The Container Festival: Bedtime Stories for Girls, Blessed and The Wiggle

The Container Festival

MUST

31 July to 15 August

Monash University, Clayton Campus

msa.monash.edu/must
containerfestival.com.a

Guest blogger Chris Edwards

The Container Festival

 I’ve seen some damn good theatre lately.

MUST’s Container Festival been in full swing for just over a week and I’ve been spending a lot of time in tiny performance spaces forgetting about the cold thanks to the excellent art in front of me. So much time, in fact, that finding the time to write up my thoughts on these shows has been difficult, to say the least.

But, without further ado, here are some of the best shows that I’ve been lucky enough to get to, and with two nights of performances left, do try and get out to Clayton to see what all of the artists have on offer.

Bedtime Stories for Girls

By Genevieve Atkins

Directed by Jessica McLaughlin Cafferty

Possibly my favourite show of the festival, this is a shockingly honest and brutal deconstruction of the hierarchies and cruelties of young female relationships – and it’s also terrifyingly hilarious. The writing is the hero here, as Atkins’s biting wit and sharp satire brings to mind Amy Schumer or a David Mamet who’s more-feminist and less-douchebag, and sustains what might have just been a sketch-length concept to half an hour without showing any signs of strain.

Bedtime Stories for Girls

The direction and performances are just as striking, with Imogen Walsh and Hayley Foster particularly standing out as the bitchiest of the four girls, though all four (including Aislinn Murray and Emily Stokes) have excellent chemistry and comic timing. This is an angry shout of a play, viciously attacking the way in which this society teaches young women to fear their own bodies and hate each other. Go see it, and definitely watch out for whatever this team makes next.

Blessed

A play reading

By Fleur Kilpatrick

Directed by Danny Delahunty

If you’ve read my previous post then you’ve already heard me wax rhapsodic about Fleur Kilpatrick’s writing, so I’ll try to keep this brief:  I loved it. In a pared back reading, with just performers Olivia Monticcuolo and Kevin Kiernan-Molloy onstage, the beauty of Kilpatrick’s words shone through. The poetry of her dialogue, the simplicity and skill of the performers, and her ability to hone in on the specificity of a character through how comfortable they are or aren’t with their own poetry, make the script a pleasure to experience.

Plus there’s something particularly impressive in the fact that Kilpatrick has written a play that is both about religion and full of a potent rage, but not one that’s directed at that religion. To say anymore would be to delve into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that this rage is more directed at a society in which the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing bigger and bigger and nobody seems to care anymore. I will definitely be seeing whatever full production this text receives at the beginning of next year.

The Wiggle: A One Man Tribute to the Best Band of the Nineties

Created and performed by Jordan Broadway

This show is just pure fun. Jordan Broadway embodies everyone’s favourite group of colour-coded children’s entertainers in a 25-minute nostalgia-based contact high. I sat in an audience of 40-plus adults who all sang and danced along as Broadway’s crystal clear voice perfectly covered such classics as "Hot Potato" and "Big Red Car". 

If you don't have a particular connection to The Wiggles, then this may not be the show for you, but if you do, prepare to feel like a little kid again. I don't think I've purely enjoyed any other show from this year's festival quite as much as I did this one, and that's saying something.

I'll be posting more reviews over the next few days, but do make sure you make the trek out to Clayton tonight and tomorrow night for the last two nights of regular performances before Saturday's Closing Night Gala. There have been some truly great shows this year, and I'm looking forward to telling you about some more of them!

SM: I'm back in Melbourne and heading out on Friday.

Last chance: The Myth Project: Twin

NEON
The Myth Project: Twin
Arthur
11 July 2014
The Lawler
to 20 July
mtc.com.au

Photo by Sebastian Bourges

NEON's Twin is the first of Arthur's The Myth Project series that's about exploring the Australian psyche and the myths it creates. Exploding in a shiny-streamer world that moves from a cabaret-noir-cum-disco underworld to a bleak country pub that hides a secret, it's the second show opening this week where an established company is working with high school students.

Arthur is director Paige Rattray and producer Belinda Kelly. They work with a group of collaborators and for this project the group includes 32 year 11 and 12 students from Launceston College in Tasmania. Unlike Red Stitch's current collaboration with students from St Michael's Grammar school, The Flock and the Nest, the teenagers aren't the focus of the story. Instead they are a chorus who watch and mock and are welcome every time they are on the stage. And they're terrific. It's easy to stand out on a stage; it's a skill to blend with 31 performers and still be yourself.

The overall story is hard to follow but each episode (by writers Amelia Evans, Duncan Graham and/or Dan Giovannoni) has a satisfying completeness and adds to the ongoing mystery. It starts with twin sisters, a cowboy and a pub, and continues years later at the adult twin's birthday party where the guests are strangers, singing is dangerous and no one knows who is really alive at the end. Does this family have any hope or is Hell a place where our past deeds come back and where everyone wears shiny blue dresses?

And if is Hell, then I'm joining the line to get in. Twin is creepy and mysterious, and while never letting the tension drop, it doesn't lose its sense of fun or its heart; we may not really know what happens to the sisters, but we sure care and want them to be happy.

Part of the joy in watching is the continual questioning of what happened and the displacement from where we thought we were, but it wouldn't work without a cast who are as shiny and spectacular as their teenage ensemble. From dream-haunting weird to sexy-as-all-go-get to innocence-with-a-gun, Julia Billington, Catherine Davies, Kevin Kiernan-Molloy, Rose Lockhart, Markus McKenzie, Kurt Phelan, Guy Simon and Netta Yaschin, with Stephanie Francis and Trinnay Hancock-Holmes as the young sisters, are at one with the picnic-at-hanging-rock-teen-disco-mystery-horror-movie tone and know how to know the truth without sharing the secrets.

This is theatre that wants to create a world that's always questioning the world it's created in. Without using tired icons or even hinting at the obvious, Twin shows an Australia that's disturbingly recognisable and perhaps a lot closer than we'd like to think.

And the next instalments of The Myth Project will be at  Red Stitch and at Theatre Works.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.