The Man Who Dreamt The Stars

My review of Merrigong's The Man Who Dreamt The Stars is up at Australian Stage. Check it out over here.

Dead Man Brake

I reviewed Dead Man Brake at Merrigong over at Australian Stage. Have a look at what I thought here.

Cautionary Tales for Children

Cautionary Tales for Children runs at Merrigong from April 23-4. Based on the poems by Hilaire Belloc, written by Claudia O'Doherty, directed by Naomi Edwards.

 

There is a lot of potential for fun in Cautionary Tales for Children. Sadly, the show does not live up to it. The performers try their hardest to engage their audience, but ultimately fall short. This show isn't bad, per se - it has some good elements - but overall, it's pretty mediocre.

Cautionary Tales for Children is based on the poems of Hilaire Belloc. Belloc wrote the poems in the early twentieth century and they were intended to be a parody of the cautionary moral tales prescribed to children in the Victorian period. As such, the consequences for misbehaviour were very exaggerated - for example, in one tale a boy wanders away from his nurse and as a direct consequence, is eaten by a lion. In this production, the tales are related through song to the audience by a troupe of time-travelling children (Jolyon James, Sarah Ward, Natalie O’Donnell, and Mark Jones) who preach good behaviour wherever they go. Their time machine is powered by good behaviour, and so the show is based on the premise that they must scare the children into being good via Belloc’s tales.

Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the cast, the show fails to engage the audience. It’s aimed at kids aged 8-12, but I’m pretty sure that if you took a 12 year old along to this, they wouldn’t be very impressed. In terms of tone, it seemed to be aimed at a much younger audience. Considering that the poems were originally written for adults, this isn’t a particularly good decision. The show gets caught somewhere in the middle. It’s hard to judge how effective kids’ theatre is when you’re an adult, but the kids in the audience really didn’t seem to be responding to the show. They responded when they were asked to – screamed when they were asked to scream, for example – but otherwise, they were almost silent throughout, which seemed to me that either a) they weren’t that engaged, or b) they were really, really well-behaved. And if it’s the latter, well... that kind of defeats the point of the show.

I also think the show had structural problems which made it hard for the audience of kids to relate to it. The main characters are neither co-conspirators with the audience nor antagonists – they exist somewhere in between. Perhaps a commitment either way here would have made the show stronger. As it was, the characterisation felt a little muddled and confused. I felt at the beginning that the interludes between the poems might be the most compelling part of the show, but it quickly became a little self-indulgent and waffle-y. And maybe it’s just me, but they all had a kind of creepy, Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang-esque vibe about them which I don’t think was intended.

The poems themselves are a little dated, but I think they could have been made relevant to and fun for a kids’ audience. This show, sadly, does not do it. (I’m also sad that they didn’t include the Belloc poem about the boy who cried so much it ruined his political career, but I get why they didn’t.) They get lost in the song: sometimes the music is so complex it’s hard to actually make out the words and thus follow the cautionary tale.

I want to end this review on a positive note. The set for this show (designed by Jonathon Oxlade, last seen on Wollongong stages in School Dance) is absolutely awesome. It’s practical, functional, and has a really appealing aesthetic. Five stars for the set. The rest of the show...? Not so much.

 

The Bull, The Moon, and the Coronet of Stars

The Bull, The Moon, and the Coronet of Stars runs at Merrigong from April 19-27, Griffin Theatre from May 2-June 8, and Hothouse Theatre from June 13-22. By Van Badham, directed by Lee Lewis.

In 2005, the first titles in the Canongate Myth Series were published. In these books, contemporary authors took ancient myths and reimagined them for modern audiences. Margaret Atwood took the Odyssey and created the Penelopiad, which focused on Odysseus’s wife Penelope as she waited faithfully for him for twenty years. Jeanette Winterson revised the story of Atlas and Heracles in Weight. Michael Faber retold the story of Prometheus in The Fire Gospel. I could go on – there are a bunch of titles.

I’m not sure if the series is still ongoing, but regardless, Van Badham’s play The Bull, The Moon, and the Coronet of Stars would fit right in. A retelling of the story of Ariadne, her relationship with and eventual abandonment by Theseus, and her eventual union with Dionysus, it is ambitious, lyrical, fierce, and beautiful.

I am an absolute sucker for shows with small casts and romantic plots. Shows that number among my favourites from the last couple of years include Midsummer (a play with songs) and This Year’s Ashes, as well as the most recent show I wrote about, Once. However, this is not a formula to ensure I’ll automatically like a show, as my somewhat vitriolic reaction to Sex With Strangers demonstrates. In this genre, The Bull, The Moon, and the Coronet of Stars is an absolute standout for me. It does what all good romantic stories should do: it tells a small story, because what smaller, more intimate story is there than one of a connection between two people? and then it makes that small story universal. In this show, this is particularly pronounced, because that small story becomes myth, the characters at once modern, relatable people, and kings and gods and princesses.

(Because the story of Ariadne, Theseus, and Dionysus is a relatively well known myth, I’m going to assume some degree of familiarity with the story here. I don’t think this is hugely spoiler-y, but if you really, really don’t want any, you might want to stop reading now.)

Our Ariadne is Marion (Silvia Colloca), an artist, who meets her Theseus, Michael (Matt Zeremes) when she works in a museum. Their love is hidden, so hidden neither is really aware of it, but it is still powerful, passionate, and transgressive enough to manifest in the form of a Minotaur. From an academic-history-of-love perspective, the love story told here is like one you find in pre-modern romances, before love was domesticated: love, passion, and desire are dangerous, destructive, devastating. Love is a wild force that destroys rather than creates. This is mirrored in the language. It is so easy to get swept away on the tide of words that Badham unleashes, just like Marion and Michael get swept away by their passion. This is an incredibly difficult script – the diegetic form, as well as the fact that the dialogue of both characters overlaps, particularly in one very memorable section between Marion and Michael in the museum, requires incredible precision and cooperation. Colloca and Zeremes are absolutely masterful. Director Lee Lewis has managed to ensure that neither actor is overwhelmed by the other: in this piece, where getting swept away is so easy, she has maintained a truly remarkable balance.

This is true both of the section with Marion and Michael and the section with Marion and Mark (also played by Zeremes). (The structure of The Bull, The Moon, and the Coronet of Stars is a little like To The Lighthouse: two long sections separated by one short, transitional section in the middle.) Mark is a very different character to Michael – he is much funnier, much freer, far less repressed – and it would be easy for Marion and her pain to get a little lost in the wake of his shiny-brightness, but the balance is maintained beautifully. After the overwhelming passion Marion felt for Michael, it seems almost impossible not only to us but to Marion that she will ever love again. In technical terms, her relationship with Mark faces its point of ritual death, the moment where it seems like it can never happen, before it even begins. But theirs is a different kind of love, and a different kind of story. This is not the destructive passion of pre-modern romance. This is a more modern love. It grows slowly, warmly. There is no explosive eruption of passion like there was with Marion and Michael. Instead, there is just a moment of tenderness: a small moment, with mythological proportions.

If it’s not obvious, I not only really, really liked this play but found it incredibly interesting from an academic perspective, what with love, romance and all that jazz kind of being my thing. I’m fascinated by the way romance is represented on the stage. I have an academic piece about this percolating in my mind in which I think this play is going to feature, so if you’re like, “Jodes! tell me more about how The Bull, The Moon, and the Coronet of Stars is located in the literary history of love!” you might get your wish. But I’ll stop talking about that now and talk a little about the actual production values before I finish. I’ve already mentioned what a superb job director Lee Lewis and actors Silvia Colloca and Matt Zeremes have done, but I’d like to reiterate it. Van Badham has created an absolutely exquisite script, but it’s also an incredibly difficult one, and it is staged with such restraint and such respect for the poetic, luxuriant language. Colloca is at her best when she shows us the rawness of Marion’s heartbreak. Zeremes’s transformation from intense, repressed Michael to wild, open Mark is amazing. The set is simple and functional (I’ll be really interested to see how it translates between spaces, actually) and Lewis has used it to create a rich imaginary world in which this small-but-universal story takes place.

The Bull, The Moon, and the Coronet of Stars is simply a beautiful piece of theatre. Its layers of language are lyrical and lush. It is a little story that becomes a large one not just because of its connection to myth but because that small moment – that small moment of connection with another person – is something that is universally relatable. It is tragic and funny, sad and uplifting, raw and hopeful, heartbreaking and heartwarming. Go and see it. You won’t regret it.

Sundowner

Sundowner runs at Merrigong Theatre Company from March 19-23, and then embarks on a national tour. By David Denborough, directed by Kate Denborough.

A couple of years ago, when I was still living and working in Canberra, I passed by a bookshop on my way home from work. Every day, I would stop and look at the sale table before going on my way. On this one particular day, I picked up a picture book and idly flicked through it. The book was My Gran’s Different by Sue Lawson. It’s about a boy and his relationship with his grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. The last line is one I will always remember (though I might have paraphrased it a bit here). ‘My gran’s different. She doesn’t remember who she is. But that’s okay, because I remember who she is.’

Maybe I was having a particularly bad or emotional day that day – I don’t remember. What I do remember is that that book struck me like a punch to the heart. I had to rush back to my office two blocks away and barricade myself in the bathroom, ugly crying. Something about it just really, really got me.

Sadly, I cannot say the same thing for Sundowner. It clearly borrows from Lawson’s book – it has that same last line which got me so hard – but instead of fleeing sobbing to the bathroom, Sundowner kind of left me cold. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to have the same kind of emotional response to it, and that’s okay. There’s no rule that every text about something like this has to be deeply, gut-wrenchingly emotional. However, I feel like I didn’t come away with much of an emotional response of any kind.

I don’t think has anything to do with the performances. This is superb physical theatre: I want to be very clear on this point. Technically, this is a superior show. The dancing is incredible and Helen Morse’s performance as dementia sufferer Peggy is sensitive and nuanced. I think it has to do with the structure. I can understand why this piece didn’t have a straightforward narrative: it was from Peggy’s perspective, and she no longer experienced the world in a linear, straightforward way. But this didn’t feel like a person’s story at all. I was discussing it afterwards with my sister, who came to see it with me. She’s a psych student, and she made the astute observation that it felt like a dramatisation of the entry of dementia in the DSM. Instead of exploring Peggy’s relationships and interactions and how her dementia affected them, it seemed more preoccupied with dramatising her symptoms. In places, it had that kind of educational feel about it that you get in those Very Special episodes of TV shows that deal with the big issues.

I have already mentioned the technical superiority of this piece, and I want to mention it again, because in this sense, it really is outstanding. In some places, it’s almost a little too outstanding. Maybe I’m just really shallow, but I’m ridiculously easily impressed by feats of strength and flexibility, and there were bits where I was all, “wow! that’s amazing! that guy is standing on that other guy’s shoulders while he’s kind of doing a half sit up leaning on his elbows! how does that even work?” This is all fine and good, but the spectacle broke me out of engagement with the show. I also felt that, while the dance was brilliant, it was used in much the same way the whole way through: to dramatise and metaphorically mirror the struggles and turmoil going on in Peggy’s mind. I would have been interested to see what other ways dance might be used in a performative sense here.

I feel like I’ve been quite hard on Sundowner. There is a lot to like in it, not least the physical prowess of the performers. However, I think it contained the potential for so much more. In particular, there was a lot more room for emotional exploration in the narrative. I would have loved to get more of a sense of who Peggy was as a person. Beyond the fact that she was a writer and liked dance and music and theatre, we didn’t know a whole lot about her. Maybe this is because the show was told very much from Peggy’s perspective and she didn’t quite know who she was either, but it lowered the narrative stakes. It was hard to imagine just how much Peggy had to lose.

School Dance

School Dance ran at the Sydney Theatre Company from January 11-February 3, and at Merrigong from February 7-February 9. By Matthew Whittet, directed by Rosemary Myers.

The 1980s are a special decade for me. Not just because I was born then (I was) but because of the memories I have. A lot of people can’t remember their early childhood, but there’s one thing I remember really clearly from mine. The music. My mother was an aerobics teacher, and she used to take me along to her classes when she couldn’t find anyone to watch me. I have a stupid amount of 1980s dance music uploaded in my brain. I don’t think about it a lot, but when I do, it always makes me smile. This is the place that School Dance took me to.

Baudrillard has this idea that things that make us nostalgic allow us to effectively become tourists in our own lives. Like any tourist, we go and see the cool things – in the case of the 1980s, it’s the music and the clothes and the whole retro enterprise – but we gloss over other stuff. It’s really interesting thinking about this alongside School Dance. Sure, on the surface it seems like fun and games and glitter, but there is darkness beneath, very real fears that drive the three boys at its heart – a drunk father, a terrifying bully, and the fear of literally fading into the background forever. It might be a tourist trip, but it’s also a quest. School Dance is at once a relatively realistic take on teenage angst, a surreal piece of art, and a John Hughes movie. It has just the right mix of nostalgia and drama, humour and heartfeltedness, irony and sincerity. It’s at once hilarious and humorous, a tribute and a message.

School Dance is the story of Matt (Matthew Whittet) and his friends Luke (Luke Smiles) and Jonathon (Jonathon Oxlade). They are all losers (of different breeds, as the hilariously meta voiceover reminds us). Matt is so desperate to ask popular girl Hannah Ellis (Amber McMahon, who plays several different female roles in the show) to dance and so equally convinced that she will say no that he begins to become invisible. He, his friends, and an unlikely invisible ally (also Amber McMahon) must overcome dangers untold and hardships unnumbered to get back to the school dance, where Matt must finally step up, be brave, and pursue his desires. Also, there is a unicorn (Amber McMahon again).

The teen genre is often written off for being simplistic, but School Dance clearly exposes that this is not the case. It is a deceptively complicated piece of theatre – beneath all the music and the laughs, there are emotional layers waiting to be peeled back. The invisibility and centrality of Matt highlights the fact that the loser is often the hero in the typical 1980s piece, and his journey shows that just because he is beaten down he is not automatically heroic – Matt must earn his payoff. He must go through a transformative journey to realise what he really wants at that school dance, against a backdrop of glitter curtains, mogwai, and truly radical dancing.

I loved School Dance. I have a lot of nostalgia for the 1980s in me, and I can’t see how anyone who didn’t have a soft spot for the decade of shoulder pads and Martha and the Muffins wouldn’t really enjoy this show. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym talks about nostalgia as “a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values” (8). She also writes that “irony is not opposed to nostalgia” (354). School Dance strikes the perfect balance between the two. It creates the 1980s as an enchanted world, one in which our heroes must go on a quest, and it laughs at itself at the same time. It is at once a fairytale, a Dali painting, a period drama, and a Spandau Ballet concert. Most of all, it is enormous fun, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who even vaguely remembers the 80s. And anyone who went to high school, really – that kind of thing transcends decades and becomes universal.

(Sidebar: Gold by Spandau Ballet is one of the songs I use when I’m in a tough place with my thesis and need to get motivated. I blast it loud and pretend I’m in an inspirational montage from an 80s movie. School Dance made that fantasy that much more potent. Thanks, Windmill Theatre!)

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!

Syncopation

My review of Syncopation, which I saw at Merrigong, is now up at Australian Stage: you can read it here. Contains references to Edward Cullen, Christian Grey, and Prufrock... all in the same paragraph.

Charcoal Creek

I reviewed Merrigong Theatre Company's production of Charcoal Creek for Australian Stage - you can read my review here.

Midsummer (a play with songs)

I reviewed Midsummer (Sydney Theatre Company, Merrigong & Traverse Theatre) for Australian Stage: you can read my review here.

(Seriously, go to this show. It is absolutely gorgeous. J'adore.)

Table of Knowledge

I reviewed The Table of Knowledge (Version 1.0 and Merrigong) for Australian Stage - you can read the review here.

Rainbow's End

I reviewed Rainbow's End at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre (Riverside Theatres, part of the Merrigong 2011 season) - you can read the review here.