Review - Blood Wedding

Blood Wedding

by Federico Garcia Lora

Adapted by Raimondo Cortese

Directed by Marion Potts

Set and Costume Design – The Sisters Hayes, Lighting Design – Paul Jackson, Composition – Tim Rogers, Assistant Director – Claudia Escobar

Performed by: Silvia Colloca, Nicole Da Silva, Irene Del Pilar Gomez, Ivan Donato, Mariola Fuentes, Ruth Sancho Huerga, Matias Steven, Greg Ulfan, David Valencia

Merlyn Theatre 21 July 19 August

Malthouse’s production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding sees language as no barrier to understanding a narrative of overwhelming desire and crushing grief, and potentially, injects heat and passion into the bleak, cold and wet Melbourne mid-winter.

In this contemporized, bi-lingual and ‘universal’ production the performances are strong and flowing.  However the bold staging on a vast desert like space, by director Marion Potts, and atmospheric lighting by Paul Jackson does not adequately support the actors, vocally or physically, to reach up into the large auditorium and move the audience through poetic emotion.  Nor is the small cast able to satisfactorily infer the largess of a huge wedding party or oppressive aspects of community as described and inferred by Lorca.  

This staging’s sense of arid space contradicts the claustrophobic lack of freedom that is at the core of the text.

The intense introductory scene, a duologue between mother (Mariola Fuentes) and her son (David Valencia) the bridegroom, is strong and elucidating and sets a high benchmark.  Both actors create a solid and convincing connection between their characters and clearly introduce the framing motif of violence. 

Throughout there can be no doubt that Fuentes’s mother is perpetually in pain due to the grief of losing a son to violence and therefore desperate to keep her last remaining child safe.  She plays an archetypal winging mother but vocally any rich timbre at her disposal is not projected to fill the space with nuance.   

The design by The Sisters Hayes incorporates intriguing ambiguous elements and motifs of extreme contrast, such as hot and cold.  They feature numerous fridges along the back of the set – establishing a reductive and basic environment suggesting domestic spaces and/or the kitchen of a huge reception a centre.  Stage right is placed a huge wall of symbolic crucifixes covered with what appears to be growing vines that later are transformed into something more disturbing and sinister. 

The wedding dress, beautifully worn by Nicole De Silva, is superb.  

Towards the end of the production as Spanish is flatly translated into English by a voice stripped of musicality.   This could be purposefully done to more vividly contrast the Spanish with the English but the result is dreary.  

Through working on two of Lorca’s plays The House of Bernarda Alba and Yerma I have felt Lorca to be a man pathologically at odds with societies constrictions. Interestingly, through the broadening perspective of this production, I realize the culture he wrote about had at its heart a perpetually brutalizing cycle of damage that he was hitting out against.

This is one of those occasions when reading the director’s notes after a performance goes a long way to validate and inform a production.  

Although, for me, all aspects of this production are not successfully integrated, it is doubtless, developing and consolidating as the actors become more at home in, and start to assertively fill, the Merlyn with passion and poetry.

Well worth seeing but try to sit as close to the actors as possible.

For Stage Whispers

Review - Triangle

Triangle by Glyn Roberts

Presented by MKA (Winter Season)

Director – Tanya Dickson, Dramaturg – Jane E. Thompson, Set Designer Eugyeene Teh, Costume Designer – Chloe Greaves, Lighting Designer - Rob Sowinski, Sound Designer – Russell Goldsmith, Co-Sound Designer – Chris Wenn, Stage Manager/Operator – Hayley Ricketson, Voice Coach  - Leslie Cartwright, Movement Consultant – Janine Watson 

Cast: Elizabeth Nabben and Janine Watson

Sutton Street North Melbourne - Season July 25 to August 4

Like an old haunting fairytale Triangle seduces with the familiar, then commences a journey traversing the realms of passion, violence and the supernatural in a in a perfectly unexpected yet strangely anticipated manner.   

It is set in and around a supermarket like Tuesday another terrific work presented by MKA in June.  However unlike its predecessor Triangle veers into fanciful, lyrical subliminal territory.

It commences with the student (Elizabeth Nabbin) addressing the audience about her response to and experiences at Piedemonte’s supermarket in Fitzroy. Then disconcertingly and without warning realities start to shift from the mention of eating unprepared couscous.  Similarly the situation of a young wife and mother (Janine Watson), presented in a rational - factual manner, slightly slips a cog and becomes hilariously and outrageously funny from the suggestion of the affects of caffeine on a toddler.

Triangle has been refined through input from an inspired and inspiring team.  There is hardly a hair out of place.  Sound (Russell Goldsmith and Chris Wenn) underpins the atmosphere and light (Rob Sowinski) mostly elucidates but some times endows the whole with a sense of question.  Set by Eugyeene Teh and costumes by Chloe Greaves define and enhance from a ‘less is more’ perspective.

Both actors are exemplary in their roles.  Their work, although subtle, is clear, forthright and strong.  Some actions, sudden changes and dialogue, that appear to be wholly embraced by the actors, make no immediate sense, and yet, are oddly just so right. 

The direction by Tanya Dickson displays foresight and immaculate attention to detail.

Engrossed by the hilarious weirdness of it all I looked at my watch, craving more – not wanting it to end knowing the short fifty minutes must almost be up.  How often can one say that about theatre? 

I wanted to be wowed by Triangle and, so was. 

Go and see this innovative yet grounded production from fascinating pen of writer Glyn Roberts, but not, if you prefer the unshakable comfort of the literal. 

It is the type of art that highlights and questions through collapsing preconceptions.

For Stage Whispers

Review - Shifting Ground

Shifting Ground

by Zoe Scoglio

Presented by Arts House

Concept/Performer/Videographer – Zoe Scoglio,Sound Designer – Nigel Brown, Set and Prop Designer – Zoe Stuart, Interaction Designer – Chris Heywood, Producer – Briony Galligan

Meat Market 19 to 22 July

This refined work requires a receptive open mind from its audience, who is ushered into a small reception room to receive a piquant glass of tea and choose an industrial or natural rock of their own, to then enter the small gallery of a performance space. 

In the intense, short but highly immersive forty-five minutes Zoe Scoglio engages, discovers, explores and plays with natural and constructed images of the forming, formations, and constructions of geological terrain.  Not a word is spoken and the audience is free to read into it what they will.

Performer, lighting, sound, image and projections are honed and melded to explore shifting interactions with the universe, earth and manmade construction. 

Throughout, it is the interactive mechanisms of sound and movement that are particularly intriguing and affecting.

Shifting Ground is a beautifully managed, sensitive and finely tuned collaboration of considerable artistic merit.

Highly recommended for those into, or wanting to experience, performance art.

Suzanne Sandow 

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - McNeil Project

The McNeil Project:

The Chocolate Frog

The Old Familiar Juice

Presented by Wattle We Do Next Productions

In association with Stable Productions & Auspicious Arts Projects

Writer Jim McNeil, Director Malcolm Robertson, Actors: Will Ewing, Luke McKenzie, Cain Thompson and Richard Bligh

45 Downstairs:  6-29 July – Tuesday to Saturday 8pm, Sunday 5pm

The McNeil Project offers the chance to revisit a significant era of Australian Theatre History, in presenting two enlightening short plays that are set in prison cells of the 1970s.  These works are written by Jim McNeil who himself was a convicted prisoner.  

Production values are crisp and clean and the acting sincere and focused.  Both plays are well written, intriguing depictions of destabilized and volatile power relationships.

In The Chocolate Frog two inmates deal with the introduction to their cell of a ‘new chum’ Kevin (Will Ewing) a young University Student.  As Kevin becomes progressively more threatened by Shirker (Luke McKenzie) he becomes more opinionated and patronizing, risking life and limb.

The Old Familiar Juice, a more complicated and nuanced work, shows three prisoners imbibe in an illicit alcoholic concoction that triggers complex and destructive behaviors and unleashes the predatory sexual appetites of Bull (Kevin McKenzie).  All three actors McKenzie, Cain Thompson as Stanley and Richard Bligh as the shrewd Dadda have moments of riveting excellence.

Times have changed and I realized I was viewing these plays I had seen many years before, through a psyche heavily affected by more recent works, such as films like The Boys, Animal Kingdom and Snowtown, that portray blood-curdling intimidation and inability to break patterns of behaviors of the type Jim McNeil wrote about. Which, I am ashamed to have to admit, left me wanting to experience more sense of imminent danger.

On the night I attended there were some initial issues with vocal projection in Chocolate Frog, where all three actors seemed to be bouncing sound around in a way that made it difficult to catch exactly what was been said. Too much dialogue was being declaimed.  Fortunately this problem did not bleed into the second play. 

As the acting grows in subtlety and more subtext is discovered throughout the run this production should peak into very satisfying theatre.

Suzanne Sandow

For Stage Whispers

Review - sex.violence.blood.gore

sex.violence.blood.gore

By Alfian bin Sa’at

(co-writted with Chong Tze Chien)

Director – Stephen Nicolazzo, Set and Costume Designer – Eugyeene The, Costume Maker – Tessa Leigh Wolfenbuttel Pitt, Lighting – Yasmin Santoso, Sound – Claudio Tocco

Cast – Genevieve Giuffre, Catherine Davies, Matt Furlani, Whitney Boyd, Amy-Scott Smith, Zoe Boesen, Caitlin Adams.

sex.violence.blood.gore is an unexpectedly fascinating political satire.   However it must be said, that without historical knowledge and experience of Singapore, its messages can be a little cryptic and confusing at times.  Regardless, it is an engaging, absorbing, often highly amusing work beautifully presented by gifted, articulate, eloquent actors playing with restraint and irony.  

Due to the title and the discussion in The Age (26 June) of the author being inspired by Marquis de Sade and Foucault I was expecting a jarring and disturbing piece of theatre, with provocative aspects of ‘Theatre of Cruelty.’  However the visceral implications of the title are more often realized through dialogue than action. 

Director Stephen Nicolazzo capably and perceptively orchestrates the whole.

On a set (designed by Eugyeene Teh) inferring ageless civilization - with make-shift Grecian columns supporting an arch decorated by an extravagant freeze of torsos, limbs and body parts, behind gauzy curtains scantily clad performers, wait as though in a bordello, for their turn to be on stage.

Costumed throughout in exquisite, extravagant and redolent undergarments, designed by Eugyeene Teh and made by Tessa Leigh Wolffenbuttel Pitt, five females and one male actor, all in stylized ‘oriental’ make-up, present a number confronting scenes of various degrees of nihilism.

 

For me there was a twinge of – ‘is this cultural exchange or appropriation?’  Perhaps for this fabulous adventurous theatre company such concerns would appear petti and ‘old hat’.  And ultimately it is liberating and refreshing to watch theatre that questions notions of the ‘politically correct' with sharp and subtle acumen.

Go MKA!

Suzanne Sandow

For Stage Whispers

Review - Bindjereb Pinjarra

Bindjareb Pinjarra

Presented by The Pinjarra Project, Deckchair Theatre, ILBIJERRI Theatre Company and Footscray Community Arts Centre, Created and Performed by Isaac Drandic, Geoff Kelso, Sam Longley, Frank Nannup, Kelton Pell and Phil Thomson 

Footscray Community Arts Centre

45 Mooreland Road

Jume 13 - 17

Bindjareb Pinjarra is the very essence of a stunning touring show.  It is particularly accessible because of its down to earth ‘boysey’ humour and totally worth catching for a number of reasons I hope I make clear in the following.

Part of its very considerable charm is that in relation to contemporary race relations in Australia it walks an excruciatingly fine line, between both the potentially sanctimonious and the awkwardly self-effacingly, politically incorrect with surprising and uplifting success.  It never becomes ‘cringe worthy’!

It is a vital, engaging, partly improvised and often very funny, highly tuned physical theatre piece that borders on Theatre In Education.  I would like to say it is also timely.  However truthfully it is way over due and would have been timely if it had been brought to us ten years ago when it was first conceived.  But, better late than never!

Bindjareb Pinjarra explores black/white relations in south-west Western Australia, with a focus on the early days of settlement and it culminates in the retelling of the Massacre at Pinjarra that was lead by Governor James Stirling in 1834.

However, on another level, it is the story of how some white blokes and some Noongar blokes  are taking on the mission of sharing shameful and baffling truths from violent pasts that  - hidden in a kind of half-life - are haunting us.  In doing this they are making some sense of it all, by liberating knowledge and sharing it with audiences and ancestral spirits alike.  It contains a wonderful haunting, mystical element, that is reinforced, not only by an exquisitely painted and beautifully lit backdrop, a live and recorded soundscape that doesn’t miss a beat, but also, with a concluding question and answer session.

As a piece that does not have a single writer or a director it is a testament to what can be achieved by a group of talented dedicated men, with lashings of integrity and purpose, working and creating together.  

Inspirational!

Suzanne Sandow 

For Stage Whispers

Review - The Girls In Grey

The Girls in Grey

By Carolyn Bock and Helen Hopkins

Presented by The Shift Theatre in association with Theatre Works

Directed by Karen Martin, Cast: Grace – Carolyn Bock, Elsie - Olivia Connolly, Alice – Helen Hopkins, Syd, Harry, Len, Soldier – Lee Mason, Lighting Design – Nick Merrylees, Sound Design – Nick Van Cuylenberg, Set Design – Alexander Hiller, Costume Design – Lyn Wilson

 Theatre Works - April 25 to May 13

The Girls in Grey is an amalgam of experiences of Australian Army Nurses serving in World War One. Much of the text comes from diary entries and letters. It is a work that ‘tells it like it really was’ through the sensibilities of the women of the era.

It is written by Helen Hopkins and Carolyn Bock over two years of research and creative development.  Real-life experience is adapted for performance without being reinterpreted to satisfy contemporary insights or expectations.  And as such The Girls in Grey is a noteworthy historical document that offers significant insight into social expectations through how these women expressed themselves whilst living under great duress.

In this meaningful actor’s vehicle, all performers, and most particularly Helen Hopkins and Carolyn Bock, excel in conveying the social mores of the time through their well-honed expressive skills and clear well-modulated voices.  They are amply assisted by excellent costumes designed by Lyn Wilson. Both Bock and Hopkins convey moments of strong and moving emotional revelation.

As an insightful historical text it is no surprise that The Girls in Grey is on the VCE Drama list.  It would make an excellent touring show that would delight members of Historical Societies.

Director Karen Martin displays deep respect for the material and the skill of her actors by staging the whole in an uncomplicated fluid manner.  The set (Alexandra Hiller) is a wooden rostrum with a backdrop of a symbolic trench.

However the work is worthy of a more complex and subtle lighting design (Nick Merrylees) that specifically and atmospherically signify environments.  The sound scape (Nick Van Cuylenberg) is heavy handed and lacks nuance at times.

Perhaps startling affects could be incorporated to jolt an audience into vivid and visceral experiences of the horrors of war.  However the depth of empathy and understanding as expressed by the actors, most particularly in moments of heightened emotional experience, is elucidating and convincing.

As the season continues this troupe of talented actors will sense opportunities for defining environments, enhancing atmospheres and add touches of believability.

In all, The Girls in Grey is a sensible, well-constructed, interpreted and presented testimony of experiences of our nurses working by the side of our soldiers in WWI.

  

It will move and please many people.

(For Stage Whispers)