Theatre: Metalhead

Tiffany Barton

Creative Collaborations and The Fremantle Festival
Written by Tiffany Barton
Directed by Monica Main
Featuring Della-Rae Morrison, Maitland Schnaars, Caitlin Jane Hampson, Amri Mrisho, Maja Liwszyc and Rubeun Yorkshire
Victoria Hall
23 – 30 October 2014

We’ve seen two plays from and about the Pilbara town of Roebourne here in the last month. Both are the result of long collaborations with the local community, and both spring from the tragedies that have beset that hardscrabble, blighted place. 
The first, Big hART’s Hipbone Sticking Out, has triumphantly reached its potential; it’s as exciting and creatively successful a piece of theatre as I’ve seen.
Tiffany Barton’s Metalhead (at Victoria Hall, directed by Monica Main for the Fremantle Festival) still has some distance to travel.
Metalhead lacks accuracy and development in parts, and some of its characters are hard to grasp. There is, though, undoubted power, unflinching conviction and theatre craft in much of Barton’s writing. She’s shown in work like Diva and Polly’s Waffle that she has no fear of sex or violence, either separately or in combination, in her work, and there are some savage lessons to be learned from it.

Theatre: Diva and The Vaudevillians

Diva

By Tiffany Barton

Directed by Helen Doig

Performed by Tiffany Barton

The Vaudevillians

Jerick Hoffer (Jinkx Monsoon) and Richard Andriessen (Major Scales)

In Tiffany Barton’s small triumph of that name, the diva is June, a faded opera singer living out a scratchy, frustrated retirement with her costumes, her wigs, her pills and her lurid memories.

It’s beautifully constructed, and sets you up for an absolute zinger of a climax, a seemingly inevitable ending that doesn’t so much fail as get rejected outright, an affirmation of life, with all its heartbreak, darkness and obscenity.

Barton is simply great as June. She has an impeccable collaborator in Helen Doig, a director with all Barton’s courage who keeps June’s unruly story firmly on the straight and narrow. 

Jerick Hoffer’s celebrated character Jinkx Monsoon is far and away the most convincing, and authentically talented drag artist I’ve ever seen. With the gifted Major Scales (Richard Andriessen) alongside her, and the brilliant conceit of the show, it’s a fantastic set-up, but it ended up leaving me cold.

Link here to the complete reviews in The West Australian

Theatre: Playhouse Creatures

By April de Angelis

Her Infinite Variety Ensemble

Directed by Helen Doig

Performed by Tiffany Barton, Rhoda Lopez, Angelique Malcolm, Claire Munday and Summer Williams

The Guild Studio

Until June 8

Tiffany Barton, Angelique Malcolm
and Summer Williams

The British playwright April de Angelis’s Playhouse Creatures is the best kind of historical drama. Firmly based on, but not bound by, real events and characters, it illuminates an era without either lecturing or tutoring.

It's a perfect choice for the all-female Her Infinite Variety Ensemble (HIVE), whose charter is to create opportunities for women in theatre. Beyond its obvious advantages – five strong roles for actresses – it deals with the most elemental opportunity for women in the theatre; the right to be in it at all, which, on the English stage at least, only came a few years before, in 1660. 
To their credit, they’ve had the initiative to turn a disused room in the old Equity Guild building in Claisebrook into a pop-up theatre. It’s fairly rough and ready, and only seats forty, but this instructive and richly entertaining production deserves to fill them. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian