peteg's blog

Belvoir Downstairs: The Suicide

Six months after my last foray to Belvoir, I saw that the Hayloft Project have once again migrated north for these dying days of summer. The cheapie Tuesday price has been jacked up to <$12 />. I was fortunate when the girl behind the counter sweetly squeezed me in with about ninety other people when some reservations didn't show. Apparently at least some in the crowd were watching it as part of their drama studies at Sydney Uni.

This play is a farce. The comedic elements are diverse and self-knowing, which is not quite the same thing as innovative and funny. Apparently the play was written in 1928 by Russian Nikolai Erdman: roughly, Lenin is dead, Stalin is just beginning to stack the bodies, and things are looking a tad grim for the locals. Semyon Semyonovich wants out because his wife is insufficiently servile, he has no employment and no real prospects of an outsize life. Once suicide is decided upon, there's the question of naming rights. Segue to a pre-wake and then a suitably improbable conclusion for Semyon.

I can imagine that the play originally manifested a lot of political commentary, but that has been toned down in this production. Mr Nip-it-in-the-Bud would make an excellent motivational speaker, and indeed all the actors where excellent. Gareth Davies has a huge role and carries it off as well as anyone could, playing (being?) drunk ala Robert Downey Jr for extended periods. Everyone keeps their undies on this time. However the ending dragged and I wanted Semyon offed at least twenty minutes before the actors took their bows. I have to say I much preferred the director Simon Stone's efforts on The Only Child.

This crew has a lot of fans, and maybe a good press agent. Perhaps that explains the lack of diversity in the reviews. Also there is no interval, just a hundred continuous minutes, which weirded me out as I did want a beer.

New Theatre: Feelgood

I haven't been to the theatre in a while, so I figured it was worth risking the cheapie opening Sunday evening (<$10 /> min) to see this political something-or-other. The crowd was small, which was somewhat due to it starting at 5pm.

Briefly: the presumably-British-Labour-Party is having their annual conference at some swank hotel, and protesters are outside trying to riot. Inside we see the speechwriters at work, the snowballing of a genetically-modified scandal, and a Pilger-esque journalist's possibility of influencing government policy.

The production was solid, as was the acting. The script itself was a bit flat: as the process of manufacturing political bullshit is entirely cynical, entirely banal, it takes a lot of effort to make it more than that on the stage. The concluding speech repeats some of what came before in combination with some jarring hackneyed realpolitik. I found the humour a bit forced at times, and while it has been mildly adapted to Australian circumstances, the original English sensibility leaks through. It is probably not so far from what Williamson might attempt if he were to take on this topic.

Version 1.0: The Bougainville Photoplay Project — A slideshow with fireside chat

I figured it might be worth heading back to the Old Fitzroy Hotel on the strength of the last Version 1.0 show I saw, viz The Wages of Spin. (I felt this theatre lost the plot a few years ago.) The company's schtick is to highly orchestrate and slickly integrate multi-media with traditional theatrical mechanisms, exploring topics in more depth than the average Smage article without being precious.

Well, pretty much as billed. Paul Dwyer's solo performance is heartfelt, effective and convincing. It is a bit indulgently sentimental, but forgivably so as the stories are deeply personal, often focussing on Dr Dwyer senior's visits to Bougainville as an orthopedic surgeon in the 1960s. The production was as I expected, seamlessly stitching the monologue to video, photographs, newspaper clippings, and miscellaneous props. Even with all this stuff, the skillful lighting made it clear where one's attention should be.

Unlike East Timor, the story of Bougainville goes mostly untold in Australia, perhaps because few really want to think about our, or anyone else's, post-colonial activities, but more likely because it is now generally unknown that Papua New Guinea was a colony of Australia until 1975. Roughly the troubles in Bouganville during the 1980s and 1990s were all-too-familiarly due to the locals not receiving an adequate share of the mineral wealth of their own land.

This show promised to explore the mechanics of restorative justice and reconciliation in the rapidly changing cultures of that part of the world. I felt this came off less successfully than the treatment of other topics, and was a bit disappointed that the theatrical recreation of such an event was the limit of the substantive material. It left me with no clear idea about what makes these processes possible, or how much they might be at odds with Western culture and notions of justice.

Ultimately this monologue is a show-and-tell public lecture, albeit more immersive and performative. I guess this is something that might strike a chord with an older audience that directly experienced town-hall style activities that don't take one to be a fool or party hack. As such it felt a bit weird to pay to attend it, and for there to be no question-and-answer at the end.

Belvoir Downstairs: The Only Child

My first time at Belvoir in more than two years. I dragged Dave and his friend Belinda (contemporaneous ex-BKK AYAD) to their cheapie Tuesday downstairs performance: pay at least ten bucks and run the risk of seeing some theatre that might be OK.

Well, The Only Child was more than OK. Set entirely in a bathroom, embodied in an ornate bath tub and shower fitting, the cast of four savage a marriage under stress. The acting was excellent, the dialogue taut and the narrative gripping for the most part. Structurally and thematically there were some obvious parallels with Closer, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: trust is violated, restored, vulnerability displaced by vengeful capriciousness. Humor prevents things spiralling down the plughole.

The set and lighting designers are genii, and I'll be keeping an eye out for other things by the Hayloft Project from Melbourne.

Jason Blake's review for the Smage is spot on.

Bell Shakespeare: Pericles, Prince of Tyre at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House.

Featuring a plot that would embarass Michael Bay, Pericles is one of those minor Shakespearean comedies that I was and should have remained oblivious to. The laughs are thin on the ground, and according to Wikipedia it is of dodgy provenance.

To be fair, the acting was fine without anyone standing out, and the set design quite fancy and well-used. But what is a director to do when the plot cannot possibly captivate the audience? Throw the focus to exotic music (Japanese TaikOz) and dance (err) to enliven, to enbulk. The drumming, indeed captivating at times, seemed to be of little relevance to the action, apart from perhaps evoking some kind of heraldry, yet Pericles is no worthy king. Conversely a wan flute was more impressive than the dreamy sequence it accompanied.

Thematically there were no ruminations, no exploration of the human spirit, just a bunch of coincidences and commerce. The gods are Roman (Jupiter, Diane) not Greek, and lost their gravitas in translation; not so much in the machine as worn lightly in dialogue, to glue things together, for the wordy virgin to implore as her improbable fate unwinds, and to smite the weak king and his capricious consort as explained in the closing words-rather-than-action monologue. John Bell has been spruiking this as levity, a worthy piece of escapism from the morass of the moment. I must admit to wishing for a speedier return to my tribulations.

More prosaically I was a bit shocked about the lack of etiquette in the theatre, with the late comers that were admitted well into the performance pushing past me, interrupting my view of the stage, and the usher's flashlight too regularly shining brightly in my peripheral vision. This was a preview, and if I hadn't got in for <$42 />.50 I would've been even more annoyed.

Moreover the refurbishment of the theatre foyer is a joke. The box office is slap in the middle, so the queue blocks people walking between the bar and the dunnies. The dunnies are artless. The cloakage counter is narrow and the bloke has to walk too far to retrieve the gear, making for incredibly slow service. Again the queue there blocks the free movement of people. The bar is on the opposite side of the ticketing desk, and yes, that's another queue to snake through. The entry doors are narrow and perpendicular to the ramps, leading me to wonder how the lady in the wheelchair gained access.

Has it really been a year since i last went to the theatre? I guess I've lost interest.

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.