Tag Archives: KXT

Ophelia Thinks Harder

26 Mar

This is high energy feminist fun (with a few scenes that are less fun and more confronting.)

Written by Jean Betts in 1993, it’s an appropriation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, one that places Ophelia centre stage.

Ophelia has feelings for Hamlet, but she can’t pretend he’s not utterly obnoxious. Her father and her brother are far too interested in her virginity. And Gertrude offers unwanted advice about how to live as a woman in a man’s world. (Don’t think too much.)

Betts cleverly weaves elements of the original text into her version of the story. With only a little tweaking, Ophelia gets all Hamlet’s major soliloquys, and they work magnificently. (Though I have to say I was less excited by the interpolation of so many lines from the other plays and the sonnets. Fortunately, my eyes no longer make that clicking sound when they roll. But what I found tiresome, others will find erudite and inventive.)

There’s also an appropriation of a poem by A E Housman, which is intriguing, and anachronistic (though that can hardly matter in a play like this.) It’s a brave writer who puts her words alongside the Bard and possibly the last great popular poet (that is, before modernism alienated the average reader.) But Betts definitely holds her own, and sometimes left me feeling I’d prefer more of her and less of them.

Alex Kendall Robson directs a terrific cast, and the key note is vitality. This is a wise decision; few people come out of a production of Hamlet wishing it were longer. (To stay or not to stay has been pondered at many an intermission. This version, at 150 mins including interval, keeps its engine at full throttle to keep us engaged.)

Brea Macey is superb as Ophelia – but I’ll get back to that.

Shaw Cameron as Hamlet is deliciously brutal, offering an engrossing portrait of the worst of privilege and entitlement. His physicality, especially, is a highlight, being both enthralling and threatening (as hinted in my first paragraph.)

Lucy Miller as Gertrude is a delight. Having accepted the misogyny of her society, the Queen has adopted a transgressive Machiavellianism that makes the character captivating. Many audience members have waited a long, long, long time to see the closet scene with this Gertrude.

Eleni Cassimatis as Ophelia’s maid servant gives the piece a poignant gravity, a terrible, galvanizing awareness of the dangers of this patriarchal world.

Pat Mandziy as Horatio offers a male character beyond the myopic, self-obsession of the other men, and both his performance and his text is crucial for the humane, richness of the work.

I started this article with the bland assertion that this is a feminist piece. Perhaps it occasionally overplays this element. The set is dominated by a painting of the Virgin Mary, and discussion of the history of the Church’s attitude to women gets a lot of stage time, a curious decision considering its all placed in the world of the Elizabethan playwright who was perhaps the most secular (admittedly, in a very religious society.) And this historical focus emphasises the academic. I’m not in a position to comment on whether contemporary women feel the challenges they currently face become more surmountable with the aid of a history lesson, especially one going back to Aristotle, Aquinas and the (aptly named) Church Fathers. I’ve written before that theory has little place in theatre, the form being more suited to the dreadful messiness of human reality than theory’s seductive simplicity.

Having said all that, by positing the protagonist’s problem in sociological or cultural terms, she must respond (at least partially) in kind. The result is that Ophelia has not only an emotional journey, but an intellectual one. 

But the rub is, her response to the theoretical language in which her problems are explained is not to simply regurgitate that language but rather to consider and test how it might inform her life. That is, she thinks – and I, for one, am thrilled to see a thinking character on the Australian stage.

Macey’s Ophelia is glorious, expressing beautifully the conflict between her self-doubt and her fundamental sense of dignity as a person. Macey powerfully presents Ophelia’s growing awareness that, for all her enervating inconsistencies, she deserves more agency than she’s permitted. Betts does well not to make Ophelia some kind of virago; the play is classic bildungsroman, a genre far better fitted to the dramatic form than any platform for slogan sprouting heroines. In the open-ended nature of the conclusion of Ophelia’s journey, there’s a splendid, invigorating optimism.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Paul Gilchrist

Ophelia Thinks Harder by Jean Betts

Presented by Fingerless Theatre, in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre

At KXT until 29 March

http://kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Phil Erbacher

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Don’t Save Me

3 Mar

The premise of Don’t Save Me is so thought-provoking that it almost makes redundant the actual writing or production of the play.

Jade (Holly Mazzola) is dying. Her husband Pat (Ben Itaba) secretly records their conversations, so she can be brought “back to life” by AI.

Does Pat have the right?

Written by Karina Young and directed by Nelson Blake, the focus of the play is primarily, and narrowly, ethical.

But when Jade discovers Pat’s plan, and objects, his response is a flat But you’ll be dead – which doesn’t quite trump all further argument, but feels awfully close to doing so. The dead, after all, don’t have rights. (You can lie about the dead, but you can no longer libel them.) And, with little time left, and that time to be inevitably filled with physical suffering, Jade’s insistence on her rights seems odd, an unacknowledged avoidance strategy as against a justified indignation. (Life perceived solely through the lens of rights is particularly barren. As victims of blind circumstance, which we all ultimately are, rights offer little counsel and even less consolation.)

And, with its sights firmly on ethics, the play sidesteps more interesting ontological issues. Instead of Should we do it? how about Could we do it?

The answer to the second of these questions is not only dependent on technology, but also on what we think it is to be a person. Are we just a collection of relatively consistent words and behaviours? If so, AI is perfectly capable of replicating us. However, vitally aware of our own agency, our freedom and the endless dynamism of being alive, we resist such a reductive vision of personhood

But the experience of love raises a thorny problem. We love particular people. Or, if we’re talking romance, solely one person. Based on what? Their relatively consistent words and behaviours? If that is so, Pat’s reductive AI plan is disturbingly little different from his choice to marry Jade in the first place!

And that’s why a deeper psychological exploration would have been fruitful. We don’t see Pat make the decision to record his wife. He’s already doing it before the play begins. We don’t see him so overwhelmed by the sheer wonder of his wife’s existence, that in the mad hope it might continue, he desperately clutches at straws. Similarly, when Jade discovers Pat’s plan, her response is merely anger. It doesn’t seem to occur to her to seriously consider why her husband might be tempted. She’s too focussed on her supposed rights to openly face the awful, bewildering mystery of ultimate loss. (Even when she asserts she is scared of death, we aren’t shown her fear, only her anger that her husband has failed to recognise her emotions.) For most of the 90 minutes of the play, the characters are remarkably unchanging, altering only in mood rather than outlook – and that’s a pity, because character development is a terrific dramatic tool to explore the moral, philosophical and emotional complexities of any thorny issue.

Indeed, the characters appear to be deliberately infantilised: her sister (Raechyl French) attempts to bribe her way back into Jade’s trust with ice-cream; the married couple’s dream holiday is Disneyland; they build a pillow fort in the loungeroom; and their relationship appears to consist of home cooking, including the baking of cookies, and watching reality TV on the couch. (Admittedly, the last of these could be an invitation to consider authenticity, after all, the play is about AI.)

But why are they such static children?

It functions as a powerful portrait of fear, of debilitating terror before those two most dreadful agents of change: Technology, control of which we’ve lost, and Death, whose measure we never had.

Paul Gilchrist

Don’t Save Me by Karina Young

presented by Puncher’s Chance Co in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre Co

at KXT until March 8

kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Phil Erbacher

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Cruise

19 Feb

In the war between the generations, the final result is inevitable. All that’s in doubt is what the victors will learn from the vanquished, before they too ultimately join the ranks of the defeated.

Jack Holden’s Cruise was first performed in 2021 in London. A young gay man works at a phone help line. An older man calls, and is disgruntled to be answered by such an inexperienced responder. Already annoyed at one of the older gay men working at the centre, the young man is taken aback. The tension between the generations is established.

This is a 90 minute monologue, with Fraser Morrison playing an astounding number of characters. Morrison’s control of voice and movement is superb. It’s an absolutely extraordinary performance. (And credit must also go to his terrific support team: director Sean Landis, accent coach Linda Nicholls-Gidley and movement director Jeremy Lloyd.)

The basic set up of the piece is that the older man tells the younger man his personal history, of his time in Soho in the 1980’s. It’s parties and promiscuity, dancing and drugs, and true love… and true love’s awful nemesis. There’s oodles of charm, plenty of humour, and at the dawning of that cruelly indiscriminate plague, distress, dread, and soul-deep sorrow.

As an outsider to this world – I spent the 80’s not in dance clubs but in libraries – a piece like this is a beautiful gift. To witness a community in the process of building itself, to observe it openly constructing its history, is a wonderful privilege. (Self-indulgent digression: While in those libraries, I was learning about love in a way very different to that of the characters in Cruise, reading the history of mysticism, first in Christianity, then in Judaism, then Islam and then from further east. So, History and Love – where the lesson is that Eternity is in love with the productions of Time, to quote William Blake.)

And that’s the glorious wisdom of this piece: by knowing our history, by knowing the sorrows and solaces of those who came before, we gain the strength to step into the future. And what’s more, knowing our place in Time is the best preparation for the joys which seem to transcend it.

Paul Gilchrist

Cruise by Jack Holden

presented by Fruit Box Theatre in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre Company

at KXT until 22 Feb

kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Abraham de Souza

Tags: , , , , , , ,

The Hero Leaves One Tooth

25 Jul

The myth of a vagina equipped with teeth has been with us for quite a while. The myth functions in several ways. It expresses the male fear of women, their dangerous allure, their power, the fact that the sexual act radically changes the participants. It also expresses the female desire for safety, the longing to secure themselves from sexual assault.

I don’t want to oversimplify; if the meaning of the myth was obvious and indubitable it wouldn’t be a myth, but merely a parable or fable, or even a truism. Myth works well in drama because it invites reflection rather than reduces to sermon.

And Erica J Brennan’s take on the myth of vagina dentata warmly invites reflection. Brennan reworks it as speculative fiction, imagining the phenomena to have occurred to most contemporary women. How we would navigate this concrete physicalization of our subconscious fears and desires?

Brennan sets the action in a dinner party, the archetype of privileged normalcy, and lets the characters attempt to make sense of it all. Their dialogue is stilted and sparse, evocative of the challenges of the new world in which together they find themselves, but also of the deep troubling internal darkness that alone they’ve always inhabited. Director Cam Turnbull effectively ramps up the sense of dislocation by slowing the pace. Lighting designer Jasmin Borsovszky also powerfully disrupts any illusions of a comfortable reality with unexpected and haunting variations. The addition of clever, catchy songs by Jake Nielsen further subverts complacency.

The cast do some good work. A highlight is Kira-che Heelan, as Neeve, offering an engaging performance that marvellously mixes the horror, the despair, the anger and the hope. Claudia Shnier’s Sasha is beautifully and provocatively part conniving minx and part feminist warrior, and all vulnerable human being, as she attempts to cope with forces much larger and more ancient than herself. David Woodland’s Mark, in his desperate, bumbling attempts to make connections despite the world’s brutality, is a splendidly sympathetic everyman.

The Hero Leaves One Tooth is like a gem dragged up from the underworld; deliberately only half-polished, it glimmers and shines while still suggesting the darkness from where it came.  

Paul Gilchrist

The Hero Leaves One Tooth by Erica J Brennan

Presented by Ratcatch Theatre in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre Company

At KXT until 29 July

www.kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Clare Hawley

Tags: ,

माँ की रसोई Maa Ki Rasoi – My Mother’s Kitchen

5 Jun

I don’t read the program before a show, nor after it (except to get the names of the creative team.)

I took Maa Ki Rasoi to be a sharing. I assumed the performer was sharing her personal story of her relationship with her mother. My assumption was supported by actor Madhullika Singh’s generous-spirited vulnerability, her warm-hearted performance style.  And my assumption was further encouraged by the meta-theatricality; we see the protagonist, a theatre maker, overtly choosing how to best tell her story.

If a personal sharing, this piece is part of a contemporary trend. It’s fascinating that personal testimony has become so common in theatre. We speak of the need to tell our stories, and this ubiquitous phrase has come to mean bearing witness to actual and specific lived experience. I’m not suggesting dramatists can’t or shouldn’t do this, but it’s curious that we’ve come to think it’s what they mainly do. (Hamlet undoubtedly reflects Shakespeare’s interests and assumptions, but does anyone really think it’s his personal story?)

Closely related to our desire to tell our stories is our interest in representation. It can only be good when our stages reflect the diversity of our population. But just as the phrase tell our stories has come to mean something very particular, so has representation. It’s come to mean something akin to speaking for, as we might imagine an elected representative speaks for her electorate. But an elected representative is chosen. Theatre makers aren’t chosen by those whom we increasingly assume they represent. In this piece, the protagonist makes a generalisation about South Asian mothers (already a rather broad category.) Am I being asked to consider this generalisation as testimony, information to add to my store of knowledge of South Asian mothers? Or am I being asked to consider the generalisation as I would’ve previously done in a theatre; that is, assume it’s telling me something about the protagonist’s mental habits?  

But this piece was not what I imagined. Maa Ki Rasoi is written and directed by Pratha Nagpal and, as previously suggested, performed by Madhullika Singh; so it’s not simply a personal sharing. (And, to anyone uninterested in the dramatic form and its development, all my earlier comments will appear just so much self-indulgent digression.) The piece mimics a personal sharing. I’m not suggesting this mimicry is dishonest or inauthentic, certainly no more than theatre is generally.

It’s a gentle story, presented with an overly gentle pace. The protagonist ponders the importance of cooking in her mother’s life. Both Nagpal’s writing and Singh’s performance present beautifully the tension between the wish for autonomy and the guilty regret of dismissing tradition. There’s delightful humour in the ironic exploration of words like feminism and patriarchy, abstractions that naturally fail to capture real life’s complexity. There’s also an intriguing use of the phrase safe space (or was it safe place?) Several times we’re told the kitchen is her mother’s safe space. Unless this phrase is in the process of morphing to mean happy space, what’s missing is a description of from what it is that her mother requires safety. It’s a poignant omission.

There are several other absences that are equally powerful. Many phrases in an Indian language (Hindi?) aren’t translated, and that refusal to privilege English speaks eloquently of both the joys and pains of the migrant experience. Similarly, for 45 minutes, the kitchen is empty. Spoken of, but absent, the protagonist’s mother is a wonderful symbol of how those we love imbue our every thought and feeling.

Paul Gilchrist

Maa Ki Rasoi – My Mother’s Kitchen by Pratha Nagpal  

at KXT until 4 June, as part of the TAPE OVER Festival

kingsxtheatre.com

Tags: ,

Party Girl

26 May

“I don’t believe in anything,” says a woman dressed as a fairy.

It’s a provocative line, in several ways.

It encapsulates the key tension driving this very funny piece: an earthy, jaded, sharp-mouthed protagonist pretends to be a magical, fantastical being. It’s how you add some glitter to children’s parties. It’s also how you pay for your next bottle of vodka.

Lucy Heffernan, who wrote and performs Party Girl, is extraordinary. Her magnificent stage presence, her marvellous voice, her mean electric guitar all result in this under-an-hour show being a theatrical joy.

Fairy Sparkles tells of a day performing at kid’s parties. Linking her tale together are references to the rules of being a fairy. They are nothing but practical: Arrive in costume. Don’t be late. Don’t park too close to the birthday girl’s house. Don’t smoke.

But it’s not just the contrast between fictional fantasy and cynical pragmatism that fuels the show. At home, Mum is falling apart, a victim of mental illness. Where’s the magic in a world where this can happen? It’s hard to be ethereal when shit’s so real.

Director Lily Hayman uses the KXT traverse stage beautifully. A blank space, it slowly fills with detritus. It’s lit evocatively by Tyler Fitzpatrick, her design suggesting both rock performance with haze and the confusion of conflicting visions of life.

Linked to the whole pub rock vibe is the show’s awareness of class inequality, reinvigorating in a theatre scene currently focussing on alternative theories of privilege.   

Which oddly enough, brings me to the other way in which “I don’t believe in anything” is a provocative statement.

It’s a line that draws attention to the glorious ambiguity of that word believe. Believe to be true or believe to be of value? A thing can be true but not important (or helpful.) Can things be not true but important (or helpful)?

Yes, that’s what magic is. Not the magic that happens to you; I mean the type you cast yourself.  The world we experience is the spell we cast….up to a point. Where exactly that point is, the point where our personal magic ceases and the brute force of reality takes over – and it will – is a thing to argue. And a thing to test.

Paul Gilchrist

Party Girl by Lucy Heffernan

at KXT until May 28, as part of the TAPE OVER Festival

www.kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Clare Hawley

Tags: ,

Mortel

27 Apr

As a writer, one might assume I have a deep love for language (though, being a theatre reviewer, one might expect that love to be expressed in the form of a disturbing fetish for cliché, banality and formulaic structure.)

But it’s not all about language. One of the glories of theatre is that it combines language with physicality. There aren’t just words, there are bodies saying those words. And what those bodies do as they say the words, and what they do when they’re not saying the words, produces a splendid complexity. (I love that in theatre a character can say how much she adores her husband at the very moment she is seen making love to someone else.)

What happens when language is taken out of theatre? (It’s worth noting, that in the rehearsal room of new work, the most common alteration to the text is the cut: I don’t need those words, says an actor, to present that emotion.) What happens in a performance when movement is privileged? What happens is a beautiful reminder of physicality: its richness, its expressiveness, its significance.

That’s what Mortel is. This 60 minute piece of physical theatre is a paean to the body; its energy, its strength, its beauty.

Directed magnificently by Steven Ljubović and performed by a gifted cast (Phoebe Atkinson, Gemma Burwell, Abbey Dimech, Giani Leon, Meg Hyeronimus, Levi Kenway, Aiden Morris, Bella Ridgway, and Shannon Thomas) Mortel highlights the experience of embodiment, of what it is to be a body. This might seem a strange thing for me to assert, but as Wittgenstein suggested “The human body is the best picture of the human soul”. Witnessing the extraordinary things the body can do is a reminder of possibility, of potential, of the flame that burns within us (which I think is a pretty passable definition of the ineffable entity that is the soul.)

It’s probably not accurate to call Mortel a dance work, but the cast interact beautifully with Kieran Camejo’s evocative and ingeniously varied soundscape. And with the space lit magically by Clare Sheridan, Ljubović creates powerful images, ones of passionate interactions and of poignant isolation. Both the initial and concluding tableaux are deeply moving expressions of the essence of individuality, that blessing and burden shared by us all.

Paul Gilchrist

Mortel directed by Steven Ljubović

Presented by Merak in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre

At KXT on Broadway until April 29

kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Abraham de Souza

Tags: ,

Cherry Smoke

2 Apr

Theatre is a weird art form. (Though, they all are, if you think about it.) What’s odd about theatre is the predominance of interpretive artists. Compare it to visual arts and literature, which are filled with creative artists.

Let me explain. If you buy a play from overseas, or dip back into the canon, no-one in your team is doing the original creative work. Everyone is interpreting what already exists. And, in theatre, this is par for the course. (It could be argued it’s what actors and directors always do, no matter from where the play is sourced.)

In theatre, no-one blinks an eye when you choose to produce, say, Hamlet … again. What is important is your take on the play. On opening night your hope is not that someone will say something like “Where’s the playwright? I got to meet the guy who absolutely nailed the debilitating chasm between the brutal simplicity of action and the rich ambiguity of thought.” No, you hope the buzz is more: “Swahili speaking puppets? What a brilliant choice!”

As result, we get what I call “cover theatre” – in the way a band is said to do a “cover” when they play a song they didn’t write. Those sort of musicians are usually relegated to RSL clubs, but fortunately, in theatre, there’s no such privileging of originality. (And, please, read to the conclusion of my review before concluding my attitude to this phenomena.)

Consider Crisscross’ production of James McManus’ Cherry Smoke. The play is American and has been kicking around for a decade or so. But, here and now, director Charlie Vaux’s production is an invitation to an intriguingly foreign world. It’s brutal; these characters are from the south of the US, and they’re seriously down and out. Cherry (Meg Hyeronimus) is homeless, effectively abandoned by her deeply damaged, and damaging, family. She looks for more in Fish (Tom Dawson), her “angel”, but he was forced into the boxing ring as a child, and so violence, and the incarceration that often follows, is his existence. He knows there’s something wrong with the “wires” in his head. Duffy (Fraser Crane) tries to guide Fish, but it’s a challenging task, especially when his garage barely breaks even and his own relationship with Bug (Alice Birbara) is troubled. She desperately wants a baby, and her childminding and occasional midwifery is, in Fish’s words, like being an alcho working in a bar. She “hates God” because He won’t give her what she feels she needs.

How do you find hope in such a world? Well, Cherry espouses a sort of soft-metal romanticism. It’s tough, sensual and hyperbolic. She calls Fish “Baby” a lot, and can’t eat, or breathe (she says) without him. She claims Jesus once lit her cigarette, with His finger. The smoke was cherry coloured. She offered Him one, but apparently He’s trying to quit. Her conclusion: He’s broken – just as they all are. There’s little more religion than that in the play, but the sequence evokes perfectly the pathos of weaving meaning from scraps.

We do cover theatre like this because it reminds us of basics. The world of the characters is one in which a “meanness” swirls endlessly, and lands randomly, refusing to be shaken off. In this world, posited by McManus and brought back to life here by Vaux and his committed cast, we meet again those age old problems of suffering and evil.

And so, in KXT’s cool new space in Broadway, we’re invited to a foreign place, to be reminded of our common humanity.   

Paul Gilchrist

Cherry Smoke by James McManus

presented by Crisscross Productions in association with Bakehouse Theatre

until April 8 at KXT Broadway

www.kingsxtheatre.com/cherry-smoke

Image by Abraham de Souza

Tags: ,

Newer Entries →