peteg's blog

Our Country's Good

Sarah invited me to this National Art School production, where it seemed every cast member had invited a few hundred of their friends. Strangely enough Darlinghurst Theatre was putting the same play on at the same time.

I was right up the back so I couldn't hear much. The theatre itself was a delightful old sandstone cellar-ish thing which might have been cold if it weren't for the crowd.

A Kangaroo comes to Vietnam

Some performance art by a Vietnamese bloke who spent some time in Australia, part of the celebration of thirty-five years of diplomatic relations between Australia and Vietnam. Loan and I went along in the spur-of-the-moment.

Old Fitzroy Hotel: The Soldier and the Thief wait on a bridge over the river Thames while Oblivion waves hello

There was a time when the Old Fitzroy Hotel could do no wrong; I saw at least four high-quality plays in a row there, when I first found out about it. Now, well, I can't remember the last good thing they hosted. Still, their ginger beer is as good as ever.

All you need to know about the production is contained in Ashley Walker's review. If sceptical, this polite review in the SMH should further dissuade you from attendance. It was packed when I went, which I took to be a combination of cheap-Tuesday prices and the large social network of a large cast.

TAP Gallery: Friday Night Drinks

With Sarah, on their everyone-gets-in-for-fifteen-bucks night. As the blurb says, this is a set of "three one-act plays about Sydney on the best night of the week", focusing on "the quarter life crisis, beer and a lot of sexual tension..." Given that the protagonists are twenty-five year olds, it is not clear the writer has come to terms with his mortality as yet.

The production is almost setless, using just a few pub familiars — a barrel, a mirrorball, a fancier table — to evoke various drinking ambiences (the beer garden of an urban pub, a gay nightclub, an inner-city bar). Thus the play is largely carried by the actors, who do a solid job with some occasionally dodgy material. All the situations are somewhat stereotypical, which is hardly surprising given what people are looking for in an end-of-the-working-week boozing session, and the humour is a tad forced, more cringe-inducing than clever.

There's a review at Sydney Stage.

New Theatre: Oh What a Lovely War, Mate!

Like clockwork, a first Sunday of the month and another production from New Theatre. This is song-and-dance, and as it was billed as such I got pretty much what I expected, viz something not to my taste. The cast put in a solid effort and the political message — the horrors of war, the perfidious propaganda that sells it — comes across loud and clear.

NUTS: Chamber Music

Couldn't pass up on the last NUTS gig of the session, however much the pitch lacked specifity. This is an absurdist play set in an asylum, and while the production was great I didn't get much of a handle on it.

Darlinghurst Theatre: This is a Play and Never Swim Alone

Apparently these Daniel MacIvor efforts date from the mid-to-late 90s. The first, This is a Play, is a short piece where the actors articulate their inner monologues and stage directions for the most part... a meta-activity that I found funnier than I would have expected, perhaps due to the (as usual) excellent acting.

The meat of the evening was definitely the longer Never Swim Alone, where a woman in a blue swimsuit (Lotte St Clair, also in the first play) referees two suited men in a mostly-verbal contest of masculinity. The recycling of cliché and drifting in and out of sync of the two actors' schtick (Tim Major, Michael Howlett) is fantastic, and clearly requires immense concentration from them. It's difficult to say much beyond what's in the blurb without saying too much.

The Smage review is a bit cooler than I would've expected.

Darlinghurst Theatre: City for Sale

With Sarah. A flash-in-the-pan script, saved by some great actors. The plot ambled along in a somewhat predictable fashion, with the requisite double, triple twist and a half-pike. The NSW State Government has been replaced by a mortgage board and the citizenry is stratified according to their real estate interests in a semi-articulated spaghetti of health insurance and voting rights. Marrickville is now part of Balmain, just "several stone throws" from the harbour. Melbourne has, of course, managed to retain its social democracy and is otherwise the usual cliché of itself.

Sydney has supposedly gone bonkers over this play, and while it is a sharper comedy than Sold, it comes at the cost of being blandly impersonal. The characters, while amusing and well played, are all scumsucking bottom feeders.

Pymble Players: Travelling North.

Trekked up to Gordon/Pymble, mrak territory, who had the good sense to be in Newtown. The second-hand bookshop there is a real trove of Australiana, and Gordon Thai is not terrible for a non-inner-city Thai, albeit not somewhere one can rock up and expect to get a table without a booking.

What drug me up here was a production of David Williamson's venerable Travelling North, purportedly one of his best. I still haven't seen the movie, featuring Graham Kennedy, much to my chagrin.

This production, being community theatre, was a bit uneven but of high standard. The dialogue was quite amusing, and great use was made of the large fixed set. The play itself has mildly dated, with some cultural referents likely to be missed by people born around that time, who aren't politics junkies.

NUTS: The Festival of Light and Dark.

Specifically, Brecht's How Much is Your Iron? and Woody Allen's God: A Play. The Brecht play left me a bit cold, which was perhaps the intention. It smacked of the classically unsettling First they came... poem.

The night definitely belonged to Allen's raucously irreverent play, with the first third being so chaotic that one can barely draw breath between such gags as:

ACTOR: You idiot, you're fictional, she's Jewish - you know what the children will be like?

By the time the chorus issue the instruction:

CHORUS: Let's go, Phidipides, the play is bogging down.

the play has indeed bogged down and become quite difficult to follow, which was probably intentional. Heck, it was all intentional; hassling the audience, that's a bit cheap... until you realise they're all plants, every last one of them.

Again, it's a shame NUTS doesn't run this one for longer to larger audiences.

New Theatre: Life After George.

Once again I headed over to New Theatre for their free-for-the-unwaged-and-students showing of their latest production, this time being Life After George. Apparently this play dates from the late 90s, and partakes in a lot of the "we're rooned" yelping that surrounded the universities at that time. (Now I think most are (or have) resigned to just waiting for a change of government.) The playwright, Hannie Rayson, is more recently famous for biting the hand that starves in Two Brothers.

The play itself is stridently Eurocentric, with a backdrop of the modern and post-modern intellectual political fashions from Oxford, to 1968 Paris, to ... Melbourne, pre Dame Edna. The ambit is to flashback through Professor George's life, using the four women central to it to represent each of the eras in which he operated. Melbourne (Uni) is a hothouse of sex and dissent, with Sydney mentioned only as somewhere to dispose of one's children (by adoption, in this case).

As far as production goes, the set is of the minimalist unvarying type symptomatic of independent theatre. As a lot of the play is speechifying, the audience is often looking back over their shoulders wondering who's being talked to.

Belvoir Downstairs: Anna in the Tropics.

Cheapie Tuesday with Jen. Apparently there was no upstairs gig, and so the place felt a bit empty. Zoe Carides was as gorgeous as ever.

The Spook

The first NUTS production I've seen in ages, at Studio 1. Some excellent acting by Tom Petty and Lara Kerestes as Greek migrants, and good work from the leads as well. The set was the usual NUTS-minimalist effort.

The play itself was written by Melissa Reeves and appears to have been performed in Melbourne and at Belvoir a few years ago. It's a shame NUTS has such short runs on its productions.

Love's Triumph at the Darlinghurst Theatre.

With Jen. In the style of a Shakespearean farce, a plethora of storylines tidily resolved in the overlong climax-denouement. The dialogue was good, the acting mostly excellent, and the sets quite effective.

The Smage review is on the money.

Splendour at the Old Fitzroy Hotel.

Not really to my taste: a portrayal of a claque of women attached to one of the Generals ousted in the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. I got sucked in on the history angle, little realising the play took an iterative deepening approach to exploring some born-to-rule lives.

Codgers at the Riverside Theatre.

My nextdoor neighbour Jon is in this workshop ("Gala") performance of this new play, Codgers, alongside a raft of older Australian gentleman-actors. The gambit is to tell a story about the modernisation of Australia from the perspective of blokes who fought in the Second World War. It's quite funny and the semi-polished performance worked quite well.

Sold at the Old Fitzroy Hotel.

With Jen. Great production, slightly lame narrative arc. Laughed through the whole thing. The serious bits were not so helpful or insightful, cliched attempt to lend gravity to the sell-your-soul aspect of working in real estate.

Mojo

Downstairs at Belvoir with Jen, on their pay-what-you-like (but ten bucks minimum) night. This play is from 1995, and I found the claim that it influenced the vaguely seminal Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels a bit of a stretch. The production is decent but I struggled with the material.

Belvoir: The Golden Ass

Tuesdays are give-us-ten-bucks-or-more at the Belvoir, downstairs at least. Even after the refurbishment that theatre remains a bit of a dungeon, serving as a home to their outre B Sharp company. The bar and ticketing area is all smiles and soft couches, and presumably it was all sweetness and light at the Keating! production upstairs.

This play is an adaptation of an apparently unique Latin novel. It rambles. Its not entirely coherent. Its ludicrous. Its quite long, at about three hours with three intervals. Well staged, well performed, though the macro narrative made merry with my empty stomach and eluded my grasp. It's terribly unsubtle, but what fun.

New Theatre: Laughter on the 23rd Floor

Again it was free-for-the-unwaged evening at New Theatre. Similarly to the previous production I saw here, this one is slick and hilarious.