Review: J.A.T.O

J.A.T.O
MKA
14 July
MKA Pop up Theatre
to 30 July

If you've ever sat in an unlit cement car park at midnight with only over-brewed black coffee and unripe lemons to eat, your night was still lighter and less-bitter than the voice of writer Vedrana Klepica.  And there's no one in town who would bring us such a playwright, apart from than MKA.

MKA's fourth playwright for the year is Klepica. She's from Croatia and met Melbourne's Declan Greene at a playwriting conference in Cairns. Dec says that she didn't like Cairns. I suspect that she didn't like the pleasantness. With a work about pigeons with fucked up legs, jokes about fags and invalids and not washing away the clotted blood of a violently lost pregnancy, I imagine that the fat touristy happiness of tropical Australia was too much for her.

Fortunately she let Declan be the dramaturge for MKA's production of her J.A.T.O. Narratively the story needs some tightening, but her voice and her characters are so deliciously dark that plot can be damned.

J.A.T.O are an obscure European pop group who arrive in Zagrab at the same time as a dignitary. There are security officers to ensure the safety of the official and a local has on her best slutty dress to pick up the bartender, or better, at the gig.

This isn't angry Agitprop eastern European theatre that celebrates the just way forward. Rather it's a reflection of a generation who are so frustrated and angry that they have to laugh because there's not much left to do.

Director Tanya Dickson has recently graduated from VCA and brings the fullness that is missing in the script by making the conflicting layers of bleakness and comedy blend like dark sea salt chocolate. This contradiction of flavours is supported superbly by the designers. David Samuel makes the stage a giant sandpit for play, but surrounds it with black curtains and Chloe Greaves' costumes dip the heads and shoulders of the characters into a grey that makes them look like their heads are in a black and white movie.

And, again, MKA are letting us see some of the best recent graduates in their casts. This won't be the first time I write about Stefan Bramble, Rory Kelly, Cate Wolswinkel, Tristan M Watson, Janine Watson and Tom Dent.

MKA's 2011 season 1 is drawing to a close. They have no funding or formal support, but in a few months they've marked their place in Melbourne's independent theatre scene and shown us some of the most exciting new writing and emerging artists around.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Crossed

Crossed
Platform Youth Theatre, Appetite and La Mama Theatre
11 June 2011
Courthouse Thearte
www.pyt.org.au

Platform Youth Theatre creates theatre about the issues their young members feel strongly about. Chris Summers wrote Crossed after a teenage boy was shot by police at a Northcote skate park. The work centres on a fictionalised event and confronts the reverberation of violence and pain that such an unthinkable, but too real, event causes.

The mood is set by the design team (Kat Chan, set and costume; Lisa Mibus, lighting; Pete Goodwin, sound) who turn the room to 'landscape' and use the horizontal space to give a sense of distance and ultimately of magnified intimacy, which is made stronger with some of the best sound design I've heard in this venue.

The story is told by five people who witnessed the violent event.  They have nothing in common, but crossed paths on the day.  Each represent their own section of society and their stories bravely confront their own stereotypes, preconceptions and contradictions.

Director (Matt Scholten) and cast (Prag Bhatia, Stefan Bramble, Nick Linehan, Jenny Lovell and Ioan Roberts) bring an honest and angry energy to the stage. This is supported by an unexpected and connecting empathy to their initially-unsympathetic characters, as each take a snapshot of stereotype and peel away the layers to show how wrong initial perceptions can be.  Their anger is sustained throughout the show, but a bit more light and shade will make the passion stronger and give each character an even greater range.

Summers, who is still in his early 20s, captures the angry, disconnected and confused souls of his characters, who speak without censorship or fear. The device of having each speaking to a different person creates a subtle tension in the audience as we have to keep shifting our individual perspectives of the characters and what happened.

When the off-stage confessors appear in the second half, this tension drops, especially as this half doesn't reveal anything new from the strong first half. Summers has to trust that his subtext is already clear and strong, and that audiences really can use their imaginations to fill in the empty spaces. What we imagine might not be exactly what the writer intended, but it will be something just as powerful.

Platform Youth Theatre continue to make  "awesome and unique theatre that topples notions of what ‘youth’ or what ‘community’ theatre is". This is a company who help to create our thearte artists and the kind of grown ups who will always strive to make our communities better.

This review originally appeared on AussieThearte.com.