Tag Archives: 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

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

A Mirror

4 Mar

This is an utterly engaging production of a clever, curious piece.

Written by Sam Holcroft, it was first produced in the UK in 2023.

It has a play-within-a-play structure; it’s art about art.

It’s set in a fictional oppressive regime, one in which the Ministry of Culture censors plays critical of that regime and promotes ones that encourage a positive vision. In this regime, plays like Julius Caesar and Romeo & Juliet are banned. It’s not obvious why. Certainly, the Ministry’s response to any new work is to go at it hard with a red pen, eliminating anything deemed inappropriate – from garden-variety profanity to whatever might cast life in the regime in a poor light. Plays, it is dictated, must inspire.

The outer play – the one that frames the other – presents an underground theatre company producing an illegal play. We the audience are included in this act of transgression; we’re addressed as co-conspirators, as though we’ve defiantly come to see this clandestine performance. (Everyone’s familiar with that sometimes-true fantasy that artists are cool rebels, and it was nice to be included in the cosplay – though sitting in my comfortable Belvoir seat after a good meal and a glass of wine, with the promise later of my usual warm bed, I’m not sure I could entirely fool myself that what I was doing was an act of rebellion.) But in the world of A Mirror, surveillance is overarching, and this underground theatre company is prepared, at any moment, to hide their illegal play and us, its audience, behind the pretence of a legal wedding and joyful congregation.

The play-within-the-play, the supposedly illegal play of which we are the risk-taking audience, presents the story of a playwright called to the Ministry of Culture. He is asked to explain a play he has submitted, one which has broken many of the dictated guidelines.

Despite the serious themes of A Mirror, the structure I’ve outlined obviously invites playful mischief – and it’s an invitation director Margaret Thanos and her cast fully embrace. Despite its one hour fifty length, the production has an exhilarating energy.

Performances are splendid. (I’ll refer only to the performers in their roles in the play-within-a-play.) As Čelik, Director of the Ministry of Culture, Yalin Ozucelik is superbly suave, but also animated and personable, a tension that beautifully hints at danger. As his new assistant, Mei, Rose Riley presents a character arc of brilliant comic awkwardness, hilarious enthusiasm, and moving desperation. As Bax, legendary playwright and long-time inhabitant of the theatre milieu, Eden Falk gives a portrayal, equally funny and poignant, of that world’s painful potential to promise more than it can deliver. Faisal Hamza, as Adem, is suitably bewildered by the Department’s unexpected attention.    

But back to those serious themes. Apart from the critique of political repression, Holcroft’s play is about the nature of theatre. The most obvious tension is between theatre as fiction and theatre as non-fiction, or between theatre as myth-making and theatre as reality-recording.

What Holcroft does that is so curious, or so stimulating, is to present these two alternatives in strawman fashion; that is, they are presented so hyperbolically that both seem absurd. Embodied in the attitudes of the Director of the Ministry of Culture, Čelik, the myth-making aspect of theatre is reduced to the promotion of a problematic regime. Embodied in young playwright, Adem, the reality-recording aspect of theatre is reduced to the verbatim transcription of actual conversations. Adem is not even characterised as possessing a gift for dialogue; he just has a photographic memory.

With these two facetious alternatives set before us, we the audience are impishly asked What is the nature, and potential, of theatre?

You could be tempted to think Adem’s perspective is meant to be the correct one; after all, you’ve got to get brownie points for not being actively complicit in oppression. But Čelik gets the best speeches, ones expressing the purpose and power of storytelling. In contrast, for much of the play-within-a-play, Adem seems without an aesthetic philosophy at all, appearing not that far from an individual with Savant Syndrome, exhibiting a political and artistic naivete that is unexpectedly combined with one extraordinary ability. And to assume Adem’s supposedly simple truth-telling is superior to Čelik’s myth-making is to ignore that the very play that might lead you to this conclusion is gloriously artificial, meticulously structured and entirely fictional – nothing like the sort of play Adem would write.

It’s Hamlet who suggests theatre is the holding of a mirror up to nature. The metaphor that Art is a Mirror has long been in circulation, but it is a figure of speech that deconstructs itself. If a mirror exemplifies the reflection of an unadorned reality, while art implies some sort of craft or artifice, then (like all metaphors) the metaphor that Art is a Mirror is more arty than it is mirrory. 

Of course, theatre can do something mirrors do: both show us ourselves from the outside – which is the exact opposite of how each individual experiences Life. It’s no wonder that both mirrors and theatre can be fascinating in a disturbing way. I’ve quipped before that There are times and places in which theatre has been banned, and if you don’t know why, it’s because you haven’t seen it done well. But I would add, it’s not the being-done-well part that is the only disconcerting, and thrilling, aspect of theatre. And when Savonarola lit his famous Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence, mirrors were among the many soul-sapping fripperies thrown into the flames.

As you can probably tell (if you’re still reading) A Mirror set me thinking.

Real mirrors are flat; only in fantasy is there any through the looking glass. Mirrors just stare back at us, dully. But this play and this production entirely transcend this quality; intelligent and exuberant, it’s all wonderfully invigorating.

Paul Gilchrist

A Mirror by Sam Holcroft

At Belvoir until 22 March

belvoir.com.au

Image by Brett Boardman

Tags: , , , , ,

Es and Flo

19 Feb

This is a beautiful presentation of an absolutely terrific play.

Written by Jennifer Lunn and first presented in the UK in 2023, it tells the story of the lesbian couple of the title.

Es and Flo met and fell in love during the anti-nuclear protests of the 1980’s, but now, like us all, they have aged. Es is beginning to have difficulty with her memory, and Flo is caught between acknowledging this and wanting to wish the problem away.

And then care worker Beata and her daughter turn up, paid for by Peter, Es’ never present son. A battle has begun, for control of Es, and her property.

Director Emma Canalese allows the pace to be truthfully gentle, and she elicits wonderful performances from her cast.

As Es, Annie Byron splendidly blends the exuberance of the woman at her peak with a growing bewilderment at her diminishment and a pathos-inducing fear of being a burden. Fay Du Chateau as Flo offers a superb portrait of indignation tempered by doubts and personal inadequacies. (Her stunned disbelief, her unwieldy tongue, her unreflecting mistakes are so much more truthfully human than the self-righteous grandstanding which too often struts our stages, a pontificating that is probably the unconscious projection of a need to be moral heroes in a world so loud and large that it threatens us with irrelevancy.)  

In seeming contrast to our flailing protagonists, Charlotte Salusinszky as Beata, Polish immigrant and carer, offers a model of no-nonsense competency. But Lunn’s script is textured so that Beata does not reduce to some sort of magical migrant dispensing wisdom; she suffers challenges and makes errors, and Salusinszky marvellously captures both her practicality and her vulnerability. As her daughter Kasia, Erika Ndibe presents delightfully both the grace of innocence and its naïve moral certainty. If there was a moment that best encapsulates the piece’s extraordinary achievement, it’s when Kasia shares a plan she has for good with Es’ daughter-in-law, Catherine. Played brilliantly by Eloise Snape, Catherine is on the surface a silly, glibly narrow-minded woman, but realising the danger of little Kasia’s plan, she gently warns her it might be more complicated than she imagines.

Simplicity is resisted. Even forever offstage Peter is not simplified to mere villainy. His attitude to his mother and Flo may seem self-interested, but he is given reasons, ones that are – if not acceptable – certainly comprehensible.

The play is a moving representation of the challenges of aging, a stinging indictment of the erasure of lesbian experience, and a glorious hymn in praise of loyalty and love in their many, many forms.

But its brilliance is its honest acknowledgement of complexity. This is drama in the great tradition, a stage in which the human condition is honestly portrayed, where good and its opposite might be real, but are never found unmixed in any human soul. And to acknowledge complexity is to stand at the gateway to compassion.

Paul Gilchrist

Es and Flo by Jennifer Lunn

Presented by Mi Todo Productions

At the Old Fitz until 28 Feb

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Robert Catto

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Gia Ophelia

16 Feb

I’m twice as old as the protagonist of this piece, but I can still relate to the story because it’s about a failed artist and I’m a reviewer.

(Incidentally, the protagonist claims that the reviewers in Sydney are dogs. The more sensitive among us might find this offensive, but fortunately no dogs were in the audience.)

But seriously, I found Gia Ophelia, written by Grace Wilson and directed by Jo Bradley, very intriguing, vastly entertaining and quite disturbing (in a good way.)

Despite obstacles possibly unjust but entirely predictable, Gia desperately wants to play the role of Ophelia.

It can be difficult to care whether someone (else) succeeds in the arts. It’s a small story, even for those who love art (or perhaps even more so for people who love art and are familiar with Stanislavski’s exhortation Love the Art, and not yourself in the Art.) And, anyway, success is what we pursue until we realise there are more important things to work for.

In Gia Ophelia, I’m not sure we’re not being gifted a portrait of a sort of madness. There are parallels to Ophelia’s famous mad scene from Shakespeare’s play, with Gia handing random audience members books just as Ophelia distributes flowers. (And, just like Laertes, it lit in me a burning desire to find out who had done this to her.)

Somewhere, I’d heard that this was a story about ageism and sexism in the arts. Such evils clearly exist – they exist throughout our society – but this story seems far too idiosyncratic to be a serious attempt to take them on. It does riff on the societal privileging of youthful looks and of motherhood. But if it does operate as an indictment of ageism, it does this most provocatively by presenting Gia as having internalised the very prejudice she rails against. And curiously, in regard to sexism, it’s Gia who reduces Shakespeare’s Gertrude to the mother. Ironically, this diminution of Gertrude is in direct contrast with Hamlet’s response, who is upset that his mother is refusing to fulfill the conventional female role. (I know Gia’s dismissal of Gertrude as the mother is also fed by the bitter irony of her own situation but, as I’ve suggested, there’s also a stimulating lack of self-awareness. More on that later.)

Rather than a social justice piece, the play most fascinatingly operates as a Saturn returns story. Characters in stories of this type often ask Is this all Life offers? Or have I settled too early? But here, Gia’s quarter life crisis is about confronting the question If this is what Life has dealt me, can I really go on pretending otherwise? Gia must cope with the closing of two of Life’s opportunities, one rather specific and small (the opportunity to play Ophelia), the other much closer to universal (a situation which Gia refers to most of the play as my secret, and concerns her fertility.)

I found Gia a difficult character to like – she’s too-cool-for-school, oddly obsessed with the Ophelia role, and dangerously dishonest. Despite the enormous dissonance between the characters’ personalities, we’re tempted to view both Ophelia and Gia as mainly sinned against. It’s a temptation to which Gia seems to succumb. But she’s also perfectly capable of doing the sinning herself – the keeping of her secret being the prime example – but Gia never seems to consider her choice problematic.  

All this is not a criticism of the writing; it’s a rich, complex, very human portrait. And it’s not a criticism of the performance; actor Annie Stafford is magnificent. A droll but fierce intelligence simmers through the first two-thirds of her performance, textured beautifully by brief but very skilful embodiments of other characters. And when Gia’s exterior cool is finally broken, Stafford presents her grief with a heart-rending power.

Grief. Is this the key to the connection between Gia and Ophelia? Shakespeare’s play is often read as suggesting Ophelia goes mad with grief. Is this what has happened to Gia? But what, exactly, is she grieving? The obvious answer, one that relates to her secret, her fertility, is mooted. But Gia seems unwilling to own that plainly, to state that her other obsession is just a type of psychological smokescreen, conjured to hide a more fundamental pain. But, then again, maybe it’s not…. Thrillingly, the play resists simple answers.

Early on, I suggested I found this play disturbing (in a good way.) Here’s why.

In Shakespeare’s play, in a moment of lucidity despite her madness, Ophelia says Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. In Wilson’s play, Gia could be accurately described by an inversion of this famous observation. It’s as though Gia imagines she knows all she needs to know about her future, whilst not knowing herself.

If that’s a type of madness, it’s one many of us suffer.

I find this piece thrilling and disturbing (in a good way) because it represents the incomplete messiness of very human Truths.

Paul Gilchrist

Gia Ophelia by Grace Wilson,

presented by JB Theatre Co. in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre,

at KXT on Broadway until Feb 15

kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Phil Erbacher

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea

18 Jan

I last saw this play more than a decade ago, and I’ve never read it, yet going into this production at the Old Fitz, I still remembered a line from the script.

“I forgive you.”

It’s a line we all desperately need to hear more often – though, I admit, it’s not one that seems especially memorable from either a theatrical or literary perspective.

But it’s the context in which it’s used in John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea which makes this line so very extraordinary.

The spoiler rule means I can’t describe that context. But I can say that line is followed closely by this line “Just because it doesn’t make sense, doesn’t mean it isn’t true” – which might give a hint of the type of experiences Shanley is exploring.

But first, some basics. Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is a 70 minute two-hander that’s very funny and deeply moving. Roberta meets Danny in a deadbeat bar. Danny is a fighter, though more in the style of perpetual belligerence than praiseworthy resilience. He’s at war with the world. And any victories he’s achieved are entirely Pyric; he might have just killed a man. His behaviour is a clear red flag, but it doesn’t frighten Roberta. In fact, she courts the danger. Perhaps she feels she needs to be punished; she certainly feels she’s done something awfully wrong.

These characters are big and colourful, passionate and physical, and under the superb direction of Nigel Turner-Carroll, JK Kazzi and Jacqui Purvis give utterly beautiful performances. 

But back to that line (or, at least, the line adjacent to that line): “Just because it doesn’t make sense, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” This is an assertion of the supra-rational, and though the play is not religious in any conventional way, Shanley does explore material that’s often the province of religion: deep human faults, deep human needs and the regenerative nature of love.

In addition, as Danny and Roberta try to imagine a relationship together, we’re asked to consider the power of make believe, to contemplate hope’s miraculous ability to untether the future from the past. Despite their self-loathing, by being “nice” to each other, perhaps these two can gain some control of their destiny, and might yet share in the good things of Life.

It’s agency born of imagination, and so it retains the childlike quality of innocence, seeing only the world’s promise.

Perhaps it won’t work out. After all, both characters can be brutal, Danny especially so.

But didn’t I say the production was funny?

Well, it is. Not that it’s a black comedy. Nor is the potential for violence taken lightly. The humour is an expression of the love the playwright, and these actors, have for the characters. It’s a love we’re invited to share, and it’s a very easy, and very worthwhile, invitation to accept. (Especially when you’ve heard that line.)

Paul Gilchrist

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea by John Patrick Shanley

presented by NicNac Productions

at the Old Fitz until 1 Feb

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Tony Davison

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Sh!t Theatre, Or What’s Left Of Us

22 Sep

This is beautifully written and wonderfully performed, very funny and deeply moving.

The title hints at the key theme. 

But we begin with the two writer-performers – Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole – in badger headgear. Think fur, fangs, whiskers, and snouts. Cute.

Apparently, when badgers hit hard times, they get into a torpor. (Yes, it’s a technical thing.) But you can’t remain in a torpor forever.

And I neglected to mention that these badgers begin the show by singing a folk song. Apparently, when human beings hit hard times, they get into folk music. (That’s not a technical thing.) But, as the performers suggest, folk revivals do seem to occur at times of disorder and uncertainty. Like the Industrial Revolution. Like the 60’s. Like Now.

They visit an old folk club. Everyone at the club takes turns singing. It’s not about being good. It’s like those Japanese bowls: when they’re broken, they’re put together again with a lacquer powdered with gold – and become more beautiful because their imperfections are acknowledged. (Those bowls, indeed bowls in general, are mentioned several times, and it’s the sort of thing that makes this such an exceptional piece of writing and performance; what begins as Play grows into Beauty and Truth.)

Many of the songs are about drinking: like The Barley Mow (a cumulative drinking game of a song, with its repeated refrain of Good luck to an increasing number of participants, and ending each time with Good luck to the round bowl.) And there’s the old John Barley Corn (a personification of the grain that becomes beer, and so must die. But He comes back again.)

There’s a lot of songs about death. This is a song about death, we are told repeatedly. (And these songs are performed delightfully.)

We learn the folk club burnt down a week after they visited, and there’s a suggestion the show might become a whodunnit. 

But some questions don’t have answers, and we begin to suspect that the torpor, the chaos, they’ve been speaking about is not especially political.

This is a song about death, we’re told again.

But this time, it isn’t a song. It’s two superbly written, intersecting monologues about personal loss. They’re funny, generous-spirited, courageous and incredibly affecting. They also give an enormous poignancy to so much of what preceded them, so much that earlier in the show seemed only for laughs. The bowls are just one example. Go along and find your own. There’s an extraordinary richness to it all.

Richness and wisdom. The piece is a glorious artistic expression of the most humane of wisdoms: that, if there is a path to salvation, it begins not with the seeking of perfection – in ourselves, in the world –  but with the acknowledgement of all that is broken.

Paul Gilchrist

Sh!t Theatre, Or What’s Left Of Us written and performed by Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole

Presented by Sh!t Theatre in association with Soho Theatre

At New Theatre, as part of the Sydney Fringe (Touring Hub)

Until Sept 27

sydneyfringe.com

Image by Ellie Kurttz

Tags: , , , , , , ,

The Frogs: In Hell They Sing Show Tunes

26 Aug

Adapted by Alex Kendall Robson, after Aristophanes (about twenty-four centuries after Aristophanes.)

Robson’s adaptation follows a very similar plot to the original.

In an attempt to save the world, Dionysius visits the underworld to bring back the greatest playwright. It might seem an odd strategy, but as the God of Theatre, Dionysius might be excused for overestimating the impact of the artform.

The original play, first produced in 405 BCE, was a mixture of satire and broad humour. Robson’s adaptation is similar in tone, though with slightly more focus on the second of these comic elements.

Aristophanes included songs, though not show tunes. (The Ancient Greeks can be blamed for a lot, including theatre and philosophy, but not for the abomination that is modern American musical comedy.)

With amended lyrics, this adaptation of The Frogs includes versions of Putting on the Ritz and Singing in the Rain, as well as Wayfaring Stranger and something (I think?) from Bizet’s Carmen. The last two aren’t show tunes, but then, the manner in which all the musical numbers are presented doesn’t justify the title’s joking implication that songs such as these are the essence of the tortures of Hell. (Nor does their presentation justify my earlier cheap shot at musical comedy.) Under musical director Zachary Aleksander, the talented cast perform the songs beautifully. (Though I wonder whether amplification might have better delivered the wacky, high-spirited energy this production clearly values.)

Working with Robson’s fun script, and under his direction, the comic performances are excellent. I’ll cherry pick a few. Pat Mandziy as Dionysius is a delicious blend of camp and privileged naivety. Eddy O’Leary as his underling, Xanthias, is a fine inheritor of the long tradition that the disempowered see truths to which the powerful are blind. (The script mischievously asks whether we can call this character a slave – but I’ll get back to that later). Axel Berecry as Heracles is gloriously over the top in his presentation of the stupid he-man. Larissa Turton and Meg Bennetts deliver a terrific parody of two tough-speaking old-school landladies. Bennetts also turns up as Sappho, and her portrayal of a character of gravitas, dignity and wisdom is a sensationally effective change in tone from the rest of the production’s madcap hijinks.

I’ve expressed previously that I think it’s odd that Australian theatre makers are fascinated with Ancient Greece. It’s odd because Ancient Greece is truly a foreign culture – yet we seem to see it as a sort of universal. It’s not. Example: Up to 40% of Ancient Greece’s population were slaves – yet, as this production implies, we have trouble even saying the word. And don’t get me started on the misogyny of the ancient world.

Not that audiences will have any trouble following this adaptation. Robson makes this foreign world accessible – a challenging task when you consider that the original play’s dramatis personae consists of a mixture of mythical characters and historical individuals who are hardly household names in modern Australia. Sensibly, when we get to the two historical playwrights who are contending for the title of the greatest – Euripides and Aeschylus – this adaptation slips into a musical number and a quick bawdy sight gag. It’s a smart choice, as contemporary audiences are likely to find a debate concerning the relative merits of the competing styles of Ancient Greek tragedy more soporific than stimulating.

Another change to the original is the addition of Sappho. As I’ve suggested, it’s a scene that makes for fascinating theatre. But curiously, it also functions as a criticism and rejection of Dionysius’ quest. I say curiously because – up to this point – the assertion of theatre’s ultimate value seemed to be the only serious justification for the piece. (If one was needed.)

But the Sappho scene also highlights what I’ve suggested about the Ancient Greeks being a very different culture from our own. And I know I’m close to spoiler territory here – but, when you go, note Sappho’s prayer. Who she prays to is not anachronistic, but what she asks for is. It involves a conception of human relationships which lay centuries ahead, at least in Western culture.   

By now, reading my response, you’ve probably come to the conclusion that it’s not show tunes that are the essence of Hell, but rather nit-picking, such as mine. (The devil being always in the details.)

But, by pointing out an anachronism, I’m not criticising the script. With such a deliberately playful piece that type of petty fault finding would be utterly misguided. (Especially since the piece consciously indulges in it’s fair share of impish anachronism.) And, anyway, I agree with Sappho’s imagined-though-anachronistic solution. I’m merely pointing out that the actual answer the Ancient Greeks would offer to our problems might not satisfy us (…..which is why Robson has rewritten the end of the play.)

Ultimately, this production is an exuberant celebration of love and laughter, and whether that’s a timeless panacea or not, it’s sure as hell welcome now.

Paul Gilchrist

The Frogs: In Hell They Sing Show Tunes adapted by Alex Kendall Robson, after Aristophanes

At New Theatre until 6 September

newtheatre.org.au

Image by Bob Seary

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Three (Short) Plays by Tennessee Williams

11 Aug

An increasing familiarity with a writer’s body of work offers real delight.

And it’s not just the delight of the know-it-all or the systemiser, the sort of pleasure that comes from a sense of superiority or control.

It’s the joy of meeting the artist behind the work, of getting a sense of their world view, their fascinations and their fears, what they feel they can attempt and what, for whatever reason, they eschew.

Jane Austen famously described her writing as a little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour – and if you’ve had the good fortune to read her six novels, you’ll know that even in her throw away aphorisms she was the master ironist.

But what of Tennessee Williams?

Many of us are familiar with Williams’ full length plays The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Street Car Named Desire, but we’re less familiar with his short works. This production presents three of those playlets: At Liberty, Auto-Da-Fe and This Property is Condemned.

Williams was very proud of many of his short works.

And they further the impression of the artist and his art that many audiences get from his better known plays. On a linguistic level, they’re constructed from a beautifully heightened language that never loses its connection with the genuine vernacular. On a thematic level, they’re built from the tensions between sexuality and respectability, purity and pretension, and loneliness and fulfilment. And because they’re usually performed in a Southern accent (as they are here) they seem to offer a portrait of a particular part of the USA at a particular time. (You might assert that all theatre does something like my last point; that is, depict a specific place and time, but I think that’s true to varying degrees. Williams always seems aware of Society – that demographic cultural phenomena which is the subject of study of sociology, and is posited by modernity because it recognises the ubiquity of the arbitrary. Williams is aware of this Society in a way that, say, Shakespeare is not. You could argue this is because Williams is more interested in the outsider, but Shakespeare has characters like Othello and Shylock. Williams’ outsiders, however, are not obviously outsiders: he’s the great playwright of the hidden subversive.)

Directed by Megan Sampson, this production is a wonderful opportunity to consider the exact nature of the playwright’s genius (and, if you read this before you go, offers the added pleasure of concluding that my assessment of Williams is utterly inadequate or simply absurd.)

I’ll forgo filler and refrain from a description of each playlet; with the whole evening only 50 mins long, scenarios too easily slip into spoilers. Suffice to say, each piece is a treat, and the six different roles, doubled by Helena Cielak, Will Manton and Emma Wright, are brought to life with a precise energy. Cielak portrays two different women who each in their own way balances a radiant presence with a pathos-inducing bluster. Manton creates portraits of both uptight repression and bewildered innocence. And Wright brings fitting focus to two distinct characters who represent firmness in the face of flailing volatility.

Paul Gilchrist

Three (Short) Plays by Tennessee Williams

Presented by Ground Floor Theatre Company

At the Old Fitz, as the Late Show, until 15 August

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Robert Miniter

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

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

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: , , , , , , , , ,

← Older Entries