Review: Cloudstreet

Cloudstreet
Malthouse Theatre
11 May 2019
Merlyn Theatre
19 June
malthousetheatre.com.au

Cloudstreet. Malthouse. Photo by Pia Johnson

The 1991 novel Cloudstreet won WA writer Tim Winton his second of four Miles Franklin Awards. It's a book that's easy to find in op shops as it's studied at high school, has been a telly mini-series and is one of those books that needs to be seen in bookcases.

The 1988 Black Swan and Company B Belvoir stage adaption by Nick Enright and Justin Monjo brought a new generation to the story as it toured Australia and went to London.

Matt Lutton directs the new Malthouse production. He's from Perth and says how reading the book helped him "understand what it meant to be growing up on Perth". Now, he lives in Melbourne and this Cloudstreet is more about its far-reaching themes than a reflection on living in the most isolated capital city in the world.

In the early 1940s, circumstance, luck or God bring the Pickles and the Lamb families to share a sprawling house in suburban Perth: 1 Cloud Street. Each family have challenges, successes and tragedies – and the threat of a serial killer – over the 20 years it takes for their stories to become one. It can be seen all on one night or split into two.

The stage adaption naturally cuts and condenses the novel. The pig doesn’t make the cut, but the third person narration does and is given directly to the characters. Talking about themselves in the third person creates intimacy as the audience become confessor and are allowed to know more than we see. But Lutton's new production brings the story even further into now. The most powerful changes are the introduction of Noongar language – the house is on Noongar land – and the "Black Man" character has become a male and a female storyteller. This helps to honour the story of the women who once lived, and now haunt, the house and, supported by a racially diverse, makes the story less about the people who lived there in the mid-20th century.

Cloudstreet. Malthouse. Photo by Pia Johnson

This is supported by having a small cast playing multiple roles. The bigger picture is evident, but it doesn't help make the story clear. There are times when it's confusing as to who are Pickles, Lambs, storytellers or new characters. Even something as simple as a cast list and synopsis in the program would help.

The actors with one character are much stronger. Natasha Herbert and Bert LaBonte are Dolly and Sam Pickles. Alison Whyte and Greg Stone are Oriel and Lester Lamb. Each bring a compelling understanding of the characters and the added complexity of seeing them with an empathy that can be missed in the book. Herbert lets Dolly be loved far more than she ever allows her herself to be loved; Whyte shows how Oriel hides her broken soul; and LaBonte and Stone each find a different kind of acceptance, determination and lovability in Sam and Lester.

As the story moves into the latter years, it becomes that of Rose Pickles (Brenna Harding), Quick Lamb (Guy Simon) and ultimately Fish Lamb (Benjamin Oakes), the favourite child who nearly drowns and suffers brain damage. Harding also brings a complexity to Rose and lets her make decisions rather than face consequences; Simon captures Quicks constant guilt; and Oakes lets Fish always react with a mix of wonder and patient acceptance that one day he will go back to the water.

Cloudstreet. Malthouse. Photo by Pia Johnson

At first view, Zoe Atkison's design looks like it's embodied the themes and motifs of the story with dark waves and hints of ghosts on its three sides. The stage floor of old thick floorboards and hidden walls that slide in and out, like the lift doors on Star Trek, hint at the old house and its many rooms. But as the rooms are indistinguishable, the design doesn't capture the house as the titular character that wants the families gone as much as it wants them to stay.

While there are some mighty powerful moments with complete black outs and a flooding stage, the story often feels too literal. Its magical realism of rowing through fields, swimming through stars, and Quick Lamb glowing is told far more than is seen. This ultimately makes it feel like a family-saga-cum-soap-opera, which seems to flow against the bigger Dreaming story that’s also being told.

This Cloudstreet isn’t the same as the book, the mini-series or of the first famous production. Its version is very much one seen through a contemporary point of view. This is its strength and part of the reason it doesn’t resonate as strongly as it could. None of which should will stop Cloudstreet lovers from seeing and loving it.

And if you don’t know what the fuss is about, grab a copy from an op shop for a couple of gold coins. For what it's worth, I like the book.

Review: Hand to God

Hand to God
Alexander Vass and Vass Production 
24 February 2018
The Alex Theatre
to 18 March
alextheatrestk.com.au

Hand To God. Morgana O'Reilly & Gyton Grantley. Photo by Angelo Leggas

Hand to God was nominated for a pile of Tony Awards in 2015, including Best Play (which was won by The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-time; which has just finished at MTC). Set in conservative, religious, small-town Texas, its success depends on a balance between its story of personal trauma and God-fearing repression, and the freedom of its God-damning, adults-only language and puppet-fucking irreverence. Yes, it's another Broadway show where puppets have raunchy sex – and it is regularly (and unfairly) compared to Avenue Q.

It's also regularly called "irreverent", and the focus on the naughtiness of being rude may be why this production hasn't found its emotional strength or empathy.

Recently widowed middle-aged Margery (Alison Whyte) is running a puppet workshop for teenagers in the her church hall. The only kids are her quiet son Jason (Gyton Grantley), bad-boy Timothy (Jake Speer), and pretty nerd Jessica (Morgana O'Reilly). The class is an inevitable failure but bumbling Pastor Gregory (Grant Piro) wants an in-church performance, Timothy has a super crush on Margery, and Jason will never tell Jessica that he likes her – until he's fist-deep in his puppet Tyrone.

Demonic possession, inappropriate sex and blashphemous abandon follow. There are plenty of laughs, but many fall flat. The fast-paced direction (Gary Abrahams) revels in jokes, but it tends to play the joke rather than tell the story. And when it is telling the story, it isn't clear what it's really about.

Deep laughs – even the most inappropriate ones – come from feeling connection to character and caring about what happens to them; laughing at potty-mouthed idiots is easy, and forgettable. With a severely-traumatised child, deep grief, and unexpected heroes, there's plenty to make the audience care, especially as the tone shifts in the second half and it becomes clear what's really at stake.

Meanwhile, there's still plenty to laugh at and the tone is set by the wit and fun of the design, by Jacob Battista (design), Chloe Greaves (costime) and Amelia Lever-Devidson (lighting). When the curtain opens, it initially looks so much like a hideously familiar church hall that it takes a while to notice the gorgeously hilarious detail (read the posters, look at the costumes) and it comes into its own with a stage-within-the-stage-within-the-stage.

The shock and laughs in Hand To God don't come from its blasphemy or sex but from from wondering if we, too, would behave like that if our life took a similar turn. I suspect that this side of the production will develop as it runs and finds its connection to its audience.

Review: Faith Healer

Faith Healer
Melbourne Theatre Company
9 March 2017
The Sumner
to 8 April
mtc.com.au

Paul Blackwell. Faith Healer. Photo by Jeff Busby.

Faith Healer, directed by Judy Davis, at Sydney’s Belvoir last year was so successful that the MTC put it into the Sumner Theatre. While twice as many can see it each night, most can’t experience the intimacy that made it so successful and the production struggles to find its strength in the large space.

Irish playwright Brian Friel’s play of four monologues only lasted for 20 performances on Broadway (with James Mason) in 1979 but has since gone on to scoff at those first reviews and opinions.

In the 1950s, Irish faith healer Francis “The Fantastic” Hardy (Colin Friels) travelled through Wales, Scotland and Ireland with his wife, maybe mistress, Grace (Alison Whyte), and manager-cum-dogsbody Teddy (Paul Blackwell). As their monologues coincide in time, the audience can imagine them together and find their own truths, which sit somewhere between comforting and devastating.

Moving from places including village halls, a desolate roadside, and a pub that’s more of a lounge bar, they remember more about death than healing. And their memories are shaped by the conscious and unconscious tweaks that create a story that can settle in their own psyches, no matter how broken or blackened, and help them make the only choices that feel right for them.

Friels holds his emotion tightly with a heavy physicality that makes Francis feel every movement as pain. Whyte leads with Grace’s heart and shares the emotion that lets us into her thoughts. Blackwell’s Teddy connects with the audience as he also sees the couple from an outsider’s perspective and because he survives by finding the awkward humour that offers much-needed space to breath and reflect.

But while they talk to us, we don’t know who “we” are. We’re not Francis’s “fictions” or “despairing people” wanting to be healed or to give up on hope. Are they talking to judge, jury, friends, strangers or gods? Are we listening to a confession or a yarn?

This is questioned more as most of the audience have little direct connection the stage. Brian Thomson’s design of an empty town hall engulfed by storm clouds (that subtly change colour and mood with Verity Hampson’s lighting) is clearly made for Belvoir. So much that ther’s a Belvoir-shaped thrust staged and a couple dozen of the luckiest punters get to sit on the extra seats around this stage. But while most of the audience were so close in Belvoir, I felt too distanced in the closest third of the seating bank.

If post-show chat is anything to go by, those close and centre had a much more engaging evening, but it left me watching performances and listening to words rather than being so lost in the memories of the characters that their pain was felt.

This was on AussieTheatre.comaussietheatre.com.

Review: The Last Man Standing

The Last Man Standing
MTC
11 November 2015
The Sumner, Southbank Theatre
to December 12
mtc.com.au

The Last Man Standing. Peter Carroll & William McInnes.  Photo by Jeff Busby

My review is in The Age.

Review: The Bloody Chamber

The Bloody Chamber
Malthouse Theatre
6 August 2013
Merlyn Theatre
to 10 August
malthousetheatre.com.au

Alison Whyte's irresistible performance of The Bloody Chamber is reason enough to see it before it finishes on the weekend. It's like being tucked into bed and read a fairytale that lulls you into wanting to sleep with the lights on forever, but finally leaves you safe and comfortable in its blood-soaked darkness.

Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber is a re-telling of French Bluebeard story where a new young wife discovers the fate of her much older husband's former wives. It's from her 1979 collection of re-told fairy tales where women and girls don't end up as dead or eaten as they are in traditional tales, have and want sex, and are capable of being their own heroes.

Van Badham – who might be my favourite Tweep (@vanbadham) – has adapted this text from Carter's novella.  It's still told by the young wife (who's now an older woman) and glories in Carter's graphic and bloody imagery that's guided by an under current of sexuality and power that's belies any dull gender stereotypes.

Director Matthew Lutton creates a curious balance between telling and showing a story. The stage has a delightfully eerie atmosphere with three live harpists and a water-stained space where three huge black chambers hide secrets. And Anna Cordingley's design of black boxes, a bed and just enough red reveals little, but forces the audience to imagine the shining jewels, turning tide and bloody horrors. (However, I was sitting at the back and couldn't see all of the early revelations.)

But it's all about Whyte, whose telling (with some help by Shelly Lauman) evokes the story's ghosts in all of the stage's empty spaces. She may not be the innocent narrator imagined by some readers, but it's still like she strode out of the pages to make us really understand what she went through, rather than leave it to the unreliable imaginations of the readers.

This was on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Australia Day

Australia Day
Melbourne Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company
26 April 2012
Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 26 May
mtc.com.au

Jonathan Biggins's Australia Day is as Aussie-Aussie-Aussie as a CWA lamington and as comforting as wrapping a sausage (animal or soy) in white bread and adding tomato sauce.

The MTC pack us into the 4WD for a day trip to generic-regional Coriole where the Australia Day Committee are planning the annual celebration on the oval. There's Brian (Geoff Morrell), Mayor and running for Liberal pre-selection;  Robert (David James),  Brian's best mate and next in line to be Mayor; Wally (Peter Kowitz), a local builder who calls a spade a spade; Marie (Valerie Bader), the CWA rep who loves her grandkids; Helen (Alison Whyte), a sea changer, Birkenstock-wearing, single mum Greens council member; and Chester (Kaeng Chan), an ABV (Australian born Vietnamese) primary school teacher.

These are folk who say "get a wiggle on" and "what's eating you". We know them so well (even if we haven't met anyone like them) and the planning meetings are so real that they send shivers of recognition through anyone who has sat on a committee or spent hours dealing with the public liability nightmare that the sausage sizzle has become.

Written after his experience as a Australia Day Ambassador (unrecognised by everyone in the towns he visited), Biggins's capture of small town (or any) politics is spot on. His characters are created from love and a begrudging respect, and there can't be anyone who doesn't recognise this type of event with its cricket match, karate display, vintage Datsun 180bs and backed up porta loos.  The result is the kind of genuine and hearty laughs that come from seeing our world and knowing that we're part of it

This world never disappoints our expectations – or question them.  The Greens chick is a 40ish chick who insists on a welcome to country, thinks a snag sizzle is culturally offensive, rides a bike and questions the Indigenous voice in the the local dance school's Godwana display. Pudgy, bearded Wally is a wally who doesn't care that he's called a racist and a misogynist by the Greens bitch. And there's jokes about a middle-age, small-business owning man not being able to get Liberal pre-selection; jokes about Chester being Chinese (Vietnam is like China's New Zealand he explains) and Marie gets in a tizz when she thinks she might get to make a cake for former First Lady Jeanette Howard.

It may challenge a dude like Wally who think an Asian face in a country town is an unusual site, but that's not the people who see Australia Day in a posh city theatre.

Don't think that I didn't enjoy it. I did. It's harmless entertainment and will rightly be one of the most popular shows this season, but like a lamington, it's mostly white and light and forgotten a few minutes later rather than savoured, remembered and thought about for days after.

This review was on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by Jeff Busby.

Review: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
MTC presents the Belvoir production
16 January 2012
Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse
to 18 February 2012
mtc.com.au

Sometime in the 70s, the ABC filmed the MTC production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll; my grandmother made me watch it with her.  I didn't really get it, but I liked it, especially as 1950s Melbourne and 1970s Adelaide weren't that far apart. Years later in high school, The Doll was an English text and I aspired to be Bubba; I still didn't really get. Now that I'm older than Pearl and Olive, I get it, and the opening night ovation for this production and for writer Ray Lawler confirmed that it's still one of the best plays out there and a piece of Australian theatre history that should be compulsory.

Does Summer of the Seventeenth Doll really need an introduction?  If you've been to high school in Australia, you must have read it. It's the one set in Carlton in the 50s, where two cane-cutters arrive to spend their 17th five-month lay off with their Melbourne barmaid girlfriends, but one of the women left to get married, the cane season brought trouble and all are confronted with not being 30 anymore.

It's a brilliant story that forces painful change as each character faces the chasm between what they want to be seen as and who they are, and it's a masterclass in the power of a three-act structure.

Director Neil Armfield lets Lawler's writing lead and he guides his cast to find a depth and a rawness to their characters that brings a freshness and new understanding to those familiar with the text.

Steve Le Marquand (Roo), Travis McMahon (Barney) and TJ Power (Johnny) each reject comfort for the need to be masculine, but this production is about the women.

Eloise Winestock shows how much Bubba wants to be a better version of Olive. While Alison Whyte lets Olive be the young woman who flouted convention and ages in moments as she's offered a salvation that means she's lost everything.

Robyn Nevin is unforgettable as Olive's caustic mother Emma, who sees the truth and can't help her daughter.  But Helen Thomson's Pearl is the performance to see. Too often Pearl is a prude, but Thomson lets us see why Olive chose her in the first place – she's a hoot – but she knows that reputation is all that she has and can't let herself be swept into Olive's life. Choosing an un-married and openly sexual life in the 40s and 50s was a choice that few women willingly made and Olive's explanation to Pearl about decency depending on people can't dull the sting of having other women feel sorry for you.

This Summer of the Seventeeth Doll confirmed it as one of my favourite plays. Lawler ensures that we understand why every choice is made, but we long for every one to choose differently and find a way back to happiness and love. Its honesty is as true now as ever and its world is still so close to ours. I'm sure I’m not alone in admitting that I'd bluff happiness rather than have anyone feel sorry for me.

If you love Australian theatre, if you love theatre, you have no excuse to miss see this Doll.

This review appeared on AussieThearte.com

Photo by Jeff Busby

Review: Clybourne Park

Clybourne Park 

Melbourne Theatre Company

22 September

Sumner Theatre

to 26 October

www.mtc.com.au

Let's get it out in the open. Let's just be honest and talk about what Clybourne Park at the MTC is really talking about. It's an issue I feel very strongly about, something I won't change my mind about, and something that makes too many Melbournians behave like selfish knobs. It's about property development.

And it's about racism and about stuck up, white cunts.

As the MTC continues to explore how tough it is to be a middle class property owner, along comes American playwright Bruce Norris, who won the Pulitzer for this little beauty set in a family home in a white Chicago neighbourhood in 1959 and in the same house in 2009 as the now-black neighbourhood is being gentrified.

At first, it feels like the ultimate white-do-gooder, racism-and-sexism are-bad rant. It's like a competition to see who can resist sniggering the longest, and the first laughs are like watching Guess Who's Coming to Dinner with your Indigenous Australian pal while your dad makes monkey noises each time Sidney Poitier appears and yells at your mum to open his beer. We DO NOT laugh at such things.

Of course we don't, and no one coming to see a show by a posh university-run theatre company with the likes of Greg Stone, Alison Whyte and Berte La Bonte in it is going to expect a hooray-for-segregation story.  So there's no need for director (Peter Evans) to hold back and stress the social commentary in act one. My date for the evening compared the first half to The Help and didn't believe that it was meant to be funny.

It is funny. It's nails-down-the-blackboard satire filled with ridiculous people that is written to be laughed at as loudly as possible.

Act two is much freer with the comedy. Perhaps because it's easier to laugh at conversations we've had or heard. When an argument (Norris writes very fine arguments) develops about whether a joke is funny/offensive because it's about a black man, anal sex or rape, the delicious pain is not in the joke but in the squirming embarrassment and huffy indignation as each person the tries to explain, justify or deny the intent of their harmless words.

Norris says that too many people think "that my plays are about exposing hypocritical liberals...and what's missing from that assessment ... is that I'm something of a hypocritical liberal too." Writing, programming, being in or seeing Clybourne Park should never be about tut-tutting at the ignorant and misguided, but about cringing at our own blatant hypocritical attitudes.

The suburb cast (Stone, Whyte, La Bonte and Patrick Brammall, Laura Gordon, Zahra Newman, Luke Ryan) grasp this tone and relish in Norris's exquisite parallel structure. Each present the worst of their character, but finds their wholeness and their humanity, leaving them so real that the tipping point between laughing and crying is so precarious that's it's easy to slide down the other side without noticing.

Don’t wait for permission to laugh in Clybourne Park. Laugh because it’s so wrong and because it’s so true. Laugh because we know better and because we never learn. Laugh to prove you’re not uptight and because you know you really are.

Photo by Jeff Busby

Review: Rising Water

Rising Water
Melbourne Theatre Company and Black Swan State Theatre Company
The Playhouse, the Arts Centre
9 August 2011
to 10 September

I love Tim Winton's books. His writing reminds me why I will happily miss watching people on a stage if I can sit on the couch with some cushions, my cats and a lot of words in a book.

Black Swan from Perth and our own MTC have produced Winton's first play, Rising Water (Cloudstreet was an adaption of his book). If you love Winton's novels, the writing and the sound of the text is familiar and, at first, comforting – but theatre writing is a very different beast from prose and there's already a lot of debate about whether Winton has caught and freed, or squished and barbequed this beast.

Like much of Winton's works, Rising Water is about loners and the ocean. Baxter (John Howard), Col (Geoff Kelso) and Jackie (Alison Whyte) have run to the edge of Australia and are living on their boats in a Freemantle marina, when a pissed British tourist turns up with her huge backpack, tiny shorts and observation that Perth is the whitest place in the world. Which it is.

Christina Smith's design brings us so close to the Freeo docks that I felt a pang of nostalgia for the Freeo markets and coffee that tastes a bit like the sea. The three boats float and rock on the stage as black as the still night ocean and it's almost a shock to realise that it's not water.

But the stunning realism is corroded by the forced symbolism of the text (the mysterious row boat boy, needing to drown to live, the mast that can't get an erection...) and characters who say so much, but don't let us see much beyond our first impression. It may make me cry if I read it, but our ears don't read and hearing this text is a struggle, especially as we can see so much of what it's saying.

See it for the cast and the design, but please don't think that Rising Water represents Tim Winton's writing and make sure you read something like Breath.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: All About My Mother

All About My Mother
Melbourne Theatre Company
19 August 2010
Sumner Theatre
to 26 September
www.mtc.com.au

I'm not sure why anyone would want to adapt a Pedro Almodovar film for the stage when there's a perfectly good film that can be popped into a DVD player. But the Melbourne Thearte Company liked the script (by Samual Adamson) and it's hard to resist the lure of casting Paul Capsis, Alison Whyte and Wendy Hughes.

As all adaptations should be, this All About My Mother is unlike its source. It's been taken off the streets and into the internal worlds of the characters. With a greater focus on the story and characters, the atmosphere of Barcelona backstreets, drugs, prostitutes, transvestites and transexuals is missing and it heads towards being a living room/backstage drama.

Manuela's (Whyte) son Esteban (Blake Davis) is killed in an accident when he's trying to get the autograph of great actress Huma Rojo (Hughes). Searching for Esteban's father (Lola, who is living as a woman), Manuela find her old friend Agrado (Capsis) and a pregnant nun (Katie Fitchett) and becomes Huma's personal assistant.

It's meant to be melodramatic and extreme and its super-high stakes and ridiculous coincidences make the story irresistible.

In Act One, Simon Phillips' direction stood back and let the story and the characters capture the audience's hearts and interest. This was supported by Stephen Curtis design, which nods to the film while leaving room for the story to unfold, and Alberto Iglesias' composition, structured by Ian Macdonald's sound design.

In Act Two, the melodrama takes over and drowns the story. It becomes less about caring and more about seeing how much emotion can be squeezed out of it. All the emotion is on the stage, as the audience are told how they should feel (complete with the underlining score), rather than letting us discover our own real emotions. Does anyone like being told how to feel?

This was especially apparent to me when I realised that not once in a piece about motherhood did I think about my mother.

All About My Mother is Almadovar made nice, which could be great if it brings new people to his films. But what I found especially distracting and a bit insulting was that Agrado – the transvestite prostitute – is played as the clown. Capsis performance is superb, but Agrado is the character who is getting laughed at. Almadovar does not laugh at his characters.  He laughs at the absurdity and universality of human weakness. He certainly doesn't laugh at the sexual, social or identity choices of the people in his world.

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com.

Tartuffe

Tartuffe
Malthouse Theatre
20 February 2008
Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse

The creatives and cast of Malthouse Theatre’s Tartuffe seduce the audience so convincingly that imperfections with the production become irrelevant.

It’s an intimidating task to adapt a classic work. Louise Fox remains true to Molière’s structure and characters, whilst delightfully playing with the language. (How could anyone resist rhyming Tartuffe with poof?) Grange, the Financial Review, Byron Bay and Desperate Housewives didn’t make the 17th century French original, but they set up many a contemporary reference and joke in this version. If Molière had a Facebook profile, I’m sure he too would have referenced it.

In this version we find ourselves in a suburb like Toorak, complete with its own pool and ornate faux French iron fencing. As always Anna Tregloan’s design beautifully supports the script and the space with an intelligent balance the practical and the aesthetic.

Living here are an indulged family, frustrated by their patriarch’s (and his mother’s) admiration and support of the very religious Tartuffe. With a cast including Marcus Graham, Alison Whyte, Barry Otto and Malthouse favourites Francis Greenslade and Peter Houghton, it would be difficult to be disappointed in cast. On a technical level, the scenes between Alison and Marcus are superb. There buzz from making an audience laugh is naturally addictive for a performer, but some of the clownish aspects of some performances could be better balanced. The clowning can be huge in this farce, but there was a bit of “look at me” acting, which really shouldn’t happen in a cast this experienced.

The build to Tartuffe’s entrance is structured perfectly. Certainly there is a lot of exposition in the first scenes, but we are eager to see the god-like presence that has taken over the household. Marcus doesn’t disappoint. His god-like entrance is as divine as it can be and we very soon discover how this Tartuffe was able to so thoroughly deceive and seduce. Getting over the fact that he is pleasing on the eye, Marcus’ delivers a complex and rounded character. He successfully elicits a degree of empathy and support for the character we could so easily despise – which makes his Act Two downfall even stronger.

The pace picks up significantly in Act Two as it heads to the unavoidable deus ex machina (used almost in its literal sense). I do wonder if a contemporary “king” may have been more relevant than the choice of Christian king or even a less obvious Christian image. It certainly worked in the context of the script, but in the context of Melbourne in 2008, there was something lacking. The final ironic twist may also have been more poignant with a different image of religion, belief or intervening deity.

Finally Matthew Lutton’s direction must be acknowledged. (He was assisting director Michael Kantor until a few weeks ago, when his own ironic deus ex machina intervention arrived when Michael became ill.) There are some hints of inexperience, especially in communicating in a big space, but otherwise the direction is tight, balanced and admirable. Act 1 would benefit from work on establishing the status and relationships of the characters through direction and performance, rather than relying on dialogue and exposition. And sometimes a joke for the sake of a laugh distracts too much from the story and doesn’t serve the script and production as a whole.

At the end of the night, Tartuffe is thoroughly enjoyable. It’s not the strongest or most relevant piece of theatre I’ve seen at the Malthouse, but it’s one that sets the bar high for the rest of season.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by Jeff Busby.