2013: Bijou – A Cabaret of Secrets and Seduction by Chrissie Shaw

Chrissie Shaw as Bijou

Bijou – A Cabaret of Secrets and Seduction by Chrissie Shaw.  SmallShows in association with The Street Theatre Made in Canberra, performed by Chrissie Shaw and Alan Hicks (piano), directed by Susan Pilbeam.  At Street Two, Thursday 29th August - Saturday 7th September, 7.30pm; Sunday 1st and 8th September, 4pm, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

The artist Gyula Halász, originally from the ancient Transylvanian town of Brassó,  became the photographer of Paris nightlife where he was known as Brassaï.  In 1933 he published a book including this photo of “Bijou” of the Montmartre cabarets, apparently without ever speaking to the woman.

"Bijou" - photo by Brassaï, Nuits de Paris 1933

Four years of research and writing has produced a life and times of Bijou – fictional, but entirely possible.  Beginning from lines from Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire, which include Elle n’avait gardé que ses bijoux sonores, and entwining into a kind of internal monologue – spoken, mimed and sung by the anonymous “Bijou” – an enormous range of French and German music, Shaw has created perhaps the most significant work of her long stage career in Canberra.

"Bijou" - photo by Brassaï, Nuits de Paris 1933

 Her story begins as she refuses to acknowledge the Brassaï closeup hung on the side wall of our cabaret setting.  He knew nothing of the real person he so rudely photographed.  She blinds him with her hat and recalls the joys and terrors of her life.  The measure of her character was coming across one of the girls she had known at convent school – like her, sexually used and abused by a leading figure in the Church – as an adult: poverty stricken, demoralised and literally looking like death.  Bijou would survive: indeed she would use the men who would use her, and succeed in bringing down the archbishop via a secret tunnel by which he visits her brothel.  He does not recognise her from when she was his 12-year-old sex-object, literally; but one of her “girls” recognises him in all his regalia during Mass, and screams out the truth.

The son born of her illegitimate liaison is brought up by Bijou’s parents, believing Bijou to be his elder sister.  But the play – which this is, rather than the merely entertaining cabaret it first appears to be – is not only about the appalling treatment of women, family shame, and the strength of character needed by a woman to rise above the indignity and even threats to her life, such as when her German nobleman officer “husband” sends her home to Paris after World War I when “he could have killed me” because she knew too much of his affairs.

The awful twist to her story is that her secret son dies in that very war, and we are faced not only with how a mother must carry on despite such a loss, but also with the realisation that this war – the “Great War” to “End all Wars” was a lie, as all wars are.  And we know, as she was photographed in 1933, how true her recognition of this would be.  And still is.

Though for me the first half was played rather too “studied”, in the second half we warm to this woman, from her first true love (who at 21 is recovered by his upper class family and married to the “right” kind of girl) to her acceptance of her life as a permanent denizen of a bar in Montmartre, in her sixties.  She has an odd but interesting relationship with her pianist who, having previously walked out to escape her demands, finally returns to recover her hat.  The Brassaï photo is revealed once more, but we now know the truth behind the picture.

This is a brave work, and a great example of the value of the Made in Canberra project, with excellent quality in the work by Susan Pilbeam as director and dramaturg; Alan Hicks as pianist and in character; Imogen Keen for a wonderful evocative set, reminding me very much of the erstwhile School of Arts Cafe, Queanbeyan; Liz Lea for choreography which recreated the styles of the times, from the 1870s to the 1930s; Gillian Schwab for lighting; Victoria Worley for providing costumes that could peel back the years as Bijou remembered them; and Chrissie Shaw herself for an original work, both personal and socially significant, and for singing and speaking with such vocal range – from the likes of Johann Strauss, various art song composers, Eric Satie, Kurt Weill and, to conclude, to Jean Lenoir’s Parlez-Moi d’Amour – just my thoughts, indeed.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Catalogue of Dreams by Urban Theatre Projects. Preview feature article.

Catalogue of Dreams – devised theatre for the Canberra Centenary 2013 by Urban Theatre Projects, based in Sydney.  Co-Directors: Rosie Dennis and Alicia Talbot.

Performances at Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre.
Previews: Saturday July 13 and Tuesday July 16, 8:15pm
Opening: Wednesday July 17, 8:15pm
Season: Thursdays – Saturdays July 18-27, 8:15pm

Preview by Frank McKone
June 21

The history of Urban Theatre Projects can be seen at
http://urbantheatre.com.au/about/history/
where the group’s 30 years of work explains why Centenary Director Robyn Archer approached Alicia Talbot more than two years ago for a theatre piece from Sydney, as part of the program of works representing a wide range of Australian local communities for the celebration of Canberra, the nation’s capital.

Rosie Dennis tells me that Catalogue of Dreams is ‘contemporary theatre’, collaborative and ‘devised’ – different from the standard convention of an audience watching a performance through a 'fourth wall'.  The audience in the Courtyard Studio will find themselves integrated in the acting space as if they are in the Family Court with the young Canberra people who find themselves in difficult circumstances there.

Though for many theatre-goers in Canberra the tradition of this form of theatre – going back to at least Carol Woodrow’s company Fool’s Gallery in the 1970s – will not be a surprise, the keyword for this production is the Dreams of the title.  As a Centenary piece, there are two aspects which make it clearly ‘different’.

First, instead of showing off something that represents the community where the theatre company resides, such as we saw in the Northern Territory’s contribution, Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui by Jason De Santis, Talbot and Dennis have worked here for some 12 months with local performers starting from issues that face young people dealing with bureaucracy and the law.

The result is a scripted work, now in solid rehearsal as I write, largely written up by Dennis, which is entirely appropriate in the Canberra context – raising concerns for us about the centre of government 100 years on – while also being relevant to audiences around the country.  Anyone who has ever had to explain again and again to, say, Centrelink officers, to police officers, to lawyers or in court hearings who they are, what has happened to them, what they did and why, will appreciate this show.

But rather than this becoming another kind of ‘reality’ show, what Catalogue of Dreams reveals is the disjunct between the playful dreamlike fantasy world which is natural to teenagers, still naive and childlike in so many ways, and the formal situations demanded by the system of laws and rules of behaviour which constitute the ‘adult’ world.  Here is a universal theme, applicable to any human society as Wulamanayuwi showed us in the Tiwi Islands.  For anyone caught up in fraught circumstances, the experience is surreal – as it will be for the audience in the Courtyard space when this drama opens on 17th July.

In performance, the work is essentially image-driven – not so much in the form of multi-media presentations but rather through creating images in the minds of those observing through text and story, voice-over and devices such as masks.  In this sense, it seems to me, this Urban Theatre project is not so different from the long tradition of street theatre going back to the commedia dell’arte of centuries ago, with its combination of humour and absurdity, now in a modern context.

Though personally I’ll be travelling – perhaps following my own fantasies – while Catalogue of Dreams is on stage, I feel disappointed to miss what should be a fascinating and significant production.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Opal Vapour by Jade Dewi Tyas Tungaal

Opal Vapour  Dance created and performed by Jade Dewi Tyas Tungaal.  Composer and music performer, Ria Soemardjo. Set design, Paula van Beek. The Street Theatre, Canberra, June 14-15, 2013

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 14

A mesmerising, slow, sinuous dance begins as a body lying on a plinth.  Covering shrouds are gently removed by a musician who has entered from the audience tinkling tiny bells as if in mourning.  But a hand begins to dance in isolation, lit from below, and slowly, the body comes to life, reproduced as a writhing shadow on a screen.  It is an awakening.

The figure remains at floor level for a long period, seeming to go through a series of reptile and animal-like incarnations, until finally rising to standing human form, dressing in clothing at first simple in style and then more sophisticated and formal.

This life goes through several stages, including what seems to be a period of mental difficulties back writhing on the floor – perhaps finally attaining a peaceful death.

I am not qualified to judge or analyse the details of the choreography, but found this work interesting in concept, combining the creators’ Indonesian heritage with Western modern dance.  For me the slow and steady movement was absorbing, rather in the way that I might look at a large painting and gradually become aware of all its different elements.

The music is Javanese in style – some gamelan, some as if the sounds of dry grass and wind, some sung in haunting notes, some bowed on a stringed instrument, perhaps reminiscent of the Hindu origins of the culture that we saw in much of the dance in the body shapes, hand and eye movements.  Both performers were precise and disciplined.

This is an original work, not so much cross-cultural but integrating elements of the Australian and Indonesian cultures to which these Melbourne performers belong.  Interesting and worthwhile to see.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Phèdre by Jean Racine

Catherine McClements - Phèdre

Juli Forsyth - Oenone

Bert LaBonte - Théramène

Edmund Lembke-Hogan - Hippolytus

Abby Earl - Aricia

Phèdre by Jean Racine (1639-99), trans. Ted Hughes.  Bell Shakespeare directed by Peter Evans; designed by Anna Cordingley; composer: Kelly Ryall.  Sydney Opera House Playhouse June 6-29, 2013

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 12

Peter Evans has created an intense theatre experience of the tragedy of unfortunate misunderstanding and deliberate but understandable intrigue which, in this high drama, leads to deaths – by guilty suicide, pride and self-destructive bravado, and insurmountable mental stress.  Though the family concerned is of Ancient Greek royalty, mortals whose forebears are Olympian gods, it is not difficult to relate this story and the psychology to any modern family.  For Queen Phèdre this was absolutely her Annus Horribilis.  For our Queen Elizabeth this was 1992, just five years before the accidental death of Princess Diana.

For Bell Shakespeare, Evans brings a new style as well as a new interest in plays beyond the Shakespeare canon, this time from France where Racine was the major tragedian of the later 17th Century.  The experiment is a thorough success.

Be prepared to be frightened, as the theatre suddenly blacks out and loud alarums sound, at a level and clarity that the best of modern electronic sound systems can produce.  Attention is at once fixed and focussed on the spotlit unmoving figures on stage whose words, spoken with precision of imagery and emotion, tell us the story as each character sees it.  This is the style some call ‘presentational theatre’ which may well have been how Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed, and was certainly the way the main characters were presented in Ancient Greek tragedies by, say, Sophocles or Euripides.

But Racine did not use the relieving comedy of Macbeth’s porter, nor the change of pace of a singing and dancing chorus as the Greeks had done.  His play takes the myth – of King Theseus (Marco Chiappi), his second wife Phèdre (Catherine McClements), her step-son Hippolytus (Edmund Lembke-Hogan) and Theseus’ beautiful young captive Aricia (Abby Earl) – into an ever-deepening vortex of disaster: a black hole indeed for the King who was so famous for having succeeded in destroying the Minotaur with the help of Phèdre’s sister Ariadne, who provided the thread by which he was guided back to safety out of the labyrinth.

Racine’s ‘chorus’ consists of just four ordinary mortals – Oenone, Phèdre’s nurse (Julie Forsyth); Théramène, Hippolytus’ adviser (Bert LaBonte); and two messengers Ismène (Olivia Monticciolo) and Panope (Caroline Lee).  Each has an essential role in this drama as commentator, analyst and critical adviser, and Evans’ direction nicely judges the fine points of the relationships of each in the status positions they hold.

The result is that, in what is essentially story-telling with minimum action, relying almost entirely on quality of voice and spoken expression, every actor needs equal skills – and every actor comes up to the mark.

Yet it has to be said that Catherine McClements, Julie Forsyth and Bert LaBonte stood out for me, perhaps because their parts were given more emotional qualities in Ted Hughes’ script.

Hippolytus’ pride in self-restraint compared with his father’s womanising and monster-killing seems to soften his character, making him more hesitant in revealing his love for Aricia until the situation forces him into action, and making it surprising when Théramène describes how, reckless and without restraint, Hippolytus faces up to the monster created by Neptune which kills him – as Theseus had asked Neptune to do.  Hughes’ modern poetic language – almost pentameter in form – I think made it more difficult for Lembke-Hogan to establish the strength of aggression which comes through Racine’s basically four-beat couplet lines in French. 

A nice example is when Hippolytus exclaims, in response to Phèdre’s revelation of her love for him:

Dieux!  qu’est-ce que j’entends?  Madame, oubliez-vous
Que Thésée est mon père, et qu’il est votre époux?

For the other characters Hughes’ English heightens the poetic to good effect, and in the end, after LaBonte’s wonderful dramatic telling of how Hipploytus died and of Aricia’s mourning for her true love, we feel all the sympathy we should for the young couple, and satisfied that Theseus at last recognises his mistakes and gives Aricia her due.

The whole evening, in its almost monumental set yet with characters in modern dress, is fascinating for the linkage created beween the ancient and mythical, the Renaissance and Romantic, and the modern psychological life.  An intense experience, not to be missed – or easily forgotten.




© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: The Maids by Jean Genet

Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert
All photos by Lisa Tomasetti

 The Maids by Jean Genet, trans. by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton.  Directed by Benedict Andrews; designer: Alice Babidge; video designer: Sean Bacon; composer: Oren Ambarchi; lighting designer: Nick Schlieper; sound designer: Luke Smiles.  Sydney Theatre Company, June 4 – July 20, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 12

Watching The Maids is terrifying enough.  Daring to write a review ....

But, like Solange, in the end I have to follow through.

Isabelle Huppert as Solange, Cate Blanchett as Claire in rehearsal

It would be easy to say the performances of Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Huppert and Elizabeth Debicki go without saying.  But that would only be because their extraordinary command of their voices seemed to come so easily.  It takes a little while to catch the details in Huppert’s French-accented English, but the new translation leaves no doubt about Solange’s meaning.

Huppert creates a delightful, at times almost whimsical character, and therefore all the more tragic in the end.  Blanchett’s Claire was exquisite – a character as demanding of her sister as the Mistress is of Claire. 

I could say these two were as I expected, considering the last performance I saw by Blanchett in Uncle Vanya and Huppert’s films over the years, but Debicki’s Mistress was an equal to her more experienced colleagues’ quality.

The point made – that Claire and Mistress were parallel personalities in different universes – was beautifully, even magically, reinforced in the similarities in movement, voice, physical likeness and moody energy of these two actrices.  For visual and emotional display, the ripping off their stands of the huge array of dresses and furs in an enormous flurry of frustration was a great example.

Elizabeth Debicki as Mistress

When Claire declared that she was exhausted!, there was laughter in recognition – even in sympathy.  But by the time the Mistress had taken us through her wild destructive phase, and Claire demanded her tea of Solange – the tea laced with Nembutal meant for the Mistress whose role Claire had now taken on for real, no longer as a game – we found ourselves equally exhausted.  Not laughing, just applauding.

There is much more than the acting to applaud in this production.  There is the taking of new risks: in bringing a play of the immediate post-war 1940s to a modern Australian audience, and in the originality of the use of live camera and amplified voice.

The latter was a highly successful device (in contrast to many multimedia failures I have witnessed in other shows).  Here the screen above the action brings the details of facial expression, of objects of significance, and oddly humorous angles which enhance and often enlighten – including for those of us, like me, squeezed by massive bookings months ago into the Circle.  The scenes in the almost off-stage bathroom became intriguing with directly observed glimpses of private behaviour selectively showing in wide shot or close-up at the same time.  Our perception – both of what we were literally seeing and what was really going on – became part of the ‘game’.  Here was a technical device being used to elucidate the concept of different universes in parallel.

Technology, which was not available or probably even thought of by Genet in 1947, has today brought us to the understanding of ideas like ‘quantum leap’ in physics and how there may be copies or versions of ourselves existing in different universes at the same time, but never accessible from one to another.

This is, for me at least, what brought this play into the modern era.  In Genet’s day, and in Europe especially, the basically feudal tradition of servants as trusted retainers, almost family of the autocratic rich, was still close enough for The Maids to be immediately relevant (and why I wrote actrices rather than ‘actressess’).  Even decades later, friends of mine were employed by ultra-rich Europeans as chef and housekeeper.  They came back disgusted after a year, with stories like being sent to Harrods to pick up up a dress, worth only £10,000, or on Majorca (or maybe Capri) having to prepare banquets daily which were hardly touched, but then not being allowed to pass perfectly good food on to local poverty stricken villagers.  It must be thrown away, they were ordered.

Perhaps the final straw for this couple was when a ‘radical’ daughter, of a similar age to them, visited the family.  The daughter talked to the couple on an equal basis, but was then instructed by her parents not to talk to the servants, or she would be banished.  What she did, I don’t know, but my friends came back to our parallel universe in Australia.

But, of course, Genet’s maids had nowhere else to go, no other employment (except, one supposes, in another placement just as bad as the last) – in other words no freedom from their low position in the status power game.  Maybe, a lesson might be learnt by a certain Australian mining family whose Mistress has suggested paying workers $2 a day, and whose children (let alone any maids we do not get to hear about) are struggling to keep up their position. 

But that kind of family’s story is perhaps more relevant in my following review of another French play – Racine’s Phèdre, which I saw in the same extraordinary day in Sydney.

It may not be easy, considering the bookings, but if you can get to see The Maids the trip will be well worth the effort.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Cate Blanchett (Claire) and Isabelle Huppert (Solange) in performance

Isabelle Huppert and Cate Blanchett

Elizabeth Debicki as Mistress

The Maids set in performance (upstage bathroom blacked out at this point), bird's-eye view on screen
showing Cate Blanchett (Claire) and Isabelle Huppert as Solange wearing rubber gloves

 

Solange (Isabelle Huppert) watches from outside the apartment (shown on screen)
as Claire (Cate Blanchett) is left holding the poisoned tea that Mistress has refused to drink

2013: The Major Minor Party by Version 1.0

The Major Minor Party group devised by Version 1.0, presented by Canberra Theatre Centre and The Centenary of Canberra, at the Playhouse May 29 – June 1, 2013.

Performers: Drew Fairley, Irving Gregory, James Lugton, Jane Phegan, Kym Vercoe.
Dramaturgy: Chris Ryan, Dr Yana Taylor.  Creative Development: Dr David Williams.  Video: Sean Bacon.  Sound: Paul Prestipino.  Lighting: Frank Mainoo.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 29

http://www.versiononepointzero.com/index.php/about/more/micro_lecture_by_david_williams : Theorising practice and practising theory: making performance with version 1.0 : A micro-lecture by David Williams.

I was wondering on what basis I should judge The Major Minor Party, until I read David Williams’ “micro lecture”. He is “a founding member of version 1.0, and has co-devised and produced all of the company's work since 1998 [and] is currently an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, and has lectured in theatre at UWS and UNSW. He has scholarly articles published in Australasian Drama Studies, Performance Paradigm, and Research in Drama Education, and his writings about contemporary performance appear regularly in RealTime. David is on the Board of Arts on Tour, and is a member of Performance Space’s Arts Consultation Group.”

His lecture begins: “We (version 1.0) start a new work not knowing what it is.”  My review begins: “And they still don’t know.”

This wasn’t the case, as I recall, with their perhaps most famous work CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) (2004) when they ripped apart the children overboard issue with a surgeon’s precision.  This time their target – “Sex, Religion and The State” – is too broad, too diffuse.  It suffers from being too obviously group devised, needing, I suggest, the focus that a single writer might offer.

At the same time, the performances are very precisely acted, so the audience was kept firmly engaged throughout the 90 minute show.  Yet Williams’ words: What is the shared passion that brings us here together? Might passion be uncertain? Can I be passionate and uncertain at the same time? I don't know, but I'm thinking hard about it; if I think hard enough I can make it so, explain to me why I felt that the show was a bit thin, the content of too many items was not well developed, and the transitions between scenes left a sense of dramatic disunity.

The strongest scene, in fact, became almost a parody of Williams’ words about “sharing passion”.  As a sort of climax, the actors approach the audience – naming themselves with their real names and as members of Version One point Zero – exhorting us to join them and donate money.  Fortunately, before anyone actually hands up their credit card, the group impressively sings of the passion of Version 1.0, sounding very much like a Hillsong Church meeting, retreating slowly upstage.  As the singing fades, in a side conversation a member thinks out loud “If we were a church, we could claim tax exemption”, and another responds “So we should become a church instead of a party?” – and at last we saw real satire.

It just took too long to get there.

William’s lecture (which of course the audience is unaware of) gives the impression, quoting the inevitable Roland Barthes among several other theatre theorists, that this kind of group searching for what sound like “known knowns, unknown knowns and even unknown unknowns” is original, contemporary or experimental.

My experience and research suggests that Erwin Piscator began this kind of work in his Piscator-Bühne Studio in 1927 “to provide a framework within which the techniques of political theater could be explored and developed”.  (The Political Theatre – A History 1914-1929 by Erwin Piscator, Avon 1978; translated by Hugh Rorrison from Das Politische Theater Albert Schultz Verlag, Berlin, 1929).  And there were many group devised companies particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, including here in Canberra.

Which allows me to segue (I love that word) neatly into the relevance of the show to Canberra’s centenary.  The words of Lady Denman are quoted as bookends, but the content of the scenes (such as argument between Family First and the Australian Sex Party, and the connection between Cory Bernardi and right wing religion)  and the theme of the linking scenes (on voluntary euthanasia) had no special significance in the Canberra we live in, or on whether we have achieved the “beautiful city of our dreams”.

The issues were all about Federal Parliament and legislation, but even here there were opportunities to work in many more of the minor parties which were listed at the beginning of the show but forgotten about later.  In fact Canberra itself could have added much more spice with stories of the Sun-Ripened Tomato Party, the Party Party Party Party, and the infamous Dennis Stevenson who was elected for two terms when he opposed self-government, and then camped out in his Legislative Assembly office.

The intention of The Major Minor Party to raise the issue of religious influence in politics was clearly sincere, but I doubt this show will have the impact that CMI had without more focussed writing and stronger satire.




© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: HOW TO BE (or not to be) LOWER by Max Cullen

HOW TO BE (or not to be) LOWER written and performed by Max Cullen.  Directed by Caroline Stacey; scenic and visual design by Maragarita Georgiadis; lighting design by Nick Merrylees; sound design by Seth Edwards-Ellis.  The Street Theatre, Canberra, May 25 – June 1, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 25

There’s a lot in Max Cullen’s portrayal of Lennie Lower that’s a sad reflection on ‘traditional’ Australia.  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for me, I arrived in this godforsaken country in 1955, some eight years after Lennie Lower died.  I never heard anyone mention his name until I read the adverts for this show.  I was therefore naturally intrigued by the prospect of Max Cullen’s writing and performing How to be....

Unfortunately, I am now rather less intrigued by Lennie Lower than I thought I might be, though – fortunately – rather more intrigued by Max Cullen’s writing and performance (and by the directing and design).  Despite the fact that Lower’s famous novel Here’s Luck is apparently still in print, I can see why no-one ever told me to immerse myself in wit limited so much to obvious puns and occasional flashes of original word-play.

Cullen’s extensive research and collection of audio-visual materials certainly placed Lower into the context of the 1920s and 1930s in a jingoistic, maudlin, poverty-stricken Australia.  However, it would be interesting to see Barry Dicken’s Lonely Lennie Lower (1982) as a comparison.  Unfortunately, of course, I missed it then and the production 20 years later at Melbourne’s La Mama, where it was described as “the acclaimed Barry Dickins play Lennie Lower.... This tragic comedy based on the real life story of comic journalist Lennie Lower...the foremost comic journalist of the depression era, Lennie Lower, is alone, drunk and crying...Lower jokes and entertains as he reflects on life as a newspaper 'contributor' at a time when the term 'freelance' was as unheard of as 'politically correct'.”

Max Cullen’s performance shows Lower alone, drunk and trying to pull his fragmented mental life into some kind of line, through the constant need to spout out one-liners and puns – and Cullen’s skills as an actor are amply demonstrated – but I was left not being sure what Cullen, the writer, was aiming at.

In his version, it was hard to know whether we are to see the ‘play’ as being performed by Cullen or by Lower.  The script deliberately makes explicit the fact that we are seeing a ‘play’, but Cullen does not seem to come out of the character of Lower when making this point.

It’s also not clear how we are to respond to the stories that the character Lower tells.  Did Frank Packer really pay Lower £100 per week for his comic columns in the Daily Telegraph and the Women’s Weekly?  And if so, are we to take it as tragic that Lower appears to have drunk it all, when the average wage of the day was about £3?  Are we to see Lower as a significant writer brought down by the unedifying commercialism of the likes of Packer.  If you read just the beginning of Here’s Luck – which you can do at http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/lowerl.html#heresluck – you might see him as a much better writer than he appears in Cullen’s pastiche of snippets from Lower’s life.

On opening night, I thought it was interesting that the audience, though clearly committed to supporting Max Cullen – cheering him on as he first appeared – and though ready to laugh mildly at Lower’s puns, did not respond with great warmth to the play.  Perhaps this is, unfortunately for Cullen, because this was a Canberra audience with different expectations at The Street Theatre than, say, a Dubbo audience at the RSL might have.

I’m not sure, just as I wasn’t sure about the ending.  Surely it was Lennie Lower, not Max Cullen, who took such a diffident bow, but it seemed inconsistent with the character we had seen before – or were we to take it that it was an inconsequential ending to a life without real meaning.  But what, then, was the meaning of the digger’s hat spotlighted at the very end, rather than Cullen himself appearing out of character for a curtain call?  Especially when Lower had deserted from the armed forces on the three occasions he had enlisted, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography (at http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lower-leonard-waldemere-lennie-7251 ).

So I end up with mixed feelings, fortunate or unfortunate as that may be.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Prime Time produced by Shortis & Simpson

Prime Time produced by Shortis & Simpson, with the Worldly Goods Choir.  Director: Catherine Langman; music and lyrics by John Shortis; writer/dramaturg: John Romeril; set and costumes designer: Imogen Keen; audio visual production: Robert Bunzli and Evan Croker.  The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, May 23 – June 1, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

The trouble with history is that themes (or ‘tropes’, as they are termed nowadays) are only apparent in hindsight.  What happens in reality is mostly accidental.  Writing a show with 27 main characters, each one of whom is unpredictably replaced by the next, is true to history, but makes for somewhat disjointed drama.

The series of songs, from Julia Gillard to Edmund Barton, form the bones of a skeleton, for which John Romeril provides some ligaments via a story of a couple who married in the Rose Garden, while travelling when young, and years later have returned to find that Old Parliament House is now the Museum of Australian Democracy.  On tour, they discover not only stories about our Prime Ministers, but even something of their own histories.

Without this back story, the songs would make something like a revue rather than a drama with a spine, but I thought the ligaments and bones needed a lot more fleshing out to turn this show into a full living history.  Though Romeril’s writing is effective in creating the relationship between John Henry Stahl, of German origin, and Roberta Quinn, of Irish background, and these roles are played skilfully and sensitively by Nick Byrne and Kate Hosking, their fictional story remains peripheral to the non-fiction history.  Their story is not of sufficient significance to take the dramatic lead.  Perhaps something like a fictional Who Do You Think You Are? could connect characters in their family stories to the stories of the Prime Ministers.

The strength of Prime Time is in John Shortis’ songs, based on research which reveals events, characteristics and quirks of each of the PMs, though necessarily with a bit of a skip through the very short careers of Francis Forde (1945), Arthur Fadden (1941) and Earle Page (1939).  Of special note, in my view, were the letter written by Joe Lyons to his wife Edith about the horrific scenes he witnessed travelling around the nation in the Great Depression years, and the final scene showing Edmund Barton huddled over his billy and frypan, cooking all alone on a tiny kerosene stove in his attic room, while presiding over the first years of Parliament in Melbourne and establishing the administrative basics of the democracy of the ordinary people which we still enjoy.

And who will forget the women of the Worldly Goods Choir singing of the need for international arbitration in opposition to Billy Hughes’ attempts to introduce conscription in World War I – to send their sons to kill other mothers’ sons.

It was a successful idea, again from John Romeril, to play the history ‘in backwards chronology’ and to use the choir and the principal singers – Byrne, Hosking, Shortis and especially his partner Moya Simpson – as the electorate, rather like an Ancient Greek Chorus, and to have the married couple agreeing to differ in their political positions, based upon a true story of a couple married in the Rose Garden who presented their guests with T-shirts with Rudd on one side and Abbott on the other – which could be worn with whichever one you prefer to the front or back.

For me, the interest finally lay in appreciating something I hadn’t thought about directly before.  As the history moved back in time, the tendency of Shortis and Simpson to make fun of the political figures – for which they are justifiably famous in the Canberra cultural scene – changed to a more serious tone, as we faced up to World War II with John Curtin, the Depression with Joe Lyons, the despair of World War I and finally the demands made of Edmund Barton – “a  learned man with the unenviable task of leading a motley bunch of ambitious politicians, whom he named his Cabinet of Kings”.  Where is his kind of unassuming leadership now?  And what has happened to the sense of commitment to democratic government throughout the community?

This new venture of Shortis & Simpson once more stretches the boundaries of their work, both in a new strength in their musicianship - especially in suiting the music to the historical period of each PM -  and in taking on a study of more than a century of history – and in doing so making their mark in a significant way on our cultural understanding in the year of the Centenary of Canberra.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Frankenstein by Nick Dear

Frankenstein by Nick Dear.  An Ensemble Theatre production presented by The Street, Canberra, May 7-11, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 7

My favourite book right now is the 802 page work by Harvard Professor of Psychology, Steven Pinker – The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.  Having just seen Dear’s version of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel – and Lee Jones’ gripping performance of the ‘monster’ – I’m glad Pinker has the evidence to prove his case.  We might look back on ‘Gothic Horror’ as just another blood-curdling theatrical and literary genre, but there’s more to Shelley’s story than you might think.

But first, to this production.  What a knockout blow to modern sensibilities!  How should a Sensitive New Age Guy respond without getting snagged by his willingness to suspend his disbelief?  But snagged I certainly was by this sorry tale.  Except at the tail end, when it seemed to me it should have been set in Antarctica where the memory of Scott’s ill-fated expedition would have made Frankenstein’s monster’s mania for reaching the pole even more horrible. 

But then Dear is British, so I suppose Go North Young Man has to be the thing to do.

The set (and presumably costumes) by Simone Romaniuk, the on-stage amplified cello played by Heather Stratfold (music composed by Elena Kats-Chernin), the lighting by Nick Higgins, the soundscape by someone not mentioned, and the direction by Mark Kilmurry were all fascinating.  The core approach was highly stylised, in the visuals and the audio, and equally in the movement and acting by the cast: Katie Fitchett, Andrew Henry, Lee Jones, Brian Meegan, Michael Rebetzke, Michael Ross, Olivia Stambouliah.

(Despite being New Age, though, I do find it annoying when a company, especially and surprisingly the Ensemble, has minimum information about the cast only on the web.  I want a proper program, please.)

There was never any doubt that we were watching a carefully designed piece of theatre, yet despite the ‘alienation effect’, it was easy to be drawn into the emotional effect at the same time.  It was quite extraordinary to find myself ‘believing’ in these characters’ dilemmas from the capital 'R' Romantic past.

This is where Pinker sneaks back into the story.  In the half-century leading up to Mary Shelley’s writing, English language books published per decade rose from about 2000 to more than 7000 (after being zero in 1475).  In that same half-century, the abolition of judicial torture (that is, torture ordered by a court) spread rapidly throughout European countries, leaving – by Shelley’s time – only Spain, the Vatican, Portugal and Russia still officially torturing people.  Pinker does point out that England still executed people, but had introduced the more humane method of drop-hanging, which "instantly renders the victim unconscious”, in 1783, when public hangings were also abolished.  He goes on to say “The display of corpses on gibbets was abolished in 1834, and by 1861 England’s 222 capital offenses had been reduced to 4.”  One of Pinker’s arguments is that the spread of the printed word, and particularly the ability to read, combined with the rising popularity of fiction in the novel, was a real factor in changing attitudes against the acceptance of violence.

His study of the evolutionary background to human violence (this is a scientific work, not a New Age touchy-feely fuzzy waffly book) suddenly came to mind.  Frankenstein works because Shelley (and Dear) understood and have laid before us the very motivations that Pinker explains in neurological brain studies.  At the very time that attitudes were changing, Shelley got the story right.  This play is enlightening: in a couple of hours the artist in Shelley and Dear reveals directly what it has taken me several weeks of reading the scientist Pinker to understand.  And I’m still only on Page 603!  199 more to go!

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: 35º 17 South - Gaming Theatre by Karla Conway. Interview feature article.

35º 17 South created by Karla Conway.  Canberra Youth Theatre at the National Gallery of Australia Sculpture Garden, Saturday April 13 to Saturday April 20, 2013.

Frank McKone in discussion with Karla Conway.

When I reviewed 35º 17 South (on Canberra Critics' Circle blog and this blog Sunday 14 April, which you may like to refer to as you read on) I found myself asking questions about drama games, audience involvement, risks, and results of experimenting with new technology.  After being present for just the very beginning of a work that continued over a whole week, I was keen to meet the creator, artistic director of Canberra Youth Theatre, Karla Conway, to find some answers.

What I discovered is a new kind of theatre.  In recent times theatrical forms have been merging in new ways: I have been particularly interested in the new forms of Dance Theatre, for example.  But here we have “location gaming theatre”.  As Karla explained the process of creating the work and told stories from the experiences of the 400 people who took part over the week, I bit by bit saw my understanding come into focus.

Gaming Theatre sets up a new relationship between the audience (or “players”), the actors, and the location (in this case the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Australia).

A starting point for discussion was whether 35º 17 South was really no different from a large-group drama improvisation workshop, of the kind often used in drama education and theatre rehearsals.  Were the paying “audience” simply participants alongside the CYT “actors”, all improvising in an unstructured way on a theme of refugee issues?  In this kind of process, I would have established the theme via some kind of stimulus in an acting space, let the improvisation develop, and follow up with a reflection and debriefing session to explore what happened and what the participants learned about themselves and the theme.

But, no, explained Karla.  She was the author of a complete narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end.  In fact she holds the copyright on that creation, which in its final form looks rather like a flow chart, with optional pathways at certain points, rather than a single-spine narrative.  The structure is supplied by the game, which is played by the audience – that is why they are called “players” rather than being a static observing “audience”.  They pay for a theatre experience as they actively play the game, rather than for a conventional passive absorbing of theatre.

Each player in Gaming Theatre has the same objective – to complete the narrative and find out what happens in the end – just as an audience member has in a conventional play-watching situation.  What the game provides are multiple possible choices after the first task (counting the bolts on the Diamond sculpture), taking each player through the flow chart on an individual set of pathways.  This process is dramatically enhanced by the basic scripting of each of the characters they meet, allowing the actors to improvise, strictly in character, in response to each player’s questions or expectations of them.  One of the major successes of the week’s work for the Canberra Youth Theatre as a training institution was that so many players were surprised and very impressed by the actors’ maintaining their characters so well in the face of unknown and often highly unexpected demands made by players who were trying to work out how they, as refugees, could find the shelter they needed.

It is at this point that I recognised what is new in this form of theatre, especially compared with experiments in the past about changing the relationship between the audience and the actors.  In the Open Theatre of the 1970s, or action taking place in the auditorium or the foyer, or in street theatre of all kinds, including all those different arrangements of audience participation, the actors are in control.

In this Gaming Theatre, the players are in control, making their own decisions as they seek out the codes to take them further, and decide what to say to an actor and how to respond to the actor’s character’s decision in return.  All this takes place within the game structure with its explicit and sometimes hidden rules, and so the theatrical experience is much more like playing out situations in real life than can happen in conventional theatre.

Here it is important to recognise the crucial role played by the writers of the code for the game, the Academy of Interactive Entertainment team, who worked over a lengthy period to make the game work consistently with Conway’s original narrative.  This was more than a clerical exercise, of course, but a creative work complementary to hers.  (I didn’t ask who holds the software copyright!)  As Karla pointed out, one of her disappointments in theatre of recent times has been the use of multi-media which is no more than illustration or distraction, instead of being fully integrated into the creation of the drama.

Here, the gaming code, the use of the tablets to find one’s way, and the narrative are all integral to the action and the player’s sense of satisfaction with this new form of theatre.   The location might be seen as more peripheral, since the main achievement here was to open up the players’ and the actors’ awareness of the artworks.  I suppose the only other way to integrate the location would have been to do what SBS did with Go Back to Where You Came From – and play the game for real starting in Afghanistan and ending up in Canberra!

But something like that reality happened, on occasions that Karla observed.  In the story there is a baby – represented physically by a doll – in “radioactive” mist.  To rescue the baby (and save themselves from the radioactivity) a player must find the code as quickly as possible and move to the next position with a digital “saved child”.

However, one player, male, took the doll physically to the actor who was a black market trader and tried to sell it to him to obtain other resources, like a weapon, to get further along the road to safety.  How’s that for something Brechtian.  Mother Courage and her Children you could say.  After negotiations, in character, the baby was returned to its “radioactive” location for another player to find it.

But then (I think on a different day), a woman picked the baby up to comfort it, refusing to hand it to the nearby actors because, she said, she couldn’t trust them to treat it properly.  So the actors had to improvise, within their various characters, bringing in others to help, until they established trust enough for the player to hand over the baby – so it again could be returned to its location.  So there you go – The Caucasian Chalk Circle in the Sculpture Garden, except that empathy provided a positive solution to who owned the child, rather than the threat of cutting it in half.

Other stories too showed how deeply players became immersed in the ethics of the drama and the emotional effects of the situation of being a refugee.  There was no formal de-brief for the players, just as they would have left a conventional theatre having to work out for themselves whether it was right or naive of Mother Courage’s daughter Kattrin to bang the drum which warned the village below of impending attack, from the very soldiers who then killed her as a traitor.  But then, Karla reported, every player completed the game, and so reached the safety of the Skyspace – both as a player in the role of refugee, and in a different sense, as a person experiencing theatre.

Not only, then, is Gaming Theatre an exciting original new form, especially for the young for whom apps and tapping tablet screens is entirely normal, but – in the right author’s hands – is as valid and powerful as any other good quality theatre.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change by Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change by Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts.  Presented by Queanbeyan City Council at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, directed by Stephen Pike; musical director: Lucy Bermingham; choreographer: Annette Sharpe; set designer: Brian Sudding; costume designer: Christine Pawlicki; lighting: Hamish McConchie; sound: Evan Wythes.  Wednesday – Sunday April 24 – May 5, 2013-04-25

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 24

This is an up-front musical, quite explicit on matters sexual (and a few other bodily functions), very American culturally speaking, mostly very funny and occasionally touching.

It’s also very well-known, having reached Queanbeyan after productions in more than 400 other cities in at least USA, Britain, Israel, Mexico, Spain, Holland, Hungary, Czech Republic, South Korea, Italy, Brazil, South Africa, Ireland, Argentina, Germany, Hong Kong, mainland China and Taipei, as well as Sydney and its original run of 5003 performances in the off-Broadway Westside Theatre.  This production certainly stands up very well in this company, if the various You Tube efforts I’ve viewed represent the standard.

First is the music.  Lucy Bermingham on the grand, Vanessa Driver, violin, and Jason Henderson, bass, captured each of the American musical styles perfectly for each song, and for the interludes as scenes shifted from one vignette to the next.  Quality here gave the edge to the singing, lifting the performers – Dave Evans, Jenna Roberts, Christine Forbes, Krystle Innes, Nick Valois and Greg Sollis – often to an operatic level, which gave the stereotyped characters in many scenes an extra dimension.

Add to the music a wonderful sense of comedy in Annette Sharpe’s choreography, and precision in the timing which showed Stephen Pike’s strong direction, and we ended up with a show better than might be expected from what is, after all, not much more than a series of revue sketches.  The greatest depth, though, welled up unexpectedly – but wonderfully – in the non-singing scene “The Very First Dating Video of Rose Ritz”.  Jenna Roberts was awarded a special round of applause for her characterisation showing guts and integrity in a very vulnerable Rose.

At a different end of the spectrum was the performance of Ted, the bear, as he cheerfully but in a certain sense rather sadly waved us goodbye, manipulated by Nick Valois, as the father reverting to childhood.  Very nice work.

I think a reason behind the success of this Australian production is that we are not Americans.  There was some discussion during interval about the decision to use American accents, but in the second half the culture, perhaps especially of the American Jewish characters, is so specific that Australian voices just would not do.  What we have to offer, instead, is a view of these characters from the outside looking in, and a picture of the absurdity of their behaviour against what we would expect in our culture.

The result is more than a humorous reflection on love and marriage, but a more biting level of comedy approaching satire.  In other words, more satisfying theatre rather than mere light-hearted entertainment.  Some of those You Tube videos seem to present the latter and miss out on the former.  Much of the script and the libretto can easily fall into the guffaw laughter trap, but scenes in this production – such as Christine Forbes’ country and western “Always a Bridesmaid” and Dave Evans’ and Jenna Roberts’ “Marriage Tango” – showed what an Australian perspective could bring to this American life.

So gird your loins and see for yourself at The Q.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Pea! by David Finnigan

Pea! by David Finnigan.  Serious Theatre – director: barb barnett; designer:Gillian Schwab; audio designer: Seth Edwards-Ellis.  At The Street Theatre, April 20-27, 2013, 10am and 2pm.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 24

If there is one lesson which should be taught to all young Australian children, surely it must be irreverence.  Pea! does it nicely.

On the other hand, children’s theatre must treat its trusting audience with respect – as indeed should all theatre.  Pea! does this too.

The Hive Program at The Street Theatre encourages new writing and, with dramaturgical assistance, offers a season on stage.  David Finnigan’s work in Pea! is perhaps the most assured and sophisticated product that I have seen so far from The Hive.

He has taken the moral behind the Hans Christian Andersen fable of the princess and the pea – that those absorbed in their own self-importance should be brought down to earth – and turned it on its head.  “Princess” is no more than the name given Gwendoline by the wolves who kindly brought her up when her parents had abandoned her in the Wild Wood of the West.  Gwen satisfies Prince Gregor’s pea-brained mother’s Princess Test, which she learned from daytime Royal Weddings television, precisely because Gwen is not full of self-importance but only wishes to save everyone from the Dragon-with-One-Nostrilled-Snout.

Gregor is certainly lucky to be taken in hand by a woman who can look after herself and sleep as comfortably on the ground as on 40 mattresses – and can solve the problem of how to use the pea to stop up the One-Nostrilled Snout.  The whole kingdom is saved as the fiery Dragon’s internal gas pressure forces explosive farts from his other end, and he flies home in shame to his mother.  It wasn’t just the children who could not contain themselves at this point in the story.  I’m sure the laughing adults around me were thinking of a number of figures of seeming social importance whose snouts they might like to stop up with a pea, or three….

But the respect and care for the children was there from the beginning, as the actors – Cathy Petöcz and Josh Wiseman – made sure they had found out just about every child’s name and engaged them in conversation – about the other theme of the play: what’s your favourite vegetable?  The Pea becomes the narrator, from his pedestal in the Museum of Famous Vegetables, and is even rather boastful of having saved the kingdom – except that everyone soon learns that it was really Gwendoline with a little help from Gregor.  But, significantly, when there is thunder and lightning as the Dragon approaches, Pea stops the action to check if anyone is scared – because he or she (according to which actor is puppeteering at the time) is a bit scared too.  “No, of course not,” the children reply.  “We’re not afraid of the Dragon!” – and on we go to the explosive farts.

Carefully thought-out touches such as this were in themselves educational – for the children and even perhaps for parents.  The script, and I suspect work done during the workshop and rehearsal process, shows how theatre can manipulate an audience’s reactions, but good theatre does this ethically.  It’s this, the irreverence of the script, and the originality of the set design and use of puppetry, that I would like to praise the whole team for, in Pea!

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: 35º 17 South created by Karla Conway

35º 17 South created by Karla Conway.  Canberra Youth Theatre at the National Gallery of Australia Sculpture Garden, Saturday April 13 to Saturday April 20, 2013.

Commentary by Frank McKone

Drama games as I used to know them are being taken to a new space by this CYT experiment.  From the drama workshop studio to an outdoor venue, like the Sculpture Garden at the NGA, is one thing.  Setting up a kind of treasure hunt, with clues to be discovered and directions to be understood and followed, is another.  But to have all this set in the context of a semi-scripted scenario which can only be understood via an up-to-date tablet device is one step further than I had previously imagined.

Computer, keyboard and mouse I can cope with, but a blank screen on a tablet is pure mystery to me.  Fortunately a one-time student from my days at Hawker College spontaneously appeared to save my reputation as a drama expert.  Catherine Prosser is now CEO and Co-Founder of stagebitz.com, (http://stagebitz.com/)  providing software which can make running all the technical side of theatre a whizz.  She had no trouble tapping the right bits on the tablet provided by CYT’s front of house coordinator Jim Adamik, and off we went to find the first of those other little mysteries (at least to me) – the black and white squares which look like miniature maps of mazes, stuck on the wall near the Diamond sculpture (Neil Dawson, Aotearoa New Zealand born 1948: Diamonds 2002).  The tablet read the coded maze, only to tell us that we couldn’t go further until we had correctly counted the number of bolts which hold the sculpture together.

After four goes we got it right (37 in case you’d like to know), typed it in and then began the game for real – well, sort of real, except that at that stage we only knew that we had to find clean water.  Why?  Because the only safe place to be was in the Skyspace (James Turrell: 'Within without' 2010) on the other side of the Gallery.  We knew this because we had been there with others who were desperate to get in because they were starving and had travelled so far and for so long to find a safe haven.  We were now in their situation, but we didn’t know why.  But we had not been allowed in until we could find resources like food and water to bring with us.  We couldn’t eat the tablets, but we needed them to find what we needed for entry to the only place of safety.

Catherine and I collected some useful resources like toilet paper and chocolate, and discovered with help from CYT writer Morgan Little that there were not only actors as desperate refugees, but others such as a trader who might exchange our chocolate for a weapon which we would need to help defend the community.  Not all the game concentrated on the immediate objective of survival: there are some codes which are games in themselves, like one which showed insects flying around in the Sculpture Garden which needed to be sprayed to prevent people being bitten by them.

After an hour or more, we had got nowhere near completing the game – we hadn’t even found the clean water – but as responsible adults we had to leave.  The younger members of Youth Theatre were by this time absolutely engrossed in the activity: if they didn’t complete the game on Saturday, they could continue each day next week!  This is one very big school holiday activity.

But is it as ground-breaking an experiment as it seems?  Is it a worthwhile way of teaching drama?  Is it suitably educational more broadly?

I think the answer to the last question depends on the content of the game.The story assumes a “Lucas Heights incident” in 2032 which means the east coast has become unliveable.  The refugees are escaping to Canberra as the only safe haven.  The refugee theme is, of course, entirely relevant in considering the position of those who recently arrived at Geraldton, after some 44 days in a small boat, from Sri Lanka.

However, there is a further assumption that in 2032, those managing the place of safety, the actors refusing entry to the refugees at the beginning of the game, would be openly aggressive with defensive weapons, and would arbitrarily lay out their demands to be satisfied by starving refugees.  Of course, there is a parallel with the way refugees are being treated by officialdom.

But what I wanted to know was, where in the game will the audience/participants have an opportunity to be debriefed and to reflect on the storyline, its implications and truthfulness.  This game, by having an “audience” attending, is different from a large group improvisation workshop where everyone participating takes part in the devising, the role-playing, and the reflective debriefing.  In this case, only the CYT actors and staff are in the know.  Of course, it is true that when an audience leaves a standard theatre production, they are not debriefed but have to sort out what they think about what they have seen for themselves.  This game, though, is more like some of the audience participation experiments of the late 1960s / early 1970s such as New York’s Open Theatre (Robert Pasolli: A Book on the Open Theatre.  Discus Books, 1970) where the actors imposed themselves on the audience members in an undifferentiated space.  These experiments lasted for only a few years, because audiences preferred enough degree of separation from the action to feel they were safe.

Because 35º 17 South is a pre-programmed game, there is a degree of safety for participants, since they have to follow the rules to complete the task.  Usually, of course, electronic games are entirely on screen, while this one involves interaction with real actors in a large relatively unconfined space where immediate supervision by CYT staff is problematic.  Though things like the weapons are no more than images on the tablet screen, what if a non-prepared participant (as opposed to the partially scripted and rehearsed actors) – a member of the public – were to take on the role of a desperate refugee to the point of a physical argument, say, with the trader of weapons who refused to accept chocolate in payment?  What would be the learning, on either side, from this experience?  And what are the safeguards?

At this stage I’m willing to keep an open mind until the conclusion of the game, next Saturday.   But I would be interested to know how the follow-up, what used to be called the backstage post-mortem, will be done – not only for the young adults and late teenagers in the acting roles, and of course for the CYT staff and the people from the Academy of Interactive Entertainment who wrote the computer code, but also for all those people, and perhaps their parents, who were audience/participants.

Since Karla Conway, the CYT Artistic Director, has invited us to “experiment alongside us and embrace the possibilities that technology can play in the evolution of our artform”, I think it should be encumbent on CYT to see the “experiment” as the lab research, requiring a careful analysis of the results and a public report of the findings.




© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas.  Canberra Rep directed by Duncan Ley at Theatre 3, Canberra, April 12-27, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 13

For 50 years I have heard the words of Under Milk Wood and allowed them to fill the spaces in my mind with a myriad of images – of the characters and even of their dreams.  Now I have a new set of visual and audio memories, created by Duncan Ley and his designers Anne Kay (set), Heather Spong (costumes), Chris Ellyard (lighting), and Neil McRitchie (sound) to add to and renew my old imagination.

This is a great achievement on Rep’s part, and a great joy to me.

Ley’s directing is exquisite.  Using Duncan Driver as 1st Voice, physically present but unseen by the village dwellers, as the close-up observer on our behalf, he has created for us a solid personality in place of the traditional disembodied voice of the original radio play.  Having an experienced and skilled ensemble cast of 10 – Geoffrey Borny, Alice Ferguson, Sian Harrington, Peter Holland, Terry Johnson, Adele Lewin, David McNamara, Erin Pugh, Steph Roberts and Graham Robertson – enabled Ley and his design team to work out a highly complex scheme to present just about all the characters physically, including the children (the “kiss me for a penny” scene was especially wonderful) and even more detail in the daily life in the street than Thomas’s words describe.

This is done so well because Ley has a clear concept of the theatrical form he is using.  Essentially it is expressionist in style, with all that tradition of black, light and shadow, but given what I might call a gentle touch.  The only harshness was to throw the main switch to shock us out of the reality of seeing actors out of role and into the black of night to begin the action; and to do the same in reverse at the end.  Yet this risky device worked perfectly.

I should also add the properties person, Helen Vaughan-Roberts, to the list of credits because the collecting of all those props hung on the moveable scene sections, representing characters’ kitchens, bedrooms, shops and so on must have been a daunting task.  They made the set a visual feast in its own right.

A completely new thought for me was to use recordings of the Welsh crowd singing at  a rugby match, and of the traditional Welsh male voice choir at significant points.  I wondered about this at first, but the ending especially took any of my doubts away.  The sound track put the play into its proper context, and gave it extra strength on stage.

If Dylan Thomas, high up in Rev Eli Jenkins’ idea of heaven, is watching this production, I’m certain he would not be saying the village’s name backwards.  He may be wishing he could be here to take part in an exciting improvement on the limited first performance he was able to offer at the YMHA Poetry Centre, New York, May 14, 1953, with only five actors and himself standing stock still, except for when he stepped forward two paces to deliver Rev Eli Jenkins’ morning poem.  I now have that recording and Ley’s staging to keep my imagination going for another, perhaps not 50, years.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Wulamanayuwi / Once and Future Landscape Care

 

 Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui by Jason De Santis.  Presented by Centenary of Canberra as Northern Territory’s contribution, from Darwin Festival, directed by Eamon Flack at The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre, April 10-13, 2013.

Once and Future Landscape Care forum with Bill Gammage, Bruce Pascoe and Ben Gleeson at Two Fires Festival, Braidwood, April 12-14, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 12

What a wonderful day was Friday April 12, 2013.

In the evening, Canberra Playhouse became a centre of Australian cultural life, as Jason De Santis – of Tiwi Islander and Italian heritage – presented his often amusing yet emotionally engaging version of the traditional story of Wulamanayuwi, the daughter of Jipmarpuwajuwa.  Though superficially De Santis has made a connection with the European story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there is even more significance behind the myth of how death first happened to humans.

Here we see how universal – from Genesis in the Bible to this even nowadays remote community – is the fear of evil and death, and the determination to live and to love.  For an audience in the National Capital, representing a wide range of cultural traditions, responding with great warmth and communal laughter to the originality of this first Tiwi play, and to its author speaking to us in the foyer afterwards, came naturally.  Just as in the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, there is tragedy and a recognition of human failings in this Tiwi story – but I must say I felt more positive about the future of humanity as Wulamanayuwi finally came through her troubling times, making her own decision to begin her adult life with her chosen husband, Awarrajimi.   Her seven brothers, the Panamui, are mischievous but ultimately spirits of family support, rather than competitive and murderous as in the ancient Middle Eastern Biblical story.

Natasha Wanganeen as Jirrakilala and Kylie Farmer as Wulamanayuwi

 If you would like to read more about “Tiwi Art and Culture and the First Old Lady”, Pedro Wonaeamirri (puppet maker and set maker, with John Peter Pilaukui and Linus Warlapinni) has written his version of the story: of Purrukuparli, his wife Waiyai, and of his brother and her lover, the moon man, Taparra, and its importance in his life – available at

http://site.jilamara.com/~jilamara//images/articles/kitty_pedro_1_mar.pdf

The program notes describe the production, saying “The approach is to embrace the classic traditions of Western theatricality to excess, and to allow the clash between Western theatre and Tiwi culture to energise the work....brightness and colour, sound and movement, character-doubling, live music, minimal “acting” and lots of performing and storytelling, things popping out from behind corners, drop-cloths, shadow-puppetry, scrolling landscapes etc.  Everything we can possibly achieve with very few resources – Tiwi style.”  All I can add is to say that they achieved everything!

The actors – Kylie Farmer as Wulamanayuwi; Natasha Wanganeen as her evil stepmother Jirrakilala; Kamahi Djordan King as her father Jipmarpuwajuwa; Jaxon De Santis as her husband Awarrajimi; and Jason De Santis as the Narrator and Evil Spirit of the Water – were hardly “minimal” in effect.  It took no time for connection to be established firmly with the audience, and not a beat was missed from then on.

Then more connections were made for me as, in the foyer, Ngambri father Paul House, with his children, welcomed us all to his country (noting that he was born in the centre of his country, at the old Canberra Hospital – did he mean that was why it was blown up, to be replaced by the National Museum?)  and Jason De Santis spoke, thanking the Ngambri elders for permission for him to tell his Tiwi story here.

All at once it came home to me again that we are living in Aboriginal land, just as it had that very afternoon, in Braidwood, an hour’s drive to the east.

The Two Fires Festival – Fanning the Flames of Arts and Activism – included three speakers, in the presence of Yuin Elder, Uncle Max Dulumunmun Harrison, on the topic Once and Future Landscape Care. 

Bruce Pascoe, of Bunurong and Tasmanian heritage, a novelist, short story writer and researcher into indigenous history and language revival, spoke of the invisibility, in conventional histories, of Aboriginal technology, such as in house construction, river flow and fishery management, crop growing, and maintaining a surplus of goods for trading – the very activities that showed traditional Aboriginal culture to be “civilised”.  The refusal to recognise these activities – despite their being described in great detail by well-known European explorers – was the basis for Australia to be treated as “terra nullius”, and the people already living here as so “primitive” they did not count.

Bill Gammage, an academic historian at the Humanities Research Centre at ANU, spoke about his recent publication The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, filling out – for me, at least – this study of the careful and precise use of fire management by Aboriginal people all over Australia, prior to the intervention of Europeans from 1788, with an understanding of the complementary religious beliefs and ceremonial practice developed over many tens of thousands of years.  Once again, here was evidence of a civilisation, rather than an haphazard existence.

Ben Gleeson lives locally, with a degree in Ecological Agriculture and doing honours in Restoration Ecology.  He put together the previous speakers’ themes in emphasising that the essential difference between traditional Aboriginal culture, beliefs and practice and the more recent European approach is that in the one, all forms of life, including us humans, are intimately related; while in the other we humans pretend we are separate from all other forms of life – and try to control everything else.  His most telling example, perhaps, is the development of industrial monoculture agriculture, and his main concern for the future is that greater and greater urbanisation means that our chance of people recognising the imperatives of our interdependence may not come in time to save our species. 

Yet it is the understanding of evolution that Charles Darwin’s theory gave us, and that modern science is beginning to put into practice, which gives us the chance after all.

When Uncle Max spoke, in concluding the session, he praised the young men, like Johnny Huckle, of Wiradjuri heritage, who participated in the earlier welcome to country ceremony with his song to honour the Festival – Two Fires Light our Hearts.  This represented for me the theme of the day: respect the ancient culture, study history honestly, connect science to our humanity in harmony with all the rest of nature.

What a day was Friday April 12, 2013!

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler

CDP presents Tall Stories’ magical musical adaptation of Room on the Broom adapted from the book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler.  Original director: Olivia Jacobs.  Music and lyrics by Jon Fiber, Andy Shaw and Robin Price.

Director for Australia: Morag Cross;  Resident Director: Jane Miskovic; stage design by Morgan Large; lighting design by James Whiteside; puppets by Yvonne Stone.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, April 8-12, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 9

It is a great satisfaction to see a show for young children which is entirely appropriate both theatrically and educationally.  And the business behind the scenes, I discovered, was a complicated mystery in itself.

The opening of the show cleverly takes the audience – young children who cannot be expected to automatically respond to standard conventions – through the transition from ordinary life (where they even had to be taught by their adult minders that each person has just one seat) to the fictional world of theatre.

With house lights still up and children still being brought in and seated, and the stage open but in shadow, the four actors – Andrew Threlfall (understudy for Stephen Anderson): Dog; Josie Cerise: Cat; Crystal Hegedis: Witch; and Damien Warren-Smith: Bird, Dragon – appear without fanfare.  They are playing hide-and-seek (“Coming, ready or not!) among the children in the audience, who become involved in the game, pointing out where someone is hiding.

The set on stage is highly evocative – a large rising full moon seen dimly through a chunky forest, with an owl calling – and the “children”, who are camping out, don sleeping bags and form a sleeping heap on stage; except for excited and fully-awake Josie, who comes out of hiding, realises she must join the others, gets a front-row audience member to help zip up her sleeping bag and joins the heap.  I think this is the first play I can remember which begins with everyone going to sleep, as the house lights fade.  Now everyone, on stage and in the auditorium is silent.  Now the drama can begin.

Already the children watching have learned by osmosis what theatre is all about, and have no trouble going along with the next transition by the actors from the camping children to the witch and her cat flying on the broom stick, through all the characters in costume and puppet form, or even occasionally as briefly out-of-role narrators, and finally back to the sleeping children.  Josie, of course, having played the Witch, puts a spell on the boys to stop them snoring, and everyone, on stage and off, joins in the accompanying spellbinding song to bring this lively entertainment to a thoroughly enjoyable end.

At the same time, of course, the text of the book is teaching rhyme, rhythm and vocabulary, while the story is teaching about positive relationships, scary situations, and even tricks to save friends from fiery dragons.

We adults may know, of course, that even to mention a witch is a strict no-no.  Women were actually accused of riding on a broomstick in the 16th and 17th Centuries in Europe and often had to face their own kind of fiery dragon, but the children here are safe with a witch who has friends and makes room on the broom for them all – even to the point where it breaks in half!

Mentioning Europe is my fashionable “segue” into the mystery of who were these performers, and why was the owl clearly of the English barn variety?  Where was the mopoke or the boobook, or even the tawny frogmouth?  Yet there were the occasional Aussie references:  Damien (I think it was) couldn’t quite read the label on his sleeping bag which seemed to say “flec bag”, but of course we bushwalkers knew it was really “flea bag”.

So I found out from director Jane Miskovic that the UK company Tall Stories, whose team had devised the original adaptation, as well as of the Gruffalo stories, tour their productions world-wide – except that, in Australia, CDP and Tall Stories have negotiated an arrangement where the plays are directed and performed by our local professionals, allowing them to include some humorous Australianisms in the text to complement the exuberant physicality of the Australian acting style.  This makes the show a family affair, including the adults in the fun.

Jane has a degree in education and psychology and several others in the team have similar education and training, including at NIDA.

So it was no wonder that I was seeing a top-class performance.


http://tallstories.org.uk/shows/room-on-the-broom
http://www.cdp.com.au/home.html

If you miss the show in Queanbeyan, on 14 April 2013 – 27 April 2013 it will be at
the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House (whose image I have borrowed above).



© Frank McKone, Canberra