Theatre: Head Full of Love (★★★½)

By Alana Valentine

Queensland Theatre Company/Performing Lines

Directed by Wesley Enoch

Associate director Catarina Hebbard

Designer Susanne Roanuike

Performed by Paula Delaney Nasarski and Annie Byron 

Margaret River Cultural Centre

September 24, 2015

An old woman (Paula Delaney Nasarski) sits on a low stool crocheting. Around her are bundles of wool and the instruments of her craft.

“Old” is a relative term, though. We're in the town camp outside Alice Springs, and there you can get very old very young. As the woman, Tilly, says, in the town camps “bad things happen, and they happen to you”.

Bad things do happen in Alana Valentine’s sad, sweet Head Full of Love, but good things too, and in the most unlikely of ways.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Black Diggers (★★★★½)

Queensland Theatre Company
Written by Tom Wright
Directed by Wesley Enoch
Designed by Stephen Curtis
Cast: George Bostock, Luke Carroll, Shaka Cook, Trevor Jamieson, Kirk Page, Guy Simon, Colin Smith, Eliah Watego and Tibian Wyles
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until 7 March



Late in Tom Wright’s Black Diggers, a returned WWI serviceman begins bleeding under the arm, and a piece of shrapnel, buried in his body for decades – a “bit of left-over war” – comes to the surface.
It’s an apt metaphor for the work done by this magnificent piece of storytelling.
Something like 800 indigenous Australian men sidestepped regulations that barred them – as non-European non-citizens – from enlisting in the 1st AIF. They fought at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front, and gained respect and comradeship in the trenches, where mud and blood covers all colours of skin, and killing and dying come alike to all races.
For many, though, their homecoming was appalling, their service largely ignored by a country unprepared to afford them the dignity and opportunities of being an Australian, let alone one of its returning heroes.

Theatre: Gasp!

Black Swan State Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre Company
by Ben Elton
Directed by Wesley Enoch
Designed by Christina Smith
With Damon Lockwood, Caroline Brazier, Lucy Goleby, Greg McNeill and Steven Rooke
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Until November 9

Nothing to get steamed up about: Damon Lockwood (r), Greg McNeill and Steven Rooke (pic: Gary Marsh)

Black Swan wraps up its 2014 season with revivals of two all but contemporaneous comedies; the first was Neil Simon’s 1993 Laughter on the 23rd Floor; now we have Ben Elton’s Gasp!, an update of his Gasping from 1990.
The Neil Simon was a delight; genuinely funny, and a platform for some bravura performances. The Ben Elton? Meh.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Managing Carmen

Black Swan State Theatre Company/ QTC

Written by David Williamson

Directed by Wesley Enoch

Designed by Richard Roberts

Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by Tony Brumpton

Audio Visual design by Declan McMonagle

Featuring John Batchelor, Tim Dashwood, Claire Lovering, Anna McGahan and Greg McNeill

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

Until December 2

At 201cm tall, David Williamson could have been an AFL ruckman. Instead, he used his 1970s heyday to establish himself as Australia’s pre-eminent, and most bankable, playwright.

With Managing Carmen, Williamson returns to footy 35 years after The Club, his signature hit about shenanigans at a barely-disguised Collingwood.

We’re back at the Pies, but this time it’s conniving managers and their precious players – rather than coaches and board members – who take centre-stage.
As an exposé of big-time sport, it’s 30 years out of date; as an argument for tolerance and honesty, it’s wafer-thin and unmemorable, and, in a gobsmackingly horrible first half, it reduces its actors to the grossest of caricatures.

But here’s the thing. Like a battered old champ having a bad day, Williamson demands to be taken on his own terms, and treated with caution if not respect.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian 

PIAF: Waltzing the Wilarra

Written and composed by David Milroy

Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company

For PIAF 2011

Directed by Wesley Enoch

Musical Director Wayne Freer

Featuring Ernie Dingo, Jessica Clarke, Kelton Pell, Irma Woods, Ursula Yovich, Trevor Jamieson, Tim Solly and Alexandra Jones. David Milroy (guitar), Wayne Freer (bass), Lucky Oceans (pedal steel and accordion), Ric Eastman (drums) and Bob Patient (keyboards)

Subiaco Arts Centre

3 Feb – 6 Mar, 2011

The world premiere season of David Milroy’s Waltzing the Wilarra is an auspicious start to the 2011 Perth International Arts Festival’s theatre program.

Set in post-WWII Perth, the musical drama tells of a mixed-race dance club operating under the watchful eye of its MC and manager, Mr Mac (Kelton Pell).

Mr Mac has reason to be careful; Aborigines live under a regime of curfew, identity paper checks, no-go zones and nights in the lock-up. The races mix rarely, apart from in master/servant relationships.

In the club, though, there are black/white relationships of other kinds, despite the opprobrium of society and the law, such as the marriage between the club’s Aboriginal star, Elsa (Ursula Yovich), and the deeply damaged returned digger Jack (Tim Solly).

Trevor Jamieson and Ursula Yovich are
stunning in Waltzing the Wilarra (pic: Jon Green) 

Elsa’s Aboriginal stage partner, Charlie (Trevor Jamieson), has grown up like a brother to Jack but can’t deny or hide his affection for her. He, in turn, is pursued by Fay (Alexandra Jones) a white girl from the western suburbs who has been nannied since birth by Elsa’s mother, Mrs Cray (Irma Woods).

It’s a combustible mix, and someone’s bound to get burned. The first act leads inexorably to the tragic outcome of these tangled lives.

After interval we return to the club 40 years later and, for some minutes, we watch a young, pregnant woman (Jessica Clarke) re-arranging its furniture. It’s an oddly mesmerising ritual (the subject of much conjecture and debate after the show), but it serves Milroy and director Wesley Enoch’s audacious purpose of breaking the first act’s spell and preparing the audience for what is to come.

As the now much older surviving characters file in to a “reconciliation event” the day before the old hall is demolished, we find ourselves in a very different play. Instead of song and dance we have tightly scripted dialogue and biting social comment – nothing is sacred here, including “welcome to country” ceremonies and other shibboleths of the age of reconciliation. We have deeply-felt anger, grief and emotion as the characters work through the painful tatters of their lives towards truth and real, human, reconciliation.

This is a terrific, stylish production, and Yirra Yaakin has marshalled a powerful, charismatic cast for Enoch to work with. All the performers are outstanding, with Jamieson and Yovich remarkable both as the young, talented Charlie and Elsa of the 1940s and the haunted old couple half a century later. Most of the cast have star musical turns, with Clarke and Jones’s hilarious bathing beauty contest vamping and Solly’s striking Nick Cave-like ballad, “Criminal Love”, especially notable.

It’s always wonderful to see our National Living Treasure Ernie Dingo back home on a local stage, and he is his customary sagacious and hilarious self as the play’s chorus, Old Toss.

The music throughout is instantly memorable, especially in the hands of a white-hot five-piece band including Milroy and musical director Wayne Freer, along with musical luminaries Lucky Oceans (that man again!), Ric Eastman and Bob Patient.

The show looks sweet, the dancing’s elite, and the Subiaco Arts Centre space gives it just the intimacy it needs.

The raucous standing ovation and the contented look on her face after the show suggests that PIAF artistic director Shelagh Magazda’s last Festival has its first hit a week before it officially kicks off.  

   

An edited version of this review appeared in The West Australian 7.2.11 here