Hamlet

I reviewed Hamlet (for the third time this year!) at Belvoir St. And it was absolutely incredible. You can read what I thought here at Australian Stage.

(And if you want to know what I thought of my first two Hamlets this year, here you go: Hamlet, A History and Kupenga Kwa Hamlet.)

Empire: Terror on the High Seas

Empire: Terror on the High Seas (Tamarama Rock Surfers) runs from September 4-28 2013 at the Bondi Pavilion. By Toby Schmitz, directed by Leland Kean.

There is a lot that is very interesting about Empire: Terror on the High Seas. It is a play with a lot of layers, a lot of nuances, a lot of complexities. Story and history are stacked together here, narratives of colonialism and aestheticism running parallel to the gory murder mystery that drives the plot. It has the potential to be fascinating. Sadly, it isn’t. It’s bloated and bombastic, the interesting moments and scenes buried underneath the weight of so much stuff, leaving the play to collapse under its own weight.

This really bummed me out, because I enjoyed I want to sleep with Tom Stoppard from the same creative team very much last year, and I had high hopes for this one. Anyone who’s read my blog on even a semi-regular basis will also know how much I love mystery and horror on the stage, so I was doubly pumped. The premise is full of fun: a murder mystery on board a ship? in the 1920s? Yes please. That sounds awesome. But the premise is misleading. Empire is obviously intended to be much more than an episode of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries on steroids. This is also more than fine, but what results is a colossus of a show, trying to do way way too much, and yet strangely at the same time, not that much at all.

The best way I can think of is to describe this as a kind of 1920s episode of The Mole. You’re in a situation with set limitations (here, the confined space of a ship), and you know someone on board with you is the eponymous mole – in this case, a serial killer. People keep getting eliminated (killed), narrowing the number of suspects while ratcheting up the tension. Actually, let me revise this comparison. The first act of Empire is like a 1920s super-murder-y episode of The Mole. But imagine if you were watching The Mole and it was revealed who the mole was halfway through the season? The dramatic tension would deflate immediately, right? In Empire, the murderer is revealed to the audience not in the traditional Agatha Christie-style denouement, where all the suspects are gathered while the detective cracks the case wiiiiiiiiide open in an epic soliloquy, but at the end of the first act (and to be honest, it’s not that hard to work it out before then). This leaves the second act floundering with nowhere really to go. There’s a secondary plotline about a mysterious illness affecting several of the passengers on board, but to be honest, it’s pretty weaksauce. It becomes incredibly frustrating, as you wonder why these people are so dumb they can’t work out who the killer is.

I appreciate that playwright Toby Schmitz is trying to subvert the tropes of the genre here, and in some respects, it’s quite cool. I would talk more about this, but it would be a bit of a dead giveaway (pun obviously intended) as to who the killer is. Suffice it to say that there is an aesthetic reason to do with an artistic movement, and the way the show interacts with it is pretty clever. But while it might work thematically, generically...? not so much. At interval, I really wasn’t sure where the show would go after unmasking the murderer so soon. Could it be a false reveal? Were there two murderers? Was there going to be some big twist? Turns out... no. Dramatic irony and gore was just not enough to carry the second act.

This tension between theme and genre is one that underpins the whole show. I feel like Empire sacrificed form for style, but you can’t really have the latter without the former. There are a lot of ideas contained within the framework of the murder mystery here – for example, the image of the human zoo, which some of the passengers discuss, is neatly mirrored by the plight of the characters, caged in their staterooms in the larger, inescapable cage of the ship. The chaos and anarchy that spreads as the killer begins to claim more and more victims mimics the crumbling of empire. The spectre of World War I lurks beneath the conversations of the 1920s bright young things, who are largely unaware not only of the effect it had, but the effect it is still having on their society. But all this cleverness is wasted when the story isn’t engaging. It’s hard to care about these nuances when you don’t really care about the characters. It’s hard to appreciate the wide-ranging impact of history on the events of the show when said events are not that interesting. What might have seemed like interesting detail becomes pontificating. You can’t appreciate the beauty of the single tree, because the whole forest is drowning it out.

I would like to commend the cast, who do a good job with some very tough material. And if you like gore on stage (I do, a lot), then there are some moments which you will really enjoy. But for me, Empire: Terror on the High Seas just did not work. Sailing in at just under three hours, it is much too long, especially considering that the tension bleeds out of it in the second half as surely as if the show itself were one of the killer’s victims. Thematically, it’s an interesting play, but this alone cannot make a good show. I wanted to like this so much, and I just couldn’t.

Private Lives

Private Lives ran at Belvoir St from 22 September-11 November and is now on tour. In Wollongong 14-17 November and Canberra 21-24 November. By Noel Coward, directed by Ralph Myers.

Private Lives is a champagne comedy. Let’s be real. It’s light and frothy and screamingly funny. It’s full of Cowardian bon mots and one-liners that are agonisingly hilarious. Belvoir’s production of it (which I saw twice, once at Belvoir, once at Merrigong) is definitely full of fizz. It’s sharp and snappy and perfectly cast – I mean, Toby Schmitz as Elyot Chase? how was that not going to work? But what I find interesting – and something which I think the Belvoir production highlights – is the darkness percolating below the surface. Beneath the banter of Elyot and Amanda (and, eventually, Victor and Sibyl) is something dangerous, devastating, and deadly serious. Underneath the fun, there’s destruction.

In her 2009 book A Vindication of Love, Cristina Nehring writes:

“I bear the bodily scars of a loss or two in love. I have been derailed by love, hospitalised by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired, and unsettled in love. But... I feel new. Ready for the next round.” (p.275)

There are some serious flaws with Nehring’s book which I won’t get into here, but watching Private Lives, I could not help but think of this quote. Nehring subscribes to the view of love articulated by Denis de Rougemont, love as the sublimated desire for death (something I write about a lot in my academic life which I’ve managed to shoehorn into my theatre reviews before – see here). For love – or, more correctly, passion – to flourish, there must be an undercurrent of destruction. Love is not really adoration or veneration. In Private Lives, Sibyl and Victor adore Elyot and Amanda respectively, and that love is nowhere near enough: it is pale, insipid, fruitless. Love is tied to the desire to possess: to want someone so desperately you want to climb inside their skin (which happens almost literally in Private Lives). Elyot and Amanda cannot live with each other and cannot live without each other because they each want to control the other, to dominate, to lead, to possess. Nehring writes that, “theatrics are at the very heart of romance” (p.65), and between these two, there are theatrics aplenty. The entire play is based on the explosive theatricality of their relationship. They love and desire each other so much that they cannot help but want to destroy each other: Elyot’s cut lip and Amanda’s black eye in the third act are potent physical reminders of this.

It was a brave decision by Ralph Myers to leave the domestic violence of Private Lives in the script. (I went along to Belvoir’s Sunday Forum, where he said that when he was preparing to direct the play, a lot of people he talked to advised him that it had to be cut.) Does it pay off or not? I’m not sure. Looking at the play purely as a champagne comedy? Probably not. Both times I saw it, the room went silent when Elyot and Amanda discuss the first time he hit her – not just I’m-not-laughing-at-this-present-moment silent, but oh-holy-shit silent. People going along looking purely for just light fizzy fun will probably find it offputting. I guess whether it works or not depends on how much darkness you want to find in the show. Private Lives certainly doesn’t function as an endorsement of this kiss-with-a-fist style relationship. Elyot and Amanda’s love is consuming, but it isn’t idealised (this is, as it happens, where I think Nehring’s book on love falls down: her overt fetishisation of destruction and inequality). Intellectually, I found it quite interesting. In literary terms, the relationship of Elyot and Amanda is a throwback to love in medieval romance, before the marriage plot in the novel. Their love isn’t domesticated – when they tried to domesticate it, it failed spectacularly. Love is innately individual for them and will not be bound within a social institution. This harks back to Nehring again, who writes that, “Love is always against something as ardently as it is for somebody” (p.103). This kind of thing is the stuff I can – and do – nerdle about all day long. But on a purely visceral level? God, watching two people beat each other up is deeply uncomfortable.

The actual reason I saw this play twice was a) I liked it, but mostly b) I’m really interested in how stuff translates from big city mainstage to different stages on tour. This is something I thought I’d have a lot more to say about than I actually do. The Upstairs theatre at Belvoir and the IMB theatre at IPAC are fundamentally very different spaces – if nothing else, they’re totally different shapes – but this play translated beautifully. I think the cast did take a little while to adjust to the massive IMB theatre: it’s so big that the jokes seem to take more time to reach the back, and the timing at the beginning in the Wollongong performance was a little uneasy compared to when I saw it in Sydney. Their adjustment was swift, however, and the third act was sidesplittingly hilarious, even the second time round. Both Tobies, Schmitz and Truslove, are real standouts. Schmitz’s dry, sardonic delivery is perfect for Elyot’s witticisms; and Truslove is a total comic natural.

This has all been a very long-winded and nerdy way of saying that I really like this play. It made me think a lot more than I was expecting it to – it’s not often I come out of a comedy and smash out 500 words on the Theory of Love™. I definitely think it could make some people very uncomfortable and should maybe come with a trigger warning, but it really is wonderfully performed and absolutely desperately funny. I’m not entirely sure why everyone was spending so much time hanging out in what appeared to be the hotel corridor, but you should go along and see it and work it out for yourself. If nothing else, it totally wins the award for Best Use Of Phil Collins On The Stage Ever!

Strange Interlude

I reviewed Belvoir St Theatre's production of Strange Interlude - you can read my review (in which I have quite a different opinion to many others who have reviewed this show) here.

Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing runs until 25 June. It plays at the Canberra Theatre Centre until 4 June and at the Melbourne Arts Centre until 25 June 2011. By William Shakespeare, directed by John Bell.
I sometimes think I have a bit of a split personality, particularly when I watch theatre. Perhaps it is the curse of the academic - I go through life seeing things on one hand as normal Jodi, and on the other hand as Jodi the Scholar, for whom everything is potential thesis material. Watching Much Ado About Nothing made me hyper-aware of this dual nature of my personality. Luckily, both Jodis really enjoyed it.

Jodi the Scholar is a PhD student who's writing a thesis on virginity and who has a particularly love of Renaissance literature, and so Much Ado is ripe with material. Although the play is obviously about Benedick (played wonderfully in this production by Toby Schmitz) and Beatrice (the excellent Blazey Best), they're not the drivers of the plot. In fact, if all you saw was the first half before interval (to the end of Act III, Scene II, ending deliciously on the word 'sequel'), you'd assume there wasn't much of a plot. Basically, there's this dude called Benedick and this chick called Beatrice, and they make out that they don't like each other but they obviously are head over heels for each other and totes have a history, and so their friends put together a plan to hook them up.

But then in the second half it all gets a bit dark.

Benedick's mate Claudio and Beatrice's cousin Hero are engaged – Claudio saw her, thought she was a bit of all right, and she (and, moreover, her father) was down with it - and it all seems hunky dory. But then Claudio, through a convoluted series of events involving what is played in this production as the mafia, gets it into his head that Hero isn't a virgin, and the plot really kicks off. And instead of taking her aside and going, 'hey, Hero, so I heard this crazy rumour, how about we have a discussion here,' Claudio decides to humiliate her at the altar. Because a woman who's deflowered is a woman who's worthless.

I have written a lot about the commodification of virginity in Renaissance literature - I'm presenting a paper on it in Canada next week - and we have a perfect example of it here. Jodi the Scholar, watching this, was all, I should put more Much Ado in my conference paper. Claudio finds a deflowered Hero not only worthless, but loathsome. And Hero's father Leonato isn't far behind - he screams at his daughter not to open her eyes when he thinks that she's been deflowered. The only one who immediately comes to Hero's defence is Beatrice, who manages to convince Benedick that she's right.

This obviously sits uneasily with the modern audience - both the nature of Claudio and Hero's engagement and the fetishisation of Hero's virginity. John Bell has dealt with this unease in a subtle way, I think... there is something very petty and a bit poisonous about the bromance between Don Pedro and Claudio, and when Leonato tells them that they have essentially killed his daughter, they are sorry, but yet somehow nonchalant about the whole thing. Don Pedro, Claudio and Benedick are a group of three friends who like to joke around together, bros, a sort of Shakespearean Ted/Marshall/Barney How I Met Your Mother trio, and the Bell production really emphasises this, but the Hero incident really does reveal their true colours - Benedick cares enough to stay behind and see that Hero is all right, and then (after coercion from Beatrice) cares enough to challenge Claudio to a duel. And then at the second wedding, when Claudio is to marry the veiled girl (who really is Hero, but which he doesn't know yet), Bell has kept in an often cut line - Claudio says he will marry her even if she is an Ethiop. There was an awkward silence all around the theatre when he said this as everyone realised he really is an enormous douchelord.

However, Much Ado really is a romcom. The plot may focus on Claudio and Hero, whose eventual union leaves the modern audience with an immense sense of unease, but we all know that Benedick and Beatrice, the real focus, will be much happier... even though they'll fight like cats and dogs. There's a concept I remember reading about in my life as Jodi the Scholar called the erotics of talk which I think plays into the difference between the two relationships - Hero/Claudio is based on Claudio thinking Hero is hot. Beatrice and Benedick is based on wit and dialogue - an erotic connection through conversation. And all audiences - Renaissance and modern - are led to believe this is the superior one.

Right. Jodi the Scholar is going to stop wanking on and on about random academic concepts and start talking about the actual show now. Normal Jodi is in the house. And she loved it.

The show stealer was clearly Toby Schmitz's hair - that fifties coiffe he affects at one stage is HILARIOUS - but Schmitz himself was outstanding. At first, his very Australian accent was a little jarring, but after a few lines it seemed perfectly natural. This was an example of excellent, EXCELLENT casting - Schmitz wore this role like a glove. He embraced the awkwardness and the embarrassment and the reluctance to admit change that is at the core of Benedick, and it was awesome. He's not afraid of silence on stage, and some of his funniest moments were silent - or at the least non-verbal, where he made incoherent noises of protest. And the scene where he's under the pool table listening to Don Pedro, Claudio and Leonato talk... priceless.

I really cannot speak highly enough of Schmitz's performance in this role. The only criticism I have is that he did overshadow a lot of the other characters - even Beatrice. Blazey Best was an excellent Beatrice, but with material which is not quite as awesome as Benedick's and such a great performance opposite her, I think it was a little hard for her to live up to. All this said, she really was good. She and Schmitz were a bit adorable together. Okay, a lot.

Bell held off on having Benedick and Beatrice kiss right until the very end and I think that was a great directorial choice. The awkwardness between them when they've admitted that they love each other but they're not quite together yet was just perfect. A lot of versions have Benedick and Beatrice being a little too couple-y too early, and this one didn't fall into that trap. The moment at the end when they read the (saucy) sonnets that each has written about the other was just fantastic theatre.

Jodi the Scholar and normal Jodi both loved this production. I highly, highly recommend it. And seriously - check Toby Schmitz's hair. There's a double meaning in it. Somewhere.