Review - Poor Boy - Melbourne Theatre Company

A Doll(boy)'s House
“For the majority,” said Jean Cocteau, “a work of art cannot be beautiful without a plot involving mysticism or love”. Matt Cameron’s Poor Boy has a bob each way by including both and, like one of Cocteau’s elegant films (like the voice from the other side coming from the radio which was a feature of Cocteau's Orphée), creates a spirit world alongside the real world where mysticism and love are intrinsically bound together.

Daniel (Guy Pearce) has been killed by a hit a run driver whilst on a Zebra crossing. He was studiously keeping to the black lines, it was a foggy night, he was wearing a zebra mask and, we discover, was asking for it. Thirteen minutes later at the stroke of midnight a boy is born in another part of town. When the play begins it is the night before that boy's seventh birthday. He has become withdrawn, prone to fainting spells and worrisome child to his parents Viv (Linda Cropper) and Sol (Greg Stone). That that night he is nearly hit while on a zebra crossing. Then the boy announces to Sol, Viv and sister Sadie (Sara Gleeson) that he is not their son or brother but an adult man and marches off to join his wife Clare (Abi Tucker), mother Ruth (Sarah Peirce) and brother Miles (Matt Dyktynski). The families are united by the creepy boy and by the end of the first act the circumstances leading up to Daniel's death are uncovered. The second act needs to prepare every one's soul, not just Daniel's restless one, for final truth that has caused to him to occupy - Dybbuk style - the young boy for seven years.

Iain Aitken's set is a dark world. A drab, grey, house full of of generations of bad memories that haunt as much as any spectre. As the play opens the ghost of Daniel wanders through the house lifting dust sheets off the other characters as though they were ghosts themselves. In Cameron's script the grief over the physical loss of one son, the emotional loss of the other and breakdown of both families have rendered them able to speak only in aphorisms or do only things that have overtly symbolic value. The climax, for example, has Sol, like his biblical namesake Solomon, settling with his revelation, the dispute between the rival mother's Viv and Ruth. Tim Finn's songs have been slotted into the action, 'juke box musical' style, but not with consistent dramatic value. In some instances it feels as though Cameron's script purposely includes key works from Finn's songs in order to launch yet another one into the action. But, as with Malthouse's Sleeping Beauty, audiences cant help enjoying hearing familiar songs and when they clinch a dramatic situations all the better. The singing is very good, Pearce sings even better than I remember (I saw Grease) and puts across a big, heart-felt ballad, crooning high notes and all. The rest of the cast as impressive and often give startling twists to some of the songs in their new dramatic contexts. The band is great too, a cross between a rock and pit band with just a touch of strings and some really attractive mallet percussion in places.

Even with a secksay international movie star in the lead Poor Boy is only one half of the attraction; the new MTC’s ultra theatrical new Sumner Theatre in Southbank is the other. Spacious foyers, masses of glass walls allowing for natural lighting in the foyers (where you see the other kind of stars shining in the night sky as you exit the auditorium). Inside the theatre the walls are peppered with quotations in blue lights from plays while the seats in the single-level auditorium cascade down to the stage like as in a classical amphitheatre with impressive sight lines and acoustics.
Poor Boy (2009) a play with songs by Matt Cameron and Tim Finn
Daniel - Guy Pearce
Viv - Linda Cropper
Sadie - Sara Gleeson
Solomon - Greg Stone
Clare - Abi Tucker
Ruth - Sarah Peirce
Miles - Matt Dyktynski
Boy - Gulliver McGrath, Jack McKinnis-Pegg or Hunter Stanford
Director - Simon Phillips
Musical Director - Ian McDonald
Set Designer - Iain Aitken
Costume Designer - Adrienne Chisholm
Lighting Designer - Nick Schlieper
A co-production between the Melbourne and Sydney Theatre Companies
Sumner Theatre
21 January - 8 March 2009
150 minutes (including 1 interval)

Review - The Genuine Exhibition - Midsumma Festival

The exhibition title, The Genuine Exhibition, as Troy-Anthony Baylis explains in the catalogue interview “is a loaded, multivalent (meaning to have many values, meanings and appeals) title. Knitting is a very traditional craft of Ireland and Western culture and Baylis’s Aboriginal and Irish heritage could be one of the many ‘strands’ that appears to ‘thread’ - to use appropriate metaphors - into his deceptively simple art.

Baylis is also gay and in the interview stresses the equal importance of his indigenous and queer identity, “identities that have gained considerable mobility for expression.” That mobility is evident in the scope of Baylis’s activity as artist, performance artist and activist. He recently assumed a drag identity based on the pulp-romance novelist Barbara Cartland which, in its artistic context explores albeit humorously gender roles, pre and post feminism (by mocking both the frilly, fluffy appearance Cartland adopted in retreat from feminism) and the Queer Theory inherent in Drag. Knitting, learned from his mother and grandmothers, was the first ‘strand’ in Baylis’s artistic life, where he explains he was “like a stitching hand, where the control of the works lay with my female elders” and, in the same way when elders, passing on a craft, instill an ingenious ability to adapt objects to any given situation and environment, Baylis demonstrates the same ingenuity adapting the works into a wider artistic practice while retaining the appearance spiritual significance of what he makes. The brightly coloured knitted and embroidered Am an animal and a plant (2008) or monochromatic It’s a grey thing (2009) resemble traditional decorated twined baskets.

Drag evolved as part of Baylis’s ‘coming out process – a fascinating paradox as the notion of ‘coming out’ would imply an unmasking of the self whereas adopting drag is to explore and undertake disguises which by their nature are insincere or patently false.

The artworks in the current exhibition are installed to compliment one another, the knitted works and painted works sit alongside one another mimicking each other’s structure in their composition. The paintings, made from rows of x’s as opposed to the more familiar dots of Central Desert paintings (and seeming to be in direct contrast in Western thinking to dots). The 'x' refers to a kiss which in turn refers to "romantic performance," the performance of the finished artworks being as important an aspect of Baylis's work as the work he physically performs. The rows of tiny x’s in the paintings flow across the canvases like row upon row of stitches in the knitted poles that hang by them. Similarly the knitted poles, made from tonally matched pink and lavender wools, echo the rows of crosses in the paintings.

Troy-Anthony Baylis, The Genuine Exhibition
Australian Dreaming Art
116 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy
23 January – 21 February 2009

Review - This Is Our Youth - Inside Job Productions

The Stoned Age
Set in New York in 1982 Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth uses the dawning new conservatism in US social and political culture and its effect on the youth of that decade as a parallel with the new generation. Social commentary aside, the play emerges as one of the most engaging American comedies of the last twenty years; a three-hander with superior characterisations and situations and very permissivce as though Neil Simon were writing a comedy in the style of David Mamet. The conceits of the middle-American business class are played up with an almost Ortonesque absurdity. Escaping from his bullying, lingerie manufacturer father, geeky Warren (Ashley Zukerman) escapes (with $15,000 of his father’s shady money) and crashes at his drug-dealer friend Dennis’s (Ben Geurens) apartment. In the long opening scene these Mamet-styled bad boys in training plan a series of drug deals using Warren’s money as capital, after first having a celebratory splurge on drugs and champagne in which Dennis plans to win back his feuding girlfriend and Warren hopes to win favour with her friend Jessica (Nicole da Silva). Naturally it all goes wrong and the two hopeless stoners are left alone, the classic ‘odd couple’. Lonergan casts the play as a succession of duos for either Warren and Dennis or Warren and Jessica. In doing this he gives more emphasis to Warren's character as sap to the overbearing Dennis or opening up to the catalyst provided in the first scene with Jessica and then closing down again in their ‘morning after’ encounter. As the play ends Warren is symbolically adrift in the adult world, having lost his precious childhood toys - and prized 'toaster amazing' - and ill prepared for adulthood. There is the feeling that Warren and his kind will not survive oncoming 'Reaganomics' generation. Lonergan’s script is very good and detailed however; filling two well balanced acts where everyone’s back-story is filled out in the dialogue with the same unforced detail.

Andrew Bailey’s set for Dennis’ grungy apartment is practical and detailed down to a packet of Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix in the cupboard while Govin Ruben’s lighting bathes it the hazy light of unwashed globes. As the self-important Dennis Geurens sports an amazingly consistent accent, as do the rest of the cast. Zukerman uncovers every facet of the wounded and vulnerable Warren in a beautifully detailed performance that exploits the intimacy of the acting space. In the scene with Jessica, one of the funniest wooing scenes written, her brittleness and Warren’s sensitivity unfurl in a most impressive display of acting and direction.

Produced by a newly established company Inside Job Productions, comprising Zukerman, Geurens, director Nicholas Pollock and producer Martina Murray, the play is mounted and performed down to the smallest detail and is a very impressive debut work.
This Is Our Youth (1996) by Kenneth Lonergan
Dennis – Ben Geurens
Warren – Ashley Zukerman
Jessica – Nicole da Silva
Director – Nicholas Pollock
Set Designer – Andrew Bailey
Costume Designer – Mel Page
Lighting Designer – Govin Ruben
Sound Designer – Robert Stewart
Fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
15 January - 1 February 2009
140 minutes (including 1 interval)

Review - Rosalie Gascoigne - Ian Potter Centre

Fame came late to the New Zealand born artist Rosalie Gascoigne (1917–1999). Emigrating to Australia in 1943 as a war bride she settled in Canberra as the wife of astronomer Ben Gascoigne raising three children and practising nothing more artistic than flower arranging. She progressed to more rigorous Japanese flower art of Sogetsu Ikebana and achieved such individuality to be praised by the creator of the discipline, Sofu Teshigahara. With more time to spend on art she began to experiment with the now familiar assemblages of scrap iron, packing crates and other found objects.

The retrospective exhibition covers her short but very productive professional career beginning with her whimsical assembalages similar to, if not inspired by, her near contemporary, the American Joseph Cornell. As her profile increased her work lost some of that fantasy as she worked toward a more abstract use of found material. The most important of these experiments were the work created from wooden packing crates, cut up and re-assembled with her natural eye for the beauty and potentional of such material. She progressed into an ability to place pieces of warped sheet metal alongside each other with a feeling for form, space and placement that, knowing her skill with the rigourously simple Ikebana, is hardly surprising.
It is a pity that she never returned to the whimsy and nostalgia of her earlier assemblages with their more powerfull manipulation of such banal material as the Arnott's parrot or scraps of art-deco linolium but, constantly refining towards kind of "less in more" visual Zen, she achieved a great deal in a short time.

Ian Potter Centre

Federation Square, Melbourne
19 December 2008 - 15 March 2009

Review - Grace - Melbourne Theatre Company

Mother, Son and Holy Ghost

"Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see."

C S Lewis The Screwtape Letters

For a jointly written play (by theatre boffin Mick Gordon and “the public face of British atheism” philosopher A C Grayling), Grace is a well devised piece of theatre. Grace (Noni Hazlehurst) is a science professor, eloquently demolishing Intelligent Design in her lectures as succinctly as she demolishes, albeit less eloquently and 'graciously', all trace of religious belief amongst her family; non-observant Jew and retired teacher Tony (Brian Lipson), their son Tom (Grant Cartwright) and "daughter-in-law elect" Ruth (Leah Vandenburg). Tom and Ruth are lawyers and we see him with Ruth studiously rehearsing a defense, unconsciously - Freud gets thrown literally as well as sub-consciously into the textural mix as well - striving to emulate his mother's verbal precision. When Tom abandons Law for the priesthood Grace is outraged. Priests to her are another species of lawyer that encourage and defend fanaticism.
The play has ironies; Grace is the daughter of an aggressively religious father and, after defending Islamic militants as a lawyer, Tom’s religious ambition is cut-short by them. With less talk that irony could be strengthened. Instead it has the feel of one of Ibsen’s philosophical/religious tracts reworked for the 21st century, Brand perhaps, but in reverse, and suffused with Kierkegaard’s atheism confronting the need for religious experience. Instead of going up into the icy mountains like Brand, Grace participates in a scientific experiment to simulate religious experience with unsettling (for her) results. Unlike Ibsen and other writers who pit their firebrand against society Grace remains firmly within a domestic setting. Apart from Ruth (a reference to the Biblical character?), who is quickly absorbed through pregnancy and then tragedy into the family, no outsiders enter to challenge Grace. We glimpse her, again, in another of her eloquent lectures condemning the place of bogus religion in US politics, but her impact on the world is not the stuff of this play. Instead it steers into the domain of a domestic tragedy. It is well written but ultimately becomes another study of loss amongst the upper middle class like Ninety or Love Song.

The play’s ‘preachiness’ runs the danger of becoming a secular sermon and is at odds with the more obviously theatrical parts that try to give it momentum and personality. That is considered a kind of Atheist tract blots out the plot. In its closing scenes it is beautifully acted. Ruth, after suffering Grace’s intellectual barrages for so long retaliates in a beautifully arced speech that rises and falls as precisely as a good lecture, even trailing off for a few beats into silence that prepares for Grace’s lament, this time with a different and illogical passion magnificently contrasting with her clinically calculated speeches. Perhaps if the play were skewed a little more to this story of woman who appears to have blocked out more than just her religious feelings, but how right the worthy devil Screwtape was.
Grace (2008) by Mick Gordon and A C Grayling
Grace Friedman – Noni Hazlehurst
Tom – Grant Cartwright
Tony – Brian Lipson
Ruth – Leah Vandenburg
Director – Marian Potts
Designer – Adam Gardnir
Lighting Design – Matt Scott
Composer – Darrin Verhagen
Fairfax Studio, The Arts Centre
2 January – 14 February 2008
95 minutes (no interval)

London buses are saying it more succinctly

Review - Billy Elliot

Billy Lyre

This musicalised version of the popular and populist 2000 Billy Elliot film is by the original screenwriter (Lee Hall) and director (Stephen Daldry). Perhaps it is their continuing involvement in the production that saves it - and in some parts actually intensifies it - from the bad choices that plague other films-turned-into-musicals. The first act is the most effective although the early 'establishing' scenes, chiefly the one introducing Billy’s home life, father (Richard Piper), Grandmother (Lola Nixon) and brother (Justin Smith), are often awkward and overly long. Other scenes such as Billy’s hated weekly boxing lesson introduce the perpetual course language and character of Billy and his community. The crucial scene where Billy is first exposed to dance at Mrs Wilkinson’s (Genevieve Lemon) weekly ballet class is, conversely, an excellent example and the first of several scenes combining dance, drama and singing inventively. Even more successful are the subsequent scenes depicting the clashes between the striking miners and the police which are juxtaposed with Billy’s determined attempts to master Mrs Wilkinson shonky interpretation of the RAD syllabus. Rows of tutu wearing ‘coal miner’s daughters’ weave around alternating rows of miners and police who move in determinedly ‘un-danced’ looking choreography. These scenes are highly effective and reach their zenith in the act one finale when Billy, forbidden to attend a Royal Ballet School audition, bellows through the streets where the strike has spilled into a riot, his anger riding him over picket fences and riot shields. This thrilling fantasy sequence echoes the power and theatrical effectiveness of the famous ‘rumbles’ from West Side Story.

Act two makes less of an impact. Another fantasy sequence where the young and older Billies dance together resembles a circus wire act while a song and dance when Billy is asked at his Ballet School audition ‘what it feels like when he dances’ is corny and carries little of the urgency of the act one scenes where dance thrillingly energised the inarticulate child. Unlike the film, where Billy’s ultimate success as an adult dancer is briefly glimpsed, the stage show ends quietly with the defeating miners returning to work and Billy, after bidding his dead mother farewell, leaving Durum for London and the Royal Ballet School. Fearing leaving the audience with such a downbeat ending an all-singing, all-dancing curtain routine has been devised where the cast, including the miners, sport tutus and tap-dance. This well-meaning 'encore' unfortunately annihilates the melancholic mood and everything that has gone on before.

Ian MacNeill’s sets and particularly Paul Arditti’s lighting scheme convey the gloom of Billy’s home town. A high brick wall and cable wheel both blackened with centuries of coal dust and surmounted by the ominous initials NCB (National Coal Board) dominate the stage. The mechanism that rises and lowers the multi-storied set for the Elliot household, however, does become a trifle tiresome in its unnecessary elaborateness. This grimy set provides a continuing reminder of the shows proletariat back-story, even if the script - swear words aside - is little advanced on the genteel agit-prop of British pre-war dramas like Love on the Dole. There are few breaks from the oppressive gloom, one in the opening to the second act with the Miner's Club Christmas Show, reminiscent in its ramshackle way of the troop show in South Pacific, but even then the jollity is only comprehensible to anyone familiar with the history surrounding the 1984-85 strike. The other is the sudden and surprising appearance of the ten-year-old crossing dressing Michael, who tries to entice Billy into the world of pre-pubescent transvestism in a dance routine backed by a chorus of larger than life, tap dancing frocks. It is so over the top in its gaudiness to make any of the numbers in Priscilla Queen of the Desert pale into insignificance.

Elton John’s musical imprinture is apparent in many of the ballad songs. The choral songs for the miners have the same feel as the popular politicised songs for genuine miners penned by the likes of Hans Eisler and made famous by Paul Robeson. They are introduced in a marching song “The Stars Look Down” that sets the scene of industrial chaos as sentimentally as the 1940 film of the same name. At other times songs and routines echo shows like Chicago or John's own popular ballads but ultimately the music remains forgettable. It is the purely danced moments that provide the most immediate and lasting impressions, saving the show, as it does the title character, from his routine fate.
Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne
Production and booking details at the Billy Elliot website