Tag Archives: Flight Path Theatre

As You Like It

10 Mar

Directed by Alex Kendall Robson, this is a marvellous presentation of a Shakespearean classic.

Full disclosure: As You Like It is one of my favourite Shakespearean plays, and its protagonist, Rosalind, is certainly my favourite Shakespearean heroine.

Rosalind is whip-smart but no fool. (With such a penchant for paradox, might I wear motley?) What I mean is that Rosalind is witty but humble; she entertains no hubristic dreams that her intelligence makes her superior to the world and its grand forces. This being a romantic comedy, the grand force is Love. Rosalind accepts Love’s power – but knows that this power does not automatically grant romantic Love pre-eminence in the human experience.

Rosalind might have said Love is the silliest of the serious things. Instead Shakespeare gives her lines like these: 

Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

Shakespeare gifts us a heroine who is both bubbly and balanced, who both feels and thinks.

Jade Fuda’s portrayal of Rosalind is absolutely brilliant. And I found it a wonderfully fresh interpretation: more giggly and more fraught than customary, and this tender vulnerability, coupled with Fuda’s total command of the wit, makes her portrayal of Rosalind extraordinarily rich.

As You Like It is one of my favourites for other reasons. It includes one of my favourite scenes in the whole of English drama, the one in which Celia accepts exile rather than part from Rosalind. In a play centring on romantic Love, here’s a shining example of a different type of love: friendship. It’s a scene that always brings tears to my eyes, and played here by Fuda and Larissa Turton as Celia it did so again.   

The play also features some of Shakespeare’s greatest poetry.

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

So says the Duchess, exiled to the Forest of Arden by her tyrannical sister. The two roles are doubled superbly by Sonya Kerr in a performance that excels both physically and vocally, and with glorious authority juxtaposes compassion and cruelty.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players

So says the melancholy Jaques. Sure, this most famous of lines could simply be read as a case of professional myopia: if Shakespeare had been a footballer he might have said All the world’s a game; or if he had been a risk assessor, All the world’s an accident waiting to happen; or a fisherman, All the world smells of fish. But Shakespeare the dramatist captured something of Life’s bewildering, and perhaps unbearable, lightness – the sense that it all deeply matters, but at the same time, it all doesn’t matter that much. Kendall Robson plays Jaques with splendid humour and a show-stopping poignancy.

O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!

So says Orlando, in a stinging moment when it seems his brother has secured love but he never will. Traditionally, Orlando is a challenging role; lover of the effervescent Rosalind, there’s always the danger he may not seem worthy of her, a smaller man than Love’s grand game of hide-and-seek in which he is a prime participant. But here, Pat Mandziy creates a magnificent Orlando, a beautiful balance of confusion and charisma.  

So, as I suggested, a play of unparalleled poetry. (And I think we get almost the whole thing!) The entire ensemble is exemplary; with a mastery of the Elizabethan language and a complete commitment to comic exuberance, we’re invited to a world of delight.

Paul Gilchrist

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

presented by Fingerless Theatre

at Flight Path Theatre until March 14

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Phil Erbacher

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God’s Cowboy

5 Feb

There are times in God’s Cowboy when you could be excused for thinking that budget considerations alone have determined the costuming choices – though you might wonder how much is really saved by not providing the actors with shirts.

I’m being silly, of course. The costuming is fine. The actors do have shirts.

Though they do take them off.

A lot.

Gay male theatre often has a lot of bare chests. That’s partly because such theatre is a celebration of the diversity of human sexuality. (One unintended consequence of this is that straight audiences can be left with the impression that gay men are obsessed with sex  – which is to miss the salient point that theatre celebrating gay sexuality is still making up for the millennium and a half in which our culture pretended gay sexuality simply didn’t exist. Except, of course, for the times when it was acknowledged so it could be persecuted.)  

Though a paean to difference, gay theatre is also an assertion of kinship. It says In some ways my life may be different from the majority, but I share the same joys and face the same challenges.

In Les Solomon’s play, the universal joy is love, the challenge abuse.

Gentle, naïve twins Penny (Sophia Laurantus) and Peter (Nathaniel Savy) audition for a show. They’re successful, and join a cast filled out by the charismatic Daniel (Max Fernandez) and the disturbing Demetrious (Tate Wilkinson Alexander).

Peter and Daniel begin a showmance – but Daniel’s back history makes it difficult for him to give Peter what he needs.

Under the direction of Ella Morris, performances are engaging (though the pacing could be sharpened to make more of both the humour and the rising tension.)

The story is simple and appealing. Ironically, it could be argued the script needs both a trim (to stick closer to the chase) and a fleshing out (to answer some questions, especially regarding Daniel’s revelation to Penny and the response it invites.) But these supposed faults could be exactly how Solomon’s script achieves its winsome mood of wistful nostalgia.

For me, the most enthralling aspect is the presentation of that eternally uneasy relationship between love and sex.

There’s a wildness about sex, a physicality that has a disturbingly soft border with violence. Excitement is its bright side, abuse its dark.

The play represents several attempts by characters to tame this wildness: Peter and Penny valorise romantic love; Peter is a refugee from the dependable dream-land of classic movies; Daniel’s cowboy swagger safely repackages threat as confidence; and Daniel, as his character in the play within a play, cheekily posits a God who has gifted us sexuality and who wants us to enjoy it in every-which-way-we-can.

Provocatively, the Daniel of the dressing room also posits a God, though his spirituality has less of the cowboy about it, being rather a soul-stretching awareness that the divine gift of joy comes wrapped in moral responsibilities.  

Paul Gilchrist

God’s Cowboy by Les Solomon

Produced by Little Stormy productions in association with LambertHouse Enterprises

At Flight Path Theatre until Feb 21

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by David Hooley  

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Crotchless

5 Nov

This is a fine comedy. 

It’s written by Eloise Aiken, this year’s winner of the Katie Lees Fellowship.

The Fellowship is designed to support young female/female identifying theatre makers, and here it has once again shown itself to be a vital contribution to the Sydney theatre scene.

Crotchless is about how contemporary teenagers and their parents navigate the cultural reactions to feminism.

Aiken has a great ear for comic dialogue; the script is funny and truthful and shit. (And, in case it’s not obvious, the last of those three adjectives is meant as an admiring imitation of Aiken’s uncanny ability to portray the language use of the young, rather than some vocab-deficient, mean-spirited evaluation of the play.)

Teenage Shona has dating issues, but it’s her twin brother Owen’s dive into the rabbit hole of misogyny that especially troubles her. Trish, the twins’ single mum, acknowledges Shona’s concerns but is less certain how to prevent her son’s disturbing moral diminishment.

The piece is driven by some fascinating tensions.

One tension is that between the broader culture and personal agency. Owen is admonished for listening to misogynistic podcasts and told to read feminist texts. Of course, what we put into our heads is important, but we’ve come to view ourselves almost as if we were passive computers: just load the correct software and we’ll run appropriately. It’s an understandable but disconcerting assumption – because it seems to erase the possibility of both critical thinking and moral discernment.  (But, we do live in a culture that has rather suddenly become aware of the concept of Culture, and everyone who’s seen Terminator 2 knows the frightening consequences of suddenly becoming self-aware. Skynet isn’t alone in its over-reaction to the unexpected advent of choice.)

Closely related to the tension between instruction and intellectual agency is that between confrontation and love. Should we simply condemn those who disagree with us? Or, as Trish suggests, will that just drive them further away? Is a strict insistence on moral conformity merely counter-productive? Must individuals learn for themselves?  

That Crotchless posits both sides of these tensions suggests its maturity of vision, its beautifully honest awareness of the complexities of Life. If it ultimately comes down a little too heavily on one side of all this, the feel-good-tell-it-how-it-is-for-victory-and-empowerment side, that’s completely understandable. After all, it is a comedy. (And, anyway, is the conclusion of a play actually the sum of its meaning and value? Especially when it’s a comedy. Perhaps the comic happy ending is just one more dramatic convention, as meaningful, say, as the fourth wall.)

Madeleine Withington’s direction is splendid; the pace and bounce is spot on.

Performances are comic excellence. 

Esha Jessy is thoroughly engaging as Shona, the quick-witted teenage girl caught between vigorous assertions of female worth and a risky desire for the rather unworthy male Other.

As Owen, Ashan Kumar brilliantly captures the inarticulate energy of the teenage boy, the hilariously non-threatening high-modality, informed with just the right hint of danger: a cute, clumsy oversized wolf cub trying out his fangs.

Sarah Greenwood is utterly superb. Her performance dances with the lightness of comedy, yet her portrayal of Trish truthfully represents the challenges of maternal love, in all its poignant mix of strength and vulnerability. Greenwood also doubles as Shona’s best friend, Malory, and delivers a playful-almost-parody that is a delight in itself, but also serves to highlight the glorious complexity of her portrait of the more mature of the women.

Paul Gilchrist

Crotchless by Eloise Aiken

At Flight Path Theatre until Nov 8

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Alex Macleay

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Othello

26 Jul

There’s currently another company in Sydney producing another play by Shakespeare – and they’re employing the slogan All Bard, No Bull.

In contrast, the marketing for this production of Othello led me to expect something somewhat closer to the bull end of that imagined spectrum.

And, yes, bold choices are made – but, at heart, what we’re given is an engaging presentation of Shakespeare’s classic script.

As for most modern productions, that script has been slightly abbreviated. I’ll admit, some of my favourite lines and speeches are missing, but all the key elements of the story remain.

The cast is all female. Some might think this an usual choice, but it’s worth noting that each of the characters retains the gender Shakespeare originally gave them.

Casting is also colour blind. Some might think this an even more unusual choice, as a common reading of the play is that Othello is susceptible to Iago’s deceit and manipulation because of his outsider status. (There’s plenty of textual evidence to suggest Iago takes advantage of Othello’s potential vulnerability as the only black man in a white society.)

The marketing states the production has a “movement-based performance style”, but don’t fear, Shakespeare’s incomparable poetry is not sacrificed to an undue focus on physicality. Director Diana Paola Alvarado’s interest in movement mainly manifests itself in the rearrangement of the set between and within scenes. Designed by Jason Lowe and Leandro Sanchez, and consisting of four industrial-style pillars, the set is moved by the performers with a beautifully fluent choreography, and complemented by Theo Carroll’s wonderfully evocative haze-tinted chiaroscuro lighting design, as the play moves to its climax, the mood becomes increasingly and disturbingly claustrophobic. This perfectly captures the tragedy of Othello and Desdemona: a man who has been through so much, whose life story of “most disastrous chances, of moving accidents … of hair-breadth scape(s)” has elicited from Desdemona “a world of sighs”; a tale that “in faith, ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange; ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful” is what wins her love – and the ultimate pity of the play is that the lives of two such great souls as these should end in a horror of pettiness.

Sometimes the performers deliver the verse at too great a pace, but intriguing choices are made regarding characterisation. Cassio, played with suitable sophistication and charm by Chloe Schwank, may seem recognisable to audiences, as will be Lucinda Jurd’s delightfully foolish Roderigo, but other choices are less expected. Doubling, Jurd’s Emilia is less earthy than usual, Lisa Hanssens’ Iago is less hail-fellow-well-met in his duplicity than usual, Sedem Banini’s Desdemona is less refined and demure, and Natasha Cheng’s Othello, in the play’s initial acts, less calmly commanding. I’ve deliberately phrased my descriptions of these performances to highlight what they don’t do – and I’m sure that’s frustrating –  but I’d rather not spoil the surprising freshness of the choices.   

Paul Gilchrist

Othello by William Shakespeare

Presented by La Fábrica de Microbios and Gente Perdida

At Flight Path Theatre until August 9

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Felipe Godoy

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Instructions for Correct Assembly

28 Jun

Poet Philip Larkin earnt a place eternally in the hearts of many a son and daughter when he expressed perfectly the magical wonder of filial gratitude: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”

(More fortunate souls might relate instead to Adrian Mitchell’s parodic response “They tuck you up….”)

The idea of child-rearing is the main focus of Thomas Eccleshare’s speculative comedy.

I use the term speculative because the major conceit is that Max (Jane Wallace) and Hari (Nick Curnow) have purchased a do-it-yourself flat-pack artificially intelligent young man, Jån. Trouble is, as friends quickly notice, Jån bears an uncanny resemblance to the couples’ lost son, Nick. As parents, can Max and Hari get right what they feel they got wrong before?

I don’t have children and, when I’m in the company of anyone who does, I feel enormous admiration for the immensity of their effort and complete bewilderment at the oddness of their choice. I’m inclined to feel that child-rearing should be left to those most suited to it: wolves.

Yet, despite the emotional immaturity and self-obsession that fits me for theatre reviewing, I am aware that a large number of parents, especially middle-class ones, experience a prodigious amount of angst about their chosen role. Am I doing what’s best for my kids? And, the disturbing corollary, how do my kids reflect on me?

Eccleshare’s mischievous script offers huge comic potential, and under the direction of Hailey McQueen, the cast delivers the laughs. As robot Jån, Ben Chapple is absolutely hilarious – and, as the troubled Nick, he offers in counterpoint an honest portrayal of fickle, flawed humanity. It’s a doubling opportunity that allows an actor to show off a tremendous range and Chapple seizes it, giving a virtuoso performance.

The doubling does epitomise the piece’s greatest challenge (that is, apart from the large number of short scenes). The piece has titanic tonal ambition. A certain smallness is being satirised, that middle-class desire for control in the face of Life’s wildness, that determination to make the world one of neat, smooth, straight lines. Yet we’re also invited to care about the characters, or at least to find the genuine or the recognisable in their emotional responses. Throw into the mix that the setup is speculative – or to put it less euphemistically, untruthful – and you’ve got one provocative, audacious piece of theatre.

Paul Gilchrist

Instructions for Correct Assembly by Thomas Eccleshare

Presented by Clock and Spiel Productions

at Flight Path Theatre until 5 July

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Patrick Phillips

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Various Characters

9 May

I’m not a fan of Australian theatre’s obsession with teenagers. For me, it suggests a tiresome childishness in our intellectual outlook, a mawkish nostalgia that resists adulthood, a fear of responsibility being allowed to trump the embracing of opportunity.

But I also know that childhood leaves no survivors*, and if you want to explore vulnerability (whatever its cause), the teenage years are a very good place to start.

And that’s what Šime Knežević does in his beautifully written Various Characters, directed with skilful subtlety by Victor Kalka.

Set in Western Sydney in the early 2000’s, most of the characters are teenagers.

Nina (Georgia Da Silva) has lost her mother and is living unhappily with her aunt. She desperately wants to visit her sister in Melbourne, but she doesn’t have the cash. The solution? Sell the dog. But she can’t sell it to just anyone; it has to go to a good home. Both touching and funny, this initial scene operates as a perfect symbolic introduction to the wider problems the characters face: insecurities that threaten to degenerate into desperation.

Knežević captures the teenage voice brilliantly (though some of the actors go a little overboard in their embodiment of youthful apprehension and would benefit from greater vocal projection.)

Da Silva, Maliyan Blair, Nashy MZ and Tate Wilkinson-Alexander as the teenagers capture the age’s enthusiasms and doubts, and give performances that are both amusing and affecting.

The two adult characters seem only a small step away from children, a powerful suggestion that the challenges the teenagers experience are ubiquitous. After all, this is ethnically diverse Western Sydney under a conservative government (and, some would say, a perpetually conservative mono-culture.)

Dog-purchaser and police officer Raoul expresses the confusion of a man who has somewhat unwillingly conformed to the hegemony. Tony Goh’s portrait is simultaneously comic and pathos-inducing.

Greta has lost her job, but there’s a market at Bigge Park and she hopes to kickstart a business venture with a stall selling Croatian food. She was born in Australia, but is proud of her heritage and dreams of a community open-hearted enough to embrace and celebrate diversity. Kate Bookallil as Greta gives a splendid performance, evoking magnificently the character’s fierce determination and quiet despair.

Paul Gilchrist

Various Characters by Šime Knežević

Presented by Plus Minus Productions, in association with Virginia Plain and Flight Path Theatre

At Flight Path until 17 May

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Robert Miniter

*I haven’t been able to find the source of this quote.

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Two Hearts

20 Mar

Romance is such a garden variety human experience that we often forget its potentially wondrous result.

(Or, to slightly misquote Chesterfield, the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the consequence damnable.)

Written by Laura Lethlean and directed by Kirsty Semaan, Two Hearts tells the story of Him (Yarno Rohling) meeting Her (Danette Potgieter), and of what follows.

Throughout, the couple are shadowed by It (Lisa Hanssens).

For a while, it’s a guessing game as to what (or who) It is. I suspect some audience members might find this frustrating or dissatisfying, but not as frustrating or dissatisfying as when they realise the answer. You could suggest that the answer to the question of who is It? begs the fundamental question of the play.  (I’m attempting to avoid breaking the spoiler rule, so forgive me for being so vague. When a play risks so much on one dramatic trick, it seems poor form to reveal the nature of that trick in a review; a bit like revealing who did it in a whodunnit.)

But, perhaps the fundamental question of the play lies elsewhere (away from the issue I’m not naming, the issue that’s both very current and also universal, the issue I suspect many audience members will have very decided attitudes regarding, attitudes which will remain unchanged by this play.)

Perhaps, rather, the fundamental question is how do we navigate memory and regret, how do we construct a narrative of our lives? Though some scenes between the couple are played in naturalistic dialogue, many are played in a manner that suggest both the woman and the man are recalling events and trying to determine the truth of that moment. Sometimes the characters will play out the actions of the scene while seemingly remaining in their own internal worlds, trying to recall (or assert) how it all actually occurred. For example, the couple sit down and He says something like We were sitting next to each other and this is juxtaposed with Her reflection (rather than Her response), something like We sat far apart. This motif of reflection on the past is furthered by scenes in which It asks the man and woman, separately, about decisions made during the relationship. Combined with a sometimes heightened poetic language, and a muted but expressive lighting design (Jasmin Borsovsky), and a movingly melancholic sound design (Charlotte Leamon), we get the sense of two individuals grappling with a great mystery, the passing of Time and all the loss that entails.

Potgieter and Rohling as the young couple are wonderfully believable, both in their initial excitement as the romance blossoms, and in their growing frustration as it threatens to fade. The differences between the two lovers are subtly portrayed in both script and performance.

The character She is gently performative – I want people to like me – and perhaps a little more selfish – a friend has said to her You are the happiest person I know, because you are the most selfish. Both despite these flaws, and through them, Potgieter beautifully creates a character who we like and who we pity (which is probably the most suitable response we can have to any other person.)

In contrast to Her, He is more genuine, perhaps a little simpler. He dreams of being a musician but is self-deprecating enough to realise it is unlikely to happen. Rohling’s presentation of the character brims with warmth, and as things begin to go wrong in the relationship, his portrayal of a sad, anguished bewilderment is superb.

As It, Hanssens has the oddest of roles – but pulls it off with aplomb. With both movement and voice, she effectively evokes something passionless yet present, something uncomplicated yet curious, something without skin in the game, but that watches eternally. (There’s an infinite pathos in a figure who stands always at the bank, as the river of Time slides endlessly by.) To use the body in a way that suggests the soul is a remarkable achievement.

Two Hearts is a piece that is as gently disconcerting as it is softly beautiful.

Paul Gilchrist

Two Hearts by Laura Lethlean

presented by Space Jump Theatre

at Flight Path Theatre until March 29

http://flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Philip Erbacher

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Rabbit & Crow

7 Mar

A rabbit is hit by a car and now lies injured on the road. A crow waits for it to become carrion, in order to consume it.

In a brave and laudable snub to trendy woke identity politics, writer and director Leon Ford casts humans in the animal roles.  

As the titular rabbit and crow, Sophie Gregg and Justin Smith are brilliant. Philip Lynch is equally superb as another crow who later attempts to join in on the action. With enormous skill, they play Ford’s amusing script, finding the magic in every moment, and achieving both humour and pathos. (All you performers who identify as crows and rabbits, notice has been given. The days of lazily asserting you’re entitled to the role simply because you’re a bird or a small furry animal are over. From now on, you might have to try actually acting.)

The humour of the piece comes from various mechanisms. One is simple anthropomorphism. We delight in the conceit that the animals speak in our vernacular, display our peccadillos, and face very human problems. (It’s a vein of humour long mined by cartoonists. The artists working for The New Yorker, for example, have especially excelled in it.) It’s a genre that both gently mocks humankind, but also expresses joy at the non-human Other. (Who hasn’t been enchanted by the absolute amorality of cats?)

Another comic mechanism is dramatic irony. Neither the rabbit nor the crows understand human aspirations and human technology, but I suspect a small percentage of the audience do.

So, is it allegory, fable or just fun?

It certainly brings to mind Aesop and Orwell. But it also evokes the ancient Greek poet Archilochus and his claim “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”  In Ford’s 50 minutes of fun, it’s the crow who knows many things, who is an individualist, an opportunist, an obfuscator, a chancer. The rabbit knows one big thing: love.

You might argue that the tension between these two worldviews is a false dichotomy, that life is not simply a choice between the individual and the community, and that any such reductive binary belongs in a children’s book – but to quote someone with even greater moral authority than a theatre critic: “Unless you become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (And that allusion offers me a segue to a speech the rabbit gives concerning the afterlife; it’s a superb parody of eschatological wishful thinking.)

The other tension Rabbit & Crow plays with is that between choice and inevitability, between the things we can change and the things we can’t. Must crows eat carrion?

Perhaps the piece gets itself into a bit of a corner here. When much of the humour comes from the sense that the animals represent types, and when our overarching belief is that the animal world is utterly innocent because it’s without a moral dimension, the presentation here of an ethical dilemma might be hard to swallow (like road kill.)  

But something else is on offer, or more accurately, not on offer. As the play doesn’t actually represent people, that is, specific human characters, we’re not offered the option to respond to it in the following, time-honoured, tired manner: This play is a criticism of all those people who claim they have no choice, when they indubitably do. This play is a criticism of all those people who resist moral progress, when they assert it’s against the “nature of things”. This play is a criticism of all those people who maintain the immutability of the “nature of things”, when they’re simply defending their own privilege. This play is a criticism of all those people who are not people like me!

Rabbit & Crow denies us this easy out, as the sheer playfulness of the script, and the magnificence of the performances, lifts it into universality.  

Paul Gilchrist

Rabbit & Crow by Leon Ford

At Flight Path Theatre until March 8

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Philip Le Masurier 

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Turpentine

24 Feb

This is new Australian work and it’s a Victorian Gothic comedy. Such bold choices are always invigorating.

Set in the London of the late 1800’s, it tells of a desperate mother (Megan Elizabeth Kennedy) who begs a mad scientist (Tommy James Green) to enact a dreadful procedure.

In the broadest sense, the Gothic is a response to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution – and to the extraordinary technological developments that followed. Often the Gothic is a plea: Not so fast! Be wary where all this is leading! Don’t so glibly dismiss the wild darkness within us!

It’s interesting how the Gothic changes through the nineteenth century. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), it’s a warning against intellectual hubris; be careful what you do with this newfound science. By Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) the warning has changed; now it’s an assertion that our rational scientific world view is limited, blinding us to the dangers that lie beyond its myopic vision. Shelley says be wary of the power, Stoker says don’t overestimate it.

Turpentine by Tommy James Green is closer to Shelley’s work thematically, but because it positions itself as comedy, the Gothic beast’s bite is softened. It’s tempting to see it simply as the unadulterated opportunity for larger than life characters and some entertaining mayhem.

Directed by Katherine Hopwood Poulsen, the cast energetically commit to the craziness. Vocal delivery (excluding that of the mute, played by Freddy Hellier) would benefit from more variety, both for the sake of emotional impact and comedic effect, but also for audience comprehension. Though the decision to set the play in London allows resonance with the grand tradition of the Gothic, I wonder whether an Australian setting might have freed the performers from the accent work that limits the production’s impact (though enhances its intended silliness.) As the piece stands, references to British colonialism effectively employ the Gothic’s ability to gaze into the darkest chambers of the human heart, but considering our nation’s troubled history, a change of setting wouldn’t diminish the potency of a similar, but more local, exploration.

Despite its playful intention, the piece takes its narrative structure seriously: it’s a genuine two act play, rather than a mere cavalcade of comic nonsense. Act One invites us into this wild Gothic world and cleverly sets up the events of Act Two. (Though I wonder if the dramatic question of the first act could be further clarified by establishing earlier the reasons for the doctor’s reluctance to perform the procedure. Let the question be whether the bereft mother can convince him despite what he fears. We know the procedure is impossible in the real world, but by introducing its nature and consequences earlier we know the rules of the game being played, and so can give our attention to the human truths that game serves to highlight. Note how Shelley’s Frankenstein spends little time on how the monster is created, directing our focus instead to the very real human experience of hubris and its terrible repercussions. My suggestion would also giving meaning to the doctor’s first act babbling, positioning it as a recognisable avoidance strategy, rather than merely colourful characterisation.)  

Yes, I know, I’m indulging in that most annoying – and pointless – of dramatic criticisms: describing the play I wish had been written, rather than discussing the play that actually was. We critics think we’re specialists, though we’re only ever called in for the autopsy.

Design by Alex Baumann and James Shepherd is especially evocative, establishing a world of potions and poisonous pleasures. Sound design by Kyle Stephens deals ingeniously with the curse that occasionally strikes this theatre, and which its name in glorious honesty acknowledges. If external noises do intrude, an ominous rumbling thunder disguises them, while simultaneously suggesting the frightening secret tensions which are the Gothic’s speciality.

I mentioned an autopsy before, but I don’t want to suggest Turpentine lies cold on the slab. It’s deliciously audacious, with the potential to be truly electrifying.

Paul Gilchrist

Turpentine by Tommy James Green

Presented by Popular Playhouse

At Flight Path Theatre until March 1

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Jack Aliwood

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Three Sisters

10 Feb

This is a fine production of a classic.

Director Victor Kalka has gathered a talented ensemble, and they give riveting performances.

There’s a fascinating tension between a simple truthfulness and the theatricality of created humour. (Though I’m not sure that a certain curtain-call gag doesn’t give too sharp a pull to one end of that tense tightrope.)

Kalka adapts Chekhov’s play. A few minor characters are cut and some of the subtleties of the plot are made more apparent, but the key alteration is the transference of the action to the present. (Though the word action takes on a different, deeper meaning when applied to a play by Chekhov.)

You could be critical of the decision to modernise the setting, arguing that many of the characters’ problems – Why can’t I be with who I love? Why must I live here? –  would simply evaporate in a society in which change has become so easy that it’s expected, normalised and, in an if-you-can’t-stop-it-you-may-as-well-embrace-it sort of desperation, even lauded.  

But what Kalka’s adaptation does is ensure the play is not read solely as a portrait of one particular decadent society.

It’s natural for us to read Chekhov through a sociological lens. After all, just sixteen years after Three Sisters was first produced came the epoch changing Revolution, sweeping into the dust bin of History the privileged lethargy of the old regime. And then, dominating the 20th Century, came the tension between that new Russia and the so-called free world.

But Chekhov didn’t know all that. Perhaps he saw the writing on the wall … but a solely historical, sociological approach to his work discounts the miracle that occurs on stage. The play itself is a revolution. It takes the inherently undramatic experiences of boredom and enervation – and turns them into an utterly watchable piece of theatre.*

Is lethargy being indicted? Perhaps. More importantly, it’s being acknowledged. A brilliant light is being shone down into the shadowy grey recesses of the human condition. Our current zeitgeist glibly pounces on inaction, equating it with complicity, and with a cavalier disregard for complexity, even conflates silence with violence. (If I were Satan, I’d be proud to have invented that slogan.) But Chekhov’s play reminds us, that sometimes, a mysterious, invisible weight holds an individual down; that for some inexpressible reason what we would do inexplicably remains undone. It’s a compassionate vision, reminding us that all those who don’t act or speak as we wish might be something other than enemies.

Modernising the setting – placing the characters in a world in which their problems should be more easily overcome but for some reason still aren’t – invites us to look beyond easy externals and shallow judgements. Kalka’s adaptation of Three Sisters draws to the fore the revolutionary aspect of Chekhov’s deeply humane art and, with rich poignancy, the excellent cast portray that eternal dance desire has with disappointment.

Paul Gilchrist

Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, in a new version by Victor Kalka

presented by Virginia Plain

performed by Matthew Abotomey, Meg Bennetts, Alex Bryant-Smith, Nicola Denton, Barry French, Sarah Greenwood, Jessie Lancaster, Alice Livingstone, Ciaran O’Riordan, Mason Phoumirath, and Joseph Tanti

at Flight Path Theatre until Sat 15 Feb

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Samuel Webster

*I think I might have borrowed this idea from Richard Gilman.

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