Review: Cock

Cock
MTC
13 February 2013
Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 22 March
mtc.com.au

Cock immediately demands attention and begs for jokes that are too easy. Yes, this Cock satisfies and I'd go for the ride again. Now let's move on.

First seen in 2009, the title of UK writer Mike Bartlett’s play brings expectations before a word is spoken. Some are met and more are dismissed as far more than cock comes to play.

Twenty-something John has been with his partner for seven years. On what seems to be a regular break, he meets someone else and falls in love. What causes the most shock for the scorned partner is that John’s new love is a woman. With a definite assumption that a choice must be made between the two and that John must define himself by the gender of his lover (as declared by the father who  comes to dinner), the tug of love is on.

While trying to make gender a non-issue in love, Bartlett’s writing dips (and occasionally plunges) into the stereotypes it’s trying to avoid: girly woman want romance in Paris and babies, gay men act like girls. But this is what makes this work so engaging. With neither lover being likeable enough to care who wins John (who’s neither a cock nor cocky), it forces its audience to question what’s going on rather than cheer for a winner and a happy ending.

But enough of the writing. It’s always great to see good newish writing on our commercial stages, but it’s more exciting to see new realisations of these works.

Leticia Caceres’s direction is exquisite and she’s created a production very different from the ones that brought attention to this play. She lets her actors (Tom Conroy, Angus Grant, Sophie Ross and Tony Rickards) bring themselves to their characters as she deftly controls the dark humour to build the so-awkward tension to its inevitable breathless breaking point. And she works with her co-creators to make something that Bartlett may never have imagined as he wrote it.

There’s Missy Higgins’s original music adding the emotional pull that’s not in the script, but it’s Marg Howell’s design (with Rachel Burke’s lighting) that brings so much to the stage and invents a world far from the propless bare stage asked for in the script. The Fairfax’s semi-circle stage is covered with huge white pillows that highlight the brightly mis-matched costumes while looking part-giant-bed and part-padded-cell. It makes for unstable ground that, as they are moved, support and cover, become walls, define arenas and continue to confirm that Howell is one of the best designers on Earth.

Cock's not as confronting, and more conservative, than as its title implies. All puns intended, it’s a softer, more gentle and far funnier work, which might have been a very different play if it weren’t called Cock.


Photo by Jeff Busby.

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

Review: Evolution, Revolution and the Mail Order Bride

Evolution, Revolution and the Mail Order Bride
8 February 2014
fortyfive downstairs
to 16 February
fortyfivedownstairs.com

Performer–composer–singer–writer Zulya Kamalova's Evolution, Revolution and the Mail Order Bride is three stories about three women that explore how the suppression of the feminine affects evolution, a revolution and a mail order bride.

Kamalova is a remarkable talent. Her voice is like an indulgent homemade caramel that no one can say no to, she lets her characters be their unique selves, and her music made me feel a bit like it was the 1920s and she was contemporary of Kurt Weill. Her composition is more personal and broader in style to Weill (and she writes her own lyrics), but he was the first composer I thought of when I heard her four piece orchestra (Erkki Veltheim, Charlotte Jacke, Justin Marshall and Donald Stewart).

Director Maude Davey has brought as much meaning as possible to the piece by working with a complex design (Adrienne Chisholm) that sprawls around the fortyfive downstairs carven like a lost op shop in a forest and creates some mesmerising visuals with projections (Michael Carmody) and lighting (Katie Sfetkidis), but, for all that is beautiful and complex about it, there's little sense of story in the interwoven lives.

Telling us what happened isn't a story. Telling us what you believe isn't a story. This work seems so intent on being a lesson (that's explained on the poster and told to people who are already on side), that it's difficult to find a way to care about and connect to the characters and their lives because their plot is so controlled.

Kamalova enchants with her songs and music, but maybe there's enough character, emotion and heart in every song to share what needs to be told without the explanatory monologues.

Photo by Sarah Walker.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Mini review: Special Victim

Special Victim
Ash Flanders
14 February 2014
Hares and Hyenas
to 22 February
facebook.com

What do you do if you're scared you won't get enough Valentine's Day attention? Ash Flanders invited a bookshop full of friends, relatives and strangers to spend the evening with him to avoid seeming needy.

After the overflowing audience love of his first solo show, Negative Energy Inc, he got the gang (musician Dave Barklay and director Stephen Nicolazzo) back together to make a show for Adelaide's Feast festival last year. The result was Special Victim and Melbourne finally gets to cut that special love heart into their flesh this and next weekend at the ever-lovely Hares and Hyeneas bookshop in Fitzroy.

While Negative Energy Inc was about coping with a career that wasn't swimming in the big pool, things have changed for our Ash, but that hasn't changed his attitude or his obsession with special victims: those of the Law and Order kind and those who bring it on themselves.

It's not as revelatory as his first show, but there are still songs, wigs and stories about life with Heather (mum) and Daniel (partner) – and there are trips to Geelong and Adelaide that are as frightening as trips to Geelong and Adelaide can be.

And it is Ash, so it's fucking hilarious.

And he wears a white, be-sparkled jump suit and stilettos. What more do you need to know? Apart from it may be his last performance before being Hedda Gabbler at Belvoir Street in June.