2017: The Father by Florian Zeller

John Bell

Photography by Christine Messinesi and Philip Erbacher

The Father by Florian Zeller, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton.  Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1, August 24 – October 21, 2017.

Director – Damien Ryan; Designer – Alicia Clements; Lighting Designer – Rachel Burke; Composer and Sound Designer – Steve Francis

Cast:  André – John Bell; Anne – Anita Hegh; Laura – Faustina Agolley; Pierre – Marco Chiappi; Man – Glenn Hazeldine; Woman – Natasha Herbert

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 25

The concept behind this play is essentially simple.  Imagine what it will be like when you, if you are unlucky, reach a late stage of dementia where memory becomes completely unreliable but your feelings in reaction to others – who are by now caring for you full-time – are just as strong as ever, even though you are misinterpreting reality.  It’s even worse when you realise that you don’t actually understand things at all.

Then, at least in The Father, you end up in tears, crying for your mother to take you home.

Of course, especially for John Bell playing Anne’s father André, the short scenes are not so simple.  As he has said “I find this text particularly tricky to learn – and I think I speak for the other actors as well – because it’s very fractured and you need to make your own links between phrases.  It’s just short grabs of text, which are hard to learn.  It’s easy to learn a slab of Shakespeare, for instance, or Chekhov.  They write these long passages that have an internal logic, that might even rhyme.”

In fact all the other actors, and especially Anita Gegh as André’s only surviving daughter needing to get on with her own life, and of course John Bell himself, succeeded admirably with the disjointed language.  The fascinating thing about watching the play is that we found ourselves caught up in this mental state, and like André found it hard to know what the true story really was.

On the way to the theatre, I saw in Martin Place that the old traditional pavement message, Eternity, has now been changed to the word Empathy.  That’s what this play is really about.  There is no eternity – all our lives will end – but at least in our kind of society there is provision for empathy…well, there was for André in the full-care nursing home Anne had to admit him to.  The play ends where the author probably began constructing André’s mental world, with a professionally empathetic nurse cradling the crying old man in her arms.

In the Conversation with the Playwright, Florian Zeller, printed in the program (translated from the French by Marie Laubie and Carl Nilsson-Polias), the question is raised, saying “Some have compared the role of André in The Father to King Lear.  Is it, in the end, a tragic role in that sense?”

Zeller replies “It’s always perilous trying to sum things up in one word.  Still, I would say, ‘Yes, I think this is a tragic role’.  The play seems to me to be animated by a destination, its end, which is a tragic destination.” 

Though I recognise the awfulness of dementia, I have also seen the worth of an empathetic caring staff who managed my mother through some 5 years of demanding behaviour (going back to her working life when she ran the office and now expected to run the dementia unit), paranoia like André’s belief that his watch was stolen because he couldn’t find it, incomprehensible but highly imaginative flights of fantasy, and a complete inability to understand what was on the television screen.

At a week short of 93, my mother died peacefully, thanks to carers who were never punitive, nor full of sympathy, but had what I would call a practical empathy.  This is what I saw in the final scene of The Father – not a tragic but a positive end in the acceptance of reality.

And that makes this play worthwhile being produced by the Sydney Theatre Company, justifies the effort and the quality of the actors’ and creatives’ work, and certainly says you should take time out to see it – and help prepare for that time in your life.

Illustration by Nicholas Harding:
John Bell in rehearsal

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: HIR by Taylor Mac at Belvoir

Helen Thomson

HIR by Taylor Mac at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, August 16 – September 10, 2017.

Director – Anthea Williams; Set & Costume Designer – Michael Hankin; Composer & Sound Designer – Steve Toulmin; Lighting Designer – Sian James-Holland; Associate Artist – Lucky Price; Voice & Dialect Coach – Paige Walker; Movement Director – Scott Witt; Design Assistant – Jeremy Allen

Cast: Paige – Helen Thomson; Isaac – Michael Walley; Max – Kurt Pimblett; Arnold – Greg Stone

Photos by Brett Boardman

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 24

If I describe the household of father Arnold, mother Paige, elder son Isaac and younger trans sibling Max as dystopian, it would be true but would miss the point.  A golden veil of tinsel strips swept aside to reveal a lounge-room/kitchen in complete disarray.  The characters’ accents were absolutely definite: this is America.

As I watched a very funny but telling first act I had the weird feeling I was seeing a David Pope cartoon in action.  So often his picture (usually of the day’s Australian political news) is funny, yet always with a sense of foreboding.  If we were to see the image play out, surely funny would turn into disaster.  This is what happens in HIR.

Then I found the Pope cartoon to match:

[ http://www.smh.com.au/photogallery/federal-politics/cartoons/david-pope-20120214-1t3j0.html ]

This is the America who elected Donald Trump, whose Whitehouse daily falls apart as each new appointment takes off in their own direction, trying to escape impending disaster.

Paige’s home is in a poverty-stricken suburb built on a garbage dump.  There is no employment for Isaac, who has joined the Marines seeking some surety of existence and now arrives home after years of collecting dismembered body parts, having been discharged for drug use, to find his mother no longer cleans the house on principle as a feminist.  His once family-violent father is demented after a stroke brought on, his mother claims, because after the last time her husband raped her, she stood up to him and took control. 

His young ‘sister’ is now in the process of transitioning with hormones to becoming male, looking forward to surgery to increase the size of hir clitoris, and insisting on the correct pronouns to be used.  Hir mother actively supports the change.  She has sold the house to raise funds and support her venture organising a non-profit to return the suburb to its original natural condition.

Isaac attempts to put everything back in ‘order’ in military fashion, and the result is an explosion of emotional conflict.

All this can be presented with cartoon-style humour, in the same way that Jewish people satirise their foibles, or Aboriginal people create blak comedy, because the writer, Taylor Mac “started plotting my escape” from Stockton, California, which “held the honour of having the highest murder rate (per capita) in America…the second I developed a feminine walk and became conscious that I wasn’t like the other boys.”  Max – played by transgender actor Kurt Pimblett – in this play seeks to “survive and find community”, while it is important to acknowledge the valuable role in this production played by Associate Artist Lucky Price who “was identified female at birth  and at the age of 34 transitioned his gender in 2014 to male.”

But – as I imagined about David Pope’s cartoon – when the funny stuff gets to an extreme stage (as I think it will for Donald Trump), the explosion in HIR is a horribly tragic end.  Though Taylor Mac can write about hirself “We continually talk about how lucky we are that our queerness and our need to survive and find community gave us the extra bit of drive that was needed to get out of those homophobic and transphobic environments”, the end of his play leaves all four characters with literally nowhere to go, not only within the family where any remnants of personal relationships have been destroyed, but with no economic support in Donald Trump’s Great Again America.

At that moment of realisation, as the final blackout was about to happen, there was a great silence in the audience. 

I would have much preferred that depth of silence to have been held for much longer before bringing lights up and the cast on for curtain call, which induced the usual claps, cheers and whistles in the audience.  The quality of the writing, performances and design in this production certainly justified that highly positive response, but I needed more time to absorb and cope with the tragedy of our times which this excellent play exposes.

Michael Walley as Isaac, Greg Stone as Arnold, Helen Thomson as Paige
in HIR by Taylor Mac

Kurt Pimblett as Max
in HIR by Taylor Mac

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Lip Service by John Misto

Lip Service by John Misto at Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, August 17 – September 30, 2017.

Director – Nicole Buffini; Assistant Director – Shaun Rennie; Designer – Anna Gardner; Lighting – Christopher Page; Sound – Daryl Wallis; Wardrobe – Margaret Gill; Make-up – Peggy Carter; Dialect Coach – Nick Curnow

Cast: Patrick O’Higgins – Tim Draxl; Helena Rubinstein – Amanada Muggleton; Elizabeth Arden – Linden Wilkinson

Interesting art is often described as ‘edgy’.  John Misto’s Lip Service (first produced earlier this year as Madame Rubinstein at Park Theatre, London) sits on an interesting knife-edge between farce and love.

A huge amount has been written about Helena Rubinstein’s world-wide make-up empire, starting in Melbourne, Australia, in 1902; her life-long competition with Florence Nightingale Graham aka Elizabeth Arden; and with Charles Revson of Revlon fame.  An excellent place to grasp the impact of Rubinstein is to go to

http://mrmhadams.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/beauty-is-power-how-helena-rubinstein-with-elizabeth-arden-ans-madame-c-j-walker-improved-the-world-.html
and
http://thejewishmuseum.org/press/press-release/rubinstein-release

Misto makes Madame his central character, so well drawn by this performer that I entirely forgot she was the Amanda Muggleton I remember from Steaming, and her recent solo show, The Book Club.  Make-up, costume and her exquisite Polish-Jewish-New York accent and language mannerisms certainly created the picture of the eccentric Rubinstein, but it was the truth in Muggleton’s acting – in a large number of short cameo scenes – which captured my imagination.

The play has been written from the point of view of Patrick O’Higgins, usually described as her gay secretary-factotum, who in real life was a journalist on Flair magazine in New York when he met Helena Rubinstein by chance in 1955 and was employed by her for the final ten years of her life. I haven’t read his biography of his boss, but I imagine that some of Misto’s story comes from that work, and from O’Higgins’ niece, Marianne Hinton who “generously shared her memories and photographs of her uncle Patrick and was delighted with the play.

Tim Draxl’s characterisation task as an actor was made a little easier than the demands made on Muggleton, but their playing together was technically brilliant.  There was so much fun in the farcical side of Rubinstein’s treatment of O’Higgins that every scene extracted laughs all round the Ensemble’s intimate in-the-round theatre, that we were ready to accept the contrasting feelings of concern for Helena at the intimation of an attack at the end of Act 1; of understanding as ‘Irish’ (as she called Patrick) at last found a way to allow Helena to cry for the death of her son, Horace; and even of his sense of love for her, and loss, when she died – in 1965 in real life. 

Draxl’s final line, yelling at the illusion of Charles Revson, taking Helena’s part, got just the right level of laugh to relieve what might have been an overly sentimental death scene.  Good writing with precise acting brought us back from the edge. 

Elizabeth Arden’s role dramatically is written as the constant foil, because, as she probably was in real life, she may not have had the glorious self-centredness of Helen Rubinstein, but she was the more consistently successful businesswoman.  The ‘straight’ character might not have been as complicated to perform, but Linden Wilkinson provided the exact quantity and quality of contrast needed to make sure the dramatic tension – the source of our laughter – never fell away.

So why would an Australian write this sort-of comedy about these women?  Certainly to make the point about women living from the late 19th Century to the mid 1960s who made their way with great financial success in the men’s world of business.  Perhaps it was to show (though not directly said) that it was in Australia in the early 1900s that a woman had the sense of individual freedom and power to make the start that Helena did in Melbourne (in real life some sources say she made £12,000 in two years), while I wonder if the same might have been true for Florence Nightingale Graham in Canada.

If it was true that young women at the university in California where Rubinstein spoke when receiving an honorary degree objected to her success in making women want to wear make-up (and I have seen that change in attitude take place in my own daughters), then the play about the make-up business still has resonance.  This thematic issue was certainly played up in this production by showing the actual television adverts of the 1950s which began to rile women in the 1960s.

So the fun of this play which could feel a bit superficial, especially in the first half, is perhaps a mask for more significant thinking. 

And there was one issue which is raised early in brief, and then again more bluntly later, but without going into any depth.  This was about what happened to Helena when she stayed with her two uncles in a country town in Victoria for the year or so before she shifted to Melbourne.  She was around 20 at the time.  Wikipedia says she had a ‘falling out with her uncle’.  Her words in this play imply – that is, much more than suggest – that she was abused by at least one of these men.  Her relations with her husbands, her sons (especially with Horace, named after her own father), and with the gay Patrick, as we see them in the play, show a dark side to the strength of her independence as a woman.

Though it seems that the real Patrick O’Higgins wrote a humorous biography (having known her only in her later life) and John Misto seems to have picked up on that, perhaps there is a place for a play on the other side of the knife-edge, taking up what happened in Coleraine, Victoria, Australia.

Lip Service, then, is an interesting play, with a great production, in other words.

Photos by Prudence Upton

Tim Draxl as Patrick O'Higgins and Amanda Muggleton as Helena Rubinstein
in Lip Service by John Misto

Linden Wilkinson as Elizabeth Arden and Amanda Muggleton as Helena Rubinstein
in Lip Service by John Misto

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Town Folk in Queanbeyan

Town Folk: Community Comedy by Damian Callinan, with John Cherry – Film Maker and Zillah Morrow – Technical Management and Design.

Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, The Q, August 19, 2017.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Town Folk is a touring show, taking in local communities around Australia.  There is, and can only be, one performance in each town.  Callinan and his surprisingly small team research and make contact with a wide range of people in the chosen community, arriving some 3-5 days ahead of the show. 

There is no script.  The show is put together on the run as they film features which particularly distinguish the town in question, all done with a rumbustious humorous approach, even on matters of serious local controversy.  In the case of Queanbeyan, much of the film shown last night became a points-scoring competition between Queanbeyan Shire and Palerang Shire, recently merged by the New South Wales State Government against the wishes of many in both shires.

While Queanbeyan, for example, has a properly set-up sportsground with a large and even impressive seating facility – indeed, almost a stadium – the Palerang town of Bungendore has nothing but an open playing field with one tiny completely unimpressive exposed to the weather 3-tier seat for, maybe, 20 barrackers at best.  Queanbeyan 1, Palerang 0.

Over a good two hours, with interval for drinks, Damian Callinan shows his skills as an expert one-time drama teacher, improvising like mad and making it all work, with the participating audience in fits of laughter at every twist and turn in this outsider’s interpretation of their town.  There was not a dry eye in the house.

With too much to even begin to describe, I’ll limit myself to what I thought was a neat slogan for Queanbeyan, invented by an audience member doing homework in the interval.  Apart from the obvious two sided sign at the border with the Australian Capital Territory which, on one side says “Queanbeyan – Gateway to Canberra”, and on the other says “Canberra – Gateway to Queanbeyan”, I liked the more subtle “Queanbeyan – Best For Good Burgers” which could also read “Queanbeyan – Best for Good Burghers”.  This would need a Rodin statue, of course.

Damien Callinan, as I see him, is following in a comic tradition of his home town, Melbourne, which began in the 1970s with Rod Quantock’s stage shows at venues like The Last Laugh, his 1980s television show Australia – You’re Standing In It and his follow-up events variously known as Bus, Son of Tram or just Bus, where he took his audience literally on a bus and visited all sorts of public and private places unannounced, introducing “unsuspecting people to this idea that the world’s not such a frightening place and you can have fun with strangers”  [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Quantock ].

The best way to understand Callinan’s modus operandi is to go to his web page:

www.damiancallinan.com.au/


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Blue Love by Shaun Parker

Photo: Simon Wachter

Blue Love at Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse, August 16-17, 2017.
http://www.shaunparkercompany.com/shows/blue-love/

Director/Writer/Designer/Choreographer: Shaun Parker
Original Direction by Shaun Parker & Jo Stone
Dramaturg: Kate Champion (Founding Artistic Director of Force Majeure)
Performed by Shaun Parker, Lucia Mastrantone & Jo Stone





Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 17

When a show so cleverly satirises the criticism of art, what am I to write in response?  Can I just say, “Well done!” and be done with it?  Or better, “Extremely well done!!!”

Maybe a little verbal dancing will save my critical bacon.  The great writer on criticism, the poet TS Eliot, pointed out that “There are several forms which criticism might take; there is always a large proportion of criticism which is retrograde or irrelevant; there are always many writers who are qualified neither by knowledge of the past nor by awareness of the sensibility and the problems of the present.”

Am I so qualified?  I can’t dance like Glenn and Rhonda Flune.  Or sing mediaeval French folk songs like them.  With a bit of redevelopment of ancient experience, I might be able to act a bit like them, and fool my audience into not being sure if they are fictional or real.

I’m pretty sure I can’t write like Shaun Parker, even with the help of such a spot-on dramaturg as dance-drama expert Kate Champion.  My imagination is just not so wonderful.  I think I should accept Samuel Beckett’s criticism:

“VLADIMIR: Moron!
ESTRAGON: Vermin!
VLADIMIR: Abortion!
ESTRAGON: Morpion!
VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!
ESTRAGON: Curate!
VLADIMIR: Cretin!
ESTRAGON: (with finality). Crritic!
VLADIMIR: Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.”

But maybe that’s just my being qualified by knowledge of a past sensibility – 1960’s absurdism.  In modern times, Blue Love is remarkably original.  Yet I was reminded that it does have antecedents by the flyer, perhaps ironically left on my seat. 

“An acrobatic exploration of the place we call home.”  “Thought provoking...heart stopping.”  “The finest piece of circus I’ve ever seen.”  To which I would add, “The funniest piece of theatre I have seen for a very long time.”  But wait.  These paeans of praise are about Landscape with Monsters (not the ‘funniest’ bit), the show by Circa at the Canberra Theatre on 6-9 September.  Did the front-of-house staff realise these words are as true of Blue Love as we hope they will be of Landscape with Monsters.

And I’m sure I saw a line of history back to the original Circus Oz.  Shaun Parker’s sense of humour is wild in that same vein.

‘Home’ in Blue Love is Rhonda and Glenn’s home, which includes all of us visitors, welcomed with snacks and beers.  We are entertained by them for an hour or so, as they tell us the story of how they met, fell in love, married, bought their house, lost their first child, had two more.  We never quite get to the Darby and Joan stage, as ‘lurv’ seems to fall apart while we watch their home movies and listen to a startling sound mix of lines from just about every recorded love song of the past hundred years.  Even TS Eliot when writing the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1917 might have been thinking ahead to Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (even apparently under water in Blue Love).

To describe Shaun and Lucia’s choreography in words is impossible.  A Youtube virtual reality headset would be the only way.  As Eliot said about poetry: “It is not always true that a person who knows a good poem when he sees it can tell us why it is a good poem.  The experience of poetry, like any other experience, is only partially translatable into words."

So that’s it.  Good theatre can’t be translated into words.  You have to see it to believe it. Blue Love is an experience you should definitely not miss.  Because you will love it.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: The Inheritance by Greg Gould

The Inheritance by Greg Gould.  Budding Theatre at Belconnen Community Theatre, August 16-19, 2017.

Directed and designed by Cate Clelland; Lighting Designer – Andrew Snell; Costumes - The Cast

Cast:
The Three Daughters: Linda Chen – Gina Essington; Alexandra Howard – Amanda Essington; Jess Waterhouse – Emily Essington
The Parents: Victoria Hopkins – Dianna Essington; John Kelly – Lesley Archibald Essington
The Lawyer: Rob Defries – John Lauder.  Lawyer’s Clerk: Vivek Sharma – Paul
The Daughters when young: Erin Stiles – Young Gina; Martha Russell – Young Amanda; Vivien Murray – Young Emily

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 16
© Frank McKone, Canberra

Greg Gould has written a conventional morality play in a unusual style.

The story might seem a little reminiscent of Shakespeare’s King Lear, but is centred on the roles of the women in the family of a dominating man.  Gina is clearly Cordelia, Emily perhaps Goneril, Amanda would be Regan, the lawyer John is the sensible Kent, while Paul is Oswald the fop.  Les Essington, like Lear, has to learn the value of his youngest daughter’s integrity.  Dianna has no parallel in Shakespeare’s play, of course, since Lear’s wife is never even mentioned.

Gould’s story is less grand.  Les is a self-made wheeler and dealer, a billionaire in his robust sixties, who competed with Alan Bond to try for the America’s Cup, but who surprisingly dies while having sex with his young mistress (not a bimbo, but a biochemist).  Only a few months prior, he had made his lawyer redraft his will – apparently leaving Gina nothing.  But there is a twist: Gina accepts his decision, and his only gift – a ragged looking doll which he had refused to let her keep when she was a young child.

The set, an office to one side and a bathroom-toilet on the other, doesn’t change but the action takes place mainly in the lawyer’s office at the gathering of the widow and daughters for the reading of the will, or in the bathroom with Dianna refusing to come out of the toilet, interspersed with flashback scenes between Gina and her father.  In the final brief scene, we see Les reappear and drink a scotch with his lawyer – perhaps a flashback to when they met to change the will; or suggesting that Les is not actually dead (so the reading of the will is a ploy to bring his recalcitrant family together); or suggesting it is Les’ ghost celebrating in John’s imagination.

The writing of the dialogue is well done, capturing the different characters of the three daughters, the manic behaviour of their mother, and the good nature of the lawyer.  In the first scene with the youngsters, the playing is quite naturalistic (and the three young performers are very good), but after that I couldn’t be sure whether the exaggerated style in the acting was intended by the author; or whether Cate Clelland was using exaggeration as a device to make the script work.

On reflection I think it was the latter.  The script, if played straight, would become a melodrama, a typical moralistic tale.  Played this way, Paul’s character would be no more than a cardboard cutout of a servant.  But Vivek Sharma makes him into a highly over-the-top caricature of a gay man, almost to the point of a politically incorrect stereotype.  He does it very well, and gets plenty of laughs to balance the internecine verbal warfare between the three sisters and their mother.  The style of all four women, especially in Jess Waterhouse’s Emily, is exaggerated, not to the same degree but still enough to contrast with the very natural style used for John, who finally has to stand on his digs and bring the battles to a standstill so that the will can be read in something like the proper manner.

Going at it in this way meant, I think, that the issues – such as the rights and lack of power of women, and the acceptance or not of the right to be wealthy – became clarified.  If the style had been kept naturalistic all round, the play would seem to be no more than a very ordinary sentimental and unbelievable story.

This doesn’t mean that I can say it’s a great play.  It falls too much between the stools of satirical comedy and straight social commentary.  I think the model that Greg Gould could work towards is the tv show, The Family Law, where the comedy and social criticism sit more comfortably together.  Clelland has written in her Director’s Note of these characters that “Their immense wealth makes them larger than life and highly theatrical”, achieved very well by all the adult women performers, “but their problems make them believably human”.  Though the actors under Clelland’s direction achieved some moments where we could emotionally identify with those characters, the script will need more development to shift us more easily from one stool to another.

Clelland notes that she “would like to thank Greg for deciding to finish this play and for trusting us with taking it for its first run”, and I can certainly support her in this.

Victoria Hopkins as Dianna Essington

John Kelly as Les Essington

Photos by Reid Workman

Martha Russell as Young Amanda

Erin Stiles and Vivien Murray
as Young Gina and Young Emily

Alexandra Howard as Amanda Essington and
Linda Chen as Gina Essington

Linda Chen as Gina Essington and Jess Waterhouse as Emily Essington

Rob Defries as lawyer John Lauder

Vivek Sharma as Paul

2017: Belvoir announces new Executive Director

We are thrilled to announce the appointment of one of Australia’s most prominent and experienced arts administrators, to the position of Executive Director.

WHAT'S ON BUY TICKETS SUBSCRIBE DONATE BELVOIR ANNOUNCES NEW EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR We are thrilled to announce the appointment of Sue Donnelly, one of Australia’s most prominent and experienced arts administrators, to the position of Executive Director of Belvoir, recently vacated by Brenna Hobson. Sam Meers, Belvoir Chair, said today, “I’m thrilled to be announcing Sue Donnelly’s appointment as Executive Director and Co-CEO of Belvoir. Sue has been appointed after an extensive recruitment process that included interviews with an impressive short list of potential international and Australian candidates. The breadth and depth of Sue’s experience across the industry, and the esteem in which she is held by colleagues worldwide, make her the standout choice as our new Executive Director. We look forward to an exciting future under her joint leadership of the company with our Artistic Director, Eamon Flack.” Our Artistic Director Eamon Flack said of the appointment “This is very good news. Sue is an old friend of Belvoir’s, she knows the company from the inside and she’s very much at home with its idiosyncrasies. Her sense of the work we make and the kinds of risks this company is built on, is excellent. She knows what makes Belvoir special and she’ll fight the good fight. I’m particularly pleased because Sue was the acting General Manager when I joined Belvoir as the Literary Manager in 2006. She was tough-minded and kind-hearted then, and she is now. We’ll make a good odd couple, I think, in the best possible way. It’s terrific news.” READ MORE

2017: Under the Influence by Shortis&Simpson

Moya Simpson OAM and John Shortis OAM
in Under the Influence
Photo by Sabine Friedrich

Under the Influence by Shortis & Simpson.  At Ainslie Arts Centre, Canberra, Friday August 11, 2017.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

When we reach a certain ‘aaagh’ (that’s French for ‘age’ pronounced arj), we tend to look back in some wonder with an academic objectivity at what has made us what we are today.  Shortis & Simpson’s Under the Influence, recalling their own musical history, rang bells last night for an audience of just the right demographic.

It was genuinely poignant to know that Moya Simpson and her father (in Twickenham, UK) were at odds over her teenage interest in jazz and rock in favour of country and western.  It didn’t help that a strict school music mistress objected to Moya’s singing harmony (in Polly Wolly Doodle!) before the teacher had taught harmony singing.  Moya was tossed out of the class for ‘singing differently’.  It took 20 years of independent living before she felt able to sing in public.  Though her story, for us, was a humorous note, it was amusingly ironic that she had picked up harmony singing from her father as he (privately) sang along with his cowboy LPs.

Fortunately, for us, Moya’s chance encounter with Bulgarian girls singing their native folk songs – now in Sydney in the early 1980s – sparked an ‘aha’ moment. Encouraged by the enjoyment of public group singing with the Martenitsa Choir (in eastern European languages from Albanian to Hungarian), she stopped teaching as she found her voice, nowadays with a remarkable pitch and tonal range, and a great talent for accents.

John Shortis was rather more lucky with a father who conducted an amateur choir in his lounge room in Sydney ‘on the opposite side of the earth’ from teenage Moya.  As she had done, John picked up doing music, wrote his first (admittedly awful) song at 13 and failed in his audition for a radio talent quest – being told by an adamant Scottish auditioner (faithfully performed by Moya) that he couldn’t sing in tune. 

When John became a teacher, in Bomaderry while Moya had arrived unbeknowns in Sydney, he was expected to teach his class to sing something worse than Polly Wolly Doodle: the Eton School Boating Song, about rowing “with our bags between our knees” of all things!  There was no piano in the school, so John taught himself to play guitar in class, so the children were learning basics like chords along with him.  Spike Milligan’s children’s poems came to the rescue, with words like:

A baby sardine
Saw her first submarine
She was scared and watched through the peephole.
“Oh come, come, come”
 Said the sardine’s mum
“It’s only a tin full of people.”

By now our very mature audience responded to Moya’s recitation to John’s accompaniment with as much laughter as his Bomaderry class of youngsters must have done.  While we also recognised the truth in John’s new song for this show, Everyone’s Father Did, about how they each as children naturally assumed that everyone’s father did what their fathers did.

From the time they each turned into teenagers in the early 1960s, each had ‘seminal moments’ musically.  Presenting these made up a fascinating show over two 50 minute segments, brought together in a ‘now it’s time to go’ finale bracket –

Goodnight by The Beatles;
So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya by Woody Guthrie;
That’s No Way To Say Goodbye by Leonard Cohen
Farewell Angelina by Bob Dylan;
The Way We Were, (written by Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman), sung by Barbra Streisand;
You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, (originally a 1965 Italian song by Pino Donaggio and lyricist Vito Pallavicini: '"Io che non vivo (senza te)"), sung by Dusty Springfield; and
Can’t Help Falling In Love With You, (written by Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore and George David Weiss), sung by Elvis Presley.

Baby Boomers stamped their approval, and were rewarded by an encore.  Moya took us right back to George and Ira Gershwin’s Someone to Watch Over Me, significantly  as sung by Linda Ronstadt.  Sentimental?  Not in this context.  The song now seemed to be partly about the Shortis & Simpson relationship, 33 years of being and working together.  The photo says it all.

But it seemed to me also to be about the serendipity of day-to-day history. 

In John’s song A Catholic and an Atheist, it was the music – from Bing Crosby singing Cole Porter’s Don’t Fence Me In, through Thomas Aquinas’ Pange Lingua, Dusty Springfield’s Silver Threads and Golden Needles, Slim Dusty’s When the Rain Tumbles Down in July, Shortis’ own memorial to Elvis’ Heart Break Hotel called Elvis Has Left the Building, Irving Berlin’s You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun, a swag of Streisand including Brother Can You Spare a Dime?, a stack of Beatles in which Eleanor Rigby and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds set this audience cheering, to Shortis’ contemplative celebration of the 50th Birthday of Sergeant Pepper, called Happy 5-0 – it's the music that has held these two apparent opposites together and with their audiences here in Canberra for more than 20 years. 

And that was just up to interval.  The second half gave us Marlene Dietrich Falling in Love Again, Gracie Fields’ Walter, Edith Piaf’s style in Je Ne Regrette Rien, Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues and Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right followed up by Shortis’ satirical If It Were Not For My Lyrics, quoting one-time Prime Minister John Howard, who famously said Dylan was his favourite – but only politically correct people would like his lyrics just because they liked his music.

You can check this gem out at http://australianpolitics.com/1996/02/19/john-howard-comfortable-and-relaxed-enjoying-dylan.html

The influences that surprised me after reviewing Shortis & Simpson’s mainly humorous political commentary since the days at the Queanbeyan School of Arts Cafe in 1996, were Woody Guthrie (John’s tribute is called Three Chords and the Truth), Leonard Cohen in Famous Blue Raincoat (John’s tribute is a sad piece called simply Mr Cohen), and the highly original music from the 1920s by Erik Satie, the effect of which is remembered by John in Felt I’d Come Home.

The value of Under the Influence is that it shows us the unexpectedness of life and the particular moments which become serendipitous, as well as the sensitivity needed to pick up on those moments, and the work needed to build skills and quality in performance.

And finally this show explains why Moya Simpson and John Shortis have a special place in Canberra.  They are not ‘politically correct’ but neither are they ideologically incorrect.  Their humour is for the most part gentle, but still telling.  They are entertaining, but not mere entertainers.  When sadness needs recognition, sadness gets is due – in this show perhaps most significantly for the poet Leonard Cohen. 

The audience last night knew its theatre, knew its politics, and its social history.  We felt at home with the lights and shades of the story of these two artists who have found their own ways separately and then together to live, create and perform for us.

We enjoyed last night and wish them well, As Time Goes By (written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931).


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Putting Words in Their Mouths Platform Paper No 52

Putting Words in Their Mouths: The Playwright and Screenwriter at Work by Andrew Bovell.  Platform Paper No 52, Currency House, August 10, 2017.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Many of us in Canberra will remember with great sorrow, along with Andrew Bovell, as he writes about the murder in Thailand in 1988 of  “the inspirational theatre director Ewa Czajor.  She was on her way to study theatre in Warsaw and had stopped off for a brief holiday with her friend, the actor Peter Murphy.  In that moment our youth came to an end.  The first death among us was brutal and savage.  The world was no longer innocent.  Ewa left a gaping hole in the lives of many.”

I remember, too, a year or two earlier, a fresh sort of excitement when this new young playwright suddenly appeared out of the blue: “I had my first professional work produced in 1986, whilst I was still officially at college.  Roland Manderson, with whom I had studied at the VCA [Victorian College for the Arts], asked me to join the Ensemble Theatre Project in Canberra, to create a work about living in the national capital.  The result was An Ocean out My Window.  The title was ironic, given that Canberra was the only Australian capital without an ocean outside its window.  This project used the principles that we had practised at VCA – of building a work through improvisation and collaboration to support the writing process.  The play was well received by its audience and critics; and my first royalty cheque at the end was a significant symbolic moment.”

I have an image in my head of a figure waving his arms about (was he jumping about on his desk?) seeking some kind of escape out that window from Federal Capital bureaucracy. So I think it’s appropriate to show you Andrew Bovell as he is today, dressed successfully in the window of a cave, the sea going on forever behind his image.

Andrew Bovell, Playwright and Screenwriter

The key to the value of Bovell’s story of his life, as a playwright and screenwriter for film and television, is his insistence on the importance of those enduring VCA principles for success and quality.  You might expect that he would be the central figure in his story, yet in every chapter he explains how essential other people have been in his process of “building a work through improvisation and collaboration”.

In contrasting the work of a novelist, poet or short story writer – whose words are primarily to be read – with his work as a playwright or screenwriter, he emphasises that his words are primarily “to be said and heard.  I rely on the work of the actor, the vision of the director and designers and the presence of the audience.  Without them, my work remains as just words on a page.”

Of course, these words could be no more than a conventional homily, a moral injunction.  But it is the sense of immediacy and sincerity we have all felt in watching plays like Speaking in Tongues, When the Rain Stops Falling, Holy Day, The Secret River and even in the very early After Dinner (1988), as well as in his most famous film Lantana, which shines clearly throughout each chapter.  In fact, he ties the whole story together with words he has put into the mouths of characters, beginning with

I do not believe in God.  I do not
believe in miracles.  I cannot explain this.
Gabriel York, When the Rain Stops Falling (2008)


Though Gabriel is speaking about fish falling out of the sky in Alice Springs in the year 2039, Andrew explains how he finds himself thinking about his writing in the same way: I do not believe in miracles.  I cannot explain this.

Rather than becoming a set of instructions on how to Put Words in Their Mouths, his Paper is a series of revelations about his own experiences from his childhood in the Western Australian wheatbelt through to his present mature state.  He quotes the marginal woman Nora in Holy Day (2001):

Look at it!  Endless fucking plain.
Soon a thousand flowers will bloom.
It’s a bastard to trick us like that.  To
make us forget what easy death lies
out there.

Today he writes “Some writers burn quickly and brightly and produce an extraordinary body of work in a short time.  Others attain early success and then simply repeat themselves.  I want every piece I write to be different from those that preceded it.  Although, there will always be common themes and approaches to process, I want to venture in to new ground each time I write a play.  I’m in it for the long haul.  I still believe my best work is ahead of me.  I have to believe that.  But, in order to ensure that’s the case, I need to keep learning.”

Andrew Bovell takes us with him across that ‘endless fucking plain’ past the ‘death that lies out there’, thankful for the ‘thousand flowers that bloom’.  His learning experience becomes ours.  Though the words in a Platform Paper are primarily to be read, reading Putting Words in Their Mouths is like being on stage in a great improvisation, or being in a virtual-reality life-long movie with our best work still ahead of us.

Like the best theatre, he writes deceptively simply; like the best movie, he lets the story tell itself.  What is there not to like in this insightful Platform Paper 52, a credit to Currency House and, of course, to the author, Andew Bovell, himself.


© Frank McKone, Canberra