Review: Oil

Oil
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
17 November 2019
Cromwell Road Theatre
to 15 December
redstitch.net

Daniela Farinacci. "Oil". Photo by John Lloyd Fillingham

Oil by UK writer Ella Hickson takes place between 1889 and 2051. Fossil fuels (coal, petroleum, natural gas) began to be used in the late 1800s and it's predicted to take about 250 years for humans to use all of the fossil fuels on earth. It will take millions of years for our fossilised bodies to make more.

But Red Stitch's Australian premiere of this 2016 play is far more than a history lesson, social commentary or plea for us to treat our world better.

While it moves from Cornwell and Hamstead in the UK to Tehran and Bagdad in Iran, with visits from Libya and China, its emotional spine and connection to the audience is the relationship between a mother and her daughter. Daniela Farinacci and Hannah Fredericksen are both mesmerising as consistent characters who age as each act moves in time and place. Their story of choice, sacrifice, loneliness and the line between control and love is gripping as it finds its space in the parallel story about humanity. If only we could always choose to have light, warmth and freedom.

Red Stitch have opened a new theatre in South Yarra in an old Anglican church hall. It's bigger than their St Kilda theatre and gives the space needed to share an epic story, especially as its age asks how many other stories have been told in this place. The church next door was built about 150 years ago so would have been lit by candles.

The script is layered and structurally balanced in ways that ask even more questions as its brings attention to the writing. Director Ella Caldwell adds more layers and questions with a consistently strong cast (Jennifer Vuletic, Darcy Brown, Jing-Xuan Chan, Matthew Whitty, Justin Hosking, Charlie Cousins, Krisraw Jones-Shukoor, Nicole Nabout) who let the epic nature of the work tell the story; characters create the world rather than letting the world create the characters.

Some of the most striking performances can't easily be seen. The only time the full cast is on stage is in act one in a farm lit by candles. Candles don't create much light. Clare Springett's lighting (working with Greg Clarke's set and Chloe Greaves character-defining costumes) is the character that influences every choice in Oil and makes the telling extraordinary.

It's so easy to dismiss how much we depend on the light and warmth created by fossil fuels, as it's so easy to know why we choose light and warmth. And to question it all in an old dark hall is riveting.

Review: Barbara and the Camp Dogs

Barbara and the Camp Dogs
Malthouse presents a Belvoir production
9 February 2019
Merlyn Theatre
to 3 March
malthousetheatre.com.au/

Elaine Crombie and Ursula Yovic. Photo by Brett Boardman

The back wall of the theatre is a huge board with "The Camp Dogs" chalked over partially rubbed-out memories of bands past. The floor is covered with the kind of carpet only found in pub band rooms and old hotels; its waves of bright orange could look like song lines after a few beers. Singers Barbara and Rene are older than their three-piece band and are still rocking their looks from the 80s. Welcome to Barbara and the Camp Dogs. Prepare to dance. Or cry.

Barbara (Ursula Yovich) and her cousin Rene (Elaine Crombie) were brought up by the same mum in Katherine in the Northern Territory. They're older than they want to think they are, frustrate the hell out of each other, and live in Sydney doing whatever gigs they can. Pub sessions don't pay the rent, neither does busking. Barbara doesn't approve of Rene doing girl-band covers at the casino and is still angry that an Aboriginal woman singing is considered "world music",  but is happy to be dodgy when they really need money. When their mum's in hospital in Darwin, Rene convinces Barbara that it's time to go back home.

Crossing the red desert from southern city to the top-end is a well-used Aussie story trope; crossing our continent is impossible to forget. Watching from a plane, Barbara knows that her unwanted journey home is going to be longer and more personal and painful than she fears.

The comfort and easy early laughs of the pub band room fade in the top-end heat where the wound that Barbara tries to hide begins to bleed. Abandonment and being treated like you don't matter doesn't heal with a Band Aid and some Dettol. And she knows it's far more than just her soul that's breaking as cops, lonely roads and cheap wine casks remind her that she lives in a country founded on theft.

Leticia Caceres's direction lets the story about Barbara and Rene move from one about watching strangers to one that it's easy to see your own life in, even if your life is so distant from Barbara and Rene's that you don't know anyone like them.

The use of song – there's a whole other rave review about the music and Yovich and Crombie's singing) – can seem like a break in the action, but music and song make us feel before we realise it. The music (Yovich, Alana Valentine, who co-wrote the script with Yovich, and Adm Ventoura) creates the emotion that starts with the whooping fun of the pub and moves deep into our shared stories, which hurt as much as they celebrate.

Stephen Curtis's design is every inner-city pub we've drunk in while the script takes us to places inner-city pub drinkers rarely visit. And, as always, Chloe Greaves's costumes let us know so much about the characters who are stuck in a time when perhaps they felt best about themselves.

Barbara and the Camp Dogs is urgent and vital theatre. It's about the deep personal loss that screams for family and belonging, and about understanding that our contemporary Australian stories all begin with that theft and the intergenerational trauma that too many people think is in the past.

Review: Hand to God

Hand to God
Alexander Vass and Vass Production 
24 February 2018
The Alex Theatre
to 18 March
alextheatrestk.com.au

Hand To God. Morgana O'Reilly & Gyton Grantley. Photo by Angelo Leggas

Hand to God was nominated for a pile of Tony Awards in 2015, including Best Play (which was won by The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-time; which has just finished at MTC). Set in conservative, religious, small-town Texas, its success depends on a balance between its story of personal trauma and God-fearing repression, and the freedom of its God-damning, adults-only language and puppet-fucking irreverence. Yes, it's another Broadway show where puppets have raunchy sex – and it is regularly (and unfairly) compared to Avenue Q.

It's also regularly called "irreverent", and the focus on the naughtiness of being rude may be why this production hasn't found its emotional strength or empathy.

Recently widowed middle-aged Margery (Alison Whyte) is running a puppet workshop for teenagers in the her church hall. The only kids are her quiet son Jason (Gyton Grantley), bad-boy Timothy (Jake Speer), and pretty nerd Jessica (Morgana O'Reilly). The class is an inevitable failure but bumbling Pastor Gregory (Grant Piro) wants an in-church performance, Timothy has a super crush on Margery, and Jason will never tell Jessica that he likes her – until he's fist-deep in his puppet Tyrone.

Demonic possession, inappropriate sex and blashphemous abandon follow. There are plenty of laughs, but many fall flat. The fast-paced direction (Gary Abrahams) revels in jokes, but it tends to play the joke rather than tell the story. And when it is telling the story, it isn't clear what it's really about.

Deep laughs – even the most inappropriate ones – come from feeling connection to character and caring about what happens to them; laughing at potty-mouthed idiots is easy, and forgettable. With a severely-traumatised child, deep grief, and unexpected heroes, there's plenty to make the audience care, especially as the tone shifts in the second half and it becomes clear what's really at stake.

Meanwhile, there's still plenty to laugh at and the tone is set by the wit and fun of the design, by Jacob Battista (design), Chloe Greaves (costime) and Amelia Lever-Devidson (lighting). When the curtain opens, it initially looks so much like a hideously familiar church hall that it takes a while to notice the gorgeously hilarious detail (read the posters, look at the costumes) and it comes into its own with a stage-within-the-stage-within-the-stage.

The shock and laughs in Hand To God don't come from its blasphemy or sex but from from wondering if we, too, would behave like that if our life took a similar turn. I suspect that this side of the production will develop as it runs and finds its connection to its audience.

Review: The River

The River
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
1 May 2016
Red Stitch
to 28 May
redstitch.net

Ngaire Dawn Fair & Dion Mills. The River. Photo by Jodie Hutchinson

Award-winning UK writer Jez Butterworth (Mojo, Jerusalem) continues to explore men and masculinity in The River, which has its Australian premiere at Red Stitch.

A man (Dion Mills) has brought his girlfriend (Ngaire Dawn Fair) to his cabin by a lake and convinces her to come fishing on a moonless night.On his return, he frantically tries to call the police because he can't find her, but she comes back and is different woman (Christina O'Neil). The night continues with the women  – who are seen how the man remembers them – alternating in each scene, creating a mystery that questions time and identity but may have its answer in a much baser reality.

Director John Kachyon returns to Red Stitch (his last show was Midsummer in 2012) and again creates an intimacy that is often missing in the small theatre that can leave its audience feeling distanced from the stage. With a realism design by Chloe Greaves, the performance space is moved to the centre of the room with four rows of seating on either side. This creates interrupted views and others so close that it'd be easy to touch the actors.

The intimate realism is continued with contained and honest performances that let the characters, rather than the actors, control the action. There are still moments of the actors being too aware of being watched, but Butterworth's elongated scenes of moving furniture or gutting a fish create space where the acting disappears and the audience feel like invisible voyeurs.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.au.

Review: Blak Cabaret

Blak Cabaret
Malthouse Theatre & Summersalt Festival
11 February 2015
Malthouse forecourt
to 22 February
malthousetheatre.com.au

It's worth seeing Blak Cabaret to hang outside in the Malthouse forecourt, and it's impossible not to love Kahmahi Djordon King in a frock.

Conceived by Jason Yamiru, Blak Cabaret is part loud, brash and sequins, and part heart, land and song. The combination of songs that hurt to hear and satire (written by Nikkiah Lui) that can hurt to watch is what makes cabaret a form than can change views of the world.

Black queen, Queen Constantina Bush (frocked up magnificently by Chloe Greaves) arrives in white Australia and declares it terra nullius. With assistant Nikki Ashby, making hip hop hipper, and keeping her out of line, Queen Constantina dismisses disgusting white culture, fake apologises and insists that the audience prove that they are white. We're drinking fizz at the opening night of an Indigenous cabaret in Melbourne's inner city: oh yeah, we're white.

It's funny and lots of fun, but it's satire that grabs the obvious and doesn't have that biting reflection of something like the "take a selfie with a black kid" in 2015's Hipbone Sticking Out. It's satirising those silly white people who don't get it, rather than us who drink at Indigenous cabaret shows and claim to understand.

The heart comes in with Deline Briscoe, Emma Donavan, Kutcha Edwards and Bart Willoughby playing and singing. Willoughby formed No Fixed Address (Australia's first Indigenous rock band) in 1978 and has been playing and performing all over the world, and teaching and mentoring, ever since. He's one of those performers who you've probably seen (he been in things like Wim Wender's film Until the End of the World) but don't know his name. I've been looking at his website; I had no idea he'd done so much. Look him up. He's pretty amazing.

Luckily the stormed out night has passed and the weather is looking good for the rest of week. Blak Cabaret is a lovely start to the Malthouse's year and let's hope for a tear of more experiments, diverse voices and risks.

This was on AussieTheatre.com

Last chance: Thérèse Raquin

Thérèse Raquin
Dirty Pretty Theatre & Theatreworks
sometimes last week
to 30 August
theatreworks.org.au

Photo by Lachlan Woods

With a raised stage, red velvetish curtain and promise of an interval, Thérèse Raquin makes Theatre Works feel as old-school proscenium-arch (without the arch) theatre as it can. As the curtain opens, the sense of occasion and the mixed expectations of hooped-frock theatre are immediate.

Thérèse Raquin was the first major novel (1867) by the Paris-based Émile Zola. Zola later wrote a play version and the story has been adapted for many films. Gary Abrahams wrote and directed this adaption of the novel.

Not-long-gone-20 Thérèse (Elizabeth Nabben) is married to her sickly and self-obsessed cousin Camille (Paul Blenheim) after living with him and his aunt (Marta Kaczmarek) since she was a child. They've moved to Paris where old friends (Rhys McConnochie, Edwina Samuels and Oliver Coleman) are found and Camille's friend Laurent (Aaron Walton) becomes Thérèse's special friend. When social and economic circumstances don't allow you to flee, there's only one option for the lovers: kill Camille.

Very influenced by Darwin, Zola's called his writing Naturalism because it's about the control and impact of social and environmental conditions. He said he wrote about temperaments rather than characters and asks if his characters could really choose how they behave given their circumstances.

It's easy to see his stories as unearned and predictable melodrama but remember that when Zola wrote, this type of story was new; we seen it so many times since because these tipping-over-the-top stories reflect a truth that continues to connect.

What makes this production so watchable and enthralling is that Abrahams's writing and direction find the wafter-thin balance in tone that lets the characters be real and recognisable enough to make their own choices (sorry Zola) while still being caught in a world they can't escape from. If the tone slipped even a semi-tone the wrong way, it'd be too much melodrama or too much documentary re-inactment. (It's not really comparable, but it reminded me of the first season of Downton Abbey: pure soap but riveting.)

The note-perfect cast maintain Zola's goal of not making any character stand out and each approach their performance with enough of now and themselves to ensure that their stories feel as real as they can. They're not showing us 1860s Paris, they're taking us to an 1860's Paris that shares our knowledge and sensibilities.

All are supported by a design (Jacob Battista: set, Katie Sfetkidis: lighting) that create a claustrophobic Paris flat that feels both light and gloomy and transforms to a water-filled lake with a touch of simple genius. There's just enough room for Chloe Greaves's hooped skirts, which also ensure that we know it's a production about today. And all are led emotionally by live original music from Christopher De Groot.

Thérèse Raquin is big-story, big-skirted, historical naturalism that never feels caught in the conventions or expectations of big-story, big-skirted, historical naturalism. It finishes on Saturday.

MIDSUMMA: The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant

MIDSUMMA
The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant
Dirty Pretty Theatre and Theatre Works
31 January 2014
Theatre Works
to 8 February
theatreworks.org.au

If The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant is glimpse at how filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder saw women, well, let's just say he was a dick. But Dirty Pretty Theatre have re-imangined Fassbinder's 1972 cult-favourite film, transporting the translated film script to now and bringing a new level of camp and understanding (and shoe porn) to what's often known as "that German lesbian S&M film".

Petra Van Kant (Luisa Hastings Edge) is a mid-30s successful fashion designer who's recently divorced, again, and is living in an expensive apartment with her assistant Marlene (Joanne Trentini), who silently dotes on Petra and is rewarded with atrocious treatment, the worse the better. When friend Sidonie (Nikki Shields) introduces Petra to 20-something Karin (Anna May Samson), Petra is instantly besotted and offers to create a modelling career for the very beautiful young woman – if she moves into Petra's flat and bed. And when Petra's at her lowest, Gabi, her teenage daughter (Fantine Banulski), and Valerie, her mother (Uschi Felix), come to celebrate Petra's birthday.

It's a ridiculous story about picture-perfect women who act on every whim of emotion, change their empty little minds in seconds, care only for personal satisfaction, and value themselves based on their sexual attractiveness and the power it gives them.

But this production isn't a copy of the film.

Director Gary Abrahams has turned up the camp and the melodrama to off-the-scale levels, but pulled away far enough to find a focus and distance that highlights the extremity while creating a genuine and disconcerting emotional connection to the characters.

There's little to connect to in the script – Fassbinder's women are as dimensional as a ripped out page of a fashion mag – but it's amazing what happens when the insubstantial is put into the hands of very good actors. For all their histrionics and external selfishness, the cast find a truth and honesty in their characters. By bringing them to the stage with so much more than was written – and never playing them as clowns – it's easier to laugh, or despair, at their emptiness because we know there's a world of hurt and frustration behind the behaviour.

But Abrahams has not gone so far as asking us to feel sorry for the rich beautiful white women, just to see them as more than the world they inhabit and to see this story as a reflection of how women and this world are often still seen.

And the stage creation of this world is something indeed. Romanie Harper's design – which creates even more space in Theatre Works by running diagonally – nods to the film and creates a locked-in apartment for Petra, where objects are chosen for their beauty/value rather than if they belong.

But it's Chloe Greeves's costumes that define the world of high fashion, endless money and mirror-fed narcissism. There were times when the frocks made me feel very fat and old, but I gently slapped myself for thinking so and went back to drooling at the unattainable pretty.

From Sidone's off-white, wide legged, bottom-defining pants with an emerald green silk shirt with three-quarter sleeves and peek of breast, to the ribboned-laced back of Karin's floral cocktail dress, to Valerie's over-jewed handbag and body-hiding sweeps of velvet, the detail of this design makes this world real – cheap knock-offs would have made it a joke. As all tower in glorious and very expensive shoes that force them to turn sideways as they step into the sunken living room, it's a world of accepted, welcome and chosen pain and restriction.

And who care's if you get to wear those shoes! Sure, I was wearing mock-Birk slip ons that make walking a breeze, but I felt the toe-bleeding, arch-aching, misshapen-foot joy of every step Petra and her women took.

Photo by Sarah Walker

Review: J.A.T.O

J.A.T.O
MKA
14 July
MKA Pop up Theatre
to 30 July

If you've ever sat in an unlit cement car park at midnight with only over-brewed black coffee and unripe lemons to eat, your night was still lighter and less-bitter than the voice of writer Vedrana Klepica.  And there's no one in town who would bring us such a playwright, apart from than MKA.

MKA's fourth playwright for the year is Klepica. She's from Croatia and met Melbourne's Declan Greene at a playwriting conference in Cairns. Dec says that she didn't like Cairns. I suspect that she didn't like the pleasantness. With a work about pigeons with fucked up legs, jokes about fags and invalids and not washing away the clotted blood of a violently lost pregnancy, I imagine that the fat touristy happiness of tropical Australia was too much for her.

Fortunately she let Declan be the dramaturge for MKA's production of her J.A.T.O. Narratively the story needs some tightening, but her voice and her characters are so deliciously dark that plot can be damned.

J.A.T.O are an obscure European pop group who arrive in Zagrab at the same time as a dignitary. There are security officers to ensure the safety of the official and a local has on her best slutty dress to pick up the bartender, or better, at the gig.

This isn't angry Agitprop eastern European theatre that celebrates the just way forward. Rather it's a reflection of a generation who are so frustrated and angry that they have to laugh because there's not much left to do.

Director Tanya Dickson has recently graduated from VCA and brings the fullness that is missing in the script by making the conflicting layers of bleakness and comedy blend like dark sea salt chocolate. This contradiction of flavours is supported superbly by the designers. David Samuel makes the stage a giant sandpit for play, but surrounds it with black curtains and Chloe Greaves' costumes dip the heads and shoulders of the characters into a grey that makes them look like their heads are in a black and white movie.

And, again, MKA are letting us see some of the best recent graduates in their casts. This won't be the first time I write about Stefan Bramble, Rory Kelly, Cate Wolswinkel, Tristan M Watson, Janine Watson and Tom Dent.

MKA's 2011 season 1 is drawing to a close. They have no funding or formal support, but in a few months they've marked their place in Melbourne's independent theatre scene and shown us some of the most exciting new writing and emerging artists around.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Honey Bunny's Sagittarian Full Moon Finale

MIDSUMMA
Honey Bunny's Sagittarian Full Moon Finale
3 February 2011
Northcote Town Hall

Writer and director Julian Hobba says that Honey Bunny's Saggitarian Full Moon was inspired by a night with friends in 2002. The resulting work captures the energy and mood of a 20-something party, but is far more than a glimpse of a gen Y gathering.

A group of friends gather in an empty backyard for a housewarming. With a gift of gilded bunny, they find something to pay homage to as they try to avoid the truths and secrets that they know they have to face.

Just as Ys distant themselves from Xs, generations will always claim to be unique – I'm sure the first kids to move out of the family cave to live in a bark hut scoffed at the dated Cavers. Honey Bunny's characters (and cast) broadly represent their generation, but are based on more than generalisations and it's easy to see, and feel, that their selfishness, pain and hope are no different from anyone else's. With such an understanding of archetypes, and a quote from Jungian scholar and legend Marie Louise Von Franz in the show, it's a work also influenced by Jung.

Hobba's writing freely uses moon, tide and blood imagery and plays with language without letting it get in the way of his story.  Directing his own work, he is supported by his totally watchable cast (Brendan Barnett, Alicia Beckhurst, Emma Breech, Marcus McKenzie, Ben Andrew Pfeiffer, Michael Wahr and Drew Wilson) and a design team (David Samuel, Lucy Birkinshaw and Chloe Greaves) who all ensure a balance between the drama and the gentle surreal beauty and horror that their full moon brings.

Near the end, characters wonder if they can see moonlight tears or water, and with such lovely writing, I have no doubt that we'll soon see more of Hobba and everyone who bowed before Honey Bunny.

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com

photo by Pia Johnson


PS: Some reviews that disappeared in the weekend of flooding are now floating to the surface...