On Stage (and walls) Melbourne: June 2010

June 10, 2010

Review [of sorts] The Turn of the Screw - Victorian Opera

When lighting designer Matt Scott is good, he's very good and created the one deluxe image in this otherwise uninspired production.
The children's former governess, Miss Jessel, has drowned herself. When her ghost appears Scott picks out her figure on the drakened stage in flickering, dark green light suggesting her submerged body in the rippling lake.
That contrast of saturated colour against total darkness was worthy of a lighting maestro like Mario Bava.

Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw (1954)
Australian premiere - University of New South Wales (1968)
Victorian Opera
Playhouse, The Arts Centre 7, 9, 11, 13, 15 & 17 2010

Review - Boston Marriage - Melbourne Theatre Company

Material Grrrrrrl

Not that are many, but Boston Marriage is one of the funniest male authored imaginings of lesbian sexuality since Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George.
Countering the charge that he could write only for and about men, American playwright David Mamet concocted a play featuring only women. A ‘Boston Marriage’ is a 19th century American term for a domestic arrangement between two unmarried women. Whether a Boston Marriage has a sexual dimension or open to quiet speculation. In Mamet’s play it is rampagingly obvious.

To secure a house and income to support herself and her estranged lover, Anna (Pamela Rabe) is the mistress of a wealthy man. Her estranged lover, however, is a woman, Claire (Margaret Mills). Instead of welcoming the offer of a ‘Boston marriage’ Claire wants to use Anna’s home for, an assignation with sweet, young and curious girl. Both women’s plans backfire when their new loves have an unexpected relationship of their own.

The farce is not played out as physical comedy. Instead Mamet has the pair taunting Anna’s well meaning maid Catherine (Sara Gleeson), going at each others throats or hatching plans to save each other’s necks.

The dialogue is steeped in Oscar Wild-ish artificiality requiring effortless delivery and barbed double-entendres. As an elegantly dressed but foul-mouthed, voyeuristic lesbian Rabe is in her element. She wrings every nuance of comedy out of the least funny words so an innocent word like ‘chintz’ becomes hysterical. As the plan backfires Rabe calculates Anna’s escalating frenzy to the smallest detail. Discovered elegantly nibbling bon-bons as the play opens, Anna is soon diving into them, guzzling them in her nervous frenzy like her modern counterpart would guzzle Valium.

Mills plays Claire as the butcher of the two, striding open-legged over Anna’s elegant furniture but creating a character reminiscent of the era’s real proto-feminists. As the maid Gleeson suggests the character’s development in the emancipated household from cringing dimwit to sexually liberated woman.

Christina Smith’s bold, glowing wallpaper set beautifully emphasises the artificiality of the play while Matt Scott's lighting provides a clean unfussy sheen over the main stage but adds a slightly Freudian, glowing, red tunnel of an 'entrance' through which the women enter and exit. Ian McDonald’s surprise musical touches emphasise how these women are not all they seem as well.

Mamet may have a limited insight into female sexuality but for play that was almost written for a bet Boston Marriage is little gem.

Boston Marriage (1999) by David Mamet
Anna - Pamela Rabe
Claire - Margaret Mills
Catherine - Sara Gleeson
Director - Aidan Fennessy
Set and Costume Designer - Christina Smith
Lighting Designer - Matt Scott
Composer - Ian McDonald
Fairfax Studio, The Arts Centre, 9 June - 24 July 2010.
Information and bookings: mtc.com.au

This is an expanded version of the review published in Melbourne Community Voice

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