Once Upon a Stage

Two Blue Cows

After I’ve been twice around the program, the play is five minutes late starting, the actors come on with Tas/Yank accents, slightly disconcerting, and microphones, the ones which look like bent knitting needles, pasted onto their heads. The theatre’s small, the music’s big and loud. It’s all wrong. Then suddenly that thing happens and I’ve broken through into someone else’s world. Now, the play and I are both heading somewhere together and even though Next to Normal is about things that are all, all bad, everything is all, all right. When you are lucky it really does happen as quickly as that. For some plays you have to struggle to find a way in, and for others you only want to be allowed out.

At the Peacock Theatre in Salamanca Place, Hobart, you choose your own seats. This is a good thing because there are a few whose springs leave lasting impressions. The small auditorium seats about 150 people and the raked seating looks down onto a playing space which is part of an old quarry. The wall at the back of the stage is rough stone and when not disguised or disfigured by a set, makes a dramatic backing for concerts or plays. When cast bores, a block of rock can be very consoling.

The US musical Next to Normal was first staged in Australia in 2011 by the Melbourne Theatre Company. As plans for a Sydney season collapsed, Hobart is getting to see the musical, in this production by Blue Cow, before Sydney audiences. It’s that rock musical about madness and depression: subject matter that turns away the crowds. Written by Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt, it began life off Broadway in 2008. Then, after rewrites, it went on Broadway in 2009 and won three Tony Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Depression central, home to the bruised family we are staying with tonight, is a suburban house somewhere in the USA. In a larger theatre you would expect to see an opened-up two-storey suburban house on stage. Here, a large part of the stage is taken up by the seven musicians and the main playing space runs along the front of the stage. Between the musicians is a narrow space the actors use as a walkway to the back or as a confined playing area. There are simple black fabric coverings on the wings. Within these small spaces the play goes from the family home to doctor’s office, hospital surgery, school classroom. In this compact auditorium the big sound and big performances make a perfect fit. Directors Robert Jarman and Cassie Xintavelonis have a light touch and have presented a musical ideal for intimate performance.

The stage is home to an affectionate family, all lovely and smiling, lots of shining teeth: “With a smile so white and winning all the way.” Yet everything is falling apart as her husband and children grapple with Diana’s (Chelle Burtt) depression. This is rock opera with a beating soap opera heart. The writers manipulate and trick the audience, naturally. But they treat us as people worth tricking and manipulating. The writing is intelligent and, as we effortlessly follow songs coming at us from different characters at the same time, makes us feel clever. As husband Dan (Kristian Byrne) and the two children (Alessandro Frosali and Anna Kidd) sing:

It’s just another day
And the morning sun is stunning
And you wish that you
Were running far away.

Diana sings:

A busy, busy day.
I will hold it all together.
I will hide the mess away.

Next to Normal is the legitimate child of the rock opera Rent and an older musical theatre tradition rumoured to be past it. It’s also the granddaughter of that hackneyed stuff about the integrated musical. Here story and song are so integrated that the music doesn’t seem to have an independent life. You come out remembering the musical but not the music. Maybe someone somewhere fancies singing “My psychopharmacologist and I … It’s like an odd romance.” Playing some of it on YouTube later I find I’m quickly clicking away. The writing is smart, and sure. When schoolmate Henry (Daniel Cosgrove) tells Natalie

The world is at war, filled with death and disease
We dance on the edge of destruction
The globe is getting warmer by deadly degrees

she knows her adolescent suitor is making love to her. His Occupy T-shirt is a good fit. Natalie is a new cliché of contemporary American writing. The All-American Boy has given way to the all-whingeing, all-whining, All-American Girl.

I Kindled a copy of Next to Normal, planning to read it before the performance, but only managed a few pages. I’m glad. Coming fresh to this musical leaves you open to surprise and unexpected pleasure. When the plot takes a sudden twist I’m genuinely startled. Often when new plays are presented you can tell what’s coming, what words come next. There’s even a cheap thrill from the set as a hidden cupboard opens in the wall. It’s a large light-filled cupboard of medicinal drugs. Diana isn’t kidding when she says, “Valium is my favourite colour.” I can watch a movie with zillions of dollars of special effects and yawn, yet this simple bit of stagecraft delights me. Maybe it taps into childhood fantasies of furniture with secret drawers and rooms with hidden doors. Or perhaps it’s just that theatre can still make magic happen, just as the actors tonight are doing.

There are good performances but we don’t applaud much. It’s not one of those nights where they sing a song and we clap our hands—we save it for the end. Though when Scott Farrow’s star doctor suddenly and momentarily becomes a triumphant rock star the audience gasps are praise enough, and Alessandro Frosali as son Gabe brings applause with “I’m Alive”. At play’s end the loud clapping goes on and on. As the cast do that bowing thing Kristin Byrne has a smile that seems to take up most of the stage. He’s earned it, they’ve earned it.

LEAP ahead a few weeks and the Theatre Royal Backspace is full of smoke. It’s Irish fog, and another Blue Cow production. Part the mist, find your seat, look down as one by one the three actors, Jane Longhurst, Anna Kidd and Jeff Michel, come onstage and begin their monologues. And that’s the trouble. You are watching a talking book talk and you could be home watching television. This is Terminus by Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe. At home on the couch drug addiction Breaking Bad has given way to the soft porn of The Tudors.

The story of Terminus is about eighty minutes of wordy magical realism—it combines naturalism and fantasy. The winding tales the actors tell of violence, devils and angels, a murder and a mother’s confession drag themselves along when we could be doing something more interesting; anything would be more interesting. A text we could have quickly read for ourselves, skipping over the overwritten bits, is too long and dull to fill out the empty space. I wasn’t expecting a book at bedtime, I was expecting theatre.

Jane Longhurst plays a Lifeline-type worker who encounters strong violence, a lesbian with bad hygiene, and her own past. Jeff Michel plays a dreary, cardigan-wrapped singing serial killer; the sort of Centrelink staffer they keep in the back office for emergency use. Anna Kidd plays a flaky young woman who I know. We probably all know her. The performer creates a type we are probably all familiar with. Having recently seen Kidd as Natalie, the daughter, in Next to Normal, this is impressive. Seeing her in two roles in a fairly short space of time makes it possible to compare her skilful creation of two very different characterisations. One of the good things about taking an interest in any of the small and sometimes very good theatrical companies around Australia is that you get to see particular players and compare the work they do in different plays. If only the writing was as good as the players can be.

Dim light, dull night

WHEN a piece of award-winning physical theatre is falling in your direction it’s wise to duck, or you could do what I did and take your chances with a cheap ticket. As places like Dandenong, Wagga Wagga, Albury, Colac, Canberra, Geelong, Portland, Warragul and lots of others had already suffered Mari Lourey’s Bare Witness I took a seat at the Theatre Royal as the production’s touring season came to an end in Hobart.

The play is about photojournalism and is set in war zones in the Balkans, East Timor and Iraq. It begins with darkness, musical twangs, actors coming onstage in a meaningful manner (not sure what that means exactly but it seems to fit the play’s pretensions). Forget the exotic destinations, the things that go bang, and the glitter that falls from the flies. The only war zone this play knows is that dark space under Flinders Lane in Melbourne where they hide the fortyfivedownstairs theatre—a place drama teachers go before they die. Did I mention that this is a La Mama and fortyfivedownstairs production?

This looks so familiar. Dark stage. Figures moving. Discordant sounds. A musical instrument is being tuned. Cue story: A young girl has done a photography course, snapped a few fashion shots and society parties and then heads into war photography, meeting the professionals. Enter rough trade with hearts of gold and strong female to look up to. These aren’t real people, they’re ghosts from 1970s Cleo feature articles, or a 1990s Women’s Studies reading list. The acting replays clichés. As the lead, Dannie, Daniela Farinacci gives us Rodgers and Hammerstein, sans music. Flinging herself about the stage as a careless, carefree young kid she’s Maria, that gay, light-hearted novitiate from Sound of Music. When fame and the rigours of guerrilla fighting at fortyfivedownstairs take over, sorry, when the experiences in the war zones have their influence she matures not into sensible, lovable Mother Abbess but into the mean nun in the movie. There are short bursts of dialogue, some not bad but they don’t lead anywhere, interspersed with silences, dance, music, lights.

The piece runs for seventy-five minutes. Take out the breaks, turn off the slides and the video and the repetitions and you have a few short stop-and-start narrative scenes with unconnected interludes and bangs. The music, a cello and synthesiser played by composer Kristin Rule, is very contemporary dance and very good, the rest is not so good. Physical theatre, a combination of narrative, dance, music and theatrical effects can be exciting: this wasn’t.

I’m sitting in a cheap seat at the far end of the first row of the dress circle. The performance takes place on a completely bare stage. You see the theatre walls. This is a travelling production which has played in a variety of different venues. This is an example of modern performance theatre so it’s not locked into the confines of a three-walled set. Yet when action takes place on my side of the stage I can’t see what happens. There are a lot of empty seats, and they have a much better view than I do. That a company can’t take account of the sight lines of a theatre and simply adjust their performance is not terribly considerate towards their audiences. I also can’t hear clearly. The old theatre has good acoustics, but some of these players can’t clearly project their voices even as far as the first row of the dress circle. Hobart was the last city in their touring season and they are still mumbling.

The few ideas were unexplored. Foreign correspondent Edward Behr’s memoir Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? says more in its title than anything in this play. A handful of dialogue scenes and lots of repetitions, including the technical specifications of a camera, do not take us very deeply into the world of photojournalism. The photographers being represented are the professionals, they get paid for doing what happy-snap German soldiers did on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Apart from the money and fame their clicking earns them, the big difference between them and the Wehrmacht sightseers is that they turn suffering into Art.

Some of the publicity material calls this a “brave” play. I’ve been reading Hélène Berr’s Journal, the testimony of a young Jewish woman in Paris from April 1942 until her deportation. She died in Belsen only days before the camp was liberated. That was a life which deserves to be called brave, not this. The Marketing and Publicity Resource Pack for selling the play thought it would appeal to “Theatre goers seeking riskier, edgier theatre” and under this heading noted that this included “innovative lighting techniques, including actors manipulating lights on stage as part of the performance”. Pity they couldn’t use the lights to find their way out.           

This play about photojournalism does not include actual photos, although there are back projected videos—of dogs. The repetitions, the unintegrated physical movements and the staging don’t take us very far. Also on the back projection screen are a series of numbers which count backwards from 011 to 001. Meant to represent important photos in Dannie’s life they really mean we will eventually be freed.

A core of information, not drama, is wrapped in pretension. The choreography included the full cast forming happy-snap groups at the front of the stage: made the Wiggles seem high art. Maybe coloured skivvies would have helped.