Theatre: The Bleeding Tree

by Angus Cerini

Black Swan State Theatre Company and The Blue Room Theatre

STC Studio

Until May 14

(This review was originally published in 2019 for the production's original season at the Blue Room Theatre. Stephanie Somerville is in the role originally played by Abbie-Lee Lewis) 

Angus Cerini’s The Bleeding Tree is a remarkable work. The Helpmann Award winner for best play in 2016, its Blue Room season is passionate, poetic and immensely powerful.

The fine actor Ian Michael makes his directorial debut with a play he’s dreamt of staging since he saw it five years ago, and he and his outstanding cast do complete justice to Cerini’s vision.

The Bleeding Tree is a “murder” without a mystery. It begins with a gunshot as the audience is entering the theatre. We learn immediately there’s a body – represented by a pile of dirt on the floor – and that it’s that of a brutal drunkard who’s the husband of a woman (Karla Hart) and father of two sisters (Abbie-Lee Lewis and Ebony McGuire).

He’s returned home from the pub, shit-faced and terrifying. One of his girls fells him with a blow to the shins, another clubs him unconscious on the ground before the mother puts a shotgun to his neck and blows it apart. “Thank God the prick is dead”.

It’s also a horror story without the traditional tension. The physical threat posed by the man is over with his death, but the horror of him is recalled by the three women in awful detail throughout the play.

The lack of traditional tension continues as three people – two neighbours and the local postman – who come to the house quickly piece together what has happened.

They haven’t the slightest intention of informing on the women, though. If anything, they help the women get their story – the man had left them and gone to stay with his (fictitious) sister Marg  “somewhere up north” – sorted and assist with the disposal of the body.

But this is no ordinary story, and it’s told in an extraordinary way.

To begin with, the dialogue is entirely in verse, most often blank, sometimes in rhyme. It’s a dark liturgy of outrage, of fear and fury at the despicable man who blighted their lives.

And it is dominated by a ferocious metaphor; the women have no means of disposing of his body, but their first visitor remarks, ostensibly apropos of nothing, that under the right circumstances, an exposed body will decompose in three days.

It’s an idea worth acting on.

The body is strung up on a tree in the back yard where the family bled out the goats they slaughtered – literally where the dingoes and crows could molest him.

And they do, along with the rats, the flies and their maggots, the ants, even the chooks, and finally, taking its long-awaited vengeance, the postman’s dog.

It’s a righteous carnival of the excarnation of the body, and Cerini takes it further than even Zoroastrians do; after the scavengers have done their business, the mother boils the bones into a broth to fertilise the roses she intends to grow. Like Dylan Thomas’s lovers, his “bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone” – but for this man there will be no stars at elbow and foot, and Death will have its dominion.

It sounds gruesome, I guess it is, but you feel like cheering every time a rat climbs out of the neck wound or the dog crunches a bone; it’s an excoriation devoutly to be wished.

It’s also a deeply moral story in the face of the daily real-life horrors faced by women and children at the hands of violent husbands and fathers, and, in the hands of an Indigenous director and cast, the unretributed violence committed on the inhabitants of Australia by its colonisers.

The production is faultless; Tyler Hill’s set – a box of latticed wood, somewhere between an enclosed lean-to and a cell, floats in darkness above the theatre floor, it’s interior lit menacingly by Chloe Ogilvie. This is a project made for Rachael Dease, and her sound design begins as a soft growl, a dirge and a buzz, but folds into a soft hymn as the ritual obliteration of the man proceeds.

In this stultifying, defiled but somehow sacred place, Hart, Lewis and McGuire are avenging angels, priestesses at the sacrifice of the un-innocent. Their anger, and their humanity, are incandescent.

This year the West Australian theatre has emerged from the pandemic better and more vital than could have been hoped. The Bleeding Tree is an amazing way to finish it. Do not miss it.

 

Comedy: Paul Foot (★★★★)

Perth Comedy Festival
May 5, 2023

I really should stop reviewing Paul Foot’s stand up comedy.
Not stop seeing him, mind, because he’s one of the funniest people on the planet, but because writing about his act is a little like telling your partner how much you love them. Again.
The first time I saw Foot, back at the first version of the Perth Comedy Festival in 2012, I was literally helpless with laughter. Friends watching me watching him were genuinely concerned something might burst.
The sad, inevitable truth about seeing him every chance you get since is that the wonderful disorder he creates in you wears off, especially when you see newcomers in the audience behaving like a dog kicking its hind leg as its tummy is scratched as Foot’s carefully crafted madness overwhelms them.
Despite his on-stage paroxysms, his violent bobbing and bizarre, leaping walks that physically punctuate his material, there’s something charming about a comedian who welcomes the audience “Greetings!” and performs it without obscenity (one indecency, another word for fellatio slipped in late in his monologue, may have been the only lewdity I can recall in all the times I’ve seen him).
But his subject matter, from the priapic and environmental impact of powdered rhino horn to demented ad copy for SpecSavers and the Swiss assisted dying clinics Pegasos, from the virtue of the word “charlatan” to the critical importance of the year 1903 to our perception of everything from wars to serial killers, all delivered in (what he claims are) “extended and ill-advised ad-libs”.
It’s all hilarious, erudite and culturally literate, and deeply, deeply funny (too deep, possibly, for the stony-faced cohort in every Paul Foot audience who are clearly wondering what on earth they’ve wandered in to).
What it is is a disturbance of the comedy spheres as ambitious as very few comics – Spike Milligan is the only one who comes immediately to mind – have attempted. And, fear not, even if you do see him as often as I have, familiarity will only breed respect.
Here's a taste…

Perth Festival 2023: Cyrano

by Virginia Gay (after Edmond Rostand)

Melbourne Theatre Company

Presented by Black Swan and Perth Festival

Director Sarah Goodes

Musical Director Xani Kolac

Choreographer Janine Oxenham

Set designer Elizabeth Gadsby

Costume designer Jo Briscoe

Lighting designer Paul Jackson

Sound designer Kelly Ryall

Performed by Holly Austin, Zenya Carmellotti, Virginia Gay, Robin Goldsworthy, Joe Jackson and Tuuli Narkle

Heath Ledger Theatre

February 17 – March 5 2023

Here comes the happy ending! Virginia Gay (l) and the cast of Cyrano (pic: Daniel L Grant)

It’s easy to see why Australia’s big market theatre companies are programming radical re-imaginings of classic stories. Let’s be frank; it makes good box office sense for audiences for whom familiarity breeds content, while providing plenty of opportunity for the companies to display their technical chops, the talent at their disposal and their creative heft.

This year’s Perth festival delivers two prominent examples, the Sydney Theatre Company’s spectacular cine-theatre take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde horror show and, now, the Melbourne Theatre’s romp-com mash up of Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

Both stories were sensations of the 19^th Century fin de siècle that have since become ingrained in high and pop cultural literacy; both have become part of our language.

And both are malleable properties in the hands of writers and directors with the inclination and skill to bend and shape them.

Virginia Gay’s Cyrano is the more entertaining of the two, despite the dazzling pyrotechnics of Kip Williams’ The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

This may be in part a comfort zone issue. Cyrano lives fairly and squarely where it belongs, on a stage in a theatre. The claim that, from the ghost light centre-stage stage as it begins to the tinsel and glitter as it ends, it’s primarily in homage to live theatre, is one I’ll happily buy, while Jekyll and Hyde lives in a kind of ether where the theatre is a convenient space for something that could be just as easily performed on a movie lot or anywhere large and dark, and the homage is as much to the screen as the stage.

Enough: On with the show.

Gay’s other great love is language, and this makes her a perfect fit, both as writer and actor, for Cyrano, whose most potent weapon, apart from the sword we never see unsheathed, is wit and wordplay.  

She dominates her posse-cum-chorus (the superb, hysterical trio of Holly Austin, Zenya Carmelotti and uncanny David Templeman doppelganger Robin Goldsworthy) with words laced with a touch of eyeball-to-eyeball intimidation.

But when the perfect Roxanne, (Tuuli Narkle), roller-skates into her life in a pure white mist, her words fail her.

What transpires is a case of flesh and bone may break my heart, but words will never win me. The fleshy, bony item in question is Yan (Joel Jackson), a chiselled hunk of spunk from the Pilbara who bowl Roxanne over, leaving Cyrano bereft.

Sure Cyrano and Roxy still have a nice thing happening – one delightful scene has them cuddled up and tossing witticisms they’ve pilfered from famous lines from the classics at each other – but it’s all too, too, BFF, and when the services of the production’s Intimacy Co-ordinator (Amy Cater) are called for, it’s Roxanne and Yan she’s working with.

The second-most famous balcony scene and the second-most notorious nose in history are both played for laughs, and earn them all, as do all the neatly constructed comic set pieces that are liberally sprinkled throughout the show.

Every one of the actors are expert winkers and nodders, and there are plenty, but not too many, merry song parodies, from Jobim’s sublime Girl from Ipanema to the Archie’s ridiculous Sugar Sugar, courtesy of musical director Xani Kolac.

Plenty, but not too many, is the guiding principle of Gay’s writing and Sarah Goodes well-measured direction.

There are in-jokes and local references, but not too many.

Cyrano teeters on the edge of the trap wherein lurks the creature pantomime, but escapes the slippery slope.

The other trap it evades with style is proselytising; Cyrano, obviously enough, is a queer take on the celebrated old romance, but it sails on heedless of any need to make, let alone labour, the point.    

There are subtle moments too; Roxanne may be perfect, but she might also be just a tad insufferable. Love, you know, is blind.

And Cyrano, for all her bluster, learns how precious love is, even if you are only granted fragments of it. You can have just enough, so you don’t lose it all.

She doesn’t; Gay cheats the fate of Rostand’s de Bergerac, and when Cater is next called for, Cyrano is among those being co-ordinated.

A happy ending, and a more than happy audience.

After this sweet treat of a show, so they should be.

 

Perth Festival 2023: Manifesto

Stephanie Lake Company

A Perth festival Co-commission

Choreographer Stephanie Lake

Composer Robin Fox

His Majesty’s Theatre February 10 – 13, 2022

(pic: Roy Vandervegt)

When all else fails –watch the drummer.

In Stephanie Lake and Robin Fox’s exhilarating dance work, Manifesto, nothing was even remotely failing, but the phalanx of nine drummers – on for each of its dancers – arcing above the Heath Ledger Theatre stage on a set (elegantly designed by Charles Davis) with more than a nod to Busby Berkely – were as irresistible as the dancers below them.

And that’s saying something. The dance ensemble was athletic, acrobatic and drilled to the millisecond, breaking out into solos and smaller combinations and back to the corps with breathtaking precision.

And, happily for someone who doesn’t claim to be fluent in the language of dance, if there was a manifesto to Manifesto, it was “we’ve got an hour and a stage – let’s see what we can do with it!”. Relieved of the stress of having to decipher what was going on and, even worse, what it meant, we are able to dive in and become a slave to its rhythm.

And what a rhythm it is – sometimes a beat but, rising to a pulse that drives life into the dance like the heartbeat of a massive animal. 

Along the way the drummers literally deconstruct the musical possibilities of their all but identical standard kits, showing what each can do individually and in unison to Fox’s amazingly various and melodic score. Anyone who went into Manifesto thinking that a drummers gig is to keep the beat and keep the band company would have had another think coming (I kept thinking of Elena Kats-Chernon’s Concerto for Eight Double Basses, another piece that masses an often-overlooked instrument to thrilling effect).

Having said that we weren’t challenged by Manifesto’s meaning, its purpose was clear; we have within us, alone or together, the power to move mountains, even if we have to break rocks to do it. The sheer work ethic of the dancers was overwhelming (even from my eyrie perched high above the distant stage I could smell the hard-earned, honest sweat of their labours!).

They may have toiled on our behalf, but it required no effort on our part to enjoy and exult in the result.

 

(Beyond these scattered observations, I defer to someone who speaks dance fluently, my editor and friend Nina Levy in Seesaw Magazine link here)

 

 

Fringe World 2023

The temperature rose as if on cue on the boulevard of dreams stretching from the Cultural Centre to Russel Square on Friday, and all the auguries were good for a Fringe World that, if not quite back to its raggedy pomp of the Naughties (500 acts this year vs 700+ before the plague), was at least a passable imitation of its glory.
But how would the ancient Turnstiles, a tattered coat upon a stick in no country for old men, take to the bright lights and painted faces of this brave new world?

Sit by me, mes enfants, and let us see what wonders are passing by…  

Sensemaker★★★★

Like all of us, the Swiss performer Elsa Couvreur knows what its like to wait in a queue for someone real to answer your call. She’s turned that Herculean task into an hour of gripping, very often riotous, theatre where she doesn’t speak at all (a recorded voice does all the talking, but every movement and gesture of hers says volumes).

Sensemaker isn’t dance, although she moves brilliantly, or mime, although she creates spaces and surfaces superbly; she uses all her physical gifts to tell a story and send an unmistakable message without words.

And that message, which, ultimately, she communicates in the most graphic way a body can, is that “they” want to know everything about you, but want you to know nothing about “them”.

And the next time you find yourself dangling on the phone waiting for the right to be interrogated by a digital voice, it’s a message worth having.

Colossal ★★★★½ and Vehicle ★★★★
The rejuvenated Fringe World begins with a bang with two gigantic shows:
Patrick McPherson’s ‘Colossal’ came garlanded with plaudits and prizes, including Theatre Weekly’s “Best Show of the Edinburgh Fringe 2022”, and is the epitome of the best fringe; hilariously, crafty, shocking and far, far more than meets the eye. 
With “Vehicle”, Sam Longley and Shane Adamczak, two of our very best improv performers show, like modern-day Laurel and Hardys, what mischief can be made if, instead of having to craft a story on the spot, you gave them three months to work on it.

(Read my complete review of both Colossal and Vehicle in Seesaw Magazine link here)

Elise Wilson (pic: Sophie Minissale)

 All the Fraudulent Horse Girls ★★★½
Horses spook me. I’ve seen two plays about them, and one – Peter Shaffer’s Equus – was the worst. Ever. With or without horses in it.

Plus, I’ve only “ridden” a horse once, and my arse, when it landed on the hard dirt of the Darling Downs during the ensuing stampede, still hurts whenever I think of that ride.
Now that that elephant has left the room, I’m happy to report that All the Fraudulent Horse Girls is the very best play about horses I’ve ever seen by the length of the straight (okay, I haven’t seen Warhorse). And it doesn’t hurt a bit.
The story of 11-year-old Audrey, and the ecstatic obsession with horses that gets her through the perils and agonies of looming adolescence, is crazy and – just – believable enough, to float, and the performances by a quartet of talented young actors (Hannah Davidson, Courtney Henri, Elise Wilson and Lucy Wong) are wacky and energetic enough to make you blink and miss some of the playwright Michael Louis Kennedy’s text’s more fragile moments.
A kick in the head by a pissed-off police horse on a wet Stirling Highway (don’t ask) sends Audrey spiraling into the world of the American author Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and her affinity with its hero, John Grady Cole.
The picaresque cowboy novel is a cipher for Audrey’s brave outsider personality and the obstacles she faces, and its helter-skelter story, while only roughly sketched, comes across well.
I’d have liked a little more reflection in the characterization and text, more opportunity to sit a while with Audrey and share her thoughts, but the director Mitchell Whelan and his cast had a long way to ride, and not much time to do it, so it’s a missing piece rather than a flaw.
The cast plays a parade of characters, and all but Henri (who does a great horse) take a turn as Audrey, passing the baton every time a horse whacks her in the head.
All of them have great moments, and Elise Wilson’s turn as the “first” Audrey is worth the price of the ticket alone.
Wilson has shown a phenomenal range and presence in her nascent career since graduating from WAAPA’s remarkable Performance Making course in 2018 (the rest of the cast are also alumni).
One moment, when a thought seemed to make her her lose it completely, she had us in the saddle and galloping along beside her.

 

A little editorial: I should point out that All the Fraudulent Horse Girls is not part of the Fringe World Festival. It’s one of the shows in the Summer Nights season curated by the Blue Room theatre that runs concurrently with the fringe.
It’s most unfortunate that the shorter Summer Nights, and the State Theatre Centre’s curated State of Play season (which is part of Fringe World), both kicked off, along with the rest of the Fringe on January 20^th, meaning that there is an unmanageable (for audiences) glut of interesting theatre/performance shows in the first two weeks of the festival season and a dearth of them thereafter.
I hope the organisations behind all these programmes (don’t get me wrong, they do a wonderful job) will bang their diaries together and rationalize these delights in future.

 

 

Otto and Astrid Play The Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Concert You've Ever Seen! ★★★★

What the world needs now is a faux-German Europunk parody sibling duo thrashing their way through songs like Burger Store Dinosaur, I Wanna Be Your Kitten (for Iggy Pop), 2nd Best Friend, Ich bin kein Roboter (I am not a robot) I’m a Lion, Trying Not To Die and Rock Bang, all of which sound like variations on My Sharon meets Kraftwerk meets Plastic Bertrand.

So why go for a pale imitation when you can have the real thing, the pride of the Berlin unter Tage. Meine Damen und Herren – Otto and Astrid, the Red Dots (or, by a happy fluke of English to German translation, Die Roten Punkte)!

Clare Bartholemew and Daniel Tobias – like Bernadette Byrne aka punk cabaret superstar Bernie Dieter, as German as Flinders St Station (what is this Melbourne/ Berlin thing? Oh, jas gut, I get it now) – have been hauling this vehicle around the world for a couple of decades, and they’ve got it down absolutely pat.

The result is hilarious, really hilarious, and way, way smarter than they pretend to be. I turned to the person sitting next to me and said “these idiots could do a fantastic kids’ show.’’ She replied,“They do’’ – and she should know.

This, I hasten to add, isn’t it.

Jamie Mykaela: Floozy ★★★½
My admiration for Jamie Mykaela is boundless, both for her extravagant talent and presence and for her courage and freedom as an artist.
So if I say that her world premiere season of Floozy in the State Theatre Centre Studio is an uncomfortable experience, that’s not to discourage you from seeing it. As always, she’s a brilliant performer and a magnetic presence, and there’s much to enjoy in her stories of an Armadale gal it home and abroad.
(Read my complete review of Floozy in Seesaw Magazine link here)

Josh Glanc: It’s Great to be Here ★★★½
What do comedy agent provocateur Tomas Ford, lawyer turned fringe-filler Josh Glanc and funnyman superstar Steve Martin have in common?
They all play instruments from the lute family? Uh huh. All three are very hairy guys? Yep. Correct. Could be bears.
I know. All three have worked out they can do anything they want – and if they do it like it’s dead funny, then it is dead funny? Si! Correcto!
So when Josh Glanc wanders around the jam-packed Gold Digger marquee selling “hot chips, potato cake, dim sim, sausage roll” the giggles begin, and by the time he sings with a parrot from the wildlife sanctuary “ between the Giant Grapefruit and the Giant Strawberry” on the Bruce Highway or evicts a guy from the tent because he’s too tall, the punters are heaving.
On and on it goes; there’s the lonely widow who takes him upstairs to show him a turtle, the woman he intercepts trying to help a baby doll escape the show, the Sam and Dave classic bowdlerised as “Small Man” by a tiny puppet. It’s silly, sappy, doesn’t have punch lines, sometimes tails off into nothing, but Glanc is so sure of it, so confident that it’s really funny that we can do nothing but obey his demand that we piss ourselves laughing.
And when he pulls off his fake moustache and obeys our demand that he take off his shirt to reveal his tangle of a chest – told you – we howl with pleasure.

 

Theatre: Oil

Hayley McElhinney and Michael Abercrombie
(pic: Daniel J Grant)

By Ella Hickson

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Directed by Adam Mitchell

Set and Costume designer Zoë Atkinson

Composer and Sound designer Melanie Robinson

Lighting designer Matthew Marshall

Performed by Michael Abercrombie, Violette Ayad, Will Bastow, Grace Chow, St John Cowcher, Polly Low, Tinashe Mangwana, Hayley McElhinney, Abbey Morgan and Will O’Mahony

Heath Ledger Theatre
20 August – 3 September

A play that begins with a family huddling by fitful candlelight in a freezing Cornwall hovel in the early years of the Industrial Age and ends, approaching two centuries later, in the same house by the light and warmth of a device powered by an element mined from the surface of the moon by a Chinese conglomerate, needs to have a lot going for it.
Oil, by the British playwright Ella Hickson, certainly does; it’s audacious, epic, polemically devastating, dialectically thorough and engaging.
And if it sacrifices a little of its greatest strength for a less convincing one, that’s a small price to pay.
In any event, the quality of this Black Swan production’s direction (by Adam Mitchell, design (by Zoë Atkinson) and performances is so fine that qualms about the balance of the text’s strengths and weaknesses should and will matter little to its audience.
Oil is the story of one woman, May (Hayley McElhinney), who, in Kurt Vonnegut’s memorable phrase, has “become unstuck in time” – specifically, the Time of Oil – from 1858 in Cornwall to Tehran in 1908, oil-shocked London in 1970, war-torn Iraq in 2025 and, finally, back in Cornwall in 2051.
She is the same woman, at different ages, and her daughter, Amy (Abbey Morgan) is the same girl.
May, pregnant with Amy, flees her pitiful existence the night her family rejects an offer to sell their farm to an executive from an American kerosene company (Will Bastow). She deserts her husband, Joss (Michael Abercrombie, a massive presence yet again) who she loves with deep, emotional sexuality, whose loss she will mourn all her life.
She next appears in domestic servitude in Tehran with the young Amy, as the European powers jostle for control of the Middle East’s seemingly boundless oil reserves.
In 1970, May is the CEO of a British oil company operating in Libya when Colonel Gadhafi “negotiates” the nationalisation of its operation, while Amy, now 15, claims a sovereignty of her own.
In the war-torn Iraqi desert of the near future, May, now a former MP, pleads with Amy, now an environmental activist, to escape as the oilfields burn as battle rages around them.
Finally, as the petroleum splutters to its end, May, now old and cared for by Amy, returns to where it began, cold, caught in the ruin of the life we have lived and resisting the dawn of a new age.
McElhinney is magnificent in this fertile, hybrid role, inhabiting its dramatic changes without losing its personality; she is determined, stern by necessity, vulnerable and needy, sometimes all at once.
As a young single mother in Teheran she juggles the overtures of her superior Mr Thomas (St John Cowcher) and the louche, treacherous British agent Officer Samuel (Will O’Mahony). Later, in the play’s outstanding scene she is Thatcherite as she spars with the Libyan envoy Mr Farouk (the incredible Tinashe Mangwana) over the rightful ownership of his country’s oil, the legacy of colonialism and reality of post-colonialism. 
The world changes, but May, in McElhinney’s hands, is eternal.
The cast, which also includes Violette Ayad, Grace Chow and the eminent actor and dramaturg Polly Low has been expertly assembled and give fine supporting performances.
If I have a reservation, it’s hardly more than a technicality. The parallel story of May and Amy, the protective mother and – versus – the headstrong girl is cogent and well-founded (Morgan impressively inhabits changes in Amy that are even more sweeping than those of May), but it doesn’t sit in the balance of the narrative as securely as the wider historic dimensions of the play do. Where Farouk and May’s battle of wit and will is mesmerising and expository, May and Amy’s seem repetitive and overcooked.   
But Mitchell’s management of the story, and the stage, is too meticulous and focused to let this disrupt the impetus of the work, and Atkinson’s design, with its shifting rectangles in sharp black frames gives the action a cinematic quality that is endlessly inventive and absorbing (Oil must surely one day be adapted as a long-form television series, though I doubt it could better the original).
There’s similar care and focus in Matthew Marshall’s lighting and Melanie Robinson’s sound design, notably a low, subterranean growl that could be an oil well about to blow or tanks advancing on a sleeping town.
The final and most important quality an epic story like Oil must have is pressing contemporary relevance. As places like the UK prepare for a miserable, perhaps fatal, winter, as embargoes cripple the world's economic structures and tanks rumble again across the old killing fields of the East European Plain and ships sail unhindered across the Northwest Passage, that is a task, a duty, it fulfills.The audience may not have been humming Midnight Oil’s Beds are Burning as it played them out of the theatre, but they won’t have easily got it out of their heads.          

Oil runs at The Heath Ledger Theatre until November 27

Theatre: Blue/Orange

By Joe Penhall

THEATRE 180

Directed by Stuart Halusz

Set and Costume designer Neil Sherriff

Composer and Sound designer Noah Ivulich

Lighting designer Garry Ferguson

Performed by Tinashe Mangwana, Jarryd Dobson and Andrew Lewis

Burt Hall
20 August – 3 September, 2001

Andrew Lewis and Tinashe Mangwana (pic: Stewart Thorpe)

What dates a play?

Not for the first time, I wonder whether the cataclysm of 2001 and the two decades since that are, undoubtedly, its direct aftermath, have become a prism through which we look at many things, including the theatre.

Blue/Orange, Joe Penhall’s Olivier Award-winning drama about systemic racism, mental illness, the individuals who treat it and the economy in which they operate is a case in point.

First staged in April 2000, it has many of the hallmarks of the topical, realist, character-driven theatre of that time. It’s loquacious, tendentious and combative. It’s three characters: the ambitious, passionate young registrar Bruce (Jarryd Dobson) and the vain, strategic specialist Robert (Andrew Lewis) parry and thrust while their patient, Christopher (Tinashe Mangwana) bounces around the walls of their dialectic.

Blue/Orange works around valid questions about unconscious cultural and racial bias, the logistical challenges facing health services like Britain’s NHS (the play is set in it’s mental health system), hierarchical structures and the personal responsibility of specialists dealing with the vulnerable and damaged, the minority person and the unentitled.

No-one can doubt the currency of these questions – a quick scan of the WA Coroner’s Court list this week provides a particularly tragic example of them.

But, for all that, is Blood/Orange dated? Are we too skittish now, do we take too much in with us to our seats, does our own uncertainty and anger override the uncertainty and anger of a play and its characters? Do we want to participate in a conversation any more, or do we just want our opinions reflected in what we see and hear.

Or are we so careful in our own thoughts and expressions to honestly examine to the things we have become careful about?

“Uppity nigger*”.

Two words (according to the Urban Dictionary, words used by racist old white Southerners to refer to any black person who looks them in the eye) that encapsulate the thesis of Blue/Orange, and its problem.

First used, cunningly, by Christopher to describe how the world, and the two doctors, view him, then weaponised by both Bruce and Robert, they are a fulcrum on which the power struggles of the play are balanced.

Each of the doctors is convinced in their worldview, each hitches their personal ambitions to it. But perhaps it’s only Christopher who sees his world as it is, and who clearly knows what is wrong with it, and him.

Christopher is the play’s hero, and it’s victim

Even when the play feels out of its time, there’s no doubting the quality of the production. Stuart Halusz manages the action on a claustrophobic stage in the round, defined as much by Noah Ivulich tense, often subliminal compositions and Garry Ferguson’s interrogatory lighting as the space itself.

Dobson and Lewis are excellently cast, unmasking the self-interest behind the younger man’s idealism and his senior’s pragmatism.

But it’s all about Mangwana’s Christopher. He’s a great ball of fire, torching the stage with physical and expressive humour, yet capable of great subtlety of mein and inflection.

As he showed in his fetching, idiosyncratic Valere in WAAPA’s Tartuffe earlier this year (Mangwana was released from his studies there for his role in Blue/Orange) he’s a compelling, singular performer who will be worth keeping a close eye on in future.

His performance is a highlight of a quality production of a play with plenty to say, even if the way we expect things to be said may have changed.

 

* I’m reminded that my daughter was castigated by her professor at the liberal arts college she attended in the US for quoting the word verbatim from Randy Newman’s Rednecks – a brilliant, excoriating attack on racism and racists from the 1970s – in her presentation. Perhaps she, and this production, needed to be more “careful”.