Review: Stop. Rewind

Stop. Rewind
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
23 July 2010
Red Stitch Theatre
to 21 August
redstitch.net

Melissa Bubnic joined Red Stitch as Writer in Residence at Red Stitch in 2009 and Stop. Rewind has spent 18 months in development with the company's Writers Program.

With a structure that lets the characters say what they wish they said, but rewind back to what they actually said, Stop. Rewind can't fail to strike a familiar chord. I'm glad that other people spend much of their time re-running their encounters with better dialogue.

Bubnic's characters work in the public service with its long-termers, team meetings, bad cakes and rooms filled with people playing on Facebook, emailing gossip or trying to get a promotion by doing extra work. When a colleague gets cancer, each is faced with the reality of their situation and contemplates the possibility of change.

And change is rare in an office staffed with uninspiring, unfulfilled, boring sods. And this is where I has trouble with Stop. Rewind. Stories about uninspiring, unfulfilled, boring sods are ... well ... We have real life to watch boring people. For all it's recognisable "we all get bored/depressed" discussions, it felt too much like a work about "them" rather than a reflection of "us".

However,  I almost disregarded my own feelings, because Bubnic brings her characters to a beautiful ending of hope and perfect oddness that made all previous quibbles seem irrelevant and the Red Stitch cast and creative team created a strangely enchanting world.

Peter Mumford has, again, devised the most astonishingly simple and effective design in the tiny Red Stitch space and the expectation that the post-its would come down added a subtle tension to the night.  Anne Browning's lively direction captures the quirks and humanity of these people and this company continue to let actors do what they do best. Olga Makeeva, Andrea Swift, James Taylor, Giordano Gangl and Ian Rooney all bring so much more than the script to the stage and Ella Caldwell and Tim Potter are going to be people we have to pay a lot of money to see in the future.

Stop. Rewind isn't the best thing I've seen at Red Stitch, but it's still far more engaging and interesting than some of the more expensive shows on in town. And you can still buy a half year subscription to all of Season 2, which starts with Stop. Rewind.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

A Black Joy

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2009
A Black Joy
24 September 2009
fortyfivedownstairs

A Black Joy is very funny, very dark and may be the gayest* thing Declan Greene has written. As all fellow-lovers of Greene's high-camp-punk shockers know, that's saying something!

While A Black Joy's original characters grab our addiction to pop culture by the toes and dangle it out of a hotel window over a pool of snapping crocodiles and paparazzi, it is more disturbing and much nastier than his Sisters Gimm work and reveals a maturity and understanding that is going to make an indelible mark on theatrical writing of the 2010s.

 With 200 kg, bed-ridden John Candy (Tom Considine) central on the stage, we are drawn into a world desperate for love, but replacing it with celebrity, control, fear and violence. Dakota Fanning (Miriam Glaser) cannot recover from losing her fame as a childhood leukemia suffer; Bette Davis (Carole Patullo) can't support her daughter, but fries John Candy's bread in butter; Diane Keating (Anne Browning) strengthens up to fight her lesbian cleaner; Joseph Cotton (Chris Bunworth) save the whales to hide his love of torture; Megan Twycross's character makes us feel for the Parises and Britneys we love to hate, and Corey Haim (Ash Flanders) finds real love at a Nazi rally at a supermarket. And, until now, I never knew how much I'd wanted to see Ash as a teenage virgin neo-Nazi with a Texta’d tattoo.

With such potential to tip over the edge of taste, reason and sense, the perfect cast never let their overdone, over-the-top characters be anything less than human, and director Susie Dee deftly controls the mood from outrageous hilarity to a gritty dark climax that unexpectedly grabs you so deep in your guts that the only release is uncomfortable laughter.

A Black Joy isn’t comfortable (boring) theatre. Like a brand new pair of six-inch-heel, patent leather, knee high boots, it hurts so much that your toes bleed – but looks so amazing and makes you feel so fine that nothing will make you even glance at your comfortable flat maryjanes. See this show.


*Before the hate mail begins and we drown in a discussion about semiotics, linguistics, offensive language and the true definition of g-a-y, just go and see this play and you'll understand exactly what Dec meant when he wrote it and what I mean when I quote it. Yes, it's still a controversial combination of letters; in fact, I think gay is the new cunt. As cunt is bandied about with gay abandon in our festival shows and dinner parties, the language-Nazis (I wonder if I can join) have grabbed gay by the balls because they don't like how its cultural meaning continues to change. But let's leave the worthy discussion for another day.

More 2009 Fringe reviews.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.