peteg's blog 2006-08-16-WagesOfSpin.autumn

Belvoir: The Golden Ass

Tuesdays are give-us-ten-bucks-or-more at the Belvoir, downstairs at least. Even after the refurbishment that theatre remains a bit of a dungeon, serving as a home to their outre B Sharp company. The bar and ticketing area is all smiles and soft couches, and presumably it was all sweetness and light at the Keating! production upstairs.

This play is an adaptation of an apparently unique Latin novel. It rambles. Its not entirely coherent. Its ludicrous. Its quite long, at about three hours with three intervals. Well staged, well performed, though the macro narrative made merry with my empty stomach and eluded my grasp. It's terribly unsubtle, but what fun.

New Theatre: Laughter on the 23rd Floor

Again it was free-for-the-unwaged evening at New Theatre. Similarly to the previous production I saw here, this one is slick and hilarious.

TAP Gallery: Below

I hadn't been to the TAP Gallery for years, and it is was a review in The Program that brought me to this beaut production in the warmly embracing theatre, beyond an art-strewn corridor running beside the main gallery. Tuesday is their pay-what-you-can night, and I can't help but think a better policy would be a <$10 /> bums-on-seats and a pass-the-hat-around afterwards.

The two blokes (Andrew Bibby and Rodger Corser) are fabulous, and Lotte St Clair is destined to become a Home and Away favourite. The drama is tight, fluid and mostly unaffected, founded in Andrew Bibby's heroic acting in the role of Dougie. Definitely worth seeing. Keep an eye out for their company, Ground Up Theatre.

(Just a small nit about Nick Marland's otherwise spot-on review: Sarah's father did not cark it in a mining accident, and the manner in which he did die plays the major part in the resolution of the fraternal friction.)

Ensemble Theatre: Are You There?

I scored some free tickets from The Program. First time at the Ensemble Theatre, a tiny theatre on quite a pretty little stretch of the harbour at Kirribilli. Met up with Jen at Milson's Point train station and had a drink at what seems to be the only pub in the area; it pulls a strange cross-section of punters, that's for sure. We had a quick dinner at Luigi's (Italian, in the hub of restaurants) and hurried down the backstreets to be there just in time.

The play itself was a pretty standard exploration of themes surrounding relationships, e.g. as listed in this review in the Smage. I found it stultifying for extended periods, though the actress provided great relief whenever she was on stage. I just can't imagine too many new things to be said in this format, and a retreat to novelty as happens here is a bit of a cop-out. The social upheaval in Argentina over so many years could surely yield something more than this.

New Theatre: The Voysey Inheritance

Again, students and the unwaged gain free entry to New Theatre, it being the first Sunday of the month for these godless socialist types. My last two visits had proven less than exciting, and so it was with a what-the-heck sigh that I put my bum on the seat this time.

The play itself is an update of a century-old tale of inherited avarice, and examines the angles a family may take on ruin: honour, nonchalance, legalism, morality. It works. The cast was large, dynamic, well-used and effective. The narrative was a bit unwieldy at times, and the love sub-plot betwixt Alice and Edward suffered a bit in this abridged version, though what is there is funny enough.

Definitely worth a look.

Darlinghurst Theatre: Terrorism

The Darlinghurst Theatre has <$18 /> previews, invariably on the Wednesday before the show opens. That's why I was there tonight.

The play was billed as "The Presnyakov Brothers' black comedy", and this production certainly is black if not so very humorous, apart from some cringe-bringers worthy of the The Office. The (relatively) large cast were uniformly great, and ambient sounds were well-used to create spaces (the automatic door of the airport in particular) on an otherwise static set.

Structurally the ambit was to recount a series of loosely connected stories that show the permeation of terrorism through people's lives, from the impersonal, the public to the intimate, and exhibit the range of responses, of fatalism, neuroticism, revelry and marginalisation. The characters remain nameless throughout. Effective? Perhaps. Worth a look? Yep.

Google knows about plenty of reviews of other productions; here's one from the Smage.

New Theatre: Family Stories

The first Sunday of these New Theatre productions has free entry for students and the unwaged, that's why I went. The spiel for this show was:

A war is over. Or maybe not?

There are demonstrations on the streets, politicians are publishing self-help books, and children are left unsupervised in concrete playgrounds. From this chaos, parroting the ways of adults as observed by the uncritical and receptive hearts of children, springs a game called Family Stories.

Four adult actors play children who in turn play mums, dads, sons and daughters in a cyclical family saga spanning a decade of civil war. Every scene is a metaphor for the fear that results from living in a society without free media or civil liberties under a government at war with itself.

Family Stories is a game of 'playing house' that becomes a thrilling, hilarious, devastating allegory of a post-war society.

I found the "metaphor" somewhat threadbare; it was as if we were voyeurs in a stereotyped and somewhat violent Serbian household where the entreaty to stop thinking and articulating (to ease survival in a police state) was both predictable and non-unique to the troubled time of the former Yugoslavia. The gibbering dog / broken girl was a curiosity that went under-used and unresolved, perhaps providing a link with New Theatre's previous show, The Man Who.

Version 1.0: The Wages of Spin

I caught a packed re-run of Version 1.0's The Wages of Spin at the dear old Performance Space — one of the last nights before they move to the old Eveleigh rail yards. So very Melbourne, so very saddening.

New Theatre: The Man Who

A production somehow related to National Science Week. I've never read anything by Sacks, and this came across as neurological freak show; like the circus, for the curious. Some good acting, especially from the young blokes, but I was generally unpleasantly unsurprised.