Category: Theatre

Bell Shakespeare Company

His Majesty’s Theatre

reviewed by Neville Cohn

As is well known, the perfidy of King Lear’s ghastly daughters Goneril and Regan tips him over the edge into insanity after he abdicates and gives each one half of his kingdom – a very foolish move as becomes apparent later. And Cordelia, who loves Lear in the most genuine sense, is disinherited and meets a terrible end as well.

But there’s probably a case for supposing that Lear had begun to lose his grip on reality before disinheriting Cordelia and giving his kingdom to her appalling sisters. Consider this: is it a rational move to base so pivotal a decision as disposition of a kingdom entirely on the basis of an answer to this question: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most? “

Has Lear been deaf and blind up until that point? Has he over the years not formed a clear view how his daughters relate to him? Not to have done so suggests that there is something very wrong with the old man. And is his reaction to sweet Cordelia’s answer rational? No, it is the act of someone who is losing contact with reality. Dementia, perhaps?  

Nothing so clearly indicates the timeless and universal nature of the predicament Lear finds himself in than Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer prizewinning novel A Thousand Acres which is a modern take on the Lear story, set not in early Britain but a 20^th-century farm in rural Iowa,  US A.. Smiley adds a further dimension – the protracted sexual abuse by the father which makes this an even more disturbing tale than the Lear original.

In this 20^th anniversary production of  Bell Shakespeare Company, John Bell demonstrated the form that has made him a legend in Australian dramatic circles.

His bearing and diction brought the stamp of authority to every syllable uttered, to every gesture in the eponymous role. It was a model of its kind, the disintegration of Lear’s mind evoked to painful effect.

Lavish laurels to Jane Montgomery Griffiths as Goneril and Rachel Gordon as Regan each of whom comes across strongly as the essence of daughterly ingratitude.

Violence of both word and hand is here in abundance, not least in the hideously cruel blinding of Gloucester (played by Bruce Myles), an instant of horror in which a flash of searing white light and bloodcurdling scream as the horrible deed is done make for stunning theatre.

There are no weak links in the cast; each contributes something of worth to the overall production. I particularly admired the artistry of Peter Carroll as Fool. Step forward, sir, and take a well deserved bow for a first rate contribution. Peter Kowitz, too, as the Earl of Kent, did well.

As an ensemble, the company is impressive in conveying the cumulative power of the play in a way that calls to mind the words of former USA President Woodrow Wilson who, in a quite different context, spoke of  “experiencing history to flashes of lightning”.

As well, I cannot too highly praise the musicianship of Bree van Reyk, percussionist extraordinaire. Discreetly positioned to one side of the stage before a bank of percussion instruments, she employed artistry at a consistently high level with a range of sound effects that did much to enhance the impact of on-stage word and deed.

Nick Schliepers’s discreet lighting design strikingly complements Marion Potts’ direction.

His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth(Australia)

reviewed by Neville Cohn

Although the prime focus of pre-season publicity and advertising for Waiting for Godot was Sir Ian McKellen, (quite understandable bearing his huge celebrity in mind) it would be fair to say that on-stage honours were shared equally by the four main players. Indeed, having experienced a number of productions of Beckett’s masterpiece, each with its particular strengths (and weaknesses), I would unhesitatingly place this presentation at the forefront; it riveted the attention – and for all the right reasons.

I cannot too highly praise the skill which each of the players brought to the production; their ensemble was flawless. The four brought priceless skill to their acting.

As Pozzo, Matthew Kelly was superb, a towering figure (in both histrionic and visual terms) who came across as the apotheosis of cruelty, an incarnation of callousness, not least through his indifference to the plight of the unfortunate Lucky. The latter, played by Brendan O’Hea, gave the performance of his life. Literally bowed down by the weight of the heavy bags he carries, his hopelessness and defeat would surely have moved even the most indifferent of theatregoers. His death-like pallor and bedraggled, colourless hair made him wraithlike.

For almost all the time he’s on stage, Lucky utters not a syllable. But, when he does begin to talk, one could sense an almost palpable initial relief on the part of the audience willing him to have his say. But, as ever, when the luckless Lucky finally opens up, there’s a seemingly unstoppable torrent of muddled, incomprehensible verbiage, so much so that – and this invariably happens – one begins heartily to wish he had never opened his mouth.

As Estragon and Vladimir, McKellen and Roger Rees respectively were beyond reproach. A facial gesture here, a flick of the wrist there, a frown, a smile, a snatch of  song and a softshoe shuffle, a chuckle, a sigh: these were the minutiae of a magically matchless offering where the impact of the whole was far greater than the sum of its constituent parts. Have audiences ever before encountered a more engaging couple of hobos than those given us courtesy of McKellen and Rees?

Young Craig Hyde-Smith did well as the messenger of the mysterious, ever-absent  Godot.

During intermission, I overheard a playgoer bitterly complaining that Godot was a play about nothing. Perhaps so – but I’d any day watch this ‘show about nothing’ with its myriad subtleties and veiled meanings than the one George Costanza had in mind in the Seinfeld TV series.

Sean Mathias worked wonders as director. Lavish laurels to set designer Stephen Brimson Lewis for dreaming up an altogether appropriate visual environment for the playing out of Beckett’s masterpiece with what looked like the a dark brick wall of some huge industrial building as a backdrop with, on either side of the stage, a representation of a crumbling, double storied mansion with, stage centre, a tree, bare but for a very few leaves, all, for the most part, bathed in the curious, greyish-silver light design of Paul Pyant.

Downstairs at the Maj

reviewed by Neville Cohn

It’s a preposterous notion, a gratuitous awarding of German citizenship with all rights and entitlements to six million Jews from around the world to somehow assuage the limitless grief and pain that the Holocaust caused. It is a thought-provoking “what if…….”

   photo: Belinda Dunbar

One of the nazis’ most odious policies was that of ‘lebensraum’, a ferociously violent and cruel colonisation of vast areas of conquered lands to enable the German people to have as much territory as needed for the expansion of the so-called master race. In putting this into practice, millions of innocents, primarily but not exclusively Jews, were butchered on an industrial scale.  

Three actors, portraying literally dozens of people, provide an absorbing theatre experience on this most unusual theme. I cannot readily recall a play that makes such extraordinary demands on its players, not least because the characters are of all ages and backgrounds coming from a wide range of countries necessitating the use of numbers of linguistic accents. And apart from the opening moments of the play when the German accent adopted was quite unconvincing, the players delivered impressively on this count through a lengthy work. True, there were some minor fluffs – but in the wider context, this gave an added dimension of reality to the proceedings.

All three actors – Vivienne Garrett, Brendan Hanson and Craig Williams – delivered remarkably credible impersonations of a daunting number of characters. On this level, the production was a tour de force.

I particularly admired the skill with which animated conversations between two people were held -  but featuring only a single actor. Craig Williams was impressive in this, with a rapid exchange of hats the only prop in a hugely skilled episode, an animated conversation between two people, courtesy of one actor. 

An American couple with a son take up the offer as does an outrageously camp gay pair from France. There’s also a very old Holocaust survivor living out his last days in a remote spot in Australia. He, too, turns up. He finds himself a job in Charlottenburg (whence he fled years earlier) as carer for a very old, bed-ridden and now-helpless former piano teacher, the very person who dobbed his family in to the Nazis because he and his siblings ‘wore pretty clothes’. He was the sole survivor. He exacts an unusual revenge.

Back to the Americans: the man of the house finds a place in the work force quickly as a wharfie – he’s a hard worker, impresses his boss and is soon offered a promotion. Then his boss gives him a supervisory role. There’s growing resentment from German-born workers as more hardworking Jews from abroad are welcomed to the country and given jobs. There are ugly scenes. As this happens, I dare say that the notion of a 21^st-century revisiting of the Holocaust takes up a lot of wishful thinking  on the part of displaced German workers.

There’s also young love between a young American fellow with a German lass.

Horovitz’s play consist of many, often very brief, scenes that call for considerable skill on the part of the actors to ensure a smoothly unfolding play.  And that was gratifyingly apparent, so ensuring that the impact of the play as a whole was greater than the sum of its constituent scenes, directed with gratifying attention to detail by Lawrie Cullen-Tait.

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.