tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1014175132928982252024-03-19T13:44:15.460+10:30MarginaliaNotes in the margins of theatre and life by Ben BrookerBen Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.comBlogger78125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-32519959928572000842016-09-14T12:47:00.000+09:302016-09-14T12:49:09.328+09:30Review: Adhocracy 2016<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Vitalstatistix,
Waterside Workers Hall, 2–4 September 2016. Curated by Emma Webb, Jason Sweeney
and Paul Gazzola.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ5NWfT4mm_tL-3_84jUTTyQ4uuZXTfwmxpJy0LXfEtD0uZXRl_LVNq-PtzhdC4Q8K8x0dcwuYzMO1_NmJOUmtu19Vij1-OQrCaLLUWLwTTyVnWMDrBHfmjBM9uVql3tEhFaeJgtcXu2c/s1600/IMG_1454.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ5NWfT4mm_tL-3_84jUTTyQ4uuZXTfwmxpJy0LXfEtD0uZXRl_LVNq-PtzhdC4Q8K8x0dcwuYzMO1_NmJOUmtu19Vij1-OQrCaLLUWLwTTyVnWMDrBHfmjBM9uVql3tEhFaeJgtcXu2c/s640/IMG_1454.JPG" width="476" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Raft of the Medusa</i>. Photo: the author.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It’s with
a strange mixture of pleasure and pain that I find myself writing, once again,
about Adhocracy, the national artist hothouse presented annually by
Vitalstatistix at the Waterside Workers Hall in Port Adelaide. Pleasure because
this festival-in-all-but-name remains a highlight of South Australia’s
performing arts calendar, bringing together multidisciplinary artists from
across the country to develop new works in the presence of fascinated
audiences; pain because it’s impossible to forget the precariousness of it all,
Vitals, along with Slingsby and Brink, having born the brunt of the Coalition’s
funding cuts to the small-to-medium sector in this state (the company waits on
tenterhooks while its application to Mitch Fifield’s Catalyst, the successor to
George Brandis’ short-lived NPEA, is considered).</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Adhocracy
seems emblematic in this regard: scrappy and investigational, infused with
feminist, queer, and environmental politics, it is an aesthetic light year from
Brandis’ beige, unthreatening prescription for the arts: canonical, formally
conservative, bound to received ideas around artistic merit. The loss of Vitals
itself would leave a distinctively large hole in the state’s performance
ecology: no company outside of the State Theatre Company of SA maintains such a
busy and varied annual program—developments, presentations of touring work, performances,
residencies, events, long-term projects, and exhibitions. While there’s no
telling what the future holds, a paring back of that program seems the more
likely outcome—a testament to the hard work and resilience of creative producer
Emma Webb and her small staff.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This
year’s Adhocracy, the sixth since its day-long format was abandoned in 2011,
was held for the first time in September, having followed the sun from its
traditional Queen’s Birthday long weekend berth. No doubt the move was a
question of logistics rather than audience comfort—despite the welcome
sunshine, the evenings were familiarly bitter—but the novelty of a sunny Port
for much of the event was strangely thrilling. Perhaps Adhocracy’s rescheduling
was thrown into relief by something else too—the fact that this year’s event felt
to me, more so than in previous years, like a consolidation rather than an
advancement; not exactly a greatest hits compilation, but something like one of
those late-career albums by a veteran artist content, for once, to restate
rather than innovate, to finesse an established groove instead of push at its
edges.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">There
was, for example, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Aeon</b>, this year’s
two-week residency project, which strongly echoed last year’s large-scale
participatory sound work <a href="http://marginalia-bb.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/review-adhocracy-2015.html" target="_blank">Crawl Me Blood</a>. Both works provided audience members
with personal audio devices while they navigated the area around Hart’s Mill
Flour Shed, finally ending up in the Mill itself where what had been an
individualised experience turned into a collective one. Whereas Crawl Me Blood used
Jean Rhys’ 1966 postcolonial novel <i>Wide Sargasso Sea</i> as its launching off
point, Aeon (led by artists Lz Dunn, Lawrence English, Lara Thoms, and Shian Law)
drew on the principles of bird flocking, in particular the three behavior types
that have been identified by computer modeling since the 1980s: separation,
alignment, and cohesion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Separated
into groups of about ten or so, each assigned a different starting
location—mine was the Wells Street laneway beside the Waterside Workers
Hall—audience members were given a small portable speaker and a business
card-sized piece of paper on which was written a relevant factoid or, in my
case, epigram: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Everything is natural.
Nothing is normal.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Thus
equipped, we were left to drift as we may, informed only by the instruction
that, as with birds, we were to think of ourselves as leaders as well as
followers. While our speakers piped out birdsong, snatches of human voices, and
drones of varying volumes, my group fanned out organically towards the river,
eventually melding with the other groups where the presence of several
provocateurs became more obvious, some attempting to seduce us into running or
flapping our arms or, more challengingly, remove items of clothing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Our
collective destination, it becomes clear, is the cavernous Mill, where we exchange
our speakers for blankets at the entrance and find a space in the semi-darkness
among a floor strewn with bodies. The low lighting fades away, and a drone
begins. I fight down rising panic—there’s something about the combination of
near-pitch darkness and the vast, empty space that evokes the kind of existential
anxiety that makes anechoic chambers so famously unendurable—as the drone
builds to a chest-rattling crescendo, then dies away. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">As with
the rest of this work-in-development, it’s a moment that, while experienced
individually, carves out a communal space at the same time. In the darkness,
unlike outside the Mill when we were answerable to our smaller, more clearly
defined groups, our sense of responsibly to the rest of the human beings around
us—of being a part of something larger than ourselves without having our agency
stripped away—diminishes, leaving us feeling adrift and cut off but not alone;
a richly metaphorical provocation in the neoliberal era.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDsnDMrovLc4KI6HCStkvst92xcHiYy4y3SCdVu4DZWZdVBOIcndLrNwdfwMptMCZ-1ji75ZifIXWhn70fIcfEm5AVbcBqFshq2-iVL6_WPnIaLO7d6YVb_9k7AFyAHYkN_7VuqbvES18/s1600/14362600_10154329296195272_9014323698726576791_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDsnDMrovLc4KI6HCStkvst92xcHiYy4y3SCdVu4DZWZdVBOIcndLrNwdfwMptMCZ-1ji75ZifIXWhn70fIcfEm5AVbcBqFshq2-iVL6_WPnIaLO7d6YVb_9k7AFyAHYkN_7VuqbvES18/s640/14362600_10154329296195272_9014323698726576791_o.jpg" width="424" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The author, during <i>Aeon</i>. Photo: Jennifer Greer Holmes.</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Also
responsive to place was Pony Express’ </span><b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Raft
of the Medusa</b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">, another participatory work featuring an intersection of natural and anthropogenic worlds. Intended by its creative team of Ian Sinclair
and Loren Kronemyer to finally be performed on a life raft, the blackly
humorous work is a commentary on rising sea levels, the titular
watercraft—inspired by </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raft_of_the_Medusa" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Théodore
Géricault’s infamous depiction of the wreck of the French naval frigate <i>Méduse</i></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">—pitted
against a dilapidated yacht in a “mid-apocalyptic” contest. Not much of this,
admittedly, was in evidence during the artist talk I attended on the Saturday
evening, but its on-water potential is beyond doubt: the kayak we lugged from
the Workers Hall shop front to portside proved eminently seaworthy, Sinclair
delivering his artist talk through a loudhailer while an alarmingly multiplying
group of seagulls swooped at the hot chips covering his body, and Kronemyer
successfully rowed in a loop around the Port River. According to Sinclair, Port
Adelaide is second only to Bangladesh in terms of its vulnerability to climate
change-induced sea level rise. True or not, Raft of the Medusa was a welcome
complement to Vitals’ ongoing <a href="http://vitalstatistix.com.au/event/climate-century-an-afternoon-of-artist-talks/" target="_blank">Climate Century project</a>—a five-year series of commissioned
artworks, projects, and events speculating on how we might commemorate this
dangerous historical moment—making us complicit in its response to potentially
catastrophic environmental change without sacrificing the playfulness that Pony
Express have come to be known for (see, for example, </span><a href="http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue132/12261" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">reports of their
recent Next Wave work, Ecosexual Bathhouse</a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">).</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It’s
difficult in a single piece of reasonable length to do justice to Adhocracy’s
richness—eight works in various stages of development led by a total of 33
artists—but I do want to briefly mention three more projects (unfortunately,
due to time constraints, I wasn’t able to engage with Angela Goh’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Uncanny Valley, Girl</b> or the equally intriguing
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Lady Example</b> by Alice Dixon,
Caroline Meaden and William McBride). <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The
Lost Art of Listening</b>, a collaboration between two South Australian
artists, Zephyr Quartet’s Hilary Kleinig and “conversationalist” Emma Beech, is
shaping up to be a fascinating meditation on an <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/october/1443621600/anna-goldsworthy/lost-art-listening">essay
by pianist and memoirist Anna Goldsworthy</a> on whether classical music has
lost its relevance as technologised distractions multiply, and our relationship
to music becomes increasingly passive. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In an
intimate, leveling exchange of a kind typical of Adhocracy, Kleinig engaged us
with a series of questions that functioned as an exchange between audience and
performer, rather than a one-sided presentation of her discoveries so far. We
were invited to share our recollections of times music had made us cry, and to
attach our answers written on tags to small trees steeped, so we were told, in
the tears of those who had come before us. (My recollection? Hearing Górecki’s
Symphony of Sorrowful Songs for the first time, in a state of total
unpreparedness, while splayed on the couch one slow-burning Sunday afternoon.
The wrong piece of music can move you to tears if you happen to hear it at the
right time—while grieving, or in the middle of a breakup say—but some require
no special circumstances to open up a world of feeling.) It looks as though the
final work will build on Kleinig’s previous explorations of incorporating
electronic elements into democratised sound works, including <a href="http://indaily.com.au/arts-and-culture/2014/11/04/concert-with-a-chorus-of-smartphones/">mobile
phones operated by the audience</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Two final
works rounded out my experience of this year’s Adhocracy: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Tension of Opposites</b>, by newly-formed multidisciplinary
collective Capture the Flag (Hew Parham, Meg Wilson, Nick Bennett, Paulo
Castro, and Sascha Budimski), and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Dirty
Pieces</b>, a highly embryonic attempt by dancer/choreographer Rebecca Jensen and
Adhocracy regular Malcolm Whittaker to unpack the difficulties associated with
understanding contemporary dance. I saw two showings of The Tension of
Opposites, though not much changed. It’s an unusually developed work for
Adhocracy, the two performers, Parham and Bennett, using an established text—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8Zi0XUCeOM">Austrian writer Peter
Handke’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Self-Accusation</i></a>—to
explore notions of dictatorship and conflict within Wilson’s highly detailed
apartment room set. The audience were divided from the performers by a wall,
some panels cut out, others covered with obscuring gauze. By removing the two
rows of seating that had been in place during the first showing, the audience
were able in the second to move from panel to panel, in a sense editing their
own film by “framing” different parts of the action from moment to moment. Such
filmic gestures, as well as a distinctly political-European sensibility, are
typical of Castro’s body of work, with which The Tension of Opposites feels
strongly of a piece.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US">As for
Dirty Pieces, a work that recalls the quip, attributed to Elvis Costello and
others, that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, it’s
difficult to know what to say. “This work is about…” Whittaker repeated over and
over again, before exhausting his own struggle for interpretation, for
meaning-making, and handing the microphone over to various members of the
audience. “This work is about everything,” one of them said. “This work is
about nothing,” responded another.</span></span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-59789603339973269692016-08-24T11:47:00.000+09:302016-08-24T11:47:39.851+09:30Review: 'The 39 Steps'<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dunstan Playhouse, 19 August–11 September 2016. Adapted by Patrick Barlow from the movie by Alfred Hitchcock and the novel by John Buchan. Performed by Charles Mayer, Tim Overton, Nathan Page, and Anna Steen. Directed by Jon Halpin.</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCEEs3yEI628iCHw-bMWTUNhAaBv7PVFumIr4rENzlam1_evLJGRkK_SsUBqxasqvzpuJbyIjoEjqGMT5dpMqSI4-NfH_W4i34KXF_bwzBco_Sf4v2hnrjzlpaDw9oq7OLOPg6-hB8LC0/s1600/unspecified-3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCEEs3yEI628iCHw-bMWTUNhAaBv7PVFumIr4rENzlam1_evLJGRkK_SsUBqxasqvzpuJbyIjoEjqGMT5dpMqSI4-NfH_W4i34KXF_bwzBco_Sf4v2hnrjzlpaDw9oq7OLOPg6-hB8LC0/s400/unspecified-3.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Melbourne
Theatre Company’s <i>Double Indemnity</i>, a
new play by Tom Holloway based on James M. Cain’s 1943 novella and directed by
Sam Strong, has just closed at the Arts Centre’s Playhouse. Unlike Simon
Phillips’ staging of Alfred Hitchcock’s <i>North
By Northwest</i> last year for the same company, the play was widely regarded
as a failure, if not a disaster, which must have come as a shock to MTC’s
programming committee who had presumably gotten used to banking on adaptations
of old noir thrillers after the critical and commercial success of <i>North By Northwest</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But
it was an earlier production that really set the mold: Patrick Barlow’s
adaptation of another Hitchcock classic, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
39 Steps</i>, which MTC presented in 2008 in a remount of Maria Aitken’s
original London production. (South Australian audiences were given a taste of
this sort of thing with Kneehigh Theatre’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brief
Encounter </i>in 2013, and again the following year—albeit on a more modestly
resourced scale—with five.point.one’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Notoriously
Yours</i>, in which Van Badham riffed off Hitchcock’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Notorious</i> to fashion a lively script about the surveillance state).
Barlow’s adaptation, as this new production by the State Theatre Company of SA
attests, is a play with many lives, as improbably adept as its hero, the
handsome but vacuous Richard Hannay, at overleaping fences and stopping
bullets.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Perhaps
where Holloway and Strong erred in their version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Double Indemnity</i> was in cleaving more to Cain’s book than the 1944
film, which had the benefit of a screenplay by noir maestro Raymond Chandler. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The 39 Steps</i>, in contrast, adheres
closely to Hitchcock’s film (only the most famous of three screen adaptations
of John Buchan</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">s 1915 novel), replicating much of its dialogue and retaining almost all of
The Master of Suspense’s innovations including the prototypical femme fatale
Annabella Schmidt, absent from Cain’s all-male book. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Barlow’s
most significant original contribution is a simple framing device that sees
Hannay give suitably hardboiled monologues at either end of the show, a conceit
that both recalls another noir classic, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Third Man</i>, and helps to bridge the gap between performers and audience by
knowingly placing us in his shoes: bored observers of life, drained by the
daily horrors of the news, and longing for, as he puts it, ‘something mindless
and trivial’. (Barlow also adds an explicitly Nazified bad guy, a tin-pot
fascist in the mold of Oswald Mosley, in a move the playwright now regards as a
chilling portent of the far-right’s new self-styled <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">übermenschen</span>, which—though it’s surprisingly easy to imagine Nigel
Farage in a smoking jacket and monocle dragging on a cigarette holder—seems a
longish bow to draw.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Frivolous
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The 39 Steps </i>may be, but the demands
it places on its cast of four are considerable. In reproducing a film that
involves dozens of characters, locations, and much technical wizardry—not to
mention any number of planes, trains, and automobiles—they are required to
juggle half a dozen arts at once (there is some literal juggling too, albeit
sans balls) like the old vaudevillians they resemble when madly swapping hats
and places in a splendidly frantic recreation of the film’s train chase
sequence. Biplanes and marching bands are summoned via the rough magic of shadow
puppetry, and cars are fashioned as though by improvisation from packing crates
and a rostrum, all couched in the high energy of farce and the winking joy of
meta-theatrical knowingness that brings us along for the ride by firmly
engaging our imaginations. Barlow is a specialist at this sort of thing, having
previously tailored the nativity, the French and Russian Revolutions, and even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ring Cycle </i>for casts as small as
two, and there is, as director John Halpin notes in the program, a special
pleasure in watching actors attempt the seemingly impossible, and failing and
triumphing ‘in equal and hilarious measures’. (Halpin is no stranger to Barlow,
having previously directed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Messiah </i>for
HotHouse Theatre and Queensland Theatre Company.) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Halpin’s
cast, spearheaded by co-star of ABC TV’s popular <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries </i>Nathan Page as Richard Hannay, is
uniformly excellent. Page, in a characterisation that, unlike Robert Donat’s
original, is more doltish than debonair, charms and repulses in equal measure,
bouffant hairdo framing a strong-jawed, though open, even babyish face, that is
permanently, and funnily, set in pokerfaced straight man mode. Anna Steen,
though given lamentably little to do, impresses as the characteristically enigmatic
femme fatale Annabella Schmidt, and later as Hannay’s cynical love interest
Pamela Edwards. Charles Mayer and Tim Overton—the latter now, in this critic’s
mind, firmly established as one of Adelaide’s finest young comic
actors—skillfully inhabit a dizzying variety of roles, including an almost
grotesque pair of Scottish hoteliers. I think it’s fair to say that the
precision necessary to carry all of the gags full-term was not yet in evidence
on opening night, and there are some dead patches that a simple injection of
pace will probably remedy, but I’d be surprised if Tuesday night’s chuckles
hadn’t become belly laughs by this time next week.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Ailsa
Paterson’s set and costume designs revel in delightful period detail—I
particularly liked the red velvet drapes, shell footlights, and polished boards
highlighted during the London Palladium sequences—but the three wooden
scaffolds, their platforms often obscured by an inelegant black screen,
occasionally produce a claustrophobic effect that feels inappropriate. The
production works best when the scaffolds are whisked away to allow the
flying-in of various bits of scenery—mainly doors and windows—and the actors
the space to work wonders out of nearly nothing. Geoff Cobham’s lighting ingeniously
reproduces some of film noir’s most iconic effects—lots of hard light,
silhouettes, and venetian blind slashes—as well as making good use of cinematic
side lighting. Composer Stuart Day’s score works less well, kitschy where it
ought to be moody, and beset on opening night by what seemed to me to be uneven
levels and slipshod cueing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Still,
if it’s something mindless and trivial you want—and, let’s face it, who doesn’t
at this perilous and precarious moment in history?—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The 39 Steps </i>delivers like a film noir patsy with the handle of a
knife sticking out of their back.</span> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> </span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-32868244640398948692016-06-17T22:51:00.000+09:302016-06-17T22:51:52.038+09:30Adelaide Cabaret Festival review: 'The Juliet Letters' <div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dunstan Playhouse, 17–18 June 2016.
Compositions by Elvis Costello and The Brodsky Quartet. Music performed by The
Zephyr Quartet. Piano and musical direction by Carol Young. Performed by
Michaela Burger, Cameron Goodall, Jude Henshall and Jamie Jewell. Directed by
David Mealor.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR8GLmP5gbz_jkb8xCm5I9MSxUpyvqMvZwAKFUJQtkRuKFyKVw_N0NJDsgLOg0ozD3JBKxdCfNWKbS80qaxLG0_ztFnRhzROFJzyGsOikBWgpL-8rX61r8WPd2CVPiECmOjpxcGVF4vSk/s1600/unspecified-2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR8GLmP5gbz_jkb8xCm5I9MSxUpyvqMvZwAKFUJQtkRuKFyKVw_N0NJDsgLOg0ozD3JBKxdCfNWKbS80qaxLG0_ztFnRhzROFJzyGsOikBWgpL-8rX61r8WPd2CVPiECmOjpxcGVF4vSk/s400/unspecified-2.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Elvis Costello and The Brodsky Quartets’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Juliet Letters</i>, recorded live and
released in 1993, stands tall in pop music’s much-derided pantheon of classical
crossovers. Inspired by the apparently true story of a Veronese professor whose
job it was to return letters addressed to Shakespeare’s Juliet, the album’s
twenty songs—many of them only a minute or two long—constitute a sort of love
letter to the letter, to the kind of yearning, expressive correspondence nobody
writes anymore (at least not by hand, and not free from emoticons). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Costello’s lyrics—every bit as long-winded
and acid as his work in the pop arena—infuse each song with its own
micro-narrative, some slippery and elusive, or simply too generalised to produce
a clear image of the sender, others summoning substantial visions of nervous
husbands filing for divorce, female soldiers writing home from the front, or
advertising executives filling the world with their sensationalist copy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Musically, the album is difficult to pin
down. Costello, famous for his encyclopedic knowledge of all forms of music,
draws on a range of eclectic influences. There are, particularly in ‘This Offer
is Unrepeatable’, flashes of Brecht-Weill-style satire; ‘I Almost Had a
Weakness’ and ‘Jacksons, Monk and Rowe’ (improbably released as a single!) evoke
the Beatles at their most luscious by way of Philip Glass; other elements
recall, variously, the lieder tradition of Schubert and Wolf, and even the
ethereal beauty of French composer Messiaen’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quartet for the End of Time</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In this mini-opera-like production, The
Zephyr Quartet replaces The Brodsky Quartet of the original album, with
Costello’s vocals shared between well-known Adelaide performers Michaela Burger,
Cameron Goodall, Jude Henshall, and Jamie Jewell. Musical director Carol Young
augments the quartet with piano and, during ‘This Offer is Unrepeatable’,
accordion. The decision to introduce piano to the score, which has been
subtly rearranged by Young, is a curious one on the part of director David
Mealor, often banishing the Quartet—one of the country’s most accomplished—to
long stretches of silence. Even when playing, they seem too far to the rear in
the mix, and rarely allowed to attack or stretch out in the same way the
Brodsky Quartet does on the record. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The vocal performances, on the other hand,
are uniformly strong, especially that of Michaela Burger who draws the first
applause of the night, thus breaking a substantial layer of ice, for her
soaring, torch song-like rendition of ‘Taking My Life in Your Hands’. It’s an
improvement on the original, Costello’s abrasive over-singing happily forgotten.
Other songs, such as ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ and ‘The First to Leave’, profit
from their rearrangements as duets, while a lyrically updated ‘Damnation’s
Cellar’—the legs of Kim Kardashian replacing those of Princess Diana—features a
stunning four-voice canon.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Mealor keeps on stage movement to a
gestural minimum, red letters written, sealed, and delivered—and sometimes
burned, or turned into paper planes—as the performers weave between designer
Kathryn Sproul’s intriguing assembly of chairs from different time periods. Chris Petridis</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> lighting and AV design sees the title of each song projected in individual
typeface onto a huge black scrim that also allows for some evocative stage
pictures, such as when, during the closing number, ‘The Birds Will Still Be
Singing’, the performers are lit solely by candles. Petridis’ inventive,
sinuous lighting design is a reminder that the near-ubiquitous Geoff Cobham is
no longer in a school of his own in this town.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">The
Juliet Letters </span></i><span lang="EN-US">has the unmistakable feel of a
work-in-progress, neither concert-like enough to succeed as a purely musical
event, nor theatrical enough to amount to a thorough reimagining of the
original album. Like that album, it is a hybrid that resists classification but
contains many pleasures, not the least of which is Costello’s first-rate songcraft—worthy
of reappraisal, and skillfully showcased by this production’s four fine
performers.</span> </span> </div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-26491504589536417972016-06-17T13:27:00.001+09:302016-06-17T13:27:42.935+09:30Adelaide Cabaret Festival review: 'Songs for the Fallen'<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dunstan Playhouse, 15–16 June 2016. Written by
Sheridan Harbridge. Directed by Shane Anthony. Performed by Sheridan Harbridge,
Ben Gerrard, Garth Holcombe, and Steven Kreamer. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0WHTjMsOvw3eqpTiKI-PNpHC-Qcc6OHxQLOIedjU2HvJMN8J6E_PIlGVr-NI0_jQ5RZ2Ylm-H9eCSAE42zJSI0pBZ_0LeAgyTd8xNw75FKetDFTLNzTkGxnCwPWbzEt4TC5Tk-Q3Ih9Q/s1600/Cabaret-Festival-Songs-for-the-Fallen-2-credit-Louis-Dillon-Savage-850x455.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0WHTjMsOvw3eqpTiKI-PNpHC-Qcc6OHxQLOIedjU2HvJMN8J6E_PIlGVr-NI0_jQ5RZ2Ylm-H9eCSAE42zJSI0pBZ_0LeAgyTd8xNw75FKetDFTLNzTkGxnCwPWbzEt4TC5Tk-Q3Ih9Q/s640/Cabaret-Festival-Songs-for-the-Fallen-2-credit-Louis-Dillon-Savage-850x455.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Louis Dillon Savage</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></o:p></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">‘Well-behaved women,’ wrote American
academic Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ‘seldom make history’. Attributed variously to
Marilyn Monroe, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Anne Boleyn, the aphorism makes it into
the mouth (besides much else) of Marie Duplessis (Sheridan Harbridge), infamous
19</span><sup style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">th</sup><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> century courtesan, in this ‘strange little independent theatre
show with pop music’. Also written by Harbridge, Songs for the Fallen shares much
in common with Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Marie
Antoinette</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, which jettisoned the formula of the traditional historical
biopic in favour of a brash, fast and loose style that employed a contemporary
idiom and soundtrack of 1980s pop and post-punk.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Similarities between the subjects, though
separated by more than half a century, abound: proto celebrities by the time
they were twenty, both were profligate and promiscuous, running up enormous
debts while indulging every whim for clothes, parties, and men (and women, it
was rumoured, in Antoinette’s case). At her most spendthrift, Duplessis was lavishing
100,000 francs a year of her various paramours’ generous incomes on the kind of
lifestyle that would become de rigueur for her 20<sup>th</sup> century
equivalents—actors and rock stars and, latterly, reality TV idols. She was just
23 when she died, her waiflike body wracked with tuberculosis in what, it
doesn’t take much imagination to note, looks in hindsight like a prefiguring of
the fabled <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club">27 Club</a> of our
own times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Duplessis’s life and death are the stuff of
myth, to be sure, kindled by their seemingly limitless fascination for artists
of all stripes. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pygmalion</i>-like
story of an abused street girl propelling herself up the social ladder by means
of beauty, charm, and wit, shedding her common accent and adding the faux noble
‘Du’ to her name along the way, drew chroniclers like moths to a flame. The
first was Alexandre Dumas fils, penniless, illegitimate son of a famous writer
and one of Duplessis’ last lovers, who rendered her—just five months after her
death—as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La Dame aux Camellias </i>(Verdi
saw the play, and based <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La Traviata</i>
on it). In one of Songs for the Fallen’s more amusing moments, Duplessis asks
Dumas if he will write about her after she has gone; unable to meet her gaze,
and anxiously toeing the floor of her apartment, he produces a long ‘um’,
followed by a barely audible ‘no’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Such is the tone of much of Songs for the
Fallen—irreverent, knowing, flip. When, at the beginning of the show,
Duplessis’ loyal maid asks if she needs anything, the courtesan replies,
‘champagne and a microphone. We’re going to have a fucking party!’ It’s her
birthday, and also the day of the Paris Carnival—the Carnival falls on her
birthday, she coos, not the other way about—and she has only 18 more days to
live. The English translation of the title of one of the first songs, Harbridge
tells us in one of the many moments she steps out of character to address us
directly, shamelessly abandoning her French accent because ‘it hurts’, is ‘Why
Do We Love It When Sluts Go Wild?’ <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If the show’s Fringe origins look a little
exposed on the spacious Dunstan Playhouse stage, the energy of Harbridge, ably
supported by Ben Gerrard and Garth Holcombe in a shifting array of minor roles,
produces a shrinking effect, as do her forays into the audience—dragging
hapless members into an onstage orgy or assailing them with feather-filled
pillows—and Michael Hankin’s intimate set, a wide circular bed against a
painted backdrop of heavy curtains. Steven Kreamer performs Basil Hogios’ score
live, employing keyboard, glockenspiel, and the R&B-style beats that
underpin many of the songs. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Harbridge’s voice is terrific, and she has
created a script that, though more or less chronological and faithful to the
known details of Duplessis’ biography, is dynamic and compelling, rife with
sexual and scatological humour, and sharing something of the subversive
silliness of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Monty Python’s Flying Circus</i>
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blackadder</i>. Baz Luhrmann’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moulin Rouge!, </i>another iteration of the
Deplessis story, is the subject of much ridicule—a twisted tribute, perhaps,
given many obvious similarities—and humorously anachronistic references abound,
from Beyoncé to AIDS and spam email.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Harbridge wonders, frequently, at the moral
of it all. ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn…’ she begins over and over,
aping <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moulin Rouge!</i>’s Christian. One
of her conclusions is ‘don’t masturbate to Radiohead’.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-9584954780048140582016-06-16T14:36:00.000+09:302016-06-16T14:36:28.014+09:30Adelaide Cabaret Festival review: 'The Wharf Revue: Celebrating 15 Years'<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Her Majesty’s Theatre, 15–18 June 2016. Written
and devised by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe, and Phillip Scott. Performed by
Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe, Phillip Scott, and Amanda Bishop. Musical
direction by Phillip Scott.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnGhnwZzcA9_hrVP3ACCDmKUmdYkzQY0XF8Zayh2jCKCLxSwArfbI0Yj4IwNM4-o4C1qoOdIB-IxhriFl9p-L6kdFBTFcv_7Tozieypu43jb1Ml7K74nc4cCNOjIEU-C0cSR6ezrmXeGk/s1600/Article+Lead+-+wide1001825092gkgktiimage.related.articleLeadwide.729x410.gkgl6s.png1445559841099.jpg-620x349.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnGhnwZzcA9_hrVP3ACCDmKUmdYkzQY0XF8Zayh2jCKCLxSwArfbI0Yj4IwNM4-o4C1qoOdIB-IxhriFl9p-L6kdFBTFcv_7Tozieypu43jb1Ml7K74nc4cCNOjIEU-C0cSR6ezrmXeGk/s640/Article+Lead+-+wide1001825092gkgktiimage.related.articleLeadwide.729x410.gkgl6s.png1445559841099.jpg-620x349.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Brett Boardman</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My first taste of the venerable Wharf Revue
was via their 2011 show, </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Debt Defying
Acts</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd merry-go-round was in its second rotation; the
highlight of the evening was a prophetic sketch called ‘Rudd Never Dies’, which
transformed the verbose Queenslander into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom. To
think the prime ministership has changed hands three times since then!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Rudd
Never Dies</span></i><span lang="EN-US"> is one of many past glories revisited in
this summa of the Revue’s nonpartisan political satire, a commemoration of 21
shows and 15 years of continuous service to the Australian public that began, according
to legend, on the back of a coaster at the end of Sydney’s Wharf 1. This is an
altogether different beast to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Debt
Defying Acts</i>: slicker and somewhat blunted, on account of the age of most
of the material, while David Bergman’s high-powered sound and video designs add
a new layer of polish.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘Howard’s Bunker’, from 2007’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beware of the Dogma</i>, is the show’s
inauspicious opener, whiplashing the audience back to the far-distant demise of
the Howard government through that overfamiliar parodic device, Oliver
Hirschbiegel’s film about Hitler’s last days, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Downfall</i>. Only the stomach-turning references to the sex life of
John (Phillip Scott) and Janette (Amanda Bishop) are able to raise a titter
over the sound of a dud coming to a soft landing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Other older sketches still detonate on
impact, for example Drew Forsythe’s Alan/James Joyce mash-up from 2012’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red Wharf</i>, the Irish-born Qantas CEO’s
self-serving corporate speak rendered in the labyrinthine prose of the
modernist author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses</i>. It’s a
wonderful idea, sheeted home by Forsythe’s fruity delivery and freight
train-like momentum. Almost as good is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Latham Diaries</i>, a tailcoated Jonathan Biggins performing, in the arch
manner of a modern chamber opera, excerpts from the former Labor leader’s
infamous political memoir. As elsewhere, Scott, a gifted pianist, provides dexterous
accompaniment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The new sketches, on the whole, don’t work
as well, too many tricks missed and unfunny ad hominem jabs landing below the
belt (the fat gags, especially, come relentlessly, and Clive Palmer isn’t the
only target). In the case of a set piece that depicts the Palmer United Party
as a farcical series of phone calls between its only members, Palmer (Biggins)
and Dio Wang (Scott), a good joke is squandered by Scott’s tasteless
impersonation of Wang. Forsythe’s ‘Chrissie Pyne Rap’—‘I’m a fixer!’—ought to
produce a perfect storm of absurdity in its bringing together of Pyne’s noted effeteness
and the posturing masculinity of hip-hop but it fails to come alive, undone in
part by the unintelligibility of its lyrics. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Interspersed among these sketches are
blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos by Jacqui Lambie, Annabel Crabb, Emma
Alberici, and Leigh Sales, each exquisitely captured by Bishop in short
video segments. Bishop’s Lambie—all taut skin, heroic bluster, and infinitely
expandable vowels—cries out for the tribute of full sketch treatment. Popular
culture is mined in ‘Greek Lightning’, which brilliantly retools the musical <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Grease </i>as a Eurovision-style takedown of
the politics of austerity, and in a search for the mythic ABC Charter rendered
in the form of a Goons Show sketch. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While the latter showcases the ensemble’s splendid
comic and vocal ranges, it does highlight the need for Biggins, Forsythe and
Scott to drastically update their cultural reference points—although slyly
acknowledged, there is an unmistakable creakiness present in this 15-year
commemoration; even some boomers, I imagine, will be left scratching their
heads at a sketch that riffs on Dylan Thomas’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Under Milk Wood</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US">The extended set piece ‘Les Liberables’
exposes another problem: how to satirise Malcolm Turnbull who, as yet, has
shown himself to be beyond even the Revue’s formidable powers of imitation
(Abbott is not so lucky—Biggins’ reptilian, cowboy-gaited caricature is marvelous).
It remains to be seen whether Turnbull’s prime ministership will endure long
enough for Forsythe to work up something with a little more bite.</span> <i> </i> </span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-73435128678200198782016-06-14T14:20:00.000+09:302016-06-16T14:26:36.407+09:30Adelaide Cabaret Festival review: 'Dancing on the Volcano' and 'The Weill File' <div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Dancing on the Volcano: performed by Robyn
Archer, piano Michael Morley, accordion George Butrumlis, Space Theatre, 11–12
June; The Weill File: MC Robyn Archer, piano and musical direction John Thorn,
accordion George Butrumlis, performed by Robyn Archer, Barb Jungr, Eddie
Perfect, Hew Parham, Ali McGregor, Dunstan Playhouse, 13 June.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwZBxcStj3b6wSo6pYMRa-7k7onBVlpwpFzmEPpWzfhSZn7dy1JHz4o71dpS-rc5JQMqOrhi6RfaEUaoJ8PcENf_GqWIC2KY9hA1CkepNi2M2v6eEYFJhZdnfnW0dUWtUd93No7Llv7PY/s1600/robyn-archer-artist-supplied-image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwZBxcStj3b6wSo6pYMRa-7k7onBVlpwpFzmEPpWzfhSZn7dy1JHz4o71dpS-rc5JQMqOrhi6RfaEUaoJ8PcENf_GqWIC2KY9hA1CkepNi2M2v6eEYFJhZdnfnW0dUWtUd93No7Llv7PY/s400/robyn-archer-artist-supplied-image.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Two scenes of extraordinary artistic and
cultural foment were as good as extinguished when the Nazis came to power.
There was Vienna, home to Klimt, Karl Kraus, Mahler and others, its cafés later
fanning the essays and spoken wit of an unrivaled intelligentsia—mostly Jews—that
included such lights as Arthur Schnitzler and Peter Altenberg. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And then there was Berlin, awash in the
1920s with American money that gave buoyancy to an unprecedented hedonism and,
following the Weimar Government’s relaxing of censorship rules, a new cultural
form, conservative at first but soon acridly satirical and preoccupied with
sex, politics, and street life: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kabarett</i>.
‘<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Berlin,’ wrote Stefan Zweig in
horror, ‘transformed itself into the Babel of the world’. No wonder one of the
Nazi’s first orders of business was to silence its nightclubs; in light of the
horrific events in Orlando on Sunday, just one of the era’s innumerable parallels
with our own dark times. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US"><b>Dancing on the Volcano</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, performed by Robyn Archer with
musical accompaniment by Michael Morley and </span><span lang="EN-US">George
Butrumlis, is a potted history of Weimar cabaret, focusing on its key
partnership of composer Kurt Weill and lyricist Bertolt Brecht, with
supplementary excursions into the work of many others: Hanns Eisler, Frederich
Hollaender, Wilhelm Grosz, Kurt Tucholsky, Frank Wedekind and Henrich Heiner. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Archer opens with ‘Benares Song’ from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Little Mahagonny</i>, Brecht and Weill’s
1927 small scale concert work for voices and orchestra (it was later
incorporated into the full opera, <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Rise
and Fall of the City of Mahagonny</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">, banned by the Nazis in 1933). </span>‘There
is no money in this town,’ Archer croons, eyebrows knowingly raised as the
audience titters uncomfortably. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Surprisingly, the ‘Alabama Song’ from the
same opera—a signature of Weimar cabaret on account of covers by David Bowie,
The Doors, and Ute Lemper—isn’t performed. The most well known song here is
‘Mack the Knife’, the murder ballad-cum-popular standard originally from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Threepenny Opera. </i>Archer sings it
with relish, eyes widened, teeth bared, r’s rolled. Though unafraid to
foreground her Australian accent elsewhere, here her voice is clipped,
businesslike, nerve-jangling in its furious detachment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">We’re in the same theatre where, forty
years ago, Archer played the role of Anna I in the Australian premiere of
Brecht and Weill’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Seven Deadly Sins</i>,
and it shows: you would say she could do this stuff in her sleep if she didn’t
seem so alive in every moment, whether channeling the oily salesman of Weill’s
‘Petroleum Song’ (‘all the rest can go to hell/Shell! Shell! Shell!’) or,
accompanying herself on ukulele, the young murderer Jakob <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Apfelberg. Archer remains our foremost
interpreter of this music, the seeming effortlessness with which she performs
it a con enabled by a lifetime of devotion to understanding its ethos and
socio-political context.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">But
Archer knows, simply, how to sell a song too, proving the point by dipping into
the repertoire of Berlin émigré Wilhelm Grosz (Hugh Williams once, having fled
from the Nazis, he washed up in England and then America). </span><span lang="EN-US">‘Harbour Lights’ and ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ are given brief but
fulsome treatment by Archer who, though wryly acknowledging their ‘beautiful
schlock’, can’t help but, along with the rest of us, marvel at Grosz’s ear for
a transcendent melody.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">After the burning of the Reichstag in 1933,
Brecht and Weill’s remarkable partnership came to an end as they too found
themselves in exile, Weill in America where he began writing for Broadway,
Brecht flitting all over Western Europe and Scandinavia. Archer tells us, in
one of her many insightful asides, that pretty much anyone who was anyone in
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kabarett </i>scene had left by this
time (and to think the outbreak of war was still six years away!). Kurt
Tucholsky was one of the few artists who refused to join the exodus, unable to
believe, as many others did, that Hitler’s dictatorship would soon collapse. He
killed himself in 1935.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">‘Look back on us with indulgence’, Archer
quotes Tucholsky as the show ends, the stage plummeting into darkness. And so
we have.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Kurt Weill returns as the sole subject of <b>The Weill File</b>, a revue under the direction of Zac Tyler and musical direction
of pianist John Thorn. A small orchestra—drums, violin, and double bass—is
completed by George Butrumlis on accordion, and Michael Morley, who accompanies
MC Robyn Archer during her musical numbers. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Unsurprisingly, it’s Archer who opens the
show, a spirited reprisal of <b>Dancing on
the Volcano</b>’s ‘Mack the Knife’ (this time with the first verse sung in
German for extra flavour) setting a high bar. Eddie Perfect follows with a less
than perfect ‘Lost in the Stars’. The song’s poignancy, deepened by the knowledge
that the musical of the same name from which it comes was Weill’s final work
for the stage before his death the following year, is somewhat neutered by
Perfect’s harsh, ill-controlled delivery.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">An inevitable mixed bag, the show’s best performances
are provided by its female artists, especially Barb Jungr whose ‘Alabama
Song’—finally!—is a delightful mess. Even better, though, is her bitter, histrionic
‘<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Surabaya Johnny’ (‘no one’s meaner
than you/my God and I still love you so’). The format is rewardingly disrupted
by the appearance of comedy duo Die Rotten Punkte, the supposedly Berlin-based
art rockers turning out a grungy ‘Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife’ with Otto Rot
(Daniel Tobias) on guitar.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Although
Archer convincingly argues that, contrary to popular perception, Weill, unlike
Brecht, was not fired by political concerns (the ‘Petroleum Song’ again), <b>The
Weill File</b> nevertheless makes the case for the composer as tunesmith par
excellence rather than dissident artist. Never able to, as he once told his
wife, the singer Lotte Lenya, ‘set the communist party manifesto to music’,
what we are left with instead is an enduring legacy of songs and shows that
altered the face of popular entertainment for all time. Anybody can be a
didact; it takes real skill to write a tune you can hum for days after hearing
it just once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span> </div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-60951823886529038602016-04-20T17:44:00.001+09:302016-05-03T13:03:32.552+09:30Review: 'Machu Picchu'<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Sydney Theatre Company and the State Theatre Company of South Australia</span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">, Dunstan Playhouse, 13 April–1
May 2016. Written by Sue Smith. Directed by Geordie Brookman.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Photo: Brett Boardman</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: windowtext;">‘In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a
dark wood,’ begins Dante’s </span><i style="color: windowtext;">The Divine
Comedy</i><span style="color: windowtext;">. The sentiment, although attributed to the author’s 35-year-old
narrator, has an inclusive ring; we all, Dante seems to be saying, stumble into
the </span><i style="color: windowtext;">selva oscura</i><span style="color: windowtext;"> – the dark wood –
sooner or later.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">For playwright Sue Smith, the entrance to the wood was marked
by a cancer diagnosis – non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the same cancer my oldest brother
was lucky to survive as a child – in 2014. Smith’s play <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/prizes/101-arts-update/2221-kryptonite" target="_blank">Kryptonite</a></i>, a co-production by Sydney Theatre Company and the State
Theatre Company of South Australia,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>was
about to start rehearsals; the news that she was seriously ill must have
arrived like a thunderclap, the first sign of a deluge that washes away all the
old certainties.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In her new play, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Machu
Picchu</i>, Smith transmutes her experience of cancer into a creakingly
familiar scenario: a sudden, unexpected event – in this case a car crash –
turns the lives of middle-aged, middleclass engineers Paul (Darren Gilshenan)
and Gabby (Lisa McCune) upside down. The play opens with those lines by Dante,
muttered by Paul moments before a stray kangaroo propels him into the depths of his own <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">selva oscura </i>with a ‘C6 incomplete
spinal cord injury’. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Permanently disabled, and haunted by drug-induced visions
while recovering in hospital, Paul’s pain and immobility kindle an existential
crisis that was probably going to happen anyway. Incan engineering marvel Machu
Picchu, with its remarkable cut stone infrastructure that ensured the famous
‘lost city’s’ endurance as a historical site, becomes the locus of Paul’s
dashed dreams: he and Gabby had always meant to go, but now it is too late.
Life, as they say, intervenes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Smith knows how to write complex but humane dramas that, like
a clear voice emerging from a loudhailer, project the narrowly particular onto
the vertiginously universal. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kryptonite </i>was,
for me, a fine example of this kind of play, director Geordie Brookman’s epic
theatre flourishes vividly exposing the vim and sweep of Smith’s deeply thought
and felt inquiry into Sino-Australian relations since the Tiananmen Square
Massacre. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Machu Picchu</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"> reunites
Brookman with Smith, but the results are altogether more mixed. It’s said that
the stones of Machu Picchu fit together without mortar so tightly that a knife
blade still can’t penetrate the cracks between them – would that the same could
be said of Smith’s play. Where <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kryptonite
</i>was unerringly taut and outward-looking, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Machu Picchu </i>feels jerry-rigged and insular. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Watching it, I was reminded of critic Murray Bramwell’s
observation about the middleclass plays of Yasmina Reza: that they are about
less than they seem. Paul’s tragedy, however entertainingly leavened by Smith’s
witty dialogue, rarely connects to the world beyond his and Gabby’s cocoon of
bourgeois privilege. That Smith relentlessly satirises the indulgence and
narcissism that are the fruits of this privilege – as in a scene set in a
meditation retreat run by a stuttering guru (Renato Musolino) – only draws
attention to the play’s circumscribed vision. Unlike in Chekhov’s tragicomic
meditations on middleclass frustration, Smith’s characters only ever seem to be
speaking for themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This would matter less if <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Machu
Picchu</i> held together as well as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kryptonite</i>,
but unfortunately it doesn’t. More than one reviewer of the Sydney premiere season
suggested that the play was a couple of drafts away from being stage-ready. I
hear that changes have been made between then and its present run in Adelaide,
but there remains much to be ironed out. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Neither the play’s flashbacks nor Paul’s hallucinations –
indifferently staged in this production – provide much in the way of
psychological insight, and the script abounds with improbabilities: not only
does the guru pop up again, this time as a new-agey psychologist, at the
hospital where Paul is convalescing, but so too does his daughter, Lucy
(Annabel Matheson), who happens to be a nurse there. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It might fairly be asked, too, why Paul and Gabby have
remained friends for so long with a couple as obnoxious as Kim (Elena
Carapetis) and Marty (Luke Joslin), and with whom they seem to share little
chemistry. A more significant question is that of who’s story <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Machu Picchu </i>is; it feels, variously,
like both Paul’s and Gabby’s, and the uncertainty twists out of focus the
play’s themes: perseverance in the face of personal tragedy, and making the
most of lives we know to be fragile and finite. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Gilshenan and McCune, familiar from innumerable television
roles, are well cast as Paul and Gabby, McCune successfully playing against
type, Gilshenan impressing in his fearless uptake of Smith’s unsparing
portrayal of disability’s physical and mental hardships. The smaller roles,
anemically drawn, give the rest of the cast little to do except fill in the
interstices of Paul and Gabby’s deteriorating relationship with broadly
humorous brushstrokes. It’s tempting to wonder whether the two-hander form
Smith applied with such success to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kryptonite</i>
might not have been fruitfully reemployed here, perhaps in combination with a
set less grimly naturalistic than Jonathan Oxlade’s uninspired wall of
hospital-green flats.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Machu Picchu</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext;"> strives to
invite us to imagine our own sudden descent into Dante’s ‘deep place’,
untouched by the sun. But Brookman’s direction, compassionate as it is, can’t
make the leap for Smith – or for us.</span> </span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-86206446767407062592016-03-29T11:58:00.000+10:302016-04-07T21:04:02.605+09:30Review: 2016 Adelaide Festival - danceHabitus: Australian Dance Theatre, conceived & directed by Gary Stewart, choreography Garry Stewart & Larissa McGowan, composer Brendan Woithe, Space Theatre, 26 Feb-5 March; The Beginning of Nature: Australian Dance Theatre, conceived & directed by Gary Stewart, choreography Gary Stewart & the ADT dancers, composer Brendan Woithe, WOMADelaide, 12-14 March; monumental: Holy Body Tattoo, choreography & direction Noam Gagnon & Dana Gingras, music Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Festival Theatre, 4-5 March; Nelken (Carnations): Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, director & choreographer Pina Bausch, set designer Peter Pabst, Festival Theatre, 9-12 March.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Beginning of Nature</i>. Photo: Rob Sferco</td></tr>
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Australian Dance Theatre Artistic Director Gary Stewart has stated that the exploration of humanity’s relationship to the natural world will form the basis of a number of works by the company over the next few years. The first fruits of this focus, <b>Habitus</b> and <b>The Beginning of Nature</b>, received their premieres at this year’s Adelaide Festival and WOMADelaide respectively. They could hardly have come at a more apposite moment, recent reports indicating that civilisation is heading towards disastrous, human-induced climate change even more rapidly than previously thought, 2016 set to break global temperature records for the third successive year.<br />
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In Habitus, our conflicted relationship to the excesses of the materials economy is highlighted by Gary Stewart and Larissa McGowans’ richly humorous choreography in which the movement of bodies through space is shaped by a cornucopia of consumer goods: books, sofas, ironing boards, and the like. Here, these familiar items are rendered comical, uncanny like the decontextualised objects of surrealist art. They are also malignant: a key moment sees one of the performers crushed beneath a sofa, fighting for life. They draw out, both by their suffocating corporeality and sheer proximity, extreme physical responses from the dancers, such as heavy, urgent breathing and violent retching. “The sad thing is,” Thomas Fonua tells us in one of the work’s spoken word sections, “all this shit – chairs, tables, sofas, whatever – is ultimately going to end up as landfill.”<br />
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But the work also foregrounds our inseparability from “all this shit”. Echoing economist Victor Lebow’s claim that “our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life”, the dancers’ bodies become integrated with, and extended by, the objects of our consumer desires, stacks of books, for example, becoming monstrous pairs of stilts. Performers Zoe Dunwoodie and Michael Ramsay, meanwhile, swap “sofa memories” of disarming, sometimes unsettling intimacy (“this is where I lie when I listen to Miles Davis/”this is where I cried when I learned my father had died”). Brendan Woithe’s sound design is correspondingly split between ironic rhapsodising (the deployment, for instance, of baroque classical music during a Regency-like dance in which the ensemble lovingly balance books on their heads) and banal metronomics (the incessant ticking of clocks and the dripping of water).<br />
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Stewart notes in the program that “an undercurrent to our consumerist excesses is the thought that some day ‘all of this’ will be reclaimed by nature.” The work’s finale, bringing to mind King Lear’s “blasted heath”, sees an apocalyptic storm reconfigure the stage’s detritus as a kind of midden, the accumulated, undegradable domestic waste of multiple generations stacked high. Human figures – worshippers, scavengers, ghosts? – circle it cautiously. “Where are we?” one of them asks, “what is this place?” It is, I suppose, a kind of monument to human folly, a 21st century equivalent of the “martyred village” of Oradour-sur-Glane that Charles de Gaulle ordered be conserved as a permanent reminder of Nazi barbarism. “As I exhale my last breath,” Fonua says in a final monologue, “none of this will disintegrate with me, but will persist and persist and persist, stretching for an eternity well beyond the traces of this brief existence.” <br />
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The Beginning of Nature might be Habitus’ “origins” story or, perhaps, a more fleshed out account of its vision of a post-apocalyptic world repossessed by nature. Arguably it is both, the work seeing Gary Stewart’s familiar choreographic vocabulary supplemented with rhythms and shapes drawn from the endlessly returning cycles of the biosphere: “day and night, the seasons, tidal patterns, migration, hibernation, sleep and waking, weather patterns, the binary of growth and decay, and the various systems of the body” [program]. Its object world is populated by the natural rather than the anthropogenic: rocks and trees, transported through the space with the assiduousness of ritual and revered as in pre-Christian religion. The work is underpinned by images of birth, death, and rebirth, situating divinity in nature and suggesting the sacred feminine as the originating principle of all life. <br />
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Brendan Woithe’s score, an immense, shuddering wall of tonal sound generated by the composer in real time by stretching and looping the live orchestrations of the Zephyr Quartet, reinforces Stewart’s interest in feedback systems; in one part it resets every few seconds with a deep growl like a giant turntable starting up with the needle already in place. In a not entirely explicable addition, two vocalists, Shauntai Batzke and Vonda Last, sing in the recently revived language of the Kaurna People, the traditional owners of the Adelaide Plains (Tarndanya). The simple vocal lines and bell-like voices recall the “holy minimalism” of 20th century composers Henryk Górecki and John Tavener, even if the decision to incorporate Kaurna language into Woithe’s score remained, for me, confounding. <br />
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Like Habitus, The Beginning of Nature is an unsubtle, though less didactic, work that questions humanity’s place in the natural order. To my mind, Habitus is the more successful of the two, its nuanced twinning of humour with accessible dramaturgy the more adroit vehicle for exploring our increasingly vexed relationship to the ecological systems that simultaneously sustain, and are most threatened by, us. I wondered if, conversely, The Beginning of Nature’s retreat into a Rousseauean longing for an imagined golden age didn’t in fact signal a kind of defeatism, a (gentle) refusal to confront the global environmental crisis on anything but the most fabulist of terms.<br />
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Staying with Rousseau, it might be said that <b>monumental</b> portrays humanity’s corrupting transcendence of nature, the endpoint of cultural and material progress in which human relations are no longer defined by “natural” desires but by fear, jealousy, egocentrism.<br />
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Suggesting the public/private interface of the modern office, nine dancers in drab business attire occupy individual grey plinths. Their movements – hard and fast, full of obsessive tics – speak to the physicalised anxieties of urban culture, and the struggle to resist the corporate machine’s erasure of selfhood. Repeated gestures that resemble trichotillomania (the compulsive tearing out of one’s own hair) and the stance of boxers (fists held vertically in front of the face) indicate a tormented, internalised back-and-forth of self-loathing and self-preservation. The dancers tend to topple from rather than dismount their plinths, at which attempts to forge human connections are thwarted by frightening, mob-like group dynamics driven by the rising urge of each of the workers to competitively assert themselves. In this cutthroat atmosphere, embraces end up asphyxiating, and violent shunning constantly undermines a shared sense of belonging. The plinths, when lit from internal LED strips, double as a cityscape in miniature, combining with William Morrison’s time-elapsed video projections of wind farms and multilane highways to lend the production a neo-futurist feel. <br />
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The work, however, does not for the most part share neo-futurism’s essential optimism. Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras’ combined choreography and direction reflects a bleak view of contemporary urban life, evident in the doom-laden score – performed live by 8-piece Canadian post-rock collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor – and Jenny Holzer’s barbed text (“Obviously you strike out against people within range. It’s cathartic to affect someone when you’re angry. Alternatively, choose enemies impossibly far away so you never have to fight”), projected onto a scrim like a subverted PowerPoint presentation on corporate etiquette.<br />
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A final voiceover plunges us into the post-apocalyptic, its evocation of an “empty city flickering in the dark” a grim reckoning of our urban alienation. Bodies fill the stage (advice is offered on how best to walk around them), the band’s metal-inflected bombast trailing into an extended diminuendo of ringing drums and guitar feedback. Does this cataclysm anticipate the expunging of a decadent, disaffected elite, and a return to a less venal social contract, the kind Rousseau thought fatally lacking in the modern state? I was left wondering.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Oliver Look</td></tr>
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Seven years after her death, Pina Bausch’s legacy remains immense, her work while Director of Dance for the Wuppertal theatres (later Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch) from 1973 onwards significantly expanding the expressive range of contemporary dance through conventions drawn primarily from theatre. <b>Nelken (Carnations)</b> dates back to 1982, by coincidence the same year Bausch’s company brought a trilogy of pieces – Kontakthof, Bluebeard, and 1980 – out to the Adelaide Festival in the company’s first Australian visit. The work’s depiction of arbitrary authoritarianism, embodied in the figure of a suited man continually demanding to see the passports of members of the public, must have held a visceral resonance for its initial audiences in a divided Germany. Contemporary parallels abound, however, most notably in the ongoing European refugee crisis.<br />
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The abuse of power is the theme that connects Nelken’s lightly absurdist flow of images, each taking place in the incongruous setting of designer Peter Pabst’s vast field of calf-high pink carnations (an allusion, perhaps, to 1974’s virtually bloodless “Carnation Revolution” during which Portuguese citizens, celebrating the overthrow of an authoritarian regime, placed the flower in the rifle muzzles of soldiers). Andrey Berezin’s immigration official, almost a comic figure at first in his punctiliousness, becomes a model of petty domination, forcing one of the dancers to degradingly impersonate a succession of animals to his satisfaction; a Grandma’s Footsteps-style game sees the participants coolly reverse the leader’s oppressive enforcement of the rules; four men with live dogs (what else but German Shepherds?) frighteningly encircle the stage, carnations bowing under boot and paw alike.<br />
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The audience’s collusion in these oppressions is made explicit by the sustained employment of house lights, and a weirdly exhilarating sequence in which (in a critique that has, admittedly, been dimmed by three decades of post-modernism) an increasingly frustrated Fernando Suels Mendoza exhausts his repertoire of classical ballet positions in a desperate attempt to gratify us. Bausch, anticipating Neil Postman’s famous articulation of the twin poles of tyranny in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), gives us both Orwell’s prison – subjugation by state control (Big Brother) – and Huxley’s burlesque – pacification by amusement (the centrifugal bumblepuppy). How else to account for the scene in which four stuntmen execute a spectacular fall in unison from a scaffold tower, or in which a vintage automated fortune teller is wheeled on while performers rub freshly sliced onions into their faces? As one of the dancers says, “When there’s trouble in the air, I just look away.”<br />
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<i style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', serif; font-size: 15px;"> An edited version of this review appeared in RealTime issue #131, Feb-March 2016.</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif;"><i>You can read my report on Adelaide Festival 2016's theatre program <a href="http://marginalia-bb.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/review-2016-adelaide-festival-theatre.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></span></span>Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-30163945755614800232016-03-29T11:32:00.001+10:302016-03-29T12:10:15.127+10:30Review: 2016 Adelaide Festival - theatre<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Go Down, Moses: Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, direction, set, costumes, lighting Romeo Castellucci, music Scott Gibbons, text Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci, Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre, 25-28 Feb; The James Plays: National Theatre of Scotland, National Theatre of Great Britain, and Edinburgh International Festival, writer Rona Munro, director Laurie Sansom, design Jon Bausor, lighting Philip Gladwell, Adelaide Festival Theatre, 26 Feb-1 March; The Country: Stone/Castro, writer Martin Crimp, director Paulo Castro, design David Lampard, lighting Daniel Barber, State Opera Studio, 8-13 March; Deluge: Tiny Bricks, writer Philip Kavanagh, director Nescha Jelk, design Elizabeth Gadsby, Plant 1, 8-13 March.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Guido Mencari</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 15px;">In <b>Go Down, Moses</b>, Italian auteur Romeo Castellucci reconceives the Book of Exodus’ story of Moses, liberator of the Israelites, as an elliptically sequenced dreamscape that ‘transfigures the various moments of the life of Moses’ [program]. Each such episode is filtered through a stridently contemporary aesthetic, narrative causality eschewed in a startling weaving together of deconstructed mythologies and mise–en–scenes almost overwhelming in their vivid, painterly composition. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">In a prologue of sorts that commences while the house lights remain up, well-heeled visitors to an art gallery move about purposelessly. In the seeming absence of anything to look at, they begin to objectivise each other in an eerily impersonal exchange of touches and what look like measurements based on various body lengths (perhaps the cubit, the ancient unit that appears in the Bible, describing the distance from elbow to fingertip, is the reference point). The movement is abstracted and unsettling, recalling the grim history of institutional attempts to classify individuals into discrete races and character types. A repeated gesture, something like the thrusting of a knife, periodically scatters the visitors, who nonchalantly regroup in different parts of the space, the memory of the earlier violence forgotten or suppressed. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">One member of the party finds a reproduction of Dürer’s masterpiece of observational art Young Hare on the floor and affixes it to the wall as if to say ‘there – now you have something to look at’ (Castellucci is, in his own way, saying the same thing, both acknowledging and ironising our voracious relationship to his art). Unmoved by the painting, the visitors saunter off, Scott Gibbons’ elusive soundscape of muffled pops and clicks giving way to the roaring of an industrial turbine, the gigantic, captivating object – the one the gallery visitors, and we, the audience, have been waiting for? – having materialised during a blackout. Three women’s scalps, long hair trailing down, descend slowly from the ceiling, their ensnarement by the turbine’s rotor a profoundly unnerving inevitability (the sequence is, superfluously, later repeated without meaningful variation).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">The drone of the turbine extends, momentarily, into the third scene wherein a young woman (Rascia Darwish) occupies a remarkably lifelike toilet cubicle, from which we are distanced by a scrim that remains in place for the duration of the work. Bleeding below the waist and in visible pain, the woman stuffs toilet paper between her legs and chaotically veers from the cistern to the sink, smearing the walls and mirror with her blood. Hemorrhaging after having given birth in secret, this is Castellucci’s Jochebed, mother of Moses, filtered through a contemporary lens that sees emoticons projected onto the scrim throughout her ordeal – a withering, if rather gauche, statement on our technologised indifference to suffering. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">We are provided a brief glimpse of the baby’s fate – alive, put in a plastic bag and cast into a dumpster, reflecting the Biblical narrative in which Moses is abandoned on the banks of the Nile – before the woman is questioned by police (English surtitles accompany the Italian dialogue). Even allowing for the implausibility of such an interview occurring prior to medical treatment, this scene’s relative naturalism vexes, and feels overly self-conscious in its calculated, unimaginative appropriation of the conventions of the police procedural. It becomes interesting only when the woman’s refusal to reveal the location of her baby – an unthinkable dereliction of feminine duty, in the eyes of the detective (Sergio Scarlatella) – gives way to apocalyptic ramblings (‘there are animals all over the floor, they live in the same world as us’) and prophet-like declarations (‘we have meat to eat and we are sated but we are slaves’).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">At the conclusion of the interview, the woman is placed in a CT scanner. As the platform slides into the tunnel, penetrative resonances are unavoidable given the significance of fertility in Castellucci’s reimagining of the Moses myth (a second baby, as well as heterosexual intercourse, feature in the final vignette). In an astonishing coup de theatre, the woman emerges into a vast, exquisitely rendered prehistoric cave replete with opening that looks out onto a crepuscular, star-flecked sky. The mind, as mathematician John Playfair remarked when he saw the strata of the angular unconformity at Siccar Point, ‘grows giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time’. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Sacred choral music, contemplative in tone but resounding in volume, accompanies the arrival of a group of early humans (actors in prosthetics) who, manifesting the woman’s vision of sated slaves, consume a meal of dried meat prior to burying and, briefly, mourning a stillborn baby. Their balletic, slow motion movements are observed by a second group of humans, a competing tribe perhaps, who gather at the mouth of the cave. Two of the cave dwellers copulate, bringing to mind the doctrine of original sin, the Biblical Fall that Genesis tells us corrupted all human nature. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">And yet the act, on reflection, feels cyclical rather than foundational, connecting these early humans across the gulf of deep time to both their ancestors and descendants. They have a message for us, scrawled in red pigment across the wall of the cave – SOS – that ripples through the space and time that separates us from them. The presence of the woman, our avatar, collapses temporality, spatiality. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">We have, by this point in the evening, already heard Empire Jubilee Quartet’s take on Wade in the Water, the Negro spiritual whose lyrics (wade in the water, children/God's gonna trouble the water) reflect the Israelite slaves’ escape from Egypt. But Castellucci’s most distinctive manoeuvre is to project the Moses myth beyond its established associations – its primacy, namely, as a symbol of African American emancipation – towards what he thinks of as ‘our incorporeal slavery’, that of ‘people exiled from being’ [director’s note]. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Seen through this lens, all of humanity is subject to different slaveries: not physical and economic bondage à la the 19th century slave trade, but, for instance, helpless attachment to technology (the emoticons) and the perpetuation of gender-based oppression (one obvious reading of the pulverised scalps). Then there are those slaveries that exist beyond the physical world: subconscious drives, and a form of race memory – Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious – that links us to the early humans depicted in the final sequence. Seen in this way, the function of Moses is not so different from the Biblical myth: as a figure of salvation who can lead humanity out of servitude and into the Promised Land. What might it say about us that Castellucci’s Moses remains, for all we know, squirming unfound within an overflowing dumpster beside a forgotten byroad?</span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan</td></tr>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15px;">The James Plays</b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 15px;">, a cycle of historical dramas written by Rona Munro and directed by National Theatre of Scotland Artistic Director Laurie Sansom, also assay the nature of complex inheritances from a distant time populated by beings that feel (at least superficially) like our psychological kin. The plays, first performed in Edinburgh in 2014, dramatise three generations of Stuart Kings, variously enthusiastic presiders over a feudal, fragmented 15th century Scotland.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">In the first, The Key Will Keep the Lock, James I (Steven Miller) returns to Scotland after 18 years of detention in an English prison to an impoverished nation beset by factionalism. His long exile and bookishness make him the subject of suspicion (‘what sort of a king is brought up reading books and writing poetry?’) but his dutifulness and patriotism – he quickly marries Joan Beaufort (Rosemary Boyle), daughter of the 1st Earl of Somerset, and decries the financial rapaciousness of the English – wins grudging respect in a volatile parliament (though not enough, of course, to prevent his assassination).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">In the second play, The Day of the Innocents, James I’s heir (Daniel Cahill, in place of an injured Andrew Rothney) – known as Little Red Face on account of his conspicuous birthmark – becomes King of Scots at just six years of age. Acutely aware of his tumultuous inheritance (‘I have dark blood like snakes under my skin’), the boy is plagued by nightmares and seeks respite through friendship with an older boy, William, the future Earl of Douglas. Douglas’s powerful family, however, led by the mercurial Balvenie (Peter Forbes), has designs on the throne, an ambition unlikely to be jeopardised by an infantile king driven to hide in a box, fearful of fulfilling his dark fate. ‘You’ll grow to be a monster,’ James is warned. In this world – where ‘god can take our lives in an hour, in a minute’, as John (Ali Craig) puts it in the third play – survival, let alone success, demands it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">The cycle is completed by The True Mirror, the longest of the three plays, in which the flamboyant James III (Matthew Pidgeon) leads a parliament increasingly ill-at-ease with his profligacy – he wants £60,000 to see the cathedral at Amiens for inspiration for the European style court of his fantasies, and a choir (‘just forty or so’) to follow him everywhere, so as to ‘cushion every moment with something beautiful’. The Queen, the prudent Margaret of Denmark (Malin Crépin), begins to steady the ship of state by taking control of the court’s finances. ‘This whole country,’ she tells him, ‘is like a house we’re trying to hold together with our bare hands’. The King’s excesses, both fiscal and sexual (he takes a mistress, the first to appear in the trilogy, and has dalliances with numerous men), take on paranoid (‘I’ve long suspected I’ve been surrounded by liars’) and, finally, hubristic dimensions.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">The first play is the slightest of the three, reducing the courtship of James I and Joan Beaufort to pure soap opera, the machinations of 15th century Scottish feudalism to, for the most part, little more than a suitably alien backdrop for comedy overdependent on fish out of water-isms. The four nooses that overhang the stage during the first scene prove a red herring, presaging only Munro’s consistent difficulty in organically working up tension out of the drama. The Day of the Innocents is a significant improvement, in that it at least has an absorbing character arc at its centre, as is the final play, the most stylistically diverse of the three, which introduces some invigorating contemporary accents in Jon Bausor’s otherwise firmly period costume design, and which sees a commanding performance from Pidgeon as James III. The trilogy as a whole (able to be viewed in Adelaide in a single sitting, albeit with multiple meal breaks) benefits from a strong ensemble.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">The texts themselves are problematic, tending towards the blandly expository. Munro and Sansom seem so frightened by the idea of a single audience member losing track of events for even a moment that everything is spelt out to the letter in the manner of a crude ledger. The result is staidness, a flattening absence of intrigue or subtext, and unwelcome recourses to ‘edgy’ language and soap operatics to artificially enliven proceedings. In contrast to the plays’ publicity, their nearest TV counterpart isn’t Game of Thrones or House of Cards, both fine exemplars of long-form cable TV drama, but the soapy Tudors. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">As with that series’ creator, Michael Hirst, Munro has been upfront about taking significant liberties with the historical record – perfectly admissible in the name of populist entertainment – but the real problem is the paucity of psychological depth: few, if any, of these characters seem motivated by anything except generalised longings for sex or power, and none, until we meet James III in the final play, The True Mirror, exhibit a compelling personality flaw. Death comes and goes, usually offstage or antiseptically stylised, with few aftershocks. However cheap human life may have been in the 15th century, it’s strange, and ultimately distancing, that grief and guilt – those mighty catalysts of Shakespearean tragedy – are in short supply. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">The only theme to really emerge over the trilogy is the loneliness of governance (‘the king has no friends’) but its treatment is insufficiently nuanced to prove insightful. Its claim to contemporary resonance is staked, mainly, on Munro’s use of demotic language, but there is little in the way of universality here: these plays may usefully synopsise a neglected period of history but no amount of colloquialisms, however tunefully rendered, can disguise their essentially hermetic concerns (initial reviews picked up on the trilogy’s timeliness in light of the then-current referendum on Scottish independence, but even that localised reverberation has already died away).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">It can all, perhaps, best be summed up in the centerpiece of Bausor’s set: a gargantuan sword embedded, Excalibur-like, into the stage. For such an overwrought statement, it’s surprising how quickly you forget it’s there.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCigTvl84grrR-9utcVZ9FMXkug7qqKfiRrnHYgPbWnEDkli2se-KX_pjEBErym8RpExIxAPOpM_-XQp_vtDFqicXoYxg0If_pZ-Z-fag2gBuGG6ouG5r0ag1HR9mYqO36L5WYrahaYCA/s1600/abbebd884552f2a61fdecf31b700af99.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCigTvl84grrR-9utcVZ9FMXkug7qqKfiRrnHYgPbWnEDkli2se-KX_pjEBErym8RpExIxAPOpM_-XQp_vtDFqicXoYxg0If_pZ-Z-fag2gBuGG6ouG5r0ag1HR9mYqO36L5WYrahaYCA/s640/abbebd884552f2a61fdecf31b700af99.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Daniel Purvis</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">British playwright Martin Crimp’s <b>The Country</b> (2000), like its thematically-linked successor The City (2008), is a tense study in Pinteresque menace that combines an ambiguous narrative with a fascination with language’s ability to conceal and distort.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">A middle-class couple, Richard (Nathan O’Keefe) and Corrine (Jo Stone), have relocated from the city to a converted granary in the country. He’s a doctor, she a neurotic housewife who outsources the care of their children to a nanny. Richard claims to have found a young woman, Rebecca (Natalia Sledz), unconscious by the roadside, and has brought her back to the house. ‘She’s not going to wake up,’ Richard tells Corrine ominously. She does, and punctures both Richard’s story – she claims he, a fellow drug addict, moved to the country specifically to be with her – and Richard and Corinne’s fantasy of a rural idyll (‘the land, the stream, the beautiful house’).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Uncoiling in a predictable, stuttering rhythm, Crimp’s dialogue, like Pinter’s, is rife with elisions. Verbal obfuscation and aggression draw a permanent veil over unspoken thoughts and accusations. Each conversation, held at cross-purposes and thick with unaddressed questions, has an excruciatingly contrived feel. An additional, meta-theatrical layer is also present: ‘The more you talk the less you say,’ Rebecca tells Richard, in what doubles as a comment on the playwright’s method; ‘There’s a limit,’ Richard observes, ‘to what we can say – what we can achieve with words’.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Less elliptical than the later The City, a play that marked Crimp’s further move towards a more ‘post-dramatic’ style, The Country remains nonetheless abstruse. Rebecca disappears without explanation, her relationship to Richard still mysterious, and we are left to assemble Crimp’s myriad clues – embedded in, for example, a motif around cleanliness and purity, and the involvement of unseen character Morris, Richard’s superior – that point to Richard and Corrine’s complicity in removing the tainting Rebecca from their immaculately constructed lives.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Director Paulo Castro has, rewardingly, defied the naturalistic trend established by previous productions. The house, in a design by David Lampard, is an abstracted mess of exposed woodwork and torn wallpaper, and reflects the play’s transmutation from a British to an Australian setting in its surrounding expanse of grass replete with woodpiles and scattered branches. The interior of the house, viewable through slats that frequently obscure the actors and, puzzlingly, require them to stoop in order to access the lawn, is a jumble of furnitureless, cubicle-like rooms duskily lit by Daniel Barber whose cinematic, ever-shifting design makes intensive use of side lighting. The music, combining the brooding post-rock of Melbourne band Fourteen Nights at Sea with a short, astringent piece for cello and violin by Johann Johannsson (in Adelaide for the Festival’s experimental music program Unsound), effectively amplifies the prevailing mood of unease. The cast are restrained and balanced, if occasionally lacking in volume when within the house, and happily refuse the script’s occasional invitations to melodrama.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">The production is not without its missteps: the presence of a lifelike toy cat is a redundant quirk, and Castro’s decision to omit between-scene blackouts in favour of continuous action throws up some odd stage pictures, such as when we see Richard piling branches into the house for no discernible reason other than to metaphorise the dissolution of his and Corinne's pastoral sanctuary. Nevertheless, Crimp's unjustly overlooked play—and this taut revival—compellingly bear out the old paradox that an idyll can only exist once it’s passed.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq6FPgA3C0i7bsAroKloetxoAMQVRJDwnalZX7FapA8BLvEhdATNaRYpNas0gN0jAEfqy6jZW8UBZnMj8W_SfwCBsNH4b8t0on793AiaKsrPn5rsGVTYuw8clhpEb_1GOAUiSRXFCMTTQ/s1600/Deluge-Production-47-850x455.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq6FPgA3C0i7bsAroKloetxoAMQVRJDwnalZX7FapA8BLvEhdATNaRYpNas0gN0jAEfqy6jZW8UBZnMj8W_SfwCBsNH4b8t0on793AiaKsrPn5rsGVTYuw8clhpEb_1GOAUiSRXFCMTTQ/s640/Deluge-Production-47-850x455.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Che Chorley</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><b><br /></b></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><b>Deluge</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Out of a vast Perspex box emerge ten actors, each buried to their waist – in this case by hundreds of white foam cubes – like Winnie from Beckett’s Happy Days. A weave of multiple, mostly partnered narratives begins immediately and the audience, seated in the round, starts to snatch at the threads: disparately-skilled gamers playing a first-person shooter; a man enthusing to friends about his conversion to Baha’ism; an army whistleblower divulging classified information to ‘a crazy white-haired Aussie who can’t seem to stay in the same country for very long’. Most troubling is a disturbed man in a crowd, his anxious writhing periodically plunging his whole body back beneath the sea of cubes as he spouts religious-hued nonsense. ‘So many people,’ someone says, ‘so much noise’. Suspended above the box is a sculptural web of subtly pulsing LED lights, redolent of the transmission of data through fibre optic cables or the neural pathways of the brain. Sporadic power surges produce visual and sonic flare-ups that punctuate the intermeshing narratives below.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Deluge, presented by Tiny Bricks in association with Brink Productions, dramatises information overload – or, more precisely, what is known as continuous partial attention – through the simultaneous unfolding of five ‘micro plays’. Playwright Phillip Kavanagh’s text, three years in gestation over multiple creative developments and a rehearsed reading at last year’s National Play Festival, is musical in its construction, employing, for example, counterpoint and crescendo. Each play forms a sort of melodic line that shifts in and out of harmony with the others. Sections of the whole, although rarely sustaining the same mood, recall the self-containment of a symphonic movement. The dialogue never exactly doubles up but rather overlaps, making for some fascinating instances of textual and, sometimes, thematic congruence. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Kavanagh’s motifs are established quickly and vividly: religious compatibility (‘different flowers blooming in the same garden’), the problem of making sense across barriers of space and culture (‘we’re all saying the same thing but no-one’s stopping to translate’), and the impact of globalisation on human relationships (‘I feel connected to everybody as though they’re distant family’). A further theme, which implicitly links violent video games with American war atrocities (specifically, the infamous ‘Collateral Murder’ incident exposed by WikiLeaks in 2010), left me feeling uncomfortable in its underexplored implications.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Deluge’s piecemeal nature, large cast, and brief running time of just fifty minutes (wise, given the assaultive effect of its storytelling mode on audiences) provides little scope for nuance on the part of the actors. Nonetheless, the young cast – all recent Flinders University Drama Centre graduates – does well to maintain clarity amidst Elizabeth Gadsby’s restrictive set and the text’s non-linear sprawl. Nescha Jelk’s direction is canny, adding pleasing dramaturgical texture – in, for example, the positioning of the actors in relation to each other, and their manipulation of the foam cubes during moments of heightened tension – to Kavanagh’s dense script.</span></span><br />
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<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">But what of the deluge’s human cost – the drowned and the drowning? The polish of Kavanagh’s text – and perhaps too the production’s swamping, maximalist approach to design – prevents us from engaging passionately with this question. As verbal music realised through an impeccably wrought structure, Deluge is an impressive achievement but one that comes off, ultimately, as a triumph of form over feeling.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><i> Edited versions of these reviews appeared in RealTime issue #131, Feb-March 2016.</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><i><br /></i></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><i>You can read my report on Adelaide Festival 2016's dance program <a href="http://marginalia-bb.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/review-2016-adelaide-festival-dance.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></span></span>Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-26167983636002884812016-03-25T10:59:00.000+10:302016-03-25T10:59:29.293+10:30Is bigger better?: reflections on Adelaide Fringe 2016<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US">It seems that every year since
going annual in 2007, the Adelaide Fringe Festival has been convulsed by a
fresh bout of severe self-reflection. Normally, the Festival’s artists and
commentators have the good sense to wait until the last bleary-eyed comedian
has left the city, or returned to her day job, before reporting on the
Festival’s vital signs. This year the examination began prematurely, initiated
by a </span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/alexisdubus/posts/10153946786950979">Facebook broadside</a></span><span lang="EN-US"> from British comic Alexis Dubus on 5 March, over a week out from
Festival’s end. Dubus’ post, much quoted by approving artists and local media sensing
a useful ruckus, read in part:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Well it saddens me to say this, but farewell Adelaide Fringe. This
is going to be my last time playing you.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">9 shows in and my total sales across my entire run are still 50%
of my OPENING NIGHT sales in Perth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Something’s not right here any more.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 17.85pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When I first came here in 2009 it felt like a genuinely
experimental and exciting creative hub, with audiences seeking out tucked-away
venues and subversive shows.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Having visited Adelaide before, I was blown away by how much this
sleepy town got behind the weird and the wonderful offerings that Fringe threw
at them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 17.85pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Seven years on and those people seem to have vanished.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US">I wouldn’t be so cynical as to
suggest a marketing ploy lay behind Dubus’ clearly heartfelt missive, but a
part of him must have been satisfied to see his words embraced by local,
national and, eventually, international media in a way he felt his show, </span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="https://www.adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/alexis-dubus-verses-the-world/52ceacc7-79ac-4c86-bf39-6c276f876457"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alexis Dubus Verses the World</i></a></span><span lang="EN-US">, had not been by Adelaide audiences. The
city’s daily tabloid the </span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/entertainment/adelaide-fringe/top-adelaide-fringe-acts-slam-big-venues-and-lack-of-audiences-on-facebook/news-story/f9eaa9a25143d682e3d667d1d1c0b551"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Advertiser</i></a></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></i><span lang="EN-US">ran Dubus’ post in full as an op ed, and both
the </span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-07/british-comic-says-adelaide-fringe-complacent-and-greedy/7227632">ABC</a></span><span lang="EN-US"> and the </span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/mar/09/has-the-adelaide-fringe-festival-gotten-too-big-for-its-boots"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guardian</i></a></span><span lang="EN-US"> picked up on the story as it made ripples as
far afield as the </span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/2016/richard-jordan-high-quality-theatre-is-threatening-stand-up-comedy-on-the-fringe-scene/">UK</a></span><span lang="EN-US">. Unsurprisingly,
however, the debate played out with the most intensity within the small circle
of artists for whom the Adelaide Fringe has traditionally been a key stop on
the global circuit that underwrites their professional existence.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGZD_P0oBq8eypOa-cWstQIWTlWuSOk-u0Lk7VOPF5vZxnYdpPeSAsOBm0yvM_i1_uavd8IYb5XkL8rty2EdIZwkqA9SCP3iFNslI7-F1l5hmyL_S63zBZe0PFjT3du8dHfko1mCbDIyU/s1600/fringephoto.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGZD_P0oBq8eypOa-cWstQIWTlWuSOk-u0Lk7VOPF5vZxnYdpPeSAsOBm0yvM_i1_uavd8IYb5XkL8rty2EdIZwkqA9SCP3iFNslI7-F1l5hmyL_S63zBZe0PFjT3du8dHfko1mCbDIyU/s400/fringephoto.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Garden of Unearthly Delights</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This year marked my Adelaide
Fringe debut as an artist (I’ve covered the Festival as a critic since 2009)
and, like many artists, I had my own set of experiences against which to hold
up Dubus’ comments. As a maker of (relatively) serious-minded theatre, I
sympathised with Dubus’ bemoaning of the seeming preference of Adelaide
audiences for ‘soulless, mass-produced bollocks over thoughtful, innovative
works in quirky spaces’. But is this true?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US">The raw facts tell us only that
ticket sales have been going up every year, as have the number of events (up to
around 1,200 in 2016) in what remains, true to the Fringe’s original vision, an
open-access festival. At such a size – second only to Edinburgh – there are no
guarantees of quality for audiences, and no guarantees of full houses for
artists. My own show, </span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="https://www.adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/this-storm/d65c0089-9f95-4724-a503-119b8581b54c"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This Storm</i></a></span><span lang="EN-US">, ran for five performances at Tuxedo Cat,
the same venue where <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alexis Dubus Verses
the World </i>struggled. Conversely, we enjoyed audience numbers well above our
expectations with an average house across the season of over 90 per cent
(current Fringe director Heather Croall reckons 40 per cent is ‘</span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://indaily.com.au/news/local/2016/03/07/terrible-festival-the-worst-by-a-long-shot-has-adelaide-gone-beyond-the-fringe/">a pretty good night</a></span><span lang="EN-US">’ – we did too, as reflected in our budget). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Alan Grace, whose company Duende produced
two plays at the same venue by acclaimed Adelaide playwright Duncan Graham,
told me his experience was similar:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 17.85pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For the most part, audience numbers exceeded our expectations, or were
about where I had hoped they might be. We did really well for the last week,
and sold out two of the nights of the season. With a 70-seater venue, we were
extremely pleased with that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Local comedian and
fringe circuit veteran Fabien Clark, whose show <span lang="EN-US"><a href="https://www.adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/fabien-clark-the-walking-dreads/a918a139-09c5-40bb-8ac7-c0fd9ebdd7ba"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US">The Walking Dreads</span></span></i></a></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>played for two weeks at CBD venue The
Producer’s Bar, was similarly positive when I asked him how it went, describing
this year’s Adelaide Fringe as his ‘best to date’ in terms of ticket sales.
Dubus also had a successful show, albeit not the one at Tuxedo Cat: his <span lang="EN-US"><a href="https://www.adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/marcel-lucont-is/7bb4ad34-f6b5-4e37-8e59-08dd924eecaa"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US">Marcel Lucont Is</span></span></i></a></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>proved a considerable commercial and
critical success at parklands hub Gluttony. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I’m not suggesting
that this small sample of experiences is broadly representative – I also know
of artists who struggled, like Dubus, to fill even small venues, and those who
ended up having to cancel underselling shows, even taking into account Adelaide
audiences’ notoriety for booking late/not at all. A Melbourne-based playwright
I know has stated publicly that, after bringing shows here for six consecutive
years, she won’t come again after her last play in 2014 got houses of three to
eight people a night as against between 30 and 60 in Melbourne and Perth (Dubus
has made contradictory statements about whether or not he’ll return to
Adelaide). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But the historical
reality is that for every show that undeservedly bombs, one deserving of good
houses gets them. No doubt this equation has been skewed in the wrong direction
by the heightened competitiveness brought on by the increasing domination of
cashed-up venues The Royal Croquet Club and The Garden of Unearthly Delights –
not to mention the Festival’s sheer size in the face of a small, economically
disadvantaged and geographically isolated population – but artists like Dubus
have no more right to feel entitled to large audiences than audiences do to, as
Dubus rightly lamented in his post, access shows for free.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Like a lot of
artists, I’m not immune to wishing that more people would seek out provocative,
non-mainstream (i.e. actual fringe) fare rather than queuing up for the latest,
reassuringly familiar appearances by the same marquee comedians who were here
last year (and the year before that). As someone deeply invested in both seeing
and making this kind of work, and who believes in its unquantifiable benefit to
society, I understand the urge to implore audiences to challenge themselves and,
in doing so, support local and emerging artists. But how quickly this desire
turns into contempt for audiences, and the most repellent appeal imaginable
that says you must do something because it is worthy. Maybe Dubus’ Tuxedo Cat
show deserved to fail – more likely, if the reviews are anything to go by, it
didn’t. Either way, pointing the finger at ‘the attitude of Fringe-goers’ is to
disappear up a rhetorical cul-de-sac. It ignores the inconvenient but
nonetheless decisive reality that audiences for live art are shaped by many
factors, not the least of which – especially in Adelaide during the city’s
famously event-saturated ‘Mad March’ – are limitations of time and money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDvsGk-yu0UVfh0goCn9t5n7U6CL-YP4mf3T-gxSRaZJZ-JsOVvZU8U5j_0KR4lqa3t742nOTysxD-NSnB0UyrEsgIhPKZzkc2tv3xuUQHyvhVgRB_1bQWE7xXIkWOVI-9ta7sJ-PNZqI/s1600/201.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDvsGk-yu0UVfh0goCn9t5n7U6CL-YP4mf3T-gxSRaZJZ-JsOVvZU8U5j_0KR4lqa3t742nOTysxD-NSnB0UyrEsgIhPKZzkc2tv3xuUQHyvhVgRB_1bQWE7xXIkWOVI-9ta7sJ-PNZqI/s400/201.jpg" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Michael Allen (l) and Tamara Lee (r) in <i>This Storm</i>. Photo: Lauren Playfair</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Why shows succeed or
fail commercially sits on a complicated axis of geography, timing, reviews, publicity,
word of mouth, luck, and the vagaries of public opinion. The mix is even more convoluted
during festivals where competition for the attention (and cash) of audiences is
fierce. It’s no wonder that, as it grows seemingly exponentially in size,
increasing numbers of artists are feeling like committing to the Adelaide
Fringe is to dive into the deep end, left to sink or swim alongside commercial
leviathans like The Garden by a management primarily concerned with profit. But
smaller venues – none of which are run by Fringe – must step up too. Holden Street
Theatres, in inner suburban Adelaide, recorded its highest ever Fringe ticket
sales this year, the result, largely, of slick advertising and the canny
crafting out of a niche in a certain kind of show – well-made, minimalist,
lightly political – imported from Edinburgh. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Anyone watching these
events from that city will no doubt be doing so with a feeling of <span lang="EN-US">déjà vu</span>. Edinburgh Fringe, too, has gone through
its share of growing pains. One result was Forest Fringe, a free,
not-for-profit ‘Fringe of the Fringe’ launched in 2007 as ‘<span lang="EN-US">a community of artists making space for risk
and experimentation’ – in other words, the fostering of exactly the kind of
work fringe festivals were established to showcase. It remains to be seen
whether such an enterprise could work in Adelaide, but Edinburgh – with its
three and a half thousand shows – is nevertheless seen as the model: in August,
members of Festivals Adelaide, the umbrella organisation that represents ten of
South Australia’s major arts festivals, will travel to Edinburgh on (depending
on your point of view) an intelligence-gathering mission or a junket. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What they won’t need to be told
is what everybody already knows: that Adelaide simply doesn’t have the
population, or proximity to a large centre such as London, to sustain a fringe
festival of anything like Edinburgh’s size. The irony is that it is precisely
what has traditionally made Adelaide Fringe special – the city’s small size and
compact CBD, which allow for the electric, all-encompassing atmosphere of a
bustling village – is the very thing that is now perceived to be threatening
its sustainability. Whatever the Festivals Adelaide committee discover in
Edinburgh, the same debates will rumble on about the dominance of big venues
and big comedians, and about what Writers’ Week director <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Laura Kroetsch and others regard as </span>Adelaide’s
festivalisation problem – too many cultural events taking place over too short
a space of time, resulting in an overcrowded calendar in February and March,
and little going on for the rest of the year. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US">But the reality is that a culture
of festivalisation suits the economic interests of all the big players, right
up to the state itself. As Croall recently told the<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/entertainment/adelaide-fringe/adelaide-fringe-considering-lowcost-performers-village-venue-subsidies-new-marketing-techniques-to-help-struggling-artists/news-story/30e430b23338fc49a5c01445d1526e7f?sv=11c4cd698f45f5761d9ef5969bf5db55"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Advertiser</i></a></span><span lang="EN-US">:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is this growing idea that you should shut down big shows in
order to make people go to the little shows – that is totally never going to
work.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US">On the table at the moment
instead, according to Croall, are subsidies for artist accommodation and venue
hire. These will help. Talk of an imagined lost golden age won’t, and neither
will excoriating audiences for going to the ‘wrong’ shows. We can expect more
hissy fits while the Adelaide Fringe goes through its difficult adolescence. But
we have no choice but to work together if we are to maintain and strengthen its
viability as a platform for independent artists to try out new work, to experiment
with form and theme, and to engage with audiences in ways that won’t happen anywhere
else.</span> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-28785500478521133862016-02-28T17:26:00.000+10:302016-02-28T17:26:38.004+10:30Review: 'The Events'<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">State Theatre Company of SA, Belvoir, Malthouse Theatre and Adelaide Festival, Her Majesty's Theatre, 25 February-5 March 2016. Written by David Grieg. Directed by Clare Watson. </span></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2zlB8Ls7Lgoisvhdrxlp14sjv1gTFIs6ywRQ659U8LTR_MoWLQQ6bl_0waW2ng2aJtqy-04amCKTxoO9zakTqb0LwMWzv_HH6mW4sGo9Po_sWXvKMdJ8A3b0cXkbYvH7VytneMLoBJT4/s1600/The_Events_665.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="403" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2zlB8Ls7Lgoisvhdrxlp14sjv1gTFIs6ywRQ659U8LTR_MoWLQQ6bl_0waW2ng2aJtqy-04amCKTxoO9zakTqb0LwMWzv_HH6mW4sGo9Po_sWXvKMdJ8A3b0cXkbYvH7VytneMLoBJT4/s640/The_Events_665.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Shane Reid</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">All art, the old truism goes,
should ask questions rather than answer them. Scottish playwright David Grieg’s
play <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Events</i>, loosely based on the
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks">2011 Norway attacks</a>,
is abundantly enquiring. However, the interest generated by its moral and
political conundrums is ultimately outstripped by a frustrating lack of either development
or resolution.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Claire (Catherine McClements) is
an Anglican minister in a small town. The multicultural community choir she
leads becomes the target of The Boy (Johnny Carr), a disaffected right-wing
extremist who guns down a number of the choir’s members in a vicious, unsparing
attack. Claire, lucky to survive when The Boy found himself with only a single
bullet and two potential victims holed up in the church music room, struggles
to make sense of the events in their aftermath, spiraling into a destructive
cycle of grief, psychological instability, and existential doubt. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Her quest for answers leads her
to fraught encounters with psychologists, politicians, her partner, Katrina, The
Boy’s friends and family, and, ultimately, The Boy himself (Carr embodies all
of these characters with little physical or vocal differentiation, requiring
some work on the part of the audience to ascertain who’s speaking in each
scene, but it’s nevertheless a strong performance, grounded and attentive to
detail, especially in Carr’s unsettlingly reasonable portrayal of the killer). Above
all, Claire wants to know why. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘I kill to protect my tribe from
softness,’ The Boy intones chillingly, echoing history’s legion of masculinist butchers.
For Claire, it’s not enough. Mad or evil, she insists on knowing. Is his father
to blame, or the anti-immigration party of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geert_Wilders">Geert Wilders</a>-style
politico, or violent video games, or a crisis of masculinity? All familiar
debating points that will resonate with different audiences for the same
reason: the recurrence of the figure of the lone, white male killer, embittered
and delusional, and, like Camus’ Meursault, estranged from mainstream society –
Martin Bryant in Australia, Timothy McVeigh and countless others in the US.
Grieg may have been thinking of the Norway attacks when he wrote <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Events</i>, but surely the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_school_massacre">Dunblane school
massacre</a> – perpetrated by another toxically aggrieved white man, Thomas
Watt Hamilton – could not have been far from his mind either. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Perhaps overcompensating for The
Boy’s conformity to this stereotype, Grieg throws the audience several
curveballs. Both Claire and the killer are same sex-attracted, and their
relationships to violence are startlingly reversed: we hear about The Boy’s
defense of a young woman under assault by three men, and Claire’s infanticidal
daydreams. On one occasion, she violently forces a kiss on Katrina then spits
in her face. Is Grieg, in these moments, simply implying that everybody is
capable of good and evil, that psychopathy is a spectrum and not a stable
descriptor? If so, it seems trite in the face of the events. If not, these
moments are difficult to read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Various contrivances and
omissions prove similarly puzzling. It’s occasionally hard, for example, to swallow
the choir’s endurance, and PTSD-affected Claire’s continued leadership of it. Claire’s
unsegregated meeting with The Boy seems implausible (or is it another
nightmare?). Given that she is an Anglican minister, we also learn surprisingly
little of the nature of Claire’s faith. She is still a believer, apparently,
although not in providence. ‘Do you pray?’ she is asked at one point. ‘Yes,’
she says. ‘Nothing.’ Claire’s flirtation with spiritualism, alienating to her
choristers, reveals her dissatisfaction with mainstream faith, with its failure
to provide her with either answers or solace after the massacre, but the
audience is given scant sense of her religious journey. ‘Before I was good,’ is
as much as she says. ‘Before I was happy’. Was she? There’s no way of telling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The play’s most striking conceit
is the appearance, each night, of a different community choir on stage that
functions, albeit in a limited way, in the manner of a Greek chorus (there’s
also a Brechtian touch, with members roleplaying from time to time). It’s a
device that neatly inverts the divisive tribalism evinced by The Boy, reminding
us of the suturing power of community and of music (it’s telling, of course,
that Claire instinctively fled to the music room to escape the shootings even
if, in the end, it proved a sanctuary only for her). Sharply directed by Carol
Young and performing traditional hymns as well as contemporary pop songs, in
addition to original music by John Browne that lightly comments on the action
of the play, the rough energy of the choir (the wonderfully named La La Land on
the night I saw it) is a delight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Catherine McClements is
excellent, a finely measured account of Claire’s emotional and spiritual
bewilderment happily banishing memories of a storied film and television CV. Geoff
Cobham’s plain set – steel-frame chairs and battered upright piano evoking a
dusty church hall – nicely complements Clare Watson’s unembellished direction,
and is lit by his own design that makes effective use of both warm washes and chilly,
driving followspots. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘the
finished work, in our times and climate of anguish, is a lie’. It may be that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Events </i>says no more than this: that
closure is an impossibility, because finally life – and death – resist reason,
and can never be fully understood. However appealing this view is in the age of
ISIS, Syria and the world-as-battlefield mentality of a US empire in its death
throes, it’s an unsatisfying foundation for drama, and one that, perversely,
risks aping the nihilism it identifies in its subjects. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘Sometimes shit just happens,’
one of Grieg’s characters says. But there’s a difference from being usefully
discomforted by this thought, and being convinced that it’s more profound than
it sounds. A lot of shit just happens to Claire over the course of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Events</i>, too much of it inscrutable, too
little that adds up to a clear and compelling trajectory. No doubt the play is
an assertion of the good of community, of the coming together of disparate
people in the name of a shared sense of belonging (and, by extension, of the
good of theatre itself). But the play also reminds us that none of these things
– even if within them might reside the source of our recovery and our
redemption – is of itself capable of stopping a hail of bullets.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Maybe The Boy needs a name. Maybe
the play’s brevity (it runs for just over an hour) is constrictive. In any
case, we are left with a jumble of questions – puzzle pieces set out in front of
us as Watson puts it in her director's note, only there’s no picture on the box to
guide us in their assembly. Why?</span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-87505102792203623832015-07-17T10:11:00.000+09:302015-07-17T10:35:53.785+09:30Statement regarding the impact of the 2014 and 2015 Australian federal budgets on the arts<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">PO Box 6100</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Parliament House</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Canberra ACT 2600</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">legcon.sen@aph.gov.au</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">16 July 2015</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To Whom It May Concern,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><u>Re: Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Australian federal budgets on the Arts </u></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I am a fulltime freelance writer. I have written reports, reviews and features for a wide variety of print and online publications including RealTime, Daily Review and Australian Book Review. In addition, I am the author of many published short stories, poems and essays, as well as a regular non-fiction contributor on a wide range of issues to Overland, one of Australia’s oldest literary and cultural magazines. My first full-length play was produced in Adelaide in 2013 by the award-winning independent theatre company five.point.one and, as of time of writing, I am rehearsing a play for the National Play Festival’s Homegrown, a showcase of the work of four emerging South Australian playwrights. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As a critic, arts practitioner and audience member, I am alarmed about the impact of changes to arts funding arrangements as outlined in the 2014 and 2015 Australian federal budgets. I believe the combined effects of the funding cuts and reallocations contained in these budgets will be long term and deleterious. They will diminish the ability of many of Australia’s most promising emerging artists to grow, flourish, challenge and enrich, and they will have a significant impact on jobs and the economy (in 2011, according to the Creative Australia report, cultural industries employed 531,000 people, and indirectly created 3.7 million jobs on top of this). Those who will be most effected will be those least able to thrive with less funding: individual artists and small-to-medium arts organisations. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These individuals and organisations are often referred to as the ‘engine room’ of the arts, driving artistic innovation and distinction across the country at every level. Without this engine room, the major arts companies would cease to function, as it is from here that, ultimately, they draw their talent. These artists have never been funded at a level that reflects their contribution to the arts in Australia, and to society more broadly, but the further loss of funds – and changes to the way those funds are distributed – has already had a profoundly demoralising effect across the entire creative sector. Of particular concern to me, and many of the other young and emerging artists I have spoken to about the 2014 and 2015 Australian federal budget decisions on the arts, are: </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">multi-million dollar cuts to what was already a relatively small amount of funding administered by the Australia Council. These cuts will effect, according to Ben Eltham, 145 arts companies. As an emerging writer, I depend on many of these companies for support and they, in turn, depend on Australia Council funding. Some of these companies include Australian Book Review, O L Society Limited (publisher of Overland), Open City Incorporated (publisher of RealTime) and PlayWriting Australia. Each of these companies has fostered many luminaries, past and present, from Peter Carey and Christos Tsiolkas to Lally Katz and Debra Oswald </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">the reallocation of $104.8m from the budget of the Australia Council to fund the National Program for Excellence in the Arts, a non-transparent and unnecessary further layer of bureaucracy that will, troublingly, do away with the important principle of arm’s length peer review that has been a staple tenet of arts funding, with bipartisan support, for many years. The introduction of the NPEA represents an unprecedented politicisation of arts funding that is unacceptable in a modern democracy.</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It is not yet clear how these changes will play out long term, but there is no need to wait for a taste of their impact. Now, more than ever, independent Australian artists and those attached to small-to-medium companies are fearful, anxious and dispirited. A few weeks ago, I kept running into artist friends who had put countless hours of hard work into applying for six-year funding only to see their applications go down the drain as the Australia Council, operationally devastated by these budget cuts, cancelled a crucial funding round with little notice. With such uncertainty rife, it is impossible to believe that private philanthropy can, as Senator George Brandis has suggested, plug the gap. It can only get worse, and the knock-on effects will be considerable: to artists, to arts organisations, to the Australian economy, and to our culture as a whole. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I warmly thank the Inquiry for this opportunity to express my views.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Ben Brooker</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Writer, editor and critic</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Some useful resources for preparing your own submission:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://visualarts.net.au/news-opinion/2015/call-action-arts-sector/">https://visualarts.net.au/news-opinion/2015/call-action-arts-sector/</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://alisoncroggon.tumblr.com/post/124196679616/submission-to-senate-inquiry-into-the-2014-and">http://alisoncroggon.tumblr.com/post/124196679616/submission-to-senate-inquiry-into-the-2014-and</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://writersvictoria.org.au/writing-life/news/senate-inquiry-%E2%80%93-have-your-say-on-federal-arts-funding">https://writersvictoria.org.au/writing-life/news/senate-inquiry-–-have-your-say-on-federal-arts-funding</a></span></div>
</div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-2793335514283363742015-06-30T13:10:00.001+09:302015-06-30T13:13:15.587+09:30Review: Adhocracy 2015<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Vitalstatistix,
Waterside Workers Hall, 6–8 June 2015. Curated by Emma Webb, Jason Sweeney and
Paul Gazzola.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The
curators of Adhocracy – headed, during the past three years in which I’ve been
writing about it, by Emma Webb, Jason Sweeney and Paul Gazzola – know a thing
or two about lassoing the zeitgeist. In 2013, as the murky palaver of Labor’s
leadership unrest was approaching its nadir, the national artist hothouse hummed
with questions of personal and, especially, political authenticity and
illusion. Artists like David Williams and Malcolm Whittaker pulled back assorted
veils to reveal harsh truths (and untruths) about liberal democracy’s terminal
condition in a time of radical capitalism, fiercely partisan politics and the irresistible
ascension of the tycoon and spin-doctor alike. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Adhocracy
2014, meanwhile, landed as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was
finalising its Fifth Assessment Report. The report’s findings? That atmospheric
and ocean warming is unequivocal, that it has been occurring since the middle
of last century at unprecedented rates, and that it is virtually beyond
question that human beings are responsible. By the time the Queen’s Birthday
long weekend, Adhocracy’s traditional timeslot, came round, a government led by
one-time climate change denialist Tony Abbott had been in power for ten months
and was just weeks away from repealing Australia’s eminently sensible carbon
pricing scheme. A piquant admixture of hope and despair infused the numerous
works-in-progress – chief among them <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Future
Present</i>, led by </span><span lang="EN-US">Rosie Dennis of Urban Theatre Projects – that
assayed an irrevocably climate-changed future.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This year, if we are to accept the enduring adage that
the personal is political, Adhocracy’s gaze turned inwards but nevertheless retained
the interrogative charge of previous years. As the commentariat sparred over
the merits and meanings of Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal, companies All the
Queens Men and Applespiel investigated the fluidity of truth and identity in still-developing
works rich in ambiguity and sly humour.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Crawl Me Blood</i>. Photo: Bryony Jackson</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Perhaps contradictorily, however, I was most taken
this year with a project somewhat removed from this ambit, and otherwise discrete
from the rest of Adhocracy’s program on account of its scale and literary lineage.
I’m talking about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Crawl Me Blood</i>, a
work-in-development by Halcyon Macleod, Willoh S. Weiland (of large-scale arts
project specialists Aphids), and a posse of collaborators drawn from a variety
of disciplines including sound (Tristan Louth-Robins, Felix Cross, James
Brennan), text (Alan Grace, Phillip Kavanagh), and performance (Ellen Steele,
Josie Were). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Crawl Me Blood</span></i><span lang="EN-US">’s source material is Jean Rhys’ 1966 postcolonial novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wide Sargasso Sea</i>, and it’s intended
that the development will ultimately blossom into a radio docu-drama and a live
installation experience. I attended the final showing, having been warned that
it would be substantially different to the previous two, and can report that
the work, whatever form or forms it eventually takes, contains an embarrassment
of potential.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Its setting was not the Waterside Workers Hall that
has served as Adhocracy’s base since its inception, but the newly renovated
Hart’s Mill Flour Shed, a cavernous space a few hundred metres from the Hall
and which we, the audience, entered with portable radios pressed against our
ears, the easy lilt of reggaeton beats filling the decidedly un-Caribbean-like
Port Adelaide air. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Once inside, we were gently shepherded between a
series of performance sites, each one a response by one or a small group of
artists to either an aspect of the novel or one of the many interviews that had
earlier been conducted by Macleod and Weiland with Caribbean women and expats.
These responses – loosely allied by Brennan’s woozy, swathing sound design, and
light installations (including an outsize Christian cross, symbol of suffering
and defeat, triumph and salvation) that seemed to flicker into life at our
presence – were invariably intriguing. Almost all of the human senses were
played upon in vignettes, redolent of the novel’s setting, that had us gently
assailed by the Flour Shed’s massive industrial fans (the Caribbean’s famous
trade winds?), handed cups of rum punch as we entered a room imbued with a
tropical atmosphere, and situated us as witnesses to monologue-as-autobiography,
the construction of a pineapple sculpture, and the loud, unnerving intrusion of
a ute into the space. All the while, the distinctive chiming of steel drums
teased the edges of our hearing, not to mention our wintered faculties with
evocations of warmer climes. What a joy and a privilege to see a work of such
scale and lightly worn ambition so early in its life, and at a time when
economic, and, concomitantly, aesthetic austerity is the name of the game.</span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Crawl Me Blood</i>. Photo: Bryony Jackson</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As to the theme alluded to earlier – namely, the unfixedness
of identity – Applespiel’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jarrod Duffy
Is Not Dead</i> and All the Queens Men’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Versions
of Truth</i> staked out the territory. In the first, the titular Jarrod is
revealed to be the ninth member of the company who supposedly vanished without
trace in 2010, a mere fortnight before he was due to appear in an Honours show
(the company is made up of graduates from the University of Wollongong’s
Creative Arts program). In this second stage creative development, the story of
Jarrod’s disappearance and the subsequent attempts by the rest of the company
to find him takes the form of a sort of live podcast, Appelspiel’s members
gathered behind assorted laptops and microphones at a desk. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Laced with irony, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jarrod
Duffy </i>amusingly deploys tropes that will be familiar to anyone who has
listened to podcasts such as This American Life (part of the joke, I suppose,
is that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Serial</i>, This American Life’s
popular spinoff, is about a real-life murder case whereas the mystery around
Jarrod Duffy turns out to be, shall we say, rather more prosaic). The work, as
I saw it, finds itself on less sure ground with an excessive conclusion during
which, among other things, a wheelchair-bound Jarrod in a wig is pushed onstage
to the tune of Rodgers and Hammersteins’ ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. It may be
that this is the company’s preemptive response to the question the work in its
present form will inevitably face from audiences – why not simply make an
actual podcast? – but the effect is jarring, and serves to detract attention
from the other, more important questions the work opens up – about the nature
of truth, the ethics of appropriating other people’s stories for public
consumption, and about how possible it is to know someone, even a cherished
friend and colleague, truly. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">More puzzling again is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Versions of Truth</i> by All the Queens Men, a company better known for
large-scale participatory projects than the intimate, audition room-set work
presented here. Beginning with the premise that ‘our lives are built on made-up
versions of ourselves’, performer Tristan Meecham guides two participants (one,
I think, was a plant) through an acting audition that includes a screen test.
The auditionees are variously challenged and humiliated by Meecham, who also
weaves throughout the work stories (presumably, though not explicitly, drawn
from his own experiences) about life in the acting business. These stories,
which include Meecham’s successful audition for the role of the Young Collector
in a Melbourne Theatre Company production of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Streetcar Named Desire</i>, are sinisterly undercut by allusions to
some terrible event that is never revealed.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Versions of
Truth</span></i><span lang="EN-US"> situates itself within the current wave of
‘confessional’ performance art but Meecham’s performance is far too slippery
for the fit to be a snug one. The work gets stranger as it goes – ‘down a
rabbit hole of deceit’, as the program, not inaccurately, puts it – and winds
up, confusingly, with an almost wholesale recreation of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZDoYz773r4" target="_blank">Fiery Hawk</a> Comic
Relief skit that went viral a few years ago. I was not alone in being unable to
discern the purpose of the skit’s inclusion/imitation; was it an homage, a
parody of a parody, some wily comment on artistic pilfering or something else?
I couldn’t believe for a moment that it was a guileless rip-off – and, who
knows, maybe that in itself was the point.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsTCofe5FZv477BYVN2js-tP8VBmn_6_x0VZYQivcjtBag8eAbkizwYw2ucApe-pzPjyyh9LtqCS1sXyvAuxoYDnDgJ8pm23-x35-_EEkVrlSB8BWle2vo-vYGf_RrQCQ_H1s4GJy5s4w/s1600/_HLB0132.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsTCofe5FZv477BYVN2js-tP8VBmn_6_x0VZYQivcjtBag8eAbkizwYw2ucApe-pzPjyyh9LtqCS1sXyvAuxoYDnDgJ8pm23-x35-_EEkVrlSB8BWle2vo-vYGf_RrQCQ_H1s4GJy5s4w/s640/_HLB0132.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Future Turf</i>. Photo: Heath Britton and Jennifer Greer-Holmes</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Finally, it is worth mentioning, if only briefly, two
works that enjoyed first stage creative developments during Adhocracy 2015, </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Awkward Sex Scenes</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> and </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Future Turf. </i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Both are embryonic but,
growing out of clear, fertile ideas – the often uncomfortable relationship
between artistic representations of sex and audiences in the case of the
former, and the intersections between the built environment and the human form
in the latter – show great promise. </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Awkward
Sex Scenes</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, concerned with a seemingly universal but often unspoken
experience, will find ready audiences wherever it goes, and it would do well to
retain the interactive element whereby audience members are invited onto the
stage to recount their own awkward experiences with sex scenes as the creative
team of Ahmarnya Price, Dan Koerner and Ingrid Voorendt shuffle elements of the
set around them to evoke those sites, mostly lounge rooms, of occasional but supreme
discomfort.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US">I gather that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Future
Turf </i>underwent radical transformations between its three showings, but the
work’s underlying hybridity – a meeting of text by poet Emily Stewart,
sculpture by Henry Wood, performance art by Emma Hall, and choreography by
Rachel Heller-Wagner – looks as though it will be carried through to subsequent
developments. This will be no bad thing; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Future
Turf</i> is cross-disciplinary practice with the brakes on, a meditation on the
politics of both home and land ownership that may find one of its great
strengths is its open-hearted and open-minded search, if not for any kind of
truth, then at least for poetic, meaningful resonance.</span> <i> </i> </span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-41687119047552302492015-06-23T14:18:00.000+09:302015-06-23T14:24:43.510+09:30'We know that we are cruel': a conversation with theatre-maker Sarah Dunn about comedy, kindness, and the Theatre of Compassion - part two<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is the second part of an email conversation between myself and theatre-maker Sarah Dunn about her production of Sarah Ruhl's <i>Melancholy Play</i>, and the possibilities for a 'Theatre of Compassion'. You can read the first part <a href="http://marginalia-bb.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/we-know-that-we-are-cruel-conversation.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I was prompted to explore the issues raised in these pieces by two very different performance works: Sarah's <i>Melancholy Play</i>, and Cat Jones' <i>Somatic Drifts</i>, which I participated in at Vitalstatistix' artist hothouse Adhocracy in 2014. This is what I wrote about Somatic Drifts: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Grounded in horticulture and neuroscience, Cat Jones’ full body experience for one person at a time was an undoubted highlight of this year’s program. Gesturing towards the emergent ontologies of a post-human future, Somatic Drifts sought, through sensory and aural immersion, to radically unsettle the sense of self of participants, who had both human and plant identities progressively imposed over their own through sound, aroma, touch and visual feedback. My initial trepidation was quickly forgotten, the work proving unexpectedly affecting in its therapeutic, closely guided dislocations of sense and self as well as its emotive engagement with ideas around the fostering of empathy between species. Still in its first stage of research and development, the progress of Somatic Drifts will be keenly monitored by this writer. (RealTime issue #122, Aug<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">–</span>Sept 2014, pg. 44)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I invited Cat to participate in this discussion but that 'progress' I said I would monitor is keeping her extremely busy; she has just begun a new creative development of the work at the UNSW. (Happily, Cat has agreed in principle to have a chat with Mr Marginalia when time permits. Stay tuned!)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I mention all this because Sarah felt that we might be painting a pretty grim (not to mention parochial) picture of the performing arts in Australia if we didn't take into account other artists who are working in a similar vein, and I agreed. As we shall see, overseas artists are also developing practices that can be loosely, though usefully, gathered together under the umbrella of performance that brings special care and attention to the situating and role of the audience. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In Australia, in addition to Cat and Sarah, I would add a third artist, Astrid Pill, whose 2006/7 Adelaide Fringe/Malthouse show <i>Cake </i>bobbed to the surface of my mind when I found myself considering possible antecedents for Sarah's (as yet embryonic) 'Theatre of Compassion'. Reading contemporaneous reviews by <a href="http://www.australianstage.com.au/reviews/melbourne/cake--vitalstatistix-707.html" target="_blank">Jan Chandler</a> and <a href="https://theatrenotes.wordpress.com/category/vitalstatistix/" target="_blank">Alison Croggon</a>, I was freshly struck by the similarities between <i>Cake</i> and <i>Melancholy</i>: the engaging of multiple senses (especially taste), and the close blending of music (what is it about the cello?!), text, and physical languages; Croggon's observation that <i>Cake</i> 'could all be too cute for words, but the show’s intelligence and wit – and its slyly obscene subversion of the apparently inhibited femininity it explores – ensures that it never is' could apply with equal incisiveness to <i>Melancholy Play</i>. At the risk of being accused of advocating some form of gender essentialism, I wonder too if there is anything more to be said about the fact that all these artists are women. If there is, however, that's a conversation for another day. </span> <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rebecca Mayo in <i>Melancholy Play</i>. Photo: Yvonne McAuley</td></tr>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Ben:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I should have said (I think I talked around it a bit)
that your production of <i>Melancholy Play</i>
and Cat's work tap into a wider resurgence that’s going on at the moment around
experience-based performance. The reasons why this resurgence is happening are
complex but I’d suggest it’s partly a reaction against the atomising effects of
social media, and a resultant craving for deeper, face-to-face exchange. A
curator recently said to me she’d heard another curator say that she can’t sell
paintings anymore because people want experiences now instead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Sarah:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> I think you’re right about a growing awareness of our physical
isolation. I think there’s a more practical element to that too, though, for
performance art, and that’s that you have to provide something that really
necessitates people leaving their homes, physically travelling somewhere, and
then sitting in a room full of other people. While we may crave deeper
exchanges, I think we are also unwilling to go to the theatre only to be a
detached observer, since we can do that more easily and comfortably in our own
homes. You have to provide something that cannot be delivered to people through
a computer or a television, I think.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have also been
pondering whether there might be something else going on, which is about the rise
of individualist politics. This can be seen really clearly through capitalism
and neoliberalism, but there are also echoes of it in feminism (the personal is
political), environmental politics (everyone can contribute to recycling, for
example). We are, in our current societies, the protagonists of our own world. Everyone
has followers, everyone has a voice, everyone sees themselves as central to
their own lives. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, but I
think it might (possibly) be something that is taking people away from
non-experiential theatre.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">B: </span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">I found your comment ‘sometimes people will have a
negative reaction even if you don’t intend it’ really interesting, as I know
not everybody who saw <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Melancholy</i>
responded to it in the same way I did. So I guess something has to be said
about work that sets out to ‘make people feel good’ and the
usual corollaries about the subjective nature of our responses to art.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">S:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> Yeah, for
sure. I think in Adelaide especially we have a relatively small pool of
theatre*, which means that anybody who follows the theatre pretty much goes to
everything. I think what that means is that we expect that if something is
‘good’ (whatever that means) then we’ll like it. Obviously I’d love for every
single person on earth to love the theatre I make, but I think it’s unlikely to
happen. All of the theatre pieces I have loved have had other people hate them
(except maybe <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Roman Tragedies</i>, but
that was just freakishly, impossibly brilliant). And of course, some people
don’t want to feel the things I’m asking them to feel, or they don’t go to the
theatre for feelings, or they don’t engage with the subject material, or any
number of things. Ideally, I would love for theatre to be seen more like music,
where we can allow ourselves to have preferences, be open to possibilities of
liking something else. I think I’d probably be something like indie pop.
Not everyone likes indie pop, or is moved by it, or is interested in it. That’s
cool with me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">*This obviously
doesn’t go for festivals, where I think these thoughts don’t apply, perhaps
because we’re not expecting to like everything.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">B:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> This is slightly tangential, but your comment about
the sexuality of some characters in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Melancholy</i>
resonated with me because I remember saying to Caryn [my partner] after the
show that it’s strange that, though so much progress has been made in the
developed world as regards the rights and representation of homosexuals, it’s
still unusual to see something in which gay characters simply are – i.e. in
which their sexuality is not foregrounded or framed as an issue. In other
words, I think we’re still somewhat conditioned to think about ‘why’ characters
are gay in a way that doesn't really reflect how much community attitudes have
shifted in this area. I found it very refreshing to see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Melancholy</i> challenge this.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">S:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> It is
exceptionally unusual to see queer people onstage who could be easily replaced
by straight people, and even more unusual to see butch women on stage. This was
one of the things I loved about the play when I first read it, that it locates
queerness to be just as valid as heterosexuality as a choice for the author to
make. You’re right to say that we normally only see queer people (or
people of colour, or people with a disability, or even still, in some cases,
women) when it’s an <span style="text-transform: uppercase;">Artistic Choice</span>
that we somehow need to decode. I hope that we can start to dismantle that
coding because it’s getting in our way, I think.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">L-R, Rebecca Mayo, Lochlin Mayberry, Holly Langridge, Ashton Malcolm, Antoine Jelk and Rachel Bruerville in <i>Melancholy Play</i>. Photo: Yvonne McAuley</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">B: </span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Predictably, I Googled ‘Theatre of Compassion’ after the earlier part of
our discussion. As we suspected, there’s not much scholarship or anything else
around this idea, but I did find an interesting </span><a href="http://howlround.com/interview-with-catherine-filloux"><span lang="EN-US">interview</span></a><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> with the American
playwright Catherine Filloux. I don’t know Filloux’s plays but she</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">s written
about some pretty heavy stuff – genocide, honour killings and so on. She talks
about her work in quite a surprising way. She says in the interview: ‘it is not
the “big issues” which guide me, but my own personal connection to love which
urges me to build plays, as what can be called pieces of art, like castles of
hope. I use the word castle not for its grandiosity, but for its qualities of
dream and magic. And theater can be like a haven with a moat around it,
somewhere sacred where you get to come in, no matter who you are. You are
protected, in the sense that a play is a different gift for each person that
sees it.’ (I should add that Filloux points out that tickets to her play LUZ
were relatively affordable at $18.) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">S: </span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">I love the thought of theatre as a haven with a moat around it. It
conjures such a beautiful sense of safety, but also of potential attack from
the outside world, which I think speaks volumes about what we’re talking about.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I always think of it
in a little more rudimentary way, which is that theatre is the seeing place
(the root meaning of the word), and that I ought to make it easy for people to
see that which is difficult to see otherwise. And I completely agree with
the notion that it is a sacred place, and a sacred place for
everybody. That’s a task all on its own, to create that sense, and I think
that might get to the root of the thing – what does it mean if everyone is
equally welcome? Equally valued?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">B: </span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Do you already have other plays in mind that you would like to produce
using the same techniques you applied to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Melancholy</i>?
I know that you have also written for the stage. Do you have any ambitions to
build your own ‘castles of hope’? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">S: </span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Indeed, I hope to approach all of my work, without exception, with three
key things in mind: thought, tone, and heart. I think those basic building
blocks create the effect we</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">re talking about. Thought relates to an ‘issue’, I
suppose, or, more accurately, some connection for the audience to draw to their
social/personal/political/combination of all three lives. This also
relates to my queer and feminist discourse, which is throughout all my work. Tone
refers I suppose to the feeling in the room. I don</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">t mind what the feeling
is, as long as it is palpable, and all-encompassing, and irresistible. Heart
refers to caring about the audience’s experience, and I think this is perhaps
what might sometimes create that uplifting feeling. It’s also that vulnerability
I mentioned before, and the commitment to being compassionate to the audience
as well as to the characters. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I think you could do
these three things with anything that had something strong to hold onto (strong
character, strong narrative – anything fundamental to storytelling). I am
particularly interested in early naturalism for their feminist discourse, Shakespeare
(natch), Lally Katz’s work, the list goes on.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In terms of writing –
well, it’s been a little while since I wrote anything, but the last time I did
it certainly had a similar composition. It was an exploration of grief, using
comedy and music and had all sorts of similarities [to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Melancholy</i>]. I was working with six actors though, and they
were as much the creators of that project as me. I certainly would be
interested in playing around with those ideas further in playscript form, but
for now my focus is on finding these qualities in existing works and bringing
them out, rather than making new ones. I’m a bit of a collaborative beast, and working
alone makes me feel isolated and not creative at all. Maybe I’ll learn to
work alone and become better suited to writing – fingers crossed!</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sarah Dunn is a founding member of milk theatre collective, independent theatre maker and directing student at the Flinders University Drama Centre. At the Drama Centre, she has directed several productions including a devised piece, <i>The Girl Who Grieved Everything</i>, <i>The Boys</i> by Duncan Graham, <i>A Single Act</i> by Jane Bodie, <i>Dracula</i>, <i>Melancholy Play: A Contemporary Farce</i> by Sarah Ruhl, and <i>The Thugs</i> by Adam Bock. As an actor, Sarah has worked with State Theatre Company, the ABC, ActNow Theatre, Patch Theatre Company and various other independent companies. She devised, directed, and performed in several forum theatre workshops with ActNow Theatre, the Legal Services Commission and the Marion Youth Health service developing Expect Respect and Speak Out. Sarah has directed and written for Urban Myth Theatre, the five.point.one reading sessions, independent theatre company go begging, and was dramaturg and writer for milk theatre collective’s first show, <i>Alice and Peter Grow Up</i>. She assisted Julian Meyrick on <i>Neighbourhood Watch</i> in 2014 at STCSA.</span></span></div>
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Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-12217244394980380162015-06-15T14:56:00.000+09:302015-06-30T13:12:14.151+09:30'We know that we are cruel': a conversation with theatre-maker Sarah Dunn about comedy, kindness, and the Theatre of Compassion - part one<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">'It's so easy to laugh/It's so easy to hate/It takes guts to be gentle and kind' - Morrissey, 'I Know It's Over'</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This post represents a few firsts for Marginalia, not the least of which is its format: an email-based conversation between myself and a theatre-maker. I wasn't sure at first whether I would make this conversation public or if it would simply inform a more structured piece of writing. The more it progressed, however, the more certain I felt that it was interesting enough to warrant a readership without (yet) being bludgeoned into something more scholarly. As it is, both interviewer and interviewee are still thinking through some of the issues raised during the course of the discussion and anything more 'definitive' than a conversation would probably be premature. I hope it is as stimulating to read as it was for me to take part in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">First, a little context. Around a month ago I attended a performance of <i>Melancholy Play</i> by American playwright Sarah Ruhl. The production was directed by my friend Sarah Dunn and was her graduation piece from Flinders University Drama Centre. The play, described as a 'contemporary farce', premiered in 2002 at the Piven Theatre in Evanston, Illinois. Its protagonist is Tilly, a bank teller whose allure seems irresistible to all around her: boyfriend Frank, therapist Lorenzo, and lesbian couple Frances and Joan. The play's other character is a cellist (Rachel Bruerville in this production), who remains unacknowledged until close to the end. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The play's idiom is a complex one, drawing in satire and absurdism, and fusing conventions from farce, melodrama and musical theatre. It's also thoroughly camp, in the sense that Susan Sontag defined the word </span><span style="background-color: #eef4ff; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">–</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> as a sensibility built around artifice and exaggeration </span><span style="background-color: #eef4ff; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">–</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> in her classic 1964 essay <a href="http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html" target="_blank">'Notes on "Camp"'</a>. I had a strong and, for me, unusual reaction to the play. I left the theatre feeling elated, moved as well as amused in a way that seemed to belie the play's lack of depth. It was a feeling I couldn't (and still can't) completely articulate, but one I instinctively felt I had not often experienced in the theatre previously, and certainly wanted to have again. It was for this reason that I felt compelled to engage with Sarah about what for me had been a surprising and revitalising encounter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I am grateful to Sarah for taking the time to share (at length) her thoughts with me, and for allowing me to publish our conversation here. The second part will appear next week. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ashton Malcolm (l) and Holly Langridge (r) in <i>Melancholy Play</i>. Photo: Yvonne McAuley </td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Ben:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> It’s very rare that I leave a performance feeling genuinely uplifted,
which is a very different thing from feeling as though you’ve simply been
entertained or amused. Is it the same for you, and if so, why do you think
theatre makers don’t attempt this more often?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Sarah:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> Absolutely it is the same for me. It is a rare experience to feel, when
you leave the theatre, that you are a complete person and that you’re enough,
just as you are. I don’t know exactly why theatre makers don’t attempt it,
although I have a couple of theories. One element is surely that it is
challenging. To be, as one audience member said to me, 'light but not shallow',
takes a fair amount of thought and preparation that isn't very funny or
uplifting. Rehearsing <i>Melancholy Play</i> was often incredibly tiring and
depressing because of the subject material that we were working with, and it’s
difficult to then find the humour again.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It also takes a huge
amount of vulnerability from the creative team. They were displaying very raw
and traditionally feared/rejected/mocked/discouraged emotions and experiences,
and, furthermore, allowing people to laugh at them. Their courage in doing
that was monumental, and took a great deal of kindness and support from one
another, and a sense that we were creating a space for the audience to be
vulnerable too. We trusted our audience to do that, and I think it’s quite rare
for audiences to be trusted like that. They respond very well to it, however –
it feels similar to how people respond to nudity on stage. I have never in my
life experienced an audience treat a naked performer with anything but total
respect and deference. I think it’s such a raw expression of vulnerability, and
people respond to it with great kindness.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I think finally that
there might be a kind of fear of doing anything light because people might feel
that you are being less thoughtful. I feel this often in my life, too. Positivity
is somehow less legitimate, or an indication that you haven’t thought hard
enough. I find this interesting because the people from history that we
remember are rarely those who spoke of hopelessness and fear, but rather of
hope and love. But it makes sense, too – it is difficult in Australia for
theatre makers to be seen as doing an important job. I completely understand
why people don’t want to appear to be having too much fun, lest they be valued
even less in our culture. Ironically, I think that is perhaps what makes a
lot of theatre unappealing to so many people, and why comedy, music and big
scale musicals are flocked to at numbers far outstripping our own.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My partner, Annabel,
is an actor, and when I asked her about this she said that when she tells
people what she does, she is often asked whether she can cry on cue. There
seems to be this sense that it’s difficult to make people upset, and that if
you can do that, you’re somehow magical. I can’t tell you how much I
disagree with that common assumption. It’s much harder to make a room of people
fall in love with you than make a room of people cry, I think. We’re all easily
wounded. We’re not so easily taken off guard and made to feel trusting.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">B:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> It strikes me
that a sort of fetish has been made in performance of making the audience feel
uncomfortable and ill at ease. There’s this idea that ‘proper’ theatre must
always challenge, provoke, confront etc. and that anything that doesn’t is trivial,
commercial or bourgeois. But I wonder if a different kind of audience exchange
– one based on generosity, embracement and/or intimate connection – is the
truly radical idea, especially under late capitalism where our interactions
with other people are increasingly utilitarian and transactional. I wonder if
there is a danger that ‘challenging’ performance actually reinforces the status
quo by showing no hope of change.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">S: </span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Yes, I think there is a very strong bent towards a particular kind of
challenging of audiences, one that makes them feel deeply uncomfortable and
complicit in the negative aspects of society. This is a complex phenomenon, but
I think it’s because of two main factors.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The first is due to
looking at plays from other periods of time, understanding their impact but not
taking into account the greater dramaturgy of the surrounding social climate. Brecht,
Artaud, Meyerhold – and more recently, Osborne, Beckett, Kane, the list could
go on and on – were all dealing with a world markedly different from the
information rich, highly connected, news saturated world in which we live
today. They were also speaking to a theatrical context that was entirely different
to the one we are in now. It is not enough to say that the same techniques
(alienation, shock, confusion, existentialist dramaturgies etc.) will do
something of worth for contemporary audiences. This is a problem I have with a
lot of theatrical work. One would think that the very medium itself – a live
art form that is happening in the immediate present, moment to moment – would
instruct theatre makers to pay attention to what is happening around that 8:00pm
to 10:30pm time slot for the audience. But often it is divorced from time, or
pretends that it is somehow outside of time, and that I find very confusing and
odd.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The second is not
moving past initial reactions to injustices and going on to consider how art
might be able to redress the situation. I completely understand why people
might be angry about a whole lot of things, or despondent, or jaded. But
theatrical art is thought in the form of an event. I believe we ought to be
giving people an experience that might give them a perspective on things that
is not the norm, not the same perspective made clearer. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So yes, I don’t
believe it’s radical. I think you’re right to say that it is much more radical
to engage people with your whole heart. It is a much more dangerous proposition
in the world than not doing it, put it that way.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFuOyBOiFi7ORJ7DK0mgS6kXwRboRdIORxV-RxAKj3wFhyphenhyphenpeFSu5XKc9Qt4ex9BYMaxzHEVAxZZTxD0AM0qwgKx_w0VcM-AJ4yMU4-NFJ3SQ73kBb27hXnLY0sMBOIZ-cXJkio-o8-NZk/s1600/Melancholy_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFuOyBOiFi7ORJ7DK0mgS6kXwRboRdIORxV-RxAKj3wFhyphenhyphenpeFSu5XKc9Qt4ex9BYMaxzHEVAxZZTxD0AM0qwgKx_w0VcM-AJ4yMU4-NFJ3SQ73kBb27hXnLY0sMBOIZ-cXJkio-o8-NZk/s640/Melancholy_3.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Antoine Jelk (l) and Rebecca Mayo (r) in <i>Melancholy Play</i>. Photo: Yvonne McAuley</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have recently been
contemplating a kind of theatrical theory that is the inverse of Artaud’s
Theatre of Cruelty. I’ve been calling it Theatre of Compassion, but I’m not
completely sure that’s right. But in essence, it works through connecting
people to the viscerally beautiful in them, rather than the viscerally ugly. It
used to be that humans believed themselves to be the greatest of all creatures,
untouched by animalism, that we are pure and close to God. I don’t think
we believe that any longer, not now that every moment of the day you have
access to the vast atrocities that humans are inflicting upon one another,
other creatures, and the environment. We know that we are cruel. But do we know
that we are all compassionate and loving and kind, as well? I think we need to
be reminded of it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">B: </span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">How much of the way <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Melancholy
Play</i> was framed – the letter given to audience members, the almonds that
were handed round – was in Ruhl’s play, and how much did you devise? What
exactly were you trying to achieve with these elements?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">S:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> None of that
framing was in the play. I took elements from the text (almonds are obviously a
very strong motif and symbol, letters are mentioned many times, the sense of
smell, looking out of windows) and assigned ‘stations’ and these symbols to the
actors, who then improvised their interactions with the audience. I instructed
them only to always be honest, and they were very capable of doing that.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I was trying to
recalibrate the contract that the audience enters a theatre with. I believe
theatre-goers – even first timers – have a fairly tangible sense of what is
expected of them, unless they are told otherwise. They will be
disembodied, passive observers, and they will think about the play, and then
come out with some kind of an opinion. I think that a lot of the time this
contract works incredibly well, and it is the kind of basic contract that I
sign in my own mind before I go into a theatre to see a performance.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For <i>Melancholy, </i>though,
I wanted people to have a different kind of relationship to the work. I
wanted them to feel as though it was as much about them as it was about the
characters, and not in an abstract way, in a really tangible way. Sarah Ruhl
does say in her notes that audiences know the difference between being talked
to and talked at, and says 'talk <i>to </i>them, please'. I built on that
idea and made it very plain for the audience that the characters knew that they
were there, they could be touched, they could be spoken to, they could respond
to you, and all those things in reverse.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I think especially
for a comedy, there is such a great need for the audience. Often as
theatre-makers we forget that they are as vital an element as performer, space and
time for theatre to exist. I want to honour that in my work, and I want people
to feel as though the performance is for them, because it honestly is. I
believe that the art really resides in the spectator, not on the stage or in
the performers. Finally, I really wanted people to know that the performance
was meant to be a pleasurable thing. That they were safe, that they had been thought
of, that we wanted them to be comfortable and looked after. That we practiced
what we preached.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgveSmt4WMd9stUG2l5Ys5p8yGba82fMXIwgSO9cRqmaZffZM8SbFK-CkbzSaX6v5fsq76x3hJcC99nazyWXMyAaTyos_WxzvnL7vHGmulHksAwhvEZLVWmxkJViZOUh0JJe0SoK_wWYU4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-06-15+at+12.22.29+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgveSmt4WMd9stUG2l5Ys5p8yGba82fMXIwgSO9cRqmaZffZM8SbFK-CkbzSaX6v5fsq76x3hJcC99nazyWXMyAaTyos_WxzvnL7vHGmulHksAwhvEZLVWmxkJViZOUh0JJe0SoK_wWYU4/s640/Screen+Shot+2015-06-15+at+12.22.29+pm.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The letter given to audience members by the cast before the beginning of the play.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">B: </span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Tell me about the feedback you received, and whether this gave you the
sense that this kind of theatre experience was one that audience members valued
and wanted to have more often.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">S:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> The feedback
we all received was very encouraging, and many people made an effort to speak
to the cast and crew after the show. Perhaps most telling of all, however, was
that people were happy when they left, smiling and talking to one another, and
wanted to stay afterwards for a drink. Many people returned once or even
twice in a five-day season to see the show again, which was lovely. Also,
people were laughing throughout the piece, but were also silent when there were
moments of tenderness, and also saying ‘aww’ to characters, not in a condescending
way, but in a way that said ‘I know what you’re feeling and I’m feeling it with
you’. I was very proud of that.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The world that week
was particularly grim. There had been two natural disasters worldwide, and the
political climate wasn’t particularly encouraging either. The plays that were
on in Adelaide at that time were very beautiful but also quite bleak. And, we
must always remember, there are always people in an audience of any play who
are having a pretty terrible week, or month, or year. I know for a fact that
there were people in very raw states of grief and shock, living through tragic
circumstances. They enjoyed the show, laughed and thanked us afterward. That
mattered more to me than I can say. It was lovely to make a piece that
could accept anyone, at any stage of their lives, into the audience and take
care of them. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Many people, speaking
to me afterwards, co-opted the language of the play to describe their own emotional
states. Many people told me that they were in an almond state, or were almonds.
They felt more comfortable telling me as someone they had never met before – or,
perhaps more interestingly, someone they did know, but had never spoken to in
that way – how they had been feeling melancholy and that they felt a lot better
about it having seen the play. That demonstrated to me that there was great value
for them in the experience. I was also told by someone that they felt that
they knew me better after seeing it. As a director, whose work is usually
invisible to an audience, that was really delicious – I feel so exposed when I
direct work, because it’s how I see the world, it’s my own private vantage
point made public, and it was beautiful to be seen inside of it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">B:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> We seem to be
comfortable, even complacent, about the idea that our beliefs can only be
challenged/changed by art that provokes a negative emotional response – guilt,
say, or disgust or outrage. Do you think that performance that doesn’t in some
way make audiences feel such things can still bring about change, or at least
speak to ‘important’ issues? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">S:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> I think it can
bring about more change. It is very rare for people to change their minds
when they feel attacked. It takes a very rare kind of person to be able to
change their mind when they are under duress. I don’t think that was always the
case, but I believe that is the case now. We live in a society that is absolutely
soaked in shame and fear. I think that these two things are the foundation of
all the cruel things that are happening in Australia today. We do not talk
about Indigenous rights in any measured way because we are deeply ashamed. We
do not accept refugees into the country because we are afraid. We can’t
speak about many things because of our fear and shame, and I think attacking
people for being ashamed and fearful is not going to help them at all.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Melancholy </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">had some very important things to
say about mental illness, our mental health care systems, queerness, love and a
few other things too. There was a pansexual and two lesbians in the play. One
character refused to take medication that was prescribed to her. These issues
are important, but they don’t have to be <span style="text-transform: uppercase;">Made
Important On The Stage.</span> They’re just important. They matter to people.
We don’t have to make them matter, they already do.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I will hasten to add
that there is still a place for people to be challenged by things in the
theatre, but that it just doesn’t <i>have</i> to provoke a negative response. And
let’s face it, sometimes people will have a negative reaction even if you don’t
intend it. And maybe the things that haven’t been spoken about, or perhaps
don’t matter to people, do need to be revealed in a stark and perhaps
uncomfortable way. The form needs to follow the function. The tone needs
to be geared towards an outcome that is positive. And we need to think about
what positive is very carefully before we proceed.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">You can read part two of this conversation <a href="http://marginalia-bb.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/we-know-that-we-are-cruel-conversation_23.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">—</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sarah Dunn is a founding member of milk theatre collective, independent theatre maker and directing student at the Flinders University Drama Centre. At the Drama Centre, she has directed several productions including a devised piece, <i>The Girl Who Grieved Everything</i>, <i>The Boys</i> by Duncan Graham, <i>A Single Act</i> by Jane Bodie, <i>Dracula</i>, <i>Melancholy Play: A Contemporary Farce</i> by Sarah Ruhl, and <i>The Thugs</i> by Adam Bock. As an actor, Sarah has worked with State Theatre Company, the ABC, ActNow Theatre, Patch Theatre Company and various other independent companies. She devised, directed, and performed in several forum theatre workshops with ActNow Theatre, the Legal Services Commission and the Marion Youth Health service developing Expect Respect and Speak Out. Sarah has directed and written for Urban Myth Theatre, the five.point.one reading sessions, independent theatre company go begging, and was dramaturg and writer for milk theatre collective’s first show, <i>Alice and Peter Grow Up</i>. She assisted Julian Meyrick on <i>Neighbourhood Watch</i> in 2014 at STCSA.</span></span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-58562064248253084332015-05-27T10:49:00.000+09:302015-05-27T10:52:33.802+09:30Review: 'Masquerade'<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Griffin Theatre Company and State Theatre Company of South Australia, Her Majesty's Theatre, Adelaide, 20 May-31 May 2015. Adapted by Kate Mulvany from the book by Kit Williams. Directed by Lee Lewis and Sam Strong.</span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi15OD7c32a5KGzaSSt8gceIkeFHzu3oA51zQiJZzXv_2y0hf8Nj9B-wGf-ZgmCSxicPyHNJuTtHMm6FpxagT5Sp9cJ4z3y9jXTkkccmXYuLngbzKdFMBqDZfN_4EQv0lNaO932wVwVMqk/s1600/Dallimore_Masquerade.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi15OD7c32a5KGzaSSt8gceIkeFHzu3oA51zQiJZzXv_2y0hf8Nj9B-wGf-ZgmCSxicPyHNJuTtHMm6FpxagT5Sp9cJ4z3y9jXTkkccmXYuLngbzKdFMBqDZfN_4EQv0lNaO932wVwVMqk/s640/Dallimore_Masquerade.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Brett Boardman</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In the 1970s,
English children’s author Kit Williams was challenged by his publisher to “do
something no one has ever done before”. The result was </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Masquerade</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, a visual puzzle- and riddle-filled picture book about a
hare’s quest to unite the Moon and the Sun with the aid of a jeweled golden
hare. On the book’s publishing in 1979, Williams created a minor sensation when
he announced that he had buried a real golden hare – an 18 carat pendant,
sculpted by the author himself – somewhere in England, and that the clues to
its whereabouts were scattered throughout the book. Thousands participated in
the search for the hare, which culminated (ultimately controversially, when
insider knowledge was alleged a few years later) in Ken Thomas winning the
contest in 1982.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The book’s
popularity, however, extended beyond Williams’ native England, its elaborate
paintings and innovative ‘armchair treasure hunt’ format finding significant
audiences in many countries – including Australia (though a warning about
acquiring a copy today: you may have to embark on a treasure hunt of your own,
as I hear that the book is long out of print). One of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masquerade</i>’s most avid antipodean admirers was Kate Mulvany, now an
actor and playwright. Mulvany was suffering from childhood cancer when a woman
named Tessa read the book to her at her bedside, making, according to Mulvany’s
program notes, “the timelessness of a children’s oncology ward somehow
bearable”. Williams set two conditions for Mulvany’s stage adaptation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masquerade</i> – that it be “for nine to
ninety year olds”, and that the story of her illness and friendship with Tessa
be included. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Mulvany meets
the second condition with what, at first, is a parallel narrative. In the world
inhabited by ‘mortals’, Tessa (Helen Dallimore) reads the book of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masquerade </i>to her son, Joe (Louis
Fontaine/Jack Andrew), who is largely confined to a hospital bed. Joe hasn’t
been outside for days; Tessa, tired and frazzled, seems to long to escape almost
as much as Joe. Around the ward – in Anna Cordingley’s design, a curtained box on
a much-used revolve in the centre of the stage – Jack Hare’s (Nathan O’Keefe) fantastic
quest to deliver a message of love from the Moon (Kate Cheel) to the Sun
(Mikelangelo, whose Balkan gypsy music-inspired Black Sea Gentlemen provide the
show’s live music) plays out. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Known as the
‘Celestial World’, this realm couldn’t contrast more with the drab,
time-slowing mundaneness of Joe’s oncology ward surroundings. It is filled with
colour and motion, and peopled with bizarre characters like the
extravagantly-attired ‘collector of dreams’ Tara Treetops (Cheel) and her
talking crow, Craw, and a lisping, lusciously-coiffured Isaac Newton (Pip
Branson), unfazed by seeing his law of universal gravitation, well, suspended. In
the play’s third and final act, Joe and Tessa – dismayed by Jack’s dim-witted
blundering and his losing of the Moon’s love token, the golden hare pendant –
enter the Celestial World to find the jewel. (The book effectively ends at this
point, leaving its readers guessing; Mulvany’s third act is an entirely
original contribution.) They have little to go on except </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Masquerade</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">’s recurrent riddle: “Fifty is my first/Nothing is my
second/Five just makes my third/My fourth a vowel is reckoned/Now to find my
name/Fit my parts together/I die if I get cold/But never fear cold weather”.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizfey_C5eoOX2uQjkbzPFljOs3C7n2ZRfJOH3PWbsMQnSBmEqY23jw_VbuPmrd-vSZ9XH21_mgW8n14_SFKF1PB5UULZ8mXVhe90AkPkMlOSJqggNQm-A9xZTICdVVN9u0ym5h80agNZo/s1600/O%2527Keefe_Masquerade.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizfey_C5eoOX2uQjkbzPFljOs3C7n2ZRfJOH3PWbsMQnSBmEqY23jw_VbuPmrd-vSZ9XH21_mgW8n14_SFKF1PB5UULZ8mXVhe90AkPkMlOSJqggNQm-A9xZTICdVVN9u0ym5h80agNZo/s640/O%2527Keefe_Masquerade.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Brett Boardman</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">O’Keefe,
substantially reprising the deft physical comedy he brought to Windmill’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pinocchio </i>last year, engages and
delights as Jack. Equally skillful and charismatic are Cheel and Zindzi Okenyo,
the latter playing the Celestial World’s Penny Pockets and sundry characters
including, hilariously, the <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">terpsichorean<b>
</b></span>Fat Pig (it would seem that no dimension is safe from <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Gangnam Style</span>). Louie Fontaine
appeared as Joe on opening night, giving a more than creditable account of a
demanding role that includes some singing (“I dream of outside…”). Dallimore,
as Tessa, is not as impressive – inexplicably cold and dour for much of the
time – but brings her noted musical theatre skills to bear on the show-stopping
Tessa’s Dream. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Williams’ book
proves to be a somewhat problematic vehicle for a stage show, its selection
made, I suspect, more on account of Mulvany’s understandable attachment to it
than any compelling theatrical potential. In the first place, the solution to
the book’s central riddle is text- and picture-based and can’t, despite the
production design’s nod to Williams’ page borders containing stencilled
letters, be effectively replicated on stage. Similarly, something substantial
feels lost in translation between other aspects of the book – such as its ornate
pictorial style, and English folk-infused surrealism – and this production,
which, under the direction of Lee Lewis and Sam Strong, often feels hyperactive
rather than adventuresome, jumbled rather than whimsical.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Chris Petridis’
audio-visual design, incorporating animated projection, is striking but
underutilised. Mulvany’s dialogue, while amusingly metatextual and never patronising, is undoubtedly
overwritten in places, and Williams’ edict that the play be for “nine to ninety
year olds” occasionally rather too clearly shows through, especially in the
tonally uneven first half. This is not to say that the play’s darker aspects
are unwelcome – Joe’s illness, and themes of love, mortality, and family are
commendably straightforwardly handled – but simply that Williams’ brief was
perhaps a deceptively challenging one, its results surprisingly charmless rather than universally entertaining.</span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-71883691013790841322015-04-20T10:59:00.001+09:302015-04-20T10:59:18.612+09:30Review: 2015 Adelaide Festival<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Beckett Triptych: State Theatre Company of SA, State Theatre Company Scenic Workshop and Rehearsal Room, 20 Feb-15 March. Directed by Corey McMahon (Eh Joe), Geordie Brookman (Footfalls), and Nescha Jelk (Krapp’s Last Tape); SmallWaR: SKaGeN, Space Theatre, 2-4 March. Written and performed by Valentijn Dhaenens; La Merda: </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Marta Ceresoli, Richard Jordan Productions, and Produzioni Fuorivia, </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Space Theatre, 5-8 March. Written by Cristina Ceresoli, performed by Silvia Gallerano; riverrun: TheEmergencyRoom, </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dunstan Playhouse, 26 Feb-2 March. A</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">dapted, directed, and performed by Olwen Fouéré. </span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhamte37sH0s3WjBfRkeKQ7czVXvFCxDW5qilNdAgwr3y9QO_iI_u8vpXd-dAlr7ZhEuYUxdth2EqOpBoiW6OoZLtLSTmCPfyDJrNG_Y9kHlcbVTpi6pxnMvPp0b1TuF1hlr-FSeX9LGvk/s1600/Paul+Blackwell+in+Eh+Joe+as+part+of+Beckett+Triptych+%C2%A9Shane+Reid.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhamte37sH0s3WjBfRkeKQ7czVXvFCxDW5qilNdAgwr3y9QO_iI_u8vpXd-dAlr7ZhEuYUxdth2EqOpBoiW6OoZLtLSTmCPfyDJrNG_Y9kHlcbVTpi6pxnMvPp0b1TuF1hlr-FSeX9LGvk/s1600/Paul+Blackwell+in+Eh+Joe+as+part+of+Beckett+Triptych+%C2%A9Shane+Reid.JPG" height="425" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Shane Reid</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Whether through the vagaries of curatorial
taste, the spectre of economic austerity, or some untraceable shift in the
theatrical ether, the actor in brutal isolation – tethered almost solely by
text to stages dimly lit and emptied of relieving or easily symbolic dressing –
dominated this year’s Adelaide Festival of the Arts.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></o:p></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Beckett
Triptych</span></b><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The State Theatre Company of SA’s offering,
Beckett Triptych, locates its three onstage soloists – Pamela Rabe (Footfalls),
Paul Blackwell (Eh Joe) and Peter Carroll (Krapp’s Last Tape) – within the
crepuscular atmospherics of the Company’s subterranean Scenic Workshop and
Rehearsal Room spaces. The audience, ushered between venues like visitors to
the underworld, is divided in half for the first two ‘dramaticules’, which run
twice in succession, then reunited post-interval for the climactic Krapp.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">In Eh Joe, we watch through a scrim as
Blackwell, in his ‘stinking old wrapper’ of worn dressing gown and slippers, shuffles
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">paranoiacally around Ailsa Paterson’s monochromatic, vaguely fabulist set
that telescopes weirdly towards an upstage door. He checks under the bed – no
monsters there – then slumps onto its end, submitting to some expected but
unspoken consequence of bringing his body to rest. There he remains in silence
for the remainder of the play as a woman’s disembodied voice (Rabe) torments
him about his lascivious past and barren present, her clipped, accusatory voice
an aural waterboarding. Joe’s face, crumpled and impassive, is projected via a
video camera onto the scrim in a series of increasingly extreme close-ups.
Finally, just his eyes – unnervingly massive and miraculously unblinking – fill
the screen, windows onto a soul in ineffable anguish. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Director Corey McMahon’s montaging of live action and projected image,
though not innovative (Canadian film-maker Atom Egoyan employed both scrim and
video feed in his 2006 production for Beckett’s centenary celebrations), is
nevertheless an effective solution to staging a play originally written for
television, its disturbing intimatisation of a mind under remorseless psychic
assault undiminished by the shift in medium.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Like Joe, Footfalls’ May is persecuted by ghosts from a neurotically
reproduced past; the present, as a result, is rendered a sleepless purgatory.
‘Will you never have done…’ the voice of May’s mother (Sandy Gore) asks in the
low, drawn-out timbre the characters familially share, ‘revolving it all? In
your poor mind’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Rabe looks like the ‘tangle of tatters’ to which May elliptically refers,
face drawn and pallid, hair overlong and disheveled (the only mistake is the Victorian-style
dress, a too elaborate and loaded an interpretation of Beckett’s call for a
‘worn grey wrap’). But for the audible, mathematical tread of her feet on the
worn strip of floor beneath her, Rabe is spectral in Ben Flett’s narrow,
starkly contrastive lighting. She looks, occasionally, monstrous as she leans
disfiguringly out of the light, or like the tortured figure in Munch’s The
Scream as her mouth yawns soundlessly open. Here, perhaps more than in any of
Beckett’s other short plays, the role of the director is akin to that of a
conductor – the rhythmical progression implied by the play’s title and inherent
in its text demands to be both physically and verbally realised – and in this
Geordie Brookman keeps time admirably.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s somewhat mystifying that Footfalls is followed in the triptych not
by That Time, written specifically to accompany it, but Krapp’s Last Tape, the longest
and most familiar of Beckett’s shorter plays for the stage. It stands apart
from the other two pieces presented here in other ways too, namely that Krapp’s
private perdition (for what are each of these plays but inversions of Sartre’s
dictum that hell is other people?) is ultimately, if incompletely,
reconcilable: ‘Perhaps my best years are gone,’ he says, ‘but I wouldn’t want
them back. Not with the fire in me now’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This impression is strengthened by Carroll’s performance as Krapp, in
which, under the direction of Nescha Jelk, the clowning Beckett minimized in his
later revisions of the play is fully reinstated. The result is a slightly fussy,
childlike Krapp, less visibly haunted than in many previous incarnations that,
however unreliably remembered, cannot be easily forgotten – Patrick Magee, John
Hurt. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While at times I yearned for more of the gravitas those actors brought to
the part, at least neither Carroll nor Jelk mistake ponderousness for insight,
a trap both lesser and greater interpreters of Beckett have succumbed to. The
production’s one true shortcoming is Paterson’s overdesigned set, a crudely
symbolic and needlessly focus-pulling array of middens on trolleys that
threatens to overwhelm the only detritus of moment, that of the ultimate unreconstructed
hoarder, the human mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">SmallWaR<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It is the body, at least at first, that is the
site of trauma in SmallWaR, a companion piece to Belgian writer/performer
Valentijn Dhaenens’ BigMouth that substitutes the earlier play’s cast of powerful,
militant orators – Patton, Goebbels, George W. Bush – for one of doomed youth,
ordinary soldiers destined to die, in Wilfred Owen’s words, ‘as cattle’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">A truncated gurney is wheeled onto the
stage in front of a giant scrim by Dhaenens, dressed in the starchy, army green
uniform of a World War I nurse. Fixed to the bed is a flat screen TV on which
pre-recorded vision plays: Dhaenens again, this time a limbless, prostrate soldier,
only his head and shoulders visible atop crisp white sheets. He is silent and
motionless. The nurse sings softly: ‘There was a boy, a very special boy’.
Multiple, ghostlike duplicates of the soldier peel away and cross the stage to
answer a phone, the almost seamless transition between video and projection
stunning. On the other end of the line are fathers, mothers, lovers – each
voiced with skilful differentiation by Dhaenens – who, as with the letters and
memoirs which form the basis of much of the script, wrestle with war’s
teleology as well as its lived reality. ‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">When you look death in the face,’ one of the
soldiers muses, ‘do you think of democracy, freedom and honour?’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is,
refreshingly, little here in the way of simplistic anti-warism, but a late,
awkward turn into a seemingly unironical jingoism – evidenced by, for example,
the appearance of the words ‘It is sweet and right to die for your country’ –
propels the work too far in the opposite direction. It was Owen, after all, who
called Horace’s phrase, originally set down in Latin in Odes, ‘the old
lie’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">La
Merda</span></b><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">A woman (Silvia Gallerano) perches naked on
the edge of a tall, pedestal-like chair, clutching a microphone into which she
is mumbling the words of what sounds like</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> the</span><span lang="EN-GB"> Italian national
anthem. Her lips, quivering and almost cartoonish, are bright red, her body
pale and unforgivingly exposed in the cold glare of multiple spotlights. ‘Yes
I’m a small one,’ she says, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pianissimo</i>,
in the first of the three movements (and one counter-movement, ‘Italy’) that
make up Cristian Ceresoli’s monologue, ‘and I’ve got these thighs of mine but
still I never quit and never give up’. An actor in desperate pursuit of fame
whose fascist father killed himself when she was thirteen, she has the
rusted-on look of someone on the verge of a breakdown or, perhaps, a
breakthrough that never quite arrives. The howling, narcissistic crescendos
(‘me, me, me, meeeeeee’) that end each movement, plunging the theatre into
darkness and silence, presage a negation of the self that can only be brief and
temporary – the ego, insatiably hungry, must always return to cannibalise its
host.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3fbZYf7MRrNLdd9RbJ-2rmYvaA6vYxQly7C77TtSE2dnctyePLolFtFsUVxUgvxuIzHV-7QJpVOpq3ai5GY1d1iwwL-_GZkmaNeQJKhLMcd57F70NqZ9VnPrqF7ZjdlgxFZpWlr_8BkI/s1600/600x600.fitdown.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3fbZYf7MRrNLdd9RbJ-2rmYvaA6vYxQly7C77TtSE2dnctyePLolFtFsUVxUgvxuIzHV-7QJpVOpq3ai5GY1d1iwwL-_GZkmaNeQJKhLMcd57F70NqZ9VnPrqF7ZjdlgxFZpWlr_8BkI/s1600/600x600.fitdown.jpg" height="424" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Valeria Tomasulo</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">La Merda (in English, The Shit) is not,
however, merely an atomistic study of neurotic obsession with body image and celebrity.
It reveals, through the actor’s grotesque evocations of various men – an odious
TV director, her father, sexual predators in school and on the subway – a
culture of nationalistic masculinity that connects the Italy of Garibaldi to
those of Mussolini and Berlusconi, a lineage that traces the country’s journey
from, in Pasolinean terms, a fascist to a consumerist totalitarianism. ‘The
male sex our flag, the male sex our flag,’ Gallerano spits at the conclusion of
the monologue before clothing her body in a green, white and red flag – an
ambivalent gesture freighted with both embracement and resistance. A charged
silence hardens, after what seems like a minute or more, into a standing
ovation that justly rewards a performance of startling intensity and import.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></o:p></span></b><b><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">riverrun<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Olwen Fou</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">r</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">, adapter, director and performer of
this one-woman interpretation of the voice of the river in Finnegans Wake, has
described James Joyce’s modernist apogee – ‘admired more often than read, when
read rarely through to the end, when read through to the end not often fully,
or even partially, understood’, according to Anthony Burgess – as ‘a seam of
dark matter somewhere between energy and form, music and language: the trace of
a boat on an endlessly changing surface’. Fou</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">r</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é, in a virtually uninterrupted monologue that freely
splices together passages from all over Joyce’s infamously sprawling text, is
at once vessel and waterway, embodying both the river’s sinuous, dreamlike
course that ultimately circles back on itself (the novel’s final sentence,
which has no period, leads back to its first word, riverrun, which has no
initial capital) and the shadowy characters who drift and drown in its currents.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></o:p></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">C</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">oiled, shifting like a prizefighter on the balls of
her feet, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Fou</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">r</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é begins with a dawn
prayer, three words in Sanskrit that are found in Finnegans Wake at the opening
of Book IV, the beginning of the novel’s final section: ‘Sandhyas! Sandhyas!
Sandhyas!’ The jagged stand of </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Fou</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">r</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é’s microphone and its lead’s tracing of the edges of a vast patch of
chalk evoke the uncertain, meandering quality of the flow of bodies of water, but
it is the topographies of the body and of language that are foregrounded here.
Joyce’s multilingual, polysyllabic wordplay is given endlessly fluid shape by </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Fou</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">r</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é’s sinewy, gestural physicality and almost
schizophrenic vocalisations. She hisses, growls, murmurs, sings, and, quite
literally, breathes the river – Dublin’s Liffey, personified in Finnegans Wake
in the character of Anna Livia Plurabelle – into life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">The elusiveness of
Joyce’s text is unquestionably amplified in its transition to the stage. The audience
member, unlike the reader, never has the luxury of pausing its inexorable flow
to dig deeper into its strata of meaning, or to fully unpack its complex puns
or allusions to Irish history. But, as Beckett, a close friend and aide of
Joyce’s, noted, ‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">[Joyce's]
writing is not <i>about</i> something; <i>it is that something itself</i>”.
That <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">something</i> is, in essence, a
dream conveyed through language rendered as music, and it is in the splendid,
endless noise of Fou</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">r</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é’s furious unintelligibility that the pleasures of riverrun arise.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i> An edited version of this review appeared in RealTime issue #126.</i></span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-47807589531836987272014-09-08T16:52:00.000+09:302014-09-08T16:55:45.885+09:30On theatre, magic and faith<i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A talk I gave on Saturday at the Emerging Writers' Festival in Adelaide. I spoke alongside playwright Phillip Kavanagh and critic Jane Howard, who chaired the subsequent panel discussion.</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A good friend of mine who is a theatre director confided in me recently – he wasn’t sure if he liked theatre or not. He’s still very young, younger than me, and I think I’d asked him whether or not he wanted to keep on directing plays. I was taken aback at first – where was his commitment, his passion, his undying belief in the transformative power of the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd? And then I remembered – I’d heard this sort of thing before. In hushed tones in theatre foyers mainly, but also on university campuses, in rehearsal rooms and bars. </span></div>
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The same sentiment popped up in <a href="https://australianplays.org/making-theatre" target="_blank">a recent essay</a> by Back to Back Theatre’s Bruce Gladwin and in a book I’d started to read, Darren O’Donnell’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Social-Acupuncture-Darren-ODonnell/dp/1552451704" target="_blank">Social Acupuncture</a>. Gladwin, to be clear, loves making theatre – he was reflecting on people he had worked with who apparently do not. Then there is the case of one of Australia’s most important playwrights, Patrick White. Andrew Fuhrmann wrote of White in <a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/108-november-2013-no-356/1695-a-theatre-of-his-own" target="_blank">an essay for the Australian Book Review last year</a> that: “as a playwright he offers that intriguing combination of profoundly felt obsession and frustration with the stage.” Another 20th century literary light, Dennis Potter, was so frustrated by the stage that he never bothered to write for it at all. The loss was, undoubtedly, the theatre’s.</div>
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But there must have been a reason White continued to write for the stage, even as his plays continued to be met with puzzlement and indifference by critics and audiences. Playwrights, it seems to me, are uniquely bad at articulating what it is about their chosen form of expression that makes them want to keep doing it. I’ve never heard a novelist say that they doubt whether a novel can change the world, or a filmmaker say that they suspect the cinema can’t tell the sorts of stories they want to tell. If anything, arts makers in other fields seem to have an inflated sense of the value of what they do. </div>
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In his essay, Fuhrmann wrote that what White wanted from theatre was “magic and dreams and, where the magic was potent enough, love, the kind of world-consuming love that exceeds the scope of the stage and justifies the theatre as a place of worship and enlightenment: a place to nurture faith and the inner life, and a place to renew our vision of the world.” White expressed this himself in a monologue from his virtually forgotten play Shepherd on the Rocks: “Are you for magic? I am. Inadmissible when we are taught to believe in science or nothing. Nothing is better. Science may explode in our faces. So I am for magic. For dream. For love.”</div>
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Would it be somehow sacrilegious, then, to think about where our love for theatre comes from – the science, if you will, behind our dazzlement in the face of its enchantments? Human beings have always been attracted to magical explanations but it seems to me that theatre makers fail themselves, the art form and the culture if we cannot or will not communicate its distinctive pull. Yes, the bad plays and professional disappointments wear us down. That’s the easy bit. They are the excuses that are always close at hand. But just as good criticism must always have more to do with love than hate, even when its subject is the most flawed art, so the act, the ritual of making theatre demands that we think the world of it and that it, in turn, may deliver us as much. You have got to be for magic.</div>
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“Playwrights,” the critic <a href="http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/patrick-white-playwright.html" target="_blank">Alison Croggon has said</a>, “differ from other writers because the demands of their form are different. Writing a play requires another kind of imagination to that of a novel: a precise sense of the spatial dynamics of a stage, a musical intuition for the rhythms of spoken language, a certain fondness for the necessary vulgarities and strict limitations of theatre. Above all, a playwright is a writer who collaborates.”</div>
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Croggon also reminds us of a neglected point of difference between playwrights and other kinds of writers: their literariness. In the hands of White’s detractors the word was a weapon but it need not have been. Text-based theatre makes the stage a uniquely concentrated and gymnastic site for the written word – playwrights should not be afraid to say so. If I was asked to remind myself of why I still want to write for the stage I would perhaps think of one of those many moments I’ve sat in a dark, bare theatre and watched a world be born in front of me: Aston’s monologue in Pinter’s Caretaker, those weird harmonies of interweaving lines in Bovell’s Speaking in Tongues, Mark Antony’s wrenching eulogy for Caesar by Shakespeare. Yes, such moments are group efforts – writer, director, actor, designer all contribute – but it is the words that light the fire that wards off the darkness.</div>
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It is moments like these that I think theatre makers have to get better at articulating, or at least acknowledging. They intoxicate in a way that, for me at least, is unique, and never fails to send me drunkenly back to the keyboard to do better. When I think of these moments, the question of why anybody would still want to make theatre starts to seem less like a question than an evasion. What else is there?</div>
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For all the ways theatre frustrates those who make it – the realpolitik it cannot seem to change, those ‘necessary vulgarities and strict limitations’ it cannot seem to free itself from – there is a nakedness to it, an almost gladiatorial way of being exposed that makes it a special proving ground for writers. The rewards, when they come, are received by the audience as much as by the playwright. Only a play has ever made me want to run screaming into the street outside from some terrifyingly but brilliantly revealed truth. Hold onto moments like those and you’ll never forget why you always seem to end up back in the auditorium, waiting for the lights to go down and the magic to begin again. </div>
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Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-18860571071412306242014-07-21T18:07:00.000+09:302014-07-23T16:27:14.489+09:30Review: 'Man in a Bag'<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Polygraph Collective, Holden Street Theatres, 18
July-2 August 2014. Written by Emily Steel. Directed by Tiffany Lyndall-Knight
and Ben Roberts.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">On 23 August 2010, a policeman
entered a top-floor flat in upmarket Pimlico, central London. He was there on a
‘welfare check’, the flat’s occupant, 32-year-old Gareth Williams, having not
been heard from by his work colleagues for several days. There was no sign of
trouble. In fact, on the contrary, the flat was immaculate; books smartly
stacked, multiple iPhones and an Apple notebook neatly arranged on a table. By
contrast, the scene in the bathroom mirrored something out of a horror film: in
the bath was a sports bag locked from the outside and, within it, contorted so
much that the policeman thought at first its arms and legs had been cut off,
the decomposing body of Gareth Williams. How Williams – a brilliant though
reclusive mathematician who, at the time of his death, was working for Britain’s
Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) – had come to lose his life under such
bizarre circumstances became the subject of multiple, inconclusive inquiries
and, now, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Man in a Bag</i>, a new play by
Emily Steel. It is yet another contribution to the thick fog of speculation
which continues to surround the case.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">During the course of Steel’s play
we are introduced, largely through a succession of mono- and duologues, to
characters both central and ancillary to Williams’ life: his garrulous landlady
(Chrissie Page), two uniformed cops (Tiffany Lyndall-Knight and Lochlin
Maybury), a possibly jilted shop assistant (Sara Lange), his grieving sister
(Holly Myers) who cannot find closure. Each summons not only an alternative interpretation
of Williams’ final days, but also a different version of the man himself,
echoing the British media’s feverish conjecture as to the kind of person he was
– closeted homosexual, workaholic public servant, sexual pervert, suicidal
loner. Williams himself makes an appearance (Sam Calleja) and even he is not
above a little rumour-making, running through multiple scenarios of his own
death which take in girlfriend-impressing pranksterism, a fatally misconceived
attempt to emulate Harry Houdini’s escapology, and a John le Carr</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;">é-esque</span><span lang="EN-GB"> conspiracy
that involves him being overwhelmed in his own flat by two enemy agents. Williams
tells us, though, that this last theory is completely implausible and we are
left, once again, with few facts, still adrift in a morass of unanswered
questions.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It is no wonder that Steel felt
drawn to this story whose, to quote Hanna Arendt, ‘possibilities are endless,
unlimited by reason and unhampered by knowledge.’ Strange it is, then, that the
play runs to a mere 55 minutes and ends up feeling shallow as a result, a work
composed of flashing surfaces that always keeps the audience at arms-length,
grimly intrigued by the emergent details but never sufficiently invested in
their stakes. There are numerous, juicy aspects of the Williams case which are
never considered in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Man in a Bag</i>; I
couldn’t help but wonder how many of these Steel may have been able to work
into a longer and, in all likelihood, more substantial play. As one example, it
is never touched on that Williams’ work brought him into contact with Russian,
Turkish and Chinese cyber crime gangs as well as Islamist terror groups and a
host of potentially murderous lone criminals and extremists.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Unfortunate design decisions, as
well as some tentative direction by Ben Roberts and Tiffany Lyndall-Knight,
undercut what Steel is able to achieve despite the play’s brevity. The British
canvas of the original events is swapped out for an indeterminate setting that,
confusingly, includes SAPOL uniforms (costume designer Olivia Freear) and a combination of Australian and English
accents. Steel’s script sticks too closely to the Williams story to make this
globalised orientation work, and too much colour is drained from the production
through the loss of the distinctively British details which fleck the real-life
events on which the play is based – Harrods, MI6, even the familiar stiff upper
lip/kinky duality of the British bureaucracy. There are other problems: the
portable screens that comprise the set rustle distractingly every time they are moved (set designer Olivia Zanchetta), and Callan Fleming’s sound design is much too quiet throughout. There
are, on the other hand, strong performances from the entire cast who appear to
revel in the extended soloing that Steel’s monologue-heavy script enables.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">The most recent inquest into
Gareth Williams’ death, conducted by the Metropolitan Police, concluded late
last year that the man in a bag had died alone and by accident. The verdict is
sure to reenergise the conspiracy-minded who all along have been saying that a
cover-up has taken place. I hope, too, that Steel has a fresh surge of
inspiration in the near future, so that she might return to her treatment of
this fascinating mystery and to find more flesh for its bones, and more space
for its limbs to fully stretch out. There is, I feel sure, a very good play here –
but it is still waiting to be let out of the bag.</span> </span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-200415398150235102014-06-10T10:44:00.000+09:302014-07-16T09:13:58.297+09:30Australian politics and the English language<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It was Julia Gillard who began
the retrogression in Australian politics on the question of Israeli breaches of
international law. Only under pressure from her cabinet did Prime Minister
Gillard in 2012 reconsider her intention to oppose a UN resolution to upgrade
Palestine’s status in the General Assembly. Gillard’s preferred position would
have seen Australia marginalised within a US-led, stridently pro-Tel Aviv
minority of the international community. (Gillard apparently had no qualms
about the Vatican’s holding of the same ‘non-member observer status’ that
Palestine were seeking, and eventually won. Perhaps she needed reminding that
the ‘non-observer status’ was created specially for the Vatican – a single-religion
enclave that was unilaterally dreamed into existence by fascist Italy in 1929
and undoubtedly has far less of a claim to increased UN recognition than
Palestine.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is no need to rehearse here
Bob Carr’s condemnation of the influence Melbourne’s ‘pro-Israel lobby’ allegedly
had on Gillard while she was PM. She was a politician of strong, if often
seemingly contradictory, personal convictions; an atheist in an unconventional
relationship who did not support gay marriage, a woman vocally proud of her
British heritage but at the same time a fierce supporter of the Australia-US
alliance. It is, I suspect, the latter that had the most to do with Gillard’s favoured
position on the Palestinian vote than any undue (and unproven) influence of
Jewish-Australian lobbyists.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Which brings us to the present
government, led by the even more determined and altogether more paradoxically US-enamoured
anglophile Tony Abbott. Last week, the Abbott government quietly announced it
would no longer be using the word ‘occupied’ when referring to Israeli
settlements in East Jerusalem. George Brandis told a Senate estimates hearing
that to characterise the settlements in this way was ‘judgmental’, ‘pejorative’
and ‘unhelpful’. Why is this shift in language significant? Because, as George
Orwell knew almost 70 years ago, it is, like all political language, designed
to ‘make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance
of solidity to pure wind’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The UN, the International Court
of Justice and the International Committee of the Red Cross are all in
agreement: the establishment of settlements in territories that have been
occupied – what other word is there for it? – by Israel since the Six-Day War
is illegal under international law. It is no more pejorative or judgmental to
say this than it is to say that Ronnie Biggs was a thief. On the other hand, we
know that the Coalition has form in the area of pointedly dissembling language.
It has routinely used incorrect and prejudicial language to paint asylum
seekers as criminals. This is a government that understands all too well
Orwell’s belief in the power of language to shape our perceptions of reality.
Our leaders insist upon these tiny revolutions in the language when they
suddenly glimpse a reality that holds no further political mileage for them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The pure wind that blew through
the Senate hearing last Thursday had the goal of making murder respectable. The
military occupation of the Palestinian territories has resulted in the deaths
of thousands of Palestinians. The notorious saturation bombing of Gaza that
began in December 2008 claimed the lives of over a thousand civilians alone.
Daily, the occupation guarantees the humiliation, oppression and bullying of
countless Palestinian men, women and children. Israel’s night-time terror raids
go on, as does the detention of children who may, or may not, have thrown
stones at heavily armed and armoured Israeli soldiers. Not only does Brandis’
announcement fly in the face of reality – it flies in the face humanity.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">Moreover, it should not be seen
as an aberration, only an isolated case of overzealous pro-Americanism, but rather
as part of the Abbott Government’s wider project to soft-peddle gross human
rights violations when it is politically expedient to do so. The combined
commentary of Abbott and Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop on the Sri
Lankan civil war and its aftermath has been consistently mendacious. In
November last year at Colombo’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (which
was boycotted by countries including India and Canada), Abbott dismissed Sri
Lanka’s complicity in war crimes with a Rumsfeldian ‘</span><span lang="EN-US">sometimes in difficult circumstances difficult things happen’. Bishop,
meanwhile, wanted us to see the Sri Lankan situation ‘in context’, and to
forget that the country’s sitting president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, is accused of
the massacres of Tamil civilians and captured Tamil Tiger militants. None of
this, of course, has anything to do with the necessity of having Rajapaksa on
side in order for the Abbott Government’s refugee policy to remain intact.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The UN has already rebuked us over our breaches of
refugee convention. We are now, I think, at serious risk of becoming an
international pariah, not only far out of step with global political consensuses
on any number of critical human rights issues, but with reality itself. Is
there anything we won’t deny, downplay or rechristen in the name of a
short-term political fix?</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-58346076811255363102014-05-12T10:05:00.001+09:302014-05-13T14:44:57.115+09:30The Five Stages of Conservative Broken Promise Denial<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -18pt;">1. D</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -18pt;">eny that any promises made pre-election by the Abbott Government have been
broken. (From the man himself, December 2013: </span><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: -18pt;">‘There have
been no broken promises and there will be no broken promises under this
government.’) It helps, when referring to the new taxes the Abbott Government has or is going to introduce and which represent clear breaches of pre-election commitments, to refer to them by any other name: levy, excise, impost, Bette Midler.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -18pt;">2. A</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -18pt;">ccept that <i>one </i>or <i>some </i>promises <i>may</i> have been broken, but claim that the ‘mess left by Labor’ necessitated
it. (Source: everybody on the right).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: -18pt;">3. A</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -18pt;">ccept that promises have indeed
been broken, but that it’s not really a big deal when the Coalition does it. (‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: -18pt;">Election promises,’
Institute of Public Affairs stalwart Chris Berg tells us, ‘are there for the breaking.’)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: -18pt;">4. A</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -18pt;">ccept that many promises have
been broken, but the only one that actually mattered was that the Abbott Government would ‘fix the budget.’ (Cue Tony Shepherd, chairman of the
Commission of Audit: </span><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: -18pt;">‘They did make one iron-clad promise: to return the budget to a
sustainable surplus. And in my view that trumps all.’)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: -18pt;">5. L</span><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: -18pt;">ather,
rinse, repeat.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Selected
links:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Abbott's new world record: 25 broken
promises in 150 days<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/abbotts-new-world-record-25-broken-promises-in-150-days,6145">http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/abbotts-new-world-record-25-broken-promises-in-150-days,6145</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Election promises are there for the
breaking<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://ipa.org.au/news/3091/election-promises-are-there-for-the-breaking">http://ipa.org.au/news/3091/election-promises-are-there-for-the-breaking</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Has Tony Abbott gone mad?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.smh.com.au/comment/has-tony-abbott-gone-mad-20140511-zr9io.html">http://www.smh.com.au/comment/has-tony-abbott-gone-mad-20140511-zr9io.html</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Commission of Audit in a nutshell:
ideology over evidence<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2014/may/05/ideology-over-evidence-commission-audit-nutshell">http://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2014/may/05/ideology-over-evidence-commission-audit-nutshell</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-29419259136364707272014-04-25T14:20:00.000+09:302014-04-25T14:30:16.102+09:30Review: 2014 Adelaide Festival<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 17.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Roman Tragedies: </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Toneelgroep, Festival Theatre, 28 Feb-2 March 2014. Directed by Ivo Van Hove. Based on the plays of William Shakespeare; BigMouth: SKaGeN, Queen's Theatre, 27 Feb-3 March 2014. Directed and performed by Valentijn Dhaenens; Blackout: Stone/Castro, AC Arts Main Theatre, 3-9 March 2014. Conceptualised, written and directed by Paulo Castro; Girl Asleep: Windmill Theatre, Space Theatre, 28 Feb-15 March 2014. </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Written by Matthew Whittet. Directed by Rosemary Myers.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3o1RdO9WeI60ZQhUyuMA8GdD0mtxcFGptlVRzUqMMmgM3msFuN2L06noC1EBxG1fuiM2FxVXSKP7tX-gn5rtL5T68k1_vm3Wu5tKgjGj3eUukN9-UeIAofbD75_wmoNzecvVPY6Bue6Y/s1600/IMG_0433.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3o1RdO9WeI60ZQhUyuMA8GdD0mtxcFGptlVRzUqMMmgM3msFuN2L06noC1EBxG1fuiM2FxVXSKP7tX-gn5rtL5T68k1_vm3Wu5tKgjGj3eUukN9-UeIAofbD75_wmoNzecvVPY6Bue6Y/s1600/IMG_0433.JPG" height="298" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: the author</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In 2013 David Sefton’s theatre program for his first
of four Adelaide Festivals was noted for its emphasis on the interactive and
interdisciplinary. Belgium company Ontroerend’s immersive trilogy – The Smile
Off Your Face, Internal and A Game Of You – came to define the program in the
eyes of many, its intimacy challenging long-established expectations of the
size and spectacle of the Festival’s offerings.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Although this year’s theatre program continued to lean
heavily towards the Western canon, a marked return to scale was felt by this
writer in Toneelgroep’s titanic Shakespearian anthology Roman Tragedies, the
expansive arc of Windmill’s coming of age trilogy, and the vast historical-political
sweeps of SKaGeN’s BigMouth and Stone/Castro’s Blackout.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Roman Tragedies</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are
run consecutively, chronologically and without interval in Toneelgroep’s
six-hour reimagining of Shakespeare’s unofficial trilogy of Roman histories.
Director Ivo Van Hove has stripped away the poetry of the original plays and,
with translator Tom Kleijn and dramaturges Bart van den Eynde, Jan Peter
Gerrits and Alexander Schreuder, pared the dialogue back to a crisp,
utilitarian plain English (via surtitles translated from the original Dutch). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Part television studio, part airport departure lounge,
Jan Versweyveld’s set, which reaches deeply into the wings of the Festival
Theatre, transforms Shakespeare’s mouldering halls of imperial power into a
sort of drab, corporatised purgatory. The stage, around which the audience are
invited to more or less freely move after the first set change, is equipped
with television screens running 24-hour news channels, computers on which
audience members can tweet (‘Coriolanus just got banished from Rome. Damn. His
Mum’s angry’) and two functioning snack bars. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The contrast between the production’s sweep and
duration and its emphasis on an individualistic, social media-informed
experience is intriguing, simultaneously bloating and anatomising the drama.
Witnessed from the auditorium, much of Coriolanus plays out like an unusually
compelling press conference, but the view from the stage, despite the proximity
of the performers, is fractured and unstable. The action is always partially
obscured, either by elements of the set or other audience members, and the
search for optimally readable surtitles amongst the dozen or so strategically
arranged screens is sometimes frustrating. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The audience is positioned as the denizens of this
new, information-overloaded Rome, snatching at supposedly sense-making updates
and relief-giving gossip as hungrily as the ‘rabble of plebeians’ that sets the
events of Coriolanus in motion does for corn. The plays’ numerous wars and
annexations are familiarly distant, signified not by the movement of swords and
armies but by sound and vision: pounding music and a news ticker. We could be
watching Fox News on the eve of the Iraq war. Our contemporary impotence is
given a freshly chilling dimension by the audience’s powerless proximity to Shakespeare’s
ruling classes who, in Van Hove’s production, die as the politicians of our own
times die – publicly and bloodlessly, arraigned, photographed, and finally vanished
for our grim pleasure. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">All three plays are distinguished by remarkable
performances <span style="color: #262626;">but, for me, Coriolanus most
rewardingly benefitted from Van Hove’s consummate ensemble, giving us Gijs
Scholten van Aschat’s viciously anti-civil title character and Frieda Pittoors’
calculating but earthy Volumnia, Coriolanus’ mother. Their relationship is
fascinating, a dynamic power play between intellectual equals that contains none
of the camp or soft misogyny of earlier interpretations. If the other two
plays, with the exception of Hans Kesting’s Mark Antony whose tear-drenched eulogy
for Caesar is a mid-show highpoint, are not as resoundingly successful, it may
be that the unbroken, saturating tides of these histories begin to conflate,
challenging the audience’s ability to fully engage with so much information. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Roman Tragedies is, nevertheless, an
almost wholly successful marriage of innovative design and gutsy, exacting
performances which refreshes Shakespeare’s plays for an era marked by the
escalating tension between our technology-powered connectedness and our anxiety
about our political emasculation in the face of increasingly hermetic state and
corporate arrangements. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>BigMouth</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Also offering a broad historical vista this Festival,
albeit on a radically reduced scale, was Belgian actor Valentijn Dhaenens in
the one-man BigMouth. Dressed in nondescript business attire, Dhaenens uses
whole or partial speeches to fashion a performative mashup in the guise of a
lecture. The names of the original speakers are scrawled on a digitised blackboard
and disappear each time Dhaenens progresses. The conceit is simple and
consistent, disrupted only by tenuously linked period songs that are performed
live and, notwithstanding the assistance of loops, a cappella.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Taking in Ancient Greece and Rome (Pericles, Socrates,
Cicero), Nazi-occupied Europe (Goebbels, Patton), colonial Africa (Lumumba) and
post-9/11 America (George W. Bush) the speeches cover vast geographical, historical
and thematic terrain. What is less than clear is what ties these disparities
together. Though skillfully performed by Dhaenens, who is bilingual and an
impressive mimic in multiple languages, the lack of a binding schema reduces
BigMouth’s impact. Moreover, not all of the speeches are great or even good;
Coulter’s is especially conspicuous, not only because it is the sole
contribution by a woman but also because it is entirely unremarkable, an
asinine anti-Muslim diatribe by a mediocre politician. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There are discernible subtexts – the ebb and flow of
democracy over time, racism and colonialism, what Samuel P. Huntington and
others have termed ‘The Clash of Civilisations’ – but perhaps it is the
omissions that do the most to prevent an intelligible through line. I wasn’t
sure what to make of the absence of women, or why none of the speeches touched
on the Cold War despite the predominance of 20<sup>th</sup> century material.
At times, as when Dhaenens wickedly interweaves warmongering speeches by a
blustering Patton and a frighteningly serene Goebbels, BigMouth seems close to
forming a useful critique of oratorical power, but the production remained for
this writer an unsatisfying and opaque experience. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Blackout</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Having interviewed Portuguese theatre maker Paulo
Castro, one half of Adelaide-based duo Stone/Castro, for RT 119, I was prepared
to be confronted by Blackout, an interdisciplinary work for dancers and actors
inspired by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Instead, I found the
production to be a defiantly playful one, ironical and full of textual and
choreographic eccentricity.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A young couple, played by dancers Alisdair Macindoe
and Larissa McGowan, is to be married on a sailboat amidst a disparate group of
guests which includes the groom’s father (Stephen Sheehan), a kurta–wearing
bohemian, the mysterious Portuguese best man (John Romao), and a wannabe rock
‘n’ roller (Nathan O’Keefe). A series of unexplained power cuts throw the
wedding into a state of chaos as each of the guests attempts to make a speech
in praise of the increasingly estranged bride and groom.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Castro’s text, translated from Portuguese into English
by Joao Vaz, is sharp and funny, full of bitterly satirical takedowns of middle
class pretensions. Conversely, some of the jokes – such as O’Keefe’s
character’s inability to stop talking long enough to perform his song ‘Shandy’
– are stretched well beyond tolerability, and the surrealness of speeches by
the bride (on aliens) and Charlotte Rose’s waitress (on the killing of her
ex-lover’s dog) are vexing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In Blackout’s final moments the best man, having
stripped to his waist and partially cross-dressed, assumes a Christ-like
posture as water laps at his outstretched arms and legs, the rest of the guests
having presumably made it to safety. Daniel Worm’s precise lighting ensures the
image, like many others in the play, is striking, but its significance is
obscure, as its relationship to the rest of a production which up until that
point has been predicated on skewering rather than indulging in high-flown
posturing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Girl Asleep</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">With its
late 70s aesthetic, disco- and hair rock-mining soundtrack, and nods to Jim
Henson’s Labyrinth, Girl Asleep digs deeply into Generation X nostalgia to
produce a brash, filmic and spikily postmodern take on the transition from
female adolescence to womanhood. It is one of three stylistically consistent
plays penned by Matthew Whittet for South Australian children’s theatre company
Windmill which, together with Fugitive and School Dance, form an unofficial
coming of age trilogy, performed together for the first time during the
Festival at the invitation of artistic director David Sefton.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Girl
Asleep’s fourteen-year-old heroine, Greta (Ellen Steele), is, like most of the
trilogy’s protagonists, an unfashionable teenager on the undesired cusp of
adulthood. In a subtle recasting of the trope of the older, wiser sibling who
assists the younger in navigating the transition, Greta’s sister (Jude
Henshall) cautions her not to fall asleep during the birthday party her parents
(Matthew Whittet and Amber McMahon) have organised for her. Greta, of course,
falls asleep, and her burgeoning sexuality becomes the subtext of a series of
bizarre, sometimes scary and often funny encounters with fantastical humans and
subhumans including a witch, a goblin, and a younger version of herself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Girl
Asleep’s cross-generational appeal is built on various fronts: its unguarded
appropriation of familiar fairy-tale tropes, its knowingly silly pop culture
grabs and its conventions – faux slow motion action sequences, exaggerated
light and sound effects – which both mock and pay homage to contemporary
children’s cinema. If Girl Asleep’s mawkish ending errs a little too much on
the side of homage in its kid gloves treatment of Greta’s sexual awakening, the
young adults sitting either side of me did not appear to notice. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> <i>An edited version of this review appeared in RealTime issue #120.</i></span></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-48618251488901299162014-04-01T16:45:00.000+10:302014-04-01T17:01:42.468+10:30Two wheels good: in defence of urban cyclists<div class="MsoNormal">
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_cDMputSY_appz1-7MLXbAGhhMjWiaTawIswPgWTDE6yAImncDuJ-s2D2bZzxJr6Wzldj9zbeJFfCgYLFXNftbhQla_ruYWn-fDjrmHOAJUtSuJ4C22WURLgxr_Y-HuJ85LlQd3s_Qfs/s1600/DSCN2201.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_cDMputSY_appz1-7MLXbAGhhMjWiaTawIswPgWTDE6yAImncDuJ-s2D2bZzxJr6Wzldj9zbeJFfCgYLFXNftbhQla_ruYWn-fDjrmHOAJUtSuJ4C22WURLgxr_Y-HuJ85LlQd3s_Qfs/s1600/DSCN2201.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The author's girlfriend, on her way to menace Adelaide motorists </td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Why do so many people hate
cyclists? It’s a question that has both serious and less than serious answers,
but to my mind it’s the serious ones that are winning out. We seem to be living
in a time of increasing hostility towards those among us who opt for two wheels
over four, and I say that as someone who has neither owned or routinely used a
bicycle since the 1990s. (If anyone is interested, in primary school I was a
member of a bicycle-based gang called Slashed Spokes whose membership was
limited to desperately affable nerds. Our quest for notoriety in the badlands
of leafy middleclass suburbia proved futile, although it’s possible we once
terrorised an elderly magpie).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The urban cyclist has long been
the subject of ridicule, connecting generations of comedians from Monty Python
to Eddie Perfect. The latter’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoRuVyAL-h8%E2%80%8E" target="_blank">‘Self Righteous Cyclist’</a>, an unfunny grab bag of
clichés, encapsulates a view held by many: that urban cyclists are
lycra-wearing phonies more interested in their next fat-free latt<span style="color: black;">é</span> than their next kilometre on the bike.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Other critiques paint a more
ominous picture. With satire-proof silliness, a <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/editorials/the-menace-of-urban-cyclists/story-e6frg71x-1226860557764" target="_blank">recent editorial in the Australian</a> condemned city cyclists as ‘arrogant’ and ‘selfish’, and the
authorities as craven servants of cyclists’ lobby groups for extending bike
lines and putting up fines for people who open their car doors into cyclists.
The editorial came in the wake of a <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/police-urged-to-charge-passenger-after-cyclist-cardoored-in-cbd-20140318-34zr2.html" target="_blank">now infamous dooring incident</a> in
Melbourne’s CBD.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bicycle use in Australia is
increasing and so is the number of accidents involving cyclists. 2013 saw a 42
per cent spike in cyclist deaths across the country. It goes without saying
that such a statistic is not a laughing matter, but I doubt songs such as
Perfect’s reveal genuine malice. Much more troubling than the self righteous
cyclist is the self righteous motorist, if only because the laws of physics
dictate that the former will always come off – often literally – second best in any
collision with the latter.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The anti-cycling brigade would
have us believe that cyclists are forever breaking road laws and riding on
roads that they shouldn’t. I have never seen a cyclist run a red light; I have
seen the passenger of a car <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">deliberately </i>open
his door into a cyclist when both were stopped at a red light. Both the
passenger and driver laughed as they sped off, leaving the cyclist tottering
dangerously on a busy road. Within weeks of my partner taking up cycling for
her commute to work on Adelaide’s highly bike-friendly flat near-city roads,
she told me that at a succession of intersections a carload of young men had
yelled at her. This wasn’t a particularly high-spirited brand of wolf whistling,
she felt, but a concerted attempt to intimidate her into losing her balance.
Still, the Oz tells us, it is the cyclists who are the menaces on our roads.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">So what exactly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is </i>our problem with cyclists? Why, in
the words of Melbourne writer Doug Hendrie, do </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #0e0e0e;">drivers
<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-20/hendrie-better-bike-lanes-are-the-issue-not-dooring/5331078" target="_blank">‘reserve a particular savagery for cyclists’</a> that does not extend to other differently
wheeled forms of transport such as buses or trams? One answer </span><span lang="EN-GB">could lie in the fact that cyclists do more
for their bodies and more for the planet than the rest of us. One <a href="http://www.fietsberaad.nl/library/repository/bestanden/do_the_health_benefits_of_cycling_outweigh_the_risks.pdf" target="_blank">recent study</a>
has shown that transitioning from the car to the bike could add as much as 14
months of life while <a href="http://www.deakin.edu.au/travelsmart/docs/theenvironmentabenefitsofcycling_fact%20sheet.pdf" target="_blank">Deakin University research</a> tells us that for each
kilometre travelled on bike rather than by car, about 0.3 kg of CO<sub>2</sub>
is saved. Guilt, if you’ll pardon the pun, has always been a powerful driver of
hate. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The more substantial answer, however,
can I think be traced to where the real sense of entitlement exists: in the
‘right’ of motorists to drive as quickly and carelessly as they want on city
roads. The harried businessman does not want to have to look before swinging
open the taxi door, the mother who is running late dropping her children off at
school does not want to have to wait for a break in the traffic to overtake a
slow-moving cyclist. Unsubstantiated anti-cyclist rhetoric fuels the sense that
too many drivers have that the roads belong to them, and anyone on two wheels is
an interloping upstart who should get out of the way or else. This territorial
angst is made worse in my hometown, Adelaide, by a farcically disproportionate
amount of car parking space in the city; there are currently 41,000 spaces
compared to 30,000 in Sydney, a city with more than three times Adelaide’s
population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The reality is that cycling is
the way of the future. Its uptake is steadily rising in Australia (though more
markedly amongst men who, it would seem, are more willing to take the risk) at
a time when it is widely recognised that road transport accounts for <a href="http://www.carbonneutral.com.au/climate-change/australian-emissions.html" target="_blank">one of the largest slices</a> of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions pie. ‘When I see an
adult on a bicycle,’ H.G. Wells said, ‘I do not despair for the future of the
human race.’ He was probably thinking of cycling’s essential and too often
forgotten playfulness rather than its environmental credentials, but the
aphorism works even better today because the future of the human race really is
at stake, and in no small part due to the massive consumption of fossil fuels
engendered by our overreliance on motorised transport.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">A friend of mine has promised to
lend me his bike for the rest of this month while he is overseas. No doubt I’ll
be wobbly for a few days while I try and think of all that stuff you’re
supposed to never be able to forget about how to make the bike move forwards
with you still attached to it. You may hate me for it, but the only one who’ll
be terrified will be me because the only menaces on our roads are the ones with
smoke coming out of them, and out of the ears of the people making them move
self righteously forwards.</span> </span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-7615707473440482212014-03-24T10:24:00.002+10:302014-03-24T10:28:58.522+10:30Savaging dissent: on the right's refusal to get March in March<div class="MsoNormal">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNQYrCpBYhdxMaRsKhgTqyg0alLOjNrDvAoT4GaCBTKqNcg4xo6vwmcGbtOgbiwrnL5iwi-sPJfSG40BNRMRVskS7o0q5zUM8PLy3nb7wwfhDwbLnKwbLQmK07eFcZwcrr0ir2snR8K3I/s1600/IMG_0442.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNQYrCpBYhdxMaRsKhgTqyg0alLOjNrDvAoT4GaCBTKqNcg4xo6vwmcGbtOgbiwrnL5iwi-sPJfSG40BNRMRVskS7o0q5zUM8PLy3nb7wwfhDwbLnKwbLQmK07eFcZwcrr0ir2snR8K3I/s1600/IMG_0442.JPG" height="298" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: the author</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It is now over a week since more than
100,000 Australians took to the streets in nationwide protests, collectively
dubbed March in March, against the Abbott government. I joined a crowd of
around 5,000 in Adelaide, the first city in which preparations have already
begun for a follow-up, the similarly alliterative March in May, to be held a
few days after the federal budget is delivered. No doubt, for the nation’s
progressives, there will be much to discuss and decry.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The reaction of the mainstream media to
last weekend’s protests has been absorbing. Initial, properly journalistic
coverage by the ABC and Channel 9 boded well but the flavour of the commentary
to come was encapsulated early by a misleading Channel 7 report, which
characterised the Adelaide event as an unsavoury scrap between the protestors
and members of the notorious Street Church. For much of the protest I was just
a few metres from where the preachers had dug in with their hateful,
deliberately confrontational placards and can happily assure Channel 7 that the
overwhelming response of the protestors was to ignore them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To ignore was, also, the first response
of the right wing commentariat to the marches, but their unexpectedly large
turnouts made that posture look, at best, out of touch and, at worst,
spineless. It is a measure of the Abbott government’s success in reenergising
the culture wars that when the conservative press found its voice on the
subject (and there really was only one voice) it was a hysterical one, outraged
and shrill, full of the same missionary zeal with which the right’s culture
warriors prosecuted their case for an insular and safely homogenous nation
during the reign of John Howard.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/march-in-march-protest-was-big-on-people-power-but-what-was-the-point/story-fncynjr2-1226856898563" target="_blank">This piece</a> by Malcolm Farr, National
Political Editor for news.com.au, was typical, but his sniffy disdain was
surpassed by a <a href="http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/barbarians_march_in_march/" target="_blank">feverish Andrew Bolt</a> who labelled the protestors ‘barbarians’
and ‘savages’, and the aptly named Tory Shepherd whose cliché-riddled <a href="http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/tory-shepherd-grabbag-of-rage-as-the-march-in-march-was-much-ado-about-nothing/story-fni6unxq-1226858515087" target="_blank">smear job</a>
appeared to blame the protestors for her failure to comprehend their messages. (The
diatribes were not, it should be pointed out, limited to News Corp; Jacqueline
Maley’s <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/march-in-march-tony-abbott-gina-rinehart-cop-blasts-in-sydney-protest-20140316-34v63.html" target="_blank">report</a> for the Sydney Morning Herald would have run without controversy
in any of the Murdoch tabloids).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Two criticisms were common to all of
the denunciations: that the protestors’ signs were disrespectful and offensive
in the same way the ‘Ditch the Witch’ and ‘Bob Brown’s Bitch’ signs had been
during the 2011 anti-carbon price rally Convoy of No Confidence, and that March
in March was not a legitimate protest but an incoherent ‘grab-bag’ of
grievances.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is no question that a handful of
the placards I saw in Adelaide were in extremely poor taste. Some contained
allusions to Nazism, and one man had stupidly inverted the ‘Ditch the Witch’
business with a Julie Bishop-riding broomstick. But – and it’s a big but – the
obsessive trawling for images of this minority of protestors by the
denunciators illustrates how well behaved and civil the vast majority of
protestors were. Most of the placards were impersonal, related to policies, not
politicians, and many were ingenious. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I would also ask these commentators to
consider Stephen Fry’s wonderful hypothetical hospital in which psychological
treatment is given for those who claim to be deeply offended by words but who
are unmoved by violence, repression and injustice. The real stories on the day
did not come from t-shirts with the word ‘fuck’ on them, but from students,
single mothers, Indigenous Australians and working men who are suffering as a
direct result of the Coalition’s policies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The second major criticism, that the
rallies were somehow invalid because the protestors raised multiple issues, is harder
to address because it is harder to know what is meant by it. It may be that the
obvious response – so what? – is the most correct. The same criticism was
levelled at the Occupy movement which has gone on being wilfully misunderstood by
conservatives in the US long after it has become abundantly clear to everybody
what the issues are and what is at stake. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">Noam Chomsky has likened Occupy to the
‘large-scale popular activism’ that helped to ferment the right political
atmosphere for the New Deal legislation of the 1930s. The New Deal, famously,
was not about one issue but the ‘three Rs’: </span><span lang="EN-US">relief (for the poor and jobless); recovery (of the
economy); and reform (of the financial system to prevent another depression).
Were the ordinary Americans pushing for these reforms unworthy</span><span lang="EN-US">
</span><span lang="EN-GB">because their platform for change was a broad one? Why the
surprise at the fact that the Abbott government’s attacks on welfare, the
unions, the environment and asylum seekers have catalysed a heterogeneous
movement?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What the right will not admit is that
their real issue with March in March is that so many Australians – not ‘urban
elites’, socialists or hippies, but a stunningly diverse coalition of ordinary
men and women – turned up. Andrew Bolt thought it <a href="http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_labors_arrogance_is_killing_it/" target="_blank">‘arrogant’ of Labor</a> to
dismiss the Convoy of No Confidence which drew a mere 1000 people (and was
possibly an <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2850098.html" target="_blank">Astroturf job</a> anyway) but has said nothing about Tony Abbott’s
<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-16/protesters-march-in-march-across-australia-against-govt-policies/5324048" target="_blank">cheery ridicule</a> of the more than 100,000 people who marched last weekend. If
the organisers of March in March made one mistake, it was to borrow the ‘no
confidence’ furphy from a corrupt, crackpot campaign that nobody except <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/mass-convoy-to-make-real-voices-heard/story-fn59niix-1226114844783" target="_blank">The Australian</a> thought amounted to more than a hill of beans.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It is too soon to ask too many
questions about March in March of the soul-searching variety. Like Occupy, it
has shown itself to be a consciousness-raising exercise but it is not yet time
to consider any lasting impacts. Visible already, on the other hand, are the
ranks of commentators, both right <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/13/march-in-march-doesnt-offer-credible-alternatives" target="_blank">and left</a>, who have chosen not to grapple with
the significance of the first rallies or the genuine issues they broached in
favour of viciously distorting the character of the protests.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It has all been, as John Birmingham
recently <a href="http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/comment/blogs/blunt-instrument/will-you-miss-us-when-were-gone-20140317-34xtk.html" target="_blank">lamented</a>, yet another demonstration of why so many Australians have
turned their backs on a traditional media that is writing itself into
irrelevancy via the mediocrity of its reporting, the oneness of its perspective,
and the falseness of its claim to be either willing or able to speak truth to
power anymore. On this last point, it may be that only the people are now
capable of doing this in a grossly lopsided and fiercely partisan media landscape.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">See you on the streets in May.</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101417513292898225.post-90060890378292747932014-03-05T14:35:00.000+10:302014-03-05T14:35:02.698+10:30Adelaide Festival review: 'The Seagull'<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">State Theatre Company of South Australia, State Theatre Company Scenic Workshop, 21 February-16 March 2014. Written by Anton Chekhov, adapted by Hilary Bell. Directed by Geordie Brookman.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFIGhgMN3FxXFaBuo29iTP6YH0udpeMPpRaMvQKx3yr6WouhCUqbC41q2PXYFnw6rMy3k3fl1v_Zt47OKn9IElgNvAUQYrkP8I_T49lbZlFVzxiq3uzo9C9oVVQonX_mZrGVRZXL3Xgvg/s1600/Lucy+Fry,+Xavier+Samuel+(photo+Shane+Reid).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFIGhgMN3FxXFaBuo29iTP6YH0udpeMPpRaMvQKx3yr6WouhCUqbC41q2PXYFnw6rMy3k3fl1v_Zt47OKn9IElgNvAUQYrkP8I_T49lbZlFVzxiq3uzo9C9oVVQonX_mZrGVRZXL3Xgvg/s1600/Lucy+Fry,+Xavier+Samuel+(photo+Shane+Reid).jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Shane Reid</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">‘Little
action, tons of love’ was how Chekhov described his new play </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Seagull </i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">in a letter to Aleksey
Suvorin in 1895. In this State Theatre Company of South Australia production,
using an adaptation by Australian playwright Hilary Bell, there is ample inaction
but not nearly enough love.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For
the second time in two years, the STCSA’s scenic workshop has been pressed into
service to stage a Russian classic (the other, a reworking of Tolstoy’s novella
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Kreutzer Sonata</i>, was,
incidentally, among Chekhov’s favourite pieces of fiction). The space – dark, musty
and acoustically flat – has a hole-in-the-wall feel which is seemingly at odds
with the faded but still felt opulence of Chekhov’s middle class world. The
surprise is that it works, refreshing a century-old play by paring back its naturalism.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The
action is lent the same charmingly crude theatrical effects as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Seagull</i>’s play within a play,
director Geordie Brookman further thinning the naturalism by, for example,
having the bad weather of the second half denoted by a traditional wind machine
and the actors throwing handfuls of white confetti above their heads for snow.
The play’s two-year time lapse is signified by a caption attached to the back
of an actor’s coat, the word ‘LAKE’ is printed in large black letters on the
sliding door which is periodically opened to reveal the play’s key backdrop,
represented by nothing more corporeal than a wash of blue-white light and
swirls of dry ice.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When
the audience enters the space, Medvedenko (Matthew Gregan) is serenading Masha
(Matilda Bailey) on a parlour guitar as she fights to erect the heavy outdoor chairs
for Konstantin’s (Xavier Samuel) play. (I should say here, as my only note on
Bell’s otherwise competent adaptation, that the decision to dispense with the play’s
famous second line – usually translated as ‘I am in mourning for my life’ – was
an unwise one. The banal exchange with which she has replaced it has none of
the arrestingly graceful poetry of the original). There are platforms at either
end of the traverse stage, one comprising Konstantin’s playing space, obscured
initially by a dark brown curtain, the other the interior spaces of Sorin’s
estate, demarcated by the rolling out of various rugs. Designed by Geoff
Cobham, all of this is elegantly simple and works, as it should, to maximize
the audience’s attention to the performers.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The large
ensemble, packed with STCSA stalwarts including Paul Blackwell, Terence
Crawford, Lizzy Falkland and Chris Pitman, is strong and connected. Samuel, in
overlong shirtsleeves and raffishly askew hair, is a suitably angsty
Konstantin, though we have to wait until the play’s second half to see the best
of him as he finds more of the melancholy and less of the vituperative excess
in the part. Rosalba Clemente, in her first STCSA role in ten years, both
dazzles and terrifies as the desperately insecure prima donna Arkadina. Renato
Musolino’s Trigorin remains engagingly enigmatic even as his role in fulfilling
the dark promise of the symbol of the seagull is exposed. Much less effective
are the younger women in the cast. Matilda Bailey’s Masha is perversely dotty,
while Lucy Fry in the crucial role of the ingénue Nina is unable to bring
either the necessary allure to the first half of the play, or pathos to the
second.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Where
this production errs is in its pace, which always seems about thirty per cent
too slow, as though Brookman has mistaken the play’s lack of dramatic action for,
simply, a lack of drama. Lifelessness, rather than emphasis, fills this
production, the powder keg passions of Chekhov’s characters undermined by a
feeling of enforced languor. The transitional songs, sung live by the cast to
Gregan’s accompaniment, contribute to the problem by borrowing too heavily from
the current mania for soporific acoustic pop of the Jason Mraz variety. There
are, I think, other missing or imperfect connections, from, for example, Nina’s
final speech to Chekhov’s deeply embedded sense of irony, and from the exaggerated
awfulness of Konstantin’s play to his psychological turmoil.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US">There
is much to commend in this plain rendering of a play that, as recently as <a href="http://belvoir.com.au/productions/the-seagull/" target="_blank">2011 in this country</a>, has seen many radical interpretations. Even in translation,
the clarity and penetration of Chekhov’s feeling for the causes and consequences
of human sorrow easily comes down to us through the decades. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Seagull</i>’s great challenge – one
which this production is not quite dynamic enough to meet – is that it is a
comedy in which nobody is happy. That is life, and there is just not enough of
it in this production to make it a great rather than good one.</span> </span></div>
Ben Brookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14363478353326882678noreply@blogger.com0