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.

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.

Oh, you pretty things: Puberty Blues

I’m not embarrassed to admit I’m quite a fan of the recent television series Puberty Blues. Perhaps for no other reason than because it is so good, because it stands out from the crowd, head and shoulders above the rest of the mediocrity on offer; because it is an engrossing piece of Television. 

Recently seen on Channel Ten, it is an adaptation of the 1979 book by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey. Written when they were just shy of twenty, Puberty Blues is a brutal and unsanitised portrait of seventies youth culture, a window onto a despairingly misogynistic world where (young) women were something worse than second-class citizens. In an episode of Australian Story from 2002, Kathy Lette describes the boys she grew up with in Cronulla as “[disproving] the theory of evolution. They were kind of evolving into apes. It would have looked much more natural if they squatted on their haunches and groomed each other.” It shows, both in the book and the television series. As an example of the vernacular of the time, especially in the surfing fraternity, the terms for sex were “‘rooting’, ‘tooling’, ‘plugging’, ‘poking’, ‘stabbing’ and ‘meat injecting’… And the terms for women were ‘bush pigs’ or ‘swamp hogs’; if you were very good-looking you got called a ‘glamour maggot’.” But as brutal as the book is in its depiction of the times and the attitudes towards women, it almost seems to be a caricature, the briefest of sketches. Maybe I’m too old or perhaps too cynical, but there is almost a lack of depth to the book which I was surprised at, considering its status as a ‘classic’, an important part of our cultural maturation. It focuses squarely on the (mis)adventures of the kids – whose ages are described as being thirteen in the book, but in the film and television series have been raised to sixteen – and everything life throws at them, with barely a mention of their parents or the adults in their lives.

The television series however, constructs the story as a set of two parallel narratives – that of the kids, and that of their parents – mirroring and contrasting one with the other. Produced by John Edwards and Imogen Banks, the pair responsible for much of the critically acclaimed television drama series’ of the early twenty-first century – The Secret Life of Us, Love My Way, Spirited, Tangle, Offspring – the series does not flinch away from depicting the times as they were, complete with their mannerisms, vocabulary, actions, and values systems, no matter how crude or backward they seem to us now. If anything, it perhaps works to its advantage, not to show us how far we’d like to think we have come, but to show us how far we haven’t. (Full points are also awarded for reintroducing the word ‘moll’ to the vernacular.) But the show belongs to the young cast who seem so uninhibited and natural; there’s an unadorned charm and intrinsic honesty to their performances, something that is definitely not acting so much as Being.

In too deep: Griffin's Between Two Waves

You think we’re like, actually all fucked? Like rising seas, and hurricanes and judgement and shit?

A white stage, a single lightbulb in the middle of the white ceiling. The black walls of the theatre. A blank slate, a fresh start. Except it’s not, not really.

Ian Meadows’ Between Two Waves is a bittersweet and immediately political relationship drama about climate change. It may seem an incongruous mix on the page – relationships and climate change – but when you think about it, it’s not that big a leap of the imagination to draw a direct correlation between the two. Seasonal Affective Disorder is not just a flippant way to explain away our despondency on a lack of sunshine or clement weather, something my good friend Rosie talks about on her blog. And as for climate change, we all know what’s happening – weather becoming increasingly erratic and unpredictable from one year to the next; extreme weather events – floods, hurricanes, cyclones, drought, bushfires – becoming more frequent; temperatures rising unforgivably, unstoppably; icecaps melting, sea levels rising… They’re all phenomena which Ian Meadows’ Daniel has been researching and studying for ten years. Until the worst floods Sydney has witnessed destroys his research as well as part of his house. The irony isn’t lost on him, however, and as the play unfolds, we see Daniel’s grip on surviving in the face of catastrophe start to loosen. Something that isn’t helped by his partner, Fiona, when she tells him she’s pregnant.

It’s not just a play about climate change; it’s also a play about finding happiness and contentment in the face of uncertainty, of keeping calm and carrying on as the posters tell us. Originally written as a screenplay – a form to which it has aspirations – Between Two Waves is a gripping and engaging piece of theatre about the hereandnow, the very moment we’re being faced with now. Like so many books and plays and films out in the past six months, there’s a degree of anger and frustration to it, but it’s a passionate anger for the most part, anger at the way we’re dooming ourselves and the planet, hammering in the nails on the lid of our coffin with every passing day just that little bit more; anger at the lengths to which we’ll hide the truth, the way we interact with each other (or don’t), but there’s also a desperation – a need – to cling to those around us, to draw together when it all goes to shit.

On Reading, Part Six

I learnt a new word recently. Bibliobibuli. It means someone who reads too much. H. L. Mencken describes it as being “constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing, hearing nothing.” For about a week at the end of August, that was me. For just one week, all I wanted to do was read, readreadread, read as much as I could and then keep going, straight on til morning. It was only when Mum told me to stop being so OCD that I stopped and looked past the end of the book and saw that it was perhaps true. This doesn’t happen often, in fact I don’t think it’s really happened before. And it only happened this time because of J. K. Rowling’s new book, The Casual Vacancy, which I talk about later.

What do you see?: Ensemble's RED

There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend…
One day, the black will swallow the red.

In the middle of his studio, Rothko sits, staring at a large (unseen) canvas, a cigarette burning in his fingers, his eyes eagerly darting around the large red expanse, the gaping hole on the wall. Around him lie the detritus and the carcases of his work: buckets splattered with dried and congealed paint the colour of blood; jars of pigments, boxes of receipts, bottles of Scotch, cartons of eggs; a phonograph, brushes, shelves overflowing. And behind him, a dropsheet covering a wall, spattered with dried paint in dark angry blobs. Enter Ken, Rothko’s new assistant, out-of-place in a grey suit. And Rothko asks him, ‘What do you see?’ 

It’s the underlying theme of the play – one of them, at least – the theme of looking, of seeing, of understanding and grappling with art. And, at times, it’s angry, it’s passionate, it’s impassioned, it’s frustrated, it’s defensive and defenceless; it’s human and intangible; emotional.

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.