Review: Golden Shield

Golden Shield
Melbourne Theatre Company
16 August 2019
Southbank Theatre, The Sumner
to 14 September
mtc.com.au

"Golden Shield" photo by Jeff Busby.

My review in in Time Out.

Review: The Real and Imagined History of The Elephant Man

The Real and Imagined History of The Elephant Man
Malthouse Thearte
9 August 2017
Beckett Theatre
to 27 August
malthousetheatre.com.au

Daniel Monks. The Real and Imagined History of The Elephant Man. Photo by Pia Johnson

My first experience of Joseph Merrick's story was in 1980 with David Lynch's film The Elephant Man, on the big screen. I may have been too young to deal emotionally with the initial fear – and eventual love – created by Lynch, but it carved the story of the young man who few could see as human into my memory. Unlike the well-known stories of Merrick that run the gauntlet of extreme emotion and see Merrick with pity, director Matt Lutton and writer Tom Wright take us into Merrick's imagined thoughts in The Real and Imagined History of The Elephant Man at Malthouse.

The production begins in 1880s England with the audience being welcomed behind a giant sideshow curtain to gawp for the cost of our ticket. Once we're complicit freak gawpers, Merrick’s story is told chronologically from his impoverished childhood to circus exhibit to the questioned sanctuary of a hospital. Based on what is known about his life, each scene gets closer to his imagined thoughts until we're with Merrick and looking back at ourselves.

Daniel Monks performance as Merrick finds a personal and intriguing space where he lets the audience know that he knows he’s being looked at because he is an actor with a physical disability. Performing without prosthetics, Merrick’s “cauliflower squeezing into pigskin” growths are imagined and there’s much more power in his wearing and final rejection of his “gentleman’s” suit. It’s cool to be different as long as you’re trying to be the same as everyone else.

Marg Horwell's costume design stresses the sameness of Merrick’s world and her set (with Paul Jackson’s consistently-remarkable lighting) initially feels Lynchian with a wide-screen frame that opens in black and white. But any comfortable and safe idea of a flat and distanced world is dismissed when the smoke and fog of industrialisation can’t be controlled and makes the audience part of the world.

Having all other characters performed by women (Paula Arundell, Julie Forsyth, Emma J Hawkins and Sophie Ross) parallels the question about how we tell and remember stories though different eyes. So much of Merrick’s story is known because it was told by Frederick Treves, the doctor who brought him to the hospital. Treves isn't part of this story; this time it’s Merrick’s story.

Yet for all it’s visual power and emotional punch, the production is dramatically inconsistent and at times feels like it’s caught trying to reflect on perceptions of disability rather than exploring the imagined life of the man whose skeleton is still on display and is mostly remembered because of his moniker.

Review: What Rhymes with Cars & Girls

What Rhymes with Cars & Girls
Melbourne Theatre Company
21 February 2015
Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 28 March 2015
mtc.com.au

What Rhymes with Cars & Girls. MTC

What Rhymes with Cars & Girls was Tim (You Am I) Rodgers's first solo album in 1999. Aidan Fennessy loved it so much that he wrote narrative to sit between the tracks and be told on a stage. The result has the same listenable swagger as Rogers's songs and is as easy to enjoy as a Sunday afternoon in a cool beer garden with friends and hot chips.

Aidan Fennessy's characters tell their story directly to the audience and re-inact the moments that changed their paths. He evokes inner-west and outer-north Sydney perfectly as 28-year-olds Johnny Carr (Johnno) and Sophie Ross (Tash) are plucked from their under-the-flight-path and harbour/ocean-view-mansion worlds to sit in a Morten Bay Fig tree as lovers who cross Sydney's harbour and class divide. They talk about class a lot.

The metaphor-filled script shines with images like the Hills Hoist as apocalypse maypole, but is so over worked that instead of unexpected sparkles, the writing reminds that it's memorised words rather than a story to get lost in.

This is mostly overcome as Clare Watson's direction lets the warm and loving performances from Carr and Ross be more than a love letter to Rogers, and the split-level recording-studio design by Andrew Bailey (and Kate Davis's character-defining costumes) makes the presence of the band feel natural, while offering a future world for the couple.

And with Rogers, now in his mid-40s, and band (Xani Kolec from the Twoks and Ben Franz) on stage (they play, the characters sing), it's easy to feel the love for Rogers and equally as easy to send a little more his way.

I don't know how well it would work without the presence of Rogers. It's a sweet, if obvious, story and beautifully realised, but it's a bit wobbly to stand alone. Which is moot because Rogers ain't going anywhere and his old, and new, fans will love this version of the album.

This was on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Cock

Cock
MTC
13 February 2013
Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 22 March
mtc.com.au

Cock immediately demands attention and begs for jokes that are too easy. Yes, this Cock satisfies and I'd go for the ride again. Now let's move on.

First seen in 2009, the title of UK writer Mike Bartlett’s play brings expectations before a word is spoken. Some are met and more are dismissed as far more than cock comes to play.

Twenty-something John has been with his partner for seven years. On what seems to be a regular break, he meets someone else and falls in love. What causes the most shock for the scorned partner is that John’s new love is a woman. With a definite assumption that a choice must be made between the two and that John must define himself by the gender of his lover (as declared by the father who  comes to dinner), the tug of love is on.

While trying to make gender a non-issue in love, Bartlett’s writing dips (and occasionally plunges) into the stereotypes it’s trying to avoid: girly woman want romance in Paris and babies, gay men act like girls. But this is what makes this work so engaging. With neither lover being likeable enough to care who wins John (who’s neither a cock nor cocky), it forces its audience to question what’s going on rather than cheer for a winner and a happy ending.

But enough of the writing. It’s always great to see good newish writing on our commercial stages, but it’s more exciting to see new realisations of these works.

Leticia Caceres’s direction is exquisite and she’s created a production very different from the ones that brought attention to this play. She lets her actors (Tom Conroy, Angus Grant, Sophie Ross and Tony Rickards) bring themselves to their characters as she deftly controls the dark humour to build the so-awkward tension to its inevitable breathless breaking point. And she works with her co-creators to make something that Bartlett may never have imagined as he wrote it.

There’s Missy Higgins’s original music adding the emotional pull that’s not in the script, but it’s Marg Howell’s design (with Rachel Burke’s lighting) that brings so much to the stage and invents a world far from the propless bare stage asked for in the script. The Fairfax’s semi-circle stage is covered with huge white pillows that highlight the brightly mis-matched costumes while looking part-giant-bed and part-padded-cell. It makes for unstable ground that, as they are moved, support and cover, become walls, define arenas and continue to confirm that Howell is one of the best designers on Earth.

Cock's not as confronting, and more conservative, than as its title implies. All puns intended, it’s a softer, more gentle and far funnier work, which might have been a very different play if it weren’t called Cock.


Photo by Jeff Busby.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.