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 - Joan

Luisa Hastings Edge

JOAN

Presented by THE RABBLE and Theatre Works

Co-creators Kate Davis and Emma Valente

Set and Costume Design - Kate Davis

Text/Direction /LX Design / SFX Design – Emma Valente

AV Design – Martyn Coutts

Dramaturg - Leisa Shelton

Production Manager – Rebecca Etchell

Stage Manager and LX and SFX Operator – Ruth Blair

Creative Producer – Josh Wright

Performers:  Luisa Hastings Edge, Emily Milledge, Dana Miltins and Nikki Shiels

20 April - 30 April 2017

Opening with extraordinary multi media projections on scrims, JOAN by the RABBLE, is a work of high art.  It is riveting, hypnotic, haunting and sometimes deeply shocking.  But at all times uncompromisingly designed to insightfully explore a deep feminist response to the now canonized, illiterate peasant, who was ‘the virgin from Orleans.’   Joan of Arc who, in The Middle Ages, led the French into battle with the English, who ultimately burned her at the steak thrice, is the subject of this production.

Dana Miltins and Emily Milledge by David Paterson

Here her story is stripped back to its powerful and profound essence by a courageous affiliation of theatre makers who have previously brought us similarly weighty works such as The Story of O (2013) and Salome (2008).

I strongly advise before seeing this show you read up on Joan of Arc to be able to augment this astonishing ‘black and white’ offering with one’s own understandings, insights and colourful nuances.

Luisa Hastings Edge

The performance at Theatre Works is remarkably finely micro managed.  Lighting, sound, projections (Emma Valente and Martyn Coutts) and the human bodies of performers, Luisa Hastings Edge, Emily Milledge, Dana Miltins and Nikki Shiels work in outstanding synchronicity to produce startlingly crisply timed images.

Costumes by Kate Davis have the capacity to morph suggestively from military uniform to flowing dresses to projection screens of sorts.

Encapsulated here are Joan’s strengths of huge courage and dogged determination, along with her humiliation at the very private becoming excruciatingly public, then her torture and horrific demise.

As a mostly image based work, when text is finally spoken it is acutely and intensely visceral.  All four performers excel in affecting the audience with words but most particularly Nikki Sheils with Emma Valente’s sharp acute text.

It feels like a privilege and honour to be able to attend theatre of this caliber.

Suzanne Sandow

Review - Little Emperors

Little Emperors

By Lachlan Philpott

Directed by Wang Chong

CAST

Diana (Xiaojie) Lin

Liam Maguire

Alice Qin

Yuchen Wang

Dramaturgy – Mark Prichard

Set and Costume Design – Romanie Harper

Lighting Design and AV Consultant – Emma Valente

Sound Design – James Paul

AV Programmer – Andre Vanderwert

Stage Manager – Harriet Gregory

Malthouse Theatre

The Beckett

9 – 26 February 2017

Little Emperors is multi layered.  It is a personal family story that is profoundly meshed in the immeasurably burdensome cultural story of China’s One Child Policy.  It is presented in a wonderful surreal abstracted way, and yet surprisingly, it also accentuates the naturalistic and acutely personal via the use of ‘state of the art’ Audio-Visual projection.

The staging is unusual - perhaps inspired.  The set (Romanie Harper) is a shallow pool of water in front of a scrim made up of numerous distended scrolls.   At first the performers work with the water in a tentative controlled way.  However, as the work progresses, the water is used to express emotions of varying extremes.

Considerable variety in atmosphere is communicated specifically with the use of lighting (Emma Valente) and how it plays on/and with the water and the scrim.  Lit with red lights at times it feels encompassing and hypnotically lulling, at other times, bright and clear - with sharp reflections in the water, and silhouettes on the scrim.  Crisp clarity and murky confusion and numerous states in-between are conveyed. 

Generally the acting is stunning.  Yuchen Wang as Kaiwen is wholly convincing in his role of hidden second child who finally escaped China to ‘indulge in’ a Western way of life in Melbourne.  His work is fine and astute and seems to channel the writer and director and character all at the same time.

As Kaiwen’s Mother Diana (Xiaojie) Lin gives a very sincere tightly timed and controlled performance.

Alice Qin who plays Kaiwen’s sister gives a vital performance full gloriously expressed energy.  She plays a first child who although a girl was kept and dressed as a boy to hide her gender.

Sound (James Paul) initially introduces a kind of weird surreal atmosphere and then enhances and underscores effectively.

This is a wonderful glowing experiment as a cultural exchange.  It has particular relevance to our changing political landscape.  And it highlights the hubris intrinsic to the overly nurtured children of China’s One Child Policy - that may constitute a ‘cultural time bomb.’  

But who can say if it is any more of a cultural time bomb then the one building in the West - through unfettered consumerism, self-interest and individual self-aggrandizement?

It marks a very successful venture of a commissioned work with Writer (Lachlan Philpott), Director (Wang Chong) and Dramaturge (Mark Pritchard) developing a significant and resounding piece of contemporary Theatre for Asia Topa.

In many ways a masterful achievement!

Suzanne Sandow

Review - Story of O

Story of O

By THE RABBLE after Pauline Reage

Supported by NEON (Melbourne Theatre Company)

The Lawler Studio – Southbank

June 27 – July 7

Creators – Kate Davis and Emma Valente

Director – Emma Valente

Set & Costume Design – Date Davis

Cast

O – Mary Helen Sassman

Sir Stephen – Jane Montgomery Griffith

Rene  - Gary Abrahams

Jacqueline – Dana Miltins

Anne-Marie – Pier Carthew

Nathalie – Emily Milledge

Actors move around on a sparse stage, set with merry-go-round horses and sprinkled with sand that makes a crunching sound as it is walked on.  This modern reinterpretation, by The Rabble, of the original novel Story of O written by Pauline Reage (Anne Desclos) and published in 1954, is at times, an overwhelmingly visceral experience.

The masochism of being subjected to erotic/pornographic sex is explored from the female perspective.  Mary Helen Sassman plays O, a young woman with a healthy defiance, who throughout is symbolically violated with clinical objectivity - as though such exploits are an imperative and necessary evil.  The unquestioning compliance, with which, the-matter-of fact sex acts are perpetrated, by the other characters, is fascinating.  This disturbing malaise of neutrality allows, the viewer, space for contemplating meaning that is uncluttered by emotional connectivity. 

As O, Sassman tellingly and poignantly portrays the journey of a feisty and strong willed young woman being corroded by voluntary sexual exploitation/victimization.

Emily Milledge is beautifully cast as Nathalie an apparently unquestioning compliant and complicit child like assistant who’s participation in torturous activities implies the self perpetuating unquestioning and cyclic nature of the exploitation of the female body.

The character of Sir Stephen played by Jane Montgomery Griffiths establishes an unstable patriarchal focal point.  Griffith richly and disturbingly embodies this controlling and unlovely male character who initially lectures the audience on the semantics of erotica.

Story of O is a serious work and not for the faint hearted.  Acts of sex and violence such as penetration, restraint and whipping are robustly and graphically, albeit symbolically, enacted. 

Director Emma Valente courageously and rewardingly explores theories of erotica in relation to gender – fulfillment, satiation and annihilation.

It is an intense and rocky ride that has much to recommend it including a hilarious parody on the casting of a classic work that is concurrently running at Melbourne Theatre Company.

(For Stage Whispers)