Review: Buyer and Cellar

Buyer and Cellar
MTC
5 November 2015
Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 12 December 2015
mtc.com.au

Ash Flanders. Photo by Jeff Busby

Barbra Streisand has a replica of a shopping mall in the basement of her super mansion in Malibu. She uses it to keep her collection of dolls, clothes and pretty stuff. This is true. I didn’t know that, and am surprised that Brooklyn-based playwright Jonathon Tolins is the only person who’s been inspired to write about it.

Buyer and Cellar started when Tolins joked about what it must be like to work in her private mall. The result is a solo show about out-of-work actor Alex who loses his job at Disneyland and finds himself the only staff in Bab’s rabbit hole. With the actor playing Alex also playing his cynical boyfriend Barry, Barbra’s bitter long-time staffer, and the diva herself, the playwright oddly begins by telling the audience that none of it is true – except the hoard.

It’s a strange play that at first seems stuck on a one-note Barbara obsession – and when the “People” dress comes out, that note sounds amazing as the audience gasp in unison. But it develops into something far more curious as Alex possibly befriends his boss and has to choose between lying on a perfect couch in her too-perfect world or a duller real life with Barry.

If Alex were in any other tight t-shirt than the ever-watchable, consistently-glorious Ash Flanders’s, I’d wonder what it was doing on an Australian mainstage program, instead of packing in the Midsumma crowds at the Greyhound.

In a work that could easily be as outrageous as an amyl-fuelled Barbra drag queen at 3 am, director Gary Abrahams has pulled everything back to a point where its moments of high-camp glory, snarky bitching, and bonkers-Babs-buying-her-own-dolly feel real.

It could easily be a parody of Barbra fandom, gay men, drag queens, and anyone who’s sung “Don’t rain on my parade” and made a giant muff joke. But it’s not.

Everything that squeals Barbra is still there, but it’s muted enough to let us see the people who love the “People” dress. Even Adam Gardnir’s spiral-staircase, sunken living room, pop-out wardrobe design (beautifully lit by Rachel Burke) is restrained in its campness; his “People” dress is beautiful.

Maybe that’s also the appeal of Barbra herself. She knows how to work hard, how to make her work feel real, and when to stop adding beads to a dress so that it’s closer to classy than crass.

Instead of satirising her, Buyer and Cellar have listened, watched and found the path that knows that being laughed at isn’t the same as being loved for being who you are.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Shit

Shit

Dee & Cornelius

26 June 2015

Southbank Theatre, The Lawler

to 5 July

mtc.com.au

Shit is the shit. The fourth show of the 2015 MTC Neon Festival of Independent Theatre screams louder and stronger than the women it's about and inspires us to make our support for independent theatre as louder than possible.

Writer Patricia Cornelius says, "Really good independent theatre is radical. It is actually going to shock you. It is actually going to make you think differently." Shit is astonishing independent theatre. 

I don't understand why every theatre company in the country (and beyond) isn't competing to get the next Patricia Cornelius and Susie Dee play. From their days with the Melbourne Workers Theatre to their 2103 award-winning and independently-produced Savages, their consistent accolades somehow don't translate to commercial demand.

Shit is about three women who have been arrested and are locked up. Their crime isn't revealed until later – and shown remarkably with Marg Horwell's design – but the act isn't what the work's about.

Nicci Wilkes, Peta Brady, Sara Ward

Sam, Bobby and Billy are women whose stories are rarely told on our don't-upset-the-subscribers or our let's-talk-about-me stages. If we do see them, they are characters to laugh at; they are not "us" who go to the nice theatre. They are women who punch and fight. They are women who have never felt safe and joke about having a bed room door with a lock, wanting a bed with sheets and a doona cover, or remembering if someone ever hugged them as a child.

Their stories are confronting and raw, but not because of who they are. They confront who the audience are. The talk about being on public transport and knowing that all it takes to make someone get off is to yell at them. I would, and if I saw them at the train station, I'd get in the safe and crowded front carriage. This is theatre that lets us see ourselves through someone else's eyes; eyes we may never have thought of looking through.

Cornelius's writing leaves me shaking. Her dialogue sounds natural but it isn't like spoken language. She makes the profane poetic and lets language be so much more than words with assumed meaning. Her text has shape and rhythm and feels like it's beating to the heartbeats of her characters. It makes us listen to every "fuck" and "cunt" – and there are many – and really hear what they mean. And she only tells what needs to be told, leaving the subtext and the untold as the voice on stage that sneaks into your guts and doesn't let go.

This text is given life by Susie Dee's direction. Dee lets the actors be everything their character asks, while still working as one. She finds ways to make the shape of Cornelius's words become visible. She take us from violent gutter back to the stage and reminds us that we are watching theatre and, as such, are complicit in creating the world and the lives we see.

All of which is nothing without Peta Brady, Sarah Ward and Nicci Wilks as Sam, Billy and Bobby. Each embody the pain and anger that fuel these broken women while never letting the audience feel pity. They put up walls but the truth seeps out as they show us why we're laughing at the type of darkness and violence that can only be laughed at to save yourself from despair.

This Shit is why we go to theatre. This Shit is real. It's what can happen when a creative ensemble are given the resources to work together and not be concerned with pleasing or fitting criteria. It's astonishing theatre that needs to be presented as far as it can be seen. It's unmissable.

This was on AussieTheatre.com . 

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: Solomon and Marion

Solomon and Marion
Melbourne Theatre Company
12 June 2013
Arts Centre Melbourne, Fairfax Studio
to 20 July
mtc.com.au

In Cape Town in 2006, actor Brett Goldin and designer Richard Bloom left a party and never got home. They were found naked, except for their socks, near a freeway; they had been robbed and shot through the head.  Goldin was playing Guildenstern in a production of Hamlet  that was about to fly to Stratford to open the Complete Works Festival. Writer Lara Foot worked with the same theatre company and Solomon and Marion is the result of her trying to understand the incomprehensible – and incomprehensibly accepted – violence in her country.

It's a beautiful play. Its uneasy undertone of violence and mistrust creates tension, but it's gentle and loving and finds hope in the endless grief.

Marion (Gillian Jones) is an old white South African who lives alone in the Eastern Cape. She doesn't want to move to Australia to be with her daughter and grandchildren and leaves her door and windows open, despite the constant threat of violence. Solomon (Pacharo Mzembe) is the black grandchild of Marion's former maid and he turns up one day saying that he's been sent to see her.

In a world that's dominated by loss, poverty and guilt, Foot explores two people who cannot escape the violence and are secretly scared of their own complicity.

In a production where design (Richard Roberts, set and costume; Rachel Burke, lighting; David Bridie, music), performance and script work like one, director Pamela Rabe lets this very place-specific story resonate way beyond its South African borders. As its secrets are dug up and assumptions buried in the hilly floor of sand, Marion and Solomon try to understand why the other is in their life, each wanting the other gone, but terrified that they might leave.

But the night belongs to Mzembe and Jones.  I first saw Jones in the early 80s in Jim Sharman's Midsummer Night's Dream; when Mzembe wasn't even born. You don't forget the great actors when you see them, and on TV and stage, Jones is an actor who leaves ego aside and creates characters who live. Mzembe graduated from NIDA in 2007 and lets us see every nuance of Solomon's complex relationship with Marion, which begins with a confused mix of resentment, respect and pity.

This story had its roots in the kind of violence and loss that creates hatred, but it leaves the hate behind to reveal the broken hearts of two people whose have to live with its consequences.

Photo by Jeff Busby

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Save For Crying

Save For Crying
La Mama
20 February 2011
La Mama Theatre
to 6 March
www.lamama.com.au

"Nice people make matter," says Luv in Save For Crying. Call La Mama NOW and book because it's beautiful and uncomfortable and funny, because it will be sold out and because it's a gut kick reminder about why theatre matters.

Angus Cerini wrote and directed Save for Crying. Cerini writes about people and lives that educated, inner-city, latte-drinking theatre goers (like me) are more comfortable avoiding, ignoring or buying a Big Issue from. He says he writes about bad stuff and what we do about it and tries to answer it in the "art stuff" he makes. Like the bad stuff in life, there isn't a clear answer and Cerini never gives ones. Instead he leaves his writing in a much stronger and more disturbing position where we question our own lives and the bad stuff we turn away from.

Walking into near darkness, it's easy to feel uneasy and also easy to distance ourselves from the action of these people in a cell who are not "one of us".   The genius of this work is how is it creeps up on us until there's no comforting distance and it has become our story.

Luv (Peta Brady), and Alfie (Ben Grant) have their share of bad stuff. They know that five dollars isn't enough for fish and chips, but they can keep it from Ratspunk (LeRoy Parsons) who "everyday he does the not nice things". Each performer is so embodied in their character that there's no time to admire their acting; so much that their "real" selves final bow is a sharp jolt back to reality.

The artistic collaboration on this work has made an astonishing script an unforgettable show. As the actors create broken souls, the design (Marg Horwell) and lighting (Rachel Burke) hide and reveal action and characters in ways that the mere words of a script can never achieve and Kelly Ryall's astonishing music and sound design is almost inseparable from the words.

And Cerini's words are as beautiful as they are disturbing and terrifying. He writes with a language that plays with word order and strips away everything that isn't needed. In the wrong hands, it could feel forced, but it sounds natural in this world. It's a language that is pure emotion and makes us feel the pain, hope and humiliation that these people are trying so hard to block from their lives, without forcing us to justify, over-think or even completely understand what's going on.

Save For Crying is confronting theatre told with humanity and guts. Don't regret missing it.

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Moth

Moth
Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre
16 May 2010
The Tower, CUB Malthouse

If the teenagers on Glee leave you wondering why your high school memories aren't so perky and choreographed, Malthouse and Arena theatre's Moth is the perfect antidote.

Declan Greene continues to fascinate and seduce Melbourne theatre goers by consistently surprising us with unexpected stories. Moth is far removed from his uber-high-camp Sisters Grimm work, darker than his 2009 Fringe hit A Black Joy and more grounded in reality than his 2009 MTC Young Artist commission  Pretty Baby.  But it's still filled with authentic characters dragged in from the limits of social acceptability,  gooey visceral imagery,  odd pop culture references, absurd reality bluring and a dark dark humour that leaves you almost hating yourself for laughing.

Sebastian (the perfect Dylan Young) is too weird to ever be accepted and clinging onto the equally-desparate friendship of Claryssa (the equally-perfect Sarah Ogden), the emo wicca chick who has let herself become too weird to ever be accepted. These are the kids who no one ever sat next to at school, whose parents have no idea that their babies are in so much pain that they won't recover, and who leave me so glad that I was a teenager before the internet and its mass humiliation.

With a story of bullying too familiar to teens on the outer and too vile for many grown ups to even comprehend, Greene plunges into the fractured minds and perceptions of these souls and takes us to a surreal world where Jesus and Saint Sebastian have chosen a misfit to warn the world of its pending destruction and two young people scream for rescue and forgiveness.

Greene writes difficult material that could easily be lost in a moosh of preachy compassion or over-arty pretence, but the Arena creative team of Chris Kohn (director), Jonathon Oxlade (design), Rachel Burke (lighting) and Jethro Woodward (composition) are at one with their writer and create a world where the morphing of time, space and character is natural, expected and so beautiful that you understand why moths fly to blinding light.

Like young writer Polly Strenham's teens in That Face, currently at Red Stitch, Greene (who is an old fart compared to Strenham) writes teenagers who aren't silly or pretty or full of impossible dreams, and force their audience to understand their extreme, illogical and exaggerated reactions and feelings to the world they are growing into. Greene leaves us relieved to have grown up and embarrassed to know that we still don't want to be friends with a Sebastian or a Claryssa.

Moth is rightly selling out, so book now so that your not among those who wish they had seen it

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com.


Photo: Jeff Busby