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.

Comfy bloody country: Belvoir’s The Great Fire

Appropriating Chekhov’s own description of his play The Seagull, Belvoir’s latest offering – Kit Brookman’s The Great Fire – is billed as “a comedy; a family, ten actors, a landscape (view of the Adelaide Hills), a great deal of conversation about politics and life, Christmas, large hopes, five tons of love.” A self-professed “big new play about us – middle Australia in 2016,” Brookman’s play has much to commend in it (big cast, sprawl, decent running time), but although the Chekhovian associations seem apt in many cases, it ultimately proves to be self-defeating.

Set in a house in the Adelaide Hills, The Great Fire is the story of three generations of a family and the dream they tried to build for themselves, only to watch it change and drift away from them as their children grew up, moved away, while the world moved on. Now, this Christmas, the whole family returns (with a new generation on the way), but they’re at a crossroads – can the dream still be achieved?

You gotta get brave: Belvoir's Jasper Jones

A darling of the Australian literary landscape ever since it was published in 2009, Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones is the story of fourteen year old Charlie Bucktin who lives in small-town Western Australia, and dreams of writing the Great Australian Novel. But when Jasper Jones appears at his window one night, Charlie knows something’s happened. Something terrible has happened that night, and the two boys take it upon themselves to get to the bottom of it. With a beautiful warmth of spirit and a keenly-observed ear for humour, Silvey’s story does not shy away from the darker side of small town life, and manages to bring the politics of the Sixties into this coming-of-age novel in a way that does not feel forced or abbreviated. Following its premiere in Perth in 2014 by Barking Gecko Theatre Company, Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Jasper Jones now opens at Belvoir as the first production for 2016 – and indeed for Eamon Flack’s artistic directorship – and in many respects, there could not be a better show to kick-start the year.

All is lost without a kayak: Belvoir’s Ivanov

Written in 1887, Ivanov is perhaps Chekhov’s thorniest play – even to Chekhov himself – and he rewrote it a year later, while a third version appeared in print before his death in 1904. From the very beginning of its life, audiences couldn’t make up their minds about Ivanov – the play as much as the character – and whether they sympathised with him or not. This was something of a dilemma for Chekhov, and he subsequently reworked it, perhaps never being fully satisfied with it. Astonishingly, this production at Belvoir is its first Australian mainstage production under the direction of Eamon Flack, and it is a strange play, but it is also something of an antidote – a way to close one door and open another.

The outsiders: Sport for Jove’s Of Mice and Men

Published in 1937, John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men tells the story of two displaced itinerant workers, looking for work in Depression-era California. Based on his own experiences in the 1920s, Steinbeck’s book is a haunting and non-judgemental view of the world, something which ripples through a lot of his work from the 1930s and 40s. In an adaptation written by Steinbeck himself, Sport for Jove’s production – currently playing in the Seymour Centre’s Reginald theatre – is tight, elegant, mesmerising and atmospheric, richly evocative of the hardship of the era.

Young and restless: STC and MTC’s Jumpy

April de Angelis’ Jumpy is a strange play. At once about Hilary approaching fifty and the impending sense of a mid-life crisis that follows her around, it also follows Hilary’s relationship with her often-wayward fifteen-year-old daughter Tilly, and the accompanying dramas, struggles, and battles which seem to follow her around. Claimed to be “the funniest new play the West End has seen in ages” when it premiered in London in 2012, it comes across here as blunt, unsubtle, and coarse, and it makes for a rather long and tedious two-and-a-half hours of theatre.

Backstage in the forest of Arden: Bell Shakespeare’s As You Like It

As You Like It is a bit of a mad old cornucopic delight. It has everything Shakespeare has to offer – political intrigue, danger, love, mistaken identity, a smattering of philosophy, a few songs, (not to mention a spot of cross-dressing and disguise), and it is full of the kind of whimsy and mad-logic that Shakespeare specialises in. In many ways, it’s not so much concerned with a complex plot, or a plot’s complexities (as, say, in Hamlet or Twelfth Night), but rather the interactions and relationships between characters, the ways in which these interactions explore the play’s themes and issues including (but not limited to) love, identity, and self-expression.

Bell Shakespeare’s current production of As You Like It is a strange old beast. Played out against a backdrop of old canvas dropsheets, with several concealed exits and entrances (as befits the oft-quoted set-piece speech), it is characterized by a peculiar languid energy, a strange “holiday humour” where time slows, love is professed, declared and role-played with varying success, and magic can happen if only they’d let it. Directed by co-artistic director Peter Evans, this Arden is full of ideas, as are all his other productions, but somewhere in the transition from the page to the stage, some of Shakespeare [and Rosalind’s] effervescence is lost, and I don’t think it finds it again, if at all.

The Christmas spirit: Belvoir’s A Christmas Carol

Each year the signs of Christmas seem to be visible earlier and earlier. With forty-two days until the day actually arrives, Belvoir’s A Christmas Carol is one of the more human and beautiful evocations of this time of year, and its magic creeps up on you unawares, like the sleep that steals upon you as a child sitting up in bed determined to see Father Christmas. Directed by Resident Director Anne-Louise Sarks, a self-confessed Christmas tragic, this Christmas Carol – drawn from the Dickens novel – is imbued with that Belvoirian brand of stage magic which previously infused Peter Pan and The Book of Everything.

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.

More life: Belvoir’s Angels in America, Parts One and Two

It’s one of the biggest plays of the late twentieth century, perhaps one of the last entries in the American canon, one of the newest classics, and it’s not without its own kind of grandeur. Written as two plays, and billed as “an epic double-comedy of love and hate, heaven and earth, past and future,” Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is set in 1985, and revolves around a group of “marginalised individuals in New York in the last years of the Cold War,” as the AIDS epidemic sweeps them all up in its path. To see the two plays in sequence on consecutive days is by turns compelling and grueling, and I don’t think it would be any easier seeing them on the same day.

Staged within a beige-tiled atrium, Angels in America is directed with a vitality and cleverness by Eamon Flack, and to use a character’s analogy, it’s all a bit like an octopus with its eight arms waving about, trying to keep track of every character, every actor, each plotline, and still keep everything in the scope of the bigger picture. Now a generation old (as a complete play, it is a year or two younger than I am), whether you realise it or not, it’s “actually a play about the beginning of the era we’re now in the thick of.”

Casual brutality: Griffin Independent & Stories Like These's Rust and Bone

The short stories by Canadian author Craig Davidson are not for the faint-hearted. In his collection of eight stories entitled Rust and Bone (also the title of the first story), there is a certain masculine façade, a swagger and bravado that is fiercely entertaining and quite alarmingly funny. There are boxers desperate to survive another round, their hands broken toomanytimes; pitbull breeders and killer whale trainers and sex addicts, their stories told with a bluntness that belies their strange brand of sensitivity. Chuck Palahniuk describes them as “[smudging] the line between cruelty and horror, comedy and mercy,” and that’s quite an accurate way to describe them.

From three of these stories, then, comes Caleb Lewis’ Rust and Bone currently playing at Griffin Theatre as part of their Griffin Independent season. It’s not a comfortable evening by any stretch, but it’s certainly not bleak; there is humour there but it’s confronting more than anything – are you meant to be laughing or not?