Room temperature: STC’s Arcadia

This is a revised version of a piece written for artsHub.

VALENTINE: Heat goes to cold. It’s a one-way street. Your tea will end up at room temperature. What's happening to your tea is happening to everything everywhere. The sun and the stars. It’ll take a while but we're all going to end up at room temperature.

Known for his wit and wordplay as much as his intellectual rigour (and occasional density), Tom Stoppard’s plays are a marriage of big ideas, drama, and the occasional gimmick, but they never fail to dazzle in one way or another. No matter how dense or impenetrable the science or intellectual debate behind his work is, you generally leave one of his plays “wondering whether you have just been educated or entertained, in the end allowing for the likelihood of both,” as William W. Demastes wrote. Arcadia, written in 1993, is without a doubt Stoppard’s most perfectly constructed play – on a technical level as much as a narrative one – and has led to it, not undeservingly, labelled “the greatest play of our age.” Described by Stoppard himself as “all sex and love and romance and jokes,” Arcadia is at once fiercely intellectual (in typical Stoppard fashion), but it also has a strong emotional counterweight, and manages to combine both of these – through the constant juxtaposition of two time periods, two-hundred-odd years apart – with flair, wit, lightness and, ultimately, poignancy. Presented here by Sydney Theatre Company, Richard Cottrell’s Arcadia certainly looks handsome, but like Mr Noakes’ improved Newcomen steam engine, it doesn’t quite reflect the sum of the energy and care that has gone into it, and “repays eleven pence in the shilling at most.”

Still single: STC's After Dinner

Written in 1988, After Dinner is Andrew Bovell’s first play. Set in a suburban pub bistro, five single thirty-somethings meet after work for Friday night drinks and a meal, and their very individual personalities and circumstances collide in an achingly brutal riot of sex, misdirections, and variations on the idea of friendship.

Best known for his plays such as When The Rain Stops Falling, Speaking in Tongues (later filmed as Lantana), Holy Day, and the recent adaptation of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, Bovell is increasingly drawn to the turbulence and tumult of daily lives, the dark and gripping mysteries which lie concealed beneath a veneer of normalcy in each of our lives. Written when he was just twenty-one, After Dinner lacks his trademark finesse and subtlety; everything here is dialled up larger than it should be, all seems to be turned well past naturalism into a kind of crude grotesquerie. Presented here by the Sydney Theatre Company, it is one-hundred minutes of painfully coarse and blunt banter between the five lonely hearts, as their Friday night quickly deteriorates into a night none of them would want to remember in a hurry.

Cyranose: STC’s Cyrano de Bergerac

His is the nose that launched a thousand quips. A famous literary swashbuckler in the same league as Dumas’ musketeers, Cyrano de Bergerac was, incredibly, a real writer and philosopher in France in the early seventeenth century. Imbued with the famous proboscis and a life much embellished beyond reality, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is a romantic swashbuckler like no other. With an uncanny gift for words – his pen, they say, is as mighty as his sword – he is both heroic and hopeless in the face of love, and his story is one of love – lost, won, and unrequited, and is as humane as his nose is larger than life.

While Rostand’s play was written in 1897, the Sydney Theatre Company’s production uses Andrew Upton’s adaptation from 1999 in an updated version, and is set in Cyrano’s own mid-seventeenth century world with much flair and panache. It is the story of Cyrano, a man who is blessed with an unfortunately large nose, and who is in love with Roxane. Roxane is in love with Christian. Christian is in love with Roxane but cannot express it anywhere near as adequately as he’d like. Cyrano agrees to help him and, well, I’ll leave the rest up to you. But as lofty and as word-drunk as the play – as Cyrano – is, there is still a sparseness, an disconnection between the period flummery in the costumes and the occasionally spare mise-en-scène (designed by Alice Babidge with Renée Mulder), and Upton’s adaptation.

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.

Keep calm and Carry On: STC's Noises Off

Playing farce is a dangerous business. Not only is the timing and hitting of marks crucial, but physicality is also a key element in the success of a piece. In a way, farce largely depends upon an audience’s knowing of things that the characters do not. “We know the vicar is behind the door, but the ingénue does not. We know why she’s in her underwear and the husband’s trousers have fallen down but his affronted wife does not,” writes Jonathan Biggins in the play’s program. Enter then, Noises Off, Michael Frayn’s seminal farce – nay, play – about a “third-rate production of a creaky bedroom farce” called ‘Nothing On’ as played by a less than fourth-rate troupe of actors. I say play because the plotting and precision of the writing is pure Stoppard, the collision of art-imitating-life is Pirandello’s, the characters’ awareness of a curtain that will never fall is Beckett’s. Yet for all its double entendres and mishaps, there lies at its heart the very real dilemma of not knowing your next line, your next entrance, your next move, and in that way it is very much like life – we never really know what (or, perhaps, who) is coming through the door next.

Staged in three acts, Act One depicts the final rehearsal before opening night (the first time they have ever run the show through head to tail in one go). Act Two is the production seen from backstage, four weeks into a national (regional?) tour (and played mostly in actions, “looks and gestures”), while Act Three is the production on its final night in Stockton-on-Tees, the last leg of the tour, and indeed on its last legs. It’s all a bit Groundhog Day in a way, the way we see the same one-act’s action played over and again, but with increasing variation and divergence from the prompt-book.

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.