Books, Movies and Random Thoughts

Woman in Mind is the first Ayckbourn play I’ve ever seen, so I didn’t really know what to expect. We included it in our subscription because it had Noni Hazlehurst in the main role, and was directed by Gale Edwards. And the concept – woman is knocked out after being hit by a garden rake, and when she comes to she finds she has a devoted fantasy family existing alongside her less-than-thrilling real one – seemed intriguing.

Up to the interval, it was fairly lightweight – amusing, but not particularly insightful or thought provoking. But after the interval, even though the funny lines were still there, it got a lot darker and grimmer. Ultimately, the play seemed to be about loneliness and dementia and people not listening to or noticing each other. I think the turning point was where the fantasy family and the real world start to interact with each other, and the fantasy became increasingly bizarre and frightening. And the way passing comments and minor events were reflected in the fantasy world, but in a completely perverted manner, was very powerful. It was very creepy and scary by the end. And the idea that Susan couldn’t escape from inside her own head was terrifying.

I think any production of this play will stand or fall by the actor who plays Susan, as she is on stage for the whole thing and carries the full emotional weight of it. In this case, I thought Noni Hazlehurst did a magnificent job. The rest of the cast were more patchy. Their challenges were completely the reverse of Noni Hazlehurst’s: they are all relatively minor parts, so it would be difficult to find the people inside them. I think this is particularly true of the fantasy family – especially in the first act – as they are so “perfect” they don’t really have any personalities. Sophie Ross, who played Lucy (the daughter) managed to pull it off, and Mark Owen-Taylor (Tony, the brother) was okay, but John Adam (Andy, the husband) just didn’t come across as three dimensional. It was arguably the most difficult of the fantasy roles. In the Q&A afterwards, he said that one thing which made it particularly difficult was the upper-class English accent. It was very important to the role (one of the features of the fantasy family is that they are a rung or two up the social ladder from Susan’s real family), but it sounds very artificial, and this makes it all the more difficult for the character to come across as a genuinely loving and caring husband.

Another interesting point that came out in the Q&A was the question of how the comedy and the tragedy was balanced. Gale Edwards (I think) said that someone had once asked Ayckbourn when the laughter should stop, and he said “at the second last line”. She herself said that, as the director, for the first couple of weeks of rehearsals she deliberately didn’t draw the actors’ attention to the fact that certain lines should get a laugh.

And a piece of trivia from the discussion afterwards. There is a scene near the end where Susan is lying in the rain and gets absolutely drenched. They do use warm water for the rain, but it is quite a long pipe going up to the stage, and so initially the water is very cold. Noni Hazlehurst said that often it has only just reached a pleasant temperature at the time it has to stop!

Spoiler: This essentially gives away the ending (though most people probably have a better than 50% chance of guessing it anyway).

Although it had its laughs, Fat Pig was ultimately quite a depressing story. Essentially, Tom throws away what could have been the best relationship of his life, because he is too emotionally stunted to handle it. Initially, it seems that he is drawn to Helen for her personality, in spite of her size; but I think the bedroom scene is designed to show that he has come to love her body as well. So the problem is not that he can’t deal with the fact that she is overweight: it is that he can’t handle what he thinks other people will be thinking about her, and thus about him. His way of ending the relationship with Jeannie shows that his method of dealing with conflict and difficult situations is to just ignore them, and hope they go away; and he simply doesn’t realise how much pain this is causing Jeannie. It seems that he is stuck at about age 15, and you can kind of feel sorry for him – but nowhere near as sorry as for Helen, whose final scene (where she offers to lose weight, if that’s what he wants) is just heartbreaking.

I though Carter was an interesting counterpoint to Tom. He is certainly selfish, and has a great capacity for cruelty (specifically the bit where he runs off lots of pictures of Helen and scatters them around the office – though actually, this was one scene I couldn’t quite believe in. I just don’t see it happening, at least in any of the offices I’ve worked in. Maybe I’ve just been lucky!) But at the same time he seems a lot more self-aware, and thus basically more mature, than Tom. This doesn’t necessarily make him a nice person, and nor does it mean that things will necessarily work out with him and Jeannie. But I think if he does dump her, it will be a much cleaner break, and won’t mess her up as much as Tom did. Of course, if that did happen, he wouldn’t feel the same kind of guilt that Tom does – but then, it’s arguable that Tom feels bad, not because he has hurt Jeannie, but because she keeps shoving her pain in his face. If he didn’t have to see it, then he’d probably be able to convince himself that there wasn’t a problem.

I thought all the performances were good. I was initially taken aback that all the actors used American accents, but I quickly got used to it. They explained in the Q&A afterwards that this was because some of the lines really needed the American intonation, and wouldn’t have worked as well in Australian accents. I guess I can kind of see this, though I’m not quite 100% convinced it was necessary.

I found the set design a little odd, in the way that some of the props were used interchangeably between home, office and other environments. In particular, I was a bit disconcerted when the mattress was used in the office scene. But this wasn’t a major problem.

And I was really pleased that, unlike The Lost Echo and other plays we’ve seen recently, this was a n ice, straightforward, beginning-middle-end production, with no talking to the audience, no symbolic characters, and nothing particularly cutting-edge or experimental about it.

The Lost Echo was supposed to be innovative and cutting edge. Maybe I missed the point, but I didn’t find it to be either of these things.

It was a mammoth production – about seven and a half hours, over two nights, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The four acts were all very different from each other, and, with the possible exception of Act II, I disliked all of them for different reasons.

Act I (The Song of Phaeton) concentrated on the stories of Phaeton, Callisto and Actaeon. It was mostly done like a musical – song and dance numbers, with dialogue – and in contemporary Australian dress. With nudity, sex and anatomically improbable fake penises. It was quite fun, though pretty lightweight, and at times a bit tasteless (though maybe I was supposed to see it as confronting, or shocking), but hardly innovative. There were two cases of cross-gender casting. Deborah Mailman was very funny as Satirino, but I really didn’t like Paul Capsis as Diana. I think this is because Satirino was done purely for laughs, but Diana was involved in storylines that could have been quite moving, but that lost their emotional effect with the central character being done as a rather over the top drag queen.

Act II (The Song of Mestra) was the stories of Myrrha, Salmacis, Beryl, Arachne and Procne and Philomela: all done by the actresses speaking directly to the audiences. This was actually very powerful, although to release the tension, in between each story there was a musical interlude, with more sex, nudity and fake appendages. Pamela Rabe was (unsurprisingly) very good as Salmacis, but I think the story that had the most impact was Procne and Philomela: Deborah Mailman, as Philomela, could not speak, so told her story in sign language, with Amber McMahon translating, and the effect was electric. Particularly at the end, when Philomela started screaming.

Act III (The Song of Bacchus) I believe came fairly directly from Euripides, although set in the most disgustingly filthy men’s room you could imagine. More sex, nudity and fake appendages, plus a lot of violence. It wasn’t ineffective, but I think maybe the two main actors – Dan Spielman as Bacchus and Martin Blum as Penthius – didn’t quite have the stage presence to carry the whole thing.

Act IV (The Song of Orpheus) was without doubt the most boring piece of theatre I have ever sat through. In fact, I seriously considered walking out, except that the actors would have seen it, and it didn’t seem fair to them, since it wasn’t their fault. Given that he was working with an Actors’ Company – the relevant word being actors – where the players range from the eminently capable up to the truly powerful, what can have made him think it would be a good idea to have a whole act of singing and symbolic, stylised movement? They were all competent singers (certainly far better than I would ever be) but they were employed as actors, and yet they weren’t really given the opportunity to do so. There was an okay bit in the middle, where the story of Echo and Narcissus was read out, and performed in dumb show; and it finished up with a song and dance number that I quite enjoyed (though I may have been, in the words of Antonia Forest, “confusing artistic appreciation with relief that the end was in sight”); but aside from this I was bored, bored, bored. On the plus side, the fake penises weren’t used in this act. On the other hand, by the end the actors were wearing nothing but their underclothes, and not all of them were really up to the challenge of this level of scrutiny. Though it was interesting to see which of the women were allowed to wear more than just a bra and pants, and to speculate on what the reasons for this might have been.

So, other than the fact that it was long (not necessarily a virtue), I didn’t really see anything special, or new, or exciting in this production. I’m kind of hoping that the next play we see (Fat Pig) will be a nice, straightforward, traditional production, with a linear storyline, non-symbolic characters, and a nice solid (if invisible) fourth wall between the actors and the audience.

I’ve been very slack – it’s three months since I’ve blogged anything. I’ve just done a lengthy write up of Superman Returns, and I’m going to do one of The Lost Echo in the next few days, but in the meantime I’ll do a quick summary of the films/plays I’ve seen recently.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest at Hoyts, Broadway.
Quite fun, but nowhere near as fresh as the first one. They seem to have the idea that if something was good in the first film, having much more of it in the second will be even better. It isn’t.

Hoodwinked on Qantas flight QF580 (Perth to Sydney).
An enjoyable take on a fairy tale, and I liked the way it was all told in flashback from different perspectives. Compared to other digital animation films, it wasn’t as good as Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles or Shrek, but much, much better than Ice Age or Madagascar.

Thank You for Smoking at Hoyts, Broadway.
Funny and clever.

Embers (Campion Decent) – Sydney Theatre Company at the Wharf Theatre.
At the Talk With The Actors I learned that this style of play is called “verbatim drama” – absolutely everything said on stage is what someone said in an interview. The only other example of this I’ve seen (though I’ve heard of others) was The Permanent Way, which I found a lot more compelling, and in which I got a much better sense of the individual people the actors were portraying. Embers was strong, but didn’t really match up. My other thought was that it was such a celebration of Australian-ness, I wondered if it would ever get an overseas run, and, if so, whether people would understand it.

I’d read You Never Can Tell years and years ago, but never had a chance to see it performed. I don’t think it’s one of Shaw’s best plays (my favourite is Arms and the Man) but it has some very good stuff in it.

This was a very straight-down-the-line, conventional production. On the whole, I was pleased about this. I think the first time you see a play – and particularly if it’s one you’re only ever likely to see once – it’s good to see it done straightforwardly, rather than an experimental or innovative production. Obviously, innovative productions can be amazing, but they can also be abysmal; whereas a production that takes less risks may not rise to the same heights, but it also won’t sink to the same depths.

I enjoyed this production a great deal. The two big stars were Edward Fox (as the waiter) and Diana Quick (as Mrs Clandon), and they were naturally wonderful; but in fact the whole cast was very strong. There was sometimes a degree of artificiality in the way the lines were delivered, but I think the script does demand this, and it never went too far.

It seems a bit ironic that a week after seeing an English translation of The Cherry Orchard, I should see a Russian translation of Twelfth Night. The audience seemed to be a mix of people who had come because it was Shakespeare, and people who had come because it was Russian. I guess you don’t get a lot of Russian-language theatre in Sydney.

We weren’t sitting in the best position to read the surtitles, but that didn’t matter too much, as I’m sufficiently familiar with the play that I could just glance at them now and then, and enjoy the performances while the sound of the words washed over me. I hadn’t realised until now just what a beautiful language Russian is.

As well as being in Russian, this was an all-male production, and there was little attempt to disguise the sexuality of the actors. Olivia and Maria were both in skirts, but Olivia, in particular, had a very male haircut, which looked rather incongruous. And when Viola was wearing a dress, the boy-shorts underwear was very obvious. Ages ago, I remember reading a piece about Shakespearean theatre, which said that when a female character dresses as a male, for the audience this was simply a removal of disguise. I hadn’t actually realised the full psychological impact of this until now. In some ways, Viola was much more ambiguous than usual, simply because it was so much easier to think of her as male.

This production was from the same director as Othello a couple of years ago, and some of the same techniques were used: mostly empty stage, rather minimalist costumes, and particularly the way one scene sort of bled into the next one (ie the new scene would start even as the previous scene was still finishing). Although it doesn’t always work, this can be very effective.

I enjoyed all the performances. There were some interesting casting decisions – particularly the fact that Malvolio was quite young, and one of the two best-looking of the actors (the other being Sir Andrew!), so he did actually have some small basis for believing Olivia was in love with him.

The character of Fabian was completely dropped, with Feste taking over much of his part (though, oddly, the line about Toby marrying Maria was spoken by Maria herself). I’m not sure how I feel about this. He’s a bit of an add-on character who seems to appear out of nowhere to take over Feste’s part in the conspiracy (Jasper Fforde makes a joke about it in one of his Thursday Next books – that Feste has run away, so Fabian will have to cover for him). And yet, while the character was probably created for the practical reason that they had a leftover actor who needed a part (and, in this production, cut in order to save paying another actor), it does serve to keep Feste a bit more independent – on good terms with everyone, but not actually part of any of the inner circles. Which, for me, is very much the essence of his character.

It was hard to tell for sure how much of the play was cut. Certainly lines were missing from the surtitles, but I have a suspicion that in at least some cases, the actors still spoke them. The ending was interesting. There was a hint at first that Orsino wasn’t totally comfortable with Viola as a woman (he instinctively snatched his hands away from her when she reached out for him) but this seemed to disappear. More oddly, it seemed as if they were going to cut Malvolio’s “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” line. And then right at the end, when everyone was dressed in happy, light coloured clothes, Malvolio came back on in his servant’s dress, served them all drinks, and then came to the front of the stage and said “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” in a really menacing tone. At which point, the play ended. One can only wonder what might have been in the drinks he served!

I’d never seen a production of The Cherry Orchard before, and I’d never actually read it before. So I didn’t really have any preconceptions about the play (well, except that I knew it wasn’t going to be a barrel of laughs). Without having anything to compare it to, it was a bit hard to form a strong opinion of the adaptation, although at times I did feel that it was perhaps a bit too much “Australian colloquial” (given that the setting itself was clearly Russian). Some of the language seemed to jar a bit. Though I suppose that is still better than a formal, stilted translation.

With a cast that included Robyn Nevin, John Gaden, Lucy Bell and Pamela Rabe I expected the performances to be good, and as far as I could tell, without having any views of what the characters should be like, they certainly seemed to be. Though I was very surprised that Pamela Rabe’s part was so small (she played Charlotta) – I kept waiting for her to have more scenes, or more significance, and she didn’t.

And yet, somehow I didn’t feel any of the power that the play is supposed to have – not when compared to, say, Uncle Vanya. Some of the characters did seem a bit inconsistent from scene to scene, and some bits I didn’t really see the point of. So maybe there was something not quite right about the performances, or the direction, or the adaptation. Or maybe The Cherry Orchard is just one of those plays that doesn’t work for me.

We included this play in our subscription mainly because it had both Miranda Otto and Barry Otto in it. Going in, however, I found I didn’t have the faintest recollection what the subscription guide had actually said it was about. So when I opened the program and discovered four pages of information about stalkers, I was a little taken aback. It seemed that this was not going to be a fun night at the theatre.

In fact, there was quite a lot of humour in the play. In particular, Barry Otto’s relatively minor role as a film director obsessed with big breasted women was a scream. (It also explained why, after the information about stalkers, the program had two pages about Russ Meyer, the director of, among other things, Faster, PussyCat! Kill! Kill!.

But on the whole, the play was very serious and a bit creepy. The character of Tony only had three or four scenes, quite early on, plus two or three walk ons during scene changes – but he cast a malevelent shadow over the whole production (during which time the actor was, presumably, putting his feet up in the dressing room).

I was distinctly underwhelmed by this production. I didn’t like the mix of Roman and modern dress, I didn’t like the “staginess” of it all, the actors were singularly lacking in charisma and Brutus seemed to spend the whole play in an unchanging cloud of gloom. Rather disappointing, since this was the first time I’d ever seen Julius Caesar live. When Michael was in New York for a conference earlier this year, he saw a production starring Denzel Washington – he said it was a lot more accessible than this production.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen or read a Pinter play before. And I don’t think I’ll be rushing out for another one. I’m not sure whether it was the performances or the script, or whether it’s just become a bit dated, but it really didn’t do anything for me. It was stylised rather than realistic, but not in a particularly interesting way; and I just didn’t care at all about any of the characters. I think I just completely missed the point of it all.