Primrose Hill / Kissing For Australia , March 25, 2008

Primrose Hill / Kissing For Australia  
by Adam Zwar, La Mama

When & Where: Courthouse Theatre, 6.30pm Tues & Sun, 8pm Wed to Sat, 25 March until

April 12, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

If you’ve never heard of Patsy Kensit, know nothing about Britpop bad boys Liam and Noel Gallagher or their band Oasis, a few jokes in Adam Zwar’s Primrose Hill may elude you. 

However this one-man play fires on all rockets and really takes the Michael out of smug and very rich British pop celebs.

Paul Denny plays Miles, an ordinary Aussie bloke who is mugged outside the luxury home of pretty cockney Patsy and her dumb musician-thug husband, Liam Gallagher. Miles believes they want to help him with his injuries but the nutty pair virtually holds him captive as a sex slave so that Liam can film Miles’ sexual antics with Patsy.

Denny, directed skilfully by Russell Fletcher, peoples the empty stage with the pompous (Bono and Sting), the dim (Liam and Naomi Campbell) and the ridiculous (Terence Stamp with Posh Spice). His portrayal of a floppy-haired and ingenuous Hugh Grant is delicious.

The quest to escape the hotshots’ house party is genuinely hilarious and Denny is a delight even when he drops a few lines at the end.

The second play, another solo, is performed by Zwar and directed by Joy Mitchell. In it Zwar portrays another Aussie bloke, Lenny, the office geek who bemoans the fact that he is liked but never seduced by the office girls while his mate Bob blinks and those gals jump him.

Zwar’s performance is not as polished as Denny’s but he has a simple charm and knows his material well. We suspect he was that sweet geek before he got famous with an AFI award. The jokes come rapidly and are often self-deprecating observations about Lenny’s predicament both before and after he finds himself a nice girlfriend.

What makes Kissing for Australia different from Primrose Hill is its dark ending. It could easily be billed as a tragi-comedy when Lenny’s uninspired love life evolves into the wedding from hell.

Both plays are cleverly crafted by Zwar and take us on a fast and funny ride.

By Kate Herbert

The China Incident, March 19, 2008

The China Incident

by Peter Houghton, Malthouse Theatre

march 19 to April 12, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

There is something I have noticed when a show really grabs me: my mouth drops open and I don’t scribble any notes. 

Even during this, my second viewing of The China Incident, my mouth gaped, my eyes widened, I laughed out loud, grimaced and gasped as I witnessed this galloping, hilarious corporate workplace disaster.

Anne Browning as diplomatic PR consultant Bea Pontifec, stalks the stage like a crazed stick insect in a pin-striped suit and stilettos. From start to finish of this solo Grand Prix of performances, Bea prowls around her high-rise corporate office, juggling seven phones and even more social, political and family crises.

On the red phone Bea advises the US President – who displays a lecherous, drunken obsession with her undies – about his “Five Party Talks”. On the black phone she soothes the General, the brutal dictator of an insolvent, war torn African nation, trying to solve his international image problem while she listens to him slaughter his rebelling people wholesale.

Meanwhile her personal life is in chaos. Her son is arrested for drug trafficking and her new-age daughter plans an embarrassing wedding with a gay man as bridesmaid and appalling old china as table centrepieces. Bea’s married lover is on his way to the Bahamas with his wife and Bea’s assistant, Minty, is brainless. Her useless, hippy ex-husband is attached to the intercom downstairs, the groom and his boring parents are on the phones – and Bea offends all of them.

Peter Houghton’s script is cunningly written and very, very funny. He also directs Browning (his wife), maintaining a cracking pace that leaves Bea gasping for air by the time she makes a pig’s ear of everything.

Bea makes one fatal error after another but Browning and Houghton never put a foot wrong. This really is a marriage made in heaven – despite the fact that he makes her portray an arrogant, heartless, bigoted corporate monster.

We too are left breathless after this race to save the dictators of the world from image disaster. There is something satisfying knowing that the bad guys might all be found out.

By Kate Herbert

Our Country’s Good, March 18, 2008

Our Country’s Good 
by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Preferred Play Company

Theatreworks, March 18 to 29, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Peering myopically at our Australian history, we can miss the detail of individual lives and see only the bigger political picture. Based on Thomas Kenneally’s novel, The Playmaker, Our Country’s Good zooms in on a microcosm of Governor Phillip’s (Mick Lo Monaco) infant settlement in Sydney in 1789. It provides a vivid, personal and often brutal portrayal of a few English officers and hapless, abused convicts.

Timberlake Wertenbaker uses historical fact interwoven with fiction. To please Arthur Phillip, Lt. Ralph Clark (Brendan McCallum), a modest young Royal Marine, attempts to stage a play with a cast of convicts. The cruel landscape of the convict settlement continually intrudes on his rehearsals.

Officers are resistant or downright obstructive to such a liberal endeavour to engage the convicts who are constantly punished for petty or fabricated crimes. Clark cannot predict the problems he will face. The headstrong Lizzy (Katya Shevtsov OK) may be hanged before opening night, Arscott (Brett Christian) is flogged senseless, everybody hates Freeman (Michael Wahr) who is the hangman and Clark falls for Mary (Marissa Bennett), his leading lady.

Glenda Linscott directs an energetic ensemble of recent VCA graduates with an assured and imaginative hand. She creatively employs minimal props ­– rope, trunks, a ladder – physicalisation and vocal effects to create multiple locations in the Australian landscape.

There is an old-fashioned charm in Wertenbaker’s period dialogue but it raises themes and issues relevant to our contemporary lives and to the theatre.  “Intelligence has nothing to do with the state into which we are born”, says one character. In this new colony, bigotry and social abuse are rife.

“This is theatre. We believe you,” says another character. The oppressed convicts keep trying to escape their real chains but, in the democratic theatre, they escape into another life through a role and pay each other respect as actors.

Our Country’s Good is a thought-provoking and skilfully staged production that deserves an audience.

By Kate Herbert

Moving Target, March 13, 2008

 Moving Target

by Marius von Mayenburg, Malthouse Theatre

Beckett Theatre,  March 13 to 29, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Moving Target, by Marius von Mayenburg, is funny and chaotic at the beginning but disturbing and tragic by its end. 

Two years ago, director Benedict Andrews explored ideas with Mayenburg who then wrote this play about a community of parents who are afraid that their children are dangerous – in fact that they are violent terrorists.

This compelling story is overlaid with the chaos of children’s games. The ensemble  (Julie Forsyth, Robert Menzies, Hamish Michael, Rita Kalnejais, Alison Bell, Matthew Whittet) spends an inordinate amount of time playing wild, often hilarious games of Hide and Seek. Repeatedly one of them counts to a hundred while five scramble to find the perfect hiding place. They secrete themselves under the couch or the table, inside a sleeping bag or cushion covers, until their choices become absurd, insane or simply childlike.

The game distracts the adults from the terror they feel when they look at the poor little girl who is under suspicion. Slowly their panic rises as they attempt to avoid detection by the ever-present “Advice Centre”. Did the child really hide a green parcel in a street bin? Is it a bomb? Should they report it, or ignore it and hope it goes away?

The group of playfellows inhabit a scruffy white box (Robert Cousins) from which there is no escape. Between games, they reveal snippets of the story about their fear of psychopathic changes in their children. Blaring music and amplified voices echo the escalating chaos. Stark white light becomes more dramatic and vivid with violent, crimson and green (Paul Jackson).

The ensemble is vigorous and unified, shifting from childlike play to distressed and frightened adults. Each actor brings his or her own quirkiness and energy to the story.

The Hide and Seek becomes repetitive and is reminiscent of a drama class and the hands-over-your-ears noise level is intermittently intolerable. But Moving Target investigates contemporary performance with verve and Mayenburg’s script makes interesting statements about societal hysteria and fear.

By Kate Herbert

Beware of the Dogma, March 7, 2008

Beware of the Dogma
by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe, Phillip Scott, Sydney Theatre Company

Whitehorse Centre Nunawading, March 7-12

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

We rarely see political comedy in Melbourne despite our pretensions to be social critics and our Comedy Festival with hoards of shows. Beware of the Dogma not only has the wittiest title, but it is intelligent, hilarious, incisive political cabaret – and it’s from Sydney. Not only that, it is produced not by some lefty fringe cooperative but by Sydney Theatre Company. Be ashamed Melbourne.

Writer-performers (from Sydney – let’s rub it in) Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott with Valerie Bader, present scathing musical and comic wit targeting dogmatists past and present. They lampoon self-help gurus, scientology, Papists, academics, politicians, Russia, China and New Zealand.

The title song cunningly warns against “mad dogma”. A deliciously clever Papal conference of 16th century dogmatists features the supercilious Cardinal Pell of Umbrage, the rambling Lord Barry Jones of Oxford and the self-righteous Sister Greer of St. Germain and is moderated by monkish Tom Kenneally.

New Zealand’s Helen Clark and her NZ “fush and chups” accent take a smacking in a cool parody of jazz classic, Take Five. Biggins, as a stunningly accurate Paul Keating, presents the John Howard Memorial Lecture to “fellow irrelevant Australians”, snipes at the “performing midget” (Rudd and Howard) and fires barbs at both parties.

Speaking of irrelevant, the Democrats get a serve and Barnaby Joyce laments having a girl’s name and sings, I’ll Toe the Line.

The Russians celebrate their new world singing, “Russia was the pits” to Puttin’ on the Ritz and the Chinese forecast world domination as they poison us with lead paint and pollution.

Catholic Guilt wins the morality stakes ahead of Tony Abbott on Moral Outrage. Kevin Rudd goes camping with Labour Party Boy Scouts and we witness The Last Days in Howard’s Bunker as the Liberals face annihilation – at Howard’s hands.

The final epic musical, Fable of Prosperity’s Child, in the pretentious style of international festivals, attacks Gen X and its delight in spending money it does not have. It’s All About Me, sings 35 year-old adolescent while her Baby Boomer dad informs her that her inheritance is gone in, I Spent It All On Me.

Funny show. Catch it if you can.

By Kate Herbert

Disjointed Story, March 6, 2008

Disjointed Story 

by Sean Hanson, Cast & Crew Productions

Chapel off Chapel, March  6 to 16, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Disjointed Story, written and directed by Sean Hanson, is just as the title suggests: a disjointed story. 

The concept owes something to Schnitzler’s La Ronde or David Hare’s The Blue Room in which numerous lives intersect in an episodic format. However Hanson’s script and production lack such sophistication. This being his first play and first time directing, he has perhaps bitten off more than he can chew.

There are certainly some scenes that are more successful than others and Hanson peppers the script with some playful, swift and funny dialogue. The pace and rhythm of chatter between friends is captured in scenes featuring a group of girlfriends and another with guy-friends.

Although some individual scenes are entertaining, the structure of the 90-minute play is clunky and the story is confused. It requires enormous skill to write for sixteen characters and direct as many actors. The production is more like a showcase for an acting class than a play.

The narrative threads are multiple. A young woman ­– a police officer we discover later – has doubts about her impending wedding. Another engages a hit man to kill the violent boyfriend of a character never seen on stage. A young man attempts, then succeeds, in killing himself after a hit and run accident. Several characters are dumped by partners, four go on a blind date, two rob a mansion, one confesses to beating his girlfriend.

There are two completely bonkers scenarios. One involves a man and woman who are, in fact, a dark angel and a good angel. The second is an anachronistic scene about a manipulative butler and his weak master. The butler is also responsible for some interminable and totally unnecessary scene changes.

If Hanson scales down his next play to a manageable size, his capacity for writing entertaining dialogue could be more effectively employed.

By Kate Herbert

Sanctuary, Feb 27, 2008

Sanctuary 
by Amedeo Astorino

 La Mama, Feb 27 to March 9, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Terminus and The Resort, two short plays by Amedeo Astorino directed by Bruce Langdon, deal with mental illness and marginalised persons seeking solace or escape from the big, bad world.

Astorino incorporates well-observed characters and edgy dialogue. The longer play, The Resort, has the more menacing scenario and stronger performances. Valerie (Jae Dee Scott), a returning resident at the ironically titled “resort”, a psychiatric clinic, re-encounters Cliff (Glen Hancox), a vulnerable patient, and Kyle (Doru Surcel), a smarmy, intimidating nurse.

The play depicts the prolonged hours between treatments when psychiatric patients fend for themselves, dealing their own demons.

Scott is capable and credible as the wry Valerie, playing her with cool control that masks her inner turmoil and Hancox captures the naive confusion of the closeted homosexual Cliff. Surcel sets the tone with his threatening portrayal of religious fanatic Kyle who wears a constant, almost imperceptible sneer.

Kyle is a manipulating meddler who clearly suffers an undiagnosed mental illness – perhaps religious mania. He reveals that he read Valerie’s file and uses her violent secrets as emotional and sexual blackmail. Knowing that Cliff’s mother is domineering and conservative, he informs her of her son’s homosexuality and causes Cliff to attempt suicide.

Terminus is a two-hander about Jack (Ian Rooney), an unstable older man inhabiting a decrepit room near a train line. He left his comfortable life and wife and now struggles to maintain his sanity while her drinks himself into an early grave. His only company is a bottle (or two) of Johnny Walker and a young prostitute (Karla Silvey) who follows him home after he comes to her rescue on a train.

The dialogue is well written and the drama could be compelling, but sluggish cueing slows the pace and interrupts the rhythm of Astorino’s play. Rooney captures the nervy despair of Jack but needs to be on voice rather than using his breathy whisper and Silvey has a bright youthfulness that could to be dirtied up for the hooker.

By Kate Herbert

Rock and Roll, Feb 27, 2008

 Rock and Roll 

by Tom Stoppard, Melbourne Theatre Company 

Playhouse, Vic Arts Centre, Feb 27 tol March 29, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

In Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, hidden within political diatribes about Communism is a story of love unrequited. 

After arguments about revolutions, the failure of socialism, abuse of dissidents and the pursuit of freedom, what we may remember is the reunion of two people separated after Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968.

We will also remember the rock music: Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground and the obscure Czech band, Plastic People of the Universe (PPU). As Czechoslovakia struggles after the Prague Spring of 1968, PPU come to represent freedom and an infant revolution that succumbs to further oppression.  Rock music symbolises all that is new, revolutionary and anti-Soviet. Strangely, old rock musicians of the East and West eventually sold out for cash or fame. Is revolution always doomed?

We hear Stoppard’s political arguments and refutations through Max Morrow (William Zappa), an ardent Communist and Professor of Politics at Cambridge, and his ex-Ph. D. student Jan (Matthew Newton), a reluctant Czech spy and, later, a dissident, who is obsessed with Western rock music.

Stoppard is both accused of and praised for being an intellectual playwright. His earlier plays were constructed on witty badinage, wordplay and philosophical argument. In Rock ‘n’ Roll, humour takes a back seat to complex political debate and dense dialogue peppered with historical facts.

The exposition sometimes becomes repetitive or tiring. The various components: rock music, death of communism, Sappho’s poetry and Syd Barrett (drug-damaged ex-Pink Floyd guitarist) do not fully form into a coherent whole by the end but Stoppard takes us on a challenging intellectual, if not emotional, journey.

Simon Phillips’ production sets domestic scenes inside the vast scaffolding of a rock concert venue (Stephen Curtis), complete with giant screen showing political news and footage of rock artists. The cast is impressive with compelling performances from Zappa as the zealous professor, Newton as the hapless, workless Jan, and a fine emotional performance from Genevieve Picot as Morrow’s dying academic wife.

Stoppard, an immigrant to England from Czechoslovakia, developed a powerful relationship with Czech playwright and President Vaclav Havel that is at the base of this play. There is no doubting Stoppard’s skill as a playwright but this personal-political story could give the play more heart.

By Kate Herbert

Asylum, Feb 20, 2008

Asylum by Kit Lazaroo

La Mama, Feb 20 to March 5, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

There is an hysterical and uncontrolled edge to Kit Lazaroo’s play, Asylum, which deals with a Chinese refugee in Australia and her desperate struggle with bureaucracy in order to avoid deportation.

The style of the script and production is abstract but it is intermittently incomprehensible and makes the central issues more confusing than illuminating. The play blurs the boundary between reality and the confused inner worlds of the characters and focuses on the lack of logic and compassion of government policy and the half-truths and misinterpretations that interfere with the treatment of refugees.

The four characters are broad caricatures, each with a pathological behavioural disorder. Yu Siying (Fanny Hanusin), a young Chinese refugee, is characterised as paranoid, violent and manipulative. Her family is persecuted in China and she contracts HIV while in Australia.

The rigid Immigration representative, Turlough Dando (Tom Considine), rejects her refugee status so, to assist her application, Siying demands a positive psychiatric assessment from Dr. Lally Black (Glynis Angell). Meanwhile Lally’s brother, Smudge (Tim Stitz), a prison guard, suffers deafness caused by trauma after shooting an escaping prisoner.

The issues regarding treatment of refugees are significant, vexed and continuing in our community. Lazaroo and director Jane Woollard present notions of our government’s lack of sympathy to refugees, their ignoring of inconvenient details in their stories and our willingness to believe misinformation.

Unfortunately these issues take second place to the awkward form and the stylistic choices that are laid over the story and characters. The absurdist elements and the introduction of puppets to depict the story of Siying’s Chinese family provide so much visual information that it becomes difficult to follow the plot.

Amanda Johnston’s set design, ingeniously constructed from stacks of filing cabinets, opens to provide tiny rooms within rooms. The puppet stage appears inside a cabinet door and Siying is secreted inside the cabinets when she hides from Immigration officers.

The four capable actors work hard and create some comic moments. However, the heightened clown-like characterisations do not permit any depth of analysis or time for reflection.

Despite this play winning the 2005 Wal Cherry Play of the Year, Asylum has some significant theatrical flaws.

By Kate Herbert

Arcadia, PMD Productions, Feb 13, 2008

Arcadia 

by Tom Stoppard by PMD Productions

Chapel off Chapel, Feb 13 until March 1, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Et in Arcadia ego (And I am in Arcadia). The characters in Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia, seem to live in some earthly purgatory rather than in Arcadian bliss.

Stoppard weaves a gloriously complex tapestry from mathematics, gardening, literature and philosophy. His play takes place at the stately English manor house, Sidley Park of Lord Croom, but shifts in time between its residents of 1809 and those of the present.

Arcadia is a period mystery with echoes of Agatha Christie without the murder. Paul Knox’s production is conventional and competent, relying on character and relationship rather than glossy production values. It is contained in a small stage area very close to the audience, making it an intimate theatrical experience.

With a period play there is always the risk of sliding into melodrama and Jane Austenisms. There is some of this in the less experienced actors but there are several charming and capable performers.

Septimus Hodge (Matthew Kenny) is a promiscuous, classics educated Renaissance Man and tutor to the precocious and clever young Thomasina (Kellie Tori) in 1809. Kenny has great comic timing and is delightfully arch and loose-limbed as Hodge, playing him with a wry tone and louche demeanour. Tori has a golden glow as Thomasina, giving her a vivid playfulness to complement her intellect. Their relationship is central to the story, and they engage us at every turn.

 Brenda McGinty brings a suitably brusque determination to Hannah, the 20^th century researcher investigating the shadowy Hermit of Sidley Park. As Valentine, son of the current Lord Croom, Luke Lennox has an easy charm and finds emotional range in his character. Jennifer Innes captures the 19^th century period in Lady Croom.

Stoppard’s script is inventive and challenging, incorporating his signature wordplay, intellectualism and also draws on scientific theory: Newtonian physics, iterated equations and algorithms. It sets the brain in a whirl. Stoppard cunningly crafts notions of Romanticism and Byronic poetry, Rationalism and the thriving 19^th century business of designing gardens into a dense and compelling historical mystery.

By Kate Herbert

Keating! The Musical, Feb 13, 2008

 Keating! The Musical

music and lyrics by Casey Bennetto

Comedy Theatre, Melbourne, Feb 14 to March 8, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

 

Seeing Keating! The Musical for the third time is still an invigorating theatrical experience. 

For my guest, Casey Bennetto’s dazzlingly clever musical evocation of Keating’s (Mike McLeish) rise to the Prime Ministership was all new, glossy and surprising. Meanwhile, I was anticipating my favourite songs, laughing at caricatures and political references and singing along (embarrassingly) as if it were a Wiggles concert.

In the week of Rudd’s parliamentary apology, the songs about Mabo and Keating’s 1992 Redfern speech about historical injustices against aborigines, assume a celebratory quality.

Bennetto writes both a farce and a scathing political satire about the period from 1990 when Hawke (Terry Serio) won his fourth term, until Keating’s unwinnable victory in 1993. Bennetto writes songs in eclectic styles ranging from reggae to bossa nova, sultry blues to cool jazz, and the on-stage band, under musical director Enio Pozzebon, is deliciously versatile.

But it is Bennetto’s hilariously incisive lyrics and inventive rhymes that captivate us. On The Floor depicts the parliamentary face-off between Keating and John Hewson (Brendan Coustley). It is a rap littered with Keating’s infamous verbal gymnastics and vitriolic attacks on opponents. Hewson collapses under such inspired insults as “like being flogged with warm lettuce” and is decimated in the ensuing slow, suggestive love duet, I Want to Do You Slowly.

McLeish is almost edible as Keating: sleek, smug, stylish, snake-hipped and seductive. His reggae vanity song, I Am the Ruler of the Land (“Who Da Man? You da man, Yes I am.”), sends the crowd wild.

Terry Serio is super in several roles, capturing both Hawkie’s blokey appeal and Howard’s 100-pound weakling facade and cunning political manipulation. Howard’s song, The Mateship, is achingly funny as Serio dons the ex-PM’s gold and green tracksuit. New cast member, Coustley, in fishnets and corset, eats up the role of Alexander Downer singing, “I’m so freaky.”

Keating! is such a witty and rollicking ride that it deserves a fourth viewing.

By Kate Herbert

Coop by Black Hole Theatre, Feb 7, 2008

 Coop by Black Hole Theatre

 At fortyfivedownstairs,  Feb 7 to 17, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

 A demented old man living in a chicken-coop with his son and daughter sounds like a bleak scenario but Coop is both grim and comical. 

The collaborative production, devised by the ensemble of Black Hole Theatre, inventively incorporates actors, visual imagery and a range of puppetry forms.

Nancy Black (director) and Rod Primrose’s (actor/puppeteer) initial inspiration was Hieronymous Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, depicting Adam and Eve, naked humans cavorting with giant birds and fruits and the descent into corruption and Hell.

Coop focuses on mankind’s descent into sinfulness. The old man (Primrose) appears to be, or to believe that he is God and his children (Conor Fox, Tamara Rewse) represent Adam and Eve. Their rough humpy, constructed of old wood, canvas and hay bails, (Ben Cobham) houses his family and his chicken. Images of birds and eggs recur throughout, emphasising the notion of genesis, birth, evolution and corruption.

There is whimsy and humour but the sense of menace is pervasive. The old man is volatile and violent, unpredictable and merciless with his children, just like the God of the Old Testament. The children cower or furtively ravish one another with Bosch-like lust. Intermittently the family plays games. Father makes an egg disappear from an eggcup and the children make tiny fluffy chicks dance in a chorus line. Meanwhile Beulah the live chook ambles around pecking.

One truly inspired moment is when they convert a chicken carcass into an hilarious marionette. It wears tiny gumboots and its wings flap hopefully as it dances like a ballerina over the sleeping old man’s chest until eventually it flies. Another is the luminous and disturbingly disembodied babies’ heads that crawl menacingly over the children’s bodies.

Black allows the piece to develop an almost musical rhythm as the old man’s moods ebb and flow. There is little or no dialogue. The characters grunt and sigh, shout or groan expressively making words redundant.

The dim lighting (Cobham) accentuates the threatening mood with smoky atmosphere and occasional glaring blasts of light. Kelly Ryall’s complex and evocative sound design incorporates haunting bells and whistles with brighter sounds, music and distorted voices.

Coop is eccentric and unpredictable – and it gives poultry a new and inventive role in theatre.

By Kate Herbert

D.E.A.D: The Department of Existence and Death, Feb 6, 2008

 D.E.A.D: The Department of Existence and Death, by Company 13

Where and When: Carlton Courthouse, from Feb 6, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Clowns and death are an unlikely coupling but D.E.A.D.: The Department of Existence and Death effectively blends the two seemingly incompatible elements.

Six peculiarly rabbity characters are a motley bureaucratic mob with the unsavoury job of shepherding us into the afterlife. Their antics are chaotic, comical and incomprehensible as they assess the mode of death and apply due process to every human case.

All goes awry when one recently dead soul refuses to give up her darkest secret and is unable to cross into the next life. The band of nutty, after-life conductors are confounded. D.E.A.D. sounds grim but it incorporates classic clown moments and poignant scenes about death.

The show was devised with director James Pratt, and demonstrates the assets and some disadvantages of devising. It has energy and commitment, a strong ensemble feel, individual characters and quirky plot. It also has some unevenness in the level of performers’ skill, some bumpy transitions and missed opportunities for comic business.

What makes the actors look so demented is an elastic strap wrapped around their heads creating buck-toothed, plump-cheeked squirrelly critters. The beauty of clowns doing death is that they can do outrageous things to dead bodies, smack each other with large foam bats and make awful mistakes, but they look like confused children so we laugh and forgive them.

Comic routines are repeated, exaggerated and become more urgent and ridiculous as they contend with their recalcitrant dead person and fail to discover why she just won’t die properly. The God-like head bureaucrat – AKA Nanna – phones persistently, issuing instructions and admonitions to this motley bureaucratic crew.

Meanwhile, the poor lost soul (Kate Hunter) sits at her desk filling out a life questionnaire the size of two phone books. The bonkers bureaucrats mutter in groups, search for a solution or sing idiotic ditties to send her on her way.

No matter how much clown technique others may have, some people are just natural clowns. Kristzian Bagin

is magnetic. Even when doing very little his every glance, flinch and pose is inspired. Glynis Angell creates a poignant moment when she pummels the dead gal and John Forman booms and blusters with style.

There could be a little tweeking of this show but it is a deliciously silly clown’s eye view of the afterlife.

By Kate Herbert

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dec5-22, 2007

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

The Preferred Play Company

When & Where: Theatreworks, Dec 5-8, Dec 16-22 until Dec 22, 2007

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Shakespeare’s romantic comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a perennial favourite with its fairies and love potions, rough clowns and aristocratic lovers. 

The roles of the Fairy King and Queen are in the capable hands of experienced actors, Andrew Blackman and Danielle Carter, but all other roles feature recent graduates of the Victorian College of the Arts. Director Glenda Linscott remounts her 2006 VCA student production here.

The play is most often performed in an edited version with actors playing multiple roles but this version is near full length. Blackman is magnetic and imposing as Oberon, his commanding presence, statuesque physicality and= resonant voice testament to his experience performing Shakespeare. Every image in Oberon’s lyrical dialogue is clear and he inhabits the character fully relishing the Fairy King’s power and passion, his wit and playfulness.

Danielle Carter is stately and elegant as his airy consort Titania, shifting effortlessly from regal to lovelorn and from raging to seductive. The rivalry and lust between this fairy couple is palpable.

The younger performers, although they are energetic and committed, are less secure in the classical text. There is a little too much shouting and running about and too little connection to the meaning and imagery of Shakespeare’s poetry.

Nonetheless the cast hurls itself with vigour into the playful roles of the fairies. Two actors share the role of Puck (Stuart Bowden, Katherine Harris) thus allowing the sprite to appear in two places at once and to thrown his

voice magically.

Several performers double as the Mechanicals and their final amateur tragedy performed for the Duke (Benedict Hardie) and Hippolyta his bride (Meredith Penman) has some funny slapstick moments.

One issue is that there seems to be little distinction between some of the characters. The male lovers Demetrius (Carl Nilsson-Polias) and Lysander (Tim Ross) are indistinguishable from each other except by their dialogue and, apart from their physical characteristics, Hermia (Anne-Louise Sarks) and Helena (Celia Mitchell) could be interchangeable.

The fairies purposely mirror each other as a chorus but this does not allow for any distinctive characterisation and all of the tradesmen except the swaggering Bottom (Gerard Lane) are timid and terrified.

Perhaps the extremely short rehearsal period has not allowed the cast to explore greater subtlety and variety that could give more range and colour to the production.

Kate Herbert

Vagina Decliner, Jan 19, 2008

Vagina Decliner  by Anthony Menchetti

Midsumma Festival

Dantes Fitzroy, Jan 19 to Feb 3, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Anthony Menchetti jokes that he prefers to be called a “vagina decliner” rather than simply “gay”.

It certainly supplies a high visibility title for his new stand-up comedy show that incorporates some untried material with some good older jokes.

One of his funniest sight gags is his origami chickens fashioned from bar towels. Every time a new gag falls flat he conjures another uncannily real-looking towelling chook. There are four by the end of the show. A few jokes flop but he recovers with a self-deprecating remark - or a chicken.

Menchetti’s comic delivery and material lack polish and he is certainly not a belly laugh comic but he is cheerful and boyish which makes him engaging. He opens with a full-size cut-out of himself – a pirated copy – then proceeds to mourn the passing of a friend who took up pyramid Tupperware selling. It’s a funny routine presented on film with echoes of White Lady Funerals adverts.

As he achieves his comic goals, he ticks them off on a wall chart: “be original”, “relate to audience”, “flawlessly move from topic to topic”. His use of suspense involves smacking an egg with a golf club – right at me.

He is the only comic to use a fuzzy felt chart as a visual aid to explain dating and ways of escaping the next morning.  He has plenty of material about coming out, being sent by his parents to a Christian gay conversion camp, failed romances and crazy gay clubs. His description of Captain Cliché, his disastrous date who wore his white fishnets and cape, is a hoot.

His experiences working in a Call Centre selling unsellable goods to unwilling customers provide some laughs and the lunatics who work there with him also receive some jibes, including the socially inappropriate woman with her sexual innuendo.

Menchetti has a cute song to explain gay relationships to children. It begins with, “Dad’s like dads and mums like mums,” and includes some acerbic commentary on social prejudices.

All that said one of the funniest sight gags in the show is Menchetti’s new haircut. It’s like a confused cockatoo crest. Was his hairdresser having him on?

By Kate Herbert

Vaudeville X, Jan 17, 2008

Vaudeville X 

by Michael Dalley, High Performance Company

Black Box, Arts Centre, Jan 17until Feb 2, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Fluff  up your feather boa, don your fishnet stockings and a sultry pout and prepare to have a cracking good time at Vaudeville X.  The sixteen original songs are by Michael Dalley who is a wizard with wicked satirical lyrics.

Three haughty bourgeois characters (Dalley, Daniel Fletcher, Grant Cartwright) wearing dinner suits - and an occasional pink boa - perform the collection of songs incorporating intelligent and well-observed lyrics, barbed social commentary and acerbic wit.

From their middle-class ivory tower, these characters pine for the glorious Keating-inspired years and mourn the death of elitism. Each tune is another biting comment on the comfortable middle-class urban set that despairs of the upward mobility of unsophisticated suburbanites in Things Aren’t Going Well When Girls Called Narelle Drink Café Latte – and boys called Troy and Kyle.

Every aspiration of the middle classes is a target. In Backpacking, smug young travellers blithely ignore poverty while trekking through the Third World. Middle Class Welfare celebrates tax avoidance, share portfolios and negative gearing and the choral Spirit Song praises supporting “art approved by bureaucrats”.

The modern phenomenon of educated, corporate, artsy women hooking up with rough trade is analysed in Upmarket Woman, Downmarket Man. Men who marry and hide their homosexuality are exposed in Double Life and those appalling pseudo-feminist seducers and charlatans of the New Age are damned in He’s A Masseur. I Love Reading Freud With My Mother is about – well ­­– a troubling relationship between mother and son.

If you’ve ever stumbled unwittingly upon the drivel on morning FM radio, Morons on Breakfast Radio will tickle you. If you love Kurt Weill The Sewers of Berlin is a scream. If you loath indulgent post-modernism you’ll love The Ghost of The Post-Modern Dancer and Your Queer Performance Art and music theatre lovies gets a slapping in I’ve Got Something To Say.

The trio is slick, funny and playful and is accompanied on piano by the unobtrusive but sterling pianist, John Thorn. Vaudeville X is a deliciously naughty and provocative cabaret.

By Kate Herbert

Shout! The Legend of the Wild One, Jan 10, 2008

 Shout! The Legend of the Wild One

by John-Michael Howson, David Mitchell & Melvyn Morrow

State Theatre, Jan 10 until Feb 10, 2008

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

If you were a fan of Australian rocker Johnny O’Keefe, The Wild One, you’ll be rocking along in Shout, a biographical musical about his short life. His life was peaks and troughs, the peaks being in his earliest years before his shocking injuries in a car accident.

JO’K was an ambitious, self-absorbed show-off when he touted himself to American concert promoter Lee Gordon (Mark Holden) in1959. His behaviour rapidly deteriorated into substance addiction, manic-depression and schizophrenia.

In biographical shows the facts are massaged to create a dramatic structure. Three writers (John-Michael Howson, David Mitchell & Melvyn Morrow) take highlights of JO’K’s life and glue them together with songs from his repertoire.

The show, directed by Stuart Maunder,  opens with an awkward scene portraying O’Keefe in the 1970s reminiscing at the Stadium where he wowed the audience. What follows is a narrative constructed from selected episodes in his life.

We see his rebellious school days at a Catholic college, his obsessive bid for the Stadium gig, his hounding of Gordon, live gigs, the tragic car accident that interrupted his career, his television shows, reckless lifestyle and careless treatment of his wife Marianne (Alexis Fishman) and his disastrous quest for fame in America and England.

The songs are the heart of the show because the dialogue is often trite and the structure of the narrative clumsy. You’d have to be tone deaf to think Johnny O’Keefe was a great singer but, in his early days, he was a terrific showman who sold a rock song hard.

The return season of Shout! has a change of cast with Tim Campbell as O’Keefe. He is certainly not a look-alike for JO’K (lucky for him) but his voice is definitely better so the songs do not have that rough, slightly tuneless quality of O’Keefe. The crowd were delighted with his versions of Wild One, What’d I Say, Move Baby Move, Six O’Clock Rock, She’s My Baby and Shout!

Colleen Hewett is a feature as Johnny’s Mum and her duet of On A Slow Boat to China with Glenn Shorrock and the family singing Mockingbird were a treat. Fishman is moving as Marianne and Holden is brazen as Gordon. The Delltones (Steve Judkins, Nicholas McMahon, Paul Ross, Kurt Sneddon) Get a Job was a delicious vocal blend. The beatnik scene, Shimmy Shimmy Koko Pop, was a highlight with sultry choreography by Ross Coleman.

Shout! is a crowd pleaser because of its songs and O’Keefe’s place in our rock history but it lacks the dramatic coherence needed for great music theatre.

By Kate Herbert