Review - Anti Hamlet

The New Working Group & Theatre Works Present

Anti-Hamlet

Writer/Director – Mark Wilson

Associate Artist - Olivia Monticciolo

Set and Costume Design – Romaine Harper

Lighting Design – Amelia Lever-Davidson

Sound Design – Tom Backhaus

Dramaturg and Producer – Mark Pritchard

Cast:  Marco Chiappi, Natascha Flowers, Natasha Herbert, Brian Lipson, Marcus McKenzie, Charles Purcell and Mark Wilson

Theatre Works

3 – 13 November

Anti-Hamlet is a clever slick journey opening with Mark Wilson as Hamlet engaging the audience with fabulous sparkling heightened energy.  This energy is embraced by all actors and doesn’t let up as we are taken on a fast a wild and lengthy ride through a sort of Australian ‘boy’s own’ contemporary Australian Hamlet, which, mainly through their absence, highlights aspects of Shakespeare’s original. 

It offers thought provoking perspectives for those who know the text.  For those who don’t, I would hazard a guess, is a wacky sort of parody of aspects of Australian politics that replaces God with Sigmund Freud and contains an eye opening and kind of shocking visceral explanation of the Oedipus Complex.

There is never a dull moment in this wacky romp and Wilson has made some great choices.  However his characters are pretty two-dimensional but excellent, mostly very experienced, troupe of actors serve the ideas and flow of the whole wonderfully.

Natascha Flowers plays an Ophelia who gets off very lightly as a sort of bland clever young woman a Rhodes Scholar who shrewdly spots Hamlet’s homosexuality before it makes mince meat of both of them (assuming it was one of the difficulties in their relationship).  However, wittily she does end up in a swimming pool. 

Horatio played by Marcus McKenzie hovers generally being useful and perhaps a bit pedantic.  Brian Lipson makes a great Freud who replaces the sometimes wise but mostly silly Polonius, although unlike Polonius he is indestructible and omnipresent.  Marco Chiappi is energetic and brazen as a Claudius who is nowhere near as personally threatening to Hamlet as Shakespeare’s invention.  Edward Bernays is a very sleazy politician played as a total controlling slime by recent VCA graduate Charles Purcell.

But it is Natasha Herbert who ‘takes the cake.’   She is glorious as a glamorous Gertrude who is dressed for cocktail party after cocktail party.   Much more than a coat hanger, Herbert’s Gertrude is sublimely over the top.  It is wonderful watching a usually serious actor throw herself successfully and courageously at such an outrageous piece, her range of emotional states is extensive. 

In Anti-Hamlet, Wilson’s Hamlet is not riddled with maudlin self-doubt and indecision and there is not a ghost, grave or a skull insight.

Sound (Tom Backhaus) is kept to a minimum.   Set design by Romaine Harper is austere and practical – indicative of music concert stage.  It left me wondering if the whole would feel less like a work in progress if it had a more theatrical staging.

This is a work that is likely to be referred to often in years to come.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Caliban

Western Edge Youth Arts - presents

CALIBAN

(Where do the spirits go when the water rises?)

Written by; Georgia Symons, Achai Deng, Abraham Herasan, Piper Huynh, Natalie Lucic, Rexson Pelman, Oti Willoughby, and Dave Kelman.

Directed by Tariro Mavondo and Dave Kelman

Dramaturgy: Dave Kelman

The Edge Ensemble

Caliban – Oti Willoughby

Prospera – Natalie Lucic

Miranda – Achai Deng

Ariel – Piper Huynh

Ferdinand – Abraham Herasan

Phano – Rexson Pelman

Music Composition and Performance: Callum Watson

Movement Director: Amy MacPherson

Design: Lara Week

Lighting Design: Matt Fabris

The Becket – Malthouse

24 – 26 November 2016

Caliban is pertinent worthwhile theatre presented by a great group of very skilled young people who do a marvelous job of getting a multi-layered message across to the audience.  Through using the framework of Shakespeare’s The Tempest they are able to utilize established characters and remodel them to serve the purpose of developing a story that correlates to our global warming crisis.

This work is underscored by the original musical composition of Callum Watson who plays the piano as the audience settles and through the show. Callum's work is most enjoyable and does much to move the work on.

Direction by Tariro Mavondo and Dave Kelman has engendered a glorious sense of balance, respect and inclusion.  All players appear to have equal agency.  Voices of all actors are strong and clear and physicalization solidly established. 

Most performers also have stories or aspects of their cultural backgrounds melded in with the narrative.   For instance Rexson Pelman although born in Australia has Samoan heritage and one of the storylines is about the swallowing up of Islands by the Oceans.  Rexson energetically engages his audience with a splendid bold performance.  

Piper Huynh plays an android with a marvelous, acutely realized, fluid machine like physicality. 

Natalie Lucic creates an excellent strong and self-serving Prospera with the clearest annunciation and lovely swift movement.

Achai Deng who fits the bill as Prospera’s protected daughter is a fine actor to watch.  As a sensitive singer, I think, she could afford to pelt the songs out with just a bit more commitment.

Paradoxically through Abraham Herasan’s presentation of billionaire character Ferdinand we are encouraged to better relate to what it feel like to live as a Muslim in Australian suburbs.   

It is Oti Willoughby’s stunningly keen natural comic timing that elicits the most laughs.  He is just great fun to watch when he is portraying ‘the last swordfish.’  Although hysterically funny this is actually a very poignant moment indicating just how concerned we should be for the future of the endangered creatures of the seas.

On opening night Western Edge were playing to a responsive audience compromised predominantly of people who know and hold this troupe in high regard.  The mix of cultures represented in the work is heartening and satisfying.  And the number of cultures represented in the audience was truly something marvelous to behold.

Go Western Edge!

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Animal

Animal

Created by Susie Dee, Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks

Director - Susie Dee

Performers – Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks

Composer – Kelly Ryall

Designer – Marg Horwell

Lighting Designer – Andy Turner

Projected Text and Dramaturgy – Angus Cerini

Producer – Adam Fawcett

Theatre Works – St Kilda

17 to 27 November 2016

Susie Dee, Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks, with the assistance of Angus Cerini, have had the courage to delve into the murky depths, and usually hidden experience, of the insidious damage of abuse.  Marvelously they have extracted a poignant poetic essence.  And with the help of an exemplary production team are sublimely communicating this to audiences.  

Designer Marg Howell has created what looks like a found space and made Theatre Works feel cavernous.  It is fitted out, like a huge shed, with metal encased water tanks.  There is a sense of being in the country feathers are littered and float about and a kind of angel bell is ringing.  Two young barely clad women are perched near the rafters like featherless birds with clipped wings who are unable to escape and destined to an existence of ‘acting out’.  Imagery abounds and so do semiotics.

Composed sound (Kelly Ryall) is often effectively loud at times, and at some points appropriately disturbingly overwhelming.

Animal interprets the tragic effects of the internalized response to abuse.   It is not the experience of being violated we witness.  It is the resulting carnage that is expressed through the exceptional work of performers/co-creators Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks.  The ordeal is relived again and again.   A huge energetic expression of trauma is exhibited through their strong vigorous physical performances.

Wilks is extraordinary in her capacity to morph into an innocent child.  Evidently the abuse, this work is most particularly looking at, is the sexual abuse of young girls.  This aspect of victimization is depicted as children dancing in a ‘sexy’ way for someone.  There is a weary desperation in this dance, a sense of fretful apprehension.  It is evident that their aim to please is marked with a deep fear and a kind of defeated resignation.

The perpetrator is absent, but his presence is palpable.  He is rendered an absent shadowy figure – a larger than life specter that will always haunt.  His victims may have murdered him, however if this is the case, it is to no or very little avail.  His dark presence looms larger than life.

All roads seem to lead to a bottomless pit of psychological pain.  This devastation is expressed with amazing clarity in a kind of helpless, hapless stillness.

The abstracted roles these two women play interchange between victim and bystander, inferring an unavoidable situation.   They take on dresses – guises.  There are two distinctly different costumes one indicates more kudos the other outright victim status.  Although throughout there is a shared victimhood and a strong sense of sisterhood even when they attack each other.   They express an extraordinary intimacy through shared experience.

One discussion I had in the foyer likened the work to The Boys (the film adaptation by Stephen Sewell).  However it is not so much the horrifying edge of threat we witness, as audience, but the overwhelmingly demoralizing results of violation.  It is not frightening but enlightening.

Also in the foyer while I was half listening in to someone telling me it didn’t make them feel anything, I was observing a woman struggle with her tears.  Responses will by mixed.

This is such a gutsy challenging work – so worth catching – we will be talking about it for years.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - A Sonatina

The Victorian Arts Centre Presents

A Sonatina

By

A Teatret Gruppe 38 production

Cast: Bodil Alling, Christian Glahn, Søren Søndberg

Directors: Bodil Alling, Ole Sørensen


Set designer: Claus Helbo


Composer: Søren Søndberg

Arts Centre

12 and 13 November 2016

This marvelous show is full of surprises, the first one being, where we are taken to, to become an audience. Like going down a rabbit hole both physically and metaphorically, down, down we go into the bowels of the Arts Centre to a rehearsal room.  This disorientation surely helps the viewer to be more available and receptive.  

Once the audience is settled after our very physical decent - the work opens with the narrator/storyteller Bodil Alling (an older woman with lovely messed up grey hair) getting things ready for a chicken to welcome the audience.  This is so funny and ridiculous, but also kind of believable as Alling is working with a particularly chatty chook who is comfortable and obviously very well cared for.

A Sonatina is set in and around a glorious little truck with a sort of olden-day trades person’s tray.   This is a very clever arrangement that houses not only the chook, particularly for egg laying, but other props as well, including, a double barreled shot gun.  Well the gun is - fortunately only a figment of imagination that never actually appears.  However through its absence it speaks volumes about the created relationships of the performer’s characters.

The crux of the show is the telling of the Little Red Riding-Hood Fairy Tale with rustic quirky props and musical accompaniment on a double base and trumpet. 

It is a delightful, deep, funny and sometimes dark offering.  Like the good telling of a Fairytale the whole performance holds secrets and inexplicable logic and a weird sort of darkness the feels dream like.  Then of course - it all comes out all right in the end.  And it is presented with a dry wry sense of humour and irony that enriches.  At the same time this ensures children are not talked down to or patronized but rather taken on an unexpected adventure.

Full marks to the Arts Centre for bringing us this rich inspirational cultural exchange from a world class Danish Children’s Theatre Company.

And I have to say this fabulous children’s show took me back to a time when there was interesting Street Theatre being presented in Melbourne –particularly around at the time of the Melbourne Festival when it was called Spoletto.  Culturally we could surely do with more of this.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Blaque Showgirls

Blaque Showgirls

By Nakkiah Lui

Directed by Sarah Giles

Cast:

Molly – Emi Canavan

Chandon Connors – Elaine Connors

Ginny Jones – Bessie Holland

Kyle MacLachlan/True Love Interest – Guy Simon

Dramaturg – Declan Greene

Contributing Dramaturg – Louise Gough

Set and Costume Design - Eugueene Teh

Lighting Design – Paul Jackson

Composition and Sound Design - Jed Palmer

Merlyn Theatre – Malthouse

11November to 4 December 2016

Blaque Showgirls is a unique, timely, riveting work that is not for the faint hearted.  It is raucous, lewd, crude and ridiculously funny, politically very dodgy and out there.  Depending on one’s sensibility, it is perhaps a little destabilizing and disconcerting. 

Nakkiah Lui, who is also a writer on Black Comedy  or the ABC, writes a satire that is based in the fluid social milieu in which we live.  It plays with notions of performativity and constructs.  For example; if sex is performed and gender a construct could race also be seen as a construct.  Are all three constructs?   Have we commodified them, all three?

The whole is like a big narrative skit with loads of smaller skits that leave one with the feeling that ‘whities’ in our community will never really let minorities and particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders reach and maintain unfettered independent agency.

It talks about exploitation and appropriation and comes to surprising conclusions. 

All performers are impressive.  As Ginny Jones, Bessie Holland, a girl on a quest to be come a Show Girl like she believed her mother once was, presents a delightful mix of girlish determination, ruthlessness and vulnerability.   She is as controlling and manipulative but innocent and righteous.

Guy Simon impresses as Kyle MacLachlan and True Love Interest.  As with his work as the title role in MTC’s recent production of Jasper Jones Simon brings clean focus and a lovely fresh energy.

Direction seems to be totally appropriate to the material.  However it needs to be said, looking at the names of the extremely accomplished production crew, it is a pity that more aboriginal creatives are not part of this team.

If you have been engaged or fascinated by or enjoying Black Comedy on the ABC this is a main stage theatre performance for you.  Or if you want to keep up to date with changing mores from a ‘black’ pen

on contemporary racial politics and the commodification of culture it is well worth catching.

Warning it is provocative - you could be offended - my plus one was.

Suzanne Sandow
(For Stage Whispers)