On Reading, Part Three

A colleague at work asked me a while ago how many books I’d read in a year. I replied that it was ‘a lot,’ and that I’d never really counted properly before. So, these bi-monthly entries are that attempt, a record of the books I’ve read this year with commentary and thoughts on the patterns, the images, the styles that I come across.

Perhaps the first truly noteworthy piece I read in this instalment was This Year’s Ashes, a play produced by Griffin Theatre Company in November 2011, written by Jane Bodie. It had received good reviews and I wanted to see it, but as with many things, time conspired against me and it closed before I could get a chance to find an evening to go. There’s something about reading plays that I find wonderful: on one level, I see them playing out as if in real life, like a film I spose, with the scenes being cut together without the blackout or change in lighting state and or costume that you get in theatre. On another level, I see them as they might have been performed in the theatre (if I didn’t see them performed, that is), and I try to imagine how they would’ve been staged, how it would’ve all worked. And on another level, I look at how the scenes are ordered, how the characters are written, how the play is written, how it all works, trying to work out what makes it tick.

A day at the festival

Each May, the Sydney Writers’ Festival rolls around and I look at the program of events, highlight a few that interest me and then… do nothing about it. I realized the other day that the last time I went to the Writers’ Festival was in 2004 with school, (I’ve still got the ticket stub for it somewhere).

But this year, seeing how writing is what I want to do and what I love doing, what I’m passionate about, I thought that it would be beneficial – productive – if I went to something. So I consulted the program and chose three events that sounded interesting (there were others, but other factors had to be taken into consideration) and, as luck would have it, they were all on the same afternoon. I’m not going to go into the nitty-gritty details of each of the three events because it won’t mean anything, but I do want to make a few observations.

Belvoir's Strange Interlude

The whiteness is total, all encompassing. Like a void, it swallows the vanishing point into its depths so you are convinced something strange is happening in the fabric of reality. Like the backdrop in a photographer’s studio, Robert Cousins’ set for Belvoir’s latest production (a Simon Stone rewriting of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play) creates a blank page in the open book of Belvoir’s corner. Ingenious in its simplicity, it recalls Peter Brook’s at-the-time groundbreaking A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1970, the foremost example of Brook’s ‘empty space.’ You might’ve seen the pictures – a white cube of a set, with doors and panels set in its walls, swings hanging from the flies, the giant red feather of Titania’s bower, the actors dressed in brightly-coloured costumes, purples, reds, yellows, blues, greens; a circus-like aesthetic, as it’s often been described as – and as the play progressed, you could tell that the audience too, was aware of the intertextuality, the meta-theatrical allusions at play. Much of what Brook wanted to do in his Dream, was to strip away the tradition of realism that theatre had become entrenched in since the 19^th century, and liberate it into a heightened realm of metaphor and symbolism, where the audience was part of the theatre-making process, involved implicitly in completing the circle of theatrical illusion.

Cold Boiled Potatoes: Griffin's The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself

Few things feel as cosmic as a cold boiled potato at midnight. 

The first thing that struck me was how small the foyer was, how the theatre’s capacity ended up spilling outside (a street party in Griffin’s foyer). One hundred and five people in close proximity creates its own weird alchemical energy, almost as if you’re reading from the same sentence of the same book. I used to (and still do) think that Belvoir’s ‘open-book’ corner stage was intimate, but Griffin’s precious diamond, its wedge-like stage among the seating banks takes intimate to a new level. Which, for the productions they do, seems to work a treat.

In the program, musician Tim Rogers is described as a “prancing satyr,” and it’s actually not far off the truth. From his opening dialogue with the musicians (violin and double-bass), he had a puckish raconteur-like effect on proceedings, his eyes glinting mischievously, hinting at a secret truth. It was Rogers who kept the ball rolling when Mary MacLane (a wonderfully mercurial Bojana Novakovic) rebelled against the show and disappeared off-stage, returning with a green shopping bag filled with her own possessions and diary. The line between artifice and reality, show and life, was blurred throughout, and you almost got the impression that, if MacLane hadn’t been a historical figure from the early twentieth century, then she could have been an alter-ego of Novakovic’s without much of a stretch of the imagination. (Popular opinion has taken to calling Novakovic’s MacLane ‘BoClane,’ a rather succinct way of phrasing this duality.) “You see only an impression... the impression of an impression impersonated by an imposter... She is a stupid, pompous, pretentious actress," (p22-23) she says at one point, and it’s hard not to hear Novakovic talking here, perhaps when viewed in light of her diary, read by Rogers to mock-comic effect, which speaks of being bored and angry with the production, with being someone she’s not.

To build a globe

London, 1598. 

Picture a theatre in Shoreditch, a tall polygonal building, a wooden O, with tiered galleries facing a stage, a wooden embrace able to house three-thousand bodies in rapt entertainment. It is London’s first theatre, owned by James Burbage, a businessman and impresario, father of Cuthbert and Richard, the latter a soon to be well-known actor. Creatively enough, theirs is named the Theatre, the first and only of its kind for sometime. Outside the city walls, anything is possible. Here, dreams are made and acted out by men playing at soldiers and braggarts, kings and queens, lovers, tyrants, gods and mortals; a kingdom for a stage, princes to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

This winter, in 1598, the Burbage’s and their company of players, the Chamberlain’s Men, players to the Her Majesty, found themselves in the unpleasant place of having a landlord who wanted his land back, preferably without a theatre on it. Only trouble was, as players and theatre-folk, the theatre was their only means of survival. Sure, they could have toured, but every touring company needs a base, needs a home ground, a waterhole, a place of succour and refuge; their place. The Burbage’s called a council of war, a meeting of minds, where each of the shareholders in the Theatre met to voice their concerns. Present that night was a man who has since become legendary, a William Shakespeare of Stratford. As the night lengthened and their wits wandered, desperate to find a solution to their darkest hour, a candleflame flickered in that marvellous mind.

Upon the heath: Bell Shakespeare's Macbeth

The houselights go down and you’re plunged into blackness. Thick total inky suffocating blackness. The audience begins to shift uneasily in their seats, caught off guard, until at the rear of the stage, a thin shaft of light illuminates a disembodied face hanging, impossibly, upside-down from the ceiling. We soon realise it’s a mirror, or what passes for a mirror, and it speaks – all at once female and male, its timbre trebled and possessed – and the alltoofamiliar opening lines of the play echo confusingly around the theatre. As the lights rise on the stage, we see a gently raked space – the “blasted heath” – a scattering of gravel, dirt, and tussocky grass. Suspended above it is a black reflective panel, the counterweight to the heath, a mirror for all intents and purposes. And the play begins.

Bell Shakespeare’s first production for 2012 is Macbeth (or ‘The Scottish Play,’ if you’re a superstitious mug), directed by Peter Evans. It’s a play about politics and power, rumours and gossip, witchcraft and lineage, kings and courts, and was written around 1605 in response to the Gunpowder Plot. All that is merely historical context to this production which, true to Bell Shakespeare’s ethos and house-style, is in modern-dress, a fusion of 21^st century jeans, boots and shirts, and 1940s elegance, in the lords’ bright cerulean blue jackets and Lady M’s dresses. Director Peter Evans (who directed Julius Caesar for Bell Shakespeare in 2011) wanted to focus more on the people and the power, the relationships and humanity of – in – the play, than on the politics, a decision which gave the play a weirdly languid dynamic and yet one of the most insanely gripping and astoundingly brilliant endings I’ve seen yet.

On Reading, Part Two

I suppose I should continue on from the first post; it’s no use having a part one without a part two or three. While I may be writing my Honours thesis, reading is like my keep-sane, my distraction, my sleep-inducer at days’ end; I can’t recall the number of times I’ve fallen asleep with a book open on my face or woken to find it splayed open on the floor beside my bed like the carcass of some wond’rous beast.

The first book of note this time around is The Children’s Bach, by Helen Garner. I’d heard things about her earlier book Monkey Grip, in that it was meant to be a classic and all that (Penguin recently republished it as one of their modern classics in their iconic orange-and-white covers), but compared to her later book, Monkey Grip was empty, a constant cycling of same-old same-old. The Children’s Bach is entrancing from the outset – using the idea of a book of music as the loosest of frameworks, what you end up with is a series of linked vignettes, rhapsodies on a theme of life if you will, and they are as elegant, as mundane, as heart-warmingly extraordinary in their ordinariness as they are in their rhythm and essence of human behaviour. The way Garner captures her characters’ eccentricities and mannerisms, the way you feel a part of their household sucks you into the story so seamlessly, is just magical. It's like a more intimate Cloudstreet – in that its scope isn't as rambling, but it's just as eccentric and acutely captured – as good as it in its own way, on its own strengths, on its own terms. Their conversations have an otherness to them, that they could be happening anywhere at any moment but they still seem extraordinary in their construction and phrasing; the images they conjure of the books’ inhabitants are just beautiful.

‘But I like the mother,’ said Poppy. ‘Athena’s perfect, isn’t she.’

‘Perfect - you reckon?’ said Philip.

Elizabeth looked at him. ‘She’d have to be, to live up to the name.’

‘The goddess of war,’ said Philip.

‘I didn't mean that perfect,’ said Poppy.

‘Of war and needlecraft,’ said Elizabeth. [p66]

Every Breath wasted

I'm still asking myself ‘why?’ Juvenile, immature, ludicrous, preposterous, silly, self-indulgent, are all words I’d use to describe this production. It was a case of nudity-because-I-can-get-away-with-it, and I don't think I can begin to expound upon how completely pathetic a waste of 80mins of my life it was.

Benedict Andrews, Every Breath’s writer and director, has a lot to answer for in the current Sydney theatrical scene. Perhaps the man who single-handedly bought pretentious wanking back onto our mainstages (literally, intellectually, metaphorically), Andrews is famous for the continuous stream of gold confetti in STC’s War Of The Roses (as well as continuous streams of ash and rain, not to mention Prince Hal performing fellatio on Falstaff), as well as the seagulling of Chekhov’s Seagull, and the ‘sexy’ power-fuck of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

Mirrors, or The Play Chooses You

O, is all forgot?

All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream [III.2]

Preamble: People often talk about having a favourite Shakespeare play, the one play that they love and admire above all the others, for any number of reasons. While it’s a fantastic thing, I also think it’s not possible to have just one favourite Shakespeare play for ever, for the simple reason that as we go through life, so too do our tastes change; we keep looking in the mirror and seeing new things reflected back at us.

By my own admission, while I am a Shakespeare tragic, a bardolater if you will (I used to joke I had Bard flu), and have been for a number of years (since Year Twelve, if it matters), but it’s only quite a recent thing for me, if we talk about the passion and drive, the underlying connection to his oeuvre. Before that time, like a lot of people, Shakespeare was just this guy, you know, who wrote some plays about four-hundred years ago, and people think he’s pretty okay still… I never really ‘got’ why Shakespeare was Shakespeare, why he held such a godlike position in the literary canon. Okay, yes, Mum and Dad took me to see ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)’ when I was twelve, and I ‘got’ enough of it to thoroughly enjoy myself. (I particularly remember the ‘balcony scene’ in Romeo and Juliet. One actor knelt in front of a chair with three tiny flowerpots strapped to his head, while another actor stood on the chair with a small watering can. ‘The balcony scene,’ the waterer said, deadpan, and the audience roared and applauded.) You could say that was the beginning, if you really wanted to.

But if you think about it, this idea of having a sequence of favourite Shakespeare plays, whether we like it or not, is actually a part of our education. Consequently, I have a theory happening, and I’m beginning to think it’s more purposeful and subtle, more conscious, than we’d ever assumed at first.

number one cloud street

Tim Winton. Where do I start?

I think cloudstreet is unarguably his best piece of (serious) work. But… To be forthright, as much as I love his style of writing, I have a problem with his books, as whole pieces of work. They are sparsely written with hauntingly simple yet achingly eloquent language and subtly vivid descriptions. Once you step back and look at them again, however, you realise how hollow and empty they are, like waves; there’s all the build up (and promise) in the world, but once it breaks and another book has been read, you wonder what all the fuss was about. Throughout everything Winton wrote pre-cloudstreet, you find traces and fragments of the themes that would come to define his masterpiece, as if they were all experiments before he found the right recipe. Post-cloudstreet, everything he writes is trying to be cloudstreet, as if he’s trying to recapture the seemingly effortless wonder and economy of storytelling he employed so magically in his sprawling story, trying to recapture the epic lovefest that surrounds Australia’s favourite book about itself. I think part of the problem is that because of cloudstreet, and the way it’s loved by everyone (I may be exaggerating, but it seems not too far off the truth from my experience), people are willing to overlook or turn a blind eye to the lack present in his other books. (Critics don’t help much here, either; they seem afraid to point out the inadequacies of the emperor’s new clothes, and instead fall over themselves in their emphatic and borderline sycophantic praise for everything Wintonian.)