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
Adelaide Theatre Guild Student Society. Little Theatre. 12 Oct 2023
British playwright James Graham specialises in political and socially charged subject matter with titles like: Brexit: An Uncivil War, Best of Enemies (debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.), Privacy (data surveillance culture), This House (shenanigans in the House of Commons), and Labour of Love (you guessed it). What Robert Bell and Rebecca Kemp chose to direct from his canon is something more relevant to antipodeans – the epic battle in 1969-70 between the biggest selling newspaper in the world, The Mirror, and that impudent and audacious Aussie upstart, Rupert Murdoch, competing with a makeover of his newly purchased paper, The Sun. This is the stuff of legend.
It's a big, dramatic story to tell. Graham’s script is well-researched and if you knew nothing of the times, or how a newspaper is actually made, you will after this play. The playwright did his best to condense the events of about a single year, but the word-work still weighs in at 3 hours 50 including interval, but don’t let that deter you; there is not a dull moment.
The creative team, led by directors Bell and Kemp, generates the vibrant verisimilitude of the excitement, the moods, and the energy of the times and a newsroom so vivid you can smell the ink. Displaying Normajeane Ohlsson’s set model in the lobby - created months before rehearsals began - and then seeing the real thing faithfully rendered in the theatre demonstrates her skill and professionalism. Bravo! The walls are decorated with a collage of headlines (my favourite is “Elton Takes David Up The Aisle”), and forlorn filing cabinets, typewriters and newspaper presses authenticate the stage. The closest the program gets to crediting costume design is director Kemp’s contribution as Wardrobe Manager, which is a stunning achievement. Bravo! Original music by Phil Short contributed a drumbeat to pace the action as well as sounds of the times. Lighting design by Stephen Dean was a bit of the sun and a bit of the moon with an eclipse thrown in here and there.
Bravo to Joshua Caldwell! If you didn’t know Rupert Murdoch before, you know him now. Dressed very nattily indeed, Caldwell evinces corporate muscle, enthusiasm, leadership and drive. You witness how naked ambition manifested in shock and awe tactics revolutionised the failings of Fleet Street. Rupert is teamed up with his indefatigable editor, Larry Lamb, played by Bart Csorba. This is a complex part of a hard-working lefty agonisingly uncertain of the new Murdoch paradigm whilst he leads its implementation. Csorba is a bundle of energy and nerves and conveys these conflicts with aplomb although somewhat unrelentingly. Playwright James Graham wrote a showcase for the Murdoch-Lamb team but also a battle history. Murdoch’s nemesis at The Mirror – who also sold him The Sun – was Hugh Cudlipp. Steve Marvanek does him righteous justice playing a stuffed shirt on the wrong side of history in a great performance. The large cast - many of whom had several roles – mastered multiple accents and quirky personalities that added colour and gloss to the political struggle and the bewilderment caused by the audacity of Murdoch’s ideas. Gary George conjures his best John Cleese for great comic effect but also evokes empathy when the chips are down, but Sarika Young and Charlie Milne out-quirked them all.
You’ll see all the drama of that incredible year – the Muriel McKay abduction, the origin of the Page 3 nudie, perfecting the tabloid, the triangular tangle of Murdoch, Lamb and Cudlipp – in a fast-paced, energetic, authentic and well performed exposition. Bravo!
David Grybowski
13 October 2023
When: 12-22 October 2023
Bookings: trybooking.com
David Gauci and Davine Productions. Start Theatres. 13 Oct 2023
Director/Set Designer David Gauci’s production of William Finn and James Lapine’s A New Brain is a 60s paranoia-fuelled, hallucinatory, high-octane, acid trip filled with high-glam, sharp choreography by Shenayde Wilkinson-Sarti.
Finn and Lapine’s tale of Gordon Schwinn (Daniel Hamilton), a composer for a kids TV show suddenly faced with possibly dying from brain surgery, features two conflicting levels in its structure.
At its surface, it’s a show stopping high camp romp featuring Schwinn’s nemesis, Mr Bungee, (Adam Goodburn) the frog-costumed artist he’s writing for, along with assorted eccentric characters including his mother Mimi (Catherine Campbell), business manager Rhoda (Dee Farnell), and homeless lady Lisa (Lisa Simonetti).
Beneath this is a much more subtle dig at neuroses of mother son relationships, serious art, how to really effect change, and good relationships.
Stringing that together in balance and effectively is a huge challenge. In a sense, the work is overwritten towards the feel-good, high-camp, trippy end of the scale, meaning there’s a sense of incompleteness about the sharper undertones.
No matter, Gauci and cast plough on anyway, undeterred by this sense of textual incompleteness. It’s as if there was no choice really.
The romp through Gordon’s addled mind as he seeks to clarify his spectacularly disordered life is spellbindingly played by a perfectly cast ensemble in voice and performance.
Hamilton’s pedantic Gordon parries superbly against Goodburn’s mesmerisingly acidic, evil, Kermit gone bad, Mr Bungee. Catherine Campbell’s, Mimi Schwinn is the perfect showbiz mother who probably needs a therapist. Dee Farnell’s, Rhoda is wonderfully taut, organised alpha neurotic, while Lindsay Prodea as Gordon’s lover, Roger Delli-Bovi and Mark DeLaine as nurse Richard provide much camp satire and lightness.
David O’Brien
When: 13 to 21 Oct
Where: Star Theatres
Bookings: trybooking.com