Review: The Mysteries: Genesis

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

Peter Craven's Total Bullshit

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.

The Crimp Report

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…

Review: Elling

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

Review: The Duel

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

David Williamson?

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.