MAN ABOUT TOWN

‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’ When he wrote those words for a 1945 essay in The Atlantic Monthly , Raymond Chandler was describing the ideal private detective, such as his own Philip Marlowe, the protagonist of hard-boiled classics like The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell My Lovely (1940), but they could also apply to the protagonist of Patricia Cornelius’ latest work, the site-specific performance piece, Taxi . Created for this year’s Big West Festival, and directed by Susie Dee, Taxi sees a small audience seated in the back seat of a taxi and driven about Footscray, from busy thoroughfares and desolate riverbanks to quiet suburban back streets. Throughout the journey, as a subtle sound design broadcasts snippets of talkback radio, opera and dispatch calls, we witness the trials and tribulations of the taxi driver (the quietly charismatic Rodney Afif, in this instance) as he goes about his daily dr...

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People premiered at the St James Theatre, London, on February 14, 1895. Following Wilde’s first trial, it closed after just 66 performances and would not be staged again until the following century. A comedy par excellence, the play’s deliciously witty text elegantly satirises Victorian conventions – respectability, marriage, social obligations – and was described by authoritative Wilde biographer Richard Elleman as the playwright and poet’s ‘most brilliant work’. This new production of The Importance of Being Earnest is the swansong of the Melbourne Theatre Company’s outgoing Artistic Director, Simon Phillips. His last production for the company as their AD, it is also a remount of an earlier production of the play which Phillips directed for the MTC in 1988. Three of the cast members of that original production – Jane Menelaus, Bob Hornery and Geoffrey Rush – take on the roles of the governe...

Set in Tathra, a quiet seaside town on the NSW south coast, Lally Katz’s Return to Earth tells the story of Katz-substitute Alice (Eloise Mignon) as she returns home after a mysterious absence and seeks to reconnect with the life she left behind. Tragedy has struck in Alice’s absence, adding tension to her relationships with her mother, Wendy (Julie Forsyth), father Cleveland (Kim Gyngell), brother Tom (Tim Ross) and young niece Catta (played on opening night by Allegra Annetta). Her former best friend Jeanie (Anne-Louise Sarks) has grown up and grown distant. Even the fisherman Alice begins a new relationship with keeps her – at least initially – at arms length. Complicating matters further, during her absence from the family home Alice appears to have forgotten basic motor functions such as how to chew her food. Simple routines such as setting the table now elude her. Has she always been this scatty? Has she been institutionalised? Where did she go, when she went aw...

The State Theatre Company of South Australia’s final play for 2011 is a deeply moving production about love and loss, based on the acclaimed memoir by actor and playwright Timothy Conigrave. Posthumously published in 1995, just a few months after Conigrave’s death from HIV/AIDS, Holding the Man tells the charming, frank and touching story of Conigrave’s relationship with his partner John Caleo, who he met in 1976, while the pair were still in high school. Despite their differences (John was the captain of the school football team; Tim was an aspiring actor) and the challenges posed by conservative parents, infidelity and occasional separation, their love flourished for 15 years, until John’s untimely death from an AIDS-related illness in 1992. This new production of Holding the Man (originally staged in 2006 by the Griffin Theatre Company, and adapted for the stage by Tommy Murphy) is directed by Rosalba Clemente, a former Artistic Director of the State Theatr...

Compassion fatigue afflicts many in the western world due to prolonged exposure to suffering via the media. Already encouraged to think, during wartime, of an enemy as ‘other’, as something less than human, our concern and empathy for victims of war and natural disaster further diminishes when we are saturated with images of tragedy in newspapers, magazines, on television and online. Aftermath , by the writer/director team of Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, was originally developed by the New York Theatre Workshop in 2009. Based on a series of interviews Blank and Jensen conducted with Iraqi refugees living in Jordan, the play is a remarkable exercise in humanising the people of Iraq, and a powerful antidote to compassion fatigue. On a stage bare save for a series of chairs, eight actors take on the roles of real Iraqis: a theatre director and his artist wife; a pharmacist; an Imam; a dermatologist; a housewife and mother; a married couple, both cooks; and a translator ...

I am accustomed, at the theatre, to occasionally wiping away tears. I am not used to being so moved by a production that I have to struggle to stop myself breaking down completely and bawling my eyes out in a snotty, sobbing mess at its conclusion. Big hART’s account of the life of celebrated and betrayed artist Albert Namatjira left me reeling. The basic story of Albert (Elea) Namatjira is relatively well known: the Western Arrernte man whose exquisite watercolours taught white Australians to look at their country in an entirely new way, and the first Australian Aboriginal to be granted citizenship. In 1958 he was sentenced to six months jail for supplying alcohol to members of his extended family. After a public outcry, and two appeals, the sentence was reduced to three months. Namatjira finally served two months of ‘open’ detention at the Papunya settlement in March-May 1959. Three months later he died at Alice Springs Hospital, aged just 57. Written and directed b...

Originally staged in an all-too-brief season at the City of Melbourne’s Arts House in 2010, this genuinely startling one-woman show by Tamara Saulwick is a theatrical exploration of the experience of fear; an evocation of those incidents, events and imaginings that cause your pulse to quicken and raise the hairs on the back of your neck. Clad in boots and a blue dress which she occasionally smoothes across her lap or picks invisible specks from, Saulwick recounts moments of genuine terror as told to her by a range of interviewees, women and girls ranging from six to 92 years of age. Walking into your house to discover a man hiding in your wardrobe. Waking suddenly in the middle of the night as someone tries to break down your door. A late night train trip in an unknown country. A frantic race through a lonely forest. An obscene, threatening phone call. Sometimes Saulwick embodies their stories, speaking their words in her own voice but copying their every inflection, sta...

Last year’s MTC production of Richard III was widely proclaimed as a masterpiece, with particular praise heaped on Ewen Leslie’s striking performance in the title role, Simon Phillips’ bold direction, and Shaun Gurton’s revolving, West Wing -inspired set. This year, the same creative team have re-assembled for Hamlet , with Leslie taking on the demanding role of the melancholy Dane. There is much to like about this new production, but for all its strengths, there is something of the air of a Hollywood sequel about it; a sense of rehashing a winning formula with less successful results. Updated into a world of power and politics where electronic surveillance is commonplace, this Hamlet sees messages delivered by mobile phones instead of by heralds and pages, an effective trick which was slightly undone by the cheap gimmick of having one of the actor’s mobiles ring during the opening scene, interrupting Claudius’s speech. Once again the production makes full use of the ...

Judging from his short season at the second annual Melbourne Cabaret Festival, 23 year old Toby Francis – the winner of Sydney’s 8th Annual Cabaret Showcase in December 2010 – has a remarkable career ahead of him. Possessed of a powerful tenor voice - displayed to good advantage in a selection of songs ranging from rock numbers to showtunes - as well as excellent comic timing and a gently self-deprecating wit, there were times on Wednesday night when Francis definitely felt too large for the small Butterfly Club stage, despite being very new to the cabaret world. His debut solo show, Blokelahoma! – directed by David Campbell and previously performed at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in June – is an engaging exploration of what it means to be a man in a post-modern world, in which Francis discourses about everything from painful hair removal incidents to coming out as an atheist to his deeply religious family. Impressing with both his emotional and vocal range, in a s...

Founded in 1959, when 22 rebels broke away from the Nederlands Ballet to form a new company dedicated to contemporary rather than classical dance, over the past 52 years Nederlands Dans Theatre has developed a global reputation for choreographic excellence and virtuosic performance. On the opening night of their exclusive Australian season at the Arts Centre, that reputation was bolstered by the performance of three works, beginning with a dramatic solo choreographed by the company’s former Artistic Director, Jiří Kylián, Double You . Created by Kylián in 1994, this was a work of muscular choreography performed by Bastien Zorzeto. To the accompaniment of a Johann Sebastian Bach harpsichord work, and as two large pendulums swung hypnotically at the rear of the State Theatre stage, the shirtless Zorzeto spun, slapped, pointed and whirled through this powerful piece; the slow roll of a shoulder here, the deliberate tremor of a leg there displaying a precise and controlled p...

Crouched over his typewriter and relying on booze, coke and pills to kick-start his imagination, horror novelist Stephen King sits tormented by writers block, waiting for the muse to strike. But rather than inspiration, his subconscious dredges up characters from his already published works to mock and torment him, as the boundaries between real life and fiction slowly begin to blur. Written by Australian playwright, essayist, and regular contributor to horror film magazine Fangoria , Lee Gambin, King of Bangor sets out to explore the relationship between a writer and his work; examining the alchemical process by which a writer’s imagination takes personal experiences and transforms them into fiction. Unfortunately, while Gambin is clearly knowledgable about his subject, he fails to adequately explore the writer’s psychology in compelling detail. King’s struggle with writer’s block and addiction, as depicted in King of Bangor , feels more cartoon-like than truly dramatic...

Perhaps the most influential science fiction film ever made, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) was also the most expensive silent film ever produced, going well over its allocated budget and failing to make a profit – which perhaps explains why its distributors were so eager to see the original German print drastically cut down for the US and UK markets. Reduced from 153 minutes to approximately 90 – cuts which significantly altered the story, as well as the film’s pacing and tone – the international release of Metropolis failed to recoup its losses, though a review commissioned by the New York Times from none other than H.G. Wells, in which he dismissed the film as “unimaginative [and] incoherent” probably didn’t help it find an audience. Today, Lang’s magnum opus is widely recognised as a masterpiece of German Expressionist cinema, and one of the first dystopian science fictions films ever made. This is despite the fact that the Metropolis we have seen has always been ...

Long before Frankenstein’s Monster aroused both pity and terror in a generation of film-goers, there was the Golem. Lurching out of the myths and mist of antiquity, this soulless creature of clay, animated by the name of God and designed to protect the Jews of Prague from persecution, has fascinated storytellers since at least the Middle Ages. While references to Golem-like creatures appear as far back as the oldest books of the Bible (Adam, after all, is made of “the dust of the ground”) perhaps the most famous version of the Golem story is the landmark 1920 film by actor/director Paul Wegener, Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam ( The Golem: How He Came into the World ), ranked alongside The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922) as one of the true masterpieces of German Expressionist cinema. Expressionistic motifs are subtly referenced throughout the Malthouse Theatre's latest production, A Golem Story . Anna Cordingley’s stark wooden set, the stage juttin...

If your perception of history is that it’s the dry and dusty domain of tweedy old academics, this accessible and engaging publication from the Australian Lesbian & Gay Archives (ALGA) will surely change the way you think about the discipline. An account of the travails and triumphs of Melbourne’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex – or ‘queer’ (to use the umbrella term that has grown in popularity since it was first introduced to Australia circa 1991) – community from the 18th to the 21st centuries, the book makes no claim to be a comprehensive history. Rather, as its editors acknowledge in their introduction, it is a series of ‘snapshots, fragments, vignettes’; a collage of histories told over 51 chapters, written by 12 separate authors. Having grown out of a series of history walks presented by the ALGA at Midsumma and similar festivals, the book’s tone is accessible, concise, and distinctly non-academic despite the qualifications and careers of its var...