Club Troppo

I wonder why oz theatre icon David Williamson reacted with complacent high dudgeon to a bitchy review on Crikey of his latest turgid thespian offering Don Parties On?  After all, the Murdoch and Fairfax reviews were almost as negative, and redoubtable blogging theatre critic Alison Croggon posted a splenetic masterpiece.  Croggon is married to someone with a real claim to be Australia’s leading contemporary playwright in Daniel Keene, so you’d imagine her undisguised contempt for Williamson’s writing would sting rather more than the somewhat amateurish scribblings of some callow youth on Crikey.  Here’s an extract from Alison’s review:

In Don Parties On, all his writerly clumsiness is writ large – the dire expository dialogue, the stereotypical characters, the almost neurotic repetitiveness, the constant machinations of getting people on and off stage. Much of the dialogue – the pronouncements on baby boomers, greenies, Australian politics and so on – in fact sounds as if it’s been cribbed from some of Australia’s more active political blogs. The people-moving is about as clunkily done as I’ve seen – characters are constantly announcing that now they must go into the garden to show each other photographs of their children, or to the bedroom to check on someone hysterical, or to the study to watch a DVD, so that two or three people can be left on stage to reminisce or reveal something shocking. Alternatively, you get rows of frozen actors standing on stage watching as two or three others do their dialogue.

Robyn Nevin’s direction makes as decent a fist as is possible of this stylistic rubble – I left feeling that it could have been a lot worse. The actors fail to make the characters credible, but it’s hard to blame them given that they are all written as walking cliches; although Sue Jones gives some feisty life to the character of Jenny. But for me, there was no escaping the creeping numbness as the evening wore on.

Naturalism this certainly isn’t. Considered as a comedy of manners, it lacks the grace, wit and formal mastery that gives the form its champagne fizz. A direct comparison with Don’s Party starkly demonstrates how stale Williamson has become: the lively colloquialism of the original, its chief virtue, has long leached out. This really is zombie theatre, devouring the brains, not only of its audience, but of its own playwright.

Joan Sutherland has passed on. Inevitably, obituarians are taking the opportunity to contend that she was the greatest soprano, or even the greatest singer, of the post war period, or even of the 20th Century. Others are content just to raise the question.

When it comes to choosing between artists in the highest rank, it’s a partly matter of taste. Some will prefer one singer for her ability to convey emotion; others will prefer a different one for the ‘purity’ or ‘warmth’ of her tone, whatever those words mean (the vocabulary of the voice critic is as specialised as the wine taster’s). But when it comes to something called technique, I suspect that Martin Kettle (linked above) is expressing conventional wisdom in saying that:

…it’s the once-in-a-lifetime combination of instrument, ambition and technique that makes [Sutherland] such a complete artist. Of course, it was the amazing security of her top notes and the dazzling accuracy of her coloratura that always brought the house down. But it was Sutherland’s soaring, flowing line that really marked her out from the others…

However, this is actually the worst time for ranking exercises. (Continued)

If you are of a certain age, you will know what people mean when they refer to “The War”.   You will be able to cast your mind back and imagine a type of blustery former warrior, of proud bearing, and fixed views on pretty much everything.  Having been in the War, they were accorded great respect, and it was a privilege when they’d share a fraction of their tales with some snotty kid who’s naturally hanker for the full gory details, but was happy to get the smallest tidbit of life in khaki.

Last night I saw Peter Houghton, bring to life a remarkable facsimile of those blustery old soldiers.  In his one man play “The Colours“,  he inhabits Colour Sergeant Tommy Atkins.  Veteran of the First World War (one of the Kaiser’s original old-contemptibles), of El-Alemain in the Second, and now, in 1946, stationed in a lonely outpost in the British colony of Batundi in Africa.  It’s a time of reflection for Colour Sergeant Atkins as his devotion to his regiment, to King and Empire, is not being reciprocated by a post War government that is drained, heavily indebted, and seeking to free itself from its burdens.

It’s a brilliantly funny portrayal of a man who knows nothing but the Army life and who knows where he sits in the pecking order. He knows that the Africans are cheating thieves, that the Irish are untrustworthy and stupid, and like to live in pig stys, that Americans are poseurs and soft,  that Kiwis and Australians have big chips on their shoulders hence the loud mouthed boosterism of their very modest achievements, that the grey uniformed Prussian Calvalry are really just men. You can tell that when you put the bayonet into them. And that the British Army is the most glorious army of all.

At one point Sergeant Atkins quotes those famous Kipling lines, that even today have a  chilling relevance.

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Houghton is a genius.   His script is speckled throughout with historical British military tidbits, but given a real sense of life and place by Sergeant Tommy Atkins who revisits his life in an often hilarious, but intimately poignant way.  Houghton’s portrayal of the man, could easily have become a caricature with his handlebar moustache and bilious attitude,  but it doesn’t.  It is really quite moving, and as the play draws to a close I found myself captivated and dreading what might befall him.

Houghton’s skill as a writer and performer is such that he leaves you hanging over the cliff and then brings you safely back in the denouement. At the very last Sergeant Tommy Atkins gets to keep what he needs, and deserves.  His dignity.

I really wish I’d seen this play earlier, to let Club Troppo readers in Melbourne know about it.  As it is, today,  Saturday,  is the last performance.  So if time permits, instead of taking the safe option of Pizza and a Vid,  why not drop the kids off at Auntie Flo’s and get down to the new playhouse, and really indulge yourself with a surprising and really brilliant piece of work.  You won’t be disappointed.

I can’t think of a single song of his that is a really big favourite of mine. But has there ever been any big star who was more of a genius as a dancer? Surely not.  Not even Fred Astair comes close.

David, Cate and Andrew in happier (very recent) times – from SMH

It’s always sad when heroic high achievers begin to lose their powers, still more when they fail to age gracefully and succumb instead to bitterness and envy. But so it seems to be with David Williamson, once said to be Australia’s greatest playwright.

On the same day the Sydney Theatre Company’s season of new wunderkind Andrew (Lantana) Bovell’s blockbuster When The Rain Stops Falling opened at the Opera House to rave reviews, Williamson was bitching in the SMH about the poor judgment of the STC under the tutelage of Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton in preferring “dazzle theatre” and “capital-T theatre” over the sort of “storytelling theatre” of which Williamson sees himself as the epitome.

Although the STC has just finished a revival run of his vintage play The Removalists, it appears Cate and Andrew were less interested in staging Williamson’s newer works penned since he revoked a previous 2005 decision to retire from the playwrighting caper.   As a result, Williamson has taken his theatrical bat and gone home via Kirribilli’s Ensemble Theatre, which is about to stage his new work Let the Sunshine (why all these weather metaphors? – it must be the zeitgeist).  The plot summary tells you all you need to know about why Cate and Andrew didn’t want it for the STC:

Let The Sunshine, starring William Zappa, Georgie Parker, Andrew McFarlane and Kate Raison, is a comedy about two ideologically opposed couples living in Noosa, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, who are forced to get on when their children marry and have a child.

“It is a rerun of Romeo And Juliet,” Williamson says. “It’s the Capulets and the Montagues but my star-cross’d lovers don’t come to an horrendous end. Comedy is based not on life-shattering events but ordinary people muddling through their problems.”

Sounds more like an attempt to recycle Travelling North by making the protagonists sea-changing Babyboomers instead of old codgers while grafting a confected ideological conflict onto an already tired concept. 

(Continued)

Am I mistaken or is this a reasonable description of the last – say – thirty years in cinema.

A generation ago, you could do a film about foreigners in a normal English speaking accent. The Sound of Music was done in a mix of fairly unobtrusive (to us) English accents (the adults) and American accents (the kids). Some of the baddies spoke with a German accent. (OK so the Sound of Music was forty years ago. No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition). In Casablanca too, the Germans speak with a German accent I think, whilst Claude Rains has a kind of clear generalised international English speaking accent – I don’t think he tried to sound very French, although where people were to be presented with some ethnicity, they spoke English with an ethnic accent.

Anyway all this became decidedly non-U. It signified that the film wasn’t ‘realistic’ and as film sets were turfed out and we went ‘on location’ wherever and whenever, realism in the way people spoke became valued. So gradually accents came to be seen as corny, and where films involved interspersed scenes with different communities speaking languages other than English original languages were spoken and English subtitles were provided. Thus (IIRC) Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence would have had the Japanese speaking Japanese with subtitles. Even Tora Tora Tora did this I think – and that was 1968 (again from memory).

Anyway this spell seems to have been broken. There are now a whole bunch of films on the screens that seem to take us back to the production mores of the past – of The Sound of Music. In The Reader they put on German accents. In Valkirie they don’t bother. The German high command spend a lot of their time discussing tactics in all sorts of mainly British accents.

Anyway, for my taste I don’t mind translating other languages into English in a film – it makes it easier to watch. But I don’t like delivering that English in recognisable accents associated with other places and styles. Accents are very powerful things which body forth all sorts of implicit assertions about character. Imagine Hitler delivering a speech with a soft Irish accent or an Aussie accent or Mao with an upper class English accent. Of course you could say that playing Hitler or any other German as a person who speaks English with a German accent is just engaging in stereotyping. But for my money if you’re going to speak English, the only way to convey the German-ness of a person linguistically is with some kind of German accent (and of course there are lots of English speaking German accents to choose from – one can presumably make the accent quite lifelike if one goes to sufficient trouble.) I think Kate Winslett did this well in The Reader, even if I kept thinking how English she nevertheless seemed.

Anyway I wonder what others think about this burning issue of our time.

Dave Bloustien looks like a cross between Dr. Who and a 1960s mod with a cravat, waistcoat and sideburns. Certainly a contrast to the t-shirt and jeans that constitutes the usual comedy clobber, but Mr. Boustein doesnt deliver the usual stand-up routine either. Instead he offers an intriguing story that forms the spine of his current show, The Social Contract, playing at the Melbourne comedy festival.   Its a story about the deep self-doubt that must surely wrack all but the wealthiest of cocaine-fuelled comedians.  Its the big existential question.  I want to be a comedian, but am I funny?   And its a question that Mr. Bloustien has had tested, through an interesting chain of circumstances, in a court of law.

It is the story of a contract with a Sydney event promoter, a subsequent gig on board a Harbour cruise boat with an audience of schoolies, the deep humiliation of dying and the ramifications that lead to the Waverley Magistrates court and the testing of his funniness in front of a judge.  

(Continued)

It seems incredible, hard to believe, but we’ve got ten double passes to give away to Highly Suss, which looks like fun.  I’d go myself if I wasn’t going to be overseas. If you’re planning to be in Melbourne for the 4th of April, then let us know and we can send you a ticket to a Troppo table – or perhaps a block of seats in the audience. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be amazed at the incredible elephants that will be on stage. You’ll be abducted by aliens. But you’ll be returned back to the theatre in time for you to catch your tram home.  

How do you let us know – with a comment leaving your email below or by emailing me at nicholas AT gruen DOT com DOT au. Or after Monday 23rd March to rex UNDERSCORE ringschott AT yahoo DOT com DOT au

(Continued)

Barrie Kosky is a big hit with people who are vastly more knowledgeable about theatre than me.  He’s very big in Europe.  So maybe he’s just the ticket.  My two exposures to his theatre have been strikingly similar.  At the end of something I went to at the Sydney Opera House I snuck into the second half of his King Lear at the Opera House.

I love the play but didn’t stay long.  From memory, it consisted of people wandering about in a space made as unpleasant as possible.  A bit of a metaphor for how bad things were going for His Majesty Mr Lear no doubt. Anyway, I didn’t really come to any strong conclusions about it.  It seemed cliched to me – with many shopping trolleys and neon lights and loud and harsh noises and people speaking at each other with rat-tat-tat voices making things pretty unpleasant.  But I hadn’t seen that much of the whole play and maybe there was a point to it all – and maybe I wouldn’t have got it even if I had seen it all.  After about 30 minutes or so I let myself out and thought no more about it.

My wife Eva – who’s Greek – organised that we go see her favourite classical Greek playwright – Euripides (It’s funny how one keeps discovering English words and expressions with classical roots – the most obvious here being that exclamation you hear at the footy “you-little-ripper-dees’). Eva told me that the notices indicated that you had to be there on time or you got locked out of the whole thing.

Anyway it was only on arriving I discovered that this was directed by Barrie Kosky.  That was OK by me, I figured what with this guy’s success in Europe I’d see something of interest.  Well perhaps I would have – but I’m afraid I only got through another 30 minutes with the master.  It was the usual post-holocaust scenario.

Hecuba is hauled on in an Abu Grahib style hood, plonked on a pedestal, has all her possessions removed from her and says a few words of woe.  Then four more women are wheeled on (literally on a trolly) with hoods, shackles and electric wires attached and put on their own pedestals.  One of the women then undergoes depedestalisation, is bashed nearly to death and then shot dead.  She lies there while Cassandra jabbers and jibbers in pretty much the same rat-tat-tat style I remember from Kosky’s King Lear. It’ s virtually impossible to understand but one gets snippets.  Things are not going at all well for the women.  There’s some sound in the background a TV or something, but you wonder if it’s the theatre next door with bad sound insulation. But that makes it even harder to figure out what’s happening.  Then mercifully the TV noises die down.

Then Cassandra gets the same treatment as the previous girl except she’s also dragged into a tin filing cabinet (the back wall is all filing cabinets) and emerges raped with blood streaming from her undies, is repedestalised whereupon she graces us with the big vomit that she’s ingested while being secreted in the filing cabinet.

We left at that stage – another 30 minutes of Barrie to my name – though not without being warned by the usher that we wouldn’t be let back in.

I’m writing this just to let you know.  I’m certainly not saying that you shouldn’t go. There are people whose judgement I’d trust much more than mine who might well say you should. But Barrie and I don’t see eye to eye and I’ll probably stay away in future if warned.  I think I understand some of the points that Barrie is making, but it’s not really my thing.

I’ve reproduced a much more favourable review below the fold – well it’s not quite a ‘review’, it’s a kind of promotional interview. (Continued)