The Perf

The Bougainville Photoplay Project

2010-11-17T12:34:00.001+11:00

When I first saw The Bougainville Photoplay Project at the Olf Fitz last year, I was blown away. I expect to like version 1.0 (which I learnt recently is spelt with a non-captialised vshows, but they always manage to surprise me. I wrote a bit about it for this blog at the time which you can find here (in the same post I damned Streetcar… controversy-monger that I am). When it was announced that Belvoir were presenting the show for another season, I was pretty stoked. Firstly, it was another chance to see one of my favourite pieces of theatre and secondly it meant a chance for my friends who had missed out previously to see the show. I had one concern, and that was the size of the venue. Part of the show’s charm was its personal nature and I was worried that in a bigger venue the personal connection between Paul Dwyer (performer and writer) might be lost. In hindsight, this was a fear fuelled by ignorance. The show has been touring at various times for three years now and has been performed in a variety of venues of differing sizes. Never mind the fact that in Dwyer’s role as a university professor he has no doubt lectured to similarly large rooms. The show worked beautifully in the upstairs space, and both the laughter and the weighted silences stretched from the front row right up the back.

In my very short review of the Old Fitz incarnation, I focused on the content of the show and I imagine that most other reviews have done so. The issues are fascinating after all, from Dwyer’s personal recollections, to the stories of his father, to the horrific facts about Australia’s recent colonial past, you can’t leave unaffected. However, I feel that something that often gets overlooked is the construction of the piece, which is nigh on perfect. Hence, that’s what I’ll be devoting this reflection of the Belvoir production to. (If you’re after a simple judgement “should I see this or not?” sort of review, the answer is yes you should).

As good a place to start as any is the vision which handled by version 1.0’s regular video artist Sean Bacon. Whenever I have to write about his work I always come up with the word “measured.” I’m sure I’ve written about this before but video in theatre is very easily overdone. It’s often horribly integrated and distracting and rarely creatively useful. More often than not I feel like it’s there for the sake of having technology in the project. This is not the case with version 1.0 shows however, and that is because of Sean Bacon. He always finds the perfect balance between intrusion and insignificance, hence I think of his work as perfectly measured. In this project his role is relatively simple (certainly compared to the last project he undertook at Belvoir, Bendedict Andrews’ Measure For Measure) and often he is simply showing pictures or video at the request of Dwyer. But there are moments when he has a little bit more freedom, when he reminds of images we have previously scene, or carefully scrolls through particularly evocative pictures that we realise Bacon is more in control than we realise.

This brings me to the images that are shown. At first the photos and close-ups of documents seem simply expository, however as the play continues there are some important parallels that are drawn. The most telling of these are the two sets of images that Dwyer feels the need to warn the audience about, the process photos of his father’s surgical work and the images of the aftermath of a massacre at a church in southern Bougainville. Both are photos that involve blood and the stark reality of our anatomy. What is particularly telling to me is that the surgical photos are perhaps more gruesome than the photos of those injured and killed in the violence. Images of violence abound on our televisions, cinema screens and newspapers. Yet the reality of life-changing surgery, the blood, the holding of skin, the implements used, these are the images we are not accustomed to. However, it is by far the photos of violence that are more affecting. When the images of surgery are shown, the audiences allows themselves many sounds, a few groans, squeals and even laughter at the excessive redness of the image. When we are shown a picture of man who no longer has a head due to an explosion, the room is completely silent, as the weight of the moment rests of every single person.

Another part of the show’s construction that I find fascinating is all the “things” involved. I suppose you might call them props, but as more often than not the objects are relics of Dwyer’s childhood I find it hard to think of them merely as props, yet I suppose that is what they are in this context. The first two props we are drawn to are those that Dwyer enters with, a human spine and a briefcase. This serves several purposes. It introduces Dwyer as an academic, who else would be walking around with a spine and a briefcase? It also serves a practical purpose, with the briefcase containing a slide projector which is used later in the show. The briefcase also inspires images of travel, whilst the spine introduces us to one of the play’s other key themes, the work of Dwyer’s father, although we are yet to realise this. The spine is never mentioned again, but its presence serves as a symbol of the biology beneath our skin that binds us together as humans. Other props of note include an authentic set of vertebrae which Dwyer performs an operation on, a noticeboard full of maps and newspaper clippings ranging in subject matter from Dwyer’s father to the Bougainville Crisis and a table which serves a variety of purpose including briefly that of a hospital bed. What I love about all these items is that they are never removed from their place. No attempt is ever made to clean the space after a prop has served its purpose. Instead by the end of the play the objects in the space serve as the landscape of the hour and half journey the audience has just travelled. Perhaps I am pushing this too far, but it became for me a perfect mirror of the events of the play. Just as the props stay on stage as reminders of past action, the open-cut mine, the battle scars and the life-changing orthopaedic work of Dwyer’s father remain in Bougainville, as reminders of past battles and bravery.

The work done by both David Williams and Dwyer in the meshing of the stories and the pacing of the work is also superb. The way the personal stories of Dwyer and his family are used to draw you into the work before the political implications of the story are raised is classic version 1.0 and you can see why the company has made a name for themselves discussing these sorts of issues. The ebb and flow between exposition, humorous anecdotes and tragic events is beautifully managed so that one is never left feeling like they’re being bombarded. The fact that despite the show’s somewhat lecture type feel, the more theatrical moments such as the room going dark whilst Dwyer recounts a journey by torchlight, do not feel out of place is a testament to the show’s skilful construction. Pacing is another area that has clearly been paid a lot of attention to. There are times when Dwyer is veritably flying through the material, particularly when creating the nervous mood of the unsure traveller, and others when the audience clearly needs more time to comprehend the material. The final build is particularly skilful, with the audience in darkness, the mood of fear and eventual relief that is created is positively palpable.

It is due to all these beautifully crafted measures that Dwyer’s stories, and the moving content of the work is so affecting. This is not the sort of show you want to miss.

- Simon

Apologies, The Trial & Namatjira

2010-10-27T20:45:00.000+11:00

It seems that more than not when I post something on this blog, it starts with an apology for a lack of updates. Sorry about that, maybe I should just stop promising these things! Unfortunately for you readers, it’s been a very busy few weeks, between the Sydney Fringe Festival, This Is Not Art Festival (which you should definitely check out the results of at Applespiel's blog - you can download the show we did... awesome. http://applespiel.wordpress.com/), and just a general amount of crazy things happening in our personal lives, that things have been put on the back burner here at The Perf.

What I offer to make up for it is a quick wrap of a couple of shows that I’ve seen lately. I might get around to doing a closer analysis of other seasons as well as post my long-awaited opinions on the Belvoir Downstairs changes, but I guess I have to start learning to make fewer promises.

The Trial – STC

Let’s put it out there – I’ve been excited about this production since it was announced last year. More Ewen Leslie in my life can only be a good thing. When the production rolled around however, I realised that there was even more amazing acting to be had with a fantastic ensemble of John Gaden, Peter Houghton, Rita Kalnejais, Belinda McClory, Hamish Michael and Igor Sas. I mean, they’re all stars in their own right really, so it was pretty exciting to have them all together, and this was really what I took away from the production. I thought the production was strong, and vividly created the increasingly maddening world of Joseph K. Unfortunately it dragged and there were definitely times when I dropped out of it and started thinking about other things. However, the further I get away from the show, the more I simply remember the fantastic performances and intelligent stage design. The final stage trick, whereby what was previously thought to be a backstage area was revealed through a dropping of curtains to create an almost cathedral like feel in what is not one of Sydney’s most giant theatres, was quite an achievement and more than brought me back into the world of the play. I left impressed. From what I hear though, others did not, let me know why!

Namatjira - Belvoir

This show made me feels some things very strongly. The strongest of which was a sense of absolute regret for not seeing Ngapartji Ngapartji. It must have been a phenomenal show. Trevor Jamieson is amazing. He is amazing physically, he is an amazing storyteller, he has amazing comic timing and he is amazingly honest. What this translates to is an incredibly engaging performance. For the two hours of the show you are absolutely in his hand, following along as he recreates the story of Albert Namatjira, Australia’s first Aboriginal citizen, and one of our country’s finest painters. The content, which Scott Rankin has done an amazing job of synthesizing, is absolutely astounding and depressing at the same time. All the things that you go into the show expecting will make you happy turn out to be sad. The fact that was the first Aboriginal citizen is countered by the fact that this was simply allowed so that the government could tax him, and it also placed him between a rock and bottle shop in his community, where his newfound ability to buy alcohol (a privilege only extended to citizens) made him a lackey to the many people who saw him as their uncle. His meeting with the Queen is countered by a radio report of his visit to Taronga Zoo which describes how the other animals got very excited at having a creature that was closer to them in their midst. The fact that his artworks at one point epitomised the height of Australian art culture is obscured by his inability to buy land that would allow him to support his community. In fact all of his achievements are left marred by the revelation that despite all his fame he died poor, and unhappy. It is these paradoxes of his life that Rankin has so effectively highlighted and Jamieson masterfully brings out, putting forward a few paradoxes of his own. One particularly memorable moment was when Jamieson explains that Aboriginal practice of leaving behind elders who have grown incapable of keeping up with the tribe. He doesn’t pass judgement on the practice, but instead turns the moral question onto the audience asking, “Would you take them in? Surely, if an old Aboriginal person knocked on your door asking for help at 2am you’d welcome them into your home.” However, Jamieson’s perfect manner of audience interaction is impossible to adequately describe here, instead, I just recommend you get along to this show in its final weeks if you haven’t already.

It would also be remiss of me to not to mention Derek Lynch, who does a superb job of playing all the characters around Jamieson. His turn as the queen is particularly memorable, and it gave me an odd jolt of patriotism knowing that I live in a country where an Aboriginal man can portray our female head of state with no more recourse than hysterical laughter from the audience.

Perhaps even more exciting than the show itself however, is the community project around it. Check out the details RIGHT HERE.

Hope that’s enough to keep you interested for a while. Hopefully have more for you soon.

Oh, and Applespiel have a show tomorrow night, it’s free, in Sydney, and a whole lot of fun. Check out the details here:http://www.performancespace.com.au/?p=4904 We're very excited to be presented by Performance Space.

Hope all is well!

Simon

Tis The Season... (Belvoir Season Wrap-Up)

2010-09-21T20:49:00.000+10:00

It’s that time of year! Theatre season time. Pretty much everybody in Sydney has now announced what’s going on in their 2011 seasons and isn’t it all very exciting? I know I’m a bit late to this particular party but there’s the small matter of the Sydney Fringe festival which has been taking up a significant amount of my time, (*Cough* Come see Appleloft please *Cough*). I’m going to start with Belvoir and hopefully work through the other major players in the coming days. So with further ado…

I was trying to think of a cleverer superlative here but I’m just going to say the first thing that came to mind… holy crap on a stick! The new Belvoir season is phenomenal. Aside from the not so small matter of the changes to the Downstairs theatre set-up (which I intend to devote a whole post to some time soon) I could not really be more pleased with the offering Ralph Myers has thrown up in his debut season. It’s a such a strong start you’ve got to wonder whether he’ll ever be able to follow it! Let’s go through the plays one by one.

THE WILD DUCK
12 February – 27 March
Written and Directed by: Simon Stone (after Henrik Ibsen)
With: John Gaden, Anita Hegh, Ewen Leslie, Eloise Mignon, Toby Schmitz

From the moment the picture of Toby Schmitz and Ewen Leslie came up on the screen, I knew we were off to a good start, I just didn’t know how good. Simon Stone and the Hayloft Project have made a name for themselves with their investigations of classic texts. If you feel the need to reacquaint yourself, head back to our review of the Only Child from last year. The man has done some solid work, and if we only lived in Melbourne we would have seen even more of it. Now he’s the resident director at Belvoir and his first play in the role is set to be a solid start. Now I can’t say I’ve read the play, nor am I a huge Ibsen fanboy or anything, but what excites me about this play is the cast. THE CAST. Seriously, if I was asked to list my favourite actors write now, it would read Ewen Leslie, Anita Hegh, Toby Schmitz (the order would change depending on the day). Add to that, the ever reliable John Gaden (who is currently tearing it up in The Trial) and Eloise Mignon, who is better known to Sydney audiences for her TV work, but who we’ll soon get a glimpse of in STC’s The Grenade later this year, and one can only assume that this show is going to be golden. It would take some dramatic self-sabotage for this project to turn sour with such good ingredients. I’m pretty freakin’ excited about this one.

JACK CHARLES V THE CROWN
An Ilbijerri Theatre Company Production
30 March – 17 April
By: Jack Charles and John Romeril
Directed by: Rachel Maza-Long
With: Jack Charles

Autobiography shows are something I have always found intriguing. Whether it’s William Yang, or it’s The Bouganville Photoplay Project (soon to be seen at upstairs Belvoir), there is something incredibly powerful about having someone tell you a personal story, offering insights only they, the protagonist, can give. One can only imagine that with a life as vibrant as Jack Charles’, this format will be all the more rewarding. This is also the first play in the season to show that Belvoir don’t intend to be criticised again for a lake of female directors on their stages.

CUT (Downstairs)
7 April – 1 May
By: Duncan Graham
Director: Sarah John
With: Anita Hegh

The creative team of Sarah John and Duncan Graham were last seen at downstairs Belvoir in April last year with Ollie & The Minotaur. That show was memorable, not least of all for its all female cast, but also for it’s moving script and tight performances. Now the Adelaide crew will have another chance to impress us with their new show Cut. Rather than the gritty naturalism of Ollie, this show is described as a “theatrical riddle” that walked the line between fantasy and reality. It’s great to see Myers pulling in great artists from out of state, and as I’m sure you’ve already gathered, I’m pretty happy with the casting as well.

THE BUSINESS
23 April – 29 May
Based on: Vassa Zheleznova by Maxim Gorky
Adapted by: Jonathan Gavin with Cristabel Sved
Directed by: Cristabel Sved
With: Russell Kiefel, Sarah Peirse

This is one of the projects I’m not quite as sold on. Relocating a play based in early 20th Century Russia to Australia in the eighties is always going to be a dangerous move. But that is perhaps what makes it exciting. Gorky’s reputation precedes him, and for anyone who saw Gethsemane last year, which I hope most of you did (see the archives for my thoughts) you’ll be aware that Sarah Peirse is an amazing actor to watch. She dominated the ensemble cast in David Hare’s play and I can only imagine that she will bring just as much gusto to this new project.

THE KISS (Downstairs)
12 May – 5 June
By: Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, Peter Goldsworthy and Guy De Maupassant
Director: Susanna Dowling
With: Danielle Cormack, Catherine Davies, Yalin Ozucelik, Steve Rodgers

This is without doubt the bravest of the season’s offerings. Dowling spoke at the launch about how this project, where four short stories with the common name “The Kiss” are retold word for word, was partially inspired by Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz. I was not able to see this show, but from what I’ve heard, which you can see for yourself by reading Mark’s review from last year, what began as an exciting experiment dissolved into hours of tedium. This is however a quite different prospect, calling on the work of four authors, and what I imagine will be a slightly different setting. The goal here I assume is to reacquaint ourselves with the power of the written word, and with yet another strong cast (I suppose you do expect that from main stage companies) one has to hope it will come off. For more info on the director’s previous work, check out my review of Yellow Moon from only a few weeks ago.

(Hilarious photo)

THE SEAGULL
4 June – 17 July
By: Anton Chekhov
Director: Benedict Andrews
With: Emily Barclay, Gareth Davies, Judy Davis, Maeve Dermody, John Gaden

It’s truly odd that considering the fact that for all writers at the Perf (past and present) Benedict Andrews constitutes one of our favourite directors, that only one of his shows (The City) has ever been written about here. Well, just to get you up to speed, we’re all pretty big fans, and so the prospect of Andrews taking on Chekhov’s classic with such masterful actors at his disposal is a pretty exhilarating one. There’s not really much else to say. Oh, this play does mark the first, but certainly not last, appearance of another of our favourites, Gareth Davies, in the season.

NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH
23 July – 28 August
By: Lally Katz
Director: Simon Stone
With: Charlie Garber, Heather Mitchell, Robyn Nevin

Lally Katz, why aren’t you brought to Sydney more often? Who knows, but let’s just be happy for the ones we get! This play, which Katz wrote specifically for Nevin, is set to be hilarious, and as with all things hilarious, it will be great to have Charlie Garber along for the ride. Simon Stone wins again, getting to direct one our finest actors in a role that is set to stick in the memory for a long time to come.

WINDMILL BABY (Downstairs)
28 July – 21 August
By: David Milroy
Director: Kylie Farmer
With: Roxanne McDonald

Continuing the drawing in of talent from all over Australia, this project comes from Perth-based playwright David Milroy, whose new script has already been seen and read all over the world, from Paris to Ireland. Somehow, Sydney has always been left out, but Belvoir are jumping in to fix that. Along with Jack Charles vs The Crown, this show reaffirms Belvoir’s commitment to supporting Indigenous stories on Australia’s main stages, and considering the play has already won the 2004 Patrick White Award and the 2005 Equity Guild Award, I think we’ll all be better for it.

HUMAN INTEREST STORY
A Lucy Guerin Inc. and Malthouse Melbourne Production in association with Perth International Arts Festival
31 August – 18 September
Choreographer: Lucy Guerin
With: Stephanie Lake, Alisdair MacIndoe, Talitha Maslin, Harriet Ritchie, Stuart Shugg, Jessica Wong
Hold your hourse, what’s this? Cross-artform programming at Belvoir? This is a new age indeed! Perhaps that like the theatre that this work premiered at (Malthouse) Belvoir is going to become a place for more broader sort of theatrical experimentation. By all accounts this show should be pretty phenomenal, an exploration of the bombardment of media in our society, and again shows that this season is set to be one of the most varied Belvoir seasons yet.

AND THEY CALLED HIM MR GLAMOUR (Downstairs)
A co-production with The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm
15 September – 9 October
By: Gareth Davies
Director: Thomas Wright
With: Gareth Davies

If there is one show in the season that I am perhaps more exciting about than the Wild Duck it is this show. I have been reading reviews of Black Lung shows for years now and could not be more excited for them to finally come to Sydney. Gareth’s second entry in the season is a one-man plea for respect. I only hope that this production is chaotic as all the descriptions I’ve read of other Black Lung shows. If what I’ve read and heard is true, we are sure to leave this performance truly affected.

SUMMER OF THE SEVENTEENTH DOLL
24 September – 13 November
By: Ray Lawler
Director: Neil Armfield
With: Robin Nevin, Yael Stone, Helen Thomson, Dan Wyllie

As far as texts go, this is the play I’m least anticipating. The HSC has a way of draining the life out of many things and this play is one of its victims. However, the fact that Neil Armfield, who is barely out the door, is at the helm gives me hope. To quote one of my previous reviews “I’m yet to see an Armfield show I dislike”, and with a cast this strong I doubt I’ll change that opinion. Particularly happy to see Yael Stone working with Armfield again after her brilliant turn in Scorched two years ago.

THE DARK ROOM (Downstairs)
3 – 27 November
By: Angela Betzien
Director: Leticia Caceres
With: Brendan Cowell

Bringing the tally to five out of eight of Australia’s states and territories represented in the season, this new work from the founders of Queensland theatre company Real TV sounds fascinating. Billed a work of great emotional complexity yet theatrical simplicity, my interest has certainly been piqued, not least of all because of the casting of Bredan Cowell, who let’s face it, was totally awesome in SBS cult series Life Support.

AS YOU LIKE IT
19 November – 24 December
By: William Shakespeare
Director: Eamon Flack
With: Alison Bell, Gareth Davies, Charlie Garber, Shelly Lauman

I think I’ve gushed enough already, so all I will say about this last show is that you should go and read my review of the Flack’s Midsummer from December last year, and you’ll know why I’m keen for this new Shakespearian outing. The show completes Gareth Davies acting residency at the theatre this year, one assumes that he will have set up some sort of tent in the rehearsal room by this point.

All in all, I think Myers has delivered a season that answers all the critics. If you want more new Australian plays on our stages, they’re there. If you love the classics, they’re there. If you want more female directors at Belvoir, they’re there. There's even some dance just to mix things up. If you read this blog you’re probably aware I have a pretty strong pro-Belvoir bias, the humanity of the plays offered gets to me pretty much every time, but even I was stunned by quality of the works on offer next year. It’s diverse, drawing on artists from all over the country, and there is not one play that I don’t want to see. Let’s hope they deliver on the hype (that I am creating for myself). If you’re still reading, thanks for putting up with my gushing.

- Simon

The Helpmanns and helping ourselves.

2010-09-12T12:39:00.001+10:00

What’s that? There was a big theatre awards ceremony this week? Surely as a blog that presents itself as a place for theatre commentary, “The Perf” should be writing about it (I hear you say). Well guess what, we are! Sort of.

First off, I know most theatre commentators have already discussed this topic, but I feel the need to get something off my chest…

Things that make me happy: The ABC news covering a live performance awards night - did not expect that.

Things that make me unhappy: Half of that coverage being “OMG I can’t BELEEV CATE BLACNHET wasn’t EVEN NOMINANTED>>>>WTFBBQ”. (They seriously talked like that. I could tell they were making spelling mistakes from their tone).

I expect this crap from News Corp, but seriously ABC, if you’re going to cover the thing, which like I said, I was excited you did, then cover the event! Not a meaningless story that was created by the media as an excuse to talk about Cate Blanchett. (I feel I should at this point clarify that I am a massive Cate fan. She is an incredible actor and deserves to be discussed in the media, just not in this ridiculous context). Props on the interview with Ewen Leslie though.

Other than that I really don’t have that much to say about the Helpmanns. There were no big surprises for me, and as I said when the nominations were announced, the most frustrating thing for me is the constant reminder that I missed MTC’s Richard III. Sydney Festival planners, if you’re reading, please bring Richard III to this year’s Sydney Festival. The winner I was most excited about was Version 1.0 who won Best Visual or Physical Theatre Production for their show “This Kind Of Ruckus”. If you read this blog at all last year you’ll know that we’re kind of big fans. Hopefully they will now be commissioned to create new works at all the major theatres. I was also happy that Ewen Leslie won, because I’m also a fan of him (looking forward to The Trial), and that Neil Armfield is as well received in the opera world as he is in the theatre world.

In other exciting theatre news the Sydney Fringe Festival has begun! This is very exciting for a few reasons namely, the three project that we here at the Perf are involved in:

Appleloft
Nathan and myself are in this one! It’s going to be an awesome night of baked goods and short performance works culminating in a festive dance. Good times will be had.

Zetland

Rip Whitening’s Synchrodestiny Experience
These two are Jenni’s festival babies. The first she assistant directed, and she has produced both of them. Very exciting times for every so please get along to them. In case you haven’t realised, the titles are links to the Fringe page which has times, dates and ticket details.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this short bit of self-promotion. You should be getting a review of the Trial sometime next week, so keep checking back for that. Also, there’ll be more self-promotion in a couple of weeks as Applespiel heads to the This Is Not Art in Newcastle straight after the Fringe. Stay with us.

- Simon

Yellow Moon - B Sharp

2010-09-06T16:29:00.001+10:00

It’s funny the way by pure accident shows with similar themes can end up being on at the same time. In some cases it even happens that the same show ends up being done within a short period of each other. In my first year of uni, I think there were three Virginia Woolfs going on in Australia at the same time. In my second year, it seemed as if the broader theatre scene was looking to our university for inspiration, as just after we did productions of Titus and Antigone, Bell Shakespeare and Belvoir followed suit. This year, it seems that after however many years of absence there are not one, not two, but THREE Howard Barker plays happening in the region (again, two of them are UOW productions). Now, after only having seen Tusk Tusk at the Wharf a couple of weeks ago, I found myself at another play about teenagers. Oh and the same play was JUST performed in Perth.

Apart from the main characters being troubled youths however, there isn’t much else that ties the two plays together. Whereas Polly Stenham is interested in the failure of middle-class families, David Greig’s poetic play is about a couple of individuals with very different backgrounds. “Stag” Lee (John Shrimpton) comes from a troubled family. With a depressed mother, an uninterested would be stepfather, and no biological father in sight, he is pretty much left to his own devices. This leads to many an altercation with the police and family services. All you need to know about Lee is that he never takes of his hat. It’s embroidered with an image of a proud male deer which as well as looking like an advertisement for a low-carb Toohey’s product, is also where young Lee he gets his nickname. Silent Leila on the other hand is the daughter of migrants, we think, she does after all dress a bit like a Muslim. No one is really sure, all they know is that she never talks. The two are brought together by coincidence, and bound together by crisis. Then follows a relatively standard coming of age story complete with a near-death experience, a hard-working montage, and a shocking revelation.

Told through narration, the play is essentially four actors in a room telling you Leila and Lee’s story, although there are clear characters throughout, there are times when it is actors describing action rather than actors playing actions. This allows a certain freedom of character, with the two older cast members moving fluidly in and out of the various adult roles that have an impact on the lives of the two young protagonists. This narrative style means that the language holds a lot of power in the text. Action is not always necessary for it is often perfectly described with language and to try and represent it would only take away from that description. However, there is always a balance that has to be struck between the narration and the acting to ensure that emotional investment is kept and Greig’s text finds this balance pretty well throughout the play, although there are times when you wonder why you’re being told things rather than just shown them. But it does offer its own beautiful moments where the characters take control of how they are depicted.

Originally written for a youth theatre company, there is a certain immaturity that remains in this script, which is at times tiresome, but also works to the advantage of the main roles. So often when scripts are written for teenagers by adults, the teenagers are either wise beyond their years, or caricatures of teenage angst. Here however, I found them quite realistic. Sure, they are extremes of teenage behaviour that are explored, but they also hit the nerve right on the head with a lot of the little details, starting with Lee’s refusal to take off his hat (the amount of fights that people got into in high school over people stealing their hats was ridiculous).

The cast is quite strong with the two young leads in Estasy and Shrimpton finding a beautiful chemistry together, brewing with hormonal desire. Their older counterparts in Danielle Cormack (who I can’t help but mention used to be in Xena) and Kenneth Moraleda bring an equally playful energy to the small stage.

The most exciting aspect of this production which I probably should have mentioned by now is the physical language that the creative team have brought to the work. Much talked about in the promotional material, but not overbearing at all in the final work, director Susanna Dowling and choreographer Johanna Puglisi have worked with a soundtrack by sound designer Ekrem Mulayim to bring a dance-like physical fluidity to the work. The result is some beautiful illuminations of the poetic text. I found that this attempt to physicalise the subtext of the work was particularly effective for Leila’s character. Given that she is such a reserved presence, there was more to learn about her through this process. When Estasy and Cormack work together this technique is especially beautiful. This physical approach was best used when it was at its most removed from plot points. Occasionally it was used to simply indicate action or place and this was when it sometimes proved unnecessary. However, overall, I was delighted by the subtle investigations into the text which the movement highlighted.

Oh wow, I just remembered that I forgot to mention that there is regular A-Ha referencing in this play. A definite positive. Kenneth Moraleda's heatfelt rendition of "Take On Me" was truly a highlight.

- Simon

Gwen In Purgatory - Belvoir

2010-08-24T10:14:00.002+10:00

I am not normally the sort of person to complain about a lack of “Australian stories” on theatre stages. I have a certain amount of belief in the universality of the human race and don’t really care where a play is written or who it is written for as long as it’s good. I’m much more critical of television in this respect, and get really excited whenever home grown shows do well – I was over the moon the other day when I found out that Gruen Nation won the ratings for Wednesday. I think this differing standard is due to the fact that television has a larger audience and stands to affect our culture more dramatically. Anyway, this is getting off topic. The point is that I don’t give plays extra brownie points for being written by Australian playwrights. I think this is perhaps also related to the writing I normally like which is generally more international issue based than local problem based. However, in the case of Gwen In Purgatory, I felt a definite sense of pride that it was written by an Australian for an Australian audience.

If I’m honest with myself, there is one big reason for this – the play is set less than an hour away from my hometown of Goulburn and Goulburn even warrants a mention in the play (even if it is only for our gaol). I’m sure for people who live in New York or London it would be exhausting to get excited about every new film or TV series or play that mentions your home city, but for me, it is downright exhilarating to hear the words “he went to Goulburn” on a stage. Apart from this irrational excitement, it also means that I get most of the local references, which is nice, but far from enough to carry almost two hours of theatre. Fortunately however, Tommy Murphy has written a delightful play with characters who are fascinating and perhaps more to the point, familiar.

Gwen is 90 and has just moved into a new house. Not just any house, but rather one of those new development type places that exist on the edges of towns and look like they were bought from IKEA and then simply put together on site. The sort of place one drives past and thinks “who would ever want to live out here?” To which one answers, “I guess rich retirees who want to get away from the city”. Gwen is certainly not rich, but she is definitely a retiree, perhaps several times over. As we watch this slice of life, we soon discover that her children’s stories are just as important here and are in fact at the centre of the drama that drives the play. What makes it so compelling is that every person who is shown on stage is someone that you’ve met. You’ve met the troubled grandson who’s job has saved him from worse, you’ve met the slimy uncle who’s out to make a buck wherever he can, you’ve met the worried mother who’s trying for a new life. Perhaps the only person one is likely to not have met is the Catholic priest who’s come over from Nigeria, and he is certainly someone worth meeting. This is not to say that they are stereotypes, far from it, but rather that in this case, we are seeing art reflecting life in the positive sense of the term.

It is the characters’ likeability that gives the play its success. With perhaps one exception, I found myself drawn to everyone who appeared, desperate to give them all a fair hearing. I found myself particularly drawn to Peg, whose story of a life dedicated to others I found most touching. Neil Armfield, as always, has brought out the humanity in the play to its fullest, and I can’t really imagine the work in any other director’s hands. It is a compliment to the production that rather than coming out in awe of all the actors, I was simply left with love and affection for the characters. So much these days I spend my time admiring craft rather than content, but there was none of that here, for the stage was too well inhabited.

In the end however, I found myself dissatisfied with the play’s conclusion. It seemed to me that Murphy had created this fruitful situation full of beautifully real and fleshed out characters, only to have it all end rather abruptly. It all went quite fast for me, and I was genuinely waiting for a second act when the lights came up. I knew there was no interval and thus assumed that there was going to be some sort of theatrical break. This is quite an achievement really. I genuinely thought there was at least another 40 minutes of play to go. So to make an hour and 40 feel like only an hour is a tribute to both Armfield and Murphy. But it was also truly disappointing that there was no more material.

However, I’ve come to accept lately that I hate most endings to plays. Good endings are just so hard to find, and especially in a slice of life style play such as this, it is always hard to find the point where that slice finishes. So I guess that’s my only real criticism… I wanted more from the characters. I wanted more story. I wanted a second act that delved even further into this family’s machinations. But for my only desire to be more of the same, I guess that’s a fairly laudable achievement.

- Simon

Woyzeck - B Sharp

2010-08-16T14:24:00.002+10:00

I’m not going to lie. I feel a certain trepidation whenever I am told that a show will incorporate dance. It’s not that I don’t like dance, quite the opposite, some of my favourite theatrical moments have involved dance, (the friends who were unfortunate enough to see The Border Project’s “Highway Rock ‘n’ Roll Disaster” with me will never forget my visceral, joyous reaction to that show) it’s just that sometimes, I find that dance can be used very badly in theatre. I think it’s because of how out of place it can often seem, or tacked on, or that perhaps the best dancers in the world are not always the best actors. It may also be because I just don’t get dance and it never really seems to do for me what they director wanted it to do. At its worst it can completely take me out of the play, and even sometimes at its best it simply leaves me with the feeling one gets when watching someone play guitar really fast (Man I wish I could do that!). So I was a little bit worried about seeing Woyzeck, and as it begun with a series of dances in the Belvoir foyer, it took a short time for that fear to dissipate.

It didn’t take me long to realise that this would be the sort of play I would love to love. It does some interesting things (certainly the first show in my four year history at B Sharp that started in the foyer) has some great performances and is based around a great text which is far from treated with reverence. It’s the sort of contemporary investigation of a text that can be truly rewarding when done well. Unfortunately this one only makes it halfway. In her director’s note, Netta Yashctin says that “without forcing a concept onto the work, the audience are free to make up their own view of Woyzeck’s journey.” What this translates to is a complicated web of cultural references and theatrical techniques that often feels in need of a through line or clearer directorial vision. Instead, I was left feeling off-put as an audience member for pretty much the entire time, as each new scene came out of nowhere.

A problem I often find with work like this that when so many different techniques and references are used, with each new scene I am waiting for the trick rather than investing in the scene. Between Katy Perry, the Spice Girls and professional wrestling, to name a few there’s quite a bit of pop culture implanted into this show. Thus, with each new scene often feeling incredibly separate from those around it, I often found myself thinking “what’s the trick with this scene? Will it be a Venga boys dance number? I would really like a Venga Boys dance number” rather than worrying about the characters in the scene, or even the theatrical language. (For the record, there is no Venga Boys dance number).

However, this feeling of being on the backseat the whole time is perhaps Yashctin’s way of dealing with the presence of war in the play. This is another thing she mentions in her programme note as key to the work, yet I feel the production moved away from the physical and mental realities of war. I guess in an attempt to use a more theatrical language of movement and gesture, the harsh reality of war was softened. Instead perhaps, the feeling of unease that I felt throughout the play was the desired effect, the lingering presence of war keeping me on the back foot.

There is only one truly unifying force in this play, and that is Michael Pigott’s performance in the leading role. Woyzeck’s journey into mental decay is a hard one for any actor to take on, but Pigott does so with gusto, finding a perfect rhythm for the character’s decaying body. But more than anything else, it is his honesty in the role that really wins you over. It would be easy for Woyzeck’s metaphysical monologues to fall in posturing and falsity, but one never doubts Pigott as he negotiates the twisting and turning of Woyzeck’s existential arguments. It is Pigott’s consistency that one can hold onto throughout the show as it bounces from scene to scene.

Now I worry that this all sounds a bit negative when in fact I genuinely enjoyed the show. I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet, but there are great live musicians and for all my fears, dance was used really well. I was always sure that the next scene was going to be the one that would draw me in and leave me raving. But sadly it never quite made it there. Instead it is a production that is worth seeing for the performances, for the exciting approach to a classic text, for the opportunity to see a work that is likely to never be produced again on such a stage for a long time, but which failed to leave me in awe.

Simon

P.S. We don’t discuss this often on here, but this show has a great marketing image. This is an underrated achievement. I hate most marketing images. Perhaps not most, but certainly a lot. Thought it was worth a mention - Well done to whichever person in charge of marketing was responsible.

Dirty Butterfly (B Sharp)

2010-08-03T14:40:00.000+10:00

I remember when I used to dislike Wayne Blair. This negativity was mostly based on seeing him as the guest actor in “An Oaktree” two years ago, a show where a different performer was led through the play every night at downstairs Belvoir (go here for more info). I felt that Blair failed to make any interesting choices or take any risks, and as such, the show felt really flat. I had also heard horrible things about his direction of “The Removalists” at STC last year. In retrospect, to base my opinion of him on a theatrical experiment that was not his own, and a show that I didn’t even see was perhaps unfair. The last two shows of his I have seen have been truly fantastic. The first, being Ruben Guthrie, which I certainly spoke in adoration of to many of my friends but I think because of impending overseas travel I never blogged about, and now this new production of Debbie Tucker Green’s harrowing Dirty Butterfly. It seems my opinion of Wayne Blair is now distinctly positive.

Before seeing this play, I kept hearing that it was “forceful”. This is a pretty apt description. From the moment the actors enter the space, the audience is on the back foot. At first it’s because of the language. Debbie Tucker Green doesn’t waste time with unnecessary words. While she takes advantage of repetition, she doesn’t use excess flourish, but rather writes lines that cut straight through the excess of normal speech to simply state what the character needs to say, and it is certainly a need with these characters rather than a want. This play deals with the needs of three broken individuals. Every word they speak is a plea to another character, or perhaps to something larger.

Just as the language starts to settle with you, and you’ve got a handle of its rhythms and idiosyncrasies, the content begins to push at you. It becomes apparent that the conversation being had is not in relation to any small matter, but rather that of a continuously abusive relationship. The story of this abuse, and the other character’s contrasting responses to it, are then extracted from all three characters for the audience to experience. Then, just as the audience is beginning to come to terms with the story and deal with its horrible implications, the scene changes, we are given a moment of relief (with the best use of an S Club 7 track you will ever hear) before the physical ramifications of the story we have just been told are thrust upon us in all their horror. Wayne Blair doesn’t pull any of the play’s punches, and the final third of the play is played out on a pure white floor, whilst a broken and bruised woman bleeds all over this cleaner’s dream from her many wounds and possible miscarriage. At no point are we given the chance to feel comfortable as the play winds to a tragic close.

Dirty Butterfly is an unforgiving experience. It deals with some disturbing issues that our society normally tries to sweep under the carpet: domestic violence, sexual pleasure from violence, and the simple but unachievable dreams of the underclass. That’s not to say that there aren’t a few laughs, or heart-warming moments. But they are few and far between, and are more often created by the audience in a vain attempt to find some comfort in the content. Debbie Tucker Green’s interests clearly lie in the needs of the less fortunate and here their desires and frustrations are beautifully yet horrifically articulated. This was her debut, and it is not surprising that it made quite an impact. I’m very glad it finally made its way to Australia.

There are two other noteworthy points I feel I need to make about this production. Firstly, it had a majority non-white, majority female cast – an absolute rarity for the Australian stage and something it should receive just recognition for. Secondly, the acting. I have been very proud of the last two shows I’ve seen in Sydney. Like A Fishbone at the Wharf showcased two incredible performances from Anita Hegh and Marta Dusseldorp (more on that to come) and now this show, which demanded incredible dedication from its actors. Zoe Houghton, Dorian Nkono & Sara Zwangobani all pull out stellar performances, finding the sense and rhythm of Tucker Green’s often complex language. Whether it is the joy Zoe finds in her character’s harassment of the others, or Sara’s delightful description of how she sometimes pretends to be a barista, the actors bring an incredible energy to these dark stories. I only hope this trend of exceptional acting continues.

Starfuckers (Merrigong)

2010-07-28T11:44:00.000+10:00

Gossip magazines are ridiculous. Seriously. Every time I go to the doctor’s or to Gwynneville take-a-way (for life), I am confused as to why I’ve begun to read about some d-list celebrity’s trip to the key chain store. I mean why can’t they just get their key-chains from friends as awkward “I didn’t know what to get you so I got you a key-chain” gifts like the rest of the world? Then we wouldn’t have to read about it. Instead we’d probably be reading about a c-list celebrity’s haircut disaster…

It is this sort of reportage of minutiae that is the basis of Laura Caesar and Malcolm Whittaker’s Starfuckers, a durational performance which was performed at Merrigong theatre in the Bob Peet Studio as part of the Independent Producer’s Programme. The set-up is very simple: Malcolm and Laura browse through gossip magazines and read from them, but instead of articles about celebrities, they read stories about their relationship, which has lasted eight years. Once they have finished reading the story, they rip out that particular page of the magazine and shred it in a document shredder. The shreds are then used to create paper-mâché models of famous couples from history, which are placed on a long table in the centre of the room. This process continues until the couple runs out of stories.

The result is mesmerising. I entered the space at 7pm, with the show finishing at about 9:50pm on this particular evening. The marketing makes clear that audience are willing to come and go as they please and stay for as long as they desire, but the desire to leave never took hold. The stories were honest and engaging and left me wanting to know more. Malcolm and Laura’s point about the needless voyeurism of these magazines was well made, for as the show continued, I became more and more desirous for anecdotes from their past. With both parties sharing their own side of the same story, there also developed a need to get the complete picture of any situation. If I were to leave, I’d never find out what Laura thought about the story Malcolm just told. If I stayed, there was a possibility I would hear her opinion. Also, as the piece went on and heard more and more stories from their relationship, I found myself reflecting on my own relationships and the similarities and differences I found.

The most interesting stories were those from the more distant past. Stories from recent times gave interesting insights, but there was something about hearing what these two people were like in their formative years that added another dimension to the experience. It is hard to reconcile your knowledge of someone as a performance artist with their stories of being a scout when they were younger. It was also the honesty of the stories that gave them their power, with everything from random fantasies about other partners, to masturbatory desires, to day-by-day frustrations one has with their partner being discussed. I think this played perfectly into the weird voyeurism of magazine culture that they were exploring.

This was my first durational performance. I’ve often read about durational works and thought “that sounds like a great idea, I wonder if it would actually be interesting to watch for four hours?” This one was, and I sincerely hope it will be restaged at some point so you can all get along to it.

- Simon

And we're back!

2010-07-26T22:02:00.000+10:00

Ok so we lied. It’s taken a little bit longer than expected to get back on top of things here at the Perf, but back we are and I couldn’t be more excited. The reviews and commentary will hopefully come thick and fast in the coming weeks. As you may have noticed if you’ve been here before, we’ve changed the look of the Perf a bit. As we’re no longer students, I guess we’re trying to make the place look more professional or something. We’re also changing the purpose of the Perf a little bit at the moment so the new look goes with the new direction I suppose. This change has come out of a question we’ve been asking ourselves a bit…

Being both an artist and a critic – can it be done?
Last year when Mark and I started this blog, the idea was to reflect on plays in terms of our emerging practice as theatre and performance students. If we’re honest with ourselves, which we are, it was formed more out of a desire to get invited to Alison Croggon’s awesome blog barbeques and hang out with her and other cool theatre people than out of any great desire to write about theatre (whether or not Alison Croggon hosts such events is still a matter of contention). Once we started writing however, we really enjoyed it, and sometimes it provided a much needed outlet for all the thoughts that one harbours when they spend their days reading about, performing in and seeing theatre.

However, as we neared the end of our careers as students and began venturing out into the real world of the theatre, our fun was thrown into a very different light. We were certainly given pause for thought, when at our Equity day we were faced with a director whose play we had rather unfavourably written about. Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the problems associated with being a creative and then ending up in the world of being a critic. My biggest worry is that one day I’m going to be auditioning for a play, and a director will recognise my name and call me out on the bad review I once gave them back when I was a theatre student. I’d like to think this wouldn’t happen, but it’s a possibility I have to accept if I want to keep reviewing plays.

I guess my response is that firstly, we here at the Perf don’t take ourselves too seriously and neither should you (if you need proof simply look to your right at our amazing photo). However in my discussions with the newest permanent member of the Perf team, Jenni (whom you may remember from our brief Sydney festival coverage) she brought up something else which I’d like to share with you here:

“When we review we do so as much to share a personal opinion as to create a discussion. We say something in the hope that someone will disagree openly because without honest commentary how can we ever hope to improve or really know how the theatre being created is being received and affecting people? If everyone smiles and says "good work" when is there growth? Should there not be an honest sharing of opinions that is not taken personally or as any kind of definitive statement but a starting point for discussion? When we stop taking offence and start openly discussing without worrying about repercussions, and if everyone starts doing the same, I think we start to create the debate and genuine sharing of feelings that good art should create in a community. And in not taking things too seriously this is possible.”

I feel like we have this discussion about the nature and usefulness of criticism at least several times a year and must say it's a bit weird discussing it from the inside. But I guess our hope is, as Jenni points out, that a sustained critical community will lead to a building, and bettering of the theatre community through discussion. That’s really what makes a blog different to a newspaper I feel. You can leave your responses straight after without having to wait for an editor to decide to print your letter.

In line with this hope, I’m hoping that the Perf can become a place not just for reviews, but also for interviews, opinions and who knows, maybe even academic writings about theatre. We’re going to continue shamelessly advertising our own projects, (the photos that are in this blog post for no reason other than to make it look less like a mass of text are from Applespiel's recent hit "Snail Piece" which was performed at Underbelly Arts Festival) and those of other artists we love, and hopefully just have a good time while we do it. Please, if you have thoughts on this, hit us up with comments. We’d love to hear from you.

As well as this change in direction, which isn't that much of a change, we’re also having another changing of the guard. Mark is no longer writing from the Perf, and as I mentioned before, we’ve been joined by Jenni. If you would like to get into contact with us, or learn what we look like, those details are to the right of the screen on the home page.

It’s exciting times ahead for us. First review back is coming at any moment…

- Simon

Neglect and Excitement

2010-05-24T11:41:00.002+10:00

So you're probably all wondering what's been going on with The Perf. More likely, you haven't even thought about us because we haven't been writing. I'd like to apologise for this. We're all crazy busy here with our various commitments (honours and America) but rest assured that when I return to Australian shores, there will be blogs ahoy!

As for the moment, I'm currently doing a theatre for social change trip in Guatemala. I thought it might be of interest to some of you. We're keeping a blog of reflections and outlines of the work we're doing so check it out at http://cupwb.blogspot.com

Give me a month and we'll be back to regular updates and incendiary comments. It's gonna be fun.

Simon

Tiny Stadiums

2010-02-23T09:13:00.003+11:00

Tonight marks the start of Quarterbred's Tiny Stadiums Festival, taking place over the next two weeks in Erskineville.

The festival features new works from many interdisciplinary artists from Sydney, Melbourne and Wollongong. Our friends Tiger Two Times are presenting their work Nature League, and Mark and I will be there for most of the two weeks as part of Applespiel's Sexy New Urban Design Team... You can find us in the Town Hall, everyday, from 11am till 5pm. This Saturday I'll also be talking at the Future of Art Symposium.
You can find more information at www.quarterbred.blogspot.com

It would be great to see you there!

(Belated) Sydney Festival Wrap-Up

2010-02-11T10:40:00.003+11:00

Something of a nearly irrelevantly late post on the Sydney festival, and I apologise for that, offering pathetic excuses of University showings and preparing for Quarterbred’s Tiny Stadiums. But it was an enjoyable Sydney Festival for me, one where I managed to see a couple of things that tickled my fancy, and I know of a few other shows that friends saw and enjoyed, so I thought it would be a shame not to write about it.

Also, almost as a gentle reminder, I just received a Sydney Festival t-shirt in the mail.

Sydney Festival is a great time to not have much money. There are almost always things on that I want to see, and these things cost money. So one has to make some very tough decisions. I made it to four shows, and regrettably missed three, not to mention missing out on a lot of the free Domain action.

Hamlet

Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet, from the acclaimed German company Schaubühne, was the theatrical headliner of the festival. Big, fancy, foreign and cool. For me, Hamlet brought a standard that raises a lot of questions about Australian theatre. This level of theatre (not necessarily scale, but more the qualitative level) should be the rule, not the exception. There was a sharpness in this production, an immediacy and a thrilling sensation of theatre achieving great things, which I’ve only felt in a handful of shows (it’s quite easy to bring War of the Roses to mind). But perhaps I’m romanticising festival fare a bit too much. There was something to be said for the unshakeable feeling that this was a work that has now toured the world extensively; that the show itself was no longer the exciting challenge for the company that it may have been at the beginning - but does that matter to a new, Australian audience? Many of the moments of Lars stepping out of Hamlet to talk to the audience and make jokes, while done with an integrity that flowed through his entire performance, wore thin on me a little. And applause after jokes (in theatre and in stand-up) has always been a pet hate of mine. Perhaps I just felt slightly uncomfortable with how ‘cool’ the show was. And perhaps I am simply looking for things to criticise. Because I did think this show was fantastic.

Ruhe

 A few days after Giselle, I saw Muziektheater Transparant’s Ruhe. After my initial excitement of Hamlet coming to Australia wore off, I started getting very excited about this show. And I was right, because this was my pick of the festival. This production was everything I wanted it to be, but I shall try and stop myself from waxing lyrical on it.
Ruhe is a combination of liedert by Schubert and Van Parys, and monologues drawn from interviews with ex-SS members taken in the 1960s. We enter University of Sydney’s Great Hall, which with its stained glass windows, huge organ and high ceiling is the perfect house for this show. Two hundred scattered, assorted wooden chairs for the audience form a giant circle pointing towards a small empty middle of the room. As we sit, eleven men stand on their chairs and begin to sing. Their voices are incredible, and on this Wednesday afternoon I find myself mesmerised by the sounds filling the building. Soon, a woman stands, and as the songs come to a close, begins to tell us of her childhood. She is dutch, and as a young girl, through completely normal and understandable circumstances became a member of the SS.
I am reminded on working on Talking to Terrorists with Mark Haslam last year. All the strengths of verbatim theatre are here; an easily relatable humanity and earnest desire to tell a story.
Both the performers, Han Kerckhoffs and Truus te Selle, are phenomenal. Real, honest, and fleshed out with a complexity and proficiency that honours the real life figures from whom the monologues have been formed.
Throughout the performance, there is a weight of history that I find tremendously interesting. It is serious, but not oppressively heavy as in the case that investigates subject material like this. The result was a liberation allowing insight into the people behind the history, culminating in the final song being performed next to a David Claerbout’s visual material, a haunting photo from the era with moving trees but statue-still people.
I cannot stress enough (though I did try not to) how beautiful, humbling and superbly crafted this piece of theatre was. Precisely what I wanted from my festival experience.

The Rest

I’ve already talked about Giselle, and Jenni has written of Six Characters (never have I wanted to leave a show at interval until that show). I wish I had seen Urban Theatre Project’s The Fence, I heard many good things about it and I had intended to find the time to make it. Similarly, apparently Oedipus Loves You was very interesting and I would have liked to have seen it. Finally, I missed out on Tempest: Without a Body and Fractured Again, both of which I read about after the event.

Did you see anything that we haven’t covered? Or maybe something we have? What did you think of it?

Giselle

2010-01-27T09:21:00.005+11:00

Sydney Festival’s Giselle is a new interpretation of the romantic ballet brought to us by internation dance ensemble Fabulous Beast, heralded by director/choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan. Giselle traditionally tells the story of a young girl dying because of the selfish men in her life, and this production sells itself as giving the ballet a line-dancing face lift. As it turns out, I guess I really like line dancing. There just was a whole lot of the show I didn’t like.

Designer Sophie Charalambous and Lighting Designer Adam Silverman have done a wonderful job of creating a series of stunning images. From preshow, where Giselle and a lone telegraph pole give sharp silhouettes against the back wall, I was consistently impressed by the clarity and effectiveness of the design. Similarly I thought the sound was great, if a tad repetitive by the end of the show. It belied an urgency and gravity that dwelled beneath the narrative.

The narrative itself, however, was abysmal. When Giselle’s father, the narrator, climbed atop the telegraph pole and began to introduce us to the characters and their relationships, I was irked, but permissive. Surely this part is just putting the story into the space so that the imagery does not need to rely on storytelling? And surely the childish and slapstick exchanges being carried out between the performers to match the narrator are just a bit of fun as we warm into the piece? Alas, no. The entire first half was a messy, indulgent, and most importantly unfunny acting out of a reworked Giselle story. It felt like the ensemble was working under a “show AND tell” mantra, as the narrator’s unnecessary intrusions were then played out for far too long, with all the dramatic integrity and comic maturity of a year nine camp skit. I was quite prepared for this show to be light-hearted and funny, but as Pat Dunn’s butcher ad went nearly as long as the painfully juvenile sex scene, I just felt embarrassed to be there.

 It wasn’t all terrible. The scenes between Giselle and her mentally-ill brother w

ere very solid, mature pieces of drama. Similarly the tragedy of the mute and outcasted Giselle came across with a very earnest clarity at times, but unfortunately the rest of the story in all its irrelevance ruined these would-be effecting moments. The line dancing too was amazing, but there just wasn’t enough of it (particularly considering the show was marketed on that).

But then Giselle dies from an asthma attack brought on by shock. And something amazing happens. The performance becomes breathtakingly amazing. We move from an awful rendition of the story to phenomenally beautiful dance, music and images. The spirits in the graveyard thrown dust into the side-lit air, and weave themselves across the space and through each other with sublime movements and huge noose-like ropes, accompanied by the angelic voice of a male soprano. The lights and music frame the action with remarkable efficiency, setting the tone for this second half of the Giselle story. Giselle’s brother enters and is gracefully dispatched by the spirits. The same nearly happens to Giselle’s lover, but she steps in, and the two share a beautifully choreographed ballet sequence. I was entranced the entire time. The performance ends with Giselle’s lover stepping back as she returns to her grave at sunrise.

This show was possibly the most frustrating performance I have ever seen. I felt insulted and embarrassed for the first forty minutes, and then the end featured an absolutely beautiful sequence of images. I worry that this is typical Festival fare where the strengths are outweighed by pandering to an audience that just isn’t there. But even though the first half did nothing to serve the piece, the finale brought a depth of beauty that I am very glad I witnessed.

- Nathan

2010-01-20T21:38:00.005+11:00

Six Characters In Search Of An Author
Thursday, 21st January
___________

Hello again,

I will once more venture to "guest appear" on Simon and Mark's blog as I am in need of a discussion about the "Six Characters in Search of an Author" adaptation that is playing as part of the Sydney Festival. To break tradition, it is still on. So you can actually go and see this one and I look forward to hearing what people thought.

I was disappointed. Not to say that there weren't many excellent things about the production but just that in terms of what it was marketed as eg. THE PLAY and what we saw, it was different. There is much to be said about the positive impact a re-imagining of a classic work can have and I think this can work marvellously (as reviews of Hamlet this year have shown). But when the adaptation dampens what is at the heart of the work and its main thesis, there is a point at which I become a purist and get a bit disgruntled (excellent word).

The company "Headlong" has made the setting an office building and reset it as a film company who are editing their latest documentary when six characters enter demanding their story be filmed. The set is fantastic. It is detailed and layered with a corridor and whole other room visible from a large window in the set of the office created on the stage- used to great effect. Angled monitors ensure that whenever the action of the characters is being recreated for their film we are able to see this from a variety of angles even if our view on stage is obscured. In this way the text is updated to feature a commentary on multi-media authorship and not just that of the print writer. This premise was what disappointed me. The realisation using the various techniques introduced by employing cameras was often inspired but lost what I see as the central theme of Pirandello's work: the theatre.

There is an immediacy that is created when the six characters revolt against theatrical construction in a theatre itself that is lost when the bulk of the text is wound up in the screen medium. Had this been a film version I think it would have been entirely appropriate. Instead, until its conclusion, the audience is not made aware at all of the theatrical environment they inhabit. I will hint that this is addressed in part at the conclusion with a series of alternate endings, that become painfully self-reflexive, but the power is diminished substantially. I also felt like the role of the Son and Mother had been cut to make way for the Father and Stepdaughter which meant their purpose in being unrealised characters went unpronounced and they simply became so. Some of the actors were also very soft so words were lost and audience members reshuffled to get closer which is unexpected amongst an accomplished cast. While the acting was strong I found the interpretation of the characters to be two dimensional and while yes, this is the point of them to an extent, we still need/want to relate and sympathise with them. In making this too shallow we have no vested interest in them or their cause and I felt as if we should have.

The ending was inconclusive, but in the sense that I was unsure what the director/adapter intended the piece to be inconclusive about. I feel this is no longer a critique based on my own assumptions of what the play should have been, but a critique on the construction of the piece in general. As realities begin to collide it becomes more and more self-referential with actors discussing the Sydney Festival itself and a literal death of the author occurring. Seemingly this is to highlight the 'what is reality?' theme but it does so in such a blatant way that I felt like it actually mocked and cheapened the conventions that essentially it was using- and not in a sophisticated way.

To avoid being overly negative though, there are a lot of reasons why you should see this play. You should see it for the sets and to see the more clever uses of the film genre to adapt it and make it something entirely new. You should see it for the acting (The Emperor' from "Star Wars" playing the Father). You should see it for the sound design, musical interludes and for the movement work. These being used to destabilise the naturalistic devices and blur the realities of the Characters and the editing team and are very powerful.

While I could view it as a separate text, I could not help but think that the adaptation cut out a lot of reasons why the Pirandello text is meaningful in the theatre, taking away much of the depth and meaning. I think that making texts new and relevant is always important but not when you aim to produce a specific work and lose what it is that makes that work great. You should also see it so that you can disagree with me.

--Jenni

2010-01-15T13:52:00.006+11:00

The Manganiyar Seduction
Friday, January 15th, 2010
__________________

Hi guys, This is Jenni here and as Simon just mentioned, I will be doing the "guest appearances" for the Sydney Festival which means that if you begin to be irritated by my posts, in much the same way as a TV guest spot would work, I will suddenly disappear in mysterious circumstances only to return years later with a new face and a completely different writing style which you will much prefer, possibly even becoming a permanent character. I enjoy writing overly long sentences with too many commas and have been known to create the largest paragraphs known to man- so I apologise in advance. In spite of this and to continue Simon's tradition, my first review is of a show that has closed. I am hopeful though that the company will return at some point in which case I would encourage everyone to go see them.

The Manganiyar Seduction is a musical experience. A fully sold out show erupts to a standing ovation after 70 minutes of traditional Indian music that has steadily built from a sole musician to almost 40 musicians. Roysten Abel, the creator of the piece, has smartly placed each musician in a box, as you can see from the picture, which illuminates when the artist is playing. Until their debut a velvet red curtain covers the musicians. This creates suspense and the impetus to watch as we know that all will reveal themselves but not when or what kind of instrument they will be playing.

While aurally stunning, the light show that accompanies the well placed musicians makes it visually stunning as well. This piece could easily have been like so many things we see all the time. It could have been a traditional orchestral setup with chairs or build in a predictable way and as we expect this to happen our expectations are exceeded. The craft involved is clear when all the boxes have eventually been revealed and still we watch with anticipation as it continues to build and be interesting although seemingly they have shown all at their disposal. It is a song of devotion and love, evident in the passionate delivery from all involved which is infectious with many in the audience clapping and moving to the rhythms.

The unique nature of the piece makes it powerful. Even if you were familiar with the music, the presentation is so innovative that this would be a new experience while its theatrical construction makes it accessible for even those unfamiliar. Abel, who speaks after the pieve, believes in the transcendental nature of the music, specifically referencing conflicts such as that currently occurring in Austrlaia with Indian students. I think that more immediately the impact lies in bringing to Australian audiences something that so openly celebrates and shares in a very culturally specific way a universal message. A dialogue is constructed between the performers in the shared space of the performance. Whether or not this transfers across to real spaces, it makes an impact for the duration and is a visceral experience that is completely moving and enlivening.

- Jenni

We're still here!

2010-01-14T16:15:00.004+11:00

Hey all,

Sorry there hasn’t been a lot of action here of late. We apparently decided to take a Christmas holiday without alerting anyone. Mark and I have been pretty busy with various things, such as family celebrations and TINY STADIUMS FESTIVAL. Well that last one was Mark. I have been busy getting ready to fly to America where I will be studying for 6 months. In fact, I’m already there (here). This is a photo of me on a chairlift at a ski resort in Utah.
Isn’t the internet amazing?

As some of you may know, or have guessed by now, this means there’ll be some changes here in Perf land. Mark and I are pretty keen to keep the blog happening, but with me on the other side of the world, and his career blossoming (read: doing honours) it’s going to be a little bit harder for us to keep up as the past few months have shown. Thus, to keep the blog sustainable, we’re adding another permanent contributor. His name is Nathan, and I’m sure you’ll here lots more about him soon. Perhaps we’ll even have an embarrassing photo to share.

Not only that! We’re also getting a guest in to help us ramp up coverage of the Sydney Festival, which is currently sweeping the city (of Sydney). That guest’s name is Jenni, and she is pretty awesome.

So in conclusion, hopefully there’ll be some excellent Sydney Festival reviews happening shortly, and perhaps even a “Hi, I’m Nathan” from Nathan. If no embarrassing photo is posted I suggest a mass comment petition for one. There’s only so much I can do from over here… for the record, I’m still going to blog about any theatre I see, it will just be more “this was cool” blogging rather than “you should go see this” blogging. Which to be fair, I never did that much of anyway because I generally wrote about shows that were closed.

So in conclusion, enjoy our new bloggers and show them you love them by commenting lots about how you disagree with everything they have to say. Also, thanks a lot to everyone who has supported us over this year. When Mark and I first threw this idea around in the car, we certainly never thought it would have anywhere near the impact on our lives that it has had. A long time ago Mark and I had plans to do a post of "hilarious photos of Simon and Mark". As a little memento of our first year in the blogging world, here's a photo that definitely fits that description.

- Simon

P.S. Did you know that Mark, Nathan and I are all members of the now renowned performance collective Applespiel, and that the now renowned performance collective Applespiel has a facebook page? Well now you do… it is located at: Right here. Alternatively, just search for Applespiel on facebook. However you find us, you should definitely become a fan.

A Midsummer Night's Dream - Belvoir Downstairs

2009-12-07T20:57:00.002+11:00

Midsummer (as I shall henceforth refer to it as) is essentially a best man speech. It was probably originally performed at a wedding which it was written specifically for and therefore is full of in jokes that we can’t possibly get, as we’re somewhat lacking in intimate knowledge of the betrothed. All the cracks about single life are equivalent to the “he’s getting married – ball ‘n’ chain mate, ball ‘n’ chain” humour that romantic comedies have led me to believe all best man speeches must include. This is the context that director Eamon Flack is drawing on with this production, (most of these ideas are lifted straight from the programme), attempting to bring that sense of frivolity and play to the now very old text, and to be honest I think it’s probably the way to do Midsummer. This production is thoroughly silly. As we entered the theatre Cindy Lauper’s opus “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” greeted our ears, and the play began with Theseus singing a love to song to Hippolyta accompanying himself on the Casio keyboard (the same keyboards which my father has taught many a primary school student to play). This sets up the mood for the rest of the show, which is essentially a romp through the Shakespeare text.

This is where the whole thing could fail. If you don’t know the text, I think it’s possible you’d get lost in the tightly choreographed mess of this production. The plot is sometimes put behind the curtain while a moment of comedy brilliance occurs, but that’s the feel of the piece. Just as the best man will undoubtedly digress to tell the story of some drunken misdemeanour, Charlie Garber (who never really seems to be off stage) breaks out of character to fall in love with an audience member. I pretty much think that as long as you were aware that there was a bunch of lovers, a bunch of actors, and a bunch of fairies, you’d probably be able to make it through this show without being too confused. Except for whenever Gareth Davies is on stage. After an amazing performance in Hayloft’s “The Only Child” earlier in the year on the same stage, Davies has again proved that he is a tour de force of comedy. His Thisbe was truly a sight to behold, and I even saw off-stage cast members cracking up at his performance. However it is Garber who is truly in control of the piece playing Bottom and Puck. His comic timing never falters but it’s his absolute control of the Shakespeare text that I find so impressive. It is a credit to the other members of the cast though that despite the innate presence of these two performers, the other actors never get lost in the mix. I could probably go on for a while about all the performers but that would get very boring as I’m somewhat limited in my positive adjectives.

Essentially this play was pretty darn funny. I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time, and I was never bored in the two and a half hour running time. But I think that it also achieved that other goal of a best man’s speech, it had its touching moments, such as Titania’s (Katherine Cullun) final speech, which drew me in beautifully. I was really impressed because honestly, I’m not that big a fan of the play. When it’s performed “faithfully” I think it’s a pretty boring clichéd love story. That’s what happens when you ignore the fact that it was probably intended for a bunch of drunk rich people. This production tries to bring that feeling back, and does so with glee.

- Simon

Review: The Mysteries: Genesis

2009-11-24T12:27:00.003+11:00

Mysteries: Genesis is a strange monster to be walking into on a Monday night at the Wharf. In three parts, directed by Matthew Lutton, Andrew Upton and Tom Wright respectively, Mysteries tracks the opening moments of the bible, from Creation through Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel and Noah’s ark. I call it strange not only because of the conceit of the work (somewhat like Hayloft’s 3xsisters; same actors, 3 directors, three different takes on the same progression, except with the bible and no fake blood) but also because of the fact that I was viewing it as part of STC’s mainstage season. This feeling continued through the night, a strange mix of radicalism and conservatism.

Wharf 2 has been completely transformed for this performance. The audience surround the space on two levels, ground floor and upstairs, in the centre we look onto the playing space. The blurb states designer Alice Babidge took inspiration from “old courtyards, bear-baiting pits, cloisters and coaching inns of the medieval world.” and this rings true, although I was also reminded of an underground parking lot or food court at any multi level mall. While I had thought that sightlines would be a nightmare in this space, such was the confidence in design that I never felt I was missing anything, despite staying on the ground floor and hugging the walls most of the night. It is a credit to Babidge and each director that the space was used in vastly different and developing ways across the three sections of the piece, I felt only at the very end had I seen a trick before.

Matthew Lutton’s Eden is a square of white confetti, populated by the naked Adam and Eve (Cameron Goodall and Sophie Ross) in glorious white wigs, a fluffy suited penguin and hanging from a rope in the corner of the square, is a plastic apple filled with milk, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Lutton’s piece is the most aesthetically assured of the three, establishing a theatrical language almost immediately as the lights slowly rise on God, slumped naked in a chair. The performances are heightened, as is demanded by Hilary Bell and Lally Katz’s highly poetic text, Lutton matches the poeticism of the text with a formalism of gesture, repeating certain actions that we become familiar with the meaning of. Because of this the piece takes on a sort of distance, and we become sucked into the theatrical world of Eden, the text and movement of the naked bodies lulls us into an almost meditative (perhaps religious) state. This serves Lutton brilliantly as paradise is stripped from it’s inhabitants after Eve succumbs to Lucifer and the serpent, rendered here as a lock of black hair. The text shifts into purer action and so does the performances, we see Adam and Eve shiver from cold and beg God for one last hug before they are cast out. In this first section of the Mysteries, Lutton has created a stunningly confident and rather unsettling opening. And while the piece is occasionally marred by weaker passages of language and some fairly indulgent acting to match it, I think I may be starting to “get” this Lutton thing.

After a fifteen minute break head back in for Upton’s After the Fall, which is, I have to say, pretty rock and roll. There are a few balloons strewn around the place and the cast (STC’s residents) are belting out a version of Velvet Underground’s Run Run Run from the upper and lower levels of the space. Upton’s piece is performed in promenade and the performers move and appear amongst the audience as Adam and Eve (now a dysfunctional Australian family swearing at each other) lament their great loss while their son’s Cain and Abel feud over their respective harvests. Through this landscape stalks death, a girl with her pony tail hanging over her face, claiming everyone as the end comes to them as murder, suicide or old age. The actors are here given license to play clear, somewhat realistic actions, Adam bitches about Eve, Abel teases Cain and Seth wanders around trying to calm everyone down. This is a massive relief after Lutton’s formalism, and while Upton lacked Luttton’s aesthetic confidence, it certainly gained something from this shift. The space is used well and the performers seem to relish the opportunity to be so close to the audience, allowing a different sort of communication, I always get a kick out of laughing and having the actor look straight at you to share the moment. It’s magic: television can’t do that. The audience seemed fairly bemused by the staging, and for the most part they steered clear of wandering around to get a better look at the action. This is so far removed from the world of promenade performances at PACT or Performance Space, where the audience is more literate in this style and will move freely to view more or even to test the limits of the performers. The strange mix of radicalism and conservatism was no where more prevalent than in Upton’s section, made more obvious by some clunky sections of text intoned once again to great virtuosity but little effect, set against really powerful images and kick arse music. Stranger and strangerer.

The final section dealt with Noah and his ark. Here Noah is a bedridden obsessive compulsive listening intently to the radio as his wife pleads with him to come down and back out into the town. Tom Wright’s set is a pile of mattresses in the centre of the stage on which Noah remains for the entire piece. His daughters coming to him from the depths of the sheets and God appearing to him through the radio or from the foot of his bed. Wright’s piece is the weakest of the three, suffering from further ponderous sections of text and some fairly unsubtle choreography. I am also totally sick of revolves and as soon as the mattresses did so I switched off, content to watch the lights in the ceiling and listen to the loud amplified rain instead of what was happening onstage. The strength of Wright’s section was in how he combined formal elements from the other sections and reused them so as to illuminate the story of Noah, it was a fitting end to the whole performance as it reminded us of what had gone before and suggested beginning anew after the flood.

The Mysteries: Genesis is an amazing thing to be occurring as a part of a main stage season at STC, The Residents (STC’s new crack team of young theatre makers) are committed and sometimes thrilling performers, the direction is playful, assured and considered and the language, while sometimes ill formed, invokes a certain tone of spirituality that is invaluable to the work. It is flawed, in some places quite deeply, but nevertheless it is a landmark thing to be occurring at a flagship company and deserves support for this kind of programming. It is the most interesting thing I have seen at STC all year, and I hope that their 2010 season can come up with something just as interesting, by the looks of it… maybe not, but fingers crossed anyway.

Also sorry for being out of the loop for ages, I had shows and assignments. Here is a picture from Elephant People by Daniel Keene, which I directed with 2nd students at UOW.

Mark

Catch-up: The Bougainville Photoplay Project, Gethsemane, A Streetcar Named Desire

2009-11-04T17:43:00.004+11:00

Wow, it’s been a long time since we’ve done any real blogging. Both Mark and I regret the lack of sweet blog times on offer lately, and you’ve already heard our excuses before so I won’t bother giving them again. Instead what I do have to offer is a quick wrap of a few things I’ve seen lately that I wanted to comment on. It goes back a while so I thought rather than doing full reviews that nobody is going to bother to read about shows that finished a month ago, I’d just write some comments about a few different things that hit me about each production. I’m sure Mark will get some writings up sooner or later, even if only to say “holy shit man, Körper changed my world” (although he’s a little busy right now directing the English language premiere of Daniel Keene’s Elephant People). Anyway, let’s get to the plays…

The Bougainville Photoplay Project – Version 1.0 at The Old Fitz

This was truly an extraordinary night of theatre. The concept is quite simple. Paul Dwyer recounts some stories from his life based around his trips to Bougainville, a small region of Papua New Guinea. In the course of doing so, we learn about his father’s work as a surgeon, the various human rights abuses that have been perpetrated in Bougainville, and the amazing reconciliation process that is now occurring in the region. The stories themselves are amazing, insightful and at times truly horrifying. The delivery is honest and is set against the backdrop of the physical objects of Dwyer’s memories – newspaper articles, photos, and even a set of bones that his dad once used to demonstrate surgical techniques. There are several visual aids to the storytelling, from an old slide projector, to Sean Bacon’s video stylings which were perfectly measured as usual. However, the true victory of this show is that amidst these many technical elements and dramatic techniques, the story is what comes through. It is because the show is so tightly crafted that the message comes through pure and strong.
For more info about Bougainville, one can consult the ever-useful wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bougainville

Gethsemane – Belvoir St

I know I’m coming incredibly late to the party, but I think I just might be a David Hare fan. After seeing this show I finally got around to reading The Vertical Hour which I bought a few months back, and I was impressed by both, and if the hype is anything to go by I haven’t even got to his best plays yet. I was expecting a lot from Gethsemane. I cared a lot about the subject matter, the problem of corporate funding controlling political parties, and I’m yet to see an Armfield show that I dislike (Scorched in particular was an affecting experience).
For the most part, the show delivered. The script was tight, and merciless, going for the jugular of a variety of political players, the direction cool (setting props by lighting rectangles? Very cool…) and the performances were mostly memorable. In a weird turn of events, it was Charlie Garber’s Fran Pegg, the irrepressible butler, that stole the show, with Garber turning one word answers into moments of comedy brilliance. In fact all the younger players were impressive, with Emily Barclay simply stunning as the troubled teenager of the home secretary, played with equal skill by Sarah Peirse. However, Claire Jones as sympathetic teacher was anything but sympathetic, and Dan Wyllie’s journalist never seemed real to me. Hard to reconcile from actors with such strong history.

Unfortunately, the play lacked a strong ending, something I found similarly problematic in the Vertical hour. It seemed in both texts as if once Hare had finished his political discussions he struggled to conclude the personal stories, and in turn the plays. I’ll keep an eye out to see whether this is a theme that runs throughout his oeuvre.

A Streetcar Named Desire – Sydney Theatre Company

Now we come to one of the most anticipated theatre events of the year. Cate Blanchett as Blanche. This was the show that more people in Sydney were going to see than any other, and therefore the biggest theatrical opportunity of the year, and in my opinion it was wasted. There is no question that the acting was top notch. With the exception of a few of the bit parts, the performances were solid and beautifully crafted, and yes Cate proved once again that she is truly a chameleon, this time eschewing her powerful low register to take on the soprano range of the faux-timid Blanche. What was so frustrating though was that the play was really, really slow. I got bored, regularly, and maybe that’s because I’m born of the internet generation that as a result of tabbed browsing and violent video games can’t pay attention to anything for longer than 30 seconds, or maybe it’s because I’ve studied the text twice at different institutions. Maybe it’s because I missed the details of the relationships, or because I’d driven 2 hours in the pouring rain and was a bit stressed and was therefore distracted easily. But maybe, just maybe it was because this main stage production, which sold out before it opened, whose budget I can only imagine, was directed by a first time theatre director, was horribly paced, and failed to find anything new or insightful in the text, and instead simply came over as a bit bland. I was hugely disappointed. I have been defending Cate and Andrew’s decision making to the more cynical of my theatre friends all year, and was disappointed to not have a gem in the crown of my argument. I just hope star-studded Uncle Vanya next year doesn’t prove to be another lifeless staging, a fear that will perhaps be confirmed or denied when the director is finally revealed.

Well that’s all I have for now. I’m off to the next in the Appleloft series, a performance night presented by everyone’s favourite performance collective Applespiel.

- Simon

Quick Post - The Bougainville Photoplay Project/Angels In America

2009-10-26T23:22:00.007+11:00

More apologies for the lack of blog action of late. You know the drill: uni, grad show, honours applications, it's all been piling up and sadly reviewing has lost out a little. But don't worry there's going to be an update storm anyday now...

However, I did want to mention Version 1.0's the Bougainville Photoplay Project before the week got too old. I will have a full review coming soon, but as it's only got this week left in its current run at the Old Fitz I wanted to take this opportunity to encourage anyone who's thinking about going to go. If you only see one show this week and it isn't Angels In America at PACT (our grad show) then you should see the Bougainville Photoplay Project... It's quite simply a beautifully crafted moving theatre experience that should be had by all. Just in case you missed my incredibly subtle linkage you can find all the information here:

The Bougainville Photoplay Project
http://www.versiononepointzero.com/index.php/projects/the_bougainville_photoplay_project1/

Angels In America
http://www.uow.edu.au/crearts/performances/UOW068184.html

If any of you do come to our show this week, be sure to stay around and say hi afterwards. Hopefully there'll be some more stuff to read soon. Thanks for sticking with us through the downtime!

Cheers,
Simon

Sorry for the lack of excitement...

2009-10-14T20:41:00.005+11:00

Hi All,

This is one of those lame "sorry we haven't updated the blog a lot lately, we're really busy" messages. Mark and I are being kept pretty busy by our uni degree at the moment so unfortunately we probably won't be able to get any new reviews up until next week. Get ready though, we have the big This Is Not Art report coming up as well as hopefully a review of Gethsemane and perhaps some comments on Streetcar... The UOW season is now well under way so we also might get around to writing about those shows as well. This is if we can fit this all in between finishing our last session of study and putting on a grad show.

In the meantime, here is some shameless advertising for our uni and our graduates... enjoy!

Bake Sale For Art have another Monthly Friend coming up, and this time it's being presented by our friends over at Quarterbred. Here's the flyer and press release. Or you can just use the handy link on the right hand side of our site to go straight to their blog.
The author is dead.
The aura is dead.
The critic is dead.
God is dead.
Theatre is dead.
Art is dead.
Bela Lugosi is dead.

But hey, let’s not get overly maudlin. The theme for this Monthly Friend, ‘Dead or Alive’, questions our conception of how ideas, forms, texts and spaces may ‘live’ or ‘die’. Are these bold proclamations of death premature? (The author is still very much alive in mainstream theatre and literature, at least.) And what is the flipside of death? When the author dies the audience becomes alive, and that ain’t so bad is it? Monthly Friend October also celebrates the merging of live and not-live forms. Contemporary arts need not these distinctions! So ah, let’s all take a leaf out of George Romero’s book and let the dead live again. And let the living dead suck the brains out of the living, so that the living die and eventually become the living dead and go out looking for more living. Hope to see you there.

Meanwhile, the UOW season has already begun! Over this week and next we've got two second year shows. Check here at the Faculty website for further details of Dario Fo's Trumpets & Raspberries, and Catherine McKinnon's As I Lay Dreaming. If the beach wasn't already a good enough reason to visit Wollongong, you've now got two more incentives...

Hope to see you all soon,
Simon

Brand Spanking New (New Theatre)

2009-10-08T15:25:00.003+11:00

Opportunities to show new work are both exciting and important. For a start they give everyone a deadline, something to work towards. But most importantly it’s a chance for artists to test out their ideas in front of an audience. It’s all very well for something to work in your brain or on the page, but it’s another thing altogether for it to make that next step to performance. This is why performance opportunities are so important, this is why we here at The Perf are great supporters of initiatives like Bake Sale For Art’s Monthly Friend series, or the recent Applelöft where a bunch of our fellow artists got together in a house to share new ideas. These sort of low risk events help to create a strong community of support for new artists as well as serving as a breeding ground for new talent.
Which brings me to Brand Spanking New, a two-week festival of new writing put together by Augusta Supple at the New Theatre in Newtown. This time it’s the writing that is on show, with both established and emerging writers offering their wares to the good people of Sydney. What was exciting for me was that it was often the names I didn’t know, at least as writers, whose scripts I found the most interesting. Highlights for me across the two weeks were Kit Brookman’s “if i could be anything i would be something different” with director Mark Pritchard carefully wedging the actors into the space, Jonathon Ari Lander’s “Measure” which looked at the aftermath of years of pain in Cambodia, and Sonal Moore’s “White Wedding”, a tender look at marriage in another culture.

But in the end it is not the specific works which make the festival worthwhile. It is the theatrical community coming together to give emerging artists a chance for their work to be seen and critiqued. It is also a chance for new actors and directors to be seen on a Sydney stage. Experiments like this should be the rule not the exception, and hopefully, they will be successfully and spurn more opportunities for new work of all varieties. The second week programme opens tonight, so you've got four nights to get in there and support it.

- Simon

Peter Craven's Total Bullshit

2009-09-30T15:59:00.004+10:00

Here is a link. Read it then read on.

http://www.nationaltimes.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-trouble-with-australian-theatre-20090930-gbkn.html

In his article Peter Craven derides a new trend he percieves in Australian theatre, a trend which he lables as "talented directors who feel they are above realism and well-made plays." Talented directors like Benedict Andrews and Barrie Kosky. According to Craven their productions War of the Roses, Season At Sarsparilla and Women of Troy are some of the worst offenders in a director led revolt against the text. He suggests that these directors "often...cut their teeth with student theatre and have been too narcissistic to grow up" and indeed that "It's much easier to treat student actors like puppets and to improvise a text than it is to treat Judy Davis like that. Most cut-and-paste postmodern tinkerings with classics make Joanna Murray-Smith look like Racine on a good day"

As a burgeoning director, working at present in student productions, cutting my teeth as it were: I think Peter Craven is full of shit. His article shows a willing blindness to new playwrighting, an obvious penchant for the naturalistic and perhaps worst of all an outdated attitude to the artform itself. Poisonous attitudes such as his are what stunts the theatrical community, and are not (as i'm sure he sees it) a heroic belief of the sanctity of illusion. Any person working in the artform that dismisses the work of Robert Wilson as "mime-oriented experimentalism" is not only ill-informed and a lazy researcher but a complete fucking idiot, and the fact that his pompous wank of an article was published at all is what is indicative of real issues in Australian theatre.

His article bears several similarities with David Williamson's back earlier in the year, in which the big DW accused the STC of only programming capital T theatre, the theatre of Barrie Kosky. At the time on theperf I accused DW of being an antiquated tit-mouse, not knowing what a tit-mouse was, but finding the insult fitting nevertheless. Since finding out a tit-mouse is actually a small insect-eating passerine bird of the family Paridae, found in woodland areas throughout the world, maybe i missed the mark a little. But I think the sentitment was still there and as such I would like to declare that Peter Craven is too, an utter tit-mouse.

What he is suggesting about student theatre is so patronisingly infruiating that it needs to be explored further. I think that (in between the lines) he's calling me young, telling me to grow up, get a real job, get into realism, direct Joanna Murray-Smith, forget about Sarah Kane, forget about Performance Space, Romeo Castellucci and The Black Lung, forget about 3xsisters and Marius Von Mayenburg, forget about the Sydney Front and Robert Lepage and Open City, you'll grow out of it, wake up to yourself, tuck your shirt in, all the people you admire are not artists but arrogant wankers, what you like will take you nowhere, give up the dream, give it away, theatre is not for you Mark Rogers, you who cannot write for the stage and as such must to find other ways of communicating, theatre is not for you, it for other people, it is for Joanna Murray-Smith and for the big DW, it is a literary theatre where you Mark Rogers have no place.

Well Peter... get fucked.
I direct plays, plays written by writers, but I try to bring to plays written by writers an attention to aesthetic detail, an interest in formal innovation, an awareness of the power of direct audience contact, a willingness to delve into abstraction, a search for some kind of truth however we get there, a hope not to create a theatre that has been perfected, but one that is ever evolving and fluid, one that listens to the artists around it and filling it and one that doesn't simply put all the faith into one individual writer. Theatre is made by many people, not one, and they are all important.

I listened to a radio national podcast of Edward Albee's recent talk at STC a while ago and when he said that directors are interpretive artists and not creative artists (or something to that effect) i thought; how interesting to hear this kind of statement, he thinks about it like a heirachy, wow, that's not the way people think anymore. But obviously I was wrong. Peter Craven does.

Now that was a rant, yes. But am I unjustified? Is this what he's saying? Shoud I just wake up to myself and get my hands on a copy of Don's Party? What does everyone else think? Please comment, I need to talk about this.

A two way interview with Simon and Mark, regarding The Hayloft Project’s The Only Child.

2009-09-20T21:25:00.003+10:00

M: Simon. The Only Child?

S: Good play. I had a really great time, I loved the comedy, thought the acting was all quite strong and design was beautiful. There were some glorious images (flowers) and the whole thing felt pristine.

M: Pristine? Do you care to elaborate?

S: You walked into the intimate Downstairs Belvoir theatre, to the serene sound of a shower running into the stark porcelain of a claw foot bath. The bath sat atop perfectly polished floorboards. Obviously, this was the bathroom of someone successful. We soon learned that it was the home of Rita and Alfred, a well-to-do couple with a harrowing secret.

M: I’m yawning already.

S: I know right? When you dumb it down to its simplest elements, it’s a fairly conventional plot. But the story itself in fact takes many twists, and at times a dark comedy comes out moving it away from the simple story it could easily have been

M: It’s an Ibsen adaption yeah?

S: Yeah, not that I know anything about the original, which doesn’t seem to be a problem with this production as the story is quite far removed from the play that inspired it.

M: What did you like about it?

S: I’ve talked already about the comedy, which I think was one of the most striking elements of the play. I’m a great lover of awkwardness on stage, and the character of Henrik (Gareth Davies) was awkwardness personified. It was as if he was in a different play altogether, but rather than this being a problem, it in fact provided a great counter point to the heavy burden the text placed on the other characters.

M: Heavy burden you say. What burden?

S: Alfred and Rita have a child, Eyolf, who at the beginning of the play is missing. This is all the more worrying because Eyolf has a disability, one of his legs is crippled. The play begins with Rita and Alfred’s sister Asta in the bathroom discussing the incident, as well as Alfred’s impending return. It is clear from the start that Alfred and Rita’s relationship is far from harmonious. This is then compounded when Eyolf is declared dead, and we watch as Alfred falls to pieces, unable to leave the bath, let alone the bathroom. Throw into the mix Henrick, who is in love with Asta and gloriously unable to deal with people, and you have The Only Child, an hour and a half long investigation of guilt and recrimination in modern relationships

M: Did you love it? Why don’t you marry it?

S: But there’s the frustrating thing. It was so close to being marriage worthy, but it never quite got to the altar. Was this your experience? Am I being too harsh?

M: No you’re not too harsh. I thought it was great too. But I left wishing it’d been better. In the language, the content, the images, the form was such potential. But ultimately I felt like I’d seen the veneer of a show, the surface of an emotional impact. Never something as raw and painful as I was sure it would be. I think it glossed over all the nasty bits.

S: Do you mean in the text or the production?

M: Well the text was nasty as fuck. Thomas Henning and Simon Stone’s adaption of the Ibsen is a cutting look at moral collapse with a vicious wit and sly humour. So that rules out the text.

S: So it was the production then?

M: Set and lighting you mean?

S: Yeah, and the direction.

M: Direction then. All the theatrical elements made this play easier to bear. As you’ve mentioned they were gorgeous and really effective. But to the wrong end. The transition states, the ethereal images and stage pictures made the raw content disappear. I wanted to be rubbed raw by the uncomfortable truth of Alfred and Rita’s relationship, by their inadequacies mirroring my own personal failings but instead, everything was working to placate me.

S: Even the nudity, did that feel like gloss? Surely that was visceral. For those who haven’t seen it, there was a fair bit of nudity.

M: The naked bodies were beautiful first, visceral second. And this was to do with how they were framed. Despite Downstairs Belvoir being a tiny little space and even though I was two feet away from the naked actors, they seemed pictorial and not physical beings. Beautiful but, AHHH, I didn’t care. Is that fair enough, am I just insane or something. They were naked for ages why didn’t I get the sense it was raw?

S: I think you’re right, and I think it was partially to do with the beautiful framing, the warm lights shining back of the polished floor to give their bodies a sort of sheen rather than leaving them stark and grotesque. With the possible exception of Henrick’s initial forays into nudity.

M: Yeah that worked. I feel guilty for slamming it this way. Because I think it is such an achievement to make abundant nudity onstage beautiful first, it never felt tacky. Always an organic development of the staging. It was stunning really. It’s just that it didn’t serve the text in the right way. It slightly backed off from really being effective.

S: I think that was the main thing that stopped this production from being absolutely devastating, was that it backed off at all the wrongs moments. Just as I was on the edge of my seat, there was a blackout or a joke to let me off the hook. The most obvious example was when Rita joined Alfred in the bath and began to seduce him.

M: And…….blackout.

S: I was left thinking why didn’t they just have sex? It would have horrific in the wake of what had come before. But we seem to have lost sight of our interview form. Did you have a problem with the transitions?

M: Not really. I accepted the blackouts as a convention that was consistent, they weren’t overly long. It was the inbetween images and subtle shifts that annoyed me. FUCK SIMON. This is so frustrating. I loved it. I loved The Only Child. It is a confident, aesthetically assured, devastatingly performed production by a young company under the restless direction of Simon Stone. I hated The Promise. I thought this Hayloft work was awesome. BUT. It could have been so much better and all I can think about is What If? What IF? WHAT IF? This sucks.

S: I had the same problem. In the past couple of days I’ve had several conversations about the play where half way through, I realise I sound like I hated it. Which I didn’t. It’s just that it could have been one of the shows of the year, and it just didn’t quite get there.

M: Everyone should see it though yeah?

S: Absolutely. They’re one of the most important companies in Australia at the moment, and this is further of evidence of that.

M: So we keep hearing. I’m glad that this time, Hayloft and Simon Stone lived up to hype. But they could have exceeded it.

S: ARGH! I’m normally frustrated when things are bad, not when they are good.

M: ARGHHHGGGHHHHH!!!!

Simon and Mark

UOW Report: grads around the country this september

2009-09-14T11:21:00.002+10:00

Where are our grads at? Well apparently to opposing ends of the country. One up in Brisbane for Under The Radar 09 and another group down in Melbourne for the Fringe festival. And the shows are on a basically the same time. So if you have unlimited access to plane travel and are a UOW grad enthusiast then this is what you should do…

First up:

The Red Room by Malcolm Whittaker

______________________________________________

In The Red Room a solo performance is longing to and resistant to take place. It is a dance between the unexplainable desire for the spotlight and to hide in the black hole at its edge. It’s about looking, being looked at and love as much as it is fear.

“A stand-up comic quipped in a past US presidential election that the person who should run country should be the person that wants it the least, the person that has to be dragged kicking and screaming into The White House. I think a similar disposition is required of performance. A certain resistance to being in the performance situation. Part of you that does not want to there to hold up an integrity outside of oneself. This work is important to me because I believe there is a certain necessity for resistance and terror to stimulate creativity and sincerity in both process and performance. Working with the fear avoids the work slipping into a vacuum, exhausted of purpose, presence and necessity.” (Malcolm Whittaker, Creator/Performer)

Warehouse, Metro Arts, 109 Edward St Brisbane
Monday 21 September – Friday 25 September, 6:30pm
Booking: www.brisbanefestival.com

Malcolm’s been overseas for a while but has managed to line this up for himself. It’ll probably be awkward, low-fi and shitty looking but that’s what he does best. Sticking his head under a lampshade. Magic.

Next up, all the way down in Melbourne….

Nature League in North Melbourne by Tiger Two Times (Amy Wilson, Georgie Meagher, Megan Garrett-Jones and Natalie Randall)

Retreat into the hothouse. Play in the garden. Help to cultivate a surreal world. Nature League are here to make you radiant, tranquil and relaxed.

Performance group Tiger Two Times merge installation and theatre in their investigation of constructed environments. Inspired by the ‘fake nature' found all over the city, from pot plants to community vegetable gardens, and even jungle-themed lounge-rooms, this work delves into human interaction with natural spaces. Questions arise over our desire for greenery - is it purely aesthetic, or environmental? And, how many pot plants are needed to offset your carbon footprint? Nature League is an inquisitive and earnest organisation. Nature League is a retreat. But what will happen when the reality of outside pervades this sunny fantasy?

Fringe Hub - The Warehouse521 Queensberry Street North Melbourne
25th Sept – 2 Oct
Booking: http://www.melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/nature-league-in-north-melbourne

This is the Bake Sale girls in creative rather than curatorial mode, and we think they’re awesome in both, so get along to see them if you’re down in Melbourne for the fringe.

love Mark

This Kind Of Ruckus (version 1.0 and Performance Space)

2009-09-13T21:45:00.005+10:00

S: I was really excited for this show. As in, the week before it opened I had a dream that I went and saw it. Sadly I don’t remember much about the dream except that the show included the cast climbing on a wall using magnets. Basically the wall was a massive sheet of metal and the cast held magnets in their hands and feet (in dreams people can hold things with their feet) and climbed on the wall. It was an awesome effect that sadly wasn’t in the real show.

M: Disappointing

S: I do remember after the show, in my dream, someone asked me what I thought, and all I had to say was “well it was no Deeply Offensive… but it was quite good”.

M: Are you sticking by that assessment?

S: Yes I am. When I saw Deeply Offensive in 2007, I was a first year theatre student with a better knowledge of west end musicals than the Sydney theatre scene, and it completely changed my concept of how theatre could be put together and what it could do; so I guess my expectations were kind of high for this show. Anyone who has read my Deeply Offensive… review (see archive) knows how much I loved their previous work. What about you?

M: I think it’s a pretty hard line you’re taking in comparing it with Deeply Offensive. This work struck me as being totally different, both formally and in terms of its content.

S: Absolutely, and if these two shows weren’t made under the same banner, I would never have thought to compare them. But I guess I had somewhat naively, considering I’d only seen one show, come to an understanding of what to expect from Version 1.0 and this was something different from what I had wanted. That being said, it was something else that I wanted.

M: After all Deeply Offensive was so clear in what it was doing that maybe it was hard not to see it as a company defining production. Essentially, This Kind Of Ruckus is an exploration of violence in contemporary Australia, or rather, as I saw it, attitudes to violence. Entrenched in a landscape of club beats, bubble wrap and sporting exercises spanning the depth of Bay 20; the work uses recent high profile sexual assault cases emerging from the football community as a catalyst in their work. We piece together this view from the personal stories of the cast, press conferences and possibly other media sources, as in this work, unlike Deeply Offensive, their research remain unnamed.

S: Which I was surprised to think was a good decision in this case. The sometimes bodiless voices made the piece more haunting than it would have been if every story was academically referenced.

M: Yeah, it wasn’t about lampooning certain individuals; that would have been too easy, stand up comedy material, even footy show material. Like I suggested earlier, this work was about attitudes towards violence not just who did what and to whom.

S: The play essentially was split into two halves, of similar action, bookended by some cheerleader moves in front of a brightly lit curtain. The sporting theme informed the piece throughout, from the cast doing warm-ups to the half-time oranges.

M: Magic

S: Each half began with a personal story from a cast member which was then either interrupted or interrogated by the other members of the cast.

M: These moments were where I could most clearly identify these attitudes I’m talking about. When, after Danielle Antaki recounts a harrowing night with an ex boyfriend, Jane Phegan asks “What were you wearing?”

S: That was fucked.

M: For me this encapsulated something of both the Media’s attitude to victims of sexual violence and said something about club culture. A kind of disdain, an accusation that they’re asking for it, an easy shift of blame.

S: A similar moment was when Arky adorned Jane with a black eye (a simple make-up effect) then tried to justify it as an accident, “what do you want me to do? Do you want to spank me?”. His response just didn’t let up, until his questioning shoulders were almost above his head.

M: That was also, really fucked.

S: So much so the audience was split between gagging and laughing. But these small personal moments acted more as transitions for the major sections of the show which took place behind the curtain.

M: These sections were made up of repeated motifs and movements, gradually getting more and more brutal and uncontrolled. Each drawing of the curtain revealed David Williams on a chair staring directly at a prostrate, possibly unconscious Kim Vercoe. I want to say staring straight at her cunt. His face, along with other gorgeously time lapsed, delayed and live fed footage was projected onto two large white screens hanging over the front half of the stage.

S: Let’s talk vision for a moment. Sean Bacon makes video in theatre work. Projections can be really tacky and unnecessary but Version 1.0 use them perfectly. Throughout the piece a combination of live feed and recorded videos are seamlessly mixed to give us not only a different perspective on the work, but insight into the stage action that would otherwise be lost.

M: Here they contributed to the works swirling visceral nature, flesh on flesh, breathing. Bringing a liveness and weight to the action onstage. Yes I agree.

S: Visceral is exactly it, and I think this was largely to do with Gail Priest’s completely violent club inspired soundtrack.

M: Maybe not largely, I think it had more to do with the bodies of the performers. Whether it be dancing (aggressively) at each other or sprinting the length of the space or downing beer and fluoro coloured muck in plastic cups or punching each other in face as Jane and Kim did by the beer table late in the work.

S: For me though it was often the music that brought that feeling from the stage into the audience, the bass entwining itself in your stomach, as you watched the sometimes gross, but always bodily, action.

M: It’s interesting then, that we’ve already spoken about possibly the most visceral reaction in the audience, which was unaccompanied by music, just Arky’s shrugging shoulders.

S: True.

M: Point one Mark. Chalk it up.

S: Alright mate, well said. Alright, let’s get on with the show. (That’s a Ruckus joke for those playing at home). We haven’t talked about our favourite bit yet.

M: Oh yeah that was also fucked up. After David’s menacing stare at Kim, Jane facilitated a kind of reconciliation between them. Constantly interrupting a role playing conversation between the two of them. Asking, how they think it’s going. Pulling David up for doing the wrong thing.

S: But getting him to put it in positive turns, like a primary school teacher saying “let’s not have a rules list, let’s have a hopes list”.

M: Kim is frustrated to be in the same light as David and she hates it when he does that walking thing when he pretends he’s not walking. It’s very threatening.

S: He totally does that by the way, she’s not making it up.

M: You did see Deeply Offensive three times right?

S: Yeah but I’m not being a fan boy anymore because I didn’t think this show was perfect.

M: What was wrong with it Simon?

S: For a start I felt like there was a lot of wasted time. There were lengthy movements between images that I didn’t think helped build anything.

M: I appreciated the time to catch myself, and found that the break meant that diving back into the same kinds of issues/images made the work even more present. I picked up a paper the other day and reading the sports section, they actually had a cute little graphic saying “scandal free zone” next to an article on the footy.

S: I guess the other problem I had was with the content, and I that I felt it didn’t blow out the issue, so much as recap the attitudes towards it. Maybe it’s just because I’m at a university and in a course where we talk about gender politics all the time, but I just came out feeling like I hadn’t really heard or seen anything that I hadn’t thought about before. It seemed to me like the material was made for an audience that wouldn’t ever attend a Version 1.0 show. I didn’t see any football colours in the crowd.

M: Yeah maybe

S: But I guess it’s also important for this issue to not go away. I may be happy with my own attitudes and be willing to put the issues to rest in my mind, but there is still a lot of cultural change that needs to occur.

M: And that’s what I held onto as the most important statement the work was making. That a cultural attitude to sexual violence exists in Australia that means we expect to open the paper and see a scandal, and that these situations can be swept away with a few mumbled words. Embarrassing for all concerned.

S: But I wanted more engagement with why that culture exists and how we can move forward from it, or even how it is treated in the media, or how it affects the individuals who fight against it, rather than simply a portrayal of how horrible the culture itself is. I feel there was meat in the issues that they never got onto the stage.

M: You wanted documentary theatre, not a real exploration of the culture’s impact on bodies.

S: That’s because I’m Brecht and you’re Artaud.

M: (silence)

S: Simon evens it up, chalk it up.

M: …Fair call.

S: I did love a lot of the elements. I couldn’t stop talking about the video, and there were times when they made me feel absolutely horrible, some of which we’ve already discussed. David Williams and Jane Phegan have two of the most beautiful voices you’ll ever hear and I could listen to them talk in official tones for hours. But most of what I will take away from this production is theatrical, and with Version 1.0 I had hoped I would leave more affected by their politics.

M: Hmmmm. Maybe. I still think they nailed a cultural treatment of violence, and they nailed that through the theatrical elements, not despite them.

S: Indeed.

M: I guess we leave it at one all.

Simon Binns and Mark Rogers

Once And For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen (Sydney Theatre Company/Ontroerend Goed)

2009-09-08T22:19:00.006+10:00

Directed By Alexander Devriendt

Adolescence wasn’t really that long ago for me. I’m only two years older than the eldest members of the 13 strong cast of what I will from now on be referring to as Once and… The trials, tribulations and triumphs of this part of our lives are all recent history for me and rarely do I feel that they are well represented, on stage, screen or in other public forums. More often than not I see that representations and discussion are informed by outdated clichés, and I get the feeling that all those involved in Once and… feel much the same. This play has taken the clichés, mixed them up with real life experiences, and left you to figure out which is which. The result is a work which neither reinforces nor attacks popular notions of “teenagehood” but instead presents an honest portrait of the lives of 13 young Belgians.

The form is simple. A song plays. For the duration of that song, the 13 performers gradually emerge onto the stage, go through a series of actions associated with teenage life. These range from flicking a friend with a balloon to kissing a girl in a sleeping bag, to kicking over someone’s impressive pyramid of plastic cups. When the song ends a siren sounds and the performers clean up the stage and run off. After this form has been set-up with two pretty much identical run throughs, the action then takes place through different experiential ciphers. For example, there is one run where everyone is in love with each other, one where everyone is on drugs, one where everyone is ear-piercingly happy, one where no one actually comes on stage, and so on and so forth, until finally the magnitude of the action is increased tenfold, plastic cups have become water-cooler tanks, sleeping bags have become giant garbage bags etc. and the stage becomes a playground for some amazing(ly choreographed) chaos. The cycle is intermittently broken up by direct to audience monologues. When it’s all over and the bows have been taken care of, the cast then come out and start cleaning up.

I thought it was an interesting example of how to quickly establish a theatrical language. For the first run I wasn’t sure what to think. I was enjoying the experience, and there was a wealth of content on stage, but I wasn’t sure how to engage with it. Was this the beginning of a story about these kids? Were they in a classroom? Was the show just going to be an hour of kids being kids? How would I feel if it was? All these thoughts were running through my head while these kids laughed and played with chalk. However as soon as the process was repeated I instantly knew where I stood. Rather than attempting to take in the whole picture I started watching individuals, investigating the little moments they were having. This investigation was then taken over by the performers with each subsequent run as they revealed something new in the otherwise innocuous set of actions. Overall, I adored the form, its structured chaos the perfect metaphor for adolescence.

I also felt that the work had a really clear dramatic structure despite not having any narrative. The work was beautifully crafted by director Alexander Devriendt using what I thought was a pretty traditional three act structure of set-up, confrontation and resolution. The difference here being that the set-up is that of the form, the confrontation is that of the performers’ views on adolescence with popular opinion, and the resolution is that of the performers’ rights to their experiences.

Experiences that we both heard about and watched them have. Each cipher pinpointed the feeling of an experience of adolescence and then let this feeling drift over to the audience. The drug scene is the most extreme version of this obviously, with the loud music and visceral action demanding a reaction. But some of the simpler ideas, such as the performers simply saying their tasks rather than carrying any of them out, gave you just as strong an insight, in that case to the feeling of being robbed of your autonomy, as well as pointing out the paradox of the play itself which both freed and constrained the performers.

The monologues were perhaps the weakest part of the play. Charlotte De Bruyne’s opening was outstanding, performed with a naturalness that actors with far more training and life experience should envy. However, Jorge De Geest’s contribution was one of the few moments where the play lost momentum. Interestingly he is one of the performers that wasn’t in the original cast. The monologues were the only moments when you felt the work heading towards cliché, but luckily they were short enough that you either didn’t quite end up there, or the cliché was shown so that it could be addressed. They were also home to some genuinely heart-warming moments, which included getting the audience to scream fart.

I suppose the message of this play was that adolescence is a crazy time and to try and control it is counter-productive; that just because adults think they know what’s good for youths, that doesn’t mean they should stop them from learning for themselves. When I write it like that it seems really bland and far from groundbreaking. But after 45 minutes of this performance, this realisation was exhilarating. Watching the performers indulge in the ridiculous act of supersizing the performance in the final scene was pure vicarious satisfaction and the sense of joy that filled the room was palpable. The performance left me wanting only one thing - to see the show again many, many times. Unfortunately it closed two days later. The key to its success was simple really, the press release declared “you’ll think we’re super cool” and it was right.

- Simon

Poppea (Sydney Opera House/Vienna Schauspielhaus)

2009-09-03T00:12:00.010+10:00

Directed By Barrie Kosky

I have been scared about writing this review ever since I saw Poppea two weeks ago. This is because I didn’t really love it. I mean I enjoyed it, was glad I’d seen it, thought the performances were mostly of a great standard, but I left the theatre, not that bothered overall. Normally not loving a show is not that big a deal, and in fact can make writing a review easier. It can be hard to write a review of a show you loved without sounding sycophantic (a crime I am certainly guilty of, and one I expect to commit again when I review “Once and for all…” in the coming days). The difference with this production is that a) it was a Kosky, and b) EVERYONE seems to have loved it, from theatre critics, to my fellow undergrads, to my friends who I generally consider a good indicator of the fabled “general public”. It’s never easy being in the minority of opinion on a show; it makes you wonder what it was everyone else saw that you didn’t. When the show is directed by Barrie Kosky, Australia’s very own theatrical auteur, who occasionally returns from his post in Europe to offer Australia fresh insight into his genius, well let’s just say the stakes are somewhat higher. For one, no young theatre practitioner wants to be aligned with David Williamson…

Thus I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly why I didn’t engage with this work. The first problem I came across is that I simply don’t like opera that much. This perhaps a somewhat naïve statement, after all, Poppea is only the third Opera I’ve seen, although I’ve listened to quite a lot of operatic music, my father used to be an opera singer and I grew up with classical music around me. Also, the operas I have seen have been of quite a high standard. When I was travelling in 2006 I saw Carmen performed at the Vienna State Opera House. It’s a classic and was performed by some amazing singers, but I found it long and uninteresting. I got excited at the famous songs (I was the operatic equivalent of that annoying guy at concerts who only knows the singles) but the production as a whole failed to have any great effect on me. I think the problem with this opera was that it was so foreign to me. The music, the costumes, the acting style, none of it resonated. However, that was a pretty straight opera, an attempted “faithful” reproduction of a classic. Poppea was not. I figured that if anyone was going to inspire my interest in the form it would be Kosky, but unfortunately it was not the case.

My second main frustration was the text itself. I’m just not that interested in these ancient affairs. What’s more, the opera had been cut in such a way that for a long time the specifics of the story were quite hazy. But I suppose the story’s not really what’s important is it? Not in any sort of Aristotelian “we must have catharsis for it to be good theatre” sort of way anyway. It’s about what Kosky does with images and how he makes you feel right? Which is I guess why I was really disappointed. When I saw Kosky’s Tell-Tale Heart, and Women Of Troy, I felt things. I had feeling thrust upon me. Those works demanded my engagement, bodily, and I think that’s what was meant to happen with Poppea. It was certainly a very bodily work. One could say it was completely concerned with the physicality of the performers. If a character felt something, we saw it physically enacted, from Poppea playing air guitar, to Drusilla singing whilst on her tiptoes, not to mention all the sex. But none of this really did anything to me. There were definitely moments where I appreciated the craft of the actors, but I was rarely overwhelmed. I think this is partially because I was pretty much as far back as you could be. Perhaps if I had been closer to the stage the show’s physical nature would have had a stronger impact on me. Although at times I found the highly physical style of performance quite annoying. I simply thought Ruth Brauer-Kvam who played Drusilla was over-acting, and there were numerous other moments, particularly in the first half, that I felt lacked sincerity.

For all this negativity, there were things I adored. Kyree Kvam’s voice was tremendous, possibly the best singing I have ever heard, certainly in any recent history. His rendition of “So In Love” was jaw-dropping. Which brings me to my favourite aspect of the production – the Cole Porter songs. Most times they were used, I found them absolutely revealing, bringing out new meanings in the songs themselves and in the relationships of the characters. The strangling that accompanied “So In Love” was truly unsettling. As many a commentator has said, this show has changed the way many people will listen to Cole Porter. It was during these numbers that I felt most closely connected to the work, that I felt the tension coming off the stage. I’ve considered the possibility that this was simply because of the language barrier, that because in these moments I wasn’t being distracted by the surtitles I was better able to give myself over to them, but I don’t think it was that simple. I feel it was in these moments that Kosky was able to delve deeper into the action than the libretto otherwise allowed and find material that was genuinely surprising.

I found the second half superior to the first in its image work, which was certainly aided by the back walling lowering to reveal a wall of mirrors. This gave the stage new depth and a sense of openness, allowing the actors nowhere to hide. The final images of both acts were also fantastic, and the way that Kosky created them was beautiful. Before each ending he filled the stage with performers, only to remove almost all of them leaving us with a stunning stage picture as the curtain fell. At the end of the first it was Seneca’s corpse flopping awkwardly out of the bath that was his home, and for the second it was Poppea and Nero, sitting side by side as rulers of the Empire, now without need for physical affection. They were both chilling.

So what do we have in the end? A play that I quite liked elements of, but overall wasn’t that affected by - not exactly an odd night out at the theatre really. But I guess what makes it different and so frustrating is the weight of expectation I brought with me into the theatre. Barrie Kosky is an incredible director. His understanding of the power of music is second to none in the Australian theatre scene, and I found his productions of the Tell-Tale Heart and the Women Of Troy absolutely fascinating. As well as my experience of these two shows, Poppea had received absolutely glowing reviews from some of the harshest critics I know. I went into the theatre ready for something awe-inspiring, and came out largely disappointed.

- Simon

Monthly Friend #2: Askew, Amiss, Awry

2009-08-30T15:15:00.001+10:00

Last night the gals from Bake Sale For Art ran their second Monthly Friend. This time at another kick arse venue; Bill and George in Redfern, an artist run studio and rehearsal complex. Monthly Friend is an opportunity for young artists to show their work, as complete or as developmental as it is. It is also an opportunity for critical discussion, new artistic connections/collaborations and really, really excellent soup.

Events such as this create a real sense of community, everybody is splayed out on comfy couches, sweet nibblies are abundant and so is conversation. This kind of support network is something that I highly value as I stare down the home stretch of my uni course. “The industry”; this thing we hear about from lecturers, grads and our parents; is a cruel, inhuman and vicious place, where we’re most likely to get torn apart and then shamefully crawl back to uni for a Dip Ed. But nights like Monthly Friend make it seem as comfortable as grandma’s biscuits, and I thank the Bake Sale crew for that.

The theme of the night examined all things wrong, slightly left of centre or not quite right. Things askew, amiss and awry. In keeping with the theme there were countless technical fuck-ups, awkwardly covered by Nat Randall MC; a stand up comic who sent a tape in place of himself; red wine appearing out of fish bowls of milk, and incredibly phat beats made entirely out of fruit. Despite all the memorable insanity however, it is the connections made and the joy of likeminded company that I really took from the night. Bring on Monthly Friend #3.

Mark

Thom Pain (based on nothing) - B Sharp

2009-08-27T17:58:00.007+10:00

Written By Will Eno
Directed By Sam Strong

Monologues are hard. In my first year at university we put on a production of Gary Owen’s Ghost City, which is essentially a collection of 25 monologues. It was a very useful exercise for us in terms of developing as actors, and while I thought it was quite a strong show (some of my classmates might disagree) I spoke to a lot of people who simply thought, “two hours of monologues… not really a good thing”. I’ve often wondered why this is the case and I think it’s because in life, we rarely listen to one person speaking for extended lengths of time, there’s generally some sort of dialogue. If we are listening to the one person speak for an extended period, it’s generally in a classroom or lecture situation, experiences we don’t normally associate with captivation. That being said, last year I went to a couple of one-person shows that I thoroughly enjoyed. Radio at the Old Fitz, was a beautiful story, tenderly acted by Andrew Bibby, and My Name Is Rachel Corrie, offered a strikingly personal insight into the Palestine/Israel conflict that brought me to tears. However, even in these works, there were moments when the labour of listening to the same voice for over an hour hit home and I tuned out. Therefore, it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I approached Thom Pain (based on nothing). I knew Luke Mullins was a talented actor, and I had also heard good things about Will Eno’s script, but would it be enough to keep me interested? In short, yes.

At the heart of Thom Pain is a story of lost love. It would perhaps be too simplistic to say that it is Thom’s story, because one is never really sure who Thom Pain is, and whether anything or in fact everything is personal. The telling of the story is broken up by moments of existential contemplation, stand-up comedy, and audience interaction. If anything, it is this relationship, between audience and performer which is the core of Thom Pain.

The stage is completely bare, apart from a chair and a glass of water and from the moment the lights go down, the audience is on the back foot. I find it highly disappointing that in these days of OH&S the head usher has to tell us beforehand that the play will begin with an “intense blackout” (as opposed to a more placid “greyout” I suppose) because it somewhat spoils the surprise. However, as I discovered earlier in the year at Benedict Andrews’ The City, blackouts can really affect you whether you know they’re coming or not. Something about being plunged into darkness for an extended period of time sets some sort of inner alarm bell off, warning you that you’re vulnerable. Perhaps this fear is why so many mobile phone lights were visible in the audience at this point. More likely some people are just shit. Regardless, there was something truly wonderful about Luke Mullins appearing out the darkness with the lighting of a match. It was even better when he returned to darkness and kept talking, asking questions about how he looked. This production stopped you from getting comfortable for a long time. For the first fifteen minutes you were never quite sure what was coming next, and it was only after you got used to expecting the unexpected that you allowed yourself to relax. This settling was of course subverted later on.

Some of my favourite moments in theatre are when you ask yourself the question was that meant to happen? Surely that can’t have been rehearsed? The most memorable for me was the time during Exit The King when Geoffrey Rush’s wig fell off and he quickly replaced it whilst mumbling, “You weren’t meant to see that. 1, 2, 3 and you’re back in the room!” The ultimate pay-off was later in the show when the wig was taken off to reveal Rush’s decaying body, one performer exclaimed, “That’s never happened before!” The solution to the problem was almost too good to be random. Throughout Thom Pain I found myself wondering time and again what was detail and what was accident. By the end I had come to the conclusion that nothing was left to chance, it was just good theatre. This included a great piece of audience plant work, where someone ran out of the theatre, and Mullins ran after him saying goodbye, only to remark unhappily “cunt!” while returning to the stage. For a moment I was genuinely fooled, and was sure that this “random” audience member had just got a text message about his wife being in labour. Unfortunately, the text went on about the exit for just a little bit too long, and I recall being very disappointed upon realising that it was faked. But you were just as unsure when the glass of water was spilt, or when a light came up on a different area of the stage to where Mullins was standing. Throughout, the audience expectation was played with, culminating in the final section of the play where an audience member was brought up onto stage to help Pain finish the story.

Luke Mullins’ meticulous performance was stunning. He had impressed me before, particularly with the STC Actor’s Company, but this was a new level of his work for me. I’m sure that that is in part due to the intimacy of Downstairs Belvoir, but I also feel that the text gave him a lot of room to explore to the full realm of his abilities. No gesture was out of place, and his voice moved through its registers as if he was singing. He gave the words sufficient bite to confront you, but he also kept the sense of intimacy required for us to care about his stories. He also generated a lot of trust, which was important because of the playful nature of the work. I didn’t really mind when he made me jump in my seat by screaming “boo!” in my face, and I was more than happy to watch him as he laughed to himself for a while after commenting “I have a vibrant inner life”. The details created a fascinating portrait of a man, who almost made not wearing socks with a suit look good.

After a somewhat disappointing finish to the last B Sharp season, I’m once again excited about this strong start for one of my favourite spaces. Will Thom Pain be another Ladybird, the standout beginning that was too hard for the rest to live up to? I guess I’ll find out at the Lonesome West next week.

- Simon

Review: Knives In Hens (Malthouse - Melbourne)

2009-08-24T22:20:00.004+10:00

Written by David Harrower
Directed by Geordie Brookman

Before this play, I had only heard brief allusions to David Harrower. I knew that successful productions of his Blackbird had been programmed by both the STC and MTC in recent years, and I had heard his named thrown about as the leader of a new movement of Scottish playwrights who eschew naturalism with poetic language. With these fragments of knowledge in hand, I was surprised at the opening scene of Geordie Brookman’s Knives In Hens. There was no poetry in the language whatsoever. Robert Menzies’ Pony William almost coughed out his words, while Kate Box’s Young Woman, was too lacking in knowledge of language to be able to treat it with care. Instead it seemed a decision had been made to ignore the poetic possibilities of the text and focus on physical presence, particularly in William’s attempted control of the Young Woman, and the industrial frames of the set’s impact upon the actors.

The set presented some nice opportunities, and I particularly liked the water at the front-right of the stage. I’m quite a fan of stage elements that can’t be faked. Everyone knows when an actor drinks a glass of wine on stage it’s probably iced tea or an equivalent, but with a large pool of water, you know their socks are getting wet whether they like it or not. I also enjoyed the sound as they walked through the water, in fact it’s probably the only sound I have any real memory of. I also liked the off-stage space of the stables created through Anna Cordingley’s ominous drainpipe. Unfortunately this dominating design robbed the play of a lot of its intimacy, as a well as requiring a lot of time between scenes as the actors moved about its various stage areas, which included an upstairs section for the Miller’s home.

Which brings me to my main reservation about the play, the pedestrian direction. I felt as if each scene had been directed without much care for those preceding or following it. There was very little build between scenes, with each instead seemingly treated as a self-completing entity. By paying too much attention to the ebb and flow of each moment, the overall experience was stilted. The audience was always given time to relax during the many transitions whilst the actors climbed ladders and battled with grates and doors making it very hard for the penultimate moments of the play to have any real impact. I never felt any moments of great dramatic tension, and they’re definitely there in the script.

In the end it was the text and Kate Box that got me home. Harrower’s deceptively simply story sent my brain off on many tangents about the importance of female education in a society (there is research to suggest that the only way forward with AIDS in Africa is to educate the women), and the freedom that language gives us to define our identity and experiences of the world. It reminded me of the angels in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings Of Desire who only learnt to speak when the humans they had been watching since creation gained knowledge of language. I also found Box’s portrayal of the Young Woman, in constant struggle with her own ignorance, engaging in what otherwise felt a long and stagnant show.

- Simon

Review: Spectacular (Arts House - Melbourne)

2009-08-19T19:58:00.007+10:00

Created by Forced Entertainment (UK)

Spectacular is the latest work from UK theatre company Forced Entertainment, who this year celebrated 25 years together. The show is essentially one man in a terrible skeleton costume (Robin Arthur) describing a show that for reasons beyond our knowledge, and seemingly his, has failed to take place as usual. The set isn’t out, and the opening guy didn’t do his bit, so instead, this poor man is left with the task of explaining what we would normally experience. Other than his good self, the only element of the original show that makes it to stage is Claire Marshall’s epic death scene, which she undertakes for the majority of the show. The concept is not uninteresting and for a while I was completely engrossed. In a very understated English way, the beginning was hilarious. The way Arthur explained almost every minutia of the show was captivating and just as the energy was losing its way, Marshal entered and in the driest deadpan you’ve ever heard, announced the beginning of her death. Her violent throes provided an ideal counterpoint to the lulling monologue of Arthur, which was more than enough for an entertaining half hour of theatre.

Unfortunately, it continued for another hour after that (the programme’s promise of a 75 minute running time was either a poor estimate or a calculated lie) without change. No performer relationships emerged, there were no shifts in pace and only the smallest pay-offs for the effort the play demanded of its audience. In the play’s defence, the early morning flight to Melbourne had meant that I’d only gotten three hours sleep the night before, and instead of intellectually engaging with what the work was trying to do, I was instead thinking “eyes, stay open” and rueing my decision to sit in the front row. But I think that placing the blame on my interrupted sleeping patterns would be giving the show too much credit.

The play was attempting to investigate the idea of stage deaths and their inherent falseness. There are several deaths being explored, Marshall’s over the top theatrical death, the death of the show which is not being performed for unknown reasons, Arthur’s comical depiction of death, and then the death of the current show which peters out into nothingness. The work engages with these various deaths with what my friend described as “painful subtlety”, which I found simply translated to a boring show. I got so frustrated in the last half hour as I waited and waited for the play to do something, anything, to actually interest me. But instead I watched as a man performed a monologue he didn’t seem interested in, and a woman over-acted a death scene, which other than damaging Claire Marshall’s vocal chords didn’t achieve much. Now I know that this is probably the point of the work, that as we watched the play die on stage we ourselves died a sort of death, and what about the way they were deconstructing theatre as a form and aren’t all these things very interesting to think about? My answer is yes, these things are interesting to think about, but it’s also interesting to watch good theatre. My question is, what did Spectacular do in performance, that couldn’t have been done in a short essay? I would argue very little and that’s what I found frustrating.

Props to Arts House for their green ticket scheme, which meant that this disappointing experience was at least a cheap one.

- Simon

The Crimp Report

2009-08-15T23:45:00.003+10:00

AT LAST! The long awaited Crimp report arrives. Earlier in the year Simon and I were delighted to see that Martin Crimp, one of Britain’s most critically lauded and uncompromising playwrights, was programmed on not one, but three separate seasons; at UOW, STC and Griffin. “Hurrah”, we thought, a chance to see what Australian practitioners can do with such a formally intriguing writer. We did have our reservations however. What about the language? Is it too British? How does one approach Crimp? Naturalistically? He does write about the domestic unit a lot, but would that kill the poetry? Who are the people in Crimp’s work? Are they Characters? Should we treat them as such? Are we getting a little too worked up over all this?

The three productions that Simon and I saw over the past few months answered a few of these questions and quite often raised more. Sanja Simic’s The Country, Benedict Andrews’ The City and Cristabel Sved’s Dealing With Clair were all surprisingly similar interpretations of the same writer, with incremental differences in how various aspects were handled. Differences which Simon and I discuss below…….

S: The most impacting of the designs was undoubtedly Ralph Myers’ looming staircase for The City. As soon as the lights came up, the sheer size of the stairs which almost completely filled the Wharf 2 stage space, pressed upon you, especially from my front row position.

M: Mirroring the audience obviously.

S: It also demanded a certain physical approach from the performers who had to negotiate the large steps.

M: Like Colin Moody galloping around the stairs or Belinda Mccory having to pace herself when ascending wearing a particularly inconvenient skirt.

S: The design allowed for some truly wonderful theatrical tricks, most notably the piano which appeared seemingly impossibly at the top of the stairs.

M: That was awesome. A trick obviously allowed by the EXTREME blackouts. Which also provided a space of disorientation for the audience between scenes. Couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.

S: This I guess is where the problems began in terms of the impact of the text itself.

M: The text obviously works on various unsettling levels. First domestically estranged and uncomfortable then with increasingly bizarre images both in the language and in the doppelganger nature of the child figure.

S: However, because we were already unsettled by the design, the unsettling moments in the text had less of an impact.

M: Which is for me to do with a required level of naturalism in the work. You need a kind of base to work from. From where you can start to invade and fuck up the naturalistic world of the text.

S: On the opposite end of the spectrum you have Dealing With Clair which strived for naturalism at the expense of Crimp’s unsettling moments.

M: And at the expense of good design and theatrical sense.

S: Ouch. I agree. The Dealing With Clair set was stuck between trying for a beautiful theatrical image and trying for a realistic setting.

M: And so it basically ended up in no mans land. It was a little square carpet room

S: Filled with indicators of a family ready to move, such as cardboard boxes marked fragile, and lamps and laptops

M: And those black rope thingys

S: Cables?

M: Yeah was that it,/ Cables?

S: Maybe they were something to do with trains?

M: That’s a little obscure isn’t it? In any case they didn’t really do anything.

S: You certainly spent the entire play wondering if they were going to do something, but when they were finally engaged with, in what was meant to be a climactic emotional moment with Boris Brkic cutting them, it was just horrible.

M: Yeah I think they made a real problem for themselves in boxing in the space like that, it meant that the transitions became stilted and awkward since there was just one entrance to the playing space. They were tripping over each other.

S: At first I was thinking surely that’s meant to be like that? That’s some sort of emotional world of the character right? The way they have to watch each other as they come and go. But no, it was really a matter of practicalities.

M: The metaphor got a bit swamped. So for me the level of naturalism in Dealing With Clair was almost too much. It didn’t allow the text to breathe poetically really. And so instead of seeing through the real estate world to the heart of human greed we got a very bourgeois dinner story about property investment. It was totally banal.

S: Which was really disappointing, because even though this is an early Crimp, written before he was critically acclaimed playwright “Martin Crimp”, you could see the hints of his unique style emerging, and rather than relishing them, this production bulldozed through them.

M: I got the feeling of being yelled at.

S: Why were they so loud?

M: I don’t know. That was full on. It was a feeling I did not get from watching The Country. Which I felt might have been closer to nailing the right level of naturalism in Crimp’s work. Obviously The Country, in looking at a domestic landscape, is a little more realistic than the imaginative warzone/thoughtzone of The City. But it struck me as finding the unsettling in less theatrical ways than Andrews’ production.

S: Well it was set on a traverse, with lighting bars shining at one end and a suspended tree emerging from a doorway at the other, The Country was obviously not attempting to create a realistic set, but at the same time, nor did it completely remove any sense of realism as in The City.

M: They sat on chairs and talked to each other.

S: They were always obviously in the same room, a physical room, and the hints of realism such as the chair and the phone anchored this sense of place.

M: So it became more about the language games that the characters play on each other. The wife against the husband, the husband against the lover, the lover against the wife. About tactics. Which the performers (Natalie Randall, Theresa Mullan and Murray Clapham) handled beautifully.

S: The emphasis on character kept the stories grounded, so that the relationships were never lost in the language. You were never swept up into Crimp land like in The City.

M: The Country was my favourite text of the three.

S: Agreed.

M: Although I can see the danger in it falling into the Dealing With Clair pothole, and just being more of a dinner story. In Sanja Simic’s production however this was nimbly avoided.

S: Imagine if it had been placed in naturalistic home, with pots and pans and babies’ booties lying about the place. One of Crimp’s greatest strengths I feel is the imaginative world he creates for his audience, and to rob his language of that power is to do a disservice to the text.

M: Vomit.

S: You can’t run away from the domesticity of Crimp’s work. The City did this, and I think it definitely hindered the lasting impact of the work. The final scene failed to leave me with any lasting effect really; because I felt the same way I’d felt the entire time.

M: So you have to get the balance right. It can’t be too naturalistic because then you destroy the language and it becomes dull, but it can’t be too far into fantasy theatre land otherwise it stops being menacing and you miss what the texts are trying to say.
Despite The City being the most accomplished and visually stunning of the three (I remember really liking it as I walked out) it sort of faded away over the next few days.

S: Now that raises an interesting question about which response is the most important, the initial reaction or the more contemplative week later thoughts.

M: I guess it depends on when we write the reviews.

S: (laughs) Ultimately, The City was the most accomplished production, with fantastic performances

M: Colin Moody!

S: And sharp design, but it was almost as if Beno let his imagination run a little too far ahead of text, hampering its overall impact.

M: And Dealing With Clair was a little misguided, seemingly lacking an awareness of how to deal with Crimp’s language, opting to plough through it at super pace and volume, instead of excavating the gaps in understanding and communication that make it an interesting work. Whereas The Country managed to balance the unsettling with the domestic, demonstrating a more complete understanding of Crimp.

S: Allowing his distinctive style to have its full effect.

M: It’s interesting that these three works are the less formally stunning Crimp plays. Attempts On Her Life or Fewer Emergencies are for me far more intriguing works because of their disregard for character and conventional dramatic structure. I’d be more excited to see Beno do one of these, where I think his eye for image wouldn’t be quite so out of place.

S: It was certainly a different experience to watching War Of The Roses, where his images often gave the actors the power from which to work. I felt that in this production, the actors held his images together. Which was perhaps the biggest problem with Dealing With Clair. The decision to treat the text naturalistically had been made, but the acting simply didn’t match up to this decision.

M: Between the drunk acting and the game of snap I just wanted to kill them.

S: I couldn’t help but feel though that poor direction was the major problem though rather than any lack of skill on any individual actor’s behalf. Why hadn't they been instructed to actually play snap? Why had they been led to perform at a size large enough for the Opera House’s Drama Theatre, rather than at a more intimate level that a space like the Stables demands? There even seemed uneasiness in the bowing. I’m not sure if I imagined it because of my own experience of the play, but there seemed to be a lack of confidence in the work.

M: Yeah. We probably didn’t help by squirming throughout the play and half heartedly applauding. I feel a little bad actually since I’m sure they are not as unilaterally awful as that production made them seem. It really was just a few degrees off where it should have been. But after having seen The City and The Country, the difference just grated on me.

S: Hmmm

M: Yeah. Right. I think that’s it.

Your turn. The discussion can continue below…

UOW Spring Season

2009-08-08T14:54:00.003+10:00

Sorry for the recent neglect of the perf, Simon and I have been caught up in the usual early session rush of subject outlines, auditions and scrambling for tutorial times. Over the next week there'll be plenty of catching up to do with the blog. Crimp, Beckett, Simon's overseas adventures and we better both see te Kosky sometime soon as well.

In the meantime, UOW has lined up its spring season of performances. Make sure to check http://www.uow.edu.au/crearts/performances/index.html for dates and booking numbers closer to end of session, for all non gong people that's basically late October onwards.

The Pidgeon
Directed by Deborah Pollard
with first year students

Trumpets and Raspberries
Written by Dario Fo
Directed by Janys Hayes
with second year students

As I Lay Dreaming
Written and directed by Catherine Mckinnon
with second year students

Angels in America Parts 1 & 2
Written by Tony Kushner
Directed by Tim Maddock and Christopher Ryan
with third year students

Attempts On Her Life
Written by Martin Crimp
Directed by Sanja Simic

Elephant People
Written by Daniel Keene
Directed by Mark Rogers

Mark

Review: The Promise

2009-07-17T21:08:00.004+10:00

Written by Aleksei Arbuzov
Directed by Simon Stone

Hype is a dangerous thing, a poisonous thing. It is seductive and works within the imagination first of all; a few sentences or a picture is enough to get it started. There in the imagination it simmers; the words of praise repeat themselves, the picture grows bigger, 3D in fact, and then extends to represent the entire breadth of one’s desire. But however perfectly it manifests in the brain, it isn’t satisfying simply to think on it. Despite trawling through the vast pools of information in the internet or library for more snippets or glimpses of its true nature, once that is exhausted you are left in the same position. Unfulfilled. Hungry. At this point it moves into the real world and becomes about sharing the hype externally, spreading it onto close friends or colleagues. Mining them for information, exciting them, watching them build their own fantasy and letting it inform your own. But still this is not enough, you’re still hungry, you just have company. Hype works insidiously to take over personal consciousness, until every waking moment is empty unless satisfied, for better or worse, by whatever is being hyped up.

For me, Simon Stone had a lot of hype. This is a director who at 24 is a member of one of “melbourne’s most vital new companies” (Alison) The Hayloft Project, who, after winning the $20000 George Fairfax Memorial Award in 2008, this year alone has directed 3xSisters, Spring Awakening, Leaves of Glass and The Promise, with The Only Child set to premiere at Downstairs Belvoir in September/October. He is in vogue, described variously as “brilliant”, “classical” and “dynamic” with an “eye for a memorable theatrical image”. I pored over the reviews of The Hayloft Project, excited that such a young company could be doing such intellectual and consistently acclaimed work, gagging to actually SEE something, after missing Spring Awakening at B Sharp in 2008. (which my co blogger Simon raved about to me). Finally, (and surprisingly) my opportunity came with The Promise upstairs at Belvoir, featuring two actors I greatly admire in Alison Bell (Moving Target) and Ewen Leslie (War of the Roses, The Serpent’s Teeth) and a third closely aligned with Hayloft, Chris Ryan. So, obviously… well come on, wouldn’t you be, I was keen keen keen keen for the show.

The Promise is written by Aleksei Arbuzov, a post thaw Soviet playwright who, in this particular work, focuses on a relationship formed between three teenagers during the grueling siege of Leningrad from 1941- 44. Then in a series of filmic scenes, follows the development of this triangle over the passage of time, first at the end of the war, then months, years later as they try to reconcile their fevered teenage dreams with their relatively comfortable existences. Steady jobs. Marriage. It is a work concerned with friendship, love and longing.

Simon Stone stages it on Adam Gardnir’s revolve, a raised wooden square construction which the actors appear from under and are turned around upon. Behind this, as the play progresses, various household items are placed opening up a new location, softly lit by lampshades. But the set is plain, and underused. The revolve adds little to illuminate the changing dynamics of the characters, more often than not serving to obscure our view of them, with the back wall of upstairs Belvoir getting many of the most powerful lines. The lighting after a promising start of strobe explosions and thin beams of warm light through a hazer, descends into a energy draining slew of long scene change blackouts which kill any tension or interest in the way the play moves through time. Even Hamish Michael’s gorgeous sound design couldn’t cover these deathly pauses in the story, which completely undercut the filmic nature of the text. Further than this there were TWO intervals, which further slowed down my engagement with the performance. I could say that the intervals were conceptually valid in that it broke up the acts, and divided the three distinct periods of the character’s lives, but really… It felt more like an opportunity for a set or costume change, (however miniscule or ineffectual they were) and purely practical rather than creatively interesting. The performances are strong, Ewen Leslie was by turns invigorating and desperate, Alison Bell passionately committed and Chris Ryan has a natural warmth and gift for comic timing. But even with these brilliant actors the piece is overly sentimental and never approaches the political undertones of the play’s setting, seemingly whitewashing it with romance and mateship. So if I can’t place the blame on the actors, or purely on the lights and set, I suppose I have to lay it on the director.

This for me is the danger inherent to hype. I thought the work was bland and after having read and built up an ideal image of perfect actor/adaptor/director Simon Stone, this was a severe let down. I saw no memorable theatrical images, nor anything of the brilliant staging I was led to believe in. Perhaps The Promise suffered for my expectations, maybe it was never going to live up to my imagination, but I don’t think that is the case. Other shows where I have indulged in the hype have far exceeded my expectations, the often used as an example War of the Roses and Pacciti Company’s Finale being examples of this. Given the sheer amount of hype Simon Stone has floating around him (the biggest rumour perhaps being the SMH’s suggestion
that he’s in line to fill the gap Neil Armfield is leaving at Company B’s artistic director), I thought that like the others I would be more than satisfied after seeing The Promise. In fact I was disappointed and not a little disillusioned. It’s left me with mixed feelings regarding The Only Child at downstairs Belvoir, which I will see, if only to compare a Hayloft project work, with a pure Simon Stone work like The Promise.

Has anybody else had any experience like this, or indeed an experience like this with Simon Stone? I’d love to hear your thoughts, however depressing they are.

Mark

Review: Elling

2009-07-16T14:54:00.002+10:00

Based on a novel by Ingvar Ambjørnsen
Adapted for stage by Axel Hellstenius in collaboration with Petter Næss
Translated by Nicholas Norris Adapted by Simon Bent
Directed by Pamela Rabe

At the end of a pretty intense burst of theatregoing over the past week came Elling at the STC. I had been back and forth between the Gong and Sydney far too much and I was fairly exhausted, the trains being cold and every single one happening to be the ‘all stops’ service. The Wharf at STC is freezing when you have a bit of a wind lifting the air off the ocean and, despite having a new coat I’m growing quite fond of, I was shivering the whole time I was there.

Luckily, Elling turned out to be one of the most warming theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. Elling is the story of two unlikely friends, Elling (Darren Gilshenan): an agoraphobic would be underground poet and Kjell (Lachy Hulme): a sex starved orangutan who doesn’t wash his underwear. After being released from the mental asylum where they met, we follow these two as they try to exist in the ‘normal’ society of Oslo; in which they will order pizza, use the telephone and fall in love. Pamela Rabe stages Elling sparingly at first, with beds and tables being moved around to create the asylum, their government apartment or a local diner, then as we move further into the strange world of these characters the stage starts to get lived in, food and refuse pile up on the floor, books fall from the ceiling, and panels on the back wall open up to reveal the moon, an open mic night and a box of sauerkraut. By allowing the stage to map the events we share with Elling and Kjell, Rabe maintains the delicate relationship that this play needs, a sense of camaraderie and care.

Normally I wouldn’t be interested in something quite as sentimental as Elling, but this production won me and the rest of the audience over. After a strange first half in which there were few titters from the auditorium, almost from the outset the second half had us in stiches. This is testament, I think, not to a pacing problem or a lack of humour in Act One but the audience’s need to build a relationship to the characters and larger world of the play. This is a difficult point for me to reconcile with my own practice, having always been interested in colder, more distant works. (see the Martin Crimp Report [The Country, The City, Dealing With Clair] coming soon) That being said I think the important point is not the warmth of the piece, but its focus on a creating a specific kind of relationship with the audience, a strength I also recognised in Talking To Terrorists at UOW. It’s not about making something unmalleable or fixed, it’s about treating every audience member as different, and surfing the wave of the crowd each night. Terrifying… yes. But as in Elling, when soiled underwear mistakenly flew into an elderly gentlemen’s face in D row, Darren Gilshenan’s wide grin proved it can be exhilarating too.

Mark

UOW Review: Osama The Hero

2009-07-05T04:13:00.005+10:00

Written by Dennis Kelly
Directed by Mark Rogers

Osama The Hero is a heavy text. It spans a huge amount of subject matter regarding fear, terrorism, justification of terrorism, torture, the effect of torture on the torturers and perhaps most importantly of all, the volatile environments that are British council estates. All of this in just three acts running under an hour and a half. Dennis Kelly’s handling of the material is deft, and with the exception of a few heavy-handed moments, the play rarely feels preachy. By entrusting the material to such powerless people, Kelly has ensured that the weighty words are easy to swallow. The play was written several years ago, but with the British government currently revising its view on torture, Obama cleaning out Guantanamo and the recent trouble in Sydney public housing, it retains a biting relevancy.

The story is based around Gary, a school kid whose misguided idealisms leads him to writer numerous school projects that question the western notions of terrorism, the penultimate of these being a presentation about why Osama bin Laden was a worthy hero. His polarising views make him the perfect scapegoat for violence that is occurring in his council estate.

Mark Rogers has placed the show on a corner stage, within which a smaller tiled square is placed and it is clear from the start that this is the only area that Gary is allowed to move in. The first act is a combination of three scenes playing concurrently. In the centre, in his tile prison, is Gary. He talks straight to us, desperate for us to comprehend his often misunderstood views. To his left are Louise and Francis who embody the council estate culture, the history and the pent-up rage. Francis is worried that his father’s legacy is being ignored with the arrival of a new neighbour – a pervert, Mark. To the right of the stage, we see this “pervert” and Mandy, his younger female friend. They are a playing a weird sort of coupley game, talking to an imaginary press about their happy family. A division between them soon becomes obvious however, as he pontificates about his desire for even a touch of her, which she refuses all but once.

The second act brings these three parties together, and explores the violence that ensues, with the staging emphasising this violence from the beginning. Immediately after the first act, the lights snap to black and two of the actors winch down the lighting bars, bringing with them a black square box directly above the tiles. It houses a number of fluoroes which flicker and strobe as the sound design shoots out heavy bass accompaniment. Amongst this, Gary is gaffa-taped to a chair and gagged. As the act progresses, we watch as he is interrogated, tortured and eventually beaten to death with a hammer, an image which is achieved here through the murderer smashing the tiled floor, the sound of which was then amplified throughout the theatre. This entire act was limited to the tiles, and sometimes felt cluttered, but more often than not the claustrophobia served the tension of the scene.

The third act follows each character in a personal monologue as they try to move on in the wake of Gary’s murder. For this act, two rolls of plastic are unfurled from the lighting bars leaving Gary to roam his tiled after life behind a veil of plastic. The last act is performed all on one microphone, beginning with Mark discussing his home cooking skills and then building as the other characters also begin sharing their thoughts. All of a sudden we are in a weird open mic club spanning stand-up comedy, spoken word and train of thought discussions. The play ends with every character behind the plastic and shadows being cast by the soft light of Mandy’s iPod.

There were two key elements that I found to be the most strident, but also effective. The first was the violence. Stage violence is something I find myself having stronger and stronger opinions on as I see it used badly in many shows. Time and again I see a realist approach failing to have the strength that the violence clearly needs, and thus more and more I feel a desire for stylisation. The actors can’t actually hit each other with hammers on stage, so instead something has to happen that impacts the audience as much as the literal violence would. I feel that this production found that with the eventual image of smashing tiles. The sheer sound of this action reverberating through the seats of the audience had real power. However, the first two hammer hits, which were achieved through a slow motion action accompanied by a bass thud through the speakers, lacked this. They felt half-hearted, with the bass not being nearly loud enough to have true impact.

The second element was the microphone. It worked beautifully to begin with, doubling the power of every consonant and revealing the rhythm of Kelly’s words. Each actor brought a unique style to the performative nature the mic demanded and the mic-lead took on a life of its own. However, as the monologues intertwined more and more, the practicality of one mic between three performers began to hinder rather than serve the language. One was overcome with a certain sense of relief when it was again handed to a solitary performer.

I left the theatre with a sense of excitement and pride. Excitement at the work - a gripping realisation of relatively new script by a playwright I am growing to love. The more I see of Dennis Kelly’s work, the more I become a fan of his stammered style that can so easily bring massive world issues down into the domestic sphere. But also pride at the artists, my colleagues who have worked hard to bring this difficult play to life. There is nothing that inspires one more than seeing your friends doing good work.

- Simon

Report: Monthly Friend: Ficto-Critico

2009-06-30T08:10:00.005+10:00

I’m not sure that a name has ever been so apt as it was for the crew from Bake Sale For Art’s first Monthly Friend. On a rainy Saturday afternoon, at my new favourite Sydney venue – the Red Rattler, in Marrickville, a small collection of artists and their fans joined together for a relaxing afternoon of art and discussion.

The theme of the day was Ficto-Critico, exploring the possible overlaps between the subjective World of creativity and the supposedly objective world of criticism. There were several performances, a couple of installations and the afternoon finished with an open-floor discussion about subjectivity and critical theory in art, led by Georgie Meagher with special guest Chris Ryan.

The performances ranged from short story readings to stand-up comedy to more performance art based work. The atmosphere was always relaxed, thanks largely in part to the natural light offered by the afternoon time slot which meant that the usual gap between performer and audience was never created. This meant the afternoon felt more like a sharing of ideas and personal insights than a traditional programme of performances.

The Red Rattler is a converted warehouse which offers a selection of incredibly comfortable couches and a bar which at this event was stocked with Bake Sales’ signature cupcakes, and a selection of delightful teas. The stage itself is a little proscenium arch, and is fully equipped with a massive speaker system and a bunch of lights. But most exciting of all, is that it’s run on a not-for-profit basis, and is doing very well, which is great for a small but vital community venue. Check it out – theredrattler.org. Also, don’t forget to keep up the with Bake Sale blog - Bake Sale For Art.

Review: Whore - B Sharp

2009-06-24T01:26:00.008+10:00

By Rick Viede
Directed by Christopher Hurrell

Whore is Rick Viede’s coming of age story about a young girl, Sara (Rhiannon Owen), who travels to London with a desire to become “interesting”. This desire leads her to work as a prostitute after meeting Tim (Paul-William Mawhinney), a fellow young Australian who has earned a significant amount of money in the trade. Tim teaches her the rules of the job and we watch as their friendship and lives develop concurrently, going from the initial exhilaration to disillusionment. This all takes place in 10 segments as we go through the 10 steps to a happy life that a self-help author offers Sara at the beginning of the play. The various characters that Tim and Sara encounter are played by the experienced Keith Agius and Ben Mortley.

The script won the 2008 Griffin Theatre award, and is solid enough. It reminded me of Ross Mueller’s Concussion - naturalistic scenes, interspersed with rock songs and hyper-real monologues, minus the problematic meta-theatrics. However, like Concussion, I found the production somewhat confused. The play moved between naturalism and stylisation often, but more often than not I felt the stylised moments, such as the bath with no water, were the demand of practicality rather than dramaturgy. This was most jarring during the penultimate scene, as I watched actors clumsily move between the stylised world of mime, and the naturalistic world of blood-smeared props.

I also thought the performances felt slightly too big for the space. Downstairs Belvoir puts you so close to the action that the every hint of feeling is laid bare. This works beautifully for plays such as Ladybird where we see a cast truly inhabiting a text. I felt that for much of this play however, the actors lacked the subtlety the space demands. Mawhinney, who I was greatly impressed with recently in Dennis Kelly’s DNA at the Old Fitz, has a talent for making large reactions feel natural, and if anything his voice was too soft at points, but I found the other actors lacked integrity in crucial moments.

Director Christopher Hurrell describes the play as a “crime thriller” but the problem was that I was never thrilled; I was never on the edge of my seat, because I found myself confused by the form. The numerous blackouts also hindered the building of tension despite the rockin’ soundtrack.

The soundtrack was in fact one of the most exciting parts of the project. A collection of local Sydney bands wrote the music for the play, under the curatorial eye of sound designer David Heinrich, a member of the band Lions At Your Door, but much more importantly, a founding member of Adelaide’s The Border Project whose Highway Rock ‘n’ Roll Disaster remains one of my favourite productions to date. This sort of collaboration between the theatre and music industries fascinates me as an artist who intends to be a part of both. The songs were quite good, and the soundtrack is currently being sold online at www.fbiradio.org.au, however, I can’t say that I found they played any great part in forming my experience of the play. They simply felt like a way to try and keep the energy going through the blackouts and had limited success in this role.

Belvoir’s downstairs theatre has the power to be so affecting, yet I have found that every performance I have seen there since the season opener Ladybird has failed to take advantage of the intimacy the space offers. I hope that the newly announced August to December season will rectify this.

- Simon

Review: The Duel

2009-06-22T23:27:00.002+10:00

Adapted from Fyodor Dostoyevsky
By Tom Wright
Directed by Matthew Lutton

Right. Well… I didn’t like it very much. First of all I thought it was derivative, Matthew Lutton has seen one too many Benedict Andrews shows and liked them a bit too much. I imagine him taking notes eagerly during the performances, sneaking in a camera phone so he can pore over the set design, delighting in the acting style and jotting down all the people Beno has worked with. The set design for The Duel was alarmingly similar to Moving Target, even with a bright red couch. The actors playing all the music themselves from a boombox, same kind of concept as the Ipod in Who’s Afraid… at Belvoir. The performance ended on an intake of breath, as if the actor (David Lee Smyth) was about to say something more, the same way Beno’s Far Away ended at STC. I’m sure there were more but these are the ones that stood out as the most blatant.

Now, I’m not saying that Beno himself was the first to use these ideas, nor does he have some kind of theatrical copyright on them. I’m not burying my head in the sand hiding from postmodernism, or Roland Barthes “tissue of quotations” or the transient nature of images in out media soaked culture. But… come on. If you’re going to pinch and borrow, let some time pass, or at least don’t do them all at once, and certainly not from the same artist. It’s like copy/pasting from Wikipedia into your major essay. It’s just not done.

The work was an adaption of a chapter from Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov, in which Zosima looks back on his death bed on his rash youthful behavior leading to The Duel of the play’s title, and the conflicted friendship that arose from it. The writing is clear and in some parts quite gorgeous but it is not enough. Even Luke Mullins as Zosima, who I’ll admit I adore having seen WOTR, The Eisteddfod and The Serpent’s Teeth, was not enough to keep my interest. Which is a real pity because I was looking forward to seeing him in what I assumed to be a play with a cool young director. I was wrong. I’ll see another Matthew Lutton if it comes around, I’d be happy for it to be proved otherwise, but The Duel did not do it for me.

It prompted me however, to think about my own work and where it comes from. I am now in the middle of production week for Osama The Hero, which will be the first show I have directed after ADing a few with Chris Ryan and Tim Maddock. I’m obviously going to be influenced by these individuals but outside of that, where do I draw my inspiration? From whom am I borrowing?

Schaubuehne videos on youtube. (Fluros rule)
The White Devil – Tim Maddock and Miriam Wells (plastic sheets)
The Lost Echo – Kosky (tiles, bathroom)
Tricky –Council Estate filmclip (the mess, the smudged faces)

And that’s just the aesthetics. It was an interesting thought and a revealing list for me to mull over and one, thanks to The Duel, I’ll continue to check up on moving forward onto other projects.

Here’s a shameless pug for Osama, if anyone is interested. http://www.uow.edu.au/crearts/performances/UOW060177.html

Mark

Review: Food Court – Back To Back Theatre

2009-06-10T18:58:00.005+10:00

Text, Direction and Set Design by Bruce Gladwin
Music by The Necks

First and foremost, Food Court was an aural experience. A gradually cresting wave of sound made by the performers incredible voices which, true to the program, “circumnavigate the universe, dissecting heaven and hell, good and evil” and the unclassifiable work of The Necks. The sound of the piece breathes with you, often jarring or unfathomable but always interesting.

Back To Back Theatre predominantly works with an ensemble of actors with intellectual disabilities. The piece is based on their own experiences of control and guilt. At first we see a highly theatrical realism, all the workings of the stage are laid bare as two gold gym suit clad performers accuse a girl (Sarah Mainwaring) of being fat. From the gap in the pros ach curtain chairs are brought out for them to sit on, the mics are held in place for them so they can be heard. Then as the accusations increase in volume and intensity we descend from the workings of theatre and into a harrowing fantasy. The curtain parts and we see everything behind a screen, the performers are just shadows and colours, smudges in a forest of incredible animation (Rhian Hinkley). The degradation doesn’t stop there however, in this darkly beautiful landscape everything gets worse. After the girl is made to strip and dance a crowd of people emerge, pointing at her while more insults are thrown. Then as they leave, in a moment I in the audience so desperately wished would be tender, a boy takes a mic and begins to speak to her. He’s not had much experience sexually, he wants to touch her face, he wants someone to love him. The only reply she gives as he holds the mic in front of her is her breath. This moment is not tender, nor does it give any respite from blame and guilt, it is free from morality, innocent and very very threatening. Finally, as The Necks build in intensity and waves of sound patterns shake the stage, she struggles alone as she speaks an excerpt from The Tempest being projected onto the front screen, Caliban: The isle is full of noises… At first trying to catch up with the scrambling letters, then overtaking them and making them her own. It is an extraordinary and cathartic finish, despite a major screen fuck up at the end on the night that I attended.

It is tragic in structure, Bruce Gladwin describes it in the program as a Geelong tragedy. Coming from a company whose work is mostly produced outside a traditional ‘theatre’ context, Food Court reinvents within the classical western canon and absorbs it into Back to Back’s own practice. It is an aesthetically sophisticated and harrowing work but it is the sound of it that gets to you, the sound of it that awakes in you fear and horror, the gradual build to a climax of sound that creates the tragedy. The Necks are fucking awesome.

It is this that I took away for my own work. The quality of music and sound that dictates emotion and even the body’s physical reaction is an incredibly powerful tool in the creation of theatre. It reminded me of this passage in Artaud’s No More Masterpieces

“Snakes do not react to music because of the metal ideas it produces in them, but because they are long, they lie coiled on the ground and their bodies are in contact with ground along almost their entire length. And the musical vibrations communicated to the ground affect them as a very subtle, very long massage. Well I propose to treat the audience just like those charmed snakes and to bring them back to the subtlest ideas through their bodies.”

For this, and the experience itself, Food Court is a show I am not likely to forget.

Mark

Review: Chicago

2009-06-09T14:52:00.004+10:00

After seeing Chicago I was left feeling a bit hollow. Let’s start however, with the positives. The design was a welcome change from the busy sets that normally occupy the Lyric, with the only setting being the band sitting on stage, tiered like a jury blasting out the fantastic, brassy score. The dancing is spectacular. The Bob Fosse inspired choreography is crisp and exciting, and the ensemble takes to it with vigour. Other than Gina Riley as “Mama” and Damien Birmingham as “Amos” the entire cast produce some truly exhilarating moments. This is matched by superb vocal performances from the cast. The two leads, Caroline O’Connor and Sharon Millerchip are of course outstanding, but they are almost overshadowed by Gina Riley’s impressive range.

The problem with this production was that it had no soul. The story of Chicago is dark and fascinating. It is a tale of sex and violence, of adulteress husbands being killed by their wives, and adulteress wives killing their lovers. The stakes are high for the women in prison as they could all be hung for their offences. It is not a happy, go-lucky tale. Yet that is how it is presented in this production. The show focuses on the razzle dazzle rather than the more dangerous content, and the result was that I simply didn’t give a damn about any of the characters. When an innocent woman is hung, as is the case in the second act, I should care. However, this event had no power, as the character had not been utilised as anything other than shallow comic relief, and as far as I am concerned this was a directorial mistake. I think the major problem was that other than the two leads, who were able to find an integrity in their broad American accents, none of the performers found truth in the text. The ensemble’s brief contributions were generally over-acted (I actually cringed at the judge), Craig McLachlan seemed to be walking through Billy Flynn and I was particularly disappointed in Gina Riley, whose television work I so admire (particularly The Games). Damien Birmingham came as close as one could hope to a few touching moments as the naïve husband Amos, but with no support these glimmers were lost amidst the sparkles. I often find myself defending music theatre as a genre to peers who accuse it of being over-funded, meaningless entertainment. In the case of this production their accusations would be justified. With the minimalist design, I had hoped that a performer-led show would result in a moving experience. Instead, I enjoyed a night of dance and song, which I couldn’t help but feel was an opportunity missed.

- Simon

Geoffrey Rush Wins Tony

2009-06-09T14:42:00.003+10:00

Geoffrey Rush wins Tony for Best Actor

Very exciting to see one of our own actors, and in fact productions, doing so well on the international stage. Who would have known that the show many of us saw at Belvoir St two years ago would now be taking New York by storm.

- Simon

UOW Review: Arabian Nights

2009-06-07T20:41:00.005+10:00

Written By Mary Zimmerman

Adapted from The Book Of The Thousand And One Night

Directed By Tim Maddock

Assistant Director Mark Rogers

The first thing one notices about Arabian Nights is the space in which it is performed. The Hope theatre used to be a large, proscenium arch, 500-seat theatre. Whilst it was mainly used for lectures, it also housed a number of performance works and was certainly the largest space the university had to offer. It was a “traditional theatre” with side stage space, a massive fly area and an orchestra pit, a very different experience to the black-box style spaces the majority of our work is performed in. The stage area often acted as a rehearsal space while lectures continued on the other side of the fire curtain. Recently however, the performing licence ran out, and the decision was made not to renew it. I should say that I am certainly far from privy to any of the details of these decisions, but these are the events as I have been told them. The fire curtain has been replaced with a wall and the majority of the rigging has been ripped out. Soon the space will be divided into two levels and it will become a new rehearsal room and sound studio, but currently it is simply a massive concrete room. It has the same feeling of depth and height that Carriage Works offers, yet with an impressive informality that only a space you are forced to enter through a giant loading dock roller door can have. The stark concrete walls provide a surprisingly beautiful aesthetic, and as you enter on to the stage space and walk past the technical crew and then in turn the performers, who are all simply milling about on stage playing with pillows and doonas you feel strangely comfortable as you are guided to the opposite end of this vast industrial room.

The comfortable feeling makes sense, as you soon realise you’ve paid to come to an awesome sleepover. The performers lie about on the ground, and then gradually get up and do party tricks. The scene quickly turns awkward when two girls manage to fit their fists inside their mouths, and you realise that there are two people having sex at the front of the stage under a doona. The participants are revealed and violently dealt with, and thus begins the story of the Arabian Nights. Adapted by Mary Zimmerman from The Book of The Thousand And One Night, it is the story an Iraqi caliph Shahryar, who having been cuckolded by his first wife, now weds, beds and murders a different virgin every night, and the brave Scheherezade, his intended bride, who postpones her execution by telling the caliph wonderful tales, stopping tantalisingly short of their conclusion just before dawn.

The ensemble of 16 performers (my year) bring a youthful energy to this fable, as over the course of two hours using no more than a few sheets, doonas, pillows and a guitar they bring Scheherezade’s stories to life. Having been a performance student at the University of Wollongong for two and a half years now, I have both seen and performed in my fair share of ensemble work. With year groups ranging from 25-50 people, finding texts to perform is never easy and often ensemble investigations are seen as a more practical alternative. In some cases, I have seen this approach forced on texts which do not necessarily welcome it, however with Arabian Nights the text is elevated because of it. The stories serve as springboards for the image work that the ensemble and director Tim Maddock have created, whereby the performers make the work their own. It proved a delight to watch the unique talents of my colleagues being utilised to full effect. This ownership also went some way to removing the connotations of words such as Baghdad and phrases like “By Allah”, that we have heard bandied about in the press so often in recent history. This production is about people not place. The decision to avoid comment on Iraq is a good one in my eyes, because the material within the text is not strong. Short of some “Muslims are people too” moments, the play does little to try and deal with the issues, and Zimmerman’s intended ending of air raid sirens and the cast stopping, dropping and rolling is thankfully avoided (although possibly the most amazing deus ex machina I’ve ever seen is not). The fun filled first act is particularly successful in this, but when in the second act we hear a lecture about how many words there are in the Koran, one can’t help but feel the words “Iraq” and “Islam” flash across their eyes in big red letters.

While the space provided a beautiful aesthetic it also presented some practical problems, namely the appalling acoustics. The vast concrete walls simply rebounded sound around the room in all directions, making clarity for the performers difficult. Curtains were hung from the remaining lighting bars to combat this, and the packed audience sucked up much of the sound, but there were still moments when it was hard to hear the dialogue over the sound of the ensemble and the laughter of the crowd. Rarely however did this take away from the performance, as it generally occurred at moments when the images were doing more work than the words anyway (the most obvious example being that of the family dance, an event that simply cannot be adequately described in text form).

The lasting thought for me is how successful the sense of informality was in this performance, and how this was a direct result of this being a site-specific work. The informality stemmed from the venue. There was no foyer, the audience simply hung around outside until the loading dock opened. When the first act finished, a performer simply took a step forward, thanked the audience and informed them there would be a 20-minute interval. The back stage area only had one set of bathrooms which the cast and audience had to share, therefore at interval the actors and crew simply hung about, chatting to family and friends. There was no pretence and this served the work beautifully. No attempt was made to force the morality of the stories on the audience, one simply felt that stories were being shared in a bedroom, albeit a cavernous concrete bedroom.

- Simon

UOW Review: Talking To Terrorists

2009-05-30T20:41:00.004+10:00

Written by Robin Soans
Directed by Mark Haslam
Assistant Director Emma Mcmanus

Verbatim theatre is a strange thing. To my mind it is the antithesis of what theatre aspires to, in that it (often under the guise of being objective) uses the words of real individuals or documents to present a kind of overview of a particular subject; a presentation of reality. To me, theatre is much more about an aesthetic and visceral engagement with the world than a summary of situations or people that exist in it. Surely that is the domain of the documentary and the nightly news, not the theatre. As Simon identified in Version 1.0’s Deeply Offensive and Utterly Untrue, objectivity in verbatim work is highly suspect. Simply by framing it as theatrical, the work loses any pretence to objectivity, seemingly undercutting itself. So in light of this, what is the deal? Why bother? What does it offer us?

Talking to Terrorists, in Mark Haslam’s hands, offers us a human connection. The performers relate this text directly to us, looking us in the eyes and sharing the experience with us; something a documentary or interview could never do. It is staged simply in a beige box and the performers are mostly static throughout their monologues and scenes, entering and exiting either from a door upstage or a second level staircase above it. It has no pretense to high aesthetic ideals, the focus is purely on the performers and their communication with us. To quote the program…“though the space, actors and production might all be built on artifice, the truth of the experience remains.”

And the truth of the experience is distressing. Talking to Terrorists is the product of 12 months of interviews with individuals involved with or having some experience of terrorism. In a broad sweep this covers child soldiers in Uganda, British politicians and ambassadors, members of the IRA and UVF, Palestinian Miltia, Kurdish separatists and aid workers. The complexities of the subject matter are done away with in favour of the emotional core of the experience, the consequence being that some of the most affecting moments are not driven by horror but by recognition: giving a face to something that is usually represented as faceless. It is the domestic insight as someone slops a cup of tea, accidently picks up the wrong wine glass or has a tiff with their partner that really brings terror home to us.

The nuances of the text are handled gracefully by the cast (my year); it is delightful to see a university production where every single performance is on the same level, since usually it is a bit of a mixed bag. It is incredibly exciting to see how they have progressed through this process and full credit to Haslam for bringing this out in them.

In relation to my own practice, Talking to Terrorists reminded me that theatre is a two way street, a shared experience and, while I am still wary of verbatim theatre, a beautiful way to be informed and learn.

Mark

Sad News For Sydney - Neil Armfield to leave Company B

2009-05-26T23:08:00.004+10:00

Neil Armfield to leave Company B

The gist is that 2010 will be Neil Armfield’s last season as artistic director of Belvoir St Theatre. This is sad news to me. Since coming to University and exploring the theatre landscape of Sydney, Belvoir has been a source of some amazing experiences. The first show I saw there, Benedict Andrews' "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?", remains to this day my favourite theatrical production. However, Armfield’s own “Scorched” would be a close contender, and many other Belvoir shows would not be far behind. One of my lecturers once described Belvoir plays under Armfield’s direction as “absolutely reeking of humanity”, and this is why I think they have been so successful.

The new artistic director is not expected to be announced for another six months or so, and it will be exciting to see the direction the company now takes, but after 15 years, it’s going to be quite an adjustment.

- Simon

Review: Deeply Offensive & Utterly Untrue (Version 1.0)

2009-05-26T00:54:00.007+10:00

Deeply Offensive & Utterly Untrue is Version 1.0’s inquiry into the Cole inquiry. Distilling an 8500-page document into an engaging hour and a half of theatre can’t have been easy, but that is what this unique company has achieved. The play was first performed in the depths of Carriage Works’ Bay 20 in Sydney, and what we see here with the touring production is an expansion of that work. I saw the show twice in its original production, and was very excited when I heard it was coming to Wollongong, not least of all because it is a shining example of hard work in the independent theatre scene paying off. Version 1.0 have been recognised, as of last year, as a key arts organization and receive triennial funding. They make one realise that all the mock grant applications we do at uni are perhaps significantly more important than our other assessments.

The events discussed are astounding. At the same time as John Howard was declaring that a war with Iraq was necessary to dethrone a cruel and harsh dictator, AWB was paying up to $300 million in kickbacks to the Iraqi government. Aside from analysing the inquiry itself, the first point that this play is trying to make by its very existence, is that these are massive events which have been swept under the carpet very quickly. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about an affair. Here we are talking about hypocrisy on a much larger scale going unpunished.

Version 1.0’s handling of the material of the inquiry is deft. Stagings of many interviews and speeches from the inquiry and surrounding media are combined with direct discussion of the issues by the cast, which together bring lucidity to the proceedings. Clarity is a key point in this production. At all times, the details of those being interviewed are available on screens either side of the stage (this is quite amusing when the performers are talking as themselves), the images are all clear and crisp, and even when a scene is accompanied by large scale AV one is never put off balance. What I find interesting about the form of the work, especially as I am currently working on a piece of verbatim theatre, is that although Version 1.0 use much of the exact text of the inquiry document, as we enter the theatre we are reminded by messages on the video screens that “every word in this performance is true”, the words are so obviously interpreted that one could never define it as a verbatim work. The example that sticks out in my mind is the interview with John Howard that is accompanied by those playing the interviewers stroking him and offering him wine. The company makes no claims to objectivity, yet I think those who label their style as “documentary theatre” should be wary of the connotations of the term.

With the exception of a few moments that have lost their impact, such as the reference to Mohamed Haneef’s SIM card, the work still feels quite fresh in spite of its age. The newly added material, including speeches from Kevin Rudd and quotes from David Marr’s recent assessment of the events assist in achieving this relevancy. Unfortunately, I think that some of the beauty of the piece was lost by placing it in a more traditional proscenium arch theatre, which lacked the depth of the Carriage Works space. Not only did it mean that moments of the piece which had previously been separated merged together in the centre of the stage, it also meant that the mechanical elements of the theatre were hidden in the fly gallery and side stage, rather than laid bare for all to see which took away from the impact of the clever use of space. Whereas in Carriage Works, you could see all the elements from start, which made it more startling when they surprised you with a sandbag you hadn’t expected, or a light that appeared out of seemingly nowhere, here these moment felt like traditional theatre tricks. The venue also created some practical problems in terms of visibility. I was quite far back in the theatre and found it quite difficult to read the smaller screens either side of the stage, which at times contained important information. However, these are the problems one faces with a touring production, and for anyone who hadn’t seen the original I am sure that these would not have factored into one’s engagement with the work.

I could not finish this review without mentioning my favourite moment of the play, that being the live feed of a mouse attempting to eat cheese off a mouse trap being projected from two different angles from the two massive screens which dominated the set. The superb video elements are the work of Sean Bacon who has seamlessly integrated the visuals into the production through these two large screens, the two smaller screens already mentioned, and the more subtle television screen at the back of the stage showing footage of the trial of Saddam Hussein. Version 1.0 have a knack for using vision to offer fresh perspectives, as they do for breaking down complex documents into digestible theatre.

- Simon

UOW Review: pre]paradise/sorry nOw

2009-05-23T15:29:00.005+10:00

Written by RW Fassbinder
Directed by Christopher Ryan
Assistant Director Sanja Simic

In Manchester England during the mid 60’s, Ian Brady, an office clerk, and his work mate come lover Myra Hindley kidnapped and murdered 5 children. The children were raped and brutalised before their deaths, their bodies were dumped in the moors. Brady and Hindley were seemingly striving for a kind of fascist purity through their sadomasochistic acts and serial killings. A good indicator of the kinds of values they tried to embody is Brady’s reading material; Hitler’s Mein Kamf and The Marquis de Sade’s Justine. In pre]paradise/sorry nOw Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the German auteur best known for his radical film-making, uses the Moor’s murders as a tool to critique the dream of social paradise; the figures of Brady and Hindley stalk through scenes of oppressive violence and sexual perversion. No hope, no kindness, just people. It is an unrelenting and harrowing work which reverberates today when considering the increasing number of cases like that of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who kept his daughter as a sexual slave in his basement for more than 20 years.

Chris Ryan (the Sydney Front, Version 1.0) has, in this version of pre]paradise , created a work deeply concerned with Fascism. He avoids signposting this as such however as none of the costumes or paraphernalia refer to the fascist aesthetic politic, instead it is the world of Andy Warhol’s Factory, that Avant Garde chic. It references several of Warhol’s works from the 60’s; his film Blow Job, the product pieces (Brillo, Coca Cola bottles) and the Campbell’s soup cans are all used to particularly devastating effect. The work instead deals with fascism on a more visceral level. The performers belt out their text, almost every moment in this work is seemingly delivered from the metaphorical lectern which, I’ll admit, is completely exhausting. I wouldn’t have been able to stomach it if it weren’t for the delicate image work and choreography which sweetened (somewhat disturbingly) the acting style. That being said, the moments in which the personality of a few odd performers bubbled through were a welcome relief, a breather before the cycle of brutality started again.

This is a structurally and aesthetically powerful work featuring committed and passionate young performers from UOW’s Faculty of Creative Arts. These performers are my peers which is actually very exciting. Special mention to Emma Lockhart-Wilson’s murky lighting design and Rob Hughes’ intelligent AV work, both of whose contribution found an aching beauty amidst the horror of the onstage action.

Mark

Ps. Over the next few weeks there will be a number of reviews of UOW performances. After carefully considering the politics of reviewing student work, Simon and I have decided to do so despite our personal involvement. As after all, this blog is meant to not only be a place for discussion, but a record of our emerging arts practice, a mapping of our personal interests, and what is more relevant to our interests than our own work and the work of our peers? Not only that, but when else would we get an opportunity to see a work by Fassbinder, or indeed any of the other productions looming over the next few weeks. If anyone has any objections or thoughts on this matter, we’ll be happy to chat about it further. Just comment.
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This play operated on quite a high intellectual level. The connections that Fassbinder has drawn in his text between the Brady/Hindley case and West German post-war experience are already quite complex, and with the added layer of the Warhol referencing, there is quite a lot to think about. However, the reason this play was so successful for me was that in the end, it was not about what the play made me think, but what the play made me feel. It demonstrated to me the strength of theatre medium to viscerally affect you. About three quarters of the way through, I was finding the play hard work. As Mark pointed out, the onslaught of the text was quite exhausting, and I was wondering if the play would ever shift pace. It was at this point that possibly the most beautiful piece of 80s pop burst out of the speakers and the entire cast, of 30 or so performers, turned the stage into a nightclub. Rarely have I felt such relief in the theatre. I relaxed as for three minutes I was given release from the violence. The play then shifted immediately back into one of the most horrifying moments I have ever seen on stage as Brady screams obscenities and attacks with an axe handle a child who is slowly backing away whilst Myra films the event, giving us a live feed close-up of the horror on the boy’s face. We are left with The Smiths’ beautiful “Suffer Little Children” as the details of the murders are projected onto the back wall, whilst Ian and Myra make love against the back wall. I felt completely hollow. It occurred to me then, that the whole way through my emotions had been manipulated leading up this moment. I had to feel exhausted, so that I could then feel so relieved, so that I could then be so horrified. Chris Ryan’s greatest strength I think is that he understands so well how to use theatre to affect people in this manner.

In an emerging practice sense, it is also interesting to me that he uses the form to reflect the content. Mark has already pointed the way the language was used, and the layering of the imagery seemed to me to be doing a similar thing. A friend commented to me that at times you didn’t know where to look. I thought this was a clear decision to disconcert the audience. The content is obviously disconcerting, why should the form not reflect that?

The question I am left with however is that of intellectual engagement. Is it ok, that one’s view of the show is completely changed by reading the director’s note? Is it ok if I only engage with the Brady/Hinley story, rather than the grander narrative that is being attacked? Is it still worth exploring post-war German experience? My thoughts have always been that as far as Chris Ryan is concerned, it doesn’t matter what you engage with, as long as you engage. However, I have spoken to others who question the point of staging a work concerning particular themes, in this case that of West German experience etc., if these themes don’t come through without reading the programme. I am yet to reach a solid conclusion on the subject.

-Simon

Review: Gatz

2009-05-18T17:48:00.000+10:00

Gatz, as in James Gatz, as in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This particular incarnation of Gatz is a six and a half hour production by New York company Elevator Repair Service (apparently named for the occupation artistic director John Collins was predicted to fulfill after a high school aptitude test). It is not an adaption of the novel, it IS the novel, read in full by the company within the backdrop of a musty office complete with filing cabinets and boxes of paper no one ever reads. At first, when performer Scott Sheperd discovers the novel on his desk and begins to read from it, the world of this office still exists; his co workers mill about throwing letters in the bin or reading on the couch; which is totally absorbing and exhilarating. But gradually, his co workers transform into the characters from the novel forming relationships and positions that correspond to the text then finally speaking lines from it as if they were their own. The world of the office becomes the world of Gatsby, or rather the narrator of the novel Nick Carraway.

It is at this point, about an hour into the piece, that it all starts to go wrong. As soon as the staged reality of the office is subsumed by the relationships of the novel, Gatz becomes a plain adaption of the novel, acted out and spoken with little use of the environment. It is then that the performance becomes increasingly (… and increasingly) more boring. Any interest is generated by the beautiful text, its astute observations and characteristations, not by the performance of it. Which begs the question: why bother, why not just read it?

I’m glad I did see it performed if only because I probably never would have read the book on my own accord. I enjoyed the wryness in the writing, the mythic proportions of Gatsby next to the ordinary nervousness of narrator Carraway, but this has nothing to do with Elevator Repair Service or even Scott Sheperd's measured reading of the work, it was F. Scott Fitzgerald I admired after the performance, the writing and not the theatre.

This really pissed me off. It added up to a work being staged and not interpreted, which is Simon’s constant gripe about text based work in Sydney. In this situation nobody comes out untouched, the writing loses something essential and the creatives attached to it seem dull or uninterested in the work. Although The Hayloft Project’s 3xSisters down in Melbourne is getting insanely mixed reviews, from the sound of it at least it tried to DO something. I rather get something horribly wrong than do nothing at all.

Mark

David Williamson?

2009-05-13T21:00:00.000+10:00

Today, DW (as he is affectionately known... maybe... by anyone who might be affectionate of him) has made it clear that he feels ill at ease with the direction that STC and indeed theatre in general is heading. He is uncomfortable with a perceived shift of focus towards the director as auteur and chief artist involved in theatrical production, citing Barrie Kosky as main offender. He instead falls back on facts and figures, insinuating that the 20 million dollars he has made for the STC must count for something. Anyway read the article and decide for yourself.

Earlier this evening, in a fit of rage I described him to a friend as "an irrelevant, upper class, self serving tit mouse." and went on to infer that he was "a backwards, stagnated and audience pandering fool".... but maybe that was a little harsh.

Any thoughts?

Mark.

project:ALICE | Review

2009-05-09T01:30:00.000+10:00

project:ALICE was a mixed bag combining club culture, fashion, spoken word art and audiovisual elements to re make Lewis Carroll’s novel for Generation Y, using their (read our/my) experiences to reinterpret this classic work. Under the direction of Mark Haslam, performance poets Bravo Child and Cook ‘n’ Kitch embody in verse, monologue and hip hop an explosion of Alice’s character, searching for contemporary resonances with the “over stimulated generation”. This Alice is a club hopper, a pill popper, a traveler not a tourist, a myspace junkie and pretty fucked up as well.

The technical elements were superb, Toby Knyvett’s lighting design consisting of a semicircle of large poles with evenly spaced lights filling up the space, as if plucked directly from the Big Day Out, which functioned not just to light the performers but also as a constant counterpart to the pulsing rhythm of the sound design. The AV was (shock) brilliantly interwoven into the work as a multifaceted interface of televisions and computer monitors, vision was streamed live to it from mobile phones, the performers interacted with each other on the screens, a butterfly of light flitted across them and their unhealthy blue glow lit much of the action onstage. It was exciting to see the technology working inseparably from the work, instead of being a lazy tack on (see Ladybird review).

The performers were obviously more in their comfort zones when delivering poetry and relying simply on the pattern of words in their mouths without labouring them with actorly intention, which was a pity since it made the more personal moments of Alice’s monologues seem melodramatic. At these moments where I could have related to her experiences I balked. This was perhaps why I took such an issue with this work in the end.

I have a major problems with a work trying to define me, the blanket term Generation Y sits uncomfortably on my shoulders. By trying to tap into a zeitgeist the work ultimately became quite alienating and I left thinking that it just wasn’t made for me, but then maybe I need to club on pills more often. The closing moments offered not much more than the feeling of ‘we’re all individuals and it’s ok to be you’, which I found slightly naïve. It touched on contemporary malaise, listlessness and boredom, but I wanted to see this notion held up and examined, not put aside for Facebook jokes and more things that rhyme with clitoris. I don’t think the solution is that easy.

Mark

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I didn’t feel as affronted by the content of this show. I felt the piece presented a mash-up of what the artists involved consider to be “Gen Y Experience” but at no point did it attempt to convince me that these were my experiences, although at times I found myself in them. A message of individualism emerged in the final scenes, however I engaged more with the striking word play it was embedded in, and came away from the piece with a sense of the stories and experiences, rather than the ideals, that were presented.

That being said, I dropped in and out of this performance and I think this was due mainly to the performances. In the beginning I was alienated by both performers. I found Bravo Child’s voice to be harsh and grating to the ear, whilst Cook ‘n’ Kitch seemed simply, for want of a better word, loud. I got the feeling I was being yelled at but wasn’t quite sure what I’d done to deserve it. As the show progressed, it became apparent that for Bravo, this had been a choice as he explored pretty much the entire range of his voice over the course of the performance, but for Cook ‘n’ Kitch, the volume continued. However, due to her complete dedication this became less of an issue. I found it fascinating watching two performers who completely owned what they were presenting. Cook ‘n’ Kitch’s "throw myself at every moment" style was often engaging, but it seemed to hinder the more nuanced moments of the show as Mark has already pointed out. When the performance and text matched the show was gripping. However, there were many times when the performers’ over the top style seemed to jar with the text and as a result I was immediately alienated.

A special mention needs to be made of the beautiful scene when Alice, unable to piece herself back together, climbs to the top of the jungle gym and lashes out at a TV resulting in a downpour of tiny crystals. It was a stunning image.

What is exciting about this work as an emerging artist however is the process. The play was devised by director Mark Haslam and the performers themselves. There are no actors in this work, you are often watching the writers themselves deliver the text, and all this is performed on an ethereal set which at times seemed as small as a TV screen and at others as large as a warehouse. The result was a raw work full of energy, which created some truly beautiful and some truly awkward moments but this is the nature of brave concepts. I enjoyed the risk.

Simon

Review: Travesties (Sydney Theatre Company)

2009-04-30T01:16:00.000+10:00

There is no doubt that Travesties is a great play written by a great playwright. It is the perfect example of what Stoppard does so well – taking a series of highly intellectual concepts and boiling them down into an entertaining, yet none the less didactic work of theatre. He takes the theories that we performance students struggle to incorporate into our essays, in this case about the purpose of art and its place in society, and weaves them seamlessly into plays digestible to the theatre-going public. His latest work “Rock ‘n’ Roll” was met last year with mixed reviews, however this play displays Stoppard in his finest hour – as the marketing is so desperate to tell us.

There is also no doubt that the actors who took part in this particular production were of a high quality. Each executed their character to a great standard, with Toby Schmitz’s Tristan Tsara being the standout for me, although this may have been more due to the success of costume designer Julie Lynch. Stoppard’s clever words flowed out of the performers at a great speed, but with great clarity, and at no point did I feel the length of the piece, which is quite significant for a two and half hour show.

The only problem I had was that I couldn’t help but feel that if the same actors had simply been given the text without direction, they would have come up pretty much the same show. I understand that directorial restraint is often a choice made to enhance the beauty of the text itself, perhaps the most striking recent example being the first hour of Benedict Andrews’ “The War Of The Roses”, however I felt that this was not the case with Travesties. I was so sure that the busy set decorated with text from “The Important Of Being Ernest”, and placed on a revolve was desperately trying to convey something, I was just never quite sure what. At times I wondered if the revolve was simply an easy way out of having to incorporate two sets which can easily morph between one another. The exception to this confusion being the arresting moments when “Dada” was projected across the stage as Tsara threw the crockery about.

In the end, it is Tom Stoppard’s name that is on the poster, but it is disappointing that director Richard Cottrell didn’t try and earn a place alongside it. This is perhaps the major difference between the work that I feel impacts greatly on my practice and the shows that I simply enjoy. Between work that is directed and plays that are merely staged.

Review: Metamorphosis (Vesturport Theatre/Lyric Hammersmith)

2009-04-20T22:55:00.000+10:00

Franz Kafka’s novella where a man awakens to find he has transformed into a giant insect has been reimagined in many mediums since its original publication in 1915. Its latest internationally successful incarnation, a co-production between Iceland’s Vesturport Theatre and England’s Lyric Hammersith, conjures the mood of a Grimm fairy tale to explore the fable as an allegory for Jewish experience in 20th century Europe.

Metamorphosis’ clever design is integral to its success. Börkur Jónsson’s split-level set is striking, shifting Gregor’s upstairs room 90º so we are looking down on his furniture from above. I was not surprised to learn from one of the performers that the set was built in the rehearsal room early on in the process, as it has been fully taken advantage of by directors David Farr and Gísli Örn Gardarsson, with Gregor’s newfound insect form moving intimately throughout the space. The startling images this produces are supported by Björn Helgason’s measured lighting design, and the atmosphere is created throughout by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ unsettling soundtrack.

However, it is Björn Thors’ bravura performance as Gregor that is the true focus of this show. From the moment he emerges from his straightjacket like bed, it is hard to take in anything other than his acrobatic movements within the warped environment of his family home. Whether it be crawling down the railing of the stairs, or simply sitting in a horizontal chair as if were nothing, the physical demands of the role are truly astounding. In the original production, the role was played by Gardarsson, co-adaptor/director, and it therefore must have been quite intimidating for Thors to take on, yet not a hint of this is ever revealed as he owns the stage throughout, with the family left feeling like a strong supporting cast. This doesn’t necessarily serve the story however, as it is the family’s response to Gregor’s condition which is the thematic focal point of the work.

Speaking of thematic, I couldn’t help but wonder whether we really needed another investigation of Jewish mistreatment, a topic which has already been explored at great length since the horrors of World War II. It seemed to me an odd choice to apply the story to the past given the current proliferation of fear throughout many first world nations. In the Sydney Morning Herald, director David Farr commented that he wanted the work to be open, as theatre should be a conversation, however I felt that among other things, the exaggerated gestures of the family and the father’s overt love of uniform made it hard to escape the references to Nazi Germany.

It is a credit to the work that my frustration with the interpretation did not stop me from engaging with the production. I thought that it was a rare example of ingenious design combining harmoniously with strong performances and a clear directorial vision. It is perhaps due to the show’s quality that I was so perturbed I didn’t share in this vision.

-Simon

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I’m a little more critical than that.

This production is the love child of amateurish bourgeois naturalism and lame 80’s physical theatre. I found the performances mannered and irritating, the set design pointlessly detailed and distracting and as for the gimmicky 90° angled upstairs trickery, putting aside the obvious strength it took Björn Thors to achieve the images I was never impressed by the strength of the images themselves. For a production which has been garnering praise for its physical verve and ingenuity (most recently by Simon Binns, see above), it felt as if it had run out of its bag of theatrical tricks too soon. The first half of the performance is basically only sustained by waiting to see how Gregor the insect will next use his environment and even the introduction of a trampoline, the removal of furniture to climb on and tearing a way down through the upper level floor is not consistently surprising enough. Once again I stress that I was impressed by the strength of the performer but not with the images themselves.

The piece was momentarily lifted by the presence of a prospective lodger for the family home Herr Fischer (Jonathan McGuinness), whose performance seemed to invigorate the other actors, or perhaps that was the presence of a clear cut dramatic situation with conflict and the promise of comedy. Sit-com stuff but certainly more entertaining than anything else that happened.

It seems problematic also for David Farr to speak of the piece being read as allegory for the 19th century Jewish experience, when considering that Kafka wrote this short story in 1915, twenty to thirty years before the Nazi’s came to power. Now don’t get me wrong, I am aware and a firm believer in the right of a director and company to reflect and interpret as they will, I’m certainly not advocating a kind of textual sanctity, I am not a bloodless, unimaginative stickler who complains when Shakespeare is performed with anything other than complete historical accuracy. I am simply questioning, just as Simon has, the relevance of this particular understanding of the work.

If David Farr considered the piece “open” and wished for it to be a “conversation”, why then did he refer to the Jewish experience at all, why not let us see it as we will? As the family dealing with a gay member (the monster closeted upstairs), the corrupting and transformative powers of economics or, like I did, as a mediocre and fairly irrelevant work with nothing much interesting to say nor a way of saying it interestingly.

Mark.

Review: Concussion (Sydney Theatre Company/Griffin Theatre Company)

2009-04-08T20:25:00.000+10:00

Concussion tried to do a lot. From the meta-theatrics, which permeated throughout to the dancing scene changes scored by modern rock songs and a storyline that we discovered in reverse it was always pushing for something greater, something cooler. Unfortunately in this production, I don’t think that vision was achieved. The play began with the central character, Julia addressing the audience to explain that she was taking it upon herself to ensure that we didn’t witness yet another tragedy. Her plan was to take hold of the action and give us a sexy comedic romp. Sadly, this break into reality simply didn’t feel real, and instead of being engaged and intrigued by Rachel Gordon’s performance, I was immediately alienated. If the piece had continued in this vein I probably would have walked away disappointed, but once we got past the unnecessary setting up of the stage by the actors, a moment which seemed to lack any dramatic purpose, everything solidified.

Ross Mueller’s dialogue is very strong, and once the scenes began, the momentum rarely let up. Particularly impressive were brothers Luke and Chris Ryan as the brothers James Junior and James Junior Junior. What could have been disregarded as a piece of novelty casting, produced some of the most memorable moments of the production as we watched how their relationship had deteriorated. The staging allowed for the vignettes to flow seamlessly in and out of each other, and as the story emerged the connections between each character became more and more engaging. It was then quite jarring when the action was halted by the few scene changes that were accompanied by blasting rock songs and exaggerated physical action. These moments that I assume were meant to heighten the tension and emotion, had the opposite effect of slowing down the play and giving the audience time to resettle. It seemed in these moments that the production was caught between the reality of the scenes and the perceived need for stylisation due to the text’s meta-theatrics.

It was in these confused moments that one got the feeling the play was trying just a little too hard. This feeling was strengthened by Julia’s direct address about fellating herself in her dreams. This production was unable to take advantage of the opportunities offered by these non-naturalistic moments and instead they served only to clutter and confuse the narrative rather than build or enhance it. Fortunately the strength of the text and the performances, with a couple of exceptions, carried the action past this, and left me excited by the experience of this new Australian work.

Simon

Review: Ladybird(B Sharp/small things productions)

2009-04-04T18:04:00.000+11:00

By Vassily Sigarev. Translated by Sasha Dugale.

The strength of Ladybird was in the language, adapted or localised by Ian Meadows and the company to match the casual, violent and limited vocabulary of any group of kids in town on a Thursday night. “I just, like, kept kicking him for like fifteen minutes, ay.” This simple approach made this Anti-Putin Russian play feel more crucial and important to our context than any Australian play recently programmed at B Sharp. As it was adapted by the company, the actors seem to really own the language, which contributes to some truly excellent performances, specifically Sophie Ross as Lera and Ian Meadows as Dima.

The coarseness and brutality of the language is reflected in the design by Justin Nardella, the stage rakes up with a construct of junk, a mess of TV’s, antiques and take away food wrappings. While this does make for some interesting playing spaces, for the most part the set is completely superfluous and at worst rather distracting from the realities of the language. The TV’s embedded in the set flicker on and off with AV that has no bearing on the performance and really seems like an attempt to incorporate vision for visions sake. Yes, indeed we are living in a world of advertising, shock! Far more effective would the play have been if we were allowed to just engage with these ‘cool’ young actors and the text standing alone.

In terms of affecting my emerging practice, Ladybird highlights the problems inherent to incorporating design in theatre. Where is the line between an illuminating and beautiful design that is inseparable to the action of a performance and a pointless add on that is tacted on to a text? I’m certainly not sure yet. It is to Ladybird’s credit that this split was so obvious, for I would not have been able to make this distinction if the texts adaption were not so keen and so dazzling.

Mark.

Ps. Also. Herbal Cigarettes? I was frustrated by this claustrophobic party not smelling anything like one. In fact it smelt more like a Body Shop, or a room full of incense. I say to hell with the audiences sensitive nostrils, give us the real smell of decay.

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I disagree almost completely about the set being superfluous. Rather than take away from the realities of the language, the set offered the perfect frame, its overbearing nature highlighting how all these coarse, brutal characters are merely products of their harsh environment. It allowed for the simplest of scene changes and the two “trick” moments, where Slavik disappeared through a newly discovered hole in the ground and then again through the fridge door, were just magic. The only element I found to be tiresome were the TVs, which I agree felt quite token, as if they had been added late and not fully explored. However, their being switched off added a nice accent to the final moments of the play, certainly a much nicer effect than the half-hearted attempt at snow falling that was simply not required.

Overall, I thought the show was outstanding, with remarkable performances of a fascinating text. An exciting start to the next section of the B Sharp season.

Simon

Review: Killing Don

2009-03-08T17:31:00.000+11:00

Killing Don (evolution of a memory) is a really great party. Free nibblies and beer/wine, sheshah, piñatas and a killer DJ. To enter, you ring the doorbell and are welcomed by the hosts, your picture is taken and you are shown around the place, a huge Bay 12 at Carriageworks, decked out with a few spare lounge sets, party lights, the aforementioned piñata and long strands of unwound video tape hanging from the ceiling. You get comfortable, you meet people, maybe you have a quick dance. From then on, just like at all good parties, things start to get a little strange.

The audience (partygoers) are treated to a gradually swelling series of images, which overlap and surround us. A karaoke performance gone wrong, a brief sexual fumbling on a fold out couch, an awkward speech and a slap on the back. With these comes the projected images of a couple on a mattress and a slideshow of photos from the night. The effect of this is to immerse the audience in a kind of dream logic, or rather a drunk logic. Most effectively illustrated by the passion pop skulling competition, which leaves the performers quite sozzled and a bit red faced for the last section of the show. Kudos to Luke Holmes for completely dominating in that race. As the party ends we're in much the same condition as the performers, drunk on wine, images and excellent tunes. Walking to the train station afterwards I can't really recall much of what happened but it doesn't mater. As Malcolm Whittaker, one of the hosts, proclaims in his welcoming speech. "It's not about all those things. It's about the moment you know!"

Team MESS are a group of young UOW graduates and Killing Don is a work that gestated throughout 2008. First with a Performance Space residency, then at Quarterbred, Underbelly Arts Lab and UOW. This version of the work, programmed in the Performance Space season, is the culmination of their various showings and workshops. It still has the vibe of a showing somewhat; with the nuts and wine, certain sections dragging on too long and the introduction acknowledging all those who helped get the work up and running. In a different context this could have been a problem, but considering it was a "members only free event" it didn't feel as if it mattered all that much.

As a recent graduate company, Team Mess are a good example of what making the right connections and writing inordinate number of applications can get you. From a student perspective it reinforces the necessity to learn the language of applications, to research past recipients and so on. All those mock grants and tortured group work seem a lot more important than the 20 or so percent they are worth in our course work. Hopefully all the experience writing them means that Team Mess will get the opportunity to continue to develop as a company.

Mark

A Short Welcome

2009-02-11T16:20:00.000+11:00

Well... Relatively short anyway.

This blog was conceived in a car. Simon (my co-blogger) and I were travelling to Sydney to see STC’s rather excellent War of the Roses and, in what slowly stopped being a joke about getting to meet Allison Croggan, we hit upon the need in the online arts blogging community for a student voice. A voice focused on how seeing independent and professional theatre can shape and influence a young emerging artist. We thought back to our favourite shows over the past years and how the sessions in which we saw them at Uni were changed and effected by these experiences, what we learnt from them. We remembered how shows like Martin Del Amo’s Never Been This Far Away From Home Before opened our eyes to stillness and storytelling, how UOW’s Oedipus Wrecks showed us excess and the magic of an unexpected dance number and how Company B’s Who’s Afraid... blew our heads off completely and made us point back to the theatre on our way out and say: “I want to be able to do that.”

So in memory of these and many other shows, we decided it was time to share our impressions of the theatre we see and the impression that they make on us as we finish up our final years of study.

Wish us luck.
Mark