Comments Off on Women’s Revue: Everything, Everywhere, In 3 Hours
A review of a revue is a challenging thing, not only because it’s a mouthful to say. Watching students perform anything brings to mind my own anxiety of theatrical performance and a desire to know the regular lives of the actors who are probably more similar to me than either of us are to professionals. Add onto that the pressure of comedic performance which, because of the inherent awkwardness if it doesn’t land, makes you doubt the veracity of your own opinion, but it also leaves you wondering what to actually write about.
Sitting in the back row for the Friday night performance of the Women’s Revue, I gauged a lot of it from the audience reaction and so I think broadly it worked. This is to say, most skits received a plausible laugh and quite a few got a real cackle from groups. Only two sketches had anything questionable, but more on that later.
For the uninitiated, revues are put on by various extensions of student organisations, such as the Womens’ Revue, or the Law Revue. They are skit shows, and consist of a series of sketches which range, in this case, from the political, to the social, to the hyperlocal. The set itself is pared back out of necessity – it cannot change every five minutes – and props are limited to the essential wig, jacket or for this play, wand and rollerskates. Womens’ Revue, as acknowledged in the introductory song, is the first of the season, meaning this review must be taken with a grain of salt.
Revues are fun. They are the most fun if both the actors and audience lean into the kitchiness and the amateur aspects of it. Across the revue, the best performances were those where the actors were clearly enjoying the performance. As Directors Meg Dawkins (she/her) and Emma Tuckwell (she/her) put it, the “cast and writing team are the heart of the show” and I think this is what provides the eternal appeal of student theatre, that the audience, who can often relate to the cast, get to watch a group of people have fun for their entire performance. For instance, one overarching skit was that some regular skit was interrupted as soon as a character noticed any form of kilt or tartan pattern. The cast would then descend into chants of “For Scotland.” It’s the zany, wackiness that you find funniest only when you’re actually performing it, but the joy was contagious and it was this kind of kitchiness that I think the audience liked the most.
This revue had live music which is impressive for a number of reasons. Firstly, the trumpeter, Jess Hill (he/they) in the corner who also conducted the band must be commended. Having played the saxophone briefly in primary school, I can only imagine how difficult it is to both play an instrument and simultaneously coordinate the other musicians. Secondly, the live music underpinned a series of impressive and imaginative musical acts. Popular songs ranging from those famous on TikTok to the ‘Room Where It Happened’ from Hamilton were parodied successfully for several numbers. Not all were funny but I also don’t think they were intended to be, and the Directors were clear that aspects of the show are meant to be thought-provoking. Every one of them, though, worked, with lyrics to fit the tunes and no doubt there is some more musical theory to be unpacked there, but for the average watcher, I was thoroughly impressed. Apparently the songs were written collaboratively and thus are an achievement of the whole cast. Particular favourites was the sharehouse anthem to the tune of Frozen’s ‘Fixer Upper’ and ‘Can I Interest You in Centralism all of the Time?’
There is likely no perfect concoction of skits, but I noticed that those about the ANU prompted the most laughs. A Lighting McQueen skit about parking on campus, or about Mike who studies Computer Science replacing ChatGPT, did very well. Politics sketches will always be challenging, least of all because by the time a revue gets around to it, the ABC and social media will have thoroughly dissected the underlying material. However, a reference to Scomo shitting himself will probably never not be funny.
I would have enjoyed more jokes about the university experience, both because they were the funniest but also because this is the niche of a student comedic performance. Something about the unjustifiably confident bloke in a tutorial or Schmidt’s Tesla would not have gone awry. I imagine that there is pressure to always do something different from last year, but that was a year ago, and some audience members, like myself, are new to the scene. Oldies can still remain goldies.
The acting and singing were good. Comedy is always difficult to perform, as is an Irish accent which features in an early skit, and yet the cast did well at both. I did take a mild delight at deciding who clearly preferred the acting over the dancing and who was clearly there to sing, but being unable to personally do any of the three, I respect everyone’s commitment. Maddy McQuin (she/her) stood out to me as fully committing to each role and nailing the pantomime facial expressions as required.
At the most, I could only ever be consistently funny for five minutes or approximately 1,000 words. Three hours is a stretch for anyone, I feel, particularly if it starts at 7pm. I would baulk at a three hour play by professionals, and most stand-up routines go for around an hour and a half. It is, in short, probably too long.
I would like to make an aside about the quality of the audience. I yearn for the day we return to silent or near-silent viewing of films and plays. A group of people sitting next to us simply wouldn’t shut the fuck up. I don’t expect complete silence but one of them would, like a dog, loudly say “Ally” anytime a character said “Slay.” I’m as gay as the next doc-wearing, non-binary twink but Jesus did I want to hit a bitch. A similar thing happened when I saw Barbie recently and I believe it stems from being too saturated in social media’s incessant need for a joke every ten seconds.
In three hours of skits, there are bound to be some that don’t land perfectly. But, two skits wandered beyond the unsuccessful and towards the uncomfortable.
The revue had three skits about an ordinary person dating various Australian Prime Ministers after their time in office, which included Scott Morrison, Harold Holt and Julia Gillard. Gillard’s skit I fear became an odd moment of woman-bashing. She was characterised as a shrill, alcoholic woman and her famous misogyny speech was compared to a fight with what was implied to be an ex of sorts (bizarre, I know). The message was unclear to me, and fell into some deeply problematic tropes in the representation of Gillard, from her being an emotional, loud, complaining woman, to comparing Abbott to an annoying ex and not a misogynist who led the federal opposition and launched a campaign of vitriol and sexism that set female leaders back decades. Likewise, to liken Gillard to a stereotype about alcoholic middle-aged depressive women is both problematic and unjust. Gillard was no perfect leader and no perfect feminist, I am not defending her record here. But her misogyny speech was a groundbreaking moment in Australian politics and her success as Prime Minister was an important moment for feminism in Australia. That skit made all the wrong jokes. During the intermission, a stranger sitting next to us remarked unprompted about how the scene was simply “not it.”
I also think the revue would have benefitted with more Queer jokes, which is to say, it would have benefited from less of a focus on heterosexual issues and characters. One of my favourite skits was of two lesbian librarians using a series of literary double entendres to flirt, and the audience loved it too. Theatre has always been a Queer space, I believe both the cast and the audience would have found jokes about Queer dating funny and simple to write. Conversely, the skit in which two podcasting dude-bros confessed their homosexuality was confusing; a little more nuance would be needed to convince me that the joke was not the very fact that they are gay.
Comedy is challenging, and these two skits sit within dozens of others than landed well. It happens, and I would never attribute them to malice, but it must also be remarked upon. Overall, it was an amusing evening, with a clearly dedicated cast which the audience cannot help but enjoy.
A review of a revue is a challenging thing, not only because it’s a mouthful to say.
Comments Off on Interview with ANU alum, director and producer of The Giants, Rachael Antony
Few figures have had as powerful an impact on the course of Australian history as Bob Brown.
Currently showing in cinemas, The Giants is a feature length biopic directed and produced by ANU alumn Rachael Antony, exploring the life and accomplishments of Bob Brown alongside a stunning portrayal of the history of the Tasmanian forest and landscape. The documentary reveals his journey from doctor in Tasmania, to eventual leader of the first Greens party, and hero of the Australian environmentalism movement.
The Giants skilfully traces the achievements of Bob Brown as champion and protector of the Tasmanian forest and Franklin River, beautifully interwoven with the lifecycle and stories of the forest itself. While much of Bob’s life has been subject of public interest and knowledge, The Giants takes viewers behind the curtain. The film explores Bob’s private world and the important figures who have continually supported him behind the scenes. Showing the parallel life stories of Bob and the forest he treasured, side by side, The Giants invites viewers to come to know the trees as Bob did; wise custodians of the land and complex beings with their own history to tell.
Seeking to both entertain and educate, The Giants explores the horrors of clear felling and logging that plague the Tasmanian forest. While tracing the journey of Brown’s courageous fight to save both the trees and the Franklin River, viewers are reminded of the willing ignorance of political figures against whom Bob fought, showing (as if Australians needed further reminding) the sheer greed and recklessness of private interest and political parties’ historic, blatant disregard for Australia’s natural treasures. This destruction continues to this day. I suggest readers check out the Bob Brown Foundation Instagram to follow the journey of Lenny who is currently attached in protest to a cable logger, protecting the forest around her from logging, which is a critical habitat for Swift parrots.
Breathtaking drone shots, archival footage, and intriguing animations work together to create a stunning cinemascape for viewers, bringing the trees to life and immersing viewers in the world that Bob fought so hard to protect. For aspiring activists, those interested in the origins of Australian politics, or any lover of the natural world, The Giants is a worthwhile watch.
I sat down with Rachel to chat about making The Giants, the inspiration behind the film, and why more people should put Tasmania on their travel lists.
To start off with, I’d love to know a little bit about you and your background, and how you came to be directing and producing this documentary?
Long story short, I studied in Canberra. I studied anthropology and politics. And even though I didn’t work in either of those fields, I found that they were really quite helpful because I think both anthropology and politics ask you to question your assumptions and to ask questions of the status quo, and that’s really the starting point of any storytelling, I think. Later I studied journalism at RMIT. So I started out as a writer, and then I guess as time has evolved, and video has evolved, I’ve branched into different mediums and worked in TV and online video.
Originally the idea was to get people off screens and get them engaged into events, but based around the screens, I guess. So one of the things that came out of that was we wanted to do this big event for the anniversary of Cathy Freeman’s win at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. So we want to do that in 2020, and then what happened was everybody loved this idea, but we couldn’t get any money. Then we ended up getting some funding from ABC to make a documentary and that was the best possible thing that could have happened because September 2020, everybody was locked down, stuck at home watching television. Yeah. So that’s how that came about.
So then once we finished Freeman, I guess we were thinking about telling stories about people whose stories are bigger than themselves. Because I think, while people can be fascinating individually, the stories that they tell in terms of the way that their life is, and the messages, the bigger that is, the more compelling it is.
We were thinking about other people who we felt were really interesting and to be honest, really only one name came up and that was Bob Brown.
I think one thing that we were quite concerned about was the messages we’re getting about climate change. We have a kid ourselves, so we have this very tangible link to the next generation. Which is not to say that we wouldn’t have cared otherwise, because we did. Then of course, with the bushfires, what we saw was a massive amount of our native forests destroyed. And then soon after that, you know, while native animals were being pushed to the brink of extinction, we saw state logging operations coming in and conduct salvage logging, so removing old dead trees from the forest that – if they had just been left – would have served as habitat because various species of birds or possums can live in dead trees, and it gets them off the ground away from predators.
At this point, we just felt this was taking things too far, humans will never have enough. We’ll never say ‘no, we’re done now’. It’s always about more, things are really out of balance. We thought ‘this is crazy’, and around the same time we have been getting really inspired by some of the reading we had been doing. So we’ve been reading the Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, and they’re making us start thinking differently about forests and trees and also realising how crucial they were.
We made this film pretty quickly, so it’s hard to remember exactly how it all came together. But what we came up with was telling the story of Bob Brown, intertwined with the life of trees. The reason we did that is because we felt that by embedding the forest into the film from the outset, it sort of explained Bob’s worldview and why he’s worked so hard to save these forests and why we should all care about this as well. We also wanted to show the majesty and beauty of these places. Keeping in mind that, you know, Australia is one of the few places left on earth that does have primary forest. In Europe, they basically have no primary forest. So this is a very long story, but um, an answer to your question ‘how did it end up producing directing?’ well, a whole lot of life events.
One of my favourite parts of the film was the way it wove together Bob’s personal life with the hidden story of the trees and embedded his story within the story of the forest. I got the impression of so much richness and depth to Bob’s life. How did you decide which aspects of Bob’s personal life you were going to kind of focus on?
So we decided we would tell the story of Bob, intertwine it with a life of trees, everybody said that was a good idea. Nobody said ‘you’re crazy, how are you going to put Bob’s life into 45 minutes and the trees into 45 minutes?’ And so the answer to that is, we didn’t.
The film was at an hour and fifty three minutes, we could not get it any shorter. Our first cut was three hours, and we hadn’t even finished making the film. So to answer that, we really had to be quite brutal. I guess, because we had intertwined the life of trees, we had meeting points for both. So that gave us a trajectory, from you know, seedling, childhood, to sapling, maturity, and grandfather elder, if you like.
So we knew where we were going, then we needed to figure out which things to put in, which not. In the end, we had to get rid of a lot of stuff that’s actually pretty fascinating. Bob tried to pass gun control in Tasmania, years before Port Arthur happened and both Liberal and Labour parties shot it down, figuratively speaking. We didn’t put in the fact that he and another bunch of environmentalists were sued for $20 million by the Gunns wood chipping company in Tasmania.
We didn’t put in the fact that Bob once took out a mortgage to pay the ransom of an Australian pirate who had been kidnapped in Somalia.
So I know this is so much more, so what we had to do is this broad brushstroke story that connected as much as possible with those key convictions. He talks about optimism, he talks about defiance and he talks about compassion. So we found those stories, the ones that told those stories most strongly, or pointed into the direction of the forest, are the ones that we went to. So it was really quite a heartbreaking process. Also, obviously Paul [Bob’s partner] is a central character, but I’m sure if you’ve seen the films, you know that at every step there’s this amazing woman, right in there, doing exactly the same thing, he doesn’t do it alone. Each one of those women has a whole backstory. Basically we could have made a mini series, but we didn’t, we’ve made a film. So yeah, so the answer is, we just took the bits that told the story the best, and then we had to kill our darlings, so to speak.
Obviously we were always going to talk about his relationship with Paul, and then that became a slightly bigger part of the story, because while we always wanted to present that essentially as a love story, obviously it was complicated by the legal and social context of the time, so we needed to provide some background to that. So we have Paul, who was involved in gay law reform in Tasmania, tell that story about the movement that was headed up by people like Rodney Croome. So that did become a little bit bigger, but I think it also became stronger because of it.
When you were envisioning the documentary, how were you hoping people would feel walking away from it? Was there something in particular that you wanted people to feel or be influenced towards?
We felt Bob was an interesting character because he’s a baby boomer, but his interest in his message is so contemporary. We felt that a lot of the dialogue around climate change has pitted one generation against the other: the generation that’s old and has benefited from everything and stuffed it up for the younger generation. And a lot of that is true, but not entirely true. We felt that the best way to tackle these issues was in a cross generational way, whether it’s on action or voting, or whatever it is. We thought that Bob, because he’s an older person, but he speaks to younger audiences, we felt that he was potentially a unifying person in some ways. What we wanted people to feel was wonder and marvel for our forest and our natural heritage, which is so extraordinary. Most Australians know about the Redwoods, but I don’t think many people know about the Eucalyptus regnans. People would be horrified if they thought ‘oh, you would just pulp the redwoods for toilet paper’, but that’s apparently okay in Australia!
But it’s not, because 70% to 80% of people want native logging stopped, they just don’t understand what it really entails. People think it’s been used to make fine furniture, but it’s not, only 2% is used for long term wood products, 60% of it is left on the forest floors, and it’s set on fire. It transforms from a carbon storage facility of a forest to carbon emissions. It’s just insanity.
So we want people to feel a wonderment about the forest, but we also wanted them to feel hopeful and galvanised, if that’s possible. We didn’t want to make a depressing documentary. We can’t watch depressing documentaries and definitely can’t spend two and a half years making one. So while some of the subject material was challenging, I think overall it’s a hopeful film, and I think overall, Bob is a hopeful person and you do need hope right now.
We just need to stay focused on the idea that if we are hopeful and if we act, then change will come. And as Bob says, it was a long campaign to save the Franklin, eighteen months before it was saved, it looked like it was doomed. So eighteen months isn’t a long time, it’s not even two years. So what we think is, let’s talk about native forest logging now and let’s finish it now. Because if we’ve got money for submarines and football stadiums and tax cuts for very rich people, then we have money to stop this industry that’s costing us money and to make meaningful action on climate change.
There’s some absolutely stunning shots of the Tasmanian landscape throughout the film. How did you balance trying to get those shots with trying not to disturb or harm the ecosystems and wildlife where you were filming?
We worked with a team called The Tree Projects in Tasmania. They’re professional tree climbers, and they helped to rig cameras high up into the canopy. So the opening shot that you see is not a drone camera. We showed the forest in a number of ways. One was using cameras, one was using drones, and one was 3D scanning of the forest working with an organisation called TerraLuma, at University of Tasmania. Then sending the data to Alex Le Guillou who’s a French animator, and he turned it into point cloud animation. The animation you see in the film is actually an actual tree. So what we did was actually cast three trees like you would do three characters. Eucalyptus regnans, which are amongst the tallest plants from the world; Huon pines, one of the oldest lived and myrtle beech in the Tarkine, which is one the most diversity rich trees. One of the people we spoke to described it as a ‘great barrier reef of trees’ because it’s covered in lichen and algae and stuff. Very interesting trees. So in answer to your question, for instance that tree in the Tarkine, it’s just inside an area near a clear fell. So basically, the Bob Brown foundation stopped them logging it, otherwise it wouldn’t have been there. They’re really taking direct action, using whatever means they have to protect the Tarkine and to protect native forest in Tasmania, as are, you know, groups across Australia. And it’s really thanks to their direct action that we could film that tree, because literally, it’s next in line.
Speaking about some of the other groups that are operating in Australia, while you were making this documentary, I think it was at the same time that Blockade Australia was taking action that was very reminiscent of Bob’s methods, these really direct, not aggressive, but impactful stages of a protest. How do you kind of feel about that? Did it give you any similar hope, reflecting on those young people doing such similar work to what Bob did during his life?
I didn’t think specifically about Blockade Australia, but, obviously, we’re all very well aware of the school strikes and all those other environmental grassroots movements, and also youth movements. At the time, I remember just before COVID-19, when there were these massive street protests, and there was debate over whether kids should be on the street or not, and my personal feeling was always to say “when there’s kids on the street, it’s a symptom that adults haven’t stepped up and done their job, so this is the only means left to them.” They can’t vote, they don’t have other means of power. So for me, it was really a symptom of adult failure. I guess we wanted to contribute to that.
I think that when you think about climate environmentalism, it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed. But ultimately, everybody can do something.
When I interviewed Christine Milne, she said something very interesting, which was that environmental movements need everyone, they need people to protest, sometimes they need people to get arrested, but they also need graphic designers or web people. Ultimately, the world just needs people who can just have an environmental frame of mind.
Maybe you can’t protest, but maybe if you’re in health or education or departments, you often have within yourself the power to ask questions to make changes, and these can add up to quite a lot. I think when you look at Bob Brown and all he’s achieved in his life, him being one person alone, but making that decision is just really the fundamental start.
Something I really loved about the film was how it wove archival footage of the protests on the Franklin together with recent footage of Bob Brown. What was the process like of finding that footage?
It was really massive because Bob Brown has basically put on fifty years of activism, so he’s been in the public eye for that time. So, we had an extraordinary amount of material to work with, but that was also the problem as well, because there was so much to work through so we did a number of things. We got a lot of news, archived from the ABC, and probably most of what you see of the Franklin is that, but the more recent Franklin footage was sourced from other places.
One of the reasons why we showed modern footage of the Franklin is that the older footage, I think, fails to capture the beauty because it feels a bit faded and it doesn’t quite have the aesthetic quality of contemporary footage. So we wanted to really show, ‘actually this is how it looks and it is really spectacular’. Also access from the National Library of Australia, they have Bob Brown’s personal archive there, which is again, massive amounts of boxes, and we were able to go through that to get childhood photos and reports, and letters and get up the idea of who was crucially important in his personal life, and then there are a number of documentaries as well that we could source material from. So, let us say that we have an archive producer who basically has this spreadsheet from hell, so it’s a huge job.
When you were going through the process of filming, you said it was over two and a half years. Was there a particular memorable or special moment either with Bob Brown or maybe just with the trees, that stands out to you from your time making the film?
Well, so when I say two and a half years, that’s not filming, that’s doing everything so you know, producing, scripting, and post production everything. We did the shoot in Liffey, at Bob’s farmhouse and it was really, I guess, interesting, because he had talked about this house as like this companion and this friend. So it was interesting to go there and see how it was, and suddenly just to be struck by the warmth of that environment and how beautiful it is. Because you’ve got the farmhouse, you’ve got the mountains, you’ve got the river and all the elements are in place, and I feel like there’s something in that landscape that really balances Bob’s idea, which is like you’ve got this little human space, which is the hut, but there’s space for nature all around it. And that for me sort of encompasses the way he looks at the world. We should take up a little bit of space but let everything else flourish.
What’s interesting is the Tarkine where we filmed, it’s really 30km away from Cradle Mountain National Park, which is one of the biggest tourism draw cards in Tasmania. So you could literally go there and just drive along [to the Tarkine], and that would be like the perfect tourism adventure, but it’s just being logged and Tanya Plibersek is yet to rule on whether that forest will become a toxic waste dump for a Chinese mining company. So really, the more people who go to the Tarkine and talk about it, the better, because this is an absolutely astonishing rainforest and the Bob Brown Foundation has this encampment out there sometimes and you can go and meet people and find out about the place.
When you stand in that forest, it’s weird, it’s like you’re not standing on ground. You’re standing on this sort of spongy surface. It’s like millions of years of organic matter beneath your feet and it’s so quiet, it’s just really unworldly. So I really encourage people to go there, as Bob says, the Tarkine is a very arresting place.
THE GIANTS is now screening at Palace Electric Canberra, find all screenings: https://www.thegiantsfilm.com
There will be a National Day of Action for Native Forests – including Canberra on August 19. Details here: https://defendthegiants.org/events/
Few figures have had as powerful an impact on the course of Australian history as Bob Brown.
Comments Off on On Thin Portraits and the Incurable Brilliance of Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Life and Masterpiece, ‘Save Me the Waltz’
“Nobody has measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
—Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz
There are exactly two things that I know for certain:
The first is that wholemeal bagels are a direct result of the rapidly dissolving integrity of the human species, and the second is that Zelda Fitzgerald was brilliant. A perpetually unrecognised genius.
Zelda’s first and only novel Save Me the Waltz (1932) is semi-autobiographical and, like Scott’s later Tender is the Night, predominantly written about the period during the 1920s which the Fitzgeralds and their contemporaries spent in Paris. It is the lesser-known of the pair, but certainly not the less valuable for it. The novel was written by Zelda in a creative fervour of six weeks while institutionalised for schizophrenia (whether or not she actually suffered with schizophrenia is debated—her “breakdowns” are often attributed to bipolar disorder, or alternatively depression or anxiety). When Scott initially discovered its existence, he was furious; his letters, notably to friends including Ernest Hemingway, and industry figures such as editor Max Perkins, disclose his anger at her depiction of him. In a letter with Zelda’s psychiatrist, he wrote:
“My God, my books made her a legend and her single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a nonentity.” –Scott, in a letter to Zelda’s psychiatrist
Originally written, to quote Scott, as a “thin portrait” of their marriage and their characters, in Zelda’s early drafts she went to the lengths of naming the love interest “Amory Blaine” after Scott’s autobiographical protagonist in This Side of Paradise. Afraid that the book would damage his reputation, and angry that she had chosen to write based on the same period of their lives as his then-unfinished Tender is the Night, he convinced her to rewrite it. Eventually, he helped her to edit and publish the novel, and praised its quality. But not before she had made significant changes, which she didn’t appear to resent, and on which we can only trust her judgement as the competent and intelligent writer she has painstakingly proven herself to be.
Save Me the Waltz offers, for the first time, some real insight into the glamorous and turbulent marriage of the Fitzgeralds, as well as Zelda’s thoughts, feelings, and character, beyond what is shown to us in Scott’s work. The female love interests throughout his fiction are, by his own confession, thin portraits of her, his muse. On their marriage, he told a reporter, “I married the heroine of my stories.” At times, he lifted entire passages from her diaries and letters, which Zelda playfully notes in her review of The Beautiful and Damned.
“Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that’s how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” –Zelda Fitzgerald, in The New York Tribune
Zelda Fitzgerald has been often viewed as “the original flapper,” “jazz baby,” “wild child.” Rarely “writer,” “artist,” “dancer.” In marrying Scott, she “unknowingly sealed her fate as a symbolic being…as the quintessential muse, artist’s wife, and, eventually, doomed woman—a brilliant but mercurial talent whose public persona subsumed the identity she herself attempted to create and control” (Lawson, 2015).
Scott opposed most of Zelda’s creative endeavours; he discouraged her work in ballet, and actively tried to prevent the publishing of her book in its early stages. In Save Me the Waltz, protagonist Alabama Beggs’ husband (David Knight) openly disapproves of her dancing, probably reflective of the author’s own situation. David is a successful painter—thinly replacing Scott’s writing—and refuses to acknowledge Alabama as an artist equal to himself. I don’t believe or mean to suggest that Scott was fundamentally a bad person, or a woman-hater. But he was a romantic, an idealist, and he was validated by the standards of the time in his expectation of a romantic relationship with the dynamic of female muse for the male artist—a tale as old as time, an idea which hasn’t been disrupted or challenged until comparatively recently. He built up an expectation which she fulfilled—friends noted how he would hang on her words, scribble down her comments at parties. She was the heroine of his stories, and things were good, so long as she could be reduced to something two-dimensional, and could be distilled into beautiful words and pressed onto white pages.
But then there was the problem of her incurable brilliance, her capacity as expansive as his for creation. In fact, she excelled in ballet and painting and writing. When she wanted to create, she became something more than the heroine of his stories, rejecting the expectations he had so fancifully set. And this, I think, is where their problems began—assisted, of course, by the excessive drinking, affairs, and inadequate mental health care courtesy of the time.
The overwhelming majority of the—sorely limited—critical attention Save Me the Waltz received on and since its publication has been negative; in the preface of the second edition of Save Me the Waltz, Zelda’s writing ability is called merely “surface level,” (Moore, 1966) repeating the oft-cited criticism of her unusual use of language.
But it is her fantastically imaginative language that makes her writing so wildly unique, so fantastically appealing.
“The rain spun and twisted the light of their third wedding anniversary to thin prismatic streams; alto rain, soprano rain, rain for Englishmen and farmers, rubber rain, metal rain, crystal rain.”
Especially towards the beginning of the novel, she writes to disorientate—metaphors composed of borderline-nonsense; surrealist imagery; wacky, Zelda-devised turns of phrase to make your head spin. And it is truly, utterly captivating.
Caught inside Zelda’s words are feelings of bewilderment, joy, fractured relationships, obsession, hedonism, and beneath it all, a fight for a sense of self. Her style, regularly criticised as unpolished, simultaneously confronts the reader with the glamorous, playful ‘Jazz Age’ and its contorted underbelly of subtle misogyny and the imbalanced perception of one’s own identity.
“He pulled himself intermittently to pieces, showered himself in fragments above her head.”
“She crawled into the friendly cave of his ear. The area inside was grey and ghostly classic as she stared about the deep trenches of the cerebellum. There was not a growth nor a flowery substance to break those smooth convolutions, just the puffy rise of sleek gray matter. ‘I’ve got to see the front lines,” Alabama said to herself. The lumpy mounds rose wet above her head and she set out following the creases. Before long she was lost. Like a mystic maze the folds and ridges rose in desolation; there was nothing to indicate one way from another. She stumbled on and finally reached the medulla oblongata. Vast tortuous indentations led her round and round. Hysterically, she began to run. David, distracted by a tickling sensation at the head of his spine, lifted his lips from hers.”
“Outside the wide doors of the country club they pressed their bodies against the cosmos, the jibberish of jazz, the black heat from the greens in the hollow like people making an imprint for a cast of humanity. They swam in the moonlight that varnished the land like a honey-coating and David swore and cursed the collars of his uniforms and rode all night to the rifle range rather than give up his hours after supper with Alabama. They broke the beat of the universe to measures of their own conceptions and mesmerised themselves with its precious thumping.”
Perhaps even more remarkable than the stylistic depth and character of Zelda’s writing is the means by which she presents the feminine search for self within the early 20th century. Throughout Save Me the Waltz, Zelda uses mirrors as tools for the female pursuit of creative, intellectual, and emotional identity, in a blink-and-you-miss-it subversion of what may be considered the traditional notion of mirrors as tools for female vanity.
Zelda conveys the intrinsic dislocated sense of identity within her protagonist from an early age through mirrors and reflections, introducing the idea towards the beginning of the novel.
“She ran her fingers tentatively through her breast pocket, staring pessimistically at her reflection. ‘The feet look as if they were somebody else’s,’ she said. ‘But maybe it’ll be all right.’”
To David’s displeasure, Alabama takes up ballet during her late twenties, where she dances incessantly in a room filled with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, Zelda thus skillfully entwines Alabama’s near unhealthy compulsion to dance with her unyielding search for identity. It grows into an obsession; a relentless cycle of eating, sleeping, and breathing ballet, despite—or perhaps in part driven by—her husband’s criticism. Alabama’s disjointed sense of self is once again presented in a separation from the psychological and the physical, the mirror and the mind in conflict.
“…she thought her breasts hung like old English dugs. It did not show in the mirror. She was nothing but sinew. To succeed had become an obsession.”
However, before there was ballet, there was David, and Alabama initially sought to find herself in him; she feels that being with him is like “gazing into her own eyes”. But this perception of him becomes “distorted,” having warped her own view of him in a fervent attempt to find meaning within herself.
“So much she loved the man, so close and closer she felt herself that he became distorted in her vision, like pressing her nose upon a mirror and gazing into her own eyes.”
David, however, only looks in a mirror once in the entire novel, in stark contrast with Alabama’s dozens of times, and it culminates in his being “pleased to find himself complete.” Complete. Assured of his identity, recognised as an artist, an individual, certain of his place in the world.
“He verified himself in the mirror…as if he had taken inventory of himself before leaving and was pleased to find himself complete.”
For me, Save Me the Waltz is both joy and melancholy. I wonder if Alabama—which is to say Zelda Fitzgerald herself—ever found what she was looking for. I wonder if, after all the parties and all the laughter, and the breakdowns and the fame and the starlit revelry, she found something that fulfilled her. I hope in her painting, and her dancing, and her writing, she came to some understanding within herself about her world, and her place in it—an understanding that I also hope brought her security and strength of identity.
And so, I’ll leave you with one final urge to pick up the magnum opus of Zelda Fitzgerald (writer, artist, dancer).
Love,
Caelan xxx
Lawson, Ashley. “The Muse and the Maker: Gender, Collaboration, and Appropriation in the Life and Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 2015, pp. 76–109.
Moore, H,T. 1966, Preface in: Fitzgerald, Z. Save Me the Last Dance.
There are exactly two things that I know for certain: The first is that wholemeal bagels are a direct result of the rapidly dissolving integrity of the human species, and the second is that Zelda Fitzgerald was brilliant. A perpetually unrecognised genius.
Director: Damien Chazelle
Writer: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Diego Calva
Running Time: 189 minutes
Rating: 2/10
Babylon is lurid, aggressive, and utterly demented.
Damien Chazelle’s deep thrust into Dante’s Inferno of Hollywood stardom and obscenity, set amidst the technological metamorphosis of cinema and sound from the 1920s onwards, is a relentless barrage of visceral debauchery, sexual objectification, and human degradation. Chazelle has practically modelled the plot of Babylon on Singin’ in the Rain. As the moviemaking industry confronts the impending transition from the silent pictures to the immensely popular ‘talkies’, the careers of some of Hollywood’s nascent and established stars face ruination and obsolescence. So Babylon follows the contours of Singin’ in the Rain, except the former lacks any of the wholesome charm of the latter, and features orgies. It is a three hour lumbering beast of a movie that regularly refuses to die quietly, and it is not a picture I am inclined to ever watch again.
In recent years, it has become public knowledge that the Hollywood film industry has long harbored a toxic underbelly; wherein lies the expectation that one should degrade and subjugate themselves to make headway in the industry. This is Babylon’s treatise: to enlighten the viewer to a historical precedent of gendered and racialized discrimination and abuse within the Hollywood film industry. However, in the age of #metoo and #oscarssowhite, wherein the dominance of white, male power within the entertainment industry has come to the fore of the public consciousness amidst much scrutiny and debate, and where strides are being made to hold abusers to account, and to advocate for greater degrees of inclusivity, representation and respect within the industry, Chazelle’s treatise unfortunately feels both outdated and intensely laboured. And laboured it is in Babylon, with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and the pornographic sensibility of a horny teenager. Chazelle may believe that his movie belongs to the zeitgeist, except Babylon is more provocative than introspective, and it quite regularly feels like a regression, in lieu of a progression, in challenging the structures of white, male power that has long pervaded Hollywood. We should endeavour to find solutions, not reopen old wounds.
Chazelle’s contribution to the historical narrative of Hollywood culture involves the perverse degradation and depravity of its human subjects, which endures for the entirety of its three hour runtime. In the eternity that it takes to move from an elephant excreting onto a camera lens to a descent into the bowels of an L.A snuff dungeon, I wondered if the self-styled provocateur, Damien Chazelle, is punishing his audience as much as his characters. The film is an exhaustingly perennial exercise in human denigration that is summated in a pre-title prologue featuring a boisterous Hollywood mansion party filled with end-to-end debauchery that sets the underlying tone of the movie, and it never relents. Most scenes end with a grisly punchline, and it is truly exasperating. Babylon seeks to illuminate the institutionalised intolerance that white, heterosexual Hollywood has historically fostered towards race, gender, and sexuality, and whilst the film does confer rare moments of topical dialogue to its audience, Chazelle is all too keen to return to the hedonistic excesses of champagne, cocaine and sex, often depriving those fleeting moments of their power.
In what will surely become the most discussed sequence of the film, the climax of Babylon transports us through a cosmic, Space Odyssey-esque montage of cinema’s technological evolution, from cinema’s early beginnings and innovations, such as the conception and the capture of the moving image, to the more recent advances made in the filmmaking process i.e CGI and motion-capture. The montage is crudely stitched together as if Chazelle and his film editor, Tom Cross, only conceived of it a few hours before the production deadline. Ironically, the montage celebrates films that are infinitely superior to Babylon, such as Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, as well as films that are not so great such as James Cameron’s technically superb, but albeit total bloat-fest Avatar. But what does the montage actually signify? In essence, the montage illustrates how the art of cinema has ultimately endured, thrived, and evolved throughout the decades, despite the personal toll that Hollywood has demanded from its artists. Ultimately though, it is yet another trite argument on the separation of Hollywood art from the Hollywood culture that produces it, and worst still, Chazelle proves himself to be too immature to handle such themes with any tact. Furthermore, the montage creates a dissonance between the evolution of filmmaking technology and the personal losses that come from pursuing a Hollywood career. These two ideas are often irreconcilable, and lack elucidation, but if I had to guess, I’d conclude that Chazelle holds the belief that achievement and progress always requires some measure of personal sacrifice, and that, whilst cinema will live on through its technological change, its stars will inevitably fade. However, as the weight of the film’s preceding three hours of carnage bears down on its montaged climax, one can’t help but interpret Chazelle’s controlling idea as nothing short of cynical and misguided, especially given the recent developments coming out of Hollywood visual effects houses detailing the exploitative working conditions that artists are operating under for demanding and unscrupulous film studios like Marvel Studios and Disney.
Damien Chazelle’s long-time collaborator, Justin Hurwitz, infuses the film with a pulsating and jazzy score – which has been riding high on my Apple Music playlist for a few weeks now. It is the film’s single most creative element, and it certainly accentuates the film’s manic persona. To my ear, the soundtrack also features melodies that are inspired by Hurwitz’s Oscar-winning score from Chazelle’s 2012 La La Land. This is a purposeful decision made by both Hurwitz and Chazelle. La La Land is arguably a love letter to the Hollywood dream, and therefore, Hurwitz’s allusion to La La Land lends a profoundly darker note to Babylon’s nightmarish inversion of that very same dream.
With all its grotesquely lurid and over-the-top proceedings, Babylon evidently wants to polarise audiences and wants to be deemed ‘provocative’ yet one cannot help but feel that such an intent is merely an attempt to excuse the film’s appalling lack of both substance and of any adept directing on Chazelle’s part. Babylon is crude and humourless, and frankly, I was given more enjoyment out of wondering what the boomer couple in front of me thought of the ‘golden-shower scene’. The film’s inter-textual relationship with Singin’ in the Rain is also misjudged, and I doubt that Stanley Donen or Gene Kelly would have appreciated their feel-good film being used as the inspiration for this story. With Babylon, Chazelle self-styles himself as a provocateur and an auteur, which might just be the film’s flattest joke of all given that he’s made one of the worst films of 2023 thus far.
Comments Off on Arts Revue: A Labour (Liberal and Greens) of Love
Arts Revue delivers Bob Katter’s Hot Minion Summer with chaos and tenacious spirit and a whole lotta cast service.
Arts Revue opens with the cold, unflinching eyes of Dora the Explorer and her talented cop buddies searching for clues as to where Arts Revue has gone for the last two years. The skit stretches on over several scenes and witnesses, before finishing on a terrified looking first year saying, “The truth is…” and blue ballsing the audience with a fade to black delivered with perfect comedic timing from the performers and the tech crew.
It steers clear of your usual -ist jokes…For the most part. Would it be Australia’s university with the lowest enrolment rate of low SES background students in Australia’s city with the highest average rent if we didn’t throw in a classist joke?
A sketch lamenting the ‘extinction of Florida Man’ and the ‘closely related cousin, the Australian Bogan’ played up stereotypes meant to poke fun at ‘white trash’. However, it came across tone deaf when delivered in the same revue as students singing loudly about the dreadful, awful couch worthy tragedy of having to work in the APS with its job security. Or even trade your soul away to the private sector and its high figured salaries. This association of low SES people in dehumanising, animal-like language is nothing new, it dates to a studied phenomenon of class bias. That this skit made it through several stages of the drafting and the performance process begs the wider question of classism at ANU, a question not suited to be explored here.
The skits mixed a range of comedic styles from sexually charged Bob Katter erotica, to self-arranged musical parodies of the pains of grad job hunting, to pop culture references. One of the directors refers to it as divine, delirious chaos, and it certainly was. Arts Revue also doesn’t shy from satirising life on campus (Jedi Council for ANUSA anyone?) to Canberra culture (expect the number of babies named DavidPocock, yes, all one word, to rise in the next few years) to broader socio-political strata.
Arts Revue made great use of its form, engaging the audience with a great deal of interaction. The performers continue to run into the audience on some songs, as well as emerging from the stands, or calling for one crew member’s father to stand (done impromptu too). There was a skit involving seeing if the Woroni reviewer was there too; I didn’t respond, unsure if it was actually seeking audience participation or if it was just part of the skit. When I told the Directors this, they laughed, and we lamented the opportunity to have done something impromptu. It may have been fun, they say, gushing about their belief in the abilities of the cast to improvise.
As for the directors, I was well and truly pranked. Attending a rehearsal to gather interviews, I approached the Canberra REP theatre, notepad at the ready. I ask to speak to the directors of Arts Revue and two young lads present themselves: I meet Charlie and Rory. We have a conversation where they reveal themselves to be science students, both proclaiming to have had no prior revue experience and then went onto describe themselves as which of the iconic moves of the iconic character ‘Po’ of the iconic franchise Kung Fu Panda they were.
In hindsight, the red flags were many and varied.
After the show, I met the real directors of the show: Claire and Finn. Yes indeed, Charlie and Rory had duped me. Claire and Finn were previously described to me as ‘the old hands’ of Arts Revue, and then also as ‘Master Oogway’ and ‘Master Shifu’ (respectively) before we all had the [spoilers] realisation that Master Oogway indeed passed away and perhaps it was better to choose a mentor character that made it unscathed through the events of the movie.
Claire became Po’s Dad after that.
Now that the revue is over, Claire and Finn glow with the exhausted satisfaction of a job well done. They speak at length happily about the camaraderie they felt in doing Arts Revue, and practically glow with pride when we discuss the growth as performers that the whole team has experienced. Then, we get down to the nitty gritty of administration, to twin winces from the directors.
Theatre kids are not born with the innate knowledge of how to put on a revue. There’s a lot of institutional knowledge that goes into not just writing and performing, but also the whole shebang of hiring a venue, sound, and lighting equipment, as well as advertising. It’s a huge undertaking, and one that Claire and Finn handled without the help of an Executive Producer (who traditionally handle more of the administrative elements). Sprinkle in two years of COVID (2022 was Finn’s third revue, but her first one that went ahead) and a cast of fresh eager faces, the task of guiding them falls firmly on the shoulders of the Directors.
Notwithstanding the whole show was paid for out of pocket by those in it, since Arts Revue has lost access to their bank account over the stretch of the pandemic.
It was only with the tenacious spirit of the cast and crew that pushed Arts Revue to happen this year, born out of no obligation other than the sheer desire to See It Through. Why? Well, I hear it’s because it’s ‘so dangerously fun.’ The Arts Revue opened with a skit that asked, where has Arts Revue been the last two years? “The truth is…”it doesn’t matter. It was here this year. And it will be here next year, and the year after that.
Comments Off on Ancient Greek Tragedy Ages like a Fine Wine: NUTS’ Bakkhai
I’m thinking it, you’re thinking it, let’s not mince words; Bakkhai is kind of a funny name for a play. But we needn’t be embarrassed to think so. Sitting down with director Kieran Knox just before opening night, the cast me-mi-ma-mo-mu-ing in the background, he told me it was precisely the funny spelling that initially drew him to the play. However, when he cracked it open, he found a sexy, blood-soaked gem and began a four-year odyssey culminating in the production we were about to see.
For context, Bakkhai is a modern translation by Anne Carson of a fifth-century BC Athenian play by Euripides. Maxine Eayrs (who plays Dionysus) cheekily described it as “the best thing since Homer”. The play centres on the coming of Dionysus, god of wine, theatre, and revelry, to Thebes, and her revenge against that city’s impious king Pentheus (Jamie Cardillo). All the while, the play weaves in a discussion of toxic pride, gender dynamics, and a queer narrative that became a central focus for NUTS’ rendition.
When discussing how the play was translated, both in language and production for a modern audience, Cardillo was visibly thrilled. Especially to talk about how the cast and crew explicitly worked to run their character Pentheus as a trans woman. And this decision makes for some great moments. After seeing Pentheus for who she is, Dionysus casually refers to the king of Thebes with she/her pronouns among her followers. This scene was an early delight, although the swapping of pronouns doesn’t always go down so smoothly. There are a few points late in the work where the decision caused some friction with the plot, but this was a small price to pay for what it added to other areas.
There’s a small scene near the midpoint where Dionysus dresses Pentheus in women’s clothes. In a different production, this might have been played for laughs – but because of the direction the cast took with it, it became the emotional centre of the production. Both Jamie and Maxine spoke about the importance of this moment. They also highlighted how their experience as trans people, and their memories of introduction into queer communities, helped shape the scene into a touching moment of self-realisation and mentorship.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, given Bakkhai is about the god of theatre, but the blocking and set design render the play’s bloody antics in startling, visceral, and creative ways. In this fashion, Bakkhai punches well above the weight of a student production. While the abstract layout of the stage’s first iteration took time to wrap your head around, the lengthwise setup made Kambri Theatre feel bigger than any other production I’ve seen there. On the other hand, the post-interval stage setup, reminiscent of an amphitheatre, felt tense and claustrophobic – an excellent complement to the tragic finale. The choreography was also of exceptional quality, keeping a foot grounded in both storytelling and spectacle, and it didn’t spare an inch of theatre space. It is a credit to both the cast and Knox, the first BIPOC director NUTS has seen in years, whose inclusive and collaborative approach has been lauded by everyone I’ve spoken to. Overall, the production doesn’t just feel at home in Kambri Theatre; it feels like it was born and raised there.
Outside the physical set, Bakkhai is a tour de force for Jessica Luff’s now-famous lighting design. The gorgeous and dynamic setup for Dionysus’ opening monologue was a personal standout. And while the recorded sound was minimal, the chanting, stamping, and wailing of the cast members – both on and off stage – filled that space in an immediate and thrilling way. While perhaps not as tight as some other ANU productions, what the performances lacked in precision was often made up for in energy. With its poetic language and larger-than-life emotions, a play like Bakkhai is a tough ask for a performer. But when the cast lands the balance between subtlety and violence that the work requires, as they often but not uniformly did, the effect is spectacular. Outside of the duelling protagonists, standout performances included Darcy Hoyle’s Agave, whose blood-craved reverie was a joy to watch, and Marty Kelly’s Tiresias, who was an island of calm in a play that is anything but.
Finally, in speaking with Eayrs, I asked her to define what it meant to be Dionysian for her – and I’ll quote her in full:
“It’s something that is fake at its core, yet real in how it affects people. Its pure social construct – pure theatre. Theatre is a fake story, and nothing that’s happening on stage is really happening. And yet, at the end of the day, everyone goes home having learned something – or been affected in some way. It’s the pure social construct of pleasure and letting go that is, at once, completely empty but is made meaningful because of the emptiness it offers.”
Another word for emptiness is space. And I think that is at the core of this production, which is vacuous and sensational but creates space for its cast and crew to tell their stories and show off their experiences. Like the goddess herself, Bakkhai is all surface, which allowed this production to put its own heart into it.
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
Comments Off on Mind the Crust: Canberran Comics Rise to the Occasion
Last night I had a dream. It was… strange. I was sitting in a packed-out theatre in Belconnen. There was some kind of comedy show on. They were singing a song about hay fever. And then another one about… erectile dysfunction? Then I was transported to a motivational seminar about how to do a little bit of white-collar crime. The last thing I remember was Mikhail Gorbachev trying to stop his alternate-universe neoliberal self, Reagan Gorbachev, from introducing the free market to the Soviet Union.
Imagine my surprise when I woke to realise that it wasn’t a dream at all. No, it was Bread Revue’s debut show, Mind the Crust. Developed by Synan Chohan, Rohan Pillutla, and Anna Coote, Mind the Crust was a one-night-only sketch comedy show at Belco Arts. A wacky and provocative performance of twenty-six sketches by eight local actors, it struck an impressive balance between esotericism and broad appeal.
For a highly wheaty title, there were hardly any bread references in the show. Producer Synan Chohan shared that the idea began with ‘an undeniably bad in-joke: to create a live sketch comedy show where every skit is bread-themed. However, our plan crumbled when we realised that, much like a carb-only diet, you can’t sustain a performance on bread-based jokes alone.’ So the bread-themed comedy was jammed into just one sketch. Two Mafia types discuss a hit on some poor victim, only to reveal that the ‘hit’ was more of a ‘kneading’ and the ‘dough’ they earnt was a golden loaf of bread, hot from the oven. There was some bread at the close of the show too: baguettes thrown onto the stage by well-prepared fans in lieu of flowers.
It was weirder than most things I’ve experienced recently, or maybe ever, but the team also knew when to pull in the reins. Quality acting was the talk of the post-show crowd, and every actor brought something different to the stage. Take the sketch with two wartime comrades meeting at a park bench in Tuscany, for example. One sits on the bench, face covered by a newspaper. The other, Lloyd, pontificates about the complexities of war, before the first drops the newspaper and reveals herself in a tux and a Cthulhu mask. Cthulhu speaks in garbled screams. ‘You were an idealist once, Cthulhu,’ Lloyd responds, understated and serious, ‘Don’t you believe anymore?’. It would have been slapstick, but the execution was spot on.
Most of the sketches felt like they were based on a ‘wouldn’t it be funny if…’ question taken to its humorous conclusion. Wouldn’t it be funny if Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ was reimagined in an Australian pub (‘VB, or not VB’)? Wouldn’t it be funny if glass-ceiling-smashing feminism was used to get women into gambling? Wouldn’t it be funny if there was an army whose only weapons were sex toys? And for most of them – not including that uninspired last one – the answer was yes, it would be hilarious.
The sketch of the night would have to be the self-absorbed poet, played by Jack Foster. Lounging at Smith’s Alternative with Ulysses and a coconut water, he waxes lyrical to himself. “I’ve always said Canberra in the wintertime was like living in limbo. I never elaborate on that statement.”
A woman walks into the room. His thoughts continue, “I was frozen in her presence as she passed, perceiving me in my insecurities. Baby, I’m the most emasculated man alive! I’m all withered from your gaze, can’t you see?”. He takes to the stage with some nonsensical slam poetry and bathes in the resounding clicks of his audience. The woman, impressed, approaches him, but he’s too shy to talk to her. “Ugh,” she storms out, “I’m so done with poets!”. Back in comfortable solace, he returns to his asinine soliloquy: “Like parallel lines, we were two ships in the dark. Destined to converge but never interact.”
Interspersed among the performances were skilfully produced video sketches, giving both the actors and the audience a break from the live format. In one, reminiscent of La Moustache, a woman is driven to insanity when no one but her, not even Google, remembers the hit 1997 Robin Williams film Flubber. “Why does it matter so much?” her therapist asks. She gravely responds: “It doesn’t. It’s Flubber.”
Minimalistic sets provided only what was needed for the scene, combined with props and audio-visual elements where necessary to drive the jokes home. A bird-hating scientist in Broken Hill uses a microwave time machine to go back and extinguish the very first bird, butterfly effect be damned. The main street of Broken Hill on the projector suddenly changes to a futuristic utopia: Fixed Hill. Lloyd is forced to assassinate his friend Cthulhu, scattering a bag of polaroids across the stage. On screen, we see an animation of each polaroid floating to the ground, showing various shots of the two friends knocking around in their wartime heyday. Even the sex toy army sketch was somewhat enjoyable because of the magnificently crafted papier-mâché penis sword, with veins and dangling balls and all.
I feel obliged to discuss the Gorbachev sketch, but I’m not sure it’s possible to fully translate into words. In an Everything Everywhere All at Once-style multiverse mash-up, Mikhail Gorbachev – the last leader of the Soviet Union – puts an end to Reaganomics with a little help from his alternate selves: Skateboarder Gorbachev, Goku-chev, Gorba-Chef, Simpsons-head-in-a-jar-Gorbachev, and somehow several more variants, all with detailed costumes. Like the previous sentence, it was a little too much Gorbachev, and it dragged on a bit long. But as the second last sketch of the show, by that point the crowd was won over enough to appreciate the silliness.
The show was advertised with this description: ‘Mind The Crust is sure to be your night’s delight. Or, you may be left concerned why a group of twenty-somethings spent their own money into creating a live performance just to temporarily cope with the hollow ennui of their youth.’ I certainly experienced the former, with just a healthy pinch of the latter. While there was little to take away from the show except for a good time and some funny quotes, I felt like I had been witness to a momentous event to forever be inscribed in the history of Canberran twenty-somethings post-COVID comedy. It was certainly worth a bit of dough, especially with the profits donated to HelpingACT, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with next. I’ll be there, front and centre, armed with a bouquet of baguettes, bagels, and maybe even a croissant.
______
Mind The Crust was a one night show at Belco Arts Centre written and performed by Synan Chohan, Rohan Pillutla, Kayla Ciceran, Jack Foster, Alana Grimley, Lily McCarthy, Claire Noack and Jack Shanahan.
Writers: Lily Ievarsi, Eldon Huang, Elroy James, and Ella Serhan-Sharp
Production Manager: Anna Coote
Set and Costume Design: Roz Hall
Choreography: Gabi Izurieta
Marketing and Graphic Design + Backstage Crew: Jamie Leonard
Stage Manager and Lighting Designer: Evelyn Perry
Musical Directors: Kian Shayan
Assistant Musical Directors: Ryan Yu & Kahlil Perusco
Cinematography: Jeremy Tsuei Backstage
Crew: Anna Coote, Roz Hall, Jamie Leonard & Kahlil Perusco
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
Comments Off on Putting the Students back in Student Theatre: Wamburun and Burton & Garran’s An Ideal Husband
In going to see Wamburun and B&G’s production of an Oscar Wilde play there were a few things I expected to see. London High Society with all the flouncing, sulking, and pettiness that goes with it – check; a sardonic, witty bachelor dismissive of the rules of that society – check; using that bachelor to have a riot of a time poking fun at said London High Society – check. So far, so good. What I didn’t expect was the play’s villainous mastermind Mrs. Cheveley (Freya Brown) bathed in red light, cackling like a third-rate Bond villain (in the best way), while that one song from the Phantom Menace crescendos in the background…
So, not an entirely traditional adaptation then.
Perhaps the best way to describe this rendition of An Ideal Husband is as a production with all the dials set to ten (or eleven, or twelve). The cast’s posh-ish British-ish accents perfectly set the tone for a play that seems utterly incapable of approaching anything earnestly, and I love it. Chloe Tyrell’s physical comedy as Lord Cavesham steals every scene she’s in, and watching Sir Robert Chiltern (Oscar Mikic) winge, mope, and occasionally-chug-a-whole-can-of-seltzer-mid-scene his way into a position as a British cabinet minister is a joy. In a memorable scene, the play’s flamboyant bachelor Lord Arthur Goring (a perfectly ridiculous performance by de Mars) tells his father that, by order of his doctor, he is only serious on the first Tuesday of each month, between noon and three. I saw it late on a Saturday and am happy to attest that nothing remotely serious enough to concern Lord Goring’s doctor occured.
However, to deny the play’s seriousness is not to doubt its cleverness. The modest set of a few pieces of furniture and two free-standing doors is dressed well enough to sell the late 19th century, yet flexible enough to configure itself into the different houses where the play takes place. What sexism there is in the play is elegantly submerged in so many layers of ridicule and pomp that it doesn’t feel too jarring, and the lighting by Josh Abeler and Colin Loh is also a rousing success. Particularly the use, and then reuse, of spotlights to give a sense of Robert Chiltern’s egotism and to point out the gay subplot between him and Lord Goring which, given this is Oscar Wilde, is sometimes more text than subtext.
It is worth mentioning that, compared with other student theatre productions, An Ideal Husband is distinctly less professional. There were line stumbles, technical difficulties, and lighting and scene transitions weren’t always frictionless; however, I found it very hard to care. A different audience’s mileage may vary, but I found these little slip-ups deeply humanising. Each ad-libbed line to cover a dropped prop was a peak behind the curtain – which might have been a problem had what we saw behind it not been so much fun. In his Director’s Notes, Lachlan Houen places the enjoyment of the cast and crew on an equal level with the enjoyment of the audience, and that priority shows. Wamba and B&G’s production is unabashedly student theatre – and is as much for the students performing the work as those in the audience; but when everyone in the room is having as much fun as was had on Saturday night, I can’t call it anything other than a complete success.
Comments Off on Intergenerational Trauma with a Side of Fish Soup: NUTS’ When the Rain Stops Falling
Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers.
When the Rain Stops Falling is a complicated play. By the close of the first minute there had already been umbrella art, a man had screamed into the audience, and a fish had fallen from the sky. The play becomes only marginally less strange after this point.
Despite this slightly absurd starting point, the opening monologue, delivered by Gabriel York (an impressive performance by Nic Mayrhofer) after he has finished screaming, and prompted by the aforementioned fish, brings the play a little closer to earth and deftly sets the tone going forward. The story of When the Rain Stops Falling is that of a family spanning four generations, with each being failed by the one before, then failing their children in the same ways. It is slow and melancholic, and the play’s 80-year span allows for a nuanced exploration of how the way we are raised shapes us, and how that goes on to influence the people around us. How family history repeats itself – over and over again.
A real understanding of this theme is what gives NUTS’ production its first laurel. Throughout the work, scenes, parts of scenes, and even turns of phrase are echoed – different characters in different places going through the same motions. The way these moments are staged in this production, with the same movements in the same positions only with different actors and context, evokes an appropriately eerie sense of déjà vu that is a credit to director Emily Austin.
These mirrored moments are not the only way the play works to show how past events trickle down to influence the present. Over the course of the play, scenes from different times occasionally ‘collapse’ in upon each other, providing a contrast between the two or showing the action in different lights. The technique is uncommonly abstract for the work and, as such, can take a little time to adjust to before the audience has time to become familiar with the whole complement of characters. The payoff, however, is tremendous, and sets up some genuinely heart-wrenching moments. Perhaps the highlight of its use is the moment in which a much older Gabrielle York (with two ‘l’s and an ‘e’; played by Angie Weckert) watches her younger self (Chloe Tyrell) during one of her few happy moments, leaving the viewer torn between the perspectives of the two characters.
Perhaps the only real disappointment with the story comes with the reveal of the play’s original absentee father Henry Law (Lachlan Houen) as a, probably murderous, paedophile. While certainly shocking, it never feels truly integrated with the rest of the work and thus, somewhat unearned. The reveal’s only real plot significance is as catalyst for Henry’s wife Elizabeth’s change from her young, frustrated intellectual iteration (a standout performance by Taylah Shiell) to the older, broken woman (Winnie Ogilvie) that we see through the eyes of her son, Isaiah Prichard’s Gabriel Law (one ‘l’, Law not York – I know). As it stands, the reveal ends up colouring the whole work with an unnecessary sense of gone-too-far which at times makes a touching and subtle story feel hostile and unapproachable.
The director’s note for the production thanks the crew for putting the ‘magic’ in magical realism, and Austen was right to say so. The lighting design works well to carve up the crowded and mostly unchanging set into distinct areas and feels natural enough that it rarely draws attention to itself. The sound design is a little more hit and miss but the hits are spectacular. While the sad piano covers of pop songs that underscore part of the play often distract from rather than add to their scene, the atmospheric sound – the hum of an engine or the ever-present rain – was reliably in the sweet spot of present but not obtrusive. This is not to say, however, that the sound design plays only a supporting role; the cavernous echoes that accompany some of the most important notes in the play are both a striking effect and draw attention to what that line means for the characters, present and otherwise.
While the feel of the production became distinctly messier during its latter half, that part also contained some of the best scenes and performances of the show. The dramatic irony of the scene in which Gabriel and Gabrielle declare their love for one another blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are about to wrap their car around a tree at 140 kph is enough to make you feel ill and the scene where Gabrielle tells Elizabeth Law of her son’s death in that accident would feel at home in any professional production.
All in all, NUTS’ production of When the Rain Stops Falling is a skilful execution of a complicated and extremely heavy work. While the scrappy, rough-around-the-edges feel common to student productions is absolutely present in this one, the powerful performances and clever design and direction of its best scenes make its flaws easy to forgive and can leave the audience reeling long after the curtain falls.
Comments Off on Love Stories: In Conversation with Trent Dalton
Go hug someone you love, ASAP!
On Saturday the 13th of August, I sacrificed an hour of my busy afternoon to the gods of the Canberra Writers Festival. The event? Love Stories: In Conversation with Trent Dalton. The attendee? Me, alone – I had failed to convince any of my friends that this was an event for normal people (I.e., non-bookworms, people who hadn’t read his book and therefore didn’t immediately begin writing a series of letters to all the people they love). Love Stories is Dalton’s most recent book, inspired by his best friend’s mother leaving him her antique typewriter. In honour of her and her life, Dalton took to the busiest corner in Brisbane with a sign saying, “Sentimental writer collecting love stories. Do you have one to share?” The stories he collected and the conversations he had with people, safe to say, had quite an impact on me.
Having attended another Canberra Writers festival event that morning, I was dubious about this one. Although I love, admire and deeply respect Trent Dalton, the morning panelists had made me want to (in order):
become a leader of industry (maybe like a CEO in a male industry type vibe), using her position to pull other women and disadvantaged groups up with her;
pursue journalism (idk, one of the panelists was a journalist and she sounded like a baddie);
hug my parents (and thank them for never telling me women should be seen and not heard);
hug my (dearly departed) grandmother and tell her that while I understood why she was forced to be polite, accepting etc. etc., things had changed, and I wished she hadn’t been so strict on forcing my sister and I to become nice, quiet, polite young women.
The ability of this event to inspire these feelings within me came from the honest and inspiring connections between all the panelists and the discussions of their experiences. I was therefore unsure that the one white man on stage (being interviewed by the wonderful Lisa Miller) would be able to provoke in me the same thought-provoking, inspiring, empowered ideas that the morning event had. And yet, it kinda did??? Maybe even more so?? Weird. The fact that the first event managed to instill so many immediate and forceful feelings within me and yet not be the best event of the day is still disturbing to me.
When he (Mr Dalton, naturally) first came on stage and began speaking, I was a little shocked and offended at the number of times he used the word “like.” Although I study linguistics and am aware that no forms of language are inherently better than any others and I shouldn’t judge people for how they speak and so on and so on, I’ll be honest, it made me cringe. It made him sound (in my humble opinion, speaking with all the authority of an undergraduate university student) rather inarticulate. The opposite of the eloquent, moving speaker I expected him to be.
As the event went on, I began to see how wrong my first impression truly was. Not that Dalton didn’t use the word “like” a lot, he did. And not that he didn’t swear, because he did. Or have a bit of a bogan accent (he definitely did). I just came to see that there was far more to him and his message than his initial appearance led me to believe. And like, I knew this before, but he really made me believe it. Because he appealed not to my head, and my university education, which said, rationally, the first event had been better, but to my heart. And my heart said that any person who could make me, over the course of an hour, want to:
Go and hug every person in my life,
Fall in love (straight away, if possible – anyone interested?)
Cry
Send a message to all the people I’ve lost
Begin saying ‘I love you’ more (maybe even to my tutors? Life is too short)
was someone that I should really take notes from.
I could tell that everyone around me was affected in the same way. As Trent (calling authors by their last name is so outdated) spoke about his dead best friend’s mother, who bequeathed him the typewriter he used to write the book, the two women in front of me hugged, clearly having also lost someone recently. As he spoke about his mother’s experiences of horrific domestic violence, the audience all around me gasped. When he joked about his former teacher telling him he would one day be the head of an outlaw bikie gang, we laughed. That was the power of this event, and what the first event had, in some way, been missing. Trent speaking so openly and honestly about love, and its importance in all our lives, made us all feel a little closer to the person sitting beside us than we had been when we first sat down. He used love, his experiences of it, and others’ experiences of it to weave the common thread of humanity through every row of that theatre.
I was also deeply impacted when Lisa Miller, the interviewer (or conversation partner I suppose), asked Trent what the whole point of his book was. While most of his responses to questions were rather roundabout, he did directly answer this one in the end. And the simple answer was: love.
He described it as the kitchen scene within his Brisbane home. The environment that you look forward to returning to at the end of the day. The place you tell your loved ones about your stuff-up at work. The place you laugh and hug and cry and get relief from the world at the end of your 8-hour workday. The place you feel safe. And while not everyone has the luck and incredible privilege of having a place like this to return to, many of us do.
And I, on behalf of Trent (and I hope he would approve of this, as I am not sufficiently close to him to ask), would like you to appreciate that extra hard today, or tomorrow, or whenever you are next there. Appreciate the people who make you laugh when you’re on the verge of tears, and who make every problem seem smaller just by sharing it. Appreciate the fact that we, as humans, have the need, the desire, the drive, to create these connections which give our life meaning. And don’t forget that you, too, are part of this ongoing and resilient chain of humanity, and that you deserve a pat on the back for your role in it.
After all, if you go and hug someone, or tell someone you love them, or you, personally, get yourself through a tough period in your life, you are contributing to the loved and lived experiences of others, and of yourself. We are all a little patchwork of the love we have given and received over the course of our lives, something which Trent made me incredibly proud of and grateful for. Thanks, Trent (love you!).