Archive | October, 2023

Dazza & Horse Play

31 Oct

This evening of two short plays is part of the Everything But The Kitchen Sink Festival.

The first show, Dazza, written and performed by Frankie Fearce, is seriously top class satire. It’s a beautiful, measured criticism of the parochial Australian male, focusing especially on his attitudes to gender identity. “You’re one of those pronoun people, aren’t ya?” Dazza says to an unexpected visitor to his local. Fearce’s writing is wonderfully sharp, and the rhythms of the vernacular are spot on.

Like all top rate satire, there’s little hyperbole, just a commitment to truth. Garden variety satire criticises. Great satire portrays. If the artist tells us the character is flawed we might choose to read it all as a comment about the artist themselves. However, if it’s we who decide the character is flawed, the criticism appears indubitable.

The beauty of the portrait is that Dazza refuses to consider that he might be closed-minded, which is, of course, the epitome of closed-mindedness. Dazza is a good bloke in a world that’s certain he is one, and that’s the very problem.

The change from the introductory scene where Fearce plays themselves (I guess) to where they play Dazza is a piece of theatrical magic. It was also a feast for thought: the change in the audience was utterly electrifying. We had been witnessing a person give testimony of their lived experience and the vibe was definitely supportive. Then came the change, and suddenly we were confronted with the delicious, dangerous lie that is fiction and, in addition to abundant laughter, there was a shifting in seats, an intake of breathe, a palpable uncertainty.  It was as though we had been in a church and now we were in a theatre. The experience clarified for me why I prefer performance to personal testimony: when someone genuinely shares, only a dickhead (such as Dazza) is not supportive; when someone performs we feel little moral necessity to respond to the character in any fixed way, and so it is we who are encouraged to be genuine.   

The second show of the evening is Horse Play. It’s a clever title for a clever show. Zoe Tomaras directs a fun sitcom, devised and written by the team (Nat Knowles, Sophea Op, Angela Johnston, Linda Chong, Georgia Drewe and Tomaras.) Five soldiers (men, of course) wait inside the Trojan horse. Sometime in the night they will slip out and open the city gates … and the rest is known. (And told in its full horror by Euripides in his The Women of Troy.)

In this tale, the men just wait. It’s Waiting for Godot in togas. (Ok, not togas, but you get the point.) It’s a wonderful set up which the team doesn’t so much use to discuss war as masculinity. The very gifted comic cast present the male characters as being unable to transcend the puerility of teenagers (a criticism which dovetails well with who is often left to do the fighting of wars.) There are dick and masturbation jokes aplenty and homosexual curiosity masquerades unconvincingly as homophobia.  There’s also a playful exploration of how we attempt to fill time until the big moment, whatever that big moment might be (which is the family connection to Godot.) To portray characters who are bored is always risky, but Tomaras deals with it astutely. The piece is not presented in real time but is offered in multiple brief scenes, moreish slices of experience, cute skits cut and served to us by the dimming and raising of lights, a directorial choice which functions as an effective laugh track.  

If I’ve made it all seem merely wacky fun, the concluding scene of Horse Play throws down the gauntlet. It powerfully reminds us that those we find most laughable might be just that because of the infantilizing impact of the trauma that they face, and that we ignore. Euripides followed a tragedy with satyr; here we have something that poignantly approximates the reverse.    

These two short shows exhibit the inspiring wildness that makes the Everything but the Kitchen Sink Festival a terrific addition to the Sydney theatre scene.

Paul Gilchrist

Dazza by Frankie Fearce

Horse Play by Nat Knowles, Sophea Op, Angela Johnston, Linda Chong, Georgia Drewe and Zoe Tomaras

Part of the Everything But The Kitchen Sink Festival at Flight Path Theatre until Nov 4

www.flightpaththeatre.org

Images by Toby Blome

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The Memory of Water

26 Oct

The Memory of Water follows some familiar tropes. Members of a dysfunctional family gather for a loved ones’ funeral. Forced to be in the same room, they argue their conflicting perceptions of family history. Though hard to imagine, if any of my reviewing colleagues were ever tempted to petty mindedness they might dub this piece The Memory of Other Plays. However, the seeming familiarity of the plot has no doubt been enhanced by the presentation of other similar stories in the twenty seven years since this play was originally written.  

But the plot is not the play, and it’s certainly not the production. Playwright Shelagh Stephenson’s take on family differences is hilarious and director Rachel Chant elicits from her cast brilliant comic performances. Madeleine Jones as Catherine is especially engaging, presenting a personality whose enormous energy knows no matching purpose. Jones’ portrayal of this lost soul is both terrifically funny and deeply poignant. Thomas Campbell’s Frank is also extremely amusing, as he desperately tries to maintain distance from the family craziness. Michala Banas as Mary is the emotional heart of the piece, with sarcasm balancing beautifully with vulnerability she attempts to understand her relationships, both with the living and with the dead.

Designer Veronique Benett deserves special mention; her vibrant set and costuming create the perfect space for comic fun.

Not that it’s just frivolity; one of the tropes of modern theatre (and one I don’t grow tired of) is that it has philosophical ideas. The title invites us to consider memory. I’m not sure if the play’s observation that memories are neither objective nor deliberate will strike many audience members as particularly insightful – however, eighteen hours after seeing it, my memory of the play is neither entirely objective nor entirely deliberate.

But the glory of the philosophical in theatre is that it provokes reflection. Rather than being told what to think, we’re teased into thought.

Paul Gilchrist

The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson

at Ensemble Theatre until 25 Nov

www.ensemble.com.au

Image by Prudence Upton

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Venus and Adonis

6 Oct

Written and directed by Damien Ryan, this is big, bold, and delightfully ambitious. It’s also very entertaining (but more on that later.)

It is not a dramatization of Shakespeare’s poem but rather follows a growing tradition of fictionalising aspects of the poet’s life.

It’s not a surprising tradition; Shakespeare’s influence on the language and theatre is overarching (and I will admit somewhere in the first act, for just a moment, I understood why some people call for the total erasure of everything to do with the Bard so we could all just start again.)

Several Elizabethan stories are layered together here: the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet; the possibility that poet Aemilia Lanier was the Dark Lady of the sonnets; the performance by Shakespeare’s company of Venus and Adonis before the monarch herself (which I guess is completely fictional??)

The play is a musing on love, and love may be a many splendored thing, but it’s certainly a thing of enormous semantic diversity. Sparked by the poem Venus and Adonis we are offered love as desire, but the play also explores sexual love beyond physicality, and friendship and familial love. In one provoking moment, lust is juxtaposed with grief, the little death lying side by side with its stronger sibling.

Though moving and provocative, the production forefronts entertainment. There’s excellent physical humour aplenty, theatre jokes abound, and there are constant allusions to Shakespeare’s work (which might be either diverting or distracting, depending on whether you buy into the theory Shakespeare was less a creator of enormous vitality and more of a sponge absorbing nutrients from the ocean of language in which he swam.)

Performances are magical. Anthony Gooley as Will is both poignant in his pain and funny in his frustrations, a very human take on a man we have diminished by raising to an icon. Aemilia Lanier is Will’s lover and one of the earliest published female poets, and possibly the first explicitly feminist one. Adele Querol is glorious in the role: fire and strength; at one moment a lightning bolt falling mercilessly on the earthly patriarchy, and at the next, that even more miraculous phenomena, a bolt shot back heavenwards, lighting the way to a brighter future. Jerome Meyer as Nathaniel Field, who plays Adonis to Amelia’s Venus, is brilliantly comic as he navigates some truly teasing tensions: in Shakespeare’s company he plays the women, but before the Queen he is asked to play a man, a gorgeous man, who as the target of Venus’ unrelenting desire might feel somewhat reduced to passivity…. like that projected on women by the male gaze. Belinda Giblin as Queen Elizabeth is magnificent, perfectly regal and (as the script demands) unexpectedly sage. Perhaps the character operates as a coda. Certainly she is a deus ex machina, arriving from the beyond and offering …. But perhaps all fictional histories function as such, offering a solution, of a certain type, to our problems: assuring us they are eternal.

Paul Gilchrist

Venus and Adonis by Damien Ryan

at Seymour Centre until 21st October

www.seymourcentre.com/event/venus-and-adonis/

Image by Kate Williams

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Home Country & The One

2 Oct

New work is always exciting, and here we have two original, distinct pieces.

Home Country, written by Stephanie Reeves and directed by Glen Hamilton and Romney Hamilton, is a gentle but sophisticated tale about loss and belonging. Dot, played by Reeves, has migrated to Australia from Britain. She feels the distance from the home country and from family members she left physically behind and who seem to have left her emotionally behind. Dot visits Uluru, where she must camp with a stranger, Jane played by Susan Jordan. In the very watchable growth of their friendship, the thematic concerns of loss and belonging are further teased out: the indigenous connection with the land, the evaporation of pride in what it is to be British; the dislocation that results when cultural discourse moves to a certainty that jettisons subtlety; the personal grief of bereavement.  

The One, written and directed by Mel Jensen, feels almost like two plays. It begins as a satire on dating via the apps. The female protagonist (Jensen) tells her friend (Emily Shaddick) of the absurd and disgusting behaviour of some of the men she has communicated with or met. An interesting theatrical gimmick is to have the friend play out scenes that the protagonist has already lived; this creates humour but also distance, with focus being on the evaluation of the lived experiences, rather than the actual experiences themselves. (More on this phenomena later.) There are some great one liners delivered by both Jensen and Shaddick, and the male actors (Oliver Harcourt-Ham, Enoch Li and Matthew Van Den Berg) playing the victims of this satire display wonderful comic commitment. There’s a provocative ambiguity to the satire; the female characters are hardly presented as flawless. You’ll struggle to find a play in which both the words “feminist” and “dick” are repeated more often, and said by the same character the logical incoherence is stark. Similarly, there is much talk of “love”, of the I-want-someone-to-love-me or the I-deserve-someone-worthy-of-my-love types; so it all falls into that horrible trap of validation or evaluation (a reminder that romance is the stupidest of the serious things.) One way out of this trap is to focus on the physical mechanics of sex, which is what both the men and women do.

In the last third of the piece we get something much more dark and confronting, with John Michael Narres giving a terrific performance of both vulnerability and frightening volatility. It’s difficult to write about the end without spoilers, but the shift in genre and tone is so very large in the final scenes that I’m not sure the piece doesn’t inadvertently sabotage itself. What I guess is meant to be a warning that dehumanising dating apps and immature, entitled masculinity inevitably culminate in violence ends up potentially implying something rather different, and sinister: that any sensible woman simply should know better than to get herself in such a situation.  

But, of course, good theatre often sends you out into the darkness feeling the darkness to be deeper than when you arrived.

Paul Gilchrist

Home Country by Stephanie Reeves

The One by Mel Jensen

at Darlo Drama Studio Theatre as part of the Sydney Fringe

These productions closed on Oct 1

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