Review - August: Osage County - Melbourne Theatre Company

A Family That Flays Together Stays Together
Even before the play begins Dale Ferguson’s impressive set imposes itself on you, like the doom-laden palace of a Greek tragedy. A shambling, three storied old house, which has undergone theatrical open-heart surgery, opening it up to reveal the chambers where so much blood has flown. Written for one of the world’s great acting ensembles; the Steppenwolf Theatre Company this is a play in the great American pedigree of family tragedies of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill on the stage and the family melodramas played out in television soap opera. This has the feel of a piece of writer's theatre, actor's theatre and designer's theatre. It unfurls like a chronology of classic, 20th century American theatre. In the opening scene there is a homage to O'Neill's James and Mary Tyrone in the Beverly and Violet while Mattie Fae (Deidre Rubenstein) browbeats her husband and son with the ferocity of any one of Tennessee Williams' mothers and even the sleazy Steve (Sean Taylor) is reminiscent of a David Mamet sleaze.

The play has a sense of fatalism; even the gentle seeming opening scene where the family patriarch and one-time famous poet Beverly Weston (George Whaley) muses about his idol T. S. Eliot having committed his wife to an insane asylum has deeper meaning. As soon as Beverly’s drug-addled wife Violet (Robyn Nevin) enters we realise those musings were tinged with regret that he didn’t do the same to Violet. Violet is revealed as one of the cruelest wives and mothers, a woman outrunning anything Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee could have imagined. Love in this family is more like Stockholm Syndrome. Each of the cankers that gnawed at Beverly and Violet throughout their marriage is inherited by their three daughters, one canker each. To reveal what they are would would spoil the deliciously mounting horror of the second and third acts.

August: Osage County lives up to the plaudits as one of the most compelling plays of recent history. It is made more compelling by Fergusson’s visually (and metaphorically) multi-layered set and Simon Phillip’s detailed direction of the many full-blown arguments and introspective scenes, often on the middle level of the set, where a few characters gather to debrief after a catastrophe. But no matter where they go onstage either en-masse or in pairs, Phillips directs the focus on any part of the set they dwell. Similarly Matt Scott's lighting seems to illuminate without spotlighting the action anywhere and suggests the heat and gloom of the house where Violet has banished air-conditioning and boarded up the windows. Even when the play begins and the set has been on view as the audience arrives and take their seats, the opening scene instantly rivets your attention to Beverly, picked out in his gloomy study explaining the household set-up to the new housekeeper Johnna (Tess Masters). Another moment is a family dinner, where the extended family are assembled around the table so that the focus is on Violet’s face as she connives yet another family squabble. As Barbara, the eldest of Violet’s three daughters Jane Menelaus captures the image of a woman carrying shards of both her mother and father and which begin to assume her own personality. "All women become like their mothers," said Oscar Wilde, "that is their tragedy" and that tragedy is writ large in Barbara.

An actor himself, the author, Tracey Letts, has bestowed on every member of the large cast a memorable personality, no matter how briefly they occupy the actual stage. Beverly looms like Agamemnon's spectre over the House of Atreus and even an incidental character like the local Sheriff (Tony Nikolakopoulos) is made familiar long before he appears. In one of her most protean characterisations Nevin is through-and-through the cantankerous, pill-popping matriarch. Whether shambling around in a barbiturate fog or assuming vicious command of her family as they cower before her at the dinner table, it is a compelling performance. Letts’s equally compelling script and well-drawn characters brings out the best in the other actors. August: Osage County deserves the accolades it has received its inherent brilliance all of which are made abundantly clear in this production.

August: Osage County by Tracey Letts (2007)
Karen Weston - Heidi Arena
Jean Forham - Kellie Jones
Johnna Monevata - Tess Masters
Barbara Forham - Jane Menelaus
Bill Fordham - Robert Menzies
Violet Weston - Robyn Nevin
Sheriff Deon Gilbeau - Tony Nikolakopoulos
Charlie Aiken - Roger Oakley
Little Charles Aiken - Michael Robinson
Mattie Fae Aiken - Deidre Rubenstein
Ivy Weston -Rebekah Stone
Steve Heidebrecht - Sean Taylor
Beverly Weston - George Whaley
Director - Simon Phillips
Designer - Dale Ferguson
Lighting Designer - Matt Scott
Sound Designer - David Franzke
Playhouse Theatre, The Arts Centre 23 May - 4 July 2009 (season extended to, ironically, American Independence Day!)

pictured: Robyn Nevin (picture Jeff Busby)

Review - Optimism - Malthouse

2009 marks the 250th anniversary of Voltaire's hilarious satire, published in 1759 and Malthouse have coincidentally mounted an adaptation by Tom Wright. Wright sets the story in the present and makes very few changes to Voltaire's plot and characters. For some reason the famous but unnamed and mono-buttocked Old Woman (Alison Whyte) is christened by Woods as Emily and the kindly Anabaptist becomes a Salvation Army lady who meets her death, not in the Lisbon earthquake but being thrown from a plane attacked by terrorists. In this modern analogy Candide's lonely wanderings involve a lot of air travel. A real lot! Every second scene seems to take place on an plane - Candide's preferred airline is no doubt Volt-Air - (Boom-Boom!).

Pangloss (Barry Otto) is dressed as a Pierrot clown and manically espouses his sham philosophy in contrast to the memorably melancholic French clown depicted by Watteau in Voltaire's own time. Candide (Frank Woodley) is dressed as a Grimaldi clown, the the chattering, ad-libber beloved of Dickens and the precursor of his own stage persona. In Voltaire's story Candide is made to suffer horribly while the rest of the characters live and die (often more than once) with comic book unreality. Pangloss is cured of syphilis and resurrected from the dead, as is Candide's beloved Cunégonde (Caroline Craig) and her brother (interesting that with all these curings and bringings-back from the dead mean old Voltaire couldn't grow the Old Woman's lost buttock back!). Instead of Candide's bitter reflections as he tries to apply Pangloss's absurd 'chin-up' reasoning to the log-jam of misfortunes that befall him Woodley indulges his well-known clown character in stand up routines.

Nearly all of the interpolated songs don't work in the same way contemporary pop songs had been used in previous Malthouse music theatre. Often they are delivered in a very low-key manner, often emphasising the irony. They like Candide's stand-up routines and a lot of the jiggery-pokerery of the production seem to gloss over a hollowness which has been pointed elsewhere as possibly an intentional comment on the hollowness of the ludicrous philosophy Voltaire set out to satirise. What shows up the hollowness of the optimistic philosophy most is the speech by the Old Woman as she relates her story (including how she lost one buttock). As acted by Whyte it is a supremely well realised mono drama. The Old Woman has suffered long and hard and, unlike Candide, stared at her misery and contemplated suicide. Only the instinctive will to live, that still sparked somewhere inside her, made her go on. That sharp smack of pragmatic reality works as well as any of the other and better remembered silliness in Voltaire's story and worked as well in this production.

Optimism (2009) by Tom Wright after Candide, ou l'Optimisme (1759) by Voltaire
A Malthouse, Edinburgh International Festival, Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Festival production
Director - Michael Kantor
Candide - Frank Woodley
Cunégonde - Caroline Craig
Cacambo - Francis Greenslade
Paquette - Amber McMahon
Cunégonde's Brother / A Slave - Hamish Michael
Doctor Pangloss - Barry Otto
The Old Woman - Alison Whyte
Martin - David Woods
other roles played by the cast
Original Music - Iain Grandage
Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse
22 May - 13 June 2009 followed by productions at the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival and the Sydney Theatre Company during 2010
135 minutes (including 1 interval)

Review - Melburnalia No 2 - White Whale Theatre

In 2007 White Whale Theatre commissioned Melburnalia, five short plays about various Melbourne suburbs. The idea was good and the plays, although disparate in style, sat well against each other. Five more plays Melburnalia 2 have been commissioned with a unifying theme of trams and again the styles vary from almost sketch comedy to a purely vocal evocation of place based on Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.

Indigenous and migrant experiences feature as well beginning with Birrarung, by Andrea James, where the spirit of a Wurundjeri man evokes a memory of public transport with conductors instead of fare evasion officers and the legendary Flinders Street Station Ballroom as a kind of White Man’s Dreaming. Hoa Pham’s Maribyrnong powerfully contrasts the post war migrant settlement camps with the severity of the modern detention centres. A visiting Vietnamese student has been detained due to her working more hours than her student visa allocated. In this suburban detention centre she meets a Greek national who has been resident in Australia since he was two years old but who had not formalised his citizenship. Between them a ghostlike, elderly migrant begs to be let into this awful place because, according to her parents, these 'holding centres' were nurturing places. That this takes place in the suburbs - the Maribyrnong tram rattles past! - instead of somewhere hidden in the outback gives this playlet a nasty edge.

Aiden Fennessy’s Mentone is a ‘choral symphony’ which cleverly incorporates Under Milk Wood into its text by way of the local drama society rehearsing the famous play. Even more so than in Melburnalia, the older history of each suburb informs the plays. Preston's 19th century origins as a pig farming and bacon curing centre underpins Kit Lazeroo's play which has a veiled attack on the modern Real Estate industry.

Danny Katz's Caulfield is a sketchy sketch where thinly drawn caricatures of squabbling thirty-somethings showing off in a desirable yuppie suburb tries to either emulate or encapsulate a David Williamson snob comedy ending with the infantilism of their pretensions given a surreal twist.

The juxtaposing the past and present and, particularly in the plays about Maribyrnong and Preston, works particularly well, pointing the way to a Melburnalia franchise with more ways of exploring our suburbia.

Melburnalia No 2 (2009)
Birrarung by Andrea James
Maribyrnong by Hoa Pham
Caulfield by Danny Katz
Preston by Kit Lazeroo
Mentone by Aidan Fennessy
Director - David Mence
Fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders lane, Melbourne
20 May - 7 June 2009
120 minutes (including 1 interval)
White Whale Theatre

Melburnalia 1 on DVD and (parts thereof) in Revival at the MTC
In the past few years Melbourne's independent theatre has had an enormous boost thanks to the scripts of many of the plays written and performed being put into print. While the scripts of Melburnalia have yet to be published, the production has been made available on DVD. Filmed in performance with multiple camera angles, some fudged through trying to be discreet, but with acceptable sound and eminently watchable accounts of the plays in performance. I was very happy to revisit Melburnalia this way and re-watch the writers forum where the authors spoke about their work which is included on the DVD.
Melburnalia (1) included Lally Katz's wonderful little two-hander The Fag from Zagreb which featured one of the earliest sightings of her enigmatic Apocalypse Bear (who certainly has a thing for gay boys). That terrible teddy has now been developed into an Apocalypse Bear trilogy, including a revival of The Fag from Zagreb, at the Melbourne Theatre Company's new Lawler Studio between 8-24 October this year. Meanwhile the DVD of Melburnalia is $10.00 and is a hopefully the first example of recording the very exciting work happening in independent theatre at this time. The plays in Melburnalia were good but, like the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Review - A Little Night Music - Opera Australia

My Year Without Sex

As music theatre becomes less willing to risk alienating an audience by being too eloquent or too intelligent Sondheim’s classic shows stand out like beacons. A Little Night Music is mid-period Sondheim and, like mid-period Verdi, has musical and theatrical assurance right from the start. Using operatically inspired motives and multi-layered ensembles and with an ability to write lyrics that have the dead-pan wit of W.S. Gilbert on a good day, his scores are works of genius. The songs in A Little Night Music bristle with rhyming patterns that are still unmatched after thirty years. Middle-aged lawyer Frederik Egerman (Robert Grubb), for example, is contemplating how to make his 18-year-old wife Anne (Lucy Maunder) overcome her fear of consummating their 11 month marriage, “A) I could put on my nightshirt or sit disarmingly B) in the nude,” he ponders,

"That might be effective, my body’s all right,
but not in perspective and not in the light."

Or perhaps he will read a suggestive book in her presence and give her a hint

“In view of her fancy for something Romantic,
De Sade is too chancy and Dickens too frantic.
Stendhal would ruin the plan of attack,
as there isn’t much blue in the Red and the Black."

This wittiness runs through the lyrics of every song and Sondheim’s’ score - nearly all of it waltz-time - is so detailed and polished in contrast to Hugh Wheeler’s rather stodgy book which at times is very saggy and appears beyond the help of director or cast. Sondheim's best work is founded in musical pastiche. The quasi-operatic Sweeny Todd is based on Victorian melodrama and its musical form is derived from 19th century music theatre like Michael Balfe'sand vincent Wallace's sentimental ballad style operas, certainly Gilbert and Sullivan's complicated patter solos and ensembles, Music Hall and even at times thunderous Verdi-esque arias. Pacific Overtures dips into Japanese music and, with the approach of the Western Powers, nationalistic music parodies. Assassins too frames each of its episodes in the popular musical style of the era. A Little Night Music is the first of his shows to recreate music of another era rather than to recreate the formulaic style associated with a Broadway musical. Madame Armefeldt’s song reminiscing about her many liaisons is a stumbling waltz, as though it were an old lady too, dominated by a plaintive oboe but the song shimmers like a golden memory due to a celesta underlining the melody. Only a few minutes long but it has such detail and individuality that compares with Ravel again or Sibelius’s Valse Triste. Another ingenious device is the Liebeslieder quintet that appear and sing memories and unspoken thoughts of the other characters.

The programme reproduces Scandinavian landscape paintings from the time the story is set and these appear to have influenced Roger Kirk’s sets, gauzy curtains painted to look like pallid watercolours that accentuate the sumptuous and detailed costumes. The melancholy of Scandinavian Symbolist art is an apt influence on the melancholy in so much of the story. At the end of the 19th century too, the sexual/social order, as Madame Armfeldt laments, was breaking down; sexual anxiety in Scandinavia was the order of the day too as the proceedings in A Little Night Music are unashamedly erotic. Actress Desiree Armfeldt (Sigrid Thornton) and her coterie fuss and flounder about trying to organise their sex lives and pipped to the post by the Egerman’s no nonsense maid Petra who gets it on with Madame Armfeldt’s footman Frid (Byron Watson) within a few hours. Carl Magnus and his wife even have a mildly Strindburgian love-hate relationship, the musical comedy equivalent of Edgar and Alice in The Dance of Death.

The cast is best in the central and outermost roles. The vocal quintet (Julia Malczewski, Jacqueline Dark, Jane Parkin, Benjamin Rasheed and Andrew Moran) are drawn from the company ranks and give a magnificent account of their Brahms Libeslieder Waltz-inspired music. The rest of the cast is variable as it ascends toward the principal role.

As Madame Armfeldt Nancye Hayes adopts a Euro-pudding accent that when not French or German tinged is fruity in the same way Hermione Gingold’s (the roles creator) was. Her character and even appearance also bears an uncanny resemblance to late career Maggie Smith. Katrina Retallick’s interpretation of Countess Charlotte was effective enough but the bitterness and self-reproach in her lines were glossed over and, as with most of the spoken dialogue lagged and lumbered along. Grubb, in a Trotsky beard and, at times a Trotsky voice sings/speaks a lot of his songs, often off the beat and only sounding and holding notes at the ends of phrases where he displays briefly an attractive voice.

One of the best, if perhaps not the best, performances is Matthew Robinson as Henrik. In his bitter introductory song he shaped the words and the music with astonishing clarity. Kate Maree Hoolihan as Petra was in the same league, her song done with a earthy tang and brassy vulgarity, right against, as Sondheim might have intended, the charming but ineffective waltzes that accompany everyone else’s sexual frustrations. Both WAAPA graduates too, they must put something in the food at the canteen there; everyone comes out of the place with such so polished and assured voices.

As Desiree Sigrid Thornton does carry the show with her winning interpretation. Famous as a role for an actress who can sing it is still a difficult part to bring off and Thornton makes Desiree a minor Arkadina with ‘actressy’ mannerisms; pouting and purring (with the same voice she used for the actress in The Blue Room) to Egerman and acidic to her domineering mother. But as the complications set in her Desiree is a deeply anxious and vulnerable woman. Her famous “Send in the Clowns” is an admission of failure and needs to be her final breakdown. The famous song is the antithesis of the big number, an introvert moment coming from an extrovert and yet it has all the impact of a traditional show-stopper. Thornton handles it exceptionally well, self-effacing then distraught and finally tearful and all without overplaying or milking the sentiment. "Send in the Clowns" also tries to become a waltz number but because Desiree is just too unhappy to launch the waltz rhythm, instead she repeats a halting - almost sobbing - and repeated phrase that sounds like the beginning of a waltz. "Isn't it rich!" ... "Aren't we a pair?" ... that introduction to the songs is similar to the introduction to The Blue Danube theme but Sondheim lets it fall away each time as Desiree tries to sing what should be the big 'sob' number and achieves so much more with, instead, a brilliant understatement. Thornton is right on the money in the way she sings this ingenious number.

There is a good body of strings in the orchestra of about twenty players and the richly employed and varied instruments are heard to their best advantage. Conductor Andrew Greene leads the majority of songs in the manner of Victor Silvester, a 'strict-tempo', one-two-THREE waltz beat which gives a forward, even fast sounding momentum to the songs. This is a lavish production, with perhaps and uneven cast but in any case the real star is Sondheim's incredible score.

A Little Night Music (1973)
Desiree Armfeldt - Sigrid Thornton
Madame Armfeldt - Nancye Hayes
Anne Egerman - Lucy Maunder
Fredrika Armfeldt - Erica Lovell
Petra - Kate Maree Hoolihan
Fredrik Egerman - Robert Grubb
Henrik Egerman - Matthew Robinson
Count Carl Magnus - Ben Lewis
Charlotte Malcolm - Katrina Retallick
Frid - Byron Watson
Mrs Anderssen - Jacqueline Dark
Mrs Nordstrom - Julia Malczewski
Mrs Segstrom - Jane Parkin
Mr Lindquist - Andrew Moran
Mr Erlanson - Benjamin Rasheed
Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Andrew Greene
Director - Stuart Maunder
Designer - Roger Kirk Lighting
Director - Trudy Dalgleish
Choreographer - Elizabeth Hill
19 - 30 May 2009
State Theatre, The Arts Centre
165 minutes (including 1 interval)
sildeshow via Australian Stage Online

Pictured: Erica Lovell, Sigrid Thornton & Nancye Hayes. Picture by Jeff Busby

Vale Heather Begg

Heather Begg
1933 - 12 May 2009
New Zealand mezzo soprano Heather Begg died in Sydney at the age of 76. Born in Nelson, Begg moved to Australia and studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and joined the National Opera Company of Australia making her professional debut with them in 1954, sharing the role of Azucena in Verdi's Il Trovatore with (the recently deceased) Margeta Elkins and singing the role when the National Opera of Australia toured to New Zealand. In 1955 she won the Sydney Sun Aria contest and in 1957 travelled to London to study at the National School of Opera.

Begg joined the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in 1959, her debut role in Die Walkure and was made a resident principal in 1972 until she returned to Australia in 1976. In Australia she sang with The Australian Opera regularly and sang her last role with them, in 2006 as Grandmother Buryjovka in Janacek's Jenufa.

She married a Canadian, Johnnie King, in 1964. King died in 1979 a few weeks before Begg, now a widow in real-life, undertook the role of the widow Popova in William Walton's opera of Chekhov's play The Bear. Although she was mostly cast in comic roles - the operatic equivalents of Margaret Dumont in any Marx Brothers movie - Begg also played the occasional heavy dramatic parts including the Princess in Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur and Mother Marie in Poulenc's harrowing Dialogues of the Carmelites.

Heather Begg was awarded the OBE in 1978 and in 2000 became a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to opera.
The Government decided in March to restore the titles of knights and dames to the honours system and Begg was awarded the title Dame last month.

A beautiful thing

I listened to Radio France last week broadcasting a song cycle by Henri Dutilleux Le Temps l'Horloge, the world premiere of the definitive work. At the end of the performance soprano Renée Fleming and conductor Seiji Ozawa repeated the entire work as an encore.

Review - The Role Model - BOOBook Theatre

The Role Model is a rough diamond that has been progressively polished since its first draft in 2004. A few workshops and staged readings later, including a two week workshop at NIDA under the guidance of none other than Edward Albee, the play is turning into a little gem. The central plot of a disgraced sports hero using even more disgraceful means of recovering his bankable public image is immediately appealing.

Former Olympic gold medalist Scott Sumner (James Doolan) is a compendium of all that has gone bad in Australian sports. Self absorbed and a compulsive womaniser he has fallen from favour for sleeping with his best mate's wife and his only defence is that "he wasn't my best mate". Desperate to get him onto the motivational speaking circuit his ex-swimmer manager Wanda (Denise Kuchmar - pictured left with James Doolan) plans his come back as a mentor to depressed adolescents at the Beating the Blues Foundation where, as soon as he helps his first kid to beat the blues, she will leak the story to the national media and cash in on his sympathetic image. Too inept and self-interested to care about other people, especially the depressed and pimply 15 year-old Adam (William Ridley) assigned, him Scott strikes a deal with him instead; $10,000 for a glowing account of Scott's life-changing effect on him when the story goes public. In the classic tradition of farce, it goes horribly wrong at first. The tables are turned on Scott and Wanda but, after a plot twist that involves someone coming out on a cliff top on national television it has an amorally happy ending.

pictured: William Ridley & James Doolan [pictures: Naomi Wong]

The play is a cynical satire, very reminiscent of David Williamson at his early best. The main characters of Scott, the corrupted Australian icon and - even more so - his corrupt manager, are a kind of aquatic Faust and Mephistopheles. The swimming and Olympic in-jokes like the difference between an Olympic gold medal and the less important Commonwealth gold medal are all part of a script that is very promising although it needs the final polish a good farce requires. That central trio of Scott, Wanda and Adam already show great promise as comedy characters. In particular the unscrupulous gold medalist turned gold digger Wanda is a gift of a part for a comedienne.

The Role Model by Bruce Hoogendoorn

Scott - James Doolan
Wanda - Denise Kuchmar
Louise - Stephanie Osztreicher
Adam - William Ridley
Jack - Angus Brown
Kate - Anuroop Sabhawrwal
Director - Sue Lindsay
Set and Costumes - Naomi Wong
Lighting Designer - Patrick Gooden
7 - 16 May 2009
Cromwell Road Theatre, Cromwell Road, Prahran
90 minutes (including 1 interval)
Boobook theatre

This is an expanded version of the review published in MCV/Canvas

Review - Leaves of Grass - Red Stitch Actors Theatre

Glass Houses
Philip Ridley's play is another example of the world as known by 'in yer face' dramatic standards. Every strata of life right down to familial and personal life is dysfunctional. He is also maintains a multiple artistic practice, working as a children's author and photographer. The second of three plays about brothers this is less the futuristic, nihilistic fable of Mercury Fur and set, instead, in contemporary London. Steven (Dan Frederiksen) and his younger brother Barry (Johnny Carr) are both a mess. After their father committed suicide when they were 15 and 10 respectively Barry spiraled downward while Steven inherited his father's deep depression. At his worst Steven is near comatose for days but through seemingly sheer will-power gets on with life, career and marriage but at the cost of being switched off emotionally. Ridley touches on the semi-autobiographical in the depiction of of Stephen the survivor and protector, although Ridley's own childhood circumstances were very different to those of the play. With each scene Ridley peels back the layers of family complicity and denial to have us presume that childhood abuse is the cause of the brother's problems but even with that a more terrible complicity is revealed at the plays conclusion.

Peter Mumford's set echoes the seeming transparency of Ridley's play and like the play has a red herring of its own. In the same way the viewer may conclude what caused the two brother's lifelong damage from what is said, the set - multiple layers of clear plastic curtains drawn back and forth to differentiate scenes, would appear to lay the story transparent. In addition it serves to highlight Steven's need for compartmentalising so much of his psychical and emotional life. Mention of houses, rooms and the importance of spaces seem to form a sub-text, whether it his mother's boxed-up belongings (and family history).

The sudden pulling back toward the end of the first act of the front curtain dividing the actors from the audience and which had remained untouched until then even signified a metaphorical opening up and clarification of the ambiguous events so far. But like Ridley's red herring, this device is a visual red herring that plays along with the presumption not the truth until the plays climax where a new environment is revealed. The clever and contrasting sound-scapes also added to the internal and external life of Steven. The orderliness expressed by the rigid and formal baroque music was sharply contrasted by the organic, groaning of the sounds surrounding his solitary appearance. In this semi abstracted environment the characters have abstractions of their own. Steven's inherited depression has incredible visual impact as does his mother Liz's ambiguous complicity in his control over the family. This is one of Frederiksen's best performances internal as well as external; emotionally dead and even the lights in Steven's eyes appear to be turned off. Ridley's brothers are just as disturbing, and even as creepily co-dependant as the brothers in so many of of Sam Shepard's plays. Leaves of Glass is a good play and as it is the creation of a writer with a interest in visual art, the intensely visual aspect of the production makes it more fascinating thanks to Simon Stone's direction and Mumford's ingenious set.

Leaves of Grass (2007) by Philip Ridley
Steven - Dan Frederiksen
Barry - Johnny Carr
Liz - Jillian Murray
Debbie - Amelia Best
Director - Simon Stone
Set Designer - Peter Mumford
Lighting Designer - Kim Kwa
29 April - 30 May 2009
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
2 Chapel Street St Kilda
130 minutes (including 1 interval)

picture: Jodie Hutchinson

This is an expanded version of the review published in MCV/Canvas

Outstanding Actress Kat Stewart Wins Logie for Outstanding Actressness

Theatre goers have known she was an outstanding actress for years but Red Stitch stalwart Kat Stewart was awarded a Silver Logie last night for 'Most Outstanding Actress' for her appearance in Underbelly. And Kat does great frock, even La Blanchett would have to concede.

Review - Tom Fool - Hoy Polloy

Unpopular Mechanicals

German theatre literature from the 1970s has less currency outside of Germany than the era's literature and cinema. English versions of Franz Xaver Kroetz's plays were taken up most notably by British companies like Scotland's Traverse Theatre and Traverse supporting new writing. Naturally, as Alison Croggon has pointed out in her opportune interview with Kroetz, new writing focused theatres like La Mama have hosted productions of his plays.
His plays in the 1970s which include Tom Fool adopt a popular theatrical form volksstück or folk piece, a genre which focuses on the lives and situations faced by ordinary people and presented in a style accessible to them; a form of 'soap opera' if you will. Kroetz's method is to write mundane seeming plays about these 'jedermench' trapped in economic and social conditions about which they cannot effectively communicate to each other (and the audience) about. The dialogue instead is cliched - a kind of Teutonically un-satirical Joe Orton - and written in a way that makes it seems unshaped and as it would appear in an ordinary conversation. The characters are invariably miserable and unable to articulate their misery, except, it would appear here, through violence. A device Richard Gilman called 'a theatre of the inarticulate'
Tom Fool appears to be one of the more verbose of his volksstück but it does have these 'hallmark' stretches of reflective silence. The story is simply the breakdown of a family. Father and mother Otto and Martha want their teen-age son Ludwig to secure a better job than Otto, a semi-skilled worker on the BMW production line. Otto is domineering father, presented as the end of the line of the traditional stern patriarch. Martha is presumably the end of the line of the traditional hausfrau, the 'Kinder, Küche, Kirche' reduced to just 'Kind, Küche'. Ludwig just wants out; he is bored and has no respect for his father. The play has an inevitability about it, part of the author's intention though. Otto looses his patriarchal grip, Martha and Ludwig defy the expectations of their class roles. Martha's folksy wisdom - as powerful a feature of her character as Otto's explosive temper - stretched by her new situation into a new life of new despair. Ludwig is a largely observing and ambiguous character and perhaps to become a hopefully socialist alternative.

The play is long and has long stretches of silence but not inactivity. The author's famous silences and lack of dramatic action may be considered tedious. The arbitrarily banal dialogue also draws divided responses. The banality also extends to the controversial nudity, Ludwig's parents attempt to have a sex a couple of times and people get naked for that. There is one scene where Otto punishes Ludwig by making him strip naked. As presented Ludwig anxiously undresses and his stance, head bowed and concealing his genitals with his hands while his father berates him, has an echo of a prison camp inmate stripping for inspection. Whether Kroetz intended this or not or, for that matter, how well the translation conveys the author's preoccupations but it was one of the many scenes that seemed to me might have pricked the conscious of the plays original audience as much as the political messages current then would have. Kroetz's political subtext is subtle but defining. Working class Otto and Martha, are excluded from the Marxist debate that caught up the classes above them. They are, instead, envious of the remaining European aristocracy and anxious that Ludwig should land himself a 'better class' of job than his father. The climax, the shattering of the family unit and all three destined to lives as labourers, is as shattering as any regal tragedy. Otto's social and personal failure is made all the more confronting by it being a graphically depicted as a sexual failure, the most intimate aspects of the family's lives are included along with their more uniform class characters.

Beng Oh's direction instills a deliberate if slow pace to the action but in which so many small details, hints at the thousands of 'bytes' of interconnected family knowledge, are given giving rise again to the thought of how much is translated (or lost) by the English version and to what extent of the stage directions in the original text. One example is the way Ludwig carefully takes down conceals a David Bowie poster and, later, how it found by Martha and concealed with equal care. The three actors give committed performances; studiously maintaining a spontaneity in the text. Thirty years on and with audiences given more exposure to ground-breaking theatrical style Kroetz's methods are more appreciable as a form of ultra-realism. Kroetz writes with with bleakness that is uncommon compared to most theatre we see here and the solemnity of this production reinforces this. The play is still a challenge and the style will either repel or invite a viewer.

Tom Fool (Mensch Meier) (1978) by Franz Xaver Kroetz translated by Estella Scmid and Anthony Vivis
Martha - Liz McColl
Otto - Chris Bunworth
Ludwig - Glenn van Oosterom
Director - Beng Oh
Set Designer - Chris Molyneux
Costumes and Properties - Mark Young
Lighting Designer - Ben Morris
Sound Designer - Tim Bright
1 - 23 May 2009
Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre, Brunswick
180 minutes (including 1 interval)
Hoy Polloy Theatre

pictures by Tim Williamson