Showing posts with label Nikki Shiels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nikki Shiels. Show all posts

24 January 2023

Review: Sunday

Sunday
Melbourne Theatre Company

20 January 2023
The Sumner, Southbank Theatre
To 18 February 2023
mtc.com.au

 

"Sunday". Photo by Pia- ohnson

 

 My review is on Australian Arts Review.

23 April 2017

Review: Joan

Joan
The Rabble
22 April 2017
Theatre Works
to 30 April
theatreworks.org.au

Dana Miltins. Joan. Photo by David Paterson

Damn you, The Rabble. Just when I think I can’t love you any more, you go and make Joan.

I felt burnt alive and risen from the ashes.

Joan. Joan D’Arc. Saint Joan.

A young woman. Whispered to by saints. Virgin. Sinner. God’s holy soldier.

She became a hero, a saint, an aspiration for young women that they too can be strong and be destroyed. She’s a great audition pieces in the play by a man written three years after she was canonised.

She was burnt alive. She was 19.

Starting with a darkness that only Emma Valente’s lighting and Kate Davis’s design can find, shapes – women? a woman? young women? – move into light or are found in the darkness. It could be the holy light above or a light to run from. With projections in front of and behind the stage, it hints of a black and white movie but is nothing like a black and white movie as the sound of breath and bodies falling to their knees asks if their kneeling is choice.

After light, they move through explorations of body, fire and voice. And to make such mesmerising imagery sound so clinical, intelligent and “artistic” is unfair.

Founded by Valente and Davis, The Rabble’s process starts with design and develops through improvisation. Text and texts are vital to their process but is one of the last things on the stage. We watch more than we hear, and when the women are finally given voices, their words are fiercer, brighter and more blistering that the fire – that fire! –  that came before.

It’s hard to think when watching this work. It’s seems so clear but every moment is filled with ideas and discussions that are too complex to be reduced to words.

Luisa Hastings Edge, Emily Milledge, Dana Miltins and Nikki Sheils are Joan. Each is extraordinary and together they confront the expectations of Joan and her story, and question why pain, strength and faith are considered virtues for a woman, let alone a child.

At times, it’s like getting into Joan's soul and feeling with her. But it’s more confrontational when we’re distanced and see ourselves judging her as a Saint or Sinner and putting both on a pedestal that burns with the bundles of wooden faggots stacked around her.

The Rabble create astonishing independent theatre with an independent budget. I'm thrilled to be able to see them in small rooms, but it's beyond my understanding why festivals around the world aren't begging for work like this to be in their programs.

17 May 2014

Review: Night on Bald Mountain

Night on Bald Mountain
Malthouse Theatre
8 May 2014
Merlyn Theatre
to 25 May
malthousetheatre.com.au


There's the moment when you walk into a theatre and get the first look of the world you're going to be playing in. And all fear of the play that Patrick White himself called "a dishonest play" flew when faced with a real bald mountain.

Dale Ferguson's design for Night on Bald Mountain is a roof-to-floor and wall-to-wall terraced mountain made of plywood with secret doors opening into endless black and secret goats for instant joy. With Paul Jackson's always-glorious lighting, we're taken from dawn to dawn on the mountain and into a house that wants to be part of a landscape that it doesn't belong in.

Neil Armfield, a close friend of White who directed many of his plays, once said in Meanjin that White's plays "only work in wonderful productions. Patrick knew this, and that is why he was so selective about his directors. And it’s not a case of bad writing needing to be rescued, or papered over; rather the plays present great challenges that need to be overcome."

Photo by Pia Johnson

Matthw Lutton directs this Mountain. He was a child when White died in 1990, so never saw the author-approved productions, yet his vision of this 50-year-old work finds a completeness in the difficult-to-perform play.

With its goat-lady chorus of one, an older couple who never found each other, a young couple who never have a chance to find each other, and outsiders who want to but can't escape the mountain, it's a psychological piece about character. But Lutton doesn't let this constant exploration dominate and his movement around and through the imposing mountain creates a pace that drives the story, lets the comedy come freely, and creates a tension that lets us hope for an ending that isn't pre-destined by the mountain's slippery paths and crevices.

Actors love White because there is so much in discover in his characters and his language. This cast – and it's worth seeing if only for the cast – approach their characters in ways that result in different styles of performance, and this somehow adds to the complexity without ruining the overall flavour. Nikki Sheils's sunny naturalism, Julie Forsyth's Brechtian distance and Melita Jurisic's anguished almost-expressionism should clash, but the combination of unique performer and character bring a closeness to the characters while still maintaining the distance that allows us to see the wholeness of the work.

This push-and-pull is supported by David Franzke's sound that mixes amplified and natural sound – and Ida Duelund Hansen's live music – to bring us into mountain and its people or leave us safely watching from afar.

It's a production that brings a very-now theatre aesthetic to a work that could easily get stuck in the 60s, and ultimately lets us see the writing of Patrick White though fresh eyes.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

The tribute piece by Neil Armfield in Meanjin.


03 February 2014

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

08 May 2013

Review: True Minds

True Minds
Melbourne Theatre Company
29 April 2013
The Sumner
to 8 June
mtc.com.au


I'll always see a new Joanna Murray-Smith play. She's one of Melbourne's most commercially successful playwrights and she writes terrific jokes about being middle class in Melbourne. Her latest, True Minds at the MTC,  is the theatrical equivalent of a black-and-white romcom that you're happy to watch every time it's repeated on the ABC because it's an easy giggle with some terrific performances.

Daisy (Nikki Shiels) lives in her enviable converted warehouse with a collection of giraffe knick-knacks. She's written a commercially successful book about how men need their mum's approval before they choose the girl of their dreams. It's a bit of a surprise, as neither of her leftie parents – mum (Genevieve Morris) is into beyond-alternative medicine and young men, dad (Alex Menglet) is a drunken academic and philanderer – are into marriage and her last beau (Adam Murphy) is in rehab. But love is strange and Daisy's fallen for the most conservative hunk in town (Matthew McFarlane) and is preparing to meet is his mummy (Louise Silversen), who would call Julie Bishop a raving liberal Liberal. As Dasiy gets the dips ready, there's a storm brewing outside and everyone ends up in her open plan living room.

For all the big laughs and performers who bring extra so much extra to their characters (it's worth seeing for the three women), there's not a second's doubt as to what's going to happen or an opportunity to wish for something different. Couldn't we even like the hunky fiance for a bit and understand why Daisy wants to marry him? The jokes are easy and obvious, the politics are duller than QandA, and the characters are so full of cliches that they become unrecognisable as real people. This leaves the audience safely distanced because there's little chance of really seeing theselves on the stage.

Peter Houghton had written/directed/performed some of our funniest theatre. He builds a manic world where the background action says as much as the script, but he seems to be pushing for True Minds to be farce. It's not extreme enough to be farce and the characters are too likeable to push them to farcical extremes. At the same time, there's not enough guts in the script for it to be social satire: conservative ladies in peach don't like gay marriage while young liberal lefties are all for it, some people are happy not to get married, and it's all about love at the end of the day. Really? There's so much more to explore. (And out of rehab and happily pouring booze all night without any of your loved ones keeping an eye on you?)

It's a funny and enjoyable show, but it's so safe that it's inoffensive and forgettable.

Photo by Jeff Busby.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

12 October 2012

Review: The unspoken word is "Joe"

The unspoken word is "Joe"
MKA and La Mama
6 October 2012
La Mama Theatre
to 14 October
lamama.com.au

The unspoken word is "Joe" has added as many performances as possible. The last lot sold out in 20 minutes. This means that the cast get pizza and those without tickets will have to see something else at the Fringe and believe what they heard about this show.

Last year, award-winning playwright Declan Greene recommended that I see a show co-created by Zoey Dawson. I know there's a lot of noise outside but you have to close your eyes was one of my favourites in the 2011 Fringe and since then Dawson's directed us The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of  Romeo and Juliet and performed all over the world in in MKA's The Economist.

Zoey's great! And wunderbeast producers MKA have grabbed her new script to create the rarest of Fringe beasts: a show that you can't get tickets for and a show that all reviews agree about.

"Joe" is a meta theatre reflection on indie theatre and breaking up. Really! What's so wonderful is that it's also nothing like that. Only the bravest go meta and so few succeed. Being in on the jokes, I was there from second one, but knew just how good it was when my date whispered, "It's not for real, is it?"

Hell yes, it's for real. It's so painfully real that it guarantees to send everyone back to their own memories of making art and stuff, being really serious about it, getting drunk, thinking you're the bee's knees and making a total muggins of yourself. It's wonderful stuff.

And it's all made more perfect with Greene's direction and dramaturgy, Eugyeene Teh's consistently awesome and witty design and a extraordinary cast (Nikki Shiels, Georgina Capper, Annie Last, Matt Hickey and Aaron Orzech) who never let us in on the joke.

Cameron used up all the best adjectives and the metaphor about taking liberties with dead body. And I couldn't agree more.







13 March 2012

Review: The Most Excellent and Lamentable...

The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of  Romeo and Juliet
The Zoey Louise Moonbeam Dawson Shakespeare Company
2 March 2012
45downstairs
to 11 March

Is there anything as all-consuming as first teenage love? We may smile with gooey nostalgia, but remember what that first heart break felt like and how no one understood because no one could love as strongly as you did? Romeo and Juliet is about that kind of teenage love and Zoey Dawson's all-female version lets us see the story from the heart of a teenage girl.

Dawson creates theatre from an authentic and positive female perspective, and her work continues to remind me of what love was, is and always will be like.

As a teenager, I adored Juliet's suicide because it proved the power of great love. As an adult (possibly older than her parents), it's almost impossible to see any romance in such a devastating choice. By telling it from Juliet's perspective, Dawson and her remarkable and delightfully surprising cast (Brigid Gallacher, Carolyn Butler , Devon Lang Wilton, Laura Maitland, Naomi Rukavina and Nikki Shiels) ensure that it can't be seen as a social tragedy out of the young lovers' control.

Gallacher's Juliet is a 13-year-old who still wears flat shoes and has a pastel bedroom decorated with teddy bears. Her vision of sex is sweet kissing and her idea of romance is so absorbing that she can't see beyond her boy in his blue flannel shirt (played by the five other members of the cast). Gallacher's performance creeps into your heart and reminds us that children have the passion to make decisions that can't be un-made and don't always have the experience to know that it will get better. The stunning final scene takes some liberties with the script, but they are such that they may leave the ghost of Shakespeare wishing he could re-write.

While it highlights the teen suicide, violence and sexualization of children aspects of the story (remember that Juliet is 13 and being forced to marry an older man), it doesn't neglect the joy and fun with characterisations that I've not seen and the best wedding scene ever.

Shakespeare didn't write his women with the same complexity as his men, so it's wonderful to see young women rejecting any concepts that woman are virgins/lovers/wives/hags/witches. The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of  Romeo and Juliet is indeed most excellent and I so hope that Zoey Louise Moonbeam Dawson gets her creative teeth into Shakespeare's comedies.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com



22 September 2011

Review: The Dollhouse

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2011
The Dollhouse
fortyfivedownstairs and Daniel Schlusser
16 September 2011
fortyfivedownstairs
to 25 September


It might be best to get to the fortyfivedownstairs for The Dollshouse before the madness of the Fringe begins. Just don’t regret missing it. Don't worry if you like or despise Ibsen, because this remarkable adaption will leave you with a new perspective. It's overtly theatrical, but feels like overhearing your neighbours fighting and you can't tear yourself away from the delicious uncomfortable intimacy.

It doesn't take long for Ibsen and nineteenth-century naturalism to turn up in any drama or theatre studies class. And it takes less time to realise that naturalistic dialogue and situations are far from naturalistic. As all scriptwriters learn, the art is in making the terribly contrived sound real and, even in translation, Henrik Ibsen is a fine starting point.

The opening of Daniel Schlusser's adaptation doesn't start with Ibsen. Nora (Nikki Sheils) is in a black slip, Torvald (Kade Greenland) is on his games chair with a big TV, Dr Rank (Josh Price) and Kristine (Edwina Wren) are talking about massage and Nils (Schlusser) has a microphone and is looking at vodka. Described by Schlusser as "hyper realism", their conversations are far from the known text ("Torvold have you seen my phone?") and feel improvised, but there's far too much order and design, and the heightened theatricality of the extended stage of cold beaten metal and the interaction with the audience and crew only adds to the sense of inclusion.

Schlusser has re-written Ibsen's story as its subtext. For all its deceit and lack of communication, when these people speak, they say what they mean. This is so unnatural, but the effect is so real. Perhaps it because we don't have to interpret the falseness, so are able to understand and feel for everyone on the stage. Or maybe because there is so much awkward humour in the tension and unraveling horrors. It’s more natural to try to laugh when things are bad than to make a serious speech.

This is the first time I've seen an Ibsen and totally got it. It must be as close to understanding what the1879 audiences felt like when they witnessed such a new style of writing and performance, and I'm betting that Henrik himself is gazing down and high-fiving Chekov at the use of Chewy costume.

And having a can't-see-the-acting cast doesn't hurt. All are so comfortable on the stage that even with the excessive fairy lights and tissues from Ben the sound operator, it's wrong to think that they are performing, as they are simply what Ibsen must have thought of. Sheils especially shows a Nora who struggles, without making us pity her or hate her. (And if you saw Nikki in Don Parties On, please see this so you know it was the play and not the actor.)

The ending may surprise. In 1880 Germans producers insisted on a new ending and Ibsen wrote the alternative saying, "I prefer, having learned from previous experience, to commit such violence myself, rather than surrender my works to treatment and adaptation by less careful and less skilful hands than my own."

If all adaptations were as skillful as this one, great writers would never have to worry.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by Marg Horwell



14 January 2011

Review: Don Parties On

Don Parties On
MTC 
13 January 2011
Playhouse, the Arts Centre
to 12 February 2011
www.mtc.com.au


David Williamson was my favourite playwright when I was 14 and I got an A+ for my Don's Party English essay. Suspecting that my teen taste may have been naive, I re-read the script and still recoiled with embarrassing recognition and nostalgia at the perfect snapshot of the generation who raised me. I love Don's Party. I'm not alone and 40-odd years later Williamson has given us Don Parties On.

I was a toddler when Don's Party was written; the same age as the offstage baby Richard. Discovering the play in 1980s Adelaide, I was far from 1970s Melbourne, but I knew Don and Kath and their guests. They were the young, university-educated middle-class generation who supported the left to rebel against their parents and felt entitled to their easy education and well-paid jobs. From their casual misogyny to the excitement of home made pizzas, this was the last generation we now call Baby Boomers and the generation whose free sex created gen X ... and in 2010 they still have friends over on election night.

Don (Garry McDonald) and Kath (Tracy Mann) are still together in their tastefully renovated house in Lower Plenty, Mal (Robert Grubb) and Jenny (Sue Jones) got divorced, Cooley (Frankie J Holden) is now a Liberal voter and married to newcomer Helen (Diane Craig), Mack is dead and there's name dropping of Evan, Kerry, Jody, Simon and Susan.

There are few surprises. They've all followed the path they were set on in 1969 and the biggest laughs came from Kath doing her PHD at Deakin (is anyone not tertiary educated in Melbourne weeing themselves?), the three men singing Creedence Clearwater Revival and the three women wanting to listen to Maxine McKew criticise the ALP when she lost her seat.

I still recognise these people, especially Jenny and her preaching to 42-year-old Richard and liberal Liberal Helen supporting Medicins Sans Frontiers and buying goats for Africa, but I don't believe them.  They have elements of people I know, but each is little more than a cliche.

But these are fictional people and "Don" tells his friends that his fictional accounts of them (he finally had a book published) were never meant to offend and that all writers borrow and exaggerate from life. If this is exaggeration, Williamson must know some very dull people. The 70s swinging stories didn't even make them interesting.

The perfectly chosen boomer cast all brought more to their characters than they were given, but the "young" ones were less successful. Playing a stereotype (even if it's written) gives an audience nothing to relate to. Instead of seeing ourselves and caring, we're left grateful that we are not like them.

Naturally I looked to Richard (Darren Gilshenan). He's 42 and thinks he's 30 (so do I), but behaves like a brat who needs his mummy to give him an overnight flu tablet to calm him down. The original offstage baby Richard was more authentic. He and his 30-year-old lover (Nikki Shiels) are poor caricatures of selfish people whose only purpose is to be laughed at. Which was ironic, as Jenny tells us how her generation feels such passion for their children.

Structurally the new party is a reflection of the old with enough exposition and self-references to excite my inner-14-year-old and make my 42-year-old self want to attack the script with a red pen. One chips and twisties joke was plenty and who cares about dentist Evan if he's not part of this story.

And as gen Y nightmare granddaughter Belle (Georgia Flood) screams, "Just because there's a vampire in the movie, doesn't make it a vampire movie", just because every ABC political celebrity and well known politician is mentioned doesn't make it a political play or a social reflection of our society.

The political satire was restricted to name dropping (including enough Nick Minchins to convince Nick Minchin that he's important) and comments about the faceless assigns of the ALP and the irrational fear of boat people. Combined with sound bites from the ABC's 2010 Election Night coverage, it felt like the kind of political lecture a new Australian should listen to in order to pass their are-you-bonza-enough-to-be-one-of-us test.

I just don't get it. I know we get more conservative and complacent in middle age, but we don't get dumber. I secretly hoped that Don Parties On would be David Williamson's finger to all of us who have scoffed at his post-Emerald City writing, but then I'm just a 42-year-old who recently asked her mum for a Panadeine Forte because she had a bad headache. And out of nostalgia, curiosity and a love of play written in the early 70s,  I would have gone to see it no matter what any review said.

Photo: Jeff Busby
This appears on AussieTheatre.com


The first review was this one on Crikey.
Arts Hub
Theatre Notes
The Age


Don's Party film trailer


11 August 2010

Review: Madeline

Madeleine
Jenny Kemp and Black Sequin Productions
Arts House
6 August 2010
www.artshouse.com.au


Madeleine is the second in a cycle of works by Black Sequin Productions exploring mental illness.  Following bi-polar Kitten in 2008, Madeleine explores the effects of schizophrenia.

Director and writer Jenny Kemp says, "I am interested in how we can deal with mental illness, in a way that is positive and not one of denial." She is fascinated by the logic of the mentally ill and details her fascination on the stage.

Maddy is 19 and hears voices (as do the audience) that tell her she is a bride of Christ and responsible for the creation and care for the new Garden of Eden. Maddy's prodigal sister is desperate to get her help, her mother (also Madeleine) is angry that Maddy is controlling their lives and her father is doing what he can to help her survive her own world.

Like Kitten, Maddy is almost a textbook study of a disease.  She has lived with trauma (her twin drowned in the bath as a baby), is obsessed with menstrual blood, hears logical voices and dreams that she is raped by whispering voices in the dark – voices that could belong to God. And, also like Kitten, for all the moving performances and visual beauty, it feels too much like an academic study trying to be a community service announcement.

The dialogue is honest, but never sounds real because it lacks subtext.  Lines like, "Drugs are not the solution, she needs love" are at home in nightly soaps and don't feel right coming from the mouths of a family whose coping method is denial and non-communciation.

Nikki Sheils's performance as Maddy is engaging and brave, but she is played like a disease, not a person. Ironically by the end of the night, we know all about Maddy's illness, but too little about Maddy. This story about damaged people coping and could be so much more powerful if the obvious religious symbolism and  "this is what the disease is like" scenes were reduced to glimpses and moments, so that the audience (of intelligent people) could be free to care about the people rather than watch the disease at work.

It's hard not to compare Madeleine to Malthouse's current Sappho...in 9 Fragments as they both developed from academic perspectives. Sappho is far more academic, but it reaches our hearts because it sits in a recogniseable world with people who we understand, while Madeline, which has the stronger story, distances us, even if it does give us a lot of information about mental illness.

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com