Category Archives: Theatre

Black Swan State Theatre Company

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Endgame (Samuel Beckett)

State Theatre

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photographer Daniel James Grant.

 

 

He’s like the spirit of malevolence and bitterness: blind, marooned in a chair from which he almost never moves as he dispenses – generously –  bile and self-hatred.

 

He’s not the sort of person anyone would willingly want to befriend. But Clov – played with masterly skill by Kelton Pell – has reserves of patience and compassion that are wildly out of proportion to the constant stream of unpleasantness that issues from Hamm.

 

Pell is star of the production; his characterisation is wonderfully, and satisfyingly, complete. There’s understated artistry in his every gesture, the slightest semi-sentence. He makes of Clov a man of angelic patience, never for a moment – not even a second – gruff, abrasive, dismissive. His every word and gesture are informed by a quietness – a calmness – that make him the very antithesis of Hamm.

 

Clov climbs a ladder.(He never sits – anywhere, any time.) He places a foot on the first rung – and waits a while before bringing his other foot to the same rung – and so on. In a sense this typifies Clov – quiet, unhurried, gentle with a near-angelic forbearance.

 

Despite given every reason to,  he NEVER raises his voice. There’s quiet understatement to his every word – the absolute antithesis of the monstrous Hamm., – but although viscerally unpleasant, one cannot help feeling pity for this dreadfully stricken being.

 

Hamm’s handicaps are awful;  his abrasiveness, his virtually complete lack of empathy add to the sheer unpleasantness of the man.  But – and this is the crucial question – how many others would act differently to awful Hamm in his dreadful predicament.

 

Who would uncomplainingly accept blindness and additional incapacity? How many would accept being weighed down by such hideous handicaps? It is so easy to be judgemental – but how many in a similarly awful  situation would act differently?

 

Then there are Nell (Caroline McKenzie) and Nagg (George Shevtsov), both legless, each living in a bin. Although on a much smaller scale, their parts require consistent skill – and on this score, they both deliver wholesale.

 

This is a five-star offering, much due to first rate direction by Andrew Ross.. I hope it’s seen by thousands. It deserves to be.

L’Elisir d’Amore (Donizetti)

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W.A.Opera Company and Chorus

W.A.Symphony Orchestra

His Majesty’s Theatre

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

In more than half a century of attending opera productions here and abroad, I cannot  recall so frankly delightful a production of Donizetti’s comic masterpiece. What, I wonder, would the composer have thought of his opera being set in the Australian outback during WW1 with the male chorus on horseback kitted out as cavalry?

 

Simon Phillips has done wonders with the work, underscoring its comic dimension to a gratifying degree and giving the opera as a whole a freshness of conception in visual terms that clearly – and understandably – delighted a capacity audience.

 

It scores high on the ‘zany’ gauge. Horses are made of what looks like cut-out corrugated cardboard. The same goes for dogs and sheep. And sets are the perfect backdrop for on-stage comedy in an outback setting.

 

It was an inspiration to cast Rachelle Durkin and Aldo di Toro as the leads. Each was perfectly suited to the role in both vocal and theatrical terms. And as a duo, the operatic chemistry could hardly have been bettered. It sizzled.

 

Durkin has a priceless comic gift which, allied to a voice in top form, makes her an artist of formidable ability. She was in A1 form as Adina.  Aldo di Toro, too, was in splendid fettle, reaching for – and touching –  the stars. He is perfectly suited to the role of Nemorino.

 

Marco Nistico was a most convincing Dr Dulcamara, that shonkiest of snake-oil salesmen, a purveyor of  extremely dubious remedies for just about any ailment. And Jennifer Barrington was a delightful Gianetta. Laurels, too, to Jose Carbo who wsas in fine form as Belcore.

 

From the pit, Stuart Stratford presided over a reduced-size WASO. Tempi were almost invariably sensible and workable. Adam Mikulicz played, beautifully, the bassoon introduction to Una furtive lagrima, the singing of which quite rightly brought the house down..

 

Of the women’s chorus, this: the singing was delightful, the ladies seeming positively to embrace their roles, underscoring the comic dimension of the work with gusto. The male chorus did well, too.

 

 

 

Cirque de la Symphonie

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W.A. Symphony Orchestra

Perth Concert Hall

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

In more than thirty years of attending WASO concerts, many of them novel and unexpected, I had not encountered anything remotely like the astonishing and often delightful goings-on of an unforgettable excursion into a circus world.

 

With the orchestra positioned far back on stage, the latter significantly expanded into the auditorium, conductor Guy Noble presided over events with a steady and reliable beat.

 

A very clever lighting design simulated the interior of a circus tent.

 

Nerves of steel, absolute confidence in one’s physical ability to shimmy up and down ropes and silks while placing what must surely be immense strain on muscles and ligaments, the circus acrobats took the audience into an unforgettable world of grace, daring – and danger.

 

This was a catalogue of acrobatic marvels from Christine van Loo doing wonders with aerial silks as we listened to the eerily ghostly measures of Saint Saens’ Danse Macabre to two heavily muscled blokes – Jaroslaw Marciniak and Dariusz Wronski –  definitely not the sort you’d want to get into an argument with. They demonstrated stunning control of hand balancing to the accompaniment of Sibelius’ Finlandia.

 

Elena Tsarkova was a frankly brilliant contortionist in a waltz from Khachaturian’s Masquerade  And she was joined by her husband Vladimir Tsarkov in a delightful offering to music from Tchaikowsky’s Swan Lake. As a duo, they astonished and intrigued in a series of extraordinarily rapid costume changes. This, too, brought the house down.

 

In his own right, Tsarkov was the focus of gleeful laughter in linking offerings that were an hilariously comic delight, not least due to a face that seemed capable of  registering a seemingly endless range of expressions. Tsarkov is also a first rate juggler.

 

A muscled Vitalii Buza flew through the upper reaches of the venue’s space as if jet propelled.

 

This was a WASO concert to relish –  and for the very best reasons.

 

 

A Perfect Specimen (Nathaniel Moncrieff)

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Black Swan Theatre Company

Studio Underground

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

Fascination with human disfigurement is as old as mankind. That archetypal figure, The Bearded Lady, who’d come to town as a star of this or that travelling freak show, was a source of endless curiosity. In some – perhaps most – cases, the Bearded Lady would have been a fraud aided by a skilled make-up artist – or, very rarely –  it might have been the real thing.

 

In the opening moments of Nathaniel Moncrieff’s play – A Perfect Specimen – we see Julia Pastrana seated, her face almost entirely obscured by a scarf over the much publicised beard which can barely be made out.  But, while in conversation with her husband cum manager Theodore Lent, the latter leans towards the seated figure and carefully removes her beard and headgear to reveal an attractive young women with an unblemished visage.

 

What is one to make of this?

 

With nothing about this mentioned  in an otherwise informative and helpful program booklet,  I imagine that at least some, if not many, of the audience would have assumed that the ‘bearded lady’ was nothing of the sort, a charlatan, a not uncommon state of affairs in many, if not most, of these bizarre travelling shows that reached their highest popularity in the late 19th century.

 

What was NOT explained in the program booklet was that, apparently, the removal of scarf and beard was deliberately decided upon to allow the play to proceed without visual distraction. But surely, at least some of those in the audience would have come to the conclusion that the Bearded Lady was a fraud – not the real thing. And this would give an altogether different perspective on the play.

 

Shortly after the performance had ended and while in the adjacent parking garage, I spoke to three theatre goers at random. Each told me they’d assumed the central character was not the real thing at all but a fraud (opined one) or a confidence trickster (said the others).

 

This notwithstanding, the play is genuinely fascinating with Adriane Daff as a  touching figure, whose dilemma is exacerbated when she falls pregnant. If, because of this, she’d had any hopes of being allowed to give up her theatrical work, they were dashed. Her appalling husband would not hear of it. Shortly after giving birth, both mother and baby died. Incredibly, Lent – whose awfulness must have seemed boundless to those who came into contact with him – arranged that the bodies of both mother and child were mummified. And then, he used the mummified bodies to coax even bigger audiences to pay for entry to gawp at this dreadful sight.

 

Adding to Julia’s misery is the knowledge that her faithless husband is having an affair with Marian Trumbull played by Rebecca Davis as the travelling show’s acrobat.

 

Frances Danckert’s set design fits into the action perfectly. Tatty, bedraggled side-drapes look as if they might have been found in some charity bin – and the circular, revolving stage also looks as if it hasn’t be swept for weeks, perhaps months.  There’s an all-encompassing, seedy drabness that is theatrically perfect. And Joe Lui’s lighting design cleverly underscores the visual tattiness of the set.

 

 

 

Black Swan Theatre Company

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Extinction (Hannie Rayson)

State Theatre of W.A.

reviewed by Sophie Saxe-Lehrman

 

Too infrequently, a new play is mounted which has the seemingly effortless ability to draw the viewer –  in the most meaningful way  – into the world created by the dramatist.

 

BSSTC Extinction Production ImagesThis was very much the case with Stuart Halusz’s sure and sensitive directorial touch and a cast of four who brought Hannie Rayson’s play to consistently convincing life ie apart from a curious feature: siblings whose accents were so strikingly different that they sounded as if from utterly different families, utterly different countries for that matter.

 

This curious dichotomy aside, on-stage conversations were invariably engrossing – and one sensed also a total absorption by the audience into Rayson’s idiosyncratic theatre-world.

 

Central to the play is the fate of a seriously endangered mammal – the quoll – which serves as the focal point for much of Act 1. One of these rare creatures has been injured in a road accident and has been brought to a veterinary clinic – and is being looked after by a veterinary nurse. The injured animal has been brought in by the driver of the car which caused the injuries. By a curious co-incidence, he is a senior executive of a mining corporation which plans to start digging in areas where the quoll is at its most vulnerable.

 

Rayson has a good ear for conversation; her lines draw one almost at once into an intriguing mood-world. It is rather like eavesdropping on private conversations – and fascinating ones to boot. Of course, even the best lines can be a turn-off if they’re delivered indifferently. But on this crucial count, the cast scored impressively.

 

Not the least of the pleasures of this production is its seamless continuity with both  actors and stage personnel soundlessly and rapidly moving props around and on or off a darkened stage. And lighting design is one of the production’s best features, subtly underscoring mood and drawing the viewer into the unfolding story.

 

It was a pleasure to experience stage craft of such high order