Theatre: Macbeth (★★★)

by William Shakespeare
WAAPA 3rd Year acting students

Roundhouse Theatre, ECU Mt Lawley
Until 16 October

Whether it’s in anticipation of the looming 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, or a reflex action in response to the real-life slaughter of the innocents with which we are constantly assailed, there’s a lot of Macbeth about these days.
Which is no bad thing for admirers of this most efficient of Shakespeare’s killing machines. It's barely half the length of Hamlet, but is pound-for-pound, and by a very great margin, the most poetic of his great tragedies.
Then there's the dark unreality, the hallucinogenic quality, of Dunsinane and the charnel house made there by its lord and lady.
And there is also some of Shakespeare’s greatest contributions to the language, from “fell swoop” to “screw up courage”, from “double, double, toil and trouble” to “out, damned spot”, reaching its apogee in Macbeth’s great hymn of nihilism, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…”.

…Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
If that doesn't make you shudder, even four centuries leter, you need to take a good, hard look inside yourself.

Theatre: Clinchfield

By Caleb Lewis

Directed by Andrew Lewis

Musical director/composer Reg Cribb

Set and costume designer Lauren Ross

Performed by WAAPA 3^rd Year acting students

Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA

16 – 22 March 2012

pic: Jon Green

Clinchfield, Caleb Lewis’s saga of small town hysteria and its consequences, opens the performance series for the 2012 graduating acting class at WAAPA.

As always, it’s an important opportunity for the year’s batch of emerging performers to shine in public.

This production is of particular significance as the first public appearance of the inaugural winner of the Richard Burton Award for New Plays. Prizes are an important incentive in this under-remunerated industry, but the mark of the award, and what Sally Burton is no doubt seeking to foster with it, must surely be works that can be successfully and repeatedly staged in the professional theatre.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Ruben Guthrie

By Brendan Cowell

Directed by Andrew Lewis

Set and costume designer Jessica Glaser

Performed by WAAPA 3^rd Year Acting students Ben O’Toole, Lara Schwerdt, Griffin Blumer, Ryan Jones, Jessica Clarke, Kali Hulme and Josh Brennan

Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA

June 17 - 23, 2011

Brendan Cowell’s high-style morality play, Ruben Guthrie, is a gift for any company of actors, and it certainly is for this cast drawn from the graduating class of the WA Academy of Performing Arts acting course.

I must confess to being a little wary of the piece. There’s a bit too much bender glamour here, and while the hot-shot creative genius ad guy who can only function on a cocktail of booze and coke is almost a stock character on the stage and screen, it’s a far cry from the miserable truth of abuse and addiction that ruins real lives in the real world. Any play that attempts, as director Andrew Lewis somewhat disingenuously asserts in his notes, to “hilariously tackle the territory of alcoholism and substance abuse” needs to be approached with considerable caution.

Kali Hulme and Ben O'Toole (pic: Jon Green)

Having said that, I suspect Cowell’s purpose is more allegorical – the lure of power and control expressed through the pitfalls of substance abuse and addiction – than realistic. He writes with great verve and creates some memorable characters around his  protagonist, Ruben Guthrie (Ben O’Toole).

Like John Bunyan’s beleagured Christian, Guthrie is centre-stage throughout the play, while his family, friends and lovers swirl around him like birds of carrion. His Czech model girlfriend, Zoya (Lara Schwerdt), flies back to Prague, soon to be replaced by the control freak, Virginia (Jessica Clarke), he meets at the addiction program he books into. His account manager, Ray (Griffin Blumer), though, wants him back on the booze to rekindle his creative spark, as do, for reasons more related to their own issues than any concern for their son, his estranged parents (Ryan Jones and Kali Hulme).

Things only get worse when Ruben’s outrageous gay friend, Damien (Josh Brennnan), returns from an abortive sojourn in New York and desperately wants to party. When Zoya also reappears after some late night phone pleading from Ruben to find Virginia in her apartment, and her T-shirt, Ruben hits the bottle, the pills, the blow and whatever else he can lay his hands on.