Review: The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest
MTC
17 November 2011
Sumner Theatre
to 14 January 2012
www.mtc.com.au

The Importance of Being Earnest is pretty much sold out. As Simon Phillips's  original 1988 production is still talked about, tickets to its revival were swooped upon. And the promise of Geoffrey Rush as Lady Bracknell certainly helped. The good news is that standing room spots are being released. So is it worth some queuing and tired legs?

Yep.

It's gorgeous and fun and the joy of watching our Geoffrey is worth a leg cramp.

To round off his final season of plays about the perils of being wealthy and middle class, where else could Phillips go but back to Oscar Wilde's satire of Victorian sensibilities and the mask of manners. First produced in 1895, its ridiculous story is balanced by its wonderful plot and a love of language and wit that few have come near to matching. In other words, it's one of the funniest things ever written.

From the first sight of Tony Tripp's re-realised design, there's no doubt that this Earnest should please even the most cynical. His black and white pop-up book set has delicious hints of Victorian erotica that contrast with the feathers, lace and velvet of the frocks, umbrellas, hats, handkerchiefs and handbags. It's sparseness leaves space for the text, while the complexity of the costumes establishes the expectation of the characters so that the cast are free to let them be so much more than what's expected.

And none frock up more magnificently than Rush. Treating the text like music, he doesn't miss a beat or a grace note and his restrained and refreshingly straight Lady B lets her power comes from more than her age and position.

And he is among a Wilde-wet-dream cast: Patrick Bramwell (Algernon), Toby Schmitz (Jack), Christie Whelan (Gwendolyn) Emily Barclay (Cecily), Jane Menelaus (Miss Prism), Bob Honery (Lane and Merriman) and Tony Taylor (Chausable). Some are less comfortable with the language and there are moments when giving in to the rhythm of the text will free the laughs, but each surprise and bring something unexpected to the well-known characters.

As Simon Phillips's MTC swan song, Earnest soars above criticism, so keep your tickets safe or try for the rare spots left.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Clybourne Park

Clybourne Park 

Melbourne Theatre Company

22 September

Sumner Theatre

to 26 October

www.mtc.com.au

Let's get it out in the open. Let's just be honest and talk about what Clybourne Park at the MTC is really talking about. It's an issue I feel very strongly about, something I won't change my mind about, and something that makes too many Melbournians behave like selfish knobs. It's about property development.

And it's about racism and about stuck up, white cunts.

As the MTC continues to explore how tough it is to be a middle class property owner, along comes American playwright Bruce Norris, who won the Pulitzer for this little beauty set in a family home in a white Chicago neighbourhood in 1959 and in the same house in 2009 as the now-black neighbourhood is being gentrified.

At first, it feels like the ultimate white-do-gooder, racism-and-sexism are-bad rant. It's like a competition to see who can resist sniggering the longest, and the first laughs are like watching Guess Who's Coming to Dinner with your Indigenous Australian pal while your dad makes monkey noises each time Sidney Poitier appears and yells at your mum to open his beer. We DO NOT laugh at such things.

Of course we don't, and no one coming to see a show by a posh university-run theatre company with the likes of Greg Stone, Alison Whyte and Berte La Bonte in it is going to expect a hooray-for-segregation story.  So there's no need for director (Peter Evans) to hold back and stress the social commentary in act one. My date for the evening compared the first half to The Help and didn't believe that it was meant to be funny.

It is funny. It's nails-down-the-blackboard satire filled with ridiculous people that is written to be laughed at as loudly as possible.

Act two is much freer with the comedy. Perhaps because it's easier to laugh at conversations we've had or heard. When an argument (Norris writes very fine arguments) develops about whether a joke is funny/offensive because it's about a black man, anal sex or rape, the delicious pain is not in the joke but in the squirming embarrassment and huffy indignation as each person the tries to explain, justify or deny the intent of their harmless words.

Norris says that too many people think "that my plays are about exposing hypocritical liberals...and what's missing from that assessment ... is that I'm something of a hypocritical liberal too." Writing, programming, being in or seeing Clybourne Park should never be about tut-tutting at the ignorant and misguided, but about cringing at our own blatant hypocritical attitudes.

The suburb cast (Stone, Whyte, La Bonte and Patrick Brammall, Laura Gordon, Zahra Newman, Luke Ryan) grasp this tone and relish in Norris's exquisite parallel structure. Each present the worst of their character, but finds their wholeness and their humanity, leaving them so real that the tipping point between laughing and crying is so precarious that's it's easy to slide down the other side without noticing.

Don’t wait for permission to laugh in Clybourne Park. Laugh because it’s so wrong and because it’s so true. Laugh because we know better and because we never learn. Laugh to prove you’re not uptight and because you know you really are.

Photo by Jeff Busby

Review: The Ugly One

The Ugly One
MTC
27 May 2010
The MTC Theatre, Lawler

What would you do if you were told you were ugly? Not homely or plain or "not my type", but so unacceptably ugly that even your beloved can only look at your left eye.

Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One is far more than a deliciously dark glance at superficiality, but draws its audience close with the shared fear of being rejected for our exterior. Who hasn't glanced in a mirror wishing that the face/body/clothes of someone else would wink back? No matter how much we know that real beauty is on the inside, we don't want to be ugly.

Lette (Patrick Brammel) had no idea that he was ugly, until his boss, Scheffler (Kim Gyngell), wants to send the hotter Karlmann (Luke Ryan) to a conference and Lette's wife, Fanny (Alison Bell), confesses that she always admired her husband for coping so well with his ugliness.  Now knowing he is socially unacceptable, Lette finds help from surgeon Scheffler and is transformed into a total spunk rat.  Business for the good looking can only get better and new friends like wealthy surgery addict Fanny and her son Karlmann offer new paths. Until everyone wants to look like Lette, and surgeon Scheffler owns the template.

Berlin-based von Mayenburg's work was last seen here in 2008 in Moving Target, directed by Benedict Andrews.  Mayenburg's style joyfully exploits all that is unique about theatre and gives its creative team the freedom to inject their own staging solutions.  From Moliere to McNamara, director Peter Evans lets his playwright's voices lead, yet the The Ugly One doesn't allow for an uninstrusive director; and it's a welcome surprise to see a sense of Evan's own style and choices.

The in the round stage contains office chairs, a microphone and buckets filled with crunchy, dribbly apples that provide a gruesome soundscape for the surgery. The couldn't-be-better cast morph between same-named characters as sharply as the surgeon's knife and the moments of doubt in between provide an unexpected rhythm to the text – and even more laughs.

Like recent gems Moth (Malthouse/Arena) and That Face (Red Stitch) and even MTCs Richard III (that didn't tickle me under the chin and make me smile), getting a ticket to The Ugly One is a challenge, but extra 9.30pm shows have been added so you don't have to miss out.

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com.