tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/stage-9589/articles
Stage – The Conversation
2023-05-11T11:36:26Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/205149
2023-05-11T11:36:26Z
2023-05-11T11:36:26Z
Eurovision 2023: why the stage itself is the silent star of the contest
<p>This week, Liverpool stages one of the <a href="https://eurovision.tv/mediacentre/release/183-million-viewers">world’s largest live televised events</a>, the Eurovision Song Contest. I grew up watching it as an annual family get-together. </p>
<p>Now, as a lecturer in theatre and scenography – the study and practice of how set, sound, light and costume work together in an event – I have come to appreciate the immense logistical effort this entertainment behemoth requires. </p>
<p>More fascinatingly though, it is an extraordinary example of media and performance history, providing a yearly snapshot of pan-European <a href="https://theconversation.com/eurovision-even-before-the-singing-starts-the-contest-is-a-fascinating-reflection-of-international-rules-and-politics-204934">national identities and politics</a>.</p>
<p>While the contest’s rules state that <a href="https://eurovision.tv/about/rules">it is a non-political event</a>, it undeniably puts international relations on display. But while looking at different countries’ acts and voting patterns offers interesting insights, there is a silent star of the event that often goes unnoticed – the stage.</p>
<h2>Staging a nation</h2>
<p>Since the contest’s inception in 1956, there has been no serious discussion about the way Eurovision is an exercise in staging nation, nationality and nationalism in the literal sense – namely how these ideas inform the scenography.</p>
<p>2023 marks the first time Eurovision will be hosted in the runner-up’s country due to war, with the UK hosting on behalf of Ukraine. </p>
<p>The host’s stage set-up must be everything and nothing at the same time. It needs to provide a flexible, adaptable canvas for the wide-ranging individual acts of up to 44 countries. At the same time, it must offer a memorable and distinct experience to measure up to previous iterations of the competition. </p>
<p>The stage also needs to embody that year’s chosen theme, while meeting the extensive requirements of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organises the event, in order to allow the competition to run efficiently.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Inside Liverpool Arena as the Eurovision 2023 build got underway.</span></figcaption>
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<p>2023’s theme is “united by music”. After the UK’s difficult departure from the EU, it now faces the challenge of staging itself as part of a united European community. Meanwhile, it also needs to give space to Ukraine to do the same. </p>
<p>The Liverpool stage’s designer, Julio Himede, has repeatedly offered the <a href="https://recessed.space/00097-Julio-Himede-Eurovision">image of a hug</a> – of open arms welcoming Ukraine and the world – as central to the stage’s spatial configuration.</p>
<p>The early days of Eurovision were a much smaller affair than nowadays. When the UK first hosted in 1960 at the Royal Festival Hall in London, it seated just 2,500 people. That’s less than a quarter of this year’s 11,000 at the Liverpool arena.</p>
<p>And if you have been watching the semi-finals, you’ll already have a good sense of the sheer scale of this year’s stage. At 450m², it is almost as big as a basketball court. With an integrated lighting design through video-capable floor and ceiling tiling and huge LED screens, the only apt descriptor is “spectacular”.</p>
<p>For Eurovision, the concepts, symbols and metaphors underpinning the design have to work in tandem with the creative vision of each delegation, as well as the 45 second turnover between acts in the live show.</p>
<p>The design concept also has to be one that acknowledges the particular situation of this year’s contest and simultaneously unites the identities of Ukraine and the UK. </p>
<p>Ultimately, the image of the hug that underpins the sweeping curve of the main stage space aims to offer a more universal theme, rather than one which is culturally specific. Viewers will notice the “open arms” of the stage are echoed in the arrangement of the “green room”, where the national delegations are located during the show.</p>
<p>In this sense, Eurovision is a prime example of a “soft power” approach to international relations, which works by persuasion or influence, rather than the “hard power” of economic sanctions or military intervention. </p>
<h2>The UK after Brexit</h2>
<p>This year, it will be fascinating to see how much space the UK will give to Ukraine, not only last year’s winner but a nation in need of international recognition and support. And to what extent the UK will use this event, post-Brexit, to stage itself as a welcoming part of Europe.</p>
<p>The UK does have a history of highly successful <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2012/jul/31/olympic-opening-ceremony-agitprop-theatre">agit-prop</a> events, which have engaged audiences emotionally to shape public opinion. Think back to the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2012/jul/31/olympic-opening-ceremony-agitprop-theatre">2012 London Olympics opening ceremony</a>, which strove to inspire <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642529.2014.909674">a sense of national identity</a>. </p>
<p>In 2023, the UK sees itself in the middle of global instability and national tension over <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/16/hostile-authoritarian-uk-downgraded-in-civic-freedoms-index">mounting authoritarianism</a> and <a href="https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/articles-reports/2023/02/07/yougov-cost-living-segmentation">widening social divisions</a>. Once again, it has the chance to use an international stage to put forward an idealised narrative.</p>
<p>In any such example, the stage underpins the entire event. It is essential to the atmosphere for the live audience and fundamental to its appearance on television. </p>
<p>There is no doubt that Eurovision 2023 is a staging extravaganza and will test the UK’s capability to shake off its <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/britain-is-the-sick-man-of-europe-again/">“sick man of Europe”</a> image. It is a stage which offers the UK the opportunity to adjust its global image in line with the contest’s welcoming theme. </p>
<p>It will be interesting to see whether the image of open arms for the world is sincere or cynical.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205149/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lara Maleen Kipp does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
2023 sees the UK host the Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of Ukraine. But what role does the stage itself have to play in the musical spectacle?
Lara Maleen Kipp, Lecturer in Theatre and Scenography, Aberystwyth University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/202566
2023-03-28T12:21:12Z
2023-03-28T12:21:12Z
The Winter’s Tale review: jarring Shakespeare’s Globe production lacks warmth
<p>The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s great “<a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781315757346-11/hospitality-risk-grace-bargain-uncertain-economies-winter-tale-james-kearney?context=ubx&refId=f9bb2210-47ca-429d-8b51-de3e182ea726">hospitality</a> plays” – a <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315612720-12/italian-pastoral-tragicomedy-english-early-modern-drama-robert-henke">tragicomedy</a> about what goes wrong when a guest outstays their welcome. </p>
<p>Leontes, king of Sicilia, suspects his friend Polixenes, the king of Bohemia, of adultery and catastrophe ensues. In keeping with the 16th-century genre, however, the villain is eventually reformed and the friends – and husband and wife – reconcile. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Director Sean Holmes and designer Grace Smart discuss their staging of The Winter’s Tale.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Director Sean Holmes streamlines things in this production for Shakespeare’s Globe, so the action in the kingdoms of Sicilia and Bohemia each revolve around a feast. The audience are invited in to the second but are strictly onlookers for the first.</p>
<p>The opening three acts in Sicilia are played as a dinner party with a “fourth wall” in the indoor space of The Globe’s Sam Wanamaker theatre. Set designer Grace Smart has created a strong, if claustrophobic, design – a tasteful mid-century dining room with a large glass-topped dining table, the back wall modernised with a lick of peppermint green paint. </p>
<p>The dialogue of the diners – Leontes (Sergo Vares), his wife Hermione (Bea Segura), Bohemian King Polixenes (John Lightbody) and Leontes’s son, Mamillius (George Robinson) – is punctuated by discordant string music, announcing the arrival of a stream of Heston Blumenthal-style dishes. The audience are positioned as voyeurs, while the court of Sicilia are reduced to Downton Abbey-style servants anonymously waiting at the side lines.</p>
<p>Cut down to jarringly bite-sized episodes, the production reaches for a more conceptual adaptation. It conveys something of the brittleness of Sicilia’s court but loses much of its complexity and depth.</p>
<p>Dishes continue to be served, through Mamillius’ bedtime story, the truncated prison scenes, birth of Perdita and Hermione’s trial – whether the diners are present or not. </p>
<p>The cuisine morphs from fine dining to takeaway dishes from Deliveroo, as Leontes descends into a jealous rage. Stripped to his underwear, he crawls on the table and chases his friend and servant Camillo (Beruce Kahn) around it.</p>
<p>As Hermione speaks the heartrending lines of her hopeless self-defence: “Now, for conspiracy / I know not how it tastes, though it be dish’d / For me to try how”, she clutches a steaming burger.</p>
<p>Stripped and chopped like this, the play cannot convey the tenderness of the relationship between Leontes and his son, the friendship between Paulina (Nadine Higgin) and Hermione, the concern of Leontes’ wise councillors or the pathos of Hermione’s dignity and despair. It is not exactly clear what is left.</p>
<h2>Hospitality in The Winter’s Tale</h2>
<p>The current political debate around <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/suella-braverman-robert-jenrick-home-secretary-prime-minister-cabinet-b2215331.html">the UK as a place of “welcome”</a>, calls out for artistic engagement with hospitality and its stakes.</p>
<p>An ambivalent art of social and political navigation, hospitality is a play of manners, sustained in the tensions of obligation and reciprocity. Identifying what is real and what is feigned in hospitality is hard. Theatre should be the perfect laboratory for its investigation.</p>
<p>The first scene of The Winter’s Tale, which is almost always cut – as it is here – stages a war of courtesy over whose hospitality is better, Sicilia or Bohemia. Holmes takes the bold directorial decision to stage each kingdom in a different performance space and have the audience move between them. This is the first time Shakespeare’s Globe’s two spaces have been used in tandem in a production.</p>
<p>In the cold night, with a bare and makeshift stage, Florizel (Sarah Slimani) invites the audience into Bohemia, switching on rigged fairy and flood lights. There’s a shared thrill in creeping into an empty theatre after hours. </p>
<p>Antigonus (Colm Gormley) abandons new-born baby Perdita in Bohemia and is eaten by a bear. A baroque but necessary plot device in other productions, the abandonment takes on a different gravitas in the cold open air. </p>
<p>Indoor Sicilia is stiff and uninviting by contrast with hospitable and festive Bohemia, outdoors. The contrast is over-egged, however, which means the dramatic ambiguity of hospitality on which the action turns is lost. </p>
<p>Holmes has an ambitious vision for this production of The Winter’s Tale, but its realisation is a piecemeal tasting menu that is better celebrated in its parts than its whole.</p>
<p><em>The Winter’s Tale is on now at <a href="https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/the-winters-tale-2022/">Shakespeare’s Globe theatre</a>, London, until 16 April.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202566/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Penelope Woods has received funding from the Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is a member of the Labour Party.</span></em></p>
The Globe has used both its theatres in tandem for a single production, for the first time in its history.
Penelope Woods, Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/201018
2023-03-03T14:40:49Z
2023-03-03T14:40:49Z
National Theatre’s Phaedra review: suicide tragedy leaves a bad taste
<p>Suicide is an act so shocking and violent that it undoes not only sensation, memory and feeling, but meaning. Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong describes how it unpicks even the connective tissue of <a href="https://therumpus.net/2022/12/20/the-weight-of-our-living-on-hope-fire-escapes-and-visible-desperation/">language</a>. </p>
<p>The death of my best friend by suicide last summer completely undid me. The experience has changed the way I experience the world, my relationship to myself, friends, loved ones, but it has also changed my relationship to my work. It has forced me to think differently about suicide’s frequent appearances in what we know of ancient Greek and Roman tragedies.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for the National Theatre’s Phaedra.</span></figcaption>
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<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG8eD6UKRTM">Phaedra</a> is one such suicide tragedy. Director Simon Stone is at the helm of a new adaptation for the National Theatre, having previously directed <a href="https://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/Yerma-NT-at-home">Yerma</a> (2016) with Billie Piper, at the Young Vic and then <a href="https://tga.nl/en/productions/medea">Medea</a> (2014), which came to London’s <a href="https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/event/internationaal-theater-amsterdam-medea">Barbican</a> in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/mar/07/medea-review-barbican-london-simon-stone">2019</a>. In both previous productions, Stone has the female lead take her own life at the end of the performance and his Phaedra is no different.</p>
<p>Stone is working from multiple sources: Hippolytus by the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides, Phaedra by the Roman poet Seneca, Phèdre by the 17th century French dramatist Jean-Baptiste Racine and Phaedra’s Love (1996) by British playwright Sarah Kane.</p>
<p>As classics professor <a href="http://edithhall.co.uk/">Edith Hall</a> explains in the National Theatre’s programme, each version portrays Phaedra’s suicide differently in her plot to love and then discredit her stepson Hippolytus by falsely accusing him of rape following his rejection. A second death occurs when Hippolytus’ father kills him, for what he believes Hippolytus has done to his wife.</p>
<p>In all these versions – but especially Kane’s – suicide is an avoidable but seemingly inevitable horror. It is a corrosive agent for the drama, that leaves the characters on their knees, making sounds <a href="https://therumpus.net/2022/12/20/the-weight-of-our-living-on-hope-fire-escapes-and-visible-desperation/">“like an animal that just learned the word for God”</a>.</p>
<h2>Stone’s production of Phaedra</h2>
<p>The National Theatre’s Phaedra is quick witted, acerbic and does some <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/feb/10/phaedra-review-janet-mcteer-simon-stone-national-theatre-lyttelton">light decolonial thinking</a>, but it cannot fathom the ways in which suicide undoes people and their relationships to one another.</p>
<p>Stone changes much of the Phaedra story. Phaedra’s part is distributed among a couple of characters. Firstly, Helen (Janet McTeer), a shadow environment minister who, while studying at Oxford, went abroad to Morocco. There she fell in love with a man and took him away from his family so that he could drink, consume drugs and dream of being a rock star.</p>
<p>Hippolytus is no longer Phaedra’s stepson but Helen’s lover’s son, Sofiane (Assaad Bouab). Sofiane looks just like his father, who died tragically in a car wreck. We hear his voice recordings to his son which play in the long blackouts between scenes, variously morose, loving, macabre and suicidal.</p>
<p>Helen is complicit in this infidelity and her former lover’s eventual death. The play blames her almost entirely, with a long, hateful monologue delivered in French by Sofiane’s wife Reba (Sirine Saba) and translated live into English by Helen’s diplomat husband Hugo (Paul Chahidi) in the final scene.</p>
<p>The part of Phaedra is also shared with Helen’s daughter, Isolde (Mackenzie Davis) – a millennial who would be a good fit in <a href="https://theconversation.com/artworks-are-more-than-just-plot-clues-in-the-white-lotus-season-2-they-are-the-shows-silent-witnesses-196374">White Lotus</a>. Isolde is wracked by white guilt and very upper- middle- class privilege consciousness. Her marriage and NGO are failing. She shares Phaedra’s desire to be <a href="https://www.theoi.com/Text/SenecaPhaedra.html">out in the wilderness</a>, have scraped knees and hoist a bow over her shoulders.</p>
<p>Both Helen and Isolde sleep with Sofiane, producing much of the play’s farcical energy. The scene in a London restaurant that opens the second act is excellent – the audience gasped, feared, pitied and wondered at every revelation, expertly delivered by the ensemble. But it is Helen alone who shares Phaedra’s death.</p>
<p>Excruciatingly, she takes her own life on stage, creating the final image of the play. Sofiane disappears into a heavenly white haze, while Helen sinks into the ground alone, traces of her blood and sweat staining the “glass” box in which the production unfolds.</p>
<p>In Euripides and Seneca’s versions, Phaedra is undone by a god. But Stone’s Helen is a villain driven mad by the guilt of her own actions. “At least”, a <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/janet-mcteer-interview-realised-quickly-never-going-pretty-one/">Telegraph interviewer</a> reports McTeer saying, “Phaedra has the ‘redeeming’ grace to kill herself.”</p>
<p>Instead of implicating us in Helen’s choices and their aftermath, Stone asks us to project our shame onto this “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/jan/21/director-simon-stone-my-heroes-are-women-phaedra-janet-mcteer-national-theatre-billie-piper-yerma">post-menopausal woman</a>” and make her the scapegoat. </p>
<p>I marvelled at the set design and excellent performances. And I enjoyed the skill of the lighting, costume and sound designers, the work of the intimacy director, the speed and determination of the stage managers and backstage team. In minutes, they turned an upscale London living room into a Suffolk field. </p>
<p>However, I found the choice to stage Helen’s suicide as a redeeming act – and the invitation to cheer in the curtain call, just seconds after her death – dreadfully misplaced.</p>
<p>Instead of railing against Helen, I’d like to see a version of Phaedra where the desires of a postmenopausal woman aren’t played for shock and laughs. One that looks at why suicides like this take place and advocates for a world where mental health services are funded and people don’t die in their <a href="https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/research-policy/suicide-facts-and-figures/latest-suicide-data/">thousands</a>. </p>
<p><em>Phaedra is on now at the The National Theatre, London, until April 8.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><em>If you’re struggling with suicidal thoughts, the following services can provide you with support:</em></p>
<p><em>In the UK and Ireland – call Samaritans UK at 116 123.</em></p>
<p><em>In the US – call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or IMAlive at 1-800-784-2433.</em></p>
<p><em>In Australia – call Lifeline Australia at 13 11 14.</em></p>
<p><em>In other countries – visit IASP or Suicide.org to find a helpline in your country.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/201018/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marcus Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
An expert in Greek tragedy can’t get past a seemingly callous approach to suicide in the National Theatre’s new take on Phaedra.
Marcus Bell, PhD candidate, Classical Languages and Literature, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/192421
2022-10-13T10:59:42Z
2022-10-13T10:59:42Z
Angela Lansbury – a storied career sure to touch people for years to come
<p>I never met Angela Lansbury, but she was one of those icons that felt like a trusted friend and family member. Every Sunday evening, I devoured Jessica Fletcher’s activities in Murder, She Wrote – <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086765/">catching the bad guys and saving another poor victim from eternal damnation</a>. The younger generation discovered her as Mrs Potts in Disney’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101414/">Beauty and the Beast</a> and more recently as the balloon seller in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5028340/?ref_=fn_al_tt_0">Mary Poppins returns</a> (<a href="https://variety.com/2018/film/awards/mary-poppins-returns-julie-andrews-1203065856/">a role created as a cameo appearance for Julie Andrews, who turned it down so attention was not taken away from Emily Blunt</a>). Disney considered Lansbury for the original casting of Mary Poppins, so it is fitting that one of her last film appearances return full circle to her earlier Hollywood career.</p>
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<p><em>You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/audio-narrated-99682">here</a>.</em></p>
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<p>Lansbury, who died on October 11 2022, was a constant presence in film, stage and TV for nearly 70 years. She was one of the original Hollywood greats from the silver screen, but she did not fade into obscurity; she worked far longer and harder than many of the starlets of her age, who said no to unbecoming roles.</p>
<p>Dame Angela Lansbury was an icon of the stage and screen, but beneath this strong and lovable figure is a story filled with highs and lows that fuelled her talent and perseverance. </p>
<h2>A star of the silver screen</h2>
<p>Born in 1925 in London to Irish actress Moyna Macgill and politician Edgar Lansbury, the first experience to shape her life came at the age of nine when her father died of stomach cancer, leaving a gaping hole in Lansbury’s life. Finding refuge in the cinema as her interest in school waned, she fell in love with the movies and was able to pursue acting when the family moved to the US in 1940 to escape the Blitz. </p>
<p>Lansbury gained employment at the movie studio MGM, taking on minor roles in many major films, but more importantly, socialised in the world of acting. In 1944, she befriended John Van Druten the scriptwriter for <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036855/">Gaslight</a>, a tale of psychological manipulation (where the term “<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-does-gaslighting-mean-107888">gaslighting</a>” derives from), and was subsequently cast in the role of maid Nancy alongside Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. The film led to her first Oscar nomination. </p>
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<p>Her socialising continued and in 1945 she met and married her hero, actor <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0188673/bio">Richard Cromwell</a>. The marriage lasted all but a year; she was one of the last people to know he was gay. In 1946 she met British actor <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7151929/bio?ref_=nm_dyk_trv_sm#trivia">Peter Shaw</a>, who she famously told after a screentest: “Darling, I love you very much, but an actor you aren’t.” He subsequently left the profession, eventually turning to casting and production. The couple were married in 1949 until his death 54 years later.</p>
<p>Lansbury continued her film career, playing, as she described, villainous parts much <a href="https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/958167/angela-lansbury-5-things-you-might-not-know-about-murder-she-wrote-star">older than her age</a> and appeared in over 40 films. It was not until the 60s that she was recognised as a leading lady and at the age of 41 took on the title role of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcF-WRNLcTc">Mame</a>, winning her first Broadway Tony award. Despite her effort at creating the role, she was rejected by the film studios to play the same part in the Hollywood adaptation, losing out to Lucille Ball.</p>
<h2>Leading roles</h2>
<p>During the 70s, the family retreated to County Cork, Ireland after their Malibu home was burnt to the ground and daughter Deidre had a close encounter with murderer <a href="https://variety.com/2022/film/news/angela-lansbury-saved-daughter-charles-manson-1235400889/">Charles Manson</a>. She limited her work to focus on her family until Disney’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066817/">Bedknobs and Broomsticks</a> delivered her long-awaited Hollywood leading lady role in 1971. </p>
<p>Developed at the same time as Mary Poppins but put on hold due to technical complications, Bedknobs and Broomsticks was originally planned for <a href="https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/72445/13-magical-facts-about-bedknobs-and-broomsticks">Julie Andrews</a>. However, by the time Andrews went to accept the part, Lansbury had already been cast. </p>
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<p>She continued to pioneer new stage roles, notably for Stephen Sondheim as Rose in Gypsy (1973, London premier) and the original Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd (1979 Broadway premiere) leading to a further four Tony awards. In 1980, she met with Andrew Lloyd Webber, who pitched to her the role of Norma Desmond for his new musical version of the Billy Wilder classic film, Sunset Boulevard. The song he used to try to entice Lansbury was later rewritten and became Memory, finally appearing in Cats sung by Elaine Paige. Although Lansbury desperately wanted to play the role she was not considered when it was finally produced in 1993. </p>
<p>In 1991, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast introduced Lansbury to a new audience as the motherly figure Mrs Potts and ironically this was as close as she was going to get to winning an Oscar when the title tune for which she is now famed for singing won best original song.</p>
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<p>In her massively varied career, it was the TV series <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086765/">Murder, She Wrote</a> (1984-96) that established Lansbury as a worldwide household name as the amateur detective Jessica Fletcher, running for 12 seasons. Lansbury holds the record for the most Emmy nominations for outstanding lead actress in a drama series receiving 12 for Murder, She Wrote, one for each season.</p>
<p>Lansbury kept working to the very end. Her final screen appearance will be aired in December 2022 in the Netflix murder mystery <a href="https://www.looper.com/1042609/how-you-can-see-glass-onion-a-knives-out-mystery-in-theaters-before-it-hits-netflix/">Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery </a>. While details of her exact role in the film have not been made public, it will likely have some connection to Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. </p>
<p>Through her iconic roles, Angela Lansbury has left a legacy that will touch the lives of people for years to come – whether that’s as Mrs Potts weaving a “tale as old as time” or as the sleuth Jessica Fletcher. Goodbye, Dame Angela Lansbury.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/192421/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Langston does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
From her role as sleuth Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote to originating some of the most famous roles on the stage, Lansbury’s career was impressive and expansive.
Stephen Langston, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Performance, University of the West of Scotland
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/141821
2020-07-02T13:31:43Z
2020-07-02T13:31:43Z
Paid for digital streaming has a place in theatre’s return
<p>From classic <a href="https://theconversation.com/as-andrew-lloyd-webber-launches-a-youtube-channel-heres-how-he-revived-the-musical-135980">Andrew Lloyd Webber</a> plays to the release of a recording of the original cast of <a href="https://theconversation.com/hamilton-the-diverse-musical-with-representation-problems-141473">Hamilton</a>, theatre lovers have been able to stream the best of the stage at home during lockdown. </p>
<p>Digital streaming has been a welcome stand-in while live performances haven’t been possible. However, as pubs and restaurants start to reopen this weekend, theatre managers have been looking around their stalls and realising <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52632475">how few audience members</a> they can safely get in the building. Crowds of 2,000 are still a long way off, so theatre is likely to stay on our screens for a long time to come. </p>
<p>While streaming has proven popular, making theatre accessible to a wider audience across the country, it raises the question how it can help live theatre’s return and what role it might play once it’s back.</p>
<p>One particular success has been <a href="https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/nt-at-home" title="), which saw the release of free-to-view performances every Thursday night. Around [217,000 people simultaneously watched](https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/tens-of-millions-watching-streamed-theatre-shows-worldwide ">National Theatre at Home</a> its production of Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors. The National Theatre was in an enviable position of having a treasure trove of recorded shows ready to go, thanks to their highly successful <a href="http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/about-us">NT Live programme</a>. The project, launched in 2009, involved the broadcast of their productions to cinemas and arts institutions in the UK and internationally. </p>
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<p>Other theatre companies were not so ready and have had to change and adapt to new digital practices. Some have done this in really inventive ways, such as Sheffield’s <a href="https://www.unshutfestival.com/?fbclid=IwAR2a6WO70X3S9HargCqdDbU2QABF7_jN7MmSzGge9PS9PV8igcbW0e7t9k4">Unshut Theatre</a>. Their 2020 festival features an array of works made for a socially distanced world. Performances are happening through the <a href="https://www.unshutfestival.com/programme/routes-out-a-catalogue-of-resistance">post</a>, by <a href="https://www.unshutfestival.com/programme/plastica-galactica-get-involved">podcasts</a>, on <a href="https://www.unshutfestival.com/programme/youve-got-five-more-minutes">Zoom</a>, on game streaming platform <a href="https://www.unshutfestival.com/programme/build-it-up">Twitch</a> and even <a href="https://www.unshutfestival.com/programme/anxeity-crossing-new-normal">Animal Crossing</a>. Each of these explores new ways to include audiences in the performance when they can’t be in the same room.</p>
<h2>Reaching new audiences?</h2>
<p>With the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-53182634">government’s (controversial) advice</a> that one of the next steps of unlocking the arts will be audience-less performances, we’ll probably start to see more live streaming of shows. They might not be as well-produced as the National Theatre’s recordings but will make up for that in being a communal, instantaneous experience.</p>
<p>As an audience researcher, I regularly hear lots of the reasons why <a href="http://www.sparc.dept.shef.ac.uk/research/uaca/handbook/">people just can’t go to arts events</a>. It’s too expensive, too far, I can’t get a babysitter, I don’t know if it will be any good, I don’t have anyone to go with, I don’t know how to behave, I’ll feel out of place and people will judge me for being there.</p>
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<p>Digital performances have the potential to open up access to the theatre to much wider populations. You can watch it at home after the kids have gone to bed. You can watch it in chunks when you have a bit of free time. If it’s rubbish, you can just turn it off without having to waste any money. You don’t have to be in London or other urban arts centres. And there is no one else in the audience to make you feel like you don’t belong.</p>
<p>We don’t yet know if digital works are changing the make-up of the audience for theatre – but <a href="https://www.indigo-ltd.com/covid-19-after-the-interval-national-audience-survey%5D">research</a> is <a href="https://www.theaudienceagency.org/bounce-forwards-evidence-hub">being carried out</a>.</p>
<h2>Keeping theatre alive online</h2>
<p>While free access to content could be great for building new audiences, this business model is unsustainable. Actors and people behind-the-scenes need paying, broadcast technology is expensive, and without people writing new plays, theatre will stagnate. </p>
<p>There is <a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-for-performers-in-lockdown-online-is-becoming-the-new-live-133961">no real consensus yet</a> on how to monetise online performances while keeping it accessible. However, some have asked for donations for new zoom material, like <a href="https://www.newdiorama.com/whats-on/workfromhome">New Diorama theatre</a> in London. While others are charging a nominal fee, like Sadler’s Wells who is asking for £5 to view a new film of the last rehearsal before lockdown of <a href="https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/2020/dancing-at-dusk-a-moment-with-pina-bauschs-the-rite-of-spring/?utm_source=wordfly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MKTSEG200701Oncers&utm_content=version_A&sourceNumber=14670">Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring in Senegal</a>. </p>
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<p>We’re also in danger of reaching – or already having surpassed – saturation point for online content. Standing out in a busy online world is becoming more and more difficult as productions from around the world compete for audiences. It’s a far cry from the normal choice between a few local theatres.</p>
<p>All this means that we’re at risk of de-localising arts provision. If an unlimited number of people can watch high-quality online performances from the National Theatre, what appetite will there be for fringe theatre made on a shoestring budget?</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/eugeoneirevi.40.1.2019.0087?seq=1">Research</a> shows that we shouldn’t be too worried about digital theatre taking over. The hushed excitement before it starts, the thrill of watching a one-off event, talking about it with friends in the bar afterwards – live theatre has an appeal that is hard to replicate online. However, venues, theatre companies and freelancers <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/globe-theatre-shut-london-shakespeare-south-bank-coronavirus-a9523611.html">need additional support from the government </a> until theatres can welcome back audiences fully.</p>
<p>Where digital works best, therefore, is when it functions not as a substitute for live performance, but as a means of creating work that is only possible via an online platform. Digital work which meets participants where they are (like their Animal Crossing island) and allows them to actively participate on their terms is likely to be a part of life beyond lockdown.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/141821/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Price has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the project 'Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts'. </span></em></p>
Streaming has made theatre more accessible to a wider audience. However, it needs to be monetised and shouldn’t take the place of live theatre, which is in dire need of funding.
Sarah Price, Research Associate with the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre, University of Sheffield
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/108193
2019-04-04T14:06:04Z
2019-04-04T14:06:04Z
Why I got up on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe to explain my research in cabaret
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267582/original/file-20190404-123410-a0kmhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/microphone-stool-on-stand-comedy-stage-1031487514">Sutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Never had I felt such a terror. Not on the day of my wedding, nor the day of my most important job interview. So what was I doing? This was the fear that gripped me last August before I stepped on stage at the 2018 <a href="https://www.edfringe.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_ezo79Ox4QIVTLDtCh2RzAz1EAAYAiAAEgL0qPD_BwE">Edinburgh Fringe</a> to perform my show for the <a href="https://www.beltanenetwork.org/opportunities/cabaret-of-dangerous-ideas/">Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas</a>.</p>
<p>Basically, it’s an academic’s nightmare: you are alone on stage, like a comedian, and for a full hour you explain a “dangerous” idea that you explore in your research to a lay audience.</p>
<h2>Come to the cabaret</h2>
<p>A year in advance you send a proposal of your idea, and a tough panel decides if you have what it takes to thrill an audience. One of the panel, Susan Morrison, is a professional comedian and also your guardian angel on stage; she’s there to support you, make fun of you, and protect you if your idea is too dangerous for some people. </p>
<p>Once I was selected, I realised it would be the first time in my life that I’d performed on stage. In a cabaret show. In English (I am Italian). In front of strangers. Strangers who were not researchers, who did not work in academia. If they actually showed up. Why on Earth did I say yes to this?</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267601/original/file-20190404-123419-ext2dr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267601/original/file-20190404-123419-ext2dr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267601/original/file-20190404-123419-ext2dr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267601/original/file-20190404-123419-ext2dr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267601/original/file-20190404-123419-ext2dr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267601/original/file-20190404-123419-ext2dr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267601/original/file-20190404-123419-ext2dr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Author Anna Sedda on stage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Well, I’d seen the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas, and it seemed an excellent platform to talk to the public about my <a href="https://brainstimlab.hw.ac.uk/publications/lab-publications.html">research</a>. I study body representation – how we imagine our physical body. In particular, I am interested in understanding a condition known as <a href="http://www.biid.org">body identity integrity disorder</a> (BIID), which usually involves a desire to amputate a healthy limb. </p>
<p>I have <a href="https://theconversation.com/new-hope-for-people-obsessed-with-amputating-one-of-their-own-limbs-59184">written about this condition</a> for The Conversation in the past in an effort to fight the stigma that surrounds it. People usually react with disgust when someone tells them they would like to have their left leg amputated. Unfortunately, this means those who suffer from this condition have very little support and often rely on illegal and very dangerous means to obtain their desired body state.</p>
<p>But I cannot fight the stigma by publishing in academic journals, read only by academics. I want to reach real people – a bit like The Conversation.</p>
<p>I planned a set of games involving the audience, asking them to rate unacceptable behaviours, such as eating human flesh or being attracted to their dog, then discuss why these taboo behaviours are accepted in certain settings, such as in TV series like Game of Thrones.</p>
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<p>I wanted the audience to understand that sometimes we react with disgust because this is how our brain is programmed to defend us from harm. Eating human flesh can lead to disease, mating with a dog does not advance the species. So evolution equipped us with disgust. Still, we can learn how to pause before reacting, which helps us to be more understanding when it comes to diversity. </p>
<h2>Stage fright</h2>
<p>I was terrified, but at 1.30pm, with the microphone in my hand and the audience looking at me, something unexpected happened. I did not faint. I did not start crying. The audience was bigger then five people. An hour later, and not only had I survived, but I was on a high, planning how I could develop the show for 2019.</p>
<p>Without spoiling things too much, here’s a taster. I asked the audience to shout out disgusting words. You can try it at home in front of a mirror. If you watch your face you may see your nose wrinkle and the corners of your mouth turn down. You may feel a bit uneasy, and it is unlikely that you will feel any pleasure. This is the power of disgust.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267585/original/file-20190404-123413-16d6e4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267585/original/file-20190404-123413-16d6e4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267585/original/file-20190404-123413-16d6e4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267585/original/file-20190404-123413-16d6e4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267585/original/file-20190404-123413-16d6e4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1003&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267585/original/file-20190404-123413-16d6e4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1003&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267585/original/file-20190404-123413-16d6e4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1003&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Academics get to be a stand-up at the Fringe for an hour.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/illustration-comedian-girl-talking-on-spotlight-1270871419">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The audience had the same reaction. I explained why: even the idea of something potentially harmful or contaminating leads to a physical reaction. Soon the discussion moved to a more in-depth consideration of moral topics that elicit disgust, one example being the condition I study.</p>
<p>Why do we react with disgust? Can we stop this visceral reaction? Should we stop it? The answer to the first question is that we are programmed to react like this. The answer to the second and third questions is a definite yes. By the end of the show, I had the audience promising me that next time they found themselves reacting with disgust, they would stop and think and try to better understand what was in front of them. </p>
<p>It was worth being scared, because I got to share my research with the public, and this way we change the world step by step.</p>
<h2>Crowd surfing</h2>
<p>It is challenging to be on stage for the first time – few are used to it, even if they teach or lecture every day. Things I learned? Prepare properly, you are still a researcher, even if masked as a comedian for an hour, and it is your job to be professional and know your stuff. Leave room for improvising. Have the first part well rehearsed, when things are at their most challenging and you are experiencing peak terror. But don’t overdo it. Leave room for riffing on things as the show continues. You know your topic, just go with the flow. That way you can tailor your show to your audience and the reaction you’re getting.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267584/original/file-20190404-123431-kevgzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267584/original/file-20190404-123431-kevgzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267584/original/file-20190404-123431-kevgzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267584/original/file-20190404-123431-kevgzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267584/original/file-20190404-123431-kevgzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267584/original/file-20190404-123431-kevgzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267584/original/file-20190404-123431-kevgzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">At the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas, the audience is your friend.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/man-appears-on-stage-theater-many-1268916376">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Remember the audience is there because they want to listen to you, and know more about your research. Your task is to share your knowledge so that they leave the room knowing more and interested in changing the world with you. </p>
<p>Work-wise, it improved the quality of my lectures from “I am telling you things” to a more interactive “we are doing things together”. Thanks to the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas I have greatly reduced the number of presentation slides I use, and my students now spend a lot of time talking instead of writing notes. </p>
<p>See you at the Fringe.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/108193/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna Sedda does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
How one academic found the perfect platform to share her research with the public.
Anna Sedda, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Heriot-Watt University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/106075
2018-10-31T05:50:12Z
2018-10-31T05:50:12Z
While I Was Waiting captures the tragedy of the Syrian civil war in Damascus
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243184/original/file-20181031-76408-tqlony.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A DJ provides the soundtrack of Damascus in While I Was Waiting.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Didier Nadeau</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: While I Was Waiting, OzAsia Festival.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Unrest breaks out in a proud and ancient city, its inhabitants are divided against one another, local big shots control neighbourhoods, war rages outside the city gates, and many inhabitants scatter to all corners of the earth. This is not ancient Troy, rather Damascus today.</p>
<p>The tragedy of Syria, which since 2011 has been broadcast into our homes via television, computers, and hand-held devices, is perhaps amplified because the place once looked so familiar to us. This is true especially of pre-2011 Damascus, with its cosmopolitan, well-dressed people enjoying middle-class lives in a beautiful city with attractive, tree-lined streets.</p>
<p>Given what has happened in Syria, that a piece of theatre could be made about the intersecting lives of six people living in Damascus in 2015 is itself the real miracle of this Arabic language production of While I Was Waiting. It was created in Marseilles, France, where a group of diasporic Syrian actors came together with a few remaining in their home country to create this hard-hitting play, crafted by playwright Mohammad Al Attar and under the direction of Omar Abusaada.</p>
<p>Since that time, the play, which received its Australian premiere at Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival, has toured extensively to Europe, the US and Japan. It is easy to understand the play’s international appeal. It is written and presented by very people who themselves are, in the words of Abusaada, “living in that in-between space.” This space, between “staying and going”, is presented in a mode between “documentary and drama,” integrating clips of dynamic and deeply affecting videos taken surreptitiously on the streets of Damascus by Reem Alghazi.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243185/original/file-20181031-76390-1hhhky3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243185/original/file-20181031-76390-1hhhky3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243185/original/file-20181031-76390-1hhhky3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243185/original/file-20181031-76390-1hhhky3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243185/original/file-20181031-76390-1hhhky3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243185/original/file-20181031-76390-1hhhky3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243185/original/file-20181031-76390-1hhhky3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243185/original/file-20181031-76390-1hhhky3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mohammad Alrefai (not in OzAsia production) and Mustafa Kur.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Masashi Hirao</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The play’s action, which unfolds between spring and winter 2015, revolves around each character’s relationship to a young man, Taim (Kinan Hmidan), who, we soon learn, was found comatose in the back seat of a car. Like his friends and family who gather to attend to him, we want to know more, who did this to him and why, but these questions are left unanswered, as they are for those who love him.</p>
<p>At the start of the play, Taim lies immobile on a hospital bed as his mother recites verses. The actor rises from the bed and it soon becomes apparent that for the rest of the play it will be his spectral presence that moves in and around those who gather at his bedside.</p>
<p>In addition to his mother, we are soon introduced to his elder sister Nada (Nanda Mohammad), who had fled to Beirut to build an independent life, his girlfriend Salma (Reham Kassar) and an older friend, Ousama (Mohamad Alrashi) who gets through the day self-medicating with hashish.</p>
<p>At times, the drama was overloaded with unnecessary and cumbersome dramatic questions, with conflicts quickly flaring in predictable ways between mother and daughter, mother and girlfriend, the daughter and the hash-smoking brother’s friend. There is perhaps too much drama over the long-dead father, the making of Taim’s film, which connects the story of the family with the city, and unanswered phone calls on the night of his death.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243186/original/file-20181031-76384-5arxtd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243186/original/file-20181031-76384-5arxtd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243186/original/file-20181031-76384-5arxtd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243186/original/file-20181031-76384-5arxtd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243186/original/file-20181031-76384-5arxtd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243186/original/file-20181031-76384-5arxtd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243186/original/file-20181031-76384-5arxtd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243186/original/file-20181031-76384-5arxtd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mohamad Alrashi and Nanda Mohammad and .</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stavros Habakis</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But it is in the quiet, confessional moments where this play is most affecting. In one such sequence, Nada shows her comatose brother a series of photos that connect the personal with the mad world outside. We see the little girl, safe and protected, the time when “the family was the limits of my world.”</p>
<p>When we later see the sadness in her adult eyes, it hurts. She recalls “the last time I’ll ever see your name come up on my mobile.”</p>
<p>At such moments, of which there are many in this production, there is no acting, no artifice, only the pain borne of real, incalculable loss.</p>
<p>A dramatic and emotional counterpoint is created by another young man, an aspiring DJ whose life was cut short years earlier. He occupies a kind of DJ’s booth onstage, activating the urban soundscape that weaves in and out of the play’s action from a position that floats above the city. His hovering world, the world of “the unburied dead,” becomes the Damascus that we want to see restored.</p>
<p>And it is on high above the city that the play’s emotional arc comes full circle for the audience. Here we see Taim on the roof of his building, just before the “accident,” looking out at a sea of lights. As he lingers to connect one last time with the city he loves and has decided to leave, we too are there with him, enveloped by the sounds of a broken city.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://www.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/events/while-i-was-waiting/">While I Was Waiting</a> is being staged as part of the OzAsia Festival in Adelaide until October 31.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106075/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William Peterson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A group of diasporic Syrian actors in Marseilles came together with a few remaining in their home country to create this touching, hard-hitting play.
William Peterson, Senior Lecturer in Drama, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/104559
2018-10-08T19:10:12Z
2018-10-08T19:10:12Z
In Trustees, Belarus Free Theatre mercilessly demolishes Australia’s cultural debate
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239651/original/file-20181008-72127-q83673.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hazem Shammas in Trustees: his powerful incantations towards the end of the production will leave you reeling.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nicolai Khalezin</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: Trustees, Melbourne International Arts Festival.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>The Belarus Free Theatre, exiled from their home nation, have returned to Australia to collaborate with local theatre artists on a new political work, Trustees. The production begins with a hypothetical scenario in which the Australian government has placed a moratorium on public funding for the arts. While this scenario isn’t real, it cuts close to the bone after then-arts minister George Brandis gutted the Australia Council in 2015.</p>
<p>The production stages a public debate hosted by the (made up) Melbourne Trust Forum. It unfolds as part media reportage and part gameshow. The actors take on the roles of charismatic celebrity types, stalking the stage and encouraging the audience to register an online yes or no vote to the question “does government funding for the arts do more harm than good”? Several positions are thrashed out by the four celebrities who embody the spectrum of right-wing and left-wing commentary, in a parody of Australia’s own culture wars.</p>
<p>If not our poets and playwrights, argues one of the members of the trust forum, who or what forces will shape a cohesive and distinct Australian cultural identity today? As if such a thing were possible or even desirable. These arguments are not staged as earnest interventions, but rather as an absurd spectacle. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239653/original/file-20181008-72124-1tftcg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239653/original/file-20181008-72124-1tftcg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239653/original/file-20181008-72124-1tftcg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239653/original/file-20181008-72124-1tftcg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239653/original/file-20181008-72124-1tftcg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239653/original/file-20181008-72124-1tftcg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239653/original/file-20181008-72124-1tftcg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239653/original/file-20181008-72124-1tftcg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Natasha Herbert.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nicolai Khalezin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This staged debate becomes a decoy for exploring other structures of political disenfranchisement and privilege. For instance, can the debate over the arts be connected to Australia’s dehumanising treatment of refugees and asylum seekers? While a direct link is never explicitly made, it is certainly intimated.</p>
<p>The stage, which until this point has been modelled on a TV studio, with its bright lights and cues for audience applause, is then transformed into a boardroom. Here, the trustees of the Lone Pine Theatre Company gather to elect a new CEO and decide on a survival strategy amid the wreckage of a defunded arts sector. A proposal for a new form of theatre is floated: an immersive playground housed in a multi-storey building. It will host plot-lines and participatory experiences where jingoism might intermingle with a Kardashian style reality TV format: something to really make theatre profitable again.</p>
<p>The absurdity mounts. The trustees brainstorm underground levels where the violence of the Frontier Wars will be re-enacted in a kind of sexed-up colonial “Westworld”. The critique of arts funding driven by cynical interpretations of what counts as innovation and diversity in Australian theatre is certainly not lost here. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239655/original/file-20181008-72100-175s2ah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239655/original/file-20181008-72100-175s2ah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239655/original/file-20181008-72100-175s2ah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=385&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239655/original/file-20181008-72100-175s2ah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=385&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239655/original/file-20181008-72100-175s2ah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=385&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239655/original/file-20181008-72100-175s2ah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239655/original/file-20181008-72100-175s2ah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239655/original/file-20181008-72100-175s2ah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The boardroom table is not what it seems in this production.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nicolai Khalezin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The increasingly debauched suggestions of the trustees create a tension and sense of complicity in its audience. We laugh at the trustees’ rising absurdity and self-exploitation, yet recognise our role as consumers of their commodifiable identitities: a Palestinian man (Hazem Shammas), an Aboriginal woman (Tammy Anderson), a young Indian woman (Niharika Senapati), and as counter-point, two white characters (Daniel Schlusser and Natasha Herbert).</p>
<p>Then the mood shifts again, to great theatrical effect. Where in the earlier scene the audience was asked to take on the role of adjudicators in a failed debate on arts funding, we now became voyeurs. One of the trustees is to be elected as leader, and a choreographed leadership spill ensues where board members battle it out in a dirty power play.</p>
<p>Bridget Fiske’s movement direction comes to the fore here. Her stylised choreography captures the slow-burn horror of market-driven competitiveness in the arts. The tussle for power is expressed as a violent libidinised tango, intimating that power is not only synonymous with brute physical force but laced with sado-masochistic impulse.</p>
<p>As is to be expected, the white guy (Daniel Schlusser) wins. He mounts the boardroom table to give a terrifying victor’s speech with a recognisable reference to John Howard’s <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/john-howards-acceptance-speech-20041010-gdjw7v.html">2004 acceptance speech</a>. The boardroom is suddenly transformed into a bizarre occultish space where the acceptable violence of Australian political and cultural life bleeds to the surface and the anti-racist platitudes of the liberal left are prodded and deflated.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Daniel Schlusser, as the victorious white guy, and Tammy Anderson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nicolai Khalezin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It provides a surreal platform for the actors as they explore legacies of male anger and violence. The disturbing dynamics of white guilt are played out, political complacency is confessed, and theatrical traditions of exploitation of Indigenous women’s bodies are confronted head-on.</p>
<p>The production avoids the kind of earnestness that imbues much of political theatre. Is it didactic? Yes. But it also cuts through the turgid crust of fraught public debate over the arts and culture to create an atmosphere that verges on gothic horror. Unable to concede to the viewpoint that a distinction between left and right even exists, it asks us to imagine a post-political world. Here, freedom of speech no longer functions as the dignified ideal of democratic institution but is captive to hellish modes of spectacular, and mediatised, presentation.</p>
<p>It asks us to imagine that we live in an oppressive echo chamber that resembles one of the rings of Dante’s Inferno, a purgatorial space of ritualised punishments. The only way out of this impasse of opinion and apathy, it seems, is to invoke chaos. </p>
<p>On this front, Hazem Shammas’ powerful incantations towards the end of the production will leave you reeling. With a kind of terrifying conviction, he speaks the unspeakable into the void of Australia’s political sublimations, jolting us temporarily out of our sense of complacency: “Fuck the Australian dream”, he tells us, “fuck Allah, fuck Christ, fuck white validation, withdraw, stay safe, stay comfortable.”</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/trustees">Trustees</a> is being staged as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival until October 21.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104559/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sandra D'urso does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
This production, a collaboration with local theatre artists, stages a public debate hosted by the (made up) Melbourne Trust Forum. It unfolds as part media reportage and part gameshow.
Sandra D'urso, Researcher, The Australian Centre, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/99759
2018-08-30T06:11:00Z
2018-08-30T06:11:00Z
Sarah Kane’s controversial 1990s play Blasted feels prescient in the #MeToo era
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234159/original/file-20180829-195319-giepbj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">David Woods and Eloise Mignon in the Malthouse's production of Blasted. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo Pia Johnson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: Blasted, Malthouse Theatre.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Playwright Sarah Kane was an “honorary lad” in in-yer-face drama that dominated the 1990s in Britain. Hers was one of few female voices in the testosterone-heavy genre, as well as one of its most prominent, even though her oeuvre was slight: five plays written over five years, and one short film, Skin (1997). The plays were: Blasted (1995), Phaedra`s Love (1996), Cleansed and Crave (1998), and finally 4.48 Psychosis, which premiered in 2000, not long after Kane’s life ended in suicide. </p>
<p>Today considered one of the luminaries of British dramatic writing, her work was hotly debated during her life, none more so than Blasted, a play that met such a furious response on opening night that an entire mythology has sprung around it. Some of the outraged review headlines – most famously Jack Tinker’s “This Disgusting Feast of Filth” – were picked up by the media and amplified into a nation-wide frenzy. The director Stephen Daldry defended it on national television. The first run sold out, with queues around the block for returns.</p>
<p>What incensed the critics in 1995 was the violence, both physical and psychological, that permeates the play in ways that then seemed gratuitous, overblown, and dramaturgically incongruous. Blasted spliced together forms of abuse that until then rarely appeared side by side on stage. The play opens with a chamber piece, a man and a woman in an expensive hotel room in Leeds, “so expensive it could be anywhere in the world.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234170/original/file-20180830-195307-1pq4wsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234170/original/file-20180830-195307-1pq4wsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234170/original/file-20180830-195307-1pq4wsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234170/original/file-20180830-195307-1pq4wsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234170/original/file-20180830-195307-1pq4wsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234170/original/file-20180830-195307-1pq4wsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234170/original/file-20180830-195307-1pq4wsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234170/original/file-20180830-195307-1pq4wsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The play opens in a hotel ‘so expensive it could be anywhere’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ian, a middle-aged journalist who rants about the wogs and Pakis taking over Britain, has brought in a much younger and vulnerable Cate, whom he verbally puts down, cajoles, and – it is implied – coerces into sex. The interaction between them is a series of discomforting, not-enthusiastically-consented-to steps towards sexual intercourse. With today’s eyes, it reads like one of those accounts of what Harvey Weinstein allegedly did with his hotel room guests; but even in 1995, the intimidation, power struggle and joylessness were apparent.</p>
<p>However, roughly halfway through the play, as Cate locks herself in the bathroom to have a bath, a soldier erupts into the room. From this moment on, another play entirely seems to take place, one no longer set in Leeds, but in a country for which Ian needs a passport. The intimate violence between a man and a woman suddenly explodes into the panoramic violence of bombs, guns, mass rapes. The soldier rapes Ian, after telling him about the atrocities committed outside, to his own girlfriend. A bomb blasts through the room. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234171/original/file-20180830-195325-a6by7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234171/original/file-20180830-195325-a6by7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234171/original/file-20180830-195325-a6by7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234171/original/file-20180830-195325-a6by7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234171/original/file-20180830-195325-a6by7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234171/original/file-20180830-195325-a6by7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234171/original/file-20180830-195325-a6by7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234171/original/file-20180830-195325-a6by7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fayssal Bazzi as the soldier.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And then it all grows bigger, operatic almost. The soldier gouges Ian’s eyes out. Cate returns with a baby, which dies and is buried under the floorboards of the room. We are in Tarantino territory by this point: grotesque violence, theatrical, all plot dissolving into a series of disconnected, visually pregnant scenes as Ian descends into despair. </p>
<p>Interestingly, even though Kane’s later works, plotless and poetic, are considered to be the “hard” ones, they all seem to get staged more often than Blasted. The cynic in me thinks that, as hard as it may be to stage a prose poem, it may not be as hard as staging a bomb going off in a hotel room. Anne-Louise Sarks’ production of Blasted for the Malthouse is the first stage version I have ever seen - and it offers an opportunity to observe how this defining play of the 1990s has aged.</p>
<p>In 1995, Blasted was a play that connected the ordinary, everyday life in the UK, marked by hooliganism, lad culture and post-Thatcherism, to the atrocities of war in former Yugoslavia, a war which was schizophrenically experienced in Western Europe as both geographically close and unfathomably distant. </p>
<p>The collapse of contexts and genres that marks the play (and that so infuriated the critics) is a gesture that would later repeat in Michael Haneke’s films (particularly <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387898/">Hidden</a>), as well as in Lars von Trier’s: by the 2000s, the slip from middle-class banality to splatter horror would become common. It would also become more legible, as an expression of anxiety: that the prosperous peace here and the civic collapse there are somehow linked, perhaps even causally.</p>
<p>In 2018, Sarks’ production is a Blasted of the #MeToo era, and of the Syrian refugee crisis. The notion that terrorism and domestic violence are intimately linked by underlying diseased masculinity is no longer just a poetic metaphor: it is discussed in policy papers and newspaper articles around the world. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234172/original/file-20180830-195301-kphmyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234172/original/file-20180830-195301-kphmyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234172/original/file-20180830-195301-kphmyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234172/original/file-20180830-195301-kphmyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234172/original/file-20180830-195301-kphmyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234172/original/file-20180830-195301-kphmyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234172/original/file-20180830-195301-kphmyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234172/original/file-20180830-195301-kphmyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 2018, the link between domestic violence and terrorism is no longer just a metaphor.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>2018 makes Blasted look prescient, prophetic. Sarks, who is an exceptionally imaginative and courageous director, but has never been one for unnecessary statements, deliberately pares back directorial gestures to let the play speak. It is not a showy production. </p>
<p>Marg Horwell’s normcore set (very similar to her work on <a href="https://theconversation.com/search/result?sg=488d8933-24bd-4648-9053-c131b2eb8112&sp=1&sr=1&url=%2Fwho-knew-the-world-could-be-so-awful-alice-birchs-apocalyptic-feminist-theatre-79830">Revolt, She said. Revolt Again</a> in 2017) is a box of grey hotelness, later explodes to reveal the walls and utilities of the Malthouse building. The actors are exceptional, but none draw attention to themselves at the expense of the ensemble. The production takes a while to find its rhythm, but once Fayssal Bazzi’s Soldier enters and the war gets going, it grips and holds us breathless until the very last words of the play. It is the work of a director who has come into her full powers and has nothing left to prove.</p>
<p>It is hard to know how the contemporary audience will receive a stage work where so much of the effect hinges on being genuinely terrified by simulated rape, or theatrical cannibalism. The 1990s were, in some ways, a simpler and more naïve time. </p>
<p>But even if some of the mechanics of Blasted have aged, its central emotional core stands solid. Kane often said that all her works are really about love. The central journey in Blasted is not a tourist trip through extreme violence. It’s the emotional journey of a bully who learns to be grateful for small acts of kindness.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/blasted">Blasted</a> is being staged at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, until September 16.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99759/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jana Perkovic does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The central journey in Blasted is not a tourist trip through extreme violence. It’s the emotional journey of a bully who learns to be grateful for small acts of kindness.
Jana Perkovic, Sessional lecturer and researcher, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/100459
2018-07-30T19:58:46Z
2018-07-30T19:58:46Z
Opera’s digital revolution may be the key to increasing the artform’s appeal
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229739/original/file-20180730-106502-13k52xq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dancers in Opera Australia’s 2018 production of Aida at the Sydney Opera House.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Prudence Upton</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Opera Australia has recently premiered a “digital” production of Verdi’s Aida, a classic of the operatic canon known as much for its expansive musical score as for its obligatory spectacle. In the publicity campaign leading up to opening night, Opera Australia emphasised the cutting-edge nature of its new production. “No other opera company in the world – no other theatre company in the world – is using technology to this extent,” <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/opera/facing-the-music-opera-australia-makes-its-boldest-move-20180709-h12f6j.html">declared Opera Australia artistic director Lyndon Terracini</a>. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229740/original/file-20180730-106514-nuswe8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229740/original/file-20180730-106514-nuswe8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229740/original/file-20180730-106514-nuswe8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229740/original/file-20180730-106514-nuswe8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229740/original/file-20180730-106514-nuswe8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229740/original/file-20180730-106514-nuswe8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229740/original/file-20180730-106514-nuswe8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229740/original/file-20180730-106514-nuswe8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Elena Gabouri as Amneris and Amber Wagner as Aida in Opera Australia’s 2018 production of Aida at the Sydney Opera House.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Prudence Upton</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The production’s set consists of ten movable LED panels that provide digital background scenery ranging from a massive black panther to an ominous, blood-red sky. It has been positively received by critics so far, and Opera Australia reportedly plans to use this digital set-up <a href="http://performing.artshub.com.au/news-article/reviews/performing-arts/gina-fairley/review-aida-opera-australia-256129">for other upcoming productions.</a></p>
<p>Yet, while Aida may be a hi-tech departure from the set designs usually seen at Opera Australia, Terracini’s digital revolution is far from new. In 2012, Komische Oper Berlin (run by Australian Barrie Kosky) wowed audiences with its wholly digital set for Mozart’s The Magic Flute. A collaboration with London-based animation company 1927, the production features all encompassing digital environments and even digitised characters.</p>
<p>Through detailed choreography, the live performers also <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14794713.2016.1161955?journalCode=rpdm20">appear to interact</a> with their digital surroundings. This example of what is called “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23322551.2017.1400764">full-synthesis</a>,” sees <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Flute">Tamino </a> fleeing from a digital dragon, the Queen of the Night spouting vengeance with the body of a digital spider, and Monostatos wrestling with unruly digital dogs.</p>
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<p>In the same year, San Francisco Opera presented an “all-digital” production of The Magic Flute (2012), with a projected set that featured 1,200 pieces of digital media designed by ceramic artist <a href="http://www.junkaneko.com/artwork/production-design-detail/channel/C47/#/0">Jun Kaneko</a>. </p>
<p>Two years later, Cleveland Orchestra staged The Cunning Little Vixen (2014), in which live performers sang through head-sized windows in a projection screen while their bodies were superimposed with animated forest creatures.</p>
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<p>Expand the field to include opera productions that have combined digital projections with physical sets, and the list of innovative productions grows even longer. Royal Opera House’s Don Giovanni (2014) had digital scenery that deteriorated with the title character’s mental state. </p>
<p>The Metropolitan Opera’s Das Rheingold (2010) had its Rhinemaidens emit digital bubbles in real-time. Dallas Opera’s Moby-Dick (2010) had the sailors of the Pequod perching inside digital longboats, to name just a few.</p>
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<p>Even within Australia, there have been a number of recent productions that used entirely or partially digital sets. Victorian Opera’s <a href="http://motionlab.deakin.edu.au/portfolio/the-flying-dutchman/">The Flying Dutchman</a> (2015), <a href="http://motionlab.deakin.edu.au/portfolio/4-saints-in-3-acts/">Four Saints in Three Acts</a> (2016) and <a href="https://www.victorianopera.com.au/season/the-snow-queen">The Snow Queen</a> (2017) all incorporated 3D stereoscopic scenery which required audience members to wear 3D glasses in order to see the full visual effect.</p>
<p>The Australian International Opera Company similarly <a href="http://invenio.deakin.edu.au/deakin-motion-lab-helps-take-western-opera-to-china/">commissioned digital backdrops</a> for its touring productions of The Magic Flute and Turandot in China in 2016 and 2017.</p>
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<p>The real difference between these productions is not the size of the opera company or even the kind of digital technology being used. Rather, it’s a question of how live performers are being integrated with the digital elements on stage. </p>
<p>Is the technology used to create background scenery, like a hi-tech version of traditional painted sets? Or is the production experimenting with the relationship between the live and the digital in a more innovative way? </p>
<p>Digital technology is seen as one possible solution for opera’s seeming <a href="https://theconversation.com/does-opera-deserve-its-privileged-status-within-arts-funding-84761">lack of relevance and sustainability</a>. In fact, <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/sites/g/files/net1761/f/national_opera_review_final_report.pdf">the National Opera Review </a> recommended that Australian companies use digital technology to innovate the art form, appeal to diverse audiences, and lower production costs. </p>
<p>However, using digital technology is more than a matter of mere spectacle or aesthetic but has huge implications for the very processes that make opera what it is. Depending on its scope, digital technology can have a major impact on creative hierarchies, rehearsal processes, and even the performer experience.</p>
<p>As soon as digital projections become more than background scenery, a production needs significantly more planning, more rehearsal time, and potentially more funding to bring everything together on stage. Meanwhile, as digital projections play a more prominent role, so too does the projection and/or video designer and/or animator within the creative hierarchy. </p>
<p>The biggest impact is often on the performer, who may be forced to adjust his or her behaviour on stage in order to make the technology “work.” Consider Barrie Kosky and 1927’s The Magic Flute. While the illusion of interactivity between the performers and the digital elements creates a spectacular effect for the audience, the illusion is only possible if the performers adhere to extremely restrictive choreography. As a result, these kinds of productions have been accused by some of turning live performers into “puppets” for the sake of digital technology.</p>
<p>Despite these obstacles, opera’s digital future is already well underway. The first step for opera companies is to join the party.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100459/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Caitlin Vincent does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Opera Australia’s new production of Aida features movable LED panels with digital scenery. It’s part of a revolution transforming the art form.
Caitlin Vincent, PhD researcher in performance and technology, Deakin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/100094
2018-07-24T04:26:23Z
2018-07-24T04:26:23Z
Melancholia artfully brings the end of the world to the stage
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228943/original/file-20180724-189310-jrb40u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Eryn Jean Norvill as Justine in Melancholia: the play echoes and resonates with details of its cinematic predecessor.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Rewiew: Melancholia at the Malthouse, Melbourne.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Melancholia is based on <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1527186/">Lars von Trier’s 2011 film</a> of the same title but has been adapted for the stage by writer Declan Greene and director Matthew Lutton. The languid stillness of the cinematic performances, especially by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst, linger in the mind, leaving you to ponder how the film’s finely-tuned attention to lush surfaces, its lingering close-ups on faces, and slow-burn anxiety could ever be rendered theatrically.</p>
<p>In many respects, Greene’s adaptation is faithful to Trier’s vision and narrative, it echoes and resonates with details of its cinematic predecessor. A good adaptation allows for synergy to exist between texts, and this theatrical presentation achieves just that.</p>
<p>Greene artfully renders some of the film’s visual elements into theatrical dialogue and monologue, and the actors transform the writing into a stuttering feast of spoken poetry and metaphor, allowing us to glimpse the protagonist Justine’s inner thoughts and feelings of unravelling. </p>
<p>In these moments, Greene’s writing seems to be borne out of a tradition of “fractured-self” poetics we see in the work of playwrights such as Sarah Kane. The play, as in the film, is an intimate study of a depressive illness, melancholia – the silent actor in it – explored through the narrative of a cataclysmic planetary event. It seems to be asking, is melancholia an internal psychic phenomenon, or is it embedded in the very laws that govern the physical world?</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228945/original/file-20180724-189332-1q1o9tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228945/original/file-20180724-189332-1q1o9tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228945/original/file-20180724-189332-1q1o9tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228945/original/file-20180724-189332-1q1o9tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228945/original/file-20180724-189332-1q1o9tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228945/original/file-20180724-189332-1q1o9tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228945/original/file-20180724-189332-1q1o9tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228945/original/file-20180724-189332-1q1o9tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Steve Mouzakis as John, Leeanna Walsman as Claire, Eryn Jean Norvill as Justine, Gareth Yuen as Michael and Maude Davey as Gabby.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The play is divided into two acts, which shift in mood and genre. At the core of the story is the relationship between two sisters, Justine (Eryn Jean Norvill) and Claire (Leeanna Walsman), who are wrapped up in a fraught dynamic with their mother Gabby (Maude Davey). The first act takes place at a wedding celebration for Justine and Michael (Gareth Yuen), and displays the hallmarks of a conventional modern drama. It has a Chekhovian sensibility in which we spy the interpersonal foibles of a crumbling upper-middle-class, out of step with reality. </p>
<p>In the second act, in which Justine is convalescing at her sister’s country estate after the breakdown of her marriage, the aesthetic tone shifts to speculative sci-fi. Earthly tones transform into a hollowed-out, alien, landscape contributing to a sense of uncanny dread, enhanced by the lighting and sound design. The characters themselves behave like misaligned planets, radiating magnetic energies which repel those in their orbit: siblings are in conflict, mothers turn against daughters, and lovers find they are nauseated by the other. </p>
<p>Sigmund Freud described melancholia through the metaphor of an “open wound”; the melancholic cuts off all libidinal attachments and retreats completely from the world. They grasp after an ineffable lost object and internalise the disappointment and disgust they feel towards a lover or mother, making them prone to narcissism and self-loathing. </p>
<p>Justine, as portrait of the feminine melancholic, seems to echo Freud’s thinking to the letter. Moreover, the feminist Julia Kristeva, described melancholia as a “black sun”, which fits with the lighting scheme used to denote Melancholia’s radiating influence in the play. In the stage design, this symbolism appears as an imposing hole in the ceiling, a cosmic mouth, which rains petals and ash to stunning theatrical effect.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228944/original/file-20180724-189335-qbj40q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228944/original/file-20180724-189335-qbj40q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228944/original/file-20180724-189335-qbj40q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228944/original/file-20180724-189335-qbj40q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228944/original/file-20180724-189335-qbj40q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228944/original/file-20180724-189335-qbj40q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228944/original/file-20180724-189335-qbj40q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228944/original/file-20180724-189335-qbj40q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Leanna Walsman and Eryn Jean Norvill.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The play begins with a lavish wedding reception for Justine and Michael. The stage is almost bare except for three gilded chairs, a chandelier, and a bottle of Moet – the signs of opulence that bristle and chime with claustrophobic effect. A constant and slow rumbling sound invades the merriment of the wedding band as it plays La Bamba. Claire, the bride’s older sister, anxiously attempts to wrangle time as the reception runs hopelessly behind schedule. We, the audience, are positioned and addressed as the wedding’s inopportune guests. </p>
<p>Justine’s brother-in law John (Steve Mouzakis) delivers an unsettling speech in which he ritually humiliates the bride before the guests. Justine is a copyeditor at John’s firm and has neglected to deliver an overdue tag-line for an important advertising campaign.</p>
<p>As though things couldn’t get any worse, Gabby takes to the microphone and regales the wedding party with a horrid vision of married and reproductive life – a maternal horror which runs the gamut of pregnancy, death, blood, shit, and “the factory of hospital and husband”. </p>
<p>Maude Davey’s embodiment of an abject mother figure is electrifying, darkly humorous, and moving in equal measure. Michael, the affable but suffocating groom, attempts to recover the mood by delivering a Percy Shelley poem, The Cloud, a romantic poem in which elements of nature are personified. But this pushes Justine away, leaving her to contemplate the faraway star Antares, which she spies in the night sky. Spurred on by Antares, Justine presages the inexorable pull of nature toward the void. </p>
<p>In a moment of protest Justine irreparably severs her bond with Michael. The stage retreats too, exposing a grassed platform, which doubles as the grounds of the country estate where Justine will be convalescing. The motion of the stage pulling away impresses upon us the gravitational pull upon Justine’s mental state, which appears more prophetic now, rather than disturbed. </p>
<p>The characters each grapple with the growing awareness that earth is about to be hit by the rogue planet, Melancholia. The brother-in-law, John, holds to the rationality of science dismissing the hypothesis of planetary collision as collective paranoia and crack-pot conspiracy. Justine on the other hand is in a state of rapture now, and almost invites Earth’s demise. Claire struggles to come to terms with it and desperately clings to her son Leo (Alexander Artemov) – he is a portrait of innocence, cushioned by the love of his mother and aunt. As Melancholia hits, the three figures, Claire, Justine and Leo, huddle in a kind of cave they’ve constructed from sticks. </p>
<p>The play ends with the haunting image of Claire’s face twisted into an open- mouthed and silent scream amid an overwhelming wall of sound. Leeanna Walsman’s transmission of horror was palpable in this final image of a mother’s despair. I came away feeling almost guilty, having feasted on the actors’ intensity as they conveyed all too well the existential pain of these doomed characters. </p>
<p>The shadow of Freud also loomed large in my thoughts, leaving me to ponder a tradition in which varieties of psychic pain are transmitted over time through the narrative lens of the male auteur. This isn’t a criticism of Greene and Lutton’s adaptation, which breathes a new kind of agency and energy into the roles of Claire, Justine, and Gabby – but perhaps of Von Trier, who stands accused of relishing in unbridled sadistic narrative ends for the women in his films.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Melancholia is being staged at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, until August 12.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100094/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sandra D'urso does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A successful adaption of Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia breathes new life and energy into its female characters.
Sandra D'urso, Researcher, The Australian Centre, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/99854
2018-07-17T20:05:13Z
2018-07-17T20:05:13Z
Decoding the music masterpieces: Rossini’s William Tell, and its famous overture
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227924/original/file-20180717-44100-1k8twxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The cast of Victorian Opera's staging of William Tell. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Victorian Opera</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Although it boasts one of the most famous sequences of music in existence, Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell is hardly a staple of the operatic repertoire. At five hours long in its original composition, and with a challengingly high male singing part, it is rarely heard in its entirety. Victorian Opera’s current production of William Tell, a three-hour abridged version, is the first in Australia in over 140 years. </p>
<p>The opera is certainly most famous for its 12-minute Overture, the piece that sets the scene for it. Few excerpts of classical music have been used (and indeed, parodied) in popular media as frequently. Now widely recognised as the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XSwVNBeNFw">theme to The Lone Ranger</a>, the tune also appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZjk-CC044s">A Clockwork Orange</a> (in an electronic arrangement by American composer Wendy Carlos). <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlcAgY-AlMk">Mickey Mouse</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj6fkrYr_ts">Bugs Bunny</a> and The Flintstones can all be credited for the Overture’s presence in popular cartoons. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The Flintstones take on Rossini’s William Tell Overture.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The work premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1829, not long after Rossini settled in France following successful tours of Vienna, Bologna, Venice and London. Yet, after only three performances, sections of the score were already being cut for the comfort of the audience. </p>
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<span class="caption">Rossini in 1829.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gioachino_Rossini#/media/File:ROSSINI-1829-Litho_Charlet_Ory.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
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<p>In 1830, the Vienna Court Opera staged their 1830 German-language version over two consecutive evenings. Accommodations like these inspired Rossini to prepare an “official” abridgement in 1831, but it was too late: a myriad of translations, adaptations and truncations had already appeared. Consequently, there are many versions of William Tell for present-day opera companies to consider.</p>
<h2>A ‘grand’ opera</h2>
<p>William Tell was the first serious opera the Italian-born Rossini authored in Paris. Upon granting his residency in 1824, the French government contracted him to produce a work for the Paris Opéra: an institution that demanded grandiose music with noble storylines, often based on heroic historical events. These productions were sung-through (dialogue detracted from the “seriousness” of the music), and the stage designs, effects and costumes were all suitably lavish. Throughout the 1830s, this style became known as “grand opera”.</p>
<p>As the composer responsible for the Italian opera craze that had swept Paris in earlier decades, it is no surprise that Rossini rose to the challenges of this elite new genre. For what would become a masterwork of the 19th century, Rossini borrowed the plot of a German play: Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (1804). </p>
<p>Appropriately grand in subject matter, the storyline follows the legendary Swiss marksman who inspired rebellion in 14th-century, Austrian-occupied Switzerland. The popularity of William Tell gave way to a golden age of Parisian grand opera. </p>
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<span class="caption">An 1860s French staging of William Tell.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stereokort,_Guillaume_Tell_1,_Arriv%C3%A9e_de_Guillaume_-_SMV_-_S150b.tif">Wikimedia</a></span>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-beethovens-mistake-became-one-of-our-most-famous-tunes-93055">How Beethoven's 'mistake' became one of our most famous tunes</a>
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<p>In addition to its use of fable, William Tell explores themes of paternal relations, and the conflicts of an occupied nation seeking independence and peace. </p>
<p>Tired of Switzerland’s continued oppression, the plot sees William Tell convince a young Austrian soldier, Arnold, to assist in a rebellion. Yet, Tell is arrested when he and his son Jemmy do not pay their respects on the hundredth anniversary of Austrian rule. </p>
<p>The Austrian governor Gesler orders Tell to shoot an apple off Jemmy’s head: if he refuses, both of them will die. In the poignant solo “Sois immobile” (“Be motionless”), Tell urges Jemmy to stand completely still and think of his mother. Despite being a male character, Rossini intended Jemmy to be performed by the higher-pitched voice of a female soprano, in line with the bizarre operatic tradition known as the “trouser role”.</p>
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<p>Although Tell successfully shoots the apple, Gesler only releases Jemmy. Upon learning of Tell’s imprisonment, Arnold becomes set on revenge, and with a rousing call “Amis, amis, secondez ma vengeance” (“Friends, friends, second my revenge”), he inspires a group of Swiss confederates to storm the capital. The repeated and sustained high notes make this one of the most demanding tenor arias in the repertoire. </p>
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<h2>An iconic overture</h2>
<p>The overture’s popularity in isolation from the larger work began with Austrian composer Johann Strauss Snr’s Wilhelm Tell Galop (premiered in 1829, mere months after the original opera). Hungarian composer Franz Liszt’s 1838 transcription for solo piano also contributed to the appeal; it was standard practice in the 1830s for touring pianists to show off with virtuosic arrangements of opera highlights, and William Tell was at the core of Liszt’s repertoire. </p>
<p>While the Finale is undoubtedly the most recognisable, the Overture is actually structured in four contrasting sections. It tells a story within itself, making it structurally distinct from anything Rossini had composed before. </p>
<p>Representing daybreak and functioning as a prelude to the upcoming three parts, the Overture opens with a gentle passage in the lower strings. A solo cello presents the melody, which then enters into dialogue with the remaining players in the section. </p>
<p>Double basses gradually thicken the texture; meanwhile, two distant timpani rolls hint at an incoming storm. For the French composer Hector Berlioz, the prelude evoked “the calm of profound solitude, the solemn silence of nature when the elements and human passions are at rest.” </p>
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<p>The upper strings (violins and violas) announce the transition to the Overture’s energetic second phase. Shimmering string phrases are punctuated by short interjections from the woodwinds, which build in intensity until dynamic brass and percussion announces the arrival of the storm. As the chaos subsides, sections of the orchestra fade away until only a solo flute remains. </p>
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<p>In the pastoral third movement, we meditate upon the plaintive tone of the cor anglais (a larger member of the oboe family). Rossini turns a <em>ranz des vaches</em> (a traditional Swiss herdsman’s melody) into a duet between cor anglais and flute, in what is now one of the most renowned orchestral woodwind solos.</p>
<p>Suddenly, the peaceful scene is interrupted by a fast-paced, high-intensity galop, which was a popular style of ballroom dance at the time. Titled “The March of the Swiss Soldiers”, it points toward the majestic final scenes of the opera, where the Swiss Armed Forces free their homeland from Austrian rule. (For the full impact of the abrupt transition, it’s best to listen to these two sections in sequence.) </p>
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<p>Despite living for another 40 years, William Tell was last opera Rossini would compose. In stark contrast to today’s circumstances, the financial viability of William Tell was such that Rossini was able to enter semi-retirement, composing only cantatas, sacred and secular vocal music until his death in 1868.</p>
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<p><em>William Tell is being staged by Victorian Opera until July 19.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99854/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Madeline Roycroft does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In its original form, Rossini’s William Tell went for five hours. Yet soon after its 1829 debut it was being cut for the comfort of its audience. Its Overture - a mere 12 minutes - has become one of the most famous pieces of classical music.
Madeline Roycroft, PhD candidate and tutor in music history, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/98147
2018-06-14T02:42:14Z
2018-06-14T02:42:14Z
Life, death, gravity, sex and string theory in The Mathematics of Longing
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222695/original/file-20180612-182724-1n4b9qw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Gavin Webber and Kate Harman in The Mathematics of Longing. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Art Work Agency</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: The Mathematics of Longing, La Boite, Brisbane</em></p>
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<p>We face a skeletal, triangular pyramid with a platform at the summit; the three vertices are three sets of steps leading up to it, hinting at the history, wonder and timelessness of mathematics before any of the performers appear. </p>
<p>They arrive. At first there is a cacophony as they all speak into microphones at once (evoking, perhaps, the big bang). Then, one-by-one, they deliver Newton’s three laws of motion, before physically representing or enacting them.</p>
<p>It is from this basic premise that The Mathematics of Longing, written by playwright Suzie Miller, follows. In a series of vignettes, the performers first read out a physical or mathematical idea before repackaging it into either a situation conveying a human relationship or a more physical piece. Scenes delve into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory">string theory</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything">theory of everything</a>, gravity, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number">complex numbers</a>. </p>
<p>Particularly effective are the scenes addressing string theory, which argues that the universe is fundamentally composed of tiny vibrating strings. In one, a couple get ready to attend their dead baby daughter’s funeral, In another, they are about to go to the same child’s christening. The script hardly changes, with nice work from performers Todd MacDonald and Ngoc Phan giving a very different energy and feel to the two scenes.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222696/original/file-20180612-182710-dj230p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222696/original/file-20180612-182710-dj230p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222696/original/file-20180612-182710-dj230p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222696/original/file-20180612-182710-dj230p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222696/original/file-20180612-182710-dj230p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222696/original/file-20180612-182710-dj230p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222696/original/file-20180612-182710-dj230p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222696/original/file-20180612-182710-dj230p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Gavin Webber and Kate Harman in The Mathematics of Longing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Art Work Agency</span></span>
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<p>There are some stunning moments from Kate Harman and Gavin Webber as lovers who meet, fall in love and eventually part, each element of the relationship sharing a specific physicality from the weightlessness of the beginning of a love affair to the man’s displacement at the end. </p>
<p>And there’s a great string theory sex scene, with four actors playing one couple, showing how successful and unsuccessful the same encounter can be.</p>
<p>There are moments of magic. Todd MacDonald explains how we all fall in love with the blue sky and ocean, when in reality it’s the only wavelength of light that is reflected from these surfaces we are able to perceive.</p>
<p>In a piece towards the end, Merlynn Tong explains that the molecules of which we are all made, upon our demise, will be freed to join other entities, elements and the future. And so, in a very metaphysical way, we all really do get to live forever.</p>
<p>However it is hard to remain emotionally engaged as the vignettes break up any momentum. A scene will develop to the point when it really starts to take hold, but then it will be the turn of the next theorem and its associated scenes. </p>
<p>At the post-show discussion, the playwright Suzie Miller posited that the show was about grief, from the grief of actual death, to the death of a relationship, and even the death of innocence.</p>
<p>Still, despite my reservations, the production evoked delight; it is a visual feast with thought-provoking images. This new collaboration between La Boite, The Farm and The Uncertainty Principle delivers a work that poses fascinating questions linking science and humanity in a powerful and engaging way. </p>
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<p><em><a href="https://laboite.com.au/the-mathematics-of-longing/">The Mathematics of Longing</a> will be staged at La Boite until June 23.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98147/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jacqui Somerville does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In an ambitious new work of theatre and dance, performers read out mathematical theories then build scenes around them.
Jacqui Somerville, Senior Lecturer in Acting, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/97698
2018-06-05T02:17:05Z
2018-06-05T02:17:05Z
The House of Bernarda Alba is an extraordinary portrait of imposed silence and female misogyny
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221678/original/file-20180605-175451-dodtjg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Melita Jurisic as the mother who confines her four daughters to their house for eight weeks of mourning. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: The House of Bernarda Alba, Arts Centre Melbourne.</em></p>
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<p>Could a Spanish rural drama written in the 1930s still be relevant in 2018 Australia? In their production of Federico García Lorca’s <a href="http://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/season-2018/the-house-of-bernarda-alba/">The House of Bernarda Alba</a>, director Leticia Cáceres and playwright Patricia Cornelius show us that it can.</p>
<p>Lorca’s play tackles the struggle between oppression and the desire for freedom, paying particular attention to the invisible ways in which women are harmed. Lorca set the play in a specific yet indefinite time and place, which allows it to be transferred anywhere.</p>
<p>Lorca (1989-1936) was murdered in the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) by a Nationalist firing-squad, only months after he’d finished writing the play, which he was never able to see on stage. In it, Lorca criticised the complicit silence around violence towards women - the same retrograde conservatism that would end his life. He even seemed to foresee the long dictatorship that would oppress Spanish women and men starting in 1939.</p>
<p>In the play, after the death of her second husband, Bernarda subjects her five daughters to eight years of rigorous mourning in which “no breath of air is going to get into this house.” In Cornelius’s contemporary adaptation, Bernarda is Bernadette; the five daughters are now four; and the time of confinement at home is eight weeks. Without internet.</p>
<p>In her opening monologue, the housekeeper Penelope (Julie Forsyth) informs the audience that after the patriarch’s death, Bernadette (Melita Jurisic) is left with no money and “stuck with four ugly girls”: Angela (Peta Brady), Marti (Candy Bowers), Magda (Bessie Holland) and Adele (Emily Milledge). Bernadette has also locked up her senile mother, Maria (Sue Jones), who dreams of escaping and getting married.</p>
<p>Attached to the walls, numerous air conditioners warn of the suffocating summer ahead in rural Western Australia. Hanging from the ceiling, several mosquito zappers betray the bugs that circumvent the window screens - and Bernadette’s ruthless control measures. The absence of a male figure does not prevent the women from being subjected to a repressive patriarchal system. Bernadette embodies the tyranny of a misogynist woman.</p>
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<span class="caption">Candy Bowers as Marti.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span>
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<p>Suffering from poor health, 39-year-old Angela is the only heiress to the family’s fortune, which leads to other deeply human themes: envy, social injustice, hypocrisy. A young man, Peter Romano, shows a sudden interest in Angela, raising both suspicion and repressed passion among her siblings.</p>
<p>Like the rest of the male characters, Peter is talked about but never appears on stage. Men belong on the outside. The external voices of Lorca’s wheat reapers singing on their way to work are now noisy miners who are free to drink beer and gamble at the pub. Stories of the women’s sexual defencelessness at the hands of generations of abusive men show that women aren’t allowed the same freedoms. After all, as Adele laments, “Men get away with everything”. </p>
<p>Despite this, men are inevitably present inside Bernadette’s house: in the sisters’ conversations, in Penelope’s retelling of external gossip, in the urn with the ashes of their father, symbolically witnessing their actions.</p>
<p>The matriarch’s obsession and mission is to protect the decency of her daughters (and the reputation of her family name), even if that means confining them to living in what Cornelius describes as a “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIr2zRGrBy4">bunker</a>”. This imposition of silence and repressive behaviour impedes Bernadette from seeing the approaching tragedy. “When it comes to your children you’re blind,” forewarns Penelope.</p>
<p>The characters’ experiences intertwine in the stifling setting of the household. As the weeks go by, the heat and tension escalate, due largely to the daughters’ sexual repression. Adele, the youngest, claims her right to go out and is especially sensitive to the invasion of her own, individual space. For different reasons, the four sisters are characters in pain condemned to a life between four walls, unable to establish healthy relationships with the outside - or even themselves.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221676/original/file-20180605-175407-ulrwiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221676/original/file-20180605-175407-ulrwiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221676/original/file-20180605-175407-ulrwiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221676/original/file-20180605-175407-ulrwiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221676/original/file-20180605-175407-ulrwiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221676/original/file-20180605-175407-ulrwiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221676/original/file-20180605-175407-ulrwiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221676/original/file-20180605-175407-ulrwiq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Emily Milledge, Sue Jones, Julie Forsyth, Peta Brady, Bessie Holland, Candy Bowers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Marg Horwell and Rachel Burke’s austere set and lighting design evoke a prison. The main stage and the back hallway are separated by bars and sliding doors, contributing to this effect. When the lights emulate sunset or sunrise, elongated bar shadows are projected onto the stage floor. Irine Vela and Jethro Woodward’s sound design dramatically accompanies the different phases of confinement.</p>
<p>Cornelius and Cáceres succeed in bringing Lorca to a contemporary Australian context by taking his universal message and filling it with ordinary, relatable situations and conflicts. Cornelius maintains Lorca’s original structure, reworking it with references to popular culture: instead of sewing, the characters read gossip magazines filled with plastic surgery makeovers and superficiality. Moreover, intertwined with the inheritance conflict, the play subtly alludes to the Indigenous dispossession of their lands.</p>
<p>The cast is extraordinary. The performances are nuanced and complex, providing reasons to understand the characters even in their most questionable actions. Forsyth engages with the audience from beginning to end, and Milledge’s Adele is unforgettable.</p>
<p>The House of Bernarda Alba is a shocking play filled with symbolically loaded poetry. As a queer man, Lorca knew the torture of imposed silence too well. In his representation of domestic dictatorship, Bernarda’s first and last word in the play is “silence,” highlighting her intransigence and abuse of power. This is precisely the starting point of Cornelius’s evocative exploration of gender and power in the 21st century. And it is more timely than ever.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="http://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/season-2018/the-house-of-bernarda-alba/">The House of Bernarda Alba</a> is now on at the Arts Centre, Melbourne until July 7.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97698/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ana Puchau de Lecea does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Federico Garcia Lorca’s shocking civil war play is successfully transferred to the Australian desert by the Melbourne Theatre Company.
Ana Puchau de Lecea, PhD Candidate and Teaching Associate, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/97464
2018-05-31T04:07:55Z
2018-05-31T04:07:55Z
Australia’s major dance companies need to step up on gender equality
<p>The dance sector in Australia has a gender equality problem. While nearly <a href="http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/making-art-work/">70% of people working in the industry</a> identify as female, there is a significant gender gap in programming and leadership at the major dance companies. </p>
<p>A report released this week, <a href="https://www.delvingintodance.com/turning-pointe/">Turning Pointe</a>, by Andrew Westle, looked at the five big dance companies that receive the bulk of public funding – the Australian Ballet, Queensland Ballet, West Australian Ballet, Bangarra Dance Theatre and Sydney Dance Company. All the artistic directors at these companies are men. Between 2011 and 2017, women choreographed only 13% of full-length works and 24% of shorter works. Only 26% of Australian premieres were from women. </p>
<p>In the small-to-medium sector, which is significantly underfunded and under-resourced compared to the bigger companies, women are faring far better. Overall, in this part of the sector, women choreographed 59% of works. </p>
<p>Key recommendations of the report include:</p>
<ul>
<li>bringing in quotas as a funding requirement</li>
<li>increasing support for child care</li>
<li>increasing mentoring, particularly around the skills required to be an artistic director</li>
<li>getting audiences to become advocates for equality. </li>
</ul>
<p>The quota idea is based on the model introduced by <a href="http://www.screen.nsw.gov.au/news/nsw-screen-industry-achieves-dramatic-increase-in-female-key-creatives-with-drama-projects-delivering-gender-parity-commits-from-july-1-50-of-feature-films-it-funds-will-be-written-or-directed-by-women">Screen NSW</a> in response to a <a href="https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/f20beab8-81cc-4499-92e9-02afba18c438/Gender-Matters-Women-in-the-Australian-Screen-Industry.pdf?ext=.pdf">2015 report on gender balance in the film industry</a>. Within a year of Screen NSW introducing these measures, significantly more grant applications had women as key creatives. </p>
<p>Dance, like other creative industries, has not been immune to revelations of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/arts/dance/peter-martins-ballet-new-york-city-physical-abuse.html">gender discrimination and harassment</a> in recent years. However, these <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/les-grands-ballets-reels-from-self-inflicted-gender-bias-pr-disaster/article38267913/">discussions</a> have happened primarily <a href="https://www.dancemagazine.com/equality-in-ballet-2492924587">overseas</a>. </p>
<p>Andrew Westle conducted interviews with 23 men and women working in the sector. Although the sector may not have appeared to have gender equality in creative leadership on the agenda, the interviews revealed that individuals are very much aware of the issues.</p>
<p>Some of the issues people talked about were more unique to dance, such as men being given increased support and attention to improve lower participation numbers. Others reflected iniquities in wider society, such as the challenges of balancing childcare responsibility alongside a career — particularly a career that involves travel, evening performances and odd hours. </p>
<p>In the small-to-medium and independent dance sectors, these barriers to participation are linked directly to income. Women reported that they are spending their whole contract fee on child care. Here, the major companies are ahead of the curve, with some offering well resourced and supported maternity leave structures. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, the disparity in support across the whole of the sector is concerning. Interviewees offered examples where companies blatantly contravened <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2014C00002">Australian</a> <a href="https://www.wgea.gov.au/about-legislation/workplace-gender-equality-act-2012">legislation</a>. Yet women felt powerless to act, as they feared they would not get a second opportunity to choreograph, direct, or perform.</p>
<p>Women interviewees indicated that confidence was a trait that was fostered in men, but that a confident woman was not given the same respect. Men were said to pursue more opportunities as a result of this confidence. The impact of increased confidence and opportunities as training and emerging artists can arguably be traced to leadership later on in their careers.</p>
<p>Gender equality in creative leadership has recently, and importantly, been placed on the agenda in <a href="https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/f20beab8-81cc-4499-92e9-02afba18c438/Gender-Matters-Women-in-the-Australian-Screen-Industry.pdf?ext=.pdf">film</a>, <a href="http://sydney.edu.au/business/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/315275/Skipping-a-Beat_FINAL_210717.pdf">music</a>, <a href="http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/research/women-in-theatre-april-2012-54325827577ea.pdf">theatre</a> and <a href="http://thecountessreport.com.au/">visual arts</a>. The gender imbalance in dance should be quickly redressed. </p>
<p>Gender equality should not be seen as a hindrance, but as an opportunity to strengthen the sector and celebrate its diversity. Dance is a tool for storytelling, and it should matter to us whose stories are being told on our stages.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97464/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Westle submitted a draft of this report for a MFA (Cultural Leadership) at NIDA. The Delving into Dance podcast is run by Andrew Westle and has some project funding from Creative Victoria.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jordan Beth Vincent does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Since 2017, only 13% of full-length works by Australia’s major dance companies have been choreographed by women.
Andrew Westle, Assistant researcher and PhD candidate, La Trobe University
Jordan Beth Vincent, Research Fellow, Deakin Motion Lab, Deakin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/97079
2018-05-29T06:05:46Z
2018-05-29T06:05:46Z
Terrestrial, a tale of friendship, loneliness and aliens in the Australian desert
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220714/original/file-20180529-80653-ds3vll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Annabel Matheson as Liddy in Terrestrial. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kate Pardey.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Theatre review: Terrestrial, Adelaide Festival Centre</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Fleur Kilpatrick’s Terrestrial, directed by Nescha Jelk for the State Theatre Company of South Australia, is a story about memory, friendship and aliens set in an Australian desert mining town.</p>
<p>Through a narrative frame structured like nesting Russian dolls, witness testimony on the extraterrestrial disappearance of a teenager gradually gives rise to accounts of fear and loneliness, which, in turn, hold fragile experiences of hope and compassion. The effect is uncanny because, as if set on repeat, the story throbs like a beating heart.</p>
<p>Terrestrial plunges us in the psychological space of 15-year-old Liddy (Annabel Matheson), who longs to leave Earth and fly across the Milky Way to get as far away as possible from her abusive father. For nearly ten years now, she has been on the move with her mum. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/blackie-blackie-brown-is-a-ridiculously-fun-story-of-archaeology-race-and-revenge-96911">Blackie Blackie Brown is a ridiculously fun story of archaeology, race and revenge</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The surroundings of the small mining town where they seek safety resemble Mars. In her writer’s notes, Kilpatrick reflects on the ways “landscape informs how our trauma, confusion, illness or fear manifests itself. What happens when you’re scared and all you have is an endless sky to escape into? You look up.” The vast, star-studded sky is the only thing to keep Liddy company in her isolation. She cannot accept that it might be empty because if life has taught her anything at all it is “how possible the impossible actually is”. She is convinced that if her father can find her, so can aliens who can save her from him. </p>
<p>The only other teenager in this remote mining town is Badar (Patrick Jhanur), who also projects a growing anxiety onto the landscape. Son of Muslim immigrants, for whom the desert and the mine spell safety, and part of a caring family, Badar has no other home. For him this place is magical, despite the impending closure of the mine, the growing number of ghost houses (“empties”), and increasing loneliness.</p>
<p>Charming and compassionate, sensitive to what she cannot say, Badar welcomes Liddy into his world and patiently teaches her what it means to be a friend. It takes only a month and 99 lessons, to be specific. “Be kind,” he asks Liddy. Stay on Earth with me, she hears, we’ll keep each other safe. </p>
<p>Only the alien messes things up on the night the mine closes down. With a rifle Badar found in one of the empties, Libby fires straight up into the sky, “the last beacon on a sinking ship”. And the alien finally reveals itself, known to Libby all along. But, instead of taking her away, it takes Badar.</p>
<p>Now she must make sense of it all and tell things in a way that the investigator (the pre-recorded voice of Patrick Frost) would understand. How can she recall all she’s been trying to suppress? </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220715/original/file-20180529-80645-g18eaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220715/original/file-20180529-80645-g18eaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220715/original/file-20180529-80645-g18eaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220715/original/file-20180529-80645-g18eaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220715/original/file-20180529-80645-g18eaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220715/original/file-20180529-80645-g18eaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220715/original/file-20180529-80645-g18eaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220715/original/file-20180529-80645-g18eaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pat Jhanur as Badar with Annabel Matheson as Liddy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kate Pardey</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Most science fiction fans would agree that the best representatives of the genre are great not only because they compellingly imagine what might be out there - they imagine, too, the present world and our place in it differently.</p>
<p>Terrestrial accomplishes this spatially. Each location to which the stage transports us represents one of Liddy’s nesting memories. These are intersecting planes of experience, dominated by the harsh fluorescent overhead light and concrete besser-block interior of the interrogation room, the blindingly bright sunlight of a desert day, the spooky flashlight beam exploring empties, or the gentle twinkle of the Milky Way in the dark sky or reflected in the water of the nearby reservoir.</p>
<p>A two-tone wall brings to life the colours of the night desert, serving also as a contrasting projection surface for the investigator’s recording of Liddy’s interview. Like the wall, Liddy’s recollections are divided into truths she can tell others and memories no one – not even she! – must see. </p>
<p>Meg Wilson’s uncomplicated, yet elegant set and Chris Petridis’ evocative lighting immerse us in the realities Liddy and Badar share, juxtaposing them with the stifling spaces where the teenagers no longer feel safe. Andrew Howard’s sound design signals emotional transitions, drawing attention to Liddy’s delicate encounters with kindness or harshly punctuating her painful recollections of inimical spaces, adding to them a layer of mystery, perhaps an allusion to the alien’s presence in the girl’s life. </p>
<p>Under Nescha Jelk’s capable direction, Annabel Matheson and Patrick Jhanur create characters who pulsate with life. Matheson’s Liddy transforms from a snippy and withdrawn teenager into someone who can open up to allow a friend in her life. Jhanur’s teasing playfulness gradually exposes Badar’s growing wound, caused by the loss of his home. We feel with their characters. </p>
<p>Like Liddy’s memories, Matheson and Jhanur’s are nuanced and multilayered performances that will resonate with the young audiences for whom the show is intended.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Terrestrial is currently playing at the Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, until June 2.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97079/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maggie Ivanova does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In Terrestrial, teenager Libby wants aliens to whisk her across the galaxy to escape her abusive father.
Maggie Ivanova, Lecturer and Director of Studies, Drama, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/96528
2018-05-14T05:47:53Z
2018-05-14T05:47:53Z
Going Down finds hilarious satire in migrant identity
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218736/original/file-20180514-178743-q2hn03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Josh Price, Catherine Davies and Jenny Wu in Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre Company’s Production of Going Down. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Brett Boardman </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Going Down is a vibrant, layered comic exploration of stereotypes, from <a href="http://guide2coffee.com/guide-2-coffee-1/2014/3/8/piccolo-latte">piccolo</a>-quaffing urban Melbournites to migrant memoirists from ethnic minorities.</p>
<p>The plot follows Hmong-Australian writer Natalie Yang (played with delightfully energetic bombast by Catherine Davies) over a long weekend, in the come-down from the success of her first novel, Banana Girl, as she is consumed by rivalry with another Asian-Australian writer, Lulu Jayadi. </p>
<p>The parallels to playwright Michele Lee’s own life are hardly veiled: Lee is a Hmong-Australian writer, whose debut novel, Banana Girl, shares the same cover photograph and the same back cover blurb: “Sexy, irreverent and nuanced, Lee isn’t afraid to lay herself and her relationships bare”.</p>
<p>As Lee acknowledges in the program, “Banana Girl has a lot of sexual content, which reflected a particular phase in my life”. Determining just how autobiographical this story is adds to the intrigue of this production. Lee has written a devastating caricature of herself and she serves as the butt of many of the finest jokes in this play. But as with all “confessional” works, one must be careful not to be sucked in by autobiographical over-determination. Yang is not Lee. The reductive comic caricature needs to be understood within the larger context of this play as one of many stereotypes being explored.</p>
<p>As the plot zooms along, directed with a singular clarity by Leticia Cácares, we are introduced to a veritable smorgasbord of Melbourne clichés: wearing Gorman or Marimekko, taking pride in the shelf-space in Brunswick Bound bookstore next to the Moleskine display, the northern tribe to which Natalie belongs is strictly defined by Bell Street and the Yarra River.</p>
<p>Natalie and her friends (one runs a non-profit, the other works with her at a local council) consume a variety of beverages from a swag of bartenders and baristas, most of whom are played by a suitably bearded Josh Price. The play in fact seems to be structured around drinks, which accompany, if not induce most of the significant plot points. The set, by the Sisters Hayes (who also did costumes), is a slick construction of angular wood and steel that enhances, enables and extends the humour, complete with hole-in-the-wall cafe and a roll-away bed. It packs Melbourne in a nutshell.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218738/original/file-20180514-178746-396k35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218738/original/file-20180514-178746-396k35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218738/original/file-20180514-178746-396k35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218738/original/file-20180514-178746-396k35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218738/original/file-20180514-178746-396k35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218738/original/file-20180514-178746-396k35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218738/original/file-20180514-178746-396k35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218738/original/file-20180514-178746-396k35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Catherine Davies as Natalie Yang.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Brett Boardman</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We see all this as we follow Yang over the weekend, going down on both a series of unsuspecting men and into an emotional spiral, as the pun in the title suggests, and struggling to come to grips with her voice as a writer. Her rival, Lulu Jayadi, infuriates her. An Indonesian refugee, who wears a headscarf to please her father and whose tiny grandmother is always in the background, Jayadi writes more recognisably ethnic migrant stories. And they sell. Jayadi speaks to sold out audiences at the Wheeler Centre and wins the Miles Franklin (and a marathon, for good measure).</p>
<h2>Performing ethnicity</h2>
<p>It is tempting to dismiss these characters as two-dimensional, but to do so would miss the point. Rather, Lee serves up these clichés to engage with the way they produce expectations. Which brings us to the issue at the heart of this play: the expectations placed on writers with migrant backgrounds. Do Australian audiences expect them to perform their ethnicity, producing artefacts of otherness for general consumption? What motivates this demand? And should it be catered for?</p>
<p>The battle plays out in hilarious fashion between Lulu’s “migrant porn” and pornography of the more straight-forward variety, specifically, Natalie’s plans for her second novel, 100 Dicks in 100 Days. In the final scenes, it is actually Lulu who points out, in language that zeroes in on the commercial reality, that each writer has their own brand and that these brands, while they serve certain purposes, can become cages. These shorthand placeholders can never encompass the full complexity of their identities, which includes family, culture, and importantly, desire. </p>
<p>It is on these lines the play finds its resolution, with both writers beginning to negotiate their way out of such cages. They never fully leave behind the stereotypes, but are able to recognise and see past them. In the touching final scenes, Natalie finally begins to come to terms with her own heritage, coming back to her mother, and with fresh eyes, realising her own misplaced assumptions.</p>
<p>While one could quite simply enjoy Going Down for the joyous blend of its wit and slapstick, don’t be mistaken – there is depth behind the pom-pom earrings and yarn-bombed bollards. While the play is narrowcast for a very Melbourne-centric audience, there is something apt in this specificity, as it is the details that matter. </p>
<p>Despite the self deprecating reference to being like Christos Tsiolkas, “except less souvlaki, more sticky rice”, Lee shows herself to have a keen eye, a wicked sense of humour, and a willingness to take the piss out of herself. It’s a voice that is distinctly Australian, while working simultaneously to complicate just what it means to be a contemporary Australian.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="http://malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/going-down">Going Down</a> will be showing at the Malthouse Theatre until June 3.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96528/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Asher Warren does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Michele Lee’s play is a vibrant and layered comic exploration of stereotypes, from piccolo-quaffing urban Melburnites to migrant memoirists.
Asher Warren, Lecturer, University of Tasmania
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/92925
2018-03-07T00:46:13Z
2018-03-07T00:46:13Z
Memorial is a shattering excavation of the scars of war through poetry, dance and mind-blowing score
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/209219/original/file-20180306-146694-19pqrtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Helen Morse lends her voice to the poetry of Memorial. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shane Reid</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Arthur Danto, in his Analytic Philosophy of History, calls the common noun “scar” a “past-referring term”. In this way, language acknowledges the passing of time, representing verbally what happens to us physically. The mystery of appearance and disappearance in the world – the cycle of life and death – is caught in the warp and weft of how we speak, the soul made manifest by the word.</p>
<p>Memorial is a large-scale performance piece drenched in a sense of time passed. Based on <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12841067-memorial">Alice Oswald’s poetic exploration of the Iliad</a> (the precise, and again temporally charged, descriptor is “excavation”), it brings together a transcendent score by composer Jocelyn Pook, deft movement of 150 supernumeraries by Yaron Lifschitz, and a charged narration by actor Helen Morse, a voice born to convey feelings of love, loss and grief.</p>
<p>Chris Drummond, whose work has headed towards a new synthesis of refinement and ambition for some time, writes in his director’s note:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The idea of translating a work’s atmosphere is a compelling one, but coupled with the notion of enargeia (“bright, unbearable reality”), Memorial offered the possibility of being an immensely theatrical proposition. In the theatre, gods (and ghosts) are manifest, real, physical presences and in the right context, at its greatest, theatre can conjure a living communion with our immortal selves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Just so. In essence, Oswald’s poem is a 90-minute-long casualty list. It names and details the deaths of the ancient combatants on both sides of the ten-year Trojan war – that distant struggle that has become the universal index for all war.</p>
<p>No Australian has to be told of the significance of blood-soaked beaches in the Dardanelles, of savage death under perfect blue skies. From the opening image of a stage covered in prostrate bodies all of whom slowly raise one arm, Memorial occupies a register of high pathos that is both personally familiar and nationally confronting.</p>
<p>Here we go: the long itemisation of those who have lost their lives in causes that now seem so much hazier than the deaths they engendered. Things are much easier – and shorter – when enumerated rather than enunciated: one reason governments prefer statistics to vivid description.</p>
<p>The brilliance of Oswald’s writing lies in its combination of unrelenting singular focus with endless poetic invention, of simile and metaphor drawing on the natural world to capture a repetitive and eventually routine outcome (the deaths of combatants). Watching, I felt a visceral tug to memorise the text, to ingest its words into my mind. Hurriedly, I wrote down snatches afterwards:</p>
<p>“He opened a door in the earth and an entire generation vanishes.” “This whole river is a grave.” “Grief is black; it is made of earth.” “The works of men pass away.” “Thousands of names, thousands of leaves.” “… and is gone.”</p>
<p>The stage of the Dunstan Playhouse in Adelaide is a forgiving one, but, even so, moving 150 people on it requires outstanding choreographic skill. Three of Memorial’s “soldier chorus” are listed as dancers; the remainder are drawn from South Australian choirs and opera companies. Choreographer Lifschitz’s approach is to keep the physical text in motion most of the time, then still the picture, or clear it, leaving Morse alone, in the gloom.</p>
<p>Sometimes this works with startling power, sometimes it feels a little overdone; movement for movement’s sake. The great benefit of such massification, however, is that it acts not only as a reminder of scale, but that a non-professional chorus cannot hide its polyglot humanity – the mad variety of visages and elbows, walks and hairstyles, eye-lines and auras. It is this difference that war kills, returning everything to the sameness of the grave, of <em>gone.</em></p>
<p>Pook’s score is a golden stream of soft, devastating sadness: the sinuous reediness of oboe, shawm and clarinet; the pong and chime of bells; the wail and keen of counter tenor and Bulgarian and Macedonian vocals. The musicians are suspended on an illuminated bridge above the stage, like demi-gods. At its most climactic, Memorial’s music is almost literally mind-blowing. I thought, “If death is like this, it might not be too bad.”</p>
<p>But that’s life talking. In truth, when people die we have no idea what happens to them next, and that goes equally for the Archbishop of Canterbury and Richard Dawkins. De-heroicizing violent death, which has been part of the English literary tradition since the War Poets a hundred years ago, is surely also Oswald’s intent here. Many of her vignettes include the paralytic sorrow of those left behind – bereaved lovers, wives, brothers; crippled parents and children; lives torn apart and torn up. War looks sort of OK in the movies. But it really, really, really isn’t.</p>
<p>In bringing this piece into existence, director Chris Drummond shows two things. First, that his ability to handle the outsize tools of epic performance, previously on show in Night Letters and When the Rain Stops Falling, is now approaching the definitive. Second, that his interest in the human condition, in vulnerability, in drama, remains squarely at the centre of his vision. </p>
<p>Plays always have to be entertaining, one of my students said to me the other day. Well, yes. But they also have to be much more than that. Memorial is full of the death that life is full of. It is deeply compassionate, a quality emanating not only from Oswald’s poetry, but from every artist involved in the production.</p>
<p>Most compellingly from Helen Morse, who vibrates with feeling like a musical instrument herself. Her command of the text is total, her delivery shattering. She keeps herself on a short leash, emotion never spilling over structure, bleeding heart shielded by dry eyes. But then if we started weeping, would we ever stop?</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2018/memorial">Memorial</a> was staged as part of the Adelaide Festival.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92925/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Memorial brings Alice Oswald’s poetic retelling of the Iliad to the stage, with its furious indictment of war and its aftermath.
Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/92824
2018-03-05T04:10:14Z
2018-03-05T04:10:14Z
Down Syndrome on stage: You Know We Belong Together crosses boundaries between life and artistry
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208839/original/file-20180305-65547-1dnfl26.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Julia Hales and the cast of You Know We Belong Together</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Toni Wilkinson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The title of this show is taken from the theme song of Australian television soapie Home and Away, which has been screening for 30 years. Julia Hales, who has been watching the TV show since it first aired, is the star of this play, which is about her dreams of finding love, and acting on Home and Away.</p>
<p>Its world premiere in Perth in the Underground Studio on March 1 was part of the Perth Festival. Indeed, the festival commissioned the show in a pioneering initiative in partnership with Black Swan State Theatre Company and <a href="https://www.dadaa.org.au/">DADAA</a>, the local disability arts organisation that has a reputation for continuously innovative programs and opportunities for people with disabilities. Did I mention Julia Hales has an extra chromosome? Yes, she has lived with Down Syndrome for her 37 years of life, as has the rest of the cast bar one.</p>
<p>The stage is empty as the show begins; Hales enters alone. She soon invites a sign language interpreter to join her, and the show gains momentum as more cast members gather on stage and join her in conversation at café tables and chairs in an imaginary reproduction of Home and Away’s diner at Summer Bay. It works beautifully, with a waitress adding furniture as more friends are brought on stage. The show is skilfully structured, interspersing Hales’s direct-address monologues with still photographs projected against a backscreen as well as artwork and screened interviews, a continuous accumulation of guests, and even some audience participation.</p>
<p>Hales’s research for the show involved interviewing 11 people with Down syndrome about their dreams and experiences of love. These edited interviews were projected prior to them joining Hales on stage. In a manner typical of people with Down’s, they are emotionally open, sensitive, raw and funny. </p>
<p>Hales warns us at the beginning that she is an emotional woman, and also exclaims in wonder how beautiful she is in photographs (“and did I tell you I am single?”). While this is a marvellously professional performance, it’s the personalities on stage that cross the boundaries between life and artistry that really make it stand out.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208845/original/file-20180305-65529-17nkgif.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208845/original/file-20180305-65529-17nkgif.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208845/original/file-20180305-65529-17nkgif.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208845/original/file-20180305-65529-17nkgif.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208845/original/file-20180305-65529-17nkgif.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208845/original/file-20180305-65529-17nkgif.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208845/original/file-20180305-65529-17nkgif.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208845/original/file-20180305-65529-17nkgif.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Julia Hales in You Know We Belong Together.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Toni Wilkinson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The other research Hales draws on in her monologues is about the local institutions in Claremont and Fremantle where people with Down’s were imprisoned in the not-so-distant past (until the 1980s) in appalling and inhumane conditions. She also delves into art history to find a 16th-century painting of <a href="http://www.downsyndromeprenataltesting.com/down-syndrome-diagnosis-at-the-adoration-of-the-christ-child/">The Adoration of the Christ Child</a> featuring an angel with Down Syndrome. She uses statistics, medical explanations and comparisons (“How many chromosomes does a horse have?”) to contextualise disability in general and Down Syndrome specifically.</p>
<p>There was a lot of goodwill in the audience for this show, and a lot of wheelchairs and Down Syndrome kin as people came out for a show that reflects some of their lives and dreams. This is the most important part of the show: that people with Down’s are “playing” people with Down’s and putting their life narratives on stage and screen. </p>
<p>It is also part of Hales’s monologue – that it’s time for Home and Away to have a character with Down’s; indeed, for all shows to incorporate the lives of disabled people, as one in five people in Australia live with disability. Part of the script is Hales performing an imagined scene in Home and Away as an imaginary character – alongside two members of the audience who were invited on stage to read the scripts for the character’s mum and dad. </p>
<p>The audience participation sections worked brilliantly on the night I was there, even unintentionally tearing down the fourth wall, which was always precarious anyway with direct audience address. This Summer Bay dramatic scene was woven through the rest of the show, and sometimes became entangled with Hales’s monologues so that her dream of performing seamlessly moved into its actualisation. The finale is a clip of a specially manufactured scene in Summer Bay with veteran actor Ray Meagher and Hales on the set of Home and Away.</p>
<p>While I’m not usually a fan of family-and-friends love-and-dreams sentiments, this show was disarming and charming, political and professional, entertaining and educative — and, most of all, moving. Supported by excellence in stagecraft and production personnel, the festival could not have hoped for a better result of their commission. Hopefully it will be the start of many more. And Home and Away are mad if they miss this chance to scoop up Hales!</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://www.perthfestival.com.au/event/you-know-we-belong-together">You Know We Belong Together</a> was staged as part of the Perth Festival.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92824/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alison Bartlett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
You Know We Belong Together is a moving demand for more representation of people with Down Syndrome in the arts.
Alison Bartlett, Associate Professor, The University of Western Australia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/90111
2018-01-15T19:07:16Z
2018-01-15T19:07:16Z
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time trades deadpan for high-octane
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201899/original/file-20180115-101502-1cuippj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Julie Hale (left) and Joshua Jenkins in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, an adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The National Theatre’s production of <a href="http://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/season-2018/the-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time/">The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time</a>, currently playing at the Arts Centre Melbourne with MTC, is a lauded adaptation of Mark Haddon’s debut novel, of the same title. Haddon’s book was published to much acclaim in 2003. Its literary innovation is in part due to the author’s dead-pan characterisation of the internal monologue of 15-year-old protagonist, Christopher Boone, whom the reader is led to assume is neurologically atypical.</p>
<p>Publicity for the novel referred to the young protagonist, Christopher, as having Asperger’s Syndrome, something that in hindsight, the author “slightly regrets”. Rather, <a href="http://www.markhaddon.com/aspergers-and-autism">Haddon insists</a> that The Curious Incident is “a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way”.</p>
<p>The novel was adapted by British playwright, Simon Stephens, known for his inventive dramatization of bleak social realities, and ability to theatricalise inner-monologues. Stephens’s adaptation is faithful to Haddon’s novel – it shows Christopher’s love of mathematics, his instinctive recoiling from human touch, insistence on the truth, and unbridled capacity for memorising detail.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201900/original/file-20180115-101502-1qwa7yw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201900/original/file-20180115-101502-1qwa7yw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201900/original/file-20180115-101502-1qwa7yw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201900/original/file-20180115-101502-1qwa7yw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201900/original/file-20180115-101502-1qwa7yw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201900/original/file-20180115-101502-1qwa7yw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201900/original/file-20180115-101502-1qwa7yw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201900/original/file-20180115-101502-1qwa7yw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joshua Jenkins as Christophe Boone on the hi-tech set, which stands in for Christopher’s inner-world.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brinkhoff/Mögenburg</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The direction, by Marianne Elliott, emphasises elements of humour, creating characters that seem larger than life. It is a very affirmative interpretation, and at times is deeply sentimental.</p>
<p>The hi-tech set, which stands in for Christopher’s inner-world, is impressive. The walls and floor are overlaid with perfect grids, an expression of the “infinite” in mathematical thought. In the centre, lies the taxidermied body of a Golden Retriever with a garden fork wedged through its torso; the dog’s wound is denoted by a dark, glittery stain.</p>
<p>The play runs for approximately two and a half hours, and is divided into two parts. It opens with Christopher’s discovery of the dead dog. The puzzle of the pet’s grisly demise provides the whodunnit crime narrative structure, which informs its dramatic arc. An ensemble cast of ten actors, all adept physical performers, plays multiple roles, including neighbourhood characters, commuters, policemen and a station guard.</p>
<p>The first part follows Christopher (Joshua Jenkins) as he investigates the dog’s death. Inspired by Sherlock Holmes, he surmises that the crime is performed by someone “known to the victim”. The dog, Wellington, belongs to a neighbour, Mrs Shears (Amanda Posener), whom we later learn has been in a relationship with Christopher’s father, Ed (David Michaels).</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201901/original/file-20180115-101492-2kh04d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201901/original/file-20180115-101492-2kh04d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201901/original/file-20180115-101492-2kh04d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201901/original/file-20180115-101492-2kh04d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201901/original/file-20180115-101492-2kh04d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201901/original/file-20180115-101492-2kh04d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201901/original/file-20180115-101492-2kh04d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201901/original/file-20180115-101492-2kh04d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Emma Beattie (as Judy) and ensemble.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brinkhoff/Mögenburg</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The animated dialogue is matched by the pacey stage directions, which have actors darting across the stage like syncopated clock-work. The main action is interspersed with slower, more lyrical, choreographed sequences, suggesting the slowing down of time, and delving into memory.</p>
<p>We also see Christopher’s exchanges with his sympathetic teacher, Siobhan (Julie Hale), who sometimes doubles as one of his internal voices. While they discuss Christopher’s covert investigation into the crime – Ed has warned his son to “stay out of people’s business” – Christopher opts to bend the rules, and documents his investigation in a book.</p>
<p>Then Ed discovers the forbidden book, igniting his rage. This results in an altercation staged as a highly choreographed tussle between father and son. It includes a sequence of gut-wrenching slaps and punches – a testament to the play’s movement directors, Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett of Frantic Assembly.</p>
<p>By way of apology, Ed concedes that he killed Wellington. Furthermore, Christopher discovers his father has lied about the death of his mother, Judy (Emma Beattie), who lives in London with Mr Shears. As Christopher’s conflicted mother, Beattie delivers a more naturalistic performance, which captures the more nuanced aspects of conflict in the story, as well as its emotional cadences.</p>
<p>Upon learning these shocking facts, Christopher’s sense of safety dissolves, and the stage – a reflection of his fracturing inner-world – erupts in a volley of deafening sounds, screams, and pulses of blinding light.</p>
<p>The second part details the events of Christopher’s perilous train journey from Swindon to London, to escape his father, and find his mother. On his way, he stops off at school and discovers Siobhan wants to make his detective novel into a school play. </p>
<p>“I don’t like acting, it’s a kind of lie”, responds Christopher. This is the one intervention Stephens makes into the book’s narrative, a kind of humorous allusion to the form of “a play within a play”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201903/original/file-20180115-101511-1xuuxk4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201903/original/file-20180115-101511-1xuuxk4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201903/original/file-20180115-101511-1xuuxk4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201903/original/file-20180115-101511-1xuuxk4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201903/original/file-20180115-101511-1xuuxk4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201903/original/file-20180115-101511-1xuuxk4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201903/original/file-20180115-101511-1xuuxk4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201903/original/file-20180115-101511-1xuuxk4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Matt Wilman and Johsua Jenkins: Most of part two takes place at the train station, and is it here that the hi-tech set, and exacting choreography come to the fore.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brinkhoff/Mögenburg</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The line is delivered as a joke. At times, I found the comedic delivery of text and characterisation an elision of the undercurrent of menace and violence in the story. After all, Ed has killed his girlfriend’s dog in a jealous rage and Christopher, terrified, is the subject of police and community ridicule.</p>
<h2>Atmospherics of anxiety</h2>
<p>Most of part two takes place at the train station, and is it here that the hi-tech set, and exacting choreography come to the fore. It is a thrilling mix of sound, lighting and projection, adding to the atmospherics of Christopher’s anxiety.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the young protagonist emerges unscathed; he finds his mother and makes it back to Swindon in time to take his A-level maths exam.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201902/original/file-20180115-101495-1x0mbyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201902/original/file-20180115-101495-1x0mbyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201902/original/file-20180115-101495-1x0mbyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201902/original/file-20180115-101495-1x0mbyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201902/original/file-20180115-101495-1x0mbyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201902/original/file-20180115-101495-1x0mbyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201902/original/file-20180115-101495-1x0mbyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201902/original/file-20180115-101495-1x0mbyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joshua Jenkins, Matt Wilman and Crystal Condie.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brinkhoff/Mögenburg</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The play demands high-octane performances of the ensemble cast, especially Joshua Jenkins as Christopher, who is present for its entire duration. Jenkins’s delivery is expressive and energised, but a far-cry from the “dead-pan” delivery and granular vision indicative of the novel’s characterisation of Christopher.</p>
<p>I’m curious about the choice to cast an older actor, who can play “young”, rather than an actor of a similar age to Christopher.</p>
<p>It seems like an unintentionally absurd, if not entirely patronising choice. This is not intended as a critique of Jenkins’s skill as an actor, but an acknowledgement of the fierce intelligence and sensitivity often displayed by young actors. (I’m thinking here of the striking performances in the TV series Stranger Things. In a theatrical context there is Australian theatre company Fraught Outfit, who include children and teenaged performers to stunning effect).</p>
<p>The play concludes with a triumphant Christopher who makes a list of his achievements: He solved a murder, wrote a book, caught a train to London, found his mother and blitzed his A-level maths exam. He turns to Siobhan and asks a difficult question, “that means I can do anything, doesn’t it”? </p>
<p>There is a long, silent, pause as Siobhan, looking slightly downcast, considers her answer. She turns, inhales, preparing to speak, but is cut short when the lights go out. </p>
<p>Of all the spectacular moments in The Curious Incident – the high-tech lights, projection, sound, impeccable choreography – it is this tiny moment, showing Siobhan captive to doubt, which truly sticks.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/season-2018/the-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time/">The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time</a> is at Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse until February 25.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90111/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sandra D'urso does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A theatre production of Mark Haddon’s much-loved novel is affirmative and at times deeply sentimental, with a hi-tech set, and exacting choreography.
Sandra D'urso, Researcher, The Australian Centre, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/86212
2017-12-06T19:15:36Z
2017-12-06T19:15:36Z
Out of character: how acting puts a mental strain on performers
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197728/original/file-20171205-23018-13okxx4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Actors are often required to tap profound emotions in their performance, which is one of the reasons for poor mental health in the industry. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Performers are twice as likely as the general population to experience depression, according to the 2015 <a href="http://www.equityfoundation.org.au/equity-news/the-australian-actors-wellbeing-study.html">Australian Actors’ Wellbeing Study</a>. Many suffer from performance anxiety and report high levels of stress arising from work-related pressures such as low income and job insecurity.</p>
<p>Research over many years has acknowledged that those drawn to working in the arts tend to be highly vulnerable to depression and anxiety. However, there are contributing factors to the strikingly high levels of anxiety and stress specific to the acting community. These include the deep emotions they are often required to access and express when playing a role and the strong identification they can form with their characters.</p>
<p>I recently conducted research into the stresses incurred by acting students at the country’s leading drama schools. Most of the acting teachers I interviewed acknowledged that their students did not take the time and space to separate themselves from their roles. This resulted in emotional hangovers, which often caused extreme moods and difficulties in their personal lives.</p>
<p>Although it became clear that more still needs to be done to safeguard these acting students’ wellbeing, mental health issues in the arts – along with other stressful workplace environments – are fortunately now being given more significance. Many performing arts schools and companies are actively seeking to address their artists’ mental health and wellbeing concerns.</p>
<h2>Getting in character</h2>
<p>Getting into character is not just as simple as “putting on” or “taking off” a role. <a href="http://www/academia.edu/244485">Performing arts scholar Mark Seton</a> argues that playing a character is a complex process that cannot be separated from the life of the actor.</p>
<p>Sometimes actors are unable to let go of the emotions associated with their characters. This boundary blurring can result in them carrying the role into everyday life – with negative effects.</p>
<p>One acting teacher described how a gentle, polite male student became rude and aggressive during the time he played one of the men involved in a re-enactment of the Anita Cobby murder. The teacher had to point out to him that “seepage” seemed to be taking place between him and the character.</p>
<p>Actors frequently tap into their personal histories to evoke the emotions required to play a role. This can be traumatic if it triggers deep issues or elicits difficult experiences and memories. </p>
<p>One drama school director disclosed that he had to be very careful when choosing plays if they involved domestic violence or sexual assaults because he was aware some of his students had lived through these experiences. It could be emotionally dangerous for them to act out such scenes.</p>
<p>The 2015 Australian Actors’ Wellbeing Study found that almost 40% of actors surveyed had difficulty shaking off intense emotional and/or physical roles.</p>
<p>Although strategies have been developed to help actors detach from the roles they play – to de-role – in my experience and in my research, actors or acting students rarely use these practices. It has long been acknowledged that heading to the bar for a drink after a performance is the traditional way for actors to unwind after performances. The <a href="http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=499926749273237;res=IELHSS">2015 study</a> found that, perhaps unsurprisingly in light of this fact, actors’ alcohol consumption was high.</p>
<h2>How to de-role</h2>
<p>There are many ways to warm down from a performance. Actors can participate in a brief feedback session with cast members. This can involve sharing how the performance has gone as well as other procedures such as deep breathing, visualisations or physical releases.</p>
<p>Other de-roling suggestions include ritualistically disrobing in order to consciously let go of the costume and the character by leaving them both on the rack. Any post-performance sense of closure that actors can create is helpful if it assists them in leaving their characters in the dressing room.</p>
<p>It could involve the use of a symbolic talisman that is carried only when playing the role and left backstage, or the singing of a little tune that represents to them a sense of completion. Whatever works!</p>
<p>The teachers I interviewed maintained that more needed to be done to help acting students better differentiate between the theatre space and the space outside the stage door. This would reinforce healthier work habits, which could eventually transfer into the profession.</p>
<h2>Performing arts companies paying attention</h2>
<p>The 2015 study resulted in the establishment of an Actors Equity Wellness Committee. Its aim is to educate the industry about mental health and wellbeing while providing resources for those who may be at risk.</p>
<p>More performing arts companies are employing psychologists. The Australian Ballet and contemporary dance company CO3 have resident psychologists to assist with dancers’ mental wellbeing.</p>
<p>Theatre productions are more frequently using the services of psychologists – particularly if the subject matter is dark or difficult and likely to trigger psychological or emotional reactions in the actors. Cases in point are recent productions of Sarah Kane’s 4.45 Psychosis, an exploration of mental illness, and a dance-theatre production, Good Little Soldier, which dealt with the family of a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD.</p>
<p>Drama schools tend to rely on their instructors and affiliated university counselling services to help students with mental health issues. Sydney drama school NIDA has had a resident counsellor one day per week for many years – and he is always booked out. My research suggests that specialised counselling services are an essential backup for students in all areas of the performing arts.</p>
<p>In the future artists will hopefully suffer a little less for their art in order to provide audiences with their best work.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86212/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Leith Taylor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
While we appreciate an actor’s craft on the stage, the deep emotions they draw on in performance take their toll on mental health. Actors need to “take off” their characters to return to normal life.
Leith Taylor, PhD graduate, W.A.Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/87855
2017-11-23T04:43:09Z
2017-11-23T04:43:09Z
Muriel’s Wedding: the Musical is a deeply satisfying tribute to Australia’s most-loved dag
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196003/original/file-20171123-6035-1j1h14x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C19%2C6336%2C4180&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hilary Cole, Helen Dallimore and Maggie McKenna in Sydney Theatre Company and Global Creatures Production of Muriel’s Wedding the Musical.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Lisa Tomasetti</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Muriel Heslop occupies a precious position in Australian cultural life. She is, perhaps, our most-loved dag. The creative team that has transformed her story into a musical have produced a deeply satisfying night at the theatre. Any moment of translation carries with it the possibility of disappointment and betrayal. But the Sydney Theatre Company’s Muriel’s Wedding: the Musical makes us fall in love with this story all over again.</p>
<p>Muriel’s ABBA-propelled journey burst into <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/">Australian cinema in 1994</a> as part of a cultural moment in which Australian quirks became the object of tender and loving laughter on the big screen (alongside <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109045/">Priscilla: Queen of the Desert</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105488/">Strictly Ballroom</a>). She is the last and most challenging of this trio to be given the musical treatment – perhaps because the emotional landscape of this story is a little more complex.</p>
<p>The main contours of the plot remain the same on stage as they did on the screen, though the action has moved into the present. The totally daggy and ostracised Muriel is trapped in Porpoise Spit where she listens to ABBA and dreams of a wedding where the popular girls and her family will finally see her as a success. Rather than meeting her true love, however, Muriel meets Rhonda - another outcast with whom she escapes to Sydney.</p>
<p>Freed from the judgemental gaze of her father and supported by the carefree Rhonda, Muriel transforms herself into the story she always wanted. The truth of her past life and the reality of her current one, however, soon impinge on this fantasy world to make it unsustainable, and Porpoise Spit begins to exert its influence on her once more.</p>
<p>While satirical, Muriel’s Wedding also has a deep vein of sadness. The Heslops are a family bullied and belittled into misery by a boorish patriarch, Bill. I was a little nervous about how Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall would engage this complex interplay in their music and lyrics; they have managed to keep the balance between these sensibilities without ever teetering into melodrama or cliché. The writing is whip smart and completely loving.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196004/original/file-20171123-6016-1bv2i5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196004/original/file-20171123-6016-1bv2i5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196004/original/file-20171123-6016-1bv2i5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196004/original/file-20171123-6016-1bv2i5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196004/original/file-20171123-6016-1bv2i5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196004/original/file-20171123-6016-1bv2i5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196004/original/file-20171123-6016-1bv2i5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196004/original/file-20171123-6016-1bv2i5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Maggie McKenna as Muriel and Madeleine Jones as Rhonda.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Lisa Tomasetti</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As in the film, ABBA’s music still provides the backbone to Muriel’s story of herself and now, crucially, her mother. Miller-Heidke and Nuttall have masterfully woven various ABBA songs into their original music and lyrics. When Muriel retreats to her inner fantasy world, ABBA burst out of cupboards or through shop windows to narrate Muriel’s story to herself. </p>
<p>Maggie McKenna’s Muriel makes us fall in love with her all over again. So too, Madeleine Jones’s Rhonda is the kind of friend we all wish could deliver us from the limitations of how we see ourselves. The love song “you’re fucking amazing”, sung in thick Australian accents between this pair in the first act, is an anthem to the pleasures and potency of female friendship. This is friendship as revelation and saviour. It is mateship with a feminist sensibility. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196005/original/file-20171123-6031-1flkbis.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196005/original/file-20171123-6031-1flkbis.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196005/original/file-20171123-6031-1flkbis.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196005/original/file-20171123-6031-1flkbis.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196005/original/file-20171123-6031-1flkbis.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196005/original/file-20171123-6031-1flkbis.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1242&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196005/original/file-20171123-6031-1flkbis.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1242&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196005/original/file-20171123-6031-1flkbis.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1242&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stephen Madsen as Alex.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Lisa Tomasetti</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Indeed, the beautiful irony of Muriel’s story is that – in the film at least – she essentially ends up with her female best friend rather than the bloke of her imagination. While the musical does maintain the centrality of this plot, it amplifies her romantic coupling at the same time. To my mind, this dulled some of the power of the story.</p>
<p>The production also provides the deep pleasures of recognition as these caricatures of Australian life are given the musical treatment. The audience positively shivered in pleasure when “you’re terrible, Muriel” is uttered by Muriel’s sister and roared with laughter when Tania screeches “but I’m a bride”. (Tania is played with scene stealing presence by Christie Whelan Browne who manages to burst out of the long shadow cast by Sophie Lee’s filmic performance). </p>
<p>By moving Muriel’s story into the present, her feelings of inadequacy and hopes for reinvention intersect with the psychological death trap of social media. Popularity, which in a 1994 story was as much a feeling as it was a quantifiable reality, is now something that can be tracked through “reposts” and “likes”. </p>
<p>The musical is also a love song for Sydney. When Muriel escapes her family and friends in Porpoise Spit, she arrives in a city in which it is possible to “be the me” she wants to be. Sydney has long enabled this kind of remaking of the self – not least because <a href="https://theconversation.com/only-heaven-knows-brings-1940s-queer-sydney-roaring-back-to-life-78747">queer life is part of the city’s DNA</a>.</p>
<p>The musical makes queer Sydney into a more central part of this story; the streetscape of Sydney on this stage is full of same-sex desire and one character (not who you might expect) comes out in a set of delightful plot turns in the final act. Given the ways in which the same-sex marriage postal survey revealed divisions in support across Australia, it is hard not to read this musical as a gentle critique of the stubborn phobias and prejudices that still dominate in some parts of the country. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196008/original/file-20171123-6055-ljzxqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196008/original/file-20171123-6055-ljzxqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196008/original/file-20171123-6055-ljzxqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196008/original/file-20171123-6055-ljzxqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196008/original/file-20171123-6055-ljzxqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196008/original/file-20171123-6055-ljzxqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196008/original/file-20171123-6055-ljzxqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196008/original/file-20171123-6055-ljzxqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Cast of Muriel’s Wedding: the Musical.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Lisa Tomasetti</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, while Bill Heslop’s battler is the object of savage satire and critique in both the musical and the 1994 film, comfortable cosmopolitans might do well to remember that the “battler” was key to former prime minister John Howard’s election in 1996. Many people felt alienated from what they perceived as an urban-centred cultural and political elite. The stories we tell about these differences have the capacity to entrench or undo these perceived divisions.</p>
<p>Rhonda and Muriel escape back to Sydney at the end of this story, which left me with some questions about how this musical might play on stages outside this city. A Sydney audience is probably pretty ready to watch a story in which their city becomes a haven for the marginalised. But I wonder how people in those apparently stultifying communities will feel about having their homes reflected back to them as sites of oppression. </p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/whats-on/campaign/2017/muriels-wedding">Muriel’s Wedding: the Musical</a> is showing at Roslyn Theatre until January 27 2018.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87855/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Leigh Boucher receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>
Muriel Heslop stole Australia’s heart when she debuted on screen in 1994. Now she gets a loving, ABBA-filled musical tribute, that is definitely not terrible.
Leigh Boucher, Senior Lecturer - Modern History, Macquarie University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/87856
2017-11-23T02:10:20Z
2017-11-23T02:10:20Z
Blood on the stage: Let the Right One In is a vampire love story for our times
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196012/original/file-20171123-6061-yqptst.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sophia Forrest as Eli in Let the Right One In</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo credit Daniel J Grant</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The popularity of vampires has endured since Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/729018.The_Bride_of_Corinth_and_Other_Poems">Bride of Corinth</a> (1797) and Bram Stoker’s better-known <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17245.Dracula?ac=1&from_search=true">Dracula</a> (1897), based on a Transylvanian folk myth. Stoker’s novel set many of the literary conventions for the genre: drinking fresh blood, the constant search for new (young, female) victims, the male vampire as a lonely outsider, superhuman strength and agility, immortality, and many more. </p>
<p>Black Swan Theatre Company’s production of <a href="https://www.bsstc.com.au/plays/let-the-right-one-in">Let the Right One In</a>, directed by Clare Watson, revisits the vampire story and stays true to many of these tropes, using copious amounts of blood. But it has a major difference: the vampire is a teenage girl. </p>
<p>Let the Right One In is Jack Thorne’s adaptation of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/943402.Let_the_Right_One_In">the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist</a> (<em>Låt den rätte komma in</em>) published in 2004, a year before the popular teenage vampire saga Twilight. It was made into a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1139797/">Swedish-language film in 2008</a>, and a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1228987/">Hollywood adaptation</a> followed in 2010. The stage version premiered in Scotland in 2013 and became an international hit after its transfer to London’s West End. </p>
<p>Linqvist began his career as a playwright and screenwriter, and Let the Right One In is a versatile story that can be told in any genre. At its core it is a love story for our times. The vampire, Eli (Sophia Forrest), while able to scale walls and kill people at will (all the victims are men), still wants to share her life with someone. The reasons are practical, such as helping her to feed without detection, but as the play unfolds, she seems to want to have a genuine friendship with 12-year-old Oskar (Ian Michael), and cares enough about him to push him away so he cannot discover her terrible secret. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196013/original/file-20171123-6055-944jcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196013/original/file-20171123-6055-944jcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196013/original/file-20171123-6055-944jcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196013/original/file-20171123-6055-944jcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196013/original/file-20171123-6055-944jcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196013/original/file-20171123-6055-944jcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196013/original/file-20171123-6055-944jcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196013/original/file-20171123-6055-944jcy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rory O Keeffe, Alison van Reeken, Clarence Ryan and Ian Michael Let The Right One In.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Daniel J Grant</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is in stark contrast to the mature man, Harkan (Steve Turner), who arrives in the Swedish town of Blackeberg with her. At first, it seems he is her father, but we soon learn he is in love with her, and he wants her to love him back. </p>
<p>Even though Eli is several hundred years old she has the body of an immature girl. The sexual overtones between her and Harkan are disturbing to say the least. This is echoed by the overly clingy actions of Oskar’s mother (Alison Van Reeken) who cuddles up on the sofa or in bed with her son after one too many red wines. </p>
<p>As the story unfolds, our perceptions change and Eli shows her true nature. She has an old and very manipulative head on young shoulders, and her kitten-like helplessness comes with fangs.</p>
<p>For her directorial debut with the company, Watson has teamed up with Bruce McKinven (designer) and Richard Vabre (lighting) to create a visually stunning, three-storey set that supports the isolation and loneliness of the main characters. Stark flat surfaces evoke the concrete walls of an apartment or the smooth segments of a Rubric’s cube, and serve as a backdrop for Michael Carmody’s projections of falling snow or bare trees under a dark winter glow. Rachael Dease’s dramatic and often ethereal soundtrack completes the mood.</p>
<p>There are excellent performances particularly from the young cast members. The two thugs who bully Oskar, Jonny (Rory O’Keefe) and Micke (Clarence Ryan), are at times quite terrifying. Both are comfortable in their physicality and navigate the demanding set with ease. Forrest is also exceptional and exhibits the movements of a gravity-defying vampire with grace and agility. Oskar is body-shamed by the bullies, and Michael’s gestures and stance poignantly show his pain and his fear of his persecutors.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196014/original/file-20171123-6020-1lrllb2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196014/original/file-20171123-6020-1lrllb2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196014/original/file-20171123-6020-1lrllb2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196014/original/file-20171123-6020-1lrllb2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196014/original/file-20171123-6020-1lrllb2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196014/original/file-20171123-6020-1lrllb2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196014/original/file-20171123-6020-1lrllb2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196014/original/file-20171123-6020-1lrllb2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sophia Forrest as Eli and Ian Michael as Oskar.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Daniel J Grant</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The other members of this ensemble cast (completed by Stuart Halusz and Maitland Schnaars) put in fine performances in multiple roles, making the most of their function to move the story along with minimal character development. This is perhaps the result of taking a novel-cum-film and making it into a play. The scenes are all relatively short and jump across time and location; they are framed around physically dramatic action, making the dialogue seem quite sparse; and the coming and going of many minor characters. </p>
<p>The constant sliding to and fro of the nine screens to reveal a new scene is at times slow, and becomes predictable despite attempts to disrupt this with projections, music and occasional choreography. The contained spaces work well for the claustrophobic rooms of the apartment block, but the set loses the isolation of a town surrounded by a wild forest. Sitting near the front of the stalls my view of the upper levels was not ideal and occasionally the onstage lighting was blinding. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, this is a fine debut for Watson and demonstrates a bold vision for the company she now leads. She is unafraid of expanding theatre’s appeal to a younger, screen-driven audience through plays such as this, while keeping the regular and possibly more theatrically sophisticated patrons entertained with strong narrative and visual spectacle. Her previous experience is varied but her work in theatre for young audiences has served her well here. The troubled relationships of the young characters are touching to watch, and their energy and emotional lives on stage are captivating. </p>
<p>Watson has programmed the complete <a href="https://www.bsstc.com.au/seasons/2018">2018 season</a>, titled The Conversation. It aims “to catalyse and contribute to the big conversations” we face at local, national and international levels. It is an opportunity for her to provoke, engage and stimulate an Australian audience and I look forward to it with great interest. </p>
<p><em>Let the Right One In will be on at Black Swan until December 3 2017</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87856/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vivienne Glance is a playwright, performer and advocate for the arts, a member of the Australian Writers Guild, Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance and the Greens WA. </span></em></p>
Based on the 2004 novel, Let the Right One is a bloody staging of a vampire romance. Except in this show, the predator is a teenage girl.
Vivienne Glance, Hon Research Fellow in Poetry and Theatre studies, The University of Western Australia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/85698
2017-10-16T13:24:38Z
2017-10-16T13:24:38Z
Assassinating Katie Hopkins may be bad taste but theatre-goers may just love it
<p>Katie Hopkins, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/katie-hopkins-and-the-sun-when-the-unreadable-prints-the-unspeakable-40505">controversial British media commentator</a>, has become the subject of a new stage play guaranteed to inflame the public as much has her <a href="https://theconversation.com/katie-hopkins-proclaims-herself-the-jesus-of-the-outspoken-its-a-very-dangerous-message-78544">own extreme columns</a> do.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/oct/11/theatre-to-stage-musical-based-on-imaginary-death-of-katie-hopkins">Assassination of Katie Hopkins</a> musical is due to open in spring 2018 at Theatr Clywd in north Wales. Tucked away in the market town of Mold, Flintshire, one may not expect it to be the venue for such a topic, and yet Theatr Clwyd has <a href="http://www.dailypost.co.uk/whats-on/theatre-news/rhyl-murderer-ruth-ellis-story-12644097">long held a reputation</a> for excellent, thoughtful, and entertaining stage productions, often attracting <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/jul/08/toby-robertson">luminaries of British Theatre</a> to tread the boards there. </p>
<p>One can already hear the knives of public opinion being sharpened. The Twitterverse went into spontaneous combustion as those both for and against the controversial celebrity mouth piece etched the lines of battle into virtual sand. Of course, whether any of them will look up from their smartphones long enough to actually go see the musical in spring, is another matter. </p>
<p>I for one applaud writer Chris Bush, director James Grieve and artistic director Tamara Harvey for daring to provoke. This is part of theatre’s rich history – theatre is an art and art should provoke. In the late 1820s and early 1830s Daniel Auber’s opera <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/30/opera-on-the-barricades">La Muette de Portici</a> inspired not only the July Revolution in 1830s France, but also the establishment of an independent Belgian nation, from under the yoke of King William I’s Dutch kingdom. </p>
<p>Closer to home, on the streets of Dublin in 1907, there were riots after a performance of <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/1010/">The Playboy of the Western World</a> by John Millington Synge. The play’s plot centred around Christy Mahon who, on the run after murdering his father, is ironically turned into a local celebrity. The play was attacked at the time for a lack of moral decency – Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Féin and later president of Ireland, called it a “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/apr/16/theatre.samanthaellis">vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language</a>”. Yet The Playboy went on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/sep/23/playboy-western-world-old-vic">to be performed globally</a>, and is now studied by Irish school children as the master work of a major writer.</p>
<p>Moving forward to 1960s London, playwright Joe Orton, a working class, gay man had his breakout play, <a href="http://www.joeorton.org/Pages/Joe_Orton_Plays3.html">Entertaining Mr Sloane</a>, which also used patricide as a theme. In it, Sloane murders Kemp, the elderly father of Kath and Ed, who are both sexually attracted to Sloane. The play of course was extremely controversial. One Telegraph reader complained “I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion”. The reader, one Edna Welthorpe, was actually an <a href="http://www.joeorton.org/Pages/Joe_Orton_Life9.html">alter ego character invented by Orton</a>, a master of social and transmedia before such things existed. </p>
<p>Orton was a playwright with his finger on the pulse of British Society. He knew how to press buttons and get a reaction. Orton, who was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/from-the-archive-blog/2017/aug/09/joe-orton-death-archive-1967">brutally murdered</a> by his lover Kenneth Halliwell in 1967, has inspired many a writer since. It is hard to imagine that there would be a <a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/mark-ravenhill">Mark Ravenhill</a> without a Joe Orton. Ravenhill first came onto the scene with a play entitled <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-shopping-and-fucking-royal-court-london-1356460.html">Shopping and Fucking</a>, directed by Max Stafford-Clark in 1996, in which there were portrayals of male rape and perhaps the first use of the word “rimming” on the British stage. Outrage followed, but the play had a serious message about consumerism, and indeed the state of the nation. </p>
<p>Another controversial playwright at this time was Sarah Kane, whose play Blasted <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/young-playwright-blasted-for-brutalist-debut-work-1568794.html">was so controversial</a> it was debated on the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight. A middle-aged, bigoted, male journalist rapes an innocent young girl in a hotel room, a soldier then appears in the hotel room with a sniper rifle and we are transported into a different reality that is of war and inhumanity as jogtrot. Jack Tinker of the Daily Mail called it a “disgusting feast of filth”. Today it is considered as an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2015/jan/12/sarah-kane-blasted-was-dismissed-by-critics">incredibly important play</a> by a playwright who sadly left this world too soon. </p>
<p>I was also writing controversial plays in the 1990s: <a href="https://carolinefarrellwriter.com/2015/08/24/doing-it-with-passion-writers-in-ireland-series-len-collin/">Box</a> looked at two London runaways who find the diary of a British soldier who fell in love with a German soldier in the trenches of the World War I. It challenged male sexuality and, though it did attract some criticism, it was also named critics’ choice in Time Out and City Limits – a rare thing at the time.</p>
<p>Despite each of these plays causing a stir, the performances were well attended, and several have been revived in more recent years. While assassinating Katie Hopkins may seem like the perfect type of clickbait headline to encourage a new young audience to go to the theatre, the fact of the matter is that the stage has been home to this kind of content for centuries. Closed off from the world for a few hours, one can delve into the depths of the human psyche. It is one of the last places where a watcher is forced to form their own views of the performance before heading to the social media platforms beloved by the likes of Hopkins to praise or complain.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85698/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Len Collin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The stage is the perfect place to explore dark thoughts.
Len Collin, Senior Lecturer in Screenwriting and Media Production, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/84761
2017-09-27T04:36:11Z
2017-09-27T04:36:11Z
Does opera deserve its privileged status within arts funding?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187708/original/file-20170927-23629-9ew2kn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Opera is treated differently to other artforms in Australia. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Tracey NearmyAAP Image/Tracey Nearmy</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is a strange reality but opera as an artform is always given special and arguably preferential treatment by governments and other influential forces in Western society. This happens, it seems, regardless of whatever government is in power.</p>
<p>It is argued that opera represents the “highest” of artforms given its combination of music, theatre dance and the visual arts. Certainly it usually receives the most financial rewards from government and often also from private benefactors.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/_aca_annual_report_2015-16_-lr-582161b4b29d1.pdf">2015-16, Australian opera companies</a> received $23.7 million from the Australia Council, representing 13.7% of the council’s overall grant allocation. Opera, while seen as an art that embraces other artforms, is located primarily within music. Music overall receives 53% of the council’s allocation. This compares with 2.7% given to literature and 9.7% given to the visual arts.</p>
<p>Since 2015, when the arts funding scene in Australia was afflicted by cuts and controversy instigated by George Brandis’s grant heist at the Australia Council, one area has been totally unaffected and protected - the major performing arts sector. Its share of the funding pool in 2015-16 was $107.8 million (or 62%) out of a total pool of grants in 2016 of $173.75 million. This amount was divided between 28 companies; <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/sites/g/files/net1761/f/national_opera_review_final_report_-_appendix.pdf">Opera Australia</a> received the largest individual share. Overall, Opera Australia received $25.5 million in <a href="https://d30bjm1vsa9rrn.cloudfront.net/res/pdfs/opera-australia-2016-annual-report.pdf">federal and state government grants</a> in 2016. </p>
<p>When arts minister Mitch Fifield announced in March 2017 the <a href="https://theconversation.com/after-the-catalyst-arts-funding-mess-many-questions-remain-74848">return of much of the money taken by Brandis</a> from the Australia Council, he nevertheless directed that $1 million of this should be allocated to funding the recommendations of the <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/have-your-say/national-opera-review">National Opera Review</a>. So while the opera sector had not been cut during the previous two years, it was nevertheless going to be rewarded with more funding (arguably taken from the small to medium sector originally). </p>
<p>The National Opera Review was commissioned in 2014, with the <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/documents/national-opera-review-final-report">final report</a> released in October 2016. The review was asked, under its Terms of Reference, to make recommendations aimed at promoting the financial viability, artistic vibrancy and accessibility of Australia’s four major opera companies: Opera Australia, Opera Queensland, State Opera of South Australia, and West Australian Opera.</p>
<p>While containing many interesting recommendations, the review re-affirms the special status of opera and the companies involved. As the rest of the arts sector was scrambling to survive because of the enforced cuts, the opera sector, it seems, continued to be protected. </p>
<p>For example, the review recommends that Opera Queensland, which has been operating mostly in deficit over a period of six years, should be given another three years to get its house together. Through this period of trying to “improve”, the company remains a member of the Major Performing Arts Board. This is despite the fact that the board is said to demand the highest artistic and financial standards of its members. </p>
<p>If Opera Queensland is still unable to manage itself after three years, only then will it cease to receive government funds. This recommendation seems to contrast dramatically with what would happen to any other arts company in a similar situation receiving government funding.</p>
<p>On September 20, the federal government released its <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/documents/response-national-opera-review-final-report">official response</a> to the review. Some of the interesting recommendations that have been agreed to (at least in principle) by government include the provision of an “innovation” fund of $1.2 million for opera companies so that they are encouraged to produce new work.</p>
<p>Unlike the rest of the arts sector, which produces new work as part of its standard remit, the opera companies will receive an incentive for doing this. Overall the review recommends more core funding for the opera companies (in addition to the innovation fund).</p>
<p>More shocking is that the government has agreed in principle with a recommendation to penalise companies (by up to $200,000) if they do not balance the employment of Australian and overseas artists. It seems that the percentage of Australians employed by opera companies in leading roles has dramatically declined over the past decade, particularly at Opera Australia. It goes without saying that a basic expectation of government funding would be that it goes towards the employment of Australian artists. But the penalty seems an odd choice when this could be a condition of receiving government funding in the first place.</p>
<p>Reminiscent of the US governance approach (“give, get or get off”) the review recommends that directors of opera boards should be “making a financial contribution (regardless of size) and assisting with raising funds”. In this model, the role of a board director is to be a fundraiser, a philanthropist or both. This automatically limits the range of board member skills and ensures that most board members of opera companies are expected to be independently wealthy. The government has agreed to this.</p>
<p>Further recommendations are that the Australia Council should be given extra funding ($250,000) to employ staff with specialised expertise in understanding the needs of opera companies. Such staff should be senior enough to be taken seriously by the companies concerned.</p>
<p>While the opera review members have been thorough in their approach, the premise of the review and of the government’s response is that opera and opera companies should continue to be a privileged sector in the arts spectrum. </p>
<p>The people who are involved with opera companies generally represent the most privileged in society - the wealthy and powerful. The review recommends that this should be further enhanced.</p>
<p>Over the past three years arts funding has been a contested domain, yet the opera sector has been protected from this and continues to be so. Is this the basis of a democratic system?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84761/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jo Caust has previously received funding from the Australia Council. She is a member of the Arts Industry Council (SA) and NAVA.</span></em></p>
It is a strange reality but opera as an artform is always given special and arguably preferential treatment by governments and other influential forces in Western society. This happens, it seems, regardless…
Jo Caust, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow (Hon), The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.