Theatre: Glengarry Glenn Ross (★★★★)

Will O'Mahony and Peter Rowsthorn

by David Mamet
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Kate Cherry

Designed by Richard Roberts
With Luke Hewitt, Ben Mortley, Will O’Mahony, Kenneth Ransom, Peter Rowsthorn, Steve Turner and Damian Walshe-Howling

Heath Ledger Theatre
Until June 14

Once again Kate Cherry and Black Swan show the appetite and aptitude for the late 20th Century American theatre canon that made Laughter on the 23rd Floor the hit of their 2014 season.
Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s hugely influential drama of venality and the despairing criminality it breeds, might not have the irresistible exuberance of Neil Simon’s memoir, but it shares its energy and masterful use of language. Cherry’s vigorous, uncomplicated staging, supported by a talented, finely balanced cast, does justice to it in this impressive production at the Heath Ledger.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian 

Theatre: Dinner (★★½)

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Written by Moira Buffini
Directed by Kate Cherry
Set and lighting designed by Trent Suidgeest
Sound designer and composer Ash Gibson Greig
With Rebecca Davis, Stuart Halusz, Greg McNeill, Kenneth Ransom, Steve Turner, Alison van Reeken and Tasma Walton
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Until 29 March 

There’s a line in Moira Buffini’s 2002 play, Dinner, when a woman, overhearing an ex-soldier’s stories of his violent exploits in Liberia, exclaims “You killed a LIBRARIAN??”. Boom-Tish!
Make of that gag what you will, but we can assume those involved in Dinner aren’t approaching the undertaking too seriously. Or at least they shouldn’t be.
Dinner is professionally prepared and well served. It’s just hard to fathom why anyone bothered to reheat it.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian
  

Theatre: Laughter on the 23rd Floor

Peter Rowsthorn (pic: Gary Marsh)

Black Swan State Theatre Company
by Neil Simon
Directed by Kate Cherry
Designed by Lauren Ross
With Humphrey Bower, Stuart Halusz, Damon Lockwood, Jo Morris, Ben Mortley, Peter Rowsthorn, Igor Sas, Lara Schwerdt and James Sweeny

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Until September 21

We live in a golden age of television comedy, but there was another. And Sid Caesar, as his name suggests, was its king. Caesar, who died early this year, was a masterful comedian with superb comic ideas who gathered around him a pack of talented, ambitious, mainly Jewish, writers to generate a weekly, 90-minute live show, Your Show of Show, that ran over 139 episodes from 1950 to 1954. It dominated the ratings and set many of the parameters for television comedy that still apply today.
You don’t have to spend long on the writer’s floor at NBC in Rockefeller Plaza to hear laughter from other rooms, echoing back down the decades from Seinfeld and 30 Rock.
Neil Simon was one of Caesar’s writers, and this is his love letter to his colleagues, and especially to the unpredictable genius who paid his bills and forged his talent.
For a writer with Simon’s prolific brilliance and life story, the play is a cinch. Put eight comedians in a room, sketch out the times—Joseph McCarthy is shaming the US Senate, Josef Stalin dying in the Kremlin—give them remembered or invented punch lines and let them rip.
You can legitimately accuse Simon of laziness: most of the external storylines peter out, there’s little personal consequence in the central action and there’s a downy sentimental mist over the characters and proceedings. But when everyone’s having this much fun, it’s hard to care very much about it.

Theatre: The Seagull

Black Swan State Theatre Company
by Anton Chekhov
adapted by Hilary Bell
Directed by Kate Cherry
Designed by Fiona Bruce
With Adam Booth, Rebecca Davis, Leila George, Michael Loney, Andrew McFarlane, Luke McMahon, Greg McNeill, Sarah McNeill, Ben Mortley and Greta Scacchi

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Until August 31
 
This remounting of The Seagull, Anton Chekhov’s great first play, owes much to a modest, approachable adaptation by Hillary Bell, effectively executed by its director, Kate Cherry.
Bell, who has no Russian, has interpreted several English translations of the play made over the past century—if this sounds like “adaptation by committee”, Bell seems to be happy to live, and Cherry to work, with it.
The result stays loyal to its roots—we remain by a Russian lake, not in an Australian beach house or a Long Island estate. The characters speak in their own accents, but traditional representations of the Russian idiom remain. They are dressed, by the designer Fiona Bruce, as per fin de siècle Russia, and her set, a stripped-down proscenium, is like many that have housed the play in the past 120 years. 
So this Seagull is not spectacular, or edgy, but it is handsome and approachable. If it’s something of museum piece, that’s not the worst charge that can be levelled at a work of its significance in theatre history.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: A Streetcar Named Desire

Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Kate Cherry
Designed by Christina Smith
Sound designer and composer Ben Collins
With Ben D’Addario, Nathaniel Dean, Callum Fletcher, Luke Hewitt, Michael Loney, Rhoda Lopez, Jo Morris, Sigrid Thornton, Steve Turner, Alison van Reeken and Irma Woods

Black Swan State Theatre Company 
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Extended to April 11

There’s no doubt about A Streetcar Named Desire. Its impact on the American stage and its cinema, and the consequences of its writing and performance are still with us 67 years after its debut.
Its tumultuous reception, the famous opening-night standing ovation, the huge critical and popular success that followed it, and the 1951 film version, suggest audiences were ready to see real life, its violence, its sexuality and the savagery with which it tears down anachronism, pretention and delusion, played as it is for what it is.
Which all makes Streetcar a tricky conveyance for its director and stars.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Shrine

Whitney Richards

Tim Winton
Directed by Kate Cherry
Designed by Trent Suidgeest

With Paul Ashcroft, John Howard, Luke McMahon, Sarah McNeill, Will McNeill and Whitney Richards
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
August 31 – Sept 15, 2013

Shrine, the third of Tim Winton’s annual forays with Black Swan into writing for the stage, leaves unanswered the question posed by his earlier Rising Water (2011) and Signs of Life (2012).
There’s no doubting his quality as a writer, the impact of his language and his instinct for character. He also has a wonderful knack for the transcendent, especially when his characters find themselves alone and exposed to nature.
Is this, though, enough to make him a playwright? Is the poet in Winton also a songwriter?

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Other Desert Cities

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Written by Jon Robin Baitz

Directed by Kate Cherry

Set and costume design by Christina Smith

Lighting designer Trent Suidgeest

with Janet Andrewartha, Conrad Coleby, Robert Coleby, Rebecca Davis and Vivienne Garrett

Heath Ledger Theatre

Until August 4

pic: Gary Marsh

Black Swan has, for the second time running, mounted a production that improves the material it’s working with. In Joanna Murray-Smith’s Day One, a Hotel, Evening, director Peter Houghton, designer Tracy Grant Lord and a strong cast made a more than satisfying entertainment from an improbable and inconsistent text.

Other Desert Cities, Jon Robin Baitz’s story of familial and political disintegration against the background of lotus land America, has some similar flaws, but they don’t diminish the sparkle of his dialogue, the magnetism of his characters and the quality of the play’s architecture.

The play is given an immaculate, CinemaScope reading by director Kate Cherry; it's dressed to kill by designer Christina Smith (once again producing a set for the Heath Ledger you’d spend your lottery winnings to live in) and lit with technicolor glamour by Trent Suidgeest. In the face of such excellence, there’s not much point picking over the script’s occasional shortcomings.

Theatre: The Importance of Being Earnest

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Written by Oscar Wilde

Directed by Kate Cherry

Set design by Alicia Clements

with Adriane Daff, Jenny Davis, Rebecca Davis, Stuart Halusz, Michael Loney, Pete Rowsthorn, Scott Sheridan and Pauline Whyman

Heath Ledger Theatre

Until March 28

Scott Sheridan and Adriane Daff (Garry Marsh pic)

The full title of Oscar Wilde’s most famous and popular comedy is The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Play for Serious People. It’s both an invitation and an admonition.

Conventional wisdom has Earnest as a witty, farcical dissection of late Victorian attitudes to love, marriage (and, more recently and contentiously, sex and even homosexuality), but that’s probably putting the hansom cab before the horse. I’m of the view he was using their hypocrisies and paradoxes as a jumping off point for a pure entertainment rather than the other way around.

It’s a perfectly legitimate pleasure to sit in a comfortable seat in a dimly-lit auditorium watching attractive, extravagantly costumed people in ludicrously funny situations saying intricately clever and memorable things to one another.

This Earnest will give you some, but not all, of that well-deserved delectation. I wouldn’t be surprised if this production finds its rhythm as its season progresses; but, on opening night at least, I’m afraid it was dancing with a limp.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Signs of Life

Tim Winton

Directed by Kate Cherry

Designed by Zoe Atkinson

With Tom E. Lewis, Helen Morse, George Shevstov and Pauline Whyman

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

July 31 – August 18, 2012

George Shevstov and Helen Morse

In Tim Winton’s Signs of Life we are re-introduced to two of the central characters in his 2002 novel, Dirt Music; Georgiana Jutland (Helen Morse), whose escape from dress circle Perth, and then from the boss cocky fisherman she’d taken up with, and Luther Fox (George Shevstov) the craypot poacher and ne’er-do-well she absconds with and for.

The Moore River runs through the play like it does the property. It hasn’t rained for five years, and everything, the riverbed, the olive trees, the birds, the wild dogs and Georgie herself, are dry as bone dust. 

As we anxiously wait for soaking rain right here, right now, in Perth, it’s easy to empathise when a character says “I don’t think it will ever rain. This is it. The end.”

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: The White Divers of Broome

by Hilary Bell

Directed by Kate Cherry

Featuring Caitlin Beresford-Ord, Adriane Daff, Kylie Farmer, Michelle Fornasier, Stuart Halusz, Sean Hawkins, Yutaka Izumihara, Miyuki Lotz, Kenneth Moraleda, Jo Morris, Greg McNeill, Tom O’Sullivan and Ian Toyne  

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

February 1 - 16, 2012

For the second consecutive year, Kate Cherry’s Black Swan State Theatre Company begins its season, and makes its contribution to the Perth Festival, with a sprawling tale of one of the skeletons in the closet of Australian history.

This is a good thing. For all its faults, at least last year’s Boundary Street shed some light on the strained relationship between Australian civilians and US servicemen during World War II.

Hilary Bell’s The White Divers of Broome does the same for the strange, exotic boom that drove the Kimberley town of Broome from its foundation in 1883 well into the 20^th century.

It’s a cracking story and powerful, instructive history. But whether it makes for great theatre is another question.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian. 

Theatre: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

By Tennessee Williams
Black Swan State Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre Company
Directed by Kate Cherry

Designed by Bruce McKinven

Featuring Cheree Cassidy, Tom O’Sullivan, John Stanton, Carol Burns, Caitlin Beresford-Ord, Hugh Parker, Damon Lockwood, Daniel Murphy and Gina Williams

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

Sept 10 – Oct 2, 2011

John Stanton and Carol Burns

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is an audacious, free-spirited American masterpiece given a clearly struck and handsome revival by director Kate Cherry in the centenary of its playwright’s birth. 

Its audacity lies in the almost complete elimination of plot and dramatic tension. The play takes place in real time in one room and, for almost all of its length, nothing consequential actually happens.

Even the one surprising thing that happens, Maggie’s startling announcement toward the play’s end, is unlikely to change these people or their lives, whether it is true or not.

Stripped of action and artifice, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a universal human drama of need and repulsion, love, hatred and, above all, lies and truth.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Rising Water

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Written by Tim Winton

Music by Ian Grandage

Directed by Kate Cherry

Designed by Christina Smith

Featuring Alison White, Claire Lovering, Geoff Kelso, John Howard, Stuart Halutz and Kai Arbuckle and Callum Fletcher (alternating)

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

June 25 – July 17, 2011

Rising Water marks the arrival of the Heath Ledger Theatre, and Black Swan as its resident company. It’s a big-hearted entertainment with some striking assets, the most important of which hits you the moment you take your seat.

Christina Smith has done the play, and the theatre space, a great service with her set; three boats bobbing – actually bobbing ­– in their pens, with deep blue gleaming water below and a transmuting Indian Ocean sky above.

It’s brilliant to look at, and a perfect platform on which director Cate Cherry can manage the story and her cast. Significantly, it's the first design that solves the problems of visual focus in the space and makes the great curving wood surfaces of the auditorium look right at home.

Theatre: A Midsummer Night's Dream

William Shakespeare

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Directed by Kate Cherry

Set design by Christina Smith

Costume design by Alicia Clements

Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by Ash Gibson Greig

Featuring James Beck, Elizabeth Blackmore, Benj D’Addario, Adriane Daff, Arielle Gray, Stuart Halusz, Brendan Hanson, Luke Hewitt, Natalie Holmwood, Michael Loney, Sam Longley, Kelton Pell, Myles Pollard, Kenneth Ransom, Scott Sheridan, Alison van Reeken and Shubhadra Young  

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

May 11 ­– 22, 2011

There’s no mystery to the enduring popularity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or its allure for directors and actors. The earliest of Shakespeare’s very greatest plays, its poetry – the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations selects 63 separate passages from it – and sheer sexiness, its bravura set pieces and memorable characters are an irresistible mix.

Alison van Reeken and Luke Hewitt 

Director Kate Cherry wisely lets the text, rather than any real or imagined sub-text, do the talking, and by and large it works for her.

Luke Hewitt’s turn as the immortal Bottom is a great success. Hewitt is a big, funny man, which makes Bottom the figure of fun meat and drink for him, but he’s got the sensitivity to deliver the character’s humanity and essential goodness. We can laugh at Bottom, but we need to respect him as well, and Hewitt makes us do both.

Alison van Reeken’s Titania is armed and dangerous, with weapons both human and supernatural at her disposal, even when lost in love or lust. She’s a knockout.

PIAF: Boundary Street

Written by Reg Cribb

Music by James Morrison

Directed by Kate Cherry

Featuring Adriane Daff, Rebecca Davis, Matt Dyktynski, Luke Hewitt, Christopher Kirby, Damon Lockwood. Clare Moss, Emma Pask, Kenneth Ransom, Gina Williams and Terry Yeboah, with James Morrison, Roger Garrood, Harry Morrison, John Morrison and Raymond Walker.  

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

Until March 20

Miss Lila Draper and Pte Bob Walker, New York City, dance to 
the US Fifth Air Corps Orchestra at Dr Carver's in 1943 .

This is an important production for many reasons, and the historic events on which it is loosely based, and the issues that arose from them, have been strangely neglected for almost 70 years.

I wish I could say Boundary Street steps up to these marks, but sadly it falls well short. Reg Cribb’s script is terribly episodic, with many short scenes that led nowhere yet required some awfully clunky set changes. Situations arise and disappear without explanation; the fate of the central characters is left unresolved in a denouement that lacks either historical accuracy or theatrical power. 

Director Kate Cherry has difficulty filling the stage with the forces at her disposal, leaving some scenes, especially the dance numbers, dreadfully exposed. Even the music, much of it original material by jazz legend James Morrison, who led the band, seemed tentative.

Too much is wrong with Boundary Street. Despite all the anticipation and high expectations, this play and this production are simply not ready for the public. 

The complete version of this review appeared in The West Australian link here.   Meanwhile, from the safety of his Canberra bunker, Ron Banks sent this spray in to The West, while Vickie Laurie's review for the ABC link here has some back-of-house detail to ponder.