The Women of Troy

The Women of Troy
Malthouse Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company
13 November 2008
Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse

Barrie Kosky never wants his audiences to feel too comfortable and The Women of Troy is a relentless reminder that wars continue to strip women of power, dignity and hope.

Of course, he does it in true Kosky fashion; with blood, music and a mixture of discomfort, unexpected beauty and unsettling humour. It starts with confronting violence and never lowers its intensity. By the end, we accept the constant gore, gun shots and pain as normal. I initially thought this was a pacing problem, then I realised that it was probably the point – and it was a point made damn well.

Kosky describes Euripides’s ancient work as, “one of the most searing and moving antiwar plays ever written.” With Tom Wright he adapted and condensed the script to its core, telling of a post-war time after the city of Troy has been overrun by the Greeks (with a cunning plan involving a big horse) and those left alive can only see a future of humiliation, pain and violence.

For a director who loves words, sounds and music, the impact of a Kosky show is always the visual. The music and three-person chorus (Natalie Gamsu, Queenie Van De Zandt and Jennifer Vuletic) were stunning at the time, but I’ve forgotten what they sung, and I can barely remember the script.  But the images have remained.

The direction draws on unforgettable horrific images from our current wars, supported by Alice Babidge’s design of an endless warehouse of lockers and cabinets, where blood trickles and pools, and we don’t want to see what’s behind the closed doors. Here the bloodied and bruised women are treated as carcasses, ready to be shipped off to their new owners in boxes bound with packing tape.

Robyn Nevin (as Queen Hecuba) and Melita Jurisic (as Cassandra, Andromache and Helen of Troy) are riveting. Kosky directs his performers in a way that breaks down all public personas and shows us the uncensored thoughts of the person’s inner voices and unconscious. As classical works were written without thoughts of naturalism, it’s no wonder Barrie presents them so vividly.

The choice to cast Jurisic in the three roles continues to split opinions. If you know the work, each character is clear, but it is confusing if you don’t, or haven’t read the program notes. Either way, it distracts by focussing the show on her performance (which is superb), rather than the piece as a whole.

I’m never quite sure how to read a Kosky work – which is what I love about them. He understands his own intricate interpretation and directs with a detail that supports his every thought. So, to avoid confusion, I think its best to just sit back, let the experience flow and see how you feel at the end.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com

The Navigator

MIAF 2008

The Navigator
Melbourne International Arts Festival and Brisbane Arts Festival
9 October 2008
Playhouse, the Arts Centre

It wouldn’t be the opening night of the Melbourne International Arts Festival without walkouts and disgruntled mumblings.  Liza Lim’s new opera The Navigator is already eliciting extreme reactions.

At Thursday afternoon’s In Conversation, Kristy Edmunds and Robyn Archer discussed the unique role that Australian festivals play in enabling the creation of new work, supporting authentic voices and giving artists the freedom to create without the pressure of a known outcome. The Navigator is a product of the direct support of MIAF and the Brisbane Festival. Whether you choose to embrace or reject this outcome, it would never have existed without festival support.

Composer Liza Lim’s international demand far surpasses her local reputation. Archer describes her as Australia’s most important composer. I didn’t know about her, but I so want to hear more.

Lim’s composition is filled with unexpected contradictions and extremes. Like a child learning how to communicate, she plays with the myriad of sounds a human voice can make. Combining coloratura soprano (Talse Trevigne), baroque alto (Deborah Kayser), counter tenor (Andrew Watts), baritone (Omar Ebrahim) and bass baritone (Philip Larson) is already an unusual choice, but each also contradicts their own voice with squeals, grunts, barks and clicks.  Don’t expect to be humming the tunes on the way home.

Patricia Sykes libretto embraces the extremity of the music and lets her language and words joyously produce new sounds and images of their own.  Poetry like, “Embracing skeletons freeze and chime like beautiful relics”, force you to question the non-skeletal images and the non-chiming sounds.

Director Barrie Kosky has never been afraid to experience, explore and show us the new or the extreme. His controlled direction is terribly over-indulgent, but exquisite. There is no defining line between composition, direction, design and performance. All combine to create sumptuous, luscious and often absurd images that are designed to produce emotional and visceral responses.

Perhaps this is why people left. Maybe their responses were so extreme that they couldn’t bear the emotion any longer. Or maybe they just didn’t like it. 

I do wonder about the resistance to laugh and enjoy Kosky’s images. Is it the residual notion that opera is serious high art that is only meant to be admired? I enjoyed the absurdity of his images. Surely, the extra-sparklie gold lamé curtain, the fat bloke covered with butterflies, and the Fool/clown masturbating his over-sized penis, are meant to be a little bit funny!

The Navigator is not – and is not meant to be – for all tastes. It’s challenging, confronting and disorienting. I’m still not sure what it was about (and not completely sure if I liked it), but I was never bored, always fascinated and continually questioning and wondering about what I was experiencing.  I wish I could feel like that in every show, and am so glad that they had the support to create such a work.

This review appeared on AussieThearte.com

The Tell-Tale Heart

MIAF 2007
The Tell-Tale Heart
Melbourne International Arts Festival/Malthouse Theatre
12 October 2007
CUB Malthouse Workshop

The Tell-Tale Heart is sold out. If you have tickets, guard them well and be very glad that you got them while you could.

Barrie Kosky is back in Melbourne directing his English language adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart. It was originally performed in German in Vienna in 2004. It’s a story that was created to be read on paper, but put in the hands of Kosky, becomes a monologue that could be told in no other way but on a stage.

Kosky continues to prove that he completely understands the art of theatre and theatrics. It opens in darkness and silence. Then we see light and a man on an endless staircase than may reach from Heaven to Hell. Then his voice breaks the silence. This is theatre at its addictive best.

Martin Niedermair is the story teller. His performance is as close to perfect as it can be. It is sharp, precise and controlled. Yet he creates tension and danger and never lets the audience feel too safe. It’s like watching his soul or his psyche. This is what we might be like without our consciousness controlling our thoughts and actions.

Kosky has created a work about the darkness and light of our minds and our souls. The design’s use of dark and light is astonishing. Whereby Robert Wilson (The Temptation of St Anthony) is using lighting to create colour and emotion, Kosky uses it just for light and dark. To have light in our lives, we must acknowledge the darkness that dwells within us and lets us hide.

This work is reliant upon the power, threat and tension of pure black and pure silence. The Malthouse workshop is not designed for either, so minor things became more distracting that they should have. Someone looked at their well lit mobile phone in the black, a motor bike drove past during the silence and a passing moth did what all moths do and headed to the light. This is obviously a very difficult venue to completely black out and silence. However the impact of the endless staircase is lost when you can see where it meets the wall and how the steps are constructed. The light and dark of the narrator’s story and mind is lessened when we can see the physical lights that create it.

As it’s also so dependant on the contrast between silence and sound, I wonder why Kosky chose to accompany the work himself. Certainly he is capable of putting the right fingers on the right notes at the right time, but he isn’t a pianist and certainly not an accompanist. The art of accompanying is to amplify and support the performer, whilst being almost unnoticed. Kosky’s playing isn’t good enough to go unnoticed. A singer and performer as sublime as Niedermair needed an equally brilliant musician, not a competent piano player. And please tune the piano every day. Pianos don’t like big, cold warehouse spaces and let you know through their sound.

If you are lucky enough to be seeing this work, I recommend getting there early to make sure you get your choice of the general admission seats. Don’t be tempted to go to the front and head at least half way up. This will give you the best view of the stage and shield you from most distractions.

Yesterday I wrote that director Robert Wilson takes the beautiful and makes it exquisite. His works prove that beautiful isn’t good enough. On the Wilson stage there isn’t room for a moment that isn’t as perfect as it can possibly be. The Tell-Tale Heart is astounding and magnificent and I loved every second of it, but there were small distractions and imperfections that are keeping it that step away from exquisite.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.