2015: Festival of Museum Theatre: Come Alive 2015

Festival of Museum Theatre: Come Alive 2015.  Artistic Director – Peter Wilkins.  Participating schools – Orana Steiner School, Daramalan College, St Francis Xavier College, Calwell High School Dance, Canberra College, Namadgi School, Telopea School, Canberra College Dance, Marist College, and Bateman’s Bay High School.

James O Fairfax Theatre, National Gallery of Australia, October 26 – November 1 2015.

by Frank McKone
October 31

In conjunction with the International Museum Theatre Alliance (IMTAL), Come Alive! has been presented each year since 2010, mainly at the National Museum of Australia, on occasion at the interactive science museum Questacon, and this year jointly by the National Gallery of Australia and the National Portrait Gallery.

The essence of Wilkins’ approach is simple in concept, highly effective in results.  I saw only two of the ten shows today, Light by Daramalan College and Lina by Orana Steiner School.  Having reviewed Come Alive! previously in 2012 and 2013 I can confidently say that the promise of developing a tradition and improvement in the two aspects of the program – understanding of the process of presenting theatre and appreciation of culture – has been very well fulfilled. 

Light took the work of James Turrell, represented in the NGA by Skyspace and Perceptual Cell and by his recent James Turrell: A Retrospective extended exhibition.  Lina was inspired by four Australian paintings from the 1940s Heide modernist group – The Red Hat by Jock Frater and Lina Bryans’ Nina Christiansen, The babe is wise, and Yellow portrait.

The basic principle of Wilkins’ method is that the student group in each school, with no more than minimal assistance from a teacher, will choose their subject from the museum / gallery display, undertake detailed research and create a theatre performance of about 20 minutes to express their new understanding.

Light became a kind of ‘abstract’ theatre, in which figures in white tops moved slowly together and apart, front lit by moving spotlights while live video showed them via changing differently manipulated images on a rear screen, as individuals spoke sections of poems referring to light, with backing group vocal sounds sometimes in harmony and sometimes quite discordant in effect.  The sound became like light, played as if it were light of different intensities and colour.  The piece concluded with a twist on the Dylan Thomas injunction – going ‘into the dying light’ as the stage lights faded before a silent bow (while we in the audience clapped gently).

Lina showed us, partly in mime or briefly frozen tableaus, and using spoken material from critical writing, personal letters and interviews, twelve of the artists and others associated with the Heide group: Lina Bryans and her relationships with William ‘Jock’ Frater, Ian Fairweather, Alex Jelinek, Nina and Clem Christiansen, novelist and critic Jean Campbell, Joy Hester, Albert Tucker, John Brack, Winifred Frater and Alan Sumner.  Despite the fractious nature of these diverse relationships, out of which came such an immense change in Australian painting and sculpture, the students found a peaceful ending in the interview with Lina, in her old age, married to Alex and content to look back with a degree of equanimity.

Each show, though completely different in stylistic approach, showed the same commitment, enthusiasm for research, originality in devising how to present the material, and remarkable maturity in dealing with ideas like Turrell’s ‘wordless thought’ in his work which has ‘no object, no image and no focus’; or with the contrasting and often conflicting philosophies of art, and the often explosive feelings (or especially in Ian Fairweather’s case, the depths of depression) generated between the artists of the Heide group. 

On my visit I was fortunate to hear some of the delegates from the International Museum Theatre Alliance (Asia/Pacific) conference currently being held in Canberra, whose questions of the two casts in a Q&A session brought out highly articulate expressions of delight at what they had achieved on stage.

To quote from my first encounter with museum theatre in 2001: "Banging a visitor over the head with a message will only serve to concuss their mind, not expand it." - Catherine Hughes, Boston Museum of Science, [then] Executive Director of the International Museum Theatre Alliance (IMTAL).  This was on the occasion of only the second IMTAL conference.  If you would like to follow up information on museum theatre, you could well begin here:
 http://www.recollections.nma.gov.au/shared/libraries/attachments/imtal_2005_bibliography/files/11890/IMTAL2005_biblio.pdf

Further reading will take you to the psychology researcher from Harvard University, Howard Gardner (of Multiple Intelligences fame) who was probably the main stimulator of thinking about ‘museum education’ – that is taking students out of their isolated classrooms and stimulating their intelligences beyond the conventional numerical and verbal aspects, which effectively are the only sources of measurement in IQ tests. 

Peter Wilkins’ work in Come Alive! is a major contribution, serving not to ‘concuss their mind’, but ‘expand it’ for all the students who take part, especially because they become responsible, to themselves, for both observing and choosing from the cultural artefacts in the museums, and then for discovering and putting into practice the theatrical form which will convey their ‘excitement’, as one student said today, of finding out so much from ‘reading in the National Library’.  This is what we might call ‘wholistic’ education, the value of which cannot be over-estimated.

I now have a much better understanding of James Turrell, and learned a great deal more than I had known before about the Heide modern art movement.

And, finally, I must thank the teachers who will surely have worked overtime and inevitably had much more than ‘minimal’ input to their students’ success in this year’s Come Alive! : Jana Watson, Joe Woodward, Douglas Amarfio, Kym Degenhart, Ian Walker, Stephanie Ikin, Jessica Dixon, Sharon McCutcheon, Susan Johnson and Carla Weijer.  And the staff of NGA and NPG for their technical and administrative work – and their commitment to education.




© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: The Art of Teaching Nothing by Kirsty Budding

The Art of Teaching Nothing by Kirsty Budding.  Free Rain Theatre Company: directed and designed by Cate Clelland; lighting and sound by Joel Edmondson; costumes by Fiona Leach.  Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, October 22-25, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 25

This is a new locally written play about which I find myself in several minds.  It’s certainly about the business of being a teacher, set definitively in the government school system as opposed to any private school.  And clearly in the Canberra jurisdiction.

Its title has an element of foreboding which comes to fruition in the final scenes.

But it’s the author’s intention in writing the play that is not clear to me. 

Some parts are farcical – and there’s nothing wrong with farce which is funny for the sake of being funny.  That’s a well established theatre genre.

Some parts are comedy with ironic material as, for example, an incompetent Level 2 English Faculty head Clara (Elaine Noon) who has had a longstanding sexual relationship with the Principal Julian (Rob De Fries) finds herself promoted even further above her level of incompetency into a sinecure administrative position in Head Office.  There are several other similar situations as the play progresses.  The complete nonentity Deputy Principal George (Arran McKenna) is used as a comic foil in most situations.

Some scenes, though, are anything but comedy.  A particularly nasty one is where the woman Head of Student Services, Bronwyn (Emma Wood) – in charge of everything, especially staffing (Human Resources) – and the newly promoted woman Level 2 English Faculty head, Steph (Marti Ibrahim) attack the recently appointed young woman teacher, Lucy (Glynis Stokes) on personal grounds such as her youth and beauty.  It isn’t that this couldn’t happen when jealousy raises its ugly head, but the intensity and viciousness of the scene was quite out of line with both the comedy and sometimes farce of most other scenes.  I found that scene actually quite shocking, and wasn’t at all sure of how I was meant to take it.

Then again, there are quite sweet scenes. Lucy explains her background relationship with her now dead father.  The art teacher Paul (Brendan Kelly) has a similar kind of story to tell about his mother, and about his father – the Principal who has employed his son despite his having falsified  teaching qualifications.  At these points the theatrical form is anything but comedy, certainly not farce: here it strikes home as straightforward realism.  The character of the PE teacher Ray (John Kelly) seems to exist in this realist frame throughout the play, while it’s hard to place the elderly maths teacher Mary (Liz Bradley) who dies on the job.  Realistic, comic commentary, or farce?  I’m not sure.

However, finally we find that we have been taken in because these apparently genuine characters, except perhaps Ray and the now dead Mary, turn out to be frauds like all the rest.  The key point in the story is about who put the blog online which exposes the corruption of the Principal and indeed the whole process of employment and promotion.  The play becomes a whodunnit, and the answer is that the new young genuine idealistic teacher Lucy uses a bright student, Beth (Sophie Hopkins) to do the dirty work.  And even worse, Beth and Lucy turn out to be sisters.

At this point I either have to see the play as a clever piece of extreme absurdism, or perhaps it is a deeply cynical piece saying that teaching is essentially nothing more than an entirely selfish power play.  The art, indeed, of teaching absolutely nothing.  And then its deliberate setting in the government school system makes me wonder about the author’s politics, particularly in our local jurisdiction.  Am I to lightly pass off the evening’s entertainment as a bit of enjoyable fun, or should I take up the issues seriously?

One way of thinking about this is to do a thought experiment.  Imagine if this play were designed, directed and performed by, say Belvoir or Sydney Theatre Company?  Imagine then that it might be done with the absurdism of, say, Eugene Ionesco in mind.  Rhinoceros comes to mind.  Deputy Principal George in this play has a flying shark to entertain the students.  Maybe, parallel to Rhinoceros, people turn into sharks, going green and floating about – except perhaps for the Artist, Paul, who refuses.  He has done the right thing by Lucy after all, just as Berenger does his best to save Daisy.  Paul almost gives in and accepts the corruption, but perhaps like Berenger his last line should be “I’m not capitulating!”

I can see such a possibility, but it would mean much more work on the script and its style of presentation for The Art of Teaching Nothing to educate us about conformity and corruption as Ionesco achieved.  That’s a worthy aim for Kirsty Budding.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Company by Stephen Sondheim

Company Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.  Everyman Theatre, Canberra.  Director – Jordan Best; Musical Director – Tim Hansen; Choreographer – James Batchelor; Set Designer –Michael Sparks; Lighting Designer – Kelly McGannon; Sound – Steve Allsop; Technical Manager – Hamish McConchie (Eclipse Lighting and Sound).  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre October 16-24, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 16

Highly skilled, entertaining, and quite original in style, this production of a 1970 musical “comedy” succeeds despite the unlikely nature of Sondheim’s writing. 

The casting has brought together singers who can act and actors who can sing from among the best musical theatre performers in Canberra-Queanbeyan.  They, the chorus (named The Vocal Minority), and the nine-piece orchestra handle the quirky music beautifully –if that’s the right language to describe Sondheim.

The mood was upbeat throughout on opening night with a very responsive audience, even if somewhat biassed towards friends and family on stage.  For me this is an important value of our local theatre: our performers include many with professional training and experience, while we still have the ‘feel’ of a country town without the pretensions of the big-city-slickers.

The success of the show depends on Jordan Best’s may-I-say-it? Australian approach.  It’s all very well for the Americans to take Sondheim’s representations of heterosexual marriage seriously and therefore Bobby becomes a sentimental figure “poor baby”.  Best has said, let’s not bullshit – this is comedy, so it’s got to be funny.  She has kept the show absolutely New York America, but exaggerated the way all of these characters behave, including Bobby, to get as near as Sondheim’s lyrics and dialogue allow to satire.

It can’t work all the time, considering the quote from Dr Duncan Driver’s very informative article on the history of the show, where Sondheim said “Broadway theater has been for many years supported by upper-middle-class people with upper-middle-class problems.  These people really want to escape that world when they go to the theatre, and then here we are with Company talking about how we’re going to bring it right back in their faces.”

What pretentious bullshit!  Perhaps the nearest to ‘in their faces’ – which means satire for Jordan Best – is the Ladies for Lunch scene, where Joanne does her serious best to race off Bobby: but he won’t smoke her cigarette!  Well done Karen Vickery in this role.  And well done Jarrad West, whose Bobby was a very knowing 35-year-old, rather than some kind of innocent booby as he appears in some other productions, available on YouTube.

If you dislike my argument, consider that the well-known popular play in Australia in 1971 was David Williamson’s Don’s Party.  If you want to think of Company as the equivalent of a musical Don’s Party, have a good look at the depth of character in the marriage relationships in Williamson’s writing.  Sondheim’s characters are shallow cardboard cutouts in comparison.

Four images stand out for me from Best’s Company: Ladies for Lunch for satire; the karate scene for great slapstick comedy by Jordan Best herself as Sarah; the I’m (Not) Getting Married Today scene for frantic comedy by Phillipa Murphy as Susan; and the story of the butterfly for beautiful timing by Amy Dunham as April.

So whatever Stephen Sondheim thought he was doing, our Everyman Theatre production has picked up the good bits, made fun at every opportunity and avoided the American tendency for sentimentality.  It’s still an odd ending, as Bobby (on the third, or is it fourth, version of his 35th birthday party) simply stays away until the company have decided not to wait, leaving him to his quiet life in his favourite apartment.  I’m not sure what Sondheim meant this to mean, but in this lively show of terrific singing and playing, it doesn’t matter.

It’s just a good way to finish, with the mysterious “But Alone, Is Alone.  Not Alive”.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Photos by Daniel Boud

Hamlet by William Shakespeare.  Bell Shakespeare directed by Damien Ryan, at Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse October 13-24, 2015.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 14

Designed by Alicia Clements; Design Assistant – Elizabeth Gadsby; Lighting – Matt Cox; Composer and Sound – Steve Francis; Fight and Movement and Assistant Director – Nigel Poulton.

Cast:
Hamlet – Scott Sheridan (understudy for Josh McConville)    Ophelia – Matilda Ridgway
Claudius/Ghost – Sean O’Shea                Gertrude – Doris Younane
Horatio – Ivan Donato            Laertes/Franciso/Guilderstern – Michael Wahr
Polonius/Gravedigger/Norwegian Captain – Philip Dodd
Reynaldo/Rosencrantz/Osric/Gravedigger – Robin Goldsworthy
Marcellus/Voltemand/Player Queen – Julia Ohannessian
Bernardo/Cornelia/Player King/Fortinbras – Catherine Terracini

There are many ways to go with Hamlet – brooding, pusillanimous, unable to take action, unsympatico are common approaches.  But not this Hamlet by Scott Sheridan, who has stood in magnificently for the injured Josh McConville.

This Hamlet is a study of how the personal is political, and how the political destroys the personal.  Literally, as all the key players are dead by the end of the play.  In the play’s the thing speech at the end of the first half, we are suitably warned that Hamlet may catch the conscience of all of us.  And indeed, as Horatio says, so shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, of accidental judgements, casual slaughters, of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, and, in this upshot, purposes mistook fall’n on the inventors’ heads.

In any audience, in Shakespeare’s dreadful time of autocratic rule as much as in today’s rule by even the best examples of representative democracy, who can say they are completely innocent of every one of these kinds of acts?  Accidental judgements with unintended consequences are, I suppose, probably unavoidable, even if we have not personally been caught up in worse policy decisions.  A Canberra audience with a good smattering of government officials might well want to exclaim, as King Claudius does, Give me some light: away! when the players hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature.

But this Hamlet is a study in action.  Sheridan captures the energy of the intellectual Hamlet.  He is not constrained by weakness but by the strength of his questioning, of his demand to know and understand the truth.  As anyone would do, he seeks out information, he tries to set up situations to test what he thinks may be true, and he makes, among his worst accidental judgements, the decision to save Ophelia even from himself – with the most horrific of unintended consequences.

The result of Damien Ryan’s directorial approach is a production of Hamlet in which there is such high definition and clarity of meaning that I find myself struggling to remember any previous performance of this play.  Every character, even the infamous Rosencrantz and Guilderstern, is sharply drawn by their clear intentions, reactions and responses.  Every actor deserved the three curtain calls, while the extra applause for Scott Sheridan was not just for his willingness to stand in for such a part at such short notice, but for the consistency which he gave to such an inconsistent character.

We felt for Matilda Ridgway’s Ophelia, treated so abominably by her father and so apparently incomprehensibly by Hamlet.  Though we understood Philip Dodd’s Polonius’ position as intelligence gatherer for his political master, it was hard to accept how he played that role against his own bright and upbeat daughter, against his very proper son Laertes (played precisely by Michael Wahr) at university in Paris, and of course against the very prince who by all rights should have been King Hamlet of Denmark, with Queen Ophelia by his side.

So there it is: how politics and subterfuge destroys the personal.  And proof that the play is the thing that is the mirror up to nature.  Shakespeare’s subtlety and complexity is matched by the quality of the acting, in a set design, lighting design and sound design which works perfectly.  Voice, spoken and in song, is especially intriguing for its modern Australian natural cadences – a touch which opens up early 17th Century Shakespeare to our culture in the 21st.

Try not to miss Bell Shakespeare’s Hamlet while it is here in Canberra, but otherwise make sure you see it in Sydney, October 27 to December 6 at the Opera House Playhouse.

Matilda Ridgway as Ophelia - bright and upbeat

Robin Goldsworthy as Reynaldo and Philip Dodd as Polonius
- intelligence gathering

Matilda Ridgway (Ophelia) sees
Doris Younane (Gertrude) and Sean O'Shea (King Claudius)

Josh McConville as Hamlet, Sean O'Shea as King Claudius
And am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage?

Matilda Ridgway (Ophelia) and Josh McConville (Hamlet)
You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate
our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved you not.

Josh McConville as Hamlet
Now, mother, what's the matter?

Catherine Terracini as Bernardo, Matilda Ridgway as Ophelia
Ivan Donato as Horatio, Michael Wahr as Laertes, Doris Younane as Gertrude
There's rosemary, that's for remembrance

Robin Goldsworthy as Gravedigger, Ivan Donato as Horatio,
Philip Dodd as Gravedigger, Josh McConville as Hamlet
This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2015: Soul of Fire by Susanne F Wolf.

Maxi Blaha as Bertha von Suttner
Photo by Peter Rigaud

Soul of Fire by Susanne F Wolf.  Presented by The Street in association with the Austrian Embassy, Canberra, at The Street Two, 8pm October 2-4, 2015, plus German language performance 4pm October 4.

Performed by Maxi Blaha as Bertha von Suttner with live guitarist, Georg Buxhofer. 
Director - Alexander Hauer; designer - Hannes Kaufmann; production, idea - Maxi Blaha; costumes - Moana Stemberger.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
October 2

In 1889, Bertha von Suttner had published her anti-war novel Lay Down Your Arms. After that, she was drawn into the international peace movement. She undoubtedly exercised considerable influence on Alfred Nobel, whom she had known since 1876, when he later decided to include the Peace Prize as one of the five prizes mentioned in his will. In 1905, she was awarded the [fifth] Peace Prize, the first woman to receive such a distinction. Her supporters strongly felt that the prize had come too late, since she had had such an influence on Nobel.

"The Nobel Peace Prize 1901-2000". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 2 Oct 2015. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/themes/peace/lundestad-review/index.html

For a more detailed biography see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_von_Suttner

Bertha von Suttner 1873, aged 30

 Susanne Wolf’s 55 minute monologue is written in the first-person as Bertha, born in 1843, covering from her childhood as Countess Kinsky of Austrian parents in Prague to her death in 1914, only two months before the World War began which she had so desperately tried to prevent.

The writing is daunting for an actor, not just in presenting a complex life story as a consistent character developing from a child to a feisty septuagenarian, but finding a suitable style and manner in performance.  Maxi Blaha succeeds in revealing to us both the public and private sides of a woman of great significance in the history of the peace movement, without pretension yet with a sense of great respect.

Incorporated into the performance is beautiful delicate guitar music which Georg Buxhofner plays as if it were improvised in unison with the mood of the story’s episodes and Bertha’s ever-changing feelings.  Silences, on the part of the guitar and the actor, often make us listen more deeply.  The performers’ respect for their subject is passed over to us, watching from the future.

The setting is simple.  Dark curtaining, information panels in German and English, a plush chair in the centre which might have come from an upper-class residence.  A museum exhibit, which is inhabited by the guitarist, with a small-scale amplifier, seated partly facing away from the audience, playing softly, slow notes, perhaps wistful.  The living exhibit enters from the shadow, peruses some printed sheets which she scatters around her as she sits.  Her mother calls, the child Bertha responds, and bit by bit we see and hear figures from her life speaking and see her responding, as well as see her taking the initiative, speaking privately and publicly.

Bertha von Suttner 1896

There are some significant episodes – when she is 30 and falls truly in love with Arthur von Suttner, when she speaks and writes to Alfred Nobel, when she is published in the Neue Freie Presse, when she discovers her husband’s dalliance with his young niece, when her husband dies, when she is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, when she reaches her end.  She hands out her major speech, and we read:

Hence it is necessary that wherever proponents of peace exist, they confess themselves publically as such and work for the cause to the best of their ability.  My challenge goes out to all those who wish to join us: send in your name and address.

If ever there was a theatre presentation relevant in our times, that speech says it all.  Though perhaps the strict social hierarchy of European nations which she had to face may have levelled somewhat, many of the conflicts in countries she mentions, from Russia to the Balkans and across Europe, worsened in the century following her death, and now are in contention again through North Africa and the Middle East.  Just today there are reports of the rise of the “Freedom” party on the far right of politics in Bertha’s home country – Austria – as the masses try to escape from the South to the North, from the East to the West.  The Austro-Hungarian  and the Ottoman Empires might as well still be here.

But at least Bertha’s work, along with that of other Nobel Peace Prize winners and of untold unsung activists, has maintained the Peace Movement, and led to the tentative beginnings of world-wide political negotiations instead of an automatic recourse to war, in the United Nations Organisation after the worst paroxysm in World War II.  We may have a long way yet to go, but without Bertha von Suttner’s words of 1891:

Would it not be simpler to lay down the fuses voluntarily, in other words to disarm?  To apply international law – merge the divided groups in a single group and found a union of the civilised nations of Europe!  Tiny is the minority that still wishes for war.  Immeasurably vast are the masses who yearn for peace – not a truce maintained out of fear but a secure and guaranteed peace.

we would not have come as far as we have.

Soul of Fire  is a message of hope, common sense and reason, presented in a performance of dignity and respect.

Bertha von Suttner 1906
Nobel Peace Prize 1905

© Frank McKone, Canberra












 

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