Slaved By The BellThe Beckett estate seem to have relaxed a little over the author's instructions and stage directions (permission for the Belvoir Street production of Waiting for Godot was nearly withdrawn when music was played at a point where the author had not prescribed it). In Michael Kantor's new production of Happy Days the famous mound of earth consuming the central character Winnie across the two acts is interpreted as a jumble of black metal plates surmounted with jagged rocks and looking as though Emil Pretorius's sets for a pre-war Bayreuth Walküre has mated with Ron Robertson-Swann's sculpture Vault ...
Archives for “Classic”
A Friend of Dorothy'sI first saw The Man from Mukinupin when it was new in the late 1970s and everyone in the cast was white. Since then I don't recall seeing another play by Dorothy Hewett and, like so many other playwrites whose names are not David or Williamson, her work seems to vanished from the boards. Hewett’s 1979 musical play was an unlikely way of celebrating Western Australia’s 150th birthday. Set around the time of the First World War it shows the ugly side of the Anzac legacy, with the local war hero Harry Tuesday (Craig Annis) becoming ...
Army FatiguesWoyzeck by George Büchner, the science geek who also wrote plays and stories in a style a century ahead of his time, is one of those watersheds in European art that, usually after a long time become hailed as a masterpiece. Büchner was by training a scientist; studying medicine, languages (becoming fluent in French, Italian and English) then specialising in animal anatomy and what we call Biology. His treatises on the nervous system of fish landed him, at 22, a Doctorate and a teaching position at the University of Zurich. His twin love of literature, especially drama, (although no ...
The rich but foolish Orgon (Gary McDonald) and his mother Madame Pernelle (Kerry Walker) have fallen for the religious zealot Tartuffe (Kim Gyngell), who nearly seduces Orgon’s wife Elmire (Marina Prior) and robs him of his estate before he is unmasked. Justin Fleming’s translation is faithful to Moliere’s original, even to the improbable final scene where the King intervenes to apprehend Tartuffe (the widely known Richard Wilbur translation morphs the character into a bailiff's officer who is revealed to be acting on the King's order). The verse, with its short, deliberately rhymed phrases, is retained too creating an artificiality that, ...
Delta SkelterTo celebrate the 65th birthday and negative cancer test of 'Big Daddy' Pollitt (Chris Haywood), the richest man on the Mississippi Delta, his sons Gooper (Grant Piro) and Brick (Martin Henderson) gather at the family home with their wives Mae (Rebekah Stone) and Margaret (Essie Davis) for the party. Mae is pregnant with their sixth child while Brick and Maggie are childless and their marriage is on the rocks. Brick is an alcoholic, his leg in plaster from a drunken prank the night before, and indifferent to his beautiful wife. Despite that Maggie is crazy for love of him. ...
What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning - and a child's more important than a joke, I hopeThrough the Looking Glass. Chapter 9Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, along with his other non-academic writings (as an academic and under his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, he published mathematics and logic treatises) seemed to escaped operatic settings until quite recently. A 'Musical Dream Play' appeared as early as 1888 but apart from small scaled adaptations for school and amateur performance major English composers left ...
In(step)JokesThe 39 Steps could be the Melbourne Theatre Company's entry in this year's Comedy Festival as a high energy spoof of John Buchan's famous spy story of the same name. The version more spoofed here, however, is Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 film version. Hitchcock's script added the now famous, train sequences, the Music Hall performer and fellow spy Mr 'Am I right Sir?' Memory (one of my favorite movie characters) as well as some unrelieved sexual tension. This take on a classic book and film is by Patrick Barlow who acts, directs, produces and writes plays, his speciality is improbable farce, ...
She's Gotta Have ItI agree with Harry Kippax's estimation (Nation, 1 June 1963*) that The Season at Sarsaparilla is a "rich, relevant, accessible play ... None who cares for drama, Australian or otherwise should miss it". White's story of adultery in complacent suburbia is designed to provoke. A character Roy (Eden Falk) is introduced to act as chorus/participant constantly criticising that complacency while the adultery is pre-empted by another chorus, this time of dogs baying for a bitch on heat while the soon to be adulterous wife Nola (Pamela Rabe) soaks up the sexual atmosphere like a sponge. The louchness ...
Juan Good Turn Deserves AnotherThe year of Moliere adaptations #1Last year Red Stitch staged Patrick Marber's adaptation of Strindberg's Miss Julie. It was brought forward to the immediate post war period and, like this adaptation of Moliere's Don Juan, transferred to England. At the time there was still enough class and sexual prejudice for the tragedy of Julie's randiness to cut deeply. Moliere's Don Juan is a dangerous comedy about a swaggering atheist. Mozart's Don Giovanni, was equally scandalous presenting as it did (and in a court theatre) a corrupt aristocrat blaspheming in a cemetery and literally defying God. Creating ...
Chamber of HorrorsA welcome return of Brian Lipson’s multi-layered theatrical extravaganza. His one man show that sets out to be a piece about the 19th century social-scientist Francis Galton but which turns into and fantasia on the nature of theatrical performance is as funny as it is fascinating. Galton is best remembered as the founder of Eugenics. In his time (the second half of the 19th century, Galton died in 1911, the same year as that other great English satirist W.S. Gilbert) his theories were considered cranky like Phrenology and all those other pseudo-sciences. Only the connection ...
Night of the Long WivesEdward Albee’s famous alcohol fuelled, all night psycho-battle between husbands and wives is a modern classic. After a college drinks party, professor George (Gary McDonald) and his wife Martha (Wendy Hughes) invite the new biology teacher Nick (Stephen Phillips) and his wife Honey (Alison Bell) back for a nightcap that becomes a nightmare. Nick and Honey watch as George and Martha indulge in a battle of wits, minds and souls developed over twenty plus years of marriage. Soon Nick and Honey, nicely soused with bourbon and brandy and not so unassuming as we thought, become part ...
Sloane Square!In this new production, the first professional staging in years, poor old Joe Orton gets a battering almost as bad as the one his psycho boyfriend gave him back in 1967. Entertaining Mr Sloane was Orton's first staged play and one of the greatest English sex comedies since the Restoration. In Orton’s words “it’s about a young man who wants a room and comes into this house. He’s met the woman of the house in a public library and she shows him around the house. Within about five minutes she attempts to seduce him. A bit later on, she ...
