» middlebrow guerrilla semiotics

Jun 07 2010

Show Ponies for a Young Nation

Show Ponies For A Young Nation

By Jana Perkovic

There’s a thriving, internationally recognised performance scene in Australia — but it’s barely reflected in the programming of major arts companies, writes Jana Perkovic

Beneath the surface of Australian cities bubbles an undercurrent of performance. Artists — both young and old, trained and untrained — are creating small interventions of chaos and beauty, much of which draws on specific local traditions of vernacular theatre: travelling circus, pub music, guerrilla performance, mixed-media cabaret.

It’s easy to dismiss these forms as niche pursuits; and they are, indeed, an ecosystem of small communities. When this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival organised a perplexingly dull launch for McSweeney’s, one of the world’s most innovative young literary journals, it was the Suitcase Royale, a local performance collective, who saved the event with an electrifying gig/stand-up/performance.

If our literature has forgotten joie de vivre, and our cinema is proclaimed “recovered” on the basis of seven good films a year, then theatre certainly ought to be recognised as one thing Australia consistently does well.

Overseas, reviewers rave about Acrobat, Back to Back, Panther and Chunky Move: circus, physical theatre, interactive performance companies producing cutting-edge work in their select fields. They don’t pay so much attention to the companies that swallow the lion’s share of our arts funding: our state theatres.

With the honourable exception of Melbourne’s Malthouse, our major performing arts companies have persistently avoided this undercurrent, opting for programming that lacks flair. Even allowing that 2009 was a panicky year for the mainstream — the Global Financial Crisis bit into both ticket sales and corporate sponsorship — the year’s programs were altogether business-as-usual. Fifty years after Merce Cunningham choreographed to chance music and Beckett put nothingness itself on stage, our theatres still offer a bewilderingly old-fashioned mix of European classics, last year’s Broadway and West End successes, and a smattering of local plays with music (the latter to be distinguished from musical theatre by virtue of being unfunny).

Scavenging through Australia’s main stage offerings in 2003, German journalist Anke Schaefer noted that “every expectation of a German audience of 100 years ago would have been well served by these productions.” The problem is not just that our mainstream theatre is overwhelmingly male-dominated and almost completely white. And it’s not that staging a play written in 1960 is still considered adventurous — it is the abyss between what the bulk of “performing artists” in this country are doing and the work showcased on the well-funded stages.

To be fair, there have been some improvements over the past few years. The Lawler Studio is a not-yet-properly-funded baby stage for the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) with a small, but promising season, and the Sydney Theatre Company’s maturing Next Stage program brought in Perth wunderkind Matthew Lutton — and will present the abovementioned Suitcase Royale in 2010. But for every innovation that reaches a big audience, there is a scathing critical attack from the likes of Peter Craven that we need better-made plays, not avant-garde tinkering.

Craven typifies the deep conservative current in our theatre commentariat. While aficionados have organised themselves in the blogosphere, forming a reliable network of guerrilla arts reportage, the mainstream patron is limited to the opinions of the mainstream press, which consistently criticises any departure from pleasant digestive after-dinner theatrical fare.

The understanding that permeates theatre criticism, funding policies, festival curatorship, even the design of performing arts venues, is that theatre is an expensive toy to show off to our international visitors. It helps prove that here, at the arse end of the world, we have a functioning high culture. Arguably, we build “world-class” arts centres, fund show-pony opera and invest in international arts festivals because we fear being mistaken for a subcultural backwater. A national ballet ensemble — like a broadcasting network, a flag, an army and a giant ferris wheel — is a sign of a serious nation.

Hence the currency of theatre as an impossibly highbrow endeavour, something that excludes large swathes of the population who claim not to attend for the pricey “elitism” of arts events. Yet, when we leave the realm of the ethereal and the literary, of The Nutcracker and King Lear, it is often hard to distinguish performing arts from fairgrounds and other dubious entertainments.

Our mainstream arts funding reflects this confusion. Theatre is sometimes a flagship investment, and sometimes a failing commercial sector in need of subsidy. If we give it money, it better demonstrates its market relevance. Most of our state festivals were set up as tourism initiatives, providing world-class this and gold star that — but they are also judged on the extent to which they animate the city.

State companies are thus in a double bind: they ought to stage excellent interpretations of classics, but they also need to keep their subscriber base with populist programming. The media and the funding bodies do not question populism. Here the Peter Cravens, Andrew Bolts and Paul Keatings of the nation join voices to demand in unison that we fund some quality orchestras before sponsoring avant-garde wank.

So, while Opera Australia can cross-fund its season with My Fair Lady without reprimand, Kristy Edmunds’s edgy curatorship of Melbourne Festival was viciously attacked as — you guessed it — “elitist”: insular, pretentious, niche. But young audiences responded and artists found her choices inspiring.

This year, under Brett Sheehy’s artistic direction, the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF) broke box office records — mainly due to the sell-out performances by the London Philharmonic Orchestra — and gleaned glowing praise for restoring mainstream common sense to the program. Yet the local theatre community has criticised it as too white, too European, too predictable, focusing on big-ticket events at the expense of smaller, braver shows, and — yes — “elitist”. In this equation, elites, like hell, are always other people.

It is a scavenger hunt for audiences. Where the audience preferences lie is not so clear. The MTC may have the largest subscriber base in the country but it is rapidly aging. Programming for the middle-class, middle-suburb punter may rely on unwise mathematics: audiences are not developed through insistence on a 19th-century understanding of highbrow. For all its success at the box office, often I felt off attending MIAF 09 performances surrounded by an audience thrice my age.

Melbourne Fringe featured no Philharmonic and managed to break its box office record in 2009 — despite the GFC — showing how robust specialised audience loyalty can be. TINA and Imperial Panda, independent arts festivals in NSW, have also done well, as has the inaugural Dance Massive, dedicated exclusively to contemporary dance. Perhaps mainstream programming should acknowledge these “passionate communities” and “creative laboratories” that make up the solid core of the arts audience: they, after all, nurture its most vibrant new developments. Even fans of well-made plays, we should recognise, are increasingly becoming a niche.

Rather than trying to stretch nation-making dinosaurs over an increasingly diverse nation, we should focus on nurturing smaller, specialised festivals, and recognise that our cultural excellence may lie not in opera but in grungy circus. Our current funding model is completely unsuitable for this task. Audiences will not develop through programming that blends the safest aspects of all our arts into a soup that, in attempting to please everyone, pleases no one. What we should do, instead, is encourage the continuing exploration of the many vibrant art forms thriving under the radar: they count as culture. And statehood? Aren’t we too old to worry about that?

Originally published on 31 December 2009, on NewMatilda.com

Oct 20 2009

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education, festivals, formal inquiry, MIAF, middlebrow, naturalism, script, theatre

Three perhaps not-so-obvious points on ‘Pornography’ (the play, not the genre)

I do need to preface this comment by noting I am writing it from behind the opaque screen of a 38°C fever, and that I saw Pornography as the swine flu was comfortably settling in. It was, however, a remarkable theatrical event, for many non-obvious reasons.

1st non-obvious reason: demonstrating that an artists’ festival is not a punters’ festival
Pornography was the first MIAF 09 show to really polarise the audience. You wouldn’t know this from the mainstream press, of course. The artists and the theatre-makers hated it with a passion, calling it trite, facile, lazy, not trying hard enough, and a Brett Sheehy show. All for a reason. Kristy Edmunds has worked very hard on turning MIAF into an artsts’ festival, and artists come to MIAF expecting to see courageous, bold and innovative developments of their art shown, demonstrated. You could trace the reverberations of particular acts in the local performance for years after: Jerome Bel in Attract/Repel, Societas Raffaello Sanzio in glimpses, Forced Entertainment across the board.

As is becoming clear, that’s not Brett Sheehy’s idea of a festival. Pornography is not theatre-maker’s theatre. It’s people’s theatre. In that respect, the equivalent of last year’s Romeo & Juliet (and therefore likely to win the people’s vote this year.) To every outraged theatre-maker in the audience there were at least two exhilarated punters from the eastern suburbs, clapping themselves numb. Again, it would be easy to snark at the theatre-illiterate plebs, but that’s not what’s going on here. In this year’s festival, Pornography features as the prime example of well-made theatre: disciplined, taut, contained, focused and effective. While it is true that it breaks absolutely no new ground, formally, narratively or conceptually, therefore leaving the part of the audience that shows up with notepads and pens in a state of dismayed disappointment, it is undeniably a very well realised theatre piece.

The only complaint I have heard from the other side of the barricades, which we may term The Hawthorn Side (with a tinge of irony), has been linguistic: why has it been done in German? We would have preferred it in English. Why not bring an English production?

2nd non-obvious reason: elucidating arcane questions of translation in theatre
Let’s revisit the pedigree of Pornography: a play by Simon Stephens on the subject of the London bombings of 2005, it was certainly written in English, and there is certainly a three-way translation going on in having it performed in German and re-translated into English via surtitles on three sides of the stage, but no one seems aware that the play was commissioned by that same Hamburg Schauspielhaus, which also, naturally, gave it its first production. The question of authenticity is turned upside down if you hear Stephens himself:

It couldn’t, says Stephens, have been written for the British stage. For a start, the subject was too raw: “It was so soon after the event. I would have felt guilty about fictionalising something very real. But writing for a German theatre freed me up.” It also allowed Stephens – who usually tells heartfelt, formally conventional stories – to experiment. Nübling is a characteristically German director: “I believe in theatre being the art of images,” he says, “not only the art of texts.” And so, says Stephens, “if I had written a play with a unified narrative, cogent characters and a three-act structure, he’d have fucked it up anyway.” None of the dialogue is attributed to any particular character – it’s up to the director who says what.

There’s a whole set of explanations for why Schauspielhaus Hamburg would do so: first, German theatre is director-oriented (or production-oriented, if you so wish), and is interested in seeing what different directors do to the same texts. While English theatre is terminally text-focused, always trying to find newer and fresher plays and voices, most European theatre will revisit plays and playwrights with great frequency, since it’s the particular take on the material that is really what makes theatre. This is why a non-emerging (or non-star) playwright, so to speak, could be held in such interest. (The contrast with Abbey Theatre’s Irish production of Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus is striking: the production adds so little to the extraordinary text that it’s hard to see it as anything other than words on stage, and hard to imagine why seeing another production of the same kind would be a significantly different experience.)

Secondly, with about 150 publicly funded theatres presenting around 5800 productions a year (of which about 360 world premieres), German theatre industry is a big market constantly looking for new material. The question of why Germans would be interested in a London story strikes me as odd, presupposing a cultural insularity that just isn’t there in Germany. After all, I don’t walk the streets of Melbourne (as I well could) wondering why Royal Shakespeare Company would be interested in such quintessentially Slavic stories as Uncle Vanya, do I?

The translation (of words, bodies and theatre into German) here reminds us, simply, of the process of imperfect translation that always already occurs in the theatre, which is metonymical and metaphorical in its core, which always traces real world on the sides of a black box, outdoors into indoors, past era and foreign countries into locals, mismatching ages, accents, general demeanour. Since theatre, unlike cinema, cannot ever vaguely pretend to be showing unadorned, unadulterated reality, than certainly this imperfect translation becomes one of its main charms? Brueghel’s imposing Tower of Babel, the vast backdrop to the Hamburg Pornography, is one such imperfect translation of an idea: the multicultural confusion of languages and intents, causing the failure of a grand idea (or is it just vain and presumptuous?) is as good a metaphor of the London Olympics/bombings as it is reductive and silly; but certainly it takes an outside eye to draw that parallel in such simple terms?

3rd non-obvious reason: proving Peter Craven wrong
Pornography is a production for Hamburg’s Schauspielhaus, the equivalent of MTC or STC: big, well-funded public theatre with a subscriber base, production exchange/touring arrangements with other such theatres, a core ensemble of 20-40 actors, an opera and possibly a corps de ballet. This is not, in other words, a work of a lone genius in a cave: it is a big-balled production, bringing to the citoyens of Hamburg new hot writing, in style. The equivalent of the Pamela Rabe’s God of Carnage; Benedict Andrews’s The City; or the Apocalypse Bear Trilogy. It demonstrates very well what the standard good mainstream theatre production in Europe looks like, and in our city, chronically starved of decent mainstream, it is no wonder that the audience was so pleased. If half of all theatre in Australia looked like that, we would have nothing to complain about.

The whinging artists about town should probably consider that all successful formal experimentation relies on an educated audience. Pornography breaks no new formal ground, true, but it revisits the existing playing space for theatre with crisp, elegant matter-of-factness, demonstrating the poetic advantages of non-naturalism, anti-realism, metaphor, symbolism, metonymy, and so forth, to anyone with a working set of eyes. It must have done more for the form than the rest of the mainstream fare together, this year in Melbourne, and it has done so by explicitly shitting on Peter Craven’s recent argument for what-is-wrong-in-the-Australian-theatre. So explicitly, in fact, that we can trace it point-by-point.

Straight? NO. Classical? NO. “Showed what theatre could do rather than what could be done with the theatre”? NO. Naturalistic and muted? NO. “Delivered, on the note, without distortion”? NO ( Nübling had changed the text, rearranged the order of the episodes, and plastered a whole Babel at the back of the stage, hey). Indeed, it had many more of the qualities that for Craven exemplify theatre “too narcissistic to grow up”. Ugly-ugly aestheticism? JUST ABOUT. “Demolition site with its smeared body fluids and blood spitting”? Sounds correct. “Cut-and-paste postmodern tinkerings”? Can I mention that Tower of Babel again?

The paradox is, of course, that Pornography, with its invisible light switches, its puzzle symbolising the woes of multiculture, its Coldplay singalongs, its classroom stage space standing indifferently for houses, offices, school yards, and swanky restaurants and THEREFORE blatantly middle-fingering naturalism, has immense and palpable appeal to the same middle-of-the-road taste Craven is speaking from. It is no wonder whatsoever Craven himself reviews the production so glowingly; and yet the workings of this production seem completely lost on him, working in a frenzy to prove that it is not because, but despite, the anti-realism that Pornography is such a lovely night at the theatre.

All of which strikes me as deeply ideological, but also really, really funny.

Pornography. Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. Written by Simon Stephens. Director Sebastian Nübling. Set Designer Muriel Gerstner. Assistant Set Designer Jean-Marc Desbonnets. Costume Marion Münch. Music Lars Wittershagen. Lighting Roland Edrich. Dramaturgy Nicola Bramkamp & Regina Guhl. Cast Marion Breckwoldt, Katja Danowski, Juliane Koren, Hanns Jörg Krumpholz, Jana Schulz, Daniel Wahl, Samuel Weiss & Martin Wißner. The Arts Centre, Melbourne International Arts Festival, October 15-18.

Mar 23 2009

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atmospheric, circus, Lally Katz, Malthouse, middlebrow, reviews, theatre

RW: Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd

To call Lally Katz a surrealist would be correct, but imprecise. She is certainly the only widely-produced playwright of her generation to be squarely settled in a very personal world of half-digested fairy tales, misunderstood urban myths, and personal anxieties. This is not that dissimilar from Black Lung productions; however, while Henning’s writing features pastiche characters bereft of a play, a sort of channel browsing embodied and searching for the lost narrative thread, Katz stretches her pop incoherence over sociohistorical confusions (from Ern O’Malley to suburban rivalries in Melbourne, to the history of local vaudeville), overlays it all with an anxious suburban sexuality, and wrings hard.

Katz’s characters are always vaguely aware of their fictitiousness and, like suburban teenagers, less fight it than try to manipulate their own image, make willful exits, evolve, delude: and yet, they are always trapped in the strict girdle of a Lally Katz play, a self-aware machine of its own, that gallops with the unrelenting mercilessness of the grown-up world. Levels of discourse intermingle, predictable plotlines start and finish against all odds, while the unpredictable ones drift off, and the characters, like the repeatedly erased Daffy Duck in that seminal cartoon, struggle to assert themselves. Abalone and Gerture, the two suburban orphans in The Eisteddfod, get trapped in an entire soap-opera of intrigue and ambition, despite cracking under the conflicting pressure of their own alter-egos. In Black Swan of Trespass, Ern O’Malley cannot find consolation in his brief and tortured life, despite being just a literary hoax, while Ethel O’Malley is a psychological cripple, a tragic puddle of incomplete characterization (like some David Williamson character magically granted self-awareness). In Smashed, two teenage girls are on a time trip through their own fantasy, confusing themselves and each other. It is this wild democracy of reference points that makes Katz’s productions, usually directed by Chris Kohn, a respected translator of her ideas, something of a treat for Australian stages.

Julia Zemiro and Christen O’Leary. Photo by Jeff Busby.

None of this magic, mind you, could be deducted from their last collaboration, now playing at the Malthouse. There is a 15-minute chunk towards the end of the second act, when Katz’s usual voice cuts through the conflicting ambitions of the play so far, and suddenly all the botched possibilities are made visible. Ethylyn Rarity (not the first one to embody the role), while wrestling Charlie Mudd, the owner of the unsuccessful vaudeville house she is trying to leave (I have retold you the previous act and a half just there), finds an exact copy of her wig and dress under the stage. “How long have I been here?”, she cries, and gives a repeat of one of the first phrases we hear her utter in the show: “I don’t know my lines…” After that, she somehow coerces Mudd into killing all his characters, and it’s all meta- and confusing and utterly beautiful. And somehow, you see how high the performance could have flown.

Instead, the 125 minutes beforehand are a pretty studious failure; and less so because of any precise decision, than the cumulative effect of so many moves in many directions. A large part of Vaudeville is a low-key, low-intensity, terminally slow and dramatically flat vaudeville performance. Racist and sexist jokes are shot at us, repeatedly, with a painfully consistent lack of audience enthusiasm. Had this gone on for 140 minutes straight, it wouldn’t have been the average Katz/Kohn production, but would have been interesting nonetheless: it would be an unflinching look into the eyes of the past, untainted with the cushy nostalgia that so ruined a similarly-minded A Large Attendance in the Antechamber in 2007 Tower. As Stuff White People Like has succintly pointed out, there is a diffuse and mute sense of guilt over so many things in certain Anglo-Seaxon societies that apologies become a sort of thin veneer on the everyday life. The dissection of what exactly we get so nostalgic about that drearily drags across those planks is a marvelous goal: Mark Jones in blackface, Christen O’Leary’s horny ventriloquist puppet, Jews who lend at zero interest?

Unfortunately, Vaudeville then cascades into a stage version of Dr Quinn the Medicine Woman; a psychologically slim docu-drama on the backstage of history that cannot escape its own absurdist impulses. In purging nostalgia, it seems to veer towards revealing unpleasant historical truth, but trips over its own hysterical fantasies instead. A ventriloquist has slept with her father, the magician with two midgets, and the until-then squirmy humour turns genuinely humour-like – it still isn’t funny, but it stretches its own playing field, simulating an honest attempt at inducing laughter. Perhaps Katz has been outdone by the self-parody of cinema. While the unmasking of characters as paper dolls trapped within the play is nominally her territory, I can think of a bucketful of Sunday afternoon films in which circus freaks reveal a saccharine human face in digestible, family-friendly doses (and it merely starts with The Wizard of Oz).

Ultimately, the tripartite coalition of tendencies doesn’t quite lead us anywhere: it is not an absurd inside-out of a play that Katz likes to write; not a crude dissection of nostalgia that the program notes roundaboutedly hint at; and the part that most easily absorbs these two failed trajectories is the third slant towards rather unremarkable nostalgic setpiece. The result is wildly uneven. Like John Bolton’s recent The Masque of the Red Death, it is neither representation nor pure presence, neither vaudeville nor a well-made play, and certainly not the Katz/Kohn theatrical lunatic asylum. Its majestic, spectacularly boring offensiveness neither lasts long enough nor steps into territory slippery enough to seriously challenge the audience (the way This Is Set in the Future, with its unrelenting vulgarity, did at La Mama last December). It looks, more than anything, like an MTC-esque crowd-pleaser, and as such it clearly fails, due to the above-mentioned surrealist and offensive tendencies.

These days, I rarely book myself into performances that completely disappoint me. After Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd, I had to apologise for dragging my +1 along, which is very rare indeed. The last time this happened was at the equally praised, and equally ill-conceived The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, another promise of a quirky tale that couldn’t quite decide how close to middlebrow to trot. Perhaps Katz and Kohn work better off on small, semiotically already oblique stage. Perhaps it could have all been saved by more spirited acting. Not mine to tell. I am just hoping that next time will be better.

Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd. Written by Lally Katz, concept and direction by Chris Kohn. Set and costumes by Jonathan Oxlade, music composed by Mark Jones, sound design by Jethro Woodward, lighting design by Richard Vabre. With Mark Jones, Alex Menglet, Christen O’Leary, Jim Ruseell, Matt Wilson and Julia Zemiro. Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre. Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until March 28.

Dec 03 2008

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dance, essays, formal inquiry, middlebrow, performance, reviews, theatre

A Disappearing Number & The Age I’m In; observation on the middlebrow

1. There is nothing more dispiriting than coming out of a performance feeling exhausted, disappointed and sad, only to have to face the clamour of a delighted audience. People giving multiple rounds of applause, praising the same production for being moving, lovely or touching. For making them smile. I recently saw two, back to back.

The Age I’m In, by Force Majeure. Carriageworks, Sydney 2008.

The Age I’m In, by Force Majeure, at Carriageworks (still going), is an example of physical theatre that would not leave a hole in the world if it disappeared overnight. It is, in one word, unnecessary. It is, just like it could not be. Soundtracked with audio recordings of interviews with Australians of different age groups, it makes a diverse group of performers dance and lip-synch the responses about the joys and difficulties of life. It is a most unfortunate combination of verbatim, pedagogical, feel-good and accessible. It is dance drawn with crayons, Saturday night date theatre, and social commentary ranging from bold (7-year-olds saying cute things) to extremely provocative (vague mythologisation of the struggle against breast cancer). It doesn’t have the power of a documentary on more concrete struggles, nor the centreless, open-ended poignancy of the 7 Up series. It has also been described, over at Stage Noise, as mesmerising, clever, innovative, imaginative, witty and moving.

On the other hand, Theatre du Complicité is filling the Sydney Opera House with A Disappearing Number, according to Diana Simmonds an amazing, exhilarating experience, making one feel happy, touched, humble and smarter (if I quote Simmonds again, it has more to do with the ready availability of her in-depth, articulate reviews online than to signpost a personal dislike; I respect Simmonds’s opinion). The grand ordinariness of this production is a little harder to explain, due to its sheer foreignness to Australia. It is overwhelmingly expensive, produced, all glitz and media. However, underneath the seemingly complex narrative lines and moving screens, it is a very straight-lined story of an unhappy love, peppered with a biographical sub-plot of the maladjusted-genius genre. It has a grieving husband, some Hollywood-like, profound-sounding blabber on mathematics, pretty images and music, and the end is clearly visible quarter-way into the performance. Every element is presented in its most polished, most palatable, least surprising version: the American is a capitalist simpleton, every mathematician is out of touch with reality, every university a temple of intellectual pursuit. There is even a most calculatingly middle-of-the-road touch of post-colonial nous, discreetly pointing out that not every Indian-looking, these days, was born in India.

A Disappearing Number, Complicite. Sydney Opera House 2008.

What frustrates the most, however, is that A Disappearing Number, formally speaking, looks a bit better than The Age I’m In: good enough to confuse us into thinking it is more courageous than The History Boys, another prime example of middlebrow art as consolation. It is easier to recognise the crayon dancing in the latter as the Australian mediocre than is it to place the moving screens and layered projections of the former in its context within the formal bell curve of European theatre. A Disappearing Number, put simply, is well-informed mainstream. It is a mainstage production coming out of a place with healthy independent theatre. It collects a number of formal ideas that were ground-breaking about 10 years ago, and incorporates them with no other purpose but to showcase what has become acceptable to the middle taste in Britain. This is a good, healthy dynamics, mainstream pinching innovation, innovation becoming mainstreamed, but it makes the screens, the lights, the physical movement in A Disappearing Number no more than an educated decoration on a very proper, conservative body. It clearly does not develop organically out of the problems within the play, just like the simple maths employed does not organically jell to the story (and is not even correct: 1/2 plus 1/3 is not 2/3, etc). It relates to formal inquiry the way a faux-hawk relates to punk.

A Disappearing Number. Sydney, 2008.

What this sort of art does is coat deep ordinary mediocrity with a shroud of golden, shining glory. It reassures us that it is all very meaningful: not because profundity can be uncovered in the meaningless detail, not even because order can be discerned out of life chaos, but because we can play Beethoven over the most banal events, feelings and thoughts. The illusion of artistic depth, in both cases, is just a cloud of mystifying nonsense: mathematics and multimedia for A Disappearing Number, dance and (simpler and less expensive but still) multimedia in The Age I’m In.

2. It would require more than a short essay to question the politics of these two productions, the implications of the glorification of the great genius, of the common person, of the academia. It would require a book to argue why presenting the world without a single uncomfortable question mark narrows our worldview. Both of these two works of theatre give us exactly the same answers to unanswerable questions as the sum of our world, as it is now, does. Which amounts to no answer at all: instead, an attempt at comforting us that everything is just right. Perfect. The best of possible worlds.

It is worth remembering Kundera, who diagnoses precisely the problem in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. If he calls it kitsch, and not middlebrow, the difference is in cultural temperament, I dare suggest, inessential. Middlebrow, often understood as a pursuit of simple artiness, to make us look good, is certainly sliding, nowadays if not always, into a pursuit of feelgood, of touchedness. On the level of aesthetic experience, says Kundera, Middlebrow causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes middlebrow middlebrow.” The first tear is in empathy, the second in our self-gratulatory recognition of empathy.

Middlebrow, he continues, is the absolute denial of shit. Middlebrow is that vision of the world in which nothing unwholesome or indecent is allowed to come into view. It’s the aesthetics of wanting to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Middlebrow excludes shit in order to paint a picture of perfection, a world of purity and moral decency. Middlebrow is Nazi propaganda films of beautiful, blond children skiing down the Bavarian Alps.

Middlebrow is also, more tellingly, a categorical agreement with being. Nothing can be private, unpleasant, complex or idiosyncratic. The problem, argues Kundera, is that the world of middlebrow is the world purified of everything troubling, ugly and unwholesome. It is a picture of the world at once illogical, emotional, aggressive and demagogical in its simplicity. Everything purged outside the frame of this picture grows into monsters and returns to haunt. The logical conclusion of the Nazi kitsch is the ghetto and the concentration camp, just like the natural extension of middlebrow theatre is Sarah Kane.

3. What else to say? I have labelled shows that make other people smile as toxic, dangerous and Nazi, and if there ever was a place for me among the normal theatre audience, I’ve shut that door behind me now. I wish there was redemption past this point, a sense that I could do something more meaningful than say, be suspicious of feelgood. Be suspicious of mathematical geniuses, the wonders of academia, and history boys. There is an entire army, in Australia, that would love to see this sort of middlebrow installed as the mainstream, replacing not only brave theatre but television schlock as well. It is a lonely, unhappy place for me to be in. I don’t know.

The Age I’m In, by Force Majeure and Carriageworks. Choreography Kate Champion. Set / Lighting Designer Geoff Cobham. Costume Designer Bruce McKnvin. Sound Designer Mark Blackwell. Visual Artist William Yang. Audio Visual Producer Tony Melov. Audio Visual Technician Neil Jensen. Performers: Marlo Benjamin, Samuel Brent, Annie Byron, Tilda Cobham Hervey, Vincent Crowley, Daniel Daw, Brian Harrison, Roz Hervey, Kirstie McCracken, Veronica Neave, Tim Ohl. Carriageworks, Sydney, 26 November – 6 December.

A Disappearing Number, co-production by Complicite, barbicanbite07, Ruhrfestspiele, Wiener Festwochen, Holland Festival, in association with Theatre Royal Plymouth. Conceived and directed by Simon McBurney. Music Nitin Sawnhey. Design Michael Levine. Lighting Paul Anderson. Sound Christopher Shutt. Projection by Sven Ortel. Costume Christina Cunningham. Performers: David Annen, Firdous Bamji, Paul Bhattacharjee, Hiren Chate, Divya Kasturi, Chetna Pandya, Saskia Reeves and Shane Shambhu. Sydney Theatre, Sydney, November 19 – December 2.

Nov 03 2008

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Daniel Schlusser, horror, kitsch, LITERATURE, middlebrow, reviews, script, sex, theatre, VCA

The Masque of the Red Death

Not entirely successful, The Masque of the Red Death stands unsure between presentation and representation, self-awareness and not, always doing things a tad bit too literally. Its starting and ending point is Edgar Allan Poe's short story of one continuous party, closed off from the society ravaged by plague. This is a powerful trope, used since Boccaccio, at the bottom of it our unease about antisocial activities of all kinds, a desire to punish the autonomous outcasts, the death wish behind certain forms of transgressive hedonism; and then the tantalising image of total social breakdown. It is so simple, so resonant, that anything could have been made out of it. Instead, this production doesn't move further than square two. The program notes give it all away: “Daniel Schlusser […] told me about a task he had once set a group of actors: create the last piece of theatre allowed by a government before theatre is entirely banned in the land.” From here to pre-plague hedonism, and from Poe to the free-rolling funfair of a performance, are two very small steps.

The other problem is that Masque swings between describing the last party, and being the party, backing-and-forthing in its interaction with the audience in a way that ultimately isn't very thought-through. The dramatic structure is upheld by the narrative frame of the story, used to insert a range of Poe's writing, most of it in a purely declamatory fashion. The representational middle, a series of one- or two-person acts, draws on the vaudeville more than it tries to explore this imaginary aristocratic party, which in itself would not be a sin had the visual and spiritual clichés of vaudeville not been endlessly over-exploited on every kind of Melbourne stage already. Although the performer-spectator relationship is explored in all sorts of ways: performers sitting in the stalls, the audience sitting on stage, both dispersing into small groups and withdrawing into little rooms; it never feels like there is any higher purpose to these explorations of form than to try another trick. In the end, the two parts are collated quite safely, and our palates should be predictably satisfied: mindless amusement boxed into a safe experience, book-ended by some sense of purpose, explanation.

In certain moments, I had real hope that the performance was leading somewhere other than to the anticipated punishment of privileged antisociability. There appeared to be a slow build-up of acts, performed apparently for us, of greater and more intense transgression: from the bizarre, complexly disturbing image of a girl squatting on a skateboard, to the deliciously trash version of Raven as smut, to the full frontal nudity of a cross-dressing madame Butterfly. And yet, despite these upswings of visual creativity, most of the imagery was intellectually shallow, not doing much more than presenting commonplaces: violence on semi-naked women, glittery cross-dressing, unneeded accents. It was also visually misconceived: with gypsy fortune tellers, clowns and dancers, it was more of a romanticized village fair than the last supper of the medieval condemned. Which, again, would not be a sin had it not been the thousandth time this decade that a faux-Slavic accent was donned by a gypsy fortune teller on Melbourne stage.

The performances are passionate across the board, with each performer given a moment of one-act glory, and this ultimately makes The Masque of the Red Death a rather enjoyable experience. Much more enjoyable to witness, I may add, than think about later. However, perhaps due to the looseness of the direction, one never forgets that one is watching a student production, in serious discrepancy with last year's VCA shows, one of which, YES, could later easily get re-staged at fortyfivedownstairs.

I like tropes, I like clichés, I like common places. I believe in the power of fairy tales, of myths, of rituals. There is intrigue in the commonality of the simple ideas that order human existence across time and space. I would like to see them explored in ways more intelligent that simple declamation of poetry masquerading as provocation.

The Masque of the Red Death. Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Directed by John Bolton. Music: Jo Laing. Set design: Jeminah Reidy. Costumes: Jane Noonan. Lighting design: Kimberly Kwa. Sound design: Timothy Bright. Victorian College of the Arts Company 2008 Graduating Performance. Space 28, Dodds St, Southbank, 29 Oct – 7 Nov.

Oct 30 2008

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collage, dance, MIAF, middlebrow, reviews, theatre

Appetite: A post-critical review

ONE. YET ANOTHER MAN.
Irony and humour are close neighbours, but they should not be confused. The Anglo-Saxons have a humorous vision of that enormous ennui which characterizes their social life, and which raises fears for the future of ‘industrial society’. They need this sense of humour; it makes boredom bearable. Humour can soften a situation, then go on its way. Humour manages to metamorphose the ennui of everyday life – almost. It may fail to transform it completely, but it makes it more decorative, and so henceforth the man who is bored can at least find his boredom enjoyable. He lives a life of well-being without pressing problems and devoid of all romance, and he cannot decide whether to feel comfortable or merely bored, a dilemma for which humour offers him a kind of solution. In any sociology of boredom, the study of Anglo-Saxon humour would bulk large.
– Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity

TWO. Attempts at an angle.
1. The formalist: it was not a brave fusion of physical and text-based theatre. It was a simple dinner drama with some dance tacked on.
2. The feminist: if we are meant to sympathise with a woman who has it all without feeling in any way fulfilled, shouldn’t we know more about her than her wealth and real estate situation? Shouldn’t we know, at least, what her job is? Doesn’t one find most basic meaning of life, sense of purpose in the work one does? Not if one’s a woman, Ross?
3. The logocentric: hasn’t this type of drama been done to death, from 19th-century to Albee? Haven’t we said everything there is to be said about failed dinner parties, about seemingly casual socialisation that implodes into tragedy? Shouldn’t we at least try to surpass The Doll’s House?
4. The social commentator: why did all the mainstream media reviews seem glowing? Why was there a strong applause at the end of every performance? The abyss between the theatre lordforgive community and the general public never seemed greater.

THREE. I WILL I WANT I CAN.
I dislike unsolicited wit, and will not even attempt to describe everything that went wrong with this show. It has been done, with both despair and zesty bitterness.

But shall we view it as an exposé of a mindset? Sugary music over vacuously clever lines of dialogue. False problems, false solutions. Every smart cliché of a society was laid bare, through shoddy execution, as nothing but vacuous placebo. We will get over existential misery by living every day like we’re falling in love!, we will play autistic music, and hold hands.

This is Haneke without the outside world ever shattering the walls. Instead, a momentary illusion of escape, a failed conclusion bound to bring nothing but further misery. The audience applauds, and learns another way to delusion. What a strangely thorough failure of insight.

FOUR. CODA.

Warning
Warnings: Simulated Drug Use, Full Frontal Nudity, Cigarette smoking – nicotine free, Adult themes, Strong coarse language.
– MIAF, program notes

Melbourne International Arts Festival. Appetite. Directed by Kate Denborough. Writer: Ross Mueller. Dramaturg: Brett Adam. Composer & Musician: New Buffalo. Set Design: Kennedy Nolan Architects. Costume Design: Paula Levis. Performers: Michelle Heaven, Brian Lucas, Catherine McClements, Carlee Mellow, James Saunders & Gerard Van Dyck. KAGE at the Arts Centre. Season hopefully ended.

Oct 20 2008

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Artshouse, dance, Lucy Guerin, MIAF, middlebrow, reviews

On Lucy Guerin; generally, and Corridor; specifically

Lucy Guerin, who, together with husband Gideon Obarzanek of Chunky Move, makes up Melbourne's choreographing royalty, sometimes seems to define dance in this city. So little of what the mainstage sees is radically different from their work, that having to disagree with what they have to say sometimes feels like a heresy.

And yet.

Guerin is a choreographer who will use a theme, an issue or an idea in order to explore movement, rather than using movement in order to explore a theme, an issue or an idea. In other words, while Guerin may create beautiful dance informed by the nature of love, one is unlikely to come to new conclusions on the nature of love from watching the piece. Guerin's pieces are always a solipsism, closed off from their point of departure in a strange way, self-sufficient and happy – which is not a flaw by definition. However, Guerin's choreography also appears increasingly simple, clear and semantically fixed like an open book or, less benevolently, a children's crayon drawing. (For this reason, I think, Guerin's dance is also an excellent introduction to contemporary dance in general, as it is squarely dance, yet very legible. Just like Jérôme Bel's work, by the same virtue of simple, glass-like clarity of intention and effect, is an excellent introduction to conceptual dance.) There is never an esoteric point of departure, never one too far away from the quotidian (structure and sadness, love, communication or, in the case of Corridor, over-saturation with commands), and the resulting performance never strays too much from being a dancing illustration. This occurs with such consistence that one ought not to read the program notes if one truly wants to think in front of the eye candy. Guerin's program notes are the most unsatisfying program notes in the world, spelling points and references out until the performance becomes an open structure, legible like an architectonic sketch.

As a result, cleansed of conceptual enigmas or radical opinions, Guerin's pieces rise or fall on the strength of choreography. Hers is often lovely movement, with nice balance between filigree and broad, between strong and soft, sharp and round, between abstract and figurative. Aether, for example, was Guerin at her aesthetically most satisfying. But, when the movement is mostly trite, a piece like Corridor starts to look grossly unexciting.

Harriet Ritchie and Lee Serle. Photo: Jeff Busby.

Corridor, Guerin's new piece commissioned for MIAF '08, gives one plenty of time to ruminate on what doesn't work, and why. The program notes, with characteristic subtlety, inform you immediately that the over-abundance of information, instructions on how to live, are at the bottom of the work. If one experiments in ignoring the notes, it will take no more than the first quarter of the show to glean the theme, still deserting the remaining three quarters to terrifying boredom, as the running motif of orders, orders, orders, fails to develop in either depth or breadth. Guerin commits another major crime of spelling out the methodology – dance improvisation on instructions delivered in real time, via phone, mp3 players, written text, imitation and verbally. Leaving the notes unread, though, one is left in the cold, with no insulation from fully noticing how uninventive, ham-handed the movement is. With dancers spontaneously responding to a whole array of orders, from roll on the floor to fall madly in love, figuration completely overruns abstraction, and a sea of details any broader structure, spoiling the usually solid balance of Guerin's work. It is all the more tragic that Corridor's cast lists all of the most promising young dancers in Melbourne, from Sara Black and Kirstie McCracken (somewhat less razor-sharp than usual), to the exquisite Harriet Ritchie, my new favourite Melbourne body.

Language is employed in the way that cannot be called more than tokenistic: here again, like in Two Faced Bastard, is Anthony Hamilton saying nothing in particular; and there is the writing on mirrors, inept descriptions of audience members. As if someone's idea of incorporating language (in itself not ground-breaking in dance), was merely tested, and still awaits evaluation. To use words, one of the most powerful elements of performance, in such a cavalier way, is shockingly slack. To decorate dance with some language is no more honourable than decorating verbal theatre with some dancing, as happens these days.

Because of Guerin's strong focus on effect of meaning on movement, rather than the other way around, a lot of it would work better if it were incorporated in theatre, with the dance motifs expanded and drawn out by a more discplined format, restricted by the need to pay attention to characters, dramaturgy, narrative line. The phalanx of order-reciting dancers, sweeping the narrow corridor in rotating formation, exempli gratia, is a beautifully realised image, but one the strength of which disperses in the dramaturgically vague sequence of scenes that follows. The duet of ailing between Kirsty McCracken and Harriet Ritchie is graceful, humourous and accessible, but, likewise, comes out of nowhere and proceeds into nothing. The structure of Corridor, ultimately, is one long, stop-start list of possible responses to one same question (© Carl), with no progressive development, coming across very much like a workshop in conceptual something or other.

Melbourne International Arts Festival. Corridor. Lucy Guerin Inc. Choreography: Lucy Guerin. Dancers: Sara Black, Anthony Hamilton, Kirstie McCracken, Byron Perry, Harriet Ritchie, Lee Serle. Sound design: Haco. Set Design: Donand Holt. Lighting design: Keith Tucker. Costume Design: Paula Levis. Producer: Michaela Coventry. Arts House, Meat Market, Oct 16-25.

Oct 16 2008

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Artshouse, Chunky Move, dance, Lucy Guerin, MIAF, middlebrow, reviews, theatre

Two Faced Review

I'm not sure about you, but I went to Two Faced Bastard expecting something very similar to what I got: something fun and by no means unwatchable, but simplistic, shallow and pseudo-cerebral, not really committed to exploring in depth the ideas (or rather idea, for there is only one) it professed to be exploring.

I only expected courage. I expected an idea taken to its logical conclusion. To me, Two Faced Bastard was an indecisive smear on a big white canvas left mostly untouched. On the dance side, I would say, my side got the full picture in the first part of the show. So much that I wondered if it hadn't been designed, misdesigned, from there. Strangely, the faint panel discussion voicing over Stephanie Lake's dancing never felt like it could stand alone as anything other than muffled background to movement. It sounded distracted, casual, glib in a swampy way, as if the panelists too were more focused on watching Stephanie: meandering in and out of listening, I never felt I was missing on much.

But there was a lot to look at on my side too, a dance of another, subtler kind. Brian Lipson is a genius when it comes to the niceties of body language, and plays himself brilliantly. He also plays extemporaneousness brilliantly, a certain this-is-happening-for-the-first-time-ness.

There was not more than a hint of extemporaneousness to the Brian Lipson I saw, although I allow I may have only seen patches of him, coming and going as he was. There was a tightly choreographed affectation of chaos, interrupting a line of tightly choreographed movement which, by not pretending to be spontaneous and free, seemed more genuine. What I enjoyed instead was the overlap of movement and non-movement, performance and not, particularly because, unlike virtually everything in Bastard, it had an effortless, surprising grace: the transition between Stephanie doing warm-ups (Stephanie the unstructured body) and performing (body as concentrated machine); and each time another performer would walk into the dance from the panel discussion – I wondered what it looked like from the panel side. This was virtually the only moment I was curious about the other side..

Alison has described the side I was on as the side of language, which I think is a little disingenuous. Sure, the cast spoke more on my side, but they also threw their bodies around a lot. Ours was the side of physical comedy. (I was reminded almost constantly of Donald O'Connor and the 'Make 'Em Laugh' sequence of Singin' in the Rain, surely the secret root of much contemporary dance, or least that strand of it which involves flopping around violently on the floor.) Maybe this is why I have been told by others who sat on your side that the laughter coming from ours made them jealous in the same way that your applause made us jealous of you. I was content on my side until then. I didn't feel like I was missing out on too much until your side applauded at the end of the first dance.

Take into account, however, that my side was silent, and yours almost perpetually noisy. Our side may have been all elusive mystique, but you were the tedious noisy neighbour. To us, it was the side of language. Certainly of noise.

The point is this: we weren't missing out for being on the so-called wrong side of the curtain. To wit: one of the most jarring moments in the first half of the production, before everyone starts changing sides, comes when two of the dancers turn Brian's long and stumbling spiel from the beginning of the piece, the one about introducing chaos into the performance, into a perfectly synchronised duet, transforming even his ums and ahs, his stutters and seemingly ad-libbed asides, into movement. And you're retrospectively thrown by how perfectly Lipson played the monologue earlier, not to mention by the precision of the duet itself.

What displeased me, though, was the clear affectation of these supposed breaks in the performance, at least on my side: dancers did not say anything meaningful, and didn't really introduce chaos into choreography either. Lipson running around and interrupting the show was a symbol of rupture, not a real one; and so was the panel discussion, and so was the call to the audience to choose sides, and so was the war that followed. It was almost a parody of theatrical deconstruction, going through the empty motion.

But while its intellectual games were simplistic – and we agree on that much at least – the production's effect on the audience was nonetheless genuine: it frustrated them. It was a show designed to frustrate, and to this extent was entirely successful. The show's title was not a title, but rather an accurate description: it was a two-faced bastard, this show, an adulterer, a backstabber. For all its unwillingness to probe its operations too deeply, it did generate a certain jealous longing for off-stage space, for the greener grass of the other side. And it did so very effectively.

I wish I had been frustrated the same way. Frustration is a beautifully genuine feeling to get in the theatre. On my side, it was all too pretty, too choreographic. Cute and totally predictable scenes on a string don't add up to a show. More often than not, the logic of the sequences was skin-deep: when Vince suddenly bursts onto our side of the curtain to long for Stephanie, it merely signals an escape from a narrative slump. When, later, Michelle dances and lip-syncs all wrapped in white paper – you wouldn't have been able to see this – Vince and Stephanie are suddenly annoyed at her presence, which is frankly inconsequential and doesn't relate to any other interaction these three characters have had – at least on my side.

But in feeling there was a certain inconsequentiality to Vince and Stephanie's annoyance, that it didn't relate to anything else you had seen, you did in fact feel some frustration in not knowing what had happened on the other side of the curtain. Frankly, I can't believe you were looking for narrative logic, and what's more don't really believe that you were.

I wasn’t looking for narrative logic; I was looking for dramaturgical logic: if you’re constantly adapting your terms of reference to the clichés of the scene, it expands neither the scene nor the whole. And the whole, on my side, the value-for-money side, so to speak, often looked like a confused blockbuster of the most extreme kind: eye candy and tokenistic humour with not much tying them together.

My side was like hanging out with the production runners on the set of a blockbuster: it was kind of fun. I had no idea there was a love story running through the piece until you told me. The only hint we got of it in the first half was when Lipson, wearing that ridiculous jacket, interrogated Vince about it. This, coincidentally, was the only section of the piece I really didn't like, this blatant incursion of narrative into the proceedings. Obviously, as we have both noted, the whole show was in its way a fiction – a symbolic or affected chaos as opposed to the real thing, a superficial exploration of bigger, harder questions – this was the only moment on my side of the curtain where narrative fiction stuck its nose in where it wasn't wanted. Maybe this is something you saw more of – you were, after all, the one who followed the love story from one side of the curtain to the other, while I followed the before-and-after-the-deluge-ness of the narrative-free backstage space. This space was fictitious too, of course – it's hardly as though the nonchalant wandering around of the performers wasn't equally as choreographed as what was happening on your side – but it wasn't a narrative fiction, and I appreciated that.

What I’m noticing is that there were obviously two very different sides to this show, but not the way we originally assumed. There was the back and the front, the honest frustration of the hungry and the more insidious frustration of gluttony.

I really wasn't that hungry backstage: there was plenty of termitic detail to fill me up. (Chris Boyd, however, appeared to be starving.) Meanwhile, it seems increasingly to me that what you were after was a happening, not a show. Is this a fair assessment? It's a similar complaint to those being made by most critics of an oak tree, who have claimed that the guests invited to take part have not been willing or able to transcend performativity. (Tim Crouch should get members of the audience to do it. Members of the audience who aren't actors.)

Funny you bring up Tim Crouch, since an oak tree had exactly the same problems that Two Faced Bastard does. Unsolicited, unneeded humour, and total transparency of method, both employed in order to make the experiment as safe as humanly possible while keeping the semblance of courage and of crossing boundaries. But, remember, Two Faced Bastard invited the audience on stage, and yet controlled the effect with an iron fist. An oak tree featured the same participation as tokenism, in which the supposed wild element cannot significantly alter any conclusion the performance strives to make – the same thing we regularly witness in your average political process.

I don't think Two Faced Bastard controlled the process. We controlled the process. You or me or anyone could have sat down in the middle of the stage – on one of the chairs even – and refused to move. That moment was about giving us a choice and none of us really chose to take it. In other words, Vince won the argument: we could have induced chaos but didn't. We have internalised the rules, not only of Two Faced Bastard, but of theatre-going etiquette more generally: the show is the boss.

I dare you to sit down in the middle of the stage next time you're invited to audience participation, and test the political permeability of the situation.

You're on.

I think every show in this country is chiefly concerned with providing closure in regards to value of the money spent. There is no brutality, no violence, in Australian theatre, lest we get another opinion piece bemoaning the extravagance with which the decadent artists spend the taxpayer’s dollars. I think it hurts everyone if we are tickled, yet treat it as a slap. It makes for a weak audience, and weak artists. It makes us sheltered, self-satisfied, and whiny. Of course people don’t know in which direction to faint first when they see a Kosky show: nobody is used to a real slap anymore. What Bastard does brilliantly, perhaps without meaning to, is lay bare this desire to get the value of our ticket price back. My side, with Lucy’s pretty dancing bodies, I would say, is where our money's worth was meant to be. Even when we changed sides, we were still hoping the money’s worth would follow us.

I'm not too surprised by all this. We're talking about Lucy and Gideon here, for whom the answer to the question of chaos is invariably to provide only an illusion or illustration of it. It is on this point, I think, that we both agree, but also where we ultimately part company. We agree that the show could have gone further, introducing a genuine level of risk for all parties concerned. I did not expect it to do so, due in large part to the team behind it, and so was not too disappointed when it didn't. I was able to take something away from it, the Farberian minutiae, the little things. You, while not seeming gutted exactly, nonetheless seem somewhat angrier.

That's because I can imagine the damage this will do to the local theatre for another twenty-four months at least, with any brave exploration flagellated, even self-flagellated, because, hey, if Chunky could do it and be so fun and accessible, why does any tall poppy need to get all aggro with the audience? This, to me, was deadly experiment, an equivalent of Brook’s deadly theatre, more insidious for pretending to be brave when, in fact, it was deadening:

The problem of the Deadly Theatre is like the problem of the deadly bore. Every deadly bore has head, heart, arms, legs: usually, he has family and friends: he even has his admirers. Yet we sigh when we come across him – and in this sigh we are regretting that somehow he is at the bottom instead of the top of his possibilities. When we say deadly, we never mean dead: we mean something depressingly active, but for this very reason incapable of change. . .

When good actors play in bad comedies or second-rate musicals, when audiences applaud indifferent classics because they enjoy just the costumes or just the way the sets change, or just the prettiness of the leading actress there is nothing wrong. But none the less, have they noticed what is underneath the toy they are dragging on a string? It's a wheel.

But is that what we settle for? Is that what we've come to expect? Do we not, ever, demand more?

Two Faced Review. Dialogue by Matthew Clayfield (Esoteric Rabbit) and Jana Perkovic (Mono no Aware).

Melbourne International Arts Festival. Two Faced Bastard. Direction & choreography: Gideon Obarzanek and Lucy Guerin. Set design: Ralph Myers. Lighting design: Philip Lethlean. Costume design: Paula Levis. Composer: Darrin Verhagen. Performers: Vincent Crowley, Anthony Hamilton, Michelle Heaven, Stephanie Lake, Brian Lipson, Byron Petty & Lee Serle. Arts House, Meat Market. 8-12 Oct.

Jun 16 2008

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expressionism, formal inquiry, kitsch, middlebrow, naturalism, overviews, starred, theatre

On accents and other forms of realism: a mini essay.

1. A few weeks ago, my review of Hoy Polloy’s production of Fin Kennedy’s How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found appeared on vibewire.net:

“Two of the things ostensibly most cherished in a work of art are battling throughout the Hoy Polloy's production of Fin Kennedy's How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. On the one hand, the universal relevance of the questions and answers presented. On the other, the evocative and resonant portrayal of a time and place.

In translating art, be it literature or a play, one has a peculiar problem of deciding just how much local colour to keep, how far to stray from literalness. While in cinema unintrusive conveying is relatively easy, in literature this may require a catastrophe of footnotes; and in theatre, naturalism.

The entire first act of How to Disappear… is an agony of accents and costumes, wrung and turned and stretched down to an inch of its life by a relentless pursuit of verisimilitude. It takes the second act to realise that no, this was not obligatory. The play doesn't dictate realism, quite the contrary, the text itself is a nightmare of confused faces, hallucinatory places, contradicting motives. It is as set in London as it could be in Sydney, or on the Moon. That the second act almost redeems the first is due to its rebellion from the style of the production, the fact that Hoy Polloy allow it to be something other than British television. For the entire first act, we are progressively more confused: if this is objective life, what is going on? In which order? Why are characters such clichés, and how can this Mike the Deus Ex Machina character be taken seriously by anyone? What should we feel, why?

In this naturalistic hell, it is good to ask why do it in the first place. It is, for one, immensely hard. Film has free access to the recognition, to the synthesis of memories and associations, endlessly triggered by details: the scenery, the facial traits of the local populace, the gesture, the weather, the textures, the sounds. The play, creating the world anew in the black box, must conspire with the audience to allow for the sparse staging elements to stand for the world of details the audience may not even be familiar with. We need to work together. And so, the first act of How to Disappear… is one big effort to distil a quotidian London from the strange string of events, semi-realistic costumes (but recognisably slack Australian tailoring), and shaky accents which travel the British Isles in order to accumulate credibility.

Hoy Polloy: How to Disappear…, Melbourne (Au), 2008. Photo: Tim Williamson.

I am highly against theatrical acting in accents. I imagine that deftness with accents is bread and butter to local actors, but it helps neither the play nor the acting to have them stumble around Commonwealth as if in a farce. All the usual problems are present here: the acting suffers, the sense of inconsistency abounds – why does everyone feel the need to try on an Irish accent? – and, most importantly, it creates a high wall between our time and space, and that of the play, with the result feeling a bit like sitting in front of some imported BBC show. I left the theatre wondering why it made me feel so little. The text was so strong. As a person who once thought about disappearing herself, I thought I would feel its breath on my neck. Instead, its energy was dissipated in a hopeless chase of details.

And why? When a play is showing a mirror to its context, and skilfully breaks reality down into minuscule details, like Ranters Theatre recently did with The Wall, there may be a rationale, but if a play is already striving towards a universal message, why not try to bridge the gap, climb the wall?

David Passmore probably gives the most consistent performance, both in mood and accent, holding the play together with his omnipresence on stage. Michael F Cahill's performance is of equally high standard, but the remaining three actors struggle to represent an entire world of strange, half-hallucinatory yet unmistakably British people. And who can blame them?”

2. Quoting the above in toto should contextualize the comment made by John Richards, also quoted in toto:

Despite that fact that this reply may give your “review” more importance than it warrants, I feel compelled to correct you on a couple of points. As a recent viewer of this production my estimate of the number of accents used is that there were only two Irish accents (the Priest and the Nurse). While there were a couple of American accents, one Scottish and one Ukranian, the majority of accents were English. I wonder what you would have said about Hoy Polloy’s Shining City, set in Dublin – perhaps too many English accents?

“It is as set in London as it could be in Sydney, or on the Moon.” The play is specifically set in London and Southend, nowhere else. Neither Sydney nor the moon have equivalents to Southend and its world-famous pier. It would be interesting to hear the playwright’s opinion of altering its locale to these inappropriate settings.

3. This is a belated response, due to personal reasons of all sorts. I wanted to have space to think breezily about the questions of setting, verisimilitude, and theatrical devices. I would encourage further comments, because I’m not an old conservative with opinions set in stone. None of this should be very smart, nor new to anyone who dedicated five minutes to the same question. I am simply replying.

4. The theatrical reality is built from stratch, just like no world is pre-given on the white sheet of paper. Faced with the impossibility of total re-imaging, theatre resorts to the more or less intelligent employment of few selected objects, sign-posting with more or less precision. The economy of theatrical time means that a play simultaneously builds a reality, and tears it apart to show how it leaks, how it creaks, what it is made of. It builds a cathedral out of signs, and tears it down with a few precise blows.

5. It seems erroneous to me to consider the choice setting to be a simple tick of a box. A play, first of all, can never be set in (eg) London, not even when it’s set in London. Unless it’s literally produced and staged in London, and even then it is a complicated operation. A play is set in a black, abstract space. The Southend pier cannot be brought into this space, no matter how pure our intention, it can at best be re-created on a blank canvas. There is no less artifice, therefore, in putting London into the play, than in putting in Sydney, or the Moon. The play is always primarily in a non-place, built from scratch.

The theatre audience enters the theatre always somewhat aware of stepping into a different place, always prepared to look for signs. Keeping the play within its city limits is the easiest of the options, because the objects and ideas do not need to be transferred far, and because their meaning is familiar to the audience. The farther out we move (in cultural, rather than necessarily geographic terms), the harder it becomes to bring the right objects, right ideas, and convey the right space/time. Subtlety is lost depending on the attention to detail demanded: if a sign needs to be understood, it may need to be literalized to the point of banality. Consider, for example, the difficulties in conveying Eastern Europe to Australia. It is normally done with permed blonde girls, tasteless white or pink skimpy attire, strong accents, frequent smoking, references to communism or poverty. These are not signs found within an Eastern European theatre production to denote hereness. Depending on the transfer within time, the signs may be: packaging and brand names, slight accents, a picture on the wall, or complete lack of costumes.

In Union Theatre House’s production of Attempts on Her Life, the space evoked is an underground station. Michael Magnusson, however, saw a vague airport lounge instead. This is in no way a flaw in the set design, but a simple consequence of our different experiences, and the images we recognise. Was our understanding of the production in any way impaired if our mind substituted one cold, impersonal space with another? Certainly not. In Young Vic’s production of The Good Soul of Szechuan, critics have lauded the modernisation of setting, from a hungry early-20th-century China to the modern, capitalist Szechuan. However, the only signs within the stage design are modern cement factory uniforms and equipment, signs in hanzi, and the engulfing bare plywood that the entire theatre appears to be made of. To a different eye, the stage may well signify Hunan, or Guizhou instead; or Taiwan of the 1980s, or 1950s Japanese factory employing only Chinese workers. Would it be possible that the set designer is making a complex reference to these locales and the working conditions? Of course. We happen to be concluding: Szechwan; but there is nothing in black box that unmistakably says so.

Union House Theatre: Attempts on Her Life, Melbourne (Au), 2008.

Young Vic: The Good Soul of Szechuan, London (UK), 2008.

6. There is, at the same time, more to these signs than simple place-or-time-making. ‘Eastern Europe’, as described above, also means, depending on the eye of the beholder: poor, uneducated, prostitution, traditional femininity, war scars never heal, we should restrict immigration, etc. Combined with theatre’s economy of signs, this is dangerous semiotics. To control the general shape of meanings created in the black box means taking full notice of the multiple resonance of the few objects placed inside. I have witnessed the confusion of European spectators when faced with the portrayal of Australian middle-class torpor and delusions in Don’s Party: swearing, casual attire (shorts! singlets!), and anti-elitist attitude made the class profile of the characters rather murky to the continental eye. Many spent the evening trying to detect whether the conflicts stemmed from different social standing of various characters.

Yet this flexible sign-posting can also easily be played with. Can we produce a classic play without ersatz costuming? Numerous independent theatre continue to do so, with smart costumes that follow the general shapes of times, rather than insist on silk stockings and layered petticoats. Looking into a sparsely furnished black box, mind easily adopts associative logic, finding resonance with small details. A lamp here, a table there, a lacy parasol and hair tied up, and Chris Goode’s Sisters have been fully 19th-centuried. Music is another imprecise clue: Gypsy-sounding music can convey Romany culture enough for our purposes; it is not uncommon to employ classical music mismatching both era and locale, to stand for history; and a modern soundtrack has hardly re-situated a 19th-century play into yesterday.

Hayloft Project: Spring Awakening, Melbourne (Au), 2007.
Photo: Jeff Busby.

In The Good Person of Szechuan, a few interesting choices of this kind were made, with different levels of success. Cross-racial (or blind) casting was employed, although – and this is significant – most viewers would probably notice a South-Asian and an African man first, and only then realise that the entire remaining population of Szechwan is Caucasian. Here is an example of a sign that can easily be ignored if treated right: suspension of disbelief in the black box regularly allows us to watch actors of all shapes and colours; the same way in which we do not object to differently-built and –looking people playing family members. The cast of The Good Person have been sufficiently homogenised in acting for their racial differences to appear no more significant than those of a classroom of children.

Refusing to cast only East-Asian actors does not, pay attention, relocate the good person outside Szechuan; the choice of accents nearly does. Judging from past treatments of Russianness and Middle-Easternness, it would not be unreasonable to expect an Australian production to demand faux-Asian-English lilt from everyone involved. The British production, quite the contrary, makes most of the cast don a lower-class-British accent – as if their poorness is not sufficiently alluded to in the play. Prostitute Shen Te, notably, speaks in one of those good-natured, television-poor sort of stretched, slow, womanly accents, roughly of the Northern English kind, switching to proper theatrical enunciation whenever tough male cousin Shui Ta appears. The variety of local colour complicates the question of locale very much, but this is not all. The semiotic resonance of this teeming mass of naturalistic British poor, helped with Jane Horrocks’s melodramatic acting (which in this case may be a consequence of accent, rather than vice versa), unfortunately results in the entire production looking rather kitchen-sink to anyone acquainted with the British tradition of social melodrama. The resultant play loses Brecht’s epic, sombre qualities and turns into a pretty dire politicking soap-opera, doused in preachy moralism and cheap sentiment. (Even getting a good Brecht play right requires a merciless lack of pathos.)

Young Vic: The Good Soul of Szechuan, London (UK), 2008.

The sign language of the text remains the one set hardest to tinker with. It is not merely a joke here, a poignancy there. Classical plays are full of clever quips that don’t automatically enthral today’s audience, and social cues that go unnoticed. Translation flattens local colour, time murders references to current affairs. Too often, everything in a production has been fine-tuned except the text. In Goode’s Sisters, an excellent restoration of a text, two country officers argue over the meaning of escalope; is it meat, or a kind of onion? One is probably better off not knowing that, in the original text, they were confusing two Caucasian dishes, cheharma and cheremsha. This argument is not about cuisine, but commanding respect for being worldly, experienced.

The Pain and the Itch, recently staged by Red Stitch Actors Theatre, is a play clearly set in California yesterday morning (as long as yesterday morning is also Thanksgiving). The text points it out relentlessly, with references to those lower-class people who voted Bush situating it rather precisely in between the parliamentary and presidential elections; and the production responds by sticking a thick American accent on each and every actor. Inky, a Reagan-era satire of American consumerism recently seen at Theatreworks, treats the same genre accordingly. The problem, in this case, is that no matter how bravely Australian actors pursue their accents – and they do it quite well, relatively speaking – I have not yet witnessed a play in which the actors aren’t obviously putting most of their focus into accents. In The Pain and the Itch, there is a noticeable point towards the last third of the first act, when everyone finally relaxes and starts acting first, and speaking second. In How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, that moment never arrives for most of the cast. In Inky, the production is greatly helped by the delicious Kellie Jones in the title role, first, who acts like she was born backstage, and the focus of the play, second, which is a sort of Fight Club for girls before a satire of manners.

Gate Theatre and Headlong Theatre:
Sisters, London (UK), 2008. Photo: Simon Kane.

The purpose of this quick, upper-class Californian dialogue, may I suggest, lies less in poetical treatment of the rhythms and vocabulary of the language, and more in illustrating the breezy, lite verbose yet hollow communication even intimately connected persons engage with. Making a witty, effortless and fundamentally meaningless exchange of quips sound heavy, rehearsed, focused on, betrays the very reason why the dialog is on stage. And in a resonant black box, where every small sign and gesture is replete with meaning, this is big stuff. The audience can see which way they should suspend belief, but it turns into theatre where too much work is required from the auditorium.

7. Simply speaking, there is no one sign for time, place, emotion or moral. From the clues given, the audience patiently builds the cathedral. The suspension of disbelief can work wonders: in independent theatre groups, we accept young actors playing elderly roles; in established ensembles, we let middle-aged actors play youths. Cross-racial casting leans on this capacity of theatre to favour performative over objective reality. Theatre-makers, even playwrights, can learn to harness the multiplicity of signs generated in this make-believe. Genet’s girls can be played by boys, Srbljanovic’s children by grown-ups.

8. It seems to me that to argue that ersatz accents are required for a play to stay in Southend and London is akin to demanding poor accents in Szechuan, as if to stop Brecht’s characters from inadvertently getting wealthy. It seems suspiciously like a lack of trust in the play itself to demand verisimilitude in an environment where it is near-impossible, to preserve something that may never risk getting lost. Chekhov’s plays are never less Russian for not being performed with thick immigrant accents – just avoiding the comical clichés of the multicultural soap that we are now familiar with. Had How to Disappear… been played in a moonscape, would it be any less set in London? Perhaps it even would (although the spectator who concluded that the play was a Sci-fi piece set on the moon would be a very unusual person indeed). But would it speak any less of London? I doubt.

The Pain and the Itch was originally presented by Red Stitch with most of the play acted in underwear. At the very end, when the characters have been completely exposed in their bickering, hollow human littleness, they finally appear dressed, coiffeured, proper. I know this because we were told. However, I saw a different play. Bruce Norris, the author of the play, had found out about the underwear, and complained to the company, which decided to have the actors wear plain black clothes instead. The effect, suffice to say, was completely lost. Compared to the harm done to the play with the forceful employment of accents, I would not say that the underwear took much away. If anything, it strikes me as strange that the author himself would have so little faith in his play as to consider that his characters could be undressed with a simple directorial decision. In our stoic black box, painted red for the occasion, there were more than plenty of road signs pointing that the play was not about a near-nudist family. Just like we would never conclude that these wealthy Americans lived in a brothel. That Inky is set in a half-apartment, half-boxing ring did not make the audience tear its hair out in confusion: it was the play itself that was both a document of quotidian life and a boxing match.

Red Stitch Actors Theatre: The Pain and the Itch,
Melbourne (Au), 2008. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

What all the plays mentioned have in common, and I myself have only realised now, is being productions of successful texts from far away: either in time, space, or mindset. The reasons why Inky is a thoroughly successful play, while The Good Soul of Szechuan somewhat schmaltzy and spineless, are more complex than my little essay can dwell into. However, it is this faithfulness to the effect, rather than the external form of the play, that separates a good theatrical moment from a merely decent one. To be careful, but not literal, is all I can recommend. To stay on the safe side of brave, would it not be possible to learn from the way independent theatre approximates costumes and set, and approximate accents in order to protect the actors’ expressive range (the way Tory Rodd sort of did in How to Disappear…, speaking in that polite, closed upper-middle Australian English)? Are there not more than two ways to go?

How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, by Fin Kennedy, directed by Paul King, Sound design by George Bisset.With Michael F Cahill, Glen Hancox, Helen Hopkins, David Passmore and Tory Rodd. Hoy Polloy Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre, Melbourne (Au), 23 May – 7 June 2008. Season ended.

The Pain and the Itch, by Bruce Norris, directed by Gőrkem Acaroglu. Design by Anna Cordingley. With Sarah Sutherland, Daniel Frederiksen, Brett Cousins, Andrea Swifte, Terry Yeboah, Erin Dewar, Oregen Guilloux-Cooke and Fantine Banulski. Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Melbourne (Au), 30 April – 31 May 2008. Season ended.

Inky, by Rinne Groff, directed by Jacquelin Low. Set design by Emily Collett. Costume design by Doyle Barrow. With Kellie Jones, Eleanor Howlett and Roderick Cairns. Original music by Wintership Quartet. Theatreworks, Melbourne (Au), 22 May – 8 June 2008. Season ended.

The Good Soul of Szechuan, by Bertolt Brecht. Translated by David Harrower. Directed by Richard Jones. Set by Miriam Buether. Costume by Nicky Gillibrand. Light by Paule Constable. Music by David Sawer. With Steven Beard, Linda Dobell, Gareth Farr, Adam Gillen, Shiv Grewal, Jane Horrocks, Merveille Lukeba, John Marquez, Sam O'Mahony-Adams, David Osmond, Susan Porrett, Sophie Russell, Liza Sadovy, Tom Silburn and Michelle Wade. Young Vic, London (UK), 8 May – 28 June 2008.

Sisters, by Anton Chekhov. Adapted and directed by Chris Goode. Design by Naomi Dawson. Lighting design by Anna Watson. With Gemma Brockis, Catherine Dyson, Julia Innocenti, Helen Kirkpatrick, Tom Lyall and Melanie Wilson. Gate Theatre in co-production with Headlong Theatre, London (UK), 5 June – 5 July 2008.

Jun 11 2008

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La Mama, lyrical realism, middlebrow, reviews, script, theatre, violence

Rio Saki & Other Falling Debris; with regret

La Mama and Parnassus’ Den Productions present: Rio Saki & Other Falling Debris. Written by Shaun Charles. Directed by Dave Letch. Performed by Daniel Agapiou, Melanie Berry, Cat Commander, Joshua Hewitt, Gina Morley and Gus Murray. Production designed by Christina Logan-Bell. Lighting designed by Christopher Tollefson. La Mama at the Carlton Courthouse, 349 Drummond Street, Carlton. June 4 – June 21. Thursday to Saturday at 8pm, Sundays at 5pm. 2pm matinees on Saturdays June 7 & 21. Tickets: $20/$10. Bookings: 9347 6142.

A version of this review was published online on vibewire.net.

It is much harder to criticize a production built from scratch, than a flawed production of an established text: the reasons for failure are harder to pinpoint. Was it the line or the delivery, the character or the costume, the tone or the set? Moreover, is it unredeemably bland, or just short of decent?

Set during the last few days before the world's certain end, Rio Saki & Other Falling Debris follows six characters as they, rather predictably, go mad, buy drugs, look for someone to die with, see angels, betray and love and need each other. And from the first to the last moment of the play, it is standing right next to line, and refusing to cross.

The whole point of apocalypse stories is wider-scheme revenge, fuelled by our self-righteous moral high ground. We observe shallow, hollow people around us, as they follow trends, send text messages, order take-away, mull over the new mobile phone to buy, betray higher ideals, we despite this perceived lack of involvement with great ideas, with life itself. And we yearn to see them faced with questions of life and death. We want them shaken out of their tepid complacency. We want them a bit more human. We want to know what they would be like.

Tragically, I am quite positive they would behave like the characters in Rio Saki: get absorbed in petty disputes, commit small acts of civil disobedience, have hysterical fits of fear, and endlessly describe their hopes for a glorious death. Unlike in better end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it stories, from Solaris through Apocalypse Now or Mercury Fur, they would not do crazy and significant things that would reveal higher laws of human nature. They would stay bland, uncreative and unreflexive right until the end. But if this is a compliment, it is a rather weak one. In a good fictional end of the world, there should be absolutely disgusting human behaviour, extremely lateral emotional logic, unexpected conclusions, traumas distorting the story and memory in short circuits, cathartic regret.

Originally, I had posted a photo-moment from the play. Having been supplied with this sort of photography since, however, I have decided to use Parnassus' Den Productions' preferred publicity images instead. They explain the 'television' part better than words ever could.

Rio Saki is much too gentle on its characters, and much too easy-going with the plot, to offer catharsis. This one is a mild, suburban apocalypse. Right until the end, everyone was well-groomed, tall and slim, tidy, rather television-looking. Nobody reached the bottom. The line of quotidian, self-interested decency was never crossed. It was the apocalypse in a soapie world. And yet, at every moment I had hope: I was waiting until the very end to give it up.

Shaun Charles’s is competent writing, well-paced and measured, yet at the end one looks back and realises that it went nowhere. The Rio Saki from the title is a symbol that never quite becomes the key to the play; of the many relationships that crack at the start, not one is significantly transformed by the end, and no personal journeys are completed either; even the world ends just as predicted. Paradoxically, the chief reason for this, apart from the refusal to torture characters, seems to be the desire to end the play in a measured and balanced way, give it a sense of closure and a calm end to rest on. As a result, everyone's journey ends before any real transformation has a chance to happen.

Could this have been compensated by braver acting or directing is the last thing that bothers me. Cat Commander is fine in her (admittedly easy) role of the deranged, perpetually screaming Charlotte, and Joshua Hewitt keeps the spirits up at the other end of the play as the drug-obsessed Louis. The rest are lukewarm and more than a bit television; but then, so are their characters. The main apocalypse devices end up being the set (clever, dirty and cluttered), and the excellent soundtrack (moody and full of feelin’).

There is a strong tendency in Australian writing to stay on the surface without approaching satire, keep understated minimalism without finding profundity, and genuinely shelter characters and plot from great events. To write an apocalypse story in that spirit, frankly, may be stretching the genre a bit far.

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Show Ponies for a Young Nation

Three perhaps not-so-obvious points on ‘Pornography’ (the play, not the genre)

RW: Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd

A Disappearing Number & The Age I’m In; observation on the middlebrow

The Masque of the Red Death

Appetite: A post-critical review

On Lucy Guerin; generally, and Corridor; specifically

Two Faced Review

On accents and other forms of realism: a mini essay.

Rio Saki & Other Falling Debris; with regret