Highly emusing: Don’t Look Away’s Babes in the Woods

An edited version of this piece was published on artsHub.

First produced in 2003 by Melbourne’s Playbox theatre company (now Malthouse), Tom Wright’s Babes in the Wood was a twenty-first century take on the colonial pantomime tradition, spiralling out of control into a hallucinogenic cornucopia of disreputability. Now, thirteen years later, Don’t Look Away – the company responsible for Inner Voices and The Legend of King O’Malley – have returned to the woods of the Old Fitz, and have brought us something approximating a sequel but also a more contemporary reinterpretation of the panto tradition and an interrogation of the milieu from which the Australian pantomime tradition sprang in the nineteenth century, as well as our own 2016 context. And even though it might look like it’s raided a Christmas warehouse for its set in the best possible way imaginable, it still packs a satirical punch and leaves you doubled over in laughter, appropriately heckling the performers and throwing cabbage. What’s not to love?

The elephant in the room: Griffin’s The Turquoise Elephant

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One of the first productions I saw at Griffin was Ian Meadows’ Between Two Waves, a finely-wrought and emotional play about the personal toll of climate change. Four years later, Stephen Carleton’s Griffin-award-winning The Turquoise Elephant, is a play about climate change, egos, and running out of time; it explodes onto Griffin’s tiny stage with as much verve, farce, panache and delicious wickedness as it can muster, and it is in may ways both the antithesis and dark mirror of Meadows’ play, as well as being a darkly comic piece of absurdist mastery in the vein of Ionesco.

Fallen from the sky: Ensemble’s A History of Falling Things

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A romantic-comedy about two keraunothnetophobes, James Graham’s A History of Falling Things is a gentle, humorous and ultimately moving play about overcoming your fears and venturing outside of your comfort zone (literally, in this case).

Robin and Jacqui are both keraunothnetophobes – that is, they both suffer the fear of things falling from the sky. When they both meet online in a chatroom for others like themselves, they find each other reaching out across the space between them, through their screens, and ultimately facing their fears.

Shakespeare Make U LOL: The Listies & STC’s The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Skidmark

This is a revised version of a piece written for artsHub.

When I was twelve, my parents took me to see The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), and even though I didn’t get all the jokes and references, I fell in love with the craziness, the silliness, and the sheer fun that the show revelled in and celebrated. To this day, I still maintain that your first serious exposure to Shakespeare (sometimes as a child) is how you see him and his work throughout life. Over the past number of years, there have been various productions which have come close to embracing the same sort of silliness and irreverence which the Reduced Shakespeare Company ushered in, and it is always a delight to revel in each production’s new take on the Bard.

While the rest of the world tries to out-do each other in the Most Reverent Homage To Shakespeare’s Legacy award to celebrate Shakespeare’s 400th death-day, The Listies – along with their friends at Sydney Theatre Company – have mounted a production entitled Hamlet: Prince of Skidmark no less, which somehow manages to embrace Shakespeare’s play (and all its variants) and the kind of mindset often found in children aged five to ten, and pulls it off with enough fart jokes and theatrical magic (as well as a healthy dose of chaos) to make you feel like a kid again.

A new Shakespeareience: Post-Haste Players’ Bard to the Bone

This review was originally written for artsHub.

To celebrate the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death (as well as his 452^nd birthday), Post-Haste Players are doing something a little bit different. While others are falling over backwards trying to enunciate why Shakespeare is Shakespeare, why his plays still matter, what he might be doing if he was alive today, Post-Haste Players are celebrating his skill for creating new words and new stories with a show that would probably make the man himself laugh and roll in his grave (quite possibly with laughter), at the same time. Using their skills as improvisers and actors well-versed in the themes and patterns in Shakespeare’s plays, the Players are creating entirely new and improvised plays which may be Shakespearean, with the help of the audience. What ensues is, well, nothing short of madness.

Room temperature: STC’s Arcadia

This is a revised version of a piece written for artsHub.

VALENTINE: Heat goes to cold. It’s a one-way street. Your tea will end up at room temperature. What's happening to your tea is happening to everything everywhere. The sun and the stars. It’ll take a while but we're all going to end up at room temperature.

Known for his wit and wordplay as much as his intellectual rigour (and occasional density), Tom Stoppard’s plays are a marriage of big ideas, drama, and the occasional gimmick, but they never fail to dazzle in one way or another. No matter how dense or impenetrable the science or intellectual debate behind his work is, you generally leave one of his plays “wondering whether you have just been educated or entertained, in the end allowing for the likelihood of both,” as William W. Demastes wrote. Arcadia, written in 1993, is without a doubt Stoppard’s most perfectly constructed play – on a technical level as much as a narrative one – and has led to it, not undeservingly, labelled “the greatest play of our age.” Described by Stoppard himself as “all sex and love and romance and jokes,” Arcadia is at once fiercely intellectual (in typical Stoppard fashion), but it also has a strong emotional counterweight, and manages to combine both of these – through the constant juxtaposition of two time periods, two-hundred-odd years apart – with flair, wit, lightness and, ultimately, poignancy. Presented here by Sydney Theatre Company, Richard Cottrell’s Arcadia certainly looks handsome, but like Mr Noakes’ improved Newcomen steam engine, it doesn’t quite reflect the sum of the energy and care that has gone into it, and “repays eleven pence in the shilling at most.”

Not quite fantastick: Wooden Horse & Hayes Theatre Co’s The Fantasticks

This review was originally written for artsHub.

Written in 1960, you could be forgiven for thinking that The Fantasticks is a period piece. But in the Wooden Horse/Hayes Theatre Co production directed by Helen Dallimore, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s musical is brought forward in a clever and, for the most-part, considered staging which exudes a quirky kind of charm. Sitting somewhere between Romeo & Juliet and a Tim Burton film (think, Big Fish), with a dash of a twisted Elizabethan revenge drama, The Fantasticks is the story of two single fathers (Laurence Coy and Garry Scale) who want their children (Jonathan Hickey and Bobbie-Jean Harding) to fall in love, so pretend they’re in the midst of a bitter feud, and build a wall between their two houses. Unable to determine how to end the feud, they enlist the help of El Gallo, a Pirandellian narrator-cum-stage manager, who concocts a diversion to ensure everything ends well. Or does it?

To know, to know: Genesian Theatre’s Three Sisters

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First performed in 1901, Chekhov’s Three Sisters is a play about love, the question (and delusion) of love, and the notion of happiness and/or contentedness. Perhaps not as bleak as Ivanov, or as elegantly poignant as The Seagull, Three Sisters is still undeniably Chekhovian in its depiction of a group of people caught up in their foibles and their lives, with much philosophising and talk of fate and the future that lies ahead of them. The three Pozorov sisters – Olga, Masha, and Irina – are stuck in a provincial town hundreds of miles from Moscow, and one day dream of returning to their beloved city; fate, however, has other ideas, and life overtakes them, further anchoring them to the small town. In one sense, it is a comedy in the Chekhovian sense, but at the same time it is very much a drama. This production at the Genesian Theatre is undeniably a comedy, but not as Chekhov ever intended it.

Love will tear us apart, again: STC’s The Present

This review appeared in an edited form on artsHub.

Chekhov’s reputation as a writer rests upon the legacy of his four major plays (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard) and his short stories. Generally dismissed as juvenilia or the work of an amateur writer, his earlier plays – and particularly the play we generally call Platonov – should not be so easily dismissed. While sources and critics disagree as to its exact creation, the consensus is it was written when he was just eighteen, and finished a few years later as a student in Moscow, and was originally intended for a notable actress, in the hope she would stage it for her benefit performance. Sources cannot agree on what happened next, but a (the?) manuscript was discovered in 1914 (or 1920, depending on who you believe), and it has only been since the 1950s that the play has found a wider popular and critical audience, and it has been restored to its rightful place in Chekhov’s oeuvre.

A bard thing: Genesian Theatre’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)

This review was originally written for artsHub.

Back in 2002, my parents took twelve-year-old me to see The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) at the Glen Street Theatre. It was my first introduction to Shakespeare and while I might not have understood every joke or (palpable) hit at the Bard, I enjoyed it immensely and try to see each subsequent production of it, to remind myself of the joy in getting so caught up in something it changes the way you think. This production, at the Genesian Theatre in Sydney’s CBD, is the fifth production I’ve seen of this play, and it is every bit as silly and as enjoyable as it was thirteen years ago; as it has always been.

Barking mad: Living Room Theatre’s She Only Barks at Night

This review appeared in an edited form on artsHub.

The old adage goes that you should never work with children, animals, or firearms. In Living Room Theatre’s (henceforth LRT) new performance installation, children and animals play a central role in evoking the world of hysteria. Presented in association with the Sydney Environment Institute and Sydney University’s Macleay Museum and Veterinary Science faculty, LRT’s She Only Barks at Night is an eerie and unsettling evening, though perhaps not always as its creators intended.

Cosmic dancer: Belvoir’s Blue Wizard

This review was originally written for artsHub.

Billed as “the gayest one-man show ever!”, Nick Coyle’s Blue Wizard is like nothing you’ve seen before. Presented by Belvoir as part of the Mardi Gras festival, it’s the story of a cosmic wizard who crashes to earth in a comet, and sings and dances in an effort to return home. First presented by PACT centre for emerging artists in 2013, Blue Wizard is a show that doesn’t apologise for being itself. Playing in Belvoir’s Downstairs theatre, Coyle’s wizard cavorts and dances, shimmies struts and frets amongst piles of junk and detritus set atop a mirrored floor. Lasers flash and strobe, smoke creeps along the floor, and the blue wizard must care for an egg which hatches uncharacteristically early.

Murder, she wrote: STC’s Switzerland

This review appeared in an edited form on artsHub.

A sharp triangular fragment of a room – a lounge room, a roaring fire, a couch, armchair. To one side, a desk stuffed with papers and a typewriter. A spiral staircase winding through the ceiling; a book-lined room off the side. This is the world of author Patricia Highsmith as envisaged in Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Switzerland, a new play by Joanna Murray-Smith originally commissioned by Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Here, on a set purportedly based on Highsmith’s home in Switzerland, it is always dark outside, while inside all manner of murderous deeds are concocted alongside plots for future novels. Featuring many nods to her body of work, as well as drawing upon the rich connotations and associations of the genre and period itself, Switzerland sees Highsmith – the author of the Tom Ripley novels as well as Strangers on a Train and The Two Faces of January – becoming the subject of an enthralling two-hander stage-thriller set late in her life.

Monkey magic: Theatre of Image’s Monkey… Journey to the West

This review appeared in an edited form on artsHub.

The Chinese legend of the Monkey King – purportedly born from an egg on top of a mountain – is the stuff of legend. So, too, are the 16th century novel based on the story, Journey to the West, and the popular television show from the 1970s, Monkey Magic. The story of the chaste monk Tripitaka and his quest to gain enlightenment, and bring the teachings of Buddhism from India to China, like all great road-trip stories, it is not so much the destination but rather the journey which is important. Here, as Tripitaka is accompanied by her three trusty disciple-cum-chaperones – Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy – it recalls the grand quest stories that form the cornerstones of the literary canon – Don Quixote, The Canterbury Tales, The Odyssey, and Orpheus in the Underworld.

Produced by Kim Carpenter’s Theatre of Image, Monkey… Journey to the West is a grand musical adventure, featuring richly textured costumes, a simple and inventive set, and a healthy dose of theatrical flair. Incorporating large- and small-scale puppets and physical theatre with a hint of pantomime, it is a show in the tradition of commedia dell’arte, heavily influenced by clowning and buffoonery and play-fullness; with a heart of gold, and a seamless blend of mythology, adventure, action and wit, there are echoes here with the work of other theatrical dreamers such as Julie Taymor.

All you need is love: Slip of the Tongue's Europe

This review was written for artsHub.

First performed in 1987, Europe is one of Michael Gow’s earlier plays, but to pass it off as merely an ‘early work’ is to do the play a disservice. Presented by Slip of the Tongue as part of the Seymour Centre’s Reginald Theatre season, Europe takes you on a grand journey of the heart to the cities where love lives larger and, well, more romantically than perhaps anywhere else on the planet. But at the same time, it asks us whether we are truly content with what we have, or whether we need to chase something else, something bigger to make us feel alive?

How do we fix Country?: ATYP’s Sugarland

This review was written for artsHub.

In 2011, ATYP began a series of residencies in the Northern Territory town of Katherine. Using experiences and observations gained overt the next two years, writers Rachael Coopes and Wayne Blair have created a play in an attempt to understand what growing up in a remote Australian community is like. That play is Sugarland. Sugarland is not sugar-coated, though, nor should it be. True to its origins, it is about worlds colliding, about issues that are not so much clear-cut black-and-white as they are big, immediate and extraordinarily real. Following the lives of five teenagers, it is about growing up in a country where rules and government schemes are often counter-intuitive and do more harm than good. But amongst the politics and racism and bureaucracy, we witness five young people navigating their way through this uncertain terrain with love, grace, humour, resilience and a desire to keep going.