Squizzy

Squizzy
Barry Dickins
At La Mama
Until 24 June

You know, there’s a lot of old guys in the Melbourne theatre who spend a lot of time telling us how great things were back in the Pram Factory days. Phooie I say to them usually. Only I tend to say it a lot less politely and in the comfort and safety of my own home. Well, me ol mate Barry Dickins and me other not so old but still kinda old mate Greg Carroll are a bit prone to golden days syndrome too on occasion, though not always. They’re just as liable to tell you how shit everything was back then and how such and such playwright was an arsehole no matter what the history books say.

They’re also two of the only guys left from that generation, keeping the spirit of the pram burning, kickin it live and keeping it real at spring break y’all. Woooh.

Squizzy is about the closest thing I think we’ll see to what things were like back in those days, and judging by the amount of grey hair that made it’s way into the Courthouse on a cliché cold Melbourne night , I reckon I’m probably right. A rambunctious, ramshackle, vaudevillian performance of mobster horror from the streets of Fitzroy and Carlton. The Chopper of his day, Squizzy Taylor, gangster and psychopath is a loveable rouge like Sweeny Todd or Macheath. Syd Brisbane is spectacular as Squizzy, surely one of his best performances in years, and Sean Barker, nearly unrecognizable in his new blonde hair, earns that horrible reviewer statement, “he’s one to watch.”

These days there’s so much focus on the new, “young” independent theatre mob, that it’s easy to let the guys from the Pram slip into legend and memory. With Squizzy, Greg and Barry once again prove that there’s still a couple of the old farts out there, who’ve still got enough steam to blow.

The Fall

The Fall

Albert Camus Theatre Festival

The Stork Hotel

Until 25 June

So there’s an Albert Camus Theatre Festival huh? Who knew? Camus was such a fun loving people person it just stands to reason to dedicate a theatre festival to him. And all those sullen, literate teenagers reading the outside and insisting that it’s called L’etranger… now they have a fringe all of their own.

I kid. Or do I? There were more appreciative old folk at The Stork than grumpy teenagers so what do I know? The sort of audience you expect to see at Montsalvat nodding arythmically to live jazz or chaining themselves to a tree outside The Bunyip wondering where the tractors are.

Mono-drama is a hard thing to review really. As has been famously said, there’s not much more than can happen beyond suicide, at least with two characters you can have a murder. I’d tell you who so famously said that but my internet’s bust so I can’t Google it to seem more well read than I am.

Drew Tingwell is very watchable, his rhythm and personality, his charm if you will, are what succeed in holding our attention. The script which he’s got to work with is so very clearly really a short story that Drew’s about all there is to keep us listening to what is, in essence, a truncated, one sided conversation.

I haven’t told you much about the plot, but if you’re familiar with the existentialists then you can guess. In brief, man is fake, man is confronted by cruel indifference of universe, man finds himself alone in bar in Amsterdam (or wherever) and hassles strangers with the story of how he became destitute. It’s a cheery winters tale.

Emma Valente’s light touch direction and Drew’s skill as a performer are what make The Fall bearable but I’m really not sold on the idea of the festival. Why not a Hunter S. Thompson festival. Or Chuck Palahniuk. That’s be a festival worth seeing.

Hmm… on second thoughts…

What Danny Thinks of ACCA

What Danny Thinks of ACCA.

I wrote this for Beat, I dunno, end of last year some time. They printed like one of my rants, and I guess have had too much advertising to do to have room to print another. Anyway, here it is.

This is written under the influence with Nick Cave’s Curse of Milhaven playing. That’s not important.

Pardon me for saying so, but the front end of the of the “serious arts” end of town, the Sturt Street section, is a fuckin disgrace.

Is it me, or is it a hideous Baltic wasteland? And you know it too, don’t’ you Melbourne? Parked the Yellow Peril, Melbourne’s single most hated piece of public art, smack in front of it. Trying to tell us something.

What callosal fuck up saddled us with this eyesore?

This rant began going to the Malthouse last week as the sun was setting, the sky that deep blue fading to perfect a pool at the horizon, stars beginning to come out. Walking through the VCA, which is ugly in its own way, with its haggard and leprous face, with the exception of the new School of Drama which looks like a white filling in a mouthfull of black teeth. Well, that’s alright, does em good, students to live in shit holes, ‘specially arts students. If Taryn from Toorak can take slaving twelve hours a day, every day, in an Edwardian sweatshop, then yeah, she wants to be an artist. If she runs screaming back to mummy, then she’s gonna marry someone rich.

Including the fact that when the prevailing wind isn’t blowing the smell of horse shit from the mounted cops who are housed across the road, you’re sucking in the collected exhaust for the city link tunnel which pumps its shit out a giant chimney smack in the middle of the arts centre. It’s a direct delivery system of lung cancer and I don’t care how many orange pipes you stick around it in an interesting pattern, that’s what it is so I say smoke em if you got em.

What kind of message is that sending the artists?

So I come through that and what do I see? Modern industrial art made to look like the fucking industrial waste land that already surrounds it. And you say artists live there? Has nobody told them about contrast?

The giant rusty orange ACCA building was designed to look like a goanna. The whole building is a sculpture. It’s spectacular and you know why we hate it? The ground around it. Flat, white ugly stone and brick. It looks like a giant piece of junk smashed into a junk yard.

You know what’d fix it? Trees. The whole of the arts centre is an urban nightmare, a clash of idiotic marketing and high culture, what it needs at it’s heart is an oasis. A haven. It needs a fucking park. That brilliant orange building would look so much better rising out of a thick cover of bright green trees. And the Yellow Peril, actually called Vault by the way, might be a damn site more popular if it was bloody cleaned once in every century. It’s covered in graf and tennis shoe marks, I know people who have climbed the fucker and pissed on it. if it was cleaned and surrounded by green, it might look more like a flower than a stepped on Tonka toy.

Throw in some well chosen lights on poles, some light-up signs advertising the art that goes on there, and maybe extend a covered court yard made of perfect glass into the agora at the heart. Get a nice café in there. Not that the café there isn’t okay, but a proper café, not caterers. And a book shop. A proper friggn book shop, not that paltry selection of Australian crap being hocked by Grandma Nevins in the foyer.

So that’s all it’d take, to turn an eye sore into an urban retreat. Might even encourage the public to come see a show or two.

See give the bastard to me, I’ll make us some money.

I’m Danny Episode, vote one for evolution.

Reflections of Next Wave

Reflections of NextWave
Danny Episode

This is an article i wrote for Next Wave 2006. Beat Published it, but i think it can go up here for posterity.


Never one to mince words, senior episode is the first to say that the Next Wave is a festival still in the process of figuring out who it is. Perhaps that’s appropriate for a festival of emerging artists, just coming out of art school, some of them still in high school. It’s hard enough figuring out who you wanna fuck at that age, much less being able to pin point the zeitgeist of your generation.
What were you doing at that age? Waking up from a red wine soaked haze called your early twenties breakdown to a world where music’s shit, politics has gone crazy and you’re staring out through eighteen year old eyes at a twenty something face in the mirror.
Sorry, that was me.
I’m sitting here in Adelaide covering the fringe and feeling old, looking over old programmes and reliving fond memories, so forgive me if I wander off the point.
It’s remarkable, looking over the last twelve years of the festival, how many now familiar names first came to our attention through Next Wave.
In 1994 a notable appearance is a company called Back to Back with a show called Voices of Desire. A couple of days ago at the Arts Market, I sat watching the same Back to Back perform their 2005 Melbourne Festival hit, Small metal objects, to a packed crowd of international delegates.
That year was also the first time I started hearing about this guy who’d written a play called Features of Blown Youth. Some guy called Raimondo Cortese.
1998 Kate Denborough’s Kage physical theatre appears with Contamination and Sandra Long makes Rear Vision with theatre membrane. Sandra’s the first of my whatever happened to’s… the next year in 2000 Sandra made the all conquering Happy 100, a blend of English, Indonesian and Auslan (sign language for those of you who aren’t hip to the groovy fascinations.)
Ah, now we come to 2002.
Beyond the questionable ethics of certain members of the creative team (who thankfully have moved on) this year is the self-absorbed and, gasp, dare I say it, pretentious Next Wave, trying awfully hard to look like the successor to the Melbourne Festival.
The cryingly obvious example being the highly dubious cultural faux pas of
the publicity campaign, “Free at last.” At the hight of the refugees in detention controversy, the key image of the festival that year was a pair of open lips “sewn together” while scores of detainees were actually sewing their mouths shut in protest of their detention. Unsubtle, thoughtless and smacking of more than a little subconscious racism, the appropriation of that image was, well, not particularly appropriate. Praise be, those guys are gone.
The best of the new emergent work in 02 seemed to be crushed into one event, Primetime, which had White Crane (krinkl theatre) the Virgin Wars (which became Virgins. A musical threesome at the Malthouse Tower earlier this year) and Gretel Taylor and Jo Lloyd’s butoh performances. Gretel and Jo are the next of my whatever happened to’s... Primetime was talent scouted by Lally Katz. At least she had her finger on the faint pulse of the next wave back then.
I also remember the Next Wave mafia come snooping around spART when it was at the bowls club. There’s a test for you. Just how hip were you, did you go to spART?
The other new name we started hearing was company called Rawcus, with a brilliant new show called Designer Child.
Because it only happens every two years, only resulted in one embarrassing festival. In 2004 the indefatigable Marcus Westbury took over bringing us An Oration of Filth, form Self-saucing Pudding Productions and introducing a young Emma Valente. Melbourne Workers theatre showcased Angus Cerini’s Diatribe, directed by Chris Kohn of Stuck Pigs Squealing fame. Lucy Guerin danced with Balletlab, Lauren Taylor directed Panic in an underground cavern and Uncle Semolina whipped up Gilgamesh in a shipping container.
Unkie Episode’s picks from the guide this fest are From a Distance presented by Version 1.0 from Sydney. Suitcase Royal are back with a brand new show (and beards). Faisceau d’epingles de Verre looks stunning but that could just be clever publicity photography and a little bit of inside knowledge tells me that Y, by Ming Zhu Hii will be worth getting out to see.
My point is that Next Wave is the festival where you’re likely to see the new talent we’ll be hearing from in the coming years. If you wanna be ahead of the game, looking back over the history suggests that getting along to Next Wave is a safe bet at seeing a glimpse of the future.

Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano

Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano
Stuck Pigs Squeeling
Theatreworks
Until June 18

Into every generation of artists are born a handful of uniquely talented people, people who change the way we look at the world. This generation it’s Lally Katz and Chris Kohn and we should count ourselves lucky that they found each other to work with.
I’m not going to bore you with a trite recounting of the plot (I’ll leave that to certain other reviewers.) It would be impossible to do justice to a story as complex, deep and beautiful as this in a three hundred word review anyway.
There’s always been something unique but hard to define about Lally’s writing. Since her emergence from the VCA’s Creative Arts School experiment, her plays have always seemed to hold something back. Behind the whimsy and craziness and dead people, there’s a sinister promise. In LK and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano that promise comes to fruition. Lally’s writing has evolved into a style all her own. Fairytale fantasy and adventure have become her tools rather than her subject matter. If you think you know what you’re in for with the divine Ms K, guess again.
And what can you say about the direction of Chris Kohn except “why aren’t there more directors like Chris Kohn?.” I wanna compare him to Barrie Kosky and Jim Sharman except Kosky’s a prig and I’m too young to know Sharman well enough to say. Like them though, I don’t doubt that when the book is written about the Independents, Chris will get a chapter all to himself.
The performances are all so strong I don’t really want to single any out. They all do a fantastic job. I do have to point out Luke Mullin’s though as the world renowned detective Lally Katz (that’s all I’m saying, don’t wanna blow the reveal.) Luke is a regular on Chris Kohn’s stage and it’s not hard to see why.
LK and the Volcano will undoubtedly surface on my top five plays of the year list in December.
Just go see it, damn you’re eyes.