Author: Kate Foy

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Greenroom going dark for a bit …

Social networking brings with it the necessity of keeping up with your ‘tribe.’ And so it is here.

Greenroom’s contributors post regularly: the Monday post What’s On This Week in Queensland Theatre, we keep the Calendar of events filled, see shows and write reviews, interview theatre people, and keep the Twitter stream flowing along nicely. All of this activity is going to stop for a bit because Greenroom is going to take a break of about 6 weeks while the Editor (me) scoots off overseas on a theatre road-trip in North America. We’ll be back on October 16.

So, dear regular readers and casual droppers-by you are going to need to rely on those other top Queensland bloggers for a bit. We’re sad to be missing the Brisbane Festival, but it’s covered over on Critical Mass. We’re sure that Katherine Lyall-Watson will be doing her best to keep up with the Brisbane theatre happenings on OurBrisbane.com. You can find links to both of these blogs on Greenroom’s homepage.  Of course, there’s always Twitter. Ah Twitter! And, of course, Facebook, where there’s a big theatre crowd.

So, in the meantime, stay well, enjoy the Spring and what’s going to be a huge month of theatre activities in Queensland.

If you’d like to keep up with my theatre comings and goings while I’m in the US and Canada, you can do so on my other blog Groundling

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MEAA Showcase Agreement: breakthrough?

The ongoing discussion around the labels professional and amateur, independent, pro-am etc. continues elsewhere and will, undoubtedly, go on. I’ve written elsewhere on this issue – here and here. Last week I noticed that Katherine Lyall-Watson revived the discussion in a post called ‘Pro vs Am‘ on OurBrisbane.com. Along with a couple of others, I had my 2c worth in the discussion which has since petered out – for the time being. You can be certain it will return.

I also noticed from the latest MEAA Equity bulletin that A Catch of the Breath by Robert Thwaites currently playing at !Metro Arts is the first to utilise the new Equity Showcase Agreement. I was intrigued to see what these terms and conditions comprise, so I got in touch with MEAA – the Agreement isn’t on the web yet – and they very quickly sent through a copy.

It’s an interesting document, and one which may sort out some of the disgruntlement over labelling, maybe set to rest the ‘taint’ of amateurism which can linger around productions not covered by MEAA awards, but which use the talents of professional artists. More importantly, it provides a way to protect its independent members from exploitation. Should there be any disputes arising from the Equity Showcase Agreement, all parties have to agree, on signing, that MEAA will mediate. Continue reading “MEAA Showcase Agreement: breakthrough?”

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Getting things right: Barbara Lowing – (Interview 11)

If Barbara Lowing is in a show, you know your night in the theatre is going to be a good one. I love her work, for which, incidentally, she’s won a stack of acting awards. I note from her C-V that she was the first Queensland graduate of WAAPA (West Australian Academy of Performing Arts). Apart from being a director-teacher and a terrific photographer, she’s also great company, so it’s good to catch up with her for lunch last week. Barb’s in Toowoomba rehearsing for the Empire Theatre Projects Company (EPC) production of April’s Fool by David Burton, directed by Lewis Jones.

This production marks a lot of firsts for the EPC: the first fully professional show, the first to tour – it opens in Oakey this week, then Chinchilla, Dalby, Ipswich and a city season in Brisbane at the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts. April’s Fool is possibly also the first-ever home-grown play about a real-life event in the city, the death of a young man, Kristjan Terauds in April 2009 from the complications following illicit drug use.

Director Lewis Jones heard of the events from mutual friends of the Terauds. His bringing of the story to the stage has been done with the full cooperation of Kristjan’s parents and extended family. The play also offers the perspective of other characters in the play – friends, observers – some of whom take varying points of view. ‘It’s didactic but never melodramatic,’ Barb adds. ‘Lewis and David have structured the text so there’s no sense of lecturing ever.’

We chat about the way the EPC production team have been working on what has turned out to be a verbatim theatre piece researched and scripted by Dave Burton and which the company has created from the ground up. Material has been drawn from interviews with friends, family and others associated with the event which is not yet 18 months old. The play’s action spans the 6 days following Kristjan’s death, in which his family attempted to come to terms with that most terrible of experiences for a parent, their child’s death. Whilst some names have been altered, all characters are ‘real’ and there’s not a word in the play, Barb tells me, that hasn’t been taken from interview transcripts, or from the diary which David Terauds (Kristjan’s father) kept during the event – as his book of solace, I imagine.  Continue reading “Getting things right: Barbara Lowing – (Interview 11)”

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The Secret Love Life of Ophelia (Review): Fractal Theatre

Iambic pentameter (aka blank verse) is known for being the rhythm that most closely approximates everyday speech in English. Most of us meet it for the first time in the plays of Shakespeare. With its repetitive de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM spring on each line of the verse, despite – or perhaps because it’s closely associated with Shakespeare – IP often gets a bad working over in the hands of inexperienced actors. In a misguided attempt to make it sound more ‘real,’ all the insistence and momentum in the rhythm can get flattened out and choked. Perhaps even more unfortunately, it can be spoken in a kind of reverential ‘poetic’ voice which casts the content and the speaker into some kind of other world divorced from reality. IP is full of traps for the young player.

And now, here’s playwright Steven Berkoff appropriating the old master’s metric verse form for  The Secret Love Life of Ophelia, currently playing at !Metro Arts Studio in Brisbane.  I started by mentioning IP because one of the real delights of this Fractal Theatre production, directed by Brenna-Lee Cooney, is that the two actors in the production, Eugene Gilfedder (Hamlet) and Mary Eggleston (Ophelia) handle the verse so well; it’s earthy, muscular, lyrical, downright dirty (but in a soft-porn kind of way) often delicate, and always affecting. Neither actor is the slightest bit disarmed by the text, in fact they chew it up and spit it out – as utterly befits this 21st century, retro-Elizabethan, poetic psycho-drama. Phew!  Hoorah for them and hoorah for Berkoff; it’s great to hear such tough verse done proud. Continue reading “The Secret Love Life of Ophelia (Review): Fractal Theatre”

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Boy Girl Wall (Review): The Escapists @ !Metro Arts (2010)

Spring is just round the corner; love is in the air – along with deadly magpies – so it’s a perfect time for a new, one-man show all about romance and other local hazards, natural or man-made. With no more than a stick of chalk, a couple of puppet socks, a few props and an overhead projector, Lucas Stibbard creates and embodies the entire world of Boy Girl Wall in the bare, black-walled box of the !Metro Art’s Sue Benner Theatre.  It’s a sweet, very funny and touching confection, and a quite splendid night in the theatre from The Escapists.  This is the same creative collective that brought you The Attack of the Attacking Attackers a year or so back. The Escapists’ manifesto: imagination, theatricality and the joy of play are all joyously present in Boy Girl Wall.

Floppy haired, chalk-stained-suited and bare-footed, Stibbard, like his quirky imagination, takes flight through the tiny space of the inner city’s favorite theatre haunt. Stibbard’s is a wonderfully original and intelligent voice, and he leaps and whirls in a non stop, dazzling performance in the best Aussie tradition of yarn spinning. Flicking and switching between characters with the ease of someone totally in charge and on top of his game, it’s a 70 minute delight which flies by at full tilt and as nimbly as the story teller himself.  Continue reading “Boy Girl Wall (Review): The Escapists @ !Metro Arts (2010)”