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Summer of the Seventeenth Doll: Review

January 21, 12 //  

Helen Thomson and TJ Power in the latest Doll at the MTC.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, By Ray Lawler, MTC, Playhouse, The Arts Centre, Until February 18.

Four generations of eyes lit up at the opening night of the Doll; the excitement was palpable. Ray Lawler’s great Australian play stands the test of time, and the playwright, now in his 90s, who ambled onstage at curtain call to thank the cast, crew and audience, exuded a humility and gentlemanliness of a bygone age. And he was understandably chuffed. It’s a terrific production.

The central paradox of the Doll is that this play – about failing to grow up – did more to dispel our colonial inferiority complex than any other. It showed us how the rhythm and colour of suburban Australian idiom could be articulated without embellishment or sentimentality. That’s a rare and lasting achievement, as potent today as it was in 1953.

Neil Armfield’s production belongs to the women. Helen Thomson’s Pearl steals the show. Her brittle vanity, posh airs and feminine affectation dapple the performance with genuine humour that keeps smearing into an ugly censoriousness that isn’t separate from her tough, unromantic view of men. It’s a staggeringly detailed piece of naturalistic acting that works towards a gully of sorrow – affectless, husky, staring blankly out the kitchen window – before putting the mask back and carrying on.

No less impressive is Robyn Nevin’s Emma. Nevin knows her stuff: the 1995 Doll she directed with Frankie J. Holden and Genevieve Picot was what first made me fall in love with Australian theatre, and her flinty, sardonic matriarch doesn’t miss a note.

Alison Whyte was born to play Olive, and she’s effective, although perhaps too shrill from the outset, overemphasising the incurable romantic at the expense of her character’s pride: Olive knows what she has isn’t much, but is convinced of its dignity, and all of a sudden they’re both gone.

Conversely, Steve Le Marquand’s Roo exaggerates his character’s pride to the detriment of his character’s easygoing authority. This is an unusually taciturn, depressive interpretation of a leader of men facing down the ravages of time and losing. Travis McMahon’s Barney captures the feckless charm of a man-boy, but as with Le Marquand he doesn’t ripple with contradiction as well as muscle.

Armfield directs with energy and pace, and the drama takes hold with visceral inevitability. If you care about theatre, it’s unmissable.

 

The Importance of Being Earnest: Review

December 8, 11 //  

Simon Phillips’ last production as Artistic Director of the MTC – The Importance of Being Earnest starring Geoffrey Rush – is the hottest ticket in town, although the stars that shine brightest aren’t the ones you might expect.

Christie Whelan as Gwendolen, Tony Taylor as Rev. Chasuble, Geoffrey Rush as Lady Bracknell, and Emily Barclay as Cecily.

The Importance of Being Earnest, By Oscar Wilde, MTC Sumner Theatre, Until Jan 14.

“In matters of grave importance, style, and not sincerity, is the vital thing,” says Gwendolen near the end of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. It’s one of the innumerable, perverse witticisms that power what, without being the greatest comedy in English, remains one of its greatest farces.

Wilde embraced that one-liner as a personal credo of course, and it was a cause of his tragic fall from grace. His stylish but insincere testimony in his sodomy trial seemed to forget that the truths he expresses in his ‘trivial comedy for serious people’ matter because they upend more predictable ones.

Yet if vitality and not happiness was Wilde’s goal, he succeeded onstage and off it, and the life-blood in this production – Simon Phillips’ last as Artistic Director of the MTC – is drawn in equal measure from the brilliant elegance of its verbal entanglements and the social miseries they hang upon.

It’s a simulacrum of Phillips’ original 1988 version, with Geoffrey Rush as Jack Worthing, Jane Menelaus as Gwendolen and Bob Hornery as Reverend Chasuble. The whirligig of time has served up a delectable comic revenge. Those same actors now play, respectively, Lady Bracknell, Miss Prism, and the play’s ancient butlers, while a generation of future stars take the reins.

Each act opens on an empty, tiled space against a backdrop of Beardsley illustrations. The costumes are as elaborate as the stage is plain, and if the chafe and rustle of Victorian fashion provides grist for physical comedy, the spare design accentuates the performances.

He gets top billing, but Rush as Lady Bracknell isn’t by any stretch the main attraction. A formidable comic actor he may be, but his female impersonation here is more frill-necked lizard than dragon-lady. I’d imagined Rush would climb higher into his upper register and reach for a crisper RP accent. He doesn’t, and while his portrayal does titillate, and takes its character’s comic anxieties seriously, it isn’t really a credible portrait of a Victorian society matron, and there’s a sense in which it coasts on Rush’s fame.

The real star is Christie Whelan, whose piping Gwendolen steals the show, from the subtle subversions of her flirting behind her mother’s back, to the ritualised cattiness of her scene with Cecily, played in wonderfully plummy style by Emily Barclay.

I enjoyed the conception of Toby Schmitz’s Worthing – stiffer, more uptight and restrained than his natural bent – better than the execution. He’s at his finest opposite Patrick Brammall’s Algy, a memorably foppish performance that embraces an engrossing fraternal turbulence, skilfully trapped in amber at the end of each act.

Hornery’s butlers are a hoot, while Menelaus’ attractively skittish Miss Prism isn’t given anything to work with by Tony Taylor’s appalling turn as the Reverend Chasuble. Still, there’s a mordant frisson in Prism’s final stand-off with Lady Bracknell, especially when Rush delivers the immortal line: “Is this Miss Prism a female of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education?” to his offstage wife.

It is a fitting farewell to Phillips, this well-turned crowd-pleaser, and an historic production perfumed by the flowering of bright young things, and the valedictory air of those whose bloom is gone.

Clybourne Park: Review

September 24, 11 //  

Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park is a beautifully constructed and entertaining examination of racial prejudice, social inequity, and changing political pieties in America. The MTC’s production has frailties, but is still well worth seeing: the stronger performances are stunning, the weaker will settle as the season progresses. Regrettably, I don’t have time to expand the review right now. 320 words to review a play like this is … most unfortunate.

Clybourne Park, By Bruce Norris, directed by Peter Evans, MTC Sumner Theatre, Until October 26.

Alison Whyte, Greg Stone, Bert Labonte and Zahra Newman

Initially, I struggled to see why Clybourne Park won this year’s Pulitzer Prize. It’s worth persevering. Bruce Norris’ examination of race and real estate in Chicago offers much food for thought. There are some high-fibre ideas underneath the melting ice-cream of the repartee.

A contemporary theatrical response to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin In The Sun (1958) – the first play by an African American woman to hit Broadway – it’s set in the same house, before and well after that play’s action.

The split-level comedy drama opens with constipated humour. Some of the performances are so strained it’s like watching a bad stage resurrection of the parents in Leave It To Beaver (after Beaver and Wally have offed themselves in despair).

A mourning couple (Alison Whyte and Greg Stone) is leaving a white-bread, picket-fence suburb. They’ve sold the house to the first coloured family to move there. White neighbourhood leaders intrude on their grief to protest – an ugly farce.

Dreadfully approximate American accents and brittle, overbright stereotypes obscure period authenticity. Challenging, though, to make late-50s politics and mannerisms come alive. There’s much to unimagine.

Performances and play improve vastly after interval. After decades of ‘white flight’, the community became poorer, blacker, socially troubled. It’s now gentrifying. A young white couple (Patrick Brammall and Laura Gordon) wants to demolish the house and rebuild. They’re mired in a planning dispute with African American neighbours. Tensions fray; political correctness flies out the window as instinctive biases leap to their throats.

Zahra Newman. What a star. Her two characters – a cheerful, self-censoring maid and an articulate, passive-aggressive middle-class African American – are beautifully observed, setting up subtle resonances and preserving a lucid genealogy of the effects of prejudice. Bert Labonte is only slightly less accomplished, and a fine comic actor indeed.

Freed from period constraints, the script and acting take flight. The comedy is funnier, true to life. Patrick Brammall’s anxious WASP takes such commanding flow of the conversation that his insistence on reverse racism seems at once plausible and ridiculous. Peter Evans’ initially lame direction finds its legs, and the show leaves you with a thoroughly entertaining portrayal of what hasn’t changed in US culture. These characters spend so much time arguing about houses, they’ve forgotten what makes a home.

Rising Water: Review

August 11, 11 //  

Rising Water, By Tim Winton, Black Swan State Theatre Company, MTC Playhouse Theatre, The Arts Centre, Until September 10.

Alison Whyte and John Howard in Rising Water. Photo: Gary Marsh.

In literature, Tim Winton has nothing left to achieve. The four-time Miles Franklin winner is a National Living Treasure. He isn’t one to sit in the trophy cabinet tarnishing. His first play, Rising Water, wades into the treacherous currents of drama, and Winton has every reason to be nervous. It’s a sinker, and you wish that it went down, as one character quips, ‘like a bag of cats’.

As with much of Winton’s fiction, Rising Water hinges on fringe-dwellers, loners and outcasts. Set on a marina in Western Australia, three middle-aged characters have taken their sea change to the extreme. Each has fled a troubled past and bought a boat, to live cheek by jowl in a watery limbo. Under all the Williamson-like banter, they hide from the world and nurse secret wounds. It’s an odd place to do so – the marina is hardly private, especially on Australia Day, and when drunk British backpacker Dee (Claire Lovering) rocks up, confrontation looms.

The only unambiguously wonderful thing about this production is the design.  Christina Smith’s set is dominated by three large-scale boats hovering mid-air, a jetty arcing behind, and the masts of yachts in silhouette beyond that.

A black sheen floor ripples with Matt Scott’s aqueous lighting, and in the one coup de theatre – an acrobatic dive into the sea below – light and set unite with Iain Grandage’s submarine music to create a spectacle rich and strange. It’s a shame Winton saw fit to describe the same waters, earlier, as ‘toxic smegma’.

Winton can write for the page, obviously, but the stage is a different proposition entirely. The ear is slower than the eye, and drama must leave room for the words to be twice interpreted, once by the actors, and again by the audience. Winton’s script, torn between broad vernacular and florid poetic flourishes, is too verbally dense. It’s long on blokey comedy and metaphor-crowded sentiment and, with the exception of Baxter (John Howard), short on character.

Too often, Winton’s characters are flimsy mouthpieces for his own waddling bombast. Dee’s eviscerating screed against the racist monoculture of Perth, or the boat-dwellers’ declamatory wind-bagging about xenophobic nationalism, don’t emerge organically through credibly imagined human figures. You can see the playwright’s hand up their bums a mile off. It’s self-regarding indulgence, and a clumsy way to integrate such social issues. Besides, however overdrawn the language gets, the actual arguments raised remain curiously underdeveloped.

The actors make the best of it. Howard puts in a poignant performance as a depressive, bleeding heart of a man battered by scandal. Geoff Kelso’s Col indulges in broad larrikin clowning, though that’s as far as his role goes. And Alison Whyte as the lesbian Jackie has to reach to near-hysterical emotion to prop up her desperately underwritten part. Winton has dropped the ball with Jackie: she doesn’t harbour even a trace of lust for the hot young backpacker chick, and immediately after interval, expresses implausible outrage at something she already knows.

Kate Cherry is top-notch at casting, but her direction compounds the play’s overwritten and underwritten aspects. The comic repartee is sometimes blurted too fast to sink in; the emotional undertows – whether monologues, or wordless scenes where a mysterious boy (Louis Corbett) haunts the waves – are turgid and slow, often without enough visual dynamism or theatrical gravity to hold your attention.

Rising Water presents a hyper-real, histrionic vision of Australia with an oddly retro feel to it. If you love Winton’s fiction, it’s worth seeing to satisfy your curiosity, but he will have to unlearn some of his novelistic skills if he wants to master drama.

Hamlet: Newsflash, Rant, Review

August 8, 11 //  

NEWSFLASH

Tickets to the MTC’s exquisite production of Hamlet starring Ewen Leslie are very hard to come by. Good news. The show has just been extended by three days. Better get in quick. If you miss out there, the MTC is also selling standing room tickets for $30 a pop. I saw the show from near the back of the theatre, and you get a fantastic view, so if you’re feeling slender of wallet and able of limb, go for it.

Ewen Leslie and Eryn Jean Norvill as Hamlet and Ophelia.

 

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, MTC, Sumner Theatre, directed by Simon Phillips, Until August 31.

There’s some interest in my opinion of the latest Hamlet at the MTC. (Ok, so a few random netizens, my mum, and my partner, who’s threatened me with the Lysistrata treatment if I don’t come up with the goods.) Sorry it’s taken so long, but I’ve cultivated a horror of writing for free.

 

One question, before I start the review proper: Are the critics of Simon Phillips’ Hamlet mad, or pretending to be mad? As a rule, I don’t read other people’s reviews before I write mine. I did this time, and I’m bemused by the fact that this production has attracted critical ambivalence from Elly Varrenti in The Age and outright scorn from Chris Boyd in The Australian.

I think they’re quite wrong, though true to their sense of the show, and no one can ask for more from a critic than that, can they? As a defence, the honestly held opinion might be all but a lay-down misere, but on a broader level, it seems to me that the role of the critic suffers for the negative connotation it carries in our culture. In Australia, ‘critic’ gives a strong sense of the adverse comment that invariably goes with the territory, and only the weakest echo of the word’s deeper meaning – that the task of the critic is an urgent one, critical. We end up cast as professional fault-finders, rather than free agents who, in our best light, can actually help to create beauty in a work of art.

Needless to say, this isn’t a state of affairs you want to internalise.

Not that any critic worth the name should refrain from delivering a spanking when it’s deserved. As the notoriously spank-happy Ken Tynan wrote in his diaries: “90% of a critic’s job is to demolish the bad to make way for the good.” Still, there’s a persuasive case that we ought only to nitpick when there’s nothing better to say. With word counts dwindling in newspaper reviews, we might usefully recall Joseph Addison’s dictum at the dawn of newspapers, just as pertinent in their twilight:

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover … concealed beauties … and to communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

One wonders whether such egregiously bitchy and misleading hyperbole as “putting Pamela Rabe in killer heels is pretty much the extent of Simon Phillips’ interpretation of this play” is worthy of Chris Boyd’s observation. I wouldn’t have thought so. More troubling, neither Boyd nor Elly Varrenti at The Age wasted more than a sentence on Leslie’s performance as Hamlet. This might not be their fault (I’m aware of a reviewer’s exigencies: tight deadlines, disaffected subs taking a machete to one’s copy and whatnot), but it strikes me as unfortunate. “What’s Hamlet like?” is the question readers will most want answered.

* * *

Perhaps the wisest response comes from Oscar Wilde’s funny and profound dialogue on arts criticism, The Critic as Artist, With Some Remarks on The Importance of Doing Nothing:

“If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life. There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.”

Wilde’s insight is a good touchstone for appreciating Simon Phillips’ Hamlet. Everything from Shaun Gurton’s design to Ewen Leslie’s performance as the Dane converges to form an utterly contemporary vision of the play that hovers unnervingly between definition and obscurity. On one level, it’s a brilliantly paced pop Hamlet with broad appeal, and on another, a distinctly existential Hamlet, echoing our current obsession with privacy against a backdrop of rampant corporatism and surveillance.

It’s an exquisite prison, this Denmark. Titanic glass panes reflect the sterile elegance of a corporate Elsinore. The effect is stunning. It’s as if the play’s characters have been trapped inside a huge revolving door, at the entry to a sinister multinational whose precise business they will never know. The corporate Hamlet is nothing new, of course, and nor is the interpretation of Hamlet as essentially a tragedy of surveillance, most influentially proposed by the Polish Shakespeare critic Jan Kott. But uniting the two suggestions is clever, and in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, timely.

Our main stages have had their share of monumental design that dwarfs the performers. At its worst, it’s wasteful window-dressing. Not here. Shaun Gurton’s spectacular set is integrated into and informs the acting. Lines are sometimes delivered as the scene revolves, dissipating into the air, generating a thriller-like sense of momentum. The performances seem to embody the revolving door metaphor. Retaining Wilde’s ‘obscurity that belongs to life’, they’re suggestive rather than definitive – assuming a flickering, winnowed and ephemeral theatricality; respecting the heart of each character’s mystery, rather than plucking it out.

Ewen Leslie’s physically stylised performance as Richard III last year attracted rave reviews. I admired it without being blown away, so I didn’t expect to be haunted by his Hamlet. I was. It’s an excellent sparrow’s Hamlet: cynical, impulsive and painfully shy, with the last quality intriguingly dominant.

Leslie is a wonderful stage technician, and his Hamlet is built on a foundation of forensically skilled body language. We first spy him cringing into a couch, as a well-groomed Claudius (John Adam) speechifies with all the sincerity that attends corporate functions – Hamlet, the boy who doesn’t want to be watched, can’t bear to watch.

Leslie encodes Hamlet’s performance anxiety by compulsively turning upstage. It’s a motif repeatedly employed to texture his soliloquies, and builds a creeping sense of encroachment, complicity in the violation of his privacy. We’re made subliminally aware that we’re destined to watch Hamlet’s worst moments, when it’s the last thing he wants. This becomes a potent thread in his tragedy. There’s more than a hint that this Hamlet resents us, the voyeuristic audience, as much as anything.

All of which makes Leslie compulsively watchable, though it’s not the whole picture.  In solitude, his Hamlet seethes with emotion, from the calculated intensity of contemplating suicide to the soft exhalation of the Yorick speech, delivered with an unsentimental, resigned clarity. In company, Hamlet’s panicked extroversion is characteristic of the pathologically shy; heavily underscored in his spurning Ophelia (Eryn Jean Norvill), and his assault on Gertrude (Pamela Rabe).

Typically, the supporting roles in Hamlet are directed toward just that: holding the Prince aloft. This production is no exception, with recessed but distilled performances. Adam’s attractive, well-spoken Claudius is a classic CEO, more chilling for being so superficially sympathetic. He’s particularly compelling in his half-hearted attempt to spin the one thing he knows he can’t – his soul.

Rabe’s Gertrude cuts a chic, imposing figure. It’s a husky, low-key portrayal, but effective – the degree of Gertrude’s culpability in her husband’s murder remains wreathed in mystery. As Polonius, Garry McDonald is blinkered, avuncular and officious – you keep expecting shades of Norman Gunston, but it’s a subtle comic performance, understated and droll without being laughable. And Robert Menzies is a dire apparition as the murdered King, his reverberate verse equal to his spectral costume.

A slight blonde girl in pale florals against all the suits and military uniforms, Eryn Jean Norvill’s Ophelia looks out of place. The visual incongruity bleeds into the performance, lending an otherworldly quality to Ophelia’s mad scene: her broken thoughts flit and glitter like shards of coloured glass in the eye of a bird. Grant Cartwright makes a crisp, silver-spooned Horatio (though it’s odd he’s been given Fortinbras’ lines at the end), and Tim Ross’s Laertes has an easygoing gallantry that darkens to rage, culminating in the final, handily choreographed fencing match.

Simon Phillips is one of a handful of theatre directors in Australia who can manage everything from blockbuster musicals to intimate ensemble drama. He has his peccadilloes: he’s known for his obsession with revolving stages, and a little piece of Priscilla seems to have lodged itself in his soul. Yet he’s adept at turning his weaknesses into strengths. Only Phillips could get away with doing Hamlet’s dumbshow in strobe-riddled, hard-trance-inspired drag – and probably, only Phillips would think of it.

Such flourishes don’t always work: the riffs of rock music don’t seem germane to the enigmatic atmosphere, but they’re a tiny irritant. You only notice because the overall effect of this production is so engaging and sedulously constructed.

Phillips has achieved a rare feat: his Hamlet works as clever and accessible popular entertainment, rocketing along without a single dead moment, but it also breathes deeply of the zeitgeist, embracing a cogent critical reading that holds a mirror to our over-capitalised, privacy-poor culture, shows us how it corrodes trust, and makes us think about our own small involvement in it. It’s a breathtaking show, and a highlight of Phillips’ career. When you compare it to other recent Hamlets here – especially Brendan Cowell’s ill-fated turn at Bell Shakespeare – it’s one you’d be insane to miss.

Australia! The Show!, Who’s The Best?, Bond-A-Rama: Review

August 8, 11 //  

Australia! The Show!, By Aidan Fennessy, John Halpin, Jean-Marc Russ and Hayden Spencer, MTC Lawler Studio, Until August 12.

Tim Wotherspoon, Hayden Spencer and Isaac Drandic

Australia loves its panto. Critics are less keen, because there’s a strong argument that the form – for better or worse – has colonised our drama. Australia! The Show! takes the phenomenon to its absurd conclusion. It’s a rambunctious piss-take of Australian history and culture, so fast, furious and funny it had an audience of high school students hooting with laughter for over 90 minutes.

The conceit involves a highly-strung actor, Leslie Barrymore-Lockett (Tim Wotherspoon), trying to capture Australia through amateur theatre. He’s comically undercut by his sidekick Owen Blunt (Hayden Spencer), a dense bloke from Owen’s Mowin’. Their farcical high-jinks whitewash Australian history: third wheel Terry (Isaac Drandic), an indigenous musician, has had his lines cut – and the show won’t go on without some kind of reconciliation.

The satire gets a bit lost in the endless japes, but the three actors are perfectly cast, and the show is carried by their superb clowning. They’re fortunate to be directed by Anne Browning, whose experience with Peter Houghton’s one-man farces keeps the theatrical zaniness simmering along.

Expect vaudevillian antics, lightning slapstick, irreverent sight gags and burlesque set-pieces. There’s a mock-ballet celebrating Australian sport; Burke and Wills traipsing across the desert with a Webber in tow (to the tune of Crowded House – “always take the Webber with you”); a thwarted attempt with indigenous fire-sticks that doubles as masturbation; Captain Cook playing charades with Aborigines; and Spencer’s pants-wettingly funny wildlife impersonations.

A formidable actor, Wotherspoon pitches his role between panto villain and vaudevillian fall guy – a pompous, neurotic Pom to Spencer’s laconic larrikin. They create a brilliant comic contrast, with Drandic rounding out the equation as a sly foil.

I’ve been impressed by the MTC education program this year. The company could usefully consider it as a proving ground for the main season. It’s a much tougher audience. If Australia! The Show! can keep a room of year 10s entertained, it’ll have general audiences rolling in the aisles.

* * *

Who’s The Best? Devised by post (Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose and Zoe Coombs Marr), Commissioned by Sydney Theatre Company, Arts House Meat Market, Season Ended.


Eden Falk, Mish Grigor and Zoe Coombs Marr.

This oddball piece of contemporary theatre examines competition as a driver of human behaviour. The three members of Sydney-based indie company post – Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose and Zoe Coombs Marr – are long time collaborators, and the question naturally arises: Which of them is the best?

The show begins with three heads peeking through the curtain, vertically piled, their faces obscured by long brunette tresses. It looks like a pyramid of baby Grugs, until Marr brushes the hair from her face and outlines the project.

Everything counts in the quest for the best – talent, luck, skills, experience, personality, and on and on. Seeking standards of evaluation leads to an absurd burgeoning of pseudo-scientific categories and sub-categories; the performers resort to such dubious methods as Dolly quizzes and enneagrams.

Rivalry pervades the performance, from gruelling outbursts of daggily choreographed dancing to a sequence where the actors compete to see who can make themselves cry first. The script contains perverse insights, and is at its cleverest when it shadows the morbidly competitive side of the performing arts.

Yet the creative cocktail needs more critical fizz: at points, we’re served the flat lemonade of glorified drama exercises. Post also regards its work as political theatre, and the show’s message, if any, gets too diluted by obtuse, indulgent humour.

Marr and Grigor play themselves, with Eden Falk replacing Natalie Rose while she’s on maternity leave. Post-dramatic acting of this kind requires a nonchalance that Marr and Grigor capture effortlessly, though it also demands the performers intensify their personalities, the same way a critic does when she writes a review.

Funny and full of mischievous energy, Who’s The Best? is a kooky show that would make a fine addition to the Comedy Festival. Just don’t go expecting a coherent critique of competitive culture.

* * *

Bond-A-Rama, Chapel Off Chapel, By Stephen Hall and Lawrence Mooney, Marnie Foulis and Scary Orphanage Productions, Chapel Off Chapel, 12 Little Chapel St Prahran. Until August 21.

Stephen Hall (behind), with Michael Ward, Emily Taheny and Lawrence Mooney.

Squeezing comedy out of the James Bond franchise is a challenge, because it’s been done to death. Ian Fleming’s superspy has inspired countless lampoons, from Get Smart to Spy Hard, and has long since become a figure of fun: “a misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War” as Judy Dench’s M calls him in GoldenEye.

Bond-A-Rama comically compresses 22 Bond films into an hour. The show does struggle to freshen up the material, occasionally over-stretching juvenile gags, and the timing needs an atomic clock precision it doesn’t always achieve. Still, there are enough outrageously silly moments to keep you entertained.

One aspect that works is the grab-bag of ultra-low-budget special effects. Famous action sequences are skewered using toy helicopters, cardboard parachutes and inflatable crocodiles. Bond villains get the same cheesy treatment: Michael Ward, for instance, tapes alfoil to his lip to play the metal-mouthed assassin Jaws.

The quality of the impersonations can be exceptional. Stephen Hall’s send-up of three Bond actors – Sean Connery and Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan – is hilariously acute. He’s even funnier when he performs fictional auditions for the new Bond, using implausible candidates like Julian Clary and John Safran.

Ward and Lawrence Mooney often bring a similar frisson to the remaining Bonds and the supporting cast from the films, with Emily Taheny tackling the harem of Bond girls, good and bad (though if you’re looking forward to perving at Ursula Andriss’s classic bikini scene from Dr. No, you’re in for an ugly surprise).

Taheny’s voice runs to Sheena Easton, but isn’t within cooee of Shirley Bassey, so she looks uncomfortable during some of her Bond-theme parodies. More generally, Bond-A-Rama hasn’t yet found its groove in performance. When it does, it’ll be a complete hoot. Until then, Bond fans, this show’s for your eyes only.

Hamlet: Review

July 24, 11 //  

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Directed by Simon Phillips, MTC, Sumner Theatre. Until August 31.

FOUR AND THREE QUARTER STARS. (A perfect Hamlet is a contradiction in terms.)

Reviewer Cameron Woodhead

Extend the bloody season. Now.

The Joy of Text: Review

June 22, 11 //  

Robert Reid’s The Joy of Text is an impressive, unusually ambitious new Australian play. I’d put money on it to win the Premier’s Prize for Drama in a strong field. It’s great that the MTC is programming new Australian work, but the company keeps shortchanging it in performance.

The Joy of Text, By Robert Reid, MTC, Fairfax Studio, Until July 23.

Louise Siversen, James Bell, Peter Houghton. Photo: Jeff Busby

Reading a play is like smelling a hamburger. True, you might get a distant appreciation of its flavour, but you also remain blissfully ignorant as to whether or not some spotty-faced drudge has dropped hair in it. Robert Reid’s The Joy of Text stinks of brilliance. I madly want to read it – not least because, when it comes to new Australian work, the MTC is prone to McDirection.

Reid’s ingenious satire takes a scalpel to the teacher/student sex scandal, framing it as a fictional literary controversy with echoes of Helen Darville’s The Hand That Signed The Paper and Helen Garner’s The First Stone.

Two high school English teachers must decide whether to put an infamous novel, The Illusion of Consent, on the syllabus.

Enter Danny (James Bell), an ultra-bright year 12 boy. Citing postmodern theory, he deliberately plagiarises a Wikipedia entry on Jonathan Swift, claiming it as ‘pastiche’. “Reality is the new Lilliput,” he declares. His teacher is unamused. Humiliated, Danny begins to act out his own version of The Illusion of Consent. Will history repeat itself as tragedy, or as farce?

Reid’s comedy of ideas welds astonishing cleverness to labile feeling, while constructing a richer schoolroom drama than The History Boys. Bell’s Danny lays a minefield of academic brilliance and social naivety, though he doesn’t nail a salient point – the little shit’s playing with his teachers because he has no friends.

Of the teachers, Louise Siversen’s Diane is strongest – a hatchety Garner-figure, wise but also pedantic, manipulative. Helen Christinson’s impenetrably snarky façade lacks subtlety, trampling over paradoxes of character, and Peter Houghton collapses what could have been a complicated portrayal of male anxiety into panicked lampoon.

Aidan Fennessy’s direction yields shouty, reductive acting that milks the obvious. In a play that asks us to seek out complexity, that shows us the dangers of reducing life to text, this is unforgivable. The timing’s off, too – stern when it should be swift and vice versa, with the last half hour of multiple viable endpoints turgidly directed.

It’s weird. Everything about this show gets Reid’s thrust, intellectually. So why does it so often fail to crystallize his ideas, onstage, into something irreducibly human?

The Gift: Review

June 6, 11 //  

Sometimes there’s not enough time or space to do justice to theatre in a newspaper review. That’s the case with Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Gift, which I’m seeing again next week, with a view to writing a more extended review essay. One strand saliently missing from my review is what the play has to say about the philosophy of art. Nevertheless, I offer up this little piece of “Cameron Woodhead unsubbed” as a starting point for discussion. (Should you wish to comment, please refrain from spoilers. Anything that reveals the twist in Murray-Smith’s new play will be summarily deleted.)

The Gift. By Joanna Murray-Smith, Directed by Maria Aitken, Performed by Heather Bolton, Richard Piper, Matt Dyktynski, and Elizabeth Debicki, MTC, Sumner Theatre. Until July 9.

Richard Piper and Heather Bolton in The Gift Photo: Jeff Busby

Is Joanna Murray-Smith the natural successor to David Williamson? The two playwrights share a talent for middle-class social comedy and witty one-liners. Both tend to divide critics. It’s fair to say Murray-Smith’s wild recent satires, tackling old-guard feminism (The Female of the Species) and celebrity adoption (Rockabye), have outclassed Williamson’s over the same period.

Yet there’s another string to Murray-Smith’s bow – emotionally intelligent, character-driven, psychologically astute drama. That’s as true of her most performed play, Honour, as it is of the sharp, shapely monologues in last year’s Songs for Nobodies. The last time Williamson succeeded on this level was probably After the Ball, more than a decade ago.

The Gift attempts to break new ground by overtly fusing social satire and intimate drama. It’s a brilliant, vexing play. The enthusiastic audience response might confirm Murray-Smith’s position as bankable storyteller to the tribe, and whatever its flaws, it’s certainly entertaining theatre that gnaws at the mind.

Two couples meet at a posh resort. They’re from different worlds. Ed and Sadie are rich and middle-aged, a businessman and housewife. Martin and Chloe are younger and struggling, a conceptual artist and an arts journalist. A friendship between rich philistines and arty bohemians might be impeded by a crust of mutual suspicion in the real world. Trapped together in an enclave of leisure, the awkwardness falls away.

The progression of this unlikely bond is skilfully handled. Maria Aitken has a highly developed comic intelligence (she’s a renowned interpreter of Noel Coward plays), and conducts the dialogue with a wonderfully light hand. Timing is central to comedy, and the opening act is as fluid and vividly syncopated as jazz, for which Ed and Martin share a mutual passion.

When Martin saves Ed from drowning in a boating accident, Ed wants to give a gift in return. Unable to decide on one, the couples promise to meet again a year later. Telling you more would ruin the play’s provocative surprise.

It will divide people, the surprise. I thought it lacked psychological credibility, but the way the second half of The Gift is performed, it’s unclear whether it’s intended as the blackest of black comedies, or whether it shifts goalposts into private tragedy.

Indeed, the toxic cloud of uncertainty the play throws up may be part of its point. Even so, for the black comedy to convince, Martin and Chloe need to be more effectively caricatured. And for their tragic situation to move, we need a clearer sense of the dynamics of their relationship and its inferred suffering.

This last is achieved with Ed and Sadie by allowing them to break the frame and address the audience directly. Perhaps repeating this device with the younger couple might work. Direct monologue would have to be better than the formless prevarication that consumes a substantial fraction of the second act, and makes Martin and Chloe seem impossibly callous and narcissistic.

The performances are entertaining, and infinitely better than, say, the cursory, workmanlike acting in Williamson’s Let the Sunshine – another play about two unlikely couples – where you could almost see paycheques in the actors’ eyes as they strolled dutifully about the stage.

Richard Piper and Heather Bolton make a convincing married couple, their emotional chemistry – from finishing each other’s thoughts to the unspoken comfort of shared pain – is endearing and droll, even if Piper overplays his character’s artistic ‘enlightenment’.

Matt Dyktynski and Elizabeth Debicki as Martin and Chloe are weaker. As played, Debicki’s character is nothing like an arts journalist; while Dyktynski has the idealism of an artist without the charisma. Diagnosing the problem is difficult. Performance and script are at fault in hard to determine quantities.

Joanna Murray-Smith can write one-liners to die for, and there are plenty of laughs in this new work. But if she has indeed attempted to finesse the anxieties of marriage, parenthood and the creative life into a play that dives from light comedy into intimate drama, the drama doesn’t have the emotional fuel it needs. One thing’s for sure, The Gift is theatre unnerving and vital enough to have you arguing about it all the way home.

Random: Review

May 10, 11 //  

I’ve just received word this stunning performance will be playing at the Sydney Opera House from 17-20th of May. Almost worth flying up there for it, if you miss out down here.

Random, By Debbie Tucker Green, MTC, Lawler Studio. Until May 13.

Zahra Newman

Zahra Newman had a breakout year in 2010. Talk about versatile. She started the year with high musical comedy, as Trix the Aviatrix in The Drowsy Chaperone, and ended it playing Sophocles’ Elektra. If you were lucky enough to see the latter, you’ll know how good an actor Newman is. Infusing totalising grief with negative teen spirit, her incarnation of Elektra was a spiky, sullen refusenik, exuding scorn like some dark pheromone.

Debbie Tucker Green’s one-woman show Random is a perfect vehicle for Newman’s talent. The performance is a tour de force. Why this tough jewel of a play isn’t in the MTC’s main program is anyone’s guess, but there are truckloads of VCE students seeing it. If you care about acting, you’ll join them.

Green is associated with Britain’s In-Yer-Face theatre movement, though what strikes you about Random is how classical it is. Green isn’t interested in shock tactics, here, unless you count avoiding theatre that comforts the comfortably off.

Random shows us a working class family of Caribbean descent, going about an ordinary day. Green’s free-floating poetry captures each voice and launches it into a fluid polyphony. The piece starts with burnt porridge and a traditional British whinge, and works its way into news that every family dreads.

Green’s artfulness makes the dialogue seem like she’s overheard it in the street, but requires equally skilful acting to make it live. If I tried this sort of Caribbean lilt, I’d probably sound like Ja-Ja Binks.

Zahra Newman delivers a performance as emotionally bruising as it is technically accomplished. With seamless character changes and strong differentiation between them, near flawless accents, and an enviable command of mannerism and gesture, she becomes the tissue that binds the family together.

Newman brings nuance and humour to moments of connection so insignificant they might not register, and plaintive weight to the grief that annihilates them. It’s a superb piece of acting, encompassing everything from a mother’s silent agony to the affectionate rendering of siblings annoying each other.

Letitia Cacares’ direction keeps the action shiftless, edgy, fuelled by anxious energy. In a simple but effective stage design, Newman appears under metal scaffolding suspended at jagged angles, complementing Green’s fragmentary poetry and evoking the urban jungle from which it springs. Random is heart-wrenching theatre, and a compelling performance from an actor with a very bright future.

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