Review: Cosi

Cosi
Melbourne Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company 
4 May 2019
Southbank Theatre, The Sumner
to 8 June
mtc.com.au

Cosi. Photo by Jeff Busby

My review is in Time Out.

Review: The Government Inspector

The Government Inspector
Malthouse Theatre and Belvoir
5 March 2014
Merlyn Theatre
to 23 March
malthousetheatre.com.au

Robert Menzies nervously faces the audience dressed as a priest. He explains how the night's performance of The Government Inspector was meant to be The Philadelphia Story but it's not and it's also not The Government Inspector. Confusing? Nah.

When Malthouse and Belvoir announced their 2014 seasons, Simon Stone was going to direct The Philadelphia Story. Woo hoo! Wonderful play re-created by the guy who made Chekov and Ibsen rock and who can do no wrong (and was even forgiven the hiccough with the rights over Death of a Salesman).

Then just as everything was ready to roll, the Philly rights were refused. What! It's out of copyright; it's way more than 70 years since writer Philip Barry wrote it. But it turns out that Ellen Barry was the co-author and retains the copyright. But how the heck can anyone know that if she's not credited as a co-author on the scripts or any writing about the play? This debarcle is all made very clear over the night.

Google, can I see a pdf of The Philadelphia Story play script, please? Ellen Barry is not credited as the author – anywhere!  But it's clear on the imprint page that Ellen S. Barry owns the copyright until 2039 and there's the the usual licensing fees blah blah blah.

Oh copyright blah blah blah is just rich people getting richer off poor artists. Until someone uses your work and doesn't pay you.

If it was a publicity stunt, it's brave and brilliant. If it's a stuff up, the result is insane and brilliant.

So back to Rob trying to explain what happened, but it's easier to just go back three weeks and see what happened when the Philly cast (Rob, Fayssal Bazzi, Mitchell Butel, Gareth Davies, Zarah Newman, Eryn-Jean Norvill and Greg Stone) were backstage and heard the news. Zarah didn't want to take the dress off, Mitchell was on the phone to Play School, Gareth wanted a snack and Simon buggered off.

But of course he didn't, and with Emily Barclay at the ready to write and Ralph Myers ready to create a set to reveal laughs, Simon and his cast went mighty meta and created a play that plays with the absurdity and reality about faking it in the theatre – while riffing off The Government Inspector by Gogol (totally public domain), which is about a stranger being mistaken for someone important and the stranger making the most of his impostering.

The actors are all exaggerated versions of the worst bits of themselves – which shows how wonderful each one of them is – and as genres are thrown into the farce, it gets more farcical and more hilarious by the minute.

Unless you think too hard. It's best not to and to enjoy every in-joke and laugh at ourselves as theatre goers, rather than wondering if the indulgence on the stage is laughing at us.

There's nothing at all wrong with self indulgence. Who doesn't love getting expensive ice cream rather than home brand. But here Simon's bought every flavour of the best stuff, added freshly whipped cream, chocolate sauce, salted caramel praline, edible gold leaf and hand-crafted sugar sprinkles carved in his likeness.

It's so outrageously full on and delicious that it can't be resisted.

But you know that you can only get away with such a creation once.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by Pia Johnson

Review: Music

Music
Melbourne Theatre Company
14 November 2012
Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 22 December

Music's another play about middle-aged, wealthy middle class academics who think their lives are empty, so it has to be in the MTC program.

Jack (Richard Piper) is a retired 50- or 90-something academic who has weeks to live, his wife Margie (Janet Andreawartha) doesn't care and has a Schubert recital to prepare for, his doctor and friend Max (Paul English) is shagging Margie and asking Jack for feedback on his short stories, and Jack's brother Peter (Robert Menzies) is a miserable Catholic priest who hasn't seen Jack in three years. There's ranting about the dumbing down of the English department, affairs, grief over a child, the accidental description of the quilt from a lover's marital bed in the writing given to the cuckolded husband, and everyone decides that it's time to tell the truth about things that really don't matter when you or someone you sorta like has days to live.

As Billy Connolly describes dull folk as beige wearers, Music wears a beige elastic-waisted fleece pant with a matching cardi.

With writing that brings attention to itself with atrociously awkward alliteration and rhymes that even students from the dumbed down English/Cultural Studies department would roll their eyes at, it's a story made from cliches worthy of a daytime soap. No, I take that back, the melodrama of soap is addictive and surprising in its outrageous inventiveness. There's nothing unexpected in this tale.

Dull story choices aside, what's missing is the heart and relationships that make us care. Situation doesn't make character and exchanging smart-arse comments, well-read quotes and a Les Murray joke doesn't make dialogue. Relationships are made in the subtext, the things not said that say so much more than the chosen words. While each told secrets (that the other knew), the space between the characters was empty, which left them feeling no more complex than  the jaded academic, out-of-love wife,  miserable priest and wanna-be-writer doctor who appeared at the start.

Then there's the music. In the program notes, writer Barrry Oakley says the music's used "more or less" like in opera. My snobby reaction was to wonder if he'd ever been to an opera.  Then I read on. Despite the Beyreuth and Wager references (Hitler liked him, you know), the writer jokes that he "couldn't sit though the entire Ring Cycle – all those hours and hours, days of music".  At least that explains why the music is nothing like an opera and sounds and feels as inspired and relevant as a Top Twenty Tunes for Old Farts cassette from the bargin bin at Big W.

Over at Malthouse, there's another story about middle aged, wealthy, jaded academics. In Wild Surmise, he has cancer, she's had an affair. It's pretty much the same story, but this one soars.

This appeared on AussieTheatre.com

Photo by Jeff Busby

Review: Queen Lear

Queen Lear
MTC
12 July 2012
Sumner Theatre
to 18 August
mtc.com.au

Queen Lear was always going to be a bitch to review.

Men and women are different beasts who adore and loathe each other because we see the world in slightly different ways. Shakespeare's women aren't as richly fascinating as his men, so the gender swap isn't that unusual (Kate Mulvany's recent Cassius comes to mind), but to do so successfully means that every relationship to Lear has to change in subtle ways that together change the story.

It's here that Rachel McDonald, as dramaturg and director, is most successful. Too often the on-stage relationships in Shakespeare are ignored for the sake of original character, but McDonald's Lear is led by the changing status and relationships that are often much clearer that her story.

The relationship between mother Lear (Robyn Nevin) and daughters Reagan (Belinda McClory) and Goneril (Genevieve Picot) starts with the bitter angry resentment that comes from not being loved enough by the person who's meant to love you the most. It's personal and touching and a father could not make Goneril cry in quite the same way. (I haven't mentioned youngest daughter Cordelia because I have no idea what was going on with her and gave up trying to understand.) The most unexpectedly moving relationship is between Kent (Robert Menzies) and Lear as Kent tries to protect and respect his Queen, and Greg Stone brings a surprising depth to his wheelchair-bound Albany by focussing on how his relationship with his wife Goneril changes.

Niklas Pajanti's lighting is exquisite in its creation of the void-like world and its momentary glimpses of characters as they came in and out of the dark. It made the stage look beautiful and intriguing and helps make sense of a design (Tracy Grant Lord) that baffles.

The stage has depth and levels that are beautiful to look at, but offer a confusing world. Maybe the hanging chains bound them to the gods; perhaps Edgar's bike and naked shower were his last hints of freedom – but why was there a giant phallus that grew and shrank and ejaculated pretty fools in white nighties?

McDonald's program notes say, "It is like a science-fiction world ... simultaneously ancient, contemporary and retro." This explains why the costumes were a bit Bride of Frankenstein meets Blake's Seven and Mad Men, but by drawing on so many aesthetics, Lear's world is merely a mish-mash of ideas that distract – often comically – from the telling of the story. It may be a stronger telling with just the costumes and the lighting.

But no matter what, it's Lear we go to see.

Robyn Nevin was always going to be Lear like no other. And she is. The night opens magnificently with a woman with undisputed power. She loves being Queen and the accompanying parties and gorgeous frocks; she never considers that her power will change when she splits the property between the kids. As the two elder daughters learnt how to behave from their mum,  everything is taken from mum and her anger mixes with dementia as she fights to maintain her mask and keep the hurting old lady hidden.  Her fool is placed in her head and appears as versions of her daughters who help create her lucidity in the madness; if only they didn't keep popping out of the giant penis.

For all the oddness of Queen Lear, when Queen Robyn is on stage, the rest makes more sense.

Photo by Jeff Busby

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

NOW, head to TheatreNotes to read what everyone else has to say.

And Alison's reaction to Julian Meyrick's rant about the evils of the blogosphere.

(If the links hit paywall: Google.)

Review: The End

The End
Malthouse Theatre presents a Belvoir production
25 February 2011
Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse
to 11 March
www.malthousetheatre.com.au

Samuel Beckett said that "Words are all we have." I'm a word lover and if it weren't for theatre makers, I would have missed too much of Beckett's astonishing writing.

As Coner and Judy Hegarty Lovett showed me the painful bliss of the Beckett's Molloy novels at the 2010 Melbourne International Arts Festival, performer Robert Menzies and director Eamon Flack have convinced me that Beckett's plays are just a hint of his genius.

The novella The End was written in 1946 (originally in French), before Waiting for Godot (1953) and Beckett's Nobel Prize for Literature (1969). His first person storyteller is kicked out of an institution and back on the streets he knows too well. Conned out of his rent money, he heads to the country and finally returns to the suburbs "... beyond the stupid hope of rest or less pain". Beckett's characters are usually in despair, but they show us a light so dim that it's often uncomfortable to laugh – and Beckett wanted us to laugh.

On a bare wooden floor with a cross to mark his place, it's performed as written. Beckett's language is so compelling that the story, for all its drama, can become secondary. Reading Beckett is about the words and language and I don't hear the narrative voice when I read him.  What Menzies's remarkable performance does is turn the wordy narrator in to a character so unforgettable that the words become the music to his story.

Menzies and Flack have created a telling of The End that surpasses the words and creates an experience where the emotion overwhelms the admiration – and the admiration floods in after. This isn't a show to miss.

This review appears on AussieThearte.com

The End is in this book

Review: Furious Mattress

Furious Mattress
Malthouse Theatre
27 February 2010
Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse

In her program notes, writer Melissa Reeves says that the drafts of Furious Mattress took it “from farce to tragedy”. And it would seem that every real and imagined genre in between got a look in. No wonder I have no idea what this play is trying to be or what it wants its audience to feel.

Forget what reviews say, the best feedback comes from sitting with the audience in interval and casually standing around after the curtain closes. “Can we run?” “That’s a shocker.” “I can’t believe it was reviewed well.” Perhaps I just heard the ignorant souls who didn’t get it. Well, I declare myself with them.

I have no idea what Furious Mattress is. Farce abounds with multiple entrances/exits, obviously bad stage continuity (please be done on purpose), non-connecting face slaps and a giant rat masturbating an albino exorcist who is clad in short shorts. But it’s about a woman who is slowly tortured and violently killed by her husband and her church mates. That’s not intrinsically funny, especially as it’s based on a true story.

At times it explores the pure faith and religion that brings these normal people to act so far from themselves and their faith. But then, it indicates that the possession is real with a circus trick levitation, the giant rat and the angry bedding. If the possession is real, are we meant to cheer when they vanquish the devil and all its life force from her?

By trying to be everything and then some, Furious Mattress ends up as nothing. The opening scenes (which are mysterious and beautifully written) tell us the whole story and the subsequent 90 minutes tells us again. The story is: a woman dies after an attempted exorcism, which we know from the opening moments. The story urged us to go forward, but it took us back – when we’d rather have been taken for a drink.

The cast (Rita Kalnejais, Kate Kendall, Robert Menzies and Tom Wright) make us care as much as is possible with such contradictory material, but even wonderful actors can’t invent substance and truth that isn’t in the writing.

The exorcism stories that scare the bejesus out of us and make us reassess our own faith are those that put the possibility of evil and the redemption of faith at the centre. Furious Mattress seems to laugh at both, but never gets into the heart of why loving people could believe that killing was saving.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.
Photo by Jeff Busby.

Theatrenotes's Alison Croggin thought very differently about this show. I love her analysis, even though I had such a different reaction.

Knives in Hens

Knives in Hens
5 August 2009
Malthouse Theatre
Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse

Anyone who knows David Harrower’s remarkable Blackbird, will be eager to see his Olivier Award winning Knives in Hens, written in 1995. This co-production by Malthouse Theatre and the State Theatre of South Australia is almost mesmerising, but gets lost in its interpretation

Anna Cordingley’s design strikes before a word is spoken, as she continues to prove her stunning visual aesthetic. We are at the end of huge drain in a world coloured by rust and moss and mud. The circles and water give lighting genius Paul Jackson a canvas that rarely disappoints our eyes – but this beautiful, beautiful design works against the text. I loved how Cordingley’s recent design for Happy Days created an incongruous gap between the text and the design, but here its dissonance is confusing and frustrating.

The huge concrete pipe with the rural-looking costumes and straightforward language of the text immediately establishes a post-now, post-apocalyptic world, as it’s a society that has created giant drains big enough for an industrial city and probably destroyed itself. Suggesting an unknown future, as an audience who know how to read stage language, we search for clues about this world - that aren’t there. In the program, Cordingley says, “The opportunities in the drain pipe offered up for Paul’s lighting and Geordie’s (Brookman – director) physical blocking were instantly compelling.” Which they are, but how does this help to tell the story and share this text?

Harrower’s text is full of metaphors and his magnificent words summon vivid visions of a rural landscape and its struggling people. As productions all over the world have proven, the dense text never restricts the creators in their interpretation, but nothing else in this production is congruous with the giant drain, so the text and the stage worlds never become one.

For all the wonderful things about Knives in Hens, it is a confusing experience. Kate Box, Robert Menzies and Dan Spielman’s performances are individually perfect, but they don’t acknowledge the world they are living in, be it moving through the water the same as they move on solid ground, letting us believe that they can see a village at the other end of the pipe or creating a relationship subtext between the characters.

This could be because Brookman’s direction is felt too much on the stage, from ‘compelling’ blocking that doesn’t always sit with the text to performance levels that restrict the performers. They start so intensely that importance becomes meaningless because they have nowhere to go. There’s a constant tension and we feel and hear a lot of powerful emotion, but it lacks light and shade, and is so relentless that there isn’t enough room for the text to speak.

This production feels like it is trying so hard to bring an originality and a theatrical intelligence to the script, that it forgets to trust the script and forgets to tell the story to the audience. As it runs, it may forget about trying to be so clever and relax enough to let the story free. And, if they can make that drain a vital part of the telling, it may still be seen as one of the best designs of the year.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Moving Target

Moving Target
Malthouse Theatre, Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts, Sydney Opera House
13 March 2008
Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse

Last week I despaired at seeing banality on Melbourne’s professional stages and began to wonder if I was being too harsh. Last night I saw Moving Target at the Malthouse. To Benedict Andrews and everyone involved in the creation of this work – may I say thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Moving Target has come to Melbourne after a season at the Adelaide Festival of Arts. They also brought the Adelaide heat wave with them, but this show was worth sitting in a very hot room for two hours. Direction, performance, writing and design blend to create original, moving, addictive theatre.

The final script is a melding of Marius Von Mayenburg’s words (ably translated by Maja Zade) with an improvised ensemble rehearsal process. What seems chaotic and spontaneous is structured intricately and intelligently to build tension and gradually reveal story and character. The language gives us incredible images like a stubble-covered palm, a half-eaten bird and a green package that is never on the stage, but we never stop seeing it. The final scenes are all exposition. In the show-don’t-tell world of visual story telling, this isn’t recommended, but in the hands of such a team – all I can say is WOW. And this is regardless of content; which is as stunning as its telling. Children and terrorism are highly emotive subjects. This story embraces arch types, avoids clichés and lets its audience feel every genuine emotion.

The ensemble of Alison Bell, Julie Forsyth, Rita Kalnejais, Robert Menzies, Hamish Michael and Matthew Whittet are perfectly cast. It’s a tough job to get the balance right in this show. It takes exceptional skill and craft to make well-rehearsed and detailed staging look random and improvised, let alone to reveal complex characters from what initially appears to be the “real” actors on the stage. All worked as an ensemble, but I have to say that Alison’s subtlety was beautifully powerful and Hamish could pitch his performance just a squidge lower.

All elements of the design fuse to tell this story. The unexpected brilliance of Robert Cousins’ set becomes apparent as the hide and seek games begin. Fiona Crombie’s costumes look like a quick grab from the op shop, but show us the core of these characters. Performer Hamish Michael also designed the sound. The introduction of amplified sound and noise mirrors and supports every moment on the stage. Finally, there is Paul Jackson’s lighting. His Malthouse designs are consistently excellent, but this is sublime. The clean white, the coloured shadows, the transformation to black and white and the seconds of red show the emotion of this story. It is the best lighting I’ve seen since Robert Wilson was last in town.

This whole box of irresistible goodness was brought together by director Benedict Andrews. What an original and powerful theatrical voice. He uses the uniqueness of theatre to tell a story that burrows into the hearts and souls of its audience. The pacing is superb and the release genuinely cathartic. Sometimes the humour and gag were played too hard. The hoodie joke was very, very funny, but it took us away from the world on that stage and reminded us that we were watching an actor on a stage. Even if it’s the best joke ever seen – if it distracts from the story telling, it isn’t worth it.

Audiences deserve to see original, cliché free, astonishing theatre on our main stages. Malthouse’s focus on ensemble creation and original voices is proving that we don’t have to settle for boring. Moving Target might not instantly engage or move you – just go with the journey and you may be amazed where you end up.

This review originally appeared on AussieThearte.com.