Julia by Joanna Murray-Smith

 

Justine Clarke / Julia Gillard

Julia   by Joanna Murray-Smith.  Presented by Sydney Theatre Company and Canberra Theatre Centre at The Playhouse, Canberra, March 18-25 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Opening Night March 21

Director – Sarah Goodes; Designer – Renée Mulder
Lighting Designer – Alexander Berlage
Composer and Sound Designer – Steve Francis
Video Designer – Susie Henderson
Asst Director – Charley Sanders; Voice Coach – Jennifer White

Performed by Jessica Bentley representing ‘Young Woman’ in her developing understanding of Justine Clarke’s ‘Julia’ – one-time Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the first and as yet only woman prime minister of Australia.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Joanna Murray-Smith’s Julia, ending as it must with Julia Gillard’s ‘Misogyny’ speech, is an extraordinary work of theatre art – perhaps the most important Australian play in our history, past, present and future.

The writing is compact, every word is significant, placed perfectly to reveal Julia’s character, motivation, intellect and power in the context of real life and death.  The text is a gift for an actor of Justine Clarke’s sensitivity and for director Sarah Goodes’ intuition in making meaning of every moment in voice, movement and facial expression.  This production takes us to the core of drama, to the performance of the truth, to the story-telling which is the essence of human nature.

Julia is a play about leadership.  You may not expect it, but Julia is as central to the modern political leadership question – the place of women at the top – as another great play from the past – Shakespeare’s Richard III (1592-3).  This was about leadership by a king, ironically written at the very time that William’s ruler was the extraordinary woman, Queen Elizabeth I.  And so I could not help remembering Kate Mulvany’s terrific performance of Richard (reviewed here 13 April 2017).  Justine Clarke is a perfect match.

Of course the parallel is not perfect.  500 years of archaeology – see The Lost King also reviewed here, 7 December 2022 – has shown that Shakespeare’s story was not all factual.  Julia quotes Hansard when she demolishes Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, but Thomas Hansard took over William Cobbett’s 1803 parliamentary reporting business in only 1810.  Julia notes the point, and I add that there was no written record of Richard III killing the two boys in the Tower of London.

The parallel, though, is very close when it comes to the anguish and self-analysis while finding the way to becoming the leader, whether King or Prime Minister, and managing the task when in the role.  As Julia represents it, Question Time is not far short of throwing the opposition into dungeons, while the Party Room surely often came down to words like these:

Buckingham: Your grace may do your pleasure.
K. Richard: Tut, tut!  Thou art all ice, thy kindness freezeth.

Was Julia Gillard Kevin Rudd’s ‘Buckingham’ in 2010, with the roles reversed in 2013?
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=rudd+gillard+rudd+timeline

The reason I emphasise the importance of this play is that gaining full equality in decision-making powers of women, men, and all the other varieties of humankind (determined by our genes or our cultural differences) is crucial to our future – in our daily lives and as a species.  

We face a world still run by those who think they are kings.  And a world where our kindness freezes even as we cause the ice to melt.

Listen to Julia. Hear, see and understand Justine's performance. Notice Sarah's concept of the drama.  Respond to Joanna’s work of art.  Let the wonderful depth of feeling in Renée’s set design call you to do as Julia Gillard said:

….I say to the Leader of the Opposition I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not. And the Government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever….Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn't need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror. That's what he needs.

Julia is the mirror we all need.  Don’t miss it.


 ______________________________________________________________________________

Copies of Frank McKone's reviews are also available at

www.frankmckone2.blogspot.com 

 

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

At Dinner by Rebecca Duke

 

Thea Jade as Anna
in At Dinner by Rebecca Duke
ACT Hub, 2023

At Dinner by Rebecca Duke.  ACT Hub at Causeway Hall, Kingston, Canberra, February 9-11, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 9

At Dinner – or rather “at DINNER” – could be called "The Cancelling Game" or perhaps the more sophisticated "Dangerous Liaison".

It’s frightening to realise, watching this play written and directed today by such young people, that nothing has changed in my 82 years.  Anna and Eden are ‘right’ for each other because they both enjoy, as a skilled game, manipulating others’ assumptions that people are normally honest.  

But then, as IMDB online reminds us, in the popular TV series, Dangerous Liaisons, “A pair of scheming ex-lovers attempt to exploit others by using the power of seduction. TV adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' classic 18th Century novel 'Les Liaison Dangereuses'. 

So Rebecca Duke and Holly Johnson are in good artistic company with Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The School for Scandal 1777) and you could say even William Shakespeare in The Comedy of Errors.  

Obviously my ideals about how modern people should behave online and at dinner are simply naïve.  And that’s no joke.  As the company describes their play:

After some months apart, a young couple go out to dinner at a restaurant. At first, Anna appears to be stuck in a dead end relationship with her high-school boyfriend Eden.  As the night progresses, however, it becomes increasingly clear that Eden is out-matched by Anna and tangled up in a situation over which he has little control.

'At Dinner' is a serious, funny, and twisted examination of modern love.

The writing and the directing are a great example of the ‘less is more’ rule.  Thea Jade does an exquisite performance of every little nuance of Anna’s expressions and mannerisms which she uses to undermine the expectations of both Eden and the waitress, Pearl – giving Timothy Cusack and Nakiya Xyrakis every opportunity to read things the wrong way, which they succeed in doing very well.

This quality in the acting makes the play pass on a message at a different level for denizens of the digital world of the web: live performance is real – you can never trust TikTok, nor even what you see on any screen, where editing and post-production rule the roost.  But when Nakiya fell down and Thea and Tim rushed to help her, I instantly felt for her and them – and then in a minute realised this was written in the script.  Only live theatre can do this, (though I was always a bit concerned about Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello).

For me at least, then, At Dinner in barely an hour offers much that is “serious, funny, and twisted”, and is well worth recommending.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Little Explorers' Days at Questacon

 

 

Questacon Little Explorers’ Days.  National Science and Technology Centre, Canberra. February 8, 9, 10 2023. www.questacon.edu.au

Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 8

Like Dr Who’s Telephone Box, Questacon is huge on the inside.  It’s a relatively small building between the Australian National Library, the Australian National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Australia and the High Court of Australia.  

Maybe Einstein could see a case of relativity in this universe.  It’s certainly a prestigious position for STEM education to be in.  That’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, of course – and Questacon is absolutely chockfull of hands-on experiential learning, though I was a little concerned for the 4 year old as the Tesla coil Faraday caged lightning exploded on its 15-minute deadline.  She hid behind her loving mother’s skirts and was not too frightened, I hope.

But the Questacon Tardis really runs on STEAM – Science, Technology, Engineering, ARTS and Mathematics.  Its 170 seat theatre plays 3 shows every day of the year except Christmas Day – 364 x 3 x 170 = 300,000 according to what BJ Anyos, the Early Learning Coordinator in the Learning Experience Team told me.  Even if it should be 185,640, that’s still probably the largest audience reach per annum of any theatre in the country, as she claimed.

Today, with parents and carers and their 0 to 6 years children (yes, there were some 0’s), I watched Mutti, a plant-eating Muttaburrasaurus, (puppeteered by Dan Power) learn to be brave  - with the help of a hundred or so little dinosaurs – rather than be scared of a meat-eating Australovenator (Brent Brosnan).  We all had to run away very fast together from the billabong, leaving our footprints to record a fossil stampede.  We were gobblers, bug-suckers, or slow-moving yawners with appropriate hand actions, even while we were stamping our feet hard and fast.

As palaeontologists, of course, we had to practise pronouncing Muttaburrasaurus.

Out of the theatre, perhaps in recognition of our DNA, strings of littlies explored the spiral of galleries beginning in Gallery 1 Robots and Artificial Intelligence.  Hold a lever down outside the glass to lift the other end up inside, and a robotic jointed arm with an eye sees what you have done, and (gently but firmly) reaches out and pushes the inner end down again.  Though very littlies basically absorb the experience, as they grow older – and become grown-ups – even such a simple device asks questions, like does the robot have feelings and (I thought) how do I feel about the robot and AI?

There are hours’ worth of activities in the main 5 galleries.  Some are about engineering and spatial learning around fitting what appear to be impossible shapes together; some involve a staff teacher, such as one I saw doing practical mixing of liquids of different colours.  As the children chose and helped with the mixing, they were being asked to predict what colours would result and to work out how to create the colours they wanted.  Here was the Arts again in a lab setting.

My three hours’ exploring with the littlies left me thoroughly impressed with the originality of the Questacon team in their approach to experiential learning, and with the obvious engagement of children and their accompanying adults throughout.

And I remembered how the use of theatre and games in museums had really got under way in Australia some twenty years ago, when Questacon started the Excited Particles performance team, and in March 2002 the first Australian national conference Raising the Curtain: Performance in Cultural Institutions took place at the National Museum of Australia, on the other side of Lake Burley Griffin, inspired especially by Catherine Hughes, of Boston's Museum of Science and IMTAL (International Museum Theatre Alliance), who began her keynote speech as Mary Anning (who discovered the first complete fossil remains of an icthyosaur at the age of 11 in the year 1812) and ended the conference with a lecture and workshop on how to evaluate the successes - or failures - of performance programs in museums.

For more detail, go to my review of that conference at

https://frankmckone2.blogspot.com/search?q=Excited+Particles

Twenty years later, Questacon has fulfilled the promise of Catherine Hughes’ inspiration to the Nth Degree.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Holding Achilles

 

 

 Holding Achilles.  Produced by Legs On The Wall, Dead Puppet Society, Sydney Festival, Brisbane Festival, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Glass Half Full Productions.

Sydney Festival at Carriageworks Bay 17, January 19-22, 2203

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 20


Director and Co-Creator David Morton
Movement Director and Co-Creator Joshua Thomson
Creative Producer Nicholas Paine

Lighting Designer Ben Hughes
Sound Designer Tony Brumpton
Rigging Designer David Jackson
Composers Tony Buchen and Chris Bear with Montaigne
Puppet Design Dead Puppet Society
Music performed live by Montaigne
Dramaturg Louise Gough
Set Co-Designers Anna Cordingley and David Morton
Associate Director Matt Seery
Costume Designer Anna Cordingley
Associate Producer James Beach

Cast:
Achilles Stephen Madsen
Paris / Chiron Nic Prior
Patroclus Karl Richmond
Briseis Christy Tran
Ajax / Hector / Puppeteer (Baby Bear) Ellen Bailey
Priam Caroline Dunphy
Odysseus John Batchelor
Thetis Montaigne
Agamemnon / Lead Puppeteer (Bear) Lauren Jackson
Ensemble / Counterweight Johnas Liu
Meneleus / Peleus Christopher Tomkinson

The ideas behind this conception of the Trojan War are interesting and worthwhile.  But the style of presentation – in the writing of the dialogue, the acting, the sound composition and singing, and the symbolic aerial dance work – makes the performance a re-enactment of an idea, rather than a creative work of art with the emotional impact that the ideas deserve.

Perhaps the intention was to attract a young generation brought up on The Game of Thrones, but subtlety is not the word for what needed to be an intimate development of the love relationship between Patroclus and Achilles, nor for the depth of anguish felt by Patroclus as the machinations of the powerful play out in the continuing use of violence for political ambition.

Considering what is happening in Ukraine right now, and the changing – and improving – attitudes on the human rights of people across a wide range of differences, the issues arising in the story of how, why and what happened in Ancient Greece are highly relevant today.

(Wikipedia records: Those who believe that the stories of the Trojan War are derived from a specific historical conflict usually date it to the 12th or 11th century BC, often preferring the dates given by Eratosthenes, 1194–1184 BC, which roughly correspond to archaeological evidence of a catastrophic burning of Troy VII, and the Late Bronze Age collapse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_War )

But Holding Achilles mixes up theatrical genres in a way that tells a story – through a kind of ‘grand’ style interspersed with action in aerial acrobatic form symbolising warfare almost like circus – yet with spoken dialogue in very ordinary modern day language.  The massively over-loud music and singing is oppressive rather than impressive; the dance sequences are far too long, seeming indulgent rather than progressing the drama; the spoken scenes are ‘acted out’ rather than expressed from within.  Only a few of Odysseus’s explanations of political necessities and some of Patroclus’s expression of frustration at the acceptance of violence create some empathy on our part.

If you want a modern, highly effective – and wonderfully affective – account, written with depth of characterisation and achieving the kind of impact that Holding Achilles misses, you can’t go past the novels by Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls (Penguin 2018) and The Women of Troy (Hamish Hamilton 2021).

There you will find the story of the woman Briseis, Achilles’ concubine, with a sincere interpretation which I think reflects more deeply on the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles than Holding Achilles gives us.

The messages about the need for love as individuals and for non-violence in international politics are clearly there in the Holding Achilles version of Homer’s Iliad – and surely we need to hear what David Morton, Nicholas Paine and Joshua Thomson have to say.  The production is big and loud, but needs much more subtle development for the emotional impact worthy of its themes to come through.

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2023: Paradise or The Impermanence of Ice Cream

 

 

Paradise or The Impermanence of Ice Cream by Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis.  Indian Ink Theatre Company (New Zealand) for Sydney Festival 2023 at Lennox Theatre, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta January 17-22, 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 18

Creatives
Writer/Director – Justin Lewis
Dramaturg – Murray Edmond
Set Design/Projected Imagery Artist – John Verryt
Costume Design – Elizabeth Whiting
Composer/Sound Design/Musician – David Ward
Musician – Adam Ogle
Lighting Design/Production/Tour Manager – Andrew Potvin
Projected Imagery/Photographer/Editor – Bala Murali Shingade


Performed by
Writer/Actor – Jacob Rajan
Puppet Designer/Builder/Puppeteer – Jon Coddington

Jacob Rajan and Jon Coddington
in Paradise or The Impermanence of Ice Cream

 It’s hard to know where to start and end discussing Paradise or The Impermanence of Ice Cream.  It is a play with seven characters all performed by a man who is dead at the beginning, just as a traditional vulture begins to clean his bones; and places himself in the same position at the end for the vulture to continue providing its service to humanity.

In the intervening 110 minutes we are thoroughly entertained while learning about the way of doing business in Mumbai, especially selling ice cream; about the need for conservation of the dwindling population of vultures (I wondered if human induced climate change is a factor in addition to our poisoning them - https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Indian_vulture_crisis); and about human cultural rituals in response to the knowledge that the most consistent feature of life is that all of us will die.

Emotionally, Jon Coddington’s vulture is beautiful; while Jacob Tajan’s physicality, even to the most extraordinary facial expressions, is reminiscent of and equally powerful as the master of mime, Marcel Marceau.  

Then, David Ward explains, Each new Indian Ink production presents new challenges, new instrumentation, new techniques and technology, and Paradise has been no different! Significant this time around has been the move away from live musical instruments, towards a much more atmospheric sound design. The lack of physical props and minimal set, means that sound effects play a huge role in defining the sense of place and atmosphere. This has meant delving into hundreds of sound effects and many, hours editing and mixing them to create the sound world. Marceau could never have imagined such a sound and video-imagery setting, becoming a character in its own right in this constantly surprising, often funny yet thoughtful play.

As a Festival presentation, the originality of this work, the quality of the performance, the cross-cultural standing of the Indian Ink company, and its origin and history in Aotearoa New Zealand makes Paradise or The Impermanence of Ice Cream an ideal choice.

Jon Coddington and Jacob Rajan
in Paradise or The Impermanence of Ice Cream

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2023 Girls and Boys by Dennis Kelly

 

Girls and Boys by Dennis Kelly (UK).  State Theatre of South Australia at Seymour Centre, Everest Theatre, in Sydney Festival 2023, January 5-15, 2023.
 
This play was first presented at Royal Court, London (2018); this production for the Adelaide Festival, Odeon Theatre, (February – March 2022); and it will be shown again in Dunstan Theatre, Adelaide in August 2023.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
January 14, 2023

Director - Mitchell Butel
Set & Costume Designer - Ailsa Paterson
Lighting Designer - Nigel Levings
Composer - Alan John
Sound Designer - Andrew Howard
Assistant Director - Rachel Burke

Performed by Justine Clarke

Sydney actor Justine Clarke makes a quite remarkable lower-class London girl into a story-teller, who begins seeming like a stand-up comedian; develops into a wife, a mother dealing with her strong-minded son and daughter, and a woman becoming a creative successful documentary maker; and ends as a tragic survivor whose own story is true for far too many women the world over.

I have a habit of avoiding reading up on plays new to me, and I recommend this especially for Girls and Boys.  I have already told you too much.  I can certainly tell you how well Justine caught the personality and style in the early scenes that I remember personally from my bringing-up in the very Wood Green in London she makes fun of, along with Paris and Rome.  The prejudices as well as the romance of travel (based apparently on Dennis Kelly’s own experiences) are very English, and works very well as comedy for Australians, according to last night’s audience.

But you may wish to put aside the rest of what I have to say until you have seen the play yourself.  I certainly recommend a trip to Adelaide in August.

__________

Dennis Kelly decided that he would not give his central character a name, intending of course for her to represent all the women who face what she calls – literally – marriage destruction.  In Australia, the play cannot help but remind us of the 2015 Australian of the Year, Rosie Batty, who has taken on such a powerful role in the campaign to prevent family violence since her husband’s murder of their son.

Perhaps Justine Clarke had her example in mind when concluding the play with such a sense of determination that we, these actual ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ in the audience, appreciate the reality that any of us can make assumptions about our close relations that are wrong; that for our own emotional needs we can misinterpret the other’s behaviour.  

In an interview (www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/feb/22/dennis-kelly-interview-girls-and-boys-carey-mulligan-royal-court) shortly before the first production with Carey Mulligan performing, Lyn Gardner reported “There are only two characters in this play: the actor and the audience,” says Kelly. “You risk running the audience out of the play when it gets hard.” The going gets very hard indeed, and anyone who has tickets for the sold-out hit may not want to read any further. As Kelly says: “You can’t talk about the play without giving away what’s going on.” But he thinks we do need to talk about it – and it’s his job to do it.

The point of seeing the play is that, as ‘Justine’ talks directly to us, acts out scenes with her invisible children and husband, talks to herself as we overhear her thinking, often trying to work out what is happening, and why – including, as she matures, philosophical questions about human relationships and even thoughts about the evolution of power and violence – we ourselves are placed in her kind of situation.  When at last the worst that we can imagine might happen actually does, we are as overwhelmed by the fact that it was as unforeseen by us as it was by ‘Justine’.

The effect is quite extraordinary.  We feel a tremendous sense of respect for ‘Justine’ and her strength in the aftermath of the moment, just as much as we feel respect for Justine in having created the role and held us in her thrall for 110 minutes.

No wonder the whole audience gave Justine Clarke, and ultimately Dennis Kelly and the State Theatre of South Australia team, a genuinely felt standing ovation.  

Justine Clarke in Girls and Boys by Dennis Kelly
Photo: Sam Roberts

© Frank McKone, Canberra

Sydney - A Biography by Louis Nowra. Book Review

 

 Sydney, A Biography by Australian writer, playwright, screenwriter and librettist Louis Nowra.  
Published by NewSouth Publishing, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

A pot-pourri of a book: an eclectic collection of pecadillos, full of fascinating anecdotes.  Sydney: born in 1788, still growing up in 2022, with touches of maturity and little sign of premonitions of old age.  Louis Nowra is a playwright: here we read his observations and background research for his characterisation of the protagonist, in late pregnancy named romantically Albion; but pragmatically named at birth, on Gadigal land, after an absent progenitor, Lord Sydney.

And what a complex character Sydney is!  

So what is Sydney really like, when we delve into ‘their’ transgender nature, their motivations and their self-understanding?  Do we find consistency in a sense of personal development – a positive drama; perhaps even a romantic enjoyable comedy?  Or, as many literary commentators say of theatrical characters, do they struggle with unresolvable internal conflicts – often never recognised except by others in sympathy or enmity – which turn their life’s drama into tragedy?

Will the author, like the best of dramatists, avoid pushing his view down our throats, but provide us with scenes strategically put together so that we, the readers, come to a new understanding – perhaps of more than just this character, but even of our own lives?

Here’s one episode, a short scene from one of the 49 chapters.  You will see that Nowra is writing in plain style, without literary flourishes.  Yet his work is all about storytelling and letting each story do its own thing.  This one is in the chapter called Undercurrents, beginning with his creating the TV series about Bondi Beach, The Last Resort.  He writes “The 30-part series wasn’t a success (though it was big in Malaysia), but I learned to like Bondi….[even though] the area became known as Bondi Badlands.”

But Sydney’s beaches have had another side as sites of religious fervour.  In 1924 the Star Amphitheatre opened at Balmoral Beach.  It was constructed by the Order of the Star in the East, founded by the president of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant.  The amphitheatre was intended as a platform for lectures by the mystic Krishnamurti.

At this point I must confess feeling part of Louis Nowra’s Sydney.  A one time girlfriend’s family in Sydney belonged to the Theosophical Society and she left to attend Krishnamurti’s ashram in India in the early 1960s.

An urban legend persists that it was built in order to watch Christ’s second coming, when he would walk through Sydney Heads.  The crumbling amphitheatre was demolished in 1951.

In January 2003 one of Sydney’s most popular beaches, Coogee, a favourite party zone for backpackers, became a site of religious veneration.  One day, a man was looking out of his front window when he suddenly noticed an apparition of the Virgin Mary at the end of a wooden safety fence.  He called his friends to have a look.  By the next day, word had spread, and several hundred people flocked to the park.  Soon the crowds swelled to several thousand a day, especially in the late afternoon when the apparition materialised.  As the Sydney Morning Herald reported:

Some wept, others sang, most prayed.  Scores more hiked up the cliff path 

to touch and kiss the post which had been transformed into something like a shrine.  

Pictures of the Virgin, rosary beads and flowers were piled up around the 

whitewashed fence.  Most agreed they could discern the shape of a veiled figure.

The rational explanation was that the vision was an unlikely combination of the fence’s design and colour, late afternoon shadow, and a small rise that changed the angle at the end of the railing.  Even so, the Catholic Church didn’t know how to react, with the Sydney Archdiocese issuing an anodyne message:’If people are experiencing a sense of peace by being there, then it is a good thing.’  Ten days after the Virgin Mary arrived vandals destroyed the fence where she had appeared, disappointing thousands of believers.  The fence was quickly rebuilt but with a slight alteration to the original design.  Although the Virgin Mary hasn’t returned, a tiny garden has been planted to mark the spot and people still come to pray.

Louis Nowra, a Melbournite, first saw Sydney and was “stunned and speechless” viewing the harbour while driving over the Harbour Bridge in his father’s truck, at the age of nine.  “‘It’s fantastic, isn’t it?’ exclaimed my elated father.”  Only five years before that, I, arriving from London at the age of 14, was equally amazed entering the harbour on the immigrant ship Otranto, through the Heads, tugboats guiding us under the Harbour Bridge to Pyrmont Wharf 13.   

As Nowra turns 72 and I a month later turn 82, his almost 500-page ‘Biography’ of Sydney reveals the fantastic nature not only of what you see, but of the many surprising aspects of the city’s character hidden in history.

In the end, he writes, I turn my attention back to the water.  It is a beguiling sight.  Today the air and the light of the intense blue sky and how it plays with the water seems magical.  It’s like one great act of affirmation, an open heart that invites you to take Sydney personally.  And I do.

And now I do too.  Because now I see, as Nowra quotes the author Peter Corris as saying, that Sydney – Australia, indeed the whole human world – has “its beauty, atmosphere and culture providing a spectacular contrast to its underbelly of poverty, corruption and vulgarity.”  And racism, I would add; though I would call it ‘ethnicism’ since we are all members of the only human race left on Earth.

But la commedia is not quite yet finita.  Is humankind’s a drama of positivity or tragedy?  Sydney says, I think, it might go either way.  



Frank McKone’s reviews of productions of plays by Louis Nowra – The Incorruptible (1996), Summer of the Aliens (1999), Cosi (1998, 2001, 2019, 2021), Radiance (2015) and The Golden Age (2016) – are available at www.ccc-canberracriticscircle.blogspot.com

 

 

 

2022: The Tempest by William Shakespeare

 

 

 

 The Tempest by William Shakespeare.  Sydney Theatre Company at Roslyn Packer Theatre, November 15 – December 21, 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
December 10

Director Kip Williams
Set Designer Jacob Nash
Costume Designer Elizabeth Gadsby
Lighting Designer Nick Schlieper
Composer & Sound Designer Stefan Gregory
Dramaturg Shari Sebbens
Associate Director Jessica Arthur
Fight & Movement Director Nigel Poulton
Associate Fight & Movement Director Tim Dashwood
Intimacy Coordinator Chloë Dallimore
Voice & Text Coach Charmian Gradwell

Cast:
Ariel – Peter Carroll; Antonio – Jason Chong; Sebastian – Chantelle Jamieson
Alonso – Mandy McElhinney; Ferdinand – Shiv Palekar
Prospero – Richard Roxburgh; Miranda – Claude Scott-Mitchell
Caliban – Guy Simon; Stephano – Aaron Tsindos; Gonzalo – Megan Wilding
Trinculo – Susie Youssef
Understudies – Danielle King; Ian Michael; Nicole Milinkovic

Photos – Daniel Boud

Shive Palekar and Claude Scott-Mitchell
as Ferdinand and Miranda
in The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Sydney Theatre Company 2022

 

A 1972 Performance Syndicate production of The Tempest received critical and popular acclaim, being remounted and taken on tour until 1974.  

Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19, 2021 https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cramphorn-rex-roy-15453

Because The Tempest has played a leading role in my working life as a drama teacher, and later as theatre reviewer, I was not as enthusiastic as the rest of the audience seemed to be when the final spotlight faded on Richard Roxborough, standing atop his rock, as Prospero, appealing to us “In this bare island…release me from my bands…With the help of your good hands…[or else] my ending is despair”.

Rex Cramphorn was born on 10th January 1941, one day younger than me and tragically died of AIDs in 1991.  The influence of that 1972 production, taking up the work of Peter Brook and especially Jerzy Grotowski’s “Poor Theatre” approach, was the basis of the group improvisation workshop teaching format which I and, over some 16 years, several colleagues developed, reaching its climax in the 1992 Hawker College Drama course.  Our public performances had begun in 1976 with The Tempest using mime and group sound effects to a narration by Prospero, the students working with a local community group, Melba Players.  The always-present cast encircled Prospero, representing the island, moving into his space for action and out to the edge as scenes required.  The student-designed backdrop showed a huge almost menacing eye watching.

Sydney Theatre Company grew out of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) with Richard Wherrett as first artistic director in 1979.  I attended a professional development workshop with Wherrett, who had worked with Cramphorn in Nimrod Theatre, including a 1977 production of The Duchess of Malfi.   Peter Carroll, playing Ariel wonderfully today, was in that production, while in the year before John Bell had directed A Handful of Friends at Nimrod.

I sat with Bell to watch his Bell Shakespeare production of The Tempest in 2015 (reviewed here August 29, 2015).

Two aspects I found to be missing in Kip Williams’ production, which lost connection with my expectations from this history.  To quote my Bell review:

First: “It was the creation of a spirit world that had inspired me about Cramphorn’s work.  It was a world of philosophic enquiry, where the island became the universe, a place of wonder and mystery….Though Cramphorn (and I) had kept all our actors in the circle on stage throughout, as if there were no other place to be, even for those not active in the scene, Bell used the circle as an ever-changing space into and out of which characters come and go….and the movement exciting and telling: the balance between fantasy and reality, or rather the fact that both exist at one and the same time, is made in the movement design and the capacity of the actors to work as dancers….”

Second: Bell “shows us Miranda as the girl brought up in the wild – she hisses at Caliban with animal ferocity.  Now the hormones of developing sexuality lock her onto the quite proper young man, Ferdinand.” And shows us Caliban  “representing rebellion.  It makes him a genuinely serious threat to Miranda’s safety, which Prospero must defend, while we also realise that Caliban is justified in hating Prospero, in parallel to Ariel’s position – though Ariel is more like an indentured labourer, while Caliban is enslaved.”

In today’s presentation, with the island so dominated by the rock, and the circle established only at the very end by fire, the island becomes not so much a “universe, a place of wonder and mystery” as a place of threat and fear where dancing and our enthusiastic clapping have little effect.

On another hand, today’s Caliban is angry because his ownership of the island is stolen from him, just as in Shakespeare’s play – but Shakespeare’s view is uncompromising.  Those in power will never give the land back.  Caliban (and even the naïve comics Stephano and Trinculo) are chased off with no mercy.  Prospero makes it clear to Ariel: “Let them be hunted soundly.  At this hour / Lies at my mercy all mine enemies.”  There is no Gough Whitlam pouring sand into the hand of Vincent Lingiari.  The best for Caliban finally is to accept Prospero’s pardon – can you believe?

The irony of Prospero’s final appeal to us is lost in this production of The Tempest.  “As you from crimes would pardon’d be,/ Let your indulgence set me free”.  Kip Williams’ Prospero, who gives Caliban his island back, is a romance at best.  Shakespeare knew he wouldn’t, and knows that possession is ten points of the law.  Caliban can have his island only because Prospero has regained his Milan and has no more need of the rock.  Why should we indulge him?  All he wants is for us not to even make him say sorry, despite his crime of invading Caliban’s land; and to praise him for making Caliban think he should “seek for grace”.  Whose grace?  It’s as if he has to say sorry to Prospero.

Maybe if we can get enough of us Prosperos to pass the proposed referendum for the Voice from the Heart, we might prove Shakespeare wrong.

The odd effect of making this The Tempest more of a political play than a philosophical play is that the style or presentation is technically brilliant, in lighting, sound effects, and real flames (which was perhaps how Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre burnt down), but the detail of the words and Shakespeare’s use of language was too often lost.  In the very first storm scene, yelling in fear of the lightning overcame the play between Gonzales, Sebastian, Antonio and the Boatswain, with the Boatswain trying to get the upper class passengers out of the way so he can get on with his job of saving them, if possible.

Prospero’s telling of his story to Miranda became, as she says: “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness”, as a teenager might carry on; but the problem was that I couldn’t follow the story either as it was pumped out at her, rather than being the lengthy (to her interminable) expression of his feelings about what happened.  He tries hard to explain everything to her, as Shakespeare wrote it.  Although she may get bored, we must not be.  But, I’m sorry to say, I was, because I didn’t hear and sense his feelings at each point.

In terms of theatrical effect the production is outstanding for the most part, though I did think the music was sometimes less prominent in the soundscape than it should have been.  But in terms of drama effect – of our emotional responses to what characters were saying and how they were behaving – it was Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban who made it through to me best, until the very end.  The final speech by Prospero, isolated on his rock, with its background rumbling thunder, made it through and, I think, was the effect that made the applause happen – and continue as the cast took to the stage around the rock.

So my feelings about the show as a whole are mixed.  Kip Williams writes “Nature is a pivotal character in any reading of The Tempest, and in our production we have sought to bring this aspect of the text to the very fore.”  As I see it, Nature is the spirit, wonder and mystery, but the text and the subtleties of expression and emotions – the details – of the relationships between the characters have to be to the very fore.

The ring of fire
in The Tempest
Sydney Theatre Company 2022

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2022: The Lost King - movie

 

The Lost King, movie directed by Stephen Frears and written by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, based on the 2013 book The King's Grave: The Search for Richard III by Philippa Langley and Michael Jones.

Produced by Pathé, Baby Cow Productions, BBC Film and Ingenious Media, and distributed by Pathé in France and Switzerland as a standalone distributor, and in the UK via Warner Bros.Pictures. The film premiered in Toronto International Film Festival on 10 September 2022, and was released in the United Kingdom on 7 October 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Media Contact (Sydney): Sue Dayes, Tracey Mair Publicity
Ph: + 61 (0) 404 022 489

Maybe you are not a King Richard III fanatic, unlike the Richard III Society. “We have been working since 1924 to secure a more balanced assessment of the king and to support research into his life and times.”  If you would like to become one, you can join the nearby branch at http://www.richardiii-nsw.org.au/ .

But this movie is the true story, with a fascinating twist (or three) of Philippa Langley’s quest to find the grave of the Plantagenet King Richard III, (2 October 1452 – 22 August 1485) despite the accepted story that after only two years on the throne he was killed and his body thrown into the river near Leicester, after the Battle of Bosworth Field, as the Tudors took over the monarchy.

Even though, just as in Ancient Greek theatre where the audience knew the end, we know that his buried bones were found in 2012, the movie looks as though it might be a tragedy for Philippa.  Twist one is that she, like Shakespeare’s version in The Tragedy of King Richard III, is disabled – emotionally rather than physically – and has to work around and often fight against herself to keep going.  What we see as her obsession, even to the point of hallucinations, becomes her saving grace.

Twist two is that she is a woman facing a world of university men for whom strictly ‘rational’ thinking and putting down  of ‘womanly’ feelings is the norm – however wrong their conclusions are, while hers turn out to be the truth.

And the final twist is in the history, when Queen Elizabeth II – whom we take to be the natural descendant of the Tudors Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I (on the throne when William Shakespeare’s play was published in 1597) – agreed to accept that Richard had been a legitimate king, and deserved royal honours when he was reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015.

So The Lost King is a dramatic mystery play, but directed – in the acting style and in the cutting – with a light touch.  Philippa is an entirely human character, as performed by Sally Hawkins, alongside Steve Coogan as John Langley, committed to her own suburban family, engagingly worrying about what she feels she has to do, and surprising herself as she finds she can deal with powerful people.  

I found myself worrying for her, surprised with her, laughing alongside her, and enormously grateful for what she achieved.  Especially for her debunking so much of the conventional denigration of Richard as King of England.  

I’m a one-time £10 Pom who was brought up by republican socialists and believed in Shakespeare.  Philippa Langley, via Sally Hawkins, and Harry Lloyd as her imaginary King Richard III, in these enjoyable performances have helped me understand that we are all human – only human – no matter our class, our abilities, and disabilities.  

It’s that warmth of feeling that makes the movie The Lost King very well worth viewing.  It opens at Dendy Canberra tomorrow – Friday 9 December 2022.

Sally Hawkins, and Harry Lloyd
in The Lost King
as Philippa Langley and her imaginary King Richard III

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2022: Emilia by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm

 

 

 

Emilia by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm.  Presented by Essential Theatre and Canberra Theatre Centre at The Playhouse, December 1-3 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Opening Night December 2


Creative Team

Playwright: Morgan Lloyd Malcolm (UK)
Director: Petra Kalive; Movement Director: Xanthe Beesley
Set Designer: Emily Collett; Costume Designer: Zoë Roüse
Composer & Sound Designer: Emah Fox/Sharyn Brand
Lighting Designer: Katie Sfetkidis
Production Manager: Rockie Stone; Stage Manager: Olivia Walker
Deputy Stage Manager: Rain Iyahen; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Smith
Co-Producers: Amanda LaBonté, Sophie Lampel, Darylin Ramondo and Sonya Suares Associate
Producer: Trish Carlo

Cast

Emilia 1: Manali Datar; Emilia 2: Cessalee Stovall; Emilia 3: Lisa Maza
William Shakespeare / Man 2: Heidi Arena
Lady Margaret Clifford / Midwife / Man 1: Emma J Hawkins
Lord Alphonso Lanier / Lord Collins / Emilia (Othello) and others: Catherine Glavicic
Margaret Johnson / Mary Sidney / Hester: Carita Farrer Spencer
Judith / Priest / Lord Henry Carey: Genevieve Picot
Lady Cordelia / Lady Anne and others: Jing-Xuan Chan
Susan Bertie The Countess of Kent / Mary Bob: Amanda LaBonté
Lady Katherine / Desdemona (Othello): Sonya Suares
Lord Thomas Howard / Dave / Flora: Sophie Lampel
Eve / Lady Helena: Sarah Fitzgerald

Understudies: NazAree Dickerson and Izabella Yena

_____________________________________________________________________________

Bruce Lehrmann / Retrial won’t proceed after prosecutors drop charges for alleged rape of Brittany Higgins

When I read this headline that night in The Guardian I felt sickened and angry.  

When I read why this woman would not receive justice, my anger was not abated. The ACT director of public prosecutions, Shane Drumgold …. said he still believed "there was a reasonable prospect of conviction at a second trial".

But he said he had to consider the public interest in proceeding, given a retrial would pose a “significant and unacceptable risk to the life of the complainant”. [My emphasis]

“I’ve recently received compelling evidence from two independent medical experts that the ongoing trauma associated with this prosecution represents a significant and unacceptable risk to the life of the complainant.”

Though the evidence made public during the aborted trial could hardly be seen in any light except that though the woman was at the very least mistreated, it is the man who becomes the ‘defendant’ in court as if he is the victim and she the aggressor.  But how else can she get justice except by laying charges?  

And then to have a juror break the jury room rules by introducing material beyond the evidence heard in court!  My anger only grew as I wondered who this juror was and what was their motivation.  Reading more – as the prosecutor says “During the investigation and trial, as a sexual assault complainant, Ms Higgins has faced a level of personal attack that I have not seen in over 20 years of doing this work…. She’s done so with bravery, grace and dignity and it is my hope that this will now stop.” – and I can only feel horrified and even more angry that the law cannot find justice for the woman while all the man has to do is to continue to maintain he is innocent.

So when at the end of Emilia, Lisa Maza as Emilia in her later years expresses her deep anger at the refusal of men to treat women as their equals, with an image of hot anger like the heat in the centre of the earth, I understood what she meant.  She spoke directly to us, asking us did we feel that anger?  The first time just one woman’s voice broke the silence, “Yes”.  When asked again, all the women’s voices filled the Playhouse, “Yes!”  

This is the woman, Emilia Lanier née Aemilia Bassano, described in Essential Theatre’s program: “poet and revolutionist in 1609 and her sisters reaching out to audiences across the centuries with passion, fury, laughter and song as they inspire and unite to celebrate women’s voices through the story of this trailblazing, forgotten woman”.

In this remarkably complex script, intertwining the words of  Emilia with those of William Shakespeare, taking up the possibility that she was his ‘dark lady’ – his inspiration and likely originator of speeches in many of his plays – writer Morgan Lloyd Malcolm stands alongside other women whose works I have mentioned on this blog site: Pat Barker (April 2022) in her two novels about the Trojan War: The Silence of the Girls (Penguin 2018) and The Women of Troy (Penguin 2021) and Maggie O’Farrell (June 2020) in her story of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet (Tinder Press, UK 2020).

The production of Emilia is certainly done with “passion, fury, laughter and song as they inspire and celebrate”, in an amazing array of costumes and a simple but cleverly designed set, with excellent lighting and sound.  The show is exciting to watch, engaging us with the issues in a very modern way in an almost cartoon-like picture of the English court in the time of the Lord Chamberlain’s Players, Shakespeare's theatre company.  Often very funny, yet with times of despair, we are taken through the experiences of this fascinating character Emilia, determined to be a writer from a demanding seven-year-old (Manali Datar) through growing up and maturity against the odds (Cessalee Stovall), to a very justifiably angry older woman (Lisa Maza).

Perhaps you may want to criticise me for writing more detail about the real Bruce Lehrmann case than about the performance on stage, but this is a polemical play.  The truth is that in my threescore years and twenty – older than King Lear – the poems of Emilia Lanier, nor even her existence, have never been brought to my attention.  The silence is the injustice, just as it is for Brittany Higgins.  The headline on the front page of The Canberra Times, December 3, 2022, reads “Higgins in hospital, case dropped”.

But thankfully today we have Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emilia_Lanier and AZ Quotes https://www.azquotes.com/author/69017-Emilia_Lanier  to tell us more.  If Emilia Lanier had no part to play in Kate’s ironic speech to women at the end of The Taming of the Shrew, I would find it hard to believe.  Emilia Lanier wrote

Then let us have our liberty again,
And challenge to yourselves no sovereignty.
You came not in the world without our pain,
Make that a bar against your cruelty;
Your fault being greater, why should you disdain
Our being your equals, free from tyranny?

William Shakespeare’s Kate says, and means it:

My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown.

Morgan Lloyd Malcolm has written Emilia to break 400 years of silence.  So far its run has been at the Playhouse Theatre Arts Centre Melbourne, November 11th to 27th, and now at Canberra Theatre Centre. Commissioned by Shakespeare’s Globe, where it premiered in August 2018, Emilia then transferred to the West End, "becoming the hottest ticket in London". Surely this Australian production must at least tour this country.  The Canberra season is far too short.

And I hope for Brittany Higgins’ full recovery and that she will receive the justice she is due.  

Essential Theatre Company

My suggested follow-up movies: Margrete Queen of the North and She Said.

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2022: New Platform Papers Vol 2 - Currency House

 

From the Heart - The Voice, the Arts and Australian Identity

 
New Platform Papers Vol 2, 28 November 2022: Currency Press, Sydney.
242 pages in pdf format.

General Editor – Julian Meyrick
 
Currency House, Sydney, in association with Griffith University, Queensland.
This volume has been published with the generous support of the University of Sydney, School of Art, Communication and English.

Media Contact: Martin Portus 0401 360 806; mportus2@tpg.com.au

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Arts, Culture and Country
Josephine Caust:  ‘Arts, Culture and Country’
Tyson Yunkaporta:  ‘The Trouble with this Canoe’
Noel Pearson:  ‘J’accuse: Australia’s great crime against the jobless. The
creation and perpetuation of the passive welfare underclass
and the urgent need for a universal job guarantee.’

From the Heart: the imperative for the arts ~ the sector responds
Eddie Synot:  ‘The Meaningful Expression of Indigenous Sovereignty through the Uluru Statement from the Heart’
Sally Scales:  ‘Art, Culture and the Voice’
Rachael Maza:  ‘Re-RIGHT-ing the Narrative’
Liza-Mare Syron and Harriet Parsons:  ‘Power, Culture and the Search for Legitimacy’

Wesley Enoch:  Take Me to Your Leader: the dilemma of cultural leadership (reprinted)

Submission to the Government on the National Cultural Policy
Currency House Board and Editorial Committee

____________________________________________________________________________

If you are keen to know the state of the live on-stage play and all those attached to it, and perhaps of our political future, you might like to begin with this quote from Josephine Caust:

A report by Bill Browne, published by the Australia Institute
in May 2021, calculates that if the Federal Government had
invested $2 billion in the arts and entertainment sector instead
of the construction industry in 2020–21, it would have created
8,593 jobs: twice as many jobs for men and ten times as many
jobs for women. Women represent only 12% of the workforce in
construction, while in arts and entertainment the gender balance
is 49% men and 51% women.

Julian Meyrick explains:
Welcome to Volume 2 of the New Platform Papers with essays by Josephine Caust, Tyson Yunkaporta and Noel Pearson; the keynote speeches of Eddie Synot, Sally Scales and Rachael Maza from this year’s Authors Convention, From the Heart: the Imperative for the Arts; Wesley Enoch’s landmark essay from 2014 Take Me to Your Leader (reprinted); and the Currency House submission to the federal government on the National Cultural Policy consultation.

He continues:
In the National Cultural Policy consultation, the first goal those making submissions were asked to address was drawn from Creative Australia: to ‘recognise, respect and celebrate the centrality of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures to the uniqueness of Australian identity’. It is the view of Currency House that this is not an additional policy goal but rather the gateway through which the vital question of ‘Australianness’ in our arts and culture should be properly understood. In other words, the full and free expression of First Nations culture is a matter that affects us all ….Taken together, [the essays] are a signal indication of the spiritual expansion that is taking place in our ‘national imaginary’ to include and own the real story of this continent, its First Nations and our modern Australian nation.

Josephine Caust goes on:

In early 2020, the ABS revealed that ‘arts and recreation’ had
been the sector hardest hit by the closures in Australia with 94%
affected.  The Grattan Research Institute estimated that up to
26% of Australian workers were likely to lose their jobs due to
lockdowns and restrictions, but in the creative and performing
arts this figure jumped to a whopping 75%.  Yet Coalition politicians
continued to portray the arts as a ‘lifestyle’ choice.

The value of the Currency House Platform Papers, from No 1: ‘Our ABC’: A Dying Culture? in 2004 to this year’s second volume of New Platform Papers, is to be found in the range of issues and experiences that make up that “spiritual expansion” in “our ‘national imaginary’” – and as Caust makes clear – in our concrete reality.

This body of work is all about knowing our past so we may improve our future. Tyson Yunkaporta expands my non-Indigenous understanding of those Australian Bureau of Statistics numbers, when he writes about having trouble with his canoe:

Ours was a give-and-give economy, not give-and-take, as those
who believe in ancient free market instincts of reciprocity like to
tell us. There was no invisible hand entity guiding us, only the
Law of the land. In embassy and trade, we shared this give-and-give
relation across the sea to the north. This relation enriched us,
not with growth, but with increase. Our increase-based economy
measured wealth in the multiplication of connections rather than
the hoarding of resources and credit.

I’m having trouble with this canoe, because it exists now in a
skewed give-and-take economy. It is art now, because there are
layers of abstraction and extraction between the canoe and the
ocean of life it is supposed to travel.

Noel Pearson makes that art as concrete as the destruction of life in:

If leaders are dealers in hope then the unabating problems of
despair in Australia’s remote communities, exemplified by the
recent media concerning Yuendumu [Northern Territory police
officer Zachary Rolfe has appeared for the first time at the
coronial inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker
15 November 2022], leaves the nihilists who say
‘fuck hope’ in commanding authority—because the facts on the
ground support them, rather than those erstwhile leaders like me,
who try to deal in hope. Yuendemu is only the latest instalment
in a decades-long story of despair and long tolerance of misery
and destruction of lives.

The Platform Papers are invaluable for me, this invader, however unwitting and naïve at age 14 in 1955 - a £10 Pom.  The expansion of First Nations culture out of their tens of thousands of years of tradition in song, storytelling, dance and visual arts into creative writing and theatre began for me with the National Black Theatre, established in Sydney’s Redfern in 1972, and in a significant way by Sam Watson, a Wangerriburra and Birri Gubba man, who had blood ties to the Jagara, Kalkadoon and Noonuccal peoples, who wrote the novel The Kadaitcha in 1990.

The family names Maza (Rachael) and Syron (Liza-Mare) link the From the Heart section of this Platform Paper immediately to the National Black Theatre and its development through connections with ABC TV and Nimrod Theatre, the precursor of today’s Belvoir, which through the Balnaves Foundation has put the spotlight on First Nations theatre for many years now.

Wesley Enoch (whose professional development workshop for teachers I attended, probably in the 1980s) has become a legend in himself, not only for the unforgettable The 7 Stages of Grieving (written and performed with Deborah Mailman), but as director of the Sydney Festival 2017 – 2021.

In other words, this volume of essays and speeches is, in bureaucratic speech, a change agent – about the changes in the Australian ‘national imaginary’ that have been and will continue to be under way.  Just so long as, at the political level, the put-downs and mistreatment of the arts as mere ‘life-style’ develop, as I hope they will with this year’s new government, into the cultural necessity which the arts are, for all Australians.

Go to https://www.currency.com.au/books-category/platform-papers/ to purchase hard copies.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2022: That Was Friday by House of Sand

 

 

That Was Friday by House of Sand & Belco Arts.  At Belconnen Arts Centre, Canberra, November 23-26 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 25

Director & Co-Creator – Charley Sanders
Choreographer & Co-Creator – Eliza Sanders
Writer & Co-Creator – Jack Sullivan
Performance Artist & Co-Creator – Amrit Tohari Agamemnoian
Video Designers – Laura Turner & Mario Späte
Lighting Designer – Tony Black
Costume Designer – Monique Bartosh
Company & Stage Manager – Dr Anni Doyle Wawrzyńczak
Associate Video Designers – Susie Henderson & Morgan Moroney

Cast:
Actor, Eliza – Enya Daly; Dancer & Videographer – Alec Katsourakis
Dancer – Billy Keohavong; Actor, Jack – Lachlan Martin
Dancer – Ryan Douglas Stone; Dancer – Jareen Wee; Dancer – Ella Williams
Actor, Mum & others – Sara Zwangobani

_________________________________________________________________

Since I found most of what I was watching and hearing, on stage and on video, was incomprehensible, I can only tell you what it was supposed to be about by quoting the published program, which begins with the first spoken words:

Hey dickhead, pick up yer phone.  Mum’s dead.

“ We are shaped by the people closest to us.  Our blood family, our chosen family.  What happens when those connections become strained?  A mother desperately tries to keep her family together.  A son discovers the blinding force of love.  A daughter grapples with a life-altering surprise.  An artist lives in exile, their identity a crime in their homeland.  Through both autobiographical and fictional narrative, each asks the same question: how do we honour our past, while appreciating who we have become?”

Darkly humorous, joyful, and visually stunning, That Was Friday will take your heart and squeeze it.

My heart wasn’t squeezed, but my brain was twisted, trying to work out whether there was any point in keeping on watching.  After Part 1 Family (the dickhead with the phone appeared to be one member); a literally three-minute break (had the equipment broken down for real? – I couldn’t tell, but apparently not because the Short Break appears in the program); Part 2 Society, which at least had an Armenian history (the massacre of millions) and a person going through sexual transition, where discrimination and fear of genocide were real issues; and, after a standard interval, back in Part 3 to Beginnings – apparently about the two years of this ‘project’ up to when somebody said they couldn’t continue with it.

This apparently happened at the time when Part 2 ended.  So Part 3 was about what didn’t happen to get completed.

By the end of  Part 3, though, I at least understood that the ‘Mum’ of the first quote had fallen off her excercise bike and died.  I also began to gather that because everybody on earth is different, and no-one can really understand anyone else, since they haven’t had the same life experience; and that no-one can really even understand themselves and be sure of what it means to say ‘I am …..what my past says I am / what I have become’; then I may as well conclude that watching for two and a half hours (including interval) was really pointless.

So the best I can say is that this project is just a company doing art for art’s sake, claiming in their program that by “Layering dance, theatre and video, this ground-breaking new work fills the gaps between these art forms to create something entirely new”.  Well, the dance was largely what my family call ‘writhing’; the theatre entirely lacked any drama; the video was big and unavoidable (which meant my attention was often taken away from the ubiquitous dancing).

And now I’m even unsure what ‘ground-breaking’ means any more.  It seems to be a House of Sand indeed.

But don’t let my opinion hold you back.  Go make your own judgement.

That Was Friday - House of Sand at Belco Arts
Photo: Lorna Sim

 

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2022: The Torrents by Oriel Gray

 

Lexi Sekuless as J.G.Milford in “The Torrents”.
Canberra CityNews - Photo: Tim Ngo

 The Torrents by Oriel Gray.  Presented by Lexi Sekuless Productions at The Mill Theatre, Canberra, November 23 – December 3 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 24

Director – Lexi Sekuless; Designer – Victoria ‘Fi’ Hopkins
Movement Direction – Netty Sharpe and Tim Sekuless
Musical Arrangements – Leisa Keen
Voice and Acting Coach – Sarah Carroll
Production Stage Manager – Zeke Chalmers
Mentors – Julian Meyrick and Wendy Strehlow
Sound Production – Andrew Brown; Lighting Designer – Stefan Wronski
Prop Design – Tracy Cui
Front of House – Katrina Williams, Branka Gajic, Fiona Wade

Cast:
Christy and Stuwell – Helen McFarlane; Bernie and Squires – Bronte Batham
Jock and Twimple – Elaine Noon; Gwynne Thomas – Jasmin Shojai
Kingsley Myers – Stefanie Lekkas; Rufus Torrent – Rachel Howard
Ben Torrent - Kat Smalley; J. G. Milford – Lexi Sekuless
John Manson – Heidi Silberman

_____________________________________________________________________

Theatre is all about style and the intentions of both the playwright and the director.  A director in today’s world may create a show in a way that the writer, long ago, could never have imagined.  Yet, a production should be in tune with the author’s purpose.  I think in this production of The Torrents the style is a mismatch, despite the director’s good intentions.

The good intention was to use the play to emphasise Oriel Gray’s purpose, in writing – in the 1950s as a Communist – about the right for women to have equal status with men.  There is an irony in the fact that Gray’s play employs only two women actors in a cast of twelve.  To employ women today to play all the male as well as the female characters makes sense.  To use as a theme Madonna’s song about being a ‘material’ girl in a ‘material’ world is a device which makes the feminist point.

The women’s singing, marking the scene changes, was genuinely beautiful – along with the amusing dance sequences – but, writing inevitably as a male theatre critic, I feel I may be on some shaky ground when I say the style of performing the play too much as a shouting match undermined an important part of Oriel Gray’s script.  We lost, not only often the detail of the words, but the sensitivity Oriel showed in the men characters’ development of understanding.

The important example, though the writing is often amusing, is that Rufus Torrent’s gradual recognition of J. G. (Jenny) Milford’s human quality and intellectual strength, and his coming to understand the value of his son – and his realising the importance of Kingsley’s water supply plan – is the key to appreciating Gray’s purpose.  She set the play in the previous century, at the time in real history when the idea of the ‘New Woman’ became established.  Her Jenny Milford is not a star-performing material girl, but a sensitive woman who we can believe in as she shows her capacity to help the men – the young Bernie and Ben – and finally even the boss Rufus, to understand themselves.  And, in doing so, she realises that she and Rufus are a pair, on a level of equal status.  

For me, then, when in this production Jenny rushes off in a teenage kind of excitement to go to Rufus as the play ends, as the shouting style comedy required, Oriel Gray would have shaken her head.  Her J. G. Milford, despite doubts about herself at some points, is now in charge, on an equal basis with Rufus because they both have come to understand themselves and each other.  This is the point of the play, growing out of the comedy and male competition, which this production missed.  

The other character of great concern for Oriel Gray is Kingsley Myers, the designer of the water supply scheme who is treated abominably by the men with the money.  In real history the model for his character was Charles O’Connor, whose 530-kilometre-long pipeline Eastern Goldfields Water Supply Scheme in Western Australia was finally completed, but only after his death, by suicide.  Though Gray did not take his story to its final conclusion, in the style of this production he is presented in a quite superficial way, rather than developing the depth of personal despair which Gray intended.

So my conclusion is that though I could see an interesting and worthwhile idea behind this production of The Torrents, and enjoyed the singing, and some of the comedy roles such as Helen McFarlane’s Christy as well as the straight presentation of the other woman, Gwynne, by Jasmin Shojai, I couldn’t enjoy the show overall because the style didn’t suit the play’s setting in its time and place in Australian history, nor the characters’ development as Oriel Gray intended in this play which in 1955 was joint winner of the Playwrights' Advisory Board Competition with Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler.

Oriel Gray
(Doolee.com)

 

 © Frank McKone, Canberra