...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 ...
Archives for “New Writing”
La Chat Noir: A (B)romance in One ActI Love You, Bro is a creepy little black comedy that is becoming justifiably famous since its debut at the 2007 Melbourne Fringe and subsequent season at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Set in England the eighty minute solo act is told by Johnny (Ash Flanders) who recounts how, as a lonely fourteen year-old, he began a chat-room relationship that nearly cost him his life. Bored and frustrated Johnny spends his nights at his computer talking to equally bored and frustrated strangers until he meets by chance another boy in his town who ...
A Doll(boy)'s House“For the majority,” said Jean Cocteau, “a work of art cannot be beautiful without a plot involving mysticism or love”. Matt Cameron’s Poor Boy has a bob each way by including both and, like one of Cocteau’s elegant films (like the voice from the other side coming from the radio which was a feature of Cocteau's Orphée), creates a spirit world alongside the real world where mysticism and love are intrinsically bound together.Daniel (Guy Pearce) has been killed by a hit a run driver whilst on a Zebra crossing. He was studiously keeping to the black lines, it ...
Brno BrainerIt' been a long time coming but finally a new play by Tom Stoppard has arrived here. Since Arcadia (1993, which incidentally is currently being staged modestly but coherently at Chapel of Chapel) the plays Indian Ink (1995) and The Invention of Love (1997) an adaptation of The Seagull (1997) and a trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002) seem to have passed without interest. Rock 'N' Roll, on the other hand was greeted with the enthusiasm of his best work from the 1970s and 1980s. In this current production it feels like a very loose piece of writing indeed.The ...
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 ...
Through a Dark GlasslyHannie Rayson’s play, like the enormously popular adaptation of A B Facey’s A Fortunate Life that played to over 30,000 people back in 1984, is one of those plays about the Great War told through the eyes of an ‘everyman’ rather than an official hero. In this case it is told through eyes that were clouded for half a century.Nelson Ferguson was a promising artist who served on the Western Front. Mustard gas robbed him of his full sight but he struggled on, raising a family and making a career in art none the less.Rayson adapts his ...
A story dealing with one of the most shocking murders committed by a young person in recent Australian history might be a surprising subject for Arena Theatre Company, an organisation for and about youth. Even more surprising is the bringing together of two of the most formidable emerging writers, Lally Katz and Tom Wright to author it. Based on the murder in 1997 of the engineer, Joe Cinque who was murdered by law student lover Anu Singh, the same event that Helen Garner explored in her book Joe Cinque's Consolation.Criminology is based on fact but is a fictional account of ...
Evil Under the SonIn her earlier play The Memory of Water Shelagh Stephenson set up an intriguing story about three daughters dealing with the recent loss of their far from perfect mother. Although not intended to be ghost like the ghost in Hamlet, their mother appears as a kind of living flashback. It was a lot of plays ago but The Memory of Water still sticks in my head.Enlightenment had a similar theme and a similar combination of grief, loss and the supernatural and will also have a similar effect on me. Lia (Sarah Peirse) and Nick's (Nicholas Bell) 20-year-old ...
She walks in beauty like the night(mare)There must be a curse on Malthouse when it comes to doing dark and creepy shows. After the less than successful staging of The Pillowman Michael Kantor and Maryanne Lynch's take on Sleeping Beauty does not come near to the dark and nightmarish theatre work I was expecting. None the less it is hugely enjoyable. Lasting nearly two hours Sleeping Beauty is totally sung throughout. The songs are a mixed bag of mostly contemporary pop and they all delivered 'no holds barred' by the tireless cast. The basics of the story are there; Mother ...
Evil Under the SonIn her earlier play The Memory of Water Shelagh Stephenson set up an intriguing story about three daughters dealing with the recent loss of their far from perfect mother. Although not intended to be ghost like the ghost in Hamlet, their mother appears as a kind of living flashback. It was a lot of plays ago but The Memory of Water still sticks in my head.Enlightenment had a similar theme and a similar combination of grief, loss and the supernatural and will also have a similar effect on me. Lia (Sarah Peirse) and Nick's (Nicholas Bell) 20-year-old ...
Pillow SlipMartin McDonagh is of Anglo-Irish descent and was something of a flashy individual when in his twenties he emerged on the British theatre scene (Richard Eyre was startled to encounter a snazzy young man in an Armani suit when he first saw McDonagh in person)McDonagh's has a writing style that goes back to all those Jacobean tragedies that were packing 'em in between the death of Shakespeare and the closure of the theatres in 1642. Violent yet flippantly humorous he deals out schlock the same John Waters dishes out tastelessness or Tarantino deals out dispassionate violence respectively in their ...
School Daze?Alan Bennett's first play was a self styled revue called Forty Years On unrolling the history of post-war Britain with singing schoolboys and doting dons. This time Bennett's boys recount the downfall of one dear and queer old teacher Hector and the rise to power of another less popular but no less queer Irwin.Underneath the surface story is Bennett’s view of Post-Thatcher Britain. Even Thatcher’s most memorable saying “There is No Such Thing as Society” is parodied on the blackboard when the play opens.In 1983 a group of boys, fresh from their A-Levels (something akin to the VCE) have ...
