The PaperBoats. Goodwood Theatre and Studios. 26 Aug 2022
There’s nothing simpler than a kindy kid happily playing with a tennis ball.
But playing with a tennis ball and sharing it, is a different thing!
The Boy and a Ball is the most subtle, low tech, magical and highly intelligent engagement of a captive kindergarten audience you could want.
Performer Stephen Noonan created this work under the dramaturgical support and direction of Dave Brown. It is a masterpiece in exploring the subtle niceties, insecurities and joys of play, making friends and sheer magic. Dave Brown’s direction is most subtle, effective and unobtrusive.
Greg Cousins’ design of a cardboard cylinder fort of varying cylindrical sizes and James Brown’s wonderfully eclectic soundscape offer Noonan all he needs to play a soft, shy, gentle childlike human who slowly but surely makes friends with the audience and enjoys adventures with highly engaged, animated and loud commentary making kids.
The fort of cylinders is in itself magic. It can become a container, a torch, a magic trick. A means of shared play with a chosen kid happy to engage as the tennis ball is flipped back and forth.
The mastery of this work is its delicacy and respect for its young audience, their capacity to respond to it and be rewarded in that response by what happens before them by a supremely aware performer in Noonan.
David O’Brien
When: Closed
Where: Goodwood Theatre and Studios
Bookings: Closed
State Opera South Australia. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 27 Aug 2022
This is perhaps one of the best productions of La Traviata this reviewer has seen. It is fundamentally different to many others in one key element: the attention is thrown squarely on Violetta, on how she sees others around her, and how she responds to events. Often, productions of Verdi’s masterpiece focus as much on the perspective of the other characters in the opera – including the prevailing social mores of the day – as they do on ‘la traviata’ (translated as the ‘fallen woman’).
It is almost trite to say that the telling of an event depends on who is doing the telling, and in this joint production between State Opera South Australia, Opera Queensland and West Australian Opera, director Sarah Giles looks for every opportunity to hear from Violetta. Unsurprisingly, Giles relegates any hint of judgement about Violetta’s life style to the sidelines and there is recognition that for Violetta to do what she does requires instigation, and the willing participation, by men. This is underlined by an oh-so-funny scene in which men ludicrously run around in various states of undress in pursuit of satisfying their lust. But it’s not just funny – it’s also a not-so-veiled comment about how men control women and exercise double standards. In her Director’s Note, Giles aptly points to a contemporary example: Roe v Wade.
La Traviata is the story of Violetta Valéry – a high class courtesan – who falls deeply in love with Alfredo Germont but is encouraged by his father Giorgio to break up with him so that the ‘taint’ of her profession will not ruin the chances of Alfredo’s brother at a successful marriage. Violetta reluctantly agrees and reasons that she needs to really hurt Alfredo to achieve a separation. She also knows she is dying of tuberculosis, and in some ways this makes it easier for her to sacrifice herself for the benefit of Alfredo and his family.
Giles’ unapologetic focus on Violetta produces some atypical interpretations of at least two of the principal roles. We often see Giorgio Germont played with much more indignant self-righteousness, at least initially while he is laying out his case to Violetta. In this production Giles has baritone James Roser play Giorgio much more gently throughout. This has the effect of highlighting Violetta’s struggle with the proposition that is being laid before her, and Giles has soprano Lauren Fagan visibly fighting her inner demons and rebelling at the situation, before finding grace and surrendering herself and her own happiness to Giorgio. It was a telling moment in the production, and both Fagan and Roser sang the scene with bitter tenderness.
Giles has tenor Kang Wang play Alfredo with less earnestness than we might otherwise be accustomed to. Wang beautifully plays (and sings) the besotted young lover, but it is not syrupy and overemotional. This (presumably) deliberate portrayal again allows the audience to focus on Violetta and interpret her love for Alfredo as something of virtue, and not to be confused with the ‘affections’ she shows her customers.
Kang Wang and Lauren Fagan both give excellent performances – they both sing very well, and their stage-craft is unstilted and natural. At risk of body-shaming other principals in other productions, they are both attractive and ‘fit’ and the passion they imbue their characters with is all the more believable for it.
In the minor principal roles, Pelham Andrews gives an entirely believable performance as the philanderer Baron Douphol. Jeremy Tatchell’s Marquis d’Obigny and Mark Oates’ Gastone are also well realised, with appropriate measures of dignity and humour. The cast is rounded out with credible performances by Conal Coad (as Doctor Grenvil), Cherie Boogaart (Flora), Teresa LaRocca (Annina), and Jiacheng Ding (Giuseppe). There are no weak links, and the principals give truth to Stanislavski’s oft-quoted maxim that “There are no small parts, only small actors”.
But there is much more to a successful operatic production than a strong principal cast. Sarah Giles direction breathes new life into what is a frequently performed opera. Charles Davis’ set and costume designs are outstanding, with the set seamlessly transforming in front of our very eyes from a three room mansion to an expansive country house. The transitions are realised by members of the chorus and it is poetry in motion. The costumes are lavish, and not representative of any particular period, which assists in underlining the timelessness of the story. Paul Jackson’s lighting design is empathetic to the overall intention of focussing on Violetta. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is ably led by Oliver von Dohnányi: the pacing and dynamical balance are en pointe and never compromise the vocal output. Anthony Hunt’s chorus is very well prepared, and the expertly choreographed crowd scenes (and dance scenes and scene changes) are visually and aurally exciting, with precise cueing with the orchestra. With great attention to detail in the tableaus, we again have poetry in motion as well as in pictures. Intimacy Coordinator Ruth Fallon’s careful work ensures that the tenderest scenes are affecting and not contrived, and the bawdy crowd scenes make the point but are not offensive.
Giles has included some very evocative and affecting directorial touches. When Giorgio is explaining to Violetta that he fears his other son’s marriage will be imperilled by her relationship with Alfredo, we see upstage two softly lit members of the ensemble acting out a simple and stylised representation of the marriage about to founder at the altar. The way it is choreographed serves as a blunt reminder of the double standards mentioned above. It is beautifully done. This same dramatic device – seeing apparitions to underline the emotional arc of the story – is used again at a later point in the story with great sincerity. To say more would be a spoiler, but it leaves a lump in one’s throat.
State Opera South Australia’s production of La Traviata is simply outstanding: visually sumptuous, gloriously musical, and an emotional roller coaster. It’s everything opera can and ought to be, and not to be missed.
Kym Clayton
When: 30 Aug, 1 and 3 Sep
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Weber Bros Entertainment. Bonython Park. 13 Aug 22.
The Big Top comes to Adelaide once more, with The Circus landing in Bonython Park. Calling Adelaide home for the second leg of their tour, the Weber Bros Entertainment group will be in town for just over 3 weeks.
Coming in at around two hours long the show is a mixture of death-defying stunts featuring highly technical apparatus and traditional circus variety tricks with a dash of slapstick between.
Set changes are complex and require a cast of thousands to move pieces into position, but this team have it down to a fine art. Keeping the audience entertained whilst sets are transformed are some incredibly talented circus clowns that dazzle with impeccably timed slapstick comedy routines that have the audience in stitches; a real favourite with the kids!
For the big tricks, apparatus such as the wheel of death, human cannon, BMX jump ramps, and the Globe of Death are wheeled out and assembled. The latter a white-knuckle, jaw-clenching performance that truly has one on the edge of their seat! Bravo!
It’s not all smooth sailing at this matinee performance, which really highlights the very real danger these talented performers are putting themselves in for our entertainment. Short delays to ensure crash mats are correctly positioned and safety harnesses to catch falling performers make the odd, entirely necessary, appearance.
There are also the more common aerial silk performances, trapeze acts, whip cracking and rope spinning, and hula-hoopers. A modern addition of LED-light dance performance is perhaps less successful given the proximity of the performers and daylight sneaking into the tent, but one expects this would really hit after dark.
The Circus is wonderfully high high-tech and still highly traditional. For that family experience to remember it is not one to be missed! Just be sure to dress for the wet; be that outside in the rain or around pesky clowns with water pistols. And don’t forget your welly’s. Bonython park is mighty muddy this time of year!
Paul Rodda
When: 12 Aug to 4 Sep
Where: Bonython Park – Under the Big Top
Bookings: iticket.com.au
University of Adelaide Theatre Guild. Little Theatre. 13Aug 22
Sir Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia has been classified as one of the great contemporary plays of the English language. Indeed, now that it is over thirty years old, one looks upon it in this latter era of short and sweet and scaled-down theatre as one of the wordiest and most complex of popular contemporary plays being, as it is, presented as a contemporaneous duopoly of time.
In the same old English house there exist characters from 1809 hashing out the fine points of mathematics, landscape gardening and literature interspersed with characters of 1993 doing much the same retrospectively. The audience must pay close attention to the two periods and the assorted concepts and opinions as must the actors master a highly complex and prolix script.
It’s not a play for the faint-of-heart.
But UATG is far from faint-hearted. It braves works of erudition and packs its little theatre in so doing. For Arcadia, Matthew Chapman has stepped away from acting to take on the role of a solo director for the first time. It is a sterling start.
This production rockets along on a sleek and simple one-table set against a pleasant pale blue facade which represents the grand old Sidley Park mansion in Dorset. A subtle festoon of flowers signifies its verdant setting; a great landscaped garden which is subject to the aesthetic upheaval of the latest trends in landscape gardening. This is just one of the fascinating themes which threads through the plot, introducing the character of Noakes (Rohan Cassidy), the Capability Brown of the moment, whose “modernisation” of the glorious formal vista landscape seeks to make, if wild and dense, a suitable abode for a hermit. Thomasina Coverly, (Pari Nehvi) teenage daughter of the house and under the tuition of the handsome Septimus Hodge (Robert Baulderstone) is fascinated by this possibility and draws a hermit into the landscape architect’s sketch where it remains for the misinformation of future historians. They are the other aspect of the play and very ably embodied indeed.
Two time periods are enacted, first with clever young Thomasina challenging her tutor with concepts of physics beginning with why, once stirred, jam cannot be unstirred from rice pudding. Subjects such as determinism, iteration and chaos theory wind around sex education, gardening and poetry, salient since the second-rate poet Ezra Chater (Maxwell Whigham) is a regular guest in the house and the unseen presence of Lord Byron lingers everywhere, he having been a friend of tutor Septimus.
Also in the 19th Century household is the chatelaine, Lady Croom, (Kate Anolak), a very firm and sensible Matriarch with a wee flirtatious edge. It is a big and busy household and this is a big and busy play.
And in come the contemporaries, at the same table at Sidley Park, hashing over the history. There’s Hannah Jarvis (Alison Scharber) and Valentine Coverly (Guy Henderson) and, most significantly, Bernard Nightingale, the Oxford don who masquerades under the alternative avian name of Peacock, and who is obsessing on Lord Byron theories. John Rosen makes a delicious meal of this character.
The transitions between the present and the past slip to and fro very nicely with the occasional moveable prop and, of course, changing period costumes. All of which, importantly, is illuminated by the excellent Stephen Dean, late of the beloved Bakehouse Theatre.
Rebecca Kemp pops into the production credits as an “intimacy co-ordinator” which is very on-trend but de trop when the intimacies in this play, while integral, also are hardly lusty or intimate. There’s also Nicholas Clippingdale in the credits as “mathematics advisor”; it seems more logical, albeit oddly obscure. As is the need for a “classics advisor”. ’Tis a much-advised production.
One wonders what the playwright might be making of these further offstage loads to a production team when, already, the play calls for a large cast and some very niftily co-ordinated switchings of time and players.
Indeed, Arcadia is an ambitions production which embraces a fecund swathe of academic erudition, ideal perhaps in a university context.
It is also a play inclusive of seasoned and young players in its cast, which it the perfect combination in an educational environment - and which worked so very well in the balance of performances, not always even, but not bad at all.
For those interested in the rules of physics, there is some grist to an ancient mill. For those caring about the egocentric bastardry of landscape gardeners, there is an ongoing agenda over which to fume.
For those seeking an intellectually busy night of theatre, here it is.
Samela Harris
When: 13 to 21 Aug
Where: Little Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
The Genesian Theatre Company. Genesian Theatre, Sydney. 13 Aug 2022
It’s widely acknowledged that Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll changed Australian theatre forever when it premiered in Melbourne in 1955. It’s the first play – or the first popular play - to put working-class Australians and their sturdy vernacular centre stage for an exploration of the search for happiness in unconventional domestic arrangements.
While presently a time capsule of social norms of the ’50s – feminism hadn’t reached Carlton yet – forgive him this trespass as the emotional quotient of misunderstood love and nostalgic yearning in the play is as relevant today as it ever was. The Doll is far deeper than any one theme and compels endlessly debatable questions for the trip home. After opening in Melbourne to critical acclaim in 1955, productions in the UK and New York commenced before the end of the decade. Ray Lawlor is still collecting royalty cheques at the rare age of 101.
Canecutters Roo and Barney return to Melbourne for the seventeenth layoff from the season up north. Olive, happy with love only five months a year and eschewing conventional domestication, anticipates the boys breathlessly but, this time, with some agitation. Her beau is Roo, but Barney’s Nancy has married elsewhere. Olive sets up a blind date between Barney and her fellow barmaid at the local pub, Pearl. Pearl’s primness and uncertainty around the arrangement foreshadows the fading of the romantic mirage.
Olive’s shabby home is well-conveyed by Tom Fahy’s set design and Barry Neilson’s decoration. But this veracity is shattered by Grace Swadling’s bitchy and unpleasant Pearl. Who could stay in a room five minutes with this person, let alone work with them? A viewable nuance of trepidation mixed with vulnerability went wanting. Jodine Muir’s Olive has hard work dealing with this deadweight and what could have been an empathetic but challenging encounter was delivered as unattractive anger. Director John Grinston here employs a technique repeated through the production – characters on opposite sides of the stage delivering out front. This heightens disengagement where a dialogue simmering in subtext could be more interesting. I don’t think people say what they mean in the 1950s any more than they do now.
All was forgiven when the boys arrive. Lawlor has Olive build them into demi-gods and like “a couple of eagles descending out of the sky” – to paraphrase a line from the play – their entrance signals the game is on. The boisterous boys bounce around the tiny room and the relationships are realised with alacrity. Harley Connor has the best role as the robust larrikin Barney. No wonder Lawlor himself played Barney in the initial Melbourne, Sydney, UK and New York productions. Barney’s seduction in the Taming-of-the-Pearl scene is masterful, as are Pearl’s subtle and self-surprising hot flushes in reaction. Bravo! Martin Grelis is a formidable Roo, hulking, sulking, and coming to grips with this challenging layoff. Grace Swadling develops her Pearl into a far more complex and interesting persona as the play progresses and Jodine Muir excels in Olive’s climactic outburst.
The nostalgic routines of the seventeenth layoff are falling apart and Lawlor has given us three observers to the tragedy, each with a unique viewpoint. Heather Tleige’s Bubba was five at the first layoff and is now confronted with losing the magic and the need to rekindle it elsewhere as Kathy, her real name. Liz Grindley as Olive’s sardonic mum provides comic relief and caps the proceedings with bouts of wisdom. Her contumelious Emma, however, is more caricature than authentic. Johnnie Dowd is a young cane ganger who worked with the fellas up North, and now intruding on the foursome, reflects on the unreality of their situation. Hamish MacDonald gives a sweet performance.
Besides the aforementioned physical/emotional distancing, director John Grinston needs to pay more attention to detail. Like the lack of festive decorations on New Year’s Eve and the pre-mature fireworks. Roo apparently was looking for a job in the Financial Review and wears tennis shoes when he should be putting his boots on. And would it be that hard to have labels on the beer bottles, like Carlton? Small beer, but details do matter. On the other side of the ledger, the physical business is very good, and Susan Carveth’s costume design (and hair?) distinguishes the period. Bravo!
Ray Lawlor has constructed a near perfect play in which all the characters realise they have to change. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a dynamic rendering of its time yet crammed with modern emotions. Highly recommended for both.
P.S. Saint Genesius is the patron saint of actors.
David Grybowski
When: 16 Jul to 20 Aug
Where: Genesian Theatre, Sydney
Bookings: genesiantheatre.com.au
Photography Credit: Craig O'Regan