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.

Further on and further up: STC’s Travelling North

The idea of ‘going north’ is firmly rooted in the Australian psyche. Analogous perhaps with the great (American) road trip and the immense body of literature that has spawned from it, from Kerouac’s On The Road and Nabokov’s Lolita, to home-grown classics such as Michael Gow’s The Kid and Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (albeit partly in reverse), as well as the life-affirming Bran Nue Dae. There is the myth of the bush, the untameable wetlands and inhospitable red desert; the cattle-owners, the crocodile wrestlers, “the serial killers, salt-of-the-earth stalwarts, bigots [and] drag queens,” as Ailsa Piper writes in the program. Simply put, “the north is epic,” just as its allure is irresistible, and not just in a physical literal sense of ‘going north’.

The road trip has long been associated with coming-of-age stories and journeys of self-discovery. So it is in David Williamson’s Travelling North, presented here by Sydney Theatre Company. And while Williamson’s protagonists might be a generation or two older than most other literary road-trippers, the process of change and discovery, of soul-searching and path-finding, of going deeper in and further up, still speaks to our restless twenty-first century mindset as much as it did in 1979 when it premiered.

This Is Our City In Summer

Each January, Sydney erupts into a kaleidoscope of colour, diversity and ideas with the Sydney Festival. Now in its thirty-eighth year, the festival is a smorgasbord of theatre, dance, music, arts and free events that take place across the city for most of January. As always, summer is a time to grab a picnic, head outdoors with your friends, and be in the life. And I wouldn’t miss it for the world. In honour of the 2014 Sydney Festival starting today, I decided to put together a playlist inspired by this year’s program.

On Reading, Part Seven

To live is to dream. To dream is to want to escape. To escape is to read. Ergo, to live is to read, to read is to live. It’s a bit of a vicious circle sometimes, as I’ve mentioned on a number of occasions already this year – the need and want to read sometimes cannot match the volume and supply of books. Which is why I trawl through bookshops and libraries like fishermen do the ocean, hoping that amongst the shelves and thousands upon thousands of volumes there’ll be just one that catches my eye.

Everybody extols the virtues of Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap. And for that reason, I wanted nothing to do with it. I also don’t like the way he writes, the way he uses language, certain words peppering his writing like bullets. When I finally did get around to reading it, I wondered what all the commotion was and had been about. 

A moveable feast: Bell Shakespeare’s The School for Wives

Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably, they are both disappointed.
– Albert Einstein

It’s November, eight weeks until the new year, and the city is in its holiday humour. I don’t think there is a better way to bring on summer than with a life-affirming comedy – such as one of Bell Shakespeare’s offerings – of which their production of Moliere’s The School For Wives is a perfect example.

Following on from her beautiful and ingenious production of Twelfth Night for Bell Shakespeare in 2010 (also the national tour production), Lee Lewis directs a new Australian translation of Moliere’s “comedic train-wreck of a love story that tangles innocence with arrogance – and the other way around.” Set in Paris in the 1920s, Lewis’ production borrows and riffs upon the aesthetic of silent films and is filled with a rollicking knock-about sense of life, self and body. It plays to and acknowledges its stylistic progenitor in a deliciously playful and whimsical way, every pratfall and moment savoured and delighted in by cast and audience alike.

The School For Wives tells the story of Arnolde (or ‘Monsieur de la Souche’ as he prefers to be called), a man who desperately wants to get married but is afraid that a smart woman will cheat on him. He devises an ingenious solution, and enlists the help of a local convent to raise a girl so stupidly innocent that she won’t know the first thing about cheating – let alone the last. In his mind she will be the ever-faithful perfect wife. But is she? In true Moliere style, much like a Shakespearean comedy, “the course of true love never did run smooth” and by the play’s end, the characters’ passions and desires have become so entangled only something akin to a miracle – or at least a heaven-sent miscommunication – could save them and right wrongs.