Ordinary Misery, March 10, 2002

By Irene Korsten  La Mama, MArch 10 to 24, 2002

At La Mama

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

After a week in Adelaide seeing too much mediocre theatre, it is a relief to see Ordinary Misery. This three-hander is tastefully written, directed and acted.

Irene Korsten's script is well crafted, simple but never obvious. The story is about Emily,  (Caroline Lee) a young woman recently emerged from drug rehab.

Lee plays her vulnerability and fragility with great sensitivity and skill. Director, David Wicks with Lee, highlights Emily's vibrating nervousness.

 We are helpless witnesses to her stubborn refusal to see that Tony, (Richard Bligh OK) her recovery support person and new 'boyfriend,' is using her for sex.

Emily visits drug recovery meetings where she meets Tony. He is eight years clean and selfishly sees Emily as an easy sexual target.

Bligh plays him with relish. He captures perfectly Tony's angry, rough, manipulative, sexist, working class character.

Emily also visits a therapist, Helen who is portrayed with great empathy, ease and attentiveness by Angela Campbell. the sub-text of dialogue is ever-present. She is aware that Emily is on thin ice with her health and rehabilitation and that Tony is dangerous.

Wicks' direction is subtle and almost invisible but it is this very quiet quality that makes the piece work so well. The actors stay in the space at all times. As scenes shift the therapist moves out of light, Tony drifts at the sidelines, moving only when his next scene is beginning.

Emily is always in the presence of the two people who are helping her. One, Tony, is a pretender. The other, Helen, is unable to stop Emily's inevitable slide into depression and addiction.

Korsten's dialogue is brisk and beautifully observed. Each of the three characters has a distinctive voice and rhythm. The story is well paced and, although we fear for Emily we never know where she is actually going. We hope she is moving forward.

The tragedy of this girl's life is that she has no idea that her past contributes to her addiction. She has no awareness of the real world and expects that being clean will make her happy. She does not understand the ordinariness of life, ordinary misery.

The world is not necessarily a happy place for us all. As her therapist says, we have to do something to feel worthwhile. It does not come automatically.

It is a hard road to walk, the return to health and wholeness.

By Kate Herbert

The Adelaide Festival 2002, March 38 20

Adelaide: Is it The Cringe Festival?

Writer: Kate Herbert

 March 8, 2002

The Adelaide Festival is dear to my heart. Every two years, I wing across to the city of churches and weird crimes for a dose of inspiration from exceptional international and local performance companies. This year was disappointing.

Peter Sellars the flamboyant, huggy Californian that resigned as Artistic Director, created  what appears to be a Community Theatre Festival from the 80s.

His replacement, Sue Nattrass, filled gaps left by this limited programming with some fine solo productions although none was breathtakingly inspirational.

.

The result is, sadly, a festival with no heart and little buzz. The Festival Centre is a construction site. There is no Festival Club in which to meet, argue and carouse. There are no free forums stimulating arguments about core contemporary arts issues.

There is nowhere to eat, no visible signs of a festival, no artists in cafes. It is a sad ghost of its former self.

There is a rising irritation, if not anger, at Sellars for patronising the Aussie community. Max Gillies' Your Dreaming includes a scathing parody of Sellars.

Australia is noted for its community arts. Since the late 70s we have had excellent community and political theatre developed with, for or by community. Melbourne Workers' Theatre is a major company.

Our theatre for and by young people has a long, successful history. A burgeoning industry produces indigenous work. Recently Playbox-Ilbijerri staged seven plays by Koori artists.

Sellars intentions were good. Putting indigenous work on the main stage of a major festival is commendable. But the works are not appropriate to conventional venues. The Career Highlights of the Mamu  has Trevor Jamieson  and family telling his story.

The informality and looseness of style are ill suited to the Playhouse. The context is wrong. We can't get close to the storytellers and it makes the performers look shabby, the show poorly written and under-rehearsed.

Train Dancing from Alice Springs  is almost incomprehensible and does not do justice to issues of family violence.

There were commendable projects for youth (Urban Theatre projects OK) staged out of town. These were placed in more appropriate but inaccessible locations.

Sellars spent much cash on commissioning indigenous films. Couldn't film funds finance these?

The festival may be about community but costs were not. El Nino, Sellars opera, cost $114 and Mamu $48. Who can afford that?

A Large Attendance in the Antechamber  (Brian Lipson) was masterly. Via Dolorosa was a highlight, presented challenging views of Israel and Palestine. Barbara Cook's concert and William Yang's  Shadows  were appealing. Your Dreaming  is filled with gleeful political jibes while Ros Warby's  Solos  is a trio of marvellous dances.

The real success story is the Fringe Festival. Every night the Spiegeltent and Lunar Tent hosted a huge, accidental party. The Fringe included the exceptional 3 Dark Tales, The Age of Unbeauty,  Acrobat  and the hilariously named It's Partly About Love Partly About Massacre.

The Fringe felt alive. It was accessible, visible, playful, varied and affordable - if not challenging.

Please Adelaide, bring back the inspiring, international, controversial, exceptional artists. We need them to challenge us.

By Kate Herbert

The Loves of Shakespeare's Women by Susannah York , March 8, 2002

 Athenaeum Theatre

 6 & 7 March, 2002 then Adelaide Fringe

Reviewer: Kate Herbert March 6, 2002

We remember Susannah York as a luminous blonde screen beauty in movies. The Loves of Shakespeare's Women is another step in her return to performing the works of William Shakespeare, the Bard.

The performance is warm and engaging. She strolls the stage, sits at a small table or on a plain wooden chair in front of a striking design of three Elizabethan tapestries.

Twenty-one monologues from Shakespeare's plays or sonnets make up the program. She begins with the ingenues, the young lovers. Then she progresses to the menacing, the raging, the hilarious, or the grieving older women.

York is a waif-like creature as she appears in the first half in a silky white outfit that floats around her thin, girlish frame. Her voice is her most distinctive quality. It has a rich and fruity despite its slightly damaged, crackling huskiness. It is better suited to the older characters because of its chesty depth.

For those who know little of the plays, York succinctly explains the context of the speeches she chooses. Once the story is clear, the lighting shifts subtly and she launches into the character. It is a simple device and allows us to get acquainted with her as a personality as well as an actor.

Juliet's 'gallop apace" speech, she explains, was her nerve-wracking first audition piece. She performs Viola  (Twelfth Night) Rosalind  ( As you Like It) and Portia  (Merchant of Venice)

 All three speeches are by women cross-dressed as men. The irony being the fact that boys played Shakespeare's women.

York's anti-romantic character, Beatrice,  (Much Ado About Nothing) is a fine, wit who scares men.

After interval we see Cleopatra, the wild, vain, manipulative lover of Antony. Gertrude,  Hamlet's mother, is sonorous and sad after Ophelia's drowning. But most compelling is Emilia's (Othello) shock and despair at Desdemona's murder.

York is very funny playing both Mistresses Page and Ford (The Merry Wives of Windsor) agonising over their matching love letters.

But it is Queen Constance  from King John who steals our hearts, grieving quietly for her dead son.

Ms. York was appalled to hear Shakespeare might be cut from the UK curriculum. So she created The Loves of Shakespeare's Women. Someone needs to do it here to before we too lose the Bard.

By Kate Herbert

Counting Icebergs by Frances Rouse, Feb 28, 2002

The Shed Theatre at Captain Cook's Cottage 
until March 24, 2002

Mott's Cottage Port Fairy Festival March 9 & 10

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Captain Cook's Cottage is a pixie house for tiny people who sleep in short beds. The basil-scented garden is an enjoyable environment for a site-specific historical play.

Cook and his wife, Elizabeth never lived in the cottage in the Fitzroy Gardens. He lived on the high seas or in exotic places most of the time.

She, poor, tortured, sad woman, stayed at home in England waiting for his return to get her pregnant once more.

Frances Rouse's play, Counting Icebergs, directed by Gillian Hardy is about Elizabeth's long life alone at home. It attempts to make a dramatic meal out of a very thin stock.

The problem is that Elizabeth's life was not interesting. This is not to say that an ordinary life cannot make dramatic fodder. The issue is with how a life is presented.

 A biography is 99% drudgery. If it is edited, or if one short period is amplified, it can make drama.

 What is poignant and most dramatic in Elizabeth's life is the death of all of her five children and the murder of her husband. She is interesting for her awful grief.

The tragic month during which Elizabeth's husband is savagely murdered in Hawaii in the same month as her eldest son dies at sea would be a perfect dramatic choice.

James Cook's stories and diaries, the deaths of her other children could be interpolated into the shorter time frame.

All the action happens off stage - probably a hangover from earlier drafts for radio. There is little physical stage action and no onstage dramatic action.

The playwright presents the three ages of Elizabeth simultaneously: the young wife, (Donna Matthews) the mid-life mother, (Brenda Palmer) the old woman who reminisces. (Esme Melville)

This is an interesting device that allows observations, hindsight and commentary to filter through the fragmented, sometimes lyrical dialogue.

The play is non-naturalistic in style. The women read from Cook's diaries and tell tales of his adventures.

It is difficult for the actors to get their teeth into character because they are very sketchily drawn. But Matthews particularly is vocally strong and gives her character passion.

The writing is better suited to listening. The ebb and flow of Elizabeth's life and repetitive quality of the narrative are better suited to radio.

By Kate Herbert

The Race to Create: Shire of Nillumbik Ephemeral Sculpture

Article

February 23 to March 4, 2002

Tony Beilby's perspex box is at Dynamic Vegies shops 2 & 3, cnr Beard St & Main Rd Eltham Open Mon-Fri. 8.30am-6pm, Sat 8am-2pm

Writer: Kate Herbert

If you are confused about the term ephemeral art, you are not alone. Ephemeral art has a limited shelf life and artist Tony Beilby takes this idea literally.

On February 23 a big, fat porker of a sausage in a plastic package with a use-by date of March 4, was placed in a small, sleek airtight perspex box, 25 centimetres square  at Dynamic Vegies store in  Eltham.

It is part of "The Race to Create", an Ephemeral Sculpture show mounted by the Shire of Nillumbik.

The criteria for the exhibition were, " To create, on the 23rd February, a three dimensional sculpture which can exist and survive in the environment for 10 days."

This work is more eccentric because Beilby is not in the country. Although from Melbourne, he directs it by remote from Berlin where he works.

Shop owners, Greg Martin and Sam Staley  provided the location. Beilby's brother placed the sausage into the cube and delivered it. Everybody became a contributor.

"The box arrived on Saturday.  Six minutes later I got a call from Berlin from Tony checking whether it was there," says shop co-owner, Greg Martin.

There was one last minute problem. The original cheese sausages were accidentally eaten before installation. Oops. The new, very meaty snag has a further irony in an organic vegie shop.

Beilby jokingly describes the work as "a virtual-retro-interactive piece."  

A vital component is interaction with the viewer. Visitors to the shop are invited to write responses, thoughts, and criticisms on the perspex with black or white marker pens provided.

Greg Martin observes, "Some just look. Others boldly grab the pen and write on it."

"I am hoping", says Beilby, "that the comments made will slowly obscure the original object......As the number of comments and critiques grow, the artwork will become obscured and, at this stage, the comments themselves will form the artwork."

Voila! You become part of the artwork.

On day three, a flock of people fluttered around it. Written comments were funny, poetic, rude or gently critical.

'Poor sausage.' 'Silly sausage.' 'Art lives but does the sausage?' 'Is this Art?' and my favourite, 'Curly penis', a rather accurate reference to the shape of the big curled banger.

Beilby calls the piece a 'ready-made', referring to the term coined by French artist, Marcel Duchamp  early this century. The object already exists and is used for another purpose in an artwork.

Duchamp said it was possible to declare something an artwork even if the artist was in another country and had not seen it.  Curator, Chris Marks  and organiser Sonia Turnbull,  said Beilby's absence would be no problem.

"I often use the external constraints of a festival as the starting point for an art work", Beilby says.

"One piece which hung in the Berlin Underground wasn't allowed to stick out more than 2.5 cm from the surface. Here I covered the entire 4X2meter surface with about 90,000 strips of typewriter ribbon, all cut to 2.5cm lengths."

Sixteen artists are represented in parks and public locations around the shire. Stephanie Mew's,  outside Eltham Library, is a pile of books that were to be trashed.

 "Excited people are walking by and discovering the work and getting involved and wondering what's going on," says Chris Marks.

So do we get to eat the big snag on March 4?

By Kate Herbert

Moon Babies, Feb 21, 2002

By Patrick van der Werf 
 at La Mama until March 3, 2002

Reviewer: Kate Herbert, Feb 21, 2002

Actor, Don Bridges, gives a compelling performance in this production of Moon Babies by Patrick van der Werf and directed by Peta Hanrahan.

He plays a peculiar old derelict, looking spookily like Old Steptoe, who wanders into an abandoned shack inhabited by two odd young brothers. (Tom Davies OK, Cameron McKenzie). 

Bridges is totally believable, controlled and sympathetic. He handles with great aplomb the abstract and the poetic language as well as the Australianised dialogue.

His physical presence is magnetic. He is crippled, wizened and scruffy, limping and crawling on his skinny tinder-like legs.

The old man is hunting for his long-lost brother. He reminisces about him, about his own time in hospital and about sex. He drools over his little pleasures: a square of grubby chocolate, a cup of golden tea and a jam sandwich.

Van der Werf writes some interesting material in this script. The narrative stalls about twenty minutes in when it starts to repeat itself and not advance the relationships, the plot nor the violence that sits so close to the surface.

Of the three characters, the old man is the most fully realised. The two young men, Grub  (Davies) and Tic  (McKenzie) are less satisfactory.

Grub is the older and wields power over the simpleton, Tic. Both speak in bastardised Australianisms. Grub locks his brother in a cupboard, shout and terrorises both him and the old man with a stick.

Which brings me to the major flaw in this production. Davies shouts the entire time, mistaking stridency for passion.

His performance is on one note for most of the 75 minutes and McKenzie seems to be trying to meet him on the decibels. It is so unpleasant my guest and I had to block our ears.

Davies appears to have little vocal or physical control of his performance. At one point he smashed his stick repeatedly and a large chunk flew at the heads of the audience. This is unacceptable.

The lighting design by Rebecca Etchell  is effective and the distressed  walls of the set by Hanrahan are evocative.

Bridges' work makes this piece worth the visit. With some greater control by the other two actors, it could be a good short work.

By Kate Herbert

VCA School of Drama Directors' Season, Feb 9, 2002

Ticket to Ride -VCA  School of Drama Directors' Season

Speaking in Tongues by Andrew Bovell

Journeys in a Suitcase  by Tanja Beer

One Good Useless Man by Michael Block

Grant Street Theatre  until February 13, 2002

Reviewer: Kate Herbert, Feb 9, 2002

One important skill of a director is the ability to choose a good script. Director, Diane Gavelis, selected Andrew Bovell's Speaking in Tongues  for her graduation production at VCA.  

The play is a stylish piece of writing upon which Bovell's award winning film, Lantana,  is based. Gavelis directs parts two and three of the play and uses its idiosyncratic structure to great advantage.

The narrative, about a woman who disappears one night when her car breaks down, is broken into four strands.  In part two, four characters inhabit separate but overlapping sectors of the stage and reveal their own obsessional stories.

Bovell's clever construction creates dramatic tension. The pace of this production is sluggish in its first half and some of the acting is awkward.

Part three is well paced with two delightfully committed and credible performances from Mark Tregonning and Christopher Brown.  A sparse design, (Iain Smith)  evocative lighting (Dan Sheehan) and sound design (Jethro Woodward) enhance the production.

Tanja Beer  in her project called Journeys in a Suitcase  chose a completely different style of work and process of development. With a group of six teenage women she devised a movement-based work around themes of travel.

The continuing visual motif is suitcases. They are packed, sat upon, carried, ridden and used to expose or conceal.

The young women take turns, perhaps too predictably, to present their characters' fears and excitement about travel, escape, alienation and lost luggage.

The piece makes good youth theatre but needs a more coherent through line to increase its appeal to a broader audience.

One Good Useless Man is a three-hander written and directed by Michael Block.  It is a futuristic, absurdist story about a man living in a Big Brother-Brave New World environment ruled by TV commercials and bureaucratic controllers. He discovers life and love with a new model of robotic servant.

The script is quirky and entertaining but it is not a new topic and it lacks the substance to make it compelling as a socio-political commentary.  The frequent and lengthy scene changes and blackouts need to be tightened to give the piece a swifter pace.

By Kate Herbert

for 2 pages:

Sweet Bird of Youth, MTC, Jan 31, 2002

By Tennessee Williams  

Melbourne Theatre Company  at Playhouse until February

Reviewer: Kate Herbert Jan 31, 2002

In Tennessee Williams 1959 play Sweet Bird of Youth, names are like character descriptions.Chance  is a gigolo, The Princess is a faded movie star, Boss  is an autocratic racist and the Southern belle is Heavenly. 

This production boasts fine acting from Guy Pierce, Wendy Hughes and John Stanton  and tasteful and unobtrusive direction by Kate Cherry.

The play is not Williams' best. It does not rouse in us the depth of passions of Streetcar Named Desire (1947) or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. (1955). It does feature Williams sniping, witty, camp Southern dialogue and his  familiar theme: decline.

Youth and beauty fade from Chance (Pierce) and del Lago. (Hughes) Fertility is wrenched from the childlike Heavenly (Phillips). In this fetid, steamy Southern town, bigotry and racism thrive despite anti-segregation laws.

Chance travels to St Cloud, his home-town, with del Lago. They reveal their lives of quiet desperation like a slow strip tease. In his vanity, Chance expects to be admired for his travel companion, her Cadillac and his lies about a movie career. Instead, he is greeted with loathing, violence and a legacy of disease from his last visit.

Pierce plays the young Adonis with a fine edge of impending doom. His is a captivating, eccentric beauty perfect for this immature, romantic, conceited man facing his demons.

Hughes is at her best here as the gravel-voiced, aging lush who has lost her looks, her pride and, she believes, her career.

The two cling to each other in their egocentric worlds, ignorant of the pain and changing fortunes of the other. They are alienated, afraid and determined to hold onto their deteriorating beauty.

As Boss Finlay, Stanton is commanding and convincing. The character is compellingly cruel, gruff and domineering. Belinda McClory  as Miss Lucy is cheeky. Matthew Dytynski  as Tom Junior is suitably thuggish. Phillips is luminously shattered as Heavenly and Peter Houghton  adds detail to the tiny role of Bud.

Paul Grabowsky's  sultry jazz evocatively underscores the mood as does the asymmetrical grandeur of Tony Tripp's  set. Rory Dempster's lighting is simple and occasionally dramatic.

Scene changes are laborious and the pace of the play is a little sluggish initially but this is a good production.

 By Kate Herbert

By Kate Herbert

CuSp Curatorial Space, Jan 30, 2002

Article

CuSp Curatorial Space

Shop 10, Campbells Arcade, Degraves Passage Underpass  Flinders Street Station

Writer: Kate Herbert

If you think of artists' exhibition spaces as large galleries with loads of wall and floor space for enormous artworks, think again. CuSp,  a curatorial space, is a mere 1.5 by 2.5 metres.

It perches in the window of an artists' independent book and zine shop called Sticky (part of Platform Artists' Group), in the Degraves Underpass at Flinders Street Station.

CuSp is the brainchild of Alex Dalglish, an emerging Melbourne-based curator who is currently studying a Masters of Art Theory degree.

Her thesis, she says, focuses on "contemporary artists who make small models of buildings, like architectural models or doll's houses. Some of these models have sound tracks or a miniature video to provide a narrative."

A miniature curatorial space makes perfect sense in this context. She began curating the space in March 2001. Her proposal was accepted by Andrew Seward and Richard Holt  , the coordinators of Platform at Spencer Street and Platform 2 at Flinders Street.

" I had done a a curatorship course. Rather than solely relying on people to accept or reject my proposals, I wanted to have some control over my practice. I also wanted student curators to have somewhere to start on a small scale without too much pressure."

According to Dalglish, there is no shortage of student artists to take advantage of the space. Student curators, the people who are learning to conceptualise, design, place and select exhibitions, are less forthcoming.

"I do most of the curating. Artists love the space. Curators don't find it quite so inspiring. There is only one wall and one window," she says.

From Wednesday January 30, CuSp presents Diary of Persistence in the Foreground, a series of high-tech drawings printed on tracing paper and hanging from the ceiling.

They are associated with the Platform 2 exhibition in Degraves Underpass, Persistence in the Foreground by American designer, Christopher Kaltenbach  

CuSp will exhibit pinhole photographs and cameras by Richard Holt from Wednesday February 13. Dalglish approached him and suggested an interactive element for the viewer to take photos with the cardboard, home made cameras.

Previous shows have included Andrew Seward's eccentric collection of envelope linings. Ever noticed that the inside of envelopes have tiny decorative designs?

Recently, Kate Benda  from Adelaide worked with Dalglish to create a site-specific, minimalist sculpture. She framed the tiny CuSp space with skeletal, red balsa wood walls.

In future, Dalglish hopes that "more artists make site specific work that takes into account not only the size and shape of the space but also its idiosyncratic position in the Degraves Underpass."

Although Platform has funding from The City of Melbourne, CuSp has no specific funding apart from the space provided by Platform.

"Sponsors are always welcome," grins Dalglish.

CuSp Curatorial Space, Shop 10, Campbells Arcade, Degraves Passage Underpass  Flinders Street Station, Melbourne 

Until Wednesday Feb 13, Diary of Persistence in the Foreground,. From Wednesday Feb 13, Pinhole cameras.

By Kate Herbert

Sydney Festival 2002, Jan 30, 2002

Sydney Festival 2002

Writer: Kate Herbert

Jan 30, 2002

It was a wild old weekend visiting the Sydney Festival to see the French Theatre du Soleil and Barcelona's La Fura Dels Baus.  Neither are coming to Melbourne. Nobody asked them.

La Fura Dels Baus is dubbed experimental but is one of many companies internationally making theatre of this kind. They visited Adelaide Festival in 1998 with a show called MTM.

Their latest, OBS Macbeth, is based on the story of Shakespeare's Macbeth but, strangely, uses none of his poetic language.

Their highly developed form of visual and visceral spectacle incorporates video technology, live electronic music, huge machines, pyrotechnics, non-theatre spaces and an audience that is never allowed to sit or stand still.

Nor are they safe from marauding machines, roving video cameras, showers of water, tubs of blood or getting trampled by panicking crowd members attempting to escape damage.

OBS does just as it intends. It recreates in an innovative form, the violence of the murderous would-be king and his manipulative wife.

So, allow me to be controversial about a controversial company.

Audience members who love the work say they like the edge of fear in the space, that theatre is not usually physically dangerous. The company might say it presents a complacent middle-class with an image of social violence to shock them out of their fuzzy, self-satisfied fog. 

What I see, is a theatre company appropriating social violence for the entertainment of the young, middle class, theatre-going audience.

They are marketing the fear. It is used as titillation for an audience that has no first hand experience of it.

Lady Macbeth   is a strip artist, a tabletop dancer, a lewd, provocative tart whose only power is her gorgeous body. It also, just like MTM, violates women. She is almost penetrated with a sword by her soldierly husband on return from battle.

In profound contrast is Flood Drummers, created with her company by the heroic and much mythologised theatre director from Paris, Ariane Mnouchkine.  

Mnouchkine's company, formed in the 60's, has sufficient funding to allow her to take five to twelve months to develop a show. This Sydney season, she tells me, is the last of Flood Drummers in the world.

This show is kinder to audiences. We are seated, albeit in a non-theatre space. The story is an political parable written by Helene Cixous.  What makes this piece so extraordinary is the form and mode of presentation.

It derives from Asian styles, particularly the Japanese Bun Raku puppets and Noh Theatre.  But the actors are the puppets. Each has manipulators to lift, propel and animate him.

 Prior to the show, we watch the actors dress and put on delicate masks and costumes in their public and very decorative dressing rooms.

On stage, an exceptional musician, who has worked with Mnouchkine since the 70s, accompanies the action.

There is less passion and assault in the Flood Drummers than OBS. There is more dialogue, less flesh, blood and fear in the audience. And there is no nudity. Nothing shocks. It merely transforms the actors and transports us.

The only other show in Sydney that involves a naked man is the Elocution of Benjamin Franklin  featuring a new, more svelte John Wood . That show, we will see in September in Melbourne, according to Mr. Wood.

Will he be writhing naked like a strip artiste? Or bathing in a tub of blood or chucking bladders of blood at us?

Sydney Festival closed officially on Australia Day weekend. Some visual arts and cinema events continue.

By Kate Herbert

My Life as a Dyke To -The Shequel, Jan 25, 2002

My Life as a Dyke Too - The Shequel  

By Nik Willmott  at La Mama  until February 16. 2002

Reviewer: Kate Herbert, Jan 25, 2002

Don't judge this show by its title. It is not an earnest or over-the-top politically correct show appealing only for lesbians. My Life As A Dyke Too - the Shequel, is a genuinely funny series of sketches and characters. 

This show deserves a wider audience than just the ardent all-lesbian followers of the prequel, My Life as a Dyke.  sell-out.

Yes, the jokes are about lesbians. Don't feel they will not appeal to you if you play for the other team.

They are critical as well as sympathetic, and never preachy or simplistic. The sketches are intelligent, ironic, sometimes self-deprecating and often beautifully observed.

The show is performed by Nik Willmott and Rachel Forgasz  and is written by Willmott. There is a clever comic mind at work in this dialogue and two lovely character actors on stage.

One of my favourites is a scene with two friends discussing the hidden costs of having a new lover: dinners, pressies, phone bill, even therapy after the awful ending. This is relevant to all genders and types of relationships.

My other fave was Forgasz's lecture in Lesbianism 201. She plays a very familiar style of university academic who patronises, snarls, shouts and parades herself sexually, seducing students as she lectures them about the pitfalls and patterns of the first six months of the lesbian relationship. 

If you need a short course in understanding lesbians and their disastrous, romantic and often hasty affairs, this is the one.

A recurring sketch involves a rather self-contained, private lesbian driving to a conference with her dizzy, heterosexual co-worker. The latter is determined to share secrets about boyfriends, clothes and make-up. It is hilarious and excruciating.

The writing is excellent in most sketches. What makes this show work is the clearly defined characters and smart acting of Forgasz and Willmott.

One charming scene is between two elderly women who divorced their husbands to live together twenty-seven years ago but insist they are not lesbians. Willmott and Forgasz capture the imagination with a sweet Miss Marple type with a burly Margaret Rutherford type.

Get over your concerns about this not being a show for you. It is a hoot.

By Kate Herbert

Shush by Dolly Adamson, Jan 23, 2002

By Dolly Adamson

La Mama, Carlton Courthouse until February 9, 2002

Midsumma Festival

Reviewer: Kate Herbert on Jan 23, 2002

Coming out as a lesbian to the family is difficult enough. Add to this being an incest victim of one's grandfather and you have a familial molotov cocktail. Such is the content of Shush, written by Dolly Adamson. The play is part of the Midsumma  Gay and Lesbian Festival program.

The topic is not new in theatre and is a highly emotive and socially relevant area. The play has scenes that effectively reflect the lifestyle of the gay club scene, the shared house and awkward family relationships.

The lesbian relationship between Alex (Delene Butland) and Holly (Jaqcui Tamlyn) highlights their raging fights, drug-taking.

This is a patchy production with a script that needs some serious editing. The narrative follows a plausible path but the dialogue is repetitive and the story predictable. Characters are stereotypes and their relationships shallow.

The play is a drama. However, there is a peculiar and inappropriate addition of the drag queen, Barb Wire, (Barry Soloman) who introduces the play and enters the final club scene.

Other quirky but unnecessary characters include Trevor, (Tamlyn) a dysfunctional stalker who writes hilariously bad love poetry and Sylvia, another drag queen (Robert Kelty) who runs the club.

All three of three of these would make a fine cabaret comedy show but interfere with the style and narrative in Shush.

There are some credible and moving moments from John Flaus playing the grandfather. He is warm, loving and finally enraged at his granddaughter's clearly accurate accusations.

Butland warms to the role after some initial awkwardness and Tamlyn is strong as her roughhouse girlfriend, Holly.

The character of Judy, Alex's mother, (Libby Stone) is written as a one-note, whining critical matriarch that makes it difficult for Stone to make much of the role.

Tamara Kuldin as Alex's sister, Michelle, whimpers and leaps about like a child which makes it difficult to believe she is about to marry.

Director Susan Pilbeam has found some truth in this piece but it lacks polish and needs a huge cut on the script.

By Kate Herbert

I Should Be So Lucky, by David Knox, Jan 18, 2002

I Should Be So Lucky by David Knox 

Chapel off Chapel  until February 3, 2002

Reviewer: Kate Herbert on Jan 18, 2002

Blend a heap of Kylie  songs with a gay relationships self-help book and you get this show.David Knox's sell-out new musical, I Should Be So Lucky, is as camp as the genre gets.

Scott, (Damien Aylward) a young gay guy, searches for love - or at least a lover that stays more than 24 hours. Scott falls for Danny,  (Frank Raco) the evidently heterosexual bouncer. The problem is, so do his fag-hag girlfriend, Charlene  (Wendy Mooney) and his potentially long-term lover, Jason.  (Paul Ross) Oh, what a tangled web.

This peppy musical confection is entertaining - especially if you're young, gay, male and not expecting intellectual stimulation. Serious issues arise but are dismissed summarily. Scott is a victim of a doping and rape. He remembers little. This is chillingly reminiscent of a current trend for this kind of abuse of gay men.

The words Kylie and gay boys are often found in the same sentence so the Midsumma Festival crowd loved the songs and the gay lifestyle gags.

Knox creates several likeable and recognisable characters. However, his dialogue needs an edit. It is overwritten, expository, often preachy or simply too obvious.

The plot is thin. Dramatic action is avoided for the first half, contrived in the second and there is absolutely no sub-text.

But, hey! It's a pop musical so musician, Jonathan Densem keeps the songs coming thick and fast. The actors have a hoot belting out songs and dancing their bottoms off with video clip choreography by Kelly Aykers.

Their voices are competent although there are a few missed notes here and there and the microphones are unnecessary in such a small space.

The strongest and most believable performance is Paul Ross as the composed, sensible and loving Jason.

Knox's use of Kylie's lyrics as dialogue is clever. The two couples bouncing lustily under sheets singing, I Like It Like That, is a hoot.

The most satisfying musical and dramatic scene was the blending of two songs (Spinning Around and Finer Feelings),  into a four part harmony, a capella ending.

More of that quality would kick this project into the next level. But this is entertaining Midsumma fare.

By Kate Herbert

Women in Love by Julia Britton, Jan 10, 2002

Women in Love by Julia Britton

Adapted from D.H. Lawrence

By Performing Art Projects & Australian Shakespeare Company  

at Rippon Lea  from January 10 through summer, 2002

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

D H Lawrence captivates the mind with his impassioned and controversial novel, Women in Love. It is a treatise on relationships, love, passion, friendship and the differing emotional agendas of the genders.

Julia Britton, in her theatrical adaptation, retains the battle of ideas within dramatised scenes. The script could benefit from a greater distinction between novel and script.

A major difference between theatre and prose is action.  Dialogue in theatre moves the action along whereas much of Lawrence's wonderful dialogue is static. We have little sympathy for the characters. The play is successful despite this.

The story is set in a village in Nottinghamshire. Two sisters, Ursula (Belle Armstrong  and Gudrun, (Carolyn Bock) both teachers, struggle with notions of femaleness, marriage, children and love.

Ursula falls in love with the ailing and cerebral Rupert Birkin, (Antony Neate) who is modelled on Lawrence himself. Gudrun, the cynical and sexual sculptress, has a fraught affair with the blokey mine owner, Gerald Crich. (Shawn Unsworth)

Lawrence is maddening. He raises hackles with his demented arguments about his idea of a perfect world. He spent his life searching for a Utopia, even in Australia where he wrote Kangaroo. He would have made a fine hippy.

The performances of the four leads are strong. Bock, as the brooding, waspish Gudrun, is magnetic. Armstrong plays Ursula with a spark of inner light. Opposite her as Birkin, Neate manages Lawrence's speeches with alacrity although he is a little to hale and hearty for the tubercular Birkin.

Unsworth captures Gerald's repressed passion and sadness. However, director, Rob Chuter's casting is odd as Gerald is clearly written as a bulky, Nordic blonde. As the aristocrat, Hermione Roddice, Penelope Bartlau is appropriately chilly and desperate.

The spectacular gardens provide exceptional locations for the scenes: the lake, the facade of the house, the candlelit ballroom.

Britton uses the character of Lawrence (Anthony Morton) as the narrator and commentator. He fills in parts of the novel not included in scenes. Some of his narrative interludes could be incorporated into dialogue. The narrator is also the vehicle for moving us from one glorious location to another in the Rippon Lea gardens.

By Kate Herbert

Twelfth Night, ASC, Jan 5, 2002

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Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

The Australian Shakespeare Company

Royal Botanic Gardens Gate E 

Running through summer, 2002

Reviewer: Kate Herbert, Jan 5, 2002

Staging a play in the Botanical Gardens is almost fail safe. We arrive with blanket, picnic and a bottle of wine. The ducks quack at sunset. The bats emerge after dark. Only a stray police helicopter shatters the calm.

Director, Glenn Elston locates Twelfth Night,  this year's Shakespeare, in a slightly less idyllic setting against the wall of the glasshouse. The advantage is that the voices are more audible because the space is confined.

Twelfth Night is a comedy-romance with a dark edge but Elston's production plays it for laughs and love. Any potential grimness is underplayed. The show's great strengths are the visual gags and slapstick routines from Sir Toby Belch, (Brendan O'Connor) Sir Andrew Aguecheek  (Bruce Woolley) and Fabian.  (James Shaw)

The three observe their practical je on Malvolio, (Michael Bishop) the pompous and puritanical servant of Lady Olivia, (Helen Hopkins) from secret viewing posts. They bob up and down like sideshow clowns in the best form of knockabout humour.

The play is a grab bag of mistaken identity, cross-dressing, separated identical twins, lovelorn or grieving masters and mistresses and bawdy servants.

Twelfth Night is a raunchy Shakespeare play that will appeal to those who do not like the heavy, wordy tragedies by the Bard.

The actors and director toss into the mix of love and naughtiness, a seasoning of Australianisms, contemporary musical references and jokes.

Woolley is a great find. His Sir Andrew is relaxed, suitably goofy and hilarious. He is a fine foil for the outrageousness of O'Connor's grotesque Sir Toby. The bawdiness is emphasised by plenty of burping, farting and peeing jokes.

Kevin Hopkins  as Feste the Jester  acts as Master of Ceremonies, addressing the audience and leading actors and audience in songs. Kate Campbell has the requisite bounce and cheekiness for the servant, Maria.  Helen Hopkins is regal as Lady Olivia and, as her suitor Orsino, Phil Cameron-Smith  is an attractive and stately presence.

The role of Viola is a difficult one, being that of a girl dressed as a boy falling in love with a man. Marisa Warrington is charming in the role and gives it her best shot but lacks the necessary vocal power and control.

If you want a pleasant night in the gardens with an entertaining show to boot, Twelfth Night is the one.

By Kate Herbert