Family Matters by Dave Christner. Phoenix Players: Director Margaret Forster. Supported by the International Year of Older Persons. Belconnen Community Centre 8pm September 24, 25, 30 and October 1, 2; 2pm September 25, 26 and October 2, 1999. Seniors Card concession $9.
America's minor playwrights produce a continuing stream of light comedies with sincere themes, and this one will have older persons (I'm nearly one myself) rooting for our rights - to independent lives, freedom from rules laid down by our children, freedom from society's ageist assumptions.
Margaret Forster has a clear conception of the directing style this play needs, adjusting the references to politics and places to suit Australia and underplaying the characters to suit our sensibilities. On opening night this meant that pacing was a little slow, but there were some effective comic highlights such as the stylised statements of despair from Abby and her husband Dan about their respective mothers, Claudia and Sarah, and the mothers' drunken homecoming at 3am - to the announcement from their middle-aged children that they are "grounded". Janine O'Dwyer, Paul Mullins, Margery Ehnhuus and Fay Butcher formed an effective central ensemble who will surely spark as the season warms up.
An interesting element of the play is the weight given to the women, particularly widows needing to recreate themselves as separate individuals after conventional marriages - and the learning required by the middle-aged Dan in discovering in his mother's childhood experiences the cause of his need to escape her cloying attention and his limitations in loving his wife. Though the play is not well enough written to cope thoroughly with such deep matters, it certainly touched the first-night audience visibly if briefly.
Unfortunately the cameo suitor roles, played by Graham Bauerle, John Alsford and John McKinlay, are not well developed in the script but were adequately delineated to make the play work.
"Theatre is for everyone, young and old" writes Phoenix President Richard Niven, and this production lives up to the Players' ambition very well after many shows which have given young people enjoyment and opportunities to perform. Phoenix, now 10 years old, has settled nicely into its community theatre niche - look for The Wizard of Oz and Half a Sixpence in January and May 2000.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
Saturday, 25 September 1999
Saturday, 21 August 1999
1999: Shakespeare Globe Centre Australia
Shakespeare Globe Centre Australia Youth Festival, ACT Final. Murranji Theatre, Hawker College, Friday August 20, 1999. ACT and North Side Coordinator, Stephen Brown (Hawker College); South Side Coordinator, Helen Parker (CCEGGS).
The goodwill of an estimated 50-60 teachers who voluntarily support this Festival representing government and non-government secondary schools has once again produced an excellent standard in the ACT finals. This year students from all the finalists - Telopea Park School, Marist College, St Clare's College, and Merici College - received commendations from judges Maureen Bettle (University of Canberra), Tina van Raay (Chief Minister's Office - Community Liaison) and myself - for the high quality of their work.
Awards went to Telopea Park for music composed for Much Ado About Nothing and duologues from Henry V; and to St Clare's College for costume designs for Macbeth. Commended scene and duologue presentations from Marist, Merici and St Clare's from As You Like It and Twelfth Night kept the audience laughing as they have for 400 years, while St Clare's movement/dance group showed us the Macbeth story from the witches' perspective as they take control of human ambitions and as a struggle between elemental positives and negatives after Macbeth's death.
Four special personal awards are given, not necessarily chosen only from award winning presentations but rather for individuals who the judges believe are ready for a taste of professional training. These young people, in company with those selected in the other states, go on to attend a week of intensive work with theatre professionals, here in Canberra, leading to two performances on October 1 and 2 at Theatre 3. One of these performers will be selected as Young Shakespearean Artist of the Year, and will visit and study at Stratford-upon-Avon and The Globe Theatre in London.
Composer Tessa Keenan, designer Sarah la Brooy, and actors Caroline Pryor and Leah Kimball were the chosen four, though the judges had a difficult task distinguishing among the best 6 or 7.
Difficulties with administering the Festival and maintaining corporate sponsorships will not make the Shakespeare Globe Centre's task any easier in the future, but standards are rising if this year's performances are any guide.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
The goodwill of an estimated 50-60 teachers who voluntarily support this Festival representing government and non-government secondary schools has once again produced an excellent standard in the ACT finals. This year students from all the finalists - Telopea Park School, Marist College, St Clare's College, and Merici College - received commendations from judges Maureen Bettle (University of Canberra), Tina van Raay (Chief Minister's Office - Community Liaison) and myself - for the high quality of their work.
Awards went to Telopea Park for music composed for Much Ado About Nothing and duologues from Henry V; and to St Clare's College for costume designs for Macbeth. Commended scene and duologue presentations from Marist, Merici and St Clare's from As You Like It and Twelfth Night kept the audience laughing as they have for 400 years, while St Clare's movement/dance group showed us the Macbeth story from the witches' perspective as they take control of human ambitions and as a struggle between elemental positives and negatives after Macbeth's death.
Four special personal awards are given, not necessarily chosen only from award winning presentations but rather for individuals who the judges believe are ready for a taste of professional training. These young people, in company with those selected in the other states, go on to attend a week of intensive work with theatre professionals, here in Canberra, leading to two performances on October 1 and 2 at Theatre 3. One of these performers will be selected as Young Shakespearean Artist of the Year, and will visit and study at Stratford-upon-Avon and The Globe Theatre in London.
Composer Tessa Keenan, designer Sarah la Brooy, and actors Caroline Pryor and Leah Kimball were the chosen four, though the judges had a difficult task distinguishing among the best 6 or 7.
Difficulties with administering the Festival and maintaining corporate sponsorships will not make the Shakespeare Globe Centre's task any easier in the future, but standards are rising if this year's performances are any guide.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 13 August 1999
1999: Six Actors in a Room by Lachlan Abrahams, Rohini Sharma, Estelle Muspratt
Six Actors in a Room. Written by Lachlan Abrahams, Rohini Sharma, Estelle Muspratt. The Acting Company directed by Estelle Muspratt. Currong Theatre Wed - Sat until August 2, 1999. 8pm.
Jean-Louis Barrault famously said "Theatre is Illusion". Estelle Muspratt et al say "Theatre is Bullshit". Though one experienced director on opening night laughed throughout this satire - in company with the many other doyens of theatre present - she was overheard expressing heartfelt nervousness about how she might be greeted in her next rehearsal. Could she even say "Please find your own space" without a howl of merriment!
An admitted first draft, Six Actors shows promise. It is certainly very funny, except for the finale on video which would have been better done live. It is a confident piece written by Canberra's theatrical young turks - and theatre in our town will only mature through such satirical self-examination. It is very well acted by the whole ensemble, though I think I should give special mention to Tim Wood's Earnest Mutton, born and bred in Albury and afraid his father will send him back - maybe to (pause) Wodonga. When Earnest takes control, sparks really fly.
But there's lots more to do with this script. It's been written and workshopped by a committee, and the humps show. The references to Pirandello, Brecht, Stanislawski, Bell Shakespeare, and rehearsal techniques like finding the lion within yourself, need development - satirical, of course - to a point where the absurdity of theatrical hypocrisy turns to face us with the stark quality of the child's death in Six Characters in Search of an Author, or the horror of Mother Courage's final song.
The fictional Barely Coping Theatre Company is forced to work without funding, just like the real Acting Company (though Muspratt's residency at The Currong and the support especially of The Jigsaw Company must not be forgotten). Exposing the black quality of this situation - of the ridiculous position in which professional theatre, and the arts in general, are left dangling on jangled nerve strings by socially immature governments - is what needs fuller development in this script. Then, ironically, the Australia Council might come to the party and we can all celebrate.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
Jean-Louis Barrault famously said "Theatre is Illusion". Estelle Muspratt et al say "Theatre is Bullshit". Though one experienced director on opening night laughed throughout this satire - in company with the many other doyens of theatre present - she was overheard expressing heartfelt nervousness about how she might be greeted in her next rehearsal. Could she even say "Please find your own space" without a howl of merriment!
An admitted first draft, Six Actors shows promise. It is certainly very funny, except for the finale on video which would have been better done live. It is a confident piece written by Canberra's theatrical young turks - and theatre in our town will only mature through such satirical self-examination. It is very well acted by the whole ensemble, though I think I should give special mention to Tim Wood's Earnest Mutton, born and bred in Albury and afraid his father will send him back - maybe to (pause) Wodonga. When Earnest takes control, sparks really fly.
But there's lots more to do with this script. It's been written and workshopped by a committee, and the humps show. The references to Pirandello, Brecht, Stanislawski, Bell Shakespeare, and rehearsal techniques like finding the lion within yourself, need development - satirical, of course - to a point where the absurdity of theatrical hypocrisy turns to face us with the stark quality of the child's death in Six Characters in Search of an Author, or the horror of Mother Courage's final song.
The fictional Barely Coping Theatre Company is forced to work without funding, just like the real Acting Company (though Muspratt's residency at The Currong and the support especially of The Jigsaw Company must not be forgotten). Exposing the black quality of this situation - of the ridiculous position in which professional theatre, and the arts in general, are left dangling on jangled nerve strings by socially immature governments - is what needs fuller development in this script. Then, ironically, the Australia Council might come to the party and we can all celebrate.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 21 March 1999
1999: Rhythms of Mother Earth - Classical Indian and Contemporary Dance
Rhythms of Mother Earth - Classical Indian and Contemporary Dance presented by the Australian Tamil Foundation Canberra for Canberra National Multicultural Festival. ANU Arts Centre March 20, 1999.
The ATFC has done multiculturalism, the Indian community and the broader Australian community a valuable service in asking three companies to make dances in response to the theme Rhythms of Mother Earth. A new blending of classical Indian and contemporary styles was presented, as migrants from India and SE Asia come to terms with the Australian landscape while descendants of European migrants discover the power of the Indian dance language.
Bharatam Dance Company (Melbourne) presented a strongly focussed Bhumanjali - Homage to Mother Earth, choreographed and performed by Thamilvanan Veshnu under the direction of Dr Chandrabhanu, who after 25 years has clearly established a major inspirational role. This work shows why. Beginning in classical style to represent the Earth as Goddess, and progressing through stages towards an international "modern" style, representing Earth as Mystery and finally as Destruction, the Hindu understanding of the universe is brought to bear on present-day reality. The mystery and beauty of Australia, evoked in a rhythmic soundscape of bird calls, does not survive in this tragic view.
Tara Rajkumar, researcher and teacher at Monash University - instrumental in reviving the softer Mohinattam classical dance style and popularising the more theatrical form of Kathakali - presented Natya Sudha Dance Company performers Nithya Gopu (as Kali, Mother of the Universe), Prathayana Chandrakumar (an excellent Kathakali drama of Bhima in the Forest) and Tatayana Pozar-Burgar with Nithya Gopu (a contemporary style view of woman as Prakrithi - cosmic energy that is infinite, positive and feminine). For me the classical forms were much more successful than the modern from this company.
From Sydney, Lingalayam Dance Company Director Anandavalli opened the evening with an impressive secular invocation to Bhumadevi - Mother Earth. Earth, Water, Fire and Wind were brought together in a Space full of vibrant energy.
Inspired by Anandavalli, Canberrans Jenny White presented her Orbital Fracture and Niki Shepherd her Resounding Rhythms. Both smoothly blended classical and modern forms: White's piece a clear and pure abstraction on the moment of decisive silence; Shepherd's solo a dramatic mix of Greek myth and Hindu expression. A satisfying and fascinating evening.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
The ATFC has done multiculturalism, the Indian community and the broader Australian community a valuable service in asking three companies to make dances in response to the theme Rhythms of Mother Earth. A new blending of classical Indian and contemporary styles was presented, as migrants from India and SE Asia come to terms with the Australian landscape while descendants of European migrants discover the power of the Indian dance language.
Bharatam Dance Company (Melbourne) presented a strongly focussed Bhumanjali - Homage to Mother Earth, choreographed and performed by Thamilvanan Veshnu under the direction of Dr Chandrabhanu, who after 25 years has clearly established a major inspirational role. This work shows why. Beginning in classical style to represent the Earth as Goddess, and progressing through stages towards an international "modern" style, representing Earth as Mystery and finally as Destruction, the Hindu understanding of the universe is brought to bear on present-day reality. The mystery and beauty of Australia, evoked in a rhythmic soundscape of bird calls, does not survive in this tragic view.
Tara Rajkumar, researcher and teacher at Monash University - instrumental in reviving the softer Mohinattam classical dance style and popularising the more theatrical form of Kathakali - presented Natya Sudha Dance Company performers Nithya Gopu (as Kali, Mother of the Universe), Prathayana Chandrakumar (an excellent Kathakali drama of Bhima in the Forest) and Tatayana Pozar-Burgar with Nithya Gopu (a contemporary style view of woman as Prakrithi - cosmic energy that is infinite, positive and feminine). For me the classical forms were much more successful than the modern from this company.
From Sydney, Lingalayam Dance Company Director Anandavalli opened the evening with an impressive secular invocation to Bhumadevi - Mother Earth. Earth, Water, Fire and Wind were brought together in a Space full of vibrant energy.
Inspired by Anandavalli, Canberrans Jenny White presented her Orbital Fracture and Niki Shepherd her Resounding Rhythms. Both smoothly blended classical and modern forms: White's piece a clear and pure abstraction on the moment of decisive silence; Shepherd's solo a dramatic mix of Greek myth and Hindu expression. A satisfying and fascinating evening.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 19 March 1999
1999: Dormez, Je Le Veux by Georges Feydeau
Dormez, Je Le Veux by Georges Feydeau. Melbourne French Theatre directed by Michael Bula at Belconnen Community Centre. March 19, 1999, 8pm and 20 at 2pm.
La Francophonie is an association of 48 French-speaking countries from 5 continents - from Belgium to Vietnam, Nigeria to Canada, Egypt to France itself. For World Francophonie Day, as part of Canberra National Multicultural Festival, Feydeau's Belle-Epoque farce was an interesting choice.
Michael Bula's direction, and performance of man-about-town Boriquet, showed class befitting the French mime tradition and its historical links to commedia dell'arte. Clearly everyone in the cast - with special mention of the two valets, Justin (Eddy Fatha) and the Belgian accented Eloi (Dominique Gibert) - understood the style and played it for all their worth. It's a pity that there could be only 2 performances in Canberra.
Indeed, I'd go again to see Frederique Fouche, as Boriquet's sister Francine, playing Carmen under hypnosis, with her brother - also hypnotised -acting as a monkey. No wonder Dr Valencourt (Nicholas Panayotis) and his daughter Emilienne (Catherine Pierce) thought them mad, until the Doctor realised that Justin was the hypnotist - and so it was safe for Emilienne to marry Boriquet after all.
It was also appropriate to humiliate Justin by making him say, under hypnosis, "Je suis miserable". In a final twist of farce, Justin was only pretending to be hypnotised: after the upper class people have exited, he raises his fists to declare with great pride, "Je suis miserable". From Bula's notes about giving the play "bite" and emphasising the socio-political context, I guess this is a reference to Hugo and Les Miserables. The problem is that this servant is actually celebrating his continued employment as a servant: Feydeau confirmed the upper classes in their rightful place - no emancipation here.
Feydeau's essential conservatism, clothed in such good humour, makes an interesting comment not just on French society of the fin de (last) siecle but on La Francophonie at the end of this century: not all the old colonies have quite risen to full independence, and it was a bitter struggle for many who have.
Melbourne French Theatre have presented Anhouilh and Sartre in Canberra before: this production reminds us of the diversity within French culture. An interesting choice.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
La Francophonie is an association of 48 French-speaking countries from 5 continents - from Belgium to Vietnam, Nigeria to Canada, Egypt to France itself. For World Francophonie Day, as part of Canberra National Multicultural Festival, Feydeau's Belle-Epoque farce was an interesting choice.
Michael Bula's direction, and performance of man-about-town Boriquet, showed class befitting the French mime tradition and its historical links to commedia dell'arte. Clearly everyone in the cast - with special mention of the two valets, Justin (Eddy Fatha) and the Belgian accented Eloi (Dominique Gibert) - understood the style and played it for all their worth. It's a pity that there could be only 2 performances in Canberra.
Indeed, I'd go again to see Frederique Fouche, as Boriquet's sister Francine, playing Carmen under hypnosis, with her brother - also hypnotised -acting as a monkey. No wonder Dr Valencourt (Nicholas Panayotis) and his daughter Emilienne (Catherine Pierce) thought them mad, until the Doctor realised that Justin was the hypnotist - and so it was safe for Emilienne to marry Boriquet after all.
It was also appropriate to humiliate Justin by making him say, under hypnosis, "Je suis miserable". In a final twist of farce, Justin was only pretending to be hypnotised: after the upper class people have exited, he raises his fists to declare with great pride, "Je suis miserable". From Bula's notes about giving the play "bite" and emphasising the socio-political context, I guess this is a reference to Hugo and Les Miserables. The problem is that this servant is actually celebrating his continued employment as a servant: Feydeau confirmed the upper classes in their rightful place - no emancipation here.
Feydeau's essential conservatism, clothed in such good humour, makes an interesting comment not just on French society of the fin de (last) siecle but on La Francophonie at the end of this century: not all the old colonies have quite risen to full independence, and it was a bitter struggle for many who have.
Melbourne French Theatre have presented Anhouilh and Sartre in Canberra before: this production reminds us of the diversity within French culture. An interesting choice.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 17 March 1999
1999: What Do They Call Me? by Eva Johnson
What Do They Call Me? by Eva Johnson. Canice Productions: performed and directed by Marie Andrews. National Multicultural Festival at The Street Theatre Studio 7.30pm March 17-20, 1999..
It is a great joy and privilege to experience a writer and performer at one with their traditions, their style, their themes and their audience. Make sure you don't miss this short, significant piece of theatre.
Marie Andrews, a Bardi woman and lawyer from Broome, is surely a Kimberley diamond, reflecting brilliantly the three characters of the mother Connie and her two daughters: Regina, taken by "Welfare" and brought up in a middle-class foster family; and Alison, both proud of her Aboriginality and her self-determined role as a lesbian activist.
Connie is in jail on trumped up charges of "abusing the language" - "Can't even swear in my own country," she says. Regina cannot hate her white "mother" who can't accept that her properly married "daughter" finds after 30 years that she must meet and identify with her real mother Connie. Alison, a sophisticated naif, works her intelligence to maintain her relationship with white feminist Sara, while bravely facing her mother with the truth of her sexual orientation.
Eva Johnson, the Malak Malak woman from Daly Waters whom many of us may remember performing in Women of the Sun, has turned playwright and teaches drama in Adelaide. What Do They Call Me? is 10 years old, written before the Stolen Generation report. It is partly autobiographical, and uses the ancient storytelling form with minimal but absolutely effective costume and light changes. Andrews, who was Company Manager for the tour in 1994 of her cousin Jimmy Chi's Bran Nue Day, is entirely at home as director and performer - and as herself in an open forum with the audience to finish the evening.
"I see this as a healing process between indigenous and white people, and hope that we can move forward as a whole people," says Andrews. Canice Cox, whose mother was Aboriginal and father was the white policeman at Fitzroy Crossing, and who married Japanese pearl diver James Ishiguchi, was Andrews' adoptive grandmother. Her name is honoured in Canice Productions. She believes it's this multicultural Kimberley history which fires creativity not to be missed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
It is a great joy and privilege to experience a writer and performer at one with their traditions, their style, their themes and their audience. Make sure you don't miss this short, significant piece of theatre.
Marie Andrews, a Bardi woman and lawyer from Broome, is surely a Kimberley diamond, reflecting brilliantly the three characters of the mother Connie and her two daughters: Regina, taken by "Welfare" and brought up in a middle-class foster family; and Alison, both proud of her Aboriginality and her self-determined role as a lesbian activist.
Connie is in jail on trumped up charges of "abusing the language" - "Can't even swear in my own country," she says. Regina cannot hate her white "mother" who can't accept that her properly married "daughter" finds after 30 years that she must meet and identify with her real mother Connie. Alison, a sophisticated naif, works her intelligence to maintain her relationship with white feminist Sara, while bravely facing her mother with the truth of her sexual orientation.
Eva Johnson, the Malak Malak woman from Daly Waters whom many of us may remember performing in Women of the Sun, has turned playwright and teaches drama in Adelaide. What Do They Call Me? is 10 years old, written before the Stolen Generation report. It is partly autobiographical, and uses the ancient storytelling form with minimal but absolutely effective costume and light changes. Andrews, who was Company Manager for the tour in 1994 of her cousin Jimmy Chi's Bran Nue Day, is entirely at home as director and performer - and as herself in an open forum with the audience to finish the evening.
"I see this as a healing process between indigenous and white people, and hope that we can move forward as a whole people," says Andrews. Canice Cox, whose mother was Aboriginal and father was the white policeman at Fitzroy Crossing, and who married Japanese pearl diver James Ishiguchi, was Andrews' adoptive grandmother. Her name is honoured in Canice Productions. She believes it's this multicultural Kimberley history which fires creativity not to be missed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 10 March 1999
1999: Grushenka adapted by Rodney Fisher
Grushenka adapted by Rodney Fisher from F.Dostoyevski's novel The Brothers Karamazov. Kropka Theatre: solo performer Jolanta Juszkiewicz directed by Rodney Fisher. Canberra National Multicultural Festival at The Street Theatre Studio March 10-13, 1999, 7.30pm.
In this brief 30 minute etude polonaise, Polish actress Jolanta Juszkiewicz plays on the white keys of anger and the black keys of despair with equal precision, but I found that Rodney Fisher's attempt to encapsulate Dostoyevski's character Grushenka fails to match the drama of a Chopin study.
Without the full context of the novel and without Dostoyevski's objective slightly sardonic authorial tone, this snippet of Grushenka's conflicted feelings as she waits to face again the man who has seduced her - Does she love him? Or might she kill him? - leaves not only her situation unresolved, but ours in the audience as well. We wanted to thank the performer for her undoubtedly sincere and skilful effort, yet hesitated because the script did not give us a frame for clearly understanding the picture of this woman.
If Chopin's etudes are complete within themselves, then this script seems to need an image of Dostoyevski watching his misogynist creation with the contempt that one imagines he had for his real-life admirer Apollinaria Suslova, who refused to accept that "Women have but one calling in life - to be housewives and mothers." This would give us a context within which we could see the relevance of presenting Grushenka. Reading matter in the program cannot replace the necessary theatrical device.
Mind you, the crowd in The Street foyer waiting to go into the main theatre meant Juszkiewicz and her audience had to cope with considerable background noise - not conducive to such intimate theatre. The acting held me, nevertheless (but bright spotlights on the audience before and after the performance were a serious distraction). Re-read The Brothers Karamazov today, then go to see this meticulously presented character study by Kropka Theatre.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
In this brief 30 minute etude polonaise, Polish actress Jolanta Juszkiewicz plays on the white keys of anger and the black keys of despair with equal precision, but I found that Rodney Fisher's attempt to encapsulate Dostoyevski's character Grushenka fails to match the drama of a Chopin study.
Without the full context of the novel and without Dostoyevski's objective slightly sardonic authorial tone, this snippet of Grushenka's conflicted feelings as she waits to face again the man who has seduced her - Does she love him? Or might she kill him? - leaves not only her situation unresolved, but ours in the audience as well. We wanted to thank the performer for her undoubtedly sincere and skilful effort, yet hesitated because the script did not give us a frame for clearly understanding the picture of this woman.
If Chopin's etudes are complete within themselves, then this script seems to need an image of Dostoyevski watching his misogynist creation with the contempt that one imagines he had for his real-life admirer Apollinaria Suslova, who refused to accept that "Women have but one calling in life - to be housewives and mothers." This would give us a context within which we could see the relevance of presenting Grushenka. Reading matter in the program cannot replace the necessary theatrical device.
Mind you, the crowd in The Street foyer waiting to go into the main theatre meant Juszkiewicz and her audience had to cope with considerable background noise - not conducive to such intimate theatre. The acting held me, nevertheless (but bright spotlights on the audience before and after the performance were a serious distraction). Re-read The Brothers Karamazov today, then go to see this meticulously presented character study by Kropka Theatre.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Saturday, 6 March 1999
1999: Time of My Life by Alan Ayckbourn
Time of My Life by Alan Ayckbourn. Canberra Repertory directed by Corille Fraser at Theatre 3, March 5-27, 1999, Wed to Sat 8pm.
This is English middle class comedy about upward and downward mobility hung on a hallstand peg, next to the wet mackintoshes, labelled "Let's make fun of marriage." And, it is true, several members of the opening night glitterati recognised certain infidelities, brazen affairs, new-found boldness and admissions of failure among the usual Ayckbourn misunderstandings, some drunkenness and chucking up, financial mismanagement, lateness for lunch and several dogs, generally linked together by a series of incomprehensibly funny foreign (i.e. not British) waiters.
I'm going to have to praise all three men - Ian Carcary(Gerry, the father), Duncan Ley (elder son Glyn) and Luke Cutting (younger son Adam) - for effectively playing the straight men for the even more praiseworthy women - Jenny Ongley-Houston (Laura, the mother), Melissa Planten (Stephanie, married to Glyn) and Fiona Gregory (not married to Adam). Though the first act took some warming up on opening night, the second moved along with the women's development as characters.
And the five waiters played by David Bennett, Bevan Tiddent, Teddi van Bent, Dettev Bandin and Dave Tendbint deserve mention not only for their accents, but their romantic singing and rhythmic dance, and silver service hospitality.
Don't expect anything deep from Ayckbourn. His couple of attempts at pathos drown somewhere in a watery bathysphere. But at least his is a well-made play which starts in the middle, stretches out in opposite directions and ends where it began. And though one unnamable critic claimed that he slept through the first half, and one woman driver left her several passengers to find their own way home after interval, most of the audience laughed at lots of deliberately exaggerated severely prejudicial attitudes - including me.
Of course, it would be condescending of me to say that this is the sort of play that Repertory ought to be doing - since none of the professionals would touch it - but surely there has to be a place for a relaxing insignificant night of laughter after a hard and serious day's work in academia, consultancy and politics. Bob McMullan thought so - I saw him there - so why shouldn't you?
© Frank McKone, Canberra
This is English middle class comedy about upward and downward mobility hung on a hallstand peg, next to the wet mackintoshes, labelled "Let's make fun of marriage." And, it is true, several members of the opening night glitterati recognised certain infidelities, brazen affairs, new-found boldness and admissions of failure among the usual Ayckbourn misunderstandings, some drunkenness and chucking up, financial mismanagement, lateness for lunch and several dogs, generally linked together by a series of incomprehensibly funny foreign (i.e. not British) waiters.
I'm going to have to praise all three men - Ian Carcary(Gerry, the father), Duncan Ley (elder son Glyn) and Luke Cutting (younger son Adam) - for effectively playing the straight men for the even more praiseworthy women - Jenny Ongley-Houston (Laura, the mother), Melissa Planten (Stephanie, married to Glyn) and Fiona Gregory (not married to Adam). Though the first act took some warming up on opening night, the second moved along with the women's development as characters.
And the five waiters played by David Bennett, Bevan Tiddent, Teddi van Bent, Dettev Bandin and Dave Tendbint deserve mention not only for their accents, but their romantic singing and rhythmic dance, and silver service hospitality.
Don't expect anything deep from Ayckbourn. His couple of attempts at pathos drown somewhere in a watery bathysphere. But at least his is a well-made play which starts in the middle, stretches out in opposite directions and ends where it began. And though one unnamable critic claimed that he slept through the first half, and one woman driver left her several passengers to find their own way home after interval, most of the audience laughed at lots of deliberately exaggerated severely prejudicial attitudes - including me.
Of course, it would be condescending of me to say that this is the sort of play that Repertory ought to be doing - since none of the professionals would touch it - but surely there has to be a place for a relaxing insignificant night of laughter after a hard and serious day's work in academia, consultancy and politics. Bob McMullan thought so - I saw him there - so why shouldn't you?
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 4 March 1999
1999: Patapumfete by Dario Fo
Patapumfete by Dario Fo. Performed by Alfredo Colombaioni and Stefano Di Pietro. Canberra National Multicultural Festival at ANU Arts Centre March 4-5, 1999.
"If they had combined it with something to eat and drink, I think more would have turned up," said one of the seven members of the audience on opening night. I guess there's an irony in that idea which Dario Fo would appreciate.
Colombaioni and Di Pietro are experts in Fo's style of theatre, combining circus clowning and modernised commedia dell'arte with social criticism - surrealist theatre for the working class. Clowns begin with improvised patter, bouncing banter back and forth. Once the audience has warmed to the satirical humour - I was accused as The Canberra Times critic of not doing my job properly because I my notebook was too small - several short humorous skits were performed, each with a twisted barb.
The least absurd was one character moralising at another who is pleasantly and harmlessly drinking wine and having an occasional quiet cigarette. It soon transpires that the accuser pops headache pills at the first sign of tension (most of which is caused by his moral concern at the other's behaviour). The accuser goes on to stronger drugs, finally stabbing himself with a huge syringe in all sorts of inappropriate places. He dies, while the drinker leaves him to his self-imposed fate and wanders happily away.
Non-violence and robot assembly lines receive a similarly ironic treatment.
A science fiction piece which starts with one actor as an alien machine while the other is proud to be the only human who can save the earth turned into a truly absurd clown style water squirting session, which seems to reach a point of reconciliation destroyed by one last squirted betrayal.
Spoken in Italian, with a minimal amount of translation into English, and mimed exquisitely, Fo's work makes its points and is a cultural artefact worthy of this Festival. But eating and drinking could have helped, like the lady said.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
"If they had combined it with something to eat and drink, I think more would have turned up," said one of the seven members of the audience on opening night. I guess there's an irony in that idea which Dario Fo would appreciate.
Colombaioni and Di Pietro are experts in Fo's style of theatre, combining circus clowning and modernised commedia dell'arte with social criticism - surrealist theatre for the working class. Clowns begin with improvised patter, bouncing banter back and forth. Once the audience has warmed to the satirical humour - I was accused as The Canberra Times critic of not doing my job properly because I my notebook was too small - several short humorous skits were performed, each with a twisted barb.
The least absurd was one character moralising at another who is pleasantly and harmlessly drinking wine and having an occasional quiet cigarette. It soon transpires that the accuser pops headache pills at the first sign of tension (most of which is caused by his moral concern at the other's behaviour). The accuser goes on to stronger drugs, finally stabbing himself with a huge syringe in all sorts of inappropriate places. He dies, while the drinker leaves him to his self-imposed fate and wanders happily away.
Non-violence and robot assembly lines receive a similarly ironic treatment.
A science fiction piece which starts with one actor as an alien machine while the other is proud to be the only human who can save the earth turned into a truly absurd clown style water squirting session, which seems to reach a point of reconciliation destroyed by one last squirted betrayal.
Spoken in Italian, with a minimal amount of translation into English, and mimed exquisitely, Fo's work makes its points and is a cultural artefact worthy of this Festival. But eating and drinking could have helped, like the lady said.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 26 February 1999
1999: Women in War - Australian War Memorial
Women in War - in the Second World War Gallery, Australian War Memorial. Commemorative opening ceremony, Telstra Theatre Fri Feb 26. Program Coordinator: Carolyn Newman. Keynote Speaker: Julia Zaetta, Editorial Director of The Australian Women's Weekly.
Theatre often takes you by surprise. So it was when Beryl Williams, an original WAAAF, described the showers at Bradfield Park in 1941: a long pipe with shower roses every 18 inches. "Can you imagine all us 18 year old naked girls every morning?" she asked. Bradfield Park! I was there - a ten-pound (Sterling) migrant in 1955! I'm sure the showers had cubicles by then.
"Theatre of war" was a US term for a geographical region, but this exhibition gives it new meaning. Julia Zaetta spoke of the contrasts: the loss and sorrow which her generation was fortunate to miss; but the cameraderie and community among women which the war experience gave them, and which she envied.
The new Second World War Gallery certainly is a living theatre surrounding us with all the contrasts. I felt quite overwhelmed and unsure of my feelings in the midst of lights, moving pictures and soundscapes. Ms Zaetta had asked people to speak of their memories, and I talked to many other women among the exhibits and at afternoon tea.
The strongest memory for so many women was that joining up gave them independence and a feeling of control of their lives. Nurses told me how they couldn't wait to get into the air force and the army. They had no family responsibilties, were anxious for adventure. "I didn't think it would matter if a bomb got me", said one. But the other response was disappointment that the end of the war saw most women back in the old woman-in-the-kitchen role.
They lost the opportunity to put all their skills and training into practice, and expressed regret that young women in recent times have had to "re-invent the wheel, when we were doing it all back then."
And what of the exhibition? Some felt it was too overwhelming emotionally - indeed one woman had to leave. Some were concerned it seemed to glorify war's excitement, and yet thought the young today will get to know more about the war than the 60's generation which had scoffed at it. Some felt it glorified the enemy: "I was really non-plussed when I walked into the light and saw I was standing on an image of the Japanese flag - the Rising Sun. I think it might be..." She didn't say "offensive" but I felt that's what she meant.
Many said the film and sound exhibits made them shiver and re-live feelings from that time. "But we would like to put that back in the past. Perhaps it is concentrating too much in the past, when we should think of the future." "But the exhibits are very well done."
Mixed feelings. Controversial thoughts. Strong theatre indeed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Theatre often takes you by surprise. So it was when Beryl Williams, an original WAAAF, described the showers at Bradfield Park in 1941: a long pipe with shower roses every 18 inches. "Can you imagine all us 18 year old naked girls every morning?" she asked. Bradfield Park! I was there - a ten-pound (Sterling) migrant in 1955! I'm sure the showers had cubicles by then.
"Theatre of war" was a US term for a geographical region, but this exhibition gives it new meaning. Julia Zaetta spoke of the contrasts: the loss and sorrow which her generation was fortunate to miss; but the cameraderie and community among women which the war experience gave them, and which she envied.
The new Second World War Gallery certainly is a living theatre surrounding us with all the contrasts. I felt quite overwhelmed and unsure of my feelings in the midst of lights, moving pictures and soundscapes. Ms Zaetta had asked people to speak of their memories, and I talked to many other women among the exhibits and at afternoon tea.
The strongest memory for so many women was that joining up gave them independence and a feeling of control of their lives. Nurses told me how they couldn't wait to get into the air force and the army. They had no family responsibilties, were anxious for adventure. "I didn't think it would matter if a bomb got me", said one. But the other response was disappointment that the end of the war saw most women back in the old woman-in-the-kitchen role.
They lost the opportunity to put all their skills and training into practice, and expressed regret that young women in recent times have had to "re-invent the wheel, when we were doing it all back then."
And what of the exhibition? Some felt it was too overwhelming emotionally - indeed one woman had to leave. Some were concerned it seemed to glorify war's excitement, and yet thought the young today will get to know more about the war than the 60's generation which had scoffed at it. Some felt it glorified the enemy: "I was really non-plussed when I walked into the light and saw I was standing on an image of the Japanese flag - the Rising Sun. I think it might be..." She didn't say "offensive" but I felt that's what she meant.
Many said the film and sound exhibits made them shiver and re-live feelings from that time. "But we would like to put that back in the past. Perhaps it is concentrating too much in the past, when we should think of the future." "But the exhibits are very well done."
Mixed feelings. Controversial thoughts. Strong theatre indeed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 18 February 1999
1999: Kiryuho - Art of Movement Workshop
Kiryuho - Art of Movement Workshop. Master Kajo Tsuboi assisted by Teruomi Kuchina and Kyoko Sato. At the Choreographic Centre for Weereewa - Festival of Lake George Wed Feb 17, 1999.
Japanese theatre and training methods have influenced actors and dancers world-wide, but I, like most western drama teachers, had to rely on reading works such as The Way of Acting by Tadashi Suzuki, reading No plays and studying Zen. To meet Master Kajo and watch him teach was a privilege - and a humble admission to myself about how short a distance I had travelled along the road.
At least I think I was going in the right direction, towards the three R's: Relaxation, Realisation and Relationship. In three hours Master Kajo took people, of varying levels of experience, remarkably far - though he told me that even the best students take three years to absorb the lessons and be able to practice Kiryuho well.
Ki is the energy of the mind and body - physical and creative energy working together. Ryu is the streaming of energy - which can run free or be held back. Ho is the order or structure which we can give to the flow of the stream.
By using movement based on the shape of the mobius strip - in which infinity is represented by never-ending clockwise and anti-clockwise motion - Master Kajo taught how to observe the movement of all the body which follows the movement of one part; how this awareness creates relaxation, leading to realisation as one chooses to shift the lead to new parts of the body; and how this naturally allows good relationships to develop throughout the body. The result is strong and impressive movement, which is the basis not only of all acting and dance, but of healthy and effective relationships in life.
With the help of Andrew McNicol playing a ground note on didgeridoo, people created fascinating improvised movement which seemed to have no end after 45 minutes and could easily have gone on to become an extended group improvisation. Julie Rogers, who translated for us and organised the workshop, explained that this would happen in longer sessions.
Ring Mirramu Creative Arts Centre 02 6238 1492 to book for more Kajo workshops May 20-23.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Japanese theatre and training methods have influenced actors and dancers world-wide, but I, like most western drama teachers, had to rely on reading works such as The Way of Acting by Tadashi Suzuki, reading No plays and studying Zen. To meet Master Kajo and watch him teach was a privilege - and a humble admission to myself about how short a distance I had travelled along the road.
At least I think I was going in the right direction, towards the three R's: Relaxation, Realisation and Relationship. In three hours Master Kajo took people, of varying levels of experience, remarkably far - though he told me that even the best students take three years to absorb the lessons and be able to practice Kiryuho well.
Ki is the energy of the mind and body - physical and creative energy working together. Ryu is the streaming of energy - which can run free or be held back. Ho is the order or structure which we can give to the flow of the stream.
By using movement based on the shape of the mobius strip - in which infinity is represented by never-ending clockwise and anti-clockwise motion - Master Kajo taught how to observe the movement of all the body which follows the movement of one part; how this awareness creates relaxation, leading to realisation as one chooses to shift the lead to new parts of the body; and how this naturally allows good relationships to develop throughout the body. The result is strong and impressive movement, which is the basis not only of all acting and dance, but of healthy and effective relationships in life.
With the help of Andrew McNicol playing a ground note on didgeridoo, people created fascinating improvised movement which seemed to have no end after 45 minutes and could easily have gone on to become an extended group improvisation. Julie Rogers, who translated for us and organised the workshop, explained that this would happen in longer sessions.
Ring Mirramu Creative Arts Centre 02 6238 1492 to book for more Kajo workshops May 20-23.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 17 February 1999
1999: Eco-Maze by Evelyn Roth
Eco-Maze by installation artist Evelyn Roth. Bungendore Park: Fri Feb 19, 1999, 3.30-5pm, Sat Feb 20 1-5.30pm, Sun Feb 21 11am-6pm.
"Would you like me to help you read?" said the 10 year-old Eco-Guide from Bungendore's Youth Theatre to a 5 year old. "Aw, I know how to read!" came the indignant reply.
This was after nature had already had its way with the air-pressured construction - a jealous gusty north-westerly tore into the fabric of life at Lake George from the days of volcanoes and uplifts to the need to replant vegetation today.
While repairs were made I had an excellent hot cappucino at the Gib (pronounced 'jib' for Gibraltar) Street Café and delicious Armenian tea cake (walnuts and orange) under a clear sky. It looks to me that the Weereewa - Festival of Lake George is a blue sky investment for Bungendore and district.
Stan d'Argeaval deserves accolades for his organising work - and here he was with daughter Renee fixing the maze for its inaugural walk-through by an excited bunch of children guided by Sarah, Monique and Natasha whom Evelyn Roth had met only the day before. They took us through the blue-green wetlands, into a land of orange volcanoes (where we peered into the cones to read all about Lake George's history) and through to a bright blue-yellow lake where we planted velcro vegetation all around.
Evelyn - a Canadian shortly to become Australian and based nowadays in Adelaide - began by sewing a blow-up salmon for a Salmon Festival with the Haida people on Queen Charlotte Islands in 1977, having already established her work as an environmental dancer, and today has a busy career creating mazes, webs and other amazing structures for festivals in many countries.
The value of her Eco-Maze is part theatrical (this is participatory theatre, of course) and especially educational as the children experience visual stimulation, information gathering and dramatic activity around a theme which is already established in school. The maze is a support for the work of the children's teachers - and Evelyn is available to work in a residency situation for a school or community to develop fabric environments which are tailored to more specific interests. Her website is www.evelynroth.com.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
"Would you like me to help you read?" said the 10 year-old Eco-Guide from Bungendore's Youth Theatre to a 5 year old. "Aw, I know how to read!" came the indignant reply.
This was after nature had already had its way with the air-pressured construction - a jealous gusty north-westerly tore into the fabric of life at Lake George from the days of volcanoes and uplifts to the need to replant vegetation today.
While repairs were made I had an excellent hot cappucino at the Gib (pronounced 'jib' for Gibraltar) Street Café and delicious Armenian tea cake (walnuts and orange) under a clear sky. It looks to me that the Weereewa - Festival of Lake George is a blue sky investment for Bungendore and district.
Stan d'Argeaval deserves accolades for his organising work - and here he was with daughter Renee fixing the maze for its inaugural walk-through by an excited bunch of children guided by Sarah, Monique and Natasha whom Evelyn Roth had met only the day before. They took us through the blue-green wetlands, into a land of orange volcanoes (where we peered into the cones to read all about Lake George's history) and through to a bright blue-yellow lake where we planted velcro vegetation all around.
Evelyn - a Canadian shortly to become Australian and based nowadays in Adelaide - began by sewing a blow-up salmon for a Salmon Festival with the Haida people on Queen Charlotte Islands in 1977, having already established her work as an environmental dancer, and today has a busy career creating mazes, webs and other amazing structures for festivals in many countries.
The value of her Eco-Maze is part theatrical (this is participatory theatre, of course) and especially educational as the children experience visual stimulation, information gathering and dramatic activity around a theme which is already established in school. The maze is a support for the work of the children's teachers - and Evelyn is available to work in a residency situation for a school or community to develop fabric environments which are tailored to more specific interests. Her website is www.evelynroth.com.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 24 January 1999
1999: The Heart of Frankenstein by Patricia Jones
The Heart of Frankenstein by Patricia Jones. Sydney Fringe Festival at TAP Gallery, 278 Palmer Street. Jan 22-23; Feb 5-6, 1999, 8pm.
TAP Gallery is above a bathroom accessories design firm. Upstairs the design is modern eclectic rococo: a preponderance of green, purple, blue and yellow - all sort-of organic. Self-managed by the artists who use the space, TAP's Fringe program began by opening the Amnesty International Art Award ($1000) on the theme "FREEDOM" and includes the "digit.au" Computer Art Award sponsored by Apple Centre Status Graph. Ring Lesley at TAP on 02 9361 0440 if these interest you (to enter or see exhibits).
TAP has three galleries with continuous exhibitions of art work - and Patricia Jones' "Gothic ramble through the hearts and minds of poets and monsters real and imaginary during the time of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'".
It's a long ramble - nearly 3 hours - and suffers I think from the self-managing artist's syndrome. Jones wrote, directed, made the artwork and did the (very minimal) lighting. The result, from the production values point of view, was not exciting, even though the actors were generally skilled and held things together. Cath Young (Mary Shelley), Nicholas Mitsakis (Lord Byron) and Scott Hailstone (Percy Bysshe Shelley) formed the core with strong support from Kylie McCormack (Lady Caroline Lamb) and Elizabeth Richmond (Augusta Byron).
Though the script needs a good dramaturg and should be a great deal shorter, the story is a fascinating study of Mary Shelley, the only normal personality, having to deal with two talented but impossible poets, constantly in challenge posture and sexually destructive of all the women - sisters or other wives - who come into their purview.
From her marriage to her husband's death in the famous boating accident (which looks like death-wish fulfilment) we explore with Mary the idealism of Shelley's social justice themes, Byron's social nihilism, the diversion from dealing with ordinary reality which is at the heart of the art of poesy; and on the way, the denial of women's rights.
From this experience, Mary creates her monster: Pygmalion's beauty, but her Galatean scientist failed to include the ability to reason. Her novel still stands beside her husband's poetry, and we are still in need of both.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
TAP Gallery is above a bathroom accessories design firm. Upstairs the design is modern eclectic rococo: a preponderance of green, purple, blue and yellow - all sort-of organic. Self-managed by the artists who use the space, TAP's Fringe program began by opening the Amnesty International Art Award ($1000) on the theme "FREEDOM" and includes the "digit.au" Computer Art Award sponsored by Apple Centre Status Graph. Ring Lesley at TAP on 02 9361 0440 if these interest you (to enter or see exhibits).
TAP has three galleries with continuous exhibitions of art work - and Patricia Jones' "Gothic ramble through the hearts and minds of poets and monsters real and imaginary during the time of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'".
It's a long ramble - nearly 3 hours - and suffers I think from the self-managing artist's syndrome. Jones wrote, directed, made the artwork and did the (very minimal) lighting. The result, from the production values point of view, was not exciting, even though the actors were generally skilled and held things together. Cath Young (Mary Shelley), Nicholas Mitsakis (Lord Byron) and Scott Hailstone (Percy Bysshe Shelley) formed the core with strong support from Kylie McCormack (Lady Caroline Lamb) and Elizabeth Richmond (Augusta Byron).
Though the script needs a good dramaturg and should be a great deal shorter, the story is a fascinating study of Mary Shelley, the only normal personality, having to deal with two talented but impossible poets, constantly in challenge posture and sexually destructive of all the women - sisters or other wives - who come into their purview.
From her marriage to her husband's death in the famous boating accident (which looks like death-wish fulfilment) we explore with Mary the idealism of Shelley's social justice themes, Byron's social nihilism, the diversion from dealing with ordinary reality which is at the heart of the art of poesy; and on the way, the denial of women's rights.
From this experience, Mary creates her monster: Pygmalion's beauty, but her Galatean scientist failed to include the ability to reason. Her novel still stands beside her husband's poetry, and we are still in need of both.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 13 December 1998
1998: Short Stabs Program 2
Short Stabs Program 2. CIA in association with CYT at The Street Studio. December 12, 15, 16, 1998, at 7.00 pm.
I only saw five-eighths on Saturday. Nothing to do with football - just that Daniel Keene's Untitled Monologue, Christos Tsiolkas' Kennett and Luke Cutting's adaptation of Yukio Mishima's Jealous Spirit needed more work and will open on Tuesday. If they match most of what I saw, then you should not miss Short Stabs 2. Don't forget it's a 7 o'clock start.
Sockpussy, a genetically determined puppet show by Barb Kraaz and Karin Ferguson, needs a more confident (i.e. louder) performance, but is a neat and funny script for a mutated modern Punch and Judy experience.
Pared Off is a fascinating mime with voice commentary on a reluctant relationship devised by Telia Neville and performed with precision by her and Matthew Aberline.
Exile by Graham Henderson is a tragicomic completion of the latest work by an unknown and forever misunderstood blind novelist, whose younger amanuensis seems destined to follow his mentor's hopeless career path. Performed well by Phil Roberts, with David Branson in a surprisingly humble role which is nicely defined. Good directing from Cathie Clelland.
Viewing Blue Poles will ring bells for any visitor to the National Gallery - alarm bells probably as Christos Tsiolkas reveals the truth about the different perspectives of a prospective mother seeking an abortion, her bisexual lover and putative father, watched by a gay security guard who lies to them about Blue Poles and misinterprets their relationship. Only after Warhol's Electric Chair will the mother let the lover see the Early Australian Landscapes - so sad because they are empty, though full of trees, waterfalls and mountains. Blue Poles is full of loneliness, concludes the security guard. Excellent performances from Anna Voronoff, Roland Manderson and Pip Branson.
Chrissie Shaw, directed by Camilla Blunden in Alison Croggan's Famine, was the highlight on Saturday: a telling history of pioneer days, from a woman's entrapment on the streets of London and transportation to a life of violent horror in the bush, presented with vocal skill and economy of movement - an indictment of the terra nullius view of the invasion of Australia.
Short Stabs 3 starts on Thursday. See Stabs 2 first.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
I only saw five-eighths on Saturday. Nothing to do with football - just that Daniel Keene's Untitled Monologue, Christos Tsiolkas' Kennett and Luke Cutting's adaptation of Yukio Mishima's Jealous Spirit needed more work and will open on Tuesday. If they match most of what I saw, then you should not miss Short Stabs 2. Don't forget it's a 7 o'clock start.
Sockpussy, a genetically determined puppet show by Barb Kraaz and Karin Ferguson, needs a more confident (i.e. louder) performance, but is a neat and funny script for a mutated modern Punch and Judy experience.
Pared Off is a fascinating mime with voice commentary on a reluctant relationship devised by Telia Neville and performed with precision by her and Matthew Aberline.
Exile by Graham Henderson is a tragicomic completion of the latest work by an unknown and forever misunderstood blind novelist, whose younger amanuensis seems destined to follow his mentor's hopeless career path. Performed well by Phil Roberts, with David Branson in a surprisingly humble role which is nicely defined. Good directing from Cathie Clelland.
Viewing Blue Poles will ring bells for any visitor to the National Gallery - alarm bells probably as Christos Tsiolkas reveals the truth about the different perspectives of a prospective mother seeking an abortion, her bisexual lover and putative father, watched by a gay security guard who lies to them about Blue Poles and misinterprets their relationship. Only after Warhol's Electric Chair will the mother let the lover see the Early Australian Landscapes - so sad because they are empty, though full of trees, waterfalls and mountains. Blue Poles is full of loneliness, concludes the security guard. Excellent performances from Anna Voronoff, Roland Manderson and Pip Branson.
Chrissie Shaw, directed by Camilla Blunden in Alison Croggan's Famine, was the highlight on Saturday: a telling history of pioneer days, from a woman's entrapment on the streets of London and transportation to a life of violent horror in the bush, presented with vocal skill and economy of movement - an indictment of the terra nullius view of the invasion of Australia.
Short Stabs 3 starts on Thursday. See Stabs 2 first.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 13 November 1998
1998: Lunch Hour by John Mortimer
Lunch Hour by John Mortimer. The Players Company directed by Charles Glyn-Daniel at the Union Theatre, University of Canberra, November 13, 1998.
The only boring thing about this brand new theatre company is their name. And the fact that they are doing only one lunch-time stand - so you've missed an excellent performance of a clever half-hour piece about a married man and a young woman, one of his junior work colleagues, who plan to consummate their six month clandestine affair in a cheap hotel with an interesting landlady.
The stories The Man (Jason Savage) has told The Manageress (Mickey Beckett) to explain why he is meeting his "wife" for an hour over lunchtime in her not-so-cheap room (he has to pay for a day) reveal to The Girl (Fiona Gregory) that she had better get out from under. Gregory especially stands out even among her very experienced colleagues for playing so clearly both the complexity of the character, as she realises the import of The Man's fiction for her future reality, and the subtlety of the social class distinctions, as the daughter of the working class seeks to move up into the colder stratosphere of the successful English upper middle class.
Charles Glyn-Daniel is the centre of gravity for a new "theatre of intrinsic value". Using the Union Theatre at University of Canberra as its base - but moving out into other venues which suit - the Company will give a new airing to plays from English speaking traditions which have become neglected in what Glyn-Daniel sees as the imposition of neo-realism on theatre over the past few decades - "social workers' casebooks on stage".
With moral support from UC, (including some financial help from the Co-op Bookshop, UC Union and UC's Canberra Centre for Writing and Cultural Studies) Lunch Hour will go on again, maybe during Happy Hour at Theatre 3, for example. The next production being planned is R.C.Sherriff's 1928 anti-war play Journey's End. Glyn-Daniel also says he wants a more broadly intellectual weekly theatre review column in The Canberra Times!
I can only say, Go for it G-D! All God's Chillun Got Wings (Eugene O'Neill, 1924) and you should let fly for our enjoyment, stimulation and satisfaction.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
The only boring thing about this brand new theatre company is their name. And the fact that they are doing only one lunch-time stand - so you've missed an excellent performance of a clever half-hour piece about a married man and a young woman, one of his junior work colleagues, who plan to consummate their six month clandestine affair in a cheap hotel with an interesting landlady.
The stories The Man (Jason Savage) has told The Manageress (Mickey Beckett) to explain why he is meeting his "wife" for an hour over lunchtime in her not-so-cheap room (he has to pay for a day) reveal to The Girl (Fiona Gregory) that she had better get out from under. Gregory especially stands out even among her very experienced colleagues for playing so clearly both the complexity of the character, as she realises the import of The Man's fiction for her future reality, and the subtlety of the social class distinctions, as the daughter of the working class seeks to move up into the colder stratosphere of the successful English upper middle class.
Charles Glyn-Daniel is the centre of gravity for a new "theatre of intrinsic value". Using the Union Theatre at University of Canberra as its base - but moving out into other venues which suit - the Company will give a new airing to plays from English speaking traditions which have become neglected in what Glyn-Daniel sees as the imposition of neo-realism on theatre over the past few decades - "social workers' casebooks on stage".
With moral support from UC, (including some financial help from the Co-op Bookshop, UC Union and UC's Canberra Centre for Writing and Cultural Studies) Lunch Hour will go on again, maybe during Happy Hour at Theatre 3, for example. The next production being planned is R.C.Sherriff's 1928 anti-war play Journey's End. Glyn-Daniel also says he wants a more broadly intellectual weekly theatre review column in The Canberra Times!
I can only say, Go for it G-D! All God's Chillun Got Wings (Eugene O'Neill, 1924) and you should let fly for our enjoyment, stimulation and satisfaction.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 29 October 1998
1998: State Fair by Rodgers and Hammerstein
State Fair by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Phoenix Players directed by Fran Bosly-Craft at Belconnen Community Centre till November 14.
This is a warm and fuzzy musical about family values based on making sure you marry the right person. Set in Iowa, America's mid-west corn and hog farming country, in 1946, State Fair seems to be intended to re-establish old values now that the nasty experience of World War II is over. It's problem is that it is so-o-o nice - with nothing like the guts of Oklahoma or South Pacific.
Fran Bosly-Craft, however, lets the simple story tell itself without artifice, ably assisted by Jenny Hill's sensibly contructed choreography and Sally McRae's small rhythmically precise band. The result is a "Grand Night for Singing" and indeed "It Might As Well Be Spring", though I have to admit that none of the other songs are memorable - except the "Sweet Hog of Mine" barbershop quartet (actually called More Than Just A Friend) in which Ian Davenport, Frank Farrell, Kit Collins and John Van de Graaff absolutely excel themselves in praise of pig relations.
Libby Warren and Adrian Gillmore play the young lovelorn leads Margie and Wayne very well, Warren standing out as the most accomplished actor and singer in the cast. In the end, though, the value of this production is that the feeling of community - which is a sentimental American stereotype on stage - is a reality for Phoenix Players. The strongest scenes are when the whole cast from 10 year olds to people of an age not to be recorded here are singing and dancing along together. The sense of commitment is measured by Ian Davenport - actor, production manager, set constructor and painter - who took leave from his paid work for a month to get this show on the road. And Bosly-Craft, long known around this town's theatrical traps, nowadays makes the trip in for rehearsals, she tells me, "from the other side of Goulburn".
You last saw State Fair in 1962 as a film with Pat Boone. I missed it then, but like me you can catch the Australian premiere of the stage version at Belconnen Community Centre and enjoy a pleasant light spring entertainment from Phoenix Players.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
This is a warm and fuzzy musical about family values based on making sure you marry the right person. Set in Iowa, America's mid-west corn and hog farming country, in 1946, State Fair seems to be intended to re-establish old values now that the nasty experience of World War II is over. It's problem is that it is so-o-o nice - with nothing like the guts of Oklahoma or South Pacific.
Fran Bosly-Craft, however, lets the simple story tell itself without artifice, ably assisted by Jenny Hill's sensibly contructed choreography and Sally McRae's small rhythmically precise band. The result is a "Grand Night for Singing" and indeed "It Might As Well Be Spring", though I have to admit that none of the other songs are memorable - except the "Sweet Hog of Mine" barbershop quartet (actually called More Than Just A Friend) in which Ian Davenport, Frank Farrell, Kit Collins and John Van de Graaff absolutely excel themselves in praise of pig relations.
Libby Warren and Adrian Gillmore play the young lovelorn leads Margie and Wayne very well, Warren standing out as the most accomplished actor and singer in the cast. In the end, though, the value of this production is that the feeling of community - which is a sentimental American stereotype on stage - is a reality for Phoenix Players. The strongest scenes are when the whole cast from 10 year olds to people of an age not to be recorded here are singing and dancing along together. The sense of commitment is measured by Ian Davenport - actor, production manager, set constructor and painter - who took leave from his paid work for a month to get this show on the road. And Bosly-Craft, long known around this town's theatrical traps, nowadays makes the trip in for rehearsals, she tells me, "from the other side of Goulburn".
You last saw State Fair in 1962 as a film with Pat Boone. I missed it then, but like me you can catch the Australian premiere of the stage version at Belconnen Community Centre and enjoy a pleasant light spring entertainment from Phoenix Players.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 15 October 1998
1998: Ravens in Wonderland by Heaven Muecke
Ravens in Wonderland by Heaven Muecke. National Film and Sound Archive Theatre, October 15 - 17, 1998, 8pm.
Muecke's work is unpretentious theatre. Its success lies in its not pretending to be grand theatre; yet it is not insignificant by any means. Ravens in Wonderland is the work of a young genuine writer / director in touch with the dark side of fairy stories which are all too easily sentimentalised.
Rather than be drawn into the usual theatre groups - though recognising and appreciating her teenage experience in Canberra Youth Theatre - Muecke is an independent producer, working on this occasion with student colleagues with minimal financial support from the ANU Students' Association. My sense is that she is right to work this way because her work is original and in a certain way whimsical. Keeping control of the process from writing through directing the actors, creating the set, costumes and visual effects, including being technical operator, is a huge task even for a fifty minute piece; but it works for Muecke.
Of course that means it works for us in the audience. We are drawn quickly into a quirky wonderland. We half imagine we recognise characters but, as they play out unusual reflections of a mix of stories, we are amused by unexpected incongruities which suddenly touch our deeper feelings about love and betrayal.
Perhaps The Little Match Girl is the saddest story. No-one will buy her matches; she can't go home, for her father will beat her; a nasty boy steals her shoes; in the morning she is found dead in the snow. Muecke turns Hans Christian Andersen's character into a Coppelia-child, played very effectively by Rebecca Lathbury, whose humour and humanity links the disparate scenes of the play both structurally as a piece of theatre and emotionally as we enjoy her openness and recognise her naivete in ourselves.
I found the play fascinating, and disturbing, for its absurdist - almost Dada - form combined with metaphorical suggestion in the language and the imagery. I hope that Muecke keeps working and can find among the younger trained actors about town a compatible group with whom she can develop her work. It's already well worth seeing and I look forward to more in the future.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Muecke's work is unpretentious theatre. Its success lies in its not pretending to be grand theatre; yet it is not insignificant by any means. Ravens in Wonderland is the work of a young genuine writer / director in touch with the dark side of fairy stories which are all too easily sentimentalised.
Rather than be drawn into the usual theatre groups - though recognising and appreciating her teenage experience in Canberra Youth Theatre - Muecke is an independent producer, working on this occasion with student colleagues with minimal financial support from the ANU Students' Association. My sense is that she is right to work this way because her work is original and in a certain way whimsical. Keeping control of the process from writing through directing the actors, creating the set, costumes and visual effects, including being technical operator, is a huge task even for a fifty minute piece; but it works for Muecke.
Of course that means it works for us in the audience. We are drawn quickly into a quirky wonderland. We half imagine we recognise characters but, as they play out unusual reflections of a mix of stories, we are amused by unexpected incongruities which suddenly touch our deeper feelings about love and betrayal.
Perhaps The Little Match Girl is the saddest story. No-one will buy her matches; she can't go home, for her father will beat her; a nasty boy steals her shoes; in the morning she is found dead in the snow. Muecke turns Hans Christian Andersen's character into a Coppelia-child, played very effectively by Rebecca Lathbury, whose humour and humanity links the disparate scenes of the play both structurally as a piece of theatre and emotionally as we enjoy her openness and recognise her naivete in ourselves.
I found the play fascinating, and disturbing, for its absurdist - almost Dada - form combined with metaphorical suggestion in the language and the imagery. I hope that Muecke keeps working and can find among the younger trained actors about town a compatible group with whom she can develop her work. It's already well worth seeing and I look forward to more in the future.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 25 August 1998
1998: Feature article on Kate Hine and other artists-in-residence at High Schools in Canberra
When I was young, paintings on walls were mainly uncomplimentary statements about Pig Iron Bob on the backs of the grotty buildings I could see from the train on my way to school.
In my naivete, I was even then envious of the Mexican scene, the best bits of which (apart from the ubiquitous sombrero and cactus) were the stunningly colourful murals covering whole sides of buildings in an otherwise dun coloured Mexico City. Why not in Australia?
Well, wall painting has come of age, and Canberra has its own growing culture. Artists range from the young imitative graffiti-ists through to experienced professional artists-in-residence working on school and community projects. In between are the young who take their work beyond pure graffiti. Ginninderra High School was among the first to encourage them. Jon English appeared in black and white profile in the late 1970's - but has recently been painted over with all-embracing cream. Nice over grey concrete, but not so gritty. Time to move on, I guess.
Kate Hine, painter and cartoonist, currently working with woodcuts and linocuts, resided at Wanniassa High School in March this year, producing a collaborative mural of 13 panels with mainly Year 7 students "From Wanniassa High School to the South Coast". This bird's eye journey looks down Michelangelo-like from near the ceiling of a high-traffic area in the school.
Represented in the painting and its placement are the successes and tensions for the artist and the school. Schools all over the nation are decorated with students' and professional work, though painting directly on walls is still taboo in some jurisdictions. Governments don't like to be responsible for the maintenance of anything but their own paint. Hine's frieze is on hardboard sheets painted at ground level.
Ownership defines the experience for the artist and the school. At one end of a spectrum, the Wanniassa work was designed and directed by Hine, but because the school's desire was for a project which would help the new Year 7's to coalesce, the students were much more than colouring in by numbers. For the artist, it was both difficult and an interesting challenge to let the ownership go into the students' hands. The result is clearly a Year 7 work, yet as art teacher Ilona Lasmanis explained, the artistry in the work is the vision and cohesion through the narrative over 13 panels in which some 70 students had a hand - and this is what the artist-in-residence brought to the project.
At a different point in the spectrum, the Aboriginal artist Dale Huddleston, whose work appears in almost every school in Canberra, begins with airbrushed hand stencils (the children provide the hands); he outlines the figures, telling the story of the painting to the children as he goes. The children work on the colours and dots which give the story body; and Huddleston completes the work with the finely done outlining which gives each painting closure and precision of finish. The results are works which look highly professional, owned and signed by Huddleston, yet many unsophisticated child artists have ownership of key elements.
Melba High's current artist-in-residence, abstract colourist Sylva Spasenoski, has helped students, says teacher Anne Thirion, to go from "insipid" work to genuine expressions of their individuality. Spasenoski has operated both in teacher role, setting up classroom exercises and teaching technique, and as pure artist. In return for studio space and materials, her current work in progress is on continuous display. At this end of the spectrum, her painting provokes enquiries, creates awe, and provides a role model. Her product is hers; the students' work is entirely theirs - but there is an empathetic relationship which Thirion describes as worth its weight in gold.
Canberra Girls' Grammar, according to senior teacher Marilyn Faunt, has a case of the Accidental Life of an Artist coming up with the arrival of ex-student Maryanne Nairn in a few weeks. Her project is to turn blocks of sandstone, somehow acquired by gardner extraordinaire Charles Sweeney, into outdoor sculptures. This is a paid position for Nairn, but students will observe the process from first sketches to completed works during the time period when they are planning and creating their own major works. The relationship here is symbiotic: the artist becomes a cultural focal point for the school to feed off.
As Kate Hine observed, each artist needs to "negotiate your ego" in a residency. What the school needs and what the artist expects should be made clear early: ownership is a matter of high emotion.
So have we caught up with Old Mexico? In our own way: artists-in-residence have become part of our culture, integral to education. And, yes, the Wilderness Society and Amnesty International have painted walls in Bunda Street. But I still hanker after the huge and the brilliant. Maybe Dale Huddlestone, with a team of ANU rockclimbers, could do the whole of one side of the Ivory Tower in Woden? That would be a visionary statement of an artist-in-residence indeed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
In my naivete, I was even then envious of the Mexican scene, the best bits of which (apart from the ubiquitous sombrero and cactus) were the stunningly colourful murals covering whole sides of buildings in an otherwise dun coloured Mexico City. Why not in Australia?
Well, wall painting has come of age, and Canberra has its own growing culture. Artists range from the young imitative graffiti-ists through to experienced professional artists-in-residence working on school and community projects. In between are the young who take their work beyond pure graffiti. Ginninderra High School was among the first to encourage them. Jon English appeared in black and white profile in the late 1970's - but has recently been painted over with all-embracing cream. Nice over grey concrete, but not so gritty. Time to move on, I guess.
Kate Hine, painter and cartoonist, currently working with woodcuts and linocuts, resided at Wanniassa High School in March this year, producing a collaborative mural of 13 panels with mainly Year 7 students "From Wanniassa High School to the South Coast". This bird's eye journey looks down Michelangelo-like from near the ceiling of a high-traffic area in the school.
Represented in the painting and its placement are the successes and tensions for the artist and the school. Schools all over the nation are decorated with students' and professional work, though painting directly on walls is still taboo in some jurisdictions. Governments don't like to be responsible for the maintenance of anything but their own paint. Hine's frieze is on hardboard sheets painted at ground level.
Ownership defines the experience for the artist and the school. At one end of a spectrum, the Wanniassa work was designed and directed by Hine, but because the school's desire was for a project which would help the new Year 7's to coalesce, the students were much more than colouring in by numbers. For the artist, it was both difficult and an interesting challenge to let the ownership go into the students' hands. The result is clearly a Year 7 work, yet as art teacher Ilona Lasmanis explained, the artistry in the work is the vision and cohesion through the narrative over 13 panels in which some 70 students had a hand - and this is what the artist-in-residence brought to the project.
At a different point in the spectrum, the Aboriginal artist Dale Huddleston, whose work appears in almost every school in Canberra, begins with airbrushed hand stencils (the children provide the hands); he outlines the figures, telling the story of the painting to the children as he goes. The children work on the colours and dots which give the story body; and Huddleston completes the work with the finely done outlining which gives each painting closure and precision of finish. The results are works which look highly professional, owned and signed by Huddleston, yet many unsophisticated child artists have ownership of key elements.
Melba High's current artist-in-residence, abstract colourist Sylva Spasenoski, has helped students, says teacher Anne Thirion, to go from "insipid" work to genuine expressions of their individuality. Spasenoski has operated both in teacher role, setting up classroom exercises and teaching technique, and as pure artist. In return for studio space and materials, her current work in progress is on continuous display. At this end of the spectrum, her painting provokes enquiries, creates awe, and provides a role model. Her product is hers; the students' work is entirely theirs - but there is an empathetic relationship which Thirion describes as worth its weight in gold.
Canberra Girls' Grammar, according to senior teacher Marilyn Faunt, has a case of the Accidental Life of an Artist coming up with the arrival of ex-student Maryanne Nairn in a few weeks. Her project is to turn blocks of sandstone, somehow acquired by gardner extraordinaire Charles Sweeney, into outdoor sculptures. This is a paid position for Nairn, but students will observe the process from first sketches to completed works during the time period when they are planning and creating their own major works. The relationship here is symbiotic: the artist becomes a cultural focal point for the school to feed off.
As Kate Hine observed, each artist needs to "negotiate your ego" in a residency. What the school needs and what the artist expects should be made clear early: ownership is a matter of high emotion.
So have we caught up with Old Mexico? In our own way: artists-in-residence have become part of our culture, integral to education. And, yes, the Wilderness Society and Amnesty International have painted walls in Bunda Street. But I still hanker after the huge and the brilliant. Maybe Dale Huddlestone, with a team of ANU rockclimbers, could do the whole of one side of the Ivory Tower in Woden? That would be a visionary statement of an artist-in-residence indeed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 29 July 1998
1998: Feature article on Australian Government education and arts funding.
The Federal Government announcement of $1 million in grants to help universities save their arts and humanities courses has stirred the Opposition.
"If Dr Kemp really cared about the future of non-vocational courses in Australia's universities he would end the commercialisation of the sector and reverse the 1996 funding cuts. Grants of $1 million are no more than a drop in the bucket" according to Mark Latham, Shadow Minister for Education and Youth Affairs. Not to be too negative, of course, "The release of Labor's education policy in the forthcoming campaign will contain a series of initiatives designed to end the commercialisation of education in Australia and restore the viability of the arts and humanities in our universities."
We seem to be in tall-order territory. Not the Northern Territory, where according to Mr Latham, ceramics, sculpture and cartography courses have been cut and the English Department closed. Nor at the University of NSW with cuts in sport and leisure studies, applied arts and performing arts and "the closure of an entire campus" covering teacher education. The story is similar across Australia, including our own ANU losing Russian and "downsizing of philosophy, history, linguistics and sociology".
So what's the real story? And what should a good government be doing about the arts in universities?
Professor Chris Healey, Dean of Arts at the Northern Territory University explains. An English Literature Major is no longer offered in Darwin, beyond a part time tutor to assist some students using correspondence courses. Ceramics, sculpture and cartography have gone. How? Because Federal Government funding is tied so closely to student numbers that the administration finds itself forced into making cuts in areas with few enrolments which can't immediately justify the cost of staff. There is no room for cross-subsidising less popular subjects from funds generated by more popular areas.
The issue is more complex - and this is where the politics comes in. Tight government funding in itself is not the cause of the arts missing out. Because potential students have been imbued with the belief that they should not take intrinsically interesting courses, but only those that are seen as employment related, the enrolments in arts areas are reduced - and the funding follows the enrolment pattern. The cuts in the arts become inevitable - and once they are made, reversal is unlikely, since potential students' attitudes seem to be confirmed by the cuts. A very vicious circle indeed.
Will $1 million do the trick? Our man in Darwin, pointing out that the universities have not yet received official notice of the grants, thought that little would be left for the far-flung regions after the great eight universities have had their share - and $1 million divided by eight is not going to make any real difference even to them.
But even many millions of dollars might not help unless the political culture changes. Professor John Niland, Vice-Chancellor of University of NSW, speaking at the National University of Singapore in June, on The Challenge of Building World Class Universities in the Asian Region, began with "universities, where, as the Irish poet and educator W. B. Yeats so famously observed, the process of educating young minds is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a bucket". "The Spirit of Inquiry," he said, "as with the Olympic Flame, passes from one generation to the next."
Professor Niland praised Singapore for fostering original, indigenous research so that it can become a science and technology producer, rather than merely consuming knowledge created elsewhere. "That is also what we mean by the idea of Australia becoming the clever country (not just the lucky country)". It is rather ironic that a poet, no longer available for study in Darwin, should begin Niland's speech about knowledge which appears to be defined as science and technology. It is also relevant to note that his academic colleague Donald Horne used the title "The Lucky Country" in a satirical sense in an era when "she'll be right" was the common philosophy.
As President of the Australian Vice-Chancellor's Committee, Professor Niland needs, it seems to me, to be more careful that the correct political message is sent to potential students. And indeed he made a point of the value of his university's College of Fine Arts, which sends a large team of students and staff to the Singapore International Design Forum and, in defining a world-class university, he continued the Olympic analogy by saying universities are "decathletes - a competition run over 10 events, not one - but for university reputation building the distances are set at the level of a marathon - many marathons in fact!"
So the ALP is right that $1 million will not dent the losses to the arts in universities and the commercial employment-fodder philosophy of the Government is an additional cause of the narrowing of universities which will prevent them from being world-class. All we need to know now is how the ALP proposes to solve both the financial and attudinal problems which are beginning to look intractable. And we do need to know now, rather than later, before too many demoralised staff have been lost and the arts traditions sink forever.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
"If Dr Kemp really cared about the future of non-vocational courses in Australia's universities he would end the commercialisation of the sector and reverse the 1996 funding cuts. Grants of $1 million are no more than a drop in the bucket" according to Mark Latham, Shadow Minister for Education and Youth Affairs. Not to be too negative, of course, "The release of Labor's education policy in the forthcoming campaign will contain a series of initiatives designed to end the commercialisation of education in Australia and restore the viability of the arts and humanities in our universities."
We seem to be in tall-order territory. Not the Northern Territory, where according to Mr Latham, ceramics, sculpture and cartography courses have been cut and the English Department closed. Nor at the University of NSW with cuts in sport and leisure studies, applied arts and performing arts and "the closure of an entire campus" covering teacher education. The story is similar across Australia, including our own ANU losing Russian and "downsizing of philosophy, history, linguistics and sociology".
So what's the real story? And what should a good government be doing about the arts in universities?
Professor Chris Healey, Dean of Arts at the Northern Territory University explains. An English Literature Major is no longer offered in Darwin, beyond a part time tutor to assist some students using correspondence courses. Ceramics, sculpture and cartography have gone. How? Because Federal Government funding is tied so closely to student numbers that the administration finds itself forced into making cuts in areas with few enrolments which can't immediately justify the cost of staff. There is no room for cross-subsidising less popular subjects from funds generated by more popular areas.
The issue is more complex - and this is where the politics comes in. Tight government funding in itself is not the cause of the arts missing out. Because potential students have been imbued with the belief that they should not take intrinsically interesting courses, but only those that are seen as employment related, the enrolments in arts areas are reduced - and the funding follows the enrolment pattern. The cuts in the arts become inevitable - and once they are made, reversal is unlikely, since potential students' attitudes seem to be confirmed by the cuts. A very vicious circle indeed.
Will $1 million do the trick? Our man in Darwin, pointing out that the universities have not yet received official notice of the grants, thought that little would be left for the far-flung regions after the great eight universities have had their share - and $1 million divided by eight is not going to make any real difference even to them.
But even many millions of dollars might not help unless the political culture changes. Professor John Niland, Vice-Chancellor of University of NSW, speaking at the National University of Singapore in June, on The Challenge of Building World Class Universities in the Asian Region, began with "universities, where, as the Irish poet and educator W. B. Yeats so famously observed, the process of educating young minds is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a bucket". "The Spirit of Inquiry," he said, "as with the Olympic Flame, passes from one generation to the next."
Professor Niland praised Singapore for fostering original, indigenous research so that it can become a science and technology producer, rather than merely consuming knowledge created elsewhere. "That is also what we mean by the idea of Australia becoming the clever country (not just the lucky country)". It is rather ironic that a poet, no longer available for study in Darwin, should begin Niland's speech about knowledge which appears to be defined as science and technology. It is also relevant to note that his academic colleague Donald Horne used the title "The Lucky Country" in a satirical sense in an era when "she'll be right" was the common philosophy.
As President of the Australian Vice-Chancellor's Committee, Professor Niland needs, it seems to me, to be more careful that the correct political message is sent to potential students. And indeed he made a point of the value of his university's College of Fine Arts, which sends a large team of students and staff to the Singapore International Design Forum and, in defining a world-class university, he continued the Olympic analogy by saying universities are "decathletes - a competition run over 10 events, not one - but for university reputation building the distances are set at the level of a marathon - many marathons in fact!"
So the ALP is right that $1 million will not dent the losses to the arts in universities and the commercial employment-fodder philosophy of the Government is an additional cause of the narrowing of universities which will prevent them from being world-class. All we need to know now is how the ALP proposes to solve both the financial and attudinal problems which are beginning to look intractable. And we do need to know now, rather than later, before too many demoralised staff have been lost and the arts traditions sink forever.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 27 July 1998
1998: Feature article on Bren Weatherstone
Bren Weatherstone is the ACT's representative in the National Association for Drama in Education, and recently attended the International Drama/Theatre Education Association's Congress in Kenya representing Australia.
She is, of course, not merely a peripatetic representative but is a teacher of Drama at Hawker College, where she has established a reputation since 1995 for intense, stage-wise student productions.
Drama is not only theatre, but is a vehicle for learning social skills and artistic understanding. Many Drama students never perform in public but gain confidence and appreciation of theatre from "workshop" classes. Bren Weatherstone does it all.
So why did she go to Africa? And how did she get there? And what really happened?
Addiction to cross-fertilisation is Bren's first concern. Working "in a dark room with students all day" causes professional stimulus deprivation. Meeting a core group of drama education professionals each year, as she has done regularly for the last 10, stops sterility which even academic reading can't do. One special experience was learning how to put the theories of Augustus Boal into practice. Learning the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed, Bren's students have identified oppression in Belconnen. Usually they feel stymied by such problems, but have worked out alternatives and voluntarily followed up with 2 days' workshops with Community Aid Abroad.
At the Congress in Kenya, Bren was able to follow this theme further, meeting French clown Alberto and a Dalit, Nicholas Chinnapan, who use Boal's methods with Untouchables in India. And so the educational process circles around from theatre practitioners across the world through teachers like Bren Weatherstone to students in our schools.
Going to an education focussed conference was not enough for Bren, however. A friend had left South Africa when she was 18 and wanted to retrace her early steps from Cape Town through Botswana to Zimbabwe. Bren's archaeologist husband, Geoff Hope, wanted to study the latrines of the rock hyrax in the Drakensberg Mountains (hyraxes poo in the same place for millenia: digging in poo is a great dating technique for archaeologists, or so Geoff claims).
So after camping out with wild animals which, for some reason incomprehensible to Bren do not invade people's tents at night, the party wended their way to Grahamstown, a university centre some 40 kms inland from Port Elizabeth, for 9 days of theatre at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival (e-mail: sbnaf@foundation.intekom.com).
Here was white theatre for whites, like King Lear which mainly Afrikaans people attended, and ballet which even Bren's Afrikaans hosts found almost too expensive. Here too was white theatre about white on black experience, like Athol Fugard's The Island, reflecting on the past and future of Robben Island, directed by Jerry Pooe for the North West Arts Drama Company.
Most significantly for Bren Weatherstone, drama teacher, black theatre for blacks provided the most powerful examples of theatre as part of changing understanding inside one's own culture. From the townships and villages came works like Market Theatre's Koze Kuse Bash, conceived and directed by widely respected actor/director Sello Maake ka-Ncube. "It is as if the schizophrenia and madness of the township has taken human form" wrote Anton Burggraaf, guest writer at the Festival. "It is a horrifying indictment of a society that proclaims its freedom in so many ways, but that is trapped in a never-ending cycle of abuse."
It's certainly Bren's approach to teaching drama that her students should, like the African performers at Grahamstown, show the reality of their lives in theatrical form for their own understanding and for others to reflect upon.
What goes around comes around, always to the benefit of her students. But what doesn't go around is funding. Teachers, like so many of the artists Bren met, have to rely on almost no financial help for their own professional development. Hawker College has done its bit, providing $200 towards the Congress registration of $US400 and the ACT Drama Association will help. But when it comes to reality, delegates from developing countries need all the assistance the first world can give, so IDEA maintains a fund for this purpose, even though there are considerable difficulties about equitable distribution of the money.
Even using her long service leave and her school vacation, and some claim on tax, it's an expensive business obtaining such intensive PD. Well into thousands of dollars. At the very least we should appreciate the people, teachers and artists, who put so much into all our cultural development. At best, we should look forward to a society which provides the support these people deserve.
Yet, I suspect, Bren Weatherstone would also point out that a large proportion of the performers and teachers she saw in Kenya and South Africa need the greatest support - including, as she noted about one teacher from Sudan, the basic human right to teach according to personal integrity without fear of arrest and torture. At least she has that right in oppressed Belconnen.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
She is, of course, not merely a peripatetic representative but is a teacher of Drama at Hawker College, where she has established a reputation since 1995 for intense, stage-wise student productions.
Drama is not only theatre, but is a vehicle for learning social skills and artistic understanding. Many Drama students never perform in public but gain confidence and appreciation of theatre from "workshop" classes. Bren Weatherstone does it all.
So why did she go to Africa? And how did she get there? And what really happened?
Addiction to cross-fertilisation is Bren's first concern. Working "in a dark room with students all day" causes professional stimulus deprivation. Meeting a core group of drama education professionals each year, as she has done regularly for the last 10, stops sterility which even academic reading can't do. One special experience was learning how to put the theories of Augustus Boal into practice. Learning the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed, Bren's students have identified oppression in Belconnen. Usually they feel stymied by such problems, but have worked out alternatives and voluntarily followed up with 2 days' workshops with Community Aid Abroad.
At the Congress in Kenya, Bren was able to follow this theme further, meeting French clown Alberto and a Dalit, Nicholas Chinnapan, who use Boal's methods with Untouchables in India. And so the educational process circles around from theatre practitioners across the world through teachers like Bren Weatherstone to students in our schools.
Going to an education focussed conference was not enough for Bren, however. A friend had left South Africa when she was 18 and wanted to retrace her early steps from Cape Town through Botswana to Zimbabwe. Bren's archaeologist husband, Geoff Hope, wanted to study the latrines of the rock hyrax in the Drakensberg Mountains (hyraxes poo in the same place for millenia: digging in poo is a great dating technique for archaeologists, or so Geoff claims).
So after camping out with wild animals which, for some reason incomprehensible to Bren do not invade people's tents at night, the party wended their way to Grahamstown, a university centre some 40 kms inland from Port Elizabeth, for 9 days of theatre at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival (e-mail: sbnaf@foundation.intekom.com).
Here was white theatre for whites, like King Lear which mainly Afrikaans people attended, and ballet which even Bren's Afrikaans hosts found almost too expensive. Here too was white theatre about white on black experience, like Athol Fugard's The Island, reflecting on the past and future of Robben Island, directed by Jerry Pooe for the North West Arts Drama Company.
Most significantly for Bren Weatherstone, drama teacher, black theatre for blacks provided the most powerful examples of theatre as part of changing understanding inside one's own culture. From the townships and villages came works like Market Theatre's Koze Kuse Bash, conceived and directed by widely respected actor/director Sello Maake ka-Ncube. "It is as if the schizophrenia and madness of the township has taken human form" wrote Anton Burggraaf, guest writer at the Festival. "It is a horrifying indictment of a society that proclaims its freedom in so many ways, but that is trapped in a never-ending cycle of abuse."
It's certainly Bren's approach to teaching drama that her students should, like the African performers at Grahamstown, show the reality of their lives in theatrical form for their own understanding and for others to reflect upon.
What goes around comes around, always to the benefit of her students. But what doesn't go around is funding. Teachers, like so many of the artists Bren met, have to rely on almost no financial help for their own professional development. Hawker College has done its bit, providing $200 towards the Congress registration of $US400 and the ACT Drama Association will help. But when it comes to reality, delegates from developing countries need all the assistance the first world can give, so IDEA maintains a fund for this purpose, even though there are considerable difficulties about equitable distribution of the money.
Even using her long service leave and her school vacation, and some claim on tax, it's an expensive business obtaining such intensive PD. Well into thousands of dollars. At the very least we should appreciate the people, teachers and artists, who put so much into all our cultural development. At best, we should look forward to a society which provides the support these people deserve.
Yet, I suspect, Bren Weatherstone would also point out that a large proportion of the performers and teachers she saw in Kenya and South Africa need the greatest support - including, as she noted about one teacher from Sudan, the basic human right to teach according to personal integrity without fear of arrest and torture. At least she has that right in oppressed Belconnen.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 25 June 1998
1998: Barry Crocker in Almost a Legend
Barry Crocker in Almost a Legend at the School of Arts Cafe, Queanbeyan. Wednesday to Saturday June 24 - 27.
Where can you meet Nat King C., Tony B., Al J., Johnny M., Billy E., Frank S., Johnny R., Jerry L., Humphrey B., Jimmy S., Boris K., Dean M., Mario L. and Elvis P. all in close proximity to venison, ostrich, kangaroo, duck and crocodile pie? Only at the School of Arts Cafe in the company of Bazza. Where else would you want to be on a night so cold that he, as only Bazza could, claimed to have had a certain part of his anatomy stuck to the toilet bowl in the back paddock not long before coming on stage.
So it's all a fun fantasy of the Life of Bazza from the days of the Geelong Musical Comedy Society, which he accidentally joined in pursuit of s-e-x. On the way from natural and presumably irrepressible mimic to Queanbeyan via Las Vegas, New York, London, Australian, American and British television, Carols in the Domain, a United Nations UNICEF Concert and 33 gold records, Barry Crocker has added technique to talent and probably sings better now than ever, even though people keep saying he's dead.
Though he whinged about being the same age as Elvis who's been resting for twenty years, it's salutary to remember that Bazza is still alive and entertaining. He presents a melange, or what in the fifties of his youth would have been called a flummery, which I will define as a whipped up medley of mainly old favourites which entirely suited potato and leek soup, Aussie mixed-meat pie (excepting the ring-in ostrich - where was the emu?) and apple and peach bread pudding.
It's a great night out at the School of Arts, but it may be a waste of time trying to book by the time you read this. Still you could drop by and purchase the new CD called Bazazz behind which there is a complicated story which we never heard the end of. We did hear about the accompanist Dave Macrae, pianist and backing tape-deck player extraordinaire who wrote The Goodies theme music and played for the real Frank S.
Missed Bazza? Catch Jeanne Little in July.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Where can you meet Nat King C., Tony B., Al J., Johnny M., Billy E., Frank S., Johnny R., Jerry L., Humphrey B., Jimmy S., Boris K., Dean M., Mario L. and Elvis P. all in close proximity to venison, ostrich, kangaroo, duck and crocodile pie? Only at the School of Arts Cafe in the company of Bazza. Where else would you want to be on a night so cold that he, as only Bazza could, claimed to have had a certain part of his anatomy stuck to the toilet bowl in the back paddock not long before coming on stage.
So it's all a fun fantasy of the Life of Bazza from the days of the Geelong Musical Comedy Society, which he accidentally joined in pursuit of s-e-x. On the way from natural and presumably irrepressible mimic to Queanbeyan via Las Vegas, New York, London, Australian, American and British television, Carols in the Domain, a United Nations UNICEF Concert and 33 gold records, Barry Crocker has added technique to talent and probably sings better now than ever, even though people keep saying he's dead.
Though he whinged about being the same age as Elvis who's been resting for twenty years, it's salutary to remember that Bazza is still alive and entertaining. He presents a melange, or what in the fifties of his youth would have been called a flummery, which I will define as a whipped up medley of mainly old favourites which entirely suited potato and leek soup, Aussie mixed-meat pie (excepting the ring-in ostrich - where was the emu?) and apple and peach bread pudding.
It's a great night out at the School of Arts, but it may be a waste of time trying to book by the time you read this. Still you could drop by and purchase the new CD called Bazazz behind which there is a complicated story which we never heard the end of. We did hear about the accompanist Dave Macrae, pianist and backing tape-deck player extraordinaire who wrote The Goodies theme music and played for the real Frank S.
Missed Bazza? Catch Jeanne Little in July.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 18 June 1998
1998: Play Strindberg by Friedrich Durrenmatt
Play Strindberg by Friedrich Durrenmatt. Director Neal Roach. New Erektions Fringe Season, Currong Theatre, June 18 - 22. Professional.
"Critics are bastards." "But not imbeciles." Durrenmatt's attempt to undermine the carping class will not stop me. I will carp - about the play, and a little about the production.
Play Strindberg is a late play (1970) in the Durrenmatt canon. A re-working of Strindberg's Dance of Death, it feels as if it belongs to a Europe decades earlier than the social upheaval of 1968.
A "world-renowned military literary gentleman" can never become more than a major, and only then because he is "well-regarded by the colonel". He marries a "famous actress" who nobody has ever heard of. She should have married her cousin who on the rebound marries her friend.
The cousin's marriage breaks up; he spends 15 years "not doing much" except making millions in America; he visits the actress. The military man and the actress stay together despite hating each other. The actress is left at the end of the play with a dead husband and a lover who leaves her, presumably to make more millions. All this is played out absurdly in 12 rounds, like a boxing match.
I think even in 1970 this was old-hat. Ionesco, Beckett, Peter Weiss and Durrenmatt himself had done it all before, and better from the mid-1940's to the early 1960's. It's a play satirising a class structure which, even in Durrenmatt's Switzerland, was rapidly changing.
Yet done in the right style, Play Strindberg is a nasty nihilist farce about marriage. Sarah Snell (Alice), Peter Robinson (her husband Edgar) and Lachlan Abrahams (the cousin) have the elements of the style correct. First night was not well paced and only some of the unexpected changes in mood were done well enough to cause the nervous laughter that Durrenmatt aimed at, but the actors are good enough for this to improve through the season.
Roach's changed setting from a Danish island to "somewhere in or beyond far north Australia" doesn't work: the script is too European. The design needs a big expressionistic style, inspired by Andy Warhol or the later Super-Realist painters, to lift the play out of apparently ordinary intimacy.
An interesting but not thoroughly exciting production.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
"Critics are bastards." "But not imbeciles." Durrenmatt's attempt to undermine the carping class will not stop me. I will carp - about the play, and a little about the production.
Play Strindberg is a late play (1970) in the Durrenmatt canon. A re-working of Strindberg's Dance of Death, it feels as if it belongs to a Europe decades earlier than the social upheaval of 1968.
A "world-renowned military literary gentleman" can never become more than a major, and only then because he is "well-regarded by the colonel". He marries a "famous actress" who nobody has ever heard of. She should have married her cousin who on the rebound marries her friend.
The cousin's marriage breaks up; he spends 15 years "not doing much" except making millions in America; he visits the actress. The military man and the actress stay together despite hating each other. The actress is left at the end of the play with a dead husband and a lover who leaves her, presumably to make more millions. All this is played out absurdly in 12 rounds, like a boxing match.
I think even in 1970 this was old-hat. Ionesco, Beckett, Peter Weiss and Durrenmatt himself had done it all before, and better from the mid-1940's to the early 1960's. It's a play satirising a class structure which, even in Durrenmatt's Switzerland, was rapidly changing.
Yet done in the right style, Play Strindberg is a nasty nihilist farce about marriage. Sarah Snell (Alice), Peter Robinson (her husband Edgar) and Lachlan Abrahams (the cousin) have the elements of the style correct. First night was not well paced and only some of the unexpected changes in mood were done well enough to cause the nervous laughter that Durrenmatt aimed at, but the actors are good enough for this to improve through the season.
Roach's changed setting from a Danish island to "somewhere in or beyond far north Australia" doesn't work: the script is too European. The design needs a big expressionistic style, inspired by Andy Warhol or the later Super-Realist painters, to lift the play out of apparently ordinary intimacy.
An interesting but not thoroughly exciting production.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Saturday, 30 May 1998
1998: Feature article on Tim Stephens -Tim's in the Showbiz
Tim's in the Showbiz - a day in the life of Tim Stephens at the School of Arts Cafe. Youth Video Production Unit of the Cultural Centre Queanbeyan. Launched by Mayor Frank Pangallo MBE.
Feel the power of Queanbeyan as I did last Saturday at the City Library, and you touch the heart of the Country Town. The Mayor launches and tells stories about Tim; Tim tells kitchen stories and thanks his parents; CCQ President John McGlynn thanks everybody, including local sponsors Palmers TV; the video upstages everyone, though the sound wasn't in synch. The librarian Peter Conlon says the place is full of energy, and too full of people: there were barely enough scones, jam and cream to go around.
Not sophisticated enough for cities like Canberra, or Sydney? Perish the thought. I'm not so sure that false "Feel the Power" campaigns are better value than the community and family feeling of the country town. And Queanbeyan maintains its identity against its potentially overwhelming neighbour - perhaps because it's in another state. Maybe we need federalism to grow in diversity.
Gunnar Isaacson's quality work at the CCQ shines through in Tim's in the Showbiz. The young production team of Tom Murphy (producer/presenter), John Paul Moloney and Ian Andre (editor) have put together a documentary which is creatively shot, informative and creates the mood of the School of Arts Cafe.
An important element in the final version screened, however, was the work of technician Carl Looper, who assists CCQ - and thereby hangs a tale of young achievers at CCQ making videos of Young Achievers of Queanbeyan, but without the quality equipment needed to make original stock technically up to scratch. And even with help, the money was not there to lipsynch the computer projection.
Tim Stephens also shines through as much more than the comedian he appears as presenter at the School of Arts Cafe. We were told (by the Mayor no less) of banging about in the kitchen as Tim expresses his creativity, but in truth Tim is the House Manager in team with Pat, the Administrator, and Bill, the Theatrical Manager, forming a highly professional family company whose power is felt locally, interstate and internationally. Last year's Canberra Critics' Circle Award to the Stephens family clearly belongs equally to all three.
At the end of this year Tim will spend some time working in Sydney - though he promises never, ever, to abandon Queanbeyan - and I wonder a little if the School of Arts Cafe will be the same without him.
CCQ will continue its series of documentaries, following Megan Still, Olympic Rowing Champion, and Tim's in the Showbiz, with Nicole Smith, who established and publishes the free Entertainment Guide in Queanbeyan, and young playwright Tom Murphy, 1997 The Globe Young Shakespearean of the Year who has just left for his prize two weeks at the Globe Theatre, London.
But can this clearly valuable work carry on without equipment? The young media hopefuls have to borrow a camera, and have editing facilities so old that they can learn very little of the techniques which are now the norm in video production. The issue is two-pronged, I think.
Queanbeyan has in the CCQ an original outfit that could easily be outshone by a Canberra group - except that the country town community feeling is what helps produce the quality. So I hope that the Queanbeyan Council, already strongly supportive via Ann Rocca and John Wright, can find a way to establish CCQ on a firmer footing than its current hold on a likely-to-be-condemned building.
And I suspect that without improved equipment, young people - even with a drive to learn equal to the team behind Tim's in the Showbiz - will begin to tire of being unable to begin with technically good pictures. With good basic equipment, they will be excited to learn production and editing, knowing that the final product will stand up in public without apology. Maybe this needs a one-off injection of funds which Queanbeyan Council's Donation Fund could provide, with some sponsorship from a supplier.
It's worth looking at, because these CCQ documentaries help the community celebrate their own young people's achievements and record the town's history - and they're well enough made to be worth looking at in their own right. If it were technically up to broadcast standard, Tim's in the Showbiz could well go further afield.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Feel the power of Queanbeyan as I did last Saturday at the City Library, and you touch the heart of the Country Town. The Mayor launches and tells stories about Tim; Tim tells kitchen stories and thanks his parents; CCQ President John McGlynn thanks everybody, including local sponsors Palmers TV; the video upstages everyone, though the sound wasn't in synch. The librarian Peter Conlon says the place is full of energy, and too full of people: there were barely enough scones, jam and cream to go around.
Not sophisticated enough for cities like Canberra, or Sydney? Perish the thought. I'm not so sure that false "Feel the Power" campaigns are better value than the community and family feeling of the country town. And Queanbeyan maintains its identity against its potentially overwhelming neighbour - perhaps because it's in another state. Maybe we need federalism to grow in diversity.
Gunnar Isaacson's quality work at the CCQ shines through in Tim's in the Showbiz. The young production team of Tom Murphy (producer/presenter), John Paul Moloney and Ian Andre (editor) have put together a documentary which is creatively shot, informative and creates the mood of the School of Arts Cafe.
An important element in the final version screened, however, was the work of technician Carl Looper, who assists CCQ - and thereby hangs a tale of young achievers at CCQ making videos of Young Achievers of Queanbeyan, but without the quality equipment needed to make original stock technically up to scratch. And even with help, the money was not there to lipsynch the computer projection.
Tim Stephens also shines through as much more than the comedian he appears as presenter at the School of Arts Cafe. We were told (by the Mayor no less) of banging about in the kitchen as Tim expresses his creativity, but in truth Tim is the House Manager in team with Pat, the Administrator, and Bill, the Theatrical Manager, forming a highly professional family company whose power is felt locally, interstate and internationally. Last year's Canberra Critics' Circle Award to the Stephens family clearly belongs equally to all three.
At the end of this year Tim will spend some time working in Sydney - though he promises never, ever, to abandon Queanbeyan - and I wonder a little if the School of Arts Cafe will be the same without him.
CCQ will continue its series of documentaries, following Megan Still, Olympic Rowing Champion, and Tim's in the Showbiz, with Nicole Smith, who established and publishes the free Entertainment Guide in Queanbeyan, and young playwright Tom Murphy, 1997 The Globe Young Shakespearean of the Year who has just left for his prize two weeks at the Globe Theatre, London.
But can this clearly valuable work carry on without equipment? The young media hopefuls have to borrow a camera, and have editing facilities so old that they can learn very little of the techniques which are now the norm in video production. The issue is two-pronged, I think.
Queanbeyan has in the CCQ an original outfit that could easily be outshone by a Canberra group - except that the country town community feeling is what helps produce the quality. So I hope that the Queanbeyan Council, already strongly supportive via Ann Rocca and John Wright, can find a way to establish CCQ on a firmer footing than its current hold on a likely-to-be-condemned building.
And I suspect that without improved equipment, young people - even with a drive to learn equal to the team behind Tim's in the Showbiz - will begin to tire of being unable to begin with technically good pictures. With good basic equipment, they will be excited to learn production and editing, knowing that the final product will stand up in public without apology. Maybe this needs a one-off injection of funds which Queanbeyan Council's Donation Fund could provide, with some sponsorship from a supplier.
It's worth looking at, because these CCQ documentaries help the community celebrate their own young people's achievements and record the town's history - and they're well enough made to be worth looking at in their own right. If it were technically up to broadcast standard, Tim's in the Showbiz could well go further afield.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 26 May 1998
1998: Honour the Grief Ceremony. Commentary - National Sorry Day
Honour the Grief Ceremony. National Sorry Day at Parliament House. Marking the first anniversary of the "Bringing Them Home" Report.
By Frank McKone
A single candle "to light their way home".
"It was like a warm wind blowing through" said someone who couldn't get in to the Theatrette and watched with the crowd outside on closed circuit television. Inside the most extraordinary feelings of deep sadness for the terrible wrongs done in the name of doing good mixed with an amazing elation that our culture has changed forever.
I have experienced wonderful theatre before - where all the elements of lighting, sound, colour, costume and character come together with stunning effect. But artifice can never achieve real theatre like this Honouring the Grief. One candle was enough. This is the drama of our human origins, the storytelling which began long before there were theatres to separate us from the immediate experience of our emotions. And it was Theatre of Integrity.
Through a few thicknesses of cold marble, the Theatre of Insincerity was playing - the bear-baiting and bull-roaring of Question Time. The finger-stabbing, the silly-smiling, the fake-aggression and the deals behind the scenes. This was on a different closed-circuit. Who can be bothered to seriously cheer when one or other cliche role-player briefly wins a telling point?
When Gatjil Djerrkura rose to speak, with tears in his eyes, as people across the cultures held hands and personally expressed their sorrow while Torres Strait Islanders sang a slow hymn, he was heard by all of us with complete respect. When he explained that to say "Sorry" is nothing to do with guilt, but is to express sorrow and so allow us all to go forward, everyone applauded. When he described the people he had met who refuse to say sorry, he spoke with dignity and respect about how Sorry Day is also for them. The standing ovation he received was genuine, spontaneous and felt as if it should never end.
O that this might happen in that other Theatre of Parliament. I fear the hot breath and icy stares of adversarial government will never notice the warm wind there. I wish both the "Other Places" were as irrelevant as they seemed on National Sorry Day.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
By Frank McKone
A single candle "to light their way home".
"It was like a warm wind blowing through" said someone who couldn't get in to the Theatrette and watched with the crowd outside on closed circuit television. Inside the most extraordinary feelings of deep sadness for the terrible wrongs done in the name of doing good mixed with an amazing elation that our culture has changed forever.
I have experienced wonderful theatre before - where all the elements of lighting, sound, colour, costume and character come together with stunning effect. But artifice can never achieve real theatre like this Honouring the Grief. One candle was enough. This is the drama of our human origins, the storytelling which began long before there were theatres to separate us from the immediate experience of our emotions. And it was Theatre of Integrity.
Through a few thicknesses of cold marble, the Theatre of Insincerity was playing - the bear-baiting and bull-roaring of Question Time. The finger-stabbing, the silly-smiling, the fake-aggression and the deals behind the scenes. This was on a different closed-circuit. Who can be bothered to seriously cheer when one or other cliche role-player briefly wins a telling point?
When Gatjil Djerrkura rose to speak, with tears in his eyes, as people across the cultures held hands and personally expressed their sorrow while Torres Strait Islanders sang a slow hymn, he was heard by all of us with complete respect. When he explained that to say "Sorry" is nothing to do with guilt, but is to express sorrow and so allow us all to go forward, everyone applauded. When he described the people he had met who refuse to say sorry, he spoke with dignity and respect about how Sorry Day is also for them. The standing ovation he received was genuine, spontaneous and felt as if it should never end.
O that this might happen in that other Theatre of Parliament. I fear the hot breath and icy stares of adversarial government will never notice the warm wind there. I wish both the "Other Places" were as irrelevant as they seemed on National Sorry Day.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 25 May 1998
1998: Cliffhanger by Mardi McConnochie
Cliffhanger by Mardi McConnochie. The Jigsaw Company directed by Lynette Wallis at The Street Theatre, Thursday to Saturday May 28 - 30 and June 4 - 6, 1998, 8 pm. Professional.
The Jigsaw Company must be the oldest fully professional theatre company in Canberra, coming up to 22 this year. Originally funded largely by ACT Education as our theatre-in-education company, Jigsaw has continued to win contracts every three years through the 1980's and '90's giving school children an education in and through theatre - and professionally developing the teachers.
Cliffhanger more than maintains Jigsaw's reputation - it extends into a new form of theatre. Like the new "young adult" novel, this is theatre which begins to cross over the boundary between genres.
It is no longer theatre for children. The characters are young but their chaotic feelings, their internalised restraints and excesses, and the power of the future over the choices they make now, place them in the adult world. Yet the theatrical form - the acting style, the design, the use of comedy - is directly in the theatre-in-education tradition. Probably the nearest other genres are the Workers' Theatre and Community Theatre of recent decades, but they usually espouse a clear political or social viewpoint.
McConnochie has stuck to the integrity of theatre-in-education which can raise issues but must not be didactic or polemical. Wallis's direction, and the characterisation and timing skills of Jane O'Donnell (Katie) and Nick Hardcastle (Stefan), create a play which is just as much an education for adults - about their own lives in retrospect - as it is for young people trying to deal with love in an unstable out-of-control world. It is a tough play, though leavened by humour, multi-media (used in very innovative ways) and stunts dangerous enough to require a stunt director (Adam Kronenberg).
Cliffhanger is playing school matinees as well as evenings at The Street. I think late teenagers and their parents should go, together or separately, and young ragers up to at least 25 will surely recognise themselves and enjoy the experience. I also recommend to Playing Australia that they help fund the projected country town tour, especially where an original Palais Picture Theatre still stands. See Cliffhanger, and you'll see why.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
The Jigsaw Company must be the oldest fully professional theatre company in Canberra, coming up to 22 this year. Originally funded largely by ACT Education as our theatre-in-education company, Jigsaw has continued to win contracts every three years through the 1980's and '90's giving school children an education in and through theatre - and professionally developing the teachers.
Cliffhanger more than maintains Jigsaw's reputation - it extends into a new form of theatre. Like the new "young adult" novel, this is theatre which begins to cross over the boundary between genres.
It is no longer theatre for children. The characters are young but their chaotic feelings, their internalised restraints and excesses, and the power of the future over the choices they make now, place them in the adult world. Yet the theatrical form - the acting style, the design, the use of comedy - is directly in the theatre-in-education tradition. Probably the nearest other genres are the Workers' Theatre and Community Theatre of recent decades, but they usually espouse a clear political or social viewpoint.
McConnochie has stuck to the integrity of theatre-in-education which can raise issues but must not be didactic or polemical. Wallis's direction, and the characterisation and timing skills of Jane O'Donnell (Katie) and Nick Hardcastle (Stefan), create a play which is just as much an education for adults - about their own lives in retrospect - as it is for young people trying to deal with love in an unstable out-of-control world. It is a tough play, though leavened by humour, multi-media (used in very innovative ways) and stunts dangerous enough to require a stunt director (Adam Kronenberg).
Cliffhanger is playing school matinees as well as evenings at The Street. I think late teenagers and their parents should go, together or separately, and young ragers up to at least 25 will surely recognise themselves and enjoy the experience. I also recommend to Playing Australia that they help fund the projected country town tour, especially where an original Palais Picture Theatre still stands. See Cliffhanger, and you'll see why.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 24 May 1998
1998: Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett. Paradox Theatre directed by Ian Carcary at Currong Theatre. May 21-June 6, 1998, Wednesdays to Saturdays
I think there are three ways that Guards! Guards! can be played. As a broad comedy with lots of slapstick timing, in an English tradition which goes right back to Henry IV. Or it could be a biting satire about political power. It could also be done in the whimsy tradition.
Unfortunately Carcary seems to me unsure about which way to do it. Errol the Swamp Dragon is tickled under the chin continuously, but the light flights of fantasy are not played consistently. The Thieves Guild and the Watch have elements of comedy, but the pacing is never quite up to the mark. The Patrician, on the other hand, makes a final speech about how good people are only good at getting rid of bad people, but only bad people know how to run a country. This is an expose of dictatorship ("It isn't that good people say yes to bad people; it's that they don't say no"). It was played so understated and seemed so unassailable that I'm sure I heard it said in Indonesia this week.
As usual for Paradox, the costumes, sound and lighting effects are excellent, especially for such a small theatre. Diction was clear and the storyline - twisted as Pratchett's mind can be - is easily followed. Among Pratchett fans (there was obviously one group in Friday's audience) the jokes, with which we are all familiar from Monty Python days, got their laughs. But for me the momentum was lost too often, though it seemed to come together a bit better in the second half. The non-sequiturs and double takes which are Pratchett's hallmarks just weren't played up enough, and the audience responded spasmodically rather than with the flow of delight which I expected.
So which is it to be: rough comedy, hard-hitting politics or gentle fantasy? Maybe in the final weeks of the run, this production will settle in and take us away with the fairies - or rather the dragons.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
I think there are three ways that Guards! Guards! can be played. As a broad comedy with lots of slapstick timing, in an English tradition which goes right back to Henry IV. Or it could be a biting satire about political power. It could also be done in the whimsy tradition.
Unfortunately Carcary seems to me unsure about which way to do it. Errol the Swamp Dragon is tickled under the chin continuously, but the light flights of fantasy are not played consistently. The Thieves Guild and the Watch have elements of comedy, but the pacing is never quite up to the mark. The Patrician, on the other hand, makes a final speech about how good people are only good at getting rid of bad people, but only bad people know how to run a country. This is an expose of dictatorship ("It isn't that good people say yes to bad people; it's that they don't say no"). It was played so understated and seemed so unassailable that I'm sure I heard it said in Indonesia this week.
As usual for Paradox, the costumes, sound and lighting effects are excellent, especially for such a small theatre. Diction was clear and the storyline - twisted as Pratchett's mind can be - is easily followed. Among Pratchett fans (there was obviously one group in Friday's audience) the jokes, with which we are all familiar from Monty Python days, got their laughs. But for me the momentum was lost too often, though it seemed to come together a bit better in the second half. The non-sequiturs and double takes which are Pratchett's hallmarks just weren't played up enough, and the audience responded spasmodically rather than with the flow of delight which I expected.
So which is it to be: rough comedy, hard-hitting politics or gentle fantasy? Maybe in the final weeks of the run, this production will settle in and take us away with the fairies - or rather the dragons.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 7 May 1998
1998: Feature article - Interview with Tom Murphy
[Tom Murphy, later known as Tommy Murphy, went on to become a significant Australian playwright. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Murphy_%28Australian_playwright%29]
"I'll stay with something till I find something good in it," said 18 year old Tom Murphy over chips and gravy at the Central Cafe, Queanbeyan. For the young playwright, recently back from a United Nations Youth Association forum in The Hague, and visits to New York, Sweden and Norway, there was no incongruity. The world may be an oyster, but Murphy knows that a young blade needs to be determined to open it up.
The UNYA trip seemed to be accidental. They needed a boy to represent the ACT at the national meeting, and Tom put up his hand - and then was selected for Holland. The Cultural Centre Queanbeyan (CCQ) came in on the back of the UN, asking Murphy to explore similar young people's theatre and media organisations, largely following up CCQ's contacts in Europe and USA through their inimitable director, Gunnar Isaacson.
Murphy, already having had a successful production of For God, Queen and Country directed by Garry Fry and become the Shakespeare Globe Centre's Young Shakespearean of the Year in 1997, as well as completing his Year 12 - feeling a little guilty for being too busy to help much at CCQ - has agreed to be a roving promoter especially now that CCQ is taking on a new and already well-loved teacher, Allan Wylie.
But the nub of Tom Murphy now is a new script, as yet in first draft, growing out of his experience finishing school and finding himself alone and travelling. He met media directors and observed productions: "Of course Tom Murphy will be welcome"; "He is just great"; "He seems like a very nice guy". Email provides instant responses across the world, while Tom is sending back messages about the Media Factory in Sweden: "They send their regards and look forward to future contact with us. They provide a wonderful service to the community, the young people and to art here. It is somewhat of a dream for CCQ because of the range of people it reaches. I will explain more on my return but I hope this will help the vision of CCQ. Thank you for everything. I cannot express how amazing this is and has been. I have seen so much and met so many inspirational people."
For CCQ's Intima Theatre, The House on the Hill has been written to help Murphy resolve, through a group of characters more or less his own age, touring Parliament House today, in Paris and in a Museum of the Future, shadowed by their "minds", how he feels about his options as the world opens up before him. Each character represents each of the different approaches Murphy can imagine; each "mind" shadow is like his own capacity to reflect on his potential choices. Though he lives in this crowded scene, the least determined among these characters - currently named Troy - the most apparently settled, the one most unlike the organised always-going-somewhere Tom Murphy --- just disappears.
Felicity: I wonder what ever happened to him.
Ben: We always will.
Murphy is, to my mind, at core a writer. He is excited by writing. He is worried about the writing. He intends to go to university to see what good he can find in the study of literature, history and philosophy. Why philosophy? Because it's all about questioning. What is life about? You achieve things and there are things you don't achieve, but then you look at all these things as experiences you can use - and you look for the next thing you can stay with "till I find something good in it". This year "I'm examining what my process is - I'm training myself before I get any training".
Unlike Troy, Tom Murphy won't disappear. He'll extract every drop of juice from the Shakespeare Globe Centre in London in June. He'll chip away with his sharp strong blade. I wouldn't be surprised if he achieves his aim of becoming a theatre professional in the seven years he has set himself. Yet somehow he is like Troy. While others lock themselves in to the conventions of achievement - the next paper qualification - Murphy will move to the next necessary thing rather than merely satisfy an obligation. Slippery as an oyster, he can disappear from one scene to another. I suspect the rest of us will gain from the experience.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
"I'll stay with something till I find something good in it," said 18 year old Tom Murphy over chips and gravy at the Central Cafe, Queanbeyan. For the young playwright, recently back from a United Nations Youth Association forum in The Hague, and visits to New York, Sweden and Norway, there was no incongruity. The world may be an oyster, but Murphy knows that a young blade needs to be determined to open it up.
The UNYA trip seemed to be accidental. They needed a boy to represent the ACT at the national meeting, and Tom put up his hand - and then was selected for Holland. The Cultural Centre Queanbeyan (CCQ) came in on the back of the UN, asking Murphy to explore similar young people's theatre and media organisations, largely following up CCQ's contacts in Europe and USA through their inimitable director, Gunnar Isaacson.
Murphy, already having had a successful production of For God, Queen and Country directed by Garry Fry and become the Shakespeare Globe Centre's Young Shakespearean of the Year in 1997, as well as completing his Year 12 - feeling a little guilty for being too busy to help much at CCQ - has agreed to be a roving promoter especially now that CCQ is taking on a new and already well-loved teacher, Allan Wylie.
But the nub of Tom Murphy now is a new script, as yet in first draft, growing out of his experience finishing school and finding himself alone and travelling. He met media directors and observed productions: "Of course Tom Murphy will be welcome"; "He is just great"; "He seems like a very nice guy". Email provides instant responses across the world, while Tom is sending back messages about the Media Factory in Sweden: "They send their regards and look forward to future contact with us. They provide a wonderful service to the community, the young people and to art here. It is somewhat of a dream for CCQ because of the range of people it reaches. I will explain more on my return but I hope this will help the vision of CCQ. Thank you for everything. I cannot express how amazing this is and has been. I have seen so much and met so many inspirational people."
For CCQ's Intima Theatre, The House on the Hill has been written to help Murphy resolve, through a group of characters more or less his own age, touring Parliament House today, in Paris and in a Museum of the Future, shadowed by their "minds", how he feels about his options as the world opens up before him. Each character represents each of the different approaches Murphy can imagine; each "mind" shadow is like his own capacity to reflect on his potential choices. Though he lives in this crowded scene, the least determined among these characters - currently named Troy - the most apparently settled, the one most unlike the organised always-going-somewhere Tom Murphy --- just disappears.
Felicity: I wonder what ever happened to him.
Ben: We always will.
Murphy is, to my mind, at core a writer. He is excited by writing. He is worried about the writing. He intends to go to university to see what good he can find in the study of literature, history and philosophy. Why philosophy? Because it's all about questioning. What is life about? You achieve things and there are things you don't achieve, but then you look at all these things as experiences you can use - and you look for the next thing you can stay with "till I find something good in it". This year "I'm examining what my process is - I'm training myself before I get any training".
Unlike Troy, Tom Murphy won't disappear. He'll extract every drop of juice from the Shakespeare Globe Centre in London in June. He'll chip away with his sharp strong blade. I wouldn't be surprised if he achieves his aim of becoming a theatre professional in the seven years he has set himself. Yet somehow he is like Troy. While others lock themselves in to the conventions of achievement - the next paper qualification - Murphy will move to the next necessary thing rather than merely satisfy an obligation. Slippery as an oyster, he can disappear from one scene to another. I suspect the rest of us will gain from the experience.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 4 May 1998
1998: Top-Secret Forensic-Science
Top-Secret Forensic-Science. Australian Federal Police at the Australian Science Festival May 4 - 6, 1998.
The scenario: Tom Stoewer, criminal, breaks into the house before our very eyes, is discovered and challenged inside. Three shots ring out. A phone call is made to Emergency 000, but Tom escapes before the police can reach the crime scene.
Tom removes his balaclava and returns to his post, manning the AFP display in another part of the exhibition, while the school students are shown the crime scene by Petra Clissold; study the fingerprints found at the scene with David Reece and Hilary Fletcher; compare the shoe prints down to the slightest detail with John Doyle; put together the photofit image for the media release with help from Wendy Griffiths; and learn how to use ultraviolet and infrared photography equipment with Phil Turner.
How much can they learn about the crime and the criminal from the forensic evidence? Not enough in an hour to convict, perhaps, but certainly enough to realise what a painstaking task forensic science is and to see how crucial this evidence may be to finding out the truth.
Top-Secret Forensic-Science is not ordinary theatre, though it uses theatrical elements to set the scene. It is a good example of experiential education, however, and I discovered from coordinator Keith Howard that the Australian and New Zealand Forensic Science Society has been using the scenario method since the early 1990's for competency based training of police officers in forensic techniques. They have two houses at the Majura driver training centre where they can set up full scale crime scenes which will test the trainees to the limit - both AFP and other State police are trained here.
Theatre is experience deliberately removed from reality into a special frame, which we enter through the foyer and leave as we go for coffee after the show. Forensic scientists have discovered, out of the necessity to train police properly, that a fictional scenario - a little bit of theatre - can be the source of learning as good as the real thing. Even better, perhaps, as details can be included which might be rare occurrences on the job. Theatre is emotional experience; here is theatre serving science.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
The scenario: Tom Stoewer, criminal, breaks into the house before our very eyes, is discovered and challenged inside. Three shots ring out. A phone call is made to Emergency 000, but Tom escapes before the police can reach the crime scene.
Tom removes his balaclava and returns to his post, manning the AFP display in another part of the exhibition, while the school students are shown the crime scene by Petra Clissold; study the fingerprints found at the scene with David Reece and Hilary Fletcher; compare the shoe prints down to the slightest detail with John Doyle; put together the photofit image for the media release with help from Wendy Griffiths; and learn how to use ultraviolet and infrared photography equipment with Phil Turner.
How much can they learn about the crime and the criminal from the forensic evidence? Not enough in an hour to convict, perhaps, but certainly enough to realise what a painstaking task forensic science is and to see how crucial this evidence may be to finding out the truth.
Top-Secret Forensic-Science is not ordinary theatre, though it uses theatrical elements to set the scene. It is a good example of experiential education, however, and I discovered from coordinator Keith Howard that the Australian and New Zealand Forensic Science Society has been using the scenario method since the early 1990's for competency based training of police officers in forensic techniques. They have two houses at the Majura driver training centre where they can set up full scale crime scenes which will test the trainees to the limit - both AFP and other State police are trained here.
Theatre is experience deliberately removed from reality into a special frame, which we enter through the foyer and leave as we go for coffee after the show. Forensic scientists have discovered, out of the necessity to train police properly, that a fictional scenario - a little bit of theatre - can be the source of learning as good as the real thing. Even better, perhaps, as details can be included which might be rare occurrences on the job. Theatre is emotional experience; here is theatre serving science.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
1998: Science Smorgasbord
Science Smorgasbord. The Artful Scientists: Travelling Science Shows for Schools. Australian Science Festival May 2 - 6, 1998.
The Artful Scientists, Rebecca Colless (biologist) and Alan Reid (physicist) do the Professor Julius Sumner Miller thing, but their young audiences don't know about that - and the response I saw showed they wouldn't have worried if they did. Even when they knew what would happen, they cheered when the lid blew off the coffee tin and liquid nitrogen shrank the balloon.
Dramatic suspense, moments of revelation, climaxes galore and denouements of relief kept the children thoroughly entertained - even when I, a balding old man with glasses, was brought out to go fishing with an electromagnet. The atmosphere was electric, partly I thought because the Australian Science Festival arrangements gave the performers a limited time - not enough to relax, play more with ideas or ask the questions during or after the show which would lead to more understanding of the science behind the demonstrations. The hubbub and the need to push on turned the show more into a slick set of tricks.
The Festival has brought in young Australian representatives from the Science and Mathematics Olympiads to introduce the events. Thomas Lam did his bit very well, and made me start thinking about science shows. The Artful Scientists are certainly highly entertaining, but I wondered why it is that fewer people seem to be studying science at matriculation level than in the past? Though I find drama in holding a glass of water upside down above an audience member's head, with only a margarine container lid and air pressure to prevent a wet disaster, does this experience transfer to young people deciding to study science?
Despite my predilection towards seeing drama as the solution of all problems, maybe some scientific research is needed here. Colless and Reid are Artful Scientists indeed, but I felt I needed to see some educational proof. Of course the show I saw is not the full range of work they present in schools and teachers respond with enthusiasm. Yet I can't help fearing that more science as entertainment might mean less science as wonderment, personal discovery, mathematical analysis and new truths - where science and art come together.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
The Artful Scientists, Rebecca Colless (biologist) and Alan Reid (physicist) do the Professor Julius Sumner Miller thing, but their young audiences don't know about that - and the response I saw showed they wouldn't have worried if they did. Even when they knew what would happen, they cheered when the lid blew off the coffee tin and liquid nitrogen shrank the balloon.
Dramatic suspense, moments of revelation, climaxes galore and denouements of relief kept the children thoroughly entertained - even when I, a balding old man with glasses, was brought out to go fishing with an electromagnet. The atmosphere was electric, partly I thought because the Australian Science Festival arrangements gave the performers a limited time - not enough to relax, play more with ideas or ask the questions during or after the show which would lead to more understanding of the science behind the demonstrations. The hubbub and the need to push on turned the show more into a slick set of tricks.
The Festival has brought in young Australian representatives from the Science and Mathematics Olympiads to introduce the events. Thomas Lam did his bit very well, and made me start thinking about science shows. The Artful Scientists are certainly highly entertaining, but I wondered why it is that fewer people seem to be studying science at matriculation level than in the past? Though I find drama in holding a glass of water upside down above an audience member's head, with only a margarine container lid and air pressure to prevent a wet disaster, does this experience transfer to young people deciding to study science?
Despite my predilection towards seeing drama as the solution of all problems, maybe some scientific research is needed here. Colless and Reid are Artful Scientists indeed, but I felt I needed to see some educational proof. Of course the show I saw is not the full range of work they present in schools and teachers respond with enthusiasm. Yet I can't help fearing that more science as entertainment might mean less science as wonderment, personal discovery, mathematical analysis and new truths - where science and art come together.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
1998: Mary Anning: A Curious Woman by Suzanne Roux
Mary Anning: A Curious Woman. Written and directed by Suzanne Roux. ?Cogito at the Australian Science Festival, May 2 - 6, 1998.
Top science theatre-in-education, Mary Anning is true to both science and theatre. Donna Cohen is a disciplined professional actor and a highly experienced scientific researcher. She represents what Mary Anning (1799 - 1847) might have become if her social class and the male-controlled scientific establishment of her day had been different.
Mary Anning is a forgotten figure in science - her discoveries of the ichthyosaurus and the pterodactyl fossils were fundamental to our interest in dinosaurs. Yet I had never heard of her till now. The fossils, on display in places like the Natural History Museum in London, are labelled with the names of the collectors who bought them from Mary Anning - but not with her name. She did the work, became the expert, was a public figure visited by the rich and famous in her curiosity shop, but has disappeared from history.
Suzanne Roux - actor, writer and student of philosophy - introduces Mary Anning through a short lecture on the history of the earth, always a fascination to Year 5 - 8 students. Cohen, in a sense, plays herself as lecturer: a very good one at that. After the show, How do we date fossils? becomes an important question. The real scientist provides the answers and discusses the problems.
When Mary Anning appears, the emotional stuff of science draws the audience in to the story of a girl, her carpenter father (whose hammer she used to chip out fossils after his death in a cliff collapse), her dog (killed the same way as her father), her discovery of wonderful new "curiosities", her fame and the way she was viewed by famous scientists, her death from breast cancer. Cohen expertly creates in us the feelings of each episode, and without dwelling on her sad untimely end, smoothly reviews the responses to Mary's death as she seems to look down from on high. I felt as if Mary is still hanging around up there 150 years down the track, watching Roux and Cohen do the right thing by her at last.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Top science theatre-in-education, Mary Anning is true to both science and theatre. Donna Cohen is a disciplined professional actor and a highly experienced scientific researcher. She represents what Mary Anning (1799 - 1847) might have become if her social class and the male-controlled scientific establishment of her day had been different.
Mary Anning is a forgotten figure in science - her discoveries of the ichthyosaurus and the pterodactyl fossils were fundamental to our interest in dinosaurs. Yet I had never heard of her till now. The fossils, on display in places like the Natural History Museum in London, are labelled with the names of the collectors who bought them from Mary Anning - but not with her name. She did the work, became the expert, was a public figure visited by the rich and famous in her curiosity shop, but has disappeared from history.
Suzanne Roux - actor, writer and student of philosophy - introduces Mary Anning through a short lecture on the history of the earth, always a fascination to Year 5 - 8 students. Cohen, in a sense, plays herself as lecturer: a very good one at that. After the show, How do we date fossils? becomes an important question. The real scientist provides the answers and discusses the problems.
When Mary Anning appears, the emotional stuff of science draws the audience in to the story of a girl, her carpenter father (whose hammer she used to chip out fossils after his death in a cliff collapse), her dog (killed the same way as her father), her discovery of wonderful new "curiosities", her fame and the way she was viewed by famous scientists, her death from breast cancer. Cohen expertly creates in us the feelings of each episode, and without dwelling on her sad untimely end, smoothly reviews the responses to Mary's death as she seems to look down from on high. I felt as if Mary is still hanging around up there 150 years down the track, watching Roux and Cohen do the right thing by her at last.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 1 May 1998
Cosi by Louis Nowra
Cosi by Louis Nowra. Free-Rain Theatre Company at Currong Theatre, Gorman House, Thurs - Sat April 30 - May 9, 1998.
Nowra's play works at many different levels, emphasising the humanity of mentally ill people against the background of the inhumanity of warfare. Anne Somes' production, with a young company, of this often funny but terribly ironic drama is competent and effective, though without the subtlety which a fully professional company would bring to it.
The play (rather than the film version) is well worth seeing for tight interweaving of characters and themes. Somes has formed a strong ensemble of actors who, although differing in degrees of experience, each create a clearly delineated character. The result is a definite sense of purpose. The humour and the issues in the script come through.
This production is part of the New EreKtions program in which The Jigsaw Company supports the work of young companies. Director Lynnette Wallis sees the program as a natural extension of Jigsaw's educational drama work in schools, providing a continuing development opportunity for our young adults. This production of Cosi demonstrates the value, and success, of Jigsaw's aims.
Cosi is confronting, as the young Lewis (immediately called "Jerry" by his cast) attempts to direct a theatre production with inhabitants of a Melbourne mental institution in 1971. Sexual and destructive motivations are expressed with few inhibitions; violent mood swings take place in an institutional space which includes us, the audience. And Somes added large projections of those horrifying television news images which turned people in the US and here against the war in Vietnam. It really is disturbing to see these again, so explicit and uncompromising, and unavoidable.
My personal response was that presenting these images in between the Nowra scenes became a distraction from the central focus of Lewis's coming to recognise how feeling for each other is more important than what we feel about, or against, each other. Julie, drug addict and potential sexual partner for Lewis, mentions the boredom of watching TV in the institutional lounge room. Maybe, for me, a representation of this lounge, with the TV news from Vietnam playing continuously, mostly silently, in the background, might have clarified the symbolic nature of the play and have had a more subtle effect.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Nowra's play works at many different levels, emphasising the humanity of mentally ill people against the background of the inhumanity of warfare. Anne Somes' production, with a young company, of this often funny but terribly ironic drama is competent and effective, though without the subtlety which a fully professional company would bring to it.
The play (rather than the film version) is well worth seeing for tight interweaving of characters and themes. Somes has formed a strong ensemble of actors who, although differing in degrees of experience, each create a clearly delineated character. The result is a definite sense of purpose. The humour and the issues in the script come through.
This production is part of the New EreKtions program in which The Jigsaw Company supports the work of young companies. Director Lynnette Wallis sees the program as a natural extension of Jigsaw's educational drama work in schools, providing a continuing development opportunity for our young adults. This production of Cosi demonstrates the value, and success, of Jigsaw's aims.
Cosi is confronting, as the young Lewis (immediately called "Jerry" by his cast) attempts to direct a theatre production with inhabitants of a Melbourne mental institution in 1971. Sexual and destructive motivations are expressed with few inhibitions; violent mood swings take place in an institutional space which includes us, the audience. And Somes added large projections of those horrifying television news images which turned people in the US and here against the war in Vietnam. It really is disturbing to see these again, so explicit and uncompromising, and unavoidable.
My personal response was that presenting these images in between the Nowra scenes became a distraction from the central focus of Lewis's coming to recognise how feeling for each other is more important than what we feel about, or against, each other. Julie, drug addict and potential sexual partner for Lewis, mentions the boredom of watching TV in the institutional lounge room. Maybe, for me, a representation of this lounge, with the TV news from Vietnam playing continuously, mostly silently, in the background, might have clarified the symbolic nature of the play and have had a more subtle effect.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 29 April 1998
1998: Mr Affogato by Full Tilt
Mr Affogato by Full Tilt Performance Troupe. The Street Theatre Studio 8.30 pm April 29 - May 9, 1998.
Whatever you do in the next week, you should not miss this engaging, beguiling story of two hospitality venues, head-to-head in competition. The Cafe Affogato is never relaxed and comfortable and it is unlikely you will actually receive the caffe latte you hope for. But you are quite likely to win a glass of beer from Mr Tattaglia's Romany Bar. Just make sure you sit at one of the front tables. Mind you, expect to be kissed, have a hair from your very own head used to commit love's suicide, dance with a philosopher and hide a fearful soldier under your chair.
Thoroughly modern commedia dell'arte is a rare and wonderful thing - and here it is in central Canberra. One television channel which will remain nameless announced on opening night that commedia is half a century old - half a millenium, more like, still energetic, full of verbal and physical tumbling and creating continuous laughter. In a kind of children's theatre for adults, director Tony Kishawi and actors Danny Diesendorf, Robin Davidson and Mark Johnson have discovered the art in commedia, using the traditional Italian characters to comment on our lives - and the first night's highly sophisticated audience of theatricals loved it from the first Once Upon a Time.
There will be an important announcement, which will raise a great cheer, from the High Court to say that the nasty bosses have been defeated by the absolutely justified workers; and Death once again will be cheated by the power of Arlecchino's violin - but only after an agonising period of dramatic terror, when Mr Affogato gains an injunction against the playing of music at the rival Romany (read Gipsy) Bar.
I never quite worked out what happened to the Lovers, but I think they remained unrequited. The Demon did amazing handstands on a pocket handkerchief stage. The Captain waved his sword alarmingly. The Doctor (lawyer and philosophical pedant) spoke sparklingly. Mr Punch threatened terribly, but unctuously flattered his customers. And all eleven characters were played at Full Tilt by the three actors, with startling transformations. Well worth a muggacino!
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Whatever you do in the next week, you should not miss this engaging, beguiling story of two hospitality venues, head-to-head in competition. The Cafe Affogato is never relaxed and comfortable and it is unlikely you will actually receive the caffe latte you hope for. But you are quite likely to win a glass of beer from Mr Tattaglia's Romany Bar. Just make sure you sit at one of the front tables. Mind you, expect to be kissed, have a hair from your very own head used to commit love's suicide, dance with a philosopher and hide a fearful soldier under your chair.
Thoroughly modern commedia dell'arte is a rare and wonderful thing - and here it is in central Canberra. One television channel which will remain nameless announced on opening night that commedia is half a century old - half a millenium, more like, still energetic, full of verbal and physical tumbling and creating continuous laughter. In a kind of children's theatre for adults, director Tony Kishawi and actors Danny Diesendorf, Robin Davidson and Mark Johnson have discovered the art in commedia, using the traditional Italian characters to comment on our lives - and the first night's highly sophisticated audience of theatricals loved it from the first Once Upon a Time.
There will be an important announcement, which will raise a great cheer, from the High Court to say that the nasty bosses have been defeated by the absolutely justified workers; and Death once again will be cheated by the power of Arlecchino's violin - but only after an agonising period of dramatic terror, when Mr Affogato gains an injunction against the playing of music at the rival Romany (read Gipsy) Bar.
I never quite worked out what happened to the Lovers, but I think they remained unrequited. The Demon did amazing handstands on a pocket handkerchief stage. The Captain waved his sword alarmingly. The Doctor (lawyer and philosophical pedant) spoke sparklingly. Mr Punch threatened terribly, but unctuously flattered his customers. And all eleven characters were played at Full Tilt by the three actors, with startling transformations. Well worth a muggacino!
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 22 April 1998
1998: Yours Truly, Arthur Streeton.
Yours Truly, Arthur Streeton The letters of Sir Arthur Streeton between 1890 and 1942 selected and compiled by Anne Gray from the book Letters from Smike, edited by Ann Galbally and Anne Gray. Performed by Phil Roberts with music selected and performed by violinist Louise Hildyard as a tribute to Nora Clench (Mrs Arthur Streeton). The Acting Company, directed by Peter Wilkins in the New Worlds From Old exhibition space at the National Gallery of Australia, April 22 - 23, 1998.
Though there are some technical problems performing theatre in the Gallery, where acoustics are designed for people to stare, quietly, and spotlights spoil the art, the "salon" setting works wonders. For Samantha Littley, NGA's Public Programs organiser, Peter Wilkins' aim to "reflect life through the art and art through the life" has given the New Worlds From Old exhibition new meaning. This kind of cross-art experience should become a common feature of exhibitions in future.
For me it was a minor weakness that Sir Arthur was surrounded, in the only gallery where the performance could be accommodated, by American art of his period while his own "Golden Summer, Eaglemont" and "The Purple Noon's Transparent Might" stood head and shoulders above the American work, in the next room.
These paintings set the scene for Streeton's letters covering his life in England during most of this century's first two decades; his return and life at 'Olinda'; and his death in 1942. It would have been a powerful focus if they could have been set behind him as we heard him recall those early days with such clarity, in the midst of a ten year courtship, living among the "inartistic" English, an awful five years of war which took him away from Nora who had "something rare in a woman - original ideas", the sale of "Golden Summer" for $1000 guineas in 1924, and his feelings when Nora died in 1938: "I find oblivion difficult".
With simple costume changes, Phil Roberts transported us from the sometimes rather precious young Streeton, through love and war to the mature reflective artist in old age. Nora is revealed as a person of great independence, an artist in her own right, represented musically for us by Louise Hildyard. Art was made alive by the drama of Streeton's letters: I hope we will see many more projects of this kind.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Though there are some technical problems performing theatre in the Gallery, where acoustics are designed for people to stare, quietly, and spotlights spoil the art, the "salon" setting works wonders. For Samantha Littley, NGA's Public Programs organiser, Peter Wilkins' aim to "reflect life through the art and art through the life" has given the New Worlds From Old exhibition new meaning. This kind of cross-art experience should become a common feature of exhibitions in future.
For me it was a minor weakness that Sir Arthur was surrounded, in the only gallery where the performance could be accommodated, by American art of his period while his own "Golden Summer, Eaglemont" and "The Purple Noon's Transparent Might" stood head and shoulders above the American work, in the next room.
These paintings set the scene for Streeton's letters covering his life in England during most of this century's first two decades; his return and life at 'Olinda'; and his death in 1942. It would have been a powerful focus if they could have been set behind him as we heard him recall those early days with such clarity, in the midst of a ten year courtship, living among the "inartistic" English, an awful five years of war which took him away from Nora who had "something rare in a woman - original ideas", the sale of "Golden Summer" for $1000 guineas in 1924, and his feelings when Nora died in 1938: "I find oblivion difficult".
With simple costume changes, Phil Roberts transported us from the sometimes rather precious young Streeton, through love and war to the mature reflective artist in old age. Nora is revealed as a person of great independence, an artist in her own right, represented musically for us by Louise Hildyard. Art was made alive by the drama of Streeton's letters: I hope we will see many more projects of this kind.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 25 March 1998
1998: Prime Suspect by Duncan Ley
Prime Suspect by Duncan Ley. Canvas Sky Productions directed by Liz Bradley. Currong Theatre, Gorman House, March 25 till April 4, 1998.
My mother read Agatha Christie novels ad nauseam, so at a very young age my mental solution became thoroughly saturated with the murder mystery genre.
Early childhood experience, however, did not innoculate me against Shakespeare. It was never a question of, Who killed Hamlet? but how to understand the complex of relationships which led Laertes to do the dishonorable deed, and how to come to terms with the tragedies which we all play out in real life.
Agatha Christie's stories were, of course, never to be confused with reality. They were intellectual games on a par with my child prodigy career in chinese checkers. I failed at chess, but that was probably because Shakespeare got to me first.
Prime Suspect, says the program, "was written primarily as a personal writing exercise" and "the primary role of the thriller is to entertain". I was satisfied neither at the Miss Marples nor the Hamlet ends of the thriller continuum.
The Catch-22 situation (if Jonathon is mad he will be certified; if not he will be tried for murder - and incarcerated for life either way) had the potential for an Iago-Othello head-to-head, but the characters' motivations are simply insubstantial. And the revelation of the murderer in the final scene, however true to the evidence, made me feel as though I had been taken for a long walk down the garden path. This wasn't intellectual fun - not the promised entertainment - that a real thriller should be.
Duncan Ley played Jonathon well, within the limits he set for the role. Ian Carcary seemed unsettled as the criminal psychiatrist Dr Banks - but perhaps this was an attempt to prefigure the play's climactic revelation. Production quality - sets, costumes, sound - was excellent, especially considering the lack of funding. And Phil O'Brien's ABC newsreader voice-overs were spot on.
In the end the most original part of the show is The Daily Programme, with its headline Newtown Stunned: The year's most shocking murder. Excitement was promised, but my prime suspect is the author who really has given us a personal writing exercise.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
My mother read Agatha Christie novels ad nauseam, so at a very young age my mental solution became thoroughly saturated with the murder mystery genre.
Early childhood experience, however, did not innoculate me against Shakespeare. It was never a question of, Who killed Hamlet? but how to understand the complex of relationships which led Laertes to do the dishonorable deed, and how to come to terms with the tragedies which we all play out in real life.
Agatha Christie's stories were, of course, never to be confused with reality. They were intellectual games on a par with my child prodigy career in chinese checkers. I failed at chess, but that was probably because Shakespeare got to me first.
Prime Suspect, says the program, "was written primarily as a personal writing exercise" and "the primary role of the thriller is to entertain". I was satisfied neither at the Miss Marples nor the Hamlet ends of the thriller continuum.
The Catch-22 situation (if Jonathon is mad he will be certified; if not he will be tried for murder - and incarcerated for life either way) had the potential for an Iago-Othello head-to-head, but the characters' motivations are simply insubstantial. And the revelation of the murderer in the final scene, however true to the evidence, made me feel as though I had been taken for a long walk down the garden path. This wasn't intellectual fun - not the promised entertainment - that a real thriller should be.
Duncan Ley played Jonathon well, within the limits he set for the role. Ian Carcary seemed unsettled as the criminal psychiatrist Dr Banks - but perhaps this was an attempt to prefigure the play's climactic revelation. Production quality - sets, costumes, sound - was excellent, especially considering the lack of funding. And Phil O'Brien's ABC newsreader voice-overs were spot on.
In the end the most original part of the show is The Daily Programme, with its headline Newtown Stunned: The year's most shocking murder. Excitement was promised, but my prime suspect is the author who really has given us a personal writing exercise.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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