Reveiw: Ugly Mugs

Ugly Mugs
Malthouse Theatre and Griffin Theatre Company
20 May 2014
Beckett Theatre
to 7 June
malthousetheatre.com.au

Melbourne-based writer and performer Peta Brady is also an outreach worker who knows how people fall through the cracks of society and are left to fend for themselves. She's seen the violence, hatred and despair, and the hope. Ugly Mugs is a glimpse of this world that is too easy to look away from.

When a St Kilda resident was violently murdered last year, the media barely raised an eyebrow because she was a sex worker. Her family, friends and life beyond her work were dismissed as irrelevant. I didn't live very far away from her; I might have sat next to her on the tram, but I didn't recognise her.

Ugly mugs lists, updated and distributed by sex workers, describe aggressive and violent clients. Ugly Mugs is the interwoven stories of a sex worker who met one such mug and of a teenage boy who was the last person to see a young woman before she disappeared.

The first story takes place in the forensic morgue where the dead woman (Brady) talks with the doctor performing her autopsy (Steve Le Marquand). The second takes place in the park where the teenagers (Harry Borland and Sara West) met and at the boy's home with his mother (also played by Brady).

A few weeks ago, I went to Melbourne's forensic morgue. It was the 4 am show of The 24-Hour Experience that was part of FOLA (Festival of Live Art). The morgue is a short walk from the Malthouse theatre. As an art experience, we saw the Homicide Room where she would have been taken. The sight of a woman on a stainless steel medical trolley was enough to see her in that sterile room filled with hoses and knives, and as she spoke it was enough to also be walking along streets in St Kilda where street workers are as accepted as lost tourists looking for Acland Street cakes.

Yeah, it's too easy to look away.

Played out on a rough grey asphalt floor (design by Michael Hankin) that begs for bloody scrapes and scars, Ugly Mugs is emotionally raw theatre that invites us to look at our communities a little more closely, without preaching that we must. Dramatically, the second story isn't as tight as the first and having Brady as the murdered woman and the mother leads to some initial confusion, but neither takes away from the impact or heartfelt truth of the work.

As the "Australian writers don't get supported on our main stages" conversation has been active this week, Ugly Mugs is proof that wonderful Australian writing is thriving.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
MTC presents the Belvoir production
16 January 2012
Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse
to 18 February 2012
mtc.com.au

Sometime in the 70s, the ABC filmed the MTC production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll; my grandmother made me watch it with her.  I didn't really get it, but I liked it, especially as 1950s Melbourne and 1970s Adelaide weren't that far apart. Years later in high school, The Doll was an English text and I aspired to be Bubba; I still didn't really get. Now that I'm older than Pearl and Olive, I get it, and the opening night ovation for this production and for writer Ray Lawler confirmed that it's still one of the best plays out there and a piece of Australian theatre history that should be compulsory.

Does Summer of the Seventeenth Doll really need an introduction?  If you've been to high school in Australia, you must have read it. It's the one set in Carlton in the 50s, where two cane-cutters arrive to spend their 17th five-month lay off with their Melbourne barmaid girlfriends, but one of the women left to get married, the cane season brought trouble and all are confronted with not being 30 anymore.

It's a brilliant story that forces painful change as each character faces the chasm between what they want to be seen as and who they are, and it's a masterclass in the power of a three-act structure.

Director Neil Armfield lets Lawler's writing lead and he guides his cast to find a depth and a rawness to their characters that brings a freshness and new understanding to those familiar with the text.

Steve Le Marquand (Roo), Travis McMahon (Barney) and TJ Power (Johnny) each reject comfort for the need to be masculine, but this production is about the women.

Eloise Winestock shows how much Bubba wants to be a better version of Olive. While Alison Whyte lets Olive be the young woman who flouted convention and ages in moments as she's offered a salvation that means she's lost everything.

Robyn Nevin is unforgettable as Olive's caustic mother Emma, who sees the truth and can't help her daughter.  But Helen Thomson's Pearl is the performance to see. Too often Pearl is a prude, but Thomson lets us see why Olive chose her in the first place – she's a hoot – but she knows that reputation is all that she has and can't let herself be swept into Olive's life. Choosing an un-married and openly sexual life in the 40s and 50s was a choice that few women willingly made and Olive's explanation to Pearl about decency depending on people can't dull the sting of having other women feel sorry for you.

This Summer of the Seventeeth Doll confirmed it as one of my favourite plays. Lawler ensures that we understand why every choice is made, but we long for every one to choose differently and find a way back to happiness and love. Its honesty is as true now as ever and its world is still so close to ours. I'm sure I’m not alone in admitting that I'd bluff happiness rather than have anyone feel sorry for me.

If you love Australian theatre, if you love theatre, you have no excuse to miss see this Doll.

This review appeared on AussieThearte.com

Photo by Jeff Busby