Opening this week: True Love Travels on a Gravel Road

Jane Miller is of my favourite Melbourne playwrights. She's really only just started writing, but since first noticing her at Short and Sweet in 2007, she's written a pile of terrific short plays and her first full length play, Happily Ever After, was one of my favourite productions in 2010.

The premiere production of her second full-length play opens at fortyfivedownstairs on Thursday (previews on Wednesday). True Love Travels on a Gravel Road, which is also the name of an Elvis Presley song, was a recipient of the R E Ross Trust Playwrights' Script Development Award in 2011.

Described as a comedy about living the dream, it's about Jake, who has been patronised and pegged as the town “tard” all of his life, but when he falls in love with Maggie anything seems possible and making Maggie’s dream of escaping to Graceland becomes his quest.

After the success of Happily Ever After, Jane's again joined with Director Beng Oh and she says,"Beng challenges me in the best possible way – he is incredibly generous and open – and I trust his judgement as a director and dramaturge."

Beng says that Jane "has a brilliant ear for dialogue – the laughter in this work arises from the choices, situations and language of the characters. She doesn’t dwell on their misery but you glimpse it and it grounds the comedy.”

The cast of True Love Travels on a Gravel Road are Chris Broadstock, Marnie Gibson, Emily Goddard, David Kambouris, Elizabeth McColl and Glenn van Oosterom

Booking details. And remember that most shows at fortyfivedownstairs sell out, so best to book now.

Mini review: The Tall Man

The Tall Man
La Mama
5 May 2013
La Mama theatre
to 5 May 2013
Lamama.com.au

I think Leticia Caceres is my new favourite director this year. After her gorgeous Constellations at the MTC earlier this year, she's directed Tall Man at La Mama, which sold out and I only managed to see it on its last day because of an extra performance.

She also had a stunner of a script to work with. Angela Betzien tells a heartfelt and honest story about an estranged family that reflects the environmental damage of open cut mines and the destruction of a mining town and society. She made the big picture personal and the result is beautiful and painful. I especially loved how she planted backstory and just let it sit without dominating the now of their tale.

And Hayden Spencer and Louise Brehmer as the too-damaged father and daughter were the perfect cast.

I'm sure we'll see this one again.

Mini review: Dance of Death

Dance of Death
Malthouse Theatre
5 May 2013
Beckett Theatre
to 19 May
malthousetheatre.com.au

As Dance of Death was made by some of my favourite creators, I think it's best that I just say that I'm glad this wasn't my introduction to any of their work.

This work tries to show just how clever and smart its makers are. And it does; they are amazing creators and it's a fine looking show, but the story gets so lost in the being clever that there's nothing and no one to care about. What starts off as a fascinating angry style and tone doesn't change; the end is played from the start and the rest is stuck in a mid-ground that doesn't have the heart to pull us through the story or the distance to let us not want to care and just enjoy the spectacle.

As a well-read smart arse, I understood the cleverness and the reflection of Durrenmatt's reflection of Strinberg, but I wonder if it would make much sense without an understanding of the context.

Legally Blonde quickie

So who would have thought that I was going to love Legally Blonde!

Review: Scarborough

Scarborough
The Honeytrap
10 May 2013
Brunswick Arts Space
to 18 May
thehoneytrap.net.au

Another new company, another hidden warehouse space and another independent show that's more engaging than anything on our commercial stages this week.

The Honeytrap are a new independent theatre company formed by Melbourne-based creators Loren de Jong Debbie Zukerman, Kasey Gambling, Joanne Redfearn and Celeste Markwell. They've been working together since 2006, formed the company last year and helped to fund their second show, Scarborough, with a Pozible crowd sourcing campaign.

They've also all studied the Meisner method with Wendy Ward and the show has similarities with Ward Theatre's A Death in the Family – currently in a warehouse on another side of the city – starting with it being a surprisingly powerful and fascinating piece of theatre with beautifully honest performances.

The Brunswick Arts Space is in a tiny back alley behind Sydney Road and the noise from the back of the shops adds to the atmosphere of being in a tacky seaside hotel room (designed perfectly by Casey-Scott Corless with costumes by Nicholas Mackinnon). The uneasy floor is covered with sand and the audience have no where to hide, sitting on all sides of the square room.

A 30-year-old teacher (Redfearn) is having a relationship with one of her 15-year-old students (Matthew Connell). To celebrate his 16th birthday – it's not statutory rape once they're 16 – she's booked a room in seaside Scarborough, but as he gets ready for a night on the town, she says she wants to stay in.

Directors De Jong and Markwell focus on how the characters see the relationship and its subtle power shifts. And as they are all somewhere between 15 and 30, they bring an emotional empathy to each character that frees the audience to make their own judgements – which are much harder to make when you're watching the character's most private and honest moments.

And if you dare think it's easier to watch because the student is a male, the play is repeated (almost verbatim) with a male teacher (Doug Lyons) and female student (Libby Brockman). Knowing what's coming takes nothing away from the work and allows for re-thinks that focus less on gender.

This play by UK writer Fiona Evans was a hit at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe when it was just the first couple, but doubled its length at its London season by introducing the repetition; a bloody good choice.

I suggest seeing Scarborough in tandem with How I Learned to Drive (playing a few 100 metres away at the Mechanics Institute) that has a hotel room scene with an uncle celebrating his niece's adult birthday. And if you like the style of Scarborough, head to Footscray for A Death in the Family. As a southern baysider who had to drive across town to all of these venues,  it's easy to park and well worth the time spent in the car (or it's easy to PT it to Brunswick).

Meanwhile, The Honeytrap has caught some attention with this show and it's going to be exciting and interesting to see where they go from here.

Review: How I Learned to Drive

How I Learned to Drive
Mockingbird Theatre
3 May 2013
Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre
to 18 May
mockingbirdtheatre.com.au

How I Learned to Drive won writer Paula Vogel the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1988. If you want to learn about American theatre, the list of Pulitzer winners is a fine place to start. This is a beautifully written work about a harrowing subject that finds a sympathy and forgiveness that's as uncomfortable as its subject.

Director Chris Baldock's new independent company Mockingbird Theatre are continuing to bring famous contemporary scripts to audiences who already love the works and introducing some incredible writers to new audiences. Last year we saw The Laramie Project and can look forward to Equus and Kiss of the Spiderwoman later this year.

One of my regular theatre cohorts at the opening of How I Learned to Drive started a convesation about whether shows should have trigger warnings. It's an argument that can't be answered easily and perhaps the poster shouldn't be running with "wildly funny" as its lead. I'm not a fan of the trigger warning trend; I think they encourage more people to read/watch something because it's juicy than save people from content they would rather miss. If you don't know, this play's about the sexual abuse of a child by her uncle.

Set in the 60s and 70s, L'il Bit (Sarah Reuben, who was also in The Laramie Project) remembers her relationship with Uncle Peck (Jason Cavanagh). It would be comfortable to see her as all innocence and him as all evil, but what makes this work so disturbing is its gut-wrenching honest exploration of a man who believes he's in love with a child and a child who believes she's helping her uncle. As we ask what her life would have been like without Uncle Peck, the moral lines are blurred and re-established and for all its uncomfortable honesty, it's its forgiveness that stays with you.

Cavanagh's Uncle Peck is the character you can't take your attention away from. It would be easy to play him as a pervy creep. It would also be easier to watch. But Uncle Peck is a likable, ordinary man. We know his behaviour is despicable, but Cavanagh lets us into Peck's mind and the most disturbing part of this work is feeling sympathy for a man who we think deserves no sympathy. After his performance in The Joy of Text at La Mama earlier in the year (heaps better that the MTC version) and his ongoing work in making The Owl and the Pussycat a new favourite indie venue, 2013 is looking to be a terrific year for him.

Reuben's L'il Bit is emotionally spot on in her relationship with Peck – he is the only person who treats her as an adult worth listening to, but it's only as an adult that she begins to understand the relationship – but her performance felt too memorised and I could see a bit of the adult actor stopping L'il But from feeling in control. The power of this work is in letting go of our understanding of the situation and in letting all of the characters feel in control, and I suspect that with a few shows over that Reuben's performance is now soaring.

Andrea McCannon, Juliet Hindmarsh and Sebastian Bertoli play the rest of the family and society who turn a blind eye (McCannon as Peck's wife and L'il Bit's mum is especially good). They are a kind of chorus, but their strength comes from their not seeing what the audience sees; through them we see how easy it is to miss or avoid seeing the obvious.

I've seen How I Learned to Drive before and I'll see it again. It's a stunning work that's uncomfortable  and uncomfortably liberating to watch and Baldock's production is one that'll stay with you long after you've left the theatre.

This production is supporting Child Wise, Australia’s leading international child protection charity committed to the prevention and reduction of sexual abuse and exploitation of children around the world.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Re-visit: No Child...

No Child...
Theatre Works
7 May 2013
Theatre Works
to 26 May
theatreworks.org.au

No Child... sold out at last year's Melbourne International Arts Festival. Melbourne's arts community loved this show so much that the lovely people at Theatre Works have brought the inspirational and very lovely Nilaja Sun back to Melbourne and have already had to extend the season. Don't miss out this time!

The good news is that there are tickets available for later in the season, but you probably won't be able to squeeze in this weekend.

I saw it for the second time and enjoyed it even more than the first time (review). Being in the Theatre Works space is more intimate than the Fairfax and makes it feel like Nilaja is performing just for us, rather than doing a piece of capital T theatre.

No Child... is Nilaja's reaction to working as a teaching artist in New York's poorest schools. Her fictional Malcolm X High School in the Bronx is every school in the US where kids have to go through metal detectors to get to classes and aren't expected to make it to graduation. Her story includes teenagers for whom pregnancy and gang killings are a normal part of life. This is obscene. The richest country in our world can't look after its kids and educate them safely. And we certainly can't sit back and be content as our public school teachers are paid a pittance, schools are forever facing cuts and pressure is put on families to pay for their childrens' education.  This sucks. And then children are blamed if they slip through the system. We are failing as a society when any child misses out on a basic, safe and exciting education.

But this isn't a story about how an education system fails, it's about how to triumph within a system and how to teach when your class doesn't want to be there. Made with love for every student, teacher and their families, it's about people who care and people who know that all children need to feel valued.

Nilaja plays every role, including the janitor who's been at the school since the 60s, a new teacher who gave up a financial job to teach, the teenagers in the class and herself. Directed by Hal Brooks, she's been performing it since 2006 and every season has been greeted with critical gushing and audiences who want to come back for more.

It's an astonishing performance that leaves you unable to walk away uninspired, whether you're a teacher, a student, a performer, a writer, a theatre maker or anyone who has children and teenagers in your life.

It's selling our because it's THAT good. Book now before everyone books to see it again.

Review: True Minds

True Minds
Melbourne Theatre Company
29 April 2013
The Sumner
to 8 June
mtc.com.au

I'll always see a new Joanna Murray-Smith play. She's one of Melbourne's most commercially successful playwrights and she writes terrific jokes about being middle class in Melbourne. Her latest, True Minds at the MTC,  is the theatrical equivalent of a black-and-white romcom that you're happy to watch every time it's repeated on the ABC because it's an easy giggle with some terrific performances.

Daisy (Nikki Shiels) lives in her enviable converted warehouse with a collection of giraffe knick-knacks. She's written a commercially successful book about how men need their mum's approval before they choose the girl of their dreams. It's a bit of a surprise, as neither of her leftie parents – mum (Genevieve Morris) is into beyond-alternative medicine and young men, dad (Alex Menglet) is a drunken academic and philanderer – are into marriage and her last beau (Adam Murphy) is in rehab. But love is strange and Daisy's fallen for the most conservative hunk in town (Matthew McFarlane) and is preparing to meet is his mummy (Louise Silversen), who would call Julie Bishop a raving liberal Liberal. As Dasiy gets the dips ready, there's a storm brewing outside and everyone ends up in her open plan living room.

For all the big laughs and performers who bring extra so much extra to their characters (it's worth seeing for the three women), there's not a second's doubt as to what's going to happen or an opportunity to wish for something different. Couldn't we even like the hunky fiance for a bit and understand why Daisy wants to marry him? The jokes are easy and obvious, the politics are duller than QandA, and the characters are so full of cliches that they become unrecognisable as real people. This leaves the audience safely distanced because there's little chance of really seeing theselves on the stage.

Peter Houghton had written/directed/performed some of our funniest theatre. He builds a manic world where the background action says as much as the script, but he seems to be pushing for True Minds to be farce. It's not extreme enough to be farce and the characters are too likeable to push them to farcical extremes. At the same time, there's not enough guts in the script for it to be social satire: conservative ladies in peach don't like gay marriage while young liberal lefties are all for it, some people are happy not to get married, and it's all about love at the end of the day. Really? There's so much more to explore. (And out of rehab and happily pouring booze all night without any of your loved ones keeping an eye on you?)

It's a funny and enjoyable show, but it's so safe that it's inoffensive and forgettable.

Photo by Jeff Busby.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Green Room Awards TONIGHT

It's the Green Room Awards ceremony tonight.

First awarded in 1993, Melbourne's Green Room Awards are peer-assessed awards chosen by panels including practitioners, educators and media.

And there are tickets available at the door if you want to come along.

7 pm start at the Comedy Theatre in Exhibition Street.

I didn't see a lot of the nominated shows, so I'm not going to pick favourites.

The nominations are here.

Review: About Tommy

About Tommy
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
28 April 2013
Red Stitch Theatre
to 25 May
redstitch.net

When the techie has to start the applause at the end of a show, you know it wasn't a good night. I missed the super supportive opening night of Red Stitch's About Tommy, so saw it with regular punters and it was one of those nights when something was missing.

About Tommy is by Norwegian writer Thor Bjorn Krebs and was first performed in Copenhagen in 2003. The English translation by David Duchin has been seen in the UK and is premiered in Australia by Red Stitch. Based on the real experiences of young Danish UN Peace Keepers in Zagreb in the 90s – Norway has voluntary military service and its military are active in UN operations – it's partly verbatim and documentary-style theatre, but is given enough fiction to create a compelling story.

Director Kat Henry immediately places it as a story for us by not using accents despite its being in a specific time and place. If only more directors thought this way. Maybe the choice was made so that they didn't sound like the Sweedish chef on the Muppets (I know they are different countries), but maybe it was made because accents are just annoying and take away from the truth of a work.

The time and place comes from Hanna Sandgern's design. She uses the small space inventively and has projections that create both space and intimacy. A TV set is front and centre and plays footage from the city at war. This is a war that most saw through televisions and it brings a reality to the stage, but I couldn't see it. I was one seat away from the aisle and am tall enough to see over the people in front of me and I couldn't see the central design element of the piece. I don't understand why anyone would place something so vital to the emotional impact of overall work in a position where huge chunks of the audience won't be able to see it. Even if there's nothing important on the screen, you want to see what you can't see and this kind of distraction takes away from the performers.

Matthew Whitty is Tommy, who's excited to go and do good with the UN but is gradually broken when faced with the reality of watching unnecessary death and the restrictions of the force's the self-defence code. Kate Cole and Paul Henri are his friends and fellow soldiers in Zagreb, his parents who are proud to let him go and others needed. Whitty captures the enthusiasm and frustration of a young man who saw too much, Henri's ideal as Tommy's best mate and Cole is especially engaging as the women in Tommy's life.

But I wasn't the only person who didn't realise that the show was over when it ended. There was something distancing the work from the audience. For me, there wasn't an emotional connection in the performances; I couldn't see that connection to self that makes even something out of a performer's life experience feel real. For all the trying to make it our story, it was still a story about "them". We don't go to the theatre to admire actors, we go to be told a story and the story got lost the night I saw About Tommy.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by Jodie Hutchinson

It's Booktown weekend

It's Booktown at Clunes this weekend.

If you still have over flowing bookcases and love getting a paper cut from a beloved novel, you must visit Booktown.

It's a 90-minute drive to Clunes (near Ballarat) and for this weekend, the tiny town is filled with books. Literally! A walk down the main street will take hours even if you just have a quick browse at every book shop or stall; even longer if you stop for snacks.

And there are workshops and talks by writers like Kate Grenville, Hazel Edwards and Anne Summers. And  program just for children.

The full program is  clunesbooktownfestival.com.au.

For us who can't sleep

Bed does indeed become a complex thing when you can't sleep.



Insomnia Cat Came to Stay Trailer from Sarah Walker on Vimeo.

Review: A Death in the Family

A Death in the Family
Ward Theatre Company
26 April 2013
Ward Theatre at Docklands Cotton Mills
to 25 May
wardtheatrecompany.com

I'd not heard of the Ward Theatre Company, but they sent me a snail mail invitation that had black butterflies on it, so I had to see them. If sending a cute invite was all it took me to see this show, let's hope that your reading of even this opening will make you see it.

A Death in the Family is company founder and director Wendy Ward's adaption of James Agee's autobiographical novel set in Tennessee in the 1915. Ward is from New York and came to Melbourne in 2010 on a Distinguished Talent visa.  Agee is best known for his film criticism and was nominated for an Academy award as co-writer of the screenplay for The African Queen. A Death in the Family was published posthumously in 1957, after his death from a heart attack at 45, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958.

Adapting novels for stage is very tricky. If a work of art is perfect in itself, adaption means losing much of what makes it so loved. What's so remarkable about this adaptation is that it feels like a novel, with its slabs of narration, but still feels like it was born in a theatre. It's a bit like film with its close focus on character and naturalistic performances, but the direct narration, multi-level space and live music (Helena Plazzer and Emma McKay) ensures that it's a living and peresonal experience.

As narrator Agee, Soren Jensen sets the gentle and loving tone and makes it feel like the author's in the room and telling his story exactly how he remembers it. The intimacy is forced with only 20 seats in the venue  –  a converted warehouse is the gorgeous Cotton Mills community in Footscray (it's worth going just to visit this space) – but it's never uncomfortable, and with no contact from the other performers, it welcomes a closeness that doesn't have the awkwardness of people being watched.

It's a loving and sad story, but what makes it so exquisite is the performances. Although not in style or theme, they reminded me of the performances seen in Mike Leigh's films, which come from no script and weeks of character development and improvisation. Ward uses theatre's Meisner technique, which is based on improvising to bring emotional reality to a text. Each of the actors, Jensen, Darren Mort, Lee McCenaghan, Petra Glieson and Andrew McPhedran, never show they're acting; they listen and react to those around them and show how much they are completely invested in their characters when they're not speaking.  Keep an eye on Jensen during the car scene and Glieson in a kitchen table scene near the end of the second half.

Even though they run until 25 May, there really are are only 20 seats in the theatre, so please book so you don't miss out. I can see this work transferring to bigger venues, but the small audience lets it feel like they are there for you alone.

If I'd known it were two-plus hours, an American story with accents and slabs of narration in an inescapable venue, I may not have gone. If you hear this, don't let pre-conceptions put you off. This is a remarkable theatre experience.

This was on AussieTheatre.com