The Container Festival: Bedtime Stories for Girls, Blessed and The Wiggle

The Container Festival

MUST

31 July to 15 August

Monash University, Clayton Campus

msa.monash.edu/must
containerfestival.com.a

Guest blogger Chris Edwards

The Container Festival

 I’ve seen some damn good theatre lately.

MUST’s Container Festival been in full swing for just over a week and I’ve been spending a lot of time in tiny performance spaces forgetting about the cold thanks to the excellent art in front of me. So much time, in fact, that finding the time to write up my thoughts on these shows has been difficult, to say the least.

But, without further ado, here are some of the best shows that I’ve been lucky enough to get to, and with two nights of performances left, do try and get out to Clayton to see what all of the artists have on offer.

Bedtime Stories for Girls

By Genevieve Atkins

Directed by Jessica McLaughlin Cafferty

Possibly my favourite show of the festival, this is a shockingly honest and brutal deconstruction of the hierarchies and cruelties of young female relationships – and it’s also terrifyingly hilarious. The writing is the hero here, as Atkins’s biting wit and sharp satire brings to mind Amy Schumer or a David Mamet who’s more-feminist and less-douchebag, and sustains what might have just been a sketch-length concept to half an hour without showing any signs of strain.

Bedtime Stories for Girls

The direction and performances are just as striking, with Imogen Walsh and Hayley Foster particularly standing out as the bitchiest of the four girls, though all four (including Aislinn Murray and Emily Stokes) have excellent chemistry and comic timing. This is an angry shout of a play, viciously attacking the way in which this society teaches young women to fear their own bodies and hate each other. Go see it, and definitely watch out for whatever this team makes next.

Blessed

A play reading

By Fleur Kilpatrick

Directed by Danny Delahunty

If you’ve read my previous post then you’ve already heard me wax rhapsodic about Fleur Kilpatrick’s writing, so I’ll try to keep this brief:  I loved it. In a pared back reading, with just performers Olivia Monticcuolo and Kevin Kiernan-Molloy onstage, the beauty of Kilpatrick’s words shone through. The poetry of her dialogue, the simplicity and skill of the performers, and her ability to hone in on the specificity of a character through how comfortable they are or aren’t with their own poetry, make the script a pleasure to experience.

Plus there’s something particularly impressive in the fact that Kilpatrick has written a play that is both about religion and full of a potent rage, but not one that’s directed at that religion. To say anymore would be to delve into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that this rage is more directed at a society in which the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing bigger and bigger and nobody seems to care anymore. I will definitely be seeing whatever full production this text receives at the beginning of next year.

The Wiggle: A One Man Tribute to the Best Band of the Nineties

Created and performed by Jordan Broadway

This show is just pure fun. Jordan Broadway embodies everyone’s favourite group of colour-coded children’s entertainers in a 25-minute nostalgia-based contact high. I sat in an audience of 40-plus adults who all sang and danced along as Broadway’s crystal clear voice perfectly covered such classics as "Hot Potato" and "Big Red Car". 

If you don't have a particular connection to The Wiggles, then this may not be the show for you, but if you do, prepare to feel like a little kid again. I don't think I've purely enjoyed any other show from this year's festival quite as much as I did this one, and that's saying something.

I'll be posting more reviews over the next few days, but do make sure you make the trek out to Clayton tonight and tomorrow night for the last two nights of regular performances before Saturday's Closing Night Gala. There have been some truly great shows this year, and I'm looking forward to telling you about some more of them!

SM: I'm back in Melbourne and heading out on Friday.

Review: Psychopomp & Seething

Psychopomp & Seething
Barking Spider Visual Theatre, MUST
18 February 2015
La Mama Courthouse
to 1 March 2015
lamama.com.au

Kate Brennan. Seething. Photo by Sarah Walker

Psychopomp & Seething begins by taking the audience on a ride in the La Mama Courthouse. It's not a hold on and scream ride, but you do move and it ends in pure darkness.

And it gets darker.

Seething, the first piece, opens with an older woman (Vanessa O'Neil) with long blond-grey hair in a sound booth with a red-velvet curtained wall. She's reading a poem that's easy to listen to as music rather than words. When a younger dancer (Kate Brennan), with a recently shaven head, comes into the empty space between the booth and audience, her presence feels slightly intrusive until it's clear that she's dancing to the words being spoken.

These are words about bodies and love and how we blame our bodies for being imperfect and not deserving of love. It's somehow comforting and confronting as the two woman are compared to but rely on each other.

The words are by Penelope Bartlau. Using the musical nature of words and poetry, it's writing that's meant to be heard rather than read, and the kind that you to listen to with far more than your ears. She says that the works come from a mix of dreams, her own experiences and the experiences of her friends. This blend of dream and reality makes for a familiar unease because even when we wake up, we hold the too-real emotional experience of our dreams, and that emotion is never too far from a wide-awake truth.

This becomes more evident in Psychopomp.

Aislinn Murray. Psychopomp. Photo by Sarah Walker

This piece was developed by Barking Spider at Monash University Student Theatre (MUST) last year. Directed and designed by Jason Lehane, who is also the MUST Technical Manager, the cast and crew are/were MUST members.

Recently, The Age published an opinion piece that associated student theatre with "young things running around with their underpants on their heads". I doubt that writer sees student theatre made in Melbourne. This is the second work in this year's La Mama program that was developed through MUST. Although often raw, the new theatre by students in this city (Deakin and Melbourne as much as Monash) is exciting and dangerous and is created with an understanding that theatre and storytelling are so much more than well-written words on a stage.

The stage in Psychopomp is a two by two square box. The first signs of life from the four boxes are noises that become the voices of four people, or animals.

Designer, and director, Jason Lehane has created a world that's distant but impossible not to be drawn into. While Seething uses the emptiness of the space, Psychopomp is confined and impossible to escape from. By boxing in the boxes and the audience, there's no where else to look and it's easy to imagine that this four are a few among endless unseen boxes.

Each box contains a teller who's compelled to tell their story. Captured in their own worlds, the intricate design (costume and set) and exquisite lighting hint at the contained secrets. There's a warm nest, a lush garden and two darker more-empty spaces that become vivid as imaginations fill in the un-lit horror.

Unaware of each other or the watching eyes, each tell a story about a death. And while they are beautiful to hear, they are mildly traumatic to feel.

Actors James Cerche, Nicola Grear, Aislinn Murray and Lindsay Templeton are the four storytellers. Each bring a remarkable emotional understanding to their stories. With writing that isn't a simple narrative and direction that ensure the wholeness of the picture, they bring all of themselves to their story while working together like a musical quartet to let their stories overlap with sound and meaning.

Psychopomp & Seething is a work that stays with you long after you've left. Being unsure where you are in a well-known space can be unnerving, and, as it's devised to be listened to as sound as much as words, it's easy to simply experience being there. But the truth of what was told will catch up with you because it's made to be seen and felt as much as heard.

There are limited seats for each performance and no room to expand, so book for this one. And, when the timing is right, also book for The Unspoken Word is Joe around the corner at the La Mama theatre.

This was on Aussietheatre.com.au.