Review: Take Up Thy Bed & Walk

This review contains mild spoilers. 

At the opening of the double doors is Kyra Kimpton. She welcomes us into the space in small groups, where we are invited to walk around and discover. On five pillows on five beds screen projected short films animated through embroidery about young women, you can listen through headphones, read the captioning, read the braille, or, at one watch the Auslan interpretation; Michelle Ryan holds up embroidered sheets with sayings about women with disabilities; in one corner is a model of the set; in another is a live scorpion – don’t touch! reads the warning. No one says as much, but what we’re doing is part of a tactile introduction to the set and to the playing space: this functional introduction to the space presented for the blind and vision impaired before audio described shows is here part of the work itself.

Take Up Thy Bed & Walk is, by all accounts, the first “fully accessible” theatre work in Australia. While we have, in recent years, seen an increase in the amount of productions offering increased accessibility such as captioning and audio description, these performances are still infrequent in proportion to the larger season.

Take Up Thy Bed integrates access elements through the show: the four performers are joined by Auslan interpreter Gerry Shearim, who moves around the action; most of the dialogue is either captioned or projected behind the stage, with different fonts highlighting emphasis and meaning; the performers often audio describe their own actions; the music is heavy with base, reverberating through the chairs.

Review: Pornography

There have been three major terrorism attacks in the past decade which significantly cut through to the Australian media, and thus our own dialogues about terrorism. The first, the 9/11 attacks in the USA. The second, the Bali Bombings, targeting Australian tourists. And the third, the London Bombings.

Each year, we notice their anniversaries. Eleven years after 9/11, much of the currency around the discussion of the remembrance focused on the choice of major US newspapers to no longer carry the anniversary as front page news. Ten years on from the Bali Bombings, the event was carried with significance.

The London Bombings perhaps though, held the most currency looking back from 2012. Occurring the day after the announcement the 2012 Olympics would be held in London, the two events would be inextricably linked.

Simon Stephens wrote Pornography in the aftermath of the bombings, in a city which was very much in repair and recovery. His work distills the event down into stories of a handful of people in the week leading up to the event, at the same time almost makes a point of the fact that this bombing was just one day in the lives of people which are frequently full, and complicated, and messy.

The impact of the bombings, the immediacy of the event, the knowledge that these characters lives will now forever be tied up in a narrative of what occurred that day is at the forefront throughout Pornography. Directing the work for the State Theatre Company, Daniel Clarke holds tension throughout the work: relief in humour is short lived, as audience members we are privileged in knowing where the work is taking us. Jason Sweeney’s composition, too, weaved throughout the production, holds the audience on teter-edge.

And yet, the bombing is almost the least important part of the work and the stories. While these characters stories culminate in this event, more pertinently Stephens writes about a fractured England.

Review: Holding The Man

Timothy Conigrave and John Caleo met in the mid-1970s at their all-boys school in Melbourne.  He was an aspiring actor; he was the star football player.  He went on to study at NIDA and work as an actor, theatre maker and writer; he went on to be a chiropractor.  Together since high-school, Holding The Man was Conigrave’s memoir of their relationship of fifteen-years, ending with the death of Caleo from an AIDS related illness in 1991.   Conigrave passed away with the same disease a few months before his book was published in 1995.

The memoir was adapted for the stage by Tommy Murphy, and is being presented in a new production directed by Rosabla Clemente for the State Theatre Company of South Australia in their final production for 2011.

Covering twenty-two years in just over two hours, at times Murphy’s script can do little but cover the most basic surface level of the relationship.  The most satisfying aspects of the script is how Murphy not only plays with a balance of comedy and drama, a comically heightened act one giving way to dramatically heavy act two; but also balances naturalism with theatricality.

Rather than shying away from existing in a live theatrical medium, Murphy’s script fully embraces the theatre.  The action takes place over twenty years in countless locations and with dozens of characters, and this is all presented in the one space with a cast of six.

Joining Luke Clayson as Tim, and Nic English as John, are Catherine Fitzgerald, Nick Pelomis, Geoff Revell and Ellen Steele, taking the men on their journey through high school, university, theatres, and hospitals.

Review: Buried Child

And so begins David Mealor’s director’s statement, showing us that Buried Child can be summed up with the same plot as 90% of plays set in rural Midwest and Southern America.

The ideal or criticism of the Great American Dream runs through much of that country’s literature.  Written in the late 1970s, Buried Child came off the back of a nation recovering from the Watergate scandal, deep in recession and high in inflation, a country unhappy with the war in Vietnam. In his script Shepard is extremely critical of the mythology a country burying its past, looking forward to a new day.

In a gothic farm-house in Illinois, rain pours down.  Matriarch Halie (Jacqy Phillips) yells down the stairway onto the largely un-listening ears of patriarch Dodge (Ron Haddrick), as he sits and coughs on the couch, watching the television and swigging from a hidden bottle of whisky.  Their son, the lumbering and slow Tilden (Nicholas Garsden) appears, in his arms an old sack, bushels of corn plucked from the depths of the yard.

Over years, the family has become destroyed, fortunes trapped in a rural farm-house, dreaming of what has been lost and hiding away from what can never be regained.  Their other remaining son, Bradley (Patrick Graham), is an abusive lout, and Halie pains for the now dead son who was her great hope.  Halie and Dodge have for many years lived in separate rooms; her dreaming of a happier life that was and escaping the house for a happier life in town; he alive perhaps only by a stubbornness to not leave the house to anyone in his family.

Review: boy girl wall

Bursting on to the scene, far above my right shoulder, appears our narrator, Lucus Sibbard.  He is here to guide us through this story: in one apartment, lives a boy; next door, a girl;  between them, a wall.  Thom and Aletha battle on their lives alone: he, wishing he was an astronomer, wasting his days in an IT job where he doesn’t really know what his job is at all; she, a children’s book author working on that difficult second book, for which not a word has been written.  The wall, living between them for years, decides what needs to happen is Thom and Aletha must meet.  This isn’t a love story, we’re told.  But it is a story about love.

Lucas bounds up and down and across the stage, always talking to and referring to the audience (“Who goes to the theatre on a Thursday?” he asks his Thursday theatre audience): our presence as much an integral part of the production as the action itself.  Perhaps it’s even more so: we sneak a look into the lives of this pair in what seems to be the middle of their story. Lucus brings us in on a Tuesday (“Nothing happens on a Tuesday.”), leaves us with a kiss, and in 75 minutes the story is all over.  And joining us and Aletha and Thom on this crazy journey is the inanimate objects which play a part: the wall, the doors, the computer Dave, the powerbox, the days of the week.  Are days of the week inanimate objects?  They’re surely not animate objects, but then again, they’re hardly objects.  Inanimate inobjects?

Sarah Winter sits above the action, orchestrating a series of odd instruments composed by Neridah Waters, soundscaping with a delicate touch, a hint of whimsy, and an occasional burst of pop song.  The set (Jonathon Oxlade) is a chalkboard stage floor thrusting into the audience, chalkboard upon chalkboard building up in a wall above the stage.  Playing across the two dimensional stage and wall, lighting (Keith Clark) illuminates and hides created spaces.  From all this and a stick of chalk, Lucus builds his set.

Review: Shaolin Warriors

This review was originally published at Everguide.com, download the iPhone app and carry my reviews in your pocket!

You know when you’re at home and sick, or exhausted, or on holidays so it’s not like you’re going to be doing anything productive anyway, and you’re watching The Brady Bunch because that was legitimately an excellent TV show when you were six? And when it ends the remote isn’t within reach, but because you’re sick, or exhausted, or on holidays so it’s not like you’re going to be doing anything productive anyway, you decide to watch the terrible ‘80s midday movie sequel? You heard the original was good, so maybe this one will be okay.

That midday movie is Shaolin Warriors. And it’s really not okay. There’s that cheese factor of watching something that was clearly choreographed thirty years ago; it’s unintentionally hilarious in all the wrong places, but you walk away just a little worse off for having watched it.
Featuring such compositional hits as ‘Pensive Woods for Synthesisers’, ‘Kung-Fu Training Sequence for Synthesisers’, ‘80s Law TV Drama for Synthesisers’, ‘CD Track Skipping Over Scratches’, and my personal favourite, ‘Silence When The Scene Wasn’t Properly Timed to the Length of the Track’, the sound design is as perplexing as it is awful. Occasionally the cast brought on Zhangu drums, their boom echoing throughout the theatre, energy moving from the stage to the audience, but these moments were short lived. Why use live music when you could choose to play ‘Chinese Drums Over Pan Flute for Synthesisers’?

Not to be outdone, though, lighting design gets in on the act. There is no cohesion in how or when the lights change. The performers are often partially obscured in darkness before the lighting not-so-quickly changes to rectify this.

While the large ensemble of men are skilled and occasionally show some great feats of dexterity, leaps and strength, Shaolin Warriors is seemingly choreographed for a maximum number of applause breaks and minimum amount of artistry or effort. Far from that great circus mantra of repeating a trick until it lands, here the interval curtain fell after just two failed attempts at ramming a log into a performer’s stomach: twice he jumped back and scuttled away before impact.

The best part of the production was seeing 40-odd young boys (and two young girls) have the time of their life when brought onto stage to learn a routine, the joy on their faces radiating across the theatre. The remaining two audience-participation sections, however, were simply awkward as grown men uncomfortably followed instructions from the performers, the will of the audience waning for the tryingly long time these scenes took.

We’ve become lucky enough to appreciate and expect circus with all the artistry and wit of the likes of Cirque De Soleil and CircusOz – the Shaolin Warriors possess none of this. In the OzAsia Festival, an event ostensibly supposed to show us the best of Asian art, Shaolin Warriors is a tired relic. It’s best to get up and find that remote.

Review: What’s Wrong With Gregor Post?

Gregor Post’s (Benjamin Schostakowski) favourite place in Hallsop was the laundromat.  His best friend was Billy the Bulimic.  He dreamed of escaping.  One day, he finds a postcard from Alaska.  With the help of his narrator (Richard Doyle), Gregor will take us along on his amazing adventures, from Alaska, to Jerusalem, to Berlin, to the Amazon, all within an old study/bedroom.

The set (by Schostakowski) is seemingly simple, but detailed and transformative through Gregor’s imagination. Much of the joy of the work, created by Schorstakowski and Elizabeth Millington and directed by Millington, comes through the use of props and sets: when a sheet of fairy lights becomes the Alaskan night sky; a black desk fan becomes the propeller of an airplane; a section of the wall opens, the angle of the slats on a venetian blind is changed, and we are in a café in Paris.  It’s the near stupidity of these objects and the joy with which Schostakowski and Doyle expose these normally unproposed solutions where much humour comes from.  Much of the production makes little immediate sense to the audience, but it is the sense it makes to the exploring explorer of adventurous adventurer Gregor we latch on to.

Where What’s Wrong With Gregor Post? succeeds is in the awkwardness – both in Gregor’s physical ganglyness, and in his lack of social awareness.  The Gregor we are introduced to, while adult, acts as a young boy, whirled away on an adventure to see the world.  And indeed, the production carries us along on this vein of picture books and children’s’ movies where our young hero strikes out on his own, away from his hometown, and most importantly, away from his parents.

Gregor Post plays with this genre through the tired narrator, building the commentary with metaphor after metaphor, nonsense building upon nonsense.  When this production hits these moments with just the right balance of Gregor’s innocence, black comedy, and the utter bizarrely of the situation, it is frequently hilarious.

Where the production falls down, however, is when the balance in humour is lost.  A casual racism exists through the production, initially used as a means to reveal Gregor’s naivety and immaturity: he builds his life view upon heightened situations, a narrow perspective informed through snatches of life, built upon misunderstood conversations.  Through this, initially we can laugh at Gregor, his narrator, and the “extreme extremists” who at one point Gregor must battle.

As the production moves forward, however, this innocence wanes.  The creators have found many laughs in talks of oily rags, in dancing monkeys, in ridiculous nonsense metaphors, so I couldn’t understand why they continued to return to the racist images.  This culminates in a scene uninfluenced and uncommented on by the scenes preceding or following where guest appearance Lachlan Rohdes appears as a Nazi youth singing “Tomorrow Belongs To Me.”  During this performance, a lot of the good will of the audience was lost, becoming much less involved in the production.  While moments were still funny, they were tainted by the scene that went before.

I think it is the lack of commentary that made the racist comments appear so animus that made them unforgiven in the production.  They were shown as is, with no suggestion there was anything off about them.  It’s not that these ideas were supported by the production: I just have no idea what they were trying to do at all.

There is a point where black comedy loses the essence which makes it okay to laugh, and for me What’s Wrong With Gregor Post? crossed that line.  Before this happened though, I laughed a lot.  I hope it has a chance to redress the balance, because many parts of Gregor Post are delightful.

Brisbane Festival presents Under The Radar featuring What’s Wrong With Gregor Post?, created by Elizabeth Millington and Benjamin Schostakowski. Directed by Elizabeth Millington, technical coordintaion by Lauren Makin, set design by Benjamin Schostakowski.  With Benjamin Schostakowski, Richard Doyle, Lachlan Rhodes and the voice of Kimmir Mizuno.

Review: I Feel Awful

The “late” Michael Gow, in his final commission as outgoing Artistic Director of Queensland Theatre Company invited the Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm to devise a new work.   Into the Billie Brown studio the men of Black Lung have transported their offices, and with the help of a crew of young Brisbane artists, their new “interns”, they have proceeded to explore how theatre is made.

With mixed success over seventy minutes the play rollicks along exploring and exploiting theatrical conventions, disintegrating boundaries and repositioning itself and its genre, until it ultimately finds itself in the most traditional realm of theatre: naturalism.

I have a lot of respect for the theatre conventions they didn’t obey.  There was no call to “please turn off you mobile phones”, and, most interestingly, there was no curtain call.  After the show segued from the process of theatre into the naturalistic fall out between Black Lung and the interns, there was no need for the work to go back to theatrical convention.  It sustained a naturalism about the final scenes because that is where it allowed the production to end, instead of asking for acceptance or recognition from the audience.  The final notes became more about the audience than the cast.

Which was good, because at that point I didn’t feel much like applauding.

Perhaps what is highlighted in a piece of theatre about creating theatre – even if the fact is not explicitly mentioned – is the act of repetition. Theatre runs in seasons, the most rigid of productions attempting to run the same night after night.  Even those shows with only one performance are a culmination of repetition through rehearsal.  For I Feel Awful this only served to highlight the seeming exploitation of the young “interns”, and in particular the female actors, whose most defining traits as characters is the lust thrown on to them by the men.

Unlike some of the male interns, none of the female interns instigate their own actions: they don’t attempt to get the men of Black Lung to read their film scripts; they don’t get to freeze time.  The most independent action any of the women take is to ask when they can return to presenting scenes from the texts of the late Gow.  Scenes the men of Black Lung have taken out of context and played with gender casting to create every situation the intro to a lesbian porno.  This joke once is one thing, if it was a series of heightened situations in some absurdity showing an interface between writer and director.  The same joke repeated again and again celebrates an inherent misogyny in the production, and becomes gross.

The best that can be said for the misogyny is ultimately, it is the Black Lung men which come off the worst.  They are judged harshly by their interns, they are not celebrated in the eyes of the audience.  And yet this leads me to ask: what were they attempting to do with these characters they built around themselves?  I have not seen their work before, and so with this being my only knowledge of the company I would be very hesitant to see their work again.

To explore misogyny is one thing.  To explore it from the male perspective is another.  To continually, night after night, performance after performance, place the young women of the cast in a never-ending position of being lusted over, with hardly any other qualities, is uncomfortable.  To do this for no defined reason is completely questionable.

And so, when the stage was left empty, when the cast had left, the stage lights were up, and we weren’t asked to submit to ritualistic applause, I was pleased.

And this is made all the more disappointing because much of the show was strong.  Particularly when it was exploring and exploiting the rules of theatre.  Talking about theatrical styles, but never a lecture, weaving a narrative into this explanation.  The opening interaction between Gareth and “Gareth” – a prerecorded character within the TV, timed to appear in spontaneous interaction, highlights the rehearsal process.  Falling flats reveal props and a band.

Even as I write this I am making much more of a note of the exposition of these factors than the production ever did.  Occasionally yelling out “That’s Naturalism!”, primarily the piece works as an ever heightening farce, destruction of boundaries taken place with glee, as debris piles about the stage the audience is taken along for the ride, but no stopping to reflect on what is happening.

In this, I Feel Awful holds no punches.  It’s get with the production or get lost. The manipulation of theatre is all the more interesting because of where this is being performed.  This isn’t in the back of a claimed venue in the Fringe.  This is on at a state theatre company, the last commission by an outgoing Artistic Director.  And that is exciting. The legitimacy that gives to an experimental work is exciting.

And while it breaks the rules of what theatre “should” be at a mainstage company, Black Lung still respects the audience and that dialogue an audience wants to receive.  The audience which is going to see this work is probably regular theatre goers, local theatre goers, people who aren’t afraid to see work which takes risks.

I Feel Awful has strengths in its energy, its exciting ideas of the manipulation that theatre is, and the ideas of what it can be.  And yet, for all that was strong, and for Black Lung’s respect of the bonds of theatre with an audience, I still cannot shake my dislike of the inherent misogyny brandished across the work. It is sad what dominated the production is the uncomfortableness of misogyny, buying into these traditional power structures, and the “joke” of repetitious leering.  Because what theatrical culture are we in where repeated sexual harassment is played for laughs?

Queensland Theatre Company presents Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm’s I Feel Awful, written, directed and designed by Thomas M Wright.  Design consultant Simone Romaniuk, lighting designer Gavin Ruben.  The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm: Liam Barton, Gareth Davies, Aaron Orzech, Vacadenjo Wharton-Thomas and Thomas M Wright; with Courtney Ammenhauser, Fin Gilfedder, Will Horan, Tiarnee Kim, Mary Neary, Essie O’Shaughnessy, Charlie Schache, Nathan Sibthorpe and Stephanie Tandy.  At the Billie Brown Studio.  Season closed.

Images by Stephen Henry

Thoughts: Myth; or, art, feminism, and the critical juncture.

Subtitled “A study on the female species” (perplexingly omitting the word “of”) Erin Fowler’s Myth is a danced commentary on visions and stereotypes of women over time.   Fowler with co-choreographers and performers Jessie Oshodi and Mikaila Roe dance their way through images of this species: ancient perceptions of a goddess; 50s ideals of a housewife; Barbies to be manipulated; nothing more than a tease for men. Presentation of these images accompanies spoken text written by Fowler, the documentary style of Patrick Clements’ voice observing these women.

The small stage and flat seating of Nexus is hardly conducive to a good dance presentation, but Fowler, Oshodi and Roe all do well containing themselves within the space, without seeming constrained, and stay away from too much low and floor work.

The three emerging artists are technically strong, although at times sections of choreography had a tendency to delve into presentation of steps to show technique, rather than working off a through line from the choreography.  Regardless, much of the choreography is intriguing and does well to show off the strengths of the still young dancers: Oshodi particularly strong with a powerful presence in her jumps.

Review: The Book of Everything

With special guest reviewer Aria Noori, aged 11.

"You're a very special boy, you know." (Whittet and original cast member Yael Stone as Eliza.)

The Book of Everything review by Jane Howard, aged 22

It is the summer of 1951, and we are in Amsterdam, Holland, Europe, Northern Hemisphere, Earth, Solar System, Galaxy, Universe, Space.  We have a birds-eye view of Thomas Klopper (Matthew Whittet) aged nearly ten, and his book of everything.  Pappa (Pip Miller) says all good books are about God, but Thomas isn’t quite sure what his book will be about yet.

Thomas sees things that other people don’t see.  In his imagination, he sees terrible hailstorms in the Amsterdam summer; he sees tropical fish, his favourite guppies, in the rivers and canals.  In his house, he also sees things that aren’t seen outside those walls: he sees his father hit his mother (Claire Jones).

Based on the book by Guus Kuijer, The Book of Everything is delightfully funny, heart-warmingly touching, and heart-achingly sad.  It is brave theatre; theatre for children, about children; theatre which at times is hard to watch.  More sad than it is scary, Richard Tulloch’s adaptation tackles some big issues: domestic abuse, questioning and redefining faith, protofeminism, unlikely friendships, lasting effects of World War Two, love.  It is certainly a piece for older children, and one that saw many shielded eyes, but through the sadness seeps through an undeniable bravery, the strength that children can find in themselves, the happiness that is waiting for them.