Archives for posts with tag: mutation theatre

Liberate Yourself From My Vice-Like Grip, Uncle Vanya

May 24, 12 //  

Liberate Yourself From My Vice-Like Grip, Mutation Theatre, 294 Smith St Collingwood, Until May 27.

Mutation Theatre's latest venture is a boy's own apocalypse.

Mutation Theatre is a group of artists to watch, even if their latest is unsuccessful. Liberate Yourself From My Vice-Like Grip strays into a more visual style of devised theatre than their usual offering. It is an apocalyptic nightmare that homes in on the relationship between four men – possibly the last four –trapped on a ship at the end of the world.

It begins with the audience pitched into darkness. Katie Sfetkidis’ noirish lighting gradually reveals the distressing mis-en-scene, and is the only aspect of the performance that’s hard to fault. Tom Spender’s minimalist sound design starts promisingly, but resorts to a bleak and battering monotony that doesn’t give the physical theatre enough to work with and isn’t of sufficient complexity to delineate and enhance the long whimper into extinction that comprises the bulk of the work’s dramatic trajectory.

Wordless scenes of mindless repetition and sudden menace aren’t sharply realised or bound to relational characterisation of any depth. And the words, when they do come, are only rarely worth the breath and do little to shape the sense of crisis into something human.

The main trouble is the physical theatre. It needs to be as disciplined and poetic and expressive as words might have been in its stead, rather than lanky, jejune and desultory. I never felt able to disentangle my imagination from the fact that I was sitting before young actors self-consciously at work, and was secretly hoping they’d stop short of running around with underpants on their heads. They did not.

I don’t resent the experience: to experiment and fail is an essential part of artistic growth.

***

Uncle Vanya, by Anton Chekhov, fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Until June 3.

Louise O'Dwyer plays Elena in Uncle Vanya

Given that most of Chekhov’s plays are about being bored and depressed, the one thing you can’t do with them is to bore and depress the audience. While Laurence Strangio’s Uncle Vanya doesn’t quite plunge us into that abyss, it features a cast that manages only shades of the disciplined ensemble acting required to bring Vanya to life.

Fortyfivedownstairs is the perfect venue for Chekhov, and the richly detailed, spacious design makes good use of it, with the action progressing by slow degrees from one end of the warehouse space to the other. Director Laurence Strangio largely respects the play’s text and temporality, though with a slightly Australian inflection that doesn’t always work. Flourishes devised by actors in rehearsal tend toward meretricious disimprovement on what Chekhov wrote, though the effect is minor.

For too much of the performance, though, various actors remain too much in their own bubbles, or stretch to overemphatic delivery. Richard Bligh’s Vanya, for example, is pitched too high: a caricature of anguish without the affable and half-ironic veneer that makes up the dappled surface of the character and is, except when he thinks too hard about it, also his soul. Peter Finlay’s Professor is worse still, a hammy pantomime grotesque, so you can’t see even a trace of the charismatic scholar all the other characters, who have made terrible sacrifices in his name, used to see him.

Bruce Woolley plays Astrov as a curious snail of a man, a ruined genius some unfathomable distance down the spectrum of autistic disorder and it’s a fascinating interpretation, matched only in the minor characters – Don Bridges’ unassuming Waffles, Brenda Palmer’s tranquil and affectionate portrayal of the nanny.

Louise O’Dwyer’s Elena and Sarah Ranken’s Sonya sit somewhere between, with isolated unconfident passages that dissolve, especially in their scenes together, into something more subtle and elegiac. But this is not a Vanya with the level of control needed to capture those last qualities in any sustained sense.

 

 

Fringe Festival: Reviews Part Four

October 4, 11 //  

Matthew Epps and James Tresise

So Blue, So Calm, By Patrick McCarthy, Mutation Theatre, 294 Smith St Fitzroy, 8pm, Until October 8. $20/15

Two young blokes stranded onstage. Astroturf. A wading pool. An ersatz sunflower. Fake blue sky. An impossibly sunny afternoon.

Mutation Theatre’s So Blue, So Calm is low-key, searching, reflective theatre. The title comes from Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot, as his language disintegrates into cliché before vanishing altogether into silence.

Patrick McCarthy’s promising script floats through memory and probes labile emotional territory. Seemingly insignificant fragments of narrative are its strongest suit: one mistake is to baldly tell us about existential alienation, rather than dramatising it implicitly through the characters.

An ephemeral piece, it creates a quiet sense of male bonding stripped of homoeroticism. Matthew Epps and James Tresise achieve a winning chemistry. They’re both fine actors, although their performance style here owes far too much to Ranters Theatre’s recent work, right down to the daggy dancing. It is still a charming show (in a charming new theatre space), though it will have to overcome the anxiety of influence to really take flight.

***

The American Astronaut, Adapted from the film by Corey McAbee, New Holland Theatre, Worker’s Club, 51 Brunswick St Fitzroy, 7pm, $20/15. Until October 8.

If you put Joss Whedon’s Firefly, Barbarella, and the films of John Waters into a blender, you might end up with something like Corey McAbee’s cult flick The American Astronaut. New Holland Theatre has mounted a deliciously trashy stage adaptation.

The space western slash musical romp follows Samuel Curtis (Liam Sutherland) on an utterly inane quest to bring man-juice to the vixens of Venus. He is shadowed at every turn by dastardly nemesis Professor Hess (Tim Camilleri).

Sutherland’s naïve, high-wattage charisma and Camilleri’s goggle-eyed menace move from hoedown to showdown with pantomime flair. An able supporting cast – especially James Grand-Hunt and Andrew Mancini – fly through a posse of comic caricatures.

A camp, steampunk aesthetic pervades the action. Spaceships and ray guns. Clever shadow-play. A live, three-piece band on guitar and fiddle. Glitter gore. James Wray’s direction fuses all elements into zippy entertainment. Just check your brain at the door and enjoy the ride.

Select Fringe Festival Reviews 2010

September 30, 10 //  

Profound cutting-edge work finds a certain order amid the chaos
MELBOURNE FRINGE FESTIVAL – THEATRE
Cameron Woodhead Reviewer
THE WAITING ROOM
Rating: 4/5
Born in a Taxi & The Public Floor Project

ENTER The Waiting Room and you immediately ask: where’s the stage?
The entire space is filled with rows of chairs. Sit where you will; from the outset, the audience is complicit in the show’s improvisation. When we think of that last word, we usually think comedy.
What makes this piece radically beautiful is that it interrogates and embodies the random processes intrinsic to human behaviour. Informed by physical theatre, social psychology and neuroscience, The Waiting Room is a living incarnation of fractal art.
Six performers (Penny Baron, Andrew Gray, Carolyn Hanna, Kate Hunter, Nick Papas and Tamara Saulwick) enter one by one.
They seem so distinctive, at first.
As a stage inevitably emerges, their individualities dissolve, mutate and re-form. Patterns emerge; haunting human geometries arrived at through minute iteration and recursion. Each performance will be quite different.
Michael Havir’s astonishing electronic soundscaping and Greg Dyson’s lighting are themselves randomised.
Yet, as with so much of Born in a Taxi’s art, this is improvised performance that appears anything but — not least because the equations from which it flows are so meticulously considered.
The Waiting Room is cutting-edge experimental theatre: a profound exploration of how we choreograph ourselves from chaos.
Another show at the Dog Theatre is Unpacking the Epic.
David Wells offers deeply personal vignettes about adolescence, respiratory disease, fatherhood and solitude.
Wells’s physical performance incorporates bacchanalian gyrations and clever impressions.
If the show doesn’t quite capture the magnificent intimacy of his previous work — Mantalk, say —
it remains moving, the sketches
of man and boy illuminated by
his son’s live music (piano accordion, chiefly) and ethereal presence.
Bureaucrats’ quest for footballing gold is Ridiculusmus
SATIRE
Cameron Woodhead
TOTAL FOOTBALL Rating: 3.5/5 By David Woods and Jon Haynes. Ridiculusmus, La Mama, Carlton, until 10 October, $25/15
A SHOW called Total Football, with the third drawn grand final in AFL history? What a corker. David Woods and Jon Haynes form a UK double act, Ridiculusmus, remembered here for a two-man version of The Importance of Being Earnest. Their latest is a clever and supremely black British satire, set in the lead-up to the 2012 London Olympics. It’ll appeal to anyone who loves to hate Poms or soccer.
We follow bureaucrats as they try to forge a national soccer team. Going for gold, they score all sorts of gruesome own-goals in the process. Each scene combines excoriation and absurdity, verbal wit and physical comedy. The passions of genuine fans — from racist yobs to immigrants — are marginalised; dissolving into a nightmarish realm of managerial doublespeak, smug corporatism and the best of British manners. In Total Football, the anxieties of UK nationalism become both kinds of erectile dysfunction, the fun constantly vanishing into embarrassment or agony.
Travelling suitcase tells tall tales to all your mates
MELBOURNE FRINGE FESTIVAL
Cameron Woodhead – Reveiwer
THEATRE THE LOUNGE ROOM CONFABULATORS RAT ING: 3/5 By Wil Greenway and Stuart Bowden Your House, to October 2, $20
HERE’S what happens. You book your lounge room for this performance. Choose whatever audience you like to attend. At the appointed time, you’ll find a note under the door.
Two blokes and a suitcase rock up with a magical tale to tell.
Couched in a parable about twin brothers who can’t stop yarning until they’ve told the perfect story, the show is fractured and recursive — an almost labyrinthine blend of comedy and horror (and a kind of weird, aggressive pathos) that takes in everything from snatches of poetry and fable to terrible puns and haunting songs.
The suitcase contains treasures from plastic figurines to cut-price shadow puppetry.
It’s tempting to compare Wil Greenway and Stuart Bowden to The Suitcase Royale, but they are utterly original. The “junkyard theatre” aesthetic plays a much smaller role, but the narrative ingenuity behind this performance — infinitely clever, insidious and beguiling — is a rare treat.
Raucous opera parody mostly pedals uphill
MELBOURNE FRINGE FESTIVAL- OPERA
Cameron Woodhead Reviewer
THE ENDARKENMENT: A PEDAL-POWERED OPERA
Rating: 2.5/5
Written and directed by Fregmonto Stokes; composed by Angus Leslie and Julius Millar, North Melbourne Town Hall, 521 Queensberry Street, until October 1, $20/15
THIS berserk brain-melt is classic Fringe — I even left with goo in my hair.
Most opera plots are rubbish; this no exception. Stokes’s libretto, a rambunctious parody of corporate marketing, drug addiction, promiscuity and virtual reality, creates a post-apocalyptic world sans electric power.
A fraudulent preacher (Peter J. Reid) leads a flock of three original sinners — Reuben Brown, Amy Turton and Zak Pidd — on a path back to the light (with eco-friendly lighting powered by three cyclists).
If much of The Endarkenment is facetious guff, you can’t help but admire its wild, Dionysian experimentation: the opera jostles with commedia dell’arte, physical clowning and internet inanities.
Composers Angus Leslie and Julius Millar mix arias and ARIAs — the music, played by a feral gypsy band, gambols through a globalised domain of bhangra, bluegrass, turbo-folk and Gregorian chant. Occasionally a moment rises above the bedlam to make you laugh — for me, it was when Turton set up an expectation of Ave Maria, only to sing of a local retailer.
It’s a mystery how Holmes adaptation got to stage
THEATRE – MELBOURNE FRINGE FESTIVAL
Cameron Woodhead – Reviewer
A STUDY IN SCARLET (A STUDY OF . . .) RATING: 1/5 Adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle, by Robert Lloyd and Scott Gooding, Vicious Fish, Son of Loft, Lithuanian Club, North Melbourne, until October 1, $20/$15
ROBERT Lloyd has a Sherlock Holmes obsession — one he’s determined to inflict on you rather than share or, better still, investigate. The least attractive part of A Study in Scarlet (A Study Of . . .) lies outside the parenthesis — a re-telling of Conan Doyle’s first Holmes mystery that chokes Lloyd’s freshness the way a parasitic vine might a sapling.
Holmes fans may be diverted by this dire adaptation, but Lloyd doesn’t possess the acting ability to make Holmes, Watson and the cast leap to life.
You can tell that he knows it.
Yet Lloyd’s virtue is precisely what makes him such a bad poker player: the vulnerability of enthusiasm, its nakedness.
It’s the clues he offers to his fetish that shine — anecdotes about reading Conan Doyle in Dubbo, performing in a school play, of meeting Ian Richardson (his favourite Holmes) at an after party.
Play to those strengths.
Give us three quarts comic deduction, one quart Conan Doyle. Let the audience be Sherlock (or Watson, at least) — then you’ll have a show.
Sublime performance of a loner driven to the edge
THEATRE
Cameron Woodhead Reviewer
THESE ARE THE ISOLATE Rating: 4/5 By Katy Warner Fringe Hub, North Melbourne, to October 9, $18/14
HOW did a company as strong as Mutation Theatre escape my notice until now?
These Are The Isolate is a devastating two-hander. Loner Ed McCallister (Tim Wotherspoon) keeps up appearances at work, but the private cost is crushing. One day, the torment of depression — in the guise of a fantasy of happy marriage — lures him to the edge of an abyss.
Katy Warner’s play is full of rapid-fire word games — a compelling construction of a fractured interior nourished by Beckett. Albee might be another spoke in its wheel.
I kept imagining Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? where both Martha and the absent child are phantoms.
Wotherspoon’s sublime histrionic talents bring precision and subtlety to the performance; every inflection is calculated into an unfillable matrix of unhinged comedy and pathos.
Blemishes exist (like repeating the word “exist” in a play about suicide) — but this is astonishing theatre.
It knows the song the sirens sang was a lullaby.
Lost souls edit their lives to connect online
THEATRE
Cameron Woodhead
STATUS UPDATE Rating: 4/5 By Peta Brady La Mama, Carlton, until October 10 $25/$15
ONLINE interaction encourages confession and persona-creation, epiphanies and lies. Peta Brady’s Status Update makes fresh, immediate theatre from this labyrinth.
When Eve and Adam (Brady and Danielle Carter) meet on Facebook, two lost souls become kindred spirits. An online romance is kindled through a mutual love of poetry and true crime — stories from the world outside magnified by the internet’s viral iteration of them.
Both characters have secrets: their online facades are heavily self-edited.
A transition from net love to real world love forces a surreal reckoning, via a souped-up internet fantasy world — a combination of Second Life and World of Warcraft.
Status Update generates a lyrical psychodrama from visual and verbal dissonance. Both characters sit at adjacent desks, laptops ready, and the script ricochets between online exchanges and private revelations.
It’s brilliantly acted, heaving with postmodern alienation, Sapphic lust and a poignant search for connection in a world of illusion.
PERFORMANCE
Cameron Woodhead
THE LOST STORY OF THE MAGDALEN ASYLUM
Rating: 4/5
By Kylie Trounson, Peepshow Inc, Abbotsford Convent, Until October 2

Site-specific performance is providing our most haunting theatre. Maybe architecture always invites spectrality.
The last work I saw in this vein, I Thought a Musical Was Being Made, was set overlooking a busy Melbourne intersection. It turned an unwitting urban crowd into living ghosts.
This kind of presence as absence is reversed in Peepshow Inc’s The Lost Story of the Magdalen Asylum.
Inventive and spooky, humorous and poetic, it’s a theatrical tour through a section of the Abbotsford Convent previously closed to the public.
The convent served for more than a century as a refuge for penitents and postulates. The price of sanctuary was harsh. Women were given saints names, forbidden to speak of their past lives, their former identities lost. Work in the laundries was arduous and unpaid; discipline sometimes draconian.
Peepshow Inc engages with the history that stalks the abandoned, crumbling edifice of the Magdalen Laundries in imaginative and surprising ways. Our guide, Perpetua (Carole Patullo), reveals her story slowly, introducing us to a range of fellow revenants (Teresa Blake).
It’s a wonderfully researched work. I’m hesitant to give anything away. Surprise is crucial to the experience which — though it occasionally approaches historical re-enactment, a Gothic sideshow, even a funfair ghost train — will leave you with a sense of wonder.
The show unites disciplines, from puppetry and acrobatics to narrative theatre and lighting installation. That director Melinda Hetzel can merge such disparate talents speaks volumes for her creative intelligence. The final scene is utterly miraculous. Blake, an angel with clipped wings, delivers an elegy as she writhes up the limbs of the “Separation Tree” — the magnificent, sprawling oak planted in 1851 to commemorate the formal division of Victoria from New South Wales. It reminded me, incongruously but inevitably, of Ezra Pound’s famous poem In A Station At The Metro. See it while you can.