Goodbye, yellow brick road: Belvoir’s The Wizard of Oz

The story of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has found a place as one of the most famous and enduring stories in (children’s) literature; just as the celebrated MGM film with Judy Garland has become a staple of millions of people’s lives since 1939, the story has become synonymous with a journey of discovery and a quest for self-identity and -worth. At its heart are four displaced people who are in some way incomplete; the book (and film), then, becomes a chronicle of their quest for completeness, for self-change. It is also a space for dreaming and yearning, a place for the glorious flights of fancy of your imagination, a space for a certain amount of theatricality, illusion, and artifice. Based on the myth created by Baum’s book and perpetuated in all its Technicolor glory, Belvoir’s latest offering is Adena Jacobs’ reimagining of The Wizard of Oz. However: if you do happen to go down to Belvoir this May, it’s best to leave your expectations and love of the book and/or film at the door.

Cosmic dancer: Belvoir’s Blue Wizard

This review was originally written for artsHub.

Billed as “the gayest one-man show ever!”, Nick Coyle’s Blue Wizard is like nothing you’ve seen before. Presented by Belvoir as part of the Mardi Gras festival, it’s the story of a cosmic wizard who crashes to earth in a comet, and sings and dances in an effort to return home. First presented by PACT centre for emerging artists in 2013, Blue Wizard is a show that doesn’t apologise for being itself. Playing in Belvoir’s Downstairs theatre, Coyle’s wizard cavorts and dances, shimmies struts and frets amongst piles of junk and detritus set atop a mirrored floor. Lasers flash and strobe, smoke creeps along the floor, and the blue wizard must care for an egg which hatches uncharacteristically early.

The Misconception of Belvoir’s Oedipus Rex

Black carpet. A single chair. A wall made from wooden frames covered in plastic sheeting. Harsh fluorescent light.

Blackout.

Lights up slowly on a man sitting on the chair, blindfolded. He wears an oxygen mask, his breathing laboured, rasping; catching. Slow, sometimes painfully loud. A long beat.

Blackout.

The man stands on the chair, his singlet over his head, screaming wordlessly like a Bacon pope into the void.

Blackout.

Suddenly from nowhere, the sound of a hurricane envelopes us, total, all-consuming; a great sonic roar of wind and fury and anger. Like a plane crashing over our heads, like a building collapsing, like a world falling apart. The man stands on the chair, naked in the dim light, chanting wordlessly.

The lights snap to full, the fluorescence blinding, cruel. The man stands on the chair, naked; ashamed. Alone and suddenly very small. A woman enters the space carrying a large and somewhat heavy bag and proceeds to wash the man from a tub of warm water. He tries to retain his dignity, but in the small intimate Downstairs theatre, it’s not entirely possible.

Hedda, garbled: Belvoir’s Hedda Gabler

The role of a reviewer, John McCallum has said (quoting Katherine Brisbane), is to articulate why a team of people have spent upwards of six months of their lives bringing this play (or this version of a play) to the stage, and communicate it to an audience. Additionally, the role of a reviewer is to comment on a production, on its strengths and weaknesses, to review a production in all its nuances. I write reviews because I find it the most effective way to record my thoughts about a production and because, as John McCallum so eloquently said in his Philip Parson’s speech in 2010, I’ve been “theatre-fucked” and I want to share the experience with others, encourage them to be “theatre-fucked” too. Favourable reviews are only written when a production deserves it (you can find a selection of them on this site) and they are always a challenge because you can’t say everything; your average review is the most common, but is no less easy or hard for being so – the bad things mustn’t outweigh the good, but the good things can soften the bad. Unfavourable reviews are perhaps the hardest to write because of the time investment that Brisbane-via-McCallum talked about, because I don’t believe that any production is ever truly ‘bad’.

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.