June has been an incredible month for theatre in
Melbourne.
Even though my theatre-going month started with MTC’s The
Waiting Room, which was inept on most levels – it’s hard to know where to place
the most blame, with MTC’s Neon season in full swing and the premiere of three
more mainstage works (two at MTC, one at Malthouse), the quality of work picked
up considerably. I also saw a great show at La Mama and the Owl and Cat.
But let’s begin with the cream of the crop – three shows
that are still running through next weekend.
Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information is given a stunning
production at the Malthouse, with superb direction by Kip Williams, populated
with stunning performances on a modular set (David Fleischer) with evocative
lighting (Paul Jackson).
The script is divided into seven sections. Within the seven
sections there are seven scenes. The sections must be played in order but the
scenes within the sections can be played in any order. This sounds like
chemistry, like alchemy. It seems both too prescriptive and too anarchic to
work.
But what Churchill’s script evokes is our modern-day
consumption of information – scrolling through Facebook or Twitter – and perhaps
an obscuring of love or a full dose of it in mere words. Some of the scenes are
seconds long. Others are a few minutes. Some are wordless. Most of them are
funny. Many are heart-wrenching.
Theatre is a collaborative medium. With a script like this –
that doesn’t attribute dialogue, that doesn’t define setting – it asks the
director and actors to work hard. And the production draws the audience in,
telling stories we’ve heard a hundred times before – but in a way we’ve never
experienced them.
This is a top-notch production that is not to be missed. It
travels to Sydney in July.
Patricia Cornelius and Susie Dee’s collaborations stretch
back years – and it’s great to see them together in an MTC theatre, if not on a
main stage. Their work together is so forceful, so tough, perhaps it doesn’t
belong in a 500 seat theatre. Maybe it’s just enough that we squeeze into the
black box of the Lawler to witness this striking use of profanities, these
rough – and toughened – women, explaining how they never had much hope. How
their upbringing has forced them to not feel pain and to not shed tears. What
good are tears, says one character. Unless she has to use them to get her own
way. These characters describe the tools they’ve had to develop in themselves
to survive – and that mostly means shielding themselves from emotion.
Cornelius’ writing is often tough to watch, but never less
than poetry to listen to. She has an ear for reality, but in its exeuction –
under Dee’s smart direction – it’s a theatrical insight into a kind of
character we don’t see on theatre stages very often. And never on our main
stages. It’s enough that Neon has invited Cornelius and Dee onto an MTC stage
and while they deserve a bigger audience, their theatre might be better on the
fringes.
The play is called SHIT but its title is not descriptive of
its content or execution at all. Kudos also to the three actors Peta Brady,
Sarah Ward and Nicci Wilks – and to designer Marg Horwell whose set is as hard
and unforgiving as the text and these women.
When MTC announced they were producing a Simon Stephens play
in 2015, I was excited. His plays On the Shore of the Wide World and Pornography
are smart and unrelenting and haunting. Birdland premiered at the Royal
Exchange Theatre last year and while its subject matter is slightly more
palatable – how we build celebrities up and then tear them down – its no less
memorable in its end result.
Birdland is a two-hour portrait of rock star Paul, in a
never-leaves-the-stage bravura performance by Mark Leonard Winter – whose performance
in Hayloft’s Thyestes is seared into my brain. His work here is just as magnetic.
And the tension created in the script – how far will Paul go, how much will he
hurt others for his own pleasure and amusement, how much will the people
surround him hit back – is riveting.
I’ve loved Leticia Caceres’ other work at MTC – Constellations
and Cock, but this play asks a lot more of her. Constellations is a two-hander.
Cock is mostly just three characters. Birdland is a central performance
surrounded by an ensemble of actors playing dozens of other characters.
Girlfriends, sex workers, journalists, agents, band members, fans, parents,
friends... all slipping into and out of moments on a stage that gets more and
more filled with the detritus of Paul’s life. (Another amazing set by Marg
Horwell.)
At moments in the show, it feels like everything might be
spinning out of control, but that turns out to be deliberate. Paul thinks he’s
in charge, but sometimes he’s really, really not. Most of the blowback hits the
people around him, but by the end, it hits him harder and harder.
Besides the central performance by Winter, there’s some
surprising transformations by Michala Banas, Bert Labonte, Peta Sargeant and
Anna Samson. All stuck in Paul’s orbit, trying to get out – while Paul is
confronted over and over by the truth and never cares to look at it.
Also at MTC is Simon Phillips’ and Carloyn Burns’ stage
version of Alfred Hitchock and Ernest Lehmann’s North by Northwest. This is an
odd beast, a show which doesn’t demand you know the film at all, but probably
is more enjoyable if you have. It’s full of smart theatrical trickery, which I
enjoyed until is became too distracting. There’s some smart dialogue in there
that’s obscure by the clever stage craft and the story – while flimsily based
around a maguffin (just as in the film) – is lost beyond the flashiness of the
set and the deliberate cheesiness of the back projection.
At La Mama earlier in the month, I saw Christopher Bryant’s
new play, Home Invasion – which was recently short-listed for the Griffin Award
and you could see why. It’s a smart deconstruction of our obsession with
celebrity and how television is part of our lives – sometimes to the point
where we lose the divide between reality and fantasy.
And at the Owl and Cat, Renee Palmer and her actors devised
a work called I Am Katharine – an examination of Shakespeare’s The Taming of
the Shrew from a feminist perspective. It was an engaging series of scenes
exploring how society expects women to act and how women expect to be treated.
It’s about taking power and sharing power and not letting Shakespeare have the
last word, especially with each of the women penning their own final monologues
to share parts of their lives with the audience. It’s a work in progress, but I
am excited to see this show develop.
Home Invasion and I Am Katharine have closed, for now.
Love and Information and North by Northwest close on July 5.
Shit finishes on July 5.
Birdland has been extended to July 11.
Birdland has been extended to July 11.
