Monday, May 20, 2019

Party (verb)


PARTY (verb) devised by William Yang, in the Playhouse, at the Sydney Opera House. 10th and 11th May.

I first knew of William Yang when he was Willie Young and part of the cast of the iconic original production of THE LEGEND OF KING O'MALLEY, written by Michael Boddy and Bob Ellis, in 1970, and recently re-staged at the Seymour Centre in 2014. Willie was part of the troupe that created, under the Direction of John Bell, as an an actor/singer/musician. Later, I remember him as part of the Rex Cramphorn Company in his Studio experiments on some of the Classical repertoire. Willie was never an actor really. Then, other than seeing photographs of him at dinners at Patrick White's he kind of disappeared from my radar. Later, he re-appeared in my life at public parties where he always carried a camera and clicked away at the scenarios. He always dressed as himself and seemed to be content just to wander around and click, click, click.

In fairly recent times, as William Yang, he has curated his photography to create published photographic essays in book form and launched a career on the stage showing, thematically, some of his photographic work - a kind of slide-night - (the quality of the photography as photography is debatable, but as historical record, invaluable) - where he acted as a verbal interlocutor to place the work in context. I have seen several iterations of this endeavour.

PARTY (verb), is the latest offer. It concentrates in presenting a photographic history/memory of the infamous Dance Party culture of Sydney from the early 1980's up until the present. There were only two performances. The night I went - the first performance - it was like being at a gathering of old friends come to remember those old times. One saw friends that one thought were dead as well as other friends who were at the last Bad Dog or Kooky Party a month or so ago. It was a family get together, it felt warm, inclusive and special. This was a family gathering come to relish and indulge in joint ecstatic memories - one was wondering who had been captured and, was to be shown, while secretly hoping, that they might be up there in one of the photographs.

Accompanied with a soundtrack presented live by Jonny Seymour and Paul Mac performing as as Stereogamous, standing to one side of a projection screen, William Yang in a flat and mostly lugubrious voice introduces and, sometimes, elaborates about the individual projected images and of the history of some of the participants. It turned out that this show of the Dance Club phenomena became also, sometimes, a very personal journey, for Mr Yang, as we meet ex-lovers and companions across the time era that included the AIDS epidemic. It became a little maudlin, though, highly respectful, and for some of us, ultimately, fairly moving.

If you have attended other iterations of this formula from Mr Yang, there was nothing really new here - it was fairly familiar in its mode with the curiosity of the selected image/memory the sustaining element that kept one present. At 80 minutes it only just began to wear us down- you know, like any slide night can do.

Most of us were glad to have made the effort to come even though in all of those photographs of the parties and the memory of being confronted by William's lens, one did not appear in the haze of the dance spaces over the almost 40 years of coverage of this show. We got to feel warm with our chosen 'family' and were happy to be re-acquainted and have our past drawn into the present.

Pleasant.

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof


Sydney Theatre Company (STC) presents CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, by Tennessee Williams, in the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay. 3rd May -

Part way through Act One of the Sydney Theatre Company's production of Tennessee Williams, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, Directed by Kip Williams (and it was probably only twenty minutes or so into the text), I knew that I was having an experience in the theatre that was what I recognise as an experience of Grand Theatre. Watching this production of Kip Williams was the equivalent to me of what I have often experienced in the three hour or more in a Wagner Opera experience - a "Grand Olde Opry" experience, one that through its writing and the endurance of its time spread, was going to lift me to the upper echelons of exposed truths that would both burn my soul and still elate me to the joy of being witness of one man's genius in his distilled and earnest learnt vision of what it is to be human. A gift of earned insight seared from his pain for us as a gift to guide us through our own travails.

This production had the handle on the possibility of the writing and relished the words of Mr Williams' labour. This was what some would call Grand Old Fashioned Theatre. The play is written as one continuous act and is in 'real' time: three and a quarter hours long. I was witness to the huge scale of Tennessee Williams' conception. This play revealed itself as a Masterpiece and put into contextual shadow most of what we see on our stages in Sydney, as contemporary writing that in imaginative context and theme is in comparison banal, pygmy, empty, shallow. When did a new play, especially an Australian play, tell us that we were to deal with notions of existential DISGUST? MENDACITY? LIES? LIARS? GREED? Issues of our present day. Not for a long time in my experience. Let us not dwell too much on the mastery of language usage and character conception and realisation, and daring of the dramaturgical structure of each of the three acts of the play, for it is painful to know what we do not have enough of when we go to the theatre here.

Now, what I am raving about is the Play not the Production, for this production is flawed tremendously, with the ego of the Director, Kip Williams, though, relatively, it is surprisingly restrained in the exhibition of his usual 'tropes' to reveal to us his needs to make us aware that he is in charge of what we should appreciate. He signals with Sound Composition and Design (Stefan Gregory) and Lighting Design (Nick Schlieper) to intrude on the subtleties of Tennessee Williams' writing, and his confidence in our, the audience's, intelligence. It is gross overstatement of effort, over and over again, indulged with volume of noise and a huge wall of blaring light. (How much did that Lighting Design element cost? Outrageously, I imagine!)

The Sound and Lighting being the most intrusive affect, for there are also visual missteps from the first reveal of the Set (David Fleischer), that despite the careful notes from Tennessee Williams in the text, is the Director's decision to set the play in 2019, which looks, in result, in the considered conversations of solution with the Director and Designer, like a high fashion furniture shop display room, with pieces of expensive (minimalist) bedroom furniture marooned in a vast landscape of blackness that has no walls or doors, a huge warehouse show room (one looked for the price tags). Black, white and grey - reflected in mirrors many a time - having a colour dominant 'coolness' with no suggestion of the humidity of this plantation, one of the finest in the South, with all of its fecund growth surrounding it, no humidity of the sexual tension in this bedroom. The logic of the gradual disappearance of elements of the objects of design throughout the three acts, during the night into the darkness, seems to be unfathomable except as design mistakes or shallow thinking with a necessity to get rid of it (which the actors stage-managed throughout this naturalistic play, along with their other duties which involved acting!). The bed, Brick and Maggie's bed, in this design is a flimsy piece in a contemporary minimalist scale without any of the deliberate symbolism of the ghosts of the houses' history permeating - no memory of Jack and Peter, the two old maids that once owned this bed, this estate, no Simon Schama (Tennessee Williams) Ghosts haunting this room or place.

And lets not dwell on the awful visuals of most of the costuming (Mel Page), especially of the women. (The men all get away with a look of reality and function).What was Mae (Nikki Shields) wearing? What of some of Magige's wardrobe of dresses that she paraded before us? - (oh horror, horror, horror). And the 'sausage skin', white tube, full length dress that Big Mama (Pamela Rabe) wore was a shocker of some note.

The long first act 'aria' that Maggie gives in Act One is full of daring physical choices from Zahra Newman. It is stuffed with the high energy aggression of a musical comedy inclination of dance choreography. Ms Newman, perhaps, taking a cue from her introduction engineered by the Director, by giving a 'campy' torch-song rendition of some of CRY ME A RIVER to introduce Maggie - for a moment I thought we were in for a cabaret version of the play! It is an astonishing performance but it lacks any, or most, of the tactics of the Maggie written on the page. It lacked the desperation of a worn-out woman trying to secure her future, her old age security, from a man she knows is not interested and is past care. This Maggie was a childish elf seeking attention relentlessly. It is not completely fair, but my memory of Kathleen Turner and the tremendous grief and fear of a woman that motivated her actions was completely absent from this performance and the memory of the Wendy Hughes sexual heat with her Brick, John Hargreaves, was not apparent. Energy galore, outrageous choice galore but little to no close reading of the text. It seemed to me a performance indulged by the Director.

Harry Greenwood, playing Brick, does not look as if he was ever an athlete and a figure of desire - a kind of god - his body looks clapped out and seems not to have any memory of the taut hurdler on the athletic field that we are lamenting. Mr Greenwood's theatrical intelligence is a kind of compensation and gives his all, but he seems to be way out of his emotional depth in securing the self laceration of a man that hates himself, that cannot face the possibility of his truth - his homophobic internalisation of his greatest fear. He fares much better in the second act when faced with the fierce heat and energy of Hugo Weaving as Big Daddy, for there is a spark of contact, a pain of history present between them that does not really reveal itself in the work with Ms Newman in the first Act.

Hugo Weaving is the other reason to see this production - he is, quite simply, magnificent. And the intrusive hand of Kip Williams which was so evident in their last collaboration: THE RESISTABLE RISE OF ARTURO UI, with his cameras, is absent from this production and allows us to enjoy every gesture of offer of this great artist, unimpeded with film editorial direction. We are not forced to choose of where to look.

Pamela Rabe, in the above mentioned costume, adds to her gallery of entertaining grotesques (read my blog on DANCE OF DEATH), in her decisions in creating Big Mama. Lumpy and bent-over, wig almost askew with a flourished handkerchief Ms Rabe wrinkles as much laughter as she can squeeze from the opportunities Tennessee gives her. It is a highly appreciated performance - some of the audience finding it hilarious. Its only competition in the laughter stakes is in the delicate and wise offers by Peter Carroll in the tiny role of the bewildered, limited churchman, Reverend Tooker. Ms Rabe could learn by watching the understatement of Mr Carroll in securing his laugh rewards with the role.

Nikki Shields, as Mae, despite the costume, and Josh McConville as her husband Gooper, succeed, in the third act, to make these two characters almost human and maybe motivated from 'good' and decent ideas. They give interrogated performances - then, they nearly always do.

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF at the STC, worth catching. Read my blog of the Belvoir production to read my analysis of the play and my 'beef' about these auteurs of Sydney. The best thing about this production is that the love that the Director espouses for the Writer, in his program notes, allows the play to breathe at its own value. GRAND OLD THEATRE, the like of which one thirsts for in Sydney, and is happy to appreciate even in this flawed effort.

The writer is indeed GOD.

This production of the play uses the first published version of the text.

Salome

Photo by Prudence Upton
Opera Australia, present SALOME - An opera in one act by Richard Strauss. Libretto by the composer, based on Hedwig Lachmann's German translation of the French play SALOME, by Oscar Wilde, in the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, throughout March, from 6th - 26th, 2019.

SALOME, an old Old Testament, bible story.

SALOME, a sensational poem/play, in French, originally, by Oscar Wilde from 1891 - banned, originally, across most of Europe.

SALOME, an outrageously daring composition and adaptation by Richard Strauss written in 1905. Banned, but appreciated and highly lauded, gradually, through the operatic world.

SALOME, a contemporary production by the brilliant Gale Edwards, for the what I imagine should be an eternally grateful Opera Australia, that is as outrageous in its intellectual and physical conception and execution, placing this female-'revenge' work undeniably in our contemporary era of the 'revolutionary' contemplation of the 'gender bubble' of the history of the male gaze on the other half of the species than any I have ever seen before. It is accumulatively a highly disturbing and thrilling experience. It is even more remarkable to meet such sexual relevance and power in an Opera House, where the heroine usually either goes mad, marries (usually unhappily) enters a convent or dies a tragic death.

This production, is not new, it has been in repertoire for a few years, but it had the foresight to herald the eruptions of the sexual power-politics of 2019, and it is simply shocking and exciting to see, today, Ms Edwards' prescience of mind with her fellow collaborators, Brian Thomson (Set Design), and Julie Lynch (Costume Design) and Choreographer, Kelley Abbey, in the creative act they have conceived and delivered is remarkable.

This 'showing' of this work has been 'staged-revived' by Andy Morton - which seems odd to me since Ms Edwards is living in Sydney and was/is available to keep it refreshed and true. It is interesting to note that there are regular revivals of Ms Edwards' highly-reviewed Opera Australia productions such as the ever revived LA BOHEME – where the present management, led by Lyndon Terracinni, have never ever permitted the original artists, despite their availability – to take responsibility in reviving their work for us. What are the 'politics' guiding this decision to deliberately avoid using one of the great Australian Musical artists and her 'team' from giving us the benefit of their genius? This is a question no one at OA seems prepared to engage with.

I felt the heat in the revenge of SALOME on the male gaze in the demanding of the head of John the Baptist, in the daring acting, choreography and singing of the role on this night, by Lise Lindstrom. The head of John the Baptist has probably never had such a 'reward' before! Not only the singing but the acting and daring choreography that possesses Ms Lindstrom is moving beyond belief- across a wide emotional range of response.

The masterstroke in this production of the famous Dance of the Seven Veils is where each veil reveals contemporary provocative images of women's objectification through Western history: from that of a little girl with her 'teddy' on the lap of her 'Daddy', to the brilliant choice of reviving the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe standing above the grate of the New York subway system with her dress billowing up over her head. The images are mind-blowingly arresting.

Jochanaan (John, the Baptist) is wonderfully sung with an alabaster torso gleaming seductively through the costuming and staging in the 'ownership' from Alexander Krasnov. While Andreas Conrad creates a hectoring and saturated evil as Herod. It is no fault of his that the seedy and decadent presence of Claude Rains permeates my memory from his performance in the 1965 George Stevens epic of the life of Christ in THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD - a Herod of evil, oozing its way off the screen into my clammy alarm of infected dampness of rot.

Less successful is Jaqueline Dark (I last saw her as the Mother Superior in THE SOUND OF MUSIC) as Herodias, who seems to believe stock melodrama effects in response to the events of the opera are enough to fulfil a contract of belief for her audience to the machinations of a woman scorned and full of revengeful hate.

 Too, the Design image of a freezer of hung corpses looming over the action of play may now seem more than a trifle over-the-top in its constant presence - its opening impact quickly becomes a bore of visual oppression and dullness: time as wearied this concept. The costuming concept now seems dated for the other minor characters covering the ages of history, and today seems to be an intellectual over-statement.

I regard The Metropolitan Opera in New York as the Best Theatre Company in that city. The quality of the skills necessary to make opera work are available and rich in its reach of talent but is managed with contemporary design and intellectual rigour of stunning relevance on a consistent basis over the wide and extraordinary genres of the opera form. Ms Edwards' production of SALOME, seems to have satisfied my receptors with high approval and with adjustments to the passing of time in her team's visuals could well sit comfortably in that company's work.

Just why Ms Edwards sits in her home in Glebe, a stone-throw away from the performance venue where her work is re-shown by a clearly pleased Opera Management, while others attempt to recreate her work, is a question we, who travel the world and believe in the opera as a viable contemporary form need explanation, don't you think?

Gale Edwards' SALOME, you just need to see it when you can.