Sunday 31 October 2010

Becky Shaw ***1/2

Becky Shaw 
By Gina Gionfriddo, Echelon Productions,
Lawler Studio, MTC, until November 14, 2010
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars:*** 1/2

Gina Gionfriddo’s darkly comical play may be called Becky Shaw, but the character we see most of is Suzanna (Suzie) Slater (Amanda Levy), a neurotic woman in her 30s who is completing a PhD in Psychology when she should be analysing her own muddy, inner world. Suzanna’s life is “epic Faulknerian chaos”, which means everything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Gionfriddo’s play deals with Suzanna’s fraught relationships with her family and their emotional and ethical dilemmas. Suzanna’s formerly wealthy father dies before the play begins, leaving a financial and emotional mess for his wife, Susan (Judith Roberts) who suffers with Multiple Sclerosis, his daughter, Suzanna, and his adopted son, Max Garrett (Daniel Frederiksen), a high-flying money manager.

Suzanna and Max squabble then consummate a sexual attraction stemming from their childhood. Mum has a young lover-minder who is a conman. Then Suzanna marries sensitive Andrew (Alex Papps) who has a history of rescuing needy women then abandoning them.

That all seems complicated enough but things get worse when Becky Shaw, the next damsel in distress, appears. Kate Atkinson is always unbeatably charming, but as the outwardly “delicate” and needy, but inwardly manipulative, obsessive and dangerous Becky, we want to slap her and scream, “Leave them alone”. But she gets her claws well into this family.

Levy is maddeningly accurate as the neurotic, little, rich American princess, playing Suzanna with a brittle, feistiness and obnoxious irrationality. Frederiksen is delicious as the brusque, unsentimental Max, giving this tough-boy-made-good a charm and sexual energy that is both attractive and dangerous. He looks after the people close to him but dismisses losers such as Becky – at his own peril. Papps plays the unbearably feminist Andrew with relish.

Although the script wanders a little, there is some fine dialogue, smart social observation and several compelling characters. It is funny and disturbing like Yasmina Reza’s play, God of Carnage, although less savage and visceral. Contemporary America is lampooned mercilessly for its mad political correctness and its greed and acquisitiveness that run on parallel tracks. Indira Carmichael’s direction of story and characters is slick but her scene changes and repeated moving of furniture interrupt the flow.

 Becky Shaw is good entertainment with plenty of recognisable personal and social dilemmas and without too much mental challenge.

By Kate Herbert

Friday 15 October 2010

Life Without Me ***


Life Without Me 
By Daniel Keene, Melbourne Theatre Company
MTC Sumner Theatre, October 15 to November 21, 2010
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars:  ***

Daniel Keene’s plays are produced more often in France than in Australia. Life Without Me is the first produced by Melbourne Theatre Company. 

Keene’s earlier plays, developed by the Keene-Taylor Project, ranged from poetic-abstract to the gritty realism of life in Australia’s underclass that featured short plays performed in the Brotherhood of St. Laurence warehouse.

Life Without Me is a different animal; Fawlty Towers collides with Sartre’s existentialist play, No Exit. It is a comedy with a smattering of simple, philosophy. It opens with a funny, slapstick routine between Nigel (Robert Menzies), the hotel clerk, and John (Greg Stone), the hapless guest. The verbal and physical comedy continues with the arrival of Roy  (Brian Lipson), a bemused, linen salesman, and Nigel’s dotty mum (Kerry Walker).

This is not to say that it is all absurd and comical. The characters are trapped, physically and psychologically, in this down-market hotel with its “private and adequate rooms”, a non-functioning elevator and not even a pen to fill in the register. When anyone tries to leave, they are driven back to the hotel by a raging wind, an incompetent taxi driver, a lost train station or other incomprehensible interference by the universe.

Menzies is a sad clown as the obstreperous, unhelpful and defeated hotel clerk. He makes a super, comedy double act with Stone who plays the desperate, directionless, lost soul, John, who is literally blown through the revolving door (get the metaphor?) arriving bedraggled, sodden and crazed. Lipson’s impeccable comic timing and eccentric delivery make Roy sympathetic and hilarious and his budding relationship with Alice (Deidre Rubenstein) is charming. The younger characters (Kristina Brew, Benedict Hardie) are not as successfully drawn in Keene’s script.

Rubenstein’s character refers in French to, “La salle des pas perdus” (the room of lost steps). It is like a lobby, a place to pass through, hoping to find directions to your destination. All these characters are lost, seeking, spinning in a whirl of ideas, random choices and confusion.

By Kate Herbert

Friday 8 October 2010

Intimacy, Ranters, October 8, 2010 ****

Intimacy
Devised by Ranters Theatre, text by Raimondo Cortese
Where and When: Malthouse Theatre,  October 8 to 2, 2010
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars: ****

Intimacy makes me smile. It gives us a warm, comfortable glow, inviting us into intimate conversations between strangers who feel like our friends. It is deliciously soothing, despite its characters being sometimes dislocated and unsettled.

The performance style has an easy, gentle, conversational quality rarely seen in theatre. It avoids any heightened vocal or acting style and echoes the casual quality and lengthy pauses of everyday dialogue. By the end, it is as if we have wandered the streets with actor Paul Lum, chatting to the singular individuals who also haunt the night.

Ranters Theatre is a collaborative company creating deceptively simple theatre co-devised by its actors (Paul Lum, Patrick Moffatt, Beth Buchanan), director (Adriano Cortese) and writer Raimondo Cortese). The comfort, truthfulness and clarity of the acting and dialogue are a testament to the success of this devising process.

Lum briefly explains that he spent an evening wandering the streets near his flat, asking total strangers if they wanted a chat. “Some people said, ‘No’”, Lum quips. Intimacy is a record of some of those chats.

Lum is like a low-key interviewer interested in the lives of others. Moffatt and Buchanan, perched on rocks that litter the stage (Anna Tregloan), play the strangers without embellishment or extreme characterisations. The first character is Russell, a 62 year-old teacher of Ancient History with a fascination for visiting Roller Coasters around the world. The Birdman is a street performer who imitates birds and refuses to have his photo taken. Adrian is a pilot who has panic attacks and Mary is a Glaswegian who suffers crippling insomnia.

Encounters with strangers allow an artificial intimacy with neither past nor future. The strangers meet, commune, share their secrets and lives, then part never to meet again in most cases. (Although one of the strangers is now Lum’s mechanic.) The chats amble aimlessly, then touch on sensitive, personal issues or veer away to safer topics.

People’s lives are endlessly interesting and Intimacy allows us into worlds normally closed to us. We are like villagers around the campfire, listening to stories that enliven and educate, making us alert and more attuned to others.

By Kate Herbert


Intimacy makes me smile. It gives us a warm, comfortable glow, inviting us into intimate conversations between strangers who feel like our friends. It is deliciously soothing, despite its characters being sometimes dislocated and unsettled.

The performance style has an easy, gentle, conversational quality rarely seen in theatre. It avoids any heightened vocal or acting style and echoes the casual quality and lengthy pauses of everyday dialogue. By the end, it is as if we have wandered the streets with actor Paul Lum, chatting to the singular individuals who also haunt the night.

Ranters Theatre is a collaborative company creating deceptively simple theatre co-devised by its actors (Paul Lum, Patrick Moffatt, Beth Buchanan), director (Adriano Cortese) and writer Raimondo Cortese). The comfort, truthfulness and clarity of the acting and dialogue are a testament to the success of this devising process.

Lum briefly explains that he spent an evening wandering the streets near his flat, asking total strangers if they wanted a chat. “Some people said, ‘No’”, Lum quips. Intimacy is a record of some of those chats.

Lum is like a low-key interviewer interested in the lives of others. Moffatt and Buchanan, perched on rocks that litter the stage (Anna Tregloan), play the strangers without embellishment or extreme characterisations. The first character is Russell, a 62 year-old teacher of Ancient History with a fascination for visiting Roller Coasters around the world. The Birdman is a street performer who imitates birds and refuses to have his photo taken. Adrian is a pilot who has panic attacks and Mary is a Glaswegian who suffers crippling insomnia.

Encounters with strangers allow an artificial intimacy with neither past nor future. The strangers meet, commune, share their secrets and lives, then part never to meet again in most cases. (Although one of the strangers is now Lum’s mechanic.) The chats amble aimlessly, then touch on sensitive, personal issues or veer away to safer topics.

People’s lives are endlessly interesting and Intimacy allows us into worlds normally closed to us. We are like villagers around the campfire, listening to stories that enliven and educate, making us alert and more attuned to others.

By Kate Herbert

Thursday 7 October 2010

Britney Spears: The Cabaret ****1/2

Britney Spears: The Cabaret
Written by Dean Bryant
Where and When: Chapel off Chapel, until Oct 24 
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars: ****1/2

Christie Whelan is a musical and cabaret talent not to be missed. She made me want to hug Britney Spears – a huge surprise to me, not being a Britney fan in this, or any other lifetime. I also wanted to slap her.

In this intimate and sensational cabaret, Britney Spears: The Cabaret, Whelan, writer Dean Bryant and pianist Matthew Frank, mercilessly satirise the vacuous, perky but troubled, pop diva then spin 180 degrees with a poignant depiction of Britney’s life.

She is propelled by an ambitious stage mother into TV and pop music where she flails, abuses drugs and alcohol, marries badly twice, loses her children in a court battle, is hounded by paparazzi, shaves her head, mimes on stage, sings off-key and appears in her underwear.

The charismatic Whelan – tall, blonde, vivacious, with a fine voice and poured into a little, black mini-dress  – plays Britney with a mischievous twinkle. The lyrics of Britney’s hit songs have new meaning when threaded between her life stories.

I’m A Girl, Not Yet a Woman tells all in its title. Oops I Did It Again, I’m a Slave for You, Toxic and Womanizer reveal her foolish choice in men while Overprotected has sad echoes of her domineering father sending her to a psychiatric ward. This is a masterpiece of cabaret.

By Kate Herbert