EIGHT NIGHTS A WEEK

REVIEW - FOLEY

2012-01-26T13:37:00.000-08:00

Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, January 24. UntilJanuary 29

Reconciliation isa joke. Native Title is a fraud. So says Gary Foley, and his anecdote-strewnAustralian history primer tells you how he came to hold these opinions - andwhy you should share them.

Gary Foley

Acareer activist, reformed actor, longtime stirrer and now, at 61, an academic,Foley’s analysis of Aboriginal people’s struggle for land rights andself-determination is the product of wide research and his own directparticipation in it.

Foleytakes to the stage more like a stand-up comic than an academic, however. Dressedwharfie-chic, his jacket is emblazoned with a glittering Black Power salute(“very Sydney, eh?”) he wanders around a set made of cardboard and archiveboxes cracking self-deprecating jokes and quoting Winston Churchill (“Historywill be kind to me for I intend to write it”) before launching – haltingly atfirst on opening night – into his absorbing 100-minute lecture. The subject? “Thehistory you should know, but don’t”.

Foleytakes us back asfar as Federation, togovernments obsessed with racial purity, and to Prime Ministers from Bartononwards who unashamedly played the race card. We learn of the electrifyingeffect of the Jack Johnson fight in Sydney in 1908 (which some of us have readabout, probably) and Johnson’s largely unreported visit to Sydney in 1907 tomeet with the nascent Aboriginal rights movement (which was news to me and mostothers, I imagine).

Wemight know something of the galvanising influence of Marcus Garvey in theUnited States, but what of the effect the establishment of chapters his Universal Negro ImprovementAssociation had here?

We see the ways in which the American civil rightsmovement shaped the struggle for Aboriginal rights: in Charles Perkins’sFreedom Ride (which Foley saw for himself as a kid in Northern New SouthWales); in the writings of Malcolm X (which Foley and his mates routinelypilfered from Bob Gould’s Third World Bookshop, he confesses); and in themedia-grabbing actions of the Black Panthers, which leads into a very funnyyarn involving Murdoch journalist Simon Townsend, several jugs of beer, and theimplication that Foley and his housemates were in possession of a secret cacheof explosives. Foley’s intent is toeducate but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a laugh along the way.

Directedby Rachel Maza Long for Ibiljerri Theatre, Foleymakes excellent use of photographs, video and graphics but the focus issquarely on the man throughout, and after a slow warm-up, he grows inconfidence and fluency to dominate the theatre with the breadth of hisknowledge and the depth of his passion.

REVIEW - THYESTES

2012-01-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

Carriageworks, January 19. Until February 19

I alwayscome out from a Simon Stone production feeling like I’ve learned something.About what you can strip away to reveal a play’s core. About the ways contemporaryidioms can be brought to bear on a text.

Mark Winter and Chris Ryan in Thyestes (pic by Jeff Busby)

Thisproduction, which predates his version of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck by 18 months (bear in mind this director’sdevelopment should be measured in dog years) feels Stone at his most didactic: Thyestes as a lecture on audienceexpectation, with the director out to show us how wrong we can be.

The actionof each scene in Seneca’s first century tragedy is summarized in scrollingsurtitles. In the darkness, we anticipate what we are about to see, based onwhat we think we know or have already seen. (A woman sitting next to me askedthe box office if plastic aprons were required, to protect the audience fromflying blood.)

Prior toScene 1, we read that brothers Atreus and Thyestes (Mark Winter and Thomas Henning)have been persuaded by their mother to murder their half-brother, Chrysippus(Chris Ryan). We picture it in our minds: threatening postures, a stage fight,a flash of knife, lots of screaming, an actor pretends to die.

When thecurtain is raised we are confounded. First of all, we see the other half of theaudience looking back at us. Stone presents Thyestesin traverse in a white open-sided box. Instead of the three young princes, wesee three young men in casual duds, shooting the breeze, quaffing wine. Chrysippusis telling the story of his trip to Guatemala. No one expected that.

Scene 2sees Atreus and Thyestes paying for their crime. What do we observe? A game ofping pong. In Scene 3, Atreus’s wedding to Aerope (Ryan) plays out like astudent party fuelled by cocaine, gin and Wu Tang Clan.

There’snothing here of the lofty, epigrammatic Seneca, whose play is reduced to plotpoints, which are shuffled out of sequence from the halfway mark. Some scenesare little more than flash cards. Thyestes’s rape of his daughter Pelopia isglimpsed only in its traumatic aftermath. Pelopia’s suicide is represented in aSchubert lieder (Der Doppelganger) powerfully sung by Ryan, who accompanies himselfon a grand piano whose appearance is the most obvious of this production’s manycoup de theatre. The curtain risesand falls like a shutter as Atreus laughs and Thyestes pukes up the mincedflesh of his children (served here in a Bolognaise sauce).

The actingis raw and immediate, in part because Winter, Henning and Ryan invented thetext and their ownership is absolute.

There’salso significant room for improvisation, which keeps things alive andoff-balance. Winter is particularly impressive. There’s something of thespiralling mania of Al Pacino’s Tony Montana in his Atreus.

Lighting (GovinRuben) shifts from hard white to sickly yellow. Stefan Gregory's sound designrummages among the genres (Ice Cube, Roy Orbison, Queen’s I’m In Love With My Car) in its eagerness to press our buttons.

I learned a lot.But I felt almost nothing. My chief memory of this experience – and this from adad with two young boys – is of the production’s virtuosity, not the story’sgrim power.

REVIEW - BEAUTIFUL BURNOUT

2012-01-18T21:18:00.001-08:00

Seymour Centre, January 18. Until January 29

Beautiful Burnout takes its audienceringside for a breathless 90 minutes of aerobic drama set to a boomingsoundtrack.

We’re in Glasgow,the time is “noo”, and working class lad Cameron Burns is about to step intothe gym run by local boxing trainer, Bobby Burgess. Quickly assessed to havethe right stuff (the auld fella can spot a fighter in a split second, itseems), Cameron joins the Burgess stable.

All hailing fromthe same opportunity-starved council estates, Burgess’s boxers harbour bigdreams, fancying themselves as big-earning stars on the professional circuit.Neil is talented but lacks discipline. Ainslie has the discipline but not thetalent. Dina, the only woman Burgess has ever trained, is haunted by abuse andmotivated by fantasies of revenge. The showboating Ajay, the self-styled “AsianCobra”, chafes under Burgess’s authoritarian rule (and Presbyterian disdain forexpressions of flair).

A co-productionbetween physical theatre company Frantic Assembly and the National Theatre ofScotland, Burnout – at the dramaticlevel – is an unpretentious rites-of-passage story framed by the perspectivesof its two elders: Burgess (iron fist, heart o’ gold) and Cameron’s mumCarlotta, whose warmth and humour counteracts Burgess’s bristly presence.Addressing the audience directly, they get the best of the lines.

Elsewhere,playwright Bryony Lavery’s dialogue stalls at the level of banter and we don’tcome to know the young fighters to any extent though these two-dimensionalcharacters are very energetically displayed by Kevin Guthrie, Vicki Manderson,Eddie Kay, Stuart Martin and Taqi Nazeer.

Manderson and Kayparticularly striking in the dance sequences (choreographed by co-directorsScott Graham and Steven Hoggett) which ride on waves of throbbing, lager-ladtechno from veteran producers Underworld and radiate a sense of the physicaldelirium that comes with hard exercise.

The climacticfight feels inevitable though it is creatively demonstrated, played on a slowrevolve and broken up with slow-motion passages as heavy punches connect andwreak their havoc. Synaptic flashes of light and starry collages of videoreinforce the idea that damage is being done. The tragic fallout feels no lessinevitable than the fight itself, though again, its effect on a young body andbrain – demonstrated in shuddering detail - is powerfully stated.

REVIEW - 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE

2012-01-17T21:08:00.000-08:00

Sydney Theatre, January 17. Until January 21

Britain’s Cheek byJowl condense John Ford’s still-potent Jacobean play into two hours of sensual,fluid and sometimes blackly comic drama.

Lydia Wilson and Jack Gordon as Annabella and Giovanni

At the heart of Ford’splay lies an incestuous relationship between a brother, Giovanni, andAnnabella, his sister. Ford’s frankness in admitting the relationship’s sensualfrisson lies behind the play’s infamy and because of it, ‘Tis Pity was excised from early Victorian editions of hiscollected works. Abundant horrors aside – the genre’s stock-in-trade of poisonings,murders and mutilation – that union remains the play’s confronting aspect.

Annabella is waitingfor us as we enter the theatre, alone in her teenager’s bedroom (True Blood posters on the wall, clothesspilling from a wardrobe). She idly surfs the net for a while, then getsdressed up. She flips on a CD player and begins to dance. Music swells to fillthe theatre. The entire company emerges to dance with her in what feels like acelebration of her erotic potential.

Annabella, we learn,is to be married to a suitable candidate chosen from a parade of highlycompetitive if uniformly unattractive suitors, the least offensive beingSoranzo. None stands a chance, however, while the passion between Annabella andher brother Giovanni germinates, then thrives. It is consummated – joyfully -with the approval (and post-coital ministrations) of Annabella’s anything-goesmaid, Putana.

Soranzo, meanwhile, isunder siege from his former lover, the widowed Hippolita. It’s her contractingof Soranzo’s conniving manservant Vasques to poison Soranzo that opens the doorto a spiraling cycle of violence.

Declan Donnellan’sproduction blends the codified gestures of Elizabethan theatre withchoreographed movement sequences (developed by Jane Gibson), painterlytableaux, and 21^st century Tarantino-toned viciousness. For example,when Vasques lures Putana into revealing the identity of the father ofAnnabella’s unborn child with the help of a male stripper with a baggie of cokestored in his jockstrap. What happens next brought gasps from the opening nightaudience, though for the most part, Ford’s bloodletting is handled withrestraint, most of it played out of sight in a brightly lit en suite bathroomthat forms part of Nick Omerod’s otherwise gloomy set.

The performances areexpressive and assured. Jack Gordon charts Giovanni’s arc from passionateundergraduate to anguished lover and murderer. Laurence Spellman is a slick anddangerous Vasques, and Nyasha Hatendi brings a dash of Pentecostal hellfire tothe role of Friar Bonaventura. Suzanne Burden is magnificent as the spurnedHippolita.

Above all, the lithe,very young looking Lydia Wilson is outstanding as Annabella. In her portrayalof a shining intelligence and a combative wit, we see that Annabella’sunrealised potential is one of the play’s underlying tragedies.

REVIEW - I'M YOUR MAN

2012-01-16T12:58:00.000-08:00

Belvoir Downstairs, January 14. Until February 5

Director RoslynOades and her knockout team of actors recreate a Bankstown boxing gym on stagein this sharp and entertaining work of documentary theatre.

Justin Rozniak in I'm Your Man (pic by Heidrun Lohr)

Based oninterviews with fighters, ex-fighters and trainers, I’m Your Man is assembled from intricately edited interviews withcurrent and former boxers, trainers and fight game identities. The “Man” of thetitle is Billy “The Kid” Dib, Australia’s world Featherweight champ, and wefollow him as he prepares physically and mentally for an upcoming title fight.

Oades employs a technique she calls“headphone verbatim”, in which theactors simultaneously relay the voices of her interview subjects (which onlythe actors can hear, over headphones) to the audience, word-for-word. Every nonsequitur, stumble and vocal tic is retained, as are all the non-verbal sounds,the coughs, the ums and ahs.

It’s a remarkableskill in itself, though you very quickly lose sight of the technical aspects ofthe performance and find yourself immersed in what is being said. It proves ahighly effective tool to capture the voices of men who are not naturalrhetoricians, whose English is halting, who are tongue-tied with adrenaline, ornear speechless in defeat.

Casting is raceand gender blind. Katia Molina, for example, isassigned the role of a young English fighter in trouble with the law. JohnShrimpton, who has the build and glove speed of someone serious about theirboxing, plays the Nigerian-born boxer Oyewale Omotoso.

The instantlyrecognisable voices of Jeff Fenech and the late Gus Mercurio are there, bothvery capably voiced by Justin Rozniak. Aboriginal boxing legend Wally Carr, anadvisor to the production, is given authentic presence by actor and fighttrainer Billy MacPherson. Dib is winningly portrayed by Mohammed Ahmad.

In the end, it’snot the physical aspect of the fighters’ preparation that is interesting,though the actors work very hard to convey the physical buzz of the gym. It’sthe building of an invincible sense of self-belief that proves fascinating.Without it, all the training will come to nought. That said, the psyching-uptechniques applied to Dib in the minutes before the bell come across asfundamentally comic. How anyone can focus on fighting amid all the well-meaningdrivel is beyond me.

Opening nightgenerated a spontaneous standing ovation – no easy thing to do in a smalltheatre. It was entirely deserved. You seldom see theatre (verbatim orotherwise) as vivid and warm as this.

REVIEW - BRIEFS

2012-01-16T12:55:00.000-08:00

The Idolize Spiegeltent, Prince Alfred Park, Parramatta,January 15. Until January 22

This beefy, bawdyvaudeville with a distinctive bogan edge hails from Brisbane, “where dragqueen’s go to die”, according to the show’s emcee, the very much alive Brisbanedrag queen Fez Fa’naana.

Natano Fa'naana

Briefs germinated three years ago in theback room of an Ipswich bookshop and it retains its guerrilla feel despitehaving played at the Opera House and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival lastyear.

Set to thumpingclub beats, the acts range in tone from trashy burlesque (a fast and furious hulahoop routine performed in a flouro G-string bikini) to old school vaudeville (adeft and utterly deadpan plate spinning act, performed by “Gravy” DaveySampford, to The Motels’ “Total Control”) and quality aerial acts.

After a video showing highlights of his 37-hour traditional Samoantattooing ordeal, Natano Fa’naana (older brother to Fez) performs a fluid soloon suspended silks. Mark Winmill, the recently crowned international King ofBurlesque, shows his class in a rope swing act that melds power, grace andcheeky eroticism into a solo spectacle. The Idolize Spiegeltent’s low ceilinggives you a close-up of everything these performers have got – which mayconfront some as much as it titillates others.

Fez keeps the audience amply entertained in thebreaks, while stumbling through several St Vinnies-derived cossie changes. Healso runs the nightly meat raffle, which you enter at your own risk and win atyour peril.

REVIEW - I AM A CAMERA

2012-01-15T05:06:00.000-08:00

Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, January 13.

Thoughts ofmortality are almost always present in William Yang’s autobiographicalslideshows. As an obsessive recorder of Sydney’s gay scene and social lifesince the 1970s, Yang has seen many of the people he has photographed andbefriended pass away. Some were lost to AIDS, which he chronicled in 1992’s Sadness. Now, increasingly, he is losingfriends to old age.

William Yang

True to past form,I Am A Camera sees Yang front andcentre, speaking directly to his audience. His photographs are projected behindhim, on a pair of large screens.

“I was a bloggerbefore the word was invented,” he tells us. But now, thanks to mobile phonesand Facebook, everyone is a photographer. “No one will pay me anymore,” hejokes.

His thoughts onthe new voyeurism prove short-lived, however. The dominant themes of I Am A Camera turn out to be family tiesand the history of the Chinese Diaspora, which he illustrates in images takenduring several journeys recounted here: one to a major photographic exhibitionin the Chinese city of Pingyao; another to the remote, French-administeredisland of Reunion in the Indian Ocean; one to California to visit relations,another to New Zealand, another to country New South Wales with 60Chinese–Australian history buffs to the site of the Lambing Flat anti-Chineseriots of 1861.

Each strand of thestory is related in an unassuming manner with wry asides on, for example,bowling club food (which, of course, he has photographed). His voice and manneris such that his narration feels almost off-the-cuff.

Music always playsa part in Yang’s shows. Here, his monologue is interspersed with score forpercussion and cello (played by Joshua Hill and Thomas Rann) composed by ElenaKats-Chernin. It’s rich, and dark-textured, sometimes at odds with subdued moodof the piece, though very effective when harnessed to Yang’s images and videofootage of trees, glaciers and waterfalls.

One begins towonder how all of this will come together, though past experience has shown italways does. Here, as he blends in his observations of and reaction to thesudden illness and death of his brother, the neutrality suggested by thiswork’s title (“I am a camera with itsshutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking” being a line fromChristopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin) is challenged.

Close to the end,many of the images Yang has stealthily implanted in our heads seem to draw togetherin footage of whorls of floating seaweed. It’s a moment of remarkable beauty.

I Am A Camera also plays the Seymour Centre, January 17-22

REVIEW - LA PUTYKA

2012-01-15T05:03:00.001-08:00

Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, January 13. UntilJanuary 18

If you’ve everworked behind a bar, you’ll know calling time on drinkers can be a difficultbusiness. Some nights, cattle prods and water canons can’t shift them. All youcan do is beg for mercy.

La Putyka

So it goes for thered-nosed publican-ringmaster at the centre of this slapstick circus from theCzech Republic. While he dispenses some final cheer to the front row of theaudience, three moody boozers slump over empty glasses. Across the room, two yokel types face off across awooden table. Nobody is for leaving.

Youstart to feel the need for something – anything - to happen. Just then, the twoyokels launch into wrestling match that tumbles into a wobbly strength andbalance routine. A couple sways into a lurching acrobatic tango, accompanied bythe house band (none too sober themselves).

Ayoung woman in a red dress performs a teetering solo dance. A shoeless man in awhite suit (a lover?) grabs her handbag and suddenly they are swinging eachother around the stage. A curtain opens to reveal a trampoline on which acouple dance, romance and tussle. Later, a full-sized marionette of the whitesuited man loses his head – literally. All the while, the drinking continuesand the band plays on.

La Putykahas its woozy charms, though the dive bar setting struggles to fill a stage aslarge as this. Close up, in a Spiegeltent for example, the show’s chaoticenergy might be infectious, one imagines. Not so here.

Forthe most part, the performers are not life-long circus folk and the cast has,in the main, accumulated their skills in the course of their association withthe company. What they have achieved is admirable, though it’s fair to saythey’re not up to the standard of the LaClique shows at previous festivals, or of Circus Oz.

Withoutthat “wow” factor, all the staggering, jabbering, and swaying and braying soon wearsthin (likewise the falsetto scat singing from the band’s vocalist), leaving youfree to wonder if the lack of acrobatic finesse resides exclusively in theshow’s drunken conceit.

REVIEW - LOVE NEVER DIES

2012-01-12T21:12:00.000-08:00

Capitol Theatre, January 12. Until April 1

The Phan-boys willnever come around to loving it, but Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom sequelarrives in Sydney having had its reputation saved in Melbourne by this ravishingeye-full of a production.

Ben Lewis and Anna O'Byrne

All did not gosmoothly on opening night, however. Director Simon Phillips popped up afterinterval to explain that a hitch in a curtain track meant that, in thisperformance, we would see some back stage business. So we did. It hardlymattered.

More distractingit turned out, were problems with the lighting in the lead up to the show’stitle number, though even those didn’t detract much. This production’s riot ofideas and stylistic references has your brain working overtime just to keep up.

Designer GabrielaTylesova’s set is a brilliant evocation of the New World at the turn of thetwentieth century, in which Lloyd Webber’s decidedly Old World romantictorments will be played out. A spiralling rollercoaster track is both itsphysical skeleton and a metaphor for the twisted psyche of The Phantom, who,having pulled off his vanishing trick in Paris a decade ago, has reinvented himselfas Coney Island impresario Mr Y.

Two towers leaninto the auditorium, connecting perfectly to the Capitol Theatre’s head-turningJohn Eberson-designed interior with a few strands of festoon lights. A huge revolving cipher of the Phantom’s half-mask is a kind of iris,focusing our attention.

It’s into thisgaudy underworld that Mr Y (Ben Lewis) draws Christine (Anna O’Byrne), the object of his sensual and musical obsessions. When she arrivesin New York, however, she has rather more baggage than anticipated – a tenyear-old boy called Gustave (Jack Lyall on opening night), whose musical talenthas a familiar ring to it.

Lloyd Webber’sscore is plushly upholstered and quite effective though attempts to integraterock rhythms and electric guitar into the spectrum sound very eighties – asonic link to the original Phantom score.In the unintentionally funny The BeautyUnderneath, you can detect the influence of stadium rockers Metallica.Elsewhere, fans of Sinatra torch ballads will hear something familiar in barstoolnumber Why Does She Love Me? sung bySimon Gleeson’s Raoul.

GraemeMurphy's sinuous choreography shows Tylesova’s wonderful costuming to its bestadvantage throughout. The wide-eyed vaudeville pastiche Bathing Beauty – the spotlight scene for Sharon Millerchip’sover-ripe starlet Meg - is a highlight.

Sharon Millerchip as Meg

I saw this productionwhen it opened in Melbourne last year and to my mind it sits better in theCapitol (unless you are in the back stalls) and dramatically, the show is now asmoother (though no more plausible) ride.

Towering physicallyand vocally over the show, Lewis’s performance has become – within themelodramatic limits prescribed – a more supple one. His voice, which has powerright across his formidable range, seems better connected to the emotions hemust demonstrate. Given that lyricist Glenn Slater provides him with obstacles toovercome rather than words to savour, he does extraordinarily well.

O’Byrne’s thrilling sopranorings beautifully throughout, and Millerchip excels in a role that cries outfor a scene to ease the way for us to accept her fate.

There’s a paucity of memorable songs and melodies, and the story’sclimax stutters, but Love Never Dies’ deficiencies asart are more than covered for by its value as sumptuous old-fashionedentertainment.

REVIEW - THE BOYS

2012-01-12T11:08:00.000-08:00

Griffin Theatre, January 11. Until March 3

Gordon Graham’splay firstsaw the light at the Australian National Playwrights’ Conference in 1988. Justa year earlier, Sydney had been transfixed by reports from the criminal trialthat saw five young men – three of them brothers - confess to, and sentencedfor, the rape and murder of 26-year-old Anita Cobby in February 1986. We canonly imagine what effect proximity to those events might have had on the audienceswho flocked to see The Boys duringits debut season on this stage in 1991.

Josh McConville as Brett Sprague

Two decades on, it retains its capacity to chilland provoke. A new generation of theatregoers without direct memories of theCobby case will find Gordon’s portrait of personalities warped by circumstancering entirely and uncomfortably true in the present.

Gordon’s script hinges on the return of theeldest of the Sprague boys, Brett, from a year in prison for an aggravatedassault. He doesn’t speak directly of his experience inside but his stint, wegather it was a brutalising one. Now home, Brett (Josh McConville) reasserts hisdominance. He terrorises his girlfriend Michelle (Cheree Cassidy), accusing herof infidelity. He monsters his brothers, in particular Glenn (Johnny Carr), whois close to extricating himself from the haphazard management of their mother,Sandra (Jeanette Cronin).

SamStrong’s largely excellent production (a couple of furniture placements detractat times) locates the action in a compound sheathed in corrugated iron, flooredin sunburned grass. A Hills Hoist stands in its centre. Faint noise tricklesfrom a radio in the clothes peg caddy. The sheet iron has the effect of turninga suburban backyard into something more like a dog-fighting pit, in which McConville,electrifying as Brett, takes on all comers.

Carris likewise excellent as the evasive Glen, torn between loyalties to family andto his girlfriend Jackie (Louisa Mignone). AnthonyGee pitches the youngest brother, Stevie, on the cusp of normal intelligence, a12-year-old in a man’s body.

Thefilm version took us to the moment where the crime is committed. The play alsoexplores its aftermath and the community outrage that engulfs Michelle, Jackie,and Stevie’s child-like girlfriend Nola (Eryn Jean Norvill).

Theportrayal of Sandra is crucial to the success the play. Cronin’s is apersuasive one; we sense her toxicity without being able to put a sure fingeron what is generating it, though we see something of her modus operandi in the ingratiating wiggle of the buttocks she usesto diffuse tension.

Theplay’s violence is very capably handled (choreographed by Scott Witt) andloudly amplified by the savage strokes of Kelly Ryall’s score, which, likeBernard Hermann’s “shower scene” for Psycho,embodies the brutality of a crime we hardly dare imagine.

REVIEW - THE LIST OPERATORS DO COMPOOTERS

2012-01-11T15:00:00.000-08:00

York Theatre, Seymour Centre, January 10. UntilJanuary 13

Theatre can open achild’s eyes to a world of myth, art, music and history. Happily, The ListOperators For Kids are having none of that.

Matt and Rich, The List Operators

Rather thanspeaking to parents’ aspirations for experiences that have an educational bentor uplifting moral quality, Listies Matt (Kelly) and Rich (Higgins) serve upentertainment that celebrates the joys of childhood inherent in, say,sniggering over an Andy Griffiths book, or running around the playgroundscreaming, “smell my finger!”

Do Compooters is the comedy duo’s rompthrough cyber history and pop culture, stuffed with terrible puns, helpfulhints (putting sliced cheese in the DVD drive is a definite no-no), cyberglossaries (we all know what LOL means, but what about ROFLSHALBOWCO?), and poojokes.

An on-stage Pongtournament results in, predicably, a humiliating defeat for the oldies who canremember playing it back in the day. Later, in the adventure game World of Wool-craft, smartypants Rich,dressed as a Viking, rides around on a trusty sheep called Justin Bieber.

Matt and Rich havethe children fully engaged and laughing uproariously in a matter of seconds.Likewise, the adults, who enjoy the duo’s goofy antics - classic straightman/funny man stuff – as much as their charges’ uninhibited embrace of themayhem. Funny sound effects triggered from the stage and snippets of giddy popmusic add to the party atmosphere, as do the water pistols, beach balls andtea-towel “aliens” under the seats.

By the end, thechildren were jigging in the aisles unable able to contain their excitement.

In case you werewondering, ROFLSHALBOWCO is a Listies acronym for Rolled On Floor Laughing SoHard A Little Bit Of Wee Came Out. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

The List Operators For Kids Do Compooters also plays the RiversideTheatres, Parramatta, January 17-21.

REVIEW - BURIED CITY

2012-01-10T18:37:00.000-08:00

Belvoir, January 8. Until February 5

In her programnote, Buried City’s director AliciaTalbot tells us that its writer, Raimondo Cortese, likes to think of the workas a “living film set with no close-ups.”

Union man: Russell Kiefel (pic by Heidrun Lohr)

As such, we areobservers, free to absorb information from any part of the frame at any time,and from that draw our own conclusions. Denied theatrical conventions such as adramatic spine and a character focus, the effect is akin to watching anunedited fly-on-the-wall documentary rather than a play.

Buried City is a building site,represented in designer Mirabelle Wouters’s assemblage of scaffolding, milkcrates, empty bottles and rubbish. A demountable office is perched up high.

It’s the middle ofthe night but Perry (singer and songwriter Perry Keyes) is hanging around, asis Russell (Russell Kiefel), a construction worker and union man forged in thedays of the Green Bans. Meynedog (Meyne Wyatt), a mouthy Aboriginal youthappears to haunt the place, intent on stirring people up.

They are monitored- if not exactly watched - by security guard Effie (Effie Nkrumah), who spendsmost of her time following talent competitions on the TV.

After severalpassages of needling dialogue and physical business, they are joined by Haz(Hazem Shammas) and Valerie (Valerie Berry), whom Haz has apparently picked upoutside a nightclub. More needle follows, though its intensity increases, inpart the result of sexual tension that creeps in with Valerie.

It’s in thehead-to-head that develops between Russell and Haz, whose relationship has amodicum of history built into it, that the script raises questions: about theturbulence caused by investor-driven development, about the lives of those whowork on the edges of legal frameworks, about the declining role of the unionsand Gen Y’s suspicion of their motives (“a selflessness bullshit act,” snortsHaz).

Arguments areineptly but realistically articulated (“It’s this fucking no culture we live in …it’s this … it’s like it’s all too hard you know …” says Haz) and there’s no authoritative “voice” to latch on to, except perhaps, forRussell’s pro-union stance. The script – which is a highly collaborative,consultative affair, the norm for Urban Theatre Projects productions – seemsleached of the flair and humour I’ve come to associate with Cortese’s previouswork.

What you’ll get from all thisdepends to an extent on how hard you’re prepared to work for it, and even then,it doesn’t come easily. Despite the efforts of its hard-working cast (Kiefel,Shammas and Wyatt especially), this one-night-on-earth scenario never quite ringstrue, and its air of frustration and defeat will exasperate many long beforethey begin to question the reasons for it.

REVIEW - MEOW MEOW'S LITTLE MATCH GIRL

2012-01-09T11:55:00.000-08:00

The Famous Spiegeltent, Hyde Park North, January6. Until January 29.

Combustably talented,vain, tyrannical and needy, Meow Meow is all those things. Less obvious, untilnow, has been her burning social conscience.

Meow Meow - talent to burn

Thespringboard for Little Match Girl is Hans Christian Andersen’s story, the tale of an abusedchild who freezes to death on the pavement at Christmas after, by lighting hermatches, briefly experiencing a moment of transcendent beauty. This is not aretelling, however. Here, the little girl serves as central metaphor and as acandle to all the waifs and strays in the world – thousands of whom, Meow Meowpoints out, are preparing to sleep rough in the streets of our cities while wesettle in to enjoy the show.

Hangon, isn’t this all getting a little serious? Don’t fret. This being Meow Meow,some kind of malfunction is never far away and in this case, we don’t have towait more than a few minutes for a power cut to wreak intricately organisedhavoc.

Everthe unstoppable trouper, Meow Meow requisitions iPhones to illuminate her act.She scrambles backstage for torches to be handed out to non-volunteers. Onehapless punter is pressed into pedalling a bicycle-powered generator.

Oneaudience member in particular seems more than keen to come to Meow Meow’s aid.He’s a stooge of course: actor and singer Mitchell Butel, whose role expandsfrom star-struck fanboy to electrified deity as the show lurches through asongbook encompassing songs by Megan Washington, Richard Wagner (Wolfram’s aria“O Du, Mein Holder Abendstern”, from Tannhauser)and Serge Gainbourg’s “Poupeé de Cire, poupeé de Son” among others. A smallband led by pianist Lance Horne provides sensitive and versatile backing.

Thetightly-packed confines of the Spiegeltent and the nature of its sight linesdon’t always allow Meow Meow to be experienced optimally at all times (thisMarion Potts-directed production comes to us from Melbourne’s Malthouse),though the tent adds sweaty sideshow appeal to Noel Coward’s “What’s Going toHappen to the Tots?”

A rough diamondshow, a dazzler nonetheless, and one that sends you out into the dark withPatty Griffin’s “Be Careful” for company:

“All the girls that you'll never see / Forever amystery / All the girls with their secret ways / All the girls who have goneastray …”

REVIEW - CELEBRITY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

2012-01-09T11:49:00.000-08:00

Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, January 7. UntilJanuary 29

Looking for adviceon perfecting your golf swing, building your biceps, catching snakes or orallypleasing that special lady in your life? Celebrity memoirs have all theanswers, it seems.

Brought to book: Jeremy Sims and Fiona O'Loughlin (pic by Mark Metcalfe)

Celebrity Autobiography is an American concept, the brainchild of comedywriter Eugene Pack. What started as a cable TV special in which comedians andactors read out excerpts from entertainment industry autobiographies is now along-running Off Broadway show.

This version,directed by Wayne Harrison, sticks to the original’s formula with memoirs fromsuper and sub-stellar stars blended with roughly 30 per cent local contentcourtesy of Shane Warne (from his 2001 opus MyAutobiography), Steve Irwin (from CrocodileHunter), and from Danii Minogue’s dewy-eyed My Story.

These sit amongpearls from Arnold Schwarzenegger (a subcontinental-sounding James O’Loghlin),a drearily obsessive Sylvester Stallone (Jeremy Sims, spot-on), Justin Bieber(Daniel MacPherson), Carol Channing (Mikey Robbins, somewhat against type) andBeyoncé (Lara Mulcahy). Tiger Woods’s description of his pre-putt routine ishilariously shaded by his off-course misdemeanours in a wry read by FionaO’Loughlin.

Easy pickings, sure,but this 90-minute show is consistently funny and becomes more so when theformat expands into dueling memoir dramatisations of the Elizabeth Taylor-RichardBurton saga (as related in the pages of memoirs by Eddie Fisher and DebbieReynolds) and Burt Reynolds’s marriage to Loni Anderson, as depicted byReynolds’s long-suffering personal assistant in Burt and Me: My Days and Nights With Burt Reynolds.

Mikey Robbins

Someunnecessary mugging starts to creep in to the show from the halfway point(MacPherson and Robbins are the chief culprits here - really, this stuff isfunnier delivered straight) and Robbins’s mincing portrait of singer RickyMartin is crude indeed. But overall, the needle is kept swinging to thepositive by this team’s relaxed rapport, lively reads, and seemingly bottomlesswell of celebrity drivel from which to draw.

REVIEW - ANNIE

2012-01-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

Lyric Theatre, Star Casino, January 5. Until March 25

Plucky redheaded foundlinginspires President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-busting New Deal? Leapin’lizards, you’d better believe it! Nancye Hayes as the sister of Todd McKenny?Well, that’s a little harder to swallow. Suspension of one’s disbelief at thecasting of radio personality Alan Jones as FDR? That’s another matter entirely.

Ella Nicol as Annie, Anthony Warlow as Oliver Warbucks

Based on the HaroldGray newspaper strips of the late 1920s, Anniehas proved evergreen since it premiered in1977, thanks to its hard-hooking songs (lyrics Martin Charnin, music CharlesStrouse) and its unabashedly sunnyoutlook. It’s not a dramatically sophisticated work – a comic set to musicessentially - but you’d have to be stone-hearted not to see the appeal inlittle Annie’s picaresque elevation from orphanage rags to Fifth Avenue riches.

The show takes alittle while to find its feet. Uninspired video projections attempt to sweep usfrom the bright lights of New York City and through the door of the grimymunicipal institution run by the perpetually drunk Miss Hannigan (Hayes),lifelong home to Annie and her dorm mates, on whose energy and charm anyproduction of this show depends for its very life.

The early scenes are strongly sung if rather too obviously blocked.Dialogue and movement seems locked to a silent count, though that’s excusablegiven that this production employs rotating casts.

Things loosen up with the appearance of McKenny, who is excellent as thevaudevillian con artist Rooster Hannigan, and Chloë Dallimore as his arm candy,Lily St Regis. Suddenly, Hayes has someone she can bounce her lines off.

The Warbucks mansion scenes are warmly realised, with Anthony Warlow ingenial form as the lonely billionaire (his“N.Y.C.,” about the splendour of life in the Big Apple, is the evening’snon-kiddie highlight) and he’s well supported by Julie Goodwin (as the creamy Grace,Warbucks’ secretary), and Jack Webster as the elderly butler, Drake.

Act II livens up considerably, starting with a radio studio scene inwhich Annie launches her appeal to find her real parents. Its comic potentialis yet to be completely excavated, however.

Jones’s FDR? Pure stunt casting. His accent wavers, thesmirk is grating, but for the most part, he acquits himself reasonably well.The irony in having Roosevelt listening to a carping critique of his governmentover the wireless is inescapable.

Alldepends on the little girls however, and the talent on display on opening nightwas impressive. Ella Nicol gifts Annie with mature subtlety of expression inher interpretation of the show’s key songs - Hard Knock Life, Maybe,and Tomorrow delivering them clearlyand without the vocal brassiness we associate with the role.

Not quite as elevating a production as one might wish for but qualityfamily fare nonetheless. Bet your bottom dollar on it.

REVIEW - CIRCUS OZ: STEAMPOWERED

2012-01-05T13:06:00.000-08:00

Tumbalong Park, Darling Harbour, January 4. UntilJanuary 29

It’s not theslickest circus you’ll ever see. But then again, Circus Oz has never been aboutthe seamless packaging of acrobatic talent. What you get here is rough-hewn,humorous and political.

Presented undercanvas, Steampowered is anindustrial-strength blend of punk circus, ratbaggery, slapstick and cabaret andlike 2010’s Barely Contained,the whole thing is wrapped in an attractively dishabille sense of theVictorian. This time around, however, artistic director Mike Finch pumps it upwith references to the alternative sci-fi Steampunk movement (“a vision of thefuture had it happened sooner,” explains ringmistress Sarah Ward, the comely“compere with the derriere” and a killer voice to boot). Costumes (LaurelFrank) suggest mill workers on a bank holiday spree. Darryl Cordell’s set isdominated by a huge ornamental engine (the technological love child of FrankWhittle and Jules Verne) and a nodding donkey contraption.

This coal-firedvision of a future that never quite happened (one in which women’s work is asvalued and respected as much as men’s, for example) creates space for theshow’s political content, which is most obvious – strenuously so - at the topof the second act when a power cut has Ward organising collapsing pyramids ofgrey suited politicians and rapping over hip-hop rhythms provided by CarlPolke’s multi-skilled band (“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology ofthe cancer cell!”). That is about as strident as things get, though the show’sunderlying environmental message is often perceptible elsewhere.

Impressive but neverinhuman, the turns are always inventive and while they don’t often stop theheart, many are a genuine delight: Paul O’Keeffe’s collapsing bike stunt, whichhas him reconfiguring his ride in motion; a comedy trapeze duo which artfullytakes the mick out of their power ballad-loving colleagues in Cirque du Soleil.A lively tumbling and juggling sequence over a dining table is a highlight.Humour is always a Circus Oz strong suit and Steampowered is no exception thanks to the antics of inept magic actthe Hammond Brothers and spandex-clad fitness guru Fantasia (inventor of prenatalpole dancing Pilates, no less) performed by rollerblade specialist FlipKammerer.

Rambunctiouslyentertaining as ever, Circus Oz powers on through its middle age, celebrating ingenuity,courage and diversity as it does so.

FROM THE GODS ...

2012-01-03T18:28:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr Blake,

I suspect from today’s summary ofSydney’s theatrical year (“Star turns, and back-up in wings”) that your theatrical values and experienceare very different from mine.

For one thing, I don’t reallyapprove of the increasing tendency in this city’s theatres tobe impatient with what dramatists actually wrote (are the clichés actuallytrue about diminishing attention spans of the young?) yet calling the resultthe same thing as the original. Anespecially egregious example - and appallingly done toboot, although hyperbolically praised - was War of theRoses, last year. [Actually in 2009 - JB] The Wild Duck(which I did not see) sounds, from your account, of the same ilk. It’s akin to agallery director saying that he dislikes a section of an otherwise greatpicture by Klimt or Rembrandt or Rubens, so he’ll cut it outbefore putting it on display.

To judge from what you wrote about Gross und Klein,your criterion of good theatre is (again so Sydney!) star-struck: it was, youseem to say, an “outstanding work of theatre”, despite a “long andpretty obscure” text, because of a single actress. “Could it bemade to speak to a Sydney audience?” you asked. I’d suggest thatspeaking to a person who doesn’t speak your language - or is deaf - is adifficult task. So perhaps you oughtto ask, before you disparage that play, whether the problem lies with anaudience which has had next to no experience of modern German (let alone European)theatre. You denigrate it becauseit is “rooted in the German zeitgeist of the 1970s” (ah, ofcourse, it’s a German play, so we must deploy a Germanword [even if, to be spelled correctly, it requires a capital Z!]); so, Iwonder if you’d accuse Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder as “rooted” in the ThirtyYears’ War (or, even, in the time when Brecht wrote it,1941)? I don’t choose thatplay at random, rather because I think that Gross und Klein isinspired by Brecht’s work - and has asimilar metaphoric and moral intent. If the Sydney audiences were bemused by Strauss’s play (asthey seemed to be) it is, in large part, because they fail to understand thatethical, moral and social quiddity of most German art.

Furthermore, your summary of Gross und Klein as “long andpretty obscure” is trivial and should have been deleted by the editor ofSummer: the same could be said of Proust or Milton; of Musil of Joyce, butpeople would laugh were you to say it. So that, perhaps, is what I should do - laugh; butalso regret that Sydney readers are offered no better writing about theatre by whatpurports to be their “quality” newspaper.

Yours sincerely,

John Carmody

Discipline of Physiology and Centre for MedicalHumanities,

University of Sydney.

Convenor: "Medicine and Music": Master ofMedical Humanities program

President: AustralianCatholic Historical Society.

REVIEW - MACBETH

2011-12-22T13:42:00.000-08:00

Bella Vista Farm Park, December 21. Until December 30

We’re accustomedto seeing Shakespeare’s comedies performed in our parks and public gardens.Less so his tragedies.

Amy Mathews, Damien Ryan and Terry Karabelas (pi by Selya Taguchi)

Macbeth, with its strong sense of“indoors” (the world of the Macbeths) versus “outdoors” (the phantasmagoricalrealm of the witches) throws up any number of challenges and opportunities fora company game enough to open it up to the elements.

This productionfrom Sport For Jove (which runs alongside their excellent The Taming of the Shrew) takes a pragmatic approach to theindoor-outdoor divide.

The productionbegins as daylight gives way and with a short walk to Bella Vista Farm’s200-year-old sheep shed. A tableaux of WWI-era soldiers takes us back a centuryor so.

Once in the shed,Act I is staged in traverse. Scene 1 is enacted as a game of hopscotch withsupernatural overtones. What follows plays like a scene from the Western Front,with soldiers dashing through the rough-hewn shed, the “hurly-burly” of battleapparent in their confusion. From this emerge the valorous Macbeth (anexcellent Damien Ryan, who also directs) and Banquo (Matt Edgerton), heroes andpals. The witches – young girls carried in as corpses – are spectres of war’scollateral damage. The production echoes with the horrors visited uponchildren.

The courtyard ofBella Vista’s farmstead serves as “indoors”, with the Queen’s court (the gendershift only adds to the level of revulsion Macbeth must overcome to do the deed)represented as linen-suited high society types whose parlour games and gigglydemeanour give way to open-mouthed shock when the alarums are raised for theQueen’s murder. Lady Macbeth’s nightly walk returns us to the shed – and to theprimitive, in effect - for the play’s climax.

Macbeth isn’t as coherent a productionas The Shrew though it shares many ofits virtues: clear storytelling, energetic performances, some sharp staging(Banquo’s ghost scene and the witches’ “toil and trouble” spell enacted as agame of sinister elastics, for example), good swordplay and intelligent use ofthe heritage infrastructure.

Macbeth plays in repertory with The Taming of the Shrew. Both productionstransfer to Everglades Gardens, Leura, January 7 – 22.

REVIEW - THE BIRTHDAY BOYS

2011-12-14T13:26:00.000-08:00

NIDA Parade Studio, December 13. Until December 23

Some birthday.Three U.S. Marines guarding military supplies on the massive Al Asad Airbase,160km west of Baghdad, are kidnapped by a militia group.Blindfolded and cable-tied hand and foot, they are taken to a warehouse to stewin their own fear and await their fate.

Chris Galletti and Matt Hardie, The Birthday Boys

They are far fromunited in their resolve, however. Private First Class Carney’s apparentcowardice in the face of the enemy has his buddy (and fellow birthday boy) PFCTyler in a white-hot rage. It’s up to the oldest of the three, father-to-be PFCGullette, to keep the other two apart. Morale is intermittently maintained witha stream of jokes, stories, lines from movies, the Marine Corps Hymn (“From theHalls of Montezuma”) and a series of hundred-dollar bets, on such things as whowill piss their pants first.

American playwright Aaron Kozak blends elementsof hostage drama (think Frank McGuinness’s SomeoneTo Watch Over Me) and locker room comedy in The Birthday Boys, then tops itwith a “gotcha” twist. In effect, he leads his audience up the garden path bygunpoint to attack them with a whoopee cushion. I found it a profoundlyirritating exercise.

Working around that, there are some positives inthis production by the emerging indie theatre collective Ion Nibiru. Theperformances are solid with Anthony Taufa (a welcome fixture on the indie sectorstage this year), Matt Hardie and Chris Galletti - working hard to put someflesh on the bones of Kozak’s crude banter. They manage this despite beingblindfolded, bound and sprawled on the floor for 90 per cent of the play.

James Elliott delivers a cool portrait ofintelligent ruthlessness as “The Leader”, an inquisitor who will use any meansnecessary – coercion, electric shocks, threat of imminent decapitation – to getthe information he wants.

Darren Gilshenan directs and demonstrates a goodinstinct for rhythm and an ability to exploit the comic potential of the piece.There’s no designer credited for this production, however, and it shows. Withthe cast sprawled on the floor or against the wall for most of the play, atighter, more detailed playing space would have helped up the stakes somewhat.

Though we suspect all is not as it seems, atleast we’re kept interested enough to find out if our suspicions are justified.

REVIEW - NOTHING PERSONAL

2011-12-12T12:25:00.000-08:00

Ensemble Theatre, December 9. Until January 28

Playwright DavidWilliamson has had a busy year. His fan-pleasing comedy Don Parties On spun the turnstiles at Sydney Theatre, and, bolstered by some fine performances,the palliative care-themed At Any Cost?(co-authored with surgeon Mohamed Khadra) worked verywell.

Emma Jackson and Greta Scacchi (pic by Natalie Boog)

Nothing Personal is the least successfulof this season’s crop. The least successful of recent years, I’d venture. It rings hollow from the start.

In her early sixties, Bea(Greta Scacchi) is the doyenne of an Australian publishing company, one sherescued from the brink of collapse some decades ago. The book on which shejudges all others? Eliot’s Middlemarch.

Naomi (Emma Jackson)is her head of marketing (with a First in English lit, she bleats). She isambitious, shrewd, and a champion of new writing and multicultural voices.

Things come to a quickhead when Bea rejects a manuscript that goes on to be a best seller for a rivalfirm. Fearing for her reputation, Bea deflects blame toward Naomi. Naomi fightsback and Bea’s grip on the big chair is fatally weakened, at least in the eyesof chairman of the board Kelvin (Andrew McFarlane), a millionaire with an eyefor the ladies, a private jet, and a love shack in Byron Bay.

A neat set up for acomic probing of inter-generational conflict, literary fashions and businessethics, you might imagine. Not so. Williamson’s “feel” for exploitablefaultlines in his chosen territory seems to have deserted him here and thisproduction, directed by Mark Kilmurry, is a lifeless one.

Scacchi and Jacksonstruggle to animate the protagonists convincingly. They’re fine playing out theoffice ding-dongs, but Williamson’s writing in scenes plumbing their personallives makes an actor’s job very difficult.

Scenes of Bea’srapprochement with her estranged daughter Lucy (Rachael Coopes), and Naomi’srocky relationship with her architect boyfriend Simon (Matthew Moore) arepedestrian. Naomi’s heart-to-hearts with her cancer-stricken mother (JeanieDrynan) play like daytime soap opera. Kelvin’s seduction of Naomi makes theflesh creep.

Kilmurry turns thescenes over efficiently enough – the flow picks up appreciably after interval -but the play remains stuck in second gear from the mid point of the first act.Steven Butler’s all-Perspex set looks great and lights prettily. Quite what allthis transparency means is anyone’s guess, however.

REVIEW - FAT SWAN

2011-12-09T14:22:00.001-08:00

Seymour Centre, December 8. Until December 17

Chubby drag artistin a tutu? Good enough for 10 seconds of titters, but there’s plenty morebesides in this adults-only mash-up of Christmas panto and Darren Aronofsky’sbig screen psychodrama Black Swan.

Tara Morice and Trevor Ashley

Writer and starTrevor Ashley and co-writer Phil Scott gleefully shove the plot essentials ofthe movie through the mincer. Out the other end pops Ashley as Natalie Portly,anorexic dancer on a fast track to stardom playing the good pig/bad pig leadroles in choreographer Vincent Asshole’s revival of his 1968 hit Swine Lake.

It wouldn’t be apanto without some “faces” of course. In this case we have Strictly Ballroom star Tara Morice as Natalie’s insane stage mom,and TV home renovation show host Brendan Moar as the predatory Asshole. LisaAdam reanimates the old legwarmers-and-scrunchy look for Natalie’s company BFFand rival, Mila Kuntz. Pronounced Koontz? Nah, she prefers “Kuntz”. Ashley andScott aim low for their laughs, seldom straying above the waist.

Directed by GarryScale, Fat Swan is delivered indeliberately seat-of-the-tights style. Musical spoofs range from “Murder on theDancefloor” (gleefully slaughtered here) to “Everything Was Beautiful at theBallet” (from A Chorus Line) and allscenes are peppered with smut, snippy asides and industry jokes.

There’s plentyof audience participation, of course (those seated at the handful of tables mayfind themselves pressed to show off their first position, possibly more) and weall get to shout “Kuntz!” repeatedly.

It was a choicebetween a fancy set and Morice, apparently. Happily, they went with the latter.Morice is terrific in mad mommy mode and tuneful with it. Moar is no dancer buthe can carry a tune, milk a line, and is clearly enjoying messing with hisclean cut image. Lisa Adam’s powerful voice and all round music theatre chopsare ear and eye-catching and lift the ensemble numbers above“don’t-give-up-your-day-job” standard.

It’s Ashley’s showto carry, however, and he does so with potty-mouthed panache, all the way to Fat Swan’s surprise happy ending.

REVIEW - HOW TO LOSE SIGHT

2011-12-05T12:59:00.001-08:00

Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, December 3. UntilDecember 10

Inspired by interviewswith people who are vision impaired, this devised project helmed by MichalImielski takes place a short stroll from the theatre.

Chloe Fournier

With PollyannaNowicki as our somewhat loopy guide, we are taken across Prince Alfred Park toan undistinguished (though Heritage-listed) brick villa in the shadow ofParramatta Leagues Club. Assembled outside the front door, the audience is thendivided into three groups and ushered into different rooms. Each group sees thesame three pieces, though in a different order.

My evening beginswith a convulsively physical solo piece by Cloe Fournier, who illustrates thesensual pleasures and perils of blind dating in a performance that sees herclambering walls and window sills.

We were then escortedinto another room (this one draped in a tangle of white netting) in which OdileLe Clezio relates a story requiring its audience to ponder the nature ofmemories and dreams minus their visual component, as experienced by peopleblind from birth.

The third piece is adrama, apparently rooted in fact (a burglary committed in this very house, saysnarrator Barton Williams) though presented with a surreally comic edge.

Each piece has itsflashes of insight though were they to be performed in a more conventionaltheatre setting, perhaps only Fournier’s piece – thanks to its physical abandon– would be riveting. But confined with performers in small domestic spaces, weare intimately - sometimes uncomfortably - involved in the fabric of each work.

A successful,non-didactic and very much out-of-the-ordinary experiment that seeks tosensitise its audience to the experience of blindness rather than just educate themabout it.

REVIEW - RICHARD III

2011-12-02T14:17:00.001-08:00

Lyric Theatre, Star Casino, December 1. Until December11

We need to talk aboutKevin. After all, there aren’t many in the audience, one imagines, who are heresolely for Shakespeare.

And those who have shelledout up to $239 each to see Hollywood star Kevin Spacey strut his stuffcertainly get their money’s worth. His ferocious, grotesque, fundamentallycomic performance will leave no one feeling out of pocket – except for those inseats out wide, close to aisles. Many will find their appreciation of thisotherwise fine staging marred by scandalously poor sightlines.

Kevin Spacey as Richard III

For those with a clearview to the back of the funnel-shaped set, however, this production, directedby Sam Mendes for London’s Old Vic, is a clear and gripping one though itdoesn’t break much new ground. Played in a whitewashed, semi-industrial set,many elements of Mendes’s mise-en-scene hark back to the 1930s and 40s, and tothe Shakespeare productions of another Hollywood figure, Orson Welles.

A rattling live scoreof taiko-inspired percussion (composed by Mark Bennett) cleverly builds anddischarges tension, and the many doors of Tom Piper’s design allow for swiftchanges of stage personnel. Each scene is titled with its principal character,which helps focus audience attention toward key aspects of the complex plot.

Mendes throws in someinventive set pieces, too. Grumbling citizenry are depicted as a line ofstrap-hanging commuters. Buckingham’s entreaties to Richard to accept the crownare relayed via video link in a tissue thin piece of political theatre.Richard’s nightmare prior to the battle of Bosworth, in which he is visited bythe ghosts of all those he has had dispatched, is memorably realised.Elsewhere, the staging is formal and uncluttered.

This productionfeatures the complete originating cast, a diverse mix of English and Americantalent. The women are notably strong, led by Haydn Gwynne’s grief-hollowedQueen Elizabeth and Gemma Jones’s spectral Margaret. Chuk Iwuji’s sharp-suited,fast-thinking but ultimately doomed Buckingham stands out among the men, withstrong work also from Jack Ellis (whose Hastings seems like a Yorkshirealderman suddenly out of his depth) and Chandler Williams as the haplessGeorge, Duke of Clarence.

Spacey’s performance –only he seems allowed to access 21^st century idiom - is utterlydominant, however. The attention to physical detail of Richard’s infirmity isboth impressive and impressively sustained. His Richard might not be able to“strut before a wanton ambling nymph”, but he relishes being the centre ofattention and once he gets it, he fights tooth and claw to keep it. Hollywoodstar he may be, but when we talk about Kevin, we’re talking about a stageanimal.

REVIEW - HUGH HUGHES: STORY OF A RABBIT

2011-12-02T14:14:00.001-08:00

SydneyOpera House, November 30. Until December 10

At one point in the show, the emerging Welshmultimedia artist Hugh Hughes projects a quote from Luis Bunuel: “Fantasy and reality are equally personal,and equally felt, so their confusion is a matter of only relativeimportance."

Hugh Hughes

Apt,because that confusion of feeling resides at the heart of the three Hugh Hughesshows we’ve seen in Sydney (Rabbit isa sequel of sorts to Floating, whichplayed in this theatre in 2008).

The boyish boyo Hughes, you see, is afictional character, the irrepressible alter ego of performer Shon Dale-Jones.Yet, so appealing is Hughes, and so expert is Dale-Jones at narrowing the gapbetween his identity and that of his character, that we accept the reality ofHughes’s world from the moment he shakes our hand at the top of the stairs.

A handshake isn’t the only thing greeting uson our way in. The word “DEATH” is projected on the Playhouse backcloth. Presumably,Hughes has something serious to relate here.

Stage right sits Hughes’s friend Aled Williams,who creates a live soundtrack on keyboards, guitar and banjo, and also operatesthe lights. Props and objects are positioned on the stage: aladder, an Action Man in a Perspex case, a tea urn, a laptop and projector. Apair of shoes dangles above the stage. Also a potato.

After a deal of slightly frustrating chitchat(made all the more so in this performance by a spotlight-loving member of theaudience), two strands of story are unspooled: the first is that of a rabbit,specifically, one Hughes failed to keep alive for his next-door neighbour.

The second is Hughes’s recollection of hisfather’s death. By cutting them closer and closer, to the point where theyconverge, a poignant and gently humourous consideration ofmortality and memory is created.

The show looks a littlepuny in this large venue and Hughes’s voice wasn’t in tip-top shape for thisperformance, which lent his usual affability a somewhat forced edge.Nevertheless, Hughes’s storytelling, which leaps into the realms ofwish-fulfilment later in the piece, hooks you hard.

Are Hughes’s recollectionsreal? The details of dad’s death – too poetic to be true, surely? - suggestnot. Yet there’s something in his sincerity and in the pithiness of hisobservations that lead one to conclude they’re essentially truthful.

This confusion of fantasyand reality (mirrored in the show’s meticulously arranged sense of thehaphazard), and the emotions the subject of parental mortality engenders ineach of us, are what makes Story of aRabbit so curiously captivating.

REVIEW - THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

2011-11-29T13:14:00.001-08:00

Bella Vista Farm Park, November 27. Until December 29

It’s a fair trip to Bella VistaFarm for many (next stop Kellyville) but outdoor Shakespeare specialists Sportfor Jove make it worth the trek. Their Shrewis one of the most entertaining I’ve seen, and the funniest by a mile.

Danielle King as Kate

Director Damien Ryan and designerAnna Gardiner recast Shakespeare’s Padua as an Italian film studio in the 1930s.Baptista Minola (Christopher Tomkinson) is a movie director and a wealthy man. Suitorsfor the hand of his youngest daughter, the flighty starlet Bianca (LizzieSchebesta), include rival matinee idols Gremio (Barry French) and Hortensio(Terry Karabelas) and, by proxy, a student, Lucentio (Christopher Stalley) -who in this version has his sister Tania (Eloise Winestock) impersonate himwhile he goes undercover as Bianca’s German governess.

There’s a lot less in the way ofcompetition for Katarina (Danielle King). The elder and most troublesome of Minola’sdaughters is a headstrong aviatrix and accustomed to flying solo. Her one andonly suitor is Petruchio (James Lugton), a dowry-hungry naval officer used tobeing obeyed. Sparks must fly, and they do from the moment they clap eyes oneach other.

Ryan sounds all the subplots thoroughlyand funny business comes at you from deep in every frame. All the minorcharacters can be relied on to provide an illuminating moment or unexpectedguffaw: the play’s hapless, hopeless servants Grumio and Biondello (MichaelCullen and Ed Lembe-Hogan); the tailors (played as snippy French couturiers byMatt Edgerton and Amy Mathews); Petruchio’s hard-pressed crew.

Ryan has cast his leads perfectlyand Lugton is outstanding as Petruchio. He’s plausible (not some madcapdrunkard or anarchist), playful, and can turn his humour on a dime. He is morethan matched by King, who has a commanding way with Shakespeare’s language, andwhose Kate blazes with indignation, amazement, and eventually, admiration.

There’s no enlightenedfinger-wagging over Kate’s breaking-in and capitulation to her lord and master (playedin Bella Vista’s ancient wool shed, which serves as Petruchio’s ship). Wisely,I think, Ryan has it only make sense to those involved.

At the same time, you can’talienate at least half your audience, and Ryan turns the ending very cleverly witha filmed sequence (one of several, some quite inspired) which puts Kate firmlyin the driver’s seat and finds a witty double meaning in her infamous line, “placeyour hands below your husband’s foot”.

This richly imagined productionbenefits from good event management, too, though after the introductoryaddress, the crowd direction might feel less intrusive were it to emerge fromwithin the world of play rather than from outside it. Minor quibble. See thisshow.

TheTaming of the Shrew plays in repertory with Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Bothproductions then transfer to Leura from January 7 - 28

REVIEW - THE UGLY ONE

2011-11-28T12:39:00.001-08:00

SBW Stables Theatre, November 25. Until December 17

Marius Von Mayenburg’sshort, sharp and beautifully engineered satire jacks straight into contemporaryanxieties around individuality and identity.

Gig Clarke and Eden Falk in The Ugly One (pic by Patrick Boland)

At its centre is Lette (Eden Falk), a highly regarded industrialdesigner. We meet him just as he learns that his boss, Scheffler (Jo Turner),has vetoed his presentation at a technology expo because Lette is simply toougly to be the “face” of the company. Lette’s more attractive junior assistantKarlmann (Gig Clarke) will take his place.

Disbelief turns to despair when Lette’s wife Fanny (Jacinta Acevski) confirmsthat he is indeed very ugly – so stupendously ugly in fact, she can only lookhim in one eye.

Self-esteem in smithereens, Lette consults a surgeon (also calledScheffler, also played by Turner) who sells him on a radical – and as yetuntried – facial reconstruction.

The operation, performed with toe-curling live sound effects, is asuccess and Lette, now with the face of an Adonis, soon finds attitudes towardhim have changed. Women want him (especially the heavily-reworked 73-year-oldowner of a client company) and men want to be him. But with attitudes somarkedly changed toward Lette, what is happening to him on the inside? Worse isto come: Lette is shocked tofind that his new face is so desirable, it ceases to be his own.

SarahGiles’s lean production, played in a small arena, is built to the same tighttolerances as the script and is every bit as polished. Near-instantaneous character changes achieved withtelling shifts of inflection and posture from an excellent cast. With everysecond seemingly accounted for, the play comes in at just under the hour mark.

Yourassessment of Falk’s face seems to change purely based on the reactions of hisfellow cast members. It shows not only how very clever this play is, and howwell staged it is here, but also how susceptible we all are to this kind ofsurface judgement.

REVIEW - BEGUILED

2011-11-25T20:33:00.001-08:00

PACT, Erskineville, November 24. Until December 10

A “performanceinstallation” rather than a conventional text-based exercise, Beguiled takes its audience on asemi-guided tour around PACT’s darkened warehouse space and into some of itsnooks and crannies.

The event beginsin the foyer with a short address, the handing out of rocks and the sound of“phenomenal space inscribed on to a surface” (courtesy of sound designerMelissa Hunt).

The theatre’sdoors are opened and we are confronted by a trio of dancers performing atwitchy sequence. It will be the last time the audience experiences anything enmasse for some time because from this point, the crowd is divided into groupsand ushered into or around the installations in the space: a garishly lit roomcontaining a young woman who, according to information passed around, is inimminent danger of suffocation; an arrangement of large panels which are foldedinto a series of enclosures; a stairwell decked with plastic vines that is hometo a seemingly terrified young woman, which in turn leads to another roomfestooned with keys and fairy lights.

Ultimately, theaudience is brought together again for a lie down and a bit of shut-eye in thecurtained-off central space. We are politely asked to “dream the ending” to atwinkling soundscape.

Created by PACT’syoung and diversely talented ensemble, the evening’s elements share something in terms of mood but fromthe outside at least, the connections between its individual elements and tothe show’s title (which has several shades ofmeaning in itself) remain inscrutable. Bank on being bemused rather thanbeguiled.

REVIEW - AS YOU LIKE IT

2011-11-24T14:06:00.001-08:00

Belvoir, November 24. Until December 24

“All the world’s astage,” in Shakespeare’s many-stranded comedy of disguised love. In Eamon Flack’s production,all the world’s a theatre entire.

The play begins swith the audience stillchattering and the house lights up, as AshleyZukerman’sOrlando energetically airs his grievances to his ancient manservant Adam(Trevor Jamieson). From there, Act I is quickly dispatched, played up and downthe aisles. In essence, Duke Frederick’s court - in which people are routinelybullied, treated shabbily and denied their rights - is our world.

Alison Bell, Ashley Zuckerman and Trevor Jamieson (pic: Heidrun Lohr)

When Alison Bell’s beautifully played Rosalind(who seems genuinely taken aback by the eruption of passion in her life) is banished,she - along with her BFF Celia (a charmingly goofy Yael Stone) - escapes to theForest of Arden, an empty stage where anything can happen. Here, gender is aslippery construct and love in all its colours can be expressed (if notreciprocated). There’s a chill in the air, too. Pursuing your dreams andfollowing your passion can cost you a lot in creature comforts.

Taking inspiration from the idea thatShakespeare’s company would have been made up of distinctive personalities,Flack gives his own distinctive cast a long leash to play on. Charlie Garber(as the clown Touchstone) and Gareth Davies (shepherd Corin) playfully holdElizabethan in-jokes up to a contemporary light to see if they are still funny(some are not, and that’s funny in itself). Bell and Stone develop a winninglysnippy, sisterly relationship. ShellyLauman finds something touching in Silvius’s devotion to Davies’s slatternlyPhoebe. As the passionately melancholy, generationally isolated Jacques, BilleBrown’s delivery of the “seven ages of man” is this production’s dramatichighlight.

There are many lovelymoments and fresh interactions open to us in this production, though they seemrandomly scattered and the lead-up to the play’s multiple marriages feelsincoherent. As a result, the nuptial celebrations – led by a soulful CaseyDonovan (who is also terrific as country strumpet Audrey) – feel tinged with asense of relief rather than unbridled celebration.

REVIEW - FOUR DEATHS IN THE LIFE OF RONALDO ABOK

2011-11-23T14:39:00.001-08:00

Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, November 22. UntilNovember 26

It is June 2011 andSouth Sudan is just about to become the world’s newest nation state. But forRonaldo Abok, one of its many far-flung sons, there are more pressing matters.

Abraham Ajok in Four Deaths in the Life of Ronaldo Abok

Ronaldo is studyingfilmmaking but his latest script – a martial arts drama after the Bruce Lee’s Fists of Fury – has been rejected. Hiswritten English isn’t good enough, his tutor tells him. He has yet to find his“voice”.

So it’s back to thedrawing board and back to tearing tickets at the cinema he works in - which iswhere he meets and falls for Rachel, also Sudanese-Australian and a ManchesterUnited fan to boot, but with a much clearer idea of where she is headed inlife. The smitten Ronaldo will have to reconcile his past, his present, and hisideas for the future if he’s going to stand a chance.

Written by Ian Meadows after a lengthy development process in theSudanese community, Four Deaths in theLife of Ronaldo Abok isgently humorous and revealing play offering a glimpse into the lives andaspirations of one of our newest (and least understood) immigrant communities.

In short scenes,we see how day-to-day experiences in Australia (with its bureaucracies inparticular) are often coloured by memories of their past: of forced marchesthrough the desert at night; of life in the vast refugee camps on the Kenyanand Ethiopian borders (in which some of these actors spent up to nineyears).

The Sudanese castis an inexperienced one but the performances are good, especially that ofJohnson Ngor, whose easy charm immediately wins us over to Ronaldo. An equallyvivacious Amer Achiek imbues Rachel with grace and maturity, and Awek Akech andAbraham Ajok, playing Ronaldo’s Aunt and Uncle, have great presence.

A timely play thatbrings new faces, voices and stories to the stage. Let’s hope we get to hearmore of them in the near future.

REVIEW - GROSS UND KLEIN

2011-11-20T21:12:00.000-08:00

Sydney Theatre, November 19. Until December 23

Cate Blanchett delivers the bravest and most surprising performance I have seen from her to date as Lotte, the central figure in Botho Strauss’s episodic study of one woman’s estrangement from husband, family and the world.

Cate Blanchett (pic by Lisa Tomasetti)

We first encounter Lotte in the middle of a disastrous holiday, perched on the balcony of a hotel room in Agadir, Morocco. The tour party is no longer on speaking terms, it seems. Her husband has walked out. With no one to talk to, Lotte eavesdrops, excitedly relaying fragments of a conversation between two barely perceptible strangers in the upstage void. Lotte finds their empty business-speak (“beyond blue-sky thinking”, “thinking beyond the unthinkable”) captivating. Such thoughts! Such voices! Such men! She absorbs it all as if it were philosophy. Such is Lotte.

Returning to Germany, she moves into a share house (in which nothing is shared), hoping to reconcile with her writer husband Paul (Robert Menzies). He rejects her. So do her housemates.

Undeterred, Lotte reaches out to old friends and in one richly comic scene that brings Chekhov or Gorky to mind (Martin Crimp’s new translation offers a wealth of such material), her fractious family. She even accosts strangers in the streets but everywhere, meaningful connection is impossible.

Elegantly choreographing the diagrammatic elements of Johannes Schütz’s set, Benedict Andrews’s production creates lingering images of Lotte’s predicament: Lotte inside an illuminated phone booth; Lotte camped outside an building which Schütz has re-scaled to amplify her out-of-placeness. Characters emerge from and retreat into darkness. Disembodied voices hint at scenes we cannot see.

Blanchett constructs Lotte from a wealth of uninhibited-seeming yet carefully choreographed physical tics. At her most eccentric, she is terribly funny (dicing with apartment door buzzers in an attempt to see an old school friend, for example). At her most vivacious, she is threatening (as short term boyfriend Alf finds out when he attempts to dilute her romantic ardor with minor office chores). It is a performance of uncanny detail and riveting in its unpredictability.

A large supporting cast all have a moment or two to shine: Anita Hegh’s as Inge, Paul’s prickly new girlfriend, Josh McConville as a disdainful nano-technician; Belinda McClory as a small town couture-lover; Yalin Ozucelik as a drunken Turk barking words foreign to him. Alice Babidge’s unerring eye for telling details in commonplace costume is crucial throughout.

Lotte’s last moments are hauntingly staged. It takes a few moments before the audience can breathe again. It feels like a kind of apotheosis.

All the questions Lotte embodies are left open. Is she a schizophrenic tuned in to strange frequencies? An angel come to earth? My sense was of Lotte as a modern day holy fool: someone who, wearing the mask of foolishness and the disguise of folly, holds up the truth for all to see.

REVIEW - DEBT DEFYING ACTS!

2011-11-20T12:30:00.000-08:00

Sydney Theatre Company, November 18. Until December 30

The Wharf Revue team’s ability to squeeze the last drops of satirical juice from a year’s worth of near-stale stories is uncanny. That said, Debt Defying Acts! is one of their best in recent years, though hardened regulars may find it a shade more genial than previous shows.

Drew Forsythe, Phil Scott, Amanda Bishop and Jonathan Biggins (pic by Mark Nolan)

Framed in a Speigeltent-like set that lends this wide-ranging show a stylistic coherence it has lacked previously, highlights include a King Lear-like Rupert Murdoch (Drew Forsythe), driven to the brink over issues of succession, and a glorious Andrew Lloyd Webber spoof featuring Phil Scott’s cherubic Kevin Rudd as the half-masked, half-mad genius, and Julia Gillard (Amanda Bishop) as his troublesome muse. “Planning, plotting, in the shadows lurking …” Rudd croons, as he prepares to sequester her in a Parliament House disabled toilet so obscure it can only be reached by boat (or by tagging along with Alexander Downer).

The obligatory state politics skit – this time drawing on the musical Annie Get Your Gun – is much stronger than last year’s Unpopular Mechanicals effort, featuring Forsythe as the new sheriff in town, Barry O’Farrell, and enlivened by Bishop’s faded yet foxy showgirl Kristina Keneally.

It wouldn’t be a Wharf Revue without some of the old favourites making an appearance, though with Jonathan Biggins’s Paul Keating now working the numbers in a geriatric care facility, there’s a sense that at least one of them might be on their last legs.

Lowlights? Forsythe’s Gaddafi/Groucho Marx number has one cringing slightly, as does a country duet between billionaire mining magnates Twiggy Forrest and Gina Rinehart (Biggins and Scott). A shadow theatre take-down of broadcaster Alan Jones is a delightful idea but doesn’t sustain. They are quickly forgotten amid a wealth of much better material.

After an extensive out-of-town seasons, Debt Defying Acts! is thoroughly run-in and ticking over perfectly (witness the clapping game between gone-walkabout Green senators) and for an evening of penetrating humour livened up with the odd cheap shot, you can’t do better.

REVIEW - THE GIRAFFE'S UNCLE

2011-11-20T12:26:00.000-08:00

Newtown Theatre, November 16. Until November 27

Playwright Keiran Carroll unearths one of Sydney’s semi-precious literary treasures in author, freelance scribbler and full time eccentric Les Robinson.

Martin Portus as Les Robinson

Never heard of him? Not many have. A contemporary of luminaries such as Kenneth Slessor and Norman Lindsay, Robinson was a fixture in Sydney’s Bohemian arts and letters scene from the early 1930s onwards. He was not, however, a universally admired one. The poet Douglas Stewart described Robinson as “a demented hobgoblin … madly and maddeningly shaking hands with everyone in sight”.

But Robinson had his supporters, too, and with their help he managed to eke a meagre living writing for The Bulletin, Punch and The Australian Worker. A collection of Robinson’s surreal fables – The Giraffe’s Uncle - was published in 1933.

Robinson was happy to remain a stranger to success for his entire life, it seems, making just enough money to feed himself during lengthy periods of contemplative idleness during which he occupied a series of tumbledown shacks. During the Depression he lived in the sandstone caves around Middle Harbour, as did many others at that time.

Carroll’s portrait of this square-peg of a man is a humorous, compassionate and gently admiring one and actor Martin Portus blends crankiness with an ingratiating manner to bring Robinson to life very entertainingly. Better known as a broadcaster and critic, Portus hasn’t trodden the boards for 30 years, but you wouldn’t know it from this performance, which is confident and well drawn. A little more vocal light and shade wouldn’t go amiss but in a play an hour long, it’s hardly an issue.

Ron Hadley directs and his production is bare bones stuff, occasionally enlivened with archival footage of pre-WWII Sydney. Hadley’s team make a bit of a hash of the play’s only scene change, however, but it’s an easy fix if they see fit to address it.

REVIEW - GAMES IN THE BACKYARD

2011-11-18T12:46:00.000-08:00

ATYP Studio 1, November 17. Until December 3

Jessica Palyga

Written in 1993 and inspired by real events, Israeli playwright Edna Mazya’s script puts five adolescents and a controversial verdict into the dock.

Devori (Jessica Palyga) is fourteen, a bit wild by some standards and desperate for approval. It doesn’t take much for her to be lured to the shores of a local reservoir one sultry evening by four youths, older than she is though no less naïve. The ringleader of the group is Asaf (Dorje Swallow), on whom Devori has a crush.

With Asaf content to pull the strings, the boys indulge in rounds of sexually-charged hazing which sees Devori playing by a set of shifting rules. Each game is a test of sorts, to see how far this girl will go, and Devori, keen to seem less innocent than she is, finds herself very quickly cornered.

Mazya cuts back and forth from this drama into a courtroom some years later, where a similar dynamic is enacted. The four boys morph into their own legal team. Their victim becomes the prosecuting attorney. Cross-examined in aggressive style, Devori is again cornered. Meanwhile, the prosecutor is exposed to suggestive game-playing by her male colleagues.

Netta Yashchin’s production is strongly acted – particularly by Palyga, a newcomer to the Sydney stage - and uses this attractively rough studio space to its fullest extent (though it occasionally loses some dramatic focus as a result).

The hazing scenes are messy, athletic and well handled by a very capable cast - which also includes Michael Rebetzke, Joseph Del Re and Carl Batchelor – though the tension generated doesn’t carry into the courtroom scenes, which are less compellingly written.

The stumbling block here is Yashchin’s solution to the play’s TV drama-style cutting between locations. At the moment, the transitions are awkwardly long and no amount of scribbly (and not-quite-loud-enough) jazz-metal in the sound design can prevent the charge built up in the lakeside scenes from dribbling to earth.

REVIEW - GOD'S EAR

2011-11-14T12:52:00.000-08:00

Seymour Centre, November 12. Until December 3

How to speak when what needs to be said is beyond words? American playwright Jenny Schwartz takes the played out lexicon of love, loss and betrayal and turns it into 90 minutes of intricately arranged stream-of-consciousness riffs on themes of disconnection.

Julian Garner and Helen O'Leary in God's Ear

God’s Ear opens in a hospital waiting room as Mel (Natasha Beaumont) relates her young son’s last hours to husband Ted (Julian Garner). At times like these, words can only fail. “He’s in a coma. He’s hooked up to a respirator. He has a pulse. He has brain damage.”

The boy’s death spins the couple apart with Ted flying furthest. His job allows him the luxury of escape into the comforting rhythms and rituals of air travel (personified by a comely transsexual stewardess, played by Kieran Foster), into boozy, smarter-than-thou arguments in hotel bars, and eventually into a hook-up with a super-loquacious divorcee, Lenora (Helen O’Leary).

At home, Mel diverts herself with domestic chores while brushing off difficult questions (“what’s a call-girl?”) from her daughter, Lanie (Victoria Greiner). Meanwhile, unsolicited advice is provided by a dryly humorous Tooth Fairy (Gael Ballantyne) and a life-sized GI Joe action figure (Foster again, in macho mode this time).

Jonathan Wald’s production is a cool-toned and cleverly calibrated one and all in the cast seem comfortable delivering daisy chains of elliptical chitchat, gruesome puns (“beauty is in the eye of the beer holder!”), stale aphorism and cliché. If language itself can be stripped of real feeling, the writing suggests, then perhaps pain can be managed out of existence.

Schwartz’s writing is impressive, though from the mid-point, it becomes clear that her play’s appeal is almost entirely cerebral. I got to thinking not of the characters’ plight, but of Laurie Anderson’s arid monologues, and of Melbourne writer Matt Cameron’s play Ruby Moon – another play about couple unhinged by the loss of a child - and what a rather superior play that is.

That said, Wald’s cast (which also features Cameron Knight as a boozy bullshit artist) make this difficult material really fly at times. O’Leary is dizzily arresting as Lenora, and fine performances from Beaumont and Garner offer us glimpses through the verbal gymnastics and into the inexpressible grief at this story’s heart.

REVIEW - POSTS IN THE PADDOCK

2011-11-13T12:48:00.000-08:00

Carriageworks, November 10. Until November 19

The paddock is on the Upper Hunter Valley property farmed by the O’Brien family and their descendents for 120 years or so. The posts, eight of them, are all that remains of a slab hut that was home to James and Elizabeth O’Brien and their infant son. All three were murdered by Aboriginal bushranger Jimmy Governor during his 90-day rampage through New South Wales in 1900.

Sam Routledge (left) and LeRoy Parsons

Theatre company My Darling Patricia’s co-artistic director Clare Britton is herself a descendent of the O’Brien family and those eerie posts are the inspiration for this carefully crafted work of visual theatre which re-examines that terrible event and also its place within the wider tragedy of Governor and his people.

Episodes are related in different styles: in costume dumb show, in shadow puppetry, in songs, in animation sequences, and in the documented words of those whose lives are still shadowed by Governor’s actions.

In one sequence, trees are felled and slab fences erected. We are invited to think about the effects that might have on the psyche one someone whose job is to carve up and divide his people’s country. Add to that the slights and cheats Governor endured (he married a white woman and both were reviled for it), and a portrait emerges of a man (charismatically personified here by LeRoy Parsons) who has suffered considerable violence to the spirit.

Posts in the Paddock doesn’t seek to excuse or validate Governor’s actions. Rather, it serves to open up a dialogue between two sides of a story and people - black and white - who have grown up with the notion that some skeletons are best left in the cupboard. But, as performer Aunty Rhonda Dixon Grovenor says, wounds heal best when exposed to the sun, to salt water, and to the sight of others.

REVIEW - BONDI DREAMING

2011-11-10T13:20:00.000-08:00

Bondi Pavilion Theatre, November 9. Until December 3

It’s clearly informed by the folly and plight of the Bali Nine, but Sam Atwell’s play - like Manuel Puig’s The Kiss of the Spiderwoman - is just as much about the power of the imagination to comfort and sustain in dark times.

Greg Hatton (left) and Christian Willis (pic by John Dunn)

Bondi Dreaming takes us to a death row cell in an unnamed country. Bali, we assume. With only a firing squad to look forward to, it’s here that Charlie (Greg Hatton) and Frankie (Christian Willis) seek answers and solace in detailed fantasies of normalcy. Birthday parties. Footy games. Nights out with the boys. It is their alternate reality, a what-could-have-been.

When Macca (Wayne Bradley), the failed mastermind of the crime that landed them in gaol is returned to the cell after an absence, efforts to triangulate this complex charade falter. Now their role-playing only serves to highlight emotions that cannot be lived with.

This is the third time around for Bondi Dreaming after a debut season at the Newtown Theatre in 2008, and a return in the Seymour Centre’s BITE program in 2010. It has gained much from this unusually long gestation in front of an audience.

Atwell’s script always voiced its characters convincingly. He has a knack for getting what goes on in blokes’ heads into their mouths. He illuminates the tender feelings that are often suppressed in male friendships very poignantly, too. This feels like a less angry, more expressive play now. Funnier too, thanks to its splashes of gallows humour. As before, Atwell also directs, and the performances he draws from his cast are truthful and moving.

Bondi Dreaming has also gained a very effective set, a clever arrangement of sharply angled concrete slabs designed by Tom Bannerman. For once, pretty much every seat in the Pavilion’s wide-spread auditorium is a good one.

Less successfully, Atwell has also knitted in a series of Australian Story-style interviews with the mens’ relatives which are projected either side of the set. Useful scene breaks, perhaps, but widening the lens like this only to drag us out of the world of the play, and the emotions expressed seem pallid beside what is happening on stage in real time.

The play has lost its live percussion score since its debut though Alon Ilsar’s excellent sound design, which draws on field and radio recordings made in Bali, echoes it at times.

Video segments aside, Bondi Dreaming is an involving piece of theatre that touches on topical matters without getting mired in them. If this can’t generate interest in theatre at the Pavilion – particularly among those living within a stone’s throw – nothing will.

A post-show panel discussion on issues raised by the play featuring Michel Chan, brother of Andrew Chan (member of The Bali Nine), Peter Lloyd (ABC Journalist, sentenced to jail in Singapore for drug possession), Mark Davis (SBS Dateline Correspondent) and playwright Sam Atwell will take place on November 17.

REVIEW - A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

2011-11-08T12:37:00.000-08:00

Centennial Park, November 6. Until November 27

A sultry evening spent in sweaty costumes. Your tonsils dive-bombed by insects while you try to make yourself heard over aircraft noise and squabbling fruit bats.

Frank Hansen as Puck (pic by Marcelle Robbins)

The actors of Sydney co-op WildRumpuS have all these things to deal with and more in the two hours they spend romping through Shakespeare’s comedy of misdirected love.

It’s a rather more relaxing event for the audience, however. Played in the shallow, lushly grassed Belvedere Amphitheatre, a short stroll from Centennial Park’s Woolahra Gate, there’s plenty of space to spread out a blanket at whatever you deem a comfortable distance from the action.

This Dream, directed by Tony Cogin, begins with some enthusiastic if not very tuneful busking and Hyppolyta gazing out over the park, watching passenger jets curving away from the airport. It’s tempting to think the abducted Amazon queen might be pining for her home. Or maybe she’s just taking in the view, which at sunset, is very pretty indeed.

Cogin’s bare bones production opts for the strolling player look with some circus/burlesque flourishes for the fairies. The acting is uniformly hearty, the verse-speaking clear if not very nuanced, and the comic scenes – some of which are a bit over-choreographed – are energetically played. The actors’ voices are amplified, though the microphones provide only limited coverage. Any upstage turn or a move from the downstage sweet spot has a marked effect on clarity.

The emphasis is on fun and the cast is committed to showing the audience a good time. Warwick Allsopp’s Lysander is well matched by Luke Joslin as Demetrius, likewise Olivia Beardsley as Helena and Emma Cooperthwaite’s Hermia. Cogin, in the play’s plumb role, offers up an entertainingly bellicose Bottom, and the faerie realm comes across well led by Marika Aubrey (Titania), Torquil Neilson (Oberon) and Frank Hansen’s Puck, who capers in lycra and bejeweled codpiece.

There’s some still some work to be done to extract the comic potential in the rude mechanicals’ Pyramus and Thisbe and, as a result, this straightforward, traditional-seeming Dream fades at the end.

REVIEW - WARNING: EXPLICIT MATERIAL

2011-11-07T12:38:00.000-08:00

Ensemble Theatre, November 5. Until December 11

I can think of more apt precautionary statements to serve as a title to Geoffrey Atherden’s new comedy. Beware: Bogus Situations. Look Out! Convenient Plot Twists Ahead! Then again, if by “Explicit” he means “obvious”, he’s right on the money.

Artist and muse: William Zappa and Jessica Sullivan (pic by Steve Lunam)

Atherden’s 90-minute play – directed with unfussy efficiency by Mark Kilmurry – is centred on an encounter between Barry, an artist who lost his mojo years ago, and Daisy, the young art student who reactivates his lust for life, sex and art.

Barry Smith (William Zappa, perfect casting) is a former enfant terrible of the Australian art scene. His biggest claim to fame is a series called My Big Cock (images of his penis standing next to iconic buildings – a riposte to Feminist critiques of architecture, apparently). The exhibition was raided by the Vice Squad and closed before anyone saw it. The resulting furore – which Barry evidently enjoyed – also saw his unconventional home life make the tabloid headlines, culminating in “Artist Walks Out On Family”.

Now, after a twenty-year estrangement, his still-bitter daughter Alex (a sometimes fiery Michelle Doake) drops in to dad’s bush retreat. She’s ostensibly there to shoot a documentary segment on lesser-known (ouch!) artists. Instead, she uses the camera to interrogate her father about his past misdemeanors and his latest project, a series of Japanese pillow book-inspired images featuring Barry engaged in vigorous sexual activity with Daisy. And oh boy, has she got some news for him.

Fans of David Williamson will find themselves in familiar territory here though Atherden’s engineering of the play’s climax leaves something to be desired. Clumsiness extends into the dialogue, too, with its volleys of inexpertly calibrated crude language and Alex – an SBS arts journalist, she tells us - sounding off like a shock jock. Where do these so-called artists get off? How is it that artists can get away with saying and doing whatever they feel like? And just when you think Andres Serrano’s tired old Piss Christ might be hoisted up the flagpole, it is.

REVIEW - THE DARK ROOM

2011-11-06T16:11:00.000-08:00

Belvoir Downstairs, November 4. Until December 11

Composed from three strands linking six characters, Angela Betzien’s slice of vernacular Gothic takes place in a Northern Territory motel room over the space of a year.

Leah Purcell in The Dark Room (pic: Heidrun Lohr)

In the first scene, we observe social worker Anni (Leah Purcell) trying to win the trust of Grace, a profoundly disturbed teenager. Grace (Billie Rose Pritchard), we discover, is well known to the child protection agencies but is now on the run from an event whose awfulness only becomes apparent much later in the play. “You’re safe here,” says Anni. “This is a safe place.”

The same room, another time: Territory cop Stephen (Brendan Cowell), on an all-day bender, rows with his pregnant partner Emma (Anna Lise Phillips). They are Sydney-bred and very much out of their comfort zone. “It’s not safe out there,” says Emma without a trace of irony. “Streets crawling with cops.”

Betzien then introduces Stephen’s commanding officer into the frame. Craig (Cameron Stewart) is Old School, feared if not respected by his subordinates. Yet the man we see is fearful and desperate, about to face an inquiry into the death in custody of an aboriginal teenager.

Betzien’s script requires actors playing in different scenes to occasionally share the same space, the same bed, even the same cues, sometimes. It could be distracting were it not for director Leticia Cáceres, who organises bodies and words in exemplary fashion. The shallowness of the Downstairs stage makes it difficult for some in the audience to appreciate the production’s spookier moments, however, and Pete Goodwin’s electronic score takes a fraction too long to settle into its creepy symbiosis.

Cáceres has also cast the production extremely well, lead by Purcell’s Anni, dignified if not quite inured to failure, Phillips’s fiery Emma, and Cowell’s bleary, conscience-stricken Stephen. Pritchard’s portrayal of Grace is a convincing attempt to show what trauma-induced ferality might look and sound like.

Some psychological thrillers are happy to creep you out and let you go. By contrast, Betzien’s microcosmic short play – just 90 minutes long - haunts you afterwards because it looks beyond itself and out to injustices that must be acknowledged even if it can’t be rectified.

REVIEW - BARGAIN GARDEN

2011-11-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

Carriageworks, November 3. Until November 5.

Theatre Kantanka, last seen investigating aged care in Missing the Bus to David Jones, take us on another surreal trip, this time into consumerism’s bargain basement.

Recognising that the holier-than-thou, finger-wagging approach is no match for the oceanic tide of retail, Bargain Garden is seductive work about seduction itself. Rather than simply damn our consumption of giga-tonnes of disposable, everlasting junk, director Carlos Gomes and co-devisers wryly celebrate its candy-coloured desirability. It’s as if they have fallen for the very stuff they set out to despise, and who among us, during a trawl through Crazy Clark’s, hasn’t done just that?

This hour-long promenade performance has its audience free to roam like wide-eyed shoppers. Scenes take place around and among us. The eye-catching percussionist Claire Edwardes and bass clarinet player Jason Noble play a mashed-up score of real, toy and invented instruments – interspersed with in-store announcements - from a podium. Ramps at either end of the room serve as stages, and a large cube installation, when raised, reveals a series of performance sculptures. At other times, it is a movie screen.

There are elements of rub-your-nose-in-it street theatre (look out for the angry garbage monster!) but other than that, there’s little in the way of anti-consumer sentiment. Instead, Bargain Garden trades in sly textual and visual wit. A home-made trebuchet launches fluffy gonks at performer Kym Vercoe as she intones, letter-by-letter, toxic-sounding chemical compounds. Teik-Kim-Pok tells tale of his attachment to those ubiquitous white plastic chairs under a towering arrangement of same that hangs over him like a stationary tornado.

Most striking of all – marvellous, in fact - is a sequence that turns a selection of craptastic sporting gear and shoddy kitchen implements into a fashion parade-cum-religious ceremony that is weirdly joyous and unexpectedly inspiring.

REVIEW - NO MAN'S LAND

2011-11-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, November 1. Until December 11

All you can be sure of in watching Harold Pinter’s 1975 play is that by its end you’ll be less secure in your assumptions than you were at its beginning. Michael Gow’s production is funnier than I thought No Man's Land could ever be, but the relationships it portrays remain disconcertingly opaque.

John Gaden and Peter Carroll in No Man's Land

Two elderly men have just entered a room. The host is Hirst (John Gaden), a celebrated, if fading, man of letters. The guest is Spooner (Peter Carroll), obviously down-at-heel, a poet he claims.

It appears they have met on Hampstead Heath, the centuries-old magnet for those seeking rough trade or anonymous fumbles in the bushes. Yet they seem to be more than passing strangers. They recollect like old college chums. They joust like literary rivals. Some have guessed that they are not two separate characters at all but representations of Pinter’s ambiguous relationship with success and his acceptance into the realms of The Establishment. In the end, it doesn’t matter. No Man’s Land is a riddle with no solution.

Robert Kemp’s frame-filling design for this QTC/STC co-production enthrones Gaden’s dapper, dissipated Hirst plumb centre in a library-like, somewhat unreal set that could serve an Agatha Christie whodunit just as effectively.

Whatever gravitas Hirst retains after a trip to the Heath is quickly eroded as the whisky takes hold. He stumbles and slurs. Meanwhile, Carroll - whose grubby Spooner is less obviously queer than John Gielgud’s ultra-solicitous prototype - wheedles and jigs, probing for a foothold. “I elicit from all kinds a common and constant level of indifference,” he states, proudly, as if auditioning for the role of butler.

Everything changes with the entrance of Foster (Steven Rooke), who acts like some wastrel scion of old money, and the bouncer-like Briggs (Andrew Buchanan). Again, their relationships to Hirst are unclear – they vacillate between minders, servants and gaolers – but both are keen to repel Spooner’s creeping advance into their territory.

Gaden and Carroll’s relish in these roles is palpable and No Man’s Land benefits greatly from their long association in past productions. Watching these two veterans in such dazzling and playful form is a pleasure. Even if the nimbleness of their repartee and the sprightly tone of the production seem more Noel Coward than Harold Pinter at times, the chilly strangeness of No Man’s Land still makes itself felt.

REVIEW - SPROUT

2011-10-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

Old Fitzroy Hotel, October 30. Until November 19

Set in an environmentally ravaged future, Sydney writer Jessica Bellamy’s Sprout is a thoughtful addition to the growing genre of eco-catastrophe plays.

Ashley Ricardo (pic by Gerard Xavier Manfield)

No one can venture outside anymore it seems, not in the daytime at least. It’s a furnace out there. Most of the water is gone, most of the animals and plants with it. Dust storms scour whatever is left.

Those who are left eke out a much reduced, nocturnal existence, mostly without power or any form of media, save for a single radio station over which an elder, The Weatherman, intones fragments of poetry: Emily Dickinson’s Hope Is The Thing With Feathers, Elizabethan Robert Herrick’s erotic The Vine, Louis MacNeice’s Sunlight on the Garden.

Listening somewhere are John and Nicole, who is pregnant with her first child, and Tom and Emily, 16-year-olds who are attempting to nurture an unlikely little survivor. If there’s something of Mary and Joseph in John and Nicole, there’s also a hint of Adam and Eve in the teenagers as Bellamy explores life’s fragility, adaptability and ultimately its resilience.

Bellamy’s script is carefully constructed, framing flashes of rich poetry with her own parched prose. Gin Savage’s production, skeletally designed by Owen Phillips, is spare but effective. Low-keyed, well-judged performances from Ashley Ricardo, Fayssal Bazzi, Maltida Ridgway and Sam O’Sullivan pay close attention to language and rhythm, making Sprout both a pleasure to watch and listen to.

Bellamy’s idea of radio as a medium to sooth and inspire (rather than distract or enrage) harks back to the era of communal wireless listening. “Dickinson talks despair today,” intones The Weatherman, “Like birds, let worries fly away.” At times, The Weatherman’s attempts to sustain memory and language through great literature seems to echo Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

A brief, melancholy work of theatre, but in the end, a hopeful one.

REVIEW - A NEW BRAIN

2011-10-30T16:36:00.000-07:00

Sidetrack Theatre, October 29. Until November 12

Composer Gordon Schwinn is gay, a Jew, living with his mother, and oppressed by a job writing songs for a kids’ show hosted by a frog called Mr. Bungee. No wonder he’s getting headaches.

But when he collapses during lunch with his friend and agent Rhoda, it becomes apparent that Schwinn’s pain is more than existential. Tests and scans reveal a genetic abnormality in a blood vessel in his brain. It could pop at any time, the fix is surgical, and he has a 50/50 chance of surviving the operation. One way or another, life will never be the same.

Gavin Leahy (centre) as stricken composer Gordon Schwinn

Inspired by his own brush with mortality, William Finn’s upbeat 1998 musical mines similar territory to Bob Fosse’s movie All That Jazz or Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, in that the central figure, once hospitalised, can be subjected to all manner of hallucinations and fantasy/reality mash-ups involving dancing nurses, maniacal doctors and stricken loved ones. In this case, Schwinn is also haunted by an unfinished song and by his employer, Mr. Bungee, who becomes, in effect, his bête vert.

Finn’s score and book (co-authored with James Lapine) shoehorns a mix of wisecracking, occasionally sappy lyrics into a soul and gospel-styled frame. In tone, it feels rather more like Alan Menkin’s Little Shop of Horrors, than Finn’s prickly and dissonant Tony Award-winning calling card Falsettos. (That said, there aren’t many who can get away with rhyming “fuck it” with “Nantucket”.)

Directed by Craig Stewart, this production by Sydney-based Off-Broadway musical specialists Squabbalogic bustles through 30 songs in just over 90 minutes. There’s scarcely chance to catch a breath between numbers, but this very capable cast voice the harmonies of Jason Robert Brown’s arrangements in lively style and they animate Simone Sallé’s outbursts of happy-clappy choreography with plenty of heart. An offstage five-piece band (under musical director Alex Ash) plays well though the sound is thin at times.

Everyone gets a moment to shine – it’s that kind of show – but stand-outs include Gavin Leahy’s anxious Schwinn, a warmly melodious Blake Erickson as his sailboat-loving boyfriend Roger, Keira Daley as the archetypal gay man’s best friend Rhoda, and Mark Simpson’s “Poor, Unsuccessful and Fat” male nurse.

Looking like he has hopped out of a Tim Burton movie, an unrecognisable Jay James-Moody is terrific as Mr. Bungee, and Shondelle Pratt lights up the stage as a homeless woman, a choric figure (a New York version of the bird-feeding beggar lady in Mary Poppins, if you like) whose day-at-a-time philosophy stands in marked contrast to just about everyone else’s.

The message? You can’t miss it. You don’t need a new brain, you need a new way of thinking. After this super-enthusiastic show, however, you might just feel like a lie down in the dark.

REVIEW - JULIUS CAESAR

2011-10-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

Sydney Opera House, October 27. Until November 26

There’s no blood in this sober, stylish and hard cut version of Shakespeare’s political drama. Instead we watch, enthralled mostly, as political ambitions, reputations and lives are turned – literally sometimes – to dust.

Alex Menglet as Julius Caesar

Working from a condensed text by Kate Mulvany (who also plays the arch conspirator Cassius), Bell Shakespeare’s recently appointed Associate Director Peter Evans stages the drama in a monochromatic, TV studio-like space bounded on three sides by office chairs. Huge theatre lamps on stands provide baleful light. Upstage left, a ruined Roman column fenced off by scaffolding stands as a monument to past glories and evidence of current malaise.

Working with movement director Nigel Poulton, Evans deploys a distinctive physical and theatrical language to make the machinations of a well-known plot strange to us. We notice the performers observe a momentary pause before entering the playing space, a break in the stride that seems to ritualise the action. Choreographed changes of pace highlight and isolate those out of step with events. Kelly Ryall’s sound design conjures the Roman mob from sampled voices into the unearthly roar of the football terrace.

There are no swords or daggers, and, save for a single symbolic splash at the moment of crisis, no blood. Death, when it comes, is represented by handfuls of white dust that, after Caesar’s assassination (which is suspended across the interval) hangs in the air like the fall out from an explosion.

Mulvany’s editing becomes more apparent after interval and particularly in Acts VI and V. Reports from the battlefront, delivered by the ghost of his wife Portia (Katie-Jean Harding) intelligently condense Shakespeare’s big picture politics into a riveting personal drama with a tight focus on Colin Moody’s passionate Brutus, whose folly and desperate isolation is realised in a haunting final scene.

Kate Mulvany as Cassius

It’s a clever and creative treatment of the play though in the end, a triumvirate of fine performances carries the day. Alex Menglet has crafted an aggressively eccentric and unpredictable Caesar, not above using his infirmities as a weapon to discomfort others. Moody blazes throughout and is as good here as I’ve ever seen him, and Mulvany’s tinder-dry Cassius - ambiguously feminine with a touch of hauteur in the voice that recalls Katharine Hepburn – just about steals the show.

REVIEW - JUDITH

2011-10-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

Bondi Pavilion, October 22. Until November 6

Inspired by the Apocryphal tale of the decapitation of the Babylonian general Holfernes by a comely Israelite widow, Howard Barker’s one-act play is a densely wrought parable on themes of duty and desire. Not your typical night out in Bondi, in other words.

Luisa Hastings Edge and Benedict Samuel (pic by Heidrun Lohr)

We meet Holofernes in his tent on the eve of a battle that will seal the fate of the Jews. He is in gloomy and self-analytic mood yet in no mind for mercy. Tomorrow, a massacre is on the cards.

Ushered in and watched over by her servant, Judith slinks in, ostensibly his entertainment for the night. Neither is in any hurry to find solace between the sheets, however. Instead a duel of ideas and emotions ensues in which weakness is strength and seduction indistinguishable from deception.

The ideological objective versus the personal subjective; the sacrifice of self in acting for the collective. Barker crams a lot into an hour-long play and delivers it in a knotty rhetorical style that is a challenge for actors and audience. Recognising that, Cathy Hunt’s production – her first as a director – is a sober and thoughtful one. Moodily lit by Christopher Page and housed in a tent made of rope (designer Michael Hankin), Judith looks handsome, uses this tricky space quite well, and is credibly performed by its young cast.

Luisa Hastings Edge has her work cut out as Judith - a role that requires her to veer from abject powerlessness, through a bout of hysterical paralysis, and eventually into god-like dominion (“Israel / Is / My / Body!” is one heck of a line to deal with) – but she demonstrates each step clearly. Anna Houston is likewise effective Judith’s minder and motivator, combining a procuress’s cunning with some deft timing. Benedict Samuel makes for a Byronic Holofernes, and at first it’s a challenge to believe he’s ever swung a sword in anger, yet, as the play progresses, his portrayal of Barker’s runt-turned-war criminal appreciably fills out.

REVIEW - RU4ME?

2011-10-23T17:23:00.001-07:00

Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, October 21. Until October 29

The last time I saw Annie Byron on stage – about three weeks ago - she was playing a 10-year-old. This time, she’s acting her age in her own one-woman show, an adaption of Australian psychologist Andee Jones’s book Kissing Frogs.

Annie Byron as Connie in RU4Me?

Connie is a vivacious upper-middle-aged singleton in need of a movie date, and companionship with a view to love but not marriage. She is, she tells us, “a curious and constant seeker, though no longer for perfection.”

At the urging of her daughter, she joins an online dating agency where, we are not very surprised to discover, she is exposed to a new world of desire, deceit, hope and rejection.

Pitched in a chatty conversational style, RU4ME? makes for gentle, funny-old-life-affirming comedy. Some of the laughs come from the skewering of the romantic aspirations and ineptitude of Baby Boom blokes, but it also has something more profound to say about the ways in which men’s adherence to prescribed roles (seducer, provider, husband) compromises their ability to give and receive love.

A few of Connie’s would-be lovers are set up for easy laughs with unflattering mug shots and comic computer graphics. It’s by no means a turkey shoot, however. More often than not, we share in Connie’s uncommonly non-judgemental regard for most of her suitors, and in her rueful recognition of their failings.

Other than the bright-eyed Connie, there’s not much to look at in Wayne Harrison’s no-frills production (a desk, a few chairs scattered around, a projector screen) but that’s fine given Bryon’s delivery invites immediate connection.

REVIEW - TITUS ANDRONICUS

2011-10-21T13:35:00.000-07:00

ATYP Studio, October 20. Until November 5

A discomforting blend of tragedy, horror and black humour, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is a difficult play to embrace. It’s harder still to take seriously. The critic Harold Bloom labeled the play “a howler”, and suggested the best director for it would be Mel Brooks.

Gabriel Fancourt

There have been attempts to frame Titus as an essay on human resilience in the face of incalculable suffering. But what to do with the Shakespeare’s juvenile jokes and gory shock effects? Sometimes, when the heads roll, all you can do is laugh, and in this production by Cry Havoc, directed by Kate Revz, we do – even if we’re not always meant to.

General Titus (Helmut Bakaitis) returns victorious to Rome with Goth Queen Tamora (Suzanne Pereira) as his trophy. But his triumph comes at enormous personal cost: all but two of his sons died in battle.

Still wreathed in the smoke of war (as is much of this production), Titus executes Tamora’s first-born son. She vows revenge, and when new-crowned Emperor Saturninus (Berynn Schwerdt) takes her to his bed, she finds herself perfectly placed to exact it. A cycle of tit-for-tat atrocity – murder, rape, mutilation, cannibalism – is set in motion.

Lucilla Smith’s set design – which shrouds the interior of the ATYP Studio in black plastic - pre-disposes the audience to the idea that bad things will go down. Revz’s 14-member cast oblige with enthusiastic deployment of fake blood, arterial spray effects and handfuls of rubber intestines. Much depends on individual squeamishness, but mostly the effects elicit guffaws more than gasps.

The playing is uniformly hot and anguished. Only once does a chill form, when the animalistic rape of Titus’s daughter Lavinia (Eloise Winestock) is played out for all to see. Again though, its impact is diminished when Revz oversteps. Having one of the rapists frig himself with Lavinia’s lopped-off hand doesn’t add much by way of impact. Nor does giving Lavinia the opportunity to orally castrate one of her tormentors in the play’s ghastly climax.

Heavy-handed soundscaping (Caitlin Porter) soaks the play in a low roar that deadens the poetry. Movement sequences (by Sam Chester) are hit and miss. There are good performances discernable, however: Anthony Taufa’s scheming Aaron; Pereira’s lusty Tamora, and Gabriel Fancourt and Demitrios Sirilas as her rampaging sons. Bakaitis looks for some Lear-like gravitas in Titus and comes close at times, though he’s more convincing when playing the capering loon with a butcher’s knife.

All up, an entertainingly grisly effort, but one that fails to make a case for a reappraisal of Titus. Too often it feels bogged down in finding solutions to problem moments rather than the play entire.

REVIEW - NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY

2011-10-20T13:48:00.000-07:00

Darlinghurst Theatre, October 18. Until November 13.

Based on William Goldman’s slender mid-1960s potboiler, No Way To Treat A Lady brings together two men with serious mother issues.

One is failed actor Christopher “Kit” Gill, son of a recently deceased Broadway star in whose shadow he has become seriously warped. The other is Morris “Mo” Brummell, a lonely and desk-bound detective sharing an apartment with his emasculating Jewish mom, Flora.

Jason Langley gets to grips with mother issues
in No Way To Treat A Lady

Their paths cross when Kit embarks on a serial killing spree that also allows him to indulge his unappreciated acting skills in a series of disguises (Irish priest, Latin dance teacher, etc). Morris is assigned to the case and as the bodies pile up (all middle-aged women, all with a trademark lipstick kiss planted on their foreheads), he too begins to enjoy some of the fruits of celebrity.

When the strangler’s rampage finally earns a banner headline in The New York Times, Kit calls Morris to crow, “We’re a hit!” It’s a curious co-dependency.

Composer and lyricist Douglas J. Cohen’s adaptation (which dates back to 1987) turns all this into a lightweight, smart-alecky spoof that gently mocks both the hardboiled cop genre and music theatre (and those who love it).

Cohen seems more than a little enamored of his own cleverness at times and some of the numbers are long-winded, but Stephen Colyer’s sharply acted and well sung production makes good with the material. If the densely compacted lyrics don’t always emerge cleanly from Craig Renshaw’s keyboard-based arrangements, we’re not much worse off for it.

An expressive Jason Langley imbues Kit with an air of stagey self-awareness that is very funny at times and Phillip Lowe lends the schmucky Morris just enough charisma to believably capture the attention of Katrina Retallick’s more realistically drawn Sarah Stone, the art-loving uptown girl who falls for him, and later into a trap. Julie O’Reilly is unfailingly energetic as the show’s quick-change parade of disposable ladies and Mo’s overbearing mother.

REVIEW - THIS YEAR'S ASHES

2011-10-13T14:20:00.000-07:00

Griffin Theatre, October 12. Until November 19

It’s described by Griffin Theatre as a “reluctant romantic comedy”, but Jane Bodie’s bittersweet play isn’t shy when it comes to embracing some of the genre’s familiar tropes.

Belinda Bromilow as Ellen

Ellen (Belinda Bromilow) is a thirtysomething singleton, a modest success in her field. She works in marketing, plugging a device that helps you locate your mislaid mobile phone. She lives in a studio apartment in Elizabeth Bay with water glimpses - if only she could bear to raise the blinds, that is.

What marks Ellen apart from the Bridget Joneses of the world is her isolation. Without close friends and with no family near her, she seems lost. Most nights Ellen props up bars, alone, drinking to the point of amnesia. Most mornings she wakes alongside another disappointing man whose name she can’t remember.

Then, after yet another scratchy encounter (humorously negotiated with Nathan Lovejoy as a fumbling uni student), the dishevelled Ellen arrives home to find her father Brian (Tony Llewellyn-Jones) waiting for her. He’s been gone for two years. Where? He’s reluctant to spell it out - and many in the audience will find he doesn’t need to – but for now, his presence is a welcome one. Brian’s offer to stay and revisit happier days spent listening to the cricket commentary on the radio proves irresistible.

This Year’s Ashes is a broadly appealing, wryly funny and touching comedy and this clear-sighted production directed by Shannon Murphy shows it off to its best advantage. It is ideally cast and near flawlessly performed.

Ellen can seem an overly considered construction at times (she makes a living creating needs in others yet cannot satisfy her own – the irony!) but Bromilow’s performance is wholly alive and convincing.

Llewellyn-Jones radiates warmth and gentle bemusement as Brian and his explanation of his recent whereabouts is beautifully played. Even for those who guessed beforehand, it is the emotional highpoint of the evening.

Lovejoy, who is really hitting his stride as a performer, gets to showcase his range as Ellen’s lovers and he’s entirely charming as Adam, an old one-night stand whose recollection of the event proves rather more durable than Ellen’s and whose reappearance – on New Year’s Eve – offers hope of redemption.

REVIEW - KURSK

2011-10-10T13:24:00.000-07:00

The Studio, Sydney Opera House, October 8. Until October 16

Das Boot. We Dive At Dawn, Hellcats of the Navy. Gray Lady Down. I’m a sucker for submarine dramas. Even the bad ones. Even K19 – The Widowmaker. For Kursk, staged in enveloping detail by British company Sound & Fury, I am the proverbial sitting duck.

Tom Espiner (left), Keir Charles (centre)

Kursk, as you probably remember, was the giant Russian nuclear submarine lost in the Barents Sea during a Russian naval exercise in August 2000. All aboard were killed, most dying in the first few seconds of the accident. Month later, it was revealed that 23 members of Kursk’s crew had survived for many hours –days, possibly - in one of the vessel’s remaining watertight compartments.

Any attempt to stage that would be difficult at best, tasteless at worst. Instead, playwright Bryony Lavery has the audience experience the event from a distance, from a British submarine covertly monitoring its much larger Russian counterpart. By immersing the audience in the daily grind of the submarine life, a creeping empathy with the unseen men on Kursk is established.

The audience observes the production from a walkway surrounding the set or from the stage floor, milling around a platform representing the control room of the boat. Lights wink, computer screens show sonar sweeps, a periscope slides up and down. Terse instructions are relayed from captain (“The Boss”, Laurence Mitchell), to coxswain Donnie Black (Ian Ashpitel), to helmsman and adoring new dad Mike (Tom Espiner, Kursk’s co-director).

Elsewhere around the room, from which all seating has been removed (you will be standing for 90 minutes), there are crew bunks, showers, a toilet, the captain’s cabin and crew relaxation room. The production’s 3D sound and lighting plots are operated as if by members of the sub’s crew.

With all this technology on display, the human element is crucial and the crew is warmly-drawn, exemplified by Keir Charles’s sexually frustrated Casanova Ken, and Ashpitel’s veteran coxwain, who shares a new found love of poetry with all and sundry.

The staging is innovative though Kursk doesn’t strive to rise too far above genre clichés. In fact, they tend to work for the piece, not against it. Much of the dialogue feels verbatim real, though some passages – the fatal flaw in Russian torpedos spelled out for the benefit of the audience, for example – feel rather more clunky. Indeed, the captain’s soliloquies would not be out of place in a stiff upper-lipped play set on the Western Front in 1918.

Kursk’s blending of humour, sentiment, Dan Jones’s masterly sound design and convincing technical detail makes for an enjoyable rather than deeply involving ride. Then, just when you are comfortable with that, Kursk’s coup de theatre is launched: having come to know them via their British proxies, we hear the shivering voices of Russian submariners struggling for air.

REVIEW - BLOODLAND

2011-10-09T14:16:00.000-07:00

Sydney Theatre Company Wharf 1, October 7. Until November 13

This deeply collaborative piece of theatre, helmed by Bangarra’s Stephen Page, transports its audience to Arnhem Land, to a community divided by kinship first and foremost, but by other fault lines besides.

There is conflict between city-educated Billy (Kelton Pell) and traditional law man Djurrpun (Banula Marika). There is a mining company exploiting clan rivalries. There is tension between the elders and the young, whose embrace of Western culture makes the maintenance of traditional ways more important and more difficult. And at the heart of the story is a “wrong skin” relationship between youngsters from the community’s Yolgnu moieties, Dhuwa and Yirritja.

Ursula Yovich (pic by Danielle Lyonne)

Spoken mostly in Yolgnu (without subtitles), Wayne Blair’s script – developed from a story by Stephen Page and Kathy Balngayngu Marika – is a series of multi-character vignettes. There’s outback kitchen sink realism, as women bicker over groceries while youngsters share Chris Brown MP3s. There’s blunt satire, in which a teacher (a Miss White, no less) variously shoots, stabs and axes her students to death on Australia Day for daring to question the primacy of the Queen’s English.

Interspersed with these are choreographed sequences, blending traditional and contemporary forms with a strong emphasis on ritual.

If the tonal shifts jar sometimes, Stephen Page’s diverse dozen-strong cast do not. Ursula Yovich haunts with her singing and playing of a disturbed young woman toting her plastic bag of old mobile phones. Tessa Rose is excellent as the combative Bathala and Elaine Crombie’s comic abilities are put to good use. Rarriwuy Hick and Noeline Marika have no acting CVs to speak of but perform very strongly throughout.

David Page exploits his charisma as the local kava merchant. He’s part magician, part drug pusher. Meyne Wyatt, Hunter Page-Lochard and Rhimi Johnson Page are individually striking as the community’s young men, in whom the stresses of contemporary indigenous life are realised.

The negotiations that go into a piece such as Bloodland are there to see, apparent in the fabric of the work. Some may find it uneven. Some may be unaccustomed to having to piece together the story without being led by the hand - though it’s not difficult to understand what is going on. Strong production choices – in particular Damien Cooper’s lighting and Steve Francis’s score – lend Bloodland a sense of totality and coherence it might not otherwise have.

For me, the only negotiation that feels incomplete at the moment is that between the climax of the work – a powerful and very real feeling rite - and the end of the show, which observes all the usual Western conventions. Perhaps a work that asks you to come at it in your own way, in your own time, could leave you with an option of when and how to disengage.

REVIEW - LUCKY

2011-10-09T14:11:00.000-07:00

New Theatre, October 6. Until October 22

This modestly experimental drama/physical theatre hybrid is focused on two young men who put their lives into the hands of a refugee trafficker in the hope of a better life, and to discover what became of their brother, Lucky.

Hoa X, Guy Simon and Drew Wilson (pic by Robbie Pacheco)

Since Lucky left the village, nothing has been heard from him or of him. No one even knows if Lucky ever arrived at his destination. And as this voyage turns into a dangerous ordeal for Dannybird and Abduma (actors Hoa X and Guy Simon), it looks more than likely he did not.

Ferenc Alexander Zavaros’ script is spare and libretto-like, sharing the storytelling with gesture-based choreography, low-flying aerial sequences, and a live soundtrack composed and played by Joseph Nezeti on his laptop from side of stage.

Lucky isn’t particularly gripping a piece of drama, given that we have three men adrift on a raft, storms brewing, a violently unpredictable skipper (Drew Wilson), and supplies running low. But viewed with even a dim awareness of what asylum seekers endure in order to reach Australia – and the uncounted hundreds or thousands we imagine never made it - the work maintains a hold on our attention for its hour of stage time.

Designer and director Sama Ky Balson’s production evokes a swirling, uncertain world. The poetic text, the motion of the raft, and the textures of Ross Graham’s lighting and Nezeti’s score come together very effectively at times. Her cast acquit themselves well in roles more emblematic than human, and the movement sequences, co-devised by Balson and collaborator Kirk Page and performed on a rig of rope ladders and canvas, are capably staged if a little underwhelming. The New Theatre is not well suited to feats of aerial derring-do.