Archive | May, 2024

Shook

20 May

First produced in 2019 in London, Shook by Samuel Bailey is set in an institution for youth offenders and focusses on the experience of three of the inmates.

The three have in common the fact they are fathers – or soon will be – and they share classes aimed at preparing them for this responsibility.

It’s an inspired choice by Bailey. It raises the disturbing and galvanising spectre that the underclass status of these youths is an inherited one and will be passed on to their children. It effectively conveys that their traumatised lives have ill prepared them for concerns beyond themselves. It highlights their vulnerability, stuck inside when there’s somewhere much more important to be. And, most of all, it reminds us that these young people, though rejected by society, are still one with the common human experience.

It’s a terrific script, brimming with humour and heart, and in this production, directed by Emma Whitehead, the performances are absolutely superb.

Malek Domköc as Riyad, one time gang member, beautifully balances the ominous with a blossoming maturity.

Isaac Harley as Jonjo, the troubled newcomer, delivers his character arc magnificently. The glimmers of transcendence of trauma that Jonjo achieves are presented with a gradualness that is gloriously truthful.

Edyll Ismail plays the social worker who must prepare these young people for the future. Ismail perfectly portrays the inner conflict so often experienced by those working in institutions charged with remedying institutional problems: genuine concern is twinned with a patience that is a close cousin to despair.  

Louis Regan as Cain sets the stage alight with a brilliant high-energy performance, one of the most exciting I’ve seen for a while. His Cain suffers from ADHD, and bounces between intimidation, bravado, humour and a deeply affecting vulnerability.  

Paul Gilchrist

Shook by Samuel Bailey

at the Substation, Qtopia until June 5

qtopiasydney.com.au/performances/

Image by Becky Matthews

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Cock

17 May

With a title like this, it will come as no surprise to anyone that this play has similarities to a Jane Austen novel.

To start with, it has a tight focus on the success or failure of a romantic relationship.

But like an Austen novel, this focus is deceptive; Mike Bartlett’s finely crafted interrogation of what seems a garden variety experience opens up to a much deeper consideration of what it is to be human.

The scenario is simple: John has been in a relationship with a man (M), but now he has fallen for a woman (W). Who gets to keep him?

Casey Moon-Watton’s wonderfully clever set suitably evokes a boxing ring. It also gives the actors nowhere to hide –  and this highlights their splendidly precise performances.

Darrin Redgate’s direction is superb; his use of space almost ballet-like in its beauty.

Andrew Lindqvist as M plays magnificently that very challenging of paradoxes: the amiable grump. However, it’s his revelation of the vulnerability in that character which is the performance’s most extraordinary achievement.  

Grace Stamna’s W is a delight. Beginning as a glorious breath of fresh air blowing through the staleness of John’s life, it’s fascinating to watch that energy transform to flinty determination.

As John’s father, Richard Cotter produces brilliant comic work; his character weighing into crucial philosophical arguments armed with nothing more than a good heart.

John is a tough role to play. Vacillation, hesitation and indecision are not the most admirable, or indeed watchable, of human qualities. (Who hasn’t hoorayed when Hamlet finally gets poked with that poison-tipped sword?) It’s hard to be heroic when you’re busy shilly-shallying. But Stephen Schofield as John pulls it off. It’s a miraculous performance, eliciting from the audience empathy and offering them that most poisoned-tipped of swords: self-recognition.

Earlier I mentioned both philosophical issues and the play’s deep consideration of what it is to human – but don’t get the impression it’s all too heavy. In fact, it’s a very funny piece of theatre that (like Austen’s work) is a close kissing-cousin to sit-com. But the simple story digs into a treacherous fracture line in our culture. As one of the characters suggests, the labelling of straight and gay has undoubtedly aided the extension of human rights. (And I’d extrapolate that observation to every other demographic moniker currently in fashion.)

But – and this is a big but – labelling is a legal fiction. People are always more than labels. When should we let them go?

Paul Gilchrist

Cock by Mike Bartlett

at Flight Path Theatre until 18 May

www.flightpaththeatre.org

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Isolde & Tristan

9 May

If you’re familiar with the legend, you’ll know it’s usually told as a tale of passionate romantic or sexual love. You’ll also know that the names in the title are usually presented in the reverse order. It’s a clue.

In this version by Esther Vilar, Tristan transports Isolde by boat to the man she will marry, Marke, King of Cornwall. The marriage is political; it will supposedly cement peace between warring Britain and Ireland. Trouble is, the conflict’s been long and dirty, and apart from anything else, Tristan has killed Isolde’s previous betrothed.

But isn’t desire wild and irrepressible? That’s the usual point of the legend. Tristan and Isolde become lovers. Don’t tell Marke.

Vilar’s version of the story is the most satisfying dramaturgically I’ve seen, and her carefully structured script forefronts the politics.

It fits: the two islands off the European mainland have had a long, horrible history.

And, though love is universal, so are cruelty and revenge and hate and resentment and fury and retaliation and retribution. Director Damien Ryan and designer Bernadette Ryan highlight the perpetuity of these human experiences by an inspired use of costumes and props; the play begins grounded in what appears a medieval world but, gradually, modern anachronisms slip in, and by the conclusion we can’t pretend this is merely a barbarism we’ve outgrown.

All the action occurs on the boat, and set designer Tom Bannerman has achieved the extraordinary by making this work in the Old Fitz space.

Opera singer Octavia Barron Martin and pianist Justin Leong accompany the performance, creating a theatrical world of magic, emotion and true grandeur.

Ryan’s cast are magnificent.

Tom Wilson as Tristan plays his character’s arc with wonderful subtlety; it’s fascinating to watch the incremental movement from distant superiority to passionate engagement.

Sean O’Shea’s Marke is brilliant. Pompous, ineffectual, self-conscious, it’s an hilarious and painfully insightful portrait of the privileged middle-aged man.

Isolde is the toughest part. Both boldness and reflection, impetuosity and calculation must exist simultaneously, and these tensions must be suggested to the audience while believably going unnoticed or disregarded by the other characters. Emma Wright is absolutely superb as she navigates the complexities of this role.

So, that reversal of the names in the title? What sort of subversion is going on there? I wish I could write more, but the spoiler rule is so named because it always spoils my argument. (Reviewers might have the last word, but we don’t really get to write about the last scene.) Does the title hint at a subversion of the patriarchy? Or does it, in effect, suggest that and even more – a subversion of a bigger, better, more beautiful dream? I think so; after all, that’s what great drama does.

Paul Gilchrist

Isolde & Tristan by Esther Vilar

at Old Fitzroy theatre until June 1

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Kate Williams

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Switzerland

8 May

This is an extraordinarily intriguing, extraordinarily odd play.

Written by Joanna Murray-Smith, and first produced in 2014 by the Sydney Theatre Company, it’s since been produced around the world.

It presents the novelist Patricia Highsmith as she is visited in her Swiss home by an emissary from her American publisher.

Highsmith was a real person, the writer of many novels, including those featuring the protagonist Tom Ripley. (Admission: If it hadn’t been for the Matt Damon film, I probably would know nothing about either the real person or the fictional one.)

Ripley – as even myopic theatre reviewers like myself know – is talented. He is a master of deceit, seduction and, most of all, murder. In creating Ripley, Highsmith was on to a winner – or so the critics and the sales suggest. (To me, it all seems simply bizarre. Or untruthful. But the challenging of parochial assumptions about human nature is what this piece is all about.)

Anyway, in Murray-Smith’s invented meeting between writer and messenger, the bone of contention is whether Highsmith can be convinced to write one more Ripley novel before she dies. It’s a beautiful example of how clarity of motivation can keep us utterly hooked, while also providing the playwright with the most delicious opportunities for subversion.

The play is set late last century, and part of its fascination is how quickly the assumptions of the literary world Highsmith inhabited have come to seem so distant from those of the present.

In juxtaposition to our contemporary literary focus on bearing witness to what’s been done to us, here are at least three ideas the play provocatively throws forth:

  1. Writers are, or can be, neutral. (Like Switzerland.) Their job is not to tell us what is morally wrong. They simply present the truth of human nature. And they can do so in a way that renders our moral compass irrelevant. (Highsmith, apparently, makes us root for Ripley.)
  2. Writers have the ability to do what they do because of the horrible things that have happened to them. (Francis Bacon supposedly was locked in a cupboard as a child, and that’s why he became a great painter.) Our personal suffering does not position us to bear witness to injustice, but rather to see into the human heart, and to portray powerfully what we find there.
  3. The human heart is dark. Civilization is a veneer and, in truth, we are violent beasts. This idea has long be in stock, but our current focus on sociology rather than psychology has hidden it way at the back of the shelf.  

Just these three ideas should send any audience out into the night burning with questions. (There’s a fourth idea I’d like to talk about, but I’ll get back to it at the end.) It’s a privilege to see such a rich, sophisticated, utterly engaging work.

Captivated by the play, I’ve said nothing about the production. Under Shaun Rennie’s direction, it’s brilliant.

Toni Scanlan as Highsmith is glorious: snappy, curmudgeonly, hilariously acerbic until a certain familiarity about her visitor encourages a pathos-inducing vulnerability.

Laurence Boxhall as Edward is magnificent. Initially playing a terrific comic balance between the awkwardness and confidence of youth, Boxhall gradually, and mesmerizingly, morphs the character into something grippingly different.

It’s a joy to watch two consummate actors do such masterful work.

Now, the end. Don’t worry, there’ll be no spoilers – because I didn’t really understand the end. (Or, at least, it sent me out into the darkness alight with questions.)

But that fourth idea? Teasingly offered for our consideration is the relation between the writer’s created world and their reality. By extension, it’s a tantalising invitation to ask ourselves Does our vision of the world actually create our world?  

Paul Gilchrist

Switzerland by Joanna Murray-Smith

At Ensemble until 8 June

ensemble.com.au

Image by Brett Boardman

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Nayika (A Dancing Girl)

6 May

In this one actor show, a Sydney-sider tells us of her youth in Chennai. Her Indian family are working abroad and, as a teenager, the protagonist is sent to the city to study dance. She learns to present the eight heroines, all of whom are lovers. (Can a whole artistic tradition fail the Bechdel test? The answer is obviously yes, though I claim no expertise regarding this one.)

A catch-up with an old school friend and a phone call with her mother bring back memories of her youth.

As teenager, a clandestine relationship with a boy turns from romance to fear as he increasingly exhibits controlling, violent behaviour. The adults are absent – even the ones she asks for help – and our protagonist has no idea what to do.

Co-created and co-directed by Nithya Nagarajan and Liv Satchell, this is a brilliantly crafted work. Its fluid movement from the present to the past highlights how an individual’s personal history can underpin their now. The motif of the dance lessons operates on multiple levels, creating a counterpoint to the passing of time, but also hinting at attempts to bring order to a universe slipping into chaos. The script’s many references to Hindu myth further this conceit: these seemingly timeless representations portray a world both grand and frighteningly wild. (The fact that the Hindu pantheon includes Kali, the goddess of death and destruction, is one of the reasons that religious tradition is a pinnacle of human culture. It’s tempting to try to bury misery, to pretend it can’t touch us, but it takes courage, of the transformative kind, to acknowledge with clear eyes the existence of violence.)  

Vaishnavi Suryaprakash performs this piece beautifully, moving between characters and time periods with a masterful ease. Musicians Bhairavi Raman and Marco Cher-Gibard provide a magnificent soundscape for both the dances and the emotional growth of the character.  

It’s difficult to discuss what this play does without breaking the spoiler rule (which is a tribute to its superbly tight construction.) But if the eight heroines fail to serve as models, and if the past is not forever to determine the present, a new vision must be found – and, here, gloriously, it is.

Paul Gilchrist

Nayika (A Dancing Girl) co-created by Nithya Nagarajan and Liv Satchell

at Belvoir until 19 May

belvoir.com.au

Image by Brett Boardman

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Lose to Win

3 May

Mandela Mathia has an extraordinary stage presence – warm and generous spirited.

Lose to Win is his autobiographical sharing. It tells of being born in South Sudan in the midst of conflict, moving to Egypt in the hope of making real the dream of coming to Australia, and the final arrival in the so-called Promised Land.

The journey is difficult. When the average Australian has never gone hungry, it’s a soul expanding wake-up call to be told We went to funerals because there was food.

Director Jessica Arthur allows the tale to be told with suitable simplicity, an appreciation that truth needs no ornamentation.

Musician Yacou Mbaye supports Mathia, providing evocative rhythms that help transport a fortunate audience to distant lands.

Mathia tells us there were several forks in the road, moments where a poor decision could lead to moral collapse. This is an especially powerful assertion when it is apparent his tale is one of Little People being caught in Big History, ordinary people facing forces so overwhelming that individuals can seem robbed of all choice.

On several occasions, Mathia suggests the choice was between Anger and Love. (Perhaps this is THE CHOICE in Life.)

I’ve written a lot about the preponderance of sharings on our stages. I think it’s odd that we’ve come to think that theatre is about telling our stories in the autobiographical sense. One thing I haven’t mentioned previously is the challenge that autobiography creates for the theatre maker. Get it wrong and the audience response is Why am I hearing just about you? Get it right and the audience response is I want to hear more! This is not how it works with fiction. Awkward and potentially confusing analogy: make a beautiful vase and its joy is in its containment, its completeness. Its beauty doesn’t make you want the vase to be bigger. (Though it may make you want there to be more vases.)

Because Mathia’s story is wonderfully told we want to know more – but he has to stop somewhere! By the time the story gets to Australia, concrete details become fewer. Mathia talks about racism, but we hear more about the media and Peter Dutton than his own experience. It might be hard for the audience to hear, and hard for the performer, but …

But, I did refer earlier to THE CHOICE. Anger versus Love. What makes this show such a beautiful gift is that it forefronts this choice, and is gloriously clear which side must win.          

Paul Gilchrist

Lose to Win by Mandela Mathia

at Belvoir until 19 May

belvoir.com.au/productions/lose-to-win/

Image by Brett Boardman

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A Case for the Existence of God

2 May

This is a magnificent piece of theatre.

However, I suspect the title might put off an Australian audience.

Australians like to believe we’re less literal than our American cousins. Case in point: we often joke that they don’t get irony. But, ironically, when it comes to religious language, we’re the ones reluctant to use it in any way other than literally. In many other cultures, writers comfortably evoke God without fear that it automatically commits them to the theological tenets of some religion. Religious language is employed to suggest or symbolise the grand, the awe inspiring, the universal. Sometimes, it can feel like the only discourse big enough for these things. An honorary American, Albert Einstein, was famous for using religious language in this way. His oft quoted comment, expressing his objection to quantum theory, that God does not play dice, was simply an assertion that mere chance could not be fundamental to the fabric of the universe. He was saying nothing that we unsophisticated Australians would interpret as religious.

The title of Samuel D. Hunter’s play uses religious language in a similarly evocative way. In this superbly crafted two hander, no one says a word about religion. Not a word. The two male characters discuss money, work and most of all, their children. They build an unlikely friendship. The title simply implies hope, that despite problems, things might work out OK. (I know I’m getting awfully close to spoiler territory here, but the final scene, which is a theatrical surprise and an utter delight, reminds me of the conclusion of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, only more secular. Wilder himself borrowed the idea from Dante, that towering poet who spoke of the human heart via religious language – because only it had the grandeur to do justice to his topic.)

Director Craig Baldwin’s production is wisely pared back so that the focus is on the two splendid performances by Elijah Williams and Anthony Gooley.

Keith is an educated musicologist, working as a mortgage broker. As a single gay man, his dream of adoption is proving difficult, so he fosters a new born in the hope that the relationship might be allowed to become more permanent. Surviving a divorce, working class Ryan seeks a mortgage to help give his baby daughter a real home. Out of a similar sadness, the friendship between the men grows.

Williams’ Keith is brilliant: prickly, vulnerable, articulate and lightning fast. Gooley’s Ryan is marvellous: slow, awkward and inarticulate. Both characters are beautifully generous-hearted. It was pure pleasure to spend ninety minutes in their company.  

A case for the existence of God? Amongst other things, it’s their friendship that suggests the possibility. (See above. God is love is not marketing hyperbole; it will reward deep reflection in a way that Coke is It cannot.)

In a play jam-packed with scorchingly truthful moments, one of my favourites is when the two men, sharing a bottle of scotch, begin to discuss the history of Western music (as you do.) Keith mentions the invention of polyphony, a term which is, of course, meaningless to Ryan. And then the penny drops: harmony! Ryan can’t believe there was a time before harmony. The symbolism is not overplayed, the scene does what drama excels at: concrete moments played so honestly they intimate something universal.

Paul Gilchrist

A Case for the Existence of God by Samuel D. Hunter

At Seymour Centre until 4 May

www.seymourcentre.com/event/a-case-for-the-existence-of-god/

Image by Phil Erbacher

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