Review - The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy - Melbourne Theatre Company

...Your'e Sure Of A Big Surprise ...

Lally Katz's transitional object from Hell, the Apocalypse Bear, began 'bruin' (sorry brewing) in her mind after seeing a shelf of motley teddy bears in a suburban chemist shop. The beast that emerged, a spectral figure clad in the dodgiest-looking of panto teddy bear costumes, began it's reign of subtle terror in miniature films where the Bear made nocturnal visits to suburbia, interrupting a woman's late night call from a public phone box and a young man's post-fellatory hallucinations in a public toilet. The Apocalypse Bear seems to enjoy traumatising gay boys the most as his next incarnation was in Katz'z The Fag from Zagreb, Katz's contribution to the portmanteau of plays for White Whale Theatre's Melburnalia.

The Melbourne Theatre Company are rightly profiling Katz at the experimental Lawler Studio where she, and many more emerging writers to come, will hopefully flower. Reviving the first Apocalypse Bear play, The Fag From Zagreb with two new pieces which can stand alone or, as here, be joined in a delicious sequence of vignettes of maturity from adolescence to adulthood.

In The Fag From Zagreb, teen-aged Jeremy (Luke Mullins) arrives home to find his mother and sister gone and replaced by the Apocalypse Bear (Brian Lipson) who prepares his afternoon snack, listens supportively to the gay teen's secret desires, cautioning him against becoming too familiar with his on-line acquaintance (a desperate, older, Croatian, gay man) before menacingly probing Jeremy about his nocturnal visit to the woods of darkest Kew.

In the second play, the Bear shares a table in a high school cafeteria with unpopular Sonia (Katherine Tonkin) who sadly predicts her failed marriage, describing it as a past event before the Bear, toys, as he did with Jeremy, with her insecurities.

The final play introduces a childless and childlike couple Sonia and Jeremy (are they the same people, older, not much wiser and definitely still insecure?). Afraid to go out in the dark to put the bins out, Sonia relates to Jeremy her Alice in Wonderland-like dream where she is transported through a hole in a wall behind a coat rack. The delayed appearance of the Bear gives the final play an extra tingle and when he does appear he is comforting and supportive.

Katz's brand of surrealism is loaded with Jungian shared meanings and, while the original staging of The Fag From Zagreb should be cherished by all who saw it, the new version recreates its impact just as well. Mullins and Tonkin deliver the dialogue with hilarious or fearful naturalness. Originally the Bear was played by young actors, giving it a sort of a doppelganger presence, part of the psyche of the person he was visiting. Casting Lipson gives the Bear a paternal side to the often adult-child exchanges between him and Sonia or Jeremy. Lipson also brings a sinister hilarity to the Bear's words and movements all of his own, hitching up his baggy trouser fur to sit down or delicately opening salt, pepper or sauce packets with his clumsy paws he makes what was once a child's dearest companion into a delightfully menacing presence.

Lipson and Mullins share the direction. To what extend is any one's guess but the feeling is that Lipson fuelled the responses to the bear while Mullins orchestrated the Bear's to Jeremy and Sonia. The Lawler Studio, he smaller of the two theatres in the MTC's new premises is a cracker venue. The heavy and, for once, effective black drapes mean that the theatre can plunge into total darkness, even the bilious glow of exits signs don't spill into the dramatic space for once. The effect of our first sighting of the Apocalypse Bear emerging out of total darkness kick-started the proceedings. The three playlets are separated by scene changes also in total darkness and punctuated only by lightening flashes of the Bear seeming to dance in triumph over the trauma he's just wreaked. Great contemporary writing in a great contemporary performance space.

The Melbourne Theatre Company in association with Stuck Pigs Squealing Productions
The Apocalypse Bear - Brian Lipson
Jeremy - Luke Mullins
Sonia - Katherine Tonkin
Directors - Brian Lipson & Luke Mullins
Sound Designer - Jethro Woodward
Lighting Designer - Richard Vabre
Artistic Adviser - Chris Kohn
Set & Costume Designer - Mel Page
Producer - Lucy Evans
Video Designer - Martyn Coutts
Lawler Studio, Southbank
8 - 24 October 2009

90 minutes ( no interval)

CD Review - Emma Matthews in Monte Carlo - ABC Classics/ Deutsche Grammophon

Emma Matthews in Monte Carlo

Leonard Bernstein

Candide - Glitter and Be Gay

Leo Delibes
Lakme - Ou va la jeune Indoue (Bell Song)
Friedrich von Flotow
Martha - The Last Rose of Summer
Gaetano Donizetti
Lucia di Lammermoor - Ancor non giunse...Regnava nel silenzio...Quando rapito In estasi
with Catherine Carby mezzo-soprano
Vincenzo Bellini
I Capuleti e i Montecchi - Eccomi in lieta vesta...Oh! quante volte
Charles Gounod
Roméo et Juliette - Air de la coupe: Dieu quel frisson … Amour, ranime mon courage
Ambroise Thomas
Hamlet - A vos jeux, mes amis… Partagez-vous mes fleurs... (scène de la folie d' Ophelie)
Jaques Offenbach
Les Contes d'Hoffmann - Les oiseaux dans la charmille
Heinrich Proch (arr. Richard Bonynge)
Deh! Torna, mio bene, Theme and Variations
Calvin Bowman
Now Touch the Air Softly
Richard Mills
The Love of the Nightingale - The Nightingale's Song
Emma Mathews, soprano
Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo
Brad Cohen, conductor
ABC Classics/ Deutsche Grammophon 476 3555

A co-production between ABC Classics and the owners of the fabled Deutsche Grammophon label, Universal Music, the well-known DGG logo featuring on the cover and presumably sharing a European release of the disc as the soloist, Emma Matthews, launches her international career. The project is a luxurious one, instead of an Australian orchestra the Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo is employed and even a second singer (mezzo Catherine Carby) has been brought over to sing the ‘pertichio’ role in the Lucia di Lammermoor scene.

In her work with Opera Australia Matthews projects a big, secure voice in lyric and coloratura roles but also in less likely assignments including the title role in one Opera Australia’s finest achievements, Alban Berg’s Lulu, using that light, lyrical voice to revelatory effect.

The disc opens with a restrained account of “Glitter and Be Gay” from Bernstein’s operetta-inspired Candide. Eschewing the histrionics that often negate the song’s effects Matthew’s equates the coloratura passages to the type of musical laughter familiar from Manon Lescauts' laughing song in Auber's opera or the best known example, Adele's laughing song in Die Fledermaus. The result is immensely satisfying and encourages multiple hearings.

The folksy “Last Rose of Summer” from Flotow’s Martha reveals Matthews’s beautiful legato but the bulk of the disc is a 60 minute ‘potted’ history of the Bel Canto era before ending with a return to simple serenity. Instead of the celebrated mad-scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor comes the equally dramatic fountain scene is chosen which introduces Lucia (and subtly indicates her mental breakdown is already beginning). The featured mad scene is Ophelia’s scene and ballade from Thomas’s Hamlet. Given in full it the best demonstration of Matthews’s impressive technique as she incorporates the higher and more florid passages introduced by the singer Marie Carvalho and incorporated into the original vocal scores. Matthews then gives an even more elaborate account of the ‘Doll Song” from Les Contes d’Hoffmann and then just enough of an arrangement (the entire thing overstays its welcome even for coloratura fanciers) by Richard Bonynge of Proch’s Theme and Variations (presumably with his wife Joan Sutherland in mind) and which Matthews sings with the same power and agility as Sutherland.

The recital closes with two Australian compositions, and orchestration of a song by Calvin Bowman that has a folksy simplicity and even a beguiling Scotch rhythm in places. The Nightingale’s song from Richard Mill’s opera The Love of The Nightingale is sadly too brief an excerpt from an opera Matthews is so closely associated with. Sounding like a classical vocalise and orchestrated in a lush Ravel-ian manner it brings some beautiful playing from the orchestra. The conductor, Brad Cohen, has a personal interest in this 19th French operatic repertoire and the orchestra, as expected, are a world class band who respond to the familiar items, bringing some very Gallic and incisive playing to the scene from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. The recording is demonstration class, Matthews’s voice given an immediate presence with the strings, in particular in the Bowman item, sounding luscious.

Review - Strangers in Between - The Store Room

Ghost Buster

Tommy Murphy’s Strangers in Between was written and produced prior to his adaptation of Tim Conigrave’s Holding the Man whilst he was resident the Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company. Like Holding the Man, Strangers in Between contains some of the adolescent magical realism of Griffin’s great Away by Michael Gow which (or at least I wish) had been a major influence on play writing. The turmoil of adolescence, trying to shape the love and hate felt towards family into the love (and hate) of adult relationships, the angst of youthful, burgeoning sexuality and its subsequent waning and merging into a greater whole is universally appealing subject matter.

Murphy is a prodigious young writer (he is only 30) and his script has an urgency in the way it deals with its central adolescent passion. Shane (Aljin Abella) has run away from Goulburn to Sydney after being beaten up by his brother who caught him kissing a schoolmate. That turmoil of burgeoning sexuality, and now sexual ostracism, is compounded with the turmoil of finding his feet alone for the first time. The early scenes are characterised by delicious humour underlining Shane’s social skills are as naive as his sexual skills. We see his him nervously blathering with his first sexual partner Will (Cameron Moore) so much that Will kisses him just to stop his endless chatter. Shane's domestic skills are even worse; washing his clothes for the first time is as baffling as sex. Badly in need of friendship as much as mentorship he initiates a conversation with a middle-aged man, Peter (Bruce Kerr) in a bar. But no sooner are they talking than he innocently asks him where to buy coat hangers and, almost in the same breath, about the mechanics of anal sex.

Murphy’s writing is very well crafted with a sophisticated feeling for comedy. As his friendship with Peter develops, for instance, Shane is treated to dinners at the epicurean Peter’s house and samples brie cheese and terrine. Back in Shane’s home town Bree and Tarrine are the names of his brother’s successive girlfriends. The script abounds with this "easing comedy", as David Berthold notes in his introduction to the Currency Press edition of the play, to negotiate around the mounting drama and the director Ben Packer and his actors respond to them unforcedly.

The more dramatic second act is more complex. Shane’s despised brother Ben (Cameron Moore) appears, seemingly responding to a letter from Shane. Ben’s appearance is doubly surprising as the same actor playing Will plays Ben. After a fleeting introduction as the play opens Will’s establishing scene - firstly as an object of Shane’s love and then hate - is also the scene that sets him up to re-appear minutes later as Shane’s brother. Shane is constantly distressed by the violence of Sydney’s King’s Cross and fearful of being attacked. In his room, he also feels a ghostly presence. When Ben initially appears his reality is assumed. When he next appears his doppelganger similarity to Will better understood. The same actor plays Will and Ben, as Berthold explains, “for an important reason: Will is the form of Shane’s yearning for Ben”. Far from unconscious incestuous desire, Shane yearns, rather, to resolve his love/hate relationship with Ben as much as he is trying to resolve his love/hate relationship with Will. Both have hurt him and then rejected him and both appear in the second act their Gestalt presence is, in Ben’s case, a powerful climactic moment while Will’s is a gentle resolution.

In the first act Shane’s relationships with Will and Peter break down when, as Berthold says, “sex is confused with intimacy”. In a chapter entitled 'Staging A Culture That Insn't Just Sexual"A in his 1992 study Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama John Clum discusses how a gay character forges "relationships that meaningfully and honestly connect him to other people - lovers, friends, family. Like the self, relationships and the language of relationships must be forged anew out of words that have limited or negative meanings for gay men". At the conclusion of Strangers in Between the erotic thrall between the trio has been replaced by the more rewarding intimacy and language of trust and friendship. Naked and vulnerable, Shane is there for the taking but instead Will and Peter are surrogate brother and father.

As Shane Abella balances the comedy and pathos of the character, never letting you forget the desperation of his situation.
In the dual roles of Shane’s lover Will and brother Ben, Moore delineates both characters exceptionally well. As Ben his gaunt, stiff-limed and spectral appearance suggests both the troubled stoner that is Shane’s brother and the memory-stirring ghost of Shane’s unconscious. In staging Ben’s second scene Packer even has Moore walking backwards, retreating into the darkness after its purpose has been served like a proper stage ghost would. Perhaps the casting of actors of different ethnicity for Shane and his brother was a means of delineating the real presence of Will and the imagined presence of Ben.

Bruce Kerr is an unlikely choice as Peter, more grandfatherly than the intended 50-ish and fatherly character penned by Murphy but uses his terrifically long theatrical experience to mine the script for new depths, creating a kind of Quentin Crisp-ian character. Even more than Abella and Moore Kerr wrings every possible drop of humour out of Murphy’s text.

Packer’s production is valuable in these aspects. Apart from being a further production of a play (which is a luxury in this environment where plays have no life after a first production), being able to further explore the ways of signalling the important shifts of reality in the play. As originally written Shane’s brother first appears at the end of the first act. In the current staging director Ben Packer runs the play without a break and drawing tension out of Moore's sudden appearance as Ben. The text is meticulously supervised on its many levels in this production. The play’s sense of humour comes through subtly and the dialogue and scenes flowing effortlessly. Lighting, simple array of suspended, coloured fluorescent lights suggesting the cheap, nocturnal glamour of King’s Cross while scenes are punctuated with a sound scape of trains in motion. Back in business after a few years’ hiatus, The Store Room provides an intimate venue for this imaginative play about intimacy.

Strangers In Between (2006) by Tommy Murphy
Shane – Aljin Abella
Will/Ben – Cameron Moore
Peter – Bruce Kerr
Director – Ben Packer
Set & Costume Design – Micka Agosta
Lighting Design – Govin Ruben
Little Death Productions
The Store Room, 1st floor rear, Parkview Hotel,
131 Scotchmer St, North Fitzroy
23 July – 16 August 2009
95 minutes (no interval)

Rufus Wainwright's First Opera

Prima Donna by Rufus Wainwright premieres at the Manchester Festival tonight. It will be performed in Melbourne and Toronto, that's official.
I've heard some snippets and have to say its not as bad as people made it out to be. It is set in Paris in 1970 and is to a French libretto. Wainwright has assimilated a mish-mash of post French sounding Ravel music into what I have heard, lots of jolly woodwind a la Poulenc and Ibert. Janis Kelly, as the Prima Donna Régine sounds very impressive too. Via You Tube Rufus in Paris in June sings an aria from Prima Donna (believe me Janis Kelly is much, much better)

Update: Reviews are in...

The Guardian 12 July "The score itself comes clothed as Strauss, Massenet and Puccini; Wainwright would seem to be on a mission to drag opera back into the late 19th century. But his gift as a melodist and an orchestrator are in no doubt, having been proved on a series of albums which are mini-operas in their own right."

The Independent "Musically Prima Donna is at best banal, at worst boring. The orchestral writing is lumpy, leaden and repetitive, so that the merest flash of inspiration – a dashing musical signature for example – is welcomed with relief as an original idea. Wainwright didn't need to pay homage to all those dead composers he adores by including so many fragments of their scores in his own opera."

Jonathan Summers (left) and some piece of totty in Prima Donna

Jonathan Summers appears to have the choice part as the "sleazy, bullying, Mephisto-type butler" (all in a days work when your bread and butter consists of Scarpia, Iago and nasty Verdi baritones).
The New York Times is very insightful and - shock horror! written by someone who knows something about music! (and who agrees with me about the Poulenc influences) "As a longtime admirer of his music, I wish I could report that “Prima Donna” fulfilled his ambitions for writing a fresh and personal new opera. He certainly brings deep talents and potential to the challenge."

The Manchester Confidential Not an insightful review but it gives the best synopsis of the opera and commentary on the illustrative nature of Rufus's music.

Bloomberg Hates it!

Pity Rufus is such a nong about the artform he claims to love so much. In the slurry of interviews and advance publicity for the opera he claims that "there's no opera about an opera singer ... It doesn't exist in the repertoire.”

Yes there are operas about opera singers, Tosca and The Makropulos Case have leading characters who are opera singers although the plots feature little about their actual professions as both Floria and Emilia are caught up some heavy personal stuff. What Rufus probably means is that there is no opera about being an opera singer.

Interested parties might like to add to the list of operas about or featuring characters who are singers that we can send to Rufus.

Dominic Argento - The Aspern Papers (Juliana Bordereau) clip at YouTube [Elisabeth *sigh* Soderstrom and Neil Rosenshein]
Dominic Argento - Postcard from Morocco (An Operetta Singer, A Foreign Singer, An
Operetta Singer)

Arthur Benjamin - The Prima Donna (Olympia & Fiammetta)
Robert Russell Bennett - Maria Malibran (Maria Malibran)

Daniel Catan - Florencia en el Amazonas (Florencia Grimaldi) also at Wikipedia

Katherine Davis - The Unmusical Impresario (Madame DaCapo, a failed opera singer)
Donizetti - Le Convenienze Ed Inconvenienze Teatrali or Viva la Momma! (Daria Garbinati, Luiga Castragatti, Guglielmo Antolstoinoff & Donna Agata Scanagalli, don't ya love those names!?)
Joseph Haydn - La Canterina (Gasparina)
Paul Hindemith - Cardillac (The Lady, a Prima Donna at the local opera)

Sydney Hodkinson - St Carmen of the Main (Carmen, a Country & Western singer)

Adriana Hölszky - Giuseppe e Sylvia (Giuseppina Strepponi)
Janáček - Věc Makropulos (Emila Marty) clip at YouTube [Raina Kabaivanska]
Leoncavallo - Zaza (Zaza, a cafe singer)
Siegfried Matthus - Farinelli or the Power of Singing (Farinelli)
Mozart - Der Schauspieldirektor (Madamoiselles Herz & Siberklang, Monsieur Vogelsang) clip at YouTube [Yvonne Kenny & Judith Howarth]
Michael Nyman - The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (Dr. P) youtube clip not from the original film
Offenbach - La Pericole (Pericole, a street singer [also featured in operas by Henri Busser and Lord Berners)

Offenbach - Les Contes d' Hoffmann (Stella)
Offenbach - Monsieur Choufleuri restera chez lui - (Henriette Sontag, Giovanni Battista Rubini & Antonio Tamburini are impersonated)
Offenbach - La Leçon de chant électromagnétique (Jean Matois, a tenor whose voice is created by the elctro-magnetic method of the singing teacher Pacifico Toccato)
Thomas Pasatieri - Frau Margot (Margot)

Inspired by the story of Helene Berg's attempt to keep the third act of her husband's incompleted opera Lulu under wraps, Frau Margot is the widow of a famous composer and was a famous singer herself.

Laurent Petitgirard - Joseph Merrick dit Elephant Man (La Colorature, Celena [this role reputedly supplants Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos as the most difficult and high flying role for a coloratura soprano])
Ponchielli - La Gioconda (Gioconda)
Jonathan Sheffer - The Mistake (Ariel)

Set during the interval of a vocal recital, the soprano Ariel is upset over having made a mistake during the first part of her recital. She is trying to work out how and why she went wrong, is reassured by her friends and vocal coach, has an agrument with her boyfriend, Sandy, regains her composure and resturns for the second half of her concert.

Puccini - Tosca (Floria Tosca)
Antonio Salieri - Prima la musica e poi le parole (Eleonora & Tonina)
Domenico Scarlatti - La Dirindina (Dirindina & Liscione)

Comic intermezzo along the lines of Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona. An old music master, Don Carissimo, overhears the soprano Dirindina and the castrato Liscione as they rehearse a love scene from an opera Didone Abbandonata. He misunderstands the situation and thinks they have actually made love, interrupts them and, thinking Dirindina will become pregnant, tries to make them agree to marriage for the sake of the child. In the closing trio he sings "Give me your hand, Liscione, give me yours Dirindina, for your little child will be legitimate. " Liscione and Dirindina respond "Stop -- I'm a capon! Stop -- I'm a hen! A pair like that doesn't get together and never lays an egg."

Richard Strauss - Ariadne auf Naxos (Prima Donna)
Richard Strauss - Intermezzo (Christine Storch, based on Strauss's singer wife Pauline)
Richard Strauss - Intermezzo (a singer)
Richard Strauss - Capriccio (two Italian singers)
Richard Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier (an Italian singer) clip at YouTube [Piotr Beczala]

Review - Happy Days - Malthouse

Slaved By The Bell
The Beckett estate seem to have relaxed a little over the author's instructions and stage directions (permission for the Belvoir Street production of Waiting for Godot was nearly withdrawn when music was played at a point where the author had not prescribed it). In Michael Kantor's new production of Happy Days the famous mound of earth consuming the central character Winnie across the two acts is interpreted as a jumble of black metal plates surmounted with jagged rocks and looking as though Emil Pretorius's sets for a pre-war Bayreuth Walküre has mated with Ron Robertson-Swann's sculpture Vault . In any Beckett play(and in particular the big three dealing most with existence in a world where existence has ceased to exist, Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days) audiences look for clues and meanings about what Beckett is suggesting in his settings, let alone his words. In any Beckett play the story is clouded and the language dense and nihilistic and audiences look for clues and meanings about what Beckett suggests in his settings, let alone his words. Winnie is usually considered ‘up to her neck in it’. Here she is ‘on the rocks’ as well; another metaphor for the desperate situation she is so blissfully unaware of.

Originally Happy Days was to be a technological travesty in a technological world gone awry, Beckett even calling the set a 'battlefield' where Winnie ("one female lavatory attendant spared") and Willie were war survivors. In the current production the pre-performance mood music - popular songs from the 1930s and 1940s - and Winnie's costume reinforces the suggest the action could take place in a World War Two devastated place. Winnie's new prison of metal and rock is surrounded by yet another, and ultra-theatrical, prison; a turquoise curtain topped with an Art Deco lid which could be a scaled up version of her precious music box or even a carnival booth, with Winnie bobbing inside like a travesty of the plaster gypsy that should know all but now can barely remember the end of a sentence. As the curtain draws open a composite of mechanical, military and orchestral sounds is heard like sound scape of a civilisation under siege and which falls silent when all that remains, Winnie's knoll is revealed. The 'holy light' is a circular rack of carnival lights glaring down from inside the lid. Beckett requested a 'pompier trompe-l'oeil' back cloth depicting the desert wilderness, here he gets gigantic three-dimensional pompier prop, telling as much about Winnie's ruined society as the few props in her handbag.

As Winnie Julie Forsyth is a marvel and ought to be added to the list of actors (Peggy Ashcroft, Irene Worth, Madeleine Renaud, Billie Whitelaw and Fiona Shaw among them) who have given memorable Winnies. Forsyth is at once comical and pathetic without seeming to force either, a cross between Margaret Rutherford and Giulietta Massina in La Strada. The programme note reminds us that the text is littered with 150 pauses, all as important for the actor playing Winnie to decipher as much as the multi-layered speeches. Forsyth fills the pauses brilliantly with grimacing comedy or chilling, momentary, desperation. In the second act where only her head, like a loaf of white bread left in the rain, is visible and is though Winnie's physical world has disappeared and only her fading thoughts remain. Happy Days is a classic piece of theatre, a great existential comedy and at the same time a great existential tragedy and that feeling comes across in this production. The rampaging sexual innuendo in Beckett's text bounces off her and she speaks innuendo-laden lines like "having to give you a hand Willie" with the same innocence that masks Winnie's desperate situation with such cheeriness.

She spends her day under a glaring and relentlessly bright sky happily sorting through her handbag and going about her daily routine of prettying herself while chatting to her mostly unseen and unspeaking husband Willie. When Willie does appear it is briefly to rub his privates with vaseline, sunbath for a while and then slither into a cave behind Winnie’s mound. While being the usual Beckettian scenario of spiritual and societal desolation the play bubbles with absurd sexual connotations like these rather like an intellectual Carry-On movie.

Peter Carroll is luxury casting for such a thankless role as Willie. Mostly unseen and silent when Willie is visible it is with his back to the audience until the end of the play. When he does speak Carroll can make the most of absurd one-word utterances like 'formication'. A quick YouTube search locates some quite striking interpretations of Beckett's locale for Happy Days. Anna Cordingley's set is as good as any and the semi-circular placement of the audience around the semi-circular stage gives the production an extra intimacy (rather like watching a Punch and Judy show). Kantor's realisation of the play is very creative and perhaps disciplined by the requirements of Copyright when compared to recent productions of Public Domain works like Optimism (Happy Days makes a brilliant companion piece to the ironic optimism of Optimism), Woyzeck and Tartuffe.

Happy Days (1961) by Samuel Beckett
Winnie - Julie Forsyth
Willie - Peter Carroll
Director - Michael Kantor
Set and Costume Designer - Anna Cordingley
Lighting Designer - Paul Jackson
Sound - Russell Goldsmith
Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse
3 - 25 July 2009
Belvoir Street, Sydney
4 November - 16 December 2009

Review - Affection - Ranters Theatre

Affection or Affectation

Forsaking a night in sitting on the couch with a few friends, listening to music and talking about nothing much, I took in Ranters Theatre’s latest play Affection. To my surprise it consisted of little more than a few friends sitting on a couch, listening to music and talking about nothing much! Written by Raimondo Cortese and directed by his brother Adriano, Affection is set in a room where three people sit on a couch. One drinks from a takeaway coffee cup and the three make small talk for an hour or so while musician Anastasia Russell-Head plays music by François Couperin, Handel or The Ramones on a harpsichord. Occasionally all four sing, Russell-Head sings an Italian folk song and the female character twice asks one of the men if he would like a kiss and eventually gives him a massage. Relaxed (and perhaps dulled by the banal hour of nothing) he falls asleep on the sofa. All I know is that this play is not as good as Waiting for Godot because nothing happened only once.

As was the case with Ranters earlier, and highly praised, Holiday, this builds on the ideas from Holiday forming a performance ethos for the company. In a recent interview two of the actors Patrick Moffatt and Paul Lum, suggested Affection is deliberately open to interpretation and that the audience fill in the details about what is happening through the mundane conversations to create a drama from their own perceptions. Adriano Cortese suggests this approach is "not about serving the script, it's about serving the production,” his interest being “in something happening in front of an audience and for an audience to receive that rather than literature." The baroque music, according to Cortese, frames the dialogue, “abstracting the conversation and concentrating attention on the dialogue. Rather than frame the dialogue, the severe structure of formulaic classical music sits at odds with the banality of the play and the relationship between the musician and the characters, who acknowledge her presence, remains unclear.

The other musical additions and their relevance are equally up to interpretation. Where are they anyway? Is it someone’s living room? Cortese recalled that audiences for Holiday thought the two characters were in a mental home. Perhaps the setting of Affection is a visiting room in a psychiatric hospital (which would explain the appearance of a take-away coffee cup and why the conversations are so uneventful so as not over tax recovering patient), where one of the three is visited by the other two. Replacing an indisposed actor Beth Buchanan, script at hand, invests the dialogue with meaning and purpose at every point, unwittingly perhaps, defeating the Corteses’ purposes by developing her character across the play and engaging the audience by suggesting a motive. True, asking to kiss another character and giving him a massage, provide an oasis of thought and action compared with the rest of the play. As experimental writing and theatre Affection also initiates experiments in audience perception. The banality left me cold although some could argue that theatre dialogue has been banal ever since those endless conversations about the fate of a cherry orchard.
Blackbox, The Arts Centre. 1 -11 July 2009

Opera Australia Appoints Lyndon Terracini as Artistic Director

Not since Eberhard Waechter controlled the Vienna Staastoper have baritones held so much power in an opera company. Two baritones now hold the highest creative and administrative posts in opera in Australia with Opera Australia’s appointment of baritone and administrator Lyndon Terracini to the newly created post of Artistic Director. The company’s CEO Adrian Collette is also a baritone singer by training. As an administrator Terracini has been artistic director of the Queensland Music Festival and more recently the 2006, 2008 and 2009 Brisbane Festivals.

As a singer Terracini (pictured left sometime in the 1970s as a member of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Renaissance Players and displaying an impressive pair of nakers) made his operatic debut with Opera Australia (then called The Australian Opera) as Sid in Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring and sang a variety of roles with them as a career baritone ranging from Strephon in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe to Tarquinius in Britten's The Rape of Lucretia. One of his last roles with the company was Lord Byron (doubling with the role of the Monster) in one of their most impressive contemporary commissions Mer de Glace by Richard Meale. An early example of barihunk Terracini had respectable career singing the standard repertory with the national and state companies but it is his contemporary music performances that established him here and overseas. At the 1976 Adelaide Festival and subsequent Melbourne, Perth, Barossa and Darwin Guitar Festivals he gave outstanding performances in Hans Werner Henze’s solo theatre work El Cimarron. He was invited by the Henze to create the role of Sancho Panza in the world premiere of his adaptation of Paisiello’s opera Don Quichotte at the first Montepulciano Festival in 1979. Terracini stayed in Italy for over a decade but returning to Australia to perform and create new work including the lead role in Brian Howard’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in 1983. Other important premieres included The Ghost Sonata by Aribert Reimann after Strindberg's play for the Opera Factory, Zurich in 1983. Terracini (third from right) still in knee high boots but tighter tights in Opera Australia's production of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia)

Terracini returned to Australia taking the title role in the Australian premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd for the State Opera of South Australia, one of the earliest stagings of the 'opera house' version of the musical. He continued to sing overseas, still working with leading composers and theatre makers. The most notable was the title role in the world premiere of ROSA - A Horse Drama by Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway in 1994 for the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam where, performing nude, he displayed his nackers in earnest.

In 1993 he founded Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA) and in 2002 was awarded the Myer Foundation Group Award. Terracini's appointment is an inspired and inspiring one. As a performer he has worked solidly and, to me, constantly as a musician looking all the time for interesting and unusual music to perform rather than follow the beaten path of - for want of a better word- a hack baritone (have Don Giovanni will travel!). And as a member of the Australia Council’s music committee of the Performing Arts Board and his commitment to securing performances of contemporary music would enable Terracini to have a keen understanding of the issues surrounding the commissioning, creation and performance of new 'performance' works. Interviewed on ABC Radio National the following day Terracini spoke of new works being part of the company repertoire at a modest rate, suggesting one new opera per season. He also enthused about digital technology being applied to opera production. Terracini's appointment commences in October.