On Stage (and walls) Melbourne: October 2009

October 11, 2009

Review - The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy - Melbourne Theatre Company

...Your'e Sure Of A Big Surprise ...

Lally Katz's transitional object from Hell, the Apocalypse Bear, began 'bruin' (sorry brewing) in her mind after seeing a shelf of motley teddy bears in a suburban chemist shop. The beast that emerged, a spectral figure clad in the dodgiest-looking of panto teddy bear costumes, began it's reign of subtle terror in miniature films where the Bear made nocturnal visits to suburbia, interrupting a woman's late night call from a public phone box and a young man's post-fellatory hallucinations in a public toilet. The Apocalypse Bear seems to enjoy traumatising gay boys the most as his next incarnation was in Katz'z The Fag from Zagreb, Katz's contribution to the portmanteau of plays for White Whale Theatre's Melburnalia.

The Melbourne Theatre Company are rightly profiling Katz at the experimental Lawler Studio where she, and many more emerging writers to come, will hopefully flower. Reviving the first Apocalypse Bear play, The Fag From Zagreb with two new pieces which can stand alone or, as here, be joined in a delicious sequence of vignettes of maturity from adolescence to adulthood.

In The Fag From Zagreb, teen-aged Jeremy (Luke Mullins) arrives home to find his mother and sister gone and replaced by the Apocalypse Bear (Brian Lipson) who prepares his afternoon snack, listens supportively to the gay teen's secret desires, cautioning him against becoming too familiar with his on-line acquaintance (a desperate, older, Croatian, gay man) before menacingly probing Jeremy about his nocturnal visit to the woods of darkest Kew.

In the second play, the Bear shares a table in a high school cafeteria with unpopular Sonia (Katherine Tonkin) who sadly predicts her failed marriage, describing it as a past event before the Bear, toys, as he did with Jeremy, with her insecurities.

The final play introduces a childless and childlike couple Sonia and Jeremy (are they the same people, older, not much wiser and definitely still insecure?). Afraid to go out in the dark to put the bins out, Sonia relates to Jeremy her Alice in Wonderland-like dream where she is transported through a hole in a wall behind a coat rack. The delayed appearance of the Bear gives the final play an extra tingle and when he does appear he is comforting and supportive.

Katz's brand of surrealism is loaded with Jungian shared meanings and, while the original staging of The Fag From Zagreb should be cherished by all who saw it, the new version recreates its impact just as well. Mullins and Tonkin deliver the dialogue with hilarious or fearful naturalness. Originally the Bear was played by young actors, giving it a sort of a doppelganger presence, part of the psyche of the person he was visiting. Casting Lipson gives the Bear a paternal side to the often adult-child exchanges between him and Sonia or Jeremy. Lipson also brings a sinister hilarity to the Bear's words and movements all of his own, hitching up his baggy trouser fur to sit down or delicately opening salt, pepper or sauce packets with his clumsy paws he makes what was once a child's dearest companion into a delightfully menacing presence.

Lipson and Mullins share the direction. To what extend is any one's guess but the feeling is that Lipson fuelled the responses to the bear while Mullins orchestrated the Bear's to Jeremy and Sonia. The Lawler Studio, he smaller of the two theatres in the MTC's new premises is a cracker venue. The heavy and, for once, effective black drapes mean that the theatre can plunge into total darkness, even the bilious glow of exits signs don't spill into the dramatic space for once. The effect of our first sighting of the Apocalypse Bear emerging out of total darkness kick-started the proceedings. The three playlets are separated by scene changes also in total darkness and punctuated only by lightening flashes of the Bear seeming to dance in triumph over the trauma he's just wreaked. Great contemporary writing in a great contemporary performance space.

The Melbourne Theatre Company in association with Stuck Pigs Squealing Productions
The Apocalypse Bear - Brian Lipson
Jeremy - Luke Mullins
Sonia - Katherine Tonkin
Directors - Brian Lipson & Luke Mullins
Sound Designer - Jethro Woodward
Lighting Designer - Richard Vabre
Artistic Adviser - Chris Kohn
Set & Costume Designer - Mel Page
Producer - Lucy Evans
Video Designer - Martyn Coutts
Lawler Studio, Southbank
8 - 24 October 2009

90 minutes ( no interval)

Q: What is the future of arts criticism, in your view?A: Blogs.
Anne Midgette, critic for The New York Times (The Washington Post as of February 2008)

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: They know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.
Brendan Behan

A dramatic critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.
George Bernard Shaw

Reviewing has one advantage over suicide: in suicide you take it out of yourself; in reviewing you take it out of other people.
George Bernard Shaw

To a professional critic theatre-going is the curse of Adam. The play is the evil he is paid to endure in the sweat of his brow; and the sooner it is over, the better.
George Bernard Shaw

Nothing makes me angrier than critics imputing motives to artists when they cannot know what those motives are. A critic's job is to be interesting about why he or she likes or dislikes something.
Peter Hall

A dramatic critic ought to have an eye for detail. If he has no eye for detail, he will never make a dramatic historian, for it is the detail that gives life. If he cannot distinguish the significant detail from the insignificant, he will be only a gossip-writer. But if he can recreate on the page what he has seen and heard on stage, and at the same time convey the emotional impression it has made on him, he will, in my opinion, be discharging his functions in a just and honourable manner.
Harold Hobson

One of the most characteristic sounds of the English Sunday morning is Harold Hobson barking up the wrong tree.
Penelope Gilliatt

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.
Kenneth Tynan

No theatre could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.
Kenneth Tynan

The greatest films are those which show how society shapes man. The greatest plays are those which show how man shapes society.
Kenneth Tynan

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.
Kenneth Tynan

A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
Kenneth Tynan

Western man, especially the Western critic, still finds it very hard to go into print and say: 'I recommend you to go and see this because it gave me an erection'.
Kenneth Tynan

The critic ... has done his job if he evokes, precisely and with his prejudices clearly charted, the state of his mind after the performance has impinged on it ... He will find readers if, and only if, he writes clearly and gaily and truly; if he regards himself as a specially treated mirror recording a unique and unrepeatable event.
Kenneth Tynan

Has anyone ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.
P G Wodehouse

You cannot have critics with standards; you can only have music with standards which critics may observe.
Alan Walker An Anatomy of Musical Criticism (1968)

Although he never read them, Gustav Mahler used the word 'superiors' when referring to critics.

I try to keep an open mind, even when viewing the dreariest efforts, that the people involved are not criminals ... Even an IBM machine blows a gasket now and then.
John McClain

I don’t think a critic needs to have written a play or to have acted. I do think he should appreciate the niceties of theatrical technique, the dramatist’s, the actor’s, the producer’s. He should be able, during any performance, to separate the strands of which it is made.
J C Trewin

To appreciate, in the best sense, is harder, more rewarding. Enjoy yourself, said C E Montague. “To make people like a thing you must delight in it first.” But (some argue) should not the critic be the ‘Keep Out’ notice, the growling dog, the speck of ratsbane? I feel that any writer perpetually cynical, perpetually displeased, should find work more congenial. It is possible to keep standards high, to be selective, to do the reader service without being ashamed of decent courtesy (‘softness’ is, I fear the cant phrase) or regretting that a notice has not been inscribed upon asbestos.
J C Trewin

When an impecunious music critic died in Vienna, his colleagues made a round of local musicians to raise money for the funeral."How much is my share?" asked one of them."Thirty kronen," was the reply."Here's sixty kronen," said the musician, "bury two music critics."
Quoted by Nicolas Slonimsky in A Thing or Two about Music (1948)

Critics are a dissembling, dishonest, contemptible race of men. Asking a working writer what he thinks of critics is like asking a lampost what it feels about dogs.
John Osborne

For the most part men without intellect, perception, sensitivity, or background, they pander to the tastes of the empty-headed, the bored, the insensitive, the complacent, who constitute the bulk of the agency trade and supply the golden stream upon which the Broadway theatre feeds.
Elmer Rice

There are two types of criticism, subjective criticism and bad criticism.
George Jean Nathan

Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.
George Jean Nathan

No chronically happy man is a trustworthy critic.
George Jean Nathan

The dramatic critic who is without prejudice is on a plane with the general who does not believe in taking human life.
George Jean Nathan

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.
Dustin Hoffman

I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.
Max Reger, responding to a music critic

I do not wish to suggest that Australians are not natural theatregoers, merely that they look curiously relieved once on their way back to to their cars.
Sheridan Morley

I would as soon have the opinion of a stagehand as to the likelihood of a play's success as that of the drama's ablest observer.
Arthur Hopkins

The critic leaves at curtain fall
To find, in starting to review it,
He scarcely saw the play at all
For watching his reaction to it.
E B White

Sing a lament for the plays that fail -A dirge for the shows that fold.
A tear on the bier of the flops of the year
And the tickets that couldn't be sold.
Requiem sound for the overly ribald -The "ball in the air" that was faultily dribbled - And the play that had little to say.
Wringing of hands for the major fiascos,
The Saturday sundown of would-be Belascos
And the scenery carted away.
Sing a lament.
Sing for the actors who practiced in vain
Lines that were labeled inept and inane.
Sing for the orchestras down in the pits
Playing the numbers that sounded like hits.
Sing for the authors who wrote in the dawn,
The 'doctors" who came when the patient was gone.
Sing for the backers who put up the dough -One for backer and the two for the show.
Sing with your faces way down on the floor
The dancers, directors, the deans of decor.
Sing a lament.
Sing a lament for the plays that will fail
For Sullivan and McBride
But make it a wake for the critics' mistake -The Beautiful One that died.
Howard Dietz

...if one gives a concert that costs, say, 1000 marks, then one finds, some days later, according to the usual procedure, the 'review'. It usually runs as follows: "Herr X or Fräulein Y played Chopin in a very gifted fashion. Yet the final refinement of touch was lacking. A talent capable of development, which one would like to encounter more often."
Hanns Eisler On the Bourgeois Concert Business