Theatre: Grounded (★★★★½)

Written by George Brant
Directed by Emily McLean
Sound designer and composer Brett Smith
Lighting designer Karen Cook
Performed by Alison van Reeken
Blue Room Theatre
Until October 1

 



“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Robert Oppenheimer (from the Bagavad Gita) 
 
When Oppenheimer, in the high New Mexico desert, pondered the destructive power of his atomic bomb, it was its enormity and existential threat that gave him pause.
No such qualms stay the hand of the wielders of military drones, those precise, invisible predators that increasingly are the weapon of choice of the world’s militaries.
It’s easy to see why. Bloodless (to their possessors) and politically expedient, they turn warfare into images on screens, and death into the ultimate gamer abstraction.
But there are people operating the drones, and, in George Brant’s hard, cold Grounded, we meet one. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that one confronts us. The Pilot (she has no name) was an F-16 fighter jock. Her world was The Blue, W.B. Yeats’s “lonely impulse of delight”.
When it is taken from her and she’s assigned to the “Chair Force”, sitting in a hut at an air force base in another high desert an hour out of Las Vegas, staring at screen images from 1.2 seconds ago on the other side of the world, her blue world turns to grey.
As she monitors her screen, and rains death on figures scuttling around in the desert, her moral compass and her sense of self become harder and harder to grasp.
Until another reality forces her to reach back for them.
Alison van Reeken is the very best of our actors, and she’s extraordinary here. Hair tied back tight, face taut and unmade, sinewy in her pilot’s jumpsuit, her performance (85 minutes, delivered at the gallop) is uncompromising, technically flawless and emotionally convincing.
Her pilot is frightening and frightened, normal and abnormal in equal measure.
The director, Emily McLean, doesn’t have all the technical bells and whistles at the Blue Room that the celebrated Julie Taymor had to play with in the Broadway production of Grounded, so she and her lighting designer Karen Cook focus us entirely on van Reeken, and it’s to powerful, chilling effect.
The only distractions from Grounded’s tension are the songs on The Pilot’s car stereo.
Maybe one day she will crank up her AC/DC, her Guns ‘N’ Roses and Springsteen real loud, and drive. Away, up past Las Vegas, up past Los Alamos, and off into The Blue.
Tickets to Grounded will be hard to get. Don’t miss it.

An edited version of this review appeared in The West Australian 16.9.16.

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 Motherfucker with the Hat

Black Swan State Theatre Company

for Fringe World

Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis

Directed by Adam Mitchell

Designed by Bryan Woltjen

Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by James Luscombe

Featuring Rhoda Lopez, Austin Castiglione, Kenneth Ransome, Fayssal Bazzi and Alison van Reeken

The Studio, State Theatre Centre

Until February 3

It’s a delicious irony that Black Swan’s first productions for 2013 are the staple crowd-puller, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Stephen Adly Guirgis’s incendiary The Motherfucker with the Hat.

They seem as far apart as two plays can get, yet, at their heart, they share the joy of language beautifully crafted and a fascination with human duplicity and its unraveling.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Boy Gets Girl

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Written by Rebecca Gilman

Directed by Adam Mitchell

Designed by Fiona Bruce

Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by Ben Collins

Featuring James Hagan, Ben O’Toole, Myles Pollard, Whitney Richards, Helen Searle, Steve Turner and Alison van Reeken

 Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

Until September 30

Alison van Reeken and Myles Pollard

 The opening tableaux of the American playwright Rebecca Gilman’s gripping, malevolent Boy Gets Girl is a striking display of the strengths of director Adam Mitchell’s production.

We find Theresa Bedell (Alison van Reeken), a New York City magazine feature writer, in a set (superbly designed by Fiona Bruce) that is an abstract exercise in perspective, diminishing up a raked stage and down lines of massive re-enforced concrete sections towards a vanishing point obscured in shadows. There’s music, and traffic, but somewhere, close by, Theresa thinks she hears a noise, senses a presence; and we do too. She walks warily upstage towards the darkness, peering into it for the intruder. The stage fades to black. Welcome to her nightmare.

Theatre: When Dad Married Fury

by David Williamson

Directed and designed by John Senczuk

Featuring Jay Walsh, Alinta Carroll, Corinne Davies, Richard Mellick, Alison van Reeken, Lauren Lloyd Williams, Casey Edwards and Edgar Metcalfe

The Metcalfe Playhouse

Until 21 August

David Williamson has had a lucky break.

Love him or loathe him – and there are plenty in each camp – it’s Williamson’s ability to generate the pleasurable sensation of recognition for his audience that has kept him at the forefront of Australia’s playwrights for 40 years.

Alinta Carroll and Edgar Metcalfe

In his best work, that recognition comes from the universality, in particular the universal Australian-ness, of his characters; even in his lesser plays – and When Dad Married Fury is decidedly one of those – he maintains his touch for topicality.

For that, though, a little luck goes a long way: if you could choose a week to premiere a play about a wilful old man, his feisty, much younger, second wife, his dubious offspring and a loose email that brings them all undone, surely this would be it.

Theatre: A Midsummer Night's Dream

William Shakespeare

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Directed by Kate Cherry

Set design by Christina Smith

Costume design by Alicia Clements

Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by Ash Gibson Greig

Featuring James Beck, Elizabeth Blackmore, Benj D’Addario, Adriane Daff, Arielle Gray, Stuart Halusz, Brendan Hanson, Luke Hewitt, Natalie Holmwood, Michael Loney, Sam Longley, Kelton Pell, Myles Pollard, Kenneth Ransom, Scott Sheridan, Alison van Reeken and Shubhadra Young  

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

May 11 ­– 22, 2011

There’s no mystery to the enduring popularity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or its allure for directors and actors. The earliest of Shakespeare’s very greatest plays, its poetry – the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations selects 63 separate passages from it – and sheer sexiness, its bravura set pieces and memorable characters are an irresistible mix.

Alison van Reeken and Luke Hewitt 

Director Kate Cherry wisely lets the text, rather than any real or imagined sub-text, do the talking, and by and large it works for her.

Luke Hewitt’s turn as the immortal Bottom is a great success. Hewitt is a big, funny man, which makes Bottom the figure of fun meat and drink for him, but he’s got the sensitivity to deliver the character’s humanity and essential goodness. We can laugh at Bottom, but we need to respect him as well, and Hewitt makes us do both.

Alison van Reeken’s Titania is armed and dangerous, with weapons both human and supernatural at her disposal, even when lost in love or lust. She’s a knockout.

Theatre: The Deep Blue Sea

By Terence Rattigan

Onward Production

Directed by Michael McCall

Featuring Alison Van Reeken, Tom O’Sullivan, Michael Loney, Greg McNeill, Will O’Mahony, James Helm, Julia Moody and Amanda Woodhams

Playhouse Theatre

November 19 - 28, 2010

Not waving, drowning
The early 50s in England have left us a pervading memory of grimness; the certainty and glamour of its old social order shattered by 40 years of violence, and Carnaby Street and the Beatles still an age away.

In the theatre of this grey, transitional world, an established group of playwrights and an emerging cadre of vivid young actors both sought to keep and find their audience.

It would be a few years yet before the latter found the writers they were looking for; it would be decades before the artistic reputations (and box office bankability) of the former recovered from the shock of the new world that was coming.

Foremost among these established writers was the prolific, systematic Terence Rattigan, while among the new breed of actor was the powerhouse Welshman Richard Burton. It’s a happy coincidence that these two very different figures are the genesis of this fine production of Rattigan’s 1952 drama The Deep Blue Sea by Sally Burton’s Onward Production company.

The play opens where many end: worried by the odour of gas coming from a room in a frayed old boarding house, the landlady, Mrs Elton (Julia Moody), and a tenant, Philip Welch (Will O’Mahony), burst in to find Hester Page (Alison van Reeken) unconscious in front of the heater.

An empty pill bottle lies on the table. A note sits on the mantelpiece. Her husband, Freddie (Tom O’Sullivan), is away, golfing with his RAF pal Jackie (James Helm).

Another tenant, Dr Miller, is summoned, and he revives Hester. Welch’s young wife Ann (Amanda Woodhams) arrives, and they try to work out whom to call.

Then Mrs Elton drops her bombshell: they should contact her real husband, the eminent magistrate Sir William Collyer (Michael Loney). Sir William arrives, Freddie returns, and Hester’s protestation that what had occurred was just an accident falls apart when he finds the note.

It’s a good, standard set-up to the story, and it takes maybe half an hour of not especially gripping action to get there.

Alison van Reekin 

And then the play takes off, courtesy of Michael McCall’s sure-footed direction and van Reekin’s astounding performance. Her Hester burns through the remaining acts of her downfall and redemption, and she nails both the fragile insouciance masking her rising hysteria, and the sheer, physical passion that has thrown down the life she led, and her life itself. There’s a moment when Freddie leaves her embrace for the last time and she stands perfectly still, clutching the ghost of him, that is acting of transfixing quality. 

She’s supported admirably by Michael Loney, whose stock-in-trade impishness adds real charm to the deserted husband, and Greg McNeill, who handles the tricky character of the shady but acute Dr Miller with aplomb.

Even more difficult is the role of Freddie, who has to be attractive enough to besot an accomplished, mature woman and creepy enough not to deserve her. O’Sullivan is more than handsome enough to deliver the first and makes a good fist of the second. The rest of the cast – and it’s great to see eight actors in a local, professional production – have good moments that they deliver well. The show is accurately designed (Lawrie Cullen Tait) and lit (Andrew Portwine), and Hester is beautifully dressed by Steve Nolan. Stage managers don’t often make it to reviews, but this show is a minefield of potentially deadly entrances, exits and props, and Sue Fenty disarms them all with her customary skill.

Sally Burton has already earned our thanks for giving Perth a well-resourced independent production house, and The Deep Blue Sea will win her more. I wonder if she has in mind producing more shows related in some way to her husband’s career and the theatre (and cinema) in which he thrived? If this is the case, it will be a fascinating and unique development of more than just local interest.

An edited version of this review appeared in The West Australian of 22.11.10 read here