2013: the (very) sad fish lady by Joy McDonald

the (very) sad fish lady conceived, written and directed by Joy McDonald.  At The Street Theatre - Street Two, Canberra, September 28 – October 5, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 28

Between a rock and a hard place, there are laid out across the dividing waters stepping stones to this highly imaginative piece of folk theatre.

On the Rock lives a Greek grandmother alone with her chicken.  On the Mediterranean island of a Hard Place live people who are never happy – not enough olives, not enough rain, too much rain, too windy.  They tread gingerly over the stepping stones – too many of them, of course – to have coffee with the Fish Lady, so that she can read the pictures in the coffee grounds and tell them their fortunes.

But her own fortune is sad – so sad that even her chicken stops laying her daily egg – because her children live far away across the sea in Australia and she has never seen her little grandaughter.

In her imagination she becomes a fish who could swim to the other side of the world, but it is the mysterious boatman, Mister Moustache – pronounced Moustaki – who sees her sadness and magically brings her family to visit.  Their coffee grounds all present the same picture.  She will travel across the sea with them all the way to Australia – and so she does.

Though the chicken is so happy for her that she lays three eggs in one day, I was not sure about the chicken’s future – hopefully to cheer up the people of the Hard Place.

Over the years I have seen too much slick entertainment for young children.  I have called Joy McDonald’s work folk theatre because, without pretension or the veneer of commercialism, her puppets, images and sound track tell a personal story of our times for the children of our multicultural families.  Her puppeteers, Ruth Pieloor and James Scott, put on no airs while their expertise is evident not only in operating complex string puppets, hand puppets, shadow puppets and even a boat with a puppet, Mister Moustache, apparently pulling oars that really move – as well as the sad and later the smiling moon.

It is, of course, the clever design work of Imogen Keen and Hilary Talbot that makes all this possible.  I guess, in the world of art criticism, the devices and imagery in the (very) sad fish lady might be called naїve art, but that’s exactly right for 3-5 year-olds.  And with music by David Pereira and dramaturgical support from Richard Bradshaw, it’s obvious that this folk art theatre, as I think I should call it – like naїve art – is certainly not unsophisticated.  Nor slick.  Nor commercial.

the (very) sad fish lady is genuine storytelling, fascinating for the littlies and equally amusing and significant for their parents.  Highly recommended.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Michael Francis Willoughby in Elohgulp by Chris Thompson

Michael Francis Willoughby in Elohgulp written and directed by Chris Thompson.  Composer, John Shortis; sound designer, Ian Blake; set designer, David Hope; lighting designer, Alister Emerson; puppetry director, Catherine Roach.  Jigsaw Theatre Company at Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, September 28 – October 12, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 28

Jigsaw Theatre has a long successful history (see http://www.jigsawtheatre.com.au/content/about-jigsaw-theatre-company) – but this production is not one of its best.

There are elements of the show which are very attractive – the music composition and sound design; the puppets including the rubbish-cart Drits, the suspended jelly-fish-like Assupods, and the three-headed Gludse; and the lighting hung as part of the set to complement the sound effects.

But, despite Chris Thompson’s experience, the script was rather ‘ordinary’: it seemed to be too imitative of a number of children’s stories, mostly written for younger than the middle to upper primary level which Jigsaw was aiming at, while at the same time not handling scary material which these children like, along the lines of Roald Dahl.  The very realistic voice overs at the beginning of Michael’s parents arguing with each other and being angry with the boy for staying too long in the bath, with a basically empty stage, frightened me.

The pacing of the drama was too long-winded.  It took ages for the Drits to establish who and where they were before Michael finally appeared down the plughole from the “bathroom up there”.  Then it took more ages while he lay still on the floor before any action began.  In fact, as a theatrical device, the inability of the Drits and then the Assupods to make decisions and take action was not conducive to moving the drama along.  For this age group, bureaucratic committee meetings are hardly exciting.

Then there were the ducks.  Though cute in themselves, their tendency to pontificate and essentially present didactic statements about what the children in the audience were supposed to learn, to my mind, is the opposite of how educational drama should work.  Rather than be told “You learn a lot of things as you go along.  You learn about having friends you can trust; about telling stories, and passing things on; how some things can’t last forever, and that scary things can be scariest when you are furthest away from them.  And you learn that all these things are important.  Even for a kid.” I would expect the drama to reveal these points through the action and the audience to discover these ideas for themselves.

Finally, I was never sure whether I was supposed to take the matter of “all the good and bad and ugly stuff that gets flushed and washed and swept away down our gutters and sinks and bathtubs” as a reality which we should all feel guilty about; or whether all this, including Michael’s being willing to take the blame, was meant to be just in his imagination while he dreams in the bath to avoid hearing his parents arguing.

Either way, it’s not clear to me what the 8-10 year-olds’ take-home message was supposed to be.  Especially when the story became completely impossible as Michael leapt into what we had to suppose was a sewerage treatment pond.  The relevance of his duck’s grandparent having done this in 1932 was utterly lost on me, though there was talk of a great flood in that year.  Could that have meant that the flood flushed out the nasties in the pond, so the duck survived?  But with no flood now, Michael would have been eaten up by bacteria in no time – though he did have some concern about drowning!

Then, in a video at the end, Michael is back in his bath – but without his ‘Dirty Duck’.  So the visit to Elohgulp really happened, and his duck got left behind?

Sorry to be so nitpicking, but despite the attractive elements and the good quality performances, the production as a whole needs re-thinking in my book

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Shrine by Tim Winton

Shrine by Tim Winton.  Black Swan State Theatre Company, Perth, directed by Kate Cherry, at Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse, September 26-29, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 26

Tim Winton is a storyteller, and so are his characters.  Alongside the road he sees a small white cross, some flowers and objects scattered around the base of a tree.  This is not just a memorial, but a shrine symbolic of the person who died there.  But what does it mean when among the bottles of spirits and beer there is an old thong?

He sees a middle-aged man, Adam, stop to angrily tear down the shrine and disperse all the memories.  But the next time Adam drives by, he has to stop and destroy the construction again.  Who keeps re-creating the shrine?

As we hear Adam Mansfield (John Howard), his wife Mary (Sarah McNeill) and the teenage girl June Fenton (Whitney Richards) tell their stories, which include the stories told by the teenagers who survived the crash, Will (Luke McMahon) and Ben (Will McNeill), and by the dead teenager Jack Mansfield (Paul Ashcroft), we discover a complexity of life of the kind that must be represented by every shrine we see along every country road.

It’s a sobering experience, yet also enlightening.  And for many, as Kate Cherry said in the pre-show forum, the play provides a catharsis, a kind of cleansing of fear, especially among parents of teenage boys.  Though there are humorous moments, this is a tragedy in the ancient Greek form.  We know the ending before the play begins, but how did it come to this?

In Winton’s storytelling, time is a highly malleable element.  All the physical items needed – the tree, the shrine, the two halves of the car, the funeral furniture, the fire on the beach, Adam’s beach house wine bar – are present on stage throughout, so scenes shift and time changes as characters move and are lit or shadowed.

The acting was excellent throughout, with to my mind special mention justified for the women, Whitney Richards and Sarah McNeill, whose roles reminded me of the Greek – of the young Antigone, who pleaded for the proper treatment of her dead brother, and an older Electra, left alone when all in the household are dead.  As, in some sense, the central character, John Howard’s creation of the diversity of attitudes and feelings within Adam Mansfield was a brilliant piece of work – not so much ancient Greek, but rather very recognisable modern Australian.

For West Australians, as we might expect from Winton’s other writing, there are points of local identification – but these give the work specificity while the issues are universal.  This is what makes for great storytelling, and an excellent drama on stage.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.  Sydney Theatre Company directed by Kip Williams, designer David Fleischer, lighting by Nicholas Rayment, sound by Alan John.  Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre 25 September - 2 November, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 25

As Tybalt, Paris and Romeo lay dead in the Capulet Tomb, and Juliet, revived from a death-imitating drug, told Friar Laurence “Go, get thee hence, for I will not away”, I found myself thinking “She’s on her own now...why can’t she go her own way now?”   And indeed, in this version, she mourns her cousin Tybalt, kisses the poisoned lips of her husband Romeo, and as in Shakespeare’s script ignores the body of Paris entirely.

Paris, rather than toting a sword in this modern scenario, had brought a pistol, saying to Romeo “Obey, and go with me; for thou must die.”  “I must indeed; and therefore came I hither,” responds Romeo, but Paris would not leave him alone in peace.  Hiding among the graves, Romeo managed to escape the gunfire, caught Paris by surprise, disarmed him and shot him dead.

But should Juliet die?  After all, she has said “I will kiss thy lips; / Haply some poison yet doth hang on them, to make me die with a restorative.”  Maybe she lives after all, to do what I would expect her to do: tell her father exactly what she thinks of him, even threatening to shoot him with Paris’ revolver, and then come forward to speak to us.

Before the play began she had spoken the words of the Chorus in the Prologue, about how the “continuance of their parents’ rage, / Which but their children’s end, nought could remove, / Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage; / The which if you with patient ears attend, / What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.”

We do not see Juliet die on this stage.  Instead of “O happy dagger! / This is thy sheath; / there rust, and let me die;” instead of the Watch, The Prince, the Friar, Capulet and Lady Capulet, Montague describing his wife dying from “Grief of my son’s exile”, taking up a long page and a half of script talking in the presence of the four dead bodies – Juliet speaks briefly, taking up the theme of Shakespeare’s final words “Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things; / Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished: / For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

Maybe we are seeing Juliet’s spirit speaking, as Emeritus Professor Penny Gay suggests in her essay Juliet Speaks reproduced in the program:  Looking more closely at what [Shakespeare] actually wrote, we might argue that the play is more interested in the impossible cultural position of the eloquent young woman, who knows what she wants and speaks of it without fear; argues for her right to it; and, in so doing, produces poetry that is the equal of that of any of the most passionate heroes in Shakespeare.

Surely this is the intention behind Kip Williams’ direction of this play in a modern setting and style – a great success, though certain to cause “more talk” both of “these sad things” and probably also of the issue of “updating” Shakespeare.

In fact the use of today’s “rave” music and everyday costumes, though at first not easily related to Shakespeare’s language, and references to swords and The Prince, did not update the play in the same sense as other recent productions have done – such as we saw in the recent film of Coriolanus with Ralph Fiennes.  The difference lies in the nature of a movie – which we naturally see as if it is real and present – compared with a stage play, which we know to be a theatrical contrivance.

As the Prologue tells us we are here to watch a play, so the players have the freedom to create a world in our imaginations as we listen to the words, see the movement, mime and set design, hear the music and sound effects, and so on.  It’s the old injunction to suspend our disbelief.  If the theatrical devices are designed and performed well, then you can play Shakespeare as if it were in his period of history, or in ours, or in a setting mixing elements from different times and places.

This production does the third option very well.  It is not long before we find ourselves engaged in a world where young men are just not very sensible, fun-loving but too often unable to see the consequences of their actions; where older men, having grown up from such young men, become tribal, authoritarian and vicious – unless they can stand outside themselves and see things more clearly from a monkish cell, as Friar Laurence does; and where women like Juliet’s mother are forced to accept the dominance of men, or like Juliet’s Nurse learn to take life as it comes with all the necessary compromises, or like Juliet have to take huge risks to stand up for what she wants.

The staging device of the two ringed revolve is very effective as it transports us as smoothly as Shakespeare’s Globe ever did from scene to scene.  If there was a sense of something missing, it was because there was no traditional physical balcony.

The acting was expert throughout, so that not only was there clarity of language (made better by the unobtrusive microphones), but every word was spoken with the character’s intention made clear to us – hooray for Stanislavski.  I’m going to have to set up some jealousy by mentioning Eamon Farren (a brilliant Mercutio), Julie Forsyth (a wonderful comic Nurse, but with a real tenderness coming through the rough exterior), and by making special mention of Eryn Jean Norvill who made the play hers as Juliet, and made it Juliet’s play for us.

For some, this production may be controversial.  For me it was just fascinating.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: From a Black Sky by Sandra France, with libretto by Helen Nourse

David Rogers-Smith (David), Don Bemrose (Tony), Judith Dodsworth (Sophie), Rachael Duncan (Amelia)

From a Black Sky composed by Sandra France, with libretto by Helen Nourse.  The Street Theatre Made in Canberra program in Street One, September 20-22, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 20

I’m not averse to a fictional story about a predatory lesbian who succeeds in making the husband of the woman she loves in effect commit suicide, by staying ostensibly to save his burning house.  It was rather odd that Sophie, the pred les (played by Judith Dodsworth), had a husband Tony (Don Bemrose), who apparently remained completely unaware of his wife’s shenanigans with Amelia (Rachael Duncan) and saw his mate David (David Rogers-Smith) as a shining hero for being man enough to stay – despite the fact that it was obvious that they should all have gone and left their houses to the fates.

I’m not averse either to modern art-form opera music and song, composed by Sandra France, especially when performed so well by this 11-piece ensemble conducted by David Kram.

But I do find it difficult, remembering my family’s fears and last-minute efforts to prepare the house on Saturday 18 January 2003, to work out why this fictional story was connected to that particular real firestorm, using recordings from radio broadcasts which people, now ten years later, will surely remember, and which makes this show specific to Canberra.

Yes, this story is a tragedy of misconceived relationships, and maybe things like this were happening on that eventful day, but to use that firestorm merely as a background setting is to set aside the depth of feeling attached to the unforeseen destruction of 500 homes and the deaths of four people in horrific circumstances.  I remember these feelings as we were on alert to stay or go for a full two weeks after the 18th.  If there is any day in my life when I remember where I was and what I was doing, it is that day.

That all said, let’s consider the opera and the performances as a theatrical production. 

Opera means a lot of singing, but only David Rogers-Smith had the voice and the diction to carry his words over the orchestra.  The words of the other three main characters and of the chorus were rarely understandable.  I had thought perhaps my ancient ears were at fault, but unsolicited comments from other and much younger audience members confirmed my experience.  The acoustics of Street One might not be the best, and the placement of the orchestra in the centre of the stage with singers mostly behind or off to the side, probably didn’t help.

But the storyline of this new work needed the diction to be clear.  I relied on the program notes to get me through.  Subtitles or supertitles might be acceptable for foreign language operas, but surely not for one sung in ordinary plain suburban English.

The beginning and ending, using young children, was an embarrassment.  I don’t mean the children were, but the idea of a happy sort-of 19th Century opera marketplace scene to open the show just doesn’t match the Canberra shopping centres we know and love.  And the ending, so the program states, is about how “Children, teenagers, community, Tony, Sophie and Amelia all look at what their futures will hold and the memories and regrets they will forever carry”.  I saw what looked and felt like a reprise of the happy, but now just a little bit more sort-of, opening scene.  What firestorm ... what death of David?

In fact the only scene in the production which had real theatrical effect was the final solo appearance by David and his demise in the fire, with clever lighting and use of the backstage roller door.  This was genuinely dramatic, allowing us to feel at last some empathy with a thoroughly negative character who seemed to have little drive to face up to difficulties, such as having been recently retrenched.

The two women’s powerful singing did make something of their final scene together, climaxing with Amelia’s spoken “You disgust me!”  Yet shortly after, we are expected accept Tony, Sophie and Amelia seemingly reconciled.  After a play apparently presenting reality, even down to a rather clumsy sex-scene by the women in Act One, ending this way was just not possible.

I think you should not miss the music, nor the voices per se, but don’t go for the drama experience.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: A Suppository of Wisdom by Shortis & Simpson

Moya Simpson

John Shortis

A Suppository of Wisdom by Shortis & Simpson at Smith’s Alternative Bookshop, Canberra, September 12-14, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 13

John Shortis and Moya Simpson have produced another classic collection of satirical songs and monologues arising from political events, in this case the moveable feast of the Federal Election on September 7. 

So delectably unstable is this table setting that even though by the second performance they had picked up on Sophie Mirabella’s loss in the Victorian electorate of Indi, they still included the song of horror – on the part of new Prime Minister Tony Abbott – about Barnaby Joyce becoming leader of the Nationals  and therefore deputy leader of the Liberal National Coalition (traditionally offered appointment as Treasurer).  Only that very afternoon, Warren Truss was confirmed as the Nationals’ leader, while Barnaby, having successfully moved from the Senate (Queensland) to the House of Representatives (New England, NSW) is now Nationals’ deputy leader, therefore being tipped for the traditional Country Party post as Minister for Agriculture.  With his views about coal-seam gas and foreign investors buying up farming land, the horror may go on for Mr Abbott.

To have written, rehearsed and so professionally performed 18 numbers – and a thoroughly deserved encore – in less than a week says a great deal about not only Shortis & Simpson’s sense of humour but also about their dedication to the task.  After some 17 years of satire which has made them a Canberra icon, performing now in the Bookshop which is rapidly becoming the kind of small music venue reminding me of icons of the days of old in Sydney, such as The Basement and The Troubador, A Suppository of Wisdom found its audience, and the discriminating audience was not disappointed.

It is hard to pick one number above all the others, especially because each had its own special music and singing style, but maybe the two that had the audience most in fits of laughter were the yodelling Tony A and the drunken monologue Learless Feeders. 

Beginning from the idea that Tony Abbott was picking up from the US Tea Party and Sarah Palin, Simpson’s “Tony a...yay...yay” took on a life of its own that still rings in the mind.  This is a song for YouTube, surely to become the theme song for this Government until a double dissolution or the antics of the kangaroo-poo-throwing Senator Ricky Muir (elected with less than 2% of primary votes) bring the Parliament into convulsions – maybe not of laughter – some time next year.

But perhaps the truest satire was Simpson’s monologue as a typical Aussie bloke, drunk on alcohol and the power of words, with extensive views on all aspects of politics – except that every phrase, including all the usual obscenities which pepper such rantings at the bar, had the first letters of significant words reversed.  As an early exponent of Alzheimer’s, I and many of the audience (who, Shortis claimed, had increased the usual average age in the venue by 40 years) were completely overwhelmed not only with the laughter that this generated, but with the fascinating mental exercise of trying work out, at speed, what the words were and then realising how they undermined all the pretentiousness of every politician mentioned.

This speech, to my mind, matches Peter Sellers’ famous political speech (“Let me grasp ....”) and definitely should be recorded on Shortis & Simpson’s next CD.  Or better, put this up on YouTube – it is sure to go “viral”.

Unfortunately, since elections and their results are so volatile, A Suppository of Wisdom has already come and gone by the time you read this.  But Smith’s Alternative Bookshop looks like lasting for quite a while yet, with jazz, stand-up comedy and maybe more Shortis & Simpson to come.  I certainly hope so.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

John Shortis on ukelele and Moya Simpson in full yodel

2013: Project Rameau. Choreography by Rafael Bonachela

Project Rameau Sydney Dance Company - choreography by Rafael Bonachela; Australian Chamber Orchestra – guest director Dale Barltrop.  Lighting and set design: Benjamin Cisterne.  Costume design: Rafel Bonachela and Fiona Holley.  Music editor and arranger: Graham Sadler.  Dance director: Amy Hollingsworth.  Canberra Theatre Centre, September 12-14, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 12

Music and dance for the sake of music and dance.  This collaboration between the artistic directors Richard Tognetti (ACO) and Rafael Bonachela (SDC) is perhaps the most accessible modern dance work one can imagine – thoroughly imbued with the energy of youth.

It is a celebration of the ebb and flow of life, in social groups with a tremendous sense of community; in couples drifting together and drifting apart; as individuals expressing the mood of the moment; in times of reflection; in times of grand enjoyment.  The joy and satisfaction at the end of an hour’s continuous engagement in the sound and sights of this performance moved the audience to applaud for curtain call after curtain call.

The skills of the ACO musicians and the SDC dancers were beyond reproach – indeed far beyond my understanding.  How they can do it I don’t know, but the effect is mesmerising.

The music is not all by Jean-Philippe Rameau.  For example, Vivaldi’s storm, the presto from Summer, The Four Seasons provided an opportunity to see youth temporarily at the mercy of events outside of themselves, which, of course, they usually gaily ignore.

The stage design was interesting, with the orchestra upstage and a part of the performance instead of being relegated to the pit.  This meant the cueing, the beat and the mood of each of the twenty numbers in the show was immediately in the control of all the  performers – dancers and musicians – working as a unified group.  The result was an electricity lighting up each piece dramatically.

Though the simple black costumes and the modern technology in the lighting created a very much up-to-date 21st Century style, the ensemble quality with the visible live orchestra behind the dancers somehow seemed appropriate for this music originally written and performed in Rameau’s 18th Century operas, ten of which are represented here.  The atmosphere as the performance concluded was surely very like that in the opera houses of France where Rameau’s work was so popular.

Was this a worthwhile project?  Absolutely, in my view.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: RU4ME by Annie Byron

RU4ME based on Kissing Frogs by Andee Jones, written and performed by Annie Byron, directed by Wayne Harrison.  True West Theatre & Riverside Productions at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, September 11-14, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 11

If you’re a man and you haven’t GSoH, you might like to avoid this witty and telling story of Annie’s search for an arthouse cinema buddy on the internet dating service RU4ME.  Except, of course, she discovers that, at her age after raising her now-adult children, having a common interest in arthouse cinema is not what it’s really all about.  Especially when the few men she meets who actually have a sense of humour very soon find someone else.

Each of the 40 or so others not only have their individual characteristics which activate her delete button, but have in common an inability to recognise her as a person in her own right.  “Do I have to become submissive to play this game?” she asks herself, and asks us.

The wonderful thing about her play and her playing of the role is the light touch, which infuses not only the script but the set design (Andrea Espinoza), sound design (Jeremy “Jed” Silver), lighting and video (Nicholas Higgins) and the whole concept in Wayne Harrison’s directing.

There is a message behind the laughter, coming from Byron’s own experience when “I plunged into internet dating myself, and when the first person I met was so obviously not what his profile described”.  It’s not just so many men who  misrepresent themselves and fail to understand that women are equal, but she has also to learn to see herself for what she really is and really wants.

Can she find this through profiles, email, Photoshopped images, going to movies, risking alarm bells ringing in her head at “parties”.  LoL, of course not.

But, laugh out loud as we do, it’s in real life that she finds what she needs – and we are glad for her.

And we appreciate Annie Byron’s precise acting skills which bring this story to life.  If you come without a SoH, you’ll surely find one in this hour and a quarter show.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Home at the End by Duncan Ley

Home at the End by Duncan Ley.  Everyman Theatre directed by Jarrad West.  Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, September 4-14, 2013


Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 4

Duncan Ley likes to explore the psychological effects arising from a very specific situation.  You’ll surely remember the interrogation in his In Cold Light (soon to be a feature film) with its unexpected twists and turns creating the effect of a mystery drama.  We search to find out what is happening, and why.

In Home at the End, Act 1 ends with a sudden and completely unexpected horrific event.  I even wondered if this was the end of the play, but as others obviously more in the know on opening night wandered off to the bar for interval, I then had to wonder what on earth could happen next.

Because the play is a mystery I should not reveal just what does happen, except to say that the title means what it says.  The character, Joe Smith, who we realise in the second half is the central figure in the drama, does come home, at the end.  But it took me considerable time and analysis afterwards to work out what should be understood to be the theme of the play.

Apart from the question of the limitations of my intellect, does this mean that the play is a success or not?  I mentioned In Cold Light because that play ran for just 90 minutes, was absolutely tightly focussed, and made us understand, and even empathise with, the Inspector – the interrogator, who is as much trapped in the situation as the victim.

Home at the End runs for almost two and a half hours, not including interval.  Soon after Act 2 got under way I realised what the ending might be – and I was right.  But this meant that a great deal of Act 2 could have been trimmed, as well as some of Act 1, so that the drama’s momentum, already at a high point at the end of Act 1, would be better maintained – either to an inevitable end (which I saw coming), or a surprise end, which would need a reworking of Joe’s psychological development in Act 2.  He would need to be apparently coping much better with the trauma of his experience at the end of Act 1, but lose it against our expectations when his (at this point imaginary) wife Andrea sings her final song and fades away.

What the play is about is the experience of traumatic stress.  What can we expect a person to do at the dreadful moment of absolute threat?  Like any animal, and we are only a species of animal after all, will it be fight or flight?  Does a person, in this moment, have any control over their response?  I think Ley says, no.

The response to such fear, especially as in his play when the horrific event is completely unexpected by the character, Joe – and by us in the audience – is entirely instinctive.  Can, then, the person be blamed if he flees to save himself, when he might have fought back, at least yelling out a warning to others, or attacking the danger even at the risk of losing his own life?

It is this issue which is played out in the attempts to treat Joe’s traumatic stress disorder through group therapy and psychological counselling in Act 2.  Can treatment of this kind be successful?  I think again, Ley says not really.  “Home” at the end, for this person, Joe, is no kind of comfortable resolution.  It’s just an escape into pathological story-telling.

At this point, the impact of the play broadens.  Joe is (or was before the trauma) a writer.  Does Ley suggest that to be a writer is to be escaping into story-telling?  In his case certainly not pathological, even if in this play a bit long-winded.  Traumatic Stress Disorder is now such an issue in the world that TSD is a label in its own right, and counselling is seen as a necessary part of help for anyone faced with the kind of experience that Joe has.  The issue, and therefore this story, is important.

Putting this story on stage, and with excellent performances from all the cast – Isaac Reilly as Joe, Helen McFarlane as Andrea, Amy Dunham and her unusual puppet as their 6-year-old daughter Molly, with Jordan Best, Geoffrey Borny, Laura Dawson, Duncan Driver, Alice Ferguson, Will Huang, and Chris Zuber playing all the other roles (including quite fascinating commedia dell’arte characters) – makes for a very worthwhile theatre experience.  Highly recommended.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Bijou – A Cabaret of Secrets and Seduction by Chrissie Shaw

Chrissie Shaw as Bijou

Bijou – A Cabaret of Secrets and Seduction by Chrissie Shaw.  SmallShows in association with The Street Theatre Made in Canberra, performed by Chrissie Shaw and Alan Hicks (piano), directed by Susan Pilbeam.  At Street Two, Thursday 29th August - Saturday 7th September, 7.30pm; Sunday 1st and 8th September, 4pm, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

The artist Gyula Halász, originally from the ancient Transylvanian town of Brassó,  became the photographer of Paris nightlife where he was known as Brassaï.  In 1933 he published a book including this photo of “Bijou” of the Montmartre cabarets, apparently without ever speaking to the woman.

"Bijou" - photo by Brassaï, Nuits de Paris 1933

Four years of research and writing has produced a life and times of Bijou – fictional, but entirely possible.  Beginning from lines from Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire, which include Elle n’avait gardé que ses bijoux sonores, and entwining into a kind of internal monologue – spoken, mimed and sung by the anonymous “Bijou” – an enormous range of French and German music, Shaw has created perhaps the most significant work of her long stage career in Canberra.

"Bijou" - photo by Brassaï, Nuits de Paris 1933

 Her story begins as she refuses to acknowledge the Brassaï closeup hung on the side wall of our cabaret setting.  He knew nothing of the real person he so rudely photographed.  She blinds him with her hat and recalls the joys and terrors of her life.  The measure of her character was coming across one of the girls she had known at convent school – like her, sexually used and abused by a leading figure in the Church – as an adult: poverty stricken, demoralised and literally looking like death.  Bijou would survive: indeed she would use the men who would use her, and succeed in bringing down the archbishop via a secret tunnel by which he visits her brothel.  He does not recognise her from when she was his 12-year-old sex-object, literally; but one of her “girls” recognises him in all his regalia during Mass, and screams out the truth.

The son born of her illegitimate liaison is brought up by Bijou’s parents, believing Bijou to be his elder sister.  But the play – which this is, rather than the merely entertaining cabaret it first appears to be – is not only about the appalling treatment of women, family shame, and the strength of character needed by a woman to rise above the indignity and even threats to her life, such as when her German nobleman officer “husband” sends her home to Paris after World War I when “he could have killed me” because she knew too much of his affairs.

The awful twist to her story is that her secret son dies in that very war, and we are faced not only with how a mother must carry on despite such a loss, but also with the realisation that this war – the “Great War” to “End all Wars” was a lie, as all wars are.  And we know, as she was photographed in 1933, how true her recognition of this would be.  And still is.

Though for me the first half was played rather too “studied”, in the second half we warm to this woman, from her first true love (who at 21 is recovered by his upper class family and married to the “right” kind of girl) to her acceptance of her life as a permanent denizen of a bar in Montmartre, in her sixties.  She has an odd but interesting relationship with her pianist who, having previously walked out to escape her demands, finally returns to recover her hat.  The Brassaï photo is revealed once more, but we now know the truth behind the picture.

This is a brave work, and a great example of the value of the Made in Canberra project, with excellent quality in the work by Susan Pilbeam as director and dramaturg; Alan Hicks as pianist and in character; Imogen Keen for a wonderful evocative set, reminding me very much of the erstwhile School of Arts Cafe, Queanbeyan; Liz Lea for choreography which recreated the styles of the times, from the 1870s to the 1930s; Gillian Schwab for lighting; Victoria Worley for providing costumes that could peel back the years as Bijou remembered them; and Chrissie Shaw herself for an original work, both personal and socially significant, and for singing and speaking with such vocal range – from the likes of Johann Strauss, various art song composers, Eric Satie, Kurt Weill and, to conclude, to Jean Lenoir’s Parlez-Moi d’Amour – just my thoughts, indeed.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Catalogue of Dreams by Urban Theatre Projects. Preview feature article.

Catalogue of Dreams – devised theatre for the Canberra Centenary 2013 by Urban Theatre Projects, based in Sydney.  Co-Directors: Rosie Dennis and Alicia Talbot.

Performances at Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre.
Previews: Saturday July 13 and Tuesday July 16, 8:15pm
Opening: Wednesday July 17, 8:15pm
Season: Thursdays – Saturdays July 18-27, 8:15pm

Preview by Frank McKone
June 21

The history of Urban Theatre Projects can be seen at
http://urbantheatre.com.au/about/history/
where the group’s 30 years of work explains why Centenary Director Robyn Archer approached Alicia Talbot more than two years ago for a theatre piece from Sydney, as part of the program of works representing a wide range of Australian local communities for the celebration of Canberra, the nation’s capital.

Rosie Dennis tells me that Catalogue of Dreams is ‘contemporary theatre’, collaborative and ‘devised’ – different from the standard convention of an audience watching a performance through a 'fourth wall'.  The audience in the Courtyard Studio will find themselves integrated in the acting space as if they are in the Family Court with the young Canberra people who find themselves in difficult circumstances there.

Though for many theatre-goers in Canberra the tradition of this form of theatre – going back to at least Carol Woodrow’s company Fool’s Gallery in the 1970s – will not be a surprise, the keyword for this production is the Dreams of the title.  As a Centenary piece, there are two aspects which make it clearly ‘different’.

First, instead of showing off something that represents the community where the theatre company resides, such as we saw in the Northern Territory’s contribution, Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui by Jason De Santis, Talbot and Dennis have worked here for some 12 months with local performers starting from issues that face young people dealing with bureaucracy and the law.

The result is a scripted work, now in solid rehearsal as I write, largely written up by Dennis, which is entirely appropriate in the Canberra context – raising concerns for us about the centre of government 100 years on – while also being relevant to audiences around the country.  Anyone who has ever had to explain again and again to, say, Centrelink officers, to police officers, to lawyers or in court hearings who they are, what has happened to them, what they did and why, will appreciate this show.

But rather than this becoming another kind of ‘reality’ show, what Catalogue of Dreams reveals is the disjunct between the playful dreamlike fantasy world which is natural to teenagers, still naive and childlike in so many ways, and the formal situations demanded by the system of laws and rules of behaviour which constitute the ‘adult’ world.  Here is a universal theme, applicable to any human society as Wulamanayuwi showed us in the Tiwi Islands.  For anyone caught up in fraught circumstances, the experience is surreal – as it will be for the audience in the Courtyard space when this drama opens on 17th July.

In performance, the work is essentially image-driven – not so much in the form of multi-media presentations but rather through creating images in the minds of those observing through text and story, voice-over and devices such as masks.  In this sense, it seems to me, this Urban Theatre project is not so different from the long tradition of street theatre going back to the commedia dell’arte of centuries ago, with its combination of humour and absurdity, now in a modern context.

Though personally I’ll be travelling – perhaps following my own fantasies – while Catalogue of Dreams is on stage, I feel disappointed to miss what should be a fascinating and significant production.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Opal Vapour by Jade Dewi Tyas Tungaal

Opal Vapour  Dance created and performed by Jade Dewi Tyas Tungaal.  Composer and music performer, Ria Soemardjo. Set design, Paula van Beek. The Street Theatre, Canberra, June 14-15, 2013

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 14

A mesmerising, slow, sinuous dance begins as a body lying on a plinth.  Covering shrouds are gently removed by a musician who has entered from the audience tinkling tiny bells as if in mourning.  But a hand begins to dance in isolation, lit from below, and slowly, the body comes to life, reproduced as a writhing shadow on a screen.  It is an awakening.

The figure remains at floor level for a long period, seeming to go through a series of reptile and animal-like incarnations, until finally rising to standing human form, dressing in clothing at first simple in style and then more sophisticated and formal.

This life goes through several stages, including what seems to be a period of mental difficulties back writhing on the floor – perhaps finally attaining a peaceful death.

I am not qualified to judge or analyse the details of the choreography, but found this work interesting in concept, combining the creators’ Indonesian heritage with Western modern dance.  For me the slow and steady movement was absorbing, rather in the way that I might look at a large painting and gradually become aware of all its different elements.

The music is Javanese in style – some gamelan, some as if the sounds of dry grass and wind, some sung in haunting notes, some bowed on a stringed instrument, perhaps reminiscent of the Hindu origins of the culture that we saw in much of the dance in the body shapes, hand and eye movements.  Both performers were precise and disciplined.

This is an original work, not so much cross-cultural but integrating elements of the Australian and Indonesian cultures to which these Melbourne performers belong.  Interesting and worthwhile to see.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Phèdre by Jean Racine

Catherine McClements - Phèdre

Juli Forsyth - Oenone

Bert LaBonte - Théramène

Edmund Lembke-Hogan - Hippolytus

Abby Earl - Aricia

Phèdre by Jean Racine (1639-99), trans. Ted Hughes.  Bell Shakespeare directed by Peter Evans; designed by Anna Cordingley; composer: Kelly Ryall.  Sydney Opera House Playhouse June 6-29, 2013

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 12

Peter Evans has created an intense theatre experience of the tragedy of unfortunate misunderstanding and deliberate but understandable intrigue which, in this high drama, leads to deaths – by guilty suicide, pride and self-destructive bravado, and insurmountable mental stress.  Though the family concerned is of Ancient Greek royalty, mortals whose forebears are Olympian gods, it is not difficult to relate this story and the psychology to any modern family.  For Queen Phèdre this was absolutely her Annus Horribilis.  For our Queen Elizabeth this was 1992, just five years before the accidental death of Princess Diana.

For Bell Shakespeare, Evans brings a new style as well as a new interest in plays beyond the Shakespeare canon, this time from France where Racine was the major tragedian of the later 17th Century.  The experiment is a thorough success.

Be prepared to be frightened, as the theatre suddenly blacks out and loud alarums sound, at a level and clarity that the best of modern electronic sound systems can produce.  Attention is at once fixed and focussed on the spotlit unmoving figures on stage whose words, spoken with precision of imagery and emotion, tell us the story as each character sees it.  This is the style some call ‘presentational theatre’ which may well have been how Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed, and was certainly the way the main characters were presented in Ancient Greek tragedies by, say, Sophocles or Euripides.

But Racine did not use the relieving comedy of Macbeth’s porter, nor the change of pace of a singing and dancing chorus as the Greeks had done.  His play takes the myth – of King Theseus (Marco Chiappi), his second wife Phèdre (Catherine McClements), her step-son Hippolytus (Edmund Lembke-Hogan) and Theseus’ beautiful young captive Aricia (Abby Earl) – into an ever-deepening vortex of disaster: a black hole indeed for the King who was so famous for having succeeded in destroying the Minotaur with the help of Phèdre’s sister Ariadne, who provided the thread by which he was guided back to safety out of the labyrinth.

Racine’s ‘chorus’ consists of just four ordinary mortals – Oenone, Phèdre’s nurse (Julie Forsyth); Théramène, Hippolytus’ adviser (Bert LaBonte); and two messengers Ismène (Olivia Monticciolo) and Panope (Caroline Lee).  Each has an essential role in this drama as commentator, analyst and critical adviser, and Evans’ direction nicely judges the fine points of the relationships of each in the status positions they hold.

The result is that, in what is essentially story-telling with minimum action, relying almost entirely on quality of voice and spoken expression, every actor needs equal skills – and every actor comes up to the mark.

Yet it has to be said that Catherine McClements, Julie Forsyth and Bert LaBonte stood out for me, perhaps because their parts were given more emotional qualities in Ted Hughes’ script.

Hippolytus’ pride in self-restraint compared with his father’s womanising and monster-killing seems to soften his character, making him more hesitant in revealing his love for Aricia until the situation forces him into action, and making it surprising when Théramène describes how, reckless and without restraint, Hippolytus faces up to the monster created by Neptune which kills him – as Theseus had asked Neptune to do.  Hughes’ modern poetic language – almost pentameter in form – I think made it more difficult for Lembke-Hogan to establish the strength of aggression which comes through Racine’s basically four-beat couplet lines in French. 

A nice example is when Hippolytus exclaims, in response to Phèdre’s revelation of her love for him:

Dieux!  qu’est-ce que j’entends?  Madame, oubliez-vous
Que Thésée est mon père, et qu’il est votre époux?

For the other characters Hughes’ English heightens the poetic to good effect, and in the end, after LaBonte’s wonderful dramatic telling of how Hipploytus died and of Aricia’s mourning for her true love, we feel all the sympathy we should for the young couple, and satisfied that Theseus at last recognises his mistakes and gives Aricia her due.

The whole evening, in its almost monumental set yet with characters in modern dress, is fascinating for the linkage created beween the ancient and mythical, the Renaissance and Romantic, and the modern psychological life.  An intense experience, not to be missed – or easily forgotten.




© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: The Maids by Jean Genet

Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert
All photos by Lisa Tomasetti

 The Maids by Jean Genet, trans. by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton.  Directed by Benedict Andrews; designer: Alice Babidge; video designer: Sean Bacon; composer: Oren Ambarchi; lighting designer: Nick Schlieper; sound designer: Luke Smiles.  Sydney Theatre Company, June 4 – July 20, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 12

Watching The Maids is terrifying enough.  Daring to write a review ....

But, like Solange, in the end I have to follow through.

Isabelle Huppert as Solange, Cate Blanchett as Claire in rehearsal

It would be easy to say the performances of Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Huppert and Elizabeth Debicki go without saying.  But that would only be because their extraordinary command of their voices seemed to come so easily.  It takes a little while to catch the details in Huppert’s French-accented English, but the new translation leaves no doubt about Solange’s meaning.

Huppert creates a delightful, at times almost whimsical character, and therefore all the more tragic in the end.  Blanchett’s Claire was exquisite – a character as demanding of her sister as the Mistress is of Claire. 

I could say these two were as I expected, considering the last performance I saw by Blanchett in Uncle Vanya and Huppert’s films over the years, but Debicki’s Mistress was an equal to her more experienced colleagues’ quality.

The point made – that Claire and Mistress were parallel personalities in different universes – was beautifully, even magically, reinforced in the similarities in movement, voice, physical likeness and moody energy of these two actrices.  For visual and emotional display, the ripping off their stands of the huge array of dresses and furs in an enormous flurry of frustration was a great example.

Elizabeth Debicki as Mistress

When Claire declared that she was exhausted!, there was laughter in recognition – even in sympathy.  But by the time the Mistress had taken us through her wild destructive phase, and Claire demanded her tea of Solange – the tea laced with Nembutal meant for the Mistress whose role Claire had now taken on for real, no longer as a game – we found ourselves equally exhausted.  Not laughing, just applauding.

There is much more than the acting to applaud in this production.  There is the taking of new risks: in bringing a play of the immediate post-war 1940s to a modern Australian audience, and in the originality of the use of live camera and amplified voice.

The latter was a highly successful device (in contrast to many multimedia failures I have witnessed in other shows).  Here the screen above the action brings the details of facial expression, of objects of significance, and oddly humorous angles which enhance and often enlighten – including for those of us, like me, squeezed by massive bookings months ago into the Circle.  The scenes in the almost off-stage bathroom became intriguing with directly observed glimpses of private behaviour selectively showing in wide shot or close-up at the same time.  Our perception – both of what we were literally seeing and what was really going on – became part of the ‘game’.  Here was a technical device being used to elucidate the concept of different universes in parallel.

Technology, which was not available or probably even thought of by Genet in 1947, has today brought us to the understanding of ideas like ‘quantum leap’ in physics and how there may be copies or versions of ourselves existing in different universes at the same time, but never accessible from one to another.

This is, for me at least, what brought this play into the modern era.  In Genet’s day, and in Europe especially, the basically feudal tradition of servants as trusted retainers, almost family of the autocratic rich, was still close enough for The Maids to be immediately relevant (and why I wrote actrices rather than ‘actressess’).  Even decades later, friends of mine were employed by ultra-rich Europeans as chef and housekeeper.  They came back disgusted after a year, with stories like being sent to Harrods to pick up up a dress, worth only £10,000, or on Majorca (or maybe Capri) having to prepare banquets daily which were hardly touched, but then not being allowed to pass perfectly good food on to local poverty stricken villagers.  It must be thrown away, they were ordered.

Perhaps the final straw for this couple was when a ‘radical’ daughter, of a similar age to them, visited the family.  The daughter talked to the couple on an equal basis, but was then instructed by her parents not to talk to the servants, or she would be banished.  What she did, I don’t know, but my friends came back to our parallel universe in Australia.

But, of course, Genet’s maids had nowhere else to go, no other employment (except, one supposes, in another placement just as bad as the last) – in other words no freedom from their low position in the status power game.  Maybe, a lesson might be learnt by a certain Australian mining family whose Mistress has suggested paying workers $2 a day, and whose children (let alone any maids we do not get to hear about) are struggling to keep up their position. 

But that kind of family’s story is perhaps more relevant in my following review of another French play – Racine’s Phèdre, which I saw in the same extraordinary day in Sydney.

It may not be easy, considering the bookings, but if you can get to see The Maids the trip will be well worth the effort.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Cate Blanchett (Claire) and Isabelle Huppert (Solange) in performance

Isabelle Huppert and Cate Blanchett

Elizabeth Debicki as Mistress

The Maids set in performance (upstage bathroom blacked out at this point), bird's-eye view on screen
showing Cate Blanchett (Claire) and Isabelle Huppert as Solange wearing rubber gloves

 

Solange (Isabelle Huppert) watches from outside the apartment (shown on screen)
as Claire (Cate Blanchett) is left holding the poisoned tea that Mistress has refused to drink

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