State Theatre Company of SA. Dunstan Playhouse. 2 May 2019
A snapshot of Australia’s literary past is most glorious and laudable grist for the national theatre mill.
Thus does a new generation meet George Johnston, distinguished war correspondent and author of My Brother Jack and his writer wife, Charmian Clift. They were renowned in the 1950s and 60s for abandoning journalism and Australia and retreating to the Greek Islands to pursue the great sun-drenched ex-pat dream, an exotic escape wherein writers could live from the proceeds of their works. To a fair extent, they succeeded. Johnston’s seminal Australian novel, My Brother Jack, was written there. But there were considerable costs to achieving the literary dream.
This play by Sue Smith explores this wonderful, meaty tale of expat Australiana.
It sings with gestalt. Visually, thematically and in mood, it makes a potent and memorable impact.
Firstly, for this Queensland/SATC production, there is the set. And what a set. It is somewhere near to perfection. Designer Vilma Mattila fills the stage with a sweep of whitewashed wall and one vast curve of stairs. An arched door, a window, a string of garlic and dammit, we are in Hydra. Just like that. You can almost taste the retsina. Chairs and tables, desks, and even a boat are carried on and off this set as the play’s action moves from island tavernas to domestica to creative frenzy.
The characters have descended upon the island, triumphant and liberated, among friends old and new in an exuberance of bohemia. As one raised within the bohemian milieu, one was a bit askance at the depiction of the “bohemians” as name-dropping showoffs. The Australian Bohemian intelligentsia may have been flamboyant but it never struck one as pretentious. One supposes this exaggeration is a device to impress upon the new generations the identities of the arts luminaries of the time: Sartre, de Beauvoir, et al.
Prominent on the scene with Johnston and Clift are the characters Mark and Ursula who are identified by the narrator as Sid Nolan and Cynthia Reed. One assumes their names are veiled to mask the fact that Sid and Cyn only stayed for one season and that the writers’ Hydra world was peopled by a succession of talented notable friends and visitors. Nonetheless, the characters seem decisively drawn, albeit Cynthia seems by far closer to the bone of truth than the Sid interpretation. Indeed, Cynthia/Ursula is a marvellous performance by Tiffany Lyndall-Knight and she brings home many of the idiosyncrasies reputed of Nolan’s brittle and protective wife. Vic/Sid is depicted by Hugh Parker as a more muted character. He captures Nolan’s neatness but makes him dramatically more Ocker than one recalls; one doubts he would ever say “Urs and me are learning”. He was a well-read and well-spoken man.
There are other imperfections and anachronisms which seem to have escaped director Sam Strong’s attention. Typing, for instance. It is hard for anyone today to type the way the newspaper people of yore pounded their machines and these actors are almost but not quite there. Heaven knows how we slammed out copy, but it required strength and rhythm, lacking here amid a scatter of verbal asides and an absence of slamming carriage returns.
Similarly, the smoking: these characters of media yore were furiously heavy smokers, but no one typed with a cigarette between their fingers. It knocked the burning head into the keyboard, ruining both the smoke and the machine. Typing was done with the fag either dangling in the mouth or in the ashtray beside the machine.
Perhaps it is not too late to correct this.
Also, women never walked around brushing their full skirts with lighted ciggies held beside the hip. Even drunk. This was not a thing.
But, one has to be grateful that the chronic smoking of the period is powerfully represented in this history play, and also the boozing. Johnston and Clift were alcoholics and they lived in a world where assorted powerful drugs were common and available. Certainly, as the play evolves, the punishment of their lifestyle becomes more heartbreakingly evident and Smith has captured well the ravages of the years on both principal characters. She also paints interestingly the way in which Clift was both thwarted and energised in her literary partnership with her husband. It was a tortuous relationship and deeply fascinating.
Anna McGahan plays Clift, taking her from heedless pregnant joie de vivre to worn and weary survivor of a mighty literary battleground. Not always clear to the ear, she brings soul to the performance and leaves the audience wondering what the fates might have been had things been different.
Bryan Proberts is just the right sort of craggy man to play one of Australia’s most voluble craggy characters. It is a fearless performance, wracked with coughing and moody unpleasantness. One does not like him, but one feels his pain and also immense relief at his success.
Kevin Spink comes and goes as the whole word of outsiders: Greek and French, villager and artist. He peoples the stage very pleasantly.
Quentin Grant’s soundscape is mystifying. It feels culturally adrift and extraneous.
The story’s larger picture is threaded into explanatory shape by the couple’s poet son, Martin, who is given a gentle, simpatico ever-presence by Nathan O’Keefe. That these writers also have children and a family life seems unlikely from their self-preoccupied lifestyles. The play’s scant attention to them deepens the audience’s emotional experience, giving a strong feeling of the potency of the bombastic love affair of Johnston and Clift.
Hence, despite coming to grief on some nuances of history, this critic who could almost say she “was there”, rejoices in this new work and that it celebrates our literary history, both in journalism and fiction. Hooray.
Samela Harris
When: 2 to 19 May
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au
Festival Theatre. 7 Apr 2019
Many are the levels on which one gives thanks to Disney.
In an era when vapid YouTubers are overloading the entertainment zeitgeist, Disney stands up for quality, expertise, technological innovation, imagination, and cultural tradition. It depends on its mountain of money because touring productions of this scale are prodigiously extravagant. The flying magic carpet alone is an unimaginably expensive device, a squillion dollars’ worth of sophistication just to realise a few minutes of timeless fantasy. It is jaw-droppingly wondrous. Like most of the show.
And so it comes to pass that an 18th century fairy story from the Arabian Nights flows forth into a new generation. It is old culture cutting the edge of contemporary technology, a magical story delivered through technical wizardry.
The Adelaide season features an Australian cast which not only has the consummate talent for the power-packed production, but the fitness and discipline to keep the action up, up, up. It’s a fast show – rarely is the stage not swarming with cleverly choreographed activity. Much of it is as surprising and delightful as it is skilful; Aladdin scampering across the city rooftops, for instance – the city turrets rise and fall as he goes.
As for Aladdin's magic cave, what a shimmering golden spectacle. It is blindingly beautiful. The audience draws collective breath in joyful awe.
And when the big tap number emerges, well, there are faces grinning from ear to ear throughout the auditorium.
The show has lots of everything for everyone, albeit the music depends just on a couple of major numbers. Graeme Isaako and Shubshri Kandiah pair nicely as Aladdin and the lovely Princess Jasmine and theirs is the sweetest of sweet duets upon the magic carpet as it glides aloft in the night sky. It is unforgettable and a fantastical reverie.
One can believe the genie as played by Gareth Jacobs has been bottled up for aeons when he erupts from the lamp in a madness of highly-skilled, high energy which he sustains, seeming inexhaustibly, along with enough ham to feed the homeless. He and the dancing ensemble leave one quite breathless simply watching their stamina and precision.
While this gorgeous confection of a blockbuster show is diverting the attention of the young from their fixation with social media, the producers have injected a hint of that other modern world in the depiction of the harem girls. They flit and flirt and pose as if they have come straight out of Instagram. Indeed, the female content of Aladdin must have been quite an issue for the producers since the original story has the beautiful princess simply marrying the handsome go-getter urchin who becomes sultan by dint of his gender. In today’s version, the princess is more emancipated and the Sultan is forced to compromise tradition and create a law in which a woman becomes equal and will rule the land together with her new husband.
And thus is Disney keeping the old dreams alive for a new generation.
Samela Harris
When: 7 Apr to 9 Jun
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
isthisyours? theatre presented by State Theatre and Kojo. Space Theatre. 11 Apr 2019
The gloves are off. Once upon a time, it took a brave male playwright to take the mickey out of toxic male culture. David Williamson’s play, The Club, was controversial the moment it hit the stage in the 70s when the term “toxic masculinity” was yet to be invented. It exposed and satirised the boozy, seedy, and manipulative underbelly of the Aussie-Rules football culture.
Now, in the days of women’s footy, women have taken over his play and given it a mighty, mad kick in the funny-bone.
Williamson has approved this all-female version directed by Tessa Leong under the isthisyours? and Insite Arts banners. He said women had suffered men behaving badly for so long that it was time they behaved badly over men behaving badly. And so it comes to pass that three heavenly actors have slapped moustaches on their faces, pigeon-pouted their chests, and turned his classic play 360 degrees and then some in a wild act of retributive whimsy.
This production of The Club is a parody of a satire. It is stylised, inventive, zany and yet hard-hitting. It is all strutting, chain-smoking bully boys in backroom power plays. In many ways, it bounces so far from the original play that it feels like a different work altogether. Perhaps it is because there are only three in the cast and they don’t so much as wear different hats as they leap under different wigs to portray multiple characters. It is a zany and diverting device, the wigs hanging from aloft and actors darting from one to another. As the play progresses, Leong takes this visual gag to extremes and it seems that anyone can leap to any character wig. Meanwhile, the hard wall of the set is replaced by a canvas facade and, with characters in stoned-out-of-their-minds inflated phallus costumes, the play becomes a circus. Therein, the gender impersonation itself is defused. Moustaches come off. Lipstick is applied. Moustaches come back. Somehow the plot survives and the production bounds to its grand reveal. It’s a fabulous climax.
The actors are a bliss of well-studied blokedom. They assume posture and traits of high comic exaggeration, scratching a crotch here, flexing a muscle there, picking up and sending up the myriad macho mannerisms. Nadia Rossi’s gait in her low-girthed pot-bellied fat suit is desperately funny and, oh so well observed. And how smugly she can bare her teeth. What a slimy bullyboy she makes. Meanwhile, Louisa Mignone is the vanity of masculinity, a preening 70s executive fashion-plate, or sleek as the star player and sometimes unnervingly convincing with it. Ellen Steel asserts a sense of physical intimidation, chest out, muscles taut, eyes wide and confrontational.
Don’t mess with this boy. And watch out. He may not be what he seems.
It is not so much that the play is the thing in this madcap androgynous production so much as it is feast and farce of funny acting and a celebration of this different era when, any minute, the gender roles may be turned again.
Samela Harris
When: 11 to 20 Apr
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
StateTheatre Company of SA. 4 Apr 2019
Clearly, from the plethora of solo shows in the Fringe, it seems we truly are in the era of the one-hander when actors are tested to the core to retain lines, sustain focus, and bring the stage alive, peopled by their own dramatic prowess.
In Renato Musolino’s case, it is not people but animals which must be evoked; lots and lots of them as so significantly conceived by George Orwell in the mighty political satire of the 1940s, Animal Farm.
If only things had changed. But no. Orwell’s dystopian animal utopia is as fresh as a steaming 2019 cow plop.
These many decades of world politics have produced only different shades of the same old ugly power-plays and corruption.
What was old is new again, or perhaps has just gone on and on.
For his last production before heading overseas for a new chapter in his career, State Theatre director Geordie Brookman adapted Orwell to the shape of a one-man presentation. It’s a neat cut and the show runs to about 80 minutes with the major characters well and truly intact.
Its staging design is strangely austere, just a raised truck supporting a row of slim lighting rods to symbolise the farm rules. Spots on posts flank the stage. Lighting plays a major role, coming in on the actor to transform him to what seems like a bodiless face suspended in the darkness or pulling out to show him whole, his shirt soaked in sweat as he plods relentlessly through farm labours, Musolino remains on the ramp of this set device. It is his magnified microcosm.
He uses his face and voice to realise the characters of the farm animals. His vocal agility is superb. He injects squeals and grunts into his dialogue, whinnies and growls; for each beast, an identifying voice, an expression or posture. Napoleon, king of the farm, the most equal on an ever-evolving hierarchy of more equal than others, is an oinking triumph of characterisation. Muslino leaps between beasts and one loathes the self-serving propagandist Squealer, loves the gruff cynicism of the wise old donkey Benjamin, and weeps for the valiant old horse Boxer, perhaps voiced a little old to begin with. Orwell was commenting on the politics of the 40s with satirical swipes at Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Molotov, and others. But today’s audiences see modern politicians in this Brookman adaptation. They can’t wait to chew it over in the foyer.
It turns out to be quite a good bang for a State director to go out with.
The show had a short run in Adelaide at The Space and was booked out from the beginning. This critic was invited to the Barossa Valley to see it performed in the beautiful Brenton Langbien Theatre at Tanunda where, in such a large proscenium theatre, some of its detail was lost beyond about Row H. It needs an intimate space. One understands it will tour and, with the skill and stamina of Renato Musolino, it will stir and thrill wherever it goes.
Samela Harris
When: Closed
Where: Space Theatre, and touring
Bookings: Closed
SA Playwrights Theatre. Holden Street Theatres. 4 Apr 2019
It was not the chance of tonsorial genetics but a Bordertown hairdresser who was responsible for the lush glamour of former Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s hair. This is the delicious conceit of Matt Hawkins’ new play, Bordertown.
Hawke was born in Bordertown, son of a Congregational minister. He left town as a lad and visited rarely, but nonetheless he was and is the town's most famous son. It was on one of those visits purports this play, that he popped in on Patricia's hairdressing salon giving her the chance to claim her own slice of fame as the creator of the Silver Budgie’s fabulous hair-do.
With Hawke’s photo on the salon wall and magazines full of celebrity gossip on racks, star-struck Patricia obsesses that her attractive daughter should be not be trapped in small town anonymity but should dance with the stars in Hollywood. So, against her will Felicity is packed off with a stash of antidepressants to stay with an “auntie” who has contacts with the studio makeup people. Sure enough, to her mother’s satisfaction, Flick soon flirts her way into the heart of a drug-taking B-grade comic actor and into the gossip columns of New Idea. Then, suddenly, she is dead and the actor is shunning his agent’s wise advice and sneaks off to Bordertown to attend her funeral. The playwright, who appears in the play as the agent, was inspired to this crazy plot line by the true story of Hollywood’s Jim Carrey making a similar small-town pilgrimage.
But, what happens next in sleepy little Bordertown is an absolutely wild ride. Suspend the disbelief. Come on down Stephen King.
Matt Hawkins is carving a fine reputation in this hardest of writing crafts. His Frank Forbes and the Yahoo Boy was quite a hit last year in the Bakehouse. This play is a weird caper with some memorable characters, some good streaks of humour and a nice sharp barb pierced into the world’s tedious obsession with celebrity.
Its striking Maurice Hamm set with its ubiquitous checkerboard lino floor and long glamour curtains is compatible with the play’s assorted scene changes. Playwright Hawkins directs the work with the smarts that one would hope of one who knows it from conception. He also does a passable job of the slimy English talent agent. But, pivotal to the integrity of the production is the performance of Kate O’Reilly as the hard-bitten Patricia. This performance is cleverly delivered as if to a client via the mirror. She is sour, sharp, assertive, deluded. It is a recognisable and arresting characterisation. Kim Fox is simpatico as dominated daughter Flick and there is a lovely scene of her pushing her luck with lover boy in the shadows of the Hollywood sign. Chris Asimos plays the movie star, Emilio Sanchez, and he is equipped with all the charm and chutzpah to make it entirely believable. It is a gorgeous star-quality performance. Lastly, the hometown man, the handy plot-link gopher, is Dennis the taxi driver and Brendan Cooney reliably delivers the goods, however confusing they might be.
Bordertown may not quite be "the great Australian play” but it is as relevant as it is zany. Well-honed in production, it is what they say in the classics: a very nice night’s entertainment.
Samela Harris
When: 4 to 13 Apr
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com