Reviews

• 2012 Season
  • • The Kitchen Sink
    • The Kitchen Sink
    • The Pride
    • The Pride
    • The Motherf**ker with the Hat
    • Stockholm
    • Beyond the Neck
    • Beyond the Neck
    • Good People

    The Kitchen Sink

    Chris Boyd, The Australian (4/09/2012)

    The Kitchen Sink (31 Aug - 22 Sept, 2012) by Tom Wells. Directed by Terence O'Connell.

    
    

    
    

    A triumph of casting, comedy and quirks

    • IS there anything more futile, more doomed to fail, than an attempt to explain why something is funny? To narrate the plot, to paraphrase A.B. Walkley, would be like decanting champagne or, worse, it might put you off.

    
    

    
    

    The Kitchen Sink is about rather less than Seinfeld, Larry David's show about nothing.

    Tom Wells's comedy, which premiered at London's Bush Theatre last November, is as joyful and intoxicating as a good Willy Russell play, but it's so much less substantial and ennobling than, say, Educating Rita or Shirley Valentine. The Kitchen Sink is Willy Russell for the Simpsons generation. It's a play about self-awareness. Or, more precisely, of each character's awareness of the role they're playing.

    Kath (Chris Keogh) is the most interesting of these. She's like a hologram that has developed an awareness of its own fiction. She's the wife of a man who does the local milk run on a broken down milk float in a broken down Yorkshire resort town which is "knackered and funny and falling in the sea".

    Encouraging her gay son, (who has made it into a city art school on account of his heartfelt adoration for Dolly Parton, which is misconstrued as ironic and kitsch) Kath says: "Your dad and me, we love you to bits, but we are essentially hobbits . . . short and unadventurous." Kath admits not knowing, for sure, what kitsch actually is. "I think I've been calling it quiche," she mutters.

    Keogh and Russell Fletcher, who plays her long-suffering but loving husband Martin, are pulled along by their characters. The characters are like old carthorses that know the route by heart. That said, Keogh and Fletcher are so uncannily elastic, so at one with their roles, that we don't dare take our eyes off them for fear of missing some tiny but revealing tic.

    Ironically, perhaps, son Billy's self-awareness and self-acceptance haven't brought him any more joy than anyone else in his family. He just has a better idea of what he lacks. Tim Potter is so bleatingly perfect in the role he might be playing himself.

    The least enlightened in the household is Sophie, an angry young jujitsu instructor. In Kristina Brew's brief pro career, we've seen some remarkable pyrotechnics -- most notably in The Artisan Collective's Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise -- but her boiling, naturalistic performance here is beyond superlatives. It's not showing off; it's shockingly raw and transparent acting.

    Terence O'Connell's debut production with Red Stitch is an unalloyed triumph. Aside from his scintillating casting (Tim Ross is the wonderfully dimwitted fifth wheel) and his ability to wrangle his actors, there is a delightful lightness in his touch.

    
    

     

     

    The Kitchen Sink

    Catherine Lambert, Herald Sun (3/09/12)

    (31 Aug - 22 Sept, 2012) by Tom Wells. Directed by Terence O'Connell

    THE traditional kitchen-sink drama has new force in this excellent Red Stitch production.

    It may centre on a close-knit family living in Withensea, Yorkshire, but it speaks with a lot of warm-hearted humour to a much wider community.

    
    

    Each of the four members in the family are facing change in one way or another and their adjustments form the dramatic tension in the play, along with the genuinely funny moments.

    When the lights go down there is both a tear and a smile which is not an easy combination to master. Writer Tom Wells manages to have dramatic impact, expressed in a very moving, narrative style.

    At the heart of the family is the mother Kath, played brilliantly by Chris Keogh. She is such an open, generous actor, switching from frustration to practicality always with great compassion and full command of the Yorkshire accent.

    She is trying to manoeuvre her two children and husband towards accepting the changes they face, but it is not until she lets fly, bashing and bursting the kitchen sink,  that they take proper notice.

    All of the performances are distinct and eloquent. From Russell Fletcher as the taciturn dad Martin - faithful to his milk van even though customers are thinning out every day - to Kristina Brew as angry, wounded Sophie, the cast has a fine understanding of the material.

    Tim Potter as Billy is particularly strong in his subtlety. His expressive face is full of emotion and Wells has thankfully spared us from it being an "issue" that he is gay. Tim Ross also makes a wonderful Pete, the endearing plumber who has the best intentions.

    This is first rate theatre by Red Stitch, which only continues to succeed and impress.

    
    

    Rating: 4 Stars

     

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    The Pride

     Kate Rose, Sunday Herald Sun (29/07/2012)

    The Pride (21 July - 18 August, 2012) by Alexi Kaye Campbell.  Directed by Gary Abrahams.

    

    WHAT a difference some decades make.

    In 1950s London, Phillip and Sylvia are married and miserable. They wouldn’t admit it, though, because then they may have to admit that Phillip has a secret they cannot acknowledge and dare not name. Until Sylvia introduces Phillip to her colleague Oliver...

    Leap forward a few decades and, in contemporary London, Phillip has walked out on his long-term partner, Oliver, after he had had yet another anonymous encounter in the park, while their best friend Sylvia, does her best to support the despairing dumpee.

    From the social repression of the 1950s to the search for boundaries in the noughties, Alexi Kaye Campbell’s exploration of identity and freedom is worthy of the praise that’s been heaped on it since it premiered in London almost four years ago.

    Like the beautifully stylised TV series Mad Men, The Pride is confronting in its depiction on attitudes towards homosexuality and women alike, with the button-downed Phillip (Lyall Brooks) and Sylvia (Ngaire Dawn-Fair) both suffering under the weight of Phillip’s homosexuality in a more judgemental 1950s.

    Even the torn but accepting Oliver (Ben Geuerens) fails to escape the repercussions of the affair.

    The time shifts happen seamlessly as the action darts back and forward, with the extraordinary actors turning on a dime to change their clothes, personalities and accents.

    Gary Abrahams’ fluid direction makes sure the momentum never stops, while the cleverly timeless set shifts as easily as the actors right up to that final exquisite scene.

    The Pride is sharp, joyous, dark, complex and wonderful and Red Stitch at its best.

     

     

     

      

    The Pride

     Vito Mattarelli, Australian Stage (27/07/2012)

    The Pride (21 July - 18 August, 2012) by Alexi Kaye Campbell.  Directed by Gary Abrahams.

     

    Up and coming British playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell (MTC recently produced his Apologia) has written a wonderful, complex, funny, intelligent gay play. A work that innovatively plays with the dramatic form, that is clever in its writing and structure, and has already won a slew of awards. By the end of Act Two, it is easy to see why.    

     

    Containing two storylines, each set about 50 years apart (one storyline is set in the repressive 50s, while the other is in a contemporary setting, where anonymous sex is easy to find in a promiscuous world) Kaye Campbell has cleverly devised the structure so that the three principal characters in each time period share the same names and even travel simliar journeys, but with different outcomes.  

     

    In the 50s Phillip (Lyall Brooks) is married to Sylvia (Ngaire Dawn Fair), denying his closet sexuality, filled with guilt about his 'deviation', but who recognises the similar feelings in his wife's boss Oliver (Ben Guerens). This was an age where society had no room for same sex couples, and where a gay relationship was almost an impossibility.    

     

    Crossing to contemporary times, where sexual mores have drastically changed and the western world has very different values, Phillip is leaving Oliver, mainly due to Oliver's excessive addiction to casual sex with other men. Here Oliver struggles to find his way with the help of best friend Sylvia in the hope of finding love in this so-called free society.         

     

    The challenge that Kaye Campbell places on the actors is that they play their respective roles in both time periods, with scenes alternating in sometimes rapid succession. A fourth actor Ben Prendergast plays a variety of characters across the play.   

     

    It has always been a standard of Red Stitch to choose and produce work that accentuates the actor and the writing. This cast all perform marvelously, capturing the periods, the nuances, the humour and even the tragedy of these characters.  

     

    Credit must be given to director Gary Abrahams who has carefully guided his cast and sensitively staged the action. The production team have contributed to all this success by creating a mood with the costumes and design that captures effectively the different time periods, given the small space that these actors have to work in.      

     

    The Pride is a beautiful piece of work that shines brightly. As a first play, Kaye Campbell has created a remarkable piece of theatre. This is much more than a gay play, rather a glimpse into the lives of people struggling to accept who they really are. The Pride manages to acknowledge the victims of the past who paved the way for a freer world that so many take for granted today. A most satisfying piece of theatre with a bitter-sweet ending. Try not to miss it.

     

     

     

      

    The Motherf**ker with the Hat

    

     

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (13/06/2012)

    The Motherf**ker with the Hat (8 June - 7 July, 2012) by Stephen Adly Guirgis.  Directed by David Bell.

     

    IF YOU want to see high-quality acting, Red Stitch is your best bet. What's interesting about this season is that The Motherf---er with the Hat is the second show in as many months to use an ensemble entirely composed of guest actors. The standard hasn't fallen.

     

    In his potty-mouthed play, Stephen Adly Guirgis (NYPD Blue, The Sopranos) takes the architecture of farce and welds it to dramatic narrative about as funny as the Book of Job.

     

    Jackie (Demetrios Sirilas) is a young working-class Latino trying to turn a corner. He has joined Alcoholics Anonymous and is on parole, but his reunion with wildcat girlfriend Veronica (Michelle Vergara Moore) runs into trouble when he finds a man's hat in her room and suspects her of cheating on him.

     

    Impulse control has never been Jackie's strong suit, and he is soon imposing on his cousin Julio (Mark Casamento). When he takes refuge with sponsor Ralph (Adam McConvell) and his dissatisfied wife (Christina O'Neill), Jackie finds his path to recovery littered with betrayal.

     

    The performances shine with the lustre of a perfectly cast ensemble. Sirilas radiates guilelessness and decency against Moore's tempestuous manipulations, O'Neill's desperation and McConvell's saturnine charms, while Casamento plays Jackie's goofy cousin with a boyish naivety that embodies what the the play's action seems determined to crush.

     

    It isn't a magnificent play, but the fine-grained naturalistic technique delivers us into the skin of these trapped characters.

     

     

     

      

    Stockholm

     

     

    

     

    Kate Herbert, Herald Sun (02/05/2012)

    Stockholm (27 April - 26 May, 2012) by Bryony Lavery. Directed by Tanya Gerstle.

     

     

     

    LUST coupled with unbridled jealousy breed violent rage for Todd (Brett Cousins) and Kali (Luisa Hastings-Edge) in Bryony Lavery's bruising play, Stockholm.

     

    Hostages are known to suffer from the Stockholm Syndrome when they sympathise with their captors, and Todd and Kali are caught like hostages in their own dysfunctional, dangerous relationship.

     

    Tanya Gerstle's taut, confident direction illuminates the relationship in this sensual and passionate production that merges self-narration, direct address, dialogue and intense physicalisation.

     

    On Todd's birthday, the couple plan to celebrate with a romantic, home-cooked meal, shifting from silky sexuality into playful teasing and fantasies about their tip to Stockholm.

     

    When Kali's retro-jealousy escalates into violence, it becomes clear that they are hostages to each other and to their cycle of love, lust and abuse.

     

    The acting is impeccable, credible, detailed and compelling. Edge is sultry, dangerous and vulnerable in her manic-depressive state, leaving us fearing for Kali's mental health and fearing for Todd's safety.

     

    Cousins, as Todd, is the still point in the relationship, remaining warm, loving but always at risk and walking on eggshells.

     

    Throughout the hour we wonder whether this punishing cycle will repeat ad nauseum for this couple, which is a frightening thought.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

      

    Beyond the Neck

     

    Kate Herbert, Herald Sun (23/3/2012)

    Beyond the Neck (16 March - 14 April, 2012) by Tom Holloway. Directed by Suzanne Chaundy.

    Four look for a port in a violent storm

    

     

     

    PORT Arthur witnessed much human misery, first as a hellish convict settlement and, more recently, in the 1996 massacre of 35 innocents by Martin Bryant.

     

    Tom Holloway's play Beyond the Neck, sensitively directed by Suzanne Chaundy with Dayna Morrissey's simple, evocative design, is subtitled a quartet on loss and violence for good reason.

     

    Through the heart-wrenching stories of four characters whose paths intersect at Port Arthur a decade after the massacre, it compels us to contemplate the life-altering impact of losing loved ones to senseless acts of violence.

     

    All four performers are compelling, with Philippa Spicer as a teenage girl who mourns her beloved father but subscribes to a conspiracy theory that the government orchestrated the massacre. Emmaline Carroll plays a young mum who carries her grief for her husband and toddler.  Roger Oakley plays an old man who witnessed the massacre but still works as a tour guide at Port Arthur, never having dealt with the trauma.  Marcus McKenzie, as the emotionally frail child, is the most disturbing because the boy appears to be a victim, but his fantasies and violent, insensitive deeds and words suggest he is a Bryant in the making.

     

    Holloway's dialogue has characters' narrating their own and other characters stories, interrupting and correcting one another or adding details, until they finally meet at Port Arthur.

     

    Audiences will be deeply moved by this fine production.

     

     

    Beyond the Neck

     

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (21/03/12)

    Beyond the Neck (16 March - 14 April, 2012) by Tom Holloway. Directed by Suzanne Chaundy

    

     

    TOM Holloway's Beyond the Neck composes the long shadow of the Port Arthur massacre into a beautifully graduated piece of chamber theatre.

     

    Subtitled A Quartet on Loss and Violence, the play possesses a musicality and Suzanne Chaundy's rhythmical direction draws it out. She crafts an effect redolent of the purity and sadness of plainsong.

     

    Four characters converge on Port Arthur years after the massacre - a young boy with a disturbing secret (Marcus McKenzie), a teenage girl whose father was gunned down (Philippa Spicer), a grieving mother on a bus trip across Tasmania (Emmaline Carroll) and an old man who witnessed the horror (Roger Oakley).

     

    Against a backdrop that suggests the rugged beauty of the Tasmanian coast, their stories emerge in brittle fragments, the burden of telling passed between them in a playful, painful struggle. The staging intensifies the strength of ensemble acting.

     

    All four performers creep towards harrowing emotion without sentiment, bringing a lightness of being to the scarred material.

     

    With precision and black humour, Spicer dons the jaded armour of a teenager lost in conspiracy and denial. McKenzie rises to the challenge of playing a boy at a moment of lost innocence. Carroll's skin of irritability and whimsical daydream is flayed off to expose deep wounds.

     

    Oakley's luminous gentleness and uncomplaining front vanish into the uncanniness of memory relived.

     

    Beyond the Neck is a haunting drama, and this nuanced ensemble production from Red Stitch allows its soft, broken chords to sing.

     

     

     

     

     

    Good People

     

    

    Kate Herbert, Herald Sun (08/02/2012)

    Good People (2 Feb - 2 March, 2012) by David Lindsay-Abaire. Directed by Kaarin Fairfax.

    

     

    SOME people dig a tunnel and escape from their tough neighbourhoods and deprived childhoods, while others get stuck in the land of lost opportunities.

     

    In Good People, Margie, played with passion and commitment by Andrea Swifte, is trapped in working class South Boston, known as "Southie".

     

     

    She is tragic and inspiring in her determination to overcome adversity, unemployment and having to care for her intellectually disabled daughter. Thirty years after their teen romance, she meets Mike (Dion Mills), now a wealthy doctor, and Margie confronts her lost opportunities, hoping Mike can help her out of the hole.

    Swifte is sympathetic as Margie, balancing wry humour with her volatile temper and deep resentment. Mills is like a caged lion as Mike: restrained, watchful, elegant but ready to revert to his wild state if provoked. Jane Montgomery Griffiths is mischievous and brassy as Margie’s fiercely loyal friend, Jeannie, the mouthy waitress, while Olga Makeeva is delightfully oddball as Dottie.

     

    Good People is about class and, through its lovable, eccentric characters, asks if it’s possible to beat your miserable circumstances.

     

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    PICTURE: DION MILLS, TAKEN BY MANUELA CIFRA, THE AUSTRALIAN

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

• 2011 Season
  • • Day One. A Hotel, Evening
    • Orphans
    • Orphans
    • The Aliens
    • The Aliens
    • My Romantic History
    • My Romantic History
    • Princess Dramas
    • The Laramie Project - 10 Years Later
    • The Laramie Project - 10 Years Later
    • Dark and Dangerous (Howie the Rookie)
    • Howie the Rookie
    • Bruiser's Knockout Show (Howie the Rookie)
    • Ruben Guthrie
    • Ruben Guthrie

    Day One. A Hotel, Evening

     

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (22/11/11)

    Day One. A Hotel, Evening (18 Nov - 18 Dec, 2011) by Joanna Murray-Smith. Directed by Gary Abrahams.

    

    I WAS exercised by this first collaboration between Joanna Murray-Smith and Red Stitch. It seems a natural fit, and I'm inclined to forgive the production's failures because it succeeds at something more important: exploring alternative modes of staging Murray-Smith's work than the broad, overplayed farce that has been known to beat her repartee into limp submission at the MTC.

    
    The zany black comedy sees three couples enmeshed in a web of jiggery-pokery. Two business partners Sam (Dion Mills) and Tom (John Adam) are developing another remote exurb with no social infrastructure. Their wives Madeleine (Kate Cole) and Stella (Sarah Sutherland) have different reactions to infidelity.

    
    Add the siren-like charms of an aspiring actress (Anna Samson) and a romantically inclined hit-man (Ryan Hayward) to the mix, and the game gets dangerous.

    
    As with most of Gary Abrahams' work, this production is beautifully cast. His bullet-speed direction serves Murray-Smith's savage humour well, and both performances and script are at their most entertaining during sequences of outlandish invective, verbal sparring and seduction. It would be unfair to single out performances in such a strong ensemble piece.

    
    There are reservations. The epigrammatic exposition around love can be too Hallmark card; the actress and hit-man characters remain undeveloped and the comedy doesn't sustain its refined mockery, the satire occasionally extruding coarse-grained clangers.

    
    A technical hitch on the night obscured the climax. It didn't really matter.
    (Frankly, all of Murray-Smith's grotesques seemed to be equally deserving of mortality. Even a Tarantino-style ending would've suited me fine.)
    Despite its frailties, the play scoots along, buoyed by the talents of one of our wittiest writers for the stage.

     

    Orphans

     

    Elly Varrenti, The Age (12/10/11)

    Orphans (5 October - 5 November, 2011) by Dennis Kelly. Directed by Imara Savage.

    

    ORPHANS is not a comfortable night in the theatre but it is a thrilling and impressively written one. Nor is it, despite the bleakness, a story without jet-black humour.

    
    Helen (Erin Dewar) and Danny (Philip Hayden) are a married couple with a young son and a nice house in a bad neighbourhood. Helen's brother Liam (Paul Ashcroft) bursts in on the couple one evening covered in another man's blood, raving like a madman and claiming to have found a young lad injured on the street.

    
    Liam's shambolic recollection of the event wavers under questioning, suspicions are aroused and it becomes increasingly and horribly apparent that Liam is lying and his involvement is more gruesome than Good Samaritan. The couple's insular world begins to unravel as they are compelled to confront the violence outside on the council estate and their own potential for pragmatic brutality and moral compromise.

    
    In four sharp and shocking acts without an interval, Orphans traverses the ethical terrains of marriage, family loyalty and grim genetic inheritance.
    Dewar's Helen is a brilliant, twisted mix of sibling protectiveness and amoral manipulation. Hayden as the nice-guy husband who uncovers the torturer within, is excellent as a man on the verge of a moral breakdown. As the needy and damaged bully Liam, Ashcroft does a mesmerising job of it.

    
    Directed with special attention to the subtle and horrible stuff that happens between people when it can seem like nothing's happening, Orphans ripples with kinetic energy and its creepiness lingers well after curtain.

     

    Orphans

    Kate Herbert, Herald Sun  (12/10/11)

    Orphans by Dennis Kelly (5 October - 5 November, 2011) by Dennis Kelly. Directed by Imara Savage.

     

    DENNIS Kelly's Orphans, directed by Imara Savage, is harrowing and leaves one feeling violated, tense and fearful.

    In a London flat, Helen (Erin Dewar) and Danny's (Philip Hayden) quiet dinner is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Helen's brother, Liam (Paul Ashcroft), drenched in another man's blood.

    Over one relentless night, a disturbing tragedy unfolds, raising a challenging, ethical argument about loyalty to family, community and the law.

    Kelly's characters are confused and out of control, which is evident in their rapid, fractured dialogue and muddled thoughts.

    Like a jury in a courtroom, we struggle to isolate truth from fiction as Liam frantically justifies his blood-soaked T-shirt with a story about helping an injured boy - a story that quickly unravels to implicate him.

    Ashcroft is remarkable as the distraught Liam - teetering on the brink of violence - and as Danny, Hayden captures our own powerlessness.

    Dewar's Helen is a feisty, wolf-mother protecting her brother, but sending her entire family hurtling into a perilous - ultimately bloody - Greek tragedy.

    If you like light entertainment, this is not for you.

     

     

    The Aliens

    Catherine Lambert, The Sunday Herald Sun (04/09/11)

    The Aliens (24 August - 24 September) by Annie Baker. Directed by Nadia Tass. 

    SITTING in the second row of Red Stitch theatre ensures immediate involvement in the work.

    But the strength of this production makes it just as powerful in the back rows of the small theatre.

    
    

    It is a play that leaves a lasting impression in many ways.

    Annie Baker's writing is a solid foundation for director Nadia Tass to bring to life with her three brilliant actors.

    
    

    There aren't any better actors in Melbourne and they could proudly hold their own on the world stage.

    
    

    Brett Cousins and Brett Ludeman play two friends, Jasper and KJ, who meet up regularly behind a cafe among garbage, wire fences and drab concrete.

    
    

     

    They are both talented, but any type of forum where it can be expressed seems tragically remote.

     

    Jasper has been tussling with genius all his life and he breaks through in a great creative outburst, which makes his outcome all the more tragic.

    
    

    Deep scars formed when he was 15 and his mother died and KJ believes a rotten schoolteacher destroyed his life.

    
    

    But together they have found a type of connection. It has an uneasy rhythm, is funny at times and heartbreaking at others.

    
    

    When a seemingly cheerful but deeply insecure waiter, Shelmerdine, enters their world, the dynamic is brightened temporarily.

    
    

    He is played by David Harrison in an interpretation that is astounding in its detail, mannerism and timing.

    
    

    Ludeman teeters on a delicate precipice of self-consciousness and confidence. His expression of grief is like nothing you will ever see.

    
    

    Cousins is absolutely convincing as the gifted young man who has been trying to find his way since losing his mother. In fact the mothers of all these characters appear to have been unintentionally instrumental in their demise.

    
    

    They are lonely, fragile, gifted and the combination of fine writing and sensitive directing makes their stories live in vivid realisation.

    
    

    It is not cheerful or bright, but theatre at its best is much more than that and this is up there with the best. 

     

    The Aliens

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (30/08/2011)

    The Aliens (24 Aug - 24 September, 2011) by Annie Baker. Directed by Nadia Tass.

    

    The United States – a senescent Empire trapped in an adolescent culture. Decades of overconfidence and instant gratification have wrinkled America with waste, and pawned its future to the spiralling dementia of debt. Adolescence as metaphor for US culture is hardly new, but it is almost always deployed in the pejorative.

    Annie Baker’s charming play The Aliens unfurls the comparison’s silver lining. What of the diffidence and curiosity of adolescence? Or the naïve trust? Or the capacity to love as if you’d never been betrayed?

    Evan (David Harrison) is a high school senior who works at a café. A sheltered, clean-cut, middle-class boy, his eyes are opened to another America when he meets two vagrants loitering in the bin area behind his workplace.

    In this liminal space, struggling novelist Jasper (Brett Cousins) holds court, whiling away the hours with meandering chat, performance readings and song. KJ (Brett Ludeman), a schizophrenic acid-head and philosophy dropout, acts the fool.

    While the pair lives in a state of boredom and crushing poverty, the joy they derive from each other’s company is overwhelming.

    Together, they induct Evan into a mad hatter’s tea party, culminating in a disarming 4th of July celebration. Jasper reads from his novel. Race relations are reimagined through a dream of being black. The Star-Spangled Banner gives way to an impromptu song about frogs.

    Baker’s merry little congress seems much saner than the one on Capitol Hill, though satire deepens into elegy as reality intrudes.

    Nadia Tass directs a beautifully paced, intricately observed production. The interplay between boy and disempowered men takes flight – into gulfs of silence, through sporadic streams of rhythm and off-beat whimsy – borne aloft by an insistent current of yearning.

    Harrison gives a droll, poignant, and wonderfully acute performance as a shy teen. Innocence is an ephemeral thing, hard to capture, and Harrison weaves the awkwardness and fragility of boys into a delicate, utterly convincing portrayal.

    Cousins has a stoicism and resigned authority, and achieves buoyant chemistry with Ludeman, whose deeply idiosyncratic and slightly alarming performance runs from affable clowning to despair, demonstrating excellent insight into mental illness in the process. Each eccentricity is a carefully carved crutch for his character’s hobbled sanity – the irrepressible goofy grin, the weird mystical gestures, the sing-song mnemonics of his Steiner education.

    It’s education, in fact, that’s most interesting about Baker’s play. Her corner of marginal America is a world of intellectuals and artists, as much as the indigent and mentally ill. America must beware, Baker seems to be saying – a nation that mistreats its poets and ignores its thinkers will have great need of elegies, and no one left to write them.

     

    My Romantic History

    Anna Byrne, Sunday Herald Sun (25/07/2011)

    My Romantic History (13 July - 13 August, 2011) by D.C. Jackson. Directed by David Whiteley.

     

    ROMANCE and the workplace: they are strange bedfellows. And it is that bizarre premise that is cunningly explored in My Romantic History -- the perfect not-quite-romcom to open the second half of The Red Stitch Actors Theatre 2011 season.

    Combining smart observation and a touch of modern cynicism, the story begins as a boy-meets-girl tale, complete with drunken Friday night drinks and waking up in a colleague's bed. The witty script then delves into the ghosts of past lovers that often shape future relationships.

    For the first third of the play, the audience is party to the perspective of Tom who, after hooking up with his new colleague Amy, feels a little claustrophobic about the thought of their ensuing relationship. Then the typical romantic comedy plot is turned on its head with Amy chronicling her recollection of the events in the second strand of the play. She includes details omitted by Tom where she was portrayed as a girl besotted rather than a girl who was needled by colleagues about not having a man at the age of 32 so she decided to "give Tom a go''. She is a more reliable narrator.

    Neither character is overly endearing or likable but they are disturbingly real, which is perhaps the saddest part of all.

    You find yourself cringing as much as you do laughing at the pretentious Tom, deftly played by Red Stitch regular Tim Potter.

    Zoe Boeson displays a remarkable ability not only to deliver crisp one-liners but she's also poignant in her role as the eager-to-please Amy.

    Ngaire Dawn Fair sharply fills the gaps, playing a multitude of characters including samba-drummer office busybody Sasha.

    Written by D.C Jackson, My Romantic History was a popular hit at the Edinburgh Fringe festival and the majority of the charm and wit of the script has remained untarnished by the move from Scotland to Australia.

    Under the clever artistic direction of David Whiteley, the final moments will have you pondering long after the actors take their bow.

     

     

    My Romantic History

     Liza Dezfouli, InPress  (20/07/2011)

    My Romantic History (13 July - 13 August, 2011) by D.C. Jackson.  Directed by David Whiteley.

    There are so many excruciatingly familiar home truths in My Romantic History (by Scottish playwright DC Jackson) that if it weren’t so damn funny it would be almost unbearable. The play won a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival, has been produced all over the UK and it isn't hard to see why. 

    Amy and Tom are work colleagues who share what might have been left as a drunken one night stand, had they been ten years younger. The pair’s emotional fumblings and ill-informed doings as well as a ton of other characters are hilariously played out by the talented cast of three (Tim Potter, Zoe Boesen and Ngaire Dawn Fair), who leap about from one identity to another in time and place, telling a tale of not only Tom and Amy's current relationship but those from the past which have bearing on the present. Uniquely, we get the two perspectives in the story, Tom's then Amy's, and see how different scenarios are interpreted in the light of each character's own history. No interaction is neutral, there is no such thing as a clean slate and this clever play brings this to light using a singular humour.

    The play is succinctly adapted to Australian culture with familiar settings and references lending it a Melbourne sensibility. The play teems with characters but the actors are so talented there is no trouble distinguishing them. Moving from a bogan dildo wielding boyfriend to a Scottish grandmother, Ngaire Dawn Fair just needs to flick an eyebrow or deliver a quick smirk to transform herself completely; she's one of those amazingly expressive actors who radiates a particular charm of her own. Tim Potter is superb as Tom who manages to redeem his unlikeable self as the story progresses, and Zoe Boesen's pragmatic Amy is familar to all of us as the 30 year old who's suddenly, uncomfortably, the only single one left amongst her friends.

    The set is funny in its own right: three dunnies which double as office cubicles, cupboards, cars and kitchens. 

    The universality and honesty of the young couple’s compromises are illustrated with immense wit. This play bristles and glows, the one-liners make you gasp, squirm and nearly wet yourself. Here is an elegant and truly funny production with outstanding performances, a real triumph for Red Stitch and a fantastic opener for their second season.

     

     

    Princess Dramas

    Alison Croggon, Theatre Notes (17/06/11)

    Princess Drams (June 8 - July 2) by Elfriede Jelinek. Directed by Andre Bastian.

    Princess Dramas, now playing at Red Stitch, is the first play by Elfriede Jelinek ever to have been produced in Australia. And massive kudos to Red Stitch for finally giving us a chance to see her work. Jelinek - probably best known for her novel The Piano Teacher, which was adapted into a film by Michael Haneke - is an Austrian writer and intellectual, and a major contemporary German dramatist. She has won, for what it's worth, the Nobel Prize for Literature. She's a Marxist feminist whose work is underlaid by a continuing critique of Austrian fascism, and by extension, of the fascism which underlies western capitalism.
    

    However, none of these things means that Jelinek is without humour or a wicked wit: and director Andre Bastian gives Princess Dramas a grunge production that is often hilarious and always surprising. But it does ask that its audience listen in a way in which we are not often asked: here language is an autonomous entity, not an expression of character nor even of the author. What struck me first was the freedom of the writing. It's as exhilarating as reading Hélène Cixous's prose, which runs without inhibition, intelligence leaping wherever it likes, untrammeled by rule or convention. Here is a writer who feels no need to pander to anything except the imperatives of the work she is writing.
    

    Jelinek is a bit of a leap for audiences used to the idea of theatre as an empathy machine, by which its success is measured by how much one identifies with characters. Jelinek doesn't play for feeling. Although she deals profoundly with narrative, she is not especially interested in plot, which is the least interesting aspect, after all, of story-telling. What's impossible to ignore in this is the influence of Brecht, who perhaps did more than any modern writer, through the utopia of the collective, to redefine the notion of the individual in art.
    

    Jelinek's interrogation of language and her nearly absolute refusal of the empathically-imagined subjective self is the source of much discomfort in the English speaking world. When she won the Nobel, outraged editorials demanded to know why an obscure Austrian had been chosen over manifestly more worthy candidates, such as Philip Roth (to be fair, Jelinek was as surprised as anyone). There's a typical 2007 response in the New York Review of Books (called, ironically enough, How To Read Elfriede Jelinek), in which translator Tim Parks castigates her novels for their lack of authentic subjectivity.
    

    He seems to read her novels as direct expressions of ideas or experiences, which is perilously close to assuming that Hamlet is Shakespeare. He begins the review with a conflation of the author and her narrators, and discusses her work consistently throughout the review through the lens of autobiography. (This is difficult: Jelinek herself exploits autobiography in her work, but it is surely a mistake to use it as a reference for authenticity.) At one point, he says a particular book "might just have worked had Jelinek dedicated any energy at all to creating the dramatic encounters and characterizations that make The Piano Teacher such a strong novel, or alternatively if her ruminations were sufficiently coherent and convincing for us to take them seriously." It's hard not to conclude that he has almost completely missed the point.
    

    

    When Jelinek's translator, Gitta Honneger, takes him to task for ignoring all Jelinek's dramatic work, at least half her output and the source of a great deal of her fame, Parks claims that her plays - which he claims feature "unnuanced denunciation" - are only applicable to certain very localised political struggles in Austria, disclaims any literary prejudice against drama per se (Beckett! Shakespeare!) and finally suggests that she is ultimately untranslatable. It's possible to argue that every writer, embedded deeply as she is in her own language or locale, is untranslateable; it seems absurd to single out Jelinek as especially untranslatable.
    

    But it does expose a stubborn, even wilful, refusal to accept a central tenet of her writing; in particular, it suggests a misread theatricality in her prose. Speaking of her plays, Jelinek describes how she uses "language surfaces" ("Sprachflächen") in juxtaposition, in place of dialogue. Language here is a behaviour, from which meaning might be discerned only through the fractures where its tyrannies collide and break. The idea of "language surfaces" actively refuses the depth that Parks claims is a crucially missing aspect of her writing, and suggests a more supple, less literal and crucially ironic reading of her work.

    The autonomy of language is a commonplace in any engagement with modern poetry, and hardly unknown in English plays: Martin Crimp exploits the same ideas, but in a far less spiky fashion. It is an approach particularly suited to theatre, where performance is already a metaphor, where language is already a mask, already ironic, already a supple and elusive thing. What seems complex in description is, when enacted, made manifest. This doesn't mean it is necessarily simple: it forbids transparency, focusing on speech as an act rather than an expression. In Princess Dramas, Jelinek is especially interested in language as an imprisonment, exploring the creation of the feminine and its relationship to death in the communal psyche. She uses every linguistic resource she can, from fairytales to soap opera to philosophy, as weapons to break the prison open.
    

    Book Tickets

    The Laramie Project - 10 Years Later

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (02/05/11)

    The Laramie Project - 10 Years Later (April 27 - May 28) by Moises Kaufman and The Tectonic Theater Project. Directed by Gary Abrahams.

    

    Matthew Shepard was a young, gay man murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. He was tied to a fence, severely beaten and left to die on the windswept prairie. 

    The Tectonic Theater Project originally visited the town of Laramie in the crime's aftermath, keeping journals and conducting interviews, eventually creating a documentary play. Ten years on, they returned for a companion piece. 

    What they found was disturbing, but not unhopeful. Homophobia is a demon not easily exorcised. More than 60 characters appear - including the theatre group, Matthew's parents and friends, the police, the murderers themselves. All raise vexed questions about individual responsibility, and how it shapes public history.

    The Red Stitch production, directed by Gary Abrahams, is a must-see. A large ensemble cast gives an acutely claustrophobic sense of an entire community on stage.

    Abrahams directs the first half with disorienting pace, poised choric effects, and marshals many superbly acted cameos.

    Kim Gyngell as Matthew's father gives an aching portrayal of male grief, though there are too many fine performances to list. Peter Mumford's design - modular panels constantly rearranged by the actors - adds a visual metaphor for the constructed nature of history and strips itself of theatrical illusion, handing the story over to us.

    The Laramie Project - 10 Years Later

    Chris Boyd, The Australian (03/05/11)

    The Laramie Project - 10 Years Later (April 27 - May 28) by Moises Kaufman and The Tectonic Theater Project. Directed by Gary Abrahams.

    The sequel to The Laramie Project is a cooler, less sentimental affair than the original, but it has an urgency every bit as righteous and indignant. Instead of reporting the murder of a young gay man, the sequel combats the degradation of the moral of the story. Just as one of Matthew Shepards's killers now rationalises his act by claiming the 21-year-old victim was a sexual predator, wider America would rather believe Shepard's death was a result of a drug-fuelled robbery than a hate crime.

    Gary Abraham's busy and determined production papers over the odd imperfection and acting from the cast of nine (especially Paul Ashcroft and Emily Thomas) is scintillating. 

    Another impressive and unmissable Red Stitch production.

      

    Dark and Dangerous (Howie the Rookie)

    Kate Herbert, Herald Sun (29/03/11)

    Howie the Rookie (March 16 - April 16) by Mark O'Rowe. Directed by Greg Carroll.

    

    THE streets of Dublin are dank and dangerous and the characters violent and hilarious in Mark O'Rowe's award-winning play, Howie the Rookie.
    

    O'Rowe's writing is thrilling and inspired, using language to conjure a vivid, poverty-stricken, urban landscape and a parade of eccentric characters.
    

    Director Greg Carroll and his two actors (Paul Ashcroft, Tim Ross) make this a compelling production with muscular, and poignant performances.
    

    Ashcroft plays The Howie Lee, a thug in pursuit of a fight, booze and girls whose wild rampage turns into a family tragedy.
    

    Ross plays The Rookie Lee, a handsome rogue who finds himself pursued by both Howie and his pals and a Dublin crim. Their lives collide over two nights in ways neither can predict.
    

    Intense, brutal and not for the timid, Howie The Rookie is a must-see.

     

      

    Howie the Rookie

     

    John Bailey, Sunday Age (27/03/11)

    Howie the Rookie (March 16 - April 16) by Mark O'Rowe. Directed by Greg Carroll.

    Is starts small: petty Irish thugs driven to violence over a case of scabies. But soon it's clear why Red Stitch chose to remount this production as part of its 10th anniversary season. Mark O'Rowe's play is both a masterpiece of macabre storytelling and an opportunity for actors to make it their own; all involved here make the most of this potential. It's the theatrical equivalent of a king-hit in King Street: not just surprising but likely to leave a permanent scar or worse. And that's just by interval. Assume brace position.

     

    Bruiser's Knockout Show (Howie the Rookie)

    Kate Rose, Sunday Herald Sun (27/03/11)

    Howie the Rookie (March 16 - April 16, 2011) by Mark O'Rowe. Directed by Greg Carroll.

    
    

    IT'S tough to walk out of a theatre feeling like Joe Frazier after his Muhammad Ali showdown but that's the best explanation of a post-Howie state possible.

    This is theatre that grabs the audience by the collar, dons its knuckledusters and pummels away for the rest of the night. What's more, the audience likes it.

    Howie (Paul Ashcroft) is a bit of a bruiser, whose life revolves around his mates, his brother, pubs, pints and birds. And doing what he can to avoid the old man and his handicam. The Rookie (Tim Ross) is a ladies' man, a lover rather than a fighter but shoulder-shruggingly pragmatic when it comes to justice, streets-style.

    Howie the Rookie, by Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe, tells the tale of two nights in their lives, complete with a cast of memorable characters (although they never physically appear), loyalty, laughs and tears.

    Ashcroft is mind-blowingly mesmerising as Howie, careening out-of-control down a one-way street to responsibility and redemption. For more than an hour he is the only actor on stage and he skids and slides through O'Rowe's tightly written rollercoaster with extraordinary physical energy and without a faltering step.

    He flies through the raucous tales of his evening, down dark alleys and through reeking bars, before spinning on a dime and hitting viewers with tense moments of stark tragedy. Every moment Ashcroft is on stage is unmissable genius.

    With a bar set that high it would seem almost impossible for another actor to then hold the stage on his own and demand the same attention but Ross manages it. Again he constructs a character not with props or interaction, but with movement and gesture.

    Howie the Rookie is relentless, wonderful theatre that thumbs its nose at bells, whistles and party tricks, opting instead for little more than a cracking script and hypnotic performances.

    Ruben Guthrie

    Alison Croggon, Theatrenotes (09/02/11)

    Ruben Guthrie (Feb2 - March 5, 2011) by Brendan Cowell. Directed by Brendan Cowell.
    

    Yes, there is life after David Williamson. It must be said that lately the man has been hard to ignore: even John Bailey found himself adding, with an air of bewilderment, to the pile of words surrounding his latest play. "I can't think of another local play, great or rubbish," says Bailey, that has "provoked so many words from commentators, or [has been] given so much space in the public sphere". No, neither can I. And resisting that mind-numbing vortex proved impossible, even for stern-minded aesthetes such as myself.

    If anything proves the marginalisation of theatre in Australia, it's that Williamson - presumably the only recognisable name outside the theatre culture - still so dominates the general discourse. Why is it so, when there's so much more interesting stuff to see or talk about? Take Ruben Guthrie, for instance, presently enjoying a season directed by the playwright, Brendan Cowell, at Red Stitch.

    This play has everything Williamson's lacks - wit, energy, emotion, complexity. And it's a play, goddamit. It doesn't even faintly resemble the "non naturalistic" theatre that Williamson, despite all the evidence to the contrary, claims is driving his work off Australian stages. It has characters and plot. It has a beginning, middle and end. If it were on a main stage, not even the most conservative theatre nerd could argue that it wasn't mainstream.

    The most immediate difference between Ruben Guthrie and Don Parties On is that Cowell's play is a lot more fun. The second is that its exploration of its chosen theme, the nature of addiction, is a lot more thoughtful. It seems to come from a living mind: from the opening moment, when alcoholic advertising whizz and relationship disaster Ruben Guthrie (Daniel Frederiksen) arrogantly addresses his first AA meeting, the energy is pitched high, and it never slackens for the two hour duration of the show.

    The story follows Ruben Guthrie's attempt to sober up. His professional success has been all about excess: it has rewarded him with a top creative job with a mega salary, supermodel girlfriend Zoya (Anna Samson) and harbour views. We meet him at a moment of crisis: his girlfriend, sick of his narcissistic self-destructiveness, leaves him, and he has broken his arm jumping off a roof in a moment of alcohol-fuelled abandon. He goes cold turkey, and immediately discovers that his entire life - work and play - is predicated on alcohol. His boss Ray (David Whitely) isn't interested in the new sober Ruben; his best friend Damian (Simon Maiden) can't bear his not drinking, and even his irritably separated parents (Dennis Coard and Andrea Swifte) think he's a wowser for going teetotal.

    Desperately seeking to replace the world he is rejecting, Guthrie meets Virginia (Erin Dewar), former speed addict, and enters the 12-step plan with a vengeance. It's soon clear that he is replacing one addiction with another. Both are evasions of the real issues that drive his catastrophic instincts: the emotional poverties of his life as a high-flying creative are neatly complemented by the empty jargonistic platitudes of his new sobriety. It's not much of a choice: each of the options open to him is a kind of death. What hovers teasingly beyond this stark binary is the never-realised possibility of a engaged life, but only Zoya - beating her own demons - is able to pick this up. She is, in a sardonic note, the character who leaves Australia.

    Since it premiered in 2008 this play has had two hit seasons at Belvoir St, and the polish of previous incarnations is amply evident in this production. The script is sharp and supple, achieving a nice balance between comedy, satire and genuine pathos. Cowell's slick production picks it up and goes for it. Peter Mumford's elegant set - designer shelves stacked with designer liquor - permits the action to move swiftly and legibly from one scene to another.

    The evening is inevitably dominated by Frederiksen's turbo-charged portrayal of Guthrie, but this is in fact an ensemble production: there's not a weak performance in it. And there are memorable theatrical moments: my favourite is the image of Ruben Guthrie and his father Peter in hospital robes with saline drips, smuggling a flask of liquor under their robes. For a moment, the stage is almost Beckett.

    Definitely a don't miss. Life would be a lot more exciting if more of the mainstream looked like this.

     

    Ruben Guthrie

     

    John Bailey, Sunday Age (20/02/11)

    Ruben Guthrie (Feb 2 - March 5) written and directed by Brendan Cowell. 

    Brendan Cowell's no slouch as an actor but he's also developed a reputation up north for his writing. This 2008 play is a stellar advance on his earliest outings, with a maturity and wit many more established writers lack. It centres on a brash and corrosive young ad exec coming to realise the extent of his alcohol addiction. Turning his back on the bottle proves increasingly difficult in a culture where after-work drinks, a nice wine with the folks and the weekend binge with mates form the glue holding society together. Serious stuff, but unexpectedly funny and forgiving, with strong performances from all.

• 2010 Season
  • • Creditors
    • Full Credit to Top Trio (Creditors)
    • Tense Drama Gets Behind the News (Oh Well Never Mind Bye)
    • Red Stitch's Stop.Rewind
    • Stop.Rewind
    • The City
    • The City
    • A Gang of Four Builds the Plot (The City)
    • Stop.Rewind
    • Where Public and Private Intersect (Stop. Rewind)
    • The Office as War Zone (The Grönholm Method)
    • The Grönholm Method
    • Brilliant Vision of Utter Bleakness (The Grönholm Method)
    • See That Face - As Good as Indy Theatre Gets
    • Larger Than Life (Fatboy)
    • Farragut North
    • Campaign Swipe Rings True (Farragut North)

    Creditors

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (22/11/10

    Creditors (17 Nov - 18 Dec, 2009) by August Strindberg. New translation by David Greig. Directed by David Bell.

    

    August Strindberg casts a long shadow over the history of modern theatre. He wrote over 60 plays. His prolific output is less important to us (only a fraction of his work is still performed with any regularity) than his peculiarly modern psychology and the experiments with dramatic form it inspired.

    To that end, critics tend to look to his later work (A Dream Play, The Ghost Sonata), which exploded dramatic unities, dug into the unconscious mind and laid foundations for European expressionist and surrealist theatre. This obscures his less drastic, but just as influential, take on naturalism.

    Naturalism meant something quite different for Strindberg than for Ibsen. Strindberg despised character backgrounds, overt social context, and naturalism as a “slice of life”. For him, true naturalism was both smaller and larger.

    In Creditors, he focuses with forensic intensity on the psychology on relationships; the ways intimates tear each other to shreds for reasons that remain opaque, insufficient, unexplained. In this it prefigures plays like O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

    A lame artist Adolph (Brett Cousins) is talking with disarming frankness to Gustav (Dion Mills) about his work and personal life. Gustav goes for the throat, weaving a potent, Iago-like spell from his victim’s insecurities. The target is Adolph’s marriage to Tekla (Kat Stewart); the weapons range from guilt – one of the “creditors” of the title – to patriarchal, social and performance anxiety.

    Adolph becomes convinced that unless he confronts his wife and makes her submit to his will, he’ll succumb to epilepsy. (This nod to Othello would be a comic conceit, if psychosomatic illness weren’t so potentially devastating.) When Tekla arrives, their love games turn, through Adolph’s poisoned mind, into a bruising war of words. And Gustav isn’t done with them yet.

    The acting is wonderfully dynamic and well-observed, especially between Mills and Cousins. Mills’ sardonic teacher is a hypnotic manipulator, peeling back the worldliness to reveal a sadistic fount of rage and pain. Expressive, sincere and gullible, emotions pass over Cousins’ face like fast-moving clouds across the sun.

    Kat Stewart’s coquettish and fiercely independent Tekla is compelling with Cousins; pricked from casual sensuality to towering wrath, but seems dramatically off-kilter against Mills. It’s not in a major way, just in subtle timing and tone: they’re not throwing their darts at the same board.

    It’s still a brutal tragicomedy. That’s another strangely modern thing about Strindberg. Tragicomedy here seems to mean more or less what it meant for Kafka or Beckett or Pinter. The comic parts of Creditors make the tragedy harder to escape: Strindberg holds a mirror to life’s distortions and refuses to look away.

    Full Credit to Top Trio (Creditors)

    Kate Rose, Sunday Herald Sun (28/11/10)

    Creditors (17 Nov - 18 Dec, 2010) by August Strindberg. New translation by David Greig. Directed by David Bell.

    

    It has been said the people we hurt the most are the ones we love and nowhere is that more true than in the world of August Strindberg.

    The Swedish playwright has been called a misogynist for the way his female protagonists act and are treated. But his male characters neither fare better nor are better.

    Creditors, written in 1889, has been given a once over by David Greig. While still set in its original period, it's relevant and accessible to contemporary audiences.

    Adolph (Brett Cousins) is a fragile artist and Tekla (Kat Stewart) his writer wife, for whose return he waits while passing time with a mysterious friend Gustav (Dion Mills). As the conversation goes on, seed upon seed of doubt about Tekla's affection and fidelity is sown until the forest becomes seemingly too impenetrable for to Adolph to navigate.

    It's soon clear Gustav has set in motion atria of thought that will have no choice but to crash in the most spectacular way. There will be no happy ending. Strindberg is far too much of a realist for that.

    It's an absolute treat to see the rightfully praised Stewart back at Red Stitch after star turns in Underbelly and Offspring, proving she's more than comfortable on the stage as well as in front of the camera, while Cousins captures the perfect mix of optimism and naivety to save Adolph from being a sop.

    And as Mills has proven before, no one does manipulative, nasty and just a little bit mad like him.

    The one serious flaw is the set design which is a frustrating distraction at best.

     

     

     

    Tense Drama Gets Behind the News (Oh Well Never Mind Bye)

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (9/10/10)

    Oh Well Never Mind Bye (Oct 6 - Nov 6, 2010) by Steven Lally. Directed by Gary Abrahams.
    

    STEVEN Lally's incisive drama Oh Well Never Mind Bye exposes how contemporary news culture can fatally compromise the truth at every turn. It's staged in a tabloid newsroom in the wake of London's ''7/7'' bombings. The place stinks of fear.
    

    Investigative reporter Charlotte (Ella Caldwell) is a bitter and twisted idealist. Her obsession with chasing stories that matter has come at great personal cost, not least her demotion to ''monitoring the blog'' and filing fluff. Charlotte detests vested interests (including the newspaper's own), bullying editors, over-reliance on the internet at the expense of hands-on news gathering, insufficient analysis of bias in sources, and tight deadlines. And she's not shy about taking it out on her co-workers.

    Often a target of Charlotte's cut-glass Oxon invective, her colleague Fin (Timothy Ross) treats his work as a job rather than a vocation. He tries to do the right thing, but he's no sea-green incorruptible like Charlotte. He's become a ''yes-man'' through self-censorship and complicity with the editorial line.

    George (Karen Sibbing) is a newcomer. Will she become a Charlotte or a Fin? We know what news editor James (Phil Hayden) would prefer. A sinister manipulator, all James's journalistic experience and inquisitorial skill is directed not at uncovering news, but in keeping his employees writing what he thinks the paper's owner wants to hear. Two casualties lurk behind these truths: the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian killed by police who mistook him for a suicide bomber, and the shooting of a Palestinian boy by Israeli soldiers during a peaceful protest on the West Bank. Charlotte witnessed the latter first-hand.

    Red Stitch's uncanny ability to find the hottest plays from the stages of London and New York continues. Lally's drama is driven by strong characters, the dialogue so plausible it seems overheard. The scenes fly at you in pithy grabs.

    Gary Abrahams' wonderful direction marshals tense performances, full of telling body language. It's drama that - through high-calibre acting from Caldwell, Ross and Hayden - dons the mask of black comedy and delivers it to the threshold of tragedy. Oh Well Never Mind Bye will leave journalists wincing to see their frailties exposed with such intimate savagery.  

    Red Stitch's Stop.Rewind

    Sarah Adams, Arts Hub (27/07/10)

    Stop.Rewind (21 July - 21 August, 2010) by Melissa Bubnic. Directed by Anne Browning.

    Melissa Bubnic’s uproariously biting Stop.Rewind is the latest offering from Red Stitch and only further cements them at the forefront of contemporary play production in Australia. Smart, acerbic and laugh-out-loud funny, Stop.Rewind is about the different roles we play and the masks we often wear.

    Under the direction of Anne Browning, we see a well-timed, sharply acted vision of the modern day humdrum of the ‘rat-race’, with the characters feeling trapped and yearning to escape the doldrums of their every day existence. This story couldn’t be told through any other medium, with the characters acting as narrators, and intertwining stories and actions all working towards exhibiting that split personality that people have: one for work, and the other the subterranean world of their home lives; their true thoughts, fears and loves.

    Savvy, sharp and finely acted, this is a play that works because it is so fabulously relatable. Performances by ensemble cast members and guest members were all strong, with the comic ability of Giordano Gangl as Trevor a particular highlight. Gangl manages to keep his face as droopy as the character he portrays, and is somewhat reminiscent of the Sandman character from Triple J in the 90s.

    Underpinning the entire story is the tragic illness of a colleague that we never see, and this brings to a head the need for the characters to break out of the façade or normality they have created for themselves in the workplace and express their true desires.

    At times the romantic plot lines, although finely acted (in particular by Ella Caldwell), do come a little out of left field and perhaps needed slightly more flushing out in the beginning scenes in order to be as laudable as they needed to be to carry emotions of such weight and consequence. However, the chemistry between the actors is enough to just about pull the scenes off despite this.

    The set design is a fantastic wall of post-it notes, and scene changes are done with projections in a simple yet effective technique that allows the audience to know exactly where they are with little movement.

    Writer Melissa Bubnic joined Red Stitch last year as a Writer in Residence and over the last 18 months Stop. Rewind has undergone extensive development through the Red Stitch Writers Program. She was brought to attention after winning the TAC short-film competition for road safety that enabled her to fund the short-film Wanker. It has only been up from there.

    But most of all Stop.Rewind is entertaining, and in a climate of Australian theatre, where social realism often holds its depressing grip on our stage, it was refreshing to see something that genuinely funny without being trite, and dealt with hard-hitting emotions without boring us to tears.

     

    Stop.Rewind

    Liza Dezfouli, Australian Stage (25/07/10)

    Stop.Rewind (21 July - 21 August, 2010) by Melissa Bubnic. Directed by Anne Browning.

    Stop. Rewind is an unequivocal success. A triumph for young writer Melissa Bubnic, the cast and director, the Red Stitch Writers Program, and a heartily inspiring sample of what the stage does best. The playwright is currently studying in London and clearly has a terrific future in writing for theatre.
    
    Stop. Rewind explores the compromise of vitality and the erosion of dreams that working for ‘the man’ inevitably brings. The sad trickling away of creative energy, the accumulative effect of turning up day after day to the office politics of a dead end job, are expressed here with a sure touch. The script, the performances and the direction allow this work of indie theatre to cross the border into accessible, commercially viable territory without compromising on grit, freshness or meaning. Stop. Rewind is light but not lightweight. It is a comedy that beautifully balances light and dark and doesn’t mop up with a happy ending. It’s got plenty to say without spelling any of it out in capitals. Best yet, it has vibrantly believable characters you get to care about who grow and develop in the story; instantly recognizable types we’ve all worked alongside yet who are still individuals. This is anything but a stage version of The Offfice; the characters are played large but avoid cliché. Three guest actors, Ian Rooney, James Taylor and Giordano Gangl, join Red Stitch ensemble members Tim Potter, Ella Caldwell, Andrea Swift and Olga Markeeva, comprising a strong team under the direction of Anne Browning. The cast bring the peculiarities of office culture, where you have to survive being a sort of version of yourself whilst never telling the whole truth and pretending to care about the work, hilariously and excruciatingly to life.
    
    A colleague’s death forces a group of co-workers to reassess their lives, their choices, and the reasons for doing what they do. Stop. Rewind takes an original approach where the cast take turns to narrate or signpost each other’s stories – a nice device which keeps the momentum dancing. What might have been moments of ‘sagging middle-of-the-playness’ underlines the killing tedium of the week in, year out, decades-lost life of office work. There’s a distinctive voice here questioning just what ambition might lead one to do and whether or not it is ultimately worth it.
    
    Stop. Rewind resolutely succeeds in what it promises: that is, to show us distracting ourselves from the truth of our sad little lives with affairs, consumerism, fantasy, tyranny over others and occasional, defiant flickers of assertiveness or minute acts of heroism. Stop. Rewind shines the spotlight on the pitfalls of our aspirational, consumerist society and our unquestioning pursuit of what we think we want. Small people all have their stories, their reasons, the dreams of romance they cling to despite reality. Slowly and surely the nine-to-five life destroys precious things while enabling one to pay the bills.
    
    Go and see Stop. Rewind – it is very funny and a hugely satisfying, well-developed piece which will delight many more once it goes on tour. 
     

    The City

     Liza Dezfouli, Australian Stage Online (12/09/10)

    The City (1-25 Sept) by Martin Crimp. Directed by Adena Jacobs.
    

    A family, their children, their neighbor, a nurse. Off-stage, a war, an absent husband, a writer, his child, now living, now dead. If you try and analyse the story of The City any further, you won’t get very far because reality is up for grabs here. With the premise that underneath all our conventional interactions, no matter how intimate, there is an entire other universe of desire, intent and the hovering threat of violence, the play allows its characters to voice their own fears or desires but never to comfort one another. They may hold human conversations but their emotional orbits do not overlap. Even in the apparently most innocuous of discourses there is much else going on.
    

    The City is one of the most inspiring and unconventional works I’ve seen in a while, mesmerizing all the way through. It is brilliantly directed (by Adena Jacobs) and performed. We know Dion Mills is good but in this show he truly comes into his own in as Christopher in a performance that builds in intensity until we can imagine him doing absolutely anything. Fiona Macleod does some of her best work without uttering a word; the anguish she can portray is at times unnerving. Macleod doesn’t drop the ball for a second as Clair; she and Mills are most ably supported by Meredith Penman as the nurse on the verge of a nervous breakdown and by little Georgie Hawkins (sharing the role with Fantine Banulski) as the daughter. A mention has to be made of the subtle but effective lighting design. There was very nearly a hint of soundtrack predictably when a piano music came into play but this device was thoroughly deconstructed so there was no obvious underlining of text by score.

    The language in this play is taut and stretched, thrumming with menace. The characters never feel safe and neither do we. Martin Crimp’s play examines the isolated goings-on of a family, struggling to balance themselves in individual despair, attempting to connect, to share, and seemingly doing so in words but the shifting ground makes it impossible for anyone to hold fast. The world outside offers unemployment, a secret war, piano playing that is ugly when you listen closely and encounters with the horrible truths of other lives.

    The work’s ancestry can be traced to Brecht and Kafka; the tightness of the writing lends an absurdist tone to its circular layers of sadness, terror and futility but the play doesn’t stop there. It isn’t grim (although the story it tells is) and the irony can be exquisitely funny. Nor does it tidy anything up. It is a skillfully built up picture of loneliness where the commonplace threads connecting individuals are woven into a noose.

    The City is very, very good indeed.

     

     

    The City

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (7/09/10)

    The City (1-25 Sept) by Martin Crimp. Directed by Adena Jacobs.
    

    BRITISH playwright Martin Crimp is perhaps best known for Attempts on Her Life, a bold work involving splintered and contradictory accounts of an absent female protagonist. Noparticular characters are assigned to speak the lines, giving immense freedom to the director and actors.
    

    That freedom persists in The City, although the characters are more defined. There’s Clair (Fiona Macleod), a literary translator, her husband Christopher (Dion Mills), their unnamed daughter (Fantine Banulski/Georgie Hawkins), and their neighbour Jenny (Meredith Penman), a nurse.Yet the narrative remains enigmatic, and the ultimate freedom Crimp seems to be insisting on is ours — to unlock the puzzle as we see fit.

    A substantial part of the dialogue is marked by ... ‘‘literary soliloquy’’ might be the best description. The characters narrate small incidents and fragmentary impressions in vivid, compulsive detail.

    In this production, director Adena Jacobs constructs a Gordian knot of existential isolation and incidental connection by directing the performances largely to the audience, rather than between characters. The characters possess an unbearable intimacy with us, and a disturbing distance from each other.

    The latter is of peculiar effect between Macleod and Mills, who create a portrait of a foundering marriage (or is it a normal one?) by contrasting physical stasis and verbal lability. It’s an uncomfortable portrayal that prompts the question: how much can we truly know even those closest to us?

    Neither actor achieved the measure of histrionic lyricism the script seems to call for. Despite the incompleteness of the characters and stories, the performances should feel complete. They didn’t to me, but lingered in the mind nonetheless. A similar haunting from Penman, who rises from the ashes to give a berserk tirade of grief and wrath, directed at a husband gone to an unjust war.

    And the little girl’s wraith-like appearance is a masterstroke. It is, in fact, she who ends the play. After an extended speech from her father that gives this enigmatic work a meta-fictional twist, she sits at a piano and mangles a piece she is learning to play.

    All art aspires to the condition of music, indeed.

    The City is a provocative contemporary work, precisely the sort of theatre our mainstream companies should be programming. That Red Stitch continues to bring us such challenging theatre is something for which we can be thankful.

     

    A Gang of Four Builds the Plot (The City)

    Kate Rose, Sunday Herald Sun (12/09/10)

    The City (1-25 Sept, 2010) by Martin Crimp. Directed by Adena Jacobs.

    

    ARISTOTLE once said "a great city is not to be confounded with a populous one'' and given a cast of four is all that's needed to make The City great, indeed, he may well have had a point.  

    Christopher (Dion Mills) and Clair (Fiona Macleod, pictured left) are an average married couple in any average city with their average ups and downs. She is a translator who wishes she could write books rather than simply find the right words to replicate those of others, and he is about to lose his job in some industry that's all about sales and graphs and charts and politics. Maybe they're happy, maybe they aren't, but it's altogether possible they no longer remember the difference. But then they run into a series of events that are anything but average.

    Clair meets an author who has lost -- literally -- a child and flirts with an affair, while neighbour Jenny (Meredith Penman) -- a chronic insomniac -- pops in unannounced as Clair and Christopher's daughter (Fantine Banulski/Georgie Hawkins) develops an obsession with blood.

    
    The City is initially a puzzling -- albeit intriguing -- piece of theatre that examines violence in all its forms, physical and emotional. Playwright Martin Crimp has built his city in a place that exists at the intersection of reality and imagination, as well-constructed as the protagonists forced to come to terms with their own failings and vulnerabilities.

    
    At times its sense of exaggeration can be overwhelming, but the clever twist more than pays the audience back for its patience.

     

     

     

    Stop.Rewind

     

    

     

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun (27/07/10)

    Stop.Rewind (21 July - 21 Aug) by Melissa Bubnic. Directed by Anne Browning.

    

     

     

    ANYONE who has worked at the butt end of the public service will wince in recognition as they watch the staff of the DDDPTS, the local government office in Melissa Bubnic's terrific new play Stop. Rewind.

    Those who haven't worked -- or no longer work -- in the lower depths of hell will rejoice. It's like Pink Floyd's song, Time made sickly flesh.

    But this is no ordinary David Williamson or Roger Hall-style satire. First, we're privy to the innermost thoughts of these frustrated, pathetic, thwarted losers, all hanging on in quiet desperation. We hear what they actually say and what they really want to say.

    In a series of astonishingly concentrated scenes, the playwright reveals the inner lives of each of the workers. Many of their heartbreaks are avoidable . . . if only they dared to speak their minds.

    Clearly, Bubnic has worked closely with the ensemble in the time she has been playwright in residence at Red Stitch. Stop. Rewind is Red Stitch near its very best. 

     

     

     

    Where Public and Private Intersect (Stop. Rewind)

    Martin Ball, The Age (26/07/10)

    Stop.Rewind (21st July - 21st August 2010) by Melissa Bubnic. Directed by Anne Browning.

    

    A HUNDRED or so years ago the common genre for theatre was the drawing-room comedy, which typically explored the middle class mores of its intended audience. Later, in the 20th century, the action moved to the kitchen sink drama, emphasising the domestic anxieties of the time.

    But the setting de jour for theatre and film is definitely the office, that public space of work that tests the morals and desires of the individual in society.

    Melissa Bubnic's new play Stop. Rewind for the Red Stitch Actors Theatre confirms this trend, charting the lives of seven workers in a local government office. The script never gets bogged down in office mechanics; rather, it poignantly and poetically examines how the intersection of public and private affairs shapes the choices and fortunes of characters.

    Bubnic makes a feature of cleverly exposing the private thoughts that people have in delicate situations, and are usually left unspoken. Do you bite your tongue and suppress pent-up emotions, or speak your mind and reveal yourself? Here we see both options, with hilarious and poignant consequences.

    A particular success of Stop. Rewind is the carefully pitched tone of this production. Director Anne Browning allows a variety of shades of style and rhythm, which builds depth and adds complexity.

    The actors are well cast. It is especially pleasing to see Ella Caldwell return to the company ensemble, with an assured and mature performance. Olga Makeeva is a hoot as the plain-speaking Ukrainian that everyone admires but no one likes.

    Giordano Gangl lets his face speak a thousand words of resignation.

    Following the success of Tom Holloway's Red Sky Morning, Bubnic's Stop. Rewind is another feather in the cap for the Red Stitch Writers program, and solid justification for its ongoing support.

    
     

    The Office as War Zone (The Grönholm Method)

    Sunday Herald Sun (12/06/10)

    The Gronholm Method (09 June - 10 July, 2010) by Jordi Galceran Ferrer. Directed by Nadia Tass.

    With the GFC still tugging at the purse and BP averting its gaze from countless oil-smudged pelicans, corporate inhumanity remains a fish-in-a-barrel target for the arts.

    The Red Stitch production of The Gronholm Method takes aim again, but not in the normal capitalist-hating way. A corporate sales manager, Frank, arrives in a slick boardroom for a job interview. Little does he know three other candidates are also arriving to take part.

    The unusual group interview process takes a curious turn as the nameless company asks interviewees to face off against each other in a series of humiliating games. The darkest corners of inhuman corporate HR are explored, leaving the white-collar members of the audience wondering how they could possibly go back to the office on Monday. The intimate Red Stitch Theatre adds to the intensity, but the use of only four characters, constantly on set, leaves it at risk of becoming boring. Still, the risk is overcome by the engaging script.

    Unlike most business-bagging productions, the play holds at its core a knowledge of corporate process that stabs the unsuspecting office worker in the crotch in a similar way to David Brent's cringe-inducing boss in The Office.

    But at its end, The Gronholm Method is not for laughs. It certainly offers plenty throughout, with a strong lead performance from David Whiteley. The end aims to throw into doubt the behaviour of competition and the lust for corporate success over decency. Director Nadia Tass's filmmaking experience is notable in the spot lighting and gradually changing backdrop, giving an edge to this quirky production.

     

      

    The Grönholm Method

    Annaliese Gillard, RHUM online (12/06/10)
    

    The Grönholm Method (9 June - 9 July, 2010) by Jordi Galcerán Ferrer, translated by Anne Garcia-Romero. Directed by Nadia Tass.

    l'enfer, c'est les autres"  (hell is other people) - Jean-Paul Sartre.

    The Grönholm Method suggests not only that hell is definitely other people, but that by selling out, removing personal responsibility and becoming slaves to The Man, we're even more fucked.  Does it have to be inevitable, though?

    Do you like Survivor?  Exactly how far would you go to win one million dollars?  Have you ever considered auditioning for X-Factor, but then been concerned by the idea that people might think your act is more traffic accident than talent? Didn't you wonder if that isn't exactly what the 7 network wants anyway?  The Grönholm Method, a play by Spanish writer Jordi Galcerán Ferrer, explores the increasingly disturbed nature of human interaction and makes you question how far people are willing to compromise themselves, their morals, and their integrity, for a chance at success.  

    The play's premise is to take four hungry individuals and pit them against each other in a bizarre yet supposedly scientific fashion to determine who is the 'best fit' for a high powered job.  (Yes, kids, because people are like a tetris game, but with more complicated pointy parts?)  This Aussie English translation of The Grönholm Method really hits home, and while managing to be funny and insightful, is also like a car crash from which you just can't look away.  Props must go to the Red Stitch crew for creating such an immersive set, and to David Whiteley, Shayne Nagle, Karen Sibbing and Jay Bowen for making the audience feel like flies on the wall through the whole perverse process.  

    If the modern media are to be believed, the Y generation isn't all that fussed about privacy anyway, and everyone today is just out to get their own piece of the pie.  I don't agree.  This play disturbed me - it was easy to forget the fictional premise and honestly, how far off the mark is it?  Nice one, Nadia Tass. But how am I supposed to sleep at night?

    Seriously though, see this show.  It's phenomenal.   

     

    Brilliant Vision of Utter Bleakness (The Grönholm Method)

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (14/06/10)

    The Grönholm Method (9 June - 9 July, 2010) by Jordi Galcerán Ferrer, translated by Anne Garcia-Romero. Directed by Nadia Tass.

    

    IN THE mid '90s, psychologists began to study similarities between entrepreneurs and sociopaths. Superficial charm, a lack of empathy, an inflated sense of one's own importance: traits that would be disturbing in a dark alley were cherished in the boardroom.

    Catalonian playwright Jordi Galceran Ferrer homes in on the dysfunctional culture of corporate management in his slick black comedy The Gronholm Method.

    Four high-powered applicants arrive at an office for a final interview. The prize is a senior management role at a multinational corporation. What they don't know is that the interview started the moment they walked in the door.

    Observed by unseen masters, Frank (David Whiteley), Rick (Shane Nagle),Melanie (Karen Sibbing) and Carl (Jay Bowen) must compete against each other in a series of psychological tests.

    At intervals, fresh instructions appear from a drawer in the wall. They begin with the announcement that one of the four is a plant from the human resources department. The applicants have 10 minutes to discover the mole.

    If this sounds like reality TV show Survivor or, more germanely, Donald Trump's The Apprentice, it's no coincidence. But as each mind game drags the players to a new level of ruthlessness and humiliation, what starts as light entertainment becomes a grotesque examination of how corporate culture rewards immoral behaviour.

    Director Nadia Tass delivers a swift, sure-footed production, its humour laced with latent anxiety and menace. It's a very strong ensemble performance. Each actor sketches a credible corporate climber, the characters defined as much by what they hide as they reveal.

    The performances are precisely observed, the comic timing impeccable. But what impressed me most about the actors was the way they used Galceran's game-playing framework to generate momentum, swinging from light comedy to intense drama in the blink of an eye.

    The highlight was the brutal conflict between Frank and Carl. Whiteley and Bowen mesmerised, even as I cringed with revulsion. For all its humour, The Gronholm Method offers a remorselessly bleak vision of the inhumanity of corporate culture.

    As his tigers prowl around the boardroom, we slowly realise we're watching some sort of sick talent quest for the ultimate sociopath.

    In the end, it's the psychologists who have the last laugh, though that's less comforting than you might imagine.

    See That Face - As Good as Indy Theatre Gets

     Jason Whittaker (05/05/10) Crikey.com.au

    That Face (28 April - 29 May, 2010) by Polly Stenham. Directed by Sarah Giles.

    Intimate doesn’t begin to describe That Face, the new production from Melbourne’s cosy acting company Red Stitch. Suffocating seems more apt. This British-yet-ubiquitous family portrait is powerful stuff; a twisted mother-and-son love story that explodes on the company’s diminutive stage.

    Martha—as she insists on being called, not mum—is shattered to discover son Henry is straight. She had assumed the caring, artistic apple of her eye was gay. “You see the world the wrong way around", an exasperated Henry tells his mother. It encapsulates Martha, the off-centre axis of this dysfunctional family. She is ill, bi-polar perhaps, constantly drunk, wildly unpredictable and entirely unable to function without Henry or outside their small London flat.

    Henry has become a boy in a bubble. He quit school to look after his mother and it has consumed his life. As much as Martha needs him, Henry has become dependent on his care-giving role, knowing little of the world outside. No friends, as she reminds him, and never been kissed. Martha mentors his sketch artistry between the drunken highs and miserable lows. They have a strange, loving fix on each other, effectively imprisoned by their psychology.

    We open the dark closet on this family as Henry’s sister, Mia, is expelled from her exclusive boarding school. The missing patriarch, a wealthy financial broker living a new life with a new family in Hong Kong, makes a mercy dash back to London to buy his daughter out of trouble and investigate for himself the deteriorating situation at home. The fiery family reunion forces each to confront past hurt and the devastating reality for Martha and Henry that they are no longer healthy for each other (and maybe never were).

    First staged in London in 2007, Polly Stenham wrote this at the age of 19.Which just isn’t fair. One West End reviewer described this as “one of the most astonishing debuts I have seen in more than 30 years of theatre reviewing”. It is gifted, revelatory writing; a story about growing up from a playwright of maturity well beyond her years.

    I fell in love with this work after a Queensland Theatre Company production last year. If anything it works better here—magnified in this almost claustrophobic space, with wrenching performances from a wonderful cast. Sarah Sutherland rides Martha’s emotional rollercoaster to near-madness with all the frenetic intensity of a sick mind; Tim Potter, too, is devastating as Henry, in a performance as mature as his character is forced to become.

    That Face is rare theatre, indeed: bleak yet buoyant, witty and wise, heartfelt and hopeful, as good a contemporary drama as you’ll see on stage this year. Melbourne theatre-goers should not miss the chance.

    Larger Than Life (Fatboy)

    Kate Rose, Herald Sun 28/03/10

    Fatboy (March 17 - April 17) by John Clancy. Directed by Marcelle Schmitz

    

     

    A WORD of warning: if you are in any way offended by swearing, don't bother reading any more. This play is not for you.

    For those who secretly delight in infantile idiocy and profound profanity, step up.

    Fatboy is a brutal, vicious update on Albert Jarry's Ubu Roi, and proves the importance of mocking dictators and their sheep-like subjects is as great now as it was when Jarry's play was written more than 100 years ago.

    The new king is Fatboy (Daniel Frederiksen) and in this sinister burlesque he has consumed, killed or enslaved almost everyone and everything. His sins culminate in a war crimes tribunal, but with weasel words, manipulation and a filthy singalong it's clear justice is probably more than blind, she's also bored, bawdy and bigoted.

    The manic energy, dark humour and self-referential irony of Clancy's writing thunders off the stage from everyone involved in this scathingly cynical spectacle.

    Farragut North

    Kate Herbert, Herald Sun 12/02/10

    Farragut North (Feb 3 - March 6) by Beau Willimon.  Directed by Kim Durban.

          

    THE zesty dialogue crackles with wit and adrenalin in Farragut North, by Beau Willimon.

    The play dives headlong into the secretive world of a political campaign to choose the US Democratic presidential candidate. It is a world of spin doctors, ambitious interns, fawning assistants, cut-throat journalists and competing party factions.

    If you're a West Wing fan, you'll know an hour is a very long time in politics. Careers and reputations are ruined in minutes with an ill-chosen word or a secret meeting.

    Willimon worked on political campaigns, including that of Senator Hillary Clinton, and his knowledge gives authenticity to his avengers' tragedy-style plotting. Give them swords and kings to overthrow and it could be Shakespeare.

     

    Campaign Swipe Rings True (Farragut North)

    Martin Ball, The Age 08/02/10 

    Farragut North (Feb 3 - March 6) by Beau Willimon.  Directed by Kim Durban.

     

    ELIZABETHAN revenge tragedy meets Jacobean political thriller in Farragut North, a savage portrait of an American primary campaign brim full of dirty tricks, sex scandal, and internecine rivalry. And when the reputations are all destroyed, there's even a Fortinbras waiting to step over the political scalps.

    Writer Beau Willimon worked for the failed 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign, and his insight into the daily lives of the staff members brings authenticity to the script. At times it feels like watching a stage version of series seven of The West Wing - albeit without the sentimental optimism.

    The danger with a play full of political egos on stage is that the actors will overwhelm the audience, but director Kim Durban is careful to create a spectrum of characters, so that each makes room for the other.

    Brett Cousins gives one of his best performances as the cocksure press secretary Stephen Bellamy. Cousins maintains energy throughout, by turns arrogant, then increasingly desperate as his career spins out of control.

    David Whiteley turns in a subdued but subtle portrait of world-weary campaign manager Paul Zara, while newcomer Lucy Honigman is perfect as the obligatory honey-trap intern, both precocious and naïve.

    The one character who is perhaps underplayed is Kurt Geyer's Tom Duffy, the rival campaign manager who comes across more kindly uncle than hard-bitten political animal.

    Red Stitch's production crew deliver another effective and efficient design, making it a good season opener for the company.

     

• 2002 Season
  • • Love and Understanding
    • Stripping Relationships Bare (Love and Understanding)
    • A Play on the Absurd (The Play About the Baby)
    • Howie the Rookie
    • These Irish Bed-Bugs Bite (Howie the Rookie)
    • Psychopathia Sexualis
    • Sock Fetish Puts Audience in Stitches (Psychopathia Sexualis)
    • The Web We Weave When We Conceive (And Baby Makes Seven)
    • And Baby Makes Seven
    • Skilled portrayal of the Evil Men Can Do (Down the Road)
    • Emotionally Damaged in Intense Performance (Brilliant Traces)
    • Beach Encounters Not What they Seem in Search For Love (By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea)
    • New Group's Impressive Production of Thoughtful Thriller (Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love)
    • Two Hander Packs Punch (Uncle Bob)
    • The Lights
    • Extremities

    Love and Understanding

    Kim Edwards, Vibewire.net 20-Dec-02

    Love and Understanding (November 27 - December 21, 2002) by Joe Penhall. Directed by Denis Moore.

    If you are a theatre-goer living in Melbourne, and have not yet seen a Red Stitch production, you won't believe what you're missing. The quality of the acting this company offers astounded me once again, and I couldn't believe the funny little St Kilda theatre on Inkerman Street wasn't packed to the rafters, as it so richly deserved to be.

    Neal and Rachel are both doctors who work too hard, but are trying equally hard to keep their long term relationship as intimate and poignant as it always has been. Enter the charismatic Richie, Neal's renegade childhood friend, complete with drinking and drug problems, and a reckless and infectious passion for life and for getting what he wants. The developments that ensue are not difficult to predict, and I feel that the remarkably strong performances from the three actors and some astute and elegant direction by Denis Moore made this play more intelligent and beguiling than the script itself deserved.

    The performance was done in the round - always a challenging choice - but the space was well used, and I appreciated the minimalist props and clever lighting.

    However, I felt the actors doing their own stage management was at times a detraction from the atmosphere created by the previous scene, when a serious moment switched suddenly into a bustle of movement as the actors dropped character and busily arranged props in the half light. While I appreciate the need for slick scene changes and the convenience of the actors doing it themselves, allowing the performers to make an exit in character and leaving someone anonymous to do the cleaning up might have been more effective in several cases.

    Vince Miller as Neal put in a very solid and empathetic performance, though I thought the transition of his character from anxiety-ridden professional to rash self-gratification was a little rushed. Verity Charlton's depiction of Rachel was one which grew on me as the show went on - I found her more and more convincing in the role, and she played some particularly difficult scenes with wonderful naturalism and subtlety. Richie, as played by David Whiteley, was necessarily the most difficult character to portray - to be unsettling and frustrating and at times devious and dangerous, while maintaining appeal and charisma in his careless, vigorous and humorous outlook on life. David's performance achieved this dichotomy superbly, and his management of the restaurant scene and the confrontation by the river is worthy of particular mention.

    What impressed me most about all these three performers was their ability to match the cadences of natural conversation and make what was at times rather dodgy dialogue sound realistic and spontaneous and free of clich. The 'bubble and squeak' happy ending speech I found particularly trying, for example, though this was in no way due to the actors or direction.

    Thus, although I wasn't entirely taken with the plot or dialogue of the play itself, this was nonetheless once again a professional, sophisticated and very entertaining production from Red Stitch, and I can only hope the word will continue to spread about the standard of work this company offers. Last night they were offering next year's subscriptions for $70 with double passes for eight shows, which is simply mind-boggling value for the quality of performance they provide. Check out www.redstitch.net for more details.

    The Good: Wonderful acting from all three cast members
    The Bad: A script which at times was undeserving of the performances it received and the unworthy audience numbers
    The Vibe: Just can't believe this company continue to be so good - why haven't you been to see them yet?

    David Whiteley and Verity Charlton in Love and Understanding. Photo: Dans Sheehan.

    Stripping Relationships Bare (Love and Understanding)

    Helen Thompson, The Age 03-Dec-02

    Love and Understanding (November 27 - December 21, 2002) by Joe Penhall. Directed by Denis Moore.

    Joe Penhall is a young British playwright attracting attention and awards.

    His play Blue/Orange was seen earlier this year in a Melbourne Theatre Company production, and now Red Stitch has produced the Australian premiere of his Love and Understanding.

    A three-hander, it fits neatly into Red Stitch's program - an extraordinary 12 plays in 12 months - being contemporary, youthful and tough.

    It is described as a black comedy, but there is little enough to laugh over. Penhall has taken an old scenario and worked it over in a way that captures the frightening fragility of relationships in a world stripped of old anchors such as marriage and children.

    Neal (Vincent Miller) and Rachel (Verity Charlton) are hard-working young doctors, stressed-out and time-strapped, whose lives are disrupted by the unexpected arrival of Neal's boyhood friend, Richie (David Whiteley). What seems at first just a contrast in lifestyle as much as character - Richie is a substance-abusing, irresponsible freeloader, Neal an over-anxious, over-achieving and desperately over-worked medico - turns into something much uglier.

    Richie is really evil, and he sets out to wreck Neal and Rachel's relationship and, indeed, their lives. The play alternates scenes between Richie and each of the others to reveal his lying duplicity and treachery, skilfully hidden from them. He succeeds only too well, and the formal problem for the playwright then is where his characters go from there. In a sense, the play is saved by its subtext.

    Once such a plot might have been fairly simply a good/evil battle, but this contemporary version of events is not so clear-cut. Richie has a change of heart after nearly dying of an overdose. Both Rachel and Neal have learnt something valuable from the "other side" - Rachel is less naive, Neal achieves self-knowledge and liberation from his chronic anxiety.

    The old-fashioned work ethic is seriously questioned, and the lovers' relationship, if it is to be rebuilt, will be on a sounder and more equitable footing. The ending is a very tentative beginning, almost like an Adam and Eve starting out again after their encounter with the serpent.

    Yet the writing sometimes strains credibility with a sense of a moral schema being stronger than that of psychological plausibility.

    Nevertheless, Miller, Charlton and Whiteley, ably directed by Denis Moore, give the kind of intense, convincing and emotionally powerful performances that have become a trade-mark of Red Stitch's work.

    Verity Charlton, Vincent Miller and David Whiteley in Love and Understanding. Photo: Dans Sheehan.

    A Play on the Absurd (The Play About the Baby)

    Helen Thompson, The Age 05-Nov-02

    The Play About the Baby (October 30 - November 24, 2002) by Edward Albee. Directed by Kaarin Fairfax.

    Edward Albee's most famous play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was written in 1962 and filmed in 1966. Since then he has written many award-winning plays, including last year's The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, which will be staged by the Melbourne Theatre Company next year.

    Another of his recent works is The Play About the Baby, a 2001 Pulitzer Prize nominee. Red Stitch is continuing its practice of bringing new American drama to our attention with this production, directed by Kaarin Fairfax, who also directed the enormously successful Uncle Bob earlier this year.

    The Play About the Baby has the Albee trademark absurdist style. It's a very funny but black satire on innocence and experience. The four characters are perfectly recognisable, but are also just exaggerated enough to make them representative types, and to set them up for a fall.

    Albee's stage life is most definitely not real life, and part of the pleasure of Baby is its deliberate exploitation of the audience/actor relationship. He almost dares us, at our peril, to take him seriously. He certainly leaves us, and his characters, finally balanced on the edge of real tragedy - or perhaps it is only farce after all.

    Brett Cousins and Laura Gordon play the very young couple whose happiness is completed with the arrival of a baby. They are like a pair of children, simple and happy. The other two characters (all are nameless) are the antithesis of this innocence.

    The male character works the audience like a pro, putting every cheap rhetorical trick into practice. His female companion is a hyperactive, self-promoting type who is totally absorbed in the drama of her own life.

    Albee takes both couples just over the edge of believability, and they exist in a social vacuum. In the first act we are given due warning that things are unlikely to turn out well.

    The older man warns us that happy endings represent a kind of death - that you need to be wounded to know you are alive. His cynicism is complete; he even tells us that we can't take glory because it shows us the abyss.
    Yet it is the determined cheerfulness of the older pair that makes their stalking of the younger ones particularly sinister.

    They certainly blast the happiness of the young parents, baffling their attempts to discover why, with language play and ridicule. They are like beings from another planet come to teach a lesson before proceeding on their way. The casting ensures each pair is physically alike.

    Cousins and Gordon are blonde, slow speakers, almost babyish themselves, while Kat Stewart and Daniel Frederiksen, as the older pair, are slim, dark and devilishly fluent. Frederiksen does a nice line in cynicism, while Kat Stewart is hilariously histrionic. Gordon and Cousins, on the other hand, create real emotion with some intense acting that serves to complicate our response.

    This is another fine production from Red Stitch. Intriguing and challenging.

    Howie the Rookie

    

     

    Amy Dobson, Vibewire.net 13-Oct-02

    Howie The Rookie (October 2 - October 27, 2003) by Mark O'Rowe. Directed by Greg Carroll.

    Red Stitch Actors Theatre has a particular talent in choosing theatrically interesting, contemporary and relevant works to produce. For a long time now in the world of contemporary alternative theatre, there has been a move away from scripted work and a greater emphasis on image and movement based theatre. This was (to summarise very briefly) a rejection of the naturalistic, traditionally structured, middle-of-the-road scripted dramas that have dominated the stage for so long. And this is why it's great to find a company that finds and chooses scripts of current relevance, both in terms of style and content. Howie The Rookie by Irish writer Mark O'Rowe is such a work. In this contemporary and poetic monodrama, the fourth wall is gone and the characters address the audience one on one, making an intimate, at times confronting performance. In the first act, the audience rides along through the streets of Dublin with Howie (Vincent Miller), a bored, unattractive and horny youth out on a revenge mission with his mates Peaches and Ali. In the second act, the stage is Rookie Lee's, for Rookie is the mate-turned enemy of Peaches- the object of revenge for the boys.

    O'Rowe's use of language is sometimes poetic and descriptive, sometimes sparse and minimal: the style produced, something along the lines of Irving Walsh meets Dylan Thomas. These are men's stories. The characters portrayed are rather dismal for both the men and the women. Although often brutish and sometimes gruesome, the characters are written with compassion and understanding. Occasionally, moments of truth and beauty arise out of these grim settings, and what comes across is the basic need for peace, of some kind.

    There is no set or 'scenery' as such, and no need for any props- just a long, dimly lit space with a red brick wall on one side and long rows of chairs on the other, forming a laneway-like space that is the stage. The stories of Howie and Rookie take us through streets, houses, bars and urinals, but the language, the bodies of the actors and their use of the long, empty space is all that is needed to invoke these changing images and keep the play alive and real in the mind. The simple changes in lighting were also effective in enhancing these images.

    The skill of both actors was in bringing this intense writing to life not only with their voices (the play could easily be performed as a radio piece), but through bodies. Greg Carroll's perceptive direction came through in the movement, which was stylised and coherent throughout the two acts. The production was just as notable as a well-choreographed movement interpretation of the story as it was a well-acted script, and these two elements of performance- voice and body- were unified in the characters.

    These Irish Bed-Bugs Bite (Howie the Rookie)

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun 09-Oct-02

    Howie The Rookie (October 2 - October 27, 2003) by Mark O'Rowe. Directed by Greg Carroll.

    This play puts the steel cap into kick-arse. It's Dublin's answer to Trainspotting.

    As you'd expect from the Irish, a humble pint - well, several dozen of them - replaces the syringe.

    And the sad-bastard tragedy is never less than pants-wettingly funny. If most theatre is for pussycats, this play is for panthers.

    A feud begins involving a burning mattress.

    The Rookie ("breaker of hearts and hymens") left behind an infestation of scabies when he slept on Ollie's mat, and fellow mate Peaches has since contracted them.

    The Howie (Vincent Miller) is conscripted to help Peaches exact brutal revenge. But, within 48 hours, The Howie changes sides and all hell breaks loose.

    Mark O'Rowe's dialogue floats like a butterfly and kicks like a buffalo. He gives actors space in which to be immense, to dazzle. And Miller and David Whiteley seize those opportunities in Red Stitch's best show yet, and one of the very best shows of the year.

    Just when we thought we had the company pinned down, it invites Greg Carroll to direct - an inspired decision.

    Howie the Rookie is a reminder of what theatre should be: vivid, thrilling and dramatic.

    Highly recommended.

    David Whiteley and Vincent Miller in Howie the Rookie. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Psychopathia Sexualis

    Narrelle Harris, Stage Left 06-Sep-02

    Psychopathia Sexualis (September 4 - September 29, 2002) by John Patrick Shanley. Directed by Janice Muller.

    Anyone who's watched Seinfeld or a Woody Allen film will know that the Americans excel at neurotic comedy. Psychopathia Sexualis is a sparkling addition to the field.

    The premise is pure farce. Arthur (Daniel Frederiksen) is soon to be married to Lucille (Kate Cole). Unfortunately, he's unable to make love without a particular pair of Argyle socks in the vicinity, and said socks have been confiscated by Arthur's frustrated therapist, Dr Bloch (Trent Baker).

    The rest of the story is a storm of anxiety, bluster and aggressive psychotherapy as Arthur's friends try to retrieve the vital footwear before the wedding night. Rounding out the cast are Richard Stables as the pompous Howard and Olivia Connolly as Ellie.

    The cast tackle the play with enormous verve and panache, at the same time handling a variety of American accents. The characters are played to the hilt, and Janice Muller's direction keeps everything moving at a tight pace.

    This production scarcely misses a beat as it takes on John Patrick Shanley's delightful script. The result is an achingly funny show about love, sex and therapy.

    Sock Fetish Puts Audience in Stitches (Psychopathia Sexualis)

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun 09 Sep-02

    Psychopathia Sexualis (September 4 - September 29, 2002) by John Patrick Shanley. Directed by Janice Muller.

    Red Stitch has broadened the spread of plays in Melbourne, performing works by important lesser-known playwrights, like Bronx-born John Patrick Shanley.

    Shanley is best known, here, for Danny & the Deep Blue Sea and his Oscar-winning script for the film Moonstruck.

    Psychopathia Sexualis is fast-paced and riotously funny.

    Bride-to-be Lucille discovers her artist lover Arthur has a sock fetish and has been seeing a shrink for six years.

    Without a pair of his father's argyle socks at hand, Arthur is impotent.

    The problem becomes acute when the psychiatrist confiscates the socks.

    That's the basic plot, but the play is all about the facade of friendship and the sleight of hand by which we pretend to be happy and coping.

    Ellie and Howard are Lucille and Arthur's so-called friends. Howard is obsessed with demonstrating his superiority. For Ellie, friendship is a competitive sport.

    Shanley's characters live in their own hermetically-sealed worlds. They talk but rarely listen.

    Janice Muller's production, likewise, consists of five actors doing it for themselves. They are a delight to watch, one and all.

    Daniel Frederiksen has the toughest task, playing the fetishist. And he is the most impressive.

    Kate Cole puts in a HUGE performance as Lucille. The role is totally hokey and caricatured, and Cole doesn't fight it.

    Richard Stables does the cravat-wearing, buttoned-up toff to a tee. Olivia Connolly is quivering and devious as Ellie. And Trent Baker doesn't draw breath as the shrink from hell.

    Great fun.

    Olivia Connolly and Richard Stables in Psychopathia Sexualis. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

    The Web We Weave When We Conceive (And Baby Makes Seven)

    Helen Thompson, The Age 13-Aug-02

    And Baby Makes 7 (10 July - 4 August 2002) by Paula Vogel. Directed by Beng Oh.

    With its eighth production, Red Stitch Actors Theatre has once again come up with a contemporary American play we might otherwise never have seen. Paula Vogel, who won the 1998 Pulitzer prize for her play How I Learned to Drive, has had her work performed throughout the world, although rarely in Australia. And Baby Makes Seven pays homage to Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, focusing on relationship entanglements and the complications of parenting. Albee's husband and wife raged inside the cage of their marriage, tied together by their shared fantasy of a child.

    Vogel's 'family' has a fantasy family as well, but the relationships are much more contemporary and non-conformist.

    Anna (Ella Caldwell) and Ruth (Verity Charlton) are a lesbian couple who, with Peter's (Brett Cousins) help, are expecting a baby. But they already have three imaginary children, Cecil, an American boy, Henri (French), and Orphan (who was raised by wolves).

    And so baby makes seven.

    The fantasy children are the creations of Anna and Ruth, and Peter, whose fantasy character is Uncle Petey, begins to feel crowded out by the noisy, demanding brood who disrupt their nights. So, reluctantly, it is decided the boys must go.

    What follows is more than the simple comedy this plot might suggest.

    Vogel achieves a radical unsettling of our notions of real and fantasy, and of the power of play acting, as the actors relish their multiple roles.

    Here Red Stitch once again lives up to its reputation for powerful, confronting, dedicated acting, without which this play could not really work.

    Charlton, in particular, gives a superb performance as Ruth/Henri, seeming at times almost mad, possessed by her fantasy to the point where we wonder whether it is actually controlling her.

    Caldwell and Cousins, parents of the new baby, convincingly suggest more scepticism, yet it is Peter who signals, towards the end, that "normal" family life is not enough for them. The play's final scene hilariously discloses that "play" is much more fun than "life".

    What makes And Baby Makes Seven fascinating is not its lesbian parenting, or its menage a trois, but its brilliant unsettling of our notions, not of sexual boundaries, but of the "real". It is theatre that cleverly theatricalises the everyday in a way that is, thanks to the excellent acting, both startling and funny.

    And Baby Makes Seven

    Beat Magazine 18-Aug-02

    And Baby Makes 7 (10 July - 4 August 2002) by Paula Vogel. Directed by Beng Oh.

    Red Stitch Actors Theatre is a relative newcomer on the Melbourne theatre scene. And Baby Makes Seven is the company's eighth and latest production, which has yet again proven that even at these early stages Red Stitch have nothing but quality productions under their belt.

    The performance explores the lives of lesbian couple Anna and Ruth, who are creating a family with their gay friend Peter and are expecting their first child. They also have an added twist on the unusual family structure. three imaginary children the women regularly roleplay. Their choice to create a family, along with the complications added by their imaginary children, takes them toward new horizons. Do they need to be more 'normal'? How will their lifestyle effect their soon-to-arrive child? In struggling with these questions, the three adults take themselves on a journey where no matter how much they try, they cannot predict their own endings.

    The performance is perfectly suited to the cosy Red Stitch theatre. Also notable is the brave lighting design, which throws both performers and audience into near darkness for substantial portions of the piece, and the inventive and detailed soundscape.

    There are three strong performances here by Brett Cousins (Peter), Ella Caldwell (Anna) and Verity Charlton (Ruth). Cousin's portrayal of the 'outsider' in this three-way relationship, slowly being drawn further into the net of fantasies that have been created, balances out the sometimes frantic actions of the two women. In unbelievable circumstances these performers make us believe the unlikely.

    While blurring boundaries of fantasy and reality is not a new concept, the outstanding direction of Beng Oh allows the show to stand out. The performance rises one step above typical issues of modern family structures, transforming into a piece which questions what happens when we succumb to 'normal' and lose our fantasies. A seamless performance which only serves to add to the Red Stitch phenomenon.

    Skilled portrayal of the Evil Men Can Do (Down the Road)

    Helen Thompson, The Age 16-Jul-02

    Down The Road (July 10 - August 4, 2002) by Lee Blessing. Directed by Olivia Allen.

    Down the Road is Red Stitch's seventh production for the year and once again provides a rare opportunity to see the work of another contemporary American playwright, Lee Blessing. In fact, this play could have come from any place where serial killing has frightened a community.

    Blessing's play is a thriller, a tense, scary three-hander that sustains its suspense to the very end. Journalists Dan and Iris Henniman are not being stalked by a killer. They have been employed by a publisher to interview and write a book about a killer: William Reach, who has been jailed for 19 murders. Yet even in the apparent safety of a cell, with Reach handcuffed and under surveillance, a sense of inexplicable evil is pervasive.

    Trent Baker gives a splendid performance as the killer. He is cold, smug, contained and exudes a palpable air of self-satisfaction. Only rarely does he erupt in rage, but these outbursts successfully intimidate his questioners, particularly Iris, and control the proceedings.

    It is no accident that Reach, whose victims were all young women, should most disturb his female interlocutor.

    Dan (David Whiteley) and Iris (Kat Stewart) actually make a baby during the weeks of their seclusion in a seedy motel near Reach's prison. This conception provides a powerful subtext of new life during the sickening process of hearing Reach describe his cold-blooded ending of so many young lives.

    Blessing's play consists of a series of alternating scenes between the couple, and between each of them in turn interviewing Reach.
    He skilfully shows us how evil can contaminate goodness, love and trust, even when it has been apparently contained by imprisonment. Further, he reveals that evil can perpetuate itself not only by tainting other lives, but by recruiting them to its own ends.

    It is fame that Reach now craves and the Hennimans are the means to his ends, not theirs. The book will make him a celebrity, and so the public appetite for sensationalism will also in a sense perpetuate his evil.

    Whiteley and Stewart convincingly establish sympathy with the Hennimans' decency and love for each other, and much of the play's suspense is sustained by the subtle disintegration of their relationship, brought about by Reach.

    His descriptions of murder are made terrifying not by exaggeration, but by his bland and brief descriptions of sheer horror.

    Like the Hennimans, we come to understand that there is no possible control or reform or even anticipation of such things.

    Emotionally Damaged in Intense Performance (Brilliant Traces)

    Helen Thompson, The Age 18-Jun-02

    Brilliant Traces (June 12 - July 7, 2002) by Cindy Lou Johnson. Directed by Trent Baker.

    One of the strengths of the Red Stitch Actors Theatre, presenting its sixth production in six months, is its repertoire of plays that are challenging, contemporary and just off-centre.

    Cindy Lou Johnson's play, Brilliant Traces, is a 90-minute, one-act, two-hander that would not quite fit the established parameters of mainstream theatre. Yet it is an intense, compelling work, very much an actors' piece, its spare dialogue and confined action requiring acting of a high order to raise the emotional temperature to boiling point.

    Director Trent Baker has achieved remarkable effects, and the performances from Vincent Miller and Kate Cole are extraordinarily good. And, in the 40-seat black box at 80 Inkerman Street, there is an almost intimidating intimacy between actors and audience.

    The play has a wonderfully dramatic opening, when a woman in bedraggled wedding finery bursts into a remote Alaskan cabin, fleeing a snowstorm. The mystery deepens when, after a few largely incoherent words to the room's occupant, she falls asleep for two days. He is only moved to emotion when he inexplicably sobs over her discarded wedding shoes.

    Faint literary overtones of fairy stories involving dancing shoes are displaced by the emergence of the story behind these two people, Roseannah Deluce (Kate Cole) and Henry Harry (Vince Miller).

    Their stories are almost as improbable as their meeting. Both are traumatized, Roseannah by a simple incident at the door of the church in Arizona where she was about to be married, Henry by the death of the child he loved. But neither story emerges easily, or even coherently, from these emotionally damaged people.

    Johnson seems almost to be exploring some version of chaos theory in this play. It does not progress or develop in any orderly way. Rather, this pair are like atoms randomly colliding, their encounters sometimes angry, at other times pitiful, even loving, but always confined within the simple wooden cabin.

    It ends without any definite resolution, but with at least a deepening of understanding of themselves. Roseannah's experience, in particular, almost defies description; it is an out-of-body severing from the ordinary world. Henry's revelations, in comparison, seem almost banal. The challenge to both actors is to convey the intensity of their emotions despite the inhibitions these feelings impose upon their attempts to communicate.

    Cole's wonderfully mobile face is a powerful mode of expression. Miller's tightly coiled body language conveys Henry's tense battle to control despair and hopelessness. Together they sustain an incredibly intense emotional landscape producing memorable performances in a powerful and haunting play.

    Beach Encounters Not What they Seem in Search For Love (By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea)

    Helen Thompson, The Age 20-May-02

    By The Sea, By The Sea, By the Beautiful Sea (May 15 - June 9, 2002) by By Joe Pintauro, Lanford Wilson & Terrence McNally. Directed by David Whiteley.

    For their fifth show in five months, Red Stitch Actors Theatre has chosen a trio of plays set on the beach, a gesture of commitment to the beachside suburb where they are based.

    This setting provides the reason for the characters in each play to be doing something ordinary yet removed from life's action. Watchers of the sea are stilled into temporary contemplation of a landscape that can take on any mood.

    The three characters in Joe Pintauro's play Dawn are on the beach for the far-from-everyday purpose: to scatter the ashes of their dead mother. Her son (Daniel Frederiksen), daughter (Kat Stewart) and daughter-in-law (Laura Gordon) are feeling a bit squeamish about it all.

    What follows is a family mini-drama set off by the emotions aroused by this gathering. The play has an interesting contrapuntal flow of sympathies, although its character development is sketchy and its ending conventional rather than surprising.

    Lanford Wilson's Day has more surprises to it. This beach encounter is between a gardener and a beautiful, seductive woman - interrupted by the arrival of his girlfriend who looks like an off-the-wall loser.

    Ace (Brett Cousins) seems stuck with Bill (Kat Stewart), including her drug dependency, while Macy (Laura Gordon) appears to represent a class and world of wealth that could be as seductive as she is herself.

    Yet things are not what they seem. The two women discover that they had been to school together, where it was Bill who belonged to the upper strata of wealth and privilege. This information perhaps explains Macy's transformation into something much uglier: she attempts to corrupt Ace with an offer she thinks he can't refuse.

    This apparently casual beach encounter suddenly becomes something deliberately set up and sinister.

    Terrence McNally's Dusk sees three young adults accidentally encounter one another on a beach. Marsha (Ella Caldwell) and Dana (Laura Gordon) are instant rivals for the attention of Willy (Daniel Frederiksen). What follows is a slightly bizarre contest, deliberately orchestrated by the egotistical Willy, who tempts them despite his confession to having a wife and six children.

    McNally sets up all three as satirical targets, typical self-absorbed, sexually predatory thirty-somethings, it would seem, for whom the beach is an opportunity for physical display. Yet in the end he reveals Dana lives through a daily tragedy while Marsha breaks down to reveal a loneliness that gives her sexual games a real pathos. Only Willy remains incorrigible and something of an enigma.

    These are three solidly performed, well-made plays linked by the theme of human need for close relationships as much as by their seaside settings. They are interesting rather than profound, conventional in using contemporary sexual freedoms to display the eternal need for loyalty and love.

    Laura Gordon in By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea. Photo: Julian Dolman.

    New Group's Impressive Production of Thoughtful Thriller (Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love)

    Helen Thompson, The Age 18-Apr-02

    Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (April 10 - May 5, 2002) by Brad Fraser. Directed by Wayne Chapple.

    This 1989 Canadian play was made into a film, Love and Human Remains, in 1994. The play certainly has cinematic qualities, particularly its structure of rapid, brief scenes that gradually knit together the seven characters. It also has a tense subplot of violent murder that gradually works its way to the centre of the action and creates a thrilling conclusion.

    The title's reference to the true nature of love signals its concern with sexual identity as well as emotional commitment. Flatmates David (David Whiteley), who is gay, and Candy (Verity Charlton) find themselves involved in relationships that test their sexual orientations. Candy allows herself to be briefly seduced by Jerri (Olivia Connolly), while David is pursued by the hero-worshipping but straight Kane (Brett Cousins).

    But it is Robert (Daniel Frederiksen) who seems a better bet for Candy, while the real love of David's life seems to be his married, heterosexual friend Bernie (Vincent Miller).

    Meanwhile, David's mind-reading friend who is a prostitute, Benita (Kate Cole), provides David with "readings" of his friends. She also contributes a chilling background monologue that details a variety of gruesome murder-mutilations.

    What makes this more than sitcom territory - their messy, tangled lives, their search for love, something that might give meaning to their existences - is the menace that stalks their home town.

    Fraser's writing is tight, witty and sometimes surprising. His characters are all strongly delineated individuals who collectively sum up the angst of the 1980s. His employment of a thriller plot is skilful and effective.

    By finally revealing that one of this group is the killer, Fraser tests the parameters of "love" in an interesting way. He also suggests that love has nothing to do with sexual orientation in the end.

    The performances from this actors' group are all excellent. The ensemble work is well paced and sympathetically developed. Whiteley as David gives a particularly compelling performance, suggesting depths of sadness only just kept at bay, which sums up the lack of hope for the character's whole generation. Charlton is equally impressive as Candy, another young person with no obvious path ahead of her. Miller develops the challenging character of Bernie with great skill, and the entire play depends upon this for its success.

    Unidentified Human Remains is another impressive production from Red Stitch, a new theatre group to watch.

    Two Hander Packs Punch (Uncle Bob)

    Helen Thompson, The Age 20-Mar-02

    Uncle Bob (March 13 - April 7, 2002) by Austin Pendleton. Directed by Kaarin Fairfax.

    It's the excitement of discovering something new and good that keeps the theatre critic going, night after night, to all kinds of venues, even those as spartan as Red Stitch Actors Theatre's black box. The actors' co-operative is a passion-driven venture, financed by Vince Miller's lifesavings, and Uncle Bob is a stunning beginning.

    Austin Pendleton is well known in contemporary American theatre circles as a teacher, actor, writer and director. His play could only be the work of a contemporary American. It is tight, edgy, fast and dark. It keeps delivering surprises, not an easy thing in a two-hander.

    Nick Barkla and Neil Pigot give extraordinarily good performances, directed with precision and skill by Kaarin Fairfax.

    Uncle Bob (Pigot) is alone and dying of AIDS when visited unexpectedly by his nephew, Josh (Barkla). Neither even remotely resembles any known stereotype of character. That is the first surprise of Pendleton's script.

    Bob sees himself as a failure - as an actor, a writer and a brother - and has kept silent about the circumstances that resulted in his fatal infection, made more mysterious in light of his happy marriage to Sally.

    He aims to keep sentiment at bay and his reactions to Josh's arrival are hostile and angry.

    Josh also seems a failure. He's a drop-out who smashed up a series of Porsches in a self-destructive refusal to conform to parental and societal expectations of middle-class success. Their talk is combatitive, each trying to outdo the other in slashing irony and black humour. Intent on surprises, they are aggressive and punishingly fluent.

    Josh comes out with something that Bob has been waiting for: he confesses not only his love for his uncle but his desperate desire to have sex with him.

    The play keeps us in suspense to the end, when the question of whether Bob will assist Josh's suicidal desire is debated. The motives of both men, disguised for years, must be put to a test of morality, not just emotion or desire. Only when it is over do we realise the intensity with which the play has been building to its climax.

    The Lights

    Paul Bugeja, Byteyourartist.com 16-Feb-02

    The Lights (Feb 13 - March 10, 2002) by Howard Korder. Directed by Yvonne Virsik.

    Red Stitch, brain child of Vincent Miller (Artistic Director), has hit the Melbourne theatre scene with a vengeance, and is already into its second piece for the year, following a successful season of the company's premiere production, 'Extremities' by William Mastrosimone. The company has scheduled 12 productions for 2002, a huge task for any company, but one surely all Melbourne artists hopes Red Stitch achieves as proof that independent, ensemble theatre can thrive in Melbourne once more as it did in the 70's and 80's.

    Korder has written a harsh, urban tale which delves into the difficulty of survival in the modern world, especially in terms of human inter-relations. He splashes his characters across the city of New York, a metropolis filled with the dregs and downtrodden remnants of humanity...and yet juxtaposes this against some moments where hope for a better life might exist...at least for those who are prepared to survive, even at the expense of others.

    Yvonne Virsik, a graduate from the VCA Director's course in 2000, has taken an at times slightly fractured script (in terms of short, sharp scenes that require pace and high energy) and with a cast of talented actors, produced a more than palatable night of theatre.

    The space itself is small, but was well utilised in a simple but effective manner. Sets were simply constructed and props kept to a minimum. Scene changes were rapid and rarely interrupted the flow of the dramatic tension. This show is about what actors can do on-stage, and allowing the audience to focus on this, as opposed to using swish sets and lighting designs to mask weak performances.

    It was the two guest actors who left the most impression. Barry Friedlander was excellent as Diamond, the slick business man on the make, and Dion Mills, in a variety of roles, brought something very real and different to each. Trent Baker easily managed his dual roles of Erenhart and Mr Barry; David Whiteley was particularly good as Kraus, the uptight store manager and the guard at the World Trade Centre; and David Kambouris in multiple roles was strangely compelling as the queer 'man with pants'. Eva Parkin playing Rose, one of the central figures to the plot, seemed to be 'going through the motions' somewhat, which could have been a character choice but didn't come across as such initially. As the play progressed, this vanished as she became more and more attuned with her path through the central narrative, and was certainly one of the highlights by the conclusion. Olivia Connolly as Lillian, and Vincent Miller as her unfortunate partner Frederic, both had moments, but generally lacked consistency. However, as with Parkin, both did delve deeper into their characters truths in the second half, and seemed more comfortable and committed personally to the stories they had to tell.

    Aside from the fact that the space itself was not well ventilated which made it a little uncomfortable in the very warm weather, the only possible areas that might require some fine tuning were the few moments of physical violence (which had a very faked quality to them) and also some alteration to the language, which has a strong US kilter to it not suited to the Australian voice. Several of the characters sounded as though they were written for African American actors, and Friedlander himself slipped inadvertantly at times into a vague US sounding accent, merely because the writing lends itself to that particular vernacular.

    All in all though, a strong production, and a company of more than capable actors with much good work ahead of them in upcoming productions for Red Stitch. Rating: (7/10)

    Eva Parkin and Olivia Connolly in The Lights. Photo: Julian Dolman.

    Extremities

    No Review

    Extremities (January, 2002) by William Mastrosimone. Directed by Greg Ulfan.

    Extremities was Red Stitch's inaugural production in 2002 at the original Inkerman Street Red Stitch Theatre. Featuring Lisa Reynolds, David Whiteley, Kate Cole and Ella Caldwell and directed by Greg Ulfan. Design by David Scott.

• 2003 Season Please click on arrow to scroll to other tabs
  • • Tackling a Scourge with Panache (Done Deal)
    • Drugs and Sex Shake Up Family Values (Done Deal)
    • Fresh Creative Initiative (Red Shorts)
    • Survival of the Duplicitous (Push Up)
    • Capital Account of Changing Values and Economics (Black Milk)
    • To Russia Without Love (Black Milk)
    • Dirty Butterfly
    • Victim's Pain Deferred (Dirty Butterfly)
    • Raised in Captivity
    • Jesus Hopped the A Train
    • Ransom Superb in Compelling Performance (Jesus Hopped the A Train)
    • The House of Bernarda Alba
    • Where's My Money?
    • Love Hurts (Where's My Money?)

    Tackling a Scourge with Panache (Done Deal)

    Helen Thomson, The Age 08-Dec-03

    Done Deal (26 November - 21 December, 2003) by Michele Davis. Directed by Catherine Hill.

    This play, along with the previous Red Shorts season of short plays, represent Red Stitch Actors Theatre's move into new Australian work. Michele Davis's Done Deal is suited to their style and strengths. It is a tough, tightly plotted and fast moving look at one aspect of the contemporary drug scene.

    The world occupied by Holt (Brett Cousins), Laney (Kat Stewart), Carla (Olivia Connolly) and Davey (Daniel Frederiksen) is not that of the down and out junkie. They don't look like a bunch of losers. Davey, in fact, is doing very well, but so he should considering his career as a drug dealer.

    However, his brother Holt only has a career as a user, and Davey must accept some responsibility for that since he began by supplying him. Carla has a job in her family's real estate business, but she is one of Davey's most regular cocaine customers. Only Laney, engaged to Holt, is free of drugs. Alas, her relationship with Holt and Davey brings her into unwelcome contact with the scene.

    Davis's plotting is satisfyingly complex and her final line, capping the disintegration of all the relationships that have been at stake throughout, is blackly ironic. It underlines the source of all the complications - the sheer inability of the user, Holt in particular, to keep to the truth.

    Overt didacticism is unnecessary, particularly since each character reaps a tough but just reward for their actions. Davey is too morally tainted by his dealing to have a chance of reforming his brother. Carla is too emotionally fragile to beat her habit. Laney can only walk away.

    As Holt, Cousins gives a masterly performance of charm distorted by addiction. Conolly provides just the right mixture of brittle toughness and vulnerability as Carla. Stewart admirably manages to suggest the irony of the only innocent member of the group being its real victim. And Frederiksen projects Davey's moral ambiguity with appropriate subtlety. Done Deal represents another successful production from Red Stitch, and it is encouraging to see this company taking on the challenge of new Australian writing with its usual panache and commitment.

    Drugs and Sex Shake Up Family Values (Done Deal)

    Kate Herbert, Herald Sun 08-Dec-03

    Done Deal (26 November - 21 December, 2003) by Michele Davis. Directed by Catherine Hill.

    Red Stitch Actors Theatre is now producing Australian plays and Michele Davis' Done Deal is a strong start.

    It has a contemporary story, interesting plot convolutions, detailed characters and fraught relationships.

    Holt (Brett Cousins) answers the door to Carla (olivia Connolly) who is euphemistically asking for a cocaine deal left for her by Holt's brother, Davey (Daniel Frederiksen).

    Holt (named after Harold Holt by his delusional mother, makes a huge mistake with Carla that night. It involves sex and drugs and it happens on the evening before his fiancee, Laney (Kat Stewart) is to arrive.

    What transpires is a funny but dramatic web of lies, deception and revelations.

    Davis' writing is well observed and naturalistic. Her characters are real and recognisable in the twenty-something corner of our urban society. The action is concise and credible and the plot often surprises.

    Director Catherine Hill keeps the pace tight.

    Cousins gives a delightful performance as Holt, balancing charm and deception.

    As his brother, Frederiksen plays a complex palette of emotions.

    Stewart plays Laney, the only person not involved with drugs, with enough suspicion to prevent her looking stupid.
    As Carla, Connolly makes real the desperate dopehead who is also a successful real estate agent.

    An entertaining play with commendable acting.

    Fresh Creative Initiative (Red Shorts)

    Jim Murphy, The Age 18-Nov-03

    Red Shorts (November 12 - 23) by Therese Cloonan, Pat Van Der Werf & Chris Howlett. Directed by Greg Carroll.

    The three winning short plays from among more than 200 entries in Red Stitch's inaugural competition for new Australian writing are good acting pieces that together constitute a varied and eminently satisfying night of theatre.

    Six actors share the 14 roles, under the banner "Red Shorts", that allow them to display their versatility and provides a linking thread to plays that otherwise have nothing in common. It is a little strange that director Greg Carroll chooses to run them one after another with only a short blackout between.

    Since none has a clear curtain line, you're inclined to find that what you thought was a change of costume turns out to be the same actors in a different play. But perhaps that just adds to the mix.

    "Skin Deep" by Therese Cloonan takes a fresh approach to the eternal triangle, involving contributions from a pet dog and a saucy devil (both acted brightly by Verity Charlton) and parents depicted as dolls in a Punch and Judy theatre.

    Patrick Van Der Werf's "Shelter" is an unsettling story of a couple in a lonely country house playing reluctant hosts to a pregnant woman and her suspicious companion whose car has broken down on a wet night. Dion Mills and Ella Caldwell are strikingly good as the visitors, and the well-constructed piece generates a nice sense of menace as the characters are pitted variously against each other, and conflicts emerge.

    Then it's off to the great void for "Johnny Flip's Fate" by Chris Howlett, a light-hearted insight into the way Fate, a bureaucrat of the most listless kind (well, how enthusiatic would you be if you knew everything in advance?), arranges our lives by twiddling dials and pulling levers on an antediluvian control panel.

    Fate (stylishly played by David Whiteley) has to remedy a glitch in the cosmis order by locating a human named Johnny Flip and persuading him to swap his existence with anyone in history.

    When dull Johnny (a delightfully droll Brett Cousins) turns out to be incapable of seeing the benefits of such a move, Fate sends his glamorous assistant (Laura Gordon).

    In the atmospheric little theatre, the three plays, which collectively run for 90 minutes, are a great advertisement for new writing talent.

    All credit to Red Stitch, with the support of the Cultural Development Fund of the City of Port Phillip, for the initiative.

    Survival of the Duplicitous (Push Up)

    Helen Thomson, The Age 27-Oct-03

    Push Up (Oct 17 - Nov 9, 2003) by Roland Schimmelpfennig. Directed by Kaarin Fairfax.

    Roland Schimmelpfennig is a rising star in German theatre with a record of award-winning plays. But, a piercing study of the corporate world, Push Up could have been set in any large city in the Western world.

    Six characters are trying to push to the top of their organisation: to win is to survive; to lose is simply to disappear. The real world is irrelevant and rarely impinges on the consciousness of these inhabitants of 16 stories of corporate success - the Kramer building. Schimmelpfennig gives us three scenes of meetings between pairs of employees.

    In the first, the boss will stop at nothing to uncover her husband's sexual infidelities. The young woman who has been refused promotion is more like her boss than they realise. Their verbal exchanges, in which aggression is barely reined in, are interrupted by monologues telling us what each of them is thinking.

    This technique is also used in other scenes, to ironic effect. Saying one thing and thinking something quite different reveals the duplicity, the dishonesty, but also the fear and sense of inadequacy that underlies these "winners".

    Here is the real sting in the tale: winners and losers alike are frightened, lonely individuals whose lives outside the Kramer building are utterly empty. Things like shopping are used to fill the void, or an exercise bike, or surfing the net in search of a girlfriend. Is is a devastating critique of capitalism's human products.

    It is also funny, and Ella Caldwell, Kate Cole, Vincent Miller, Kat Stewart, David Whiteley and Peter Hosking give sharp, well-fucussed performances that reflect director Kaarin Fairfax's skill in producing uncluttered scenes that cut straight to the chase.

    Deadpan public exchanges keep peeling back to reveal the emotions surging beneath the well-dressed surfaces

    This is an enormously enjoyable and timely play, performed with Red Stitch's usual panache.

    Capital Account of Changing Values and Economics (Black Milk)

    Helen Thomson, The Age 02-Sep-03

    Black Milk (29/08/2003 - 21/09/2003) by Vassily Sigarev. Directed by Tamzin Nugent.

    Red Stitch has made another interesting choice with Black Milk, a contemporary Russian play that opens a window on the clash of values as Russia transforms itself into something resembling a capitalist economy.

    Vassily Sigarev keeps alive the potential for both tragedy and comedy, a balancing act that climaxes with a potentially horrific ending being undercut by the absurdly mundane. His message seems to be that both potentialities exist and are being played out all over Russia in varying keys.

    Lyovchik (David Whiteley) and his heavily pregnant wife, Poppet (Laura Gordon), a pair of con artists who have been off-loading shonky toasters, are stranded on a station. While they wait for the train, they are pursued by some of their victims (Dawn Klingberg, Hugh Sexton) and learn of criminal activity from the ticket-seller (Dion Mills), who is making a fortune manufacturing vodka for the drink-sodden locals, one of whom (Peter Hosking), seems to live in the waiting room.

    The old world of Russian kindliness and hospitality is contrasted with the new, aggressive milieu of opportunistic, money-obsessed entrepreneurs such as Lyovchik and Poppet, yet this contrast is slyly undercut by the older forms of greed and exploitation in the vodka vendors.

    Tamzin Nugent directs the kind of full-blooded performances we have come to expect from Red Stitch, Dion Mills makes an amusing, cross-dressing ticket-seller, with Whiteley and Gordon as the married couple. When Poppet gives birth, she is, for a time, absorbed into the old Russia and its kindly values. Her conversion is as infused with irony as the satiric picture of the new one.

    Like Russia itself, the married couple seem poised at a moment of choice, but Sigarev suggests that human nature and Russian society will dictate a new world as muddled and corrupt as the old.

    This is lively, thought-provoking and interesting theatre on a subject little addressed elsewhere.

    To Russia Without Love (Black Milk)

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun 02-Sep-03

    Black Milk (29/08/2003 - 21/09/2003) by Vassily Sigarev. Directed by Tamzin Nugent.

    London critics are comparing this young Russian playwright with Dostoyevsky, but the novelist was never this chilling, nor his world never this utterly banal or godless.

    Watching Black Milk, I was reminded of the story of Odysseus sacrificing a ram letting its blood pump into a ditch so that the Greek hero could speak with a dead prophet.

    Thats what playwright Vassily Sigarev is doing. Slitting the throats of his vile characters.

    Not to damn them or us to hell, but to exhume the consciences of the Russian people. To raise their dead souls.

    In this post-communist nativity story, Mary and Joseph are natural-born swindlers named Shura and Lyovchik: city-slickers ripping off peasants with their cheap toasters. They suck on cigarettes and lollies.

    Somewhere in the epicentre of their boundless motherland, Shura goes into labour at a railway station.

    Lyovchik leaves his wife in the care of strangers for 10 days or so to continue his rolling sales pitch.

    When he returns for Shura and their daughter, all has changed.

    Despite its repetitions and mundanities, and its magically sudden tilts of emotion and mood, Black Milk has a killer role for a young woman.

    She has to be hellcat bitch; a Madonna in follow-me-home boots and fishnets, rocked by the undeserved kindness of strangers and by the birth of a girl after aborting at least a dozen others before her.

    Laura Gordon is startlingly good as the foul-mouthed Shura.

    Though she hasnt entirely cracked the character open Im not at all sure there would be enough nuclear material within to fuel her acting reaction in any case Gordon flays us with her voice and gives us a glimpse into hell.

    We can see her alabaster skin glowing red from its heat.

    There is a cursory attempt by the playwright and director Tamzin Nugent at redemption at the end of the first act.

    Using the Gavin Bryars composition Jesus Blood, the redeemer is quickly killed off.

    Poisoned get this by home-brewed vodka.

    Look out, Russia, your kingdom is coming.

    David Whiteley and Laura Gordon in Black Milk. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Dirty Butterfly

    Bill Perrett, The Sunday Age 03-Aug-03

    Dirty Butterfly (23/07/2003 - 17/08/2003) by Debbie Tucker Green. Directed by Martin White.

    Dirty Butterfly is a most intense and enthralling piece of theatre. It is above all a play of words. Characters speak in a working-class London idiom that's been pared down, concentrated and repeated until it becomes a form of dramatic poetry.

    Physical action is slow, studied, ritualistic. It is confined in cell-like spaces that emphasise the claustrophobic nightmare world of the characters.

    The story is simple. Jo (Kat Stewart) is trapped in a physically abusive relationship. One of her neighbours is Jason (Vince Miller), who listens compulsively through his walls to the violence in Jo's flat. He is drawn to her plight out of intense sympathy, amounting to a kind of love, but is unable to help her. Amelia (Ella Caldwell) also knows about Jo's situation, but has moved downstairs from her comfortable flatto escape the terrible state of affairs next door. She wants to free Jason from his unbearable obsession and to find an alternative in some kind of normality.

    For Amelia, the best way to deal with Jo's problem is to get as far away from it as possible, to concentrate on doing her cleaning job in a cafe conscientiously. But she has as little chance of staying uncontaminated by the terrible self-destruction as the other two have of removing themselves from it.

    Dirty Butterfly is a tough and confronting play. It is also very moving. The cast is remarkably good. Miller's Jason mixes compassion with voyeurism, helplessness with obstinacy. Caldwell's practical Amelia makes a convincingly sane contrast to the other two.

    Without doubt, though, the outstanding performance is from Stewart. Jo is a finely drawn and complex character. While she is unable to remove herself from repeated, savage and predictable physical ill-treatment at the hands of her unseen abuser, she is self-aware, with an excruciating understanding of what is happening to her. In the worst of her desperation she is still capable of dark humour, and Stewart conveys this combination of vulnerability and strength with insight and skill.

    Martin White's direction understands all the intricacies of the script and keeps them tightly balanced. The set by Danielle Brustman is intelligent and economical and reflects the combination of grubby realism and stylisation of the play. Red Stitch continues to present challenging drama and performances of quality.

    Vincent Miller, Ella Caldwell and Kat Stewart in Dirty Butterfly. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Victim's Pain Deferred (Dirty Butterfly)

    Helen Thomson, The Age 30-Jul-03

    Dirty Butterfly (23/07/2003 - 17/08/2003) by Debbie Tucker Green. Directed by Martin White.

    Earlier this year, British writer Debbie Tucker Green was commissioned to write Dirty Butterfly by London's Soho Theatre Company. Green's work has been likened, with some justice, to that of Sarah Kane, both stylistically and in terms of its deprived, life-hardened, young Londoner characters.

    Dirty Butterfly is an intense piece of theatre, and director Martin White has increased the intensity by rapidly pacing the dialogue, spoken under the pressure of strong emotion, without reflective pauses. Each of the three characters, thus, in a sense, seems to be delivering a monologue addressed as much to themselves as to the others.

    Jo (Kat Stewart), living just a paper-thin wall away from Amelia (Ella Caldwell) and Jason (Vince Miller), is the victim of nightly episodes of rough sex and domestic violence. Amelia's response has been one of denial, moving downstairs to sleep on the sofa, out of earshot.

    But Jason has become the victim of a fascinated voyeurism, apparently both appalled and aroused by what he hears every night through the wall. Its effect on him is literally disabling, rendering him almost unable to speak or move from his room.

    Yet it is Jo who really dances with danger, greeting each morning to consider the possibility that it will be her last.

    The play's hidden and horrifying subtext has to do with domestic violence, but it does not answer the question of why women like Jo accept their victim role apparently without hope of escape.

    Amelia's response, also, is the puzzling one of anger, and the question is whether it is because she does not act, or because Jo does not. The dialogue explores the relationships within the trio, strangely distorted by unspoken horror.

    In a weird sense, Jo's victimhood provides her with a kind of power over her two witnesses, and she taunts them with knowledge they can hardly bear. The final scene sees some of the boundaries down, but Amelia can only give emotional support as Jo spirals towards the end of her dark odyssey.

    The three performances in this powerful work are first-class, and we owe thanks to Red Stitch for alerting us to a new, challenging talent in Green.

    Raised in Captivity

    Richard Evans, Stage Left 30-Jun-03

    Raised in Captivity (11/6/03 - 6/07/03) by Nicky Silver. Directed by Chris Kohn.

    Focusing on the emotional fallout following the death of a parent, Raised in Captivity is an absurd comedy tackling the complexities of human relationships. The excellent cast manage to tease out the humour of the play without undermining its tragic elements. Its a feat which results in a hilarious yet incisive production.
    Siblings Sebastian (Dion Mills) and Bernadette (Verity Charlton) meet for the first time in years, at a cemetery after the funeral of their mother, Miranda. Also in attendance is Bernadette's husband Kip (Richard Cawthorne), a disillusioned dentist with an unhealthy obsession with teeth.

    We quickly learn that Sebastian has been estranged from both his sister and mother since leaving home. He is a writer reluctant to return to his sister's house for either the wake or a protracted visit.

    We also meet Sebastian's psychologist Hillary MacMahon (Olivia Connolly) in an extremely funny exchange during which the roles of client and therapist are reversed. This scene is handled extremely well, both in terms of acting and direction. This also helps set up the second act, which magnifies the absurd elements presented during the first.

    Rounding out the cast is Dylan Taylor Sinlcair (Vince Miller) a prisoner with whom Sebastian has an obsessive correspondence. While reading his letters to Dylan, Sebastian engages in a kind of dream conversation with the felon. During this, Dylan questions Sebastian, blurring the line between communication and fantasy.

    In the second half both Connolly and Miller play additional characters. Connolly makes a brief yet memorable appearance as Miranda, visiting her confused son Sebastian. Miller plays Roger, a hustler picked up by Sebastian. Both actors successfully alter voice and body language to suit these new roles.

    The script by Nicky Silver is simultaneously clear yet complex, the American setting translating well to an Australian context. The cast adopt American accents without this coming across as contrived.  

    Jesus Hopped the A Train

    Bill Perrett, The Sunday Age 18/05/2003

    Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train (May 7 - June 1, 2003) by Stephen Adly Guirgis. Directed by Peter Evans.

    An import from New York, Stephen Adly Guirgis' Jesus Hopped the A Train makes the transition to St Kilda with creditable success. It focuses on two inmates of Riker's Island high-security prison, who are allowed an hour's exercise each day on the roof of the prison in cages. One is Angel (Vince Miller), a young Hispanic man who has been charged, in the first instance, with the attempted murder of a corrupt religious cult leader whom he has shot "in the ass" because he believes he has stolen one of his friends. The other is Lucius (Kenneth Ransom), a black man convicted of eight serial murders, currently fighting a death sentence for his crimes.

    Angel's public defence lawyer, Mary-Jane (Kate Cole), decides, after a difficult beginning, to do whatever it takes to have her client acquitted. Lucius is more interested in converting Angel to the religious belief he has adopted in prison.

    Jesus Hopped the A Train relies primarily for its effects on language. The action is, unsurprisingly, constricted to the two cages and an interview room. Ransom's Lucius does have a wonderful physical aspect - he exercises energetically while praying - but it is his non-stop razor-edged banter and philosophical disputation, his joy and skill in language use, that makes the character so remarkable.

    Angel is no slouch either as a verbal combatant, but he has most often to defer to the older man. Their exchanges - about the existence and nature of God, about good and evil, freedom, karma, justice and fairness - are sharp, tense, often very funny, provocative and always entertaining.

    Both actors deliver precise and rich performances. Cole is also impressive as the talented, once self-assured and now somewhat disillusioned lawyer. She provides a dry retrospective commentary on the action. Dion Mills is effective as the first of two guards overseeing the two inmates, a "good cop" who is dismissed for his sympathetic dealing with Lucius, and Richard Crawthorne's Valdez, the replacement, makes a credible sadist, an effectual foil to Lucius' humanity.

    Jesus Hopped the A Train is a long play - over two hours including the interval - but Peter Evans' direction never allows the pace to flag. The design by Christina Smith is suitably hard and spare. A satisfying and rewarding piece.

    Ransom Superb in Compelling Performance (Jesus Hopped the A Train)

    Helen Thompson, The Age 13-May-03

    Jesus Hopped the A Train (May 7 - June 1, 2003) by Stephen Adly Guirgis. Directed by Peter Evans.

    Red Stitch Actors Theatre has quickly won fans for its bold programming and hard work. Jesus Hopped the "A" Train is another in the series of contemporary, mainly American, hard-hitting plays that the ensemble has made its specialty. Melbourne theatregoers are unlikely to see such plays anywhere else.

    Non-mainstream, American theatre has a role in uncovering powerful issues seething beneath the surface of the world's largest democracy. Jesus Hopped the "A" Train is a prison play, one that reveals the monstrous power of a legal system that jails millions of citizens.

    Set in New York's Riker Island prison for the worst of criminals, its subject is not just violence, but the paradoxical power of Christian belief in this context.

    Two men, in adjoining cages, face punishment for murder. Lucius Jackson (Kenneth Ransom) has killed eight people, apparently without motive, but has found God in jail. Angel (Vince Miller) has shot a corrupt, religious leader who brainwashed and captured a friend. Mary Jane (Kate Cole) is his lawyer. Valdez (Richard Cawthorne) is a self-righteous prison guard with a vicious streak, while another guard (Dion Mills) has been sacked for too-sympathetic treatment of Lucius.

    Angel's worst fear is a life sentence, but it is Lucius's best hope, the alternative being extradition to Florida and the death penalty. Mary Jane gambles her own career and Angel's fate on a long shot in the courtroom. The outcome is tragic for all of them.

    What makes the play absolutely gripping is not only the plot and the suspense that hangs over everything, but the philosophical and religious beliefs that are fiercely contested and imbue the whole work with tragic irony. The Christian belief that sustains the serial killer is the reason for the incarceration of Angel, and it eventually causes his downfall.

    Miller gives a moving, intense and convincing performance as Angel, revealing beneath the tough-talking bravado the character's inherent decency - or is it weakness? - that will make him a victim of both religious proselytising and a brutal legal system.

    But it is Ransom's night. He is superb as Lucius; his portrayal of a character whose deeds are almost beyond comprehending is rich with irony, warmth, zealotry and conviction. It is a compelling, complex performance that could hardly be bettered.

    Cole is tough and tragic as Mary Jane; Mills provides another facet of American character as the guard; and Cawthorne makes Valdez's moral certainty absolutely chilling. Altogether it is another fine production from Red Stitch.

    Richard Cawthorne and Kenneth Ransom in Jesus Hopped the A Train. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    The House of Bernarda Alba

    Elizabeth Young. Beat Magazine 15-Apr-03

    The House of Bernarda Alba (April 2 - May 4, 2003) by Frederico Garcia Lorca. Directed by Christabel Sved.

    The latest production from the prolific Red Stitch Actors Theatre is the final work by Spanish playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca, who was executed by the fascists during his country's civil war. The House of Bernarda Alba is a study of the consequences of repression, and depicts the impact and fury of denied sexuality in a family of women ruled by fear and respectability.

    Set in a world where love, marriage and mourning all have a price, and servants are granted more freedom within the social confines than their patrona, widower Bernarda decrees her house in mourning for the next eight years. The play explores the intricate relationship between five sisters forbidden to marry and oppressed by the church, their mother Bernarda and society. The rising undercurrents of suppressed passion build following the engagement of the eldest, exposing the force of forbidden love, feverish yearning and revenge.

    The intimate theatre in which the play is staged, and powerful performances from the cast, capture the brutal subjugation of womanhood imprisoned by conventions, and the fatal cocktail of jealousy and simmering, denied desire.

    The House of Bernarda Alba is presented with devastating rawness, exploring the way piety can become treacherous hypocrisy, and affluence impoverished.

    Where's My Money?

    Amy Dobson, Vibewire.net - 03-Apr-03

    Where's My Money? (March 5 - 30, 2003) by John Patrick Shanley. Directed by Beng Oh.

    Where's My Money? is a play full of intelligence and wit - with some moments of rare profundity and insight too. A great choice for Red Stitchs first production of the year, the writing holds its own, but thankfully, in this production its solidly backed by great acting and direction.

    Celeste, played charmingly by Kate Cole, is an out of work actress with a limp and an unemployed stoner boyfriend. She runs into old acquaintance Natalie (Kat Stewart) in a caf, who is now an accountant and married to a lawyer. Celeste is perfectly dressed in a slip and bright cut off tights, next to the aggravatingly immaculate Natalie, in her red designer suit and bag to match. Celestes past choices and present life are called into question by both, painfully judged by Natalie and re-assessed by Celeste. For Natalie, the past is dredged up into the present unexpectedly at the end of the scene when the ghost of Tommy storms into the caf to ask, or rather demand from Natalie Where's My Money?!

    The play is beautifully structured, consisting of five scenes, and in all but the last scene we are introduced to a character who has been mentioned in the previous scene, thus more and more about each of the characters and their lives is slowly revealed. All actors are very well cast in their roles, and thus the characters are fascinatingly three dimensional. Brett Cousins does a great job of inspiring empathy as Natalies divorce lawyer husband, worn out and jaded from both previous and present love. Dion Mills plays his boss and confident Sidney, while also cast as the ghost of Tommy. In each of these roles Mills vocal and physical qualities are outstanding: intense, yet multi-levelled enough to inspire everything from hatred to admiration as Sidney, and real fear in the audience as Tommy.

    The forth scene between Sidney and his wife Marcia Marie (Olivia Connolly) was a particularly good demonstration of the skill of both the actors and director. Within this one scene consisting mainly of an argument between husband and wife, the status was constantly changing, as were the tactics used by each to get what they wanted. The tone of their relationship shifted too, from dominant husband and victim wife, to lovers, to mother and child-like relations. Olivia Connolly had a beautifully calm, sarcastic manor that switched to psychotic anger in seconds.

    The space consists of a multi-level platform/stage which runs down the centre of the room. The platform is covered in creased, brownish fabric and sprinkled with dirt and grit, and at either end of it are two red doors. This stage configuration is practical in showing us the action right up close- and dramatically, it is used to great effect, for example, the positioning of light behind the doors as they swing open and one waits, dreading to see what is behind them. Very seldom have I experienced real fear in the theatre, but there were some great moments of suspense in this play that amounted to just that.

    Director Beng Oh made some great choices here by keeping the set and blocking reasonably simple yet effective, letting the characters, and the talent of the actors in portraying them drive this production. The play is truthfully and wittily written, with twists and surprises in every scene. The supernatural and the very real intertwine throughout, embodying the way that we manifest our pasts in the present by holding onto people and things. This play is funny and entertaining, not at all moralistic or preachy- yet some profound ideas shine through about the western ideal of happiness and how we treat one another in order to get what it is we think will make us happy.

    The good: the play and cast.
    The bad: I'd say it was a bit long, but the time flew perhaps the seats are a bit hard.
    The vibe: Dont miss it. 

    Love Hurts (Where's My Money?)

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun 12-Mar-03

    Where's My Money? (March 5 - March 30, 2003) by John Patrick Shanley. Directed by Beng Oh.

    This week in New York playwright John Patrick Shanley is directing his play Dirty Story, yet another in a long line of his works about love, hate and sex.
    
    In Dirty Story, the kinky and violent lovers turn out to be Israel and Palestine. No, really! Shanley loves morality almost as much as he loves a good laugh.
    
    On this side of the world, until the end of March, you can see another of Shanley's nasty little comedies about the vile things we do in the name of friendship, love and marriage.
    
    It's a good thing we live in a godless world, because the Big Guy would stamp these folk into the dust like unwanted cigarettes.
    
    In Where's My Money? the only thing the meek inherit is the earth they're buried under. Those who love are used, abused and ripped off.
    
    It's a world in which love is an unnecessary vulnerability. Ditto trust. All it does is lower your guard.
    
    The play begins with two old "friends" meeting in a cafe. Since the two previously saw one another, Natalie (Kat Stewart) has traded rough-trade romance for a clinical marriage with a lawyer.
    
    Celeste (Kate Cole) is persisting with her loser boyfriend - and her acting career - but having a torrid and masochistic affair with a married lawyer.
    
    The beauty of the first act of this play is that it shifts like plates in California during an eight-on-the-Richter-scale earthquake. Ascendency is as fleeting as true love. Facades are quickly dropped and knives are drawn. Literally! There are even a couple of unruly ghosts exacting revenge.
    
    While Beng Oh's production gets a bit out of hand in the first scene of the second act, the play is performed with such gleeful, manic energy that we are powerless to resist it.
    And while Shanley lets us off the hook in a way that countryman Neil LaBute never would, he still manages to give us all a good bitch-slapping.
    
    Where's My Money? is easily the best thing on in Melbourne right now, and another amazing effort from Red Stitch.

• 2004 Season
  • • The Day Room
    • Gritty Realism Pits Family Against Country (Loyal Women)
    • Loyal Women
    • The Night Heron
    • Excellent Cast Conveys Moral Confusion (The Night Heron)
    • Love, Betrayal and Survival in Tough Tale (Iron)
    • Iron
    • Riding Out the Storm, Brilliantly (Under the Whaleback)
    • Under the Whaleback
    • The Twisted Face of Family Drama (Year of the Family)
    • O Daddy, Where Art Thou? (Year of the Family)
    • Outlying Islands
    • Some Voices
    • Some Voices

    The Day Room

    Lisa Cugnetto, Beat Magazine, 2/12/2004

    The Day Room (Nov 25 - Dec 19, 2004) by Don De Lillo. Directed by Alyson Campbell.

    Nothing is what it seems in Red Stitchs final show for the year, The Day Room.
    
    American playwright Don De Lillo has written a clever, unsettling work that explores the fine line between reality and fantasy, or more so, sanity and insanity. What and who is real in a world where all that you believe to be true is really something else?
    
    Directed by Alyson Campbell, the play begins in a hospital room where the anxious, introverted Wyatt (played wonderfully by Daniel Frederiksen) awaits a visit from his doctor and the determined Budge (Peter Stratford) fishes for interesting talk. But as the play progresses, madness unravels. The people you assume to be patients, doctors and nurses are all psychiatric patients in role-play; residents of the Arno Klein psychiatric ward.
    
    Highly amusing, unusual and almost absurd, The Day Room is not an easy play to understand. And while not for everyone, The Day Room is thought-provoking wickedly warped fun.

    Gritty Realism Pits Family Against Country (Loyal Women)

    Thuy On, The Australian 26/10/04

    Loyal Women (Oct 13 - November 14, 2004) by Gary Mitchell. Directed by Denny Lawrence.

    AT first glance, the latest Red Stitch production seems to be a kitchen-sink drama: an excoriating portrait of domestic drudgery.

    Brenda (Verity Charlton), the matriarch of a demanding household, has to deal with surly teenage daughter Jenny (Ella Caldwell) and Jenny's fractious, mewling baby. Then there's her bed-ridden mother-in-law Rita (Carole Yelland), whose grasp on reality is shaky at best, and her husband Terry (David Whiteley) who has just been released after 16 years in jail.

    His return adds to an already toxic atmosphere and threatens to destroy everything that Brenda had created since his imprisonment, particularly her fledgling relationship with Mark (Brett Cousins).

    But Gary Mitchell's Loyal Women is not just another play about familial or sexual dynamics and women being relegated to home and hearth. Set in Northern Ireland, it isn't long before politics pokes its head through the door.

    When dull-eyed, sharp-tongued Brenda isn't tending to her many dependants, she is doing chores -- reluctantly -- for the Women's Ulster Defence Association (an extreme Protestant unit) and hosting meetings of the local Loyalist paramilitary branch in her crowded living room.

    Her colleagues Maureen, Gail and Heather (Christine Keogh, Kate Cole and Kat Stewart) proudly call themselves the Ulster Freedom Fighters, and they're not averse to using terrorist tactics to achieve their goals. This is secret women's business and, above the clinking of teacups, the topic of conversation is torture and violence.

    When local girl Adele (Olivia Connolly) is accused of fraternising with a man belonging to the IRA, Brenda is required to prove her own loyalty to the party. The result is menacing, nail-biting theatre as national politics bleeds into personal priorities. Rare in its subject matter, and more powerful because of it, Loyal Women's portrait of strong, hard-bitten women at war is a grim affair and one devoid of any soft touches by director Denny Lawrence.

    The play is well served by the small stage, which perfectly illustrates the claustrophobic conditions of domestic servitude. With uniformly excellent performances from the cast -- who all manage a convincing Irish lilt -- it seems unfair to single out individual actors, but Charlton (who appears in most of the scenes) must be applauded for her portrayal of the beleaguered Brenda, driven to choose between family and country. That she has her own secret to protect makes Loyal Women an even more complex and compelling story. This is social realism at its grittiest.

    Kat Stewart, Verity Charlton and Kate Cole in Loyal Women. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Loyal Women

    Bill Perrett, The Sunday Age 31/10/2004

    Loyal Women (Oct 20 - Nov 14, 2004) by Gary Mitchell. Directed by Denny Lawrence.

    Although the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland is at the fore of Loyal Women, the broader political situation isn't its main concern. The play will inevitably invite comparison with Rona Munro's Bold Girls, which was staged earlier this year at Chapel Off Chapel.
    
    Bold Girls presented the lives of women whose men are involved on the Catholic side of the conflict. Like Loyal Women, which focuses on the Protestant side, it was more interested in the ways they continue to lead their lives in these circumstances. Brenda Ford (Verity Charlton) is a woman of quiet persistence. Her husband Terry (David Whiteley), just out of jail after 16 years, has already been unfaithful. Brenda's teenage daughter Jenny (Ella Caldwell) is a new and unenthusiastic mother. Terry's bedridden mother Rita (Carole Yelland) floats in and out of reality between demands for Brenda's attention. If all that weren't enough, the local Women's Ulster Defence Association cell wants Brenda to do the books for them.

    The cell, led by Maureen (Christine Keogh) and her deputy Gail (Kate Cole), also includes the rather feral Heather (Kat Stewart), whose solution to most problems is to "do" someone. They are trying to convince a local estate girl, Adele (Olivia Connolly) to give up her Catholic boyfriend, who is suspected of being an IRA member. Brenda herself is being pursued by nice Mark (Brett Cousins), who seems a little out of his depth.
    
    Charlton is excellent in the demanding role of Brenda, torn between a past of unquestioning loyalty to the organisation and a more mature present in which she can see the limitations of such blind fidelity. She creates a sense of tension barely under control, which builds towards the play's powerful climax.
    
    Stewart is clearly having a good time as Heather, who is funny in a horrifying way. Cole is also impressive as the butch and ambitious Gail.

    Director Denny Lawrence keeps the tension high and the delivery crisp and sharp, and Miranda Flinn's set works well in bringing the audience into the action. An engaging and satisfying piece of theatre.

    The Night Heron

    Bill Perrett, The Sunday Age 12/09/2004

    The Night Heron (August 26 - September 19, 2004) by Jez Butterworth. Directed by Martin White.

    Jez Butterworth's The Night Heron is set in the Cambridgeshire Fens, depicted as a place of superstitious intolerance and barely domesticated strangeness. Butterworth has created a memorably uncanny universe, peopled by strange characters and weird goings-on.
    
    Griffin Montgomery (David Whiteley) and Jess Wattmore (Dion Mills) are trying to eke out an existence on the dole, having been fired from their jobs as gardeners at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, Jess because he has been accused of the sexual abuse of a boy, and Griffin because he has stood by his friend. Into their rather miserable world comes the truly amazing Bolla Fogg (Kate Cole), ex-con, who is looking for a place to stay. She has as little time for the town as Jess and Griffin, her mother having been a cleaner in a college and victim of the careless indifference of the snooty students. There is an ever-present feeling that serious violence is never far away with Bolla, despite the fact that she is making an effort to turn over a new leaf.

    Griffin decides the way out of their financial problems is to enter a poetry competition put on by the university. The problem is his poem isn't very good. Bolla, who knows a little about poetry (she can recite Marvell's The Garden, thanks to a course she took inside) figures the best way to come up with a winner is to get, by any means necessary, an expert from Cambridge.
    
    Guest actors Phil Roberts and Reuben MacNamara as local weirdos Dougal Duggan and Neddy Beagle join Red Stitch regular Richard Cawthorne as pretend cop Royce, and guest Adam Hunter in the part of the hapless poetry "expert" conscripted by Bolla.

    Danielle Harrison's set and Alycia Hevey's lighting create a tense and claustrophobic atmosphere, and director Martin White oversees a production that is both funny and disquieting.

    Dion Mills, David Whiteley and Adam Hunter (foreground) in The Night Heron. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Excellent Cast Conveys Moral Confusion (The Night Heron)

    Helen Thomson, The Age 31/08/2004

    The Night Heron (August 26 - September 19, 2004) by Jez Butterworth. Directed by Martin White.

    This is a dark play, one that brings to mind earlier plays about the blood lust of the mob, fuelled by ignorance and superstition - plays such as Arthur Miller's The Crucible, for example. Only this one is not set in the historical past, but rather a present in which the forces of darkness are undiminished by modern enlightenment.

    Set in the fens district of eastern England, it conjures up, in this atmospheric production directed by Martin White, a powerful sense of the forces of good and evil in eternal battle.

    But British playwright Jez Butterworth radically subverts any conventional binaries: this is far from just another morality play. Its modernity lies in the gradual uncovering of a moral confusion in people without religious or any other guidance, even those who are certain of a god.
    His characters struggle for a living in the water-logged marshes of the fens, little different from their forebears centuries earlier, and their religious faith is as fanatical, irrational and ultimately brutal as any Cromwellian Puritan sect.

    Their nearest town is Cambridge, a centre of learning, which only throws into more dramatic relief their benighted backwardness, symbolised in almost biblical terms by most of the characters being gardeners, employed by the Cambridge colleges.

    Jess Wattmore (Dion Mills) is a follower of Dougal Duggan (Phil Roberts), self-styled messiah, as is Royce (Richard Cawthorne) and Neddy Beage, (Reuben MacNamara). Griffin Montgomery (David Whiteley) lives in a cottage with Jess, his friend from boyhood.

    They take as a lodger the former prisoner Bolla Fogg (Kate Cole). All become enmeshed in a plot that hinges on whether Jess is really a child molester, or just a scapegoat who unleashes the blood-lust of others.

    The plot is full of shocks, surprises, twists and turns that keep overturning our judgements of these characters. The actors, with intense, utterly convincing performances, directed with a sense of timing, gradually make us look into their doomed world with a hopeless sense of inevitability.

    This is an excellent production of a fascinating play that intrigues as much as it arouses strong emotions.

    David Whiteley, Kate Cole and Dion Mills in The Night Heron. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Love, Betrayal and Survival in Tough Tale (Iron)

    Jewel Topsfield, The Age 20/07/2004

    Iron (July 14 - August 8, 2004) by Rona Munro. Directed by Bruce Kerr.

    Fay (Jenny Lovell), who killed her beloved husband with a kitchen knife, has spent the past 15 years in prison. She can only see the sun from her cell by lying on the floor. With no visitors except for her solicitor in the early days, Fay's barren life is spent gardening, smoking, staring at the walls and enduring the malicious barbs of the embittered warden Sheila (Verity Charlton).

    Her bleak world is changed when she receives a shock visit from her 25-year-old daughter Josie (Olivia Connolly), who can remember nothing of her life before her father was killed and wants her mother to re-ignite her memories.

    In return, Fay insists on living vicariously through Josie. She urges her beautiful, successful daughter to replace her sombre black suits with sexy red dresses, dance and flirt the night away, and then recount her experiences to her life-starved mother.
    Their lives become painfully intertwined as Josie struggles to discover whether her mother was the victim of an abusive husband, who killed in self-defence, or just another murderous lifer, as the paternalistic prison guard George (Ross Thompson) warns her.

    Iron is gruelling, gut-wrenching stuff about love, betrayal, survival, the bond between mothers and daughters and how heart-breakingly easy it is to destroy your own life and the lives of those whom you love. Scottish playwright Rona Munro also wrote the screenplay for Ken Loach's brilliant but harrowing film about social welfare, Ladybird, Ladybird.

    The performances are virtually flawless, although half an hour could probably be shaved off the show's length.

    The thick Scottish accents adopted by the actors are no doubt in homage to Munro and Scottish playwriting, but all those rolled rs are a bit distracting.

    However, one of the most rewarding aspects of this play is its complexity and moral ambiguity. Unlike many plays, which pack a black-and-white moral punch, Iron does not have a neatly resolved ending. This is theatre at its best.

    Olivia Connolly and Ross Thomson in Iron. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Iron

    Bill Perrett, The Age 25/07/2004

    Iron (July 14 - August 8, 2004) by Rona Munro. Directed by Bruce Kerr.

    In Iron, Fay (Jenny Lovell) has been in prison for 15 years for the murder of the husband whom, it transpires, she loved and still misses deeply.

    As the play begins Fay is visited by her daughter Josie (Olivia Connolly) for the first time since she was imprisoned. From a nervous and tentative start the two begin to depend heavily on one another, Fay because she believes she can vicariously live a life on the outside through her daughter, and Josie because her mother holds the key to her lost memories of life before the murder.

    Rona Munro's script is deceptively simple. It builds subtly to intricate complexities of characterisation and psychological depth. It is certainly not the first time a writer has used the literal image of the jail to explore ideas of other kinds of imprisonment, but it is certainly one of the better examples.
    Josie's freedom to come and go, so prized by her mother, is really worthless to her. Life outside her visits is only a matter of marking time; reality is reconstructing the past with Fay's help.

    Two guards, each interested for their own reasons, add to the tension of the situation. Verity Charlton as the cynical Sheila and guest Ross Thompson as the perceptive and kindly George give further depth to the portrayals of the central characters. Both are first-rate in the parts, but the play focuses heavily on the mother and daughter.

    Connolly gives Josie a finely judged combination of strength and fragility. Lovell is outstanding in the role of the mother, ranging with admirable craft between a lifer's hardness and lack of sentimentality and maternal pride and love. An exceptional performance. 

    Olivia Connolly and Jenny Lovell in Iron. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Riding Out the Storm, Brilliantly (Under the Whaleback)

    Helen Thomson,The Age 06/06/04

    Under The Whaleback (2/6/2004 - 27/6/2004) by Richard Bean. Directed by Eddie Knight.

    The tiny cabin of the theatre that houses Red Stitch has never been put to better use than in this claustrophobic recreation of the inside of a North Sea fishing trawler. "Under the whaleback" refers to the crew's living quarters where they are confined for long periods of the long, dangerous voyage in search of cod.

    Richard Bean's play, which had its first performance at London's Royal Court Theatre last year, is a powerful piece of writing, and this production deserves the highest praise. The second of its three acts, in particular, recreates the terror of a storm at sea and a sinking ship with an authenticity that could induce a panic attack in audience members.

    Each of the acts contains violence, often unexpected. In the first, in 1965, it is just an overheard description of a pointless act of cruelty. Yet the details of this scene are crucial clues to understanding what follows. Why did the larger-than-life Cassidy kill his beloved good-luck dog before sailing? Why does he give his life-saving suit to Darrell, the young rookie he claims is his son?

    Seven years later, we hear of Cassidy's foolhardy death on that voyage, and Darrell is the only crew member in a storm suit when the second sinking occurs. Caught in the terrifying storm, the ice gradually building up on the boat's superstructure, huge waves battering it like a tree trunk hitting a building, the crew talk of women: whores, wives and daughters.

    That conversation haunts the third act, in 2002, when a different trawler has become a theme-park artefact, and Darrell its custodian. The disappearance of a 400-year-old way of life, one that seems to have been unbelievably dangerous, has left an angry void in the young men who would once have been its heirs.

    Once again, shocking violence occurs, this time not deadly but resolved when the mysterious threads of the stories of the dead men are unravelled at last.

    There are some marvellous performances: Richard Cawthorne as the younger Darrell; Don Halbert as Cassidy and the older Darrell (left); Vince Miller as Norman and Pat (right); Dion Mills as Roc; Peter Stratford in a beautiful vignette as Bill. All give this play about masculinity an authenticity that is totally absorbing.

    Peter Stratford and Richard Cawthorne in Under the Whaleback. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Under the Whaleback

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun 08/06/04

    Under The Whaleback (2/6/2004 - 27/6/2004) by Richard Bean. Directed by Eddie Knight.

    Richard Bean's play launches a harpoon at the mythology of the sailor's life. And it pierces deep into the belly of the beast.

    In Bean's play, fishing is still a vocation - a calling - but it's one that stops men from having to make adult choices about how to live and what to do.

    Fishing is a macho priesthood, if you like. Difficult, but safe. Salt is in the blood and is passed on, generation after generation.

    One boy meets his estranged father by accident in the first scene, set in 1965.

    Thirty-seven years later, in the last scene, another boy hunts down the truth about his father. He has inherited the dead man's madness, just as the other boy inherited colourblindness.

    As finely acted as this Red Stitch production is, Bean's words never come to dramatic life. He has written a screenplay, perhaps a radio play, and not a particularly interesting one.

    The script presents enormous challenges for cast and crew. We have to imagine salt spray and heaving oceans and the scuttling of a huge boat in icy seas. We have to believe the violence and blood.

    The production is let down by the sound, which fails to nail us.

    Seeing members of this tireless ensemble tackling a variety of roles - often against type - is one of the great pleasures of coming to see Red Stitch.

    Here yet again David Whiteley does something extraordinary in a tiny role.

    And guest actor Peter Stratford is marvellous and authentic as the senior crewman in the middle scene.

    Not for the squeamish. 

    The Twisted Face of Family Drama (Year of the Family)

    Helen Thomson, The Age 12/05/04

    Year of the Family (May 5 - 30, 2004) by Anthony Neilson. Directed by Ross Ganf.

    In this production of one of Britain's "In Yer Face" company, Anthony Neilson, Red Stitch pushes the boundaries in new ways. This is probably what Red Stitch does best, and it is to their credit that they have included two guest actors and a South Australian director, Ross Ganf.

    In Yer Face Theatre could probably be summed up as everything that is not polite. The language is extreme, the action disturbing, the usual moral framework distorted. The result is confronting, particularly so in the cramped confines of Red Stitch's little theatre.

    Neilson's play, first performed in London in 1994 (the International Year of the Family), turns the notion of family on its head. Its five characters manage to look unremarkable in the outside world, but when they assume family roles - sister, father, son, daughter - they all look like suitable cases for treatment. Dysfunctional hardly suffices to describe their strange, twisted relationships and damaged personalities.

    Neilson is not interested in trying to work out why they are the way they are. It's true Freud would have had something to say about the two half-sisters, Claire (Laura Gordon) and Fliss (Kat Stewart, pictured), who both want daddy as a lover. But since their biological fathers are missing, they make do with "found" men of a suitable age.

    Fliss kidnaps a tramp (David Whiteley, pictured) and tries to brainwash him into assuming the identity of her dead father. Unsurprisingly, he has problems of his own, but does fall in love with the idea of Fliss's mother, not exactly what Fliss had in mind.

    While her crazy adventure begins to unravel, Claire finds sleeping with both father Dickie (Peter Stratford) and brother Sid (Ross Ditcham) more and more tricky. Sid is violent and unstable, playing out his own Freudian drama with Dickie, using Claire as his weapon.

    The play tells a weird story, but its style - and here much can be attributed to Ganf - is confronting and disturbing. It swings from manic humour to tragic farce, troubling us with the real emotional needs that drive these characters into extreme behaviour.

    The cast give this play the full-blown treatment it needs in a production that is full of surprising comedy and sometimes shocking frankness.

    Kat Stewart and David Whiteley in Year of the Family. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    O Daddy, Where Art Thou? (Year of the Family)

    Thuy On, The Australian 10/05/04

    Year of the Family (May 5 - 30, 2004) by Anthony Neilson. Directed by Ross Ganf.

    Small-to-medium companies are "the major source of new and innovative Australian theatre" according to a discussion paper compiled for the Australia Council's 2003 analysis of trienially funded theatre companies.

    "Without increased funding for the creation of new work, there will be a fall in the number of productions and/or quality of work," the paper also claims. "A spiral of decline may commence."

    Fortunately Red Stitch Actors Theatre and other small independent companies offset such dire predictions.

    Receiving no government funding at all, the Red Stitch ensemble has somehow managed to survive by sheer determination and a gutsy work ethic.

    The paucity of costume and setting budget is irrelevant, as it's the high-level performance skills of the young cast that brand the company with such distinction.

    Originally conceived by 29-year-old Vincent Miller in 2002, Red Stitch fills the gap between state-sponsored theatre and fringe productions.

    As Melbourne's only repertory actors theatre company (with a dozen names on the books, plus the occasional guest performers), Red Stitch has built a solid reputation for introducing overseas work from playwrights who would otherwise not be featured on the local stage.

    It has also staged Australian plays to similar acclaim, of which Year of the Family is its third Australian premiere this year.

    It is quirky, perverse and unpredictable, characteristic of the plays staged by the troupe. Twentysomething half-sisters Claire (Laura Gordon) and Fliss (Kat Stewart) lack a father, and so go about in their own muddled way to find a replacement.

    Claire takes to a silvery-haired man, Dickie (Peter Stratford), to her bed while also indulging in a sadomasochistic relationship with vicious Sid (Ross Ditcham) - who in turn nurses plans for punishing his dad for desertion.

    While her sister moves between paternalistic and psychotic lovers, Fliss kidnaps a tramp (David Whiteley) and methodically sets out to fashion him in the image of her late father. Dressed in another man's clothes and tutored in the idiosyncrasies of his life, the tramp slowly becomes a willing participant in Fliss's delusions.

    Gordon and Stewart are excellent as the lovelorn sisters who are brittle in their need; Ditcham and Stratford are also orphans seeking acceptance, while Whiteley is all awkward vulnerability in his largely mute role. Ross Ganf ably directs the short, sharp scenes, which cut from the exploits of one sister to the other.

    Year of the Family shows how the desperate and the lonely gravitate towards one another to seek a functional family within the dysfunctional. Tainted by the blackest of humour, the final tableau of this makeshift family gathering for Christmas dinner is as triumphant as it is unsettling.

    First performed in London in 1994, in what was known as the European Year of the Family, the play is Anthony Neilson's retort to the biologically determined, politically beloved concept of the nuclear family.

    The artificial constructs set up by the siblings are shown to be no less a viable option for those trying to find a connection. Neilson belongs to a collective called In-Yer-Face Theatre, which is notorious for its course language and questioning of moral norms. Another of his plays, Stitching, performed last year by independent Melbourne company Theatre@risk, pre-empted the sexual violence and the deft dissection of relationship found in Year of the Family.

    Once again, red Stitch has chosen and performed well. Long may it survive the vagaries of the Australian theatre climate. 

    Laura Gordon and Peter Stratford in Year of the Family. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Outlying Islands

    Bill Perrett, The Sunday Age 11/04/04

    Outlying Islands (March 31 - April 25, 2004) by David Greig. Directed by Denis Moore.

    Red Stitch set the bar very high with its past production, Joe Penhall's Some Voices, and it continues that standard of performance and material with Outlying Islands by Scottish playwright David Greig.

    In 1939 two young naturalists, John (Vince Miller) and Robert (Dion Mills) go to an uninhabited and remote island off Scotland to study Leach's Petrel, a bird about which little is known. For both of them it seems the chance of a lifetime. They are billeted in an old building, once a pagan church, in the care of the island's leaseholder, the stern Kirk (Bruce Kerr) and his pretty niece, Ellen (Ella Caldwell).

    In the month that they are on the island, with war threatening in Europe, the four play out with brilliant intensity issues of freedom and convention, sensuality, love and death, all complicated by the fact that the government department that sent them seems to have sinister plans for the island.

    The Red Stitch regulars are as good as ever, with Mills forceful as the driven Robert, and Miller a study in repressed passion and self-doubt as John. Caldwell's extended monologues as the sheltered Ellen, craving a chance at a life she can only imagine from visits to the cinema, are stunning. Guest Kerr is excellent as Kirk and later the captain of the relief ship. Greg Carroll's set is the most elaborate seen in this theatre, and it works well with Nick Merrylees' lighting. Denis Moore directs with a sure touch. 

    Ella Caldwell and Dion Mills in Outlying Islands. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Some Voices

    Kate Herbert, Herald Sun 04/02/04

    Some Voices (Feb 25 - Mar 21, 2004) by Joe Penhall. Directed by Wayne Chapple.

    English playwright Joe Penhall captures in SOME VOICES the comedy and tragedy of mental illness.

    Those who have the responsibility of a mentally ill family member will recognise the love, frustration and lack of control.

    Red Stitch's production boasts a clever and compelling script and consistently strong performances from all five actors.

    The play, directed by Wayne Chapple, is set in Shepherds Bush. The walls are painted with an abstract map of the London underground. It deals with the schizophrenic Ray (Brett Cousins), who is in the care of his divorced older brother, Pete (David Whiteley).

    Cousins and Whiteley convey superbly the fraught relationship between brothers whose lives have taken such different paths.

    Ray prefers beer - lots of it - to his prescribed medication. He lies and deceives in order to avoid seeing his psychiatrist or taking his drugs.

    His life intersects, by luck or misfortune, with Laura (Laura Gordon), a young, pregnant Irish woman, when he attempts to rescue her from Dave (Richard Cawthorne), the violent father of her unborn baby.

    The numerous locations are represented by items of furniture: a table for Pete's home, a mattress for Laura's, stools for the pub.

    My one criticism is the scene changes. There is a limit to our patience with, or interest in, the constant and frequent moving of furniture.

    Get a look at this show. It is riveting.

    Look for two final, poignant scenes between the brothers.

    Some Voices

    Bill Perrett , The Sunday Age 07-Mar-04

    Some Voices (Feb 25 - Mar 21, 2004) by Joe Penhall. Directed by Wayne Chapple.

    Red Stitch are back for 2004, and they continue to impress with this first-up offering. SOME VOICES by Joe Penhall, is a remarkably good play. Penhall's subject, the effects of schizophrenia on those experiencing it and those they come in contact with, may not sound promising, but in this work it becomes the touchstone for deep truths about love, loyalty and trust.

    At the beginning of the play Ray (Brett Cousins) has just been released from a mental hospital to the care of his brother Pete (David Whiteley). Pete is down-to-earth and compassionate and feels duty-bound to help Ray survive outside the institution, something he feels will best be achieved if Ray sticks with his prescribed regime of medication and management by a social worker. Ray has other ideas. In the course of his wandering around the neighbourhood he encounters Laura (Laura Gordon), who is being physically threatened by her violently possessive boyfriend Dave (Richard Cawthorne), intervenes on her behalf to his own considerable physical cost and falls in love with her.

    A relationship develops between them, always overshadowed by Dave's incandescent jealousy and the fact that Ray omits to tell Laura about his condition. In the meantime, the gloriously insane Ives (Dion Mills), a mate of Ray's from the hospital, has arrived at Pete's place and puts more pressure on his ability and willingness to take care of his brother.

    This Red Stitch line-up is very strong. Cousins' Ray is eerily reminiscent of the memorable drug-addicted Holt he played in last year's DONE DEAL; Pete's patience and humanity, tested to the limit, are tellingly underplayed by Whiteley. Cawthorne is coldly terrifying as the out-of-control Dave. Gordon as Laura manages a compelling mixture of toughness and gentleness. Mill's performance as Ives has a rivetingly messianic quality. SOME VOICES is a work of pathos, humour and insight into a common but rarely discussed condition. 

• 2005 Season
  • • Plot Twist Takes Art to Extremes (The Shape of Things)
    • Transformational Power of Love (The Shape of Things)
    • Masterpiece Comes of Age (Vincent in Brixton)
    • Bug
    • Country Life's Seedy Secret (The Country)
    • Horror Takes Hold of Rural Serenity (The Country)
    • Passionate Betrayal of Familial Ties (I Am Yours)
    • Anti-hero Saves Surreal Comedy (Playing the Victim)
    • Family taken by lodger's blarney (The Night Season)
    • Unobtrusive charm cleverly stitched up (The Night Season)
    • Pugilist Specialist

    Plot Twist Takes Art to Extremes (The Shape of Things)

    Helen Thomson, The Age 22/11/2005

    The Shape of Things (Nov 16 - Dec 17, 2005) by Neil LaBute. Directed by Tom Healey.

    In this play by American writer Neil LaBute, best known for the play and film In the Company of Men, Red Stitch has found a work that requires, and here receives, extraordinary performances to carry off its edgy style and shocking plot transformation.

    The Shape of Things initially seems just another variation on the theme of a young foursome whose love interests become entangled, three of them small-town inhabitants who are challenged and disturbed by an outsider who seems to push the boundaries of their comfort zones.

    Evelyn (Kat Stewart) is an art student who encounters Adam (Brett Cousins) at a gallery where she is about to deface a sculpture that puritanical citizens have censored with a fig leaf.

    She is a tough risk-taker with an extreme theory of art; smart and sexy. He is a classic nerd, working and studying part-time, dazzled by her interest in him.

    Unlikely as it seems, they nevertheless begin a relationship, and Adam is rapidly transformed by Evelyn's suggestions. Diet, exercise, contact lenses, even a little plastic surgery, turn him into a remarkably attractive man.

    Evelyn also has an impact on Adam's friends, Jenny (Kate Cole) and Phillip (Simon Wood). His old flatmate and Evelyn clash immediately, Phillip's chauvinism challenged by her feminism. Jenny, on the other hand, suddenly finds the transformed Adam disturbingly sexy.

    What turns this into an almost tragically affecting, very different play, is a revelation (its surprise is crucial and therefore shouldn't be revealed here) that lifts a story of personal relationships into an exploration of the morality of art itself.

    Suddenly, the apparently casual quotations from great artists and writers that have been dropped throughout focus on an extreme form of art for art's sake, one that calls itself amoral and declares that morality is irrelevant to it. Oscar Wilde is quoted, stating insincerity and treachery are necessary qualities in the artist, and this comes to have a terrible resonance in the context of this story.

    The four actors, meticulously directed by Tom Healey, give intense performances. Brett Cousins (winner of the 2004 Green Room best actor award) and Kat Stewart are outstanding.

    Brett Cousins and Kate Cole in The Shape of Things. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Transformational Power of Love (The Shape of Things)

    Susan Horsburgh, The Australian 22/11/2005

    The Shape of Things (Nov 16 - Dec 17, 2005) by Neil LaBute. Directed by Tom Healey.

    No one does casual cruelty quite like Neil LaBute and, in this production of the American writer's disturbing play, The Shape of Things, Melbourne's Red Stitch Actors Theatre seems to thoroughly delight in taking its audience on a compelling, provocative tour of humanity's dark side.

    In the cosy surrounds of its 58-seat St Kilda HQ, the independent ensemble tells the funny, intriguing tale of four American college students grappling with life, love and the moral ambiguities of art.

    The play opens in a university museum when Evelyn, a sexy young art student, meets Adam, the insecure literature major and part-time museum attendant who tries to stop her from defacing a statue with a spray-painted penis. Their verbal jousting quickly turns into romance and before long Adam is under Evelyn's spell.

    Adam's friends Phillip and Jenny watch dismayed as Evelyn coaxes him into transforming his wardrobe, pruning back his relationships and even trimming his nose until he is unrecognisable, even to himself.

    In an era of televised extreme makeovers, it's an interesting critique of the American penchant for supposed self-improvement, but of course there is a suitably macabre LaBute twist that muddies the waters even more.

    With the cast pushing around a set of big wooden blocks doubling for college beds and park benches, the staging isn't quite as elaborate as the all-star New York production I saw five years ago -- which featured Rachel Weisz and Paul Rudd, who also starred in LaBute's 2003 film version -- but Red Stitch's is no less engaging. Directed by Tom Healey, all four cast members turn in strong performances, with Kat Stewart all insouciant undergraduate smugness as Evelyn and Brett Cousins as the dork-done-good in her thrall.
    Guest actor Simon Wood is convincing as the stiff, unreconstructed jock in Seinfeldian white runners. And Kate Cole is endearing as the sweet but dim Jenny, one of the highlights being her squeaky humiliated hysterics towards the end of the play.

    Darryl Cordell's set is spare but clever, with spotlit souvenirs of each scene accumulating around the stage as the show progresses, ultimately creating an art-installation setting for the play's devastating conclusion.

    As the lights come up, the shell-shocked audience is left to file out of the tiny playhouse, debating the slippery ethics of art and the way love and aspiration can sometimes cause us to lose ourselves.

    Kat Stewart as Evelyn and Brett Cousins as Adam in The Shape of Things by Neil LaBute. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Masterpiece Comes of Age (Vincent in Brixton)

    Jim Murphy, The Age 10 October, 2005

    Vincent in Brixton (5 Oct - 5 Nov) by Nicholas Wright. Directed by Jonathan Messer.

    Vincent van Gogh is 20, a repressed, church-going junior clerk in an international firm of art dealers. He considers himself a failure at poetry and drawing, but is resolved to somehow make his mark on the world.

    In 1873 his company transfers him abroad and the play opens with him arriving in a South London kitchen, looking for lodgings. Ursula Loyer, still in widows' weeds 15 years after the death of her husband, runs a small school with her daughter, Eugenie. She has another lodger, Sam, a house-painter with aspirations to brushwork of a more artistic variety.

    This household, which belies its facade of genteel respectability, has a profound effect on the young Vincent. Specifically, his sexual awakening, with which he has long wrestled in his Calvinist upbringing, begins to unleash the artist within. The "house filled with love" inspires him to improve his drawing, and down-to-earth Sam introduces him to the hitherto forbidden pleasures of Guinness.

    The increasingly liberated Vincent is understandably attracted to the young Eugenie, but with that door closed he switches his attention to her mother.

    "I love your unhappiness," he tells Ursula. He recognises that she, too, suffers from the "darkness of the soul", so their involvement represents the beginnings of not only his artistic talent but his mental torment.

    Nicholas Wright's light drama, based on sketchy accounts of van Gogh's brief sojourn in London and letters to his brother, Theo, won the Olivier Award in Britain in 2003 and was nominated for a Tony Award in New York.

    It plays very easily, almost nonchalantly, and the contemporary ring of the dialogue is at odds with the period feel of Harriet Oxley's first-rate costumes and set. Yet that potential clash of styles does not seem to matter.

    Jonathan Messer's intelligent direction evokes a melancholia endemic not only to the character of Ursula but to the play as a whole. Adam Hunter, with a skilfully sustained Dutch accent, is outstanding as the blunt, edgy Vincent, and Saskia Post has wonderful serenity as Ursula. The sensuality of the scene in which they reveal their feelings is palpable.

    Richard Cawthorne's deft characterisation of the working-class Londoner Sam, Verity Charlton's gently unobtrusive presence as Eugenie, Olivia Connolly's entertaining contribution as Vincent's meddlesome sister who misconstrues the situation entirely, and singer Arabella Davison's musical interludes complete one of Red Stitch's most assured, polished productions.

    Bug

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun 31/08/05

    Bug (24 Aug - 25 Sept, 2005) by Tracy Letts. Directed by Martin White.

    THIS is one of those Star Trek holodeck plays where you're always conscious of the theatre walls behind the set. Behind each door is a dark void. Characters exit and vanish utterly. They don't have a life outside the tiny bedsit set. They exist only when they're on.

    But, for once, that's not an accident or a mistake. This play by Tracy Letts is an incredibly claustrophobic yarn about sexually transmitted paranoia.

    Peter, a survivor of the first Gulf War, and Agnes, the estranged wife of a jailed crim, hook up after being introduced by Agnes's Goldilocks lesbian friend Ronnie (Ella Caldwell).

    He's paranoid about the bugs and health problems he's sure he has picked up in the Middle East; he's certain he's been experimented upon by his government and the US military. And she's (rightly) paranoid about her violent, irrational beast of a husband who's just been released from prison.

    The scene is set (literally) by designer Anna Cordingley who gives us a wedge of a squalid little single-bedded motel room and lighting designer Stelios Karagiannis. Together, they work magic. The room has a life of its own.

    The director sets a cracking pace, lines tumble across one another and the humour is completely stripped from this wacko X-Files thriller. It's a wild and unsubtle ride, but the cast of five give it everything. To the credit of David Whiteley (Peter) and Kat Stewart (Agnes), they don't burn out by interval.

    Joe Clements' cameo as the crim husband is ferocious, awesome. It's a pity the character isn't as convincing as the performance.

    David Whiteley in Bug. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

    Country Life's Seedy Secret (The Country)

    Catherine Lambert, Sunday Herald Sun 24/7/05

    The Country (July 13 - Aug 13, 2005) by Martin Crimp. Directed by Denis Moore.

    The hostility that often simmers below the surface of social pleasantries reaches boiling point in The Country.

    Leading UK playwright Martin Crimp is at his taut best. He presents a respectable London couple who have become so mannered in conversation they have lost all ability to communicate.

    Questions are answered with questions in this world of self-doubt, anger, frustration and fragility.

    All attempts to resist argument and uphold civility are maintained with such steely resolve that niceness becomes a form of aggression.

    The actors maintain the tense pace and razor-sharp lines with wonderful alacrity, tempered by profound resentments.

    It is often challenging for actors to suppress emotion and Verity Charlton shines at this. Eyes remain downcast in her resolve. She plays Corrine, wronged wife to her doctor husband, Richard (Dion Mills). He has shifted his family to the country to maintain an affair wth an American girl, Rebecca (Laura Gordon).

    The English countryside becomes the setting for the spoiling of all naturalness in domestic life.

    The veneer of respectability masks a sordid world of drug addiction, infidelity and cruelty.

    It is a path that cannot be mended as the cold pleasantness in Corrine's marriage seeps through to her soul. She not only loses the ability to communicate, she loses all capacity to love.

    Red Stitch offers the best fringe theatre in Melbourne and this is yet another fine display of sophisticated writing performed and directed brilliantly.
    

    Dion Mills and Laura Gordon in The Country by Martin Crimp. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Horror Takes Hold of Rural Serenity (The Country)

    Helen Thomson, The Age 27/7/2005

    The Country (July 13 - Aug 13, 2005) by Martin Crimp. Directed by Denis Moore.

    This play by acclaimed British playwright Martin Crimp is just what Red Stitch Actors Theatre excels at - a tight, subtle and intimate thriller that irresistibly brings Harold Pinter's plays to mind. Its setting in the country and theme of attempted but futile escape from urban problems, along with a spare, rhythmic dialogue, also reminds us of Chekhov.

    Director Denis Moore with meticulous attention to timing, has produced a series of dialogue from the three actors that resonates in an almost orchestral sense. Each exchange, simple on the surface, is rich with unspoken meanings, unanswered questions and significant gaps, which sustains extraordinary tension.

    From the first scene between Corrine (Verity Charlton) and her doctor husband Richard (Dion Mills), a sense of dread is created. Richard has brought home a young woman, Rebecca, (Laura Gordon) he claims to have found unconscious on the road.

    A fourth character only known through reported conversations and the telephone, Morris, is Richard's medical practice partner.

    Crimp demonstrates, as he did in Cruel and Tender, which was staged at MTC earlier this year, an absolute mastery of dramatic structure.
    

    Revelations, some of them devastating and sinister, come to light almost accidentally, but accumulate to build up a second version of reality in our imaginations. This is the secret to the successful thriller. The horror is never explicit, but sufficient clues are given to create a sense of the unspoken being where horrors lie. The spoken words become a delicately maintained pattern whose function is disguise.
    Corrine, the wronged wife, may appear a victim, but by the last scene it is clear she is complicit in what has gone on, trapped in deceit and guilt.

    All are condemned to simulate normality, something that returns us to the first scene in which such strenuous attempts were being made to do exactly that.

    Mills is as taut as a bow-string throughout, establishing a character with real desperation fuelling his attempts to stay in control.

    As Corrine, Charlton creates an ambiguous response essential to the suspense, while Gordon's Rebecca exudes reckless danger. Altogether an enjoyably gripping production. 

     

    Dion Mills and Verity Charlton in The Country by Martin Crimp. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

     

    Passionate Betrayal of Familial Ties (I Am Yours)

    Thuy On, The Australian, June 10, 2005

    I Am Yours (June 1- July 2, 2005) by Judith Thompson. Directed by Rochelle Whyte.

    RED Stitch Actors Theatre has built a reputation for searing domestic dramas, and its latest effort is no exception. Canadian writer Judith Thompson's play explores the need to belong: I am Yours is a proclamation from mother to son, from lover to lover, from sister to sister. However, love and enmity lie side by side and it's not long before there's betrayal.
    
    The focal point is pretty Dee (Olivia Connolly), who manipulates all the other characters to do her bidding. Estranged husband Mack (Dion Mills), sister Mercy (Kat Stewart) and ardent admirer Toilane (Adam Hunter) circulate around this damaged creature, desperate for her affection.
    
    Overwhelmed by inexplicable, nameless fears, Dee doesn't seem to know what she wants, but certainly enjoys the power she wields over her poor supplicants. She may beg Mack to return to her in one breath, and in the next taunt him and demand his departure; she may enjoy a passionate tryst with Toilane and then cry assault a heartbeat later. Dressed entirely in white, she is a picture of innocence and yet each night the darkness corrupts her mind.

    Connolly portrayed Dee sympathetically in an emotionally exhausting role that has her screaming or weeping most of the time. Her character is so vulnerable and yet so frustrating that you don't know whether she deserves a hug or a slap.

    
    Red Stitch stalwart Stewart also put in a great performance as the ugly sister, the one forever in the shadow of her beautiful, golden-haired sibling, the one who yearns for skin contact and wishes she could have a brain tumour just to attract attention.

    
    I Am Yours is the debut of the newest ensemble member, Adam Hunter, a worthy addition to the troupe. As the young man who falls violently in love with Dee and who swears that one day she'll bear his child, Hunter was perfect as the sweet, callow and idealistic Toilane.
    
    His mother, the pugnacious Peggy (Irene Korsten), provided a template for unconditional, albeit possessive, love; Korsten's no-nonsense approach offered relief from all the hysteria. However, Raymond (Jim Shaw) was under-utilised as Mercy's fantasy figure and Mills didn't have much to play with as the cuckolded husband.
    
    It gives nothing away to say that when Dee does indeed fall pregnant, the ramifications for all are tragic. Once again the combined talent of the Red Stitch team along with the direction of Rochelle Whyte transformed this kitchen-sink melodrama into engrossing theatre.

    Olivia Connolly and Adam Hunter in I Am Yours. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Anti-hero Saves Surreal Comedy (Playing the Victim)

    Kylie Skotnicki, Sunday Herald Sun 31/4/05

    Playing the Victim (Apr 20 -May 21, 2005) by the Presnyakov Brothers. Directed by Alex Menglet.

    Can playing a murder victim vaccinate you against death?
    
    This is the theory raised by this absurdist comedy as it follows Valya, an apathetic 30-year-old who lives with his parents somewhere in central Russia.
    
    A uni dropout, Valyas job is to play the victim in homicide re-enactments. Exposure to gruesome murders must inoculate him against death, he assumes, and he is too lazy to do anything else.
    
    Is Valya scared of death or real work? Probably both.
    
    The man goes to complicated lengths to dodge anything that requires effort. He eats with chopsticks because it takes him so long to finish his meal his mother will clear and clean his plate out of frustration. Although it may take him longer to eat, he has learned sometimes you have to do something unpleasant to get out of doing something worse.
    He has also found that if people feel they have already punished you, they wont punish you further. As Valyas laziness gets him in trouble, he often puts this theory into practice.
    
    As well as following the life of our anti-hero, this play is an investigation and critique of modern Russian society and their corruptible, xenophobic, post-hyphen Soviet lifestyle.
    
    Written by the Russian by the Russian Presnyakov Brothers and premiering in Edinburgh in 2003, the play offers some well-crafted scenes, some thoughtful philosophical monologues and some amusing moments. But as a whole, the piece lacks continuity.
    
    Incongruity may be the mark of an absurdist play, but this script is crafted in an haphazard way that could benefit from refining.
    
    The play ends curiously in an unfulfilling way. There is no strong plot, with the audience jolted from one scene to the next, with no progression of the characters of the characters or the story.
    
    But what holds this play together is clever direction and the performance by Angus Sampson as our anti-hero.
    
    He delivers his monologues with excellent timing and dry wit. In a surreal comedy that lacks gags or strong one-liners, his delivery consistently raises a smile.
    
    Others in the cast also give quality performances, including Verity Charlton as the Japanese woman with a mysterious past and Jim Daly as Valyas father and a corrupt police inspector.

    
    Red Stitch productions rarely disappoint, and despite deficiencies in set and costume, this low-budget work has made this surreal and confused script accessible and enjoyable.

    Jim Daly, Verity Charlton, Angus Sampson in Playing the Victim. Pic: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Family taken by lodger's blarney (The Night Season)

    Thuy On, The Australian - 22 MAR 2005

    The Night Season (Mar 9 - April 9, 2005) by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Directed by Ailsa Piper.

    REBECCA Lenkiewicz's The Night Season is both a typical and atypical production from Red Stitch Actors Theatre. Once again the ensemble has focused on family dynamics.

    However, unlike the group's usual attachment to grim material, The Night Season has moments of gentle romantic whimsy that dilute the bitterness of intergenerational friction.

    The Kennedy household is a crowded one: on top of the family tree is grandmother Lily (Diana Greentree), followed by son-in-law Patrick (Peter Curtin) and three granddaughters: Judith (Kate Cole), Rose (Ella Caldwell) and Maud (Simone Ray).

    Yet the household is not entirely full. Years earlier, Esther -- the daughter, wife and mother of the family -- had left in unexplained circumstances. In her absence, the rest of the Kennedys have been held together by self-pity and the memory of being wronged by the person on whom they'd depended.

    Into this damaged family comes John (David Whiteley), a charismatic, good-looking young actor who has decided to board with the Kennedys while he's acting in a film about W.B. Yeats.

    His arrival stirs up the household and provides much-needed distraction: all of a sudden there's a sympathetic ear, a dancing partner, a drinking mate and a love interest all rolled into one.

    Under Ailsa Piper's direction, the Red Stitch actors handle themselves with their usual professional aplomb (including Brett Cousins as Judith's lovesick suitor). Guest actors Greentree and Curtin should be singled out for closer attention.

    Greentree's sprightly Lily is a lovely creation, a woman who adores music and dance and who, despite evidence to the contrary, refuses to give in to old age. Her gentle charming of John into slow dancing with her, moments after his inebriated arrival, brings a smile to the face.

    As Patrick, Curtin plays that fixture on the Irish drama scene: the lovable rogue full of bluster and blarney, the type of wag whose perpetual drunkenness never seems to affect his lucidity or wit. Cursing freely one moment, Curtin was equally comfortable quoting bits of Shakespeare the next.

    There is song, dance, snippets of poetry and even a piggy-back ride in this affecting and enjoyable production, and a happy relief that Red Stitch Actors Theatre is capable of extending its repertoire to accommodate plays other than its traditional airless, bleak dramas. 

    Ella Caldwell and David Whiteley in The Night Season. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Unobtrusive charm cleverly stitched up (The Night Season)

    Helen Thomson, The Age 18/03/2005

    The Night Season (March 9 - April 9, 2005) by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Directed by Ailsa Piper.

    RED Stitch has once again secured rights to a new, hugely successful London play, not from the adventurously experimental Royal Court, but no less than the National Theatre. The Night Season is Rebecca Lenkiewicz's first full-length play, but it has no trace of apprentice work about it; it is a remarkably assured, varied and polished work.
    
    The work is not startlingly innovative. In fact, it works within well-worn parameters, familiar dramatic and literary tropes associated with Ireland. In this case it is a Sligo family of father, three daughters and their grandmother, long since abandoned by the mother, who lives in London.
    
    It's true that they are a little less conventional than most, but the father, Patrick (Peter Curtin), is a drunk, the grandmother, Lily (Diana Greentree), is more than a little mad, and the three sisters, Rose (Ella Caldwell), Judith (Kate Cole) and Maud (Simone Ray), are studies in Irish spinsterhood. Admittedly, they are all sexually active and fond of a joint as well as a Guinness.
    
    When the actor, John (David Whiteley), comes to board with them during the filming of a movie about the poet W. B. Yeats, there are many repercussions. Yet the story of this play is less important than the manner in which it is told.

    
    Lenkiewicz seems to have found the perfect director in Ailsa Piper, who has taken the Red Stitch ensemble to new places in this production. The play is funny, but also tender, satirical yet respectful. Yeats is sent up, but Patrick's speech is beautifully interwoven with poetic quotation. There is a remarkable gentleness.

    
    It is the maintenance of this quality in the acting that saves the play from what might otherwise threaten it - familiar Irish sentimentality, and merely satirical demolition of the same thing. It is both romantic and ribald. The father, whose every speech contains some of Shakespeare's words, is also the comic turn who invariably enters his house of womenfolk with the words, "which of you is pregnant?".

    
    In contrast with so much of Red Stitch's earlier work, often abrasive and violent, The Night Season affirms the traditional virtues of family affection holding fast through adversity. It does so with unobtrusive charm and solid, professional workmanship from the company. 

    Diana Greentree and David Whiteley in The Night Season. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Pugilist Specialist

    Owen Richardson - The Sunday Age - 13/02/2005

    Pugilist Specialist (February 9 - March 5, 2005) by Adriano Shaplin. Directed by Greg Carroll.

    Red Stitch has started the season with style, force and a strong contemporary subject, the strongest imaginable right now. Pugilist Specialist, by American playwright Adriano Shaplin, comes almost in the form of a Hollywood thriller.

    Three marine lieutenants meet in barracks: explosives expert Stein (Kate Cole), sniper Freud (Richard Cawthorne), and surveillance expert Studdard (Dion Mills). They are in the dark about their mission until commander Colonel Johns (Kenneth Ransom) appears: they are to assassinate a Middle Eastern dictator whom they refer to only as The Bearded Lady. They are also recorded, every step of the way, for propaganda and post-mortem purposes.
    
    This is a stylised and self-consciously eloquent thriller. Shaplin's writing turns military jargon and big-dick talk into a harsh poetry of cynicism and braggadocio and insidious intentions. Stein is the conscience of the group, and her sex is an issue from the word go: it becomes clear that she may have to be sacrificed for the greater good and that her proven ability to get the job done may not be what the higher-ups want.
    It's powerful stuff. You may have quarrels with the piece - the writing was a little mannered for my taste and, at its weakest, some of the political points and anti-militarist jokes seemed a little facile - but there isn't a moment when your attention wanders. In the small Red Stitch space it bears down on you, helped along by the sound design (lots of fierce rumbling and loud gunshots). Greg Carroll's direction is tight and the actors, particularly Cole and Ransom, bring a great deal of charisma and conviction to their roles.

    Kenneth Ransom and Kate Cole in The Pugilist Specialist. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

• 2006 Season
  • • Hellbent a High Water Mark for Company (Hellbent)
    • Crestfall
    • Crestfall
    • Harvest of Laughs on the Farm (Harvest)
    • Harvest
    • The American Pilot
    • The American Pilot
    • 'Heart of Darkness' illuminated (Tejas Verdes)
    • Chile's 'disappeared' given a haunting voice (Tejas Verdes)
    • Dramatic Manipulation Provides Insights (This is How it Goes)
    • This is How it Goes
    • Dramatic Manipulation Proves Insights (This is How it Goes)
    • Fewer Emergencies
    • Frightening Characters Unleashed in Confines of Crimp's Narrative (Fewer Emergencies)

    Hellbent a High Water Mark for Company (Hellbent)

    Martin Ball, The Age 27/11/2006

    Hellbent (Nov 15 - Dec 16, 2006) by Ailsa Piper and Hugh Colman (after Webster). Directed by Ailsa Piper.

    While the main stage companies are lightening up for Christmas with panto and revue shows, Red Stitch is cranking up the body count with Hellbent, a terrific adaptation of John Webster's brutal revenge tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi.

    As in Kate Cherry's production of The Duchess for the Melbourne Theatre Company five years ago, the cast is streamlined: Websters 16 characters are pared back to a neatly balanced ensemble of six. The courtiers and madmen are gone, and the characters of Julia and Cariola are conflated.

    But for Hellbent, the creative team of Hugh Colman and Ailsa Piper make a more fundamental change, re-casting the three siblings at the centre of the play as types: the Duchess of Malfi becomes simply The Lady; Ferdinand is The Judge; while the Cardinal retains his simple title. Likewise, the specifics of time and location are removed, a point emphasised in the title change.

    The effect is to allow a more free association of the themes of social and political corruption and focus even more intensely on the moral questions centred on the character of Bosola and the inner conflicts of The Lady's two brothers.

    It works perfectly, not just because of the care and thought in the script adaptation, but in the intelligence of the direction and design and the sustained quality of the acting throughout.

    Kate Cole plays The Lady in a beautifully paced performance. She begins all insouciance and gaiety and builds to a bravura expression of grief in the face of her impending execution.

    Dion Mills is The Judge who uses words as a butcher does knives. There is a grace and elegance in his delivery of Webster's 400-year-old blank verse, whether he is cursing the whole world or maniacally promising to drive six snails to Moscow. Director Ailsa Piper brings out The Judge's hidden secret that he loves his sister, and that his fury at her marriage is grounded not in greed but in jealousy.

    Simon Wood brings a sense of wounded pride to Bosola, the spy whose desire is to appear a true servant, than an honest man. It is Bosolas misplaced sense of morality that finds the most echoes in our modern world, where loyalty to cause or nation can tragically supersede a more proper sense of humanity.

    Such correlations are subtly suggested by Colman's set. Centre stage is a raised dias whose sides are faced with a wire grill, suggestive of a prison cage beneath. Backstage is reached via a narrow portal, through which Bosola grimly carries his succession of victims; the very gates of hell or the doors to any number of contemporary prisons around the world. Hellbent promises to be yet another hit for this remarkable company.

     

    Felix Nobis as The Cardinal and Dion Mills as The Judge in Hellbent. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

    Crestfall

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun 30/10/2006

    Crestfall (Oct 4 - Nov 4, 2006) by Mark O'Rowe. Directed by Ross Ganf.

    The meek shall inherit the earth. Yeah, right. Not in this lifetime.The meek are packhorses in the affairs of men.

    In Mark O'Rowe's Dublin - a horror mix of Finnegan's Wake and A Clockwork Orange - the women are worse off, even, than the horses. Crestfall is a tightly plaited story told by three: Olive, Ali and Tilly. Each has her crutch: Olive adores sex, Ali hungers for love and Tilly is a heroin addict.

    Olive reckons she's the match for the men. She's had a conga line - six in one go.

    This story begins with her and a man called The Bru going to a hotel room. They're both married.

    Remorseful, The Bru goes home to Ali, the mother of his child. Their child is brain damaged after a kick to the head from a horse. The Bru takes the boy with him to get revenge on the beast. Any beast.

    In the course of this day, the lives of all three women are touched by extreme violence.

    O'Rowe overshoots in Crestfall. He writes in a stilted, clumsy poetry. It's hard work for cast and audience, but it is worth the effort. Just.

    Ths stylised, high physicalised production begins with Ella Caldwell (Olive) snaking her way up some hay bales for yet another hay ride. All the while Erin Dewar (Tilly) sits in a horse-trough bath-tub.

    When Olive encounters The Bru's wife (a mighty Karen Roberts), she inspects her teeth and lifts her foot as if it were a hoof.

    This harrowing, brilliantly acted, thoughtful piece is another ripper from Red Stitch. But it's not for the squeamish.

    Ella Caldwell as Olive, Karen Roberts as Ali and Erin Dewar as Tilly in Crestfall by Mark O'Rowe.

    Crestfall

    Bill Perrett, Sunday Age 'Preview' (15/10/2006)

    Crestfall (Oct 4 - Nov 4, 2006) by Mark O'Rowe. Directed by Ross Ganf.

    Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe has a reputation for a hard-edged vision of the world, and nobody will accuse him of going soft in Crestfall. Its set in a dystopian community, characterised by violence, crime and a less than romantic view of relationships between men and women. The narrative is in the form of three connected monologues, separately delivered by the three female characters: Olive Day (Ella Caldwell), a sex-addicted hard case; Ali Ellis (Karen Roberts), fierce defender of her family, and married to one of Olives casual flings; and Tilly McQuarrie, drug addict and prostitute.
    
    Although it is an essentially text-based piece, each of the monologues tells roughly the same events from different points of view, there is a strong physical element to this production.

    Each performer enacts her story in movement (Ingrid Weisfelt directed this aspect) while the other two by turns and together reflect and sometimes join the action.
    
    But the strongest impression is of O'Rowe's use of language. For all their unflinching account of squalor and brutality, his words are lyrical. Theres something of Burgess and Kubricks Alex from A Clockwork Orange in the vernacular inventiveness and spark of the storytelling. Ross Ganf's direction takes all kinds of risks to create the otherness of the world demanded by the script; the whole thing works to stunning effect.

    Ella Caldwell and Erin Dewar in Crestfall by Mark O'Rowe.

    Harvest of Laughs on the Farm (Harvest)

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (30/08/2006)

    Harvest (23 Aug - 23 Sept, 2006) by Richard Bean. Directed by Denis Moore.

    There's been much wailing and gnashing of teeth recently over the demise of the full-length play. If Richard Bean's Harvest is anything to go by, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

    The original London production weighed in at over three hours. But no one was counting the minutes or yenning to run off for an early tea.

    Harvest is the kind of comic banquet that will sate even the most jaded appetite, and Red Stitch has rehearsed it down to a slick two and a half, without losing a single sprig of parsley.
    

    Set on a Yorkshire farm, the action takes place in episodes strung out over the best part of a century. It begins on the eve of World War I, with two young brothers - William (David Whiteley) and Albert (Simon Wood) - vying to be chosen for the battlefields of the Somme; and ends, with a burglary in progress, in the very same kitchen in the computer age.

    It's a comedy that creeps up on you amid darkness and drama - the backdrop of two world wars, the Depression, social, economic and technological revolution; with a foreground that takes in the gamut of familial misfortune - maiming and infertility, poverty and thwarted romance, attempted rape and accidental death.

    But underneath the flesh of Bean's family saga lies a skeleton of dry wit. The playwright, who grew up in Hull, obviously has a great affection for these salt-of-the-earth Yorkshire farmers. And as the world churns around them, as they cope with change or fail to, the only things that remain unaltered by the passage of the years are their notoriously dour demeanours and peppery humour.

    While not all the acting talent is as lofty as the ambitiousness of the project, none of it is below par, and there are some outstanding performances.

    David Whiteley, whose character ages 90 years, is magnificent - as convincing in the earnestness of youth as he is as a doddering centagenarian. As his mam, Carol Yelland is the essence of a country mother. (She also plucks a mean chicken.) And Chris Connelly provides a hilarious cameo as the ribald farmhand Titch.

    Denis Moore's direction is wonderfully tight, maintains a fast dramatic flow, and refrains from milking any of the jokes. In a small space, set designer Peter Mumford manages to conjure the phases of the 20th century through a detailed set - and the make-up team work wonders ageing the cast.

    Harvest is the best production Red Stitch has mounted in some time. It's a finely crafted provincial picaresque - entertaining and incredibly funny - that will have you leaving the theatre elated. 

    David Whiteley and Simon Wood as brothers William and Albert and Carol Yelland as their mother in Richard Bean's Harvest. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Harvest

    Bill Perrett, The Sunday Age Preview Magazine (3/09/2006)

    Harvest (23 Aug - 23 Sept, 2006) by Richard Bean. Directed by Denis Moore.

    Richard Bean is one of a group of playwrights who style themselves Monsterists. They advocate the creation and production of new "big" plays, not necessarily works with larger casts (although they believe big casts should be supported), but with broader sweeps of subject, theme, scope of ideas. Harvest certainly fulfils the requirements. It has a cast of a dozen, some of whom take two roles; it covers the years 1914 to 2005, including the effects of two world wars, and grand shifts in economic forces on a family farm. There is an unintended irony, however, in the current production in that the Monsterist manifesto argues in part for "the elevation of new theatre writing from the ghetto of the studio 'black box' to the main stage", although the play is well-suited to the limited space of this theatre as it's entirely set in the farmhouse kitchen. Nevertheless, given two entrance/exits and complex stage traffic (including wheelchairs) this is a triumph of ingenuity for cast, crew and director Denis Moore.

    David Whiteley plays William Harrison, who, at the beginning of the play, runs the mixed farm with his brother Albert (Simon Wood). Whiteley's performance in this central role (he's there in all the linked stories that make up the play) is characterised by his customary drily humorous delivery and impeccable timing. The brothers argue about which of them is to go to France to fight. William wins the argument, but at the cost of his legs. He quietly controls much of the play's action thereafter from his (ultimately motorised) wheelchair. This includes waging implacable war against the splendidly named Lord Primrose Agar (Dion Mills), who is trying to retrieve land lost in a bet to a Harrison ancestor, land which becomes increasingly important as vast corporations and supermarket chains gradually engulf the production and distribution of farm yields.

    Harvest chronicles romantic entanglements - both William and Albert are in love with Maudie (Belle Armstrong), who loves one and marries the other. Laura (Kate Cole), who makes her life on the farm, also has a complicated emotional life, which includes marrying Stefan (Craig Annis), a German prisoner of war.

    There are compulsory governmental acquisitions, accidental and intentional killings and a house invasion.

    There's also a dedicated pig man, Titch, memorably played by Chris Connelly, whose passion for his animals makes up for his otherwise larcenous, bibulous and rather prickly character.

    It's a sprawling play, full of interest, emotional impact and entertainment, and unfailingly funny. The Red Stitch ensemble and guests play to their usual high standards.

     

    David Whiteley as William, Simon Wood as Albert and Belle Armstrong as Maudie in Richard Bean's 'Harvest'.  Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

    The American Pilot

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun 16/07/2006

    The American Pilot (12 July -12 Aug, 2006) by David Greig. Directed by Aidan Fennessy.

    According to The West Wing's fictional president Jed Bartlet, a citizen of the Roman Empire could walk across the face of the known world free of fear, "cloaked only in the words Civis Romanis - I am a Roman citizen''. If that citizen was harmed, the Empire would strike back. Hard.

    The new Roman Empire, the United States of America, would also like to claim that right for its citizens. But today the payback doesn't look all that different from America's usual bully-boy behaviour. And so, at every opportunity, rebels, terrorists, the browbeaten and downtrodden will take any opportunity given them to give the bully a blood nose.

    In David Greig's play, a US pilot has crashed in a civil war zone. When the play begins he has been found by villagers and is a captive. Nominally he is an enemy, because the US supports the government the villagers are fighting against.

    Their dilemma is what to do with the American. A farmer and his family tend his terrible wounds, they feed and comfort him: but they don't wish to draw attention to themselves. A trader-reservist reckons he can sell a video of the pilot's beheading to a contact in Dubai for $US1 million.

    The local captain and his translator (who loathes America, but still thinks it the most perfect society on earth) each want vengeance for the loss of loved ones in an American missile strike. The captain also sees some small tactical advantage to be gained.

    The pilot's presence is likened to discovering that the stone you've picked up is really a fistful of uranium. And that's a fair reflection of the technological gulf between them.
    The playwright exaggerates that gap, but not by much. (Even here, in a place where owning a television is cause for suspicion, the farmer still knows Daffy Duck when he sees him.)

    Aidan Fennessy's production pushes the differences to another level. The villagers are no longer human, no longer really alive. They're dusty, hollowed-out Stone Age zombies. Their actions are barbaric. Only the pilot's agony is ever made real.

    Aside from that quibble, this is an imaginative and good-looking production with a magic realist edge.

    Greig's play is a little teachy-preachy for my liking - and his late tilt towards the Joan of Arc story is just plain loopy - but the writing is much better than the plotting.

    The American Pilot is harrowing, but blackly funny and well acted. Best of all, Red Stitch has yet again provided us with a hot-off-the-presses play. The American Pilot was premiered (by the Royal Shakespeare Company, no less) just over a year ago.

    Luke Elliot, David Whiteley and Craig Annis (l-r) in The American Pilot by David Greig. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    The American Pilot

    Bill Perrett, The Sunday Age Preview Magazine 23/7/06

    The American Pilot (12 July - 12 Aug, 2006) by David Greig. Directed by Aidan Fennessy.

    Red Stitch's latest is a strange mixture of brutal realism, symbolist abstraction and farce. In David Greig's play an American pilot (Craig Annis) has crashed near a remote village in a country riven by civil war. He has been brought to the barn of a local farmer (David Whiteley), where he sits uncomfortably, his leg broken and the rest of his body battered.

    He becomes a touchstone for the other characters. For the farmer, he's a human being in need of help. For the farmer's wife, Sarah (Olga Makeeva), he's a dangerous liability. For their daughter, Evie (Ella Caldwell), the pilot is some kind of apotheosis. A trader (Luke Elliot) sees him as a chance to make money. A captain of a rebel force (Simon Wood) regards him as a chance to defeat the government. Only the captain's translator (Justin Kennedy) has any clue of what the pilot is saying and thinking; the others don't speak English. The translator is a burnt out idealist turned pragmatist, and because he understands the pilot, he doesn't really attach any importance to him at all. It's a clever play that turns on ideas of identity, morality and reality, on self-delusion and conviction, and on the constructed nature of social relationships.

    The cast has a fine time with some entertaining characters; a little more polish will no doubt be accrued as the season goes on.

    Simon Wood as the Captain and Craig Annis as The Pilot in The American Pilot by David Greig. Picture Jodie Hutchinson.

    'Heart of Darkness' illuminated (Tejas Verdes)

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (6/06/2006)

    Tejas Verdes (May 31 - July 1, 2006) by Fermin Cabal (Translation Robert Shaw). Directed by Jonathan Messer.

    Red Stitch is one of our more highly regarded theatre companies, and deservedly so. It has a wealth of talented actors, committed to furthering their art through an ambitious program of contemporary plays from around the world.

    Its latest effort, Tejas Verdes, concerns the torture and murder of thousands following the Chilean coup of 1973, led by Augusto Pinochet.

    The fate of the "disappeared" is a horrifying subject, and one fraught with peril for any fictionalised treatment.
    

    But Spanish playwright Fermin Cabal manages to eschew cheap sentimentality and craft a work that serves as both a warning against inhumanity and a worthy memorial to its victims.

    Through the monologues of five female figures, Cabal describes the death of Colorina (Verity Charlton), whose restless ghost bookends the play. The other characters are all, to varying degrees, collaborators in the atrocities of the Pinochet era: Colorina's cellmate (Olivia Connolly), who turned her in to the secret police; a military doctor (Kate Cole), whose adverse report led to her death; a gravedigger (Evelyn Krape), responsible for interring murdered corpses; and a publicist (Laura Lattuada), representing the dictator through the legal trials of his twilight years.

    Tejas Verdes is essentially a documentary play. Cabal's monologues are naturalistic, with the force and form of oral history.

    Jonathan Messer's direction is an exercise in restraint; the production is a heavily naturalistic one, delivered in neutral and unemphatic Australian accents. It pays off, and Messer draws out some fabulous performances: Charlton is superb as the defiant Colorina; Cole's defensive doctor is acutely observed; Krape's gravedigger is a wonderfully melancholy piece of comic acting (despite the occasional stutter on opening night).

    The main flaws derive from succumbing to theatricality, which Connolly as the informant does sporadically and Lattuada as the publicist does from the moment she steps on stage, making her character utterly implausible.

    Technically, the lighting was a bit off-cue. However, designer Peter Mumford should win an award for his set - a minimalist but highly effective display of memorial art, with suspended reliquaries and the names of the disappeared in luminescent graffiti as backdrop.

    Tejas Verdes is a play that masterfully explores the darkness of the human heart, and its resilience. This production is equal to its challenges and, for the most part, makes compelling theatre.

    Verity Charlton as Colorina in Tejas Verdes.

    Chile's 'disappeared' given a haunting voice (Tejas Verdes)

    Thuy On, The Australian 05/06/2006

    Tejas Verdes (May 31 - July 1, 2006) by Fermin Cabal (Translation by Robert Shaw). Directed by Jonathan Messer.

    ONE day in Santiago, a young woman "went into the woods and never went out again. There was nothing left of her. Not even a single breadcrumb to show the way."

    The translated title of Tejas Verdes is Green Gables, a puzzlingly innocuous name for a detention centre used for gross acts of torture during Chilean dictator General Pinochet's rule.

    To represent the thousands of "disappeared" victims during Pinochet's murderous regime in the 1970s, Spanish playwright Fermin Cabal dramatises the life, torture and death of one Colorina (Verity Charlton), a political dissident who speaks to us from the grave. Her haunted spirit bookends Tejas Verdes but her story is elaborated on by four other female monologues.

    There's her friend and enforced betrayer, a grave-digger, a military doctor and a lawyer. Except for the tolling of bells at the beginning and end, there is no musical accompaniment to this production.
    

    Powered solely by voices and with minimal dramatic action, Tejas Verdes' multi-angled narrative would work just as well on radio. The protagonists speak directly to the audience, without any softening filter or distracting theatrics, as though they were witnesses at a tribunal.

    Against a wall of scrambled graffiti names, symbolising the "screams of the condemned", Charlton begins the harrowing story of her character's descent into hell. Jonathan Messer's spare, documentary-style direction renders Colorina's litany of abuse impossible to listen to with detachment and without wincing in horror.

    Beaten, shocked, raped and finally shot and thrown into the sea by the secret police after failing to name her Marxist associates, Colorina's tale is matched by her fellow prisoner's (Olivia Connolly) agonised account of how the presence of her six-year-old son and a nutcracker forced her into collaborating with her persecutors.

    As the dead-eyed victims, Charlton and Connolly give performances that are both powerful and restrained. As the pragmatic everywoman, Evelyn Krape's gravedigger testifies to the terrorism of ordinary civilians. Kate Cole and Laura Lattuada are also impressive as Pinochet apologists, one as the brusque doctor trying hard to convince everyone, including herself, that torture didn't actually happen in Tejas Verdes and the other as the lawyer, supremely confident that Pinochet was wrongly smeared as a megalomaniacal tyrant.

    She reminds us of the collusion of Western democracies with his regime and how Pinochet had a "stabilising" influence in Chile. Tejas Verdes ends on a desperately hopeful note, with Colorina believing in a divine justice as retribution for her murder. The rest of us cynics filed out quietly into the dark and pondered the war crimes of contemporary "civilised" regimes.

    Kate Cole as 'The Doctor' in Tejas Verdes by Fermin Cabal.

    Dramatic Manipulation Provides Insights (This is How it Goes)

    Helen Thomson, The Age 2/05/2006

    This is How it Goes (April 27 - May 27, 2006) by Neil LaBute. Directed by Wayne Chapple.

    Neil LaBute's best-known play, In the Company of Men, was made into the well-known film of the same name, but This is How it Goes anatomises playwriting itself, particularly its ability to manipulate truth, time and probability. It is a complex, subtle revelation of racism's prevasive presence in America, and its capacity to undermine moral resolve.

    As the character simply called The Man, suggesting he is an everyman figure, Brett Cousins gives a stunning performance, one that develops in complexity from his first appearance as narrator, engagingly taking us into his confidence, to the end when our feelings towards him are a mixture of contempt, pity and dislike.

    He is, as he warns us, an unreliable narrator, and demonstrates this by giving us alternative versions of scenes in the play he is simulataneously narrating, participating in and "writing". We must decide where the truth lies as the story of a marriage gone sour, a complicated love triangle, and the "trade" of a woman by two men, unravels in scenes that sometimes contradict one another.

    White girl Belinda marries a high-school sports hero, African-American Cody, but 12 years and two children later they seem locked in mutual animosity and anger. when their old school friend rents their garage apartment, jealousy and rage soon start to tear them apart. Or that's what one series of scenes suggests. Others construct a different narrative.

    The Man keeps freezing the action to come front stage and confide in us. He is charming and candid, drawing us into complicity with jokes and smiles.

    What he doesn't do is draw our attention to the corrosive, racial subtext that keeps surfacing in his narrative, giving us nasty little shocks that undermine his engaging charm. terms like "nigger" are only words, he assures us, but there is a real black man engaged in the action here.

    As Cody, Christopher Kirby creates a compellingly complex character, but not a likeable one. Racism has two sides to it. Cody has racial and sexual scores of his own to settle, and Belinda (Susan Godfre) becomes a pawn in the men's game.

    Director Wayne Chapple and his fine cast give this intriguing, disturbing play a first-class production: vivid, sharp and shocking.

    Suzie Godfrey and Brett Cousins in This is How it Goes. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    This is How it Goes

    Bill Perrett, The Sunday Age 15/5/2006

    This is How it Goes (26/4/2006 - 27/5/2006) by Neil LaBute. Directed by Wayne Chapple.

    The title of Neil LaBute's play is the formula repeated by the Man, its unnamed narrator, as he introduces the play and each of its scenes. He's an ex-lawyer, coming back to the American small town he grew up in, planning to try to begin a career as a writer. Outside the local Sears, he meets Belinda, with whom he was at high school and for whom he had an unrequited, even unnoticed, passion. Belinda is now unhappily married to African-American Cody, who was a track star at the high school. He now runs his father's business, successfully.

    The Man is looking for a place to live; Belinda and Cody have just finished building a small apartment over their garage; he moves in. The rest of the plot weaves its way to its final - sort of - resolution by way of some unexpected twists. But it's LaBute's narrative method, with its slides in notions of truth and morality, that makes this such a fascinating piece.

    
    The Man from the outset is a disarmingly frank and amiable storyteller. He retells some scenes in different ways - how did Belinda get that black eye? - and admits that he may have rejigged certain elements of the action to suit his own prejudices and fantasies. From the outset he warns us, "I think I might end up being an unreliable narrator". He is played with a boyish charm by Brett Cousins, who is just right for the part, which also requires a harder and less pleasant register. It turns out that the Man lost his job as a lawyer by causing a nasty scene on a plane. And yet he's such an appealing character, and the story is told with so much self-effacement and good humour, that it has audiences wondering about some of their own values.

    Added to this, Cody is a fairly bristly and unpleasant character; could it be, you find yourself wondering, that he's overreacting to the remarks? LaBute's skill is in making us confront our own beliefs and be unsure about the truth, especially as it is represented in stories: "The second you start telling somebody what the truth is - how it goes - it all starts to slip away," says the Man.

    Christopher Kirby as Cody and Susan Godfrey as Belinda are simply terrific, and Madeline French makes a fine waitress. Assured and complex direction by Wayne Chapple.

    Suzie Godfrey and Christopher Kirby in This is How it Goes. Pic: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Dramatic Manipulation Proves Insights (This is How it Goes)

    Helen Thomson, The Age 2/05/2006

    This is How it Goes (April 27 - May 27, 2006) by Neil LaBute. Directed by Wayne Chapple.

    Neil LaBute's best-known play, In the Company of Men, was made into the well-known film of the same name, but This is How it Goes anatomises playwriting itself, particularly its ability to manipulate truth, time and probability. It is a complex, subtle revelation of racism's prevasive presence in America, and its capacity to undermine moral resolve.

    As the character simply called The Man, suggesting he is an everyman figure, Brett Cousins gives a stunning performance, one that develops in complexity from his first appearance as narrator, engagingly taking us into his confidence, to the end when our feelings towards him are a mixture of contempt, pity and dislike.

    He is, as he warns us, an unreliable narrator, and demonstrates this by giving us alternative versions of scenes in the play he is simulataneously narrating, participating in and "writing". We must decide where the truth lies as the story of a marriage gone sour, a complicated love triangle, and the "trade" of a woman by two men, unravels in scenes that sometimes contradict one another.

    White girl Belinda marries a high-school sports hero, African-American Cody, but 12 years and two children later they seem locked in mutual animosity and anger. when their old school friend rents their garage apartment, jealousy and rage soon start to tear them apart. Or that's what one series of scenes suggests. Others construct a different narrative.

    The Man keeps freezing the action to come front stage and confide in us. He is charming and candid, drawing us into complicity with jokes and smiles.

    What he doesn't do is draw our attention to the corrosive, racial subtext that keeps surfacing in his narrative, giving us nasty little shocks that undermine his engaging charm. terms like "nigger" are only words, he assures us, but there is a real black man engaged in the action here.

    As Cody, Christopher Kirby creates a compellingly complex character, but not a likeable one. Racism has two sides to it. Cody has racial and sexual scores of his own to settle, and Belinda (Susan Godfre) becomes a pawn in the men's game.

    Director Wayne Chapple and his fine cast give this intriguing, disturbing play a first-class production: vivid, sharp and shocking.

    Suzie Godfrey and Brett Cousins in This is How it Goes. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Fewer Emergencies

    Bill Perrett, The Sunday Age 26/03/2006

    Fewer Emergencies (15 March - 16 April, 2006) by Martin Crimp. Directed by Alyson Campbell.

    Red Stitch begins its 2006 season with three short plays (Whole Blue Sky, Face to the Wall and Fewer Emergencies) by Martin Crimp. Guest actor Sarah Sutherland and ensemble members Dion Mills and David Whiteley take the parts in the first, and are joined by new member Ben Anderson in the second. In each play, the actors are seated on chairs in a shallow pool of water, which contains a few rubber ducks. The precise significance of the set is unclear, but it isn't out of keeping with the minimal and absurdist nature of these works, whose worlds are actually constructed of language.

    None of the plays is "about" the characters who sit on the stage. Each play is actually a narrative that is produced by the characters, who look out from the set to a distance behind the audience, turning to each other occasionally to argue or question. Each creates a storyline and defends their characters' actions and attitudes against the criticism of the others.

    
    In the first, we're told, a young woman falls in love and gets married, but the marriage is a mistake. This story is the creation of Sutherland's character, who is fiercly protective of the young woman and of her son, Bobby, and clearly has some identity with her. In the second, a student goes to a junior school and begins to shoot the staff and other students. Again, the characters on stage create the story, almost as though they were working on a film or television script; but at the same time, the story they are telling has a horrifying reality. In the last play, the child Bobby returns, this time in a nightmare house/prison from which he struggles to free himself.

    Crimp's scripts are marvels of dark, surreal, suggestive creation. The cast is excellent in a demanding piece that requires precision and the ability to create character with little but voice and expression. Special mention to Richard Whitehouse's atmospheric lighting design.

    David Whiteley, Ben Anderson, Sarah Sutherland and Dion Mills in Fewer Emergencies by Martin Crimp. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Frightening Characters Unleashed in Confines of Crimp's Narrative (Fewer Emergencies)

    Helen Thomson, The Age 20/3/2006

    Fewer Emergencies (March 15 - April 16 2006) by Martin Crimp. Directed by Alyson Campbell.

    THIS third production of a Martin Crimp play in the past year, following the MTC's Cruel and Tender last March and Red Stitch's The Country in July, is the most challenging to date. It premiered at London's Royal Court Theatre in September last year and shows the influence of the plays of Sarah Kane.

    Crimp's work has been described in terms like postmodern, surreal, absurd, and Fewer Emergencies suggests all these things, but it is most distinctively simply enigmatic. We are made to work for his meanings, stimulated by the challenge of a puzzle.

    It consists of three short plays, not-quite-dialogues spoken by characters who sit, their feet in water, facing us, staring into the middle distance.

    In the first a trio of two men and a woman discuss a marriage made in haste and soon regretted.

    A particularly impressive performance from Sarah Sutherland complicates the superficially banal conversation. Without actually grammatically slipping from "she" to "I" the woman defensively adopts the point of view of the wife and mother. She becomes implicated in a bizarre, cruel scenario of lives where pain and rage are assiduously disguised by a brittle veneer of middle-class materialism. The role of perfect mother is suddenly undermined by terrifying possibilities of abuse.

    Even more chilling is the second play where once again the speaker ostensibly discusses another man, but gradually becomes the frightening character who systematically shoots a school teacher in the classroom, and then four children, one by one. Ben Anderson as the main character here gives a powerful, disturbing version of a kind of madness barely controlled by the conventions of narrative.

    Once again there is a chilling disjunction between affect and reportage: we hear only the facts, with just an occasional leakage of childish terror and helpless fear to punctuate the horrific action being described.

    The third play enters a realm of surreal cruelty, and once again a child is the victim, the same child we heard about in the first play. By this time the unnatural inhibition of responses on the part of the characters who are listeners and prompters, (with tight, suitably chilling performances from Dion Mills and David Whiteley) thoroughly implicates them as fellow abusers in a world where innocence is systematically destroyed.

    Alyson Campbell's fine direction ensures maximum impact for this intriguing, disturbing play. 

    Fewer Emergencies by Martin Crimp. Dion Mills, Sarah Sutherland and David Whiteley. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson

• 2007 Season
  • • Motortown
    • Motortown
    • Stitching Up Laughs (The Little Dog Laughed)
    • The Little Dog Laughed
    • Slight but Funny Play on Drug Addled Love (Jack Goes Boating)
    • 4.48 Psychosis
    • Wild East
    • After Miss Julie
    • After Miss Julie
    • Rabbit Hole
    • Burrowing into Family Despair (Rabbit Hole)
    • Study of Guilt and Grief Avoids Tearjerker Traps (Rabbit Hole)

    Motortown

    John Bailey, Sunday Age (09/12/07)

    Motortown (21 Nov, 2007 - 22 Dec, 2007) by Simon Stephens. Directed by Laurence Strangio.

    War isn't hell. If Red Stitch's current production is to be believed - as it should be - the conventional drama vilifying combat is just a distraction. The real perdition is what comes after.

    When Danny comes home to his crappy town in Essex, he's really got nothing bad to say about his tour of duty in Basra. The way he puts it, Iraq was mostly ginger beer and shenanigans with the lads. He does seem a little haunted and sometimes goes red-faced and intense when reminiscing, but that's probably nothing. He is also obsessed with a girl he'd been dating briefly before he went off fighting. When he finds out she's not interested any more, and then he gets a gun from some dodgy London types, you begin to wonder if Danny hasn't maybe left a little bit of himself back in Basra.

    Brit playwright Simon Stephens doesn't pull any punches with this, the first feel-bad hit of summer. Motortown is an unapologetic noughties update of Buchner's classic anti-war play, Woyzeck, filtered through the post-Vietnam warning calls of Taxi Driver, Coming Home and even a bit of Rambo: First Blood. Luckily, even though you may feel like you've seen it all before, you don't really get much of a chance to rest your peepers because the level of tension, along with the A-grade performances, is shock and awe stuff.

    From the measured build-up tracking Danny's complex mental state to the honestly unnerving violence that forms the work's moral centre, there's little to fault in this production. The script is possessed of laugh-out-loud dialogue perfectly counterpoised with the awfulness that unfolds, and the cast get their teeth into it without overplaying at all.

    Brett Cousins is brilliant as Danny, on stage for the entire show and only ever less than riveting when sharing the space with his hypnotically watchable brother, Lee (Dion Mills). It's a hard show to stomach - the visceral violence, exaggerated profanity and sheer anger of the piece can't be absolved - but nobody shirks their duties here and the audience is left to patch up their wounds as best as they can.

    Cleopatra Coleman as Jade, David Whiteley as Paul, and Brett Cousins as Danny in Motortown by Simon Stephens. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Motortown

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun (26/12/07)

    Motortown (21 Nov, 2007 - 22 Dec, 2007) by Simon Stephens. Directed by Laurence Strangio.
    

    BRITAIN committed about 40,000 troops to the coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Brits concentrated their efforts on the south, around the once cosmopolitan port city of Basra.

    According to a recent report, the city is now in the hands of gangs and militias. Assassinations, vendettas and vigilantism are common. The British Army -- which has slowly withdrawn from the city -- is barricaded in its base at Basra airport, which is fired on by mortars five times a day.

    This new play by Simon Stephens follows one soldier on his return from Basra to the UK. It shows the flipside of the abuses seen in places such as Abu Ghraib. It looks at the effects on the men and women who have done the abusing, once they have been cut loose back home.

    Danny (Brett Cousins) struggles to fit back in. He hates the world he comes back to. He doesn't even recognise it. The only thing he's any good at, apparently, is frightening people. This has cost him his girlfriend -- his letters home were too much for her -- and ruined his relationship with his older brother.

    He's offered work, but can't imagine life behind a cash register when he's used to carrying an assault weapon. He buys a replica pistol, a Walther P99, and has it fixed so it can fire live rounds. So he can really terrorise.

    Stephens' writing, at least in this tightly directed production, makes motivation absolutely clear without ever spelling it out . . . an extraordinary achievement.

    Character by character, Motortown is a bit of a freak show and presents many challenges to the cast and director. Cousins is chillingly plausible as the increasingly unbalanced squaddie. Sarah Sutherland nails the ex-girlfriend character without turning her into a Liverbird or an extra from Eastenders.

    The play is in fact a fine rewrite of Georg Buchner's Woyzeck. It sees both director Laurence Strangio and the Red Stitch company at the top of their games. It's violent and, yes, frightening. Best of all, it hits its mark.

    Brett Cousins and Dion Mills in Motortown. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Stitching Up Laughs (The Little Dog Laughed)

    Kate Rose, Sunday Herald Sun (28/10/07

    The Little Dog Laughed (17/10/07-17/11/07) by Douglas Carter Beane. Directed by David Bell.
    

    THE Red Stitch Actors' Theatre is one of the most interesting independent groups around, consistently peddling quality work from their tiny space, and this is no exception.

    The Little Dog Laughed is a modern comedy of manners set in the world of fame and success. Mitchell (Tom Wren) is an actor, a rising star, the next big thing and gay. Diane (Kat Stewart) is his ruthlessly ambitious manager, agony aunt, proxy date for award nights and far too together to indulge in personal relationships.

    On a trip to New York for an award ceremony, Mitchell engages the services of a rent boy, Alex, (Martin Sharpe) for whom he eventually falls. Sadly for Alex's girlfriend Ellen (Ella Caldwell), her childhood sweetheart returns the affection.

    Playwright Douglas Carter-Beane has provided a witty, engaging script that - while vitriolic towards Hollywood and its fame game - is also endearingly
    empathetic towards its flawed protagonists.
    

    Tom Wren captures perfectly Mitchell's emotional confusion, while Kat Stewart is magnificent as Diane. Sharpe and Caldwell also give their characters a great sense of humanity, making them real and brave and vulnerable all at once.

    This piece is yet another convincing argument from Red Stitch about the strength of Melbourne's theatre scene.

    Tom Wren (Mitchell) and Martin Sharpe (Alex) in The Little Dog Laughed by Douglas Carter-Beane. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson.

    The Little Dog Laughed

    Vito Matterelli, Australian Stage Online 23/10/07

    The Little Dog Laughed (Oct 17 - Nov 17) by Douglas Carter-Beane. Directed by David Bell.

    Mitchell is a very good looking movie actor whose star is on the rise. Diane is his tough manager, taking care of all the details in his career and in his life. Alex is a young, attractive man working as a male prostitute - to pay the bills. Ellen is Alex’s sort-of girlfriend.
    Late one night while in New York for an awards ceremony, Mitchell calls for a rent boy and Alex turns up. Two worlds and four separate lives collide that night.

    Author Douglas Carter-Beane has created a multi-layered story rich in insight and observations. More than a tale of sexual ambiguity and immoral values, Little Dog is scathing in its attack of Hollywood stereotypes and double standards, while at the same time looks at the complex human issues of people desperate to connect.
    

    This very witty and often hilarious play will have you roaring with laughter one moment only to be moved by a character’s attempt to find love and happiness in a world where disappointment and selfishness prevail.

    Guest actor Tom Wren does a great job with the self-obsessed Mitchell. Martin Sharpe is touching as the younger Alex, street-wise beyond his years. His cockiness always ready to hide his insecurities and issues of trust. Ella Caldwell handles the lesser role of Ellen very well, creating an interesting, likeable character.

    The role of Diane however, is written for a skilled performer who has the task of not only driving the play but of also narrating some of the action, all the while spitting out some of the funniest, bitchiest lines. Kat Stewart is terrific in the role. As a performer she seizes the opportunity to play a great part and displays fine comic timing.

    Director David Bell makes a welcome debut with the company and keeps the look and feel of the production on the right level.

    While they may have been a few stumbles on opening night, this terrific piece of theatre deserves support and will be even better as the season progresses.

    Yet again Red Stitch has proved that it can make consistently high standards of choice both with its programming and casting.  

    Martin Sharpe and Tom Wren (foreground) in The Little Dog Laughed by Douglas Carter-Beane. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson

    Slight but Funny Play on Drug Addled Love (Jack Goes Boating)

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (11/09/07)

    Jack Goes Boating (5/9/07-7/10/07) by Bob Glaudini. Directed by Alex Menglet.
    

    Bob Glaudini's Jack Goes Boating drew crowds in New York this year with Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role.

    It's no surprise that Red Stitch has taken it up - the play offers four strongly drawn characters, making it an attractive proposition for an actors' theatre.

    The romantic comedy involves two American working-class couples negotiating their eccentricities. Jack (David Whiteley) and Clyde (Brett Cousins) are New York limousine drivers who escape tedium by indulging in recreational substances with some enthusiasm.

    Clyde and his partner, Lucy (Ella Caldwell), have relationship dramas. Past infidelities rankle on both sides, and their tension provides much of the play's situational comedy, unknotting itself at inopportune moments.

    Meanwhile Jack, a naive and unconfident soul, finds romance with Connie (Natalia Novikova), an equally hapless telesales assistant who works with Lucy spruiking grief counselling seminars. Psychologically delicate, Connie thinks she's being sexually harassed with alarming regularity. But when she's attacked on the subway, she's clearly not imagining things, and Jack must tread carefully to win her affection.

    Jack Goes Boating is a slight play. Despite its layering of short scenes, it feels laborious - partly because some scenes don't justify themselves, partly because the play's dialogue is too repetitive, emulating inarticulacy without dramatising it or catching its unexpected sparks.

    On the other hand, this production plays to the show's strong suits, humour and deft characterisation, and mitigates its deficiencies. Whiteley makes a great foil as the dopey hero, with a shadow-play sequence where he learns to cook among the funniest moments. Caldwell is a winning combo of brashness and empathy, Cousins has the shouty end of American humour down pat. And Novikova gives a brilliantly nuanced portrayal of the slightly unhinged Connie.

    You go to Red Stitch for the acting and director Alex Menglet draws out a fine ensemble performance, bringing this funny, light, drug-addled love story to life.

    Ella Caldwell and Brett Cousins in Jack Goes Boating. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    4.48 Psychosis

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun (10/08/07)

    4.48 Psychosis (25 July - 25 August 2007) by Sarah Kane. Directed by Alyson Campbell.

    IF EVER a writer saw too deep and too much, it was Sarah Kane. The young British playwright shirtfronted audiences in the 1990s with her brutal visions of a brutal world. Famously, her first play was denounced as a "disgusting feast of filth'' and a "sordid little travesty''.

    She routinely tackled rape, racism and terrible injustices. Yet, in her own mind, her plays were about hope, faith and love. 4.48 Psychosis is Kane's last play. It premiered a year after she took her own life. She was 28.

    Structurally, 4.48 is as deranged as its suicidal protagonist. Or protagonists. The play is written as a freeform theatrical poem. Strictly speaking, there aren't even individual parts. Lines are not allocated to characters. The script can be performed by two actors: a patient and a psychiatrist. The English premiere had a cast of three. This Red Stitch production has four. And it works well.

    Alyson Campbell's clear-eyed and confident production hides the countless gear changes in the script. Actors glide from basic stand-and-deliver acting to highly physical work that one could confidently call dance. Campbell turns therapy into a kind of religious activity.

    
    The bleakness of the material is unrelieved, but the effect is far from depressing. We watch a stand-off between a woman (a magnificently centred Suzette Williams) and her psychiatrist as we would watch a passionate political debate.

    4.48 Psychosis is definitely not for everyone, but you will be hard pressed to find a better-realised production of this play.

    Suzette Williams, Olivia Connolly and Richard Bligh in 4.48 Psychosis. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Wild East

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (4/06/07)

    Wild East (30 May, 2007 - 30 June, 2007) by April De Angelis. Directed by Lucy Freeman.

    Politicians, real estate agents, used car salesmen - all careers that score pretty low on the scale of public esteem. But as anyone who's endured a job interview knows, there are worse. Human resources managers. Scum of the earth. Describe a problem you've overcome and how you overcame it. Jesus.
    April De Angelis' Wild East is a merciless satire on this psychology-by-numbers aspect of corporate culture. The comic three-hander takes the form of an extended job interview.

    Frank (Martin Sharpe) is a young anthropology graduate applying for a position at a global marketing consultancy. His interviewers, Dr Gray (Marcella Russo) and Dr Pitt (Verity Charlton), run a good-cop, bad-cop routine on him - and the socially awkward Frank is soon regaling them with a litany of past indiscretions that render him unsuitable for the role.

    But doctors Gray and Pitt aren't on the same side. Personal and professional rivals, they've recently ended a love affair, and with a corporate restructure in the offing, are vying to retain their jobs. The videotaped interview becomes a contest, with each trying to sabotage the other - and by the time we get to the hilarious role-playing exercise, we're not in Kansas any more.

    De Angelis' comedy circles a bewildering array of issues: the corporate persona, foreign exploitation, marketing spin, environmental destruction, the difficulty of measuring cultural value. But she doesn't explore them - they're just signposts on the road to capitalist hell.

    It's an absurd and outrageously funny show, and the actors make the most of it. Marcella Russo gives a devastating performance as Gray, and Sharpe is an amazing young actor. His character's bumbling, unconfident exterior hides an unpalatable secret, and somehow, through force of charm, Sharpe makes the most unlikely transformation in the play work.

    Verity Charlton is slightly miscast as Dr Pitt - her strength is more dramatic than comic, and the role is written for an expansive comic actress. To compensate, Charlton resorts to hit-and-miss histrionics - though sometimes she's very amusing indeed.

    Director Lucy Freeman renders the production consistently absorbing, despite the slightness of the play's engagement with the issues it raises. Such superficiality is, of course, a symptom of the culture Wild East implicitly critiques - and Freeman makes us feel the full force of its allure.

    Martin Sharpe and Verity Charlton in Wild East. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    After Miss Julie

    Bill Perrett, Sunday Age 29/04/07

    After Miss Julie (18 April - 19 May, 2007) by Patrick Marber. Directed by Denis Moore.

    Patrick Marber's play is a version of the August Strindberg classic, reset in post-war England. It dramatises the same tensions between the intelligent and attractive servant, John (Daniel Frederiksen), and the disturbed daughter of the lord of the manor, Miss Julie (Sarah Sutherland). The latter, not averse to a bit of rough, sets about the seduction of the former, despite the intermittent presence of John's fiancee, Christine (Olivia Connolly), and the proximity at a dance of the other estate servants, who like nothing better than a juicy scandal.
    Like Strindberg, Marber is interested in the way class interacts with sexual attraction; another kind of power, but one that owes nothing to social position.

    This is a striking, deliberate production that builds its atmosphere slowly with pauses and absences (at one point the stage is empty) as much as with action. Sutherland's Julie veers from little-girl coquetry to shrill hysteria, torn between ingrained consciousness of her birth and urgent desire. Frederiksen's John moves between teasing, testing the edges of his "place", and angrily demanding equality. Both reflect the broader society that voted in a Labour government in the 1945 election. Connolly's Christine is chilling in her religious and social certainties. A tense, dangerous production.

    After Miss Julie

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun 23/04/07

    After Miss Julie (18 April - 19 May, 2007) by Patrick Marber. Directed by Denis Moore.

    Instead of a midsummer night in Sweden in the 19th century, Patrick Marber's rewrite of Miss Julie is set on a summer's night in England in 1945. Only months after VE day, Churchill's Conservative government has been trounced at the general election by Labour, under Clement Attlee.

    Playwright Patrick Marber, who calls his play After Miss Julie, is remarkably faithful to the spirit of August Strindberg's play in which the daughter of a count gets down and dirty with the hired help. Julie, Strindberg's and Marber's, is sexually precocious but inexperienced.

    Strindberg's footman Jean is Marber's chauffeur John, the Swedish servant Kristin is now kitchenhand Christine. But Julie is Julie is Julie. The same in any language. Capricious, wilful and dangerous.

    Having dirty-danced the staff, Julie chases her father's chauffeur to the kitchen, where his fiancee waits. In a typical Julie moment, she hold out a cigarette for Christine to light in a coldly demanding way. A second later, she offers Christine a ciggie.

    With the fall of conservatism, this is the end of an era. This is the moment when industry is about to be socialised. It might just be the end of class itself.

    Marber's play, written for television in the mid-1990s, is brilliantly witty; jokey and clever. It fairly crackles with smart lines. But it has the sting of a bullwhip in its second half.

    Julie is a dream role and Sarah Sutherland eats up the part in gulps.

    Even as Marber botches the ending -- the balance between John and Julie is markedly different than in the original -- we never doubt the actors or their choices. That's a great credit to Sutherland, Daniel Frederiksen, who plays the proud and panicked John, and to director Denis Moore.

    Red Stitch chalks up another Australian premiere with the style we've come to expect.

    Daniel Frederiksen and Sarah Sutherland in After Miss Julie. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Rabbit Hole

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun 16/03/07

    Rabbit Hole (March 8 - April 7, 2007) by David Lindsay Abaire. Directed by Naomi Edwards.

    Grief and Anger are tightly bound emotions. The more sudden and tragic the loss, the greater the need to lash out in its aftermath. Dearest or nearest. It doesn't matter who.

    Director Naomi Edwards shrewdly links the story of this play to the actions of the US government post-September 11. Al-Qaeda hits us, we'll hit Iraq. Near enough. They've both got Qs in them.

    But, sensibly, Edwards directs the play as a family drama: detailed, complex, taut and intense. Every reaction is heightened, and amplified to emotional redline.

    The play begins several months after the accidental death of a four-year-old boy. Becca (Kat Stewart) has gradually removed - stored, hidden, given away - every reminder of her dead child. She even wants to sell the family home. Her husband Howie (David Whiteley) resists. He wants the dog back, photographs back up and the drawings back on the fridge.

    Becca's tearaway younger sister Izzy (Erin Dewar) - who has just punched out a woman at a bar - announces she's pregnant to her "working musician" boyfriend.

    Meanwhile the young man (Martin Sharpe) who drove the car that hit the boy wants to visit the family.

    The plot, such as it is, is incidental. The interest is in the rawness of the interaction and the rigid and brittle power balance.

    As we've come to expect from Red Stitch, the production is utterly professional, timely (the play premiered last year in New York) and brilliantly acted.

    Whiteley surely is the most consistent and versatile actor in Melbourne at the moment. And he's in good company here. Dewar, in particular, nails her role, turning thin caricature into someone we can walk around.

    David Whiteley and Kat Stewart in Rabbit Hole. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Burrowing into Family Despair (Rabbit Hole)

    

     

    Kate Rose, Sunday Herald Sun 18/03/07

    Rabbit Hole (March 8 - April 7, 2007) by David Lindsay Abaire. Directed by Naomi Edwards.

    

    BECCA and Howie Colbert have barely survived every parent's worst nightmare and are trying to rebuild their lives in New York after the death of their young son.

    When Becca's sister Izzy -- the loud, hard-partying, fast-living, irresponsible sister -- announces she's pregnant, it's all Becca can do to keep her resentment under wraps.

    Despite the gloomy premise of David Lindsay-Abaire's play, it is still infused with a wry humour that saves it from turning into a dirge.

    Instead, it is a complex, insightful study of family, loss, grief, survival and forgiveness. The wry observations on the conditional nature of friendship and society's inability to deal with the loss of a child are biting and brilliant.

    The acting is superb and Kat Stewart and David Whiteley shine as the bereaved parents who are coming to terms not only with their son's death, but the damage it has done to their relationship. Whiteley excels at contained rage, while Stewart's desperation is almost tangible.

    
    Erin Dewar, as Izzy, and Jenny Lovell, as the sisters' mother, maintain the dignity of their characters despite the chaos they often leave behind them.

    And the newly renovated Red Stitch theatre was perfect as the lounge room setting of the play. Naomi Edwards's direction found the right balance between the innate claustrophobia of the play, taking place as it does in one house, and the freedom attained by the characters as they slowly reconciled themselves with fate.

    Jenny Lovell and Erin Dewar in Rabbit Hole. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Study of Guilt and Grief Avoids Tearjerker Traps (Rabbit Hole)

    Thuy On, The Australian (12/03/07)

    Rabbit Hole (March 8 - April 7, 2007) by David Lindsay Abaire. Directed by Naomi Edwards.

     

    RENOVATIONS are afoot at the Red Stitch Actors Theatre; the larger space a testament to its popularity after five years as one of Melbourne's most successful independent theatre companies.

    Despite the fresh paintwork and enlarged exterior shell, however, it's reassuring to know that some things never change. Rabbit Hole is a typical example of what Red Stitch does best: source and premier a contemporary, relatively unknown work from overseas.

    Directed by Naomi Edwards, David Lindsay-Abaire's play is very much a kitchen-sink drama and a weepie-Kleenex one at that, but this is not to dismiss its power and emotional pull.

    What starts off with the easy quips of a sitcom slowly takes a detour to reveal a portrait of a family in crisis. Becca (Kat Stewart) and Howie (David Whiteley) are an average middle-American couple but there's a hole at the centre of their universe: eight months ago, their only child, Danny, was killed in a motor accident and to put the situation in gross understatement, "things aren't nice any more".

    Much to her husband's chagrin, Becca copes by systematically trying to physically erase all evidence of her four-year-old son. Howie, meanwhile, attends a support group and clings on to the last video images of Danny smiling in the sun. Neither approach works, of course.

    It doesn't help matters that Becca's irresponsible sister Izzy (Erin Dewar) has recently announced her pregnancy, nor that her mother Nat (Jenny Lovell) advises faith as a healing balm. As though the blame game isn't difficult enough, the unexpected appearance of the driver, Jason (Martin Sharpe), cranks the tension up tenfold.

    Stewart and Whiteley, long-term principals of Red Stitch, are, as always, eloquent and restrained in their performances and when they do blow up and break down, the grief is so raw it takes your breath away.

    It's a credit to Lindsay-Abaire, Edwards and the ensemble cast that despite its bleak theme, Rabbit Hole doesn't feel like a manipulative or histrionic tearjerker. The occasional light-hearted banter from the exuberant Dizzy Izzy and the well-meaning but overbearing Nat goes a long way in sweetening the bitterness.

    Sharpe's awkward and remorseful teenager, too, is well handled.

    Notwithstanding Jason's culpability, his character is treated with sympathy. Like Becca and Howie, he carries guilt around like a brick in his pocket.

    The title, referring to a sci-fi story written by Jason about holes in space leading to parallel universes and therefore infinite possibilities, offers some small solace to Becca. Perhaps after all, there's another dimension where things are different and she could be happy again.

     

    Martin Sharpe and Kat Stewart in Rabbit Hole. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

      

• 2008 Season
  • • Deconstructing Angst (The Work of Wonder)
    • Marie Antoinette - The Colour of Flesh
    • Red Sky Morning
    • A Memorable Morning (Red Sky Morning)
    • Red Sky Morning
    • Strange Interlude (Red Sky Morning)
    • Love Lies Bleeding
    • Pool (No Water)
    • Dark Pool of Intensity (Pool - No Water)
    • The Pain and the Itch
    • The Pain and the Itch
    • Rash Behaviour (The Pain and the Itch)
    • Thriller With a Twist of Humour (The Winterling)
    • The Winterling
    • Darkly Comic Gangster Tale Hides a Sinister Sting in its Tail (The Winterling)
    • The Mercy Seat
    • The Mercy Seat

    Deconstructing Angst (The Work of Wonder)

     Cameron Woodhead, The Age (24/11/08)

    The Work of Wonder (19 Nov - 20 Dec, 2008) by Christian Lollike. Directed by Andre Bastian.

     

    AVANT-GARDE composer Karlheinz Stockhausen caused great controversy when he referred to 9/11 as "the greatest work of art of all time". Denunciations came thick and fast. Even his daughter changed her name in protest.
    

    Of course, it's a grossly insensitive statement. Yet that alone doesn't account for the fuss it caused. Stockhausen touched a nerve because he highlighted a profound anxiety about the place of art in postmodern society.

    In The Work of Wonder, Danish playwright Christian Lollike uses Stockhausen's remark as a springboard into a provocative examination of art, faith and terror.

    The play is a wild piece that is deeply informed by postmodern theory and culture. Lollike uses a now conventional meta-theatrical framework: the play is about four young actors (Dion Mills, Tim Potter, Meredith Penman, Chris Saxton) putting on a play, or trying to.

    It opens with a discussion of the implications of Stockhausen's remark which degenerates into black comic one-upmanship: Is 9/11 or famine in Africa the greater work of art?

    Complicating matters is a contrapuntal conversation featuring the morbid extremities - genital mutilations, public suicide attempts - of contemporary performance art.

    The titular "work of wonder" is an atrocity so apocalyptic that it punctures the self-reflexive web of reality in which the actors are caught.

    Lollike's characters are classic incarnations of postmodern angst. They live in a world where news is mediated by dramatic convention, and emotional responses to it are pre-empted and rendered into cliche by Hollywood films.

    Their attempts to access something approaching genuine feeling keep running into a wall of paranoid irony. But the horrors they keep distracting themselves from do eventually emerge.

    The actors have the timing and presence to make Lollike's grotesque humour distressingly funny, and their histrionic skill ensures that the denouement justifies the play's more onanistic tendencies.

    Director Andre Bastian seems to be on top of the philosophically dense material, and the sense of psychic entrapment is enhanced by Peta Coy's choreography.

    Though their influence is apparent, you don't need to have read the postmoderns to appreciate The Work of Wonder. Besides, this crackling, irreverent vision views the strictures of po-mo theory as every bit as closed a circle of beliefs as those of fundamentalist Islam.

     

     

    Marie Antoinette - The Colour of Flesh

    Kate Herbert, Herald Sun (13/10/08)

    Marie Antoinette - The Colour of Flesh (8 Oct - 8 Nov, 2008) by Joel Gross. Directed by Denis Moore.

     

    Joel Gross's recent play, Marie Antoinette: The Colour of Flesh, is a work of faction. It is a blendino of historical facts, supposition, rumour, innuendo and creative fiction surrounding the Austrian princess who married Louis XVI to become the maligned Queen of France and a victim of the Revolution. 

    Gross creates an elaborate construct involving Marie Antoinette (Olivia Connolly), the over-indulged, big-jawed queen, Elisa (Erin Dewar), her pretty portrait painter, and a fictional lover, Count Alexis de Ligne (Brett Cousins).

    The production, directed deftly by Denis Moore, is most successful when the characters are passionate and emotionally abandoned.

    Dewar is pert, wry and natural as the Parisian beauty from peasant background. She and Cousins shine in the scene where Elisa begs Alexis not to leave to fight the American War of Independence. Connolly is moving when revealing Marie's marriage-bed secrets, and during her final tragic imprisonment.

    Peter Mumford's simple but evocative design gives the illusion of gilt baroque tables and chairs floating against the walls above a chequerboard floor.

    Red Sky Morning

    John Bailey, The Sunday Age (21/09/08)

    Red Sky Morning (Aug 27 - Sept 27, 2008) by Tom Holloway. Directed by Sam Strong.

    I haven't seen every performance staged in 2008 but after racking up more than 100 I'm willing to nominate Red Stitch's latest as Play of the Year. There's no prize, but you should get along to see it. It's the first piece presented as part of the company's new writer's program and the collaborative development has resulted in a work that succeeds on every level. Tom Holloway's script is tight - hilarious and frequently heart-rending - and performances from David Whiteley, Sarah Sutherland and Erin Dear are pitch-perfect. They play a couple and their teenage daughter during a long, isolated day, and while the piece begins with the tender comedy of simple misunderstandings, an arresting portrait of deep depression, denial and helpless complicity rapidly emerges. Through a slow unfolding, the audience is drawn in to the despair of these utterly believable lives - unable to communicate with one another but drowning in their own thoughts. The recussing image of the black dog is the only aspect that yields to the obvious; in every other way this is a complex, urgent production that deserves to live on.

    A Memorable Morning (Red Sky Morning)

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun (15/09/08)

    Red Sky Morning (27 August - 27 Sept, 2008) by Tom Holloway. Directed by Sam Strong.

     

    If ever the State Government decides Melbourne needs a full-time ensemble of actors to rival the Sydney Theatre Company's Actors Company, it has a ready-made in Red Stitch. It's an efficient and highly professional company. Prolific, too, without sacrificing quality. But money is tight.

    Red Stitch fills up its little theatre at the eastern end of St Kilda for weeks at a time. But most of Melbourne still doesn't know what it's missing.

    The company's latest venture - called Red Stitch Writers - is to develop new plays. (Local plays haven't been much of a priority for Red Stitch so far.) This one, Red Sky Morning, is the product of a year of readings, workshops and rewrites. And it shows. It hits the stage sprinting. It's fully formed, impressively set and finely tuned.

    It's a modest yarn about a day in the life of a family: store manager father, boozy mother and shy teen daughter. They're loving, but they're deeply and tragically bottled up. Heartbreakingly inarticulate.

    What they can't say to one another they think aloud to us: their idle thoughts, their secrets, their fears, their black dog depressions. Sometimes all three chatter at once (the script is written in columns), so the director has to conduct the play like a score for three voices.

    Sam Strong (who directed Shedding, brilliantly, at La Mama earlier this year) does a fine job keeping it all comprehensible. But, all due respect to Strong, with actors of the calibre of David Whiteley, Sarah Sutherland and Erin Dewar, a drover's dog could have steered this one home. All three are chameleons. And all three are at their brilliant best.

    The combination of lighting (Danny Pettingill) and set (Peter Mumford) is another highlight.

     

      

    Red Sky Morning

     

    Alison Croggan, Theatre Notes (13/09/08)

    Red Sky Morning (Aug 27 - Sept 27, 2008) by Tom Holloway. Directed by Sam Strong.

    I have often theorised, over various beverages (coffee, whiskey, absinthe) that, while Melbourne is an exciting place to be if you like going to the theatre, with some brilliant theatrical minds and bodies, our theatre suffers from one debilitating weakness: its writing. Waxing lyrical, I'd suggest that this might have something to do with an inward-looking, parochial literary culture. Or alternatively, perhaps it's linked to a conviction I've encountered now and then among theatre artists and, sometimes, critics that literature and theatre are activities that are not only mutually exclusive, but naturally opposed.

    
    Writers can react in defence by turning into enormous intellectual snobs or, alternatively, dump the idea of literature altogether as an unnecessary affectation.

    There's often been a broad streak of anti-intellectualism in Australian theatre, that can sideline literary art as a secondary, perhaps optional, part of the theatre. Actors might train for years to discipline their voices and bodies but, hey, any fool with a keyboard can write. The other response is for playwrights to become the sterile kings of an untouchable domain, a la the Edward Albee school of theatre. (There's that joke: how many playwrights does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: none. No changes!)

    By the time I've reached this point, I usually have to be scraped off the floor and gently pushed home before I start dribbling. Or worse, before I begin to expound my ideas about what writing can be in the theatre, which is good for another three hours. But all this is a long-winded way of signalling that I think there is, in fact, a rich loam of theatre writing in Australia, which, despite the production of exciting playwrights like Lally Katz or Ross Mueller, remains mostly unploughed. Judging the RE Ross Trust Play Awards this year, I read a number of adventurous and intelligent texts that, above all, were clearly written for the theatre, as opposed to being transposed novels or bad attempts at poetry.

    This is at once encouraging and challenging. Because if there are all these writers making interesting plays, how can our theatre culture support them? The talent out there far exceeds what our mainstream theatres, even with the best of intentions, can produce. I began to wonder if Melbourne needs a theatre specifically for writers, a theatre which exploits our sophisticated theatrical practice to realise the possibilities of this new work.

    Or perhaps there's Red Stitch. (I realise this is a cue for other independent theatres to clamour that they, too, put on new writing: yes, yes, yes. And I'm not ignoring La Mama or Hoy Polloy or any others. But certainly, there's Red Stitch). Tom Holloway's Red Sky Morning is the first product of Red Stitch Writers, a system of in-house play development started last year. This is a new step in Red Stitch's history, which since 2001 has concentrated on picking up and producing the overseas work that escapes the notice of the MTC, and it demonstrates that there's a world of difference between putting on a play, however well, and making theatre.

    In choosing to produce Holloway's play, Red Stitch made a courageous bet. And it's paid off. Red Sky Morning is exciting work, which, as good theatre writing should, attempts to rethink the possibilities of theatre. And, crucially, the commitment of the director, performers and designers to realising this play shines through this production.

    Tom Holloway has written what might be called a spoken oratorio, a poem for three voices that, like a piece of music, weaves through counterpoint and harmony and tonal collisions. Holloway exploits the patterns of ordinary speech, its repetitions and elisions and fractures, with consummate skill. There is, despite the year-long development, a suspicion now and then of over-writing, a mere whisper of a few words too many, but it's a solid and artfully worked script with a powerful emotional engine.

    It consists of three internal monologues that follow the course of 24 hours in the life of a rural family, a Man (David Whiteley), a Woman (Sarah Sutherland) and a Girl (Erin Dewar). Each monologue is autonomous, touching the others not through dialogue, but through a complex pattern of echoes and repetitions. It's a device which reinforces not only the mutual isolation of each character but, poignantly, their unmet yearning to connect.

    They are at first glance an "ordinary" family living an unremarkable life somewhere in country Australia. It's a familiar landscape to anyone who has lived in a country town. The Man is a shopkeeper, his wife does housewifely duties, and their daughter is a schoolgirl whose major preoccupation is her crush on her schoolteacher. But, as Holloway begins to excavate their inner lives, it becomes clear that tragedy - as Chekhov understood profoundly - is not only the provenance of the large gesture. It exists in the smallest details of ordinary life: in the caress misunderstood, the moment missed, the dream unshared, despair unsaid and unheard.

    In fact, Red Sky Morning is a play in which, quite literally, nothing happens, which is perhaps one of the hardest things to achieve successfully on stage. It begins with a missed moment of passion between the couple, when the Woman farts luxuriously in the bedroom, and their mutual embarrassment creates an impassable wall beyond which neither are able to reach, despite their longing for each other.

    The Man goes to work, the Girl goes to school, the Woman waits for them to leave the house so she can begin drinking. Each moment of violent rebellion against the loneliness and tedium of their lives splutters out into impotent fantasy; the only character who can still express her rage is the Girl, and we suspect that she, too, will learn to push down her anger and despair, hiding it underneath the deadening normality of domestic routine.

    The beast which haunts this family is represented by the recurring figure of a hallucinatory dog (like Les Murray's black dog, which he used, after Churchill, to describe his own black depressions). The Man is deeply, suicidally depressed, a weight which perhaps has sparked his wife's alcoholism. This profound dysfunction makes their daughter long for a "proper" family, a family whose weaknesses don't expose her to shame and insecurity and finally, terrible fear.

    Director Sam Strong gives this complex, delicate play a production which is remarkable for its precision - very necessary, given the demands of the text - and its troubling, erotically charged darkness. Peter Mumford's design, moodily lit by Danny Pettingill, is a stylised Australian house floored with red earth, its walls defined by venetian blinds that can be snapped open and shut. Like the text, the design blurs the distinction between inside and outside, the hidden and the revealed.

    The performances all rise to the challenges of the writing. Whiteley is almost the cliche of the decent, inarticulate country bloke, to the point where he is occasionally outshone by the other two actors (this might account for the odd moment of over-direction in his performance). Sutherland and Dewar give committed, focused performances, wringing out of the text its painfulness, violence and comedy.

    If ever you need evidence that a production's process is reflected in what happens on stage, this is it. It certainly justifies Red Stitch's investment in Holloway, who is clearly a talent to watch. And it makes an intense, deeply absorbing hour in the theatre, a production that patiently accumulates power towards its devastating end.

    Sarah Sutherland, David Whiteley, Erin Dewar in Red Sky Morning by Tom Holloway. Picture: Gemma Higgins-Sears

     

    Strange Interlude (Red Sky Morning)

    Michael Magnusson, On Stage and Walls (31/08/09)

    Red Sky Morning (August 27 - September 27) by Tom Holloway. Directed by Sam Strong.

     

    Red Stitch Theatre’s new initiative of presenting work by local writers gets underway with a piece that is sheer virtuosity as text as well as performance. The story is of a day in the frustrating lives of a family whose channels of communication have broken down through an inability to name, let alone do anything, about the wife/mother’s alcoholism.

    Peter Mumford’s set brilliantly locates the small town locale in a space with red dirt floor, laminex table, corrugated iron sheet across the back and, on three sides, venetian blinds. Throughout the play we peer into the lives of the three characters, father, mother and daughter through the venetians.
    David Whiteley, Sarah Sutherland and Erin Dewar. Photography by Gemma Higgins-Sears.

    Tom Holloway’s masterful script takes us one step further, into their very minds. Unable to confront the woman’s addiction all three no longer talk to one another. Instead of conventional dialogue, the actors speak their characters inner thoughts. These interior monologues, unheard by the other characters, propel the action toward a near fatal conclusion.

    Unlike spoken words, thoughts can process many physical and emotional sensations are once and each monologue is a complex of sensations which often run parallel to each other and occasionally overlap, one word intruding from one monologue into another, like the baton in relay race, handed seamlessly from one to another, the family obviously attuned to each other’s fears and anxieties but not to speak.

    Holloway’s text, as the programme note explains, was developed over many months and has attained a remarkable precision and clarity. In an early scene, where the family are waking at the start of the day, the juxtaposition of states of dreaming and waking are Joycian. In a similarly Joycian way Holloway’s internal dialogues examine sexual fantasies, an inopportune fart, the onslaught of a pimple or processing the feel of one’s own body in howlingly funny and obsessive detail. With the same clinical precision he describes a mind talking itself into committing suicide (the original title was to have been Love My Black Dog, 'Black Dog' referring to Winston Churchill's nickname for his lifelong depressive episodes which make the repeated sightings in the play of a mysterious and threatening dog all the more potent). Holloway employs the device of comedy giving way quickly to deep drama as well as he employs words. The three actors realise this rich and multi-faceted text, coinciding the words they speak together or apart, as well as the author has written them. Whiteley, Sutherland and Dewar miraculously never miss a beat as though they were expert singers guided by an invisible conductor in singing a great and tragic madrigal. Like the most complex of Beckett’s writings in combining physical, psychological and spiritual states, Red Sky Morning is a remarkable theatrical experience.

    * Strange Interlude was Eugene O'Neill's most experimental play. In it he introduced internal monologues which were spoken by a character but which were unheard by other characters.

     

    Love Lies Bleeding

    Travis de Jonk, SameSame.com.au (05/08/08)

    Love Lies Bleeding (July 16 - August 16, 2008) by Don DeLillo. Directed by Alice Bishop.

    Love Lies Bleeding, by New York writer Don DeLillo, tells the story of an artist who becomes an invalid after a stroke. His wife’s tiresome daily routine of looking after him is suddenly broken by the surprise arrival of one of his ex-wives and his estranged son. The reason for their ‘out of the blue’ visit soon becomes clear – they want the current wife’s consent to commit an ‘act of mercy’ to end the artist’s life.

    What becomes apparent is that everyone has their own agenda in their decision to either end his life or prolong it, which has little to do with the artist’s best interests. Instead of overt political statements, the play deals with the issues of euthanasia through the humanity of its characters. Neither State nor God factor into these arguments. On the contrary – it’s all about the humanity and the personal – guilt, revenge, selfishness and nostalgia are what colour their decision-making.

    In his play DeLillo asks us to consider what it really means to be alive. What makes a life meaningful? And should life end when that meaning is no longer there?

    The play is punctuated by flashbacks to life before the stroke. We see little snippets of his interactions with the key characters. Each gives us a glimpse into who the he was and the way he thought. Yet neither the audience nor the characters ever get to find out what the artist would have wanted for himself. Would he have wanted to live in his vegetative state? Or would he have preferred to be free of his comatose body?

    Love Lies Bleeding definitely has a slow and calculated pace that is fitting and respectful of the weighty issues within it. Sometimes this production felt a bit too slow, and it lost its sense of pressure and heightened anxiety. However there are some really gripping moments that will leave you breathless. There’s a brutal sequence of scenes where the ex-wife and son fondly remember the artist and talk about memories with his new wife, that are contrasted with them ganging up on her, bulling her into submission to their ‘act of mercy.’ There, the pace was perfect.

    Performances from the cast are pretty good all round. The characters they create are believable, genuine and intense. In particular, the latest addition to the Red Stitch ensemble, Tim Potter, is brilliant (and at times genuinely creepy) as the son that is totally obsessed with the father who never had time for him. Christine Maloney’s character of the ex-wife is also excellent, bringing a truckload of realistic guilt, regret and anxiety to the situation.

    Kevin Summers fulfills the difficult task of playing an invalid man without being patronising or a caricature of disability. He also delivers a great performance as the artist before his stroke, with a character that is full of that ‘difficult’ and ‘angsty’ artistic temperament.

    However, while the American accents aren’t badly done, they do detract from the storytelling and the intensity at times, and seem unnecessary for an Australian audience.

    Love Lies Bleeding is another brilliant choice by Red Stitch. It’s fresh and deep, without any obvious clichés. It’s not about which side of the fence you sit on regarding the moral dilemma, instead it explores the human realities around us, regardless of the politics. It’s about the decisions, too personal and introspective to be black or white, or easily explained.

    Pool (No Water)

    Travis de Jonk, SameSame.com.au (22/06/2008)

    Pool - No Water (11 June - 5 July) by Mark Ravenhill. Directed by Simon Stone.

    From the moment Pool (No Water) begins, you will be utterly captivated and moved to the edge of your seat till the very end. This latest offering by Red Stitch Theatre tells the story of a group of ‘hip bohemian artists’ twenty years on from their art school heyday. They are not young any more, and still not cutting it in the art world. That is, except for one of them, who becomes outrageously successful.

    That is where the play begins. You soon find out that ‘Miss Successful’ tore the group up when she left them all to pursue her ambitions, and is secretly the resentful envy of her ‘friends’ who have now just become a bunch of ‘hangers on’. She is of course oblivious to the mixed emotions of her friends, believing that they love her.

    Little does she know how very very wrong she is about them, when she invites them over to have a splash in her success… I mean pool. Of course, they accept. The thrilling dark rollercoaster ride to the darkest regions of the human soul begins.

    It’s a simple story essentially, but layered with so much emotional complexity that only the human animal can have. You will feel chewed up, spat out and rolled in honey, all at once. But you won’t look away for a moment.

    Pool (No Water) was a spot on choice for this theatre company. The 2001 play is one of the most recent works by Mark Ravenhill; A notorious and controversial UK writer who would be best known for his other theatrical works Foust Is Dead, Handbag and the infamous Shopping And Fucking. The brilliant fast pace writing is peppered with hysterical but very dark humour, and more profanity than an episode of South Park. So suffice to say that this is not for the faint hearted, or those who can’t deal with the real raw human experience. Human nature reveals it’s ugly side, and it’s shocking and riveting.

    Red Stitch has made some very smart choices in the staging of this production. From the set, to the costumes, to the lighting, direction and acting choices, the language of this production is very ‘now’, drawing on contemporary references that anyone will instantly recognize and relate to. It’s very hip, cool and visual. The set leaps out at you like an 80’s remake video clip, with its tile grid and Fluoro UV lighting. The actors all decked out in bright American Apparel clothing instantly makes you feel like you are in some wicked advert or music video. The amazing raw performances from the cast contrast from this artificial world, and pop out to punch you in the face. It really works, and keeps you coming back for round two.

    Great performances by the talented cast create a convincing and captivating mirage. The ensemble paints a vivid picture, rich in emotion and packed with tension. People, places and moments in time are conjured up from thin air and the simple set, and you’ll swear that you can see them in reality, even though it is just in your minds.

    I’m fortunate enough to see a lot of theatre in my line of work. I know a great show when I see it, and this production is exceptional. Red Stitch Theatre is a true Melbourne gem. I feel sorry for all those of you who don’t live in Melbourne, because chances are you are not going to get the chance to see this truly extraordinary theatrical work. As for those of you in Melbourne, don’t waste this opportunity to catch some great art. Wow. You have to see this play.

    
    From left: David Whiteley, Dion Mills, Jessamy Dyer and Melissa Chambers in Pool (No Water) by Mark Ravenhill. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson

    Dark Pool of Intensity (Pool - No Water)

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun (17/06/2008)

    Pool - No Water (11 June - 5 July) by Mark Ravenhill. Directed by Simon Stone.

    ARTISTS typically live in great poverty or great luxury. There's a chasm in the middle. They live in bitter oblivion or find glorious fame. But most stay poor and unknown. No wonder they resent the few who make it.

    In this play, four of the moderately talented losers are invited to the palatial home of the moderately talented winner to relive their skinny-dipping, drug-taking glory days. There's a terrible accident . . . (the spoiler is in the play's title.)

    This dark and foul-mouthed play (from the author of the notorious Shopping and F---ing) is short -- just an hour -- but intense. It's all in there. It's as filling and as satisfying as a three-act play.

    Pool (No Water) is extraordinarily energising. It's hard to imagine the play better realised than it is in this Red Stitch production, handsomely set in a black-tiled pool (by Peter Mumford) and lit with intense white strip-lights (Stelios Karagiannis). No costume designer, alas. And it shows. The play is skilfully directed by Hayloft founder Simon Stone.

    David Whiteley's acting is awesomely turbo-charged, verging on psychotic. But he doesn't ever lose control. Jessamy Dyer is a master of the kind of intense role she's given here. Dion Mills, likewise, is perfectly cast as the pained, cultured, thwarted artist. Melissa Chambers makes the most of a juicy and varied part.

    Almost single-handedly, Red Stitch has revived the art of performing plays in Melbourne.

     

      

    The Pain and the Itch

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun (09/05/08)

    The Pain and the Itch (April 30 - May 31) by Bruce Norris. Directed by Gorkem Acaroglu.

    On the strength of the first third of the year, 2008 already rates as a great year in theatre in Melbourne certainly as an above average year.

    And Red Stitch has (in my rarely humble opinion) contributed two of the top 10 so far in a very strong field.

    This latest production, The Pain and the Itch, is right up there. It's a black, exciting, unpredictable and evil little comedy about a family of self-obsessed liberal Americans. And it's given a brilliantly imaginative and strikingly original treatment by director Gorkem Acaroglu.

    Written by Chicago actor Bruce Norris, The Pain and the Itch appears to have been inspired by Ibsen's play Ghosts and David Eldridge's stage adaptation of the Dogme 95 film Festen with a twist of Moira Buffini's Dinner for good measure. So, if you know your plays, you'll be expecting sexually transmitted diseases, possible incest, lots of racism and infidelity, and plenty of good old-fashioned spousal abuse.

    As a tribe, these middle-class Americans are a contemptible lot, blindly avaricious and blithely self-indulgent. Their tantrums unwittingly result in the death of a young immigrant worker.

    Though they could easily be caricatures, figures of fun, each player in this story is flesh and blood, played for real. Clay (Daniel Frederiksen) is a househusband bringing up a baby while his lawyer wife Kelly (Sarah Sutherland) works. He's proud of what he's doing, but deeply frustrated.

    His brother Cash (Get it? They're Cassius and Clay!) is a successful and smart-mouthed plastic surgeon dating a Russian sex kitten named Kalina. They're over for dinner and all hell breaks loose.

    Acting throughout is excellent, detailed and fleshy, from the brothers' slightly dotty PBS-watching mother (Andrea Swifte) down to the mute, itchy child. Pick of the bunch though is Erin Dewar as Kalina. Yet again, she turns cliche into something indispensable, something valuable and vital.

    This is a terrific piece of theatre. Don't miss it.

    Daniel Frederiksen and Erin Dewar in The Pain and the Itch by Bruce Norris. Image: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

      

    The Pain and the Itch

     Nikki Thomas, Australian Stage Online (05/05/08)

     

    The Pain and the Itch (April 30 - May 31) by Bruce Norris. Directed by Gorkem Acaroglu.

    It is without fail that Red Stitch has delivered again, with this superbly staged production of Bruce Norris’ intricately written The Pain and the Itch.

    Moving, funny and cringe worthy at the best of times, this play is an elaborate exploration into the morals and values deemed important by members of our society. Too often, do we find ourselves down on our luck about life’s dealings, only never to consider the circumstances of those less fortunate than you. With his superb use of satire, Norris has created a dark comedy with an added brilliant twist designed to cut to the very soul of your conscious.

    The play takes place over one night, with most of the action a replay of the family’s Thanksgiving dinner, held by the seemingly successful young, yuppie couple, Kelly and Clay. Played superbly by ensemble newcomer Sarah Sutherland and the talented Daniel Frederiksen, they prove through their strong choices and clear grasp of the script, that looks aren’t always what they assert when it comes to their designer relationship and home.

    Despite proclaiming themselves as post modern, 21st century left wing voters, they hypocritically still do their utmost to protect themselves and their children from those contaminated with the illness of the ‘lower class.’ On the night of the dinner, the discovery of a half gnawed avocado forces them to confront their worst fears - the thought of an undoubtedly harmful intruder in their cocooned home. Add to this, the finding of the severe rash on their 5 year old daughter’s genitalia region and their ‘pleasant’ Thanksgiving dinner turns sour faster than the turkey is defrosted.

    
    Desperately failing to be seen and respected as a home-maker, father and most of all man by his high flying attorney, breadwinner wife, Clay becomes more and more distressed by the presence of his surrounding family members and as a result the tragic events of the evening unfold.

    Brett Cousins does a bitingly sharp job as the crass, sexist brother Cash, who is continuously and without care at the mercy of Clay’s seemingly more-than-sibling rivalry. His girlfriend, beautifully portrayed by Erin Dewar is the big hearted, lower class Kalina, a Russian immigrant consistently insulted by Cash about her lack of command of the English language. Adding to Clay’s anguish, there is the consistent voice of his well meaning but condescending mother Carol, (played marvelously by guest actor Andrea Swifte) who never ceases to voice her own opinion about her naïve political views or the necessity of pornography in any sexual relationship.
    

    The chain of events of this Thanksgiving’s dinner is replayed by the family to the African accented, Mr Hadid, whose consistent presence in this apparently private domestic problem is only made shockingly clear as the story unfolds. Guest actor Terry Yeboah shines in this outside perspective role and provides a fittingly heartbreaking response of a character who has suffered considerably at the hands of the self-orientated.

    What is so engaging about this play is the identification that you have with these self obsessed monsters. Gorkem Acaroglu’s direction is flawless, allowing and channeling the wit and satire of the script to be fully realised. She skillfully handles the seemingly difficult problem of a child actor with ease, with 5 year old Kayla (played alternatively by convincing actors Oregen Guilloux-Cooke and Fantine Banulski) providing a vast contrast to the selfish conduct of the adults with her innocent presence.

    The simple design concept by Anna Cordingley is yet another brilliant aspect about this Red Stitch production, as it too taps into the twist of the script and is manifested into the design. The disturbing pictures on the walls only reveal themselves half way through the piece, while the decision of clothing the actors only in their underwear until the near end of the play, is suddenly thrust onto you as the play unravels itself.

    It is all of the above and more that really propels Red Stitch to be a leading theatre company in Melbourne. Each member of the ensemble had a brilliant and accurate interpretation of their character and always stayed one step in front of the audience by disentangling the script with their excellent choices.

    This is a piece designed to reflect on the manifesto debate - how much have we really developed in the abolishment of the line between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat? It is clear from this script where Bruce Norris places his opinion and one can’t help feeling, after viewing this production, that unfortunately he is right.

     

    Terry Yeboah (foreground), Erin Dewar, Brett Cousins and Andrea Swifte in The Pain and the Itch by Bruce Norris.Image: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

     

    Rash Behaviour (The Pain and the Itch)

    

    Michael Magnusson,  On Stage and Walls (03/05/08)

    The Pain and the Itch (April 30 - May 31) by Bruce Norris. Directed by Gorkem Acaroglu.

    Bruce Norris’s class satire The Pain and the Itch takes the mechanism of a good farce, one by someone like Alan Ayckbourn, tweaks it about along the clever farce lines like playing some scenes out of their time sequence, sets up the characters with petards to foist themselves on, lets it all play out until it the situations are totally confusing and then neatly ties it all up in the last ten minutes. Kelly (Sarah Sutherland) and Clay (Daniel Frederiksen) seem the perfect couple. Kelly is a successful businesswoman; Clay a somewhat resentful house husband sacrificing his own career (and cat) to care for their baby and preschool daughter Kayla (Oregen Guilloux alternating with Cooke and Fantine Banulski). What isn't explained at first is the presence of an immigrant African taxi driver Mr. Hadid (Terry Yeboah), why he is crying in the opening scene or what it is that Kelly and Cash are trying to explain to him.

    Their conversations ramble, Hadid asking the price Clay’s shoes, furniture or their property tax. At the same Kelly and Clay’s Thanksgiving gathering is played out. Visiting are Clay’s plastic surgeon brother Cash (Brett Cousins) and mother Carol (Andrea Swift) along with Cash’s East European girl friend Kalina (Erin Dewar). These two separate time frames are played together and the first act is mainly taken up with a litany of inter-family hatreds, resentments and anxiety over the discovery of a gnawed avocado. The new discovery that Kalya has a genital rash ups the anxiety that it might be caused by whatever rodent is gnawing at the avocado.

    The real gnawing is the extended family gnawing at each other’s nerves exposing their prejudices. Clay resents more successful wife, harbours a life long grudge against his brother Cash. Kelly clearly loathes everything about Cash, Carol claims to favour neither son but constantly and unconsciously reinforces Clay’s claim he was the second favourite. Carol is the addled mother from Hell and nobody like the bigoted and self absorbed Kalina. Norris’s trump is that this American family are series of clichés, long reinforced by television and film. They merge left wing, radical, and PC chick with every sort of conservative prejudice imaginable. Presumably this is why everyone but the child and the taxi driver wear only their underwear, exposed for us, the audience to see them for what they are. Unlike the good humoured farces of Mr Ayckbourn and co., The Pain and the Itch is a cruel spectacle. Norris creates a log-jam of individual incidents that make this family a totally unlovable one. Even the final resolution is made at the expense of their amorality. The pain turns out an unspeakable pain caused by one of the many squabbles we witness and the chain of actions it sets off. The itch is finally explained like Ibsen’s Ghosts or Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Rondel as a sexual ‘pass the parcel’. For a final indignity Norris even includes a dash of 'cruel woman on nerdy guy' action Neil LaBute style in his finale.

    I have to hand it to Red Stitch for finding a way of navigating through this bitch epic. The long acts, filled with abuse and ambiguity, were so well balanced. Director Görkem Acaroglu seems to keep the dysfunction afloat at all times, so well he might consider becoming a family therapist. The cast, as usual, are so well selected. Guest artist Yeboah, seeming to move and speak a little slower while the others buzz around, makes the enigmatic outsider a constant focus. Who is he, I kept thinking, what is hiding? (what else can the others possibly have hidden, I kept thinking regularly as well, right to the end). The small playing space puts everything up to close scrutiny (literally, the labels on the underwear can be read and whether the gentlemen dress to the left or right is readily apparent) so the well controlled mood was very welcome. When tempers flared, they did so explosively but when the room falls silent dirty looks carry just as well. The Pain and the Itch pushes a lot of moral buttons in what it exposes as well as how it is played. It also pushes a lot of boundaries in is the situations and characters. The child actors playing Kala are privy to some fairly raunchy sights and sounds and the play ends with the only member of the family with any decency squashed and betrayed while the appalled Hadid flees the two-faced assembly. Anna Cordingley's set is an angry red adorned with illustrations of various skin infections from the pages of medical book. In a way the whole thing gets under your skin. Norris may have intended it but the laughs often come with a very unpleasant after taste.

    Daniel Frederikson (foreground), Terry Yeboah, Erin Dewar, Andrea Swifte and Oregen Guilloux-Cooke in The Pain and the Itch by Bruce Norris. Image: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

      

    Thriller With a Twist of Humour (The Winterling)

    Catherine Lambert, Sunday Herald Sun (06/04/2008)

    The Winterling (19 March-19 April, 2008) by Jez Butterworth. Directed by Andrew Gray.

     

    AS the lights went down at the end of The Winterling there were many bewildered mumblings in the audience.

    Few seemed to know what it was about.  

    It was indeed a challenge that only came to light in the last 10 minutes, but when that happened, everything that had gone on before became much more powerful and interesting.

    Red Stitch is a fabulous independent company and its work is consistent and polished.

    It could certainly show the Melbourne Theatre Company a thing or two about the importance of mastering accents.

    The combination of compelling writing from England's Jez Butterworth and impassioned acting in a small venue must be responsible for the company's strong subscriptions and widening audience base.

    The Winterling is essentially a thriller and is done extremely well. From the start, it felt dark, dingy, menacing and haunted, but never heavy or burdened.It was very funny. This was ensemble acting as it should be perfectly timed, supportive, well-rehearsed and cohesive.

    Nicholas Bell as West, a mob member on the run, and Steven Adams as Wally, the stand-over mob man, made a great double act. They bounced off each other with wonderfully authentic English aggression thinly veiled in politeness.

    Wally drives to the wasteland countryside to find West and takes a hapless companion and stepson Patsy along, quite literally, for the ride.  It is not immediately apparent why the dynamics are so tense and seething, but it becomes clear that West has messed up a hit and has to make up for it by committing another one.

    His ethics seem to win out, perhaps because he has had a rare glimpse of love and affection with a destitute young woman, played by Ella Caldwell, wandering over the moor. He is particularly hard on Patsy (Martin Sharpe), who is clearly going to be the next victim, and they also have some well-fired scenes.

    Both Bell and Sharpe are magnificent in what would be very tough acting that leaves no time for hesitation and runs on pure instinct.It is true that this requires some mental gymnastics, but it is worth the effort and is thoroughly rewarding theatre. 

    Nicholas Bell (foreground) Steve Adams and Martin Sharpe in The Winterling by Jez Butterworth.  Photo: Jodie Hutchinson

     

      

    The Winterling

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun (01/04/2008)

    The Winterling (19 March - 19 April, 2008) by Jez Butterworth. Directed by Andrew Gray.

     

    JEZ Butterworth is the first playwright to have his pro debut at the Royal Court since John Osborne, one of the original Angry Young Men.

    At the end of the 1950s, Osborne's Look Back in Anger took theatre out of poncy, fast-talking drawing rooms and dumped it in the roughhouse kitchens and bedrooms of Eastenders.

    Butterworth's newest play is having its world premiere in New York right now. Not quite on Broadway, but just around the corner.

    The Winterling, from 2006, is a little like Butterworth's award-winning debut play Mojo. It's about thugs and low-lifes. Here, "business'' is just another kind of criminal activity.

    Think Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast. But instead of a Spanish villa, The Winterling is set in a derelict cottage in some godforsaken slice of the UK. And destiny is thundering down the hill like a stray boulder.

    These men talk as if they're punching a speed-ball at the gym: fast, brutal, repetitive, rhythmic. It's often hard to tell who has the upper hand.

    Butterworth is a playwright by choice, but he makes his living fixing scripts for Hollywood. It's easy to hear why. He's a gifted story-teller, too.

    Mr West (Nicholas Bell) is visited by one of his old cronies, Wally (Steven Adams). West is the "retired'' partner, though there are hints he went quite barmy. He has summoned Wally to the cottage. Instead of the third "musketeer'' Jerry, Wally brings his girlfriend's son, an aggravating little tosser aptly named Patsy (Martin Sharpe) . . . but to divulge more of the twisty plot would be to ruin it.

    We've come to expect big things from Red Stitch and this production, if anything, exceeds expectations.

    It's good-looking, finely tuned and quite brilliantly acted. Bell is terrifyingly good as West. A sane man would back quietly out of the room when he bares his teeth.

    Adrian Mulraney's cameo as the derro caretaker is also hugely impressive. 

     

    Ella Caldwell and Adrian Mulraney in The Winterling by Jez Butterworth. Photo:  Jodie Hutchinson

     

     

     

    Darkly Comic Gangster Tale Hides a Sinister Sting in its Tail (The Winterling)

    Martin Ball, The Age (24/03/08)

    The Winterling (18 Nov - 19 Dec, 2009) by Jez Butterworth. Directed by Andrew Gray.

    Gangsters have always been popular subjects for scriptwriters, offering endless varieties of characters with colourful turns of phrase and any number of devious plot scenarios. While the genre is rife with violence and crime, it's also full of humour, and British gangsters in particular are invariably funny rather than savage creatures - think The Italian Job, Monty Python's "Piranha Brothers", and Lock, Stock and you get the picture.

    English playwright Jez Butterworth is familiar with this territory, having made his name with Mojo, a comedy about the 1950s London gangster scene. Butterworth returns to the genre in The Winterling, where the gangsters enjoy a laugh, but also a sinister and stomach-churning denouement.

    
    There are some great plot moves in the play including a flashback scene, but it's not worth giving the story away in a review - save for the teaser that the ending, with its diabolical dilemma, is a terrific twist.

    What is worth revealing is that in this Red Stitch production the three key gangster characters are all wonderfully realised. Nicholas Bell gives a great performance as the central figure, Mr West. Bell has the playful snarl to a tee, lending his lines a threatening muscularity, and when the time comes he also shows us deep humiliation and pain.

    Steven Adams is smarmy Wally, a man who has spent his ill-gotten earnings on wine, women and facelifts. Adams is perfect as the gentleman gangster with a heart of stone who happily sells his friends and family down the river.

    Then there's the aptly named Patsy, Wally's stepson, who never knows when to hold his tongue. Martin Sharpe brings exquisite naivety and conceit to this character, and enjoys a scintillating verbal duel with Bell over the specifications of a nearby Roman fort. Adrian Mulraney and Ella Caldwell are equally entertaining as the two additional characters, Draycott and Lue.

    Director Andrew Gray has the actors in tip-top rhythm throughout, adding just the right amount of extra touches to the script, and Peter Mumford's simple design likewise contributes the right edge, with a hatchet and saw blade lying suggestively in the fireplace.

    The Winterling is like a short story in that it leaves the audience just at the point of the moral dilemma, without completing the narrative. But it's a great actor's play, and the intimate ambience (and new seats) at Red Stitch make it a hit.

     

    Nicholas Bell and Martin Sharpe. Pic: Jodie Hutchinson

    The Mercy Seat

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (11/11/08)

    The Mercy Seat (8 Feb - 8 March, 2008) by Neil LaBute. Directed by Alex Papps.

     

    American playwright and director Neil LaBute has a disturbing imagination. He has a talent for creating characters who are worse than they need to be: the otherwise upstanding Mormons who commit murder in Bash (the show that got LaBute kicked out of the Mormon church); the destructive relationships between car passengers in Autobahn; the psychotic art student in The Shape Of Things.

    LaBute is fascinated by manipulative personalities. His plays are full of seemingly normal people doing morally reprehensible things. Their introspection, as they justify themselves, sets the ethical compass squarely on the magnet of contemporary narcissism, and the needle goes haywire.

    But the playwright's most obvious virtue is his mastery of realistic dialogue. He has a fluid, idiomatic style that mimics so closely the way people speak that it gives the strongest impression of having been overheard. With a LaBute play, you might have to stretch your imagination to fit a Procrustean central premise, but the action follows in a plume as dramatic and inevitable as silt dredged from the bottom of the sea.
    

    The Mercy Seat was one of the first theatrical responses to 9/11. It's a claustrophobic two-hander set within spitting distance of Ground Zero on the morning after the towers came down.

    Ben (Simon Wood) is an office worker saved from annihilation by chance. Instead of going to the World Trade Centre that fateful morning, Ben had a sexual liaison at the apartment of his older lover and boss, Abby (Jane Badler). Rather than call his wife and kids, Ben plans to use his narrow escape from tragedy to run off with Abby and start a new life.

    Against the pall of a city in shock, Ben and Abby remain fiercely self-absorbed. They are drawn - like a tongue to a cavity - to examine the flaws in their relationship. Through barbed and recursive conversation, it becomes clear they have developed a corrosive intimacy - one marked by age difference, power imbalance and serial deception.

    Red Stitch has mounted a strong production, with both actors perfectly cast.

    The performances skilfully render the chemistry of this toxic romance.

    Director Alex Papps achieves a fast-flowing, carefully nuanced and consistently absorbing production.

    And Peter Mumford's set design - a spartan apartment, filmed with dust from the destruction of the towers - gives a material analogue to the moral poverty of LaBute's characters.

     

    Jane Badler and Simon Wood in The Mercy Seat by Neil LaBute. Pic: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

      

    The Mercy Seat

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age (11/11/08)

    The Mercy Seat (8 Feb - 8 March, 2008) by Neil LaBute. Directed by Alex Papps.

     

    American playwright and director Neil LaBute has a disturbing imagination. He has a talent for creating characters who are worse than they need to be: the otherwise upstanding Mormons who commit murder in Bash (the show that got LaBute kicked out of the Mormon church); the destructive relationships between car passengers in Autobahn; the psychotic art student in The Shape Of Things. 

    LaBute is fascinated by manipulative personalities. His plays are full of seemingly normal people doing morally reprehensible things. Their introspection, as they justify themselves, sets the ethical compass squarely on the magnet of contemporary narcissism, and the needle goes haywire.

    But the playwright's most obvious virtue is his mastery of realistic dialogue. He has a fluid, idiomatic style that mimics so closely the way people speak that it gives the strongest impression of having been overheard. With a LaBute play, you might have to stretch your imagination to fit a Procrustean central premise, but the action follows in a plume as dramatic and inevitable as silt dredged from the bottom of the sea.
     

    The Mercy Seat was one of the first theatrical responses to 9/11. It's a claustrophobic two-hander set within spitting distance of Ground Zero on the morning after the towers came down.

    Ben (Simon Wood) is an office worker saved from annihilation by chance. Instead of going to the World Trade Centre that fateful morning, Ben had a sexual liaison at the apartment of his older lover and boss, Abby (Jane Badler). Rather than call his wife and kids, Ben plans to use his narrow escape from tragedy to run off with Abby and start a new life.

    Against the pall of a city in shock, Ben and Abby remain fiercely self-absorbed. They are drawn - like a tongue to a cavity - to examine the flaws in their relationship. Through barbed and recursive conversation, it becomes clear they have developed a corrosive intimacy - one marked by age difference, power imbalance and serial deception.

    Red Stitch has mounted a strong production, with both actors perfectly cast.

    The performances skilfully render the chemistry of this toxic romance.

    Director Alex Papps achieves a fast-flowing, carefully nuanced and consistently absorbing production.

    And Peter Mumford's set design - a spartan apartment, filmed with dust from the destruction of the towers - gives a material analogue to the moral poverty of LaBute's characters.

     

    Jane Badler and Simon Wood in The Mercy Seat by Neil LaBute.

     

      

• 2009 Season
  • • On Ego
    • On Ego
    • Faces in the Crowd
    • Day of Reckoning for Generation X (Faces in the Crowd)
    • The Rites of Evil
    • Lobby Hero
    • Making Corrections
    • Moon Glows in a New Setting (Yellow Moon)
    • Hello Cruel World (In a Dark, Dark House)
    • Carnival Ride of Chaos (The Rites of Evil)
    • Darkly Funny (Lobby Hero)
    • Lobby Hero
    • Disturbing Family Life Laid Bare (Leaves of Glass)
    • Secrets Shattered in Sibling Rivalry (Leaves of Glass)
    • Taut Tale of Two Ex-Jailbirds (This Wide Night)
    • Yellow Moon - The Ballad of Leila and Lee
    • Making Corrections (The Rites of Evil)

    On Ego

    

    
    

    Kate Rose, Sunday Herald Sun 29/11/09

    On Ego (Nov 18 - Dec 19) by Mick Gordon and Paul Broks.  Directed by Daniel Frederiksen

     

    What makes us, us?

    It's a question philosophers, theologians and scientists have been wrestling with for centuries. Did God make the brain, or does the brain make God?

    Neuropsychologist Paul Broks and playwright Mick Gordon do their best in On Ego to wrestle an answer out of this conundrum -- as well as acknowledging half the fun is in the argument.

    So it's a smackdown between science and spirituality, Soren Kierkegaard's 'leap of faith' and Friedrich Nietzsche's potentially bleak existentialism, played out with humour, author Milan Kundera and a teleporter.

    Alex (Denis Moore) is an adamant 'bundle' theorist -- people are made up of their neurons and cells and flesh and electrical impulses and nothing else. There is no 'I'. So when during experiments with his colleague and father-in-law Derek (Tim Ross) he has the chance to teleport and be completely reconstructed somewhere else while his original body is vaporised, he has no intellectual opposition to the plan.

    His wife, ego theorist Alice (Andrea Swifte), is battling a brain tumour, however, and believes there has to be more to a person than simply the physical structure of their grey matter.

    It's a debate that has engaged some of philosophy's big names, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Camus and Sartre, all of whom ask their readers in one way or another to stare into an abyss.

    Just as Kierkegaard faltered and clung to his leap of faith -- he could not prove a god, but could not live without one -- Alex is forced to a crisis of his scientific faith.

    Can he really believe we are nothing more than 1 1/2 kg of meat inside a skull, no matter how impressive and un-steak-like the behaviour of that meat is?

    Anyone who's read Sartre -- or looked at the bleak photos on his books' dust jackets -- knows these arguments can be dark and relentless, but the playwrights and the cast make the 80 minutes of On Ego joyous, hopeful and full of love.

     

     

    On Ego

    

    
    

     

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun 24/11/09

    On Ego (Nov 18 - Dec 19) by Mick Gordon and Paul Broks.  Directed by Daniel Frederiksen

     

    ALEX (Denis Moore) and his wife (Andrea Swifte) are about to celebrate their anniversary by going out to dinner, a re-enactment of the day he proposed to her. He teleports to meet her and arrives safely. The machine malfunctions, however, and merely duplicates Alex instead of vaporising the original.

    Houston, we've had a problem here.

    Like a cross between an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and a Geoffrey Robertson hypothetical, On Egowonders which Alex has the greater right to continue. The perfect replica, complete with memories and experiences, or the original left behind?

    Alex is a scientist and lecturer. He tells us the brain is a story-telling machine. The self is a story. There is no soul, no ghost in the machine, no essence, no ego. Just a big handful of offal with a few billion nerve cells firing.

    Playwright Mick Gordon is best known for theatre essays written in collaboration with specialists and academics. His play On Religionwas written with atheist philosopher A.C. Grayling; On Death with hospice worker and psychologist Marie de Hennezel; and On Egowith neuropsychologist Paul Broks.

    Gordon does for our playhouses what Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, does for readers. He repackages complex ideas and thorny issues in ways that entertain and enlighten, even if there is some dumbing down.

    A revised version of On Religion, entitled Grace, was performed by the MTC in January with Noni Hazlehurst playing Grace, a militant atheist. But, too often, the punches missed.

    And that's a problem On Ego shares. Everything is black or white. You're either an ego theorist or a bundle theorist. There's no room for a third way.

    Naively, Gordon takes for granted that we are less valuable for being less than divine. And that's a mistake that Star Trek would never make.

    Daniel Frederiksen's directorial debut is remarkably assured. There might not be a ghost in it, but his machine is very well oiled.

     

    Denis Moore as Alex in On Ego.  Pic: Jodie Hutchinson

     

     

     

    Faces in the Crowd

    

    
    Kate Herbert, Herald Sun 03/10/09
    

    Faces in the Crowd (Oct 7 -Nov 7) by Leo Butler.  Directed by Sam Strong.

    WITH nearly half of marriages ending in divorce, Leo Butler's Faces in the Crowd may hit a nerve in many people. This two-hander depicts an intense, uncomfortable insight into the weird reunion of a long-separated couple.

    Dave (David Whiteley), after five years with Joanne (Sarah Sutherland), disappeared 10 years previously, leaving Joanne with huge debts and unanswered questions. Dave was never heard of again -- until now.

    The pain gets worse. Joanne, contacted by Dave, arrives at his fancy London flat. She is bitter, he is at first contrite. Whiteley and Sutherland capture the awful discomfort of these people who now have nothing in common. We wonder whether they ever did when Dave describes how he felt trapped and needed to escape. We also wonder why he invited her to his home and why she came.

    They snipe and bicker, defend themselves and attack with cruel words and even physical violence. And why is Joanne, with what appears to be shame, peeling her clothes off? Why is Dave not commenting?

    All becomes clear when we realise that she is taking her pound of flesh or, rather his seed. Joanne wants a baby -- and Dave owes it to her.

    The acting is skilful. Whiteley has an edge of violence balanced with smooth courtesy.

    Sutherland, as Joanne, looks shattered. Her northern English accent gives her an alien quality.

    Sam Strong's production is claustrophobic, containing the actors in a set (by Dayna Morrissey) that barely gives them room to dodge each other's blows.

    This play will have you with clenched fists and holding your breath.

     

     

    Day of Reckoning for Generation X (Faces in the Crowd)

    

    
    

     

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age 13/10/09

     

    Faces in the Crowd (Oct 7 -Nov 7) by Leo Butler.  Directed by Sam Strong.

     

    Nothing in the world can compensate one for not always being 25, Lord Byron wrote in his diaries. He died at 36, of course. Generation X doesn't have that luxury. It has started hitting early middle age, and the romance is wearing off.

    Leo Butler's Faces in the Crowd is a brilliant and excruciating anti-romance - a Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for those who misspent their youth in the '80s, and are facing the credit crunch now.

    An estranged couple, Dave (David Whiteley) and Joanna (Sarah Sutherland), are reunited in Dave's trendy London apartment. It has been a decade since Dave fled northern England, his marriage and a mountain of debt, to start afresh in the south.

    Joanna's arrival is a day of reckoning. Still bitter about Dave's abandonment, she no longer cares about the money. Now 40, Joanna wants Dave to impregnate her before it's too late. She's even brought Viagra, just in case.

    Whiteley and Sutherland put in fantastic performances, verbally pummelling each other in perfectly observed Sheffield accents. It isn't quite George and Martha all over again. As written, the play strays into caricature, making it less intensely dramatic and more overtly satirical than Albee's masterpiece.

    The scarifying emotional terrain is also leavened by incidental comedy. Sound and set design wryly capture the claustrophobia of high-density urban living.

    Filing cabinets are substituted for furniture. Depeche Mode played full-bore upstairs, a neighbour's bathroom renovations, and the traffic noise outside all form a comic soundtrack to the fumbling and mechanical attempts at sex onstage.

    It's a biting satire that will make you laugh and cringe.

     

    Sarah Sutherland and David Whiteley in Faces in the Crowd. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

     

     

    The Rites of Evil

    

    
    

    John Bailey, Sunday Age M Magazine 13/09/09

     

    The Rites of Evil (Sept 2-26) by Travis Cotton.  Directed by Alex Menglet.

    Mental illness and recidivism have never been so much fun! Red Stitch's latest treads similar ground to its This Wide Night earlier this year: a pair of mismatched ex-cons struggling to adapt to life on the outside. But where the earlier production was a heavy-handed slice of kitchen-sink realism, this new Australian work balances its more troubling themes with startling excursions into carnivaliesque non-naturalism and barbed black wit.

    Xavier is a fast-talking, hyperactive parolee who latches onto the depressive and delusional Easter; their sympathetic case worker finds herself increasingly embroiled in the unsettling world their relationship creates.

    Travis Cotton's script is full of wonderfully sharp exchanges; special credit goes to director Alex Menglet for reining in the work's excesses and adding original flourishes that prevent the work from falling too neatly into one theatrical mode.

    Hilariously on-the-mark performances from Tim Potter and Erin Dewar, along with a less nuanced but more than capable contribution from Red Stitch newcomer Johnny Carr, make this a challenging, eminently watchable piece of new theatre.

     

     

    Lobby Hero

    Kate Herbert, Herald Sun 26/06/09

    Lobby Hero (June 10 - July 11) by Kenneth Lonergan.  Directed by Denis Moore.

    

    THERE is something profoundly moving about Kenneth Lonergan's Lobby Hero. Four people struggle to live according to their own moral code. How do we decide what is right and wrong, how to serve ourselves while not damaging others, or how to make the best of what we are given?
    
    The Oscar-winning screenwriter sets his play over several nights in the lobby of a block of flats in a US city. Jeff (Tim Potter), the night security guard, waits for his boss William (Christopher Kirby) to visit on his rounds. Bill (Daniel Frederiksen), a cop, and his rookie partner Dawn (Eryn-Jean Norvill) drop by each night.
    
    Lonergan's script is beautifully crafted with sensitive, funny and vividly observed dialogue. Each character springs to life fully drawn, complete with complexities, contradictions and mistakes.
    
    Denis Moore's production balances comedy with drama and creates deceptively simple rhythms in both the story and characters.
    Shaun Gurton's design provides two stark spaces: the grey lobby and a cage-like exterior doorway.
    
    Potter is on stage for almost the entire two hours, and he is riveting, capturing Jeff's humour and his dilemma when faced with telling the truth about his friend's lie.
    
    As William, the fine, upstanding citizen who takes seriously his role of security captain, Kirby is dignified and captivating. His entire physicality embodies the anguish that William experiences as he faces his demons and tries to protect his family.
    Frederiksen as Bill has the brittle quality of a grimy, jaded street cop accustomed to getting his own way. He is smarmy, dangerous and fiercely loyal - when his friends play his game.
    
    Norvill captures the dogged ambition of Dawn. She is desperate to be a good cop, but who can tell whether her actions were on the side of the angels?
    
    Nothing is simple in this life; it is riddled with moral choices.

     

    Making Corrections

    

    Making Corrections

    Martin Ball, The Age (07/09/09)

    The Rites of Evil (Sept 2-26, 2009) by Travis Cotton.  Directed by Alex Menglet.

     

     

    Red Stitch Theatre built its reputation by staging Australian premieres of the latest plays from London and New York. More recently, the company has been nurturing local writers, too, such as the premiere of The Rites of Evil by Sydney writer-actor Travis Cotton.

    This taut three-hander explores the damaged mental landscape of two men who have just been released from an institution - psychiatric or correctional is never entirely clear - and the possibilities and consequences that flow from their attempts to take control of their bleak lives.

    Cotton's writing is stylish and assured. He creates focused scenes with confident dialogue that rises above the everyday, to develop effective imagery and metaphor. There is a good balance of wit and edginess, ensuring the language catches the audience's ear. Cotton is helped by Alex Menglet's well-timed direction, emphasising the bite in the dialogue and the unspoken tension within the characters. And there is some nice acting, too, as Tim Potter finds a role well suited to his range, and newcomer Johnny Carr makes a good debut showing depth and control in his voice and body.

    Erin Dewar is somewhat enigmatic as the case worker-cum-parole officer. Her military-style uniform adds to the unsettling and indeterminate context of the characters' situations, underscoring the disparity between outward appearance and inner identity.

    A worthy addition to Red Stitch's long list of premieres, despite some lapses into cliche.

     

    Picture: Erin Dewar and Johnny Carr.

    Moon Glows in a New Setting (Yellow Moon)

    

    Kate Rose, Sunday Herald Sun (22/02/09)

     

    Yellow Moon - The Ballad of Leila and Lee (Feb 4 - March 7, 2009) by David Greig.  Directed by Alex Menglet.

    

    WHETHER the old blues riff or the Nick Cave song, there have been many incarnations of Stag Lee and this contemporary retelling of the 19th century killing of William Lyons by "Stagger'' Lee Shelton continues the tradition, but with a 21st century sensibility.

    Instead of an adult cab driver, Yellow Moon's Lee is a teen with a depressed, alcoholic mother and an amateur boxer would-be stepfather.

    He spends his days planning to make a fortune from a life of crime and trying to get his mother out of bed.

    Leila is his silent classmate, a Muslim obsessed with celebrity magazines and cutting herself. After meeting Leila accidentally one night, Lee becomes embroiled in a fight with his mother's boyfriend and kills him.

    Shaken by what has happened, Leila and Lee flee to the Scottish Highlands with a plan to find Lee's father. It is there they meet gamekeeper Frank and their determination to find their own identities reaches a climax.

    The script, by David Greig, cleverly examines the concepts of truth and reality, playfully allowing characters to shift from first to third person and back again.

    The Red Stitch regulars milk the multilayered script for everything it has, and ensure Greig's wit is exploited, despite some of the serious issues with which the play wrestles.

    Ella Caldwell as Holly and Erin Dewar as Leila in Yellow Moon by David Greig. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Hello Cruel World (In a Dark, Dark House)

    

    
    

    Kate Rose, Sunday Herald Sun 02/08/09

    In a Dark Dark House (July 22 - August 22) by Neil LaBute.  Directed by Wayne Pearn. 

    Neil LaBute does not write likable characters. Best known for film adaptations of his plays, LaBute was established early by In the Company of Men as a writer with no interest in the gentle, polite, or easily accessible.

    Instead, he writes about a world where the lines between victim and bully are blurred, right and wrong don't exist and humans are selfish. In A Dark, Dark House is true to form.

    Terry (Dion Mills) goes to visit his younger brother, Drew (Geordie Taylor), in a rehab centre for drug addicts after the self-destructive former lawyer was busted drink-driving. But Drew didn't ask Terry there for a family catch up, he has a favour to ask: could Terry just tell the truth about the past for him, to the hospital and the judge, please? But truth is a tricky concept much like love, betrayal and revenge and owning up to it was never going to be easy.

    Red Stitch regular Dion Mills' Terry is almost unbearable to watch as anger, fear and nervousness wrestle just below the surface of the tormented character.

    Shared with Geordie Taylor as the cocky, pathetic Drew, the bookend scenes of this triptych are where the story unfolds, but they tend to veer towards the over-written and over-wrought. In their bleakness they lack the sinister inevitability of the bridge between them.

    As it plays out, the meeting between naive 16-year-old mini-golf attendant Jennifer and Terry appears random, but is intrinsically linked to the brothers' past and future.

    Eloise Mignon is perfect as Jennifer, positioning her character between an arrogant child and a curious, foolhardy, sexual adolescent.

    It's her childishness that gives Jennifer the audience's sympathy in a way so few of LaBute's characters do and consequently her scene is far more affecting.

     

     

    Carnival Ride of Chaos (The Rites of Evil)

    

    
    

     

    Kate Rose, Sunday Herald Sun 20/09/09

    The Rites of Evil (Sept 2-26) by Travis Cotton.  Directed by Alex Menglet.

    

     

     

    XAVIER (Tim Potter) has walked out of prison when he meets fellow released inmate Easter (Johnny Carr) at the bus stop on his way into town.

    'Meets' is a strong word. Xavier likes talking and hasn't really had a chance to do much of it inside, so the quiet Easter is a perfect companion.

    All Easter wants to do, however, is drink. Preferably until he passes out. And then drink some more. But Xavier doesn't care.

    He's on the straight and narrow, with a job lined up at a burger joint owned by the father of his 12-year-old pen pal.

    He has a thing for his parole officer, Bronwyn (Erin Dewar), and life's looking good.

    From the opening moments of this play it's clear this is no realist dirge about life on the outside.

    Between Travis Cotton's rapid-fire script and director Alex Menglet's nod to Soviet theatre, this is a dark, hilarious carnival ride of chaos.

    Shifting through multinational conspiracies to symbolic Socialist aesthetics, The Rites of Evil is as much about the madness of daily life as it is about the dislocation of the main characters.

    And though it covers mental illness, alienation, anger, prison, alcoholism and the failings of bureaucracy, Cotton's play still maintains its sharp, droll sense of humour.

    Potter made it clear he was one to watch with his brilliant performance in Red Stitch's Lobby Hero.

    The Rites of Evil proves he is no one-hit wonder.

    He has almost cornered the market in uncomfortable social outcasts with a dose of the eccentric.

    The minimalist and inventive set is put to great use and the stylised direction is deft and assured.

     

    Erin Dewar in The Rites of Evil.  Pic: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

    Darkly Funny (Lobby Hero)

    Kate Rose, Sunday Herald Sun 21/06/09

    Lobby Hero (June 10 - July 11) by Kenneth Lonergan.  Directed by Denis Moore.

    

     

    JEFF has had some tough times. Maybe one could call it bad luck, but that's avoiding personal responsibility.

    Still, it's been average.

    Going into the navy to impress his father, who stopped talking to him after he was booted out, he's got a bit of debt and he's slumming it on his brother's couch, but it's going to get better.

    His lucky break came when he got a security gig in an apartment building under William, a man who has pulled himself up by the bootstraps.

    The two are begrudgingly becoming friends and William's getting the promotions, Jeff's getting out of debt.

    But it's all threatened when the police start visiting. William is facing a significant moral dilemma that could see him go against every principle he has had since crawling out of the mean streets.

    Jeff wants to help his friend, but finds himself falling in love with the one person who could threaten it all and the friends have to start making some serious decisions.

    Red Stitch regular Tim Potter is perfect as the nervous, uncomfortable, cheeky Jeff, encapsulating the entire character in his fingers' nervous twitch or hangdog expression.

    The physical juxtaposition between him and co-star Christopher Kirby (William) is used to great effect in the scenes between the two

    Daniel Frederiksen and Eryn-Jean Norvill round out Lobby Hero's four-person cast with their deft interplay.

    The play is a dark, funny piece from Kenneth Lonergan, Oscar-nominated scriptwriter of You Can Count On Me.

    It's filled with black humour and questions about loyalty, family, power and truth that's engaging from start to finish, even if the ending feels a little like it's been constructed as a bittersweet feel-good.

    Overall, it's a small gripe about a polished piece.

     Eryn-Jean Norville, Daniel Frederiksen, Chris Kirby and Tim Potter in Lobby Hero. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

    Lobby Hero

    Martin Ball, The Age 15/06/09

     

    Lobby Hero (June 10 - July 11) by Kenneth Lonergan.  Directed by Denis Moore.

    QUESTIONS of moral integrity can arise in the most innocuous situations. In Kenneth Lonnergan's neat comedy Lobby Hero, the four imperfect characters are simply going about their daily routines in a Manhattan apartment building when they are thrust into dilemmas that aren't of their making.

    The comedy lies in watching characters wrestle with ethical problems that are ultimately beyond their moral intellects.

    But a certain humanity emerges, too, because while they generally make a hash of things, they somehow stumble through the moral minefield, albeit with a few scars.

    The first half is a treat, and though the second half is a bit overwritten and finally mawkish, there's a nice balance to the whole.

    Denis Moore's production evidences some of his best direction for Red Stitch, and also benefits from strong performances, particularly Tim Potter's nerdy security officer Jeff, the "lobby hero" of the title.

    Potter delights in portraying the paradoxical nervy and cheeky aspects of Jeff's character.

    It would be easy to overdo the mannerisms — and a few Woody Allen moments do slip out — but for the most part, Potter brings nuance and depth to Jeff's personality.

    There is good verbal and physical comedy between Potter and Christopher Kirby, who plays Jeff's boss William.

    The more emotional relationship between Jeff and police recruit Dawn, played by Eryn-Jean Norvill, is nicely developed by effective tone and timing. Daniel Frederiksen completes the quartet of actors with another solid performance.

    Shaun Gurton's design is almost comically Spartan, with stark whites and blacks commenting ironically on the very grey moral landscape.

    Lobby Heroes: Tim Potter and Chris Kirby

     

    Disturbing Family Life Laid Bare (Leaves of Glass)

    Kate Rose, Sunday Herald Sun 09/05/09

     

    Leaves of Glass (April 29 - May 30) by Philip Ridley.  Directed by Simon Stone.

    Steven (Dan Frederiksen) and Barry (Johnny Carr) are brothers, but DNA is about all they share. Steven is a successful businessman, wealthy, married and about to become a father. Barry is the passionate, honest, alcoholic artist who has more than his fair share of demons.

    When Barry kicks the booze and Steven approaches parenthood it becomes painfully apparent the past isn't interested in staying buried.

    Playwright Philip Ridley has put family life under the microscope and finds it has more layers than an onion crop.

    He's brutal and brilliant -- not many playwrights could liken families to the Kennedy assassination and carry it off - if occasionally heavy-handed.

    But it would be for nothing without the astonishing and raw performances of Frederiksen and Carr as the brothers. Both are transformed into their roles, slowly revealing the memories with which they wrestle.

    The sparse, modern set could leave lesser actors flailing with nowhere to hide, but the characterisations of Steven and Barry easily fill the space.

    The layered set by Peter Mumford cleverly mirrors the play, allowing the audience only the briefest of glimpses into the inner sanctum, just as they also get only the shortest glance into the past.

    This is yet another offering from a theatre group that knows exactly what it does well, but never falls into the trap of becoming repetitive.

    Secrets Shattered in Sibling Rivalry (Leaves of Glass)

    Martin Ball, The Age 03/05/09
    

    Leaves of Glass (30 April - 30 May, 2009) by Philip Ridley.  Directed by Simon Stone.

    LEAVES of Glass is the second in a trilogy of plays by contemporary English writer Philip Ridley, exploring sibling rivalry, secrets and death. With its poetic construction and visceral emotions, this play is typical fare for Red Stitch Actors Theatre, and an example of what it does best: intense characterisation, focused direction and design, and yet another Australian premiere.

    At first glance, Ridley's play feels familiar, as the fraternal plot paradigm covers similar ground to that ploughed by Sam West and Daniel Keene, among others. Leaves of Glass nevertheless claims its own space and identity, firstly through a complex power relationship between brothers, and especially in the multiple metaphors of the title, whose ultimate revelation is delayed until the very last scene, when it wrenches you with exquisite poignancy.

    The play opens with failed artist Barry (Johnny Carr) in an alcoholic delirium, haunted by sinister, half-remembered images. He is being comforted by his elder brother Steven (Daniel Frederiksen), who rather pointedly runs a graffiti removal business, suggesting a tendency to suppress expression and cover things up.

    Little by little, Ridley peels back the family secrets surrounding the death of the boys' father, firstly through their divided relationship with their mother Liz (Jillian Murray) and Steven's pregnant wife (Amelia Best).

    Simon Stone's focused direction achieves good tone and rhythm throughout. The use of clear plastic screens deftly emphasises the barriers the characters draw between each other, even while it recalls designer Peter Mumford's set for Tom Holloway's Red Sky Morning, where he used venetian blinds to represent levels of separation.

    Johnny Carr's performance as Barry is a free-flowing riff on the image of the damaged artist; it is expressive, emotional, wayward. If there is a tendency towards hyperbole, this is in keeping with the character.

    Dan Frederiksen gives a strong and nuanced portrait of Steven, nicely balancing the paradoxical shades of control, coercion, fragility and guilt. We have seen him play this sort of character a number of times before, however, underscoring that this production's success comes with a sense of deja vu.

    Daniel Frederiksen and Johnny Carr in Leaves of Glass. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

    Taut Tale of Two Ex-Jailbirds (This Wide Night)

    Cameron Woodhead, The Age, 23 March, 2009
    

    This Wide Night (18 March - 18 April, 2009) by Chloe Moss.  Directed by David Bell.

    AFTER a residency in a women's prison, British playwright Chloe Moss wrote This Wide Night, a sympathetic portrait of two former inmates, Marie (Olivia Connolly) and Lorraine (Andrea Swifte), and their struggle to adjust to life on the outside. It's a brilliant play. A month ago, it won the Susan Smith Blackburn prize in the US (the judges included Edward Albee), and given the depth and incisiveness of the script, this is unlikely to be the last accolade Moss receives.

    The action takes place entirely in Marie's double-deadlocked bedsit. Her isolation is interrupted when her former cellmate Lorraine arrives. They're an odd couple. Marie is in her 30s, a spiky and insecure ex-junkie. Lorraine, in her 50s, is a larger-than-life extrovert.

    As they natter and go about their chores, they resume the intimate relationship they developed in jail. Possibly lovers, and certainly more than friends, the pair display a mutual dependence that would be morbid if the alternative were not so bleak.

    Audiences will be reminded of Samuel Beckett, and Moss is alive to the influence: there are shades here of Vladimir and Estragon.

    Swifte portrays Lorraine's deflected maternal instincts, her capacity for violence, and her stoicism with empathy and emotional precision. And while Connolly gets off to a nervous start as Marie, she improves as the play progresses, providing a sardonic, enervated foil to her partner's big personality.

    This Wide Night is a play in which not much happens. It's a tribute to the intensity and realism of Moss' drama, as well as David Bell's assured direction, that it remains engrossing.

    Andrea Swifte and Olivia Connolly in This Wide Night. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

     

    Yellow Moon - The Ballad of Leila and Lee

    Chris Boyd, Herald Sun 17/02/2009

    Yellow Moon - The Ballad of Leila and Lee (Feb 4 - March 7, 2009) by David Greig.  Directed by Alex Menglet.

    

    IT'S hard to believe that Yellow Moon was written by just the one person. Maybe playwright David Greig has one of those multiple personality disorders, because every one of his characters is a bloody miracle - unique, complex and unpredictable - and they all jostle for our attention like eager faces at a porthole.

    The story's fairly unremarkable: teen thug kills his mum's boyfriend and runs away with self-hating Muslim girl. (Trust me, there were no major spoilers in that summary.) But the telling of that story is imaginative: the cast of four drop in and out of character to narrate the action and reveal what they're thinking. (In the case of the Muslim girl called Silent Leila, that's almost all of her dialogue.)

    And, as I say, the individual characters are utterly and adorably themselves. Jilted amateur boxer Billy (Dion Mills) loves his karaoke. Silent Leila (Erin Dewar) loves her fanzines and wants to be in a story about her. The thug teen "Stag'' Lee (Martin Sharpe) is the perfect mix of bravado and innocence. He talks the talk even though he's never really walked the walk. Until now. And starlet Holly (Ella Caldwell) hides none of her secrets.

    Just as an ordinary story is made extraordinary in the telling, this ordinary play is made extraordinary in the performance.

    Alex Menglet's production is big on thrills and low on frills. It's superbly well rehearsed. The actors hit the ground sprinting. Mills, Sharpe and Caldwell are perfectly cast and each turns in a personal-best performance.

    Like Red Stitch "captain'' David Whiteley, you could cast Erin Dewar in any old role and expect excellence. And not be disappointed.

    The same can be said about Red Stitch.

    This is great theatre. Don't miss it.

    Adorable: Martin Sharpe and Dion Mills in Yellow Moon. Picture: Jodie Hutchinson.

    Making Corrections (The Rites of Evil)

    

     

     

    Martin Ball, The Age (07/09/09)

     

    The Rites of Evil (Sept 2-26, 2009) by Travis Cotton.  Directed by Alex Menglet.

    Red Stitch Theatre built its reputation by staging Australian premieres of the latest plays from London and New York. More recently, the company has been nurturing local writers, too, such as the premiere of The Rites of Evil by Sydney writer-actor Travis Cotton.

    This taut three-hander explores the damaged mental landscape of two men who have just been released from an institution - psychiatric or correctional is never entirely clear - and the possibilities and consequences that flow from their attempts to take control of their bleak lives.

    Cotton's writing is stylish and assured. He creates focused scenes with confident dialogue that rises above the everyday, to develop effective imagery and metaphor. There is a good balance of wit and edginess, ensuring the language catches the audience's ear. Cotton is helped by Alex Menglet's well-timed direction, emphasising the bite in the dialogue and the unspoken tension within the characters. And there is some nice acting, too, as Tim Potter finds a role well suited to his range, and newcomer Johnny Carr makes a good debut showing depth and control in his voice and body.

    Erin Dewar is somewhat enigmatic as the case worker-cum-parole officer. Her military-style uniform adds to the unsettling and indeterminate context of the characters' situations, underscoring the disparity between outward appearance and inner identity.

    A worthy addition to Red Stitch's long list of premieres, despite some lapses into cliche.

    Picture: Erin Dewar and Johnny Carr.