Still cooking: Sydney Festival’s The Kitchen

Staged in the Seymour Centre’s wide York Theatre, Sydney Festival’s The Kitchen – directed by Roysten Abel – is full of noise and light, but as a piece of theatre, it is strangely lacking.

The stage is dominated by a large golden tiered frame, seating twelve musicians, drummers, each playing the mizhav, one of the world’s oldest percussion instruments. The frame, like the drum itself, is shaped like a large pot-shaped vessel, and it resounds with the sharp metallic beat of the drums, pounding and resounding with intricate and furious rhythms. In front of the frame sit two cooks, each preparing a giant pot of payasam (a type of kheer), which is later served in the foyer following the performance.

An almost perfect score: Sydney Festival’s Kiss & Cry

It begins like a fairytale – two people meet, there’s the heady giddy exhilaration of falling in love; there’s joy, heartbreak, sadness; a tiny glimmer of something else. Except there’s a twist: the two people – figures – are not human, but rather two dexterous hands. In Jaco Van Dormael and Michèle Anne De Mey’s Kiss & Cry, playing at Carriageworks for the last days of the Sydney Festival, a romance is played out on a miniature scale whilst simultaneously being filmed and screened above the action itself.

All tip and no iceberg: Sydney Festival’s Tabac Rouge

Twelve years ago I saw James Thierrée’s Junebug Symphony at the Sydney Festival and fell in love with his unique – and often surreal – mixture of movement, dance, clowning, bodily contortions, and elaborate set pieces and stage machinery. While I don’t remember much of the show today, I remember two huge shadow-puppet beasts emerging from the wings of the stage, two performers at their heads, engaged in a dreamlike ballet or battle. I saw his Au Revoir Parapluie in 2008, and so the promise of another show as the centrepiece of this year’s festival was hard to resist. Unfortunately though, in Tabac Rouge we have not just another James Thierrée show, but rather The James Thierrée Show.

Unrelenting courage: Sydney Festival’s UKCHUK-GA: Pansori Mother Courage

Mother Courage and Her Children is perhaps Brecht’s most well-known play, written immediately prior to the Second World War in 1939, and first performed in 1941. Set in the seventeeth century, it is the story of ‘Mother Courage’ as she follows the Swedish Army during the Thirty Year War, eking out a living selling food and provisions to the soldiers. Like Brecht’s story, the Korean pansori also originated in the seventeenth century as an oral tradition of storytelling. Now a rigorous artform, pansori involves a singer and a drum, and combines a strong emotional stories with the ethereal vocal gymnastics of highly dedicated and highly trained singers. Currently playing as part of the Sydney Festival is UKCHUK-GA: Pansori Mother Courage, directed by In Woo Nam and written, composed and performed by Jaram Lee.

Chasing dreams: The Last Great Hunt’s Falling Through Clouds (Sydney Festival)

While Perth-based theatre collective The Last Great Hunt are a relatively new ensemble, their reputation and work is not. As the creators of previous Sydney Festival shows such as The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer (2011) and It’s Dark Outside (2013), they have forged a name for themselves as makers of highly theatrical means using little more than a blank stage, clever masking and projections, and the audience’s imagination. So it is with their most recent offering, Falling Through Clouds, presented at the Seymour Centre as part of this year’s About An Hour program.

Alchemical love: Griffin, STCSA & Sydney Festival’s Masquerade

If you’ve read the little print at the back of a program for a Griffin Theatre Company production over the past five years, you might have noticed a play called Masquerade as being in development. In 2015, co-produced Griffin and the State Theatre Company of South Australia as part of the Sydney Festival, Kate Mulvany’s Masquerade completes its journey to the stage in a production bursting with life, colour, music and dance. But for all its joyous raucous rambunctiousness, there is a bittersweet and touching story which makes this story, this production, more raw and affecting than it might otherwise have been as a relatively ‘straight’ adaptation.

2015, the year in preview

In Sydney’s theatres this year, there are many shows to look forwards to – Masquerade, MinusOneSister, and 2014 Griffin Award winner The Bleeding Tree at Griffin; Beckett, Chekhov, Dorfman, Woolf, Shakespeare, Shaw, and new plays from Melissa Bubnic and Kylie Coolwell at Sydney Theatre Company; Radiance, Mother Courage, Samson, Mortido and Ivanov at Belvoir; and a year of staples – Hamlet, The Tempest, As You Like It – from Bell Shakespeare. There’s Sport for Jove’s Edward II; The ANZAC Project at the Ensemble theatre; James Thierrée’s Tabac Rouge, Falling Through Clouds, Kiss and Cry, and The Kitchen at the Sydney Festival, as well as the David Byrne/Fatboy Slim musical Here Lies Love for Vivid, Rocky Horror Show’s long awaited return, the Australian premiere of Matilda the musical, and several shows interstate.

Death becomes them: Sydney Festival & Belvoir’s Oedipus Schmoedipus

A disclaimer in the Belvoir foyer warns patrons that “this production contains all the bells and whistles including the use of loud noises, graphic violence and loads and loads of blood.” While early reviews did not quite know what to make of this production, it is safe to say that none of it is ever truly serious. Especially not in the hands of collective theatre group post who “take being silly very seriously.”

Oedipus Schmoedipus is a smorgasbord of over the top deaths and an outrageous amount of stage blood (all within the first ten minutes of the show). There are deaths by gunshot, knives, long-sword, cutthroat razor, throat slitting, and bomb, while various appendages are lopped with relish and groans of barely-disguised enjoyment. After this opening barrage of deaths, the stage is cleaned in a ballet-like effort by the stage management team, and the curtain is pulled back to reveal The Volunteers, post’s (not-so) secret ingredient in their madcap shenanigans. What follows is a forum about death, delivered by Mish Grigor and Zoë Coombs Marr with occasional interjections from the volunteers who follow prompts on screens set in the lighting rig. One carefully chosen-at-random volunteer enters and dies – in this performance, she sits on the ground, coughs once, then lies on the floor, playing dead. “What is that?” asks Coombs Marr. “What is that? What is that?” Her disappointment is only short-lived, as she and Grigor pun and non-sequitur their way around the often-taboo subject of death, dying, carking it, falling off the perch, kicking the bucket, meeting their maker, and various other euphemisms. Underneath the anarchy, the coordinated (and sometimes choreographed) chaos and the uncooperative backdrops, is a poignant and often quite unexpectedly frank discussion of how we all know it’s coming, sooner or later, one way or another, but we have no idea how or when, so we might as well enjoy those presented on stage in the meantime.

Red heart: Sydney Festival & Malthouse’s The Shadow King

“The greatest of all epics about nation, is finally an epic about our nation,” proclaims the promotional material for Sydney Festival’s presentation of The Shadow King, and there is much in this production to recognise, in both the Aboriginal nation and in the ‘white’ Australia. The first thing you notice when you enter the space at Carriageworks, is the red earth, a vivid orange only amplified by the lights. To one side sit a rock band – guitars, Hammond organ, didgeridoo – while the middle of the space is dominated by a marvellous overbearing metal evocation of a gargantuan mining truck which turns and slides forward, mechanised and invasive; violating the red sacred earth.

Directed by Michael Kantor from an idea by himself and Tom E. Lewis (who plays Lear), it follows much the same progression as Shakespeare’s text. It too is about familial conflict, power, land and entitlement; about learning humility, learning how to see when you are blind. Originally presented by Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre in 2013, we are introduced at the outset to the Fool (Kamahi Djordon King), who serves as a framing device for the telling of the story, all at once part of it and outside of it, a bit like a spiritual songman, drawing past present and future together. Eschewing Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter in favour of a contemporary translation workshopped by the cast in several local Aboriginal languages, the core of the story is never lost in translation, nor do you need subtitles; the language is just as expressive and direct as Shakespeare’s, and when spoken from the red earth, it breathes with a new life and vitality.

Hip-hOpthello: Sydney Festival’s Othello: The Remix

I’ve never had the opportunity to study Othello, either at school or at university. In fact, my first knowledge of the play came when I saw the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [Abridged] (in which all thirty-seven plays are performed in ninety-seven minutes) when I was twelve. Apart from teaching myself Hamlet’s ‘To Be’ soliloquy backwards, and their glorious conflation of the Comedies, the only thing I remember from it is their Othello Rap. Enter, then, Sydney Festival’s presentation of Othello: The Remix, by the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre in an Australian exclusive. Not only is it, like the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s song, surprisingly accurate, but it too is enormous fun and is something of a masterstroke.

Lest we forget: Sydney Festival’s Black Diggers

Every so often a theatre production stands head and shoulders above everything else, a production that stands out as a landmark event because of its social and cultural significance, because of it’s bearing on the shaping of Australia’s national psyche. Sydney Theatre Company’s The Secret River was perhaps such a production. Now, a year later, Sydney Festival and Queensland Theatre Company, in association with the Balnaves Foundation, present Black Diggers, an ambitious and monumentally affecting production which shines a long-overdue light on the contribution of Aboriginal soldiers in the Great War.

Like The Secret River, Black Diggers comes at a time when we, as a nation, must face the past and learn from it, when we must acknowledge the contribution people have played in the shaping of the country we know today. Directed by Wesley Enoch, we follow the stories of several archetypal figures as they travel from their homelands to the battlefields of Gallipoli, the Middle East, and the Western Front. Far from being jingoistic or representative, the result is an engrossing, harrowing and emotionally charged one-hundred minutes of unavoidably powerful theatre that does not shy away from the ugly truths of war and its legacy.

This Is Our City In Summer

Each January, Sydney erupts into a kaleidoscope of colour, diversity and ideas with the Sydney Festival. Now in its thirty-eighth year, the festival is a smorgasbord of theatre, dance, music, arts and free events that take place across the city for most of January. As always, summer is a time to grab a picnic, head outdoors with your friends, and be in the life. And I wouldn’t miss it for the world. In honour of the 2014 Sydney Festival starting today, I decided to put together a playlist inspired by this year’s program.