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 It feels outdated, exploitative of its actors and contemptuous of its audience.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.
MIAF: Two Faced Bastard
When Lucy Guerin puts on a new show, Spark pays attention. Ditto Gideon Obarzanek. Ditto graffiti-dance-wunderkind Antony Hamilton. And even old Brian Lipson creates a murmur and rumble of curiosity through the newsroom. So, imagine our delight when Kristy Edmunds leaned over and said they were all joining forces for a Melbourne Arts Festival show … well, we were positively giddy.
Two Faced Bastard reunites members of the team that brought the immensely enjoyable Tense Dave to the stage. What’s it all about? Well, on either side of a dividing curtain, a group of performers juggle two simultaneous shows played to two opposing audiences. Each exit through the curtain becomes an entrance on the other side. There is no backstage, nowhere to get off, nowhere to hide. Just how we like it.
Arts House Meat Market | Wednesday 8 to Sunday 12 October
Click here for bookings and further information
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…
Rod Quantock - First Man Standing
Trades Hall, Carlton
Wednesday 6 August to Saturday 6 September, 8:00pm
Wednesdays/Thursdays Full $30, Conc $20; Fridays/Saturdays Full $35 Conc $30
Bookings: www.comedyattrades.com.au or (03) 9659 3569 or at the door.
http://quantock.com.au/
Rod Quantock is as much a Melbourne fixture as Flinder’s Street Station. His shambolic satire has amused and irritated the proles and the pollies respectively for just on forty years now, and his latest show, First Man Standing, sees him casting his hawk-eye over his tenure as Australia’s arch-satirist.
Quantock’s style, for those unfamiliar with his work, is less stand-up than it is rambunctious lecture, a dervish of non-sequiturs and tangential riffing. Microsoft Office becomes a ready accomplice for his designs, and even Google Earth gets a run through as he makes a rambling point that since now we know everything we don’t need to know anything. For the most part all this works wonderfully well - the Wise Bearded One has a knack for making even the most mundane observations absurdly enchanting - but in First Man it sometimes feels like he is spinning his wheels, rehashing material by rote from even recent shows. To be fair, it is in the nature of a retrospective that this may occur, and it is a given that one night’s show can be as different to the next as night is to day, but followers of Quantock’s work may feel a little too comfortable here, particularly as the resurgent Labor Party has yet to provide any really juicy targets for him to take down.
Nonetheless, he can be exhilarating to watch. His scattershot approach belies an impressive hit rate, and the intelligence behind his humour implicitly respects that of his audience. First Man Standing will be a treat for those who return regularly for wisdom from the divining Rod, but newcomers may be better advised to wait until the (inevitable) next show.
Since Otar Left…
Georgia is in the news for all the wrong reasons this week, so this DVD release is something of a timely salve. It is by no means a jolly romp through the Caucuses, but its touching sense of humane irony lifts the spirits rather than crushing them underfoot. Writer/director Julie Bertuccelli worked with Krzysztof Kieslowski on Three Colours: Blue and one senses that influence in the gentle rhythms and wry whimsy of the storytelling.
The film is set in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, where three generations of females live together in a small apartment. There’s no hot water but there are shelves upon shelves of French literature and the women live in a Chekhovian state of longing for Paris. The granddaughter reads out Proust as she massages her grandmother’s swollen feet but the real link to France, and the reason for the title, are the letters that come from the absent son, Otar, who has emigrated there.
When news of Otar’s death reaches home, the information is kept secret from his mother, in the fear that the heartbreak would be too much for her. The resulting subterfuge on the part of family and friends is not so much a tool for creating dramatic suspense, but rather a path along which the film can explore the relationships between the women. It is also the event that upsets their quiet stasis and propels them into action, a sure sign of impending turmoil, if not tragedy.
Film, the artistic medium that best conjures up the illusion of effortless globe-trotting is, in this case, used as a simple reminder that some gaps are impossible to traverse: the distance between homes, the distance between life and death, the distance between two glass walls.
Turtles Can Fly
The ceaseless woes of the Kurdish people have been far from unrecognised in the past decade. Their persecution at the hands of Iraq, Turkey and Iran (the countries which the unofficial territory of Kurdistan overlaps) has been unabatedly awful, to say the least. So, it is with the weightiest of historical baggage that Bahman Ghobadi’s film, set in Kurdistan before and during the latest American invasion, comes to our screens. Yet, the film stands up as a sublime and original cinematic vision.
Turtles Can Fly is a film based on children, somewhat in the vein of Lord of the Flies or the more recent City of God. Our protagonist is Satellite, named so for his remarkable capacity to source satellite dishes for Kurdish villages desperate for international news that might herald the liberating forces of “Mr Bush”. Satellite is the best advertisement for the entrepreneurial spirit in a free-market economy that I’ve ever come across—his pragmatic approach to the desperation of his situation is to organise refugee children into work-gangs clearing landmines that they can sell or barter with to provide themselves with a livelihood. Clearly we’re not talking about the Brady Bunch kids here and it is a credit to Ghobadi’s direction that the children’s performances are both engaging and charming without treading into the mire of arch cuteness or naiveté.
The film’s tone is at once affrontingly authentic—dystopic landscapes of obsolete and burnt out munitions—and magically surreal. Ghobadi knows better than to give the viewers an overly earnest and detached documentary style. The horrifying subject matter and remarkably beautiful and unsympathetic landscapes of grey mountains and mine-infested fields demand a heightened style. There is nothing quotidian about this story, or at least there shouldn’t be, but this is of course an all too real everyday life for too many people. Ghobadi invests the story with a thrilling level of metaphor and allegory. There is no cheap symbolism, just carefully and subtly created elements and storylines that in their content and execution parallel the enticing but rapacious poetry of Ovid.
In many respects, it’s amazing that this film was made at all. I first saw the film at the Melbourne Film Festival three years ago when Ghobadi introduced the film (it was the Australian premiere) and explained that, being made only two months after the fall of Saddam, the entire film crew had to enter Iraq illegally and were under constant threat in the generally anarchic post-war situation. Fortunately, they had forty peshmerga as bodyguards but what they need now is the support of audiences—the film was entirely independently made—and, in a stroke of good fortune for Ghobadi and prospective audiences alike, Turtles Can Fly is now available on DVD. See it.
Interview with Kristy Edmunds (Part 2)
An arts festival is like no other festival; everything occurs on such a large scale. Unlike a film festival where film stock is brought into the country, and maybe a handful of film makers and stars, with performance art the personnel count is enormous. You’re dealing with entire dance companies, entire orchestras, entire theatre troupes, as well as their sets, their costumes, entire catalogues of an artists work if an exhibition is part of the menu. One can only imagine the backstage mayhem at the Arts Centre, with different shows being bumped into each of the theatres every three or so days. And we’re not just talking about evening performances. Works perform around the clock, with audiences given the possibility to see sometimes up to four shows in a given day. Glancing at this year’s line-up I can already foresee the schedule-juggling I will need to master. Is twenty minutes enough time to get from the Malthouse to Hamer Hall, and then I have fifteen minutes to make a show in North Melbourne? Or should I risk seeing an act at the Spiegeltent and try to make do with only catching the second half of a concert at the Playhouse? Is it permissible for me to skip work so I can catch a lunchtime conversation with Philip Glass and then catch a performance of the Deborah Hay dance company? And more importantly, will I survive two weeks worth of late nights drinking at the Spiegeltent? This article continues, click here to read on…
Interview with Kristy Edmunds (Part 1)
The 23rd Melbourne International Arts festival is only a couple of months away, with the full festival line up recently unveiled at a champagne-bathed event at The Meat Market in North Melbourne. The audience of media, artists and festival enthusiasts audibly gasped and cheered and ooh-ed and aah-ed as each work was introduced by Kristy Edmunds, the festival’s Artistic Director, who finishes her four-year tenure this year. There was a loud cheer towards the end of her introduction when she-with a glint in her eye–unveiled this year’s trump card, a series of works and concerts by music icon Patti Smith. Kristy laughed and grinned behind her podium, a captain proudly docking her ship successfully for the final time.
What always strikes me about this vibrant, fiercely intelligent woman is the overwhelming passion and enthusiasm she displays as she talks about the festival and the myriad works that populate it. It’s akin to watching a young child talk with glee as they describe their favourite TV show, or show you their card collection. In fact, with Kristy at the helm, I can’t shake the sense that she magically transforms the festival each year into an intellectual candy store leaving all us art lovers gawping at the seductive offerings on display-minds drooling and eyes bigger than our wallets. As I arrive at the Melbourne Festival headquarters one Thursday afternoon I half expect to discover some Willy Wonkaesque theatrical emporium, complete with theatre troupes working their magic in long corridors and European orchestras tuning up their instruments in place of office workers at their keyboards. Of course this is fanciful: the festival is still months away, the Spiegeltent hasn’t gone up yet and the troupes and orchestras of my imagining have yet to descend on our calm and grid-designed landscape. But come October 9, the arts precinct and many other pockets of Melbourne will play host to many of the worlds most exciting theatre makers, artists, musicians, composers, choreographers, photographers, actors, dancers, singers and writers, while those of us cast in the necessary role of audience will once again lose two weeks of our year in a haze of beer, bright colours, baffling sights and passionate conversation.
It’s this notion of a continuous artistic conversation that begins my all too brief hour with Kristy Edmunds at her office in the heart of the CBD. Of course the festival head quarters are just like many other offices, a pleasant maze of white corridors and light rooms in the middle of an unimposing building off Flinders Street, but there is a particularly palpable air of excitement and energy with it being only a day since the line up was announced. Kristy greets me very warmly, her eyes clear and sparkling, her voice smooth and measured with a strong hint of something mischievous in it’s American-accented deep tones. It’s a face and voice I feel like I know well, having frequented many of the free conversations with participating artist that take place at lunchtime throughout the festival and always chaired by Kristy herself.
“These (conversations) are full of people who have literally come in during their lunch hour to gain some insight into something they have seen, or heard about. To me it’s about that stimulation of curiosity. And when you watch people experience that, that seeking of stimulation and knowledge, and they get it, something, from the conversation with the artist, or maker, I love that! It’s not inert, it’s very interactive and direct.” This article continues, click here to read on…
MIFF: It’s a Free World
Ken Loach’s latest is a simple social realist film in a style not much different to what Vittorio De Sica was pulling out sixty years ago. The conflict is moral and economic, the characters humble but not necessarily noble. It is Loach’s gift for storytelling and rhythm that allow this well-run formula to evade cliché or po-faced politics. Our protagonist, Angie (Kierston Wareing), slides down the slippery pole of free market economics into an ethical landscape devoid of reference points. Along the way, we follow her logic, question her audacity and try to reproach her actions. The film is chilling in the apparent inevitability of its course, yet the twists and turns, while remaining utterly plausible, never become predictable. Only at the end, the very end, does Loach give us pause for breath, a moment’s hesitation in Angie’s sharp demeanour that lets us realise, with the mild mention of a name, how far down we have gone.
IT’S A FREE WORLD (96 mins) Sat 9 Aug 9:15 PM Capitol | Add To Diary | Buy Tickets
The Inhabited Man
by Rear Windows Ensemble
with Full Tilt
Space 28, Victorian College of the Arts School of Drama
$28/$23 concession
until Saturday 26th of July
What is at the heart of reality, and what music plays there? What is the shape of memory; the outline of the body or the fissures of the mind? Can one ever escape the past when it is so inextricably linked to the construction of the future? The Inhabited Man, from Rear Windows Ensemble, does not simply touch on these concerns - it takes possession of them, in a work of bold theatrical invention and lasting impact.
The work is a thematic husband to 2003’s The Inhabited Woman, a highly acclaimed piece that delved into the feminine psyche through a deeply considered fusion of media and performance. It sought to portray the epic struggle that exists at the centre of even the most mundane life, through the dissection of dream and archetype - lover, succubus, mother, goddess, all inhabiting a woman trapped by a life too ordinary. In The Inhabited Man, we see the promised dream as a nightmare of eternal recurrence. What happens when the great templates of the Father, Warrior and Lover are inverted, and a man fails to fit the epic fabric of their cloth?
This article continues, click here to read on…
Apparently That’s What Happened…
…though exactly what it was, well, I’ll leave that for you to decide. Jo Lloyd’s latest work is an intriguing exploration of the nature of witnessing and perceiving, observing and partaking, affecting and being affected by. As soon as the audience is invited in to the vast space of the Meat Market in North Melbourne we begin to observe each other. Jenny Hector’s superb set comprises of a vast crimson circular floor around which we sit. Upon the floor are several man size cut out figures in various states of revelling. These figures suggest that what we are about to witness takes place at a public event, a party perhaps, or some night club? The soundscape by Duane Morrison and JDFranzke alludes to similar territory, a contemporary blend of ambient electronics and thumping beats, the sort of music contemporary party goers are familiar with, suggesting vast warehouse parties or underground alternative clubs. It’s a fantastic score, providing a solid backbone for the dance work itself, offering plenty of rhythms and tones for the dancers to play with and deliberately work against. Having the audience in the round further reiterates the exploration of the retelling of incidents, we become a continuation of the cut out figures, we are therefore implicated in whatever will follow. Throughout the piece the lights always spill onto the audience, faces are aglow on the peripheries of stage in various states of observing. But exactly what is the event we are seeing? Are we at a party, a nightclub, the streets of some disturbed suburban estate? And is it a murder, a rape, a fight, a drug induced scenario of seduction? Of course this remains unclear, as it must, and it is this uncertainty the work attempts to examine.
The choreography itself at times frustrated me, and at times gave me deep pleasure. I am always struck by how bizarre and abstract contemporary dance can be, how obtuse and impenetrable for an audience member not in familiar territory. It is probably because my date for the evening had quietly confided to me that he had never been to a dance show in his life before that I kept viewing the piece through his eyes. I could tell something was being told to me, something was being said, but exactly what it was eluded me. My eyes kept shifting from the dancers to the audience surrounding them, I was amused by the stern and querulous expressions I saw, the searching gaze as people tried to make sense of what they were seeing. It’s an intriguing art form, contemporary dance; I’m always aware of trying to ascertain that place where the audience and the work meet and how comfortable that meeting is.
Jo Lloyd is evidently a choreographer of talent and intelligence. The work is intricate and precise, frenetic and fractured, held and free flowing, dictated by the sound scape and working to a rhythm of it’s own all at once. However, for me I took a while to warm to it. With such an abstract movement vocabulary the human bodies in front of me transform into something robotic, vacant, absent of feeling. The ominous sense I begin to experience is a result of the sound, the lights, the atmosphere created, but not necessarily from the dance itself. I found moments repetitive and too obscure, and the scene and costume changes felt messy and unnecessary, breaking the flow and preventing me from being immersed too deeply. Saying that, the second last sequence, the three dancers dressed in puffy white suits, was wonderful; a satisfying blend of solo and acutely timed group work that I found very satisfying. As to was Luke Georges solo, always a dancer of immense precision and connection to the material, which for me hinted strongly towards what the work was trying to communicate.
Overall it’s a strong and well executed dance work, but I’m not sure how accessible I found it. My date commented that he was mostly entertained if entirely baffled, not in itself a bad summary at all. There were a few heated discussions in the foyer about the merits of the work, which is perfectly fitting for a piece that deals with perception as it’s subject matter, though for the most part the appreciative first night audience were in agreement that it was a work of skill and intelligence. I still yearn though for something more human in the work, something more heart felt and emotionally connected. The work and I never fully met, it kept me at arms length and denied me the experience of being fully involved and affected. Perhaps just like a party goer who witnesses some terrible event but continues to party on regardless, the night a continuation of drink and dancing, the event merely a conversation piece for some other, later, party.
The Arts House
Meat Market, 5 Blackwood Street, North Melbourne,
until Sunday June 29.
Bookings: 9369 0096 or www.easytix.com.au/artshouse
Jerome Robbins: A Celebration
Australian Ballet
Arts Centre, State Theatre
5-16 June
Anticipation is something the Australian Ballet does well. Every time the curtain goes up, we’re guaranteed an image of sharpness and surprise, as if we’re closing in on a Hitchcock still. In The Cage, the surprise doesn’t end; what we’re seeing is a race of female insects bent on destroying a single male. This piece introduces us to a different sort of ballet woman: spiky and agitated. The insect women are little more than flesh-covered sticks, yet strangely alluring – as their queen, the exceptionally tall and sinuous Olivia Bell makes the concept work. Recently promoted to principal artist, Bell was magic in Balanchine’s Apollo last year; she made that static piece come alive for me. What seems like closed choreography on another dancer looks utterly smooth and effortless on her – her long body seems to go through an extra series of revolutions.
This tribute to choreographer Jerome Robbins covers a range of styles; Robbins’ talent was always hard to classify, given his work in Broadway, film, musical comedy and ballet. The late work A Suite of Dances gives us a master-class in the classic Robbins moves, from the slow turn and the jubilant arms-up (which we know from Gene Kelly), to moments of introspection. What’s distinctive about Robbins is that even his most exhilarating scenes tend to be grounded in a satire of everyday movement – from carrying an umbrella to looking at one’s own reflection. Despite its fantastic premise, The Cage ends on a note of cocktail melodrama, as two women toast their success at expelling an intruder.
Madeleine Eastoe is perhaps the company’s best actor – always animated, always expressively in character. Earlier this year, in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake, our attention was fixed on the smallest flick of her finger and wrist – or the way she’d suddenly change tone mid-move, leaving us emotionally suspended. She makes a case for the petite dancer as mischievous life force (Bart Cook, the Robbins repetiteur, deliberately cast tall and short women for whimsy.) In The Concert, Robbins’ pantomime of social relations, Eastoe plays a debutante with total emotional consistency – even as the entire cast turn into butterflies, floating around the stage.
The Australian Ballet is flying right now; along with Kirsty Martin and Rachel Rawlins, they have a suite of extraordinary female dancers, and I’d love to see more of Bell. Perhaps the key is the opening image: marking every scene with a composition that’s tight and alarming – starting on a dramatic high then never letting us down.
Frost/Nixon
“Success in America is better than success anywhere else…” says the character of David Frost (John Adam) towards the end of Act I and it’s easy to feel writer Peter Morgan feels the same. His play Frost/Nixon has had a sterling reception worldwide, premiering in London and followed by a hit season in New York. It’s easy to see why. The script is sharp, witty, insightful and at times surprisingly tender; making easily watch-able what could have been a dry piece of docudrama. As a writer he has beautifully covered similar areas with his screenplays for The Queen and The Last King of Scotland, and he has a wonderful knack for fleshing out and humanising well known figures, taking artistic liberties with well documented meetings and fashioning from them believable theatrical scenes that entertain and intrigue in equal measure.
His script is the real star of this latest production by the MTC, which is by no means not good, it’s just not great. Rodger Hodgman’s direction seems perfunctory as apposed to inspired, though I’ll admit it’s not an easy production to stage. It’s definitely a “talking heads” piece, quite literally. Most of the second act is made up of the infamous interview between Frost and Nixon (Marshall Napier), an interview charged with the intensity of a bullfighter and his bull. Not easy to achieve said intensity with two actors sitting on chairs staring at each other. Richard Robert’s set goes some way in helping this theatrical conundrum, by providing a long screen that stretches along the width of the stage above all the action. During the crucial interview we get to watch the actors faces in close up on the screen, a device which allows the actors to give wonderfully nuanced and subtle television performances in these moments, but the problem is that you only watch the screens. What is occurring live on the stage in front of us is made somehow redundant. This screen device also means that it needs to be made sense of during the rest of the play, and so we get lame projections signifying the various other locations we visit during the piece, i.e. roads when we are in a car, close up of plates when we are in a restaurant and, for some reason, intergalactic space when we are in an aeroplane. This large screen dominates the set, literally slicing the stage in half vertically, under which a black revolving stage is put to predictable use. It’s a tricky one. The script dives and dances from location to conversation in a very filmic way, apart from the many direct audience address monologues. Perhaps I feel that the director and designer took a rather obvious and easy approach, robbing the play of the staunch theatrical tension this production needs.
It’s a great story though, a foppish, humorous, popular TV host getting a formidable American ex-president to confess to his part in the largest government scandal in America’s history when no court of law or high-paid lawyer could. It would be akin to Rove MacManus getting Bill Clinton to finally admit that “Yes, I had sex with Monica Lewinsky,” on his Sunday show. As Frost, John Adam presents a cross between British TV host Jonathan Ross and Mike Walsh. It is a warm, humorous, delicate performance, and very easy to watch. Marshall Napier is very good as Nixon, a role that could too easily become a mimicry of this well-documented figure. Instead we get to glimpse something of the complex man himself, and Napier succeeds in not allowing us to judge him too quickly or too harshly The rest of the performances are fine too, David Tredinnick in particular as David Zelnick, a researcher and producer for the show.
However, there is something slightly lazy about the whole production. The stakes never feel quite high enough, the tension never really mounts to a fully satisfying denouement. It is a story and script full of passion and an earnest exploration of the nature of power and the flawed human beings we, through democracy, give power to. It also examines the power of television as a tool and weapon in politics. Both Frost and Nixon are presented at a time when their entire professional futures rested on this one interview, this one moment, this one question that brought down a king and made him admit to the criminal inside. I can’t help but feel that this is another adequate production by the MTC of a script that could have been dealt with more adventurously, more passionately and with more theatrical vigour than it has been. Still, it’s a great story and a very enjoyable theatrical experience, though more akin to a considered editorial in a newspaper than the fiery street protest the idealist character of Jim Reston (Teague Rook), a long time Nixon researcher, wishes it was.
Exit
When people think of Swedish cinema they tend, depending on their tendencies, to think either of steamy sauna porn or the collected works of the recently departed Ingmar Bergman. But between these opposite poles of cinematic expression lie a whole range of movies that range from the compelling tragedies of Lukas Moodysson to the sweet comedies of Colin Nutley. Yet foreign-language genre films don’t usually make their ways onto our screens so Exit is in rather rare company. Starring the cheekbones-from-hell of Mads Mikkelsen, this film rips across a blistering 97 minutes of twisting plot and run-n-punch action. In a Fugitive-like set up, Thomas (Mikkelsen) has to clear his name by escaping from custody and dispatching the real villain himself. Along the way are more speedboats than I thought any family would need, thick-necked Arab and Danish thugs, secret compartments and a fiery climax. It aint The Seventh Seal and it aint Uppsala Girls Go Crazy but it is Swedish, it is thrilling and even if you caught it at MIFF last year, the DVD is worth grabbing.
Available now through Madman Entertainment.
New Zealand Dance
Terrain and You are Not Alone…You are Just in New Zealand
at Dancehouse, Melbourne, 4-8 June 2008
The opening of Terrain shows choreographers Guy Ryan and Malia Johnston surrounded by a miniature city of their own making. Johnston lies on a set of wooden blocks, while Ryan bustles around her with a conscientious air - manipulating tiny cars attached to threads, planting trees, and occasionally removing a block to create a skyscraper. Sometimes he ignores the sleeping giantess; occasionally he calls on her assistance to, say, guide the path of a car, or build a freeway around her form.
The concept of this show was suggestive on many levels. These dancers don’t move freely - they’re hamstrung for fear of disrupting the architecture of their Lilliputian world. So there’s the idea that bodies operate according to the laws of an invisible city. Rather than focusing on the life-size dancers, we’re whimsically concentrated on the model town beneath them. When formal dancing does occur, it seems to take place on an improbably giant scale. Most of all, in the swings between play and exhaustion, there was the sense of a paradise of two people, endlessly recreating their own universe.
The four pieces in You Are Not Alone…, a showcase of New Zealand dance, were less satisfying overall. While each dance had a promising premise, the performers’ moves were generally not striking enough to arrest attention. Broken by Design II (directed by Johnston and choreographed by the four dancers) had the potentially great idea of creating several duets, removing one partner from each duo, and then fusing the “broken” parts together - yet this structurally ingenious notion wasn’t visible in the performance. It would have been more interesting if we’d had the sense of a missing term during each solo.
The most innovative piece was INK, where Maria Dabrowska allowed smoke and obscurity to cloud most of the stage, using the light to direct and reveal actions; at times, we could feel the impetus of dance moves in total darkness. The lighting created shapes both eerie and absurd - for instance, a series of extravagant postures was rendered moody and grandiose by the low-key light. This kind of inventive thinking about dance as a language of effects - as seen in Terrain - was the strongest aspect of the evening.