2019: Lord of the Flies - Sydney Theatre Company

Lord of the Flies adapted for the stage from William Golding’s novel by Nigel Williams.  Sydney Theatre Company directed by Kip Williams, at Roslyn Packer Theatre July 23 – August 24, 2019.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 10 Matinee 1:30pm

Cast and Creatives:

Photos by Zan Wimberley

…I see the gender of the characters as being central to the critical investigation of the work.  The characters of Lord of the Flies are all boys.  More specifically, they are all white, able bodied, and ostensibly cis gender and straight-identifying boys.  Lord of the Flies is not simply a story about “humanity”.  Rather I see it as being specifically about toxic masculine cultures.

Kip Williams

I thought that too when I first read the novel as a teenager after, at the age of seven, having been terrified when surrounded by older boys, jeering at me and challenging me to fight.

So I am glad that Kip Williams has taken the stage version out of the 1950s and brought us into today’s world of new gender understanding.

So how does he do it?

Some will love the result – especially the young.  Others will dislike the theatrical device intensely.  Let me explain.

The conception of this production involves role play at several levels.  While finding our seats, Level 1 is in play. 

The stage is open; the fluorescent backstage working lights are on; the only objects on stage are several large boxes on wheels, perhaps for props or other equipment, and a tall scaffolding tower, presumably for rigging lights.  A long piece of whitish material, maybe a couple of metres wide and reaching the floor, is hung loosely from an upstage lighting bar – as if left over from some previous set.

It appears that the stage is “dark” – that is, not being used.  Some actors, dressed in a range of non-descript ‘backstage’ clothing, wander about apparently aimlessly.  Not doing actorly warm-ups, even.

I watched for ten minutes before everyone was seated, when someone on stage began tapping on a box.  Others joined in the rhythm.  Role play Level 1 became clear: these were actors playing being actors.

They are a diverse bunch – variously ethnic and coloured, ranging from a basketball tall guy (Joseph Althouse) through middle height people and quite short, and including one disabled guy using a crutch (Daniel Monks).

In the program  I read Nyx Calder’s ‘personal note from a proud member’ of the cast – a “non-binary and transmasculine actor, artist and storyteller”.  I empathised with his experience as “victim of toxic masculinity” and sympathised with his sometimes being “seen as female, sometimes…as male, and other times I’ve been seen as a disruptive question that other people feel obliged to answer”.

But it was another Level or two before I appreciated that “Kip nor anyone else prescribed what being ‘male’ is to me, allowing my instincts and impulses to trump any preconceived notions of ‘what boys are like’."

The cast of STC's Lord of the Flies, 2019

Level 1 turned very soon in to Level 2: actors being actors playing eleven-year-old children.  The scenario seemed to be a drama group improvisation workshop such as I often have used as a teaching device. Each actor had a name of a boy from Lord of the Flies, seemingly taking on their character in whatever way they felt was right.  Being female, male, non-binary or trans was of no concern.  Ralph, Jack, Maurice, Percival and Eric were girls.  Since we were watching actors pretending to be children, it didn’t matter.

Contessa Treffone, Yerin Ha, Mia Wasikowska, Rahel Romahn and
Justin Amankwah in STC's Lord of the Flies, 2019

This morphed into a ‘workshop taken to performance level’ as the actor/children found objects to use such as the tower which became the hill on the island on which the parachutist landed (the long whitish cloth).  So we were now seeing Role Play Level 3, in which actors are playing actors who as children have been cast as characters with dialogue adapted from Lord of the Flies, with mysteriously added lighting, sound and props, including a conch shell, a pig’s head, lots of stage blood, real fire and smoke, and a great deal of mess.

The cast of STC's Lord of the Flies, 2019

Contessa Treffone, Mark Paguio, Rahel Romahn and Daniel Monks in
STC's Lord of the Flies, 2019

The cast of STC's Lord of the Flies, 2019

While drama teachers and young actors will recognise the excitement Nyx Calder describes as the “friction between actor and character” and how when “enough pieces fall into place you find yourself with bottled lightning, beautiful and unreplicable”, others (like at least one audience member I spoke to) may dislike intensely the mess and be worried about the risk of real danger – which actually occurred on this Saturday matinee.

We saw, perhaps Role Play Level minus 1, when live sparks from ashes being thrown at each other on stage flew out into Row A and the action was stopped.  While the actors left the stage as they realised with great concern what had happened, stage crew and front of house rapidly assisted a woman to leave the auditorium.

Action was re-started by the stage manager, but even with a consummate cast such as this the final twenty minutes lost a little of the energy, and was perhaps slightly less frightening and dramatically powerful than I’m sure it would have been otherwise.

Mia Wasikowska as Ralph and the cast of STC's Lord of the Flies, 2019

Rahel Romahn as Piggy in STC's Lord of the Flies, 2019

 So Kip Williams and the creative team, with this stunning array of actors, has produced a very interesting take on Golding’s original work.  I found the show highly worthwhile for its implications, often frightening, in the context of world politics today; and remarkable for being “nothing short of revolutionary for someone like me” – that is like Nyx Calder.

But not everyone will like what was a form of alienation-effect a level or two beyond anything Bertolt Brecht ever imagined.  But be brave.  You should not miss this Lord of the Flies.

The cast of STC's Lord of the Flies, 2019 - Curtain Call

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2019: Stephen Fisher-King - Morning Melodies

Songs of The Seventies – Stephen Fisher-King.  Morning Melodies at the Queanbeyan Bicentennial Hall, Wednesday August 14, 2019, 10.30am

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Stephen Fisher-King has suitably maintained the mood of Morning Melodies, attracting a reasonable crowd on a day when it was still reading only 5 degrees as I drove home at midday.  To warm us up he began by making us laugh.  He said he could see we were all ‘blondes’.  Like the rest of us with hearing aids, I knew he really meant we were “silver-grey”, but being blondes made us all feel that much younger.

From John Denver via Olivia Newton-John and Don Maclean to Leonard Cohen, and several others in between, we were given a taster of the full-length show at 8 pm in the evening: The 70’s Unplugged.

The performance was an effective ensemble of three: Fisher-King as the central singer, guitarist and even mouth-organist, accompanied by and often passing the lead over to Di Solomon for solo songs, on guitar and piano; and to Greg Hooper on piano. 

Part of the fun became a competition as to how many awards each of them had obtained over their careers, especially in club entertainment.  I think Di won when she claimed 400!

Although the intention, suited to this occasion, was to remain upbeat and light, I thought Di’s renditions of the women singers had often a quieter strength (as did her ‘ABC News” including when women attained equal pay in 1971 – I heard someone comment “We haven’t got it yet”). 

I felt too that Stephen’s When the Music Died, and the Leonard Cohen Hallelujah (just the first four verses) sung as a duet for the encore were thoughtful arrangements and sung especially sincerely. 

But for me the most powerful performance was Stephen singing The Streets of London, after asking us if anyone knew the name of the singer-songwriter Ralph McTell.  I think no-one did, but we all remembered that sad observation:

“Have you seen the old man in the closed down market
Picking up the papers with his worn out shoes
In his eyes you see no pride and hanging loosely at his side
Yesterday’s paper, telling yesterday’s news.”

As Stephen said, growing old (at only 55 he claimed) and realising that the young carry on their lives in their own new ways, is the way life goes –

“So how can you tell me you're lonely
And say for you that the sun don't shine
Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London
I'll show you something to make you change your mind.”

So thank you, Stephen Fisher-King, for making this moment special.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2019: Rainbow's End by Jane Harrison

Rainbow’s End by Jane Harrison.  Moogahlin Peforming Arts directed by Liza-Mare Syron.  At Eternity Theatre, Darlinghurst Theatre Company, Sydney.  August 14 to September 1, 2019.

Bookings: (02) 8356 9987 or www.darlinghursttheatre.com

Previewed by Frank McKone
August 11

Cast: Frederick Copperwaite – government official, moneylender, cork forest figure and others; Phoebe Grainer - Dolly; Lily Shearer – Nan Dear; Lincoln Vickery – Errol; Dalara Williams - Gladys.

Designers: Production – Melanie Liertz; Sound – Phil Downing; Lighting – Karen Norris.

Stage Manager – Julia Orlando

Photos by Robert Catto

L to R: Lily Shearer, Dalara Williams, Phoebe Grainer
as
Nan Dear, her daughter Gladys and her grandaughter Dolly

Watching Rainbow’s End is like a 1950’s slide show.  Each short scene is a picture of a moment in the life of the Dear family women in the years from 1954 when the Queen of England made her Royal Visit to her British Subjects in Australia.  What a surprise in the first scene to see Gladys, daughter of Nan Dear, mother of Dolores, so excited and determined to dress up and walk all the way from her tin shack on the river flats into country town Shepparton to see the Queen.

But the Queen never saw Gladys’s home.  Officials had lined the road with a hessian fence to hide the Aboriginal settlement.  Her practical mother who sees her role as keeping things together wants to know what happened to the hessian.  But Gladys begins to change.

The slide show also reveals the unexpected story of Gladys’s youngest daughter, 17-year-old Dolores (Dolly) and Errol Fisher (Fleischer).  Dolly is ready to find her own way into a life which she deserves – with a decent house and a marriage to a decent man who loves and respects her as an equal.

Errol, almost a comic figure in his first slide appearance amateurishly selling Encyclopedia Britannica sets, turns out not to be a Fisher but a Fleischer.  His German immigrant parents had changed their name in World War II in British Empire Australia for obvious reasons.

Dalara Williams and Lincoln Vickery
as
Gladys Dear and Errol Fisher (about to persuade her to buy Encyclopedia Britannica set)

 As you watch and find yourself thinking about each scene, including those with a  threatening male figure hidden among the cork trees, and the change from a home-built tin shack to a government imposed cement slab house – but never a home – it’s clear the play is made for discussion, and it makes very good sense that it is included in the Higher School Certificate list for classroom study.

Phoebe Grainer, Frederick Copperwaite, Lincoln Vickery
as
Dolly Dear, Threatening Figure, Errol Fisher

Nan Dear and Gladys
"cement slab house – but never a home"

 The original production of this play, by the Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-op, directed by Wesley Enoch, took place at Shepparton in 2005, but since then there seems to have been only one other professional staging, at Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, and on tour in 2011, directed by Craig Ilott.  Jane Harrison won the 2012 Drover Award at this time.

It seems to me that we all, Indigenous, immigrant or whatever sort of Australian we are, should see this Moogahlin production – especially teachers and young people – because as the decades go along the issues of cultural differences never go away.  Attitudes have changed since 1954, perhaps, and the special value of this production in the friendly atmosphere of the intimate Eternity Theatre is that you come to appreciate the complexities of living in and between cultures; and seeing that positive outcomes are possible.

I think it is also important for non-Aboriginal people to understand the place of this play in the Australian theatre scene.

Liza-Mare Syron has a family history going back particularly to her uncle Brian Syron, who was such an important figure in the establishment of the Black Theatre in Redfern, Sydney in the early 1970s.  Her clan is Biripi, linked way back through the Eora people from long before the British invasion in 1788 and Captain Cook’s landing further south at Botany Bay in 1770.  The Queen’s Royal Visit, and the power Elizabeth II still represents in 2019, has a significance in First Nations history quite different from, say, my own immigrant history including going to Enfield (that is ‘End Field’) Grammar School established by Queen Elizabeth I in 1555 for the middle-class of her day, near the forests where she would go hunting.

Jane Harrison is a Muruwari woman related to the people who built the ancient engineered fish traps in the Barwon River at Brewarrina, far to the north-west of the Eora people, and was brought up in Yorta Yorta country in Victoria.  Rainbow’s End and this production of the play represents the expansion of Aboriginal modern theatre-making across the cultures of the many First Nations peoples – some 600 language groups in Australia and the Torres Strait Islands.

Take the opportunity, then, to see Rainbow’s End: to appreciate others’ experiences, to think about the implications, and to imagine a new future for our country.  Just take on board Gladys’s speech in the final scene.

Dalara Williams and cast

Gladys speaks

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2019: The Art of Coarse Acting - Canberra Repertory Society

The Art of Coarse Acting: Best of British.

Canberra REP presents an Amateur production by Arrangement with ORIGIN Theatrical on behalf of Samuel French Ltd of six plays, at Theatre 3, July 25 – August 10, 2019:

Streuth by Michael Green
A Collier’s Tuesday Tea by Michael Green
Present Slaughter by Jane Dewey
Stalag 69 by Michael Green
Pride at Southanger Park by Rubert Bean
Trapped by Michael Green

As performed by Poon River Players, directed by Steph Roberts, written by Alexandra Pelvin, stage manager Liz St Clair Long.

The Ensemble Cast in 46 roles:
Damon Baudin                 Victoria Dixon
Glen Brighenti                 Marni Mount
Michael Cooper               Alexandra Pelvin
Patrick Galen-Mules        Steph Roberts
Cole Hilder                       Liz St Clair Long
Thomas Hyslop                Meaghan Stewart
Arran McKenna              Jo Zaharias
Nick Steain

Audience Alert:
This production contains some adult themes and an overload of chaos.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 27

I was encouraged in this endeavour by Steph Roberts, in her role as Director of Poon River Players, outing my presence as a Canberra Critics’ Circle reviewer, to cheers from the audience, and presenting me with a Poon River Players ball-point pen, obviously with the intention I should write a positive review.

I take up that ball-point as follows.

I had an enjoyable evening and recommend to Canberrans to see this show, which becomes a blur of acting bloopers and staging disasters done just for the fun of being silly.

It brought back memories from my years in amateur theatre of exactly these sorts of things happening.  These are the memories of funny moments which I’m sure keep Canberra REP together, and made this show of deliberate disasters enjoyable.

Though titled by the Poon River Players “Best of British” the six plays chosen from the Coarse Acting competitions, festivals and World Coarse Acting Championships are, from my background cultural experience, quite specifically English, rather than British.  The Scots, the Welsh and the Irish were never quite as silly.  The English by 1964, when Green had already written The Art of Coarse Rugby and then The Art of Coarse Acting, had been accustomed to the Goon Show on radio since 1951 (when the BBC at first would not use the name Goon and called it “Crazy People”); later came Monty Python’s Flying Circus with Graham Chapman, John Cleese et al and The Goodies with Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden from 1969-1970.

So the Poon River Players from some vague part of North Queensland (Yepoon?) on their first Australasian Tour have done the tradition proud.  They have not pretended to be sophisticated, or perhaps they have pretended not to be sophisticated.  It’s hard to tell the difference.  That’s the point of coarse acting.  It’s silly for the sake of being silly, even though we know that it’s actually hard work to do it deliberately.

Streuth is a Vicar of Dibley scene with a dead body and Agatha Christie style mystery story.

Photos by Helen Drum

Rear: Jo Zaharias, Glenn Brighenti, Thomas Hyslop
Front: Arran McKenna, Michael Cooper
as
Mrs D'Arcy, Hubert D'Arcy, James
The Inspector, The Vicar

A Collier’s Tuesday Tea has a large kitchen table for the whole family to support when its legs fall off.

Rear: Nick Steain, Victoria Dixon, Glenn Brigheti, Patrick Galen-Mules
Arran McKenna, Cole Hilder; Floor: Marni Mount
as
Daniel Obadiah Hepplethwaite, Ida Hepplethwaite, Albert Hepplethwaite, Lionel Headbracket
Joe Clegghorn, P.C. Clement Boothroyd
Victoria Hepplethwaite

Present Slaughter is a romance of Noel Coward sophisticates made difficult with stiff upper lips as the gentleman accidentally cuts a major artery and slowly dies.

Standing: Jo Zaharias, Thomas Hyslop, Cole Hilder
Not standing: Meaghan Stewart
as
Lavinia, Antoine, Oliver
Mimi

In Stalag 69 (not the 1953 American comic war movie Stalag 17), the British prisoner faces walls, a window, a door and a grille which in the first performance attempt are upside down and back to front.  In the second attempt, the walls are righted but un-nerve the actors with more unfortunate results.

Damon Baudin as Squadron Leader Crawford

Pride at Southanger Park never quite makes it into the Jane Austen society drama it appears to be.

 Above: Jo Zaharias, Nick Steain, Alexandra Pelvin, Glenn Brighenti, Marni Mount, Arran McKenna
Below, as stage revolves: Patrick Galen-Mules, Michael Cooper, Marni Mount, Arran McKenna
as
Mrs Squires, Sir Thomas Bottomly, Lady Fanny Bottomly, William Squires, Cecily Chichester,
and Reverand [sic] Giles Henry
Below: Actor caught backstage smoking, Marcus D'Angelo, Cecily Chichester, Reverand [sic] Giles Henry

Trapped is the classic “there’s a murderer among us but all the doors are locked” mystery – except, at the very least, the set construction fails to keep them in.  (Photo not available)

There are absolutely no serious implications to be made.  The plays fail to be satires, or comedies with recognisable plots, or even slapstick farces.  The plots that may be imagined fall apart; the characters’ relationships never develop; all that remains are actors trying to keep up appearances until even they give up the ghost.  We are still laughing at the end even though there’s nothing much left to laugh at.

And that’s a success, for that’s what The Art of Coarse Acting is all about.  Well done, Canberra REP.  The Best of British to you (well…English, anyway).

The last question is about production values.  Certainly the costumes and make-up looked very much like those in the pictures in Michael Green’s book.  The lighting was bright and the sound was loud.  The revolve revolved when it should have, that is when it shouldn’t have, according to Coarse Stage expectations.  The set fell apart and was put in place as it should, during the action, and while Director Steph Roberts frantically tried to keep our attention as she explained the situation between scenes.  Costume changes seemed to take place as smoothly as can be expected.  And Liz St Clair Long was as grumpy as any Stage Manager I’ve come across.

Everything went wrong as it should and, as far as I could tell (though it might be hard to tell), nothing went wrong as it shouldn’t.  Enjoy!

Jo Zaharias, Liz St Clair Long, Steph Roberts and Meaghan Stewart
keeping our attention

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2019: The Torrents by Oriel Gray

Program Cover
Celia Pacquola as Oriel Gray

      Oriel Gray
https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A10651
This image has been sourced from Doollee.com


The Torrents by Oriel Gray.  Co-Production Black Swan State Theatre, Perth WA, and Sydney Theatre Company, at Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, July 18 – August 24, 2019.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 24

Photos by Philip Gostelow

Cast and Creatives

Claire Watson’s directing presents us with a tantalising light-hearted comedy of manners in which a ‘New Woman’ brings sense and sensibility to the self-destructing chaos of the male-dominated conventions of her time.  The Torrens is tightly intelligent – a play of ideas, played out in comic form.

Where have I come across this before?  In theatre, in plays by George Bernard Shaw like Mrs Warren’s Profession and Major Barbara; in David Williamson’s Dead White Males and the more recent When Dad Married Fury; all looking back, of course, to Aristophanes and Shakespeare.  Yet here is one that I had not known about before.

Why not, when in 1955 it was joint winner of the Playwrights' Advisory Board Competition with Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler?  In this production of The Torrents,  Celia Pacquola, comedian, provides us with a Puckish prologue, not so much along the lines of ‘Think but this, that you have slumbered here while these visions did appear” while The Doll has appeared in every school classroom and in thousands of productions.  She insults us by assuming that we haven’t read the program (who ever does?), and finally admits that The Torrens has had only one professional production – before this one, of course! – in Adelaide in 1996.

As Jenny Milford, writing her application to become a journalist in the 1890s with her presumed male initials J.G., we see Pacquola in a remarkably straight role as a woman of practical intelligence and humorous perspicacity who runs rings around the men – except for the young copy boy Bernie, played sympathetically by Rob Johnson, who carefully avoids allowing slapstick to make the role less important than I’m sure Oriel Gray intended.  He represents the young generation, learning fast about the changing role of women; just as we see beginning to happen for the other woman in the play, Gwynne.  One lunch with feminist Jenny, and Gwynne will not marry for money: only for love.

The production is carried off with panache – made especially enjoyable by the skilful acting and directing at the perfect level of comedy without falling into the trap of farce, nor the opposite trap of post-modern absurdism.  The 1950s script has a kind of innocence about its use of stock funny characters which could seem out of kilter with the serious issues in a genuinely independent woman’s life.  But this production gets the balance right.

The Torrens, as good as Summer of the Seventeenth Doll though it may be, is not up to Pygmalion or the best of David Williamson, but certainly deserves many more productions of this quality.  It definitely should be in all those classrooms where Pearl and Bubba are regularly studied, because Jenny Milford is a character who does not brook sentimentality, either about herself as a person and certainly not about how she is treated as a woman.  She is a person to be respected in her own right, and should be as much a centre of discussion by young people today as at any time in the past.

Among the other characters, the interest centres on the editor of the Koolgalla Argus, Rufus Torrent, and his relationships with his journalist son, Ben, and the paper’s owner, John Mason, for whom profitability takes precedence over originality and even truth.  I have to disclose my bias when saying I was pleased to see my one-time student, Steve Rodgers, allow Mason’s hard-line character just enough self-doubt to save him from being pure Rupert Murdoch; while also equally praising Tony Cogin and Ben Davies for revealing their human common sense as Pacquola’s Jenny made good sense against Mason’s prejudice and obstinacy.

The one character under written by Oriel Gray, I think, is Kingsley, the proponent of a water supply for an agricultural future for the dying gold mining industry of Koolgalla (i.e. Coolgardie/Kalgoorlie in real life).  Luke Carroll did his best and gave Kingsley our sympathy, but he remained a one-note character dependent on Jenny Milford’s capacity and generosity.  Perhaps Gray should have taken Kingsley to the point of suicide, as really happened in the model for his character – Charles O’Connor, whose 530-kilometre-long pipeline Eastern Goldfields Water Supply Scheme in Western Australia was finally completed, but only after his death.  Maybe Gray could not see how to put that story into her comedy.

Bringing Oriel Gray to the stage today – and including the program which we all should indeed read for its history of Pioneering Female Journalists of Australia, Alexina Wildman (1867-1896), Stella Allen (1871-1962), Leontine Cooper (1837-1903) and Louisa Lawson (1848-1920); and remembering her work performing and writing at the Australian Communist Party’s New Theatre, which took her on to becoming “the first paid playwright-in-residence in an Australian theatre” writing the Party’s weekly radio segment on station 2KY – is an important project for modern Australian theatre, especially for national status companies like Sydney Theatre Company.

On my arrival in this country in 1955, the theatres I found as my theatre interest grew were Doris Fitton’s middle class Independent in North Sydney, the Genesians doing Shakespeare (I remember Poor Tom in King Lear presented with Christian sympathy), the Elizabethan Theatre Trust showing the American Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and the New Theatre.  Their production of The Good Soldier Schweik, adapted from the anti-war novel by Jaroslav Hasek, was a high point of political satire as the birthday lottery system sent 18-year-olds to war in Vietnam in 1967.  What better introduction to my new land could I have had?  How good was that!

The essay in the program for The Torrents, “Oriel Gray, New Theatre and ‘the new woman’” is powerful history to follow her light-hearted comedy.  Enjoy the play, and read the program!

Steve Rodgers and Gareth Davies
as
Koolgalla Argus owner John Manson and Ben Torrent

Emily Rose Brennan
as
Gwynne, socialite engaged to marry Ben Torrent

Luke Carroll
as
Kingsley, contributor to Koolgalla Argus
on water supply scheme

Celia Pacquola and Tony Cogin
as
J.G. (Jenny) Milford and Koolgalla Argus editor Rufus Torrent

Sam Longley, Geoff Kelso and Rob Johnson
as Koolgalla Argus staff
Jock McDonald (manager), Christy (print compositor) and Bernie (copy boy)

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2019: A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller

A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller.  Red Line Productions at Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, July 24 – August 24, 2019.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 24

Director – Iain Sinclair; Set Designer – Jonathan Hindmarsh; Costume Designer – Martelle Hunt; Lighting Designer – Matt Cox, Associate – James Wallis;  Sound Designer – Clemence Williams, Associate – Dana Spence; Dialect Coach – Nick Curnow; Fight Director – Scott Witt

Eddie Carbone – Anthony Gooley; Catherine – Zoe Terakes; Beatrice – Janine Watson; Louis & Various – Giles Gartrell-Mills; Marco – David Soncin; Rodolpho – Scott Lee; Alfieri – David Lynch

David Lynch as Alfieri
A View from the Bridge

Photos by Prudence Upton

You know when you’ve got your Arthur Miller right when, at the final blackout, a deep overwhelming silence fills the theatre full with a feeling of loss and an awful sense of waste.

Though the characters are fictional and the setting is not yours personally, you know the tragedy is real.  Director Iain Sinclair and his team of actors and designers have achieved perfection in their A View from the Bridge.

An absent friend, the founder of the Ensemble Theatre, Hayes Gordon, must never be forgotten for his creation of this little theatre-in-the-round – so appropriately in this boatshed on the Kirribilli wharf, which I so often look down on from the over-arching Sydney Harbour Bridge, before eating at the migrant Italian Kirribilli Village Café. 

It may be a lot more up-market than “the scene in the docks of Red Hook, a working-class part of Brooklyn” but I’ll bet there are stories about escaping to freedom in a new country, about cultural conflict, about the tentacles of family obligations – and there’ll be lawyers like Alfieri, sincerely trying to help prevent the worst from happening in the face of legal, social and political reality; maybe often working pro bono for Amnesty International. 

I feel self-conscious – as a migrant myself who still remembers struggling through unpleasantly officious customs on Pyrmont 13 wharf in 1955, the year Miller wrote A View from the Bridge – knowing how lucky I have been to enjoy the kind of life that Catherine and Rodolpho hope for, and even Beatrice can imagine for them, but will never happen now that her husband Eddie Carbone could never let his niece have her freedom; and is now dead by the hand of her cousin, Marco, in a fight for honour.

I have often wondered how Arthur Miller, born in 1915 in Harlem, NY, with such a British sounding name, could identify so closely with Italian dockworkers and the fears of migrating illegally.  But his own parents ‘of Polish and Jewish descent’ may well have faced the same kinds of desires and fears – and then “lost their successful coat manufacturing business in the Wall Street Crash of 1929”, and “had to move from Manhattan to Flatbush, Brooklyn”, which looks down on Red Hook. 
[ https://www.biography.com/writer/arthur-miller ]

Obviously, the anti-immigration politics of our day make this play even more significant, perhaps, than in 1955.

So let’s look at how Sinclair and Co broke the rules to make this work so telling.  Iain Sinclair is not the first to do something like what Laura Barnett describes in her review in The Guardian (April 13, 2014): Here, in his first production for London's Young Vic, Van Hove turns his talent for reappraisal to Arthur Miller's claustrophobic 1955 tale of a Brooklyn longshoreman, Eddie Carbone, and his obsession with his niece, Catherine. The effect is startling.

The most daring decision taken by Van Hove and his designer, Jan Versweyveld, is to dispense with Miller's precise stage directions (this was a playwright whose notes to his actors and directors were often as poignant and exacting as his dialogue). The production opens not on a Red Hook tenement, but with a stark black box that lifts to reveal a bare thrust stage, bordered by a low Perspex wall.

But in the Ensemble Theatre, with “two lighting effects, two props [and] one chair”, we are not outside peering in at  a stark black box.  We are in-the-round, in the box, with Alfieri surreptitiously watching us from near A15 as we dribble down to fill the few rows of seats in this compact 200 seat space:

As we hushed seemingly to no obvious signal, Alfieri took the chair towards centre and began to speak to us.  In B26 it seemed he spoke directly to me.  I remained, attention locked in, for 2 hours without interval.  People usually quote Peter Brook’s The Empty Space at this point, but Iain Sinclair, referring to Jerzy Grotowski, writes “We created a show firmly in the ‘poor theatre’ aesthetic following Lope de Vega’s dictum that all great theatre needs is actors, a stage and some passion”.

And passion is what we got:

Anthony Gooley as Eddie Carbone

Janine Watson as Beatrice

Scott Lee as Rodolpho, David Soncin as Marco

Zoe Terakes as Catherine, with Anthony Gooley

Anthony Gooley and Janine Watson

Zoe Terakes as Catherine with Scott Lee as Rodolpho
Anthony Gooley and Janine Watson

Zoe Terakes and Scott Lee

Giles Gartrell-Mills as Louis, with Anthony Gooley as Eddie Carbone

L:R Scott Lee, Janine Watson, David Soncin, Zoe Terakes, Anthony Gooley
as
Rodolpho, Beatrice, Marco, Catherine, Eddie Carbone
A View from the Bridge

You have until August 24 to see A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller at Ensemble Theatre, Sydney.

David Lynch as Alfieri
A View from the Bridge

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2019: 30 Years of Sixty Five Thousand by Bangarra

30 Years of Sixty-Five Thousand:
Unaipon – Choreographer: Frances Rings
Stamping Ground – Choreographer: Jiří Kylián
To Make Fire – Choreographers: Stephen Page and Elma Kris

Bangarra Dance Theatre – Artistic Director Stephen Page – at Canberra Theatre Centre, July 18-20, 2019.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 18








Bangarra has made a celebration of their first thirty years into an inspiring work in three parts.  Stephen Page makes two crucial points, quoted by Andrew Brown (Canberra Times 19 July 2019):  “…we’re not art for art’s sake”; “we wanted to have strong pieces that show the spirit of character of the company.”

And what a positive spirit that is in these young First Australians, going forward, in the context of the political culture of our ‘elders’ among Second Australians going backwards.  Bangarra’s work is art for all our sakes,  demonstrating and engaging us in an ancient ideal – unity in diversity.

We explore the philosophical thoughts of David Unaipon of the Ngarrindjeri people.  Featured on our $50 note, son of James and Nymbulda Ngunaitponi (Anglicised as Unaipon), born at Macleay Point near Tailem Bend on the Murray River as it turns towards the Coorong, in 1872, Unaipon was the antithesis of the common belief among colonial Australians that the Aboriginal race would soon die out.  He treated his traditional religious beliefs as equivalent to the Christianity of his mission education, saying "...in Christ Jesus colour and racial distinctions disappear..."; he was a ‘deputationer’ for the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association, set up in South Australia in 1858 and still active until 2001, seeking self-determination for his people; and continued to work on his inventions, especially of devices based on centrifugal rotary motion, until his death in 1967. 

In dance, Unaipon’s words and the sounds of both his mechanical and bush environments provide the spirit of movement integrating the old and the new, the traditional style with modern, representing the reconciliation of cultures that his life was all about.

This work is Part One of a great work in three parts.  It introduces us to unity in practice, though if we know the detail we can find at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Unaipon , we should remember that he was never able to afford to get any of his provisional patents fully patented, so never received financial return even for his main invention which became “the basis of modern mechanical sheep shears” from 1910.

Part Two, Stamping Ground, takes us to Groote Eylandt, the big island ironically named by the Dutchman Abel Tasman 375 years ago in 1644.  The irony is that Jiří Kylián, though not Dutch himself, visited the Warnindhilyagwa people in 1980, observed their dancing, made a video – part of which we viewed to introduce Stamping Ground – and then made his own dance with the Nederlands Danstheater.  He made it clear his work was not imitative because that would be to appropriate dance that belonged to the Warnindhilyagwa.  He was so affected – ‘overwhelmed’ he said – by their dance that he created his own from his inspiration in response.  This work was first performed in Europe in 1983. 

Now it is the first work by a non-Indigenous choreographer presented by Bangarra’s all-Indigenous company. This has taken Bangarra to a new stage of its spiritual life, linking together through Kylián the oldest continuing culture in the world with, we could say, the youngest – 65,000 years old (might be still contentious but certainly 50,000) with, we might say, 400 back to Tasman, or 2500 back to the time of Ancient Greek theatre.

The performance of Stamping Ground was fascinating for the quality of the dancing, but as well to see the differences between and the points of blending with the traditional dance movements we had seen in the video as the Bangarra dancers took hold of modern European culture.

Then Part Three, To Make Fire, put together as an ongoing story of ‘memorable moments’ from Bangarra’s performing history covering many cultures from different parts of the country. Beginning with scenes from Mathinna of the adoption in Tasmania of the young girl Lowreene by the Governor John Franklin and his wife Jane in 1837 (Muttonbird, People, Adoption), the story moved to the Torres Strait Islands people and their spirits for the four winds Zey, Kuki, Naygay and Sager.  Clan provided a conclusion with aspects of cultural life now in Dots, Wiradjuri, Young Man, Promise, and the full company performing Hope.

One might imagine such an apparently disparate array of episodes might seem disjointed, but absolutely not so.  Stephen Page has made a new work out of old, a work which is art in its own right, yet is not art just for art’s sake; a work with tremendous spirit, positive promise and hope. 

Bangarra looks forward, never backward – and I can only hope that now that we have significant Indigenous people in the Australian Parliament – Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, Shadow Minister Linda Burney and Senator Patrick Dodson – that the cultural strength of Bangarra becomes the underpinning it deserves to be for reconciliation and full recognition of the First Peoples of Australia by the Second and the many more recent Peoples, including me, who make up my country today.

© Frank McKone, Canberra