tragedy
RW: Happy Days
People who don’t go to the theatre often wonder why theatre enthusiasts are, well, such enthusiasts. The answer lies in the rarely achieved bliss of the curtain call: the actors on stage, the audience in commotion, the physical and emotional synchronicity of the long applause. It is one in a hundred, but that’s the magic [...]
RW: Peer Gynt
A sprawling dramatic poem, Peer Gynt careens freely between social verisimilitude and outrageous flights of fancy. In its psychological externalization, each troll is a momentarily irresistible girl, each nightmare a folktale monster. It was not intended for performance, and Ibsen joyously did away with reasonable staging demands: spanning 50 years, two continents, an obscene number of characters, changes of tone, pace and fabular focus, it is as unstageable as a play gets. But it was Heiner Muller who said that only dramatic writing that cannot be realised on stage is of any use for the theatre.
Woyzeck
Woyzeck, entering the play already half-psychotic, wanders lost in a world that has slipped into an orgiastic drill of sex and death. On these terms, the Malthouse Woyzeck works. While it is a production characterised by Kantoresque abstract gaudiness, it makes madness felt, close by, desired and understood as a natural reaction against the overabundance of noise.
Anatomy Titus, The Work of Wonder: This Review is About the Audience.
1. Almost by accident, I came across the following story:
In [the Serbo-Croatian war in the early 1990s], for the first time in history, the tactic of rape became a strategy. Soldiers took women from their homes, from UN or Red Cross or refugee convoys, and put them in the so called “rape camps.” Young girls, [...]
The Women of Troy; a more discursive response.
A high-school boy, at the end of The Women of Troy, tells me uncertainly: I'm not sure if it's not making me feel anything because I've been desensitized by television… Despite the necessary reservation we should have for this self-analysis, as children today have been so overanalysed in their exposure to televised and game violence [...]
Apocalypse and circular revenge: A View of Concrete & Family Stories
In Melbourne in 2006, Alison Croggon suspected she may not have liked Gareth Ellis's script of A View of Concrete half as much without Lauren Taylor's direction. In Sydney in 2008, I think she got it right. In Zagreb in 2005, I walked out of a derelict factory, seeing a nightmarish production of Family Stories, [...]
We will never talk about this.
1. THE SUBMERGED AND THE SAVED
I must repeat: we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion of which I have become conscious little by little, reading the memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years. We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: [...]
Liminal (Theatre and Performance): Oedipus - a poetic requiem
A version (with rather off formatting of Ted Hughes) has appeared in Laneway Magazine.
Liminal (Theatre and Performance) is a strange beast in the Melbourne theatre eco-system. In this city, where most theatre is produced for free and funding is at best flimsy, independent theatre-making is a long session of musical chairs, and a person who [...]
Ghost in the Shell, and the fluid self in body and mind; recapitulation.
I don't want to offend more than I absolutely have to, so I will conveniently hide most of this sleepy ramble behind a LJ cut.
1. It is not only the cyborg that is the idée fixe in Japanese animation, or Japanese art in general. It is the disintegrating body, disintegrating mind. It is body fused [...]
The Kreutzer Sonata/A Large Attendance in the Antechamber; angrily.
30.xi. 2007. La Mama presents: The Kreutzer Sonata. A Night Train Production. Based on a story by Lev Tolstoy. Adapted and performed by Humphrey Bower. With music and dolls by Jess Ipkendanz. And lighting by Gwendolyna Holmberg-Gilchrist. Season ended.
2.xii.2007. Malthouse Theatre: A Large Attendance in the Antechamber. Written, designed and performed by Mr Brian Lipson [...]
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