Review - Lost 5

Illumi-Nation Theatre - Presents

Lost: 5

By Daniel Keene

Director

Michelle McNamara

Performers

Fleur Murphy, Kiniesha Nottle, Marty Rhone, Pearce Hessling and Stephanie Pick

Lighting Designers

Jason Bovaird, and Maddy Seach

Composer/Sound Designer

Mbyro (Matt Brown)

22 November to 3 December 2017

More excellence from this years eclectic and cleverly situated Poppy Seed Festival.  This time the venue is south of the Yarra at St Martins Theatre.

The Irene Mitchell studio with its natural brick wall is the perfect venue to infer the atmosphere of a street for five probing monologues relating to homelessness by Daniel Keene.  Keene is a Melbourne playwright, deeply engaged with social issues and whose work was most prolifically staged in Melbourne in the mid 1990s. 

Lighting by Jason Bovaird and Maddy Seach creates and designates space through projections on the wall.  Cold alienating blue light creates contrast between the humanity of the characters and the brutal circumstances they find themselves.

As director of these monologues Michelle MacNamara keeps the audiences focus squarely on her very skilled actors as they highlight the poetic nature of Keene’s compassionate and acutely insightful writing.   Ms. Mac Namara splits the work The Rain in an effort to link the whole and casts several of the roles against the gender they were written for.  There is some disparity of styles, with a couple of works verging on magic realism, and the others more encased in naturalism.

In The Rain a pervading story of wartime experience, Fleur Murphy talks to the audience from various stages in her life.  She draws us into her bemusing inability to name what she experienced perhaps due to the dire profundity of it.

Two Shanks as brought to us by Stephanie Pick inspires compassion for a person outside the everyday - perhaps due to a deficiency in comprehending and accessing the social constructions she lives in. This lone individual is someone who takes her own council and does not strive to request assistance but creates her own rituals.

Kaddish is penned about an elderly man who lost his wife.  As played by Marty Rhone he expresses an overwhelming sense of anger from feeling cheated.  Traumatized by the loss of his wife to a desperate sense of victimization.

Kiniesha Nottle plays her character in Getting Shelter like a wild woman from the Medieval Era.  She brings to the work an edge of heightened realism this is a little at odds with the more grounded realism of the other characters.  However it could be argued it adds to the variety of the work as a whole.  Ms. Nottle certainly brings with her a sparkling joy of performing and is most entertaining and engaging.

Pearce Hessling most vulnerably conveys the wacky rhythms of someone who would be better served in an institution then on the streets in A Foundling.

Expect to be moved with the depth and complexity of the content about five individuals all of whom have suffered considerable trauma.  This is the type of work that elevates through its vital and elusive insights.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers),

Review - For The Ones Who Walk Away

St Martins Presents

For the Ones Who Walk Away

Concept and Direction – Nadja Kostich

Text – Ursula K.LeGuin, Daniel Keene and the St Martins ensemble

Associate Director – Luke Kerridge

Dramaturgy and Video Design – Michael Carmody

Composition and Sound Design - Jethro Woodward

Set and Costume Design – Emily Barry

Lighting Design – Richard Vabre

Associate Artists:  Stefan Bramble, Kat Cornwell, Harriet Devlin, Lyndsay Marsden, Katy Maudlin, Joana Pires, Ahmarnya Price, Gabriel Collie and Jo Dunbar

This work is for an active audience – one that is thoughtful and keen to find and make meaning. 

All the child participants work sublimely as a team. An extraordinary sense interconnected community is created through the amalgam of a big group of kids with varying skill and abilities, working together as small groups with strong messages, then as a huge cooperative where there is minimal digression – a neutrality. 

Symbols such as flower petals, rocks, strips of newspaper and feathers encourage thought processes to drift to subliminal levels.  These simple objects also act to interlink the individual stories and the driving ideas that are communicated in a number of classroom size performance spaces. 

My plus one and I only really experienced four spaces fully.  (I think there might be ten or more.)   It is not a theatrical experience that can be rushed through.  The only way to see it all would be to go twice or more.  I’m tempted but perhaps part of its charm is this illusory quality.

In our first room the offering was beautiful crystal clear storytelling from a young female performer dressed in flower petals and lit through a sort of birdcage grid.  She talked of a dark space were a child is detained in fear.  Our initial guide was one of three young women who sang beautifully as they restricted the narrator with restraints attached to her costume.

As it was the first work I saw it felt very pivotal to the whole.   However I there is an interconnectivity linking all of the separate works that surely render them all pivotal to some degree.  This is a huge testament to Artistic Director Nadja Kostich and her production team and particularly design by Emily Barrie where costume morphs into set and visa versa and holds integrated and essential meaning.

Our second room was about choices and particularly choices that require some examination of ethical thought.   As with St Martin’s most recent show Banjos, Boots & Beyonce we the audience are encouraged to participate -to find ourselves cooperating and engaging in a prescribed exercise.  This is fun and absorbing.  And I believe Associate Artist Stefan Bramble is to be complimented for this engaging, thought provoking, experience.

I am reminded of the writing of Isobelle Carmody - specifically her book of plays Way Out.  And in a room with talented musicians playing as stones were placed on a girl’s body the story ‘Singing my Sister Down’ by Margo Lanagan from her short story collection Black Juice.

One of the scenes/stories is seemingly about a child being pushed (by her mother) to public objectification.  This portrayal of ‘child as art’ turns the performance on itself and creates a kind of Meta thinking about the whole.  All that we are experiencing is, from a Youth Arts Centre, that, on it’s web home page states: Art by children for adult audiences.

For the Ones Who Walk Away is a haunting experience.  Perhaps, partly, because it is presented from the perspective of a the assumed innocence with which we endow children.  One of the things that stayed with me is searching looks from performers that questioned what I, as audience, was gleaning or understanding.

A heightened poetic language is particularly evident in the third and final section where we are all gathered together as spectators.  Ursula Le Guin’s poetic truncated language permeates the whole with a sense of struggle to create meaning from what has come before.

In the last ten minutes I could imagine myself in a hive of bees and the building of Siteworks a beehive.

All in all exciting and challenging contemporary Theatre.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Black is the Colour

Deafferent Theatre Presents:

Black is the Colour

By Daniel Keene

Director – Jessica Moody

Catherine – Anna Seymour

Irene – Hilary Fisher

Creative Producer – Jessica Moody

Auslan Master – Sherrie Beaver

Production Manager and Creative Producer – Ilana Charnelle Gelbert

Lighting Design – John Collopy

Sound Design – shannyn,art

Caption Technician – Jessica Murray

Arts House – North Melbourne Town Hall – 24 September – 1 October 2016

This is an awesome first production by Deafferent Theatre.  It is a wonderful opportunity for Deaf

and hearing friends to come together to experience dialogue and interaction in Auslan performed by two expressly engaging and consummate performers.  Their work is crisp and vibrant and clearly supported with captions. 

As a hearing person it just takes a little time to get used to looking above the actors to, as quickly as possible, read the text and then be able to check into the beauty and clarity of the signing.  And it is surprisingly satisfying to engage with a signed work that is partially buoyed with sound (shannyn.art).

Black is the Colour is about a friendship, with at times hazy boundaries, between two women where one is trying, as best she can, to support the other to leave an abusive relationship.

The choice of this sensitive, rich and current text by writer Daniel Keene is a resonant and rewarding one.   It explores the profound difficulties undergone in trying to leave a relationship that is infused with physical, and therefore, emotional and psychological violence.

A hallmark of Keene’s work the courage to look into the dark corners of social alienation and disenfranchisement.  In this instance he explores the experience of psychological instability that can be caused through enduring abuse in a relationship.

Anna Seymour is an experienced dancer, who in this work although not dancing, sensitively and explicitly, lets the audience into the quandary her character Catherine is tussling with.   Hilary Fisher as Irene communicates her characters deep concerns and persistence and also sadly - ultimate disenchantment.

As I watched I started to think how amazing it would be if, at some point, the performers could leap into dance and even just momentarily transcend the need for spoken or signed words.  But maybe that could be a twist in Deafferent’s next project?

Tickets are selling like hotcakes – so book now if you want to catch this show.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Cho Cho - Review

Arts Centre Melbourne, National Theatre of China and Playking Productions presents:

Cho Cho

By Daniel Keene

Music by Cheng Jin

Directed by Peter Wilson

Designer - Richard Jaziorny

Lighting – Wang Qi

Musical Director – David Piper

Re-rehearsal Director – Lech Mackiewicz

Cast:

Scott Irwin – Pinkerton

Wang Zheng – Cho Cho

David Whitney – Sharpless

Du He – Guma

Dong Wenliang – Lou Shu

Danielle Barnes – Kate/bar singer

Puppeteer – Hang Xing

Producer – Ziyin Wang Gantner

October 2013

Playhouse – Arts Centre Melbourne

Whether the outcomes are stunningly successful theatre, or not, we are extremely privileged in Melbourne to be regularly treated to valuable cultural exchanges by the Arts Centre.  This work is particularly interesting because of the changes and redevelopment it has been subject to.

Cho Cho in its current rendition is a wonderful opportunity to witness an attempted melding of English and Chinese language and music through the use of a timeless story of a young woman wronged, albeit as interpreted without sentiment and embellishment by writer Daniel Keene over twenty five years ago.  However the combinations of language, music and acting styles do not fully compliment, or indeed sit comfortably with, each other at all times.  This disconcerting disconnect renders the work intriguing though bemusing, and for this viewer, distances the story. 

With the exception of the use of puppets by a master puppeteer Hang Xing, some of the duets and the characterization of the two villainous comic characters, Du He as Guma and Dong Wenliang as Lou Shu the cruel mercenary relatives who foist Cho Cho on the uncaring Pinkerton, Cho Cho lacks light and shade and therefore nuance.   

Combining live music with a backing recording seems to be commonplace now days.  In this instance there is often a sense of a dulling and muting effect on the efforts of the live instrumentalists, though not the singing, which is often entrancing.

Musically composer Cheng Jin affords mixed results. However the voices of Wang Zheng as Cho Cho and David Whitney as Sharpless combine exquisitely a number of times throughout.

Problems of literalism pervade the design of the set by Richard Jeziorny.

Having not caught Cho Cho thirty years ago but remembering the excitement surrounding its inception I rushed to grab a review ticket for this return performance.  Although it is encouraging and interesting to see this twenty-five year old work revived, I doubt it bares much resemblance to the original. 

It feels a little weary, simplistic and frozen behind a proscenium arch.

Perhaps this airing in Melbourne will blow away some of the cobwebs and renew a sense of trusting connected with an Australian audience.

Suzanne Sandow