Archive for the 'theatre' Category

04
May
12

Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Sydney Theatre Company

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Categories: Sydney and theatre
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Earlier this week I caught the hot new production at the Sydney Theatre Company, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It was, as all the reviews say, excellent.

The literati may know this story from its original 18th-century French novel. Many people my age will know it from the mid-’80s film version. The younger may know the outline of the story as it was adapted in the 1999 film Cruel Intentions (though you lose the underlying theme of the moral degeneracy of pre-revolutionary French aristocrats).

This play was tops. It’s sexy, thrilling, funny, and labyrithine. The main actors dominate, though all are good. Hugo Weaving as Victome de Valmont gets to chew things up. He’s so good that by the end of the play I was so longer mentally inserting the words, “Mr. Anderson,” at the end of every sentence.

It’s showing at Wharf 1, which is not the biggest theatre, so you’re very close to the action. The costumes are just right: retro ’50s/’60s, enough to make you think of times past, but not stuffy period clothing. The way that they stage the duel scene is both imaginative and effective.

The play is still on until June 9th, though getting tickets will be hard. There are a couple of matinees with single seats, possibly.

28
Jan
12

Sydney Festival: Beautiful Burnout

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Three and a half years ago I saw Black Watch, a play in London that was a touring production of the National Theatre of Scotland. It was very good. Last night I saw Beautiful Burnout – a production by the same company – as my last Sydney Festival event. It was, perhaps, even better.

It’s a play about boxing. Like Black Watch, Beautiful Burnout contains acting, dance, and projections. It’s got lots of Glaswegian-tongued humour and cursing. And it’s utterly gripping. It’s a glimpse into a world of discipline and disappointment. It’s a tale of striving and yearning. It’s a frustrated romance. It’s a tragedy. It’s all set on a rotating stage, with amazingly choreographed fights that slide in and out of Matrix-style bullet-time. There’s a throbbing Underworld soundtrack beneath it all, too, which works very well.

It’s theatre that has high energy and high hopes, grittiness and guts. I saw it from the front row and could not look away from the split-second timed exertion. If you missed it, you’ve missed out.

11
Jan
12

Sydney Festival: I Am Eora

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Categories: Sydney and theatre
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Last night I attended my first Sydney Festival event of the year: I Am Eora at Carriageworks. It was a mix of dance, music, theatre, and projection art, with a cast of Aboriginal performers from across the country. It was meant to be a modern manifestation of the spirit of some of the big figures in Sydney’s Aboriginal past.

Immediately after the show I had mixed feelings about it. It was well-staged, no doubt. The theatre at Carriageworks is big, and they used it to full effect, with lots of movement, sound, and lights. The projections that moved across the stage as people performed were very good, I thought. And it was earnest, heartfelt.

But it was hard for me to connect with, because while it ostensibly embodied the heroic characteristics of figures from the past it did almost nothing to sketch out the history of those figures for those who didn’t know them.

As a result many of the songs, while excitingly performed, did not connect well to the spirit they were after.

Twenty-four hours later I’ve realised that I was being a bit mundane. Sure, one (more pedestrian) approach would have been to tell the relevant history of these figures from the past and then point (quite prosaically) at how they are, or should be, aspired to today. But that would probably be pretty dry.

Last night’s performance was definitely not dry. It was a celebration. And the themes of defiance, of steadfast resilience, and thoughtful reconciliation were clear, and clearly made timely and relevant. So does it matter that I don’t know exactly how those historical figures manifested those traits? Probably not. Maybe being entertained in song and dance, and spoken to in ways that matter now, will last for me longer than a boring history lesson.

I still think the performance wore its heart on its sleeve a bit much, and some of the songs still don’t connect perfectly. But it was an exciting and interesting performance. And it’s a good example of how to talk about the present with a nod to the past, without wallowing in the past.

11
Dec
11

Kevin Spacey in Richard III

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I caught the last Sydney performance of Richard III this afternoon, played by Kevin Spacey and his company from London’s Old Vic, and directed by filmmaker Sam Mendes. It was bloody good.

Shakespeare’s tale of twisted evil was faithfully scripted, though in a semi-modern setting. Spacey is a camp, chuckling, mugging-to-the-audience villain. He insinuates layers of malice and fear, of ambition spawned at the moment his broken body was born. Most of the other actors were good, too, although a couple weren’t projecting quite enough for the size of the Lyric Theatre.

Spacey mostly played to the cheap seats, though. This was good for me because that’s where I was, all the way at the back. But I know some people – and probably those near the front – found it a bit shouty. That works for me, because in the second act Richard gets angry. He gets furious. He doesn’t remain scheming throughout; his vile deeds start to catch up with him, and he begins to lash out and ends up collapsing upon himself. His murderous duplicity gives way to murderous rage, and it seems entirely suitable that he ratchets the yelling up a few notches. Some others agree.

Fun theatre.

Kevin Spacey as Richard III

15
Dec
10

Uncle Vanya at the Sydney Theatre Company

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Categories: art and theatre
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I’ve been to a couple of plays at the Sydney Theatre Company in the year I’ve been here, but last night was a star-studded showcase. I attended a night of their holiday season run of Anton Checkhov’s Uncle Vanya.

It was acted by Cate Blanchett (who’s currently artistic co-director of the STC with her husband Andrew Upton), Hugo Weaving, Richard Roxburgh, John Bell, Jacki Weaver, and more. That’s some star power, there. Blanchett, Roxburgh, Weaver, and Weaving all blew me away.

The play, as is typical for late 19th-century Russian writing, is full of despair and gloomy philosophical musings. But this production – adapted by Upton, directed by Tamás Ascher, and played by the incredible crew listed above – bring Checkhov’s grim humour out. They dance about drunkenly and make faces and swing between laughter and sobbing. This keeps the mood from becoming oppressive but somehow makes the tale sadder. Some reviewers think they’ve injected too much frivolity in order to pander to modern audiences, but I thought it was well balanced.

All nights sold out some time ago. I’m really glad I got to see it.

Roxburgh and Weaving in Uncle Vanya

05
Nov
10

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman

By Timinator 1 Comment
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Two nights ago I saw a great play, The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman AKA Bob Dylan (A Lie): A Theatrical Talking Blues and Glissendorf. Written and performed by Sydney artists, this mouthful of a play is a loving, wry homage to Bob Dylan.

It tells the story of his life, but with lots of exaggeration, wordplay, humour, and jumbled-up, made-up legend. In effect it treats Bob as a myth, just as Bob himself has always done, especially in his early days. The actor playing Dylan himself almost never stopped his constant barrage of pun-infused irony. If you’re a Dylanophile you’ll find canonical and biographical references in every other word. You don’t have to be a super-fan, but it helps.

There are musical interludes throughout, though interestingly few of the songs are actually Dylan’s. It’s a mostly playful play that posited what happened in Dylan meetings both real (Johnny Cash, Alan Ginsberg, Woody Guthrie) and imagined (Marilyn Monroe, Jesus Christ). The characters of Daniel Lanois, Joan Baez, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Ezra Pound, Abraham Lincoln, Dylan Thomas, and many more make appearances.

I missed this play during its run at the Old Fitzroy earlier this year, but it’s just finishing a stint at the Seymour Theatre, so I caught it there. I also made sure I caught a performance where the actors and a few others held a musical performance in the theatre bar afterwards. That alone was worth the price of admission, as they did good versions of Dylan songs well known (“Hurricane”, “Like a Rolling Stone”) and overlooked (“I Remember You”).

08
Oct
10

The Trial

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Due to someone else’s mixup I had a couple of free tickets to see a staging of Franz Kafka’s The Trial at the Sydney Theatre Company last night.

Like the novel it was a surreal, comic, and lewd stumble through a pretty grim world. The protagonist, Josef K, awakes to find himself accused of a crime, though he never learns what that crime is or who accuses him. It starts as a silly scenario, but spirals into a nightmare world of procedures that go nowhere. Josef fights, but eventually – between erotic distractions – loses the ability to figure out how to do so.

The actors were decent, and the guy who played Josef K was really good. The revolving set was well-used. The sound effects were normally good in that they were appropriately unsettling, but seemed a bit over-the-top in a couple of spots.

The Trial isn’t fun. But it is a dark study into the seeming logical break between social organisations and the individuals in them, as well as into how people react to pressure on their regular lives. It’s bleak food for thought.

 

The Trial. Photo by Jeff Busby

 

27
Sep
10

Donation and Quack

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Categories: Sydney and theatre
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It was a bloody good day, in at least three senses.

At lunchtime today I popped out of the office and to the nearby Red Cross Blood Service donation centre. It was a nice, new facility, and my first time there. I think they were understaffed, though, because it took quite a long time to get through. But the staff that were there were all really nice. They missed my vein on the first try of the right arm, but got a good bleeder on my left. I think I may have to switch to my left for good now; too many years of right-arm donating have left me with scar tissue, they tell me. And my O-neg duty is done for another few months.

Tonight I saw a play at the SBW Stables theatre in Kings Cross called Quack. It’s a sardonic comedy set in an old-time outback Australian mining town. It’s about the hubris and blindness of small-minded belief systems, whether ancient or modern. It’s about pressure and expectations and wanting to get away from both. And it’s about a zombie outbreak. In amongst the soliloquies and confrontations are giant splatterings of blood, flesh, piss, pus, shit, sputum, and severed limbs. It’s hilariously profane and grotesque. It was great fun.

Quack is only showing in Sydney for a few more days. If you like your satire coated in vomit and blood, you can’t miss it.

Aimee Horne as Fanny in QUACK

24
Sep
10

The Ballad of Backbone Joe

By Timinator 1 Comment
Categories: funny and theatre
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I’m just back from seeing a great bit of theatre: The Ballad of Backbone Joe is playing at the Sydney Theatre Company. If you like oddball tales of murder, country blues and roots jazz, and hilarious surreal humour, then you need to get tickets right away: it only runs to October 2nd.

This is what the theatre’s website says, and I can’t say it better:

The Ballad of Backbone Joe tells a twisted tale of the apparent death, the murder no less, of a woman in a blood red dress. Set in the roaring carnival days of prewar Australia, in a small town’s abattoir and boxing emporium, the tale unfolds through jigsaw narrative, film, visual trickery, bone-crunching slapstick, dark humour and the unique Rag ‘n’ Bone music and junkyard aesthetic of Melbourne-based, internationally acclaimed, trio The Suitcase Royale. Contra bass, banjo, guitar, accordion, drums and the ghostly voice of a reddressed vixen carry this broken-down truck of a show down the windy road of revenge.

Is it silly and unpolished? Of course. Do the band – who are also the actors – screw up and have a laugh with the audience about it? Naturally. Is it top-to-bottom charming and fun? Is it ever. I gut-laughed more than a few times, and my toe rarely stopped tapping.

Go see it, tickets are $30 max. I had a front-row centre seat tonight, you should have no problem.

I said a quick hello to The Suitcase Royale afterwards and bought their CD (remember those?). One of those tracks – and it’s one from the play – is in my Box, on the right-hand side of my music blog, if you want to have a listen. The band are playing a free gig at the Wharf restaurant in the theatre complex tomorrow night, too.

The Suitcase Royale in The Ballad of Backbone Joe. Click the image for their Edinburgh Fringe review from the Guardian

16
Jan
10

Sydney Festival: The Fence

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Categories: theatre
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Further Sydney Festival fun last night: a play called The Fence.

We took the train to Parramatta – my first time in that neighbourhood – got some dinner (they’ve got a nice Meat & Wine Co. out there) and went to the Riverside Theatre. That was only the starting point, though: we were ushered down the river, into an alley, and through some backyards to a purpose-built backyard. It was an excellent reproduction of a house – open at the back wall to allow viewing – and yard, with seats staged for the ticketholders. We watched the production, outdoors in the dying evening light, supplied with bug spray, as if we were hiding in the backyard of the home. It gave them a realistic and wide-ranging stage on which to act, with the interior kitchen and lounge, a shed, and the lawn.

The play was about middle-aged Sydney folk who – triggered by the arrival of someone absent many years – come into conflict from the pressures of the past. It seemed really well-received by the assembled crowd. The acting was very good, and I quite liked each of the performances, which didn’t seem archetypal or cliched.

But I felt it was a bit melodramatic, and the plot seemed familiar: someone from the past shows up, old memories are stirred, people come into conflict because they take their frustration and hurt out on each other. Haven’t we seen that sort of family drama plenty of times before?

What bugged me most were the little musical interludes: a handful of times the scenes would stop, people would retreat to dark corners, and a song would be played (either by one of the cast, or recorded). I suppose it was meant to give the audience time to pause and reflect, as there was no intermission. But I found that they were little spots of twee surreality that yanked me right out of what was otherwise – especially with the very concrete staging – a strongly realistic play. And it wasn’t the tunes, either: Steve Miller’s “The Joker”, Lucinda Williams’ “Fruits of My Labor” and Johnny Cash doing Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” are some of my favourite songs. The little steps into a parallel music-world just didn’t work for me.

So: loved the staging and acting, not crazy about the story and musical breaks. I think my view might be the minority from last night, though, as most folks seemed to very much like it.

The Fence

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