Mexican waves: Belvoir & STCSA’s Mortido

Angela Betzien’s reputation as a writer of darkly furious plays which are as much social commentaries as they are impassioned calls to action makes her new play, Mortido, a welcome jolt of adrenaline in the tail-end of a year of theatre. Exploding upon Belvoir’s corner-stage after a critically successful season in Adelaide, Mortido is equal parts crime drama, revenge tragedy, morality play, and familial drama all in one thrilling evening.

Co-commissioned by Belvoir and Playwriting Australia, and presented here in a coproduction between Belvoir and State Theatre Company of South Australia, Mortido begins with a Mexican fable about death, life, and rebirth, and ricochets between past and the present, dreams and reality, across multiple countries and continents, while hunting down its elusive target. Amongst it all, its beating heart is the story of Jimmy, a small-time dealer in Sydney’s west, his medium-big-time distributor brother-in-law Monte, and their various run-ins with police detective Grubbe. Connecting all of them is cocaine, and an article from the Sydney Morning Herald in 2011 that inspired Betzien to ultimately write this play.

Small world, big dreams: Belvoir & La Boite’s Samson

Small towns don't feel small when you grow up there.  That comes later.  The world as you know it seems wide.  You feel close to it, the smells, the seasons, the secret places.  But slowly, imperceptibly, like childhood itself, that comfortable, familiar, reassuring world starts to slip away.
 – Noel Mengel, RPM

Julia-Rose Lewis’ assured first play Samson is a one of those coming-of-age stories which dot the landscape of the Australian psyche. Set in a small country town, the play follows the lives of Essie, Beth, Sid, and Rabbit, as they collide, love, fight, dream, and burn burn burn. Co-produced by Belvoir and Brisbane’s La Boite theatre, Samson arrives in Sydney after a two-week run in Brisbane fizzing with life, exploding in Belvoir’s Downstairs theatre with vitality and something akin to incandescence.

Not quite shining: Belvoir’s Radiance

Written in 1993, Radiance began its life on Belvoir’s corner stage, and after being produced around the country and internationally, and made into a film, this play about coming home comes home itself, just on twenty-one years later, to the place where it all began. Written by Louis Nowra, it is the story of three sisters – united by the death of their mother – as they gather together for her funeral after many years apart. Like so many theatrical stories of families, it isn’t long before the familial ghosts come out of the past and their reunion opens old wounds.

The time of your life: White Box Theatre & Griffin Independent’s Unholy Ghosts

I don’t know how to begin talking about this production, so I’m just going to start somewhere and hope it all makes sense. I believe there are two constants in life – birth and death. They aren’t necessarily always in that order, and there mightn’t be all that much time between them, but on average, there is about seventy-odd years between the two events, seventy-odd years to grow and love and feel and hurt and laugh and cry and reach out to other people and try and make it the best you can. What Campion Decent achieves in his Unholy Ghosts is something like a reflection or a meditation upon a life-lived, a grand statement upon the resolution of two lives well-lived to the fullest, to see what lies beneath and what we can glean from surviving the passing of our parents.

Presented by White Box Theatre and Griffin Independent, Unholy Ghosts is mostly told through scenes featuring the son and one of either parent, and direct-audience address. It is a namless family – the characters are known and referred to as simply Mother, Father, Son, and Daughter (though she does not make an appearance in the story.) Obviously autobiographical to a degree, we’re not quite sure of what’s real and what isn’t; perhaps ‘creative autobiography’ is a useful term here, seeing as – in Decent’s own words – it was “written from a space of grief in an attempt to honour yet complicate the past.”

We’ll go down together: Belvoir’s Brothers Wreck

This is not an easy play to write about. Nor should it be. Of all the subjects and issues which can and remain taboo in the contemporary world, it is two essential inviolable truths which remain the most potent and prohibitively awkward to discuss openly, honestly, truthfully: death, and sex. Yet, bizarrely, they are two constants, along with birth, which we all experience during our lives. As Leah Purcell writes in her director’s note, “death is a universal subject and this play will affect anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one, more so for those who have experienced the loss through suicide. And, in particular to this story, youth suicide – this act knows no colour, it touches us all. What this play asks is: how do people deal with death?” How do we talk about death, to each other, to ourselves, as individuals and as a society?

Before a production commences, I always try to read the program notes – not so much in the hope that they’ll explain what I am about to see, but so that like reading the introduction in a book, I am aware of the context or ideas in the piece. The hardest thing about reading Jada Alberts’ writer’s note is just how personal a story this is, how very much a part of her it is, and there is no disguising it nor apology made for the content of Brothers Wreck which unfolds here on Belvoir’s Upstairs stage.

THE LOST REVIEW

When I started this blog in 2012, the first production I reviewed was Belvoir's production of Rita Kalnejais' Babyteeth. At the time, I was wary of spoiling the production, was unsure how to write a review as such (even though I'd read countless others in the papers), and it was very much a half-baked piece of writing. And it's always struck me as the one piece on this blog that I'd most like to change, would most like to rewrite if I had the chance. So, two years later, here I am. 

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.

Oresting: Belvoir’s Small and Tired

The first thing you notice is the smell. The moist wet earthy smell of dirt and grass. A garden, a backyard. Flowers. It smells fulsome, vaguely animal, like a children’s petting farm. Like lambs. And I’m instantly, eerily, reminded of Company B’s production of Love Me Tender Upstairs in 2010, of Colin Moody standing on that little slither of grass holding the lamb in his arms, staring out at the audience. It’s a curious reminder, too, since both Love Me Tender and this play, Kit Brookman’s Small and Tired, share the character of Iphigenia, drawn from Greek mythology.

Set now, in a world we could safely say is our own, Brookman’s play unfolds with an intoxicating mix of warmth, humanity, gentle humour and a strangely compelling sense of being part of something much bigger and uncontainable. Loosely adapted from the myth of Orestes, Clytaemnestra, Electra, and Agamemnon, Small and Tired tells the story of Orestes’ return following his father’s death, and the tensions and conversations he has with his family that erupt and flare and conflagrate over his arrival back into their lives after half a lifetime’s absence in one way or another.

Hellbent: Bell Shakespeare’s 'The Duchess of Malfi'

“I know death has ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits, and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways.”
 – The Duchess [IV, 2]

Elizabethan tragedies – and by extension, their natural Jacobean successors – are a strange bunch, all fire-and-brimstone, hellfire and damnation, a never-ending downward spiral of revenge and death and murder that ends only through the extinguishing of the lives of the play’s characters. Of all of the Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies, none are better or more potently – delightfully, malevolently, gleefully – delicious than Shakespeare’s: Titus Andronicus, beneath the innumerable killings and murders and barbaric acts, is darkly comic and is an absolute blast; Macbeth is a potent examination of power, and what happens when you become drunk on its allure and promise; Othello is devastating in its misrepresentation of evidence, while King Lear and Hamlet are perhaps the pinnacles, the generally-considered perfections, of the form. Shakespeare was not just writing for himself, he was writing in reaction to those that had gone before him – Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd – and those that were writing around him – Ben Johnson, John Webster. Of all of them, it is Webster whose plays perhaps took Shakespeare’s achievements and reverted them to the glory-days of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy or Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, denying the dramatic tragedy form of Shakespeare’s elegance and finesse, and restoring to it much of the robust and blatant disregard for humanity, along with all the bile and brimstone that one could muster. (If you’ve seen Shakespeare In Love, you’d already be familiar with John Webster; he’s the street urchin kid who’s often seen outside the theatres, playing with the cats and mice, and who facilitates Thomas Kent’s unmasking as Viola de Lesseps.)

This presentation of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi was written in 2006 by Ailsa Piper and Hugh Colman and first performed by the Red Stitch Actors Company under the title of ‘Hellbent.’ It’s a pretty accurate description of the play, to be honest, as the two brothers scheme and plot the maintenance of their sister’s chastity, her subsequent downfall and eventual death, along with that of her maid and husband (and former steward).