2013: The Major Minor Party by Version 1.0

The Major Minor Party group devised by Version 1.0, presented by Canberra Theatre Centre and The Centenary of Canberra, at the Playhouse May 29 – June 1, 2013.

Performers: Drew Fairley, Irving Gregory, James Lugton, Jane Phegan, Kym Vercoe.
Dramaturgy: Chris Ryan, Dr Yana Taylor.  Creative Development: Dr David Williams.  Video: Sean Bacon.  Sound: Paul Prestipino.  Lighting: Frank Mainoo.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 29

http://www.versiononepointzero.com/index.php/about/more/micro_lecture_by_david_williams : Theorising practice and practising theory: making performance with version 1.0 : A micro-lecture by David Williams.

I was wondering on what basis I should judge The Major Minor Party, until I read David Williams’ “micro lecture”. He is “a founding member of version 1.0, and has co-devised and produced all of the company's work since 1998 [and] is currently an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, and has lectured in theatre at UWS and UNSW. He has scholarly articles published in Australasian Drama Studies, Performance Paradigm, and Research in Drama Education, and his writings about contemporary performance appear regularly in RealTime. David is on the Board of Arts on Tour, and is a member of Performance Space’s Arts Consultation Group.”

His lecture begins: “We (version 1.0) start a new work not knowing what it is.”  My review begins: “And they still don’t know.”

This wasn’t the case, as I recall, with their perhaps most famous work CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) (2004) when they ripped apart the children overboard issue with a surgeon’s precision.  This time their target – “Sex, Religion and The State” – is too broad, too diffuse.  It suffers from being too obviously group devised, needing, I suggest, the focus that a single writer might offer.

At the same time, the performances are very precisely acted, so the audience was kept firmly engaged throughout the 90 minute show.  Yet Williams’ words: What is the shared passion that brings us here together? Might passion be uncertain? Can I be passionate and uncertain at the same time? I don't know, but I'm thinking hard about it; if I think hard enough I can make it so, explain to me why I felt that the show was a bit thin, the content of too many items was not well developed, and the transitions between scenes left a sense of dramatic disunity.

The strongest scene, in fact, became almost a parody of Williams’ words about “sharing passion”.  As a sort of climax, the actors approach the audience – naming themselves with their real names and as members of Version One point Zero – exhorting us to join them and donate money.  Fortunately, before anyone actually hands up their credit card, the group impressively sings of the passion of Version 1.0, sounding very much like a Hillsong Church meeting, retreating slowly upstage.  As the singing fades, in a side conversation a member thinks out loud “If we were a church, we could claim tax exemption”, and another responds “So we should become a church instead of a party?” – and at last we saw real satire.

It just took too long to get there.

William’s lecture (which of course the audience is unaware of) gives the impression, quoting the inevitable Roland Barthes among several other theatre theorists, that this kind of group searching for what sound like “known knowns, unknown knowns and even unknown unknowns” is original, contemporary or experimental.

My experience and research suggests that Erwin Piscator began this kind of work in his Piscator-Bühne Studio in 1927 “to provide a framework within which the techniques of political theater could be explored and developed”.  (The Political Theatre – A History 1914-1929 by Erwin Piscator, Avon 1978; translated by Hugh Rorrison from Das Politische Theater Albert Schultz Verlag, Berlin, 1929).  And there were many group devised companies particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, including here in Canberra.

Which allows me to segue (I love that word) neatly into the relevance of the show to Canberra’s centenary.  The words of Lady Denman are quoted as bookends, but the content of the scenes (such as argument between Family First and the Australian Sex Party, and the connection between Cory Bernardi and right wing religion)  and the theme of the linking scenes (on voluntary euthanasia) had no special significance in the Canberra we live in, or on whether we have achieved the “beautiful city of our dreams”.

The issues were all about Federal Parliament and legislation, but even here there were opportunities to work in many more of the minor parties which were listed at the beginning of the show but forgotten about later.  In fact Canberra itself could have added much more spice with stories of the Sun-Ripened Tomato Party, the Party Party Party Party, and the infamous Dennis Stevenson who was elected for two terms when he opposed self-government, and then camped out in his Legislative Assembly office.

The intention of The Major Minor Party to raise the issue of religious influence in politics was clearly sincere, but I doubt this show will have the impact that CMI had without more focussed writing and stronger satire.




© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: HOW TO BE (or not to be) LOWER by Max Cullen

HOW TO BE (or not to be) LOWER written and performed by Max Cullen.  Directed by Caroline Stacey; scenic and visual design by Maragarita Georgiadis; lighting design by Nick Merrylees; sound design by Seth Edwards-Ellis.  The Street Theatre, Canberra, May 25 – June 1, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 25

There’s a lot in Max Cullen’s portrayal of Lennie Lower that’s a sad reflection on ‘traditional’ Australia.  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for me, I arrived in this godforsaken country in 1955, some eight years after Lennie Lower died.  I never heard anyone mention his name until I read the adverts for this show.  I was therefore naturally intrigued by the prospect of Max Cullen’s writing and performing How to be....

Unfortunately, I am now rather less intrigued by Lennie Lower than I thought I might be, though – fortunately – rather more intrigued by Max Cullen’s writing and performance (and by the directing and design).  Despite the fact that Lower’s famous novel Here’s Luck is apparently still in print, I can see why no-one ever told me to immerse myself in wit limited so much to obvious puns and occasional flashes of original word-play.

Cullen’s extensive research and collection of audio-visual materials certainly placed Lower into the context of the 1920s and 1930s in a jingoistic, maudlin, poverty-stricken Australia.  However, it would be interesting to see Barry Dicken’s Lonely Lennie Lower (1982) as a comparison.  Unfortunately, of course, I missed it then and the production 20 years later at Melbourne’s La Mama, where it was described as “the acclaimed Barry Dickins play Lennie Lower.... This tragic comedy based on the real life story of comic journalist Lennie Lower...the foremost comic journalist of the depression era, Lennie Lower, is alone, drunk and crying...Lower jokes and entertains as he reflects on life as a newspaper 'contributor' at a time when the term 'freelance' was as unheard of as 'politically correct'.”

Max Cullen’s performance shows Lower alone, drunk and trying to pull his fragmented mental life into some kind of line, through the constant need to spout out one-liners and puns – and Cullen’s skills as an actor are amply demonstrated – but I was left not being sure what Cullen, the writer, was aiming at.

In his version, it was hard to know whether we are to see the ‘play’ as being performed by Cullen or by Lower.  The script deliberately makes explicit the fact that we are seeing a ‘play’, but Cullen does not seem to come out of the character of Lower when making this point.

It’s also not clear how we are to respond to the stories that the character Lower tells.  Did Frank Packer really pay Lower £100 per week for his comic columns in the Daily Telegraph and the Women’s Weekly?  And if so, are we to take it as tragic that Lower appears to have drunk it all, when the average wage of the day was about £3?  Are we to see Lower as a significant writer brought down by the unedifying commercialism of the likes of Packer.  If you read just the beginning of Here’s Luck – which you can do at http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/lowerl.html#heresluck – you might see him as a much better writer than he appears in Cullen’s pastiche of snippets from Lower’s life.

On opening night, I thought it was interesting that the audience, though clearly committed to supporting Max Cullen – cheering him on as he first appeared – and though ready to laugh mildly at Lower’s puns, did not respond with great warmth to the play.  Perhaps this is, unfortunately for Cullen, because this was a Canberra audience with different expectations at The Street Theatre than, say, a Dubbo audience at the RSL might have.

I’m not sure, just as I wasn’t sure about the ending.  Surely it was Lennie Lower, not Max Cullen, who took such a diffident bow, but it seemed inconsistent with the character we had seen before – or were we to take it that it was an inconsequential ending to a life without real meaning.  But what, then, was the meaning of the digger’s hat spotlighted at the very end, rather than Cullen himself appearing out of character for a curtain call?  Especially when Lower had deserted from the armed forces on the three occasions he had enlisted, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography (at http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lower-leonard-waldemere-lennie-7251 ).

So I end up with mixed feelings, fortunate or unfortunate as that may be.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Prime Time produced by Shortis & Simpson

Prime Time produced by Shortis & Simpson, with the Worldly Goods Choir.  Director: Catherine Langman; music and lyrics by John Shortis; writer/dramaturg: John Romeril; set and costumes designer: Imogen Keen; audio visual production: Robert Bunzli and Evan Croker.  The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, May 23 – June 1, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

The trouble with history is that themes (or ‘tropes’, as they are termed nowadays) are only apparent in hindsight.  What happens in reality is mostly accidental.  Writing a show with 27 main characters, each one of whom is unpredictably replaced by the next, is true to history, but makes for somewhat disjointed drama.

The series of songs, from Julia Gillard to Edmund Barton, form the bones of a skeleton, for which John Romeril provides some ligaments via a story of a couple who married in the Rose Garden, while travelling when young, and years later have returned to find that Old Parliament House is now the Museum of Australian Democracy.  On tour, they discover not only stories about our Prime Ministers, but even something of their own histories.

Without this back story, the songs would make something like a revue rather than a drama with a spine, but I thought the ligaments and bones needed a lot more fleshing out to turn this show into a full living history.  Though Romeril’s writing is effective in creating the relationship between John Henry Stahl, of German origin, and Roberta Quinn, of Irish background, and these roles are played skilfully and sensitively by Nick Byrne and Kate Hosking, their fictional story remains peripheral to the non-fiction history.  Their story is not of sufficient significance to take the dramatic lead.  Perhaps something like a fictional Who Do You Think You Are? could connect characters in their family stories to the stories of the Prime Ministers.

The strength of Prime Time is in John Shortis’ songs, based on research which reveals events, characteristics and quirks of each of the PMs, though necessarily with a bit of a skip through the very short careers of Francis Forde (1945), Arthur Fadden (1941) and Earle Page (1939).  Of special note, in my view, were the letter written by Joe Lyons to his wife Edith about the horrific scenes he witnessed travelling around the nation in the Great Depression years, and the final scene showing Edmund Barton huddled over his billy and frypan, cooking all alone on a tiny kerosene stove in his attic room, while presiding over the first years of Parliament in Melbourne and establishing the administrative basics of the democracy of the ordinary people which we still enjoy.

And who will forget the women of the Worldly Goods Choir singing of the need for international arbitration in opposition to Billy Hughes’ attempts to introduce conscription in World War I – to send their sons to kill other mothers’ sons.

It was a successful idea, again from John Romeril, to play the history ‘in backwards chronology’ and to use the choir and the principal singers – Byrne, Hosking, Shortis and especially his partner Moya Simpson – as the electorate, rather like an Ancient Greek Chorus, and to have the married couple agreeing to differ in their political positions, based upon a true story of a couple married in the Rose Garden who presented their guests with T-shirts with Rudd on one side and Abbott on the other – which could be worn with whichever one you prefer to the front or back.

For me, the interest finally lay in appreciating something I hadn’t thought about directly before.  As the history moved back in time, the tendency of Shortis and Simpson to make fun of the political figures – for which they are justifiably famous in the Canberra cultural scene – changed to a more serious tone, as we faced up to World War II with John Curtin, the Depression with Joe Lyons, the despair of World War I and finally the demands made of Edmund Barton – “a  learned man with the unenviable task of leading a motley bunch of ambitious politicians, whom he named his Cabinet of Kings”.  Where is his kind of unassuming leadership now?  And what has happened to the sense of commitment to democratic government throughout the community?

This new venture of Shortis & Simpson once more stretches the boundaries of their work, both in a new strength in their musicianship - especially in suiting the music to the historical period of each PM -  and in taking on a study of more than a century of history – and in doing so making their mark in a significant way on our cultural understanding in the year of the Centenary of Canberra.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Frankenstein by Nick Dear

Frankenstein by Nick Dear.  An Ensemble Theatre production presented by The Street, Canberra, May 7-11, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 7

My favourite book right now is the 802 page work by Harvard Professor of Psychology, Steven Pinker – The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.  Having just seen Dear’s version of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel – and Lee Jones’ gripping performance of the ‘monster’ – I’m glad Pinker has the evidence to prove his case.  We might look back on ‘Gothic Horror’ as just another blood-curdling theatrical and literary genre, but there’s more to Shelley’s story than you might think.

But first, to this production.  What a knockout blow to modern sensibilities!  How should a Sensitive New Age Guy respond without getting snagged by his willingness to suspend his disbelief?  But snagged I certainly was by this sorry tale.  Except at the tail end, when it seemed to me it should have been set in Antarctica where the memory of Scott’s ill-fated expedition would have made Frankenstein’s monster’s mania for reaching the pole even more horrible. 

But then Dear is British, so I suppose Go North Young Man has to be the thing to do.

The set (and presumably costumes) by Simone Romaniuk, the on-stage amplified cello played by Heather Stratfold (music composed by Elena Kats-Chernin), the lighting by Nick Higgins, the soundscape by someone not mentioned, and the direction by Mark Kilmurry were all fascinating.  The core approach was highly stylised, in the visuals and the audio, and equally in the movement and acting by the cast: Katie Fitchett, Andrew Henry, Lee Jones, Brian Meegan, Michael Rebetzke, Michael Ross, Olivia Stambouliah.

(Despite being New Age, though, I do find it annoying when a company, especially and surprisingly the Ensemble, has minimum information about the cast only on the web.  I want a proper program, please.)

There was never any doubt that we were watching a carefully designed piece of theatre, yet despite the ‘alienation effect’, it was easy to be drawn into the emotional effect at the same time.  It was quite extraordinary to find myself ‘believing’ in these characters’ dilemmas from the capital 'R' Romantic past.

This is where Pinker sneaks back into the story.  In the half-century leading up to Mary Shelley’s writing, English language books published per decade rose from about 2000 to more than 7000 (after being zero in 1475).  In that same half-century, the abolition of judicial torture (that is, torture ordered by a court) spread rapidly throughout European countries, leaving – by Shelley’s time – only Spain, the Vatican, Portugal and Russia still officially torturing people.  Pinker does point out that England still executed people, but had introduced the more humane method of drop-hanging, which "instantly renders the victim unconscious”, in 1783, when public hangings were also abolished.  He goes on to say “The display of corpses on gibbets was abolished in 1834, and by 1861 England’s 222 capital offenses had been reduced to 4.”  One of Pinker’s arguments is that the spread of the printed word, and particularly the ability to read, combined with the rising popularity of fiction in the novel, was a real factor in changing attitudes against the acceptance of violence.

His study of the evolutionary background to human violence (this is a scientific work, not a New Age touchy-feely fuzzy waffly book) suddenly came to mind.  Frankenstein works because Shelley (and Dear) understood and have laid before us the very motivations that Pinker explains in neurological brain studies.  At the very time that attitudes were changing, Shelley got the story right.  This play is enlightening: in a couple of hours the artist in Shelley and Dear reveals directly what it has taken me several weeks of reading the scientist Pinker to understand.  And I’m still only on Page 603!  199 more to go!

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: 35º 17 South - Gaming Theatre by Karla Conway. Interview feature article.

35º 17 South created by Karla Conway.  Canberra Youth Theatre at the National Gallery of Australia Sculpture Garden, Saturday April 13 to Saturday April 20, 2013.

Frank McKone in discussion with Karla Conway.

When I reviewed 35º 17 South (on Canberra Critics' Circle blog and this blog Sunday 14 April, which you may like to refer to as you read on) I found myself asking questions about drama games, audience involvement, risks, and results of experimenting with new technology.  After being present for just the very beginning of a work that continued over a whole week, I was keen to meet the creator, artistic director of Canberra Youth Theatre, Karla Conway, to find some answers.

What I discovered is a new kind of theatre.  In recent times theatrical forms have been merging in new ways: I have been particularly interested in the new forms of Dance Theatre, for example.  But here we have “location gaming theatre”.  As Karla explained the process of creating the work and told stories from the experiences of the 400 people who took part over the week, I bit by bit saw my understanding come into focus.

Gaming Theatre sets up a new relationship between the audience (or “players”), the actors, and the location (in this case the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Australia).

A starting point for discussion was whether 35º 17 South was really no different from a large-group drama improvisation workshop, of the kind often used in drama education and theatre rehearsals.  Were the paying “audience” simply participants alongside the CYT “actors”, all improvising in an unstructured way on a theme of refugee issues?  In this kind of process, I would have established the theme via some kind of stimulus in an acting space, let the improvisation develop, and follow up with a reflection and debriefing session to explore what happened and what the participants learned about themselves and the theme.

But, no, explained Karla.  She was the author of a complete narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end.  In fact she holds the copyright on that creation, which in its final form looks rather like a flow chart, with optional pathways at certain points, rather than a single-spine narrative.  The structure is supplied by the game, which is played by the audience – that is why they are called “players” rather than being a static observing “audience”.  They pay for a theatre experience as they actively play the game, rather than for a conventional passive absorbing of theatre.

Each player in Gaming Theatre has the same objective – to complete the narrative and find out what happens in the end – just as an audience member has in a conventional play-watching situation.  What the game provides are multiple possible choices after the first task (counting the bolts on the Diamond sculpture), taking each player through the flow chart on an individual set of pathways.  This process is dramatically enhanced by the basic scripting of each of the characters they meet, allowing the actors to improvise, strictly in character, in response to each player’s questions or expectations of them.  One of the major successes of the week’s work for the Canberra Youth Theatre as a training institution was that so many players were surprised and very impressed by the actors’ maintaining their characters so well in the face of unknown and often highly unexpected demands made by players who were trying to work out how they, as refugees, could find the shelter they needed.

It is at this point that I recognised what is new in this form of theatre, especially compared with experiments in the past about changing the relationship between the audience and the actors.  In the Open Theatre of the 1970s, or action taking place in the auditorium or the foyer, or in street theatre of all kinds, including all those different arrangements of audience participation, the actors are in control.

In this Gaming Theatre, the players are in control, making their own decisions as they seek out the codes to take them further, and decide what to say to an actor and how to respond to the actor’s character’s decision in return.  All this takes place within the game structure with its explicit and sometimes hidden rules, and so the theatrical experience is much more like playing out situations in real life than can happen in conventional theatre.

Here it is important to recognise the crucial role played by the writers of the code for the game, the Academy of Interactive Entertainment team, who worked over a lengthy period to make the game work consistently with Conway’s original narrative.  This was more than a clerical exercise, of course, but a creative work complementary to hers.  (I didn’t ask who holds the software copyright!)  As Karla pointed out, one of her disappointments in theatre of recent times has been the use of multi-media which is no more than illustration or distraction, instead of being fully integrated into the creation of the drama.

Here, the gaming code, the use of the tablets to find one’s way, and the narrative are all integral to the action and the player’s sense of satisfaction with this new form of theatre.   The location might be seen as more peripheral, since the main achievement here was to open up the players’ and the actors’ awareness of the artworks.  I suppose the only other way to integrate the location would have been to do what SBS did with Go Back to Where You Came From – and play the game for real starting in Afghanistan and ending up in Canberra!

But something like that reality happened, on occasions that Karla observed.  In the story there is a baby – represented physically by a doll – in “radioactive” mist.  To rescue the baby (and save themselves from the radioactivity) a player must find the code as quickly as possible and move to the next position with a digital “saved child”.

However, one player, male, took the doll physically to the actor who was a black market trader and tried to sell it to him to obtain other resources, like a weapon, to get further along the road to safety.  How’s that for something Brechtian.  Mother Courage and her Children you could say.  After negotiations, in character, the baby was returned to its “radioactive” location for another player to find it.

But then (I think on a different day), a woman picked the baby up to comfort it, refusing to hand it to the nearby actors because, she said, she couldn’t trust them to treat it properly.  So the actors had to improvise, within their various characters, bringing in others to help, until they established trust enough for the player to hand over the baby – so it again could be returned to its location.  So there you go – The Caucasian Chalk Circle in the Sculpture Garden, except that empathy provided a positive solution to who owned the child, rather than the threat of cutting it in half.

Other stories too showed how deeply players became immersed in the ethics of the drama and the emotional effects of the situation of being a refugee.  There was no formal de-brief for the players, just as they would have left a conventional theatre having to work out for themselves whether it was right or naive of Mother Courage’s daughter Kattrin to bang the drum which warned the village below of impending attack, from the very soldiers who then killed her as a traitor.  But then, Karla reported, every player completed the game, and so reached the safety of the Skyspace – both as a player in the role of refugee, and in a different sense, as a person experiencing theatre.

Not only, then, is Gaming Theatre an exciting original new form, especially for the young for whom apps and tapping tablet screens is entirely normal, but – in the right author’s hands – is as valid and powerful as any other good quality theatre.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change by Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change by Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts.  Presented by Queanbeyan City Council at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, directed by Stephen Pike; musical director: Lucy Bermingham; choreographer: Annette Sharpe; set designer: Brian Sudding; costume designer: Christine Pawlicki; lighting: Hamish McConchie; sound: Evan Wythes.  Wednesday – Sunday April 24 – May 5, 2013-04-25

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 24

This is an up-front musical, quite explicit on matters sexual (and a few other bodily functions), very American culturally speaking, mostly very funny and occasionally touching.

It’s also very well-known, having reached Queanbeyan after productions in more than 400 other cities in at least USA, Britain, Israel, Mexico, Spain, Holland, Hungary, Czech Republic, South Korea, Italy, Brazil, South Africa, Ireland, Argentina, Germany, Hong Kong, mainland China and Taipei, as well as Sydney and its original run of 5003 performances in the off-Broadway Westside Theatre.  This production certainly stands up very well in this company, if the various You Tube efforts I’ve viewed represent the standard.

First is the music.  Lucy Bermingham on the grand, Vanessa Driver, violin, and Jason Henderson, bass, captured each of the American musical styles perfectly for each song, and for the interludes as scenes shifted from one vignette to the next.  Quality here gave the edge to the singing, lifting the performers – Dave Evans, Jenna Roberts, Christine Forbes, Krystle Innes, Nick Valois and Greg Sollis – often to an operatic level, which gave the stereotyped characters in many scenes an extra dimension.

Add to the music a wonderful sense of comedy in Annette Sharpe’s choreography, and precision in the timing which showed Stephen Pike’s strong direction, and we ended up with a show better than might be expected from what is, after all, not much more than a series of revue sketches.  The greatest depth, though, welled up unexpectedly – but wonderfully – in the non-singing scene “The Very First Dating Video of Rose Ritz”.  Jenna Roberts was awarded a special round of applause for her characterisation showing guts and integrity in a very vulnerable Rose.

At a different end of the spectrum was the performance of Ted, the bear, as he cheerfully but in a certain sense rather sadly waved us goodbye, manipulated by Nick Valois, as the father reverting to childhood.  Very nice work.

I think a reason behind the success of this Australian production is that we are not Americans.  There was some discussion during interval about the decision to use American accents, but in the second half the culture, perhaps especially of the American Jewish characters, is so specific that Australian voices just would not do.  What we have to offer, instead, is a view of these characters from the outside looking in, and a picture of the absurdity of their behaviour against what we would expect in our culture.

The result is more than a humorous reflection on love and marriage, but a more biting level of comedy approaching satire.  In other words, more satisfying theatre rather than mere light-hearted entertainment.  Some of those You Tube videos seem to present the latter and miss out on the former.  Much of the script and the libretto can easily fall into the guffaw laughter trap, but scenes in this production – such as Christine Forbes’ country and western “Always a Bridesmaid” and Dave Evans’ and Jenna Roberts’ “Marriage Tango” – showed what an Australian perspective could bring to this American life.

So gird your loins and see for yourself at The Q.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Pea! by David Finnigan

Pea! by David Finnigan.  Serious Theatre – director: barb barnett; designer:Gillian Schwab; audio designer: Seth Edwards-Ellis.  At The Street Theatre, April 20-27, 2013, 10am and 2pm.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 24

If there is one lesson which should be taught to all young Australian children, surely it must be irreverence.  Pea! does it nicely.

On the other hand, children’s theatre must treat its trusting audience with respect – as indeed should all theatre.  Pea! does this too.

The Hive Program at The Street Theatre encourages new writing and, with dramaturgical assistance, offers a season on stage.  David Finnigan’s work in Pea! is perhaps the most assured and sophisticated product that I have seen so far from The Hive.

He has taken the moral behind the Hans Christian Andersen fable of the princess and the pea – that those absorbed in their own self-importance should be brought down to earth – and turned it on its head.  “Princess” is no more than the name given Gwendoline by the wolves who kindly brought her up when her parents had abandoned her in the Wild Wood of the West.  Gwen satisfies Prince Gregor’s pea-brained mother’s Princess Test, which she learned from daytime Royal Weddings television, precisely because Gwen is not full of self-importance but only wishes to save everyone from the Dragon-with-One-Nostrilled-Snout.

Gregor is certainly lucky to be taken in hand by a woman who can look after herself and sleep as comfortably on the ground as on 40 mattresses – and can solve the problem of how to use the pea to stop up the One-Nostrilled Snout.  The whole kingdom is saved as the fiery Dragon’s internal gas pressure forces explosive farts from his other end, and he flies home in shame to his mother.  It wasn’t just the children who could not contain themselves at this point in the story.  I’m sure the laughing adults around me were thinking of a number of figures of seeming social importance whose snouts they might like to stop up with a pea, or three….

But the respect and care for the children was there from the beginning, as the actors – Cathy Petöcz and Josh Wiseman – made sure they had found out just about every child’s name and engaged them in conversation – about the other theme of the play: what’s your favourite vegetable?  The Pea becomes the narrator, from his pedestal in the Museum of Famous Vegetables, and is even rather boastful of having saved the kingdom – except that everyone soon learns that it was really Gwendoline with a little help from Gregor.  But, significantly, when there is thunder and lightning as the Dragon approaches, Pea stops the action to check if anyone is scared – because he or she (according to which actor is puppeteering at the time) is a bit scared too.  “No, of course not,” the children reply.  “We’re not afraid of the Dragon!” – and on we go to the explosive farts.

Carefully thought-out touches such as this were in themselves educational – for the children and even perhaps for parents.  The script, and I suspect work done during the workshop and rehearsal process, shows how theatre can manipulate an audience’s reactions, but good theatre does this ethically.  It’s this, the irreverence of the script, and the originality of the set design and use of puppetry, that I would like to praise the whole team for, in Pea!

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: 35º 17 South created by Karla Conway

35º 17 South created by Karla Conway.  Canberra Youth Theatre at the National Gallery of Australia Sculpture Garden, Saturday April 13 to Saturday April 20, 2013.

Commentary by Frank McKone

Drama games as I used to know them are being taken to a new space by this CYT experiment.  From the drama workshop studio to an outdoor venue, like the Sculpture Garden at the NGA, is one thing.  Setting up a kind of treasure hunt, with clues to be discovered and directions to be understood and followed, is another.  But to have all this set in the context of a semi-scripted scenario which can only be understood via an up-to-date tablet device is one step further than I had previously imagined.

Computer, keyboard and mouse I can cope with, but a blank screen on a tablet is pure mystery to me.  Fortunately a one-time student from my days at Hawker College spontaneously appeared to save my reputation as a drama expert.  Catherine Prosser is now CEO and Co-Founder of stagebitz.com, (http://stagebitz.com/)  providing software which can make running all the technical side of theatre a whizz.  She had no trouble tapping the right bits on the tablet provided by CYT’s front of house coordinator Jim Adamik, and off we went to find the first of those other little mysteries (at least to me) – the black and white squares which look like miniature maps of mazes, stuck on the wall near the Diamond sculpture (Neil Dawson, Aotearoa New Zealand born 1948: Diamonds 2002).  The tablet read the coded maze, only to tell us that we couldn’t go further until we had correctly counted the number of bolts which hold the sculpture together.

After four goes we got it right (37 in case you’d like to know), typed it in and then began the game for real – well, sort of real, except that at that stage we only knew that we had to find clean water.  Why?  Because the only safe place to be was in the Skyspace (James Turrell: 'Within without' 2010) on the other side of the Gallery.  We knew this because we had been there with others who were desperate to get in because they were starving and had travelled so far and for so long to find a safe haven.  We were now in their situation, but we didn’t know why.  But we had not been allowed in until we could find resources like food and water to bring with us.  We couldn’t eat the tablets, but we needed them to find what we needed for entry to the only place of safety.

Catherine and I collected some useful resources like toilet paper and chocolate, and discovered with help from CYT writer Morgan Little that there were not only actors as desperate refugees, but others such as a trader who might exchange our chocolate for a weapon which we would need to help defend the community.  Not all the game concentrated on the immediate objective of survival: there are some codes which are games in themselves, like one which showed insects flying around in the Sculpture Garden which needed to be sprayed to prevent people being bitten by them.

After an hour or more, we had got nowhere near completing the game – we hadn’t even found the clean water – but as responsible adults we had to leave.  The younger members of Youth Theatre were by this time absolutely engrossed in the activity: if they didn’t complete the game on Saturday, they could continue each day next week!  This is one very big school holiday activity.

But is it as ground-breaking an experiment as it seems?  Is it a worthwhile way of teaching drama?  Is it suitably educational more broadly?

I think the answer to the last question depends on the content of the game.The story assumes a “Lucas Heights incident” in 2032 which means the east coast has become unliveable.  The refugees are escaping to Canberra as the only safe haven.  The refugee theme is, of course, entirely relevant in considering the position of those who recently arrived at Geraldton, after some 44 days in a small boat, from Sri Lanka.

However, there is a further assumption that in 2032, those managing the place of safety, the actors refusing entry to the refugees at the beginning of the game, would be openly aggressive with defensive weapons, and would arbitrarily lay out their demands to be satisfied by starving refugees.  Of course, there is a parallel with the way refugees are being treated by officialdom.

But what I wanted to know was, where in the game will the audience/participants have an opportunity to be debriefed and to reflect on the storyline, its implications and truthfulness.  This game, by having an “audience” attending, is different from a large group improvisation workshop where everyone participating takes part in the devising, the role-playing, and the reflective debriefing.  In this case, only the CYT actors and staff are in the know.  Of course, it is true that when an audience leaves a standard theatre production, they are not debriefed but have to sort out what they think about what they have seen for themselves.  This game, though, is more like some of the audience participation experiments of the late 1960s / early 1970s such as New York’s Open Theatre (Robert Pasolli: A Book on the Open Theatre.  Discus Books, 1970) where the actors imposed themselves on the audience members in an undifferentiated space.  These experiments lasted for only a few years, because audiences preferred enough degree of separation from the action to feel they were safe.

Because 35º 17 South is a pre-programmed game, there is a degree of safety for participants, since they have to follow the rules to complete the task.  Usually, of course, electronic games are entirely on screen, while this one involves interaction with real actors in a large relatively unconfined space where immediate supervision by CYT staff is problematic.  Though things like the weapons are no more than images on the tablet screen, what if a non-prepared participant (as opposed to the partially scripted and rehearsed actors) – a member of the public – were to take on the role of a desperate refugee to the point of a physical argument, say, with the trader of weapons who refused to accept chocolate in payment?  What would be the learning, on either side, from this experience?  And what are the safeguards?

At this stage I’m willing to keep an open mind until the conclusion of the game, next Saturday.   But I would be interested to know how the follow-up, what used to be called the backstage post-mortem, will be done – not only for the young adults and late teenagers in the acting roles, and of course for the CYT staff and the people from the Academy of Interactive Entertainment who wrote the computer code, but also for all those people, and perhaps their parents, who were audience/participants.

Since Karla Conway, the CYT Artistic Director, has invited us to “experiment alongside us and embrace the possibilities that technology can play in the evolution of our artform”, I think it should be encumbent on CYT to see the “experiment” as the lab research, requiring a careful analysis of the results and a public report of the findings.




© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas.  Canberra Rep directed by Duncan Ley at Theatre 3, Canberra, April 12-27, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 13

For 50 years I have heard the words of Under Milk Wood and allowed them to fill the spaces in my mind with a myriad of images – of the characters and even of their dreams.  Now I have a new set of visual and audio memories, created by Duncan Ley and his designers Anne Kay (set), Heather Spong (costumes), Chris Ellyard (lighting), and Neil McRitchie (sound) to add to and renew my old imagination.

This is a great achievement on Rep’s part, and a great joy to me.

Ley’s directing is exquisite.  Using Duncan Driver as 1st Voice, physically present but unseen by the village dwellers, as the close-up observer on our behalf, he has created for us a solid personality in place of the traditional disembodied voice of the original radio play.  Having an experienced and skilled ensemble cast of 10 – Geoffrey Borny, Alice Ferguson, Sian Harrington, Peter Holland, Terry Johnson, Adele Lewin, David McNamara, Erin Pugh, Steph Roberts and Graham Robertson – enabled Ley and his design team to work out a highly complex scheme to present just about all the characters physically, including the children (the “kiss me for a penny” scene was especially wonderful) and even more detail in the daily life in the street than Thomas’s words describe.

This is done so well because Ley has a clear concept of the theatrical form he is using.  Essentially it is expressionist in style, with all that tradition of black, light and shadow, but given what I might call a gentle touch.  The only harshness was to throw the main switch to shock us out of the reality of seeing actors out of role and into the black of night to begin the action; and to do the same in reverse at the end.  Yet this risky device worked perfectly.

I should also add the properties person, Helen Vaughan-Roberts, to the list of credits because the collecting of all those props hung on the moveable scene sections, representing characters’ kitchens, bedrooms, shops and so on must have been a daunting task.  They made the set a visual feast in its own right.

A completely new thought for me was to use recordings of the Welsh crowd singing at  a rugby match, and of the traditional Welsh male voice choir at significant points.  I wondered about this at first, but the ending especially took any of my doubts away.  The sound track put the play into its proper context, and gave it extra strength on stage.

If Dylan Thomas, high up in Rev Eli Jenkins’ idea of heaven, is watching this production, I’m certain he would not be saying the village’s name backwards.  He may be wishing he could be here to take part in an exciting improvement on the limited first performance he was able to offer at the YMHA Poetry Centre, New York, May 14, 1953, with only five actors and himself standing stock still, except for when he stepped forward two paces to deliver Rev Eli Jenkins’ morning poem.  I now have that recording and Ley’s staging to keep my imagination going for another, perhaps not 50, years.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Wulamanayuwi / Once and Future Landscape Care

 

 Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui by Jason De Santis.  Presented by Centenary of Canberra as Northern Territory’s contribution, from Darwin Festival, directed by Eamon Flack at The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre, April 10-13, 2013.

Once and Future Landscape Care forum with Bill Gammage, Bruce Pascoe and Ben Gleeson at Two Fires Festival, Braidwood, April 12-14, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 12

What a wonderful day was Friday April 12, 2013.

In the evening, Canberra Playhouse became a centre of Australian cultural life, as Jason De Santis – of Tiwi Islander and Italian heritage – presented his often amusing yet emotionally engaging version of the traditional story of Wulamanayuwi, the daughter of Jipmarpuwajuwa.  Though superficially De Santis has made a connection with the European story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there is even more significance behind the myth of how death first happened to humans.

Here we see how universal – from Genesis in the Bible to this even nowadays remote community – is the fear of evil and death, and the determination to live and to love.  For an audience in the National Capital, representing a wide range of cultural traditions, responding with great warmth and communal laughter to the originality of this first Tiwi play, and to its author speaking to us in the foyer afterwards, came naturally.  Just as in the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, there is tragedy and a recognition of human failings in this Tiwi story – but I must say I felt more positive about the future of humanity as Wulamanayuwi finally came through her troubling times, making her own decision to begin her adult life with her chosen husband, Awarrajimi.   Her seven brothers, the Panamui, are mischievous but ultimately spirits of family support, rather than competitive and murderous as in the ancient Middle Eastern Biblical story.

Natasha Wanganeen as Jirrakilala and Kylie Farmer as Wulamanayuwi

 If you would like to read more about “Tiwi Art and Culture and the First Old Lady”, Pedro Wonaeamirri (puppet maker and set maker, with John Peter Pilaukui and Linus Warlapinni) has written his version of the story: of Purrukuparli, his wife Waiyai, and of his brother and her lover, the moon man, Taparra, and its importance in his life – available at

http://site.jilamara.com/~jilamara//images/articles/kitty_pedro_1_mar.pdf

The program notes describe the production, saying “The approach is to embrace the classic traditions of Western theatricality to excess, and to allow the clash between Western theatre and Tiwi culture to energise the work....brightness and colour, sound and movement, character-doubling, live music, minimal “acting” and lots of performing and storytelling, things popping out from behind corners, drop-cloths, shadow-puppetry, scrolling landscapes etc.  Everything we can possibly achieve with very few resources – Tiwi style.”  All I can add is to say that they achieved everything!

The actors – Kylie Farmer as Wulamanayuwi; Natasha Wanganeen as her evil stepmother Jirrakilala; Kamahi Djordan King as her father Jipmarpuwajuwa; Jaxon De Santis as her husband Awarrajimi; and Jason De Santis as the Narrator and Evil Spirit of the Water – were hardly “minimal” in effect.  It took no time for connection to be established firmly with the audience, and not a beat was missed from then on.

Then more connections were made for me as, in the foyer, Ngambri father Paul House, with his children, welcomed us all to his country (noting that he was born in the centre of his country, at the old Canberra Hospital – did he mean that was why it was blown up, to be replaced by the National Museum?)  and Jason De Santis spoke, thanking the Ngambri elders for permission for him to tell his Tiwi story here.

All at once it came home to me again that we are living in Aboriginal land, just as it had that very afternoon, in Braidwood, an hour’s drive to the east.

The Two Fires Festival – Fanning the Flames of Arts and Activism – included three speakers, in the presence of Yuin Elder, Uncle Max Dulumunmun Harrison, on the topic Once and Future Landscape Care. 

Bruce Pascoe, of Bunurong and Tasmanian heritage, a novelist, short story writer and researcher into indigenous history and language revival, spoke of the invisibility, in conventional histories, of Aboriginal technology, such as in house construction, river flow and fishery management, crop growing, and maintaining a surplus of goods for trading – the very activities that showed traditional Aboriginal culture to be “civilised”.  The refusal to recognise these activities – despite their being described in great detail by well-known European explorers – was the basis for Australia to be treated as “terra nullius”, and the people already living here as so “primitive” they did not count.

Bill Gammage, an academic historian at the Humanities Research Centre at ANU, spoke about his recent publication The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, filling out – for me, at least – this study of the careful and precise use of fire management by Aboriginal people all over Australia, prior to the intervention of Europeans from 1788, with an understanding of the complementary religious beliefs and ceremonial practice developed over many tens of thousands of years.  Once again, here was evidence of a civilisation, rather than an haphazard existence.

Ben Gleeson lives locally, with a degree in Ecological Agriculture and doing honours in Restoration Ecology.  He put together the previous speakers’ themes in emphasising that the essential difference between traditional Aboriginal culture, beliefs and practice and the more recent European approach is that in the one, all forms of life, including us humans, are intimately related; while in the other we humans pretend we are separate from all other forms of life – and try to control everything else.  His most telling example, perhaps, is the development of industrial monoculture agriculture, and his main concern for the future is that greater and greater urbanisation means that our chance of people recognising the imperatives of our interdependence may not come in time to save our species. 

Yet it is the understanding of evolution that Charles Darwin’s theory gave us, and that modern science is beginning to put into practice, which gives us the chance after all.

When Uncle Max spoke, in concluding the session, he praised the young men, like Johnny Huckle, of Wiradjuri heritage, who participated in the earlier welcome to country ceremony with his song to honour the Festival – Two Fires Light our Hearts.  This represented for me the theme of the day: respect the ancient culture, study history honestly, connect science to our humanity in harmony with all the rest of nature.

What a day was Friday April 12, 2013!

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler

CDP presents Tall Stories’ magical musical adaptation of Room on the Broom adapted from the book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler.  Original director: Olivia Jacobs.  Music and lyrics by Jon Fiber, Andy Shaw and Robin Price.

Director for Australia: Morag Cross;  Resident Director: Jane Miskovic; stage design by Morgan Large; lighting design by James Whiteside; puppets by Yvonne Stone.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, April 8-12, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 9

It is a great satisfaction to see a show for young children which is entirely appropriate both theatrically and educationally.  And the business behind the scenes, I discovered, was a complicated mystery in itself.

The opening of the show cleverly takes the audience – young children who cannot be expected to automatically respond to standard conventions – through the transition from ordinary life (where they even had to be taught by their adult minders that each person has just one seat) to the fictional world of theatre.

With house lights still up and children still being brought in and seated, and the stage open but in shadow, the four actors – Andrew Threlfall (understudy for Stephen Anderson): Dog; Josie Cerise: Cat; Crystal Hegedis: Witch; and Damien Warren-Smith: Bird, Dragon – appear without fanfare.  They are playing hide-and-seek (“Coming, ready or not!) among the children in the audience, who become involved in the game, pointing out where someone is hiding.

The set on stage is highly evocative – a large rising full moon seen dimly through a chunky forest, with an owl calling – and the “children”, who are camping out, don sleeping bags and form a sleeping heap on stage; except for excited and fully-awake Josie, who comes out of hiding, realises she must join the others, gets a front-row audience member to help zip up her sleeping bag and joins the heap.  I think this is the first play I can remember which begins with everyone going to sleep, as the house lights fade.  Now everyone, on stage and in the auditorium is silent.  Now the drama can begin.

Already the children watching have learned by osmosis what theatre is all about, and have no trouble going along with the next transition by the actors from the camping children to the witch and her cat flying on the broom stick, through all the characters in costume and puppet form, or even occasionally as briefly out-of-role narrators, and finally back to the sleeping children.  Josie, of course, having played the Witch, puts a spell on the boys to stop them snoring, and everyone, on stage and off, joins in the accompanying spellbinding song to bring this lively entertainment to a thoroughly enjoyable end.

At the same time, of course, the text of the book is teaching rhyme, rhythm and vocabulary, while the story is teaching about positive relationships, scary situations, and even tricks to save friends from fiery dragons.

We adults may know, of course, that even to mention a witch is a strict no-no.  Women were actually accused of riding on a broomstick in the 16th and 17th Centuries in Europe and often had to face their own kind of fiery dragon, but the children here are safe with a witch who has friends and makes room on the broom for them all – even to the point where it breaks in half!

Mentioning Europe is my fashionable “segue” into the mystery of who were these performers, and why was the owl clearly of the English barn variety?  Where was the mopoke or the boobook, or even the tawny frogmouth?  Yet there were the occasional Aussie references:  Damien (I think it was) couldn’t quite read the label on his sleeping bag which seemed to say “flec bag”, but of course we bushwalkers knew it was really “flea bag”.

So I found out from director Jane Miskovic that the UK company Tall Stories, whose team had devised the original adaptation, as well as of the Gruffalo stories, tour their productions world-wide – except that, in Australia, CDP and Tall Stories have negotiated an arrangement where the plays are directed and performed by our local professionals, allowing them to include some humorous Australianisms in the text to complement the exuberant physicality of the Australian acting style.  This makes the show a family affair, including the adults in the fun.

Jane has a degree in education and psychology and several others in the team have similar education and training, including at NIDA.

So it was no wonder that I was seeing a top-class performance.


http://tallstories.org.uk/shows/room-on-the-broom
http://www.cdp.com.au/home.html

If you miss the show in Queanbeyan, on 14 April 2013 – 27 April 2013 it will be at
the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House (whose image I have borrowed above).



© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Richard, Professor of Literature by Stéphane Georis and Francy Begasse

 Richard, Professor of Literature written and performed by Stéphane Georis; written and directed by Francy Begasse, at The Street Theatre, Canberra, April 4-7, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 5

Georis, visiting from Belgium, clearly works out of the French mime tradition and the European background of puppetry (which in England is represented by Punch and Judy).  I remember a puppet version of Blanc Neige for children in Paris some decades ago.  Somewhere there’s a memory of commedia dell’arte in Georis’ style as a comedian, as well.

I could say, street theatre at The Street rather than in the street :-)

The role of Richard, Professor (as in Professeur) of Literature is played by Georis as if he is not acting, but is merely a person talking directly to us – and interacting with the front row of the audience – out of role.  I’ve called him Professeur rather than Professor because his “lecture” on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III, is more in the style of a teacher of younger children than as a university academic.

But this is not a children’s show, though I would certainly recommend it for senior secondary students.  It deals with death as failure, death for love, and death for power.  It begins with the question “To be, or not to be” as an intellectual study of angst, works through the tragic sadness of the Montague and Capulet story, becoming gross in the gore of chopping up fresh meat to represent the Lancaster and Plantagenet families’ murderous history.

The lesson’s conclusion is “Why don’t we just stop the killing?”

Yet, to reach this conclusion, Richard uses his books, newspapers, cooking implements and ingredients (I could call this “kitchen bench drama”) to create the characters of Hamlet, Romeo, Juliet – and finally a piece of meat for Richard III, while he himself travels from point to point in time and space on a motorbike (or rather on a Vespa motor scooter as I imagined it).  As well, the Professor wears hats and masks, playing himself and William Shakespeare – every now and then revealing himself to remind us “It’s me”, like playing peek-a-boo.

So we are at times a bit embarrassed by his childishness, yet we can’t stop laughing at his ridiculousness – and nor can we ignore his message: don’t take things or ourselves too seriously, for that’s how we end up killing people.

I can only agree with the quote in the program notes from Ouest-France reviewing Richard, le polichineur d'écritoire, de Stephane Georis: “ingenious, full of surprises and screamingly funny.”  Just watch his upside-down coffee pot tell you about Life, and you’ll see what I mean.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: An Idea Takes Flight - NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art) showcase

An Idea Takes Flight: showcasing the work of NIDA’s Directing, Acting, Costume, Properties and Production students and graduates.  At Gorman House Arts Centre, Canberra, April 4-6, 2013

By Frank McKone
April 4

The NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art) showcase consists of an interesting exhibition of costumes, set and costume designs and portrait paintings, and three short performances: Play House by British playwright Martin Crimp; selections from I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change! by US musical team Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Robert; and a solo peformance of Roal Dahl’s children’s story, The Witches.

The visual art work in the exhibition was excellent quality, as were the skills demonstrated in the technical work in lighting and sound, the live musicians in I Love You..., and the acting, but I felt rather as though I was watching an audition session.

When I looked more closely at the program notes by NIDA’s Director/Chief Executive Officer, Lynne Williams, I found that the only purpose of the tour is to give experience to the creative and production teams, led by three of the six directors who studied and graduated from NIDA in 2012 – Luke Rogers, Derek Walker and Lucas Jervies.

Each of the actors and the musicians is labelled ‘Guest Artist’, but without biographies or any other kind of recognition.  Very strange!

The pieces chosen for what now I understood to be demonstration exercises were suprisingly light-weight.  Play House was a good exercise for the actors Sam O’Sullivan (Simon) and Kate Skinner (Katrina) who competently handled the instant changes of relationship; I Love You... required strong singing and musical comedy skills, again well demonstrated by Nat Jobe, Simon Brook McLachlan, Cinzia Lee and Canberran Amy Louise Dunham; while Guy Edmonds playing all the roles in a quite manic mime/movement format in The Witches turned the children’s story into almost a holocaust scenario.  Here the director, Lucas Jervies, tried too hard: Edmonds had to work hard to keep up the momentum when simple story-telling would have done the trick.

But since the actors were not the point of the productions, I’m left having to wonder why NIDA chose these items.  Surely there is Australian writing, for a start, of much greater significance than any of these pieces.

According to Lynne Williams’ notes “The recently launched National Cultural Policy ushers in an era of renewed vision for the arts in Australia.”  Really?  If this is meant to be NIDA’s contribution – and I assume that bringing the “showcase” to the Federal Capital has something to do with policy pushing – then I couldn’t see any “vision” taking flight here.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Thursday by Bryony Lavery

Thursday by Bryony Lavery.  Brink Productions and English Touring Theatre, director/dramaturg: Chris Drummond.  At Canberra Playhouse, March 20-23, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 20

Before seeing this play I chose to avoid reading any details of the story of Dr Gill Hicks who lost both her legs in the London bombing of the train taking her to work in 2005.  I had also missed hearing or seeing interviews she gave, including the one on Enough Rope which stimulated the interest of Chris Drummond and led to the cooperative venture between these two theatre companies, one in Adelaide – Dr Hicks’ home town – and the other in London, where she works.

I did not want to find myself judging how correctly the play told her story.  I was hoping for a play, based upon her story, but standing in its own right as an artistic work.  And, indeed, that’s what I saw tonight.

The structure of the work is from the general to the particular, beginning that Thursday with an intriguing picture, almost like a movie where the camera shots from many different locations can be juxtaposed to make a montage in motion of the lives of the people and their partners who, by chance, became placed on that train jam-packed next to the suicide bomber.

After the explosion, which was imaginatively – and very effectively – represented in movement and light rather than excessive sound, the work draws in bit by bit to focus on Rose, based on Dr Hicks, played by Kate Mulvaney, until she walks again in the company of all those who have given so much of themselves to help another human being.

As a work of art, it was the originality of the staging, the characterisations and especially the use of heightened language which made the play work for me.  The approach to presenting what could have been a purely melodramatic plot – however true to actual events – was like using lights from oblique and unexpected angles, rather than obvious spotlighting.  The language, and a figure representing Death working to persuade Rose to depart with him, kept our conventional reactions at bay, just enough to see and feel in response, yet not to be overwhelmed by emotion.

To achieve this, Laverty writes “If I had the choice, I would always make a play in the Brink way....I always felt Chris [Drummond] and I were making it together.”  She makes it clear that “We were turning fact into fiction and those two states are empirically different....  One is random, the other is constructed.”

Yet the art is that the constructed fiction tells us so much more about the nature of the real experience than any news report.  And the artistry of all the actors met the demands of the writing.  The result was demanding but exhilarating theatre, a great confirmation of Dr Gill Hicks’ words: My hope is that Thursday will make us more conscious of the everyday and the intricacy of our interconnected relationships, whether that be with those we know and love, or with strangers.

Not to be missed.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Vakomana Vaviri Ve Zimbabwe (Two Gentlemen of Verona) and Kupenga Kwa Hamlet. Feature article.

Tonderai Munyevu, Denton Chikura, Arne Pohlmeier in rehearsal

 Two Gents Productions Approaching End

by Frank McKone
March 20, 2013

Two Gents Productions is a cross-cultural theatre company based in London.  In Canberra at The Street we are seeing its penultimate program of Vakomana Vaviri Ve Zimbabwe (Two Gentlemen of Verona) and Kupenga Kwa Hamlet, before the company’s final season on international tour in May 2013.

I was fortunate to catch them between performances, wondering how it came about that a freelance director named Arne Pohlmeier has worked with actors Denton Chikura and Tonderai Munyevu since 2007 on Zimbabwean interpretations of Shakespeare.  Why Shakespeare?  Why Zimbabwe?  And, as it turned out, why Pohlmeier?

Arne Pohlmeier is German born, but spent his childhood in Cameroon, was educated in the US and lives in London.  This is the source of his concern with the migration experience.  What does it mean to leave one culture and join another? 

Travel back to Africa took him to Johannesburg, by this time as a theatre practitioner, where the idea began for a project exploring Shakespeare from a different cultural perspective.  Back in London, he found Shona-speaking actors rare.  Munyevu had come to London after a childhood in Zimbabwe and still had family connections there.  Chikura, after seven years’ insistence by his parents in London that only English must be used at home, came seeking work with much better English than Shona.  So the three began work, with little money, but what turned out to be a highly successful idea: Not only were we able to see the production (Vakomana) through a successful run at one of London’s premier fringe venues, the Oval House Theatre; but we were also able to honour invitations to perform at such exciting events as the 10th anniversary Harare International Festival of the Arts; The Market Theatre Laboratory’s 20th anniversary celebrations (in Johannesburg); and the celebrated Shakespeare Festival in Neuss, Germany.

They explained to me that the first production was, in my words, from outside in.  The two actors were exploring, in a collaborative style, to find ways of using their Shona traditions to express Pohlmeier’s idea.  But in doing this, both Munyevu and especially Chikura had to re-discover their culture, travelling back to Zimbabwe as adults.  For Munyevu the experience was more a matter of remembering, than re-learning; but Chikura found that he was treated and felt like a tourist – even having to pay ‘white’ prices because people heard his London-accented English and saw him dressed as an outsider.

Then, as work progressed, the next production became an inside out exploration of Hamlet, starting from the father-son relationships of Shona culture and connecting from that beginning with the story of Hamlet, his father and his uncle.

In this process, a new show telling the personal story of Munyevu’s return to Zimbabwe was devised by the group, called Magetsi.  This brings directly home to viewers the traditional storytelling style incorporating dance, voice calls, and drums, as well as words, which is used  in the Shakespeare works, now also including The Moors Project focussing on the black characters in Shakespeare’s plays: Othello, the Prince of Morocco from The Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus.

There was such a strength of connection between the three as I spoke with them, grown from five years’ working together, understanding their different perspectives and finding such powerful forms of expression on stage, that I was quite shocked to find that Chikura now has a young daughter – to whom he speaks Shona every day – and not only will finish up with Two Gents in May, but will even give up acting in favour of a stable home life instead of touring as an actor must; while Pohlmeier is already working with a new group in Cameroon to explore his childhood experiences through a classical German text; and Munyevu simply says he will be ‘unemployed’.

I’m sure that the skills and experience they have gained over these five years will mean they all have a interesting future to look forward to, and I thank them for a conversation which opened up for me the beginning, the heights of the middle, and the necessary end of a professional and deeply committed theatre company.
www.twogentsproductions.com/ for further reading.

Denton Chikura

Arne Pohlmeier

Tonderai Munyevu

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: It’s My Party (And I’ll Die If I Want To) by Elizabeth Coleman

It’s My Party (And I’ll Die If I Want To) by Elizabeth Coleman.  Produced by Christine Harris & HIT Productions.  Directed by Denis Moore, designed by Shaun Gurton, sound by Chris Hubbard, costumes by Adrienne Chisholm.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 19-27, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Superficially an entertaining farce involving revelation, death and resurrection, It’s My Party... has a little something extra.  Elizabeth Coleman, in this – her first full length play – skilfully, smoothly, shifted the mood from laughter (on our part) at the characters’ family wrangling to moments of silent recognition of the truth of each adult child’s accusations against their father, and back to laughter in no time at all.

Quality writing gave all the actors every chance of establishing strong characters and clear relationships, and every one of the family members – Henri Szeps (father, Ron Patterson), Robyn Arthur (mother, Dawn Patterson), Trent Baker (son, Michael), Sharon Davis (elder daughter, Debbie) and Freya Pragt (younger daughter, Karen) – took full advantage of the offer.  Though Szeps is so well-known that he was applauded just for appearing on stage, there was no prima donna in this ensemble performance.

In the end (literally) the role of the undertaker, Ted Wilkins, emphasises the farcical nature of the situation but introduces a character from outside the web of the family’s relationships.  The writing is not so strong here, and I thought Matt Furlani could have made this character rather more absurdist in style to make the point.

One of the delights of this production was the set designed by Shaun Gurton.  Though the drama takes place in an internal room, above the “walls” are trompe-l'oeil pictures of the tiled roofs of the suburban house – at least I assume they were painted flats rather than the complete 3-dimensional structures they looked like.  This cleverly established for us, with the furniture in the room, the small business lower middle class status of Ron Patterson, stationery shop proprietor. 

Though first produced at La Mama in Melbourne 20 years ago, with a little updating of some references, It’s My Party... still works well as a study of the changing generations.  Even if our adult children don’t use Blackberries much any more, the question Ron wants to have answered by them – was I a good father? – is still relevant, and their answers are just as funny, or devastating, as ever.

Henri Szeps as Ron Patterson

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: The Chalk Pit by Peter Wilkins

The Chalk Pit by Peter Wilkins.  The Acting Company directed by Tom O’Neill at the Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, March 15-16 and 20-23, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Based upon Wilkins’ research into the history of the Hon Thomas John Ley,  Parliamentarian and Minister in NSW and Commonwealth governments in the 1920s and 1930s, this play is a lengthy narrative displaying the personality of a charismatic murderer – a psychopath.  To this end, I must give credit where it is due: to Craig Higgs, who successfully presented this worst kind of politician.  His carefully managed charm covering up his megalomania, his corrupt dealings, gradually releasing more of his essential violence as life deals its inevitable disappointments, was well done.

Otherwise, what has been a long term project for Wilkins, which began in 1986 with a chance discovery of Ley’s papers at the National Library of Australia, to cover this quite extraordinary story from the 1890s to Ley’s death in Broadmoor Prison in 1947, still needs a great deal of work – to trim and focus the drama, and to establish a consistent style.

In the first half I was strongly reminded of the 1953 folk musical by Dick Diamond, Reedy River.  There were the rambunctious bush characters, fighting for their various political causes (in Reedy River’s case around the 1890s Depression and the Shearers’ Strike), the political speeches, the softer and sometimes grim tones of Henry Lawson’s poetry (such as The Faces in the Street), and a propensity to burst into song.  Though I came to Australia a couple of years after the New Theatre staged Reedy River, I quickly absorbed this traditional culture through songs like The Ballad of ’91 from the 10” Diaphon LP which I still have, and was grateful to see the whole play performed at the National Folk Festival a few years ago.

But even in the first half, the writing in The Chalk Pit could not match Reedy River.  Dee Sheville, the singer, and Sabrina Tesfouxis on piano, had an unenviable task.  Only once, as Miss Collins, did Sheville’s singing have a role to play in the action – when invited by Ley to sing to the crowd to follow his rousing electioneering speech.  After that, songs – usually only snatches of song – were interspersed among the dialogue, sometimes with some relevant words but often with no apparent purpose beyond filling in a gap.  In Reedy River all the traditional songs are integral to the action and mood of the play, and in fact drive the drama along.

The Lawson poems might have had a better impact if they had been given much more stage prominence, rather than coming from spaces outside the central acting area.  Though Martin Hoggart and Kristy Richardson tried hard, their skills as performers were not good enough to overcome the staging.  Lawson’s poems are powerful enough to have been used as deliberate action-stoppers which reflect critically at each point in the life of John Ley.  Perhaps this was the intention, but it was lost in this production.

By interval, the first apparent ‘suicide’ by one of Ley’s opponents, but probably a murder, has taken place.   If we were to pick up the folk drama tradition, we could expect the second half to expose Ley as he becomes step by step more paranoid, more aggressive, more violent, and literally more murderous.  The style for this development might use a melodrama form, or of course move into something Brechtian as in Mother Courage and her Children, the climax of which is devastating.

But it seems that Wilkins became tied up in the minutiae of the truth of Ley’s story, which moves to England and becomes almost a comic Cockney cop story with a detective who says things like “I can feel it in my bones” that Ley is guilty of murdering John McBain Mudie, with a representation of the Old Bailey trial full of cliché lawyers and seeming to belong to some early 19th Century court rather than anything like one which would have taken place in 1946.

Along the way, the genre shifted dramatically towards artifices like having Ley arguing with both his wife – in Australia – and his mistress – in London – as if they were in the same time zone.  And, finally, we see the device where characters from his past throw up at him remembered words, I suppose reinforcing his paranoia, while he declines and dies isolated in the insane section of Broadmoor Prison, ironically escaping being murdered by the State after all.

Were we supposed at this point to feel empathy and sympathy for this psychopath?  Hardly, especially after a tedious, far too long, second half.  We had been spoken to, during the court scene, as if we were the jury, but on the evidence in this script, I was certainly somewhere beyond reasonable doubt, not about Ley, but about the play.

It’s a shame, since the virtually unknown story of this figure, elected to both the NSW and the Federal Parliaments – and therefore a warning to us all for the need to be very, very careful about those who would claim to represent us – should be made into a drama for our times.  This will be a demanding task - as the effort that Wilkins has already put in shows.  It needs, perhaps, an Andrew Bovell.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Animal Farm by George Orwell

Animal Farm by George Orwell, adapted for the stage by shake&stir theatre company (Brisbane), directed by Michael Futcher.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 5-7, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 5

shake&stir is essentially a theatre-in-education youth theatre group – and young people came along in considerable numbers.  The applause from them and from those of us who are somewhat beyond youth was for a very satisfying piece of theatre, which made the message of Orwell’s famous cautionary tale absolutely clear.

All of us benefitted from a reminder to watch out for the con men and women of politics, especially when they spout slogans which morph mysteriously from All animals are equal to All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others!  There could be no more salutary lesson for us in this election year.

The success of this 90 minute adaptation relied on high energy precision in movement and voice by the cast of five, playing over 30 animal characters plus brief narration roles; and on equally high energy and precision in the sound track and visuals.  It was a joy for me to see multi-media and stage action thoroughly integrated, yet never becoming robotic (as I have seen in some children’s shows, for example, like Dora the Explorer performed to a pre-recorded tape).

Here, Ross Balbuziente, Nick Skubij, Tim Dashwood, Bryan Probets, and Nelle Lee (especially in her role of Molly, the horse who could not resist sugar, ribbons and a properly brushed mane) were all spot on in their timing and mood creation.  This Animal Farm was a revolution in action from go to whoa, never a comfortable fable of talking quadrupeds.  Or rather: Two legs Bad, Four legs (or two legs with wings) Good – or the chooks would never have stayed.

The set was quite extraordinarily complex, especially for a touring group to cart around the country.  It must be constructed as a huge jigsaw of pieces of myriad shapes and sizes, including speakers, lights and projector.  I can only admire the designer, Josh McIntosh, for his ingenuity – and the lighting designer, Jason Glenwright, and composer/sound designer Guy Webster – in making a set where actors, lights and sounds, and visuals on screens could all come and go in the right places at dizzying speed.

No roadie’s name is recorded in the program, so I presume everyone must be congratulated for amazing teamwork just to bump in and bump out.  Maybe Michael Futcher whips them all into place every night, unless they have all become as compliant as 457 Visa holders in the mining industry.  Whatever – it’s a great show for old and young to learn or re-learn Orwell’s warning.

© Frank McKone, Canberra