Autopsy, June 6, 1996

 Written by Julianne O’Brien

Directed by Rosemary Myers and Bruce Gladwin

By Arena Theatre, at Fairfax Studio, June 6-16, 1996

 Reviewed by Kate Herbert around June 6, 1006

Pop Art, Pop Psychology and Pop Technology collide in Autopsy, Arena Theatre's new show for young audiences. Well, perhaps not too young because it would be dead scary for anyone under teenage. In fact, for this writer who has nightmares after The X Files the lurid computer graphics of a dissected body were most unsettling.

The show is like an 80-minute video clip with substantial content and welcome irony. It opens with pounding, live rock music, unintelligible lyrics, club dancing and Star Trek lighting effects. The wildly entertaining music by The Band of Hope, which includes director Rosemary Myers, continues throughout. So do the graphics, enormous visual representations of the intimate-Internet conversations of two social isolates seeking warmth and solace in an unresponsive world.

They are surrounded by computerised fitness tests, personality tests, work-places, medical treatment and communication. No wonder they are victims of that pervasive urban angst which is so prevalent in art for youth. It is tiresome for those who have been through it but people keep suffering alienation no matter who has travelled the path before them.

Myers has kept the production swift, vivid and pumpin'. It caters to the ad-break attention span of many teenagers and their capacity to absorb masses of information with a low intellectual-high noise impact.  The extraordinary set of a cartoon-like inflatable Hydra is designed by visual artist Maria Kozic and is complemented by an exceptional and complex lighting design by Ben Cobham.

Performers are all engaging and funny (Genevieve Morris, Trevor Major, Bruce Gladwin, Myers, musician Hugh Covill) and mouth the platitudes of pop psych with an acerbic touch of irony. There are sensitive adn poignant moments when a mother and girlfriend try to deal with a young man's lapse into coma.

The script has been devised after exhaustive interviews with people of all ages about their values and was developed with the dramaturgical expertise of Julianne O'Brien.

Autopsy raises issues for teenagers about what constitutes genuine communication and what we really value in our lives. It will leave 'em thinking  - and dancing. The C.D. is available at their door.

KATE HERBERT

William Shakespeare Hung, Drawn and Quartered, June 2, 1996

By Not Yet It's Difficult

IRAA 14 Lowther St. Alphington until June 8, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around June 2, 1966

It is peculiar that Anglophiles have elevated a very dead white male, notwithstanding his exceptional talent, to the status of a god. William Shakespeare: Hung, Drawn and Quartered diffuses the hype and histrionics which surround the man who became a legend after his own time.

Director, David Pledger's company, Not Yet It's Difficult, creates experimental, non-narrative theatre with passion, physicality, complicity and irreverence at its centre. WSHDQ is no exception. Its five performers (Maud Davey, Paul Bongiovanni, Kha Tran Viet, Danielle Long, Greg Ulfan) weave a tapestry of images throughout an empty space while we, the observers-participants stand, crouch, sit and follow them about.

WSDHQ shatters the barriers between audience and performer by addressing us directly, working close to us, moving us around the space. It plays roughly recorded Vox Pops of people talking about Will. It eliminates the transporting nature of most conventional theatre by interrupting the flow to introduce all the artists, even those who are not present. They forego the silly convention of a  box-office in the foyer by selling tickets in the space as actors prepare for the performance. The tickets themselves are pages ripped irreverently from your favourite Shakespeare. Wicked!

WSHDQ bridges the gap between director and performance. Pledger is amongst the audience then onstage. His ironic political diatribe is followed by an evangelical tirade about Shakespeare being the way to faith, hope and joy in a godless world.

Shakespeare has become precious as gold - or god. His work has fostered idolatry, superiority, Anglophilia, vanity and sneering at those who do not appreciate him. The company does beautifully rendered excerpts from several plays but it ridicules the obsessive, almost patriarchal dominance of his work in literary and theatrical circles. They mock-masturbate, kiss, fawn and prostrate themselves to the work. "Shakespeare invented English. Shakespeare invented Violence. Shakespeare invented The Exit."

One frighteningly accurate scene was the torture of an auditionee who does not understand iambic pentameter or any other poetic rhythmic elements of the verse. He is beaten with a volume of complete works. It is a Police State which governs our literary taste and values.

KATE HERBERTˆ

347 wds

Seven Stages of Grieving , May 28, 1996

Co-written by Wesley Enoch & Debra Mailman

 Next Wave Beckett Theatre from May 28, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert on May 28, 1996

Please see The Seven Stages of Grieving! It is a sensitive monodrama with slides which touches a poignant and distressing minor chord about death and grief like no other show, except perhaps William Yang's Sadness.

Working under the umbrella of Brisbane-based Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts (supported by ATSIC, Arts Queensland, Australia Council), director, Wesley Enoch, with co-writer and solo performer, Debra Mailman devised a piece with heart. It does not preach about aboriginality. It does not romanticise or attack. Any shame and guilt we might feel as a white audience is self-induced  - and we do feel it.

Enoch's research integrates Kubler Ross's five stages of dying and seven phases of Aboriginal history: dreaming, invasion, genocide, protection, assimilation, self-determination and finally and most recently, reconciliation. "Don't tell me we haven't always been fighting," but "Everything has its time" and the time for reconciliation is now.

Mailman is a warm and charming presence on stage with a capacity to engage and transform into a range of characters and styles. She performs a beautifully unified collage of stories, scenes, poems, aboriginal chants and even a stand-up routine about being black.

Her journey through her own familial, cultural and racial grief becomes ours. The performance is intimate. We cannot distance ourselves from this as from a news item or social issue. Here is a young aboriginal woman telling us about her grief and her joy, her family and her people. When she asks, " Are you with me?" we all mumbled, "Yes".

The design by Glenn Francis incorporates a suspended block of ice which melts and drips like tears into a grave of red sand. Duncan King-Smith's montage of natural sounds is an indispensible element.

She powerfully demonstrates disenfranchisement with a pile of sand. Groups of people huddle around the land, all surrounded by a ring of culture and language. Take the children out of the ring and they have no land, no culture, no family, no identity. "Are you with me?" Loudly, "Yes!"

KATE HERBERT     28.5.96      320wds

Burning Time, May 25, 1996

Burning Time by Nicholas Flanagan

 Playbox Merlyn Theatre until June, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around May 25, 1996

The fault is not in ourselves but in our pasts. Families are blamed for most of our social ills. We were loved to little or too much, abandoned or smothered, too poor or too rich. Parents just can't win. At some point, surely, we must take responsibility for our own lives. Some individuals with appalling childhoods make it out of the mire.

Burning Time, by Nicholas Flanagan, centres around a shattered middle- class Melbourne family. Mother is a viperous alcoholic actress, father a vague, poetry-quoting psychiatrist. There are two sons: Michael, the junkie and Vincent, the composer with ambiguous sexuality plus an aboriginal foster-son (Tony Briggs) and other hangers-on. The narrative does not declare its protagonist until Act Two when the innocent eleven year-old birthday boy, Vincent is shown at his rather more worldly twenty-first birthday.

The play itself is a burning time, running 150 minutes. The most successful moments were its silences during which the sub-text is potent. The aching stillness between the mother (Vivian Garrett) and her old, gay pal, Peter (Robert Grubb) is riveting as they carefully sidestep the real issue, Peter's paedophilia. These still moments were infrequent.

The anger is relentless and tiring. The central characters shout far too much. The cameos (Fiona Todd and Mandy McElhinney) are far easier to watch. We care very little about any of this family. They remain unpleasant and unredeemable in spite of the upbeat ending.

There is potential for a poignant and affecting narrative here but it is clouded by speechifying and overstated social issues. A times the dialogue sounds like a list of information about characters for the benefit of the audience. The play has too many words by half and lacks a sound dramatic structure.

Performances are strong. Garrett's portrayal of Kel's decline from prima donna to alcoholic is sympathetic. Grubb has a quiet dignity as the rather distasteful gay friend. It is ironic and unfortunate that the most likeable character is the most corrupt. Vince Collossimo is vigorously physical as Michael and Schluesser powers through the fraught role of Vincent.

KATE HERBERT

A Dolls House, VCA, May 25, 1996

Written by Heinrich Ibsen

Victorian College of the Arts (Drama School) at St. Martin's Theatre, South Yarra

Reviewed around May 25, 1996

Final year drama college productions are often good but rarely this good. 

The Victorian College of the Arts production of Heinrich Ibsen's A Doll's House is an exceptional piece of naturalistic theatre directed with impeccable subtlety and detail by Grigorii Dityatkovskii, an inspired director/actor from the Maly Theatre of St. Petersburg.

The expectation, having seen Maly's Adelaide Festival shows, was for an abstract, physical interpretation. Instead, we sit close to the action in a studio environment with all the goods and chattels (including acquiescent wife) of a 19th century drawing room.

For 150 minutes we are voyeurs on the demise of this marriage between Torvald (Rodney Power) and Nora Helmer (Felicity Price). Dityatkovskii and his talented actors make ordinary moments extraordinary.

The play lives in real time. Nora opens and arranges Christmas gifts carefully. She thoughtfully decorates her tree. Torvald lights a bevy of candles. All these time-consuming activities might have tested tolerance but, in fact, allow us into their world to care about these little lives in a frighteningly intimate way.

The Norwegian Ibsen was before his time in challenging women 's role in community and marriage and was ostracised for portraying such social sacrilege on stage. Our audiences gasp at Nora's subservient ignorance and her husband's over-bearing paternalism but, to Ibsen's audience, these were acceptable and unquestioned roles.

Felicity Price has a compelling talent which penetrates Nora's emotional life. Her fluttering, childish song-bird of Act One, who is so utterly unaware of the legal and social repercussions of her forging a signature, almost imperceptibly transforms into frightened dove then woman of burgeoning self-awareness flying the coop to discover her place in the world.

Rodney Power is excellent as the bombastic, pompous Torvald. Grant Ryan is sympathetic as the pathetic Dr. Rank and Lauren Clair's sad but worldly Christina is a wonderful foil to Price's naive Nora.

This is a substantial production which earns out attention. I left the theatre enlivened and inspired by such skill in writing, direction and performance.

KATE HERBERT

Away , MTC, May 18,1996

by Michel Gow

M.T.C's schools program., until June 7, 1996

directed by Kirsten Von Bibra

 Reviewed around May 25 1996

There is something of a resurrection in Michael Gow's play Away. Two marriages must be salvaged, a boy's life saved and a woman's mind restored. Relationships are built on sand. They are fragile, vulnerable and mortal, as are we.

The narrative peeks at the summer holidays of three families who are tenuously connected through a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Teenagers, Tom and Meg (Simon Russell & Jennifer Priest) have a mutual crush  which is disapproved of by Meg's stitched-up mum (Heather Bolton).

Kirsten Von Bibra's production for the M.T.C's schools program emphasises the lighter, comic elements of the play and surprises the youthful audiences with those more poignant.

The implication is that these lives are manipulated by some greater force, namely the fairies from The Dream who squeak and skitter charmingly as they change sets or conjure a storm to force the families to share a holiday and, thence, their secret lives.

The company boasts some fine actors. There are lovely comic performances from Carole Patullo, Robert Lyon as the sweet Lancashire couple and broad clowns from Don Bridges and Heather Bolton as the edgy, fraught Aussies. Alan Dale (ex-"Neighbours") as the schoolteacher demonstrates he can do stage as well as soapies and Joan Murray is sympathetic as his grief-stricken wife. The two younger actors are energetic but lack some subtlety.

The piece held its young audience, tilting frequently from the comic to the dramatic. However, it is unclear why Gow wrote the play ten years ago. It skims the surface of communication issues, dabbles in analogies and myth but provides no deeper understanding. There are problems with pace and dynamic range but it an entertaining show which works at a level appropriate for high school which is the purpose of this particular production.

KATE HERBERT

300 wds

Much Ado About Nothing, May 18, 1996

By William Shakespeare
By Bell Shakespeare Company
At Athenaeum Theatre, until June, 1996
Reviewed by Kate Herbert (around May 17, 1996)

There are some flat patches in this Bell Shakespeare production of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

I dare to hazard that this may be the result of the multi-talented John Bell playing a duel role of director and Benedick, one of the leads. Possibly this has given him less time to view the whole picture as completely as usual.

The concept of playing the whole piece for its Italianness has great potential, some of which is realised. However, it falls short of its objective with token bits of Italian language introduced, slight accents coming and going and everybody saying "Si" and "andiamo " in a vacuum.

The stage picture and concept is of a travelling circus set in a Renaissance tent which serves for entrances and is backed by rich velvet curtaining. The circus quality is accentuated by the very successful comic business and clown work of actors.  The scene in which Benedick is gulled into believing that Beatrice loves him is a gem as is the second Constable Dogberry scene which highlights the comic skill of Darren Gilshennan.

The ensemble is delightfully versatile and the curtain call demonstrates the very factor which makes this company so successful; they look as if they are having a great time together on stage just like a circus team.

Bell is colourful as Benedick and Anna Volska plays a witty Beatrice. It is perhaps a little disconcerting to see actors of maturity playing these young love adversaries, but maturity gives them quality of performance.

Each season of Bell Shakespeare I am delighted by Duncan Wass, an unaffected and gifted performer.

Vic Rooney brings grandeur to Leonato, Ivar Kants is a stately Don Pedro and David James is naughtily villainous as Don John.  His style of direct complicity with the audience could have been utilised elsewhere.

Music by Jonathon Maher and David King effectively used both an Italianate and circus influence but the two songs, although beautifuly rendered by tenor, Craig Illiot, were inappropriately Andrew Lloyd Webber in style.

The ensemble is delightfully versatile and the lively curtain call demonstrates the factor which makes this company so watchable; they have a great time -just like a circus.

KATE HERBERT

 
 

An Idiot Among Us, May 17, 1996

 by Mammad Aidani

At La Mama until June 2, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around May 16, 1996

Ever tried saying a word over and over until it completely loses its meaning? In An Idiot Among Us by Iranian-Australian poet, Mammad Aidani, the said idiot, Ollie (John Penman) struggles in his creeping disengagement from reality to make sense of language. Much of Aidani's experience of spoken English as a second, even third, language is reflected in An Idiot.

The play has a distorted, early Lou Reed world-view; like looking at life through the bottom of an empty vodka glass at four in the morning. Initially, its skewed, absurd observations are funny but relentlessly the piece becomes disturbing and words form a complex mesh through which we must beat a path. The quality of words becomes almost hallucinogenic when strained through Ollie's deranged, self-destructive thoughts. It is exhausting.

The character is obsessed with "re-structuring" himself and the world. Seinfeld fans refer to George thriving on doing the opposite of his instincts.) He has travelled from "egotist" to "idiot".  Ollie dramatic heritage is clearly other isolates such as Beckett's Krapp or Hibberd's Monk O'Neill.

Director, Lloyd Jones, has taken an essentially verbal piece and layered it with carefully and tastefully composed stage pictures and a consistent physical presence of four evocative, provocative actors (Heather O'Connell, Ramez Tabit, Tegan Richardson, Ian De Lacy) and even the stage manager.  The space at La Mama has been re-set to feature The Fireplace and actors shift position unnervingly behind and around the audience seating.

Penman's performance is refreshingly unaffected for this kind of poetic monologue. He is personal without being invasive and provides a poignant, tragic and hilarious snapshot of a delusional man. He scrambles for thoughts and resorts to farting, the only thing which seems to keep him grounded. His emotional pain and existential angst are palpable.

Cast: John Penman, Ramez Tabit, Tegan Richardson, Ian De Lacy

KATE HERBERT

300wds

Banshee, May 15, 1996

Written by Jodi Gallagher

La Mama/ Courthouse Theatre until June 1, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around May 14, 1996

When a banshee, a female spirit, screams it portends a death in the household. In Jodi Gallagher's play, Banshee, two die: father, Collum and daughter, Imogen (Caroline Bock, Kirk Alexander).

 However, it is not an outside force screaming but the daughter, who has been shrieking in both pleasure and pain for sixteen years. The adult child  at twenty-six, fights a perverse battle between her love and loathing for her drunken, boorish, incestuous father.

Being a 1920's-30's poet and academic, "He doesn't behave conventionally," chorus his wife (Liz Jones) and older lover (Vanessa Ready). "He's an artist," and his poor, ravaged daughter is blamed and guilt-ridden to the point of prostituting herself, slashing her wrists and finally attempting to force her abuser to advertise their love to the world.

As in most incest and rape cases, it is not about love, but power. This case-book narcissist cares nothing for her, allowing her to die 'so he can live'. She wreaks her hollow vengeance after death, interfering with his already failing muse.

Banshee, the text, teeters on the brink of melodrama but holds the line. The first half particularly is a clever conjunction of witty amongst dark moments. Imogen's opening monologue, played with bleak and helpless intensity by Caroline Bock, is a delicately rendered piece.

A few scenes interrupt the flow of the narrative. The entire funeral scene could be lost and some savage edits in the 160 minutes could serve. At times the banter undercuts any genuine sense of danger.  The poetic might have been re-introduced later. It reverts to an essentially naturalistic style which is not assisted by the often mannered acting and over-enunciating of some cast who are not quite connected with the text and a couple of awkward scenes changes.

The forbidden passion between these two is most horribly real in the overtly sexual moments. I found myself repeating as they kissed, "He's not really her father." I was made uncomfortably aware that, one in four women being incest victims, somebody in the audience was suffering.

It is satisfying to see this dreadful creature suffer after ruining the lives of three women: wife, lover, daughter. The incest is almost a vehicle for highlighting the hideousness of his exertion of will over them. "It is essential to be doomed to be a poet", says Collum and the scream of the banshee seals his fate.

KATE HERBERT

A Cheery Soul, May 7, 1996

Written by Patrick White

MTC, at Playhouse until June, 1996

NB: This is not a full review. Notes only remain from my review (around May 7, 1996)

A Cheery Soul, by Patrick White,  is dark comedy but there are moments of hilarity when the actors were waiting for laughs to die to get lines through. But it has a ghastliness fatalism, an intense and dreadful poetry which makes it painful and excruciating.

Neil Armfield's production is in the best Brechtian heritage acknowledging the audience who are complicit in the whole plot, revealing the lighting, the musicians, the staging and furniture removals. Even the rolling walkway is a feature recognised and stumbled over on purpose.

Robin Nevin brings a palpable enjoyment to the role of Miss Docker. She grins wickedly, almost a female Steptoe. Her maddening criticisms, her grotesque insidious interference, kindly advice are made poignant by her utter desolation when she feels God has judged her.

Strangely she is only touched or affected by creatures: the swaggie and astray blue heeler who pees on her old nylons.  She drives people to distraction so that their own Christian charity is taxed to the very limit to the point where the vicar dies from trying to teach the error of her "militant virtue" from the pulpit.

Melita Jurisic is luminous as the vicar's wife and Ian Scott is sympathetic as the inarticulate parson.

___

Director- Neil Armfield

Margaret Mills

Robyn Nevin

Melita Jurisic

Ian Scott

Damien, May 1, 1996

Written by Aldyth Morris

Napier Street Theatre until May 12, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around May 1, 1996

A monodrama is probably one of the most testing forms for an actor. Damien, performed by Daniel Kyle, is a solo piece of theatre based on the extraordinary life of a Belgian priest.

Father Damien, who was beatified in 1995, single-handedly, with little support from the church or state, ran a leper colony on the island of Moloka'i during the late 19th century.

Kyle, directed by Blair Edgar, does a valiant job as Damien without the assistance of other actors, music or an elaborate design. He struggles with the difficult role of an older man and the enormous task of carrying a two hour show. He is most successful during the second half where the script is more visual and the story gallops on at a pace, telling the tale of his life on the island.

Much of the early text is monotonous and uninspiring, which is surprising given this exceptional man's life. The play comes to life as he watches a leper crawl into a doorway to die then hears pigs dig up the shallow grave to devouring the flesh in the night.

Kyle really becomes Damien as he talks of the beautiful young island girl who attempted to shatter his vow of chastity. Perhaps the desires of a young man were closer to home. His voice fell into its natural rhythm and texture and the performance felt less mannered and earnest.

At other times the character lacked credibility. The nuggetty peasant described as "coarse", "bad- tempered", rough, rude and scruffy, is inappropriately well spoken.

The lighting design sets the self-narration in four distinct areas of the stage one being an evocative rustic table littered with lit church candles.

The play was most effective when it  peopled the stage with characters. The text might have been more dynamic if more emphasis had been given to the roughness of the man and the lighter edge of this indomitable spirit.

KATE HERBERT

Miss Bosnia, April 30, 1996

Miss Bosnia by Louis Nowra,

Budinski’s Brunswick St Fizroy

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around April 30, 1996

Try to remember the precise moment that Louis Nowra became a gag-meister and not a creator of poetry.

Sure, there were jokes and wacky characters in Louis Nowra's early works, but try to pin-point the precise moment that he became a gag-meister rather than a poetic dramatist. Whenever it was, he seems to have peaked in Miss Bosnia, which is a three-hour, eight-handed stand-up routine set in a war zone.

This is a grotesquely and grossly funny play with exceptional performances. The faultless cast includes a tour-de-force by Genevieve Picot as Mira, the Former Miss Former-Yugoslavia. She brings together six women and - Oops! - one man for a beauty pageant: first prize a trip out of Sarajevo on a U. N. truck with Mira as chaperone.

But war being what it is nothing goes to plan. The generator fails, the band plays Prince medleys, bombs hit the theatre, the general falls in love with a bloke and nobody has leg-wax strips.

The contestants are: a bitter dentist, an exotic sniper (female), a sexy soldier (male), a drunken zookeeper who has a love affair with a lion, a fundamentalist Muslim who wants to be in a Broadway musical, and a beauty has-been whose career has been following the beauty pageant trial.

The gross, often offensively sexist humour is somehow poignant set amongst the ruins of these tragic lives. The tits and bum, dick and fanny jokes are tiring and adolescent but, in some perverse way only Nowra is capable of, the whole remains entertaining - silly and outrageous but hilarious.

It is worth seeing just for the insane talent quest: Peter O'Brien doing a drag dance routine to "Xanadu", Deborah Robertson doing tacky Marilyn, Jane Borghese, a one woman Waiting for Godot. But most gut- wrenchingly absurd and shriekingly funny was Kaarin Fairfax doing crappy ventriloquism with a purple sock. Nikki Wendt's song was the singular moment of real beauty and delicacy.

There are fleeting moments of political commentary but essentially the piece rollicks along relentlessly with little respect for - well really for anything.

The most intense reminder of our mortality and was when Andruszko recklessly waved a rifle only 24 hours after the Port Arthur siege.

KATE HERBERT

Pursuing Passion, April 28, 1996

 by Evan Watts

At La Mama until May 12, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around April 28, 1996

Some would say a finite number of stories exist which are told generation after generation by innumerable artists in infinite formats. Count the myriad "boy meets girl" scenarios.

 Evan Watts' play, Pursuing Passion, would suggest that there are infinite potential permutations of dramatis personae. A young journalist visits an ex-psychiatrist turned forensic psychiatrist. They have a common past. A photographer visits and takes pictures.

Passion has four discrete plays within the piece, which Watts calls  "a play in series". Each time the scenario restarts the general description of personae remains the same but the story and specific characters alter radically.

Watts has created an interesting dynamic which works best in the final scenario when the dramatic tension is at its peak. It has a more complex and multi-layered plot, is more intensely emotional with more finely drawn characters. All scenes involve violence, voyeurism, obsession and this experimental theatrical device which works in part.

The play is part of a popular fascination with serial killers and victims. References to particular killers and their gruesome crimes seem gratuitous to one who has nightmares after The X Files.

It is all set amidst a compelling design by Paul Jackson with a claustrophobic office-mortuary feeling.

Director, Marcia Ferguson, has a fine cast. Tammy McCarthy plays four distinct young journos, Kevin Hopkins an array of psychiatrists all hooked on Jodie Foster, The Silence of the Lambs or its writer. David Tredinnick is a bevy of peculiar and familiar photographers.

Somehow, finally, the structure interferes with the drama. It is an interesting idea but not always successful. The repetition of scene and dialogue within scenes becomes a little laboured. Many responded, " I didn't understand" but the intention seems to be not to define but to draw the real and the unreal into alignment.

KATE HERBERT

300 wds

The 8.16 Vodka Syndrome, April 21, 1996

Adapted by Jim Daly & Grisha Dolgopolov from novel Moskva-Petushki by Venedickt Erofeev

At La Mama at Carlton Courthouse Theatre

8.15 Wed-Sat 6.15 Sun until May 11, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around April 21, 1996

The 8.16 Vodka Syndrome is 2.5 hours of Russian boozing, delusion and mayhem set on the Moscow to Petushki train. On opening night, Anzac Day, several drunken Anzacs reeled onstage from Drummond Street, to actor, Jim Daly's astonishment and our confusion.

Vodka  is a vigorous, entertaining show, epic in both length and style.  The thirty-odd characters are played by Jim Daly, who has multiple personalities and oodles of energy.

The script was adapted by Daly and Melbourne-based Russian scholar, Grisha Dolgopolov from the novel Moskva-Petushki by Venedickt Erofeev who died in 1990; should we assume from alcoholism, as the lead dipsomaniac bears his name?

Erofeev is a much-quoted  hero of Moscow's intellectual boozers. To quote him: "'Drink more, eat less' is the best protection against hubris and artificial atheism" and "Unrefined vodka replaced Veuve Cliquot. That was the beginning of classlessness."

It is difficult to resist using such impeccable dialogue as, "Women are different - because they have a waist - and they killed Marat with a pen-knife." However, theatre tolerates fewer words than prose and this adaptation has retained too many. The show could be sensational with twenty minutes nipped from both top and tail, making it tighter without losing its rich language and myriad characters.

And they are myriad. The inimical Daly scuttles about the stage, transforming body, voice and face in a split second. The train scene with Erofeev, "Black Moustache", "The Decembrist" and "Old and Young Mitrich" was a tour-de-force of comic timing, characterisation and philosophy. Throughout the play, he reels from misery to joy, delusion to stark sobriety.

Dolgopolov has taken artistic risks, many of which succeed. Nina Danko's  blasted urban landscape design clutters the stage with travellers' detritus, echoing the chaos of Erofeev's alcoholic stupor.  Absurd slides flash onto corrugated iron, depicting Russian images. The lighting, effectively tawdry at moments, at others leaves Daly in frustrating near-darkness.

Live music by Faye and Dan Bendrups supports the action evocatively, although a little too loudly early. Daly's sonorous songs in Brechtian style, were an inspired addition.

One cannot but be fascinated and astounded by the Russian's see-saw affair with both melancholy and ecstasy which seems, in turn, to be married to their continuing obsession with vodka and an ability to write exceptional prose.

KATE HERBERT

Verona by Magpie Theatre, April 21, 1996

 At Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around 20 April 1996

How do you make Romeo and Juliet a clown show?

Ask Neill Gladwin, Artistic Director of Magpie, Adelaide's young people's theatre company. He brings his own clown history (Los Trios Ringbarkus) and a cavalcade of multi-skilled performers together to create a delightful slapstick, acrobatic, visual and often poignant show.

Few words are spoken in the 90 minutes and two of these are "Romeo" and "Juliet". Actors walk on fence tops, scale Verona's walls (design Shaun Gurton), slide down poles and dive through windows and they play instruments.

Teresa Blake and Daniel Witton as R and J employ their exceptional acrobatic skills, honed in Circus Oz and their own duo, De Soxy, to create  the sexiest love scene for teenagers.

 In the opening vignette, the ensemble, as one, approach the audience, picking up on any nuance, sneeze, cough, flutter or late arrival and using it to tease and play.  The whole company is outstanding but Nick Newbold was a standout for me, playing Mercutio as a genuine French school clown.

What stands out in this re-telling of the tragic young romance is children being victims of family feuds. It is the young who die as a pay-back for the battles of their elders. The stripping away of language heightens the poignant moments as much as the comic and reveals the bare bones of rivalry, bitterness and irrational hatred.

Love and death always provide great copy for theatre.

Verona is here for a few performances during the Comedy Festival.

END

Lucia di Lammermoor, April 21, 1996

By Giuseppe Verdi, by Australian Opera (Opera Australia)

 State Theatre April 27, 30, May 3, 6, 9, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert round April 21, 1996

Funny that I should see, in one week, two such different renditions of doomed children of political conflict.

Verdi's Lucia di Lammermoor weeps over the clandestine Romeo and Juliet-esque romance of Lucia and her consort Edgardo from the wrong side of the Scottish political fence.

Unrequited love crosses cultural boundaries. Lucia is based on an English novel, set in Scotland and written in Italian. R and J is set in Italy written in Elizabethan English. Love knows no language. Lucia with her passionate immediate love, betrayal, abandonment, madness and suicide, echoes Ophelia, Karenin, Lady Macbeth. The terrifying thing is that this story of "violent love" is based on a true story. Beware love! One can die from it.

Gregory Tomlinson as Edgardo, is an impassioned romantic lead with a sublime tenor. Jennifer McGregor's coloratura is delicate and expressive, sending a frisson down the spine during her mad scene. In Il dolce suono mi colpi she virtually sings a duet with the piccolo. It is this scene which has made Lucia the "touch-stone of the bel canto repertoire".

The excellent cast surpassed itself in the six part Chi mi frena at the wedding contract scene. Bruce Martin was a powerful subtle presence and voice as Lucia's tutor, Raimondo and Michael Lewis as her brother Enrico was a dark force.

Conductor Richard Gill and the VSO were, as ever, excellent. Henry Bardon's stage design of a dank, grand Scottish castle was made atmospheric by Donn Byrnes' lighting.

This is a conservative production by John Copley and we travelled from the ridiculous to the sublime after Nabucco the previous night. However, such a production concentrates on the music and voices which is not a bad thing for opera.

KATE HERBERT

Nabucco, Australian Opera, April 16, 1996

Nabucco by Giuseppe Verdi, by Australian Opera

 State Theatre Arts Centre Melbourne

April 16, 19, 22, 24, 27, May 1, 4, 7, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert on April 16, 1996

Sydney must be sniffy about its Verdi. It booed Barrie Kosky's Nabucco last year. The production is a hoot - not that I've ever thought of Nabucco as a hoot before but it makes Verdi accessible to a new, funkier audience - if they could afford the $96 tickets.

It takes enormous risks, some complete clanger, others gems.  The Babylonians are represented by the bestial and the Israelites by the Word of God. Hence the Assyrians worship giant idols (A lime green Mighty Mouse with orange earrings and video screen eyes??) and are decked with dead animals ( a stuffed monkey, three tiger heads, a coat is riddled with scorpions) The Israelites tote words from biblical sentences or wear them as captives' yokes.

The stage picture is derivative of a 19th century melodrama blended with pop iconography. Peter Corrigan's design and Jane Hyland's costumes are striking and at times hilarious. The chorus is enhanced by a corps of extras who are suspended like hanged men, shovel piles of slaves' abandoned shoes and move in militaristic formation.

Carlo Felice Cillaurio conducts the VSO impeccably. Jonathon Summers as Nabucco, with his velvet-smooth and rich delivery, is delightfully playful and sympathetic, managing the vagaries of both role and style.  Elizabeth Connell entered the comic spirit of Kosky's style with zest and sang Abigaille, adopted slave daughter of Nabucco, with passion and skill. They were supported by a strong group of leads.

Accolades went to Bruce Martin who replaced an ailing Donald Shanks as Zaccaria at the eleventh hour. His fine voice, humility and effortless performance were charming.

It would not be a review of Nabucco without a comment on the Slaves' chorus, "Va pensiero" which seems to send audiences (particularly in Italy) into paroxysms of ecstasy or anger depending on its quality. This rendition was fine enough but somehow lacked the delicate dynamic range which is possible in this superb piece.

Go see this if you've got the bucks.

KATE HERBERT