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.

Murder, she wrote: STC’s Switzerland

This review appeared in an edited form on artsHub.

A sharp triangular fragment of a room – a lounge room, a roaring fire, a couch, armchair. To one side, a desk stuffed with papers and a typewriter. A spiral staircase winding through the ceiling; a book-lined room off the side. This is the world of author Patricia Highsmith as envisaged in Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Switzerland, a new play by Joanna Murray-Smith originally commissioned by Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Here, on a set purportedly based on Highsmith’s home in Switzerland, it is always dark outside, while inside all manner of murderous deeds are concocted alongside plots for future novels. Featuring many nods to her body of work, as well as drawing upon the rich connotations and associations of the genre and period itself, Switzerland sees Highsmith – the author of the Tom Ripley novels as well as Strangers on a Train and The Two Faces of January – becoming the subject of an enthralling two-hander stage-thriller set late in her life.

Fish are jumping: STC's Mojo

Written in 1995, Jez Butterworth’s Mojo is often credited with reviving the urban gangster genre, typified in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Now almost twenty years old, the play has lost none of its youthful exuberance and swagger, its rock’n’roll charm and its classic downward spiral of a revenge thriller-tragedy. Presented here by Sydney Theatre Company, Mojo is the story of a group of would-be teddy-boy petty criminals in 1950s London, with the stars of fame, fortune and success firmly in their eyes.

In the hood: Windmill's Fugitive

I grew up with the Robin Hood story (frankly, which kid didn’t?). I love its big epic tale of heroics and bravery, courage, action, romance and the ending which is only really the beginning. And it’s not hard to see why it’s such a good story, why it has lasted so long. It’s one of those stories which is both extremely simple and complex at the same time, a kind of two-way mirror or a kind of kaleidoscope that twists and magnifies the more you look at it. It’s about brigands and outlaws fighting injustice; it’s about social injustice and looking after the people who’ve fallen through the cracks in society for one reason or another; it’s about fighting for the underdog and standing up to those in charge, asking people ‘will you tolerate this?’ Yet, it’s a Romance, in the tradition of the quest stories from antiquity, the same essential story as that of King Arthur, another greatly mythologised figure.

Matthew Whittet’s Fugitive, playing at the Adelaide Festival as part of Windmill Theatre’s trilogy of rites-of-passage stories, is a comic-book fantasy hip-hop romp through a near-future dystopia. “The leaders have disappeared,” we are told. “It’s every man for himself. In the fog of his urban chaos, a young man returns. A guy with strange power and a backpack of destruction.” His name, like that of his legendary counterpart, is Robin. And he’s here to help.

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. 

No holds Bard: STC’s Romeo and Juliet

Alongside A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet is surely one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays. Yet out of this gross familiarity comes a complacency borne of contempt and over-saturation of two lovers drawn from feuding families, whose “misadventured piteous overthrows / do with their death bury their parents’ strife.” Enter, then, Kip Williams, with his production of Romeo and Juliet for Sydney Theatre Company. Tired of the age-old story of two warring households, Williams has (boldly) shrunk the scale of the play’s cast and scope to a mere ten players, focusing the story on Capulet, his expectations for his daughter Juliet, and her own conflicting choices and desires; how much of a toxic mix this is, then as now.

It’s a bold move, and one that may very well set a cat among the pigeons, just as Tybalt explodes amongst Romeo and his friends in the town square. Struck by the “underlying similarities” between houses Capulet and Montague, Williams’ production gives us our own world back at us, a world where “vacuous narcissism” and “old money” is “steeped in unquestioned tradition.” A world where “violence is born of boredom, habit, alcoholism and ego.” In doing so, he loses none of the play’s lyricism and intoxicating poetry; in fact, his staging only serves to heighten it, and by the end – almost three hours later – I dare you not to be left speechless in your seat, the full weight of this spectacular, crisp, sharp production like Tybalt’s knife in your gut.

An education: STC's Mrs Warren's Profession

Although written in 1893, George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession wasn’t publically performed until 1925, “when members of English society could no longer pretend that their world was the epitome of true respectability and elegance.” And while this might, perhaps, seem strange to a modern audience, in the 1890s Shaw’s famously strong socialist opinions were deemed unsuitable for polite society. Originally classified as an ‘Unpleasant Play’ by Shaw himself, it could be read – seen, even – as a study of prostitution, and its aim “to shew the prostitution is not the prostitute’s fault but the fault of a society,” as Shaw wrote to a colleague. Yet, Mrs Warren’s Profession is “no more a work “about” prostitution as a social crime than [Ibsen’s] Ghosts is “about” syphilis as a communicable disease.”

After their misconceived Pygmalion in 2012, I was at first wary of the Sydney Theatre Company’s choice to produce another of Shaw’s plays. Very much like Oscar Wilde (and Tom Stoppard on an good day), Shaw’s writing is filled to the brim with dialogue and scenes which positively sparkle with the fire of intelligence, wit and a playful subversiveness; whereas 2012’s Pygmalion found it early only to lose it in the Sydney Theatre’s emptiness, Mrs Warren’s Profession had it from the start, kept it and let it grow until its conclusion, two-and-a-half hours later. It’s to director Sarah Giles’ credit that this production brings out the tensions apparent in Shaw’s play, the core distinctions between mother and daughter, young and old, male and female, father and son; wealth and poverty, virgin and whore, independence and dependence, morality and depravity, marriage and a career. By re-examining these oppositions anew Giles, along with her cast and team, has created a fresh, vibrant and I’m almost tempted to call it a modern interpretation of one of the English language’s greatest dramatist’s early works.

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.”