We are left darkling: STC’s King Lear

Alongside Hamlet, King Lear is one of the megaliths of the Western dramatic canon, regarded by Percy Bysshe Shelley as “the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world.” Often cited as being sublime and universal, it is also extremely nihilistic, a bleak portrait of despair, a Bacon-like scream into the abyss. Known for his acute observations of humanity and generosity in directing, Neil Armfield’s work embraces the epic and intimate all at once, and so it was with great expectations and an almost-equal dose of trepidation that I entered his production of King Lear for Sydney Theatre Company. The only trouble is, it isn’t really that compelling at all.

Love will tear us apart, again: STC’s The Present

This review appeared in an edited form on artsHub.

Chekhov’s reputation as a writer rests upon the legacy of his four major plays (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard) and his short stories. Generally dismissed as juvenilia or the work of an amateur writer, his earlier plays – and particularly the play we generally call Platonov – should not be so easily dismissed. While sources and critics disagree as to its exact creation, the consensus is it was written when he was just eighteen, and finished a few years later as a student in Moscow, and was originally intended for a notable actress, in the hope she would stage it for her benefit performance. Sources cannot agree on what happened next, but a (the?) manuscript was discovered in 1914 (or 1920, depending on who you believe), and it has only been since the 1950s that the play has found a wider popular and critical audience, and it has been restored to its rightful place in Chekhov’s oeuvre.

Chaos theory: Belvoir’s Mother Courage and Her Children

Two particular things happened at the beginning of this year: I sat down with director Eamon Flack for a discussion about his work, process, and intentions as incoming artistic director of Belvoir; and I saw a Korean pansori production of Brecht’s Mother Courage – Ukchuk-ga – at the Sydney Festival. Without wanting to jinx Flack’s production so early on in the year, I believed Ukchuk-ga to be one of those transcendent productions where you leave the theatre exhilarated, an emotional wreck because of its story, stagecraft, and the simplicity of its craft. And I still firmly believe that. Enter, then, Flack’s production of Mother Courage and Her Children for Belvoir. In January, as in his notes in the program, he talked about his desire to bring a taste of the global sense of chaos to Sydney in 2015, and trying to figure out how to do that in a theatrical way. And while he does this to an extent, this Mother Courage feels strangely empty, as though something is missing from it, and I still don’t know what it is, several weeks and two viewings later.

Like a dream: STC’s Suddenly Last Summer

This is the third Tennessee Williams production I’ve seen inside of five months, following Eamon Flack’s lyrical and haunting production of The Glass Menagerie for Belvoir, and the NTLive presentation of Benedict Andrews’ A Streetcar Named Desire for the Young Vic. Rather than saturating the theatrical landscape, these plays have a way of opening up and revealing a personal system of inner refraction in Tennessee Williams’ work, an autobiographical repertory company of characters who shift and morph from play to play but are always present. In Suddenly Last Summer, directed by  Kip Williams for the Sydney Theatre Company, we see many echoes with The Glass Menagerie and shades of A Streetcar Named Desire, but here they are shaped into a new and compelling play which premiered in 1958.

Sound and Fury: STC's Macbeth

You don’t need an introduction to Macbeth, the play or the character. It is studied (almost to death) at school, he is cited as one of tragedy’s key tyrants, and the play’s unspooling trajectory is more of a bee-line into a waking nightmare than any kind of vague saunter downwards towards hell. Played out against the vast backdrop of the (now-empty) Sydney Theatre, Kip Williams’ production emphasises the poetry and creates many arresting images in the moody darkness. And in many ways, it is one of the most human Macbeth’s I’ve seen, both in performance and in impact.

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. 

Waiting for the man: STC’s Waiting for Godot

First performed in Paris in 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is one of those cultural phenomena that can be endlessly referenced, adapted and mimicked by just about anybody and yet none of its original power or intent is lost. Essentially the story of two displaced people, tramps we could suppose, it is, famously, a play where ‘nothing’ happens, twice over. Initially opening to hostile reviews in London in 1955, Beckett’s play went on to break the mould of the “star-actor’s theatre,” and pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved in playwriting and in theatre, both linguistically, performatively, in a script, as well as “the expectation of success from stardom.”

The story of Vladimir and Estragon, Waiting for Godot is a perhaps a kind of Groundhog Day for these two tramps, an endless succession of phrases and ideas, actions, beats and moments, that never really seem to mean anything at all. And yet amongst this nothingness, there is a kind of warmth, a kind of shared humanity between us and Vladimir and Estragon, the hapless Lucky and the rotund Pozzo, the messenger boy. Presented here by Sydney Theatre Company, and directed by Andrew Upton (after Tamás Ascher was rendered unfit to travel), this Godot is a treat to behold.

Broken mirrors: STC's The Maids

I thought perhaps this time Benedict Andrews’ mise en scène would make sense, that his staging techniques and or Effects would be justified by the production’s context and or the text’s demands. Being the fourth production of Andrews’ that I have seen – Measure for Measure (Company B Belvoir, 2010), The Seagull (Belvoir, 2011), Every Breath (Belvoir, 2012) – I thought that perhaps I had seen it all (in many respects, I suppose I have), but The Maids only confirmed the fact that Andrews is perhaps on a different planet to most people, especially myself.

In some ways, I think I understand what he is trying to do, it’s just that his execution and implementation – his deployment and reliance upon– of Effects end up distracting from any kind of message or examination he could be trying to make or conduct. For instance: I understand the notion of constant surveillance that pervaded Measure for Measure (and now The Maids), but the live-video-feeding cameras on large screens on either side of the stage meant you were watching them not the actors on stage. I understand the idea of the storm in The Seagull, but to have ‘ash’ falling from the heavens and not be referenced at all in the dialogue seems clumsy, immature. To depict (frequent) sex acts on stage seemed to negate any point he may have been making, and turned Every Breath into a farce. So now in The Maids, when we have glass walls on either side of the stage, mirrors, a live video-feed from seen and unseen cameras dotted around the stage perimeter and dressing; when the set is destroyed (to an extent) and sex acts hinted at though never fully realised; when characters seem to actually use an on-stage toilet, it really does feel like we have seen it all before. And I guess we have.

Casual misogyny: Belvoir’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

MAGGIE: You know what I feel like? I feel all the time like a cat on a hot tin roof.

BRICK: Then jump off the roof, Maggie. Jump off it. Cats jump off roofs and land uninjured. Do it. Jump.

It’s one of the core plays in the American dramatic canon, and yet there’s something distinctly unsettling about Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Simon Stone at Belvoir. Written in 1955, the play is about a family on a Mississippi plantation whose magnate, Big Daddy, is dying, drawing everyone into the maelstrom. Described as “a powerful social critique of family breakdown, gender roles and relationships,” it is about the end of an era and the next beginning, a portrait of two generations, “one [that] doesn’t want to die, [while] the other feels crowded out, confused, and desperate to inherit whatever it can get before it’s too late.” But like its fellow plays in the canon – Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire – it is also a deeply unsettling, troubling, problematic play, not least because of its portrayal, characterisation and function of women.

Pushed too far: Belvoir’s This Heaven

Tonight the night is dirty and heavy, and the moon is swollen and bright. Everyone knows that on nights like this, things happen.

The streets of Mount Druitt are tinderbox dry, a powderkeg waiting to ignite. All it needs is the reason, a spark.

Nakkiah Lui’s This Heaven is about a young indigenous woman whose father died in custody at Mount Druitt Police Station. The police were found ‘not guilty’ and were fined; the family got $9,000, and no-one is allowed to speak about it. The young woman, Sissy, is about to become a lawyer but the law can wait; tonight is a time to grieve, to make their voices heard, to push, to fight, to take a stand. Tonight, things will happen.

I’ve spent the past two days thinking about this play, and I’m no closer to articulating my thoughts on it. Because it was so blunt, so unavoidably angry and passionate, so heartfelt and real; because it happened, because it happens, because it will happen. Again. And again.

Tonight we fly: Belvoir's Peter Pan

It’s surely the best opening in literature: “All children, except one, grow up.” As J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, a tale of childhood and growing up – of dreaming and pirates, adventures and flying and giant ticking crocodiles – unfolds across the walls of your mind (and, appropriately, the open-book corner of Belvoir’s upstairs theatre), it’s hard not to feel as though you’re a part of it, whether you’re an adult, a child, or a child-at-heart.

Nothing compares to or prepares you for the homespun earthy magic of Belvoir’s production. Directed by Ralph Myers, Belvoir’s Peter Pan is just about the most beautiful piece of theatre you could see this summer, full of the crazy infectious kind of dreaming and playing and make-believe that children excel at so well, and it’s a tribute to the collective imaginations – of both the creative team, the cast, and the audience – that this production works as well as it does.

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.

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.

Every Breath wasted

I'm still asking myself ‘why?’ Juvenile, immature, ludicrous, preposterous, silly, self-indulgent, are all words I’d use to describe this production. It was a case of nudity-because-I-can-get-away-with-it, and I don't think I can begin to expound upon how completely pathetic a waste of 80mins of my life it was.

Benedict Andrews, Every Breath’s writer and director, has a lot to answer for in the current Sydney theatrical scene. Perhaps the man who single-handedly bought pretentious wanking back onto our mainstages (literally, intellectually, metaphorically), Andrews is famous for the continuous stream of gold confetti in STC’s War Of The Roses (as well as continuous streams of ash and rain, not to mention Prince Hal performing fellatio on Falstaff), as well as the seagulling of Chekhov’s Seagull, and the ‘sexy’ power-fuck of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

Tiny Apocalypse: Belvoir's Babyteeth

                                   “Lean back. I've got you. Find a bit of sky.” 

                                    – Part One

For the past two years (this being my third), I’ve held a season subscription with Belvoir St Theatre. Initially it was so I could get tickets to see the inimitable Geoffrey Rush in Diary of a Madman in December 2010, but it’s grown to be more than just that. There’s something magical about that corner stage of Belvoir’s, a rare magic, where the audience and actors play to each other, where the energy is never lost in the gaping chasm between the proscenium arch and auditorium, where everything is highly focused, cornered even; where you feel like something special is happening.

In 2010, the highlights for me were Love Me Tender by Tom Holloway, Gwen In Purgatory by Tommy Murphy, and Diary of a Madman with Geoffrey Rush and Yael Stone. In 2011, with the rebranding of Belvoir and Ralph Myers’ first season as Artistic Director, the standouts for me were Neighbourhood Watch by Lally Katz, and As You Like It, directed by Eamon Flack. (Never before have I had so much fun in a theatre than with As You Like It, and never before have I actually wanted to see a show more than once. Also, I have never seen such brilliant sheep as that cast created during interval.) This year, I think the biggest promise was Babyteeth, a new play by Rita Kalnejais, directed by Eamon Flack, and billed as “a mad, gorgeous, bittersweet comedy about how good it is not to be dead yet.”