Archives for the month of: December, 2011
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New Year’s Resolutions

December 31, 11 //  

Some New Year's Resolutions Are All Too Obvious

Here are my 10 New Year’s Resolutions as a theatre critic. I’ll look back on them at the end of 2012 and see how I did. Meanwhile, I firmly resolve:

1. To refrain from posting comments on Theatre Notes.

2. To write long form theatre criticism on a regular basis.

3. To review every piece of theatre I see.

4. To see fewer shows.

5. To improve the accuracy of my star ratings.

6. To converse more with artists about their work.

7. To read more contemporary Australian plays.

8. To go to more mid-season and closing night performances.

9. To avoid stock phrases in my reviews.

10. To get on top of the technical aspects of online publishing, so the blog looks prettier and can incorporate videos, audio interviews and the like.

Happy New Year!

And that’s a wrap … 2011 in review

December 27, 11 //  

Geoffrey Rush, Christie Whelan and Patrick Brammall in The Importance of Being Earnest. Photo: Jeff Busby

At the end of 2011, the biggest news is the departure from the MTC of Artistic Director Simon Phillips, which completes a changing of the guard at almost every Australian state theatre company over the past few years.

Phillips has proved a canny and popular figure. Although he has had his shockers, (I still cringe to remember Magda Szubanski in The Madwoman of Chaillot), he has shown a remarkable talent for ensemble drama and his best efforts have ranged from the Dogma-inspired domestic tragedy Festen to the beautifully acted version of the great American play August: Osage County.  

Phillips has been a pragmatic director, unwilling to let his own ego stand before the audience’s right to be entertained. That has put bums on seats – among his popular initiatives were musicals such as The Drowsy Chaperone, and his contemporary Shakespeare, most recently this year’s Hamlet starring Ewan Leslie.

It has also brought Phillips acclaim on the international commercial stage. You know we’re on a hot streak when we’re exporting shows like Priscilla to the world. That Andrew Lloyd-Webber got Phillips to rework Love Never Dies here in Melbourne – and declared himself thrilled with the result – proves the point.

It was another strong year for musicals: the surprise hit Rock of Ages, Anthony Warlow in the world premiere of Dr. Zhivago, and Xanadu the Musical, almost saved by Christie Whelan’s comic charms. On a smaller scale, The Production Company kept the repertoire alive, while the independent warhorse Magnormos continued to bring us new Australian musicals.

One aspect of Phillips’ legacy at the MTC has been, until recently, the paucity of contemporary Australian drama under his watch. The last year has seen a concerted effort to address the problem, with the most intensive burst of new Australian writing to grace our main stages in living memory. 

It’s tremendously exciting, and long overdue – especially when 2011 started with the execrable Don Parties On, a turkey that showed how out of touch David Williamson is with the generations beneath his own.

In the middle of the year, there were five premieres of Australian plays running concurrently at the Malthouse and MTC: Rob Reid’s The Joy of Text, an ambitious satire on literary and schoolyard proprieties, brimming with compassionate wit; Lally Katz’s stark retelling of a Jewish legend, A Golem Story; Ian Wilding’s The Water Carriers, a resonant two-hander that traced the outline of an inane rom-com only to break into the shadow of that rarest of beasts, Australian tragedy; Vanessa Bates’ Porn.Cake, a quirky and disturbing depiction of love and conspicuous consumption; and Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Gift – an unhappily misdirected black comedy, and not nearly as entertaining as her dark farce at Red Stitch, Day One. A Hotel, Evening, directed with quicksilver pace by Gary Abrahams.

It’s as diverse a range as you could hope for. Five years ago, our playwrights were struggling to find a spotlight in the face of doctrine that devalued the written word. That has changed decisively, but while our writing shines, there’s plenty of acting talent and some of our designers are the envy of the world, we continue to underperform in the interpretive arts. Without an overhaul of the way Australian work is directed, there’s every chance the fruits of our creativity will wither on the vine.

Frankly, the least attractive part of Phillips’ legacy at the MTC has been the want of solid theatre directors. He isn’t the only Artistic Director with a tendency to appoint those whose work flatters his own, leaving our main stage directing pool dominated by mediocre hacks, holding positions from which they cannot be easily dislodged.

We have to hope that Brett Sheehy’s appointment as MTC Artistic Director ushers in a more curatorial way of conceiving the role that rests on a deep knowledge of the local scene in its entirety.

Much has been done lately to integrate our flowering independent sector and our main stages, with the Malthouse’s 2012 Helium season of curated independent works the most obvious example. Yet we lag behind in matching promising independent directors with main stage work suited to their abilities, so that we lose great talents like Simon Stone, now at Belvoir in Sydney. Giving 2012 MTC shows to the likes of Matt Scholten (If Theatre) and Anne-Louise Sarks (The Hayloft Project) is a good first step, but it’s only a beginning. (If directors were appointed purely on the strength of their work, we’d be seeing main stage productions from Gary Abrahams and Daniel Schlusser.)

It has been a rocky year for Marion Potts at the Malthouse, with two highly anticipated shows, Tis Pity She’s A Whore and Die Winterreise, failing to inspire. Still, the company’s annual cabaret, Meow Meow’s The Little Match Girl, left anything Michael Kantor directed in that vein for dead, and Potts’ 2012 season is replete with envelope-pushing projects, from Lorca’s Blood Wedding to Thomas Bernhard’s The Histrionic.

Yet, as always, the smaller companies have led the way with progressive theatre. Red Stitch premiered Elfriede Jelinek’s difficult post-dramatic play Princess Dramas, while keeping audiences entranced by the best male acting I saw all year: Brett Ludeman’s luminous performance in Annie Baker’s The Aliens, directed by Nadia Tass. (The best female performance: Zahra Newman’s bruising tour de force in Debbie Tucker Green’s Random, stupidly squished into the MTC’s Education season.)

Some of our most compelling theatre highlighted disability. Back to Back gave it a staggeringly sophisticated treatment in Ganesh vs The Third Reich, the stand-out show of the Melbourne Festival.  Rawcus’ Small Odysseys unlocked its potential for visual beauty. And two outstanding shows at La Mama, Angus Cerini’s Save For Crying and Peta Brady’s Strands, dealt powerfully with the subject: the first a bleak portrayal of the imprisoning force of victimhood, the second a heart-breaking work of domestic realism that would make a fine film.

Other highlights from the independents include 4Larks’ junkyard opera Undine (watch out for them at the Malthouse in 2012), and the emergence of MKA, a company with a focus on new Australian writing that has produced work at a furious pace all year.

The independents continue to drive change as 2011 closes, poised on the cusp of a new chapter of Australian theatrical history, with a new generation taking the reins. The outlook for theatregoers is bright.

 ***

TEN THINGS TO WATCH OUT FOR IN 2012.

 

Brett Ludeman in The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later

 

Gary Abrahams: Our most under-rated theatre director, Abrahams’ sensitivity to nuance has nurtured exquisite acting over a range of genres. In 2012, he’s adapting Zola’s Therese Raquin for the stage.

Zahra Newman: An actor of extraordinary versatility and commanding presence, seen this year in Random and Clybourne Park at the MTC.

Lipsynch: In a direct challenge to the Melbourne Festival, The Arts Centre brings us Robert Lepage’s nine-hour globalised melodrama Lipsynch. More fun than watching nine eps of your favourite TV series and a better example of the legendary director’s vision than last year’s Blue Dragon.

Brett Ludeman: A star character actor of the future, Ludeman possesses unsettling charisma and precise physical intelligence. In 2011, he appeared as a homophobic murderer in The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, and as a mentally ill philosophe in The Aliens, both at Red Stitch.

Peta Brady: One of the few genuine all-rounders. As deft a playwright as she is an actor, Brady’s recent work includes Save For Crying, Status Update and Strands.

The Histrionic: The Malthouse hosts an STC production of Thomas Bernhard in April – an Austrian playwright I’ve longed to see performed here. His crackling black humour drips with scorn and schadenfreude. 

Blood Wedding: Lorca’s masterpiece, performed in English and Spanish, is sure to be a highlight of 2012.

Helium: An official acknowledgement of the creative energies of the independent scene, this program of curated works will build on the institutional legacy left by Stephen Armstrong and Michael Kantor.

Queen Lear: A quirk of the brief interregnum at the MTC, Robyn Nevin will perform Lear. We’ve seen Cate Blanchett play Richard II and Pamela Rabe monstering the stage as Richard III – but only a handful of male actors have ever come close to getting Lear right. Triumph or vanity project? Time will tell.

Christie Whelan: Famously said of her role in The Importance of Being Earnest: “It’s just like a musical without the songs.” A comic delight who can sing, dance and look fantastic in heels, Whelan knows nothing about acting but how to act.

Christie Whelan in the ill-fated Xanadu the Musical

 

PS. There are a couple of pieces that stay with me as 2011 ends, and should have been mentioned above. For starters: Trevor Jamieson’s beautiful and physically precise performance in Namatjira, which moved with consummate ease from disarming humour to the devastation of a man caught between the impossible demands of two cultures, and my pick of the Fringe, the gels at I’m Trying To Kiss You, who show every sign of being an all-female answer to the boys at Black Lung … If I think of any more, I’ll add ‘em on. Meanwhile, enjoy the New Year, and I’ll see you in the foyer sometime soon.

The Terminativity: Review

December 27, 11 //  

The Terminativity, Music and Lyrics: Casey Bennetto Book: Nick Caddaye, Trades Hall, Until December 22.

The cast of The Terminativity

Which of the following does not belong: Is it (a) three wise men, (b) a virgin birth, (c) the Son of God, or (d) unstoppable killer robots from the future? If you answered (e) None of the above, it’s time to stop watching reruns of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and get yourself down to The Terminativity.

The Christmas panto comes to us from the satirical talents behind Keating! The Musical – one of the few local shows to make the transition from fringe venue to the commercial stage. Casey Bennetto’s musical satire started life as a Fringe Festival lark and became an enormous popular success, starring Mike McLeish as the former PM. If the enthusiastic audience response to their latest is any indication, it’d pay to see it now, before it transfers to a bigger theatre next year and tickets get pricier.

A low-fi tribute to James Cameron’s Terminator flicks and an irreverent spoof of the Nativity, the chief surprise lies in not knowing exactly how ridiculous the show is going to get. So I’ll say no more about the shambolic plot.

The songs are the thing. If there are a few in the first half that don’t carry their weight, and the show’s Naked Gun-style inanity works better than its meta-theatrical humour, most of the musical numbers are hilarious.

Many are witty piss-takes of popular music genres, from the rock duet between Mary (Aurora Kurth) and Joseph (Steven Gates) to the Motown magic McLeish brings to the angel Gabriel. (It’s great to see McLeish on stage again: he has a brilliant voice, with one of the strongest falsettos around, and his stage presence and comic timing take the show to another level.)

But the song that really uncorked the audience was the one where the Three Wise Men (Andrew McLelland, Lawrence Leung and Ben McKenzie) took it up to the Beastie Boys. Priceless.

A gloriously geeky romp, featuring a cast packed with well-known Melbourne comedians, make sure you catch The Terminativity. It’s the silliest season of all.

 

Brecht – Bilbao and Beyond: Review

December 17, 11 //  

Brecht: Bilbao and Beyond, Written and performed by John Muirhead with Chuck Mallett, Butterfly Club, 204 Bank St, South Melbourne. Until Wed Dec 14 (Season Ended)

Chuck Mallett (Left) and John Muirhead

Of the poems, plays, and other writings to feature in this wickedly entertaining cabaret on Brecht’s life, there’s one that seems to capture the essence of the performers themselves. In the atheistic fable ‘Before The Flood’, a singular, ancient beast – the plateosaur – disdains to enter Noah’s ark, mocking the stupidity of the other animals.

John Muirhead and Chuck Mallett are plateosaurs (‘broadway lizards’). These silver-haired gents have more than a century of experience in the theatre between them, and their show is less interested in hagiography than in channelling the fiery scorn and barking laughter of Brecht’s spirit; his compassion for the suffering of ordinary people, and his rage at the institutions – of religion and of government – that perpetuate it.

There are a few Kurt Weill tunes – including Mack the Knife and an intoxicating rendition of Bilbao Song – but most of the music is original. It’s brilliant, too. Mallett’s piano composition emerges, jaunty and jolting, from the almost martial satire of Weimar cabaret.

Muirhead sings Brecht’s poems and songs with a rictal smile, and a voice that can unwrap any note and make it crackle with contempt for complacency.

The material’s selection and arrangement is effortlessly dramatic. One sequence builds from the poem ‘In the Doctor’s Office’ – where the joy of pregnancy is juxtaposed with the horror of war – to another poem where Brecht expresses his measured sorrow at a poor woman’s infanticide, with its famous refrain: “Make not your anger manifest, for everything that lives needs help from all the rest.”

Two moments don’t work: a twee rehearsal of Galileo, and the cap-R romantic music that accompanies ‘I Could Have Loved You More’. Quibbles. This is the sort of life-embracing performance Brecht would’ve loved. Let’s hope it returns for the Cabaret Festival next year.

Cherry, Cherry: Review, Quartet: Bonus Review

December 14, 11 //  

Cherry, Cherry, By Neda Rahmani and Xan Colman, A is for Atlas, A Dining Room In Thornbury, Season Ended.

Neda Rahmani

A is for Atlas has produced a distinctive body of work since its inception in 2006 under Artistic Director Xan Colman – one of a number of talented theatre folk I studied law with at Melbourne University in the 1990s. (There must’ve been something in the water: other refugees from law school days include Dean Bryant, the musical theatre writer and director, and the Artistic Director of Griffin Theatre Company, Sam Strong.)

Colman’s signature is the elegant fusion of musical and theatrical performance, from the haunting celebration of the Beckett and Shostakovich centenary, I Start Again, to the voyeuristic (and sonic) cruelties in his 2009 production of Heiner Müller’s Quartet.

The latest piece to emerge from the company combines food, storytelling, dance, puppetry, music and song. It’s easily the warmest and most nourishing theatrical dining experience I’ve had, and I’ll cherish the memory for a long time. The irrepressible Alison Croggon has a glowing review on Theatre Notes. I share her enthusiasm.

We’re invited into the home of Neda Rahmani. The percussionist, dancer and singer lives in a loft in Thornbury with her partner Marrs Coiro. She’s a woman of incredible charm and generosity: apparent in her welcoming smile and confirmed in the stories she tells over the course of the evening.

For the most part, they’re deeply intimate stories of her family, dappled with delight and sorrow. Her mother is Mauritian, her father Iranian, and the family fled Iran in the wake of the Revolution.

Neda’s entrancing presence isn’t limited to words: she has a beautiful voice, plays a range of weird and wonderful instruments, treats us to a whirling traditional dance in Mauritian costume, and can even beguile us into imitating her penchant for writing love letters to strangers.

The show reminded me of Derrida’s view on hospitality, which he called “the whole and principle of ethics”. “Hospitality”, he wrote, “is culture itself and not simply one ethic among others.” He said a lot of other quite impenetrable things about hospitality too, but he was right about that. How we treat strangers goes to the core of culture, and it’s the reason why our government’s treatment of refugees is a cause of such lasting national shame.

Cherry, Cherry is suffused with hospitality at every level: as entertainment, as immigration, as trust, forgiveness, as the sharing of home and food … Oh yes, you get a delicious meal. (Really, I must have that prawns in red sauce recipe.) The encounter concludes with wild improvised percussion, performed by everyone present, that will have you walking out into the night invigorated.

I can’t recommend Cherry, Cherry enough. Unfortunately, the season has ended.

***

Quartet: The Razor, By Heiner Muller, Music by Annie Hsieh, A is for Atlas, J Studios, 100 Barkly St, North Fitzroy, August 12 – 29, 2009.

Felicity Steel and Andrew Gray in Heiner Muller's Quartet

German playwright Heiner Muller is noted for rewriting classic texts into short, densely poetic plays. Perhaps his best known work is Hamletmachine, a postmodern restatement of Shakespeare’s tragedy that reduces the first three acts of Hamlet into a page and a half.

In Quartet, Muller works his magic using Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It’s a fierce and masterly condensation. The playwright employs only two characters, the Marquise de Merteuil (Felicity Steel) and Vicomte de Valmont (Andrew Gray), and all of the novel’s action is concertinaed into their battle of the sexes.

Through Merteuil and Valmont, Muller pays lip service to elaborate 18th century courtesies. Many of their mordant insults are delivered in baroque repartee. But as their cruelty and debauchery grows, Muller rips open the bodice of polite discourse and dives for more visceral language – deliberate obscenity, metaphors of beasts and bodily fluids.

Merteuil and Valmont are locked in a nihilistic dance of death. In Quartet, their games of lust and revenge are performed purely for each other: Valmont’s fatal seductions are re-enacted by the pair, with each changing gender-roles, taking turns to play seducer and victim.

The intensity of this production is enhanced by Grant Cooper’s brilliantly conceived set design. Muller wanted the setting to evoke a pre-Revolutionary drawing room and a World War III bunker. Cooper’s idea is better. We get a four-walled drawing room, with the audience peering down from above, like a crowd at a gladiatorial arena. The only gestures to modernity are closed circuit TVs built into the walls.

Steel brings lascivious energy and black humour to the role of Merteuil, and is suitably saturnine when she switches to Velmont’s part. Gray isn’t as strong, tending to be overly mannered.

Xan Colman’s direction is alive to Muller’s poetry, although some of the playwright’s ideas are lost, the language too impacted to emerge fully in performance. He needs to open the text out more.

A is for Atlas often merge art music and theatre. Composer Annie Hsieh’s chromatic modern reinterpretation of Hadyn’s Razor Quartet, performed by Larissa Weller (violin) and Jonathan Tosio (cello), is a compelling accompaniment. Hsieh collapses the quartet into two parts and unleashes a wild antagonism from Hadyn’s regulated harmonies. It isn’t easy listening – more torture chamber music than chamber music – but it complements the dramatic action perfectly .

 

Flight: Review

December 13, 11 //  

Flight, By Michael Healy, Nicole Peters & Eagle’s Nest Theatre, La Mama Courthouse, 349 Drummond St, Carlton. Until December 18.

Geraint Hill

Michael Healy’s Flight is new Australian work with unusual qualities. It’s the third in a trilogy of plays; almost as rare, it’s set overseas. I haven’t seen or read Healy’s other works, but this one stands on its own feet, despite wobbles, and the production from Eagle’s Nest Theatre sports some fine performances.

Chief among them is Geraint Hill as Tilman Hessel – a charismatic and driven environmental lobbyist living in Berlin. Tilman ticks all boxes when it comes to success. He’s good-looking and smart, passionate and ethical. He has an attractive wife (Johanne Fossheim) and close friends.

In unguarded moments, when the public mask drops, Tilman is deeply unhappy. After an acute health problem, he takes a cycling holiday around Germany hoping to reverse the downward spiral – but his sense of dislocation doesn’t go away, with drastic consequence.

Fresh from London, this is Hill’s first stage appearance here. The show’s worth seeing for his subtle and convincing portrayal of a man torn between public acclaim and private torment, and the way his performance builds to crisis with oppressive force.

As a playwright, Healy – who runs Grub Street Bookshop in Fitzroy – has predictable weaknesses for a bookish type. The most pressing one is that he overexplains, using clunky exposition rather than suggestion. He needs to trust all the non-verbal aspects of theatre, use fewer words, and leave more to the audience’s fancy.

The most engaging scenes reveal by implication: a conversation between Tilman and an old friend (Clare Callow) sparkles with an easeful wit that suggests a former erotic attraction, for instance. (Unfortunately, the fact that she’s an old flame gets spelled out in huge gold letters later.)

At its best, Skye Staude’s production achieves an unshowy naturalism, though she ought to have argued with the playwright over cuts to the script. There are longueurs, and more than a few redundant lines. Healy deserves every encouragement, but needs skilled dramaturgy if he wants his stage writing to soar.

 

The Economist: Review

December 9, 11 //  

The Economist, By Tobias Manderson-Galvin, MKA Pop-Up Theatre, 73 Nicholson St, Abbotsford. Until December 16.

In July, Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik killed more than 70 people, many of them children. It’s raw and risky subject matter for a play. The Economist probes this still open wound through incisive theatrical technique, fine ensemble performance and Van Badham’s brilliant direction.

We enter on the actors dressed in ugly red jumpers and fawn slacks, making a range of fatuously jingoistic gestures. Comedy plays a crucial role – not simply in exposing the idiocies of extreme nationalism – but in tracing the limits of representation when faced with atrocity, and in drawing attention to the trivial seeds from which horror springs.

Sharp, supercharged scenic fragments whip between barking comedy and spiralling alienation, but the political critique remains in service to the black constellation of human character it delineates.

Badham’s decision to employ gender-blind casting works wonders. Zoey Dawson as Berwick, the Breivik-figure, slouches haplessly through emasculating events. She ironically compensates through devices – steroids, plastic surgery, a burgeoning World of Warcraft obsession – all likely to exacerbate the problem.

But it’s the meticulous planning and deception and the sheer will to evil that haunts you. Dawson’s address to imminent victims, in police uniform, leaves a chilling sense of betrayal. A wolf-in-sheep’s clothing, Dawson is serene and phlegmatic, with a malign authority that reverberates in the mind as darkness falls on stage.

Manderson-Galvin’s script does have room for improvement. He could squeeze poetic potential from the Warcraft lingo. (More noobs wooting and whatnot.) And one of the few fictitious insertions, the love interest Freya, doesn’t gel. Perhaps overtly signalling that Freya is a mythic character – as with Odin, who embodies Nordic cultural supremacy in the play – might be more conceptually credible.

The Economist remains a potent and clinically performed work that excavates the bleakest extremities of home-grown terrorism. It’s a daring finale for the dynamos at MKA, whose energy and drive have seen them mount almost non-stop play readings and performances of new Australian work throughout the year. Well worth seeing.

 

 

The Story of Mary Maclane By Herself: Review

December 9, 11 //  

The Story of Mary Maclane By Herself, Written by Bojana Novakovic (from the writings of Mary Maclane), Malthouse Theatre, Until December 11.

Bojana Novakovic as Mary MacLane

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Cecily declares that her diary ‘is simply a very young girl’s record of her thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication.’ The witticism plays on the public appetite for private confessions. In Wilde’s day, the first stirrings of celebrity culture had begun, and remarkable women such as Mary Maclane set out to shock the world with their innermost musings.

Maclane attracted controversy with the publication of her first memoir in 1902. It was fearless even by today’s standards – exposing an irresistible narcissism, an admission to lesbian attractions, even a desire to marry the devil. Maclane has been claimed as an important feminist and a pioneer in the art of contemporary autobiography, but perhaps her most lasting influence is as a seminal figure in celebrity culture. She was one of the first provocateurs to perform and market the self as a public commodity.

In attempting to bring the self-confessed genius to the stage, Bojana Novakovic adapts Maclane’s diaries with mixed results. Amid mania and self-absorption, we get meta-theatrical flourishes where the script anticipates its own defeat. But if Novakovic holds the keys to her subject’s brilliant mind, she isn’t handing them out.

One of the show’s problems is the music. Tim Rogers’ jaunty country stylings, accompanied by violin and bass, prove entertaining, but they keep smudging the dramatic line. Anytime we look like getting some insight into Mary’s character a whimsical musical interlude lopes in, and Novakovic’s voice isn’t pure or strong enough to carry the demands the show makes of it.

More worrying, the characterisation doesn’t take flight. While it’s fine in theory to adopt a post-dramatic style, the effect is unedifying here. I suspect I would have liked to see Novakovic giving a full-throated stab at impersonating her subject. As it stands, the piece resembles a failed séance. Maclane’s ghost halts and sputters through what appear to be the performer’s own psychodramas: where Maclane’s narcissism ends and Novakovic’s begins is impossible to say.

Novakovic is a real talent. So is Rogers. And Anna Cordingley and the Malthouse design team have created another sensual theatrical experience. Yet the potent effect of reading Maclane’s writing – that of communing directly with a brilliant, eccentric mind – eludes this production; its subject remains obscured, rather than illuminated, by the art.

Ophelia Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest: Review

December 8, 11 //  

Ophelia Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Created by Daniel Schlusser, Chamber Made Opera / Bell Shakespeare, A Living Room in Armadale, Until Nov 29.

Karen Sibbing as Ophelia

Some shows incline the dedicated spectator to regard theatre as an esoteric and slightly loopy cult. No one in the audience of Daniel Schlusser’s Ophelia Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was wearing an alfoil-lined Stackhat to ward off alien messages, though if there had been, they wouldn’t have felt out of place.

The latest ‘lounge-room opera’ from Chamber Made is a fathomlessly strange piece that takes flight from the problem of Ophelia, arguably the most underwritten female role in Shakespearean drama.

Is it opera?  Not really. It is operatic in its willingness to embrace ritualised performance, grandiose gesture and amplified emotion; and in the prominence afforded to Darrin Verhagen’s score, a mind-haunted and eerily vacant masterpiece of stage composition.

But opera, no – the only concession to song is the ephemeral appearance of an all-girl choir. The work most closely resembles Hamlet’s dumb-show itself, or the artificial mysteries of an Elizabethan court masque, performed for the elect.

It begins with smudged and ghostly animations of Hamlet (Schlusser) and Ophelia (Karen Sibbing). The tour into Ophelia’s ruptured mind takes shape in a hyper-modern kitchen. Dislocated shards of Ophelia’s private life glitter and fade: the solitude of an empty house, the madness of herbs, tears from chopping fresh brown onions, alone.

There are nightmarish invasions by Gertrude (Lily Paskas), a horned goddess and dangerous incitement to incestuous fantasy who, in one daring scene, drowns Ophelia in the kitchen sink.

Schlusser’s domestic pageantry is beautifully designed and fearlessly performed. If his beguiling engagement with Hamlet remains amorphous, we can still delight in this unusual form of artistic patronage and the churn of ideas it has produced.

***

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, By Dale Wasserman (based on the Ken Kesey novel), Chapel Off Chapel, Until December 11.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is best known from the 1975 film, starring Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, for which both won Oscars. Human Sacrifice Theatre makes a fair fist of a stage version, notwithstanding that one of the problems of staging a famous movie is it invites comparison.

Marc Diaco assays the role of free-spirited Randle McMurphy, committed for psychiatric evaluation as part of a short prison sentence. He’s manic and rambunctious and everything he should be, but doesn’t hold a candle to Jack Nicholson.

Natalia Novikova rises to the occasion as Nurse Ratched, bringing a heart of frost to this classic villain, her officious malevolence lurking under compassion’s skin.

A large supporting cast plays the inmates, doctors and aides in the mental institution. Generally, the actors give entertaining cameos and keep the ball rolling in ensemble, but director David Myles could do more to tighten the show’s screws.

In one important adaptation, the Native American “Chief” Bromden (Stan Yarramunua) has been changed to an Indigenous character. He makes the role his own, though not even the dignified Yarramunua can extinguish the whiff of the ridiculous about the ending.

As far as it goes this is a slickly produced and ably performed show. Unfortunately it lacks the harrowing atmosphere and desperate edge that made the film so popular.

Day One. A Hotel, Evening; Coranderrk: Review

December 8, 11 //  

The first encounter between Red Stitch and playwright Joanna Murray-Smith has borne dark, delicious fruit. Gary Abrahams has the measure of JMS’s black farces in a way that main stage directors of her work (including Maria Aitken, who was born to direct farces) just can’t seem to get. The play has soft spots, but the direction’s wizardly and once you’ve seen the show, you probably won’t want to see Murray-Smith’s comedies directed by anyone else.

And over at La Mama, Ilbijerri Theatre Company brought us Coranderrk. It proved another fine piece of direction (Isaac Drandic) and ensemble acting, bringing to life a seminal conflict from the late 19th century, and one of the first political victories for Indigenous Australians deprived of their traditional lands in Victoria. It’s documentary theatre that becomes an absorbing piece of living history.

Day One. A Hotel, Evening, By Joanna Murray-Smith, Red Stitch, Until December 17.

Anna Samson and Dion Mills.

I was exercised by this first collaboration between Joanna Murray-Smith and Red Stitch. It seems a natural fit, and I’m inclined to forgive the production’s failures, because it succeeds at something more important: exploring alternative modes of staging Murray-Smith’s work than the broad, overplayed farce that has been known to beat her repartee into limp submission at the MTC.

The zany black comedy sees three couples enmeshed in a web of jiggery-pokery. Two business partners Sam (Dion Mills) and Tom (John Adam) are developing another remote exurb with no social infrastructure. Their wives Madeleine (Kate Cole) and Stella (Sarah Sutherland) have different reactions to infidelity.

As with most of Gary Abrahams’ work, this production is beautifully cast. His bullet-speed direction serves Murray-Smith’s savage, ludicrous humour well, and both performances and script are at their most entertaining during sequences of outlandish invective, verbal sparring and seduction. It would be unfair to single out performances in such a strong ensemble piece.

There are reservations. The epigrammatic exposition around love, etc can be too Hallmark card; the actress and hit-man characters remain irritatingly undeveloped; and the comedy doesn’t sustain its refined mockery, the satire occasionally extruding coarse-grained clangers.

A technical hitch on the night obscured the climax. It didn’t really matter. (Frankly, all of Murray-Smith’s grotesques seemed to be equally deserving of mortality. Even a Tarantino-style ending would’ve suited me fine.)

Despite its frailties, the play scoots along, buoyed by the talents of one of our wittiest writers for the stage.

***

Tom Long, Liz Jones and Jack Charles star in Coranderrk

Coranderrk: We Will Show The Country, Ilbijerri Theatre Company and The Minutes of Evidence Project, La Mama Courthouse, 349 Drummond St Carlton. Until November 27.

The Coranderrk station, founded in 1863 near Healesville, served as sanctuary for members of the Kulin nations, forced from their traditional lands by colonial settlement. It prospered and became self-sufficient. Within two decades, its existence was under threat.

As part of an unscrupulous land-grab, trusted station-founder John Green was dismissed. The Board for the Protection of Aborigines conspired to run the station into the ground and move the Aboriginal inhabitants on. Only one Board member, editor and publisher of The Age George Syme, resigned rather than collude in such a morally bankrupt plan.

In 1881, matters came to a head in a public Inquiry, set up to investigate the management of Coranderrk and the conduct of the Board. Ilbijerri’s latest show takes evidence given to that Inquiry and shapes it into a thought-provoking and moving historical re-enactment.

The record discloses appalling racism, official callousness and corruption, but it is also a victory for the courage and solidarity of Aborigines and their supporters. Influential figures like Green (Tom Long), Syme (Jim Daly) and the formidable Ann Fraser Bon (Liz Jones) helped to bring Indigenous voices where their protests might be heard.

There were only half as many black witnesses as white ones, but the plaintive dignity and self-possession of the Aboriginal testimony sears itself into the mind. It affirms the strongest desire for self-determination at all levels: from ngurungaeta (headmen) such as William Barak (Jack Charles), through stockmen and farmers like Thomas Banfield (Glenn Shea) and Robert Wandon (Greg Fryer) who kept the station afloat, to young women and boys (Melodie Reynolds).

Director Isaac Drandic conducts a swift and absorbing ensemble performance, resurrecting a historical episode that holds lessons still relevant today.

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