The Hypocrite
Molière definitely only wrote one play. Run Tartuffe and Le Malade Imaginaire side by side and the only difference is a few rosary beads on one stage and a few syringes on the other. That is not to denigrate the writing: anyone who can write 2000 rhyming alexandrine couplets and be canonised instead of flogged is clearly doing something right.
The trouble is that classic comedy as a form has all the freshness of chicken liver pâté that’s been sitting in the sun for a week. We know the rules and so do the actors. For it to work and be genuinely funny, the performances and the direction need to invest in these rules with vim or perhaps subvert them or at least provocatively flirt with them.
Subversion and provocation do not often sit in the same sentence as the Melbourne Theatre Company and that won’t change after this show. The opening image of The Hypocrite was at least promising—a strangely lit scene of a maid gyrating to some French soft-rock suggested something might be going on underneath the veneer of manners. But, as soon as Justin Fleming’s tame adaptation takes over, the depth is gone and the thought of 3 hours of veneer almost breaks your heart.
As for investing with vim? Well, there are moments of success created by the younger actors in the ensemble who, unlike their seniors, seem to understand that an audience enjoys being surprised. Then again, perhaps the MTC audience disagree with me and don’t want to be surprised. In that case, go for your life.
Melbourne Theatre Company Presents
The Hypocrite
A new version of Molière’s Tartuffe
by Justin Fleming
the Arts Centre, Playhouse
8 November – 13 December 2008
Let Them Make Pancakes: Interview with Sivan Gabrielovich
Sivan Gabrielovich’s new project, opening on Wednesday 19 November at the Meat Market, a video installation titled What Do You Think About Me?, brings together members of the Israeli and the Palestinian communities for a series of discussions, workshops and interviews. It offers a rare moment of viewing these two groups’ thoughts and concerns about who they are, and what they think of the other.
With only a few days to go, Gabrielovich is rushing to finish the installation, knee-deep in cutting 60 hours of video footage down to three. “I have these visions that I’ll be editing as people are entering the gallery. I’ll be just putting the DVD in the player.”
Gabrielovich ended up in Australia quite randomly: “In 1998 I had just finished my military service. The lease on our Tel Aviv flat ran out, and we said, jokingly: ‘Let’s go to Australia’. We did, I shared a house with a VCA graduate, and I fell in love with the idea of studying there. In Israel, there is no campus that brings different arts together in quite the same way.”
After graduating in Creative Arts, and obtaining a Diploma in Animateuring, Gabrielovich has formed Running Blind, a contemporary performance company, and has created a body of work with a strong line of inquiry into the nature of the Israel-Arab military conflict. Her 2007 Fringe show, Home Grown, for example, explored the story of Hanadi Jaradat, a young Palestinian woman who blew herself up in a restaurant in 2003, killing 21 people.
Women, apparently, are highly sought-after candidates for suicide bombers. As Ivana Sajko noted in her famed play Woman Bomb, they are less conspicuous, and able to hide the explosives masking as pregnancy. Furthermore, they are easier to coerce.
“Through my research, I came across examples of women who had a divorce, or an affair, different things that aren’t acceptable in the Palestinian community, which put them in a vulnerable position. They are the ones targeted for the role.”
“Jaradat witnessed the death of her brother. She was approached by her cousin from the Islamic Jihad while still in mourning, and coerced into becoming a suicide bomber. She was a trained lawyer, a provider for the family, she was trained in Jordan, which is all unusual for a Palestinian person, let alone a woman. She had prospects in life that she gave up, which made her an intriguing figure. She too masked the bomb as pregnancy, which I found fascinating. The woman as a giver and taker of life.”
Sivan is fiercely intelligent and ready to raise difficult questions. “On the other side, if I was a witness to my own brother dying, I don’t know where that would lead me.”
This article continues, click here to read on…
Dancenorth: Underground
Dancenorth’s Underground, presented at the Arts House at this strange gap at the tail end of the year, when much of the theatre on offer is perfunctory and much is splendid, itself sits in this gap, being in turns yay and nay.
It opens in an underground station, looking dangerously like Shaun Parker’s This Show is About the People, and proceeds to exercise some very similar muscles. (I haven’t seen Parker’s show, I am basing this on hearsay. The production photos, however, were stunningly alike.) Both Parker and Gavin Webber, the director and choreographer of Underground, had worked with Australian Dance Theatre under Meryl Tankard, and the influence shows. Underground is worldly, emotionally mature, and cool. The music is pumpin’; there is gum stuck under the seats, so to speak. This is a dance tribe quite separate from Melbourne’s own Chunky/Guerin clique; there is no space in its manic rhythm for finding one’s inner Isadora. It transpires with Europe, with Pina, with sex and physical violence, everyday clothes and places, everyday emotions. And it’s filled with everyday Australian characters (a business-sleaze, a clueless Asian tourist, a semi-chroming dirtbag, a private-minded book reader), and an everyday, domestic sort of unthreatening torpor.
The mix grates at times. There are two types of conflicting progression in Underground. First, there is the playful lateral movement from quotidian to magic realism, with a sparkle of stand-alone ideas. The underground station, thus, will be the place where territorial skirmishes slowly escalate into full-blown wars, and looking for a lighter grows into station seats spinning on their axes, a text-messaging girl hanging off them and sliding down. An instance of slasher-film sounds while the Asian girl is revealed to be a martial-arts champion.This is a brainstorming quality present in much local dance, circus and may-I-suggest comedy. Tense Dave, in 2006, was one such inconsequential brainstorm. Yet there is also a detached hipster short-film feel to it. Filling the stage wall-to-fourth-wall with music and motion, varying the tempo to a great simulation of a film switching between slow and fast forward, it is the epitome of the Cool of one Vandekeybus, or the Vice magazine.
On the other hand, though, there are meanderings of humourless Germanic moodiness, a deliberate push for the heavy themes, with the grotesque and the confronting used with some nonchalance. The shift is mirrored in the use of space, which opens up from the tight, rigidly structured underground platform into a loosely defined, dreamy space of trauma, fear, anger and revenge. Interspersing the mundane with grotesque images of a business man dripping sleaze all over the Asian girl, the softly comical magic realism will suddenly shift into MTV-powered battle scenes taken verbatim out of Ultima Vez, with whom Webber has trained. While theirs is certainly an interesting technique, all violence of the sexes, bodies spinning, flying through the air, grating against one another, bouncing off, it is never certain if the acrobatics weren’t imported wholesale just for the looks, with little meaning surviving the voyage. At the risk of making it sound hugely derivative, it looked like Akram Khan’s recent Bahok without the dramaturgical girdle: whereas Khan’s was insipid stage action rendered absolutely bullet-proof by hard dramaturgical logic, Underground wanders in and out of themes with much less precision. Once introduced, the darkness is never fully banished, and alienation of proximity, and individual action in the disperse responsibility of the crowd, are mercilessly explored. Yet the progression is, in the last moment, undoubtedly circular, returning the Teutonic inquiry into the safe territory of the never-changing Australian eventlessness.
Moments of semantic void are usually not the moments of stillness: the intellectual flattening is created by empty movement, rather than the empty stage. The strongest moments of the performance are precisely in the pauses, many of these U-turns of stage activity that throw the viewer completely off balance, our expectations completely confounded. Thus the assumed ordinary reality will suddenly shift into a hint of a disaster outside (nuclear error?, environmental catastrophe? gas attack?), leaving the single bookish Kate Harman trying to make sense of a darkened station. Re-emerging out of semi-slapstick and mundane gadgetry, standing on the seats, she stretches out on the tips of her toes, trying to reach the neon lights, and this moment of endless inscrutability makes up for much of the needless running that happens before and after. At 75 minutes, however, it also assumes an epic quality (another nod to Vandekeybus), which justifies some of the variability, hinting at the rich family of sagas, operas, and all those endless theatrical rambles that accumulate significance and weight just from refusing to finish.
Overall, despite the logic of a hipster film, despite looking like a collage, Underground is a rewarding experience. However, it is a production strongest at the joints. All the influences, nods and loans, remain distinctively separate and, while the epic accumulation certainly works, do not add up to the most brilliant dance theatre in the country. The in-between moments, the contrasts, are moments when Underground overcomes itself, and makes strange.
Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall.
Season: Wed 12 - Sun 16 Nov.
Tickets: $25-18.
Bookings: artshouse.com.au or 03 9639 0096.
Australian Chamber Orchestra: Euphoric Tour
The Australian Chamber Orchestra is hardly what one might call a nest of political radicalism, but yesterday afternoon, in the refined air of Hamer Hall, Richard Tognetti and Co made an important stand of solidarity with the Australian National Academy of Music, whose funding has recently been withdrawn by the federal government. Strange to think that the man whose arts ministry is responsible would once have been considered a leader of the music-as-politics vanguard. The fact that an auditorium full of classical music subscribers could be standing to the left of Peter Garrett says something rather dismaying about the slippery slope of political centrism in this nation. Tognetti’s choice of protest was inspired: the students joined the ACO on stage to perform two encores, instantly demonstrating that what is being broken by this decision is the vital continuum of musical education (from school to college to academy to orchestra). Without that final tier of tutelage, Australia risks losing its finest musicians to academies overseas and, subsequently, to the orchestras of other nations.
But, enough about the desert, lets get back onto the savannah, where Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony sees helicopter shots of storming wildebeest cross-fading into macro lens footage of ants scuttling about underfoot. It’s got pep and bounce, cantilevered dynamics and the ACO give it all a rollicking sense of joy.
From there, it’s a Mitteleuropa winter in Brahms’ darker and more plangent Double Concerto for Violin and Cello. Tognetti’s guns of Guarneri were joined in the solo stakes by principal cellist Timo-Veikko Valve. Heralding from Finland, Valve captures all the liminal quality of his homeland—his playing straddles the definitions of Western and Eastern Europe in its own particular Finno-Ugric way. You could see in his determined down-turned brow all the chill of the Baltic winds but his lyricism and tone matched the German composition with relish (or was it sauerkraut).
The second half, before the encores, was all about what Goethe called the “untamed personality” of Beethoven. The metronome markings are steep, the violin bows even more so. His Symphony No. 8 flew by with scintillating dexterity, the orchestra working their arms with the pumping sophistication of a Porsche on an autobahn.
That’s what you get with the ACO. None of this staid, starchy nonsense, just top-notch technique, gorgeous timbre and the physicality of Greek gods.
The Wackness
Hypothetical: if Ismail Merchant had lived for another 70 years, would he and James Ivory be making flourishing period films based on classic texts from the 1990s?
You see, the trouble with The Wackness is that it puts on the clothing of so many genre films that it ends up having the dress sense of Tori Spelling. It’s trying to be an inter-generational-odd-couple story (think Harold and Maude). It’s sort of an indie Bildungsroman (like The Squid and The Whale). It’s even got that teenage air of sweaty New York summer sex (à la KIDS). And the specificity of the era (1994), with all its references to Giuliani and grunge, comes off as cute rather than meaningful—what used to be “dope” is now “tight”, but who cares.
The cast is plausible. Ben Kingsley seems increasingly to be less of an actor and more of a pretty weird old man and, in this, he plays a man who persistently asks others, “Am I a weird old man?” Josh Peck is aptly, if dully, brooding and morose. Olivia Thirlby plays a hardhearted hottie. Famke Janssen plays a hardhearted hottie. Mary-Kate Olsen (!) plays a hippy hottie. Method Man pops in to lend some ludicrous cred to proceedings and, really, the more I think about this film, the more offended I am.
Perhaps the one bright spark out of this, is that I discovered that Juno alumnus Thirlby is set to appear in New York, Je T’Aime, which promises to be a gag-worthy follow-up to Paris, Je T’Aime. Natalie Portman has written a segment and Scarlett Johansson has directed a segment. Can’t wait.
Hunger for Intimacy
Sometimes curation is nothing more than serendipity and sometimes serendipity bears all the hallmarks of curation. This month in Melbourne, the stars have aligned and the fortunate populous has the opportunity to see an exhibition (Intimacy) and a film (Hunger) that in their symbiosis would make a truly excellent day-night double bill.
The provenance of filmmakers is like a timeline of cultural influence: they came from the ranks of theatre, then they cut their teeth in television, lately it’s been the turn of MTV darlings, but now it’s all about video artists. Hunger is the first feature film by the Turner Prize-winning video artist Steve McQueen. And if his debut is any indication, cinema’s pantheon might have to make room for a second coming of that legendary name. Hunger is terrifying, intelligent and thrillingly well-made. It charts the violence and suffering of the Troubles in Northern Ireland through the chill corridors of the Maze prison as IRA inmates stage passive protests against their gaolers. The issue at stake for the prisoners is their status. Having fought for their self-determination, they now protest at being labelled criminals instead of political prisoners. Inside and out, it is a matter of identity and dignity. In the name of these abstract notions, the prisoners deny themselves the concrete material of human rights: clothing, hygiene and, eventually, food.
The first half of the film is a largely wordless mapping of the prison terrain. Motifs are established, repeated and transmuted, like the building of a visual symphony that ends with an inevitable but nevertheless breathtaking cymbal crash. Given his background, McQueen’s acute cinematographic sensibility in all this is hardly surprising, but what is remarkable is the deftness of the rhythms and the unflinching sweep of the narrative. It is not relentlessly harrowing, there are moments of inspired pause for something peculiar or idiosyncratic-a fly at a window, the tears of a young officer, or op art in faeces-but it never loses its momentum either. In the wake of this horizontal march of violence, comes a scene of extraordinary dialectical depth and clarity, a 20 minute scene with only one cut and no more movement than is required to smoke a cigarette to its death. Hunger’s first act is so redolent with determined action and the pain of ingrained hatred that the characters take on a mythological scale. This second act, a conversation between a terrorist and his priest, serves as the counterpunch of psychology.
Meanwhile, in Southbank, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) has an exhibition entitled Intimacy. Included in the collection is a Steve McQueen video work that amuses itself with the sculptural posturing of African wrestlers but, for me, the most intimate of works and the most inspiring is right at the end, tucked behind a warning for those not yet 18-a slideshow by the American photographer Nan Goldin. These photographs of couples at their most private moments were themselves not new to me, but this display of them, complete with the satisfying whack of the projector and the theonostalgialogical soundtrack by Björk was completely mesmerising. Sophie Calle and Louise Bourgeois (still kicking at age 96) occupy the rooms preceding Goldin’s and don’t neglect Jesper Just’s hilarious ode to Roy Orbison.
Hunger opened November 6. Intimacy runs until November 30 (admission is free).
MIAF: Romeo & Juliet
Unlike the American Gods, immigrant deities never quite make it to Australia. By the time we finally hit the shore, most of our baggage, our culture and history, traumas and myths, beliefs and feuds, have been shed, lost in transit. Even now, with air travel and the global village, this country welcomes people and events that have, by the time they arrive, become less: all ties to something else severed, scrubbed clean of complicated meaning, they are merely a mute speck of nondescript, no less abstract than anything within Australia. By the time Oskaro Koršunovo Teatras arrive to Melbourne, Lithuania is not a real place anymore. They appear on stage emptied from references, meaning nothing, standing for nothing, black box at its most crushing, the tyranny of distance. Inside the Arts Centre, itself a sterile cocoon of purification from the worldly, OKT is a decontextualised, illegible group of people.
Everything someone may know about Oskaras Koršunovas (started attracting attention in 1990, ‘discovered’ in the surge of Western-European curiosity for their Eastern neighbours after the wall’s fall, among the most respected in the honourable line of Lithuanian theatre directors, together with Eimuntas Nekrošius, Rimas Tuminas, Gintaras Varnas, received the respectable New Theatrical Realities Award in 2006, awarded by the European Theatre Union) melts into thin air. No knowledge of the rich Lithuanian theatre tradition, rooted in a Roman-Catholic type of escapism in the face of political oppression (what the Estonian poet Rein Raud called rebellious mysticism) and less concerned with verbal clarity than with metaphor, black humour and visual allusion, survives the trip. No knowledge of the important place that Lithuanian theatre has attained in contemporary Europe, no information on the respect it commands. Not even the circumstances in which Romeo & Juliet, fully titled The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo & Juliet, was made: co-commissioned by a number of elephantine institutions, from Avignon Festival to the German cultural foundation Theorem, to the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture.
What survives this enormous ignorance, you may say, is valid enough. Truly universal art is truly universal. But this is a naive understanding of semiotics. This production, an Elizabethan interpretation of Verona gentry played by a Lithuanian ensemble as 1950s picture-book pizza clans, reminded me acutely of seeing Krystian Lupa, in Zagreb, direct the actors of the Krakow Dramatic Theatre through Yasmina Reza’s Une Pièce Espagnole: Polish actors playing French actors playing Spanish characters, with Croatian surtitles. This is the theatre festival reality: mirrors facing mirrors facing mirrors, a labyrinth of corridors leading to no rooms, fingers pointing into the dark. The meaning-making business, the piling up of signs, the most powerful of theatre tricks, is simultaneously the most vulnerable to cultural misunderstanding. Entire systems of communication depend on our consensus in sign-reading, something lost between people who know nothing about each other, people who never planned to communicate. For a message to fit into any hole, square or round, it needs to be simple, like a taste of hamburger or a three-colour logo, and let us not even get into the delicate question of big funding, big audiences, and the conflation of artistic success with ticket sales. Not too many complex thoughts can survive this crunch down to basic shapes and colours, and neither can expressive nuance. Yes, we can watch narcissistically, noticing only what relates to us, but how valid can solipsistic judgement be?
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Chunky Move: I Like This
Antony Hamilton and Byron Perry are two of the best male dancers Melbourne’s got. We also know that Hamilton has the skills to choreograph a dead donkey into life and Perry makes Malthouse ushers weak at the knees. The two of them have created a new work called I Like This, kicking off on November 20 at Chunky Move Studios. Read the press release after the jump.
This article continues, click here to read on…
MIAF: Corridor
Lucy Guerin’s choreographic trademark resides in her duets. Intricate, delicate discoveries of the human form, they suggest the tremulous excitement of first encounters, or the desperate endlessness of physical searching. There is always a dynamic tension between the dancers in these moments, illustrating the possibility and importance of human connection even in times of loss (as in Structure and Sadness).
In Corridor, her new work for the Melbourne International Arts Festival, Guerin has drawn on Franz Kafka for inspiration. The result is not Kafkaesque, Guerin’s aesthetic is still very much her own, but Kafka’s influence is made clear by the sudden lack of human connection in this piece. First, the duets, usually so intimate, are qualified by distance—dancers echo each other’s gestures but the results are funhouse mirror distortions rather than true reflections. Second, the connections are further disjointed by text—two hands in contact have an immediacy and a tenable certainty that a spoken word does not. Thus, we see slippages in form between a dancer and their interlocutor.
However, this use of text is problematic. When it isn’t just the ambient filler of mobile phone conversations, the language comes entirely in the form of lists, all written with imperative verbs. The outcome is physical interpretation of linguistic instructions, so that the exploration is simply reactive. We are watching the dancers do the work that the audience should be asked to do. Nevertheless, in the moments when this literalism is curtailed, there is inspired dancing by one of the finest ensembles that you could hope for in Melbourne and the traverse seating allows a revelatory level of intimacy between audience and performers.
With this new work, Guerin is moving into uncharted waters both structurally and tonally, which is exciting in terms of her development as a choreographer, but it gives the sense that Corridor is an unfinished list worth returning to.
MIAF: An Oak Tree
The bare stage of the Fairfax Studio is not a stage. It is a roadside, it is a hypnotists’ lair, it is a British pub, it is an oak tree. These are the sorts of imaginative leaps we as an audience are expected to make with each piece of theatre we see, and this is what Tim Crouch’s recent work is fascinated with. How far can an audience be pushed into believing that kitten-heeled and pencil-skirted Jane Turner (of Kath fame) is actually a 46-year old man with bloodshot eyes and shit down his legs? Add to that the fact that she’s met Crouch perhaps an hour before the performance and not seen as much as a script before the show and our imagination is pedalling fast.
Physical transformation is the bread and butter of actors and the four involved with Crouch’s Melbourne incarnation of An Oak Tree do this very thing very well. Geoffrey Rush, Julia Zemiro, Kym Gyngell and Jane Turner are all recognizable actors with their own particular brand of performance. When we watch them floundering within the tightly orchestrated play, we see their celebrity aura dissolve and, if we’re very lucky, a chink in their armour.
That’s presumably the plan, in any case. I do question, however, the use of such well-known actors for the play. With Crouch’s tally of performances for this particular play nearing 300, the agility he displays when jumping in and out of character is always going to overcome the ability of the guest actor. If you’re not interested in the New Weekly issues of ‘Stars Without Makeup’ then you might be at a loss to appreciate this spectacle.
But then a story unfolds. A man’s daughter has been killed in a car accident. In another play, the girl’s father could be portrayed as going slightly mad with grief, seeing his daughter still alive in the oak tree by the side of the road where she died. We’re not let off so easily, however, as we must also transform the guest actor into the father, despite the physical evidence of Jane Turner.
This is the genius of An Oak Tree–Crouch’s disarming power to conflate ideas of hypnotism, madness, grief and an audience’s imagination into the one simple and human experience. Falling effortlessly into another reality, the show argues, is as simple as enlivening your imagination, not putting an actual oak tree on stage.
Which is by no means a new conceit. ‘O For a muse of fire,’ the Chorus of Shakespeare’s King Henry V laments, ‘that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention! A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene.’ Or in Hamlet, when the Dane (Crouch) reveals Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (guest actor) to be frauds rather than friends. ‘Were you sent for?’ Well, yes and no. I came of my own free will, and my imagination thanked me for it.
The Flight of the Red Balloon
The Red Balloon, by Albert Lamorisse, first inhabited my imagination through the guise of a black and white photo-picture book, which my family owned. The book was bigger than my head and I remember delighting in colour when the photos graduated from the despair of black and white cobbled Paris and a burst balloon to the rhapsodic ascent into the sky when hundreds of balloons come to the rescue of our petit héro, Pascal.
Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s use of Lamorisse’s simple metaphor is mysterious. A Taiwanese film student in Paris accepts the job of nannying the son of puppeteer and histrionic, played by Juliette Binoche. We enter into their lives voyeuristically, appraising their problems: petty financial issues, loneliness. We aren’t given enough information as to why the son’s sister can’t live with her mother or why the student accepts the task of triumphing over this chaos with such equanimity. We are, perhaps, the red balloon itself, hovering on the periphery of Pascal’s window, floating in the realm of possible happiness.
Lovely Parisian scenes ensue. The student and boy embrace the streets not with childish abandon but through the closely guarded lens of a video camera, spotting graffiti of a red balloon on a wall in their arondissement (perhaps to remind us of its presence.) Juliette Binoche’s bleached single-mum artisan is a vibrant, fighting spirit, always reaching for a cigarette or glass of wine or pushing mess aside in order to sit down in her apartment. A memorable scene occurs between Binoche and the puppetry expert she is hosting from Asia. Binoche is touched by his mastery of the artform and gives him a postcard she has kept for years. It is somehow Asian and means a great deal to her, clearly. The man accepts her gift but the cultural non-specificity is somehow insulting.
In the course of the film, the viewer is given ample time to construct meaning. This aspect of the film has been much criticized. For myself, I was content to muse with the beauty of celluloid Paris to accompany my thoughts. The red balloon becomes less and less a feature as the student becomes somewhat embroiled in the pedestrian concerns of the mother. And so, we, too, lose the romance of the red balloon. A figment of 1950s Paris, it no longer exists, and perhaps this is the realisation the Taiwanese student in the film comes to, and Hsiao-Hsien Hou himself.
It is an empty feeling: one yearns for Paris and Godard, Lamorisse, Truffaut, Bresson; but can’t escape the contemporary cultural climate of difficulty. Here’s where I admit that my heart will always be with Pascal and simple, romantic Paris. But between the infinite possibility of childhood and the monthly rent worries of my late 20s, that’s an easy call.
MIAF: Interview with Deborah Hay
The Deborah Hay Dance Company is coming to Melbourne for the Arts Festival in October. I caught up with her from her home in Austin, Texas to discuss her career and her new show If I Sing to You.
Click here to download the podcast (5MB)
The Lonesome West
This tale of two brothers – one surly and homicidal (Ben Grant), the other miserly (Luke Elliot) – is the third in Martin McDonagh’s Leenane series, set in rural Ireland. While the English-born McDonagh has attracted controversy for his highly stylized, comic version of Irishness, it’s no surprise that actors enjoy performing his work – here, they get to luxuriate in the gruff accents and self-lacerating dialogue. The two protagonists spend their days arguing over food, fantasies of non-existent sexual encounters, and petty grievances. Unlike most misanthropes, they have a straight-man, Father Walsh (Mark Tregonning), to come and marvel at their ways, and thus aren’t inclined to stop.
The production is a long-desired project for this new Melbourne theatre company. Founder Mark Tregonning says he chose the play because it “really is a piece of tiny dynamite” – it compresses enormous amounts of tension between few actors. The set itself is designed to look like a torn fragment, something reconstituted after implosion.
The Lonesome West
Tiny Dynamite Theatre Company
4-21 September 2008 @ Theatreworks
MIAF: Interview with Tim Etchells
You feed us. You dress us. You choose clothes for us. You bathe us. You lay down the law. You sing to us. You watch us sleep.
Tim Etchells came to the Melbourne Festival with his company Forced Entertainment and their glorious big-massive-party of a production, Bloody Mess, back in 2005. This year he returns with a very different kind of show, That Night Follows Day. Featuring a cast of Flemish-speaking kids, it explores the parent-child relationship through the voices of children, but in a way that’s aimed squarely at adults. I caught up with him from his home in Sheffield, England, and began by asking him what brought him to Belgium and Victoria, the company who commissioned the work. This article continues, click here to read on…
Funny Games
Michael Haneke is not a facile filmmaker, so one has to wonder why he bothered remaking his fourth feature film some ten years later with nary a change in sight. As it turns out, the reason is facile. The original Funny Games was a disturbing Teutonic take on Hollywood-style violence. But apparently not enough Americans got to see it–distributors were presumably scared off by the subtitles and lack of redemption–so now they’ve mixed in some Yank-friendly stars (Naomi Watts, Michael Pitt and Tim Roth).
If you can find a film reviewer who hasn’t seen the original, they’re arguably not a very thorough film reviewer, but they might offer an insight into this new film that the rest of us can’t. The shadow of the past is too dark to allow anything but negative feelings towards the film. It feels outdated, exploitative of its actors and contemptuous of its audience. But, as I noted in my review of the original, the toying with our expectations and the surprise of the plot are vital–something clearly lacking in a reviewing. If you are new to Funny Games, judge for yourself, but if you have been there before, don’t bother again.
Man on Wire
Philippe Petit is a tightrope walker and juggler, a man of stunts and tricks. He is also a man imbued with a sense of the poetic that can be spellbinding. Man on Wire is a documentary film that traces how this impish French circus artist managed to walk across a cable strung between the twin towers of the Manhattan World Trade Centre back in 1974. It is also a disarmingly frank and moving portrait of the friends who got him there.
There is something of the divine in Petit’s nature. From the magic of his craft to the single-minded tenacity with which he turns his dreams into reality, Petit draws in disciples mesmerised by his impetuous, death-defying talents. He is a man who lives “every day as a work of art” and his ambition and audacity are extraordinary and uncompromising.
Petit’s feat is to conquer the void, to stand in empty space for the pleasure of its simplicity and to revel in this profound transcendence of psychology as well as the rules of nature. The most telling description of the event comes from file footage of a New York police officer who, delivering answers to a press conference, is clearly still enraptured by the beauty of what he witnessed.
But Petit’s ascendance comes at a cost, not to him but to his friends. In achieving his dream and rebuffing his own mortality, something snaps in his humanity. The fiction becomes reality, the artwork is completed and Petit leaves behind his friends as easily as a painter might abandon an easel.
The Time is Not Yet Ripe
Molière comes to Australia and meets a fetching merino ewe.
A debauched interlude worthy of Padre Padrone occurs.
The resulting birth, in all its comedic vim and ovine batheticness, is a play.
That play is The Time is Not Yet Ripe by Louis Esson. Written in 1912 and as strikingly funny, bright and incisive now as it must have been then. Moreover, you get an immaculate cast of Melbourne actors clearly having a ball at La Mama. From the first sound effect to the last double-take, we loved it. You will to.
Venue: La Mama, Drummond St
Season: 27th August – 13th September
Wednesdays & Sundays at 6.30
Thursday-Saturday at 8.00
Bookings: 93476142
You, The Living
In a wasteland of monochromatic post-industrial dullness we see fleeting moments of quiet desperation, quixotic humour and heaving torpor. It’s kind of like Samuel Beckett went to Ikea and came back with everything and a kitchen sink. The characters are beautifully realised archetypes and their stories, unravelled across intersecting vignettes, present modern maladies and ennui with a dark but often funny zeal. Underneath it all, the filmmaker Roy Andersson sprinkles political references with a prophetic doomsday mentality. There are swastikas hiding in the most delicious of homes, death is waiting around the corner, racism is only a haircut away and love seems the hardest thing to find. However, it isn’t all grim mortality on show. Indeed, there are moments of hilarity, musical interludes and a witty precision in every department of the film, from the set dressing to the performances. It’s hard to see this film joining the ranks of quirky Swedish movie success stories (think As it is in Heaven) if only because it’s perhaps a little too bleak for mainstream distribution, so catch it at Cinema Nova while you can.
The Villianelles - Melbourne Debut
Seven-piece chamber-pop outfit The Villainelles make their Melbourne debut, performing to the words of razor sharp Melbourne poets Jordie Albiston, Alison Croggon and Kathleen Mary Fallon, in a score composed by award-winning theatre and screen Composer Andrée Greenwell.
Featuring Sydney’s finest mix of noise-art, classical, indie-pop, impro and crossover musical talents, The Villainelles, reflect on ten enigmatic women (‘villain-elles’) including Medea, Amelia Earhart, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Princess Di and The Blessed Virgin Mary.
Andrée Greenwell was recently nominated for a 2008 Helpmann Award in the category of Best Music Score for VENUS AND ADONIS, a Malthouse/Bell Shakespeare co-production starring Melissa Madden-Gray and Susan Prior.
Sounds like quite an event - The Villianelles take to the stage this Thursday and Friday evening (21st and the 22nd) at the Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, from 7.30pm. Tickets are $25 full price, $18 concession, and bookings can be made on 03 96390096 or through artshouse.com.au
Interview with Kristy Edmunds (Part 3)
In this final instalment of Spark Online’s interview with Kristy Edmunds, Bryan Lewis talks with the out-going Arts Festival director about her time at the festival and her future at the Victorian College of the Arts.
It has been a long-lived gripe within our community that, in Australia, artists do not have the time to allow works to fully gestate, we are not allowed the same time as our European counterparts. A company like Theatre du Soleil may take up to three years to fully realise a particular work. There is no funding in Australia to allow for that sort of development period. Most work that occurs here, even away from the Malthouse or MTC, still has to try and work within those theatre companies’ model of a six-week rehearsal period and a four-week run. Even new work can at best hope for a few weeks funded development period, and even then the chance of securing further funding to actually advance on the development is slim. And once a new work has had an audience run it will never be able to secure more funding for a remount, which means that most new works are simply unable to develop and mature and evolve to realise their full potential. It is easy to forget that often these international works we so admire at our festivals have had long and full lives before they arrive on our shores. They are works that have breathed with audiences for many runs, they have been tweaked and finessed over many performances, the show we witness will often bear little resemblance to the show that first premiered all that time ago. And as any new theatre maker will testify, a show finding its feet in front of audiences is yet another stage in its development. However, for an Australian artist to secure a show in a festival, as has occurred with many involved this year, there is a certain freedom in the creation process, enabling them to fully immerse within the creation unencumbered by the start-stop process of typical funding. Some of these shows were able to start development two years ago knowing that the show would definitely have a life with the 2008 festival.
“Look at Jenny Kemp, an artist who I knew about from overseas. This article continues, click here to read on…