Pedalling Back

Written and performed by Jeff Michel

Blue Cow Theatre Inc.
Directed by Frank Newman and Melissa King

Touring through Tasmania Performs

Intelligent, fun, absorbing and elegantly simple. These are a few ways to describe Jeff Michel’s biographical theatre piece without giving too much away, because to go into detail would be tantamount to a spoiler. To detail Michel’s artfulness in conveying time and context would take away the delight of just working it out throughout the play. So too would be describing Michel's neat set, and clever sound and lighting by Matthew Fargher and Ghost McDonald respectively.

What can be said without giving too much away is that Michel’s nostalgic devices will grab anyone in the audience that grew up through the 80s and 90s. With the challenges of being a teenager not exclusive to any one decade, this is a play that anyone over thirteen can relate to. 

Michel’s play has evolved through a series of great theatre development schemes, including the Tasmania Performs Artist Residency, Blue Cow Theatre’s Cowshed program, the Theatre Royal, Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania Performs Rawspace and the Tasmanian International Arts Festival. It is described as a first, both for Michel as a playwright and Melissa King as co-director, working alongside Frank Newman. Both should be thrilled with the outcome of their first steps out into their new arenas.

Pedalling Back will tour Tasmanian regionally from 30 March to 9 April via Tasmania Performs. This is a golden opportunity to see thoughtful, good quality theatre outside of the city centres and deserves to be supported. Come on all you regional audiences, get yourself a couple of tickets! Check out tour dates and venues at Tasmania Performs.

by Stephenie Cahalan

Declaration: I attended the performance as a guest of a company member and with no suggestion of writing a review. However, I was so delighted with the show and so pleased that audiences across Tasmania will have the chance to see it, that I felt compelled to write it up.

Grounded by George Brant

Blue Cow Theatre Inc

Directed by Annette Downs, starring Jane Longhurst

Review by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg

Technology may have changed the methods of war yet perhaps not, Brant suggests, the human experience of it.

 

Image from Blue Cow Theatre Inc Website

‘Grounded’ after briefly favouring love and family over her military career, the Pilot (Jane Longhurst) returns to work where instead of guiding her craft in the great ‘blue’ of which she still dreams, she finds herself dropping her daughter at daycare and reluctantly driving across the desert to the strange daily mundanity that is war at a distance. Now a drone pilot, she fights and kills remotely, but she suffers and struggles here and now. Her actions might be distant but the trauma of them is very present.

She's Not Performing

By Anica Boulanger-Mashberg

Alison Mann’s first full-length play, She’s Not Performing, weaves a handful of lives around its central issue: the long-term impacts and aftermaths of forced adoption. The play broils with the anger and loss which is a daily part of life for Margarite (Sara Pensalfini), decades after giving up her daughter for adoption. Her unresolved pain ricochets and reverberates violently into her relationships with both her current boyfriend Ian (Campbell McKenzie), and also Hamish (Joe Clements), a connection from her past. Bryony Geeves completes the quartet as Annie, a young stripper Margarite becomes preoccupied with (thinking perhaps Annie could be her daughter).

Image courtesy Theatre Royal website

Director Belinda Bradley has handled some of the most sensitive scenes gently, allowing the story to bleed from its characters at just the right pace, and integrating a sometimes addictively claustrophobic and suitably nightmarish soundscape by Matt Warren. In other places, however, the actors don’t yet seem to feel comfortable in their roles, and a certain hesitance and lack of connection to the text occasionally forms a barrier to audience empathy. The minimalist design and moody yet unpretentious lighting serve effectively as each of the different settings, but also leave the actors quite naked (sometimes literally) in the moments where they are not yet at ease.

The production is at its strongest during the scenes that depart from reality in one way or other: in dreams, memories, flashbacks, fantasies. During these sections the cast seem more willing to take risks, the dialogue – perhaps ironically – sounds more real, and all the production elements come together powerfully.

The season should bring more cohesion to the relationships and allow the actors to fully embody their roles, as well as develop the moments of humour in the script which cautiously poked their way through the fury in this opening-night performance.

She’s Not Performing is presented by Tasmanian Theatre Company and will continue at the Theatre Royal Backspace until November 29, 2013. 

AS WE FORGIVE

by Kylie Eastley

As We Forgive is a play written by award winning playwright Tom Holloway specifically for Hobart based actor, Robert Jarman. Last night was the opening and Jarman played to a packed house including the usual VIP's who showed their appreciation with a hearty encore.

As We Forgive consists of 3 monologues; each a narrative that discusses three important elements to the human psyche. The first is vengeance. Jarman appears on stage as an elderly man dressed in a tweed jacket with cane in hand. He slumps into an old arm chair and welcomes the audience, thanking them for coming out on this 'auspicious evening'.

He tells the story of a man living an ordinary life within a very small world; his home, the local shop, a nearby park. The story unfolds and we hear how this world is shattered by the actions of another and the impact this has on him. Rather than hide away in fear he instead opts for vengeance as a way forward.

Everything Must Go

By Eliza Burke

Image courtesy of Theatre Royal

Rachel Leary’s Everything Must Go is a very funny and at times very touching monologue set at a garage sale in Tasmania’s Huon Valley. The sole character, Nancy Browne, is selling off a motley collection of belongings from the family home – a toilet-roll doll, a tyre swan, a deer’s head with one eye –you know the sort of things! – as well as a few not so familiar items like a jar of goat poo and two bickering pet bricks. She is moving out of the valley where she has always lived pending the multi-million dollar suburban development of ‘Perfect Ponds’.

On the surface Everything Must Go is a hilarious series of skits based around the various objects on sale and Nancy’s observations about the nature of life in the valley and the people who live there. But as the play progresses, deeper meanings emerge about loss, change and self-survival creating a unique fusion of comedic and dramatic theatre and a raw poignancy that stays with you long after Nancy has left the stage.

I'll Break My Own Heart

By Kylie Eastley

The name says it all. I'll Break My Own Heart is all about the torture and journey of love; the darkness, the disturbing and the beautiful. This is cabaret. It is sexy one hour degustation from Rose Grayson, who both devised and performed the show.

Dressed in fish net stockings, a corset and top hat, Ms Grayson welcomes the audience with Illusions a song written by Frederick Hollander. A good choice, as the subject matter, if you hadn't already guessed from the title of the show, is about love, lust, passion, hate and heartache. The trauma and wonder of love is conveyed in 19 songs and poems. There's a little storytelling, a little chatting with the punters, but mostly the audience experiences the range and beauty of Ms Grayson's voice.

Appalling Behaviour

By Ben Walter
Professional Collective Theatre

Backspace Theatre

8.15pm Wednesday 23^rd May

Early in the piece, Stephen House's expatriate drifter latches on to a passing comment; a pedestrian observes that he seems to have an admirer. He's talking about a woman who wheedled the troubled homeless man from an altercation that was turning violent. It's an offhand remark, but for House's character it becomes a focus for hope among the dissipated inhumanity of his daily life among the Parisian underclass. The two days following are full of confusion, exaltation and disappointment as he interprets his relationships and experiences in the light of it.

Sex, Death and a Cup of Tea

The Tasmanian Theatre Company
The Backspace
2-25 September

By Anica Boulanger-Mashberg

This program comprises Sue Smith’s The Seagull, Debra Oswald’s Bull Kelp, Adam Grossetti’s Sex, Death and Fly Fishing and Finegan Kruckemeyer’s The Exceptional Beauty of the First and the Last. The playwrights were commissioned for a week’s residence in remote Tasmanian towns, producing four plays describing (sometimes circumscribing) place as a way of framing narrative.

Don't Think Twice

A Double Bill:
Partly It’s About Love... Partly It’s About Massacre (Fiona Sprott) and
Andrew Corder Thinks Twice (Finegan Kruckemeyer)
Tasmanian Theatre Company
Backspace Theatre
May 27, 2010
by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg

If you think you can’t make fantastic theatre out of one actor in one small theatre, then think again. Think twice, if you will excuse the cheap pun.

As a rule, I don’t adore one-person shows. I find them hard work, and I get lonely: I crave interactions on stage. But with the Tasmanian Theatre Company’s latest offering, I am reminded that restriction is not always a negative, but rather can be the generator of great beauty and surprising moments.