Capital cabaret: STC’s Boys will be boys

Two years ago, Melissa Bubnic’s award-winning play Beached burst onto the Griffin theatre stage in a whirlwind of dreams, desires, and realities, and even though it was furiously entertaining it still made you pause for thought. Her latest play, Boys will be boys, has been produced by the Sydney Theatre Company, and like Beached, applies her trademark brand of theatrical blowtorch to the world of finance, brokers, and corporate manipulation. And it is quite a ride.

Young and restless: STC and MTC’s Jumpy

April de Angelis’ Jumpy is a strange play. At once about Hilary approaching fifty and the impending sense of a mid-life crisis that follows her around, it also follows Hilary’s relationship with her often-wayward fifteen-year-old daughter Tilly, and the accompanying dramas, struggles, and battles which seem to follow her around. Claimed to be “the funniest new play the West End has seen in ages” when it premiered in London in 2012, it comes across here as blunt, unsubtle, and coarse, and it makes for a rather long and tedious two-and-a-half hours of theatre.

I swear: Griffin & Malthouse’s Ugly Mugs

There is nowhere to hide on the stage of Griffin’s Stables theatre, just as there is nowhere to really hide in the two banks of seats on either side of the diamond-stage. Like hands holding a shard of glass or a jewel, we are drawn into the story and world of the play whether we like it or not and you cannot help but be moved by it. Here, the stage is stripped back to its barest elements – bare black walls, rough asphalt floor – and is offset by a white plastic chair, nothing more or less, save for a metal trolley. It is brutal and unflinching, just like the play itself, and doesn’t apologise.

State of play

This article was first written in March 2013 and revised three months later for publication on an online editorial website. It was never published, so I am posting it here, now, in light of a recent production of Hedda Gabler in Sydney.

In the past two years in Sydney alone, audiences have been given the opportunity to see numerous classic plays in their intended form or in new ‘updated’ versions by various writers and directors (and writer-directors). Following Simon Stone’s reworking of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, versions of Seneca’s Thyestes, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, Bergman’s film Face to Face, and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof have all been reinterpreted from their original ‘classic’ texts. While these have resulted in many critical and popular successes, I have come to realise that there is a very distinct view or presentation of the world that comes across in a large number of these new versions. Beneath their accomplished surfaces is a more troubling issue – the misrepresentation of women in theatre.

Nightmares in white: Belvoir's Persona

Belvoir’s presentation of Adena Jacobs’ theatrical reimaging of Persona is a hard pill to swallow. First performed by Fraught Outfit in Melbourne in 2012 to strong critical reviews, it takes Bergman’s 1966 film of the same name, and uses Bergman’s dialogue but reconceives it for the stage. Similar to Simon Stone’s staging of Bergman’s Face to Face for Sydney Theatre Company last year, Persona seems to be more distant and removed than it needs to be, and seems to occur in some kind of unengaging vacuum rather than the “consummate theatrical close-up ” Belvoir advertises in their season brochure.