Sorry for the lack of excitement...

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

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…

UOW Spring Season

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

UOW Review: Osama The Hero

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

UOW Review: Talking To Terrorists

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

UOW Review: pre]paradise/sorry nOw

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.
______________________________________________________

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

A Short Welcome

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