Review: John

John
Melbourne Theatre Company
16 February 2017
Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 25 March
mtc.com.au

MTC. John. Photo by Jeff Busby

American playwright Annie Baker won a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for The Flick (seen at Red Stitch) when she was 33. Her writing's won Off-Broadway Obie awards and rightly declares a new Baker as a show to see. The MTC have the Australian premier of her 2015 play, John, and director Sarah Goodes guides a must-see production that revels in the ambiguity, mystery and too-close-for-comfort humour in the writing.

Jenny (Ursula Mills) and Elias (Johnny Carr) are as much trying to stay together as they are trying to break up when they weekend at a B&B in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, run by Mertis (Helen Morse), who wears a fanny pack and a doggy apron when she's working. The tourist area offers Civil War ghost tours, but the real unease come from the gaze of personal ghosts and gods, collectable American Dolls, and, sometimes, Mertis's blind friend Genevieve (Melita Jurisic), who's happy to explain that she's no longer clinically insane.

The heart of Annie Baker's writing is in the subtext: the white space on the page that creates the silences on the stage, the time between scenes, how characters listen and reacts, and the surprises in the design and sound.

Designers Elizabeth Gadsby (set and costume) and Richard Vabre (lighting) make the homely and welcoming B&B feel creepy. At a glance, it looks super naturalistic – in a world where floral carpet, chintz and kitch figurines are expected – but the detail reveals an out-of-time oddness that hints of the supernatural, or an ageing house with quirks. There are too many lights, the grandfather clock ticks but doesn't measure time without help, the flying ducks on the wall light up, the radio is a mini juke box that plays Bach and Vivaldi, and the pianola can't be trusted. The atmosphere is perfected with Russell Goldsmith's sound design of ticking, rustling and music that's as implied as it is heard

Morse and Jurisic perform like Metris and Genevieve  – oh, Genevieve – were written for them. With timing and pacing that define their years of experience and an ability to create character from the centre of their beings, they are as heartbreaking as they are hilarious. Mills and Carr use the silences to show more than "what yelling looks like", and let Jenny and Elias be so unlikeable that the moments when they show their true feelings change everything. All four hold onto the their secrets and let the audience keep guessing, filling in the unsaid through the two intervals, and talking about their own Johns late into the night.

John isn't theatre that explains itself and the temperamental room that Metris talks about might be the one you're sitting in. Baker's writing is as complex as life but she never wants her audience to forget that they are in a theatre. Goode's production lets this conceit pay off again and again, and, as the stories unravel and tangle, we're reminded how theatre can get inside our minds and stay with us like ghosts.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Lungs

Lungs
MTC
11 February 2016
Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 19 March
mtc.com.au

MTC. Lungs. Bert LaBonte & Kate Atkinson

Duncan Macmillan’s 2011 Lungs opens with a young woman–man couple in Ikea talking about having a baby, and a feeling of safe, well-made-play-for-those-who-live in Windsor/Yarraville/Northcote predictability settles. Settles for a few breaths! This new MTC production brings a life, tension and emotional rhythm to the text that’s like breathing in the first warm air of a beachside spring and ignoring the hint of rotting fish.

There’s little unexpected in the story. The “Shall we have a baby?” not-talking-about-it talk continues for 80 minutes, but covers years without a break or change of costume or place. Once Clare Watson’s super-tight direction brings the couple out of the box into the empty space, they can be anywhere. And with Kate Davis’s neutral costumes, which say everything and suit bath sex to polite coffee in Starbucks, it’s so easy to see the world and the people though our own experiences.

Kate Atkinson and Bert La Bonte bring an honesty and warmth to their character’s imperfections. Despite their inevitable trajectory and heard-before conversations about carbon footprints versus the capacity to love, they take their performances beyond the words into the empty space of what’s hiding in the words. Under Watson’s lead, Lungs finds its truth in the subtext, which let’s us want them to work it out and live in impossible Ikea-nice world where everything fits.

And all of this happens as the set dictates the tension and rhythm of the text, without the actors ever acknowledging what’s going on behind them.

Andrew Bailey’s design (with Richard Vabre’s lighting and Russell Goldsmith’s sound) is a literal metaphor for the emotional upheaval of the characters and for the structure of the text. It seems so obvious that there had to be a moment of genius in its inspiration. Beginning in a showroom-perfect apartment that looks like every other white-box apartment loudly appearing in Melbourne’s suburbs – like the one I live in – its square and surrounding circle hints at the dimensions of Michelangelo’s too-perfect Vitruvian Man, but its perfection is brief.

At first, you notice that it’s not really square. Then books begin to lean on their shelves. With imperceptible movement, the tension of wondering how far it can rotate before it’s too far underscores the tension of a relationship where there has to be a too-far moment and going back is impossible.

With inseparable design, performance and direction, Lungs is a reminder that a well-made middle class play can be far from safe.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Elegy

MIDSUMMA
Elegy
Lab Kelpie and Gasworks Arts Park
21 January 2016
Gasworks Studio Theatre
to 6 February
midsumma.org.au

Nick Simpson-Deeks in "Elegy". Photo by Sarah Walker

I'm away for most of Midsumma, but managed to squeeze this one in.

My review is in The Age.

Daniel Kilby is reviewing more of Midsumma on AussieTheatre.com.

Mini review: Persona

Persona
Fraught Outfit and Malthouse Theatre
5 July 2013
Beckett Theatre
to 14 July
malthousetheatre.com.au

I missed Persona last year. I came to regret this, but a consistent rule of reviewing is that you will miss the show you should see. It sold out its Theatre Works season, won a pile of Green Room Awards and I heard, "Did you see Persona?" too many times to dare miss its return at Malthouse.

I hadn't seen the Ingmar Bergman film that it's based on, but YouTube shows me how much it honours the film while being something that could only be told in a theatre. It's one of those works where direction (Adena Jacobs), design (Dayna Morrissey, set and costume; Danny Pettingill, lighting; Russell Goldsmith, sound) and performance (Meredith Penman, Karen Sibbing and Daniel Schlusser) are inseparable and the audience are as immersed in the process as the creators

It's bloody good.

And it deserves much more than a hurried response, so please read Alison Croggon's Theatre Notes review. She's since seen this season as well and says it's just as wonderful.

Review: Palace of the End

Palace of the End
Daniel Clarke in association with Theatre Works
6 June 2013
Theatre Works
to16 June
theatreworks.org.au

Tell your story, tell our story or tell a story that means so much to you that it doesn't matter whose it is. In Palace of the End, nice middle class, successful Canadian writer Judith Thompson tells stories about the wars in Iraq.

She wasn't there and her personal connection is living next door to an Iraqi family, so are they her stories to tell? She said in an interview with Canada's CBC, "Who would I be to write about it?  How do I dare?  But finally I trusted myself as a writer and made a leap.".

Her writing starts with facts about three people that results in three fictional monologues. Unlike verbatim theatre (like the documentary style of The New York Theatre Workshop's Aftermath about  Iraqi refugees, which left me shuddering),  it doesn't use the recorded words of real people and this mix of truth and appropriation is both disconcerting and powerful.

Disconcerting because not knowing the line between truth and imagining creates a distance from the characters and the work. Powerful because her imagining lets us see them as so much more than their worst or best recorded moments.

Each of the three could, and will, be remembered for their abhorrent acts and behaviour.  Private Lynndie England (Hannah Norris) was a 21-year-old US soldier who posed for photos with abused Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Dr David Kelly (Rob Meldrum) was a British weapons inspector complicit in the "sexing" up of facts, and Nehrjas Al Saffarh (Eugenia Fragos) was a member of the Communist Party of Iraq who let her sons be tortured.

Each story is disturbing and the facts are chosen for their shock and emotional impact, but what makes this production so striking are performances that find the humanity and a raw emotional honesty in each character.

And they are fictional characters. They are based on real people and stories assumed from limited public evidence, but the on-stage stories are fiction. And it's this fiction that takes each from a story so far from most of our experiences – a story about them – to one that could be mine or ours.

Norris, Meldrum and Fragos's performances are stunning, and what makes then so remarkably moving is their letting us see how easy it is to make choices that seem unthinkable when looking from the safety of distance and retrospect. As the fictional England says, "Imagine your weirdest second played out for eternity".

Director Daniel Clarke's gives his performers freedom to find personal connections with their characters, but ensures a completeness and bigger-picture by helping the audience to connect to the three and letting the three (who would never have met or crossed paths) reach and maybe understand each other.

Clarke's design team (Eugyeene Teh, design; Russell Goldsmith, sound;  Rob Sowinski, lighting) are rightly listed as equal creators and have made the Theatre Works space intimate and confining. There's no escaping to empty space and no where to look but at the people speaking. The long narrow stage lets Norris tell her story from what feels very far away, Meldrum's is closer and Fragos's leaves no room to ignore her, making the audience almost complicit in her story. The lighting and sound concentrate the emotion and the inescapable darkness and, with Teh's exquisite set, give the final air and breathing space that's needed before walking out into St Kilda and thinking about poppyseed cake or pizza.

Palace of the End at Theatre Works is a harrowing night of theatre with images and emotion that are difficult to forget, but its story about these horrors is beautiful and honest and ultimately hopeful. 

This was on AussieTheatre.com

Photos by Sarah Walker

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