State Theatre Company South Australia. Space Theatre. 14 Nov 2023
“Is it you creating you, or am I creating you?”
Vi’s (Erin James) ponderous querying of the growing new life in her womb succinctly sums up many conundrums with delightful humour. Here’s a remarkably wide eyed, sharp, fresh take on the baby thing in Anna Goldsworthy’s stage adaptation of her book Welcome To Your New Life.
Director Shannon Rush’s production is a beautifully balanced one.
Intricate interloping layers of childlike innocence and confused, deliciously droll adult awareness are expressed in deft child orientated playfulness by the cast of three exploring the journey to parenthood, and beyond.
The work has a beautiful, soothing rhythm, buoyed along by Composer/Musical Director Alan John’s perfect set of songs evoking those ting ding-a-ling style sounds and feels of babyhood. James’ proves the right voice for these songs.
Rush’s approach is solidly supported by Designer Simon Greer’s terrific oversize child’s playroom set, featuring gigantic white double doors and massive number and letter play blocks, as well as a light-halo doubling as a humongous crib mobile.
Speaking of the light-halo, Lighting Designer Gavin Norris deploys it with great effect in the design mix. Norris’ series of colour washes interspersed with crisp spot lighting enhances and reinforces the sense of living within a child’s play world in which grown up people things become games to play out. For starters, did you know birth pain is a social construct? Truly!
Matt Crook and Kathryn (Kitty) Adams provide absolutely smashing support to James, playing numerous character vignettes which tease the funny bone as much as they prompt more serious introspection.
Crook as father to be Nicholas pairs with James brilliantly. Together, they successfully evoke the wonder and worry of new life to be. They do so in such a way there’s always a sense behind the performance of two kids playing Mummy and Daddy. This adds extra gravitas and comedy combined to the most outlandish and serious things they consider and fret over. In these moments, Adams offers pitch perfect punch lines. “You’re too happy to be in labour” was a crowd pleaser.
In some magical way, Welcome To Your New Life manages to talk about birth, motherhood and parenting in a completely new way. This achievement owes as much to Goldsworthy’s deeply honest, vulnerable writing as it does to a cast who manage to make it all seem so suddenly now in the moment.
David O’Brien
When: 10 to 25 Nov
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au
Holden Street Theatres Inc. 9 Nov 2023
Thelma (Kathryn Fisher) sits alone hugging a stove pot on a lounge. Draped in a warm, comforting blue night coat, she stares relentlessly into nowhere.
Despite the warm hues of the room designed by Gary Anderson, varied splashes of colour from an oddly disturbing collection of art works on the wall, the overwhelming atmosphere is of grey, deep desperation.
She perks up and begins fussing about the kitchen, talking to daughter Jessie (Martha Lott) who’s off stage. Things seem a bit lighter. More properly homely.
Jessie’s entrance changes that. She emanates an even darker grey desperation; hair tightly bound, dressed in large loose red cardigan, grey track pants and track shoes.
It’s immediately clear mother and daughter have a functioning, but fraught relationship impacted on by dark misery at the core of their individual selves. On this night, it will be challenged and irrevocably changed when Jessie announces she intends taking her life.
Marsha Norman’s play fields a multitude of difficult, crippling experiences to be found in dysfunctional, codependent or controlling relationships involving private suffering. Her profound achievement is to get past blame games and seek what real truth beneath such living there is, even if it’s not a positive one.
This is an intensely difficult, and in many ways very dangerous, thing to attempt. Traps are everywhere in this work waiting to pull actors down to the level of dogmatic, schmaltz laden moralising.
Director Peter Goers and cast do not fall for them.
Goers’ direction works to pace the emotional interaction and duelling between mother and daughter in such a way it seems we are offered momentary views of the significant interior life moments that have shaped them. Interior moments of experience that are for Jessie are her truth, for Thelma, her curse.
“What is truth?” asked Pontius Pilate. Well might we ask them same of this theatre experience. Fisher and Lott’s daring, vulnerable performances are in service of ‘truth’ being unburdened of caveats and predetermined expectations. It is a partnership shorn of stylistic affectations and technique laden trickery into which the audience is irresistibly drawn in to share the disquieting experience of confronting what is best ignored.
David O’Brien
When: 7 to 25 Nov
Where: The Studio, Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
By Sarah Kane. Famous Last Words. Goodwood Theatre & Studios. 1 Nov 2023
Content Warning: The following article contains references to suicide that readers may find confronting.
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4.48 Psychosis is a love letter to British playwright Sarah Kane’s own psychotic mind. Scottish playwright and director - and Kane’s friend - David Greig, considered the play to be "perhaps uniquely painful in that it appears to have been written in the almost certain knowledge that it would be performed posthumously." Indeed, 4.48 Psychosis was first presented a year-and-a-half after Kane died by suicide. In her short 28-year life, Kane managed to write five plays, all rather dark. Harold Pinter knew Kane personally and remarked how he was not surprised to hear the news of her suicide: "She talked about it a great deal. …”
Kane didn’t encumber this work with a plot or even a specific number of actors. Director James Watson, who earlier this year wrote and directed his own highly praised adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, would have loved the ambiguity and the opportunity to pour out his creative juices. In amongst the psychobabble, poetic monologues, and dissociative fades, Kane (I’ll call the mentally ill character Kane just for the hell of it) was clearly fascinated with her condition and especially her relationship to psychiatrists and treatments (despised them), and from this, Watson devises a terrifically tragic and compelling narrative. Bravo!
Watson also employs a tremendous array of theatrical effects. The seating and stage set-up was like a Victorian-age university surgical theatre from a horror movie, or a Francis Bacon painting (Ruby Jenkins – production design). Handheld lighting and stark white brights from all directions created a chiaroscuro bleakness. Pills and other props set an abstract yet familiar scene. A voice microphone was used to no effect except to worry about tripping on the long cable. Reggie Parker’s soundtrack was menacing and tense. Watson used all this to build tension to a fabulous suicide scene of genuine surprise and deftness. I hope that wasn’t a spoiler.
The greatest challenge of minimalist theatre is the emotional quotients of the characters and there was room to improve here. Initially stilted and wooden, things heated up as the relationship between patient and psychiatrist intensified but longing and frustration remained surficial for most of the play. The audience should ache. Rhys Stewart’s matinee idol looks suited the tragic Kane, and with Watson they wonderfully utilised the gender ambiguity left to them by the playwright. Eventually, Stewart’s performance was compelling as his Kane played, consciously or unconsciously, with the psychiatrist’s conflicts. Arran Beattie chose to be a very uptight sort of psychiatrist, but his turmoil looked ingenuine. I’m glad he’s not my doctor because he had no idea what to do with a seizure. Unfortunately, for this soufflé to rise, we needed more ecstasy and less Temazepam.
David Grybowski
When: 1 to 10 Nov
Where: Goodwood Theatre & Studios
Bookings: eventbrite.com
*This review was edited after posting at the request of the creatives to remove references that were deemed offensive. A content warning was added along with contact details for 24/7 support services.
Bronwen James. Star Theatres – The Chapel. 20 Oct 2023
Reds is a cabaret about rangas that surprises as much as it brilliantly entertains.
Bronwen James is a ranga of a certain age who’s been in show business since she was 12. Reds offers a chance to reflect on her life and the lives of an extraordinary range of female redheads in history who changed the world through popular culture, politics and industrial relations.
The ‘didn’t know that’ educational side of this production is as brilliant as James’s warm hearted, comic and satirically biting takes on her life experiences, travails, and the long-lasting legacy of redheads past and present. Her take on Julia Gillard and Pauline Hanson alone are worth the ticket price.
James is high energy from start to finish. The laughs keep coming. Her song and dance routines are a snappy blend of vaudeville, quick costume changes, and multiple perfect accent shifts from scouser, to bogan, to American. Her adapted lyrics to well-known tunes are as biting and snappy as they are thought provoking.
Set, lighting design, costume and video projections are at high production standard. James knows how to do showstopper stuff right.
James successfully melds thoughtful contemplation of her life, a difficult year in which her mother died as well as dear family friend and performer Phil Skinner with the identity challenges being a sensitive redhead performer brings.
Those challenges are vast.
It’s this brave, authentic vulnerability James’s production is shot through with which makes it the complete experience it is. Connections between her story and those she regales us with make complete sense. There’s a tremendously hopeful consideration of what it means being able to step outside a stereotype and claim a personal identity.
David O’Brien
When: 20 to 27 Oct
Where: Star Theatres The Chapel
Bookings: trybooking.com
Theatre Republic with the Adelaide Festival Centre. Space Theatre. 14 Oct 2023
The Garden confirms Emily Steel as one of the significant, gripping, thought provoking theatrical writers for troubled times in Australia.
It is brilliantly comedic and deeply revelatory - uncomfortably so - of darker, seemingly ‘harmless’ attitudes bubbling beneath surface of a supposed inclusive, open-hearted society.
Surely an organic community garden is a place where all can gather to share their lives, improve the climate, provide healthy food, and is a safe, enjoyable hobby outlet.
Not so when social politics and the mechanics of reality clash with utopian ideals.
Reality versus utopia is signalled in Designer, Meg Wilsons’s delightful set. Lovely aesthetically pleasing plots thriving with greenery. But there are signs signifying possession. ‘Do not pick’ one reads. Sure it’s a warm heartedly sunny spot thanks to lighting designer Chris Petridis’ deft manipulation of golden hues, but there is a fence in construction also. Is that communal?
Adam (Rashidi Edward) pokes his head into the community garden Evelyn (Elizabeth Hay) volunteers at, to the point of it being like a career. Their initial encounter grounds their future relationship and the paradoxes Steele seeks to expose and explore.
Those ‘harmless’ unspoken racist attitudes guised as suspicion are instantly apparent.
Adam seeks belonging without judgement. But judgement he gets. Does he belong here? Can he abide by rules and costs of membership? Does he understand the principles of organic gardening?
Director Corey McMahon expertly fashions an uncomfortably playful relationship between Hay’s driven, frustrated, ambitious Evelyn and Edward’s calm, controlled, yet always under the microscope, Adam. Sometimes Adam scores a hit. Sometimes Evelyn. It is the audience who cringes deeply while simultaneously laughing out loud.
McMahon gets maximum output from the layers of symbolism in Steel’s writing such as garden of paradise, Adam and Eve(lyn), alongside darker deeper implications of Evelyn’s seemingly magnanimous yet manipulative use of Adam’s membership.
Without question The Garden is a brilliant. A very needed check-your-privilege moment in theatre.
David O’Brien
When: 11 to 14 Oct
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: Closed