Category: Theatre

Maly Drama Theatre – Theatre of Europe – St Petersburg

His Majesty’s Theatre

reviewed by Neville Cohn

This is definitely not for those whose idea of going to the theatre is experiencing a few hours of genial mummery. Life and Fate occupies a very different world. It is a tale of physical and emotional violence, much of it state-sanctioned and so unnerving as to leave the viewer limp. It’s a tale that brands itself indelibly on the consciousness.

But for those who like their theatre pieces to have a clearly defined beginning, middle and end, Life and Fate might well be problematical, even bewildering. It could be thought of as a montage, a series of mainly brief episodes that occur during Wold War II in the cities and gulags of Russia and the death camps of the Nazis.

Like some malevolent serpent slithering through this often brutally confronting production is an ever-present anti-Semitism whether of the German variety (with its sights set on the complete extermination of European Jewry courtesy of the appalling Wannsee declaration which the Nazis were pleased to call The Final Solution) or the Russian version where an irrational, centuries-lomg hatred of the Jews seems an ingrained feature of the national psyche and all the more virulent for becoming state policy.

Periodically and improbably, we hear the strains of Schubert’s Standchen (known throughout the English-speaking world as Serenade). It reminded one that in some of the nazi’s concentration camps, an orchestra of inmates would be ordered to play this or that music as victims of the nazis’ were marched to the gas chambers. Can there have been a more cynical and evil exploitation of music than this?

An all-purpose set is an ingenious construction: a handball net also serves as a concentration camp or gulag fence, there’s a miscellany of cupboards, a battered, tinny piano, beds and chairs. Ingenious lighting does much to heighten mood.

There are no weak links in the cast which is superbly disciplined. For the many who do not understand Russian, there were first rate surtitles flashed onto a lengthy narrow screen above the action.

Tatiana Shestakova is admirable as Ana Shtrum, the family matriarch, diminutive,  soft spoken medical doctor who tends to other ghetto Jews before she is gassed and cremated in one of Germany’s nazi death camps, an ever-present spectre.

Nearly all the conversations focus on the war and fleeting moments of tenderness throw the encompassing horrors into even bolder relief so much so that at interval, one left the auditorium with a near-palpable sense of relief.

Life and Fate tells of a Russian nuclear scientist Victor Shtrum (Sergey Kuryshev) who happens to be Jewish – and this places him in a vulnerable, even dangerous, position. But because of Stalin’s desperate need to build an A-bomb, there is breathtaking cynicism on his part in bringing Shtrum out of exile to work on the project.

Again and again, the craziness of the Soviet system is underlined, memorably by a high official rejecting Albert Einstein’s theories as unacceptable because they conflict with Lenin’s world view!! Nothing so demonstrates the ethical bankruptcy and the mind-numbing, blind acceptance of what is palpable, sheer nonsense.

Precisely how many died, how many murdered, in the name of such idiocy, will probably never be exactly known. Productions such as this are crucial to keeping the memory of the slaughtered millions alive.

West Australian Academy of Performing Arts Theatre

reviewed by Neville Cohn

photo credit Jon Green c 2009 WAAPA

In the minds of most people, lynching, with all its connotations of hideous violence, is inextricably and exclusively associated with the murder of African Americans by white supremacists in the USA.

Parade, however, focuses on a victim who was abducted and hanged by anti-Semitic vigilantes in 1915 in the southern state of Georgia.

The story is, briefly, this: a girl – Mary Phagan – who works in a pencil factory managed by Leo Frank, is found murdered on the premises. The completely innocent Frank is charged with her murder and is found guilty and sentenced to death. Eventually, the governor of Georgia commutes the sentence to life imprisonment.

Not long afterwards, while at a prison farm, Frank is abducted and lynched. None of the lynching party, which incredibly, included lawyers, a court prosecutor and the son of a senator, was ever held accountable. Decades after this miscarriage of justice, Frank was posthumously pardoned in the 1980s.

I had wondered whether so dark and tragic a story was suitable for treatment as a music theatre piece. But any reservations I might have had about this evaporated only moments into the piece. By even the most severe of critical standards, this production of Parade was riveting stuff. Near-perfectly paced, its two-hour-long duration flew by in a production worthy of high praise.

In this multi-faceted offering, the youthful players in a large cast came up trumps again and again. The pivotal role of Leo Frank, who was 31 years old when he met his terrible death, was played as if to the manner born by Brendan Hawke, who captured the character’s stoic, rather prissy and edgy personality nuances to the nth degree. And Laura Page as Lucille was no less convincing as the wife who refuses to cut and run but stands loyally by her man. Lucille, incidentally, was scion of a prominent Jewish family which decades earlier had founded the first synagogue in Atlanta.

Whether coincidentally or by design, Hawke and Page are strikingly similar in looks to the characters they play.

Rather oddly, the role of Frank’s do-nothing lawyer Luther Rosser was played, very competently, by a woman Naomi Livingston. But what was the point, if any, being made?

Nearly all the large cast sang multiple roles.

It says much for the skill which Uhry and Brown brought to their creation of Parade that despite the trappings usually associated with the genre, the dancing and singing in no way robs the story of its tragic darkness.  Bobbing, weaving and twirling, the dancers brought Bernie Bernard’s choreography to exciting, pulsing life. Drew Weston, as reporter Britt Craig, was a particularly impressive presence.

David King presided splendidly over events, conducting a big instrumental ensemble positioned at the rear of the stage. Throughout, singing was of high standard as were Tony Gordon’s lighting and Jess Tran’s imaginative set designs. Cale Watts’ costumes did much to establish a sense of era. Crispin Taylor’s directorial touch was everywhere evident not least in consistently meaningful deployment of an unusually large cast.

 
Hackett Hall, Floreat

Beverley Jackson-Hooper (director)

A Playlovers production

reviewed by Neville Cohn

Since Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays was published in 1857, British school life, especially, but not exclusively, boarding school life, has spawned an avalanche of plays and novels ranging from the hugely influential Fifth Form at St Dominics by Talbot Baines Reed to Chris Edmunds’ riveting Before I Get Old. And Enid Blyton made a fortune writing twee novels about life in girls’ boarding schools.

The History Boys is meatier fare by far, with sexual undercurrents that would have been unthinkable in the works of Baines Reed and Blyton. Allan Bennett’s play is a distinguished contribution to the genre.

Hector, played by Tom Rees, is, on the surface, a teacher who grips his students’ attention by his quirky and not ineffective instruction methods – and his pillion-perching students’ genitals while roaring across town on a motorbike. The imagination boggles at the contortions that would have been needed to accomplish this curious feat.

Hector’s fate is sealed after this deplorable sex-on-a-bike activity is observed by the headmaster’s wife while peering through a shop window. There’s understated artistry on the part of Rees; his characterisation of the loquacious paedophile teacher was entirely convincing. So, too, was Kenneth Gasmier’s clipped-speech portrayal of Armstrong, the headmaster, coming across as a pompous, self-important windbag obsessed with the need for his students to gain enough credit to get into uni, preferably one of  “The Two”. Near play’s end, his clumsy dismissal of the paedophile Hector had the ring of truth.

Jordan Sibley was particularly credible as Irwin. With unfailingly clear diction, he came across as a rather repressed young school master so ashamed of having graduated from one of England’s lesser universities that he pretends to have been at one of “The Two”. When challenged on this point by one of the students, his pathetic attempt at covering up his lie was the stuff of fine theatre. His timidity and vacillation are no less apparent towards play’s end when he turns down a sexual favour offered by the bold and crass Dakin, played by Christian Dalton.

Irwin accepts a pillion ride from Hector. There’s an accident. Hector is killed but the young schoolmaster is sentenced to a living death in a wheel chair. Sibley was most impressive here, conveying a sense of quiet dignity in the face of a ruined future.

Beverley Lawrence was a polished Dorothy Lintott, a worldweary teacher who has seen it all. Bitterly, rhetorically she rails at the sadly few professional opportunities for women historians. Samuel Moscou was an altogether credible Rudge, the refreshingly straight-talking class jock, who, to Armstrong’s near-euphoric surprise, also gets his ticket to an Oxbridge future. Tim Burrows as Posner was convincing as a young man uncertain of his sexuality.

There’s no real weak link in the cast as a whole. It is only in a brief dance sequence that some of the boys seemed selfconscious and awkward.

Set designs by Cassandra Fletcher and lighting by John Woolrych did much to enhance and advance the changing moods of the play.

James Brookes (director)

Downstairs at the Maj

His Majesty’s Theatre

reviewed by Neville Cohn

Until I attended a performance of Some Kind of Beautiful, I had thought of its author Belinda Dunbar exclusively in terms of her role as deputy general manager of His Majesty’s Theatre, a busy and efficient person in arts administration.

On a Saturday evening performance at Downstairs at the Maj, I encountered a very different incarnation of Dunbar: playwright.

Some Kind of Beautiful is a slice of life that has about it a refreshing sense of reality. Nothing jars in Act 1; its repartee had the ring of truth. It could all well have happened.

It’s not a scene of unalloyed domestic bliss. Initially, we hear Kate (Julia Jenkins) in a monologue mulling over what’s recently transpired. Paul, her partner, much loved, adored even, has succumbed to a particularly nasty cancer. She’s young, rather inexperienced and clearly devastated by the passing of an adored, fulfilling partner years her senior. The household, in the process of being dismantled, is a clutter of half-filled packing cartons – books, ornaments, a miscellany of domestic detritus.

Her meditation is abruptly and unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of two women one of whom delivers a brutally frank revelation. Paul was still legally married to her at the time of his death, after an illness through which Kate had nursed him lovingly. As Barbara (Helen Searle) brings Kate cruelly up to date, speaking of some aspects of Paul that reveal him as a not entirely attractive person, we find that he hadn’t bothered, hadn’t cared – or simply ‘forgot’- to tell Kate about his married state.

He’d never bothered to dissolve the marriage formally and – a thoughtless man – he’d never updated a will drawn up years earlier in which the prime beneficiary is his charmless wife. And although they haven’t had anything to do with one another for years, the will is no less valid than on the day it was drawn up. Of course, there’s nothing in it for Kate who only came on the scene much later.

Bitterness and withering anger are widow Barbara’s close companions through most of Act 1.  Flinty, insensitive and full of anger, she holds forth with an unending stream of vindictiveness and like some beer-fuelled youth with a souped-up car, goes roaring through the lives of others causing terrible damage to innocent bystanders on the way.

In the midst of all this, her daughter, Destiny (Maree Cole), wise beyond her years – and certainly more rational and considerate than her incandescently angry mother – tries to ameliorate the bitterness of her hate. Sensing the injustice towards Julia, Maree tries to reason with her mother to give Julia (who is an innocent party) a break.

A secret, carefully kept for years, emerges with the force of a cyclone. Paul may have fathered Destiny but Barbara is not her biological mother but the offspring of another woman casually impregnated by Paul who, for all his attractiveness to women, is an arch-poep, an uber-idiot who probably thought as deeply about the consequences of his tomcat behaviour as having another tinny (probably paid for by someone else).

There are no weak links in this cast; each makes a thoroughly worthwhile contribution to the performance, no less so than in Act 2 where the writing tends to discursiveness and the narrative line, so sure and logical in Act 1, weakens.

Invisible to the audience behind his sheet music on the grand piano positioned to a corner on the stage, Tim Cunniffe is a discreet presence; the songs he has written for the actors fit seamlessly into the action. There is no jarring effect at all.

New Theatre, W.A.Academy of Performing Arts

Before I Get Old

  Reviewed by Neville Cohn

In a program note, playwright Chris Edmund points out that the genesis of his newest play was an old-boys’ school reunion he’d attended in London two years ago.

It is a stunning achievement, a disturbingly articulate resurrection of the pain and anguish that so many would have experienced during years at high school.

A cast of sixteen do wonders in a production that deserves the highest praise for the way in which it has overcome what must have been a most challenging logistical exercise, with the cast breathing life into 34 roles. Certainly, rapid costume changes and the need to abandon one persona and adopt another in seconds were object lessons in how to do this sort of thing well.

This unsettling theatre experience is not for the squeamish although to place things in perspective, the events, set in a Hertfordshire school, even at their worst, can hardly be compared with, say, Dickens’ appalling Dotheboys Hall.

But it will certainly be disconcerting theatre for those whose expectations of a play about English school life derive from the absurd blandness of, say, Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books or the school-centred stories carried by weekly editions of Girl’s Crystal and Champion papers in the 1950s. Before I Get Old is light years away from the superficial folderol that is Blyton’s twee school world.

On the contrary, Edmund’s play is the essence of gritty realism.

Edmund took what I’d imagine was a calculated risk (that pays off impressively) in presenting what is, in effect, a highly episodic offering, a fast-paced string of vignettes with snappy dialogue that touches on more than the school experience (which in any case does not function in a vacuum).

I cannot imagine anyone who might have attended a state-run high school (or any school for that matter), whether in Australia or abroad, failing to identify with at least some aspects of a play that reveals the uglier side of the educational experience. Certainly, it is often very close to the bone.

Although the action centres around a school in the early 1950s some 35 miles north of London, the play’s themes are universal and timeless and that is what makes it such a powerful offering.

With singular skill in articulating the upheavals of adolescence and the selfconscious awkwardness that comes in its train, Edmund, sparing nothing, shows us the fraught and fragile nature of the teenage psyche.

Through what might be described as a series of flashbacks, Edmund reveals all this and more with a compassion and insight that make for theatre of high order.

In less than completely sure hands, a play of this nature can so easily descend into embarrassing bathos. Not here. Consider, for instance, a vignette set in a rear row of the local cinema. With its sweaty, clumsy gropings and a literally vomitous moment (unwise drinking under age?), it encapsulates part of the teenage rite of passage with an unerring touch.

Edmund’s play casts a wide net. Who are more sensitive to the behaviour of family, parents in particular, than teenagers? And here, too, Edmund’s spot-on explorations of sometimes heartrending familial dilemmas – parental and sibling illness, alcoholism, problem gambling – make an indelible mark. So, too, do scenes that focus on the at-times unintentional cruelty of schoolmates – and on the vulnerability and need for acceptance by peers that is so often masked by desperate bravado.

In an ensemble piece of this nature, where teamwork is of the essence, it is perhaps invidious to single out individuals – there were no weak links in this cast – but it would be ungracious not to particularly mention Richard Flanagan (right) as the hapless Conger. Balaclava-clad, and with a striking resemblance to, of all people, Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean, Flanagan gave a striking performance as a gawky student not always keeping pace with his peers.

As both playright and director, Edmund has scored a triumph. Nothing so justifies the existence of WAAPA’s theatre course than a production of this quality. It deserves to be seen by the widest possible audience.

Copyright Neville Cohn 2006