Three Nights in Three Theatres

Interplay was performed at Southbank Theatre Melbourne from April 30 to May 10.

Belleville played at Red Stitch from April 30 to May 31.

Sight and Sounds of Chinese Opera is presented each Friday and Saturday at the Chinese Theatre Circle, Singapore.

Wednesday night

Sydney Dance Company is magnificent. On a visit to Melbourne’s Southbank Theatre, the company performed Interplay, three works by contemporary choreographers: “2 in D Minor” by Rafael Bonachela; “Raw Models” by Jacopo Godani; “L’Chaim!” by Gideon Obarzanek.

Sets for the first two performances were designed by Benjamin Cisterne (“2 in D Minor”) and Jacopo Godani (“Raw Models”). Each time the stage seemed at first nothing more than a big open ordinary square box. But furnished with music and lighting it transformed into a rich and lush monochrome backdrop to show off the dancers.

Writing about dance is like trying to capture the wind in a net of words. In the audience we’re flying with angels—or perhaps we’ve been sprayed by sweat from the stage. Then, with the third piece, the weather changed, the wind died away as a verbal fog ground the dreaming.

In this last performance of the evening the dancers, in casual clothes, were presented exercising and warming up. Then, in groups, they swept from one side of the stage to the other as an intensely irritating voice from the back of the audience intruded and began asking them questions—think Michael Douglas in the film of A Chorus Line (the groan you may have heard was mine):

“Are you grumpy? Is that why you tend not to dance with your face?”

“Say your cat died yesterday and you had to bury it—would you be sad when you were dancing? What would it look like?”

The text was written and spoken by David Woods. Eventually he got up, walked through the audience and joined the cast on stage. The movement on stage, for no reason, became Yiddish folklorist. Hopes that it was a joke and that the real performance would resume died. Sydney Dance is a thoroughbred and choreographer Gideon Obarzanek had harnessed it to a farm cart. It was cruelty to dancers, and audience, and a lapse in taste by the company.

Over the night the applause had been building towards the promise of a standing-ovation finale. Instead, at night’s end it feels muted. I clap, not for this piece but for the dancers. Leaving the theatre, two young men are ahead of me. As one pushes open the outside door he pauses and says to his friend, with a rising intonation and dismissive intent, “Fiddler on the Roof.”

But in the street the performance fog lifts and leaves just the afterglow of having been there and shared, at least for two out of three performances, the brilliance of Sydney Dance.

Thursday night

At Melbourne’s Red Stitch it’s the Australian premier season of Belleville, a 2011 play by US playwright Amy Herzog. The theatre is a wooden shed at the back of a St Kilda church hall. On this cold night front-of-house staff forget to open the door to let us in. When they finally remember us we crowd in, quickly filling the tiny foyer for this sold-out performance. Due to begin at eight o’clock, it’s well past the hour before the auditorium doors are open. Tickets are recycled and we hand them in to be used again. Once in, there is no way out during the performance as the exits are on the stage—a small playing area at the foot of steeply raked seating.

A young white American couple in Paris rent an apartment in Belleville from a young black French-African couple. The set shows their kitchen and living area with doors opening onto a hallway and into their bedroom and bathroom. At the back of the stage a window faces the street. At play’s beginning Abby (Christina O’Neill) arrives home in the afternoon. Hearing noises from their bedroom she opens the door and finds her husband Zack (Paul Ashcroft) watching internet porn.

Over the next ninety minutes of playing time the relationship is set for a collision with an unknown disaster. The young couple are leading American dream lives in Paris which piece by piece collapse about them. It’s a competent and entertaining thriller which promises something bad and keeps us uncertain as to what it will be until the very end.

Ashcroft and O’Neill give performances marvellously suited to the play and the relaxed playing space as the romantic fiction they are living becomes cruel non-fiction. Overplayed, Abby could turn into a twenty-something whiner, and Zack a loser liberal psychopath. They also both speak American with soft accents, a cultural lifetime away from the ugly brash American-speak an older generation used to give us. The other two characters in the play are the landlord couple played by Tariro Mavondo and Renaud Momtbrun. Director Denny Lawrence lets Herzog’s script develop at its own pace.

Predictable theatre is irritating; this is anything but. It’s old-fashioned in the best sort of way and reconnects with entertaining theatrical traditions. The one-act play could almost have been cut loose from a larger work. To have spun the stage around to the landlords’ apartment might have made a good second act, for Herzog leaves enough clues scattered about to suggest that their lives too could hold enough dramatic folly for another nice night’s entertainment.

Saturday night

It has taken the princess two hours to paint her face and put on her costume. Atop a thick chalk-white greasepaint foundation are painted black lines and a distinctive pale rose-pink blush. Her lips are bloody. The elaborate scarlet costume has long sleeves with even longer white silk extensions. A wide stiff belt encircles her waist and the heavy headdress is decorated with bobbles and gold tassels.

The dressing room is upstairs and the Chinese opera princess made her entrance from behind our backs, walking through the centre of the room to the stage with pride and courtly formality. From the stage, the two television sets have been turned off and folded back to the wall, and she talks to us in English. It isn’t an everyday experience to be addressed by a Ming princess, especially by one who tells a story of having her pocket picked in Barcelona.

We are in a teahouse in Smith Street, China­town, Singapore—one of those typical old and narrow two- or three-storey shops you find all through the area. The outside street is now closed to traffic and the empty space has been filled by open-air food stalls and restaurants. It’s very busy. In just a few years Singapore has changed from crowded to overcrowded.

The teahouse is the home of the Chinese Theatre Circle. On Friday and Saturday nights they offer dinner and an introduction to Cantonese opera. At seven o’clock, right on time, I push open the shop door and enter a long and narrow brightly lit room. Three people at a table look up. A young man speaks politely and suggests we take a seat. He explains that the people who work here seem to have disappeared, for the moment. The three are a Chinese family from Cambodia. We sit and look about.

On both sides, leaving a walkway through the middle, there are small, square, glass-topped wooden tables, each with four barrel-shaped stools which squeal a little when you move them. The tea room is brightly lit, slightly scruffy and untidy, and Chinese-comfortable. There are scrolls on the walls along with newspaper cuttings and posters about the opera group. Several costumes are on display and there are plastic flowers in vases. At the far back of the room is the small stage decorated with the televisions and large Chinese opera masks. After a time a woman pops in and sees us. Although the booking was made on the internet, no one comes to check who we are and what we are doing there. Instead our meal begins appearing.

It is served in courses: it’s optional, very tasty, and includes an unusual, tangy, salted, pickled vegetable soup. Small tea cups are filled and a teapot of longan tea is left with us. The two televisions are playing a loop of a Chinese opera aria. After our meal we sit waiting for the eight o’clock performance. The Cambodian family go out into the crowded street for a stroll. More people come in. Tonight the audience is nine. On some nights they have only one booking and find, after making up and preparing, it’s a non-show. Sometimes, at times of Chinese festivals, full performances are mounted elsewhere in the city and the teahouse is closed.

It begins when the princess makes her impressive entrance. The actress, and leader of the troupe, is See Too Hoi Siang, a woman in her mid-fifties. Most of the presentation is question and answer, show and tell. I’m at the front on her right side and get hit first with each question. Where do we all come from? That’s the easy one. Apart from Australia, we are from Spain (hence the Barcelona story), Cambodia and Singapore—I think the three young Singaporeans are either local media or project-writing students. Cantonese opera is passing away in Singapore; the young show little interest and older fans are dying off. The Chinese Theatre Circle is doing a commendable job of preservation.

We are asked to examine the opera masks on the back wall and questioned as to what sort of characters we think they represent. I wish I had sat somewhere else. I’m asked first. Mask number one is white-faced with black lines and looks like a cheerful Pierrot figure, quite unlike the next two who are red-devilish and fearsome black. Naturally I give the wrong answer and find out that he, of course, is the evil one. I begin to get the hang of this and keep my eye on one of the Singaporean boys, who gives precisely the opposite answer to what I would give. I follow his lead and get better marks. It’s reassuring to find that everything I ever thought I had understood about Chinese opera is completely wrong. Naturally those frightening red and black faces belong to loyal and true characters.

Our guide tackles some of the traditional opera conventions. To point left, the actor begins with a movement to the right—understanding the principle behind that may be a clue to comprehending Chinese society. To knock on an invisible door one must first indicate that a door exists. Our guide illustrates some principles of mime and explains the intricacies of the costume she is wearing. The typical strange sounds and movements of Chinese opera are explained by her claim that all words are song, all movements are dance. She speaks a line in normal Chinese and demonstrates what it would sound like as a line of opera dialogue. It is electrifying as suddenly these operatic sounds burst out. She has a cold, but manfully performs a duet with another costumed performer, Frances Wong.

All the performers in her troupe are female, she explains, because women are more creative than men. Her majority male audience is politely silent. The recorded music they sing to includes Western instruments—I prefer the traditional orchestras with that strange sound which always gives me pleasure and resembles the violent unwinding of a wind-up clock spring.

What is being demonstrated is also part of Australia’s theatrical history. Between 1858 and 1869 Melbourne and the gold-rush towns were visited by fourteen Chinese theatrical groups with thirty to fifty members each. It would be interesting to know if any operas were written with contemporary goldfield backgrounds.

The two performers sing a duet from The Patriotic Princess, a 1950s Cantonese opera in which the Ming princess heroine, following the invasion of her country, marries and commits suicide with her new husband: “suicide at the pavilion of the embracing willow trees”. Subtitles are projected on the wall beside the two players: “Sadly I put the poison in the wine.” The titles are both dialogue and explain the scene: “In tears they drink to each other. Their wedding gowns will be their funeral attire.” It is moving and really pleasurable. At the time this poetic suicide was first delighting Hong Kong audiences thousands of real people were suiciding to avoid the communist terror on the mainland. At the end of the evening there are a few audience questions and then photographs with the players. I’m left wanting more.

Highly recommended for Quadrant readers with free Friday or Saturday nights in Singapore. Online bookings need to be made in advance. Bookings at http://www.ctcopera.com.