Theatre: Vernon God Little

By DBC Pierre

adapted by Tanya Ronder

Directed by Sarah Giles

Set designer Daniel Ampuero

Performed by WAAPA 3^rd Year acting students

Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA

4 – 10 May 2012

Damien Strothos and Megan McGlinchey 

(pic: Jon Green)

Tanya Ronder’s darkly comic adaptation of Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning novel, gets a tight, entertaining showcase from WAAPA’s 3^rd year acting students under the skilful, inventive direction of Sydney Theatre Company associate director Sarah Giles.

First staged by the Old Vic in 2007, the play has had a similarly mixed reception to the novel (fueled, in part, by the Australian-born Pierre’s decidedly flaky personal reputation), but Giles and her talented young cast amplify its strengths and neatly side-step most of its weaknesses.

Link here  to the complete review in The West Australian 

Comedy: Perth International Comedy Festival #2

The Pajama Men, Des Bishop, Tripod
Astor Theatre, Mt Lawley

PICF runs until May 20

The Astor was under siege. People cramming in and out of the old girl, milling on the sidewalks, clambering down fire escapes and queuing for a hundred metres up Beaufort Street. It was like thousands of really hip looking orcs had descended on some fortress in Gondor looking for man-flesh.

Well they weren’t really orcs (what was I thinking). They were Perth, and what had created this frenzy was the trove of comedy gold that had been hoarded inside the building.

In February, PIAF and the Perth Fringe showed that there’s an enormous hunger in this town for contemporary, quality, accessible entertainment, especially if it’s gathered in precincts where you can hop from show to show. PICF is about to prove the point. 

Theatre: The Maj Monologues final

Directed by Michael McCall

Performed by Peter Holland, James Helm, Julia Moody, Stephanie Power, Marko Jovanovic and Ian Toyne

Downstairs at the Maj

2 – 5 May, 2012

The Maj Monologues is a writing competition first and foremost, but it’s also an entertainment, and, on the strength of the packed first night of its final, a very popular one.

The competitor’s task was to write a dramatic monologue of around ten minutes’ duration, and prizes included one adjudicated by a panel of theatre professionals and a people’s choice award voted on by audience members at the final’s four nights.

Picking the winners, though, was for them and you to do, and I think both they and you got it pretty well right. What I could judge, though, was the evening as a piece of theatre, and, on that count, everyone came out on top.

Comedy: Perth International Comedy Festival #1

Festival director Jo Marsh
Yon, DeAnne Smith, Asher Treleaven
PICF runs until May 20
at venues around Mt Lawley


PICF director Jo Marsh was doing a fine job of looking both exhausted and elated in the foyer of the Astor on night two of her festival. "We sold a thousand tickets today", she told me, "and we've got sell-outs happening all over the place!".
Good on her and crew. It's scary enough mounting an exercise like this (140 performances by 40 acts over 19 days), but when you're doing it with almost no funding support (hats off to the City of Stirling, though) and mostly in-kind sponsorship, and when your genesis was clouded by some internecine brouhaha in local comedy circles, it can be a sphincter-tightening exercise.

Asher Treleaven

I think Jo can relax a bit (maybe that's not a perfectly-placed phrase). As the PIAF/Fringe extravaganza showed in February, there's an enormous hunger in this town for contemporary, quality, accessible entertainment,  especially in precincts where you can hop from show to show, grab a drink or two along the way and mingle with hip people. There's money out there, and if Perth is given alternatives to spending it all on $45 main courses and $12 drinks, they'll take it in droves, and do it all year.
Turnstiles is going to be doing plenty of droving at PICF over the next fortnight or so, 23 shows in all, and we'll report back to you with micro-reviews and other news as we go.
So let's get cracking!

Theatre: Noises Off

By Michael Frayn

Knuts Theatre

Directed by Stephen Lee

With Ian Bolgia, Melissa Kiiveri, Angelique Malcolm, David Meadows, Graham Mitchell, Claire Munday, Adam T Perkins, Shirley Van Sanden and Summer Williams

Camelot Theatre, Mosman Park

1 – 12 May 2012

Shirley Van Sanden and Melissa Kiiveri

Michael Frayn’s celebrated Noises Off is, in many respects, a victim of its own fame. Thirty years on, it’s a hit whenever it gets a worthy production (a much-admired revival is currently running on the West End), but it has often suffered at the hands of directors and casts attracted by its veneer of broad humour – and deliberately cheap and nasty production values – but unable to manage its technical intricacies and subtleties.

I went to the Camelot Theatre in Mosman Park for the debut production the Knuts Theatre Company with some trepidation. Happily, though, this Noises Off was confidently handled and genuinely funny.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Skin

Written, directed and performed by Humphrey Bower

With music by Leon Ewing

Blue Room Theatre

April 24 – May 12, 2012

It’s no secret that I didn’t buy into the acclaim that surrounded Humphrey Bower’s award-winning Wish last year. Despite the quality of the performances, and of the production generally, in my view the story – of a lonely man’s emotional and sexual relationship with a female gorilla – lacked the necessary wider meaning or allegorical power to justify its lurid premise.

Bower returns to the Blue Room with Skin, a first-person telling of the stories of two Australian men in alien environments. It has all the strengths of Wish, and the great advantage of having something real to say about us, and our lives.

Link here  to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: John Gavin

Written and directed by Nick Candy

With Dawn Pascoe, Steven Finnigan and Nick Candy

Blue Room Theatre

17 April – 5 May

Nick Candy, Steven Finnegan and
Dawn Pascoe (pic Matt Scurfield)

There’s the tale and there’s its telling.

John Gavin was just 15 when, in April 1844, he became the first European executed in the fledgling Swan River Colony. His short life was Dickensian: when he was only 11, he was transported with 28 other boys, “Parkhurst Apprentices”, to Western Australia to serve a 10-year sentence for, we gather, some minor artful dodgering. He’d been here four months when, in February 1844, he confessed to the brutal murder of George Pollard, a son of the Pinjarra family to whom he had been indentured. He was tried on April 3 that year and, two days later (Good Friday intervened), hanged at the Roundhouse in Fremantle.

In an act of gruesome kindness, the sheriff had weights tied to Gavin’s skinny legs so the lad’s death pangs would be mercifully brief. His body was secretly buried in a shallow grave in sandhills to the south of the Roundhouse.

Nick Candy’s script recounts Gavin’s wretched story with few embellishments and scant detail. He implies, but doesn’t effectively substantiate, doubt about the boy’s guilt, but this seemed to me more for effect than purpose.