Sport for Jove's Away

Michael Gow’s Away is something of a mainstay on the high school syllabus, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a student who hasn’t studied it (or at the very least, heard of it), sometime in the past fifteen years or so. Set in the late 1960s, it is a coming-of-age story on both a personal level as well as a cultural and societal level; the Vietnam War is in full-force, conscription is very much a reality, Indigenous Australians were constitutionally recognised, and the women’s rights movement was swiftly gaining momentum. Produced by Sport for Jove in the play’s thirtieth-anniversary year, Gow’s Away here feels old, starts to show its age and, despite some nuanced moments, ultimately fails to live up to its status as a classic.

Essentially a series of vignettes – although there is a narrative progression which runs throughout – Gow’s play follows three families over their Christmas holidays, and details in soft-focus their fears, loves, losses, dreams, and the hurdles they must overcome. Performed in the Seymour Centre’s vast York Theatre, something of Gow’s intimacy is lost even if the humanity at the heart of the story remains.

2016, the year in preview

In Sydney’s theatres this year, there are many shows to look forwards to – Griffin has the 2015 Griffin Award winner The Turquoise Elephant, Phillip Kavanagh’s Replay, and Finegan Kruckemeyer’s Those Who Fall In Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon The Ocean Floor; Belvoir has a season of general munificence, including Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Jasper Jones, Kit Brookman’s The Great Fire, Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife, Twelfth Night, and the conclusion of Matthew Whittet’s Windmill trilogy in Girl, Asleep; STC has Arcadia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Golden Age, Almeida’s King Charles III, and 1927’s Golem, as well as Angela Betzien's The Hanging; Bell Shakespeare has Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and another Molière adaptation in The Literati, a co-production with Griffin. There’s a cracker year at Opera Australia with John Bell’s production of Carmen, and Julie Andrews’ My Fair Lady; Sport for Jove’s No End of Blame, Away, and Three Sisters; a new Andrew Bovell play; and (fingers crossed) Squabbalogic’s original musical-theatre take on The Dismissal.

2015, the verdict

THEATRE

Event(s) of the Year Ukchuk-ga: Pansori Mother Courage – Sydney Festival Camille O’Sullivan: Changeling – Sydney Festival The Tempest – Bell Shakespeare What Rhymes with Cars and Girls – MTC Orfeo ed Euridice – Spectrum Now
Honourable Mention 4.48 Psychosis; Manic Pixie Dream World – SUDS All About Medea – Montague Basement Of Mice and Men – Sport for Jove Battle of Waterloo – STC Love and Information – STC & Malthouse Man of La Mancha – Squabbalogic A View from the Bridge – Young Vic [NT Live]
Dishonourable Mention Tabac Rouge – Sydney Festival Five Properties of Chainmale – Arts Radar & Griffin Independent The Rocky Horror Show – Richard O’Brien She Only Barks at Night – Living Room Theatre Jumpy – STC/MTC
Best (New) Play What Rhymes with Cars and Girls, Aidan Fennessy Battle of Waterloo, Kylie Coolwell Extinction, Hannie Rayson Manic Pixie Dream World, Tansy Gardam	The Most Pertinent Award ASYLUM – Apocalypse Theatre Company
The ‘Proud Overdaring’ Award Masquerade – Griffin Theatre Company, STCSA, & Sydney Festival Mother Courage and Her Children – Belvoir Edward II – Sport for Jove	Shakesproud The Tempest (dir. John Bell) Hamlet (dir. Saro Lusty-Cavallari) Love’s Labour’s Lost (dir. Damien Ryan)

The Playlist: 2015 at the theatre

As with previous years, ‘The Playlist’ is a musical summary of the year’s theatre-going. The rule is (mostly) simple: find a piece of music that encapsulates either the production or my response to it (or both, as the case often is). The only catch is I cannot re-use a piece from a previous year, even if it is the same text.

Thus, here is The Playlist for 2015.

Proud overdaring: Sport for Jove’s Edward II

Written in 1592, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II is a spectacular exploration of what happens when passion and politics mix, when desires and allegiances are compromised, and what happens when you are forced to choose one over the other. While Marlowe’s Edward pursues his desires over good government and lawfulness, his play has perhaps been eclipsed by another Elizabethan play about a transgressive king faced with a similar choice. That is not to denigrate Marlowe’s play which is strong by itself but, like Edward II, Sport for Jove’s production suffers from following its passion for accessibility and contemporaneity rather than its foundations in solid dramatic traditions.

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.

All that glitters is not gold: Sport for Jove’s The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice is a famously thorny play. Usually called a comedy, it has a dark side to it which cannot be ignored. While it does encompass many scenes of focused around the idea of love or marriage as is wont in a Shakespearean comedy (comedies, after all, end with marriage), Antonio the titular merchant is accosted by Shylock, a money-lender, because he defaulted on the loan of 3,000 ducats and is thus required to pay the bond – the infamous pound of flesh.

2015, the year in preview

In Sydney’s theatres this year, there are many shows to look forwards to – Masquerade, MinusOneSister, and 2014 Griffin Award winner The Bleeding Tree at Griffin; Beckett, Chekhov, Dorfman, Woolf, Shakespeare, Shaw, and new plays from Melissa Bubnic and Kylie Coolwell at Sydney Theatre Company; Radiance, Mother Courage, Samson, Mortido and Ivanov at Belvoir; and a year of staples – Hamlet, The Tempest, As You Like It – from Bell Shakespeare. There’s Sport for Jove’s Edward II; The ANZAC Project at the Ensemble theatre; James Thierrée’s Tabac Rouge, Falling Through Clouds, Kiss and Cry, and The Kitchen at the Sydney Festival, as well as the David Byrne/Fatboy Slim musical Here Lies Love for Vivid, Rocky Horror Show’s long awaited return, the Australian premiere of Matilda the musical, and several shows interstate.

The Playlist: 2014 at the theatre

If you’ve followed my blog or read any of my theatre reviews throughout this year, you might have seen a numbered song at the bottom of the page. Collected together, they form ‘The Playlist,’ the idea being to find a piece of music that encapsulates either the production or my response to it (often both). So, as with last year’s round-up of the theatre-year, here is The Playlist for 2014.

Play-fullness: An Australian approach to the classics

This article was first published on NITEnews’ Spotlight website in September 2014. 

In 2010, the Bell Shakespeare Company toured Shakespeare’s mercurial comedy Twelfth Night around Australia. Directed by Lee Lewis, the production was grounded in the context of the Black Saturday bushfires of February 2009; the actors emerged out of the blackness, exhausted and covered in soot, and proceeded to tell each other a story, assuming the identities and roles of the characters in Shakespeare’s play. Using costumes drawn from a large pile of clothes donated to charity set in the centre of the stage and a scattering of cardboard boxes around its edges, Lewis delighted in the playful theatricality of disguise, the simple answers to switching identities at the drop of a hat, and made sure that joy and an effervescent sense of life were never far away from the very tangible sorrow, melancholy and heartbreak that sits at the core of all Shakespearean comedy. I mention this production for two reasons: first, it was the first time that I saw a production of Shakespeare and understood – felt – the story and the very real humanness at its heart; and second, because Lewis’ Twelfth Night felt like a fresh new play, a play written now, for a contemporary audience.

Miracles don’t happen everyday: Sport for Jove’s A Doll’s House

Ibsen’s work is going through a bit of a renaissance in Australia at the moment. To be more accurate, specifically A Doll’s House. Presented here by Sport for Jove at the Seymour Centre’s Reginald theatre, A Doll’s House will also be seen at La Boite in Brisbane in September (in a new version by Lally Katz), as well as in Nora, a ‘sequel’ of sorts, at Belvoir in August, written by Kit Brookman & Anne-Louise Sarks.

In Sport for Jove’s production, director Adam Cook has stressed the period setting and location of Ibsen’s text as being crucial to the play’s success and impact. “We read or watch this play and think, well, here is a recognisable character, a recognisable woman… There’s a richer dialogue to be had with our own times if you set the play in its original period, prompting us to wonder if we really treat each other any differently today, have we evolved in our thinking at all?” It’s an important question, though (unfortunately) I don’t think Cook’s production comes close to answering it.

What you will: Sport for Jove’s Twelfth Night

Back in 2010, Bell Shakespeare’s national tour of Twelfth Night was a revelation for me. Set in the aftermath of the (then) recent Victorian bushfires, the characters emerged out of the blackness, exhausted and covered in soot, and proceeded to tell each other (and us) a story, assuming the identities and roles of the characters in Shakespeare’s play. Set around a giant pile of clothes and cardboard boxes – a refuge centre, we assumed – director Lee Lewis delighted in the playful theatricality of disguise, the simple ingenuity of switching identities at the drop of a hat, and the joy and aliveness that is never far away from the very tangible sorrow and heartbreak that sits at the core of all Shakespearean tragedy. Ending with a beautifully effervescent dance to ‘Walking on Sunshine,’ it was hard not to be moved by the panache, verve and relish in theatrical delight with which the production revelled. But then I saw Sport for Jove’s Twelfth Night and, well, I think the two are in their own ways masterpieces of their craft.

Written in 1601, Twelfth Night draws from the deep well-spring of many of Shakespeare’s comedies – twins (or siblings) separated by a disaster and then brought together by a twist of fate – and spins it into a heady tale of reflections and refractions, mirrors and echoes, love given and unsought, lost and found. The very idea of doubles or mirrors ripples through the fabric of Shakespeare’s plot and language and characters, and it’s a curiously contemporary examination into the old adage (from the very quotable Hamlet, no less) that “the clothes maketh the man.”

To th’ wars: Sport for Jove’s All’s Well That Ends Well

Often grouped alongside his ‘problem’ comedies, Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well is a dark and peculiar play that binds itself around the double-edged sword of honour. Written around 1605, its bedfellows are the equally perplexing comedies Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida; the tragedies Othello, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, and King Lear; and the Roman plays Coriolanus and Anthony and Cleopatra. I mention all these plays not as a list, but as an indicator of Shakespeare’s range and stylistic concerns – on the one hand, his tragedies are also bound up around honour and right-action, as are his two Roman plays. His Roman plays also concern themselves with issues of war and battle, conflating it with portrayals of love and family. When viewed in this light, his ‘problem’ comedies – so labelled because their content is neither strictly comedic in the Shakespearean sense, nor are they outright tragedies – don’t seem so problematic at all; rather, they seem right at home, and are in many ways precursory stylistic experiments to what Shakespeare would do in his late Romance period.

Playing at the Seymour Centre, Sport for Jove’s All’s Well That Ends Well is a dark and beautiful stranger of a play, an unsettling “fusion of cynicism and idealism,” as A. D. Nuttall writes. Set in France, it is the story of Helena and Bertram and “a young woman’s overwhelming physical desire for a young man and the extraordinary lengths she will go to have him.” Juxtaposing issues of virginity and a maiden’s honour against the backdrop of war and military honour, it asks just how honourable both of them are when they are pushed to their limits. In typical Shakespearean fashion, neither issue is straightforward, nor are the answers clear-cut or easily resolved. Under Damien Ryan’s direction, this production is clear, crisp, fresh and quite deliciously sensual, albeit in a rather troubling way.