Hedda, garbled: Belvoir’s Hedda Gabler

The role of a reviewer, John McCallum has said (quoting Katherine Brisbane), is to articulate why a team of people have spent upwards of six months of their lives bringing this play (or this version of a play) to the stage, and communicate it to an audience. Additionally, the role of a reviewer is to comment on a production, on its strengths and weaknesses, to review a production in all its nuances. I write reviews because I find it the most effective way to record my thoughts about a production and because, as John McCallum so eloquently said in his Philip Parson’s speech in 2010, I’ve been “theatre-fucked” and I want to share the experience with others, encourage them to be “theatre-fucked” too. Favourable reviews are only written when a production deserves it (you can find a selection of them on this site) and they are always a challenge because you can’t say everything; your average review is the most common, but is no less easy or hard for being so – the bad things mustn’t outweigh the good, but the good things can soften the bad. Unfavourable reviews are perhaps the hardest to write because of the time investment that Brisbane-via-McCallum talked about, because I don’t believe that any production is ever truly ‘bad’.

State of play

This article was first written in March 2013 and revised three months later for publication on an online editorial website. It was never published, so I am posting it here, now, in light of a recent production of Hedda Gabler in Sydney.

In the past two years in Sydney alone, audiences have been given the opportunity to see numerous classic plays in their intended form or in new ‘updated’ versions by various writers and directors (and writer-directors). Following Simon Stone’s reworking of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, versions of Seneca’s Thyestes, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, Bergman’s film Face to Face, and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof have all been reinterpreted from their original ‘classic’ texts. While these have resulted in many critical and popular successes, I have come to realise that there is a very distinct view or presentation of the world that comes across in a large number of these new versions. Beneath their accomplished surfaces is a more troubling issue – the misrepresentation of women in theatre.

Google your Gogol: Belvoir’s The Government Inspector

If you've followed my blog over the past few years, you’ll know that I take issue with a lot of Simon Stone’s work. As much as I disagree with some of the ideas in his productions, the broader socio-cultural implications of his themes and the depiction of women, as well as his predilection for using the same cast members time and again, I find it hard to fault his stagecraft, the theatricality of each and every one of his pieces. The Government Inspector is no exception. A late and much-publicised replacement for The Philadelphia Story, it is in many ways a showcase of Stone’s work at Belvoir (and, indeed, in Sydney) in the three years since his The Wild Duck. Playing at Belvoir, this co-production with Malthouse Theatre takes Gogol’s 1836 play and raises it one, turning it into a behind-the-scenes romp which only Stone could envisage.

A metatheatrical self-parody, it tells the story of a group of actors who were going to perform The Philadelphia Story, directed by Simon Stone. When it appears the rights are not going to be granted, the director quits. An actor dies. Another walks. Contemplating what they’re going to do, they remember an Uzbekistani director who did a production of The Government Inspector and contact him to direct theirs. A case of mistaken identity completes the story and Stone’s play unfolds in a kind of madcap glory which only Gogol could have devised (well, sort of).

To be, or Not Toby: Belvoir’s Hamlet re-Daned

On 25^th October, Belvoir announced that Toby Schmitz would be leaving the role of Hamlet early due to a scheduling conflict. Schmitz was to be replaced by Ewen Leslie, another of Simon Stone’s usual cast members. Like Schmitz, Leslie had previously played Hamlet, for Melbourne Theatre Company in 2011, and would be stepping up to the mark from 19^th November. Curious to see how recasting the titular role would affect the production, I went along. And it was actually better the second time around.

Honk if you’re Hamlet: Belvoir’s Hamlet

It’s surely the most well-known play in the English language. If not in its entirety then from its conglomeration of famous lines. By its very nature, Hamlet needs no introduction – as a play or as a character – yet each successive staging seems to require a justification, an explanation of its resonances and relevance. Virginia Woolf once said that “to write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments on what we know.” Perhaps taking a leaf from Woolf’s sentiments, director Simon Stone has fashioned a compelling new interpretation of Shakespeare’s play, and turns it into a chamber piece for eight actors, a pianist and a singer.

Belvoir’s Hamlet, as with all of Stone’s production, is set upon a plane of dark and light, black and white. Costumed by Mel Page in variations on formal attire, these inhabitants of Stone’s Elsinore seem to inhabit the background of each others’ scenes, giving the play an oddly disconcerting and ghostly presence, which it of course already has, but Stone’s staging concept amplifies it.

Over the edge: Belvoir's Miss Julie

On the heels of Simon Stone’s previous work, I was admittedly dreading his adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, with its reputation as a “hallmark of the misogynist theatrical canon,” as director Leticia Cáceres puts it. In Cáceres’ hands however, this production of Miss Julie transcends its superficial labels and becomes a harrowing piece of theatre, one that problematises its subject matter and tries to unpick it, works to present a solution to it.

One of theatre’s ‘great’ feuding couples, Miss Julie is the story of Julie, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a prominent politician, and Jean, the man hired by her father to look after her. In the mode of writers like Chekhov or Shakespeare, Miss Julie is all at once about class and transcending the limitations of your class, while also not being about class at all but rather about lust and desire. It’s a toxic play, intense and unrelenting, but in Stone’s version – freely adapted from Strindberg’s 1888 play – there is something else, too. There’s almost a humanness that ripples through its two-hours running time, and in light of his previous work in Sydney over the last several years, it is something of a welcome relief, perhaps a maturation of his style. Of course, it could also be the hand of Leticia Cáceres, the production’s director, which has helped to balance out Stone’s trademark style into something more probing and pertinent than what it could’ve been if he’d been directing it himself.

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?

Casual misogyny: Belvoir’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

MAGGIE: You know what I feel like? I feel all the time like a cat on a hot tin roof.

BRICK: Then jump off the roof, Maggie. Jump off it. Cats jump off roofs and land uninjured. Do it. Jump.

It’s one of the core plays in the American dramatic canon, and yet there’s something distinctly unsettling about Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Simon Stone at Belvoir. Written in 1955, the play is about a family on a Mississippi plantation whose magnate, Big Daddy, is dying, drawing everyone into the maelstrom. Described as “a powerful social critique of family breakdown, gender roles and relationships,” it is about the end of an era and the next beginning, a portrait of two generations, “one [that] doesn’t want to die, [while] the other feels crowded out, confused, and desperate to inherit whatever it can get before it’s too late.” But like its fellow plays in the canon – Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire – it is also a deeply unsettling, troubling, problematic play, not least because of its portrayal, characterisation and function of women.

Fighting the American Dream: Belvoir’s Death of a Salesman

                   Will you take that phoney dream and burn it before something happens?

                    – Biff

Alone on a bare stage, stands a white car, headlights carving into the dark like twin knives, the tail lights a fiery glow on the back wall, the dream already on fire. As the houselights darken, a figure is revealed in the car – Willy Loman, the titular travelling salesman. Considered one of the staples of the American dramatic canon, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is about “a man refusing to let go of the false dreams we were all once promised.” It’s not a pretty play, either; rather, it’s grueling and harsh and unforgiving and brutal, ferocious even, in its depiction of this crumbling dream.

Belvoir's Strange Interlude

The whiteness is total, all encompassing. Like a void, it swallows the vanishing point into its depths so you are convinced something strange is happening in the fabric of reality. Like the backdrop in a photographer’s studio, Robert Cousins’ set for Belvoir’s latest production (a Simon Stone rewriting of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play) creates a blank page in the open book of Belvoir’s corner. Ingenious in its simplicity, it recalls Peter Brook’s at-the-time groundbreaking A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1970, the foremost example of Brook’s ‘empty space.’ You might’ve seen the pictures – a white cube of a set, with doors and panels set in its walls, swings hanging from the flies, the giant red feather of Titania’s bower, the actors dressed in brightly-coloured costumes, purples, reds, yellows, blues, greens; a circus-like aesthetic, as it’s often been described as – and as the play progressed, you could tell that the audience too, was aware of the intertextuality, the meta-theatrical allusions at play. Much of what Brook wanted to do in his Dream, was to strip away the tradition of realism that theatre had become entrenched in since the 19^th century, and liberate it into a heightened realm of metaphor and symbolism, where the audience was part of the theatre-making process, involved implicitly in completing the circle of theatrical illusion.