ANOTHER BLOODY SEAGULL REFERENCE

…Paul Gilchrist’s latest work Rocket Man – a play which bows to the conventions of domestic naturalism – as a ‘story’ it follows the Chekhovian example of the everyday imbued with the monumental. These are working people from your life or mine. An aspiring actor, an exhausted nurse, a loyal friend, a troubled young man. You immediately know them. But the play actively resists classification as a simple piece of domestic realism, with reflexive aphorisms sparring around the function and value of theatre (some sharp jabs at the world of public funding – worth noting subtlenuance are self-sufficient), it spins a web of in-jokes and intrigue that’s something of a hallmark for the writer. Rocket Man seems to writhe inside its skin, like the eponymous astronaut (now there’s a pointless occupation if there ever was one) who’s self-aware but chained to discontent and thus paradoxically oblivious to his potential. The human story. Unsettling, wry, dark, rich in humour and tension. Everything a play should be.

SLICE AFTER SLICE AFTER SLICE

SAY HELLO FIRST

We caught the first preview of this autobiographical verbatim work from Danielle Maas and the team at Cupboard Love (pro-tip: always favour the preview over the bustle of opening night if you fancy sheer wattage in your theatrics – especially with new work), a first tentative venture back to the Old Fitzroy Hotel since the baton was passed to SITCO for running the space.  Happy to report there’s a piping hot show in the offing this month.  Danielle Maas is a force to be reckoned with onstage and off – having researched and dramaturged and ultimately performing this tale of love, lust and lunacy with Joe Kernahan in multiple supporting roles.  At once frenzied, funny, familiar and frightening – it has a visceral boldness that comforts the soul, in the way you might seek refuge from the freezing night by wrapping yourself in the still-warm bodily organs of a recently slain wildebeest on the plains of outer Mongolia.

As a series of vignettes gleaned from interviews with twenty men from the author’s life, the play creates an hilarious mosaic of the absurdity of romance in the digital era – sometimes edging cariacture, but more often treading the path of honest reflection and investigation. In terms of catharsis, Ms Maas has the courage to turn some of the pathos in her love-life into comedy gold – always on that flickering knife’s edge of tragedy. No mean feat, and another terrific example of the trend in local theatre toward staging the deeply personal in terms of the epic, to reflect and capture a uniquely modern Australian experience. You should go and see it.

Say Hello First, presented by Cupboard Love & SITCO, playing at the Old Fitzroy Hotel until 27th July. Written by Danielle Maas, directed by Jason Langley, featuring Danielle Maas and Joe Kernahan.

QUOTE “SICK” UNQUOTE

LENNY BRUCE: 13 DAZE UNDUG IN SYDNEY
presented by the Tamarama Rock Surfers, April 2013

Newcastle, 1999. We were partying just as the Prince song had instructed us to. Benito “The Fooz” Foozolini was out on the street corner sharing a rolly with some laser beaked debonair dressed as a Pterodactyl while I took Polaroids of passing trade and swapped the results for beer. It was the Young Writers’ Festival and about twelve hundred people had crammed into a dance studio to sneer at Margo Scotch Finger for being too mainstream. Margo wrote the first political blog on the Sydney Harbinger and as such she was appropriately crucified by super fucking hip fucking radicals for being a part of the establishment. Then she lit up a ciggie and we all looked like fools for being abashed. Nobody was allowed to smoke indoors those daze. Not even radicals. At one point a naked man ran through the crowd carrying a flat cardboard box that smelt like smoky barbeque shouting “all pizza is theft” but that was fine. We just kept at our self-assigned task of mocking squares. Fucking Squares, Man.

“Over the last eighty years the campaign against government censorship has been almost completely a success story… in the case of blasphemous literature they have had only trivial setbacks”
Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition – John Coleman, 1962

Some cat was passing ’round spliffs and space cake in the name of research and I said to Van Bingham – “hey- that’s John Brown, he wrote some childrens’ book I used to love. That guy basically taught me to read!” Van said no, that’s the Midnight Cat, his cousin. They look exactly the same. I’d already spent half the night sponging cash off him for ginger ale so it’s just as well. Man if he ever finds out I’ll have to pay him back that tenner. Booze was cheap in those days so you could live cold on the dole and still sleep in a park for five days, and still have some extra dough for a night at the Crowne Plaza, where you could swap post-midnight semillon for LSD and MDMA… I spent the following day in a kimono heckling sound artists and holding court outside the festival club. I think that’s where The Fooz first noticed my talent for spectacle but I can’t be sure

“in the 1930’s and 40’s writer’s organisations such as The Australian Fellowship of Writers and The Australian Journalists Association would one minute defend our right to read banned novels because they were expressions of the True and the Beautiful and the next would denounce American Comics as Jewish-Negroid-Southern-European inspirations unfit for White Australians”
Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition – John Coleman, 1962

Around that time I ran into the Ghost of Bob Ellis. He told me to change my name back to Sanchez. So I did. I asked him to come up for a reading of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties in an abandoned shop window on Hunter St but there was no-one to read Gwendolen or Cecily, not even for ready money. It was already 9am but we found Maryam Lion out and about and she stepped up to the crease like Allan Border in the mid-eighties. Sans moustache of course. Later she became the only Australian guest on lateline or Q and A to ever walk away with dignity. Dig? They never had her back. The reading went well. I played Tristan Tzara but the only thing I’d had for breakfast was the space cake I’d got from John Brown’s cousin’s friend the night before. In the play he’s hanging out with James Joyce and by the time he takes on Ulysses my vision was doubled and I had the appearance of the Rumanian Undead.They started calling me ‘Vlad The Inhaler’ but Any attempt at Eastern European accent was fine but for some reason all I could speak was fluent Oscar Wilde.

Meanwhile Van Bingham had red and blue ribbons in her hair and was quietly becoming a destroyer-of-worlds. Some ten years later I bribed her friend Lucy Grayskull ten thousand cubits to cast me as Sergei Petrov in a ten minute reconstruction of the life of “The Glimmerman” or Blind Boy Ziesel, as he preferred. The Fooz had wrote it on the back of a red-wine hangover coaster and it seemed to make sense. it was the begining of the end. Soon we would all become legitimate artists in our own right. Humiliating.

Having declared the battle against government censorship a varied success in 1962, John Coleman went on to briefly become Chief Censor in NSW. In twenty-thirteen, a movie depicting gay sex is banned. You still can’t say “cocksucker” on free-to air TV but you can replay video of the deaths of thousands of people again, and again, and again, all through the day and night. You can promote gambling and booze to children in prime-time because ‘free markets’ and these are acceptable forms of self-abuse. But a woman breastfeeding her child in public? There’s no political will to defend that. We’ve always been uptight about banning books in this country (famously including Nabakov, D H Lawrence and of course, Ulysses). But in the context of Mr Coleman’s comments, one cannot help but wonder – was it Mr Bruce’s obscenities which caused him to be banned? Or might the journalists of the time been more forgiving if he happened to be white?

This play is probably the most important new work I have seen all year (and I’ve seen a few). It’s a vital piece of Sydney history, painstakingly researched and developed for the stage, with tight, powerhouse performances, laughter and music to boot. We can’t add anything to it because there’s simply so much there to enjoy, and learn, and laugh with, and cry for. With one week left, you would be mad to miss out.

Lenny Bruce, 13 Daze Undug in Sydney, by Benito Di Fonzo, directed by Lucinda Gleeson. Featuring Sam Haft, Lenore Munro, Damien Strouthos & Dorje Swallow.
Playing at the Bondi Pavilion until May 4th, 2013.

THE BEAST BORNE OF ADULTERY

THE BULL, THE MOON AND THE CORONET OF STARS
presented by Merrigong Theatre Company, Griffin Theatre Company and Hothouse Theatre, April, 2013

Previews are special. The uncertainty, the danger, the risk that’s unique to any other performance, as artists and performers hand over their careful creations to an audience blind, like first-time lovers. Things go wrong. The creators’ anxiety is at its peak – which as the work is tested, moment by moment to win or fail – exuding a palpable crackling energy that only comes with a rare blend of sheer uncertainty and the courage of letting go. We have referred to this phenomena before in response to another intimate production at Griffin bearing a mix of magic, mythological and contemporary motifs. It is especially fraught in first-performances of a new play. Any new play is a confronting thing to perform, let alone one as touching and personal as this. It is known. Paraphrasing from the program notes: Van Badham conveys a great deal of her own heartbreak, hope and fear into the writing, something acknowledged by Lee Lewis that we are “deeply indebted to her” for it. Indeed.

That debt must extend as well, to Lewis for her work in translating it to the stage, and to the performers who countenance such evocative and cathartic material with their craft. At times vivid, direct, erotic, ridiculous, insouciant, tragically naive or hideously proud – always committed and yet somehow slightly one-step-removed from the text. A tricky balance that accedes to the paradoxes of the text that are simultaneously ancient tales and very much the here-and now. The echoes of Theseus and Ariadne into our lives today, and the threads of action-consequence that travel into the labyrinth of milennia past. How much of our own anxiety and pain are a part of this cycle of mythologising men (or women) into heroes, from presupposing an inevitability of love or lust or loss? Badham’s script portrays an acceptance of culpability for personal distress, owning it, laughing at it, unequivocally sharing it – with a sophisticated ear for irony and trademark wit, she manages to fashion the Myth of the Minotaur (referenced in the title of the play) into her own story, now subverting the hero-figure, now recognising the allure. This is more than merely a modernised adaptation of myth in the traditional mode of Anouilh (or even TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party), as the epic is embedded to the tale in equal measure as it is historically removed. Altogether a different process and form to what we are accustomed to in the recent glut of adaptations. But perhaps that is an issue for another day.

The innate paradoxes are also apparent in the staging. From the opening seconds there’s a nod and a wink to the oral traditions of the lyric poet #notaeuphemism – as the tale is writ like a novella and much of it spoken in past tense. This allows for a concurrent distance and immediacy of the action, both drawing us in and keeping us at bay. This duality of form is a very tricky business to make work and often fails in the hands of lesser performers but these two manage to keep us sublimely in-the-moment despite the overarching and constant reminders that yes, we are watching a play. Yes, it’s a tale we all know, and yet we don’t know. Yes it’s a fable of modern horror, yet it’s imbued in the conventions of romantic comedy as well. Yes, it’s slightly tongue-in-cheek, yet devastatingly honest. But most of all, simply “Yes”.

“NO TIME TO LOSE”

THE POLITICAL HEARTS OF CHILDREN
presented by subtlenuance at the TAP Gallery, April 2013

Some years ago I attended a ‘Welcome-to-Country’ which preceded the National Young Writer’s Festival up in Newcastle. The traditional owner hosting the welcome sat everyone in a circle and told us some of the background of the place, of the Awabakal and Worimi people and how they first began to use coal way back before colonisation, and how the knowledge had been passed on through word-of-mouth in gatherings just like the one we were in that day. She asked the group to each tell something about from where they had come, myself from Sydney, others from Western Australia or overseas – it took a while (there were forty of us in the group) – but as a custom, it’s central to the welcoming process, for understanding where we have come from is a vital part of knowing who and where we are. At the end of the welcome, she thanked us said she looked forward to seeing us around the place over the course of the festival weekend. As we all got up to leave, almost offhandedly she said “and I want to hear those stories”.

I kept thinking of that day in the post-show haze of wonder. Those stories that define us, as a people, as an individual, as a nation, as a world, can so easily slip from the memory but when told, can take on such power to change lives. It’s evolution on a granular scale – and that’s why this show, with such a deceptively simple premise, is a vastly important piece of theatre. Seven actors, passing on a tale from their childhood, each defining moments of personal truth, pain, glory or fear – shared with seven writers and retold, stylised, cut up and played out in the empty space – we recall the words of Brook’s seminal text “where anything can happen”. Each tale is a truth and an exaltation, a memory and a trick of the mind – and all of them much, much stranger than fiction. This is a rare find for theatre-hunters, the opening night audience laughing, crying and so privileged to find insight into not one but seven beautiful minds. I’m going back again.

The Political Hearts of Children, featuring James Balian, Mark Dessaix, Rosanna Easton, Carla Nirella, Kelly Robinson, Kathryn Schuback and Stephen Wilkinson. Written by Alison Rooke, Katie Pollock, Kimberley Lipschus, Victoria Haralabidou, Benito Di Fonzo, Didem Caia and James Balian, directed by Paul Gilchrist. Playing until April 21, 2013 at the TAP Gallery, Sydney.

POST-SCRIPT: further reflections
After going back for a second bite – the show equally as enjoyable, in different ways – I want to just expand on what I mean by “evolution on a granular scale”. I meant the phrase sincerely but it has the unfortunate reek of pretension without context – which becomes very difficult given my hatred of spoilers! But I digress…

What struck me was the sense of rediscovery of innocence, a recurring thread throughout the pieces. The opening monologue, a back and forth between the adult and child versions of Kathryn Schuback on a trip to the beach, demonstrates just how easily we can forget ourselves, our childhood dreams “what do you want to be when you grow up?”… realistic or not “do you have to go to school to be an astronaut?” and the natural comedic pitch of such a conversation set the tone of reflective wonder. There’s some dramaturgical nous at play as well, rather than setting each tale back-to-back-to-back, this piece and the thrilling Skink-Hunt from Stephen Wilkinson & Benito Di Fonzo are broken up into sections, bookending some of the other pieces neatly and interweaving between threads, giving Political Hearts an overall tapestry feel throughout.

With each of the actor-writer teams given a similar brief, there are wildly different results. Some of the stories take the form of a set of impressionistic memories, such as Rosanna Easton’s fascinating recollection of early life in New Zealand, some key moments counterpointing the overall metaphor of the hothouse-orchid, yearning for more but trapped in the “always winter” of adolescent discontent. A recurring motif: frustration, disappointment, oppression and hope, throughout each piece, ranging in scale but always uniquely personal to the world of the actor – and for the young, that world is nothing less than everything they’ve ever known. Whether it’s a deadly backyard war-zone, or the grandparents’ farm disappearing only to live on in the memories of the now grown-up cousins, or the world of school corridors and associated bullies – the vividness of what seems so small today can pull a thread on our own tiny worlds.

We can relate to something in each, or imagine the rest. The imagination’s power intensified by the bare stage and raw images, culminating in the sudden shift in distance to a world most of us only read about. An actual warzone – Iraq, 1963 – James Balian’s tale of a trip to the dentist in the midst of a revolution. It’s a strange transition, still from the child’s perspective but fifty years gone. We’ve just come from the joyous victory of Boy Wilkinson’s heightened battle against the magpies for his prized skink. So it’s an abrupt reminder of the breadth of the world experience and its universality. These are all stories of Australia, even when they aren’t, because we’re here, now, telling them, sharing ourselves. The Welcome to Country I refer to earlier because storytelling is a vital part of our Indigenous heritage, an something we must begin to embrace if we are to come to terms with our identity, our identities as a nation today.

Oppression and fear can come in many forms. Sometimes it’s imagined, sometimes it’s projected, sometimes it’s very real, and sometimes it’s simply easier to pretend it’s not there. It’s how we react that shapes us. “We grow up.” Lest we Forget.

REACH FOR THE SKY

LUCY BLACK
presented by subtlenuance, at the TAP Gallery, May 2012

This is a fine play, replete with passionate performances, restraint, wit and darkness. Playwright Paul Gilchrist has a reputation for a richness in wordplay that balances the bawdy with the beatific and the brutal – his newest work does not disappoint. From the first strings of dialogue we are caught between styles of speech that clash like water on jagged rocks; impossible idealistic poetry jarring against quick pragmatism. It’s these two vast thematic motifs that stretch throughout the narrative for a smart eighty-odd minutes of tension and intrigue. The only drawback we can name is that the language is so richly plotted one can easily get caught up in it and miss a beat – all things considered a good thing, adhering to the golden rule of showbiz – leaving this audience member wanting more.

The density of the language is matched by the characterisations, contrasting between exuberant passionate youth, calculating cynicism, larrikin menace, mortal idealism and the cool emotional distance and restraint of the title role. Gilchrist and his ensemble have managed to find a rewarding blend for the cast of characters showing us both what each character represents thematically in the work but also, crucially what they want within the context of the narrative, no mean feat given the breadth of the stakes at play. For these are not simply individual quests for power or survival or money or love (although all of these things are on the line) – but the broader, human story of the progress of civilisation, that it’s set in the dark period of history full of uncertainty and medieval superstition emphasises the significance that it could easily be a modern journey as well – for are not people being murdered or imprisoned in the name of social justice every day? Lest we forget that for a thin veneer of square meals and the security of running water we might also fall into a darker time, lest we forget that the giants on whose shoulder we might climb, whether they be Newton, Voltaire, Epicurus or Nietzsche, also once stood and wondered what might be, like everyone, an ordinary human blessed with the yoke of curiosity. Gripping, intelligent theatre.

LUCY BLACK, written and directed by Paul Gilchrist, presented by subtlenuance at the TAP Gallery; featuring Richard Hilliar, Sonya Kerr, Corinne Marie, Joshua Morton and Zara Zoe. Until June 3rd.

CRITIC WATCH: I’ll Be Watching You

EVERY BREATH

presented by Company B, April 2012.

… we don’t know what kind of a fool, having seen a plague of Benedict Andrews’ productions on Sydney stages in recent years; would go and see one that is actually written by him as well, and then read it as a conventional piece of narrative. Are you all mad or just obtuse?

DRINKING IN OBLIVION

BLIND TASTING
presented by Subtlenuance, at 505, March 2012

This is another little gem from the strange narrative mind of Paul Gilchrist, steeped in his quirky style of meditative and philosophical storytelling; a one-woman show breaking through the fourth wall in a rich parody of the world of fine wine and romance. It’s an engaging blend of slightly nutty and melancholic memoir, delivered in charming style by Sylvia Keays, who finds the right balance of tragicomic ennui for the script, quaffing as she goes (one hopes that’s not a real shiraz she’s guzzling) through a personal tale of love and hope and disappointment and adventure. For those who braved the rain last Sunday eve for the preview (and there were fifty of us), a rich reward that softened the palate and brought a new perspective on how we perceive and appreciate the finer things in life – by which I mean art, conversation, wine, music, what-have-you – how context becomes a vital cog in creating an understanding of what it is we are beholding. Take off the label, and we are lost… we must learn to appreciate life without the gold and silver medals, or the prestige, or the name of thing. Irrelevant! After a couple of days discussing theatre and criticism at various public forums it was a poignant thing to suddenly engage with artists evoking the very thing we have been advocating – that it matters not who or what the art is called, where it comes from, who made it – just drink in what is there, and like it, or dislike it, and forget the rest. For a fine Pinot Noir is just as it comes. With or without a label… Something to be savoured, like good friends, or simple belief in oneself. Go ahead, have a taste!

BLIND TASTING, written and directed by Paul Gilchrist, featuring Sylvia Keays; playing at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, 13 – 17 March 2012.

PEOPLE LIKE THAT

THYESTES

Presented by Belvoir and Sydney Festival in association with Carriageworks.
Originally created by THE HAYLOFT PROJECT.
A Malthouse Theatre Commission.
Bay 20, CarriageWorks, February 2012

The word itself sounds like a disease. Onomatopoeic. From the Greek. Meaning “I Make” and “Name”. Thyestes. Like a coldsore. Not something you would want to share with someone. Not unless you truly love them. And even then it’s a kind of horrific scabrous viral parasite. You know how sometimes words sound like what they mean? Thyestes. To most people the word is meaningless, but you would still shy away from the thought somehow. It’s embedded. Like something crawling up the inside of your spine. You know it’s coming, inevitable, and when it reaches your brain who knows what? Not I, said the fox…

Is this a movement or a tradition? The retelling of old stories through the fish-eye lens of the modern urban patois; where once they were passed along in the ancient tavernas unrehearsed by the lyric poets, or expertly carved into marble friezes, or painted on Attic vases, these warnings against the madness of power and corruption and disloyalty long since smashed to pieces by the ravages of time. Or as Joyce might say of history without war (in Stoppard’s Travesties) “a minor redistribution of broken pots”. So it’s tradition. Modernism circa 2010 AD. The creative team at The Hayloft Project have picked up the ceramic shards of one such busted planter and like an archaeological jigsaw done their level best to piece it back together.

The missing fragments are well disguised with reams of inconsequential dialogue, crafted almost too cleverly from pop-cultural scotch tape and waxy bits of post-dramatic conceit. And the bottom half seems to be put back in place all out-of-order… But it definitely holds water. Oh yes. You wouldn’t want to drink from it though. It remains uncleansed – the catharsis is but a brief splash, a vignette placed out of context, which the audience must make their own sense of by reframing the out-of-sequence events in the second half. Like a half-remembered bad dream. You’d rather forget, but you can’t. It forces you to put it together yourself, scene by scene, so the horrors are multiplied because you know what happens next.

Thus the casual banality of the dialogues become loaded with a sickening irony. Simple things like a lover’s gift should make you smile, but they make you frown, as you sift through the wreckage of the cursed Atrean house, like the archaeologist just trying to figure out the who and the why. It happens so fast. Too fast. The speeding surtitles give as much confusion as exposition, so the people next to you have to ask what’s going on? Who is who? English was not their first language so they are stuck. Which one was Thyestes again? You thought it was the other one – so the jumbled pieces collapse and the process begins anew.

While it was Joyce who began the fusion of modern and ancient – it was Foucault who cleaved concepts of history, knowledge and the archaeology of meaning; and the play, perhaps through its self-awareness and unwavering commitment to emotional intensity, excavates a terrible truth that threads right back into a world we will never know, but somehow recognise. It is the sterility of the production design which enables these three performers to create a platform of brutal all-too-human foibles to fire up the imaginations of their utterly captive audience. Backed up with tight direction and some truly astonishing mise-en-scene; the minimalist approach gives way to the kind of psychological and emotional arm-wrestle of which there is no choice but to win.

THYESTES playing until February 19th, 2012
Co-written by Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan, Simon Stone and Mark Winter after Seneca. Directed by Simon Stone, featuring Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan and Mark Winter

HOW LUCKY WE ARE

LUCKY

New Theatre, October 2011. Presented by IPAN International Performing Arts Network in association with The Spare Room

The politicians don’t care for much beyond the populism of the day. The people tut-tut each other or heckle with home-made signs, and the boats keep smashing on distant rocks. There will be a day, we hope against hope, when the plight of international refugees will be acknowledged, and the western world will take on the responsibility it needs to face; globally, collectively, spiritually – to reach out to the downtrodden and persecuted peoples. Only when we fully accept the role such privilege plays in the global imbalances that create such desperation can we move forward. Not because it’s the right thing to do, but for the sake of our collective human soul. We must act with compassion. Not just in a “let them stay” kind of begrudging welcome (which is all we seem able to barely manage now)- but in a full acknowledgement of the privileges we are born to. To know just how lucky we are, we must face up to the misfortunes of others.

One can get on one’s high horse when it comes to people smuggling, whichever side of the fence one rides.

Lucky for us this play does no such thing. It brings the human stories, stripped down to their bare bones and rags, their most human of hopes riding waves of disappointment. It’s a difficult work to express, and director Sama Ky Balson has opted for simplicity in set and movement, allowing the measured, sparse poetry of the script to float around the production’s impressive physical and image theatre core. The third element in play is Joseph Nezeti’s sound design, comprising live vocals and harmonies that bring out the dreamlike qualities inherent in the script.

Dutch playwright Ferenc Alexander Zavaros has created a challenging piece for the cast to present; part realism part expressionism, and these challenges will translate for the audience as the cast bring a tone that recollects the detached voice of a poet reading their own work off the page. This, along with some slower pacing in the opening sequence means one needs to work that much harder to reach into the world of the play. But once we make that leap of empathy, the language and the semi-hypnotic physicality of the performance overcome the natural limitations this style of theatre can bring for an audience. One has to work towards engaging with the text, it’s deliberate that way – with poetry struggling against the possible, with the possible pushing up against the barriers of translation and the cut-throat desperation that comes with the will to survive.

So it isn’t much to ask an audience to sit forward and actively engage with this work. It’s not that difficult, but we cannot simply sit back and let this wash over us like so much entertainment. The play asks us to put in a little bit of work, and so it should, since the perils of asylum seekers and people smuggling will not go away without some effort on all our parts. But we shan’t get too preachy. People are not political chips, nor bodies piled up for one to take the moral high ground. This is quite a beautiful and rewarding piece of stagecraft, recommended for those of a mind for something that challenges without confronting, and probes without asking too many of the obvious questions. Go see.

Lucky, by Ferenc Alexander Zavaros. Playing at the New Theatre until October 22. Featuring Guy Simon, Drew Wilson, Hoa X with Joel Corpuz and Conrad Le Bron.

Photograph (c) Robbie Pacheco