MIAF: Anthem

MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL
Anthem
3 October 2019
Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 6 October
www.festival.melbourne

"Anthem". Photo by Pia Johnson

Anthem is the 20-year follow up to the much celebrated 1988 production of the Melbourne Workers Theatre's Who's Afraid of the Working Class. I didn't see it. I wasn't living in Melbourne and somehow even missed the tour. When I moved to Melbourne, I saw some of the MWT's last productions but still regret missing Who's Afraid. And I miss an arts political culture that supported a company called the Melbourne Workers Theatre (1987–2007). Sometimes we don't realise how important some voices are until they are gone – even if it's nice to not hear so much of Kennett.

The Who's Afraid writers were Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves and Christos Tsiolkas, who have since individually made significant impacts on our theatre and other writing. Each have also written at least one thing that I've loved so much – SO much – that I've asked myself why I haven't loved all of their work.

To see them all writing new work for a main stage in an international arts festival is something to cheer about. Thank you Arts Centre Melbourne.

To re-visit independent theatre 20 years after it was first made, find a way to get the gang back together – including director Susie Dee, who conceived the idea of original work, and composer Irine Vela –, and to offer enough financial support to cast, create and stage a follow up is so positive and exciting that it offers hope in a bleak arts scene. Let's hope it also leads to re-staging some of those Cornelius, Reeves and Bovell plays that only got one run; Tsiolkas is already read by a lot of people.

On a simple level, Anthem asks what we sing about today; hands up if you know your AFL team's song and mumble the words to Australia's national anthem. Like the first play, the four wrote an individual story and these stories are interwoven into a bigger story about the issues that face our city, and world, today.

Their common ground is trains. Trains are a social equalisers in Melbourne with most lines beginning in very far out suburbs and passing through some of our wealthiest suburbs.

"Anthem". Photo by Pia Johnson

Marg Horwell's striking design creates the mood. Her designs consistently get into the heads of the writers and bring their worlds to a visual life that I doubt any writer could imagine until they saw it. It looks like an underground station that reminds me of the old Spencer Street station. But they could be anywhere with functional concrete walls, stairs to the places we don't see and benches that are moved and reconfigured to create the feel of crowded trains while giving the stories as much emotional space as they need.

With a consistently remarkable cast of 14 – bloody Nora, they are good –, Vela's score played live and building the emotional complexity, and Dee's direction that never lets go of the big picture, it's easy to see it as one work, even if the writing voices are different.

Bovell's chorus of commuters makes the ritual of public transport feel mythic and his story of a Myki ticket confrontation leaves it impossible to chose whose side you're on. Cornelius brings the still-too-rare sight of middle aged and ageing women onto the stage. These women should be at the best time of their lives and yet have no way to even imagine a safe, let alone a comfortable, future. Reeve's story of exploitation and unpaid wages becomes a love story that finds joy even when everything else is pretty horrible. And Tsiolkas's continues to create Melbourne characters who are so recognisable that I don't want to see him write a middle-aged arts writer still struggling to rent in the Bayside area.

There's empathy, anger and frustration in these stories but it's hard to know who this show is talking to and what we are laughing at when it's easier to laugh than to despair. We happily cheer a woman singing for coins on a fictional train, but did any of us give $1 to the young woman begging for change on Princes Bridge when we walked back to Flinders Street station to get a train home?

And I didn't even do that; I drove because the Frankston line only runs a twice an hour after 10.00, which correlates to who catches the trains at night (end of the line suburbs) compared to those who catch it during the day (close to the city suburbs). Try relying on trains if you don't have a car, live way beyond the tram zone and don't have an Uber account because you don't have a credit card. Public transport might be an equaliser if it really served the people who need it.

And try talking about class, race and equity during a capital-A Arts festival.

Anthem is a passionate reflection of a city that struggles with its own inequity, even as it sings along to that Courtney Barnett song about having to move to Preston. But there's a degree of political and social writersplaining that takes away from its authenticity; you has me at Northcunt and lost me at nihilism.

These are stories about people who face so many of the barriers explored in this work that they may never see themselves on the stage.

And perhaps that's the point.

Having a large cast means that there are always observers to each story. And while we're following stories, it's being with the observers that create the moments when Anthem spits on our assumptions and forces us to be on the train wondering what we would do if it were us. Or what we didn't do the time it was us. Or when we complained that a train was delayed...

The biggest hope is that this isn't the only production of Anthem. Like its inspiration, it's a work that needs to develop and be seen far wider than a festival audience.

GUEST REVIEW: The Secret River

The Secret River
Arts Centre Melbourne presents a Sydney Theatre Company production
10 March 2015
Playhouse
to 19 March
artscentremelbourne.com.au

Review by Byron Bache

 The Secret River. Trevor Jameison.

BB: This is the review I was commissioned to write for the Herald Sun. It's not running either in print or online. Neither the paper nor my editor censored me or my views. Once you read it, you'll see it's really not a very Herald Sun approach to reviewing mainstage theatre, so its non-publication is on me. If I'd filed it earlier, there might have been time to refashion it into something more conventional. But there wasn't, so it's here. I'm glad it's here.

For 228 years, we've been killing Indigenous Australians. We've done it with guns, knives, smallpox blankets, even our bare hands. We're still at it, but now our weapons are regulatory, systemic, silent. Institutionalised discrimination doesn't kill quite as fast as a musket, but in the end it's statistically just as efficient.

Kate Grenville's 2005 novel, The Secret River, a brilliant and deliberately myopic tale of emancipated convict William Thornhill, ends with the violent murder of an entire Dharug family group. At the culmination of an impossible land dispute, fuelled by fear and an insurmountable language barrier, these men, women and children, who Grenville never even gives names, are left dead, as the white man contemplates his own crippling ennui. It's the kind of mirror that should be held up more often; a gut-twisting reminder of the colonists' disregard for human life.

After staking his claim on a seemingly unoccupied stretch of the Hawkesbury River, Thornhill (Nathaniel Dean) sets about building a life for his young family. But the land is far from unoccupied, and soon enough he's face to face with Ngalamalum (Trevor Jamieson) and the Dharug people, neither man able to communicate with the other.

In his adaptation, playwright Andrew Bovell gives the Dharug names, routines, relationships. They're people, instead of just "the other". But in striving for a certain brand of authenticity, Bovell and director Neil Armfield make the same mistake as the fictional Thornhill. What's intended as tolerance, compassion and understanding is literally lost in translation. Speaking only in un-surtitled Dharug, it's tough to shake the feeling that we're being presented with that icky narrative trope: the magical other. Armfield's production is slick, moving and beautiful, and the cast manage to telegraph plenty of what's going on, but something's off-kilter the whole way through.

When the historical note in your program does a better job of telling the story of the Dharug than your show does, you might be doing something wrong.

As the story of a white man and his family, The Secret River works. As a morality tale, a warning, a sober reflection, it works too. But inescapable in its engineering and execution is the fact that this is a white man's adaptation of a novel by a white woman, directed by a white man. The Indigenous voices ring loud and clear, but they're denied the agency, the immediacy and the basic humanity of being understood.

Bovell and Armfield's vision isn't insensitive. It's not racist. It doesn't apologise for unforgivable atrocities. It's a lesson – one we should all hear. But it's not the subversive, illuminating thing that it could be.

The ending will make you weep. The aftermath will leave you speechless. But being forced to observe the Dharug like the subjects of a nature documentary carries far less power than it might if they were given language the audience could understand. A version of this play in which the Dharug speak English, and the Thornhills speak an unintelligible dialect is one that illuminates. One that doesn't just prod at hearts and minds, but alters them. Imagine if The Secret River didn't fetishise otherness as a storytelling device. If instead of detailing how things were lost, it showed us what was lost.

As an unexamined piece of entertainment, it's a triumph. As a political act, it's a mess. And as a lesson in the inescapable common ground of humanity, it's token at best.

This is black theatre made by white people. Are we okay with that?

The Secret River

And a bit from me

SM: The Secret River is a wonderful piece of theatre. I loved it from the smell of burning gum in the theatre to hearing an audience member cry.

Every review and rave about the performances are spot on. As are the raves about Stephen Curtis's endless gum backdrop that makes us feel insignificant, Iain Grandage's live score and his interaction with the story, and Tess Schofield's not-now-not-then costumes with everyone in some form of white make up

This is theatre that lets Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists tell OUR story with empathy and understanding and the hope, and belief, that our current and  future selves really will learn from our past.

But I wasn't completely in that world; I always felt like I was watching.

At first I thought it was because I knew the story, but I cry every time I watch the last minutes of Six Feet Under or Terms of Endearment.

And it's not like the moments of gut-dropping horror, with no humanity on the stage, aren't there.

I wanted the moment of being so in another person's skin that you understand their world as they see it. The moment that makes you realise that you could be that person – or are that person. That confronting moment when a quiet part of your brain says, "Yep, I think I'd have done the same if that were my world."

Because even with all our hope and understanding, there's still far too much that hasn't changed.

On Writing: Patricia Cornelius

Savages

fortyfivedownstairs

16 August – 8 September

fortyfivedownstairs

fortyfivedownstairs.com

Patricia Cornelius is a playwright, novelist, film writer, writing teacher and dramaturge, a founding member of Melbourne Workers Theatre, and a mentor to many emerging playwrights.

Her many awards include the 2012 Patrick White Fellowship, the 2011 Victorian and NSW Premier’s literary awards, the 2003 Wal Cherry Award and 10 Australian Writers Guild Awgies.

Her next play is Savages, is at fortyfivedownstairs from 16 August to 8 September. 

Directed by her long-time collaborator Susie Dee, it explores masculinity, misogyny and the dark side of mateship. Here she talks about the inequity of male and female characters, writing for actors and reminds writers to see lots of theatre and read lots of plays.

What made you want to write this play?
I have written a number of plays that take on the issue of gender. Most of them have concentrated on young women but there have been so many dire incidents with groups of men in teams and on tours and on trips in the news that I wanted to take them on. I wanted to make sense of these men individually and in a pack. Many of the real incidents in the news have made an indelible bruise on our national psyche. They were powerful and called out to be explored.

How long did it take you to write it?
I’ve lost sight of how long. It takes such a long time now to get a work on that the process of workshopping and rewrites and tinkering go on for it seems an age.

Savages is a story about men written and directed by woman; do you expect anyone to comment on this?
I do expect some reaction but I can’t be bothered with it really. Men’s business is solely the domain of male artists? Why should it be? I think that male and female artists should look at both genders in their work. Part of the problem with too many plays is that female characters are poorly represented and all playwrights need to address this inequity.

You’ve worked a lot with director Susie Dee? Tell us something about working with her?
Who wins if you disagree?
Susie Dee is a fine director and she’s also a friend. The friendship means we’ve had the luxury of talking about theatre for decades. We argue of course but we agree about the essential elements that make great theatre. We both love actors and she is great at enabling them to take the material into terrific and powerful and funny territory. She likes text and can make it sing. She’s unafraid of going deep and will try everything to make a scene work. Neither of us is sentimental which means we like to cut to the chase.

Can you remember when you knew you wanted to be a writer?
I resisted being a writer for a long time. I tried to be a good actor and never got over feeling too afraid. I always wanted to make good theatre and it took me awhile to be satisfied with the plays I wrote. Now I don’t think about it anymore. It’s like I paid my dues. Wrote some early and inspired gems, wrote some stodgy numbers, experimented as much as I could, wrote mostly what I wanted to write and always wanted to say something, something strong enough to feel like a punch in the guts.

How many plays have you written? How many have been produced?
Is there an unproduced one that you’d love to see on stage?I’ve written about 30 plays. There is only one work, an opera titled Cunning written in collaboration with the wonderful composer Irine Vela, which has never been produced. It’s a huge work and it’s got something grand about it. It’s about resistance and what one does to survive: perfect operatic material.

Tell us a story about being part of the Melbourne Workers Theatre?
Performing in the first play State of Defence by Andrew Bovell on the back of a semi-trailer on a building site that was to become the Melbourne Tennis Centre, a hundred or so rowdy building workers looking on and me thinking, shit, they’re going to eat us alive.

What other writing do you do? 
I write prose and film scripts. I’m working with Decade films on a project called Dust. And I’m working up to write my second novel, an adaptation of my play Love.

What playwright do you read when you need inspiration?
I read a lot of plays. I read Australian playwrights as much as possible. I don’t read them so much for inspiration but I do often come away inspired. I read them because I want to know what they are writing about and how they are writing them. You learn heaps about your craft.

Apart from plays, what else do you love reading?
I read fiction.

Any hints to overcome writer’s block?
Walk. Long walks on your own.

What was the title of your first play?
Witch.

Do you ever hand write or is everything on screen?

I do both. I write notes in a writing book and use them to elaborate on the computer. Sometimes I take off then because the next step becomes suddenly clear.

How does it feel when you’re sitting in a theatre audience watching one of your plays?
It’s the most torturous experience and one I keep repeating. It takes many sittings before I can truly look at the work and be relaxed about it. Actually I’m never relaxed about it. It is something similar to someone driving you in a fast racing car and they take corners so sharply you are pounded against the door and every now and then it seems the driver has lost control and the car spins or lifts up on two wheels or turns over but then it rights itself once again and drives on.

Do you have a writing routine?
I sit at my computer most days, but I think I have a very scatty routing. It’s not always about the discipline of sitting at your desk and writing for a particular number of hours, although that is finally what one needs to do to get the play actually written. Once I’m into a play, I find myself taking my characters everywhere with me. We spend quite a lot of time in bed. I’m constantly placing them in a situation or in a discussion or getting inside their mind, looking for the way I can make them speak.

Are you an early-morning or a late-night writer?
I’m an anytime of the day writer.

Who do you go to for feedback about your writing?
I ask a small number of fellow playwrights and their responses are always invaluable. I also have a couple of directors who I get to read my work. And then there are friends – some friends who have read my work since I began to write and who have nothing to do with the theatre but have great politics and understanding of how the world works.

What’s one of your favourite quotes about writing?
"When I am writing a play I am sometimes frustrated by how stupid I am, and wish I were some sort of philosopher historian playwright, who could make sense of it all, explain it all, like a Freud or a Marx or a mother or a father or a god. But I have realised there are advantages to stupidity. And even though I have not quite lost the desire to make sense of the world, I have become more cynical about it, and watchful of stories or characters or images that comfortably reduce the world, rather than acknowledge its complexity." Melissa Reeves (Melbourne playwright)

Do you think actors and directors should be able to change something you’ve written? (Is the playwright always right?)
I think a new play will always have room to change and actors and directors will find better solutions to problems in rehearsal and to not go with these would be madness. I think if the work is being changed in a fundamental way and has become more a blue print for another work then the director has no faith in the original and has another agenda. I think go find another play. Part of making a play live on stage is committing to it, remembering why you chose it in the first place.

What advice can you give to emerging playwrights?
Read plays. And, don’t get stuck with a play in endless workshops and readings. Get it on as soon as you can. Find people who want to put on plays, form a company, find a space, do it, then do the next one.

What do you love most about writing for the stage?
There are so many elements to consider when writing for the theatre, but writing for actors is a fabulous thing. Giving actors enough, to do, to say, to think about, to transform is what I love the best.

Do you read your reviews?
Yes, of course I read them. Theatre criticism is important and can and should be elucidating. I’ve learnt things from critics. I don’t pretend I haven’t felt hurt and misunderstood but mostly playwrights want to know what a critic thinks.

What’s your advice on taking criticism?
I think all you can do is take it on. If it’s negative don’t be disheartened. One thing to remember is word of mouth is more powerful.

You’ve won many awards, which one meant the most?
The Australian Writer’s Guild awards (Awgies) have meant the most to me. They are awards that have been selected by your peers and I’ve always felt especially proud to receive them.

As a creator, you have to hand your characters over to actors so that they can live. When has an actor made one of your characters into something more than you imagined?
It’s a symbiotic relationship between the playwright and actor. The writing has to give enough and the actor has to take it and make sense of it and fly with it. I’m constantly thrilled and amazed and surprised how an actor can take my words and own them and allow them to unleash emotions and ideas that I wasn’t conscious were hidden there.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

When the Rain Stops Falling

MIAF 2009
When the Rain Stops Falling
Melbourne Theatre Company, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Brink Productions
12 October 2009
Sumner Theatre

When the Rain Stops Falling is already on it’s way to becoming one of those rare productions that will resonate way beyond its seasons and future theatre goers will wish that they were there.

A production opened in London in May this year and another heads to Broadway in March next year. You have the chance to see the original cast and company that created it. If you still talk about seeing or missing Cloudstreet (I missed it) or Nichloas Nickleby (I saw it), you must not miss this opportunity.

When the Rain Stops Falling is for anyone who yearns for someone’s eyes to light up when they enter a room, or known that love is abhorrent, or broken the heart of someone they loved because it was kinder than destroying their soul, or survived, or been broken, or wished for courage, or believed in redemption.

Our commercial theatre companies have a different raison d’être to our independent wonders. They have to please a very large, somewhat conservative audience who are happy to pay a reasonable price for a nice night out. So, sometimes, the rest of us don’t love the fare our big stages give their audiences. If you’re one of those who avoid the MTC, cast aside all preconceptions and see When the Rain Stops Falling (and the Apocalypse Bear Trilogy) this festival.

It might help to know that it was created by Adelaide’s Brink Productions for the 2008 Adelaide Festival of Arts, and it makes me wonder if perhaps the best theatre in this country is being created in the town I no longer live in.

Andrew Bovell (who wrote, among other things, Lantana) let director Chris Drummond coax him back to writing for theatre. Drummond describes Brink’s approach to creation as, “We ask the artists to come with nothing prepared: to come with minimal research, with no preconceptions, no decisions and no solutions ready.” This allows for unexpected symbiotic relationships to develop between creators. Drummond continues that this “requires both confidence in your fellow artist and, more importantly, it requires a deep sense of self-confidence in your own capacity and a lack of ego – both essential qualities for this kind of work.”

The resulting play is ostensibly simple, but is layered with connections and depth and symbolism that no one artist could create on their own. Bovell’s script is beautiful, but its magic realism and non-sequential plot might be almost obvious without Quentin Grant’s music or Hossein Valamanesh’s design.

Neil Pigot will long be remembered for his performance, which at first seems mundane, but draws us into the heart of both his characters. Anna Lise Phillips leaves the audience free to cry, and Paul Blackwell, Michaela Cantwell, Kay Jamieson, Carmel Johnson, Kris McQuade and Yalin Ozucelik are equally as astonishing. They prove that when actors are involved in the creative process and given complex characters who are motivated by their hearts, it is a profession and a craft that can change people.

I don’t want to discuss the story, the plot or the characters. The process of discovery is too lovely and too painful to be pre-empted. Just give it time and trust that the early confusion and repetition will pay off.

Photo by Jeff Busby.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Check out Andrew Bovell talking about writing with courage, as part of the What I Wrote series of DVDs.