Review - Heart is a Wasteland

Heart is a Wasteland

Written and Produced by John Harvey

Direction – Margaret Harvey

Cast

Aaron Pederson

Ursula Yovich

Anna Liebzeit

Dramaturgy – Mark Pritchard

Production Design – Alison Ross

Lighting Design – Lisa Mibus

AV Design – Desmond Connellan

Musical Direction and Sound Design – Anna Liebzeit

Sound Design - Steve Stelios Adam

Songs by Lydia Fairhall

Stage Manager – Ainsley Kerr

Malthouse Theatre

The Beckett

29 June – 16 July 2017

John Harvey’s play Heart is a Wasteland is a testament to the healing power of falling in love.  It is a delightful romantic comedy grounded in a rich contemporary indigenous context.

Commencing with the best welcome to country ever, flying in from the West, it is a very finely tuned work throughout.   This is a confirmation of the high degree of skill of all who have created and work on it.   It is a co-production with Brown Cabs and made with the support of Footscray Community Arts Centre.

Although an indigenous story, in a unique setting, it is the universal story of finding love.  In this instance through risking all in a half intoxicated state in a fairly ordinary bar – not an uncommon story.  Raye (Ursula Yovich) is an independent Country singer doing a tour through South Australia and Central Australia to Darwin.  She hooks up with Dan, a miner, who is a beautifully fleshed out with a rich and interesting characterization by Aaron Pederson. 

Ms Yovich has a delightful stage presence and sings like an angel.  She brings sense and gusto to some very meaty contemporary, politically sensitive chunks of dialogue.

The whole is staged (Alison Ross) simply on a minimalist set and scenes are changed through the use of projection on a wonderfully textured screen/back wall.  Sound (Steve Stelios Adam) is used to great effect.   Ms Yovich’s sings several poignant songs by Lydia Fairhall.  Guitar accompaniment is most skillfully provided by Anna Lievzeit.

This most enjoyable heart-warming theatre is well worth braving the cold to get to.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - 100 Reasons for War

La Mama Presents

100 Reasons for War

(War, What is it Good For?)

By Tom Holloway

Directed by Bob Pavlich

Lighting Designer – Tom Willis

Lighting and Sound Operator – Julian Adams

Stage Manager – Rebecca Bassett

Costume co-ordinator – Bethany Tweedale

Set co-ordinator – Elysia Janssen

Photography – Matthew Howat

Videos made by Bethany Tweedale (Beginning of the Universe)

And Elysia Janssen (Bliss Symbolics)

Performed by Joshua Brodrick, Meghalee Bose, Walter Dyson, Marnie Henderson, Elysia Janssen, Karanvir Malhotra, Simon Nixon, David Peters, Lucy Rees, Jessica Sterck and Bethany Tweedale

La Mama

June 21 to June 25 - 2017

This production by La Trobe’s Student Theatre is most impressive and completely engaging.  Performed by eleven young adults with clarity and poise.  This is a testament to the skills of Director Bob Pavlich as a very experienced director of Student Theatre having been the Artistic Director of Student Theatre and Film at Latrobe University for 21 years. 

All performers present a lovely fresh clear presence and deliver their dialogue with lucid conviction in a comfortable uncluttered manner.  Each of these individuals is either a consummate theatre maker or very successful academic students or both. 

Eveningwear is worn as a kind of ‘blacks’ – highlighting individuality and yet fashioning a sort of uniformity at the same time.  Doubtless each audience member picks favorite players but everybody ‘stands out’ to a similar degree.

The focus flows from one featured person to another.  This allows the audience to be comfortably positioned to think about the text.  Much of which is Australian playwright Tom Holloway’s but there are some excerpts from other sources.

There is an ambiguity about how this text connects directly to war - although discord is often expressed.   Many of the duologues that follow swiftly on the heels of each other speak of self-interest and disconnectedness, disruption and pending violence.

The choice of music by Director Bob Pavlich is great and there is an extraordinary piece of animation by Bliss Symbolics that works as a kind of bookend with the initial video about to brutal beginning of the universe.  In a way it is this initial video that introduces the hypothesis that we come from a mercilessly ferocious beginning  - violence begets violence.

This season has ended and was fully booked out.

Excellent Student Theatre from La Trobe University – congratulations!

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Wages of Fear

Metanoia Theatre’s

Wages of Fear

after Georges Arnaud

adapted by Shane Grant

Director – Gorkem Acaroglu

Sound Designer – Kelly-Anne

Lighting Designer – Niklas Pajanti

Set Design – Lara Week

Set Construction – Shanrah Austin

Cast

Gerard – Greg Ulfan

Johnny – Ange Arbatzis

Browning/Bimba/Priest1 – Kotryna Gesalt

Secretary/Luigi/Priest 3 – Adam Mattaliano

O’Brien/Old Man – Brain Davison

Linda/Villager – Melina Wylie

Hernandez/Priest 2/Engineer – Fotis Kapetopoulos

The Mechanics Institute

Sydney Road Brunswick

June 20 – 29  2017

www.metanoiatheatre.com

Wages of Fear is the story of how greed can put individuals at insuperable risk.  Shane Grant’s stage play is inspired by the 1950 novel Le salaire de la peur by Georges Arnaud.  Apparently Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 film of this novel is considered, by some, to be one of the most suspenseful films ever made.   

In Metanoia’s production seven actors double up to cover all the necessary roles.  The scene is set - good money will be paid for workers to risk all in a bid to save an oil company from pending ruin. A fire on an oilrig needs to be quelled by desperately volatile nitroglycerine.  Itinerant workers are sort out by an exploitative oil company to truck this dangerous chemical to the fire. 

Fear breeds fear that exposes weaknesses and ultimately unhinges already vulnerable individuals.

The Direction (Gorkem Acaroglu) is crisp and clean.  The overall tone of melodrama engages and absorbs the audience’s concentration throughout.  The set by Lara Week is surprising and remarkably successful.   Sound (Kelly-Anne) and lighting (Niklas Pajanti) work in perfect unison to create appropriately strong palpable atmospheres.  

The ensemble acting is uniformly strong, focused and impressive, however it is the two main protagonists who steal the show.

As Gerard, Greg Ulfan is very much a man’s man, confident of his own strength and character and brave to the point of foolhardiness.    Gerard’s character is unshakably motivated by a dream that he is determined to finance.   Ange Arabatzis’s Johnny, the more sensitive and fearful of the two, possibly has more to lose.  Both men portray their characters in a simple straight up fashion without any unnecessary embellishments.

Several times throughout this show I was reminded of Melbourne’s New Theatre of the late 1980s and their drive to put on works that exposed exploitation.

A most engaging and worthwhile evening of theatre – very reasonably priced - totally worth catching.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again

Image by Pia Johnson

Revolt.  She Said.  Revolt Again.

By Alice Birch

Directed by Janice Muller

Set and Costume Design - Marg Horwell

Lighting Design - Emma Valente

Sound, Composition and AV Design - James Brown

Stage Manager – Tia Clarke

Cast:  Elizabeth Esguerra, Ming-Zhu Hii, Belinda McClory, Gareth Reeves and Sophie Ross.

Malthouse

Merlyn Theatre

16 June – 9 July

This is vital Theatre - the type that demands you think and feel at the same time. 

The first three scenes are staged in a box that is neat and contained and used to denote several indoor settings.  There is much to laugh about in each of these incidents.  In all three we get to witness a perfectly rational and charming young woman speaking from a perspective that completely destabilizes very deep-rooted social moors around sex, marriage and work.  Words are used to describe what is generally unspoken and, in fact, largely unacknowledged. 

Image by Pia Johnson

Later this box-like space is disrupted, one could even say violated.  It ultimately becomes troublesome and even aggressively hostile itself in the chaotic and large space of the whole stage of the Merlyn. 

Director Janice Muller’s management of the material is marvelously effective and Marg Horwell’s intuitive design of set and costumes complementary and enhancing.  Everything moves quickly and effectively with great energy.

What starts out as a clear coherent disruption of the sex act (Sophie Ross and Gareth Reeves), a marriage proposal (Gareth Reeves and Ming-Zhu Hii)  and a boss - worker relationship (Belinda McCory and Elizabeth Esguerra) becomes a masterfully managed crazy collage of ideas and allusions.   Although I am not sure how many of these are consciously graspable.  

Then comes a description of a woman stripping in a supermarket isle  and lying on the floor amongst a messy slather of destroyed watermelons, ready to willingly accept any violation.   Things feel as though they have gone too far – as though we as women have accepted/allowed too much.

Stunning performances from actors who touch emotional chords in us even in the crazy messiest moments of the staging of the most anarchic parts of this work.

Belinda McCory gives a very striking performance as the brittle character of the female boss who just cannot make it easier for the young worker (Elizabeth Esguerra) to live a more balanced life.  She is also curiously disturbing as the inadequately mothered, inadequate mother of a desperately troubled child.  This scene looks at the tragedy of unhappy and unsuccessful mothering, disrupting any notion that all women are cut out to be mothers.

As audience I laughed a lot but also felt a cliff hanging sense of futility and experienced a distress akin to being plunged into a bottomless pit of desperation.  But all is not in vein and somehow after feeling that one has been pulled backwards through a bramble bush and left out to dry there is a highly cathartic reward of recognition. 

It feels like another step on the journey to find and connect with a truly ‘feminine’ voice.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - The Haunting

Prince Moo Productions

Presents:

The Haunting

Adapted from Charles Dickens works

Gig Clarke and Camerone Daddo

By Hugh Janes

Directed by Jennifer Sarah Dean

Set, Props and Illusion Design – John Kerr

Costume Design – Rhiannon Irving

Lighting Design – Jason Bovaird

Sound Design – Kyle Evans

Cast:

Lord Gray – Cameron Daddo

David Filde - Gig Clarke

Mary – Tehya Nicholas

Athenaeum Theatre

Until July 1 2017

The Athenaeum is the perfect Theatre for this brilliantly staged work.   All production values are in place to facilitate suspension of disbelief and immersion in the creepy ‘old world fear’ of a ghostly apparition.   The marvelous picture book set by John Kerr with lots of quirks and illusions is really the fourth character of this stunningly eerie production.

A telling of this story could well start – ‘It was a dark and stormy night……..’  From the onset we are scared with a sharp scary noise and throughout, on many occasions we are offered the opportunity to jump in our seats.  Sound by Kyle Evans and technical affects by John Kerr and the, at times, very strident use of light designed by Jason Bovaird combine to this splendid effect.

The ghost Mary, inhabited by Tehya Nicholas is good and spine-chilling!  Her presence when the audience is made aware of it is beautifully costumed by Rhiannon Irving and stunningly lit by Jason Bovaird.

Cameron Daddo plays Lord Gray with style and poise.  There is an ambivalence about this character that may be in the writing – rendering Lord Gray a kind of mercurial character.  But I am left wondering if this is because the work is an amalgam of Dickens’s stories.   Whether it is because of this - that Lord Gray is painted as neither this nor that.   This portrayal adds a little more confusion about what is really happening in the strange otherworldly atmosphere of the haunted mansion.   It is a mystery.

The character of David Filde is beautifully played by Gig Clarke as a very straightforward young man of the era, a little kooky, but without guile or pretense.  However he is hiding a secret that becomes clear in the final reveal.

Both characters are beautifully costumed and look perfect in atmospheric ‘picture book’ environment. 

If you like ghost stories – catch this one.   It is great - it balances sinister with scary and incorporates a terrific sense of humour and is very smoothly staged.  My plus one loved it!

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)