What Melbourne loved, part Sometimes Sydney

Declan, Declan, Declan, I am so sorry.
I got Covid.
It ate my brain.
I thought I'd published it.

A good reminder of a lesson best remembered: that we should be questioning every part of the traditional theatre-going ritual.  

Declan Greene
Artistic Director Griffin
Thinks he looks like Crispin Glover, but I don't see it

What theatre/art/creative experience did you love the most in 2021?
It feels a bit rude writing about this amongst all Melbourne artists, ‘cos in Sydney we weren’t quite as locked-down over the last two years... So let’s start with the online stuff, which was all Melbourne-based ‘cos frankly no-one did it better than Melbourne in 2021.

Among my faves: Lou Wall’s That One Time I Joined The Illuminati and Louisal the Musical were seriously, compulsively watchable works of musical-Youtuber-autofiction-investigative-journalism (my favourite new genre). Marcus McKenzie’s The Crying Room turned my tender brain to soup; he is a clever, clever boi. Stephen Nicolazzo and Monash CTP’s Body Horror was startling and trippy.

IRL here in Sydney, I had two favourite shows –both by indie companies. There was Dinosaurus’ production of David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face, directed by Tasnim Hossain at KXT. Then Green Door Theatre (with Darlinghurst Theatre Company) gave us Shari Sebbens’s playful-but-lacerating production of Jasmine Lee-Jones’s Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, with two towering central performances. Moreblessing Maturure was mind-blowing; she had you scream-laughing one minute and choking back tears the next.

Then... at the other end of the scale, Kip Williams’s one person adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey was exactly as thrilling as you’ve heard. The bombast of the video design was matched beat by beat with Eryn Jean Norvill’s superhuman feat of transformative performance. As president of the Marg Horwell fanclub, I was also in giggles at the details she snuck into the set design of this polished prestige production. My favourite was a lush floral bouquet, which, when you looked closer, was made of $2 fake flowers, plastic fruit, and one or two rubber zombie hands.

What surprised you about finding new ways to make art in locked-down worlds?
I was really inspired seeing how a lot of people responded to these new parameters. There were the online shows I mentioned , but also the alternative models of presenting shows IRL. I couldn’t get to see Malthouse’s Because the Night, but, from afar, I think what they did was by far the bravest, boldest, and most successful gambit of any mainstage theatre company in Australia making work in COVID times.

To toot Griffin’s horn, when we realised we could only fit 20 people in the SBW Stables under COVID restrictions, we figured out a way to stage a work outdoors in 2021: Elias Jamieson Brown’s Green Park. This was staged in the real Green Park – a site of huge historical (and fraught) significance to Sydney’s queer history, the ghosts of which rattle around in Elias’s play. We really didn’t know if any of this would work. None of us had ever done a play outdoors before, and we also didn’t know if our very-theatre-going audience would be into it. So, it was incredible to see patrons (some of whom had been coming to the Stables for 20 or 30 years) bringing picnics and lawn chairs to watch a Grindr hook-up play out in this grimy, beautiful little urban park. A good reminder of a lesson best remembered: that we should be questioning every part of the traditional theatre-going ritual.

What did you do to stay connected to your arts community?
While our theatre was dark, Griffin basically became a script development workshop. We channelled a big chunk of our disaster funding into seeding projects from artists, including new works from Melbourne icons like Sarah Ward and Bec Matthews, as well as Jean Tong, Lou Wall and  James Gales.

Socially, over the lockdowns I wasn’t as good at remaining connected to my community – neither my old one in Melbourne nor my new one here in Sydney. I really missed Melbourne a lot. Even though in most theatre foyers I’m a slime-coated rat eyeing for a crack in wall to squeeze out of... I missed those spaces a lot. You hold an unexpected number of important relationships in the foyers or courtyards of places like La Mama, Theatre Works, Dancehouse ... with people who you really miss when you’ve spent two years away (like you, Anne-Marie!)

What are you looking forward to in 2022?
I’m REALLY looking forward to finally delivering a Griffin season where all the plays actually happen!!!

....But apart from that wild pipe-dream...

Here in Sydney there’s a ton of stuff I’m looking forward to - because there are so many new plays premiering! OMG. It truly feels like we’re out of the European-Canon-But-In-ASOS era. KXT
Bakehouse’s 2022 program is super strong. I’m really looking forward to Charlotte Salusinszky’s Little Jokes in Times of War; Saman Shad’s The Marriage Agency; Kenneth Moraleda and Jordan Shea's One Hour No Oil. At Ensembl: Brittanie Shipway’s A Letter for Molly. At Belvoir:  S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack’s The Jungle and the Sea, and Vidya Rajan’s adaptation of Looking for Alibrandi, directed by Stephen Nicolazzo. At STC: Glace Chase’s Triple X. It’s wild, but there are SO MANY MORE I haven’t mentioned here.

And then hoping I’ll get down to Melbourne... I’m really looking forward to Carly Shepphard’s Chase and Aran Thangaratnam’s Stay Woke at Malthouse (I’ve read Stay Woke and it’s WILDLY, WILDLY funny and smart). Philip Adams and Ryan New’s SICK! at Temperance Hall, as part of Midsumma. And Arts House has shows by my favourite Australian theatre-makers of all time... the Rabble’s YES and Daniel Schlusser Ensemble’s Hercules. Oh god, and I’m fkn desperate to see something at the new La Mama ASAP...

Sometimes Sydney review: The Bleeding Tree

The Bleeding Tree
Griffin Theatre Company
10 August 2015
SBW Stables Theatre
to 5 September
griffintheatre.com.au

The Bleeding Tree. Shari Sebbens, Paula Arundell, Airlie Dodds. Photo by Brett Boardman

The Bleeding Tree won Angus Cerini the 2014 Griffin Award for New Australian Playwriting and its premiere production is running at Griffin's Stables Theatre in Sydney. This is theatre made with passion, guts and the conviction that change is not only possible but inevitable.

It opens as a woman (Paula Arundell) and her daughters (Shari Sebbens and Airlie Dodds) stand next to the body of the husband, father and monster they just killed. Their world (designed by Renee Mulder) is filthy, sand-encrusted, floral wall paper that looks like it's folded with knife-edge cuts and immediately feels like a forgotten Australian town in the middle of god-knows-where. As soon as they open their mouths, it's hard to remember to breath for the next hour.

This is shattering theatre that grips your heart in a vice that doesn't let go until the final syllable.

Cerini's writing is somewhere between genius and freak. It's damaged and violent and bloody and so fucking beautiful that it's like listening to music for the first time and wondering how noise can reach your soul like that.

Sounding like a ballad that recreates the idea of rhythm; it's almost begging to be a libretto. There's not a syllable out of place as each line defies the expected beat and creates one that catches the ear and refuses to be anything other than perfect.

And that's just the language.

Filled with images that are unforgettably gruesome but exquisitely just, it's a story that never gives away its next turn and could slip from hope to despair in a moment as the townsfolk discover that the man's been killed.

But astonishing writing is only the beginning of this production.

Arundel, Sebbens and Dodds bring character and history and a wholeness to the script that makes the women so real that it's hard to accept that they're fiction.

Dodds lets us see the rat-eaten, maggot-infested body through her eyes and brings the doubt of a young woman who tries to hope that her father acted out of love. Sebbens never doubts but is revolted and broken enough to be the one who could carry on the violence – her saying "hit her" nearly broke me. And Arundell cuts our hearts so many times that her breaking-point speech – about how everyone knew it was happening – speaks for every woman and child who has lived in fear and been beaten, raped and abused.

Directed by Griffin's Artistic Director Lee Lewis, The Bleeding Tree is so complete that it's hard to differentiate the creative contributions. Without preaching or lecturing, it – literally – rips open the bleeding guts of domestic violence and imagines a world where this is unacceptable.

It's unmissable.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Reveiw: Ugly Mugs

Ugly Mugs
Malthouse Theatre and Griffin Theatre Company
20 May 2014
Beckett Theatre
to 7 June
malthousetheatre.com.au

Melbourne-based writer and performer Peta Brady is also an outreach worker who knows how people fall through the cracks of society and are left to fend for themselves. She's seen the violence, hatred and despair, and the hope. Ugly Mugs is a glimpse of this world that is too easy to look away from.

When a St Kilda resident was violently murdered last year, the media barely raised an eyebrow because she was a sex worker. Her family, friends and life beyond her work were dismissed as irrelevant. I didn't live very far away from her; I might have sat next to her on the tram, but I didn't recognise her.

Ugly mugs lists, updated and distributed by sex workers, describe aggressive and violent clients. Ugly Mugs is the interwoven stories of a sex worker who met one such mug and of a teenage boy who was the last person to see a young woman before she disappeared.

The first story takes place in the forensic morgue where the dead woman (Brady) talks with the doctor performing her autopsy (Steve Le Marquand). The second takes place in the park where the teenagers (Harry Borland and Sara West) met and at the boy's home with his mother (also played by Brady).

A few weeks ago, I went to Melbourne's forensic morgue. It was the 4 am show of The 24-Hour Experience that was part of FOLA (Festival of Live Art). The morgue is a short walk from the Malthouse theatre. As an art experience, we saw the Homicide Room where she would have been taken. The sight of a woman on a stainless steel medical trolley was enough to see her in that sterile room filled with hoses and knives, and as she spoke it was enough to also be walking along streets in St Kilda where street workers are as accepted as lost tourists looking for Acland Street cakes.

Yeah, it's too easy to look away.

Played out on a rough grey asphalt floor (design by Michael Hankin) that begs for bloody scrapes and scars, Ugly Mugs is emotionally raw theatre that invites us to look at our communities a little more closely, without preaching that we must. Dramatically, the second story isn't as tight as the first and having Brady as the murdered woman and the mother leads to some initial confusion, but neither takes away from the impact or heartfelt truth of the work.

As the "Australian writers don't get supported on our main stages" conversation has been active this week, Ugly Mugs is proof that wonderful Australian writing is thriving.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.