Oleanna (12-06-2009)

Oleanna is an unforgiving theatrical treatise on sexual politics in a world constricted by political correctness. Julia Stiles (of so much more than 10 Things I Hate About You) plays Carol, a self-ascribed intelligent woman who for reasons other than potential is failing at university. Bill Pullman (who really should return to the screen as the leading man he undeniably is) plays John, the affable if oft distracted teacher of the class Carol is struggling to grasp. Pullman and Stiles are remarkable as John and Carol, two characters shaded in grey, with Pullman’s John significantly lighter than Stiles’ dark portrayal of Carol.

The play charts three meetings between John and Carol in John’s office over the course of a semester. But just what is a meeting? Language is wielded as an uncompromising tool by Mamet, and so in turn by Carol, so that one questions when a meeting is merely an appointment, or something more, perhaps an assignation or a tryst.

The first meeting sees Carol make a vulnerably impromptu appearance in John’s office to ostensibly discuss her academic troubles. Perhaps it’s John’s liberal white guilt, or his good mood at being listed for tenure, his distraction at purchasing a new family home, or perhaps he’s simply overcome with a pedagogical impulse to indulge in the Socratic mode of teaching, whatever his motives John injudiciously offers Carol an “A” if she attends six one-on-one tutorial sessions. Here marks John’s Fall.

The second meeting reveals Carol’s allegations of sexual harassment against John, his words recorded literally and without context are twisted until fully ensnaring. I failed to see the lecherous overtures in Pullman’s immensely likable John that Carol (and her cohort) perceive. Which is of course Mamet’s point – the power of words without meaning and the impotence of political correctness will blindside the best (and the worst) of us.

Carol is an interesting character, scripted with an ambiguity much like Shakespeare’s Portia. Portia’s courtroom triumph can be played as a moment of spontaneous legal brilliance or, perhaps more compellingly, as a calculated exercise in manipulating the law to suits one’s needs. Similarly, Carol can be played to either knowingly set out to ruin her university professor from their first fraught mid-semester consultation or she can be gradually swept away by a cause not of her making, used and abandoned just like John.

By the play’s end, gone is the Carol whose thoughts raced too quickly for her to articulate, whose stilted, half-started sentences hung limply in conversation with John. Here stands Carol, backed by an unnamed group, who knows the new state of play. I get the feeling that should Carol follow in Portia’s footsteps she’d be a black letter lawyer of the strictest kind.

“What a cold hearted bitch,” my theatre going companion and others commented after the actors took their bows and left the stage. Which is a fair assessment of Stile’s 2009 Carol. I do wonder whether Stiles was softer, more sympathetic, in her 2004 turn at the Garrick Theatre opposite Aaron Eckhart’s John. Slightly older, more knowing, more nuanced, and opposite Pullman’s well meaning John, there was an unexpected cruelty to Stiles’ current interpretation.

The crescendo of the play is reminiscent of Stanley and Blanche’s infamous tussle in A Streetcar Named Desire: “Tiger, tiger… we’ve had this date from the beginning.” By the final crashing scene you get the distinct feeling John and Carol were always doomed to their own pre-destined date.

PM: 8.5/10

Oleanna by David Mamet, d. Doug Hughes, Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, 12 June 2009

My Fair Lady (09-11-2008)

I tried quite hard to temper my expectations of the Sydney run of Opera Australia‘s My Fair Lady for two reasons. First, My Fair Lady is my favourite musical; it has an impeccable book (Lerner pays homage to G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion), it provides for bravura performances from its two leads (Professor Henry Higgins as the phonetician who bets he can turn Eliza Doolittle from gutter snipe to flower lady), and it has some shoulder-shimmying, interval-humming showtunes (penned by Loewe). Secondly, and not insignificantly, I adore Richard E. Grant who has taken on the role of Higgins in Sydney.

Given these factors, my greatest fear was that I would be disappointed. After all, the very capable Reg Livermore throughout the year has scuffed the comfortable moccasins Rex Harrison donned from West End stage to 1964 film, upon the stages of one Australian city to another. Other notable performers to play Higgins include Anthony Warlow (the greatest gift to musical theatre since some wondrous soul thought to set story to song) in the late nineties and Jeremy Irons in a 1987 LSO recording opposite Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

If Grant was concerned about following such comparable acts, he (and I) needn’t have been, for his first musical outing was an assured debut.

It helps of course that the production is largely the same since it began touring in early 2008. The ensemble is resoundingly good; their collective accomplishments could cushion a lesser performance, as is the case with John Wood in the role of Eliza’s father, Alfred P. Doolittle. Grant, ever so slightly unsteady in his first number “Why Can’t the English?” is buffeted by the chorus, but finds his strength, and his voice, in each subsequent scene.

There is a visceral vitality to Grant’s Higgins that I could scarcely imagine contributing to Livermore. Grant paces across the stage, bounds up the stairs, leaps upon the furniture, and leans (and I really cannot stress just how mesmerising it is to watch Grant lean without vanity, without any undertone of indolence) into the set pieces with unbridled energy. How extraordinary it then is, in the final scene, when Henry is lost without Eliza that Grant’s movements slow, the character is broken and Grant folds in upon himself – all that remains is stillness and silence. Just heart breaking.

Enough gushing about Grant, he is but one half of the story. Taryn Fiebig as Eliza Doolittle is simply remarkable. A scant number of years ago she was part of Opera Australia’s Young Artist Program and she has proven herself with this production to be worthy of every piece of praise that is attributed to her. Fiebig has a host of formidable predecessors in the role of Eliza: Julie Andrews, Audrey Hepburn, and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, to name but three. Like Grant, Fiebig need not avoid comparison, for she was an ideal Eliza – strong of spirit and song, she was joyous to watch.

There are (arguably) two distinct schools of My Fair Lady audience: you either view Henry and Eliza as an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force, whose momentum stalls at platonic, pedagogical symbiosis, or, you view the friction between the two as necessary foreplay that facilitates their union. As an incurable romantic I am firmly in the latter camp reading every veiled glance, barest inflection and merest of movement as evidence of growing affection between Eliza and Henry. To this end, this production delivers many such moments making the show all the more engaging.

The set and costumes skilfully reference the well-loved 1964 film while creating a look all of its own. The supporting actors, particularly Nancy Hayes as Henry’s mother, Mrs Higgins, and Matthew Robinson as Eliza’s thwarted suitor, Freddy Eynsford-Hill, are delightful to behold.

My Fair Lady is a charming addition to the Opera Australia season. I expect detractors will bemoan musical theatre impinging upon purists’ opportunity to see “real” opera. To them I say this popular production has not compromised the quality of the company and will easily finance whatever obscure operas may take the artistic director’s fancy in years to come. The producers may not only have a success on their hands, they may well have introduced a new and receptive audience to the beauty of stage musicals and not before time.

PM: 8.5/10
My Fair Lady, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe, d. Stuart Maunder (Opera Australia 2008 Season)

Post-show with Richard E Grant (and Michael Caton

Frost/Nixon

 

That David Frost, a British television “personality” (a term thrown with derogative glee at Frost in Peter Morgan’s script), landed the interview of the decade with recently impeached President Nixon, was a coup of unprecedented proportions.

 

For those of you, like me, too young to have witnessed the Frost/Nixon spectacle at the time, I offer the following analogy: Imagine if you will Rove McManus finally securing the interview with John Howard he sought the last several years of Howard’s prime ministership. Howard’s advisors would presumably scour McManus’ back catalogue of interviews and discover countless fatuous encounters with personalities (a term used both loosely and inaccurately) of varying repute and determine a segment on Rove Live would be a soft option to promote an autobiography and gain some quick cash. Imagine then how staggering it would be if McManus elicited from Howard a confession that he had full knowledge that the children over board scandal was a fabrication of events, that his treatment of asylum seekers was illegal and he apologised to the Australian people for the indelible stain he had left on Australian politics.

 

For me (and my theatre going companion), this contemporary example shows the resonating power of Frost/Nixon today, and resonate it certainly does. Peter Morgan – whose writing credits run the gamut from impressive (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland) to bland (The Other Boleyn Sister) – has an undeniable flair for retelling recent history. In Frost/Nixon Morgan captures the cadences of popular political culture with verve.

 

The vanity and the ambition of the eponymous leads is captivating as we are treated with imagined glimpses of their shared fear of the wilderness and shared desire for the limelight. Both John Adam, as Frost, and Marshall Napier, as Nixon, give accomplished performances. Neither descends to impersonation or falters to caricature, which is never more appreciated than when Napier skilfully avoids those dangers by playing Nixon’s signature victory wave with self-aware posturing.

 

Given the successful run of Frost/Nixon on Broadway and the West End, I wonder how much interpretative freedom Roger Hodgman was allowed as director of the Australian production. The staging, particularly the second act with its live capture of the performances playing on screens above the stage, seems to me lifted from Michael Grandage’s original direction. That speculation aside, there is little to fault of the performances Hodgman educes from his cast.

 

 

An honourable mention is awarded to Judith Cobb for her costume design – not for the credible assortment of garish 70s chic, but for the inspired decision to dress Adam in a fine cut grey suit for the majority of Act I. I confess to having a weakness for a fine cut grey suit (of varying shades, weights and fabrics), but I assure you this suit is worthy of objective praise. You may wonder what is inspired about clothing a talk show host in an utilitarian pinstripe suit. Let me suggest that the host in the suit makes all the difference. When Adam thrust his hands into his pant pockets, the transformation from ordinary costume to object of unexpected distraction was as immediate as it was mesmerising. The movement casually trapped the tails of the suit jacket between hands and hips; the outline of a shoulder blade jutted out in pin-striped relief as the fabric was pulled taught; but the piste de resistance in all its objectifying glory was the revelation of the most perfectly proportioned arse I can ever recall gracing the stage.

 

The MTC production of Frost/Nixon is captivating, from the unsophisticated aesthetics detailed above to the tabloid politics exposed with engaging intelligence. I await with interest the film version of Frost/Nixon (released late 2008), particularly given the play’s cutting analysis of the reductive medium of television. However, I fear that which worked splendidly as theatre may lose something in the cinematic translation.

 

PM: 9/10

 

Frost/Nixon by Peter Morgan d. Roger Hodgman (MTC 2008 Season)

The Impotent Fury of the Privileged – Daniel Kitson

The best observational comedy does more than amusingly comment on the life you lead – it challenges it. Kitson is our Special Rappateur of the privileged reporting on the scathing lack of basic decentness in the world today. For a set that is fuelled by fury Kitson doesn’t resort to what he calls “angry comedy” (essentially vitriolic rants where the comic mostly shouts at their auidence). Rather, Kitson delivers his whimsical abstractions with insightful, nuanced consideration (in a charmingly moderated timbre).

Kitson likens the frustrating inadequacy of trying to express thoughts in words to “giving a bucket to a dirty monkey, telling it to clean itself, then furnishing it with a fishing rod and asking it to catch the sky.” Despite this disclaimer, Kitson manages to wield words with masterful dexterity.

I wasn’t sure how Kitson’s stand-up would compare to his superbly crafted oneman show C90 which I saw as part of the international season at the Opera House last year. Here Kitson isn’t masked by characters of his creating: He reveals his bruises and how they’ve made him tender, how his cowardice is mistaken for restraint. I’m pleased to report that The Impotent Fury of the Privileged didn’t disappoint and that there is nothing cowardly about the command Kitson has over his material.

PM : 8.5/10

February 17 – 27 – The Factory Theatre – Sydney
March 6 – 9 – Brisbane Powerhouse – Brisbane
March 10 – 16 – The Royalty Theatre – Adelaide
March 19 – April 13 – The Athenaeum – Melbourne

The Impotent Fury of the Privileged by Daniel Kitson