – and the quietest – is near the end when Major Thomas confronts Colonel Hamilton to try to have the execution delayed to allow time to contact the Australian and British governments.  Kitchener has already signed the death warrants and left, leaving Hamilton to fob off Thomas.  Dr Duncan Driver played Thomas’s determination and frustration in the face of immutable forces very well indeed, while Colin Gray’s Hamilton was so cold that the atmosphere in the whole theatre silently froze.

Duncan Ley as Morant and Robert DeFries as Handcock successfully presented themselves as men of maturity and authority, but at the same time the script, I think, too often puts them out as too willing to interrupt the court proceedings with obscenities and open attacks on witnesses and the court itself.  It may be that this may have happened in the real court martial (suggesting that British law was falling apart in the wilds of Africa), but too much too often lessens the theatrical tension on stage.  I would have expected the President of the Court Martial to have taken action against them for contempt of court, but all he did was to keep saying he wouldn’t allow them to keep up their unacceptable behaviour.

Though I could see the justification for the director’s desire to make the story ‘timeless’ by using military costume from different eras, having a female prosecutor (Major Bolton played very well by Andrea Close), and removing references to specific dates, I found this distracting rather than making a strong point.  It might have been more bold to do as was done in Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus, and use a recent modern setting, in Iraq, say.  However, I think it would take much manipulation for this to work with this story, though perhaps the Bosnian war would have allowed for summary executions.  In the end keeping strictly to the historical period, when armies did as a matter of course execute their own, would have been the better way to go. 

This production of Breaker Morant, as I saw it, certainly made the point that the executions were politically motivated rather than justified in court, but the sympathy for Morant that was engendered in the film version in 1980 (which was entirely based on this playscript) was replaced by empathy with Major Thomas, who so valiantly tried and ultimately failed through no fault of his own.  It became his play, and in that way became a legal drama rather than a myth about a wronged Australian. 

I’m not sure if this was Jarrad West’s intention, but it still made this a worthwhile production to see.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Syncopation by Allan Knee

Emma Palmer                                                               Justin Cotta

Syncopation by Allan Knee, presented by Critical Stages and The Follies Company directed by Stephen Helper at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 27 to April 5, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 30

Noel Coward would have called this a ‘nice’ play.  It makes for an enjoyable evening, but it’s the dancing that gives it a feel-good quality despite a predictable, melodramatic and sentimental plot. 

Fortunately the dance work by Emma Palmer (Anna) and Justin Cotta (Henry) carried the day, while the quality of their acting kept our interest through a too long first half and another too long second half.  There was as much a sigh of relief at 10.40pm for the play having finally ended, as there was the inevitable sigh of satisfaction that at last these two determined ballroom dancers had reached the conclusion that they just belonged together.  Si-i-i-igh!

It’s amusing to see in one week two plays with the same basic romantic structure – Midsummer (reviewed March 28) and Syncopation – but with such different degrees of theatrical originality.  Syncopation has in the background something of the same issues of social class (in 1912 New York) as Midsummer (in modern Edinburgh), but the plot – will the seamstress marry the boring but conventional shopkeeper, the rich sophisticated but married man in the cape, or the dancing meatworker – is no more telling than the plot of Out in the Cold, Cold Snow, the well-known melodrama of the late 19th Century.

Considering that by 1912 Bernard Shaw had already written Major Barbara and was about to write Pygmalion and Heartbreak House and in America Eugene O’Neill was busy writing his first plays while convalescing from tuberculosis, I can only wonder where Knee is coming from.  It was nice to hear Anna tell a rather bemused Henry that she wanted women to be allowed to vote, and the idea of freedom from the conventional restraints is played out as the two come together and dance, but, for a 21st Century play, it’s all too predictable.  The characters are cyphers, carrying out the author’s predetermined construct.  Knee needs to study David Greig, the author of Midsummer, to see what I mean.

Certainly see the play, because the dancing is lovely and the sigh factor gets to you in the end.

But there are backstage questions that seem to need answering. 

One is about hype. “Syncopation is the only truly integrated play with dance in the world” says Stephen Helper on the website  http://www.syncopation.com.au/home.html . 

Sorry – not true.  Try Wallflowering by Peta Murray, a much better script than Syncopation, in my view, and an Australian play which travelled to England and the USA.  We saw a revival of this 1989 play, at Tuggeranong Arts Centre, starring Noeline Brown and Doug Scroope, in 2004.  Its original production, after a reading at Sydney Theatre Company, was by Carol Woodrow’s Canberra Theatre Company.

The other concern is about management. Critical Stages and The Follies Company did not supply The Q, at least until four days into the run when I saw Syncopation, with printed programs for the audience.  Some posters for the foyer had arrived, but even if all the audience had gathered around to read them, they might not have been clear about the names of the actors performing that night.  Now that I have searched the website, I see that the cast has changed over time.  The professionalism of Emma Palmer and Justin Cotta was exemplary on the night, with no indication of anything amiss, but if I were one of the actors I would not have been pleased.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Midsummer (a play with songs) by David Greig

Midsummer (a play with songs) by David Greig (writer/director) and Gordon McIntyre (songwriter).  Traverse Theatre Company, Edinburgh, at Canberra Theatre Centre, The Playhouse, March 28-31, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 28

What an interesting play!  It’s like pass the parcel: surprise after surprise at the unwrapping of each new layer, right until the very centre at the end.  Surely it’s a rom-trag?  But no – the last revelation is still to come.  Rom-com after all.

The play, its original structure, sparkling design and presentation by actors Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon, proves the truth of the announcement by the supposed (or is it real in Scotland?) parking ticket payment machine: CHANGE IS POSSIBLE.

The storyline, after all, is no different than Shakespeare’s tale of Beatrice and Benedick or Shaw’s of Bluntschli and Raina.  An unlikely couple meet in highly unprepossessing circumstances and find that love happens regardless of what they think they feel.  For Shakespeare it was all much ado about nothing – except that it was really about the nature of proper governance of the nation.  For Shaw it was really about the taking up of arms between nations.  For David Greig it is about the human disaster of modern urban consumer society.  Com though it might be for the characters as they “dance ere we are married’, give her hand “to my chocolate cream soldier” or board the ferry for Belgium, the fun of realising that love conquers all cannot completely hide the trag behind

My lord, your brother John is ta’en in flight / And brought with armed men back to Messina, or

Time’s up, Major.  You’ve managed those regiments so well that youre sure to be asked to get rid of some of the Infantry of the Teemok division, and

the need for Bob, at the age of 35, to have had to depend on being a criminal’s courier to survive in modern Edinburgh, the pointless lives of the youthful ‘Goths’, the irresponsibility of ‘nightlife’, and the sadness of Helena’s desire for a child and fear that at 35 she may be too late.  Using Bob’s ill-gotten gains to flee to Europe for a few weeks’ fun may not be all that it promises on the Monday after this midsummer’s wild weekend.  We can only hope that the parking machine is right, and change is possible after all.

So, if the plot is traditional, what makes this play original?  The answer is the same as it was for Much Ado About Nothing and Arms and the Man.  It’s in the language and the relationship set up between the characters and the audience.  Change in writing for theatre is possible.  It was Shakespeare who used the soliloquy as a device for a character to speak directly to the audience, it was Shaw who put the bluntness of Bluntschli on stage, and in the last century Brecht who had characters sing songs as singers rather than as the characters they otherwise were playing, while Tennessee Williams wrote characters who separately observed and commented on the action. 

Greig has taken this tradition a step beyond.  Bob and Helena switch moment by moment from being their own character to describing what the other was or is doing or playing out other characters in the other character’s life.  The play constantly shifts the ground beneath us, which is often funny even as it can make us feel insecure.

This is a new style of theatre suited to today’s 24/7 culture, but does not fall into the common trap of using technology just because it is there.  In fact the clever design, by Georgia McGuiness, uses perfectly old-fashioned visual and audio techniques, while the one more modern device which does the trick for the play is the simple continuous roll-along brightly-lit message from the ticket machine.  Change is possible, indeed, but is most effective when introduced sparingly and only to make a specific point.  The script is about a wildly out-of-control weekend, but is tightly written, giving the actors every opportunity to make the most of every minute.  As they do.

As always, discipline and being true to the right style is what makes theatre work.  It certainly does in Midsummer.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie

The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie presented by Queanbeyan City Council. Directed by Jordan Best at Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 7-24, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 7

This is a misconceived production of a play which, despite its 60 years of continuous performance in London, is essentially a farce. It certainly got some laughs on opening night, despite the director’s apparent intention from her Director’s Notes that we should have been scared and spooked by ‘a cracker of a mystery’.

Christie’s crime fiction consists of nothing but artifice – an artificial plot on which is hung artificial characters with motivations which have nothing to do with psychological truth. Her stories are interesting as games, working out possible directions to take in a maze which has already been predetermined by the designer. The more unexpected twists and turns in the design, the more fun it is to play the game. But that’s all there is to it.

Best, unfortunately, despite her professional training and previous excellent productions, has missed the point here. Naturalistic playing of these characters is boring because it is the wrong style for this type of play. The cast worked hard, but only Jim Adamik’s over-the-top Mr Paravicini and to some extent Brendan Kelly’s Christopher Wren had the exaggerated characteristics a farce requires.

The director’s decision to place the play in Australia (with such a blizzard in, presumably, Katoomba, that would cheer the cockles of a climate skeptic’s heart) compounded her problem. This play is quintessentially English, filled with stock characters, stock references to the weather and places like Majorca, and entirely in the style of English farces of its day, the 1950s before rock’n’roll, such as those by William Douglas Home who, like Agatha Christie, looked back with some kind of sentimental awe to the hey-day of English culture – the 1930s. Australia was never like this.

Mind you, it is true that my first acting role, in Australia in 1963, was as an upper-class twit in Home’s 1956 play The Reluctant Debutante. No-one, but no-one, would bother to present that even in a country town today, and presenting The Mousetrap could only work if it was made thoroughly absurdist – a spoof of the very crime fiction it represents. When you consider what we watch on tv nowadays – Silent Witness for example – the idea that we might be scared or spooked by the ‘horrors’ of The Mousetrap is the ultimate absurdity.

I would like to praise the set design (the indomitable Brian Sudding) and construction (Craig Francis and Ian Croker), except for one point – the door that should have creaked, didn’t. There was also a sound problem – almost inherent in the script – when the loud radio drowned out the characters’ voices. We needed to hear what they said because there were clues to the plot in their words.

So The Mousetrap is a disappointment, which is a pity because The Q has presented so much better local productions in recent times, and I hope will do so in the future.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Babyteeth by Rita Kalnejais

Babyteeth by Rita Kalnejais.  Directed by Eamon Flack for Belvoir at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, February 11 – March 8, 2012

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 25

It scares the life out of me to see a play that can so emotionally shake me, written by such a young person.  Then I look back in history and realise that William Shakespeare was about the same age as Rita Kalnejais when his first plays began to be noticed.  Babyteeth is her second.

I remembered that Shakespeare died when he was 20 years younger than I am now and ten years older than I was when I made my only serious attempt to write a play (which got no further than a professional reading).  But, looking back again, I did try to persuade Broken Hill Repertory to put on the legendary beginning of kitchen sink drama: John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956).  They thought it was too radical and risqué for 1964 (Alison wears her petticoat while she does the ironing), so I directed Arthur Miller’s All My Sons instead.

Why all this reminiscing?  Because Babyteeth is literally a kitchen sink play, and because it is so good to see a new play with all the strengths of the best of its tradition.

In fact I reckon Rita has done better than William did in plays like Two Gentlemen of Verona.  There’s more guts here (I’ll explain later) as well as a similar wild sense of humour.  Babyteeth is, in a modern way, even more succinct than The Taming of the Shrew concerning falling in love and maintaining a marriage, and deals with these matters with more depth than Look Back in Anger.  Kalnejais’ parents (Anna played by Helen Buday, and Henry played by Greg Stone) show more complexity in response to the death of their daughter (Milla, played by Sara West) than Miller’s parents do to the death of their son.  And where Shakespeare could have written about the Black Death but never did, she dares to write about the inevitability of death – a teenager dying of cancer.

That’s where guts and vomiting come into the picture.  It took all of the 40 minutes in first gear crawling from Belvoir Street along Cleveland Street and South Dowling Street before my palpitations slowed as the traffic at last sped up.

The structure of the play is a twist on a fairly common device.  The end is played at the beginning, which morphs into the past and leads to the end we thought we had already seen.  Except that only then do we learn what really happened.  Then there is a coda – a quite lengthy positive musical note, which is a surprise at first but completes the narrative and eases us out of the harsh reality of sex and death.  Yet, as I found out while driving home, even this resolution cannot assuage the hidden feelings.

To the production: it’s clear from the author’s and director’s notes that the play on stage is a cooperative creation of writer, director, actors and designers – just as good plays have always been.  Not only is the play good, but all the work of these practitioners is top quality.  Kathryn Beck – you’ll remember her eyes and a fascinating going-in-all-directions quality on tv in East of Everything – makes pregnant Toby and her dog the lively comic foil exactly as needed for the tragedy besetting Milla, her unlikely boyfriend Moses (archly played by Eamon Farren), her psychologist father and distraught mother, whose relationship with Milla’s violin teacher (Gidon, played extravagantly by Russel Dykstra) and his small boy student (Thuong – David Carreon or Sean Chu according to the day) is unexpected, quite remarkable, and finally crucial to her coming to grips with death.

To top it all, I drove home towards brilliant dramatic blood-red sunset clouds against a fragile teal blue sky, a wonderful reminder of the cloud Milla sees, of her tragic death, and of a beautiful play.

When you buy the program you have the traditional Currency Press publication of this new Australian playscript.  It’s this total collaboration of author, production team, actors and publisher that makes the best of Belvoir about as good as you can get in theatre today.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: To Silence: Kabir & Maria Chekhova by Subhash Jaireth

To Silence: Kabir & Maria Chekhova  by Subhash Jaireth.  Directors: Caroline Stacey (Kabir) & Camilla Blunden (Maria Chekhova) at The Street Theatre, February 16-26, 2012.

Kabir played by Raoul Craemer and Maria by Naoné Carrel.

For information about Subhash Jaireth go to:
http://asianaustralianstudies.org/resources/asian-australian-writers/bio/subhash-jaireth1/

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 18

This presentation by The Street Theatre establishes the importance of the work of Artistic Director Caroline Stacey, and the role The Street plays within Canberra’s theatre life.  The news, published on the front page of The Canberra Times just yesterday (http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/curtain-raised-on-3m-street-revamp-20120216-1tc8f.html) that “Canberra’s professional theatre practitioners will have the city’s first custom designed rehearsal space when The Street Theatre’s new $3.18 million extension, a modern bright structure, is built” is confirmation of the support of the ACT Government and theatre community for Stacey’s efforts.

Following last year’s commissioning of Alana Valentine’s MP – a play based upon interviews with Members of Parliament and bureaucrats here in the Federal Capital city – this year has begun with a work by another successful published writer, nowadays resident in Canberra.  And, in the wake of the Canberra Multicultural Festival, if Jaireth represents anything it must be multiculturalism, writing as he does in Hindi, Russian and English.  Whatever some jaundiced sections of Australian society would like to believe, multiculturalism is alive and well and living in the centre of goverment.

However, the two historical characters we see presented by Jaireth are dead, though we see them as they approach their final silence.  The Indian mystic poet Kabir died in 1518.  Shakespearean in his poetry and significance in his society, it is fascinating to realise he died so long before Shakespeare’s own death in 1616.  Maria Chekhova was the keeper of her older brother’s spirit for the 53 years of war, revolution and dictatorship after Anton Chekhov’s death in 1904 until her own demise at the age of 94 in 1957.  We see her here on the day of the announcement of Josef Stalin’s death in 1953.

Based on extensive documentary evidence, Jaireth has written two separate monologues, each just an hour long, making a solid evening’s theatre with a 20 minute interval between.  It’s concentrated listening for the audience, but well worthwhile for the quality of the language, the story that develops in the life of each character, and the implications for our own lives today.  It is the continuity of human experience from 1500 to 1950 and beyond that we come to understand as Jabir and Maria speak their minds.

Both Craemer and Carrel speak their character’s mind with clarity and feeling.  Jaireth has given them the language they need for the storytelling, and both miss no opportunity offered them by the author.  But this production gives us a theatrical context for the storytelling which places each character emotionally in their world. 

For Maria, restricted in her wheelchair to the house in Yalta, with memories sometimes mixed up and fading, the set is a minimal representation of significant objects, like half-seen paintings on the wall, a blank high wall section which turns out to represent for her the dust-covered statue of Anton, while her writing desk is just as she might have used it in real life for her correspondence and telephone calls to Anton’s wife, the actress Olga Knipper.

Kabir, though, is a mystic poet, living in the past and the present alternately in his poems and memories of family, friends and social figures, such as the religious pundits he despises for their deliberate manipulation of ordinary people’s understanding of reality.  He, a weaver in real life, is caught in a net of feelings and experiences, sometimes inescably entwined, other times in control of the warp and the weft, sometimes fascinated by the artistry and beauty of his surroundings and his part in life.  Light and colour, even darkness, become elements in our experience as Craemer changes physically through Kabir’s feelings, criticisms and philosophical analyses at different ages and circumstances. 

The stage design and lighting – by Imogen Keen and Gillian Schwab respectively – work very well in both parts, but are more exciting, more integrated and poetically thematic in the Kabir piece than for Maria Chekhova.

And then there is the sound.  Seth Edwards-Ellis has, for both parts, created a subtle sound environment, which fills in the background space around us in the audience (though I wasn’t quite sure on my visit whether all the thunder in Kabir’s life was recorded or real, considering the great storm unfolding outside the theatre).  In both parts, the essence of the sound design was to establish something of the social, historical and emotional context, and then allow the sound to unobtrusively fade away until the point of silence was reached – in Kabir’s case with his death and ‘sky’ burial, and in Maria’s case with her horror at her failure to save Anton’s Jewish first love from the Treblinka concentration camp.  Silence fell as we understood she saved his house, his stories, his plays, his reputation, but was not brave enough to save Dunya from Hitler.  And in the silence we are left wondering if she had received Dunya at Yalta in the 1930s whether the other great dictator Stalin might not have been as bad.

The two parts together say, ironically, as the illiterate Kabir says when his son has his poems written down, goes to read them, and finds they are not the same: writing is not the best way to record the spoken word.  But Caroline Stacey and Camilla Blunden and their design team have shown that theatre can do the trick – so long as the writer is as good as Subhash Jaireth.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Peter Evans. Sydney Theatre Company at Sydney Theatre, February 4 to March 3, 2012

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 4

Photos by Brett Boardman

Andrea Demetriades

Garn!  Oh do buy a flower off me, Captain

I have so much to write about this quite startling production that I’m a bit afraid of boring you with my excitement. If this happens, you can take it that I’m rather too much like Professor Henry Higgins – so determined to push through his bet with Kim Gyngell’s genuinely sincere Colonel Pickering, and sooo bored as soon as he saw that his Eliza would pass as a duchess at the garden party. Everyone in the audience was absolutely on Andrea Demetriades’ side when she threw the precisely aimed slippers at Marco Chiappi, even including boring old farts like me. Actually I have a suspicion they were meant to miss and fly off-stage, since Chiappi had to kick one off ready for Eliza's line deadpan “Your slippers.” But we were very satisfied that Demetriades hit her target.

Andrea Demetriades and Marco Chiappi

I knew you'd strike me one day

Bernard Shaw was always a favourite playwright of mine, and now I know why. It’s just wonderful to watch a production where Shaw’s special kind of language is recognised thoroughly, showing that this most popular of his plays is not populist and certainly anything but sentimental. Sentimentality was anathema to Shaw. There is no way Eliza will go back to Higgins, and Peter Evans' direction shows why.

So I am happy that the playwright has been properly respected, because this production shows how his dialogue reveals his characters in the context of their society, and in doing so makes universal the complexities of human relationships which ring as true today as when Pygmalion was written, exactly a century ago. For me, as a long-time student of Shaw’s work, it’s great to see how Pygmalion is an important development in Shaw’s capacity to integrate character and polemics, in a direct line from previous plays like Candida, Arms and the Man and Major Barbara, leading 10 years later to his Nobel Prize winning Saint Joan.

The startling quality of Evans’ work is in using an unencumbered open black stage for a work which traditionally has required a realistic representation of the columns of Covent Garden, the bachelor pad at Wimpole Street, the sensible opulence of Mrs Higgins’ morning room, and on film scenes of a royally appointed ballroom. Instead the design here seems to me to have been strongly influenced by the cartoon-like illustrations by Feliks Topolski done for the Penguin publication of Shaw's original screenplay.

Voice over, video projection and the use of laptop and monitors to represent Higgins’ recording equipment, with furniture and props brought on and off as part of the action, bring this production into the post-modern era. By obviously exposing the fact that this is actors performing on a stage, using modern technical devices, while keeping strictly to Shaw’s original dialogue, Evans focusses our attention on the meanings, implicit and explicit, of what the characters say. The result is that the humour is funnier because the implications (for example of David Woods’ on-the-take Alfred Doolittle complaining about being thrust unwillingly into the middle class instead of retaining the freedom of being ‘undeserving poor’) become apparent on many different levels at once. The same is then true for the clashes between Eliza and Higgins, which reach tragic proportions on this stage. This is no My Fair Lady. More like Heartbreak House.

At interval I talked with Bob Ellis who was doubtful, in his characteristic ennui-style manner, about what seemed to be an unnecessary anachronism of laptop and monitors being referred to by Higgins as a phonograph. By the end of the play, however, as Higgins/Marco pursued Eliza/Andrea backstage with a live video camera, catching just a brief shot of her reflection in her dressing room mirror, I saw the purpose of the modern technology. The mirror image was a symbol built up on screen from the early scene at Wimpole Street when Deborah Kennedy’s incisive Mrs Pearce had reported how Eliza was too embarrassed to see herself naked in the bathroom mirror. The use of video established this as a play of symbols, issues and relationships, creating much more meaning in the drama than I have seen before, but which I have always felt needed to be revealed when reading the script.

With casting – Wendy Hughes as the redoubtable Mrs Higgins, Vanessa Downing as terribly conventional Mrs Eynsford Hill, Harriet Dyer as her daffy daughter Clara, Tom Stokes as love-struck Freddy, as well as Deborah Kennedy, David Woods, Kim Gyngell, Marco Chiappi and especially (remember her in Crownies) Andrea Demetriades – being spot-on, costumes exactly right (with modern styles reflecting the intentions of the 1912 originals), lighting, sound and video highly effective, and the visual effects of movement and use of space all working together, I must conclude by saying that I was never even faintly bored – not bloody likely.

The enthusiastic continuing applause supported my feelings, but I didn’t stay for the after-first-night drinks, and didn’t see Bob Ellis again. It would be interesting to know his final thoughts in the dark night.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

 I want to know what I may take away with me.

I dont want to be accused of stealing.

2012: Buried City by Raimondo Cortese

Buried City by Raimondo Cortese.  Alicia Talbot, concept and director.  Urban Theatre Projects at Belvoir Street Theatre Upstairs for Sydney Festival, January 6 – February 6, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 21

Photos by Heidrun Lohr

Top: Effie Nkrumah                                                                        

Below:Meyne Wyatt        

If you think that living down and out among scaffolding on a construction site might be less than exciting, then avoid Buried City for it is a kind of faithful representation described by the author as follows:  

What strikes me about Alicia Talbot’s work is that it is not about presenting a metaphor on stage, or at least it’s not about seeing theatre as a metaphor that transforms the performance into a poetic representation.  It feels much fresher, much more contemporary, in that what is aimed for is the presentation of a new form of theatre based on ritual everydayness.

Well, the director has succeeded in this aim, but unfortunately this is not exactly a new form of theatre.  Eugene O’Neill did it in The Iceman Cometh (1939) and even Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with Ian McKellen and company, which we saw in Sydney in 2010, more powerfully showed life getting nowhere.  It’s just a bit of a pity that director Sean Mathias said Godot is “like an incredible poem or a very beautiful piece of music”, and this is what makes it effective over the generations of theatre goers.  Iceman was rather more like Buried City, in that nothing happens in an apparently naturalistic scene, but O’Neill knew how to make us feel the awful necessity of self-destructive ritual which the characters play out, which also becomes a picture not just of a few drunks in a bar but of America as a nation still in the Great Depression.

Cortese and Talbot show up their artistic problem in describing their work as “rather like a living film set with no close ups”, while also writing about revealing “how as human beings we build temporary bridges and alliances in an effort to have a meaningful purpose to how we live our lives.”  In fact there are some “close ups”: the two that work theatrically are Aboriginal actor Meyne Wyatt and Effie Nkrumah, of Ghanaian descent, particularly in their clash over belief in their different ‘spirits’.  Otherwise, the other characters are predictable, even though much of the action is unfathomable because there is no development of motivation.

The result for me was that I could not see or feel any sense of ritual in this ‘everydayness’, nor much reality.  At the end it was difficult for me to know how to respond.  I felt I should applaud the actors for their work – and they did manage to achieve some moments of dramatic tension – but this was despite the script which really didn’t help them.  They did come back for a second brief curtain call, but I noticed others in the audience also hesitating about clapping, perhaps from the same kind of confusion as I felt.

I guess the intentions of Urban Theatre Projects are worthwhile in principle – to expose the terrible empty space of living without purpose, and I suppose to show that this is a dreadful feature of our society – but this attempt is not ‘much fresher, much more contemporary’ theatre.  In her notes, Alicia Talbot writes The text has been stripped of its conventional theatrical content….  There’s no backstory and almost no personal information provided about any of the characters, no classic plot to speak of….

Perhaps then I am the problem: maybe I am just not fresh and contemporary enough for this play.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: I’m Your Man created and directed by Roslyn Oades

I’m Your Man created and directed by Roslyn Oades.  Presented by Belvoir and Sydney Festival at Belvoir St Theatre Downstairs, January 21 – February 5, 2012

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 21

Billy McPherson


Mohammed Ahmed

Photos by Heidrun Lohr                  

Katia Molino

L to R:
Justin Rosniak, John Shrimpton,
Mohammed Ahmed, Billy McPherson, Katia Molino

Using interviews recorded by boxers and trainers, I’m Your Man is another example in this year’s Sydney Festival of what I have termed ‘factional theatre’.  And, like Force Majeure’s Never Did Me Any Harm (see my review January 11), it works with explosive effect.  Reality bites, theatricality soars – like the ambitions of these ordinary men, typically the ‘little kid from Marrickville’ who ‘travelled the world'.

How it works, though, is a little different from Force Majeure’s ‘dance theatre’.  Katia Molino, the only non-male and non-boxing background performer, explained in conversation with me after the show, that I’m Your Man is acting, not dance. 

In both these shows, the words are the actual recorded words of the interviewees – in this case even more immediate because each actor has headphones in which the original recording is being played, while the actor reproduces the words, mannerisms, voice qualities at a slight delay.  Billy McPherson, who is also a professional boxing trainer, said it took four weeks’ rehearsal to create the characters using the technique, the five actors covering the experiences of seven professional boxers.  But the role of the choreographer, Lee Wilson, was to create a moving total image in the setting of a boxing training ring, but to allow the actors to put the appropriate individual movements to the words, personal style and the story being told by each character.

So I’m Your Man is ‘factional acting theatre’ while Never Did Me Any Harm is ‘factional dance theatre’, two variations of a quite new form of theatre – one which I hope will develop and last well into the future, because it gives theatre a new lease of life in the age of digital media and documentary recording.  There will always be a place for fictional drama, but, as I found watching I’m Your Man, factional theatre reveals to the audience truths about ordinary people’s real lives in a different way from great fictional work.  There is a sense of objectivity in the experience as an observer of others’ experiences that, oddly enough, is more telling about the nature of society than, say, Brecht’s attempts at ‘alienation’ which have had such a looming effect through most of the past century in Western theatre.

The performances of the five actors – Justin Rosniak, John Shrimpton, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, as well as Katia Molino and Billy McPherson – are quite extraordinary.  Physically the sparring, pummelling and other training exercises are done at the kind of speed and intensity which the real boxing training would require.  If this were not achieved, the characterisations would not be believable.  But within the first few minutes of this 70 minute show, as each character takes the floor, I found myself completely drawn into the boxing gym life – something completely outside my own experience.

At the same time, the stories showed how boxing, for these men of varied backgrounds, though with a common bond through poverty and discrimination, provided them with a structure to their lives – even down to the four rules (break the rules of no alcohol, no drugs, no smoking and no swearing and you’ll go back to New Zealand, as one was told by his trainer), and the fifth rule (no sex before a fight).  There’s a discipline here that I hadn’t imagined, and a growth of self-worth in the minds of these ‘Marrickville’ boys when they succeeded in competition.

This is Belvoir Downstairs at its best.

P.S. The seven boxers whose lives are glimpsed in I'm Your Man are Billy 'The Kid' Dib, Wale 'Lucky Boy' Omotoso, Gus Mercurio, Jeff Fenech, Tony Mundine, Wally Carr and the mysterious CJ.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Blood Brothers – The Musical by Willy Russell

Blood Brothers – The Musical Book, Music and Lyrics by Willy Russell.  Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre production directed by Stephen Pike, musical director Sharon Tree, choreographer Jacquelyn Richards, at The Q, January 19-28, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 19

What I liked about this production, which has already won Canberra Critics’ Circle awards in 2011, is that Stephen Pike captured the right style of performance for a script with an interesting mix of intentions.  This showed a knowledgeable approach which drew from his cast a sincerity in their singing and acting which made the musical worthwhile to watch for its meaning as much as for entertainment.

It’s not hard to find some rather different examples on You Tube for contrast, since the show has been produced, on all sorts of stages, just about continuously since its original incarnation in 1981 in the Merseyside Young People's Theatre program      
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Brothers_%28musical%29#cite_note-1 ) .

It attracts comments like This is one of those songs [Tell Me It’s Not True] that is really sad when you hear it on its own, but when you find out the real story behind it, it is actually so upsetting and shocking.  Amazing song, I went to see this show for a school trip, I was crying so much my teacher had to check if I was alright during it. . . AbsolutelyAllybum, as well as a raging argument about Spice Girl Melanie C’s accent because it wasn’t proper scouse since she was actually born across the water in Birkenhead, not in Merseyside in Liverpool.

I’m originally a Londoner, so I couldn’t tell the difference, but I was impressed that Doreen Robinson as accent coach succeeded in gaining consistency, and showing up the characters’ class differences, so the setting seemed real enough to me.  And, after all, class was the central issue that you would expect to find in a theatre-in-education script in Maggie Thatcher’s England, especially in Liverpool.  Keeping the original setting, I think, was the right decision – I’m not sure Blood Brothers in Cronulla would have worked without a major re-write.

Russell’s ‘mix of intentions’ as I see it relates to Blood Brothers’ origins.  On the one hand, it seems, there was a literary source in the 1844 novella The Corsican Brothers by Alexandre Dumas, père, which provided not only the basic melodramatic plot, but allowed the issue of the role of the devil (which fitted with the Liverpool tradition of Catholicism) and immoral behaviour resulting in guilt and inevitable death to be a major theme.  This would be a great source for discussion in the classroom.

On another hand, Russell seems to have wanted to emphasise in a Brechtian manner the inevitable results of capitalist social class warfare.  British drama teachers I met in the 1980s seemed obsessed with a revival of Marxism, and Thatcher was certainly a major force to be opposed.  Interestingly enough, this theme also takes Blood Brothers back to the 19th Century, to a then famous melodrama called The Factory Lad by John Walker (1832).  It also shows connections to Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, especially in the role of the Narrator/Devil, and, in its ending, to Mother Courage and her Children.

On a third hand, psychology is a major theme on two fronts: is Mrs Lyons driven insane by her natural woman’s need to have a child leading to her forcing her social advantage on Mrs Johnstone to gain the twin Edward, then trying to murder the mother when the secret in the locket is revealed, and then revealing to the other twin, Mickey, that Edward loves the girl in common, Linda?  Is this real psychology, or some kind of hangover from 19th Century / Freudian ideas of women’s hysteria?  Or Jungian myth?  Or just a literary device to push the plot along?  I’m not sure what Russell meant here.

But on the second front, there is the important issue of depression and the proper treatment of it.  Mickey’s depression has a real cause – unemployment, desire to support his wife and child, and imprisonment when crime seemed the only alternative.  But is the addiction he develops to the medication, and his uncontrolled and violent behaviour when he stops the medication, true to life?  Here’s another great classroom topic.

Where Stephen Pike and his team, backstage and onstage, got it right was to recognise that Russell has written a work full of symbols.  It is not naturalism – no musical is, in the sense that people don’t normally sing at every emotional opportunity – and so the singing of each song stops the action with just enough Brechtian alienation effect to make the thematic ideas stand out, and this is carried through into the choreography, for example very effectively in presenting the 7 going on 8-year-olds, and then the changes in their movement style as they do a slide show through 15, 16, 17 and 18. 

This was nice work which meant that the melodrama of a kind of OK Corral ending (quite appropriate for grown ups who had played cowboys and Indians with real airguns as children) did not become sentimental.  It allowed us in the audience to be aware of tragedy in real life, without merely wallowing in terrible sadness.  Director Stephen Pike was, like AbsolutelyAllybum’s teacher, considerately checking out that we are ‘alright’. 

Thanks, Stephen.

© Frank McKone, Canberra