Tag Archives: reviews

The Lotto Line

3 Apr

This is seriously committed crazy.

Written by John Tsakiris, and directed by Megan Heferen and Tsakiris, The Lotto Line presents five people waiting in line to buy tickets in a lottery. They don’t seem interested in winning. Once the outlet closes, they wait for it to reopen. Time stops.

Absurdist theatre is a funny form. Some would say that it doesn’t so much reflect Life’s meaninglessness as actively add to it.

And it’s a brave team who presents a play in which Time stops. Of course, theatre reviewers are never catty or petty, but if they were, it’d be one hell of a temptation.

And perhaps only a youthful team could produce a play in which the halting of Time – the having to Wait – is presented as a fundamental human experience.

That’s what absurdism does: in convention-shattering ways, it tries to express something about the human condition. It’s transgressive spirit means that it especially values innovation (in fact, some commentators might suggest that the only thing absurdist plays have in common is that they’re all longer than they need to be.)

To suggest a formula, absurdism is where the Theatre of Audacity (I can’t believe you’re doing that!) combines with the Theatre of Authenticity (I totally believe what you’re doing.) It’s an absolutely explosive mixture.

I’ve already suggested I struggled to connect with the authenticity of this piece, but neither my personal limitations nor my impatience with decoding should get in the way of discussing its audacity.

In terms of physicality, performances are super tight. The choreographed movement that suggests these characters are slaves to routine is wonderfully executed. Jess Spies as the Lotto Master is a terrific counterpoint, engendering a swaggering superiority.

When those who Wait individualise themselves from the group, there’s more skilled comedy. Larissa Turton’s gruff crazy cat lady is splendid. Holly Mazzola’s clever, particular and prematurely middle-aged woman is a masterclass in focus. Jonathon Nicola’s petulant pedant is engaging fun. As Mr Horner, James Thomasson balances well the eternal battle between frustration and hope. Megan Heferen’s imperious, supercilious Ms Atkins drives much of the piece.

On occasions, there could be more care with vocal work. There were moments when I was afraid I’d be reduced to recommending this show to only enthusiasts of screeching. And, unfortunately, some of the mischievous linguistic humour was lost in delivery. But there’s a neat trick where characters swap vocal styles, and Turton and Mazzola pull it off with aplomb.

The Lotto Line is a playful puzzle, a nonsensical 90 minutes, an invitation to laugh.

Paul Gilchrist

The Lotto Line by John Tsakiris

Presented by Studio Five Productions

At Flow Studios until 12 April

events.humanitix.com/the-lotto-line

Image by Patrick Phillips

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The Glass Menagerie

27 Mar

This is a beautiful production of a superb play.

The Glass Menagerie was first produced in 1944, and it launched Tennessee Williams’ career.

This slightly amended version is a poignant meditation on dreams, memory, and regrets.

Blazey Best is absolutely magnificent as Amanda, matriarch of a small house, evoking both laughter and pathos as she presents the fading southern belle, all attitudes, airs and … anguish. Once, in a single afternoon, she had seventeen gentleman callers. Now she worries for her daughter Laura, who has no gentleman callers at all.

Laura has a slight defect in her leg, but suffers more from her crippling shyness. Her life has reduced to playing records and tending her ornamental glass menagerie. Bridie McKim is brilliant as Laura, portraying perfectly her painfully overwhelming self-consciousness, while still finding those heartrending moments where hope glimmers through.

Tom, Laura’s brother, chafes under the responsibility he has to his fatherless family, and can barely endure his banal warehouse job. He also narrates the play, stepping out of the action to muse on the distance between mundanity and magic, between the average life and the adventurous one. Tom is a partially autobiographical creation; he dreams of being a writer, and his family situation is not unlike that of Williams’ youth. Danny Ball is mesmerising in the role, capturing both Tom’s energy and his desperation.

Tom also rankles under his mother’s insistence he find his sister a beau. The tyranny of women snaps back Amanda, with scathing satire.

He brings Jim to dinner.

Tom Rodgers offers a splendid portrait of Jim, bubbling and brimming with naïve enthusiasm. His scene with McKim’s fraught Laura is dramatic gold.

Liesel Badorrek’s production is a wonderful opportunity to see a classic of the American stage.

Paul Gilchrist

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

at Ensemble Theatre until 26 April

ensemble.com.au

Image by Prudence Upton

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Iphigenia in Splott

14 Mar

Apparently, this is based on an “enduring” Greek myth, but whatever that myth is, it hasn’t endured in my myopic world.

But, unquestionably, Iphigenia in Splott is one of those gritty, working class British plays that Australian theatre loves. Effie has a drinking problem. And she’s aggressive, in the way those who have substance abuse problems, or are marginalised, sometimes are. She tells us about a couple of months in her life, and challenges us to see her as a someone of value.

In this colossal monologue, directed beautifully by Lucy Clements, Meg Clarke plays Effie, and does so wonderfully, finding the humour and sharing the heartbreak.

On the most obvious level, the piece is a powerful plea for empathy, a passionate and engaging reminder that the person you might want to avoid on the street is a person all the same. Effie acknowledges that this can be difficult, joking that she’s sometimes herself uncertain about her boyfriend’s claim to full humanity.

The piece also floats the idea that Effie’s problems are societal, that she is somehow representative of those who have suffered because of political mismanagement.

Written by Welsh playwright Gary Owen, it was first produced in Britain a decade ago, and perhaps it’s outgrown its origin. This is not a criticism of the piece per se, but a reminder, that like Greek myths, stories belong to their context. Effie talks a lot about “cuts”, and I can guess at the sort of policies she means, but the piece doesn’t give the background to assess whether these “cuts” are the result of hardhearted corruption, or were simply unavoidable. No doubt, it would’ve been far clearer to an audience in Cardiff in 2015.

Ultimately, Effie gives the impression that someone else is to blame for her situation, and that’s why she’s angry. But we’re also shown her making poor choices, and she herself criticises her boyfriend for complaining about all the shit on the street, turds he hasn’t picked up after his own dog.

It can be a mistake with a piece like this to assume the sole character is a truth-teller, some sort of Greek oracle. Drama works on the dynamic that no character has such a monopoly; that’s the form’s deeply humane vision. Only in the shallowest of drama is one character wholly right and the others wholly wrong. Monologue is no different. We’re not being asked if what Effie says is the Truth, but why it might be the Truth for her – that’s how we grant her the personhood she demands, and so deserves. (And, no, I’m not saying we don’t have a responsibility to help the marginalised, but am suggesting we shouldn’t confuse political engagement with simplistic readings of the dramatic form.)

Some audience members might thrill to Effie’s final dark, threatening statement, but it’s not some clarion call to action, but rather an expression of who she is, in all her pained bewilderment. If she is an oracle at all, she is in the way oracles enduringly are: their predictions will come to pass, but in ways far more disturbing and tragic than we can imagine.

Paul Gilchrist

Iphigenia in Splott by Gary Owen

Presented by New Ghosts Theatre Company

At Old Fitz Theatre until 22 March

http://oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Phil 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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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

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Song of First Desire

21 Feb

Drama is in love with the productions of time, to misquote William Blake. Drama is an artform concerned with duration. Unlike, say, lyric poetry or sculpture, drama represents what happens next.

This was done and so This followed, and then This … and so on. As Arthur Miller has suggested, drama is the artform that portrays the chickens coming home to roost.

As a consequence, dramatists have long been attracted to historical stories. (Shakespeare wrote plenty, over a third of his output. But more on him later.)

Song of First Desire is set in Spain, and through intertwined stories, explores the ways in which the Civil War of the 1930’s continues to cast a dark shadow over that nation. If war is hell, then civil war is its innermost ring (to borrow from both Sherman and Dante.)

One strand of the story tells of a Columbian immigrant who comes to contemporary Spain and finds himself working in a house with some rather scarred occupants. The other strand of the story is set in the same house, but in 1968, nearly thirty years after the Civil War, but while the nation was still controlled by Franco’s victorious fascists (a dictatorship which lasted until at least 1975.)

The characters in the two story lines are personally connected, but I have to admit it took me a long time to figure out exactly the nature of those connections. Now, I know that there are members of the audience who like to have something to think about while the characters onstage are just talking – but for me, having to pay attention to the present action while simultaneously attempting to draw the connections with the past was a multi-tasking challenge: not so much chewing gum while walking as putting together a 3D jigsaw puzzle while riding a unicycle. Homer is rightly blamed for inventing the flashback, and it’s probably worth noting that Shakespeare maintains a healthy abstinence from the technique. (What happens next? always being a more interesting question than Why did that happen?)

But having said all that, this production is one hour fifty minutes long without an intermission – yet the time flew, and offered the glorious, heartrending vistas born of such flight.

Writer Andrew Bovell and director Neil Armfield are Australian theatre legends, and masters of the craft, and this piece is utterly enthralling. The four-strong cast (Kerry Fox, Borja Maestre, Jorge Muriel and Sarah Peirse) are brilliant, embracing the challenges of doubling and creating remarkably vivid characters in each of the two storylines.

If Bovell is more interested in disrupting a story’s chronology than, say, Shakespeare, it’s possibly because as a modern he’s working our contemporary interest in historical sociology. We knowing our present is a product of our past, but is it also its prisoner?

In Song of First Desire several characters suggest there are some doors to the past that should be left shut, but they say it in such pained desperation we wonder if it’s a word of the wise or a cry of the wounded.

Now, I know there are members of the audience who like to have something to think about after the characters stop talking – and Bovell’s powerful play is a provocative invitation to consider our own nation’s dialogue with its past. As a society, do we consciously forget in order to move forward? Or do we consciously remember in order to heal? And is either of these options actually psychologically possible?

Though no Spaniard, French philosopher and later mystic Simone Weil volunteered for the Republicans in their battle against the fascists in the Civil War. And though not concerned exclusively with the history that each of us carries, she wrote a line that resonates with Bovell’s vital interrogation, and which here I’ll paraphrase: What’s taken from us does us harm; what we relinquish does us good.

Paul Gilchrist

Song of First Desire by Andrew Bovell

At Belvoir until 23 March

belvoir.com.au

Image by Brett Boardman

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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

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Antony & Cleopatra

13 Feb

This is an odd one.

It’s probably the most abridged version of this play you’ll see outside a school incursion.

It’s all performed by three actors: Charles Mayer as Antony, Jo Bloom as Cleopatra, and Charley Allanah as everybody else (or at least everybody else who isn’t cut.) Performances are bold and spirited. For reasons that will become more apparent later in my response, design focuses on costume, and these by Letitia Hodgkinson are beautifully lavish.

There’s also a narrator or guide, a role taken by Nathan Meola. He almost gets as much stage time as Shakespeare, though far fewer words. He appears to be adlibbing. He speaks very slowly and quietly, as though he’s speaking to the guests at a spiritual retreat. We’re thanked for the journey each of us has made to get to the theatre, and it’s acknowledged that the journey may have been difficult. (There’s even talk of snow.) We’re asked several times if we feel safe, and at each repetition I feel a little less so. His speaking style is a curious mix of condescension and coercion, made all the more disconcerting by the very convincing illusion that it’s not a created dramatic character being performed. He asserts that we humans are not immune to stories and, for a moment, I question my own humanity – until I recall that he’s ignoring a rather vital point: the power of a story depends on how well it’s told. This narrator recaps what we’ve seen and tells us what we’re about to see – which may seem superfluous, even to those unfamiliar with the play. He also assumes we’re deeply affected by the performance. (In our current theatre scene, in which there’s far too much of telling audiences what to think, it’s refreshing to be told what to feel.)

The marketing describes the production as immersive – which can mean a lot of different things, but here means you may not get a seat. We’re needlessly shuffled back and forth between the foyer (where there aren’t enough seats) and the theatre (where there are plenty.) These changes of location, and the narrator, have a slowing effect, but the whole thing is only 90 mins, including interval.

Shakespeare’s play is reduced to the story of two people going through a dark night of the soul to find eternal love, or divine love, or some such thing. (At least that’s what the narrator tells us is happening.) The political tensions and the grand clash of civilizations are given little space. This reduction enhances the sense the play is being used as a vehicle for a certain New Age philosophy.

So is it “Shakespeare”?

That’s an absurdly conservative question, based on some disturbing essentialist assumptions. But I’ll answer it anyway.

On one level – a particularly academic one – the answer is No. Shakespeare and his contemporaries dragged theatre away from being what was almost a religious ritual, with narratives dominated by religious perspectives. They moved the artform away from the traditional Mystery play. These Elizabethans still acknowledged that spiritual experiences existed (in a way that, say, Jane Austen seemingly does not) – but they viewed those experiences as part of the wider human experience, not necessarily as its key. To be essentialist, they were humanists.

But, soaked in Renaissance humanism, Shakespeare was not an essentialist. He looked at the world with humility and wonder, and I suspect he wouldn’t dismiss a production like this, but would ever so gently chastise those who might. After all, as his most famous creation says, “There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in your philosophy… “

Paul Gilchrist

Antony & Cleopatra by William Shakespeare

Presented by Come You Spirits

At The Lounge, The Concourse until 22 Feb

theconcourse.com.au

Image by Syl Marie Photography

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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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