Reviews:
April-June 2006
               
          

Amadeus

Anne of the Thousand Days

Away

Buffalo

The Clown from Snowy River

Corporate

Hotel Sorrento

Howie the Rookie

It's a Dad Thing

Love Letters

Njunjul, the Sun

Oliver

Over the Top with Jim

Perfect Skin

Romeo and Juliet

Seven Last Words from the Cross

Spring Awakening

Three One-Act Plays



Dance

Big Black Box
Earlier reviews
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Njunjul, the Sun  
Kooemba Jdarra (Cremorne Theatre, QPAC)


From the book by Meme McDonald and Boori Monty Pryor

Professional production


Njunjul, the Sun is a coming-of age play, where young people have to leave home to discover themselves, and where they have a choice of going back home to live a transformed life, or staying and coping with the new life that a new environment offers.

Although it is best known to us through Western culture, as a truth that goes back to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, it’s common to all evolving cultures, and it’s never easy. To use just two western examples — American writer Thomas Wolfe said in 1940, “You can’t go home again”, and in the 18th century the poet William Blake wrote about the painful necessity of leaving the age of innocence and entering the world of experience.

And for any Aboriginal person in any Murri mob within modern Australian society, the choice is essential, unless you want to stay on the mission or in the reserve or, even more radically, have nothing to do with western society, like the Ramingining community from north-eastern Arnhem Land, who appear in the ground-breaking film Ten Canoes.

To a certain extent 16-year-old Njunjul (played by Isaac Drandich) has this choice. He can stay in the ironically-named Happy Valley, a disadvantaged settlement of huts on the edge of Townsville where, for some unexplained reason, his house has been bulldozed and he is reduced to eating flying fox stew and apple pie. Or else he can go to Sydney to stay with an aunt and uncle who in some ways have managed to break through the black barrier and make a go of it in white society. “My boy,” says his aunt in Happy Valley (played superbly by Roxanne McDonald, as one of her many roles in the play), “you’re not fitting in here, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes you need to grow in some other garden.”

But if he goes, he has to leave behind his brother Cedric, his dark shadow who eventually kills himself out of sheer frustration, and whose fate tempts Njunjul to do the same in Sydney. And when he does arrive he finds that his uncle, who had seemed so much in control of his destiny, with a good job teaching about Aboriginal culture in city schools, is himself as disturbed and discriminated against as Njunjul. There are family rows (Uncle Garth, played with great spirit and vitality by Aaron Fa’aoso), has married a white woman who doesn’t understand his problems, and it seems as hard to make things work for him as it is proving for his nephew, who wants to give up and go home.

The play says important things about coming to terms with who you are, and realising that not everything is going to be rosy for ever, a lesson we all have to learn if we are to become proper grown-ups. It has wit, lots of humour, deadly dialogue and some breath-taking physical movement (choreographed, I assume, by Wayne Blair, as no specific credit is given in the program notes).

And the cast is of the calibre that we have come to expect from Kooemba Jdarra. Roxanne Macdonald is a skilled character actor who can transform herself from passive township aunty to slick basketball player with the change of a cap; and relative newcomer to KJ, Aaron Fa’aoso, who made such a strong impression in Howie the Rookie, shows us that he can play more than just one kind of character. Actor/dancer Mark Sheppard is a grim reminder of the pain that many indigenous people feel in the in-between world they are forced to inhabit, and Kerith Atkinson is cute and seductive at the same time.

Which brings me to Isaac Drandich, who plays the title role. He is called on to perform at many levels, from the introspective brooder to the young man full of hope to a typical teenager trying to make out with the mob, and he does it very well, making the final scene, where he accepts his aboriginality to the fullest, almost a tear-jerker. I just wish he (and the other young cast members) would lose that upward inflection!

So far, so very good. But regarding it objectively as a play rather than a performance, I have to wonder whether the text presents both theme and format in a way that is a little old-fashioned for modern audiences. There are too many pious clichés and too much trite philosophy, spelling out sentiments that could well be left as sub-text. And there’s a bit too much of the poor-blackfella-me for my personal liking — Aboriginal culture, especially as Kooemba Jdarra rightly presents it, has outgrown this blatant self-pitying and now prefers to give us a welcome and more positive spin, showing the great achievements of indigenous people and the strengths of the various cultures.

Within the text itself, do we really need to have truisms like “There’s good and bad in both cultures”, or “Don’t forget where you come from”, spelt out so obviously? In great drama, these points are made not through dialogue but through action, and no matter how true and important the ideas are, they would work better if we were left to intuit them for ourselves. And this is why, for me, this production is more of a simple morality tale than a full-on gutsy drama, and although it’s the ideal play to tour to schools and youth groups, its vision is as unsophisticated as that of Njunjul himself.

There’s nothing wrong with a good morality play — and this is a very good one — but in style and format it’s a step back for Kooemba Jdarra, rather than an illustration of chairperson Lorna O’Shane’s stated vision of seeing Kooemba “emerge from its chrysalis and herald metamorphosis rather than change”.

The company has been doing that very successfully for its 13 years, and I’ve watched it with enthusiasm and admiration all that time. This play, though, is the kind of production that Kooemba might have presented 10 years ago, when they were still part of the fringe culture, rather than in their solid place in today’s mainstream theatre world where no allowances have to be made.

Kooemba Jdarra in association with QPAC

Adapted and directed by Wayne Blair

Playing 22 June–5 July at 6.30pm Tuesday and Wednesday, 7.30pm Thursday, Saturday, except Saturday 1 July at 2pm

Duration: 90 minutes, no interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 29th June 2006)
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I Failed  
Brisbane Powerhouse

By Judith Lucy

Professional Production


As all writers know, comedy is extremely difficult to write and even harder to write about, since what one person finds funny often leaves others completely cold. I have to admit at the outset that I am ambivalent about one-person comedy shows. A few bad experiences left me bored with a genre that had come to seem little more than a competition to see who could get away with using the grossest language and most offensive material. My saner self kept asking: “Why do people subject themselves to an evening with often deeply unattractive ‘comedians’ whose humour is puerile and whose self-disgust drives them to belittle everything around them, including their audience?”

On the other hand, for those of us who are incapable of telling a simple joke without losing the interest of even the most polite of our friends after ten seconds, the skill of a stand-up comedian who talks like a grown-up and can keep an audience enthralled for 90 minutes is awe-inspiring. When that comic is a woman (often the worst joke-tellers in the world), it is even more impressive.

Not that entertainers like Judith Lucy actually tell jokes — instead they keep up a one-sided conversation in which they share with an audience their views on life’s idiocies, illustrated by absurd encounters and apparently off-the-cuff observations. When it works, as it does in this case, it can all seem intimate, improvised on the spur of the moment and hilarious. It is like being at a dinner table with a gifted and uninhibited storyteller who nobody wants to interrupt. If it doesn’t work, it can seem ill-tempered, studied and embarrassing.

Much of the skill of a comedian, of course, depends upon how well they read their audience; knowing just how far to go with the in-jokes, the coarse language, the religious or political ridicule. Being offensive is almost de rigueur for comedians of course, and fans of Judith Lucy will know that she has a very acerbic wit, a wry and dry delivery, and a pretty cynical view of society. In her current show (built around the story of her sacking from breakfast television) she gets the mix just right, to judge by the response of her audience on the night I attended. Granted, evangelical Christians and fans of John Howard are probably thin on the ground at her shows, but even the most tolerant and broad-minded of us can make our resentment felt if we sense we are being patronised or bored by a performer.

I am always fascinated by the response of audiences. I think I would have particularly enjoyed going to the theatre in the 18th century if I could have scored a seat in one of those stage boxes from where you could spend as much time studying the audience as the performers on stage. In all forms of theatre an audience can make or break a show, but in this sort of show in particular, with no scenery, music, props or other actors for support, a performer has to work hard to get the audience in the groove and keep them there. From where I sat, Judith Lucy did just fine. Like most of her audience, I had a smile on my face the whole evening, I was helpless with laughter much of the time, and I loved the visual joke at the end. What more can you ask?

Playing until 25 June: evenings 7:30pm

Running time (no interval) 90 minutes


— Maureen Strugnell

(Performance seen: 15th June 2006)
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Oliver  
Brisbane Arts Theatre


Music and lyrics by Lionel Bart, from the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Amateur production


You have to give it to Brisbane Arts Theatre; they do a very good musical, and Lionel Bart’s Oliver! is a very good musical indeed.

It was Bart’s only real success — he soon became an alcoholic and eventually died of cancer at the age of 69 — but it was a hit from the moment of its first performance, winning the Tony Award for 1964. In 1968 it was made into a film starring Ron Moody, Shani Wallace, Oliver Reed, Hugh Griffith and Harry Secombe, and it won six Academy Awards.

Such a cast is a hard act to follow, and nobody is pretending that the current BAT performers are the world’s greatest actors, but they are all very accomplished singers, with some truly wonderful voices among them. Catherine Collings as Nancy is the stand-out — she sounds as if she’s had professional training, and has a stage presence to match, totally in control and beefing out her more flamboyant numbers with never a false step or note — but there are other good singers as well, including Elspeth Sutherland (Widow Corney) and Simon Temple as Bill Sykes, thankfully looking as unlike Oliver Reed as it’s possible to be, and more like a taller nastier Robert Carlyle.

All the children’s parts are doubled, and the afternoon I saw the show Andrew Whitmore was Oliver and Taylor Pearce was The Artful Dodger. Andrew Whitmore has a particularly fine singing voice, and if he’s not in a cathedral choir he ought to be; while the gangly Taylor Pearce does some deft shoe-shuffling in the dance numbers, which made up for his weaker voice work.

It’s a fascinating musical, not least because of the irony that underlies its cheery score. In spite of its inevitable happy ending, the novel being a product of Victorian England, after all, Oliver Twist is one of Dickens’ grimmest novels, and in the musical Bart retains the most frightening elements of the plot, which deal with prostitution, murder, child exploitation and the cold heart of charity. Well may Oliver ask “Where is love?”, for there is precious little to be found among the London underclass portrayed in both novel and musical. Only in the refinement of the upper middle class can integrity and happiness be found, it seems, and even the good-hearted Nancy is doomed. Dickens’ novel is dark and desperate, and underneath the oom-pah-pah rhythms of Bart’s score and the cheerful lyrics, that darkness never disappears.

That’s one reason it’s not a musical for very young children. I went to a matinee performance, and many of the little kids there were getting restless in the second half, as the plot drew to its unavoidable violent conclusion. In the beginning everything may seem happy in Fagin’s den (although John Mulvihil portrays the evil beneath his superficial heartiness very well), and even the kids in the workhouse sing cheerfully about hot sausage and mustard, and cold jelly and custard, as if they are about to appear, and in Mr and Mrs Sowerberry’s funeral parlour the terror a pubescent boy must experience at being surrounded by death is never fully realised. But once Bill Sykes appears in the second half the mood changes rapidly, and there’s nothing more to laugh at.

As usual, Brisbane Arts Theatre has come up trumps with what is perforce a tiny budget, and Una Hollingworth has worked her customary magic with the sets, the tiny stage space morphing into at least eight different settings almost seamlessly, simply by moving a few flats and screens around. That woman is a genius, and I’d love to see what she could do with a serious budget. Sandra Hines’ costuming is another example of what can be done with very little, and I’ve seen far less impressive costumes in much flashier professional productions; while Phil Carney augments the stage setting with his innovative lighting. Admittedly the back-stage team at BAT have been working together for years, but they always manage to produce a visual image that augments what are sometimes flawed performances.

Not that there are many in this production, though. Some of the actors are very stiff in their movements and look quite uncomfortable during the big production numbers, and not all of them handle their lines very well, but luckily in this musical it’s mostly lyrics and not much text, so it doesn’t become a problem for the audience, who can sit back and enjoy it all.

With a cast of thousands like this — well, 40 at least — there’s no room for biographies, so I’ll never know whether Catherine Collings is a professional singer, or who the delicious tiny tot in the children’s chorus is. But as not everyone wants to know these details, it all comes down to a very pleasant experience at the theatre, and a production for which no apologies need to be made.


Director and musical director Rodney Wolff, co-director and choreographer Susan Gillingham

Playing until 24 June 2006: Thursday–Saturday at 8pm, matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2pm

Duration : 2 hours 30 minutes including 15 minute interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 10th June 2006)
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Anne of the Thousand Days  
Crossbow Productions (Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse)


By Maxwell Anderson

Pro-am


Nobody was a winner in Tudor times. Henry VIII died bloated from syphilis, two of his wives were executed, two divorced, one died in childbirth and only the lucky last, Catherine Parr, managed to survive her monstrous husband. Of his descendants Edward, the only son, died young before he could wield any personal power, first daughter Mary died embittered and childless, and only Elizabeth, named a bastard by her father, survived to reign happy and glorious.

Of Henry’s friends and advisers in this turbulent period of political and religious turmoil, Cardinal Wolsey died on his way to the Tower of London, while Thomas Cromwell and Thoma More got the chop on the scaffold, as did Bishop John Fisher. Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, managed to survive by betraying members of his own family, notably his unhappy nieces Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and then escaped death on the scaffold himself only because of Henry’s expedient demise.

The Tudor period, during which England went, in a seesaw fashion, from being Catholic to ultimately Protestant, with thousands of deaths along the way, has long fascinated writers and the general public, and the fates of Anne Boleyn and her daughter Elizabeth I have been dissected, analysed, and generally made a meal of on stage and screen and in print for at least the last hundred years, to the extent that many of us feel quite Tudored out.

Elizabeth doesn’t appear in Maxwell Anderson’s 1948 play Anne of the Thousand Days except as an object in a cradle, but she is an important character in that, had she been a boy rather than a girl, her mother Anne would probably have been allowed to live. The play doesn’t pretend to be a faithful historical rendition of the Anne/Henry marriage, but rather an examination of the psychological sub-text to the personal and political power plays that are as relevant today as they were then, although these days the losers don’t end up on the block or tied to the stake — not in Western countries, at least.

Crossbow Productions have made their home in Brisbane after a number of years in the USA and Sydney, presumably because founders Christian Heim and Caroline Beck are respectively working at the Royal Brisbane Hospital and undertaking PhD studies at UQ. The company, with its current focus on presenting historical plays with a modern twist, is a welcome addition to the Brisbane theatre scene, for no matter what you may think of their approach, it is an intelligent and lively one, and is guaranteed to engage an audience.

It’s difficult for 21st century people to get inside the 16th century mind, for changes in scientific, religious and social understanding have made it impossible to accept, for example, that the mother can be “blamed” for the sex of her child, or that natural disasters should be interpreted as the will of God, or events construed as direct punishments of an individual. Nor do we accept the concept of the Divine Right of Kings, and our modern sensibilities are shocked by what appears to us to be blinkered thinking and unjustifiable behaviour.

To overcome this problem, Christian Heim, who composed and plays the original music as well as directing the play, has given us a multi-layered chronological interpretation. The costuming, for example, by bridal designer Hilde Heim, is both ultra-modern and sparsely suggestive using, for the women characters, elaborate shot-silk gowns which make no concession to 16th century fashion and, for the men, jackets and jerkins of rich fabric simply thrown over ordinary modern day clothes.

The choice of music is another aspect of the production to ponder. Playwright Maxwell Anderson specified music of Bach or earlier, and Christian Heim is a performer of note, but somehow the High Baroque mood of The Well-Tempered Clavier sits oddly with Heim’s own mock-Renaissance songs. There are plenty of authentic Renaissance songs available, some by Henry himself, but this deliberate decision to modernise the musical mood is another example of the time shifting in this production.

At the heart of the play is the relationship between Henry and Anne, and the mind-games that she, a witty independent woman in a dangerous age, plays with the naïve Henry, who understands nothing except brute power. Anne loses, of course, as most women of the time did, and we may wonder at the risks she takes in dealing with this megalomaniac, but in Caroline Beck’s interpretation she is a woman of integrity, mindful of her status and determined not to submit meekly to being put away as Henry’s first wife had done. She is an edgy, passionate foil for Peter Marshall’s dumb ox Henry, who cannot cope with the complications that arise when his need for an heir, his political responsibilities and his sheer lust become tangled up, and Marshall’s performance gives us a different perspective on a man who is deeply troubled by his conscience but fully conscious of his rights as a monarch.

Other impressive performances are from Stephen Tandy, doubling as the world-weary Cardinal Wolsey and the scheming Duke of Norfolk; and Sandro Colarelli, whose darkly slinking Cromwell has echoes of Richard III as well as a modern Iago. The other actors were adequate rather than outstanding, but worked well as an ensemble.

It’s a treat to see such a thoughtful production of a modern classic, with emphasis on performance rather than tricky design, and with such respect for the text. It’s to be hoped that Crossbow goes from strength to strength, and that we see more of their work in the near future.

Directed by Christian Heim

Playing until 17 June 2006: Wednesday – Saturday 8pm, Saturday matinee 2pm

Duration : 2 hours 15 minutes, with a 15 minute interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 9th June 2006)
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Three One-Act Plays: A farce a trois  
Centenary Theatre Group


Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer
Not in Front of the Waiter by Colin Graham and Viola Tunnard, with music by Offenbach
49A by Michael Harvey

Amateur production


Have you ever played suicide chess? Or thinking in reverse? Black Comedy is based on an intriguing concept, a reversal of dark and light, where actors speak initially from the darkened stage, acting “normally.” When a blown light fuse “blacks” out the room, the stage lights come up, and the characters are seen shambling around apparently invisible to one another. (While they mostly remembered to grope and stumble there were dead patches when some actors went into lulls when not actually speaking. Sure, they’re “in the dark”, but we do still see them!)

In this reversed lighting scheme, sculptor Brindsley Miller (Mark Tinsley) becomes both villain and victim of the farce as he stumbles around covering up a continued relationship with mistress, Clea (capably played by Bianca Cole). Indeed, many characters have secrets they would prefer to keep "in the dark."

Carol (Hayley Berry) is Brindsley’s shallow society debutante fiancée – Carnaby Street 60’s mini skirt, boots and lurid blue eye shadow, she looks the part but her cooing high pitched voice soon grates especially with her liberal adding of “poo” to nouns. Playing this classic twit character must become a thankless task and her father, Colonel Melkett possesses a similarly simplistic military mind: “Problem: Darkness. Solution: Light.”.

Brindley, trying to impress as a potential husband for the “dumpling” daughter “borrows” furniture and antiques from his stereotyped gay neighbour, Harold (Matthew Zande) who returns home unexpectedly. Brindley has to keep the lights out long enough to return them undetected. Inevitably things disintegrate into chaos, with bumbling cover-ups.

A downside of playing farce is that characters are necessarily cartoonised: there’s repressed spinster neighbour Miss Furnival (Helen Hunter), a Baptist minister’s daughter and teetotaller who in the dark accidentally downs glasses of whiskey and gin instead of bitter lemon and becomes tipsy. Her rapid descent into drunkenness is a mirror of the deterioration of the whole evening. These, and German electrician Schuppanzigh (Mark Scott), while stereotyped cardboard characters, do add real touches of comic flair.

This morality play focuses on lies, mistaken identity and deception: don't keep secrets, because they will undo you. Black Comedy explores the effect loss of light would have on a group of people who all hide things from each other. All in all, though, they’re a rather unpalatable group of people who fail to hold our sympathy, and even within the parameters of farce, more plausibility and depth would hold our attention better.

Perhaps my reactions were negative due to disappointment as I’d recently seen Peter Shaffer’s brilliant Amadeus , rich in characterisation and psychological insight. I looked forward to similar with his one-act play (written in 1965, soon after his much acclaimed The Royal Hunt of the Sun ). But although a clever and intriguing concept, it was too long and too shallow in characterisation to sustain interest for 90 minutes. With tighter script editing, direction and acting it might have been more effective.

This theme of black and white is effectively continued in the costuming of the second play, Not in Front of the Waiter , as is the central theme of infidelity: “He thinks I’m with my aunt” blithely trills one potential adulterer. The two couples are out for clandestine dinners in the same restaurant as their equally culpable spouses. Ho hum? Well, this is farce, after all.

The use of singing throughout picks up vitality after the first play’s lagging tempo. It’s aided by Ann Gaffney’s able piano accompaniment. Granted, the score is rather basic oom-pa-pa music hall style, not particularly memorable, but we’re too grateful for our lifted spirits to quibble.

The opening scene shows the waiter endearingly hamming up his table-setting. With a flourish he ushers in the first couple (she in white satin, he in dinner suit). The soup is brought in and returned to the kitchen as the couple obviously have other more pressing appetites. Enter the second couple, he in resplendent white tails, she in black satin. The two couples are shielded and divided by a large aspidistra, until the waiter interrupts to announce that he recognises the women’s strawberry birthmarks and pronounces them his long-lost twin daughters. He recounts his fall from grace that caused him to lose all contact with his wife and family. As the couples mix and match back with their spouses and line up to make their final bows, their costumes colour- coordinate. In a satisfying balance we notice the central father-waiter wears – you guessed it? – black clothes and white apron.

The opening duet caused a few concerns as far as pitch goes, especially from soprano Ruth Bridgstock as Solange, but her nerves settled and the intonation improved, revealing a quite pleasant if dominating voice. Mezzo soprano Kathleen Parker is overall more secure in pitch if less resonant, and all the singers could pay more attention to the requirements for ensemble singing, even though their individual vocal training is evident.

I confess I know little about the playwright Michael Harvey, and so it seems does Google. This third play, 49A refers to the bus of that number which, to the chagrin of two waiting commuters, fails to appear. It show-cases the acting skills of director Chris Guyler, which are considerable. Anyone who can hold the audience for around five minutes with just one word has something going for him. We’re intrigued with this static opening for some time, especially as we realise that as audience members we are waiting for that bus with them, in real time, feeling bored along with the characters. It’s a play on time. Inevitably we begin to wonder if this is a take on Waiting for Godot in the style of farce.

As we become restive, we wonder if perhaps the evening would be better advised to have ended with the Offenbach play. Would it be preferable to send us out with singing – even occasionally off-key – on a high? But no, as the more outgoing and adventurous commuter, Wicklow (played with a pleasant balance of British composure and dash by Gary McEwen) the farce escalates. Encouraged, the very proper but anally retentive British gentleman loosens, along with his tie (a symbol for inhibitions and habits) into schoolboy prankster. We see the two very proper gents who’ve waited patiently for the bus 49a are transformed. They play some silly wordplay and practical joking kids’ games, have such unaccustomed fun that the ending – no, I won’t spoil it for attendees – is in fact a hoot. Yes, it was a good choice for ending. Mirth? Yes, a fun premise, a good laugh.

These three short plays are typified as Mayhem – Music – Mirth. They deliver reasonably convincingly on all counts.


Directed by Chris Guyler

Playing until June 3, Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 6pm.

Duration: 2 hours 30 minutes, two fifteen minute intervals


— Ruth Bonetti

(Performance seen: 28th May 2006)
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Spring Awakening  
Underground Productions (Cement Box Theatre)


By Frank Wedekind

Amateur production


Almost the best thing about amateur theatre groups is that they can afford to take risks, putting on plays that no professional theatre company would dare to touch. This is not because the plays are too outrageous for the general public (remember Shopping and F****** that the QTC did a few years ago?) but because they are too obscure, too far out of the fashionable mainstream, to be able to guarantee an audience.

Student theatre especially has always been game to take on such challenges, and Underground Productions, a student-run theatre company based at the Cement Box Theatre at the University of Queensland, is no exception. As their mission statement claims, “we are a non-profit organisation committed to producing quality theatre. The nurturing environment that we provide for actors, directors, writers, designers and technicians encourages up-and-coming artists to explore and develop their talents”, and their second production for 2006, the late 19th century German expressionist play Spring Awakening , meets all the criteria, especially the nurturing bit.

Plays with a cast of 16 are non-starters in today’s world of pared-down production budgets, so nowhere else would you be likely to see this notorious masterpiece that shocked the respectable European middle-class of its time with its frank examination of the sexual ignorance of teenagers and the dreadful results that often ensued. In the play the young pregnant Wendla is killed by the quack into whose hands her mother has delivered her; Melchior, her innocent seducer, is condemned as a moral pervert; and Moritz is driven to suicide because he cannot pass his exams.

At the time, Wedekind was accused of exaggerating his characters, but today our more open society realises the truth of what had too long remained hidden, and how vulnerable susceptible adolescents really are.

True as all this may be, Wedekind’s language is overblown and overly rhetorical for modern tastes, so it wouldn’t work on a mainstream stage, although I wonder what Ted Hughes’s translation of six years ago was like. Unfortunately the program notes didn’t identify the translator of this version, but it didn’t sound like Ted Hughes to me.

Spring Awakening is a fantastic play, and I mean that in every sense of the word. There are strong echoes of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, who were writing fifty years earlier than Wedekind, but it also touches on the ideas about dreams and memory that Freud was working on at exactly the same time. How much Wedekind was influenced by the great scientist I don’t know, but the play also prefigures all kinds of 20th century works of art, from John Fowles’ 1965 novel The Magus to Ingmar Bergmann’s 1959 film Virgin Spring, with hints of the darker Walt Disney cartoons along the way.

It would take a stronger cast than this irrepressible group of students to pull off this histrionic script completely - and if you know the play you’ll recognise my reference. Perhaps to compensate for their lack of experience, they played it as high farce rather than melodrama, and the audience was in hysterics. Unfortunately I had to leave before the end, so I wasn’t able to see how they managed the tragic finale, but the two-thirds of the production that I did see produced some good moments, even if many of the actors didn’t display much stage presence, and their lack of experience made them very self-conscious. Playing fourteen-year-olds is difficult for late teens to do well, and there were rather too many hoonish schoolboy antics to be convincing, although the girls made a recognisable gaggle of pubescents.

But it was a good try, and not many student actors would have been able to do it better. The set, by Helen Vann, was innovative and flexible, and although the costumes might have been better had they come within coo-ee of an iron at some stage, they evoked the period very well — I especially liked the Alice-in-Wonderland look and the Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee stockings of the schoolgirls.

The three principals — Georgina Horsburgh, Michael Jones and Kade Greenland — all have the potential to go on to bigger things once they’ve got over their self-consciousness, and Scott Drummond pulled the complex play into a coherent whole. BR>
Probably not many people saw this production, as it only had five performances, and in any case it wasn’t really ready to go public, but Underground Theatre is to be congratulated for giving this quite wonderful play another airing. And you’ve gotta love a theatre company with a heart, one that thinks that live theatre should be more than just entertainment and self-indulgence, especially when they have donated a sizable part of their profits (assuming there are any) to Open Doors, a counselling service for non-heterosexual teenagers, and to the Domestic Violence Help Line.

Let’s have more of this kind of theatre, and more young actors and directors with a social conscience as well as big egos, who want to challenge audiences while they themselves have a good time playing at being actors. I’m sure none of them are thinking of making a career of it, but as one who sees a great deal of drama-student theatre, I find that quite a relief.

So keep an eye out for their next production, which runs from 26 July to 5 August. It’s called Tribes of Avalon, a company-created musical about which I know absolutely nothing, except that it promises to be an Arthurian romp. But I suspect it will be very different from Spring Awakening .

Directed by Scott Drummond

Played 24 – 28 May 2006

Duration: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 28th May 2006)
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Amadeus  
4MBS Festival of Classics

By Peter Shaffer

Grand Hall, Masonic Centre, Brisbane

Professional production

We’ve seen the film Amadeus, so we know that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a potty-mouthed precocious little genius who managed to rile all those in contact with him, while dashing off sublime music with a billiard cue in one hand. So it must be incredibly difficult to strike the right note in playing Mozart without either tarnishing his hallowed gloss or burying him under lathers of burlesque. Especially in this, his anniversary year, when audiences are already overwhelmed with Mozartiana. It’s a remarkable balancing act that actor Tamu Matheson can keep us on-side, laughing — though often aghast — with Wolfgang in his excesses, barracking for some shreds of patronage from the snooty upper-class, feeling his frustrations and then desolation at the news of his father’s death.

Was precious young Wolfgang really so foul-mouthed, so obsessed with bodily matters, so flighty? Unfortunately for those who try to preserve him in chocolate-boxed marzipan coating, his letters are testament to that. Young Mozart was all too prone to shooting his mouth off — and himself in the foot. It’s been suggested that his genius was spiked with Tourette Syndrome, typified by his love of word play, hyperactivity, fidgets and mood swings. Matheson plays him with frenetic vitality and yes, with that infectious high giggle — the latter less grating than in the film. His airy hand flourishes while improvising the now famous Figaro March are slick and witty. Peter Shaffer’s brilliant text gives him fast streams of nonsense rhyming talk along with its dense layers of psychological insights.

Matheson portrays a convincing lively and likeable character. After his frenetic high spirits rolling Constanza on aristocratic carpets, the despair of his last scenes contrasts darkly. We share his struggles through failing health to finish his Requiem, fending off visions of a beckoning grey-caped figure.

Nose-thumbing the patrician moneyed-class when starving is hardly a wise career strategy, yet would the upper class hierarchy have put more commissions and students his way in spite of his offending them if it were not for the crafty machiavellian manoeuvrings of Antonio Salieri, his rival? It would seem the early prayer of Salieri, who became that court composer for the Emperor of Austria in the late eighteenth century, has been answered: “Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world. Dear God make me immortal. After I die let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life, Amen.” So far so good.

Until he hears Mozart’s sublime music and compares his own mediocrity with its sheer genius — the "voice of God" coming from an "obscene child". “That was Mozart. That! That giggling dirty-minded creature I had just seen, crawling on the floor!” The battle front changes, as does the theme — from professional jealousy and subterfuge, to God’s granting divine inspiration and mediocrity. “From now on we are enemies, You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me only the ability to recognize the incarnation.”

Despite its title, the play belongs to Salieri and his determination to destroy his rival. The real battle is with God: “Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on Earth as far as I am able. I will ruin Your incarnation.”

Ann Street’s Grand Masonic Hall is a fitting performance venue, as Mozart was himself a Mason and his opera The Magic Flute is steeped in Masonic rituals — though one wonders how the host Masons of today might take Mozart’s words: “They say the Masons poison people who offend them.” However the venue presents challenges and limits the staging options; the production is presented in the round — or rather, the rectangle. To the direction’s credit, one rarely feels alienated by actors’ backs and the resulting intimacy is a plus, if one can call saliva sprays, sweat stains and visibly unhooked bodices such. There’s a sense of voyeurism as Salieri bares his soul barely a metre away. Yet it’s a brave venture to use this venue, as the sheer logistics of lighting the stage often risk power-surges. Given these challenges, it managed to rise to the scope of Salieri’s dramatic opening invocation: “I wanted fame — to blaze like a comet across the firmament.”

Kerith Atkinson as Constanza, Mozart’s wife, is charming and vital; the delivery of her second baby is affected on-stage with no-nonsense ingenuity. Of the minor characters, the two Venticelli characters (Dragitsa Debert and Nicole Denington) whose whispers of “Assassin” introduce the opening scene, are crisp in enunciation; Emperor Joseph II (Nick Backstrom) is perhaps too bumbling and homespun; yes, he’s famous for the “too many notes” comment, but surely even with Hapsburg inbreeding some patrician nobility filtered through? It doesn’t help that his costume appears derived from an antiquated dressing gown.

This is, of course, Salieri’s play and Eugene Gilfedder is nothing short of brilliant, commanding the stage with nuances ranging from the subtle to powerful, making it his own. He effects seamless transitions from age 31 to 78 by donning a dressing gown and changes of posture. It’s obvious that for Gilfedder this play is a passion rather than a mere role. He lives and breathes Salieri, bringing out the dignity and intelligence, relishing each word. The combination of Shaffer’s powerful script and Gilfedder’s depth of portrayal means that as villains go, this Salieri wins the audience vote. It’s an engrossing and satisfying evening.

Directed by Tama Matheson

Playing Friday 19 May, Saturday 20 May and Sunday 21 May, 2006 at 8pm

Duration: 2 hours 30 minutes with a 20 minute interval



— Ruth Bonetti

(Performance seen: 20th May 2006)
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Buffalo  
Queensland Theatre Company

By David Mamet

Bille Brown Studio, Merivale Street

Professional production


If it weren’t so funny, you’d have to weep. These small-time Chicago losers, planning a heist that never gets off the ground, aren’t very far removed from The Three Stooges, except that here there’s a grim undertone to their feckless plot.

The American Buffalo of the title is a rare US coin, which has been lying unnoticed in a pile of worthless items in Don’s junk shop. And what a junk shop it is! This is a set that outshines (make that out-grunges) even the famous clutter of the share-house in He Died with a Falafel…. It’s designer Bruce McKinven’s masterpiece, but all I could think of was the poor stage manager and crew, whose job it is to make sure all those piles of trash, decaying furniture, stuffed tigers and Matchbox cars are in their right places so that the actors can get their hands on the appropriate piece of pig-sticking equipment without getting lost in the chaos. And when things literally fall apart at the end of the play (you don’t think I’m going to give away the plot, do you?), my heart went out to Anita King and Jodie Roche, of that unsung, nameless, but invaluable tribe of back-stagers, who have to put it all together again six times a week. Even if you don’t like David Mamet’s language, you have to see this play for the set alone. It’s a work of genius.

Don owns the shop, and seems to be the brains (I use the term loosely) behind the enterprise. Russell Kiefel plays him rough-as-guts but heart-of-gold, too generous in his relationships to be a proper crim. At first I was a little disappointed in his physical and emotional restraint, his too-ready acceptance of failure and disappointment, but realised when Teach, the manic wannabe crim who has obviously left home without his Prozac, comes in like a crazed gorilla, that Kiefel needs to hold back to be not a foil but a complement to Hayden Spencer, who revels in this role as if he were born to it.

Spencer here is at his fidgety, illogical, surreal best, like a volcano waiting to go off, and desperate to get this heist going. The plan is to raid the house of the man who bought the coin from Don earlier in the day for $95, so they can get it back and sell it for a fortune. There’s a universal protest underlying this project, that the rich and the canny always manage to out-smart the small and powerless, so Don and Teach’s revenge plan is based on resentment of the way the world works. It’s a futile gesture, and really quite unnecessary, for Don (a) didn’t realise that he had such a valuable coin among the box of pennies and dimes and (b) wouldn’t have a clue how much it was really worth anyway.

And then there’s the strange younger man Bobby, who is some kind of protégé of Don’s, but is even more clueless than the others. His own scam, to get back at all of them, goes terribly wrong, and he ends up with a hospitalising crack on the ear when Teach finally loses it, and without the easy money he thought would come his way.

The twists of the plot don’t really matter, any more than the mind-numbing irrationality of their argument, which leave the audience bewildered – although it had me helpless with laughter and disbelief, for had he been born into another social class, Teach would have made a brilliant defence lawyer, baffling his hearers with logic so irrefutable that they wouldn’t have time to realise that it made no sense.

It’s a superb play, a simple fable of natural injustice taken by David Mamet into realms of glory. The pace, once the actors got over their first-night hesitancy, was a cracker, rushing along physically and verbally so fast that the audience never had time to get bored or wonder what was happening, because the Alice in Wonderland logic makes its own internal sense. The language, of course, you have to be prepared for, because these are uneducated people who communicate only in profanity, and through their inarticulateness create a world which only they can inhabit.

If you’re looking for an underlying theme, I suppose it has to be about male communication, friendship and loyalty, and what can happen when any of those break down and the participants have nothing to fall back on. That’s where Russell Keel’s stolid unemotional presence is essential, to provide a firm base for the other two’s crazed behaviour, and Kiefel shows his own integrity as an actor by holding back from the temptation to upstage Hayden Spencer. And Anthony Standish, in his QTC debut performance as the sad street kid Bobby, is a knock-out. I hope we see a lot more of him in the future.

A truly wonderful play, intelligently directed, magnificently visualised, and impeccably acted. Colonel Blimp won’t like it, but that’s his loss. It’s my choice for the best production of the year so far.

Directed by Jon Halpin

Designed by Bruce McKinven

Lighting by Jason Organ

Playing until 17 June 2006: Wednesday – Saturday at 7.30pm, matinees Wednesday at 1pm, Saturday at 2pm

Duration : 2 hours, including a 20 minute interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 25th May 2006)
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Big Black Box  
Harvest Rain Theatre Company


Directed by Callum Mansfield

Pro-am production


“Bigger than a swollen walrus on crutches, blacker than a burnt bit of toast, better than being slapped in the face with a soggy cornflake ...” Not my words, but those of the publicist for this piece of dance theatre, which had its first run last year as part of Harvest Rain’s admirable Youth Initiative program.

How can a simple reviewer compete with such deathless/deadly prose? I have to admit I knew nothing about Big Black Box , but when I looked at the program and saw that the dancers were called Anger, Lust, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth, Greed and Pride, my initial response was that we were about to be catapulted into a morality play, and when the Big Black Box appeared, more thoughts about Pandora’s Box, from a rival religious tradition, entertained my mind, so that I began looking for a syncretic blending of Christian and Greek philosophy.

Pandora, if I may jog your memory, was the Greek equivalent of Eve in Jewish mythology. Zeus, king of the Gods, punished Prometheus for giving human beings the gift of fire by chaining him to a rock for eternity, with an eagle eating his liver every day — it grew back at night, thus ensuring the torture never ended. But an even greater punishment for the human race was to come — Zeus created Woman! Pandora was a poisoned gift (‘twas ever thus), being beautiful, dexterous and musically gifted, but cunning, bold and in possession of a box which she had been warned never to open. Of course, being a woman, she did open it (haven’t we heard this somewhere before?) and released all the misfortunes that have plagued the human race ever since — crime, illness, sorrow, poverty, crime — you name it. Only Hope remained at the bottom of the box, and Pandora eventually released it as well, to sighs of relief all round.

What a story! And fraught with possibilities for a director, too. Was this indeed a Christian allegory, I wondered, with the Seven Deadly Sins the equivalent of the evils Pandora released from her box? Harvest Rain is, after all, a Christian-based company. But once the smoke from the dry ice started creeping across the stage, I realised I was in the wrong story, for surely no God-fearing evangelical theatre company would dabble with such Catholic heresies as incense smoke!

And the moral of this experience is that sometimes it’s not a good idea to over-intellectualise and read too much into things, for this turned out to be merely a skilful and witty set of dance routines without any underlying philosophy — or at least not as far as I could make out.

There are six dancers, clad identically in frayed black dinner suits and white shirts, indistinguishable one from another except for the short one in a fat suit, whose name I couldn’t work out from the program notes. They perform all kinds of dance styles, from jazz ballet to bush-dancing to tap-dancing in sneakers holding cards with pictures of taps on them, and did some very witty routines with black and white Stop-and-Go balloons, reeling and writhing like the Mock Turtle – or like the damned in Dante’s Inferno or the fallen angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost , bush dancing with pot plants, and ballroom dancing with — you guessed it!

Very cute, very well done, and demonstrating what talent there is among young people in Brisbane, so top marks to Harvest Rain for giving them the freedom to experiment.

But don’t read too much symbolism into it, or you might end up thinking that the rainbow swathes of silk at the end are part of the Gay Pride movement, and the apocalyptic lighting is a pre-figuring of the eschatological End Time.

So NB: potential reviewers: leave your erudition behind and just enjoy this show for what it is — seven kids demonstrating their undoubted ability to hoof it, and having a great deal of fun along the way.

Choreographed by Jack Chambers

Playing until 27 May 2006: Wednesday–Saturday at 7.30pm, Saturday matinees at 2pm

Duration : 55 minutes, no interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 18th May 2006)
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Romeo and Juliet  
Opera Queensland (Lyric Theatre)

Opera Queensland's Romeo and Juliet is a sumptuous and romantic production, introducing Brisbane audiences to one of the more popular pieces in the French operatic repertoire. Gounod's full-on mid-nineteenth century romantic music is combined with a scaled-down version of Shakespeare's play by librettists Barbier and Carre. The opera is not well-known in Australia, but deserves more attention: it includes some beautiful arias and chorus work, the music full of parallels with musical traditions of the time, including resonances or anticipations of Bizet and Tchaikovsky.

This new production, first staged in Sydney by Opera Australia seven months ago, is conventional and mainstream, producing some magnificent effects in direction, design and lighting. Stuart Maunder's imaginative direction plan is brought to the Queensland stage by Luise Napier. Gounod's rich orchestration is realised by the Queensland Orchestra under conductor Peter Robinson, including much beautiful work in lower registers, woodwinds and percussion.

Soprano Sarah Crane is a splendid Juliet. Blonde and shapely, she has no trouble turning the head of any potential Romeo, and gives a strong and confident vocal performance. Her big Act 1 aria "Je veux vivre dans le reve" (originally made famous by Nellie Melba) is outstanding. Her characterisation is also effective. No adolescent naif, Crane's Juliet is nevertheless dreamy and romantic, and she acts out her feelings well. For example, although later to prove quite forward in their relationship, her initial response to Romeo's frank admiration is one of bashful surprise. As Romeo, Michael Martin sings with a pleasant voice with not quite enough consistent power, but acts well his love-at-first-sight and is good at displaying his turmoil of emotions when confronted by the Capulet gang after secretly marrying Juliet.

Costuming is a highlight of the production, with two sets of magnificent finery for the large chorus of Capulets and Montagues, as an Italian city-state aristocracy takes on a French persona. The challenge of a variety of scenes is met with commanding but versatile sets depicting exteriors and interiors equally well.

Juliet's nurse is not the lumpy and ultimately perfidious figure ("Ancient damnation! o most wicked fiend!") of many theatrical productions, but rather a fine woman of maturity and elegance straight out of the French Second Empire, sung with assurance by Jacqueline Dark, while Andrew Collis is a vocally commanding Friar Lawrence.

Tenor Bernard Hull and baritone Jason Barry-Smith are very effective as the hot-headed bovver boys Tybalt and Mercutio. Hull also gives the opera a fine start in his opening duet (with the firm and dignified Shaun Brown as Paris), while Barry-Smith does a great job with his Queen Mab aria. Dimity Shepherd is delightful as the cheeky page Stephano, singing with verve and convincingly earning a bloody nose in the fight scene (although Tybalt's bloodstains appeared to anticipate his stabbing by Romeo). Henry Ruhl sings firmly as Juliet's father. Supporting solo parts are well covered by Brett Carter, Virgilio Marino, David Hibbard and Matthew Broadbent, while the chorus members do their various dramatic bits as Capulets and Montagues with flamboyance and style while not straying from their vocal lines. French locution is convincing throughout.

Gounod's librettists let themselves get carried away by giving Romeo and Juliet an extended duet in the final scene, but apart from this rewrite (probably following the 1748 "improvement" on the Bard by David Garrick), Shakespeare's plot is followed, if not always his characterisation or depth. Literal translations from the French for the surtitles are rather bland — I would have preferred use of some of the Bard's own language wherever possible, even if somewhat at variance from the actual words being sung.


— John Henningham

(Performance seen: 12th May 2006)
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Perfect Skin  
La Boite Theatre

From the novel by Nick Earls, adapted for the stage by Janis Balodis

Professional production


The Nick Earls bandwagon rolls on, with yet another coming-of-age fantasy about a young Brisbane man trying to relate to Life, the Universe and Everything. Perfect Skin is, I think, the fifth of his novels to be adapted for the stage, but here Jon, the protagonist, is older than Earls’ previous heroes by ten years or so.

He’s not necessarily wiser, however, although one would think that becoming a widower and a father on the same day would have forced him into some kind of instant maturity. Jon is a dermatologist, surely the second-least desirable medical career after proctology, but the speciality is necessary for the metaphor of the play, which is about skin and layering, and superficiality and the truth behind the façade, and beauty and its depth, and all kind of other clever things, which could have become very smart-Alick in the hands of a lesser playwright than Janis Balodis, who has adapted the novel for the stage.

Balodis’ dry understated dialogue saves the script both from an overly academic approach and from the potential sentimentality that lurks under the text of the novel, and even Earls’ regular running gags, in this case the sacrificial domestic cat, take on a painful edge when the stuffed toy is adroitly manipulated by the cast into semi-reality, and its sufferings become more than a joke.

Under the surface frivolity of the plot (here’s the skin metaphor again) there’s real tragedy, not because Jon has been widowed and left to bring up his daughter single-handed, but because of the circumstances in which little Lily was conceived and born, and the ramifications of that for the father-daughter relationship, especially when Ashley, a potential new love, jogs into his life. But as this isn’t made manifest until near the end of the play, we can go along with the very funny situational dialogue without worrying about what lies beneath if we chose not to.

Philip Cameron-Smith as Jon is the centre of the play, an endearing performance marred by badly muffled diction — or was it just the notorious Roundhouse acoustics swallowing the voices again? The same problem occurred with Candice Storey as Ashley, although this may be forgiven in her professional debut in a very difficult theatre.

The others — Mark Conaghan, Lewis Jones and Caroline Kennison — are old enough hands to have come to terms with the acoustic, and so managed much better, with the result that their performances were much more convincing. A shame really, because Philip Cameron-Smith was trying hard, and he has a delicious role which he wasn’t able to exploit to the full because of the auditory problem.

Part of the fun in his character is that we both laugh at and sympathise with this bumbling 30-something guy in his current predicament. He loves Lily (played by a baby doll) but is stuck with her, and relies heavily on his friends (and seemingly doting parents) to help him out whenever he needs some free time. At the time of the play, however, Lily is only six months old, still at the adorable non-ambulatory stage, but what’s going to happen when she becomes a mobile ankle-biter? Will his friends and colleagues be quite as besotted with her then, and as willing to baby-sit? It’s just as well that the possibility of Tru Lerv occurs at the end of the play.

Jon works in a group practice, where his colleagues are also his friends, especially because his dead wife was also a member of the practice. In the play, all three are fall guys to his semi-tragic presence, and they make a brilliantly contrasting trio. Lewis Jones is the laconic wise-cracker with a quip for every occasion, a role which he plays with great skill and obvious delight, while Caroline Kennison in her dual personae as colleague and tough office-manager Wendy, and her flaky 1980’s caricature sister Kate (she of the put-upon cat and the '80s hair), makes the family resemblances and differences believable as well as very funny.

Mark Conaghan as Oscar has the best role of all, for as well as being a gormless colleague, he gets to take over from the stuffed cat and become its animated alter ego, as funny as the Dave Hughes interviews in The Glass House.

This is why the play works so well, because playwright Balodis has distanced the audience from the serious/sentimental potential of the plot. Everything is taken out of the reality box, examined objectively and then put back, providing at least three degrees of separation and a much more rewarding experience for the audience than just having to sit back and enjoy an amiable romp.

But for those who want it, the play can be taken at this easy level, and the production loses nothing for those who just want light entertainment. But Balodis’s script, Scott Witt’s sharp-edged direction and Alison Ross’s multi-layered set allow those who want more to dig below the surface and see what really lies beneath that perfect skin.

Directed by Scott Witt

Playing until 3 June 2006 (Tuesday and Wednesday 6.30pm, Thursday – Saturday 8pm, matinees 10, 16, 23 & 30 May at 11am and 3 June 2pm)

Duration : 2 hours 30 minutes, including interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 12th May 2006)
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Hotel Sorrento  
HIT Productions (QUT Gardens Theatre)


By Hannie Rayson

Professional production


Much as I appreciated the opportunity to revisit Hannie Rayson’s Hotel Sorrento, presented by the Melbourne based HIT Productions and currently touring Australia, it is always somewhat dispiriting to be part of an audience made up almost entirely of young people who are there because the play is on the English Syllabus.

Such was the composition of the audience on opening night and, as the Arts Victoria-funded tour continues its way around the country through centres such as Nunawading, Echuca, Wangaratta, Gunnedah, Narrabri, Ipswich and Charters Towers (to name but a few of their stops), one can’t help thinking that this may well be a typical audience demographic.

First performed in 1990, Hotel Sorrento is a gift for the English or Drama teacher; it has eight well-balanced roles, not too much bad language, no sex, and it provides great opportunities for heated debates about male chauvinism and Australia’s cultural identity. Set in a sleepy seaside town, it concerns the reunion of three sisters and the effect on their relationship of a semi-autobiographical novel written by the expatriate Meg, who returns from London with her English husband to see if the Australia she has left ten years before has moved on from its entrenched parochialism.

The play also explores issues of loyalty, the nature of female sensibility, the role of the author in society, family relationships and national stereotyping (you can see why teachers love it), but it is hard to get around the fact that the play now seems somewhat dated. The lack of fully-paid-up adults in Thursday night’s audience might be put down to apathy, poor publicity, or the rival attractions of The West Wing on the ABC. It might also be that, since this play has had a number of amateur and professional performances in Brisbane in the last fifteen years, a new production excites less interest.

Certainly it could be argued that the central themes of Australian attitudes to women and the embarrassment of our cultural cringe have been so heavily worked over in literature and in the media in the last decade that most people are thoroughly bored by them. I would guess that it would be hard today to find anyone who cares what expatriates (other than the ever-more-bizarre Germaine) have to say about us, while contemporary feminism has different battles to fight.

However, as a piece of theatre the play works well still, and Rayson has produced four very juicy roles for women and four less well-developed but nicely contrasting roles for men (an old man, a boy, a conservative Englishman and an argumentative left-wing Aussie). The cast is a strong one, most of whom would be well-known to audiences from their television appearances. Outstanding among the women are Jane Nolan as the writer Meg and Beverley Dunn as Marge, the weekend visitor to Sorrento who becomes enchanted both with the place and with Meg’s descriptions of it in her novel.

Beverley Dunn’s stage experience means that her diction, timing and projection are exemplary, enabling her to hold the audience in the difficult opening stages of the play and present her character’s point of view with perfect clarity. In contrast, Kevin Harrington as Dick, the outspoken journalist, is often hard to hear and appears more ineffectual than his role demands. In his arguments with the women he appears shrill rather than overbearing – making it easier for Meg and Marge to make their points count.

Jane Nolan’s Meg is a nicely observed characterisation, convincing us that here is a woman who has spent years living away from home, relishing most of what life in England has to offer yet irritated by its sillier stuffiness. Her relationship with her English husband Edwin is warm and believable, and she is helped in this by a lovely performance from Roger Oakley. Again, Nolan’s beautifully modulated voice, swinging appropriately between Meg’s acquired English intonation and her native Australian tone, is a joy to listen to.

Meg’s sisters, the stay-at-home Hilary and the high-flying advertising executive Pippa, are played by Celia de Burgh and Marcella Russo. De Burgh’s Hilary is a thoughtful and sensitive woman with a delightful relationship with her son (the very talented Jared Daperis). She is the sister who has taken the dead mother’s place, caring for her rough diamond of a father (John Flaus) while her sisters have pursued careers overseas. The question of her sisters’ relationship with her dead husband lies unspoken at the heart of the play, and de Burgh shows us a woman dealing bravely with both loss and suspected betrayal.

Marcella Russo is less successful as Pippa, never convincing us that she is a bright, New York-dwelling career woman who has come home for a flying visit. Rather, she comes across as a smart-mouthed clubber with a hangover who has never moved further from home than St. Kilda. This is not helpful as the plot depends upon a contrast between the lives of Meg and her sisters, who have both fled Australia for supposedly more fulfilling lives overseas.

However, quibbles aside, this is a polished, professional show and it is heartening to see a company such as HIT Productions able to attract well-respected actors to perform around the country in quality plays. The company is committed to taking plays to venues outside of metropolitan centres and will tour seven productions this year. This is the second that has come to Brisbane in 2006 and we should look out for further opportunities to see what they bring our way.

Directed by Bruce Myles

Played Thursday 11, Friday 12, Saturday 13 May, 8pm

Running time: 2 hrs 20 minutes


— Maureen Strugnell

(Performance seen: 11th May 2006)
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Away  
Queensland Theatre Company

Professional production

Twenty years on and still wearing well. How many of us can say that?

But Michael Gow’s Australian classic, Away, is just as relevant as it was in 1986, and although we see it now through a multi-focal lens, its painful truths can still speak to us – that Happy Families are never what they seem, that marriages totter on the brink and often fall over, that young people die and that their elders are as helpless in the face of circumstance as they always have been and ever will be.

The Christmas beach holiday with the kids is part of the white Australian myth. Prawns on the beach for Christmas lunch, lots of lying around and working up a suntan (no fears about skin cancer then), the mating rituals of the young, and the enforced camaraderie of adults thrown together in the caravan park.

But under that cheap and cheerful exterior tragedies are waiting to happen. Young Tom is in temporary remission from leukaemia, his blue-collar Pommy migrant parents Vic and Harry know that he’s going to die soon but don’t want him to know, Tom knows it too but doesn’t want them to know. Everyone is putting on a brave face, determined to enjoy what they know, deep down, will be the last family holiday ever.

And that’s just Family No 1. Meg, in Tom’s class at school, is holidaying at a classier caravan park with her elitist mother Gwen and her down-trodden father Jim. Chance brings the family into contact with Tom’s family, and it seems as if Young Love is about to blossom, to the dismay of Meg’s mother – who is also, shall we say, just a little bit neurotic. Bex powders were invented especially for women like her, as every slight set-back brings on her migraines, and everyone suffers her martyrdom.

Family No 3? Roy, who is Tom and Meg’s headmaster, is trying to keep a stiff upper lip after the death of his only son in Vietnam, as well as preserve the façade that his profession demands, but his wife Coral’s response to the tragedy is to retreat into her shell and ignore the rest of the world.

And Family No 4, Rick and Leonie, are an unhappy young married couple on their honeymoon and out of their social depth in a Gold Coast hotel. (This is the 80’s, after all.)

There’s a pack of diasters waiting to happen, and so they do, with everything you can imagine going wrong, including a cyclone. But it’s an ill wind, as they say, and Families 1 – 3 end up on a beautiful secluded beach, where all wrongs will be righted and there will be a fairy-tale ending, or so it seems. Is it The Tempest all over again, as the references seem to suggest?

‘Fraid not. Although there are reconciliations, young love doesn’t win out, and there are no happy endings, just a coming to terms with the vicissitudes of life. A troubled peace and the knowledge that perhaps love must be sought in unimagined ways is the only comfort Gow has to offer, but it’s an ending more realistic than any 17th century fairy tale.

When it was first produced, Away was a play for its time, but the big question is how it has lasted the distance. The temptation for Michael Gow, who directed as well as wrote the piece, might have been to update it, trying to prove the universal nature of its theme. But he courageously avoided this cop-out, leaving it firmly in its own period, with all the inherent difficulties.

The play was a time-warp even in its own day, for the post-Vietnam references place the action firmly in the 1960s. To begin with, then, there are three time layers – the 1960s, the 1980s and the 2000s – and looking back forty years, the culture of the 1960s is today a big joke, perfect culture-cringe material. The clothes, the hair-do’s, the racism, the class differences, are all things we have outgrown in our own sophisticated era.

Or have we? Are we any better at dealing with death, with social relationships, with grief, with love, than our parents and grandparents were? By distancing the audience from the action through the potential joke of the design – Robert Kemp gets it those costumes just right – Michael Gow makes us work hard to overcome our modern-era prejudices and, with the help of a powerful cast, forces us to look at the characters on their own terms rather than our own. Yes, we may snigger at those dreadful bouffant do’s and hideous house dresses, not to mention the men’s shorter-than-shorts, but these are real people with real problems that can’t be ignored by re-focussing our modern lens. We are forced not just to take them seriously, but to examine our own reactions and to find that we, like them, have been weighed in the balances and found wanting.

The cast of eight acted as a genuine ensemble, with nobody up-staging anyone else. Leon Cain and Francesca Savige as Tom and Meg could be called the young romantic leads, but their problems are no simpler or heart-rending than those of their elders. Sad Roy (Joss McWilliam) trying to hide his own sorrow and save face before the school population, as well as dealing with his wife’s hysteria, is a the model of the emotionally confused 60s man.

Georgina Symes is a sad-but-dippy Coral, turning inwards after the death of her son and breaking Roy’s heart as well as her own; while Harry and Vic (Daniel Murphy and Sue Dwyer) have the cheerful resilience of the British new chums who were the backbone of that particular period of migration, grateful for everything Australia has given them while grieving internally for the fate of their son. Barbara Lowing and Richard Sydenham as Meg’s mother and put-upon father drag us back screaming into the 1960’s. Were we/they really as ghastly as that? These two sharp-edged performers make us believe it, and not just about the 1960s, but today as well. If ever there were a Dreadful Warning, it’s this couple.

So yes, this production really works on three parallel levels, speaking to three generations with equal force. No happy A Midsummer Night’s Dream resolution here, for fairies are spiteful as well as beneficent and, like Fate, they cannot be relied upon to play fair. All we have is the return to equilibrium that we find at the end of King Lear , another framing Shakespearean reference in the play. The loss of children, the breaking up of families, the coming to terms with change, and the inescapable pain of growing up, no matter how old you are – these are the issues the play raises.

It’s like being in a hall of mirrors, looking backward to the past and forward to the future, and realising the sad truth that, in spite of changes in fashion, no generation can escape the faults of its parents. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose , as the old adage has it – the more things change, the more they stay the same.


Directed by Michael Gow, designed by Robert Kemp

Playing until 3 June 2006 (Wednesday – Saturday at 7.30pm, Tuesdays at 6.30pm, matinees Saturday 2pm, Wednesday 1pm)

Duration : 2 hours, including 20 minute interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 4th May 2006)
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The Clown from Snowy River  
deBASE productions (Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts)


By Bridget Boyle and Liz Skitch


There’s an enormous amount of talent in the deBASE group, who bring clowning to a higher level than we ever see in commercial circus. Beneath their silliness is a genuine attempt to address important issues, and in this heavily condensed history of Australia (seven segments in one hour) they pack quite a punch – sometimes. At other times the silliness just gets out of hand and becomes puerile, but let’s look at the good things first.

The technical skills of the six players are beyond criticism. Liz Skitch, Jonathan Brand, Laurel Collins, Allen Laverty, Nadine McDonald-Dowd and Mark Sheppard are agile, controlled and very witty as they morph from role to role while still retaining their intrinsic individual qualities, and each character is distinguished from the other in personality type, costume and routines. I particularly like the way they have brought indigenous and whitefella situations together in an even-handed way – we don’t get the usual white-versus-black issues, but a more general poor-fella-my-country philosophy, where the less powerful – white workers as well as indigenous people – get the rough end of the pineapple every time.

It’s an impressive attempt to see all Australians as one with the bosses as the enemy, and the victims range from the Aboriginal people of Botany Bay when Captain Cook first comes ashore; to the foot soldiers at Gallipoli being sent to a purposeless slaughter; to Burke and Wills and their friend Murray Darling; and to Ned Kelly as a misguided hero in a clay flowerpot helmet.

But this is where I began to get nervous. I know the show was devised with a young audience in mind, but at times it lost focus and the silliness took over, to the detriment of the content. Of course we can laugh at terrible things - The Chaser, Spicks and Specs and even The Glass House are essential viewing for anyone who wants to see political behaviour satirised – but this show is at times a little too silly and undisciplined, adolescent and crazy rather than witty, so that the gags became more important than the ideas behind them, and the sense of proportion was lost.

It also raises the question of what is an appropriate subject for satire, and whether some things are too important to be mocked. Are there still taboos and cows too sacred to be touched? Is it really appropriate to send up the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli? Farting the Last Post is quite funny in a Monty Python kind of way, and time and distance lend objectivity, but can we laugh at Schapelle Corby yet? We will never be able to laugh at the Myall Creek massacre, of course or, to use a contemporary example, make jokes about little Sophie Delezio’s latest tragedy, but The Chaser had a few good jokes about the Beaconsfield miners last week. Was that because they had a happy ending? There is a fine line between satire and simple bad taste, and I don’t think this show always managed it well.

The show needed more discipline, both in the writing and the performance, and it points up the dangers of having writers direct their own show, especially when one of them is also a performer. Almost by definition they lack the necessary objectivity to see what works in performance and what doesn’t, and if they’d had a dramaturge and an outside director, many of the gaucheries might have been avoided.

End of lecture, however. There were lots of good things, like the send-up of the Sydney Olympics, and I really liked the can-can, especially when Jonathan Brand, who clearly can’t dance for peanuts, did his segment sitting on the floor with somebody else’s legs kicking up behind him. Captain Cook was very patchy, but had one good line when he insisted that he wasn’t really a cook but a captain; and the running joke of Ned Kelly with his flower-pot helmet also worked well.

A lot of people whose opinion I greatly respect thought this show was very very funny and laughed all the way through it. I, on the other hand, barely managed to crack a smile, and I found much of the script self-indulgent and lacking in irony and wit. And I wasn’t the only one. So for the audience, it was a matter of “you pays your money and you makes your choice”, and if you’re one of the people who laughed themselves sick, please don’t write me off completely as a Grumpy Old Woman. The Chaser is my favourite television show, after all.

Directed by Bridget Boyle and Liz Skitch

Played 2 – 6 May 2006 at 7.30pm, with matinees Wednesday – Friday

Duration : 1 hour, no interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 2nd May 2006)
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Over the Top with Jim  
Villanova Players ((Morningside TAFE Theatre)


By Hugh Lunn



Amateur production


We are greeted at the entrance to the auditorium by people in big white aprons with Lunn’s Buns printed in red on them because, you see, Hugh Lunn’s dad always sent his leftover buns over to the convent which was the centre of the dangerous world of Annerley Junction.

Lunn’s Over the Top with Jim, which he adapted from his bestselling autobiography (with some script consultancy from Bille Brown), evokes a tight little Catholic world in Brisbane in the '50s in which there are constant vicious skirmishes between the convent school boys and the state school kids; where the Lunn kitchen was re-floored with the cast-off lino from the Catholic presbytery; and where the threat of eternal damnation was ever present.

I have a friend, Brisbane-born but resident in Texas for many years, who was overcome with waves of nostalgia when he first read Lunn’s book, and he’s followed the later volumes of autobiography religiously (dare I say) ever since. It was a cosy, homespun world: the family dinner with Aunt Vera’s Honeymoon Tart (there’s even a picture and the recipe in the program - it seems to have been made mainly of condensed milk), camping with the school cadets, saying prayers to Who (“Who made the world?”), ghastly sisters (not the nuns) tap dancing, Mum checking bottoms for worms when you’re asleep, and the Queensland School Readers and a recitation of How Horatius Kept the Bridge.

During interval, by a deft bit of eavesdropping, I heard people swapping memories of a Catholic childhood and discovered that not only Hugh Lunn but also Archbishop Bathersby had attended the performance the week before. Apparently both were happy with it. Villanova has a loyal following, and this play is a wonderful piece of programming. It will probably be booked out for the whole of the run.

There are inevitable comparisons with Cloudstreet in the big family saga area, but without the pathos, and more particularly with The Christian Brother in the wonderful school scenes, once again, though, without the pathos. Indeed much of the material was so similar to Ron Blair’s school scenes that it reinforced just how uniform and strongly based Irish Catholic education was throughout Australia - up until fairly recently really.

The same admonition not to put AMDG at the top of the exam paper if you were doing a state exam (“what does that mean?” says Jim, the new Russian kid, “Auntie Mary’s dead goats,” sniggers Lunn), Brother Basher’s delight in the cane and his acceptance that some of his pupils might end up in England as Aussie con men, and the clumsy attempt to teach concepts which often the Brothers themselves might not have understood—such as ?r2, “Take a meat pie ……”

Villanova depends upon the enthusiasm not only of its regular audiences. It also relies heavily on the many volunteers who work behind the scenes and who supply props and expertise of various kinds. In this show the work of the volunteers was particularly important and resulted in a wonderfully authentic look, from the photographs which were back-projected before each scene to the old school desks and genuine '50s clothes — a trumpeter in a gym slip, the pianist with a purple bow in her hair, and enough white gloves and sublime hats to satisfy everyone’s Auntie Mary. There was a lot of scene changing, seven or eight in each half, and for the most part it is handled efficiently. Perhaps the Ford car in which the family made the big trip to Melbourne involves the most elaborate bit of stage business, but it works after a fashion. “Just remember we’re not Catholic,” said Mum when they were held up by some town official/parking inspector (wearing a very strange hair piece for some reason).

The ensemble cast is particularly good in some well choreographed fight and sport scenes, and for the most part the principals are engaging, even if occasionally awkward in their command of the stage. I liked the personality of Robert Garnham’s Hughie, although he could work on his voice, which, though loud enough, needed better articulation. Jim (Ronan Lock) and Sister Vincent (Natalie Mean) are the most confident in their roles and have a stage presence lacking in some cast members. Ann Gaffney at the piano is superb.

I must confess to being mildly disconcerted seeing grown men in little boys’ shorts, and unfortunately the theatre was so small and the stage so close that the variety of skinny knobbly knees and hairy bulging thighs were at times a little too cosy for comfort. That said, however, there were some good songs and plenty of laughs, and as Sister Veronica said, “Every time you laugh, you get a holy soul out of Purgatory.” What more can I say?

Directed by Leo Bradley

Playing until 13 May. Friday-Saturday 21/22, 28-29 April; Thursday-Saturday 4-6, 11-13 May.

Duration: 2 hours 30 mins (including interval).



— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 28th April 2006)
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Love Letters  
Centenary Theatre Group


By A.R. Gurney

Amateur production


Written by prolific award-winning American playwright A.R. (Albert Ramsdell) Gurney in 1989, Love Letters reminds us of the loss represented by the decline in letter writing in the age of the txt msg.

Born to wealth and position, its WASP characters, Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner, begin their correspondence as childhood friends and continue to exchange letters through their separate and disparate lives until Melissa’s death some forty years later.

Andy’s carefully structured and conservative life proceeds from college to Yale and law school, naval service, law practice and politics. He marries once and raises three children who will probably follow his carefully trodden path.

Melissa’s chaotic journey provides the counterpoint. She drops out of college, fails as an artist, marries more than once, divorces, becomes estranged from her children, turns to the bottle and gigolos and dies prematurely.

We see all these facets of their respective lives through their letters. They share the thoughts and feelings lovers should (and sometimes do), but only for a brief period. Their true relationship is consummated too late, and only after Melissa’s death does Andy acknowledge to himself (through a letter to her mother) that he has loved Melissa all his life.

The play is written to be read, as letters are. The players, Brian Cannon and Beverly Wood, sit side by side to deliver the well- paced repartee the letters provide — a line, a passage, a whole epistle — informative, touchingly funny and often very moving. But the side-by-side setting does not serve to establish an appropriate ‘distance’ between the correspondents.

Without movement, the impact of the play depends on the voices, faces and a limited use of props. Beverly Wood adapts to these demands more effectively than Brian Cannon, but together they deliver a satisfying and rewarding evening.

The production deserves a longer run, and The Centenary Group is to be commended for staging this ‘one night stand.’


Directed by Gary O’Neil


— Ron Finney

(Performance seen: 22nd April 2006)
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Corporate  
Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts


By Louise Marshall

Loulabelle Productions

Amateur production


“I am woman, hear me roar!”

Oh, Helen Reddy, where are you now that we really need you? Back in 1972 you made a very necessary statement, and you shouted it loud and clear. You were strong, you were invincible, and you set the tone for much of the feminist rhetoric that was to influence popular culture.

But today, your 1970s voice sounds as strident as Germaine’s. First-wave feminism has long passed, and it’s a brave playwright who revisits it without a clear sense of irony and an even clearer post-modern vision. Which means that Louise Marshall’s new musical show, Corporate: Work’s a Bitch, is taking on a huge job.

I saw the play on a Saturday night, when the Sue Benner Theatre was packed with aspiring middle-management city types, lots of friends and relations, and a fair smattering of good corporate citizens. Not the audience you’d find at La Boite or the Brisbane Powerhouse, or even at other Metro Arts offerings; rather the kind of people who flock to shows like Menopause: the Musical and smutty British comedies. Lots of hairy-lesbian jokes, office sexual politics, deep cleavages and tight jocks, and of course girl-titter about the size of the men’s equipment.

I still can’t work this show out. Retro it certainly is, with flat cat-walk pancake make-up and busting bustiers, and silken legs as long as those in a Hollywood chorus line, but I couldn’t find any irony in the treatment. It was more like The Pyjama Game gone up-market, where the clichés of life in a city legal firm are no different from those on a 1960s factory floor. Guys rule, OK, and if a girl wants to get on she has to have balls of steel, even if it means tearing them from one of her male competitors. Let’s laugh at the old sexist clichés, the show seems to be saying, but let’s not really do anything to change them — in fact Corporate encourages rather than undermines sexism, by refusing to take it seriously.

Almost everyone in the cast is a product of The Actors Workshop, and whatever else they teach them there, it certainly isn’t theatrical professionalism. To start the show 20 minutes late on the fourth night of a run, without any explanation or apology, is insulting to an audience, and no other theatre company in town would dare to do it. But then, the show doesn’t really try to be professional. It’s more like graduation night at an expensive Talent School, where pretty prancing ponies show off their tricks for the talent-spotters, and the makeup artists and costume designers are the real stars of the show. I haven’t seen so much gorgeous underwear in years, and the makeup is straight from a potential barrel girl’s portfolio.

Clear diction and projection obviously aren’t an important part of the curriculum either, if this production is anything to judge by. Louise Marshall’s script is clichéd enough, but when it’s gabbled and garbled as badly as it is by most of the actors, even the most obvious of the comments fall flat. Most of the laughs are generated by the physical action, like the tizzy walk of the Doris Day look-alike who teeters on her kitten heels, and the serial bonking on the office desks. Great choreography from Simone Fallon, but as far as scripts go, Michael Frayne does farce much better.

This is partly a personal judgment, of course, because plays like Corporate are not to my taste. The playwright has taken the easy option of sending up an unattractive culture without taking it seriously. There are important issues at stake here which could have been addressed in a less simplistic manner. Heaven forbid that I should come across as an ageing, joyless, hairy-legged, ball-breaking heterosexual feminist, but this show needs a sharper wit, a keener edge, if it’s to be anything more than a silly romp.

However, as I’m also the last person to knock new playwrights and companies, full marks to Louise Marshall and her team for having a go, and I have to admit there’s an audience for this kind of show, as the full houses demonstrate.

Who’s going to play Twister on the board room table? How many para-legals can the CEO hump in one night? Will those golden glitter false eyelashes drop off? Which office tart will burst out of her décolletage first? If you care about these questions, then you might well enjoy it. But on a professional level, I’d be very worried indeed if my solicitor’s alcohol of choice were Johnny Walker and coke in a can. Don’t young corporates have any class these days? Whatever happened to Bolly and that other kind of coke? Come back, Eddie and Patsy, all is forgiven.

To sum up, then — nice try, everyone, but don’t give up your day jobs. As far as the cast goes, I’m tempted to paraphrase what the MGM talent scout said about Fred Astaire at his first audition — “can’t act, can’t sing, can dance a little.”

I’d really like to be proven as wrong as he was, so I’m looking forward to Loulabelle’s next production. With a little more wit and sophistication, and a competent dramaturge, this company and this playwright could go far.

Directed by Kathy Burns

Playing Tuesday 25 April at 7.30pm, then Wed–Sat at 7.30pm until 29 April 2006

Duration : 2 hours 15 minutes, with a 15 minute interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 22nd April 2006)

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Howie the Rookie  
Kooemba Jdarra


By Mark O’Rowe

Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse


Cast: Aaron Fa’aoso, Simon Hapea Professional production


The moral is — if you’ve got scabies, don’t kip on your friend’s spare mattress, or there’ll be tears before bedtime.

Leah Purcell’s direction of this internationally-renowned play takes Kooemba Jdarra (or KJ, as they are now sometimes called) into yet another dimension, another forward leap for this always-innovative and vital indigenous performing arts company.

For the first time, to my knowledge at least, they are presenting a play that has not been written by an indigenous Australian. At the Edinburgh Festival seven years ago, Leah Purcell was so impressed by Mark O’Rowe’s smash hit about Irish street kids that she has adapted it to an Australian environment. It’s a valid concept, for tough kids are tough kids, and some sub-cultures transcend racial and national boundaries and speak their own universal language.

The precise vocabulary of the streets may vary from city to city, and some of the idioms may be strange to an Australian audience, but those who let themselves go with the beat, and resist the temptation to make literal sense of it all, will soon be absorbed into the rough lyrical poetry of the street rapper. Its cadences have their own beauty, its rhythms their own mesmerising effect, and although we may neither like nor care about Howie and Rookie, much less accept their vision and their ethical framework, it’s ultimately the poem that matters.

Youth must find its voice, and in this show they find it and hold onto it tenaciously. In the Friday night slums the law of the jungle rules, which means that might is right, and sexual conquest is just part of the game. “One minute people’s ya bruz, the next they’re after ya. When someone’s after ya, you’s hunted.”

The story is told in two monologues from Howie Lee (Simon Hapea) and his deadly enemy but no relation Rookie Lee (Aaron Fa’aoso). Howie and his mates catch scabies and track down the perpetrator by a process of reasoning that even Andy Dalziel wouldn’t come at, determining to gi’ him a hidin’. Along the way Howie is pursued by the buxom Avalanche, sister of one of his mates, and his story of how they both decide, after half a dozen pints, that the other is sexually repulsive, adds another dimension to lives that we may find sad but are the norm in this environment.

Simon Hapea is deadly (in every sense of the word) in his performance. His is the longer monologue, and he stalks around the stage, confronting the audience with an in-your-face presence that projects a barely-concealed sense of menace, while allowing the humour of the situations full run as well. At first his speech rhythms are annoying, with their consistent pattern of a rising inflexion, but soon they become part of the poetry, creating the time-honoured Brechtian effect of removing us from the action so that we can watch the performance as if through a hazy screen, but bringing us up sharply at specific moments of threat.

Aaron Fa’aoso is shorter, stockier, less menacing, more a figure of fun, even when he meets his nemesis and is beaten up (in mime, as the victim, with nobody else on stage). He too stalks, but lurks at the back of the stage rather than up-front — and Leah Purcell has made effective us of the full stage of the Visy Theatre, using the back pillars and shadows which most productions ignore, thus giving the simple set a depth that increases the emotional impact.

Here, of course, credit must also go to production designer Tanja Beer who achieves some spectacular effects, such as randomly projecting the actors’ heads or body parts onto the back wall or on the brick columns. She obviously worked closely with lighting designer Conon Fitzpatrick, another talented local.

The big question is how well this specifically Irish play (it won the Irish Times New Play Award 2000, the 1999 George Devine Award, the 1999 Rooney Award for Irish Literature and the Herald Angel for the Best Production at the 1999 Edinburgh Festival Fringe) translates into an urban indigenous setting.

And the answer is — pretty well, on the whole. The two actors have enormous stage confidence, and cope admirably with the huge physical and vocal demands made on them. The mimed fights were not quite as successful, as each in his separate way had to mime a multi-character punch-up, and it was very hard to sustain credibility. But I can’t think of any actors in Brisbane, except perhaps Scott Witt, who could have managed such a Herculean task.

In language, theme and performance Howie the Rookie is rough as guts, so don’t expect to be soothed by it. It’s certainly not West Side Story but, as the publicity material has it, more like Once Were Warriors meets Trainspotting.

Definitely not one to take your aged aunt to see, but if you’re interested in the next step that KJ are taking along the way to becoming a really important theatre company, then you shouldn’t miss it.

Directed by Leah Purcell

Playing Wednesday–Saturday until 29 April, evenings at 8pm, matinees Saturday 22, Thursday 27, Saturday 29 at 2.30pm

Duration : 90 minutes, no interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 20th April 2006)
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Seven Last Words from the Cross  
Canticum (St John's Cathedral)


By James McMillan

Semi-professional


How privileged we are to have a chamber music choir like Canticum in Brisbane. Founded by Emily Cox 11 years ago, it has always been an important part of Australia’s music community, not just giving performances of the great Baroque classic like Bach’s St John Passion, but introducing audiences to modern composers, as well as more obscure composers from the past, to enrich our musical imagination.

Last year Canticum was selected as a special guest choir at the 7th World Symposium of Choral Music in Kyoto, and last week we heard the first of their four major performances, in the form of their traditional Good Friday concert in St John’s cathedral.

I don’t pretend to be a music critic, so this isn’t so much a review as a sharing of the experience of last Friday. Liturgically the evening of Good Friday is a time for quiet reflection after the traumatic Passion services, a time for believers and unbelievers alike to wind down, to be sombre, to think about serious things and seek spiritual nourishment in a passive way. Cox has always caught this mood perfectly in her Good Friday concerts, and this year’s was no exception.

It began simply enough, with a traditional motet by the 16th century Spanish composer Tomas Luis de Victoria, a setting of words from the Good Friday liturgy of the Adoration of the Cross, Vere languores nostros (“surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows”). This was sung from behind the cathedral’s high altar, and the pure notes and complex harmonies poured down into the nave with a subtly theatrical effect, prickling the back of my neck in the darkling light.

And then came the highlight of the evening, a startling different modern piece by contemporary Scottish composer James MacMillan (born 1959), based on the traditional Seven Last Words of Christ from the cross, which astonished and overwhelmed the dumbfounded audience, as we listened to strange harmonies and our ears were simultaneously shocked and stimulated by the juxtapositions of mood, tone and volume.

This is where I wish I had the technical vocabulary to convey what was going on. From the quiet beginning of the “Father, forgive them”, the singers and musicians built to a chilling lament; the “Woman, behold thy son” sequence was a frenzied evolution from near-hysteria to exhaustion; and the third movement, “This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise”, took the liturgical versicle Ecce Lignum Crucis , where the cross is thrice displayed to the people, and sang it three times rising from the basses through the tenors to the altos, finishing with a fiendishly difficult repetition by the high sopranos, which just teetered on the edge of a screech. It was impossible to believe that the human voice could reach so high without becoming ugly — imagine the Queen of the Night’s aria in sorrowful mode and you almost have it — and the highest praise must go to soprano soloists Lyn Moorfoot and Tricia Bartkowiak for pulling it off.

And so it went on from lament to desolate harmonics to distant whispering, to the hammer-blows of reproach and resigned anguish, finishing with a long instrumental lament with Scottish overtones, leaving the audience emotionally exhausted but deeply fulfilled at the same time. It was, quite simply, one of the most emotional musical experiences I’ve ever had.

You’ve missed it, of course, but put it in your diary for next year. And don’t forget Canticum’s other concerts this year, in June, November and December.

Directed by Emily Cox

Played Friday 14 April 2006

Duration : 1 hour


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 14th April 2006)
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It's a Dad Thing  
Tim Lawson Productions (Gardens Theatre)


Created and written by Liam Amor, Michael Fry, Matthew Green, Colin James, David Lander, Geoff Paine

QUT Gardens Theatre

Professional production


It’s a Dad Thing is the opening show in a new venture by QUT Gardens Theatre to bring interstate professional theatre to Brisbane on an annual subscription basis. Five short-run shows are scheduled for 2006, with Hannie Rayson’s Hotel Sorrento up next in May to be followed by two WA touring productions and a NSW production of a one-man show by Henri Szeps.

Under each announcement in the subscription brochure are the magic words, “The Australian Government is proud to be associated with this tour through the national performing arts touring program, Playing Australia, which gives Australians across the country the opportunity to see some of our best performing arts.” What’s happening here? Has our government suddenly realised that unemployed actors tend to become politically active given half a chance? Pay for them to go out on the road in the time-honoured players’ way, and your problem’s solved? Should we be sceptical about the term Playing Australia ?

Given the fact that two of the shows in this series are about kids and families, should we be wondering about some hidden agenda? My guess is that there’s someone down in Canberra who is actually on the side of the angels, beavering away in the Australia Council for the Arts, supporting the arts in a pretty hands-on way with real money without necessarily running every choice by the Minister. Just like they’d have us believe the AWB works, really.

The sooner Brisbane theatregoers become aware of this QUT venture, the better, because not only is it great to have more choice in professional theatre in town (and incidentally in regional areas as well), but it’s also a delight to see what they have done with the old Con Theatre. It always had a nice intimate feel about it with good sightlines and easy access, and the fairly recent makeover has given it a chic look with a greatly enlarged foyer for pre-show and interval drinks. Pity it was so sparsely filled on opening night, but increased advertising should fix that for the rest of the season. You can, by the way, also ask for free parking when you book, which is not to be sneezed at.

And so to the show. Its history is quite interesting: a group of suburban men in Melbourne wanting to make a show about men and parenthood meet every Saturday and finally test the show in South Yarra and then play it at a couple of other Melbourne venues. The present production has a completely new cast, and it’s been doing well on its regional tour so far. It’s directed by one of the original cast and produced by Tim Lawson who is the person responsible for all those productions of Topol’s Fiddler on the Roof that periodically show up in Australian theatres. The five actors are all excellent and very experienced, but the show is very much still a series of stand-ups, despite the attempt to give it the structure of a working bee at the local kids’ playground. The working bee, by the way, gives the opportunity for some nice business with power tools (doubling as an ultrasound tool), and provides some colourful pieces of the set to leap around on.

The ending when the playground is finished is stunning with a boat and a lighthouse complete with seagulls and the George-Clooney lookalike (Tony Farrell) giving a very acceptable rendition of Nessun dorma with his vincero rivalling Big Lucy’s. His reply, “Piss off,” to his mates was even better.

There are some very funny bits of role-playing, like the Nazi midwife, the new mum who keeps putting off the sex scene, and the super dad, but mostly it’s the men retelling their stories of the marriage, the pregnancy and parenthood. It’s all a bit blokey and predictable, with the same tired old routines like the turkey baster insemination (here by one member of a gay couple), cowering up the north end during the birth, burying the placenta, Phenergan as a performance-enhancing drug, and how to cope with the vagaries of the postnatal woman. In the role-playing the women are delineated by one of those dreadful flowered headbands which young mothers insist on putting on hairless new daughters just so people won’t goo and say “what a handsome little fellow he is.” There are some moving and clever moments though, particularly the group singing of Beautiful Child.

It could have been mawkish and it did go on a bit too long, but the singing was great. A very funny and clever sequence was the ’63 Ford Falcon with four of the actors dressed in Hawaiian shirts as the new dad’s old mates, representing different parts of the car, the body, the engine, the dashboard and the upholstery, while he has his last spin before he trades it in for a Commodore to accommodate the new twins.

During the interval the cast interacted with the audience and then grooved into a pretty chaotic dance. Perhaps a less predictable second half might have helped to maintain the interest. It was more of the same though, more stand-up with some attempt at seriousness such as “Do what you can, love your kids and hope it all works out” or updated music hall patter on the playground boat, “Where’s your buccaneer? On my bucking head.”

It’s a Dad Thing doesn’t set out to be a male Vagina Monologues. It doesn’t have the emotion and complexity for one thing. But it’s funnier than Grumpy Old Men, and not quite so misogynistic.

Directed by Geoff Paine

Played 3 performances only, from Wednesday 5 April to Friday 7 April at 8pm

Duration : (including interval) 2 hours

— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 5th April 2006)
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