King of Bangor

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, an impression reinforced by Dione Joseph’s one-note direction and a tone which borders on the hysterical.

American accents are inconsistent, as are the performances, with some exceptions. Mim, who plays King’s housekeeper, demonstrates good chemistry with Peter Berzanskis as Stephen King, but when she takes on the role of an obsessive, intrusive fan (either inspired by, or the inspiration for, the crazed Annie Wilkes in King’s novel Misery) her performance needs reigning in. Of the remaining cast members, Nicholas Brien as King’s errand boy (as well as characters from Salem’s Lot and Christine) is the strongest, with Tamara Donnellan also noteworthy.

The lighting design by Roxan Bowes is simple but effective, while Gowri Paary’s set design is ill-suited to the stage and forces the actors to awkwardly clamber over and around it. The live score – provided by violinist Christine Munroe – is suitably evocative, and displays a restraint lacking in the rest of the production.

Despite its faults, King of Bangor is a passionate piece of theatre, with so much heart it virtually bleeds on stage. I may not have especially enjoyed the play, but it did inspire me to re-visit King’s oeuvre, starting with his classic vampire tale, Salem’s Lot, for which Gambin and company can take all the credit.

Rating: Two and a half stars

King of Bangor
By Lee Gambin
Directed by Dione Joseph
Performed by Mim, Nicholas Brien, Tamara Donnellan, and Reville Smith
Live music by Christine Munroe

Old Council Chambers, Trades Hall
June 29-30, July 1-2, and July 6-9
www.bellaunion.com.au
kingofbangor.wordpress.com

This review first appeared on Arts Hub on July 6th 2011.

MICF 2010: PROPHECY OF THE QUANTUM CHILD

Local comedy troupe Vigilantelope wowed audiences in 2009 with their exuberant, pun-filled Tale of the Golden Lease, a clever series of sketches and 80s-style dance routines constructed around a fantastically improbable McGuffin-driven plot. Last year’s show concerned time travel, an epic chase and hell hounds. This year’s show features time travel, an epic chase and a marauding cyborg army. See where I’m going with this?

Prophecy of the Quantum Child features many of the elements Vigilantelope used so successfully in their first production, but like a Hollywood sequel, the second time around it all feels slightly stale. It’s also undercooked; more development is needed to speed up the story and cut the weaker gags. Nonetheless, audiences unfamiliar with Vigilantelope’s shtick should be entertained, though not challenged, by this science fiction confectionary of wordplay, warring tribes, killer cyborgs and a doesn’t matter hole (like a black hole, but worse).

Three stars

Trades Hall until April 4
Tue-Sat 9.30pm, Sun 8.30pm
$16 - $21

This review first appeared in The Age on Monday April 5.

2009 MIFF Diary Part 12

BLESSED
(Dir. Ana Kokkinos, 2009)

Based on the Melbourne Worker’s Theatre production Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? by Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves and Christos Tsiolkas (which was first performed at the Victorian Trades Hall in May 1998), Ana Kokkinos’ Blessed will doubtless re-engage the audience she lost with her last effort, the painful The Book of Revelation.

Blessed is a bleak story of mothers and children set in contemporary Melbourne; and as with the play, a number of storylines play out simultaneously over its 113 minute running time:

• Tanya (Deborah Lee-Furness) and her husband Peter (William McInnes) watch their relationship fall apart as they argue and fight over their mortgage, while their son Daniel (Harrison Gilbertson) tries his hand at crime, having already been accused of theft by his mother.
• Young runaway Orton (an excellent performance by Reef Ireland) struggles to look after his mentally retarded sister Stacey (Eva Lazzaro) on the city’s streets, while their mother Rhonda (Frances O’Connor) struggles with the Department of Human Services.
• Two young school girls, Katrina (Sophie Lowe) and Trisha (Anastasia Baboussouras) pretend to be from a private school with unexpected consequences.
• A gay youth (Eamon Farren) runs away from home.
• A middle class Aboriginal man, James (Wayne Blair) deals with racism on the worksite, and finds himself lost between two worlds.
  

Frustratingly, at least for me, the film makes significant – and to my mind unnecessary – changes to its source material, especially to the characters created by queer author Christos Tsiolkas in Suit, his section of Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? (And I should add a disclaimer here: Christos is a mate of mine.)

In the play, the character of Daniel – who becomes Roo in the film – is an angry and aggressive gay youth, who, in a remarkable and confrontational monologue exploring the fetishisation of power by the powerless and dispossessed, fantasises about having sex with Jeff Kennett, who was the Premier of Victoria at the time the play was written.

In Blessed, however, the character becomes a weak and passive victim; and in one of the film’s most unlikely scenes (which like The Book of Revelation portrays sex as something ugly and to be feared) Roo is forced to masturbate on camera for a pornographer.

Not only is the scene filmed in a cinematically 'dramatic' decayed warehouse rather than in a domestic setting, as would normally be the case with amateur porn, Kokkinos also shows Roo weeping as he masturbates; yet he is still able to maintain an erection and ejaculate despite his obvious fear and discomfort. Unrealistic much?

Elsewhere in the film Kokkinos takes major liberties with the Aboriginal man, James, who in the play is shown as a flawed and conflicted character. As written by Tsiolkas, James is both a victim of racism and a perpetrator of it, and his vilification of a white prostitute reinforces the fact that racism is a two-way street. In Blessed, however, Kokkinos not only whitewashes the character (pun intended) but effectively writes him out of the conclusion of the film, which seriously unbalances the film’s dramatic structure as it reaches its conclusion and ties its various plot threads together.

I also had problems with some of the performances, particularly Miranda Otto and Frances O’Connor, neither of whom I was ever entirely convinced by. There’s a constant, niggling awareness while watching Blessed that one is watching middle-class Australian actors pretending to be working class; a sensation I don't have in similar films by other Australian directors, such as Alkinos Tsilimidos for example, which to my mind points to a weakness in Kokkinos' directorial style.

Coupled with the fact that I was sitting watching this film as part of a middle class audience seeking entertainment at a film festival, this made the whole experience somewhat unreal.

These criticisms aside, Blessed is still a powerful film, and will no doubt provoke a strong emotional response from its viewers upon its cinematic release later this year.

Rating: Three stars

Comedy Festival review #11: Putting Hats on Ducks

Putting Hats on Ducks

By A Lot Of Bread

Trades Hall – Old Council Chambers, 2 Lygon Street, Carlton South

Tuesday to Saturday at 9.30pm until April 25

$15 - $20

Rating: ***

Putting Hats on Ducks is the Comedy Festival debut by A Lot of Bread – Lucy Shaw, Courtney Trathan and Madeleine Tucker – and cements the reputation this eager young trio earned with their acclaimed 2008 Melbourne Fringe show, All Aboard the Fizzy Train.

Three farmers are aghast to discover that The Big Company is constructing a train line across their adjacent properties in order to assist the commute to work for a community of snobbish barnacles.

The farmers’ quest to save their livelihoods introduces us to a surreal range of characters – including a bakehouse that yearns to follow in the footsteps of Olympic swimmer Daniel Kowalski – and some marvellously absurd situations.

Puns, slides and homemade props feature heavily.

While the trio’s energy flags towards the end, this drolly whimsical show, with its simple yet spectacular costumes (the echidna kidnapper is a stand-out), cardboard sets reminiscent of The Suitcase Royale, and a deadpan performance style, most definitely entertains.

Macbeth Re-Arisen

White Whale Theatre's audacious, hilarious, horror movie homage is a sequel to Shakespeare's Macbeth. That's right, a sequel. Turns out the witches' magic is stronger than Macduff's sword; so even though he's been decapitated, Macbeth manages to return from the grave and wreak havoc upon Scotland once more, aided and abetted by the witch-goddess Hecate, his reanimated wife Lady Macbeth (who's now seeing damned spots everywhere, not just on her hands) and a ravening undead horde.

Written and directed by David Mence in 2004, and originally staged at Melbourne University that same year, the play and its players then embarked for the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006, where they garnered rave reviews ("Macbeth meets Shaun of the Dead in B-grade movie schlock-horror splendour!" raved The Scotsman). Now it's been remounted at Trades Hall, with a cast of 13, a magnificent set of crags and standing stones that's more lavish than most independent theatre companies would ever dream of (kudos to set & costume designer Christina Logan-Bell and set constructor Shane Lee), and some truly spectacular gross-out special effects.

On one level, Macbeth Re-Arisen is a serious exploration of the themes of Macbeth: the natural order has been disturbed by Macbeth's murder of the King, and the resulting chaos is spinning out of control. Characters and scenes from the original are seamlessly wrought into Mence's text, which is audaciously written in iambic pemtameter, and scattered with references not only to 'the Scottish play', but other works by the Bard, as well as evoking the gleefully pitch-black humour of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy.

Opening with the original 'blasted heath' scene when Macbeth firsts meets the weird sisters, the play leaps to Macbeth's death at the hands of Macduff, then segues smoothly into new material: Malcolm is crowned king, a heart-sick Macduff becomes a hermit, and Macbeth rises from his shallow grave, his neck a gaping, gory wound.

Soon, blood is fountaining across the stage (the scene where Macbeth murders a young man who has interrupted his soliloquy by plunging a hand through his chest is to die for), a zombie army is on the march, and things look black for Scotland. The only light is cast by the appearance of Banquo's ghost, who sets Macduff's feet on the downward path to Hell itself, where salvation in the form of an accursed tome writ in human blood may yet be found...

As pastiches go, Macbeth Re-Arisen is a right bloody marvel. It's full of sly digs to literary convention, and revels in the fact; and is also a gloriously gory homage to 80s horror films. Performances are strong throughout, especially Craig Annis' gleefully scenery-chewing turn as Macbeth, Grant Foulkes as a suitably sombre and sick of life Macduff, and Michael Finney as young Fleance, Banquo's son. As you can tell, I adored it. It's last performance of the season is tonight: see it, or rue that you've missed it for the rest of your miserable life.

Bookings: www.easytix.com.au or 9639 0096, or on the door at Trades Hall's New Ballroom.

The laughs continue

THE BOY WITH TAPE ON HIS FACE
Having seen two previews of this show, I was very much looking forward to it, and it didn't disappoint. That said, don't go in expecting unbridled, constant hilarity. This is a show with considerable quiet moments, and lots of build up, but the sight gags, when they come, are uniformly strong. It's also a show that's heavily dependent on its audience - if you don't throw yourself into it 100% you won't get a lot out of it. Kiwi performer Sam Wills is an enigmatic, deranged presence, at whose urgings audience members help create musical mayhem and surreal, expressionistic mime. A word of caution though - if you don't like shows where performers pick on the audience - albeit, in this instance, in a good-natured and collaborative way - this is not the show for you.
Three and half quizzical hoots of mirth out of five.


ROD QUANTOCK - 2050 AD The Musical
In his usual endearing, slightly flustered way, national comic treasure Rod Quantock presents an arry of information about how our current lifestyles are killing the future: oil shortages, water shortages, and what they mean for the coming decades. Some chaotic use of IT equipment - cameras, graphs and websites - rather than his usual whiteboards and butcher's paper displays - appropriately in keeping with the theme of his show, which is futurism - often as seen from the past, ie outmoded views of how we'd live as seen from 1948 - sadly, we're still waiting for those personal jetpacks we were promised... A slightly depressing yet delightful show that provoked regular laughs and constant grins.
Three slightly nervous laughs out of five.


GERALDINE QUINN - Dumb Things
There's much less music than I've come to expect from Ms Quinn and a lot more stand-up in her new show, which is essentially an exploration of gaffes and blunders, from asking random old people to be a grandparent, to reading 19th century literature aloud on the tram. Some excellent stories and strong delivery, but just a bit too much bogan-bashing for my tastes.
Three chuckles out of five.

Comedy Festival 2008 - the first reviews...

Another week, another festival. I haven't even had time to finish detailing some of the films I saw and/or previewed at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, and already the 2008 Melbourne International Comedy Festival is underway. Eeek! Oh well, on with the (somewhat hasty) reviews...


DANIEL TOWNES - YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH
The first real night of the festival, not counting last night's comedy gala, and only a handful of people came to see Sydney comedian Townes in his show at the Portland Hotel. I caught the guy last year and enjoyed him, in a lacksidasical way. Less impressed this year. He has this whole laconic bogan schtick thing happening, which is sporadically funny, but I saw little progression or evolution in his material since 2007. Endearing, but the ultimate impression was that he was lazy. Nonetheless, an intelligent guy who can and should do better if he can be inspired to lift his game.
Two and half ocasional chuckles out of five.


ANDREA POWELL in Gobbeldygook
Part of the Comedy@Trades program at Carlton's Trades Hall, comedian Andrea Powell presents a range of new characters in her latest show; only one of which - a delightfully wrong junkie hippie - has strutted the boards before. The rest of them are new, although the opening character, a wonderfully bitter yoga instruction, seems to have grown out of Powell's 2007 show at Town Hall. Not all of the characters are strong enough to warrant inclusion, particularly a video store clerk, who is the most passive character on show, interacting with an imaginary customer on the phone rather than with the audience, but there are some wicked laughs to be had here if you don't sit in the front two rows...
Three gasps of recognition and wicked cackles out of five.


ANDREW MCCLELLAND'S Guide to Being a Modern Gentleman
Or, Diverse and Entertaining Facts about Dandies, Debonair Role Models, Eccentric Uncles and the Importance of Manners and Style, delivered with chortles, reverb and flair.
The strongest show McClelland has done since he taught us all about pirates several years ago. Richly delivered, well timed, with just the right amount of gentle self-mockery, and of course, cravats and a handy flip-book. Definitely recommended.
Three and a half chortles which set off one's gout out of five.