2014: Enlightenment or Entitlement by Peter Tregear. Brief commentary on Platform Papers No 38.

Enlightenment or Entitlement by Peter Tregear.  Platform Papers No 38, Currency House, February 2014.

Commentary by Frank McKone

For Canberra critics and the arts community Peter Tregear’s “Reflections on Tertiary Music Education” is of particular concern.  “About the Author” (page ix) states In 2012 he was appointed Professor and Head of the ANU School of Music and has led a successful overhaul of the curriculum and staffing of that institution.

I am not professionally able to make any judgement about the success or otherwise of his appointment, since straight theatre is my area of arts criticism and teaching.  But since the change of approach at the Canberra School of Music, as it was known throughout its long history before being amalgamated with the Australian University, generated great controversy, I think it is appropriate to alert interested parties to the publication of this Platform Paper, available from February 1.

Go to http://currencyhouse.org.au/node/317 for a description and purchase options.

Much of Tregear’s argument is about education, of which music education is one aspect.  From an educator’s point view, he raises the issue of a distinction between ‘conservatoire’ and ‘university’ style education.  This issue is also relevant to discussion of the change at ANU of the Theatre Studies course, after the retirement of Reader and Convenor, Geoffrey Borny, into Performing Arts And Creative Writing.

On curriculum grounds, Tregear goes into detail on “The Limits of the Mentor-Protégé Model” which he describes as the essence of the ‘conservatoire’, saying that the shift at ANU to a ‘university’ model, should never have been received as the existential threat it was made out to be, but rather as a timely occasion to implement necessary change.

He goes on to say, Gearing a curriculum – and the ‘pitch’ made to prospective students – so strongly (and uncritically) towards ‘elite’ classical and jazz performance per se, and the increasingly chimeric career path as a full-time virtuoso performer, operatic soloist or orchestral musician that might sustain it, is self-evidently no longer justifiable.  We have an urgent need, instead, to produce graduates who have an empowered sense of agency and responsibility for the musical culture that now surrounds us.  To do that, we need urgently to reassess both what we teach and how.

Platform Papers are published quarterly by Currency House, which is an independent not-for-profit organisation based in New South Wales, Australia, founded in 2000 by Katharine Brisbane.  For more information go to www.currencyhouse.org.au .

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Othello: the Remix by GQ and JQ

L to R: Jackson Doran, GQ, Postell Pringle, JQ

Photo: Michael Brosilow

Othello: the Remix written, directed and music by GQ and JQ.  Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Richard Jordan Productions for Sydney Festival at York Theatre, Seymour Centre, University of Sydney, January 9-26, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 26

Othello always seemed to me to be the least satisfactory of Shakespeare’s tragedies.  Either the play should end as Othello rises, horrified at what he has just done in smothering Desdemona; or he should face justice.

But Shakespeare lets him go.  However much he admits his failing, he is not brought to book.

This Chicago rap music version fails to resolve this issue for me.  I think, for modern times, justice should be done – not only to Iago, the leader parallel to those in Serbia in the Kosovo conflict; but because regardless of his being duped, Othello killed Desdemona.

Dramatically, the stronger ending – and it was a very strong point in this version – is as Desdemona dies.  We all know by then that all the women are innocent, while only men are the killers.  Why Shakespeare felt the need to have Emilia knock on the bedroom door, giving Othello the opportunity to explain himself and for the play to fiddle about with the details of Iago’s perfidy being told to us again, I don’t know.

But we end up forgetting Desdemona!

The long pause after her death said to me that the Chicago team clearly felt the problem, but then decided to stay true to Shakespeare.  The message of the play was shot into our hearts by Desdemona as she died, even when, in this all male cast, she was no more than a fabulous singing voice and a flattened pillow.  I’m sure a modern audience, tuned into the rapid niceties of the language of rap, would need no more.

On the issue of should we modernise Shakespeare, I must say that this is the most successful attempt I have seen.  The rap scene, with its misogyny, drug dealing and anti-social attitudes among the worst of its practitioners is cleverly turned on its head through the very movement style, rhyming, timing and humour that is rap’s signature.

Photos: Prudence Upton

The performances are absolutely tight, even including the highlighted DJ.  Though I’d just like to tweak Shakespeare at the end, the final spotlight on a silent Othello gave us a clear focus to this version’s conclusion.

I had wondered, being rather older than the rap scene myself, how I would cope with this update, but it was less pretentious than Steven Berkoff’s Cockney “rap” and definitely never as sentimental as West Side Story. 

I can’t judge how the rappers of Chicago might respond, but I found it very interesting, fast, loud and surprisingly funny.  A success, in other words.

Postell Pringle (Othello) and GQ (Iago)

Photo: Michael Brosilow

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: The Shadow King by Tom E. Lewis & Michael Kantor

 Photo: Robert Frith

The Shadow King by Tom E. Lewis & Michael Kantor.  Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, for Sydney Festival, directed by Michael Kantor at Carriageworks Bay 17, Sydney, January 9-26, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 26

The set represents the mining juggernaut destroying country.

Photo: Prudence Upton

The Shadow King is simply extraordinary.  For the second time in the Sydney Festival I have been brought to tears.  And like Black Diggers, it’s a close collaboration between the European and Aboriginal cultures.  Where Shakespeare made the legend of King Lear into an English drama, Murrungun man Tom Lewis and European Michael Kantor have made the story deeply Australian.  They have shown how the universal issues of King Lear – the ruination of the land on which we all depend, through family demands, jealousies, greed and spite – are the same in our fractured country, with terrible consequences in Aboriginal experience.

I have seen several King Lears from the Genesian Theatre, Sydney in 1967 to Bell Shakespeare in 2010, but never one to match The Shadow King for emotional effect.  This was because there was more to the tragedy than Lear’s personal folly and realisation too late to save Cordelia.  Edmund’s evil, for one thing, turned him into a policeman acting against his own people, as had happened notoriously in Queensland.  Goneril had her children taken away – by Cordelia when she returned from banishment.  Edmund was sexually violent to Regan, at the point where she began to regret her stand against her father.  Gloucester became a mother – of Edgar and Edmund – of great moral standing and strength, but still blinded by the forces unleashed in her children.  The Fool, who dies mysteriously in Shakespeare’s play, returns to complete his role as the spirit narrator who puts the story into its Aboriginal context.

It’s in this extra dimension, with all the implications and references to Indigenous history on country, that brings the emotions of great sadness welling up. 

And, to conclude, the characterisations by the actors, speaking their own Kriol, or Yolnu Matha as well as Shakespeare’s English are finely drawn with simple clarity.  Tom E Lewis is a remarkable Lear, a leader among equals in Jada Alberts, Jimi Bana, Frances Djulibing, Rarriwuy Hick, Damion Hunter, Kamahi Djordon King, and Natasha Wanganeen, thoroughly supported by the band Selwyn Burns, Djakapurra Munyarryun and Bart Willoughby, and the film makers Natasha Gadd, Rhys Graham and Murray Lui.

They all deserved the standing ovation they received on their last night in Sydney – a fitting celebration of Australia Day.

Lear divides his country

Photo: Jeff Busby

and his family

Photo: Prudence Upton

Evil Spirits: Edmund & Goneril

Photo: Jeff Busby

True Spirits: Edgar, Lear uncrowned, Fool, Edgar's Mother

Photo: Jeff Busby

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Oedipus Schmoedipus by post

Photo: Brett Boardman

Oedipus Schmoedipus by post (Zoë Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor & Natalie Rose) with Belvoir, in association with Sydney Festival.  At Belvoir St Theatre January 9 – February 2, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 25

Zoë Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor

Photo: Ellis Parrinder

Death!  Should we take it seriously?  In the final moment of Oedipus Schmoedipus the answer is “Yes”.  Blackout!

The seriousness of the ending catches us by surprise when the show has begun with highly realistic – and terribly funny – deaths as depicted in an enormous range of plays by “Great White Writers”, from Sophocles on, to a soundtrack from the most dramatic sections of Verdi’s Requiem and other operatic scenes.  But there was a clue even in that first scene as the women stripped to their bras to reveal strapped on suicide bombs, and the theatre exploded.

Zoë Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor

Photo: Ellis Parrinder

The material in the script, mainly a kind of lecture on the nature of death by Zoë and Mish (in their blood-soaked white dresses resulting from their first scene) is an original idea.  They pick up on lines, often by a dying character (Shakespeare gets a good go) and expand on them largely by word association until the idea of death becomes absurd.

But the other very original aspect of this work is that 25 people from the general public volunteer (“without pay” gets a laugh) to take part.  They are, after only a brief rehearsal a few hours before the day’s performance, directed by a highly sophisticated program shown on screens in the wings and above the stage (which the audience can’t see), with stage manager Roxzan Bowes coordinating their cues with the dialogue on stage.  Each volunteer has a personal number, so that instructions can be given about what they say, how they say it, what they do, and what costume they wear – as individuals or in groups – so that they form a continuously changing background comic illustration for the actors’ performance.

The absurdity gets more and more out of hand as the hour long show progresses, all with the dead body of Natalie Rose lying on the stage, until that final moment when we are brought to the point of realising that, absurd or not, we all will die – and it could actually happen this minute.  The blackout, of course, caused all the still living members of the audience to wildly clap, whistle and cheer.

Lights up for the bows, and for a second time, as applause continued and everyone left the stage – except for the dead body.  Pause.  Then stage manager Bowes appears, crosses the stage, and drags the body off – to more cheers.  House lights up – the end.

I thought then of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author(1921), which I don’t think was quoted, where the audience are actually left wondering if an actor (the little girl) has actually been killed, as the stage manager tries to clear the stage and deal with the crisis.  Oedipus Schmoedipus in the end did not go that far.  We all knew that Natalie Rose was not really dead, but she played the part extremely well.  I just hope that, one night, no-one does actually die, on stage or in the audience.  That really wouldn’t be funny!

Mish Grigor, Volunteers, Zoë Coombs Marr
Natalie Rose

Photo: Ellis Parrinder

I guess we can’t really avoid taking death seriously, and we should also take seriously the clever writing and design involving the volunteers who effectively represented us – the ordinary people.  post  say they “take being silly very seriously, and have a deep and true commitment to innovation that doesn’t alienate audiences or get boring.”  They certainly  have achieved their goal in this show.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Arc, Memento Mori & Every Action… by Ockham’s Razor

Photos: Nik Mackey

Arc, Memento Mori & Every Action… devised and performed by Ockham’s Razor (UK).  Sydney Festival at York Theatre, Seymour Centre, University of Sydney, January 9-26, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 25

 Photos: Prudence Upton

When a show depends on pulleys and fulcrums you might expect a science connection.  That’s made in this company’s name, Ockham’s Razor, and the remarkable skill they have for keeping their audience in suspension.

But don’t be taken in by the photos.  Each of the three items is much more than aerial gymnastics.

Even the lightest work, Every Action…, with its premiere (in 2005) having taken place at Ah! Les Beaux Jours, Palaiseau, France, is a fun work about how strangers can come together in enjoyment when something intriguing is in the offing.  In this case it is 25 metres of rope suspended through two separated pulleys.  Pull one end down, and the other goes up.  How simple!

But William of Ockham would be proud: keep your explanation simple – no more complex than it needs to be.  This principle keeps this company’s work clean, neat, accessible, poignant and pointed.

Memento Mori is a vertical dance duet.  Based on a woodcut by Holbein which shows Death as a “skeleton that dances each of us to our grave”, this work shows a young woman coming to terms with the shock and loss, finally reaching acceptance.  At first she sits bolt upright on the horizontal deathly pale male body, as if in surprise or in an attempt to say “It’s alright, I’m OK, I’m in control.”  But as the dance of the living and the dead develops, she goes through remorse, fear, guilt, love and in the end becomes horizontal herself in acceptance of the inevitable.

To watch all this created on a single trapeze is to see physical skill and art entwined in a way which could not be done on a flat dance floor.

This may be the most pure and simple work, but Arc is perhaps the most surprising and original.  What seems to be a raft, in at times stormy seas, is always at risk of failing to support the two women and the man clinging on for dear life.

As they face disaster, their relationships go through stages from childish unthinking spontaneous behaviours which inevitably have unintended consequences – causing friction, disappointment, anger, disdain and division – until the realisation dawns that their situation will not change, even as they have survived the storm.  There is no solution but to make the best of things together on our raft on the rough seas of life.

Arc is a dance work but, set on its hanging grid of climbing bars, it becomes a work of imagery.  I saw a raft swept off a ship in stormy seas, but it could be seen as a children’s playground on which the children play until they grow up, into a mature understanding of adult relationships.

Arc may be more complex than Every Action…and not as pure dance as Memento Mori, but it remains in keeping with William of Ockham’s injunction: no more complex than it need be.

And, for the Sydney Festival, it proved its worth to a full York Theatre, from the children to the ancients like me.  The laughter, the silences, and the extended applause said it all.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

  

Photo: Prudence Upton

2014: Black Diggers by Tom Wright

Cast in rehearsal
Photo: Stephen Henry

Black Diggers written by Tom Wright.  Queensland Theatre Company and Sydney Festival in association with the Balnaves Foundation, directed by Wesley Enoch at Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House January 17-26, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 19

I approach commenting on Black Diggers in all humility, for this is impressive theatre dealing with difficult history.  It is an important achievement for our culture, for our country, and for our theatre.

In one hour and forty minutes, Wesley Enoch has done a brilliant job of making Wright’s text come to life with humour, straight talk, and finally with ceremony which both ennobles his subject and must bring tears to anyone’s eyes.

The drama covers the experiences of the Aboriginal men – at least 800 of them, according to Sydney University researcher Dr David Williams – who fought as Australians in World War I.  Their story necessarily requires context before and after the War, and falls into five parts: Pre-Nation, Enlistment, The Theatre of War, The Return and The Legacy.

Not only is this a story of literally epic proportions, but the men’s Aboriginal identities also required permissions from elders and agreement from families from many different communities all over Australia.  As Enoch has written, “When constructing this piece of theatre we were confronted by the enormity of the task, the cultural protocols, the military records, the family lore….” 

To have shaped all this into 60 scenes so that the emotional flow of the drama never falters, while the truth of the history is not lost, is a task that I suggest has not been achieved in our theatre before.  It is Shakesperean in scope, and more true to history.

It could be done only because the Aboriginal tradition of storytelling, with its mix of humour, irony and directness is so well understood by the Indigenous team of actors (above, in rehearsal) – led by George Bostock as cultural consultant, with Luke Carroll, David Page, Hunter Page-Lochard, Guy Simon, Colin Smith, Eliah Watego, Tobian Wyles and Meyne Wyatt – working with the doyen of Indigenous directors in Wesley Enoch.

But even more is achieved because this is, I believe, the first-ever absolute crossover piece of Aboriginal-European theatre.  The essence of Indigenous performance is that the actors and the audience are one and the same community.  Because the lives and deaths of the Indigenous soldiers in the War were no different from those of the 400,000 non-Indigenous men who fought in that same conflict – believing in their contribution to Australia’s place in the world – this play brings together everyone on stage and in the audience as one. 

This is not an Aboriginal play about Aboriginal experience, separate from the lives of a Euro-centred audience.  It is a play about the Australian experience of world wide warfare: the bravery, the practicalities, the violence, the destruction – and the sadness, not just because of these men’s deaths and injuries, but from the disappointments which followed.  What was it all for?

For the Aboriginal men who survived – “dozens were killed” writes Dr Williams – there was extra disappointment because they had fought on equal terms and in equal relationships with their non-Indigenous comrades, but were denied equal rights when they returned.  When the Last Post is sounded, my tears were for all those who had died for little gain, but with an even deeper shame for those who were Aboriginal and whose descendants still today are so disadvantaged.  The example those more than 800 men showed us all in World War I should have changed the world for the better, but White Australia would not listen.

Wesley Enoch - Director

Tom Wright - Writer

The Balnaves  Foundation, the aim of which is “to create a better Australia through the funding of education, medicine and the arts with a particular focus on young people, the disadvantaged and Indigenous communities” is to be congratulated for its support, in association with the Sydney Festival, for the Black Diggers project.  It has achieved its hope that “this production will be a landmark for future Indigenous theatre projects.”  I hope it will be a landmark for real political and social change as well.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: All That Fall by Samuel Beckett

All That Fall by Samuel Beckett.  Pan Pan Theatre, Ireland, for Sydney Festival.  Directed by Gavin Quinn at Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre, University of Sydney, January 9-26, 2014.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 18

It was a sad night (but only for 70 minutes) because Beckett was determined to not allow Mr Rooney (Andrew Bennett) to tell Mrs Rooney (Áine Ní Mhuirí) what happened to delay his train home from his dingy little office; but finally she was told by the little boy Jerry (Joey O’Sullivan) what the station master Mr Barrell (John Kavanagh) had told him.  A young child had fallen onto the tracks and had “fallen under the wheels”, said Jerry.

This play, said Beckett, ironically perhaps, was written “for voices not bodies” and was originally broadcast on the BBC in 1957.  Nicholas Johnson, Assistant Professor of Drama at Trinity College, Dublin has written a mini-essay in the program notes entirely about the business of presenting a radio play on stage, but nothing about the content of the drama.  I found myself rather saddened on both points.

The play seems to me to belong to the British depressed culture of the 1950s, alongside John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger for example, made even worse by Beckett’s emphasis on his characters’ deep and constant anxiety about the inevitability of their deaths.  It’s a mental world of worthless post-war suburban life that hardly seems to fit in our world from the swinging sixties to today’s social media. 

Presenting the play seemed to me to be an exercise in museum theatre, despite the attempt to do something new with the audience, seated on rocking chairs among loudspeakers beneath a ceiling covered in dim incandescent globes and facing, more or less according to our inclination, a wall of par can lights laid out in a grid 12 vertical by 14 horizontal.  Different configurations were lit and unlit at points throughout the play: sometimes we were in complete darkness, listening to the voices.  Sometimes we were dimly or brightly lit – perhaps with the intention of making us take notice of each other, or for us to interpret the changing configuration.

Unfortunately, though I found some interest in noticing odd features of some other audience members, I could not see any particular relevance of the light show to what was happening in the play, except for once when religion was mentioned and the wall lights formed a cross.

The rocking chairs were problematic too.  I supposed, since Mr Rooney talked so much about retiring and having nothing to do but wait for the next meal, we were meant to experience these old people’s lives in our rocking chairs.  I did this so well that I fell asleep and missed several minutes, until the earth shaking sound of the train arriving at the station woke me up.

I had no concerns about the quality of the performances of the voices, but even as I was listening it occurred to me that I could not tell if the whole show had been pre-recorded (including the software for the lights) or whether I was hearing a live performance.  When the play was written, of course, it was common to broadcast live – from the Goon Show to Mrs Dale’s Diary (or Blue Hills in Australia) – but how could I know on this occasion?  The Goon Show had a live audience who could see the shenanigans going on around the microphones, and we could hear their reactions.  But on this occasion we had no actors to watch, only their voices to hear.  Perhaps the whole show was an Irish joke, with all those actors and technical designers down at the pub in Dublin except for a couple of roadies to rig and push the buttons at the Seymour Centre.

(Actually, as one audience member complained, the roadies seemed to have forgotten to connect all the surround-sound speakers tonight.  I agreed that all the sound was coming from one source behind my seat, and none from the other speakers I could see across the space in front of me.  The stage manager was made aware of the complaint – hopefully just a one-off technical problem.)

On the other hand, presenting this work in the university context and as part of the Festival of Sydney can be seen as a valid thing to do.  It provides an opportunity for students today to hear Beckett’s voice through a different medium than the inevitable Waiting for Godot.  Yet one aspect of Beckett’s work which was very well brought out in what some have called “The Sir Ian McKellen Production” was the richness of the humour.  I haven’t heard the original broadcast of All That Fall, but I heard plenty of points in this script which I think should have been played for laughs.

Then, rather than an essay about the nature of radio broadcasting and “Pan Pan’s faithfulness here to the sense of ‘occasion’ of early broadcast media”, we might have found ourselves engaged in the tragic contrast between the funny, inconsequential obsessions of our daily lives and the reality of sudden, random death.  This is what I think Beckett was on about.  But tonight the audience only laughed once, and the death, though sad, was a bit of a dramatic let-down.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Heaven & Earth by Will Gayre

Heaven & Earth by Will Gayre.  Mainstage Theatre Company directed by Don Gay at Peacock Theatre, Salamanca Place, Hobart.  November 22-30, 2013

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 28

Canberra critics have published reviews recently from Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.  It’s now Hobart’s turn.  Mainstage is based at the Peacock Theatre in the Salamanca Arts Centre.  The author and the director are one and the same person despite their different names.  This alone begins to explain the nature of the philosophy behind this play – that reality is so vast, indeed infinite in its possibilities, that any unexplainable experience may be as likely to have a cause outside what we regard as evidential in the scientific sense as to have a place within our concepts of the physical universe.

It’s a challenging task to make a successful drama on this kind of theme, beginning from a personal apparent déjà vu recognition of an Italian country house while driving past on a holiday trip from Tasmania.  Tourist Dan’s obsession with finding out the ‘truth’, and the apparent truth he finds and reacts to, with tragic consequences, is presented to us by his defence lawyer as a question for judgement.

If all the events are no more than a mental aberration on his part, should Dan be treated as criminally guilty of murder?  On the other hand if these events, inexplicable in normal physical terms, really happened, then who did he actually kill – and was this a criminal act?

There are reminiscences all the way from Carrie to The Maids as the ‘spirit’ world seems to have effect 80 years after the causative events on that Italian farm in World War II, but this script does not match either of those for dramatic quality.  The writer Will Gayre provides a lengthy description in the program of his recurring dream “from the age of about six until maybe twenty” of “standing in front of an old double-storied [sic] farm house with a tiled roof and cream stucco walls” which he would enter and sometimes see “people in the rooms – never anyone I recognised and they didn’t seem at all aware of my presence.”

Fictional tourist Dan speaks Gayre’s words from the program notes: “Nearly ten years later I was driving through Italy on my first major Eurpoean sojourn.  Somewhere between Pisa and Livorno I turned a corner with the river I was following and, there, sitting on the river bank was ... the villa from my dreams!”

Bit by bit a story develops of two couples – Dan (Alex Rigozzi) and current girlfriend Sue (Melanie Brown), and their friends Matt (Aidan Furst) and Jo (Bryony Hindley) who also play the roles in 1940-41 of newly married Marko and Sophia.  Sophia refuses to accept Marko's being called up in the defence of his country, calls upon God – who seems unable to help her – and kills her husband rather than allow him to return to battle after his all-too-short leave.  She stabs herself, but lives for some time before dying in a mental asylum, while the local villagers believe the violence was at the hands of unknown assailants on one side or the other in the confusion of the war in Italy.

So far, so good – except that in the modern time Dan’s digital photo of the house shows a shadowy figure of a woman.  Later her image has disappeared.  Then when Sue makes seriously playful sexual approaches to Dan, some inexplicable force throws her away from him.  After an attempt to take Dan back in time by an older woman hypnotist (Carol Devereaux) with whom Dan had previously had a relationship, Sophia appears as a ghost to him, but a touch on the shoulder spins him around, and it is Jo he kills.

Matt and Sue are distraught and mystified, while it seems that Sophia had become Jo, whom the obsessed – or rather possessed – Dan had to destroy.  At this point Devereaux appears as Dan’s defence attorney to present her concluding speech to us, as the jury.

You can see the connection with Carrie, I guess, but you may be wondering why I mentioned Jean Genet’s The Maids.  The problem for Heaven & Earth is that it is far too much like the superficial idea of horror-spirit-reality in popular genre movies like Carrie, when it needs the subtleties of psychology of The Maids to support the weight of serious discussion of the nature of reality which this writer seems to want to have with us.  Images disappearing from a hard drive and a character being thrown across the stage by a mysterious force just don’t cut the mustard.

Gayre takes Shakespeare as his source – There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy – as if we, or indeed Shakespeare, might believe Hamlet’s father’s ghost to be literally real.  Nothing inexplicable happens in Hamlet.  But Shakespeare, like Genet, understood that events can overwhelm some people’s ability to hold onto reality, while their plays help us understand ourselves.  Gayre does no more than fall into the fad of questioning everything just because we can.

There is also the problem that Don Gay, director, was not able to present the play on stage in a smoother format, rather than switching back and forth between  times and places in a repetitive and interruptive way.  Yes, it was obvious when we saw the slide of the old farmhouse that this was now 1940/41, and now it is modern times in Don and Sue’s apartment when that stone wall was turned around to become their sofa.  Too obvious.

Though the script itself makes this a technical staging problem, it could have been handled better – even in the fairly limited performing space of the Peacock Theatre – by, for example, setting aside one area for the 1940/41 period and another for modern time.  Then, with lighting and actors held in freeze positions, changes would not need actors to exit and enter, with the occasional backstage person or the actors themselves having to move props and furniture that I had to watch.  It would also allow space and time to be connected for us, for example by the force that throws Sue appearing to come from Sophia’s area on the stage, and so that the transition of Sophia into Jo might be made as Dan moves into the 1940/41 space and time.

However, if there was one aspect of the play that showed dramatic strength it was in the performance of Sophia and Jo by Bryony Hindley, backed by effective work by Aidan Furst as Marko and Matt.  Hindley, at nineteen, is written up as seeking to audition for further training.  I for one would certainly encourage her in this endeavour.

Mainstage is clearly a small-scale company, similar to the many Canberra companies like Elbow Theatre, Bohemian Productions and others now associated with the development programs offered by The Street Theatre which continue to generate new work and opportunities for practitioners, often opening up interstate and international employment.  I suppose I should conclude, then, that there are more things, indeed, at least on earth, and perhaps even in heaven, for such theatre companies to aspire to.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Symposium on Splinters Theatre of Spectacle. Report.

A Canberra Critics' Circle Symposium on Splinters Theatre of Spectacle
Saturday November 2, from 1.30pm to 4pm at the Canberra Museum and Gallery Theatrette.

A brief reflection by Frank McKone

Chaired by CCC convenor, Helen Musa, each of the speakers took the floor for some 20 minutes, including questions from the small but keenly interested audience.  Speakers were:

Patrick Troy, one of the founders of Splinters, who remained central to Splinters’ work throughout the company’s performances from 1985 to 1996, coming from a drama background in high school and secondary college, and Canberra Youth Theatre.  He provided a lively sense of the variety, energy, and sometimes conflicting forces which stimulated the work of Splinters, as well as the often difficult times of touring with little finance.  Discussion arose about the place of women, including leading performers and writers such as Pauline Cady, who subsequently became co-director of Snuff Puppets in Melbourne (http://www.snuffpuppets.com/) and the photographer Katherine Pepper, whose documenting of Splinters’ performances has formed an essential part of the exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery Splinters Theatre of Spectacle: Massive love of risk (28 September – December 2013) (http://www.museumsandgalleries.act.gov.au/cmag/).  The current director of ACT Museums and Galleries is Shane Breynard, also a supporter of Splinters in the 1980s.

Actor/Artist  Renald Navilly who worked with Splinters over many years in a role which might best be described as enabler and shaper.  He made it clear that his was never an authoritarian approach: his function was to hear ideas put forward by people, welcome all ideas however diverse, encourage people to be the authors of the development of ideas, and help guide the process of selection to create a dramatic structure in performance. He spoke of the influences on his philosophy and practice such as the Living Theatre (http://www.livingtheatre.org/about/history), Jerzy Grotowksi’s Polish Laboratory Theatre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Grotowski) and to some extent by the work of Antonin Artaud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_Cruelty).
 
Assistant Professor Dr Geoff Hinchcliffe, Media and Graphic Design at University of Canberra, was a participant in many Splinters performances, on stage and in visual design and effects, with a background in secondary college drama and tertiary training at the Canberra School of Art.  He spoke on the visual culture developed by Splinters, but also took up discussion of the group collective approach which made Splinters into a social unit open to welcoming new participants and changing ideas, noting that possibly some 1000 people were involved over the decade.

Canberra author Joel Swadling spoke on the  biography he is writing about the late David Branson, a founding member of Splinters as well as a key figure in a wide range of theatrical and musical work as director and performer until his tragic accidental death in 2001.  As the work on the biography progresses, from a detailed study of nine boxes of Branson’s papers – now held in the ACT Heritage Library Manuscript Collection http://www.library.act.gov.au/find/history/search/Manuscript_Collections/David_Branson – and through extensive interviews with many of the people who knew and worked with Branson, a picture is forming of the quality and importance of his contribution to theatre arts in Canberra, Australia and internationally.

This writer, educator/theatre critic Frank McKone, spoke on the issue which others also alluded to: how did Splinters’ often anarchic approach to theatre arise in Canberra, the capital city largely populated by public servants, and seen by outsiders as a planned city with no soul.  He proposed a theory that in 1968, the 19th year of conservative government, the accidental rise to the Prime Ministership of John Gorton, described as a man who liked to portray himself as a man of the people who enjoyed a beer and a gamble, with a bit of a "larrikin" streak about him, in stark contrast to the previous Liberal Party PMs, stirred the conventional public servants, by osmosis, to reject the control of Canberra’s education system by the authoritarian New South Wales Department, and to demand our own ACT Schools Authority.  In starting a new system from scratch, including offering the first Drama courses in Australia at matriculation level, teachers found themselves with the freedom to “negotiate the curriculum” with their students from 1972, very much in the manner that Renald Navilly described in his work with Splinters participants from 1985.

The curator of the CMAG exhibition which included this Symposium, former  Splinters member Gavin Findlay who joined after being impressed by the work they presented at the Performance Space, Redfern in Sydney, (http://www.performancespace.com.au/us/history/)  then spoke on the archiving of Splinters records and how the materials and history form the basis of his doctoral research designed to recognise the place of  Splinters in 20th Century theatre, nationally and internationally.

In discussion, as well as the developments in the schools in the 1970s, the importance of the establishment  by Carol Woodrow (http://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/AWE4882b.htm) of Canberra Children’s Theatre, Reid House Theatre Workshop, Canberra Youth Theatre, The Jigsaw Company, and The Fools’ Gallery during the same period, showed that Canberra was developing its own sense of authorship in both the educational and professional theatre circles, so that by the mid-1980s there was fertile ground for Splinters to grow among young people committed to the crossover of theatre and visual arts.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Canberra Critics' Circle symposium on Splinters Theatre of Spectacle - Preview

Splinters: Faust

Splinters: only in Canberra? 

A Canberra Critics' Circle symposium on Splinters Theatre of Spectacle  

Saturday November 2 

from 1.30pm to 4pm 

at The Canberra Museum and Gallery Theatrette. 

FREE event. RSVP via cmagbookings@act.gov.au or 6207 3968.

Splinters Theatre of Spectacle was an Australian Performance Troupe formed in Canberra in 1985 by David Branson, Patrick Troy, Ross Cameron, and John Utans, that was known for large outdoor spectacles.^[1] Between 1985 and 1996, Splinters produced more than 20 works that played at Australian theatre festivals. In 1992, they produced Cathedral of Flesh which won the Best Promenade Theatre Performance Award, at the Adelaide Fringe Festival.^[2]
[Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinters_Theatre_of_Spectacle ]

Speakers will include:

Patrick Troy, one of the founders of Splinters.
 
Actor/Artist  Renald Navilly on Splinters as a theatre process.

 

Curator, former  Splinters member Gavin Findlay on the archiving of Splinters records.
 
Canberra author Joel Swadling on the  biography he is writing about the late David Branson.
 
Educator/Theatre critic Frank McKone on the influence of ACT College arts and drama on the development of Splinters.

Assistant Professor Dr Geoff Hinchcliffe on the visual culture of Splinters
 

Canberra Critics' Circle convener  Helen Musa in the chair.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare

Imara Savage - Director

The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare.  Bell Shakespeare and State Theatre Company of South Australia directed by Imara Savage; designer Pip Runciman; lighting designer, Mark Pennington; composer & sound designer, David Heinrich; physical comedy consultant, Scott Witt.  Canberra Theatre Playhouse, October 30 – November 9, 2013-10-31

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 30

I suspect that William Shakespeare’s move from staid and sensible Stratford-on-Avon to lewd, lascivious and libellous London paved the way for the horror faced by Antipholus and his stolid, mercantile merchant father from Syracuse when they landed in energetic, excessive, sexually-charged Ephesus.  It must have been quite a revelation for Shakespeare to discover that his London of 1593 was not very different from what Plautus, some 100-200 years BC, had already described in his fictional Greek city of Epidamnum, in his play Menaechmi.

So for us it is a wonder to see the brilliance of Shakespeare’s words reveal how little different is the world of, say, Sydney’s Kings Cross after another 420 years.  Like Plautus, Shakespeare understood that a farcical treatment was the only way to come to terms with both the light and dark sides of such a community.  In this Comedy of Errors, Savage Witt is brought to bear with unerring aim.

To follow my line of thinking you need a copy of the wonderful program with its extensive background to the production.  It adds enormously to the satisfaction of seeing the play to read, far beyond the usual plot synopsis and director’s notes, source quotes and essays on comedy, farce, Plautus, Shakespeare’s Ephesus, the place of the classics, Kings Cross as explained by Louis Nowra, The Comedy of Errors as explained by Andy McLean, more details on Shakespeare’s sources, and the concept drawings of the characters by Pip Runciman.

The result on stage is near perfection.  Every nuance of Shakespeare’s intention in each line spoken and each action taken by each character is brought into a shining spotlight.  Now it is absolutely clear that this is not a young playwright’s immature imitation of a Latin classic.  This is farce precisely performed to the point of satire of human society.

The casting is exquisite.  The make-up and the costuming of the two sets of identical twins is so well done that, until the final scene, it was hard to believe that there were four actors rather than two doubling up the roles.  The set consisting of even more doors across the stage than I have ever thought possible – and added to by left and right entrances upstage and downstage – made this necessary element of stage farce into a character in its own right.  And no-one will ever forget props like the sun-tan machine, the hot electric iron and especially the washing machine and its sudsy servant Dromio – a scene which can justifiably claim the loudest laugh of the night.

There has been a long tradition in Australian acting of rumbustious physical theatre, fully endorsed by Bell Shakespeare and training at NIDA and in all the institutions since the 1960s, which comes to a peak of entertainment and theatrical maturity in this production of The Comedy of Errors.

If you can’t get to see it in Canberra, you have one more chance at the Sydney Opera House Playhouse from November 12 to December 7 – the last of 32 venues in the Playing Australia touring program.  Do your best not to miss it – and don’t forget to buy a program.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Renato Musolino, Nathan O'Keefe, Septimus Caton, Hazem Shammas as Dromio and Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio and Antipholus of Ephesus, with Demetrios Sirilas as Angelo (upstage)

Nathan O'Keefe (Antipholus of Syracuse) with Jude Henshall as Luciana

Suzannah McDonald as Courtesan

Elena Carapetis as Adriana, Eugene Gilfedder as Dr Pinch, with Jude Henshall and Suzannah McDonald.

    Anthony Taufa (not pictured) played The Duke and Balthasar.  Suzannah McDonald also played Emelia.  Eugene Gilfedder also played Egeon.     All photos by Matt Nettheim   

2013: Come Alive at the National Museum of Australia

Come Alive at the National Museum of Australia.  Artistic Director, Peter Wilkins; Manager, Mitch Preston, NMA Learning Services and Community Outreach. October 28 – November 1, 2013.

Commentary by Frank McKone

This is the fourth annual Come Alive festival in which nine Canberra schools present 11 performances written and performed by students based on their observations of exhibits currently on display in the National Museum of Australia.

The festival is an initiative taken under the Museum’s keen interest in IMTAL, the International Museum Theatre Alliance, whose annual conference has just been held at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, described (pre-conference) as follows:

The 2013 IMTAL Global Conference will focus on creativity and innovation in today’s Museum Theatre. In 2013, Museum Theatre is a proven, tested, educational approach in the field of museum studies. It is also an art form bringing the best of performance to museum visitors of all ages. But how is the field continuing to evolve? The 2013 Global conference will bring together practitioners, researchers, performers, and museum professionals from around the world to discuss, debate, present, and share examples of how the field is evolving and innovating.
http://www.imtal.org/Default.aspx?pageId=1329539&eventId=546003&EventViewMode=EventDetails

As far as I know, Wilkins’ approach at the NMA is rare, if not unique.  He combines the learning about Australia’s social history with the learning of the practice of theatre by putting the students in the position of researchers, writers and performers. 

In one show I saw today (October 30), Melrose High School took up the question of whether each of three women whose stories are on display – Holocaust survivor Olga Horak, Annette Kellerman who was the first woman to swim the English Channel and stood up for women’s rights early in the last century, and Ida Prosser-Fenn, a missionary and nurse in Papua New Guinea through the 1940s and 50s – should be allowed into heaven.  The last laugh on the gatekeeper (a woman, not St Peter) was that all had satisfied Heaven’s requirements – but Olga Horak is still alive, volunteering at the Jewish Museum in Sydney.  So they promised she would be let in when she dies.  Their play is called The Final Reward.

Canberra College students took an entirely different angle. The Saw Doctor’s wagon was the mobile home and workshop of Harold Wright, who started travelling the roads of rural Australia during the 1930s Depression.  After migrating from England to Australia in 1930, Wright began walking Queensland roads to find work. In 1935, he used the little money he had saved to convert a horsedrawn wagon into a combined workshop and home. Over the next 34 years, as he travelled throughout the farmlands and towns of north-west Victoria and New South Wales sharpening knives and blades, Wright made updates and changes to his wagon, promoting himself as ‘The Saw Doctor’.  
[http://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/353629/Museum_Issue2_Sep2012_Well-travelled.pdf]

Instead of re-telling the story of Harold Wright, the students turned him into “Tinker Tom” whose tractor and wagon became a time-travel machine to take an audience of second and third-graders back to the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and one of the first outside television broadcasts in Australia, to the burning of their mining licences by the gold diggers at the Eureka Stockade, to the convict days of the female factory, and even back to the era of the dinosaurs.  Humorous and even quite absurdist, Tinker Tom’s Travels will go into primary schools and I’m sure will succeed in its prime purpose of engendering a sense of history through the fun of time travel.

There’s no doubt in my mind that these examples show that Peter Wilkins succeeds in encouraging the creativity and innovation that IMTAL seeks.  But it struck me watching today that there is a further level of education going on here.  The young people participating in museum theatre are engaged in the very multicultural life which the National Museum encapsulates as the core of life in Australia.  Writing and performing their own plays takes the students out of their personal circumstances, and perhaps out of their assumptions, into the lives of a great variety of people across the country and across time.  Within the groups performing today the variety of cultures in our society was clearly represented, all working together to explore their Australian heritage – and watching other groups from other schools travelling a similar journey.

So I see Come Alive not so much about learning about history, but being history through drama.  It was, perhaps, the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, famous for his Seven Intelligences, who first established the importance of education through museums.  Come Alive, I suggest, is proof in action.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Whoops! – The Wharf Revue by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott

Whoops! – The Wharf Revue by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott, with Amanda Bishop and Simon Burke. Musical director and accompanist, Andrew Worboys; sound and video designer, David Bergman; video artist, Todd Decker. Sydney Theatre Company at Canberra Theatre Playhouse, October 15-19, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 15

The central theme of last night’s Revue, so successfully expressed in the lengthy political satire based on the absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead, was thoroughly confirmed by the explanation in today’s Canberra Times (Times 2, p.4) by economics correspondent Peter Martin of why the award of a Nobel prize to the economists Eugene Fama, Robert Shiller and Lars Hansen is so invaluable.

As Martin reports, Australian economists Richard Holden at the University of NSW and Justin Wolfers at the Brookings Institution summed up the findings online as being that financial markets are efficient (Fama), except when they’re not (Shiller), and that we have empirical evidence to prove it (Hansen).

Though not all the fifteen items in this year’s Revue were as good as last year’s  Fall of the Garden of Earthly Delights, (the National Rifle Association country and western song, and even the ever-giggling Dalai Lama were a bit ordinary as satire goes), this year the “new maturity in the writing” which I noted last year, and the quality of the video work by David Bergman and Todd Decker, have become established.

The characterisations of Tony Abbott’s hypocrisy, Gina Rinehart’s pontifications, Bob Katter’s country pub pretence, and Julia Gillard as an operatic Carmen were all on the money (just  to maintain the economic metaphor).  In fact Amanda Bishop’s Gillard Habanera swansong, in that long slinky brilliant red gown, stirred the house to the same kind of reponse that we saw in the Sydney Opera House when Anne Summers interviewed the real Julia on September 30, 2013: (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-30/live-coverage-julia-gillard-at-the-sydney-opera-house/4989792).

This year, too, the whole company’s singing throughout, perhaps especially in The Tale of Eddie Obeid and The Wizard of Oz (who lives in The Lodge), demonstrated the point that effective satire depends on top quality performance.  For me the ultimate moment, or rather very long moments, came at the opening in excruciating silence of Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Instead which developed deeper and deeper into the sense that there is no possibility of these sidelined characters ever being able to understand the central characters of politics because, as the Nobel-winning economists have empirically proved about financial markets, politics make sense except when they don’t.

Whoops! leaves us all realising that we are all sidelined like R&G.  The laughter and extensive whoops of appreciation at the curtain calls can’t paper over the cracks which reveal the dark side of political life, which we are all engaged in whether we like it or not.  It’s only through art and science, as the Revue showed so well in the item The Culture Wars, that this kind of truth can be expressed.

We need the annual Wharf Revue, at least to be able to laugh at the absurdity.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: The 39 Steps adapted by Patrick Barlow

Mike Smith and Anna Burgess

Sam Haft and Michael Lindner

The 39 Steps adapted by Patrick Barlow from an original concept by Simon Corble & Nobby Dimon, based on the novel by John Buchan and the film by Alfred Hitchcock.  Produced by Christine Harris & HIT Productions; directed by Terence O’Connell.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, October 8-12, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 8

Having been born in the opening salvos of World War II, a period of history I prefer to forget, I never read Buchan’s World War I novel or saw Hitchcock’s 1935 film, so I didn’t recognise the allusion to North by North West as Richard Hannay (nicely played by Mike Smith) scooted around Scotland on a mission to prove his innocence on a murder charge and to save Britain.

If you didn’t either, I’m with you, but there apparently are many still fascinated by spy stories of that era, and happy to enjoy the fun.  This adaptation from a concept based on a film of the novel turns out to be an example of English farce – a spoof of a spy story – very funny in parts (like the curate’s egg), but otherwise completely inconsequential.

The strength of this production is not only in the vocal and movement skills of all the actors – Mike Smith, Anna Burgess, Sam Haft and Michael Lindner – in the rapidity with which they changed costumes and characters for the innumerable short cameo scenes.

The major award must go to Alana Scanlan for her remarkable choreography.  Burgess’s first role as the murdered spy Annabella was made into a quite extraordinary character by her movement style – even when dead!  And Haft and Lindner had all the right dance steps to be justifiably applauded as they took to the London Palladium stage.

The English have always made fun of war, from Shakespeare to the Goon Show, and even to the point where it’s funny not to mention it, but I found too much of The 39 Steps is dated and cliché.  The only point where it moved a fraction of the way to more interesting satire was the election speech made by the escapee Hannay who the lower-class locals assume to be their famous upper-class visiting speaker.  There’s even a sort-of nod here, reversing the social classes, to Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator but the point is soon lost in the farce that follows.

Since my own (very minimal and entirely amateur) acting career included playing Mr Mole in the English farce Love’s a Luxury (by Guy Paxton and Edward V. Hoile – see http://www.ba-education.com/for/entertainment/sjt/lovesaluxury.html for some interesting reading), I can’t pretend to complain.  In fact I laughed along with a substantial audience at The Q, but came out wondering about whether the intention behind this adaptation was to use an expressionist style to turn farce into satire – which really didn’t work – or to simply indulge in a cultish fascination with Hitchcock and spies, which went over my head.

And I can’t complain about the performances.  Very entertaining and done with professional precision.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2013: Emily Eyefinger based on the books by Duncan Ball

Emily Eyefinger based on the books by Duncan Ball adapted by Eva Di Cesare, Sandra Eldridge & Tim McGarry.  Monkey Baa Theatre Company:
Director     John Saunders
Designer     Mark Thompson
Lighting Designer     Martin Kinnane
Sound Designer     Rowan Karrer
Dramaturge     Caleb Lewis
Animation     Andrew Hagan
at The Street Theatre, Canberra, October 1 – 5, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 5

Since Monkey Baa makes considerable claims http://monkeybaa.com.au/info/history/)  such as Founding members Eva Di Cesare, Sandra Eldridge and Tim McGarry established Monkey Baa to raise the bar of work for young people in Australia..., their production of Emily Eyefinger needs some detailed consideration.

The style of acting and the construction of the storyline can only be described as zany pantomime.  Like traditional British pantomime there was nearly as much for the adults to recognise and enjoy in the story of entering the tomb in the Ancient Caves of Tutenkamouse, with its mystery of the curse upon the first to enter, and in the characterisations especially of Great Aunt Olympia and the evil Arthur Crim, as for the target audience of 5 to 10 year olds.

There were some younger children in the audience when I saw it, and they were a bit frightened by some of the sound effects and Arthur Crim’s coming off stage into the audience – and they probably didn’t follow the story very well, especially since the transitions between scenes were often unpredictable.  In fact, in academic terms, “zany” could almost be classed as “absurdism”.

On the other hand the older children clearly got the hang of the visual jokes and clowning, and recognised the reactions of the young characters, especially of Malcolm sulking because his mouse researcher father insisted he wear  a mouse costume all the time, and of Emily’s feeling that she had lost her identity because her finger with its third eye had become the centre of attention.  The fact that they both took control of their lives – Malcolm taking his mouse head off in front of his father, and Emily realising she should keep her eyefinger and even enjoy being different rather than ‘normal’ – was an effective educational message, presented as a natural part of the action without obvious moralising.

On the point of standards (raising the bar), the acting was certainly up to high chin up level in characterisation and movement skills, and I was impressed with the set, props, sound and video design (and technical quality), especially considering the limitations you might expect when touring.

Having seen only one Monkey Baa production, I can’t say anything about the quality of their work overall, but within the range of the style of Emily Eyefinger, this production is certainly at a very good professional standard.


© Frank McKone, Canberra