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: 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.