2015: Ivanov by Anton Chekhov, adapted by Eamon Flack

Image by Julian Meagher

Ivanov by Anton Chekhov, adapted and directed by Eamon Flack. Presented by Belvoir at Belvoir St Theatre Upstairs, Sydney, September 23 – November 1, 2015.

Set designer Michael Hankin; Costume designer Mel Page; Lighting designer Verity Hampson; Composer and Sound designer Steve Toulmin; Song translation Francis Merson.

Cast:

Borkin – Fayssal Bazzi; Shabelsky – John Bell; Babakina – Blazey Best; Sasha – Airlie Dodds; Gabriella – Mel Dyer; Lebedev – John Howard; Ivanov – Ewen Leslie; Anna – Zahra Newman; Lvov – Yalin Ozucelik; Zinaida – Helen Thomson.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 26

To Stanislavski, or not to Stanislavski?  That was the question.  This is not an academic exercise.  Eamon Flack did it both ways, and it works wonderfully well.

L to R: John Howard, Airlie Dodds, Blazey Best, Ewen Leslie, Helen Thomson, John Bell

Photos by Brett Boardman

Wikipedia records:

"Ivanov (Russian: Иванов: драма в четырёх действиях (Ivanov: drama in four acts)) is a four-act drama by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.

"Ivanov was first performed in 1887, when Fiodor Korsh, owner of the Korsh Theatre in Moscow, commissioned Chekhov to write a comedy. Chekhov, however, responded with a four-act drama, which he wrote in ten days. Despite the success of its first performance, the production disgusted Chekhov himself. In a letter to his brother, he wrote that he "did not recognise his first remarks as my own" and that the actors "do not know their parts and talk nonsense". Irritated by this failure, Chekhov made alterations to the play. Consequently the final version is different from that first showing. After this re-write, it was accepted to be performed in St. Petersburg in 1889. Chekhov's re-write was a success and offered a foretaste for the style and themes of his subsequent masterpieces."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanov_%28play%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanov_%28play%29
J.L.Styan in Modern drama in theory and practice 1 – Realism and Naturalism notes:
"The Moscow Art Theatre went on to produce the last plays of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), each with a structure more fragile than that of The Seagull with its comparatively conventional plotting.  These were Chekhov’s masterpieces, Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904).  Whereas Stanislavsky largely developed his thinking about the art of the theatre after Chekhov’s death, it was during the production of these plays that Chekhov increased his understanding of stage realism.  He learned by experience and largely taught himself."

Ewen Leslie as Ivanov, Zahra Newman as his wife Anna

Airlie Dodds as Sasha

 On the one hand, Flack has made the three central characters – Ivanov, his dying wife Anna and his almost wife Sasha – as the only ones who need a serious dose of Stanislavski.  We see how well Ewen Leslie and Zahra Newman achieve realism, especially in their last moment together at the end of Act 2.  We are already aware of Airlie Dodds as her Sasha sees through her crass commercial parents, but in her speech Active love is better... in Act 3 and then her final speech when she tells the doctor Lvov exactly what she thinks of him and takes control of the situation ...It’s a beautiful day, the sky is blue, the sun is shining, and I’m getting married or else... we see characterisation with clear intention and motivation as Stanislavski hoped for.

Zahra Newman as Anna, Ewen Leslie as Ivanov

Except that Ivanov is really at the end of his mental tether.  I can’t reveal the ending, especially since Chekhov, according to Flack’s Program Notes, couldn’t make up his mind on that point anyway, but I can say that by that stage I really was beginning to worry about Ewen Leslie’s state of mind.  If he was using Stanislavski’s original Method, or worse Lee Strasberg’s version (the American Method), his creation of Ivanov’s  absolutely frantic incapacity to cope might have left him in danger of becoming a Marilyn Monroe, James Dean or Marlon Brando.

On the other hand, fortunately, Flack has had the good fortune to be brought up on later theatre developments, including Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, and in Sydney the Hayes Gordon technique (a practical Stanislavski in his Acting and Performing) and a large dose of the Marvellous Melbourne effect.  So these three characters are kept in check by all the others who could easily have come on board direct from The Legend of King O’Malley (by Bob Ellis and Michael Boddy).  The whole group singing Advance Australia Fair in Russian language and musical style has to be the highlight of absurdity which brings the house down.  Literally in Ivanov’s mind as his country estate falls apart, in a set which includes very dodgy French doors, obviously ‘found objects’ picked up at a recycling facility.

Fayssal Bazzi as Borkin

John Bell as Shabelsky

John Howard as Lebedev, Airlie Dodds as his daughter Sasha

Mel Dyer as Gabriella (Lebedev's servant)

So Eamon Flack, with a team of the usual excellent suspects, has created a comedy-drama surely beyond anything Chekhov could have imagined.  But to the extent that Chekhov was anything like his Ivanov, always on the verge of existential self-destruction, he would have been saved from suicide if he could have known that his first complete play had been such a success 118 years later.

Chekhov actually died of tuberculosis, in a similar situation to Anna in this play, whose fate is modernised and described by Dr Lvov as a cancer which has metastisised.  Ivanov might be seen as a great memorial to add to Sydney Theatre Company’s Uncle Vanya in 2010 and this year’s Platanov, an adaptation by Andrew Upton of Chekhov’s even earlier attempt at exploding the myth of upper-class social security in Russia.

Helen Thomson as Lebedev's wife Zinaida
Family photos: Lebedev, Sasha, Zinaida

Blazey Best as Babakina, Ewen Leslie as Ivanov, Helen Thomson as Zinaida

And, now to end, on an economically sound note, entirely in tune with the busting-out all-over Blazey Best’s piggery-owning Babakina.  Paul Keating has a lot to answer for, I guess, as she bemoans to her best friend, Sasha’s mother  (Helen Thomson’s flower-rearranging Zinaida), Labour’s expensive, infrastructure costs go up and up ... it’s a fine line between growth and inflation ... There’s just no certainty any more ... I don’t want management costs, I’m thoroughly sick of innovation.  Efficiency dividends.  How efficient finally is a pig?....  Maybe Rod Sims and his Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will be pleased to note the proper degree of competition without graft and corruption between these two producers of Anton Chekov plays.


Neither can be said to dominate the market, and quality is clearly on the rise.


And the ACCC may also like to suggest to the new Prime Minister that competition in the theatre market generally could be improved by returning $105 million to Rupert Myer AO at the Australia Council and letting that independent arms-length body also manage the international market in conjunction with the Department of Foreign affairs and Trade.

But maybe that's just me, wanting the ways of the old days never to change.  Sigh....

Ewen Leslie as Ivanov, Airlie Dodds as Sasha

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: But Wait...There’s More Circus Oz

But Wait...There’s More  Circus Oz at Canberra Theatre Centre, September 23 – 26, 2015.

Musical Director: Ania Reynolds

Performers: Sam Aldham, Candy Bowers, April Dawson, Sharon Gruenert, Spenser Inwood, Nathan Kell, Derek Llewellin, Olivia Porter, Kyle Raftery

Musician: Ben Hendry  Musician & Performer: Matt Wilson

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 24

It seems a bit odd to keep calling Circus Oz ‘new circus’ after nearly 40 years.  It’s still different, though, even from any of the other ‘new’ circuses from the French-Canadian Cirque du Soleil to Britain’s Okham’s Razor, and even Australia’s other company, Cirque (with an upside-down ‘i’).

I saw Circus Oz when it was brand new.  What made it different and very popular then, just as it does today in But Wait...There’s More is the combination of having a theme but turning everything into a joke.  Cirque’s recent Le Noir – the Dark Side of Cirque, for example, was a grand display with a theme expressed mainly in costume.  Circus Oz takes up its serious theme, this time of consumerism gone rampant with a parallel concern for Indigenous issues, but with a larrikin absurdist approach.

This is the Australian way, of course: never taking itself too seriously.  It grew, in Circus Oz, from the old tradition of clowns – who were funny because they always got things wrong, such as attempting to walk the high wire and seeming to fall off.  Only later did you realise that to do this was even more skilful than not falling off.  The other thing the old clowns did was to play music, again often out of tune but again showing top musicianship to be deliberately funny.

As I recall the trapeze artist ‘accidentally’ letting go and flying sort-of horizontally until hitting the wall in a spreadeagled splat, and the slightly wild jazz band of the early days, I see that Circus Oz performers are all clowns, and great musicians.  This is their ‘new’ tradition.  And it still works so well because it taps into the best thing about being Australian. 

In fact we need Circus Oz even more now, considering our national political history of the last 25 years or so.  Bob Hawke was the last of the larrikin prime ministers, unless you want to see Tony Abbott as a clown on his bike in his budgie smugglers.  Everyone’s a clown in Circus Oz.  They just reflect our society.

Though it’s completely unfair to pick one performer out above any other, since everyone is brilliant in their own way, the consumerism theme is led by a character played by the contortionist Matt Wilson.  He does the acting so well that you won’t believe it when you see him lose an arm and a leg, and finally everything before your very eyes.  And don’t close your eyes for the amazing trapeze sequence, although you’ll want to when you’ve seen the first near miss.  It just gets better and better, until if you’re like me you’ll feel completely exhausted by the end of the show.

Excited and exhausted.  Just as I felt at the end of the great old circuses of my childhood.  If Circus Oz can do that for this ancient septuagenarian, it’s no joke, I can tell you.  Just very very funny, and occasionally scary.  And very very worthwhile.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw

L to R: Charlie Cousins, Andrea Demetriades, Mitchell Butel
as Sergius, Raina and Bluntschli
in Arms and the Man

Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw.  Sydney Theatre Company directed by Richard Cottrell; set designer – Michael Scott-Mitchell; costume designer – Julie Lynch; lighting by Damien Cooper; sound by Jeremy Silver.  At Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, September 18 – October 31, 2015.

Cast:
Nicola – Brandon Burke
Captain Bluntschli – Mitchell Butel
Major Sergius Saranoff – Charlie Cousins
Raina Petkoff – Andrea Demetriades
Catherine Petkoff – Deborah Kennedy
Russian Soldier – Jason Kos
Louka – Olivia Rose
Major Paul Petkoff -  William Zappa

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 23

 “What a man!”  So says Sergius, and so said all of us at the curtain call.  But Sergius, being Sergius, inevitably must say one more line: “Is he a man?”. 

Our praise was not only for the wonderful cast, a director who understood how they should be directed, and set, costumes, sound and lighting designers who knew how to make all the author’s stage directions work, but also especially for George Bernard Shaw.  What a perfect performance, say I.

The musical introductions and interludes were jaunty as they should be for this humorous take on the Bulgaria / Serbia war of 1885, but the pièce de resistance in sound was not flagged by Shaw, despite his always extensive directions: a short “ta da” trumpet voluntary before the line “What a man!” and again before “Is he a man?” rang out a different note. 

The effect was brilliant, lifting the ending out of a quieter sense of wonderment, which almost makes Sergius seem sensible at last, up to a very funny but much more significant glorious celebration of integrity in love – of Bluntschli and Raina, and of Louka and Sergius himself – as the key to understanding the play.

In my own directing of Arms and the Man (many years ago for the amateur Wyong Drama Group http://www.wyongdramagroup.com.au/1960s ) I had taken the quieter way.  Cottrell takes the much more daring leap.  What an ending was here – two great bursts of laughter and instant applause.  And what a lift for the cast after their two hours’ traffic upon the stage.  Their hard work, so detailed as it has to be to satisfy the demands of Shaw’s text, received the reward it deserved, with a great sense of rapport between us and them as they bowed.

Yet neither ending quite answers the question, what did Shaw mean by his very last line?  My ending had placed the emphasis on “he”.  “Is he a man?”  At the time I saw this as a simple re-emphasis of the line before: “ What a man!”

Cottrell’s ending seemed to say, more evenly stressed but possibly asking, “Is he a man?”  This raises a more extensive question: What does it mean to be a man?

This question makes the play, in its historical context, more interesting, I think, than my simpler ending.  And more relevant to a modern audience.  And it explains something about why, as the Program mentions in an essay by Diane Stubbings Debunking Military Glory: Shaw’s ‘Arms and the Man’, the audience at the first production was confused as well as amused.

My interpretation would still be confusing to the many who still believe that there is reason and justification for warfare, always boosted by romantic nationalism.  Sergius in the end sees Bluntschli and the whole circumstances in a new light, where principled political decision-making, competent organisation and serious negotiation  avoids people being killed.  In my day I was as strongly influenced as I suspect Shaw was by Carl von Clausewitz’s 1832 On War (translated and published in London in 1873), not only for the well-known quote that “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means”, but also for his dictum that it was each commander’s central task, whichever side he was on, to reduce their own casualties to the absolute minimum.  This underlies Bluntschli’s horror at the stupidity of Sergius in leading his Bulgarian cavalry charge against machine guns (and the incompetence of the Serbian side in supplying the wrong ammunition).  Logically this leads to not only running away (as Bluntschli describes so well)  but also to commanders arranging peace negotiations as soon as they can get the politicians out of their hair.

As a polemical play against warfare, Arms and the Man still stands up tall and strong.  Using real events of his time, Shaw created a metaphor which we can still see being played out in the Middle East today, as it was in World Wars I and II, in Korea and Vietnam, Cambodia and Rwanda and so on.

But is this all that Shaw was concerned about?  The other interpretation of the line “Is he a man?” takes on a very different thread that Shaw followed through many of his plays – and took him close to ethical disaster in the time of Herr Hitler.  Picking up on the, admittedly schizoid, philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly as expressed in his 1883 poetic work Thus Spake Zarathustra, first translated into English in 1896, (just after Arms and the Man was written), Shaw became fascinated by the idea of the Ubermensch.  Through later plays, particularly in Major Barbara, Man and Superman, Back to Methusaleh, Saint Joan and the much later The Applecart, the idea took hold that a “beyond-man” could evolve and look down upon the ordinary man of our day (as Zarathustra does from his isolated mountain-top) and see our crude behaviour in much the same way as we may look down upon the behaviour of our evolutionary predecessors.  Though the plays remain comedies, Shaw’s attraction to mystical ideas like “Life Force” and “Creative Evolution” was real enough.  (See Bernard Shaw as Artist-Philosopher: an exposition of Shavianism by Renée M. Deacon: London 1910 if you want to read more.)

It was unfortunate that, for a while, it was possible to think that Hitler could be in the line of Bluntschli, Adolphus Cusins, Jack Tanner, Lilith, Joan, or even Magnus, the King in The Applecart (1930) who proposes to stand for election against his own Prime Minister.  That thought became unthinkable as Hitler proved that being elected could be a useful way of establishing insane absolute power.  Shaw’s comedy was turned on its head by anything but a “superman”.

I felt, in watching Richard Cottrell’s Arms and the Man that he has achieved in those last two lines something near to Shaw’s heart, as recalled in Diane Stubbings’ essay: “You are wrong to scorn farcical comedy.  It is by jingling the bells of a jester’s cap that I […] have made people listen to me.  All genuine intellectual work is humorous.”

Being intellectual doesn’t mean always being right, but in Shaw’s case it certainly meant having the wit to be very funny.  I thank all the cast, crew and director for having their wits about them to match. 

Photos by Heidrun Lohr

Andrea Demetriades as Raina, Mitchell Butel as Bluntschli

Andrea Demetriades (Raina), Deborah Kennedy (Raina's mother Catherine Petkoff)
and Mitchell Butel (Bluntschli)

Andrea Demetriades (Raina) and Charlie Cousins (Sergius)

Andrea Demetriades (Raina) and Mitchell Butel (Bluntschli)

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Mother, Wife and the Complicated Life by Amity Dry

Mother, Wife and the Complicated Life by Amity Dry.  Presented by Popjam Productions at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre.  Book, music and lyrics by Amity Dry; music and arrangements by Mark Simeon Ferguson; directed and designed by David Lampard; lighting by Daniel Barber.  September 15-27, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 16

Performers:

Kate – Amity Dry, Bec – Nikki Aitken, Jessie – Rachel McCall, Lily – Susan Ferguson

Band:
Bass – Alana Dawes, Piano – Brenton Foster, Drums – Jarrad Payne

This is a women’s play about women’s business – being mothers and wives.  Kate, Bec, Jessie and Lily learn as they go along, and teach us through humour and empathy, in talk and song, that girls’ expectations of a ‘perfect’ life are simply not realistic.  But, as their final song says, that does not mean that life isn’t ‘worth it’.

Quite the opposite, in fact.  The show ends in a celebration of recognising that freedom from those false expectations is what makes life worthwhile.  A woman, and only  a woman, has babies, and no amount of information can prepare her for the unknown.  Only she can have this experience.  Only she can know how she feels and what it means to go through the pain, the fear, the determination and strength not only of the physical birth but of being a mother for her children, at the same time as being in a continuing relationship as a wife and as well as playing her part in the wider world – and satisfying her own need for personal growth.  Only she can know love – and know when love is missing – from a woman’s point of view.

The bravery, the directness, and the skills as performers of these women, made this father (and husband of nearly 50 years’ standing) a humble observer on several fronts. 

I thought they were far more brave than I would have dared to be, in my 30s as they are now, to write so honestly of the details of sex and marriage.  It seemed to me that there must be a great deal of personal experience in the writing of the dialogue and the lyrics of the songs, which in the past would have been kept private.  But, maybe, and I hope this is true, generations after mine have become much more open about such matters.

Other shows, of course, seem to have been similarly public in this way – Menopause, the Musical is the obvious comparison.  But I think that show squibbed the basic underlying truth by emphasising comedy at the expense of the ‘Complicated Life’.  These women laugh, in many of their songs, at the contrasts and absurdities that arise in their experiences, but the fears caused by the one-night stand for Kate and the breakdown of her marriage for Lily produce serious and thoroughly affecting talk and song.  Amity Dry has written a work of genuine depth, balancing the theatrical value of humour with the emotional value of truth.

Finding, as a writer, a way to satisfactorily conclude the slice of these characters’ lives was perhaps the only point where Dry had to bend reality a little.  Before her one-night stand and definitely unplanned pregnancy, Kate had tickets to Paris which she could not recoup in the circumstances.  She offers these (by now many months later) to persuade Lily to take the trip to rebuild her confidence after her marriage and life running a restaurant had fallen apart permanently.  Though, perhaps, a too-neat ending, it made a strong point about the importance of the bonds between the group of women.

For me, on the second night of the run here in Queanbeyan, it was odd that there were hardly any men in the audience.  Though women were clearly delighted that their ‘business’ was so energetically and realistically presented on stage, I think it is equally important for men to come to realise that women really are essentially different.  Though I have experienced  being present at my child’s birth, that can never equal my wife’s and daughters' complicated lives.

And the weird thing, for those men who still see feminism as a nasty plot against men’s rights, is that they will find themselves laughing most of the time and at the end will be nodding in agreement with the common sense.  Take the ticket to Paris, Lily.  Even Paris won’t be perfect, but sure enough it will be worth the trip.

Like the trip to see Mother, Wife and the Complicated Life.

Susan Ferguson, Amity Dry, Nikki Aitken, Rachel McCall
as
Lily, Kate, Bec, Jessie

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: The Wharf Revue: Celebrating 15 Years

Rehearsal photos: Hon Boey

The Wharf Revue: Celebrating 15 Years by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott, with Amanda Bishop.  Music director: Phillip Scott; Lighting by Matthew Marshall; Sound and Video by David Bergman.  Sydney Theatre Company at Canberra Theatre Centre, The Playhouse, September 15 – 26, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 15

I’ve become so used to the annual Wharf Revue that I felt as though I’ve seen every show, but my reviews go back only to when Julia, despite Kevin’s avowed love for her in the guise of the Phantom of the Opera, stabbed him in the back to make really sure he would never rise again.  That was 2011.

In 2015, this scene was recycled in Celebrating 15 Years.  After a minute’s silence, while apparently slumped dead at the piano, one of Kevin’s hands creepily crept around the side, white against the shiny black surface.  Then the other began to crawl, climbing up off the keyboard and over the top.  “But the Phantom never dies” – we all know what happened, and what resulted in the 2013 election.

Phillip Scott and Amanda Bishop
in rehearsal as Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard (about to stab the Phantom)

And, even more creepy according to your viewpoint, on this very day after the historic Liberal Party Room vote on Monday night, September 14, 2015 – “When the ‘Canberra games’ turned lethal”, to quote a Canberra Times headline (by James Massola and Tom Allard, September 16, 2015), The Wharf Revue team had to add a new ending to their history of theatre and politics.  Malcolm Turnbull has done a Kevin Rudd, with Julie Bishop holding the knife which has left Tony Abbott “dead, buried and cremated”.  Malcolm gloriously swans off, wrapped in the backdrop as if in the Australian flag.

The writing and the performances are as incisive and funny as ever – and as necessary to the Australian cultural scene as David Pope’s cartoons.  In the Canberra Times, (Times Two, September 16: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/photogallery/federal-politics/cartoons/david-pope-20120214-1t3j0.html ) we see Pope’s satirical metaphor: Turnbull, looking like some kind of cockatoo, has stolen Abbott’s traditional ‘budgie-smuggler’ swimmers, leaving the ex-PM fuming naked on the beach, while everything is recorded by the Press in the form of seagulls.  Turnbull, is screeching (as sulphur-crested cockatoos habitually do) “Free at Last! Free at Last!”, but his feet are entangled in the budgie-smugglers, labelled ‘Liberal Right’.  The smile on Turnbull’s face (which has been in every photo opportunity since Monday night’s vote) is already looking rather haunted.  Maybe he is not so free to be a small-l Liberal while still hamstrung by the Tea-Party types of the Liberal Right.

The artistically equivalent scenes in The Wharf Revue which were, I think, the best written, concerned the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Qantas, Irishman Alan Joyce, and Welsh-born one-time Prime Minister Julia Gillard (famous for her ‘misogyny’ speech against then Opposition leader Tony Abbott). 

Alan Joyce becomes the writer of Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce, performed magnificently by Drew Forsythe in an amazing speech about the modern airline industry with all of the twist and turns of Finnegan’s thoughts and language, exaggerated for an even greater comic – and satirical – effect than the original James Joyce achieved.

The Welsh connection turned Julia Gillard’s life into Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, played almost exactly as the original performance of that play was done on stage at the YMHA Poetry Centre on May 14, 1953.  The actors stood still, as they had then, being just ‘voices’ of all those characters, except that they formed into a quartet for Drew Forsythe to step forward briefly as the Reverend Eli Jenkins – as Dylan Thomas himself had done – and to end in a kind of hymn.  I still have that original recording (Philips B 94022 L / B 94023 L: 2 12inch LP records) and it was a goosebump moment to watch The Wharf Revue team play their wonderful satirical version.

Having now played out their first 15 year history, next year will be even more fascinating to watch, as it will probably be at about the same time as the next Federal election.  What will happen to Malcolm Turnbull and Labor’s Bill Shorten between now and then?

Don’t miss this year (if you don’t make it to Canberra by September 26, you can pick it up at Wharf 1 in Sydney from October 20 to December 19), and look forward to election year 2016 full of excitement.  Just be careful not to fall off the wharf into Sydney harbour as the famous human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson appears to do in the introduction to The Wharf Revue, Celebrating 15 Years.

LtoR: Phillip Scott, Drew Forsythe, Jonathan Biggins, Amanda Bishop
in rehearsal (Under Milk Wood  'quartet' scene)

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Ghosts in the Scheme by Scott Rankin

Ghosts in the Scheme by Scott Rankin.  Big hArt directed by Scott Rankin; lighting by Gillian Schwab; sound by Kimmo Vennonen; music directors and performers: Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen – Michael Simic, Pip Branson, Guy Freer, Sam Martin, Philip Moriarty.  Canberra Theatre Centre, The Playhouse, September 2-5, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 2

This show is the product of Project Cosmopolitana, the latest work by Big hART “working with the country’s most invisible, silenced or marginalised communities to explore many of the country’s unknown gifts”.  Invited to Cooma, NSW, by South East Arts and Cooma Monaro Shire Council “to embark on a new project working across generations and cultures...[they conducted] a wide range of community workshops including music, dance, oral history and archival research”.

I suspect that the real value of this work remains in the two years of working with the community.  Although the previous two Big hART shows I’ve seen (Ngapartji Ngapartji and Namatjira) produced highly effective theatrical storytelling of great significance to the wider Australian community, Ghosts in the Scheme fails on both counts.

The show is held together only by the quality of the music by the Black Sea Gentlemen, particularly by Pip Branson in a singing role as an occasional commentator on the action.  The script writing is, to put it bluntly, woeful.  The story which is murky for much of the time, gradually turns into a battle between three “old” people, a woman who fell in love when young with a man who she decided was unreliable, and so married his friend whom she never really loved.  In old age, the triangle blew apart.

Unfortunately, for the apparent purpose in writing the play, the Scheme (that is, the Snowy Mountains Scheme) was entirely relegated to background images and occasional difficult to hear voice-overs of bits of stories garnered from oral histories, while the central story could have happened anywhere to any generation.  There is nothing in the script which ties the story of the love triangle specifically to the experiences of the multicultural life of Cooma in the period of the Scheme.  The ‘Ghosts’ of the title were limited to the memories of these three, while what we needed was to get to know what happened to people because of the scheme.

So I’m left hoping that the people in Cooma who took part in the process of this project gained the great deal of satisfaction that they deserve – more than 30 groups and families are listed in the program – but despite our recognition of the musicianship of the Black Sea Gentlemen, theatrically Ghosts in the Scheme doesn’t make the grade.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: The Tempest by William Shakespeare

The Tempest by William Shakespeare.  Bell Shakespeare directed by John Bell; set and costume designer, Julie Lynch; lighting designer, Damien Cooper; composer, Alan John; sound designer, Nate Edmondson; movement director, Scott Witt.  The Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, August 19 – September 18, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 29

Only one other production of The Tempest has inspired me as much as John Bell’s farewell to his career as artistic director and founder of Bell Shakespeare.  This was Rex Cramphorn’s “1972 Performance Syndicate production of The Tempest [which] received critical and popular acclaim, being remounted and taken on tour until 1974.”   It’s an irony of history that  Cramphorn’s later production of The Tempest in 1991 was his last show before his untimely death in November that year.

There seems to be something magical in the divergences and points of contact in the histories not only of John Bell and Rex Cramphorn, but even for me.  Our births were very close (1 November 1940, 10 January 1941 and 9 January 1941 respectively), though far apart in Maitland, Brisbane and the UK.  We each were influenced by choreographer and dance-drama teacher, the inimitable Margaret Barr, briefly in my case at summer schools, as his teacher at NIDA for Rex and as his colleague when John taught at NIDA. 

I attempted a few dance classes with Margaret Barr, and remember her home as light, white, almost bare of furniture, spotless, pure and simple.  I began my 20 year drama teaching career at Hawker College, Canberra, in 1976, with a production of The Tempest, keeping in mind my image of Margaret Barr and Rex Cramphorn’s production, keeping the action within a circle, enclosed only by loose unadorned material.  And so it is for John Bell’s production all these years later.

In the tradition of Margaret Barr’s teaching, both Cramphorn and Bell focus on movement of the actors in open space, creating an island of dancing magic – sometimes heavy on the ground, sometimes up and light yet powerful, often ethereal and invisible, yet audible – or, in contrast, silent.  This is The Tempest that was also William Shakespeare’s most original and last major work. 

It was the creation of a spirit world that had inspired me about Cramphorn’s work.  It was a world of philosophic enquiry, where the island became the universe, a place of wonder and mystery.  It was this theme that my late teenage students took up enthusiastically, with an image of a huge eye painted high on the rough hessian backdrop, observing all silently, as if from a different universe.

Bell’s production keeps the same feel and the same philosophical implications, but blends in the complexity of ordinary reality.  Though Cramphorn (and I) had kept all our actors in the circle on stage throughout, as if there were no other place to be, even for those not active in the scene, Bell used the circle as an ever-changing space into and out of which characters come and go, as if the rest of the island is concretely out there somewhere, while the spot we see shifts from place to place – entirely in our imaginations, with nothing more than wind moving the surrounding material drops, a rope or a log, or no more than the characters’ costumes to tell us where we are.

The effect is to add a layer of understanding to those previous productions, anchored as they were in the 1970s.  For me, and I suspect for Rex Cramphorn, influenced so much by Jerzy Grotowski, the freedom of the magical world to explore the unknown was where we needed to go.  We were escaping philosophically, perhaps.  But the new world order today requires us to come to grips with strategic thinking – as indeed it was in Shakespeare’s time as absolute monarchy was beginning to be taken down, at first by extremist Puritans, until over the next centuries a reasonable form of democracy could evolve.  Shakespeare is described in John Bell’s director’s notes as “to have been a remarkably competent businessman and one celebrated by those close to him for his witty, mild and affable companionship”.  The very kind of democrat we would all hope to see – and to be.

So in Bell’s production, Prospero is realistically getting a bit past it, and at times is aware that he can’t keep his powers up to the mark.  At 74 I find I have the same problem, and perhaps John Bell feels a bit the same way.  I asked him if leaving the task of directing Bell Shakespeare, the Company, was to be free in particular of Responsibility (though he is continuing to work, as an actor in Ivanov with Belvoir next month).  “No more applications for funding grants,” was his reply.  And there he was, as director of The Tempest, in the second week of the run, still watching and making notes for cast and crew.

My notes say that the casting is excellent, the set and costumes brilliant, the lighting, sound and music composition wonderful, and the movement exciting and telling: the balance between fantasy and reality, or rather the fact that both exist at one and the same time, is made in the movement design and the capacity of the actors to work as dancers – and singers – while completely grounded in their characters. 

You may not think you are seeing dance for the most part, since the choreography is of symbolic or natural seeming movement.  But watch this perfect apparition of Ariel, played with such grace and strength by Matthew Backer.  Watch the two drunken clowns, Trinculo and  Stephano – Arky Michael and Hazem Shammas, who also amazingly play Sebastian and Antonio – to see what I mean about choreography.  But especially watch the one and only woman in the cast (the others – Caliban's mother Sycorax and Prospero’s wife – die before the play begins). 

Eloise Winestock shows us Miranda as the girl brought up in the wild – she hisses at Caliban with animal ferocity.  Now the hormones of developing sexuality lock her onto the quite proper young man, Ferdinand.  Felix Gentle is exactly the right name for this actor, and his Ferdinand is just as amazed at Winestock’s Miranda as she is by him.

I would have presented Caliban, I think, as much more ugly or wild-looking, but I can see why Damien Strouthos was given a less animal-like hair cut, but one still representing rebellion.  It makes him a genuinely serious threat to Miranda’s safety, which Prospero must defend, while we also realise that Caliban is justified in hating Prospero, in parallel to Ariel’s position – though Ariel is more like an indentured labourer, while Caliban is enslaved.

Finally, Prospero’s awareness of his own ageing frailty explains how he can step out of the fantasy and speak directly to us, asking us to free him from his responsibility as an actor.  This speech, especially under Bell’s direction, places Shakespeare centuries ahead of his time in theatre history – beyond Bertolt Brecht even.  We see this level of sophistication currently in the ABC’s The Weekly, in the relationships between Charlie Pickering, Tom Gleeson, Kitty Flanagan and the studio audience, as well as with us watching our screen at home.  If we thought Shakespeare is no longer relevant after 400 years, think again on Prospero’s final speech.

Which ends “Let your indulgence set me free.”  And so be it for John Bell, except that it’s no indulgence on my part.  Bell writes in his program notes “Prospero is a dreamer and is a disastrously ineffective leader.  He prides himself on being a humanist scholar, but in fact governs through terror, tyranny and the employment of dark forces.  Shakespeare, on the other hand, seems to have been....”  I think the evidence, in this production of The Tempest, proves that John Bell is more like Shakespeare than Prospero, and so thoroughly deserves his freedom.


Links:
Ian Maxwell in Australian Dictionary of Biography, at http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cramphorn-rex-roy-15453

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bell_%28Australian_actor%29

Garry Lester in Australian Dictionary of Biography, at
http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/barr-margaret-14855

Photos by Prudence Upton

Matthew Backer as Ariel, Brian Lipson as Prospero

Brian Lipson as Prospero, Eloise Winestock as Miranda, Damien Strouthos as Caliban

Damien Strouthos as Caliban

Eloise Winestock as Miranda, Brian Lipson as Prospero

Thunder and lightning. Enter Ariel, like a harpy

Eloise Winestock, Arky Michael, Haxem Shammas as Spirit Shapes
Brian Lipson as Prospero

Felix Gentle (Ferdinand) and Eloise Winestock (Miranda) in rehearsal

The Drunks in rehearsal
Arky Michael as Trinculo, Hazem Shammas as Stephano, Damien Strouthos as Caliban

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim

Into the Woods  Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; Book by James Lapine.  Dramatic Productions in association with ANU School of Music, directed by Richard Block.  Musical Director: Damien Slingsby; Choreographer: Kathryn Jones; Lighting: Hamish McConchie; Sound: James PcPherson.  At Gungahlin College Theatre, Canberra, August 28 – September 12, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 28

Having only previously seen Into the Woods via the movie, I would like to thank the Dramatic Productions team.  Now I know what Sondheim meant me to understand.  Only on stage, because of the way a playwright structures the drama, do we appreciate both the humour in the breaking of conventions and the genuinely serious theme which results.

At the simplest level, the film does not have an Act I Finale, followed, after an interval of popcorn consumption, by Act II with its Finale.  ‘No One is Alone’ is a powerful expression of humanity in the context of truth about the human condition.  In movie format the guts of the message is lost.

My appreciation also goes to all the performers for clearly understanding the Sondheim style, in the music and in the often surprising structure of the songs, where what would be short sharp dialogue between characters makes duets into lively interactions – little dramas in their own right.  The two princes Alexander Clubb (Cinderella’s Prince) and Anthony Simeonovic (Rapunzel’s Prince) created very effective comedy in their timing in their singing lines, as well as in their choreographed movement; while Veronica Thwaites-Brown and Grant Pegg captured the edginess of the marital arguments of the Baker and his Wife, as well as their tenderness.  Despite the ‘spoof’ nature of the whole idea of the mixed up fairytales, the sudden death, crushed by the Giant’s footfall off-stage, of this Wife made me feel entirely at one with this Baker’s sense of loss.  Her later return in spirit to give him support and direction was played with such simple sensitivity by Veronica, that we could genuinely accept Grant’s new quiet strength as the Baker taking the still impetuous young Jack (Pippin Carroll) under his wing in ‘No One is Alone’. 

The relationship Veronica and Grant had established by then also passed on to Philippa Murphy’s Cinderella in mentoring Siân Harrington’s effervescent Little Red Riding Hood in their half of that quartet.  Here was the formation out of the worst adversity of a new family of the best kind.  For me it was the emotional strength in this scene which lifted the play far above making fun of fairy stories, and beyond conventional sentimentality.  The Giants with their crushing footsteps are all around us, yet on this very day instead of our society understanding the need to bring us all together in positive human feeling, people in Melbourne were on the streets in instant protest against the Australian Border Force proposing to stop people – “any individual we cross paths with” – and demand to see that they are legitimately in Australia.  Within hours Operation Fortitude was cancelled as a result of the Melbourne Jacks’ action.  The Giant was slain.  But I fear this may not be the last of the Giants our Bakers, Jacks, Cinderellas and Red Riding Hoods, or indeed the sons and daughters of the Baker and his Wife, the Baker and Cinderella, and presumably Jack and Red Riding Hood, will have to deal with.

Though there were a few glitches in the lighting and once or twice in the singers’ mikes, the set, costumes and choreography made very good use of the excellent Gunghalin College Theatre.  I could only be jealous in comparison with what for me had been an unusually good school theatre at Hawker College back in the 1990s.  It’s good to see such wonderful – and appropriate – development in government school and community arts facilities.

Finally, the musicianship of the orchestra, directed by Damien Slingsby, must not be forgotten.  Sondheim writes ‘difficult’ music, and this 16-piece orchestra made it a joy to listen to, in combination with singers all of whom mastered what I, as an amateur, would call ‘musical jumps’ – like an obstacle course for an Olympic horse-riding team.

So thanks again for a very interesting night out.

All photos by Peter Stiles

Baker's Wife, Baker, Jack, The Cow
Veronica Thwaites-Brown, Grant Pegg, Pippin Carroll

Cinderella's Family
Jessica Baker, Kitty McGarry, Miriam Miley-Read
Philippa Murphy as Cinerella

Cinderella at The Ball
Philippa Murphy

Kelly Robert as The Witch

The Wolf and Red Riding Hood
Alexander Clubb, Siân Harrington

'No One is Alone'
Little Red Riding Hood, Jack, Cinderella (holding Baker's son), Baker
Siân Harrington, Pippin Carroll, Philippa Murphy, Grant Pegg

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Betrayal by Harold Pinter

Alison Bell as Emma
with the tablecloth from Venice
on the table at Jerry and Emma's flat

 Betrayal by Harold Pinter.  State Theatre Company of South Australia: Directed by Geordie Brookman.  Lighting and Set Designer, Geoff Cobham; Sound Designer, Jason Sweeney; Costume Designer and Associate Designer, Ailsa Paterson.  At Canberra Theatre Centre, The Playhouse, August 19-22, 2015.

Cast: Alison Bell – Emma; Nathan O’Keefe – Jerry; Mark Saturno – Robert; John Maurice – Waiter

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 19

How would you handle this situation?  You meet up with someone, on their invitation, with whom you have had an intimate relationship in the past.  You might say How’re you going, then?  We haven’t seen each other for a while, eh? and the other person hesitates a little, and then says No. It’s OK, I’m alright.

What do you think?  Do they know something I don’t know?  Why did they call me to meet up again after all this time?  Do they mean they really are OK, or are they just saying that?  If they aren’t really OK, what does that mean?  Do they want to tell me something because they think I should know whatever it is?  Or because they think I can help in some way?  And if they are really OK, then why did they call me?  Do they want to start up with me again?  Do I want to start up with them again?  If I do, should I say something?  Or should I just wait and see?  They haven’t said anything else, but it seems a bit ordinary just to say something like “That’s good, then”, considering how we were together before.  I’d better say something, I guess.  How long can we sit here?  Are they looking at me, waiting for me to say something?  Or are they just needing a quiet time, and don’t really want me to say anything?

As you read all these possible thoughts, try timing how long it takes, remembering that there will be gaps of time between thoughts, probably with changes in your expression (eyebrows, forehead, where your eyes turn, how your head moves, how your body relaxes or tightens up).  My timing suggests at least a full minute – which is a long pause on stage.

This a Pinter pause.  Some are much longer, maybe even up to three minutes, which ought to kill a drama stone dead – except that it doesn’t in a Pinter play.  It might if the actors were not skilled enough to give us the expressions which they will derive from their study of the play, the relationships between their characters, the history of their relationships, and the possible future of their relationships.

Pinter’s skill is to provide his actors with a back story, all put together in very ordinary language – in fact using words which in themselves are so ordinary they are more or less meaningless (Oh, for example).  Two productions of Betrayal will end up revealing to us the same basic story, but the picture we may have of the quality of the triangular relationship between Robert, Jerry and Emma will be different in its impact on us Peeping Toms according to each director’s and actors’ decisions in rehearsal and skills in performance.

If you’d like a detailed analysis of the nature of betrayal in Betrayal you could hardly do better than read Hanna Scolnicov’s 2008 essay available at http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/?id=1228 .

My concern here is the quality of this production as a theatrical experience.  I have no complaints about the top-class professionalism of the actors or Geordie Brookman’s directing of them. 

I did find, though, that people with different sightlines had different responses to the need to see the subtle facial and bodily expressions of characters’ thoughts and feelings in those pauses.  I placed Nathan O’Keefe as having a stronger impact than the other actors, but in talking with other audience members, realised that from my seat (E6 – close to the stage-left proscenium wall) I had more consistently seen Jerry front on through several of the nine scenes, while Alison Bell’s Emma more often showed me a side-on or even partially rear view of her face.  From a stage-right position my viewpoint would have been reversed.  But then a friend who sat in the upper circle had not responded to the pauses’ intensity or detail merely because of her extra distance and higher angle of vision.  Opera glasses would have been an advantage, even in the Playhouse.

Our discussion led to wondering if the play would be better performed in a smaller theatre, perhaps preferably in-the-round, such as in the Ensemble, Belvoir Upstairs or Wharf 1 in Sydney.  Though Brookman made a point of praising Canberra’s Playhouse as a better venue than some others – unnamed – I wonder if its conventional fourth-wall proscenium design might not serve this play well.

This thinking led me to consider the stage, lighting and sound design for this production.  It’s a matter of big or small scale.  The set surrounds the stage in a big way between the scenes.  As it grinds its way around to reveal the next scene, the sound is raucous, aggressive and industrial in the earlier transitions (which are later in historical time) and become a little gentler as we approach the end of the play (which is the beginning of the story).  But the set visually remains big.

Yet each scene is small, often with only two characters, sometimes only one, and rarely with three.  Each scene has a single focal point (a bar, a restaurant table, the table in Jerry and Emma’s flat, Robert and Emma’s bed), and especially in those great pauses the action is minimal.  Between scenes, mysteriously half-hidden behind the semi-see-through set, the action is busy as furniture is moved into and out of the centre and actors change out of and into clothes hung on the stage side of the set.

I found myself unsure of the designers’ intention in making the scene changes visually large and audibly loud, sometimes with very bright floodlights in our eyes, while the scenes were lit to make them seem to take up only a small space on the stage, except for the final scene with Jerry, Emma and Robert in the bedroom – but even then the action was mainly restricted to a small area around the bed.  Perhaps there was a kind of Brechtian intention – that is to force us out of the assumption that we were seeing naturalistic scenes being played out for us to emotionally/sentimentally engage in.  The big scene changes made it clear we were watching a highly theatrical presentation. 

From a practical point view, there was a need to separate each scene and help us accept that time was going backwards and (once) forwards, which was done by adding big projected titles of the year, the location and the season of the next scene as the set spun around.  The costumes took us back to the fashion of each year, so perhaps the projected information was not entirely necessary, at least for those of us who recognise what the London literati wore in those years from 1968 to1977.  But at the end of the day I suspect that less giant and gimmicky scene changes might have given us a softer focus of attention on the words, silences and feelings in each scene.  Rather than having the sound effects between scenes seem to illustrate too obviously the bitterness of betrayal, perhaps romantic music might have better made the contrast between the conventional expectation and the reality of love.

So it’s a play and a production which should not be missed: for Pinter’s work and the quality of the acting.  But for me, less might have proved to be more, in the set and sound department.

Nathan O'Keefe as Jerry, Alison Bell as Emma
Meeting at the bar

Nathan O'Keefe as Jerry, Mark Saturno as Robert
Lunch at the restaurant

Nathan O'Keefe as Jerry, Mark Saturno as Robert
Publisher and Literary Agent

Nathan O'Keefe as Jerry
"Small" lighting in a "Big" set

Alison Bell as Emma

  © Frank McKone, Canberra