Dreamer: Windmill's Girl Asleep

At the Adelaide Festival in 2014, a new play by Matthew Whittet was premiered. Forming the third part in a trilogy for Windmill Theatre Co. (what is now known as the The Windmill Trilogy), the play was the story of fourteen year old Greta Driscoll, her dreaded fifteenth birthday party, and everything that happened on that night. The play was Girl Asleep, and it went on to become an internationally successful film. When it premiered in Adelaide, playing in rep with the rest of the trilogy, I missed it due to Hilary Bell’s gorgeous version of The Seagull, and the first instalment of the trilogy, Fugitive. But two-and-a-half years and numerous successful film festival campaigns later, Girl Asleep rocks onto Belvoir’s corner stage in all its 1970s glory, but I can’t help but wonder if it suffers from Whittet’s tendency to wallow in a conceit without properly exploring and/or developing its structure and the full extent of the world.

Copping Flack: Belvoir’s Twelfth Night

Shakespeare’s festive comedies – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night – are bound within a series of strict societal rules, rules which govern behaviours, moods, actions and reactions, as well as language and plot. They also perform a very specific function, namely allowing the society’s capacity for anarchy or misrule to find a full expression in an environment where mischief-making can be corrected, apologised for, and in some cases, released. Punning on the notion of ‘will’ – the idea of desire and love (and/or lust), as much as autonomy, as well as being a euphemism for penis – Shakespeare somehow manages to create a play which, like Rosalind at the end of As You Like It, asks us to cherish what pleases us and forgive the rest.

Eamon Flack’s As You Like It, seen at Belvoir in 2011, took Shakespeare’s play and infused it with a wit, warmth, and fullness of life and expression that barely seemed to be contained within the two walls of the Belvoir stage, and later spilled over into the street outside. In creating that production, Flack and his collaborators “gave [themselves] the same task Shakespeare gave himself and his company” – that is, to (re)create the kind of experience that Shakespeare might have written to be performed on Shrove Tuesday at Richmond Palace in 1599, in the presence of Queen Elizabeth I. In that instance, As You Like It became “a show about a bunch of city people visiting a pastoral realm of bucolic contemplation, performed for a bunch of city people visiting a pastoral realm of bucolic contemplation,” that is to say the theatre. I mention all this in prologue to ground Flack’s latest production of Shakespeare’s last great festive comedy – Twelfth Night, or What you will – also perhaps Shakespeare’s darkest, within a kind of self-critical feedback mirror.

In his director’s notes for Twelfth Night, Flack writes about the holy days and feast days when controlled anarchy (such as pageants and rough-theatre) was permitted. He also says that for Twelfth Night, he and his collaborators set themselves the task of “performing the play almost entirely as written[,] partly as a boast and partly as a warning, because some of the play is now archaic nonsense… [We] have taken the play on its own terms and plunged headlong into its strange poetry because the archaic oddity of the play is what makes it glorious.” Except that it’s not. Not really. Not much at all.

Terror Firma: Malthouse’s Picnic at Hanging Rock

The story of Picnic at Hanging Rock is seared into our collective conscience, and has become a key part of our national mythology as both a thing of beauty and a force of terror. Written by Joan Lindsay in 1967, the story tells of a group of young women, students from Appleyard College, who have a picnic at Hanging Rock on St Valentine’s Day, 1900, and inexplicably vanish during an afternoon expedition. Filmed by Peter Weir in 1975, the story was fast-tracked into our cultural imagination, and has become an iconic story that plays upon our insecurities about possession, sexuality, colonialism, and mankind’s control over nature. Now, in the hands of playwright Tom Wright and director Matthew Lutton, Melbourne’s Malthouse theatre brings Lindsay’s novel to the professional stage for the first time, and capitalises on the story’s eeriness and terror, as well as its latent sexuality and potency.

Get Hitched: MTC's North by Northwest

Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest is one of those films which dwells in the collective cultural consciousness as a series of memorable images or sequences – the crop-duster chase, the Mount Rushmore finale. Described as “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures,” the film has now become a stage production under the guidance of Simon Phillips for the Melbourne Theatre Company. And it is every bit as thrilling and audacious as you would expect.

Adapted by Carolyn Burns from the screenplay by Ernest Lehman, MTC’s North by Northwest remains almost entirely faithful to the film. But whereas in other productions this could be seen as a disservice, whereby it slavishly seeks to replicate its filmic predecessor, here Burns, Phillips, the cast and crew all approach their task with relish and glee, and the results, while serious, never take themselves too seriously, giving us a magical new version of Hitchcock and Lehman’s thrilling tale of mistaken identity.

We can dance if we want to: Windmill’s School Dance

You’re in Year 9, a nerd. It’s the school dance. Your friends, also nerds (one’s a loser-nerd), are there. You wait outside, trying to pluck up the courage to go inside because, well, the school bully is in there and he said that if you were to show up tonight he’d break every bone in your body. And you knew he probably wasn’t kidding. Also, there are girls in there. And they’re dancing. Which is even harder.

This is the premise of School Dance – a play developed by Windmill Performing Arts and presented to much acclaim at last year’s Adelaide Festival – playing as part of the Sydney Festival by the Sydney Theatre Company. Written by Matthew Whittet, it is set “right [at] that horrible just-getting-into-girls phase,” and follows three awkward teens – Matthew, Luke and Jonathon (the play’s writer, composer and designer, respectively, playing semi-fictionalised versions of their fifteen year-old selves) – as they embark on a hormone-fuelled quest for social acceptability.