Theatre: Hamlet

William Shakespeare

Barking Gecko Theatre Company
Performed by WAAPA Third Year Acting students

Directed by John Sheedy

Designed by Patrick James Howe

Sound design by James Luscombe

Subiaco Arts Centre

Until March 22

James Sweeny and Grace Smibert

John Sheedy’s fresh, energised Hamlet shows its hand early. In its opening tableau, orderlies mop a bleak institutional common room, with its linoleum floor, green wall tiles and neon strip lighting. Mantovani’s saccharine, soothing ’50s hit, Charmaine, is playing. A green, illuminated hospital sign on the wall reads Helsingør. When Hamlet appears, he’s in dressing gown and trackpants, a patient’s tag on his wrist.

Now where have we heard that tune before? Where have we seen that room? Where have we seen this damaged prince?

Such direct and pervasive evocations (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with a more than passing nod to Marat/Sade) might rankle. In this case, though, they work so well and consistently that, unusually for referential treatments like this, they liberate rather than bind the action and the performances.

In both its own terms, and those it was designed to achieve, it succeeded entirely.  

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian 

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

Perth Festival: It's a wrap!

This year’s Perth Festival gave us a clear indication of its director Jonathan Holloway’s vivacious, egalitarian view of the arts.

I doubt that Holloway has an elitist bone in his body, but he does have a tailor’s instinct for the warp and weft of artists and their performances. Much of what he delivered this year had the sheen of high art, but if he made a single selection for his programme that didn’t have genuine (and in many cases compulsive) appeal to enough people to seriously tick over the box office, I’d like to know what it was.

Jonathan Holloway

In the new festival landscape in Perth, with a mightily enlarged, high-octane Fringe offering shows at close to cinema prices in a carnival precinct going toe-to-toe with the established festival, Holloway approach is exactly correct, and crucial to his gig’s success.      

I can only comment about the theatre programme (for a comprehensive overview of the whole occurrence, link here to my friend and mentor Steve Bevis’s take in The West) but it was a unqualified success, both in its component parts and taken as a whole.

Music: Laurie Anderson and the Kronos Quartet

Perth Concert Hall

27 February 2013

I’m curious to know what Laurie Anderson had in mind doing when she locked in the commission to collaborate and tour with the Kronos Quartet that saw her on stage with them at the Perth Concert Hall last night.

Landfall, the massive, elegiac work they performed was clearly not how Scenes From My New Novel, the title of the work they were commissioned for, was originally planned. No one can plan for a spring tide and a great wind from the south.

pic: Ben Crabtree

On October 29 last year, just as we were sending back our RSVPs for the Perth Festival launch, Hurricane Sandy smashed into the US Eastern Seaboard, wrecking the great Atlantic boardwalks and the communities behind it and flooding much of Lower Manhattan (including, we learn in Landfall, Anderson’s basement). That event, the foreboding of its approach and the effect, both physical and emotional, of its arrival, dominate the seventy-minute piece.
Ironic, then, that Anderson and Kronos were performing in Perth just as Rusty, our clockwise version of Sandy, was making a landfall of his own on the Pilbara Coast.

What transpired can’t be better described than it is by the great Ray Purvis in The West link here, and I share his enthusiasm entirely (although I’ve always been reminded more of John Huston in Chinatown than Darth Vader by Anderson’s pet vocoder voice). For me, it was a fitting end to a festival spinning around the eye of the avant-garde, especially in its American manifestations.   

Theatre: The Secret River

by Andrew Bovell

from the novel by Kate Grenville

Composer Iain Grandage

The Sydney Theatre Company

Directed by Neil Armfield

Artistic Associate Stephen Page

Designer Stephen Curtis

With Nathaniel Dean, Bailey Doomadgee, Lachlan Elliott, Kamil Ellis, Roy Gordon, Iain Grandage, Ethel-Anne Gundy, Anita Hegh, Daniel Henshall, Trevor Jamieson, Rhimi Johnson Page, Judith McGrath, Callum McManis, Colin Moody, Rory Potter, Jeremy Sims, James Slee, Bruce Spence, Matthew Sunderland, Miranda Tapsell, Tom Usher, Ursula Yovich

 His Majesty’s Theatre

Until March 2

The journey of a well-loved story from page to stage is a treacherous one, with the expectations of both its audiences – readers and theatre-goers – to be met, and the vasty fields of the original to be somehow crammed within the theatre’s wooden O.

The Secret River, with its description of early colonial society and the fatal clash of people and cultures in our far-from-terra nullius has deeply affected those who have read it.

The tears I saw last night in the audience were, I’m sure, from readers whose emotional investment in the book had been realised on stage. I haven’t, and can only leave the truth of that to them.

Theatre: The House of Dreaming

Arena Theatre Company

for the Perth Festival

Written by Halcyon McCloud

Directed by Chris Kohn

Performed by Sam Routledge, Penelope Bartlau, Phillip McInnis, Sarah Kriegler

ABC Perth Studio

Until March 2

Elio and Eva went into The House of Dreaming with eyes wide open, and came out thirty minutes later with wide-open eyes. They were two of the children who stood on the ceiling, climbed through the clock and sailed through the storm in Chris Kohn’s indoor adventure made just for them.

Along their way, in the labyrinthine house built inside the ABC’s big studio in East Perth by Melbourne’s Arena Theatre Company, they got to laugh, wonder, change colour and even get a little frightened.

Immersive installations are becoming a regular feature at festivals; last year’s Oraculos and Proximity were festival season highlights and La Marea drew thousands to Rokeby Road a fortnight ago. It’s good to see the same experience being created for children, especially when it’s as stimulating as this strange, dreaming house.

Link here to the complete review in the The West Australian

Theatre: Mission Drift

The TEAM

for the Perth Festival

written by The TEAM

Music by Heather Christian

Directed by Rachel Chavkin

With Stephanie Wright Thompson, Bryce Gill, Heather Christian, Ian Lassiter and Amber Gray, accompanied by Matthew Bogdanow and Josh Myers

Heath Ledger Theatre

Until March 2

Bryce Gill, Ian Lassiter, Stephanie Wright Thompson and Heather Christian
(pic Lee Griffith)

There’s no objective measure of theatre or how it gives each individual the particular things they like, want and need from it.

So, when I say that I have never seen anything better than Mission Drift in the theatre, you will only know if you can at least understand me if you have the great good fortune to see it for yourself. It has everything I think theatre should have, and does everything I believe theatre should do.

 Mission Drift is a daring encompassing of America, its historic promise and its breaking.

It’s the incredible fecundity and westward impulse of America that inspire Mission Drift’s thrilling first half, which is, quite literally, a history of a nation.

If the second half of Mission Drift lacks some of the ebullience of the first, it simply mirrors the grinding stasis that has beset America, and its dream, since those last days of ’07.

I was often in tears during this brilliant production (and here I should disclose that I was living in America, and personally affected by the events of 2007 and ’08); two days later its effect on me has scarcely subsided. If there’s still a ticket to be had, go see it.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian