PYGMALION

By George Bernard Shaw.
Sydney Theatre Company. Sydney Theatre.
Director: Peter Evens. 4 February – 3 March, 2012.

After 50 years of the comfortable, tuneful, overdressed My Fair Lady who would have thought there’d still be such energy, laughter and stinging relevance in Shaw’s mighty original? Peter Evens’ STC production is a revelation, and the packed opening night audience rattled the rafters in appreciation.

With virtually no set — the huge stage is open to the wings and flies — and modern-dress costumes and props that deliberately clash with Shaw’s unchanged 1912 text, Evens and his actors triumphantly reclaim the wise old bird’s comic theatricality. The first half, in particular, gets huge laughs: the new-look, new-sounding Eliza’s first afternoon tea party with confused Mrs Eynsford Hill and her two upper-class-twit children is marvellously funny.

Deprogramming our inbuilt memories of Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison in the leading roles, the Eliza of Andrea Demetriades and the Higgins of Marco Chiappi are splendidly fresh and believable. She starts drenched and bedraggled (“squashed cabbage leaves from Covent Garden”) and is convincingly moulded into high-class respectability. He prowls the stage eccentrically, a grown-up boy with masses of unkempt curls, a GBS substitute who must speak the truth no matter what the cost. Unlike in the musical, this couple are doomed to remain at war.

The supporting cast are also fine. Deborah Kennedy is sharply disapproving as a Scottish Mrs Pearce; Kim Gyngell is warmly helpless as Colonel Pickering; David Woods gives Eliza’s philosopher/dustman father a dark, abusive edge.

The acres of empty stage bring some sound problems when the actors move too far upstage, and there’s some hardly necessary video input on a flown-in screen. But this is a terrific production that reclaims Shaw’s great comic masterpiece from its long Broadway kidnap.



'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE

By John Ford.
Cheek by Jowl / Sydney Festival.
Director: Declan Donnellan.
Sydney Theatre. 17-21 January, 2012.

By inviting the great European company Cheek by Jowl to present their sensational version of this Jacobean blood-and-guts epic, the Sydney Festival has delivered a rich, fresh transfusion to local actors and directors. Let’s hope they catch one of the 5 performances.

Stripping away all unnecessary clutter — in sets, costumes, ‘classical’ acting, intervals, etc — director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod, founder/leaders of the company since 1981, give a pounding, non-stop and utterly comprehensible version of Ford’s lusty 1630 ‘revenge tragedy’. Sense and motives are made crystal clear by the dozen expert actors who rarely leave the stage, sharing the main roles and acting/singing/dancing as chorus/spectators.

The action all happens in Annabella’s modern-day bedroom. Marvellously played by Lydia Wilson, she’s the young, tattooed, much admired daughter of a rich Italian business man. All the local eligibles are after her hand but she — alas for all concerned! — is hot only for her brother, Giovanni (Jack Gordon). The siblings see their actions on the red central bed as pure and simply wonderful: the rest of society soon see her as the ‘whore’ of the famous title. An incestuous pregnancy forces a swift marriage with the unsmiling Soranzo (Jack Hawkins).

Wilson and Gordon speak the complex language with great simplicity and truth: the narrative is always brilliantly clear. There’s also excellence from the surrounding cast, especially Laurence Spellman as Soranzo’s lurking man-servant Vasques and Lizzie Hopley as Annabella’s ditsy maid who spills the beans and so has her tongue bitten off and her eyes coat-hangered out by a strip-o-gram murderer. The blood flows free and the gripped audience duly gasps, laughs and shudders.



NOTHING PERSONAL

By David Williamson
Ensemble Theatre, Sydney
Director: Mark Kilmurry
1 Dec 2011 – 28 Jan 2012

Ensemble audiences are always ready for a new play from David Williamson and most nights for this lengthier-than-usual season are already sold out. With the considerable added allure of Greta Scacchi in the lead role, this is a scheduling no-brainer. Kudos to the Ensemble for immediately following one brightly intelligent, smartly directed new Australian comedy/drama (Geoffrey Atherden’s Warning: Explicit Material) with another. Artistic Director Mark Kilmurry staged both excellently so he’s probably due for a Xmas rest.

Obviously in rude creative health, Williamson turns 70 in February. Despite an announced ‘retirement’ in 2005, he keeps adding to his many plays (over three dozen) and significant screenplays. Nothing Personal may not be top vintage, but it ends a busy year that has already seen Don Parties On at the MTC and the STC, When Dad Married Fury at the Metcalfe Playhouse, Perth and At Any Cost? (co-written with Mohamed Khadra) also at the harbour-front Ensemble.

Williamson’s theme this time is ‘generational change’, something he has no doubt heard much about himself. Scacchi plays Bea, “a publishing icon” (we are told twice) who runs the books and authors side of a large media conglomerate. Getting older, she flinches from new trends, hates ‘chic lit’, vampire novels and e-books, and she is feeling the scorn and exasperation of Naomi (Emma Jackson, impressive), the firm’s ambitious young marketing manager.

The two square off for an all-or-nothing clash. Bea leans heavily on her long-suffering assistant Roxanne (Julie Hudspeth) while Naomi flirts with Kelvin (Andrew McFarlane), their wealthy, womanising CEO, putting strains on her relationship with live-in boyfriend Simon (Matthew Moore). As well, both protagonists deal with difficult ‘generational changes’ of their own — Bea with her angrily estranged daughter (Rachael Coopes), and Naomi with her mortally ill mother (Jeanie Drynan). These side issues, though important to Williamson’s overall concept, are far less assured, more ‘soapy’, than the office politicking.

Kilmurry’s direction is swift and exciting: scenes merge and flow unexpectedly on Steven Butler’s stylised setting with its see-through furniture, walls and props.

Greta Scacchi holds centre stage as the troubled Bea, always ready for a fight. Delivering her lines with an edgy filmic naturalism, she moves her character through a most convincing journey. She demands equal commitment from her audiences, so very, very close to the action at the Ensemble.

On the night I attended, Scacchi stopped the show during Act One and insisted a cuddling couple in the front row leave before she would continue. It was a heart-stopping moment. The shamed couple mutely agreed to keep still and the action continued. Scacchi personally delivered a handwritten note to them during the interval and they watched the second act from the back row.

Such are the joys of up-close theatre. I’ve never heard such an interval buzz.



THE MERRY WIDOW

Co-produced by Opera Australia and Opera North (UK).
Operetta by Franz Lehar.
Libretto: New translation and adaptation by Kit Hesketh-Harvey with Giles Havergal.
Director: Giles Havergal

The program for this new production of perennial favourite The Merry Widow reminds us that the previous Opera Australia Widow was Dame Joan Sutherland who, on her first entrance, “appeared at the top of an 88-step staircase surrounded by men and then seemingly effortlessly descended the stairs to stage level”. This extravagant production, said The Australian review, “must have cost a fortune”.

No such budget here, certainly no giant staircase, no steps at all for Amelia Farrugia, La Stupenda’s pocket-sized successor. The settings (by Leslie Travers) are cut-price by comparison. The Act One Pontevedrian embassy has exactly the same saucy Art Nouveau lighting features and 2D chandeliers as the Widow’s Act Two luxury apartment/ballroom. And the plot-pivotal summerhouse — in which Valencienne (Sian Pendry), the Ambassador’s needy wife, has a secret locked-door tryst with overzealous lover Camille (Henry Choo) — is here represented by three unjoined flats flown in and out when required. The cuckolded Ambassador (John Bolton Wood) just has to pretend not to see what’s going on inside.

But the famed operetta with the creaky plot and the gorgeous songs still exerts its magic. Highlights include Farrugia’s full-throated rendition of Vilja, David Hobson’s world-weary I Go To Maxim’s and the 7-man comic rouser Cherchez La Femme, with its wonderful wailing “women, women, women” bridge.

British director Giles Havergal’s drama-lite production is serviceable, as is the “new translation and adaptation” by Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who is unprofiled in the program. Opera singers are not renowned for their diction, so the considerable wit of the new lyrics is often lost, best checked on the surtitles high above the stage. The honourable exception is tenor Henry Choo, whose clear words and soaring, crystal voice are a constant delight.


CAPRICCIO

Produced by Opera Australia
Opera by Richard Strauss
Libretto by Clemens Krauss and Richard Strauss
Director, John Cox

The great German composer Richard Strauss wrote many great operas, including Salome and Der Rosenkavalier, plus the mighty tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which was to become the theme to 2001, A Space Odyssey. In 1942, in his late 70s, his last opera Capriccio was written under the suspicious eyes of the Nazis. They needn’t have worried: this ‘conversation piece in one act’ exclusively asks “what matters most in opera — the music or the words?”

This burning question is precisely stated immediately after the overture, then restated at regular intervals for the next three hours. There’s a wisp of a story. The widowed Countess Madeleine (Cheryl Barker) is being courted by gangly composer Flamand (Andrew Brunsdon) and stumpy poet Olivier (Michael Lewis); and she just can’t decide which one she prefers. “Music or poetry?” she muses when confronted by the two eager twerps. “Which one wins the prize?”

Also in contention for premier status (operatically speaking, that is) is bombastic producer/director La Roche (Conal Coad), who brings some much needed comedy. “Not much action,” he observes mordantly, and how right he is.

Fortunately the second half benefits from the visit of two pairs of travelling entertainers — Pierrot/Pierrette dancers with attitude and over-the-top Italian opera singers who get stuck into the house refreshments.

Though there are fine musical moments — including two richly complex 8-part ensembles and Madeleine’s passionate end solo — Strauss’s score is too often as uninvolving as his subject matter.

Cheryl Barker sings up a storm when required, which is not nearly often enough. Her ravishing, hair-flying portrait on the posters outside the Opera House contrasts markedly with her on-stage appearance in tightly crimped wig and unflattering dress.

John Stoddart’s salon setting includes a revolve that allows us to see the room, like the music/poetry question, from two different angles. Lighting designer Robert Bryan offers lovely stage pictures, constantly changing with the mood and the time of day.


PARTENOPE

Co-produced by Opera Australia and English National Opera
Opera by George Frideric Handel
Director, Christopher Alden

This classy co-production, already an Olivier Award winner in London, breathes new life into a dusty Handel opera from 1730. That the composer of Messiah had written such a comic, absurdist romp is a surprise; though even he might have blanched at some of the night’s gender-bending, sex-obsessed goings-on. Handel’s classical setting has been moved to the languorous 1930s surreal world of Salvador Dali and Man Ray.

There are only six in the cast but sorting out who’s in love with who takes all of the first act. And why is a woman disguised as a man? Why is a real woman playing a man’s role? Why does a man sing in falsetto the whole evening? (A: the role was originally written for a castrato!).

The racy new English ‘translation’ makes you wonder what was the original form of such early-18th-century phrases as “Don’t be such a turd” and “How very dare you”.

Meanwhile Handel’s glittering solo arias come tumbling along, dozens of them one after the other, some gorgeously sprightly, some achingly sad, all with a woodwind, strings and harpsichord accompaniment of great beauty.

The small cast work hard, with brilliant contributions from Emma Matthews as the queenly, man-hungry Partenope; and, show-stoppingly, from Kanen Breen who not only plays the sulky warlord Emilio but also Man Ray in a long skirt doing full-on yoga while singing an aria.

At three-and-a-half hours, it’s an experimental challenge for Opera House regulars. The audience had noticeably thinned by Act Three.


DOCTOR ZHIVAGO

Musical produced by John Frost & many others
Music by Lucy Simon
Book by Michael Weller
Lyrics by Michael Korie and Amy Powers
Directed by Des McAnuff

Adapting Pasternak’s monumental Nobel Prize winning novel for the musical stage is a tough task. Operatic in its sweep of historic events, passionate in its psychological intensity, the book’s best known popular manifestation is David Lean’s 1965 movie adaptation with the luscious Julie Christie famously playing Lara, the doctor/poet’s muse.

Now the team lead by composer Lucy Simon (The Secret Garden) and director Des McAnuff (Jersey Boys) brings great skill and 10 years of top-quality development to this musical version. Whether they have created a popular theatrical phenomenon to rival such big-novel adaptations as Les Miserables or Man of La Mancha remains to be seen.

For this Doctor Zhivago is, uncompromisingly, a very serious work. If 20th century Russian history turns you on (as it does me) you’ll greatly enjoy the careful exposition and rich background detail. But if it’s a fun-night-out with tears mixed with laughs you’re after, this could be a long night. With a running time just under three hours, there are many moving melodies but very few light moments.

Anthony Warlow has a busy night as Yurii and the opening night audience adored him for it. Thunderstruck by his first look at the wild-eyed Lara, he pursues her over many years and over vast tracts of revolutionary Russia. Warlow sings beautifully, articulates his lyrics like no one else on stage, runs about changing costumes and facial hair at a rate of knots. No wonder he pulled a muscle!

Lucy Maunder has the near-impossible task of embodying ‘the soul of Russia’ as the ‘irresistibly beautiful’ Lara. Her scenes and songs with Warlow — notably, the moving On the Edge of Time — are beautifully done, though without the burning sexuality Pasternak’s idealised creation requires and Julie Christie so memorably embodied.

As Yurii’s rivals, Bartholomew John is splendidly corrupt; and Martin Crewes grabs every opportunity in the best role of the show as the Marxist-turned-proto-Stalinist unbedded husband of Lara. Taneel Van Zyl adds grace to the thankless role of Yurii’s staunch, long-suffering wife.

Swift-moving and packed with detail, Des McAnuff’s well drilled production is greatly aided by Michael Scott-Mitchell’s brilliant settings. Side panels glide restlessly on and off the raked stage providing ballroom, train station, library, attic and grimly real Great War battlefield. Pinpoint-accurate lighting by Damien Cooper is never less than perfect.


JUST THE TICKET

Ensemble Theatre, Sydney
Written by Peter Quilter
Directed by Sandra Bates

The Ensemble’s long-term Artistic Director (now Co-Artistic Director) Sandra Bates has already introduced three of British playwright Peter Quilter’s plays to Australia. Now Quilter has given her the world premiere of his latest – this 90 minute one-woman monologue about Susan, a lonely, chatty North Country spinster, self-described as ‘an unaccompanied old biddy’, who takes a three-week budget holiday from London Heathrow to a low-budget Sydney backpackers’ hotel.

The vivacious Amanda Muggleton, padded out to look as frumpy as possible, gets the solo gig, much to the delight of the Ensemble’s loyal audience. Not content with her monologue, she chats directly to people in the front row, asks their names (‘Are you Australian, Richard?’), responds to their questions. When one lady asks her husband ‘what did she say?’, Muggleton reruns the past couple of minutes until the lady is up to date. It’s an hilarious sequence which rather puts some of the scripted comedy in the shade.

More ‘stand-up comedy’ than ‘drama’, Just the Ticket can’t help but evoke memories of Willy Russell’s brilliant Shirley Valentine, a one-character play once played with award-winning distinction by Muggleton. This is not in the same class. Whereas we got to know all about Shirley’s background, her unhappy marriage and her desperate need for change, here Susan’s past remains largely unrevealed, her haphazard Australian adventure reduced to dancing alone in the bar and flirting with its ‘ape-like’ barman.

But the irrepressible Muggleton grabs every chance, works the room, breaks the ‘fourth wall’ with ease. She gets zero help from the setting — measly white and black tabs with some minimal furniture and pot plants. There’s no Set Designer credit in the program.


MADAMA BUTTERFLY

Produced by Opera Australia
Opera by Giacomo Puccini
Director, Moffatt Oxenbould

Funny old art form, classic opera. Sublime music goes hand in hand with a vital suspension of disbelief. Partly I blame Puccini, who in this case wrote 1904 music of great range, maturity and power for a fifteen year old lead character. He could easily have aged his tragic geisha in her thirties: the story would still have worked. But, no; Cio-Cio-San, nicknamed Butterfly, actually tells the worried United States Consul that she’s fifteen after he has guessed that she’s ten!

Visiting American soprano Patricia Racette has a vocal triumph in this much-revived 1997 production by the now-retired Moffatt Oxenbould. Her ‘One Fine Day’ is a poignant joy. The audience rises to her after a magnificently sung down-centre suicide. But she never overcomes the central problem dumped in her lap by Signor Puccini: fifteen, she ain’t. Has any prima donna ever managed to square this particular circle?

The other big problem for non-buffs is the casting of Rosario La Spina as the dashing Lieutenant Pinkerton who spends his Nagasaki shore leave from US Navy ship ‘Abraham Lincoln’ getting the teen geisha to fall for him. In fact, Puccini’s great love duet convinces you that they are madly in love with each other. La Spina has a fine, rich, effortless tenor voice, but he is, shall we say, on the large side - portly, perhaps. Not yet Pavarotti sized, nevertheless his uniform is made from many metres of cloth.

Does this matter? It depends on your ability and willingness to suspend disbelief for the sake of the undoubted musical experience. Oxenbould’s production points the way by employing elements of traditional Japanese Theatre to distance the unlikely reality onstage. Oddly wrapped figures – a cross between mummies and surgery nurses — assist the action, supplying props to the elegantly bare stage when required. Sliding panels reveal newcomers and, to end Act One, the walls disappear completely for a thrilling star-studded, full-mooned fantasy love scene.

Graeme Macfarlane is fine as the shifty, bowler-hatted marriage broker and Jacqueline Dark adds dignity and strength as Butterfly’s long-suffering servant/companion. The very young, unnamed boy who played Butterfly’s secret son was wonderfully still and focussed: his curtain call was thunderous.

Pre-overture, an on-stage announcer informed us that the performer advertised to play Consul Sharpless was ill, and that Andrew Moran “has agreed to sing the role at very short notice”. This must be Opera Australia code for “the understudy will take over”. At any rate, Moran sang the role well, with gathering unease and foreboding. The fact that he was a couple of decades too young for the part only added to the general sense of operatic disbelief and delusion.


DRIVEN TO NEW PASTURES

Sydney Festival 2011
Downstairs Theatre, Seymour Centre
Written & Directed by Rosie Dennis

As we assemble in the Downstairs Theatre foyer, the cast and crew of this highly agreeable one act Festival offering greet us with cups of tea and slices of cake. And the homely atmosphere continues inside as writer/director/performer Rosie Dennis chats to a surprisingly full house.

In what is essentially a low-key, naturalistic monologue, she first tries to sell us a ghastly apartment in the proposed ‘lifestyle’ suburb of New Gladeview. Then she switches focus to the last days for residents of Number 3, Waratah Avenue, Old Gladeview. Now she’s the socially-aware wife of a musician (Jackson Harrison, wistfully playing an onstage piano). She tells us about the four other families facing imminent eviction and we meet Sarah, the oldest resident, the one most likely to be devastated by forced removal to a far-flung suburb.

The two women have formed a bond: they chat, drink tea and dance together in Sarah’s lounge room. Sarah is charmingly inhabited by elderly June Hickey, making her acting debut. She’s hardly acting at all, really; just being. Her unaffected presence works a treat, constantly reminding us of the human reality of such urban ‘renewals’, ‘relocations’ and ‘lifestyle offers’.

It’s an unstrident piece, full of cheeky humanity. It doesn’t preach. What is likely to remain is the memory of the young woman and the old woman sadly, fondly dancing in the condemned lounge room.


A LIFE IN THREE ACTS

Presented by Sydney Festival and Sydney Theatre Company
Written by Bette Bourne and Mark Ravenhill
Directed by Mark Ravenhill

There’s a problem of identification here. The Wharf 1 program calls this a ‘play’. It isn’t: it’s a sort of an under-rehearsed chat show without a Michael Parkinson or an Andrew Denton to keep it flowing. And it’s in two acts, not three.

The star guest has had problems of identification in the past, but not anymore. Bette Bourne fiercely declares that he is an East London gay man who has dressed in drag since the 1970s. Via prompted anecdotes, acid jokes, snatches of unaccompanied songs and the projection of personal photographs we glimpse the outline of an off-centre, off-limits life — including much cavorting in London parks, in gay communes and in the drag-based Bloolips theatre company that he founded and toured to off-off-Broadway-type venues for many years.

Now in his grey-frizzed 70s, in sparkly top and black three-quarter-length pants, he looks like a cross between Dame Edna and Quentin Crisp. He’s got a bad cough tonight, but ploughs on with the faux interview show that he compiled with controversial British playwright Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and Fucking) who himself filled the Parkinson/Denton role when A Life in Three Acts played the Edinburgh Festival in August 2009 and subsequent seasons in The Hague, London and New York.

Illness has prevented Ravenhill from doing this Sydney Festival gig, so local actor Mitchell Butel has been recruited to do the near-impossible job of keeping his other-worldly interviewee on the rails. To his great credit, Butel remains pleasantly interested throughout Bette’s many coughs, meanders and losings of his place in his conspicuous on-stage script.

There are some bright, brassy moments and a few flashes of fire when Bette remembers an injustice or rejection or dreadful calamity (like the coming of AIDS). But the night is long and, even after playing London and New York, Bette still seems to need more rehearsals. Whenever he leaves his script on the music-stand and addresses us directly with a remembered song or a raw family memory this odd show starts to work. Maybe if Andrew Denton had been there to ask the questions Bette might have been happier, the narrative might have been sharper, and we might have all relaxed a bit.


RIGOLETTO

Produced by Opera Australia
Opera by Giuseppe Verdi
Directed by Elijah Moshinsky

As certain a crowd-puller as anything in Opera Australia’s repertoire, Elijah Moshinsky’s 1991 take on Verdi’s powerful melodrama returns for more spins of its marvellous revolving set. Though almost 20 years old, the production’s 1950s Fellini-inspired design still seems a great idea. The dissolute Duke of Mantua’s opening party comes hot from La Dolce Vita, with drunk/drugged couples twisting the night away, cardinals dancing with circus girls, and toffs betting on races with fashionable lady jockeys riding puffing, crawling aristocrats. Amazingly, Verdi’s 1851 music fits just fine.

Not that court jesters were around much in the 1950s. This Rigoletto (Alan Opie) is a mordant hunchback, hobbling around on two walking sticks. He doesn’t even try to amuse anyone, let along his boss, the Duke (Paul O’Neill), who scolds that “you always push a joke too far”. Rigoletto’s brand of jesting relies on dark mockery: he’s the Les Patterson of his day. Everyone hates him, except his daughter Gilda (Emma Matthews) who begs him to let her leave the house, to go anywhere other than to daily Mass.

There’s a great sense of creative fun in this interpretation, from the lusty two-dozen-strong male chorus in dark glasses, to the motor car — a tiny ‘Italian Job’ mini — into and out of which poor Rigoletto must several times cram and extract himself. The heightened reality keeps melodrama at bay until, unable to hold back the Act 3 floods, director Moshinsky lets rip with added thunder, lightning and electrical fuse-blowing. Verdi goes for broke, too, of course, and the opera ends in magnificent desolation. The thunderous applause lasted many minutes.

Alan Opie has a busy night as the hated outsider and loving father. His rich baritone dominates the many set-piece duets and brilliant Act 2 quartet: he keeps returning to his feelings of cursed doom. Emma Matthews, as the innocent, preyed-upon girl in this deadly misogynistic society, thrills with some tremendous vocal flourishes. Almost to the end, dressed as a man and illogically determined to save her rotten lover, she defies the innate absurdity. “Am I ready to die so young?” she sings. Oh, yes, indeedy. (The OA program states that her performance is ‘proudly sponsored by Jennifer Brukner’: thanks, Jennifer.)

Paul O’Neill’s sleek, sex-mad Duke seemed under-par at this performance, and his top notes kept the audience uneasy. Before the start of Act 3 an on-stage announcer told us that Paul was suffering a flu bug but had agreed to gamely soldier on. This got a huge round of applause and, naturally, everything he did thereafter was loudly appreciated, especially his brave rendition of Verdi’s mighty ‘La donne e mobile’, the great hit song of its day.

The gorgeous set is almost worth the price of admission. It offers Moshinsky an almost cinematic sweep in the first act and a real grounding in backstreet reality for the more static acts that follow. Fellini would have loved it.


OUR TOWN

Produced by Sydney Theatre Company
Written by Thorton Wilder
Directed by Iain Sinclair

Though probably the most performed American play ever, Thorton Wilder’s 1938 masterpiece rarely gets a major professional production in Australia; which makes this almost-traditional, very moving Sydney Theatre Company staging worth travelling far to catch. Affirming life while facing the inevitability of death, Our Town urges us to celebrate even the smallest events of our daily life — so seeing a great play very well done must deserve special celebration.

Apart from one spectacular Third Act innovation, Iain Sinclair’s production sticks to Wilder’s theatrical rulebook: no sets, no props, lots of miming with imaginary cups and saucers, houses represented by chairs and ladders, and an always-onstage Stage Manager (Darren Gilshenan) as benevolently bossy stand-in for the playwright.

Even now, in 2010, this approach seems theatrically radical despite our long acquaintance with all things Brechtian and postmodern: imagine the shock it must have been for audiences in 1938. But the characters are so clear and warm, the writing so strong and the philosophical implications so challenging, Wilder’s magic still works.

Director Sinclair has added ‘Foley Artist’ to the program cast list. Lanky, smiling, long-haired Steve Toulmin crouches at the side supplying live sound effects for the mimed props. With audience-delighting precision, he rattles cups, clinks milk bottles, flops newspapers, blows passing train whistles and rings the town bells. Foley is a movie process that goes back to the first talkies: it’s highly unusual to find it on stage.

The town in Our Town is fictional, turn-of-the-century Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. It’s small, decent and definitely ordinary. Wilder’s focus is on the Gibbs and the Webb families, next-door neighbours. Baseball-mad George Gibbs (Robin Goldsworthy) is shyly keen on academically clever Emily Webb (Maeve Dermody). They are sixteen in the first act; they court and marry two years later in the second; Emily dies having their second child before the third act begins. It is Wilder’s wonderful idea that Emily should then take her place in the local cemetery where she converses with other dead citizens, including Rebecca Gibbs, her mother-in-law.

“Human beings must realise life while they live it,” cries Emily, and she begs the Author/SM for a last return to one happy moment in her life, her 12th birthday. And it’s here, after two acts of plain black tabs, that director Sinclair gives his designer Pip Runciman permission to re-imagine Wilder. Bringing the full force of the STC’s 21st century set/lighting/sound technology to bear, Runciman suddenly presents a whole new dimension into which dead Emily intrudes. It’s both magical and horrific, a shattering half-alive, half-dead experience, and perfectly in keeping with the play’s serious intent.

The acting is strong and committed all round, with standout performances from Dermody as the time-travelling Emily, and from Ashley Cummings as the mother who wonders if perhaps there is something worth seeing beyond the tight, loving embrace of Grover’s Corners.


THE TRIAL

Produced by Sydney Theatre Company, Malthouse Melbourne and ThinIce Perth
Adapted by Louise Fox from the novel by Franz Kafka
Directed by Matthew Lutton

One of the most disturbing and influential novels of the 20th century, Franz Kafka’s The Trial is no easy candidate for stage adaptation. Unfinished at the time of its 40 year old author’s death from tuberculosis in 1925, the novel follows an increasingly desperate year in the life of Josef K. as he fights a nameless charge against him through the corrupt and uncaring Austro-Hungarian courts.

With dozens of characters and multiple locations to synthesise, playwright Louise Fox and director Matthew Lutton present their adaptation as a 120-minute free-flowing nightmare peopled by Josef (Ewen Leslie) and six hard-working actors who spin, sprint, change genders, strip, smooch and emote at breakneck speed.

The trouble with dreams — let alone nightmares — is their lack of logic. Events can tumble one after the other, often at random, as they do here. Kafka’s Josef struggles to find the bureaucratic logic behind his very real predicament. But it’s hard to sympathise with Fox and Lutton’s Josef, to fully participate with his thought processes when, at any second, almost anything might happen, any character might morph into almost anyone. Who’d have thought, for instance, that four people might suddenly appear wearing obviously-fake Abraham Lincoln beards?

The novel’s undercurrent of sexuality is here delivered as a flood. The two admirable female performers (Rita Kalnejais and Belinda McClory) are regularly down to their undies and dedicated to wide-open-mouthed kissing, sometimes with each other.

The determinedly plain, curtained setting features Josef’s sparse rented room on a revolve that gathers rotations as the nightmare intensifies. Round and round (and round) it spins with the cast lurking, spying behind the doors, often barely dressed, sometimes roaring and frenzied as in a Punch and Judy Show. Interestingly, exactly the same effect was achieved at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre for their recent production of Measure For Measure: madly spinning, trashed rooms are in the Zeitgeist. The extra ambition of set designer Claude Marcos is revealed at the end when all curtaining and carpeting have been removed to show the impressive starkness of his towering, unpainted panelling.

Likeable and baffled, Ewen Leslie is on the run throughout. The vastly experienced John Gaden plays many cross-gender characters with conviction, especially a kindly priest who offers Josef a sympathetic sermon. Peter Houghton impresses as, among others, a distraught long-term litigant who has already engaged and sacked five unhelpful lawyers.

Excellent music by Ash Gibson Greig adds to Kelly Ryall’s very full, often very loud, soundscape that even backs some scenes with a TV-style laugh track. Is it only Josef who can hear this fake laughter? ‘I am going to be a free man,’ he declares. But first he must wake from his spiralling dream.


THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE

Produced by Opera Australia
Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House
Comic Opera by Arthur Sullivan & W S Gilbert
Directed by Stuart Maunder

Who can blame Opera Australia for squeezing every potential dollar from their Gilbert & Sullivan repertoire? The bookings are always big, the audiences are always loudly appreciative and the famed comic operas can fund more eclectic, difficult, less obviously commercial productions like this year’s ‘Bliss’ and next year’s ‘Of Mice and Men’.

So, with many an ‘ooow!’ and ‘aaarh!’, the OA’s 2006 ‘Pirates’ has sailed again into Sydney Harbour with Anthony Warlow firmly in place as top billing. G&S aficionados might murmur that the Pirate King should hardly have precedence over focal points Frederic (Matthew Robinson) and Mabel (Rosemarie Harris), and especially over ‘the very model of a modern Major-General’ (Peter Carroll) — but that wouldn’t reflect the production’s focus or, to be fair, the audience’s obvious delight.

Long loved as Australia’s ‘Phantom’, Warlow can do no wrong. His pirate is firmly based on the Johnny Depp ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ model, plus lashings of his own hard-working, loose-limbed, camp, eyes-rolling eagerness. It’s only in the context of his actual role in Gilbert’s delicious opera parody that Warlow’s billing and his superstar walkdown at the end seem a touch — well — overboard.

Stuart Maunder’s pretty production is bright and breezy on Richard Robert’s splendidly simple setting with sliding cut-outs like a Victorian child’s toy theatre. The two romantic leads are particularly fine. Apprentice pirate Frederic is the plot’s focus and Matthew Robinson is handsomely dashing and believably over-dutiful to the ridiculously unfair pirate contract that Gilbert cooked up for him. His duets with Rosemarie Harris’s keen, determined Mabel are both silly and thrilling, exactly what Gilbert & Sullivan require.

Peter Carroll does an effortlessly expert job with his famous patter song, ending at express speed. Suzanne Johnston’s Ruth moves convincingly from a downbeat drab spurned by the object of her misplaced passion in Act One to a sexy pirate maid swishing a cutlass with great swagger in Act Two: a terrific journey. Richard Alexander has great fun with the cowardly Police Sergeant, singing with a booming bass.

The pirate chorus, oddly enlarged to include some prancing dancers in tights, sing with energy, as do the Major-General’s multiple giggling daughters, often flowing together down the raked stage like treacle. Though amplified (is this now usual at Opera Australia?), Gilbert’s brilliant, vital lyrics were often unclear, requiring recourse to the production’s overhead surtitles. Perhaps operatic training is not the best thing for opera parody.


MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Produced by Company B Belvoir, Sydney
Written by William Shakespeare
Adapted & Directed by Benedict Andrews

Shakespeare’s late ‘problem comedy’ gets a rare airing at the Belvoir in a full-on, jaw-dropping production by rising ringmaster Benedict Andrews. Well, MY jaw dropped several times in the course of an unsettling and challenging evening.

Resolutely re-imagined, the 1604 play is set in an upmarket 2010 hotel room containing a fashionable glass-walled bathroom with working shower and toilet. Jaws dropped as, from time to time, undies dropped so that characters could relieve themselves (and worse) in full view. Nothing is hidden in this ‘Vienna’: roving video cameramen support in-built camera positions (there’s one behind the bathroom mirror) that send constant, live-edited images to two large screens beside the set and, presumably, to the rest of the city outside, and onwards by MySpace, perhaps. Each actor wears a tiny microphone. It’s a wired, Big Brother world — and brilliantly handled in-house technology.

Andrews’ adapted text is performed by a dozen hard-working actors doubling and trebling as required, but the gleaming bones of Shakespeare’s play remain. When Vincentio (Robert Menzies), the fair-minded Duke of a sex-obsessed Vienna, decides to inspect his city from the inside he hands power to Angelo (Damon Gameau), his upright deputy, and dons the light disguise of a cowled priest. Nobody recognises their long-time boss, rather like nobody spots that Clark Kent is Superman wearing spectacles. But absolute power corrupts Angelo the instant he meets Isabella (Robin McLeavy), an attractive novitiate nun who comes begging for the life of her condemned brother Claudio (Chris Ryan).

While lewdness, lying and bodily functions are on general display, Isabella is the suffering, moral centre of the tale, and McLeavy is especially fine. She is both precise and passionate, and her verse-speaking is superb, putting to shame some of the rushed mumblings around her.

Also notable are Toby Schmitz as an untrustworthy dandy scoffing chocolates from the minibar, Helen Thomson doubling as mini-skirted brothel-keeper and scorned aristocrat, and Frank Whitten as a rake-thin ancient lord who manages to balance fairness and power.

This is an extravagant blitz of a production. The room spins giddily as the bed gets a pounding, pillow feathers fill the stage after an opening orgy, and there’s prolonged masturbation and (yuk!) fecal smearing. It’s time to re-hinged my jaw.