Tag Archives: Sydney Theatre Review

Fewer Emergencies

28 Jul

This one resists an easy reductive reading – and that makes for thrilling theatre.  

In Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies, four characters appear to be constructing a narrative. The narrative they tell each other is a story (or stories) of a couple who marry and raise a child. The four characters (one of whom may be the actual child) add to each other’s ideas for the narrative. They echo suggestions they like and challenge those they don’t. They toss up various motives for the actions of the characters, and insist – sometimes successfully – on consistency.

It’s oddly reminiscent of a TV writers’ room – but it’s most certainly not. The narrative building that Crimp is exploring is far less specific than that. It’s the narrative building that is the common inheritance of humanity.

Crimp’s script is an absolute delight – funny, horrifying, invigorating.

The narrative his four characters construct is part-cliché and part-inspiration. And that’s true of the narratives we build of our own lives: the cliché aligns us with a community, the inspiration grants us individuality.

Crimp plays with linguistic clichés: That only makes it worse; Don’t help me; Things are getting better.

But he also undercuts these clichés with a glorious poetry of the vernacular, making music from its rhythms and repetitions.

There’s also some startling imagery: In a drawer, awaits the island of Manhattan; Dangling over the suffering child is a dazzling key (a tantalisingly ambiguous symbol of varieties of opening – to reality’s wildness, or of the understanding.)

Crimp also has fun with clichés of the narrative kind: The troubled marriage that results in a troubled child; The formula for happiness being money plus property plus family plus shopping; And GOOD shopping – not just the usual big brands.

But these narrative clichés are also mischievously disrupted: With intimations of frightening mental illness; With scenes of appalling violence; With magical realism.

It would be easy to do this sort of theatre really badly. (I can certainly imagine botching it. My inner nightmare narrative, in common with everyone’s, consists of cliché tempered with terrifyingly unique personal disasters.)

But director Harry Reid pulls it off brilliantly, creating an extraordinarily engaging 60 minutes of theatre. Aided by a clever lighting design by Izzy Morrissey, Reid uses the space magnificently, presenting a piece as visually exciting as it is linguistically. He also elicits from his cast (Clay Crighton, Olivia Hall-Smith, Bayley Prendergast and Monica Sayers) wonderful performances. Without the usual safety net of dramatic realism – the verisimilitude to recognisable individuals – the cast display virtuoso skill, captivating us with both voice and movement. Crighton’s physicality, powerfully suggesting determination’s battle with fear, and confusion’s with certainty, is a highlight.

Paul Gilchrist

Fewer Emergencies by Martin Crimp,

presented by The Company Theatre,

at The Old Fitz, as a Late Show, until 3 August.

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Robert Miniter.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Emerald City

24 Jul

David Williamson is a legend of Australian theatre and Emerald City is one of his best known plays.

First produced in 1987, it tells the story of screenwriter Colin who brings his family to Sydney to further his career.

True to traditional satirical structure, the play is constructed from dichotomies: Sydney versus Melbourne; the Eastern Suburbs versus the Rest of our Sprawling Metropolis; Private Schools versus State Schools; America versus Australia; Entertainment versus Art; Ambition versus Acceptance; Hypocrisy versus Integrity.

Each of these dichotomies evoke the more fundamental binary division of Evil versus Good.

The game we’re asked to play is to consider whether these dichotomies are overly simplistic or just plain false. We’re encouraged to do this by intriguing character arcs and piercingly funny one-liners.

As a screenwriter, Colin gives the advice that something always has to be at stake – but it’s not reasonable to assume a theatre reviewer will relate to a story in which characters seek glamour and success. (Some might even suggest that ambition is not a particularly interesting subject – unless it leads you to kill the king of Scotland and afterwards deliver some hauntingly desperate soliloquys.)

Inoculated by hard experience, two-bit reviewers might be immune to the siren song of Success – but that immunity is hardly universal. Many conversations about Art do sound like demarcation disputes, or performance reviews, or quality control panels, or price negotiations. But only one conversation is vital. And it happens in the desert, when the artist battles with the devil – alone, naked and true – and in that battle forfeits her ego to win her soul. And tired but free, she returns to the city, and scratched in the dirt if necessary, she offers a vision of the kingdom of heaven.

This play attempts no such a vision – but it does effectively make the primrose path to hell appear a little less rosy.  

Mark Kilmurry’s production is a fascinating opportunity to observe the challenges of the actors’ craft. Satirical roles can be surprisingly tricky, especially when the characters themselves are granted an aptitude for mocking comic observation. It’s fun to watch Tom O’Sullivan as Colin and Rachel Gordon as his wife Kate navigate the slippery duality of being both declaimers of foibles and figures of ridicule themselves. Juxtaposed with these two is the more straightforward characterisation of the hustler Mike, who is transparently duplicitous, a gloriously self-seeking philistine – and Matt Minto embraces the role with a wonderful physicality and a mirth-inducing energy.

Paul Gilchrist

Emerald City by David Williamson

At Ensemble Theatre until 23 Aug

ensemble.com.au

Image by Phil Erbacher

Tags: , , , , , ,

Betrayal

23 Jul

I know a lot of us justify the fact we’re yet to win a Nobel Prize in Literature by telling ourselves that it’s really just about who you know.

However, Betrayal by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter raises the disturbing spectre that the prize might also be awarded to those of genuine genius.

Several years ago, and for quite some time, Jerry had an affair with Emma, the wife of Robert, his best friend. Pinter tells most of the story through a reverse chronology, ultimately ending at the beginning.

The impact of reversing the tale’s chronology is twofold.

Firstly, it facilitates dramatic irony. Lies become more apparent, like shards of glass in sunlight. The audience delights in discovering the ways the characters have not been open and honest about the past.

But Pinter’s unconventional structure is not about giving the characters some sort of back history that explains or justifies their infidelity. (I’ve never been a fan of plays that use flashback to explain the present, feeling the question What happens next? is always more interesting than Why did that happen?) What Pinter does is more akin to what a craft-person working in the plastic arts might do. He crafts an object from the concept of betrayal, leaving us as unconcerned with narrative as we would be with, say, a small glass ornament. Instead, the concept is held up to the light, and we’re given glimpses from different angles, to marvel at the way the Truth is tainted.

This leads me to the other stroke of genius displayed in this unconventional structure: it weakens the sense of the passing of Time, as though whatever it is that is being betrayed is beyond Time – which, of course, it is. Every committed relationship we have is an attempt to transcend Time, to deny its inevitabilities, to say This Always, despite all Life’s vagaries.

And this hope filled fantasy of permanence aligns with how we usually think about ourselves as individuals. We imagine we’re like some solid object somehow caught in the current of Time. It’s as though we’ve accidentally fallen into that mysterious river and our natural element is elsewhere. Yes, we acknowledge the current will ultimately beat and batter us till destruction – that’s just a matter of Time – but we don’t see ourselves as fundamentally a part of the world that does that, but somehow outside and opposed to it. The soul-expanding thrill of Pinter’s play about deception is that the characters are continually shocked to discover that their secrets were always known, that their belief in their separation from the wider world was an illusion all along.

Cristabel Sved directs a wonderful production of this superb play. The staging is suitably and deliciously simple. Performances are excellent, offered in a gorgeous understatement that both highlights the glib naivety of those who deny realities greater than themselves, and which creates all the more poignancy when genuine vulnerability and passion are revealed.

Let me highlight a few moments of utter dramatic magic: the deeply human fragility of Ella Scott Lynch as Emma when she is simultaneously known to be unfaithful and aware the affair is over; Andrew Cutcliffe as Robert at a restaurant, cutlery in hand, barely containing his anger towards his supposed best friend; and Matt Hardie and Lynch as the two lovers, in the scene where their affair begins, so wanting to see life-affirming magic in what’s just a garden-variety curse; and Diego Retamales in a terrific comic cameo.

Paul Gilchrist

Betrayal by Harold Pinter

presented by Sport for Jove

until 10 Aug at the Old Fitz

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Kate Williams

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,