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…