Toffs behaving badly: Belvoir's Private Lives

It seemed impossibly good to be true, too much of a dream to miss, the most tantalising of carrots to be dangled in front of subscribers a year ago when the 2012 season was announced: Ralph Myers directing Toby Schmitz in Noël Coward’s Private Lives. In a nutshell, the play is about two newly-wed couples – Amanda and Victor, Elyot and Sybil – who go on their honeymoon. To the same hotel. Elyot and Amanda were previously married, and now they’re are about to find out all over again why they got divorced in the first place. Considering Coward wrote the piece as a vehicle for himself (playing the role of Elyot, Schmitz’s character) and the censors tried to ban it upon its premiere in London in 1930, it’s pretty much still bang-on the money, still definitive in its wit, almost-perfect in its plot, and utterly beguiling in its critique of modernity and the rich, to paraphrase Belvoir’s season book.

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.

Unpredictable: Belvoir's Conversation Piece

The prospect is tantalising. “A group of actors and dancers meet on stage and begin the show with a short conversation about… Well, we don’t know yet. Each night it will be a different conversation – just an ordinary pre-show chat like [the audience themselves might have] – and this conversation will form the basis of the rather surprising performance that follows.”

Conversation Piece is a mad idea by any standard. By its very nature, every single performance of its three-week run is going to be different, unique, irreplicable; the very best example of an act of theatre – lost into the ether, contained only within the memories of its participants.

It’s also a wonderful show.

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.’

On Reading, Part Five

*** POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT ***

August has been a slow month. Time seems to have elongated itself, gone backwards almost. Chronic time distortion syndrome, it’s called, at least I think so. Each day seems like a week, weeks turn into moths and they fly into lightbulbs. I read to escape, pretty much always have done so, and the only bad thing about it is when the experience is not worth it, is not worth the days and pages you’ve invested in it, when the author is condescending to the point of patronising, when they treat the reader like an idiot. When the reverse happens, when the book is as much a gem as it can be, when reading it feels like flying, when the characters seem to be your best friends, then it’s the most wonderful thing in the world. This month has seen both these cases, and if anything else, it confirms what I already suspected – that writing stories (anything, really) is one of the hardest and most rewarding things is to share it with people and see the smile on their faces when they’ve finished.

So. First up, I want to talk about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. If you’re eagerly awaiting the Wachowski siblings’ new film (co-directed with Tom Tykwer) adapted from the same book, now would be a good time to stop reading and join us again after the break. And perhaps not; I don’t know what the film is like.

The main problem is the book’s structure, both its physical construction and in its nature. It is, in its most simple form, a set of six interconnected albeit truncated stories which, upon reaching the middle of the sixth story, reverse their order and conclude their respective narrative fragments. I don’t know if that’s such a good thing.

“Let me introduce to you:” How I met The Beatles

If you wanted to, you can pinpoint the day I started listening to music and looking at films. I mean really listening to music, obsessively, the same way I read books – trying to decode its mysteries and secrets, trying to work out why it makes me feel the way it does, trying to make sense of its sounds and melodies. Likewise with films, the way meaning and shots work together, how the disparate elements add to form the total (or not), how a film is made; how it all works.

July 2007, and I was meant to be writing an essay at school in study hall when I found out about Across The Universe, and… well, one thing led to another, and I found a trailer for it and fell in love with it – its colours, music, visuals, scope, diversity, sprawl. When it opened in Australia in November, I asked my two best friends if they’d like to see it with me, knowing they were huge Beatles fans, and so we went, and ‘everything changed’ that day, or so they say. From the film’s opening shot – a slow zoom in to Jude sitting on an empty windswept beach, as the waves fell upon the screen, intercut with archival images of protests and violence and revolutions; as the all frenetic agitated guitar of ‘Helter Skelter’ cut across it all, I remember thinking ‘so this is what it’s all about.’ The ‘it’ in question was the Beatles – their music, their lyrics, personas; their magic, their mystery, the phenomenon; their legacy. The film picked you up on “a wave of terrific Beatles songs” and catapulted you head-first through the decade of the Sixties – from the youthful innocence of the early days, to the experimentation and exuberance of the psychedelic era, to the violence and protests of Vietnam, to its ambiguous end. Two hours later, as the final strains of ‘All You Need Is Love’ faded over a girl standing on a rooftop, smiling amongst her tears, ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ played and the credits rolled, it was hard not to sing along. There was one point, I think, when the three of us were singing along, and we left the cinema grinning like maniacs, bouncing on the tide of energy and music that was the film.

‘Do you have any of the Beatles’ music?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I replied, immediately ashamed of the fact.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’re about to remedy that.’

On Reading, Part Four

Since finishing uni, my book consumption has dropped dramatically. Reading has always been a bit of an escape for me, something I do instead of doing what I’m meant to be doing, something that lets me escape the word around me and lose myself for a couple of thousand words, spend time with people I’d otherwise never have the opportunity to meet. Very rarely do I go anywhere without a book, even if it is just to feel the weight of words in my bag.

Berlin Syndrome by Melanie Joosten was one of this year’s Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist awardees, and is essentially, the story of two people – Clare and Andi – and their struggle of co-dependency, seen through the Stockholm Syndrome. Cleverly appropriating the Stockholm syndrome (from which the book is titled), we slowly see Clare and Andi’s world collapse in upon itself, their needs and want destroying the beautiful obsession which brought them together in the first place.

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).

FRAGILE: IDEAS – THIS WAY UP: Remembering Brain Freeze

Four years ago, I assembled a group of friends and we made a film. We didn’t set out to blow our minds or create something of undeniable genius or change the world; we set out to make a film, have fun, and feel as though we’d created something special and wonderful out of a bunch of words on a page. That was our goal, our sole reason.

In a nutshell, the film – brain freeze – is about Leonard, a struggling author, and his attempts to end the writers’ block that has been plaguing him for the past eon. Onceuponatime, he was a successful author, but he hasn’t written anything for months. Desperate and at his wit’s end, he decides to go into his mind to see what old ideas he can use. But as he soon finds out, his characters have other ideas.

Fighting the American Dream: Belvoir’s Death of a Salesman

                   Will you take that phoney dream and burn it before something happens?

                    – Biff

Alone on a bare stage, stands a white car, headlights carving into the dark like twin knives, the tail lights a fiery glow on the back wall, the dream already on fire. As the houselights darken, a figure is revealed in the car – Willy Loman, the titular travelling salesman. Considered one of the staples of the American dramatic canon, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is about “a man refusing to let go of the false dreams we were all once promised.” It’s not a pretty play, either; rather, it’s grueling and harsh and unforgiving and brutal, ferocious even, in its depiction of this crumbling dream.