Home Brew , Aug 21, 1996

By Peter Rowsthorn (With Simon Rogers, Ross Daniels, Robin Butler)

Last Laugh Theatre Restaurant, Aug to Sept 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around Aug 21, 1996

Peter Rowsthorn has been doing stand-up comedy around town for about ten years or more and he's still funny even when he's doing old material. It's his physical humour which makes him standout.

If you don't know him, Rowsthorn is a bit of a local Jim Carrey with his rubbery face and body, fast patter, silly accents and impressions.  His stage persona is more than a little wired pushing him to the edge of incomprehensibility and vibrating goofiness.

Rowsthorn conjures up Australian images of 40 degree Melbourne summer days running barefoot on burning asphalt or towel-hopping over 200 degree sand. He muses at beach fashion changes. The coolites at Middle Park beach now posture and pose in G-string, bum-hugging bathers that once were just called "wedgies" and Slip, Slop, Slap and Osh Kosh have replaced the token stripe of zinc cream on a nipper's nose.

The TV trivia quiz drew the refreshingly uninebriated Wednesday comedy night audience into Rowsthorn's warm circle. Audience is divided in two to compete for points answering questions about Mr. Ed, Lost In Space and that fabulously eccentric Japanese show, Monkey - with a few side references to my childhood fave, Shintaro.

His impression of E.T., complete with tubby tummy and flapping arms, is still hilarious as is his finale routine about the Royal Show and Luna Park. Chucking up on the Rotor and shrieking on the now defunct Big Dipper ride are terrific examples of his wild, nervy physical comedy.

It's the warmth and charm of Rowsthorn which works for him. Even when the material lets him down, he is able to keep charming the audience and send them home happy and cosy and all laughed out.

KATE HERBERT

Wrung Out! Glynn Nicholas, Aug 21, 1996

Wrung Out! by Glynn Nicholas

Comedy Theatre from August 15, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around Aug 21, 1996

Director Terry O'Connell with Ann Wilson & Anna Mitsikas

Glynn Nicholas certainly knows how to work a crowd. All those years begging and doing classical mime on the streets of Adelaide and Paris paid off. Once a busker, always a charming-bloody-busker.

They were eating out of his hand and throwing money ("Wrap it in bills. It's safer.") and there was a standing ovation – but more of that later.

Nicholas manages to find the perfect blend of the schmaltzy-sweet and wickedly grotesque. His fascist kindy teacher, Pate' Biscuit, remains a timeless and vicious satire on all those repressed, angry, child-hating Playschool presenters worldwide. Pate' with Bongo, her silent, salacious puppet alter ego, has become a classic for Nicholas.

Another skilful and hilariously well-observed character is Sergeant Smith, the local copper who mixes his cliches, uses the "f" word (sans "f") every second '...uckin' word, and is a grotesque parody of every old school Plod.

Nicholas strings together these characters with an engaging personal story about leaving hearth and home to go on his restless young man's journey to gay Paris to study mime. He even pre-empts any mime cynicism in the audience with, "I trained with Marcel Cliche." He covers a bad gag with a coy apology or a gaze tossed to his musician (Ana Mitsikas).

He gets away with appalling puns and gross tits and bums humour by the skin of his teeth. The seamy jokes come as such a surprise we laugh and let him move on.

He re-incorporates gags, latecomers, characters and references throughout the show. He is able to demystify the bull-dust of theatre by allowing us into his world and then amazing us with magic and mime illusions. The crowd still responds with most gusto to his mimetic skills. His motorcycle cop catching a drunken driver is a virtuoso set piece of comic mime.

Less successful are the sometimes icky-sweet songs and the love story narrative about Marlon Hickey the pavement artist from Wollongong who brings a classy Parisian bride back to Wollongong to "leeeeave". The integration of a second performer, the very skilful dancer-singer Ann Wilson, is not quite complete but this may settle as the season continues. Mitsikas' musical accompaniment enhanced the show but the star is always Nicholas himself.

That's who the people stood up for at the end - even if he made us do it.

KATE HERBERT

Strangers In The Night, Aug 8, 1996

 by Abe Pogos

Playbox until August 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around/before Aug 8, 1996

Lower West Manhattan feels like Blade Runner dubbed into several foreign languages: incomprehensible, bleak, dangerous, poorly but stylishly lit. Everybody in the subways is a potential threat. So why go there? - to experience this very danger, according to Daniel  (Adriano Cortese), protagonist and writer in Strangers in the Night.

How thin is the line between abusive and psychopathic? Playwright, Abe Pogos probes this question with a stiletto blade which is all too popular in his New York.  Daniel Lewin's cousin, Sarah (Jacqueline Linke) advises him to "murder something", so he can write about things he has really experienced. He ventures out of the bosom of his clinging limpet Aunt Lina (Heather Bolton) and begins his heroic journey into the dark cave of the beast which is New York.

The tension shrieks. Victims stay too long with their murderers, the nephew stays with the annoying aunt. The weak, using emotional manipulation, become the powerful. The homeless guy tells his tragic story and wins, the Jewish aunt bleats about loneliness. She wins. Gerry whimpers, "You hate me," and wins.

Strangers is almost too gruesome, too violent and suspenseful, too intentionally claustrophobic for this squeamish audient, but it is compelling theatre with some impeccable and layered performances, crisp direction and skilful text. The dialogue is taut, the narrative has the tension of a guitar string stretched to snapping and the plot has a final twist followed by a double somersault with pike. We peer into people's apartments, perv through their windows, poke around in their minds, eavesdrop on their conversations.

Hugh Colman's design effectively represents midnight New York with the seeping walls of a public urinal. It divides the space into three which is useful in providing differing locations but fragments the stage leaving us distant from the performance, albeit safer.

Gerry (David Tredinnick) is a gay misfit from Milwaukee (where that?). His rank little apartment is the site of nasty habits which have escalated into the tragic and psychopathic. Daniel's quest for 'experiences" remains firmly in the voyeuristic until his path and the plot, cross with Gerry's.

Tredinnick is riveting, terrifying but maintains a child-like, if psychopathic, vulnerability. Cortese is sympathetic in the difficult role of ordinary guy amidst weirdos. Patrick Williams transforms with ease from charming gay to Rasta peep-show spruiker. Melvin J. Carroll's pornographic narrative was marvellous despite its repulsive content. This is not a play for the faint-hearted nor the easily offended - but it is good.

KATE HERBERT  

Maestro, Aug 8, 1996

by Geoffrey Williams

Courthouse until August 17, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around Aug 8, 1996

There is a clause in small print at the bottom of every artist's contract with the devil which declares, "Create great art and be a tortured soul." Piotr Tchaikovsky was no exception.

Geoffrey Williams play, Maestro, focuses on the great composer's covert homosexuality, his love for pretty boy, Walsa Lekovsky (Richard Gyoerffy), and the torment this secrecy and deception wrought on his long-suffering wife, Nina (Kath Gordon). This sham of a marriage, designed to keep up appearances in polite Russian and French society, drove Nina to the asylum.

Williams uses the ravaged older and madder Nina as a constant presence and narrator after the fact. Although she talks of her marriage, we never actually see her with Tchaikovsky (Nicholas Stribakos). She wanders, dislocated, through the landscape of his past before she knew him and before she knew his secret.

The production fills the stage with numerous locations, characters and time frames. Its most effective moments were its simplest. Nina, alone at last in a single spotlight, speaks of her love of the piano. Later, Nadia and Alexei, Tchaikovsky's consumptive ex-lover, speak of their mutual love of the great composer. Less is more.

Its most effective moments are its simplest. Nina, alone at last in a single spotlight, speaks of her love of the piano. Later, Nadia and Alexei, Tchaikovsky's consumptive ex-lover, speak of their mutual love of the great composer. The rest of the time the production clutters the stage with numerous overlapping locations, characters and time frames. Less is more.

Nina is perhaps, the most complete character. Tchaikovsky himself is rather thinly drawn. It was surprising that he was not coloured more by his music which plays a significant role only in the second half as he writes Swan Lake for his patron, Nadia von Meck (Sue Dwyer).

Performance levels are uneven but Gordon plays Nina with a simple intensity which is very affecting, avoiding the "mad acting" of others which often upstaged her or made her words inaudible. Dwyer's Nadia is dignified and contained and manages the melodrama of later scenes with style.

This is a major shortcoming of this production. It lapses into overstatement and the melodramatic so that, at times, it is a period soap opera with too much shouting, coughing blood, whimpering under tables, tearing of hair and wringing of hands. The stage, particularly in the first half, is cluttered and the script could benefit from some rigorous editing of dialogue and some of its purple prose.

KATE HERBERT 

Sextet by Leonard Radic, July 31, 1996

At  Napier St Theatre until August 18, 1996

Reviewed by kate Herbert around July 31, 1996

The phenomenon of a critic writing a play is sufficiently unusual. What are the odds on a critic-playwright reviewing a play by another critic-playwright who recently reviewed the first critic's play. Here goes!

Leonard Radic's Sextet, which he vows is not autobiographical, draws on years of experience as The Age critic and observations of the theatre industry and its creatures. It is directed by Malcolm Robertson in a traverse stage which seats audience on two sides of the action.

A new play is being staged with a critic (William Gluth) in a leading role and his wife (Jane Badler), her lover (John Higginson) and the critic's potential lover (Penelope Hanby) also acting. It is wickedly entertaining to see Radic's composite characters based in real people we love to hate. 

Ralph Tomasetti (Damien Richardson) is a fine satirical portrait of every pompous, jumped-up young director who ever deigned to grace our stages with productions of classics with bastardised text, set in mud with hessian costumes. His tour de force was Macbeth set in the Mekong Delta.

Actors whimper and quibble, writer chucks tantrums about his adulterated text, director wants total control. It is an unbridled attack on the pretentious in theatre. It's probably still funny even if you do not work in the theatre.

Radic has tampered with narrative form, blurring boundaries between rehearsal and performance, writing and improvisation and, most significantly, between reality and fiction. The actors live out their tangled real life relationships as the writer (James Benedict) tapes them to use, verbatim, in scenes.

The director is dragged into the action, initially to narrate then, later, as a character in the play within a play. There are direct references to audience, the stage manager, stolen lines and mixed up names. There is something of Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound without all the deaths and much less complex.

All this works better in the first act where the dialogue is brisk and the humour acid. Richardson is breezy and charmingly smug as the arrogant director and Benedict is appropriately precious and earnest as the writer. 

There seems to be some miscasting elsewhere in the production and the second half, particularly, suffers from some rather mannered acting as well as some repetitive dialogue. Richardson's lesser presence after interval leaves the piece taking itself a little too seriously. But is all, nonetheless, a bit of a hoot.

KATE HERBERT 

Road Movie, July 29, 1996

Written  by Melissa Reeves

Back to Back & Melbourne Workers' Theatre

Lonsdale St. Power Station until August 10, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert round July 28, 1996

The road movie genre is a modern version of the mythic "Hero's Journey" where the hero leaves a secure environment, takes a journey, makes mistakes, pays the price, seeks a mentor, endures hardship and tests of personal strength. They do not always end happily. Think of Thelma and Louise.

Such is the plot of Road Movie. Two workers from a sheltered workshop in Melbourne are involved unwittingly in a violent payroll robbery and become fugitives from justice. What enhances this production is that its protagonists are played by actors who themselves have some intellectual disability. Both have been members of Back to Back Theatre for some years.

These actors are committed to representing the way the world treats those with disabilities and to tackling issues arising from living with disability. This in no way suggests that they are token members of this production.  Sonia Teuben as Karen who goes in search of her long-lost parents, gives a gripping, unaffected and passionate performance and Mark Deans (Louie), with his cheeky, mobile face and snappy moves, remains one of my favourite local clowns.

The play begins dramatically with the narrative's ending. The audience, as is common in non-traditional industrial venues, move from location to location within the Lonsdale Street Power Station. The whole takes full advantage of the stark concrete environment and its potential for vivid and dramatic lighting (Ben Cobham).

The script by Melissa Reeves, regular writer for Melbourne Workers' Theatre, is simple and direct in its narrative and dialogue and includes a range of quirky and effective comic characters played by Kate Gillick and Tim Aris. The naive errors of judgement by Karen and Louie are both funny and dangerous.  The play has an emotional edge which could have been further developed. One concern was that the ending remained unclear.

Director Bruce Gladwin has worked boldly with huge slide projection, mechanical devices, broad characterisation and a further layer of pumping rock music by Hugh Covill. This is a charming and entertaining production.

Kate Herbert

Kafka's Dick, July 28, 1996

Kafka's Dick by Alan Bennett

At Athenauem II until August, 1996

 Reviewed by Kate Herbert around July 27, 1996

Alan Bennett's play, Kafka's Dick, is not a euphemism. It really refers to Czech novelist Franz Kafka's penis. An odd topic for a play? Evidently Kafka's member was tiny and for a man with an almost psychotically distorted body image, this was disastrous.

Although the Kafka of this production (Mark Butler) is more rigidly dignified than charming, Bennett's Kafka is a charming, neurotic artist whom women find irresistible. Do we have no taste? He hates his name (Kaka plus "F"), fusses about food, lives with his parents, obsesses over detail and demands attention for his depressive behaviour.

Is it any wonder that he has become the darling of the angst-ridden moderns. His eerie, desolate images of Joseph K. arrested for no reason (The Trial) and Gregor Samsa transforming into a dung beetle (Metamorphosis) parallel our obsessions with a meaninglessness and uncontrollable world.

Bennett, who wrote the screenplay for The Madness of King George and tele-series Talking Heads, is a comic writer of great skill although this script has far too much explicatory dialogue.

Kafka and his friend, Max Brod (Peter Rowley), appear to dreary Kafka buff, Sydney (Ian Toyne), and his wife Linda (Meridy Eastman) sixty years after Kafka's death. Sydney is, laughably, writing an article on Kafka for an insurance journal. Like Kafka, he hates his name, works in an insurance office and craves recognition.

Brod admits that not only did he not burn all Kafka's works after his death as directed, but that he published the lot and made a career out of Kafka who is, to say the least, displeased. He prefers wallowing in misery and self-loathing and suffering in ignominious anonymity. Aah, the inverted vanity of the garret artist.

Bennett's style is farce-meeting-psychology. The thematic core of his story is Kafka's relationship with his oppressive father, Hermann (Dennis Moore) and here Kafka's dick becomes relevant. Papa was a rambunctious button-seller who harassed his indulgent, narcissistic and annoying son. Hermann also appears in Sydney's house to attempt to redeem his appalling reputation but realises, on seeing Sydney's old dad ignored, that "a good father is a father you forget. Bad fathers are never forgotten." Great artists are rarely the product of secure, normal and happy families.

The second half is the stronger in this co-operative production. There is greater dynamism and dramatic tension after Hermann arrives which is assisted by a vibrant performance by Dennis Moore. Performances are uneven with a few breathless one-note characters but Bob Hornery's cameo as Sydney's abandoned father is well placed and hilarious and Eastman's Linda is an engaging sketch of a mistreated wife. 

The direction is competent but lacks some inventiveness and comic sensibility which leaves the production reliant on Bennett's glib dialogue and rather arch and contrived narrative.

KATE HERBERT 

Brand New Ford, July 18,1996

The Brand New Ford by Ian Scott

La Mama until August 4, 1996 Wed to Sat 8pm, Sun 6pm

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around July 17, 1996

The language of theatre is a cosmopolitan one and Ian Scott, writer-director of The Brand New Ford, is well versed in all its dialects, both linguistic and physical. The four members of this eccentric stage family prattle and prate at each other in rich, complex and allusive phrases.

The starting gate for the content of this play is cars: grotesque V8's and other revving, noisy, petrol-guzzling motors. Dad (the inimical Jim Daly) talks like a Fairlane manual. He rants about the bloke over the road, about his bedraggled dropout son's (Mark Pegler) choice of vehicle. His wife and daughter (Melanie Beddie, Maria Theodorakis) are uncomprehending in the face of alternators, carburettors and drive shafts.

The language drives the play. It bubbles and gushes hilariously or it vaporises absurdly, almost incomprehensibly. It rushed by so quickly at the start, I wanted to hear it all over again.

The first half is the more successful. It is crisply constructed, swift-moving dramatically and clearly bedded in its absurdist style. It surprises and satisfies and it is extremely funny in its observations of modern living and our mad family miscommunications. All four performances are colourful and skilled.

The second half is less coherent but perhaps I missed a beat. It leaps from the absurd into the bizarre; Japanese mass-produced baby makers, male pregnancy, rapid aging, sudden death. Modern technology goes berserk. It was confusing but nonetheless entertaining. However, after accepting that I had no idea where this vehicle was carrying me, I still craved a resolution to the car theme. Perhaps I was just being too linear in my narrative needs.

The cosy, toasty-warm space at La Mama is always a tight squeeze and this show almost bursts out the doors as it fills with huge cartons and scattered bodies. The space is framed effectively, if enigmatically, with an array of umbrellas (Louise McCarthy) and is lit subtly and evocatively in darkly moody colours (Daniel Zika).

This piece leaps at the audience and gob-smacks us with its provocative, naughty wit. Catch a look.

Kate Herbert

Easy To Say, July 8, 1996

Easy to Say by Kevin Nemeth

At  La Mama until June 25, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around July 8, 1996

An ordinary life can be so strange if examined too closely. Kevin Nemeth 's latest play, Easy to Say, staged at La Mama draws us into the orbit of several people related by family or friendship. Both the naturalistic style and the intimate La Mama staging force us to peer up the noses of the characters and observe their aching confusion about their sleeping and waking lives.

Nemeth's dialogue is swift and intelligent with well-observed characterisations. The superb quality of this script is its understatement. It speaks volumes through its speechless characters. Howard Stanley as the reticent middle-aged Mark, creates a whole sub-text through listening and reacting to his sister and his soon-to-be-ex-wife. Gary (Matthew Green) reveals more by refusing to explain his eight-year absence.

There is a Pinteresque quality in the sense of menace and emotional danger on stage which is a result of Nemeth's fine writing and Paul Hampton's inspired simplicity of direction. The realism combines with such intensity of performance and edgy writing gives a surreal feeling to the play.

The play is comprised of short, crisp scenes between intimates: a marriage ends, a friend returns, a silent man speaks, a relationship is remembered. There is one prolonged scene involving a card game with much quipping and prying. Although the scene is a little too long, between the lines spoken and tricks won, are yards of layered meaning.

These people are enmeshed in worlds of their own making, pasts which they do not understand, families which spin out of their control. They are helplessly pushing their faces up against the mesh trying to peer out.

The performances are often exceptional and all eccentric. The inimitable Howard Stanley is riveting as Mark, his first role after a six-year absence. Linda Gibson is witty and detailed as Liz, the almost non-smoker. Caroline Lee is quirky as her brittle friend, Maree and as Maree's blabbermouth husband, Russell Fletcher taps an uncanny quality of ageing party boy or child-man. 

There is a great deal remaining unresolved at the end. What happened to the settlement of father's will? Did Gary stay? Do Maree and Geoff continue their petty marital bickering? But this is the way of an ordinary life. It goes on and on and on without resolution - doesn't it?

By Kate Herbert

Kevin Nemeth writer

Paul Hampton idrector

 Cast:

Howard Stanley 

Linda Gibson

 Nancy Black 

Caroline Lee 

Russell Fletcher

Matthew Green

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