Archive | April, 2017

Down an Alley Filled with Cats

27 Apr

Talk to virtually anyone in the theatre world and you soon learn that there is a grand tradition of self-obsession.

This production refuses to honour this tradition, instead presenting the audience with a simple, engaging entertainment.

I, however, uncomfortable with such radicalism, will adhere to the time tested way.

I would not choose to direct this play – because it’s so difficult.

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Photo by Andrew Langcake

Down an Alley Filled with Cats by Warwick Moss was first produced in 1984 and won the Premier’s Literary Award before seasons in the West End and New York. It’s a comic thriller. And that’s what makes it so challenging – getting the balance right between the playful and the serious.

This production has a good shot at it, but I’ll be honest, it took me a long time to pick the tone. Maybe I’m just slow. (See, it’s all about me.)

Actors Gabriel Egan and William Jordan easily hold our attention, but I suspect opening night nerves may have played a part in making vocal performances a little muddied.

The two participants in this cat and mouse game to possess a valuable object are (conveniently) locked together in a room. Dramatists love this trick of offering the characters no possibility of escape, and audiences often go along with it as it mirrors their experience of the theatre. But it’s a trick that demands careful consideration of the physicality of the performances; it’s inevitable that close proximity will have to reflect both intimacy and antipathy, and in so far as this genre is a distant cousin of naturalism, there’s enormous pressure to get the pacing right to make this appear believable.

Moss’ script uses other classic tricks – you might end up wondering with it’s intricately plotted or all just a sleight of hand – but it will lead to interesting post-show discussions. Were you taken in or not? Of course, if you’re part of the grand theatrical tradition, you never were, not for a second.

Paul Gilchrist

 

Down an Alley Filled with Cats by Warwick Moss

Directed by Tom Richards

at King Street Theatre until 13 May

tix and info here

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Future Seekers

25 Apr

Carol Dance’s Future Seekers is made up of ten loosely interlinked short pieces. It boldly traverses time (1917 to 2017) and place (Russia, USA, Lithgow). Excepting costume, design is minimalist in the extreme.

This is big theatre, presented simply.

It explores how the past informs the present. Generation connects with generation.  It is a powerful reminder that our actions matter, that our present impacts on more than ourselves.

Dance’s writing is charming and good-hearted. A cold soul might call it naïve and, at times, convenient but it’s these very features that create the magic of its wide-eyed wonder and the appeal of its optimism.

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Director Mark Langham elicits good performances fitting the broad, bright style of the piece. Occasionally characterizations falter, but there’s a real pleasure in watching four skilled actors (Neveen Hanna, Eli Saad, Sana’a Shaik and Michael Wood) move from role to role, exhibiting a playful versatility.

Between scenes pianist Philip Eames presents a series of classical pieces. His performance is beautiful, and the breadth of the selection eminently suits the play’s purpose: the sharing of the belief that in the immensity of the wide, wild world there is space enough for both surprise and connection – and from such a union hope is born.

Paul Gilchrist

 

Future Seekers by Carol Dance

at Philharmonia Hall, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay Arts Precinct until 30 April

tix and info here

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Sex Object

24 Apr

This is new work, but I’m not the audience for it.

It’s for those who enjoy TV sitcom.

Writer Charlie Falkner has put together three hyperbolic characters; a pretentious artist, a vacuous New Ager (who the other characters also call pretentious), and an inarticulate slacker. Falkner then throws in a fourth, an escort, to stir the plot.

There are some funny lines and energetic performances, but it’s of that genre only too common in the indie scene – Philistine Theatre.

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Philistine Theatre has bad faith in the art form. It attempts to imitate the conventions of television or B grade film. Philistine Theatre claims its purpose is to simply entertain but, in aiming so low, it undermines its very reason for existence.

This play is a descendant of American slacker films. In these films, the protagonist fights for the right to smoke dope on his mother’s couch. In this version, the protagonist fights for the right to watch porn on his girlfriend’s dead father’s couch. As you can see, the genre has come a long way.

But seriously, Falkner does subvert the ending typical of this style of drama. In the films, it’s usually painful: the protagonist ‘grows up’ and becomes ‘responsible’, which could be interesting, if it weren’t for the fact that ‘responsible’ seems indistinguishable from ‘conventional’. However, Sex Object doesn’t go in for that sort of tripe; its ending is more like Porky’s. (An allusion that shows I’m far too familiar with C grade American films.)

The slacker, played amusingly by Falkner himself, has a porn addiction. This is not taken seriously by the script, which is not aiming to be anything but a light comedy. However, it’s as close as the audience gets to the sex implied in the title.

The marketing of the show suggests it’s an exploration of ‘millennials’, that category error pushed by other marketers when trying to sell mobile phones. Fortunately, Falkner knows the type of play he’s writing and doesn’t attempt any faux sociological analysis.

In fact, the program notes suggest the play says nothing (which is a fundamental tenet of Philistine Theatre.) But, of course, it does say something. The target of the play is what it calls ‘pretence’. It fights for the right to be small.

No, it may not have been my cup of tea, but as Voltaire could’ve said (if he’d indulged in such quaint euphemisms) I’ll fight for your right to drink it.

Congratulations to Jack Rabbit Theatre for producing new work and for the Depot for making it possible.

Paul Gilchrist

 

Sex Object by Charlie Falkner

Directed by Michael Abercromby

Presented by Jack Rabbit Theatre

at The Depot Theatre until 29 April

Tix and info here

 

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Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

20 Apr

This play by Rajiv Joseph premiered in the US in 2009 and won the Pulitzer in 2010.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is beautifully rich and multi-leveled. (Intriguingly, the program note tells us we will ‘get no answers’. A warning? An assurance?)

Set in 2003 in Iraq, it’s not naturalism. It’s got talking animals. And ghosts. And talking animal ghosts.

Poetically, it’s fascinating. The line by line level is engagingly colloquial and profane (fuck yeah bitch!), but take a step back and there are evocative recurring motifs. Ghosts that symbolize trauma and guilt. Odd golden objects that reflect skewed values. A zoo that suggests lives lived too small or simply wasted (‘Zoo is hell’). Hands, whole and broken, that are emblematic of our ability to both build and destroy. Talk of God that represents the quest for both ultimate meaning and culpability. And the tiger itself? The nature of violence and the awesome mystery of the created world. (Tyger, Tyger burning bright?) This cluster of motifs invites speculation about the links between creation and destruction, consequences and responsibility.

Maggie Dence in BENGAL TIGER AT THE BAGHDAD ZOO (c) Kate Williams

Photo by Kate Williams

Director Claudia Barrie’s production is powerful theatre, visually and linguistically exciting. The entire cast is terrific. Maggie Dence as the tiger is gloriously imperious; her imposing presence injects the character’s existential angst with a fascinating, and very funny, tension. Josh Anderson and Stephen Multari, as American soldiers, amusingly and movingly capture their characters’ inability to deal with the complexity of the situation, and their complicity.  Andrew Lindqvist plays an Iraqi translator and one time gardener and topiarist, a creator of hedge animals in a tyrant’s garden (‘God likes gardens.’) He gives a sensitive portrayal of a gentle, intelligent man, a foil to the invading foreigners, and an example of one more poor soul caught up in Big History. Tyler De Nawi as Saddam’s twisted son is charismatic and dangerous.

Isabel Hudson’s masks*, aided in their impact by mask coach and performer Aanisa Vylet, are a highlight. They create a world that is half-dream, half-nightmare. They’re a reminder that Creation, artistic and divine, has elements of both. For what is Creation, but a dominance that only ends with a frightening, fraught letting go?

Paul Gilchrist

 

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo by Rajiv Joseph

at the Old Fitz til 6 May

tix and info here

 

*created from templates provided by Wintercroft Masks.

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Fallen

11 Apr

Can a person change?

If so, is it done by denying your past or by accepting it?

And who determines how you should change? You or others? Are we creatures of our culture or autonomous individuals?

Charles Dickens funded a home for ‘fallen’ women. This play by Seanna van Helten explores the state of five of these women as they prepare for a new life in the colonies.

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Image by Marnya Rothe

Historical fiction always serves a contemporary fantasy. The Victorian world fascinates us because we can posit it as a cautionary tale: this is repression. There’s the danger we can be smug or complacent in our comparison, but used appropriately, it’s a yardstick to hold up to our own society and judge if we’re doing much better.

The rule in this home for ‘fallen’ woman is that your past is not to be discussed. It’s a perfect metaphor for the silencing of women’s voices.

Dickens doesn’t appear, so we never hear his take. And, intriguingly, we don’t hear too much from the women themselves. The characters silence each other, and the playwright chooses to tell us little about their backgrounds, or about the outcome of the whole experiment.  The plot becomes the relationships between the women in that place, that time. It’s a fascinating miniature.

The play could be read by a misogynist as an indictment of bullying, manipulation and emotional immaturity. That’s not the intention, of course – no more than Hamlet (say) is meant as a criticism of men. The play acknowledges that we are, to a huge degree, products of our environment. If this small contained world of women is less than perfect it reflects only a larger, more deeply flawed, world.

Now, let’s change it.

Paul Gilchrist

 

Fallen by Seanna van Helten

directed by Penny Harpham

at the Reginald at Seymour til 22nd April

Tix and more info here

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Trade

11 Apr

Responsibility has gone out of fashion. Too many of us aspire to be victims.

And the truly marginalized? Perhaps we can pretend the competition is good for them.

Because unbridled capitalism is good, isn’t it? (It’s like a synonym for democracy, right?)

In Trade we follow the fortunes of a dodgy investment company. Manipulate the share price and buy or sell at the right time. And, when one deal goes spectacularly wrong and squillions are lost, it’s time to point the finger. Who is responsible? The fund manager has a golden parachute (literally and hilariously.) Sure, she does time… white collar time. In the meantime, the rest of her team reinvent themselves. Capitalism can be ethical, can’t it?  Greed is Good, that’s from the Sermon on the Mount, isn’t it?

Trade

Devised by the ensemble (Melissa Hume, Mathias Olofsson, Dymphna Carew, Alison Bennett and Alicia Gonzalez) and with words by Melissa Lee Speyer, this is sharp, very entertaining theatre.

Director Alison Bennett and movement director Dymphna Carew create a visual space that’s fun and fluid, evocative of a world where funds slip away, ethics slip away. “No risk. No reward.”

Performances are both precise and playful. Trade is very funny.

And wonderfully pointy. Just when you’re comfortably smug in your superiority to these coke-addicted high-flyers, you’re reminded: where, exactly, does your interest, your superannuation, come from?

There was a time when the question was not Who am I? but What is to be done? Exciting, vibrant and new, theatre like this takes me back, and can take us all forward.

Paul Gilchrist

 

Trade by Hurrah Hurrah

at the Old 505 Theatre until 15 April

tix and info here

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