Bloodied but unbowed

Here are the two photos I was going to include towards the bottom of the previous post - but they wouldn't stick.

Icarus descends

Despite the relaxed freedom a small Asian city offers (I am writing from Chiang Mai), when it comes to this site I feel a bit like an entombed warrior. That I have to climb out to freedom for air by way of a hole that has already been mostly closed over. A few weeks is a long time in Sydney theatre, who would ever have thought.

I feel thus trapped because I have not until now commented on Babyteeth at Belvoir, written by Rita Kalnejais and directed by Eamon Flack; Every Breath which followed at Belvoir, written and directed by Benedict Andrews; and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, written by Christopher Hampton from the novel by Choderlos de Laclos, and guest directed for the Sydney Theatre Company by Griffin’s artistic director Sam Strong.

Before I start, for the record, I want to acknowledge the successes our two big companies (STC and Belvoir) are having overseas right now (since this post has been held over since I started on it, perhaps that should be 'of late'. The STC's Gross und Klein wowing them in Europe, especially Cate Blanchett's performance; the STC's Uncle Vanya, which traveled to the USA last year, up for some big awards; Belvoir's The Book of Everything also a hit in New York; and its production of The Wild Duck to travel to a special Ibsen Festival in Oslo in August (they will like it).

Meanwhile Griffin, the little-theatre-company-that-could, goes from strength to strength with its recent production of The Boys, written by Gordon Graham and directed by above-mentioned Strong, (if I have got this right) has broken box-office records for that historic venue.

Take-off

Of course there have been new openings since I left Sydney a month ago. I apologise for my tardiness but the heat makes one languid, and besides I have a backlog of National Library work which, right now, must take priority.

I haven't got a lot to say about Babyteeth. For all its ups and downs, it was clearly a collaboration between a talented novice writer and an emerging director. Did it merit a main-stage production at Belvoir? Well it's not in the league of The Book of Everything. But that was created, not only by a talented, but also a very experienced team - Neil Armfield and Kim Carpenter for starters. I will watch with interest as the careers of Kalnajais (already a good actor) and Flack evolve. Or maybe I won't - up to them.

An acknowledged classic

Every Breath was the creation of another novice writer, Benedict Andrews, in my view a gifted director. Many disagree. For me it is not easy to abandon him, particularly, when a week before I saw Every Breath, I encountered Andrews' elegant, smart, witty, dextrous production of The Marriage of Figaro for Opera Australia.

Much has been written and said about Every Breath, officially and unofficially, at dinner parties and on buses, in print and online media. It even got a mention here in Thailand, where its damning notices in the Sydney press were noted in the Bangkok Post! I could go on for months about this play and its production - but for the most part I would be repeating the comments, observations, speculations and conclusions made by my online peers, in particular Kevin Jackson and Augusta Supple. They, in turn, make links to other sites. A good number of you would have checked out those posts, but if you haven't they are worth a read. And maybe you should do that now.

On the presumption that you have read those pieces, I want to make only one other point. Which may help explain what went wrong. It's at best a calculated guess (who can know the mind of an author?). And it's not about the whether or the what - but  the why? Why doesn't this play/production work? There have been quite a few efforts - but who has got close? I propose one tiny idea - in the wake of all that I have read - because you can't have that many people exit a theatre unhappy and pretend there isn't a problem.

Presumably something went terribly wrong in the journey of Every Breath from germ of an idea to finished product on stage. Theatre is unlike any other art form, and cruelly so: because you can't get ahead of your audience. You can get ahead of some of your audience, as Barrie Kosky often does. But you also need to carry a sizable, or significantly reputable, posse of audience with you. It is not like painting where the artist can die and come to fame and acclaim later. The most extreme example being Van Gogh, who sold only one painting in his life-time. A play text can wait like Buchner's Woyzeck. But here, with Every Breath, in the very least we must wait for that occasion when a different director finds a way to make this script work, or the same director for that matter. Neither option is very likely.

More to the point: let me distinguish script from text. The script is what is on the page that the actors and director attempt to bring to dimensionality in time and space. The text is the whole work as it comes to life in the empty space between actors and audience on any given night. In this unusual (if not rare) instance, Andrews is both the author of the script and the text. And he has (I think unwittingly in claiming both those tasks) made the same mistake twice.

I direct my comments to Kalnajais and Andrews because both are straying into writing from other forms of expertise. And their problem stands clarified when put up alongside the test of Les Liaisons Dangereuses - a superb script from a very experienced playwright brought to life by a very fine cast with the help of an excellent director. Andrews gets a bigger knock on the head from me simply because, as a director, he is significantly more renowned and he really should know better.

My singular contribution to the debate is this:

Just because you 'feel' something as you are writing (an emotion) or 'think' something (an idea), it doesn't mean you have actively captured that feeling or thought (or both) in the words you have just put down on the page. Ask an experienced poet. It's called the limits of language.

Go and check how many plays Ibsen wrote before he started to attract attention. And while your at it, have a close look at how his better plays are put together. They are Swiss clocks.

Not paying attention

How often does an actor go over and over and over a line. Directors spend years in the struggle to get a handle on their craft. The journey of Andrews (the director) is a case in point. Why should it be so much less effort for the person who writes a script?

To be so over-confident and cavalier to imagine that just because you are a good actor, or director, or cook or mother or father, you are already a good playwright is disrespectful to writing craft. We have got to the point in Sydney where anyone who has learned to text or tweet thinks, in the same hurry, they can knock off a three-act play. It is my observation that Australian playwriting has never been so lacking in quality since the days before the APG and early Nimrod. And it's not for lack of writing talent. The problem lies in the bigger companies and their dramaturgical departments who don't know a good play script when they see one, or a bad one for that matter. And they seem utterly incapable of cogent advice.

All a bit of a laff really

It takes many years for a writer to come to know their own strengths and weaknesses. And some like David Williamson never do. You can't blame Andrews for putting up his best debut effort and asking for it to be embraced. My feeling right throughout the production of Every Breath was that some very big themes were brewing beneath the surface. But that's where they stayed. Others have alerted us to the similarities in the plot to Pasolini's Teorema (1968). If Andrews was expecting us to pick up that reference well that is just way too demanding. Though I have to say, as someone who grew up on the European New Wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Every Breath constantly evoked the same feelings of existential slipperiness (two-dimensional characters), invisible fears, and dagger-like political attack in the form of class war (the worker v the elite) - eg Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) which features a grand dinner party.

While we are at it, let's defer to other great cinema of that time which comes to mind as we watch the story of Every Breath play out. The sexual politics of another great Bunuel film - Belle du Jour (1967) starring a luminous Catherine Deneuve who plays the part of a bourgeois house-wife who takes up prostitution because she's bored. Even the gender agenda was explored in some detail by the German Fassbinder, most particularly The Year of 13 Moons (1978)  about a gay guy who is rejected by his lover after he has a sex change in an attempt to further please him.

If good can come from this production by Andrews, it might be that some of you will take a look at a few of the many exciting, extraordinarily radical films that were produced by a generation of  French, Italian and German directors through the 1960s and 70s.

So what about this play's title? Is it a nod to  Sting's 'Every Breath You Take - I'll Be Watching You'. Which is pretty much the theme of the play. Surely a little low-brow for Andrews? A pop culture reference? Mind you the bucket-bong in The Seagull was pretty good. What about the exceptional Breathless (1960) directed by Jean Luc-Godard, a script from Truffaut, starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Masterpiece it might be, but its plot bears no similarity beyond the title to Andrews' domestic concoction. I just can't see it as a reference, despite, in so many other ways, Every Breath being littered (it seems to me) with allusions to a very particular era of European avant-garde cinema, in particular the so-called French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague).

Then we get the double trouble. Say I am correct in imagining Andrews 'felt great things' while writing this play. Well of course he is going to feel the same 'great things', if not more so, during his endeavour to transform the script into a dramatic text - a production on stage. Given the loose talk about big changes in the last week of rehearsal (to script and production), one gets the feeling that some of those in employ at Belvoir who had been unthinkingly praying at the altar of St Benedict for some time now suddenly realised the man may indeed be mere human. Meaning capable of imperfection. How this highly dubious script got to be shortlisted for the Patrick White Award is difficult to fathom. How Andrews was then allowed to bring the work to the stage without advice that its (presumably) huge themes weren't at all clear is gravely worrying.

Despite all I have just said, I'm not gong to suggest there isn't a playwright in Andrews. But there is no getting around the fact that the script of Every Breath is a 'prentice work'. And unless completely dismantled and rebuilt through the rehearsal phase, it was always going to end up dead on stage.

Regarding Sam Strong's beautifully put together production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Can I hold off for another day? If I write about it here, many are going to make the leap that Strong is a better director than Andrews or has a better approach to the art of directing. Some would hold that view already. I don't want to encourage my readers to jump to that conclusion - to make what may well be a possible mistake by equating an error with an absence of talent. What I will say, in advance of further comment, is that Sam Strong's production is a superb fit for this very finely crafted script from Christopher Hampton (an experienced writer - over 50 scripts across genres including adaptations for the stage and screen). And if you want to know more about this wonderful production do go to Kevin Jackson's brilliant review. There is no way I can better that, or even come close. Not even sure if I have anything to add.

PS: Quite obviously, this review practically wrote itself - from beginning to end without once coming up for air. Actually thirty years into writing stuff like this, I still struggle over days (and weeks sometimes) to get to something that even vaguely reflects what I think or how I feel.

PPS: This post just wouldn't hold the other two images I had planned for it. After giving up I posted them above in a separate post. What does Becket say: 'Fail again. Fail again better.'

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Here is a little pick-me-up while you twiddle your thumbs. Hey – I’m On holidays OKAY! Go HERE!

Just letting you all know that I will get back to this site soon. A whole bunch of shows I have seen and not written about. In particular the enigma of Every Breath, written and directed by Benedict Andrews, and the classy rendition of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, directed by Sam Strong for the STC. But I have also got a heap of typing to do for the National Library – and so I’ve also taken myself away somewhere calm and quiet to do it. Chiang Mai, which I visited previously in November 2010. That was in the cool season. This time it’s been hot hotter and hottest. The end of the dry season! Which just broke with rain about an hour ago – temperature plummeted about 15 degrees in a few minutes.  Not like Sydney (I hear) it just cooled everything off and then stopped. No doubt more to come in next few weeks.

I started this piece as a round up of the 2012 Sydney Festival and then got side-tracked with some money-earning and other responsibilities. Mean-time I didn’t stop seeing shows and other outings so I will try and do a catch up piece. First some paragraphs I wrote not long after the Festival closed on 29 January – and now its 11 March!

Last night (meaning two weeks ago) I was in a big room at Carriageworks, part of a salubrious crowd saying goodbye to Lindy Hume Read the rest of this entry »

I have been trying to catch up on missed posts for a while now, and among them are stories about goings on at Opera Australia – and good goings on, I mean. For many years Australia’s most expensive performing arts company thrived of the rare vocal gifts of Dame Joan Sutherland. Her voice was so great, and she was so loved and admired by audiences, that the company only had to include a production with her in a season and they basically had a thriving subscription base. Like any good ecosystem – a generation of fine Australian singers and other theatre-craft folk grew up around her. It was also an era when many subscribers were European emigres, with good ears, who came to HEAR opera rather than necessarily LOOK at it. Directors included some great originals like Elijah Moshinsky, but very often what we might call the exceedingly capable, like John Copley, who could mill massive crowd-scenes (aka the chorus) into elegant shapes around a diva in just a few rehearsals. It was the way opera was done back then – and few complained.

Joan Sutherland

I am telling this story in a kind of cartoonish-way to keep the story succinct. The point being Read the rest of this entry »

‘Should I go see it?’ the short answer for most people is: ‘Yes’. And the main reason? This play is by George Bernard Shaw. And of his more than sixty plays, one of the best. There was a time in the mid-to-late 20th century when across the British Commonwealth (when that meant something), Shaw stood second only to Shakespeare as the superior English language playwright.

Andrea Demetriades as Eliza before transformation

As well as prolific, Shaw was both witty and proselytising. He supported many social causes, and was at his most merciless when Read the rest of this entry »

Hi Gang,

this is just a short note to say that I have got to get back to work for the National Library and so won’t be filing as often as I have of late. I will try to get something up each week, maybe more. But I have a backlog of Timed Summaries to do which is the typing bit of my interview work. I also need to wade through all previous posts and re-catalogue and tag them. I will try and do a bit of that each week.

The next piece I will do is about the Australian Opera. Meanwhile here are a couple more photographs from childhood in PNG. I got a nice surprise putting up that previous bunch of pix – messages from two of my cousins – Lesly and Rayner – from my father’s side of the family. Anyway here goes, from when we were a bit older and now living on the mainland. It was a soggy town called Kerema in the southern gulf district. Given the weather, especially in the wet season, this three-wheeled vehicle called a Trackgrip was the most effective mode of transport.

 And another from that same town. I see by the sticking plaster on my knees, I must have already been accident prone. I will also write soon about how I think growing up in this strange place shaped the way think about art and life.

Hey there, I hope you have noticed that my front page has been tidied up. My genius techno geek friend stroke actor stroke student, Grant Moxam, is helping sort out a way I order and file my stories. This model will be tested for a while and we may make some further changes later on. There is a lot of work to be done as I rename and tag every story posted thus far. Here among the new categories is one tantalisingly called – Autoblogography. Yes it’s a new word I think. I’ve had an urge for sometime to open my site to topics and themes beyond theatre  – and so here is a taste treat. Meanwhile at Christmas, my sister and and I sat down and sorted through some old family photos.  Tricia since then has scanned some of them for me and sent down from her estate in Wyong.

ME WITH OUR 'HOUSEBOI' KOKOBONI

One of the topics I want to explore is how growing up in a country that wasn’t Australia, ie Papua New Guinea – way back in those years, the 1950s and 60s – might have shaped the way I think and write about culture especially. But another time. Nothing formal here, just a few random shots and not exactly in chronological order.

Read the rest of this entry »