Theatre: The Fremantle Candidate

Deckchair Theatre

Written by Ingle Knight

Directed by Chris Bendall

Designed by Fiona Bruce

Featuring Steve Turner, Geoff Kelso, Ben D’Addario, Igor Sas, Christie Sistrunk and James Hagen

PICA

Until August 5

John Curtin

I hope the teaching of Australian history has improved since my schooldays. Back then, after laborious lists of the early explorers and governors and hoary tales of squatters, shearers and swaggies (all the better for making sense of Waltzing Matilda, I suppose), the narrative all but collapsed.

Apart from the disgraceful marginalisation of Aboriginal history and the lives of women, perhaps the greatest tragedy was the paucity of our Twentieth Century political history. The mighty battles over free trade, the franchise and industrial relations, conscription, the banks and the communist party were a passing blur, and the great figures who fought them, Deakin, Barton, Fisher and Hughes, Theodore and Lang, Lyons, Chifley, Evatt and even the never-ending Menzies were derelict sketches without personality or insight.

With so little to spark our imagination, it’s hardly surprising that political biographies other than those of current or recent figures are so rare in print, on film or on stage. All the more reason to welcome Ingle Knight’s examination of the pivotal years in the career of perhaps our greatest, certainly our most intriguing, leader, John Curtin.

Theatre: The Magic Hour

Deckchair Theatre

Written by Vanessa Bates

Directed by Chris Bendall

Set and costume design by Alicia Clements

Light and sound designed by Joe Lui

Performed by Ursula Yovich

Ursula Yovich (pic: Jon Green)

Ursula Yovich is an experienced and garlanded performer yet, in The Magic Hour, she continues to challenge herself and her craft.

These retellings of iconic fairy stories take her away from her signature motifs, her singing and her Aboriginal heritage, but playwright Vanessa Bates and director Chris Bendall have created a character in the storyteller who, while ethnically non-specific, plays beautifully to Yovich’s strengths. Clearly relishing the chance to fly out of her comfort zone, she delivers a potent, nuanced performance that had the Deckchair Theatre audience on its feet at the curtain.

Theatre: The Modern International Dead

Deckchair Theatre

Written by Damien Millar

Directed by Chris Bendall

Featuring Steve Turner, Michelle Fornasier and Stuart Halusz

Victoria Hall, Fremantle

March 17  - April 2, 2011

Steve Turner and Michelle Fornasier

We woke the morning after the opening of Deckchair Theatre’s production of Damien Millar’s The Modern International Dead to yet another country in flames. Like Somalia, like Kosovo, Iraq, Cambodia, Rwanda and East Timor before it, Libya joins the nightmare list of countries whose people endure torture and execution, disease and starvation, incursion and insurgency, ethnic violence and the deadly infection of the minefield. They are the modern international dead of the play’s very apt title.

Miller’s play centres on the stories of three Australians dealing with these seemingly endless agonies. 

The closer the play stayed to the real stories of real people plainly told, the more effective it was. Two monologues describing the terrible consequences of a land mine explosion in Cambodia and a car hijacking in Somalia were its emotional and dramatic high points. 

During these scenes, and in others where the characters bore plain, direct witness to actual events, the production had a similar impact to the powerful and illuminating Aftermath, recently seen at the Perth Festival.

The Modern International Dead isn’t everything it could be, but it still deserves praise for bringing a terrible darkness to the light, and for a performance from Steve Turner that alone is worth the price of admission.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Footnote: I’ve had a brief email exchange with Chris Bendall about the extent to which Damien Millar is transcribing stories told to him, especially the Somalia carjacking story told by the Rod Barton character in the play, which relates to some of my comments in the full review in The West.
 Bendall tells me that, while that story is not a transcription, “the incident, reactions and actions are all factual”.
“The same incident is described in the book Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures). In Damien’s interviews apparently Rod spoke of the story but not nearly to the same length, so Damien has re-constructed (it) using his voice. 
“I guess the interesting thing about the play is it feels like verbatim theatre, and nothing is made up so it's all based on the extensive interviews Damien conducted, but he has gotten inside the voices of each of the actual people and recrafted their words for dramatic purposes –which is why he uses the tag ‘witness theatre’ more than ‘verbatim”, Bendall says.