2014: Highway of Lost Hearts, Food and The Dream. Feature article.

Highway of Lost Hearts written and performed by Mary Anne Butler.  An Art Back NT, Arts Development and Touring Production, directed by Lee Lewis.  Dramaturgy by Peter Matheson and Lee Lewis.  At The Street Theatre, Canberra, August 26-30, 2014.

Food by Steve Rodgers (writer/co-director ) and Kate Champion (co-director).  Co-produced by Force Majeure and Belvoir, at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, August 27-30, 2014.

The Dream written by William Shakespeare, adapted from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and directed by Peter Evans.  Bell Shakespeare at Canberra Theatre Playhouse August 30 – September 13, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 30

This week has become a demonstration of today in Australian theatre, confirming or challenging the views of Professor Julian Meyrick and Noonuccal Nuugi playwright and director Wesley Enoch in their Platform Papers The Retreat of Our National Drama and Take Me to Your Leader (Canberra Critics’ Circle blog, 15 May 2014 and 8 August 2014 respectively). 

Both Food and Highway of Lost Hearts are quintessentially Australian, while The Dream is a modern re-working of a European classic.

Butler works on a tiny scale out of Darwin, and appears in the tiny Street Theatre 2, with a solo piece from the heart. 

Rodgers’ play began, already in the margins of the new mainstream, Downstairs at Belvoir, Sydney, two years ago (previously reviewed on this blog 29 April 2012).  Wednesday this week at The Q was the hundredth performance.  Is it on its way to becoming an Australian classic? 

Bell Shakespeare is surely in the old mainstream, but feels the need to shake up Shakespeare.  The Dream was first developed in Bell’s education program for young people, with such success that it has now grown up, opening tonight on the mainstage in Canberra.

Do they all have their place?  Is it a level playing field?  Should the new mainstream resources go into more Rodgers and Butlers, rather than more of the Macbeths and Tartuffes that have been the stars of the last few weeks in Sydney?

Is this a conundrum I see before me?

While there are issues to be discussed, the quality of these three shows and their theatrical value has made this week an excellent reminder of how good Australian theatre can be.  Each play is distinctly different in content, yet surprisingly similar in what Peter Evans termed the ‘conceit’ in the writing, and equally successful in creating a sense of community in the theatre.  I would call each production a performance with the audience, not one for an audience.

I suspect that this directness of contact, and lack of pretension about performing, is a natural Australian characteristic.  We recognise Australian actors, even in films made in America, because of this quality.

The keyword for this week is heart. 

Mary Anne Butler searches for her own heart after the loss of her friend, drowned in Darwin harbour.  As she travels through the heart of Australia, 3000 kilometres south to Port Augusta plus 2000 kilometres east to Sydney, bits of her heart jump back into place as she experiences truths – good and bad, some fearful, some full of human warmth – until she accepts reality and finds peace.

Steve Rodgers’ two sisters, the elder Elma (now played by Mel King) and the younger Nancy (Emma Jackson) have broken hearts, bit by bit revealing the history of Nancy’s teenage gang-rape and Elma’s guilt.  Their ‘highway of lost hearts’ takes them to a takeaway pie shop in a small country town.  Their hearts are put back together by Turkish kitchen hand Hakan (Fayssal Bazzi), stopping over on his own international highway.  As he departs, all three – like Mary Anne, on the beach with her dog in Sydney – have accepted reality, both bad and good, and know there can be peace.

Shakespeare’s four lovers Helena (Nikki Shiels), Hermia (Lucy Honigman), Demetrius (Johnny Carr) and Lysander (Gareth Reeves) take a highway less travelled, through a European wood full of dangers – bears, lions and wolves – and mysterious forces – the spirits Oberon (Ray Chong Nee), Titania (Janine Watson) and Puck (Julie Forsyth).  On a parallel track is Nick Bottom, the weaver (Richard Piper), with a sense of his own importance to match that of the most self-centred young lovers.   For all five, their road is as rocky as Mary Anne’s, Elma’s, Nancy’s and Hakan’s, through their midsummer madness, and like those others they reach an acceptance of reality and a time of peace in their hearts.

The key to the issues raised by Julian Meyrick and Wesley Enoch lies in the theatrical style and the relationship between the actors and our audiences which make these three productions real and heartfelt.  Our tradition of theatre being made physical makes a solid ground on which directors Lee Lewis, Kate Champion and Peter Evans firmly sit.  Whether small and independent, middling mainstage or long-established theatre company, it is the choreography of movement which holds the text together and gives it meaning. 

Bell Shakespeare has captured, I imagine, the very sense of theatricality that Shakespeare achieved for the groundlings of his day.  The Chamberlain’s Men, when Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the age of 31, probably had about as much security as Mary Anne Butler or Steve Rodgers, at a similar age and stage.  The Swan theatre had just been built in 1594, but according to Amanda Mabillard in Shakespeare's Theatres: The Swan, Shakespeare Online, 20 August 2000 http://www.shakespeare-online.com/theatres/therose.html  The Swan has a rather bleak history after 1597, when the staging of plays gave way to a variety of other activities such as amateur poetry readings, and swashbuckling competitions.  Some other sources say that the Government closed all theatres in 1597, presumably because of their bawdy productions.

Considering our current and future government, independent and less than mainstage companies, who can’t command the level of sponsorship that Bell Shakespeare has achieved, may have to face new highways of lost hearts.  This is the point about leadership from government and community culture that concerns Wesley Enoch.

But I have to say that Bell’s The Dream is a challenge to the even bigger mainstage companies that Meyrick criticises, such as Sydney Theatre Company.  As my review of their Macbeth suggests (Canberra Critics’ Circle 13 August 2014), emphasising star actors and star directors who seem to experiment for experiment’s sake should not be the way to go.  Using the attraction of the European (and American) classics as bait for audiences on a commercial basis, and thus taking the bulk of government subsidy through popularity, leaves the development and maintenance of good Australian work somewhere on that highway of lost hearts.

The Dream does not fall into the error of STC’s Macbeth.  Peter Evans understood that Shakespeare, in this play, deliberately made the nature of acting and the actors’ relationship with their audience an overarching theme which supported the story of lovers, amateur actors, kings and queens, and faery forces.  By beginning with the eight actors as the ‘rude mechanicals’ who turn into all those other characters, and return to acting out their farcical Pyramus and Thisbe story at the end, Evans has integrated Shakespeare’s intention with the action, brought the audience into the actors’ world, and put all of us in the position of the characters on stage.  Peace and understanding is the result.  The positive feeling was palpable at the curtain call, in the foyer and in the drinks and nibblies speeches after the show.

The same was true after Food and Highway of Lost Hearts.  It was not the feeling after STC's Macbeth.  But where does the money go?  Where is the level playing space?  Where is the leadership which will make Food or Highway of Lost Hearts the classics they deserve to become?

Mary Anne Butler
Photography: Street Theatre

Fayssal Bazzi (Hakan), Mel King (Elma)                               Mel King (Elma), Emma Jackson (Nancy)
Photos: Heidrun Löhr

The Lovers L to R: Nikki Shiels (Helena), Johnny Carr (Demetrius), Lucy Honigman (Hermia), Gareth Reeves (Lysander)

Ray Chong Nee (Oberon), Julie Forsyth (Puck)

L to R: Ray Chong Nee (Thisbe), Johhny Carr (Wall), Janine Watson (Quince), Richard Piper (Bottom), Lucy Honigman (Lion), Nikki Shiels (Moon)
The Dream Photos: Lisa Tomasetti

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

L to R: Yalin Ozucelik (John Worthing J.P.), Rory Walker (Rev Chasuble), Lucy Fry (Cecily Cardew),
Anna Steen (Hon.Gwendolen Fairfax), Nancye Hayes (Lady Bracknell), Nathan O'Keefe (Algernon Moncrieff).
Off stage: Caroline Mignone (Miss Prism)

Caroline Mignone (Miss Prism), Rory Walker (Rev Chasuble)

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.  State Theatre Company of South Australia, directed by Geordie Brookman.  Designer: Ailsa Paterson; Lighting: Gavin Norris; Composer: Stuart Day; Hair, Make-up and Wardrobe: Jana DeBiasi.  At Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse, August 18-23, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 19

An enjoyable, if conventional, production of Wilde’s highly amusing comedy of manners, this production stands out for the stage design and a clever approach to stylising the acting.

The set, made by the Company’s workshop for touring, has its own circular curtain which defines the acting space for whatever stage the performers find themselves on.  It’s simple in concept but, with a minimum of props, furniture and suspended lights, and sections of curtain with different decoration, the mood, location of the scenes and the historical period are quickly and smoothly suggested as the butler draws the curtain around.

As the design takes us out of the convention of a naturalistic box set, it follows that the acting includes choreographed movement which takes on a life of its own.  The humour of the play is already built in to Wilde’s one-liners and highly unlikely plot, while, under this director and I suspect his assistant director Yasmin Gurreeboo,  physical actions are used to define each of the characters and how they relate to the others, adding substantially to the comedy.  Perhaps for the first time I was able to see Wilde’s work in the context of English absurdism, which for me goes back to Laurence Sterne’s 18th Century novel Tristram Shandy and on through the university traditions which spawned shows like The Goodies and Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  I could almost see John Cleese’s funny walks and Faulty Towers in the making.

Instead of finding myself wondering if Wilde should be compared with his more or less contemporary Bernard Shaw, this production made it clear that Earnest is nearer to farce than Shaw’s comedies of social analysis, and that this is not a bad thing.  The basic structure of the play is not too far from a Feydeau farce, though Wilde’s servant class do not much more than roll their eyes at their ‘betters’, rather than undermine them.  Wilde focusses on and exposes the human foibles of the upper class without pontificating.  The fun of doing this is what has kept this play alive well into its second century, even in ‘classless’ Australia.  We may not have too many real Lady Bracknells in Canberra, but we surely have plenty of micro-managerial operators, and plenty of young people falling in love with superficial features in the opposite sex and bonding or arguing immediately they meet with others of the same sex.

The performers – Nancye Hayes (Lady Bracknell), Lucy Fry (Cecily Cardew), Nathan O’Keefe (Algernon Moncrieff), Yalin Ozucelik (John Worthing), Anna Steen (Gwendolen Fairfax), Caroline Mignone (Miss Prism) and Rory Walker (butlers Lane and Merriman, and Rev Chasuble) – were all up to the professional mark required, as we expect nowadays from the mainstage companies, both as individuals and as a close-knit ensemble.  The result was a very satisfying presentation of a favourite English classic.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Tartuffe, the Hypocrite by Molière

Tartuffe

Sketches by Anna Cordingley

 Photos: Lisa Tomasetti

                    L to R: Robert Jago (Cléante), Kate Mulvaney Dorine), Helen Dallimore (Elmire), Charlie Garber (Damis), Geraldine Hakewill (Mariane), Jennifer Hagan (Madame Pernelle)

  
 

Sean O'Shea (Orgon), Geraldine Hakewill (Mariane), Kate Mulvaney (Dorine)

Tartuffe, the Hypocrite by Molière.  A new version by Justin Fleming, directed by Peter Evans.  Designer: Anna Cordingley; Lighting: Paul Jackson; Composer: Kelly Ryall; Movement: Scott Witt.  Bell Shakespeare, Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, July 26 – August 23, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 13

In the light of recent developments, where a politician appears to have special relations with Chaser dogs, cartoons are defended by Leaks and Popes, and bigots are politically correct (or very nearly), Molière’s introduction to his 1664-69 play Tartuffe should bring a smile to all our two-faces: If the function of comedy is to correct men’s vices, I do not see why any should be exempt...  It is a vigorous blow to vices to expose them to public laughter.

The very public laughter from the mixed matinee audience when I saw the show, in the company of a never cross section of a model modern audience – from teenage school groups to staid ancients like me – proved the author’s point magnificently.  But when you consider that Molière’s central character appears as a pillar of the Church, deliberately using his position for his own personal satisfaction – sexual and financial – then it may not be long before we see writer Justin Fleming, director Peter Evans and even the institution of Bell Shakespeare itself brought before a certain Royal Commission for Institutional Perversion of Youth.

After all, that’s what happened to Molière, to quote from Melissa Lesnie’s most informative article published in the Program: By the time the final, heavily revised version of Molière’s most controversial comédie made it to the boards in 1669, the playwright’s name would be forever tied up with Tartuffe’s, linked with anti-clerical sentiment and what was deemed morally depraved theatre.  Schoolgirls and schoolboys in Catholic school uniforms (and some were there on Wednesday) beware: Fleming has written a new version which seems to me to reinstate everything sexual that the original author was forced to ‘heavily revise’.  It is not Tartuffe’s financial greed and gluttony which makes the play salacious and open to Church attack.  It’s his twisted and devious sexual demands that threaten his author.

Fleming, Evans and Bell are as brave in modern times as Molière was in his.  Whereas, Lesnie writes Paradoxically, in making the play more acceptable to religious dévots, Molière managed to transform it into a reactionary critique not only of hyprocisy, but also of the very censorship to which it was subjected, the Bell Shakespeare team have allowed themselves every modern licence, to the point where some of those schoolgirls’ reactions behind me made it very clear that they expected, excited in their trepidation,  that Tartuffe (Leon Ford) would actually expose Elmire’s private parts in the scene of his seduction exposé.  Fortunately Helen Dallimore maintained her privacy, in a very funny scene where she, now hidden from the audience on a huge turned-around sofa, apparently with no chance of escaping Tartuffe as Ford dropped his daks and leapt with amazing athleticism over the sofa’s back ... only to arise face to face with Orgon, Elmire’s husband, who is now finally disabused of Tartuffe’s manipulative ‘humility’.

It may be an old slapstick device, but it works.

It is, of course, the Maid Dorine, inevitably pronounced in Australian as ‘Doreen’, with the blunt wit of the old commedia traditional servant, who runs rings around the stupidities of the upper-class men.  Here’s her description of Tartuffe:

True, it is something altogether scandalous
A stranger in the house with no idea how to handle us;
He arrives with no shoes, his clothes not worth a cracker,
No sooner in the door, than he starts to wag his clacker.

At once you can see what Fleming is doing – taking the original French and turning it into racy rhyming English.  Kate Mulvaney’s Dorine has a complete set of movement and gestures to go with her words that turns her into a very funny annoying bane of Sean O’Shea’s Orgon’s life, as he does all he can to maintain control of his wayward family.  But Dorine is not just wonderfully funny: without her perspicacity, Tartuffe would have had his way without real opposition.

Yet Fleming is actually doing far more with the language than meets the ear and eye.  He’s a serious classics academic, no less.  (He will now sue me under Section 18C for ‘insulting’ him!)  But there it is: the rhyming patterns are as complex as anything Shakespeare wrote, while the choice of words is as bawdy as in Aristophenes’ Lysistrata.  I think, in precise Australian (watch for the one about a man bringing his sausage, but the woman doesn’t have to cook his steak) Fleming has done what Molière would be proud of: shown that Tartuffe, written by a rouseabout bloke of the theatre, is a work of art of classic proportions, and an example to us all.

Everybody, from Jennifer Hagan’s overbearing grandmother figure as Madame Pernelle to the teenage lovers Mariane (Geraldine Hakewill) and Valère (Tom Hobbs) have the timing and the precision of movement and rhythm exactly right for a true comédie.

Finally, indeed at the very end, when it seems that Orgon has no way to recover his property from the nefarious Tartuffe (whose name, so Melissa Lesnie tells us, is derived from the Italian word for ‘that pungent fungus buried deep in the ground’: a truffle), Fleming comes up with his cleverest twist.  A figure rises from the depths to explain that only one person has the power to save Orgon, despite his foolishness.  In the original play, this figure is an official of the king, the name of whom is not mentioned but was Louis XIV.  It must have galled Molière to conclude his play by giving the king not only a sense of morality but also the ultimate say (unless he hoped his audience would see through his rigidly smiling mask to the reality of political power). 

Referring to Tartuffe the official says:

Ce monarque, en un mot, a vers vous détesté
Sa lâche ingratitude et sa déloyauté

In Fleming’s version, it is not an autocratic king, however morally inclined, but the Author himself – also not named, but in other words Molière – who cannot allow perfidy to win the day.  What lesson indeed would we learn if hypocrisy rules?  So, it is the Author who reveals Tartuffe’s criminal past, who is horrified at his ingratitude and disloyalty, who forgives Orgon for his ineptitude, and tears up the contract he had signed passing all his estate over to Tartuffe, and sends Tartuffe and his odious agent down into what looks like a fiery hell.

The family – now rather like Pirandello’s six characters having found their author – are grateful not to the temporal power of a monarch but for the omnipotence of the artist and the power of art.

A great ending to a magnificent comedy.

Robert Jago, Charlie Garber, Geraldine Hakewill, Helen Dallimore, Kate Mulvaney

Leon Ford (Tartuffe), Helen Dallimore (Elmire)

"Jesus wants to be your friend"

Kate Mulvaney, Geraldine Hakewill, Tom Hobbs, Sean O'Shea, Helen Dallimore, Jennifer Hagan, Robert Jago

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

What the audience sees

Hugo Weaving as Macbeth

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The witches tell Macbeth that he cannot be defeated until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, nor by a man of woman born.  Chaos reigns behind him.

Kate Box, Robert Menzies, Hugo Weaving, Ivan Donato














Macduff, Banquo, Rosse, Malcolm, support King Duncan
Kate Box, Paula Arundell, Robert Menzies
Eden Falk, John Gaden

Melita Jurisic as Lady Macbeth, Hugo Weaving as Macbeth

Hugo Weaving

Eden Falk as Fleance, Paula Arundell as Banquo
are about to be attacked by Macbeth's thugs

Paula Arundell as Lady Macduff and Hugo Weaving as Macbeth

All photos © Brett Boardman

Macbeth by William Shakespeare.  Sydney Theatre Company: director, Kip Williams; designer, Alice Babidge; lighting designer, Nick Schlieper; composer and sound designer, Max Lyandvert.  At Sydney Theatre July 21 – September 27, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 12

This staging of Macbeth is brilliant but flawed.  Macbeth himself is brilliant but flawed: that’s why the play is a tragedy.  Hugo Weaving, who plays Macbeth, is brilliant, but not flawed.  Overall the production is not a tragedy, but rather like Macbeth’s character, it contains conflicting elements.

Shakespeare, as Weaving so magnificently demonstrates, gives us a clear and detailed understanding of the character who is determined to be king at any cost, and therefore believes what his witches and ghosts would have him believe.  Unable to recognise that these are the figments of his wishful thinking, not solid truths, the gap between the extremity of his actions and his underlying guilt widens until he is mentally torn apart.

This constitutes the brilliance of this production, where Weaving is thoroughly supported by all the ensemble of actors: Paula Arundell (Banquo / Lady Macduff); Kate Box (Macduff / Witch); Ivan Donato (Seyton / Witch); Eden Falk (Malcolm / Fleance / Apparition); John Gaden (Duncan / Old Man / Young Macduff / Apparition); Melita Jurisic (Lady Macbeth / Bloody Captain / Apparition); Robert Menzies (Witch / Rosse / Porter).

The cast list and their characters may give you some surprises, and some clue as to what I see as a flaw in the direction, which results in some design issues (though Alice Babidge creates some highly successful solutions).

The conceit (using the term as in John Donne’s poems, for the sake of some reference to Shakespeare’s period) seems to be that a group of actors have come together to explore the nature of this play, Macbeth.  For some reason unknown to those of us who have been invited to watch this improvisation / workshop, it happens that there are only eight actors, only three of whom are women.  It might be thought that, gender balance being an important concern in modern times, the parts might be passed around so that everyone has a fair go at significant roles.

Because we audience are backstage rather than frontstage, we find ourselves looking down onto an extended apron from temporary bleacher seats set up on the stage.  We are not comfortable.  It could be said to be true that I sat on the edge of my seat for two hours, but mostly not because of the emotional impact of the show.  It was to stop my circulation being cut off by the edge of the seat.

I thought for some time that this was a device to tell me that Macbeth is an unsettling play, but as time went along it was the quality of the acting by Hugo Weaving of Macbeth and Melita Jurisic of Lady Macbeth that told me this.  It was her mad scene and his response to her breakdown that made me forget that damn’d seat.

The point is that on the one hand we seemed to be watching actors acting a play – very Brechtian in concept I suppose – but in some scenes we seemed to watching a play as if it were ‘real’.  Our ‘distance’ was deliberately maintained until after Duncan’s murder (for example, as witches dunked their faces in a plastic bowl of water to represent their cauldron, or death was represented by splashing fake blood onto Duncan’s face, among many other such devices).  Then the acting area was engulfed in stage fog for the porter’s ‘knock, knock, knock, who’s there’ scene, as if the group of actors around the long table had been whisked away and we were now transported to Shakespeare’s mediaeval castle.

Of course, this illusion of reality was still surrounded by all the backstage lights, an impressive sound track, and the fake smoke, so the Brechtian insistence on us knowing we were watching a play was not broken.  But from then on we were switched on and off from one ‘reality’ – the actors’ improvisation around Shakespeare’s words, in rehearsal clothes with bits of costumes added where they thought necessary – to the other apparent reality of scenes like Macbeth seeing Banquo’s ghost, or persuading thugs to kill Banquo and Fleance, while at the end there was a weird mix of Macbeth with a hugely long sword being defeated by a female Macduff by her words and a splash of fake blood.

I had read in a newspaper interview that the placing of the audience on the stage, and the action taking place in the auditorium would be a ‘surprise’.  I suppose, as a one-time drama teacher and observer of theatre since the 1960s, I might be expected to not be surprised by such playing around with convention.  I certainly didn’t notice anyone else being surprised the night I saw the show.  Some laughed rather nervously as they had to ask others to stand on tiptoe so they could be squeezed past to get to seats, along rows set far too close for comfort.

For the convention of a play (Macbeth) within a play (of actors rehearsing or workshopping), looking down onto the apron with the empty seats in the auditorium rising on the other side, and some of the action being played among those seats, worked quite well.  Macduff and Malcolm were in England up in about Row J while Macbeth was pacing about in Scotland on the apron below them, where he had just killed Lady Macduff and her young son, played by the same John Gaden in modern casual dress who had recently been Duncan alive and dead, and later was an old man fearful for the future of Scotland.

But the breaking in and out of this convention, despite the power of the acting, left me unsettled.  Was I supposed to be focussing on, and being appreciative of the actors’ skills in clarifying Shakespeare’s text, which was certainly very well done; or was I supposed to be absorbed in the story and the interplay of Shakespeare’s characters, and the implications for life today (just as he was using past history to imply concerns about the abuse of power in his own day)?

In the end I have to conclude that this production of Macbeth is an interesting but not entirely original experiment.  For me the experimentation, though cleverly and skilfully done by the actors and designers, got in the way of the absorption in the drama, which I think was what Shakespeare was on about.

Hugo Weaving as Macbeth waiting for Macduff for the final battle

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Take Me to Your Leader by Wesley Enoch

Take Me to Your Leader by Wesley Enoch.  Platform Papers No. 40, August 2014, published by Currency House, Sydney.

Commentary by Frank McKone
August 8

Wesley Enoch’s subtitle is The dilemma of cultural leadership.  Let me begin by pointing out that Wesley is a cultural leader in his own right.  He should be formally recognised.  We have the right government at this very moment to do this.

Just as in England we have Sir Paul McCartney et al, PM Tony Abbott can have His Excellency, General the Honourable Sir Peter Cosgrove AK MC (Retd) dub Sir Nick Cave, Dame Cate Blanchett and Sir Wesley Enoch, as well as all those others that Wesley nominates, including: “filmmaker Gillian Armstrong AM, novelist Thea Astley AO, novelist Rodney Hall, designer Jennifer Kee, ABC broadcaster Jill Kitson, Indigenous teacher and performer Michael Leslie, choreographer Graeme Murphy AM, cartoonist Bruce Petty, arts czar Leo Schofield AM and academic Peter Spearritt”.  This was the team that wrote “the first ever national cultural policy, called Creative Nation” for Paul Keating in 1994.

Among other “elders of the theatre [who] are often forgotten, thrown on the scrap heap of natural attrition and fashion [are] the rare few [who] seem to float above it all – Robyn Archer, John Bell, Wendy Blacklock, Carol Burns, Peter Carroll, John Gaden, Roger Hodgman, Liz Jones, Robyn Nevin, George Whaley; but for every person remembered there are untold casts of forgotten.”

But is this European style what Australian leadership is all about – a sort of cultural popularity contest where the monarch picks the winners?  Is it what this “Nunuccal Nuugi man from Stradbroke Island” really wants?  Is it appropriate?  At the risk of offending the Australian Indigenous “race” under Section 18C, this one-time £10 Pom says I don’t think so.

Nor does Wesley, of course.  He’s far more polite than Sir Paul McC, as I suspect are all those others Wesley mentions (though I’m not so sure about my suggestion, Sir Nick).

So let’s get down to the business of Enoch’s argument.  Talking of theatre, his artistic milieu, he claims essentially that the history of government support for the arts, largely through the Australia Council, has ended up undermining the creative energy which we saw taking the lead – despite lack of support – during the 1960s and 1970s.  “In the 1970s with the establishment of the Australia Council we saw the formalising of funding support and the growth of some kind of official culture.  Funding provided a framework within which to experiment and explore ideas that examined Australian life and reflect our own aspirations.  The question today is whether the idea of state-sanctioned culture has led to the taming and silencing of the rambunctious, dissenting mob that ruled our performing arts for over two centuries.  In the search for the approval of the public purse have we lost our wit and charm, the art of surviving through persuasion, our critical purpose and our taste for the popular?” [Enoch’s emphasis]

In particular, Enoch notes, “After the stock market crash of the late 80s a new type of economic speak crept into the cultural language....We started to see papers on economic impact and multipliers, and we moved from an artistic community to an industry.”  In 1993, when the Drama Committee of the Australia Council, which included Wesley Enoch, divvied up the money according to the old criteria – diversity, gender representation, Indigenous arts, young people and Australian content, and the overarching ‘excellence’ – “All hell broke loose.”

The committee had found “that the larger theatre companies did not comply with the criteria.  Their lack of cultural diversity, gender representation and Australian content was very clear....Most of the large theatre companies received decreases in funding of around $500,000.  This freed up resources to support a range of other activities across the country.”

Then, writes Enoch, “The boards and artistic directors of the larger theatre companies went direct to government to have the Australia Council return the money that had been taken from them.  This was the beginning of the MOB (Major Organisations Board), an unfortunate acronym that soon changed to MPAB (Major Performing Arts Board).  This Board removed almost all artistic and cultural leadership criteria from the assessment of these privileged companies.”  Only “the overarching criterion of excellence remained unchallenged” and the “larger companies exited the general application process and the dollars they had been receiving from the Drama Committee went with them.”

Enoch sees cultural leadership as much more than putting on ‘excellent’ productions.  He writes, “Artists, by their very nature, are rogues and philosophers – instinctual, naughty, vibrant, edgy, fringe-dwellers who use their wits to survive in a world that pressures its citizens into many shades of conformity.”  And, in a brief reference to his own culture which I would love to know much more about, he states, “For thousands of years in this country there has been a balance between the sacred and the profane in performance.  Lewd, sexually explicit dances sat side by side with the most profoundly-felt ceremonies.”

So is there a way we can get back, at least to the kind of leadership we once had from another list of names: Jennifer Blocksidge, Rex Cramphorn, Jack Davis, Alma De Groen, Max Gillies, Louis Nowra, John Romeril, Stephen Sewell, Brian Syron, Rod Wissler and even the still popular David Williamson?  But, Enoch asks, “would a vocal critic like Stephen Sewell ever get produced on our mainstages these days?  Would any radical voice find access to the resources of the larger companies and if so under what conditions?  It is interesting to remember a time when Neil Armfield, Gale Edwards, Dorothy Hewett, Stephen Page, Geoffrey Rush, David Williamson, were radical and new and the systems that were in their infancy supported them to grow into national and international figures.”

I sense that in his conclusion, Wesley Enoch does not agree with previous Platform Papers contributors, Peter Tregear in Enlightenment or Entitlement and Julian Meyrick in The Retreat of our National Drama (reviewed on this blog February and May 2014 respectively).

Opposing Tregear, he writes “The apprenticeship is a long-established trade practice in other fields but has been abandoned by theatre and the responsibility surrendered to the tertiary education sector.  But the university structure, with its emphasis on academic excellence and compliance is an inappropriate place for a budding actor or entrepreneur to learn the practicalities and opportunities of theatre life.”

Enoch doesn’t mention Meyrick, but perhaps the two could meet in the foyer of Meyrick’s proposed National Theatre (which I proposed could be established in Canberra).  The National Theatre would be entirely focussed on producing new and classic Australian work, would not be a university institution, and would operate as a guild, with its practising performers, writers, directors, designers, technicians and managers mentoring apprentices in each field.

Productions by the National Theatre would not take place only in Canberra, of course.  The leadership it offers must be seen around the country.  The model I see for this in  today’s theatre world, perhaps, is the way Bell Shakespeare is based in Sydney, opens shows in other cities, tours, and offers both mainstage and educational productions.  We have some of the management structure already in place in Playing Australia.

All we need is someone like Wesley Enoch to be the artistic director.  Not Sir Wesley.  Just the Wesley from Stradbroke Island who writes “In Aboriginal society, I was taught, everyone dances and sings and paints and tells stories.  You have to, the arts are the way you understand the world.  If you don’t sing and paint and dance and tell stories you have no way of connecting with your family, your landscape, your history, your religion, your survival.  Everybody does it and understands the power of culture.”

And the Wesley Enoch who worried about accepting sponsorship from a sandmining company – the one which works on his traditional country, Stradbroke Island.  “On one hand the money could facilitate the project’s realization and enable its artists to reach their potential.  On the other, there are deep cultural and spiritual issues connected to the exploitation and extraction of the Land.  I talked with my father and other elders.  Their advice was to accept the money and use it to promote the stories, people and spiritual and cultural values that the project was attempting to celebrate.  I should also use what skills I had to speak up about the issues that were important to me.  So in the end I decided to accept the money of the sand mining company.”

The project was the play Black Diggers, reviewed on this blog January 19, 2014.

Enoch lays out his sponsorship options, saying “I don’t believe in such a thing as ‘clean money’.

1. Boycott or deny participation as artist or
sponsor/donor;

2. Accept support from the sponsor; but at the same
time create a critical environment within the
work or in a discussion about the work that
promoted alternative views to those of the donor;

3. Adopt a ‘it has nothing to do with me I just
make the Art’ position.

He concludes:  “The only way to really promote debate is to be part of it; and to engage through your work.  That is why my preference is Option 2.”

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Circa “S” directed by Yaron Lifschitz

Circa “S” directed by Yaron Lifschitz.  Technical / lighting director: Jason Organ; costumes designer: Libby McDonnell; music composed by Kimmo Pohjonen and Samuli Kosminen (Copyright Control/ TEOSTO) performed by: Kronos Quartet / Kimmo Pohjonen / Samuli Kosminen from the album Uniko courtesy of Hoedown Arts, Helsinki; additional music and sound composed by Purcell, Viñao, Múm and the cast: Nathan Boyle, Jessica Connell, Gerramy Marsden, Daniel O’Brien, Brittanie Portelli, Kimberley Rossi, Duncan West.

Canberra Theatre Centre, August 6-9, 2014
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 6

In recent times I have seen Circus Oz: From the Ground Up (Australian Indigenous reconciliation theme on a building site); Okham’s Razor: Arc, Memento Mori & Every Action… (UK aerial dances); Circolombia: Urban (city street life in Colombia); and now Circa’s S (Australian work by Yaron Lifschitz “of philosophical and poetic depth from the traditional languages of circus”).  All are examples of what is now being termed ‘contemporary circus’.

This genre is generally to be supposed to have been begun by Canada’s Cirque du Soleil and, according to Wikipedia was self-described as a "dramatic mix of circus arts and street entertainment". It is the largest theatrical producer in the world. Based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and located in the inner-city area of Saint-Michel, it was founded in Baie-Saint-Paul in 1984 by two former street performers, Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix.  But Circus Oz claims that Circus Oz was founded in 1978 as an amalgamation of two already successful Australian groups, Soapbox Circus and the New Circus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirque_du_Soleil
http://www.circusoz.com/circus-oz/history.html

The entertainment value of contemporary circus has made it a world-wide phenomenon, so the first quality to look for is the performers’ skills.  The ensemble performing S are perhaps the best I’ve seen, not just because they perform each movement, on the floor or in the air, with more precision than I’ve seen from many Olympic gymnastic contenders, but especially because of the complex shifting required from one movement to the next in a highly detailed choreography, and because of the timing of the movement to create the mood changes of the piece.

S is different from the other three companies' work.  Though closest to Okham’s Razor is style, S is not about telling stories.  Okham’s Razor’s works that I saw were like three visual video artworks, using a storyline as the basis for each relatively short piece.  S is one complete dance over 85 minutes, not structured around a storyline but as a work of changing moods as the figures experience a kind of lifetime.  The images are not obvious, as if representing the reality of a life, but are highly abstract.  The qualities of the physical movement as ‘scenes’ progress alter the mood on stage just as they do in modern dance.  The work becomes a metaphor which we interpret through the feelings created in us.  In other words, S is, as director Lifschitz hoped, a poetic work spoken in the language of circus.

Though life begins, as a figure is drawn upwards from the floor by a suspended glowing light (a ‘star’ perhaps), and life ends as the star, and the figure beneath, descends and dims to dark, the feeling of joy in life and satisfaction in so skilfully creating a life well-lived flowed off the stage for a warmth of applause and appreciation beyond what one might expect of a mere entertainment.

Circa’s S has taken ‘contemporary’ circus to a new level of artistry, and establishes the company firmly in the forefront of what is now a genre almost 40 years old.  It, I think, takes its place alongside the new developments in dance-drama, or dance-theatre, that we see in the work of Kate Champion’s Force Majeure Dance Company in linking with actors and playwrights, such as in Food by Steve Rodgers.  These new forms of stage work make Australian theatre an exciting place to be.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: The Burning by Duncan Ley

The Burning by Duncan Ley.  Everyman Theatre directed by Duncan Driver; composer, Tim Hansen; lighting by Kelly McGannon.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre July 31 to August 10, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 31

The subject of this play about the burning of witches in Bamberg, Germany, in 1628, inevitably brings to mind two other famous plays, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and George Bernard Shaw’s St Joan.  Ley has not written a drama with the depth and complexity of human relationships that Miller achieved, and The Burning does not create a central character to match the powerful figure of Shaw’s Joan. 

But he successfully adds a dimension which both those other plays touch upon: what is the nature of justice?  When the fount of justice is faith in God (or potentially in any unchallengeable belief), and faith cannot be judged by reason, how can any court apply any human law reasonably?

I have not studied the original history to know if Ley’s characters were real, but the importance of the play is that it shows the tragic results of the application of law as if it is based on objective reasoning, but starting from a faith-based assumption. 

Madeline Couillart, her husband Francis Schiller, and even his jealous and vicious rival Frederick Vasolt should never have been “burnt in God’s fire” on the grounds  that they were witches and heretics.  Madeline, played sensitively and beautifully by Amy Dunham, was a prime example of humanity rising above her destructive social setting.  Francis, played very effectively by the young actor Jack Parker, represented all those honest and reasonable lawyers who we might see today as working pro bono on human rights cases.  While Frederick, played with increasingly ugly and terrifying violence by Will Huang, is in his own way a victim of a society in which the Inquisition is given absolute power.

The worst irony is that Frederick’s father, Ernst Vasolt, played horrifyingly well by Duncan Ley himself, is the very Commissioner of the Inquisition who is the prosecutor who can manipulate the ‘secular’ court because even that court and the prince, under whose rule the court exists, can never be independent of the assumption that God’s law is above all – even though that really means Commissioner Vasolt’s interpretation of crimes against God, like witchcraft and heresy.

The horror lies in the fact that Vasolt is honest, carrying out his belief according to the law.  Not only does he succeed in ‘proving’ Madeline and Francis ‘guilty’, but is forced, by his own logic, to condemn his own son.  The complexity of how this plays out in court needs to be seen, in the powerful second act of The Burning, to be believed.  But, since I have had personal experience, in the days when National Service was compulsory in Australia, of having to conduct my own case in court to ‘prove’ my conscientious objection to being drafted into the army, I understood the position of Francis Schiller, and can believe what happens in Ley’s court scene.  I even, after failing in a magistrate’s court, appealed to a higher court before a judge, where I acted as my own lawyer and, rather like Francis, called my own father as a witness, knowing he would be cross-examined by the prosecution lawyers.  Fortunately I was not under threat of being burnt at the stake, though I could well have been jailed – but that’s a another story.

I’ve concentrated here on the content of the play, rather than on this production, because I think it is in Ley’s writing that we see the value of theatre arising from the modern day experience which we see paralleled in history.

In fact the production was very effective, including a strident sound track cleverly employing modern, even avant-garde style, in combination with renaissance style music, which for me enhanced the idea of the present being an extension of the past.  Although the acting varied somewhat in quality – not surprising when the cast included actors of very different degrees of experience – I found myself imagining the play as it might be done by, say, Sydney Theatre Company. 

With a little more work on the first act, and I would think very little more on the very tight drama of the second, I could see The Burning at Wharf 1.  It’s certainly well worth seeing at The Q.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: The Government Inspector by Simon Stone with Emily Barclay

The Government Inspector by Simon Stone with Emily Barclay; devised by the cast featuring a short musical by Stefan Gregory; inspired by Nikolai Gogol.  At The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre, May 28-31, 2014.

Dear Mr Stone and Company,

Thank you for your invitation to the National Commission of Audit to inspect your operation. 

To place our conclusions in an appropriate context, we refer you to those of our Terms of Reference relevant to your situation, as follows:

http://www.ncoa.gov.au/docs/NCA_TERMS_OF_REFERENCE.pdf

Scope:

In relation to activities performed, the Commission is asked to identify:

–whether there remains a compelling case for the activity to continue to be
undertaken; and
–if so, whether there is a strong case for continued direct involvement of
government, or whether the activity could be undertaken more efficiently by the
private sector, the not for profit sector, the States, or local government.
  

Efficiency and effectiveness of expenditure

The Commission is asked to report on efficiencies and savings to improve the
effectiveness of, and value for money from, all expenditure, including:

–options for greater efficiencies such as:
:increasing contestability of services;
:adoption of new technologies in service delivery;
:consolidation of agencies and boards;
:rationalising the service delivery footprint to ensure better, more productive
and efficient services for stakeholders;
:flattening organisational structures and streamlining lines of responsibility
and accountability;
:consolidating support functions into a single agency; and
:privatisation of assets.
–potential improvements to productivity, service quality, and value for money
across the public sector, including better delivery of services to the regions; and
–anything that is reasonably necessary or desirable to improve the efficiency and effectiveness generally.

To save the Commission's time and expense, following is a brief Executive Summary of our Conclusions.

We recommend a revolving door structure and note that your operation in this regard is highly efficient.  We note that only on rare occasions have you flattened organisational structures, and consideration could be given to furthering this objective, in comparison, for example, to the complete flattening achieved in the Perplex operation (audited 10 April 2014).  We were suitably impressed by the almost continous contestability of services in your operation, to the point of saving on staffing via departures and death.  More productive and efficient services were evident in the high degree of multitasking in your staff.  The public sector has expressed its satisfaction with your operational service quality, including effective delivery of services, and the strategic planning of touring to regions including Uzbekistan.

Your operation began well in the matter of rationalisation of the service footprint, represented by a single pair of shoes, though there was some concern that the footprint became somewhat out-of-hand in an all-singing all-dancing finale.  Propriety and approbrium were issues at several points of the progression of the operation, leading some stakeholders to question whether there had been sufficient privatisation of some of the staff’s assets.

On the whole, the Commission has concluded that there remains a compelling case for the activity to continue to be undertaken, and that there is a strong case for continued direct involvement of the Australian Government, in partnership with the private sector, the not for profit sector, the States, and local government.

Signed

Frank McKone
Critically certified
29 May 2014

Operational staff in operation
Not necessarily Left to Right
In alphabetical order:
Fayssal Bazzi, Mitchell Butel, Gareth Davies, Robert Menzies, Zahra Newman, Eryn-Jean Norvill, Greg Stone

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Mojo by Jez Butterworth.

Photo: Brett Boardman

Mojo by Jez Butterworth.  Sydney Theatre Company directed by Iain Sinclair, designed by Pip Runciman (set), David Fleischer (costume), Nicholas Rayment (lighting) and Steve Francis (sound).  At Wharf 1, May 17 – July 5, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 28

For many decades since the 1950s we have seen a bowdlerised and often quite sentimental view of British small-time criminal life on our tv screens.  Even the picture on the program cover, in a kind-of modern 'mod' style, makes the characters in Mojo seem rather attractive.

Over those same decades, the British stage has had Harold Pinter’s plays to take us into something more like the reality of the culture of menace in the lives of a certain stream of the lower class for whom graft and trickery provided what they saw as the only way up in the world.

Yet I had not been aware of the next generation of writers like Pinter, represented here by Butterworth in his first play, from 1995.  It was picked up immediately for the Royal Court’s main stage, making Butterworth the only first-time playwright to have this honour since John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956.  It’s no wonder that the younger Butterworth ended up a close friend of the older Pinter.  Mojo is as perceptive and subtle in reproducing the relationships between those controlling  (or wanting to control) a cheap ‘night club’ as, say, the story behind The Birthday Party.

But, perhaps beyond Pinter’s achievement, Butterworth takes us back to John Osborne’s time, and shows us the contrast between Osborne’s intellectuals messing up their middle-class lives and the seriously dangerous lives of the lower classes at the time of new possibilities of rock’n’roll.  Black humour and the rhythms of Cockney language make us laugh in the midst of social and personal tragedy.  There is no sentimentality here.

For Butterworth to write this, looking back 40 years, was remarkable, but for Iain Sinclair to create such an accurate sense of that 1950s period another 20 years later is even more so, in my eyes.  I can say this because as a young teenager in London I was brought up to be conscious of those parts of the city which were no go for our kind of family.  I knew about the Teddy Boys and was well aware of the danger.  Fortunately I had arrived in Australia by the time rock around the clock had chimed, and only had to learn about avoiding the sly grog merchants of Sydney’s Kings Cross, rather than  the extension of the violence of the early 50s Teddy Boys into the amphetamine trade and the night club music scene.

In the program there are a series of photos of 1950s street scenes, from the Mary Evans Picture Library, which I cannot reproduce here for copyright reasons, showing both the poverty of the parts of London where the Teddy Boys were active and the attitude they displayed.  For this production, not all the costumes are accurate copies of those of the day but are designed to give us the feel of characters using a kind of natty formality of dress and hair style to make themselves seem further up the social scale than they really were.  The 'duck's arse' or duck's tail hair style was a special feature  - very nicely done.

Josh McConville, Lindsay Farris, Ben O'Toole

Eamon Farren, Josh McConville

Alon Ilsar, Lindsay Farris

Lindsay Farris

Photos © Brett Boardman 2014

Stills cannot show perhaps the most remarkable feature of the acting.  The style of movement and the tonalities of voice took me straight back to my teenage days.



I had wondered before seeing the show whether the past would be a different country, perhaps not really relevant for 2014 – but the story in the news this very week of the murder of a methamphetamine carrier, perhaps by previously corrupt coppers, in the Sydney suburb of Padstow gives Mojo all the significance it needs.

Technically and acting-wise, this is another highly successful Sydney Theatre Company production, well worth the trip since it’s unlikely to come to Iain Sinclair’s one time home town, Canberra.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Love Letters by A.R.Gurney

Hannah Waterman, Huw Higginson

Love Letters by A.R.Gurney.  Produced by Christine Harris & HIT Productions.  Directed by Denny Lawrence; designer, Jacob Battista; lighting designer, Jason Bovaird.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, May 21 – 24, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 22

The American President Abraham Lincoln wrote: “Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.”  Love Letters is a quintessentially American play: of Americans, by an American, for Americans.

This production of Love Letters, directed by an Australian, acted by Britons (recently settled in Australia), and presented for Australians, seems to me to miss a key element of American culture: the sentimental nature of the American dream.

A. R. Gurney knew the weakness of his culture, as have all the great American playwrights from Eugene O’Neill onwards.  That’s why his story of the born-rich Melissa Gardner and the self-made ironically-named Andrew Makepeace Lad III turns out to be a tragedy.

Let me make it clear that Hannah Waterman and Huw Higginson understood and created the characters’ deep sense of failure, to the point of still being tearful even as they acknowledged our applause in recognition of their quality acting.

But Denny Lawrence’s approach to directing the play left us feeling that there was something missing.  It began, I think, with the set and lighting design.

Hannah Waterman & Huw Higginson in Love Letters by A.R.Gurney (Photo: Belinda Strodder)

The shiny see-through brightly lit lecterns at which the actors stood, facing front until the very end, with the backdrop of an upright backlit screen in the centre behind them, produced a sense of formality which was at odds with the nature of the letters being written and received by Melissa and Andy throughout their lives from primary school in 1937 to Melissa’s suicide some 50 years later.

Despite the fences and finally the insurmountable barriers – like a thicket of thorns which grows continually wider and higher between them, from their childhood social class division and then the requirements of her life as an artist (whose function is to buck convention) and his as a rising star through Yale, service in the navy, prominence as a lawyer and election as a liberal Republican Senator (whose function is to build on conventions) – in their letters they are their real selves.

Perhaps the most telling, and amusing, episode occurs when Andy’s secretary sends out the standard overblown self-congratulatory Christmas letter from his family (on this occasion written by Andrew, though usually written by his wife Jane), with glowing stories about their three sons’ successes.  Melissa tears into Andy in reply, and he is remorseful in response, telling her the truth about his sons’ bad behaviour.  Maybe we, not just Americans, have received – and perhaps even written – such awful Christmas letters.

Hannah Waterman as Melissa Gardner

Huw Higginson as Andrew Makepeace Lad III

Photos: Belinda Strodder



















However the clue to what I think was wrong about the directing is in the letters Andy writes from very early on, even while they were still teenagers, worrying about whether Melissa is OK.  “Are you in trouble?” he writes much later as he realises that her marriage to Darwin, of Wall Street, is just not right for her.  Then there are the intermittent lengthy periods with no communication from her, when his letters become panicky about what’s happening to her.  To me this says that the formal setting of hard, sharp, angular, well-lit edges has to go.  And even more so when she manages to persuade him, and he succeeds in consummating the relationship – unfortunately in the lead-up to his crucial re-election.

Andy may be writing from the office of Andrew Makepeace Lad III, but only his absolutely trustworthy confidential personal secretary is in the know and protects his privacy.  He is not writing while standing at a public lectern.  Melissa is writing in darker and darker places as time goes along, even when she has an exhibition of her paintings – a complete disaster in her eyes.  Andy might be capable of presenting himself at a public event – even speaking at a lectern – despite what’s really happening in his personal life; but not Melissa.

Only after reaching this conclusion did I have a look at YouTube.  It would have been cheating otherwise, since I have never seen a production of Love Letters before. 

At http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Pd_Z6ExxE  I found Cleo Holladay and Rex Partington in an excerpt “from A.R. Gurney's Pulitzer Prize winning play.”  You can’t trust YouTube, of course.  Gurney was a finalist for a Pulitzer, but never won.  However the setting and the stage relationship between the actors demonstrates my concern about Lawrence’s production.

Cleo Holladay & Rex Partington (YouTube screenshot)

Partington has Melissa and Andy seated at the same table, side by side and visibly close.  The letters are an animated conversation between the two, as if there is no physical or time separation.  There is no sense of formality or distance.  In Lawrence’s setting I quite liked the backlit screen changing as the seasons changed, and even becoming a stained glass window for Melissa’s funeral, but a softer and more intimate setting would have allowed his actors much more freedom of expression, as they ‘wrote’ and as they ‘read’ each other's letters.

Then the innocent comedy of their young selves would have felt insecure – to us watching, as well as to the actors playing the roles – and the dark shadows would gradually overwhelm Melissa and Andy, and be felt by the audience, until the inevitability of her death could take on the same kind of significance as in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. 

Then we would have seen a truly American play – emotionally sentimental, but through the playwright’s eyes, a damnation of the American Dream.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: The 13-Storey Treehouse by Richard Tulloch

 The 13-Storey Treehouse by Richard Tulloch.  Adapted from the book by Andy Griffiths and illustrated by Terry Denton.  Presented by CDP Theatre Producers, directed by Julian Louis. Set and costumes designed by Mark Thompson, lighting designed by Nicholas Higgins, sound by Jeremy Silver.
Canberra Theatre Centre, May 15-17, 2014.  60 minutes, no interval.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Bamboozled!  Frantic!  Nervous about catnaries.  Anxious about not being prepared.  Is this a rehearsal or the real thing?

Writing a play about writing a play about a book which is about writing a book is no easy task.  No wonder we were all a bit bamboozled – just the right word, said my assistant reviewer, Stevie, aged 8.  He also had to explain ‘catnaries’ to me, and why Andy and Terry were nervous about how Jill might feel about her favourite cat being painted yellow and turning into a canary – especially when it flew away!

Arriving at the theatre half an hour early proved that I am the last person in Canberra to know about things like catnaries, and what happens when your sea monkey turns into a mermaid, which turns into a monster when you marry her.  The queue to have books signed by the real Andy Griffiths after the previous performance still snaked 80 metres along outside the theatre.  By the time our performance had finished, that queue had dissipated, but the foyer was immediately refilled with the next contingent.  ‘Popular’ was my assistant reviewer’s word for it.  We didn’t have another hour or more to spare, so Stevie had to miss his signature moment.  Can I get one by email?

‘Emotional’ was Stevie’s other word for the play.  This surprised me a bit, until I thought things through.  The characters were frantic (and therefore very funny), but there were times when laughter was not the emotion of the moment.  There were significant silences, such as when Terry and Andy realised that what they had said might really have upset Stage Manager Val.  It was a mark of the quality of the writing – of the play in this case rather than the book – to sense the change in the audience’s feelings as they swung from irrepressible laughter to sympathy for Val and empathy with Andy and Terry.

There was a point where Terry and/or Andy (who reminded me of Rosencrantz and/or Guildersten) said to no-one in particular that this play (the play they were trying to write) wasn’t just entertaining but educational as well.  My assistant Stevie, well within the show’s intended age bracket 6 to 12, didn’t exactly pick up on this line.  But he had picked up on ‘emotional’.

Thinking about this, I found I had some concern about the celebrity status of the author of the book.  Where was the author of the play?  There should have been a queue for Richard Tulloch to sign everyone’s copy of the script.  It’s his imagination which has turned Andy Griffiths’ and Terry Denton’s imagination into an even better education (as well as more subtle entertainment) than the original book.  The play educates the audience about the value and nature of theatre at the same time as informing them of cultural icons, as well as introducing some adult jokes (in the book) such as “That’s not a knife.  This is a knife!”  We adults fully appreciated the place of ‘luminous’ Cate Blanchett, ‘tough’ Russell Crowe, not so tough Geoffrey Rush and beautiful Nicole Kidman – and the youngsters got to hear their names (except Crocodile Dundee’s Paul Hogan, who is perhaps persona non grata nowadays).

The most important aspect of Tulloch’s work was his playing with the relationship between the actors and the audience.  He draws from the pantomime tradition in some ways, where the actors speak directly to the audience, but takes this to a possibly new level for children’s theatre especially in the character of Val, who of course is not in the book.  She is the Stage Manager, inveigled by Andy and Terry to play all the other roles in their story (since they thought this was only going to be a scriptwriting session (and, so they said, Cate, Russell, Geoffrey and Nicole couldn’t be there).

The essential message of the play (as it is in the book) is to use your imagination.  We see Eliza Logan playing Val playing next-door neighbour Jill, or Bill the Postman, or Mermaidia (as a seductive mermaid who transmogrifies into a husband eating monster), and returning to Val in between times, as well as appearing as herself in the curtain call.  Watching Eliza use her imagination right before our very eyes is a lesson in itself.

In addition to the excellent performances of the three main actors Andrew Johnston as Andy, Matthew Lilley as Terry and Eliza Logan as Stage Manager Val, two crew members played essential roles handling props and scenery as part of the action.  We didn’t see the real stage manager, Vanessa Wright, but her deputy and assistant stage managers, Sally Reid and Holly Neil, kept the action flowing smoothly, working closely with the actors in a set as frenetic in construction as one would expect from the drawings in the original book.

Compared with the original book, which was about writing a book, there were two differences which I appreciated.  I’m backed up in this by my assistant reviewer Stevie.

On stage the wonderful set design included a seriously more realistic massive eye and stomping foot (which gruesomely squashes Bark the Dog) of the gorilla who tries to shake down the 13-storey treehouse.  The original drawings are simply not so scary – but a bit more scary is good in the theatre.

The other is a more subtle change by Richard Tulloch, which makes the ending work dramatically (whereas the ending of the book is a bit weak, I think).  Mr Big Nose in the book is Andy’s and Terry’s publisher, very angry because they forget to finish the book on time.  At the end, though he publishes the book, he remains a distant and rather unpleasant character.  But when Mr Big Nose appears on the projector screen from his smart phone in the play, he is demanding but not as nasty.  At the end, now the play is finished, as Terry and Andy are worried that everything has gone wrong, Mr Big Nose phones in to say how good the play has turned out.

This is not just a happy ending (which after all it should be for a comedy), but it makes the point that imagination may take you to all sorts of unexpected and apparently disastrous places on the way, but in the end that’s how making a book happens – or even making a play about making a play about making a book about making a book.  So thank you to Andy and Terry, and Richard, and Andrew and Matthew and Eliza and Vanessa and Sally and Holly and Julian and Mark and Nicholas and Jeremy, and CDP for presenting Richard’s play of Andy and Terry’s book.

Eliza Logan playing Stage Manager Val playing Mermaidia

Andrew Johnston as Andy

Matthew Lilley as Terry

Photos by Branco Gaica




© Frank McKone, Canberra