Theatre: The Hypotheticals

Created and performed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler and Sarah Reuben
The Last Great Hunt
Director Adam Mitchell
Choreographer Laura Boynes
Composer and sound designer Louis Frere-Harvey
Visual designer Matthew McVeigh
Lighting designer Peter Young
STC Studio
July 27 – August 5

In 2022, the population of Japan fell by 800,000, a demographic implosion four times as devastating as the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If this is a glimpse of the future, perhaps our family photos are destined to have the kids photo-shopped out, our family holidays spent in adult-only resorts.
Perhaps our destiny is to be alone, with our machines.      
Perhaps all humanity deserves the final Darwin Award; perhaps the species most at existential risk from our carelessness and greed is our own.
In times like these, and with a zeitgeist like this, how is anyone going to even contemplate having a child?

These questions are the playground of Jeffrey Jay Fowler and Sarah Reuben’s snappy, crackling The Hypotheticals, but the game they play is at once not as deep as it might have been, but even deeper than you might expect.

Which are both good things, but hardly surprising. Over the past decade Fowler, it’s fair to say, has been Perth theatre’s most exposed artist as writer, director, performer and core artist with its leading company The Last Great Hunt.

We know him, and the games he plays, well.

He’s also a great collaborator, notably with fellow Hunter Chris Isaacs (Fag/Stag, Bali) and now with the Darwin-based Reuben, with whom he shares a long friendship and theatrical vision (their first collaboration, I’ll Tell You in Person, was a 2021 Perth Festival hit).

Both these partnerships have been based on a dialogue between alternative realities that requires great skill in both writing and performance to succeed convincingly.

In The Hypotheticals, what if Fowler was himself, a partnered gay man and Reuben was herself, a straight single woman, both in their mid/late thirties? What if all kinds of clocks were ticking, and, to the beat of that rhythm, what if she asked him if, maybe, they could have a kid together?

And if they did, what would happen then? To him? To her? To them? To “it”?

Sarah and Jeffrey examine themselves and each other, running the gamut of hope and fear, of what they expect of themselves, each other and others.

It’s very often riotously funny (their attempts at insemination by syringe, a catastrophic Passover with Sarah’s family), sometimes sad and perplexing.

They are open with each other, they talk things through, but each is on a journey neither can explain because they don’t yet know where it leads to themselves.

All of which leads to an unexpected and surprising denouement – a whatif as sly and astute as the best whodunnit.

Fowler’s previous collaborations have had the simplest imaginable staging and performance – with Isaacs just the two actors talking, perched on stools; with Reuben only their voices through headphones, but The Hypotheticals is audaciously staged, with movement and dances accentuating the characters’ internal monologues and dialogue.

Neither Reuben or Fowler are dancers, but the precision of their unversed physical work is extraordinarily impressive. The director Adam Mitchell and his choreographer Laura Boynes have schooled their performers in the minutest detail, and the result is consistent in its clarity of purpose and often thrilling in its execution.

Louis Frere-Harvey’s soundscape and Peter Young’s lighting of Matthew McVeigh’s stark cuboid set (visual design is a more apt description) are as much dancerly as theatrical, and the expressiveness of both performers owes as much to the dance as the drama.

Fairly or unfairly I’ve sometimes taken issue with Fowler’s ability to find and take the straightest path from cup to lip in his work (an impressive skill that should be avoided at all cost).

In The Hypotheticals, though, Reuben and Fowler discover and explore all kinds of slips, surprising byways and hidden places, and the result is up with his best work.

And that’s about as good as it gets.

 

Don’t delay. The short season of The Hypotheticals ends August 5.

Theatre: The Snow

By Finegan Kruckemeyer

Barking Gecko Theatre Company

Directed by Adam Mitchell

Designed by Zoe Atkinson, Lucy Birkinshaw and Cathie Travers

Performed by Grace Chow, Charlotte Otton, Andrea Gibbs, Isaac Diamond and Cathie Travers

STC Studio Until July 15

Charlotte Otton and Grace Chow

I made the fatal error of going to the opening night of Barking Gecko’s latest foray into the fertile imagination of the prolific Tasmanian playwright for (mainly) kids, Finegan Kruckemeyer, without my infallible wriggle-meter.

It’s all very well for all-grown-up audiences to enjoy and appreciate theatre for the young because so much of it – and particularly Kruckemeyer’s – keeps a weather eye on what tickles the adults the kids are taking care of as well.

But the missing wriggle-meter is the real test. Are the kids engaged, entranced and a little bit naughty? Are they shifting in their seats, have they got an endless stream of questions for mum or granddad? Are they bored? Has the play lost them, or are they happily lost in it?

The Snow has got plenty going for it. Kruckemeyer’ s allegory of how distrust, ignorance and rusted-on enmity is like snow that won’t melt is neatly imagined and just as neatly staged by director Adam Mitchell and his feisty and talented performers Grace Chow, Charlotte Otton, Andrea Gibbs and Isaac Diamond, accompanied by the outstanding accordionist Cathie Travers.

It staging is inventive, with multiple chuckleworthy characters drawn by Gibbs and Diamond, a crafty set-in-a-roadcase design by Zoe Atkinson and lashings of clever and entertaining puppeteering and size-shifting magic.

In its “simple story” (Mitchell’s own words), the young, little Thea (the kinetic Chow), the silent, mysterious and much larger Olive (the much loftier Otton) and a bunch of local heroes are catapulted away from the permanently snowbound village of Kishka (pop. 200) and over their despised rival, snowbound too, village of Gretaville (pop. also 200) to find a solution to their white, cold, obstinate problem.

After many adventures, overcoming many obstacles and uncovering many surprises, our mismatched champions bring all to rights, heal many old wounds and cause many piles of snow to melt. Because as any kid’ll tell you, 200 minus 200 comes to nought, while 200 plus 200 is, well, heaps.

The problem is all in the “many”; too much of a good thing is just that, and I suspect there might have been a fair bit of fidgeting and losing the plot going on in a young audience as Thea and Olive’s odyssey plays out.

There are just too many episodes in The Snow, too many pieces to fit into the jigsaw to finish the picture (for example, there’s a drear and dingy district called The Darkness that the characters seem unable to avoid and keep diving into without much rhyme or reason).

None of which detracts from the craft of the production, the energy of its performances or the worthwhile messages The Snow delivers. And none of it makes Finegan Kruckemeyer less than a master of stage writing for all us kids. It’s just something a little less than the sum of too many parts.

And I’m sure that’s what the wriggle-meter would have said.     

 

 

Theatre: Sisterhood of the Travelling Lightly

By Courtney McManus and Hannah Quaden
Crash Theatre
Directed by Ella Cooke and Hannah Quaden
Designed by Megan Mak
Performed by Stella Banfield, Courtney McManus, Clea Purkis and Shannon Rogers
Blue Room Theatre
May 16 – June 3

The enigmatically titled Sisterhood of the Travelling Lightly from Crash Theatre is very much a traditional Blue Room show, and that, for me at least, is a very good thing.

Perth’s hub of independent theatre is at its best with stories by and of young people in recognizable situations and settings, dealing, or sometimes, not with their emerging world and themselves.

Sisterhood tells the stories of four friends on the eve of graduating from Uni; Bree (Stella Banfield), Nic (Courtney McManus), Georgia (Clea Purkis) and Holly (Shannon Rogers) gather at Bree’s place to celebrate and reminisce about their intertwined lives since they stumbled across each other by sheer school assembly alphabetical order (they’re all ‘Ps’) through the highs and lows of adolescence and beyond.

The cast work well together, and their characters are nicely contrasting: Holly is a bombshell, but wounded by her parent’s split when she was in just Year 7; Georgia is intense and had battled bulimia through high school; Nik is loud and careless, harbouring an infatuation that is going nowhere; and Bree is all heart and soul, but struggles with the realities of work and the getting of it.

All of which makes a strong foundation that promises impressive and enjoyable theatre.

Unfortunately it’s too far between cup and lip for Sisterhood. The show’s clunky structure moves back and then forward in a series of scenes focusing on each character in turn, but the transitions lack fluidity.

In part this is due to arduous and largely unnecessary scene changes during which the cast cavort around the stage in what seems to be an attempt to distract us from the stage business around them.

Even more unnecessary, and, frankly, plain silly, is the device employed to move the characters through time, a mysterious joint a hit on which somehow instigates the relocation in space and time.

Inevitability, with its interruptions and artificiality the narrative ran out of steam, and the final story of Bree and her job-hunting seemed more like an attempt to shoehorn a misfortune on her in the absence of anything more meaningful.

All these are roadblocks to appreciation of Sisterhood’s considerable insight into the lives and relationships of young women, of friendships, how they can be frayed and repaired. 

It could be well worth Crash Theatre taking the time and effort to set Sisterhood’s qualities free from the encumbrances that currently constrain it.   

 

 

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)