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.

Fringe Review: Chants des Catacombes

You often find in shows in the fringe design becomes the least rigorous element. Tight deadlines, tight bump-in/out schedules, tight budgets: it makes sense that the focus on design might be lost.  The focus is on the central element: the text, the choreography, the music. Design is often simple, perhaps a few key items picked immaculately.

Chants des Catacombes bucks this trend completely. In the Old Adelaide Gaol (at the end of a poorly lit, poorly sign-posted road) for the Adelaide Fringe, the design is stunning.

We’re invited to walk into the space in small groups, and under the starry night air we walk between high, sheer walls of stone, the path marked with flickering candle light.  We are released into a large, grassed courtyard, where we can just make out the silhouettes of our fellow travelers. As someone lightly plays away at the discordant piano, we sit talking with each other around candles in jars.

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: 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: 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: Three Sisters

Peter O'Brien and Ksenja Logos. Photo: Matt Nettheim

This review originally appeared on ArtsHub.com

Today, a team of archeologists are exploring an old house; they dust off glassware, take photos to document the past. In turn-of-the-century Russia, one year on from the death of their father, at the birthday of Irina (Kate Cheel), she and her sisters Olga (Carmel Johnson), Marsha (Ksenja Logos) lament their small town lives. Over several years in nearly three and a half hours, we watch the lives of the three sisters, their brother Andrey (Patrick Graham), and the people who move in and out of their house, as they continually ask the questions: what does it mean to live there? What legacy will they leave?

Adam Cook’s traditional reading of Three Sisters for the State Theatre Company is fine, but it does little to show the relevance or importance of the text to a modern Adelaide audience; which is interesting considering the position Adelaide – and art in Adelaide – is often finding itself in relationship to Sydney and Melbourne.

Cook’s set, co-designed with Gavan Swift, places the Prozorovs’ dilapidated house at the bottom of an archeological excavation. While the dilapidation of peeling green paint exposing red stone walls is beautiful, and in itself an interesting frame for the unhappy lives of all who pass through, in the end, this only serves to detract from the text. Framing the work in a context that highlights the museum qualities of the piece does precisely that: it highlights the staid approach, the old Russian ideals, and the clipped language of much of the script.

While visually stunning, within the context of this classical reading the set is logically confusing – draped with red dirt of arid deserts, rather than the black soil of cold Russia – and thematically distracting. I expected something to happen or to be said in the ‘modern’ world of the dig, but the archeologists remain silent through their scenes, which are little more than taking to the stage at the top of each act, helping to change sets. These characters further are infused with a fuzzy logic: while at the start of the play they are oblivious to their Russian counterparts, by the end of act four they seem to be standing and filming their existence.

Thoughts: The Seagull

Almost a month ago, I travelled to Sydney to see The Seagull at Belvoir.  I absolutely intended to write a review of the show; in many ways I wish I had.  But somewhere in between being caught up in the excitement that was a weekend in Sydney, and the overwhelm I felt from the production, every time I sat down to write something it felt like an impossible task.

Had it been in Adelaide (a small town, with fewer critical voices, and where most of my readers are) I’m sure I would have found a way to say what I could.  It being in Sydney both gave myself a remove from the need to write about the production, and reviewers whom I keenly agree with: I feel James Waites in particular had a very similar experience as me, and wrote about it more eloquently than I could have.

Judy Davis as Arkadina and David Whenham as Trigorin.

But this week a friend asked me if I would describe Benedict Andrew’s script as a new Australian work.  Saying no, he pressed me for a more detailed answer.  Here was my response to him, mixed in with some of the thoughts I’ve scribed down over the past month whenever I’ve given this write-up a try:

To define Benedict Andrews’ The Seagull as a new Australian text or not inherently hinges on your definition of what exactly is a new Australian text, which to me implies a uniqueness of character, a separation of itself from works which came before it.  If Andrews had used Chekhov’s script as a launching point to craft an original work, then perhaps my answer would be different.  But for me, a true strength of the work was that Andrews was so faithful to the original as to truly highlight the timelessness and universality of themes on youth, art, country towns, and, with particular significance to me, of writing.

What Andrews did with Chekhov’s text is to set it in an inherently, unabashedly and unashamedly Australian setting.  I, admittedly, don’t have an overly large knowledge of Chekhov, but it felt so honest and faithful to Chekhov I can’t believe it was anything but.  He brought forth a contemporary context and an Australian vernacular to the work, but within this it still felt like a translation rather than an adaptation: he was just translating more than the language, he was also translating years and countries and context.

Review: Pie

Pie by Gabrielle Griffin. Photo Heath Britton.

In the house of a purple gauze tent, a woman (Gabrielle Griffin, who conceived, devised and performs the work) counts money and squirrels it away in a box.  Under the ticking of a clock, she pulls out a pastry dish from a draw in a wooden cabinet, its glass cupboards filled with eggs, and proceeds to make a pie.  Out comes a puppet (designed and constructed by Rid Primrose) who checks the money in what is her box, and administers Griffin for the few coins she has taken.

What follows is Pie: a play I don’t quite know how to explain.  Structurally, there is little in ways of plot.  In fact, I am still not certain if the show was essentially following a structured plot, or if the scenes were simply thematically linked rather than lineally. Either way would be justifiable and fine in the context of the production, but it is the ambiguity that is not resolved, an uncertainness of time framing which has left me puzzled.

A word-less performance by Griffin is supported by her tender, skillful and considerate use of puppetry (there was one particular moment where the puppet climbs a ladder, and the swing of her leg up a step, a slight reverb and then rebalance in the hip struck me with such humanity it would be mundane in any other situation), but without a narrative or a history to the characters or their relationship most scenes threw up more questions than they answered.  I couldn’t explain to myself what a Ferris wheel was supposed to represent; I was confused if pills were fertility pills or The Pill; I didn’t know if scenes were dreams or reality within this world.

I thought perhaps it could be the fact that reproduction isn’t a thought or an issue in my life at the moment.  But I don’t think that precludes me from the understanding of the subject matter.  It’s a work that would certainly be easy to have a response to if reproductive issues were front and centre of your life, but I don’t think that goes hand in hand with it being inscrutable if they are not.

Letting these issues go, though, the production sits within a attractive design, changing to create new interesting surrounds throughout the production.  Through the gauzed tent design (Gaelle Mellis and Wendy Todd), the lighting (Mark Penningon) refracts in such a way to create rainbows of light glittering through the walls.  The use of shadows, while sometimes enigmatic within the narrative, formed compelling images.  Black and white animated projections (animation by Luku Kuku, projection design by Cindi Drennan) are at times clear in their intent and purpose to the show (sands through an hour glass), and at times not.

Composition and sound design (Catherine Oates and Belinda Gehlert) used a variety of styles, from the ticking of a clock, to the tango, to fairground music, to differentiae each scene.  This sound aids in the movement and responses between Griffin and her puppet, and gently pushes the pace along.

At just under an hour, Pie doesn’t outstay its welcome: there is enough in the design elements and Griffin’s work with the puppet that the production is a gentile divertissement.  Yet, I came away with the pressing question: if I didn’t know it was about reproduction, how long would it have taken me to have worked that out?  In the scenes and the structure I unfortunately lost too much to really comprehend the story Pie was trying to tell.

Vitalstatistix presents Pie, conceived, devised and performed by Gabrielle Griffin.  Design by Gaelle Mellis and Wendy Todd; lighting design by Mark Pennington; projection design by Cindi Drennan; composition and sound design by Catherine Oates and Belinda Gehlert; rehearsal director and dramaturgy by Kat Worth; puppet design, construction and consultancy by Rod Primrose; animation by Luku Kuku; outside eye and dramaturgy consultant Maude Davey.  At the Waterside Workers Hall until August 6.  More information and tickets.

Review: Aleksander and the Robot Maid

This review originally appeared on www.lowdown.net.au

Aleksander and the Robot Maid, Drop Bear Theatre’s new steam-punk adventure for children explores a technologically advanced age. But, instead of the future, we’re taken back to industrial-revolutionist Russia in an alternative history: one with robots.

Young Aleksander (Tim Kurylowicz) is moving from the country to the big city Robotica with his guardian Miss Katarina (Sarah Lockwood). Here, they never need work again: the robots will do everything they require. While Miss Katarina cannot wait for her life of relaxation and luxury, Alek isn’t so sure: what will he do all day, when he has nothing to do at all? Aunt Lychova (Margot Politis) warns Alek of the dangers of getting to close to the robots, under the care of the menacing Mr Whipp (Andrew Brackmann) and tells him to take his peppermints for his health. Left without a father after a robot-mishap, Alek is at first scared of the robots, but then befriends one he calls Daisy (Carolyn Ramsey, remarkably expressive as she jerks around the stage, head concealed in a cardboard box.). Aunt Lychova is less than supportive of this friendship, as she strives to make Robotica the utopia she dreams it to me.

For ages eight and up, Caleb Lewis’s script directed by Ali Gordon, is frequently quite menacing, but always maintains a steady heart through the burgeoning friendship of Alek and Daisy. Lewis deals with many familiar stands of work for children, exploring the ideas of who and what exactly is human; what makes us us, and what defines the other?

Marin Curach and Tomy K C Leung’s set is simple, initially, as just a single box is moved around the space to create the different locations, and the strength of the design in the illustrations melding the industrialist Russia with robots shown on overhead projector by Matt Huynh.

In the second half, though, as curtains are pulled away and the set can literally come to life, the excitement of the script is finally realised in an excitement of design. As it stands, the production would benefit from some significant tightening and a slightly faster pace. The piece is at is strongest as Alek moves towards finding out more about the hidden side of Robotica, the secrets kept by Aunt Lychova, and the threat of robot-handler Mr Whipp.

Occasionally, the play moves off this primary line, spending too much time away from the mystery and the friendship of Alek and Daisy. Additionally, some ideas aren’t fully explained in the current script: it is clear that the peppermints Aunt Lychova forces on Alek have some quality which perhaps discourages a connection with the robots, but their purported purpose or action isn’t explained.

These are minor quibbles though, in a play filled with heart and joy of young friendship and seeing through the lies of authority and differences in status. Lewis surrounds this story with darkness and fear, and while he and Gordon do take the piece in to some very scary places, it’s an exciting and invigorating type of fright, where Alek’s bravery sees them through the day.

Drop Bear Theatre and the Seymour Centre’s The Reginald present Aleksander and the Robot Maid by Caleb Lewis.  Directed by Ali Gordon, composition by  Scott Gillespie, design by Marin Curach and Tomy K C Leung, lighting design by Sophie Kurylowicz, Illustration by  Matt Huynh, stage manager Lydia Nicholson.   With Andrew Brackman, James Deeth, Tim Kurylowicz, Sarah Lockwood, Margot Politis and Carolyn Ramsey.  In the Reginald Theatre.  Season Closed.