Review: The Flock and the Nest

The Flock and the Nest
Red Stitch and St Michael's Grammar School
10 July 2014
St Michael's Drama School
to 19 July
redstitch.net

St Michael's Grammar School is next door to the Red Stitch theatre and when the school approached the theatre company to collaborate on a production, it was impossible to say no.

Working with director Gary Abrahams and playwright Glyn Roberts, The Flock and the Nest was developed specifically for and with the cast of students (a role was created for everyone who wanted to be in it) and four Red Stitch adult actors.

They started with wanting to explore the gap between childhood and adulthood, the pros and cons of competition, and the concept of utopian lives and living the dream. The result is a story about a comfortable family in the city who seem to have it all and what happens when they meet and visit their cousins who live in the country in a small community who are trying to create their own dream.

By involving a cast of 16, it's run time gets close to too-long, but any cutting would cut performances that don't deserve to be cut. It's more ambitious than many high-school productions and its biggest strength is how it feels like a story that the teen cast (from years 9, 10 and 11) had a large part in creating.

The structure and big-picture is from Roberts, but so much character development and character choices clearly come from the teenage actors. This gives it an authenticity, relevance and freshness that is often missing when adults write teenage characters.

As a collaboration, The Flock and the Nest blurs the line between high-school and professional theatre and suggests that collaborations like these could happen more.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

What Melbourne loved in 2013, part 17

That's it! 51 members of Melbourne's theatre community have shared their 2013 favourite moments, shows and people.

The last very-loved three are Mary Helen Sassman, Glyn Roberts and Richard Watts.

(And there might be a bonus next week.)

What Melbourne loved the most in 2013

The Sovereign Wife, Sisters Grimm, NEON

Summertime in the Garden of Eden, Sisters Grimm, Theatre Works
They saw a thylacine, Sarah Hamilton and Justine Campbell, Melbourne Fringe
Story of O, The Rabble, NEON
Kids Killing Kids, MKA, Melbourne Fringe
M+M, Daniel Schlusser Ensemble, Theatre Works, Melbourne Fringe

But the MTC's NEON Festival of Independent Theatre is the undisputed winner.

There's still no award statue, no cash prize and I'm in my pjs as I announce the winners, but there are quotables and every show and person mentioned knows that Melbourne really loved you in 2013. 

Mary Helen Sassman

performer

MARY HELEN: I have felt a bubbling undercurrent – sometimes champagne all fizzy pop and sometimes simmering soup all hearty – this year, as though something special is happening to our little industry. We have seen courage and risk-taking robustly applauded.

As a performer, my scariest, most formative and now favourite moment was while performing in The Rabble's Story of O, where scores of audience walked out mid-performance; some loudly exclaiming their disdain as they left. I inherently aim to please – or so I had thought – so was challenged, but ultimately it felt dangerous and honest.

Also this year I have been working at what Chris Boyd has called "Headquarters": La Mama Theatre. What I love most about that place is that it feels like home to so many ridiculously talented people and companies.

My favourite moments there and elsewhere:

A stunning and dark tale in Angela Betzien's The Tall Man. Director Leticia Caceres created an eerie and raw world with some seriously good Brisbane-bred actors Hayden Spencer and Louise Brehmer.

Super Discount (Back to Back Theatre) was super awesome.

Menagerie (NEON, Daniel Schlusser Ensemble) thrilled me. I am now and forever unfulfilled if there are less than three simultaneous climaxes at any one time on stage.

SM: MH's performance in Story of O left me reeling (and I lost count of the climaxes). 

It's almost impossible to get into the head of the O in the book. Mary Helen got into O's head and did what the book doesn't: showed us what this women felt. It's when actors bring more than the writer created to a character that they become so real that we are willing to forget that we're watching an actor.

Glyn Roberts
was Co-Creative-Director, MKA
is Program Manager, La Boite Theatre Company (Brisbane)

GLYN: Well. 2013 was for me one of the most hectic years of my life; although, not the busiest. That was 2011–12: those heady years where we built cutting-edge performances spaces out of eggshells and barley sugar.

My favorite show was The Rabble's Story of O, but that has been talked about quite a bit here. And I finally caught Arthur's Cut Snake, a show that is "performance" at it's simplest and most effective. Such a lovely thing.

My favorite moments in theatre this year were more the symptoms of shows. Watching a Year 10 class from the Gold Coast lose their shit while watching The Economist at the World Theatre Festival in Brisbane or, in Brisbane again for the Brisbane Festival, having MKA's production of The Unspoken Word is 'Joe' programmed alongside so many friends and colleagues from Melbourne.

It was a sign that something was beginning and ending simultaneously. Change was afoot, not to mention the emergence of a curious culture of sharing and communication between Melbourne and Brisbane, cheekily going on behind Sydney's back.

The most telling moments were the white hot fury that MKA's Kids Killing Kids could, on any given night, insight and the bacchaenalian thrill that it would inspire in the hearts of others.

The same went for Mark Wilson's Unsex Me, which divided audiences with many to this day still unable to control the volume of their voice when the piece is mentioned (which is excellent).

Both shows represented my swan song as a Creative Director of MKA and both were shows that forced those that saw them to lay their cards on the table. These pieces not only polarised members of the audience but exposed who they were ideologically, aesthetically, sexually, culturally and artistically. It was these moments where theatre managed to expose people's essence and foundations and had them leaving the theatre raw and alive both livid and joyful.

As Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.” If we avoid indifference from here on in then I think we will be set to have a good 2014.

SM: I was going to talk more about Kids Killing Kids and a bit about Group Show (what a bunch of writers!), but I'm going with:

 "If we avoid indifference from here on in then I think we will be set to have a good 2014."

Let's all take that in to 2014.


Richard Watts
writer, broadcaster, the guy who sees more shows than anyone and should be given a present by Melbourne's independent artists for all the amazing support he gives

Ho and Ho

RICHARD:  Between all the performance delights that Melbourne had to offer, as well as the biennial Castlemaine State Festival, the World Theatre Forum at Brisbane Powerhouse, and a truly spellbinding performance by Pantha Du Prince and the Bell Laboratory in Barcelona (hands down my favourite performance of the year in any artform), 2013 has been an excellent year. Congratulations to everyone who made and staged work this year – you’ve been amazing, and I can’t wait to see what you’ll create in 2014.

This year got off to an excellent start with Psycho Beach Party at Theatre Works, a camp feast of satire and leopard print, beautifully performed and designed and excellently directed and performed.

I also adored the MTC’s Constellations, a heartbreakingly beautiful exploration of love across parallel worlds by UK playwright Nick Payne starring Alison Bell and Leon Ford; Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You Never Had it So Good) at the World Theatre Festival, which featured some of the best integration of technology and the audience I’ve ever seen on stage; and, at the same festival, I Heart Alice Heart I by Irish company HotForTheatre, the single most romantic production I saw all year – I was sobbing happy tears by the end of the play, and I certainly wasn’t the only one.

Coming back to Melbourne, I was amazed and delighted by Brisbane circus company Casus and their show Knee Deep at the Famous Spiegeltent (a venue I’ll miss in 2014), an intimate display of physical skill that playfully subverted gender norms, and I laughed uproariously at the Indigenous fairy tale Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui at the Castlemaine State Festival. I also shrieked with mirth at Lucy Hopkin’s superb solo clown act Le Foulard at Tuxedo Cat and at the return season of the wonderfully rude and hugely entertaining  Slutmonster and Friends. at Northcote Town Hall during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Windmill Theatre’s School Dance was wonderful too – its awkward geek heroes really resonated with me, reminding me of my Dungeons & Dragons-playing high school days – as was Simon Keck’s hilarious play about suicide, Nob Happy Sock at the Imperial Hotel, though in a very different way.

I missed some of the MTC’s NEON season due to a trip to Spain but I was very taken by The Hayloft Project’s exploration of myth and theatrical form, By Their Own Hands, and, seemingly like everyone else in Melbourne, was thrilled and delighted by Sisters Grimm’s subversive, playful, confrontation and brilliant The Sovereign Wife.

Back at Theatre Works I saw one of the most riveting performances of the year in The Palace of the End – overall a very strong production, with an absolutely riveting performance by Robert Meldrum, who I couldn’t take my eyes off. Simply astounding.

On the other side of town at La Mama I was equally enthralled by Maude Davey’s My Life in the Nude, a classic encapsulation of the adage "the personal is political" in cabaret form, while the equally powerful The Bloody Chamber at the Malthouse, skilfully adapted by Van Badham and directed by Matthew Lutton, not only made me see Alison Whyte in a new light, but gave me a new appreciation for the feminist fairy tales of Angela Carter. Great stuff.

I finally caught up with sci-fi puppet epic The Omega Quest at Revolt in Kensington; cheered Geraldine Quinn’s excellent Sunglasses at Night: The 80s Apocalypse Sing Along Cabaret at the Butterfly Club; was made to empathise with beastly men thanks to Patricia Cornelius's superb Savages at fortyfivedownstairs; gasped in wonder at Richard Vabre’s absolutely exquisite lighting for Stuck Pigs Squealing’s night maybe at Theatre Works;  delighted in a bite-sized range of contemporary and traditional dance styles in Nat Cursio’s Private Dances II at Northcote Town Hall; was taken aback and enthralled by Branch Nebula’s Whelping Box at Arts House Meat Market; and adored Elbow Room’s Fewer Emergencies at the Owl and the Pussycat.


Then it was Fringe time. The controlled simplicity of They saw a thylacine and the judicious blend of comedy and heartbreak in Black Faggot thrilled me; Wolf Creek, The Musical revelled in its low-fi silliness, as did Dr Professor Neal Portenza’s Love Muffins; I was taken aback and thrilled by Mark Wilson’s committed performance in MKA’s Unsex Me, while Big One Little One’s live art piece Confetti was one of the most exhilarating and life-affirming works of the year.

Next came the Melbourne Festival, where my highlights were Nicola Gunn’s post-modern masterpiece In Spite of Myself and Belarus Free Theatre’s electrifying piece of agit-prop Minsk, 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker.

After the madness of Fringe and the Festival, where I saw 40 shows in 40 days, I collapsed a little, though I still had time to see Malia Walsh and company’s circus-puppetry-dance hybrid Arabella at the La Mama Courthouse, which was superb, as was Sisters Grimm’s remounted, gender-fucking Summertime in the Garden of Eden at Theatre Works.

This was meant to be a brief summation of just some of the year’s highlights – not all of them. Oops. Damn, it’s been an excellent year!

SM: Damn, it has been an excellent year! And Richard has seen most of the shows.

Richard's another one of those people whom I trust if they tell me to see something. Without his recommendation, I wouldn't have seen Slutmonster and Friends. And, to not have seen this fuzzy-pink, giant-cocked slut of a monster is too sad a thought to contemplate. I sat with Richard at Slutmonster and Wolf Creek and, I've said it before, but it's wonderful to be with people who laugh (and cry; Dr Who) at the same things I do.

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 13

Part 14

Part 15

Part 16

2012 part 1, with links to the rest

FRINGE: Kids Killing Kids

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2013
Kids Killing Kids
MKA and Q Theatre Company
20 September 2013
Fringe Hub, The Warehouse
to 3 October
melbournefringe.com.au

I thought Kids Killing Kids was astonishing; the friend I saw it with was astonished that I even applauded at the end.  We're not the only people experiencing such a chasm of differing opinion about this show that's pushing buttons and forcing a discussion that extends way beyond the smugness of "is it good theatre?".

This is the last show MKA founder Glyn Roberts is producing for the company – he's off to Brisbane to be share his awesomeness – and he's left us with a work that epitomises so much about why he and Tobias Manderson-Galvin founded MKA.

With an overhead projector, a slide carousel, milk crates and a laptop projector, it's a theatre documentary. It's not verbatim or polemic theatre, it's four young Aussie writers (Sam Burns-Warr, David Finnigan, Georgie McAuley and Jordan Prosser) telling us their story of working in Manila with a community theatre company and inadvertently writing a cult play that has thousands of fans and very vocal critics, including the UN Subcommittee for the Victims of Torture and members of the cast.

It begins with an offering of dried mango and pictures of the four at high school in Canberra in the early 2000s. By 2011, they were in Melbourne and packed their backpacks for a month in Manila to work with the Sipat Lawin Ensemble.

The experience of being in a huge Asian city is always a jolt after the space, road rules and general niceness of even the biggest Australian cities. They settled into the routine of odd coffee, Spam for breakfast and hilarious t-shirts, but were still distanced tourists who didn't think twice about taking KFC into a Buddhist monastery. For the sake of all things sacred, don't eat that shit!

But they were there to make theatre and as they became friends with the company members, they argued art and culture into the night and wrote a script adaption of the pulp Japanese novel, Battalia Royale, which is about a class of school children who are forced to kill each other – kids killing kids. (And the internet tells me that the author of The Hunger Games claims to have never read it.)

They handed the script over and came home, thinking they'd never see Battalia Royale again and were much more excited about the experience of being in the Philipines.

But it was performed. The first night to 250 people, the second to 450, the third to 950 – already more than will be able to see this show during the Fringe. The fan response was extreme and thrilling for the playwrights, who experienced it through Facebook, emails and fan blogs filled with fan fiction and kids showing off the fake blood they got on their clothes when they saw it.  Then the critical backlash began.

It's now that this show starts creating the conversation that's becoming so much bigger than the questions it asks.

Four young white privileged 20-somethings wrote a play about children killing each other, set in a country that they didn't know very much about (hell, my first thought was Imelda and her shoes and I couldn't remember when Marcos was disposed). When the criticism started – and a UN subcommittee claiming that you've done bad is very different from a grumpy critic saying they thought you could do better – they learnt a lot more about the country that has a history of violence, including the ongoing arming of children, that most tourists and visitors will never know about or care to find out about.

What I love the most about this work was that it is always these four people telling their story. The politics is complex and confronting, but they share enough for the audience to begin to understand the context, but not enough to overwhelm. Or to really understand it. They leave it up to the audience to decide if we want to go home and read more.

I was curious about the country that I have never been to, but I wanted to know what happened to these four. I wanted to know their story and hear their voices. After all, they are the people in the room with us and they had given us dried fruit.

As writers, they told it with a mixture of honesty and distance, created a structure and likely bent the truth to make the story better.  Their story kept asking "and then what?" and they underscored it with a dilemma that has more questions than solutions.

Did they make a successful piece of art that should be celebrated or a piece of crap that continues to do harm?

They don't answer this. And imply many more questions about violence, the western eye looking at the Philipines, their own skills, what the hell they were doing there in the first place, and whether they should have done or still do anything to address the criticism. Again, they don't answer these questions, but the audience do.

It's these answers that are making this one of the most talked about shows this festival. And this is the success of Kids Killing Kids.

So many shows are forgotten by the time the first post-show drink is ordered; this one is resulting in arguments and discussions and anger and elation. Any work that does this is damn good theatre.

My friend – who looked at me like all sense of morality had left me – thought it was bragging and boring and that they took no sense of responsibility for the sexualised violence that was being celebrated by the thousands of young fans. She thought they learnt nothing from the experience and that they should have taken responsibility rather than celebrated the experience with us.

I hope that they left all the questions so open so that we could have these discussions. What is on the stage is their story and I was fascinated by it. Their ultimate reaction was to make another piece of theatre, and I'll be there for the next version, when they tell us about what it was like to have their new work about their old work dissected by friends, peers and the audiences who love and support independent theatre.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

What Melbourne loved in 2012, part 10

Glyn Roberts, Tobias Manderson-Galvin and Yvonne Virsik are the last three to the post. (Maybe.)

Thirty of  Melbourne's writers, actors, directors, creators have shared their favourite moments, shows and memories for 2012 and it's been a hoot.

Thank you to everyone who contributed. This series has been the most-read of all posts this year, so let's do it again next year.

It's clear that our commercial and subsidised theatres aren't creating the art that our theatre community remembers. MTC got votes with The Golden Dragon and On the production of monsters and Malthouse with Pompeii L.A., but these shows were mostly created by artists who have been working in our independent theatres for years. Perhaps it's time to see more of these artists on our subsidised stages?

Pompeii L.A., Summertime in the garden of Eden, The unspoken word is 'Joe' were often mentioned favourite shows and all have one thing in common: Declan Greene (writer, writer/director/lighting designer/stage manager, director). So Declan wins – another – brand new award as the Most favourite of Melbourne's favourites for 2012. (I'm also in the process of writing something about our Dec.)

Now all that's left is for me to write up my favourites (which I decided on before this started) and have a couple of weeks off.


Glyn Roberts
MKA creative director

Photo by Sarah Walker

GLYN: I really liked the Dewey Dell show at Arts House. It was a form of dance/performance art/theatre that I want to see more of in town. I think The Golden Dragon at the MTC had a loneliness and sadness to that is rarely seen here, particularly in ensemble pieces. I loved it.

Over with us (MKA), the best moments were usually audience based.

Jamming 100-plus people into the restaurant/kiln at the Malthouse at 11 pm for our National Play Festival readings.

Sneaking into a hot and heaving and pink theatre to watch the final acts of sex.violence.blood.gore, then doing it all again in Sydney.

Hearing the gasps when Janine tore up the floor in Triangle and again as she disappeared into the distance.

When the earthquake happened during Tuesday and the entire audience (60 people) just collectively assumed that it was Toby and me shaking the set/entire room as a prank.

Also The Unspoken Word is 'Joe' was pretty cool in general.

SM: MKA have collectively shaken up Melbourne's theatre scene and reminded a lot of us why we keep going to theatre, so pretty much every moment with them is memorable, but my favourite moment with Glyn was at a show at the warehouse. I bought a drink from him and realised that I hadn't bothered to bring money with me. He gave me the drink.


Tobias Manderson-Galvin
MKA creative director

Another photo by Sarah Walker

TOBIAS: According to a document I've been keeping, I've seen about 300 live performances this year. That said, I count going to the Rugby League and seeing live music in there but it's about 200 for capital P performance and capital T theatre combined.

With that in mind, what I loved was:

Tom Green Live: ostensibly comedy but anyway he's more than that and I loved seeing him.

Justin Shoulder, The River Eats Itself was spectacular. (Next Wave)

The Lana Del Rey live concert. A stage covered in ferns, a string quarter, a grand piano, but it was the ritual of it all and Del Rey's impeccable character work that made this one of the theatre moments of 2012 that I loved. And that she performed without any percussion contributed to this being one of the most intimate experiences I had this year.

Nicola Gunn's Hello my name is was the only of its kind that Melbourne had to offer this year. And it was a pleasure.

When Amaya Vecellio and I apparently got too boisterous at Impasse (a fantastic interactive memory foam maze/world) at Arts House, one of the artists accosted me afterwards. Despite the bullying, it was the playground within that I loved.

When Hayley Bracken and I turned up one minute late for Schaubuhne's Enemy of the People, we had to sit in the 'viewing room' for 16.5 minutes, so we started reading the subtitles out loud. The show was great but that's was what I'll remember. Someone should put this in a show on purpose.

Stephen Sondheim in conversation. Rare opportunity to see a master. Insightful.

SM: 300 live performances. Three-fucking-hundred! Even if only 200 are theatre, that's still a number that few get near. (I see about 100 theatre shows each year.)

Tobias writes, directs and creates exceptional theatre;  he's the co-founder of MKA, the company with the reviews where writers try to out wordgasm each other; and he freaked out Brynne by wearing a hat.

See the correlation? When new playwrights ask me for feedback, the best thing I can say is, "See more theatre". If you want to make great theatre, you have to see a lot of theatre. It's like if you want to write, you have to read – a lot.

If you've never created theatre but want to, I promise that if you see 200 shows next year, you'll be making better theatre by 2014 than a lot of people who have been around for ages but see 20 shows a year.

Favourite moment with Tobias? Every MKA show and Judging Short and Sweet when he didn't get why he didn't hate a play with very dull content. (It was because its structure was textbook and it hit every story mark.)

Yvonne Virsik
director, MUST artistic director

YVONNE: In the middle of 2012, I was lucky enough to spend three months overseas. I saw some extraordinary theatre while I was away and clearly missed some back here.

Two verbatim pieces had a strong effect on me and made me determined to investigate the ‘genre’ in my own work.  At Edinburgh Festival, Fringe, I saw Look Left Look Right’s Nola, which dealt with the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill – subject matter I didn’t think I’d be interested in – but it was well-executed and complex, leaving loads to ponder.

Hate Radio in the Berlin Theatertreffen festival was a punch in the gut – maybe more of a pummel. It portrayed the vicious anti-Tutsi propaganda proliferated by the popular Rwandan radio station RTLM, which fuelled the violence during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Can you even imagine a radio show call-in topic: ‘Tell us where the Tutsis and their sympathisers are hiding so we can broadcast it and the Hutus can get them’? The fact that it was theatre that brought me this part of the Rwanda story reignited my belief in what it can do.

There were a few very memorable moments in Berlin with audiences. On one occasion, in a theatre rather like The Playhouse, several audience members yelled "speak up" and "louder" to the actors onstage and we often saw people walking obviously along the edge of stages to go to the bathroom and then back again!

Caroline Horton's Mess (Edinburgh) again dealt with a seemingly theatrically unfriendly subject – anorexia – but was written and staged with incredible charm, humour and inventiveness.  I’ve become a huge fan.

SM: Yvonne, have I really not seen anything you've directed this year? Oh yeah, you spent three months in Europe. No wait, Girls Do Gertrude. Pyjamas, mystery and a cast who loved every moment and ensured that the audience had as much fun as they did. Sometimes Stein wrote for the sake of showing off, but you found the absolute fun, the delicacy and the story in Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters.

part 1
part 2

part 3

part 4

part 5

part 6

part 7

part 8

part 9
part 11

Review: Triangle

Triangle
MKA
25 July
MKA Pop Up Theatre, North Melbourne
to 4 August
mka.org.au

Lesbian vampires. Do I need to say more?

Lesbian vampires in North Fitzroy.

A play with lesbian vampires, set in North Fitzroy, performed in an empty North Melbourne (really Kensington) warehouse by MKA. What more could you want?

And there is more. There's Piedimontes (the greatest worst supermarket), Chopper, Vince Colosimo, 4WDs that have never been as far as St Kilda, the guy who sells The Big Issue, the gardens where many a virginity has been lost and a soy-latte-addicted baby called Finnigan.

I love that theatre like this exists.

I love that its writing has been workshopped and developed and tightened,  and that it's creepy and beautiful and blood thirsty, and that its humour lets us laugh at our selves and inner-city community.  (Even if I transposed it to the Carlisle Street Coles in East St Kilda.)

I love that director Tanya Dickson (JATO) finds the theatre in the story's structure and works so closely with the design team.

I love that designer Eugyeene Teh has made another corner of this warehouse inseparable from this work and that he uses carpet squares. I love that Rob Sowinski's lighting and Russell Goldsmith's sound are such a part of the story telling.

I love that actors Elizabeth Nabben and Janine Watson found the dead hearts and bleeding souls of their characters and didn't let us dismiss their recognisable cliched outer selves.

Triangle is not going to be the work that takes writer Glyn Roberts (Horror Face) to the world (yet), but who cares when the world for many is that North Fitzroy triangle and it's captured with a mixture of cynicism and love that's as welcome as a marked-down fruit bun wrapped in plastic from Piedi's when you're really hungry and want to save your change for a pear cider later in the evening.

I love that Melbourne theatre is so much more than the ongoing big-worded tiff about Queen Lear and that The Triangle was so much better than staying in with a pizza and watching the Masterchef final, which is what I so nearly did.

You may now go and re-watch The Hunger and wonder why straight men think so much about lesbian vampires.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com

Photo by Sarah Walker

Review: The Horror Face

The Horror Face

MKA

23 June 2011

MKA Pop Up Theatre

to 9 July

www.mka.org.au

MKA co-founder Glyn Roberts needed to create a company that would champion his writing and let us see his magnificently warped view of the too-close-for-comfort future. The Horror Face has the best lion ever on a stage and play three of season one 2011 proves again that MKA are a shot of adrenalin into the heart of Melbourne's independent theatre.

To prepare for your drugs, you have to put on a disposable lab coat to enter the Pop Up Theatre, where the plastic walls make it feel like Dexter has prepared another kill room, and the only comfort is that at least one of us must survive to tell the tale... if the downstairs door isn't locked. Designer David Samuel is the morphine that takes away the pain of dull design.

And Robert's fearless writing is the amphetamines that force his audience to pay wide-eyed attention to his dystopian world where humans will connect if it's the last think they do. His language dances and trips with the likes of "Armageddon again" and his offstage images are more disturbingly hilarious than the ones on stage. It's more cohesive than his dark Christmas story This is set in the future and this time he's letting the characters lead the action, rather than relying on the surreal and shocking world.

With director Felix Ching Ching Ho balancing the uppers and downers with a tone that rolls from prophetic to confronting, Soren Jensen, Annie Last, Brendan McCallum and Matt Young grab their multiple roles by their delicate bits and ensure that there's only just enough time to draw a breath in between laughs. But in such small room, don't let the audience know how much you're loving this performance. When we glimpse the actor behind the character, their struggle and confusion becomes less powerful.

MKA's The Horror Face is selling out most nights, but if you book now you've got until the end of the week to join the MKA cheer squad. And you'll get to see a gay android and Andrew the lion puppet, who may well be my new favourite performer; Aslan sucks in comparison.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com

Review: 22 Short Plays

22 Short Plays
MKA
9 June 2011
MKA Pop-Up Thearte, Prahran
to 16 June
www.mka.org.au

MKA are officially my favourite company this year. With no funding, a diabolical sense of it's-ok-to-be-wrong and a middle-finger salute to boring theatre, their battle with a local council made them stronger and, at only months old, they have established themselves as one of those Melbourne companies who have to be seen.

MKA call themselves the theatre of new writing and already have the support of some of our best playwrights.  Founded by Tobias Manderson-Galvin and Glyn Roberts, they finally have a home above the Prahran Mission in the still-groovy Windsor end of Chapel Street, and rarely has an office been so gorgeously transformed into a theatre.

22 Short Plays is by David Finnigan. With a sketch structure that is far funnier than any sketch show, Finnigan embraces the perception of gen-Y apathy and mixes it with a distorted look at the blandness of a society ruled by commercialism. And there's a great cum joke, a near-perfect conversation with God and who wouldn't watch a sitcom called Sad Threesomes!

Narratively, there's room for some more coherency and some editing would punch up some of the jokes that are a bit flat – but such minor quibbles are nothing at this stage of development. This is bloody funny stuff and I'll be in line to see Finnigan's next work.

The on-stage coherency comes from Manderson-Galvin's in-your-face direction, which ensures character and contrast in every sketch and knows how to make the most of the individual talents on the stage (Conner Gallacher, Paul Blenheim and Ellen Grimshaw).

He also has a strange obsession with ELO. Don't get me wrong, I thought ELO rocked when I was a pre-teen, and when they did "Xanadu" with our Livvy, the excitement of my favourite musical talents combining with a movie about roller skates and an angel was almost too much. Now, I just feel old now because ELO have become ironic.

Another MKA name to keep an eye on is resident designer David Samuel.  Not long out of VCA, his design of Honey Bunny's Sagittarian Full Moon Finale stood out at Midsumma and he's establishing his his love-of-symbols style with MKA.

If we're to support and maintain a challenging, positive and brave theatre community, we need companies like MKA.


This review first appeared on AussieThearte.com

This is set in the future

This is set in the future
La Mama
December 2008

This is set in the future is a traditional Christmas tale of blood, cum and karma, complete with a pseudo Santa resplendent in a tight frock contemplating an even tighter noose. The publicity did say it was more festy than festive…

Glyn Roberts’s not-so-cheery tale explores the not-too-distant future where we could live forever. Will folk get up to acts of selfless good and create heartfelt joy? Not with Robert Reid directing.

As always, director Reid (theatre in decay) hides his hope behind a large wall of cynicism. He despairs in his program notes that Melbourne theatre has “gotten ever so samey”. Melbourne’s independent theatre would be a duller place without Reid and I’m not alone in my gladness that he is determined to produce original work.

With Sayraphim Lothian’s spot-on design and a cast of competitive alphas (Scott Gooding, Rachel Baring, Hayley Butcher, Joshua Cameron and writer Glyn Roberts), Reid guides the delightfully-dark script into a place where even the Christmas-cracker jokes would need a PGR rating.

There’s not much left in this future world beyond “fuck or punch”. It sets out to shock and this is where I think it just missed the mark. There were some moments where it could have gone somewhere very nasty and interesting, or somewhere even more outrageously, hilariously obscene – but I felt that the brakes were applied and what could have been jaw-dropping black was simply taken back to joke. They were good jokes, but didn’t have the expected effect.

It might have just been final night excitement, but the cast were enjoying the fun a little bit too much. The impact of having the crap beaten out of you is dulled if the actors make it clear that it’s meant to be funny. There’s no shock in “incest is the new gay” if it’s being said to create a nervous audience titter. The comic book style of performance was perfect for the script, but we needed to see more of the fascinating characters, rather than the terrific actors, because the telling of their story was lost. We were watching to see what the performers would do next, rather than what would happen next.

Reid declares that we shouldn’t “expect meaning from people paid to fake it”. It was clear that everyone involved in This is set in the future understood every nuance of meaning, but they could have shared their meaning just a little bit more with the audience.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com