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Melbourne Theatre Wrap 2012

December 29, 12 //  

It has been a busy year on Melbourne’s theatre scene. As always, much continues to haunt me – good and bad – and even more manages to flee from the mind.

Robyn Nevin as Queen Lear in th 2012 MTC production.

On our main stages, the Melbourne Theatre Company had the worst year I can remember. (One of the few saving graces was Neil Armfield’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, itself a Belvoir production.)

It was programmed by a committee of artists – Robyn Nevin, Aidan Fennessy and Pamela Rabe – whose brief allowed them to program themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we ended up with unedifying vanity projects. This is no way to program a theatre season. Theatre artists can be blind to their own weaknesses, and giving them licence to indulge themselves at public expense was a terrible misjudgement that incoming artistic director Brett Sheehy looks set to rectify with a curatorial approach to the 2013 season (which is packed with new blood and intriguing fare).

Aidan Fennessy can be an indifferent playwright and worse director. Playing both roles sullied National Interest, his take on the Balibo Five. The play had its points, though how you get an actress as fine as Julia Blake to give such an unconvincing performance is beyond me. Rabe’s turn in the spotlight – the screwball comedy His Girl Friday – was a relief by comparison, but not without its longueurs.

The biggest flop, however, was without question Robyn Nevin in Queen Lear. Director Rachel McDonald’s lack of experience at theatre of this scope doomed the whole enterprise. It was a salutary reminder (as was Anne-Louise Sarks’ production of Kate Mulvany’s The Seed) of how deeply counterproductive it is – and what disastrous art we can get – when unthinking feminism meets a rigid and underfunded culture of theatrical production.

Both of these young women, as directors, needed more support, more creative freedom and more experience. Women directors with the required experience do exist. They were overlooked.

This is an attack on ill-considered Australian conformity and the theatre world’s obsession with bright young things, not on the imperatives of feminism per se.

It could hardly be the latter when much of the best theatre I saw in 2012 was deeply informed by feminist aesthetics: Jenny Kemp’s production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls at the MTC; Adena Jacobs’ magnificent stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona at Theatreworks, which proved as unerringly theatrical as the great master’s film is cinematic; Marion Potts directing Jane Griffiths in Dorothy Porter’s Wild Surmise over at the Malthouse; The Rabble’s anarchic, gender-bending take on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando at the Melbourne Festival; Zoey Dawson’s all-female Romeo & Juliet on the independent scene.

Syd Brisbane (front) and Dana Miltins in The Rabble's Orlando.

The Malthouse provided a stark contrast to the MTC. Marion Potts might be producing less work per season, but the quality and ambition of the theatre being presented more than compensates. Highlights from 2012 included Daniel Schlusser directing Thomas Bernhard’s black screed against the theatre, The Histrionic (featuring a tour de force from Bille Brown); the understated naturalism of Simon Stone’s The Wild Duck; Potts’ bilingual production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding; and the operatic vision of doomed child stars in Declan Green’s Pompeii L.A, directed by Matthew Lutton.

My one serious reservation about the company’s work is its Helium season. This is, on balance, a disimprovement on the Tower seasons it replaces.

The Arts Centre has revivified and diversified its theatre programming in 2012. It has hosted an impressive range of children’s theatre, the Canadian master Robert Lepage’s 9-hour melodrama Lipsynch, experimental plays from Japan with human and android actors, and will see the year out with a bang by bringing us the National Theatre’s production of War Horse from London – the first New Year’s Eve gala opening Melbourne has seen since the musical of Billy Elliot.

Among 2012’s commercial musicals, we won’t soon forget the ebullient camp of Simon Phillips’ A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (with Geoffrey Rush heading a star-studded cast), nor the sweeping passions of Lisa McCune and Teddy Tahu Rhodes in South Pacific. The Production Company continued its devotion to the Broadway repertoire with a season that included The Producers and Chess, while Cat Stevens’ colossal, self-funded vanity project Moonshadow showed how difficult creating new music theatre can be (and was completely outdone by the charming, small and independently produced Margaret Fulton: Queen of the Dessert at Theatreworks).

Geoffrey Rush in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

On the independent scene, Theatreworks itself is making a great leap forward under the directorship of Dan Clarke, who has turned a sadly under-utilised venue into an independent theatre hub of great vigour and vision. That effort was matched by the ingenuity of Emily Sexton, artistic director of the Next Wave Festival, who discovered inventive ways to bring audiences to experimental (and often category-defying) work from younger emerging artists.

Red Stitch continues to program local and international fare, typically well-directed and performed at a high level of histrionic skill: Alexei Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, Tom Holloway’s Beyond the Neck and David Grieg’s Midsummer stood out.

La Mama is always a bit of a raffle, but Robots vs Art, NOA, and The Unspoken Word Is Joe were all the sort of vivid and viable new Australian theatre that might not see the light of day without it. And North Melbourne Arts House again proved itself one of our more progressive and interesting indie venues with a weird and wonderful range of hybrid and international fare, including Black Lung’s Doku Rai, a piece performed in conjunction with East Timorese artists.

MKA has also consolidated its reputation as a dynamic writer’s theatre. It produces challenging new work at fair quality and volume, and keeps attracting talented collaborators. (My MKA highlight was Alfian bin Sa’at’s sex.violence.blood.gore – a seriously kinky bit of political theatre that could never have been performed the same way in the playwright’s native Singapore.) The Owl and Pussycat in Richmond, too, has become home to some rangy, independent theatre.

Giving a complete picture of the independent theatre scene in Melbourne is impossible, really. It’s too diverse and complex and creative for any one pair of eyes to take it all in. That’s a boon to audiences in the know, and leaves this critic, at year’s end, in a state of exhausted gratitude.

 

Krash Test Kulture: Review

December 9, 10 //  

Krash Test Kulture, Komissar Kabaret & Canto Coro, La Mama Courthouse, 349 Drummond St, Carlton. Until December 19

Krash Test Kulture

Krash Test Kulture is vibrant musical satire performed by the intercultural Komissar Kabaret and Canto Coro, a community choir based in Brunswick. It’s multicultural mayhem – a blend of Bollywood and suburban panto, with world music influenced by everything from rebetika to klezmer.

It begins with the affecting tale of Ajak Kwai, a Sudanese refugee whose first taste of Australia was Hobart on a day that Pauline Hanson visited. This irony-tinged deliverance surrenders to a voice as free as wind, in a cappella song that conjures the Dinka village of her childhood and the bewilderment of her search for a new home.

What follows is more rough and ready. Bogan meets Bangladeshi in a wedding between Shazza (Rebecca Bone) and Rashid (Vinod Krishnan), performed as colourful operetta with large choruses playing the families.

Narrative isn’t one of the show’s strengths, and some of the song lyrics of had me fearing the worst – playful inanity is an understatement – but it’s held together, somehow, by wild energy and spectacle and the loose theme of cultural collision.

One scene satirises the depressing bureaucracy of immigration, with a queue of migrants having their names mispronounced and being given employment unsuited to their qualifications. A song called Aussie Immigration History – Unplugged parodies nationalism through waves of assimilation, although its Howard-bashing seems old hat.

Yet many of the numbers dramatise the racism (and sexism) that shadows ordinary places. One effective song ricochets between an African woman smiling on a tram and the ugly thoughts of her fellow passengers. Another – a rousing, up-tempo feminist version of Istanbul (not Constantinople) – confronts repressive attitudes to female sexuality.

For all its flailing radicalism, it’s entertaining. With fairy lights and lurid costumes, songs from huge chorus numbers to plaintive solos, this is festive and confronting political cabaret.

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.

Conundrums of Charisma: Essay

December 4, 10 //  

Theatre that pays homage to charismatic celebrities is wildly popular. Performers impersonate stars, resurrect them, or at least borrow their glamour, usually through cabaret or musical theatre. Why? And what is charisma, anyway?

Weirdly, the mundane sense of the word – personal charm – is barely half a century old. To the Greeks, charisma was a “gift” from the divine. It struck like lightning, mysterious and elusive. This view remains common, and might explain why charisma is so valued. It’s one of the few things you can’t buy.

And yet it can be practised. Charm school is real. Castiglione’s Renaissance handbook on etiquette advocated sprezzatura, or nonchalance. Cultivate effortlessness, he advised. Centuries later, Emerson elaborated in his essay on manners. To be “fit to stand the gaze of millions”, you must carry the holiday in your eye and “exhilarate the fancy by flinging wide the door of new modes of existence”.

Emerson was right. Charisma isn’t simply about being liked. It’s about new kinds of being. Most descriptions involve an oxymoron: “practiced effortlessness”, “acting natural”, “public intimacy”. I’d suggest that the key to charisma’s mystery lies precisely in its unusual ability to embody paradox – to give valency to, and hold in flux, various contradictions of human character: power and vulnerability, virtue and vice, the exemplary and the ordinary.

So the world’s greatest stars tend to suffer tragedies commensurate to their talent. And, if we’re honest, there’s resentment behind the worship, a desire to make them pay for their gifts in blood. If celebrity culture is a kind of secular religion, it’s one that demands sacrifice. In the surveillance age, we consume and scrutinize the famous with no less savagery than the Aztecs, who ripped out the still-beating hearts of their enemies to keep the sun aloft.

Our ambivalence to human gods is dramatised in shows like Boulevard Delirium and Songs for Nobodies. In the former, Paul Capsis channelled the transgressive souls of tortured stars – his Judy Garland was at once pathetic and sublime, with tottering, drug-affected antics yielding to a soaring voice.

Songs For Nobodies, currently playing at the MTC, is animated by Bernadette Robinson’s gifted impersonations, from Edith Piaf to Patsy Cline. But it’s Joanna Murray-Smith’s compellingly crafted stories of ordinary women that provide a subtle dramatic counterpoint, exploring the ironies of fame:

“We can praise those who escape,” says one, reflecting on Billie Holiday, “We can stand on the sidelines, write our feature articles and buy the records as if we honour them, but underneath it all, we don’t like those who refuse to be earthbound. They frighten us. Their freedom reminds us of our own little prisons. And in the end, people like that… they have nowhere to go but trouble, ‘cos trouble is the only place that welcomes them.”

Fortunately, theatre permits miraculous resurrection.

In Dean Bryant’s Britney Spears the Cabaret, Christie Whelan showed it could be done while the star is still alive. Spears has been synthesised, mediated and demonised beyond belief. The cabaret is ingenious remedial satire, using theatrical language – real body, real voice – to salvage dignity from the degradation.

Even nostalgic entertainment like Jersey Boys remains faithful to charisma’s ambiguity. Bobby Fox’s simulacrum of Frankie Valli’s voice – its bright machismo filtering into vulnerable falsetto – has the same extraordinary range.

And it’s no coincidence that our last great political cabaret – Keating: The Musical – saw Mike McLeish channel a man who embraced extremes of vitriolic arrogance and aesthetic sensitivity. Keating was also the last PM to go to a main-stage theatre show. If you want to know why our politicians lack charisma, look no further.

Irony is crucial to charisma. I don’t mean the modish, ubiquitous irony that indicates you’re sophisticated and jaded and just way too cool to actually mean anything you say. I mean irony as a scalpel, not a butterknife; the kind that splits the surfaces of things and probes the tissue underneath.

Great performers know this instinctively. They play chords of emotion upon their faces, can summon grief and determination in an eyebrow, or capture innocence and experience in one note. It isn’t easy. Embodying contradiction is something our minds rebel against. Try thinking “I’m a good person” and “I’m a bad person” at the same time.

Consider the original victim of the virgin/whore trap, Helen of Troy, perhaps the most charismatic woman of all time. Legend has it she struck blind the Greek poet Stesichoros for writing a scurrilous verse about her. Unlike Homer, he wrote a palinode, or counter-song:

No it is not the true story.

No you never went on the benched ships.

No you never came to the towers of Troy.

His sight was magically restored; the price was only this – an acknowledgement that stars are nobodies, too.

That’s all you need to know about charisma, right there. It demands that we straddle contradiction. It shows us things about life that aren’t obvious. It inspires song and counter-song.

(This essay appeared in The Age 4/12/10.)

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.

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