The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (★★★★½)

By Simon Stephens
National Theatre of Great Britain
His Majesty’s Theatre
Until August 18

 All serious theatre is an exploration of the human mind and its mysteries, and good theatre attempts to illuminate, but not explain, it and them.
Explanation is a task for lectures, illumination for the stage.
That’s what makes Simon Stephen’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time among the best of plays.
It’s the story, adapted from Mark Haddon’s much-loved novel, of a courageous 15-year-old, Christopher Boone (Kaffe Keating), who triumphs over the weaknesses and deceits of his parents (Stuart Laing and Emma Beattie) and the terrors of loneliness and alone-ness to achieve what seems an impossible goal, and at least begin to repair the mess those around him have made.
This is as fine, entertaining and insightful a couple of hours as I can imagine, and it would be curious of you to miss it. 

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Julius Caesar

By William Shakespeare

Bell Shakespeare

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

August 8-11

Julius Caesar is a problematic play, and this is a problematic staging of it.

I’m not quite sure why Bell Shakespeare have taken it out on the road so soon (seven years) after they last mounted it, and I couldn’t find anything in particular compelling about it to have forced their hand.

Whether we’re to make anything of its extensive gender and ethnic impartiality (five of the historical and original male characters are played by women; Caesar by an African American), there’s nothing especially ground-breaking about it – indeed a major “drawcard” of Bell’s last crack at Caesar was the casting of Kate Mulvany, who also delivered a terse, concertinaed adaptation of the script, as Cassius.

Which leaves us with the problems of the play, and how Bell dealt with them, and it’s a mixed report card.

The elephant in the room (okay, allow me a little Hannibal joke) is Julius himself. The play is mistitled, of course – it should be Antony and Brutus, but Shakespeare obviously was saving the latter part of the title for Cleopatra. Julius is, after all, merely the victim of the play’s pivotal moment, and that happens fairly early on in the piece.

Before it, he does nothing other than ignore some ultimately good advice, change his mind a couple of times (so much for being “as constant as the northern star”) and wander into a one-way knife event.

He’s barely more important, either to his play or the parade of Shakespeare’s characters, than Duncan in Macbeth, and no-one has ever thought to re-name the Scottish Play after him.

Bell’s last Caesar, Alex Menglet, played him like an ailing Russian oligarch, which was a bit comic but made some useful points about the unsuitability of any individual to claim the entire apparatus of a modern state for themselves.

I could find no similarly useful points in Kenneth Ransome’s awkward portrayal of the general who  would be king.

On the other hand, Sara Zwangobani’s Mark Antony did bring something to her role. She stripped Antony’s great “friends, Romans, countrymen” of much of its rhetorical flourish and left it as the prowling, snarling incitement to slaughter it is.

Perhaps the production’s best – and most surprising – moment was the argument and reconciliation between the conspirators Brutus (Ivan Donato) and Cassius (Nick Simpson-Deeks) in IV.iii. They squabble and flatter each other like the doomed children they are while the pincers of the vengeful Antony and ambitious Octavius (Emily Havea, effective as a Prince on the cusp of her purple reign) close in on them.

From the end of Antony’s speech on, the playing out of Julius Caesar is as weakly constructed and written as anything in Shakespeare.

To their credit, Donato and Simpson-Deeks at least made it worth sitting through.

Theatre: Improvement Club

The Last Great Hunt

Written and directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler

Performed by Gita Bezard, Arielle Gray, Chris Isaacs, Frieda Lee and Mararo Wangai

Set and costume designer Sally Phipps

Sound and Lighting designer Joe Lui

22 June – 7 July

Groucho Marx swore that he would refuse to join any club that would have him.

The protagonist (perhaps not quite the perfect description) of Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s Improvement Club has an antonymic problem; he wants to be in a club and has a gift for starting them – he just struggles to stay in them.

Adam’s (Chris Isaacs) error is constitutional; the stated purpose, or at least the marketing pitch, of the clubs he founds is Improvement. The catch is that he has no real interest in that purpose. He just wants a way to get to hang out with people who would otherwise shun him.

They – Cameron (Gita Bezard), Dylan (Frieda Lee) and Blake (Mararo Wangai) – discover soon enough that improvement, to Adam, is measured in quantity, not quality, and reject, first, his leadership, and then him.

He tries again and again, searching for ways to ensure his primacy and survival, each time failing in the face of his own shortcomings and the ambition of others.

If you’re detecting the odour of allegory, you’re on the money.

Theatre: Tale of Tales ★★★★½

Written, directed and performed by Clare Testoni
with Paul Grabovac
Sound design by Joe Lui
Lighting design by Rhiannon Peterson
Blue Room Theatre until May 9

Tale of Tales is a small, brilliant gem of storytelling, and a breakout achievement for its deviser and performer, Clare Testoni.

Testoni’s previous work, including The Beast and the Bride and West of the Moon, has explored her interest in fairy tales, but any concern that her imagination and talents are confined to and by them is quickly dispelled in Tale of Tales. 
She uses the fairy tales collected by Giambattista Basile in the 17^th century (which include the earliest known versions of Rapunzel and Cinderella) as a jumping off point for a wider and deeper story of four generations of her own family, the rise of Fascism in Italy and the resistance to it, the flight of many Italians to Australia and their fate here.

It’s a passionate statement against fear and prejudice, and especially the practice of interment that is often its consequence. The parallels to the same practices in our own times are clearly and powerfully made.

It’s also the true love story of her great-grandparents, Sante and Antoinetta, and their strange, sad parting and estrangement. Their story is paired with Basile’s The Princess Who Couldn’t Laugh or Cry, The Crystal Tunnel, The Dragon and the Flea and others. The narrative technique give Basile’s stories new life and meaning – it’s a lesson in the purpose and power of fairy tales as well as a wonderful device for the telling of her own story.    

Testoni is a shadow puppeteer, and she takes her craft to a new level. Working alongside the excellent actor Paul Grabovac, shining torches on tiny cutout figures on tables, she throws silhouettes of people and places – villages and cities, internment camps – onto the white-papered walls of the stage.

The images have a magical three-dimensionality, and move with an almost cinematic quality. They are interspersed with family photos and archival material, some very shocking, of Mussolini’s Italy and internment camps.

Tale of Tales is an honest show, and a heartfelt one; as Basile says in The Sun, the Moon and Talia, “a story left untold is destined to repeat itself.”

It’s a good thing, then, that Clare Testoni has told hers – and that she’s done it so very well.

This review has been archived by The Press Reader (link here)

Theatre: The Talk (★★★½)

The Last Great Hunt
Written and directed by Gita Bezard
Performed by Cassidy Dunn, Megan Hunter and Christina Odam
Until April 21 at the Subiaco Arts Centre
 
The Talk is a departure for Perth’s globetrotting indie theatre collective, The Last Great Hunt.
It’s their first production without any of their six members on stage, yet the performance of the young cast they’ve recruited is shot through with their house style.
The result is the energising and sometimes thrilling humour of surprise as snatches of conversation suddenly turn into song-and-dance routines. The show is very often very funny, but it’s infused with the great sadness of someone all alone in a crowd.
The Talk sometimes ticks off more than it can chew, but the pertinence of the story, the tightness of the production and the energy and talent of the cast makes it well worth paying attention to.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: The Second Woman ★★★★½

By Nat Randall and Anna Breckon

Performed by Nat Randall and others

PICA 3-4 March 

The last show in the Perth Festival’s theatre programme will be its most – and best ­– remembered. With The Second Woman, the performance artist Nat Randall and her collaborator, the director Anna Breckon, have conceived and executed an addictive experience that extends the boundaries and dramatic opportunities of one-on-one theatre.

Despite appearances to the contrary, that’s what this show is. Randall’s “leading men”– there are a hundred of them – appear one at a time in an identically scripted, unrehearsed, scene. She and the men perform it in a cube set out of which I suspect they can see only dimly, if at all. Inside that box, aware of nothing but each other, they are one on one.

The scene they act out is inspired by John Cassavetes’s 1977 play-within-a-film Opening Night, with Randall re-imagining Gina Rowland’s dipsomaniac actress character, Myrtle Gordon (and the character, Virginia, she plays), and the men, the “Marty’s”, grown from the character Cassavetes’s character plays.

So Randall plays Rowland playing Myrtle playing Virginia. Complex? You bet.

Outside the box, however, are us. We can see the actors, and we know what will – or should – happen, in precise detail, because we’ve seen it before – in many cases dozens of times.

Randall plays the scene 100 times in 24 hours, stopping only for a short “interval” every 90 minutes or so. We can come and go when we please.  

It might sound like a gimmick, but it serves a purpose.

The Randall/Gina/Myrtle/Virginia we saw early in the marathon was different toward the end. Tired, a little frayed around the edges, a little less accommodating of the man than before. A little more humorous. She’s lived one long day more, it hurts, and it shows.

And what, exactly, is the man to her? Well, it depends.

Sometimes he is her husband, sometimes she is his mistress, and sometimes he is her gigolo. He’s older than her, or younger, or about the same. She prompts him to repeat, “And I love you”, and he says, “And you love me.”

At the end of each scene (spoiler alerts really don’t matter here), she offers the man some money. Is it a payment? Or a refund?  He takes it. Or doesn’t.

As he leaves he tells her he loves her. Or has never loved her. Who is she? Who is he?

These questions abound, as do the ways the men deal with them. The audience becomes hypersensitive to the tiniest nuances, or missteps accidental or deliberate (it doesn’t take too kindly to the latter). This minutia, and the cinematic effect of the scene, is magnified by the roving and fixed cameras around the cube that capture every moment, often in excruciating close-up, on a screen to its side.

It’s part of a real technical achievement by Randall and Breckon, the video director EO Gill, the composer Nina Buchanan, lighting designer Amber Silk and the set designers Future Method Studios.

As word of mouth flashed around the festival, and people arrived and just didn’t leave, the queues lengthened. I hear it got up to two hours to get in.

What they waited for was mesmerizing, superbly executed and groundbreaking. 

And worth every second of it.   

Music: ACO Underground ★★½

Australian Chamber Orchestra members Richard Tognetti, Satu Vänskä, Julian Thompson and Nicole Divall, with Brian Ritchie and Jim Moginie   

Astor Theatre 23 February

I’m loath to weigh down a review of an ACO concert with the seating arrangements, but they set the tone for a very perplexing evening.

For some reason I can’t begin to fathom, there were five rows of tables and chairs set almost obscene distances apart in front of the Astor Theatre stage. There didn’t appear to be any reason for them – no food or drink service, or any other discernable “VIP” advantage at all – and all it did was force the bulk of the audience back and more at the mercy of the Astor’s sometimes-dubious acoustics.

That was an issue, because the core of the programme was songs – often by Richard Tognetti, but also by Nick Drake and Nine Inch Nails – performed by the ACO violinist and deputy leader Satu Vänskä. Her voice has the same Mitteleuropean quality as, say, Nico, but it simply didn’t cut through the muddy sound mix with clarity and strength.

The music, too, had its disappointments. The ACO had enlisted The Violent Femmes bassist Brian Ritchile and Oils guitarist Jim Moginie for some rock heft, but they were parked to one side and hardly appeared above the battlements.

The string quartet playing, by Tognetti, Satu Vänskä, Julian Thompson (cello) and Nicole Divall (viola) was exemplary, as we expect from the ACO, but it was in the service of a diversion from their modus operandi that was fitful, unexciting, and not a little indulgent.

Still, hey, the ACO have stored away plenty of brownie points in the larders of music lovers here, there and everywhere, and they’re entitled to spend a few of them every now and then.