MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: The Bacchae

The Bacchae
St Martins, Fraught Outfit, Melbourne Festival, Theatre Works
14 October 2015
Theatre Works
to 24 October 2015
www.festival.melbourne

The Bacchae. Melbourne Festival. Photo by Pia Johnson

I didn't take my eyes off the stage and am still trying to fully understand the astonishingly beautiful, often disturbing and totally unapologetic adaption of The Bacchae created by Adena Jacobs, Aaron Orzech and a cast of teenage women from St Martin's youth theatre.

Euripides's The Bacchae is about the god Dionysus coming to Thebes disguised as a human and generally wreaking havoc with the women of the city who head to the hills and get up to all sorts of drunken, sensual and violent mischief. An angry, and pervy, king dresses as a woman, heads are torn off and most of the action can only be described because it's too much for moral and sensitive audiences.

If you know the Euripides play, it's all on the stage, even though it's told  through live music and dream-cum-nightmare visions with a blow up pool, an inflatable Luna Park smile and blood the colour of gold. There's only a page of the text, and after Dionysus's birth from Zeus's thigh, it's told from the women's point of view. The whole story is re-imagined with young women as all the characters. Dionysus – the god so often envisioned with a huge cock and women at his feet – is a teenage girl who slept in and doesn't have time to straighten her hair.

Let that sink in: young women are the gods and rulers. Not only are they the possessed and riotous mob, they are the people who cause and punish the violence and chaos. And when they become drunk and out of control, they become young men – with long fluffy phallus.  If you're a young man who wonders how young women see you, please see this.

The night I went, there was a school group in the audience. They were silent, in a can't-stop-watching way. Do I even need to say more about the power of this production?

If you don't know the play – and why should you?; embrace every re-telling as a new story – it's a world where young women are the storytellers, the exploiters and the exploited.

It lets us see how they see themselves compared to how they think the world sees them. We meet them as their unique selves wearing denim and t-shirts but they become faceless, oiled bodies in identical bikinis. It's uncomfortable to make the connections between the identifiable teenagers talking about Vegemite toast to the unidentifiable objectified bodies. Which is what makes it so brilliant.

Yesterday I was driving along Warrigal Road and stopped at the North Road intersection. There's a place called Kittens Car Wash where young women in bikinis wash cars. A blow up sex doll holds balloons at the entrance. It's a busy intersection in the semi-industrial suburbs and thousands and thousands of cars stop and see young women in bikinis washing cars.

This is why we need to see young women in our theatres saying how this isn't the world they want to live in. The Bacchae shows us what they think we see when we look at them. They see the objectification, the reduction to sexual pleasure giver (not takers) and a world where they might have to wash cars in a bikini to pay their rent, uni fees or childcare.

And they're saying no.

This is also on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Antigone

Antigone
Malthouse Theatre
25 August 2015
Merlyn Theatre
to 13 September
malthousetheatre.com.au

Antigone. Emily Milledge. Photo by Pia Johnson

In a desolate concrete yard where the only hint of humanity is a prefab building on stilts, a naked young body is dumped on the ground. Malthouse Theatre's Antigone starts with the Classic story, but it's not Sophocles's Antigone but an Antigone for now that's set in an isolated world where political power is its own reward and where there are no gods to blame or bow to, and no public chorus to witness and comment.

In the 400 BCEs, Ancient Greek playwrights competed in festivals. Filled with reflections and commentary on contemporary society, festivals were the place to hear opinions and figure out your own thoughts about issues. It was a bit like Facebook, but with better spelling. Sophocles won a lot of thumbs up and prizes.

Antigone was the first written but the final of Sophocles's three Thebean plays (that start with baby Oedipus). The first is the best known being about how Oedipus became King of Thebes by unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother, Jocasta. Jocasta and Oedipus had four children: sons, Polyneices and Eteocles; and daughters, Ismene and Antigone. Antigone followed her blind father into exile. The boys then killed each other fighting to be boss, leaving Jocasta's brother, Creon, as King, who declared that Eteocles was to be honoured while Polyneices was traitorous scum whose body was to rot in the open so the gods couldn't get his soul.

Antigone (Emily Milledge) wants to bury her brother. Her sister (Elizabeth Nabben) won't help her, Creon's son (Aaron Orzech) still wants to marry Antigone, and the unnamed Creon (Jane Montgomery Griffiths) wants Antigone and her defiance destroyed. The leader's husband is dead (for those wondering what happened to Eurydice) and the observing chorus are replaced by a guard/torturer (Josh Price) whose silence seems guaranteed.

Director Adena Jacobs and the design team (The Sisters Hayes, set and costume; Paul Jackson, lighting; Jethro Woodward, sound) create a bleak and godless world where hope is useless. The concrete is ice cold comfort and Jackson's lighting asks what's lurking in the surrounding black. Some of the most striking images come from the anticipation of one image and being confronted with something less gruesome but more horrific, like the revelation of tortured Antigone from behind black plastic sheets.

Montgomery Griffiths's text knows this story in many translations (including the Ancient Greek, which makes an unforgettable appearance). She rejects the parts she doesn't need and takes its themes, characters and familiarity to tell a story about now.

It's set in a country that has secret offshore facilities, known for their torture, and a leader who wears perfect black suits, argues that the state is right because it's the state, and refuses to listen to arguments, especially those from an angry and defiant young person. Even 12 months ago, this would have been a different play.

The contrast and similarity of Montgomery Griffiths and Milledge is what drives the work. One has power and age and knows she is right; the other has passion and youth and knows she is right. While a middle ground, cover up or lie seems an obvious solution, compromise is impossible for either woman and neither see how their destruction is mutual and far reaching.

Milledge is all contained passion and anger and Montgomery Griffiths uses the confidence of power to hide her doubts. Nabben shows how Iseme's inability to act comes from being torn in too many directions, Orzech shows how he is destroyed by trying to defy the woman who loves him for a woman she hates, and Price finds the least uncomfortable space between compliance and "don't ask".

There are times when the parallels are too obvious and there's room to tone down the references to Tones & Co (and I don't know what the pants pulling down was about), but if now isn't the time to put these issues to our stages, why do we bother to go to the theatre?

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: The unspoken word is "Joe"

The unspoken word is "Joe"
MKA and La Mama
6 October 2012
La Mama Theatre
to 14 October
lamama.com.au

The unspoken word is "Joe" has added as many performances as possible. The last lot sold out in 20 minutes. This means that the cast get pizza and those without tickets will have to see something else at the Fringe and believe what they heard about this show.

Last year, award-winning playwright Declan Greene recommended that I see a show co-created by Zoey Dawson. I know there's a lot of noise outside but you have to close your eyes was one of my favourites in the 2011 Fringe and since then Dawson's directed us The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of  Romeo and Juliet and performed all over the world in in MKA's The Economist.

Zoey's great! And wunderbeast producers MKA have grabbed her new script to create the rarest of Fringe beasts: a show that you can't get tickets for and a show that all reviews agree about.

"Joe" is a meta theatre reflection on indie theatre and breaking up. Really! What's so wonderful is that it's also nothing like that. Only the bravest go meta and so few succeed. Being in on the jokes, I was there from second one, but knew just how good it was when my date whispered, "It's not for real, is it?"

Hell yes, it's for real. It's so painfully real that it guarantees to send everyone back to their own memories of making art and stuff, being really serious about it, getting drunk, thinking you're the bee's knees and making a total muggins of yourself. It's wonderful stuff.

And it's all made more perfect with Greene's direction and dramaturgy, Eugyeene Teh's consistently awesome and witty design and a extraordinary cast (Nikki Shiels, Georgina Capper, Annie Last, Matt Hickey and Aaron Orzech) who never let us in on the joke.

Cameron used up all the best adjectives and the metaphor about taking liberties with dead body. And I couldn't agree more.