Review: Pin Drop

Pin Drop
Tamara Saulwick and Arts House
28 August 2010
North Melbourne Town Hall
to 29 August
www.artshouse.com.au

Pin Drop makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and might leave you scared of the dark.

Tamara Saulwick (Strange Fruit, Born in a Taxi) recorded conversations about physical threat and fear. Working with sound designer Peter Knight, choreographer Michelle Heaven and lighting designer Ben Cobahm, she's created a remarkable relationship between the real stories, the theatrical telling and the gut-felt reactions of the audience.

The narrative is chosen moments from the stories, told by the original recordings merged with Saulwick's voice and Butoh-inspired movement. The stories include an actor receiving a threatening phone call after an audience member foud her address in the phone book, a child being chased by an adult and a woman getting up in the night to go to the toilet and seeing someone trying to get in her balcony door. There's no need for fiction, as there is nothing more fascinating or frightening than a story about someone just like us.

Each story brings a visceral sensation of fear or threat, which could be viewed safely from the audience, but is heightened by a sound and lighting design that leave the audience in the dark with footsteps approaching, or trying to make out shapes and sounds on the stage.

I don't get to everything at Arts House (which is managed by the Melbourne City Council), but I try because the artistic team curate a program that consistently presents the most challenging and fascinating contemporary art from all over the world and supports local artists, like Saulwick,  to develop personal and challenging work. Seasons are short, so there's no time to wait for opinion.

Pin Drop finishes tomorrow (Sunday), so there's still a chance to see it.


And please check out the Arts House wonderful Green Tix for Nix offer. Use a planet-friendly mode of transport to get to a show and be rewarded with free ticket.

This review appears 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.

Review: The Trial

The Trial

Malthouse Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company and Thinice
18 August 2010
Merlyn Thearte, CUB Malthouse
to 4 September 2010
www.malthousetheatre.com.au

Director Mattew Lutton says, "The writings of Kafka create an addictive riddle of the soul that has no solution." I am shamed to admit that I haven't read Kafka, so I'm not sure if this stage version of The Trial is indeed Kafkaesque.

With a script by Louise Fox, sound by Kelly Ryall, lighting by Paul Jackson and wonderful actors like Ewen Leslie, Peter Houghton, John Gaden and Rita Kalnejais on the stage, there's a whole heap of consistent greatness to enjoy in this production. And Lutton's direction balances threat and comedy, while maintaining a sometimes manic pace that should be keeping us on the edges of our seat.

Kafta readers tell me that this pace pushed away the threat and tension that make his writing so addictive. I found that the pace kept me interested, but not engaged. Each scene was exactly what it should be, but as a whole the work felt fragmented, despite the terrific scene transitions with the best use of a revolve I've seen in a long time.

But for me, the ending was on the stage from the beginning and no one in this world had any belief or hope of a happy or even mediocre ending. Even if dreams are futile for Kafka, it is our hope and the possibility of a better life that makes every one of us get out of bed each day. We need a glimpse of hope to draw us through a story. From the moment Josef K wakes up to find thugs in his room, he knows where he's going to be in a year's time. There's no riddle because everyone knows the answer. If he doesn't have hope and no one he meets has hope, what hope does an audience have to care?

photo by Jeff Busby

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Madeline

Madeleine
Jenny Kemp and Black Sequin Productions
Arts House
6 August 2010
www.artshouse.com.au

Madeleine is the second in a cycle of works by Black Sequin Productions exploring mental illness.  Following bi-polar Kitten in 2008, Madeleine explores the effects of schizophrenia.

Director and writer Jenny Kemp says, "I am interested in how we can deal with mental illness, in a way that is positive and not one of denial." She is fascinated by the logic of the mentally ill and details her fascination on the stage.

Maddy is 19 and hears voices (as do the audience) that tell her she is a bride of Christ and responsible for the creation and care for the new Garden of Eden. Maddy's prodigal sister is desperate to get her help, her mother (also Madeleine) is angry that Maddy is controlling their lives and her father is doing what he can to help her survive her own world.

Like Kitten, Maddy is almost a textbook study of a disease.  She has lived with trauma (her twin drowned in the bath as a baby), is obsessed with menstrual blood, hears logical voices and dreams that she is raped by whispering voices in the dark – voices that could belong to God. And, also like Kitten, for all the moving performances and visual beauty, it feels too much like an academic study trying to be a community service announcement.

The dialogue is honest, but never sounds real because it lacks subtext.  Lines like, "Drugs are not the solution, she needs love" are at home in nightly soaps and don't feel right coming from the mouths of a family whose coping method is denial and non-communciation.

Nikki Sheils's performance as Maddy is engaging and brave, but she is played like a disease, not a person. Ironically by the end of the night, we know all about Maddy's illness, but too little about Maddy. This story about damaged people coping and could be so much more powerful if the obvious religious symbolism and  "this is what the disease is like" scenes were reduced to glimpses and moments, so that the audience (of intelligent people) could be free to care about the people rather than watch the disease at work.

It's hard not to compare Madeleine to Malthouse's current Sappho...in 9 Fragments as they both developed from academic perspectives. Sappho is far more academic, but it reaches our hearts because it sits in a recogniseable world with people who we understand, while Madeline, which has the stronger story, distances us, even if it does give us a lot of information about mental illness.

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Sappho... in 9 Fragments

Sappho... in 9 Fragments

Malthouse Theatre

4 August 2010

Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse

to 21 August 

www.malthouse.com.au

With passion, honesty and humour, Jane Montgomery Griffiths makes Sappho... in 9 Fragments a show not to miss if you like theatre with guts, heart and brain,

Sappho was born in Lesbos and wrote in the sixth and seventh centuries BCE. Her remaining fragmented poetry speaks of desire and love and, as Griffiths says, she is as dykonic as Martina and k.d, and as much loved by the cliterati as Jeanette Winterson.

Writer, researcher and performer Griffiths weaves her impressions of Sappho with the story of a young woman's steps into a sexual world of passion and indifference, longing and humiliation. With images like trying to warm a room with a hair drier, she brings this poetic and metaphorical world into our own awkward lives, and adds a relevance and understanding to the academic nature of the study as she laments that Electra became a more popular name than Sappho, because a matricide is preferable to a lesbian.

First seen naked with a shaved head, Griffiths's toned androgyny is as open and complex as Sappho's work. The addition of comfy undies help to define her gender and outlook, and a lush fur coat adds power, control and something to hide behind.

Anna Cordingley's clever costumes wrap Sappho in meaning, and her beautiful design, featuring a glass case slowly emptying of honey in a world that could be cut from an ancient Greek temple or newly-designed coastal home, underscores the text with its own revelations. This is the first time, I've seen Cordingly's design at one with the text and it makes her work shine, as does Paul Jackson's exquisite lighting.  Jackson knows the power of light and colour and lets it be so much more than a statement about what we can or cannot see.

Originally performed three years ago, Marion Potts has re-staged  Sappho... in 9 Fragments for Malthouse. Potts, who recently directed Griffiths as an unforgettable Goneril in Bell Shakespeare's King Lear, lets her actors find a very personal response to their characterisation, but ensures that the character stays in control, while her staging creates an unconscious reaction to the text by always keeping the whole picture alive. With these performances as the bar, we can hope to see more of Griffiths, as Potts become Artistic Director of Malthouse Theatre in 2011.

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com.

Malthouse preview



And look who was cool enough to be in Red Dwarf...