Southbank was teeming with littlies yesterday. Of course, it’s summer time and school holidays so, apart from swimming and eating icecream on a hot Brisbane Saturday afternoon, there were lots of things to do – singing, mask-making, theatre-going and story-telling among them. I had lunch while a bunch of what looked like under-5s were jumping and rolling around on the QPAC Green. They were learning all about Iggy the Iguanadon via a song – we have the Queensland Museum to thank for this, I suspect. I wished I had a small person with me; it looked so much fun and I wanted to share it with them. There were also a whole lot of families getting stuck into creative activities in the Playzone. Upstairs Mary Poppins was about to take off while, just down the road at the Cremorne Theatre, kids and their adults could go to a matinée performance of Harvest Rain’s latest production James and the Giant Peach, adapted by David Wood from the story by Roal Dahl. That’s where I was headed.
I remember this particular book from years ago. My kids loved being read to and then to read Dahl’s books as they got older; he remained a favourite into young adulthood. They switched their imaginations on and escaped into other worlds via books – at first picture books and then the word-dense stories like James and the Giant Peach. It’s a lovely fable about the capacity of imagination to transform lives. Continue reading “Review: James and the Giant Peach – Harvest Rain Theatre Company at Cremorne Theatre QPAC”
My local bottle department practically gives away the booze. Pop in any afternoon of the week and there’s almost always a tasting going on – handy little refreshments for drivers heading home after a hard day. The specials are stacked up in tempting piles round the shop. When I remark on the week’s ‘buy one, get one free’ deals, the cheery guy behind the counter tells me that there’s a wine mountain ‘out there’ and that “Someone’s got to drink it.”
La Boite’s latest production, and the last for their 2011 season, is Ruben Guthrie by actor, writer, director Brendan Cowell. In the course of the play Ruben’s Czech girlfriend Zoya refers to Australia as a beautiful ‘alcoholic country,’ and Cowell’s play points its considerable critical armoury right at our culture’s denial of the problem. Someone’s got to drink it after all. Whilst the play is pretty gut-wrenching at times, it’s also wickedly funny. Cowell’s shredding of the ethics of the advertising industry is satirical writing at its best. I think it’s his best play yet.
If this corker of a social satire didn’t make you laugh so much you’d weep. Ruben Guthrie is a tragedy about the fall and fall of a talented young man whose health, career and relationships are ruined by booze and drugs. Ruben creates ad campaigns but wants to be taken seriously as a writer – cockiness masks his insecurity. Ruben’s lifestyle where the ‘caine is freely available and grog flows to inspire creativity, celebrate, commiserate and, well, just because you can, see him sucked under. He loses his girlfriend at the start of the play, gets the wake-up call and decides to go on the wagon. Brendan Cowell’s Writer’s Note speaks of the year in which he gave up alcohol not just because he knew he was drinking too much, but to see what it would be like to go without. The experiences he had, the ‘run-ins’ with his ‘baffled’ friends and family who couldn’t understand his denial of ‘the great drink’ were the inspiration for this play.
David Berthold directs a fine, unvarnished production that takes full advantage of the theatre’s architectural space – we’re back in the round, by the way. Mr Berthold admits to admiring the play greatly, and it’s not hard to see why. Mr Cowell’s witty text flows from the compassion at its heart, and its dialogue springs off the page. Berthold has orchestrated its rhythms and thematics with confidence and sensitivity. The play also needs a gutsy company to have it work the way it needs to, and the director has cast it beautifully.
Caroline Kennison
Ruben Guthrie has a dream team ensemble headed by Gyton Grantley who is on stage as Ruben for all but a few seconds of the action. Mr Grantley’s performance is quite superb; it’s assured and powerful, and his Ruben utterly charming and heartbreaking. He is wonderfully supported by Hayden Spencer as Ray his boss, by Caroline Kennison as his mother Susan, and Kathryn Marquet as Virginia his AA sponsor and lover. New faces Lauren Orrel (Zoya) Darren Sabadina (Damian) and John McNeill (Peter) are terrific as fiancée, best mate and father respectively.
Design by Renée Mulder is stripped back and suggestive of a boxing ring right down to its bright blue squares. It’s absolutely perfect for the no-holds-barred slugfest which is the play. Jason Glenwright (lighting) and Guy Webster (sound) complete the design team with meticulously detailed lighting, composition and soundscapes.
The production is wonderfully theatrical and performative; the audience is brought into the action as Ruben addresses us as fellow meeting attendees. The cast sit around the perimeter of the square within the round and watch the action, setting and striking furniture and props, coming and going into the ring for the ’rounds’ that play out over two acts. Yes, there is an interval where you can get a drink. You are invited to bring it back into the theatre if you wish. As an aside, I asked the bar staff whether sales had been up or down during the season. They indicated rather discreetly that they hadn’t really noticed a difference. You could, however, feel a real tension in the room as Ruben agonises over the temptation of drinks forced upon him by friends and family. I don’t mind admitting my own inner voice was screaming, ‘Don’t do it!’
Don’t miss it. This is an excellent realisation of a very good, contemporary, and very Australian play.
Ruben Guthrie by Brendan Cowell plays at The Roundhouse Theatre for a limited season. Catch it between the time you’re reading this and its closing performance on 13th November. Details on the company website.
Images by Al Caeiro Main Image: Gyton Grantley and Kathryn Marquet
The last time I was at the Bille Brown Studio some weeks back it was in an unholy mess – the lads and lasses from The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Company had seen to that during the course of I Feel Awful. I wrote afterwards of feeling sorry for the stage management team who had to clean up after every performance.
Last night I walked back into an altogether different space. Designer Robert Kemp has transformed the BB’s minimalist black into the cosy living room of an upper middle class London home – the kind you see in movies where the whisky comes in cut glass tumblers and the soda splashes out of siphons. This is old-fashioned (if shabby) gentility on display. There is a huge back wall of bookshelves (complete with a secret entrance), a very well-stocked drinks cabinet. Rugs adorn the polished wood floor, and lamps of all kinds are on the shelves. There’s a comfy club chair to lounge in and, to complete the picture, a couple of China dogs – those most-assuredly English mantelpiece adornments. Get the picture? It’s all for No Man’s Land, Harold Pinter’s marvellous play about the decay of the British Empire – or is it? One is never quite sure with Pinter. However, I took my cue from the character Spooner (Peter Carroll) who leaps with delight as a metaphor escapes from the lips of Hirst (John Gaden) during the course of their extraordinary encounter in Hirst’s living room. With Pinter, you take all the clues you can get. Metaphors aside, the odd couple have met up on Hampstead Heath, and Spooner, a snowy-haired, greasy-suited pixie of a con-man – clearly fallen on harder times – has inveigled his way into the staid Hirst’s home for a drink and a chat. What happens after that is the substance of the play.
The Pinter trademarks are all there in No Man’s Land: characters confined to a single room, mysterious arrivals, and the sense of menace in the air – even the towering shelves look as though they could collapse inwards and bury the protagonists. And then there’s the linguistic relish of dialogue which winds itself around Pinter’s favourite themes – memory, power and sexuality. However, in this production, the Pinter-esque pauses, beats and often lugubrious silences which pepper his plays – seem hardly noticeable. Either they’re not indicated in this particular script, or Michael Gow has decided to ignore them in the playing. Good decision.
The direction sets a cracking pace – 95 minutes without an interval – and it produces a delightfully quick-witted interpretation of a play which is also composed of plenty of darkness and no small amount of sombre inflection if that’s the way you want to go. What happens in this production is an emphasis of the light and the quick over the dark and the heavy, and it works wonderfully well. It is a refreshing contemporary take on a modern classic.
Michael Gow has wanted to direct this play for a long time and he’s cast it superbly. I can’t think of a better pairing than these two fine actors in the central roles of Pinter’s demanding play. They carve up the text and serve it with relish. Dangle a metaphor before Peter Carroll or a linguistic double-entendre before John Gaden and stand back. Their performances are nothing less than a combined master class in comic timing, stage craft, and the mastery of Pinter’s periphrastic turns of phrase and juicy linguistic circumlocution – yes, it’s like that at times, only really, really funny.
These two nimble-footed veterans are joined by the two lurking lads about the place who appear to be butler-manservant and carer-keeper. The performance space wasn’t the only thing transformed in this production. There is an almost-unrecognisable Andrew Buchanan as Briggs; he’s boof-headed and buffed and, my God, those arms, that chest! His sidekick Foster, the dangerously-silky, Chav-like enigma is played by a manscaped, elegantly oily Steven Rooke. Messrs Buchanan and Rooke, two of Brisbane’s best younger actors, are terrific matches for their elder colleagues; theirs are wonderfully original and sure characterisations.
This is the first time No Man’s Land has been performed professionally in Australia. Queensland Theatre Company’s co-production with Sydney Theatre Company is a ripper of a show. Don’t miss it.
No Man’s Land by Harold Pinter Bille Brown Studio, Brisbane 19 Sept-22 Oct Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House 1 Nov-7 Dec (Check STC website for session times and details)
Director: Michael Gow; Designer: Robert Kemp; Lighting Designer: Nick Schlieper; Sound Designer: Tony Brumpton
What a hoot this show is – a refreshingly anarchic romp that takes the piss out of theatre and itself; I think this lack of pretension in I Feel Awful is one of the things I liked most about it.
Whilst it is dedicated to the ‘late’ Michael Gow (he is no such thing – MG has never been late to anything in his life) it is one of the experiments that QTC’s last Artistic Director programmed into his final season for the Company. Black Lung were commissioned to create something and began with a creative development in late 2010. What eventually emerged as I Feel Awful has now popped up in 2011 Brisbane Festival time, and right good festival fare it is too; you can see it at 7pm or later at 9pm on some evenings during the Festival. Check the times on the Company site for the show. By the way, when not happily engaged in writing plays, Michael Gow is equally happily engaged (right now) directing the Company’s next production No Man’s Land by the late, great Harold Pinter somewhere else in the building, one assumes.
Part of the sleight of hand of the Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm (their name is the only grandiose thing about this group of wonderfully smart and funny Melbourne thesps) is to set up the premise that the former Artistic Director of the Company has requested their presence to show Brisbane how theatre is made – first cringe button pressed. To do so they have engaged a group of young Brisbane actors as their ‘interns’ (that word again) and attempt to imprint their own brand of theatre making on our best and brightest. The result is splendidly contrived mayhem and 70 minutes of high-energy, dada-esque delight. The benign features of Michael Gow oversee the general irreverence and trashing of some theatrical sacred cows including his own plays, some of which are splendidly ‘re-imagined’ in a delicious gender inversion. I couldn’t help but feel he would be delighted by what he was seeing unfold in the Bille Brown Studio.
I Feel Awful is cleverly constructed – and then torn apart – terrifically performed, and will appeal to anyone who loves the idea of theatre.
Speaking of trashing, I Feel Awful is a messy hoot as well. Here’s another production that sets about destroying and remaking just about everything in as comprehensive a way as is possible. I do feel for the stage management teams on shows like this – a special shout out to the heroic Shaun O’Rourke on this one. Nice to see him get the last word!
I’ve pondered (and written) about the trashing tendency in a lot of contemporary theatre before. I am sure there’s a dissertation or two or, at least, a learned paper on why this is so. Maybe it’s the most obvious way for some theatre-makers to demonstrate their perennial desire to overturn the status quo. On a deeper level it’s about the theatre’s ability to demonstrate the impermanence of anything – from artistic directors and their aesthetics to politics and beyond, as well as the flux and evolution of culture and the insecurity of our times.
I Feel Awful plays at QTC’s Bille Brown Studio at 78 Montague Road, South Brisbane until 10th September. You’ll need to get in fast.
Writer and Director: Thomas M Wright; Designer: Thomas M Wright; Design Consultant: Simone Romaniuk; Lighting Designer: Govin Ruben; Stage Manager: Shaun O’Rourke; ASM: Daniel Sinclair The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm: Liam Barton, Gareth Davies, Aaron Orzech, Vaczadenjo Wharton-Thomas, Thomas M Wright With: Courtney Ammenhauser, Finn Gilfedder, Will Horan, Tiarnee Kim, Mary Neary, Essie O’Shaughnessy, Charlie Schache, Nathan Sibthorpe, Stephanie Tandy
Back to the theatre last evening for the first performance of the final production in La Boite’s 2011 Indie program. It’s The Danger Ensemble’s TheHamlet Apocalypse directed and designed by Steven Mitchell Wright. It’s had previous seasons in Melbourne and Adelaide, and it’s now back home. Last night was the first time I’ve caught a piece from The Danger Ensemble and I’m very glad I did. Its intelligent, gutsy theatricality and complexity will please some and, just possibly, repel others. Whatever you do, leave your preconceptions in the foyer. As the website has it
The Hamlet Apocalypse is a dsytopia of the now generation, a silent party, a desperate plea, a rambunctious prayer… Seven actors stage Hamlet on the eve of the apocalypse. As the line between fiction and reality blurs; the actors, their characters and their worlds collide and are distilled into the simplest of human states. It’s about the power of death and the value of life.
The sheer energy of the ensemble at work and of the production itself is mightily affecting. Certainly, you cannot hide in the usual safety of the dark auditorium. Dane Alexander‘s sound and Ben Hughes‘ lighting are terrific and cruel! From the moment you enter you are caught in the spotlight – literally. The show gets its claws into you and, from this point until the final blackout, you are jumping in your seat. For 75 minutes there is no exit, no retreat for audience or performers … Continue reading “Review: The Hamlet Apocalypse – The Danger Ensemble and La Boite Indie at The Roundhouse”
