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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.

Jun 08 2008
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collage, David Williamson, Melbourne Theatre Company, middlebrow, reviews, theatre

Ceci n’est pas une critique;

1. Scarlett O'Hara at the Crimson Parrot, new David Williamson play opening next week at the MTC, is absolutely worth walking out of in the interval. It is also more than worth walking out of during the show. It is worth the embarrassment of getting up mid-row, the awkwardness of stepping on senior citizens' feet, of disturbing the performance, of causing grunts and complaints, of stumbling out in the dark, of disdainful looks you'll attract.

2. Scarlett O'Hara plays out like a text written by a computer program: fed Australian newspapers on one given day, regurgitating the content into themes, motifs, characters, motivations, dialogue. The glitches and retakes of the preview performance were the only moments to enjoy – I pity the audience that won't have that relief – because they had soul.

3. The play could instead be called seven characters looking for authorly love. Not to mention mutual respect. As they are, abandoned on stage in a puddle of psychological dead-ends, semi-devised motivations, right turns visible miles ahead, and plotlines with validity set to expire in 2009, they come across as theatrical cripples, interesting more as a self-unaware society reflected in the broken mirror of the unconscious, regurgitating computer program mentioned above, than any attempt at lite forgivemelord comedy.

4. There are shards that one can see something in, of course: the relationship between Scarlett and her mother is such a clearly dysfunctional, de-framed, re-framed, translated and costumed relationship between a mother and a bruised, withdrawn yet raging, homicidal son. One may, you see, think a thought or two within these two hours. But is it worth the time of our senior citizens? Their money?

5. It is not mine to come up with reasons why such an embarrassment is what most ordinary people in this city seem to consider the only relevant theatre. But it breaks my heart, over and over again.

Jan 13 2008
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Melbourne Theatre Company, middlebrow, reviews, sex, theatre

Don Juan in Soho;

10.i.2008. Melbourne Theatre Company: Don Juan in Soho. Written By Patrick Marber. Cast includes Craig Annis, Angus Cerini, Daniel Frederiksen, Katie-Jean Harding, Bob Hornery, Kate Jenkinson, Bert Labonte, Christen O’Leary, James Saunders, Dan Wyllie. Directed By Peter Evans. Set & costume designer: Fiona Crombie. LX designer: Matt Scott. Composer: David Franzke. Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, until 16 Feb 2008.

The best thing about Don Juan in Soho is that, at 90 or so minutes, it's mercifully short. (Now that wasn't a good start. But what else to say? Since I've decided to dedicate some time to proper theatre reviews, not a whole lot of decent theatre passed my door.)

It has been said that Dan Wyllie is miscast, that his DJ (as our protagonist is here known) lacks playful suaveness, that there is too much applied effort, too much struggle; this, however, implies that there is a qualitative difference between his and the remaining performances, whereas this audience member felt that the entire cast was mishandled, pushed into an effortful sort of acting. While Katie-Jean Harding as the humanitarian unbeddable wife is solely responsible for the little pathos that squeezes through, it is Daniel Frederiksen as DJ's servant Stan, the holder of the BlackBerry, who resists the collective acting catastrophe most consistently. Sganarelle is certainly the character in the Don Juan universe with greatest interest to an actor, and Frederiksen creates one that never slips into easy parody, subtly balancing out the over- and the under-stated. His almost constant presence on stage almost, but never quite, saves the production from being unwatchable. Everything around Frederiksen is a sort of half-arsed train crash. The actors run through their lines in that theatrical rush of mangled emotions, faux surprises and revelations, running from one end of the stage to another as if it has meant anything since Brecht (the acting verisimilitude of opera – but the main purpose of opera, at least, is singing). The stage design doesn't know what it is doing, and music is used to create bursts of franticness in between the already jumbled scenes. Every line is shouted, every fellatio overwinked at, every transgression transfigured into grotesque.

don_rev

The resulting play is not comical, and certainly not seducing. It is a Don Juan that handles sex with no sensuality, transgression with no flair, and hedonism with no gusto. Ultimately, we get the old MTC effect: it feels like nobody wants to be here, doing this. Not the actors, not the director, not the light technician, not even Patrick Marber himself, and least of all the audience. Nobody is enjoying themselves. (I can imagine an entire new generation of subscribers coming out of the Arts Centre with a sigh; yes, well, it's all fine, this theatre thing, but let's not do it next year.) The entire purpose of this exercise seems to be filling a gap in the relatively well-funded MTC season with yet another play that made money in London or New York. And if the play did it originally due to the qualities of the casting, direction, well, let's disregard that, because the play, we all know, is the text and can be mishandled in whichever way will make it more palatable to the imagined conservative, senior-citizen and MTC subscriber.

The result? Since text itself has little meaning without the tone of voice and the gesture (only about 5% of our communication is strictly verbal), Marber's play may have been the sexiest, most alluring ode to joie de vivre out there (although I somehow doubt it), we wouldn't know. MTC stages a moralistic story of sin and punishment, akin to those biblical tales of bad boys punished and good boys rewarded that Mark Twain wrote delicious little parodies of good 150 years ago. There is that in the DJ canon, alright, but there is more. In a storyline that everyone contributed to, absolute fidelity to a text, any text, is unnecessary. Or a political choice.

Which brings us back to Marber. Can I claim that he wanted DJ to be a spitting, shouting, deranged MTC-creature that seems to sleep with women out of drug-fuelled compulsion and/or manic depression? Perhaps. There is an element of truth in there, the play is well-documented, I know plenty of people who live such lives: in London, Rome, Zagreb, all over the US, mercifully few in Melbourne (Australia doesn't have quite the level of open debauchery, for all sorts of reasons). That the prostitutes are Russian, even, is racist but fair. But because of the way it comes across – a moralistic tale where sin is ugly and punishment just, delivered to the fancily dressed, restrained MTC auditorium where nobody ever puts a foot on a chair – it strikes me as the right-wing play par excellence.

There would be a way out. Criminology, for all its flaws, gave some psychological insight into its deviant, drug-crazy and sex-obsessed characters, as a way to connect their haphazard lives to the bigger human drama out there. As a way to say, well, alright, but it's all a part of the same game. In contrast, not an ounce of glory is left to dust sex, hedonism or transgression with after Marber and MTC have finished with it. Not an ounce.

It is useful here to import wholesale Giulia's comment on the Turner Prize, because she identifies the same cultural tendency, within the same civilisation:

And I knew that the Turner Prize reached its aim: it did for contemporary art what the Booker Prize did for the novel, turning it into the perfect mixture of good feelings and morbid curiosities, apparent rebellion towards the society but only within the safe boundaries of political correctness… giving the Guardian-readers from all over the world the possibility of feeling like they have appreciated something intellectual without the need for any actual engagement with what is in front of them: we'll tell you what's good, and we'll carefully select something that will only shock and disturb you and stimulate you in the measure in which you are already anticipating to be shocked and disturbed and stimulated.

Yet, with all due disapproval, let's give credit to those who pull it off, who trick us all, not just bore to death. The London premiere of Don Juan in Soho may have been entertaining, slick, funny, well-cast and -directed. Faced with the MTC debacle, however, had I had a choice, I would have much rather spent 90 minutes in between the two halves of Damien Hirst's cow.

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