Theatre: My Shout

Undercurrent Theatre Company

Devised and performed by Claire Appleby, Scarlet Davis, Shaun Johnston, Christopher Moro and David Stewart

Directed by Samuel Gordon Bruce
Blue Room Theatre until Sept 17, 2021

My Shout is a snappy, even-handed trip through the jungle of social and antisocial drinking. It makes no excuses for its excesses, and doesn’t dismiss its pleasures.

That makes it both frank and restrained – a high-wire act that’s not easy to achieve in dealing with something so dear to (most of) our hearts but so damaging to it and many of our other organs.

It’s also an exciting achievement in ensemble performance, combining the skills of narrative, physical, musical and circus theatre.

That’s not surprising, as the performers are all graduates of WAAPA’s excellent Theatre Making course, and they put their wide-ranging talents and training to the best possible use here.

The play’s structure is straightforward enough; four friends, Clare (Appleby). Scarlett (Davis), Sean (Johnston) and Kris (Moro) are out for a Saturday night booze-up.

During their customary weekend ceremony, from footy-watching first beers to drinking games at midnight and dueling shots at dawn, they run the gamut from euphoria to morose emptiness, from playfulness to sombre introversion.

Scarlett, sober after three months off the grog, a little detached and a whole lot more observant, acts as a kind of travel guide for their journey, Kris plays along, Sean is in boots and all and self-destructive, and Clare – well she’s something else.

Two routines Appleby features in, one a supercharged choreography that ends with some table-top skollery, another a frenetic karaoke of The Champs’ Tequila, are memorably hilarious (don’t try either at home kids).

They are among many ensemble sequences that punctuate the show, giving it a structure very like a musical; for this the work of the fifth cast member, the musician David Stewart, whose electric guitar and tech-driven sound bed is crucial and outstanding.

Director Samuel Gordon Bruce has a fine eye for the placement of action in the small Blue Room space, and the effects he and the ensemble create often seem much bigger than the forces at their disposal.

My Shout is a cracking show; it’s a spritzy entertainment spiked with a lot worth saying. You should try a glass of it.

Photo: Kaifu Studios

Theatre: Unbound

Devised and performed by Bridget Le May, Gala Shevtsov, Hannah Evelyn, Hock Edwards, Kynan Hughes and Ryan Marano

Designed by Bridget Le May
Sound design by Bec Price
Blue Room Theatre until Sept 10, 2021

 

There’s a easy trap for critics, when confronted with a work like Unbound, to write a thesis rather than a review, especially when present day political and intellectual issues and stances collude or collide with works of art from other times (here’s a recent example: www.seesawmag.com.au/2021/07/is-it-time-to-retire-west-side-story).

It’s not my practice to buy into these arguments, unless the work demands it by how it’s been adapted.

I will, though, say my piece about William Shakespeare and his female characters, whose words, if not their personages, are at the heart of Unbound.

The late Harold Bloom, in his magnum opus Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, argues that the playwright was more interested in character than action, and in that pursuit, created many of the most memorable women in all literature. Rosalind, Cleopatra, Juliet, Portia, Lady Macbeth – these are only some notable examples – are vivid, powerful figures capable of leading their circumstances, and often their play’s male characters, by the force of their personality.

I’m not sure any other writer – certainly any other male writer – has peopled their work with so many, so compelling and complete, women.

So, with that said, I approached Unbound not as a critique of Shakespeare but as a piece using his work and words to create a perspective on feminism and the patriarchy.

Their technique, the cut-up method, was codified by the American writer William S Burroughs and famously adopted by David Bowie. It simply involves cutting phrases, sentences and passages from existing work and pasting them either at random or with judicious editing, to create a new, even if familiar, work.

The devisors of Unbound, Bridget Le May, Gala Shevtsov, Hannah Evelyn, Hock Edwards, Kynan Hughes and Ryan Marano, have plenty to work with – the complete works of Shakespeare (they say only one play, King John, is missing from the free-for-all).

The first act, The Kingdom, tells the story of three royal sisters struggling for what is rightfully theirs and mere survival, against the machinations and violence of the men around them.

For convenience they take the names of famous Shakespearean characters, Ophelia (Evelyn), Hamlet (Edwards), Emilia (Shevtsov), Iago (Marano) and Volumnia (Le May), but their words and actions are drawn from across the plays.

It’s a striking dramatic effect, well supported by some stylish costuming (by Hughes) and set design (by Le May), but it struggles with tempo and clarity.

Overburdened with high passion and intensity, the dialogue’s temperature is feverish, and the narrative melts in its heat.

The second Act, The Forest, is a much shorter, slighter creation, but in some ways more successful. In large part a dance that weaves through torrents of falling paper petals (the device used to create the effect was quite something), it was pretty, nicely devised and, after the sound and fury of the first act, it was something of a relief that it signified nothing.

      

 

 

 

      

 

 

Theatre: Borderline

Written and performed by Evelyn Snook

Music by B Gosper

Directed by Kylie Bywaters

Design and AV by Clare Testoni

Lighting designer Jasmine Lifford

Blue Room until July 31, 2021

 

When an artist like Evelyn Snook stands alone on a stage and tells us the whys and wherefores of their life, criticism is largely an arid exercise, or at least one that operates on the margins of the drama.

A person’s life is, after all, their own, and it’s not for us to pass judgment on it, or even its worth as performance.

That said, Snook is an engaging and accurate performer who is able to convincingly and movingly reconstruct their battle with Borderline Personality Disorder, the insidious and potentially dangerous condition that affects perhaps one in fifty people, particularly teenage and young adult women.

Its symptoms – among them fear of abandonment, rapid changes in self-image and self-identity, wild mood swings, risky behavior and self-harm – make life and relationships extremely challenging. 

Tragically, the risk of suicide is ever-present (studies suggest up to 10% of people suffering from BSD take their own life).

It’s admirable that Snook can take us through the toughest battles they have fought with candour, positivity and humour. The place they have reached now is clearly precious and liberating to them, and we can do nothing but share their joy.

The other pleasure of Borderline is the quality of the production the director Kylie Bywater and producer Kailyn Crabbe have built around Snook. The involvement of the award-winning shadow puppeteer and theatre maker Clare Testoni is crucial to the productions success. The show looks lovely, and the subtle, unobtrusive AV elements add immeasurably to it.

The revelation of Borderline is its musician, B Gosper. They sit quietly in a corner, with just a small smile and a guitar, and the songs they sing that punctuate the performance are sweet, gentle and deeply moving.

I would gladly listen to to the songs alone; as part of this extremely moving and uplifting show, they are a small miracle. As is Borderline.

Theatre: York

by Chris Isaacs and Ian Michael

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Directed by Clare Watson and Ian Wilkes

Designed by Zoe Atkinson

Composer and sound designer Dr Clint Bracknell

Lighting designer Lucy Birkenshaw

Performed by Shakira Clanton, Isaac Diamond, Ben Mortley, Benjamin and Jacob Narkle (alternating), Sophie Quin, Maitland Schnaars, Alison van Reeken and Elise Wilson

Heath Ledger Theatre until August 1, 2021

 

Maitland Schnaars

Even without its qualities (there are many), Chris Isaac and Ian Michael’s York is among the most significant works to come to the State Theatre Centre stage over its first decade. 

It’s the product of a web of training and experience, inspiration and experience, knowledge and sheer talent from sources as wide as WAAPA, the Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company and the Blue Room, The Last Great Hunt and others of our independent companies, the WA Youth Theatre Company and Black Swan – both at its genesis and in its current status as the State Theatre Company.

What Michael and Isaacs have done is take a location (the barely-disguised old York hospital and its site) and peeled back its history from the present to the early days of European settlement.

That, of course, is only a wafer-thin slice of this place; before then, stretching back tens of thousands of years, it was the country of the Ballardong Noongar people, a fertile, fecund land of bush and river flats, providing everything its inhabitants needed to live full, spiritually-charged and welcoming lives.

It underpins the hard story Isaacs and Michael tell – it’s that lost life that is the unquiet ghost that drifts through the trees like smoke from spectral campfires and rattles the windows of the old hospital with grievous memories.

The other unspoken but crystal-clear message of York is that, while the near-destruction of the lives and culture of this continent’s First Peoples is the stark and terrible result of often brutal and inhumane European colonization, no-one has been left undamaged by it. The colonial European world that was built here carries a persistent, angry flaw at its heart, an original sin that even 250 years hasn’t erased, making victims of its own as well as the “other”.

In York, we meet those victims, a slaughtered settler family and the Ballardong men falsely accused of their murder, a desperate family hoping to save the life of their boy and the stern matron who tries to help them, a young man driven mad by Europe’s wars and a committed Aboriginal lawyer driven crazy by an indifferent legal system stacked against her clients in the present day.

Before we meet them, though, we’re taken on a wild, zany ride through the old building, so out of character with both our expectations and what is to follow that it defies conventional theatrical logic.

It’s a classic horror-com, complete with things that go bang in the night, shrieking apparitions, Rooms That Must Not Be Entered, a ditzy neighbor who’ll only come to the house armed with a cricket bat, and then only during daylight hours.

In the middle of this mayhem comes a little scout troupe (Isaac Diamond, Ben Mortley, Jacob Narkle, Sophie Quinn and Elise Wilson) and their two Akelas (Jo Morris and Shakira Clanton) on a Foundation Day long weekend camp in 1985.

Young Michael (Mortley) relates a lurid story of a cannibal ghost told him by the old building’s janitor (Maitland Schnaars); a young Indigenous boy, Lewis (Narkle), conjurs up ghoulish monsters from his tradition. Blood streams from bannisters, ghostly hands encircle young necks –  it’s the whole shebang.

The whole affair is gleefully orchestrated by its directors Clare Watson and Ian Wilkes, the designer Zoe Atkinson (that set of hers is ALIVE!) and lighting and sound designers Lucy Birkenshaw and Clint Bracknell.

(I should say the fun and games were greatly enlivened by a hyperactive first night audience who found the whole thing genuinely hilarious and terrifying. Bless them – I wish every opening night mob were half as entertaining!).

There are intimations of the real-life horrors to come in the first act, although they might have been more direct and extended in the interests of the balance of the enterprise.

The mood of the first act is swept away after interval by the abject figure of a young man (Diamond), recently returned from the horrors of the WWI trenches, rocking in a chair, his mind in torment, his waking nightmares too hard for the matron, Roslyn Bell (Alison van Reeken) to relieve.

Another nightmare comes to the hospital – a young boy gravely ill with influenza (Narkle) from one of Chief Protector of Aborigines Neville’s Native Reserves, and his distraught parents (Clanton and Schnaars).

Duty and humanity overcome the matron’s fear and misgivings, and she treats the young boy despite the regulations forbidding it; her transgression is discovered, the price she pays is swift and brutal.

Finally, in 1839, a half-century before the hospital was built, a little family, Elijah and Sarah Cook and their infant daughter settled the same land. Sarah struck up friendships with the local Ballardong people, giving them water from the well, greeting their families as they passed through.

When the Cook’s homestead was razed to the ground, the bodies of Sarah and her child in the ruins, Inspector of Native Police Drummond fixed, by mere rumour and supposition (and despite any evidence to the contrary), on the guilt of two Noongar men, Doodjeep and Barrabong, who were hunted down, found guilty in a show trial in 1840 and hung in chains at the site of the crime as a “severe example” to the local Indigenous population.

This terrible story is told by the cast as a chorus front of stage, before York ends as it begins, with a married couple (Clanton and van Reeken) settling into the old building they plan to make their home.

And its past is theirs, to haunt them too.

There’s no denying the power of these stories, each based on fact, even if the structure of the play, and the changing moods and performance styles used to tell them can sit uncomfortably at times.

The younger actors, Jacob Narkle (he alternates with his brother Benjamin), Quinn, Wilson (whose intensity is weapons grade) and Isaacs are assured and convincing, and Mortley and Clanton bring poise and experience to their various roles. It’s a delight to see van Reeken and Morris, two of our very finest actors, working together in extended scenes.

Above all, York is a major career achievement for Maitland Schnaars. His presence, and his great, sombre, soul, fills the theatre when he conjures up the wronged ghosts of generations, while his comic touch in a couple of smaller roles is exquisite.

Schnaars has become an exceptional actor, and it’s a privilege to see him in a work that clearly means a great deal to him

As it should to us.     

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

      

 

 

Theatre: Fire

by Ebony McGuire

Kalyakoorl Collective

Directed by Sian Murphy

Performed by Ebony McGuire, Nadia Martich and Christopher Moro

The Blue Room

July 3 - 10, 2021

 

One of the greatest strengths of the Blue Room Theatre and its circle of independent producers and artists has been telling the stories of young adults and their contemporary, West Australian, domestic lives.

Those stories have a realism and relevance that make them both important and compelling.

They also offer great opportunities for young actors, directors and creatives to deal with subject matters they know and understand, resulting in many of the best performances we’ve seen on the Perth stage.

We are also fortunate that more and more work about life and issues by First Peoples artists is being presented on our stages. These stories, too, are real, relevant, important, compelling – and strong.

(Read the complete review in Seesaw magazine link here)

Cabaret: Koorlangka Re-imagined

Gina Williams and Guy Ghouse

Perth International Cabaret Festival

His Majesty’s Theatre, 19 June

Nothing about human beings is more fascinating and revealing than language. Our evolution, the way we think and act, the way we view the world and understand ourselves, is told in our words.

A dozen millenia ago, there were many thousands of independent human worlds scattered around the globe, each only dimly aware, if at all, of others apart from their immediate neighbours. Each with its own language.
Four thousand years ago, as hunter gathering gave way to agriculture (the “Greatest Fraud” according to the historian Yuval Noah Harari) and the first territorial empires arose, those  worlds had dwindled to a few thousand at most, and, by six centuries ago, most of the people on earth, ninety per cent or so, had assimilated into the vast world of Afro-Asia, with its imperial and nation states, interconnectedness and relatively few languages.

Only in Meso and Andean America, Oceania and Australia were smaller worlds and their languages found. Over the next three centuries they, too, were swallowed by the giant world order.

What has this little history lecture got to do with the opening night of the inaugural Perth International Cabaret Festival? If you were at His Majesty’s Theatre for the wonderful Koorlangka Reimagined by Gina Williams and Guy Ghouse, I think you might know the answer.

Why has the first language of the land of the Noongar Whadjuk people survived, and why does it now enjoy a nascent renaissance in the face of oppression and neglect, the vast tide of the modern world that overwhelmed the small, ancient worlds in its path?

It’s partly because it had thrived for so long, become so deeply imbedded in country, that its deep roots could withstand, if barely, the fires of colonialism and the floods of world culture.

It’s partly because of the dedication and determination of people who kept it alive in their families and through their music and words.

But it seems to me it’s also because, notable among the world’s languages, it is a beautiful tongue, gentle and expressive, musical and full of humour and wisdom. There is a compelling, aesthetic reason for its existence quite distinct from its importance as the language of a continuing people.

I think that’s why the Welcome to Countries before many events have evolved from essentially an acknowledgement of our Indigenous communities and their custodianship of the country they hold to much-anticipated performances in their own right, given with increasing complexity and confidence (Walter McGuire’s witty and wise welcome before Koorlangka was a perfect example).

And it’s a huge part of the force of Koorlangka, Williams and Ghouse’s song cycle of family and nature.
Many, like the title song, Ngoonyoong Nindjan (Darling Child) and Djinda Djinda (Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star) are lullabies, others celebrate the natural world surrounding them, - Bindi Bindi (the butterfly) and Gitty Gitty (the willy-wagtail).

Songs in Noongar language transposed into English, and vice-versa (Moon River) show that Williams is a transcendent artist in any language, and her friend and collaborator Guy Ghouse’s generous, serene presence and fingerstyle acoustic guitar playing (often reminiscent of James Taylor, with the thumb taking the place of a pianists left hand) is a show in itself. The supporting ensemble, Russell Holmes on piano and the Dolce Ensemble’s strings add further depth and beauty to the songs, and also the cross-cultural context that enhances the universality of Williams and Ghouse’s artistry.

There’s much more to be said about Koorlangka, and my Seesaw Magazine colleague Bourby Webster does it perfectly (read her review of a 2020 performance here).

Koorlangka is a lovely, warm, even inspiring, experience – I urge you to listen to its songs (easily found on-line, and there is a cd available) and see it live when next it comes to country near you.     

Circus Cabaret: Railed

Head First Acrobats

The Rechabite until June 20

 

When Marcus Canning, of Fringe World fame, brought the old Rechabite Hall on William Street back to life at the beginning of 2020 there were things neither he, nor we, knew were about to happen.

He didn’t know that the venue would be all but closed through the guts of the following year, and certainly unable to put an entertainment programme together in 2020.

What we didn’t know was what it would be like.

pic: Katarina Witt

We’ve got a better (though not complete) idea now with the release of the Rechabite’s season for June and July, Chasing Rainbows.

It’s a mix of circus cabaret, comedy and live music in the main hall and downstairs club, dovetailing with the eatery and three bars over the venue’s four stories.

Unsurprisingly, the spirit of fringe abounds throughout, even if Chasing Rainbows is not exactly fringe at its most eclectic and challenging; but any single venue you could walk into at 5pm and pour yourself out of (responsibly of course) at midnight, having been generously fed, watered and entertained along the journey is worth having. You should try it soon.

Nothing better demonstrates the idea of Chasing Rainbows than its star attraction, the return of Head First Acrobats and their 2019 Fringe World smash, Railed.

It’s easy to see why the show pulls a crowd, and the crowd it pulls. It’s a heady mix of hen’s night tease and cleverly constructed acrobatics heavy on visual appeal if not, necessarily, high on degree of difficulty.

There’s absolutely nothing new in the routines, a straight- forward mix of strength acts, balancing, juggling and aerial work, mixed in with some neatly devised slapstick humour and much nodding and winking. If you’ve seen a bit of circus cabaret, you’ve seen it all.

But, hey, that’s not a bad thing. This is a night out show, and there was plenty of whoopin’ and hollerin’ in the audience as the trapeze artist Thomas Gorman, the juggler Louis Biggs, the acrobat Louis Biggs and strong man and balance artist Callan Harris plied their trade.

Harris is quite a specimen, and clearly the crowd favourite if the enthusiasm of the delightful and delighted posse of hens-nighters next to me were any gauge (I heard Chris Helmsey’s name bandied about sotto voce between the girls as he strutted his stuff).

While his big finale (pictured) owes more to precise carpentry than extraordinary athleticism and derring-do, it’s guaranteed to raise the roof.

Which it did – and which is all that needs to be said about Railed.