Review - Unknown Neighbours

Theatre Works and Festival of Live Art Present

UNKNOWN NEIGHBOURS

By Ranters Theatre and Creative VaQi

Created by

Beth Buchanan                 Performer

Adriano Cortese               Co-Director

Da-Huim Kim                    Performer

Kyung-Sung Lee               Co Director

Deborah Leiser-Moore   Performer

Kyung-Min Na                   Performer

Soo-Yeon Sung                  Performer

Theatre Works 12 – 18 March 2018

Site-specific work can be a bit hit and miss.  Unknown Neighbours is a hit not to be missed!  No seriously - this is a rich and rewarding collaboration between Ranters Theatre and Creative VaQi from Korea for the FOLA (Festival of Living Art).  And the season is only a few days!

As an organic cultural exchange that was first performed in Seoul, Unknown Neighbours is, and is destined to be, much more then the sum of its parts.  It is a collaboration between Theatre makers from Eastern and Western communities with differences in language, community structures, religion and styles of theatre making and an inimitable offering. 

On any single visit each audience member gets to see one main piece of the four or five unique sight-specific installations, but most significantly, acquires a rich sense of the connections and rewards of this intercultural collaboration.

On opening night I went to the house that was occupied by Beth Buchanan and her investigation into, and expression of, separation.  This intense and affecting work conjures the visceral reality of what, individuals dissolving relationships can experience.  Eventually, it, very satisfyingly, morphs into a philosophical contemplation on romantic and lasting relationships, home and aloneness.  Ms. Buchanan is beautifully in control of her material and environment and communicates with her audience with great integrity.

I can only speak for this particular experience however - as an indication of the gravitas of the work on offer any of the individual works would be worth caching.  I don’t know how the bookings are decided - it may just be the luck of the draw – ‘pot luck.’  (Check with Theatre Works on this.)

A brisk walk follows the engagement with the various housed performance installations, to a park area where all performers and audience meet amongst locals and general vibrant everyday goings on.  Here the intended focus seems more general and elicits a sense of community.   Our next stop is the wonderful atmospheric and unsettlingly enhanced environment of the very old Christ Church St Kilda - next to the once Parish Hall - Theatre Works.  Here idiosyncratically East meets West with an unearthly sense of magic as Korean bells chime in a traditional church space and we move in an unconventional way throughout the area.

Finally five performers share something of their experience of involvement with aspects of the work and we are taken on a, galvanizing, projected video of the surrounding suburb and out to the bay.

A unique and very special adventure that I can’t recommend highly enough.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - All of My Friends Were There

All Of My Friends Were There

Presented by the Guerilla Museum

In association with Theatre Works and Melbourne Festival

The Guerrilla Museum:  Annie Bourke – Producer, John Byrne – Venue Production, Manager and Lighting Designer, D.A. Calf – Technical Production Manager and Sound Designer, Bryanna Lowen and Sarah Hall – Set and Costume Design, Sean Healy – Video Design, Lloyd Marsden – Video Programming

This is a really fun and joyful evening of participatory entertainment.

Pretty much what happens at Birthday Parties transpires at a completely co-opted Theatre Works for the next few evenings.  So bursting to the seams with party preparation and performance spaces - is Theatre Works - that a Porter Loo needed to the flown in!

I took and old friend and had a really great time.  We went with the flow, had silly photos taken, put on make up in a 1960’s malaise, generally relaxed, had a laugh, and went out of our way to cooperate with a large performance audience to celebrate the birthday (not even on the right date) of someone most of us just didn’t know.  And dance – we drank bubbly and danced like we haven’t in a long time.

The audience is all mixed up in designated groupings and some go off to Luna Park and undoubtedly have great fun and some stay and play amusing games like Musical Chairs and Pass the Parcel, a secretly organized group work on a speech, others make lolly bags and there is the opportunity to make Fairy Bread and discuss its cultural significance with Maude Davy as well as do a bit of shared cake decorating.

Some get treated to an awfully raunchy “Girl’s Party” – and blimey does that go off.  Three lovely nubile young women strut their stuff and get most of their audience moving in sync to The Time Warp.

Most instructions are issued non-verbally – which definitely cuts down on unnecessary time wasting and requires everybody to communicate in a more expressive, than usual, way.

You can stand back and be a voyeur or innocent bystander and/or chat to people you have never met before.  But hey our guides, and performers and the band offer engagement in such a light encouraging way it just seems fun to express exhilarating exuberance for the imaginary love of the surprise birthday person. 

A unique and memorable celebration of life!

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 - 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 - 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)