FRINGE 11: So Calm So Blue

So Calm, So Blue
by Mutation Theatre, written and directed by Patrick McCarthy, devised with and performed by James Tresise and Matthew Epps
Some Place in Collingwood
26 Sept – 9 Oct

This is a study in distance. The play’s program indicates that the title is taken from Beckett’s Godot, from the fractured end of Lucky’s wild thinkspate. I’m not sure of the particular significance this speech holds for Mutation Theatre – perhaps it’s because the calm and the blue, the patch of sky, is the last thing glimpsed in Lucky’s speech before the grey scudding of the skull, the skull, the skull, which is, apparently, shrinking and wasting concurrently, obliterates even the foolish semblance of meaning which the so-called speech pretends to. That is to say, the sky is the last thing seen before the skull closes overhead (overmind).

The skull is a singularly distant place to be, and these two, the characters played by Tresise and Epps, are characters disappearing, albeit gradually, into the dim skull-zone. On the one hand there is a sense that they are trapped together. The setting is a mock backyard beautifully designed by Ashlee Hughes and McCarthy, with astroturf and fake sky painted on a broad canvas that curves around and encompasses the stage. The fakeness of the setting, with its sky-painted canvas boxing them in, comes to resemble the painted interior of a sconce-case. It’s a little like the dome wall in The Truman Show, only in miniature. But on the other hand, they are both on the verge of separation, of being consumed by their respective introspective obsessions and meditations.

Fringe 11: The History Project / after all this / Jane Austen Is Dead … See You at &c.

The History Operation
written by Tim Wotherspoon, directed by Erin Kelly, performed by Tim Wotherspoon, Katy Warner, Peter Berzanskis
Lithuanian Club
23 Sept-8 Oct

Do you find anything bizarre about my way of speaking? Not the voice I mean but the words. I use none but the simplest words I hope, yet I sometimes find my way of speaking bizarre.
All that Fall, Beckett

I’ve now seen three Wotherspoon/Warner productions, including These Are the Isolates which won best new play (or some such thing) at last year’s Fringe, and regardless of who they’ve brought in to direct (in this case Erin Kelly), or which of them has written the piece (this time Wotherspoon, last time Warner, time before that Wotherspoon), or who else they’ve got with them on stage (Peter Berzanskis is also in this one), there has been, I think, a certin consistency of mood between all three of their pieces, an enigmatic quality which, when everything comes together, seems beautifully obscure, and when it doesn’t seems frustratingly wilful.

I’ll skip over the frustrating parts, mostly because I’ve talked about them before, and others have talked about them before, and there comes a point where you have to just accept that, well, this is the way they’ve decided they want to work, and you might as well try and look past it and see what else might be going on.

What I find interesting in their work is the linguistic self-consciousness and the way that underlines the deliberately literary and un-natural quality of their scenarios. The language they speak seems like a dead language, one which is staked through with formalisms and dislocated with unlikely constructions.  A language, in other words, which died a violent death. The struggle to get this dead weight up and about, to make it expressive, has great universal appeal, for all language, not only stage lanuage, is dying, and it is part of our condition that we wrestle with its heavy torso and unresponsive limbs our whole life, it is, to quote Beckett, “unspeakably excruciating”.

after all this
devised and performed by Elbow Room
Dear Patti Smith Gallery
27 Sept – 1 Oct

This is fairly miraculous stuff, if that construction doesn’t obliterate the meaning of miraculous, and it deserves a much more comprehensive review that what I can offer right now.

A while back, I was talking with Jana P. about “rigorous theatre”, and I recall being somewhat dismissive when she suggested that Elbow Room were “rigorous” – which was not meant necessarily as a complaint, I just hadn’t drawn the line between some of their more-or-less whimsical inventions and let’s say the kind of strict, point-vice arrangements I would normally describe as “rigorous”. Well, I was wrong: they do make rigorous theatre, and this example is mink tight.

Through three stages, or scenes, after all this dramatises the tendency in Western Culture to imagine an afterlife. Specifically, this play looks at the psychological “uses” of our belief in the hereafter. Stage by stage, the audience ascend through a multi-levelled gallery space – white walls, bare floors, sparsely lit – on the one hand literally tracking the notion of a soul rising from the earth, while the performances themselves follow the progressive intellectual rarefaction of salvation, where it begins with a pre-modern (or at least childlike) hope of seeing loved ones again, through ideas of reward for altruism, especially as such ideas are impacted by mathematical Darwinism, to post-modern millennial re-interpretations of the dualist distinction between body and soul.

Through all of this the performance is never essayistic, even where tackling difficult subjects like theoretical biology. It also shows off a super intelligent wit. For example, Angus Grant and Emily Tomlins, playing a pair of child siblings, begin the evening with a game of shadow puppets under their donna. Apart from being rather cute to see two adults in their peejays and the rest, these opening seconds don’t only cast us back into “Angus” and “Emily’s” infancy, but also philosophical infancy, back, that is, into Plato’s Cave of Shadows and the idea of platonic dualism, the philosophical font of modern Christian theology. The whole piece is littered with similarly clever asides and details that enrich the ideas at play (Up & Go? – genius!).

Jane Austen Is Dead … See You at the Wake
written devised and performed by Letita Sutherland and Mel Dodge
Gertrudes Brown Couch, Fitzroy
21 Sept-9 Oct

This is actually a double bill of two mostly unrelated pieces, although the titles go together beautifully.

The first is a monologue on dating and Jane Austen. Our hostess is single, still, and apparently it’s all Austen’s fault. Over a gentle half an hour of fairly frothy reminiscences we learn that, with her Darcys, Wentworths, Knightlys and that guy from Mansfield Park, Austen simply set the bar too high. In the real world, we’re told, men are a sad bunch of Bingleys and Willoughbys. It is possible, though I probably put myself in with Tom Betrand from Mansfield Park, what with the interest in theatre and the enormous debts. Still, he’s no Darcy, that’s for sure.

What we see then is a process of disillusionment, as the scales are removed and Austen’s influence is disentangled from real life expectations. I guess I might have preferred some insight into the original entanglement, into how Austen came to figure so significantly in the first place, because that’s something I’ve never really understood: the full Austen thing. Not the greatness of her writing, which is given, but the personal investment some folk have in the fantasy of Austen.

The conclusion is that what Austen wrote, really, are fairy tales. It’s a solid conclusion, with fine critical pedigree – it was Nabokov’s estimation too – and neatly rounds out performance that sits on that largely illusory line between standup and theatre.

See You at the Wake is a more ambitious and more theatrical work, and less successful for it, which is so often the reward for ambition. Dave is dead and we’re invited to the wake. Dave lived on the street and was estranged from his family. Those appearing at his wake include family members who don’t remember him, street kids who are grateful to him, ne’erdowells who are there for the booze, Centrelink officers who don’t care and an officious funeral director, all played by Dodge and Sutherland. The characters are a lively bunch, but the comedy is often too fussy and overworked, while the processional is rather ramshackle.

FRINGE 11: At the Sans Hotel / Black Box 149 / I know there’s a lot of &c

At the Sans Hotel
created and performed by Nicola Gunn
La Mama Theatre
21 Sep-2 Oct

Nicola Gunn’s At the Sans Hotel is like a rocket with one of those deceptive slow-burning fuses that snake up the inside of the cylinder. At first, nothing seems to happen. The flame disappears from sight. There’s a little smoke and some hissing.
The production starts with apologies, confusing explanations and diversion, and plenty of contradictions. There’s also wine, lots of audience banter and just a light note of hysteria. Then, without warning, it takes off on a brilliant zigzag flight across the night sky, illuminating and beautiful, before it finally detonates in a bewildering constellation of exploded subjectivity.

Formally, this is a fascinating production, exploring different affective ways of ordering movement and time in the portrayal of various psychological states. The material is inspired by the experience of Cornelia Rau, the possibly schizophrenic German-born Australian resident who was unlawfully detained by Australian immigration officials in 2004-5, but it goes so much deeper, getting so far beneath the mere facts of the case that we ultimately lose sight of them entirely.

Black Box 149
written and conceived by Rosemary Johns, performed by Majid Shokor and Dennis Coard, directed by Matt Scholten
La Mama Theatre
21 Sep-2 Oct

A dramatic interpretation of the grounding of British Airways Flight 149 at Kuwait International Airport during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Central to this work is the warning “fear rots your mind”. Dennis Coard plays the pilot of flight 149. The action is set some time post-9/11, and the now retired pilot has gone to ground in the Australian outback, hiding from who knows who. Much of the opening half an hour is taken up with a more-or-less deranged political rant that sounds a lot like something from a semi-rabid conspiracist’s forum, with a little family history thrown in to break up the black tar. The point here is that, yes, clearly the rot has set in. But the point is over extended and this is not time well spent. When the pilot finally takes off his tin-foil hat and begins describing his actual experience in Iraq, things improve markedly.

As a spy thriller this tale is engrossing. The question is whether American or British forces deliberately put the civilian aircraft and its passengers in harm’s way. There are some genuinely impressive descriptive scenes of what life was like for the crew and passengers held captive by Iraqi forces. Majid Shokar is wonderful as both an Iraqi interrogator and especially as a bus driver, but is somewhat underused.

I know there’s a lot of noise outside but you have to close your eyes
by I’m trying to kiss you
137 Greeves Street
21-28 Sep

Despite being staged in a share house kitchen down Fitzroy way, the production values here, in the set and lighting, while definitely low-tech, demonstrate a fair degree of professional talent and a more-than-passing interest in what might be called the dramaturgy of design.

Two old friends meet up at a bar for a girls’ night out. Immediately we see that something has come between them. What? It is the “female experience”. Thus begins a spiky but not humourless series of devised scenes, monologues and disruptions aimed at a sort of vivisection of female frustration.

I loved their unabashed addiction to verbal poetry, to long imagistic riffs on anger and dissatisfaction. Many of these dramatic poems have a terrific clarity about them.

One might complain that the political aspects of the drama are undercut by a solipsistic tendency in their analysis, a tendency perhaps typical of this kind of ambitious devised theatre; but what is most impressive here is the play’s resilience at precisely these moments. This work is spiky, but not brittle. We don’t cringe when an image slips from place and clatters to the floor – we don’t recoil, expecting the whole piece to shatter like glass. Instead, there is a humour in the work that, like a transparent coating, subtly strengthens the material without affecting its reflective quality.

REVIEW: Clybourne Park

Look. I know I shouldn’t have expected anything earth shattering. Yes, I know I’ve got more chance of winning a Pulitzer myself than ever actually agreeing with the judges, especially in the drama category. Yes, this was always going to be a relatively frivolous piece. Yes, the farce has to come first because that’s what it is. Yes it’s also a very clever script, especially with all the mirrors and inversions between the first act and the second act and with the multi-levelled connections with Raisin in the Sun. Yes, some people in the audience no doubt felt themselves uncomfortably implicated, just as some people evidently found Alison Whyte’s performance supremely witty. Yes, I am obscurely embarrassed about being so damn humourless.  But no. No, no, no, no, no.

On the one hand I sympathise with Guardian blogger Andrew Heydon when he says of Clybourne Park that “its ease and familiarity of form, and the desire primarily to entertain, leave it a pretty blunt instrument for any more serious purpose.” But I also feel like I don’t really know that for sure. I feel like there might actually be enough in this script – and the more I think about the script the more impressed I am with its intricasies – to really mean something here, in Australia, if only the production wasn’t so silly, if it was more delicate, if it toned down the performances, dried itself out, perhaps worked the patter less, tried to make a conversation out of it, not always been grinning so stupidly.

Land, and specifically the ownership of land, is the perpetually deferred problem that essentially defines Australia’s greatest socio-economic emergency, the chasm in living standards between white Australia and black Australia. And it has been so ever since Phillip laid anchor at Sydney Cove.

FRINGE 11: The Dollhouse

Here’s the much longer version of a review that appeared on Time Out last week.

Director Daniel Schlusser revisits his 2007 VCA production of Ibsen’s The Dollhouse as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Despite the visual mess and notes of extreme realism, one could almost describe this adaptation as charming in its brightness, emotional restraint and almost affectionate fidelity to the original story, a story which is, after all, structured after the conventions of a typical nineteenth-century well-made play. But it is an odd kind of charm, a sinister kind, with a sense of menace or horror or even of death “looming”, to adopt one of the words picked out in this production, behind the bright surface of busy interactions.

The Dollhouse is a portrait of a middle-class marriage in which the couple, Nora (Nikki Shiels) and Torvald (Kade Greenland), have never in eight years had a “serious talk about anything serious”. Torvald has recently secured a new job at the bank (somewhat artlessly dubbed Macquarie Bank) which Nora hopes will solve not only the family’s money problems (they have children), but also open her life to a more authentic joy. Unfortunately, her financial debts, incurred in secret and for the good of the family, are catching up with her and upsetting her illusions.

REVIEW: Julius Caesar

Herein are combined both my preview and my review of the Bell Shakespeare Co.’s production of Julius Caesar. It is somewhat inevitable that in merging these two orientations, the guardant and regardant, the result should appear something like a celebration. Previews, when they are written, as they usually are, in that strange zone between marketing and journalism, are typically essays in hope, or at least hope is what I call it if the author has any faint interest at all in the work he or she is previewing. And hopes, which are native to in-between zones (life! hope! ye breach between two voids &c), when they are set down in print, multiply aggressively. When manifested, hopes tends to invent affinities, to insist on connections, to affirm prejudices, to extend what is partial and to colonise the empty beaches of intentionality. Thus it is that setting a preview against a review invites the displacement, basically, of quibbles.

I had a lot of quibbles with this work, quite a lot; and yet, more than any staging of Shakespeare I’ve recently seen, I felt that this one managed to restore that thrilling fizz which so stimulates and inspires the imagination: an emphasis on the endlessly surprising poetry of the text itself. It does not throw an especially strong light on that poetry—it’s does not exaggerated the images or the rhetoric: this is not a grand Shakespeare. But, as the saying goes, one does not need a strong light when there is a true light.

var. links and reflections

And now let all the ships come in
pity and love the Return the Flower
the Gift and the Alligator catches
–and the mind go forth to the end of the world

Charles Olsen, from the Maximus Poems

I have links! Neandellus lives! Ring the old bell till its clapper cracks! Here, where I’ve been and what I’ve seen, the links are all for Time Out:

The Rabble’s wonderful tragedy Special which I’ve sketched a longer more coherent response to but haven’t had the time to blog .

The Rising Water thing.

Winterfall Theatre’s take on Caryl Churchill’s A Number.

This was a most welcome production. By my rough count there have been only half a dozen Churchill plays staged in Melbourne since 2005, when Barnaby Chiverton’s Evaporating Sun put on this very play at fortyfivedownstairs. I did see a Churchill play as part of VCA Masters Season last year, neatly put together by Tanya Dickson (the production was so darn classical it even had a periaktoi), but that’s been it for me. One a year is perhaps better than many worthy playwrights get in this town, but I almost feel like it’s a matter of urgency that audiences are exposed to an uncompromisingly intelligent mainstage writer like Churchill, particularly, I think, if we want our mainstage theatres to come into any new kind of seriousness.

The Annie Baker double of Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens

In the weeks leading up to seeing these two plays, I was very much down on the prospect of having to sit through two productions from any of-the-moment playwright, especially one whom the publicity was comparing to Sarah Ruhl—and that was despite even VICE Magazine telling me how brilliant she is. (Despite? Because?) Well, Beckett she ain’t, but I still really, really got a lot from especially the Red Stitch production.

The Aliens is a sensitive portrait of the very tail-end of a certain threat (threat? I meant thread) in the the American counter-culture pancho (pancho? I meant poncho–oh, but this was very carefully done). The title references a poem of the same name by Bukowski, a poem which finishes “but they are / there / and I am / here”. Although I’ve managed to read a couple of his novels, I’ve never spent much time with the poetry of Bukowski. What can you do with a poet whose lines are inked indelibly over all the bright-eyed youth of this world’s only superpower? Baker’s would-be Beat novelist Jasper says, “he cuts out all the bullshit”; well, for me he only ever seemed to talk the bullshit up. It’s all perspective I suppose, and this play helps reposition him more sympathetically in my eyes: Bukowski as the hero of small-press America, the great underground of literary magazines. And I’m kinda inspired by that. Bukowski was a great supporter of zines and small-press journals, contributing notably to New Orleans’ The Outsider, which, with its archaic nineteenth century screw press and dedication to full eight-hole binding, which to my tastes is probably the most inspiring of them all.

Although The Aliens has nothing specifically to do with small press publishing, I think the precarious freedom which Baker is describing in the slacker-life of Jasper and KJ, is the same offered by a small press, and, like their protégé Evan, I’m fascinated by that ideal.

Incidentally, The Aliens takes place in the same apparently fictional town as Circle Mirror, Shirley, Vermont. There are plenty of real towns in America and the UK called Shirley, but none in Vermont. But, also, did you know that until the publication and subsequent success of Jane Eyre’s Shirley, that name was basically reserved for boys? Because of the popularity of the heroine in Eyre’s book, who had been dubbed Shirley by a father especially eager for a son, the name then took off as a name for girls. There you go. And here, too… you go… Shiiirleee!

REVIEW: Joy of Text (part 2)

Here is the belated sequel to my review of The Joy of Text—

My first assay, part one, here, was naught but a bit of frothy rodomontade against programming and production at the MTC, or at least the MTC as I’ve experienced it these last five years.

I complained at length that, alas and alack, I have never seen anything which, as Adorno would say, broke open the bull’s eye of art: no kind of reality has ever shone through; it has all been a ghastly kind of projection. Even within the narrow performance tradition of “Australian Naturalism” it has been an artistic failure. Yes, to the rigs they pack their stages with naturalistic dramas, but with desperately degenerate examples, such as Rising Water, all effected with a tediously extravagant visual rhetoricism, such as everything I’ve seen directed by Simon Philips.

I find it difficult to get excited by Australian Naturalism anyway. It is not a tradition which seems to value ambitious imaginings. Though she doesn’t call it “naturalism”, which is something I’ll come to, I find myself agreeing with Alison Croggon when she writes that the authority of let’s call it “situational subjectivity” (or “circumstantial psychology”, which is a marginally uglier coinage) has set up expectations in the audience which inevitably stifle innovation and experimentation. But, all the same, Australian Naturalism is not as moribund or desperately safe as the MTC has made it seem. The Joy of Text, both script and production, proves that.

In discussions since then, I’ve had it put to me that the MTC is, really, very much better than it used to be, as the programming of TJOT in fact proves. In an interview with Michael Kantor, for a Time Out Sydney thing I did on the upcoming Threepenny season (which is not online yet), the former Malthouse Theatre artistic director had this to say about the MTC:

REVIEW: Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness
Hoy Polloy @ The Mechanics Institute, Brunswick
28 July 2011 to 13 August 2011

Here’s a link to my TOM review of OSUMTS. Follow the link for a summary of the play and my thoughts about this production. Some additional non-review thoughts below:

It’s an interesting proposition for Hoy Polloy. The play has gained some notoriety on account of the divergence between the author’s religion and politics, and those of his heroes. While the play is a sensitive treatment of young Protestant Ulstermen of 1916, complete with relentless cursing of the hated “Fenian”, McGuinness himself is apparently a proud Catholic Republican. But this is typical of his modus operandi. His dramas can sometimes seem like exercises in empathy, like educational explorations of the extreme aboard the good ship Humanism. Over and again, he places his characters in intolerable or dehumanising situations, only for them to liberate themselves, if not physically, then at least in spirit, through the universal power of the human imagination.

The one who would not be a critic

If only it were true! If only everyone were actually a critic. That would be a boast for human beings! Alarming? Inspiring! That would be worth all the sand and rock and pathless treks.

“It sure was something,” he says. Impenetrable apathy!

Think about it – how many venues have a curtain onstage? When was the last time a curtain actually came down? It would be a waste of resources. The curtain that falls behind the eyes of the one who would not be a critic has more finality.

“It is because I don’t want to criticise.” I reassure him: criticising is least part of criticism. “No, no, you have your apparatus,” he explains. “You know the technical terms. I can’t really judge.” I plead my ignorance. I tell him that I know nothing. When have I ever known what I’m talking about? Really known? He shrugs. “Yes, but you’ve seen more, stuff.”

I am desperate. I implore him. His detachment suggests that serious dialogue is unseemly, that to insist is poor form. Exasperated by my raving, he tries one last parry, hoping to have done with it all. “What else is there to say? I didn’t love it. But I didn’t hate it.” Yes, yes, but what was it? He sighs, faintly. He won’t waste his breath even for sighing. Fortified behind his premature surrender, there is nothing more to be done.

I can only marvel. These humble deferrals … what miraculous self-sufficiency! No wonder he resents art.