By E.M. Forster,  adapted by Roger Parsley and Andy Graham. Genesian Theatre Company,  Sydney. Directed by Mark G. Nagle.  Feb 2 – Mar 9,  2019.

Reviewed : 3 February 2019

Photos of the cast interwoven with lovely shots of Italy play on a screen in the foyer of the theatre. Reproductions of Renaissance paintings adorn the walls. Others, stylishly framed in gold, surround the proscenium arch and reach around to encompass the stained-glass windows which are a feature of 1868 building that is the Genesian.

It’s so good to see a director and his creatives thinking beyond the stage and the script. Congratulations Mark! Your vision sets the scene as elegantly as E.M. Forster described it in 1908.

Often adaptations lose some of the impact of the original novel, but this is true to the plot and to Forster’s gentle, but telling, critique of English society in the early 20^th century. The contrasts in Forster’s characters are clearly defined by Parsley and Graham and distinctly conveyed in Nagle’s direction.

Nagle and Mark Bell have cleverly incorporated the imposing brick wall and stained-glass windows behind the stage as the backdrop of the set. Four pillars are used to symbolise the Renaissance architecture. Trailing ivy evokes both the Italian summer in the first act, and an English garden in the second. The use of minimalist props – a bench, a stool, a leather chair, two ‘carriages’, a hinged leaf-covered lattice – moved on and off the stage as part of action, adequately change the various scenes.

Susan Carveth’s costumes add to the style and colour of the period – but require, as in all period pieces, careful checking by cast and crew of hems, buttons and creases. Sound designer (Martin Gallagher) and composer (Georgia Condon) recall the music of the time. Lighting, designed by Martin Schell, sets the various moods well, but does not adequately light faces in some areas of the stage, nor take into account the shadows cast by the hats that were de rigueur for the period.

Nagle directs with attention to both the style of the time, and the pace required of contemporary theatre.  Action is carefully and discreetly blocked. Actors hold themselves sedately and move gracefully – except of course for the youngest character, whose disregard of ‘genteel’ behaviour brings light humour to the plot.

Phoebe Atkinson plays Lucy Honeychurch, a young English girl travelling to Italy for the first time in the company of her aunt. Lucy is eager to lead a more independent life and her experiences in Italy challenge many of the values and ideas with which she has been raised.

Atkinson portrays all of these changes in Lucy over the course of the play, finding her original naivety, her curiosity and her burgeoning awareness and self-assurance.

Her aunt and chaperone, Charlotte, whose early restrained poise and rectitude is gradually eroded by the influence of others, is played by Anna Desjardins. Desjardins finds all of this in a controlled performance that portrays the challenges faced by the character, and her changing warmth.

One of the most delightful characters is Mr Beebe, a “wise and likeable clergyman with a youthful and playful spirit”. Tristan Black (and Nagle’s direction) suggest many aspects of Beebe’s character: his lack of social snobbery, his understanding of love despite his presumed celibacy, . . .

Review continued in Stage Whispers magazine.

Created by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar.  L-E-V Dance Company. Sydney Opera House.  Jan 31 – Feb 3, 201.

After twenty-two years dancing and choreographing with Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, Sharon Eyal and her collaborator and partner, Gai Behar, formed L-E-V Dance Company in 2013, (lev is the Hebrew word for ‘heart’). Their work, with musician Ori Lichtik, has been performed at over 200 venues around the world, including a Christian Dior fashion show at a race course outside Paris in 2018, where eight dancers interacted with the models as they showcased the collection.

In OCD Love and Love Chapter 2, described in the program as “a double shot of tough love”, Eyal explores the heights of love and the depths of loss of love. Whilst the two play on consecutive nights, each stands alone as an innovative interpretation of the almost primeval complexities of love and relationships.

OCD Love, which premiered in 2016, is based on Eyal’s reaction American slam poet, Neil Hilborn’s “personal, funny, but crushingly sad” poem about the difficulties of loving someone with obsessive compulsive disorder.

The second, Love Chapter 2, is about the “devastating aftermath of a love affair”.

The sixty-minute long interpretation is performed by three female and three male dancers, dressed simply in thin, grey leotards and shin-high black socks. There is nothing simple, however, about their skill, or the control demanded by Eyal’s inventive and meticulously structured choreography. In time with the increasing pace, intensity and volume of Lichtik’s musical accompaniment, the dancers – lithe, slim, extremely fit and, necessary for this piece, incredibly flexible – express the devastating pain and heartache of broken love.

With muted lighting emphasising the grey gloom of emotional desolation, they move with impeccably controlled precision that emphasises Eyal’s ability to physicalise intimate emotions in original, imaginative choreography. Anguish, misery and anger are represented in movements that are tightly measured and exactly executed. Tension exudes in taut muscles, tight breathing, the pulsing tempo of Lichtik’s accompaniment – and in the fixed, silent appreciative attention of the audience.

L-E-V presents contemporary dance that is avant-garde, and therefore demanding and liberating, testament to the aim of the Opera House’s Contemporary Performance program that “champions modern story tellers and the mavericks who re-invent classic forms”.

First published in Stage Whispers magazine

Kim Carpenter’s Theatre of Image.  Sydney Festival.  Riverside Theatres Parramatta.  January 18 – 27, 2019.

Using music, dance, projections and snatches of dialogue, Kim Carpenter’s Theatre of Image emphasises the visuality of theatre as it explores one of the most famous and vibrant Australian art stories. Brett Whiteley and Wendy Julius met and fell in love as teenagers at a time when social and artistic boundaries were being challenged and broken. Together they embraced a new era of excitement and risk-taking … in life and art.

Images of Whiteley’s work inform the production and the story: bird’s eggs; the swiftly drawn lines of the birds themselves; the 18-part installation American Dream American Nightmare; glimpses of the iconic blue of the Lavender Bay paintings.  Interior with Time Past is recreated in one scene, complete with the original vase and filled with bright orange blooms.

Based on a raft of research and conversations, Carpenter reveals brief images of Whiteley as curious child, mischievous brother, lover, husband, father … an artist that made an impact on the world and was lost too soon through an addiction that he found too hard to conquer.

The production is short – just over an hour – and disappointingly short on depth and detail. Characters flit in and out, sometimes momentarily, sometimes unnecessarily, belying “the love story bound by art” that the title promises. Characters tease us with glimpses of narrative that are whipped away too quickly.

With such a talented cast of performers and creatives, it is sad that this legendary story is reduced to such fragmented images.

Whiteley is portrayed by dancer Dean Elliott and actor Paul Gleeson, who together suggest the curiosity, intelligent wonder and innate creativity that drove the man and the artist. Both performers are lithe and agile, moving in and out of moments with the nimbleness that expresses the mercurial complexity of his character.

Leeanna Walsman does not disappoint in her portrayal of Wendy Whiteley. With sinuous movement and mellow voice, Walsman finds the intricacy of a woman who could love, inspire and empathise, offer wisdom and strength, but eventually and reluctantly admit the need to stop and walk away.

Jeanette Cronin captures the naïve sibling admiration of Whiteley’s sister Frannie Hopkirk. Olivia Brown plays their mother. Tony Llewellyn-Jones plays their father and the artist Lloyd Rees who was so influential in Whiteley’s life. Yasmin Polley appears in brief moments as a young Arkie Whitely.

Dancers Elliot, Robbie Curtis and Naomi Hibberd weave through and around the actors in graceful choreography designed by Lucas Jennings to link segments and imply added dimensions of the characters.

Despite all of this, the images of the Whiteleys and the way that Carpenter has chosen to portray them, tells their story too ephemerally and ends it too abruptly.

First published in Stage Whispers magazine.

By S. Shakthidharan.  Belvoir and Co-Curious.  Sydney Festival. Sydney Town Hall,  Jan 11 – Feb 2, 2019 and Ridley Centre,  Adelaide Showgrounds, Mar 2 – 9.

Sydney Town Hall has been transformed into a long, thrust stage surrounded by wooden tiered seating spread with brightly covered foam cushions. Colourful peaked gables arch above the lighting loom. Expectant patrons savour delicately flavoured lamb biryani before making their way to their seats for Belvoir and Co-Curious’ mammoth undertaking of S. Shakthidharan’s family saga, Counting and Cracking.

Sixteen actors play 50 characters in a new Australian story that traces four generations of a family from Colombo to Pendle Hill; from Australia, a land of refuge, to Sri Lanka a land trying to stay united. It’s a story “about reconciliation within families, across countries, across generations.” It’s a story about symbols and memories, traditions and change, adaptation and acceptance, fragility and strength.

In his program notes, Shakthidharan contextualises the back story to the production. “Ten years ago I was hungry. Hungry to learn about my mother’s homeland. To know my history. So I started on a journey that had no clear end”.

Ten years of reading, travelling, enquiring and listening led him to a story “… about parents and children. About coming together and breaking apart and coming together again … a story that had the power to help my mother reconcile with her homeland. To connect people across deep divides … to collapse time and join continents”.

I lean on Shakthidharan’s own words because of their clarity and translucence, qualities that are equally impressive in his script and the complex characters that people the many scenes that connect past, present, and hopeful future. This is a chronicle that could be about any of the families who have sought refuge in Australia, leaving behind ravaged homelands, cruel regimes, lost loved ones. Its appeal is universally touching – but it is written in a way that emphasises the resilience and humour that are so important in the process of change.

The production is a work of collaborative creativity. Director Eamon Flack describes it as “an almighty effort by a great coalition of people” over almost six years of travel and discussion and organisation. Shakthidharan, Flack and their enormous imaginative team have envisaged and realised a production that is vibrant and innovative. Designer Dale Ferguson has used simplicity and symbolism to establish changes in time and place. Flack has backed this with fast scene changes and carefully . . .

Review continued in Stage Whispers magazine.

Strut and Fret; Sydney Opera House Studio.  January 4 – March 9, 2019

“Not recommended for persons under 18 years, this performance contains adult concepts, nudity and references to alcohol consumption”. Of course it does! It’s local production company Strut and Fret’s Blanc de Blanc returning to the harbour city to add some saucy circus cabaret pizazz to the summer festival buzz!

Directed by Scott Maidment and led by outrageous ‘comperes’ Spencer Novich and Remi Martin Lenz, the show is bold and loud, a sort of Cirque du Soleil for adults with lots of glitz, glam and cheeky, risqué innuendo. An extravaganza of dance, clowning, song and aerial stunts performed by an international cast of audacious, multi-talented entertainers, Blanc de Blanc, like the dry champagne after which it’s named, is full of intoxicating bubbles and fizz.

Songster Ashley Straud joins this new show, along with aerial artist and sexy mover Reed Kelly, and aerial hoop duo Caitlin Tomson-Moylan and Spencer Craig. There’s Australian dancer Lauren New, burlesque artiste Skylar Benton and contortionist Uugantuya Otgonbayar (The Greatest Showman).

In a smoky haze and radiating light show, the Opera House Studio becomes a twenty-first century art deco cabaret cavern, where cast and audience merge in a frenzy of Kevin Maher’s suggestive, undulating choreography, a sound track that blasts and rebounds and a show that moves fast and furiously from segment to sexy, surprising segment …

Such as Novich and the cast, naked but for white towels, writhing suggestively in a dance routine that demands judicious timing and brazen flair. Or a huge parachute-like sheet that spreads across the space and slips away to the balcony, which, later, becomes the focus of a long plastic tube of flowing champagne that spirals through the audience to Lenz’ glass on the stage below. And that’s just a taste of the of the many acts that flow precipitously from comedy to circus to seductive song.

Infused by champagne and sparkles, energy and effusion, Blanc de Blanc Encore is everything the original was, and more. It’s a deftly-directed, tightly-performed production full of cheeky fun and flippant frivolity.

Review originally published in Stage Whispers magazine

By Geoff Sobelle.  Sydney Festival.  Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay.  Jan 9 – 18, 2019.

Home is a ’grand scale’ theatrical experience that both astonishes and amuses. Whilst it makes one think about what makes a home, it also makes one think about just what makes theatre.

Conceived by Geoff Sobelle, after discovering different layers of floor covering in the kitchen of his one hundred-year- old Philadelphian house, the production is a tribute to innovative contemporary stagecraft, meticulous choreography and timing and the creative inspiration of collaborative theatre-making.

Sobelle: “I work in collaborative theatre because I believe that the really good stuff doesn’t come from the writer’s room – it comes from the space. It comes from the designers and performers leaning into each other.”

Thus, in the ‘space’ – a bare stage – a house is precisely constructed (the ‘designers’), by seven builders and tradesmen (the ‘performers’), who erect walls, fit doors, install, furnish and equip a bathroom, a kitchen, a bedroom, a study and a living room. Then, over the course of one hundred minutes, transform into a myriad of characters who make the house their home.

Their stories are told in non-verbal, visual, physical theatre. To the audience, it is a carefully planned on-going narrative that runs seamlessly from one scene to another, chronicling passing years and changing inhabitants, their differing relationships and rituals. From collecting the laundry to sharing a bathroom, the actors weave a magical vision of the intimacy demanded of a home, and the joys and tribulations this can bring.

From the beginning, the performance is interactive. At first the audience is welcomed into the household by gestures and unspoken ‘asides – like an open hand that invites the admiration of a building triumph. They are intrigued by different techniques that show the passing of time: measuring the years by recording the height of a child on the kitchen door frame. They are titillated by a bathroom scene that involves naked bodies moving in and out of the shower and on and off the lavatory!

Later, while party lights are erected across the theatre with the help of the audience, other members of the audience are invited into the house, and, via whispered instructions and gestures become part of ritual celebrations that are intrinsic to family life: a birthday party, a graduation, a gay wedding. Some don fancy dress, others have a pillow fight. Some are taken on stage in a conga line. All dance to the music of a four-piece band that materialises. Eventually they are gathered together by the cast to become part of a funeral service. They surround the body, and to the eerie voice of troubadour Elvis Perkins, and further whispered direction, mourn, turn to face the audience, look to the right and sway gently together in perfect time.

Two then become narrators talking, unprepared, into a microphone about their memories of their first home. As their voices play over each other, the remaining ‘cast’ begin the process of moving house. Photos are taken from walls and packed into boxes that are stacked, with in front of the set. Chairs are piled on top of them, whilst stair bannisters and bedroom furniture are removed from the upper storey, and plastic sheeting, used in the very early moments of the production, is re-stapled to wooden frames. All happens in perfect time, and, as the audience members are skilfully escorted from the stage, the light fades and fans blow the plastic sheeting in a ghostly illusion of times that have passed.

These final interactive scenes are a miraculous piece of planning – and trust. It is a credit to the poise and sang froid of the actors that so many realistic characters, so much action and such confident participation can be inspired by so few words and such brief directions.

This production is awe-inspiring in so many ways. Apart from the construction itself – the co-ordination of fitting the pieces fit together, the stability of the structure, the timing and concentrated pace that is constantly sustained – there are atmospheric moments that, though theatrical, are movingly real, like the light of dawn creeping softly and gently across a sleeping house, or a moth fluttering against the glass panel of a lighted doorway.

There are, as well, so many little ‘events’ that are easy to miss, but define the real-ness of family life, like, for instance, a child climbing out his bedroom window and being brought home by the police! Such is the prodigious value of the collaborative process – ideas and experiences are shared, considered, workshopped, and whether rejected or incorporated, bring “the really good stuff” that makes this production so real, so entertaining and such an absorbing piece of theatre.

This review was written for Stage Whispers magazine

It’s always daunting to adapt a novel for young people to the stage – especially one of a series of 19 about an intrepid archaeologist-cum-poet like Cairo Jim and his companions, Doris the Macaw and Brenda the Wonder Camel. It has to capture the tenor of the prose, the imagination of the author – and his outrageous puns and poems – as well as sustaining the belief of Geoffrey McSkimming’s faithful readers.

Undaunted, Emilia Stubbs Grigoriou took on the awesome task. With the blessing and support of McSkimmings, and the ingenuity of puppet maker Katherine Hannaford, she has captured all melodrama of the plot including Cairo Jim’s derring-do … his arch rival Captain Neptune Bone’s nastiness … explosions … and assorted pieces of luggage falling out of the sky!

Hannaford’s puppets – Doris, Brenda and Bone’s wicked raven, Desdemona – are skilfully manipulated by Shabnam Tavakol, Tim Ressos and Benjamin Kuryo, and are hits with young Cairo Jim fans in the audience.

As Cairo Jim, Logan McArthur uses the ploys of melodramatic heroes to bring McSkimming’s hero, Cairo Jim, to life. He declaims as he tells of his search for the lost tomb of Martenarten; poses as he dreams of his airborne heroine; despairs as he is seized by Bones and his henchmen. All are effective devices, but they do seem to slow the production down a little too much at times.

Brendan Layton is a looming presence as the scheming villain, Captain Bones, especially in his disguise as a walking mummy – but is effectively ‘foiled’ by Joecelyn Osgood and the afore-mentioned objects falling from the sky.

Kristiann Dingas brings some needed pace and humour to the production as café proprietor, Mrs Amun Rue, as do the slapstick antics of Diego AR Melo and James Stubbs Grigoriou as Bones’ silly offsiders, Kevin and Abdullah Rhampsinites. Emma Wright also brings a little humour doubling as the dust-and-sun-affected Pyrella Frith.

All the characters of the Cairo Jim series come to life in this ambitious production. It’s fun – and funny – and way over the top, just as the fans of McSkimming’s popular, poetic hero would rightly expect it to be.

Review first published in Stage Whispers magazine