Review: Joan

Joan
The Rabble
22 April 2017
Theatre Works
to 30 April
theatreworks.org.au

Dana Miltins. Joan. Photo by David Paterson

Damn you, The Rabble. Just when I think I can’t love you any more, you go and make Joan.

I felt burnt alive and risen from the ashes.

Joan. Joan D’Arc. Saint Joan.

A young woman. Whispered to by saints. Virgin. Sinner. God’s holy soldier.

She became a hero, a saint, an aspiration for young women that they too can be strong and be destroyed. She’s a great audition pieces in the play by a man written three years after she was canonised.

She was burnt alive. She was 19.

Starting with a darkness that only Emma Valente’s lighting and Kate Davis’s design can find, shapes – women? a woman? young women? – move into light or are found in the darkness. It could be the holy light above or a light to run from. With projections in front of and behind the stage, it hints of a black and white movie but is nothing like a black and white movie as the sound of breath and bodies falling to their knees asks if their kneeling is choice.

After light, they move through explorations of body, fire and voice. And to make such mesmerising imagery sound so clinical, intelligent and “artistic” is unfair.

Founded by Valente and Davis, The Rabble’s process starts with design and develops through improvisation. Text and texts are vital to their process but is one of the last things on the stage. We watch more than we hear, and when the women are finally given voices, their words are fiercer, brighter and more blistering that the fire – that fire! –  that came before.

It’s hard to think when watching this work. It’s seems so clear but every moment is filled with ideas and discussions that are too complex to be reduced to words.

Luisa Hastings Edge, Emily Milledge, Dana Miltins and Nikki Sheils are Joan. Each is extraordinary and together they confront the expectations of Joan and her story, and question why pain, strength and faith are considered virtues for a woman, let alone a child.

At times, it’s like getting into Joan's soul and feeling with her. But it’s more confrontational when we’re distanced and see ourselves judging her as a Saint or Sinner and putting both on a pedestal that burns with the bundles of wooden faggots stacked around her.

The Rabble create astonishing independent theatre with an independent budget. I'm thrilled to be able to see them in small rooms, but it's beyond my understanding why festivals around the world aren't begging for work like this to be in their programs.

Review: Antigone

Antigone
Malthouse Theatre
25 August 2015
Merlyn Theatre
to 13 September
malthousetheatre.com.au

Antigone. Emily Milledge. Photo by Pia Johnson

In a desolate concrete yard where the only hint of humanity is a prefab building on stilts, a naked young body is dumped on the ground. Malthouse Theatre's Antigone starts with the Classic story, but it's not Sophocles's Antigone but an Antigone for now that's set in an isolated world where political power is its own reward and where there are no gods to blame or bow to, and no public chorus to witness and comment.

In the 400 BCEs, Ancient Greek playwrights competed in festivals. Filled with reflections and commentary on contemporary society, festivals were the place to hear opinions and figure out your own thoughts about issues. It was a bit like Facebook, but with better spelling. Sophocles won a lot of thumbs up and prizes.

Antigone was the first written but the final of Sophocles's three Thebean plays (that start with baby Oedipus). The first is the best known being about how Oedipus became King of Thebes by unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother, Jocasta. Jocasta and Oedipus had four children: sons, Polyneices and Eteocles; and daughters, Ismene and Antigone. Antigone followed her blind father into exile. The boys then killed each other fighting to be boss, leaving Jocasta's brother, Creon, as King, who declared that Eteocles was to be honoured while Polyneices was traitorous scum whose body was to rot in the open so the gods couldn't get his soul.

Antigone (Emily Milledge) wants to bury her brother. Her sister (Elizabeth Nabben) won't help her, Creon's son (Aaron Orzech) still wants to marry Antigone, and the unnamed Creon (Jane Montgomery Griffiths) wants Antigone and her defiance destroyed. The leader's husband is dead (for those wondering what happened to Eurydice) and the observing chorus are replaced by a guard/torturer (Josh Price) whose silence seems guaranteed.

Director Adena Jacobs and the design team (The Sisters Hayes, set and costume; Paul Jackson, lighting; Jethro Woodward, sound) create a bleak and godless world where hope is useless. The concrete is ice cold comfort and Jackson's lighting asks what's lurking in the surrounding black. Some of the most striking images come from the anticipation of one image and being confronted with something less gruesome but more horrific, like the revelation of tortured Antigone from behind black plastic sheets.

Montgomery Griffiths's text knows this story in many translations (including the Ancient Greek, which makes an unforgettable appearance). She rejects the parts she doesn't need and takes its themes, characters and familiarity to tell a story about now.

It's set in a country that has secret offshore facilities, known for their torture, and a leader who wears perfect black suits, argues that the state is right because it's the state, and refuses to listen to arguments, especially those from an angry and defiant young person. Even 12 months ago, this would have been a different play.

The contrast and similarity of Montgomery Griffiths and Milledge is what drives the work. One has power and age and knows she is right; the other has passion and youth and knows she is right. While a middle ground, cover up or lie seems an obvious solution, compromise is impossible for either woman and neither see how their destruction is mutual and far reaching.

Milledge is all contained passion and anger and Montgomery Griffiths uses the confidence of power to hide her doubts. Nabben shows how Iseme's inability to act comes from being torn in too many directions, Orzech shows how he is destroyed by trying to defy the woman who loves him for a woman she hates, and Price finds the least uncomfortable space between compliance and "don't ask".

There are times when the parallels are too obvious and there's room to tone down the references to Tones & Co (and I don't know what the pants pulling down was about), but if now isn't the time to put these issues to our stages, why do we bother to go to the theatre?

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Carrie, The Musical

Carrie: The Musical
Ghost Light in association with Moving Light
25 September 2014
Chapel off Chapel
to 12 October
chapeloffchapel.com.au

New Melbourne company Ghost Light have made a loud and proud declaration by debuting with the infamous flop Carrie: The Musical. And given that we haven't seen a production of it in Melbourne, it's a clever choice. Who doesn't want to see a show that's known as one of the worst musicals to open on Broadway?

The Royal Shakespeare Company premiered Carrie: The Musical in 1988; Les Miserables had been such a success for them that another musical was an obvious choice. It didn't do well. But it was Carrie and being based on the well-known 1976 film, which was based on Stephen King's runaway success debut novel, it got a lot of financial support and opened on Broadway in 1988. It didn't do well, closing after five performances. However, it has gone on to earn a cult status for being atrocious.

Carrie is a teenager who has been abused by her over-loving and god-fearing mother. She's an outsider at high school and her school life goes to hell when she freaks out about getting her first period and thinking that she's dying. Her mum makes things worse, but a teacher helps out and Carrie finds out that she has a friend among the mean girls. But she doesn't count on one particularly mean girl's need for revenge and the mean girl doesn't know about Carrie's trauma-induced telekinesis.

It's known as a horror story that explores the damage caused by fundamentalist religion and questions the power of young women and the existence of the fundamentalist god.

The musical's about finding friends, standing up to bullies and being yourself. Which is great – in High School Musical.

It's a dud. Musically dull, lyrically bland, Carrie feels like it was created by people who have seen musicals and replicated the outline without any detail. It's superficial and doesn't try to explore the guts and horror that created the story.

No wonder it's so popular! It's fun to watch something really bad and laugh at it.

But this production doesn't invite the laughs. It's played so straight that the opening night audience didn't have permission to laugh. It opens with earnest performances and cheesy choreography, which nails the tone that would free up the giggles, but the earnestness seems genuine. I hope that the floating Jesus picture on a string and the magical slamming locker doors are meant to be funny in their tacky obviousness, but I'm more afraid that they are serious.

But don't stop yourself from seeing it. After all, how often do you get the chance to see of Carrie: The Musical. And it has Chelsea Gibb as Carrie's mum and Emily Milledge as Carrie.

When these two are on the stage, the story comes alive.

Gibb plays the mother as a deeply traumatised women and creates an empathy and genuine feeling that overcomes her inane lyrics and the past images of the mother as a one-dimensional sadistic bitch.

And there's Emily Milledge. In an astonishing performance, she finds more in Carrie than this musical deserves. From the moment she opens her mouth, there's no doubt that she's going to bring us through the horror. As she's shown in her work with independent theatre The Rabble (Story of O, Room of Regret and Frankenstein), a can't-stop-watching performance comes from within the performer and has little to do with the words and story they are given. She shows us Carrie's inner hell and makes us dread the pig blood rather than looking forward to the most famous and gruesome scene in the story.

Without these two, it's just a confusingly straight production of an outrageously bad work, but the combination ensures that it's going to do well.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Last Chance: The Good Person of Szechuan

The Good Person of Szechuan
Malthouse Theatre and National Theatre of China
2 July 2014
Merlyn Theatre
to 20 July
malthousetheatre.com.au

Photo by Pia Johnson

The Good Person of Szechuan. Epic!

And it finishes on Sunday. So there's still a chance to see it again.

The cast and performances are divine (even the ones playing gods), the design is somewhere between wtf and wow, the text is Aussie and the direction's Chinese. And it's as Brechtian as Brecht can be.

Brecht was a German modernist and a Marxist who rejected the emotional heart-grab of namby pamby naturalism and wrote theatre that was about understanding the manipulation and falsity of realistic storytelling in order to see the creation of fiction by rulers, governments and politicians. He wrote because he saw his world being torn apart.

Be it sense, fate or luck, he left his home in Germany in 1933 and moved around Europe (avoiding German invasion) and before going to the USA in 1941. He began Good Person in 1938 and completed it in 1943; no wonder there's enough content in this play to make it feel like it's written for any audience who have seen it since.

Set in a fictional Szechuan-cum-Berlin-cum-Melbourne-cum-AnyCity, it's about three gods coming to earth to find good people. It doesn't take long for them to settle for finding one good person. With the help of a water seller, they meet prostitute Shen Te, who gives them a room for the night and is rewarded with enough money to buy a tobacco shop. And then it gets really hard for her to maintain her goodness.

Photo by Pia Johnson

This version is by Tom Wright, who makes it sound like it was written in Melbourne. And it's directed (in translation) by Chinese director Meng Jinghui, whose work in China comes close to having a cult following. His Rhinoceros in Love was part of the 2011 Melbourne International Arts Festival. I didn't get it. However, I was sitting next to a group of young Chinese women who didn't stop laughing. It clearly spoke to them, and to so many others; it's been in ongoing production in China since 1999. I wanted to know what I was missing.

But I got The Good Person of Szechuan. Perhaps all I needed was a slither of familiarity.

And from the gods arriving with shopping bags and looking like bridezilla Madonna (Christian and pop) icons (design by Marg Horwell), it's a world that's filled with the nearly unrecognisable familiar.

From designer dresses (thank you audience member for telling me that they are genuine expensive frocks and not be-dazzled K-Mart t-shirts) to the smoke machine, piles of baby dolls and the live musician (THE SWEATS) in a glass box, there are no secrets but this forced distancing is combined with performances that draw us back into the world and make us see it as us and ours.

And Moira Finucane, Genevieve Giuffre, Emily Milledge, Josh Price, Bert LaBonté, Richard Pyros, Aljin Abella and Daniel Frederiksen! What more do I need to say.

The friend who came with me did have something else to say and she said it to the man who was sitting two rows behind us, Minister Malcolm Turnball.

"At the after party, I slyly bumped into him accidentally, so he had to notice me. After introductions, I questioned him about what was happening to the boatload of Tamil asylum seekers. His answer was, 'I don't know'. He tried to reassure me they were safe because we were 'looking after them'. I politely berated him about it and he really didn't have much to say. Finally I said, 'You've just seen a play by Brecht. What do you think he'd have to say about this?' Malcolm: 'I know what he'd have to say'. Me: 'Exactly."

I loved this production because it must be talking to those who don't care about Tamil refugees and carbon taxes and slow internet. It's made for our Malcolm Turnballs. If those in power can see the world how we do, surely they'll change.

Nup.


PS. I'm blaming my computer for losing my real review. And by computer, I mean I accidentally deleted 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: Out of the Water

Out of the Water
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
7 February 2014
Red Stitch Theatre
to 8 March
redstitch.net

Red Stitch have opened the year with some of the best performances I've seen there.

Out of the Water is by US writer Brook Berman. With parallels to The Odessy, with its journey home disrupted by sirens, it captures the unease of early middle age that's fuelled by the palpable pain of what's missing or what might have been.

Polly (Kate Cole) is in her later 30s and leaves New York for a funeral, one of her dead mum's husbands, where she meets Graham (Brett Cousins), her nearly-forgotten step brother, who never left the same conservative Illinois town. They're not related and there are drunken sparks, but Polly doesn't expect Graham to turn up in NY or that his 17-year-old daughter with a Jesus crush, Cat (Emily Milledge), would follow.

With a story ostensibly about family and fidelity, there's fear of movie-of-week melodrama, but it's quickly dismissed as director Nadia Tass embraces the overt theatricality of the work and ensures a tone that lets the humour be dark and the subtext speak loudly, as the lovers say everything except what they want to.

The lighting design (Jason Bovaird) creates texture and more spaces than the design, but this cast could perform in a concrete bunker and still make us care.

Too often at Red Stitch, actors put their performances before their characters; not in this case. Cole and Cousins make the attraction between these broken and not-especially-likeable people felt as much as it's seen, and their toeing of the not-incest-but-not-Facebook-status line makes for a tension that's only momentarily broken with frantic – and hot and honest – sex.

Their contrast is Cat, who wants to bring her dad home but gets caught up in the excitement of being in NY, finding a perfect first kiss and wondering if falling in love is as wonderful as ice cream. Milledge (who last year came to attention in The Rabble's Story of O and Room of Regret) finds endless hope in this teenager who knows she should be hurting and understands what her dad is going through far more than Graham does himself.

With the year starting with such complex and complete performances from a cast who work with an awareness that makes them feel like they really are family, I'm excited to see what Red Stitch  – with new Artistic Director, Ella Caldwell – bring us next.

This was on aussietheatre.com.

Photo by Jodie Hutchinson

What Melbourne loved in 2013, part 13

O, Yes! Today, we talk to three people from The Rabble's Story of O, a show that's getting a lot of screaming happy love.

Before this show, my first thought of Story of O was the 70s soft porn film version, that I'd only ever seen the poster for. I assumed it was something about orgasm. I was aware of the book, but had never read it. Before The Rabble's show opened, Dana Miltins (who was Jacqueline) told me that I had to read it. HAD to. Turns out it wasn't in any second hand book store I looked in ("Am I looking in classics or the curtained off section?"), so I gave Kindle some money.

I'm so glad I didn't read it as a teenager and I don't recommend it as a piece of literature, an arousing bed-time fantasy or even a good read. I gave up trying to imagine how this book could become a feminist piece of theatre.

But they did, and now my first thought of Story of O will always be this astonishing production.

Emma Valente
Co-Artistic Director, The Rabble

EMMA: Watching the long rise of an illuminated rectangle (did it take ten minutes?) in Einstein on the Beach and realising that I've been quoting Robert Wilson without knowing it. There was some kind of bum-numbing ecstasy in that moment; a collapsing of several histories, a single image fluctuating through many meanings. Quite perfect.

Eating burgers on the floor of the ANZ Pavilion (top floor of the Arts Centre) during interval at Life and Times and feeling like I was at a sleep over with all my friends. Then, after a quick nap during the last hour of that show, opening my eyes and realising aliens had landed. A beautiful left turn, a chocolate brownie, a joyful day at the theatre.

M+M. This production wrecked me. The agony – an event unto itself. An incredible cast and a formidable design team. Special mention to Nicola Andrews and Nik Pajanti who produced one of my favourite lighting designs of the year – complicated simple states – colouring in with a renaissance highlighter.

NEON. I think i'll remember this year for a while. It felt like there was some kind of definitive movement which extends well beyond NEON and the companies that were programmed this year, but can be exemplified by MTC's enthusiasm and exuberance for the project and the sense of community that started to grow like moss in the walls of the castle. Nothing was censored – no one said no – though some of us were close to the edge, some of the time. This year things shifted around.

What Emma is looking forward to in 2014 at issimomag.com.

SM: I often sit and wonder what a director is doing. But not with Emma*. I see her worlds and understand exactly what she, and co-creator Kate Davis, are doing. She doesn't have to explain anything to me. I watch her work and I feel like I was part of the process.

Emma's also a lighting designer. The colour she achieved in opening of Room of Regret: it was like breathing in gold air that had somehow managed to rust. And that every room in that labyrinth design changed mood and tone together.

* Or with Robert Wilson. I love that she was quoting him without knowing it. These are both directors who understand that you get rid of the useless words to really communicate.

Emily Milledge

actor, music theatre performer

EMILY: My favourite theatre moments this year, as a performer, are definitely those in a tiny cupboard with a rather scared, confused or very willing audience member in Room of Regret. 

Rarely do audience and actor get to meet in this way, and it's safe to say that people never (I hope) meet in real life for the first time in a dark, mirrored cupboard with soil on the ground. 

Actor–audience member relationships aside, the experience of meeting another person in this kind of weird intimacy and shared self examination was quite profound. What you're asking of yourself and the other person in that moment is to jump straight to a visceral and felt  truth that is literally staring right back at you. Let's do away with traditional introductory "Hi, my name is ..." interactions; stick yourself in a cupboard with someone for a minute and you'll come out knowing oodles of things about them!

As an audience member, my favourite moment was Olympia Bukkakis's karaoke moment in Summertime in the Garden of Eden. (I've just brought up "The Animal Song" by Savage Garden on YouTube now to reminisce that moment.) So hilarious, just amazingly hilarious, perfection.

SM: I noticed Emily in Gaybies and loved her in Room of Regret, but her performance as Natalie Story of O blew me away so much that I keep calling her Natalie. She was on stage with Dana Miltins, Jane Montgomery-Griffiths and Mary Helen Sassman – three performers who amaze and seduce me every time I see them – yet Emily was the one I kept watching. With hardly a word, she showed everything we needed to know about this teenager and why she wanted to be just like O.

What Emily is looking forward to in 2014 at issimomag.com.

Gary Abrahams

actor, director

Photo by Guy Little

GARY: 2013 was the year I really noticed the status quo shifting. Suddenly my colleagues and friends were the ones making headlines, moving into the top jobs, and generally beginning the transition from the old guard to the new. People who I had witnessed struggling, evolving, growing and, at times, failing over the last decade were now appearing on the mainstages, in major festivals, in positions of leadership and basically kicking goals all over the place. 

It kind of forced me to own up to the fact that I had grown too, that I was no longer an "emerging" artist, but an artist who had been practising and working steadily in some form or another for over a decade! The players sitting behind the desks of the big intimidating theatre companies were now people I had trained, studied  worked with. It's pretty exciting to get to that point. Scary too.

Nicola Gunn, Adena Jacobs, Daniel Schlusser, Ash Flanders and Declan Greene, Sam Strong, Anne Louise Sarkes, Tim Stitz ... I'm just name dropping now. Many more too. Many wonderful actors and dear friends too, working non-stop.

I think I find/found it so kind of poignant because entering this field, it's drummed into you that so few people succeed and the work is so scarce and it's all really a pipe dream. Yet I'm witnessing this delightful and inspiring shift in the paradigm. I know it'll last a while, then plateau, then the next generation will take over sooner than I'm prepared for. But it's just nice too witness for now.

So 2013 as a year in theatre was that sort of year for me: contemplative, confronting, career focussed.

On a personal note I had a blast working with The Rabble on Story of O for NEON. Such divine people; everyone who was involved in that show. And we got to do such dirty, dirty things with each other! It was an honour to get to be a part of NEON, but everyones already gone on about that so I'll leave it at that.

I enjoyed bingeing on stuff during the Melbourne Fringe. They saw a thylacine really stuck out for me. It stayed with me, even now I can think back on it and I'm transported to the place I was in as an audience member.  It's funny the shows that do that. We don't really have a choice about what sticks, and what vanishes.

I'm looking forward to many things in 2014. All my friends work at MTC, Malthouse, Belvoir.

But I'm also looking forward to re-finding my groove. I've got a number of projects lined up, things I'm fired up about. I get to be a practising theatre artist. How fucking cool is that?

SM: When reading Story of O, I wasn't sure if Gary was Rene or Sir Stephen, so I imagined him as both. It helped. I also knew Jane was playing whoever Gary wasn't, so I was really imagining a mash up of the two of them. It was strangely comforting.

It's hard to even think what else the O cast have done this year. Gary's Rene wasn't what I imagined; it was so much more. A combination of heart and heartless and selfish generosity that made complete sense – and showed us why O made that choice for him.  And there was the ice cream.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Part 11

Part 12

Part 14

Part 15

Part 16

Part 17

2012 part 1, with links to the rest

FESTIVAL: Room of Regret

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL 2013
Room of Regret
The Rabble, Theatre Works, Melbourne Festival
22 October 3013
Theatre Works
to 3 November
melbournefestival.com.au

No one makes theatre like The Rabble do. It's like co-creators Emma Valente and Kate Davis take the concept of theatre and re-create it into something that looks like theatre, but feels like a trip – I don't mean holiday – that simultaneously assults and calms and awakens bits of your brain that you didn't know existed.

Room of Regret is their reflection on Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Compared to their recent Story of O and even last Festival's Orlando, it's close to being a literal re-telling. But don't expect a lot of words from Dorian's tumble through perfection, hedonism and despair.

Instead, expect to be immersed into, sometimes almost drowned in, a pool of pure emotion. With no restraint, it batters and confronts, but there's love and comfort around the next corner and the only fear is that of missing out.

The audience (40; there isn't room for 41) are taken into the theatre in groups. All have their heads covered in a lace veil and are lead through a house, with plywood walls and floor covered in gold leaves, and are left sitting in different rooms. No group can see the other, or really see their own group as all sit like statues covered in dust sheets waiting for the summer return of the household. As the lighting brings an eerie autumn twilight, the other draped statues come to life.

Description can't justify this experience and no experience can be the same because of the different views. Sometimes the action is in touching distance, other times it's heard, glimpsed through a doorway or projected onto a screen.

Nothing is lost by being in a different room, but nothing is gained by staying put. If a hand is offered from the cast, take it. My favourite moment was one that no one saw: there was a top hat, a dance, a whisper and a cuddle.

Technically, what's so astonishing about such a complex piece is that it sustains its changing pace and tone throughout the space. The cast (Pier Carthew, Alex McQueen, Mary Helen Sassman, David Harrison and Emily Milledge) show no favour as they dash or slink from room to room and often choose one person to tell their story to. There's repetition that's never the same and reflection is left to the audience, often very literally with mirrors.

Valente's lighting (as glorious as her direction) establishes the changing mood and Davis's design entices with lace, beads, silky leopard print and furs that begged to be felt. But (finally) there's the ability to touch her world. Here the synthetic falseness of the gold leaves can be picked up, the distortion of lace-covered eyes controlled and the touch of flesh is welcomed, but never forced. (I've never come so close to touching and comforting an actor. The only thing that stopped me was seeing my own reflection in a mirror; I now wish I had.)

I've described The Rabble's work like a dream before and it's still as close as I can get. In dreams, illogic makes perfect sense and all that really matters is how you feel, and how you still feel when you wake up relieved or devastated to be safe in your own bed. Description and interpretation only take the felt meaning away from the dreamer.

Room of Regret might be at living nightmare or leave you floating and hoping to never wake up. Whatever, it's not work to force meaning onto because whatever you feel is what it's meant to mean.

It left me feeling elated and awake wanting to do it again.

And if you want Wilde's telling of the story, read the book.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Story of O

NEON Festival of Independent Theatre
Story of O
The Rabble
28 June 2013
The Lawler
to 7 July
mtc.com.au

Carousel ponies, huffy walk-outs and a personal trigger warning when you pick up your ticket: The Rabble have adapted the Story of O for the MTC's sensational Neon season.  It's confronting and confirming and I loved it so much that it hurt a bit to watch.

I love The Rabble's work with the kind of love that defies any attempt at a star rating. In preparation for their version of Story of O by Pauline Réage, I read the book; the reading was less painful than O's preparation at Roissy, but I didn't enjoy it and had no idea what to expect on the stage.

In 1954, Anne Declos was a successful 47-year-old journalist and novelist when she wrote this tale as a gift to her boss and male lover, who fancied the writing of the Marquis de Sade. Despite winning the prestigious French literary prize, Prix des Deux Magots, she didn't publicly reveal herself as the author until 40 years after it was published.

It's ostensibly about a young woman's complete submission to secure her lover. A submission that includes being unable to cross her legs, multiple penetration by anonymous men (without any hint of lube, condoms or a moment to catch a breath to scream a non-existent safe word), whipping, branding and her ultimate exposure (considered almost too shocking at the time) is the waxing off of her pubic hair. And that's before it gets really de-humanising.

Without beginning an argument about BDSM, O gets no sexual pleasure from her submission. It's not about her; it's about her doing it for him, even when he's not around to witness and even when she realises that he doesn't want her. And it's narrated by a distanced and anonymous voice, whose gentle – almost prudish – prose leaves it as erotic as a Jehovah's Witness magazine. If pornography is meant to arouse, there's something much more to this book than its reputation, and its popularity may rest on how its distanced narration and calm description puts responsibility on the reader to imagine what O feels.

Co-creators Kate Davis and Emma Valente make us see how O feels.

And see it in ways far removed from the novel – but this doesn't matter as they only use a handful of words from the text, which it is as accurate as it needs to be and as creative as it should be.

As co-artistic directors of The Rabble, Davis designed and Valente directed, but it's difficult to sense a clear differentiation. With exquisite beauty and understanding, they've taken this fantasy tale about submission out of the imagination of its readers, queered it up, reversed some genders, whirled it around, put it in close up and thrust it back at us with such bold confidence that we understand how it's impossible to say no.

Aesthetically, the 60s French polo necks, jaunty stripes and elastic garters are given a nod, but O's world isn't wealthy Parisian chateaus. At first, it's a girly dream with merry-go-round ponies and pink flowers scattered on the floor. But horses are beasts to ride and poles are used to tie horses up. And even with its flung ribbons, party hats and ice cream, all is not as pretty as it looks.

The cast are as desirous and pleasing as the world they play in. Gary Abrahams is Rene (O's lover), Jane Montgomery Griffiths is Sir Stephen (who is given O by Rene), Pier Cathew is Anne-Marie (the older lesbian who brands O for Sir Stephen), Dana Miltins is Jacqueline (loved by O and wanted by Rene) and Emily Milledge is Nathalie (Jaqueline's teenage sister who just wants to be like O). None of these relationships are spoken on the stage, but each take their character from the book and let them live in this through-the-looking glass world where everything about their book behaviour is questioned.

Milledge's Nathalie is especially moving and as Miltin's seven-month pregnant belly is ignored by Jacqueline, it's gold-clad roundness says more about the sexual portrayal of pregnant women than words could dare.

Which leaves Mary Helen Sassman as O. Her performance transcends any depiction of O that has gone before. She's scared, hurt, excited and – this is the twist – lets O say "No" and choose to keep going. She keeps going towards boredom, acceptance and far more hurt without ever revealing if O's own desires are met. Sassman's performance is already being described as fearless, but I say it's honest. It's so uncompromisingly honest that I think the walk-outs are because she makes them feel everything that O feels, which is far more confronting than the sex and violence shown.

So far, people have walked out. This is wonderful. How often does theatre create a response so powerful that people are brave enough to walk out when their exit is seen by the audience and the performers? On the night I went, the walk-outs were men and I wanted to run after them and tell them to go back in and really look at the stage, because this is how women are seen. If it's so shocking or offensive to leave when everyone on stage is fully clothed, the sex and violence are clearly faked and when kitchen and domestic appliances are the offending objects, perhaps a sense of the true offence can be felt.

If you want to run, ask why and remember the gift is for those who stay and laugh or cringe or cry or wonder if they should be feeling as good as they do.

Story of O is theatre like no one else dares to make.

Photos by Guy Little

This will also appear on AussieTheatre.com in a couple of days

Review: Gaybies

There aren't many seats left for Gaybies and it finishes tomorrow/today (Saturday).

Everyone has loved it to pieces and all the reviewers are raving. Here's Cameron's review for a start.

MIDSUMMA 2013
Gaybies
Midsumma and Dale Splender
16 January 2013
Sumner Theatre, MTC
to 19 January
midsumma.org.au

Gaybies is on its way to being an important piece of theatre that shakes up stale and dull opinions. Opening at Midsumma, it's singing show tunes with the choir, but there couldn't be a better and more fabulous audience to introduce this work to.

Created by music theatre director/creator Dean Bryant, Gaybies is the first work commissioned by the Midsumma festival, which has been celebrating queer culture for 25 years. With little time and resources, Bryant explored verbatim theatre – verbatim theatre recreates interviews (The Laramie Project is one of the more famous) – and interviewed people whose voices and stories aren't always heard in the talkback radio screaming, media hoo ha and politician point scoring over what makes a family: children with one or more gay or lesbian parents.

If you've ever even thought "But what about the children?", here's the answer.

There's the awkwardness of seeing your dad at a gay club, the unexplainable death of too many "uncles" in the 80s, surprising a teen boyfriend's mum by explaining that drag queens taught you how to wear pantyhose and heels, and the "who cares!" attitude of friends when you out your mum – but it's mostly stories about kids being kids and parents being parents. And I dare anyone to not relate to at least one story on the stage regardless of their gender, sexuality or attitude.

As the first time it's been seen and having only gone into the rehearsal room this week, it's presented as a semi-read work, but the scripts are noticeable for a few seconds and the books become part of the stage story. There's heart and guts in every story told, but it's Daniel Clarke's gorgeous direction that brings shape and structure to the stage and the script (that's still a bit rambly). With songs, a party table, craft, bubbles and compulsory glitter, he creates context and a reason for everyone to be and stay on the stage and to get up and share their story.

And bringing every bit of love they have to the stage, there's a cast of local favourites who are all so lovely that no one can be singled out: Trevor Ashley, Virginia Gay, Brent Hill,  Gareth Keegan, Kate Kendall, Todd McKenney, Emily Milledge, Ben Mingay, Christina O'Niell, Alex Rathgeber, Georgia Scott, Magda Szubanski, Rob Tripolino and Christie Whelan-Browne.

Gaybies is created to knock out intolerance , but it's more a celebration of everyone who has faced even a hint of that intolerance in their lives and been left wondering or hurt at its ridiculousness. See it because you want to celebrate or just because it's honest, beautiful and heartwarming. And it only runs until Saturday, so you really have to get organised now.

The Midsumma audiences are adoring this show, but to have the impact that it will have, it needs to get  produced, supported and seen widely. I believe that dullness and intolerance can change with truth, so what about starting with performance at a full sitting of our federal parliament?

This was on AussieTheatre.com