2015: Long Grass Dance theatre by Vicki Van Hout

Long Grass  Dance theatre choreographed and directed by Vicki Van Hout.  Cultural consultant, choreographic collaborator and voice/sound: Gary Lang.  Produced by Performance Space and Intimate Spectacle, Darwin.  Sydney Festival, Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre January 14-18, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 16

Vicki Van Hout’s choreography and the quality of the dance work by the five performers – Katina Olsen, Taree Sansbury, Caleena Sansbury, Thomas ES Kelly and Darren Edwards – is quite extraordinary.  Their characters are modern Aboriginal people, with all their day-to-day ironic body and vocal language in the seemingly ‘off-stage’ moments, between stunning representational imagery of all the phases of life on the edges of official society.

About 2% of Darwin’s people are homeless.  Most are camped in the “Long Grass” where we see a simple plot played out: a woman takes sick and dies.  Who is she?

Dysfunction, cultural and family breakdown, alcohol, violence and inevitable almost unnoticed death are danced into our consciousness, supported by live dialogue and sound effects, in what seems to me to be an entirely original form.

There is no Martha Graham behind this “modern dance”.  There surely are elements of Larrakia traditional dance in the amazing flexibility, mimetic qualities, physical balance and strength in stillness, but neither is this “traditional dance” for these people struggling to survive in the long grass.

This dance is new.

Seeking comparisons, I looked to Bangarra.  However true to his culture, there is still some Martha Graham in Stephen Page’s work, though recent choreography by Frances Rings in Terrain shows a similar originality to Van Hout’s work (though on a more poetic theme).

I think the new development is terrific to see – Indigenous culture is breaking out all over.  No longer is there an assumed ‘traditional’ form of expression giving the impression to ‘white’ society that Aboriginals are all the same.  As it was in the past when 600 languages were spread across Australia, Long Grass is modern Larrakia culture in dance from Darwin, different from but equal to modern Murri culture from the Brisbane-based Page family, or Frances Rings’ modern Kokatha culture from Adelaide.

Long Grass is both tragic for its story and exciting for its art, and I hope to see more work from the Performance Space and Intimate Spectacle in the future.

Photos by Heidrun Lohr:

 Photos by Jamie Williams:

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: The Long Pigs by We3

The Long Pigs by We3 – Clare Bartholomew, Derek Ives-Plunkett & Nicci Wilks.  Directed by Susie Dee.  Produced by Insite Arts.  Sydney Festival at Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre January 15-18, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 16

Whatever you do in your life, make sure you avoid the black-nosed clowns.  It got quite scary when these three realised they were one red nose short and were clearly expecting to find one in the audience and chop it off.

We3 must have had a wonderful time putting together the enormous complexity of their set, as well as the characters of their clowns: the fat bossy one, the short one who regularly stuffs things up, and the tall somewhat lugubrious and rather naïve one who at one stage was nailed to a cross.  When he discovered that the nails didn’t actually go through his hands, he quite naturally exclaimed “Jesus!!”

By this time it was clear that these were anti-clowns.  After the recent ideological murders in Sydney and Paris, it struck me that this parody of Christ might have had serious consequences if they had chosen to parody Mahomet.

As it turns out, the short clown is a ring-in – beneath the surface his black nose is actually red, so it is duly chopped off.  When he is forced to eat his own nose (that’s where the cannibalism implied in the “long pigs” title comes in), red noses rain from the heavens, and the black-nosed clowns have won the day.

The message is that extremist ideology taken to its logical conclusion is a real danger.  Yet we laugh at the clowns, and even applaud, while watching it all happen.  The fact that this show must have been devised long before the Sydney and Paris murders shows the prescience of We3’s work.

And, indeed, it is great fun to watch.  And interesting to note that the clowns are all represented as male, while two of the performers are female.  I think this says something about who controls the extremist view of the world.

It’s not a pretty sight, but the gruesome story is well worth seeing.  You will surely laugh, in a black-nosed kind of way.

I've got a little list.  Isn't that one there in Row F?

Jesus!!

Birth - of a banana.

Can we trust these overblown red-nosed clowns?

Hang the ring-in.

Digest that, you red-nose!

Photos by Prudence Upton
(Captions: Frank McKone)

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Have I No Mouth by Brokentalkers

Have I No Mouth by Brokentalkers, Ireland, co-directed by Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan.  Performed by Ann Cannon, Feidlim Cannon & Erich Keller.  Sydney Festival, York Theatre, Seymour Centre, January 15 to 18, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 15

In my day, before being a mere critic, I have had my experience of less than successful attempts at using what I call ‘oblique’ images and theatrical devices as significant symbols.

If in this case the devising group had constrained themselves, perhaps limiting the imagery to the balloons and using just one miked commentator/questioner as the main device, the story of a son’s emotional troubles resulting from the deaths of his baby brother and his father could have become a gripping drama.  But too much theatrical diversity means inconsistency, which means the drama wanders without clear development.

Basically, as the audience demonstrated admirably this evening, they only wake up when they can become excited by the prospect of a new development when a previously established device or image reappears.  Though the balloons, into which you blow all your anger, is a cheap ploy to engage the audience, it was at least a theme (and the only one) which followed through from balloons being handed out at the door, blown up in an audience participation exercise, popped when the son hugged his father’s ghost hard enough, with anger relieved in the fun of swamping the auditorium with bouncing balloons to end the play.

If it sounds as though I’m giving some instruction to a group of drama students, that’s not surprising when we see that Brokentalkers have no writer, just two ‘co-directors’ who claim that “Their work seeks to explore new forms that challenge traditional ideologies of text-based theatre” in a working method “founded on a collaborative process that draws from the skills and experiences of a large and diverse group of contributors from different disciplines and backgrounds.”

Sorry if I see value in the old ideology of a writer, director and if necessary a dramaturg to create consistency in the final result, but after all I have seen the Brokentalkers kind of challenge many times before – from the time of Piscator in the 1920s in Germany, through the Open Theatre of the 1960s in New York, and even in Canberra’s Fools Gallery in the late 1970s, as well as various Sydney groups such as Kinetic Energy.  Non-text based work is not exactly a new idea.  Some has worked; some has not.

Unfortunately, Have I No Mouth uses the real experiences of the people performing: the son is Feidlim Cannon, the mother is his mother Ann, and the psychiatrist is his psychiatrist Erich Keller.  Awful though it is to have to say it, since the issue surrounding Feidlim’s father’s death is obviously very serious, and perhaps reveals a crucial failing on the part of the medicos concerned, the play ends up perhaps being a kind of psychological therapy for the participants but offering little to an audience.

Some questions are raised, which I overheard some people discussing after the show, about the role of the mother as a parent, for example.  I found it difficult to listen because it seemed too much like prying into others’ privacy.

As each new device appeared, in the action or on screen, unexpectedly different in form or style without any apparent reason, about halfway through I found myself no longer engaged with the emotional content.  The play lost its plot.  The only interest was in wondering what new technique would appear next.

The company is described as  “one of Ireland’s most innovative and original theatre companies by making formally ambitious work that defies categorisation”.  I actually don’t know what this means, or how it applies to this presentation.  I’m just concerned that the important issues behind these people’s disturbed lives do need to be addressed, and need better, well-focussed theatre to do it.

I should add, though, it is a valid thing for the Sydney Festival to host such international indie groups, so that theatre practitioners and audiences here can make their own judgements.  This is an especially important value of the About An Hour segment of the Festival.

Photos by Prudence Upton:

 

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Wot? No Fish!! by Danny Braverman

 Wot? No Fish!! by Danny Braverman, directed by Nick Philippou.  Presented by Bread and Circuses, UK, at Sydney Festival, Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre, January 13-18, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 14

Story-telling par excellence.  The personal story of Danny Braverman’s discovery of his great-uncle’s private miniature sketches, recording his married life from 1926 to his wife’s death in 1982, is a gem in itself.

But Braverman’s collaboration with Nick Philippou has created a one-man play which need not die when Braverman reaches the stage in his life when he is no longer able to perform.  It is a script of a show-and-tell, a family slide show, which, if performed by a different actor playing the role of Danny Braverman, would still work theatrically.

We would still be drawn in by the passing around of gefilte fish (real food seems to becoming de rigeur on stage nowadays), to begin the argument (after we recognise the flavours of beetroot and horse radish in the sauce) about the minority Yids who insist boiling is best against the clear majority in favour of fried, at least in the East End of London.  Danny could not believe, as he has discovered while touring his story, that Americans do not fry, even though his own mother boiled while his father fried.  It seems that Jews love to argue!

And we would find ourselves engrossed in Danny’s showing us his great-uncle Ab’s drawings, becoming bit by bit more sophisticated, done on his weekly pay packets throughout his working life as a shoemaker.  Then in retirement he bought up a supply of pay packets, though no longer containing the ‘real money’ that people were paid in those days, to continue recording with a cartoonist’s sense of sometimes dark humour, his relationship with his wife and her sister, and his sons, one of whom would nowadays be diagnosed as autistic, while the other turned out to be gay when it was still an illegal condition.

Taking up the theme of the flavour of gefilte fish, Danny sees the sweet and sour, the light and the dark, as a natural reality of the Solomons’ marriage.  Love may seem to be threatened at times, but survives through economic troubles, social competition as wealthier Jews move upmarket, World War II when the Nazis could well have succeeded in invading the Jews’ safe haven in England, and having to place their younger son in a mental institution where he died after 16 years’ incarceration.  Ab’s final drawing, by now a tiny painting, was made as Celie’s cancer finally took her life.  Some 3000 small envelopes, mostly in shoe boxes, were preserved by his surviving son when Ab died only four years after the love of his life.

Great nephew Danny, already a successful theatre-in-education and community theatre maker – including directing the disability arts centre, The Orpheus Centre, from 2007 to 2011, and currently a lecturer in Applied Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London – has created a work which is both a documentary at a personal level and a valuable illumination of history from the 1920s to the 1980s.  We are taken into his family’s daily life emotionally while simultaneously being allowed to stand outside, observing with enough objectivity to see the context.  This is achieved through the device of Danny’s telling his story of his discovery of his grand-uncle’s story.  He likens this structure to the double helix spiral of DNA.  And like DNA, it creates a living form, on stage before our very eyes.

Wot? No Fish!! is a remarkable achievement, and should not be missed – except that its Sydney Festival season is completely booked out, already.

The young Celie - the always busy housewife

Symbolism - the family reaches 1943.  Will there be a future?

Hitler: "I have no further territorial ambitions"

Grand Uncle Ab's art on exhibition at Seymour Centre

Photos by Jamie Williams

Ab and Celie are still together but caption says
"This road goes uphill both ways"

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Radiance by Louis Nowra

Image by Julian Meagher

Radiance by Louis Nowra.  Directed by Leah Purcell.  Belvoir Upstairs, Sydney, January 7 – February 8, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 8

Nowra’s stage instructions for the beginning of Radiance state As [Mae] talks she strikes matches and throws them at the chair.  Under Purcell’s direction Shari Sebbens tosses only one match after much talking about burning.  It seems little more than an ineffectual gesture. 

As I read the original instructions, the naked flames on stage, which might number at least ten to point up each of her phrases, culminating in “Everything up in flames”, should shock us, watching in fear of the possibility of a real fire on stage, let alone a fictional conflagration.

Though this production captured the “well-made play” aspect of Nowra’s writing, revealing the truth about the treatment of women by men like the “Black Prince” (and even their sons, the boys who throw rocks on the roof of an Aboriginal woman whose dementia makes her a “witch”), Purcell, as director (and performer in the role of Cressy), holds back from daring to let Nowra’s horror of the chaos in the lives of this woman’s three “daughters” flare up in our emotions as I’m sure he intended.

Only Miranda Tapsell, as the younger child, Nona, is released from constraint and becomes the star of this production.

We take the three women who appear in this play as half-sisters, each with different unknown fathers.  The revelation of the truth about Nona’s birth becomes the central theme in Purcell’s interpretation, giving the production a clear through-line.  But the effect is to weaken the dramatic impact of the older characters, Mae and Cressy.  I think Nowra saw all three as equally essential in what we should feel, as the play and the conflagration become “Just embers now” and the lights fade.

Maybe Set & Costume Designer, Dale Ferguson, could have pushed the conventional boundaries more into the unexpected, again considering Nowra’s descriptions. 

Mae, he wrote, is wearing a “dowdy black frock” ready for her mother’s funeral, after having spent the better years of her life struggling to care for an impossible personality.  Where’s the “dowdy” or the “frock” in her simple petticoat at first, or neatly cut shift dress which covers her later.  A full-on black mission dress might have made the point and strengthened the contrast with the white wedding dress she later wears. 

Nona, wrote Nowra, “enters wearing what can only be described as ‘a little black dress’.  She is also made up as if heading off to a party.”  Written in 1993, this has to mean a short flared skirt with a revealing top.  Perhaps party gear has changed, but though the top was suitably cleft and revealing,  and the bottom was short (in fact, shorts, as far as I could tell from Row H): there was no sexy flaring skirt to make us wonder if she really wasn’t wearing knickers.

Finally there is Cressy, back from London and the world of opera.  Of course, she might have dressed down so as not to embarrass her poverty-stricken half-siblings with her wealth and style, but “She is dressed in a stylish and expensive black dress”.

There is silence until Nona manages to say “You look deadly”, while Mae is so “incredulous” she can say nothing more than “Cressy...”  Yet this Cressy is wearing no more than a slightly fancy jacket with flowery shoulder appliques, over a dress which looks as simple and hardly any different from Mae’s shift dress.  The expected shock of the upper class apparition which creates enormous tension to complete Scene One as they manage to escape the decrepit house for a funeral which no-one else attends, just did not materialise in this production.

I may be justifiably criticised as coming at this view from a background of expectations different from a modern audience (though I should note there were plenty of people of my generation present including a woman whose breath indicated she had had a quantity of wine with dinner and consequently fell asleep and even snored until I regularly elbowed her into some kind of half-wakeful state). 

For a younger audience who may not have known the play from previous productions or the film, Leah Purcell’s presentation took a quieter, less intense approach in which the humour was lighter, and the role of Nona was brought to the fore.  She is the true survivor who completes what Nowra in his note for this production calls her ‘journey into adulthood’; and from the point of view of the history of Indigenous theatre, Nona’s completed journey establishes the place of her culture in the mainstream.

For this reason I can see why Nowra wrote “...what pleases me is how a new production of Radiance returns to where it all began here at Belvoir Street”.  It pleases me, as well, to see Belvoir counter some of the concerns among commentators in 2014 by bringing an Australian Classic to the mainstage.

All photos by Brett Boardman

Leah Purcell (Cressy), Shari Sebbens (Mae), Miranda Tapsell (Nona)

Shari Sebbens

Leah Purcell

Shari Sebbens

Leah Purcell and Miranda Tapsell

Leah Purcell

Miranda Tapsell

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Unwrap Me presented by Budding Theatre

Unwrap Me presented by Budding Theatre (www.buddingtheatre.com/) at Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre December 18-20, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
December 18

In an enjoyable Christmas evening of 10 short plays, the appropriately named Kirsty Budding has presented work by 10 budding new, emerging, up and coming, or somewhat more emerged playwrights.  Based on the now well-established Short + Sweet concept, the writers’ brief was to begin with the stage direction: [A character] enters carrying a Christmas present.

During interval, an essential element of the Christmas theme of giving was a raffle of wine and a Christmas hamper donated by local businesses, and the auction of a framed Unwrap Me poster signed by all the 30 or more cast members, which on opening night sold for $100.  The money raised from box office and the auction was donated to Medecins Sans Frontieres and World Animal Protection.

In general the pieces were absurdist and humorous, reminding me of earlier times in Canberra watching Elbow Theatre, Bohemian Theatre or Freshly Ground Theatre, but without those groups' emphasis on being conscientiously avant garde.  Unwrap Me is relaxed fun.  Yet there were some pieces which, in about 10 minutes, developed substantial themes and characterisation.

The evening was never competitive – quite the opposite, in fact.  It was a Christmas celebration of minimalist staging – a desk, a sofa, a dead body in the empty space beside an ubiquitous Christmas Tree, enhanced by a very effective sound track collection of modern urban pop.  But here are my comments on each author’s approach, in order of presentation.

Tom Green’s The Christmas Pitch has Santa and his Elf off-sider present a bank manager with a business plan to spend $30 billion on giving away presents all over the world: not for profit but simply for the sake of doing good.  The idea is fun for ten minutes, but the script tails off rather than coming up with a good strong punch line.

The Cat and the Cigarette by Grace De Morgan turns the apparent gift of a possibly dead cat into a metaphor for the insecurity of being in love.  The end, though, from a serious point of view, is sentimental.  So it’s a clever idea, but we are not sure of how we are to take the humour.

Nigel Palfreman, in I ♥ Alex Solomon, takes up the theme of male sexual competition expressed in the gift that Alex gives Claire, and Paul’s angry jealousy.  The plot and dialogue have no subtlety, so we are not sure if we are to find the situation funny or to seriously take sides.  It certainly seemed a bleak view of Christmas cheer.

John Lombard’s The Holiday on December 25th is a very different kettle of fish.  What if, taking the view that gift-giving at Christmas and birthdays is just crass commercialism, you bring up your child so that she is not aware that these occasions are celebrated, or that they even exist to be celebrated?  What happens when, at the age of 25, your daughter Becky Givings, becomes suspicious about the total coverage of Christmas decorations, jingles and adverts and Mrs Givings is forced to come clean?  Very cleverly, Lombard’s script takes us through the funny side as we see Becky’s dawning recognition that her mother has deceived her, yet in the ten minutes allows us to accept their reconciliation.  Only then as Becky leaves happy and Mr Givings arrives, we get the punchline which brings Mr and Mrs back together.  He may not be happy with, but has to accept, his wife’s breaking of the secret about Christmas: “But it’s just as well she doesn’t know about birthdays!”

The strength in the writing here is in the genuine motivations of the characters, the humour we find in their dilemmas, and the recognition of an issue which many families take seriously. In ten minutes there is a complete dramatic structure built before our very eyes.

Christmas with Carroll is anything but a pleasant occasion for an uplifting song.  Youthful Carroll’s hatred of being obliged to attend the family Christmas with all the oldies turns into a story of revenge.  There is a logic to the plot which leads to more than just black humour.  The humour of degustation and disgust in this surprising play by Tahlee Fereday from Darwin is both excruciatingly funny and awful to watch as Carroll’s revenge bites back and spews forth – all over her.

Chris Naylor’s A Christmas Body, after interval, drinks and the auction had revived our equanimity, was a nice simple and pleasantly amusing episode.  The author’s interpretation of the injunction in the writers’ brief about carrying a Christmas present was a practical joke on us, as was the dead body’s behaviour a practical joke on his hosts at their Christmas dinner.  There are no other significant implications in this play, but we didn’t need depth at this point in the evening.

But we couldn’t relax for long.  Original Sinners by Kirsten Lovett from Queensland is a highly abstract meeting of a mystical Australian bush woman, which in Biblical terms might be Lilith (as in George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methusaleh), though here she is named Pandora (as in Pandora’s box, perhaps), with a man – a stranger in her desert country, dressed in a city-style business suit, perhaps referencing Cain who killed his brother Abel and representing criminality and corruption.  Perhaps, on this Christmas day, he seeks redemption and some kind of reconciliation and solace.  She will only tell her story if he repays her by telling his story.  They reach a kind of peace in the telling, as the image of their existence fades away.

For a ten minute piece, this is quite unusual and even disturbing, and suggests an interesting future for this new writer who grew up in Cairns.

Kirsty Budding herself wrote No Room at the Inn, which seems to be about the children of a kind of a dysfunctional Addams Family.  Will they all be allowed to go to the family gathering on Christmas Day?  James is gay, and will not go without his father’s acceptance of his love for Lucas.  Helen is thoroughly imbued with a kind of jealousy because James came out before she could make it clear that she is gay, too.  Gollum, hidden in the back room, is a kind of maniacal throwback to a mythical apelike state, who reveals three virtually naked young men in a procession from his room and off stage behind the Christmas tree.  The present which begins this mayhem is brought by Lucas for the unappreciative Helen – a large ball-shaped gift which is never revealed.

Somewhere in all this is an absurdist satire of the conventions of Christmas family gatherings – funny but weird.  I guess there would not be room for any of these children at their family’s “inn”.

Perhaps this play was the nearest to the early Bohemians (later Boho) Theatre style (www.bohointeractive.com/about/) .

The Price of Balloons is a much more conventional play by Disapol Savetsila from University of Wollongong.  A young woman’s father insists in giving her presents, while she knows that he is not well off.  She sells his latest gift (of a fascinating balloon which has several other inflated balloons inside) to a passer by who has forgotten to buy a gift for his daughter.  She negotiates a very high price as the passer by has no other chance to buy a gift before catching his train.  When her father returns she insists on giving him the money which he can’t afford not to take, though he is devastated by her selling of his gift.

We are left feeling in two minds about what she has done, and in empathy with the father’s dilemma.  The play leaves us forced to consider what is the true nature of a gift.

Finally, the evening ended with perhaps the best written script: Sexy Beth’s Giant Dildo Collection by Canberra-based Greg Gould.  His career so far has been almost entirely centred on writing ten-minute plays, performed in Australia and overseas, with considerable success in short play competitions including Short + Sweet here, in New Zealand and Dubai.

Beth and Dale are moving into an upstairs flat.  Dale labels the biggest box of their belongings “Sexy Beth’s Giant Dildo Collection”, to Beth’s horror since her father has carried it up when he arrived unexpectedly to help.  She fears that her father, who she believes is already unhappy with her relationship with Dale, will think of her as sexually depraved.  She sees herself and her family as conventionally nice.  Dale’s joke may divide her from her family.

However when she leaves Dale to face her father, it turns out that he regales Dale with his stories of the “free love” period of his life in the 1960s, leaving the young Dale amazed, but now able to relieve Beth’s anxiety and finish the play on a positive note.

The quality of the writing is in the immediately established genuineness of the feelings and motivations of each of the characters, our easy acceptance of the situation as it seems to trend in its different directions, and our recognition of the issue of generational differences.  In its ten minutes, we see that instant judgement and assumptions are a danger we should be careful to avoid.

Reviewing 10 plays in one evening is quite a task, but well worth doing in this case because I think Budding Theatre is a valuable new development in Canberra.  Unwrap Me has drawn writers and actors from Canberra, Sydney, Adelaide, Darwin, Cairns, Wollongong, Goulburn, with experience and training backgrounds around Australia and overseas.  Budding’s idea to take the Short + Sweet (and the school level Fast + Fresh) competition into a non-competitive evening show has worked well, with an enthusiastic response from the audience on opening night.  There’s at least an annual event for Christmas in the making, and perhaps for other significant times in the year.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Philip Parsons Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights

by Frank McKone

Formerly known as the Young Playwright’s Award, the 2014 NSW Philip Parsons Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights, made possible by the generous support of Arts NSW, was awarded on the occasion of the 2014 NSW Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture, Upstairs Theatre, Belvoir Street, Sydney on 30 November 2014.

Past winners include Zoë Coombs Marr (Is this Thing On?), Kit Brookman (Small and Tired), Brendan Cowell (Ruben Guthrie) and Kate Mulvany (The Seed).

Julia-Rose Lewis was selected for her play Samson from a short list which also included Jessica Bellamy (Shabbat Dinner), Christopher Bryant (The Mutant Man), Philip Kavanagh (Jesikah), Phil Spencr (You and Whose Army?) and Chris Summers (King Arthur).

The award is given to an outstanding playwright who is in their first eight years of professional practice, and the winner receives a writer’s commission and creative development of their play by Belvoir.

[Lewis’s] play Samson generated buzz at the PWA National Play Festival after its selection in their National Script Workshop after some development with La Boite Theatre Company’s Playwright-in-residence program. Lally Katz is mentoring her as part of the Australia Council’s JUMP Mentorship Program and she’s currently completing her Masters in Fine Arts (Playwriting) at NIDA. She’s written for productions and readings with Griffin, The Australian Theatre For Young People (atyp), La Boite, The Brisbane Powerhouse, The Rock Surfers Theatre Co. Hothouse Theatre Company, Grin & Tonic. Julia’s monologue This Feral Life has been produced for both stage and as a short film.
http://camerons.dreamhosters.com/julia-rose-lewis-joins-the-agency/

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Parsons Memorial Lecture

Ralph Myers
(this is not his daggy shirt)

Ralph Myers The Artistic Director: on the way to extinction?
2014 NSW Parsons Memorial Lecture, Upstairs Theatre, Belvoir, Sydney, 30 November 2014.

by Frank McKone

Is Ralph Myers a ‘suit’?  That is the relevant question. 

His answer is emphatically, ‘No’.  Since his first meeting with the best of Australia’s theatre artistic directors, when he became AD of Belvoir in 2009, at which only he and Circus Oz’s Mike Finch did not wear a suit, he claims to have remained what he always was as an artist – a set and costume designer.

He even wore the same daggy shirt, jeans and Volleys to deliver his Memorial Lecture.  Though, as I recall, Philip Parsons would have dressed a little more nattily, I suspect that he would be concerned like Myers about the changing relationships between Artistic Directors and General Managers that we have seen in our theatres since his passing. 

Not only have GMs become CEOs, but we now see EPs – Executive Producers who supposedly combine the artistic dreamer (that’s what a real AD is) with the competitive business person (which is what a CEO really is).   The impossibility of integrating the two in one person, Myers explained, is because the manager wants everything to be done with a steady hand, while successful theatre needs a ‘violently shaking fist’.

In less dramatic terms, an artistic director must be ‘cultural and specific’, not ‘managerial and generic’. 

In his own case at Belvoir Street, he and Brenna Hobson, titled ‘Executive Director’, work as ‘equal co-directors’.  That means much argy-bargy as each fights for what they need.  Artistic directors, Myers says, are our cultural leaders, different from managers – whose task is to make things happen.  It’s a ‘ying / yang’ that’s necessary, which requires two people.  It can’t happen in one executive producer.

Myers sees two themes to explain what is happening. 

The Australian tall poppy syndrome has a long history, which he illustrated in the way the Griffins were treated after winning the Canberra design competition, repeated in Utzon’s experience as winner of the Sydney Opera House competition, and currently demonstrated by the fact that all the conductors of the major Australian orchestras are FIFO from overseas. 

Despite the case of the ‘bloke from Wollongong’ so successfully directing the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Myers sees an Australian ‘unwillingness to be led by artists’.  Selecting the Griffins and Utzon showed ‘great vision’, but snatching away their chance – perhaps their right – to take their designs through to physical completion, placing the work in the hands of, effectively, mere managers has left us with flawed results.  There is a deep sense of insecurity here, where artists cannot be trusted.

In more recent times, as funding has shifted from government towards private sponsorship and philanthropy, the old insecurity shows in the composition of boards.  It was the Nugent report which pushed towards more ‘responsibility’ – which in practice has meant arts bodies becoming more ‘corporate’.

Only Circus Oz still has more than two artists on the board.  Boards, says Myers, appoint business people who appoint more business people like themselves.  They can be ‘trusted’ in matters of profit & loss, reading balance sheets and behaving prudently.  These are, ironically, ‘white, middle-class men like me’.  “I,” says Myers with unerring bravery, “should be replaced with someone more interesting.”

Apart from maintaining the separation and difference between the artistic director (who should have the final say) and the managerial director, Myers proposes three practical actions:

1. Board membership should be 50% artists.
2. Artistic directors should be appointed for short-term tenures without the option for rolling over – say 5 years max.
3. Boards should delegate the appointment of artistic directors to an independent expert panel of artists.

In keeping with his proposal, Myers has already announced his leaving Belvoir in 2015.

But to end on a positive note, in discussion of the apparent conflict of interest between artistic vibrancy and economic viability, Ralph Myers became suitably emotional.  The suits’ concept of artistic vibrancy is alien to the artists’ concept.  What is artistic quality?  It’s when a show ‘takes off and starts to sell’.  This is not always predictable, but at this point you can feel the energy coming off the stage and being returned by the audience, in a virtuous circle.

Yet it must be a worry that if artistic directors like Ralph Myers are extinguished in favour of good management: this will extinguish theatre and nothing will be left worth managing.

My report is necessarily limited in scope, but the full transcript of the lecture is available here http://belvoir.com.au/news/artistic-director-way-extinction/

The Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture is supported by Arts NSW and Currency House.

Recent relevant Platform Papers published by Currency House and previously appearing on this blog are:

Take Me to Your Leader by Wesley Enoch
The Retreat of our National Drama by Julian Meyrick

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Education and the Arts. Platform Papers No 41

Education and the Arts by Meg Upton, with Naomi Edwards.  Platform Papers No 41, November 2014: Currency House, Sydney.

Commentary by Frank McKone

Think of education as a living cell within the body politic.  The impermeable outer membrane of the cell has bas-relief oddly shaped indentations.  To access the inner cell, for good health – as Upton and Edwards intend – or for ill – as Donnelly and Wiltshire are bent on – a mirrored matching convoluted ‘key’ must insert itself.  Only then can the positive protein or the destructive virus make changes from within the cell.

Education and the Arts was already going to print when the recommendations of the
Review of the National Curriculum (August 2014) began to surface.  “What is of concern,” wrote Upton and Edwards, “is the growing sense that arts education for Australian children will become ‘optional’ as opposed to mandated."

The problem for Upton and Edwards is that they have not been given the key which has been handed on a silver platter by the Abbott government to Dr Donnelly and Professor Wiltshire, neither of whom show the slightest understanding of the nature of arts education, let alone its importance in a modern education system.

Here’s a quote:

The Reviewers heard substantial evidence that content was added to the curriculum to appease stakeholders, which has led to an overcrowded curriculum.  Such inclusions pay homage to the very evident inclusive development process undertaken by ACARA….

It was … apparent that many stakeholders believed the curriculum has far exceeded any nominal time allocations that curriculum writers may have been given.  One strongly argued reason was that this was due to the many compromises ACARA made to accommodate the very vocal advocacies of some groups about the essential nature of content relating to their discipline.  The arts curriculum was particularly singled out in this regard. [My emphasis]
Executive Summary (p2/3)

There is a long history behind such snide language as ‘appease stakeholders’ who are ‘very vocal’ advocates, as you may see in the writings of Donnelly since he escaped from teaching to set himself up as an education ‘expert’.  There’s an interesting profile of both Donnelly and Wiltshire on the SBS website at

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/01/10/national-curriculum-review-who-kevin-donnelly

Of course, Upton and Edwards know the needs of the education cell: to have the arts placed on an equal footing in the curriculum, and indeed the teachers and government representatives across the nation have already recognised that need in the Australian Curriculum:

“An education rich in the Arts maximises opportunities for learners to engage with innovative thinkers and leaders and to experience the Arts both as audience members and as artists. Such an education is vital to students’ success as individuals and as members of society, emphasising not only creativity and imagination, but also the values of cultural understanding and social harmony that the Arts can engender
(National Education and the Arts Statement, 2007).” See

http://www.acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/Shape_of_the_Australian_Curriculum_the_arts_-_Compressed.pdf

A teacher quoted by Upton and Edwards, who are active in bringing live theatre to school students, brings their work into focus:

If there were no education programs, I could still take students to the theatre; but what I love about education programs in theatre companies is that they offer experiential learning; students learn through doing and it emphasises their emotional engagement in the form.

A source who once worked on a committee headed up by Donnelly (when he claims to have personally written John Howard’s education policy) has told me that he simply could not appreciate such feelings.  And indeed  it is clear from the Review that Donnelly and Wiltshire have produced, that the language changes as the Departmental team of four have had to try to find the appropriate words that can be seriously published at this level of importance.  Read the Review while imagining yourself in that committee room as it was put together and you’ll see what I mean.

Here’s a bit that won’t please Upton and Edwards (or the rest of us):

The impact the bloated size of the Australian Curriculum was having on a school’s ability to offer a school-based curriculum was regularly brought to the attention of the Reviewers. So much mandatory content is included that some argued it was taking up more than the total teaching time available in a school year. This is having an impact on the amount of time available for co-curricular offerings…
Executive Summary (p5)

“Co-curricular offerings” include the arts, according to this Review, so education programs in theatre companies may as well give up the ghost.

If this quote was written by Donnelly / Wiltshire, then you can see in the next – the conclusion to Chapter One: The Australian Curriculum and the purpose of education – where the departmental team have done their best to write a proper paragraph or two:

“... the Australian Curriculum represents a compromise where a number of conflicting models of curriculum exist side by side and where, in an attempt to meet the demands of all the key players, rigour, balance and standards are weakened. The need to ensure that all involved would commit to a national curriculum has also led to a consensus model of decision-making and an overcrowded curriculum that has weakened the process of developing the Australian Curriculum. Yates, Woelert, O’Connor and Millar describe this as follows:

One particular issue is a new form of content cramming (even though the ACARA website cites an explicit guideline that this should not happen). Here the public circulation of documents and the search for a reasonable degree of consensus around the country tends to lead to things being added (especially history) rather than taken away.
 
  Yates, L, Woelert, P, O’Connor K & Millar V 2013, ‘Building and managing knowledge: Physics and history and the discipline rationales in school curriculum reform’, paper prepared for the Australian Association for Research in Education 2013 Conference.

“Evidence of this can be found in the way the Australian Curriculum burgeoned from the initial four subjects to embracing the entire Foundation to Year 10 curriculum in eight learning areas, as the various stakeholder experts and subject associations argued that their particular subject or area of learning should not be left out.

As a result, while the Australian Curriculum privileges a combination of a utilitarian, a 21st century, a personalised learning and an equity and social justice view of the curriculum and the purpose of education, it undervalues introducing students to the conversation represented by ‘our best validated knowledge and artistic achievements’.

The Australian Curriculum being implemented across the Australian states and territories also fails to do full justice to the Melbourne Declaration’s belief that the curriculum has a vital role to play in the moral, spiritual and aesthetic development and wellbeing of young Australians.”

Have a look closely and you’ll see that Donnelly / Wiltshire are what I would call ‘museum’ thinkers.  Anything like actually doing the arts is, as Donnelly has often literally complained, ‘left-wing’.  After all it means children will be creating new cultural artefacts, being critical of their own creations, as well as learning where their culture fits into the past – which is also always open to critical thinking.  Not for Donnelly, who already apparently knows the accepted canon of ‘our best validated knowledge and artistic achievements’ and is confident he understands what should be ‘the moral, spiritual and aesthetic development and wellbeing of young Australians’.

With his virus key in Donnelly's hand, all the attempts not only by Meg Upton and Naomi Edwards, but of all those hundreds of people who have produced the as yet incomplete and not yet fully implemented Australian Curriculum will be defeated.  Those of us who have worked since the mid-1970s to get drama, dance, and media arts into the curriculum alongside the earlier successes of visual art and music will now have to overcome the Donnelly virus from within.

But I fear that this Federal government’s attitudes and funding will leave the ‘co-curricular’ activities of institutions like the theatre companies with no protein key to activate.  The full title of this Platform Paper is Education and The Arts: Creativity in the promised new order.  I fear this will be another broken promise in the body politic.  My thanks to Upton and Edwards for an excellent paper; but my commiserations for the future they may never see.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

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