Theatre: It's Dark Outside

The Last Great Hunt

Created and Performed by Tim Watts, Arielle Gray and Chris Isaacs

Set construction by Anthony Watts

Music by Rachael Dease

STC Studio

The Last Great Hunt's It's Dark Outside returns for a season at the STC Studio from March 16 - April 2. This review is adapted from that of its original 2012 season.

As our lives extend, the manifestations of our long declines come from the shadows. Dementia, Alzheimer’s, memory loss, sundowning syndrome (the specific subject of this play) are fearsome, insidious blights on so many lives.   

The team of Tim Watts, Arielle Gray and Chris Isaacs tackle these demons head on in It’s Dark Outside, and the result is a rare triumph of theatrical ingenuity and human compassion.

An old man (Gray performs behind the mask) gingerly takes his seat and gropes for a mug of tea that, inexplicably, isn’t where he thought he left it. It breaks on the floor, and he tries to drink from its shards. The sun is going down, and his connection with present reality is setting with it.

In the gloom, he goes wandering, and strange and wonderful things happen. His landscape becomes the wild west of his youthful imagination, a tent becomes his horse, a cloud his dog. His steps are followed by a moon shadow, a dark shape with a butterfly net. Is it death and oblivion, or is it his memory of himself as a boy?

When he rises from the tent of his dreams on the “Zs” of sleep, while a music box tinkles Somewhere Over the Rainbow, the stars are brilliant tears. The music in his head forms into a song, the only words in the play: “I’ll be your light/ when it’s dark outside”. It’s ineffably sad, and deeply, gently, moving.

I must emphasise what a thrilling entertainment this is, because I’d hate you to be discouraged by its sombre subject matter. Watts and his colleagues play in the theatre of ideas, and they stand or fall on their inventiveness. It’s Dark Outside has a dazzling multitude of both. The cloud dog is a superbly created delight; a dance to Peggy Lee’s I Love Being Here With You so sweet and sly it drew spontaneous applause from the audience. So often, if it weren’t so sad, it would be easy to laugh at the quirky brilliance of it all.

None of this will surprise anyone who saw Watts and co’s hugely successful Adventures of Alvin Sputnik. Their ability to play with shapes, sizes, silhouettes and sound effects remains just as impressive, but It’s Dark Outside is a much more coherent and powerful piece than its predecessor. The tenderness with which the performers manipulate their puppets and the eloquence of their wordless text is simply outstanding, while Rachael Dease’s lovely music and Anthony Watts’s memorable sets and gadgetry contribute greatly to the play’s achievement.  

There’s a touch of genius about The Last Great Hunt's work, and it’s on display in this, a highlight of the Perth stage over the past decade.    

Theatre: The Song Was Wrong (★★)

Jacinta Larcombe and George Shevtsov

Perth Theatre Company
Written and directed by Melissa Cantwell
Music composed and performed by Nick Wales
Set Design by Bruce McKinven
Sound design by Ben Collins
Lighting design by Matthew Marshall
Featuring Astrid Grant, Felix Jozeps, Jacinta Larcombe, Sarah Nelson, Thomas Papathanassiou, George Shevtsov
STC Studio until June 20

The Perth Theatre Company has put some significant runs on the board since it became the junior tenant of the State Theatre Centre in 2011, based on smart programming and some astute partnerships with independent companies like Weeping Spoon and Side Pony forged by its artistic director, Melissa Cantwell.
Cantwell has also demonstrated that she is a sharp, inventive director, often delivering productions with greater contemporary appeal than PTC’s larger upstairs neighbour, Black Swan.
But the company’s latest and most ambitious project, The Song Was Wrong, is a significant misstep.
New work needed to be tested, next door at the Blue Room or elsewhere – as many of PTT’s previous properties have been – before being given a full main stage production. It’s disconcerting that such a process wasn’t followed in this case.

Go to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Confidence Man (★★★)

By Zoe Pepper and Adrianne Daff
Perth Theatre Company and Side Pony Productions
Directed by Zoe Pepper
STC Studio until May 10
Theatre is generally a low-tech enterprise. Sure, little apples gleam in the dark from lighting and sound desks, but the essential business of theatre remains the activity of people deploying their skills and training in real time, and in person, in front of you.
But in Zoe Pepper and Adrianne Daff’s Confidence Man, all that human endeavour is pre-packaged and handed over to the audience to play with. The apples have taken over the orchard.
Audience members wearing huge, cartoonish masks play Confidence Man’s six characters. They each have a smart phone that gives them individual stage instructions and plays their pre-recorded dialogue for them to mime to. The rest of the audience sits in a single row around a huge set, the floorplan of Pete’s house. Each of them wears a headset and cradles a smartphone with which they can pick and choose the characters they follow as the story unfolds.
There’s a clear legitimacy to this approach, because it more accurately imitates life than conventional theatre, where the audience sees everything from a single point of view. Here the audience sees only part of the story, from one of several perspectives, like Kurosawa’s Rashomon turned back on itself. It’s an intriguing method of storytelling, and makes the plot three-dimensional and genuinely exciting as it reaches its climax.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian   

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: White Rabbit, Red Rabbit

Perth Theatre Company
Written by Nassim Soleimanpour
Sound and lighting designer Joe Lui
With solo performers, including Sam Longley and Hayley McElhinney
STC Studio until September 13
 
On a black stage there are a wooden stepladder, a chair and a table, on which are placed two glasses of water, a teaspoon and an envelope.
A solo performer enters with a small vial of white powder and opens the envelope.
It contains the script of the Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. The performer hasn’t seen it before and, apart from a very basic briefing (“you will be asked to impersonate an ostrich”), doesn’t know what to expect.
There’s little the spoiler convention allows me to tell you about what happens thereafter, but I can at least explain something of why it does.

Theatre: Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography

Andrea Gibbs (pic Brett Boardman)

Perth Theatre Company and Griffin Theatre Company
Written by Declan Greene
Composer Rachael Dease
Directed by Lee Lewis
Designer Marg Horwell
Lighting designer Matthew Marshall
Starring Andrea Gibbs and Steve Rodgers
STC Studio until July 12

The title of Declan Greene’s Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography doesn’t tell its story, though it’s not irrelevant to it. What it is about is truth, happiness, and how bitter and elusive they can be.
The play is set in 14 vignettes, each introduced simply by the announcement of the number – co-incidentally an almost identical device to that employed recently in Tyler Jacob Jones’s impressive F*@k Decaf. Like it, Greene’s play flows seamlessly across these divides, often without even stopping for breath, giving his story an impressive momentum throughout the 80-odd minutes it takes to tell.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian 

Theatre: Alienation

Perth Theatre Company

Written by Lachlan Philpott

Directed by Melissa Cantwell

Designer Bruce McKiven

Lighting designer Benjamin Cisterne

Sound designer Peter Dawson

Featuring Naomi Hanbury, Luke Hewitt, Natalie Holmwood and Robert Jago

STC Studio until July 13

Natalie Holmwood

More Americans claim to have been abducted by aliens than have been POWs. It’s one of those statistics meant to show what a crazy bunch the Yanks are.

Turn the gag around, though, and it means millions of them believe they have had an alien experience. A surprisingly big number of us do too.

If all this activity is the result of one of the psychological and memory disorders that have been ascribed to it, it’s an interesting phenomenon.

If it isn’t, we have a problem here, Houston.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: A Number

Perth Theatre Company

Written by Caryl Churchill

Directed by Melissa Cantwell

Designer Bruce McKiven

Lighting designer Jon Buswell

Sound designer Peter Dawson

Featuring Kym Gyngell and Brent Hill

STC Studio until April 27

Kym Gyngell

There’s plenty of science fiction out there. In the Netherlands, in a re-created Palaeolithic ecosystem, scientists are reverse breeding to bring back extinct species like the auroch, the almost elephant-sized progenitor of modern cattle. From genetically modified harvests and barnyard clones to dinosaur DNA in glaciers, we are playing Dr Frankenstein with the matter that makes us. It seems more and more likely that the absurdly impossible is very possible indeed.

In Caryl Churchill’s A Number (first performed at the Royal Court in 2002 with Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig, and here revived by the Perth Theatre Company with Kym Gyngell and Brent Hill), a man approaching middle age discovers that he’s not alone in the world, that there are a number of hims out there.

A Number isn’t about the mechanics of cloning, or even its ethics per se, but the expectations parents and children have for each other, individual identity, the importance of trust for love and the mayhem that can erupt when it is shattered.

Be warned; this is no comedy, even of the blackest kind. A Number is a tough, testing story, made all the more confronting and thought provoking by the quality of its telling in this fine production. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian. My favourite reviewer in the whole world has also chimed in on A Number; link here and scroll down to page 64 for her take. 

Theatre: On the Misconception of Oedipus

Malthouse Theatre with Perth Theatre Company

Devised by Zoe Atkinson, Matthew Lutton and Tom Wright

Written by Tom Wright

Directed by Matthew Lutton

Designed by Zoe Atkinson

Lighting design by Paul Jackson

Composition and sound design by Kelly Ryall

Performed by Natasha Herbert, Richard Pyros and Daniel Schlusser

STC Studio Underground

Until September 15

Richard Pyros and Natasha Herbert. Photo: Garth Oriander

In the 18 months since artistic director Melissa Cantwell and general manager Nick Clark took the Perth Theatre Company to its new home in the State Theatre Centre’s Studio Underground, they have polished it to a high gloss.

Because the company has only scant resources to support its ambitions, it’s been a process that has required judiciously cultivated artistic relationships (with the Tim Watts gang and Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre in particular) and Cantwell’s sharp, urban eye for work that delivers on both style and substance.

In this she has much in common with Matthew Lutton, the ludicrously young Perth director now working out of Malthouse. It’s his collaboration with the writer Tom Wright and designer Zoe Atkinson that has delivered Cantwell the brilliantly conceived and executed On the Misconception of Oedipus.

 Link here to the complete review in The West Australian 

Theatre: Blackbird

Perth Theatre Company

Written by David Harrower

Directed by Melissa Cantwell

Featuring Humphrey Bower and Anna Houston

STC Studio until March 24

Put two people in a room, turn on the heat and stir. It’s an exciting, but hazardous, recipe for theatre; when there are so few ingredients they have to be painstakingly matched and carefully prepared, or things can go badly wrong.

On a whim, maybe a hunch, I read David Harrower’s play a couple of days before seeing Melissa Cantwell’s production at the STC Studio. What I found was a long dramatic poem, often powerfully reminiscent of Philip Larkin and, especially, T.S. Eliot. Dialogue is broken into shards of thought, repeated and sharpened like a pencil to breaking point, heightened, nerve-stretched, and reductive in the best possible way. It’s a brilliant script on the page. It also seemed to me a daunting piece to convincingly bring to the stage.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Tender Napalm

Perth Theatre Company

Written by Philip Ridley

Directed by Melissa Cantwell

Featuring Joshua Brennan and Anna Houston

The prodigious British playwright, novelist and artist Philip Ridley divides his output fairly equally between works for children and adults. Ridley’s ability to explore the imaginary worlds of young people, their cruelties, courage and capacity for love is a vital strength of Perth Theatre Company’s Australian premiere production of Tender Napalm.

While this is most decidedly a play for adults (all the usual warnings apply), it has the bravery of youth. Its two, un-named, characters (Joshua Brennan and Ann Houston) inhabit a non-specific place and time and more often than not speak in parables and fantasies. Somehow, through stories of tsunamis and armies of monkeys, we get glimpses of something terrible that has happened to these people that has unhinged them and their relationship.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: The Disappearances Project

version 1.0

For the Perth Theatre Company

Devised by Irving Gregory, Paul Prestipino, Yana Taylor and David Williams

Directed by Yana Taylor and David Williams

Composer Paul Prestipino

Lighting design by Frank Mainoo

Film directed by Yana Taylor

Cinematographer Sean Bacon

Performed by Irving Gregory and Yana Taylor

STC Studio Underground

27 – 30 July, 2011

The haunting theme of missing people has been explored here recently in Black Swan’s Madagascar and Deckchair Theatre’s Ruby Moon. Both were fine productions but neither approaches the impact of The Disappearances Project, a sure-footed and solemn hymn of pain for the missing and those who miss them, by the NSW ensemble version 1.0.

This is far from a bleak production, despite its painful subject. I can’t recall an hour in the theatre going by more quickly, driven by the poetry of the text, the quality of the performances and the sounds and images in which they are framed.

Link here  for the complete review in The West Australian, and here for Stephen Bevis's interview with David Williams.

Theatre: The Ugly One

Perth Theatre Company

Written by Marius Von Mayenburg

Directed by Melissa Cantwell

Featuring Benj D’Addario, Brendan Ewing, Geoff Kelso and Gemma Ward

Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre

March 22 - April 9, 2011 

Geoff Kelso (l) and Benj D'Addario

The Ugly One is the first of German playwright Marius Von Mayenburg’s work to be staged in Perth, though like his Eldorado and Moving Target, it has had success in other capitals.

On the strength of this elegant, economic production directed by Melissa Cantwell in the Studio Underground at the new State Theatre Centre, it’s easy to see why.

It’s a beautiful production to look at (and not for the obvious, somewhat over-publicised reason you may be thinking of) and the cast deal effectively with the challenges Von Mayenberg’s text throws them: Benj D'Addario tracks Lette’s descent from solid citizen to outcast to degenerate with clarity while Geoff Kelso, a very funny man right in his element here, and the provocative Brendan Ewing both inject just the right amount of over-the-toppery to keep things from getting too Germanic.

It’s impossible to ignore Gemma Ward's international celebrity as a beauty, but while this perhaps adds an unintended extra layer to Von Mayenburg’s text, it does it no harm.

The Ugly One is a flying start for the Perth Theatre Company in a space that is likely to be more important for WA theatre than its grander sibling upstairs.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian