Thrill-seeking: Griffin Theatre Company’s A Rabbit for Kim Jong-Il

In the promotional blurb, Kit Brookman’s new play – A Rabbit for Kim Jong-Il – is described as “a cunning comic thriller spanning two continents,” as being “crammed with secret agents, espionage, [and] double-crossings,” and as being “a pointed parable about betrayal and forgiveness, greed and regret.” The only trouble is, it’s not quite any of those things, least of all a thriller.

Murder ballads: Griffin Theatre Company’s The Bleeding Tree

The statistics are staggering – on average, one woman is killed every week as a result of intimate partner violence; one in three women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence perpetrated by someone known to them; one in four children are exposed to domestic violence, which is a recognised form of child abuse; while two-thirds of domestic homicides are committed by an intimate partner. These are not figures but people, lives which are affected and often cut short by violence and/or abuse.Angus Cerini’s new play The Bleeding Tree – winner of the 2014 Griffin Award – takes to this world with gusto and gives us a harrowing and darkly-funny play in which women don’t die, but rather get their own back at the man who has been such a violent presence in their lives.

Produced by Griffin Theatre Company, Cerini’s play unfolds upon Renée Mulder’s steeply raked and pleated stage, and his words cascade and hurtle around the little theatre, a potent and heady rush of adrenaline and relief in chiaroscuro (courtesy of lighting designer Verity Hampson). But before a word of Cerini’s script is spoken, we are thrust headfirst into the world of the play – of a mother and her two daughters – by a swirling cresecendoing soundstorm (Steve Toulmin) that shakes the theatre and our seats with unease and trepidation. It’s a powerful mix, and in the hands of director Lee Lewis, the three women – Paula Arundell as the mother, and Shari Sebbens and Airlie Dodds as the daughters – never put a foot wrong on Mulder’s steep set.

Alchemical love: Griffin, STCSA & Sydney Festival’s Masquerade

If you’ve read the little print at the back of a program for a Griffin Theatre Company production over the past five years, you might have noticed a play called Masquerade as being in development. In 2015, co-produced Griffin and the State Theatre Company of South Australia as part of the Sydney Festival, Kate Mulvany’s Masquerade completes its journey to the stage in a production bursting with life, colour, music and dance. But for all its joyous raucous rambunctiousness, there is a bittersweet and touching story which makes this story, this production, more raw and affecting than it might otherwise have been as a relatively ‘straight’ adaptation.

The world of the news: MTC’s Rupert

First staged by the Melbourne Theatre Company in 2013, David Williamson’s Rupert is a cabaret-style ‘This Is Your Life’ of Rupert Murdoch, a man who needs no introduction. The second richest Australian who ever lived, as Williamson’s note in the program tells us, Murdoch is everywhere – in the films and television we watch, in the news we consume, in the way we think about the world – whether we are aware of it or not, whether we like it or not. Williamson’s Rupert is “a kind of Rupert Cabaret, in which he invites the audience to sit down and listen to the real story of his life, not the story peddled by lefty, inner-city, latte-sipping, acai berry-eating critics.” Directed by Lee Lewis, it is a carousel indicative of the media-saturated age we live in, where information is at our fingertips, where everything is apparently bigger bolder faster louder higher stronger better.

Power or the passion: Griffin’s Emerald City

Growing out of the age-old ‘Sydney-or-Melbourne’ debate, David Williamson’s Emerald City is a timely look at the struggle any artist faces – maintaining artistic integrity, or chasing money and fortune – and sets it against the backdrop of Sydney in the 1980s, with all the big brash audacity that makes Sydney what it is today. Produced here by Griffin Theatre Company almost thirty years after it was written, Williamson’s play is a helter-skelter tennis match between acclaimed screenwriter Colin and his wife Kate, between Colin and seemingly well-connected hack-writer Mike, between Mike and his girlfriend Kate, between Colin and his agent Elaine, between… You can almost see each serve, each rally, each shot, every palpable hit (and miss), every point won and lost; it’s a giddy sparring match between equals, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the whole argument – even if it is, by turn, scintillating, bitter, snarky and futile.

I swear: Griffin & Malthouse’s Ugly Mugs

There is nowhere to hide on the stage of Griffin’s Stables theatre, just as there is nowhere to really hide in the two banks of seats on either side of the diamond-stage. Like hands holding a shard of glass or a jewel, we are drawn into the story and world of the play whether we like it or not and you cannot help but be moved by it. Here, the stage is stripped back to its barest elements – bare black walls, rough asphalt floor – and is offset by a white plastic chair, nothing more or less, save for a metal trolley. It is brutal and unflinching, just like the play itself, and doesn’t apologise.

Don’t judge me: Griffin’s Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography

From the promotional blurb and with a title like Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography, you could perhaps be forgiven for expecting, well, just about anything. Contrary to popular belief, the play has very little to do with the actual physicality of pornography than with the repercussions or perceived stigma that accompanies it (Griffin has issued a disclaimer on their website, apologising for the lack of pornography in the production). True, one character does download eight gigabytes of hardcore pornography, but it is an incidental (albeit crucial) detail in Declan Greene’s bold, uncompromising and fearless play, co-presented here by Griffin and Perth Theatre Company.

If you’ve ever been the Griffin’s Stables theatre, you’ll know there’s nowhere to hide on that tiny diamond stage – for performers, or for the audience. In Greene’s play – as in Lee Lewis’ direction and Matthew Marshall’s lighting, this intimacy and all-seeingness is amplified; the house-lights stay up for most of the seventy-minutes’ running time, and are carefully calibrated to subliminally draw us into moments of unexpected honesty.

Clash over the classics: A perspective on the adaptations vs. new works debate

There’s an interesting article in the Review section of today’s The Weekend Australian, about adaptations and their prevalence in Australia’s current theatrical landscape. Rosemary Neill asks if it is “a sign of the bankruptcy of original ideas, or [if] it heralds a confident approach to great works of drama?”

In the past two years in Sydney alone, audiences have been given the opportunity to see numerous classic plays in ‘updated’ or ‘new versions’ by various writers and directors (and writer-directors). Productions of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova (as The Business), Chekhov’s The Seagull, Seneca’s Thyestes, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Euripedes’ Medea, and the forthcoming interpretation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, have all been rewritten, adapted or reinterpreted from their original texts. While these have resulted in many critical and popular successes, is it hinting at a wider, more alarming problem – a dearth of ‘large-scale’ Australian works?

Night at the museum: Griffin’s The Bull, The Moon and the Coronet of Stars

As many a child does, I loved mythology, and all the many intricacies of which god sired who with whom, who did what where; all the gods, demigods and deities, heroes and heroines running around the place felling monsters and accomplishing miraculous feats… I don’t know if it was that I grew out of it or just stopped being obsessed by it all, but somewhere along the line it no longer held the appeal it once did. It’s all still in my head somewhere, all the stories about the gods and the apples, the world tree, the goat-men and the epic wars, all connected (like so many other things) by that wonderful red string. And then along comes this play, Van Badham’s The Bull, The Moon, and the Coronet of Stars at Griffin theatre; with its adaptation of the story of the minotaur into a contemporary context, it’s a bit like playing hide and seek in a labyrinthine museum of myth – you’re aware of something bigger going on in the story, but at the same time, you’re trying not to get caught up worrying about it all, because you still want to be told a story, you still want it to work its magic on you.

Like friends or lovers telling the story of how they met, the play’s genesis had many beginnings (as told on the Griffin blog in three parts). It was originally written as a short play inspired by a shard of pottery in Oxford’s Ashmolean museum; it started life as a double-dare between two good friends (the other half of the dare became Dance of Death for Melbourne’s Malthouse theatre); it started as a story told millennia ago, about a man who slew a bull, a woman who helped him find his way out again, and a man who loved frivolity a little too much. It’s an enchantingly beautiful play, told eloquently by Badham’s poetic language and performed superbly by Matt Zeremes and Silvia Colloca. Something strange is happening in the museum where Marion and Michael work. As Michael keeps guard, a monster appears along with an impossible situation. Marion flees, only to become infuriated by Mark, a sommelier, and have her world turn upside down as her emotions betray her. To quote the season book, “it will lure you into an orgy of antiquity, cupcakes and beachside frivolity [in] this delightfully debaucherous fairytale for adults.”

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.

A moveable feast: Bell Shakespeare’s The School for Wives

Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably, they are both disappointed.
– Albert Einstein

It’s November, eight weeks until the new year, and the city is in its holiday humour. I don’t think there is a better way to bring on summer than with a life-affirming comedy – such as one of Bell Shakespeare’s offerings – of which their production of Moliere’s The School For Wives is a perfect example.

Following on from her beautiful and ingenious production of Twelfth Night for Bell Shakespeare in 2010 (also the national tour production), Lee Lewis directs a new Australian translation of Moliere’s “comedic train-wreck of a love story that tangles innocence with arrogance – and the other way around.” Set in Paris in the 1920s, Lewis’ production borrows and riffs upon the aesthetic of silent films and is filled with a rollicking knock-about sense of life, self and body. It plays to and acknowledges its stylistic progenitor in a deliciously playful and whimsical way, every pratfall and moment savoured and delighted in by cast and audience alike.

The School For Wives tells the story of Arnolde (or ‘Monsieur de la Souche’ as he prefers to be called), a man who desperately wants to get married but is afraid that a smart woman will cheat on him. He devises an ingenious solution, and enlists the help of a local convent to raise a girl so stupidly innocent that she won’t know the first thing about cheating – let alone the last. In his mind she will be the ever-faithful perfect wife. But is she? In true Moliere style, much like a Shakespearean comedy, “the course of true love never did run smooth” and by the play’s end, the characters’ passions and desires have become so entangled only something akin to a miracle – or at least a heaven-sent miscommunication – could save them and right wrongs.