Contest

23 Mar

Five rather different women meet to play netball. The focus is not so much on plot as character. (We’re not being asked to care who wins a game.)

You could read the piece as a representation of the female experience; the sort of piece with the raison d’etre of bearing witness.

And, if you do read it that way, you have very good reason. After all, over millennia, too much theatre has represented the lives and values of men, and this sort of piece seems an appropriate response.

The reason I’m not suggesting that it’s my reading of Emilie Collyer’s Contest is because I think it’s more dramatically thrilling than that. (When we say too many plays represent the male experience, we often make the mistake of thinking that was their conscious purpose. If it had been, the theatre created would never have had the cultural impact we rightfully complain that it’s had.)

Contest is thrilling, not because of its reportage, but because of its metaphors.

The metaphors are provocative, and threefold.

Firstly, we’re presented a team. Are we ever really a team? Do we pursue shared goals? Or are all our relationships purely transactional? And, if they are, of what are we robbing ourselves?

Secondly, the team plays in a competition. Is Life a competition? Is it really a zero-sum game, one in which my gain necessitates your loss? And, since so little of Life is actually played out on any field where comparisons could be made – our inner lives, for example – what’s the impact of our focus on competition? What is being erased?

Thirdly, it’s a sporting competition. Since sport is physical, we’re asked to what degree do we see ourselves as our bodies? There’ s probably no Life without the physical body, but there’s so much of Life in which we are unconscious of the body. How do we get the balance right?

I’ve outlined these metaphors without reference to the female experience, partly because I’m not in a position to evaluate their veracity or efficacy, and partly because the excitement of this piece of theatre derives not from being a representation, but from being an invitation. (As the above questions assert.)

Under the leadership of director Kirsty Semaan, the creative team make bold choices.     

The soundscape by Charlotte Leamon is suitably tension-creating (though sometimes in performance it challenges the actors’ vocal work.)

The simple evocation of a court by designer Jason Lowe gives the performers a fitting place to play. (It would’ve been great to see the physicality pushed even more; netballers can really throw.)

Semaan elicits good work from her cast. Willa King effectively reveals the tension between authority and waning power. Emma Monk presents well the annoyance of being reduced to an inspiring anecdote. As the over-pleaser, Suz Mawer is both amusing and affecting. Lana Morgan gives a disquieting portrait of almost existential enervation. Melissa Jones takes a character who is almost resolutely shallow, and successfully unpacks her to give us a portrayal of subtlety and poignancy.

Paul Gilchrist

Contest by Emilie Collyer

presented by Space Jump Theatre Company

at Flight Path Theatre until March 28

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Yarno Rolling

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Four Quartets

20 Mar

There’s something about this that reminds me of the experience of lying on your back and looking up into the night-time sky.

You know it’s beautiful, you know it’s deep … but you have to admit, after a while, that awe becomes tainted by alienation, and reverence begins its decay into indifference.

And then something shoots across the darkness, with a fiery life-changing radiance.

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets has plenty of lines that utterly light up the sky.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality”

“In my end is my beginning”

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”   

Four Quartets is about our relation to Time, and our seeking, in the Here and Now, of …. something… be it Meaning, or Salvation, or Love.

It crackles with religious allusion: Arjuna and Krishna in the Chariot of Life; medieval mystic Julian of Norwich’s extraordinarily provocative ecstatic assertion “All is good, and all manner of things are good”; and the Christian symbolism of the fire, the dove, the rose.

By the time Eliot wrote Four Quartets, he was making his peace with Christianity, and the tension inherent in that most unusual of religious outlooks – that a particular historical event, the Incarnation, is the key to eternity – is a tension that charges the entire piece.

Though concerned with the mystical, it’s not a guidebook, not a-here-is-how-I-achieved-enlightenment sort of crow, but rather an utterly intriguing sharing of moments in the journey of a troubled soul. It feels like a riff on the beginning of The Divine Comedy.

Dante suggests

“Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark,/For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”  

while Eliot says

“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-/Twenty years largely wasted” 

But, regardless of these musings on the spiritual, many people might feel that the fundamental question raised by this piece is whether it’s actually meant for performance.

After all, not every brilliant creation is. The Periodic Table of the Elements is a stunning human achievement, but I’m not sure I could bear it being recited on stage.

Eliot’s language is beautiful, but often abstract. Somewhere in the early 20th century, poetry seemed to relinquish its claim to be a spoken form and demanded instead to be read. Many of us will openly acknowledge that the only modern poetry we understand on first hearing is the type found inside a Hallmark greeting card.

But Eliot himself considered his work theatrical. In fact, some of the lines from the first quartet, Burnt Norton, come from a draft of his play Murder in the Cathedral (though, as Eliot admitted, ones the producer didn’t feel he could make work on stage.)

Four Quartets also has the challenge that it doesn’t present as a dramatic monologue. We’re not getting a definite character, like Prufrock. In fact, it’s not really clear if it’s the same persona speaking through the four sections. In this production, there are four different actors.

Am I saying it shouldn’t be staged?

Not at all.

Directed by Patrick Klavins, this production is fascinating because it explores the frontiers of theatre.

The staging is appropriately simple, allowing the language the pre-eminence it deserves.

It’s thrilling to witness the gifted cast (Sandie Eldridge, Grace Stamnas, Charles Mayer & Kaivu Suvarna) face the challenge of presenting this script: finding those moments of natural dialogue, which pop up like mushrooms after rain; gently delivering those moments where the abundance of the language threatens to overwhelm, like the deluge itself; and powerfully portraying despondency, when the clouds gather, and joy, at the sun’s final glorious appearance.  

Paul Gilchrist

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot   

Presented by The Wounded Surgeon

at the Old Fitz until 20 March, as a late show

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Matt Bartlett

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Fair Play

14 Mar

This one would be a challenge to make work: there’s only two actors, it’s 100 minutes long, there’s a huge number of short scenes, and it’s about athletics.

It does work, and gloriously so, thanks to skilful direction by Emma Whitehead and cracking dialogue by Ella Road.

Whitehead marshals a talented team to splendid effect, with projection by Aron Murray, lighting by EJ Zielinski, sound by Mitchell Brown & Osibi Akerejola, design by Kate Beere, and movement choreography by Cassidy McDermott Smith, all creating a pleasingly complete world of vitality and tension.

As Anne and Sophie, Rachel Crossan and Elodie Westhoff give terrific performances. There’s high-energy physicality and well-delivered humour, but also inspiring representations of strength and moving representations of vulnerability. 

For most of the play it appears we’re being given a story of young female friendship, and we could do with more of these on our stages. And it passes the Bechdel test with flying colours; sure there’s talk of boys, but they’re far from the focus of these two young women’s lives – they live to run.

Or is it to compete?

That’s the twist. Competition is not inherent to friendship. There’s something frightening and threatening about competition being the backdrop to this relationship.

Until about 80 minutes into the show I was enjoying the richness of this representation of a friendship played out in an environment hostile to genuine trust and connection – and then it changed into a play about something else. Considering this change happens a long way into the action, to discuss it risks breaking the spoiler rule – but then the idea of rules and who gets to make them is one of the things the play tries to teach us, so I’m going to break it.

Read on at your own peril.

The play becomes a promotion of the argument that a neat binary concept of sex doesn’t fit reality. As one character says, the science isn’t reductive, but society is.

Does the play become didactic? We do hear from the other side. Aired is the view, that in physical competition, a clear binary division between the sexes is fairer. But the arbitrariness, and cruelty, of such a view is made apparent.

I found this change in what the play was doing frustrating, because matters of importance were being rushed. After one event, Sophie says she mistimed her race, that she’d left her run too late – and I think that’s the case here.

But that’s just a dramaturgical complaint (one I can guarantee is not shared by everyone.) There was another aspect of the play I found delightfully provocative.

The play explores the concept of justice in competition –  but the two nouns in that phrase seem at odds. The first is an ethical term, and the other is, well … not. Or, at least, not obviously ethical. In fact, to some overly delicate souls, competition is downright problematic. I know we like to tell ourselves that human societies are fundamentally competitive – but are they? And should they be? Should we be encouraging competition? Is “Faster, Higher, Stronger” really a laudable goal? The fact the Olympic motto was updated in 2021 to include one more word – “Together” – highlights that there’s serious uncertainty about the valorisation of competition. Does the pursuit of justice in competition unwittingly justify a human behaviour that we’d be better off not justifying?

Or, more insidiously, does the pursuit of justice in competition contaminate the very concept of justice itself? Does it risk reducing justice to merely the right of every person to be considered better than other people?

As I said, delightfully provocative, thrillingly energetic and vitally important.

Paul Gilchrist

Fair Play by Ella Road

presented by Lost Thought

at the Old Fitz until 21 March

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Robert Miniter

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Monster

12 Mar

Why are there so many violent children?

What do we do about them?

And how do we stop the problem arising in the first place?

Our culture assumes there must be simple answers to questions such as these. We’re certain of the destination, so there must be a path. Perhaps this attitude is a product of our hubris, or a result of the current fashion for self-righteousness. Or maybe it’s a consequence of something closer to universal, the spell of language: if you can formulate a question, then there must be an answer.

In Duncan Macmillan’s beautifully wise play there are no simple answers.

Fourteen year old Darryl is obsessed with violence. School staff member Tom doesn’t know how to help. And Rita, Darryl’s only remaining family member, desperately wants to pretend he’s just a normal teenager.

There’s a brilliant piece of dialogue between Tom and his partner, Jodi. (I’m probably paraphrasing, but this is its core)

Jodi: Who’s to blame?

Tom: No–one.

Jodi: Then what hope do we have?

Darryl also refers to this blame game.

Counter-intuitively, blame bestows hope. Blame assumes powerful dangerous forces could have been controlled, if only we’d done what was right. (As though perfection were possible in this sub-lunar world, as though we could return to Paradise after the Fall.)

Director Kim Hardwick’s production is excellent; aided by designer Victor Kalka and a splendid cast, there’s a pared back simplicity that lays bare the complexity of the human heart. (There is one simplicity – but more on that later.)

Campbell Parsons as Darryl is magnificent. Macmillan gives Darryl an incendiary idiolect – a hilarious, frightening language sourced from English working class slang and American gansta rap – and Parsons has utter command of this explosive mix. His portrayal of the troubled, piteous Darryl is an utterly fascinating and moving combination of a bouncy-youthful energy, a cynical- saddening understanding of power, and a heart-breaking innocence and self-doubt.

Having just jumped into the role a few days ago, Tony J. Black as Tom does great work, capturing the character’s struggle for patience, his bubbling frustration, and the terrifyingly all-consuming nature of the task of helping Darryl.

Romney Hamilton as Jodi gives a superb portrait of a beautifully imperfect human soul. Though creating a silly woman – one who too easily believes emotional outbursts are Truth –  Hamilton still finds space to evocatively manifest the woman’s real need for companionship and security, and to express both her crushing fear and its all-too-common companion, anger.

Linda Nicholls-Gidley as Rita gives a gloriously rich performance. Confronted about Darryl, she’s defiant, even to obtusity, but also sharply loyal. And after a family loss, Rita has rediscovered her faith. It might be easy to dismiss this as mere rationalisation, and its manifestation – a fascination with angels – is cringey …. but its emphasis on Love is not. It’s the very heart of the piece. (Even Jodi, pondering the possibility that their first child might turn out another monster, asserts We will just love them more.)

So is Love the solution?

Once again, the same habit: a question expects an answer.

But, in the dark middle of the brutal wilderness that is Life, perhaps our chosen path is all the destination we can know.

Paul Gilchrist

Monster by Duncan Macmillan

presented by Tiny Dog Productions, in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre Co,

at KXT until 21 March

kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Abraham de Souza

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As You Like It

10 Mar

Directed by Alex Kendall Robson, this is a marvellous presentation of a Shakespearean classic.

Full disclosure: As You Like It is one of my favourite Shakespearean plays, and its protagonist, Rosalind, is certainly my favourite Shakespearean heroine.

Rosalind is whip-smart but no fool. (With such a penchant for paradox, might I wear motley?) What I mean is that Rosalind is witty but humble; she entertains no hubristic dreams that her intelligence makes her superior to the world and its grand forces. This being a romantic comedy, the grand force is Love. Rosalind accepts Love’s power – but knows that this power does not automatically grant romantic Love pre-eminence in the human experience.

Rosalind might have said Love is the silliest of the serious things. Instead Shakespeare gives her lines like these: 

Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

Shakespeare gifts us a heroine who is both bubbly and balanced, who both feels and thinks.

Jade Fuda’s portrayal of Rosalind is absolutely brilliant. And I found it a wonderfully fresh interpretation: more giggly and more fraught than customary, and this tender vulnerability, coupled with Fuda’s total command of the wit, makes her portrayal of Rosalind extraordinarily rich.

As You Like It is one of my favourites for other reasons. It includes one of my favourite scenes in the whole of English drama, the one in which Celia accepts exile rather than part from Rosalind. In a play centring on romantic Love, here’s a shining example of a different type of love: friendship. It’s a scene that always brings tears to my eyes, and played here by Fuda and Larissa Turton as Celia it did so again.   

The play also features some of Shakespeare’s greatest poetry.

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

So says the Duchess, exiled to the Forest of Arden by her tyrannical sister. The two roles are doubled superbly by Sonya Kerr in a performance that excels both physically and vocally, and with glorious authority juxtaposes compassion and cruelty.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players

So says the melancholy Jaques. Sure, this most famous of lines could simply be read as a case of professional myopia: if Shakespeare had been a footballer he might have said All the world’s a game; or if he had been a risk assessor, All the world’s an accident waiting to happen; or a fisherman, All the world smells of fish. But Shakespeare the dramatist captured something of Life’s bewildering, and perhaps unbearable, lightness – the sense that it all deeply matters, but at the same time, it all doesn’t matter that much. Kendall Robson plays Jaques with splendid humour and a show-stopping poignancy.

O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!

So says Orlando, in a stinging moment when it seems his brother has secured love but he never will. Traditionally, Orlando is a challenging role; lover of the effervescent Rosalind, there’s always the danger he may not seem worthy of her, a smaller man than Love’s grand game of hide-and-seek in which he is a prime participant. But here, Pat Mandziy creates a magnificent Orlando, a beautiful balance of confusion and charisma.  

So, as I suggested, a play of unparalleled poetry. (And I think we get almost the whole thing!) The entire ensemble is exemplary; with a mastery of the Elizabethan language and a complete commitment to comic exuberance, we’re invited to a world of delight.

Paul Gilchrist

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

presented by Fingerless Theatre

at Flight Path Theatre until March 14

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Phil Erbacher

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Fag/Stag

7 Mar

This is a simple, generous-hearted story of the friendship between a gay man and a straight man. It’s funny and engaging.

For the most part, an overly reductive binary opposition between gay and straight is avoided. Instead, directed by Les Solomon and performed by Nathaniel Savy and Tom Kelly, we get rich portraits of two likeable men.

One of the most intriguing creative choices made in Jeffrey Jay Fowler & Chris Isaacs’ script is to reject the convention of presenting a series of dramatic scenes portraying moments in the characters’ relationship. Instead, the two characters directly address the audience, not each other, taking turns to tell us their own version of the unfolding events. This juxtaposition effectively creates humour, but it also makes very apparent to the audience the isolation of the two men, and their differences.

The question is: From where do these differences derive? Because one man is gay and the other straight? Or because, regardless of sexuality, the two men have different psychologies? Or because, at the most fundamental and ontological level, two souls just won’t see the world in the same way – because they have to see it from different places?

The answer is, of course, all three. But it’s the third that’s of particular interest (to me).

Drama struggles to present the inner life of individuals; it’s far more successful in presenting relationships, the life of groups. (If this seems an unusual thing to say, that’s because the Western mind has been so soaked in the dramatic form that this particular presentation of life –  life from the outside – has come to seem entirely natural.)

Though working in an artistic form that privileges the interpersonal, dramatists over the millennia have experimented with ways to represent the personal inner experience. The Elizabethans, for example, embraced the poetic soliloquy. This play, with its beautifully veracious contemporary vernacular, is a fine modern descendant of that experiment.

And so, regardless of its humble focus on the garden-variety experiences of finding romance and friendship, what an experiment like Fag/Stag does is explore one of the greatest of miracles: how we make a connection with others, despite the isolation of our rich but singular inner lives.

Paul Gilchrist

Fag/Stag by Jeffrey Jay Fowler & Chris Isaacs

Presented by Little Stormy Productions in association with Lambert House Enterprises,

At the Substation, Qtopia, until 21 March

qtopiasydney.com.au

Image supplied.

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A Mirror

4 Mar

This is an utterly engaging production of a clever, curious piece.

Written by Sam Holcroft, it was first produced in the UK in 2023.

It has a play-within-a-play structure; it’s art about art.

It’s set in a fictional oppressive regime, one in which the Ministry of Culture censors plays critical of that regime and promotes ones that encourage a positive vision. In this regime, plays like Julius Caesar and Romeo & Juliet are banned. It’s not obvious why. Certainly, the Ministry’s response to any new work is to go at it hard with a red pen, eliminating anything deemed inappropriate – from garden-variety profanity to whatever might cast life in the regime in a poor light. Plays, it is dictated, must inspire.

The outer play – the one that frames the other – presents an underground theatre company producing an illegal play. We the audience are included in this act of transgression; we’re addressed as co-conspirators, as though we’ve defiantly come to see this clandestine performance. (Everyone’s familiar with that sometimes-true fantasy that artists are cool rebels, and it was nice to be included in the cosplay – though sitting in my comfortable Belvoir seat after a good meal and a glass of wine, with the promise later of my usual warm bed, I’m not sure I could entirely fool myself that what I was doing was an act of rebellion.) But in the world of A Mirror, surveillance is overarching, and this underground theatre company is prepared, at any moment, to hide their illegal play and us, its audience, behind the pretence of a legal wedding and joyful congregation.

The play-within-the-play, the supposedly illegal play of which we are the risk-taking audience, presents the story of a playwright called to the Ministry of Culture. He is asked to explain a play he has submitted, one which has broken many of the dictated guidelines.

Despite the serious themes of A Mirror, the structure I’ve outlined obviously invites playful mischief – and it’s an invitation director Margaret Thanos and her cast fully embrace. Despite its one hour fifty length, the production has an exhilarating energy.

Performances are splendid. (I’ll refer only to the performers in their roles in the play-within-a-play.) As Čelik, Director of the Ministry of Culture, Yalin Ozucelik is superbly suave, but also animated and personable, a tension that beautifully hints at danger. As his new assistant, Mei, Rose Riley presents a character arc of brilliant comic awkwardness, hilarious enthusiasm, and moving desperation. As Bax, legendary playwright and long-time inhabitant of the theatre milieu, Eden Falk gives a portrayal, equally funny and poignant, of that world’s painful potential to promise more than it can deliver. Faisal Hamza, as Adem, is suitably bewildered by the Department’s unexpected attention.    

But back to those serious themes. Apart from the critique of political repression, Holcroft’s play is about the nature of theatre. The most obvious tension is between theatre as fiction and theatre as non-fiction, or between theatre as myth-making and theatre as reality-recording.

What Holcroft does that is so curious, or so stimulating, is to present these two alternatives in strawman fashion; that is, they are presented so hyperbolically that both seem absurd. Embodied in the attitudes of the Director of the Ministry of Culture, Čelik, the myth-making aspect of theatre is reduced to the promotion of a problematic regime. Embodied in young playwright, Adem, the reality-recording aspect of theatre is reduced to the verbatim transcription of actual conversations. Adem is not even characterised as possessing a gift for dialogue; he just has a photographic memory.

With these two facetious alternatives set before us, we the audience are impishly asked What is the nature, and potential, of theatre?

You could be tempted to think Adem’s perspective is meant to be the correct one; after all, you’ve got to get brownie points for not being actively complicit in oppression. But Čelik gets the best speeches, ones expressing the purpose and power of storytelling. In contrast, for much of the play-within-a-play, Adem seems without an aesthetic philosophy at all, appearing not that far from an individual with Savant Syndrome, exhibiting a political and artistic naivete that is unexpectedly combined with one extraordinary ability. And to assume Adem’s supposedly simple truth-telling is superior to Čelik’s myth-making is to ignore that the very play that might lead you to this conclusion is gloriously artificial, meticulously structured and entirely fictional – nothing like the sort of play Adem would write.

It’s Hamlet who suggests theatre is the holding of a mirror up to nature. The metaphor that Art is a Mirror has long been in circulation, but it is a figure of speech that deconstructs itself. If a mirror exemplifies the reflection of an unadorned reality, while art implies some sort of craft or artifice, then (like all metaphors) the metaphor that Art is a Mirror is more arty than it is mirrory. 

Of course, theatre can do something mirrors do: both show us ourselves from the outside – which is the exact opposite of how each individual experiences Life. It’s no wonder that both mirrors and theatre can be fascinating in a disturbing way. I’ve quipped before that There are times and places in which theatre has been banned, and if you don’t know why, it’s because you haven’t seen it done well. But I would add, it’s not the being-done-well part that is the only disconcerting, and thrilling, aspect of theatre. And when Savonarola lit his famous Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence, mirrors were among the many soul-sapping fripperies thrown into the flames.

As you can probably tell (if you’re still reading) A Mirror set me thinking.

Real mirrors are flat; only in fantasy is there any through the looking glass. Mirrors just stare back at us, dully. But this play and this production entirely transcend this quality; intelligent and exuberant, it’s all wonderfully invigorating.

Paul Gilchrist

A Mirror by Sam Holcroft

At Belvoir until 22 March

belvoir.com.au

Image by Brett Boardman

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Tonsils + Tweezers

20 Feb

Tonsils and Tweezers are friends at school, possibly each other’s only ally. But when Tonsils gets the chance to join the cool group (read the bullying group), the friendship is put under strain – with consequences that are long and deep and terrible.

Despite the serious themes, this is theatre given wings by the spirit of youth. It’s mischievous, energetic and exuberant.

Writer Will O’Mahony gives us a script that’s fun and fast-paced, bouncy and bubbly, but with jagged edges that foreshadow danger. A natural chronology and a flat realism are eschewed, with Tonsils (Ariyan Sharma) sometimes functioning as an upbeat omniscient (and therefore unsettling) narrator.

The script is rich in motifs. Some plainly evoke cruelty – like the recurring reference to a skinned dog, silent and horrible in its suffering. Other motifs resist a simplistic reading. Is the binary star a symbol of loyalty? Or of mutual dependence? Or perhaps, in its wobble, of the loneliness of a loss never publicly acknowledged? Is the fact a piece of paper can’t be folded more than seven times suggestive of the impossibility of packing away one’s pain? Cause it also operates as dreadful portent of the key plot point. It’s all a playful, poignant puzzle.    

Director Lucy Rossen leans into the theatricality and, with the help of designer Bella Saltearn, gives us a stage replete with puppets and puckish props, presenting a show of ironic vitality (which is as close to a spoiler as I’ll get.)

Her cast of four – Victor Y Z Xu, Caitlin Green, Toby Carey & Sharma– give excellent comic performances.  

This is an example of what I’ve called the Theatre of Audacity. This is theatre that asks to be valued because it surprises, shocks and delights. It has us say of the actors I can’t believe you stood in front of people and did that! (In contrast is the Theatre of Authenticity, theatre that asks to be valued because of its veracity and honesty, theatre that has us say of the actors You made me believe that was true.)

So am I saying Tonsils + Tweezers is without veracity and honesty? That it is, somehow, dissatisfyingly untruthful?

Who is to make such a judgement? In every production, the least convincing performance is always by the critic pretending to be objective.  

What the audacity of Tonsils + Tweezers does (it seems to me) is express a scandalised astonishment that the world is not just. That’s why I suggested earlier that it’s a youthful piece. Which is hardly a criticism. To paraphrase someone who was not a theatre critic (though he did associate with the most disreputable members of his society) Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Paul Gilchrist

Tonsils + Tweezers by Will O’Mahony

Produced by Sharehouse Production Company

At the Old Fitz, as a late show, until 27 Feb

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Nicholas Warrand

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Es and Flo

19 Feb

This is a beautiful presentation of an absolutely terrific play.

Written by Jennifer Lunn and first presented in the UK in 2023, it tells the story of the lesbian couple of the title.

Es and Flo met and fell in love during the anti-nuclear protests of the 1980’s, but now, like us all, they have aged. Es is beginning to have difficulty with her memory, and Flo is caught between acknowledging this and wanting to wish the problem away.

And then care worker Beata and her daughter turn up, paid for by Peter, Es’ never present son. A battle has begun, for control of Es, and her property.

Director Emma Canalese allows the pace to be truthfully gentle, and she elicits wonderful performances from her cast.

As Es, Annie Byron splendidly blends the exuberance of the woman at her peak with a growing bewilderment at her diminishment and a pathos-inducing fear of being a burden. Fay Du Chateau as Flo offers a superb portrait of indignation tempered by doubts and personal inadequacies. (Her stunned disbelief, her unwieldy tongue, her unreflecting mistakes are so much more truthfully human than the self-righteous grandstanding which too often struts our stages, a pontificating that is probably the unconscious projection of a need to be moral heroes in a world so loud and large that it threatens us with irrelevancy.)  

In seeming contrast to our flailing protagonists, Charlotte Salusinszky as Beata, Polish immigrant and carer, offers a model of no-nonsense competency. But Lunn’s script is textured so that Beata does not reduce to some sort of magical migrant dispensing wisdom; she suffers challenges and makes errors, and Salusinszky marvellously captures both her practicality and her vulnerability. As her daughter Kasia, Erika Ndibe presents delightfully both the grace of innocence and its naïve moral certainty. If there was a moment that best encapsulates the piece’s extraordinary achievement, it’s when Kasia shares a plan she has for good with Es’ daughter-in-law, Catherine. Played brilliantly by Eloise Snape, Catherine is on the surface a silly, glibly narrow-minded woman, but realising the danger of little Kasia’s plan, she gently warns her it might be more complicated than she imagines.

Simplicity is resisted. Even forever offstage Peter is not simplified to mere villainy. His attitude to his mother and Flo may seem self-interested, but he is given reasons, ones that are – if not acceptable – certainly comprehensible.

The play is a moving representation of the challenges of aging, a stinging indictment of the erasure of lesbian experience, and a glorious hymn in praise of loyalty and love in their many, many forms.

But its brilliance is its honest acknowledgement of complexity. This is drama in the great tradition, a stage in which the human condition is honestly portrayed, where good and its opposite might be real, but are never found unmixed in any human soul. And to acknowledge complexity is to stand at the gateway to compassion.

Paul Gilchrist

Es and Flo by Jennifer Lunn

Presented by Mi Todo Productions

At the Old Fitz until 28 Feb

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Robert Catto

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Possession

17 Feb

Full disclosure: I come to this piece, if not an opera virgin, then certainly a novice to the artform (but still a seeker of Truth and Beauty.)

When I do what I usually do – which is write about theatre – I like to give the impression that I’m a knowledgeable expert. I get away with this because theatre audiences are used to actors pretending to be someone they’re not, and I guess it’s not too big a jump for them to continue playing this fun game when they read my reviews.

But I won’t pretend expertise here. I’ll write as someone fortunate enough to have been shown a doorway to an exciting new world.

Directed by Adam Player, Possession is what I might call a pocket opera – less than an hour, and presented in a beautiful, intimate venue. It would be a marvellous introduction to the artform. (With its simple but evocative staging, it’s also a model for how opera could be enjoyed by a greater number of people than only those who can get to the Opera House and can afford those tickets!)

Mezzo soprano Ruth Strutt, accompanied by pianist Michael Curtain, presents samples from the works of Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti and Ethel Smyth.

The Rossini is his Giovanna d’Arco, the solo cantata presenting Joan of Arc’s farewell to home before battle. It’s inspiring, it’s poignant and Strutt’s performance, in both voice and physicality, beautifully captures the character’s emotional range.

The Donizetti is his Saffo, which gives voice to the ancient Greek poet. Here Strutt has the opportunity to portray a character with even more vulnerability, and she embraces this with mesmerising passion. The Italian libretto is presented in English surtitles, as it was for the Joan piece, and it’s a wonderful chance for the creative team to use projection to establish setting and mood. Here Sappho’s lament for lost love is presented as though it were a series of text messages, and it’s a cheeky decision that underlines the universality of the experience, that Sappho’s 7th century BC concerns, via the medium of Donizetti’s 19th century opera, are still very much ours.

The Smyth pieces are her Nocturne and Possession. The latter is her work dedicated to suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. Here surtitles are no longer necessary, and Smyth’s romantic influences are apparent. Performed with a luscious, welcoming warmth by Strutt, the melodies are rich and accessible.

Why Joan, Sappho and Smyth? These are voices of female resistance, but none has been flattened to mere slogan by the weight of opposition. Each is deeply human, acknowledging challenges while all the time reaching for joy.

Under the direction of Player, Curtain and Strutt give us a gem, a small piece that dazzles (for me, a jewel given at the threshold of a previously unexplored land, a promise of treasures, of Truth and Beauty.)

Paul Gilchrist

Possession, consisting of works by Rossini, Donizetti and Smyth,

14 – 15 Feb,  

at the Substation, Qtopia, as part of Mardi Gras.

qtopiasydney.com.au

Image by Adam Player.

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