Category Archives: Theatre

Some Kind of Beautiful

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James Brookes (director)

Downstairs at the Maj

His Majesty’s Theatre

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

Until I attended a performance of Some Kind of Beautiful, I had thought of its author Belinda Dunbar exclusively in terms of her role as deputy general manager of His Majesty’s Theatre, a busy and efficient person in arts administration.

 

On a Saturday evening performance at Downstairs at the Maj, I encountered a very different incarnation of Dunbar: playwright.

 

Some Kind of Beautiful is a slice of life that has about it a refreshing sense of reality. Nothing jars in Act 1; its repartee had the ring of truth. It could all well have happened.

 

It’s not a scene of unalloyed domestic bliss. Initially, we hear Kate (Julia Jenkins) in a monologue mulling over what’s recently transpired. Paul, her partner, much loved, adored even, has succumbed to a particularly nasty cancer. She’s young, rather inexperienced and clearly devastated by the passing of an adored, fulfilling partner years her senior. The household, in the process of being dismantled, is a clutter of half-filled packing cartons – books, ornaments, a miscellany of domestic detritus.

 

Her meditation is abruptly and unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of two women one of whom delivers a brutally frank revelation. Paul was still legally married to her at the time of his death, after an illness through which Kate had nursed him lovingly. As Barbara (Helen Searle) brings Kate cruelly up to date, speaking of some aspects of Paul that reveal him as a not entirely attractive person, we find that he hadn’t bothered, hadn’t cared – or simply ‘forgot’- to tell Kate about his married state.

 

He’d never bothered to dissolve the marriage formally and – a thoughtless man – he’d never updated a will drawn up years earlier in which the prime beneficiary is his charmless wife. And although they haven’t had anything to do with one another for years, the will is no less valid than on the day it was drawn up. Of course, there’s nothing in it for Kate who only came on the scene much later.

 

Bitterness and withering anger are widow Barbara’s close companions through most of Act 1.  Flinty, insensitive and full of anger, she holds forth with an unending stream of vindictiveness and like some beer-fuelled youth with a souped-up car, goes roaring through the lives of others causing terrible damage to innocent bystanders on the way.

 

In the midst of all this, her daughter, Destiny (Maree Cole), wise beyond her years – and certainly more rational and considerate than her incandescently angry mother – tries to ameliorate the bitterness of her hate. Sensing the injustice towards Julia, Maree tries to reason with her mother to give Julia (who is an innocent party) a break.

 

A secret, carefully kept for years, emerges with the force of a cyclone. Paul may have fathered Destiny but Barbara is not her biological mother but the offspring of another woman casually impregnated by Paul who, for all his attractiveness to women, is an arch-poep, an uber-idiot who probably thought as deeply about the consequences of his tomcat behaviour as having another tinny (probably paid for by someone else).

 

There are no weak links in this cast; each makes a thoroughly worthwhile contribution to the performance, no less so than in Act 2 where the writing tends to discursiveness and the narrative line, so sure and logical in Act 1, weakens.

 

Invisible to the audience behind his sheet music on the grand piano positioned to a corner on the stage, Tim Cunniffe is a discreet presence; the songs he has written for the actors fit seamlessly into the action. There is no jarring effect at all.


Before I Get Old (Chris Edmund)

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New Theatre, W.A.Academy of Performing Arts

Before I Get Old
Before I Get Old

  Reviewed by Neville Cohn

In a program note, playwright Chris Edmund points out that the genesis of his newest play was an old-boys’ school reunion he’d attended in London two years ago.

It is a stunning achievement, a disturbingly articulate resurrection of the pain and anguish that so many would have experienced during years at high school.

A cast of sixteen do wonders in a production that deserves the highest praise for the way in which it has overcome what must have been a most challenging logistical exercise, with the cast breathing life into 34 roles. Certainly, rapid costume changes and the need to abandon one persona and adopt another in seconds were object lessons in how to do this sort of thing well.

This unsettling theatre experience is not for the squeamish although to place things in perspective, the events, set in a Hertfordshire school, even at their worst, can hardly be compared with, say, Dickens’ appalling Dotheboys Hall.

But it will certainly be disconcerting theatre for those whose expectations of a play about English school life derive from the absurd blandness of, say, Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books or the school-centred stories carried by weekly editions of Girl’s Crystal and Champion papers in the 1950s. Before I Get Old is light years away from the superficial folderol that is Blyton’s twee school world.

On the contrary, Edmund’s play is the essence of gritty realism.

Edmund took what I’d imagine was a calculated risk (that pays off impressively) in presenting what is, in effect, a highly episodic offering, a fast-paced string of vignettes with snappy dialogue that touches on more than the school experience (which in any case does not function in a vacuum).

I cannot imagine anyone who might have attended a state-run high school (or any school for that matter), whether in Australia or abroad, failing to identify with at least some aspects of a play that reveals the uglier side of the educational experience. Certainly, it is often very close to the bone.

Although the action centres around a school in the early 1950s some 35 miles north of London, the play’s themes are universal and timeless and that is what makes it such a powerful offering.

With singular skill in articulating the upheavals of adolescence and the selfconscious awkwardness that comes in its train, Edmund, sparing nothing, shows us the fraught and fragile nature of the teenage psyche.

Through what might be described as a series of flashbacks, Edmund reveals all this and more with a compassion and insight that make for theatre of high order.

In less than completely sure hands, a play of this nature can so easily descend into embarrassing bathos. Not here. Consider, for instance, a vignette set in a rear row of the local cinema. With its sweaty, clumsy gropings and a literally vomitous moment (unwise drinking under age?), it encapsulates part of the teenage rite of passage with an unerring touch.

Edmund’s play casts a wide net. Who are more sensitive to the behaviour of family, parents in particular, than teenagers? And here, too, Edmund’s spot-on explorations of sometimes heartrending familial dilemmas – parental and sibling illness, alcoholism, problem gambling – make an indelible mark. So, too, do scenes that focus on the at-times unintentional cruelty of schoolmates – and on the vulnerability and need for acceptance by peers that is so often masked by desperate bravado.

In an ensemble piece of this nature, where teamwork is of the essence, it is perhaps invidious to single out individuals – there were no weak links in this cast – but it would be ungracious not to particularly mention Richard Flanagan (right) as the hapless Conger. Balaclava-clad, and with a striking resemblance to, of all people, Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean, Flanagan gave a striking performance as a gawky student not always keeping pace with his peers.

As both playright and director, Edmund has scored a triumph. Nothing so justifies the existence of WAAPA’s theatre course than a production of this quality. It deserves to be seen by the widest possible audience.

Copyright Neville Cohn 2006


The Butcher’s Dance (Chris Edmund)

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Academy Theatre, Mount Lawley

butcher

reviewed by Neville Cohn

For a number of years, civil liberties were suspended in the Argentine which at the time was under the control of a brutal military junta. Unspeakable crimes were committed, often with impunity, and the exact fate of many thousands of Argentinians will never be known.

Chris Edmund, in his latest play – The Butcher’s Dance – has given us a disturbing insight into that terrible era. But there is much else to engage the eye and ear in what is a many-layered offering.

Whether unintended or consciously sought, much of what leads up to a hideous confrontation between secret police and a Buenos Aires family has about it a dream-like quality where some of the dialogue sounds muffled and often rather difficult to make out, an effect exacerbated by an overlay of tango music at low decibel levels. The effect is to lull the observer, again perhaps unintended – but when appalling violence breaks out in Buenos Aires suburbia, the impact, by contrast, is all the greater. It is electrifying.

Edmund includes known figures in his tale. In a New York brothel, presided over by Polly Adler (a splendidly vulgar characterisation by Virginia Gay who gives us as flinty a Madam as one is ever likely to encounter on stage), we meet the acerbic Dorothy Parker well on her way to status as a bitchy alcoholic – and Robert Benchley (Martin Williams), that other habitue of the Algonquin Round Table. As well, we meet tango-meister Astor Piazzolla (Morgan David Jones). It’s the moment of Wall Street’s 1929 collapse with all the economic chaos and human misery that follow in its wake.

For much of the evening, one is conscious of a barely contained undercurrent of menace and violence. This theme of aggressive anger is early established as we watch a butcher hacking at a joint of meat, then a knife fight that breaks out between workers in late-19th century Buenos Aires. The events of 9/11 come frequently to the fore as well.

But the chief focus is on the horror unleashed on the Argentine by General Videla and his henchmen between 1976 and 1983.

We see a Buenos Aires family including a heavily pregnant woman at home as secret police arrive. They commit horrific assaults, primarily sexual, on both women and men. Edmund does not hold back here; unflinchingly, unsparingly, he reveals the shocking violence of the time and its ghastly aftermath.

Reinforcing the impact of these scenes is the knowledge that the events portrayed are not some fanciful essay in Grand Guignol but incidents of a sort that were all too frequent and all too real.

Perhaps inevitably, as we watch the acting out of brutal tyranny, Argentine-style, we think of more recent outrages ­ torture and humiliation of prisoners in Abu Graib, for instance. Are the gross abuses of power in Iraq any less despicable and unacceptable as those which took place in the Argentine?

Are events in Iraq not even worse because a blind eye is turned to it by those cynical professors of humbug who pretend – and may even believe – that they are the white knights of democracy, ostensibly freeing the oppressed to enjoy the delights of USA-style enlightenment?

The Butcher’s Dance is not for the squeamish nor for those who prefer plays to have a chronological working out with a clear beginning and a logical end. Edmund’s offering is the antithesis of this formality; Butcher’s Dance is fragmentary and episodic, the viewer taken on a winding path along which we encounter, inter alia, a number of characters who come onstage alone and take the audience into their confidence.

One, in particular, lingers in the mind. She looks as if she might be an off-duty flight attendant, an American; her smugness, her ignorance and complacency are frightening, her uncritical and absolute belief in the rightness of the ‘American way’ appalling.

The confronting nature of much of The Butcher’s Dance is not for those whose idea of a good night at the theatre is
a couple of hours of lightweight, escapist mummery.

Society needs works such as Edmund’s, theatre that compels us to question what those in power are doing in our names.

Copyright 2005 Neville Cohn



Wallflowering (Peta Murray)

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Bruce Myles (director)
Playhouse Theatre

reviewed by Neville Cohn

For a little over two hours, with no intermission to break the spell, Noeline Brown and Doug Scroope bring to their roles as a long-married couple going through a troubled time the sort of understated artistry that critics dream about but seldom encounter in the theatre.

Past middle age, apparently childless (and therefor no grandchildren to bring some cheer into their drab suburban existences) and heading uncertainly into early old age, this couple who seem uncomfortable with, and unequal to, societal change (not least that of rampant feminism) bounce their concerns off one another with what Thoreau termed ‘quiet desperation’.

Scroope is Cliff Small, a timid man, so desperate to present himself as more significant than he really is, that to bolster his self image, he builds on a long-ago prize for ballroom dancing with his wife Peggy by buying blank trophies which he has engraved as if awarded to him for this or that fictitious win.

Peggy, despite being troubled by seeds of self doubt, is, on the whole, more self-confident and feisty than the insecure Cliff who compulsively – but hopelessly – draws up lists such as catchy titles for the book he will never write. His great achievement is to have mastered the art of self deception.

It’s impossible not to feel for Cliff’s plight even while thinking that a good shaking would jolt him out of the quagmire of self-pity he’s drowning in. Metaphorically peering at the world through a glass darkly, Cliff leaves the impression that nothing short of a huge Division One win in Lotto and the attentions of some reigning screen queen could repair his battered and cracked self-image.

Whether so intended or not, Anna Borghesi’s dark and ugly
backing set design parallels Cliff’s depressing self assessment. Rachel Burke’s unpretentious lighting design materially aids evocation of mood. And the couple’s occasional dance turns (choreographed by Tony Bartuccio)
on a small circular dais mid-stage have about them a bittersweet sadness, rather like raking over old coals now burnt out and very cold.

With scarcely a foot put wrong in both senses of the term, the pair mull over disappointments and unconsummated dreams. It’s no mean achievement to do so for two hours without an intermission or weakening of focus.

Brown and Scroope rise to the challenge with all the finesse one has come to expect as a matter of course from two of the most polished professionals treading the Australian boards. Bravo!

Copyright 2004 Neville Cohn


Glenn (David Young) Effie Crump Theatre

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reviewed by Neville Cohn

Few doors open on a single hinge so it is certainly an oversimplification to suggest, as many do, that the sole reason for Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s decision to stop performing in public was his increasing conviction that many of those who attended his recitals were there primarily to look at him rather than to listen to him. There’s a fair case for suggesting a similar motive on the part of many who attend recitals given by pianist David Helfgott (whose life was portrayed in the movie Shine).

The great virtue of David Young’s play Glenn is that it doesn’t focus exclusively on this hangup but comprehensively canvases the full range of Gould’s neuroses and oddities (his hypochondria, his horror of being touched by anyone are two of many ) of which his withdrawal from the concert platform was only one.

But was turning his back on the recital hall such a silly move? Was this merely childish or eccentric petulance? Or was it a carefully thought out career move to enable him to function more effectively as a pianist.

The evidence for this is compelling: one has only to listen to his probing, superbly insightful recordings of Bach (as well as Schoenberg).

Young’s Glenn calls for Gould to be played not by one actor but by four, a risky experiment that, in this case, comes off convincingly. Certainly, it brings home how multifaceted a personality Gould was.

James Sollis as Gould the puritan, Andrew Hale in Gould’s incarnation as a perfectionist, Roderick Cairns characterising Gould as theperformer and Glenn Hall as Gould the youthful prodigy give a virtuoso, high-energy display of verbal co-ordination. As well, the four are required to give a host of cameo performances – and here, too, versatile to a man, they come up trumps.

As ever, Raymond Omodei’s directorial touch is everywhere apparent, most significantly in the pacing and pausing of dialogue. There are torrents of lines here ­ and in less than skilled directorial hands, the entire presentation could collapse under the weight of thousands of often rapidly articulated words.

It seemed a miscalculation, though, to have recordings of Gould playing Bach in the background as the play unfolded. True, decibel levels were low but, as always, Gould’s interpretative genius and infallible finges were so irresistible an aural attraction that, at times, they made one feel that the actors’ lines were an irritating intrusion, surely not the intention of the author.

Perhaps the production might have been better served by taking out the piano backing altogether and playing it at as an overture cum introduction to the play as well as during the interval when it could be savoured in its own right without getting in the way of the action.