The quality of mercy: Sydney Shakespeare Company’s The Merchant of Venice

Written in 1596, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is generally classified as one of his comedies, along with masterpieces such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing. While there certainly are comedic elements to Merchant, it is not altogether a comedic play in the definition generally used to classify Shakespeare’s work. While it does encompass many scenes of focused around the idea of love, the titular merchant is accosted by Shylock, a money-lender, because he defaulted on the loan of 3,000 ducats and is thus required to pay the bond – the infamous pound of flesh.

It’s a dark play, full of politicking and financial matters, but underneath it all is that wonderful Shakespearean sense of humanity and life, the very lifeblood that has made him and his works what they are today. In the hands of the Sydney Shakespeare Company, their Merchant of Venice is a clear, honest and simple telling of this problematic play, one which fills the tiny sixty-five-seat TAP Gallery theatre with a warmth and generosity of spirit which is often lost in the hands of others.

Hempen home-spuns: Bell Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream is certainly one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. I don’t think there’s barely a day that goes by without another production opening somewhere in the world. Yet despite its popularity, there is a robustness to it that withstands this very proliferation – no matter how many cuts or omissions are made to it, the inherent magic of it still stands, still transports audiences to the “palace wood a mile without the town” where the Rude Mechanicals, the four lovers, and a host of wayward fairies converge upon a midsummer’s night.

Presented here by Bell Shakespeare for a schools audience, it is characterised by cocooning warmth and a very earthy, tactile aesthetic. From the curved wooden wall of Teresa Negroponte’s set, almost like a ruined ship’s hull turned on its side, to the costumes and the actors’ physicality, the robustness of Shakespeare’s script bounces back at you, even if it is somewhat truncated and reshaped.

The reality of television: Griffin’s Beached

At eighteen years old, and weighing over 400 kilograms, Arthur (Arty) is the world’s heaviest teenager. With his gastric bypass surgery scheduled for 259 days’ time, he is assigned a Pathways to Work officer and put on a strict diet, while his every move is followed by a ravenous reality TV crew from a show called ‘Shocking Fat Stories.’ This is the world of Melissa Bubnic’s 2010 Patrick White Playwrights’ Award-winning play, Beached.

Directed by Shannon Murphy, Bubnic’s play is an unapologetically satiric and pointed look at the obesity epidemic, and tries to unpick “society’s insatiable appetite for human misery.” Murphy’s direction is bold and ambitious, her staging audacious and inventive, as she (ingeniously) shows us the artifice behind the ‘reality’ of reality television. In a set constructed like a television studio, two patterned walls create a corner in which Arty sits, while cameras, lights, backdrops and costumes hang from the rungs of a cage-like scaffold which moves around him, encasing and restricting his movement and freedom.

Nightmares in white: Belvoir's Persona

Belvoir’s presentation of Adena Jacobs’ theatrical reimaging of Persona is a hard pill to swallow. First performed by Fraught Outfit in Melbourne in 2012 to strong critical reviews, it takes Bergman’s 1966 film of the same name, and uses Bergman’s dialogue but reconceives it for the stage. Similar to Simon Stone’s staging of Bergman’s Face to Face for Sydney Theatre Company last year, Persona seems to be more distant and removed than it needs to be, and seems to occur in some kind of unengaging vacuum rather than the “consummate theatrical close-up ” Belvoir advertises in their season brochure.

Her-story: New Theatre's Top Girls

Written in 1982 when Margaret Thatcher was at the height of her game following the Falklands War, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls was an incendiary and urgent play about women in power, women with power, and women and power. Now, thirty-one years later, with Thatcher’s passing and the end of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership closer to home, Churchill’s play – revived here by New Theatre – seems almost prescient.

While Top Girls can (naturally) be considered to be a ‘period piece’, borne of the social and economic transformations brought about by Thatcher’s election, it is more than a mere foretelling of the 1980s; it is an ashamedly revealing work which shows with alarming accuracy just how little we have come as a society since that time, as Lyn Gardner wrote in The Guardian in 2002.

Countdown to ignition: subtlenuance’s Rocket Man

Which child doesn’t, at some point or another, dream of reaching the stars? It’s an idea that’s been floating around the place lately, for perhaps a year or two, at least noticeably since ‘the man on the moon’ Neil Armstrong passed away in 2012. In Paul Gilchrist’s play Rocket Man playing at Darlinghurst’s TAP Gallery theatre, the idea of reaching for the stars is spun into another cosmos, a personal intimate universe of relationships, storytelling, the nature of playing and the theatre.

All the little lights: Griffin Independent & Just Visiting's This Is Where We Live

On the bare Griffin stage, there’s a little bit of magic that happens every time an audience enters the space, every time the lights go down and an actor walks on stage. This time is no different. On the tiny stage, painted a deep blue, the story of two teenagers – Chris ‘Odd Boy’ and Chloe ‘from the Underworld’ – plays out in a vivid and hypnotically potent concoction of words, in Vivienne Walshe’s This Is Where We Live.

Winner of the 2012 Griffin Award, This Is Where We Live is “a love story that conjures Orpheus leading his Eurydice out from the underworld of small town hell,” and amongst all the pain, and the shit, and the awkwardness of being a teenager, let alone being a teenager in a small town, there is a light that seems to come from the stars, and it seems – at least, for a while – that anything is possible.

Broken mirrors: STC's The Maids

I thought perhaps this time Benedict Andrews’ mise en scène would make sense, that his staging techniques and or Effects would be justified by the production’s context and or the text’s demands. Being the fourth production of Andrews’ that I have seen – Measure for Measure (Company B Belvoir, 2010), The Seagull (Belvoir, 2011), Every Breath (Belvoir, 2012) – I thought that perhaps I had seen it all (in many respects, I suppose I have), but The Maids only confirmed the fact that Andrews is perhaps on a different planet to most people, especially myself.

In some ways, I think I understand what he is trying to do, it’s just that his execution and implementation – his deployment and reliance upon– of Effects end up distracting from any kind of message or examination he could be trying to make or conduct. For instance: I understand the notion of constant surveillance that pervaded Measure for Measure (and now The Maids), but the live-video-feeding cameras on large screens on either side of the stage meant you were watching them not the actors on stage. I understand the idea of the storm in The Seagull, but to have ‘ash’ falling from the heavens and not be referenced at all in the dialogue seems clumsy, immature. To depict (frequent) sex acts on stage seemed to negate any point he may have been making, and turned Every Breath into a farce. So now in The Maids, when we have glass walls on either side of the stage, mirrors, a live video-feed from seen and unseen cameras dotted around the stage perimeter and dressing; when the set is destroyed (to an extent) and sex acts hinted at though never fully realised; when characters seem to actually use an on-stage toilet, it really does feel like we have seen it all before. And I guess we have.

It’s all Greek to me: Bell Shakespeare’s Phèdre

Untranslatable is a word often used to describe Racine’s plays, we are told in the program to Bell Shakespeare’s latest production, Phèdre. And watching the play, part of me cannot help but wish it had stayed thus, however much it hurts me to admit it. Based on the Greek myth of Phèdre, Racine’s play is a downward spiralling tragedy, much like Shakespeare’s own Macbeth and Hamlet, until at the end, tragedy befalls everyone, and Theseus and Théramène are left to pick up the pieces.

If Anna Cordingely’s set was anything to go by, the production should’ve been sumptuous. A decaying room, perhaps in a French palace, it consisted of an elongated octagonal room with the front walls removed – stairs tiled in black and white, six large windows at the rear, a ceiling with a hole smashed through it (due to a god’s intervention, perhaps?), a chaise divan and two similarly-upholstered chairs… a picture of faded elegance. The space was lit effectively by Paul Jackson in bolts of harsh fluorescence, gentle gold, and electric blue, and added to the former grandeur of the play’s location. Kelly Ryall’s sound design and ‘score’ were both effective in unsettling the audience from the opening salvo of scratching susurrations to the final blackout, almost as if the gods somewhere were spinning disks of thunder and lightning. It was used in scene breaks too, and in tiny unobtrusive blurts when a character entered via the stairs, and though my description of it sounds somewhat disparaging, it was one of the production’s strongest points, and complemented the set in its depiction of a once-faded decadence, something familiar now in disarray, beyond repair. However, when you added the cast – headed by Catherine McClements as Phèdre – something inherently 'magical' disappeared.

More life: Belvoir’s Angels in America, Parts One and Two

It’s one of the biggest plays of the late twentieth century, perhaps one of the last entries in the American canon, one of the newest classics, and it’s not without its own kind of grandeur. Written as two plays, and billed as “an epic double-comedy of love and hate, heaven and earth, past and future,” Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is set in 1985, and revolves around a group of “marginalised individuals in New York in the last years of the Cold War,” as the AIDS epidemic sweeps them all up in its path. To see the two plays in sequence on consecutive days is by turns compelling and grueling, and I don’t think it would be any easier seeing them on the same day.

Staged within a beige-tiled atrium, Angels in America is directed with a vitality and cleverness by Eamon Flack, and to use a character’s analogy, it’s all a bit like an octopus with its eight arms waving about, trying to keep track of every character, every actor, each plotline, and still keep everything in the scope of the bigger picture. Now a generation old (as a complete play, it is a year or two younger than I am), whether you realise it or not, it’s “actually a play about the beginning of the era we’re now in the thick of.”