MICF: Robot Song

MICF for kids
Robot Song
Theatre Works and Arena Theatre
2 April 2019
Theatre Works
to 13 April
comedyfestival.com.au

Robot Song

Robot Song is all kinds of wonderful and then some. It finishes on Saturday.

Juniper's 11 and doesn't like going to school. She'd rather be at home with her parents or her best friend, who's a skip bin who makes toys and more friends out of rubbish. Juniper (Ashlea Pyke) also likes singing (Nate Gilkes wrote the music) and, with the help of her mum (Jo Abbott) and especially her dad (Phil McInnes), she wants to tell the story about why she stopped going to school and how a robot helped her to see her world differently.

Juniper knows she a bit different from her classmates. She doesn't like this, but she's ok with it because she has an art teacher who knows how creative Juniper is and she has a family who love and understand her. Although it's not discussed in her play, Juniper's story was inspired by the director/writer/designer Joylon James's son, who has autism.

One day Juniper's class give her a letter saying that they don't want her at their school. They call her a robot and the letter is so horrible that, even as an adult, it's hard to accept it as children not understanding the effect of their words.

Juniper can't dismiss it either and refuses to go back to school. Until a robot from a 1980s video she watched with her dad appears in her back yard.

As Juniper is played by an adult, we are always seeing the story from an adult point of view where her trauma is understood and her unconditional love and safety is assured. This allows children to be engrossed in her story, feel her pain and still feel safe.

Robot Song is far more than an insight into to being a child on the autism spectrum. It's a story about  empathy, understanding and creativity and how difference is a way to connect far more than a reason to reject.

MICF for Kids: Sunny Ray and The Magnificent Moon

Sunny Ray and The Magnificent Moon

Arena Theatre and Salvador Dinosaur 

7 April 2016

The Famous Spiegeltent, Arts Centre Melbourne

10 April 2016
comedyfestival.com.au

Sunny Ray and The Magnificent Moon 

Don’t forget that there’s plenty of brilliant comedy for kids at MICF.

From Arena Theatre and Claire Bartholomew and Daniel Tobias (who also created the glorious rock duo Die Roten Punkte), Sunny Ray and The Magnificent Moon is pure joy for the under-10s.

In her orange and yellow jumpsuit, sparklie eye shadow and yellow sun visor, Sunny sings “It’s a wonderful day” as she wakes up her the plants and warms up the world. She loves being the sun and loves the beginning and end of each day when she hangs out with her best friend, The Magnificent Moon. In an Elvis-inspired white and silver jumpsuit, the Moon knows how cool it is to sing and party all night with the stars. 

When Sunny decides that it could be fun to stay up late, the Moon welcomes her to the party, but she sleeps in and he isn’t sure how to wake up the world.

With original songs, lots of interactive fun, and extra naughtiness and love, Sunny Ray and the Magnificent Moon light up the Famous Spiegeltent and welcome children and their families to help make this gorgeous story about friendship and how it’s cool to be different.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Melbourne Festival: The House of Dreaming

Melbourne Festival 2012
The House of Dreaming
Arena Theatre Company
25 October 2012
MTC, Lawler Studio
to 27 October
melbournefestival.com.au

I didn't want to leave The House of Dreaming. Neither did my artistic advisor, five-year-old Scout.

There's picture books (good ones) and origami in the waiting room and you get a costume and a magic talisman: I was loving it from the first moment.

Arena Theatre have created a living story book. The experience is how I remember first reading picture books. They were so real that I felt I was in the pages and living it.

Entering the life-size house in a group of three as a rabbit, wizard and king/queen, welcome to a world of magic mirrors and telephones, stories on a bed, a magician, secret doors, more secret doors, rooms full of things to touch, singing masks, flowers and a beautiful story about how wonderful it is to have a child. Each room is a new page with new story, more clues and more to explore.

Like the best picture books, it's not vital to follow the story because there is so much to see and it's so exciting to move/crawl/dance into each room. The story and marvelling at the technology are for the grown ups, but it was so much more fun to just play.

I asked Scout what her favourite bit was; she said "Everything". I couldn't agree more. Every room is so full of wow! that it's impossible to choose a favourite part.

She was a bit nervous at first, and rightly so; there are strangers and who wants to go in to a big dark room when you're not sure what's in there. This lasted until the first room.

Every child deserves stories, to always know the love of telling and sharing stories, and to experience the wonder of The House of Dreaming. 

If you have children in your life who are around 5 to 10, this is something they won't forget. Neither will you.


This was on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Moth

Moth
Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre
16 May 2010
The Tower, CUB Malthouse

If the teenagers on Glee leave you wondering why your high school memories aren't so perky and choreographed, Malthouse and Arena theatre's Moth is the perfect antidote.

Declan Greene continues to fascinate and seduce Melbourne theatre goers by consistently surprising us with unexpected stories. Moth is far removed from his uber-high-camp Sisters Grimm work, darker than his 2009 Fringe hit A Black Joy and more grounded in reality than his 2009 MTC Young Artist commission  Pretty Baby.  But it's still filled with authentic characters dragged in from the limits of social acceptability,  gooey visceral imagery,  odd pop culture references, absurd reality bluring and a dark dark humour that leaves you almost hating yourself for laughing.

Sebastian (the perfect Dylan Young) is too weird to ever be accepted and clinging onto the equally-desparate friendship of Claryssa (the equally-perfect Sarah Ogden), the emo wicca chick who has let herself become too weird to ever be accepted. These are the kids who no one ever sat next to at school, whose parents have no idea that their babies are in so much pain that they won't recover, and who leave me so glad that I was a teenager before the internet and its mass humiliation.

With a story of bullying too familiar to teens on the outer and too vile for many grown ups to even comprehend, Greene plunges into the fractured minds and perceptions of these souls and takes us to a surreal world where Jesus and Saint Sebastian have chosen a misfit to warn the world of its pending destruction and two young people scream for rescue and forgiveness.

Greene writes difficult material that could easily be lost in a moosh of preachy compassion or over-arty pretence, but the Arena creative team of Chris Kohn (director), Jonathon Oxlade (design), Rachel Burke (lighting) and Jethro Woodward (composition) are at one with their writer and create a world where the morphing of time, space and character is natural, expected and so beautiful that you understand why moths fly to blinding light.

Like young writer Polly Strenham's teens in That Face, currently at Red Stitch, Greene (who is an old fart compared to Strenham) writes teenagers who aren't silly or pretty or full of impossible dreams, and force their audience to understand their extreme, illogical and exaggerated reactions and feelings to the world they are growing into. Greene leaves us relieved to have grown up and embarrassed to know that we still don't want to be friends with a Sebastian or a Claryssa.

Moth is rightly selling out, so book now so that your not among those who wish they had seen it

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com.


Photo: Jeff Busby

Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd

Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie MuddMalthouse Theatre
Arena Theatre Company
17 March 2009
Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse

In recent years, playwright Lally Katz and director Chris Kohn have created some of the most fascinating and original independent theatre in town. Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd is the result of research grant, a commission from Malthouse and the resources of Arena Theatre - and I’m left wondering if this support has hindered their style.

Hours in the State Library reading room and searching through seemingly endless Tivoli memorabilia inspired the 1914 world of Melbourne vaudeville. Charlie Mudd’s theatre sits on the Swanston River, performing the same show every night to an empty audience. Act 1 may be as close to seeing pre-WW1 vaudeville as we are likely to get, with its exquisitely detailed design and recreations of bad vaudeville acts, all with a sprinkling of Katz darkness – of course.

It did feel like the story was just sprinkled around though. For all its authenticity, Act 1 played too much like a vaudeville sketch, with little character development and a surprising lack of mystery.
The terrific writing and originally dark stories emerged in Act 2, especially surrounding ventriloquist Maude and her search for love. The great stuff really stood out; the rest felt like padding. Hidden in the two and a half hour show is a remarkable 70-minute piece.

On stage, the relationships between characters felt dictated by plot, not character. The plot is brilliant, but the story doesn’t live until the characters make it real. I didn’t believe that Ethelyn (or Violet) loved Charlie or that Charlie loved Violet (or Ethelyn) and I didn’t believe that the magician believed that his magic was real. Whether it’s in the writing or not, the acting and direction have to make the characters choose their actions from their very real beliefs. The story feels forced if the love isn’t real.

The reality of the world was also questioned with an inconsistent performance style. What made a show like Katz/Kohn’s The Eisteddfod  soar was that the director and actors never let their audience doubt the reality of their naturally-absurd world. In Vaudeville, Christian O’Leary as Maude, and her wonderfully obscene dummy Doris, nailed the style, but others kept letting us into the “secret” that they were just playing pretend. During the after-show chat there was an active discussion among the actors about who they were performing to, and I realised why I was frustrated by otherwise great performances: the moment someone performed to the assembled Malthouse audience and not Mudd’s empty house, the onstage world died.

Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd isn’t a bad way to spend an evening, but it isn’t the show it wants to be. Hopefully some time with an audience has let it settle and it will hit its stride as it heads into its last week.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Criminology

Criminology
Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre
8 August 2007
Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse

As Criminology is inspired by the true events of Joe Cinque’s murder in 1997 (detailed in the program if you don’t know), the audience know that, after the dinner party, Una will drug her boyfriend with rohypnol and inject him with heroin until he is dead. How this Malthouse/Arena co-production get us to the final murder is the making or breaking of this work. The resulting path is a mixture of terrains that makes the journey awkward, but enjoyable.

The script was co-written by Lally Katz (The Eisteddfod) and Tom Wright (Babes in the Wood). Both playwrights have very different styles and voices, which can both be heard in the script. Sometimes they are fighting to dominate and at others they reached a compromise that was adequate, but– like most compromises – wasn’t strong or especially pleasing. When Lally’s dialogue won the fight, it brought a stilted absurdity to the characters, which forced us to listen and question the situation; whereby the more natural dialogue and situations, ironically, made the story seem less real and therefore able to be dismissed.

Una and the boyfriend are stalked and guided by their own inner demons; made real as anonymous, masked ragers or 1987cultual icons. This worked as a concept, but wasn’t working very well on the stage. It took me to the final scene to figure out what the masked characters actually were. As their role was confusing, they distracted from, instead of supporting, the accompanying action. Una’s conversations with Diana (it was the car crash year) are a perfect representation of eating disorder/beauty fixation and obsession with being loved/admired and always right. The other icons (Michael Hutchence, Mother Theresa and Tommy Lee Jones from Men in Black) were funny, but didn’t appear to support the story or its journey. The presentation of them as backwards facing puppets seemed to have little purpose, beyond a site gag.

Given the themes and issues surrounding Una are not restricted to 1997 and the story isn’t dependent on the on the facts of the case, I wonder if the placement in a specific era was necessary. Certainly it gave us a divine opening scene discussing the film Titanic against a swirling cosmos and allowed a purging scene with Princess Di after a shot of ipecac. The specific dates make us look at the era (which was only 10 years ago) for the answers, instead of really exploring the motivations and psyche of the characters.

Placing it in Canberra was entirely necessary though. This script captured the 20 something, wealthy, bored, ANU student, inner city Canberra lifestyle to perfection. I lived in Canberra for a time (I should point out that I was well out of that age demographic and not a student). I would have picked the city as Canberra, even if it wasn’t named. I admit that I was the soul person in the audience who laughed out loud at the joke about it being a sadder death than when “that girl got hit by shards of hospital”. For others who have escaped life in our capital, take some comfort in one of the final lines of the show: “You’re so fucking beautiful, but you never belonged in Canberra”.

Bojana Novakovic as Una is the most memorable performance of the cast. She has a naturalness that makes it look like her characterisation is effortless and she created an understanding of Una that explained the inevitability of her final actions. We are never meant to like her or support her, but Bojana let us see her real pain and compulsion. Her scenes with Hazen Shammas (who never talks as the doomed boyfriend) were especially compelling.

Criminology aims to shock and tries as hard as it can. The sex and drugs aren’t nearly as shocking as they make them out to be. I’d like to see more focus on shocking us through the thoughts of the characters, rather than their swinging and heroin use.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Discussion of Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation, Garner's true crime book about the case.