Theatre: In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play

by Sarah Ruhl

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler

Set and costume designer Alicia Clements

Lighting designer Lucy Birkinshaw

Vision designer Mia Holton
Composer and sound designer Ash Gibson Greig

Performed by Rebecca Davis, Stuart Halusz, Kingsley Judd, Tariri Mavondo, Jo Morris, Tom Stokes and Alison van Reeken

Heath Ledger Theatre until November 4

Jo Morris, Stuart Halusz and Rebecca Davis

 There’s A Hit – A Palpable Hit – In The Next Room

It’s an entertaining (if likely apocryphal) historical factoid that the first appliance of the age of electricity was the venerable and handy vibrator; it was certainly in wide use in doctors’ rooms as a copacetic for female hysteria – in other words, to cure that which ails you by the bringing on of orgasm – quite soon after those ACs and DCs started running through Edison’s wires.

The American playwright Sarah Ruhl has bounced off all this with In the Next Room, a witty, playful peek into domesticity and its pitfalls, the role of women in marriage and society, and quite a bit more besides.

Along the way she neatly avoids all of the traps of prurience and earnestness lying in wait for her, and the result is a wildly entertaining and intelligent piece of popular theatre.

It would be anyway, just on the strength of the text, but this production is lifted to its very considerable heights by the skill and talent of its creative team and cast.

Jeffrey Jay Fowler, the director, has accurately assessed Ruhl’s play for what it is; a modern take on Restoration Comedy, almost a bedroom – well consulting room – farce, and he plays it elegantly through the covers. He’s much assisted by his designer Alicia Clements, whose cutaway two-way-mirror set is wholly successful – quite inspired in fact –and allows the action to move from room to room seamlessly and often hilariously. Her costumes, which are removed, replaced and got inside with great regularity, are authentic and sumptuous.

Ash Gibson Greig has composed music that perfectly fits both the play’s acoustic era and electrical subject, and Lucy Birkinshaw’s lighting is subtly effective throughout, even when dealing with the tricky task of switching set lighting on and off like an electric lamp.

A cast this well provisioned, led, dressed and lit has a great opportunity, and they go to town on it. There are terrific supporting turns by Tom Stokes as the ardent but diffidently amorous artist Leo Irving (who gets a different, and squirm-in-the-seat, kind of vibration), Tariro Mavondo as the African-American wet nurse Elizabeth who introduces a suite of issues as relevant today as they were in postbellum America, and Kingsley Judd as the straight-laced but sympathetic husband of one of the patients of the New Machine.

Alison van Reeken, who stepped into the cast at late notice (as she is often asked to do), is glorious (as she always is) as Annie, a Ma Clampett nurse who gets swept up in all this tomfoolery.

The story revolves around the practice of the good doctor Givings, and Stuart Halusz gives a perfectly pitched performance as the medical technocrat oblivious to the torrents and torments of those around him. He’s in pretty good shape, too.

The play belongs to its leading women, and Rebecca Davis, as Catherine Givings, and Jo Morris as her husband’s patient Sabrina Daldry, both give career performances.

Morris is electric (sorry) as Sabrina, and she makes her I’ll-have-what-she’s-having scenes ­– she develops quite a hankering for her little buzzing friend – a tour-de-force.

Davis rarely gets the opportunity to show her range, but she does here, and her ability to slip easily from farce to genuine emotion is the touchstone for the production’s stance, and its success.

There’s much talk around about the sparse opportunities for seasoned professional actors in the current Perth theatre. There are reasons for it, and I don’t intend to argue the whys and wherefores in a review of one show.

This one, though, reminds us that the talent is here, and in spades. You can help by the easy act of seeing it when you get a chance as enjoyable as this is.

Theatre: Dinner (★★½)

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Written by Moira Buffini
Directed by Kate Cherry
Set and lighting designed by Trent Suidgeest
Sound designer and composer Ash Gibson Greig
With Rebecca Davis, Stuart Halusz, Greg McNeill, Kenneth Ransom, Steve Turner, Alison van Reeken and Tasma Walton
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Until 29 March 

There’s a line in Moira Buffini’s 2002 play, Dinner, when a woman, overhearing an ex-soldier’s stories of his violent exploits in Liberia, exclaims “You killed a LIBRARIAN??”. Boom-Tish!
Make of that gag what you will, but we can assume those involved in Dinner aren’t approaching the undertaking too seriously. Or at least they shouldn’t be.
Dinner is professionally prepared and well served. It’s just hard to fathom why anyone bothered to reheat it.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian
  

Theatre: The House on the Lake

Written by Aidan Fennessy
Directed by Stuart Halusz
Set and costume design by India Mehta
Lighting designer Trent Suidgeest
Sound designer and composer Brett Smith
With Kenneth Ransom and Marthe Rovik
STC Studio
Until June 22

By his own admission, Aidan Fennessy has set himself a difficult challenge with The House on the Lake.
The Melbourne playwright’s sad, powerful, National Interest was the standout in Black Swan’s 2012 season.
He returns with a whodunit with only two characters, one of whom, perforce, is the interrogator (a forensic psychologist, Dr Alice Lowe, played by Marthe Rovik). This leaves only one, David Rail (Kenneth Ransom) to be suspect, witness, red herring, perhaps victim or, perhaps, perpetrator.

Theatre: National Interest

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Written and directed by Aiden Fennessy

Designed by Christina Smith

With James Bell, Julia Blake, Grant Cartwright, Michelle Fornasier, Stuart Halusz and Polly Low

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

5 – 20 May, 2012

Grant Cartwright, James Bell, Stuart Halusz and Julia Blake (pic Gary Marsh)

1975 is a great swirl in the minds of Australians who lived through it. It’s unsurprising that an obscure post-colonial fracas, albeit one close by in Portuguese Timor, wasn’t high on anyone’s agenda. Or that reports that five journalists working for Australian TV networks there were unaccounted for didn’t impinge greatly on our congested consciousnesses.

Even when their deaths, in the village of Balibo, were confirmed on November 12, it was low priority news. 

In one ordinary suburban house in Melbourne, though, and for one ordinary Australian wife and mother, it was the day a world ended. The day she knew her son Tony had died.

Thirty-two years later, in Aiden Fennessy’s elegiac National Interest, that mother, June Stewart (Julia Blake) defies her own diminishing strengths and, surrounded by the shades of her 21 year old son Tony (James Bell) and his mates in the Seven Network crew who died alongside him, reaches out for peace. 

For Fennessy, who also directs the play, this must have been a voyage deep into his own heart. All these people exist, or once existed, and Fennessy is June Stewart’s nephew, and Tony Stewart’s cousin. He manages this potent mix of real life and theatre with great intuition and impeccable sympathy.

National Interest is by a great margin the most significant new play Black Swan have premiered in the Heath Ledger Theatre, and the most complete, moving and satisfying production they have mounted on its stage. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian           

Theatre: The Modern International Dead

Deckchair Theatre

Written by Damien Millar

Directed by Chris Bendall

Featuring Steve Turner, Michelle Fornasier and Stuart Halusz

Victoria Hall, Fremantle

March 17  - April 2, 2011

Steve Turner and Michelle Fornasier

We woke the morning after the opening of Deckchair Theatre’s production of Damien Millar’s The Modern International Dead to yet another country in flames. Like Somalia, like Kosovo, Iraq, Cambodia, Rwanda and East Timor before it, Libya joins the nightmare list of countries whose people endure torture and execution, disease and starvation, incursion and insurgency, ethnic violence and the deadly infection of the minefield. They are the modern international dead of the play’s very apt title.

Miller’s play centres on the stories of three Australians dealing with these seemingly endless agonies. 

The closer the play stayed to the real stories of real people plainly told, the more effective it was. Two monologues describing the terrible consequences of a land mine explosion in Cambodia and a car hijacking in Somalia were its emotional and dramatic high points. 

During these scenes, and in others where the characters bore plain, direct witness to actual events, the production had a similar impact to the powerful and illuminating Aftermath, recently seen at the Perth Festival.

The Modern International Dead isn’t everything it could be, but it still deserves praise for bringing a terrible darkness to the light, and for a performance from Steve Turner that alone is worth the price of admission.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Footnote: I’ve had a brief email exchange with Chris Bendall about the extent to which Damien Millar is transcribing stories told to him, especially the Somalia carjacking story told by the Rod Barton character in the play, which relates to some of my comments in the full review in The West.
 Bendall tells me that, while that story is not a transcription, “the incident, reactions and actions are all factual”.
“The same incident is described in the book Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures). In Damien’s interviews apparently Rod spoke of the story but not nearly to the same length, so Damien has re-constructed (it) using his voice. 
“I guess the interesting thing about the play is it feels like verbatim theatre, and nothing is made up so it's all based on the extensive interviews Damien conducted, but he has gotten inside the voices of each of the actual people and recrafted their words for dramatic purposes –which is why he uses the tag ‘witness theatre’ more than ‘verbatim”, Bendall says.