Archive | October, 2024

Hedda Gabler

28 Oct

The joy of a classic is twofold: you’ve either seen it before and are fascinated by the choices made by this particular production, or you’re seeing it for the first time and are sharing in an experience that has enthralled millions before you.

This version, adapted and directed by Anthony Skuse, will thrill audiences both familiar with the play and those to whom it is entirely new.

Skuse has tightened the piece so it runs a brisk 90 minutes, a remarkable achievement as there’s not much fat to trim off Ibsen’s original, a piece that can run two hours fifteen.

Hedda has just returned from her honeymoon with her more conventional husband Jørgen Tesman. It’s clearly not a perfect match, a fact underlined by the play’s title: Hedda’s maiden name. In the drawing room of the couples’ newly acquired home is a portrait of her father, General Gabler, watching over all. And, waiting in a drawer, is the set of pistols he bequeathed his daughter.

It’s tempting to read the plays of the second half of Ibsen’s career as documenting social issues. When Nora leaves her husband at the end of A Doll’s House, it can seem like she’s slamming the door on the whole damned patriarchy. And, I guess, if you like your theatre as a type of animated slogan, a sort of cutely repeating GIF, who am I to say you shouldn’t. But I do wonder if reducing Ibsen to a message is to rob the dramatic experience of its richness. From long, hard experience, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to pass the time in the theatre is by paying attention to the actual play, rather than holding tight to some theory you brought pre-packed from home.

Ibsen, I suspect, is best appreciated through character rather than message. Famously, he claimed to have spoken to his characters, heard their voices, noted their choice of dress. They weren’t puppets for his particular philosophy, but people….with all the wild heaving breathing contradictions that implies.

Skuse’s version honours this gloriously Life-affirming approach, and Hedda as performed by Ella Prince is beautifully rich and complex. Prince’s Hedda is intense and bewildered, focussed and fraught, iron-strong and vapour-vulnerable. She’s both the pistol and its puff. She’s a long way from some other Heddas I’ve seen: silly middleclass housewives who are close cousins to Emma Bovary, bored with their lives and self-medicating with fantasy. Prince’s Hedda longs for something more, but in a way that’s so genuine, so potent, that it doesn’t so much indict the mediocrity of the society she’s trapped in as offer a Dionysian vision of ecstatic fecundity, of human flourishing …. of tragically lost opportunity.

With a terrific cast, Skuse surrounds Hedda with characters who are tougher and less comically inconsequential than those some directors choose to present. There’s still plenty of humour, but these characters, though not Hedda’s equal in strength, inhabit a psychological world that is neither inconceivably nor prohibitively distant from her own. Considering the notorious final line of the play, this is both ironic and deeply poignant. The use of space is brilliant, making the most of KXT’s traverse stage, and the simple conceit of having characters occasionally sit with us in the front row is a powerful reminder that Ibsen offers people, just like ourselves.  

Paul Gilchrist

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, in a version by Anthony Skuse

Presented by Secret House in association with bAKEHOUSE theatre co 

At KXT until 2 November

kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Braiden Toko

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Yoga Play

25 Oct

This is a piece of dramatic bliss.

It presents as sitcom spiced with satire, but appearances are deceiving. (Or should that be illusory?)

Multinational company Jojomon makes yoga clothes – and an extraordinary amount of money. But there’s a scandal, and now they have an authenticity problem. Profits are diving.

How can they fake authenticity?

Clearly, companies that make serious cash out of any spiritual tradition are perfect for a poke, as is anyone more interested in sculpting their body than nurturing their soul. The West’s appropriation of the Eastern practice of yoga is an exemplar of how capitalism can so impoverish the invaluable that it becomes obscenely valuable.

Playwright Dipika Guha creates terrific comic characters and director Mina Morita has a brilliant cast that pitch them perfectly. Joan the CEO is fully cognisant of the discord between corporate culture and new age platitudes, and Andrea Moor superbly portrays the tensions between patience, puzzlement and pressure. Thomas Larkin is magnificent as the company owner who refers to customers as family, and then treats them with the appropriate disdain. (And there’s some beautiful and unexpected doubling here). Nat Jobe and Jemwel Danao are a sensationally funny duo, playing employees who speak the new age language fluently, and almost believe it. Camila Ponte Alvarez as the LA yoga instructor who’s all gratitude, bliss and namaste – until you cross her – is absolutely hilarious.

It’s a wonderfully fun night of theatre. But I said it was dramatic bliss – because there’s more.

In addition to sitcom and social satire, there’s surprising depth. Gently and playfully, the piece explores two of the most crucial issues facing our society.

The first is sociological and centres on assumptions about identity. By creating characters of multiple ethnicities who are exploiting the practice of yoga, Guha puts cultural appropriation firmly on the table. We talk a lot about cultural appropriation these days, but at the heart of the concept are some rather odd assumptions. I’m not denying the concept has validity; I’m just suggesting we’d all gain from the sort of interrogation this very clever play provokes.

On a cultural level, what does my biological heritage entitle me to? What do I actually mean when I refer to my culture? Do I own it?

What, exactly, does culture include? (Culture is one of the most nebulous words in my language that I don’t own.) When is something a cultural tradition and when is it just a fashion? How fixed is culture? And is it possible to have tensions within a culture? If someone of, say, Indian biological heritage holds a particular value, does that value then automatically become Indian culture? Or are a certain number of Indians required to hold that value for it to pass muster? How many?

And what does my culture demand of me? If I reject elements of my culture, does that mean I’m a bad custodian? Or does it mean I’m a mature self-actualised individual?

And if elements of my culture enhance joy, why would I prevent others from sharing in it? (Unless, of course, the joy I’m talking about is defined solely as a financial gain that would be lessened if the market was saturated. And if that’s our default way of looking at cultural appropriation, it only goes to show how capitalist materialism has been appropriated by everyone.)

The second crucial issue the play addresses is psychological, and also centres on identity. Drawing on traditional Hindu beliefs (ones shared with many mystic traditions) the play asks several of its characters to consider the nature of the Self. In our globalised world, we’re perpetually bombarded by loud, outside voices. For safety’s sake, we’ve come to define ourselves quite narrowly. Or, perhaps more accurately, we’ve come to define ourselves quite emphatically. But every definition is predicated on exclusion. In asserting I am this, I’m asserting I’m not something else. What are we losing by our adherence to this safety strategy of the Self? What would happen if we didn’t define ourselves at all? If we let go of our insistence on borders, on divisions?

The play deals with all this in a gorgeously light way, and is as joyful as an invitation to the eternal cosmic dance.

Paul Gilchrist

Yoga Play by Dipika Guha

Presented by National Theatre of Parramatta & La Boite Theatre

At Riverside until 26 October

riversideparramatta.com.au

Image by Phil Erbacher

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Wife

21 Oct

Written by Samuel Adamson and directed by Darrin Redgate, Wife is boldly structured.

It spans almost an hundred years, but is created from half a dozen twenty minute or so real-time scenes. We start in the late 1950’s, in the dressing room of an English actress (Julia Vosnakis) who’s just played Nora from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She’s visited by an intimate friend (Imogen Trevillion) and her boorish husband (Will Manton). We then skip twenty five years to a bar in London, where one of two gay lovers (Henry Lopez Lopez & Manton) is the son of one of the women in the first scene. And then we skip….. you get the idea.

There’s always at least two links between the scenes: someone is related to someone from an earlier scene, and there’s just been a performance of A Doll’s House.

The charm and intrigue of the piece comes from picking out these connections. (Occasionally, some of the cast’s accent work make this more intriguing than necessary.) The script asks a lot from its actors: establish a character quickly but deeply, then let it go and build another. Redgate’s cast are to be congratulated on their commitment to this challenge. A highlight is Imogen Trevillion, informing each of her characters with a truthfulness that both embraces and belies the brevity and bounce of each performative opportunity.  

But back to those links between the scenes. The family connections might hold the piece together, but the ongoing connection to Ibsen’s play is its beating heart.

Nora famously walks out of her marriage because she feels she can’t be an authentic person within an institution constructed from middle-class, patriarchal norms.

Each of the scenes in Wife either explicitly interrogates Nora’s decision or, by presenting tensions that result from power imbalances in intimate relationships, implicitly returns to the issues Ibsen’s heroine encapsulates.

Does this mean Wife asserts the importance or relevance of theatre? Could a piece of theatre effectively do this? You can’t prove a made-up story is relevant by telling another made-up story, not even a cluster of them. You could suggest it, but you could also just produce the original play and allow the audience themselves to determine the relevance.

And, anyway, the relevance of one play proves, or even suggests, very little about all the rest of theatre. It’s probably best to see Wife (as the title implies) as part of the ongoing discussion of the politics of personal relationships (of which Ibsen was a stimulating participant.)

Excitingly, this play applies a queer lens to the perennial discussion. A director (Peter Walters) of one the multiple productions of Ibsen’s play expresses the opinion that marriage and queerness might not be such a good …. marriage. (The Yes outcome of the plebiscite should be celebrated, but that doesn’t mean everyone now has to get hitched. Nora rejected patriarchal and middle-class values because they prohibit authenticity; might not hetero-normative values deserve similar short shrift?)

In every intimate relationship, multiple forces collide. The brute impersonal drive of sex collides with the rich inner emotional lives of the lovers. And these collide with the social expectations of both individuals, knowing as they do that the world always awaits, just on the other side of the bedroom door, eyes ever to the keyhole. And the collision of these cosmically-disparate forces is star-birthingly spectacular. It’s no wonder that mystics of all traditions, in their attempt to express their meeting with the Divine, have fallen back on the language of sexual love.

To the never-to-be-completed conversation about this happiest of collisions, Wife is a fascinating addition.

Paul Gilchrist

Wife by Samuel Adamson

At New Theatre until 2 November

newtheatre.org.au

Image by Bob Seary

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Champions

18 Oct

Four young visual artists have been shortlisted for a prestigious prize. They’re given adjacent studios and several months to create something original. The  artwork judged the best will win $50 000 and, allegedly, bestow the status that will guarantee the artist a successful career.

Written by Isabella McDermott and directed by Bali Padda, Champions operates as an allegory for our competition-based society, one in which individuals are isolated and pitted against each other.

This reading is encouraged by the play’s form: four interwoven monologues. There is no dialogue between characters; each character simply shares with the audience their experience of the competition. One of the major benefits of this creative choice is that it facilitates dramatic irony. Characters make assertions about each other, but then we swap to a new speaker and these assertions are immediately undercut. These people know little about each other, they struggle to help each other, and nothing in the world they live in suggests they should even try.

More narrowly, you could read the piece as an interrogation of competition within the arts. (Let’s face it, that sort of competition is often like the Hoof to Hook competition at the Royal Easter Show; sure, it encourages the nurturing of healthy beef cattle, but we know what happens to the contestants. Or, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, competition and art are an odd marriage: vital art rarely follows or fulfills criteria, it’s too busy questioning and challenging them.)

This piece certainly floats the idea that competition might be counter-productive to creativity, but it also invites us to care which of the four artists ultimately wins the prize. This is a sophisticated use of the dramatic form, refusing us a pat response.

However, the piece also throws out an interesting challenge. These artist characters talk a lot about themselves. And when they’re not, they’re often talking about other artists – in order to compare those artists to themselves. Is the play really tempting us with the tired old prejudice that artists are self-obsessed?  

The piece certainly reveals a fascination with personality, an interest in what particular individuals supposedly are (as against what they do or say or think or feel.) For example, two characters are initially described as charismatic (or a synonym), and they’re admired or disliked for that, the other two characters comparing their own personalities to those of their more bold competitors. This focus on a concrete personality is a sort of essentialism, one that contrasts provocatively with the dramatic form, an artform which is almost always predicated on the representation of change. In drama, any assertion like I am This or You are That can end up seeming little more than words written in the ever-shifting sands of Time.

But this essentialism is an insightful piece of characterisation. In a society in love with competition and consumerism, individuals will commodify themselves. That’s how to be valued in the marketplace. But validation is dependent on the whim of the outside world, on what others think. Several of the characters desperately want the outside world to say to them You are good. It’s a portrait of pathos-inducing powerlessness, one I suspect that resonates all too deeply in so many contemporary artistic communities.

Many people reading this review might be frustrated by my obtuse approach, my refusal to plainly give this show, say, 4 stars and move on. (Or, to expand my earlier Easter Show analogy, award a blue ribbon and then head off to the bar, oblivious to what follows.)

If this review does elicit exasperation, the reason is simple: to support the competition necessitated by capitalism, it’s expected writers about theatre will focus on evaluating performers and productions, as against discussing ideas. And so the prevailing economic structure influences everything, even trivialities like theatre criticism.   

So, to avoid being superfluous as well as trivial, l’ll add this:

Padda has gathered a terrific ensemble. Bayley Prendergast’s Fraser is hilariously and pitifully arrogant. Talitha Parker’s Emmy oozes confidence until her sense of self is threatened in a most frightening way. Lincoln Vickery’s Howie is a fish-out-of-water delight, an appealing mix of certainty and bewilderment. Cat Dominguez’s Claudia is a powerful portrait of a woman seeking the strength to claim her place in the world while not abandoning the good that might be found in her complex, troubled inner life. 

McDermott’s stimulating creatives choices make for an intriguing, engaging play, one with the potential to surreptitiously tease us out of a complacent acceptance of some of society’s more pernicious assumptions.

Paul Gilchrist

Champions by Isabella McDermott

At Old Fitz until 26 Oct

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Patrick Phillips

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The Queen’s City of the South

14 Oct

Written in a predominantly TV-style realism, The Queen’s City of the South by Mark Salvestro is thoroughly engaging.

Set in contemporary Cooma, this play achieves a strong sense of place, always a real achievement in the dramatic form.

It also builds on some fascinating tensions, pitting city against country and the past against the future.

Director Ryan Whitworth-Jones elicits good performances from the three-strong cast.

Ryan (Salvestro) has returned to his home town from the Big Smoke, and is now well and truly out. Cooma seems to have embraced his very camp community radio program.

His close friend, Maggie (Kath Gordon), is a member of the local historical society. She’d love to relaunch the Festival of the Snows, the street parade that did so much to bring the multicultural town together when she was young.

Her historical passion is tied thematically to the arrival of an outsider, Lucas (Jack Calver), a man similarly intrigued by the past. Lucas is writing a book about his recently deceased grandfather. To his surprise, Lucas has discovered that his grandfather spent time in Cooma. To his greater surprise, he has also discovered his grandfather was gay.

Why Cooma? There’s no record his grandfather ever worked on the Snowy Mountains Scheme …. and then the penny drops: the gaol. After all, homosexual activity remained a criminal offence in this state until 1984 – and Cooma is where that particular set of “offenders” were sent. In the late 1950’s, the then Justice Minister proudly boasted that Cooma was “the only penal institution in the world, so far as is known, devoted specifically to the detention of homosexual offenders”. There’s even a strong suspicion that conversion therapy was practised, something no-one’s rushing to mention at the Cooma Visitors Centre.

Set in the present, the play doesn’t dig too far into what actually happened in the gaol, but rather focuses on contemporary responses to it. As such, it’s a vital interrogation of our relationship with the past. What do we choose to remember and what do we choose to forget? What conversations about the past are we allowed to have? Ryan is given a beautiful line in which he suggests that, in regards to homosexuality, the wider community is happy with gay camp but wants it without any gay trauma. In the varied response to the town’s history, the divide between the two gay men and the presumably straight Maggie is presented with beautiful subtlety and texture.

Our contemporary focus on political rights sometimes leaves little space for consideration of political process. But how is change to come about? You may be certain of what is just, but how do you make society follow suit? The current default position is to simply assert your vision repeatedly and aggressively. It’s a strategy more suited to the creation of division than progress.  

Though the denouement is rather quick (not surprising considering the production’s already 100 minutes running time), it’s exciting to see modern Australian theatre with political maturity, a piece that suggests real change can happen, not when those who disagree with us are cast as immutable enemies, but when we seek ways in which people might work, and grow, together.

Paul Gilchrist

The Queen’s City of the South by Mark Salvestro

At The Loading Dock Theatre, Qtopia until 19 Oct

qtopiasydney.com.au

Image by Bojan Bozic

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Seventeen

10 Oct

It’s a neat trick that blossoms into a fascinating night of theatre.

Seventeen by Matthew Whittet is a piece for mature actors but asks them to play teenagers. School has just finished – forever – and they’ve gather in the local park to celebrate. It’s an ensemble piece, and we watch these six young people drink, dance and greet the dawn.

The title implies we’ll be offered a representation of a particular demographic, and like all pieces with an aim this broad, it has to fail.

What it does achieve is sentimentality, in the most wonderfully humane way. (Sentimentality, not nostalgia; the play’s set here and now, not in the past of the actors’ youth.)

Sentimentality could be defined as being overly emotional and safely enjoying the feeling – which is often exactly what we want from a visit to the theatre, and this play delivers.

It’s a top cast, and under the direction of Mary-Anne Gifford, it’s a joy to see them do their magic. Peter Kowitz nails Mike, the annoyingly alpha male with some serious growing up to do. Di Adams as Sue, his girlfriend, offers a beautiful portrait of a gentle-hearted young woman who knows Life offers more. Noel Hodda’s Tom is a captivating mix of youthful suggestibility and soul-deep maturity. Katrina Foster’s Edwina is a delightfully funny presentation of a young woman already looking to the future, dismissing teenage foolishness but still naïve enough to be caught by its allures. Di Smith is Lizzie, Mike’s younger sister, and it’s a terrific portrayal of childish pester power, impish mischief and sibling affection. Colin Moody’s Ronnie is deeply affecting, powerfully capturing the awkward vulnerability of the outsider.

Apart from the sheer talent of this brilliant ensemble, the piece is also irresistible because it brings to the fore the paradox of performance. The usual way the game of theatre works is that the audience is invited to forget that the actors are actually acting. We’ll often judge a piece successful if this illusion is so persuasive that it’s only broken at the curtain call. Yet, in this production, the discrepancy between the age of the actors and that of the characters means we’re constantly being reminded they are, indeed, acting. If in these most unusual circumstances we still forget, it’s testament to the performers’ extraordinary skill. But I wonder whether the more likely impact is that we’re made more conscious of the actors’ active empathetic role-playing, more appreciative of their creative decisions.

And that brings me to the second paradox of performance highlighted by this play. In every production, each actor brings to each role their life experience, even though it’s not their life they’re being asked to portray. Their knowledge and wisdom will inform the character but not determine the character – the play itself does that. On one level, this particular play asks its actors to forget everything they might have learnt from a lifetime of adulthood. (For some of us, though not all, that’s a hell of a lot of forgetting.) Watching Seventeen, we know the actors are doing this forgetting, this erasing. We know they know more than the characters. (If dramatic irony is defined as those occasions when we know more than the character, then all actors present all characters with dramatic irony – only in this production, they do it explicitly.)

And irony is close cousin to pity. If only you knew…..

In witnessing actors in the deliberate process of forgetting, or erasing, the fundamental emotion aroused is pity. We pity the teenager characters their myopia, their naivety, their inexperience. Perhaps we even pity their innocence.

If only you knew…..

In the play, Tom reads a letter he wrote as a child to his future self. This play is a letter written to our past selves – a wistful, funny, forgiving, love letter.

Paul Gilchrist

Seventeen by Matthew Whittet

At Seymour Centre until 19 Oct

seymourcentre.com

Image by Carlita Sari

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Ruins أطلال

5 Oct

A woman travels to Lebanon. It was trip she was meant to make with her father, a man who’d expressed great attachment to the country of his origin.

Written by Emily Ayoub, Madeline Baghurst & Mine Cerci, and conceived and co-directed by Ayoub & Baghurst, Ruins explores connections with family and with place.

Though having an engaging text – much of which is delivered with a wonderfully rich, wistful regret by Tony Poli as the father – it’s at heart a piece of choreographed movement.

As such, it’s a stunningly beautiful work of visual metaphor. A door dances about the stage, a potent symbol both of entrances to new worlds and barriers to those lost.  A tray becomes a mirror and, looking at herself, the woman sees the past to which she is intrinsically linked. Ayoub’s performance powerfully expresses the complex joys and pains of love and loss. There’s projection: the woman and her father watch together films by Jean Cocteau, and discover his motif of mirrors, doors to the underworld, to the past. Does every mirror in the world lead here?

But perhaps the most salient image is the ruins of the temple of Baalbek. The woman is told she should visit the ruins for two reasons. One is that they teach ephemerality (also taught by this show’s 45 min running time). The other reason is to find a bond with the past.

The temple is to Baal. Baal is an ancient god, worshipped possibly before Yahweh, and certainly before the father of Jesus of Nazareth or Allah (if these sort of temporal differentiations make any sense in relation to the divine.) And Baal is a jealous god. He extracts a toll on everyone who leaves the homeland over which He rules: a piece of their heart. It’s a poignant image of the pain of displacement.

The focus on Baal avoids contemporary tensions in the Middle East, but it also harks back to a pre-Axial Age world view. Baal is ancient, and perhaps old fashioned. By old fashioned, I don’t mean irrelevant; I mean in conflict with challenging modern realities. In a world where so many people are adrift, so many people have migrated, so many people live on lands different from their ancestors, so many people must share their ancestral homes with the displaced, any intense bond to a particular place inevitably means heartache.

It all had me thinking about Simone Weil’s observation that What is taken from us does us harm, while what we give up does us good.

This splendid meditation on connection and loss is both evocative and provocative.

Paul Gilchrist  

Ruins أطلال by Emily Ayoub, Madeline Baghurst & Mine Cerci

Presented by Clockfire Theatre Company

at Belvoir as part of 25a, until 20 Oct

belvoir.com.au

Image by Geoff Magee

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Well-Behaved Women

4 Oct

I’ve never really warmed to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s famous comment, that “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

To make a difference, you’ll always have to challenge the status quo. But Ulrich’s comment seems to conflate the fight against patriarchal dominance with unethical action, as though it were men who determine what’s right and what’s wrong. It oddly privileges a male perspective, and has a whiff of the juvenile about it, expressing more the thrill of getting away with the naughty rather than the steel-in-the-spine determination to stand up for what you know is right.

(Skipping maths for a sneaky smoke as you hide behind the girls’ toilets versus abandoning work to march in the streets in front of armed men hiding behind uniforms.)

Of course, I’m being pedantic. Those who deal in words probably should be.

But we all need inspiration, and Well-Behaved Women delivers inspiration in bucket loads.

With music and lyrics by Carmel Dean (with additional lyrics by Miriam Laube), and directed by Blazey Best, the show presents famous women through the ages. Some are fictional, most are not.

There’s no narrative as such; each woman sings of the challenges they face, and the world they intend to make. We hear from inspirational women as varied as Boadicea to Malala Yousafzai. I could list them all, but part of the joy of the show is guessing who’ll be next. (Of course, at 70 minutes, plenty will be left out. Interesting factoid: a 3 min song for every woman who’s ever lived would take 165 billion minutes, or 940 000 years. And that’s without an interval.)

The musical approach is the perfect creative decision: the climb to inspiration is rarely by the ladder of logic but rather through emotional epiphany.

Dean’s songs are beautiful, and range in style from power ballad to musical comedy show tune to African American spiritual. The band is superb. (And I got to say, to go to a show where music is played live and to understand virtually every word is a rare treat.)

Four brilliant performers – Stefanie Caccamo, Zahra Newman, Elenoa Rokobaro and Sarah Murr – take on all the roles with consummate skill. (On the night I attended, Murr stood in for Ursula Yovich).  

To give a sense of the thing, here are some standout moments:

Newman as Eve sets up the whole conceit, and is magnificently cheeky, bold and sassy.

Caccamo as Virginia Woolf sings of Judith Shakespeare, the imagined sister of the playwright, musing on how a woman of genius might have fared in the Elizabethan Age. It’s provoking and poignant. (And, if you haven’t read Woolf’s original version in A Room of One’s Own, do – it’s a game changer.)  

Caccamo also excels as Mary Magdelene, the only woman at the table at the Last Supper. It’s witty, fun and delightfully satirical. Peter, pass the unleavened bread …. Peter, could you please pass the unleavened bread! Unlike the Magdelene of Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice, this one’s not so much bewildered and awed by the divine, as bewildered the men are all so in awe of themselves.

Murr as Boadicea is splendidly ferocious, radiating a defiant, vital energy.

Rokobaro as Harriet Tubman is awesome. The famous African American abolitionist believed God spoke to her, and perhaps it’s true, because echoes of the divine still linger in this amazing performance.

The doubling and tripling of characters works wonderfully, not only showcasing the extraordinary talent of the cast, but evoking the shared experience of womankind and their dreadful, glorious inheritance.

This is a show about icons and role models.

Do they tell us how to behave?

No, they don’t make demands. (Hey, maybe they don’t even make history; after all, it is a rather nebulous phrase.)

What role models do is make suggestions, offer ways to navigate the mysterious mess that is Life.

So, we look backwards to find our way forward? Yes, the paradox is a recognition that we’re all in this together – and a show that draws attention to this is a true gift.

Paul Gilchrist

Well-Behaved Women by Carmel Dean

At Belvoir until 3 Nov

belvoir.com.au

Image by Brett Boardman

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sitting, screaming

3 Oct

This is a fine piece of theatre; it’s beautifully written and superbly presented.

Written by Madelaine Nunn and directed by Lucy Clements, it’s the story of Sam, a teenage school girl navigating what is (hopefully) the worse moments of her life. Dad has cancer and so mum has forgotten her. Her friendship circle has proven fragile. Sam is fraught and alone. Then a teacher, Mr David, begins to pay attention.

Nunn’s script is brilliantly crafted. Danger is hinted at gradually. Animal imagery lurks ominously amongst the everyday. Near Sam’s house, the ocean looms in the dark – loud, enormous, unceasing.

Sam’s teenage vernacular is pitch perfect. She has the glorious energy of youth and it’s frightening naivete.

It’s an one-actor show and performer Clare Hughes is absolutely extraordinary. Her Sam is utterly real, a spellbinding balance of brashness and vulnerability. Hughes (or is it Sam?) also evokes all the other characters; with a slight change of voice, a subtle physicality, she becomes each of the people in this young woman’s troubled world: her mother, the school counsellor, her best friend, her sick father, a gaggle of teenage girls, the loud mouth school boy – and Mr David. It’s a virtuoso performance.

Elsewhere I’ve written about the silencing of male voices in stories that indict misogyny. It’s an understandable response to the seemingly endless bellow of the patriarchy, but sometimes it can leave the female characters in a theatrical world in which their suffering seems oddly nebulous and ungrounded. By inadvertently questioning their grievances, it’s a creative decision that ironically can gaslight the very characters it aims to truthfully represent.

Nunn’s script is a thrillingly inventive response to this dilemma. Because Sam voices everyone in her world, it evokes her dreadful isolation but it also emphasises her power.  Mr David and the dickhead schoolboy are heard, their brutality is noted, but this is Sam’s story, and in its telling she embodies the courage that can slay the beast.

And, in having Sam voice everyone, the piece also magically positions her for a life-altering shock. Characters she gently mocks, who elicit parody and perpetual eyerolling, burst into unexpected fullness as she discovers genuine solidarity and sisterhood. It’s deeply moving and intensely inspiring.  

Paul Gilchrist

sitting, screaming by Madelaine Nunn

presented by New Ghosts Theatre Company

at Old Fitzroy Theatre until Oct 5

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Phil Erbacher

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Ten Years to Home

2 Oct

This is a surprisingly fascinating piece.

The story it tells is very gentle. (I use the word story but, apparently, it’s non-fiction.)

Written by Sonal Moore, and directed by Neel Banerjee, the conceit is that the playwright has gathered her two adult children so that their grandparents can tell them about their migration to Australia from India. Interpolated between the conversations happening in something like the present are flashbacks to the 1960’s.

All the members of this family are played by actors, which might seem an incredibly odd thing to mention – except for the fact that this is a documentation of a real family history and the majority of the participants in this history are still with us. (Moore is played by Shabnam Tavakol, her two adult children by Karina Bracken & Madhullikaa Singh, and their grandparents by Taufeeq Ahmed Sheikh & Reema Gillani.)

I say the piece is surprisingly fascinating because it really shouldn’t work. After all, it doesn’t have the allure of narrative. There’s tender humour but little real tension. In literary terms, it’s a simple recount: the sort of thing listened to by polite friends or obliged family members. (The second of these being exactly who has been asked to pay attention to their grandparents in the scenes to which we are audience.)

Yes, the production could probably do with a bit more pace and sometimes the performers with a bit more vocal projection, but gradually, like the playwright’s two adult children, we’re drawn in – not by gawdy theatrics or attention seeking histrionics, but by the quiet, plain, unassuming Truth. This history, or one like it, is shared by so many Australians. We’re seduced by the piece’s mundanity, and if that sounds like a bad thing, I’d assert the world would gain enormously from learning to listen in quiet to the quiet. It’s not only how we’ll discover our shared humanity, it’s how we’ll further enrich it.

Paul Gilchrist

Ten Years to Home by Sonal Moore

Presented by Nautanki Theatre in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre

At KXT until 5 Oct

kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Kamal Khajuria

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