Theatre: Let The Right One In (★★★★½)

by Jack Thorne

based upon the novel and film by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Director Clare Watson

Set and costume designer Bruce Mckinven

Lighting designer Richard Vabre

Composer and sound designer Rachael Dease

Featuring Sophia Forrest, Stuart Halusz, Ian Michael, Rory O’Keeffe, Clarence Ryan, Maitland Schnaars, Steve Turner and Alison van Reeken

Heath Ledger Theatre

Until December 3

The last production of Black Swan’s 2017 season marks the completion of the extended and orderly transition from the company’s long-time artistic director Kate Cherry to the leadership of Clare Watson.

During the transition, Watson has gained the trust and friendship of Perth’s theatre community, and, as her much-anticipated 2018 season demonstrates, her board and Black Swan’s sometimes tricksy and disparate stakeholders.

But can she deliver in her own right as the director of a whopping main stage production in the signature theatre of her new town? Well, as we have just discovered, 61.9% is the new benchmark for overwhelming success, and Watson’s splendidly executed and often downright thrilling Let the Right One In does way, way better than that.

We didn’t need to wait long for those thrills to start. The first sights and sounds – Blue Oyster Cult’s smashing Don’t Fear The Reaper (just the opening salvo of Rachael Dease’s soundtrack of 1980’s hits and her own haunting compositions), and Bruce Mckinven’s Rubik’s Cube of a set, animated by Richard Vabre’s lighting and Michael Carmody’s projections, set the senses racing, and the first scenes, an ominous voice-overed narration and, not long after, a bloodlettingly brutal murder, set the nerves on edge.

So, within minutes, it’s apparent that Watson knows her stuff and recruits her staff wisely. Within a few more it’s obvious she has cast just as astutely – and, in the case of her two young leads, with some inspiration.

The business in and around Mckinven’s cube by the cast, supported by Claudia Blagaich and Meabh Walton’s stage management, is adeptly paced, and Rohin Best and Tim Collins’s sound operation is of exemplary clarity and quality.

In such good hands, Jack Thorne’s adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel and screenplay could hardly go wrong.

As much young romance and teen revenge tale as horror, Lindqvist’s story exposes the unpreparedness of smug, well-ordered suburban society to deal with that which lies beneath and beyond – be it phantasmagorical or all-too-human (as Edgar Cooke and the Burnies have shown us).

Which makes Let the Right One at its heart a grim tale, and Watson is wise to take it seriously. Sure the final flight of the young ill-matched lovers, the boy Oskar (Ian Michael) and the undead Eli (Sophia Forrest) after the destruction of their pursuers and tormentors has a redemptive quality, but the drained corpses they leave behind, and the hunger that will never leave Eli, are not a good fit for cartoon treatment.

Rather like Michael Lehmann’s ’80s cult classic Heathers (there’s something about that decade) it pays to play things straight, even when Eli is wrapped around her victims’ heads like an octopus and doing some extremely unwelcome necking (movement director Claudia Alessi and fight director Andy Fraser are kept busy throughout).

Rory OKeeffe and Clarence Ryan as the school bullies who make Oskar’s life hell are deliciously odious and ripe for come-uppance, while the seasoned core of the cast, Stuart Halutsz, Maitland Schnaars, Steve Turner and Alison van Reeken are exceptional without exception.

I understand that a vampire can only come in if invited, and Sophia Forrest’s Eli is certainly the right one. Tough and sexy, needy and very scary, she clambers over this play – and its set – with remarkable surety and athleticism. Ian Michael’s singular quality shines again here. He makes Oskar vulnerable, complex and surprising, and shows that weakness, like beauty, is only skin deep.

Let the Right One In is a mightily auspicious start for Clare Watson and the new phase of what is now her State Theatre Company. 

Don’t miss it.              

Theatre: I Am My Own Wife (★★★★)

by Doug Wright
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Director and sound designer Joe Lui
Set and costume designer Cherish Marrington
Lighting designer Chris Donnelly
Voice and Dialect coach Luzita Fereday
Performed by Brendan Hanson
STC Studio
Until October 29

(pic: Daniel J Grant)

Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for drama; it’s perhaps a little more surprising that it won the Tony Award for best play the same year.

I say that because we associate the Pulitzer primarily with journalism (although its drama prize is an august award voted on by distinguished theatre critics), and Wright’s work feels as much a long-form character piece, in, say, The New Yorker or on This American Life, adapted for the stage, as a fully formed play.

That’s not to say that its subject, the German transgender personality Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, isn’t a fascinating character, or that her story lacks drama – the mere survival of a public transvestite under both the Nazi and East German regimes could hardly be without that. It’s more that its dramatic form is more akin to reporting a life rather taking us inside it.

This is partly because Wright’s narrative vehicle is the story of his research into, and extensive interviews with, Mahlsdorf shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Wright’s various tribulations – his grant funding running out, his disconcerting discovery of Mahlsdorf’s connections to the Stasi – are incidental to the story and add little to it.

But left to her own devices – and those of Brendan Hanson, who plays Mahlsdorf, Wright and perhaps a dozen other characters in a tour de force performance, and the director Joe Lui, whose conviction and command clicks into gear as soon as they get her alone – the show lifts instantly and to great heights.

Hanson is a natural fit for Charlotte; he has the charisma and subversive Kit Kat Klub glamour for her (I can’t see the Emcee in Cabaret on his resumé – some producer has missed out there) and this allows him to give a surprisingly understated performance with moments of quiet tenderness quite without the histrionics and flounces you might expect from Mahlsdorf and the terrifying world she navigates through. Hanson is capable of hugely entertaining extravagance – it’s a credit to him, and to Lui, that this performance is almost entirely devoid of it.

This restraint is echoed in Cherish Marington’s set of high vertical panels that loom over Mahlsdorf’s domestic collection, and the little gay nightclub she operated in the basement, like the searchlight pillars of the Lichtdom at the rallies in Nuremberg (though, happily, there is not a swastika or hammer and sickle to be seen). Chris Donnelly’s lighting design creates angular glimpses of figures in side streets and cells, bursting into garish colour to frame the talk show interrogation of Mahlsberg’s ambiguous past.

While I Am My Own Wife could be a more dramatic and gripping play than it is, its window into the queer demi-monde of totalitarian Mitteleuropa, and Brendan Hanson’s marvelous performance, makes it a considerable success and well worth your seeing.       

Theatre: Coma Land (★★★★)

Black Swan State Theatre Company and Performing Lines WA
Written and directed by Will O’Mahony
Set designer Patrick James Howe
Sound designer Rachael Dease
Lighting designer Chris Donnelly
Performed by Humphrey Bower, Kirsty Marillier, Amy Mathews, Morgan Owen and Ben Sutton

In Will O’Mahony’s carefully delineated and finely performed drama, coma is a place.
By logical necessity, it can only be “about” one character – a startling young girl named Boon (Kirsty Marillier) – but O’Mahony’s achievement in Coma Land is to people the strange place she is in with figments of her imagination that have their own stories, memories and ambitions.
There’s a chirpy girl of Boon’s age, Penguin (Morgan Owen), who is trying to fly according to Malcolm Gladwell’s tendentious 10,000 Hour Rule (practice something for 10,000 hours and you will become expert in it). There’s Penguin’s dad (Humphrey Bower) who might be working towards their escape but keeps a dark secret. There’s the chummy party planner Jinny (Amy Mathews) and a panda named Cola (Ben Sutton) who pretends to be a man.
This place, and these people, are treacherous dramatic territory, but O’Mahony (who also directs) has shown that he’s up to the challenge before, most notably in his 2013 indie hit Great White and in last year’s The Mars Project.
His great talent is controlled incongruity, and much of the humour – and there is plenty in Coma Land – springs from it. There’s no earthly reason why Cola would suddenly ask what our favourite font is (his, he says, is the obnoxious Comic Sans), but, then, there’s no reason why a panda would be in Boon’s coma. And so on.
Coma Land isn’t about all this, or coma, at all. It’s about success and failure, dependence and independence, families and their fault lines, and these themes weave around, and progress through, the metaphor of coma to a powerful conclusion.
For this to be an entertainment, though, or to work on any of its levels, you mast have performance of high quality, energy and control, and all five actors rise to the challenge.
Humphrey Bower is a master of the unlovely, and he conveys a kind of careworn peril that gives the play a taut thread throughout, while Mathews and Sutton expertly deliver much of its absurdity and comedy.
Owen is chirrupy and magnetic as Penguin (you’re allowed to be reminded of Jane Horrocks’s Bubble in Absolutely Fabulous, but smarter), and Marillier makes the play her own in a wise and feisty leading performance that leaves plenty of room for those around her to shine.
The show looks and sounds great; Patrick James Howe’s set of dark distances around a square riser of brown shag pile gives it both mystery and focus, as does Chris Donnelly’s exposed, meticulous lighting design. The remarkable Rachael Dease brings music of great simplicity and beauty to the play.
Coma Land is another milestone in O’Mahony’s steadily developing career, and another success in Black Swan’s impressive 2017 season.

This review appeared in The West Australian 25.7.17 


 

Tartuffe (★★★★)

by Moliere
adapted by Justin Fleming
Black Swan State Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre Company
Directed by Kate Cherry
Designed by Richard Roberts
Lighting designer David Murray
Sound designer Tony Brumpton
With Jenny Davis, Darren Gilshenan, Tessa Lind, Hugh Parker, James Sweeny, Steve Turner, Alison van Reeken, Emily Weir and Alex Williams
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until November 6

En garde! Emily Weir and Steve Turner

We’re in a ritzy two-story house in an affluent Australian suburb (an eminently liveable set by Richard Roberts). There’s a party going on.
It’s Moliere’s Tartuffe, but the house, the people in it, and the language they use, are straight out of David Williamson.
Justin Fleming’s adaptation of the great French comedy of extremely bad manners doesn’t tamper with the characters and their station in life, or the arrangement of the text.
That takes a little getting used to. Rhyming couplets, of which the dialogue in Moliere and Fleming’s adaptation is composed, can seem to our unaccustomed ears like pantomime doggerel.
But the director Kate Cherry and her cast take on the audience’s early qualms with heedless confidence, and it pays off.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: The Caucasian Chalk Circle (★★★★)

by Bertolt Brecht
translated by Ralph Manheim
Black Swan State Theatre Company and The National Theatre of China
Directed by Dr Wang Xiaoying
Designed by Richard Roberts
Costume Designer Zhao Yan
Mask designer Prof Zhang Huaxiang
Lighting design by Mark Howett
Composer/sound designer Clint Bracknell
With Caitlin Beresford-Ord, Adam Booth, Kylie Farmer, Luke Hewitt, Geoff Kelso, Alex Malone, Felicity McKay, Lynette Narkle, Kenneth Ransom, James Sweeny, Steve Turner and Alison Van Reeken
Music performed by Clint Bracknell and Arunachala

Heath Ledger Theatre
Until August 14

The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Bertolt Brecht’s 1944 parable of tyranny and the “terrible temptation to do good”, is based on an ancient Chinese folk story dramatized eight centuries ago as The Circle of Chalk.
The fulcrum of the story, though, is told in many forms in many cultures dating back as far as the legend of the judgment of Solomon.
So there’s a fine sense of closing another circle in this cooperative production of a German play set in the USSR, translated by an American, staged by an eminent Chinese director with a creative team from both China and Australia, performed by an Australian cast, with a deliberate and significant contribution from the inheritors of a living culture with stories that date back tens of thousands of years.
It’s an ambitious culmination of the tenure of Black Swan’s departing artistic director Kate Cherry and the signature piece of the company’s 25th anniversary season.
Happily, the result is a clear and persuasive staging of Brecht’s tale, and a rollicking entertainment to boot.


Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Picnic at Hanging Rock (★★★★)

by Tom Wright
adapted from Joan Lindsay’s novel
Black Swan State Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre
Directed by Matthew Lutton
Designed by Zoë Atkinson
Lighting design by Paul Jackson
Composer Ash Gibson Greig
Sound design by J. David Franzke
With Harriet Gordon Anderson, Arielle Gray, Amber McMahon, Elizabeth Nabben and Nikki Shiels
Heath Ledger Theatre Until April 17

Arielle Gray, Nikki Shiels, Amber McMahon, Elizabeth Nabben and Harriet Gordon-Anderson (pic Pia Johnson)

The author Bruce Chatwin described Australia as “a country of lost children”. Unlike settled Britain or frontier America, the Australia confronting its European colonists was empty, smothering and malevolent. A wrong step, the unseen crossing of a creek, an open window, and, as in Frederick McCubbin’s Lost or Paul Kelly’s One Night the Moon, the bush closes in.    
It’s unsurprising that Matthew Lutton has been drawn to Picnic at Hanging Rock, an Australian classic and, more than that, part of our mythology.
The achievement of the production is transforming Lindsay’s faux-historicity and the soft-focused erotic mystery of Weir’s film (I’m not its greatest fan) into an all-stops-out horror story.
We never see the Hanging Rock. And this is no picnic.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Next to Normal (★★★)

Brendan Hansen and Rachael Beck

by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Adam Mitchell
Musical Director David Young

Designed by Bruce McKinven
With Shannen Alyce, Rachael Beck, James Bell, Michael Cormick, Brendan Hanson and Joel Horwood
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until Nov 22

I’m sure we’ve all been waiting for a rock musical about bipolar depressive disorder with delusional episodes, and now we have it – Next to Normal (at the Heath Ledger Theatre, directed by Adam Mitchell).
Certainly the Americans, who are miles ahead of the game in such matters, were. When the Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey-penned show hit Broadway in 2009 it was showered with awards (including a rare Pulitzer Prize for a musical) and rewarded with record-breaking box office takings. It’s since travelled the world; this is its fifth Australian staging.
It’s a strange beast. One thing that it’s not, despite the tag and the publicity, is a rock musical; if these songs, most of which sound like scrunched up and binned attempts to write another Defying Gravity, are rock, then Angus Young wrote Jesus Christ Superstar.
I’m not even sure that it’s a musical in the accepted sense. Oh, there’s music, lots of it; there are 42 songs in the show’s 130-odd minutes, surely a record, but that leaves precious little time for anything else. The music serves no purpose other than to carry the text. Dance is discarded entirely, spoken dialogue all but. So is humour (there was originally some, I read, but it was excised in the pursuit of cohesion and a “responsible” approach to its depiction of its hard, dangerous subject).
It as if we are at two shows at once: one, a dark drama on the devastation caused by mental illness, I’ll gladly see again; the other, the one with all the watery music, I’ll happily pass on.     

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Blithe Spirit (★★★)

By Noel Coward
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler
Set and costumes designed by Bryan Woltjen
Lighting designed by Jon Buswell
Sound designer and composer Ash Gibson Greig
With Adam Booth, Adriane Daff, Michelle Fornasier, Ella Hetherington, Michael Loney, Alison van Reeken and Jo Morris
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Until 9 August

It’s hard to imagine a less opportune time to premiere a drawing room comedy about a shallow, self-absorbed chap and the dueling ghosts of his temperamental wives than the middle of 1941. 
Human nature being the resilient creature it is, though, Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit was a smash hit. It repeated its success on Broadway and on film, and remains one of those always-on-somewhere-in-the-world perennial hits.O
On opening night, by and large, the strong cast seemed uncomfortable and halting. Much of this must have been due to the late withdrawal through illness of Roz Hammond, who was to play Madame Arcati.  Her replacement, the impeccable Alison van Reeken, read from a script with skill and performed with some bravura, but the inevitable uncertainty this created was palpable.
Of course allowances must be made in such unfortunate circumstances, and it’s unwise to make hasty critical assertions under the circumstances. I’m curious to see whether, once it is bedded back in, this production has all the fluidity and élan it needs to succeed.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Dust

By Suzie Miller
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Emily McLean
Designed by Fiona Bruce
Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest
Sound Design and composer James Luscombe
With Benj D’Addario, Charlotte Devenport, Caroline McKenzie, Ben Mortley, Kelton Pell, Nicholas Starte, Alison van Reeken and Gemma Willing
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
28 June – 13 July, 2014

I owe the Black Swan Theatre Company, and the playwright Suzie Miller, something of an apology. As it turns out, Dust, her play that takes place as a cloud of red dust engulfs Perth, is far less portentous and apocalyptic than I feared it would be. It’s also lighter, sweeter and a deal more fun than I expected.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian 

Theatre: Midsummer (a play with songs)

Georgina Gayler (pic Gary Marsh)

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Written by David Greig and Gordon McIntyre
Directed by Damon Lockwood
Set and costume design by Fiona Bruce
Lighting designer Trent Suidgeest
Musical director and sound designer Ben Collins
Starring Georgina Gayler and Brendan Hansen, with musicians Ben Collins, Andrew Weir, Harry Oliff and Elliot Smith
Heath Ledger Theatre until Nov 24

Don’t you love that Scottish brogue? Wouldn’t life be interesting if it were narrated by Peter Capaldi and starred Billy Connolly?
Over the last few Perth festivals, we’ve seen it work its gruff magic in the National Theatre of Scotland productions Black Watch and Beautiful Burnout, and now David Greig, the writer of the most recent festival’s audacious, hilarious hit, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, returns, courtesy of Black Swan’s revival of his 2008 black rom-com hit, Midsummer (a play with songs).
While Midsummer doesn’t quite have the imaginative pyrotechnics of Prudencia, it’s got some exquisite screw tightening, some hilarious set pieces (watch out for Puppetry of the Cock, coming to the Regal sometime soon), and a deus ex machina that’s as inevitable as it is necessary.
If I have a problem with Midsummer, it’s that the piece suits a smaller stage in a smaller theatre. It debuted in a space quite like the Blue Room’s larger room next door, and I’d love to see it mounted there, or in the STC’s own studio.
That aside, it’s hard to find fault with a show that delivers the most and best laughs in Black Swan’s 2013 season.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian              

Theatre: Day One, a Hotel, Evening

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Written by Joanna Murray-Smith

Directed by Peter Houghton

Set and costume design by Tracy Grant Lord

Lighting designer Matthew Marshall

with Jacob Allan, Humphrey Bower, Matt Dyktynski, Michelle Fornasier, Roz Hammond and Claire Lovering

Heath Ledger Theatre

Until June 30

Black Swan’s 2013 season has found its feet with a high-spirited, handsome production of Joanna Murray-Smith’s screwball bedroom farce Day One, A Hotel, Evening.

After suffering through her diabolical Ninety, also for Black Swan, in 2011, and last year’s lazily penned MTC production of Songs for Nobodies, I couldn’t be accused of wearing an I Heart Joanna button on my lapel. I’m happy to say that Day One is a major improvement on both of them.

Theatre: Arcadia

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Written by Tom Stoppard

Directed by Kate Cherry

 Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

21 March - April 1, 2012

Scott Sheridan and Whitney Richards        pic: Gary Marsh Photography

If ever a play has mastered the trick of being at once intricate and undemanding, Arcadia, Tom Stoppard’s 1993 intellectual parlour game about four generations of one family in one room but 180 years apart, is it.

The reason is simple; there are all sorts of theories to explain the world, many of which – chaos theory, fractals, Kelvin’s theory of heat, the 2^nd law of thermodynamics, population theory – are given a good going over in Arcadia, but, as the concupiscent Chloe Coverly (Adriane Daff) proclaims, it’s sex that makes it go around.

And it’s sex, in word and deed, which drives this creamily satisfying revival by Kate Cherry’s Black Swan State Theatre Company. There is much bonking done or denied, conspired for or hankered after, in picturesque locations like gazebos and piano rooms – all, I have to report, safely off stage. The talk may be of literary criticism, landscape gardening and all that mathematics, but there’s too, too solid flesh stirring urgently under those elegant muslins and linens (prettily draped by designer Alicia Clements, whose costumes and wedding-cake set are all that could be wished for).

This is not to say that Stoppard’s academic musings are merely a front for a bedroom farce. His ruminations on life, science, art and the pros, cons and pronunciation of ha-has are finely drawn and pleasurable, while the architecture of the play, the easy way it moves its apple from Isaac Newton to Steve Jobs, and the confident, unpushy way the playwright manages internal and external speculation (Did Lord Byron cuckold and kill Ezra Chater? Was Septimus Hodge the hermit in the Coverley’s garden?) is justly admired. It’s all gloriously stimulating and, as long as you don’t fall into the trap of taking Stoppard too seriously – I’m sure he never does – great fun.