2020: Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam by Peter Goldsworthy

Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam, adapted by Steve Rodgers from the novella by Peter Goldsworthy.  A Riverside National Theatre of Parramatta production presented by Belvoir, at Belvoir Street Upstairs, February 6 – March 8, 2020.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 16

Director – Darren Yap; Set and Costume Designer – Emma Vine; Lighting and AV Designer – Verity Hampson; Composer and Sound Designer – Max Lambert and Sean Peter.

Cast (alphabetical)
Valerie Bader (Grandma / Dr Eve), Emma Jackson (Linda), Mark Lee (Grandpa / Priest), Liam Nunan (Ben), Grace Truman (Wol), Matthew Whittet (Rick)

__________________________________________________________

Though I am used to being emotionally stirred by theatre, this presentation of a controversial story as a live performance disturbs me. 

When reading a fiction, I can set myself at arm’s length, pause to consider the author’s intention, and decide whether or not to read any further.  In the theatre, as the father’s intention to kill himself and his 12-year-old daughter at some point of his choosing when it seemed that her leukaemia could not be stopped from killing her, I could not stop being taken beyond an unacceptable conclusion.

Though some people may simply consider this to be a ‘sad’ story of a father willing to sacrifice himself in the name of ‘love’ for his daughter – by keeping her company right through until the end – this motivation (in a fictional character, remember) is warped in the extreme.  This father justifies committing suicide, and murder.

Perhaps Peter Goldsworthy’s intention was to open up the reader’s thinking about this family’s twisted faith, apparently acceptable to the fictional priest.  Perhaps it was meant to be enlightening about the nature of a God who can kill a child.  Perhaps voluntary euthanasia was the issue in Goldsworthy’s mind – except that Wol (fictional again, don’t forget) was too young to be legally responsible, and Rick was certainly not terminally ill – nor of sound mind.

Perhaps, as I thought the title of the work meant, the novella and the play would be taking a severely critical view of religious belief which, for example, can lead Catholic priests to refuse to report confessions of child abuse, and protect their confreres from criminal charges.  That God is certainly not Love – and Rick’s ‘love’ makes him think that he is God.

The adaptation for the stage, unfortunately, is not clear in its intention.  The style is essentially naturalistic, except for an occasional speech from the father which seems to be aimed directly at the audience.  If the whole play had been presented in this out-to-us form then perhaps I could have stood mentally back enough to see the story as simply being about issues.  But the apparent realism of the interactions between characters, particularly between Linda and her mother and the treating doctor, and the understandable sullenness in Ben’s responses, made the play awful to watch.  So then the ending, when his mother reminds Ben, now four years older, of how his father carried out injecting his daughter and himself, as if this was a normal – in fact loving – thing to do, was just sickening.

I didn’t feel sad.  If anything, it made me feel angry that Rick had left his wife and son with no support after the unavoidable death of her young daughter and his younger sister. 

So, on reflection, I think if Goldsworthy intended to make Rick a heroic loving father, then that was a serious error of judgement on Goldsworthy’s part.  Reviews (at, for example,  https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/615999.Jesus_Wants_Me_For_a_Sunbeam )
range from “This may be the worst book I have had the misfortune to encounter. One of the most utterly hideous, contrived and disingenuous novels I have ever read.” to “I nearly shed a tear at the end of this novella, not because I was sad that the father and daughter were dying, but that the father was spinning the biggest lie - that they would be together in death.” [because] “A rejection of God and Jesus would result in them not being together and his ultimate suicide was really for nothing.”

One said simply, “A very good read. I read it at one sitting.”

Be warned, then, that you will see a well-designed and very well performed show; but be prepared for what you might shed a tear for.

Set design by Emma Vine
Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeamby Peter Goldsworthy
Riverside National Theatre of Parramatta
presented at Belvoir 2020
Photo: M McKone

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: No Pay? No Way! by Dario Fo (and Franca Rame)

No Pay? No Way! by Dario Fo, adapted by Marieke Hardy.  Sydney Theatre Company at Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, February 10 – March 20, 2020 (and at Riverside Parramatta April 1-4, 2020).

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 15

Director – Sarah Giles; Designer – Charles Davis; Lighting Designer – Paul Jackson; Composer and Sound Designer – Steve Francis

Assistant Director – Madeleine Humphreys; Fight and Movement Director – Tim Dashwood; Voice and Text Coach – Charmian Gradwell; Literal Translator – Thomas McPherson

Cast (alphabetical order):
Giovanni – Glen Hazeldine; Luigi – Rahel Romahn; Antonia – Helen Thomson; Sergeant/Inspector/Undertaker/Old Man – Aaron Tsindos; Margherita – Catherine Văn-Davies
 

Photos by Prudence Upton

_____________________________________________________________

Helen Thomson (Antonia) and Glenn Hazeldine (Giovanni)
in No Pay? No Way!
Sydney Theatre Company 2020

Behind the uproaringly side-splitting laughter in Marieke Hardy’s adaptation of this Italian 1970s political farce (almost certainly by Dario Fo and Franca Rame, dubbed “the person behind the political”) is a highly intelligent design and directing concept.  Sarah Giles and Charles Davis parallel the collapse of the capitalist economic system by making the stage set of a neat, just adequate but seemingly substantial housing unit, break into scattered pieces around the characters, who struggle along until the point is reached where there is nothing left to do except sing a sad song of hope.

Though Hardy writes “if all else fails, let’s just be together for a spell and hold hands and laugh at how messed up it all is”, Sarah Giles’ ending is less hopeful.  Her characters sing quietly and beautifully, but distinctly apart from each other among different bits of their shattered environment.  They have made us laugh with references to our very own daily political farce, then sing us into a blackout which is a grateful pause in the madness.  We applaud in a moment about which we can only think, this is “Sad but True!”

I suspect, from the Youtube examples I can find, that Giles and her designer Charles Davis have taken us a step further into the absurd than Fo and Rame envisaged.  Other productions seem to finish on a note of defiance, still in the neat home setting, for which audiences cheer as the last line is spoken.  We went quiet in the darkness before the absolutely justified burst of applause as the lights came up for the curtain call.

Farce, of course, relies on surprise, so there is no way – with or without pay – that I can describe what happens in this production.  You simply must go along to the prestigious Sydney Opera House to laugh at pretension and laugh at the collapse of the ordinary good order of life.  Just watch out for the caesarian breaking of the waters, the brine and the olives.

Say no more – though you may understand a few more jokes if you know Italian.

It is a terrific production – an adaptation that Fo and Rame would surely be proud of, however horrified they might be to know that we still need to face up to the same, perhaps even worse farcical state in Australia and the world today.  I remember George W. Bush ringing in the new century 20 years ago with the cry “A New World Order!”

Ha! Ha!  No Way!

Rahel Romahn (Luigi)

Catherine Văn-Davies (Margherita)

Aaron Tsindos (as Sergeant)

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan

Marta Dusseldorp
in rehearsal for
The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan
Sydney Theatre Company
Photo: Brett Boardman

The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan.  Sydney Theatre Company at Roslyn Packer Theatre, February 4 – March 7, 2020.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 15

Director – Paige Rattray; Designer – David Fleischer; Lighting Designer – Nick Schlieper; Composer and Sound Designer – James Brown.
Assistant Director – Kenneth Moraleda; Fight and Movement Director – Nigel Poulton; Voice and Text Coach – Charmian Gradwell.

Cast:
Hester Collyer – Marta Dusseldorp; Freddie Page - Fayssal Bazzi; William Collyer – Matt Day
Mr Miller – Paul Capsis; Mrs Elton – Vanessa Downing
Philip Welch – Brandon McClelland; Ann Welch – Contessa Treffone; Jackie Jackson – Charlie Garber
______________________________________________________________

The play begins with a beautiful scene.  A blue ocean extends beyond our horizon as if it stretches on forever.The sky is a clear uninterrupted pale blue.

In the ocean is a tiny island, dark against the light.  A point of focus in this Deep Blue Sea.  This is Hester.  She is her tiny island – her dark world.

By the end of the play we understand, as Mr (one-time Dr) Miller tells Hester, “… the world is a dark enough place for even a little flicker to be welcome.”

Marta Dusseldorp and Paul Capsis
as Hester Collyer and Mr Miller
in The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan
Production Photos: Daniel Boud

Why is clearly-gay Miller no longer entitled to be ‘Dr’?  Because in 1950s Britain, homosexuality was a crime, punishable by jail.

Suicide was also a crime, though quite what the Christian belief behind the law imagined would be the punishment is a moot question.  Of course, to attempt suicide….

What if, though, you were a woman, daughter of a local vicar, marrying ‘above’ your station into the expectations of the ‘greater public school’ men – wealthy, elite?

And that’s before the play now begins, after ten months in love with a dashing RAF wartime fighter pilot – a famous but by now insecure past-his-prime test pilot.  Where did Lady Hester Collyer meet Freddie?  At the elite golf club, Sunningdale, of course.

Matt Day and Marta Dusseldorp
as Sir William Collyer and Lady Hester

Marta Dusseldorp and Fayssal Bazzi
as Hester and Freddie

Does this sound like your cup-of-tea, in modern Australia?  You’ll be surprised.  Just as director Paige Rattray describes:  “When I went to see the 2015 production at the National Theatre in London, I was aware of Rattigan’s reputation as an observer of the British middle-class, a society playwright, but was not prepared to meet one of the most complex, nuanced and thoroughly human female characters in the history of Western theatre.”

Scene changing by actors in character - the 'fourth wall' is broken
L-R: Contessa Treffone, Vanessa Downing, Brandon McClelland, Marta Dusseldorp and stage crew
as
Ann Welch (neighbour), Mrs Elton (landlady), Philip Welch (neighbour), Hester Collyer 

To then find Marta Dusseldorp to play this role was an inspired choice.  In this clever, also surprising set design, what would have been in the 1950s a conventional English sitting-room ‘fourth-wall’ scene turns into an exciting modern play reflecting on the past attitudes to mental health, sexual identity – and thus the position of women as independent people in control of their lives – attitudes still boiling away beneath our attempts today to change that dark world into a kinder place.

It worries me that the image in Rattigan’s play of the ‘deep blue sea’, which is attractive and offers the possibility of hope, is nowadays seen as ‘the black dog’, seemingly a vicious threat to escape from.  But Marta’s characterisation of Rattigan’s Lady Hester Collyer catches us out.  She achieves wonderfully the intention that director Paige has for this production:

“In moving Hester through her despair, through her reliance on other people to a place where she can exist for and with herself”…we have a “model for a new way to look at life, and a new way to survive it.”

If you had thought, as I had, that Terence Rattigan had less to offer than, say, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams or others of his era,  Sydney Theatre Company proves us to be mistaken. 

Not to be missed.



© Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: Theatre Network Australia - Some Critical Information

Posted by Frank McKone

https://www.tna.org.au/pre-budget-submission-for-the-2020-21-federal-budget/

Media Contact:Nicole Beyer nicole@tna.org.au

2020: Platform Paper No.62

Performing Arts Markets and their Conundrums by Justin Macdonnell.  Platform Papers No. 62, February 2020.  Quarterly essays on the performing arts from Currency House.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

APAM or APAX? That is the question.  What are Performing Arts Markets for?  Are Performing Arts Exchanges better?

Justin Macdonnell is more than well-qualified to ask the questions: he has “been employed in arts management, producing and consultancy for over forty years.  His early career was occupied variously as General Manager of the State Opera of Australia, Director of the National Opera of New Zealand, Program Director of the Festival of Sydney, Executive Director of the Confederation of Australian Professional Performing Arts and Artistic Director of the Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, USA.  As principal of Macdonnell Promotions he was for twenty years one of Australia’s leading arts management consultants to both the public and private sectors and to scores of arts organisations here and abroad.”

In a lengthy but fascinating history of arts markets on every continent, he even wonders about an unexpected “elephant in the room: the entire face-to-face market model is based on continued extensive international air travel, not only to assemble delegates at one or more market-like events in Australia—a great distance by anyone’s standards—but to continue to support international touring itself.  Despite Qantas’s optimistic claims of being carbon neutral by 2050, there is already a known, marked reluctance among those concerned at the threat of climate change to use such transport.”

We Canberrans didn’t need to fly anywhere when the first Australian Performing Arts Market seemed, to me at least, to appear quite out of the blue in the midst of the 1994 National Festival of Australian Theatre, directed by the doyenne of Kurt Weill singing, Robyn Archer AO.  APAM was set up by the Australia Council for the Arts, a statutory authority, nowadays simply known as The Australia Council, which is the Australian Government's principal arts funding and advisory body. The Council is the national advocate for the arts and its purpose is to “champion and invest in” Australian arts.

Macdonnell sees the what-for? question having two answers, which have had different degrees of emphasis in the parallel arts markets which have been established around the world.  He writes, “in order to have an effective trade fair one must have buyers and sellers. It is arguable that in APAM, while there have been a number of buyers, there has never really been selling. The work has been displayed but not sold.”

Then he goes on to say, “most observers today would acknowledge that these events have a networking and relationshipbuilding purpose alongside their buying and selling
role. While there is concern with the narrowness of what ‘market’ might mean, many feel that it has been useful to add new dimensions to the program in order to facilitate what might be called ‘curated conversations’.”

On one occasion, at a US market, “Australian colleagues and I once did a roaring trade there with mass-produced clip-on koalas.”  But then he contrasts this approach, saying “But in the end success is achieved mostly after long-standing connection between artist manager/producer and presenter.”

Macdonnell’s descriptions of the experiences of attending the many dozens of arts markets, as potential buyers, hopeful sellers and professional management and artistic networkers are not only interesting in their own light, but raise for us as critics a fuller understanding of the milieu – the world-wide culture of theatre – out of which the individual performances we see emerge.

A particularly fascinating case, seen here at the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre (The Q), was the dance work by Queensland’s Expressions Dance Company combined with BeijingDance/LDTX in two parts, Auto Cannibal by Stephanie Lake and Encircling Voyage by MA Bo under the overall title Matrix.  This international cooperative venture received five strongly positive reviews on this blog alone (November 2019), demonstrating the value of the very networking and relationship building that Macdonnell emphasises – while also showing how the arts market provides the opportunity for the director of a small regional performing arts centre to buy in, to great acclaim, new cutting-edge work to expand a local audience’s appreciation of the arts.

In the past few years, the government-initiated and managed APAM now faces the establishment of Australian Performing Arts Connections as “the national peak body representing performing arts presenters and creators in Australia”.  While APAM moves towards conducting a number of markets in the year, each in a different city with a focus (for example on Indigenous work in Darwin), 2020 sees the APAC annual conference combine with Performing Arts Exchange to become an annual APAX. 

Perhaps, implies Macdonnell, APAM will become too spread out and diffuse; less effective for developing artistic relationships; less effective for selling to international buyers.  Perhaps, he writes, APAX—the Australian Performing Arts Exchange—stating that: “98 per cent of people coming to PAX and the conferences this year [2019] said that ‘Market and audience development are a critical part of the performing arts sector’ may in time challenge APAM for its place as the major performing arts gathering for the nation and New Zealand.”

So he concludes (with some reference to the role nowadays of social media and internet communication) “Regular opportunities for meeting and talking and learning are a central factor in maintaining such relationships—call them friendships if you will—and to the extent that such meeting and talking can be structured, goodwill and trust is gained and grown over time and when all is said and done, no amount of technology or wizardry of other kinds has yet found a better way.”


Media Contact: Martin Portus mportus2@tpg.com.au

Currency House:
https://www.currency.com.au/books/platform-papers/platform-papers-62-performing-arts-markets-and-their-conundrums/ 


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: Anthem by Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas and Irine Vela.

Anthem written by Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas and Irine Vela. 

Arts Centre Melbourne and Performing Lines at Sydney Festival 2020, Roslyn Packer Theatre January 15-19, 2020.

Uncensored by Andrew Bovell
Terror by Patricia Cornelius
7-Eleven and Chemist Warehouse, a love story by Melissa Reeves
Brothers and Sisters by Christos Tsiolkas
Resistance by Irine Vela

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 17

Director – Susie Dee; Designer – Marg Horwell; Lighting Designer – Paul Jackson; Composer, Music Director and Sound Designer – Irine Vela; Movement Consultant – Natalie Cursio.

Aboriginal Cultural Dramaturg – Bryan Andy
Creative Producer (2016-March 2019) – Daniel Clarke

Characters from Anthem
https://www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/event-archive/2019/miaf/anthem

 Cast (alphabetical order):
Maude Davey, Reef Ireland, Ruci Kaisila, Thuso Lekwape, Amanda Ma, Maria Mercedes, Tony Nikolakopoulos, Eryn Jean Norvill, Sahil Saluja, Osamah Sami, Eva Seymour, Carly Sheppard

Musicians
Jenny M. Thomas (violin), Dan Witton (cello)

Anthem consists of five scenes with linked characters, bookended by two, unknown to each other, on their way to the airport when a political protest holds up their train.  They are in France.  He is apparently Black African Middle-class returning to Melbourne, of working class origin but now educated and successful in business.  His views are centre right conservative. Brexit for him is about economics and Britain’s trading position. She is  apparently White Middle-class, with centre-left small-L liberal views.  Brexit for her is about racism and anti-immigration attitudes to which she strongly objects – on the way accusing him of racism. 

They discuss – argue about – current issues before fading above the mainstage action, largely on Melbourne suburban trains, with one at a 7-Eleven store and another in a company office (not 7-Eleven nor Chemist Warehouse).  The five scenes run for two hours (with a 20 minute interval), until Ruci Kaisila as an Aboriginal beggar who has observed and sung at significant points (did I hear “We are One, We Are Australian”?  I certainly heard “I still call Australia home”), sings the anthem, "Amazing Grace".

At this point, the two waiting on their train in France reappear, in a flashback, without having reached any clear political consensus, and are pleased that their train begins to move again.

But is Australia’s train going anywhere?

The black man returning from education in France turns out to be the youngest of four siblings, who resent his having left them behind in poverty.  Among the others appears to be a young unmarried/divorced mother with a six-year old son who bangs his head against the doors on a train when he is being taken by court order to stay with his violent father.  His mother is a “rough white Aussie” who believes the country “belongs to us”, but can also understand Greek, when a Greek couple complain to each other about the woman’s behaviour.  Remember when Melbourne was known as the largest Greek city outside Greece itself?

One of her brothers appears to be of “Middle-Eastern appearance” and takes a relatively benign approach.  But the last brother, seemingly white Irish-Anglo Australian, surely would have used his bounding aggro energy violently in the Cronulla riots if he had not been a Melbournian from the outer suburban fringe instead.

Interestingly, since the Sydney Theatre Company will soon be presenting Dario Fo’s “No Pay, No Way”, the thread running through Anthem is about workers not being paid (and trying to use a starting gun to threaten to kill to get the money they are owed); beggars asking for money without success, and even refusing (and being told by others to refuse) to take money which is not genuinely offered; and a middle-class woman left homeless (by a husband taking a new young wife) trying to sponge off her previous Asian cleaning woman who was never properly paid. 

The black son of the family (presumably with diverse parents) offers $30,000 to his siblings, which his sister is inclined to accept until his violent Aussie, Aussie, Aussie brother forces the educated successful black brother out of the proudly poor family who refuse to accept charity.

For the older generation like me, who still remember the Sydney Communist New Theatre production of The Good Soldier Schweik, it’s good to see true agit prop theatre again.  Unfortunately I missed the Melbourne Workers Theatre’s Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? 20 years ago, when these five writers had first been brought together, then under director Julian Meyrick (whose Platform Paper “The Retreat of our National Drama” was reviewed on this blog May 15, 2014).

The style of presentation of Anthem is true expressionist agit prop – that is ‘agitation propaganda’.  Moveable rostra are shifted around to represent being on a train or street or office – no naturalism here.  The musicians play on stage, in amongst the action.  The action and spoken word is upfront – forthright in the extreme.  The lighting is full on and or full off.  The character of the Aboriginal beggar is directly out of the tradition of the Narrator in The Threepenny Opera who sings “Mack the Knife”.

But Anthem is perhaps even more bleak than the ending of The Threepenny Opera, when the Narrator sings (Hugh MacDiarmid translation):

Now we’ve got our happy ending
Everything is on the mend
Yes, the man with lots of money
He can buy a happy end!

There are some men live in darkness
While the rest have light for free
You can spot those in the limelight
Those in darkness you don’t see.

How ironic is it that an Aboriginal sings Amazing Grace as the ethnically (non-Indigenous) mixed Australian family tears down the Australian flag (which still includes the Union Jack – perhaps for not much longer) in a state of political frustration?

What train are we on?  Let alone where is it going?  This is a thinking person’s theatre show which should not be missed (especially by those who need to see it most).

Frank McKone's reviews also can be seen at www.ccc-canberracriticscircle.blogspot.com

2020: The Aspie Hour - Sydney Festival

The Aspie Hour.  Created, written and performed by Sophie Smyth and Ryan Smedley.

Director and Dramaturg – Fiona Scott-Norman
Musical Director and Pianist – Rainer Pollard

Sydney Festival 2020 at Carriageworks, Bay 20  January 14-18, 2020.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 15

What on earth is an Aspie?  If you’re on the spectrum, you may be thinking is this what normal people call a joke, until Sophie explains that it’s a short-cut word for a person who has Asperger’s Syndrome.

Fortunately I have known someone with Asperger’s over many years.  He would probably not think being called an Aspie was funny.  It’s no joke when you don’t understand how to initiate a conversation, say.  Or realise that what someone said was meant to be a joke, or it was an innuendo and actually meant something quite different from what the words said.  My friend’s an expert computer programmer.

Sophie explained, for example, that “come up and have a cup of tea” means “sex”.

The Aspie Hour is a very pleasant entertainment.  Because they each have an obsession with musicals, but not the same sort of musicals, they demonstrate their tendency to concentrate on informative details and a strictly logical approach by performing songs from an enormously wide range of musicals, mainly with their own words.

Ryan prefaces his song and dance routines with proof of his factual knowledge by having members of the audience call out a year date, like 1955, 1984 and three others last night.  He immediately tells us which musical that year was the most popular, or which in his view was the best, even though his choice may not have won awards.  And I am sure that he knew his facts.

His songs tell the story of a visit to New York, the source of more musicals than anywhere else in the world (he claims).  The essence of his song and dance act is about what he had to learn about social contacts in order to travel by himself to achieve his dream – to see a musical each night for 20 nights and meet famous musical performers.  And, I guess from his show, he learnt song and dance skills from his obervations.

Sophie took a different line, focussed on the elements of what makes up a musical, from the intro dance number, through the I want solo to the grand finale, which has nothing much to do with the rest of the plot.  She explained what we needed to know about each element before she sang, perfectly in style, each type of number.

For me, Sophie gets a special award for “Over the Rainbow”: “If little blue birds can fly, fly over the rainbow, why, then oh why, can’t I?”  This was a moment of tender appreciation by us all, through quiet tears for an Aspie’s frustration and at the same time recognition in the strength and quality of her performance that indeed, she can fly over her rainbow.

As they have written, “The purpose of this show is to relate ourselves to the audience, asking ‘have you had an experience like this?  We’re not all that different.”  How true, and how enjoyable.

Sophie Smyth and Ryan Smedley
in The Aspie Hour
Photo supplied

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: I'm a Phoenix, Bitch by Bryony Kimmings

I’m a Phoenix, Bitch.  Conceived, written and performed by Bryony Kimmings (UK).  Sydney Festival 2020, at Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, January 14-17 2020.

Co-commissioned by Battersea Arts Centre, Arts Centre Melbourne, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts and supported by Latitude Festival.  Supported by the British Council and Arts Council England using public funding.  In association with Avalon Management.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 14

Directors – Kirsty Housley and Bryony Kimmings

Art Director – David Curtis-Ring; Projection Designer – Will Duke; Composer – Tom Parkinson; Sound Designer – Lewis Gibson; Lighting Designer – Johanne Jensen; Dramaturgical Support – Nina Steiger; Choreography and Rehearsal Direction – Sarah Blanc; Makeup Design – Guy Common.

“Performing on stage is always a risk (break a leg!), but the greatest risk – to your sanity, if not in failing your audience – is to turn your own life into a public performance, and then perform it yourself.”  In quite recent times I have coined the term “Personal Theatre” for this kind of work.

Two especially powerful pieces were RED by Liz Lea  (reviewed here March 9, 2018), a dance work expressing her pain and determination to keep performing while suffering ever-continuing endometriosis; and Ghenoa Gela’s experience of shock in finding her personal salvation in re-connecting with her traditional culture through dance on her first visit to her mother’s home island Erub in the Torres Strait, after being born and brought up in Rockhampton.  My Urrwai is reviewed here January 21, 2018.

Based on dance with some story-telling, these were demanding and impressive works, though relatively straightforward theatrically.  I’m a Phoenix, Bitch is centred on Bryony Kimmings’ experience of her psychosis arising from the sudden onset in her baby son of ‘Infantile Spasms’, seemingly life threatening: the beginning of epilepsy. 

Her creating this work for performance arises from the principle of cognitive behavioural therapy – that is, learning to objectify frightening mental experiences and recognise reality through the process of telling others.  So I’m a Phoenix, Bitch begins rather as if Bryony is a stand-up comedian setting up a relationship directly with us, her audience, through humour, about sex, marriage and childbirth.

But as her child is in hospital and her husband has moved out, she finds herself left alone in what was meant to be the ideal little family cottage on an isolated hilltop in the country – fearing for her child’s life.  Her experience is expressed on stage in acting and singing, in a complex set design using live and recorded video, a model of the house, a representation of the hill and the flooded stream that prevents her from obtaining help, with sound miked so that her inner voice sounds male threatening her female self, and a surround soundscape creating her emotions in us as we watch her despair.

The real life experience took place over a two year period, which Bryony structured to make this work in 2018 after a highly successful career following a degree in Modern Drama from Brunel University in 2003, creating multi-platform art works.
[  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryony_Kimmings  ]

In the title she becomes a phoenix in the sense that she learns that even the worst that can happen is just bad luck, and that we must not feel guilty for what, in reality, we cannot control.  As she finally drives away from the house – now rented by another family and no longer haunting Bryony – she tells us 

“And I watched the cottage disappear out of sight in my rear-view mirror.  And for a moment I felt like I was in a film.  But then I stopped doing that.  Because I wasn’t.  This was real fucking life.”

Black out.
And to tremendous applause and a great sense of relief, Bryony takes a bow and takes us back to something like the comedian she had appeared to be at first.  But we now know, “it’s time to love the new Bryony now.  She has sharper edges, she laughs a little less, she is scarred.  But she is who you will need in the next flood.”

I’m a Phoenix, Bitch is an important work of art because it is a story of real experience which becomes a meaningful metaphor for us each to interpret in our own lives.  Though more complex in the form of its expression, this is what Bryony Kimmings’ work has in common with those other works of “Personal Theatre” by Ghenoa Gela and Liz Lea.  They take the risk which is theatre; they succeed through genuine art.

And I note that these works are by women.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan, performed by Steve Rodgers

Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan, with original performer and co-writer Jonny Donahue.  Belvoir, Sydney, January 11-26 2020.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 12

Director – Kate Champion; Set and Costume Designer – Isabel Hudson; Lighting Designer – Amelia Lever-Davidson; Sound Designer – Steve Francis


Performed by Steve Rodgers (Co-Director)

The ethics of reviewing require the disclosure of potential bias.  The travel writer reveals the company that paid for their travel and accommodation at the holiday destination.  In my case, I have reviewed Steve Rodgers’s work as writer, director or performer a number of times (on this blog) with the note that he was once a student of mine.

The standing ovation he received last night at Belvoir for his solo performance as Narrator, and as co-director with Kate Champion, of Every Brilliant Thing requires me to explain in more detail why I was affected by the nature of this play, and by Steve Rodger’s interpretation of it, in a particular way, the same but different from other audience members.

I went to see the play cold.  That is, I had not been aware of its performance history, including the nomination of Jonny Donahue for several awards following his five months’ showing off-Broadway, also screened as an HBO World of Wonder Special.  My travel plans last year meant I missed the opportunity to see Kate Mulvaney’s performance; nor was I aware that Kate Champion and Steve Rodgers were the directors at that time.  I had not been aware either, of Joyce Morgan’s review in the Sydney Morning Herald (March 17, 2019), nor of any other reviews or commentary.  I had not known that a few clicks into Youtube would show me different stage designs, different actors in the Narrator role on stage and in rehearsal; even interviews with the author and company directors.

Steve Rodgers explaining her task to audience member,
Every Brilliant Thing, January 11 2020
Photo: Brett Boardman

I knew nothing, except that Belvoir advertised this return season, with a smiling photo of Steve Rodgers, as “BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!” – and not even did I know anything about the content of the play, imagining it to have some reference, perhaps, to My Brilliant Career! 

So I was surprised to be greeted warmly, with a huge hug, by one-time student Steve on the stairs to Belvoir Upstairs, who gave me and my wife a slip of paper numbered 717.  “When you hear me say seven hundred and seventeen, you must read out loud what it says,” he told us.  It read “Nina Simones Voice” (without the apostrophe, the old teacher in me noticed).

“I am reviewing,” I told him.  “Well, then I’d better be good!” he replied, as he moved on and we entered the auditorium to find our seats, kindly provided by Kabuku Public Relations at the usual Row E 25/26.  But instead of the usual centrally-situated view of the acting space taking up the corner of the old tomato sauce factory floor, on the far side was a complete reproduction of the seating on our side.  Theatre completely in-the-round – as I had seen at Belvoir only once before, for Life of Galileo last year (reviewed here August 10, 2019).

Steve Rodgers, a quiet moment in role
Every Brilliant Thing, January 11 2020
Photo: Brett Boardman

 Then what happened stunned me.  I watched my student Steve doing what I had taught him to do in the Drama Room at Hawker College back in 1987.  Suddenly my reviewer’s mortar board hat was perched precariously on my drama teacher’s skin, now even more bald, but still firmly attached.  To review is to write about drama; to teach and learn drama is to simply “Do It” – as one educational drama professional association had named their journal in the 1970s.

Over their two-year course in Years 11/12, I had not run theatre skills training classes, not academic literary or theatre history studies, or even staging theatre productions as my central approach.  Taking up from English educational drama traditions for younger students, particularly of Dorothy Heathcote and Brian Way, and combining those with my experiences, particularly in Sydney with Margaret Barr and Richard Wherrett and strongly influenced by Rex Cramphorn, I focussed my teaching on participation and learning leadership through whole group improvisation.

Classes contained students, mixing those in Year 11 and Year 12, at anywhere from Unit 1 to Unit 6 level of experience.  The basic method was for me, or for a student, or for a small group, to provide a point of stimulation to begin a “workshop”.  This could be as simple as having a person stand in a spotlight.  Others might respond by asking that person a question.  Bit by bit as they answer, that person and everyone in the class find themselves creating roles which determine action, and a drama results.

Among my favourites was one which turned out to be an upperclass garden party, in which I became the silent garden gnome, thoroughly soaked when someone turned the watering system on as a lark, and finally being “accidentally” knocked over.  I was able surruptitiously to escape by unobtrusively rolling into the non-acting space behind the drama room’s surrounding black curtains.

The principal stimulating device in Belvoir’s Every Brilliant Thing was more sophisticated but still very simple: Steve Rodgers (in my terms as last night’s workshop leader) meeting and greeting participants on the stairway, giving some of them mysterious cards with numbers and words to say, coming in with everyone, explaining their tasks to some people with cards – and then, after walking around a little in the central acting space, just quietly standing still (without even a spotlight), looking thoughtful, perhaps a bit worried, until everyone has realised he is there and gone quiet.

Steve learned to do this in Year 12, became a leader in whole-group improvisations which could often become intense dramas (and played a very humorous God Hephaistos in a student written, directed and managed production), before attending my Audition Training extra-curricular class and attaining a place as today’s program records at Theatre Nepean at Western Sydney University.

And then what was so brilliant for me, perhaps even more than for the upstanding, cheering audience at the end of the one millionth Every Brilliant Thing, was how wonderfully well Steve Rodgers melded the written script with his selection of audience members, shifting so easily in and out of his role as the son of a woman who killed herself “in a masculine way” and his role as improvisation workshop leader.

The result is, as Duncan Macmillan clearly hoped for his play, an educational drama of the very best quality.  [  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEbv1bGZhX0  ]  

The humbling thing for me was to see a student so overwhelmingly surpass his teacher in such a magnificent performance – my personal millionth and one Brilliant Thing.

Audience member in role as "Sam" proposing marriage
to Steve Rodgers in role as Narrator
Every Brilliant Thing, January 11 2020
Photo: Brett Boardman

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: The Little Mermaid - Ickle Pickle Productions

The Little Mermaid.  Music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman and Glenn Slater, book by Doug Wright, based on the Hans Christian Andersen story and the Disney film produced by Howard Ashman and John Musker and written by John Musker and Ron Clements.

Ickle Pickle Productions, produced by Justin Watson.  Belconnen Community Theatre, January 10-25, 2020.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 10

Director – Jordan Best; Musical Director – Adam Bluhm; Choreographer – Jodi Hammond.

Costume Designer – Fiona Leach; Makeup Design – Eryn Marshall; Set Designer – Ian Croker; Lighting – Sidestage Productions; Music Sequencing – Smilin’ James Aspland



When you go to see The Little Mermaid, make sure you pack your sense of humour.  Jordan Best and her team’s design and direction have set the tone exactly right.  Everyone on stage – and I think there were 40! – understood and thoroughly enjoyed the fun side of such an unlikely seaside story.  Don’t miss, for example, the array of complex characters among the wonderfully sweet-singing but terribly bitchy Mersisters.

Turning a cartoon, essentially made for very young children – almost at Sesame Street age level – into a stage show suited for 10-year-olds and up, is a risky venture.  As a movie, the close-ups of the character’s faces – especially, say, of the way Ariel’s eyes can take over the whole screen – or the way the moving image of life under the sea can be fascinating to watch just for its colour and variety, Disney’s The Little Mermaid is an attractive fairy-story fantasy.  We get the point of the story, but it presents a ‘lite’ version.

Ickle Pickle give us the grown-up version in which the Ariel’s teenage need to escape her royal father’s assumption – that he must control her life to protect his daughter – becomes a serious theme, even if it means she must accept the risks of becoming her own woman.  Emily Pogson successfully makes Ariel’s constricted life as a princess believable.  The risk for Jordan Best here is that the movie’s light quality (which is what makes it such a longstanding favourite) could become too dark and heavy.  (I almost began to think, when Samuel Dietz’s character Grimsby announces at the end “After all, I do believe in royalty”, of Prince Harry and his love for Meghan.)

The great success of Best’s directing is to find the right spot, where the characters are played with a clear sense of not taking themselves too seriously – in fact the whole production in its stage design, lighting effects, humorous choreography, costuming and makeup, and often arch singing, play with the truth that theatre is just an illusion.

And to bring this all together on such a small stage with such a large group of so many young performers (but not forgetting the adults, Michael Jordan playing King Triton and especially Janie Lawson playing Ursula as almost a spoof of Shakespeare's Oberon and Titania) is a logistical and artistic achievement in its own right.

Enjoy!


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2019: The Divine Miss Bette Christmas Special - Catherine Alcorn

The Divine Miss Bette Christmas Special.  A TenaciousC and Neil Gooding Productions presentation at The Q / Bicentennial Hall, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, December 18 – 21 (Saturday 21 December 2019 – 8.00pm  Show Only  Tickets Available – Dinner & Show Tickets Sold Out.)

Performed by Catherine Alcorn
With Clare Ellen O'Connor and Kirby Burgess
And Michael Tyack (Piano), Geoff Green (Drums) Tommy Novak and Crick Boue (guitars)

Reviewed by Frank McKone
December 18



“I insist, that all my jokes be told letter perfect.”  So said Bette Midler, immediately after her joke about her boyfriend Ernie’s ‘woman as sex object’ comments.  “Get off my back!” she told him, to ecstatic cheers from a full house.

That was in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1976, and the joke still worked for Catherine Alcorn in Queanbeyan, New South Wales, in 2019.  Wow!

Here’s how her publicity describes The Divine Miss Bette Christmas Special:

“Catherine Alcorn’s fabulous homage to Bette Midler, swings back to town for a Christmas Special. Whilst Alcorn has been tottering in Bette’s shoes for a while now, her show has been revamped and is bigger, better and even more impressive as she oozes charm and charisma channelling her idol.

“With lots of Miss Midler’s well known songs and well-presented patter, Catherine Alcorn’s ‘The Divine Miss Bette’ is a must see performance. Her show is guaranteed to warm the coldest of Christmas Nuts and her live band promise to Jingle Your Bells. So polish off your Ornamental Balls folks and make Christmas 2019 one to remember.

“Audience Advice: Suitable for ages 15+, some adult themes.”

Appreciating Alcorn’s representation of Midler becomes a complicated story.  I was never a great fan of Bette Midler as a movie actor, but her show on stage was clearly a different kettle of fish.  In Australian terms, her stage character paralleled actors like Gary McDonald playing Norman Gunston, who conducted completely absurd interviews with famous people, such as Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on the steps of Parliament House at the time of his dismissal by the Governor-General in 1975.

In her show Live at Last, Midler appears to play herself in a madcap but often telling satire of a star performer.  She doesn’t even use a separate name for the role.  The Norman Gunston story is relevant here, because even with a separate name for his character, Gary McDonald found himself in psychological difficulties as Norman became more ‘real’ than Gary.

Now we see Catherine Alcorn “channelling her idol” – apparently playing herself, including relating directly to people in the audience, while actually playing Bette Midler playing a fictional character apparently as herself.

The fascinating thing about Alcorn’s performance, as I saw it, was that she found she needed to work a bit harder than she seemed to expect at the beginning to ‘warm up’ the Queanbeyan audience (who also were clearly mainly idolising Bette Midler).  But she managed even before interval to make us feel as if she had become Midler – even though the Midler she became was a kind of satirical spoof of a performing star.

Her success, as it had been for Midler in Cleveland, was possible because ‘my girls’, Clare Ellen O'Connor and Kirby Burgess, could sing, dance and spoof to match Alcorn’s acting quality.  Midler had “The Staggering Harlettes” and also her band “Betsy and the Blowboys”; Alcorn also had a terrific band, so in tune with her even when she was improvising and responding to audience requests for songs – through two encores, ending (of course, without the need for anyone to ask) with The Rose.  So special applause from me for the women, and for Michael Tyack, Geoff Green, Tommy Novak and Crick Boue.

Is Catherine Alcorn “bigger, better and even more impressive as she oozes charm and charisma channelling her idol”?  I can’t judge since I haven’t seen her other versions of The Divine Miss Bette, but the Christmas Special certainly went down very well on Thursday – and I expect even better with the meal and champagne on Saturday night.

Yet as the advertising shows, Alcorn is not quite the real Midler.  This show certainly catches much of the raunchiness which made Midler a new woman on stage in the 70s, but Alcorn is closer to our more modern stand-up comedy performer – but without the harder edge of almost cynicism that Midler revealed in her satirical characterisation. 

Watching Judith Lucy interview Amanda McKenzie, CEO of the Climate Council, on Charlie Pickering’s The Yearly this week (ABC Wednesday December 17) showed me a modern descendant of the real Divine Miss M. 

But, after all, it is Christmas – so enjoy.

Go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCcJoiEBw-w for the Bette Midler show Live at Last.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2019: Cirque Stratosphere by Neil Dorward

Sal the Clown
Photo: Mark Turner

The Set Design
Photo: Frank McKone

Cirque Stratosphere.  Produced, choreographed and directed by Neil Dorward, Cirque du Soleil Entertainment. The Works Entertainment (Co producers Simon Painter and Tim Lawson) at Canberra Theatre Centre, December 11-21, 2019.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
December 11


The world of circus has changed dramatically since I first saw Coco the Clown (Michael Polakovs), baby elephants, bareback horse-riding and Pinito del Oro doing her headstands on a trapeze at Harringay Arena, London, around 1950.  Shows then were all about and only about the skills of the performers, our excitement at what they could do – and our fear that they might fail, with disastrous consequences (which sometimes happened, even to a lion-tamer as I recall).

Circus was simple then.

Cirque du Soleil was started in Montreal, Canada, by Guy Laliberté in 1984, but in Australia, Circus Oz had already been underway since 1978, an amalgamation of Soapbox Circus (Melbourne) and the New Circus (Adelaide). Social commentary began to turn circus into a new theatre genre.  “They wanted it to be funny, irreverent and spectacular, a celebration of the group as a bunch of multi-skilled individual men and women, rather than a hierarchy of stars.” And without animals to steal the scene.

Of course, I liked Circus Oz from the beginning – remember Roger, flying off the trapeze and being flattened against the wall; and women being caught up in washing machine action.  As time went along, Oz shows took on themes which were successfully dramatised, such as consumerism in But Wait…There’s More (reviewed here September 2015); and sometimes less effectively but still on the same kind of song sheet, such as last year’s Model Citizens attempt to unpack the “myths of Modern Australia”.

On the international scene (where Circus Oz plays its part magnificently), Cirque du Soleil was impressive in a different way from its beginning.  Also without animals, their shows became more choreographed movement, reminding me of the developments in modern abstract dance.  Where Circus Oz in, say, From the Ground Up (October 2012) has something like a story-line, Cirque du Soleil left you to interpret the flow of action in your own way. 

Until the rise of James Thieree, a descendant of Charlie Chaplin, with The June Bug Symphony (January 2003) and Bright Abyss (January 2006).  The latter is like a dance composition about human relationships, with imagery “often very funny to watch as well as exciting, sometimes frightening, sometimes touchingly sad” (to quote my review).

Variations of approaches are now common – see Urban by Circolombia (January 2013) and shows by Strut and Fret like Blanc de Blanc (April 2018).

So where does Cirque Stratosphere stand in this new tradition of ‘contemporary’ circus?  Now that Neil Dorward owns Cirque du Soleil and The Works Entertainment – the very successful management production team from Brisbane?

I have reviewed this director’s work before – The Dark Side of Cirque Le Noir – in May 2015.  “Pure seductive entertainment” was my description – “Just relax and ooh and aah as appropriate.”  But Cirque Stratosphere at least has a theme – going to the moon, as in 1969.

Felice Aguilar
Photo: Mark Turner

Oleg Spigin
Photo: Mark Turner

Evgenii Viktorovich and Natalia Viktorovich
Photo: Mark Turner

As in all circus, each of the performers is a specialist:  the clown TapeFace acts as host, so there is no old-fashioned ringmaster; the three Vanin Brothers do gymnastics on the Russian Bar; the balancing act called Hand to Hand by Dmitry Makrushin and Oleg Bespalov included an astounding standing somersault from the support man’s shoulders back to landing on those shoulders; Anne Lewandowska performed graceful acrobatic dance on a Sphere Wheel lit all round by LED lights.

The duo roller-skaters, Evgenii Viktorovich and Natalia Viktorovna, spun on a tiny circular raised platform for an extended display which I watched heart-in-mouth – if they fumbled or lost grip, Natalia would have been flung into space, facing serious injury.  Evgenii had to be stock still spinning in the centre, if you see what I mean.

Felice Aguilar was another Spinning Artist, less likely to come to grief.  While Pole Artist Polina Volchek seemed to be able to stick to her pole at very considerable heights with very little points of contact – and slide in free-fall to stop just before hitting the ground.  And Antonio Leyva Campos was equally impressive and scary on the Bungee Straps.  As were Dmitri Feliksovich, Denis and Nikolai Alexandrovich who bounced each other to horrifying heights on a specially engineered teeterboard; and Oleg Spigin ‘defying gravity’ balancing on his head on his trapeze (like Pinito del Oro!)

Finally it was the Hoop Diving Nicolas-Yang Wang and Shenpeng Nie that most engaged the audience with a great cheer when the somersault through the highest hoop at last succeeded.  This was the circus of old, for me.

Yet as ‘contemporary’ circus, although the costumes clearly represented astronauts in space, so that the idea of commemorating the first moon landing was obvious, with the story told in an American accented voice over, there was little sense of relationship between what was performed in each act and what the story was about.  What did, for example, the duo roller skaters’ spinning have to say about space travel?

In the end, in retrospect, I wondered if Neil Dorward had some conception of space being represented by the lifting and lowering of the main polished and gleaming scaffolding which was the main set design, and the action taking place in three-dimensional space.  Did he intend to have us see the circus, with its more romantic title ‘cirque’, as more meaningful than fantastic gymnastic action?

I came up with only this: that space is the universe of circus performance.  But this was surely far too arty and esoteric for a show which more or less continuously blasted us with tremendously high-volume music (from 2001 The Space Odyssey among many other film scores, for example) and often blinded us with massive lights from the cleverly designed central frame – which included the lights and sound operator, acting like an extreme night-club DJ, whose name I have not been able to discover (since the show did not offer patrons a program).

The nicest part of the show was the audience participation by Sal the clown – but there wasn’t much to do with landing on the moon in that.

So – very much a mixed night for me in the Stratosphere.  A bit too much of the ‘hierarchy of stars’ and not enough of a ‘symphony of the spheres’.

Photo: Mark Turner

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2019: How Good Is 2019! - Shortis & Simpson

John Shortis and Moya Simpson

How Good Is 2019!  Shortis & Simpson, at Smith’s Alternative, Canberra, December 6 and 8, 2019.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
December 6

Political satire comes in many different guises – all essential to our social wellbeing – from Sydney Theatre Company’s annual mainstage The Wharf Revue (this year’s is reviewed on this blog, November 12), to daily newspaper cartoons across the country, standup comedians popping up anywhere and everywhere, through to perhaps the only small-scale dedicated regional outfit – John Shortis and Moya Simpson – working continually for more than 20 years.

To confirm my credentials (if you are using Windows 10 version 1903 you know what I mean), here’s the record of my first review of Shortis & Simpson [published in The Canberra Times]:

“Shortis & Curlies - John Shortis, Moya Simpson, Andrew Bissett at The School of Arts Cafe, 108 Monaro Street, Queanbeyan.  Season: Thursdays to Saturdays till June 29, 1996.
“If you are a Liberal politician confident that cutting government spending is the only way to go; or a Labour politician feeling sorry for yourself after 100 days of the new regime; or a veterinary surgeon operating out of Woden Valley; or someone who thinks that a national gun register is not a good idea; or Princess Diana; or Jeff Kennett; or even a frozen embryo who hopes to inherit your dead father's estate: then you shouldn't see this show because you probably won't laugh.”

This year you can learn to do traditional village [Scott] Morrison Dancing; sing along with Pauline Hanson declaring she will never have anything to do with the NRMA – for our US readers, that’s the National Roads and Motorists Association, not the National Rifle Association; feel the excitement of a school student on an excursion to Parliament House Question Time; learn the essence of democracy from the Dalai Lama who explained the importance of being a mosquito; and, among the other eighteen equally zany songs, perhaps be most stunned – while in fits of uncontrollable laughter – to hear the consequences of Donald Trump’s tweet and meet with the environmentalist Prince of Whales [The Donald’s spelling unadulterated].

I have had the privilege of attending to Shortis & Simpson over all these years (I just accidentally wrote ‘tears’ – of laughter), but now face the horrifying prospect that they may not last forever.  Next year will see the last of The Wharf Revue: Good Night and Good Luck (at the Canberra Theatre Playhouse in September 2020).  The trio of Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott presented their first show (The End of The Wharf As We Know It) in 2000: they’re four years younger than Shortis & Simpson!

So it’s a worry.  We need to laugh politically at least once a year.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2019: Waiting in the Wings by Noël Coward

Waiting in the Wings by Noël Coward.  Canberra REP and The Q, directed by Stephen Pike.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre November 20–23 2019; at Canberra REP, Naoné Carrel Auditorium, Theatre 3 November 27–December 7 2019.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
December 5

Director – Stephen Pike; Costume Design – Anna Senior; Lighting Design – Nathan Sciberras; Sound Design – Neville Pye; Properties – Brenton Warren

Photo: Foyer Photographs

Set designed by Andrew Kay
“The Wings”
a charitable retirement home for actresses

Director Stephen Pike notes “The [1960] play never had any resounding success for Coward, unlike many of his earlier scripts, however I have found through our rehearsal period the text held many surprises.”

Indeed.  These surprises are the reason for seeing the show.  Among many, the two I would like to mention specifically are Joan White’s performance of Sarita Myrtle, whose dementia is funny, sad and truthful; and Ros Engledow as Lotta Bainbridge, the very opposite.  She is self-aware and consistently rational, and Ros’ performance takes the play to its most telling point in the final scene when her son unexpectedly visits with a plan to take her out of “The Wings”.

Though the London critics of the original production “had neither the wit nor the generosity to pay sufficient tribute to the acting”, according to Coward, I’m guessing that he was expected to be more ‘sparkling’ in his fiftieth play.  I can see that this script doesn’t compare in this sense with, say, Private Lives (reviewed on this blog at Belvoir, Sydney, 2 October 2012).

The first two scenes come over as a bit too ordinary, naturalistic in style, with what sounds like a not very promising ‘sparkling’ plot about a committee that won’t spend money on making the verandah into a ‘solarium’ to capture the weak English sunshine.  No need for ‘mad Englishmen’ going ‘out in the midday sun’ here.

Then, suddenly, after an interval for a retirees’ toilet break and another glass of bubbly, Sarita Myrtle, quoting lines from all sorts of roles she may have had or imagined she had since 1904, out-sparkles the presumed other central dramatic through-line – why will May Davenport (in a strong performance by Liz Bradley) not talk to Lotta Bainbridge?

Sarita goes on to win the dramatic conflict by nearly burning the house down and having to be taken away, imagining she is leaving this ‘hotel’ for another ‘tour’, for a place where the doctor says she will be ‘treated kindly’.

Nowadays, let alone in 1960, the treatment of people with dementia is an issue of great public importance.  And I have to say I wonder with some trepidation about my own future as I approach octagenarian status, remembering my own mother, like Sarita, similarly mis-perceiving the real world for some eight years until her fortunately peaceful death at 92.  The quality of Joan White’s performance allowed me to laugh with Sarita, not at her, and I thank her for that.

The same goes for Ros Engledow. Noël Coward wrote “I wrote Waiting in the Wings with loving care and absolute belief in its characters. I consider that the reconciliation between "Lotta" and "May" in Act Two Scene Three, and the meeting of Lotta and her son in Act Three Scene Two, are two of the best scenes I have ever written. I consider that the play as a whole contains, beneath the froth of some of its lighter moments, the basic truth that old age needn't be nearly so dreary and sad as it is supposed to be, provided you greet it with humour and live it with courage.”

No matter what the critics thought in London in 1960, Ros Engledow and Liz Bradley absolutely got their reconciliation right; and Ros again with Iain Murray was even stronger in that final scene.  Despite what I have to see as a very ‘bitty’ structure of Coward’s script, her Lotta developed subtly, and truthfully, from her justifiably hesitant arrival at “The Wings” to her confident new appreciation of the importance to her of a real family rather than that offered by her son.

Maybe the thought of a woman making such an independent decision was still too much to accept in 1960, even by critics who were well aware of other playwrights, like George Bernard Shaw – whose Mrs Warren’s Profession showed such a woman way back in 1894.  Maybe we were only supposed to laugh at Noël Coward, not to take him seriously as we have, say, Henrik Ibsen’s Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House since 1879.

So, thanks to Stephen Pike, artistic director of The Q and director here for Canberra REP, for this surprise, and all the women (and men) in this production of Waiting in the Wings.  I now have a new appreciation of Noël Coward and hope to continue to greet old age “with humour and live it with courage.”

The Cast:

Residents at “The Wings”:

Bonita Belgrave – Lis de Totth                Cora Clarke – Adele Lewin
Maude Melrose – Penny Hunt                 May Davenport – Liz Bradley
Almina Clare – Micki Beckett                 Estelle Craven – Alice Ferguson
Dierdre O’Malley – Liz St Clair Long    Lotta Bainbridge – Ros Engledow
Sarita Myrtle – Joan White                     Topsy Baskerville – Golda Bergdicks

The Others:

Perry Lascoe – Peter Holland                  Sylvia Archibald – Nikki-Lynne Hunter
Osgood Meeker – Dick Goldberg            Dora – Rina Onorato
Doreen – Rina Onorato                           Zelda Fenwick – Antonia Kitzel
Dr Jevons – Iain Murray                         Alan Bennet – Iain Murray



© Frank McKone, Canberra