Theatre: In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play

by Sarah Ruhl

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler

Set and costume designer Alicia Clements

Lighting designer Lucy Birkinshaw

Vision designer Mia Holton
Composer and sound designer Ash Gibson Greig

Performed by Rebecca Davis, Stuart Halusz, Kingsley Judd, Tariri Mavondo, Jo Morris, Tom Stokes and Alison van Reeken

Heath Ledger Theatre until November 4

Jo Morris, Stuart Halusz and Rebecca Davis

 There’s A Hit – A Palpable Hit – In The Next Room

It’s an entertaining (if likely apocryphal) historical factoid that the first appliance of the age of electricity was the venerable and handy vibrator; it was certainly in wide use in doctors’ rooms as a copacetic for female hysteria – in other words, to cure that which ails you by the bringing on of orgasm – quite soon after those ACs and DCs started running through Edison’s wires.

The American playwright Sarah Ruhl has bounced off all this with In the Next Room, a witty, playful peek into domesticity and its pitfalls, the role of women in marriage and society, and quite a bit more besides.

Along the way she neatly avoids all of the traps of prurience and earnestness lying in wait for her, and the result is a wildly entertaining and intelligent piece of popular theatre.

It would be anyway, just on the strength of the text, but this production is lifted to its very considerable heights by the skill and talent of its creative team and cast.

Jeffrey Jay Fowler, the director, has accurately assessed Ruhl’s play for what it is; a modern take on Restoration Comedy, almost a bedroom – well consulting room – farce, and he plays it elegantly through the covers. He’s much assisted by his designer Alicia Clements, whose cutaway two-way-mirror set is wholly successful – quite inspired in fact –and allows the action to move from room to room seamlessly and often hilariously. Her costumes, which are removed, replaced and got inside with great regularity, are authentic and sumptuous.

Ash Gibson Greig has composed music that perfectly fits both the play’s acoustic era and electrical subject, and Lucy Birkinshaw’s lighting is subtly effective throughout, even when dealing with the tricky task of switching set lighting on and off like an electric lamp.

A cast this well provisioned, led, dressed and lit has a great opportunity, and they go to town on it. There are terrific supporting turns by Tom Stokes as the ardent but diffidently amorous artist Leo Irving (who gets a different, and squirm-in-the-seat, kind of vibration), Tariro Mavondo as the African-American wet nurse Elizabeth who introduces a suite of issues as relevant today as they were in postbellum America, and Kingsley Judd as the straight-laced but sympathetic husband of one of the patients of the New Machine.

Alison van Reeken, who stepped into the cast at late notice (as she is often asked to do), is glorious (as she always is) as Annie, a Ma Clampett nurse who gets swept up in all this tomfoolery.

The story revolves around the practice of the good doctor Givings, and Stuart Halusz gives a perfectly pitched performance as the medical technocrat oblivious to the torrents and torments of those around him. He’s in pretty good shape, too.

The play belongs to its leading women, and Rebecca Davis, as Catherine Givings, and Jo Morris as her husband’s patient Sabrina Daldry, both give career performances.

Morris is electric (sorry) as Sabrina, and she makes her I’ll-have-what-she’s-having scenes ­– she develops quite a hankering for her little buzzing friend – a tour-de-force.

Davis rarely gets the opportunity to show her range, but she does here, and her ability to slip easily from farce to genuine emotion is the touchstone for the production’s stance, and its success.

There’s much talk around about the sparse opportunities for seasoned professional actors in the current Perth theatre. There are reasons for it, and I don’t intend to argue the whys and wherefores in a review of one show.

This one, though, reminds us that the talent is here, and in spades. You can help by the easy act of seeing it when you get a chance as enjoyable as this is.

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: 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: 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: Arcadia

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Written by Tom Stoppard

Directed by Kate Cherry

 Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

21 March - April 1, 2012

Scott Sheridan and Whitney Richards        pic: Gary Marsh Photography

If ever a play has mastered the trick of being at once intricate and undemanding, Arcadia, Tom Stoppard’s 1993 intellectual parlour game about four generations of one family in one room but 180 years apart, is it.

The reason is simple; there are all sorts of theories to explain the world, many of which – chaos theory, fractals, Kelvin’s theory of heat, the 2^nd law of thermodynamics, population theory – are given a good going over in Arcadia, but, as the concupiscent Chloe Coverly (Adriane Daff) proclaims, it’s sex that makes it go around.

And it’s sex, in word and deed, which drives this creamily satisfying revival by Kate Cherry’s Black Swan State Theatre Company. There is much bonking done or denied, conspired for or hankered after, in picturesque locations like gazebos and piano rooms – all, I have to report, safely off stage. The talk may be of literary criticism, landscape gardening and all that mathematics, but there’s too, too solid flesh stirring urgently under those elegant muslins and linens (prettily draped by designer Alicia Clements, whose costumes and wedding-cake set are all that could be wished for).

This is not to say that Stoppard’s academic musings are merely a front for a bedroom farce. His ruminations on life, science, art and the pros, cons and pronunciation of ha-has are finely drawn and pleasurable, while the architecture of the play, the easy way it moves its apple from Isaac Newton to Steve Jobs, and the confident, unpushy way the playwright manages internal and external speculation (Did Lord Byron cuckold and kill Ezra Chater? Was Septimus Hodge the hermit in the Coverley’s garden?) is justly admired. It’s all gloriously stimulating and, as long as you don’t fall into the trap of taking Stoppard too seriously – I’m sure he never does – great fun.