Tag Archives: Shopfront

We Have Stolen Our Bodies From God

11 Apr

In so many ways, I’m not the person to write about this show. I routinely refuse invitations to musical performances with the excuse It’s outside my area of expertise. No doubt this leaves publicists shaking their heads, thinking Expertise? You’re a theatre critic for God’s sake, not a brain surgeon! Just whack some stars on it, and go and guzzle more free champagne at your next show!

Matthew Forbes has composed a series of musical pieces. It’s described in the notes as a song cycle or live concept album. The pieces are marvellously eclectic in style, indicative of Forbes’ extraordinary talent. Forbes plays guitar and synthesiser, and he’s put together a super tight band. Particularly impressive (to a non-musician such as myself) were the vocal performances of Olivia Tajer and Felix Staas.

The 40 minute show shines with musical gems.

The space itself, the Upstairs Studio at Shopfront, is beautiful. Softly and warmly lit, it has a magical ambience, one promising the stuff of dreams.

And now I have to describe what the piece is about.

The title is wonderfully rich, evocative and provocative. (But I’m not quite sure of its intended meaning, or whether it’s deliberately – and beguilingly – ambiguous.)

Is the piece conventional in its presentation of religion?

It seems to source the Abrahamic traditions: there’s talk of a creator God, and there’s a sense that we’ve been left as custodians of this fragile planet.

But there’s also talk of space and of visitors. One track samples a small child saying something like God is someone who rules the world  … (and then something about) Outer Space. (It’s a quote I really should be able to remember, as it’s repeated numerous times, with increasing poignancy.)

Excepting blasphemy, Australians are generally very literal in their use of religious language. In many other cultures, writers comfortably evoke God without fear that it automatically commits them to the theological tenets of some religion. Religious language is employed to suggest or symbolise the grand, the awe inspiring, the universal. Sometimes, it can feel like the only language big enough for these things. Albert Einstein was famous for using religious language in this way. His oft quoted comment, expressing his objection to quantum theory, that God does not play dice, was simply an assertion that mere chance couldn’t be fundamental to the fabric of the universe. He was saying nothing that we unsophisticated Australians would interpret as religious.

With this piece, I’m uncertain whether Forbes is doing an Einstein, or whether he is genuinely discussing theological ideas. I wasn’t even sure if there was a narrative.

Live performance of original music always has the risk that your audience won’t follow the lyrics. (Indeed, anyone who’s written a straight play exploring anything other than cookie cutter conventional themes knows the danger that the audience won’t keep up. It’s enough to leave a writer questioning whether live performance is, after all, the best form in which to present her art.)

The production values of this show are first rate, so it’s not a technical problem. (Of course, it could be just a me problem; remember how I began this review.)

It might just be the nature of this gloriously rich piece that it asks to be listened to multiple times, and then it will reward its audience a hundred fold.

Still, the 40 minutes I spent last night with Forbes and his team were reward enough.

Paul Gilchrist

We Have Stolen Our Bodies From God by Matthew Forbes

Forbes was mentored by Jack Prest, and the piece is presented as part of ArtsLab: Reverb, a program from Shopfront Arts that showcases the talents of emerging artists.

Until 12 April at Shopfront

shopfront.org.au (for tix and full program)

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Mummy, I’m Scared

11 Apr

This is a work of craziness and true comic commitment.

Set in the late nineteenth century, it tells the story of a family of women intent on summoning a spirit via a séance.

I call it a story – and for the show’s 50 minute duration, the plot works very effectively – but it’s really just a fast moving vehicle for some humorous hijinks.

It’s a three hander, written by Fia Morrison, and performed by Morrison, and her co-collaborators Alison Cooper and Georgia Condon.

There’s a lot of doubling, and this adds to the show’s enormous verve.

All three performers display great physicality, and Morrison herself excels in the type of magical facial expression that’s gloriously hyperbolic and glowing with mischievous energy. (Rather than the Theatre of Authenticity, this is the Theatre of Audacity, inviting an audience response of I can’t believe you’re actually doing that!)

All three performers have thrilling, distinctive vocal styles, and use these to mine and shine the comic nuance of Morrison’s lively script. Cooper is particularly adept at the throwaway gag. (Admittedly, at times, I lost lines from all three actors, but in a show like this, that’s always a risk courted for the sake of sheer exuberance.)

The historical setting makes sense of the focus on seances and the supernatural. The world weariness of fin de siècle society, with its rejection of traditional religion and its growing awareness of the inadequacy of any substitutes, encouraged the most audacious of spiritual experiments.

But the setting also facilitates key aspects of the show’s humour and impact.

Somewhere in the last hundred years or so, the acting fraternity has developed a way of portraying (faux) late Victorian and Edwardian historical characters, one epitomised by a thoroughly declarative vocal style. (It’s one of the styles employed in this production.) Where does it come from? Perhaps it’s our shared response to amateur theatre’s penchant for quaint old drawing-room dramas. Or perhaps, more broadly, it’s modernism’s response to the era that preceded it. Virginia Woolf famously quipped “on or about December 1910, human character changed”. But from wherever the trope derives, the declarative style we routinely give to historical characters is a delightful and deliberate denial of their inner life. And in this consciously comic erasure of psychological complexity, the performers themselves gift us a playfully subversive reminder of genuine human vitality.

Paul Gilchrist

Mummy, I’m Scared by Fia Morrison

Morrison was mentored by Mish Grigor, and the piece is presented as part of ArtsLab: Reverb, a program from Shopfront Arts that showcases the talents of emerging artists.

Until 12 April at Shopfront

shopfront.org.au (for tix and full program)

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Rex

8 Apr

Jasper Lee-Lindsay’s one actor show is a 40 minute abbreviated version of Sophocles’ Theban plays.

Well, that was the plan.

What we get instead, as recompense, is a PowerPoint outlining the show he was going to write, if he’d finished it.

It’s a terrific conceit, allowing for brilliant humour and yet, surprisingly, still capturing the essence of the Ancient Greek tragedies.

Initially, the projector screen isn’t in place, and Lee-Lindsay’s mumbling, bumbling incompetence is juxtaposed to great effect with the quick action of the stage manager.

As Lee-Lindsay outlines the show that was to be, his comic timing is excellent. This is self-effacing, self-depreciating humour, beautifully delivered.

It’s not stand up, it’s a character piece. There’s whiff of Bob Newhart about it all (which shows my age, unless of course Newhart ages as well as Sophocles, and then I won’t be old, but erudite.)

Why Sophocles’ tragedies? Lee-Lindsay suggests the plague and crisis that hit Thebes resonate with the last few years in world affairs. And the title is a pun. Everything is wrecked.

Not that Lee-Lindsay articulates it, but there’s also the train wreck of this show. As I suggested earlier, it mischievously manifests the Ancient Greek tragic spirit: it’s fated that things will go terribly wrong; despite all our hopes, the universe is fundamentally, and incomprehensibly, hostile.

And there’s also the hint of what we call Shakespearean tragedy. Does the persona that Lee-Lindsay creates have a flaw which plays a part in that persona’s demise? Is that flaw ADHD? (That’s if a mental disorder can even be a flaw, in the way that, say, ambition is for Macbeth.) The possibility is aired but then, just as quickly, buried by fear. Hasn’t he read somewhere that the disorder might not even be real? It’s both a hilarious and moving portrait of debilitating doubt.

The world is big and we are small – and born of that eternal yawning disparity is bewilderment and pathos and pity and resignation and compassion and mercy and acceptance and … recognition. (Oh, and humour. Lots of that.)

Lee-Lindsay was mentored by Zoe Coombs-Marr, and the piece is presented as part of ArtsLab: Reverb, a program from Shopfront Arts that showcases the talents of emerging artists.

ShopFront proves once again to be an invaluable part of our arts scene.

Paul Gilchrist

Rex written and performed by Jasper Lee-Lindsay

presented as part of ArtsLab at Shopfront until 12 April

shopfront.org.au (for tix and full festival program)

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Art for the End Times

16 Mar

The website suggests it’s “A puppetry performance examining the future of AI developed art”, but I didn’t read that before the show.

I don’t read anything before a show.

I’m a theatre reviewer, which might tell you I find reading sort of hard.

During the show, it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with artificial intelligence. That might be indicative of RI (reviewer intelligence) but I’ll blame the fact I couldn’t see at a couple of brief but crucial moments. A combination of overly dim lighting and awkward sight lines meant I had difficulty following the narrative arc.  

On reflection, little puppet Rodrick was, I guess, suggestive of some sort of machine. And despite being forced to experience multiple examples of art, he struggled to create the real thing himself. So, yes, AI.

At the time, I took it all as a more generalised meditation on art. What is its value and purpose? What makes anyone an artist?

Looked at this way, it was fuel for a fiery demarcation dispute. It’s me and my reviewer friends who write about art in abstract terms. (We must be allowed some revenge on beauty.) In fact, I’ve been known to suggest that abstract ideas don’t belong in the theatre at all, that the stage is a place for the concrete, the specific, the particular.

But this is where puppets come in. Puppets are so clearly constructed, so obviously created, that they liberate us from what we call reality but is, in fact, mundanity. No one demands to know the back history of a puppet character – and so they live forward with a vitality that’s utterly refreshing.  No one complains a puppet’s performance is untruthful  – so they liberate us from that stifling euphemism that’s simply Narrowminded for If it’s beyond my experience it can’t be real.

Puppets are creative joy incarnate, and so are perfect for a playful poke at the big problems.

Tom Hetherington-Welch and Oliver Durbidge are company Highly Strung Puppets, and in creating this show, they create magic. Under their direction the ensemble present, with inspiring expertise, multiple forms of puppetry: marionettes, shadow figures and Bunraku-style puppets. Rodrick, who I mentioned earlier, is beautifully given life by operator Stella Klironomakis. The Curator, who collects art and hopes to teach Rodrick how to make it, is operated brilliantly by Jack Curry and the ensemble, and displays an electrifying range of emotions.

The show gains a thrilling texture from its use of projection. These projections, brimming with playful pop culture references, are the artworks from which Roderick must learn. The clips are created by Highly Strung Puppets and demonstrate both their extraordinary skill in puppet creation and their gleeful sense of mischief. Another stimulating use of projection occurs when Roderick creates his first story, and the ensemble bring it to life, there and then, filming the actions of tiny figurines, who then tower above us on the screen.  

Some audience members might feel the exploration of the artistic endeavour too narrow, too inhouse, too much just talking shop.  After all, we’re not all artists, or pursuing a career in the arts.  

But there’s something much more universal in this. Apart from a healthy critique of careerism (that very middle class malady in which we suffer from the delusion we are our job), there’s a glorious exhortation to live.

Perhaps the concluding scene is an allusion to Voltaire’s Candide, but it’s certainly a poignant image of the joy of openness, of artlessness.

Art for the End Times is part of ARTSLAB, a twice yearly event, where Shopfront’s resident artists showcase new works in a festival setting.  In its support of young creators, Shopfront once again proves itself an invaluable element of Sydney’s theatre scene.

Paul Gilchrist

Art for the End Times by Tom Hetherington-Welch and Oliver Durbidge

at 107 Projects until 24 March

shopfront.org.au/artslab-2024/

Image by Clare Hawley

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