The corroboration: Griffin Theatre Company’s The House on the Lake

Originally commissioned by Black Swan State Theatre Company and first produced in 2014, Aidan Fennessy’s The House on the Lake is a crisp combination of whodunit mystery and psychological thriller. A taut two-hander, the play unfolds in a series of loops, and sees David – a lawyer suffering from anterograde amnesia – trying to remember where he is and what has happened to him. As the play evolves and hurtles towards its thrilling conclusion, Fennessy drip-feeds us details, deliberately misdirecting us only to throw another clue into play before the scene is out.

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.

Dreams are toys: Bell Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

Written late in his career, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is perhaps one of the stranger of his plays to wrap your head around. Essentially comprising of two very disparate genres – heightened tragedy c. Othello, and bawdy pastoral comedy c. As You Like It – it, today, works on an emotional level more than a dramatic level, and pushes the boundaries of what is possible on stage, both in the Elizabethan theatres and on contemporary stages. Deriving its title from the Elizabethan storytelling mode reminiscent of a fairytale, The Winter’s Tale is classified as one of the Romances by twenty-first century critics. While the term ‘Romance’ derives from the Greek stories from the second and third centuries AD, these stories were, for the Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, merely continuations in a rich vein of storytelling; usually episodic, they utilised the processional ‘quest’ motif, and generally involved perilous journeys and final (impossible) recognitions and reunions.

Presented here by Bell Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s less performed plays throughout the world, perhaps because of its stylistic confusion. Directed with warmth and colour by John Bell, this production is enchantingly set inside a child’s bedroom, that of Mamillius, the son of Leontes, King of Sicily. Created out of white curtains, a white bed, and white floor, the austerity and winteriness of its design gives way to gorgeous washes of colour, deep blues and purples, vibrant pinks and yellows and ceruleans. The story unfolds very much from Mamillius’ point of view, yet for all its ingenuity and enchanting cleverness, something doesn’t quite sit right with this production.

Lest we forget: Sydney Festival’s Black Diggers

Every so often a theatre production stands head and shoulders above everything else, a production that stands out as a landmark event because of its social and cultural significance, because of it’s bearing on the shaping of Australia’s national psyche. Sydney Theatre Company’s The Secret River was perhaps such a production. Now, a year later, Sydney Festival and Queensland Theatre Company, in association with the Balnaves Foundation, present Black Diggers, an ambitious and monumentally affecting production which shines a long-overdue light on the contribution of Aboriginal soldiers in the Great War.

Like The Secret River, Black Diggers comes at a time when we, as a nation, must face the past and learn from it, when we must acknowledge the contribution people have played in the shaping of the country we know today. Directed by Wesley Enoch, we follow the stories of several archetypal figures as they travel from their homelands to the battlefields of Gallipoli, the Middle East, and the Western Front. Far from being jingoistic or representative, the result is an engrossing, harrowing and emotionally charged one-hundred minutes of unavoidably powerful theatre that does not shy away from the ugly truths of war and its legacy.

Food for thought: Belvoir's The Cake Man

Set against a backdrop of an old tarpauline, a ring of old packing boxes and crates, jerry cans and metal drums are set around the tiny Belvoir Downstairs space. As items are bought on – a cardboard box, an iron, a chair, table cloth, blanket – we see the beginnings of a house emerge. It could be a stage anywhere, a makeshift space made from whatever is at hand, and it seems perfectly suited to the warmth and intimacy inherent in the space. The first scene – a clever and sly depiction of a pre-invasion culture – soon gives way to a heated and politically-charged vision of Christian missionaries in Aboriginal communities, and we are thrust into the middle of The Cake Man’s grist, its political and social backdrop writ large upon its face.

A co-production between Belvoir and Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, The Cake Man was written by Robert J. Merritt in the 1970s, and was the first full-length play staged by the National Black Theatre in Redfern. In the intervening forty years, we are ashamed to realise perhaps how little has changed, how racism and intolerance is still ingrained in our way of thinking no matter how much we’d like to think to the contrary, and The Cake Man becomes a sly indigenous perspective on white paternalism.

Crossing the line: Griffin’s The Floating World

Written in 1974, and first performed at Melbourne’s Pram Factory theatre, John Romeril’s The Floating World has become something of an Australian classic. Very much concerned with the devastating effects of war and trauma upon individuals and societies long after the event has passed, The Floating World seems almost prescient in its relevance, nearly forty years later. Set on board the 1974 Women’s Weekly Cherry Blossom tour ship, itself a converted troop ship, Romeril’s The Floating World is the story of Les Harding’s decline and fall from grace. “An electrifying descent into one man’s wartime nightmare,” it is a discomforting and harrowing story as we follow Les’ journey towards Japan, and we watch, sometimes in horror, as his grip on reality soon falls away.

Directed by Sam Strong, it is a robust and startlingly contemporary story, one that still shocks, confronts and unnerves, forty years on. This is in no way a bad thing. If anything, it is all the more alarming, to see how little we have changed in many respects, despite convincing ourselves otherwise. Attracted to its unruliness and its determination to not stay on the page in a neat and civilised manner, Strong describes how Romeril’s script is a rampage through many wildly different narrative modes (comedy, satire, irony, political drama), along the way violating several ‘rules’ of theatrical storytelling: a second act which is longer than the first, and ending with a twenty-minute monologue. But it is perhaps because of this unruliness, because of this determination to not stay in one fixed place, that The Floating World is still as successful as it has been.

The new Elizabethans: Bell Shakespeare's Henry 4

I’ve never been a huge fan of Shakespeare’s History plays; they’ve always seemed a bit dull, a jumble of big speeches and set pieces interspersed with a lot of bickering and fighting amongst political factions. With Bell Shakespeare’s production of Henry 4, however, that has all changed. John Bell calls it Britain’s ‘national poem,’ and you could almost extend that to Australia, I guess. From its opening cacophony of drums and guitar, to the breaking of the set, the raucous rabble of the taverns and the streets, the political manipulating and the ultimate redemption at the end, I don’t think I’ve seen a Shakespeare play done as viscerally and as hauntingly poetic since Bell Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in November 2010.

Written in two parts performed in 1596 and 1597 respectively, Henry IV was based on Holinshed’s Chronicles and an anonymous play, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. Part One deals with the rebel problem in the North, and Prince Hal’s rebellion against his duties; Hal, spurred into action by his father’s scorn, kills Hotspur at Shrewsbury, proving himself somewhat. Part Two sees Hal fall back into his old ways with his friends, while Falstaff is sent away to gather soldiers; upon the illness and death of Henry IV, Hal assumes the crown and becomes Henry V, banishing his old acquaintances. However so much the play appears to depict historical events, “to call any of [Shakespeare’s] plays ‘histories’ is somewhat misleading, because historical events and personages are so heavily fictionalised,” John Bell wrote in The Australian. “To the Elizabethans, history was a mix of myth, legend, folklore, moralising and propaganda. Historical figures and events [illustrated] moral treatises, patterns of behaviour, warnings of consequences and character archetypes.”

This land is mine: STC's The Secret River

Kate Grenville’s The Secret River is not an easy book to digest. I wrote about it last year, saying that it was an angry book though Grenville does her best to disguise it at times; angry at the way white Australia has treated the original inhabitants of the continent, their stubborn iron-willed settlers who made little or no attempt to learn how to live in their new home. When The Secret River was published in 2005, historians jumped at Grenville’s ‘claims’ that her book was history (Grenville, however, never actually made such comments). Now, eight years later, the Sydney Theatre Company is staging a theatrical reimagining of Grenville’s The Secret River, under the pen of Andrew Bovell and the direction of Neil Armfield.

Coming at a time when we, as a nation, can no longer ignore the past, where we can no longer pretend these events didn’t happen; when there is an “inheritance of rage” at the treatment of indigenous people by white people, and a saturation point is reached, The Secret River then – as both book and theatrical event – are but two facilitators to help us as a society to look at the issues contained within them, to look to the past to find how we must [not] progress in the future. And it takes its audience to “a pretty confronting place,” to quote Bovell.

Hellbent: Bell Shakespeare’s 'The Duchess of Malfi'

“I know death has ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits, and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways.”
 – The Duchess [IV, 2]

Elizabethan tragedies – and by extension, their natural Jacobean successors – are a strange bunch, all fire-and-brimstone, hellfire and damnation, a never-ending downward spiral of revenge and death and murder that ends only through the extinguishing of the lives of the play’s characters. Of all of the Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies, none are better or more potently – delightfully, malevolently, gleefully – delicious than Shakespeare’s: Titus Andronicus, beneath the innumerable killings and murders and barbaric acts, is darkly comic and is an absolute blast; Macbeth is a potent examination of power, and what happens when you become drunk on its allure and promise; Othello is devastating in its misrepresentation of evidence, while King Lear and Hamlet are perhaps the pinnacles, the generally-considered perfections, of the form. Shakespeare was not just writing for himself, he was writing in reaction to those that had gone before him – Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd – and those that were writing around him – Ben Johnson, John Webster. Of all of them, it is Webster whose plays perhaps took Shakespeare’s achievements and reverted them to the glory-days of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy or Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, denying the dramatic tragedy form of Shakespeare’s elegance and finesse, and restoring to it much of the robust and blatant disregard for humanity, along with all the bile and brimstone that one could muster. (If you’ve seen Shakespeare In Love, you’d already be familiar with John Webster; he’s the street urchin kid who’s often seen outside the theatres, playing with the cats and mice, and who facilitates Thomas Kent’s unmasking as Viola de Lesseps.)

This presentation of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi was written in 2006 by Ailsa Piper and Hugh Colman and first performed by the Red Stitch Actors Company under the title of ‘Hellbent.’ It’s a pretty accurate description of the play, to be honest, as the two brothers scheme and plot the maintenance of their sister’s chastity, her subsequent downfall and eventual death, along with that of her maid and husband (and former steward).