Love Field

Love Field (bAKEHOUSE Theatre Company) runs at the Tap Gallery in Sydney from October 24 – November 2. By Ron Elisha, directed by Michael Dean.

It was the shot heard around the world. John F Kennedy slumped in the car next to his wife Jacqueline, whose designer clothes were suddenly covered in blood and viscera. Only hours later, as the world reeled, his deputy Lyndon Baines Johnson would be sworn in as the 36th President of the United States of America.

The premise behind Love Field is a relatively simple one: what happened on Air Force One between Jacqueline Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as they flew back to Washington together with JFK’s body? What did they say? What could they say to each other? This sounds like a fascinating conversation – and for brief period during the hour-long show, it is – but sadly, the execution in this play is sadly lacking. Love Field feels like the playwright read both their Wikipedia pages and then wrote Jackie Kennedy/LBJ shipper fan fiction.

This is not to say that there is an obligation for the conversation to be as close as historically accurate as possible (we cannot know, after all, what happened between these two). I’d go so far as to say that there’s not even an obligation to be emotionally accurate, if you’re trying to tell a story bigger than the two people involved in it – which, when there is a nation involved, you think you might be. But a lot of this show felt like, “oooh, here is this fact about one of the characters! how can I possibly shoehorn this in?” And it didn’t feel like it was trying to tell a bigger story than the two characters either, despite the constant references to the office of president. (In the program, playwright Ron Elisha writes that the play is a part of a triptych about the male psyche. I can’t say that I saw much of that in evidence.) It was about these two people on this plane in this extraordinary situation, and what they said to each other. Which leads us back to the question of emotional accuracy: if you are going to tell a small story about two people, even if that story has global consequences, then it needs to be emotionally believable.

bAKEHOUSE are lucky enough to have two very, very fine actors cast in this piece: Ben Wood as Lyndon Johnson and Lizzie Schebesta as Jackie Kennedy. (Schebesta is, to my mind, one of the finest actresses working onstage in Sydney today.) They try to chart the emotional journey of these two characters in a believable way. They really do. And to an extent, they succeed. You feel for LBJ, the big boy from the South who has spent his whole political life characterised as a hick and who feels terrible about how excited he is to be President. You feel for Jackie, the confused widow who is desperately grieving for her husband and simultaneously enraged at him for his philandering. But they are hampered by a script that takes them into some really, really bizarre and confusing places, not allowing for real organic emotional development.

I think the problem with the script is essentially that it can’t decide what it wants to be or what it wants to do. One of the key questions I think should always be asked when putting on a show is, “why this play? why here, and why now?” I can’t answer any of those questions when it comes to Love Field. It’s not really a political play, but it’s not really a personal one either. It sits uneasily between these two poles in a kind of theatrical no man’s land. It didn’t really make me think, and it didn’t really make me feel that much either – full credit to the actors that it made me feel as much as it did. I think that, with some redrafting and workshopping and focusing, there could be a script worthy of Schebesta and Wood. Love Field, in its current form, is not that script.

Compass

I reviewed Compass at Australian Theatre for Young People over at Australian Stage. You can check out what I thought here. (Spoilers: I thought it was clever, funny, thought-provoking theatre for kids.)

Kids Killing Kids

So I reviewed this show over on Australian Stage, and you can read all my thoughts on it there. (Spoilers – I thought it was remarkable.) But there was one point in it that I wanted to expand and riff on a little, because it touches on my own academic area (extremely tangentially, but still).

I’m fascinated by the process of reading/watching/consuming a text in general, and what that means. There’s this assumption you get a lot with popular texts that the readers (term used for ease, though obviously this includes viewers and other consumers) blindly imbibe meaning and mimic the text. The obvious rebuttal to this is the existence of fan culture, which by definition demonstrates an active, critical, and imaginative engagement with a text. It has been argued that fan practice is largely driven by three things:

1)      The symbolic richness of the text

2)      The inherent limitations of the text

3)      The degree to which the text can be appropriated and/or reconstructed by the reader. (Lanier & Schau, 2007, 327)

The fact that Battalia Royale garnered such a huge fan following is something I find completely fascinating, because it is just not something you see in theatre at all. I think this is often to do with the ephemerality of theatre, which speaks to both the second and third points on the list above. The transmedia aspects of Battalia Royale, which had a longer life than the show itself, probably mitigated this (in this sense, it would be interesting to look at its fan practices alongside something like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, or Such Tweet Sorrow, the all-Twitter production of Romeo and Juliet that Mudlark and the RSC did a few years ago). But what is also fascinating – and what the academic in me would love to know more about – is how those who wanted the show shut down conceptualised the fan community. There’s a tendency to treat fans of popular texts as if their reactions are uniform and banal, but the diversity and creativity of fandom belies this. To borrow a phrase, “...the community of fans creates a communal (albeit contentious and contradictory) interpretation in which a large number of potential meanings, directions, and outcomes co-reside” (Hellekson & Busse, 2006, 4). I can understand how seeing audiences cheering at the murder of the high school students is deeply, incredibly, viscerally disturbing – but how is this reconciled with the creative impulse of fan culture, which seeks to constantly renegotiate meaning?

I don’t have any answers to these question – this is very much on the fringe of my area of academic expertise – but these are issues I find so intriguing. There’s an argument that mass culture and popular culture are different entities, mass culture characterised by passive acceptance of a text and its intended meaning and popular culture characterised by active appropriate and reinterpretation, transforming meaning and usage (Lanier & Schau 325). I’m not especially enamoured of this distinction – I don’t think “mass culture” in this sense actually exists – but when thinking about Battalia Royale, it’s quite interesting. Some critics of the show seem to have pigeonholed it in this “mass culture” box, worrying that the audience will blindly imbibe it. The presence of such an active fandom shows, however, that it is clearly “popular culture”: any “intended” meaning it might have had was being constantly renegotiated, both within the fan culture and night after night in performance. I found it so fascinating that the writers were consistently being asked what the political context of the show was, when perhaps that question might have been asked more fruitfully of the fans. Just because an author intends to politicise a text, does not mean that the reader will read it politically, and by the same logic, even if an author intends no political meaning, the reader may well find one – and Battalia Royale seems to have been a text which resonated on a political as well as personal level.

This has all been a very long-winded way of saying that I found the sections of Kids Killing Kids dealing with fan culture absolutely fascinating. The way people read, consume, and use texts is so, so interesting – and idiosyncratic, something which is regularly glossed over and which is one of my greatest sources of academic annoyance. If this show ever gets a second season, I would love to hear more from people who saw Battalia Royale as to how the show affected them.

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.)

Hay Fever

Hay Fever runs at the New Theatre from 10 October – 2 November 2013. By Noel Coward, directed by Rosane McNamara.

When I was in London recently, I was lucky enough to catch one of the final performances of Private Lives at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End, starring Toby Stephens and Anna Chancellor. It was the most wonderfully enjoyable show: fizzy and frothy and funny and just gorgeous. When I was thinking about it afterwards, I realised that it was not really that substantial: Private Lives deals with love in some interesting ways, as I discussed in my review of the Belvoir production of the same show last year, but overall, it’s not going to be the show that changes your life, you know? But that doesn’t matter. It is what it is, and this particular production was like a glass of champagne – wonderful and crisp and light and leaving you feeling a bit merry for quite a while afterwards. It was the kind of show that went straight to your head.

What it also was – or, at least, felt like – was effortless. And that is where this production of Hay Fever at the New Theatre falls down. I don’t want to compare this show to the high-profile, high-budget one I saw in the West End – that would be totally unfair – but on this point, I think it’s illustrative. When you can feel the cast trying oh-so-hard? when the wheels are showing? when you can see the sweat beneath the sparkle? Comedy – especially champagne comedies like Coward’s – do not work so well.

Comedy is notorious for being one of the most difficult of the dramatic arts, and this need for effortlessness is, I think, one of the reasons why. Wit isn’t as witty when you can see the witty one working at it. And that is what happens in this production of Hay Fever: it’s funny, but it’s laborious. Coward’s script is so brilliant that it’s still a terribly enjoyable couple of hours at the theatre, but it lacks the fizz and the froth that it really should have.

This is particularly true of the first act. The scenes where the Bliss family – mother Judith (Alice Livingstone), father David (James Bean), son Simon (David Halgren), and daughter Sorell (Jorja Brain) – are talking together before their guests arrive feel like really hard work. The words and the jokes were there, but they didn’t quite make it to the level of “witty banter”. The actors all felt a little uneasy in their skins, especially the younger two. The timing wasn’t quite right (although I should note that this problem was mitigated somewhat as the show progressed). It was still funny, but it was also a bit awkward – especially because I think some of the cast were struggling a little bit with their accents.

The second and the third act pick up a lot. I’m not sure whether the actors managed to get their groove back after a flat start or whether this is a larger problem, but it certainly feels like a different show after interval. The greater stage time allocated to the Bliss family’s houseguests is a big part of this – everything suddenly becomes a lot snappier when the characters are interacting one on one. I’d like to especially commend Tess Haubrich as Myra Arundel, who was fantastic the whole way through the show. She absolutely owned her role and lit up the stage whenever she was on it.

If you go and see this production, I think it would be pretty hard not to enjoy it. It’s difficult not to enjoy Coward, even when you can see the cogs turning. With some tighter direction and some snappier, punchier interaction – and maybe a week’s extra rehearsal? – I think this could be a really great show. As it is, it’s good fun, but it’s not quite champagne.

 

The Floating World

I reviewed The Floating World at Griffin Theatre over at Australian Stage. You can check out what I thought here. (Spoilers: the show is spectacular.)

A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Michael Grandage Company) runs at the Noel Coward Theatre on the West End from September 7 – November 16 2013. By William Shakespeare, directed by Michael Grandage.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is arguably Shakespeare’s fluffiest play. It’s insubstantial, like fairy floss – glimmering gossamer strung together by a thin plot and some good jokes. The Michael Grandage Company’s production of this at the Noel Coward Theatre on the West End beautifully realises the play’s dreamlike qualities. The scenes with the fairies are gorgeous. But I can’t help wondering whether the way they’ve treated the human characters exposes some darknesses that maybe should be left uncovered.

We all know the plot. The bit I’m especially interested in here is the quartet of four human lovers, Hermia (Susannah Fielding), Helena (Katherine Kingsley), Lysander (Sam Swainsbury), and Demetrius (Stefano Braschi). Lysander loves Hermia. Hermia loves Lysander. But Demetrius also loves Hermia (and has her father’s blessing to marry her), despite the fact that he’s basically being stalked by another woman, Helena. There’s some wacky shenanigans in the woods on a midsummer’s night where Demetrius and Lysander find them both magically compelled to love Helena, leaving Hermia totally bereft, but then eventually Lysander is cured and everyone pairs up and lives happily ever after blissful monogamy. Right? Right.

The bit that worries me isn’t so much that Demetrius is forced to love Helena, his personality essentially changed, and no one really seems to care. (I mean, obviously this is problematic, but treating this text too seriously will leave you in a world of pain.) The problem I have is the way that this particular production seems to equate love and sex. It starts off with Helena. In her pursuit of Demetrius, she tears a lot of her clothes off, as well as many of his, totally against his will. Similarly, when Lysander falls in love with Helena, he starts stripping, and spends nearly half the show with an undone belt buckle. And then, depending on who is in love with whom at that present moment, everyone chases each other round the stage like Pan chasing nymphs. With scary Pan-level aggression.

Basically, it’s really, really rapey, and the fact that it’s played for laughs makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Love and sex are not, I would contend, the same thing in this play. Sure, this is a “sexy” play, an aspect often emphasised in performance, but the portrayal of love in this play is, I would argue, more about idealisation than sexualisation. The one overt sexual overture we have is when Lysander wants to sleep beside Hermia in the wood. She turns him down pretty firmly and he takes it without much sulking. This is a couple in love. Why, then, would the love-juice turn them into sex maniacs? I’d argue that it’s not only disquieting, but not a particularly sophisticated reading of the text either, even if it does lead to some moments of slapstick humour.

What this production does do well, however, are the fairies. The fact that they’re continually smoking spliffs and getting high made me laugh – in many ways, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a drug trip of a play, as well as being preoccupied with the use of “magical” potions itself. Sheridan Smith is lovely as Titania, and her scenes with David Walliams’ Bottom are fabulous. Gavin Fowler as Puck is wonderfully impish, and the whole chorus of fairies are gossamer as could be desired. And the show belongs, undoubtedly, to Pádraic Delaney as Oberon, who prowls around the stage with a wonderfully sexy mixture of menace, magic, and mischief. He’s like Richard Armitage playing a David Bowie-esque Goblin King, and it totally works.

And of course, I should mention the show’s celebrity factor. David Walliams is very funny as Bottom. The way he plays his utter self-righteousness and narcissism is pinpoint accurate, and the scene at the end where the Mechanicals do their play? Screamingly funny.

This is a really, really watchable production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The aesthetic – that playful, sexy magic it possesses – is certainly realised. I just really wish a little more consideration had been put into the way “love” and “sex” were figured, particularly when it came to the humans. Maybe it would mean a few moments of physical comedy were lost, but when the alternative is a river of disquiet pulsing below the surface? I’d suggest that’s a worthy trade.