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Not Quite Out Of The Woods: Review

January 11, 11 //  

Not Quite Out of the Woods. Created by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsyth and Phillip Scott. The Wharf Revue. MTC Sumner Theatre. Until Jan 29

Amanda Bishop as Little Red Riding Ranga. Photo: Tracey Schramm

If you had the misfortune to see Max Gillies and Guy Rundle’s Godzone last year, you could be forgiven for thinking that Aussie political satire is on the way out. It’s certainly experienced a decline. Politicians’ folly and vice are now displayed, spun and chewed over 24/7. Satire is equally ubiquitous, and has lost some of its remedial power. The Wharf Revue – in a lighthearted start to the MTC’s year – offers a lifeline to a beleaguered form.

It begins with a spoof of the ABC program Q&A. Jonathan Biggins impersonates Tony Jones, presiding over televised soundbites from famous talking heads. The funniest send-up is of press gallery veteran Michelle Grattan, who wears novelty bifocals and quietly denounces the short-sightedness of political leaders.

A loose fairy tale theme emerges, with Julia Gillard appearing as Red Riding Hood. The Ranga bumps into a woodcutter (Bob Brown), as well as Hans and Hans, who stop throwing breadcrumbs through the forest long enough to deliver a passionate ode to gay marriage. Grandma’s bed has been invaded by three independents. Julia’s unfortunate accent is spoofed, in a nod to her Welsh heritage, through a bizarre parody of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood.

Silliness takes hold, and no subject is verboten. Among the weirder skits: a po-faced David Williamson take-off called Don Watson’s Party; Tony Abbot as one of the aliens from Avatar, complete with budgie smugglers; Hey Hey It’s Saturday hosted by Mark Latham; a mad hatter’s tea party attended by Sarah Palin and friends; and an icky sequence where Amanda Vanstone gets her rocks off with Silvio Berlusconi (to the tune of La ci darem from Don Giovanni) and blackmails the Pope into canonising Mary Mackillop.

It’s a slick show, with rumbustious performances, witty lyrics and some deft impersonations. Perhaps more could have been made of the Gillard/Abbot storyline, but then we would have missed out on wacky interludes like an un-PC scene on scientific whaling, or the Eurovision Sovereign Debt Contest, where Greek pop stars in lycra sing: “Things are getting darker/When you can’t afford moussaka.”

If some of the show’s humour occasionally falls flat, or is a little arcane, it doesn’t matter. Eye-catching staging, a swift pace, and a broad comic canvas make Not Quite out of the Woods a clever and irreverent summer diversion.

The Nest: Review

December 10, 10 //  

PHOTO: Jeff Busby. Benedict Hardie, James Wardlaw (back) and Julia Grace.

The Hayloft Project are the hottest property on Melbourne’s indie theatre scene at the moment, with good reason. I’m not sure this review even touches the sides of what makes The Nest so exciting. Go see it if you can.

The Nest. By Anne-Louise Sarks and Benedict Hardie (after Maxim Gorky’s The Philistines). The Hayloft Project. Northcote Town Hall, Studio One, 189 High St Northcote. Until December 19

When Andrew Upton adapted The Philistines for London’s National Theatre, he wrote that at first glance it seemed “like a backpack of experiences just unzipped and tipped on to the stage”. Maxim Gorky’s first play has the shapeliness of a thunderstorm. It’s there, but it comes from a chaotic naturalism; inchoate patterns of speech and action, the restless pressure of human character.

This is fertile ground for those backpackers of the theatre, The Hayloft Project. If The Nest gives Gorky a new lease of life, it also gets that he was a great playwright because he knew he wasn’t getting his bond back. Naturalism, like revolution, is always unfinished business.

Victor (James Wardlaw) doesn’t understand. He thinks of himself as one of life’s landlords, subdividing and subletting his sprawling house. The stage presents the division between four rooms; the audience sits in a single row in a square around it. There are philistines everywhere you look.

Generational conflict plays out through rental metaphor. To Victor, his children are tenants, investments. Wardlaw’s suffocating performance is a crucial link in a superb piece of ensemble theatre. At best, he’s a widower who fears that the nest will soon be empty. His obsessive concern over the security of his children’s future blights and smothers their present. At worst, he perversely degrades everyone around him, shifting goalposts to keep his shield of bitterness and despair intact.

Life goes on around him, but he refuses to see it. We can, and it’s mesmerising. Those who thrilled to the overheard quality of Hayloft’s Thyestes won’t be disappointed. The script isn’t written from life so much as ripped from the throat of it, with oscillations taking in everything from the muted sighs of bourgeois mediocrity to the manic hyperventilation of dissolute youth.

Anne-Louise Sarks’ direction allows the action to billow between deflationary comedy and drama strewn across the stage, between rambunctious spontaneity and chiselled quietude.

An early scene where Victor belittles his son Peter (Benedict Hardie) and daughter Tanya (Julia Grace) shifts from etiolation to wild energy, as Victor recedes to the kitchen to wash up and his kids’ young friends invade the family room, talk over each other, show off and dance to loud music. A late one whittles away the relentless chat to expose the convergence of three stark, defining moments: a suicide attempt, a couple having sex, and a champagne toast to an impending marriage.

There’s the occasional false note, but the acting is so symphonic and character-driven you don’t care. The Nest is such a subtle and complex manifestation of what ensemble theatre can achieve it feels wrong to single out performances. Suffice to say this is one share-house you won’t want to miss.

Elektra: Review

December 6, 10 //  

Elektra By Sophocles (trans. Anne Carson) Fraught Outfit, The Dog Theatre, 42a Albert St Footscray Until December 18

Zahra Newman is Elektra

My heart leapt when I heard about this season of Sophocles’ Elektra. It’s a sad fact that Greek tragedy is rarely performed here, except in school halls and universities, so that many of our actors can go their entire careers without playing some of the most famous roles in drama.

Elektra is a “knot no one can untie”. Her mother has murdered her father, and she waits at the doorway of the house, “a stopped and stranded thing”, refusing to cease mourning. The righteousness of her cause has mingled with evil, “a pressure that shapes us to itself”. She is her grief: the mask, worn too long, has become her face.

It’s a suggestion this production makes manifest. Near the end, Orestes (Gary Abrahams) brutally attempts to heave the corpse of his dead mother onto a squalid bed, the seat of his sister’s lament. Elektra (Zahra Newman) doesn’t move. She stands in a shaft of electric light – her face uplifted, still, as unyielding as if it were set in bronze – while Kelly Ryall’s sound chimes with the barely audible approach of distant Furies.

Anne Carson’s translation equivocates. It invites downbeat, idiomatic dialogue with all the breath sucked out of it; but also poetic delivery, phrases rich and raw with emotion, rising to the screams and howls she leaves untranslated. This production doesn’t always get the modulation right, but its best acting is pitch-perfect.

Newman makes an arresting, distinctly modern Elektra. Her baseline is sullen, self-deprecating and compulsively bitchy; but the most memorable scenes are where she strikes outward with poised force.

Her mother-daughter encounter with Clytemnestra (Jane Montgomery Griffiths) is pure war. Griffiths’ face has a masculine mobility; she wields each syllable like a weapon. Newman throws her shirt over her head and bares her arse, before launching bolts of hatred and the hot oil of scorn:

Call me
baseminded, blackmouthing bitch! if you like –
for if this is my nature
we know how I come by it, don’t we?

There’s a similar glittering tension in scenes with Elektra’s worldly sister Chrysothemis (Luisa Hastings Edge).

Adena Jacobs’ direction has its flaws. Physical theatre, however visceral, is a poor substitute for Sophocles’ words. He was a master of dramatic economy after all. Yet the guts of the play spill out. Bruising performances, delivered on a stage enveloped in a suffocating plastic curtain, make this Elektra a powerful experience.

The Nightwatchman: Review

November 29, 10 //  

The Nightwatchman by Daniel Keene, directed by Matt Scholten, If Theatre, Theatreworks, 14 Acland St, St Kilda. Until December 12

Daniel Keene’s The Nightwatchman is a meditation on grief, memory and moving forward with washed eyes. It’s fitting that the Melbourne premiere should also be the last production from the talented If Theatre.

The Nightwatchman reminded me of the lines that Plato, in his dialogues, put into the mouth of Heraclitus: “You cannot step into the same river twice,” he says, “Everything flows; nothing abides.” It’s a truth that our materialistic culture – determined to scar the earth with our passing – seems desperate to deny; and one that theatre, the most evanescent of arts, is uniquely suited to showing.

Zoe Ellerton-Ashley, Brad Williams and Roger Oakley

For Helen and Michael, it is an inescapable fact. Returning to the family home as adults, they know it is not the same house; their father Bill, now elderly and blind, is not the same father. Acknowledging this is difficult, especially for Helen, who cossets childhood memories and struggles to live with the ways her family has changed.

They have grown apart over the years, settled into peculiar moulds of loneliness. At their reunion, over a last supper and rather too much wine, Bill announces that the house and everything in it has been sold. He plans to divest himself of care and move into a retirement home; a relief to him, and a fraught adjustment for his children.

For Keene, thought and emotion do not fuse easily into a stable dramatic form. The surface texture is ordinary domestic drama, but elusive depths transfigure the play. Mundane, naturalistic dialogue riffs into poetic and philosophical musing, transient memories, and a weird heightening where the unsaid becomes the said.

Director Matt Scholten negotiates Keene with restraint and rare emotional intelligence. The performances are as subtle and polished as ripples in a stream; each catching a strain of light amid currents of desolation.

As Bill, Roger Oakley distils stoicism and vulnerability into a moving, utterly credible portrait of a blind man – he’s almost a low-key, suburban Gloucester from King Lear.

Zoe Ellerton-Ashley and Brad Williams continue their compelling onstage rapport. Ellerton-Ashley expressively probes permutations of sadness, anxiety and anger, resolving into serenity as she gives the present its due; Williams is fatigued by life and possessed by the ghost of repressed emotion that finds, as it must, the ghost of release.

The design complements the delicacy of the acting: the dim shifts of Lisa Mibus’ lighting, Ben Keane’s haunting piano composition, and Kat Chan’s set, a suggestively abstract background of decomposing wallpaper on vertical panels.

The Nightwatchman is a spectral elegy that captures, in all its melancholy beauty, the moment when children must say goodbye to their parents.

Duets for Lovers and Dreamers: Review

November 23, 10 //  

Duets for Lovers and Dreamers. By Sandra Fiona Long. Directed by Naomi Steinborner. Performed by Helen Morse, Katherine Tonkin, Phillip McInnes and Matt Cornell. 45 downstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne. Until December 5

Matt Cornell in Duets for Lovers and Dreamers

This shimmering suite of short scenes appears to take guidance Walter Pater’s well-known maxim: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” A chamber piece composed in an elusive key, it bends every instrument of the theatre into ephemeral harmonies where love rises to meets death, and memory imagination.

Duets for Lovers and Dreamers gambles with sentiment and usually wins. The opening sequence, “Nana in Knapsack” introduces a young woman (Katherine Tonkin) climbing a Scottish crag to scatter her grandmother’s ashes. Her nana’s ghost (Helen Morse) echoes her progress against video projections of blasted heaths, as their speech wuthers into the whistling wind.

The vocal emulation of natural elements is weirdly enriching, and in the second scene “The Storm”, Matt Cornell’s dance adds a new layer of performance. With muscular grace, Cornell flows through counter-currents of desire and drowning, as Phillip McInnes transmutes himself. First McInnes is a camp dolly soliciting sailors, then a puff-chested picture of naval machismo. Finally, he resolves into the strange aquatic warbling of a siren, beckoning victims to a watery tomb.

It’s at this point you begin to realise the brilliance of the production design. The chiaroscuro of Richard Vabre’s lighting, and Nick Verso and D.B. Valentine’s thoughtful projections, continue to riff off the material, but Emily Barrie’s set makes the screen a profound part of the performance. Spectral scrawl appears, an egg; large concentric circles are cut out of the screen, revealing new screens behind, as if the show were burrowing into the bole of an ancient tree.

Katherine Tonkin.

This is, in fact, where we end up. Scenes build: a mesmerising performance from Morse as a war widow, taking tea with her silent husband; a dialogue between a mother and her younger self; and a comic interlude where an awkward courtship at a bistro is refracted through the metaphor of fish in a bowl.

Fittingly, the last movement is a fugue. A girl up a tree (Tonkin) dreams of the world above and below. Her flight of fancy takes her high into the clouds and the galaxies beyond them, and down into overheard cracks in neighbours’ lives. The remaining performers provide a sussurating chorus, swaying between spoken word, onomatopoeia and song.

Naomi Steinberger’s direction keeps each strain of the piece in synchrony, forging a euphonious, ruminative and dream-like theatre.

Creditors: Review

November 22, 10 //  

Creditors by August Strindberg, adapted by David Grieg, directed by David Bell, Red Stitch, Until December 18

Dion Mills and Brett Cousins in the Red Stitch production of Creditors.

August Strindberg casts a long shadow over the history of modern theatre. He wrote over 60 plays. His prolific output is less important to us (only a fraction of his work is still performed with any regularity) than his peculiarly modern psychology and the experiments with dramatic form it inspired.

To that end, critics tend to look to his later work (A Dream Play, The Ghost Sonata), which exploded dramatic unities, dug into the unconscious mind and laid foundations for European expressionist and surrealist theatre. This obscures his less drastic, but just as influential, take on naturalism.

Naturalism meant something quite different for Strindberg than for Ibsen. Strindberg despised character backgrounds, overt social context, and naturalism as a “slice of life”. For him, true naturalism was both smaller and larger.

In Creditors, he focuses with forensic intensity on the psychology on relationships; the ways intimates tear each other to shreds for reasons that remain opaque, insufficient, unexplained. In this it prefigures plays like O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A lame artist Adolph (Brett Cousins) is talking with disarming frankness to Gustav (Dion Mills) about his work and personal life. Gustav goes for the throat, weaving a potent, Iago-like spell from his victim’s insecurities. The target is Adolph’s marriage to Tekla (Kat Stewart); the weapons range from guilt – one of the “creditors” of the title – to patriarchal, social and performance anxiety.

Adolph becomes convinced that unless he confronts his wife and makes her submit to his will, he’ll succumb to epilepsy. (This nod to Othello would be a comic conceit, if psychosomatic illness weren’t so potentially devastating.) When Tekla arrives, their love games turn, through Adolph’s poisoned mind, into a bruising war of words. And Gustav isn’t done with them yet.

The acting is wonderfully dynamic and well-observed, especially between Mills and Cousins. Mills’ sardonic teacher is a hypnotic manipulator, peeling back the worldliness to reveal a sadistic fount of rage and pain. Expressive, sincere and gullible, emotions pass over Cousins’ face like fast-moving clouds across the sun.

Kat Stewart’s coquettish and fiercely independent Tekla is compelling with Cousins; pricked from casual sensuality to towering wrath, but seems dramatically off-kilter against Mills. It’s not in a major way, just in subtle timing and tone: they’re not throwing their darts at the same board.

It’s still a brutal tragicomedy. That’s another strangely modern thing about Strindberg. Tragicomedy here seems to mean more or less what it meant for Kafka or Beckett or Pinter. The comic parts of Creditors make the tragedy harder to escape: Strindberg holds a mirror to life’s distortions and refuses to look away.

Irony Is Not Enough: Essay On My Life As Catherine Deneuve: Review

November 18, 10 //  

Irony Is Not Enough: Essay On My Life As Catherine Deneuve, Adapted from the poem by Anne Carson, Fragment 31, Arts House Meat Market, 5 Blackwood St North Melbourne Until November 20


PHOTO: Ponch Hawkes. Luke Mullins (L) and Leisa Shelton in Irony Is Not Enough …

A classical scholar, Anne Carson has dwelt long on the mystery of broken things: half-eroded verse and rotting papyrus, ravines of human desire and the disintegrating echo of translation itself.

Her own poetry is best captured in a line about the Greek lyric poet Stesichoros. It was “as if”, Carson writes, “he had composed a substantial narrative poem and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat.”

Fragment 31 takes the pieces out of the box and puts them on stage. It’s an intriguing experiment, as is the poem on which it’s based.

A classics lecturer falls for a female student. Her desire remains internal, and she mentally dramatises her unconsummated passion by imagining she is Catherine Deneuve, while interweaving thoughts on ancient Greeks from Socrates to Sappho.

Fragment 31’s approach is an anatomy of desire. Through the metaphor of cinema, each organ of performance is laid bare. Anna Cordingley’s set is a film set, each scene spatially isolated. Designers hover like shadows, intruding occasionally. Two actors supply separate techniques: Luke Mullins (who created a one-man show from Carson’s Autobiography of Red) voices the poetry; Leisa Shelton provides physical theatre.

The piece creates a wavering sense of distance and proximity. Its disjunctions can be frustrating, but allow sublime moments of evanescent fusion: Shelton’s hand, or her stilettoed heel, posed in a black frame, draws minute focus on the quality of Jenny Hector’s lighting; Jethro Woodward riffing gently at a piano, walking away, the music not stopping; Mullins and Shelton repeating the same rocking motion in unison, trying to capture the perfect shot.

Mullins’ delivery sees feelingly, but sometimes squashes the poem’s complexity. One motif: ‘This is mental’ is shouted, depriving the phrase of its ambiguity. It should perhaps be spoken musingly.

Every detail matters in this mysterious dissection of theatrical art, which takes up with rigor, if not always success, Carson’s challenge. Channelling the aloof beauty of the famous actress, she writes: “If you asked her Deneuve would say Take these days away and pour them out on the ground in another country.”

This review was written from a preview.

Electronic City: Review

November 17, 10 //  

Electronic City by Falk Richter. Hoy Polloy, MIPAC, Brunswick Mechanics Institute, Cnr Glenylon and Sydney Rd, Brunswick. Until Nov 27

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I don’t think “post-dramatic theatre” really exists – not in a way you can experience in a theatre, anyhow. This is not a trendy view. The trendy view is that it does exist, and general consensus claims German writer/director Falk Richter as one of its more interesting exponents.

Richter’s Electronic City depicts two ordinary characters treading water in a sea of mundane routine and media tech. The piece cleaves to principles of post-dramatic theatre: character and narrative are marginalised. The text isn’t primarily directed to advancing either, and is replete with jagged fragments from everyday life – numerical passwords, news sound-bites, marketing slogans, corporate watchwords, airport announcements, snatches of pop songs, etc.

PHOTO: Fred Kroh. Dan Walls (Tom) with Chorus (L-R) Elizabeth McColl, Luke Mulquiney, Liza Dennis, Nick Darling, Ngaire Dawn Fair and Daniel Rice

Tom (Dan Walls) and Joy (Sarah Ogden) – an international businessman and a retail assistant, respectively – are dominated by a sinister six-person Chorus that harasses, manipulates, and coerces them, judges and finds them wanting. The chorus serves two functions: supplying interior voices for the characters, and also a swirl of exterior voices, including those of a film and television crew. (One of the show’s threads is that the characters are actors playing characters in a film, or a cheesy TV series called Joy’s World.)

This production of Richter’s Electronic City is a bit like staring at a defective fluorescent light for an hour. Richter’s work, despite the blackest view of technological influence, is usually presented as multimedia extravaganza – which would complicate its politics and distract from the fact that it is, five years on, already so dated and paints a thin slice of life very thick.

With mostly actors and text, the deadness of the writing is apparent in the performers’ struggle to make it live. The show’s best moments are quintessentially dramatic – the staccato spirals and circular thought of panic attacks; a handful of paper dots thrown into the air to represent snow; Ogden’s feisty, rambling defence of story; and the one sustained narrative episode, told as an afterthought, of how Tom and Joy met – beating each other up in a moment of airport rage and having great, very public, sex. If we take drama to mean the mode of fiction in performance, these moments cannot be anything else.

Chronicles: Searching for Songlines: Review

November 17, 10 //  

Chronicles: Searching for Songlines is the sort of community theatre I don’t get to see very much, but it’s of enormous value. The economic arguments for supporting outreach theatre, especially for the young, are compelling. On the Guardian theatre blog, Lyn Gardner makes them forcefully, in a piece about looming funding cuts to a community arts centre in England. “I don’t think social work ever makes good theatre,” she says, “but I do believe that good theatre is often terrific social work, and comes very cheap at the price.” Quite right.

In Melbourne, we should be wary of confining our view of theatre to the privileged inner suburbs. It plays right into the hands of politicians who would marginalise the arts as a plaything of the chardonnay-sipping elite. Our stages should be more inclusive, representative and multicultural. If you think suburbs like Deer Park, Sunshine and Footscray can’t produce good theatre, Searching for Songlines will make you think again. Given the show’s success, it would be great if it could be worked into, say, our International Arts Festival. Just a thought.

Chronicles: Searching for Songlines. Artistic Director: Cymbeline Buhler, Phoenix Youth Centre, 72 Buckley St Footscray, Season Ended

This promenade performance saw community theatre at its finest. Taking teens from Deer Park, Sunshine and Footscray, it was a journey of discovery, delving into the performers’ family histories to create a tapestry of globetrotting vignettes.

The performers themselves came from a rich variety of backgrounds – Vietnamese, Sudanese, Liberian, Polish, Samoan, Anglo-Australian. This sort of diversity is what our stages and screens should embrace; they could also do with a dose of the passion and commitment these young actors showed.

A tour through various rooms and outdoor spaces moved from awkward Polish Christmases to weddings in Vietnam. The dynamic ritual of participatory theatre became a celebration made more profound by moments of pain. The audience was bodily dragged into the horror and confusion of conflict in the Sudan, while in another refugee story, two young actors wove a tale of death and continuity, as one of their mothers sang a traditional African song.

Each piece was supplemented by personal explanation, and the whole evening shone with infectious optimism – an irresistible invitation to share stories, food, even dance. To see the world, Australia only needs to look within.

Chronicles: Searching for Songlines represented theatre as a powerful force for cultural understanding, tolerance and individual agency. It was also terrific fun.

The Animals and Children Took to the Streets: Review

November 13, 10 //  

The Animals And Children Took To The Streets. Created and performed by 1927, Malthouse Theatre, 113 Sturt St Southbank. Until November 28

PHOTO: Esme Appleton as Agnes Eaves with her cartoon daughter, Evie.

From British company 1927, The Animals And Children Took To The Streets is a ghoulish, whimsical delight. Contemporary social satire meets urban gothic fairytale in a playful, weirdly periodised fusion of storytelling, cabaret, physical theatre, and animation.

The show’s set in the Bayou, an impoverished tenement infested by perverts and bigots, criminals and cockroaches. Well-meaning do-gooder Agnes Eaves arrives with her daughter Evie, intending to bring hope to the ghetto’s children. But local kids have gone feral, and it will take more than collage to tame them.

One gang – led by a Marxist teen with an eye-patch – plans to escape the squalor through fiery revolution. The ruckus provokes the Mayor into devising a sinister plan to silence the children. Agnes and Evie fall foul of it, and the Bayou’s melancholy caretaker must save the day, if he can.

Paul Barritt’s animation is astonishing: the sepia-steeped apartment block crawls with insects, shadowy racist families, mobs of angry children … but it’s the interactivity between animation and live performance that makes the show. A comic-strip Evie initiates quirky exchanges with performers in whiteface. Another highlight involves an upper-class dog trainer and a cartoon pooch.

Suzanne Andrade provides lip-curling, cynical narration. If this is a fairytale, it’s told by the Big Bad Wolf dressed up as Grandma. Esme Appleton’s physical comedy is neatly informed by silent cinema. Both performers dissolve seamlessly into the spooky, discordant harmonies and kersnickety spoken-song of Weimar cabaret, with percussion and Lillian Henley’s ragtime piano haunting the action.

1927’s peculiarly modernist aesthetic delivers a sustained piece of comic grotesque. The spectres of Brecht and Weill, Kafka and the living shadows of expressionist cinema jostle against pop culture, from tied-to-the-tracks melodrama to Inspector Gadget.

There are quibbles. The performers don’t have quite enough to do, and this graphic novel come to life, while just as brilliant and stylish, has the same spatial flattening as Robert LePage’s Blue Dragon. Crucially though, it has a story worth telling.

Beneath the antique fable is a thoroughly contemporary moral about entrenched inequity, and childhood medicine as a repressive social tool. Nowadays, spoonfuls of sugar and cod-liver oil have morphed into regimes of antidepressants and Ritalin. Is this progress?

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