BIG BABY

Terrapin Puppet Theatre

Playing at the Theatre Royal Hobart

By Gai Anderson

Big Baby the latest show from Terrapin Puppet Theatre, is an evocative multilayered piece of puppetry and visual theatre created for children and families. Directed by Sam Routledge and written by Van Badham, the show explores notions of vulnerability and power through the journey of the Big Baby and his father.

WILD TIME IN THE OLD TOWN - A COMEDY OF ERRORS

 BELL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY - THEATRE ROYAL, HOBART

The word “immigration” is displayed in lights above each pair of a row of double frosted-glass doors. A dispirited elderly man in charity-bin clothing – too-large trousers, shabby old-fashioned brown sports jacket - listens to a disembodied voice from a loudspeaker informing him that he has entered the country illegally and must suffer the mandatory penalty – death. 

Fortunately, although some members may secretly applaud the idea, not even our new Government's Asylum Seeker policy goes quite as far as the opening scene of A Comedy of Errors.

It's always fun to see a fresh take on a well-known classic, and this time Shakespeare's ridiculously over-the-top story of separated twins, mistaken identities, outraged women and eventual family re-union is set, ostensibly, in Kings Cross. The Bell Shakespeare Company has created a surreal and sleazy world of suspicion, double-dealing, physical violence, sex, superstition and religion where employees are beaten with impunity, police officers obligingly arrest people on request, and time is manipulated to suit the plot.

Dromio of Ephesus (Hazem Shammas),  Antipholus of
Ephesus (Septimus Caton),  Angelo (Demitrios Sirilas)
and  Balthasar (Anthony Taufa) discuss business

The frosted glass doors become in turn entrances to pawnshops, brothels, nightclubs, an apartment block and finally an abbey. Shadows moving behind the glass suggest lewd and suspicious characters lurking in the background. 

There are ladies of the night of questionable gender, “merchants” who surely deal in substances other than gold, a gangster Duke whose command must be obeyed and various other dubious figures – the ten-person cast make a lot of very quick costume changes!

Doors also provide plenty of opportunity for standard slapstick situations: pratfalls as people run into them, other people hiding behind them, almost the entire company at times chasing each other in and out of them. 

The comedy is fast-paced and beautifully timed, in particular the chase scene. Everybody, getting completely off their faces at a disco, huddles together for a drunken group "selfie". Only when inspecting the result do the women realise the two men they have been pursuing are right there - in their photograph! The chase resumes . . . 

Antipholus of Syracuse (Nathan O'Keefe) and Luciana
(Jude Henshall) share an intimate moment
with a washing machine

Nathan O'Keefe and Septimus Caton play the Antipholus twins, becoming progressively more confused, angry and alarmed as strangers hail them as old friends and friends attribute to them conversations they can't recall.

 Renato Musolino and Hazem Shammas, in Bogan uniform of beanie, flannie shirt, runners and trackie dacks, are the Dromio twins and play the Shakespearean ill-treated clown with the appropriate mix of enthusiasm, indignation, resentment and bad puns.

As Adriana, Elena Carapetis is splendid in skin-tight leopard-print top with matching car-to-bar heels, and Jude Henshall as Luciana makes her entrance reclining on a tanning bed wearing a very skimpy bikini and a large set of headphones. They both succeed in being delightfully dreadful.

Suzannah McDonald is very funny as both the Courtesan and Emelia; I particularly enjoyed her lisping Abbess.

The Courtesan (Suzannah McDonald), makes up her
mind to visit Adriana

Combined with the formal language of Shakespeare, the incongruity of exaggeratedly showy and tasteless costumes and twenty-first century sun bed, washing machine, exercise bike, ping-pong tables, digital cameras and mobile phones transports us to a dystopian alternative reality where the ludicrous series of misunderstandings and coincidences becomes feasible and believable. What a wonderful romp!

Bell Shakespeare Company
Comedy of Errors; Theatre Royal, Hobart. 20 September, 2013

Cast:

Nathan O'Keefe

Septimus Caton

Renato Musolino

Hazem Shammas

Elena Carapetis

Jude Henshall

Eugene Gilfedder

Anthony Taufa

Demitrios Sirilas

Suzannah McDonald

Director: Imara Savage

Designer: Pip Runciman

PIP and POOCH

Terrapin Puppet Theatre 

Theatre Royal Hobart 

Wednesday July 10th

Gai Anderson

Pip and Pooch, the fun new primary schools touring show from Terrapin Puppet Theatre, is a wonderful child’s-view story about friendships and man’s – or, in this case, girl’s – best friend. For Pip, life is not easy as she negotiates the difficulties thrown up by a bizarre array of family and foe as her birthday party approaches. But when Pooch arrives things begin to improve.

The energetic engagement of actors Bryony Geeves (Pip) and Matt Wilson (Pooch) had the children in the audience enthralled and laughing right from the start, with their clever silliness, heartfelt real-life reflections and crazy puppet characters. I particularly loved the two-dimensional cut-out puppets with their simple choreography of arms and legs, and smiling / frowning magnetised faces which were removed like layers to reveal their changing emotions. It’s amazing how engaging a talking puppet without a moving mouth can be!

Expertly designed and realised, this visually beautiful show has a quirky aesthetic which 

seamlessly combines the two- and three-dimensional worlds of photorealism, live characters and magazine cutout animation, to create a somewhat surreal yet warmly familiar visual world. The horizontally layered set skillfully allows for the various perspectives and elements of the story to blend smoothly on stage, moving from mini street scape with characters at front, through Pip’s cut-out full-scale girly bedroom, to a projected streetscape at back of the mini set at the front ( as well as doubling as an animation screen). Its quite a treat to see.

This technically complex show is full of delights and enormously engaging.
Terrapin’s new Artistic Director Sam Routledge has managed to strike a beautiful balance between the multimedia gadgetry, live action and much wonder-filled puppetry .
I look forward to seeing more of his shows. 

THE TABLE OF KNOWLEDGE

Theatre Royal Hobart , Friday July 5th 

Gai Anderson

I was looking forward to The Table of Knowledge at the Theatre Royal on Friday night, as I have seen some really exciting examples of Verbatim Theatre previously interstate, but never before in Hobart.

Verbatim Theatre is a documentary form where the story onstage is constructed from the precise words spoken by the people interviewed about the event in question . The playwright or collaborators (in this case) then make choices about how to structure that material in order to create meaning and get to the heart of the drama.

Creating a piece of Verbatim Theatre is no doubt a complex and challenging process, but unfortunately in this co production, created and performed by the members of Version 1.0 and Merrigong Theatre Companies, it doesn’t really work and the drama of the story is lost amidst an endless flood of words.

For me the attraction of Verbatim Theatre as a form is that the content is real, and the emotional journey of the characters is alive, full of passion and emotional truth . Think Alana Valentines Run Rabbit Run , about the south Sydney Football Club demise, for example. Here the words of the both the big bosses and the Jo average supporter are all heard colloquially, and structured together to subtly expose the drama underneath.

But in The Table of Knowledge, a story of council corruption and a big nasty developer in Wollongong, the choice to focus on endless beaurocratic language and double speak doesn’t allow the real characters to appear, and so the show loses its passion from the start. Structuring the drama as a court-like question and answer enquiry for much of the piece added another layer to this disconnect.

The strong group of performers worked hard and their punchy pacing did create a sense of momentum and physical energy, particularly when cutting out of verbatim into interesting moments of abstracted action. There were some great vignettes ,and  at times the beautiful projections of animated architect style drawings , sometimes combined with sea scapes added an atmospheric layer. But for the most these interludes felt like bitzy distractions with little connection to each other or the main drama, their potential poetic possibilities underutilized, which was a shame.

Whilst there was an attempt to reconnect with the colloquial in the second half,  where the main victim’s real thoughts as a single mother are finally revealed in the short lunch room scene , its too little too late for me and I dont care about her predicament.

There were some great moments and sustained performances in this production, but it perhaps suffered from its collaborative nature and the lack of one clear voice.

The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

Elevator Repair Service

Presented as part of Ten Days on the Island 

Theatre Royal

I have been enjoying rereading Ernest Hemingway lately, so I was thrilled to see ‘The Select’, a stage adaption of The Sun Also Rises, appear on the Theatre Royal programme as part of Ten Days on the Island. It never occurred to me how hard it would be to stage; for me the book was all about the internal workings of the characters’ heads. And drinking. I remember feeling like I had a hangover if I read the book before going to sleep at night, as if I too had imbibed all that champagne, and the alcohol had seeped through the pages into my bloodstream.

Well, the New York-based Elevator Repair Service (ERS) have artfully adapted the book into a play. They  have captured that feeling of self-indulgent idleness and of characters with all the time and liberty in the world to drink and wallow in their own shallowness.

If ever a writer owned a classic aptonym it must be dear Mr Hemingway because, like his name, his writing is exceedingly earnest, and this book is no exception. I wonder what he would have made of the slapstick humour in this adaption, and the manner in which his characters became caricatures. I hope he would have approved. Hemingway made so many unmercifully caustic observations of human nature, so it was a relief to enjoy these observations as satire as well as social comment. And the delivery was no less powerful for the change.

The ERS company was bold and true in not shying away from the revoltingly anti-Semitic nature of Hemingway’s dialogue. Robert Cohn's character was irksome and pathetic, but his Jewishness was neither here nor there. If it had have been written out of the play, it would not have detracted from the story, and this may have been the sensitive thing to do. The play was set and written in the heady days in Europe between two world wars and its main characters, especially Jake, were damaged by the first of those wars. Hemingway had been scarred by his wartime experiences too, so it was galling to hear the openly normalised prejudice against Cohn. We in the audience had the benefit of knowing what horrors the Second World War had yet to unleash on Jewish people, and this heightened my discomfort in quite liking the largely unlikeable people.

The production was impeccable and captivating and the sound was inspired and cheeky. To have two lead actors double as Foley artists on stage showed the company respected the maturity of the audience enough to have fun with them, not just serve it up to them. The set was sparse and sophisticated – I love a set that has little fussing around and I have never seen so many uses for a trestle table! They managed to cram a whole fiesta, a bull fighting arena and many streets of Paris cafes onto one modest stage.

The soundtrack was a melange of vintage Paris jazz and contemporary funky New York hip-hop which allowed the racy choreography to take over the narrative from the dialogue. The story kept flowing seamlessly.

And the cast just nailed it. Every single actor on stage was sexy and speedy and authentic. Brave and brilliant. (It must have had an effect on me because I seem to using a lot of short, assertive sentences!)

The final scenes were awkward, but I also remember feeling that way about the book. How else could Hemingway wrap up his story after the carnage to the psyche wrought by excessive drinking, utter directionless, cruel friends and dysfunctional relationships? It was never going to be a happy ending. But it was a dammed fine production chaps.

By Stephenie Cahalan

The Select (the Sun also Rises )

Cleverly playing with form to reveal the content 

by Gai Anderson

Based on the play by Earnest Hemingway

Performed by Elevator Repair Service

Seen at the Theatre Royal Hobart, as part of Ten Days on the Island, March  2013

In these days of enthrallment with film as the ultimate form in which classic stories are enacted dramatically, transforming a classic 20^th century American novel to stage engagingly is quite a feat. But that’s what New York’s experimental theatre company Elevator Repair Service (ERS) like to do. They take the content of existing American literary forms – TV programs, non fiction writing, novels, plays etc., and then play with the form of enactment: mashing them up, juxtaposing theatrical styles, using slapstick, comedy and their highly developed abstract choreography.

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is the third of a trilogy of American classic novels, which included a 7-hour version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby where every word of the novel was spoken onstage. It’s the text that keeps it grounded and allows them to experiment with the form, apparently. 

In the case of The Select (The Sun Also Rises ) they say they found a play inside the novel – and the show is essentially narrator-led storytelling, (“ she said”, “I said”) interspersed with heightened clipped moments of interaction - feeling at times like a noir-film as radio-play, and at others a Pinteresque drawing room drama crossed with a comic strip. 

While the action is not boring, at 3 + hours, its words demand considerable focus at times particularly in the slower first act, as the narrator sets up the lives of a group of lost and damaged, post-war bohemian expats, endlessly trying to fill their vacuous lives with excessive drinking and partying in Paris bars. And there is the rub I guess - these are not pleasant people to be watching up close, and perhaps why I have never really warmed to Hemingway’s novels.

But there is also much fun, as the lush wood-paneled bar room set transforms simply into taxi, streetscape and bedroom with clever light and sound. The satire that really drives this stylish show is held by a deliciously heightened soundtrack feeding the staccato slapstick action. Sound effects of endless breaking glasses, pouring wine and laughter - coupled with surreal moments of abstracted dance and movement, a waiter who constantly juggles wine bottles and a continuous revolving  chorus of colorful local characters.

 

But in the second act, as the action moves to Spain and what is now a love-octet becomes ridiculous and painfully tragic, the pace really picks up and the real brilliance of ERS is revealed.  Set amongst the color of the bullfight and fiesta of Pamplona, the contrast between the desperate vacuous white characters, the passionate Spanish and their adulated toreadors is extreme. Here Hemingway’s message is cleverly exaggerated through the choruses of endless sculling of alcohol, and the Ren and Stimpy version of the young man Toreador (played by a woman) bull-fighting with a table sans-horns. It is silly in the extreme against the mashed up sounds of bad matriarchy-band music but totally and hypnotically brilliant.

In the end whilst I’m still not sure about the 3+ hours, I definitely got something of the genius of Hemingway - as the desperate-for-passion, tragic white-woman, destroying the men around her, is paralleled with the desperate-for-tragedy as passion of the Spanish and their blood-thirsty bullfighting .

I might even try some of Hemingways novels again, but will definitely try ERS , again should I get the chance.