Theatre: Catastrophes

 Created and performed by Renée Newman and Ella Hetherington
Composer Ben Collins
Scenographer Mark Haslam
PICA
August 16 - 26

Renée Newman and Ella Hetherington (pic Aaron Claringbold)

I’m not the first person to point out the similarities between Renée Newman and Ella Hetherington’s Catastrophes and Jeffrey Jay Fowler and Sarah Reuben’s Hypotheticals (reviewed in From the Turnstiles on July 31), and they are revealing.

Newman, Hetherington, Fowler and Reuben are intelligent, aware and experienced theatre-makers, and while their approach to the subject of parenthood is, perforce, different (the former have and are experiencing it, the latter are contemplating it) the issues they deal with or imagine, the choices they make or imagine are much the same.

Which is hardly surprising, and very real. The decision to have children that once seemed about personal logistics underpinned by a universally held belief that it should, and would, happen, are now complicated by changing ambitions and ideas of fulfillment, the complexity of daily life and the dark fears of a world increasingly out of natural and human balance. Can I have a child becomes should I have a child?

Newman and Hetherington have had those children though, the now five-year-olds Frankie and Benji, so the stories in Catastrophes are vastly more immediate, corporeal (and, in a couple of memorably nightmarish comic situations, scatological) than those in Hypotheticals.

Frank, funny, scary and sad, they are a piece of verbatim theatre gathered over years of text messages, phone calls and conversations – Hetherington for much of them living in Sydney, Newman in Perth – structured as an interrogation by the two friends of each other and themselves.

It’s an effective method of compressing a cosmos of feelings and experiences into a tight 60 minutes of gripping theatre.

It’s also a great challenge for the two actors, just in its sheer compressed workload but, more importantly, in the expression of their personality and emotion. Hetherington and Newman, though, are more than up to the task. They both have phenomenal lucidity and energy, Hetherington in her speed and animation, Newman in stillness and poise. The contrast between them is the punctuation that gives this work form and impact.

That grammar is accentuated by Mark Haslam’s set of billowing sailcloth that rises and dives above and beyond the performers, and Ben Collins’ music of biological tempos and murmurings, a soundscape of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.

Motherhood, mysterious, bewildering and consuming, emerges from Catastrophes as life’s great upheaval and the resolution of its drama.

And for mothers, despite the support of loving partners, despite the confidences of good friends, despite the overwhelming closeness of and to their children, it's a dance they do alone.      

Theatre: Selkie (★★★½)

by Finn O’Branagain
Directed by Joe Lui
Choreography by Laura Boynes
Designed by Cherish Marrington
Sound and lighting designed by Joe Lui
Featuring Paul Grabovac, Ella Hetherington, Kynan Hughes and Yilin Kong
The Blue Room
Until April 30

Yilin Kong (pic Cameron Etchells)

The legend of the selkie, seal-like creatures who shed their skins to live on dry land among humans, is part of the folklore of the islands and coasts of the remote North Atlantic.
It’s easy to see why the playwright Finn O’Branagáin, whose interest in legend and myth was manifest in last year’s The Epic, would be drawn to the selkie, and its no surprise that Joe Lui should leap at the chance to direct the result.
They are a formidable team, and Selkie is a provocative and disquieting work.The story might have both more complexity and clarity (at 45 minutes, it has the time to deliver both), and, for all its quality, the design could use more depth and intricacy.
Even as it stands, though, Selkie is a noteworthy start to a Blue Room season of increasing importance to Perth theatre.

Read the complete review in The West Australian 

Theatre: The Red Balloon (★★★★)

By Albert Lamorisse
Adapted by Hilary Bell
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Chrissie Parrott
Set and costumes designed by India Mehta
Lighting designed by Trent Suidgeest
Sound designer and composer Ash Gibson Greig
With Dylan Christidis, St John Cowcher, Ella Hetherington, Eloise Hunter, Ben Mortley and Sarah Nelson
State Theatre Centre Studio
Until 17 October

To successfully adapt a well-known and loved film to the stage takes a little luck and lots of good decision-making.
Hilary Bell’s adaptation of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 Oscar-winning short film The Red Balloon has both in spades.
In its original form, the story is a simple one, but Bell fleshes out the enigmatic original, largely by the introduction of three animal characters that narrate and comment on the otherwise all-but-wordless action. They are wise and entertaining additions.
It was an inspired decision to invite the celebrated choreographer Chrissie Parrott to direct the show. Her sensibility fits perfectly with the mood of the work, and the dances of balloons, the boy and girl, and the vermin, are highlights.
Kids are the best reviewers of their theatre, and they do it in real time, with laughter, gasps of wonderment and, especially, questions.
There were plenty of all three for this wonderful, impressively staged, story.


Read the complete review in The West Australian.

Theatre: A Circle of Buzzards (★★★)

Written by Nathaniel Moncrieff
Directed by Joe Lui
Performed by Austin Castiglione, Jeremy Mitchell and Ella Hetherington
PICA
Until 21 Feb

In Steve Earle’s song, A Gringo’s Tale, two American men strike up a conversation at a bar in an out-of-the-way Mexican town. One is a tourist; the other is a fugitive, hiding from some shadowy CIA operatives.
Substitute Australians for Americans, Spain for Mexico and an Australian mining company called The Saetón Group for the CIA and you’ve got the set-up for Nathaniel Moncrieff’s tidy little thriller, A Circle of Buzzards.
What Earle neglected, and Moncrieff has made the engine of his narrative, is the identity of the tourist, and his reasons for being in the bar plying his companion with drinks.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: The Tribe

Written and directed by Joe Lui
Designed by India Caitlin Mehta
Performed by Ella Hetherington, Paul Grabovac and Mikala Westall
The Blue Room Theatre
Until November 2

I play a little game with the writer, director, musician and lighting and sound designer Joe Lui. It comprises using more and more extravagant superlatives to describe the polymathematical Lui (whoops! I’ve done it again) who sometimes seems the mortar without which the entire edifice of alternative theatre in Perth would collapse.
It’s hard, though, to imagine an adjective that would do Lui’s epic, The Tribe, justice. “Ambitious” hardly suffices to describe a play that re-jigs Paradise Lost before interval, before moving on to six million years of evolutionary theory after drinks.

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: 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: This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing

By Finegan Kruckemeyer

Barking Gecko Theatre Company

Directed by Noel Jordan

Designed by Alicia Clements, Quincy Grant and Trent Suidgeest

Performed by Ella Hetherington, Jo Morris, Sarah Nelson and Drayton Morley

Subiaco Arts Centre

Until July 21

Ella Hetherington, Jo Morris and Sarah Nelson

The most important thing is always the telling of the story; children demand imagination and clarity, and adults deserve it. This is the secret of fables and fairy stories, and it’s the standard by which theatre for children can best be judged.

By that measure, and plenty of others beside, Barking Gecko’s show for these school holidays, This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing, was a genuinely enjoyable experience for the parents, grandparents and stray adults in the audience. For the kids (the play is recommended for six-year-olds and up), I turned to the infallible wriggle-meter, and the needle swung well away from “Bored and Restless” to the “Got ‘Em” end of the dial after a bit of customary early shuffling, and despite a little impatience towards the end (the play might be just a smidgen long).

As always with kids, the more their imagination is engaged, the more their interest is aroused. The fabulous scenes where Morris’s Beatrix’s lighthouse ship, made from a lantern, a bucket and a whisk, sails away to adventure, and where Hetherington’s fierce Albienne, full of Joan of Arc-like martial ardour, fights off the invaders with flour and ice-cream scoops, had them especially gripped and entranced. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian