Slim’s left his wife and kid for Cavale. She’s going to help him become a rock and roll god. It’s not obvious how.
First produced in 1971, Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s Cowboy Mouth invites us into a world of dreams and desperation.
We’re somewhere in southwestern USA, in a room that’s seen better days (evocatively designed by Saz Watson.) The couple argue and make up, and argue and make up, and for a while this world seems distant, a vignette of reckless wretchedness. And then the script blossoms into beauty.
Cavale explains the need for a saviour. Not for the music industry, but for the human soul. The old religious forms no longer suffice, yet the spiritual hunger remains, deep and real. (What Australian play would say this? Has our country, insipid, sunburnt and stolen, seduced us into a pose of eyes firmly down? If so, why is it different in America?)
Saints can be found in all walks of life, Cavale says. It has to do with purity of purpose. Dylan might have been the saviour, as might Jagger, but no…. perhaps it’s Slim.
There’s a sprinkling of references to Yeats – the treading on of dreams, the beast slouching towards Bethlehem – and all this enriches a script that already bubbles hot with poetry, lava-like, frightening and fascinating.
And under Anna Houston’s direction, the cast bring it to the boil. Natassa Zoe and Austin Hayden as the couple are gloriously vibrant, but also achingly vulnerable. From their wonderfully raw physicality to their command of monologues both melancholic and mesmerising, the show is a thrilling 50 minutes of theatre.
And there’s a cameo from Watson, which the spoiler rule probably relegates to critical silence. But let me say this: it’s a very funny, very disturbing meditation on what it might actually be to be saved.
This is big, bold, beautiful storytelling. And that it’s new Australian work is utterly exhilarating. Thank you Snatched Collective, White Box and KXT.
Mercury Poisoning by Madeleine Stedman is set in the early 1960’s and focuses on the space race between the USA and the USSR. It bounces intoxicatingly between three separate plotlines: the female cosmonaut program in Russia; the female astronaut program in America; and also in America, an African-American actor working on a TV series that is set (you guessed it) in space.
These plots don’t connect, except thematically, and that makes for an enormously rich dramatic experience.
It’s a colossal project and director Kim Hardwick presents it brilliantly. On a fundamentally empty stage, scenes and settings flow smoothly and quickly, one into another, positioning us to delight in discovering the many connections.
I say an empty stage, but that’s not quite accurate. In Meg Anderson’s design, above floats a sky of blue fabric, as thin as silk, ethereal, dreamlike, evoking the mystery, the danger, of space.
Hardwick’s use of movement to suggest space flight is a visual treat.
Costumes by Anderson are also wonderful, successfully transporting us to the multiple worlds of the play.
And an extra joy of a piece like this, part of its thrilling theatricality, is as actors double, they switch accents, a feat the performers navigate splendidly, thanks to accent and dialect coach Linda Nicholls-Gidley.
The entire ensemble is superb. I’ll describe some, but not all, of the magic.
Violette Ayad excels as Valeria the cosmonaut, achieving an absolutely mesmerising balance between vulnerability and courage.
Her counterpoint in the States, Molly, is played by Teodora Matović and her portrayal of determination and confidence is inspiring.
Shawnee Jones as a black actor in a white industry is magnificent, offering a portrait that perfectly blends exuberance and anger, and informs both with a searing intelligence.
Playing a musician, Tinashe Mangwana glows with an almost childlike vitality, and this is beautifully counterpointed with his later turn as sombre House Committee chairperson.
Jack Richardson as cosmonaut Yuri and as the lead actor in what feels like a Star Trek parody is terrific, finding in both roles the discomforting complexity within those we glibly label heroes.
Similarly, Shaw Cameron as the idolised astronaut John Glenn powerfully depicts the patriarchal menace lurking behind male charisma. When compared to his Russian cosmonaut and lover, it’s an especially fine polyphonous performance.
Brendan Miles skilfully presents authority figures in all three worlds of the play, effectively suggesting the multifarious ways power is exercised.
As a senator’s wife and would be astronaut, Sarah Jane Starr flawlessly captures class, privilege and that disarming charm of the American creed of positivity.
Melissa Jones stuns with a portrait of a famous American pilot who threatens to kick the ladder away from the women who seek to follow and transcend her.
Back to the script. On its most obvious level, we’re presented inspiring stories of marginalised people seeking equality. But what makes Stedman’s play extraordinary is the depth of the treatment of what has become so often in our theatre a narrative cliché.
I’ll explore this depth in terms of the choice of setting. By juxtaposing women seeking equality in different societies, we’re invited to see both the universality of the phenomena and the multiple ways it’s manifest. There’s a refreshing brashness to the American women, an energetic individualism, but this comes into collision with the House Committee’s simple question Does our society need you in space? In Soviet Russia, individualism is discouraged, and the women must speak perpetually, and perhaps sometimes genuinely, of serving the state.
Further contrasts are developed, digging deeper into the relationship of the individual with the community. The Russians posit We must follow the rules so the next generation can break them. The Americans ask Can you be it, if you don’t see it?
It’s all powerfully suggestive of the tension at the heart of modern Life: we feel we personally deserve equality, but the granting of that equality is at the whim of others.
And that’s where the time period in which this play is set is so provocative. The 1960’s were different. Think the speeches of Kennedy and of Luther King. Sixty years on, the zeitgeist has changed. The 1960’s dreamt of equality. We demand it. They said We could make this happen. We say Why hasn’t it happened yet? Our attitude is completely understandable, but I suspect much can be learnt from theirs. If your equality is at the whim of others, then you have to get the others onboard. Inviting them to share a dream might do this more effectively than telling them they are evil. Visions unite, guilt divides.
But, you could respond, it didn’t work in the 60’s.
Perhaps. But to appropriate Chesterton, the hippy ideal was not tried and found wanting; it was found difficult, and left untried.
Can it be tried now? Obama, in his campaigns, peddled hope with success.
I’m not suggesting Stedman’s play necessarily asserts all this, but through her radical choice of setting, the debate on strategy – how we are to make a better world – is gloriously refreshed.
Similarly, by her juxtaposition of a TV series set in space with the actual space race, the issue of the pursuit of equality is given true range. Equality might be spoken of from the mountain top, but it only has meaning when it comes to the people of the plain. In a brilliant final scene, performed by Mangwana and Jones, they argue the value of her silly TV job, and we’re asked to consider whether you need to go to the moon to change the world.
This is a fantastic production of a tremendous play, and one of the most stimulating pieces of theatre I’ve seen for a long while.
This is the silliest thing I’ve seen for quite a while.
It purports to be a modern adaptation of Assemblywomen by Aristophanes, but the connection with the ancient text is tenuous.
Fans of the original will be disappointed (so I suspect there won’t be much disappointment.)
The original play would be distasteful to most modern audiences. In it, the women of Athens take over the assembly, certain that they can do a better job of running the city than the men. Aristophanes is satirising the male leadership of his time, suggesting even women could do better. (It’s akin to a sporting slur like Even my grandmother could bowl faster, which is difficult to interpret as being in praise of grandmothers.)
The original play was written two and a half thousand years ago but Margaret Thanos, creator of this adaptation, has clearly not made much use of the time.
Instead of a closely worked, razor sharp script, her goal has been to create a space in which high energy comic performance can thrive, and in this she has excelled, presenting a production that is gloriously exuberant.
Thanos and the cast of co-writers leave Aristophanes behind. Despite the title, there is no parliament of women. The story revolves around two of the ancient Greek gods vying to get their chosen candidate elected to the modern Australian Parliament; we never actually see that institution. The point is that we as a nation have trouble electing women. But the gods of Olympus don’t exist as characters in the ancient text, and their addition here is more about creating opportunities for crazy mayhem, rather than sharpening any satire.
Satire is not really the goal. Yes, the protagonist Prax pretends to be a man in order to be considered seriously as a candidate. But the implied criticism of Australian society is weakened by the fact this strategy is urged, not by a member of the Australian public, not by a cynical member of one of our established parties, but by Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom, played by a male actor in a skirt. And oddly, the election appears to be about choice of prime minister, which is not a feature of our system. Similarly loose, one of Prax’s campaign policies is Equal Pay for Women, though at no time is it suggested how the legislature might achieve this, considering it was legally established in Australia in 1972. But then, another of the policies touted is Votes for Animals.
So, no, not really satire. But wonderful fun! Much of the humour is what snobs call undergraduate (a term which has always left me wondering about the nature of post-doc humour.) But there’s a shit pile of scatological jokes, simulated masturbation and sex, including one orgasm featuring the traditional whipped cream, and not one, but two examples of that much underrated mirth maker: bestiality.
Thanos has gathered a brilliant cast and guides them all to top class comic performances. Emma O’Sullivan as Prax is a delightful mix of bewilderment and determination. Matt Abotomey as the opposing candidate is enormous fun, portraying with consummate comic skill the man who knows, that in this male world, you only have to be that least inspiring of things: a good bloke. Richard Hilliar as Athena has an absolutely divine stage presence. Hannah Raven gives a superb parody of the stereotypical vamp. Clay Crighton as Hermes gives a beautiful portrait of sanity amidst madness, the axis around which this crazy world spins.
A female PM? Not now.
Not ever?
If a more just society can come about through sheer energy, then the answer to that question is soon.
Paul Gilchrist
Not Now, Not Ever: A Parliament of Women created and directed by Margaret Thanos
Perhaps you’ve heard of them? I hadn’t. But apparently, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were pirates who sailed the seas in the early 1700’s, an era referred to as the Golden Age of Piracy.
It wasn’t a golden age for women, regardless of occupation. In this terrific micro-musical by Emily Whiting and Aiden Smith, Bonny and Read must navigate a man’s world. Apart from physical dangers, they face heteronormative bigotry and male unwillingness to accept them as equals.
But it’s not a story of victims. It presents two extraordinary individuals who are more than equal to adversity, and to most of the men. Utterly inspiring (if you can forget the fact they were pirates.)
The songs are classy and clever. Melody, harmony and lyric meld brilliantly. And, considering it’s only an hour long, the narrative arc works well.
The songs are performed beautifully, by Anka Kosanović as Bonny, Gabi Lanham as Read, Ben James as Jack Rackham (Bonny’s love interest when the story begins) and Louis Chiu as Jack Bonny (Bonny’s love interest from way before the story begins). They’re supported wonderfully by the crew, played by Roya and Eli Reilly.
In this performance, the music was prerecorded and the vocals sung live. As a result, it was one of the more satisfying musical experience I’ve had – because I could actually hear all the lyrics. (Yes, I know there’s magic to a live band, but it seems SO hard to get the sound levels right.)
One challenge of the piece is, that for the majority of audiences, the world of the pirate is a literary world, an imagined world. Like the Wild West, we know a world something like this did have a historical reality – but in a pirate story we’ve come to expect something other than reality. Pirate stories are romances, in the old fashioned sense: there are wild adventures, larger than life characters, exotic settings, sudden discoveries and extraordinary coincidences. Think Treasure Island. Pirate stories have also become increasingly silly, filled with pantomime villains and absurd accents. Think Captain Hook from Peter Pan. Think Pirates of the Caribbean. Think International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19).
The attempt to tell a truthful story in pirate world can ironically (and unjustly) seem like historical naivety.
The solution? Either ground the piece in such a gritty realism that its historical credentials are unquestionable. Or begin the piece by embracing the silly and self-referential, and then transcend it – with characters we relate to and love.
Perhaps the second of these is the best option for a musical. And currently only at an hour, there’s plenty of room for this piece to grow.
Another element of the imagined pirate world is flamboyance and vitality (think swashbuckling Errol Flynn) and this piece, in its next reincarnation, would benefit from a more confidant, bold physicality.
Regardless of my unsolicited suggestions, the production as it is now is an entertaining piece of music theatre, with serious potential.
Bonny and Read is part of ARTSLAB, a showcase of new works by Shopfront’s young resident artists.
Wallis Heads is a beautiful but sleepy coastal town. Multi-million dollar property developer Alex Whittle thinks it’s ripe for a make-over.
As the new playground for the rich, jobs and money will pour in. It’s entirely logical, if driven by self-interest.
And the local mayor thinks it’s a terrific idea, especially since Whittle will fund a brand new council chambers.
But where will all this leave the little people? Any chance for maintaining a pristine environment will be gone. Any possibility of social housing will disappear. Market forces will mean new jobs, but the people working them will no longer be able to pay the rent.
That’s the great divide of the title, the division of the rich from the less so.
Single mum Penny, stacking shelves at Woolies to make ends meet, has had enough. There are things you have to fight for.
In the battle for hearts and minds, one field of engagement is Rachel, Penny’s teenage daughter. To widen the cracks in an already fractious mother-daughter relationship, Whittle expresses belief in Rachel’s big dreams, aspirations her more caring mother tempers with caution.
David Williamson’s script has a majestic simplicity, an exquisite clarity. In many ways, it’s not a new story. But, in the most important ways, it’s a true story. I don’t mean it’s non-fiction; I mean it openly deals with genuine tensions in our society.
There’s gentle humour aplenty, sprinkled with silent assassin satire; it’s a warm, hearty chicken soup, laced with shards of glass.
Mark Kilmurry’s cast is magnificent. Georgie Parker as Whittle plays every note of the script with a precision and attention to detail that’s an utter comic delight.
I haven’t cried in many Williamson plays, except from laughter, but here the mother-daughter relationship is presented with an honesty and insight that had my eyes stinging with salt only a scene or two in. Emma Diaz as Penny and Caitlin Burley as Rachel are extraordinary.
Maybe the end of play has a whiff of the deus ex machina about it. (Ironic, considering what the deus is in this case…. I don’t think the spoiler rule prohibits me from mentioning the word election.) This is not a criticism of the script; the dramatic form simply has it limits. Drama confidently represents the struggles between individuals and between small groups, but it can only hint at larger movements. Its power is not to represent the masses, but to galvanise them. What we can’t see on stage, we’re encouraged to enact ourselves. Democracy is drama in the daylight. And that aphorism, like the play that inspired it, is an invitation.
The website suggests it’s “A puppetry performance examining the future of AI developed art”, but I didn’t read that before the show.
I don’t read anything before a show.
I’m a theatre reviewer, which might tell you I find reading sort of hard.
During the show, it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with artificial intelligence. That might be indicative of RI (reviewer intelligence) but I’ll blame the fact I couldn’t see at a couple of brief but crucial moments. A combination of overly dim lighting and awkward sight lines meant I had difficulty following the narrative arc.
On reflection, little puppet Rodrick was, I guess, suggestive of some sort of machine. And despite being forced to experience multiple examples of art, he struggled to create the real thing himself. So, yes, AI.
At the time, I took it all as a more generalised meditation on art. What is its value and purpose? What makes anyone an artist?
Looked at this way, it was fuel for a fiery demarcation dispute. It’s me and my reviewer friends who write about art in abstract terms. (We must be allowed some revenge on beauty.) In fact, I’ve been known to suggest that abstract ideas don’t belong in the theatre at all, that the stage is a place for the concrete, the specific, the particular.
But this is where puppets come in. Puppets are so clearly constructed, so obviously created, that they liberate us from what we call reality but is, in fact, mundanity. No one demands to know the back history of a puppet character – and so they live forward with a vitality that’s utterly refreshing. No one complains a puppet’s performance is untruthful – so they liberate us from that stifling euphemism that’s simply Narrowminded for If it’s beyond my experience it can’t be real.
Puppets are creative joy incarnate, and so are perfect for a playful poke at the big problems.
Tom Hetherington-Welch and Oliver Durbidge are company Highly Strung Puppets, and in creating this show, they create magic. Under their direction the ensemble present, with inspiring expertise, multiple forms of puppetry: marionettes, shadow figures and Bunraku-style puppets. Rodrick, who I mentioned earlier, is beautifully given life by operator Stella Klironomakis. The Curator, who collects art and hopes to teach Rodrick how to make it, is operated brilliantly by Jack Curry and the ensemble, and displays an electrifying range of emotions.
The show gains a thrilling texture from its use of projection. These projections, brimming with playful pop culture references, are the artworks from which Roderick must learn. The clips are created by Highly Strung Puppets and demonstrate both their extraordinary skill in puppet creation and their gleeful sense of mischief. Another stimulating use of projection occurs when Roderick creates his first story, and the ensemble bring it to life, there and then, filming the actions of tiny figurines, who then tower above us on the screen.
Some audience members might feel the exploration of the artistic endeavour too narrow, too inhouse, too much just talking shop. After all, we’re not all artists, or pursuing a career in the arts.
But there’s something much more universal in this. Apart from a healthy critique of careerism (that very middle class malady in which we suffer from the delusion we are our job), there’s a glorious exhortation to live.
Perhaps the concluding scene is an allusion to Voltaire’s Candide, but it’s certainly a poignant image of the joy of openness, of artlessness.
Art for the End Times is part of ARTSLAB, a twice yearly event, where Shopfront’s resident artists showcase new works in a festival setting. In its support of young creators, Shopfront once again proves itself an invaluable element of Sydney’s theatre scene.
Paul Gilchrist
Art for the End Times by Tom Hetherington-Welch and Oliver Durbidge
I saw this play in 2007, during its first run at Belvoir. I left the theatre deeply moved, but a friend was less so. After some grumbling, he admitted the cause of his dissatisfaction. The play had said only the obvious. His partner snapped that it wasn’t so “obvious” to a lot of people. This was before the Marriage Equality Act, and not long after homosexuality had been decriminalised. (1997 in Tasmania.)
But my friend persisted, theatre should push the envelope. And, up to that moment, I probably would have agreed.
But the 2007 Belvoir production of Holding the Man changed me. It made me realise that we have to celebrate the values we think matter. Generosity of spirit. Openness. Kindness. Love. These are not obvious. No heaven underwrites them. Their promise lives only in our stories, their impact only in our actions.
This production by Eamon Flack is as beautiful and moving as that I saw in 2007.
It’s a love story. A true story. Tim and John meet in high school and fall in love. There’s acceptance of their love, there’s rejection, and hovering over it all – this is the 1980’s – the spectre of an enormous human tragedy. The threat of HIV/AIDS is still with us, but those who lived through its early years remember the horror of its blind, bewildering cruelty.
Danny Ball and Tom Conroy are utterly superb as the lovers, and the ensemble cast is brilliant.
The first act brims with humour. There’s a gleeful, glorious commitment to the comedy. We’re warmly invited to laugh, with both nostalgia and a more universal recognition, at the dagginess of life. The awkward enthusiasms of our teenager years. Our oh so suburban families. Our seriously naïve university activism. Even the drama school that will teach us truth by having us roll around the floor.
All this anchors the story in the everyday, and the pay off in the second act is of immense emotional impact. Playful theatricality makes way for a simple honesty that honours the human tragedy. The beautifully understated performances of the second act are grounded in the genuine.
No angry cry for justice, no burning resentment, gets in the way of Truth.
As Wilfred Owen would say, the pity is in the poetry, or in Murphy’s case, his complete command of the Australian vernacular.
I haven’t read Timothy Conigrave’s memoir, but Murphy’s adaptation is absolutely masterful, and Flack’s production is hilarious, heartbreaking, and so very vital.
Paul Gilchrist
Holding the Man by Tommy Murphy, from the book by Timothy Conigrave
Directed by Jane Angharad, Ross Mueller’s The Ghost Writer is a tight, clever thriller. It’s a meditation on Truth, not so much what it is, but what we do with it.
Brihanna’s daughter has been murdered. She wants to write a book about it.
To make that happen, publisher Robert employs a ghost writer.
Whether the pun in the title is provocative or naff depends on … taste.
The danger haunting all work that borrows from the thriller genre is that their representations of the horrible can appear heartless. Are these representations there to mourn the bewildering misery of existence, or merely to sharpen the story?
A lot of people love this type of sharpness and, with some good performances and an evocative set (by James Smithers), this story has real bite.
But it’s not a bite to my taste.
Brihanna (Emma Dalton) claims she knows who killed her daughter. Since the murder remains unsolved, you might think this a point of interest … and Brihanna’s claim is considered, briefly, and then disappears into the background until the conclusion of the play. Stories that withhold information foster curiosity not empathy. There’s been a lot of these type of stories since the invention of crime fiction. They invite us to guess, not to grow. They humanise us as much as a crossword puzzle might. They are the sudokus of the soul.
You might counter that thrillers are not about feelings, but thought.
But thrillers have abstract ideas in the way superheroes have capes: they’re obvious, they flap around a lot, but you’re not really sure why they’re there. (Answer: They provide the illusion of flight.)
Here the abstract idea is Truth, and that cape flaps around in quite an eye-catching manner.
There’s a sexual relationship between the writer (Mel Day) and an employee of the public prosecutor (Shan-Ree Tan). Apart from being extraordinarily coincidental, the relationship is also oddly anonymous. The couple have been sharing a bed but not personal information, not even their names.
The prosecutor has eschewed truth in another way. He has knowingly charged an innocent man with murder, giving in to pressure from a government keen to assert its credentials on crime before an election. Tan gives a fine performance as the man who knows he could have done better. The scenario itself has a whiff of the American about it, where district attorneys are elected. I won’t be so naïve as to suggest that our public servants don’t cop pressure from elected representatives, but how many Australians would alter their vote according to the arrest of a single murder suspect? (In our wide, flat land, justice is a chimera, and only the hip pocket is real. Recently, 240 years of injustice towards our indigenous people failed to impact a vote. But, it could be argued, my example only further supports the premise of the scenario.)
Other characters are also presented as having scant regard for the truth. Robert the publisher is driven by sales. Mark Langham excels in the satirical portrait of the ruthless businessman, allowing it to grow subtly, until it overshadows the more gentle humour which introduced the character as a playful rogue and confused father.
And the motif of truth returns again with Brihanna’s remarkable claim that she saw Jesus take her child to the afterlife. One character asks Do you believe Brihanna saw Jesus take the child? It’s an odd way of putting it. Perhaps if it were Do you believe Jesus took the child? it might be more to the point. Or, better still, Do you believe Brihanna believes she saw Jesus take the child? None of this is unpacked, perhaps for the best. Unless you lived in Galilee in the first century of the Common Era, seeing Jesus would surely be an experience of the inner life, and the play believes in external facts. Perhaps all plays must, even when those facts are bizarre, and the last line of this play certainly is a conversation starter, or stopper, depending on…taste.
But taste is not Truth. (In every production, the least convincing performance is always the one by the critic attempting the role of Teller-of-the-Truth.)
See this taut, taunting, teasing piece for yourself.
Paul Gilchrist
The Ghost Writer by Ross Mueller
produced by Crying Chair Theatre in association with Secret House
Theatre Red 