By James Taylor
Jeffrey the Cat Productions
Directed by Ian Wilkes
Designed by Chris Brain
Performed by Maitland Schnaars, James Hagan and James Taylor
Blue Room Theatre
Until July 16
In James Taylor’s Hobo, a perfect storm of evils collides at the dead end of an alley. Among the excrement and urine, vermin and bottles of plonk, the homeless and destitute eke out a volatile and vulnerable half-life.
Hobo maintains an impressive authenticity, especially in its portrayal of chronic drunkenness and mental confusion.
However, the play is uneven in both its text and staging.
Part of the issue is in performance. James Hagan is a wonderful and imposing actor but his presence here, the sheer volume of him, is just too much for this play in this small space.
He needs to dial down so that Hobo can be heard and understood with the clarity it warrants.
Read the complete review in The West Australian
Monday, July 11, 2016
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
Theatre: A PERFECT SPECIMEN (★★★)
by Nathaniel Moncrieff
Black Swan Lab
Directed by Stuart Halusz
Set design Frances Danckert
Costume design Lynn Ferguson
Sound design Brett Smith
Lighting design Joe Lui
With Adriane Daff, Rebecca Davis, Luke Hewett, Greg McNeill and Igor Sas
STC Studio until July 17
The sad true story of Julia Pastrana, a Mexican Indian woman who was a sideshow attraction in the mid-19th Century, has been made into a sumptuous, generally successful but not especially remarkable, stage play by the writer Nathaniel Moncrieff, the director Stuart Halusz and the Black Swan Lab, the development project of the State Theatre Company.
Pastrana was the archetypal bearded lady, due to a cruel congenital condition that led its sufferers to be promoted as ape men and bear women.
The challenge of bringing Pastrana to the stage is deftly and sympathetically achieved by not representing her deformities. Adriane Daff, in a fine and touching performance, gives a sympathetic portrait of a wounded woman without the prurient distraction of her condition.
Luke Hewitt’s Theodore Lent is also convincing. The play is as much a picaresque exploration of the complete moral failure of a man as it is the tragedy of his victim.
Rebecca Davis threatens to run away with the show as Lent’s mistress, the acrobatic Marian Trumbull. The remarkably lengthy Davis makes it easy to see how she would be a hit in the ring or between Lent’s sheets, and she brings desperate power to her characterization.
The show is beautifully staged. Joe Lui moodily and imaginatively lights Frances Danckert’s revolving set and Lynn Ferguson’s rich costumes, and Brett Smith’s sound design and original compositions add greatly to its atmosphere and appeal.
Despite all those advantages, A Perfect Specimen ultimately lacks dramatic ambition. The narrative is determinedly linear, never truly taking us inside its characters or off its rails.
That does, of course, make this strange tale clear and easy to follow, but that comes at the expense of greater opportunities it could have taken, and deeper insights it could have found.
Read the complete review in The West Australian
Black Swan Lab
Directed by Stuart Halusz
Set design Frances Danckert
Costume design Lynn Ferguson
Sound design Brett Smith
Lighting design Joe Lui
With Adriane Daff, Rebecca Davis, Luke Hewett, Greg McNeill and Igor Sas
STC Studio until July 17
 |
| Luke Hewitt and Rebecca Davis |
Pastrana was the archetypal bearded lady, due to a cruel congenital condition that led its sufferers to be promoted as ape men and bear women.
The challenge of bringing Pastrana to the stage is deftly and sympathetically achieved by not representing her deformities. Adriane Daff, in a fine and touching performance, gives a sympathetic portrait of a wounded woman without the prurient distraction of her condition.
Luke Hewitt’s Theodore Lent is also convincing. The play is as much a picaresque exploration of the complete moral failure of a man as it is the tragedy of his victim.
Rebecca Davis threatens to run away with the show as Lent’s mistress, the acrobatic Marian Trumbull. The remarkably lengthy Davis makes it easy to see how she would be a hit in the ring or between Lent’s sheets, and she brings desperate power to her characterization.
The show is beautifully staged. Joe Lui moodily and imaginatively lights Frances Danckert’s revolving set and Lynn Ferguson’s rich costumes, and Brett Smith’s sound design and original compositions add greatly to its atmosphere and appeal.
Despite all those advantages, A Perfect Specimen ultimately lacks dramatic ambition. The narrative is determinedly linear, never truly taking us inside its characters or off its rails.
That does, of course, make this strange tale clear and easy to follow, but that comes at the expense of greater opportunities it could have taken, and deeper insights it could have found.
Read the complete review in The West Australian
Friday, July 1, 2016
Theatre: Coincidences at the End of Time (★★★)
Written and directed by Scott McArdle
Second Chance Theatre
Designed by Sara Chirichilli
With Nick Maclaine and Arielle Gray
Subiaco Arts Centre
Until July 2
By the time Scott McArdle’s Coincidences at the End of Time gets under way, things have come to a decidedly un-pretty pass. Outside the beat up café Peter (Nick Maclaine) has holed up in, whopping great fire-breathing lizards are barbecuing whole neighbourhoods and a flesh-eating mist is gurgitating the survivors.
The waitress has been reduced to a smear of ash on the wall, while Peter has either had some pretty lucky escapes from the general misfortune or he’s disastrously bad at opening the café’s fiddly tomato sauce sachets.
For those of us familiar with the fashion for dystopia and apocalypse that infects our indie playwrights, the tea leaves are easy to read.
Of course – it’s a rom-com!
Second Chance Theatre
Designed by Sara Chirichilli
With Nick Maclaine and Arielle Gray
Subiaco Arts Centre
Until July 2
By the time Scott McArdle’s Coincidences at the End of Time gets under way, things have come to a decidedly un-pretty pass. Outside the beat up café Peter (Nick Maclaine) has holed up in, whopping great fire-breathing lizards are barbecuing whole neighbourhoods and a flesh-eating mist is gurgitating the survivors.
The waitress has been reduced to a smear of ash on the wall, while Peter has either had some pretty lucky escapes from the general misfortune or he’s disastrously bad at opening the café’s fiddly tomato sauce sachets.
For those of us familiar with the fashion for dystopia and apocalypse that infects our indie playwrights, the tea leaves are easy to read.
Of course – it’s a rom-com!
Monday, June 27, 2016
Theatre: The Astronaut (★★★★½)
Created and performed by Samantha Chester
Directed by Frances Barbe
Composer Ekrem Mulayim
Designed by Isabel O’Neill
Lighting and vision designed by Matthew Osborne
Until July 9
The best physical theatre occupies the space between the abstraction of dance and the directness of drama, and when it clicks it has the power and insight of both.
Last year, Dalisa Pigrim’s Gudirr Gudirr, a transcendent example of the form, had me spellbound. It’s happened again, this time courtesy of Samantha Chester’s mysterious, superbly executed and ineffably sad The Astronaut.
Even more than Pigrim, Chester eschews text in favour of movement and image.
The space that creates, in the words of The Astronaut’s director – and Chester’s colleague on the faculty of WAAPA – Frances Barbe, operates between “the performer’s intention and experience of a work and the audience’s perception and experience of it”.
Though I took some different, personal, thoughts away with me (perhaps because of my direct memory of those scratchy images), I’m sure my admiration for The Astronaut will be shared by everyone lucky enough to experience it.
Read the complete review in The West Australian
Directed by Frances Barbe
Composer Ekrem Mulayim
Designed by Isabel O’Neill
Lighting and vision designed by Matthew Osborne
Until July 9
Last year, Dalisa Pigrim’s Gudirr Gudirr, a transcendent example of the form, had me spellbound. It’s happened again, this time courtesy of Samantha Chester’s mysterious, superbly executed and ineffably sad The Astronaut.
Even more than Pigrim, Chester eschews text in favour of movement and image.
The space that creates, in the words of The Astronaut’s director – and Chester’s colleague on the faculty of WAAPA – Frances Barbe, operates between “the performer’s intention and experience of a work and the audience’s perception and experience of it”.
Though I took some different, personal, thoughts away with me (perhaps because of my direct memory of those scratchy images), I’m sure my admiration for The Astronaut will be shared by everyone lucky enough to experience it.
Read the complete review in The West Australian
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Theatre: What’s Love Got to do With It (★★★)
The Cutting Room Floor
Directed by Rachael Woodward
Designed by Olivia Tartaglia
Devised and performed by Tristan Balz, Jacinta Larcombe, Mariah O’Dea, Zoe Hollyoak, Tristan McInnes, Phoebe Sullivan
Blue Room Theatre
Until June 25
The highlight of TILT, the WAAPA Performance Making course’s final showcase last year, was a button-bright boardroom satire about love, heartbreak and how those maladies might be ameliorated, or cured completely, by pharmaceutical means.
It was a killer idea that, with just the merest tweaking, could go into the Fringe or a Blue Room season with “sold out” written all over it.
In retrospect, “merest tweaking” was a bit optimistic.
Morphing a show from a 20-minute-long skit into a 50-minute-long play isn’t simply a matter of adding more of the same.
It requires wholly new elements; plot and character development, a genuine narrative arc, action and reaction, a twist or two – just about everything that a skit can do without but a play must have.
What’s Love Got To Do With It hasn’t yet completely found its feet (if anything, the storyline was not as clear as it was in the shorter version) but there’s more than enough wiz and bang on show to thrill its audience.
And, maybe, get some “sold out” signs up at the Blue Room.
Read the complete review in The West Australian.
Directed by Rachael Woodward
Designed by Olivia Tartaglia
Devised and performed by Tristan Balz, Jacinta Larcombe, Mariah O’Dea, Zoe Hollyoak, Tristan McInnes, Phoebe Sullivan
Blue Room Theatre
Until June 25
The highlight of TILT, the WAAPA Performance Making course’s final showcase last year, was a button-bright boardroom satire about love, heartbreak and how those maladies might be ameliorated, or cured completely, by pharmaceutical means.
It was a killer idea that, with just the merest tweaking, could go into the Fringe or a Blue Room season with “sold out” written all over it.
In retrospect, “merest tweaking” was a bit optimistic.
Morphing a show from a 20-minute-long skit into a 50-minute-long play isn’t simply a matter of adding more of the same.
It requires wholly new elements; plot and character development, a genuine narrative arc, action and reaction, a twist or two – just about everything that a skit can do without but a play must have.
What’s Love Got To Do With It hasn’t yet completely found its feet (if anything, the storyline was not as clear as it was in the shorter version) but there’s more than enough wiz and bang on show to thrill its audience.
And, maybe, get some “sold out” signs up at the Blue Room.
Read the complete review in The West Australian.
Monday, June 6, 2016
Theatre: Angels in America (★★★½)
 |
| Stuart Halusz and Jo Morris (pic Daniel James Grant) |
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Kate Cherry
Designed by Christina Smith
Lighting design by Matt Scott
Composer and sound designer Ash Gibson Greig
With Adam Booth, Stuart Halusz, Felicity McKay, Jo Morris, Will O’Mahony, Kenneth Ransom, Toni Scanlan and John Stanton
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until June 19
Tony Kushner’s celebrated Angels in America is a great small play set inside an epic one.
It’s, at once, tightly bound to a particular time and place (America, 1985) and a freewheeling millenarian phantasmagoria.
And it’s a prescient play (or, at least, a lucky one): Kushner’s ferocious angel may not have brought in the Millennium, but its wings beat above New York on 9/11; in the here and now, Donald Trump’s ascendant star uncannily looms above the play.
As thoughtfully directed by Cherry, and with excellent work from all five principal actors, it would stand as complete, deeply thought-provoking, theatre on a smaller canvas.
Kushner, though, has wider and greater ambitions. Hr is attempting nothing less than, as he subtitles his work, “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”.
This ambition provides Cherry and her designer Christina Smith with some big-moment opportunities and some functional challenges.
There’s also some textual baggage that could have been jettisoned without our understanding of Kushner’s purpose being hampered in the slightest.
But that’s okay.
I hope Cherry, as a parting gift, has embedded Angels in America Part 2: Perestroika in a future Black Swan season.
Read the complete review in The West Australian
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Theatre: So Long Suckers (★★★½)
Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company and Bunuba Cultural EnterprisesScript by Peter Docker
with Ian Wilkes, Emmanuel James Brown and Kyle J Morrison
Directed by Kyle J Morrison
Design by India Mehta
Lighting design by Chris Donnelly
Music and sound design by Darren Reutens
Starring Peter Docker, Ian Wilkes and Emmanuel James Brown
Subiaco Arts Centre until June 4
So Long Suckers is a cry from the heart about the destructive power of grog in the Aboriginal community. As its writer, Peter Docker, says, “Grog. Police. Jail” has replaced “guns, germs and steel” as a principal agent of the dispossession of the original owners of the country and a wider, similarly disempowered, population.
The play works around a metaphor with wide and direct historical resonances; that alcohol figuratively “cuts off your head and takes it away” – a fate literally and famously suffered by the characters’ outlaw heroes, the Noongar Yagan, the Bunuba Jandamarra and Ned Kelly.
“Men without heads”, on the booze, in cars, on trains, in parks and on the street, are easy targets for the system of summary arrest and the dreaded bench warrants that endlessly ensnare them.
So Long Suckers is not easy theatre, and its density and aggression occasionally reduces its impact. There’s no denying, though, that it is an impressive gathering of artistic talent, indigenous and non-indigenous alike, to expose an evil that afflicts communities, families and individuals across a land we are still learning to share.
Read the complete review in The West Australian
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