Archive | November, 2023

Darwin’s Reptilia

19 Nov

This is a playful puzzle of a piece.

Written by Charlie Falkner, it works a few standard tropes: begin with a death that draws together some unlikely characters, then add some sort of natural phenomena (flood, avalanche, snowstorm, or the like) that prevents these characters escaping each other. Here it’s Renata and Flicks’ mother who has died, and so the dissimilar sisters meet for the very first time. The imprisoning setting is Darwin, and more particularity the daggy Palms Motel, where the guests are trapped by marauding crocodiles.

Director Samantha Young elicits suitably wacky performances from the terrific comic cast. Ainslie McGlynn is wonderful as Renata, the self-obsessed American self-help author (self-help reductio ad absurdum.) Mathew Lee as John, her goofy devotee, delivers a beautiful study of naivete, awkwardness and fixation. Danny Ball as Declan, Renata’s partner, is a giggle-inducing self-important hypocrite. Running the motel is Flick, in Zoe Jensen’s delightful portrait of the parochial local. Aiding her is Leilani Lau’s Bobbi, a kindly kook who provides plenty of laughs with Lau’s perfect delivery of Falkner’s malapropisms.

I call the piece a puzzle because I had difficulty seeing the connection between the different strands. (Of course, being a writer of theatre criticism, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed.) I’m not sure why Declan was Irish (though I am familiar with the stereotype informing the decision to make the other two interlopers American.) I also didn’t understand the meaning of the motif that Declan could smell blood (that is, to the degree usually attributed to sharks, rather than their distant cousins, the Irish.) Similarly, what actually had happened to the sisters’ mother began as a mystery and, for me, remained one to the end. I’m not sure why Bobbi kept a wild rat in a cage (though it might’ve been a substitute for her missing husband, who was a despicable love rat.) I don’t know why Flick suffered from something akin to narcolepsy.

Perhaps the last of these puzzles hints at the solution to the rest: faced with climate catastrophe (the sort that drives crocodiles out of their natural habitats and to the streets) these quirky characters are all asleep – and so the whole thing functions as a crazy, oddball satire on myopia.

Paul Gilchrist

Darwin’s Reptilia by Charlie Falkner

at Downstairs Belvoir (as part of 25A) until 26 November

belvoir.com.au

Image by Phil Erbacher

Tags: , ,

The Master and Margarita

17 Nov

I’ve tried to read the book. Twice. Admittedly, not in Russian. Maybe it reads better in Russian. Maybe I should learn.

Eamon Flack’s adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous book is rollicking good fun and an extraordinarily invigorating night of theatre.

Satan has come to Stalin’s Russia. (A tautology?) There he meets Margarita, who is mourning her lover. She has nicknamed him “The Master” because of the beautiful novel he has written. But his beautiful novel has got him into serious trouble and now, for all she knows, he languishes in a cell, or worse. His novel is about Pontius Pilate. Why? I guess because Pilate was one of the men who persecuted an innocent, well-meaning philosopher. Very Stalin’s Russia.

Is the production faithful to Bulgakov’s original novel? It presents as being so. (Clearly, I wouldn’t know.) The book itself is usually there on stage (even though, in this minimalist design, often little else is, except a revolve.) Matilda Ridgway as the narrator supposedly reads from the book. With her warm, intelligent stage presence, I’d like Ridgway to read me the whole thing.

The impact of this creative choice is to emphasise the novel as something distinct from this performance, something truly valuable, a cultural treasure. (It is, of course, Bulgakov who is The Master in Flack’s version. )

The whole narrator thing on a stage with a revolve (did I mention this? I’m thinking of getting one installed at home) also facilitates a gleefully impish tone, and Flack has some astonishing stage tricks up his sleeve. (I was told by the publicist to say no more, and one thing I learnt from the play, and as much as the book as I got through, is that it’s very dangerous for a writer to challenge authority.) The cast fully embrace the crazy and it’s an absolute delight. Paula Arundell as Satan crackles with mischief. Gareth Davies as Azzazelo, with perfect comic timing, is perfectly creepy. Anna Samson as Margarita is splendidly and inspiringly audacious. Josh Price as the devil’s cat and heavy is glorious goofy fun.

An intriguing texture is achieved by interspersing the madcap zaniness with scenes from The Master’s novel. Brilliant in Bulgakov’s book, they’re absolutely brilliant here. Marco Chiappi as Pontius Pilate gives a poignant portrait of a man used to wielding authority but beginning to sense both its awful weight and its surprising vacuity. Mark Leonard Winter, who is The Master in the Russian scenes, is Yeshua (Jesus) here, and delivers a performance that is divine: a luminous portrayal of the simple, truthful soul, one of those iconic characters radiating through out Russian literature, and making it a moral lamp to humankind.

Another interspersion is all Flack’s: there’s a terrific parody of the Q & A that commonly accompanies theatre and too often only illustrates the triviality of our supposedly serious critical discussions compared to the work itself. Chiappi as the chair is pathetically and hilariously unable to comprehend the experience of so many artists under communist Russia, a world in which genuine commitment braved perpetual danger.  

Full disclosure: I didn’t understand the end. (Thank God for the spoiler rule, which means no one will ever, ever know.)

But one repeated line has had me thinking ever since: the greatest sin is cowardice.

It’s said to Pilate by Yeshua. Is it true? It may have been Pilate’s greatest sin, but as a maxim it’s difficult to universalise. Courage seems a secondary virtue, it’s value determined by what it’s applied to. A Nazi might be a coward, but most of us would think that the least of his sins, and one that might even be conducive to lessening the evil of which he is capable. Or is cowardice being defined in a grander way?

It’s a provocative invitation, and one fitting a piece of theatre which made me fall in love again with the art form.  

Paul Gilchrist

The Master and Margarita by Eamon Flack (adapted from the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov)

at Belvoir until 10 December

belvoir.com.au/

Image by Brett Boardman

Tags: ,

Losing It

14 Nov

(in which I write an absurdly complicated and self-indulgent response to a simply beautiful piece)

There’s something gloriously familiar about this show. This is partly because it presents a genuine slice of Sydney life: a woman waiting at the Bank Hotel for a Tinder date. It’s also familiar because a one woman show about dating follows a tried and tested path.

But Megan Bennetts does something special with this one.

Bennetts has an extraordinary stage presence, and the character she creates, Emma, is utterly adorable. Bennetts’ script is clever and superbly structured, and with the guidance of director Nisrine Amine, she executes both the verbal and physical comedy brilliantly. Let me unpack both of these.

Bennett’s vocal performance is wonderful. Tell a tale of the modern woman drinking alone in a pub and it’s oh so easy to fall into the dull, stereotypical vocal patterns of the ladette: brutality masquerading as confidence, aggression impersonating autonomy. Bennetts instead allows the humour to be grounded in natural rhythms of speech, unforced, subtle, and far funnier for that.

Her physicality is first-rate. Moments of drunkenness are played magnificently, with hints of Emma’s inebriation mischievously showing through despite the character’s best attempts to disguise them. And the flashback to Emma as a backpack wielding school girl is gold.

Now, apart from outlining the scenario in the broadest terms, I’ve avoided discussing what the show is about.  Without spoilers, I can say that it explores one of the greatest tensions in human experience: sexuality versus individuality.

Though sexuality is so important for how we see ourselves, it cares nothing for us. It’s a blind, brute force. It’s as though we’re some flimsy chime and it’s all the winds of the wide world. In the collision of the two something beautiful can occur, but it seems we’re more suited to zephyrs than cyclones, and yet the earth’s great diurnal journey fuels more fury than fluff. Bennett’s script interprets the grand clash between sexuality and individuality as a battle with social expectations, and that’s indubitably true (and probably more suited to the dramatic form than my audacious metaphors.) Despite what the world says, Emma must decide what matters for herself.

I began this response by suggesting Losing It follows a well-trodden path – but with a crucial caveat. To explain myself, a diversion. Reductionists will tell us sexuality is all about reproduction. But in the human experience, reproduction is an inaccurate term; in so far as it guarantees Life’s continuance, sexuality ensures not reproduction, not replication, but rather diversity, both genetically and socially. That’s sexuality’s function. (Evolution could have simply chosen cloning, which it has for a number of species.) Sexuality’s raison d’être is to have us not eternally tread the same path. To consider sex this way is to begin to question convention.  And now one final crazy metaphor (building on my previous motif of sex as a primal force): Sexuality is the ocean in which swims the fish of individuality. Sexuality is as broad and deep as the sea, and for the fish there’s no escape – but there also are no defined paths, only endless possibilities.

It’s the offering of this vision of glorious variety that makes Bennetts’ work special.  

And I must emphasise, Losing It has none of the ridiculous density of my response; it’s fun, wise and splendidly Life-affirming.

The script was developed through the Katie Lees Fellowship, an initiative encouraging young women in art, and commemorating a beautiful soul.

Paul Gilchrist

Losing It by Megan Bennetts

At Flight Path Theatre until 18 November

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Robert Catto

Tags: ,

Pride in Prejudice: the Wharf Revue

13 Nov

Satire has street cred. It sticks it to the Man.

Written by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott, and performed by Mandy Bishop, David Whitney, Andrew Warboys, Biggins and Forsythe, what gives this production countless giggles is its clever caricatures of well-known people. Standouts are mischievous portraits of Anthony Albanese, Jacqui Lambie, Caroline Kennedy, Joe Biden and Peter Dutton.  

It’s a satire aimed at the famous and the supposedly powerful (though I don’t believe any of the above mentioned people were in the audience on opening night. It must be admitted, however, I do avoid all chit chat in the foyer.)

Satire always faces one huge dilemma: directly address your audience, make their lives your target, and you offend them. And, alas, the offended stop listening, and what’s worse, they don’t tell their offendable friends to buy tickets. So satire, despite good intentions, is often reduced to little more than the shadows in Plato’s cave; something that distracts us from reality, or secures us in our illusions.

One such illusion is that people who act on a political level are flawed. But isn’t that the Truth? Indubitably, but a lot of things are true that no one delights in repeating. This particular truism has the advantage that it justifies political passivity: I care, but engagement entails compromise at best, or corruption at worse, so I’ll merely watch. And, if this is my choice, then being informed must be valorised, and the consumption of media products must be conflated with genuine political engagement.  

Two skits seem to me to particularly suggest this disdain for authentic engagement. One is a series of video projections of Lidia Thorpe. I don’t admire Thorpe’s politics, and the sight of her in a “No” t-shirt filled me, once again, with dismay – but an attack on her that consisted of merely a rhyming ditty left me with a previously unexperienced empathy for the woman. Similarly, a skit in which three French people are lampooned for rioting for seemingly trivial political objectives left me reflecting that at least they weren’t sitting comfortably on their couches watching the ABC.

Another way satire gains street cred is by its flirtation with bad taste. This show has its share of such naughtiness: an animation of the Titanic mini-sub accident; an operatic assassination of Putin; and a passing reference to the current horrors in Gaza with the suggestion the problems are perennial. I’m not certain if this type of naughtiness is a challenge to conventions or a suspension of empathy.  

Subject matter aside, there are also challenges of a creative nature in a work like this. Video projection, though facilitating costume changes, might leave an audience wondering why they left home (especially an audience that it seems to be assumed watches a whole lot of TV.) Sung ditties, which made up a fair percentage of the evening, can be an inefficient and ineffectual way of making a satirical point; their critique being more rhyme than reason. And, if you perform a well loved song with altered, satirical lyrics, the prime victim is often the song.

And finally, a structural point: satire can be sharp like a scalpel, or detailed like the T & C’s for online banking, and anywhere in between risks losing either the bite or the complexity. The concluding skit, a terrific appropriation of South Pacific that explores Australian, American and Chinese diplomatic relations, gets the mix hilariously right.

Paul Gilchrist

The Wharf Revue: Pride in Prejudice by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott

At Seymour Centre until Dec 17

www.seymourcentre.com

Image by Vishal Pandey

Tags: ,

The Lives of Eve

2 Nov

The future is our home country; we’ll do things differently there. (Apologies to LP Hartley*, but more so to my readers who might have to wade through the entirety of this review in order to make sense of what I’m getting at.)

One of the greatest cultural revolutions of the last millennium was that lead by Freud. Because of he and his followers, we look to our personal past to explain our present. I am like this because I was treated like that. Maybe it’s true. Whatever the case, it’s a perspective that greatly impacts the modern world, even trivialities like theatre.

It’s extremely common for modern plays to look backwards. The heroine eventually realises (or remembers!) something about her past (that is before the events depicted in the play) and this motivates her to either accept that something or to transcend it. If you want a point of difference, consider Shakespeare. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have pasts (who doesn’t?) but the Bard doesn’t dwell on their back history to explain their actions. These are explained, in so far as they’re explained at all, by current desires and influences. (I’ve deliberately chosen the Macbeths as my example because modern directors love to read Lady Macbeth’s line “I have given suck and know how tender tis to love the babe that milks me” as an explanation for her extraordinary behaviour. Lady Macbeth has obviously lost a child and that has driven her to this – which might make sense if it wasn’t for the fact that the premodern infant mortality rate was so high that virtually every woman had lost a child, and yet only a small percentage of women went on to become regicides.)

Stephen Sewell’s The Lives of Eve is a fully conscious exploration of the tradition of the unconscious (or at least our focus on our personal histories.) His protagonist, Eve, is a Lacanian analyst. We are shown her sessions with patient, Sylvia. There’s even a couch. Sylvia suffers from sexual disfunction. (I’m prevaricating: She can’t come.) It’s a brave male dramatist who writes about the female orgasm. (No doubt, if I was to do so, some wag would gleefully quip that not only had I never had one, I have probably never been in the room when one was happening.) In addition to the challenges of Sylvia, Eve has trouble at home; she and husband Paul are drifting apart, driven by unequal sexual desires. Fortunately, Eve gets support from her dead mother. Yes, the past, again. There’s a lot of talk about the past.

Directed by Kim Hardwick, the cast are eminently watchable. Helen O’Connor as Eve offers a powerful portrait of strength seeking depth. Louisa Panucci effectively presents Sylvia as the swirling whirlpool that is the growing soul: attraction competes with repulsion, inhibition with bluntness, doubt with certainty. Noel Hodda as Paul superbly depicts affability and affection in their oh so painful collision with a hostility that’s incomprehensible. Annie Byron as Eve’s departed mother, Madeline, is charmingly nonchalant and ethereal.

Sewell’s characters are extremely erudite. They quote or reference Lacan, Freud, Augustine, Plato, Aristotle, Sappho, Donne, Shakespeare, Einstein, Badiou and Grieg (though, admittedly, the composer just happens to share his name with one of Eve’s friends.) I think it’s absolutely wonderful when dramatists present Australians as educated and intelligent. (It’s like watching a Marvel movie: sure, the suit couldn’t actually help Iron Man to fly, but it’s a fun fact to forget.)

A lot of top shelf ideas are shared. Marvel fans might suggest it’s merely psycho-babble vs socio-babble. (Lacan on language vs gender generalisations.) If it takes a brave male playwright to write about the female orgasm, you’d have to be a superhero to take on philosophy in Australian theatre.

But Sewell knows what he’s doing: it’s rich and provocative, and I’ll enjoy thinking about this work for some time to come.

I want to mention two moments that stood out for me. At one stage Eve suggests (something like) we are both mysteries and disappointments to ourselves – and to other people. It’s a beautiful, deeply humane encapsulation of what it is to be alive. Similarly, in argument with Sylvia, Eve asserts that some problems might simply not have solutions; our politics can take us only so far; being conflicted and confused is the human condition.

So, despite being a play interested in how our personal past informs our present, Eve becomes a model for maturity, for both acceptance and transcendence. The future is our home country, because our dearest dream is that we’ll do things differently there.

Paul Gilchrist

The Lives of Eve by Stephen Sewell

at KXT on Broadway until 11 Nov

www.kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Danielle Lyonne

* Hartley’s original line from The Go-Between was “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

   

Tags: ,