Theatre: Old Love (★★★½)

By Chris Isaacs
Directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler
Performed by Nicola Bartlett, Arielle Gray, Nick Maclaine and Tim Watts
Blue Room Theatre
Until May 2

The Last Great Hunt, Perth’s hyperactive little theatre company that can, is back with a sharp, twisted domestic comedy for, and about, all ages.
Meet cool 30-ish couple Jim (Nick Maclaine) and Gabby (Arielle Gray) – he’s a work-from-home software maven, she’s a work-the-phones property developer.
They’re having a dinner party, but there’s tension. He’s been babysitting his niece, and hasn’t tidied up the debris; she’s struggling to choose between all but identical little black dresses. He’s way too relaxed about it; she’s way too uptight.
We know these people well. Let’s see what they get up to.

Theatre: Concussion

By Ross Mueller
Ellander Productions
Directed by Sarah McKellar
Designed by Iona McAuley
Performed by Richard Mellick, Nichola Renton, Ian Bolgia, Paul Grabovac, Russya Connor and Danen Engelenberg

Much of the ambitious Australia/UK multi-arts company Ellander Productions’ theatrical output since they launched in 2010 has been decidedly underwhelming.
Concussion (at the Blue Room, directed by Sarah McKellar), though, is much more like it.
They’ve been wise to secure Ross Mueller’s nasty, opportunity-laden play, winner of the 2009 New York New Dramatists award. His story of a cop, Caesar (Richard Mellick), recovering from a savage beating and struggling to remember what happened before, during and after it, could be straightforward enough, but Mueller sets its narrative adrift in time and peoples it with some decidedly unsavoury types. While the result is often gobsmackingly obscene and morally bankrupt, work through all that and there’s quite a bit of wicked fun to be had and something to be said about the human condition in a world hotwired to the net and drowning in pornography.

Theatre: Confessions of a Pyromaniac

By Matthew Cooper
Imprint Productions in association with Yirra Yaakin
directed by Shakara Walley
designed by Patrick Howe
Music and lighting by Joe Lui
performed by Mathew Cooper, Calen Tassone, Katya Shevtsov and Stephanie Somerville
Blue Room Theatre
10 - 19 July, 2014
 
While Matthew Cooper’s Confessions of a Pyromaniac (directed by Shakara Walley at the Blue Room Theatre) isn’t in the first rank of Aboriginal theatre, it is undeniably and impressively liberating.
That’s because while three of its characters, and the actors playing them, are Aboriginal, their ethnicity is a subtext, rather than the defining factor in either their personalities or the play’s action.
There’s a continuing conversation about the opportunities for Aboriginal actors to play other than Aborigines; here Cooper inverts the argument by presenting characters who conform to none of the stereotypes, positive or negative, we’ve come to expect in the representation of Indigenous people on stage.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Giving Up the Ghosts and 3 Seeds

Giving Up the Ghosts 
By Sarah Young
Owl Productions
Directed by Joe Lui
Designer Sara Chirichilli
Performed by Georgia King and Paul Grabovac

3 Seeds
By Afeif Ismail
Transcreated by Vivienne Glance and Afeif Ismail
Always Working Artists
Directed by Jeremy Rice
Designed by Cherie Hewson
Performed by Violette Ayad, Michelle Endersbee, Paul Grabovac, Janice Lim, Verity Softly, Kevin Mararo Wangai, Brianna Williams

For most of us, suicide is inexplicable. Perhaps, for our own safety, it needs to be. The great strength of Giving Up the Ghosts, the playwriting debut of Sarah Young, is that she doesn’t try to explain the suicidal impulse, or impose insights upon it. Her play, as deceptively powerful as it is deceptively simple, builds a platform for us to attempt to grasp a meaning, or at least some understanding, from suicide’s opaque horror.

Theatre: Elephents

By Jeffrey Jay Fowler
The Last Great Hunt
Directed by Kathryn Osborne
Designed by Tarryn Gill
Lighting design by Chris Isaacs
Performed by Gita Bezard, Adriane Daff, Jeffrey Jay Fowler, Pete Townsend and Brett Smith.
Blue Room until May 18

Daff, Fowler, Bezard and Townsend (pic: Jamie Breen)

Jeffrey Jay Fowler knows his way round dystopia. In Second Hands, his recent Fringe World outing, humankind had taken vanity and materialism to a horrific extreme. In Elephents the extremity at which we have arrived is apocalyptic, not merely cosmetic.
We are introduced to it in bite-sized pieces. People entering the various dwellings in which the play is set automatically dry off the sweat with towels left by the door for the purpose. Sometimes their clothes are singed. We hear of things combusting spontaneously. Umbrellas are lead-lined. The climate is to die for.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Uncle Jack

By Ross Lonnie
Directed by Soseh Yekanians
Performed by Quintin George and Ben Hall
The Blue Room Theatre
Until May 10

Coming soon after the powerful, theatrically innovative The Long Way Home, Ross Lonnie’s Uncle Jack (directed by Soseh Yekanians at the Blue Room) continues the heightened interest in soldiers, and soldiering, we can expect through WWI centenary observances over the next five years.
Lonnie’s work is much more traditional, but contemplates the same brutal equation: If men are changed by war – and how could they not be – then how can we expect them to return unchanged, as if nothing had happened?

Theatre: These Guys

Variegated Productions

Created by Libby Klysz, Brent Hill, Ben Sutton, St John Cowcher and Michelle Nussey

Directed by Libby Klysz

Performed by Ben Russell, St John Cowcher and Michelle Nussey, with Alwyn-Nixon Lloyd 

For Fringe World

PICA until Feb 22

There’s only one thing wrong with this gem of a Fringe show: it leaves you wanting more, but the bastards won’t give it to you.

Theatre: Glengarry Glen Ross

By David Mamet

Little y Theatre

Directed by Mark Storen

Designed by Fiona Bruce

Featuring Georgia King, Ella Hetherington, Caris Eves, Holly Garvey, Leanne Curran, Alexandra Nell and Verity Softly

Music by Andrew Weir and Ben Collins

Blue Room Theatre

Until December 8

Leanne Curran and Georgia King

There’s a reason Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s Pulitzer, Olivier and Tony award-winning 1984 drama, is having major revivals all across the US.

It can be found in the forsaken suburban tracts and vacated foreclosures that have hollowed out many American cities, so much like the worthless developments that Mamet’s salesman are hawking to their unsuspecting clients.

Little y Theatre’s production at the Blue Room has an all-female cast (although it’s required to use the script’s male character names and pronouns). Even if you’re not a devotee of gender-swapping theatre, a revival of a play about real estate is as appropriate a place as any to do it.

Theatre: Eve

The Nest Ensemble

Devised by Margi Brown Ash, Leah Mercer and Daniel Evans

Written and performed by Margi Brown Ash, with Phil Miolin and Roland Adeney

Directed by Leah Mercer
Until November 10

Margi Brown Ash (pic Leigh Brennan)

The starting point for Margi Brown Ash’s tour de force of stage writing and performance is the sad story of Eve Langley, a little-known and largely forgotten novelist and poet who worked from the 1930s until her lonely death in a little shack outside Katoomba, NSW, in 1974.

This is no mere biographical drama, though. Ash combines some of Langley’s writing with those of her self-appointed literary Siamese twins, Flaubert, Dickinson, Keats, Shakespeare and, especially, her beloved Oscar Wilde, in a poetic, combustible interior monologue of reminiscence, longing and heartache. Her own writing fits seamlessly into that high company. It’s thrilling, gorgeously imaginative and physically potent.

I recall, years ago, jumping straight to my feet to applaud Peter Carroll and Ron Blair’s The Christian Brother. I did it again, for many of the same reasons, for Margi Brown Ash and Eve.
Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: The Book of Death

Renegade Productions

Written by Joe Lui and the cast

Directed by Joe Lui

Designed by Sara Chirichilli

Featuring Paul Grabovac, Ella Hetherington and Moana Lutton

Blue Room Theatre

7 – 25 August, 2011

Paul Grabovac, Ella Hetherington and Moanna Lutton

Life as a theatre professional in this town is tough. You’ve got to be adaptable to survive.

The best survivor I know is Joe Lui, the creator, co-writer and composer, director and lighting designer of the The Book of Death at the Blue Room. Even more impressive than his skills and work ethic is that he is always prepared to challenge and confront, often quite brutally.

He’s also a natural collaborator, and he’s gathered some fine and brave artists for this show. Together, they’ve produced a work that, while often uncomfortable and elusive, is constantly thought provoking and committed.

Theatre: Black as Michael Jackson/ Hello, My Name is…

Black as Michael Jackson and other identity monologues

by Karla Hart and Michelle White

directed by Monica Main

performed by Karla Hart and Della Rae Morrison

Yirra Yaakin at Blue Room Theatre

19 June - 7 July, 2012

Hello, My Name is…

Conceived, directed and performed by Nicola Gunn

Blue Room Theatre

12 - 30 June, 2012

Yirra Yaakin, WA’s fine indigenous theatre company, is bringing two shows to the Blue Room’s first 2012 season.

The first, Black as Michael Jackson, written by Karla Hart and Michelle White and performed by Hart and Della Rae Morrison, is a series of loosely connected vignettes that deal with questions of identity in indigenous life and culture in Perth and regional WA.

At its best it’s funny, confronting and revealing. Hart is a feisty, valiant actor, and she brings a combative energy to her recurring character, Amy, and other roles. Morrison’s Nell is older and sadder, and their combination gives a range of experience to the happy, funny, sorrowful and tragic circumstances they describe.

The later show at the Blue Room, Melbourne performance artist Nicola Gunn’s Hello, My Name Is … all but defies review. Gunn is a theatrical risk-taker, and this piece, which she cheerfully admits is in the very early stages of its development, is a big one.  

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian  

     

Theatre: Skin

Written, directed and performed by Humphrey Bower

With music by Leon Ewing

Blue Room Theatre

April 24 – May 12, 2012

It’s no secret that I didn’t buy into the acclaim that surrounded Humphrey Bower’s award-winning Wish last year. Despite the quality of the performances, and of the production generally, in my view the story – of a lonely man’s emotional and sexual relationship with a female gorilla – lacked the necessary wider meaning or allegorical power to justify its lurid premise.

Bower returns to the Blue Room with Skin, a first-person telling of the stories of two Australian men in alien environments. It has all the strengths of Wish, and the great advantage of having something real to say about us, and our lives.

Link here  to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: D.I.Y. Disaster Movie

Blue Room Theatre and Longwood Productions

Featuring Damon Lockwood, Sam Longley and Aaron McCann

Blue Room Theatre

November 30 – December 11, 2010

There's Lava Coming Down the Hill, Mommy!

As the Moon, adrift from its orbit, plummets toward the helpless Earth, the discredited scientist Derwent Silverman and his nemesis Sheldon Monsanto are holed up in the magnetic crater. The bodies of Silverman's high school sweetheart Chardonnay, his old friend Brett Baguette, the ominous Colonel Ivan Nokabolokov, little Alice and the Mexican amigos Pablo and Lupé lie broken around them.

Only they, and the faithful mutt Rufus, can save the world, and then only if Silverman can hurl a block of parmesan cheese at the approaching satellite. He swings a giant kitchen spoon, the cheese crashes into the lunar surface and the gigantic threat is averted.

We are saved! Rufus barks happily.

Sadly, you’ll never see this story told again, but Sam Longley and Damon Lockwood, who concocted it, contend you’ve seen it all before – every time you watch that most mongrel of Hollywood genres, the disaster movie.

And they go about proving their point cleverly, first improvising a story based on a disaster movie theme selected by the spin of a chocolate wheel from 20 published in the program. Ours – you guessed it – was “Falling Moon”; not so lucky audiences might get “Dugong v Panda” or that hoary old staple “Thinking, Flying, Heat Resistant Hail”.

The story unfolds, with characters named by the audience and consistent with what Longley and Lockwood claim are the Seven Rules of a Disaster Movie, which range from “everything can be fixed with dodgy science” to “the dog never dies” (good boy, Rufus).

While this is happening, the third member of the crew, director of photography Aaron McCann, is filming the scenes and inserting cut-aways and close ups of action on improbable miniature sets. The purpose of all this activity becomes clear when we return after interval and watch the movie we’ve just seen made. It’s a clever and original touch, and ticks a lot of good comedic boxes without overstaying its welcome.

Both Longley and Lockwood are charismatic and engaging comedians very much in the Chaser mould, and the tiny Blue Room space is perfect for a show that’s not far removed from a party piece.

It is, after all, summer in Perth and this sort of neo-panto is well suited to nights when you’re probably more inclined to be thinking of the bar than the Bard.

I’m not for a minute suggesting that D.I.Y. Disaster Movie is either great art or even great comedy; like a lot of full-length improv, it’s too scratchy and adolescent for that. And I’m certainly not suggesting it’s going to change the world.

Unless, of course, Derwent Silverman’s piece of cheese misses the Moon!

An edited version of this review appeared in The West Australian 3.12.10