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: City of Gold

by Meyne Wyatt

Black Swan State Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company

Director Shari Sebbens
Composer and Sound Director Rachael Dease
Set and Costume Designer Tyler Hill

Lighting Designer Verity Hampson

Performed by Meyne Wyatt, Simone Detourbet, Mathew Cooper, Ian Michael, Trevor Ryan, Myles Pollard and St John Cowcher

Heath Ledger Theatre

March 17 – 27, 2022, 2022

Meyne Wyatt (pic: Daniel J Grant)

Warnings: City of Gold contains deeply offensive and racist language that this review draws your attention to but will not repeat. Indigenous readers are advised that this review contains the names of people who have died.

 

Art is a ripple on the surface of deep waters of oppression and injustice that radiates out from a particular tragedy and makes us aware of others that lie beneath the surface.

The most striking example in Western Australia is the body of work arising from the 1984 death in custody of John Pat in Roebourne, most notably the extraordinary Hipbone Sticking Out. The 1834 massacre of Noongar men, women and children by Governor James Stirling, dramatised in Bindjareb Pinjarra, reminds us of the genocidal treatment of the state’s First People.

In 2016, the prominent Wongutha-Yamatji stage and screen actor, Meyne Wyatt (Redfern Now, Neighbours, Mystery Road, The Sapphires), was mourning his father’s death from cancer when the killing of a young relative, Elijah Doughty, and the subsequent acquittal of the man responsible for his death compelled him to speak out.

In City of Gold, an actor, Breythe Black (Wyatt), storms off the set of a risible Australia Day lamb commercial, partly in frustration at his cardboard-cut-out part in its “Change the Date” script, and because his dad had died at home in Kalgoorlie. Back in Kal, Breythe shares his grief with his brother Matao (Mathew Cooper), sister Carina (Simone Detourbet) and deaf, vulnerable cousin, Cliffhanger (Ian Michael).

And there’s the dark undertow of the old mining town, its overt and covert racism, the insults and intimidation, the constant threat of violence and the possibility of tragedy lurking with every interaction between Indigenous people and the police.        

The result is an outpouring of grief, rage and frustration, both personalising and generalising the outrage Wyatt feels and sees. The story of Wyatt’s family’s life inform the play, but its message extends to the experience of all Indigenous people in this country.

The narrative of City of Gold is very often a vehicle for Wyatt’s polemic, for which purpose the action frequently stops dead in its tracks.

One of those dramatic roadblocks does provide the play’s most memorable scene: the celebrated, impassioned monologue – sometimes beat poetry, sometimes rap ­– about an individual’s place in a world that demands the conformity and “niceness” against which Breythe revolts.

Less effective is an extended dialogue between Breythe and his brother, a litany of grievances and accusations that, while legitimate in themselves, break the first, best rule of theatre – that it should show, not just tell, how the world wags. That whole long scene could be cut without any damage to the play’s message or force.

City of Gold’s other essential difficulty is its dramatic chronology. Its action takes place in scenes that, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, have become “unstuck in time”.

Looping back and forwards in time is a device that can be effectively used to preserve the impact of the crisis of a play, even if that crisis actually occurs quite early in the piece.

But, in City of Gold, the resulting narrative was so confused that I confess to not knowing when that crisis, or many of the other scenes, occurred (an uncertainty shared by many audience members I spoke to afterwards).

Having said that, many of the scenes are powerful and effective, especially those between Breythe and his dead father (Trevor Ryan), and those featuring Carina, who has many burdens to carry, not least because of her cantankerous brothers.

There’s a sweetly engaging performance by the gifted Michael as Cliffhanger, and Myles Pollard and St John Cowcher effectively portray characters from the laughably incompetent advertising director to a craven, perilous policeman.

The creative team, led by director Shari Sebbens (who performed alongside Wyatt and Cooper in the original STC/QTC production in 2019), produces work of high quality. Tyler Hill’s skeletal homestead, placed diagonally on the stage, allows for memorable effects and efficient staging, while Rachael Dease’s original compositions are exquisite, especially the ascending, pulsating music that accompany and help drive Wyatt’s second-act monologue.
City of Gold is shot through with broad humour and pain, tenderness and brutality, and wisdom in the face of ignorance and stupidity, though it lacks the dramatic rigour and clarity that would give its raw, urgent truths all the power they deserve.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Theatre: Animal Farm

by Van Badham

from the novel by George Orwell

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Directed by Emily McLean

Set and Costume designer Fiona Bruce

Composer and sound designer Rachael Dease

Lighting designer Karen Cook

Video designer Michael Carmody

Performed by Andrea Gibbs, Alison van Reeken and Megan Wilding

Heath Ledger Theatre until October 24, 2021

Alison van Reeken, Andrea Gibbs and Megan Wilding (pic Daniel J Grant)

In 1992 the political scientist Francis Fukayama claimed the final victory of Western liberal democracy over its various competitors and, on that basis, declared The End of History in his hugely influential book with that title.

Just goes to show how wrong you can be.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet empire and its satellites that Fukayama saw as the dawn of some kind of political stasis might also have consigned George Orwell’s Animal Farm – the savage parable of the Stalinism he felt had betrayed democratic socialism and attacked objective truth – to the remainder bin of admirable curiosities like its near-contemporary, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator .

Van Badham’s stage adaptation of Animal Farm is a brave attempt to release Orwell’s parable from the specifics of the mid-twentieth century USSR and put contemporary flesh on its bones.

It’s successful in very large measure because of scorching performances from three tremendous actors, Andrea Gibbs, Alison van Reeken and Megan Wilding, who play its 17 “live” characters and a host of others on film and audio.

They are carefully placed front and centre, facing straight out to the audience, by the director Emily McLean, who shows the respect and felicity for clear, cleanly delivered dialogue and simplicity of action that makes her work so constantly accessible and satisfying.

Which is not to say this Animal Farm is merely neat or tidy. Gibbs, van Reeken and Wilding keep things gloriously salty, and video designer Michael Carmody and composer/sound designer Rachael Dease rub it into the wounds with intent.

The result is seriously funny as well as deadly serious, as brightly energetic as previous attempts, notably the CIA-funded 1954 film version, have been grim plodders.

Animal Farm happens as much on a gigantic screen as on stage, and Carmody’s effects are terrific; he films the cast in their stage characters and many more beside (a total, at a rough count, of 37) interspersed with mocked up media reports, mainstream and on-line media and revolutionary graphics.

It’s a whirligig of imagery and, combined with the three marvellous performances, an exciting experience.

But does it hit its mark, both as an adaptation of Orwell’s original and as an invention of its own?

The answer to the first question is a resounding yes.  The Orwellian nightmare is fiercely imagined, his outrage and despair clearly displayed. The process of totalitarianism, its betrayal of noble heroism and the common good, and the re-writing of history it requires, is brutally exposed.

The story of Napoleon and Squealer, Mollie and Snowball, Benjamin, Mr Jones and the tragic Boxer – so familiar they need not be repeated here – are retold with fidelity to the original.

I think, though, an opportunity – or at least an accuracy – has been missed in this updated Animal Farm, although it’s hard to level blame on this production or Badham.  This piece was conceived in 2019 and was intended to be performed just before the 2020 US Elections. It’s been updated right up to the paroxysm of January 2021 in the US Capitol Building.

It’s obvious enough, given the times, that Trump/Napoleon should be the successor to Stalin/Napoleon, but he really isn’t. Trump has been a spectacular failure as a would-be dictator, destroyer of the truth and politician. He’s no Napoleon.

A far better example of the type that caused Orwell so much grief and anger is on 24/7 news cycle display much closer to home.

Instead of “Make Animal Farm Great” as the ubiquitous slogan for this rambunctious, bitterly funny tour de force of a production, I’d suggest “How Good are Animals” would have been closer to the mark, and to the bone.         

Musical theatre: Oklahoma!

by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein III

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Directed by Richard Carroll

Musical director Victoria Falconer

Choreographer Bernadette Lewis

Designed by Jonathon Oxlade

Sound designer Tim Collins

Lighting designer Lucy Birkenshaw

Performed by Laila Bano-Rind, Stefanie Caccamo, Andy Cook, Axel Duffy, Emily Havea, Luke Hewitt, Caroline McKenzie, Sara Reed and Cameron Taylor

The band: Victoria Falconer, Wayne Freer, Adam Gare and Jarrad Payne

Heath Ledger Theatre until December 20

 

Emily Havea saddles up

Is Oklahoma really okay? Well, they’ve had 213,000 cases of Covid-19 and 1,874 deaths this year, less than half its farms have a positive net income, and their eighty-six-year-old senator, Jim Mountain Inhofe, the proud and vituperative author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, was easily re-elected in November.

So much for beautiful mornings, where the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye. I suspect if a tusker were to turn up around Tulsa, the good senator would probably bag it for a trophy.

To make matters worse, the original cast soundtrack of the musical was half of the family record collection in my (far distant) childhood (the other half, fatally, was My Fair Lady).

That’s a lot of baggage to take into Black Swan’s year-ending production of the Rodger and Hammerstein 1943 groundbreaker Oklahoma!, and my conflicting inclinations as I took my seat on the stage of the Heath Ledger were to dismiss it as a ludicrous piece of rose-coloured glassware on one hand,while insisting that not a note or step of it be changed on the other.

The director of this revival, Richard Carroll, is determined to recognize and subvert these conflicts, and the entertaining, but uneven, result is a measure of both its success and failure.

I have no particular issue with two of the striking features of the production, the casting of Emily Havea, a woman of colour, as the all-male, all-white Curly, or the introduction of anachronisms like contemporary musical styles and accouterments like cell phones.

Other, that is, than to wonder what the point of it is. Havea-as-Curly didn’t seem to me to reform the themes of the text, either in the power relationships between the characters or the romantic triangles – Curly/Laurey/Jud and Will/Ado Annie/Hakim – that occupy most of our attention throughout.

I had it put to me that it served to show that a female actor could do it. Well, yes, but I’d have thought that wasn’t in dispute.

However, the intimacy of the staging – four banks of seats surrounding within touching distance of set designer Jonathon Oxlade’s chipboard stage and the cast thereupon – was an unqualified success.

It allowed the small company of nine actors and four musicians to fill your senses, and offered an insight into the effort of a dancer’s movement, the physicality of the choreography (by Bernadette Lewis) and the making of the music (directed by Victoria Falconer).

The sheer proximity to the action excused, rather than exposed, any technical deficiencies in the singing, dancing and playing, allowing a more exuberant and informal reading of those elements that might be appropriate on a more formal and distant proscenium stage.

For that much credit is due to Falconer, who was the star of the show to my mind; her arrangements took Richard Rodger’s score back to its roots in bluegrass and jug band music and her performance, on fiddle, accordion and keyboards, singing and as an insinuating MC, was marvelous. Fans of Falconer from her series of Fringe World triumphs as half of EastEnd Cabaret would not have been surprised, but delighted, to see the other strings to her bow in full twang.

Her band of WA music luminaries, Wayne Freer (bass and tuba), Adam Gare (guitar etc) and Jarrad Payne (drums) were very fine, and the cast also hoed in with instruments as varied as autoharp and spoons. A thundering, menacing piano solo in Lonely Room from Andy Cook’s Jud Fry (off stage and vividly projected onto a string curtain) was a highlight.

The dancing, perforce, is stripped down to necessities, and mostly carried by Axel Duffy as Will Parker in Kansas City and Sara Reed subbing out Stefanie Caccamo as Laurey in the Dream Ballet that closes the First Act.

The Dream Ballet is always a strange interlude, more so with the stripped down ensemble here, although Reed, who is fun throughout the show, does very good work in it.

The emphasis in Laurey’s dream on the conflict between the cowboy and the farmhand, with Jud imagined as the henchman of a thuggish police squad attacking Curly clearly conjures up Tulsa Oklahoma’s hideous 1921 race massacre and the black lives matter movement. It’s powerfully conceived by Carrol and Lewis, even if it strains at the fabric of the piece’s original intent.

Caccamo, who was memorable in the title role of the WAAPA smash The Drowsy Chaperone in 2016, shows her vocal strength again in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it showstopper Many a New Day and ia sweet Out of My Dreams, much more a solo piece than in larger productions.

Some of the cast struggled with accent and other technicalities, but its energy and good humour – exemplified by a genuinely funny, Borat-like gallivant from Cameron Taylor as the peddler Ali Hakim – and, of course, those wonderful songs, gave the show enough aye-yip-aye-yo-ee-ay! to leave us, if not exactly dancing in William Street afterwards, at least humming a few tunes as we waited for the Uber to arrive.  

Theatre: You Know We Belong Together

Julia Hales

by Julia Hales with Finn O’Branagáin and Clare Watson
Black Swan Theatre Company
Directed by Clare Watson
Set and costume designer Tyler Hill
Lighting designer Joe Lui
Composer and sound designer Rachael Dease
Performed by Julia Hales, Joshua Bott, Patrick Carter, Tina Fielding, Mark Junor, Melissa Junor, Lauren Marchbank and Hermione Merry
Heath Ledger Theatre until March 31  

There is wonderful warmth about You Know We Belong Together. It envelops the audience, creating a shared, joyous experience of the rarest kind in theatre.
Its lead artist Julia Hales has Down Syndrome, as do her co-performers Joshua Bott, Patrick Carter, Lauren Marchbank, Tina Fielding, Melissa and Mark Junor.
Hales’s research into love and belonging for people with DS blossomed with the contributions of the writer Finn O’Branagáin and director Clare Watson into a genuinely impressive piece of verbatim theatre about life, family, hopes, desire, dreams and the part DS plays in all of them.
Much of the show consists of pre-recorded interviews with the performers about these life matters. (It’s important to realize that life expectancy for people with DS has gone from 25 years as recently as the 1980s to over 60 today, bringing with it a whole host of new challenges and opportunities.)
But let me dispel any suspicion that this is a dry, worthy, didactic piece – far from it. It overflows with happiness and real charm as these lovely and loving people tell us their stories. Some of them – the gorgeous romance of the Junors from Augusta is an outstanding example – are deeply moving; others are funny, sexy and sad.
It’s simply and shrewdly designed by Tyler Hill and lit by Joe Lui. Rachael Dease has composed an effective, unobtrusive soundtrack for the show. 
These are stories of people who are as whole and emotionally alive as any of us.
Hales’ obsession with the eternally-running TV soap Home and Away locates and drives the show. Her real friends meet in the Summer Bay café of her imagination; its beach and the real one near her family’s Eagle Bay holiday house fold together in her mind. Her own tragedies and the melodramatic happenings in the fictional lives of H & A reflect each other, and the final scene (I won’t spoil the surprise and sheer euphoria of it) wraps and ties a ribbon around this little gift of a play.
This season is an extended encore of the show's premiere at the 2018 Perth Festival. It's success there has also earned it a relocation to the mainstage Heath Ledger Theatre.
 It was a a delightful and touching show on its first outing (this review is essentially the same as it was then), and has lost nothing this time around.     

Theatre: In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play

by Sarah Ruhl

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler

Set and costume designer Alicia Clements

Lighting designer Lucy Birkinshaw

Vision designer Mia Holton
Composer and sound designer Ash Gibson Greig

Performed by Rebecca Davis, Stuart Halusz, Kingsley Judd, Tariri Mavondo, Jo Morris, Tom Stokes and Alison van Reeken

Heath Ledger Theatre until November 4

Jo Morris, Stuart Halusz and Rebecca Davis

 There’s A Hit – A Palpable Hit – In The Next Room

It’s an entertaining (if likely apocryphal) historical factoid that the first appliance of the age of electricity was the venerable and handy vibrator; it was certainly in wide use in doctors’ rooms as a copacetic for female hysteria – in other words, to cure that which ails you by the bringing on of orgasm – quite soon after those ACs and DCs started running through Edison’s wires.

The American playwright Sarah Ruhl has bounced off all this with In the Next Room, a witty, playful peek into domesticity and its pitfalls, the role of women in marriage and society, and quite a bit more besides.

Along the way she neatly avoids all of the traps of prurience and earnestness lying in wait for her, and the result is a wildly entertaining and intelligent piece of popular theatre.

It would be anyway, just on the strength of the text, but this production is lifted to its very considerable heights by the skill and talent of its creative team and cast.

Jeffrey Jay Fowler, the director, has accurately assessed Ruhl’s play for what it is; a modern take on Restoration Comedy, almost a bedroom – well consulting room – farce, and he plays it elegantly through the covers. He’s much assisted by his designer Alicia Clements, whose cutaway two-way-mirror set is wholly successful – quite inspired in fact –and allows the action to move from room to room seamlessly and often hilariously. Her costumes, which are removed, replaced and got inside with great regularity, are authentic and sumptuous.

Ash Gibson Greig has composed music that perfectly fits both the play’s acoustic era and electrical subject, and Lucy Birkinshaw’s lighting is subtly effective throughout, even when dealing with the tricky task of switching set lighting on and off like an electric lamp.

A cast this well provisioned, led, dressed and lit has a great opportunity, and they go to town on it. There are terrific supporting turns by Tom Stokes as the ardent but diffidently amorous artist Leo Irving (who gets a different, and squirm-in-the-seat, kind of vibration), Tariro Mavondo as the African-American wet nurse Elizabeth who introduces a suite of issues as relevant today as they were in postbellum America, and Kingsley Judd as the straight-laced but sympathetic husband of one of the patients of the New Machine.

Alison van Reeken, who stepped into the cast at late notice (as she is often asked to do), is glorious (as she always is) as Annie, a Ma Clampett nurse who gets swept up in all this tomfoolery.

The story revolves around the practice of the good doctor Givings, and Stuart Halusz gives a perfectly pitched performance as the medical technocrat oblivious to the torrents and torments of those around him. He’s in pretty good shape, too.

The play belongs to its leading women, and Rebecca Davis, as Catherine Givings, and Jo Morris as her husband’s patient Sabrina Daldry, both give career performances.

Morris is electric (sorry) as Sabrina, and she makes her I’ll-have-what-she’s-having scenes ­– she develops quite a hankering for her little buzzing friend – a tour-de-force.

Davis rarely gets the opportunity to show her range, but she does here, and her ability to slip easily from farce to genuine emotion is the touchstone for the production’s stance, and its success.

There’s much talk around about the sparse opportunities for seasoned professional actors in the current Perth theatre. There are reasons for it, and I don’t intend to argue the whys and wherefores in a review of one show.

This one, though, reminds us that the talent is here, and in spades. You can help by the easy act of seeing it when you get a chance as enjoyable as this is.

Theatre: Switzerland (★★½)

Giuseppe Rotondella (pic: Philip Gostelow)

by Joanna Murray-Smith
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Director Lawrie Cullen-Tait
Set and costume designer Bruce McKinven
Lighting designer Lucy Birkenshaw
Composer/ Sound designer Ash Gibson Greig
With Jenny Davis and Giuseppe Rotondella
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until September 3

This is the fourth time I’ve gone to Joanna-Murray-Smithland, a favourite destination for our State Theatre Company, and my struggles with her continue. On this occasion altitude sickness is compounded by frustration, because she’s come up with a killer idea, arranged it expertly, but failed to pull it off.
None of the improbabilities and inconsistencies that marred Black Swan’s 2013 production of her Day One, a Hotel, Evening and destroyed 2011’s awful Ninety are here.
This is partly because this Switzerland is not a real place, and the skirmishes between her characters, the real-life novelist Patricia Highsmith (Jenny Davis) and the imagined publishing executive Edward Ridgeway (Giuseppe Rotondella) are phantasmagorical.
In this shifting reality, improbability and inconsistency becomes, if anything, a blessing rather than a curse.
Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt/Carol, the five Tom Ripley novels) is boozing and smoking her way towards a lonesome death in grumpy self-imposed exile in Switzerland. She is visited by Ridgeway, a young man from her American publishers. He brings a contract for Highsmith to deliver a sixth and final installment of the Ripliad.
She’s aggressively disinterested in the project, and scornful of Ridgeway, his employers, other writers (the better the more) and anything and anyone else she turns her mind to.
She wants rid of Ridgeway, but he manages, somehow, to stick around. He plies her with gifts, those she demanded he bring with him and one, a beautiful dagger for her collection of antique weapons, unasked for.
He knows these weapons, in surprising detail. He knows her, and he knows her anti-hero. Like a book.
As the idea for the new Ripley story takes shape, it’s Ridgeway rather than Highsmith who brings its snakes and ladders to the table.
From there Switzerland wriggles its way to a climax to the Highsmithian manner born.
That’s the good news. Despite the play’s artfulness, the recruitment of Lawrie Cullen-Tait, a director with a real gift for staging the interplay of two people (Red, Venus in Fur), and a powerful creative team, the play founders on the rocks of Murray-Smith’s dialogue.
It’s highfalutin and self-indulgent, emotionally shallow and psychologically unconvincing. It leaves Highsmith, even in the hands of the admirable Davis, sounding strained and rote (if she’d yelled “G’wan, get out or I’ll call the cops!” at Ridgeway one more time, and I’d been on an aisle, I’d have been tempted to take her advice). All the acidity and wit is drained out of Highsmith, and with it any feeling – admiration or repulsion – we have for her.
Davis’s problems are compounded by an odd set (by Bruce McInven) that required two physiotherapists to be credited in the programme. A trapezium of grey granite with a rake for the performers that would struggle to pass an OH&S inspection – at one point Davis dropped a pencil that proceeded, unsettlingly, to roll away from her down the slope – it impressed initially but demanded too much attention from us, and far too much care from the actors, as the play wore on.
At least Rotondella’s character, and so his performance, goes somewhere. When we meet him he’s determined but a bit of a puppy, very like Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin in The Graduate. By the end he’s someone – or something – that looms much more dangerously. Guess who.
Rotondella is a young actor with a genuine talent and real appeal. Sadly, he’s one of very few reasons you should consider a trip to Switzerland.

Theatre: The Eisteddfod

By Lally Katz

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler

Set and costume designer Tyler Hill

Lighting designer Lucy Birkenshaw

Sound designer Brett Smith

Until July 9

Lally Katz’s The Eisteddfod takes us down into a tale of sound and fury.

It’s a disturbing experience, though undoubtedly a gripping one. It left me feeling a little sullied, considerably impressed, but with many more questions than answers.

I’m sure (as sure as I can be) that it signifies something. What that is, though, remains frustratingly elusive.

Theatre: Endgame (★★★★½)

by Samuel Beckett
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Director Andrew Ross
Set and costume Tyler Hill
Lighting designer Mark Howlett
With Geoff Kelso, Caroline McKenzie, Kelton Pell and George Shevtsov
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until June 11

 The set and lighting designers Tyler Hill and Mark Howett achieve a remarkable effect in Andrew Ross’s revival of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.
Behind a grimy, littered yard and the ochre-stained façade of a crumbling house they have engineered a background of such impenetrable blackness that, try as I might over the 90 minutes of the play, I could not distinguish the curtains, paint and manipulation of light that must have created it.
This void is a perfect metaphor for Beckett’s bleak vision, a place like some freezing ocean abyss where no light penetrates, time has no meaning, the pressure is crushing and creatures – fish with no faces, skeletal crabs like vast spiders – eke out their less-than-lives with no chance of dignity, let alone redemption.And in our time, when clowns and vagabonds operate out of the biggest houses and even the oceans can no longer save their wonders, we need people who can stare into the black void and search for its meaning.




Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: A PERFECT SPECIMEN (★★★)

by Nathaniel Moncrieff
Black Swan Lab
Directed by Stuart Halusz
Set design Frances Danckert
Costume design Lynn Ferguson
Sound design Brett Smith
Lighting design Joe Lui
With Adriane Daff, Rebecca Davis, Luke Hewett, Greg McNeill and Igor Sas
STC Studio until July 17

Luke Hewitt and Rebecca Davis

 The sad true story of Julia Pastrana, a Mexican Indian woman who was a sideshow attraction in the mid-19th Century, has been made into a sumptuous, generally successful but not especially remarkable, stage play by the writer Nathaniel Moncrieff, the director Stuart Halusz and the Black Swan Lab, the development project of the State Theatre Company.
Pastrana was the archetypal bearded lady, due to a cruel congenital condition that led its sufferers to be promoted as ape men and bear women.
The challenge of bringing Pastrana to the stage is deftly and sympathetically achieved by not representing her deformities. Adriane Daff, in a fine and touching performance, gives a sympathetic portrait of a wounded woman without the prurient distraction of her condition.
Luke Hewitt’s Theodore Lent is also convincing. The play is as much a picaresque exploration of the complete moral failure of a man as it is the tragedy of his victim.
Rebecca Davis threatens to run away with the show as Lent’s mistress, the acrobatic Marian Trumbull. The remarkably lengthy Davis makes it easy to see how she would be a hit in the ring or between Lent’s sheets, and she brings desperate power to her characterization.
The show is beautifully staged. Joe Lui moodily and imaginatively lights Frances Danckert’s revolving set and Lynn Ferguson’s rich costumes, and Brett Smith’s sound design and original compositions add greatly to its atmosphere and appeal.
Despite all those advantages, A Perfect Specimen ultimately lacks dramatic ambition. The narrative is determinedly linear, never truly taking us inside its characters or off its rails.
That does, of course, make this strange tale clear and easy to follow, but that comes at the expense of greater opportunities it could have taken, and deeper insights it could have found.

Read the complete review in The West Australian   

Theatre: Angels in America (★★★½)

Stuart Halusz and Jo Morris (pic Daniel James Grant)

by Tony Kushner
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Kate Cherry
Designed by Christina Smith
Lighting design by Matt Scott
Composer and sound designer Ash Gibson Greig
With Adam Booth, Stuart Halusz, Felicity McKay, Jo Morris, Will O’Mahony, Kenneth Ransom, Toni Scanlan and John Stanton
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until June 19

Tony Kushner’s celebrated Angels in America is a great small play set inside an epic one.
It’s, at once, tightly bound to a particular time and place (America, 1985) and a freewheeling millenarian phantasmagoria.
And it’s a prescient play (or, at least, a lucky one): Kushner’s ferocious angel may not have brought in the Millennium, but its wings beat above New York on 9/11; in the here and now, Donald Trump’s ascendant star uncannily looms above the play.
As thoughtfully directed by Cherry, and with excellent work from all five principal actors, it would stand as complete, deeply thought-provoking, theatre on a smaller canvas.
Kushner, though, has wider and greater ambitions. Hr is attempting nothing less than, as he subtitles his work, “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”.
This ambition provides Cherry and her designer Christina Smith with some big-moment opportunities and some functional challenges.
There’s also some textual baggage that could have been jettisoned without our understanding of Kushner’s purpose being hampered in the slightest.
But that’s okay.
I hope Cherry, as a parting gift, has embedded Angels in America Part 2: Perestroika in a future Black Swan season.


Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Extinction (★★)

By Hannie Rayson
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Stuart Halusz
Set and costumes designed by Bryan Woltjen
Lighting designed by Trent Suidgeest
Sound designer and composer Ben Collins
With Hannah Day, Matt Dyktynski, Sarah McNeill and Myles Pollard

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Until 4 October

Hannie Rayson’s Extinction is anchored solidly enough on reality: the effort to locate and preserve the elusive tiger quoll, mainland Australia’s largest surviving carnivorous marsupial.
Equally factual is the conflict that pits environmentalists and local residents against the mining companies interested in exploiting reserves of brown coal in the hinterland of the Otways, the temperate rainforests in Victoria that are among the quoll’s last habitats.
So there’s something to be learnt from Extinction, which is fortunate for its audience, because there’s not much else to take from it. This play perches uncomfortably between several stools and doesn’t really get a purchase on any of them.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Venus in Fur

By David Ives
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Director and costume designer Lawrie Cullen-Tait
Set designer Patrick Howe
Lighting designer Joe Lui
Sound designer and composer Brett Smith
With Adam Booth and Felicity McKay
STC Studio
Until February 8

(★★★★½)

Felicity McKay (pic: Gary Marsh)

It’s the end of a long, dismal day for the director Thomas Novachek. He’s auditioning actresses for his adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella Venus in Furs, and no-one’s come close to nailing the part.

He’s packing up to leave when a girl called Vanda Jordan bursts in, overcoat and duffle bag, blonde hair dishevelled: “Am I too late? I’m too late, right? Fuck. Fuck!” (that last expletive somehow extended to three syllables).

It’s a fabulous entrance and a taste of what’s to come in David Ives’ delicious layer cake of a play-within-a-play-within-a-book, Venus in Fur.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian