Revolutions per minute: Stories Like These & Griffin Independent’s Music

Music, produced by Stories Like These and playing at Griffin Theatre, is a “sharp critique of the way mental illness is perceived today,” and digs deeper to fathom the “consequences of raiding people’s personal lives in the name of art.” Written by Jane Bodie, it is the story of two actors (Sarah and Gavin) who befriend a seemingly innocuous young man (Adam) in the name of research for an upcoming play, unaware of the minefield and eggshells they are walking on with every step. Like Stories Like These’s last production seen at Griffin – 2013’s Rust and Bone, also directed by Corey McMahon – there is a robust sense of craft to both the writing and the production, and it is an intense and riveting uninterrupted one-hundred mintues.

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.”