Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake

Swan Lake by Matthew Bourne. At the Regent Theatre, Collins Street, until April 29.

All the swans are men, true, but let's get one thing straight: Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake is no travesty. This isn't Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo; there are no tight tights and there's very little mincing. These are definitely straight-acting boys -- barefoot and bare chested in their shaggy shorts -- whatever their sexual inclinations.


IMAGE © MATTHEW BOURNE'S SWAN LAKE

Yes, Bourne's mummy's boy Prince (Simon Williams) decides his ideal chick has a bit more meat on the bone than the average wannabe queen, but he stars in a ballet with enormous commercial appeal. Young and old, male and female, gay and straight, balletomaniacs and first-time balletgoers will get plenty from it. This is a clever and often rip-roaringly funny ballet. And, best of all, it's quite the sexiest Swan since Warwick Capper.

In look and concept, it's remarkably like the work Graeme Murphy was creating for Sydney Dance Company twenty-five years ago. Choreographically, it's conservative; psychologically it's rich; morally, it's kinky. As an adaptation, it's less contrived than it is profound.

Instead of falling for a white swan and getting conned into protesting his love for the black swan, Bourne's modern-day Prince -- who is dating the commonest of commoners (the dishy and deliciously funny Nina Goldman) -- falls in love with a hairy-chested bloke (Alan Vincent). (In the third act, we get to see the Evil Parallel Universe version of our swan, in leather pants and dress coat no less... He's very impressive!)

The Baron Von Rothbart in Bourne's version is the Prince's attendant, danced by the saturnine Ashley Bain. He's one part Dr Freud, one part Dr Coppelius. He's contemptuous of his charge's need for affection and he cruelly tricks him.

The first shadowy glimpse we get of the flock is through a scrim. The Prince has been beaten up in a bar and has fled to a nearby park. Full credit to Bourne, the swans seem utterly alien. Otherworldly. Supernatural. Extraordinary. We're as captivated and amazed by them as the Prince is.

And that, finally, is what makes this a mighty Swan Lake. Something familiar -- something overly familiar -- has been transformed into something thrillingly new. It doesn't matter how often you've seen Swan Lake or how many different versions you've seen of it -- Murphy's or Dolin's or Mats Ek's or Kevin McKenzie's -- or even if you've never seen it at all...


This review was published in the Herald Sun on Friday April 13, 2007.

La Mama: Asylum by Kit Lazaroo

Asylum by Kit Lazaroo. Directed by Jane Woollard. Performed by Glynis Angell, Tom Considine, Fanny Hanusin and Tim Stitz. Winner of the 2005 Wal Cherry Play Of the Year. Produced with the support of Arts Victoria, the City of Melbourne and the Sidney Myer Foundation. At La Mama, 205 Faraday Street Carlton, until April 1, 2007.

At heart, this is a one-joke play. A woman begging for asylum in Australia is really in need of a different kind of asylum. Political asylum, mental asylum. It's not even a good joke... just a play on words.

This is a playful play, given a deliriously dotty production. But it's about as funny as detaining a mentally ill German-speaking Australian in a facility for illegal immigrants until she's really really ill, or mistakenly deporting one of our own citizens.

Playwright Kit Lazaroo covers her proverbial behind by slipping in a line: "How can we make the world a better place when our hearts are so heavy?"

I'm no expert when it comes to Buddhism, but I'm fairly sure that we're only permitted to laugh at our own misfortune, not the misfortunes of others. For that, we risk a really rotten rebirth.

This play is set four years after the pro-democracy movement in China was annihilated in Tiananmen Square. Four years later, in 1993, the temporary visas granted to Chinese students by the Hawke government are about to expire.

Unquestionably, Yu Siying (Fanny Hanusin) is a nutcase. She's paranoid, unpredictable, violent. But is the persecution she fears real or not? That's what psychiatrist Lally Black (Glynis Angell) must determine.

Dr Black has a few loose demons of her own. Immigration official Turlough Dando (Tom Considine) is, himself, barking mad. But at least he realises he needs help. By comparison, Black's brother Smudge (Tim Stitz) is merely traumatised.

In this world that demands black-or-white decisions be made, all is gunmetal grey... except for Yu Siying's outfits, which are embarrassingly and passionately red.

But there's little clue as to the time and place. (And without knowing that it's the early 1990s, the play just looks clueless or, worse, callous.)

At every level, the execution of the play is first rate. Sometimes clever, sometimes truly inspired. But the play itself is an admission of defeat. We laugh, but our hearts stay heavy.


An edited version of this review was published in the Herald Sun on Friday March 23, 2007.

For whom the cash register tolls: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

"Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer."

-- A Grief Observed, CS Lewis, 1961.


"Will nothing persuade us that they are gone?" CS Lewis keened after the loss of his wife, Helen Joy Davidman, in the pseudonymously published A Grief Observed.

Lewis's loss is especially poignant. Not because he lost a life partner. Quite the contrary. He met and married "H." in his late fifties. As with Christianity, Lewis was a late convert to love.

They married in 1956. Helen died in 1960 of the bone cancer she already had when they met. Lewis himself died in 1963, barely 65 years old. "Oh, God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell, if it's now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?"

Lewis's memoir is a rare Hopkins-like outpouring in the modern world, at least in the West. Rare in its intensity -- god is, variously, a vivisector, a "Cosmic Sadist" and a "spiteful imbecile" -- but rare, too, that it exists at all in a world where death has been taken out of the home and where mourning has become (in anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer's words) a morbid self-indulgence.

Yet grief -- in art at least -- is all around us: big screen and small, fiction and non-fiction, poetry, drama... you name it.

More surprisingly, perhaps, it's doing more than just striking a chord. The best examples of works that mine this rich seam are both popular and critical successes. In the 21st century, grief is good.

60 year-old Irish author John Banville is the current literary master of mourning. Though he is best known for his fictional biographies of scientists, spies and killers, grief is the one theme that keeps dragging him back. His latest novel, The Sea, winner of the 2005 Booker Prize, forensically examines the impact of grief on identity. For the narrator, reality is a distant and evanescent echo of staunch memory instead of the reverse.

In Banville's earlier novel Eclipse, one of the great novels of the last hundred years, Banville's narrator, apparently, is in mourning for his life. But this is not some Chekhovian ennui. In a terrible, fatal twist, the mourning becomes justified.

Even in Australia, grief and mourning are players. Think of Tony Ayres's chain-rattling 2002 film Walking On Water and the unexpected (if well-deserved) recent success of Look Both Ways.

Think of the deeply affecting television drama Love My Way and Trisha Broadbridge's clear-eyed account of losing her footballer husband -- eight days after their marriage -- in the Boxing Day tsunami, Beyond The Wave.

Joan Didion's recent memoir about the grave illness of her daughter and the sudden death of her husband has sold an amazing 200,000 copies in hardback in its first two months. (Bizarrely, Didion has been asked if she will adapt the her story for Broadway. English playwright David Hare, reportedly, has signed on to direct.)

Didion's story begins five days after Christmas, 2003. Five days after her daughter Quintana was hospitalised with flu-like symptoms which had exploded into pneumonia and life-threatening septic shock.

Home after visiting Quintana in the intensive care unit at New York City's Beth Israel North hospital, she and her husband of almost 40 years, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, decided to stay in. They built a fire and made some dinner. There, at the table, Dunne slumped, dead of a massive heart attack.

There begins Didion's year of "magical thinking." It's not the usual blame game -- "if only I had done/said/thought/decided..." -- Didion is informed enough, and logical enough, to know that nothing short of a fully-equipped crash cart and immediate intra-venous medication could have kept her man alive for "more than one more day."

But she can't bring herself to give away his shoes, he might need them. She entertains fantasies that would not have been out of place, she says, at an Irish wake. She can't let him go.

With her rolling, precise, commaless sentences, Didion presents well... as they say. Brilliantly. Lucidly. But her compelling story has its blindspots. It seems incredible that a New Yorker post-9/11 could accept, without question, that "one no longer has the right to say [the whole world is empty for you] aloud." That "dwelling on death" and public displays of mourning are indulgences to be avoided; equivalent to wallowing in self-pity.

True, her steely and disciplined gaze and her utterly controlled writing makes this appalling tale something that can be endured, even watched like a richly metaphoric European film with its burning buses outside churches and air-ambulances in cornfields. And one can't help but admire the way Didion has not tried to con her readers any more than she could con herself.

It is no consolation to her whatsoever that her ageing husband died without agony or protracted illness. It is no consolation that their magic circle lasted as long as it did; that they spent almost every available hour of every available day together... editing and commenting upon each others works, living the Hollywood and Manhattan high life, acting -- and thriving -- on inspiration and whim. For forty whole years.

Indeed, it is these very fractures -- these most human of flaws -- that makes Didion's skewed self-analysis so impressive and ennobling.

Each of us deals with grief uniquely. But rather than isolating us, that realisation allows us -- and should encourage us -- to be open to those infinite variations. To be accepting of and sensitive to different needs.

The first step is to acknowledge that death isn't something that "happens to other people."



The Year of Magical Thinking is published by 4th Estate.

Sydney Theatre Company's production of The Year of Magical Thinking (starring Robyn Nevin and directed by Cate Blanchett) runs from March 25 to May 4, 2008.


This piece was published in the December 17-18, 2005 edition of the Australian Financial Review.

Castlemaine Festival: The Tell-Tale Heart by Dennis Vaughan

The Tell-Tale Heart by Dennis Vaughan and Edgar Allan Poe. Produced by Melbourne Opera and the Castlemaine Festival. At the Wattle Gully Mine Shed. April 2, 2005.

Well, here's a performance to stun Melbourne Opera and VicOpera doubters into awed silence. Take it from me, cos I'm one of those doubters... even if I am rarely silent.

In a tin shed at a working mine a few kilometres west of Chewton, near Castlemaine, Melbourne Opera gave a full-blown performance of brand new "gothic horror for tenor and orchestra" by Dennis Vaughan on Saturday night. (The second -- and final -- performance is this coming Saturday [April 9, 2005].)

Vaughan is a double bass player -- an associate principal -- with Orchestra Victoria. About the meanest thing I can say about the opera is that the music is a bit too likable!

For his libretto, Vaughan uses Edgar Allan Poe's creepy short story in which a man describes how he coolly decides to kill an old man because of his "Evil Eye". The eye, he tells us, of a vulture.

Like many modern readers, Vaughan appears to have made the mistake of not taking Poe's work seriously enough. In 1843, a journalistic-style first-person narration was revolutionary. And this is almost a quarter century before Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov pleaded temporary insanity for killing an old woman with an axe.

Vaughan's music is a bit too tongue-in-cheek. It's just not terrifying. There are roiling references to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries in the opening bars, a nod to Hitchcock's best composer Bernard Herrmann, some ghostly whisper music on the small but highly effective squad of strings (two violins, viola, cello and bass)... you name the trick, Vaughan uses it. He even breaks out the harpsichord. It's more like a Simpsons Halloween special than a horror show.

By contrast, the sung line is overly agitated. It's only at the bitter end, in the story, where the narrator really loses the plot.

This is, however, an interesting way of distinguishing between the narrator's mental state as he perceives it -- like all good psychos he doesn't know he's a psycho -- and his mental state as it appears objectively. The music is wide-eyed and does the finger-twirling "cuckoo" gesture at the narrator.

James Egglestone is the lone singer in this hour-long opera. He has a soft, boyish tenor that kicks easily and effortlessly into falsetto. Egglestone is unusually good at singing English, it's rare for our language to sound so natural and clear. And he's a strong physical actor.

As I say, this is a production to silence Melbourne Opera's critics. What a shame, then, that so few of them were there. No-one from the state or federal governments or arts ministries; no-one from the panel entrusted with the task of deciding which opera companies are worthy of dividing the spoils of public funding... They might have been part of the earth-shaking, stomping ovation that greeted this world premiere.


This review was published in the Herald Sun on April 8, 2005.

Tolarno Galleries: Bill Henson

Bill Henson. Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, until June 26.

It's thirty years this winter since Bill Henson first exhibited in a group show at the Ewing and George Paton Galleries in Melbourne; thirty years since Henson turned his back on two of the three primary colours and blue-shifted the world.

Even his early work in black and white is leeched of sunlight and red blood. Using filters, underexposure and overdevelopment, Henson's monochrome photographs are contrasty and thick. Cadaverous almost. Beyond the ravages of time.

It's odd that the photographer should be presumed to be obsessed with the pornography of youth -- with licentiousness and passion -- when he is so obviously fascinated with cyan: the colour of the skin in the moment between the last pulse of oxygenated blood through the arteries and the flat-line of brain death.

Henson photographs adolescence precisely because of its obliviousness -- its apparent imperviousness -- to mortality. He doesn't see the skull beneath the skin so much as the marble waxiness of flesh in the cool light of night.

Henson doesn't idolise youth, by any means, but he has an uncanny ability to isolate and capture something angelic, something numinous, in his young subjects. Think of the cherubic little girl (with her supernaturally red lips) about to breathe into the ear of an oh-so-mortal man in the Paris Opera series, circa 1990.

In Henson's theatrical (but oddly passionless) Purgatorio, sleep is a rehearsal for death. Here, in this largely unseen set of images, sleep is also a rich -- and grand -- metaphor. But for what?

In Cat. #6 (Untitled 1998/1999, CB/KMC SH 86 N 27A), we are captivated by the tension between the girl's complete vulnerability (asleep in her ratty, moth-eaten, threadbare singlet, exposed to the elements) and her absolute self-possession.

In the gloom in the upper right of the frame, lurks the spectral image of a boy, watching her intently. He's hardly present, bony and insubstantial. Yet he is as startlingly alien as a biomorphic study by American sculptor Louise Bourgeois.

His role, too, is chillingly ambiguous. Is he a guardian angel protecting the sleeping girl or a vulture about to swoop in? Is she unthreatened or merely unaware of any threat?

From a distance, our eye is drawn to the brightest areas: to the glow of the girl's upper thigh and the horizontal wave of life-light in the centre. Up close, it is a constellation of tiny pearl studs in the girl's right earlobe that begs to be decoded.

From the same series, Cat. #4 (Untitled 1998/1999, CB/KMC SH 111 N 34A) is a fascinating variation on another of Henson's great themes: the transubstantiation that comes through moments of complete openness. In the last five or six years, Henson has captured moments of astounding intimacy; made them visible. And this is his great skill. His unique skill... night vision.


Ten of the eleven images in this exhibition are available in editions of five, at $14,000 apiece unframed. The three metre by 1.85 metre one-off work, Cat. #2 (Untitled 1995/1996), previously exhibited at the 1996 Melbourne Festival, has a price tag of a cool $250,000.

This review was published in the May 29-30 2004 edition of the Australian Financial Review.

Sydney Dance Company: Underland by Stephen Petronio

Underland by Stephen Petronio. Sydney Dance Company. Sydney Opera House until June 14, 2003. Then Playhouse, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, June 18-28; and State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, July 3-12, 2003.

I made the mistake, at first viewing, of taking Underland rather too seriously. That's partly the fault of video artist Mike Daly, who contributes a backdrop of immense power and unease, especially in the opening scenes with their accelerated and subliminal snatches of urban anxiety (crash-test dummies, madly wriggling sperm, you name it) and images of full-blown internecine holocaust.

Some of the blame also lies with choreographer Stephen Petronio's choice of Nick Cave songs (remixed and soundscaped here by the original producer of the songs, Tony Cohen, and Paul Healy, respectively) and the order in which they are played.



If, rather than ending with it, Petronio's Underland began with the lugubrious, Kirin-soaked-karaoke-song 'Death is Not the End' (complete with We Are The World-style dirge-vocal contributions by Shane MacGowan, Blixa Bargeld, PJ Harvey, Anita Lane, Thomas Wydler, and the saccharinely-sober Kylie Minogue) we'd have a better idea of how to take the piece... With a glass of water at bedtime. To re-hydrate after a huge night out.

"...any second not spent watching Chatfield was a pointless second. A lost second."

But the bulk of the blame lies squarely at the winged feet of Bradley Chatfield. He dances so embarrassingly well -- with such thrilling corporeality and spine-bending, time-bending ease -- that it is an act of professional hara-kiri just daring to appear on the same stage with him. Indeed, on opening night, any second not spent watching Chatfield was a pointless second. A lost second.

Chatfield, alone among the dozen and a half dancers, became the dance. While others around him mimicked it, acted it, hammed it, aspired to it, and very occasionally just did it, Chatfield embodied it. Was it.

Not that the other dancers executed Petronio's choreography badly -- though it must be stated that the level of performance rose improved spectacularly between first and second performance -- but their repetitions of (and variations on) the movements that Chatfield pioneered looked like a corporatisation of an original impulse: as banal and mechanical and hypnotised as fashion. The very opposite of spontaneity. Indeed, I was beginning to wonder if this was the choreographer's wry subtextual moral.

When Chatfield flicks his leg below the knee -- ballistic and barefooted -- he looks like a pro-poker player dealing cards. When the others do it, they look like they're warming up for the Cowtown Hoedown. Their attitudes lack attitude. When Chatfield twists and spins, it's a kind of physical calligraphy. When the rest do it, it's just a trace; a drawing made with a Spirograph.

Petronio's choreography is impressive, if not especially well-suited to the company's skills. He turns the sign of the cross into an nonfigurative horizontal wave. He abstracts the gestures and actions of crying and punching, dressing and caressing, fucking and failing. Many of his metaphors can't easily be turned into words. But they communicate to us, nevertheless. None better than a lunging, back-arching thrust forward from the pelvis, executed en masse.

But the segue between Wild World and The Carny (from Cave's album Your Funeral, My Trial) is quintessential Petronio: formal, sculptural, blocked and cast as diligently as a shot by a great film director. Tracey Carrodus stands with her back to us, legs scissor-crossed, her right arm held up high, her wrist and flat palm tilted to the right. Behind a neutral scrim, she is lit-up and shining. To her left is a trio on the diagonal. Up stage of her, facing us, is another trio which, after a moment, storms downstage.

Also in The Carny, on-screen plumes of blue flames burst in perfect sync with the synth-tympani of the music. Katie Ripley's fine solo, which follows, turns The Weeping Song (from The Good Son) into a kind of mime, full of wordless arcs and crescent arms, breast caresses and figure eights.


Katie Ripley (click to enlarge)

In many ways, what follows is the low point of Underland. It's post-holocaust chic. The dancers wear (Imitation of Christ-label) khaki rags, the screens show multiple nuclear bursts, and all the dancers get to do is emote and slouch. A palm-up gesture of supplication turns to one of grief. Only Chatfield has the gravitas to turn a mute animal act into something resembling truth.

Petronio compensates us with a blowsy, intoxicated setting of Cave's Ship Song (which follows The Weeping Song on The Good Son). This is Swan Lake's four cygnets for Generation-X-tasy: a mixed-double of groping youngies who look like they've had a huge night out and a few too many tablets. Petronio's melodrama and gentle whimsy is strangely faithful -- even reverent -- to Cave's lushest ballad.

Another high point is the section danced to the limited edition EP-version of Mercy Seat (with Cave singing over piano and acoustic guitar) in which the dancers snake in tight formation, their movements bound.

Though Underland is pretty trivial, on the whole, and lacks the complexity that is repeatedly implied by the video and present in Cave's often awesomely poetic lyrics, this dense 70 minute work is still well worth seeing. Just don't expect to find anything but landfill.


The review was published in the May 31-June 1, 2003, edition of the Australian Financial Review.

Bell Shakespeare Company: Hamlet (Take 2) (Melbourne, 2003)

Hamlet. Bell Shakespeare Company. Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, May 24, 2003. Season ends June 7.


For comment on Bell Shakespeare's 2008 production of Hamlet, click here.


In his magnificent four-hour film of Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh tackles one of the thorniest issues of the play head-on. How is it that after the death of a King, a younger brother has taken the crown rather than the son and heir?

Branagh hints that young Hamlet is, in fact, bastard son of Claudius, the usurper, rather than the son of old King Hamlet. In which case Claudius would be the rightful heir...

Like Branagh's film, John Bell's stage production of Hamlet also plays up the similarities between Claudius and Prince Hamlet. They don't look alike (as Branagh and Derek Jacobi do) but conscience has made cowards of both.

When this production premiered in Sydney, Christopher Stollery played Claudius as a go-getting usurper, someone who patently deserved to be King, while Leon Ford played Hamlet as a young man beginning to doubt his own sanity. He wasn't going to murder his uncle just because a ghost told him to! He wanted proof.

Three months into the tour, both Claudius and the Prince are doing a whole lotta hand-wringing and not much else. Stollery is a little too low-key for my liking. Ford's navel-gazing, at least, sucks us into the very depths of his anguish and confusion. And, for all his gloom, Ford's Hamlet is a likable guy.

The cast, on the whole, has a good grasp of the language and speak it rather than reciting or declaiming it. The one great exception, regrettably, is Anna Torv as Ophelia. For audiences that can still remember Cate Blanchett's devastating Ophelia on the same stage, Torv's Ophelia is worse than disappointing.

Robert Alexander's Polonius, by contrast, is exemplary. Fast, clear, droll and glibly funny.

All up, this is an impressively clear and easy-to-follow production. It's great fun, too, believe it or not. It is also complex enough, and a strong enough reading, to capture the imagination of the Shakespeare aficionado.


This review was published in the Herald Sun on May 27, 2003.

Bell Shakespeare Company: Hamlet (Sydney, 2003)

Hamlet. Bell Shakespeare Company. Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, March 14, 2003. Sydney season ends April 17. Then Canberra, Melbourne, Hobart and regional centres.


For comment on Bell Shakespeare's 2008 production of Hamlet, click here.


John Bell's production of Hamlet is a revelation. Yet it is one of the simplest, most literal takes on this play of infinite variety.

Instead of portraying Hamlet as some mincing boy incapable of 'manly' action, Bell does something almost shockingly obvious. He demands that we consider things from Hamlet's perspective.

The young man has seen the ghost of his dead father, old king Hamlet, who demands that the boy "Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder." The ghost accuses Claudius, the dead king's brother, of that murder. Claudius, in the meantime, has seized the throne from young Hamlet (the rightful heir) and married the widowed Gertrude, his own sister-in-law and Prince Hamlet's mother.

In John Bell's production, the prince wants proof of his uncle's guilt -- proof that the ghost is not some malevolent spirit tricking him into committing an evil deed -- before he murders a king.

If Hamlet were a ballet, Mats Ek would give us Hamlet the schizophrenic: I killed my uncle because the voices told me to. John Bell's version is backed up by several dormant passages of the play. It is -- no more and no less -- a close and intelligent reading of what is written.

So why does it feel so modern? So revolutionary? Perhaps it's like Samuel Johnson's Rasselas. It breaks convention. Once we're in a ghost story, once we have accepted the rules of engagement, having the sanity of those who see an apparition questioned is a shocking spoiler. And still is.

Yet, here, it is liberating. Here, it breaks the convention that Hamlet is a wuss. Intriguingly, we are still left with the "objective correlative" problem that TS Eliot characterised as the "artistic failure" of Hamlet the play. Put simply, Eliot argued that young Hamlet is "dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible because it is in excess of the facts as they appear."

And Bell's production doesn't dodge this. When we first see Hamlet, played by Leon Ford, he is seized up with emotion; catatonic with conflicting feelings; "blasted with ecstasy".

This is a brave move, theatrically, as it looks to audiences that the role is simply beyond the young actor. Even "to be or not to be", is sacrificed to the paralysis. Yet there is a hint in the mechanically chewed consonants of "too too solid flesh" in the first soliloquy that betrays the actor's technique and an overarching strategy.

By the time Ford gets to the "what a piece of work is man" speech, he has the glittering intensity of man suffering from an illness which is resolving itself into a mania.

He's definitely not insane as he accuses himself of unpacking his heart with words, like a whore. He's bitterly self-mocking. Likewise, his attack on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is scintillating and acute.

To make this a fair fight, and a satisfyingly complex ethical battle, Bell presents Claudius (Christopher Stollery) as a worthy king. A powerful usurper. A decisive and charismatic man. In the English court, say, he would be the rightful and unchallenged king. Why shouldn't he rob the crown and the still-desirable queen (Linda Cropper) from his whingeing brother and the eternal student son of his? Any Richard worth his lion heart would.

Neither is Polonius presented as a complete buffoon. Robert Alexander has an impressive and endearing gravity as the lord chamberlain whom Johnson characterised as "confident of his knowledge, proud of his eloquence and declining into dotage."

Anna Torv is an interesting choice as Ophelia. She is an actor thrillingly capable of conveying complex and shifting emotional states. Her Ophelia is a woman new to womanhood. A girl whose greenness is constantly belied by the assertiveness of her speech. And, when it comes to the crunch, in the "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown" speech, she is as disconnected and unfeeling as the prince in his opening scenes. But, here, it rings decidedly false.

Blemishes in this production are few. And rarely more than negligible. Apart from the mechanical flickering accompanying the first appearance of the ghost, lighting is magnificent. Laurence Eastwood and Peter Neufeldis create swathes and cubes and landscapes of light. Eastwood's set, too, is compact and effective. Alan John outdoes Michael Nyman in his tactful but compelling incidental music.

Here is a production to rival the very best Hamlets seen in Australia in a generation. It's up there with Armfield's for Belvoir (Roxburgh, Blanchett, Wenham, Rush) and Wherrett's for Nimrod with John Bell himself. Idea for idea, if not word for word, it eclipses the Old Vic's Hamlet (Derek Jacobi) and other significant touring productions.


This review was published in the Australian Financial Review on March 22, 2003.

Sydney Theatre Company: The Shape of Things by Neil LaBute

The Shape of Things by Neil LaBute. Directed by Jeremy Sims. Designed by Fiona Crombie. Lighting by Damien Cooper. Original music by Aya Larkin. Sydney Theatre Company. Wharf 1 Theatre until Sunday March 16, 2003.


"I don't like art that isn't true."
-- Evelyn, The Shape of Things

Had Leonard Radic reviewed the premiere of Hamlet, four centuries ago, I'm convinced he would have written something like: the tragedy of Hamlet is not that the young prince dies in the final scene of the play, but that he dies at the very moment he is capable of becoming a great king. Great insight, shame about ruining the ending.

In commenting meaningfully on the Australian premiere of Neil LaBute's play, The Shape of Things, I run the risk of compromising the impact of the plot by commenting on its structure and hinting at its twists. So, let me begin with the executive summary. You can decide to read on or not. In three words: see this show.

The Shape of Things is a mighty play, a classic of modern commercial theatre, and one of the best scripts to come out of the United States since The Crucible. Though Neil LaBute can hardly have the same impact on theatre as Caravaggio had on art, there is something comparably shocking to contemporary audiences in the way that LaBute peoples his mythological stories of vast and unspeakable evil with the most human -- and most recognisable -- of faces. Think of Judith hacking the head off Holofernes in Caravaggio's painting... The girl next door has a machete. And a glint in her eye.

As baroque as the story of The Shape of Things is, in abstract terms, the details are utterly naturalistic and thoroughly modern. The lead couple might be named Adam and Eve -- Adam and Evelyn actually -- but this is a post-modern take on Pygmalion. For a start, our sculptor king is a sassy young woman in the throes of completing an MFA degree in applied criticism and literature.

This Pygmalion finds her Galatea -- her sculpture to be crafted and moulded -- working as a security guard in a gallery. Adam's also a student: an unprepossessing, diffident, overweight, badly-dressed, pizza-eating specimen of spotty, post-adolescent manhood.

He catches Evelyn about to spray paint a "dick" on a statue. But her motives are, apparently, pure. The "anatomically correct" statue of a god has had a plaster leaf applied to it. Not by the artist, but by one of the embarrassed faithful, years later. Seduced by the anarchist artist, Adam lets her deface the statue. And queues up to be next.

Now, in the original Greek version of the story, the King of Cyprus, Pygmalion, falls in love with a statue of Aphrodite. Ovid's reworking is much juicier. The king sets out to sculpt an idealisation of womanhood and beauty, calls his creation Galatea, falls truly-madly-deeply in love with her. Mighty Aphrodite (Venus, of course, in Ovid's Roman version) takes pity on the smitten king and brings the statue to life.

LaBute's Pygmalion, Evelyn, is the one doing the moulding, but it is her Galatea, Adam, who falls in love with the sculptor, not the other way around. Evelyn gives Adam the make-over of his life. Thanks to her art of persuasion, he gets fit, eats well, sheds 21 pounds, trades his shockin' lived-in farm jacket for something out of the "yachtsman line", he has a nose-job and sheds his closest friends... She names it, he loses it.

Adam can't believe his luck. He's hit the romantic jackpot. "Ask," she says, "and you shall receive." With his heart on his sleeve, he voices his doubt; he voices his feeling that he doesn't deserve to be with someone like her. She reassures him thus: "Don't worry about 'why' when 'what' is right in front of you."

In case the name LaBute hasn't rung a bell, don't presume that writer has a thing against women. Most infamously, LaBute wrote and directed the 1997 film In the Company of Men in which a pair of professional men cynically agree to date and dump the one woman. Because they can. And because they want to. Cruelly and senselessly.

And while it is tempting to impute a moralising agenda to the playwright -- especially when we learn he is a Mormon convert -- I reckon these twisted plots are just emanations of LaBute's (doubtless morbid) fascination with the pathology of human romance. And with pulling the wings off flies.

Whatever his motives, his writing is awesome. It's dense, smart, evocative and triggers ideas in our minds like cascading fireworks. Without any visible attempt at showing off, LaBute comments on art, truth, relationships, the fickleness and damn-fool bravery of the human heart and wo/man's infinite capacity to rationalise appalling behaviour.

His characters ring clear and true, on the whole, though in this production, Alyssa McClelland struggles to flesh out the character of Jenny (Adam's ex-girlfriend) who needs to show naivete and a simple integrity in equal parts. Nick Flint is impressively and leeringly nasty as Adam's old friend Phillip.

Leeanna Walsman (left, with Brendan Cowell, photograph by Tracey Schramm) inspires absolute confidence from the first seconds of the opening scene as Evelyn. She sucks in a breath, sucks our attention, and doesn't relinquish it for two whole hours.

Next to Walsman's technical perfection, Brendan Cowell paces his performance so that it gets more and more refined as Adam gets done over. I mean "made over"... of course. By the final scene, through sheer emotional torque, Cowell gets line honours over Walsman. They are as mighty a pair of young leads as one could dare hope to find in a single production.

Jeremy Sims directs the play with spectacular confidence and verve. With its various domestic and public zones (designed by Fiona Crombie) like stations of the cross, or an atrocity exhibition, the production is a work of art to look at.

Even the transitions between scenes are memorable thanks to Damien Cooper's impressive lighting and the specially-composed song links by Aya Larkin. The former Skunkhour singer-songwriter brilliantly juxtaposes tight and loose, expectant and troubled, in these lavish, beautiful and evocative stings.

All in all, The Shape of Things is a production by a company with a great budget, even greater taste and the utmost confidence in its abilities. As foolish as it is to say something like this so early in the year, I very much doubt that this production will be topped in 2003, anywhere in Australia.


A shortened version of this review was published in the February 22-23 2003 edition of the Australian Financial Review.

Laurie Anderson: Happiness

Happiness by Laurie Anderson. Hamer Hall, The Arts Centre, Melbourne. Saturday February 15, 2003.


"Hatred can be a beautiful thing. When it's as sharp as a knife and as hard as a diamond."


Apart from the "I'm a little teapot" and "hey nonny ney" bits of 'One Beautiful Evening', from her 2001 album Life on a String, Laurie Anderson hardly sang a note in Happiness, the one-woman show which touched down in Australia for a lightning-fast three-city tour.

Some of her poetic lyrics -- such as the rave about hatred quoted above -- were worked into the 100-minute monologue, but the bulk of the material was precision story-telling and beautifully-crafted anecdote. And most of it autobiographical.

The title, Happiness, is ironic. It is not a state, it is the object of a quest. The only direct mention of the H-word was in the context of a man suing the State of New York for compensation for loss of happiness after he was hit by a police car and lost sexual function.

Yet flowing powerfully under the surface, was Anderson's restless search for peace. A desire, perhaps, for desirelessness. For quietude. She told us of time spent with an Amish family; of a Buddhist river journey through Utah; of inventing history.

Each time, invariably, something went horribly wrong. The lesson she learned is that "worth" is not real. History is mere speculation. Technology is nothing but a marketing campaign. Even story telling is a kind of deception. Perhaps the worst kind, as it involves self-deception. It dulls the truth. "Every time you tell it, you forget it more."



Anderson appeared alone, on stage, playing celestial DJ to her own unique brand of art-rap. She played her violin two or three times, and accented the programmed synth arrangements with some keyboard playing, but everything was in the words... in her delicate, evocative, cajoling and oh-so-lyrical voice.

Apart from some sloppy and boomy sound when she played her violin, the show was close to flawless. Paradoxically, it was both indelible and impermanent -- as a dream.


An edited version of this review was published in the February 17 2003 edition of the Herald Sun.


See also Laurie Anderson talking about Homeland, touring in 2007 and 2008; my review of that show; lyrics from 'Only an Expert'; and more from our conversation here and here.

Peter Ackroyd's The Mystery of Charles Dickens

The Mystery of Charles Dickens by Peter Ackroyd. Performed by Simon Callow. Theatre Royal, Sydney, until October 27, 2002. Then Athenaeum Theatre, for the Melbourne Festival, from October 29 to November 16, 2002.

Reviewing a biography of actor Charles Laughton for The Times, in 1987, Peter Ackroyd quoted Charles Dickens: "The more real the man, the more genuine the actor."

In a twist extravagant enough to have been thought up by Dickens himself, the writer of that biography, Simon Callow, is now starring in a play penned by Ackroyd in which the "more real the man" quotation serves as its starting point.



Ackroyd, the Times' chief book critic since 1986, also writes biography. He is the capable -- even renowned -- biographer of Pound, Eliot, Dickens, Blake and the city of London itself, no less. Perhaps the most interesting (certainly most bizarre) of his literary portraits is of Charles Dickens, published in 1990, in which Ackroyd set out to "evoke the spirit of the novelist as well as the Victorian period itself" by "writing in a deliberately Dickensian fashion."

A literary mimic of formidable skill, Ackroyd writes that he even considered writing the biography as if it were a novel by Dickens himself. Though that, he adds, has already been done.

Given the marked similarities between Dickens and his characters, and the many fascinations Ackroyd and Dickens share, it is an obvious step for Ackroyd to want to turn biography into stage play.

The resulting work, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, is no dramatic masterpiece, but it is above average for this kind of bioplay. It is engrossing and thoroughly entertaining from start to finish, whether you are a fan of the Cockney visionary's writing or not. An intimate knowledge of the Dickens oeuvre is not a prerequisite, and you will probably come away with an increased appreciation and understanding of the man and his universe.

Ackroyd quickly and deftly makes his case: that Dickens' characters are just seams in the "streaky bacon" narrative of the novelist's life; that Dickens exerted control over his past through his plots; and that his invention was an inextricable part of his authenticity... the more genuine the act, the more real the man.

Ackroyd shuffles biographical details and brief scenes from novels with such deftness and speed that fact and fiction blur and finally fuse. We hear of the 12 year-old Charles being swept from his idyllic childhood in Chatham to a London blacking warehouse, where he must work ten hours a day, then are shown David Copperfield visiting Mr Micawber.

We leap from an autobiographical line about being common to the scene in Great Expectations where Pip "catches" contempt for his class from Miss Havisham and Estella. We also hear about the "lifelong contempt" that Charles learns for "the representatives of the people" in his time reporting House of Commons debates for The Morning Chronicle.

This is no hagiography though. It presents Dickens warts and all. If anything, the novelist is his own worst enemy. His opinions of his own worth are like Oscar Wilde epithets without the relief of irony. "I was a great writer at eight," he tells us. "I could write anything."

Ackroyd, sensibly, declines to turn the play into an apologia. He buttons his authorial lip when he could be explaining that Dickens was a product of the gothic novel; that the aggravating collisions of thigh-slapping farce and tear-jerking melodrama, of gloomy social comment and bathetic sentiment, were but a part of his cultural heritage.

Ackroyd, however, doesn't know where to take us in the second half. When he could be clinching his thesis, or throwing us into dramatic hyperspace, he seems to lose his nerve. The second half of the show is a series of dramatic divertissements; bravura scenes which Dickens used to read to rapt audiences on his punishing national and international tours.

One can't be too critical of a playwright when he is writing for an actor of Simon Callow's calibre, however. Callow animates the pantheon of rogues with awsome ease and alchemical skill. He even makes the dodgier passages sound reasonable. (What other British actor could deliver a line about "fanatical attention to detail" without it sounding like the Spanish Inquisition sketch from the Flying Circus?)

Callow has been performing this piece for two years or more, yet he comes to each line -- each word -- in the same way that Billie Holiday sang standards. His timing is flexible, intuitive, sure.

With his mobile and almost luridly sensuous mouth, and that mulled wine voice -- all warmth and pungent spice -- Callow captivates us. Intoxicates us. Delights us.

This is not, by any means, an arrogant flaunting of his skill. It is no more -- and no less -- than alertness. Here, we have a rare opportunity to see an immensely skilled actor entirely in the dramatic moment. Poised. Poised like a goalie capable of stopping anything that is fired in his direction.


This review was published in the Australian Financial Review, October 26-27, 2002.

The Australian Ballet: Swan Lake by Graeme Murphy

Swan Lake, choreographed by Graeme Murphy. Australian Ballet. State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, until September 28. Then Sydney Opera House, from November 29 to December 18. Adelaide in February 2003.

For comment on the 2008 production, click here.

I doubt that the national ballet company has had an opening night to match Tuesday's premiere of Graeme Murphy's Swan Lake since the winter of 1988 when prima ballerina assoluta Galina Ulanova (one of the greatest ballerinas of the 20th century) coached newly-wed principal artists Lisa Pavane and Greg Horsman in the lead roles of Giselle. It's that long, certainly, since I saw a Melbourne ballet audience erupt. Stand. Cheer. Give the kind of ovation one wishes one had timed.

In a speech after the premiere, a buoyant David McAllister waved off compliments for having commissioned the production saying the decision to ask Murphy was a "no brainer". After Murphy's scintillating take on Nutcracker, it's hard to argue. But a Swan Lake without an Odile? Without a Baron von Rothbart? Without 32 fouettes?

This is not, I hasten to add, one of those grotesque perversions of a classic you might get from Mats Ek, say, whose Giselle (for Culberg Ballet) ends up harassed by an awesomely well-hung naked man rather than the Queen of the wilis, Myrtha. But Murphy, Janet Vernon and designer Kristian Fredrikson adapt the story very freely.



After a century and a quarter of balletic creationism, this Swan Lake is as revelatory -- and as revolutionary -- as science. Instead of blaming an evil genius (the Baron) for Siegfried's betrayal of Odette, Murphy boils the drama down to something simple but knotty; something that is both banal and infinitely fascinating; something all too familiar but utterly unknowable... a love triangle.

Here, Siegfried is a man torn between his young bride, Odette, and his older lover, the Baroness von Rothbart. Though the Baroness replaces the evil genius and to some extent Odile in this telling, Murphy's 'baddie' is not motivated by anything as abstract as evil. She might show a callous disregard for Odette's feelings, and indeed of her own spouse, but the Baroness is a woman in love rather than a schemer. And, as such, she's not easy to hate.

Odette is an innocent young woman marrying into a royal family that is as complicated (and as frosty towards outsiders) as Britain's royals. It's no coincidence, presumably, that Steven Heathcote's gestures and general mien as Siegfried are uncannily reminiscent of Prince Charles.

Additionally, this Swan is as much about depression and mental illness as it is about deception. It begins with a brief scene in which Odette explores the castle the night before her wedding. Meanwhile, the Prince is cavorting with the Baroness.

Odette's suspicions turn to paranoia on her wedding day. She draws shameful attention to the adulterous couple in front of an unamused Queen, snogs a few of the royal retinue to press home her point, and generally loses the plot. The only fouettes, here, are to clear some space for herself. Odette is locked up.

To this point, Murphy's choreography is as dazzling and clean as Fredrikson's hi-key Lake Geneva set. Always one for pairs of puckish men, Murphy has an Earl and his Equerry (Timothy Harbour and Steven Woodgate respectively) dance tight and spectacular formations like binary stars.

The other distraction from the main game is an unnamed duchess-to-be (a delightfully frisky Madeleine Eastoe) who literally jumps her Duke (Joshua Consandine) at every opportunity.


(Photograph: Rick Stevens)

The women dance as if buffeted by the wind, and are lifted and carried as if parasols or designer accessories. Lines of alternating men and women concertina and expand, twist and snake like the bellows of an accordion. In a stunning climax, the women are elevated in quick succession, their arms exploding up and outward like fireworks. It's dynamic and highly musical.

Odette (Simone Goldsmith in the first cast) is almost literally weightless. She curls herself around Steven Heathcote's arm in complete defiance of gravity. She is held aloft, at right angles to the ground, with her legs perfectly vertical. She is pliant and fearless.

The "other woman" is played by Margaret Illman, whose return to the company is a cause for much joy. Always a classy dancer, even when in the corps, Illman has developed into a most remarkable and poised actor. (I swear I saw her flush when she looked -- for the first time -- like losing the battle for Siegfried's heart.)

Act Two begins with a scene that would not look out of place in Some Rooms, which Murphy created for Sydney Dance in the early 1980s. Odette is put in a bath by a pair of nuns with extravagant Opera House head-gear. There's a huge intravenous drip-bag of water to shower her with. It's the one ill-judged note struck in the entire production. Mercifully, it is a brief note.

Odette soon escapes into a delusional world. The sanatorium walls open up to reveal a frozen lake; she trades her plain shift for a shaggy tutu. Here, Murphy gives balletomanes much to delight in: squads of ballerinas, two tall guardian swans and, yes, even a quartet of interlocked cygnets.

A great part of the pleasure of this production comes from not knowing what comes next, and exactly how it is to unfold, so the plot summary stops here. It will suffice to say that there is a crashed party and a black swan scene with some gloriously gothic matt-black tutus to follow.

The party scene would have to be one of the most dazzlingly and effortlessly sexy scenes in classical ballet. It's not one of those awful simulated orgies, it's all understatement and class. Great outfits, great choreography and great motivation. Murphy has the knack of wringing committed and truthful performances out of the company's dancers in a way that others -- with the possible exception of Stephen Page -- cannot.

The ensemble dances as if it has discarded its underwear at interval.

Murphy also has a keen eye when it comes to casting, and making roles on specific dancers. His choice of Simone Goldsmith for the crucial lead role is no surprise, though it is an overdue opportunity for her.

In the third cast, however, Murphy puts his money on young soloist Elisha Willis. After the premiere, David McAllister promoted Goldsmith to the rank of principal artist. But, two days later, during Willis's first performance, a smaller star went supernova.

Galina Ulanova used to describe dance as "that which makes music visible". It could easily be Graeme Murphy's motto. With Tchaikovsky's entire score to play with, Murphy has excelled himself.


A shortened version of this review was published in the Australian Financial Review on September 21, 2002.

Queensland Theatre Company and Playbox: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Michael Gow

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, written and directed by Michael Gow. From the novel by Henry Handel Richardson. Queensland Theatre Company and Playbox, in association with the Brisbane and Melbourne Festivals. At the Brisbane Powerhouse until October 5. Then the Malthouse, South Melbourne, October 12-26, 2002.

According to Bruce Steele, a key member of the research team behind Monash University's Henry Handel Richardson Project, Mrs Ethel Robertson insisted -- on her death bed -- that her real name be removed from the proposed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. Removed, even, from the contract, which was signed in February 1946, a month before her death. (MGM proposed screen hunks Greer Garson and Gregory Peck as Mary and Richard Mahony.)

"Henry Handel Richardson" was far more than a pseudonym. It was more like an alter-ego. Or a 'nomme de guerre' at the very least. One academic goes as far as calling H.H.R. Ethel's incubus. I can't describe what that particular variety of evil spirit does to sleeping women in a family newspaper... trust me. (It's not at all clear if we are meant to imagine HHR sleeping with Ethel, or HHR being Ethel's marauding Mr Hyde.)

Young Ettie, reputedly, was incensed with the lazy but rife sentiment of the day that women's writing was both different to -- and inherently less worthy than -- "serious" men's writing. But it seems safe to presume that the autobiographical nature of her writings, and the fictional appropriation of the lives of her parents in particular, necessitated the distance that a new name -- a new authorial voice -- could provide.

The three novels that make up The Fortunes of Richard Mahony could hardly be less thinly-veiled as biography. Ethel was born in Melbourne, in 1870. Like Richard Mahony, Walter Richardson was an Edinburgh-educated Irish doctor who met and married Ethel's English mother, Mary Bailey, in the Victorian goldfields.

Henry Handel Richardson's trilogy follows the erratic fortunes and grimly fluctuating mental health of Mahony, from shopkeeper in a goldfield settlement near Ballarat, through the establishing of his medical practice in Australia and spectacular financial speculation, to bankruptcy and insanity. Both real Mary and fictional Mary work, for a time, as postmistresses: Mary Richardson (nee Bailey) works to support her young children after Walter's death; Mary Mahony works to support herself after her deranged husband burns what few shares and assets they have left. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ettie casts herself as a boy in Fortunes.)

It's clear from HHR's letters and overtly autobiographical writings that she both favoured her father and thought Richard to be the more sympathetic character in Fortunes. But, as Germaine Greer argues so eloquently with regard to The Getting of Wisdom, HHR has been radically wrong before in assessing her own work. Unwittingly, perhaps, HHR has made the patient and long-suffering Mary Mahony into a wonderfully fleshy and utterly admirable character. She's indomitable -- unassailable even -- rather than being a Thomas Hardy-esque doltish stoic.

And, while HHR gives us some profound insights into the increasing paranoia and decline of Mahony's mind, he is an aggravating and unlikable monomaniac who treats his family like pets. He is a man incapable of taking advice from his loved-ones. And markedly less likely to take advice from a woman. Any woman.

Michael Gow's mammoth production of Fortunes, remarkably, preserves the exasperating complexity of Richard and Mary's relationship. His casting is crucial. Neil Pigot has a voice that inspires confidence, even when his body language and all of his actions belie that confidence. In a pivotal scene drawn from the centre novel, The Way Home, Richard learns that his oldest (and he imagines his closest) friend has made a pass at Mary. "You must tell me," Richard says to his wife when she hesitates to tell him what has happened. And Pigot's voice -- rich and almost serpentine in its timbre -- is irresistible. How can Mary not answer? Even if we know, instinctively, that he won't cope with the facts.

If anything, Anne Browning is even stronger as Mary. While maintaining an air of utter astonishment with the events that befall her, with glittering exhausted eyes, Browning never lets us underestimate Mary. It's all suggestion. It's so subtle that it might not be convincing -- or sufficient -- in a shorter play. It's also very much to do with husbanding energy in a role that is both huge and weighted towards the latter scenes. Mary's confrontation with Richard's lawyer, when she is determined to secure her husband's release from an asylum, seems to save the best for last. After almost three hours, Browning opens up her second carburettor. Dramatic fuel, and the air in the theatre between stage and audience, vaporise. It's as if, at last, the drama has begun.

But just as Pigot embodies the duality of Mahony, his gentleness and his short-fuse, Browning embodies Mary's ignorance of her own strength. It's a brave tactic by any actor to spend the bulk of the evening persuading us that she has limits, then blasting them away before our eyes.

Rumours were circulating prior to the premiere of this play that Gow had re-set Fortunes in an asylum from Ultima Thule, the final novel of the trilogy, and that the past was enacted in flashbacks by the inmates of the asylum, like Cosi or yet another Aussie Marat/Sade. [The full title of Peter Weiss's play says it all: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.]

Each of the nine panels in Robert Kemp's set has a heavy door with a barred window, the performers are got up in grey face (not quite white face, but ashen), and some of the acting is annoyingly sylised -- trivialised really -- as if the work of the mentally disturbed, but there is little cause to question Gow's dedication to telling the story. The whole damn story.

Sensibly, Gow hides a few theatrical Easter Eggs in his script amply rewarding those who have actually read all 800 pages, reminding us of the vast sweep and metrical precision of HHR's composition. And, I must say, Gow's deviations from the chronology of the novel result in a couple of the most lively and exciting moments. But, on the whole, Gow's direction is more impressive than his writing. He could easily cut a fifth of the words, which would give him more scope to increase the dynamic range. As it stands, there is so much territory to cover, that slowing things down and beefing things up are unaffordable luxuries.

But, hey, for all of its longwindedness, Fortunes has few longueurs. And despite its occasional and glib descents into Dickensian bilge, the production has a fistful of quite remarkable theatrical images: an unfingered accordion expanded and compressed evokes the rasping breath of dying men is one of the best. Gow has not distilled a simple moral, or a defining metaphor, from the landscape of Fortunes, but he engages his audience. And that, finally, justifies the immense exertion of time and energy. Theirs and ours.


This review was published in the September 14-15 2002 edition of the Australian Financial Review.

La Mama: The Cool Room by Sivan Gabrielovich

The Cool Room by Sivan Gabrielovich. Directed by Deborah Leiser-Moore. At La Mama, 205 Faraday Street Carlton, until August 18, 2002.

Perhaps the most shocking moment in this anarchic and startling play comes when mention is made of peace in the Middle East; when someone dares to use the phrase "when peace comes..." It seems ludicrously unlikely that the cycle of violence will ever be interrupted.

But for one ex-pat Israeli, a young playwright who came to Australia when she was 21, Australia has given her room to dream. Room to imagine that reconciliation might just be possible. It has also given her the opportunity to hear the voice of the "enemy". And to see traditional foes living in relative peace.

Taking the 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon as her starting point (and making subtler references to the Israeli bombing of PLO headquarters in West Beirut in July of the previous year in which 300 civilians were killed) Sivan Gabrielovich locks two men in a cool room here in Australia.

Her protagonists -- a Lebanese Arab and an Israeli Jew -- have both fled their war-torn homelands to take refuge in Australia. Though one has apparently employed the other, their truce is uneasy. Now, together, they find their lives threatened. Senselessly.

They have nothing in common but their anger, their agony, their displacement and their mortal flesh. Not to mention their music. And their food. (One of the most delightful exchanges comes when Dror hails felafel as Israel's national food, to which Marwan snaps: you stole that from us too.)

The Cool Room is a brutal play, deeply and calculatedly offensive. It sets out to ruffle feathers -- in the same way that shooting at magpies with a 303 rifle would -- and succeeds. Yet I can't help but feel that Gabrielovich wanted to make more of the abattoir setting, wanted to make it more of a spatter-fest. Yet even as it stands, throwing plastic chops around and reenacting the aftermath of a suicide bombing was more than some audience members could stomach.

This theatrical missile could do with some laser-guidance, but it more than makes up for any lack of precision with its explosive force, its coarseness and its brutal impact. Having Matthew Crosby and Rodney Afif face-off as Dror and Marwan is this production's greatest asset.

Crosby is always a compelling and intense presence, with an awesome voice. Afif, however, matches him -- point for point -- in what is, in my mind, his best performance to date.


An edited version of this review was published in the Herald Sun on August 9, 2002.

Hoist Theatre Group: It's a Family Affair

It's a Family Affair by Aleksandr Ostrovsky. Directed by Daniel Schlusser. Set design by Simon Terrill. The Hoist Theatre Group. North Melbourne Town Hall until June 22, 2002.

According to the Russian censor: "All the characters in the play are first-rate villains. The dialogue is filthy. The entire play is an insult to the Russian merchant class."

It was banned for 13 years. The playwright lost his job and was disinherited after its publication. But, on the bright side, he was adored by the Moscow intelligentsia who demanded that he read his play all over town, and he began dating an actress.

He was more famous in Russia than Gogol and Turgenev, wrote almost fifty original plays. And, chances are, you've never heard of him...

But if it weren't for Aleksandr Nikolayevich Ostrovsky, Eisenstein might never have become a film-maker (he made an early short film for a production of The Wise Man) and Tchaikovsky might've remained a law clerk. (The 24 year-old student's first orchestral score was an overture based on Ostrovsky's The Storm.)

For its first outing, The Hoist Theatre Group has adapted Ostrovsky's second play, It's a Family Affair, We'll Settle It Among Ourselves, and turned it into a hyperactive and wonderfully exaggerated theatrical romp. It begins with a monologue by the daughter of the family, a dreamy fantasy about finding her Prince Charming -- preferably a nobleman -- and snaring him.

She announces, breathlessly, that she is the most beautiful woman in the world and the entire set shivers and sighs. We realise she's asleep and dreaming. And, indeed, she is caught wanking by her mother.

There are many brilliantly vivid scenes and moments of inspired silliness (Marco Chiappi's entrance on his arse, like a wormy dog, will go down in the annals -- ahem! -- of Australian theatre!) but the genius of the opening scene is unsustainable. Ironically, it is the production's determination to do the whole script that bogs it down.

The play's about a merchant (Chiappi) who is tired of having so much money owed to him. His solution? Ripping off the people he owes money to by declaring himself bankrupt. First, though, he puts his house and company in the name of his trusty (and equally corrupt) clerk. He also marries his daughter (Vivienne Walshe) off to the clerk, imagining that this will secure his future.

It's about the snobbishness of the upwardly mobile and the intrigue (and cash) required to cement a place in the upper middle classes.

The patchiness of the writing is not entirely overcome by the innumerable theatrical in-jokes (seagulls are shot between scenes) and all-round playfulness. Or by the incredible imagination shown in the direction (Daniel Schlusser) and set design (Simon Terrill).

But the acting is utterly delightful. Fiona Todd (in harlequin tights) turns into a hand-licking dog, wagging her entire body, by play's end. After far too much David Williamson naturalism, Vivienne Walshe revels in the heightened stuff of this production. All Amanda Douge needs is a pair of dark glasses to complete her transformation into Jacqui Onassis as the matchmaker.

It's a Family Affair is a theatrical feast, but it's one you might need to purge after.


A shorter version of this review was published in the Herald Sun on June 12, 2002.

Karen Finley

"Here's a woman who gets naked, covers herself completely in chocolate and sings. Does that appeal to you?"

"By and large I'm not wild about musicals."

That little exchange comes from a new episode of West Wing, screened last week. The show might be fiction, but the woman is real enough. Karen Finley is her name. And body painting is her game. Well, one of them.


Honey Dripper: Karen Finley in Shut Up & Love Me
(Click on the image to enlarge)

Chocolate, yams, eggs, dog food... you name it, she's applied it with soft toys. Finley is on her way to Melbourne to wallow in some honey. But be warned! She's no high-class mud-wrestler. She's a champion of free speech whose shows tell horror stories of what it's like to be marginal in a white, male, capitalist world; what it's like to be gay or black or HIV-positive... or, worst of all, female!

Finley, famously, had a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant withdrawn, in 1990, when her chocolate-dipped body was described as obscene by the ultra right-wing U.S. Senator Jesse Helms.

Finley won an initial court battle in the early '90s, restoring her grant, but the sequel -- which dragged on for another eight years -- was recently lost in the U.S. Supreme Court.

"It was as if I was in a sexually abusive relationship with these persecutors. I was starting to act like a victim."

Her hard-fought loss capped off a horror run for the outspoken, forty-something artist. Not long after her marriage ended, Finley also lost her mother, with whom she and her young daughter were living.

But rather than be brought down by fate, or dwell on her misfortunes, Finley is determined to get through it. "I lost so much... I had to go to the place in me where the far right weren't going to take away my joy."

And that place is a playful one, inspired by Queer Culture and the '70s. By Mae West and Josephine Baker. Finley's new show, Shut Up & Love Me, sounds like a one-woman Mardi Gras. Since losing the legal battle, the pin-up girl for the First Amendment has turned pin-up girl for Playboy. Yep, literally.

And she's published the New Age take on Winnie the Pooh she wrote for her daughter. In it, Winnie has a serious eating disorder, of course; Tigger is manic-depressive, Eeyore has "esteem problems" and Rabbit is a Greta Garbo-styled queen. "You know: 'I vant to be alone, Tigger. Stop bothering me.'"

Is Winnie the reason she's wallowing in honey in the new show? She laughs: "Partly. When I roll into it, on a canvas, and dance about, it's fun and it's beautiful."

While we talk, Finley's daughter peeps in, wanting to be tucked in. "You wanna go to sleep, honey?" And, there, I have my answer. Honey.

It's more than the aphrodesiac effect or the look of an Adam-tempting toffee-apple body gilded and dripping in amber. It's about love and affection. About good old fashioned sweetness.

I ask one last question. Why do you keep smearing your body? "Why does Ringo play the drums?!" I dunno, I shrug. Sadism??


Karen Finley performs Shut Up and Love Me at the National Theatre, St Kilda, on Friday March 22 at 8 pm. Enquiries and bookings: National Theatre 9525 4611 or Ticketmaster7 1300 136 166.


See also: A certain level of denial.

Opera Australia: The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart

The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart. Opera Australia. Sydney Opera House to March 7, 2002. Melbourne in November/December.

If it's humanly possible for you to get to the Opera House in the next couple of weeks, take your family, friends, colleagues and loved ones to see this production. It will delight and enthrall fanatics and novices alike. It might also restore the faith of those who, like me, believe that mainstream theatre is - on the whole - woeful and moribund.

Neil Armfield's production of this near-perfect opera reminds us why we have performing arts. To be touched, to be dazzled, to be moved to tears of joy, despair and recognition. We seek connection and catharsis; to be part of an emotional and intellectual discourse; to be privy to the play of ideas.

The Marriage of Figaro is a rare beast, indeed. Both Beaumarchais's play and Mozart's opera (his first with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte) create a stable but tangy compound out of a political satire and a domestic morality play; farce with a dark, dark edge.

One of the most admirable aspects of this new production is the way it slides along the tightrope dividing bitter and sweet. Between tragedy and comedy. Not with an insouciant swagger, but with quiet, easy grace. There's no over-arching theme in Armfield's direction beyond emphasising domestic struggle over class struggle. The action is set in a generic past, sliding easily between late Victorian times and 17th century France, closer to Moliere's time than Beaumarchais's: all breeches and powdered wigs.



As you'd expect from a production directed by an accomplished theatre director, characterisation is robust and refined, and acting is rarely less than excellent. Even the stock characters are fleshy and three-dimensional; none better than Conal Coad's scintillating Dr Bartolo.

Douglas McNicol's Figaro is rather foppish and naive, but not unattractively so. His slightly scornful bride-to-be Susanna sees the ever-popular Clare Gormley at her feisty and charismatic best. When the action begins, Figaro announces that he is delighted that their bedroom-to-be will be so conveniently wedged between the Count's and the Countess's. Too close for comfort, for Susanna, since the Master is keen to make a mistress of her.

Jeffrey Black plays Count Almaviva like an out-of-form Don Giovanni. (And Armfield has the Count suffering intense hay fever at every whiff of the "flower of virtue" he has so nobly restored to his people.)

The entire first act is like quicksilver, from the presto opening beats of the thematically self-contained overture. Simone Young rides the orchestra like a thoroughbred horse. She beats and whips them along so fast (and with such vigour) that she dare not use a baton; she could take somebody's eye out. And, for once, the tiny Opera House orchestra pit and stage gives a chamber feel - a real intimacy - to this opera of love and lust, jealousy, betrayal and forgiveness.

Young also conducts from (or rather with) the fortepiano, which inevitably will remind some of Barrie Kosky directing his plays from a barroom upright. (Kosky tackled Figaro for the VSO in 1991; it played in repertory - and shared a set - with a Melbourne Theatre Company-Anthill co-production of the Beaumarchais play.)

The Armfield magic cuts in when the Countess appears. Leanne Kenneally's first aria ('Porgi, amor') leaves the audience mute with emotion. Looking like a cross between Elizabeth I and Cate Blanchett, Kenneally acts as well as the latter with a dignity worthy of the former.

Content to delay showing-off the stellar quality of her voice, Kenneally trades vocal efficiency for heart-bursting emotion in this aria. It's a decision worthy of Callas. The comparison is not an idle one, as Kenneally serves as the emotional anchor for the entire production. (Even veiled, she manages to project her distress and anguish without the least coarseness or exaggeration.)

Gone is the Rosina of The Barber of Seville. She is now the lonely wife of a "modern husband: unfaithful and jealous."

Armfield's touches are everywhere. But they are in the fine print. The detail. (Well, apart from the scrotal pouch of money swung between thighs in a poignant reminder that power resides in the purse!) (And having Cherubino dry-rooting an ironing board. A fair illustration of his rampant hormones, maybe, but a little tactless!) He directs the opera as if it were a play in English. Gestures, action, blocking... All is natural and highly effective.

The fact that this long opera doesn't drag, even in the vocal divertissements of the fourth act, is a credit to the entire team.

I haven't yet nutted out the semiotic code of Dale Ferguson's set design - assuming it carries some significance - with its overlapping drapes of leather-look parchment; but it neatly frames the action while allowing us to glimpse other worlds and other lives.

It's time that we hailed Neil Armfield as our own Peter Brook. A magus. A visionary. A creator of miracles. His Turn of the Screw, his Markropulos Affair, and now his Figaro, are not only among the very best of the Opera Australia repertoire, they are among the very best theatre experiences to be had. Anywhere.


This review was published in the February 2-3 2002 edition of the Australian Financial Review.

The Marriage of Figaro returns to the Sydney Opera House on January 2, 2007.

Perth: Master Class by Terrence McNally

Master Class by Terrence McNally. His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth. Limited season. Then Victorian Arts Centre, from December 13; Playhouse, Brisbane, from January 31; Gold Coast Arts Centre, from February 21.

Verdi called it “la parola scenica”. Literally, the word staged. Made musical. Made real. The word brought to vivid and dramatic life. The most famous and melodramatic example of la parola scenica is the scene from La Traviata in which Violetta reads Germont’s note aloud. These days, sadly, that scene is done with such exaggerated pathos it becomes laughably sentimental.

But it is a letter-reading scene from another Verdi opera, Macbeth, that really tests the mettle of an opera actress. Callas, unquestionably, is the one to beat. No other soprano had the trust in the composer, or the sheer masochism, to perform the role as Verdi prescribed: “harsh, choked, dark... acted and declaimed with a veiled, black voice.”

Callas’s fire-breathing recklessness in such roles -- Medea even more so than Lady Macbeth -- probably destroyed her voice, but it made opera into a dramatic art form instead of a merely musical one. Thanks largely to Callas, opera eschewed its polite and courtly upbringing and claimed its pagan, Dionysian birth right.

But Callas narrowly missed the cut when it comes to recordings. Apart from some classic EMI mono recordings which transfer reasonably well to CD, the best recordings of Callas are of a voice that is decidedly threadbare. Coarse and uneven. Ugly. And, tragically, it is a voice detached from her intense physical presence.

As a result, more-prolific recording artists (with little of La Divina’s passion and dramatic conviction) have eclipsed her, and opera as a performing art is on the brink of becoming moribund once more.

Terrence McNally’s play Master Class (not to be confused with British playwright David Pownall’s brilliant 1983 drama about a confrontation between Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stalin and Zhdanov) does an admirable rescue job on Callas as a difficult and iconic star. But it seems non-commital when it comes to her status as an artist. It certainly takes it for granted.

McNally has her ranting and raving that singers are “here to serve the composer” and that the composer “is god” but presents her a tyrannical and bitchy prima donna who is, apparently, envious of beauty and charm.

The play’s worst sin is that it shows Callas as ungenerous. McNally’s Callas cutely dismisses Joan Sutherland (“she does her best”) and Renata Scotto (“know your limitations”) but doesn’t once acknowledge or credit her own roots.

The real Callas rarely failed to seize an opportunity to credit the great Italian conductor Tullio Serafin as the source of her “you’ll find it in the music” maxim. A singer can find the right gesture and through-line simply by listening for the composer’s clues, she would explain.

Callas would also hark back to her teenage years at the conservatoire in Athens when she would spend entire days (10 am until stumps) watching her teacher soprano Elvira de Hidalgo work with singers of all types and abilities. Hence her belief in the master class process.

Instead, McNally gives us a diva who, in her self-imposed exile from the stage, is obsessively dramatising her life. Past and present.

Master Class is a strange mix of documentary, re-enactment and reminiscence. Using the actual master classes that Callas gave at the Julliard Scool in 1971 and 1972 as his source material, McNally shows Callas working with three young singers, who are composites of actual students. Callas bullies and cajoles, lectures and berates these blithe and youthful wannabes.

The best and most dramatic moments have Callas (an amazingly focussed and regal Amanda Muggleton) interacting with the singers during their arias. She provides both simultaneous translation and a marvellous dramatic gloss of what and why the characters are singing.

While the one and only student of the first act, Sophie de Palma (Melissa Madden Gray, star-drive barely ticking over), is a butt of the playwright’s humour, things hot up in the session with Sharon Graham (Natasha Hunter at her most engaging) in the second act. Here, we see the potential of the master class format (and get the immediate gratification of seeing a great vocal technician learning how to understand and project the emotion and truth of a role) as well as the power of the director over a script.

This is a play in praise of “la parola scenica”, but the playwright is less than equal to the task. Luckily in Rodney Fisher’s production, McNally’s script is given the best possible chance of success. Like Callas in Cherubini’s Medea, the cast and director scavenge drama from McNally’s inert words. There is a remarkable attention to detail, a cast which more than earned its first night standing ovation, excellent lighting by David Walters and a historically accurate design by Jennie Tate.

It’s hard to imagine the play better housed, too, than it is in His Majesty’s. This beautiful theatre -- with its tiers and Juliet balconies -- is like a bantam European opera house.

Master Class might not be great drama, it is undoubtedly great entertainment.


This review was published in the November 17-18 2001 edition of the Australian Financial Review.

Melbourne International Festival of the Arts: Ubu by Alfred Jarry

Ubu by Alfred Jarry, in a new version by Tom Wright and Michael Kantor. Company B Belvoir & Mene Mene for the Melbourne Festival. Fairfax Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, until October 27. Then Belvoir Street.


“One can take a play and make it a trampoline. I see no need for making a trampoline out of Ubu.” (Peter Brook, Milan 1979)


You’re at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in Paris for the premiere of Ubu Roi, by a 23 year-old writer named Alfred Jarry. It’s December 1896. The lead actor, Firmin Gémier, walks to the front of stage, glares at you and swears: “Merdre!” That’s ‘merde’ with an extra rolling kick. (Think of an aggravated Betty Blue giving it a second syllable, with a twist.) One translator admiringly refers to the “labial overtones” of Jarry’s coined word; another gleefully translates it as “piss-shit”. And that’s just the first in a grotesque string of obscenities and scatological gags.

Ubu Roi caused outrage, closing after just two performances, but it was regarded in its day more as a juvenile prank than something shockingly new. (The Rabelaisian play was, in fact, conceived eight years earlier by a trio of spotty teenage boys wanting to take the proverbial piss-shit out of their Physics Master.)

Ubu Roi is the play that presaged Theatre of Cruelty (Artaud’s founded the Théâtre Alfred Jarry twenty years after Jarry’s death) and anticipated theatre of the absurd by half a century. Without Ubu, there could be no Godot or balding sopranos.

Ubu Roi is a great play, and still has much to say to us, a century later. But bugger Peter Brook; Ubu has to be made into a trampoline. The great anti-hero Pere Ubu (“Pa Ubu” for this production) is like a venal, stupid, grotesque Macbeth, persuaded to kill the reigning monarch by his wife.

While the play would be read as an attack on the bourgeoisie virtually anywhere else in the world, Pa seems pretty unexceptionable to audiences in Oceania: a monomaniacal and upwardly mobile mix of republican politician and grasping entrepreneur. Corporate opportunism meets coup d’état. What’s so bad about that?!

Since we no longer get any titillating kicks from saucy language, Tom Wright’s adaptation aims its black, satirical boot at our great nation’s even greater arse. Yes, initially at least, Pa and Ma are everyone we want to hate: from Alan and Eileen, through Piggery Paul, to John and Pauline... (That’s the Prime Miniature and his redheaded nemesis.)

But, remarkably, given the track record of Tom Wright and director Michael Kantor, this Ubu is more self-deprecating than self-flagellating. It’s a quite astonishingly good-natured romp.

Wright’s scintillating, potty-mouthed adaptation manages to look like a 21st century Legend of King O’Malley without ever straying from the plot or spirit of Jarry’s script. Wright stresses odd (or normally silent) syllables in homage to Jarry’s technique, he coins countless words and concatenates others. There is much internal rhyme (‘bumtrumpet’ is robustly typical) and some delicious malapropisms (regrettably “a parikeet of loyalty” is the only one I can recall), countless puns, word games and plays on the Ubu name, from “Ubu’s oboe” to ‘booboo’.

Kantor’s direction is similarly fluid and responsive and freewheeling. He exploits the amazing skills of his cast. Bille Brown (Pa) is the first among equals. Carole Skinner is his fishwife Ma. They’re ably supported by Jennifer Vuletic (tall and operatic) and Meaghan Davies (small and helium-sucking). Paul Blackwell, Arky Michael and Matthew Whittet complete the dream team.

In purely theatrical terms, this Ubu is a homage from the Kosky-styled new wave of theatrical intellectuals to the working-class Aussie anarchists who blazed the trail at the Pram Factory and Nimrod decades and decades ago. It’s a most unexpected and most ingenious reconciliation. And that’s what’s truly shocking about this production.


This review was published in the October 27-28 2001 edition of the Australian Financial Review.

Opera Australia: Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Stephen Sondheim

Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Directed by Gale Edwards for Opera Australia. Sydney Opera House until November 3, 2001. Melbourne and Adelaide in 2002.

Sweeney Todd is the one and only Sondheim composition to make it into the New Kobbe, but calling it a opera -- even a ‘ballad opera’ -- isn’t going to make it one. Sondheim has flirted with through-composition and more operatic structures from time to time, but Sweeney Todd is considerably less operatic than, say, Les Misèrables. It’s also considerably less sophisticated, musically, though Sondheim’s mastery of timing and effect is always strikingly evident.



In fact, Sweeney Todd makes most sense if you see it as a bog ordinary musical which sets out to rip up the conventions of Broadway... and, indeed, of mainstream America. It’s very much the forerunner of Into The Woods: a grim-with-one-m fairy tale. Its lyrics are subversive, brilliantly witty and unspeakably misanthropic.

Though Sondheim’s slasher musical cranked up more than 550 performances on Broadway (with Len Cariou wielding the blade and Angela Lansbury baking the ‘Nelly Blighs’) the subsequent road tour was less than a roaring success. So, like most of the Sondheim repertoire, Sweeney Todd has been left to ‘serious’ theatre companies to stage, typically in scaled-down form. (The Melbourne Theatre Company mounted a creditable production with just ten in the pit and a dozen on the Playhouse stage in 1987.)

Unquestionably, Sweeney Todd is worth doing and worth doing well. That, surely, is reason enough for Opera Australia to be tackling it. The company makes no apologies for doing G & S, nor should it for even the lowliest of Sondheim.

Director Gale Edwards resists the very real (and, perhaps, very reasonable) temptation to make Sweeney Todd into a study of female collaborators of mass murders, a la Myra Hindley. Edwards keeps things as gaudy and lurid as a penny dreadful; and as uncomplicated as a Disney cartoon.

It’s hard to imagine a more effective or impressive design. Peter England’s subterranean world of dank sewers and rusting Satanic Mills makes exceptional use of the Opera Theatre stage. (For once, claustrophobia is a design decision, not merely a limitation of the venue!) Equally impressive is Trudy Dalgleish’s thoughtful and dramatic lighting, though the uncredited make-up is crude.

Opera Australia’s decision to amplify the main cast members is, however, a dubious one. While the head-microphones ensure that we can distinguish virtually every word sung -- except when Rosemarie Arthars is doing her bag-lady mumbling as the beggar woman -- the voices are as eviscerated as Sweeney’s victims; the midrange ripped from each and every one. This single decision seriously undermines the sense of casting opera singers instead of actors who can sing competently.

Happily, the lead couple (Peter Coleman-Wright and Judi Connelli) would have a decent shot at winning the lead roles in any Sondheim Dream Team. Anywhere. Coleman-Wright is a corpse-like and monomaniacal Sweeney, obsessed with avenging his wrongful conviction, the poisoning of his wife and abduction of his daughter Johanna, all by Judge Turpin (John Pringle doing the self-flagellation and looking like Lady Chatterley’s husband, Clifford). When Mrs Lovett presents Sweeney with the blade set he left in her keeping 15 years earlier, when he was transported to Botany Bay, he sings “these are my friends, my faithful friends” as if it were a poignant love song. “At last, my arm is complete again.”

Judi Connelli is an exceptionally good Mrs Lovett. She walks the razor-sharp line that divides black humour from pathos. Like Coleman-Wright, she shows control and prudence. Instead of a radiating in all directions, Connelli harnesses and focuses her starlight into a laser-sharp beam.

With his guileless, open face and Chesty Bond jaw, Andrew Brunsdon is a spectacularly innocent Anthony Hope, the sailor who falls in love with Sweeney’s daughter after rescuing the demon barber at sea. Leanne Kenneally plays his love as if she were Rapunzel. She sings with an ironically appropriate lack of tessitura in ‘teach me how to sing’. (The word ‘screaming’, for example, ends up sounding like ‘screemeeng’. This is contagious, apparently, for Anthony eventually sings “weendow” instead of window.)

This luxury cast also has Barry Ryan as the wicked beadle and Anson Austin as the outrageously bogus Pirelli, “barber of kings and king of barbers”. Both are in excellent voice. But even in this company the Tobias of Rodney Dobson stands out. His acting skills give him the edge. No pun intended.

Like most Gale Edwards productions, there’s a revolve and some slutty Les Mis wench-acting, but the errors of tact are relatively minor. And the whole is impressively finished.

Sweeney Todd deserves a wide audience; one drawn from the ranks of ‘serious’ theatregoers (who will be delighted by the scale, the level of craft and the intensity of the drama) and lovers of musicals (who will be knocked out, at the very least, by the fact that they are enjoying an opera production).

Sweeney Todd is certainly not poor-man’s opera. Rather, it’s rich man’s music theatre.


This review was published in the September 29-30 2001 edition of the Australian Financial Review.

Sweeney Todd returns to the Sydney Opera House on Friday January 19, 2007.

CD Review: Mozart's Die Zauberflöte RIAS/Fricsay (D.G.)

Die Zauberflote. RIAS Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Ferenc Fricsay. (Deutsche Grammophon)

When Deutsche Grammophon decides to rifle its cupboards for cast offs, it’s time to go op-shopping.

DG’s latest batch of bargain-basement ‘doubles’ includes Ion Marin’s magnificent Lucia di Lammermoor (London Symphony Orchestra with Studer and Domingo, recorded in 1990, which Gramophone magazine hailed as the finest version in digital sound) and some vintage sets.

Ferenc Fricsay’s recording of Die Zauberflöte is 47 years old, and mono, but this Flute remains the most magical in the catalogue and one of the great opera recordings. The remastered sound quality is amazing; fresh and full-blooded. The sound image is so vivid, I doubt you will notice it is monaural.

The performance is fast and fizzy, more Italian in style than German. It boasts a boyish Fischer-Dieskau as the bird catcher and an astonishing Queen of Night in Rita Streich. But more remarkable than the cast, or individual performances, is the ease with which the orchestra and ensemble move from gentle humour to wretchedness to elation.

Double DG opera titles don’t come with libretti, but they are -- nevertheless -- good enough to be first choice sets. And cheap enough to be second or third choices.


This review was published in the Weekend Edition of the Australian Financial Review, September 1-2, 2001.

Opera Australia: L’Elisir d’amore by Donizetti

L’Elisir d’amore by Gaetano Donizetti. Directed by Simon Phillips. Opera Australia. State Theatre, Melbourne, until May 12, 2001. Sydney Opera House from June 29.

As a director of opera, Melbourne Theatre Company artistic director Simon Phillips veers between competent and inspired, with his Don Giovanni for the late Victoria State Opera remaining one of the most original (and satisfying) main-stage opera productions to have graced the massive State Theatre stage. Phillips shifted the action from 17th century Andalusia to Morocco in the 1950s, and made Don Ottavio a Singing Detective-style hero. Though it might sound outlandish on paper, this most unconventional approach humanised da Ponte's Grand Guignol narrative and made for an insightful and delightful night of opera.

As you’d expect from an experienced theatre director, Phillips’ stagecraft is first rate. He has, for example, the chorus pulling its weight, dramatically speaking, in a way not seen since the national company was peaking in skills and confidence, circa 1994. But, at key moments, Phillips betrays a lack of confidence in opera itself. He tarts things up when ‘playing it straight’ would more than suffice.

Superficially, shifting the action of L’Elisir d’amore to Australia at the outbreak of the first world war is easy enough to justify, but the transplant doesn’t ‘take’, and what logic there is, underlying the decision, remains buried under a mountain of gimmickry; the intrigue dumbed down into a succession of tabloid headlines.

Jokey surtitles are de rigueur nowadays -- and “It’s great to have a smoko in the sun” is a pretty reasonable gloss of the opening chorus ‘Bel conforto al mietitore’ -- but when the opening bars of the opera’s best first act aria ‘Quanto e bella’ are rendered inaudible thanks to howls of laughter at the ‘She’s an absolute corker’ surtitle, it’s hard not to be put out.

Okay, one abandons all hope of subtlety once the Sid Nolan-inspired curtain lifts to reveal a crinkle-cut set of corrugated iron hills painted in the colours of the Ken Done rainbow, but does romantic logic have to be jettisoned too? (Even the lowliest of musicals is expected to make some kind of sense!) This production doesn’t establish exactly who the heroine is, let alone what she wants and doesn’t want. And that’s a crucial flaw.

It’s unlikely than anyone walked away from the first performance guessing that Adina was, in fact, part of the squattocracy: rich, independent and well-read. She’s outfitted in a pretty (but battered) iris-coloured long dress, when she rides in on her corrugated-iron horse, but she might as well be an Aussie Zerlina -- some kind of peasant soubrette -- so little is she differentiated from the other country sheilas. (She eventually appear in jodhpurs, but way too late.)

Ironically enough, Phillips’ decision to make Coca Cola the elixir of the opera’s title is one of this productions more sensible and easily justified! (Coke first appeared in Australia, according to the director, just prior to the great war.)

But the thing, finally, that dooms this production to the twilight-zone of partial success is that it doesn’t go all the way. It raises our expectations then dashes them. With L’Elisir set in Australia, singing in Italian becomes problematic… unless the setting is an internment camp. Likewise, having an Italianate tenor anti-hero (the half-pint Jose Carreras, Jorge Lopez-Yanez, as dolt farmer who loves the rich girlie, Nemorino) in the midst of a gloriously Anglo cast suddenly begs explanation. (Call him ‘Merino’ fer cryin’ out loud!) Perhaps parts of Mark Lamprell’s auto-biographical film ‘My Mother Frank’ could have been co-opted here.

At the risk of sounding petty, Phillips’ production aims high, but not high enough.

Yet there is a scene midway through the second act in which magic happens. Set in a chook shed, under a corrugated crescent moon, the slack-jawed yokels learn that Nemorino is about to inherit a fortune. It is a moment of breathtaking simplicity and sincerity. This is a glimpse of the director’s potential and his ability to elicit engaging performances from one and all.

Musically, this production is unassailable. Amelia Farrugia might be boxing above her vocal weight as Adina, but her winsome charm more than compensates for any lightness of voice, corrugated vibrato and occasional waywardness of intonation. Sometime bullfighter (no kidding) Lopez-Yanez is infinitely more impressive as Nemorino than he was as La Traviata’s boytoy, Alfredo, a few weeks back. Jeffrey Black eats up the role of Belcore in eager gulps. (He lacks only a twirlable mustache!) And Conal Coad sounds better than he looks as the snake-oil salesman and carny, Dulcamara.

In the pit, Julia Jones provides clear and vibrant leadership, and exacts a mighty performance from the State Orchestra of Victoria.

If all else fails, you can shut your eyes.


This review was published in the April 28-29 2001 edition of the Australian Financial Review.

Louise Bourgeois, National Gallery of Victoria and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Louise Bourgeois. Curated by Jason Smith. National Gallery of Victoria until November 27. Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, from December 21.

Robert Mapplethorpe's celebrated 1982 photograph of sculptor Louise Bourgeois shows a crinkle-faced 70 year-old woman with a devilish smile and a massive sculpted penis tucked under her arm.



That year, Bourgeois had her first major retrospective, at MOMA in New York. MOMA is also home of Fillette (the nasty looking 60 cm organ) which, incredibly, has been modelled in latex.

Nothing is as it seems in Bourgeois's sculpted works. "The materials are my medium," she says. "They are there to serve me, I am not there to serve them." And one continually finds oneself staring at the plaques accompanying her work in utter disbelief.

Rubber looks like orange clay in the multi-breasted relief Mamelles (1991); marble looks like viscous gunmetal in Untitled (1990); bronze, variously, looks like burnished copper or wood. I had to touch Memling Dawn (1951) (left) to convince myself that it wasn't wood.

Like Untitled (1950), Memling Dawn is a kebab of brick-sized chunks of bronze, so detailed that they are indistinguishable from the scores of unique pieces of wood they were cast from.

But it isn't just wood that is petrified in this survey of Bourgeois's earliest and most recent work: her unpleasant childhood experiences are also turned to stone. In various exegeses published over the years, the artist has emphasised the strongly autobiographical element in her work.

I'd rather not know, for example, that the skinny totem Portrait of C. Y. was the artist's way of not hammering nails into the real "C. Y." Why shouldn't I look at the thatch of nails as the onset of puberty, say? And do I really need to know about her father's affair with the family's resident English tutor to comprehend Cell (recently purchase by the NGV)?

I'd rather look on Bourgeois's Winged Figure (1948) (left) as Brancusi's Bird in Space crucified than as some encapsulation of the artist's angst. It works differently, but just as well. Nor does one benefit from recognising a reference to the absent 1974 work Destruction of the Father to enjoy the bulbous Untitled (1990).

The half-dozen superior pieces in this exhibition transcend intimate memories. If the two biomorphic nature studies (1984 and 1986) don't startle or distress you, then you will at least admire their supreme craft.

The 1986 Nature study is a headless child figure spun into a shell of luminous white, beached on a coffin-sized chunk of what looks like sea-salt. It is profoundly and indescribably beautiful.

The acclaimed 1984 work (in bronze with a silver nitrate patina) is a headless, squatting, feral creature. It has an abundance of breasts, an erect male organ, clawed paws and an arcing, inquisitive tail.


One of Louise Bourgeois's Nature Studies

These works are ample proof that the minor figure of the 1950s has, since her 70th birthday, become one of the great sculptors of the century. She turns 84 in a few weeks.


This article was published in the November 17, 1995, edition of the Australian Financial Review.

Karen Finley: A Certain Level of Denial

A Certain Level of Denial by Karen Finley. National Theatre, St Kilda, Friday February 11, 1994.

If the roof of St Kilda's National Theatre had collapsed on Friday night, Melbourne would have lost a sizeable percentage of its avant-garde and artistic intelligentsia in one hit. And the world would have lost Karen Finley: performance artist, gender terrorist and ethical evangelist.

Karen Finley's first Australian performances are of one of her least contentious shows. That's not to say that Finley is mellowing, quite the contrary. Her attacks are increasingly urgent and focussed. She continues to rail against apathy, ignorance, hypocrisy and institutionalised hatred: of women, of gays, of the homeless and of the sick.

Absent, though, are the most controversial and least understood elements of recent New York shows in which Finley smeared her body with sweet-potato whip and ranted about castrating Wall Street stockbrokers and feeding choc-coated testicles to their eldest sons as Easter treats.

It's quite possible, too, that Australian audiences might have misinterpreted Finley's usual portrait of America's WASPish double-thinking middle-classes as a lurid caricature instead of an incisive critique, so unfamiliar is the magnitude of the gap between the empowered and the disempowered in the USA...

Increasingly, Finley's work concerns itself with AIDS and death. This decrease in scope brings with it an increase in density, coherence and authority.

A Certain Level of Denial isn't subversion, it's insurrection. It begins with Finley naked but for shoes and a hat. She stands between three empty slide-projectors which are trained on her. It is impossible for us to objectify her. Apart from the heaving of her breathing and the slight sway of her head and shoulders, she is motionless.

She intones her first monologue (about trendy East Villagers with rich parents) in a voice half way between a chant and a yell. It is insistent, unremitting, harrowing. She settles into an arcing but aggressive oratorical cadence. She captures the same kind of quaver one hears in Jesse Jackson's voice when he's striving to be Martin Luther King.

This is the first of many such raves. They are so overpowering it is tempting to discount the handful of quiet moments: Finley's placid first chat with her audience - still naked - from a high canvas chair; the simulated discussion with her white-male-liberal 'shrink'; and the eloquent coda in which she carries off a robe which has been transfigured into a "quilt of suffering" and an emaciated dead body.

There is much more to a Karen Finley performance than the often-shocking monologues and the projections of her striking drawings. Finley doesn't 'act' in the conventional sense of the word. She connects with her work utterly. She becomes the women and men whose stories she relates. In doing so, she forces us to scrutinise and reassess our shared codes of morality.


A slightly shortened version of this review was published in The Age, Monday February 14, 1994.

Gale Edwards' production of The Magic Flute (Victoria State Opera)

The Magic Flute. Directed by Gale Edwards. Designed by Roger Kirk. Lighting design by Jamieson Lewis. Victoria State Opera. State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre. November 18 to December 7, 1991.

When The Magic Flute was performed in Melbourne during the 1956 Olympics, a guest soprano from Yugoslavia sang the role of Pamina. What distinguished Sena Jurinac's performance from those of her Australian comrades was language. While Geoffrey Chard et al. sang in English, Jurinac used Italian! (Schikaneder's libretto was, of course, written in German.)

I mention this bizarre episode in our operatic history not because Chard is in the current Victoria State Opera production, but because his vocal clarity is scarce to a point where extinction seems inevitable. Several principal singers in the first cast of the VSO's Flute were virtually unintelligible.

One could be mistaken for assuming that English was Gregory Tomlinson's second language; he sang it, on opening night, like Jose Carreras. His Tamino was marred by flaccid enunciation, unnatural inflection and a disagreeable nasal characteristic. He made all the right noises but packaged them poorly.

Christine Douglas' serene light-soprano is well suited to the role of Pamina, but in her aria Ach ich fühl's es ist verschwunden [sorry, I don't know it in English] I didn't catch more than half-a-dozen words. Her singing was lustrous and exquisite - but the words were quite incomprehensible.

Those who could be understood were relegated to minor roles. Mark Pedrotti, as Papageno, was the exception. While he might've lacked the charm of a Fulford or a Hagegård, he sang with beauty and strength. Linda Thompson and Roxane Hislop - two stars in the making - also impressed. Their singing was glorious... and uncommonly lucid.

While the overall inadequacy of articulation is annoying, it does not prevent one from enjoying Gale Edwards' scintillating production. Her Flute is a modern panto that eschews the Masonic intrigue in favour of a breezy and exuberant theatricality.

Göran Järvefelt's Flute, for The Australian Opera, was always going to be an extremely hard act to follow. Edwards, sensibly, given that the AO production has been mounted here twice in the last six years, takes a quite different line through the opera. Ignoring all that is extraneous to the libretto, Edwards presents The Magic Flute as an adult fairy tale.

This journey from darkness to light, from ignorance to enlightenment, begins and ends in the penthouse of the "wealthy and spoilt" Tamino. Having partied while his girlfriend is away, Tamino is caught in flagrante with a "classy tart", as the mute role is identified in the programme. The action of the opera is thus rendered as the hallucinations of an inebriated prince.

Okay, it's tabloid opera, but that is exactly what Mozart was commissioned to write. His librettist Schikaneder, a successful actor-manager, solicited Mozart to compose a magic opera set in exotic locales allowing the use of spectacle and vernacular comedy. In that sense, Edwards' production is true to the spirit of the original work; it certainly has a precocious appeal.

Musically, the production requires some tuning. The off-stage chorus is muffled and barely audible. Stephen Barlow's commendable musical direction has one or two odd lapses. The Act One finale, for example, is inappropriately bouncy. Still, I have not heard the State Orchestra play so well on an opening night.

At a handful of performances, substitutions will be made in six principal roles and in the pit. Audiences who catch the second cast will have no cause to feel aggrieved. It is, if anything, marginally better - it is certainly superior theatrically. Roger Lemke is a splendid Papageno. Geoffrey Harris (Tamino) and Helen Adams (Pamina) are vivid and precise. Michael Terry's attractive tenor is somewhat soft for the role of Monastatos, but it is a delight to see him performing a key role.

It is worth considering just how far this company has come since it mounted Anthony Besch's dreary production of The Flute in 1984. That production, in the company's first year in the State Theatre, used sets and costumes borrowed from the Australian and English National opera companies. Roger Kirk's elegant new designs should grace this stage, and others, for many years to come. Indeed, this production of The Magic Flute will be part of the State Opera of South Australia's 1992 season.


A shortened version of this review was published in the Australian Financial Review on November 29, 1991.