Dreamer: Windmill's Girl Asleep

At the Adelaide Festival in 2014, a new play by Matthew Whittet was premiered. Forming the third part in a trilogy for Windmill Theatre Co. (what is now known as the The Windmill Trilogy), the play was the story of fourteen year old Greta Driscoll, her dreaded fifteenth birthday party, and everything that happened on that night. The play was Girl Asleep, and it went on to become an internationally successful film. When it premiered in Adelaide, playing in rep with the rest of the trilogy, I missed it due to Hilary Bell’s gorgeous version of The Seagull, and the first instalment of the trilogy, Fugitive. But two-and-a-half years and numerous successful film festival campaigns later, Girl Asleep rocks onto Belvoir’s corner stage in all its 1970s glory, but I can’t help but wonder if it suffers from Whittet’s tendency to wallow in a conceit without properly exploring and/or developing its structure and the full extent of the world.

A dream Dream: Theatre for A New Audience’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is perhaps Shakespeare’s most perennially evergreen play, in that its magic, beauty, strangeness and wonder never fades, but grows richer and deeper and more strange with every consecutive production. While it was the first Shakespeare play I studied at school, it is still the one play of Shakespeare’s that I love wholeheartedly and completely, and this production not only proves why, but is perhaps the most mercurial, effervescent, and beguiling Dream I have seen.

This production, first staged at New York’s Theatre for A New Audience in 2014, is directed by Julie Taymor, perhaps most well known for The Lion King musical as much as for the circumstances surrounding her Spider-Man musical, Turn Off The Dark. Known for her wild inventiveness, kaleidoscopic approach to style and design, and her reluctance to conform to expectations, this Dream lives up to its name and positively flies. Towards the end of the production’s season, Taymor and her collaborators were given money through Ealing Studios to film the production and create a cinematic Dream which brought its stage incarnation to even more beguiling life. Enlisting the help of Rodrigo Prieto (who previously shot Taymor’s film Frida), Taymor filmed four performances from four angles each, then spent the intervening days filming pick-up shots – close-ups, cutaways, shots you wouldn’t necessarily be able to achieve with an audience during a performance. Working with some eighty hours of footage, Taymor and editor Barbara Tulliver spent several months creating this cinematic Dream, drawing us further into the world of fairies, dark magic, shadows, and desire.

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)

Uplifted: Black Swan’s The Red Balloon

Released in 1956, Albert Lamorisse’s film The Red Balloon is a near-wordless story of a boy and an almost-sentient balloon in post-war Paris. It’s a beautiful film, whimsical and charming to boot, but rewatching it now, there’s a curious emptiness in the film which makes it even more poignant. This production, adapted by Hilary Bell from Lamorisse’s film (not the subsequent slightly over-sentimental book he fashioned from it) and designed by India Mehta, takes note of this emptiness and creates a poignant piece of theatre which never feels forced or indulgent.

Get Hitched: MTC's North by Northwest

Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest is one of those films which dwells in the collective cultural consciousness as a series of memorable images or sequences – the crop-duster chase, the Mount Rushmore finale. Described as “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures,” the film has now become a stage production under the guidance of Simon Phillips for the Melbourne Theatre Company. And it is every bit as thrilling and audacious as you would expect.

Adapted by Carolyn Burns from the screenplay by Ernest Lehman, MTC’s North by Northwest remains almost entirely faithful to the film. But whereas in other productions this could be seen as a disservice, whereby it slavishly seeks to replicate its filmic predecessor, here Burns, Phillips, the cast and crew all approach their task with relish and glee, and the results, while serious, never take themselves too seriously, giving us a magical new version of Hitchcock and Lehman’s thrilling tale of mistaken identity.

Goodbye, yellow brick road: Belvoir’s The Wizard of Oz

The story of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has found a place as one of the most famous and enduring stories in (children’s) literature; just as the celebrated MGM film with Judy Garland has become a staple of millions of people’s lives since 1939, the story has become synonymous with a journey of discovery and a quest for self-identity and -worth. At its heart are four displaced people who are in some way incomplete; the book (and film), then, becomes a chronicle of their quest for completeness, for self-change. It is also a space for dreaming and yearning, a place for the glorious flights of fancy of your imagination, a space for a certain amount of theatricality, illusion, and artifice. Based on the myth created by Baum’s book and perpetuated in all its Technicolor glory, Belvoir’s latest offering is Adena Jacobs’ reimagining of The Wizard of Oz. However: if you do happen to go down to Belvoir this May, it’s best to leave your expectations and love of the book and/or film at the door.

Doing the time warp, again: Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show

The Rocky Horror Show is a phenomenon bordering on a cult, which first sprang to life in 1973 in London, and the following year in Sydney. A mash-up of science-fiction and horror tropes, and gleefully set firmly within the tradition of the rock’n’roll musical, the Rocky Horror Show now rocks back into Sydney’s Lyric theatre in this 40th anniversary production. Despite the glitz and glamour with which it struts about the stage in its glittering stilettos, it feels tired, old, and more than a little bit more camp than it should be.

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.

2014, the verdict

THEATRE

Event(s) of the Year The Seagull – STCSA, Adelaide Festival Tartuffe; Henry V – Bell Shakespeare William Shakespeare’s Reservoir Dogs – Russall S. Beattie at The Vanguard Children of the Sun – Sydney Theatre Company Once – Melbourne Theatre Company, Gordon/Frost
Honourable Mention On The Shore of the Wide World – Pantsguys & Griffin Independent Noises Off; Switzerland – Sydney Theatre Company Jump for Jordan – Griffin Theatre Company Antigone: The Burial at Thebes – Furies Platonov – ATYP, MopHead & Catnip Productions The Legend of King O’Malley – Don’t Look Away Sweeney Todd – New Theatre A Streetcar Named Desire – Young Vic (NTLive)
Dishonourable Mention Cain and Abel – THE RABBLE, Belvoir Hedda Gabler – Belvoir Nora – Belvoir Oedipus Rex – Belvoir Rupert – Melbourne Theatre Company, David Sparrow Productions Truth, Beauty and A Picture of You – Hayes Theatre Company
Best (New) Play Jump for Jordan, Donna Abela The Effect, Lucy Prebble Procne & Tereus, Saro Lusty-Cavallari Joan, Again, Paul Gilchrist	Shakesproud Henry V (dir. Damien Ryan) William Shakespeare’s Reservoir Dogs (dir. Steven Hopley) All’s Well That Ends Well (dir. Damien Ryan) Richard III (dir. Mark Kilmurry)
The Red Curtain Award for Most Prodigious Use of Red Curtains Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin & Co. – Strictly Ballroom The Musical
The Most Restrained Deployment of Trademark Style Benedict Andrews, A Streetcar Named Desire (Young Vic; NTLive)

Lend me your ear: The Vanguard’s William Shakespeare’s Reservoir Dogs

It has been often said that Shakespeare, with Titus Andronicus, had a Tarantino phase, but did Tarantino have a Shakespeare phase? This production, presented by Russall S. Beattie and playing for four (k)nights at Newtown’s The Vanguard, sets out to test this hypothesis, and the result is nothing short of outrageously enjoyable, sitting somewhere between parody, homage, and an Elizabethan revenge thriller. Written and directed by Steven Hopley, it does not seek to replicate Tarantino’s film on stage (as with Strictly Ballroom The Musical), but instead renders Tarantino’s screenplay into iambic pentameter, featuring many subtle quotations of Shakespeare’s own words, clever assimilations of Elizabethan blank verse, as well as three Elizabethanised pop songs, sung by Key William, the in-house bard.

The story, as in Tarantino’s film, remain intact, so too do the ‘Dogs,’ styled here as bandit knights, perfect strangers to one another, hired to rob a casket of precious jewels from a coach on its way to the King. When their heist is thwarted, it becomes apparent that one of them must be an officer in disguise. The six knights – Sirs Blue, Orange, Brown, Blonde, Pink, and White – are here a motley collection of swaggering fellows, clad in leather doublet jackets, breeches, and boots, wearing daggers at their belts, with temperaments as roguish as their deeds. Along with Lord Joseph, Pleasant-Fellow Edward, Holdaway and an Officer, Hopley expertly adapts Tarantino’s chamber-ensemble into a sweaty and heady concoction of revenge, best served cold.

Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps: Global Creatures & Bazmark’s Strictly Ballroom The Musical

You know the film, Strictly Ballroom. Scott, a young dancer, bored by the convention and rigourous boundaries of competitive dancing, longs to break free and dance his own steps at the championships. When he dances with beginner Fran, he finds a kindred spirit, and together (with the help of her Spanish family) they take on the dance federation and win their way into the hearts of everyone. You loved the film, you and countless millions the world over. You’re familiar, too, with Baz Luhrmann’s ‘red curtain’ aesthetic that pervades his first three films and which, for better or worse, continues to define his career. Now, thirty years after beginning life as a half-hour student production at NIDA, Strictly Ballroom the Musical explodes onto Sydney’s Lyric Theatre stage with as much colour, light, glitter and glamour as anything else Luhrmann has devised.

Produced here in partnership with Global Creatures – the Melbourne-based company responsible for the King Kong musical, the How To Train Your Dragon Arena Spectacular, and the Australian tour of War Horse – Baz Luhrmann and his usual collaborators have brought us a musical which wears its price-tag on its ruffled sleeve, figure-hugging sequined costumes and elaborate sets. Yet, while the film had heart by the bucketload, something is lost in translation here, as the story completes its circular journey from theatre to film and back again.

Light on the Hill: Reflections on a cultural history

While everybody’s proudly displaying the flag and eating damper and lamingtons, racing ferries up and down the harbour, hurling frozen chooks at Watson’s Bay, celebrating en-masse two-hundred and twenty-six years of nationhood (or one-hundred and fourteen and a bit, if you’re being pedantic), I’ve put together a list of a cross-section of books, films and pieces of music which encapsulate what my Australia is, how I see the nation and our chequered history.

Pride and prejudice: Disney's The Lion King

Let me play the lion too: I will roar, that I will
do any man’s heart good to hear me; I will roar,
that I will make the duke say ‘Let him roar again,
let him roar again.’
 – Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream [I.2.66-9]

Eight years ago, my year twelve English teacher showed us the first ten minutes of a film guaranteed to change the way we look at Shakespeare. In an empty coliseum in the dead of night, soldiers, dressed like figurines, poured into the ‘archetypal theatre of cruelty’ to the bold choric strains of a majestic fanfare. Horse-drawn chariots sat sidebyside with tanks and motorcycles, foot soldiers danced, their hands fused with their swords, and an old battle-wearied general addressed his people, cheered on by the echo of their ghostly cries. The film was Julie Taymor’s Titus, and that afternoon marked the beginning of many things for me, not least my fascination with Taymor’s work, both on stage and on screen.

In 1994, Disney’s thirty-second animated film opened in cinemas and set records instantly to become, twenty years later, the highest grossing hand-drawn animation in history. The film was The Lion King, and three years later, it roared onto the stage of the New Amsterdam theatre on New York’s Broadway as a musical, quickly becoming a critical and popular success, and spawning numerous concurrent productions internationally. Its director, Julie Taymor, had taken Disney’s beloved film and so thoroughly reimagined it for the stage that it was a beast in a class all of its own, without peer before or since. Where Beauty and the Beast, Disney’s first foray into theatrical musicals based on their film, was described as ‘animated Broadway,’ Taymor’s envisioning of The Lion King was pure full-blooded theatre. No other director working today has so audaciously mixed theatrical styles and techniques, or used cinematic conventions on a stage so audaciously, that no matter how hard you try to resist it, the story still affects you every time because its magic is so ephemeral and so vibrantly alive, so vividly present that you cannot ignore it.

2013, the verdict

THEATRE

Event(s) of the Year Peter Pan; Forget Me Not – Belvoir Mrs Warren’s Profession – STC The Bull, The Moon and the Coronet of Stars – Griffin Henry 4 – Bell Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice – Sydney Shakespeare Company Songs with Orchestra – Lior & Nigel Westlake, with Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Honourable Mention Angels in America – Belvoir One Scientific Mystery, or Why Did The Aborigines Eat Captain Cook? – VHS Productions Rust and Bone – Griffin Summertime in the Garden of Eden – Griffin Bushpig – Bagabus inc (part of Sydney Fringe Festival) Top Girls – New Theatre
Best (New) Play Forget Me Not, Tom Holloway The Bull, The Moon and the Coronet of Stars, Van Badham One Scientific Mystery, or Why Did The Aborigines Eat Captain Cook?, Victoria Haralabidou Hinterland, Jane Bodie	The Flat Award Phédre – Bell Shakespeare Persona – Belvoir A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Bell Shakespeare Hamlet (with Toby Schmitz) – Belvoir
The Almost Award Jerusalem – New Theatre Return to Earth – Griffin	The ‘Love Me Tender’ Award Small and Tired – Belvoir
The Game-Changer Romeo and Juliet – STC

Pelican dreaming: STC's Storm Boy

We’ve all grown up with the story – the boy who raises three orphaned pelicans – and it’s become a steadfast Australian classic, a touchstone of our childhood and growing up. Growing up, I read Colin Thiele’s elegant story first in the edition accompanied by Robert Ingpen’s haunting weather-beaten illustrations. I read it again, several years later, in an edition illustrated with stills from Henri Safran’s 1976 film. And while I haven’t read it in something approaching a decade, the chance to see it on stage seemed too good to miss. In what could be considered a fiftieth anniversary production^fn, Thiele’s Storm Boy has been brought to the stage in a poetic and emotional co-production between Perth’s Barking Gecko Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company.

The year my voice broke: reflections on a year of critical thinking

I started the spell of waking hours a year ago as a way to legitimise the writing of the longer-form pieces I found myself writing, as a way to build up a personal style, to experiment with different ways of expressing my thoughts and ideas; a way to think critically about the passions, the tangents, and the trails of thread I found myself chasing, pursuing, relentlessly enjoying. When I embarked upon this voyage of discovery, I had no idea what would happen to it, what I would write, how I would write, how it would evolve. But now, a year later, with just on one-thousand hits, it has become one of the more rewarding things I have ever done, creatively-speaking. In the process, I’ve learnt how to write a review, how to write well; how to develop and articulate a point, back it up with evidence, and how to stand by that conviction.

In the thirteen months I’ve been developing this blog, I have finished university (for the time being) and have begun trying to find something I’m passionate about. In many ways, my blog is the answer to a question that I ask myself after every book, film, play, after every project – why should I/we care about what is being presented to me/us? In keeping this blog, I’ve been trying to uncover the something that ticks at the heart of every thing I encounter, the ‘why’ that keeps me going back time after time for more. While I don’t suppose we can ever truly find the answer, in some small way, I think I’ve found my niche. 

I guess the only way to find out is to keep following that red thread through the labyrinth, to keep going back asking for more. 

2013, the year in preview

I started this blog eleven months ago as a way to record my thoughts and engagement with the various pieces of theatre I saw, with the books I read and the films I saw, the things I found myself pursuing and enjoying. Now, at the start of 2013, I thought I’d take a moment to preview the year ahead, to see what’s on the horizon, if we can see that far.

2012, the verdict

Here are my selections for the best, the worst and the otherwise of 2012. In no way definitive, it is based on my own personal opinions and evaluation of the past twelve months (give or take). You may not agree with my choices, nor do I claim to be any sort of real critic, but here it is nonetheless, the verdict on my 2012.

Moonrise Kingdom: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Wes Anderson

I don’t normally do this, write singular reviews or pieces about one film. It’s not because I don’t want to, but rather because most of the films I see don’t particularly warrant it, or that the various reviews found in the newspapers and online encapsulate my thoughts, if not to the letter then in the approximate vicinity. But every so often I make an exception. (My Honours thesis, in its own way, was an elongated piece on Across The Universe, but that was kind of different again).

Back in June, at the Sydney Film Festival, I fell in love with Wes Anderson’s latest film, Moonrise Kingdom. Intrigued by his style and the oeuvre he has built up over the past eighteen years and seven feature films, I recently watched all his films, some for the first time, and it was an interesting if slightly neurotic adventure. In many ways, Moonrise Kingdom is the epitome of Anderson’s oeuvre, a kaleidoscope that refracts and refocuses his distinctive stylistic traits and thematic concerns into their most concise, most emotional – most whimsical – evocation yet.

Like Me - thoughts for an as-yet-unmade film

This is an edited version of a document prepared in November 2011, prior to starting work on the project.

Like Me is, simply, As You Like It without the politics, the explicitly philosophical debates or the ‘clowns.’ In other words, it focuses squarely on the six ‘kids’ – Rosie, Cecelia, Orlando, Oliver, Silvius and Phoebe – and takes them to a farm out near Dubbo for a couple of days, long weekend maybe, and throws them all in it together. Over the course of the long weekend, relationships develop and blossom, truths are learnt, feelings made known and affections made clear. In the end, though, who gets who? It’s not as simple as it once seemed, not now anyway.

Before the film starts, Rosie is in a fight at school with Charlie who said she was a guy. (We may or may not see this). So she and Charlie were suspended, as was Cecelia by association. Four friends – Rosie, Cecelia (Cee), and their friends Oliver and Orlando (Oliver’s brother) – had long planned to go on a road trip together, and now that the long weekend is upon them, now seems as good a time as ever to get away and find themselves, discover each other. Silvius and Phoebe are also invited along for good measure; the more the merrier, or so they say.

As we meet them – Rosie and Cee, then Orlando, Oliver, Silvius and Phoebe (arguing, lost) – they find themselves on Orlando’s family farm, a slowly shrinking sheep run still pulling itself out of the recent drought. Besides the sheep, there is a forest that runs down and along the border of the farm and it seems the perfect location to set up camp… To paraphrase Chekhov, ‘it’s a comedy – three women’s parts, three men’s – and is set in a forest (on a sheep farm) with a great deal of conversation about Being and relationships, and five tons of love.’