The story of two
families who arrange a meeting to discuss the appropriate action required after
one child attacked the other with a stick in the park, God of Carnage – appropriately – descends into a chaotic and
increasingly childish evening of name-calling, taunts, accusations, drinking
and vomit. Described
recently in The Age as being “like
a simpler incarnation of Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap, [the] chief
joy of the play is the way it slides into an Edward Albee-style marital
free-for-all, as the adults begin to act worse than the children who brought
them together.” Like Albee’s Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? and Tsiolkas’ The
Slap, there is something positively delicious and bordering on
schadenfraude about watching two couples tear each other to pieces as they try
to come to an agreement.
The ‘legend’ of
King O’Malley is as colourful as the man himself, and a cursory look over his Wikipedia entry will
only confirm this. Born in the United States
(or Canada) in 1854,
O’Malley was educated in New York City, founded
a church in Texas, and contracted tuberculosis
before sailing to Queensland
in 1888. Once recovered from his illness, he walked the 2100 kilometres to
Adelaide, and eventually became a member of the first parliament of a
newly-federated Australia, voted against the introduction of conscription in
World War I, was instrumental in the creation of Canberra and the Commonwealth
Bank and, when he died aged 99 in 1953, he was the last surviving member of the first parliament.
In 1970, Michael Boddy and Bob
Ellis wrote – or perhaps devised – The
Legend of King O’Malley under the direction of John Bell for NIDA. A
burlesquing Faustian story, full of pantomime, vaudeville, revivalist
preaching, Australian politics and music-hall turns, O’Malley is a rambunctious beast that refuses to sit still,
rampages about the stage with its uncontainable verve and showmanship. A kind
of predecessor to Casey Bennetto’s hit musical Keating!,
O’Malley is here produced by Melbourne company Don’t Look Away at the Seymour Centre’s
Reginald theatre, and is a sharp, irreverent and timely examination of the
larger than life characters we seem to attract in Australian politics.
His is the nose
that launched a thousand quips. A famous literary swashbuckler in the same
league as Dumas’ musketeers, Cyrano de Bergerac was, incredibly, a real writer
and philosopher in France
in the early seventeenth century. Imbued with the famous proboscis and a life
much embellished beyond reality, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano
de Bergerac is a romantic swashbuckler like no other. With an uncanny
gift for words – his pen, they say, is as mighty as his sword – he is both
heroic and hopeless in the face of love, and his story is one of love – lost,
won, and unrequited, and is as humane as his nose is larger than life.
While Rostand’s
play was written in 1897, the Sydney
Theatre Company’s production uses Andrew
Upton’s adaptation from 1999 in an updated version, and is set in Cyrano’s
own mid-seventeenth century world with much flair and panache. It is the story
of Cyrano, a man who is blessed with an unfortunately large nose, and who is in
love with Roxane. Roxane is in love with Christian. Christian is in love with
Roxane but cannot express it anywhere near as adequately as he’d like. Cyrano
agrees to help him and, well, I’ll leave the rest up to you. But as lofty and
as word-drunk as the play – as Cyrano – is, there is still a sparseness, an disconnection between the period flummery in the costumes and the occasionally spare mise-en-scène (designed by Alice
Babidge with Renée
Mulder), and Upton’s adaptation.
After
Shakespeare’s, Anton Chekhov’s plays are perhaps the most human. Literary
critic James Woods believes Chekhov’s characters “act like free consciousness,
not as owned literary characters, [that they] forget to be Chekhov’s
characters,” such is the way the playwright allows them simply to be. Both
Shakespeare and Chekhov, as playwright David
Hare writes, “respected the absolute complexity of life [and] never allowed
their creations to be used for any other purpose than being themselves.” Not
only a humanist, Chekhov was also a political writer, as socially and
specifically pointed as Tolstoy, Gorky, Shakespeare. But while everyone
celebrates Chekhov’s mastery in his four most well-known works – the plays The
Seagull, Uncle
Vanya, The
Three Sisters, and The
Cherry Orchard – his short stories are also exceptional, as are his
rougher earlier plays, Platonov and Ivanov.
The story of a group
of young idealists with the whole world ahead of them, Platonov – like so much of Chekhov, as in life – is about love,
relationships, the people who get under our skin, and the extraordinary lengths
we go to rid ourselves of feeling too much. Specifically, it is about Platonov,
a provincial schoolteacher, “who faces up to the implications of being
irresistibly attractive to four different women.” Presented here by MopHead and Catnip Productions in conjunction
with ATYP Selects, this Platonov
is bursting with passion, sexual energy and desperation, and in Anthony
Skuse’s adaptation it explodes across the ATYP Studio stage in a riot of
colour, emotion and drinking.
Matthew
Whittet’s previous works have included School
Dance and Fugitive
(two thirds of the Windmill Trilogy). In each case, Whittet takes a well-known
story and tweaks and incorporates it into a larger work which interrogates the
original as well as making it resonate for a contemporary audience. While School Dance was an extended homage to
Eighties high-school dramas, Fugitive
was a critique of the Robin Hood legend (complete with Stormtroopers), and both
plays were engaging and clever pieces of theatre, both from a script
perspective as well as being accomplished and sometimes remarkable examples of
stagecraft. Whittet’s imagination is no doubt a very fertile place, capable of
grand statements as well as more intimate, smaller-scale pieces such as Old
Man – a tender portrait of fathers, sons, relationships and loss –
which played at Belvoir’s Downstairs theatre in 2012.
Belvoir’s Cinderella, then,
is very much in the same mould as the Windmill trilogy, despite not being a
part of it. It is, however, a peculiar play. Created from an original concept
by Anthea
Williams (Belvoir’s Literary Manager, who also directs this production), it
feels as though it is only tangentially related to the story of Cinderella, and
as though it is still halfway through its dramaturgical fruition. As a play, Cinderella seeks to use the time-worn
fairytale as the basis for a piece which examines psychological strength,
determination, grief, and the transcendent power of transformation.
Unfortunately for Whittet and Williams, this ‘fairytale for adults’ doesn’t
really delve into the deep wellspring of its myriad sources as much as it
could, nor does it really progress dynamically from the first two scenes where
we meet Ashley, Ash and (briefly) Richard, and the whole crazy train of the
night’s events are set in motion. Nor is it terribly ‘adult’ at all.
Each year the
signs of Christmas seem to be visible earlier and earlier. With forty-two days
until the day actually arrives, Belvoir’s A Christmas Carol
is one of the more human and beautiful evocations of this time of year, and its
magic creeps up on you unawares, like the sleep that steals upon you as a child
sitting up in bed determined to see Father Christmas. Directed by Resident
Director Anne-Louise Sarks, a self-confessed
Christmas tragic, this Christmas Carol – drawn from the Dickens novel – is
imbued with that Belvoirian brand of stage magic which previously infused Peter
Pan and The Book of
Everything.
This review appeared in an edited form on artsHub.
A sharp triangular
fragment of a room – a lounge room, a roaring fire, a couch, armchair. To one
side, a desk stuffed with papers and a typewriter. A spiral staircase winding through
the ceiling; a book-lined room off the side. This is the world of author
Patricia Highsmith as envisaged in Sydney
Theatre Company’s production of Switzerland,
a new play by Joanna
Murray-Smith originally commissioned by Geffen Playhouse
in Los Angeles.
Here, on a set purportedly based on Highsmith’s home in Switzerland, it is always dark
outside, while inside all manner of murderous deeds are concocted alongside plots
for future novels. Featuring many nods to her body of work, as well as drawing
upon the rich connotations and associations of the genre and period itself, Switzerland sees Highsmith – the author
of the Tom Ripley novels
as well as Strangers on a
Train and The Two Faces of
January – becoming the subject of an enthralling two-hander
stage-thriller set late in her life.
