Theatre: Death in Bowengabbie and The Agony, The Ecstasy and I

Bryce Youngman (pic: Jacinta Lee)

Death in Bowengabbie

By Caleb Lewis

Directed by Matt Edgerton

Performed by Bryce Youngman
The Blue Room

Until May 11

The Agony, the Ecstasy and I

Tarryn Runkel and Laura Hopwood

Directed by Cara Phillips
The Blue Room

Until May 4

Oscar (the terrific Bryce Youngman) has gone back to Bowengabbie, his tiny Tasmanian home town, for a family funeral. The town has been dying since its jam factory closed down, but the identities of Oscar’s youth remain, marooned on their landlocked desert island.  

Trouble is, once one of them dies, they all start popping off. And Oscar keeps having to come back for their funerals.

Bowngabbie is a play that could sustain a cast of five or six, and it’s to the credit of everyone involved that they pull it off so well with only one.     

Tarryn Runkel and Laura Hopwood’s The Agony, the Ecstasy and I, takes on the cult of Apple and its relationship with the gigantic Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China.

Runkel, a dancer, and Hopwood, an actor, have devised a piece with director Cara Phillips that looks at the iconography of Apple and Daisey’s flawed investigation through movement and audio visual imagery, but the show falls between two stools, at times impenetrably obscure and at others in a rather too straightforward documentary style.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: A Number

Perth Theatre Company

Written by Caryl Churchill

Directed by Melissa Cantwell

Designer Bruce McKiven

Lighting designer Jon Buswell

Sound designer Peter Dawson

Featuring Kym Gyngell and Brent Hill

STC Studio until April 27

Kym Gyngell

There’s plenty of science fiction out there. In the Netherlands, in a re-created Palaeolithic ecosystem, scientists are reverse breeding to bring back extinct species like the auroch, the almost elephant-sized progenitor of modern cattle. From genetically modified harvests and barnyard clones to dinosaur DNA in glaciers, we are playing Dr Frankenstein with the matter that makes us. It seems more and more likely that the absurdly impossible is very possible indeed.

In Caryl Churchill’s A Number (first performed at the Royal Court in 2002 with Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig, and here revived by the Perth Theatre Company with Kym Gyngell and Brent Hill), a man approaching middle age discovers that he’s not alone in the world, that there are a number of hims out there.

A Number isn’t about the mechanics of cloning, or even its ethics per se, but the expectations parents and children have for each other, individual identity, the importance of trust for love and the mayhem that can erupt when it is shattered.

Be warned; this is no comedy, even of the blackest kind. A Number is a tough, testing story, made all the more confronting and thought provoking by the quality of its telling in this fine production. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian. My favourite reviewer in the whole world has also chimed in on A Number; link here and scroll down to page 64 for her take. 

Theatre: Henry 4

By William Shakespeare

Adapted by John Bell

Bell Shakespeare

Director John Bell and Damien Ryan

Designer Stephen Curtis

Lighting designer Matt Scott

Composer Kelly Ryall

Featuring David Whitney, Matthew Moore, John Bell, Terry Bader, Jason Klarwein, Ben Wood, Nathan Lovejoy, Yalin Ozucelik, Felix Jozeps, Sean O’Shea, Arky Michael, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, Wendy Strehlow and Matilda Ridgeway

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

Until April 13

Matthew Moore

It was a sad surprise to find, from conversations around the Heath Ledger foyer, that Shakespeare’s Henry IVs have become obscure.

In its time, Henry IV Part One was a runaway hit, its first part spawning three sequels, one, Henry V, for its putative hero, Prince Hal, and two, Henry IV Part Two and The Merry Wives of Windsor, for its genius, Falstaff. Such was the enthusiasm for Falstaff that Elizabethan audiences traditionally booed the hero king on his first entry in Henry V for having banished their favourite.

Shakespeare, too, had to banish Falstaff from Henry V, because the Fat Knight was bound to steal that show as surely as he had both its predecessors.

And, true to form, John Bell’s Falstaff sidles away with this merged adaptation of the two Henry IV’s tucked securely in his capacious pickpocket’s breeches.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian. 

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.