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: The Irresistible (★★★★½)

Side Pony Productions and The Last Great Hunt
Written and directed by Zoe Pepper
Written and performed by Adriane Daff and Tim Watts
Composer Ash Gibson Greig
Set and costume designer Jonathon Oxlade
Lighting designer Richard Vabre
Sound designer Phil Dowling
Until June 24

The Irresistible is as singular and wholly realised a theatre experience as has been mounted in Perth, and the apogee – so far at least ­– of the intention, and work, of the writer and director Zoe Pepper, working with Tim Watts and Adriane Daff of the busy and multi-faceted company, The Last Great Hunt.

Its achievement rests on the rigour of Pepper’s creative processes and the knockout technical effects integral to it. That work ­– by the composer Ash Gibson Greig, physical designer Jonathon Oxlade, lighting designer Richard Vabre, sound designer Phil Downing and the amazing gadgeteer Anthony “Gizmo” Watts ­– is unified, complete and often purposefully disorienting.

Into the ferment of sight and sound they have created venture the performers Watts and Daff, who co-wrote with Pepper. The characters they inhabit, and the stories they tell, ricochet around age, gender and relationships with dizzying pace and a kind of narrative violence.
The vocal distortions created by Ableton Live software (the same as used in Complicite's startling The Encounter at this year's PIAF) and controlled by the performers allow them to play over a dozen distinct characters. 

Watts is as intelligent and precise as always, and Daff is ferocious, scouring her characters raw. She is highly-charged, sometimes vicious, and gives the stand-out performance of the Perth stage this year thus far.

I listened in to foyer conversations after the show, and was amazed (and a little chastened) to hear audience members discussing the characters and their activities as if this was a conventional story and they were conventionally presented characters. I simply have no idea how they untangled it.

If that sounds like a criticism of the play, it’s far from it. Sure, there’s always room in new work to hone narrative clarity and character definition, and maybe The Irresistible will be more finely chiselled as it is played, but, in truth, that’s neither here nor there.

It’s the psychology of these characters – of all of us really – that matters to Pepper, Watts and Daff; how we position ourselves, how we see the world and judge the people in it, and how wrong, how dangerous, we can be.

There’s an example playing out right now, in the real-world case of the girl texting her boyfriend to go back into his exhaust fume-laden car. In The Irresistible a similar moment plays out; a polar opposite, in some ways, but not so different in others.

This is theatre with great strength of purpose, and a technical achievement that will leave you gobsmacked.

The Irresistible is simply irresistible. You shouldn’t try to.             

Theatre: From the Rubble (★★★½)

Perth Theatre Company
Conceived and directed by Melissa Cantwell
From stories by Sophie McNeill
Visual design by Fleur Elise Noble
Composed by Joe Lui and Mei Saraswati
Sound design by Joe Lui
Audiovisual technician Mia Holton
Performed by Mei Saraswati, Tina Torabi and Mikala Westall
PICA 16 – 28 March  

Mei Saraswati

The work of the remarkable young WA journalist Sophie McNeill has taken her deep into the world’s rubble. The stories she has brought back from it are largely of the dead and wounded, the innocent and unarmed, mothers and their children, the old and defenceless.
Inspired by McNeill and her stories from Afghanistan, Perth Theatre Company’s Melissa Cantwell has devised an artistically ambitious and generally impressive production that is as much about the universal as any particular.
From the Rubble is tough, uncompromising work (don’t look for even the darkest of black humour here) and will not be for everyone’s taste or stomach. It is, however, the bearer of some grim truths, and, for that alone, it merits your attention.        
Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Falling Through Clouds

The Last Great Hunt
Created and Performed by Tim Watts, Arielle Gray, Adriane Daff and Chris Isaacs
Music by Ash Gibson Greig
Set design by Anthony Watts
PICA
22 September – 11 October
 
Tim Watts, Arielle Gray and Chris Isaacs are great in the dark. Put them in a black room, turn out the lights, get Tim’s amazing dad to make things with paper and scissors, cardboard boxes, a few pin lights and a Texta or two – and the result is the highly original, engaging shows that have taken them around the world.
Falling Through Clouds is the third of these small sagas (following The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik and It’s Dark Outside), and for it Watts, Gray and Isaacs are joined by Adriane Daff, one of the other members of The Last Great Hunt Theatre Company
Daff is Mary, a geneticist in a future where birds are extinct. She has a one-year contract to recreate a bird, and have it fly. Or, at least, that’s what she dreams. Watts’s idea (he’s credited as the ‘initiating artist’ here) is to her impossible dream to life.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Second Hands

Little y Theatre
Written and directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler
Developed and performed by Austin Castiglione, Nick Maclaine, Holly Garvey, Georgia King and Renee Newman-Storen
For Fringe World
PICA until Feb 22

I suggested to some people who had just seen Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s ghoulish suburban comedy, Second Hands, that he could be the next David Williamson.
They were horrified that I would consign such an adventurous young writer to the remainder bin of Australian theatre, trotting out middlebrow current affairs dramas to pad out the subscription brochures of the state theatre companies, but they rather missed the point.
Which is that Fowler has the rare gift of writing genuinely funny, genuinely sharp dinner-table dialogue, and the ability to ratchet it up and down the emotional scale from banter to desperation at will. Only time will tell how Fowler chooses to use his ability; what’s indisputable is that he’s got it, and in spades.

Theatre: 10,000 Beers

By Alex Broun
Directed by Sussanah Thompson
Featuring Andrew Southern, James Porter, Joel Sammels and Paul Grabovic
PICA until Feb 1

This play about blokes who play football tells an authentic, convincing sporting story without a ball in sight. Well, not a football, at least (full-frontal nudity, adult language and themes warnings apply).
The 27 players from the Port Hedland Pirates are down in Perth for their end-of-season mad weekend. Their mission – to down 10,000 beers.
There is a stupendous bar crawl (it’s not a bad beginner’s guide to the watering holes of Perth and Freo), there is chundering, there are fights, there are the inevitable slobbering home truths. But there are also solidly drawn personalities and nuanced relationships, and a convincing transposition of the qualities and shortcomings the Pirates display on the field to their lives.
It’s fair to say that Broun and Thompson shy away from really exploring the darker side of these colossally male pursuits, but that would make 10,000 Beers a different play.
It would be hard, though, to make it more satisfying, insightful and entertaining than it already is. 


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Crash Course

Performing Lines WA
Created and performed by James Berlyn
with Sarah Nelson
Directed by Nikki Heywood
PICA until November 30

James Berlyn has constructed a language, Winfrien, of his own, and, in the hour of Crash Course, he sets about teaching it to us.
Our good work is rewarded with an encouraging “kweiloo”, as Berlyn helps – “tsoopun” – us adapt – “arn-tsunder” – to speaking – “ka-ka” – and writing – “glicken” – in this unfamiliar language.
Before the hour was up, and much to my amazement, I share with my classmates the first, dim, sense that understanding, perhaps even mastery, of Winfein isn’t unattainable. It’s an exhilarating feeling, an emotion of logic, like that which great music or dance elicits.
Berlyn delivers all this with skill and magnetism. There are little winks and nudges from the “real” world – at one point, buried so far under his Winfeinish accent you could hardly decipher them, he recited a list of English-language poets; Shakespeare, Joyce, Eliot, Yeats – but his command never drops, you never think he is talking anything but cogent, coherent Winfrien.
Crash Course was great fun, it was immensely thought provoking, and, above all, it was very, very kweiloo.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian 

Performance: Proximity Festival

Curated by James Berlyn and Sarah Rowbottam
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
Until November 2

I've never run the Trans-Sahara Marathon or tried the Swim Around Tassie, but I did attempt all three programs at the Proximity Festival at PICA in one night - and that really was a feat of human endurance.
A dozen solo acts, each performing to an audience of one, is an intriguing concept. It's immaculately organised by curators James Berlyn and Sarah Rowbottam, stage manager Mary Wolfla and their team of wranglers who move us from act to act.
It goes without saying that you're in for a range of encounters and you're going to be captivated and challenged by some acts more than others.
But if, as I was, you're going to be immersed in something for more than four hours, there needs to be an overarching sensation that drives you deeper and deeper into the experience. In that, I'm afraid, Proximity fell well short.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian.

Theatre: I'm Your Man

A Belvoir production

Created and directed by Roslyn Oades

Performed by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Katia Molino, Billy McPherson, Justin Rosniak and John Shrimpton

PICA and Mandurah Performing Arts Centre until August 3

Billy 'The Kid' Dib

Boxing defies the understandable public revulsion and incontrovertible medical evidence that, you’d think, should have consigned it to history along with throwing folk to lions for the crowd’s entertainment.

One reason could be that boxing is unique among sports for the life and death drama and tight focus that allow it to work on stage and screen.

The writer and director Roslyn Oades’s singular achievement in I’m Your Man is to show how the actual words of fighters and trainers, exactly reproduced, are a fertile source of real life drama, humanity and a beaten-up, but still beautiful, poetry.

Theatre: One Night Echo

The Duck House

Written by Gita Bezard

Directed by Kathryn Osborne

Performed and devised by Alissa Claessens, Brendan Ewing, Fran Middleton, Will O’Mahoney and Tyrone Robinson, with Tim Watts

PICA

November 8 - 17, 2012

Fran Middleton, Brendan Ewing and Alissa Claessens

For students of Greek mythology (and, after a quick refresher course on Wikipedia, us mere mortals), the central conceit of The Duck House’s stylish, brittle party piece at PICA is a delicious game of spot the nymphs and satyrs.

The party in question has been thrown by Theo (Will O’Mahoney), whose unrelenting narcissism gives his eponymous alter-identity away immediately. He’s hired a chick named Echo (google “Echo, Greek mythology”) to serve drinks. The guests arrive; his diffident, intelligent mate Eddie (Brendan Ewing), the magnetic, luminous Celeste (Alissa Claessens) and a lithe, shadowy young man (Tyrone Robinson) with hair swept over like horns. She is Selene, goddess of the moon; they are her lovers Endymion, the astronomer, and Pan, the goat, the god of the wild. This is no safe place for either Echo the nymph or Echo the girl, and, as in the myth, it tears her apart.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian 

Theatre: Thrashing Without Looking

Created and performed by Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Thoms, Martyn Coutts, Tristan Meecham and Wiloh S. Weiland

Sound Design by Alan Nguyen

PICA

Until August 25

When the boundaries between performing artists and their audience come down, the mix can be unpredictable and a little intimidating.

The assumed contract – you perform, I observe and applaud (or otherwise) – is broken when you are in close contact, and even one-on-one, with the performer. What is my contribution to all this meant to be? Who will now give their approval? Am I to judge myself?

Eek!

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Persians

by Aeschylus, translated by Aaron Poochigian

Happy Dagger and Little y theatre companies

Directed by Andrew Hale

Performed by Christie Sistrunk, Austin Castiglione, Maitland Schnaars, Leon Osborn, Helen Angell, Lynsey Trench, Megan Moir, Ellen O’Connor and Laura Hopwood

Designed by Sarah Affleck

Lighting designed by Joe Lui

Music by Adam Burges, performed by The Men from Another Place

PICA

15 - 19 February, 2012

Aeschylus

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of The Persians, the tragedy of the rout of the navy and army of Xerxes the Great by the Greeks at Salamis. The oldest surviving play, it gives us the first insight into the consciousness of mankind as expressed by theatre. Told by an exact contemporary (Aeschylus fought at both Salamis and, some years earlier, the epochal battle of Marathon) it is also the first surviving example of drama’s unique ability to frame events and personalities. It may also be the first surviving example of propaganda.

There’s no denying, too, that as the eyes of the world turn anxiously to the most recent inheritors of Xerxes’ domain – and, ironically and for different reasons, to his Greek enemies – the chroniclers and dramatisers of ancient empires and the conduct of their affairs hold a distant mirror to us and our times.

Persians, a new translation by the American scholar and poet Aaron Poochigian, does a fine job maintaining the gravitas of Greek tragedy with just enough contemporary rhythm and idiom to allow the ancient work to work for a modern audience.

Link here  to the complete review in The West Australian 

Theatre: …miskien

Written by Tara Louise Notcutt, Albert Pretorius and Gideon Lombard

Directed by Tara Louise Notcutt

Performed by Albert Pretorius and Gideon Lombard

PICA

15 - 19 February 19

Gideon Lombard

A little way into this powerful drama of dead-end lives and male bonding in modern South Africa, I realised that I had never heard Afrikaans spoken in conversation. There is much about ordinary lives in that great country, our neighbour but for 8000 kms of ocean, that are hidden from us by the enormous events that have swirled around it.

We know Mandela, but do we know Layton (Gideon Lombard) and Cormac (Albert Pretorius) the two Capetown 25-year-old office workers whose workaday world and relationship is the story of the play? As it turns out, we know them very well, because they are our lives as well.

Hilarious and awfully sad, …miskien is one of the highlights of the Fringe.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Perth Fringe Festival: The Problem with Evil

Devised and performed by Leon Ewing

PICA Performance Space

February 9, 2011

The political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” while covering the 1961 trial of the Nazi monster Adolf Eichmann.

At the risk of trivialising her insight, the problem with Perth audiovisual performance artist Leon Ewing’s Fringe Festival show about evil is, also, its banality.

Click here to read the full review in The West Australian