Theatre: The Mousetrap

By Agatha Christie

Directed by Gary Young

Set design by Linda Bewick

With Robert Alexander, Travis Cotton, Linda Cropper, Nicholas Hope, Jacinta John, Gus Murray, Justin Smith and Christy Sullivan

His Majesty’s Theatre

Until August 26, 2012

Christy Sullivan, Justin Smith and Nicholas Hope

For most people of my vintage, and many bottled in much more recent years, Agatha Christie’s wonderful, devious books and their innumerable spin-offs in films and television are part of our psyche. In my case, they run even deeper, having written (along with my friend Dave Warner) and staged a series of murder weekends that unashamedly paid homage to her immortal whodunits.

The Mousetrap is the one pillar of the Temple of Agatha I’d yet to wrap my arms around; this mighty edifice has now ticked over sixty years continuously on the West End, the only play ever to become a permanent tourist attraction.

So I went to review the show feeling like an iceberg waiting for The Titanic to show up. The good news is that the great ship sailed past me unscathed, even if it didn’t melt me much in its passage.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: The Book of Death

Renegade Productions

Written by Joe Lui and the cast

Directed by Joe Lui

Designed by Sara Chirichilli

Featuring Paul Grabovac, Ella Hetherington and Moana Lutton

Blue Room Theatre

7 – 25 August, 2011

Paul Grabovac, Ella Hetherington and Moanna Lutton

Life as a theatre professional in this town is tough. You’ve got to be adaptable to survive.

The best survivor I know is Joe Lui, the creator, co-writer and composer, director and lighting designer of the The Book of Death at the Blue Room. Even more impressive than his skills and work ethic is that he is always prepared to challenge and confront, often quite brutally.

He’s also a natural collaborator, and he’s gathered some fine and brave artists for this show. Together, they’ve produced a work that, while often uncomfortable and elusive, is constantly thought provoking and committed.

Theatre: The Cat in the Box

by Vivienne Glance

directed by Mark Barford

With James Helm, Summer Williams, Anna Brockway and Kingsley Judd

Blue Room Theatre

31 July – 18 August

James Helm and Summer Williams

Vivienne Glance’s little absurdist thriller The Cat in the Box has its roots very squarely in the 1970s, but that doesn’t make it less entertaining or provocative.

The set-up is familiar territory – four very different people find themselves locked in a room with no way of escape and precious little to survive on. How they survive, and how the political microcosm in the room forms and plays out, is the stuff of the play.

There’s nothing particularly innovative or radical about Glance’s ideas – we’ve seen them before, but they are refreshed by the quality of her writing, which is sharp, funny and rarely portentous.

There’s nothing in The Cat in the Box to change the world, but as an entertainment, and a theatrical undertaking, it has much to recommend it.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Signs of Life

Tim Winton

Directed by Kate Cherry

Designed by Zoe Atkinson

With Tom E. Lewis, Helen Morse, George Shevstov and Pauline Whyman

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

July 31 – August 18, 2012

George Shevstov and Helen Morse

In Tim Winton’s Signs of Life we are re-introduced to two of the central characters in his 2002 novel, Dirt Music; Georgiana Jutland (Helen Morse), whose escape from dress circle Perth, and then from the boss cocky fisherman she’d taken up with, and Luther Fox (George Shevstov) the craypot poacher and ne’er-do-well she absconds with and for.

The Moore River runs through the play like it does the property. It hasn’t rained for five years, and everything, the riverbed, the olive trees, the birds, the wild dogs and Georgie herself, are dry as bone dust. 

As we anxiously wait for soaking rain right here, right now, in Perth, it’s easy to empathise when a character says “I don’t think it will ever rain. This is it. The end.”

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: The Fremantle Candidate

Deckchair Theatre

Written by Ingle Knight

Directed by Chris Bendall

Designed by Fiona Bruce

Featuring Steve Turner, Geoff Kelso, Ben D’Addario, Igor Sas, Christie Sistrunk and James Hagen

PICA

Until August 5

John Curtin

I hope the teaching of Australian history has improved since my schooldays. Back then, after laborious lists of the early explorers and governors and hoary tales of squatters, shearers and swaggies (all the better for making sense of Waltzing Matilda, I suppose), the narrative all but collapsed.

Apart from the disgraceful marginalisation of Aboriginal history and the lives of women, perhaps the greatest tragedy was the paucity of our Twentieth Century political history. The mighty battles over free trade, the franchise and industrial relations, conscription, the banks and the communist party were a passing blur, and the great figures who fought them, Deakin, Barton, Fisher and Hughes, Theodore and Lang, Lyons, Chifley, Evatt and even the never-ending Menzies were derelict sketches without personality or insight.

With so little to spark our imagination, it’s hardly surprising that political biographies other than those of current or recent figures are so rare in print, on film or on stage. All the more reason to welcome Ingle Knight’s examination of the pivotal years in the career of perhaps our greatest, certainly our most intriguing, leader, John Curtin.

Cabaret: Two Weeks in Paris

Devised and performed by Analisa Bell

Musical director Mia Brine

With Rhoda Lopez and Laura Hopwood

Downstairs at the Maj

11 – 14 July 2012

You’ve got to hand it to Analisa Bell.

I doubt even her most ardent fans (and she seems to have plenty of them) would claim she’s got one of the great voices, or that the shows she puts together downstairs at the Maj have any particular insight or wit, but there’s something about her that wins you over.

Maybe it’s her utter lack of pretension, the obvious pleasure she gets in being able to do the things she does, her wide-eyed ordinariness, that does the trick. Maybe it’s also her canny instinct for her audience that you have to admire, even if you don’t share their enthusiasm.

But let’s be frank. This little show, inspired, it seems, by an unexceptional two weeks' holiday in Paris, is a barely sustainable vehicle for Bell, and nothing she does in performance lifts it above a sort of musical slide night.

Theatre: The School for Wives

 By Moliére

Translated by Justin Fleming

Bell Shakespeare

Director Lee Lewis

Designer Marg Horwell

Lighting designer Niklas Pajanti

Composer Kelly Ryall

Featuring John Adam, Harriet Dyer, Meyne Wyatt. Andrew Johnston, Alexandra Aldrich, Damien Richardson, Jonathan Elsom and Mark Jones  

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

Until July 14

There hasn’t been a production of the great French dramatist Moliére’s work in Perth since the Georgian Film Actors Studio Theatre presented Don Juan at the 1990 Perth Festival. Edgar Metcalfe’s The Misanthrope at the Hole in the Wall 32 years ago was the last local professional show. That’s far too long to be deprived of one of the kings of comedy.

Fortunately, Bell Shakespeare has departed from its eponymous mainstay to take The School for Wives, Moliére’s satire of pre-nuptual shenanigans, on the road around Australia, and it’s to be admired for its endeavour and the technical quality of its touring productions.

Unfortunately, the production misfires. This is largely because of a translation from the original French verse into something like vernacular Australian English by Justin Fleming that too often sounds like The Sentimental Bloke or, worse, that cringeworthy, milquetoast rap that infects so many attempts to be street-wise these days.

Things lifted dramatically, though, whenever Harriet Dyer’s sweetly determined Agnes was on stage, and the climactic confrontation between her and Arnolde was far and away the most convincing scene in the play. Director Lee Lewis places the piece attractively in 1920s Paris, and designer Marg Horwell and lighting designer Niklas Pajenti support her cleverly with a silent movie-inspired setting that is apt and greatly entertaining. Mark Jones, a dead ringer for the comedian Bill Bailey, also plays upright piano, bells and whistles, and keeps the whole affair nicely in tune throughout. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian