2014: The Retreat of our National Drama by Julian Meyrick

The Retreat of our National Drama by Julian Meyrick.  Platform Papers No.39 published by Currency House.  Launched by Miriam Margoyles at the Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, May 15, 2014.

Currency House with Theatre Network Victoria will also stage a public debate with Julian Meyrick, playwright Lally Katz, and Katharine Brisbane at the Auspicious Arts Incubator, Upstairs, 228 Bank Street, South Melbourne, Tuesday May 20, 2014, 5.30pm.  Free, but must book on http://www.trybooking.com/ESOJ .

Enquiries about obtaining a PDF or paperback copy of the paper: Martin Portus mportus@optusnet.com.au or phone 0401 360 806.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 16

Meyrick is incisive in documenting the ‘retreat’ of original Australian plays in the production schedules of Australian theatre companies.

I should begin, then, by inspecting my own schedule of theatre criticism.  My critical writing is in no way comprehensive, of course, but may reveal biases that would interest Meyrick, and perhaps the rest of us – including me.

Meyrick looks at five categories of plays: Australian New; Australian Recent; Australian Classic (productions of established playwright’s work); and Overseas Classics (essentially presentations or adaptations of British, European and American plays or novels); Overseas Recent.

Here’s my record since I began regularly reviewing in 1996.  I’ve included Overseas Popular (often musicals or light comedies), while local bands (such as Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, or Monica Trapaga) go into New Australian, and children’s shows may go into New Australian (The Jigsaw Company, for example) or Overseas Popular (like Dora the Explorer) as appropriate.  I also include ‘Recently New’ in New Australian, because Meyrick writes about first and second tier theatre companies in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, while most of our local Canberra groups presenting theatre would have to be classed third tier, picking up scripts from other Australian small companies as well as writing their own.  My Overseas Classics includes more serious recent work.

New Australian    Australian Classics    Overseas Classics    Overseas Popular
       199                            26                            158                             43
       47%                           6%                           37%                           10%

Meyrick’s numbers are put together in graph form on Page 27, with breakdowns for Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company, Belvoir Theatre, and Playbox/Malthouse, all from 1987 to 2013.

Over my period from 1996 the major difference in our numbers, though, is in the split between productions of new and established Australian work.  In the first and second tier companies Meyrick has recorded an average close to 20% of new work, and rather more than 20% of Australian classics, while my figures show 47% and 6% respectively.

This comes about from the fact that I am based in Canberra, with occasional excursions mainly to Sydney, and Canberra / Queanbeyan has a history of growing seedlings (like Elbow Theatre where STC director Iain Sinclair began, Canberra Youth Theatre where Tommy Murphy’s first play For God, Queen and Country was staged, Bohemians (or Boho), Everyman Theatre, Freshly Ground Theatre and many others over the years) often staging original works.

What Meyrick is concerned about is not just these numbers – showing how we have gone from an almost complete dominance of overseas theatre before the 1930s – but that in this last decade or two, a culture has developed in the main state theatre companies of making blockbuster adaptations of overseas classics with highly visible top quality actors, and emphasising directors who seem almost like the old-style actor-managers of the Nineteenth Century.  He fears that we are losing our grip on an independent Australian theatre culture which began with the Pioneer Players (Katharine Susannah Pritchard, Vance Palmer and Louis Esson) in a Melbourne season in 1923 (which was totally ignored by reviewers); began to blossom with Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll as the bookmark point in the 1950s; and came on to a fair flowering with the New Wave from the 1960s.

His paper says to me that even despite a colourful display through the second half of the last century, we are now in danger of reviving the cultural cringe of the past just when we are at the point where we have new writers bursting out all over – but not getting first productions in the major theatres, nor continuing productions which can establish a good writers’ body of work.

Meyrick specifically criticises the treatment of Hannie Rayson as an example.

The value of Meyrick’s paper, to my mind, shows in his analysis of why adapting classical dramas is attractive to directors and audiences (their dramatic structure is proven, requiring less work than developing new plays); in his factual information about our theatre history; and in his conclusion that, if we are to grow our culture up to full maturity – flowering and fruiting – we need a “national theatre along the lines of the National Theatre of Scotland, one that is non-building-based and focussed on the commissioning, development and production of new stage work through the existing theatre company network.”

Significantly for us, the Canberra Critics, he suggests “An NTA [National Theatre of Australia] could base itself in Canberra and be federally funded, thereby avoiding the perception of Sydney/Melbourne bias and the fractious politicking that comes with variable state support.  It would unite three specialisms represented by three kinds of organisation.  It would be partly a playwright development agency, like Playwriting Australia or Playworks.  It would be partly a producing entity, like the state theatres and second-tier companies.  And it would be partly a touring intelligence, like Performing Lines and Playing Australia.  Again it would not supplant these bodies but add capacity as a partner organisation drawing on their separate spheres of operation.”

Remember the good old days when the annual National Playwrights’ Conference took place at ANU?  (I do because I managed to get a script workshopped there – in 1981!)

It is not parochial on my part to support this idea – and I encourage you to read Meyrick’s paper in full to see why.  My records show that new writing is, and has long been, a key element in Canberra’s theatre culture, all the way from Ickle Pickle children’s theatre to The Jigsaw Company, from the work of Carol Woodrow to The Hive at The Street Theatre.  There have been several attempts to establish a permanent professional theatre company in Canberra – Woodrow’s Canberra Theatre Company was a high point – but as The Street shows us under Carolyn Stacey’s direction, we are very good at coordinating the development of new work.

We already have the basis for Meyrick’s concept of a National Theatre of Australia, especially as we have strong local government support in ArtsACT.

Let’s do it!


A useful more detailed summary of the paper is by Deborah Stone in ArtsHub at

http://www.artshub.com.au/news-article/features/all-arts/australian-product-missing-from-our-theatres-243655

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: 1984 adapted from the novel by George Orwell,

1984 adapted from the novel by George Orwell, by Nelle Lee and Nick Skubij.  shake & stir youth theatre company, directed by Michael Futcher at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre Wednesday 30 April, 8.00pm, Thursday 1 May, 10.30am & 8.00pm, Friday 2 May, 10.30am & 8.00pm, Saturday 3 May, 2.00pm & 8.00pm, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 2

Terrifying & depressing is how I found this production by shake & stir.

If you dress this man in a business suit:

O'Brien in 1984

it’s amazing how much he looks just like this man:

Donald Rumsfeld - one-time US Secretary for Defense

One image from the show that I can’t get out of my head is O’Brien / Donald Rumsfeld watching impassively as his underlings waterboard Winston Smith.  1948 to 1984 is nothing on 1984 to 2004 or 2014. 

Although Michael Futcher has kept to a 1948 style for the set and costumes, it seems to me that Orwell was not out of touch – just his timing needs adjusting.  I remember 1984 (the real one, not the novel) with some hope when our Prime Minister offered us the promise that ‘no child will be living in poverty by the year 2000’.  Some hope!

To the group of Year 12 Advanced English students who stayed for a Q&A, it was David Whitney who thought that what is even more frightening than Orwell’s prediction of a future of dictatorship, is to know that his prediction of future total tracking of information on all citizens and the use of manipulative psychological torture has become true of modern democracies.  Depressing indeed!

I checked out what Donald Rumsfeld is up to now.  Here it is at http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/04/15/donald-rumsfeld-to-irs-my-taxes-are-a-known-unknown/ .

To escape depression, after a walk with views along the beautiful Brindabella Mountain range, I realised that there is hope in the quality of the work by this youth theatre team.  The relationship between Nelle Lee as Julia and Bryan Probets as Winston formed the dramatic thread of the show, both actors capturing the beginnings of attraction under the duress of the industrial workplace, bombarded constantly with official announcements of glorious achievements, the need to love Big Brother, and the injunctions against sexual behaviour.

Lee played Julia’s positive leadership in the developing relationship – in the forest hideaway and the rented room in the antique shop – so tenderly and with such a feeling of excitement in finding real love that we, watching, were moved despite our doubts, just as Winston was.  It was the strength of the acting here that made their discovery, arrest and the three stages of Winston’s torture that we witness, to the point where he is forced to betray Julia, so awful.  When they at last meet again, in the factory canteen, and both know that each had betrayed the other, and in doing so had betrayed their love for each other, our sense of loss is palpable as we  realise that our own love is fragile; always at risk of manipulation.

Then David Whitney’s O’Brien becomes spotlighted by our horror at his capacity to so absolutely, coldly, calculatingly twist Winston’s reality.  Whitney spoke in the Q&A of Orwell’s interest in language, and once again I could not escape the image of Rumsfeld, who even now is twisting words about his tax as if he is the victim of other people’s incompetence.  Unbelievable!

So, for a youth theatre company, is this 1984 an important, worthwhile and theatrically valid project?  Absolutely!  No weasel words from me.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Cruise Control by David Williamson

 Cruise Control written and directed by David Williamson.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, April 30 – June 14, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 30

Had a terrific night.  Warm welcome home for David W.  And what a cruise!  Not sure so much about the control bit yet, but after all that was just David having a bit of fun.  Of course he’s terribly up-to-date, so instead of putting on the old-style slide night of boring stills, he had a stack of Twitter-length YouTube movie clips – just sooo funny, you wouldn’t believe!

Cousin John B. was there – sat just near me in fact – so David made sure he got the Shakespearean shot in, of Richard (he’s the English dark-side-of-everything novelist, you know) putting down colonial Aussie Imogen when she thought his “vaulting ambition” was from Hamlet.  Vaulting was right, in the end, as it turned out – just like Macbeth.

I suppose a lot of us were in the business, being Opening Night and all, so it really did feel like family to see David’s son Felix pretending to be that awful Richard who was pretending to be the ants-pants of sexual predators.  He did it so awfully well, in a very English way, that in some clips we almost believed he was being honest.  No wonder we felt for poor old ex-Ascham private school girl Imogen when she was so nearly trapped.  Fancy – despite going to the most expensive school in the world (or at least Sydney), if she had known her Shakespeare she might have been done for.

Of course we knew her type – marrying a bra boy like Darren making his fortune selling surfboards to China.  He was a laugh when he wasn’t basically an embarrassment.  But then he could actually splash the Dom Perignon around, and actually knew how to protect his wife.

The other women were definitely in our circle – Richard’s wife, editor Fiona, and Silky, the casting agent.  But we knew for real, if we hadn’t worked it out at first, that David was just putting the whole show on, when Silky’s husband Sol turned out to actually be Henri Szeps in his seemingly inevitable role as a dentist (though acting a typical self-effacing New York Jew, he said he just fixed gums).

It got to be a bit of a selfie in the final clip, for there was David himself, playwright and his own director, smiling modestly back at us, hoping that we thought he had achieved what editor Fiona had advised Sol about his novel idea of Al Qaeda sleeper dentists causing mayhem.  Though it was a plot that grabbed attention, she pointed out that it also needed to be credible if he hoped to sell his story.

Well, I think David’s plot is not absolutely credible, but I can’t reveal why not, since that would tell you the ending which, as in any mystery story, must remain sacrosanct until you see it for yourself.

But I can certainly say that, perhaps surprisingly for such a literate Ensemble audience, we could identify with the motivations for all the cruisers’ actions, even those of the Maroubra surfer.  And I can also say that we could retreat to the bar feeling quite OK about people being left believing something that was not true if it meant that they were now in control and communal justice had been done.

In other words, David has shown that he hasn’t lost the Williamson touch.  Cruise Control is a ‘well-made play’ in the traditional sense.  He is in control of his theatrical form, comedy on the edge of farce in one direction, while reflecting enough of reality to bring to light questions for our consideration.

In particular the playing out of the fraught relationships between the three couples, the literary English, the sentimental American Jewish and the down-to-earth Australian, could easily have been let go into slapstick stereotyping.  This can get laughs, as we laughed early in the play, except that as characters come and go through the multiple entrances and exits we expect of a farce, each new interaction exposes enough complexity in each character for us to identify with them and to make more than superficial judgements about them.

Tieing the drama together is the motivation common to each couple.  The cruise will be the make or break point for the woman in each marriage.  Tieing the situation together is the character of the Filipino waiter, whose real name is Jesus.  On board the cruise ship he is known as Charlie.  Can his family stay together as he works eight months straight, has two months at home with children and wife, provides them with more money than anyone else in the village, sends his children for a good education, then goes away again for the next eight months?

At this point I can say that I think Williamson has achieved the dictum of his own character, the editor Fiona.  There is a level of credibility here, which makes for interesting but tough-minded acting work for the cast, to set the correct level.

Kenneth Moraleda as Charlie, who has a beautiful singing voice, provided a softness in his linking role which I’m not sure I’ve seen in any of Williamson’s earlier plays.  I generally have doubts about a writer directing his own work, but I sense that Moraleda’s gentle singing which opens the action became a point for Williamson as director to return to for each character, and each actor – Helen Dallimore as Imogen Brodie, Peter Phelps as Darren Brodie, Kate Fitzpatrick as Silky Wasserman, Henri Szeps as Sol Wasserman, and Michelle Doake as Fiona Manton – knew they could trust Williamson the writer to give them the opportunity for those softer moments which brought their characters to life; and each made the most of their opportunities.

The one character without such a moment is Richard Manton.  The solution for Felix Williamson was to establish moments – even in a kind of distant-gazing pose – which gave Richard a different kind of life.  His ‘softening’ became a threat, a manipulative lie rather than a truth with which we could empathise.  It says a great deal about professionalism in today’s Australian theatre that a father can so successfully direct his own son.

And there’s no doubt that the Ensemble Theatre has a family atmosphere for a new Williamson work which enhances this play about couples moving beyond their youthful expectations to the point, as Fiona says, where she has at last ‘grown up’.

Helen Dallimore, Peter Phelps as Imogen and Darren Brodie

Kate Fitzpatrick as Silky Wasserman, Kenneth Moraleda as Charlie

Kenneth Moraleda, Peter Phelps, Helen Dallimore

L to R: Peter Phelps, Michelle Doake, Helen Dallimore, Henri Szeps, Felix Williamson, Kate Fitzpatrick

Michelle Doake, Felix Williamson as Fiona and Richard Manton

Photos by Clare Hawley

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Reflections on Sacrifice, Loss & Futility

 

 The Girls in Grey by Carolyn Bock & Helen Hopkins.  The Shift Theatre (Melbourne), presented by Critical Stages, directed by Tom Healey (original direction by Karen Martin), set designed by Alex Hiller.
The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre Thursday April 24, 8.00pm, Friday April 25, 5.00pm, Saturday April 26, 2.00pm & 8.00pm, 2014.

Reflections on Sacrifice, Loss & Futility exhibition by Geoffrey Jones at Tuggeranong Community Arts Centre, April 24 to May 30, 2014.
Opening on Thursday 24 April at 6pm, with a speech by Mr Graham Walker, Canberra Times Senior Australian of the Year. Special event Saturday 26 April from 12- 4pm with an artist’s talk at 2pm.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 24

On the eve of Anzac Day I have been honoured to witness The Girls in Grey, complemented fortuitously by the artwork of Geoffrey Jones on exhibition at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre.

The Girls in Grey is a ceremonial ritual, using the words in highly personal letters written by Australian nurses sent to the front in World War I.  Geoffrey Jones, a Vietnam War veteran, reveals his personal history in Reflections on Sacrifice, Loss & Futility.  Both shows bring home to the viewer the change from a naive acceptance of  warfare to the realistic understanding that no-one should be expected to face such destruction – of physical and emotional life.

The honour I felt arose from the honesty with which the nurses and Jones spoke through art – his own in Jones’ case and in the scripting, stage design, directing and performing by the Shift Theatre team of the nurses’ words.

Jones’ paintings, photographic work and installations speak for themselves.  Some pieces from this exhibition have been acquired by the Australian War Memorial, for display there from 2015 after exhibition in Sydney.

Shift Theatre’s 70 minute performance could justifiably become an annual ritual on Anzac Day.  The joie de vivre of the nurses as they take the oath of service and find themselves as if on holiday in Egypt; their down-to-earth practicality as “their boys” are brought in; their humanity; their determination to do everything they can with inadequate resources; their realisation as the patients arrive in their thousands that the war is beyond all reason; and their experience of the deaths of their loved ones, including among their own colleagues – leads us to a powerful ceremony of placing the poppies gathered from the grim field of war into an array representing the graves in ordered lines in the war cemeteries around the world.

With this image before us, the reprise chorus of the nurses’ oath of service is more than ironic.  It reflects the respect we must have for all the women and men in war, the great sorrow we must feel for all this unnecessary sacrifice, and the all-encompassing hope we must maintain that humanity will some day reign: that conflict will be resolved without such destruction.

The script for The Girls in Grey  has drawn upon letters of many members of the Australian Army Nursing Service, to form three characters – the matron Grace (Carolyn Bock), Elsie (Samantha Murray) and Alice (Helen Hopkins) – with James O’Connell, in this season’s tour, playing at times a generalised soldier, and the three men in these women’s lives: Syd, Harry and Len (originally played by Lee Mason).

This trimming down was a very effective way of bringing the enormity of deaths and injuries down to the level of personal experience, when, as the War Memorial records, “From a population of fewer than five million, 416,809 men enlisted, of which over 60,000 were killed and 156,000 wounded, gassed, or taken prisoner.  http://www.awm.gov.au/atwar/ww1/

To present these characters over the five-year period of the war not only required a massive amount of research, but also a style of performance which could tell enough of the individual characters’ stories while keeping us aware of the wider context.  Tom Healey’s direction focusses on what some would call a ‘presentational’ style – a form of storytelling with some symbolic action, choreographed placing of figures, and shifting between individual and chorus voices.  The cast worked together so closely that in some highly significant moments they were able to maintain a lengthy silence or period of stillness, and then precisely time their next word or movement all together.  Using such good timing, and with a high degree of poetic expression, the mood of the piece began light, and then bit by bit drew us in to the darkness.

At the end, there was a feeling in the audience that we shouldn’t clap immediately, though there was no hesitation when the lights came up on stage for a curtain call.  I felt that I would have liked the final fade to black to have been held longer, and even perhaps for the curtain call to have been less cheerful.  The standard smiles and recognition of the stage crew broke the mood too quickly for me, personally.  But this should not be taken as a serious criticism of a valuable and successful theatrical work, which extended my appreciation of the role of the nurses in wartime, for which I thank Shift Theatre.

It was sadly enlightening to see the play and the art exhibition on this day.  As Geoffrey Jones has written (quoting George Orwell to summarise his inspiration: ‘If the war didn’t kill you, it was bound to start you thinking’), As an artist and former willing participant in one of these conflicts, I hope through this exhibition to encourage people to reflect upon Australia’s engagement in these costly and sometimes futile wars...The works question the apparent eagerness of Australia to become involved in overseas wars, and attempt to convey the enormous and terrible sacrifice and loss those wars incurred.

And, as Rauny Worm, CEO of Tuggeranong Arts Centre wrote – equally appropriate for The Girls in Grey – Reflections on Sacrifice, Loss & Futility “is sure to demonstrate the ability of art to act as a powerful tool for personal expression on important issues.”


© Frank McKone, Canberra

Geoffrey Jones: Poppies in Afghanistan

Vietnam veterans, artist Geoffrey Jones and CT Senior Australian of the Year, Graham Walker

2014: Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris - Review

 

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, directed by Tanya Goldberg, March 19 – April 19, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 19

An excellent production of an excellent play.  The website says it all:

ENSEMBLE THEATRE SEASON SOLD OUT
SEASON EXTENDED - EXTRA SHOWS NOW ON SALE!
WEDNESDAY 23 APRIL & THURSDAY 24 APRIL 8PM
THE CONCOURSE, CHATSWOOD
http://ensemble.com.au/whats-on/play/clybourne-park/

Is the popularity justified by quality?  I think it is.

The Ensemble has a long tradition, going back to its American founder, Hayes Gordon, of presenting successful up-to-date plays from the USA.  Clybourne Park fits the bill since its first production in 2010, having already won a Tony, a Pultizer, Olivier and Evening Standard awards. 

The basis of its success is the witty, often excruciatingly funny, exposé of the worst kind of NIMBYism which has property values and race in the mix.

Norris has skilfully put together, all in the same house, the story of social change in this fictional suburb of Chicago which has been true of central city areas across the US through the post-World War 2 to the present time.

Each of the seven actors has two roles – one in the mid-1950s, following the end of the Korean War in 1953, as ‘coloured’ people began to buy into middle-class white areas; the other in the late 20 noughties, by which time the house had a historical heritage value as the vanguard of the change to Afro-American middle-class ownership.

But there is also the ghostly presence in that house of the son of the earlier white owners, who had hanged himself in his upstairs bedroom because of guilt, apparently for having shot civilians during a clearing operation in Korea.

None of this sounds like material for a comedy.  Just imagine shifting the scene from Chicago to the more upmarket part of Moree, say, if the people from Toomelah had had the chance to buy in 1968, when they were still refused access to the swimming pool, and while the part played by Aboriginal men in Australia’s wars went not only unrecognised but officially denied.

In this play, Chicago has gone through and out the other side to the point where the now racially mixed community tries to decide what should be done to preserve, refurbish or update the house.  These people are two generations away from those in Act 1.  The measure of Norris’ success is that the funniest – and most excruciating scene – is when his characters in 2010 fire off racist jokes at each other.

This is the point at which, through comedy which satirises each character’s stance, we in the audience are forced, as we laugh, to recognise our own hypocritical attitudes – and it doesn’t take much thought to see the wider range of issues to which the laughter can be applied.

Of course, though, the sublety of Norris’ writing could be a disastrous and embarrassing flop on stage, if it were not directed and acted with detailed care to match.  Not only has Tanya Goldberg placed the characters precisely in their American setting – recognising that the drama must be played true to its locality to have global effect – but she and all the actors have understood the style needed.   Comedy requires a degree of exaggeration and pointed timing.  This makes the first act work.  Satire requires an extra fine control to turn comedy into inescapable self-recognition on our part.  This was achieved to a very high degree in the second act.

So my praise goes to all the cast: Paula Arundell (1950s Francine / 2010 Lena); Cleave Williams (Albert / Kevin); Richard Sydenham (Russ / Dan); Wendy Strehlow (Bev / Kathy); Briallen Clarke (Betsy / Lindsey; Nathan Lovejoy (Karl / Steve); and Thomas Campbell who played three roles – Jim / Tom, and Russ and Bev’s son Kenneth, in a kind of reprise which ends the play as he writes his suicide note.

This was a genuine Ensemble production.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Warts & All by Bruce Hoogendoorn

Warts & All written and directed by Bruce Hoogendoorn at the Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, April 2 – 12, Wed-Sat, 2014-04-12

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 11

The title, I guess, imposes on me a duty to reveal all about this new play by perhaps the most indie of independent operators in the Canberra theatre scene.  Hoogendoorn calls it a comedy, but though there were some laughs from the small and sympathetic audience, there were not enough for me to think ‘comedy’.

Why not?  After all, the central device is the ghost of an athletics coach, Ken, played with exactly the right Australian manner by Rob de Fries, who is mistaken for the ghost of his father, Ted.  Though ghosts can’t be real – can they? – this one’s piercing whistle and sudden appearance from Simon’s wardrobe was certainly quite frightening.  I had a bit of a nervous laugh until my willingness to suspend my disbelief got the better of me, and he turned into a nice bloke.

Then there was Oliver Baudert playing the elderly Alice.  He did it very well, but I have to say that I could not find a reason for this casting, except perhaps that if Alice had been played by a woman, the role of bitter division between her and her contemporary Margaret would not have been funny at all.  Helen Vaughan-Roberts played Margaret straight as a realistic character who engendered much empathy.

Playing realistically, as the two just-finished Year 12 grandchildren were played by Will Huang (Margaret’s Simon) and Adellene Fitzsimmons (Alice’s Kirsty), also meant occasions when comedy was not appropriate.  On the other hand the role of Dotty, counsellor and family historian, gave the best chance for the laughs you get from the people who put their foot in it – and Elaine Noon did this well.

So what’s my problem?  Bit by bit the mystery of Ted, on one side of the family, who had patriotically volunteered in World War 2 and died in Syria, and Alan, on the other side, who had stayed in the small black soil town somewhere not far from Toowoomba to keep the family shop running, began to be revealed.

When it came to connecting the dots about Alan feeling so guilty after Ted’s death that he smoked himself to a cancerous death at 50, and Alan and Margaret’s daughter drowning – in fact committing suicide – shortly after Ted’s death, and then the discovery that she had borne Ted’s son – that is, Ken – who had been adopted out and knew nothing of his real parents (and had recently died in a car smash), I realised that this story was not the proper material for a ghostly romantic comedy.  In fact I was glad that the lack of one-liner jokes meant there was not much laughter.

To have succeeded in making a comedy out of this story would have been bizarre, when the issues of patriotism and cowardice, out-of-wedlock birth and forced adoption, and decades-long internecine family bitterness are hardly laughing matters.

Oddly enough, in his ‘Playwright’s Notes’, writing about conflict in families, Hoogendoorn says: “no wonder playwrights have mined it in such beloved plays as The Glass Menagerie, Death of a Salesman, and more recently August: Osage County and Other Desert Cities.  And funnily enough, no one gets on very well in them.  If they did, they wouldn’t be such fascinating plays.”

Just so!  There may be humour in these works, but they are not comedies.  There are ironies (like in the title Other Desert Cities reviewed in the Guardian as “a tense family portrait ...Jon Robin Baitz's Christmas-set drama uses fractured nuclear families to examine the broken American psyche”) which Hoogendoorn hardly glimpses in this script.

Maybe it’s time for his next play (he’s up to 15 according to his website http://brucehoogendoorn.com/) to put genre and content appropriately together: on the topic of families, a truly absurdist take would be good (see my recent review of Perplex), or may be a realistic tragedy of misunderstanding and bitter division on the black soil plains as the younger generation feel the need, encouraged by a conservative government, to go to the Dawn Ceremony at Gallipoli in 2015.

Art is about finding the right form for what the artist needs to express.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Perplex by Marius von Mayenburg

Perplex by Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade.  Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Sarah Giles at Wharf 1,  April 4 – May 3, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 9

The theatrical form of Perplex is metacognitive farce.  The philosophical form is farcical metacognition.  If it had been written by Shakespeare, Hamlet would have been named Piglet, and his question would have been “To be, or not to be.  What is the question?”

If you feel perplexed so far, that’s great.  It’s also very funny – not what I’ve written, but what Marius von Mayenburg wrote, as translated wonderfully by Maja Zade.  If you thought philosophy was beyond your comprehension (that’s the meta-cognitive bit), you need never worry again.  Just Give Yourself to the Elk physically (you’ll be laughing with all your might) and intellectually, as you begin to understand that the universe really is absolutely unpredictable.  Not only does God, or any god, not exist, but – since everything we know consists of no more than a bunch of electrical pulses in our brains – even we don’t really exist.  Nor does the ‘fourth wall’ of stage performance.  Nor even the play itself, whose director has never shown up to rehearsal “since the beginning”.

It’s at this point, of course, that I go into analysis mode.  That’s what a critic has to do, otherwise I wouldn’t be a critic.

Should you see this play?  Absolutely, categorically and metacognitively.  To see the whole audience making their exit from the auditorium bubbling with excitement, laughing and babbling away (even at afternoon teatime on Wednesday) is proof Sarah Giles is still on top of the form she showed when directing Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession last year.

As for the cast, well, they come up to the mark brilliantly: Andrea Demetriades as Andrea, Glenn Hazeldine as Glenn, Rebecca Massey as Rebecca, and the occasionally nude Tim Walter as Tim.  As do the essential ‘creatives’: designer Renée  Mulder, lighting designer Benjamin Cisterne, and composer & sound designer Max Lyandvert.  If you ever dare to invite people to a ‘Come as...’ party, you could not do better than ask Mulder to design the costumes – the funniest I’ve seen on stage for many a long year.

It is true (I think, therefore I...) that some education in European theatrical tradition will make you more cognisant of some of ‘meta’ aspects of this work from Berlin. In his 30s, von Mayenburg, already with a lucky 13 plays behind him, wrote Perplex in 2010.  In only his second year of writing, according to Wikipedia, his Feuergesicht (1997) won him the Kleistförderpreis für junge Dramatiker and Preis der Frankfurter Autorenstiftung. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_von_Mayenburg)

By his 14th year, in play number 14, Perplex shows his confidence as he plays with the elements of absurdism, with semi-oblique references at least to Pirandello (1921), whose Six Characters are in Search of an Author, to Ionesco’s couple of strangers (Mr and Mrs Martin in The Bald Soprano 1948) who discover they not only know each other, but are actually married, to Stoppard’s Rozencrantz and Guildernstern (1966) trying to fathom out what’s going on in Hamlet and, according to Sydney Theatre Company’s blurb, to Nietzsche and Beckett.  The extra level beyond the ordinary is that von Mayenburg satirises his own place in the absurdist tradition, of which his characters are aware.  Even Pirandello’s characters knew they were in a play by Pirandello, but for von Mayenburg’s characters acting in his play is disastrous emotionally, as they realise that modern avant-garde German playwrights traditionally have to have the whole set collapse and cleared from the stage – I suppose for a neat and precisely tidy ending.

In fact, this isn’t what happens.  The stage is a mess at the end – another final twist in the logic of absurdism.  Funny though it is to watch, there really is a sense of sadness at humanity’s incapacity not only to understand our place in the universe, but even just to organise ourselves enough to maintain a little bit of equanimity in our lives.  I saw a touch of Brecht’s The Chalk Circle and The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, after the laughter had faded away.

L to R: Andrea Demetriades, Tim Walter, Rebecca Massey, Tim Walter, Glenn Hazeldine, Andrea Demetriades, Rebecca Massey, Glenn Hazeldine

Photos: Lisa Tomasetti

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Johnny Castellano is Mine by Emma Gibson

Johnny Castellano is Mine by Emma Gibson.  Presented by Canberra Youth Theatre and The Street Theatre, directed by Karla Conway; set and lighting designed by Samantha Pickering; sound design by Stephen Fitzgerald.  At Street Two, April 3 – 12, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 5

Watching this mystical piece somehow reminded me of reading an intense emotionally shaped short story – perhaps something like one of James Joyce’s Dubliners.  When I read a story in which at first I understand only fragments based upon the words and feelings which play on my imagination, I find myself slowly drawn into the experience almost of being someone else – their flashes of memories, their reactions to bits and pieces of actions, by themselves and others, their changing moods, their story through their own eyes.

In this theatre piece, Alice, played with considerable skill by dance-trained Alison Plevey, tells of her real or perhaps unreal relationship with Johnny Castellano, the spunk boy in her small-town high school, through a lifetime and death – all possibly pure imagination.  We not only hear her words, as if we were hearing that short story, but we see her representation in movement – not quite pure dance, yet never simple mime – of her actions, her moods and state of mind.  The performance takes place in an abstract setting of horizontal and vertical straight lines, in a central hollow open-sided cube and in hanging strip lights.  When these all hang in the vertical, death and final departure is imminent.  The sound track is essentially musique concrète.

The theatrical form, then, settles into what I would call abstract symbolism, but rather than alienating us from Alice’s story, we are slowly overwhelmed by an empathetic sense of doom.  I think it was this dark mood which reminded me of James Joyce’s work where snatches of ordinary reality come to symbolise powerful forces beyond our control.

So, in my view, Emma Gibson’s new work is unusual, original and absorbing, and she has been served very well indeed by Karla Conway  and her creative team in putting together the theatrical elements to make the story work on stage, including (I am guessing) choreography by Alison Plevey which is not explicitly acknowledged in the program.

Johnny Castellano is Mine is worth more than the hour it lasts on stage.  It lives on in one’s imagination as good theatre should.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: They’re Playing Our Song by Neil Simon

They’re Playing Our Song by Neil Simon, Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager.  Produced by Chrstine Harris & HIT Productions, directed by Terence O’Connell, at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 28 – April 5, 2014

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 28

I thank Scott Irwin (as Vernon Gersch) and Teagan Wouters (as Sonia Walsk) for giving us a pleasantly entertaining performance of this 1979 play with songs, which surely must be one of Neil Simon’s least stageworthy efforts.

Simon’s strengths were first recognised in the previous decade (Barefoot in the Park 1963 and The Odd Couple, Tony Award 1965), and much later with his Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for Lost in Yonkers, but I fear that this association in between times with composer Hamlisch (A Chorus Line) and lyricist Sager fell into the old theatrical trap of self-indulgence.  Simon was certainly playing their songs, but the resulting script is dramatically thin and entirely sentimental.

Though Simon was famous enough for the romance of their lives to run for a couple of years in New York, London and even in 1980 at the Theatre Royal in Sydney – starring John Waters and Jacki Weaver – I suspect that Hamlisch and Sager knowingly ‘used’ Simon to write the ‘book’ for their ‘musical’ as a pot-boiler.

However, in this production at least Terence O’Connell and the performers realised that putting on an overlay of comic stylisation was the best way to go for them as actors, and to concentrate on the music.  We could always applaud them as singers for their musicianship.

Which reminds me that it is not clear in the program who was the excellent keyboard player behind the scrim, sometimes dimly lit.  Was it Alistair Smith, named as Musical Director?

Because the songs now seem terribly dated and old-fashioned, and with so little dramatic development in the script beyond a few fairly obvious one-liner jokes (and regular name-dropping of Elton John), Wouters and Irwin had to work hard, so here are some nice pictures of them:

Scott Irwin - Vernon Gersch in They're Playing Our Song

Teagan Wouters - Sonia Walsk in They're Playing Our Song

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare.

Polixenes, Hermione, Leontes: jealousy

The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare.
Bell Shakespeare directed by John Bell; designer Stephen Curtis; lighting by Matthew Marshall; composer Alan John; sound designer Nate Edmondson; dramaturg John Kachoyan.  At the Sydney Opera House Playhouse: Season (including previews) March 1 – 29, 2014.

Paulina, Leontes: redemption

Polixenes, Leontes, Hermione, Camillo:
reconciliation

 Cast:   

    Leontes/Old Shepherd             Myles Pollard

    Hermione/Mopsa                      Helen Thomson

    Paulina/Dorcas                         Michelle Doake

    Polixenes                                  Dorian Nkono

    Camillo                                     Philip Dodd

    Antigonus/Autolycus                Terry Serio

    Cleomenes/Florizel                  Felix Jozeps

    Dion/Young Shepherd             Justin Smith

    Emilia/Perdita                          Liana Cornell

    Mamillius                                 Otis Pavlovic / Rory Potter

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Opening Night March 12

Beautiful!

That’s all I really need to say about this original interpretation of The Winter’s Tale.

But I want to say more: about how and why it works so well, and something about this production’s significance.

The Winter’s Tale and King Lear have always puzzled me on one point: why did Shakespeare let key characters – Leontes’ son Mamillius and Lear’s Fool – just insignificantly die.  They fade from the drama without much ado.  Late in Lear we hear that the Fool has been hanged.  In the Tale Mamillius sickens, but we do not see his death – despite the crucial role he plays in Leontes’ psychological state – and even his memory is effectively replaced by his long-lost sister, Perdita.

John Bell has solved my puzzle.  He was, I guess, impressed as I was by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1969 setting – in the famous ‘white box’ – of The Winter’s Tale, which we saw on their Australian tour in 1970.  Here’s Trevor Nunn’s image of the story beginning in the child’s nursery.

 

http://www.rsc.org.uk/images/content/Photo_Galleries-2009_earlier/winters-tale-1969-judi-541x361.jpg

Trevor Nunn's 1969 production of The Winter's Tale was designed by Christopher Morley and featured Judi Dench as Hermione. Photo shows Act 2, Scene 1 with Hermione (Judi Dench), Mamillius (Sam Rich, centre) and Leontes (Barrie Ingham).

Photo by Reg Wilson.

The key that Bell has found to unlock the puzzle is to set the whole play in Mamillius’ nursery.  It is a fairy story, told to us by the young boy as if the adults are like the toys that come alive in Léonide Massine’s ballet La Boutique Fantasque, though rather more like something from the brothers Grimm collection.  Although they were called "Children's Tales", they were not regarded as suitable for children, both for the scholarly information included and the subject matter.[Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, p15-17 quoted in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales ]

In Bell’s play, Mamillius does not die for us, but becomes a kind of wizard – rather like Prospero in The Tempest – as he plays the Oracle from Delphi with a magic wand that creates magnificent lightning and thunder.  This is a young boy at play, but his story is for adults.

And so, for the first time for me, even including the Trevor Nunn version, the revelation of the statue of Hermione, brought to life by the touch of her son’s spirit, brought real tears to my eyes.  At last The Winter’s Tale made sense, from the psychosis of Leonte’s irrational jealousy in falsely believing in Hermione’s and Polixene’s perfidy, to the importance of rational, clear-minded people like Paulina and Camillo, and to the possibility – or at least the hope – of redemption and reconcilation.

And, although I highly praise all the cast and stage creative team, I am left with a special sense of the enjoyment in performing for the young boy Mamillius – Rory Potter for me, and Otis Pavlovic on other nights – when he points his Oracle’s wand and creates wonderful lighting and sound effects, or plays with his torch to create the shadow of his teddy bear as it pursues the hapless innocent, honest and trustworthy Antigone to his gory death, or conducts puppet conversations among his soft toys, and finally as he brings his mother back to life. 

What a tremendous experience this must be for these young boys, just as this production is a beautiful theatrical work of art for its adult audience.

Otis Pavlovic as Mamillius, Terry Serio as Autolycus

Felix Jozeps as Florizel, Liana Cornell as Perdita
Michelle Doake as Dorcas, Terry Serio as Autolycus, Helen Thomson as Mopsa,
Otis Pavlovic (part hidden) and Justin Smith as Young Shepherd

Rory Potter as Mamillius as Oracle of Delphi

 Photos: Michele Mossop

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris - Preview

Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, directed by Tanya Goldberg.
Season:     Wednesday March 19 – Saturday April 19 (Previews from March 13)
Bookings:     Box Office 02 9929 0644; Online www.ensemble.com.au


by Frank McKone

Perhaps the most famous American play about black-white relations is All God’s Chillun Got Wings, by Eugene O’Neill, first performed in May 1924.  Its first reviewer, Arthur Pollock in the Brooklyn Daily News, thought it was too didactic, and worse – in hindsight from 90 years later – the lead player, Paul Robeson, “was a sad disappointment”.  How things change!

In Clybourne Park Bruce Norris shows that although the issues may not have changed, even by 2010, the approach to dramatising a story of the acceptance of African Americans into a previously white conclave need no longer be didactic.  Reviews describe the play as “Indisputably, uproariously funny”, “A savagely funny and insightful time bomb” and “Ferociously smart...sharp-witted, sharp-toothed comedy” (Entertainment Weekly, Hollywood Reporter and New York Times.)

What’s more, though O’Neill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize three times between 1920 and 1928, but not for his race relations play, Norris’s “wickedly funny, fiercely provocative play about race, real estate and the volatile values of each” and in which “we watch supposedly civilised people behave like territorial savages” has won not only the 2010 Evening Standard Award after its UK premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in London, but also the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play, and the 2011 Olivier Award for Best New Play.

I disagree with Arthur Pollock about All God’s Chillun, which I think is a powerful psychological drama resulting from the 1924 attitudes against mixed marriage and upward social mobility (even if his description of Robeson as “an earnest, hard-working amateur and nothing more, apparently” was accurate), and I especially look forward to writing a compare and contrast for Clybourne Park.

It’s unfortunate, though, that I am unable get to the Ensemble until the very last night of the season.  So either you wait for a post-production review, or you go along to see for yourself.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Proof by David Auburn

Photo: Dario Gardiman

Proof by David Auburn.  Design: Graham MacLean. Directed by Sandra Bates at Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, January 31 – March 8, 2014

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 20

The proof of the success of this production of Proof is that the house was very close to full more than halfway through its run.  The excellent quality of the acting is a measure of the important training role of the Ensemble Studio, demonstrated here by Matilda Ridgway (as the mathematical daughter Catherine), Michael Ross (as her pure mathematician father Robert), and Catherine McGraffin (as her less than mathematical sister Claire), thoroughly supported by the NIDA graduate Adriano Cappelletta (as the 28-year-old mathematician Hal, afraid he may already be past his creative prime).

The Ensemble has a long-established following (at dinner I overheard a dissertation at a neighbouring table about the famous University of Sydney Professor of Philosophy, John Anderson), with a warm sense of belonging to the tradition created by Hayes Gordon and whose mantle has been taken on so well by Sandra Bates.  For this appreciative audience, including myself as an Ensemble aficionado from way back, the performance I saw received the acclamation it clearly deserved.

What was impressive was the detail, not only in an evocative set which in the intimate in-the-round theatre made us feel at home with the characters, as if they were our next-door neighbours of many years, but particularly in the fine movement work – perhaps especially by Matilda Ridgway whose expressive eyes always told us what she was thinking and feeling – which was sure-footed and specific as in classical Indian dance.  Although on the surface the dialogue seems naturalistic, it was the skilful controlled action of the whole team, in examples from Ridgway’s eyelids to a sudden jump in reaction to an apparently accidental touch (this one by Catherine McGaffrin), that revealed the style directed so precisely by Sandra Bates. Even the screen door knew exactly when to bang shut.

The only disappointment for me was the sound track.  The program provides a great deal of detail about the music, by Bach (Musical Offering), Brahms (from Symphonie No 1 and Hungarian Dance 1), Lejaren Hiller (Illiac Suite – “the first musical composition for traditional instruments that was made through computer-assisted composition”), and an anonymous mathematician’s Cantor’s Theorem and Axiom of Choice Equivalent.  These latter pieces were posted on the Metamath website because the composer “noticed that a proof’s structure resembles that of a musical score and [he] decided to see what they ‘sounded’ like.”

Even though I had read the program over dinner before the show, I realised afterwards that I had only been aware of the occasional piece of the instantly recognisable Bach, and the striking extract from the Illiac Suite which introduced Act 2.  What was needed was a device to make us become aware and listen to the sound at significant points; whereas we were always drawn immediately in each of the nine rather filmic scenes to the characters and their relationships at that moment.  If the music was playing, our attention was elsewhere so that the sound was extraneous and our brains ignored it.

The idea of the music seems very sound to me, so I think I might have had an iPod sound system clearly visible on stage, which the daughter Catherine would switch on in the opening scene (where we see her in silence for some time) – or maybe it could be playing as she appears, until she switches it off.  At other times a character (probably the father Robert, but perhaps Catherine and her sister Claire) might be seen switching it on, or indeed off, but mostly, once we were aware of its presence, we would expect the sound and would listen to it in the spaces between action and dialogue.  In other words the music needed to be integrated into the action, instead of being peripheral, and unexplained unless you had read the program.

The play, set in the academic milieu of Chicago, has some extra resonance for Canberrans, with our close connection to the Australian National University (even apart from the original city design by the Chicagoan architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney). 

In my own case, I must disclose a special interest, since my daughter and her husband are ANU academics – he as an award-winning specialist in pure mathematics.  Like Robert’s daughter Catherine in the play, my grandson, when still six, awoke his parents one morning (after lying in bed from dawn until the time he was allowed to disturb their slumber), to announce that he had worked out that the number 31 could not be divided by any other number, except the number 1.  “Ah,” responded his father.  “You have just discovered prime numbers!  Well done!”

Despite my mathematical ability being no better than that of Claire, Robert’s other daughter in the play, my experience makes me appreciate the role of Hal, the one-time PhD student mentored by Robert in earlier times when he – Robert – had his full mental faculties.  Robert's loss of his mental “machine” is at the core of the plot in the play.  No wonder Hal is in awe of the man who had redirected our whole understanding of prime numbers (except in my case, of course – I remain blissfully ignorant).

Hal claims to realise that his own creative input is minor and is unlikely to reach such intellectual heights, since the common view is that mathematicians produce their best work before the age of 23 – and he is already 28.  In the play’s plot, now that Robert has died (and Catherine is turning 23), Hal’s insecurity, alongside his obsessive desire to search Robert’s notebooks for an even greater original proof, understandably makes him an annoying character – and even suspicious from Catherine’s point of view. 

Though I think Adriano Cappelletta captured the character very well, making me find him rather annoying too, I wonder if David Auburn has stereotyped Hal’s character too far to allow Catherine to finally accept him as she does in the last scene.  My experience of the mathematicians I knew when they were in their teens and twenties – and indeed now in their forties – has led me well away from the convention of ‘nerds’ who drank, used drugs and partied hard.  Hal, or at least his friends, sound more like the engineering students of my past.  My mathematicians were more likely to be found quietly discussing philosophy in the early hours.  In fact, much more like Catherine in the play.

Even so, Proof makes its point with very considerable power, especially about proper recognition of the place of women in the history of maths and science.  It results in an excellent night of theatre, especially when so ably performed.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Matilda Ridgway as Catherine and Michael Ross as Robert

Catherine McGraffin as Claire and Adriano Cappelletta as Hal

Catherine shows Hal the final proof

Photos: Clare Hawley

2014: A Tale of Two Cities adapted for the stage by Terence Rattigan and John Gielgud

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, adapted for the stage by Terence Rattigan and John Gielgud. Queanbeyan City Council production, edited and directed by Adam Spreadbury-Maher.  Set design: Brian Sudding; Costume design: Miriam Miley-Read; Lighting design: Hamish McConchie; Sound design: James McPherson.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, February 5-16, 2014.


Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 5

There’s a potentially interesting concept behind this production which, unfortunately, fails in its execution for the most part.  The part where it succeeds is, ironically enough, at the very end when the execution takes place.

The production seems to have been closely based on the version and style which Spreadbury-Maher presented at the King’s Head Theatre in London last year.  There were mixed reviews in London.  Mine is mixed, too.

Theatrical quality proved to be a problem, even though individual actors generally caught the modernist style well – especially Laura Dawson (in the main role of Lucie Manette as well as in various smaller parts), Peter Dark (as Jervis Lorry), and Calen Robinson (in the central role of Sydney Carton).

The difficulty was that in attempting to use a modern ‘presentational’ style in the staging and acting for a script in which Rattigan had maintained the mid-nineteenth century atmosphere created by Dickens, Spreadbury-Maher ended up making us feel unhappily tense.  Not about the sense of foreboding and approaching chaos in Dickens’ dramatic romantic story, but because of our having to absorb scenes where, for example, actors moved from London to Dover by miming bumping up and down in a stagecoach, dressed in today’s jeans and gym pants, or chains and black leather, or sometimes costumes from an 18th Century courtroom, where judges and solicitors spoke via microphones and loudhailers.  In between scenes, and sometimes during a transition period, we were shaken out of the historical period by highly-amplified recordings of songs by recently modern performers, such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

It is true that Dickens’ original work is highly melodramatic and needs to be stylised on stage rather than played naturalistically, but it was difficult to see what Spreadbury-Maher’s intention was.  Finally, literally in the last scene, simplicity worked as we came to understand what Sydney Carton was going to do, in concert with Jervis Lorry as he cottoned on, and the two scenes in parallel played out to their tragic end.

Unfortunately, immediately, modern pop burst upon us before we could fully savour the feeling.  Though it was exciting, and led to an extended curtain call, it seemed to me to be out of context.  Were we supposed to watch and forget the reason Dickens wrote his novel?

On that point, this edited version concentrated so much on the love triangle between Lucie Manette, Charles Darnay (played nicely by Daniel Greiss) and Sydney Carton that the essential part of Dickens’ story about the two cities – London and Paris in the throes of the French Revolution – became a minor concern.  I think the lyrics of some of the songs that were played were meant to make us think about the social consequences of a failing society, and I can see the difficulty of staging the revolutionary scenes (an earlier version, according to Spreadbury-Maher’s notes had a cast of 40 and ran for three and a half hours), but Dickens – looking back from 1859 – was concerned to show that injustice was bad enough at the best of times, but so much more intolerable without the rule of law.

These ideas were here, but broken up into small chunks rather than developed smoothly.  The result also was that the performances, though good in parts, did not hang together very well, and often the pacing – or the rhythm of the play – was just too slow and cumbersome.

However, it is still interesting in a quirky way, and the last scene (before the pop) is worth waiting for.

© Frank McKone, Canberra