Sunrise Boulevarde by Rod Quantock , June 30, 1997

Sunrise Boulevarde  by Rod Quantock

Trades Hall, June – July 1997

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around June 22, 1997

I'm building a monument to Rod Quantock, the last of his species: political stand-ups.  It is a beautiful, historic construction with a bit of Victorian lacework around the top.

It harmonises with its surroundings and reminds us of the lost Paris End of Collins Street or Melbourne's terraces. It has no view of the Casino, the Grand Prix track, the new museum or the Tulla Tollway Gate.

Only hard-earned cash will be accepted: no 'speculative' or 'conservative' money. Walker cannot own it, Williams cannot invest in it, Elliott cannot sell it and Alan Stockdale will never privatise it.

It will be built by anyone who has walked up those well-worn stone steps of the Trades Hall where Rod is doing his show, Sunrise Boulevarde. It has Rod's boot firmly planted in the backsides of the 'Mates' who have uglified our city.

Quantock is heroic and angry. He chose the ugliest room in the Trades Hall to highlight the Ugliness of our political regime and its cronies. We may have bulldozed the Gas and Fuel but there is worse to come. "Money is ugliometric".

Rod is hilarious, accessible and passionate as he leads us through a disturbing chalk and talk lecture in Politics and Economics a la Quantock. His impeccable understanding of our political system is pickled in his satirical and wry point of view.

He points out the supreme irony of our 'Free-way Toll-way'. He draws comparisons between our new, thrusting 'Look at me!' architecture and Mussolini's. Our old AAA+++ Moody's rating must have been good " 'cos it's more than we got in woodwork".

He prophesies 'World Series Democracy' and proposes measuring the unemployed by weight. He decries a state slogan that can fit on a number plate and calls this paper 'The Hairoiled Sin'. Ron Walker called him 'Unvictorian', 'a terrorist' and 'a rabble'. "It's very hard to be a rabble alone" an d"name-calling is now a substitute for politics."

To overcome our helplessness he suggests three solutions, the final being a beauty. "They won't do any good but they'll make you feel better." His view is grim but must be heard. Social satire is one of the few remaining means of protest. As Rod says, " At least in Indonesia the government takes notice when you protest." Now that's depressing!

See this!

KATE HERBERT

Shorts by Soup Kitchen Theatre, June 30, 1997

Shorts by Soup Kitchen Theatre

Athenaeum II until July 11, 1997 At

12.10 & 1.10pm Mon-Fri

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around June 29, 1997

Does your lunch hour usually consist of jogging elbows while ordering a $10 gourmet sandwich or rushing out to buy a birthday gift at David Jones? For a change, try snack-size lunchtime theatre.

For $5 Soup Kitchen Theatre provides soup, (Rosella) bread (Pott's) and five quick, light sketch pieces. You are fed, entertained and out of there in well under an hour if you need to get back to the desk job. There is no stress, no noise and no hustle and bustle of the city at midday.

The strongest piece of writing is Igloo, a lyrical, romantic and witty monologue by Elizabeth Coleman. A woman (Amanda Armstrong) cleans her teeth and muses on the idyllic image of living in a perfect igloo where all her dreams materialise.

Another smart piece is The Message Routine that is a voiceover cleverly placed to cover the quick set changes. It satirises all those recorded message services that chew up your dollars as you wait for service.

A possibly unintentional theme throughout the pieces is romantic fantasy. Reading Between The Lines by Trudy McLauchlan is a broad comic glance at a woman's immersion in her lunch time reading matter: a Mills and Boon romance and its intrusion into reality.

Abe Pogos's Dream Girl looks at an awkward and heightened moment as a man reveals he has been dreaming about his girlfriend's sister.

Stress Management is the odd piece out being a satire on group therapy sessions. It makes a point about self-indulgent therapy junkies in a final dramatic revelation by the only silent group member.

Directors Lucy Jones and Catherine Hill have kept the style broad and light. The staging is simple, the content light and the performances competent (Steve Adams, Ariane Vrisakis, Drew Tingwell, Amanda Armstrong). At times the writing cries out for a little more depth and less effort on the part of the actors who seem to be pushing too hard with the lines.

However, you can't go wrong for $5 and the audience really enjoyed it. We don't want too much headwork for lunch, do we?

KATE HERBERT

Marty Putz, June 19, 1997

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Arthouse Theatre Universal Theatre II until June 28, 1997

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around June 17, 1997

It is a brave company that tackles Macbeth. Arthouse Theatre, directed by Bruce Alexander who also plays the lead, has taken the plunge but has simplified the task by whittling Shakespeare's four-hour text down to a pithy ninety minutes.

Now, this means the company of fourteen actors and two musicians can get their hands on all the meaty speeches without the filler. It is intelligent editing but it often forces the action along too swiftly and scampers over significant details such as who is playing whom.

The piece is stylised and approaches the murderous plot by abstracting scenes. This allows the cast to chant, to stylise fight scenes, feasts and murders and the musicians to provide with an evocative soundscape by Nick Livingston. Alexander has created some vivid, startling images that are enhanced by a striking lighting design by Jilly Judges.

The stage design (Mark Anstey) is a stark collection of wooden posts and metal pole construction. The witches perch precariously up poles throughout the play, emphasising their constant control and connection with the Macbeth's fate.

A great text, however, does not automatically make a great performance. The words become banal in the mouths of actors who cannot meet the challenge. Macbeth and his girlish wife might have been worrying over his running over the neighbour's dog rather than murdering the king and most of the rest of his court.

Their superficial passion for each other becomes risible. The weight of the tragedy and impact of the dark, portentous world of the witches loses potency as the minutes drip away.

Many of the cast skim the surface of the language, disconnected from the layers of meaning and with no vocal power. Nothing appears to be happening inside so they rush those magnificent speeches like shopping lists. It became a series of fairly static talking scenes strung together with physical-visual scenes.

There is some good text work from Emily Buxton as Lady Macduff and the witches are interesting if a little predictable in their mud-spattered, bare-breasted rag outfits. It was a valiant but perhaps too ambitious project.

And remember that old theatre superstition. If you say 'Macbeth' inside the theatre you have to go outside, spin around three times, cough, sneeze, spit, knock and be invited back in - or something like that. I think the witches say so just after "hubble bubble”.

KATE HERBERT 

Macbeth, Arthouse Theartre, June 18, 1997

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Arthouse Theatre Universal Theatre II until June 28, 1997

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around June 17, 1997

It is a brave company that tackles Macbeth. Arthouse Theatre, directed by Bruce Alexander who also plays the lead, has taken the plunge but has simplified the task by whittling Shakespeare's four-hour text down to a pithy ninety minutes.

Now, this means the company of fourteen actors and two musicians can get their hands on all the meaty speeches without the filler. It is intelligent editing but it often forces the action along too swiftly and scampers over significant details such as who is playing whom.

The piece is stylised and approaches the murderous plot by abstracting scenes. This allows the cast to chant, to stylise fight scenes, feasts and murders and the musicians to provide with an evocative soundscape by Nick Livingston. Alexander has created some vivid, startling images that are enhanced by a striking lighting design by Jilly Judges.

The stage design (Mark Anstey) is a stark collection of wooden posts and metal pole construction. The witches perch precariously up poles throughout the play, emphasising their constant control and connection with the Macbeth's fate.

A great text, however, does not automatically make a great performance. The words become banal in the mouths of actors who cannot meet the challenge. Macbeth and his girlish wife might have been worrying over his running over the neighbour's dog rather than murdering the king and most of the rest of his court.

Their superficial passion for each other becomes risible. The weight of the tragedy and impact of the dark, portentous world of the witches loses potency as the minutes drip away.

Many of the cast skim the surface of the language, disconnected from the layers of meaning and with no vocal power. Nothing appears to be happening inside so they rush those magnificent speeches like shopping lists. It became a series of fairly static talking scenes strung together with physical-visual scenes.

There is some good text work from Emily Buxton as Lady Macduff and the witches are interesting if a little predictable in their mud-spattered, bare-breasted rag outfits. It was a valiant but perhaps too ambitious project.

And remember that old theatre superstition. If you say 'Macbeth' inside the theatre you have to go outside, spin around three times, cough, sneeze, spit, knock and be invited back in - or something like that. I think the witches say so just after "hubble bubble”.

KATE HERBERT 

Panayiota & Locked In, June 17, 1997

Panayiota by Angela Costi & Locked In by Tricia Bowen

By Knock Knock Theatre

Brunswick Mechanics Institute until June 29, 1997

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around 16 June, 1997

Two writers, Angela Costi and Tricia Bowen, decided to mount their own plays at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute rather than wait for someone else to do it for them. More power to them.

The two plays, Panayiota and Locked In, are unrelated except by theme.

Angela Costi's Panayiota is the second in the program and by far the more successful. Lisa, previously known as Athena, is at a watershed in her 27-year life. For ten years she has denied her Greek-Cypriot heritage, her parents' wishes, her school friends and has followed he dream to be Anglo-Australianised, to live with a dinky-di Aussie and to be an artist.

The play has a complex structure that works mostly in its favour. It shifts between "Lisa's" present and her past, layering her developing relationship difficulties with her abandonment of her school friends.

As she struggles with Pat's (Caleb Cluff) need for a more predictable and conservative life she surprisingly reunites with her two pals. Stella (Bridget Haylock) has the model Greek marriage and baby Panayiota, (the Virgin Mary) while Silvana (Daniela Farinacci)  is still unfulfilled  in her role as tart craving love.

Director Kim Baston has created some lyrical moments and slow-motion dream-like sequences set against the well-observed ordinariness of the women's dialogue. Back projections of seashore echo Lisa's drawings, dreams, memories and fears of water that reverberate with Jungian images of an emotional sea.

The actors are more comfortable and challenged in Panayiota.  In Locked In, they are confined by a rigid, simplistic structure and narrative. It is a play more for voices than action, better suited to radio.

Three women sit 'locked in’ their homes. One is young, insecure with romantic visions of her ideal man coming to rescue her. A second is a stitched-up mother obsessed with locks and air freshener. The third is a working class divorcee who mistrusts neighbours.  They are all three stereotypes.

A man knocks at their respective doors. He has forgotten where he lives. Locked In is a play about how suburbia subsumes people's identities. It smacks of 70's Agit-Prop theatre when it was novel and in vogue to comment on the facelessness of the great suburban sprawl.

Any such social observations needs, in the late nineties, to take further the argument or imagery. There is nothing substantial or new being said in this text no in the style of its production that is rather unimaginatively realised.

Locked In feels like a play from the 70's when it was new and hence in vogue to comment on the facelessness of the great suburban sprawl. Any such social observations need in the late nineties, to take the argument or the imagery further. There is nothing substantial or new being said in this text or in the style of its production that is rather unimaginatively realised.

KATE HERBERT

Effie X-Posed by Mary Coustas, June 13, 1997

Universal Theatre 1, Fitzroy, June 1997  (no closing date)

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around June 12, 1997

Effie's people spoke to my people saying they didn't want too many press people at her three (yep!) opening nights. It would upset the balance of laughter. Now that's paranoid - even for a Boofhead Superstar!

Effie X-Posed is the next episode in the rise and rise of Effie Stephanides, altered-ego of the more benign and eminently more talented Mary Coustas. Effie stimulates the laugh glands of her predominantly "wog" (her word and theirs) young audience.

She begins by goofing about with a front row Sicilian. "Geez, a yuppie wog from Port Melbourne." What follows is a journey round Effie's return from her US tour, media coverage by Ray Martin (on huge screens) and her subsequent fall from Tall Poppy grace when Ray rolls footage of a naked Effie in soft porn, "Dean Man Bonking."

There are lots of laughs. Effie attacks everybody sometimes with a real nasty streak which can tip from funny into unpleasantness. She does a lot of Anglo-bashing, wog-smacking and American star taunting. Comparisons with our icons, Edna Everidge and Norman Gunston are inappropriate. Effie lacks their highly developed sense of satire, irony or subtlety.

The last clip is one of the most successful parts of the show. T.V. comedy director, Pino Amenta is no stage director but his Current Affair footage, shot mainly in New York, is hilarious.

Effie highjacks Dennis Hopper, who calls her "Iffie". Micky Rourke tries her on the casting couch. A real gem was the Method acting class where Effie plays opposite a Bronx Brando look-alike.

Coustas has a couple of secondary characters. Her sleezy old velvet-suited stalker, Vasili, has potential but Tammy the cocaine-freak club dancer is a clever study in phobic speed hallucinations.

She is supported by Annie Jones, who plays Sara, club owner and Blond Bitch, and Geoff Paine as Phil the woossey bartender. Paine's irrepressible comic persona intermittently busts out of straight man mode. A high point was his silly podium dance routine and "cheer up Effie" love song medley.

Writing by Coustas and television writer, Chris Anastassiades, is appropriate for TV sketches but lacks the form and narrative required of theatre or the joke quotient of stand-up. Maybe the character is best suited to the box. But the crowd seemed to go for it. Go Boofhead!

KATE HERBERT

Hideous Portraits by Tom Wright, June 11, 1997

Hideous Portraits by Tom Wright, by Mene Mene Theatre

at La Mama until June 29, 1997

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around June 10, 1997

The unexpurgated observations of the deranged can shed a glaring and unflattering light on a family's neurotic relationships. Such is the case with Burchett, (Ben Rogan) in Tom Wright's Hideous Portraits.

Burchett, youngest and maddest brother of three, is ripped untimely from his psychiatric institution and whisked away by his sentimental oldest brother Moncrieff (Christopher Davis) to the family home and middle brother, dilettante actor, Melba (Jerome Pride). The Australian diva references may reflect the pretensions of this family to high art and "Anglo-Saxon good taste."

The paranoiac Burchett is not alone in his madness. Moncrieff rehearses playing a blind woman in front of the mirror and irons Burchett's special underwear. The histrionic Melba is passionate about his youngest brother.

It is evident immediately that the bosom of brotherly love is not Burchett's ideal haven. he hates Moncrieff's dullness and Melba's histrionics. They pander to him and perch nervously on chair-edge awaiting his next peculiar outburst.

The play, which is based heavily on Austrian Thomas Bernhard's 1980's play , Ritter, Dene, Voss, is swiftly written and directed by Wright in a broad black clown style. Its stark green-black and white design combined with its stop-frame action echoes its central image of photographic portraiture.

The text is riddled with literary and philosophical allusions, witticisms and grim observations about anything that niggles the writer. It slings abuse at wealthy arts patrons, psychiatrists, anything American, pretentious photographers but, most significantly, it attacks "insipid boulevarde plays" and dilettante artists. Occasionally it is too glib.

The three actors give vigorous and intense performances. As Moncrieff, Christopher Davis prattles and mothers the young 'uns and Pride is supremely arch and prissy as Melba. Rogan grabs with both fists the challenge of Burchett, the "humanist-megalomaniac", and wrestles a nervy, pungent and hilarious character infested with quirks and staccato tics, gasps and double takes.

It is a superbly timed comic piece but it lets itself down by playing too lightly the darkness. It skims too easily across the surface of the dark psychological pond. It is so frenetic and mannered at times it undercuts its own power.

The opening night friendly crowd may have skewed the laugh response but there is a deeper resonance to this play.

KATE HERBERT