Mini review: Coranderrk at Coranderrk

Coranderrk: We Will Show The Country
La Mama
at Coranderrk
21 February 2016
coranderrk.com
minutesofevidence.com.au

The sun setting at Coranderrk at Coranderrk

Coranderrk: We Will Show The Country was developed by La Mama and Ilbijerri and first seen at La Mama in 2010. It's a verbatim-theatre collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations and artists about the 1881 Victorian Parliamentary Coranderrk Inquiry into the management of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve, near Healsville in the Yarra Valley.

The production has toured – I saw it in 2011 – and on Sunday 21 February, it was presented for the first time on country at Coranderrk.

This isn't a show that needs another review – there are plenty.

It was an honour to be there among descendants and families and to hear the voices of the past come to life at the same place they were spoken 135 years ago.

From the Welcome to Country that didn't need a smoking ceremony because everyone who was there had stomped away any bad spirits to looking at photos and realising they were taken at the house I could see from where I was sitting, this production continues to ensure that that Coranderrk's story won't be lost and now belongs to everyone who sees it.

Review: Frankenstein

Frankenstein
The Rabble and Malthouse Theatre
25 March 2014
Beckett Theatre
to 5 April
malthousetheatre.com.au

My uterus is still reacting to The Rabble's Frankenstein.

I say it every time, but no one makes theatre like The Rabble does and Frankenstein is stretching their own boundaries far enough for Malthouse to include content warnings. Read them and you'll know if you should give it a miss.

Working with their actors, co-creators Kate Davis and Emma Valente devise work based on well-know texts. Hours of improvisation and development never get near the stage (and they kept cutting after the previews). What's left is distilled, clear and so potent that it's not safe to take in more than sips.

The novel Frankenstein was written by an 18-year-old woman. In 1816 Mary Shelley was on holiday in Geneva with her new husband Percy (whose first wife had recently suicided), and writers Lord Byron and John Polidori. They had a competition to write the best horror story. Mary won with the beginnings of the novel that was first published anonymously in 1818 and in her name in 1823.  It's about a doctor who creates life: a monster who doesn't want to be alone.

The Rabble tell it as a story about fertility and birth, knowing that between 1815 and 1818 Shelley lost three children at birth. Finally, one baby survived.

In this story, an infertile doctor (Mary Helen Sassman) wants to be a mummy so much that she's going to fight until she makes a baby by any means possible, helped by her assistant (Dana Miltins) and adopted blind daughter (Emily Milledge). The return of her brother (David Paterson) makes for awkwardness, but not as awkward as the fact that she creates a monster (Jane Montgomery Griffiths). 

With the horror-film monster often better known than the book, there's as much reference to horror films as to the novel – especially those made to squeal and look away from and those that treat women atrociously. 

The orange stage is alien and uncomfortably beautiful, and filled with hundreds of black water-filled balloons.

Like monster eggs, they are slippery and wobbly and range in size from a mensturating to a first-trimester uterus, which becomes squeal-and-look-away clear when the first is ripped open into a bucket.

This is reproduction that's bleeding, empty, ripped, violent, invasive, torturous, stinking, screaming, agonising, helpless, stitched, scarred, violated, stretched and exhausted.

And it's beautiful.

Blood and pain are such a part of making, or trying to make, new life and finding the exquisite love that's swaddled in a soft bunny rug.

With an infertile naked mutant-breasted monster, a womb that never forgives its emptiness and one ripped out before it had a chance, Frankenstein's honesty is confronting and Valente and Davis never hold back when a visual choice has to be made. Yes, it has to be a coat hanger and it has to be red globby jelly and it's impossible to not see the difference between the naked flesh of a woman in her 20s and one in her 50s.

It's extreme, but no more than the horror films inspired by Frankenstein. In comparison to some, it's mild. And, as we laugh as much as squeal at horror films, it's more than ok to laugh if it gets too much, too graphic or too close.

The Rabble's monster story dares us to find beauty and laughter – and perhaps even comfort – in the horror of reproduction.

I just wish I'd had some ibuprofen with me.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Tribes

Tribes
Melbourne Theatre Company
9 February 2012
Sumner Theatre
to 14 March

Heartfelt and honest performances from a wonderful cast are reason enough to see the MTC's Tribes.

With three extravert, attention-seeking adult children living with their over-achieving parents, there's rarely a quiet moment in this house. Dad (Brian Lipson) is a writer and a never-wrong academic, Mum (Sarah Peirse) is trying to write a detective novel, daughter (Julia Grace) is trying to be an opera singer and son 1 (David Paterson) is working on a thesis. It'd be a bohemian middle class paradise, if it weren't for the constant arguing. The only one who misses out on a daily tiff is son 2, Billy, (Luke Watts), who's deaf.

When Billy meets Sylvia (Alison Bell), his view of his family and his place in our hearing-centric society changes. Sylvia has deaf parents and was brought up with Sign as her first language. She works for a deaf events company and is gradually losing her hearing and her connection to the non-deaf world. As Billy learns Sign and meets a community he'd avoid in an attempt to be normal, he sees how much he has missed and how much his deafness is seen as the centre of his personality.

The dynamic and internal-rules of family life are captured perfectly and it's an awkward joy to watch them argue over the likes of orange juice or if it's Wagner or Terry Pratchett. Lipson and Peirse are especially irresistible as a couple who show their deep love through fighting, and Bell brings the inner hell and dilemma of her character into every moment of Sylvia's smiling politeness.

British writer Nina Raine's script soars when we're caught in the emotions and dilemmas of these complex people, but, as Billy and Sylvia force change, the metaphorical and literal deafness begins to dominate and the author's voice butts in to lecture.

Sign is as complex as any other language, the Deaf community is as hierarchical and inbred as the thearte community and society generally isn't brilliant at dealing with people with different abilities. While loving that often un-spoken issues are the base of a story, but they'd be as clear without the rhetoric and ongoing metaphors, which would let the story and its characters more free to grab us by our hearts.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by Jeff Busby