Melbourne Festival: The House of Dreaming

Melbourne Festival 2012
The House of Dreaming
Arena Theatre Company
25 October 2012
MTC, Lawler Studio
to 27 October
melbournefestival.com.au

I didn't want to leave The House of Dreaming. Neither did my artistic advisor, five-year-old Scout.

There's picture books (good ones) and origami in the waiting room and you get a costume and a magic talisman: I was loving it from the first moment.

Arena Theatre have created a living story book. The experience is how I remember first reading picture books. They were so real that I felt I was in the pages and living it.

Entering the life-size house in a group of three as a rabbit, wizard and king/queen, welcome to a world of magic mirrors and telephones, stories on a bed, a magician, secret doors, more secret doors, rooms full of things to touch, singing masks, flowers and a beautiful story about how wonderful it is to have a child. Each room is a new page with new story, more clues and more to explore.

Like the best picture books, it's not vital to follow the story because there is so much to see and it's so exciting to move/crawl/dance into each room. The story and marvelling at the technology are for the grown ups, but it was so much more fun to just play.

I asked Scout what her favourite bit was; she said "Everything". I couldn't agree more. Every room is so full of wow! that it's impossible to choose a favourite part.

She was a bit nervous at first, and rightly so; there are strangers and who wants to go in to a big dark room when you're not sure what's in there. This lasted until the first room.

Every child deserves stories, to always know the love of telling and sharing stories, and to experience the wonder of The House of Dreaming. 

If you have children in your life who are around 5 to 10, this is something they won't forget. Neither will you.


This was on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Moth

Moth
Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre
16 May 2010
The Tower, CUB Malthouse

If the teenagers on Glee leave you wondering why your high school memories aren't so perky and choreographed, Malthouse and Arena theatre's Moth is the perfect antidote.

Declan Greene continues to fascinate and seduce Melbourne theatre goers by consistently surprising us with unexpected stories. Moth is far removed from his uber-high-camp Sisters Grimm work, darker than his 2009 Fringe hit A Black Joy and more grounded in reality than his 2009 MTC Young Artist commission  Pretty Baby.  But it's still filled with authentic characters dragged in from the limits of social acceptability,  gooey visceral imagery,  odd pop culture references, absurd reality bluring and a dark dark humour that leaves you almost hating yourself for laughing.

Sebastian (the perfect Dylan Young) is too weird to ever be accepted and clinging onto the equally-desparate friendship of Claryssa (the equally-perfect Sarah Ogden), the emo wicca chick who has let herself become too weird to ever be accepted. These are the kids who no one ever sat next to at school, whose parents have no idea that their babies are in so much pain that they won't recover, and who leave me so glad that I was a teenager before the internet and its mass humiliation.

With a story of bullying too familiar to teens on the outer and too vile for many grown ups to even comprehend, Greene plunges into the fractured minds and perceptions of these souls and takes us to a surreal world where Jesus and Saint Sebastian have chosen a misfit to warn the world of its pending destruction and two young people scream for rescue and forgiveness.

Greene writes difficult material that could easily be lost in a moosh of preachy compassion or over-arty pretence, but the Arena creative team of Chris Kohn (director), Jonathon Oxlade (design), Rachel Burke (lighting) and Jethro Woodward (composition) are at one with their writer and create a world where the morphing of time, space and character is natural, expected and so beautiful that you understand why moths fly to blinding light.

Like young writer Polly Strenham's teens in That Face, currently at Red Stitch, Greene (who is an old fart compared to Strenham) writes teenagers who aren't silly or pretty or full of impossible dreams, and force their audience to understand their extreme, illogical and exaggerated reactions and feelings to the world they are growing into. Greene leaves us relieved to have grown up and embarrassed to know that we still don't want to be friends with a Sebastian or a Claryssa.

Moth is rightly selling out, so book now so that your not among those who wish they had seen it

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com.


Photo: Jeff Busby

Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd

Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie MuddMalthouse Theatre
Arena Theatre Company
17 March 2009
Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse

In recent years, playwright Lally Katz and director Chris Kohn have created some of the most fascinating and original independent theatre in town. Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd is the result of research grant, a commission from Malthouse and the resources of Arena Theatre - and I’m left wondering if this support has hindered their style.

Hours in the State Library reading room and searching through seemingly endless Tivoli memorabilia inspired the 1914 world of Melbourne vaudeville. Charlie Mudd’s theatre sits on the Swanston River, performing the same show every night to an empty audience. Act 1 may be as close to seeing pre-WW1 vaudeville as we are likely to get, with its exquisitely detailed design and recreations of bad vaudeville acts, all with a sprinkling of Katz darkness – of course.

It did feel like the story was just sprinkled around though. For all its authenticity, Act 1 played too much like a vaudeville sketch, with little character development and a surprising lack of mystery.
The terrific writing and originally dark stories emerged in Act 2, especially surrounding ventriloquist Maude and her search for love. The great stuff really stood out; the rest felt like padding. Hidden in the two and a half hour show is a remarkable 70-minute piece.

On stage, the relationships between characters felt dictated by plot, not character. The plot is brilliant, but the story doesn’t live until the characters make it real. I didn’t believe that Ethelyn (or Violet) loved Charlie or that Charlie loved Violet (or Ethelyn) and I didn’t believe that the magician believed that his magic was real. Whether it’s in the writing or not, the acting and direction have to make the characters choose their actions from their very real beliefs. The story feels forced if the love isn’t real.

The reality of the world was also questioned with an inconsistent performance style. What made a show like Katz/Kohn’s The Eisteddfod  soar was that the director and actors never let their audience doubt the reality of their naturally-absurd world. In Vaudeville, Christian O’Leary as Maude, and her wonderfully obscene dummy Doris, nailed the style, but others kept letting us into the “secret” that they were just playing pretend. During the after-show chat there was an active discussion among the actors about who they were performing to, and I realised why I was frustrated by otherwise great performances: the moment someone performed to the assembled Malthouse audience and not Mudd’s empty house, the onstage world died.

Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd isn’t a bad way to spend an evening, but it isn’t the show it wants to be. Hopefully some time with an audience has let it settle and it will hit its stride as it heads into its last week.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.