The best of thespellofwakinghours (2010 – 2016) - IN PICTURES

The best of thespellofwakinghours (2010 – 2016)

Over the past seven years, I’ve had the pleasure and fortune to see over three-hundred-and-twenty productions in Sydney and interstate, across various mainstage, independent, and underground venues, by a variety of artists and companies with diverse resources, and the results contained within this blog speak for themselves.

As I write this, the future of this blog is uncertain – new adventures await, and I am putting it on hold until I can figure out the best way to continue it in the future. It will stay here as a record and a resource for theatre-makers and theatre-lovers alike.

Thank you to all the artists – mainstage and independent alike – who have invited me to your shows, who have taken the time out to share your thoughts and knowledge, and who have got in touch for one reason or another.

Sometimes you see a show that sticks with you for whatever reason hours, days, weeks, months – even years – later, and it is in honour of these shows that I have compiled the following list, celebrating the rich and wonderful hours of adventures I’ve spent in theatres over the past seven years. So, in a roughly chronological order, here are the brain-wormy experiences that comprise the spell of waking hours.

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. 

2012, the verdict

Here are my selections for the best, the worst and the otherwise of 2012. In no way definitive, it is based on my own personal opinions and evaluation of the past twelve months (give or take). You may not agree with my choices, nor do I claim to be any sort of real critic, but here it is nonetheless, the verdict on my 2012.

On Reading, Part Seven

To live is to dream. To dream is to want to escape. To escape is to read. Ergo, to live is to read, to read is to live. It’s a bit of a vicious circle sometimes, as I’ve mentioned on a number of occasions already this year – the need and want to read sometimes cannot match the volume and supply of books. Which is why I trawl through bookshops and libraries like fishermen do the ocean, hoping that amongst the shelves and thousands upon thousands of volumes there’ll be just one that catches my eye.

Everybody extols the virtues of Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap. And for that reason, I wanted nothing to do with it. I also don’t like the way he writes, the way he uses language, certain words peppering his writing like bullets. When I finally did get around to reading it, I wondered what all the commotion was and had been about. 

A moveable feast: Bell Shakespeare’s The School for Wives

Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably, they are both disappointed.
– Albert Einstein

It’s November, eight weeks until the new year, and the city is in its holiday humour. I don’t think there is a better way to bring on summer than with a life-affirming comedy – such as one of Bell Shakespeare’s offerings – of which their production of Moliere’s The School For Wives is a perfect example.

Following on from her beautiful and ingenious production of Twelfth Night for Bell Shakespeare in 2010 (also the national tour production), Lee Lewis directs a new Australian translation of Moliere’s “comedic train-wreck of a love story that tangles innocence with arrogance – and the other way around.” Set in Paris in the 1920s, Lewis’ production borrows and riffs upon the aesthetic of silent films and is filled with a rollicking knock-about sense of life, self and body. It plays to and acknowledges its stylistic progenitor in a deliciously playful and whimsical way, every pratfall and moment savoured and delighted in by cast and audience alike.

The School For Wives tells the story of Arnolde (or ‘Monsieur de la Souche’ as he prefers to be called), a man who desperately wants to get married but is afraid that a smart woman will cheat on him. He devises an ingenious solution, and enlists the help of a local convent to raise a girl so stupidly innocent that she won’t know the first thing about cheating – let alone the last. In his mind she will be the ever-faithful perfect wife. But is she? In true Moliere style, much like a Shakespearean comedy, “the course of true love never did run smooth” and by the play’s end, the characters’ passions and desires have become so entangled only something akin to a miracle – or at least a heaven-sent miscommunication – could save them and right wrongs.

Oh, you pretty things: Puberty Blues

I’m not embarrassed to admit I’m quite a fan of the recent television series Puberty Blues. Perhaps for no other reason than because it is so good, because it stands out from the crowd, head and shoulders above the rest of the mediocrity on offer; because it is an engrossing piece of Television. 

Recently seen on Channel Ten, it is an adaptation of the 1979 book by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey. Written when they were just shy of twenty, Puberty Blues is a brutal and unsanitised portrait of seventies youth culture, a window onto a despairingly misogynistic world where (young) women were something worse than second-class citizens. In an episode of Australian Story from 2002, Kathy Lette describes the boys she grew up with in Cronulla as “[disproving] the theory of evolution. They were kind of evolving into apes. It would have looked much more natural if they squatted on their haunches and groomed each other.” It shows, both in the book and the television series. As an example of the vernacular of the time, especially in the surfing fraternity, the terms for sex were “‘rooting’, ‘tooling’, ‘plugging’, ‘poking’, ‘stabbing’ and ‘meat injecting’… And the terms for women were ‘bush pigs’ or ‘swamp hogs’; if you were very good-looking you got called a ‘glamour maggot’.” But as brutal as the book is in its depiction of the times and the attitudes towards women, it almost seems to be a caricature, the briefest of sketches. Maybe I’m too old or perhaps too cynical, but there is almost a lack of depth to the book which I was surprised at, considering its status as a ‘classic’, an important part of our cultural maturation. It focuses squarely on the (mis)adventures of the kids – whose ages are described as being thirteen in the book, but in the film and television series have been raised to sixteen – and everything life throws at them, with barely a mention of their parents or the adults in their lives.

The television series however, constructs the story as a set of two parallel narratives – that of the kids, and that of their parents – mirroring and contrasting one with the other. Produced by John Edwards and Imogen Banks, the pair responsible for much of the critically acclaimed television drama series’ of the early twenty-first century – The Secret Life of Us, Love My Way, Spirited, Tangle, Offspring – the series does not flinch away from depicting the times as they were, complete with their mannerisms, vocabulary, actions, and values systems, no matter how crude or backward they seem to us now. If anything, it perhaps works to its advantage, not to show us how far we’d like to think we have come, but to show us how far we haven’t. (Full points are also awarded for reintroducing the word ‘moll’ to the vernacular.) But the show belongs to the young cast who seem so uninhibited and natural; there’s an unadorned charm and intrinsic honesty to their performances, something that is definitely not acting so much as Being.

In too deep: Griffin's Between Two Waves

You think we’re like, actually all fucked? Like rising seas, and hurricanes and judgement and shit?

A white stage, a single lightbulb in the middle of the white ceiling. The black walls of the theatre. A blank slate, a fresh start. Except it’s not, not really.

Ian Meadows’ Between Two Waves is a bittersweet and immediately political relationship drama about climate change. It may seem an incongruous mix on the page – relationships and climate change – but when you think about it, it’s not that big a leap of the imagination to draw a direct correlation between the two. Seasonal Affective Disorder is not just a flippant way to explain away our despondency on a lack of sunshine or clement weather, something my good friend Rosie talks about on her blog. And as for climate change, we all know what’s happening – weather becoming increasingly erratic and unpredictable from one year to the next; extreme weather events – floods, hurricanes, cyclones, drought, bushfires – becoming more frequent; temperatures rising unforgivably, unstoppably; icecaps melting, sea levels rising… They’re all phenomena which Ian Meadows’ Daniel has been researching and studying for ten years. Until the worst floods Sydney has witnessed destroys his research as well as part of his house. The irony isn’t lost on him, however, and as the play unfolds, we see Daniel’s grip on surviving in the face of catastrophe start to loosen. Something that isn’t helped by his partner, Fiona, when she tells him she’s pregnant.

It’s not just a play about climate change; it’s also a play about finding happiness and contentment in the face of uncertainty, of keeping calm and carrying on as the posters tell us. Originally written as a screenplay – a form to which it has aspirations – Between Two Waves is a gripping and engaging piece of theatre about the hereandnow, the very moment we’re being faced with now. Like so many books and plays and films out in the past six months, there’s a degree of anger and frustration to it, but it’s a passionate anger for the most part, anger at the way we’re dooming ourselves and the planet, hammering in the nails on the lid of our coffin with every passing day just that little bit more; anger at the lengths to which we’ll hide the truth, the way we interact with each other (or don’t), but there’s also a desperation – a need – to cling to those around us, to draw together when it all goes to shit.

What do you see?: Ensemble's RED

There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend…
One day, the black will swallow the red.

In the middle of his studio, Rothko sits, staring at a large (unseen) canvas, a cigarette burning in his fingers, his eyes eagerly darting around the large red expanse, the gaping hole on the wall. Around him lie the detritus and the carcases of his work: buckets splattered with dried and congealed paint the colour of blood; jars of pigments, boxes of receipts, bottles of Scotch, cartons of eggs; a phonograph, brushes, shelves overflowing. And behind him, a dropsheet covering a wall, spattered with dried paint in dark angry blobs. Enter Ken, Rothko’s new assistant, out-of-place in a grey suit. And Rothko asks him, ‘What do you see?’ 

It’s the underlying theme of the play – one of them, at least – the theme of looking, of seeing, of understanding and grappling with art. And, at times, it’s angry, it’s passionate, it’s impassioned, it’s frustrated, it’s defensive and defenceless; it’s human and intangible; emotional.

Toffs behaving badly: Belvoir's Private Lives

It seemed impossibly good to be true, too much of a dream to miss, the most tantalising of carrots to be dangled in front of subscribers a year ago when the 2012 season was announced: Ralph Myers directing Toby Schmitz in Noël Coward’s Private Lives. In a nutshell, the play is about two newly-wed couples – Amanda and Victor, Elyot and Sybil – who go on their honeymoon. To the same hotel. Elyot and Amanda were previously married, and now they’re are about to find out all over again why they got divorced in the first place. Considering Coward wrote the piece as a vehicle for himself (playing the role of Elyot, Schmitz’s character) and the censors tried to ban it upon its premiere in London in 1930, it’s pretty much still bang-on the money, still definitive in its wit, almost-perfect in its plot, and utterly beguiling in its critique of modernity and the rich, to paraphrase Belvoir’s season book.

Moonrise Kingdom: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Wes Anderson

I don’t normally do this, write singular reviews or pieces about one film. It’s not because I don’t want to, but rather because most of the films I see don’t particularly warrant it, or that the various reviews found in the newspapers and online encapsulate my thoughts, if not to the letter then in the approximate vicinity. But every so often I make an exception. (My Honours thesis, in its own way, was an elongated piece on Across The Universe, but that was kind of different again).

Back in June, at the Sydney Film Festival, I fell in love with Wes Anderson’s latest film, Moonrise Kingdom. Intrigued by his style and the oeuvre he has built up over the past eighteen years and seven feature films, I recently watched all his films, some for the first time, and it was an interesting if slightly neurotic adventure. In many ways, Moonrise Kingdom is the epitome of Anderson’s oeuvre, a kaleidoscope that refracts and refocuses his distinctive stylistic traits and thematic concerns into their most concise, most emotional – most whimsical – evocation yet.

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).

Fighting the American Dream: Belvoir’s Death of a Salesman

                   Will you take that phoney dream and burn it before something happens?

                    – Biff

Alone on a bare stage, stands a white car, headlights carving into the dark like twin knives, the tail lights a fiery glow on the back wall, the dream already on fire. As the houselights darken, a figure is revealed in the car – Willy Loman, the titular travelling salesman. Considered one of the staples of the American dramatic canon, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is about “a man refusing to let go of the false dreams we were all once promised.” It’s not a pretty play, either; rather, it’s grueling and harsh and unforgiving and brutal, ferocious even, in its depiction of this crumbling dream.

Belvoir's Old Man

I know I will look back on this day as an old, old man.

There’s a kitchen table. Another kitchen table. Four chairs. Two bowls stacked neatly in the middle, spoons. In the darkness, the shuffle of feet, and as the lights rise, we see Daniel (Leon Ford), stretching against a chair, arms outstretched on its back. As he starts speaking, we know something’s not right.

“Something is missing,” we are told in the season book. “The phone is not working, and the kids’ toys are not in their usual spot under the television. In fact, [Daniel’s] wife and children seem to have disappeared.” We’re not told how or when, nor even a why; they just are. Missing, gone, disappeared. As Daniel begins to try to piece it together, tries to make sense of it, we meet his mother (Gillian Jones) and later his wife, Sam (Alison Bell), and kids, Charlotte and Harry. This part, Part One, is strung through with a strong sense of loss and losing, of the vacuum that exists when the carpet is torn from under your feet and you’re left struggling to pick up the pieces. And we are never told what happened, why they are effectively in disparate albeit overlapping places. Part Two begins after a lengthy (somewhat clunky) interlude of blackout, and is immediately – noticeably – different for its presence and abundance of activity and life, of its warm familial feel. Like Part One though, Part Two is also strung through with a sense of loss or a vacuum (albeit, not as strong as the former), the hole that exists from not knowing one’s father (or, more specifically, one of your parents), how you might try and fix that if it is at all possible.

Food with your play: Belvoir's Food

I’ve got a thing for theatre involving kitchens. Not necessarily sinks, just kitchens; little theatres of life, crucibles of thought and action, meeting places; familial communal spaces. I’d heard good things about Food, playing at Belvoir’s Downstairs theatre – very good things, in fact – and so this review comes from the closing weekend of its (already extended) season, something which only adds to the performance, I think: that it could be as fresh and as moving as it did at the end of its run means it’s a strong well-crafted piece of theatre. It’s about sisters Nancy and Elma who run a takeaway ‘restaurant’ on a highway, somewhere in Australia. Amongst the endless cycle of preparing food, the daily rut of serving the same customers the same thing day after day, comes a stranger, Hakan, a young traveler, who slowly – quickly – manages to bring the two sisters together, turning their world(s) upside-down.

Things I’ve learnt at university (an un-definitive list).

If you’d asked me a year ago why I was adding an Honours year to my degree, I would’ve said it was to prolong – delay, even – the having to make a choice about what I wanted to do, delay the having to ‘get a real job’ thing and all the stuff that accompanies not being a student, like bank fees, and ridiculously priced everything.

Initially I didn’t want to do Honours (why would you voluntarily add another one to two years onto your degree?) for the simple reason that it involved writing a thesis of twelve to fifteen thousand words, something which scared me stupid. (It was only once my supervisor told me to cut bits out that I realised I’d written more than I thought I would, more than I had ever written before. Now, I know I can at least write something in the vicinity of sixteen-thousand two-hundred words all told, and I’m still not sure if it’s what I set out to write.) After I’d actually figured out how the hell you actually ‘do’ Honours – how to get the balance of researching, processing your research, writing ideas, and meeting with your supervisor every three to four weeks right – I realised that, as strange as it sounds, I actually liked the researching bit, the finding of as much stuff as you possibly can and digesting it all, seeing what comes out, what connections and ideas you can come up with, the hitherto unnoticed patterns that may become apparent. If there’s one thing I know I am going to miss about university, it’s the library and all the journals and databases you’re given access to.

Belvoir's Strange Interlude

The whiteness is total, all encompassing. Like a void, it swallows the vanishing point into its depths so you are convinced something strange is happening in the fabric of reality. Like the backdrop in a photographer’s studio, Robert Cousins’ set for Belvoir’s latest production (a Simon Stone rewriting of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play) creates a blank page in the open book of Belvoir’s corner. Ingenious in its simplicity, it recalls Peter Brook’s at-the-time groundbreaking A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1970, the foremost example of Brook’s ‘empty space.’ You might’ve seen the pictures – a white cube of a set, with doors and panels set in its walls, swings hanging from the flies, the giant red feather of Titania’s bower, the actors dressed in brightly-coloured costumes, purples, reds, yellows, blues, greens; a circus-like aesthetic, as it’s often been described as – and as the play progressed, you could tell that the audience too, was aware of the intertextuality, the meta-theatrical allusions at play. Much of what Brook wanted to do in his Dream, was to strip away the tradition of realism that theatre had become entrenched in since the 19^th century, and liberate it into a heightened realm of metaphor and symbolism, where the audience was part of the theatre-making process, involved implicitly in completing the circle of theatrical illusion.

Cold Boiled Potatoes: Griffin's The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself

Few things feel as cosmic as a cold boiled potato at midnight. 

The first thing that struck me was how small the foyer was, how the theatre’s capacity ended up spilling outside (a street party in Griffin’s foyer). One hundred and five people in close proximity creates its own weird alchemical energy, almost as if you’re reading from the same sentence of the same book. I used to (and still do) think that Belvoir’s ‘open-book’ corner stage was intimate, but Griffin’s precious diamond, its wedge-like stage among the seating banks takes intimate to a new level. Which, for the productions they do, seems to work a treat.

In the program, musician Tim Rogers is described as a “prancing satyr,” and it’s actually not far off the truth. From his opening dialogue with the musicians (violin and double-bass), he had a puckish raconteur-like effect on proceedings, his eyes glinting mischievously, hinting at a secret truth. It was Rogers who kept the ball rolling when Mary MacLane (a wonderfully mercurial Bojana Novakovic) rebelled against the show and disappeared off-stage, returning with a green shopping bag filled with her own possessions and diary. The line between artifice and reality, show and life, was blurred throughout, and you almost got the impression that, if MacLane hadn’t been a historical figure from the early twentieth century, then she could have been an alter-ego of Novakovic’s without much of a stretch of the imagination. (Popular opinion has taken to calling Novakovic’s MacLane ‘BoClane,’ a rather succinct way of phrasing this duality.) “You see only an impression... the impression of an impression impersonated by an imposter... She is a stupid, pompous, pretentious actress," (p22-23) she says at one point, and it’s hard not to hear Novakovic talking here, perhaps when viewed in light of her diary, read by Rogers to mock-comic effect, which speaks of being bored and angry with the production, with being someone she’s not.

To build a globe

London, 1598. 

Picture a theatre in Shoreditch, a tall polygonal building, a wooden O, with tiered galleries facing a stage, a wooden embrace able to house three-thousand bodies in rapt entertainment. It is London’s first theatre, owned by James Burbage, a businessman and impresario, father of Cuthbert and Richard, the latter a soon to be well-known actor. Creatively enough, theirs is named the Theatre, the first and only of its kind for sometime. Outside the city walls, anything is possible. Here, dreams are made and acted out by men playing at soldiers and braggarts, kings and queens, lovers, tyrants, gods and mortals; a kingdom for a stage, princes to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

This winter, in 1598, the Burbage’s and their company of players, the Chamberlain’s Men, players to the Her Majesty, found themselves in the unpleasant place of having a landlord who wanted his land back, preferably without a theatre on it. Only trouble was, as players and theatre-folk, the theatre was their only means of survival. Sure, they could have toured, but every touring company needs a base, needs a home ground, a waterhole, a place of succour and refuge; their place. The Burbage’s called a council of war, a meeting of minds, where each of the shareholders in the Theatre met to voice their concerns. Present that night was a man who has since become legendary, a William Shakespeare of Stratford. As the night lengthened and their wits wandered, desperate to find a solution to their darkest hour, a candleflame flickered in that marvellous mind.

Upon the heath: Bell Shakespeare's Macbeth

The houselights go down and you’re plunged into blackness. Thick total inky suffocating blackness. The audience begins to shift uneasily in their seats, caught off guard, until at the rear of the stage, a thin shaft of light illuminates a disembodied face hanging, impossibly, upside-down from the ceiling. We soon realise it’s a mirror, or what passes for a mirror, and it speaks – all at once female and male, its timbre trebled and possessed – and the alltoofamiliar opening lines of the play echo confusingly around the theatre. As the lights rise on the stage, we see a gently raked space – the “blasted heath” – a scattering of gravel, dirt, and tussocky grass. Suspended above it is a black reflective panel, the counterweight to the heath, a mirror for all intents and purposes. And the play begins.

Bell Shakespeare’s first production for 2012 is Macbeth (or ‘The Scottish Play,’ if you’re a superstitious mug), directed by Peter Evans. It’s a play about politics and power, rumours and gossip, witchcraft and lineage, kings and courts, and was written around 1605 in response to the Gunpowder Plot. All that is merely historical context to this production which, true to Bell Shakespeare’s ethos and house-style, is in modern-dress, a fusion of 21^st century jeans, boots and shirts, and 1940s elegance, in the lords’ bright cerulean blue jackets and Lady M’s dresses. Director Peter Evans (who directed Julius Caesar for Bell Shakespeare in 2011) wanted to focus more on the people and the power, the relationships and humanity of – in – the play, than on the politics, a decision which gave the play a weirdly languid dynamic and yet one of the most insanely gripping and astoundingly brilliant endings I’ve seen yet.