television is furniture

Depression's a funny thing

2008-12-17T22:34:00.000-08:00

Ha ha

The Time is Not Yet Ripe

2008-09-16T16:21:00.001-07:00

The Time is Not Yet Ripe
Louis Esson
Presented by Here Theatre at La Mama
Until 13th of September

If one listens too closely to the rhetoric and attends too many forums on the state of Australian theatre one could be forgiven for thinking that nobody ever set foot on stage in this country before The Legend of King O’Malley. The New Wave have become the old guard and our cultural amnesia has set comfortably in now at a blurry distance of roughly forty years.
Thankfully however there remains one or two who have done the set reading and Jane Woollard is clearly amongst them.

It’s a little uncharitable to the author to suggest that Woolard has unearthed Esson’s fine work but before Here theatre’s remarkable production of The Time is Not Yet Ripe, who would have done more than wonder for whom the Prize for Drama was named?

Yet, in 1920’s Melbourne, Esson and his Pioneer Players were the independent theatre movement of their day. At a time when little confidence was placed in the validity of the Australian writer, when few new Australian plays were being staged and fewer published, it fell to Esson with his friends Stewart Mackay and Vance Palmer to champion new Australian writing - would that we had a few more Essons and Palmers with us today.

A lively farcical satire on the nature of modern politics, The Time is Not Yet Ripe pits the daughter of the conservative Prime Minister and her lover, the dilettante radical socialist, against each other in a battle for the hearts, minds and votes of Australia and the electorate of Wombat. Writing nearly a hundred years ago, Esson displays a remarkably prescient understanding of Sound Bite politics. Notably, he also takes the same relatively easy way out as many of our modern political satirists, condemning all politicians as equally as bad as each other. It’s not hard to understand why of course; as doing so leaves the audience feeling like the writer has made a serious political point without actually having had to make one.

Woolard’s direction of the piece is energetic and lively and as the cast clearly have a ball we do too. Kurt Geyer is impressively pompous as Sir Joseph Quiverton, Prime Minister, Ming Zhu-Hii as the ditzy Doris Quiverton betrays a natural intelligence and charm that is perhaps less the characters and more her own and Grant Cartwright as the socialist Sydney Barrett is an hilariously foppish maverick intellectual who manages to passionately stand for absolutely nothing. Particular mention must also be made of Georgina Capper as the delightfully pinched Miss Perkins, secretary of the anti socialist league. Rarely has such a sour faced character been played so sweetly.

The Time is Not Yet Ripe was rightfully given the Green Room Award for Best Ensemble production in the independent theatre category when Here Theatre first staged it in 2006. Given Esson himself grew to dislike the play, erring in his career towards heavier fare, Here theatre’s production might well give him pause to reconsider. At the very least, the revival of this classic Australian play, more relevant now than ever, should be a demonstration to all of us that there was theatre in Australia before the doll.

Danny Episode

Red Sky Morning

2008-09-16T16:19:00.000-07:00

Red Sky Morning
Tom Holloway
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
Until September 27

Having won a slew of awards with Beyond the Neck and Don’t Say the Words, Tom Holloway is fast emerging as one of our rising star playwrights. Good for him.

Red Sky Morning is not one of those award winning plays, or at least it shouldn’t be though it probably will due to the mindless follower nature of our awards bodies. Danny has a feeling, though he can’t check Google because his internet is down, that it already netted Holloway the RE Ross.

Not for lack of talent in the writing however, let’s not get caught up in semantics. Holloway is a very fine writer and this play too demonstrates it. His weaving together of the choppy and broken dialogue is skillfully handled, though it is seriously over used. The test of Red Sky Morning is less a symphony and more a cacophony but writers are sometimes wont to overuse a simple device and drive it into the ground.

More questionable is his repeated hammering of his black dog motif (I wont insult my readers by explaining the tired symbolism). In a play about depression and it’s potentially disastrous amplification in the typically communication paralyzed Australian country family, having each of the characters interact or hallucinate a large black dog just reeks of laziness of thought.

Indeed, typical is the best way to describe the portrayal of depression in each of the characters. Mum’s a physical affection starved alcho who can’t talk to her family, daughter’s troubled young lass who beat the tar out of her best friend at school because she can’t handle the emotional turmoil of her home life and Dad’s a taciturn country type who can’t talk to his family and ends up on his knees in his shed with a gun in his mouth. The shed’s a particularly nice touch of banality in these home and away suicides waiting to happen.

The performances from Red Stitch, as always, are faultless. David Whitely, Erin Dewar and Sarah Sutherland all handle the text like pros and bring a touching humanity to their performances. Whitely in particular approaches heartbreaking with his soft spoken and gentle father. Sam Strong’s direction is at its best in its stillness. Some of the movement is a little awkward but is compensated by the depths he and his actors find in their characters.

Unfortunately in this city of mindless barking sycophants Danny has little doubt that there will be moved silence and the odd bit of discrete weeping in the stalls of Red Stitch over the coming month. Everyone can indulge their empathetic and compassionate sides and have the depression lite experience for an evening. It’s only an hour long so it won’t even be too taxing. Particularly as the trigger never gets pulled so there’s no consequence. Holloway walks us breathlessly to the edge of the abyss and points down into it as if to say, it’s a long way down, and then backs us safely away again.

Red Sky Morning demonstrates no real understanding of depression and consequently offers the audience no insight beyond a surface description of the condition. We all know what it looks like, show us what it is.

Danny Episode

Love Monkey

2008-06-07T19:53:00.000-07:00

Love Monkey
John Paul Hussey
At the Northcote Town Hall
Until June 15

I don’t know if it’s important or not but I never saw either Chocolate Monkey or Spacemunki. It’s just how it is really, either you’ve got a show on or you’re recovering from too many shows, and you just can’t make it to see everything so you sometimes miss the big thing of the moment cause you can’t be arsed to go. You’ll catch the remount, you think, and then never do. Besides, not to put too fine a point on it, despite the publicity, Danny had not heard overwhelmingly spectacular things about either show.

Hence, with a due sense of foreboding, we sat front row at the Northcote Town Hall for the third in John Paul Hussey’s simian trilogy, Love Monkey. The twittering hip people behind us smugly demonstrating in a slightly too loud voice designed to be overheard that “Oh, JP will probably pick on me for some kind of audience participation” did nothing to improve my expectations.

I must say though that “with lowered expectations” is Danny’s favorite way to go into a show. Invariably these turn out to be the best experiences and Love Monkey was not the disproving exception. It’s been an unfantastic run of shows for the last couple of months, hence Danny’s reluctance to review, but the universe threw us a bone and Love Monkey was it.

Regardless of how you feel about monodrama you’ve got to give it up for a guy who can memorise an hour and a half’s text solo. Clever, though not overly clever, use of props and set sit Love Monkey just on the edge of that “Magical Theatre” experience that’s so popular at the moment because we can’t stand to look ourselves in the face and prefer to dance around with vacuum cleaners and the soundscape Hussey’s rant is set to is, in Danny’s opinion, one of Kelly Ryall’s best so far. One hesitates to call Hussey’s characters loveable because you get the feeling that JP isn’t the sort you want to meet in a darkened bar where you can’t see what he’s putting in your drink but there is an undeniably endearing quality to them which, when layered in with Ryall’s world of sound, some slightly less than inspiring digital projection and some cute observations about life makes for an entirely watchable show.

The sign of a great night in the theatre is so often not noticing every agonizing second slouch by and an hour and a half passes in Hussey and co’s company leaving you to bop out into the night whistling Supertramp (and thank god for Supertramp by the way).

The question Love Monkey leaves you with, of course, is which are you? Danny says Intense Dionysian Hobbit.

Danny Episode

Rio Saki and Other Falling Debris

2008-06-07T19:20:00.000-07:00

Rio Saki and Other Falling Debris
By Shaun Charles
At The Carlton Courthouse
Until June 21

Where to start? Should I start with a positive? No? Well, let’s start with the writing then.

Firstly, Shaun Charles demonstrates a remarkably tin ear for dialogue some how managing to capture what people would say in a given situation and then torturing it into a rigid parody of actually human speech. Secondly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a narrative in which so little happens that is so heavily contrived. This characters girlfriend leaves him and goes and hooks up with that characters sister while that character ends up in a bar with the best friend of the first character, as interesting as a merry go round in Geelong.

By the way, incase the plays constant unvaried repetition of this single fact doesn’t clue you in; Rio Saki was known as the Artist of Love.

Directorially the play staggers along without too much intervention though the odd bit of slow mo walking at the back of the stage, occasional significance heavy blocking and an awful lot of unprompted and detached screaming

Detached is, in fact, an excellent word for the performance being given by the six actors involved. Not that they can be blamed. At some point in the rehearsal process ol’ Doc Episode himself would have mentally stepped out for a fag and never come back if he was acting in it. There’s just so little to hang your hat on emotionally. Which is contextually not surprising as the stakes are set impossibly high from the very beginning. It’s not giving anything away to tell you now that Rio Saki is set in a world fated to be destroyed by a meteor strike in four days. Consequently, as an audience member, it’s a little hard to care about the emotional ups and downs of these people on stage as we know that less than a week’s time will see them all ashes floating in space.

The design of the set is quite pretty in that post apocalyptic way but once you’ve taken that in you’re left with nothing to do but wait for the asteroid to hit and wipe us all out.

Danny Episode

Sammy J and the Forest of Dreams

2008-03-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

Sammy J in The Forest of Dreams
At The Bosco
For Comedy Festival

If cute puppets that swear sometimes and take you on a bit of a magical journey that’s a little cynical at the same time, then Sammy J in The Forest of Dreams is for you. If you grew up force fed Disney movies till you wanted to choke on your own ink and paint puke, then you know you’re at home from the very first opening number.
Sammy J, Moosehead recipient and apparently a star of TV’s Spicks and Specks, teams up with award winning puppeteer Heath McIvor to present exactly what you expect from a cute musical comic and a collection of “each cuter than the last” puppets. Sammy J, in an attempt to escape an unpaid power bill, throws himself into a magical portal and ends up in the Forest of Dreams where he meets a succession of forest creatures, takes on the evil king, foments revolution and learns how to be less of a dick.
It’s fairly standard fair plot wise for a fantasy and that leaves us on comfortable ground to sit back and enjoy the puppety fun. The gags lag a little somewhere around the middle of the show which is more than likely due to the need to get on with the plot after a certain point. Of course the Bosco is hellishly hot on a sold out night, which it was and I suspect will continue to be, which probably doesn’t make it easy to keep up that sparkle white musical comedy smile around the thirty minute mark. Never the less, a little comedy paunch around the middle of the show is forgivable as the audience never gets actively bored and I’m probably a hell of a lot more critical than most of the audience who ooohed and awwwed their way right on through.
The songs are catchy, the puppetry excellent and if you don’t come away from the show at least humming Fuck You Disney then you weren’t damn well paying attention.
Of course, we never actually get to see Sammy J get home or to find out if the power company have turned his lights back on, but then I guess that leaves us room for a sequel. It’s a show that certainly deserves one.

Danny Episode

Nightshift

2008-03-20T16:49:00.000-07:00

Nightshift
Phil Motherwell
At La Mama
Until March 23

Nightshift is one of the seminal theatre companies you read about in second year Australian Theatre History, arguably born out of the Pram, at least partially funded by according to Tim Robertson’s book, arguably born directly out of Lindzee Smith and Phil Motherwell.

Like a monster of seventies stadium rock Nightshift reunite at La Mama for a come back gig in memoriam of their fallen leader a year after his passing. With such a sweeping sense of local history attached who could resist seeing the return. After all, in thirty years time, this is what the Melbourne Independents are gonna look like.

And the view isn’t pretty. I mean, these guys were never the beautiful people, but there was a fire of passion in the heart and a spark of youth in the eye back then that look to have both long since been extinguished.

Well, you can’t stay young forever.

Danny held off on reviewing Nightshift to the end out of respect for the gone dentist and his sense of past glory. Plus, also, he’s a slack bastard as I’m sure you the benighted reader are no doubt aware. But now we’re only a couple of days from their close, Danny’s gonna say what he thinks.

I’ll start with the positive stuff. Motherwells writing is extraordinary. Where oh where are the writers that can pull of such blatant down and out aussie battler-ish-ness without seeming self conscious. No where, that’s where. Only someone of Motherwell’s ilk can do it without seeming like a tool. Not only do Motherwells words sing and clash and riff and roll the way only the poetry of the loser can, they have that undeniable ring of authenticity Motherwell earned through really living that life.

But the highest compliment I can pay Motherwells writing is that it manages somehow to still be heard through the appalling acting, the half hearted direction and the general evidence of under rehearsal.

Actors stumble on lines, not once or twice but constantly, songs by Joe Dolce are tunelessly droned, and only one performer is at all watchable (with sonorous voice and giant stage presence from such a tiny body). It’s awful. It’s practically unwatchable. It’s ultimately a tragedy because Motherwells writing deserves so so much more than Motherwell’s directing can deliver.

Danny Episode

Platonov at The Hayloft

2008-03-08T23:04:00.001-08:00

Checkov Recut: Platonov
Antonin Chekhov
The Hayloft Project
Until 16th March

It is sometimes painfully evident that fashion in Melbourne theatre is predictably cyclical. Every few years a new coterie of artists emerges with their re-invented wheels and we all do the “Independent theatre’s been reinvigorated” two step.
And along comes the Hayloft Project reinterpreting the classics.
Simon Stone became the name to know with his purportedly brilliant adaption of Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. He returns to us this year with an adaption of Platonov in a brand spankin’ rundown ex industrial venue out in Footscray.
The venue is grungy and hip, in sight of shipping containers, and makes clever use of converted packing crates and school desks in the foyer. It would all be so exciting if it didn’t have the faintest whiff of been there done that about it. Cautionary words then for Simon Stone should be Wax and Storeroom.
To the production itself - I have to say that even though we’ve suffered a slew of well meaning issues plays over the last three or four years, I still don’t find the trials of bored middle class yobs particularly interesting. Certainly it’s an exploration of the darker side of desire and intellect, but in all honesty, shallow and mean people are shallow and mean people whether they’re brilliantly observed by Chekhov or luridly paraded by E News.
And perhaps it’s just me but isn’t there something a little self aggrandizing about the artistic director of the company, directing the play and casting himself in the main role? Particularly as it’s a role in which he gets to bluster about, be cleverly mean to everyone and snog all the pretty girls. Plus, watching Stone in the star role I just can’t help but think of James Adler’s fatal attraction to Hamlet.
But beyond issues of ego, Stone doesn’t quite pull it off as he’s consistently outclassed by he fellow cast members, though it’s hardly surprising when he’s surrounded by some of the most talented young actors in town, including Jessamy Dyer, Angus Grant and Meredith Penman.
Stone’s best bet would be to concentrate on his skill for adaption and interpretation. It’s not often I hate something enough in the first act to compare it to Don’s Party and then be defending it as genius by the second. But, while we were outside having a cigarette and deciding we should probably stick around (after all we’d come all this way) inside Stone had turned the play inside out with some very clever choices. Suddenly everything I’d thought was a tediously bad decision in the first act became an ironic stroke of genius in the second, forcing us to reflect on the nature of the middle class in Australia, and the range of pitch black emotion that it’s possible for actors to find in desperately uninteresting characters.
A play, and I suspect a company, not for the impatient nor for the general “I don’t usually get theatre” public, but a play definitely worth seeing if you think you know your shit. Ultimately, the word that keeps coming back to me to describe The Hayloft’s Platonov is “Clever”.

Danny Episode

The Bones Love Gringo

2008-03-07T21:56:00.000-08:00

The Bones Love Gringo
Lady Muck
45Downstairs
Already over, if you didn’t see it, you missed out buddy…

I doubt this review will do the guys at Lady Muck much good seeing as how their season’s already well and truly over, but maybe, just maybe, if they’re looking for quotes to put on their next press release, they can come to good old Danny and put up a television is furniture word or two. After all, to the best of director Sarah McCusker’s knowledge, no single other review dragged themselves out of the arts center to see the show and that’s a real shame.

The political imperative behind a David Hicks in Guantanamo play now that he’s out and home and being harassed by Today Tonight is questionable. Given the premise of the piece, two hapless aussies (and I use the term advisedly) blunder about Cuba ostensibly trying to rescue Hicks from captivity seems just that little bit empty when he’s just not there anymore. For the first third, as we’re introduced the comically mismatched characters, the buffoonish Australians, the suave and sexy Cubans, I debated whether there was any point at all in staging this work now and not four years ago when the subject matter was at least topical. However, the longer I watched and let my natural critical instincts relax, the more I reluctantly began to like the characters and care about the story, the more the pathetic ones desperate fantasy of a Cuban life and family seemed so much more vital, the more the stupid ones fantasy of heros and villains seemed more tragic. About half way through it dawned on me with the breaking light that shines only on the very stupid, that this was not a play about David Hicks at all – this was a very clever farce on the Western world’s idealization of the other, as represented by Cuba, communism and the salsa. All the things we think we are not, we think they are. We can’t dance but we think they can dance, we can’t kiss but we think they can kiss, we don’t know how to live but we think they know how to live. What we’re missing is of course that there is no us an them. We’re all just us, we have similar problems and desires affected by our situation. We have our fantasies about them as equally they have their fantasies about us, rich Americans with their furniture stores in Ohio of where ever it was, and that both our fantasies are born of the desire to escape – neatly bringing us back to Hicks.

I longed for the hero to break into Gitmo and discover an empty cell and I sort of got my wish. I wont say more incase it gets remounted, it damn well deserves a remount.

Tom Maclachlan, the writer, worryingly notes that the idea for the play came to him while being interrogated by Cuban lieutenant in Guantanamo bay. The thought of pie eyed Australians brimming full of their right on political outrage who swarming the shores of cuba and demanding to see David makes my skin crawl. Political naiveté at it’s best really, but then I fear I’m one of those folks who thinks political demonstration should be well orchestrated and on a massive and thought out scale to affect any real change. We’ve been conditioned as a society to see anything else as little better than university student posturing (largely cause in the end that’s what a lot of it turns out to be.)

But I digress. Maclachlan has an eye for the ironic and a promising command of the dramatic and these are infinitely more important tools to the playwright than his ideology. However, McCusker’s direction was the must see element of the piece. Practically no set or props or anything fancy, just the beautiful brickwork of the stunning fortyfivedownstairs downstairs theatre, lit amazingly and using every inch of the playing space. It really was a great piece of work, tucked away in the fringe, and it deserved a hell of a lot more reviewers than good ol danny.

Danny Episode

Asylum

2008-02-23T17:07:00.000-08:00

Asylum

Kit Lazaroo

At La Mama

Until March 8

Reviewers are often charged that they have the power to make or break a play. That a bad review from Boydy or Croggon can sink a show with the potential audience. Danny tends to think this opinion is a romantic hang over from an imagined fifties Broadway that never even existed in Australia. But even were this so, there is little chance of a bad review from me having any affect on Asylum as it may already be sold out. After all, when you’re on the VCE list as a certain lighting designer told me, every night is schools night. Ah the surest way to the sweet success each of us strives for - cartloads of disaffected and disinterested teenagers who will sit mostly quietly through an evening at the theatre.

Perhaps this audience is the reason for the simplicity of the ideas contained within.

You may recall that Danny interviewed Ms Lazaroo way back when Asylum won her the Wal Cherry Play of the year. She told me back then that the play was based on the real life experiences of a woman she herself had met and we had a long discussion about the politics of asylum seekers in Australia at the time.

Well, the woman has gone from our shores as has the government that denied her right to be here, but the guilt lingers on in the fashionably left of left Melbourne theatre.

Though the play text itself is far from the worst thing I’ve seen this year, I can’t say I’m convinced it’s worthy of the proverbial swag of awards it’s collected on it’s way to stage. The characters are for my liking drawn too shallowly in favor of presenting the politics of the piece, which would be excusable to a certain extent if it weren’t the politics of the bleeding obvious. Asylum seekers should be allowed to stay in Australia if they want to cause the countries they’ve come from probably are pretty nasty. Wow, phew, thanks for setting me straight there with those cartoon sketches of bureaucracy you substituted for characters.

Not much more can be said of the direction either. Encouraging a kind of vaudevillian mugging from the actors doesn’t do the script any favors and though the transformative element of the set and the use of puppets were engaging to begin with, it rapidly becomes a sterling example of how quickly overuse of a good idea turns it into a bad one.

But what does Danny know, oh reasonable reader. You may perhaps like your politics served over easy with a side of ham, the rest of Australia certainly does. For mine however, I fear that I prefer complex issues to be presented with the complexity and seriousness they deserve. Be you left or right wing after all, over simplification of an issue is a sure way to fascism.

Danny Episode

The Mercy Seat

2008-02-14T20:31:00.000-08:00

The Mercy Seat
Neil LaBute
Red Stitch
Until March 8

Neil LaBute is one of those playwrights that everyone freaking raves about right now. Along with David Harrower, Howard Barker and Martin Crimp he’s one of the top names to throw into pretentious foyer conversation for a short cut to contemporary theatre aficionado cred. These are the names you see on the marquees at the flagships and so these are the names that you see at Red Stitch.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Red Stitch, I really do. Those guys have been going hard core all year every year since 2001 and you just gotta give it up for that. They’re some of the most talented young actors in town and the times they’ve done it right; by Christ they’ve done it right.

Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat however aint one of those times.

I doubt it’s giving away a great deal to note that its set in New York a day or two after the September 11 attacks. In a loft apartment a young executive agonizes over a decision to use the tragedy as a cover under which he can disappear, leaving his family for his boss who he’s been having a three year affair with.

Leaving aside the plays gross misappropriation of the murder of 3000 people to tell a turgid love triangle story, The Mercy Seat is far from imaginatively new ground. I mean, cheating on the wife with the boss? YAWN.

LaBute writes with that choppy, cut off half sentence style that the leading Australian theatre companies seem to think represents good writing these days – provided the writer has an American or English accent. So here’s Doc Episode’s regular whinge of the review: if an Australian playwright wrote this play it would be subjected to three dramaturgical workshops and a staged reading before being told that there was no room in the season for new Australian work. There are any number of Australian writers who can write as well as this so why don’t we stage them.

You could say ol’ Danny’s being parochial when he’d rather see new Australian writers being developed on the big stages, but Danny says it’s the Cultural Cringe and wonders when Australian Theatre is gonna grow the f*** up and take itself seriously.

Danny Episode

Eisteddfod interview unpublished.

2007-07-29T00:05:00.000-07:00

The lunchtime foyer air at The Malthouse is thick with smoke from the new smoke machine the Sleeping Beauty techs are testing next door and the sun pours in through the ancient brewery windows throwing industry tough shafts of light onto the beautiful people below. Deliberately unaware of their artfully chosen locale, not quite in not quite out of the light, they debate re-blocking the last act, suck down creamy weak coffee and wave five dollar salad and goats cheese baguettes at each other.

Through this crowd that says “Look but don’t touch”, comes an unassuming and dishevelled guy who looks more like one of us than one of them. As much as Stuck Pig’s Squealing’s Chris Kohn has the career that we all wanted, national and international tours, fringe awards out the wazoo and a constant stream of critical successes to his name, ya just can’t hate the guy.

Right now he’s remounting his former Melbourne hit The Eisteddfod in the Malthouse Tower room, while assistant directing Criminology as part of his day job (artistic associate at Arena Theatre) also at the Malthouse.

The Eisteddfod, written with the inimitable Lally Katz, first premiered at The Storeroom, received a Green Room award for best independent production, toured to new York to play at Vallejo Ganter's PS122 and Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre and has just come back from Sydney after playing Downstairs at Belvoir.

See what I mean?

Danny asked Chris how things went in Sydney.

“The show itself went really well but we had trouble getting audiences. We had three really good reviews that all came out the week we opened, the buzz was great, but by the second week we were playing to ten or fifteen people a night. Those were also two of the rainiest weekends ever in Sydney; everywhere was flooded and there were warning signs up saying don’t leave your house if you can avoid it.”

Which only proves Sydney audiences don’t know what’s good for them.

Danny was among the hip few who saw The Eisteddfod’s original Storeroom production back in 2004 and wondered how different the remount in The Tower was.

“It’s pretty much the same apart from the small things we wanted to tighten here and there. There were scenes that we thought weren’t pitched quite right and Jethro (Woodward) has been working on the sound design. It’s mostly just fine tuning, we weren’t trying to re-invent the wheel. When we took the show to New York we didn’t have the full set and we’d made it fifteen minutes shorter to make it neater dramaturgically. This time we looked back over the DVD of the original and decided we liked the slight messiness of the dramaturgy, so we’ve taken it back to the original.”

The set Chris is talking about is one of the highlights of the play, a self contained unit that operates using all the clever theatrical devices Stuck Pigs are known for.

“The set was developed along side the play. We had it before we even had the completed script.”

One of the obvious changes is the replacement of Jessamy Dyer with Kath Tonkin. Danny can never resist the gossip and had to ask what happened?

“Jess is studying full time to become a speech pathologist and this is her final year, so there was no way she could do it. We looked around and were lucky enough to get Kath on board.” So now everybody knows and it’s no where near as gossipy as we’d all secretly wondered.

So, Chris, why should a jaded Melbourne Theatre goer come see The Eisteddfod at The Tower?

“A lot of people haven’t seen it really. The last time it was here was three years ago and The Storeroom only holds something like sixty, so the season here gives us a chance to reach a whole new audience. Also you get a very different audience to The Tower than you do to The Storeroom or a basement in North Melbourne. It’s a really intense, sad, funny little piece. It all happens so quickly it’s like a roller coaster. It plays with expectations of the audience. I’ve never gotten bored of it myself and I’ve seen it hundreds of times. I dunno. People might hate it.”

Danny doubts that. He’s sure, even if the rains start washing up oil tankers on Williamstown beach, Melbourne audiences are a damn site tougher than Sydney, and won’t let global warming make them miss out on what is a damn fine production.

Danny Episode

holy god there are still people out there

2007-06-20T18:36:00.000-07:00

which i guess means clearing out their stream list isn't a big priority.
But nice to see everybody here. Thanks.

I see a certain Parachuting Playwrite is an early adopter by the way. Video. Nice. Every day in every was i get a little more MySpacey.

I've still been thinking about the whole who were the ITheatre ITcrowd. Never know, might make a good book some day. One of those low cost low print run things that only the people mentioned in it, uni students and young hopefuls ever buy. You know, like performing the unnamable or the pram factory book.

From memory here's who i remember the critics and pundits going bitch spastic about. Aside from our goodselves of course dear readers. Angus Cerini, Lally Katz, Chris Kohn, Ben and Todd, Chris Bendall, the black lung kids, Jane Bodie. Who else did we always hear a lot about?

Jah is changing All

2007-06-19T04:30:00.000-07:00

Hello dear abandoned and by now non existent readers. I do abandon you for great stretches at a time don’t i. don’t feel bad, I’m sure my closest friends feel the same way, don’t you oh blog readers.

Anyway, Danny hasn’t been out to see any shows for a while cause frankly he just couldn’t be arsed. Not that there weren’t good things going on, though to be fair, not many took his fancy, and not a hell of a lot has really happened in this neck of the woods, well, nothing worth bloggin on.

well, danny feels the need to rant and has decided to grace your deck with his presence.

What’s been going on lately? well, everyone had a great time proving just how hard core and unshockable they were over the pillowman. oh so it was trying so hard to be shocking, and it kept telling you how it was being shocking and I was only shocked at the obvious direction. So what? So it wanted to be shocking. So what if it wasn’t. Would a regular person have a good time watching it? That’s all regular people wanna know. Is it any fun? Everyone’s so serious these days. Relax Australia.

Danny has spoken.

and it struck me suddenly “where the hell has everybody gone?” is it me, of has the intense crowd of people all seeing each others shit and knowing that it was their duty as artists to really let themselves feel what they were feeling totally just up and fucked off?

Some body tell me, if any bodies still out there, who’s the hot young thing right now? No answers from the head please. Who’s the writer/director/company out there who you react to with your gut? That you really wanna work with and wanna fuck.

And whose it been in the past, interesting question. Oh I hope there are a couple of people out there who still read this, I’d like an answer to that. Who’s been the hot young thing since 2000?

Boydy? You’d have to have an opinion on that, surely.

how freaky has the weather been lately? blowing oil tankers up on shore and rolling fog all day over the city.

Grace

2007-03-10T17:01:00.000-08:00

Grace

God Be In My Mouth

@ Theatreworks

Till 25^th March

It’s been a long time since I saw anything that James Brennan’s God Be In My Mouth have done, but the last thing was the staggering Piglet (with Lucy Guerin) out the back of his house in his garage. Piglet, as anybody who was anybody in 2001 will tell you, was spectacular for its imagery and for the site specific thang everybody was doing back then.

Grace, as the programme says, is GBIMM’s first production in a regular theatre. Gossip after the show suggests that it was meant to be on a rood top somewhere (I know another company who’s done a show on a roof top actually…) and I think it’s a shame that it fell through. I don’t think the piece is terrifically served by the theatre. It’s not sabotaged by it either, but in theatreworks Grace becomes just another experiment in surreal ritual story telling.

Brennan’s imagination is certainly not constrained by the space but it’s not really assisted by it either. The collection of bizarre orphan school children (wonder which of them went to Xavier), three giant bird people and a crazy rich old uncle who goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure the children stay together has a lot of promise but seems to have been rushed to the stage.

So, if weird for the sake of weird is your bag, then Grace may well be for you. If nothing else, Luke Mullins characterisation is totally entertaining and at least worth the price of the ticket. But maybe not the uncomfortable god damn seating in theatreworks

Danny Episode

The Spook

2007-02-24T13:38:00.000-08:00

The Spook
Melissa Reeves
At the Malthouse
Until March 10

For those of you who didn’t see it last time The Spook is the story of one naïve young ASIO agent, Martin, who is recruited right off the football team and sent in to infiltrate the communist party’s South Bendigo Branch.
Thrilling as that sounds, I have to say, it’s not my cup of tea. It skims along the surface of its subject matter, neither being too funny nor too dark, all in all remaining a rather safe look at espionage, paranoia and betrayal in Australia in the sixties, and by inference now. That it won three Awgie awards and the Louis Esson prize tells you more about the people giving out the award than the play itself.
But perhaps that’s a bit harsh. As a tent buddy from a different war recently told me, reviewing is consumer advice, and with that in mind I can confidently say that the consumers packing the Merlyn on Thursday night seemed to be having a ball.
Though we did all leave very quickly afterwards.
Luke Ryan is convincingly sympathetic as Martin, Margaret Mills is a delight to watch whenever she’s on stage and Kevin Harrington is doing a roaring trade in the uptight dorky rural local. Curiously Alison Bell’s comic sensibility is underused as Martin’s wife and only finds it’s outlet in her brief appearances as one of the Communist party members.
Beautiful Tom Healy, who I love like a next door neighbour, as director brings out the pathos of the piece deftly but in doing so sacrifices some of the humour and the together with the cast swallows the button to nearly every scene.
The Spook finds its audience in those consumers who are most comfortable with the familiar, so that makes them largely middle aged, moderately educated and partially politically aware. If were a little to young to vote for Whitlam, but just the right age to maintain your rage, then The Spook is no doubt right up your alley.

Green Wolf

2007-02-24T13:36:00.000-08:00

Green Wolf
By Michael Healy
At The Carlton Courthouse
Until march 10

Well, I can’t find an entry on Wikipedia for Green Wolf so I can’t tell you if they were real or not, but in the story Michael Healy tells, they are a young, idealistic and headstrong group of eco warriors in Germany who are sliding towards using terrorism to make their point.
I can’t tell you properly what their point is because the show doesn’t throw any light on to it.
The script isn’t terrible though in Doc Episode’s opinion it needs a couple of redrafts to deepen character, polish dialog and fill out the gaps of what we don’t know about green wolf. Who they were and what they believed in are important questions. It’s clear the writer knows the answers, but we need to know them too.
Now, much as I like Xan Colman as a person and much as I respect what he’s trying to do with A is for Atlas, I struggled to see his influence on this show. Sometimes you see a show and you wonder, was this directed by conference call? That’s the feeling I had with Green Wolf. I felt like for the most part the actors were left floating in the empty well of the space with little connection to the story or their characters place in it. The only one who does a decent job is Bruce Kerr and that’s only because he’s being Bruce Kerr.
The design doesn’t help that feeling either. If you’re gonna go for stark, it’s gotta be a lot starker than that for me.)
Over all, it’s a shame cause I think there’s a good story in there and these are all talented people. Just needs more work.

2007-02-12T02:16:00.000-08:00

Detest

Angus Cerini

At the Carlton Courthouse

Until feb 17

I don’t understand why Angus Cerini isn’t more famous.

I mean that. If all the people in this town who act like they know something about art actually did, then Angus Cerini should be headlining the snobby international arts festivals all over the planet.

All over the planet he’s been certainly, but I’d hazard a guess it’s been at his own expense.

Detest is another stage in the development of a one man work that incorporates dance and text, permutations and elements of which we’ve seen in his fringe festival and full tilt productions.

Angus is a living example of what can happen when an artist spends years crafting a piece. If you can’t look at Detest and see the value of development then you’re probably an Ozco board member.

He politely introduces the show like you would a new girlfriend to your grandma. Then the show starts and it growls, snarls and roars like a tortured animal. Voice overs of Angus talking play over Angus actually talking on stage and he’s been working at the same piece for so long that he weaves in and out of the pre-recorded text so naturally you don’t register the jarring difference between recorded voice and the real thing. There is no difference and that alone is an amazing thing.

Angus Cerini has been a name that the hip crew have known since the indy scene began, and because either the doyens of culture in this place haven’t clued in or they’re too reluctant to vacate their place in the avant guard sun, he’s remained an insider name.

So if you really want to see an artist at work in the theatre and you wanna impress your date by taking her to where the it crowd are, go see detest.

And now we find he can play the piano too.

Not sure about the singing tho. We’ll see where he takes that I suppose, but I thought the piano was enough.

Danny Episode

when i say shotgun, you say wedding

2007-02-03T01:04:00.000-08:00

So,

For those of you not in that particular circle, a minor flurry was recently created amongst the theatre writing community in melbourne with an article pubished about Chris Taylor from the Chaser getting writing his first play for STC's Wharf2Load programme.

I say a minnor flurry in hopes that it will conjour the image of a coup of chickens getting the wind up them, feathers literally ruffling, cause that's what these things always seem like to me.

No names of course but there are those of us out there who still put pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard in order to crank out an item the world reluctantly calls art who have taken outraged offence at Dead Ceaser. Not the play itself, cause it's in sydney and we're all here in melbourne. But more the fact that cause he got drunk in a bar with Brendan Cowell and wrote for the chaser he get's to have the first play he's ever written staged at the freakin STC.

And then to say in his interview that he doesn't even like theatre, that it's nine out of ten times a bad night out just makes me wonder what the hell we're all doing here.

Now, Brendan, from the way people role their eyes when they talk about him, seems what australian's call a bit of a wanker. I imagine him as being the arthooligan Hoover from Spaced if anyone other than Viscious and the chef have seen it. So i can understand a bit, but Chris Mead is an inteligent guy by all accounts. What's he doing using STC's development programme to give some guy off the TV a leg up into the industry. If there's that few decent new play writes in sydney there's plenty down here in melbourne that can't get work. Employ one of us. God knows it's not for want of flying up to sydney for the day and "dropping in".

And let's face it, The Chaser was garbage. Painfully undergratuate immitations of The Daily Show. And Danny doesn't much fancy the Daly show either.

So, i said i was gonna review what was going on and that's what's going on.

What do you faithful handful of people think?

I'm danny episode
It's not the heat, it's the humanity.

honestly jeffery look at him

2007-01-30T00:59:00.000-08:00

he's a brittle hollowed out shell of a man. why would what he have to say about me make the slightest impact on me. he's a fade out. he's a down grade. he's a whore.

That'd set the cat among the pigeons.

Really, jeffery, if you're going to insist on speaking to me in that fashion you really must try and make a stronger attempt at making sense

The Golem of Ruckers Hill

2007-01-29T03:59:00.000-08:00

The Golem of Ruckers Hill
At the Northcote town hall
Already over (if you missed it, yah sux to you)
Platform Youth Arts

Well, let’s start with title, I love the title. I can’t help but hear a croaky old woman from the forest around a camp fire going “der GOLem? You want to know about der GOLem?”
Director, devisor, I don’t know what the hell you call Michael Camileri? Sorta puppets, sorta acting, kind what? Following the vertigo inducing way Camileri’s imagination seems to leap about the place I think may have given me whiplash.
Before I get to far into this let me point out that all that was intended to be positive. There’s a boy who knows something about something.
The roving performance thing was handled really well and really simply by following the dude with the bell, which freed the audience up from thinking about moving about, enough to allow Camileri’s mind to bubble out at them, literally in glowing white bubbles.
I dunno how he does it. Third eye maybe.
Cramped conditions though, thought I was gonna have to squash in next to a certain actor I’m slightly freaked out by.
Script wise, I wasn’t too fussed to start with really. But somewhere about half way through I noticed it wasn’t important. When you see what they do in the “mayors room” as the golem looses control and starts killing people, you’ll see what I mean. But, I gotta say, it took three guys to come up with that script? Three talented guys I might add. Something in that process isn’t working out.
But like I said, when you’re in the mouth of the golem you so aren’t gonna care what was said. Oh, I didn’t get to do my great bit of how it took the myth of the golem and used it to look at australia’s resurrection of the anzac image as propaganda. Well, probably best not really.

feckn ay i've figured out how to post again

2007-01-29T03:33:00.000-08:00

oh gentle reader. Oh hopelessly abandoned reader.
Oh probably sodded off to read alison or mink shoe or boydy or ben or a countless thousand other more reliable melbourne theatre bloggers out there.
Danny's been busy of late and hasn't been out to see much and didn't think he wanted to get online and ramble or rant at you until he had something worthwhile to say.
Well, sod that. everyone else seems to be able to get onto this thing and say whatever the hell they want, why should i then refuse you, oh discerning, patient and forgiving reader, the benefit of my boundless wit and reparte. Someone correct my spelling, it's the only way i'll learn.
I mean, afterall, some damn interesting things are happening at the moment, who cares if there aren't any shows you fancy, there's still plenty to talk about.
So, there you have it, my declaration. If i can be @rsed and i can remember and there's something interesting worth talking about, i'm gonna review that.
One of those things is saucier. it's a blog that i've only just bloody figured out how to link to. There's something interesting happening over there. food as life as play on the net. go. read it. Danny commands you.
Oh yes, i meant to explain, i also haven't blogged cause it's been so long since i had, i'd forgotten how to. ta to the chef for that. legally it's her fault i'm back. I'm sure she can be held to that.
I'm emailing the five people i know who've read this thing at least once and saying i'm back.
which reminds me, i really must link to mink shoe.
someone remind me how to do that.
Go read saucier if you've got any sense of taste at freaking all people.

Tragedia Endogonidia BR#04 Brussels

2006-10-16T22:20:00.000-07:00

Tragedia Endogonidia BR#04 Brussels

Societas Raffaello Sanzio

At The Malthouse

Until 28 October

It never ceases to amaze me the unmitigated crap you can get away with calling art if you’re from another country.

Perhaps I’m getting old but I just find that a series of what were little more than visual non sequiturs, isn’t enough to hold my interest anymore. I find there must have some kind of story being told, some kind of effort to communicate to me as an audience member or I begin to wonder why I’m there.

So, in order, a woman mopping the stage, a baby and I think a robot head, an old guy in a bikini who puts on robes and then a police uniform, police investigating a crime scene, police beating the living hell out of some guy, same dude in a body bag, a rhinoceros child in a top hat, a balding woman pulling out a tooth and the old dude sinking into a hospital bed. If any one can tell me what the hell that was all about then please write care of the studio.

All the images were very beautiful to look at but my sense is that this show is not only about aesthetics. And I know that one can read it on a surreal level, say that the bizarre unconnected images are the beaten mans subconscious made manifest, or whatever. I just find these things tenuous. Especially given that there is no way any self respecting critic would go out on such a limb for an Australian company.

I suspect however, judging by the audiences slavishly fashionable response that the self consciously intellectual among us will adore BR#04. For you though, dear Beat readers, Danny says go check out something at the black lung instead.

Danny Episode

Yumi Umiumare

2006-10-16T22:18:00.000-07:00

this interview published in beat as Butoh Queens (what a title, i dont come up with these things of course)

Danny Episode

It’s a grey, climate change warm Melbourne Sunday and Danny’s sitting on the back stair to an abandoned building from an empty car park in the industrial heart of Richmond. The pub where we planned to meet is still closed and I just can’t stomach the idea of entering the vic gardens shopping center, the giant Ikea sign dominating the horizon is just too much marketing for this reporter.

And somehow the gunmetal end of the world sky and the trashed and empty factories seem like the perfect place to be talking to Australia’s butoh diva, Yumi Umiumare. For the foremost performer of an artform which grew out of the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as the dance of darkness, Yumi is bright, cheerful and a joy to talk to.

But I’ll admit it, Danny’s a big fan.

Yumi is performing as part of the new Spring Dance season at dance house as a double bill with Kitt Johnson. Here’s what she had to say.

“I am doing my short solo Dis-Oriental, which I did in The Performance Space in 2004. I did a part of this project with Rakini Devi as Woman In Transit and I wanted to revisit that piece. Kitt was the main performer, I mean not main, but she's an amazing performer who I met in Copenhagen in 2003. She invited me to the post Butoh festival in Copenhagen and she did her own show, as well as curated the whole festival. They had a forum about “What’s Butoh Now” kind of thing. Butoh’s main time was sort of in the 80s and 90s and in Europe they think its slowly changing. They think it has been transformed a little bit, so Kit has also had an influence from Butoh and has worked with Japanese Butoh performers and also German expressionism. So she was creating her solo work ages ago, 25 years or something and she’s a very established performer, very busy person, travelling around the world doing her show. But because I met her and she invited me to her festival, I wanted to invite her here and at last Dance House got a bit of funding so we can bring her over.”

Kitt’s performance, called The Mirror, shares the second week with Dis-oreintal.

“It’s the full scale performance, like 55 minutes, performance. She’s going to bring a Danish musician, live music and a lighting technician. So the three of them are coming from Denmark. Kitt is already here. So this is kind of a double bill, two performers, but I call myself an entrée for kit, I’m performing for her.”

I can’t miss the opportunity to ask what Yumi thinks of Butoh now in the new millennium.

“Some people are still doing it like the first generation of butoh people, now in their 50s or 60s … Kazuo Ono is one of the eldest butoh performers in the world, I think 97 or 98, but he’s still dancing on wheelchairs, so there are definitely people in the first generation still doing it in their own way. But since they invented it, in the late 50s and 60s, lots of second generation, third generation performers have been making up their own style. Society has changed. When butoh was made there was lots of social reaction about Americanisation after the war and the 60s, it was generally a very exciting time, a very political time too. So butoh started, in a way, like a revelation. It was about opening up your own identity, the national identity, agony and difficulties. That's why they called it the dance of darkness to start with. But I think we have got lots of chaos of the social context in a very different way now in the 21^st century. I think butoh now, for me, is so many diverse performers you can’t say this is butoh and this isn’t. For me butoh is one of the few artforms that can create whatever it wants, which is dangerous too.”

2006-09-26T19:06:00.000-07:00

The Winters Tale
11^th hour

Right well, I can’t say for certain the winters tale is still running, I can’t find any damn details on the net, no company website, no listing, jack, and I’m pretty dern sure beat’s about to be packed with fringe rubbish so I’ll keep this short.
My biggest criticism of the 11^th hours winters tale is of Shakespeare himself. Sorry Billy, but that ending has just got to go. He killed her, he can’t have her back no matter how many enchanted statues you throw at us in the last ten minutes. It feels like an American re write, take it out.
Yes I know Bills dead, doesn’t mean he can’t take a bit of advice.
That said, the play is entertaining, light, a fairytale, and that’s how 11^th hour tackle it. A little girl sits alone in her room and reads the characters to life. It’s not a brilliantly original idea, but its at least a familiar one. Puts you in that wizard of oz place.
There’s always been something a little off putting for me abut the 11^th hour. It’s one of those indy theatre companies that came out of pro theatre makers so they’ve got David Tredennick and Greg Stone up there on stage. Its not something your average independent theatre company can compete with.
Hmm, this was supposed to be a positive review. I did enjoy myself
They’re great, let s not beat about the bush. Everything they do is confident and self assured and professional. They’ve got their own theatre for crying out loud. The acting, the direction, the design, it s all professional and very entertaining. If that’s your thing, great.
I really go to theatre for more than just entertainment i think. I’ve got cartoons on dvd for that.

Danny Episode

interview with sally mckenzie

2006-09-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

It’s the five o’clock rush hour and Danny’s hunkered down at the counter at Pellegrini’s feeling the ghost of Joanna Murray Smith breathing down his neck. Casting furtive, ‘I’m not sure I should be here’ glances at the door, waiting for writer/performer Sally McKenzie to arrive. All he knows is that she’s down from Queensland for the day to promote her fringe show, Episodes, and she has red hair.

She bursts through the door, orders a coffee and casts that ‘now, where’s this guy I’m meeting, I wish I’d asked what he looked like’ look around the café. She spots the mini-disk recorder and mic in front of me and makes her way over.

So, tell our readers about your show Sally…

‘It’s a multi media piece with lots of video queues and its set in the future. It makes a comment about technology and the effect that its having on both the way we communicate. It poses the question of what happens when everything we access is voice activated, prompt systems, what happens when the language breaks down. So I think its kind of a harrowing.’

Most people feel that way about their phone company’s IVR anyway. Episodes has been performed already at the Brisbane fringe. How’d it go?

‘The audience reaction we had in Brisbane seemed to be “it’s a very strong piece but it also has a lot of humour in it.” I think that needs to be said and its not obvious humour. It’s a dark comedy, and I think it’s pretty dark, but it has got a lot of sort of strong comedic elements to it.’

Sally developed Episodes with playwright Janis Balodnis as dramaturge. ‘So it’s gone through the usual developmental drafting process. Well, usual for some.’

‘It’s a one woman piece, but a lot of characters appear on video screens.’

At the narrative centre of the play is a domestic communication unit that receives all phone calls, all mobiles and all emails, and comes up via video.

‘It also has immersive virtual environments for when the character goes outside, so we’re asking the audience to take an imaginative leap, and then we’re back in her apartment again.”

“We find a woman in a very tense time of her life. She interacts with her lover and her daughter by the video communicator, the domestic communication unit, the DCU. The characters come in via screen and a series of prompts. So by virtue of the fact that you set up a dramatic situation like that, and then allow the audience into that world, you can make comparisons with or draw conclusions about how we are interacting with the rest of the world. How you can be intimately involved with someone in Oregon but not know your neighbours. Yes, that is the future and this is the global world that we live in.”

It occurs to Danny that he’s listening to Sally through a mic into the mini disk, planning to type it up and email it to his editor to be printed for you the reader. Mediated communication is already something we’re very familiar with.

‘Lets face it, it’s a great tool. So as far as it being a global world, I think it really is that, and as far as might be, being closer to someone that’s geographically thousands of miles away than next door, I guess that is the future. As long as we communicate through technology, it will continue to be so. I suppose with the advent of video phones, we might think we’re actually getting closer to people. It’ll be interesting to see what public face they’ve got and what series of layers that we’re going through, of filters, of communication.’

The Hive

2006-08-28T15:27:00.000-07:00

The Hive
Sam Sejavka
Chamber Made at The Meat Market
Until 10 Sept

There’s something about Sam that all the quirky Melbourne theatre writers owe a debt to. The excentric or fried, Lally Katz, Dario Va Circa, James Adler, and yes even me too. Wether we know it or not, we’re the heirs of his playwrite as rock star cool.

I tell you that because I want you to understand that the problem I had with The Hive wasn’t the writing.

After all, I could barely understand a damn thing that was being said. Sung.

I wanted to like this show, I really did. It’s a modern opera by chamber made, it’s reinterpretation of a classic Sam Sejavka script, I should have left that place with my brain buzzing.

Let’s get right into what I hated shall we?

Up and coming genius composer Nicolas Vines. Stop telling this kid he’s a genius. It’s not doing him any good. He’s clearly talented but the more you tell him he’s brilliant the more he’ll think he can get away with anything.

I get modern composition, I really do. Atonality and dissoncance, I love it. But I also get balance and contrast. The score for The Hive is all dissonance all the time. And after half an hour of it, the rest’s just white noise. We want a god damn melody. Once. Just once.

Even Stravinsky can’t be Stravinsky all the god damn time.

Anna Tregloan’s design is pretty if not really exploring an idea very deeply, but who can blame her, is there nothing in this town that she doesn’t do the design for at the moment?

I can’t realty comment on the direction because I didn’t notice any and as I say, the delivery of the text meant I didn’t understand a single word so I can’t really review the play. The original text however is probably still available from currency and is well worth a read.

Danny Episode

Construction of the Human Heart

2006-08-28T14:30:00.000-07:00

Construction of the Human Heart
Ross Mueller
The Tower
Until Aug 21

Okay, so it’s over and I missed reviewing it for publication. There's things to do.

I’ll admit it, after all the god damn hype around the thing, I didn’t think it was that great. I mean, it was good, don’t get me wrong, but after it premiered at the storeroom last year, everyone was like, oh my god, have you seen it, you gotta go see it.

Well, I didn’t go see it then. I had something on. That happens in this place.

And I really hate that. That I go to the remount of a show that every one said was the shit and come out going, well it was okay but…

There’s nothing in it to fault, well perhaps that even without having seen it’s original, it was obvious that they’d recreated the storeroom production in the tower. Other than that, it’s great. Todd MacDonald and Fiona Macleod, well, everyone knows they’re meant to be on stage together, from ride to construction. The direction is Brett Addam’s subltly geometric movement, Casey Benetto’s voice over just quirky enough and Ross’s writing clever and approaching it’s peak. I say approaching cause I know what’s coming and it’s gonna be good.

So perhaps that’s it’s downfall. In the storeroom you’re no more than three seats away from them, they’re spitting on you, the rage and pain washes straight over you in that confined little room, and the towers too big. We’re just too damn far away from it it get it’s full impact. This is a story of humanity and you gotta be able to get up close to understand.

Danny Episode

Festen

2006-08-09T20:05:00.000-07:00

Festen
Dramatisation by David Eldridge
MTC at the Fairfax
Until September 23rd

I've been hanging out to see Festen since some time last year. Mate of mine up at STC told me about watching it play up there (Jeremy Sims as Christian - i think) and seeing the well healed Sydney audience sink into their chairs as the play progresses. Watching them steel themselves, "no, we can do this we can do this" and then, at a certain point in the play, deciding en masse, "nope, that's enough" and walking out.

I'm pleased to say Melbourne audiences are a damn site harder than our northern contemporaries. Not one got up and left. Not a single storm out. Yay for us. You go Melbourne.

Well, the show itself... this is the kind of work i think a flagship theatre company should be doing. We all know that it's based on the Dogma film, conversation at the party afterwards was much centered on how the anarchy of the film translated to a very still and very strong staging. Never the less, the chaos of the story still plays through and very much gets under your skin in that creepy crawly don't you just wanna take a blunt knife to humanity way.

What wonderful creatures humans are.

The return of Jason Donovan to the Melbourne stage as Christian is a delight to behold. This aint the boy next door you remember from Neighbors, this a powerful actor with a deep. deep emotional reserve whose really been to some places since Especially For You.

John Stanton, down from the original Sydney production is the epitome of the bad dad, and rightly so for the guy who played Fraser in The Dismissal. It's also really good to start seeing mates appearing on the MTC stage. Shout out to the wonderful Kat Stewart from Red Stitch and Julie Eckersley.

For me MTC's Festen justifies MTC's The Clean House.

It aint an easy ride but it must be seen.

Danny Episode

back back

2006-08-08T15:02:00.000-07:00

Greetings ladies and gentlemen. Apologies for my disappearance of late but it's been a hell couple of months. There aint been nothing in beat either.
Well, who the hell knows whose reading this beyond Chris Boyd anyway. Ta for the shout btw, and punctuation and spelling be damned. that message was passed on by certain mutual parties as quite the lecture i can assure you. No, I kid and not very effectively. Will do what i can in future but make no promises.
So, where has Danny been that's been so damn important he hasn't been able to blog. Well, apart from anything he's been directing a handful of shows, writing a handful more and jet setting around the country like the international bright young thing he is. HA. If I win a green room for the last show I swear I’ll spit. Pour my heart and soul into something for six years and nothing, churn out the most self indulgent spectacle ever and they roll over and play dead. Nobody knows nothing.
Ah well, there's always use for a big green dildo in my household.
Not like that, geez.
Anyway, busy continues on well into fringe for Danny, so the reviews and blogs will likely come thin and far between.
But I am out to see a couple of things so there should be a few coming, fingers crossed. Festen tonight so perhaps we speak too soon.
Well, good to remember how to use this damn engine anyway.

ttfn
D

Squizzy

2006-06-22T15:19:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-22T15:16:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-19T00:45:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-13T23:05:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-11T23:38:00.000-07:00

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.