2021: Stop Girl by Sally Sara

 

 

 Stop Girl by Sally Sara.  Belvoir Theatre, Sydney, March 20 – April 25, 2021.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 28

Director – Anne-Louise Sarks
Set Designer – Robert Cousins
Costume Designer – Mel Page
Lighting Designer – Paul Jackson
Composer & Sound Designer – Stefan Gregory
Associate Composer – Hamed Sadeghi
Movement Director – Nigel Poulton
Video Deviser & Cinematographer – Jack Saltmiras
Video Content Creator & Systems – Susie Henderson

Cast:
Suzie (Foreign Correspondent Reporter) – Sheridan Harbridge
Bec (Feature Writer) – Amber McMahon
Atal (Afghani Asylum Seeker) – Mansoor Noor
Marg (Suzie’s Mother) – Toni Scanlon
Psychologist – Deborah Galanos
AV Actors – Hilal Tawakal; Aqsa Tawakal; Aisha Tawakal; Najiullah

“Connecting is never a mistake”.  Coming to understand what this means for Suzie, returning home to Australia after a year reporting on the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, is the key that unlocks this important, at times horrifying, drama.

Though the play ends with a kind of resolution for Suzie, I was taken by surprise to find how shaken I was when walking away from the theatre into the normal Sydney evening buzz.  I had, following my usual principle, deliberately not researched the writing of the play or other reviews – and felt a heightened concern for Sally Sara, clearly represented on stage by 'Suzie'.

Two other women, who have created theatre about their own lived experience – in  their cases performed by themselves – came to mind from my previous reviews.  In 2018 I saw Red by Liz Lea, a dancer who suffers from essentially untreatable endometriosis; and My Urrwai by Torres Strait Islander Ghenoa Gela, returning to her home island after growing up in Brisbane.  I wrote of their work “which seems to me to be a new original and significant form, which I’ll call Theatre of the Personal Self.”

Though Sally Sara has made her experience into a play performed by others, Suzie’s response emotionally must surely be as close to Sally’s as theirs was to Liz and Ghenoa.  They took us into their confidence through a combination of words, music and dance.  

Sara’s piece is superficially a more conventional series of short realistic scenes, backed by sound effects, video and sharp lighting jumps from bright light to absolute dark.  Our feelings become those of Suzie / Sally.  We feel with her and for her, and fear that we can so easily make those kinds of mistakes ourselves.  Have we always properly respected other people, in life and in death?

There is an irony here in my being a reviewer of another person’s sense of shame, almost in parallel with her being a reporter filming, asking intrusive questions, and sending back to ABC TV her live reports on people as they are injured and killed.  Keeping her distance emotionally, choosing her shots and her words to fit the expectations and conventions of “objective” reporting is a requirement of success as a professional journalist.  And, indeed, Sally Sara is one of our most respected journalists.

It’s scary, then, as her play shows, that maintaining the proper professional approach can turn into a case of post traumatic stress disorder.  But what can a PTSD counsellor advise when she – despite having seen the Foreign Correspondent reports on TV –  could not possibly imagine the horrors of what Suzie/Sally has actually seen, and done, or not done, in Afghanistan – and in Sierra Leone, and in so many other places fraught with war and poverty?

Suzie has at least her long-term friend Bec, her assistant/translator Atal, and finally her mother to make connection with.  Watching that story play out is what makes the drama work on stage.  I’m left just hoping that Sally is OK – perhaps the writing of the play is proof of that.

But the awful feeling of despair remains in the title, spoken in his language and translated by Atal, by a father walking away from his wife because she has just borne a daughter, who is therefore worthless to him.  “Stop girl!”  

Sheridan Harbridge’s tour de force performance of Sally Sara’s 'Suzie' puts that man and that culture, wherever and in whatever degree, to shame.

Sheridan Harbridge in Stop Girl by Sally Sara
as Suzie, on location in Afghanistan
Photo: Brett Boardman

 

 

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: The Beauty Thief by Rebus Theatre

 

 

The Beauty Thief: Reflections on a fairytale, by thespians with differing abilities. Rebus Theatre, at Belconnen Community Theatre, March 26-28, 2021

Directors – Robin Davidson and Sammy Moynihan
Music Composition and Performance – Marlené Claudine Radice
Lighting Design – Ali Clinch; Costume Design – Victoria “Fi” Hopkins
Stage Management – Dr Anni Doyle Wawrzynczak
Music Operation – Melissa Gryglewski; Photography – Joachim Ellenreider
Projection Operation – Nicole Seifert
Video Documentation – James Matthews

Cast:

Louise Ellery, Lucy Raffaele, Simone Georgia Bartram, Peter Rosini,
Joel Swadling, Grant McLindon, Kimberley Adams

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 26


To make a drama is to make meaning from an “insubstantial pageant” – for those who perform and those who observe.  

In many ways The Beauty Thief reminded me of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where Prospero speaks of the insubstantial pageant fading, and says

 “…These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.”

Rebus describes itself as a “mixed ability company using theatre for social change…[looking] at issues surrounding the challenges faced by people with a Disability, Mental Illness or lived experience of any type of marginalisation, inviting the audience to help us find the solutions.”  

By taking elements of several European traditional fairytales – a king, a queen, their baby girl, a jealous wicked witch, a woodsman with his axe, a wolf, a thief who would be king, a crowd of village women – as director Robin Davidson describes of the group “We found characters, tried out scenes and wove together a story.  We never talked much about what the story meant, only asked – what would this character do?  What is an interesting next scene?  And yet we happened upon a story that resonated, that had something to say, about beauty, about power.”

What it said to me was that people of “mixed” abilities have their own beauty – and aren’t we all mixed in our abilities in our different ways?  And about power, it said we all must not let jealousy and cronyism rule our lives; but we must take responsibility for ourselves and towards everyone else, joining together in community – and not take the easy way out of relying totally on a leader, even if they are genuinely empathetic.

That seems a pretty substantial achievement in making this drama, when director Sammy Moynihan says “As directors, Robin and I simply elevated the existing magic of the cast to shape a performance-ready piece of theatre.  This was also a beautiful experience, floating through the chaos of it all and being guided by the cast as much as we guided them…a testament to collaboration, fearless expression and the joys of embracing the beautiful unknown.”

The process is there in the product, so watching is not about following an exciting pre-determined page-turner.  You will need patience, allowing yourself time to absorb the sounds, the colours, the movements, the unexpected laughs, the spoken and the unspoken, while you wait with a sense of mystery.

And in the end, there is a political message for you to interpret in your own way: something about democracy and leadership came to my mind, seeing our Parliament House here in Canberra “floating through the chaos of it all” with its chorus of women standing up for power as the play’s final text slide advises.

I think these Rebus actors’ spirits will never melt away.  

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: Platform Paper No 63 - Review

 

 

Katharine Brisbane
by courtesy Currency House

On the Lessons of History by Katharine Brisbane: Platform Paper No 63, Currency House, Sydney, March 2021

Reviewed by Frank McKone


Only once in these 82 pages did I catch a glimpse of the daunting task that Katharine Brisbane has undertaken, having just turned 89 years this January, when she admitted ‘trudging’ through the previous 62 Platform Papers.  You will not ‘trudge’ through No 63, so skilfully written by the eminent theatre critic I well remember from the early 1960s.

Yet it is true that the content of the history of the arts, especially the performing arts, from  PP1 ‘Our ABC’—A Dying Culture? (Martin Harrison 2004) to PP62 Performing Arts Markets and their Conundrums, (Justin Macdonnell 2020), still leaves me to hope as Katharine writes: “My hope is that, as we come out of this dark period in our history, Australia might take the lead in the challenge to make the world a kinder, more inclusive place than it has been. By living too fast we have come too quickly to the end of the road. ‘A Change for the Better’ is the Platform Papers’ motto.  All we need is the courage to make it.”

From the creation of the Australia Council for Arts in the mid-1970s through social, economic, political and even viral changes in all directions, for better and for worse, artists and those of us – that means all of us – who need the arts, still need courage and hope to make that change.  

Brisbane selects from a wide range of the topics covered in Platform Papers (the complete list is in the Endnotes) to reveal thematic developments in the history, beginning with why the Papers were needed.  

“In the 1970s, arts support expanded under the aegis of the Australia Council, and by the 1980s artists and arts organisations were largely dependent on regular government grants, but when funding began to contract in the 1990s, this dependence made  practitioners fearful of speaking out….So in 2001 my colleagues and I began a monthly discussion club in Sydney and called it Currency House. We became a not-for-profit affiliate of Currency Press, which also gave us a home.”  

Currency Press, the major publisher of original Australian plays, of course, had been founded in 1971 by Katharine Brisbane, then national theatre critic for The Australian, and her late husband Philip Parsons, a lecturer in Drama at UNSW who worked passionately to bridge the gap between the university and the profession.  [ www.currency.com.au/about-us/ ]  These quarterly essays, “dedicated to the working life” of artists were a natural development and Brisbane’s analysis makes essential reading – as much for me to understand what was happening when I was teaching and reviewing drama from the mid-1970s, as it does for younger and future practitioners.

Her Introduction provides an effective overview of the whole 50 years, before delving into detail, where Brisbane’s journalist origins show through.  From 1. The Genesis of the Papers, through 2. Coordinating the Voices, to 3. Division and Cultural Unity we read the stories of the many real life characters and their reflections at their times of writing, as well as Brisbane’s headlined commentary to tie the complexity of history together.  Readability is the keyword; incisive observation is the result.  Understanding flows naturally.

Still hoping, as I am too, trudging along some nine years behind Katharine Brisbane as I turned 80 this January, it concerns me that it is true that we still need to push on with such courage; that we still feel that our ways of life, changing as they have and always will, do not yet integrate the arts into our political culture as they should always have been integrated.  

Facing up to that truth is what Platform Papers are all about – including No 63.  Yet this history has another lesson, about the complexity of culture rather than simplistic responses such as mine.  

In our newly electric world wide web, the effects of which Brisbane deals with in considerable depth, it is interesting to note that, in our green-hydrogen fuel cell, the current flows from the positive to the negative – on the way powering the motors of industry, including the Arts.  In history generally, out of the dark periods the arts grow in new directions, in new forms.  

In my youth, from my beginnings in the UK just after the early flurry of shots at the Battle of Britain, I found myself studying at the University of Sydney in 1960, not Australian Literature but the culture of Europe expressed by Eugene Ionesco turning all but one naïve recalcitrant into green rhinoceroses.  How would anyone imagine that Absurdism could become the key to British culture from Ionesco and Beckett, through to The Goon Show and on to Monty Python’s Flying Circus?  Yet it was the right artistic response to surviving World War II.

Today, as Brisbane notes also, since the dark days of colonialism, in a very messy process specific to Australia, since the beginning of the Black Theatre in Redfern in 1973 (I was firmly told not to make suggestions because I was white), First Nations’ artistic expression in literature, film and on stage now has a powerful presence, established and growing, in today’s Australian culture.

I once attended a drama teachers’ inservice class conducted by Wesley Enoch in Canberra (when he and I were much younger), and have not forgotten his spirit of respect which unobtrusively filled the space that day.  It is a great honour that he will launch Platform Paper No 63 in ten days’ time on March 24, 2021 at that very University of Sydney which did not teach Australian Literature 60 years ago.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Platform Paper No 63 - Media Release

 
MEDIA RELEASE                                        Wednesday, 10 March 2020

Currency House, Sydney.  Media enquiries to Martin Portus on mportus2@tpg.com.au or +61 (0)401 360 806

Posted by Frank McKone

LESSONS OF HISTORY FOR THE ARTS


As artists and companies emerge from the COVID crisis, veteran theatre critic and publisher Katharine Brisbane AM delivers a landmark new Platform Paper defining the major issues and disruptions facing Australian arts and culture this century.  

On the Lessons of History reviews the challenges raised by the leading artists and cultural experts who authored 62 diverse Platform Papers published by Brisbane and Currency House since 2004.  

Her provocative response will be launched by departing Sydney Festival director Wesley Enoch at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney at 5.30pm on Wednesday, 24 March.  

These writers have raised concerns and given insights into work practices, censorship, copyright, public policy, export, finance, environmental sustainability, welfare, indigenous work, diversity and all genres of the performing arts including film, television and ever-expanding digital media. All express the need for change.

“Currency House was conceived out of a conviction that the arts are fundamental to a civil society; that a society that does not value its own arts is a nation alienated from its own culture,” says Brisbane, aged 89.  

“But the survival of our artists – and many of our public institutions – is now more precarious.  This exploration left me with a major question. Why, when the Government set up a system to support the creative arts, was funding directed at the product rather than the creator?”   

Diversity, she says, has been weakened by hyper-division into art forms, major and minor arts organisations and by a new entrepreneurialism which encourages competition over collaboration.  

Brisbane reflects on Papers by Robyn Archer, Andrew Bovell, Alison Croggon, Kim Dalton, Wesley Enoch, Jane Harrison, Lindy Hume, Lee Lewis, Lex Marinos, Chris Mead, Leigh Tabrett, Lyndon Terracini, David Throsby and others.  

The March 24 launch will introduce the new Director of Currency House, Dr Harriet Parsons, who succeeds her mother, Katharine, who has retired as its founding Chair. Julian Meyrick, theatre director and Professor of Creative Arts at Griffith University, will also speak as its new general editor.

Following On the Lessons of History, a two-day convention in July is inviting all authors to debate how to create a paradigm shift in Australia’s view of the arts. It will be hosted by the School of Literature, Arts and Media at the University of Sydney, a proud sponsor of Platform Papers.  

The next Paper No.64, Changing Tack, by arts consultant Dr Jo Caust will chart this new direction in November.  


Platform Paper No.63 is for sale on currency.com.au  Enquiries 02 9319 4953     
 

2021: Outdated by Mark Kilmurry

 

Rachel Gordon and Yalin Ozucelik

 Outdated written and directed by Mark Kilmurry.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, March 5 – April 17, 2021.

Previewed by Frank McKone
March 7

Cast: Rachel Gordon as Olivia and Yalin Ozucelik as Matt

Designers: Set & Costume – Simon Greer; Lighting – Kelsey Lee; Sound – David Grigg


Outdated is very much up-to-date.  A romantic comedy for our times, beautifully executed by Yalin Ozucelik and Rachel Gordon in a two-hander which requires absolute precision timing and detailed movement.  

It is not entirely laugh-out-loud because, as Shakespeare might have put it, the course of true dating on this fictional (I assume) You+Me app never did run smooth.  Both Matt and Olivia reveal their middle-age insecurities in a highly amusing somewhat satirical exposé of those who daily change their profiles to attract new dates: including one who lied about how old he was online to Olivia, but turned out when she met his family to be another ten years older even than that.  Rachel captures Olivia’s mixed feelings perfectly; as does Yalin when he finds that Matt has accidentally seemed to unfeelingly leave Olivia at the worst moment.

I’ve used the actors’ first names here because the quality of their dialogue and action immediately made me feel that I knew them personally.  The writing is especially interesting because Mark Kilmurry has the characters say out loud their internal self-critical dialogue, almost as if they are speaking to us directly, in amongst their actions and what they say to, and privately about, each other.  The resulting blurring of the ‘fourth wall’ draws us in, and we find ourselves often laughing along with Olivia and Matt even as they are making us laugh at them.

The title Outdated could have several meanings – perhaps even that dating online is a risk or even a kind of scam which people seeking to resolve previously failed relationships should not trust.  Perhaps we should not accept a romantic ending.  But for this couple a kind of inevitability grows, through all their vicissitudes.  

In my ‘I know all about theatre history’ mode, I thought of Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and how Raina comes to realise that Captain Bluntschli, the chocolate soldier, is the right man for her; not the superficial conventional sword-waving Sergius she is expected to marry.  And then I thought of friends, in their 40s like Olivia and Matt, whose online dating has turned out to be the right thing for them.

Arms and the Man has been a popular success now for one hundred and twenty-seven years.  Here’s to the future for not so Outdated romance and comedy.  And make a note for yourself as you book at https://www.ensemble.com.au/shows/outdated/ .  Mark Kilmurry ends his program note : “And special thanks to my wife Jacqui for the idea of a jogging scene – she was right.”  My wife Meg was also right when she said this is the funniest scene.  Going to the Ensemble is like being with family – not to be missed.

 

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: Lamb by Jane Bodie

 

 

Emily Goddard as Kathleen, Darcy Kent as Patrick and Brigid Gallacher as Annie

Lamb by Janie Brodie, Music and Lyrics by Mark Seymour.  Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre (Melbourne) and Critical Stages Touring at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 4-6 2021.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 4

Directed by Julian Meyrick

Music and Lyrics: Mark Seymour and the Undertow, Hunters and Collectors
Dramaturgs: Ella Caldwell and Iain Sinclair
Set and Costume Designer: Greg Clarke
Lighting Designer: Efterpi Soropos
Assistant Lighting Designer: Jacob Shears
Sound and AV Designer: Justin Gardam

Cast: (in order of appearance)
Darcy Kent – Patrick / Frank
Brigid Gallacher – Annie / Mary
Emily Goddard - Kathleen



This is a play about coming, going, and staying, not necessarily always in that order, from one generation to the next.  

Mary and Frank have three children: Patrick, Annie and Kathleen.  The structure of the plot in time-shifted scenes is intriguing.  Like the characters, as they work out what they understand to be truths past and present, we find ourselves putting the pieces of their puzzle together – and unexpectedly picturing the parallel puzzles in our own lives.  Lamb, for us, is like going on an uncharted bushwalk without a map or compass (and certainly no GPS).  Yet, mysteriously, we manage in the end to reach a place where we no longer feel lost.

On stage everything seems small scale, yet the implications about how relationships start, how children are born, and how families form are of great importance.  This play, including especially the songs, is an original work of art – Australian in attitude to life; universal in empathetic understanding.

The performances are outstanding.  Emily Goddard’s representation of Kathleen’s mental disability calls upon our sympathies but keeps our sentimentality at bay.  Brigid Gallacher’s Annie is clearly Mary’s daughter, not just in her recognition of her agency as a woman but as much in her rationality and common sense.  And she sings like her father had.  While Darcy Kent shows the subtle development from a father whose emotional sensitivity is his strength, yet leads to incapacity to cope; to a son who successfully finds his way by drawing upon both his mother and his father – even though he can never quite sing as well as Frank had.

The quality of performance is, of course, also an indication of the clarity of Julian Meyrick’s direction, and is supported by strong designs of lighting, sound, set and costumes.  

The presentation of such original Australian work, local and on tour, has long been a feature of The Q – a tradition that those of us in “the big smoke” of Canberra next door thoroughly appreciate.  Even the Lonsdale Street vegans who would feel sick at the smell of cooking lamb.  See the play if you possibly can in this very short season, and you’ll understand my meaning.



© Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

 

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams.  Canberra Repertory Theatre at Naoné Carrel Auditorium, Theatre 3, February 18-March 6, 2021.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 19

Director: Anne Somes
Associate Directors: Alexandra Pelvin, Antonia Kitzel

Set Designer: Cate Clelland
Sound Designer: Neville Pye
Lighting Designer: Stephen Still
Costume Designer: Fiona Leach

Cast:
Maggie “The Cat” Pollitt – Victoria Tyrrell Dixon
Brick Pollitt – Teig Sadhana
“Big Daddy” Pollitt – Michaels Parks OAM
Ida “Big Mamma” Pollitt – Liz St Clair Long
Mae “Sister Woman” Pollitt – Lainie Hart
Gooper “Brother Man” Pollitt – Ryan Erlandsen
Doctor Baugh – Rob Drennan
Reverend Tooker – Saban Lloyd Berrell



I hope that Canberra Rep will continue, every twenty years or so, to put on Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, to remind us how family life, sexual relations, money matters and sport are all tied up in the one terribly complicated knot.  This week I should also include a special reference to party politics and the treatment of women in a parliamentary democracy, which Williams could well have covered in his America in the 1950s.

The Rep 2021 production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is very good indeed, tied together even more tightly, I think, than in 2001.  (Reviewed in The Canberra Times, April 28 2001; available at www.frankmckone2.blogspot.com.au)  

Even if often with pro input, in an amateur repertory company it can be a matter of good luck to find a cast that suits all of Williamson’s expectations.  But the difference in quality in these two Rep productions is nothing like as great as some people see between the original movie and the later one (1984) with Tommy Lee Jones and Jessica Lange, Rip Torn, and Kim Stanley, described on Youtube as “True to Tennessee Williams's original play (unlike the awful Paul Newman / Elizabeth Taylor movie from 1958)”.

Rep’s casting, characterisation and consistency of team work in this presentation is particularly satisfying.  Even the great recent Sydney Theatre Company production (reviewed here May 19, 2019) could be seen as concentrating more on the stars – Pamela Rabe (Big Mama), Zahra Newman (Maggie) and Hugo Weaving (Big Daddy) – rather than giving as much status to Brick, Mae and Gooper.  At Rep last night I came away with an equal sense of the importance of each one of these six central characters, and the solid support of Rev Tooker and even from the small part of Dr Baugh.  Rather than being overwhelmed by Big Daddy and Maggie, I felt I understood better, and with more sympathy, not only their needs and why they behaved as they did; but also the relationships between the brothers Brick and Gooper, their wives Maggie and Mae, and the essential role in the whole family of Big Mamma.

When it comes to detail, Williams did not make casting easy.  At the risk of seeming sexist, for example, I have to say that when Williams makes Maggie stand before a full length mirror and point out that she has not lost her figure, Victoria Tyrrell Dixon absolutely looked the part.  How Teig Sadhana could make his Brick unresponsive was a small miracle as I saw it.  

According to www.sparknotes.com/drama/cat/summary  at the end “Maggie thanks Brick for saving her face [after announcing she and Brick are to have a child].  Brick puts down three shots, finds his click, and exits indifferently.  Maggie forlornly gathers Brick’s liquor bottles and locks them away, refusing to release it until he has sated her.  Desperately she declares her love for him.  The distant Brick can only reply: ‘Wouldn’t that be funny if that was true?’”

However, www.gradesaver.com/cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof/ says “In the published script, we are left entirely uncertain as to whether Brick will concede to sleep once more with Maggie and allow her to bear a child.  The text itself leads one to suspect that nothing is going to change, but with enough ambiguity that each production can choose for itself which ending will be implied.

“In the playing script, however [for the original Broadway production by Elia Kazan], Brick ends the act sitting on the bed – and although the dialogue is also quite different from the published script, it is this stage direction that significantly weights the dice in favor of Brick having a change of heart.”

Somebody said to me in the foyer on the way out: “Interesting ending!”  I felt glad with the ending Anne Somes chose.

And glad, too, that Michael Sparks played Big Daddy with an interesting mix of attitudes towards himself and Brick in their long duologue, in which I learned that he has more self-awareness than I had thought before.  It was a softer interpretation, and, I thought, opened up a better chance for interpersonal compromise.  This makes the play, firstly, perhaps more in tune with Tennessee Williams’ intention; and secondly makes it more hopeful for the future.

Perhaps this means that Williams was too hopeful, when we consider the experiences of Brittany Higgins, when she was a ministerial staffer in the Australian Parliament, and of others such as Dhanya Mani – whose article in The Saturday Paper February 20-26, 2021 is essential reading.

I must say that Ryan Erlandsen’s characterisation of Gooper, in tight formation with Lainie Hart’s Mae, gives me little hope that greed for money-grabbing is on the way out.  A certain Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and now threatening digital insurrection against the Australian democratic government, says that Tennessee Williams’ hope in this play that Brick would recover from his depression after the death of Skipper, and justifably inherit Big Daddy’s property, is no more than a romantic dream.  And maybe my dream will one day come true: when Big Daddies and Big Mummas – and Little Daddies and Little Mummas – learn to treat each other, and are treated by others, truly as equals.

Thank you all at Canberra Rep for such theatre, so well directed, designed and performed.

Canberra Repertory Theatre
Set Design by Cate Clelland
for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams
February-March 2021
Photo: Helen Drum

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2021: Wolf Lullaby by Hillary Bell

 

 

Wolf Lullaby by Hilary Bell.  Echo Theatre at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, February 18-27, 2021.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

February 18

Director: Jordan Best
Set Design and Construction: Chris Zuber; Lighting design: Jacob Aquilina; Sound Design/Composition: Matthew Webster; Props: Yanina Clifton

Cast:
Rachel Pengilly – Lizzie
Natasha Vickery – Lizzie’s mother, Angela
Joel Horwood – Warren, Lizzie’s father
Craig Alexander – small town police officer, Ray

At the very least this is an interesting play to begin our year of vaccination.  There are so many viewpoints to start from.  

The policeman, Ray, in some ways is a bit of a plodder: I can almost hear him say, with heavy sarcasm, “That’s a likely story!”  How likely? is a question I have to ask.

Then I must think about Hillary Bell’s intention in making up a story about a nine year old girl’s inner wolf and her parents.  Has Lizzie inherited a dangerous mental state from her mother?  Have Warren and Angela created an evil child through their fractious relationship?  Can we ever know ‘the truth’?  Is the application of criminal law the only way society can respond, if telling lies is truly a natural element of the human condition?

The directing and design of the telling of this story on this stage must be considered in the light of this likely or unlikely child’s tale with its philosophical implications.

Then I might be able to say if this innoculation against the fear of childhood killing has worked.  

The set design image which seemed to place most of the action behind the wire of something like a refugee detention centre stirred my questioning.  That central space became Lizzie’s bedroom, the police office, Angela’s living room, the police interrogation room, as well as the remand cell.  Perhaps the image represented the idea that all the people in their different ways were trapped in a chicken-wire cage, including Angela and her daughter because of their psychological conditions; Ray as he had to interrogate only according to the book; even the dead child Toby was in there behind the community’s commemoration flowers and poems placed outside the wire.

But apparently not Warren who was so often, conveniently, ‘on shift’, to pay for Angela’s and his separate rents, or when it was the weekend – the court-order time when his daughter stayed at his place – and the parents’ arguments took place in open space around the central raised set as if in the street where the children’s hopscotch pitch was laid out.  On the sides, left and right, words about murder were projected, becoming meaningful later as Ray’s interrogation ‘progressed’ and Lizzie’s parents worked out what their daughter might have done.

This set, combined with an ominous background sound track of children’s apocryphal skipping rhymes, disturbed me in two different ways.

First, as I suppose on reflection I was meant to feel, it all seemed to be an omen of doom.  

But I also felt there was a mismatch between this use of symbolic image and space and the seemingly naturalistic presentation of the characters.  Rachel Pengilly played her nine-year-old Lizzie so realistically that I found myself worrying that such a young actor was being allowed to play such psychological trauma – only to find when reading the program after the show that she is old enough to have a BA degree from University of New England.

Craig Alexander’s Ray, again naturalistically, played out the policeman’s conflict of feelings towards this local young girl, whose family he knew: he had unbending evidence-gathering rules to follow, while feeling at times sympathetic in a kindly adult way towards Lizzie’s telling lies, as well as feeling stressed by the frustration of not being able to extract the truth.

Similarly, the coming together and blowing apart episodes in Angela and Warren’s feelings about each other were realistic and very uncomfortable to watch.

After overnight reflection, I wonder if the set design, still without any need to set-change from short scene to short scene, would have been better if it represented a plain bland small room with a small desk, a chair and single bed, in which the naturalistic acting would feel normal instead of somehow out-of-place in the chicken-wire setting.  

By amazing coincidence, the image I have in mind appeared in Canberra’s CityNews on the very day of Wolf Lullaby’s opening night.  In a highly unlikely story, a significant artist, Melissa Beowulf, has painted “Cottage Room” 2018, representing the room in which she was held in remand at the Alexander Maconochie Centre for 14 months on a charge of murder (acquitted at her trial). [https://citynews.com.au/2021/digital-edition-february-18/  Page 28 in “Effects of injustice linger for ‘powerless’ painter” by arts editor Helen Musa]

 

Image courtesy of Melissa Beowulf
CityNews Digital Edition February 18, 2021 P28

The surround-sound of children’s rhymes would still make the point, and make us feel concerned about the violence inherent in many nursery rhymes.  The words that Lizzie supposedly wrote might have been better projected above the stage, rather as Tennessee Williams did in The Glass Menagerie.  A photo of the flowers and poems for Toby could be projected perhaps on the room window, as if on TV news, when the adults in the dialogue become aware of what Lizzie had written, and her words could appear as if the news camera had zoomed in.

Perhaps my reaction seems a bit old-fashioned, but I think the playscript and our need to come to grips with the truth of the story is unsettling in itself.  The mismatch in the set design was an extra layer which disturbed my focus on the characters and the implications of their experience, though the directing and performance in the acting was excellent.

In other words, Echo Theatre’s presentation of Hilary Bell’s Wolf Lullaby at The Q, Queanbeyan is an interesting production indeed.  Innoculation is advisable.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: Fangirls by Yve Blake

 

 

Fangirls -  Book, Music & Lyrics by Yve Blake.  Directed by Paige Rattray.
Belvoir St Theatre -  A co-production with Queensland Theatre and Brisbane Festival, in association with Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP)

At Seymour Centre, University of Sydney, 30 January - 20 February 2021.  Also at
Canberra Playhouse 24-28 March 2021.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 6

Cast:

Aydan (Harry); Danielle Barnes; Chika Ikogwe (Jules); Shubshri Kandiah (Brianna); Ayesha Madon (Lily); James Majoos (Saltypringl); Sharon Millerchip (Mother); Karis Oka (Edna); Tomáš Kant or Shannen Alyce Quan

Creatives:

Book, Music & Lyrics Yve Blake
Director Paige Rattray
Original Music Director / Vocal Arranger Alice Chance
Music Producer / Sound Designer David Muratore
Dramaturg Jonathan Ware
Music Director / Vocal Arranger Zara Stanton
Set, Video Content and Costume Designer David Fleischer
Video Content Design and Production Justin Harrison
Lighting Designer Emma Valente
Choreographer Leonard Mickelo
Sound Designer Michael Waters
Associate Director: Carissa Licciardello
Associate Choreographer: Sharon Millerchip
Lighting Realiser: Renae Kenward
Stage Manager: Khym Scott
Assistant Stage Manager: Julia Orlando
Front of House Engineer: Matthew Erskine
Head Electrician: Steve Hendy
Technical Coordinator: Tom Houghton


My dictum has long been, for new plays and new productions of plays I already know, to avoid reading about them before I review.  Having missed Fangirls’ first runs in Brisbane and Sydney in late 2019, fortunately Covid confusion took over.  So when Belvoir announced its success and another season to begin 2021, I still knew little while checking in the Service NSW QR Code at the Seymour Centre yesterday.

What I love about theatre is being surprised.  Fangirls turned out to be a great and very rewarding surprise.

Of course, if you follow my dictum, you should at this point stop reading.  Just go and see for yourself.  Then you might like to read my thoughts to see if you agree.

Booking at Belvoir, I couldn’t miss the basic info:

“Edna’s fourteen and is head over heels in love with Harry- he’s beautiful, talented, perfect, but there’s just one problem: he’s also the star of the world’s biggest boyband. Getting Harry’s attention might seem impossible, but there’s nothing that Edna won’t do to prove to Harry that she’s the one.

Yve Blake’s uproarious musical makes its much-anticipated return.”

Is this the show for me, I wondered, now I’m an octogenarian?  Surprise, surprise.  There’s much more than mere fun – the focus word in other publicity I had accidentally skimmed – in this seriously funny play.

When we became the pop-star show audience, (nearly everyone decades younger than me), and everyone did a Mexican wave with their phones lit up (I’d switched mine off, of course, as normal theatre convention requires), I began to think about the nature of theatrical illusion.

As the story developed, and Act I ended with a brief appearance on stage of a tied-up Harry, I was suddenly reminded of events in the real history of fandom.

In this story, Edna is from a single-parent family.  Her mother has to work, often long hours, and tries to provide everything her intellectual daughter needs.  Perhaps Edna falls in love with the publicity image of Harry, though she can’t afford to go to his concerts, because she has lost her father-figure.  We could get into Freudian psychology at this point, but this is not raised in this script.

However, Edna has won a scholarship which means she can continue in high school and meet up with another intellectual, a gay guy known as Saltypringl.  He becomes her adviser as she writes her story of how she will meet Harry; he will return her love when he looks into her eyes; and she will persuade him to ‘run’ with her to escape the pressure of fandom.  How can she put her story into practice, is her question to Salty.

What if, though, she can’t persuade Harry to run with her?  Salty takes a while to think things through, and at last says the only answer would be to kill him.  Where the Fangirls script has been essentially an amusing satire of fourteen-year-old girls’ behaviour to this point, in the second half the play becomes a farce.  

Edna can’t get to the concert, but she organises the kidnapping of Harry after the show; ties him up in her bedroom; tries to persuade him to run from the pressures of the fan culture; and ends up more or less accidentally killing him, in company with her two (less intellectual) girl friends. On their suggestion and with her mother’s help, the body is taken ‘to the woods’. Being a farce, in the very end we find that the girls were not jailed because the court could not believe that a girl could have done the kidnapping.  That is, it is implied that girls are not expected to be able to do things like that – only men can.

And so, Fangirls turns into an unexpected study of the destructive emotional and persuasive effects of popular fandom, while maintaining a political stance in favour of gender equality.  At the end last night the audience – with a clear majority of young women –  was still laughing uproariously and cheering the performers and the show for what it meant to them.

The cheering was absolutely justified for another surprise for me.  As a musical, the singing, dancing and acting was top quality; but the stunningly successful integration of the internet culture into the audio-visual design made this show relevant to a modern young audience far beyond anything I could have imagined.  

I may be 80; I may have seen earlier clunky attempts to use live digital effects which distract and undermine the work of the actors; I may have even seen very successful use of live camera work such as in Sydney Theatre Company’s Suddenly Last Summer; and in 2020 The Wharf Revue’s Good Night and Good Luck used pre-recorded video very effectively for getting the message across.  But Fangirls builds the video, sound and music into the live singing, acting and dancing – including scene changes and props – so well that this show becomes ‘total theatre’ of a most modern kind.

And what was it about the real history of the pressures of fandom that came to my mind as Harry’s head dropped forward in death?  By the late 1960s the Beatles had become disillusioned with the effects of fandom, and I remember the hordes of fourteen-year-old girls’ extreme emotional reactions which you can see in many video records, including some used in Fangirls so I have read.  But move on to the 1980s and read this about John Lennon’s death:

https://www.thoughtco.com/the-assassination-of-john-lennon-1779404

Mark David Chapman: From Drugs to Jesus

Chapman came to see himself as a real-life Holden Caulfield. He even told his wife he wanted to change his name to Holden Caulfield and would rage about the phoniness of people and of celebrities in particular.

Hatred of John Lennon

In October of 1980, Esquire magazine published a profile on John Lennon, which portrayed the former Beatle as a drug-addled millionaire recluse who had lost touch with his fans and his music. Chapman read the article with increasing anger and came to see Lennon as the ultimate hypocrite and a “phony” of the very type described in Salinger’s novel.

He began reading everything he could about John Lennon, even making tapes of Beatles’ songs, which he would play over and over for his wife, changing the tapes’ speed and direction. He would listen to them while sitting nude in the dark, chanting, “John Lennon, I’m going to kill you, you phony bastard!”

When Chapman discovered Lennon was planning to release a new album—his first in five years—his mind was made up. He would fly to New York City and shoot the singer.

My thinking was certainly a great surprise, with a new sense of dread, thanks to Fangirls.

The cast of Fangirls
Photo: Brett Boardman

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: Kenny - on stage

 

 

Kenny adapted for stage by Steve Rodgers from the movie Kenny (2006) by Clayton and Shane Jacobson.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, January 15-27, 2021.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 23

Solo Performer – Ben Wood as Kenny Smythe

Director – Mark Kilmurry    Assistant Director – Warwick Doddrell

Designers:
Simone Romaniuk – Set & Costume
Damien Cooper – Lighting
Nate Edmondson – Composer & Sound
Mic Gruchy – Video

Photos by Prudence Upton

I arrived early, knowing everyone had to QR Covid check-in.  With time to spare, keeping my distance, I took a turn outside.  A pleasant cool sea breeze – Ensemble was once a boatshed – and a surprising announcement.  Welcome to IPSC, the International Portable Sanitation Convention.  Woops!  Isn’t Kenny on after all?

Ben Wood  as Kenny
Ensemble Theatre
Photo: Prudence Upton

Even more surprising when I find after the show that SPLASHdown Corporate Bathroom Rentals is real, and are given special thanks for their expert assistance. 

I guess that was for providing the portable toilet that Kenny persuaded an audience member, Paul, to put his arm down.  He had to retrieve the big stuff first – a bottle of wine as a reward for his bravery – until he found the wedding ring, just like the one Kenny had had to retrieve in his story of the woman who lost hers down the toot – and then couldn’t touch it, even though he sterilised it, until he wrapped it in toilet paper, leaving without thanking him because she couldn’t stand his smell.

We were, of course, all attending the IPS Convention.  Kenny was certainly the most entertaining keynote speaker I’ve ever come across.  In fact he came across as among the most humane and sincere.  

I have never seen the movie, I think fortunately.  In this adaptation, where Kenny tells us all about his experiences, and even his personal and family responses, in professionally providing and servicing portable toilets to large gatherings around the world – rather than our being voyeurs watching a movie – it seemed to me that Ben Wood was the real deal.  

At the end of this comedy with serious implications, I felt as much respect for the plumbers on whom we all rely – and for all those other frontline workers we have all become so suddenly aware of through this pandemic – as I felt for the actor.  Wood’s representation of all the layers of Kenny’s emotions, second by second, as he works directly with us as participants, was quite extraordinary.  When he showed us the slide of the women toilet cleaners – the Untouchables, of course – in India, I felt as everyone did around me, for their awful plight, with a sense of guilt for our easy lives.  Then, I realised, that Sulabh International, to whom Kenny asked us to consider donating, is real.

Sulabh International “is an India-based social service organization that works to promote human rights, environmental sanitation, non-conventional sources of energy, waste management and social reforms through education. The organization counts 50,000 volunteers.”  Suddenly Kenny and Ben Wood are one.  The fiction of theatre becomes real in the world.  [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulabh_International]

I have noted before the work of Steve Rodgers in working directly with his audience in Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing at Belvoir (reviewed on this blog January 12, 2020) and I’m sure I see a link when Kenny gives out cards recording children’s responses to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up” for people in the audience to read out.  When it is revealed that none of them wanted to be a plumber, the point is made about dignity of the person and dignity in their work.

So this production of Kenny is both highly entertaining, as I’m sure the movie is, but even more engaging because of our personal interaction with Kenny’s very-Aussie character full of positive humour and because we become committed to humanitarian ideals like those of Sulabh International.

When I say “not to be missed”, I really mean it.  And am I glad to be back in a live theatre!

Ben Wood as Kenny
Ensemble Theatre
Photo: Prudence Upton

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: Raise a Glass and Ruffle Some Feathers by Shortis & Simpson

 

 

Raise a Glass and Ruffle Some Feathers by Shortis & Simpson.  At Contentious Character Winery, Wamboin – near Queanbeyan, just in New South Wales over the border from Canberra, Australia’s Washington DC. January 21-23, 2021.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 21

The night begins with quality bubbly, hors d’oeuvres and delicious mains, accompanied by wines with unusual names of a contentious character, celebrated craftily in a song beginning Murder a Merlot, ending with Shades of Grape.  

Literally fully prepared for an S&S traditional satirical musical commentary, on this occasion covering the annus horribilis 2020, there was no hesitation about calling John and Moya back for a finger-wagging warning encore.  Drinks before dinner, drinks during dinner, and drinks after dinner, they sang, mean it will be a rednosed reindeer driving our sleigh tonight.

I made sure to drive home across the state border on a route where I knew the police were not checking if I had come from a hot-spot – a Covid-19 hot-spot, that it is – after an injection of Regeron, hydroxichloroquine and disinfectant like the boastful Donald Trump they sang about.  Actually a very smooth Pinot Grigio.  

Just fitting 'hydroxichloroquine' into the rhythm of a cheerful upbeat song shows John’s music and lyrics composing skill, the humour backed throughout the show by Moya’s quite amazing range of voice quality, and pitch varying from the deepest bass to tiny screech, in all-sorts of characters from Paul Robeson to children’s story-teller.

Shortis & Simpson have the light touch of an entertainment as members of our local community, with emotionally touching moments in their songs such as Smoke Gets In Your Vines for the winemakers and A Glimmer of Hope for native animals.  The summer bushfires a year ago cannot be forgotten.  But neither can the ongoing Covid-19 lockdowns in the sad song of the only chance once a week, putting out the garbage bins, for any excitement for their family and friends in Melbourne, in Another Tuesday Night in Brunswick.

Politics always gets a knowing laugh – about temporary acting-Prime Minister Michael Bloody McCormack (all sing together!), Mr Scomo giving the children an early mark, and the changing of just the word ‘one’ bringing us all together in the National Anthem.  Then there’s a deeper irony as John had prepared himself for the likelihood of more dramatic violence at the real Washington DC at 3am our time on the morning of the show.  The fading away of Donald Trump and the peaceful inauguration of President Biden called for a quiet contemplative poem, read with sincerity by Moya and followed by a beautiful Zoom choir toasting 2021.

Here I can only briefly touch on the variety presented in some 24 items in the two Acts, with sweets in between, of Raise a Glass and Ruffle Some Feathers.  Two more performances at Contentious Character Winery are already fully booked, but I would hope that ruffling feathers will continue, and raising a glass is a good way to do it.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2021: Shakespeare in a Divided America

 

 

Design by Keenan

 

Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro.  Faber & Faber 2020.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Monday January18, 2021

James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, has written the ultimate STEAM book.  Of course, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics have their place as they should in this story of why the United States of America remain divided.  But the Arts – Shakespeare’s art, surprisingly – has the central role, as surely we all would want to claim for it.

“Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true!” as Aesop is said to have written in his Fables,  some two and a half thousand years ago.  On Wednesday this week, American time, as King Lear’s presidential career ends, in favour perhaps of Brutus, Shapiro’s study of Shakespeare in America explains what it means when we say every child must experience the arts throughout their education.

Shakespeare in a Divided America is essential reading, in my view, for all citizens and especially for those we choose to elect to our parliaments.  It is both a structurally dramatic work of art, exciting and surprising, while its academic research is telling.  Like Shakespeare himself – telling often what we might not like to know.

My characterisation of the outgoing president as King Lear is not in Shapiro’s book, published on 12 March 2020.  It will be interesting to see if Trump realises that so many who voted for him are Edmunds, Gonerils and Regans. Will he feel sad for the loss of those Fools who tried to tell him “Thou should’st not have been old till thou hadst been wise”.  And will we feel sad that he was never able to understand, receive and offer genuine love until too late?  Still wanting to believe Cordelia lives, as he dies politically, will Trump – as Shakespeare’s Lear perhaps seems to in his final madness –  realise that his obsessive self-centredness is the cause of her death and his failure?  

Shapiro’s story begins “… it was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that convinced me to write about Shakespeare in a divided America….I wasn’t the only one turning to Shakespeare to make sense of the moment….On the eve of the election, Stephen Greenblatt published a powerful op-ed in the New York Times likening Trump to a Shakespearean tyrant….And a month after Trump was elected, Oscar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, decided to respond to this seismic event by directing a production of Julius Caesar the following summer at the Delacourte Theater…in Central Park.”

Since the open air theatre was built in 1962, “spectators – by now, more than 5 million – have flocked to see Free Shakespeare in the Park.  Fifty thousand more would see this timely Julius Caesar….That production and reactions to it, powerfully shaped my understanding of much of what follows in these pages….”

And my understanding of American culture, and the many roles played by Shakespeare in it, has been powerfully re-shaped by what followed.  The chapter titles, each centred on a date of significant change, must stir anyone’s thinking and raise our concerns about social harmony and conflict – past, present and future:

1833: Miscegenation
1845: Manifest Destiny
1849: Class Warfare
1865: Assassination
1916: Immigration
1948: Marriage
concluding with
2017: Left / Right

Australia’s story, of course, runs in parallel with America’s since their War of Independence of 1776.  That took place between Capt James Cook’s fateful arrival on Tasmania’s shore in 1770 and the redirection of Britain’s convicts from America to Australia with the appointment of Arthur Phillip as the first governor of New South Wales on 12 October 1786 – and his invasion with the First Fleet in 1789.

The close cultural connections between America and Australia, which we still perhaps take too much for granted, jump out of these pages, even though Shapiro writes entirely from the American viewpoint.  For example, being an immigrant here myself, directly from Britain, I have learned from “1916: Immigration” key points of new understanding about my Australian experience.  

In particular there is the interpretation of the nature of Caliban, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, by Joseph Quincy Adams among many others:  “…in the person of Caliban, Shakespeare represented the treacherous nature of the natives, as reported by the colonists”, which supposes that Shakespeare knew of the new colony of Virginia. Caliban’s island was taken to be an island off the American east coast. Fake news of 1 November 1611, when The Tempest was first performed?  Maybe or maybe not: the colonists first landed there in 1607, but there’s no evidence that Shakespeare was aware of or interested in this.  

But, Shapiro notes, after compulsory education  for the young was instituted (beginning in 1852), and the study of Shakespeare’s plays was made a requirement, Adams could gratefully say in 1932, in his inaugural lecture opening the Folger Shakespeare Library, this was: “Fortunately about the time that the forces of immigration became a menace to the preservation of our long-established English civilization.”  

Restricting immigration via a literacy requirement came in 1917 and, writes Shapiro, the “anti-immigration forces achieved their ultimate goal: the institution of racially driven quotas in 1921, and even more restrictive ones in 1924, that would be the law of the land until overturned in 1965.”  A White America/Australia policy which took us until 1973 to overturn.  All the result of a glorified  racist dead-white male Shakespeare showing us the sub-human example of Caliban, never to be admitted into “our long-established English civilization”.  

So keep your wits about you when you wish for everyone to be educated in the arts.  James Shapiro has a surprise in every chapter, with amazing background details (I loved especially the story of the writing and many re-writings of Kiss Me, Kate) and concluding with what happened when Brutus, full of concern about preserving democracy but terribly anxious about using violence to do so, stabbed a Caesar who looked like Donald Trump in 2017.

As I would say of any top-class drama: not to be missed.

James Shapiro
Photo: Mary Cregan

© Frank McKone, Canberra

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2020: The Wharf Revue: Good Night and Good Luck

 

 

The Wharf Revue: Good Night and Good Luck.  By Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott, co-directed by Jonathan Biggins and Drew Forsythe.  Musical director, Phillip Scott.

Sydney Theatre Company at Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse December 1 – 19, 2020.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

December 1 

CAST
Jonathan Biggins, Mandy Bishop, Drew Forsythe, Phillip Scott.  Guest appearance by Lena Cruz.

DESIGNERS
Charles Davis – Designer; Matt Cox – Lighting; Nate Edmondson – Sound; Todd Decker – Video; Susie Henderson – Video Systems and Content.

Margaret Aston – Wigs; Scott Fisher – Costumes; Andrew Worboys – Music Tracks.

Rehearsal Photographer – Prudence Upton.



The End Of The Wharf As We Know It was how it all began in the year 2000.  The truth has finally caught up with the satire as the Sydney Theatre Company has now refurbished their original theatre Wharf 4/5, Walsh Bay, to open in 2021.  Now it really is Good Night and Good Luck.  Yet with sound Shakespearian internal character conflict in mind, like Hamlet, they say “all the refurbishment works have been designed with a heritage framework”.  We will still walk the long walk out over Sydney Harbour waters, but perhaps the old wooden cobblestone effect may now become a smoother journey.

So can The Wharf Revue be refurbished but retain its heritage value?  And can we hope to wake up next year after this year’s terrifically good night to an extension of our amazingly good luck to have had such sizzling political satire run for 20 years?  I certainly hope so.

Two particularly successful features of this year’s show are precursors of continuing theatrical refurbishment for The Wharf.  

The quality of incisive sharpness in the writing is not constrained (that’s the heritage) but the warmth of feeling, of horror, of empathy for New York under Covid attack with no presidential protection was a new sensation, crossing the line and back again from satire to tragedy.

Then, throughout the whole show, the technical quality, originality of content, as well as satirical precision in the actors’ performances in the video designs and presentations, though a continuation of this developing heritage from previous years, was a leap forward this year for womankind especially.  Amanda Bishop “first impersonated Julia Gillard as part of Waiting for Garnaut, the 2008 Wharf Revue” (Wikipedia), which I remember well, but her range on stage and screen in Good Night and Good Luck 12 years later is quite remarkable, in conjunction with Lena Cruz.

For this the video and selection of material work of Susie Henderson must receive the highest commendation.

The titles of the 17 items also show their heritage and update values.  “When We Get Back To Normal” shows these very authors right now in lockdown, absolutely bored, waiting for people to appear in the auditorium.  Ooops! They’re here!

Remember The Seekers?  Amanda Bishop goes down a treat as Judith Durham: will they ever find another job?  “Norman Swan” is our hero: the medicine we all so sorely need.  “How did you get here?” says one Virus to another; “On a cruise ship.”  How else?

Democracy is the “People’s Choice”.  Solos by Putin, Bolsonaro and the very weird Elton Jong with his highly informative history of the Jong Il family make unAustralian dictatorships very funny.  Australia gets what it deserves in “Koala”; “K Rudd” (a wonderful reprise by Drew Forsythe in Kevin’s reincarnation as Murdoch critic); the Liberal “Fawlty Towers”, leavened by “The Pauline Doctrine” and contrasted with the Labor “Cats in the Ranks”. Aotearoa’s “Jacinda Ardern” is heavenly perfection in comparison, while “The Sounds of Sirens” in New York are all that we hear in the silence.  A little light relief is provided by the New South Wales premier “Gladys”, taking us off to the wild west of the Donald – “The Man who shot Liberty”.

What a way to end!

If there’s anything we need more than hope this year, it’s laughter.  I hope there will be more in the future.  I’m sure there will be more to laugh at, and I just wish The Wharf Revue could go on forever.

The Wharf Revue in rehearsal
by Prudence Upton
L to R: Phillip Scott, Mandy Bishop, Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: Absurd Person Singular by Alan Ayckbourn

 

 

Absurd Person Singular by Alan Ayckbourn.  Canberra Repertory Theatre at Naoné
 Carrel Auditorium, November 19 – December 5 2020.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 19

Director – Jarrad West; Assistant Director – Alice Ferguson
Set Design – Andrew Kay
Costume Realisation – Fiona Leach, Anna Senior, Antonia Kitzel, Members of Cast
Lighting Design – Nathan Sciberras; Sound Design – Neville Pye
Properties – Brenton Warren, Rosanne Walker

Cast, in order of appearance:

Sidney Hopcroft – Arran McKenna – an entirely self-centred developer going up
Jane Hopcroft – Amy Dunham – housewife extraordinaire, hanging on
Ronald Brewster-Wright – Chris Baldock – an incompetent banker going down
Marion Brewster-Wright – Tracy Noble – going down with her husband
Geoffrey Jackson – Cole Hilder – unsuccessful architect going nowhere
Eva Jackson – Steph Roberts – up, down and up as an independent woman

There was plenty of sanitiser on hand in the foyer to help protect us from the current physical virus.  Canberra REP on stage sanitised us with hope against the absurdity of human behaviour in a tightly-focussed, expertly performed production of this British writer’s most significant play.

The Arts and Entertainment are often blithely dropped together into a bland ‘Industry’ box on a bureaucratic office floor.  But entertainment without art is just another form of virus.  Art is the vaccine we need.  Better than mere surface sanitising, theatre art injects sanity into our veins.  Canberra REP emphasises that this is an amateur production, but their artistry – through casting, directing, and design – makes Absurd Person Singular into Entertainment +.  It’s a great pity that the reality of the physical virus restricts the number who can see the play.

Each actor establishes the central through-line of their character, so that they appear to be real; yet each brilliantly uses the techniques of farce which makes each of the three Christmases so disastrous and horribly funny.  Scene 1 in the Hobcroft kitchen sets us up for the comedy; Scene 2 in the Jackson flat pushes absurdity to the edge of a black abyss; then in the Brewster-Wrights’ completely dysfunctional household, Scene 3 turns into an awful satire in singing the carol’s words My True Love Gave To Me (The Twelve Days of Christmas).

Ayckbourn has made the three men’s characters relatively less demanding to act, since they represent, each in their own way, men who are incapable of insight and personal development.  Arran McKenna’s Sidney is essentially dictatorial in personal and social situations, even when it’s the fun of Christmas games that he’s imposing on others.  Chris Baldock captures a kind of ennui in Ronald, even when he seems to open up a little to Geoffrey before the final scene becomes disastrous.  Cole Hilder has the most complex part to play – and does it very well, particularly in Geoffrey’s frustration with his wife’s complete switch-off in Scene 2.

The women’s characters, in contrast, each develop in ways which I see as comments on the complexity of life that women face.  Amy Dunham’s Jane begins seemingly as a caricature of the standard perfectionist housewife, but as she has to deal with that impossibility when she becomes trapped outside in England’s incessant rain, and sees that cleaning Eva’s oven is not the answer in Scene 2, by the third Christmas she has learnt to come to terms with playing the game alongside Sidney even though she loses her own identity in doing so.  

Tracy Noble reveals in Scene 1 that her Marion half-knows that putting on her airs is a kind of protective sham.  In Scene 2 she sees where Eva is going into the depths.  By her third Christmas, alcohol is her only defence – her only way of giving herself identity, even as it is self-destructive.  The change is awful to watch.

In presenting Eva, Steph Roberts has perhaps the greatest work to do.  In Scene 1 she is strong but frustrated by her husband’s ineptitude.  A year later she is almost catatonic and is only saved from suicide by chance.  But the experience shows her that she has the right to be herself on her own terms, and she sings in some degree of hope in the end for where she might go (though not necessarily with Geoffrey, I suspect).

The measure of an artful entertainment, in the case of an absurdist satirical farce, is that the characters remain memorable in their own right, and we are left with hope for humanity, despite laughing so much at such ordinary kinds of behaviours.

That is success for the whole production team, and a gong for our long-standing local repertory theatre in Canberra, where, as Jarrad West reports, “I have loved this play since I was a little boy, when my mother performed as Jane in the mid 90’s.  To be able to now bring it to life on the REP stage again some 30 years later is one of the bright spots of this year.”  Community life is something to be enjoyed and valued, and at the risk of showing bias, I can report that a bright spot for me is to see on stage the daughter of the students I taught back in 1976-77, Amy Dunham, now described as “a seasoned Canberran performer for the last 23 years, with multiple leads across a wide range of plays and musicals”.

Alan Ayckbourn intended his play to be more broadly political – about property development and speculation that was rife at that time, the 1970s, in the UK – as well as about marriage relationships.  Today, we are in the midst of an absurdist election count in the United States, arguments over lockdown to save lives against opening up the economy and being “Covid normal”, and reports all over the news in Australia of our “Day of Shame” war crimes inquiry (‘Rules were broken.  Stories concocted.  Lies told.  Prisoners killed’ in Afghanistan), with a comment that “When General [Angus] Campbell says that members of special forces did extraordinary work in Afghanistan he’s not trying to sanitise the ADF of what happened”.  (Harley Dennett, The Canberra Times, Friday November 20, 2020 Page 8).  

Being able to go to the theatre, at last, even with Covid limitations, and know that our arts organisations can still put on such shows as Canberra REP’s Absurd Person Singular is not only entertaining but is a comfort and represents hope for the future.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: Mess - directed by Natsuko Yonezawa

 

 

Mess – A Belco Arts Production at Belconnen Arts Centre Theatre, Canberra, October 1-2, 2020.  

Reviewed by Frank McKone

 
Next production: intimacy October 22-23, 2020.  
Tel: 02 6173 3300 www.belcoarts.com.au

Natsuko Yonezawa – Director/Performer;
Christopher Samuel Carroll – Performer/Collaborator;
Miriam Slater – Performer/Collaborator;
Marline Claudine Radice – Composer/Live Musician;
Chenoeh Miller – Producer/Assistant Director;
byrd – Set Designer;
Linda Buck – Lighting Designer (Belco Arts’ Technical Manager)
Anni Doyle Wawrzynczak – Stage Manager
Kyle Sheedy – Audio Operator
Shan Crosbie & Skye Rutherford – Marketing & Promotion

With carefully managed Covid-19 social distancing, the brand new Belconnen Arts Centre Theatre presented its second production to a limited audience of 58, spaced out in three rows along each side of a long quite narrow performing area, its floor polished to mirror reflection quality: a symbol in its own right, reflecting a quality production.

The shadowy dimly lit corridor waits empty of living beings except for, at one end with her back to us, we notice a woman in sinuous red is making slow small movements of her shoulders, arms and hands.  As she fades out of the acting space, small percussion sounds begin and she is replaced by the composer as something like an earth-mother figure, now producing disturbing keening woodwind whistles.

As she too fades back and a soundscape surrounds us surruptitiously, in a kind of musique concrète form, two figures – male and female – each in non-descript greyish loose clothing enter from opposite ends and action begins.  Like an extension and exaggeration of the movements of the original woman in red, these two do not speak or make any sounds throughout the whole performance.  They are clearly not in communication, perhaps not able to be in communication with each other when they enter.  We wait, watching the detail of their movements and the feelings they apparently express, and wonder – will this isolation reach some point of fruitful life?

Of course, it’s not my role here to be a spoiler.

For me personally, the concentrated detailed movement work of Miriam Slater and Christopher Samuel Carroll was fascinating and absorbing in a special way.  In my teaching days I was lucky indeed to have been taught by Anton Witsel, one time member of the Nederlands Ballet and student of French mime artists Jean-Louis Barrault and Jacques Lecoq.  I had also taught a Japanese exchange student at one time, stirring up my interest in Noh drama, Kabuki and Butoh dance; and I had separately found the teachings of Rudolph Laban especially effective in teaching movement as the basis of drama to my students.

So to see these performers demonstrating like a masterclass how to make elements of movement – never quite mime, not exactly dance – into what could look like powerfully creative improvisation, in concert with sound and light, rather than either being in merely response to the other, was a wonderful experience.  It is so good to see work of this depth in this new theatre.  I trust that Belco Arts will keep up the good work.

And, almost by the way, I think Natsuko Yonezawa has a positive view despite the ‘mess’ of lockdown.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2020: A Room Made of Leaves - novel by Kate Grenville

 

 

 

 A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville.  Jacket image by Lisla/Shutterstock.  Text Publishing, Melbourne, July 2020.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Each of the three novels, Hamnet, Truganini and A Room Made of Leaves, respectively by Maggie O'Farrell, Cassandra Pybus and Kate Grenville, focusses our attention on a woman – significant in history but unknown to us as a real person.

In each case her “disappearance” is because of a man in her life who shines in the limelight of history.  Agnes, or Anne, was the wife of William Shakespeare; Truganini was the guide assisting George Augustus Robinson; Elizabeth was the wife of John Macarthur.  We appreciate Shakespeare for his playwriting; Robinson for trying to save Tasmania’s original people, according to his own lights; and Macarthur for establishing Australia’s wool industry.

Each of the three women authors starts from the premise that these men lived in highly personal relationships with these women.  Without coming to know those lives as lived by the women, are we seeing only one side of the history we are taught and have come to accept as sufficient?  Might not the women’s stories, experienced by us imaginatively from within, reveal another view of history?

The answer by each author in her own way, is Yes – indeed!

Myths grow on men in history like lichen on ancient rocks; women of all ages have to live in a different moving reality.  These works are novels, drawing on the authors’ knowledge as women; and their historical research – though remarkably extensive in each case – has to be presented as if it is fiction, since their characters’ actual personal records have disappeared.

It is in the creation of the characters of Agnes, Truganini and Elizabeth that we come to understand them as people first.  Then, in their roles as wife or guide, we see through the men’s auras, scraping away the patina, to see a new kind of truth.

I reviewed Truganini first (8 May 2020), fascinated by this First Nations woman of such self-determination, strength of character and cross-cultural diplomatic sensibility.  I knew of Hamnet only as William Shakespeare’s son, who died aged 11.  I had no preconception of his mother who made her life her own, including in her mid-twenties marrying an 18-year-old Latin tutor.  Nor how she and her often away from home husband came to terms with Hamnet’s death. (Reviewed here 19 June 2020)

And now, just published in July,  as if by magic, I’m led to believe that Elizabeth née Veale had been born and brought up in Devonshire, not far from my own favourite haunts as a child, though pigs happened to be more in my purview than sheep.  And so I was under way, with a touch of Jane Austen, into the life of this young woman needing to marry into some kind of regular income.

And what a woman, who, with all her wits about her when she has reached about three score years and twenty, living in Australia, just like me now, writes up her life and leaves her story hidden in Elizabeth Farm, Parramatta.  I don’t have her wits, but I’m sure that Kate Grenville does.  The “transcriber and editor”, as Grenville describes herself, writes of Elizabeth Macarthur: “In these private papers, written near the end of her life, she steps out from behind the bland documents that were her public face.  They’re a series of hot outpourings, pellets of memory lit by passionate feeling.  With sometimes shocking frankness, they invite us to see right through into her heart.”

Some readers may find it hard to accept Grenville’s subterfuge.  But, in effect, this apparently advertorial “quote” lays out her intention in this novel.  I believe she achieves her aim most powerfully.  Not only do we experience what surely must have been the reality of Elizabeth Macarthur’s life from a child taught so much by her sheep-farming grandfather to a woman without whom the development of the Australian Merino wool industry would never have happened, but we come to understand, as her character grows, the awful contrast between the emotional ineptness of a man like John Macarthur and the emotional maturity and subtlety needed to be learnt by a woman in the position of such a man’s wife.

It is in this understanding that Grenville’s work matches the creation of the characters of Agnes by O’Farrell and of Truganini by Pybus.  William Shakespeare and George Augustus Robinson are quite different men from John Macarthur and each other, of course.  Each of the three authors cleverly reveal the nature of those particular men, through each woman’s eyes, but each of the women have the same basic issue to deal with.

As, surely, all women do.  Agnes, Truganini and Elizabeth are wonderful models of real people in history – women from whom men can learn, as I hope I have myself.  Each of them are different, too.  From Agnes I think of her originality of approach; from Truganini her vivacity in youth and dignity in old age; from Elizabeth her growing self-awareness.

From all three it is the importance of women’s self-determination that stands out.  Disappearing from history should be no woman’s fate.  

In this sense, all three books are political – A Room Made of Leaves perhaps more overtly, in Grenville’s characterisation of Elizabeth Macarthur who seems to have been so much more deliberately written out of the record, in favour of the scoundrel, John Macarthur.  Many surprises await you in this novel approach to what really happened in the penal colony, according to this "truly incredible and strangely little-known story: How Elizabeth Macarthur's long-lost secret memoirs were discovered."

© Frank McKone, Canberra