Postcard from Perth Festival 3

Week 2: Chamber Music Weekend/Garrick Ohlsson/Kate Tempest

Alongside his commitment to working with Indigenous artists, Festival Director Iain Grandage’s passion for music has been driving force behind some of the highlights of this year’s programming. His prodigious gifts as a musician, composer and music director as well as a festival director have also been on display in the form of personal contributions to numerous events. As well as curating Chamber Music Weekend (in which he also featured as a composer-arranger and lecturer-performer) he’s also appeared as a conductor, co-composer and occasional piano accompanist with Meow Meow as part of the Kabarett Haus season at Perth Concert Hall (curated by no less than Meow Meow herself). 

Onstage and offstage, Grandage’s seeming omnipresence and generous spirit have helped make this Festival uniquely his own. I’m reminded of Barrie Kosky’s sense of showmanship and infectious enthusiasm as Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival back in 1996, as well as at the piano for many of the theatre shows he’s directed. One can only hope that Grandage somehow manages to keep this up over the next three years. 

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Chamber Music Weekend was held at the University of WA, in the magnificent Spanish Mission-style architecture of Winthrop Hall, and in the picturesque surrounding gardens and shady groves. Multiple concerts inside the hall featured Australian and international composers and musicians, classical and contemporary, European and First Nations. There were also free outdoor events, including roving performances by various artists on the program, croquet on the lawn, and the complete slow movements from Beethoven’s piano sonatas played in ‘Beethoven’s Grotto’ at hourly intervals over both days by students from the Conservatorium of Music (with varying degrees of finesse – though I did almost miss a ticketed concert after being lured into the Grotto by a mesmerizing rendition of the adagio sostenutofrom the Hammerklavier). They were played on a well-used Steinway allegedly borrowed from The Ellington Jazz Club and gaily festooned with leafy branches peeping out from under the lid; and accompanied by random outbursts of birdsong, in a manner that Beethoven would have thoroughly approved of. 

Grandage himself gave a characteristically engaging performance-lecture in the Grotto at lunchtime on the Saturday, deploying the Steinway to dazzling effect. Movingly alluding to the partial deafness he shares with Beethoven, he discussed and illustrated the composer’s stylistic evolution, as well as his own use of functional harmony in his collaborations with Indigenous composers and songwriters.

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The weekend was effectively launched on the Friday evening byAncient Voices, an eclectic but for me consistently enthralling two-hour recital of choral music at Winthrop Hall by The Gesualdo Six with various local collaborators. The all-male British vocal consort consists of director and bass Owain Parke (who is also a composer), second bass Samuel Mitchell, baritone Michael Craddock, tenors Joseph Wicks and John Coutner, and counter-tenor Guy James. Their voices are very much in the English tradition of clarity and purity, but are more individually differentiated and have more textual ‘grain’ than (for example) the more seamlessly blended and unearthly sound of an ensemble like the Tallis Scholars. 

The program consisted of a selection of favourites from the group’s repertoire, ranging from English Renaissance masters like Tallis and Byrd (as well as the Flemish composer Nicholas Gombert) to more modern and contemporary works by Britten, Poulenc and Reger, as well as less familiar names like Alison Willis, David Bednell, Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Gred Blok-Wilson. These included a newly commissioned piece by Perth-based composer Car Zydor Fesjian entitled Ode to Joyand inspired by the choral movement of Beethoven’s 9^thSymphony. Fesjian’s piece (and several others) also involved local Perth ensembles The Giovanni Consort and Voyces – most spectacularly in Tallis’s famous 40-part motet Spem in alium. The latter was given a rousing performance, although somewhat surprisingly all three choirs were clustered around the central dais rather than being spread out more widely around the audience, which might have made more sense visually as well as sonically. 

Standouts for me in the first half of the concert were Park’s own composition Phos hilaron, which featured a gleaming counter-tenor solo by James; and The Wind’s Warning, a haunting setting by Alison Willis of fellow British poet and composer Ivor Gurney’s last poem ‘The Wind’. The poem itself was written in hospital, as Gurney suffered from mental illness throughout his life, particularly after being gassed and shell-shocked in World War I. Willis’s setting eerily registers the sound of the wind through atonal vocalisations and whispers; and this was most effectively realised by placing the collaborating choirs at a distance from the dais along the outer edges of the hall.

However the most powerful work in the program for me was the final one in the program, Indigenous Queensland didgeridoo virtuoso and singer William Barton’s Kalkadunga Yurdu (in a choral arrangement by Gordon Hamilton). The work celebrates the composer’s Kalkadunga heritage and commemorates that nation’s war of resistance against European invaders, which ended when they were slaughtered by a paramilitary force of settlers and police mounted on horseback and armed with rifles at Battle Mountain in 1884. 

The performance began with a spine-tingling vocal solo from Barton himself, who entered carrying the didgeridoo and singing from the back of the hall, and concluded with a long and wide-ranging cadenza on the didgeridoo from the central dais, surrounded by a buzzing cloud of voices from all three choirs. I was overwhelmed by the impact of this encounter between ancient and contemporary, Indigenous and European traditions. Barton himself has described his work as being at the intersection of ‘two dreamtimes, between two cultures, and the birthing of time, sound and pulse’ – powerful testimony to the creative and healing possibilities of intercultural collaboration, especially when an Indigenous artist leads the way.

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The rest of the weekend saw another recital on the Saturday by the Gesualdo Six entitled English Motets and featuring their core repertoire, with notably moving renditions of two works in English (the rest being Catholic or pre-Reformation works in Latin), Tallis’s beautifully clear and simple If Ye Love Meand Thomas Tomkins’s grief-filled When David Heard, which recounts King David’s reaction to the death of his son Absolom. 

Also on Saturday was a scintillating recital by virtuoso guitar duo Slava and Leonard Grigoryan, ranging from classical to jazz and contemporary compositions. Here the standout for me was a fascinating arrangement by their father Edward of one of Handel’s marvellous keyboard suites.

Spread across Saturday and Sunday was the centrepiece of the weekend: Quartet and Country, four concerts featuring the Australian String Quartet playing all six of Beethoven’s first set of string quartets Op 18, alongside works written and co-performed by four Indigenous composers: William Barton; singer-songwriter Lou Bennett; Broome country musician Stephen Pigram (who was also musical director for the original production of Bran Nue Dae); and Noongar elder Roma Winmar (who was also language editor and consultant on Hecate). 

Once again Barton’s mysterious, spiritually inspired work for string quartet and didgeridoo Square Circles Beneath the Red Desert Sand was the most profound of these collaborations for me. I was also deeply moved by Bennett’s Dirt Song (sung in Yorta Yorta)and Pigram’s heartfelt elegy for his grandmother Mimi (sung in Yawuru and English), both featuring richly textured and harmonized arrangements for string quartet by Grandage.

As for the Beethoven quartets: the ASQ in their latest (and youthfully winsome) line-up are unquestionably a polished ensemble, with incisive and characterful leadership from violinist Dale Barltrop. However I found the rest of the ensemble slightly lacking in fully developed individual personalities or (as yet) a distinctively realised collective sound.

The Opus 18 quartets are ‘early period’ Beethoven, but they are by no means immature works. The composer had already established his own unique voice and idiom, and the quartets are full of Sturm und Drang, as well as Beethoven’s typical bursts of ebullient energy in the opening and closing allegros and prestos, rambunctious slapstick in the scherzos and trios, and heartfelt prayers punctuated by dramatic utterances in the slow movements – not to mention the exquisitely strange and delicate adagio introduction to the last movement (subtitled ‘La Malincolia’) of Quartet No. 6. Indeed when he wrote them the composer was already grappling with the onset of deafness, and his concomitant feelings of despair and alienation: the anguished Heiligenstadt Testament was written only a year after these quartets were published, and one senses a foreshadowing of this inner turmoil in some of their more uncompromising outbursts and innovations. 

The readings offered by the ASQ seemed just a little glib in this regard. After the more overtly emotional and spiritual content of the Indigenous works that opened each concert, the lack of a sense of deeper engagement with the Beethoven quartets gave the slightly disconcerting impression of having segued to works from an entirely different world of 18^thCentury European classical style without apparent substance, rather than from Beethoven’s soul. Perhaps it would have made more sense to play the Beethoven quartets first, followed by the Indigenous works; either way, the former needed to be invested with more boldness and passion.

These qualities were delivered in spades in the performance on Sunday afternoon by the Seraphim Trio of the Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, preceded by contemporary Australian composer Richard Mills’s Portraits and Memories for Piano Trio. Anna Goldsworthy (piano), Helen Ayres (violin) and Tim Nankervis (cello) are all established players with big personalities and probing musical intelligences, and have been playing together and developing a collective sound for over twenty years. The contrast with the ASQ could not be more telling, especially when it came to Beethoven. Admittedly the Archduke is a late-middle-period masterpiece, and thus a much richer and more complex work than the Op 18 quartets; but even early Beethoven requires performers who are prepared to meet him half-way, to take risks and to play for high stakes.

The concert began with Portraits and Memories, whichwas commissioned for the Trio in 2018, and is a sequence of musical vignettes. More precisely, an ‘Intrada’ is followed by three ‘Portraits’, which are interspersed with three ‘Memories’ and two ‘Promenades’, and followed by a Postlude. The identity behind each ‘portrait’ remains enigmatic; Goldsworthy reported in her brief introduction that Mills declined to divulge them; but as she pithily observed, all art is to some extent a self-portrait of the artist themselves. 

The work has more than a little in common with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and broadly shares a programmatic quality with Romantic and Impressionist sets of miniatures (typically for the piano) by the likes of Mendelssohn, Liszt, Schumann, Grieg, Debussy and Ravel. Indeed Mills’s own musical idiom (at least in this work) recalls French Impressionism in its lavish use of colour, its wayward harmonies, its rhythmic skittishness, and its languid sensuality.

Beethoven’s Archduke is altogether on another scale in terms of musical form and emotional content. Goldsworthy described it in her introduction as being like scaling Mount Everest. Possibly it was like that for the players, but for us, it felt more like flying – whether soaring, plunging, turning somersaults or at times seeming to crash and explode.

The Seraphim have been playing this work for many years now, and can truly be said to own it, in the sense of having found their own unique interpretation. Despite the challenging acoustics of Winthrop Hall in terms of clarity and balance between the piano and strings, it was a panoramic and detailed journey, from the great long singing melody of the opening allegro, to the drunken dance and fugue of the scherzo, the andante cantabile’s marvellous set of variations on a heart-rending hymn of longing, and the stumbling homeward gallop of the final allegro and presto.

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On the Sunday evening at the end of Chamber Music Weekend, there was more music further east along the Swan River at Perth Concert Hall. The venue has its own brand of early 70s Brutalist splendour to rival the Spanish Mission-style tranquility of Winthrop Hall, and is also renowned for its superb acoustic. It’s been transformed for the duration of the Festival into the City of Lights, an indoor and outdoor hub for food, drink and music – classical, cabaret and contemporary – both inside the main auditorium itself and outside on the massive temporary outdoor stage at Chevron Lighthouse.

Sunday evening saw a recital by North American pianist Garrick Ohlsson, co- presented by Perth Festival and Musica Viva. Ohlsson was last at the Perth Concert Hall in 2015 for a mighty performance of Brahms’s titanic Piano Concertos as part of the WA Symphony Orchestra’s Brahms cycle conducted by Asher Fisch; this was a more intimate recital of work by Beethoven, Prokofiev and Chopin (with whose music the pianist has a particular affinity).

Ohlsson studied under Claudio Arrau, and has something of the great Chilean pianist’s profound thoughtfulness and sonic mastery in his approach to Beethoven and Chopin. The Beethoven Sonata No. 11 Op 22 is a relatively ‘classical’ early work and was given a measured and considered performance, revealing many jewels in the allegro and adagio, but I found my attention wandering in the menuetto and the concluding rondo. Similarly, Prokofiev’s brittle and combustible Piano Sonata No. 6 (the first of the famous ‘Wartime Sonatas’) was flawlessly rendered, but lacked the sarcasm and sheer brutality that for me are essential ingredients in any performance of Prokofiev’s work.

After interval though it was another story, with a traversal of works by Chopin demonstrating Ohlsson’s powerful grasp of the composer’s unique sound-world and sense of musical structure. Like his mentor Arrau, Ohlsson takes Chopin seriously rather than treating it as salon music, deploying his own astonishingly command of colour as well as a classical sense of structure to generate a level of excitement that had been lacking for me in the first half of the concert. After lending an improvisatory immediacy to the Impromptu No. 2 in F-sharp major Op 36, effortlessly negotiating the fiendish technical demands of some of the Études Op 25, and conjuring up the dreamy delicacy of the Berceuse Op 57, the pièce de résistance was a thrilling rendition of the Scherzo No. 3 in C-sharp minor Op 39.

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The evening ended with a very different but equally thrilling experience: British writer, performance poet and rapper Kate Tempest, who delivered a powerhouse set on the open-air stage at the Chevron Lighthouse to a rapt crowd. I was riveted by Tempest’s compelling and visionary writing and her totally engaged but refreshingly unpretentious stage persona. She was in visceral rapport with her creative partner Clare Uchima, who provided an evocatively sparse and brooding electronic backing score.

The duo delivered a seamless selection of numbers from Tempest’s 2016 multi-character story-cycle album Let Them Eat Chaosand her more recent and personal The Book of Traps and Lessons. I’m not all that familiar with her work, so was encountering most it for the first time, and picking up much of the language and the vibe as I went along. Nevertheless I felt the undeniable and cumulative force of her lyrical and prophetic descriptions, evocations, celebrations and denunciations of life and love in the atomised world of global capitalism, greed, racism and environmental catastrophe, in couplets like ‘No track of love in the hunt for the bigger buck/Here in the land where nobody gives a fuck’, or the ominously ever-rising refrain: ‘7.2 billion humans…7.3 billion humans...’ 

However there were also sensual love songs like ‘Firesmoke’ – a seductive paean to a female lover – as well as moments of collective tenderness; another song reached out to the crowd with the simple refrain: ‘So much love in people’s faces.’ I left the gig feeling exhilarated, harrowed and somehow hopeful at the same time. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, as Gramsci put it. Or as another great contemporary female British vocal artist, Kate Bush, once sang: ‘Don’t give up.’

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In his next Postcard, Humph writes about Meow Meow and Rufus Wainwright at Kabarett Haus.

Postcard from Perth Festival # 2

Week 2: First Nations/Political Theatre

Bran Nue Dae, Black Ties, Anthem

Bran Nue Dae is an iconic work of Indigenous West Australian theatre, and the first Aboriginal musical. It was first produced by Black Swan Theatre Company at Perth Festival in 1990, and was turned into a hugely successful film in 2010. It’s now been remounted in a new touring production by the Opera Conference (and presented in Perth by WA Opera) with its original director Andrew Ross (who also founded Black Swan) at the helm, and features Ernie Dingo in the same role he played onstage thirty years ago (and in the film) as Uncle Tadpole. 

The original production launched the careers of several famous Aboriginal stage artists, including Dingo, Leah Purcell and the recently deceased and sorely missed Ningali Lawford-Wolf. The cast of the film includes Indigenous pop stars Dan Sultan and Jessica Mauboy, as well as leading Aboriginal actors like Dingo and Deborah Mailman, and white celebrities like Geoffrey Rush, Magda Szubanski and Missy Higgins. But the significance of the work goes far beyond the list of its various alumni (to which the names of some of the current cast will no doubt soon be added).

The show is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age road-trip rock/country/gospel/blues musical by composer-musician-playwright Jimmy Chi and his band Kuckles. The action is mostly set in Broome, where Chi (who had Chinese-Japanese descent on his father’s side and was Scottish-Bardi-Nyulnyul on his mother’s side) was born and spent much of his life (he died in Broome Hospital in 2017). In fact many of the show’s songs have become part of the cultural fabric of Broome, and some the hymns written by Chi (both for the show and separately) are often sung at Aboriginal funerals there.

The songs and dialogue of Bran Nue Dae are in English, pidgin and Nyul Nyul, one of the Indigenous languages of northwest Australia. The language is now listed on Wikipedia as being extinct after the death of its last fluent speaker in 1999, which lends an added poignancy to one of the most beautiful songs in the show, ‘Nyul Nyul Girl’. In fact there’s an undertow of sadness as well as righteous anger and sarcastic wit throughout the work, notwithstanding its ebullient crowd-pleasing surface. Personally I found the film version a little saccharine in this regard, but I was unexpectedly moved (as well as being irresistibly charmed) by the new touring production.

It's playing in Perth at the recently restored but still comfortably down-at-heel Regal Theatre in Subiaco. The theatre’s art deco ambience and sense of history as a former cinema and popular music venue (hosting the likes of Slim Dusty and Johnny Cash back in its heyday) only add to the show’s charm. The production aesthetic is similarly welcoming and unpretentious, with a country band of five musicians tucked away in a back corner of the stage, a relatively small cast of seven lead performers and seven ensemble members, and simple but effective set and costumes (designed by Mark Thompson).

The stage replicates the much-loved and ramshackle Sun Pictures outdoor cinema in Broome. An appropriately warm glow of nostalgia hangs over proceedings, in keeping with the content of the show; but there’s also a clear sense that all was not sweetness and light, even in the halcyon days of change back in the late 60s when the action is set; and there’s an abiding sense that there’s still much work to be done in the area of Indigenous rights. As the show’s most famous song playfully yet pointedly puts it: ‘There’s nothing I would rather be/Than to be an Aborigine/And watch you take my precious land away!’

I won’t rehearse the plot here, as it’s familiar enough to anyone who’s either seen the film, or hundreds of other similar coming-of-age pastoral rom-com road-movies, plays or novels like it, going back at least as far as Shakespeare’s As You Like It or Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Chi’s genius is to knowingly play on this (conscious or unconscious) familiarity in order to get under our skins (literally and metaphorically) with some gentle (and not-so gentle) messages about social justice for Aboriginal people, as well as the importance of remaining connected to land, language, culture and – above all – family. In the latter regard, the show manages to pull of the hat-trick of simultaneously tugging at the heart-strings and mocking stage conventions (including implausible coincidences and climactic reveals about who is related to whom) while also saying something profound about what ‘family’ really means.

Ultimately the success of all this depends on the cast, who are uniformly excellent under Ross’s relaxed and assured direction. Dingo is an enormously charismatic performer and wears his trademark role like a comfortable old shoe, while also managing to get away with plenty of profanities and sly digs at the expense of the rest of the story, the cast and the audience (who were mostly white, and included a fair number of school groups and old folks on the matinee when I saw the show). Relative newcomers Marcus Corowa and Teresa Moore are bursting with talent and charm in the lead roles as teenage lovers Willie and Rosie, and generate real chemistry between them. The other principal roles are all invested with appropriate levels of over-the-top bluster and genuine freshness, including Andrew Moran as the absurdly German missionary Father Benedictus, Danielle Sibosado and Callan Purcell as the hippy roadsters Marijuana Annie and her (equally absurdly German) boyfriend Slippery, and Ngaire Pigram as the put-upon, born-again Auntie Theresa, who appears like a shop-worn deus ex machinain the final Act, draws all the plot-strands together and ties them up in neat bow. Last but not least, the seven youthful ensemble players bring great energy and individual personality to their ever-changing and necessarily sketchy roles, with choreographer Tara Gower crafting a pleasingly unpretentious but potent fusion of dance moves for them, drawn equally from popular, jazz and Indigenous traditions.

It’s probably clear by now that this show got under my own white skin, and made its way into my own slightly jaded heart. Bran Nue Dae really does have all the hallmarks of a perennial classic. This production does it justice, by allowing it to speak and sing, without unnecessary updating or embellishments, but with all its sweetness, its sadness and its strength, about how some things – love and racism among them – just never seem to change.

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This leads me to Black Ties, which is all about love, family and intercultural tensions. In fact some of the language and sentiments expressed in the show would be out-and-out racist in the mouth of a white character; but in the context of a show in which all the cast are Aboriginal or Maori (and which is created by a team of First Nations artists), the effect is mostly one of healthy self-mockery, though the mood is often edgy and sometimes downright dangerous – as should be the case with any satirical comedy worth its salt. 

The show also pushes the envelope a lot more than Bran Nue Dae in terms of how it was made, as well as in terms of content and theatrical form. It’s co-produced by Ilbijerri (Australia’s longest running First Nations theatre company, based in Melbourne) and Te Rehia Theatre (a Maori company based in Auckland), co-directed by Rachael Maza and Tainui Tukihawo (who are also those companies’ respective Artistic Directors), and co-written by John Harvey and Tukiwaho (who also plays a lead role in the show). 

In terms of genre, Black Tiesis an intercultural (and audience-immersive) wedding rom-com about an Aboriginal man and a Maori woman who decide to tie the knot, but agree to meet each other’s families first as a precaution. Sure enough, trouble ensues, as each family includes at least one key figure (the mother in one case, the father in the other) who objects to the marriage, ostensibly on the grounds of geography. However these objections soon reveal themselves to be motivated by deeper cultural and personal issues, including long-festering marital or generational conflicts within the respective families themselves. Indeed among the issues the play airs and grapples with are parenthood – especially fatherhood – as well as cultural, sexual and gender identity. All the male characters in the play acknowledge that they’ve had (or been themselves) absent fathers, and there’s a spectrum of sexuality either hinted at or overtly displayed, including at least one non-binary character (a powerhouse performance from Takapui actor and singer Brady Peeti). 

The dramaturgy, staging and performances are all equally liberating. The first Act consists of short scenes that briskly introduce characters and situations, jump back and forth in time and place, and are unpredictably interrupted by a roving trio of musicians – musical director and composer Brendan Boney, sound designer Laughton Kora, and drop-dead singer, guitarist and percussionist Mayella Dewis – who also play minor but key roles in the show. The dialogue is rapid-fire (as are the text messages and live video chats that pop up on a screen at the back of the stage), and the audience have to keep their eyes and ears on the alert so as not to miss a joke or a plot-point. There’s a standout turn from stage and screen veteran Jack Charles as Uncle Mick, expertly upstaging everyone else with sly grace whenever he appears; but there are also excellent anchoring performances from the rest of the cast on both sides of the Tasman. The Kiwis include Tukiwaho as the wayward father Robert Tapuwera, Lana Garland as his unforgiving ex-partner Sylvia, Tuakoi Ohea as their corporate hotshot daughter Hera, and Tawhirangi Macpherson as her shy younger sister Tama-Girl; facing off against Mark Cole Smith as smooth Aboriginal consultancy expert Kane Baker (who wants to marry Hera), Lisa Maza as his suspicious mother Ruth, Dalara Williams as his forthright sister Alethea, and Dion Williams as his happy-go-lucky best friend Jermaine.

Without wanting to give too much away, there’s a significant shift after interval in terms of the venue, the use of space and the role of the audience. It’s a thrilling theatrical reveal that serves to ratchet up the level of chaos as well as the dramatic stakes – although it does entail some dramaturgical and pacing issues, despite the valiant and often hilarious efforts of the performers. The overall effect is to take things even closer to the edge in terms of irreparable breakdown between and within both families, while simultaneously reinforcing the show’s fundamental message of inclusiveness, tolerance and forgiveness. It’s a message that applies not just to the characters, but to the audience as well – no matter which side of the Ditch (or the colour divide) we come from.

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While certainly not a First Nations work (the writers and director are all white), Anthem includes Indigenous actors and characters among its diverse cast, and deals with issues of race and nationhood as well as class, gender and sexuality. In comparison with Bran Nue Dae or Black Ties, however, it's a much starker rendition of intersectional conflict; and there are no easy emotional consolations, dramatic resolutions or messages of reconciliation. 

Anthem is a multi-authored and multi-plotted work of political theatre by Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas and composer Irine Vela, directed by Susie Dee and produced by Performing Lines in association with Arts Centre Melbourne. It was conceived as a sequel to the same team’s similarly co-written and structured Who’s Afraid of the Working Class, which was originally produced by Melbourne Worker’s Theatre and staged at the Trades Hall in Melbourne in 1998. However, if Who’s Afraid of the Working Class was written from a broadly unified Marxist perspective in response to the economic rationalism epitomised by the Victorian State Government of Jeff Kennett in the 1990s, then Anthem is a more fragmented post-Marxist reflection on the political, economic, social and cultural fallout from neo-liberalism and globalisation, including the rise of extremism, populism, polarisation and identity politics that is currently sweeping the world. 

The playwrights weave together and occasionally superimpose four main plot-strands and situations, most of which take place (at least in part) on a city train in Melbourne at various times and locations. The effect is a little like watching the theatrical equivalent of a multi-narrative movie like Nashville, Pulp Fiction or indeed Lantana (which was scripted by Bovell and based on his play Speaking in Tongues).

‘7-11, A Chemist Warehouse…A Love Story’ by Melissa Reeves presents a troubled relationship between two casual workers, emotionally volatile Lisa (Erin Jean Norville) and temporary visa holder Loki (Sahil Saluja), who go on a gun rampage together after Loki is laid off. This leads to an unexpectedly hilarious hostage scene in a corporate boardroom that was one of the highlights of the show for me.

‘Terror’ by Patricia Cornelius brings together two women, owning-class Elaine (Maude Davey) and working-class Chi (Amanda Ma), who reconnect and find that the balance of power has shifted along with their economic circumstances, but that both are still oppressed by their husbands. This sense of enduring oppression is made even more palpable when juxtaposed with a young couple (Reef Ireland and Eva Seymour) whose playful antics on the train eventually give way to gendered violence.

‘Brothers and Sisters’ by Christos Tsiolkas is the most elaborate story in the show, involving a family of diversely multiracial siblings – Jamie (Thuso Lewape), Joella (Carly Sheppard), Malik (Osama Sami) and Cam (Reef Ireland) – who’ve diverged from each other in terms of class and geography as well as sexuality. This story also has two branch-lines that riff on the same theme of intersectional contradictions: one involving a hardworking and aspirational older Greek couple, Athena (Maria Mercedes) and Tony (Tony Nikolakopoulos), on the same train; and the other a chance encounter on the Eurostar between Jamie and a white bourgeois progressive British student, Veronica (Norville), that opens and closes the show.

Last but not least ‘Uncensored’ by Andrew Bovell involves a chorus of commuters, and features a confrontation between a desperate young white working-class single mother (Eva Seymour) with a behaviourally disturbed (but invisible) young child and a non-white ‘authorised officer’ (Sami) that was for me the most gripping scene in the play. There’s also an Indigenous woman, Charity (Rusi Kaisila), who gets on and off the train to sing ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, collect money and challenge passengers who place conditions on ‘paying the rent’; and two other musicians (violinist Jenny M. Thomas and double bassist Dan Whitton) who haunt the train and accompany the action (and some of the songs) with Irene Vela’s sombre score.

The sheer ambition of Anthem necessarily stretches the seams of the work at times, and it suffers from the inherent weakness that afflicts most anthology structures, in which some stories are more dramatically fleshed out, while others feel more schematic. The ensemble cast however are collectively and individually strong, with outstanding performances for me from Sheppard as the defiant Joela, Norville as the deranged Lisa, Seymour as the desperate young mother, and Kaisila as the Indigenous busker; and Dee’s direction is assured in terms of pace and mood.

Nevertheless I couldn’t help feeling that the show was overproduced in terms of staging. Marg Horwell’s monumental two-storey set, Paul Jackson’s sculptural lighting design, and even Vela’s richly layered sound design and score, all seemed incongruously high-end as a frame for these essentially humble narratives. Perhaps this impression was enhanced by seeing it in the plush surrounds of the Heath Ledger Theatre, and patronised by a predominantly white middle-class Perth Festival audience, who laughed comfortably at some of the most challenging or problematic moments in the show. As a friend and theatre colleague remarked, it was as if they didn’t recognise themselves in the mirror that the work held up to them, or as the target for some of its most telling accusations.

Perhaps this says more about the audience than it does about the play or the production. Nevertheless I wonder if some responsibility lies with how the show was framed. Somehow for all its breadth of vision as a panoramic portrait of Australian society and intersectional conflict between class, race, culture, gender and sexuality, Anthem comes across as a work of middle-class theatre – or perhaps more accurately creative/knowledge-class theatre – in comparison with the more rough-and-ready writing, performances and production of Who’s Afraid of the Working Class, which I saw at the Trades Hall in Melbourne 20 years ago. 

Nor does the play address or implicate the audience as directly as does Bran Nue Dae or Black Ties – or even Hecate,which either linguistically excludes those who don’t speak Noongar or (in the case of Hecate Kambarnap) warmly embraces them. Perhaps this along with the production aesthetic explains the feeling of coldness emitted by the show in spite of the heat generated by the writing and performances. Ultimately the stories and characters felt somehow trapped by the framing as much as by their situations. But then again, perhaps this too was intentional, and reflects the pessimism of the work’s creators – and the critical nature of the situation we now find ourselves in.

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Bran Nue Dae is at The Regal Theatre in Perth till March 1, and then on national tour till the end of August. 

Black Ties was at the Studio Underground in Perth till Feb 16, and is at the Arts Centre Pavilion in Melbourne till Feb 29. 

Anthem was at the Heath Ledger Theatre in Perth till Feb 16.

Postcard from Perth Festival #1

Week 2: Overview/First Nations/Hecate

Perth Festival Director Iain Grandage’s inaugural program reflects his passion for music (of all genres) and Indigenous collaboration (in many forms), as well as his love for Perth itself, where he was raised and began his career. All three reflect his professional background as a home-grown West Australian artist who’s also worked extensively around the country as a cellist, composer and music director, especially in the context of theatre and performance with companies like Black Swan, Malthouse and Belvoir St, and with Aboriginal artists on projects like Corrugation Road and The Black Arm Band. 

I wasn’t in Perth for the opening week, which consisted entirely of First Nations works. These included Bungul, a celebratory staging of legendary Yolngu musician Gurrumul Yunupingu’s final album, co-directed by Nigel Jamieson and Yolngu elder Don Wininba Ganambarr, created in collaboration with the Yunupingu family, and featuring Yolgnu dancers and songmen, the WA Symphony Orchestra, and large-screen video projections of Yolngu art and country. Also showing was Bennelong, Stephen Page’s searing work for Bangarra Dance Theatre based on the early settlement-era Eora leader’s complex life and legacy (which I saw at Adelaide Festival in 2019 and reviewed in an earlier blog post).

However, last week I saw three other First Nations works (two of which also opened the previous week). Hecate is an adaptation of Macbeth by local Noongar theatre company Yirra Yaakin (in association with Bell Shakespeare) performed entirely in Noongar language. Bran Nu Dae is the iconic semi-autobiographical coming-of-age road-trip rock/country/gospel/blues musical by Jimmy Chi and his band Kuckles, set in 1960s Broome and sung in English and Nyul Nyul, which was first produced by Black Swan and debuted at Perth Festival in 1990, became a hugely successful film in 2010, and has now been remounted in a new production by WA Opera. Last but not least, Black Ties is an intercultural and audience-immersive wedding rom-com with songs, co-produced by Ilbijerri (Australia’s longest running First Nations theatre company, based in Melbourne) and Te Rehia Theatre (a Maori company based in Auckland), co-directed by Rachael Maza and Tainui Tukihawo (who are also the companies’ Artistic Directors), and co-written by John Harvey and Tukiwaho (who also plays a lead role in the show). 

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Hecate is the brainchild of Kyle Morrison (who also plays Lennox and other roles) and Kylie Bracknell (the show’s director, adaptor and co-translator with her husband Clint Bracknell, who is also its musical director, composer and sound designer). Morrison and Bracknell are both longstanding artistic pillars of Yirra Yaakin; Morrison recently stepped back from the role of Artistic Director, and Bracknell has a long history with the company and others around the country as an actor, director, writer and dramaturg. 

The origins of the show lie in Morrison’s love of Shakespeare and passionate commitment to Noongar culture, and Bracknell’s equally dedicated focus on Noongar language. For some years now she’s applied herself to the task of translating Shakespeare into Noongar; the efforts of both led to the presentation of selected Shakespearian Sonnets in Noongar at The Globe in London in 2012. A subsequent invitation from Bell Shakespeare in Sydney led to the development of Hecate, with the support of Noongar elder Roma Winmar as language editor and consultant. 

The production has a cast of nine Noongar actors, some of whom learnt Noongar language for the first time during workshops and rehearsals. The creative team also includes lighting designer Mark Howett and movement director Janine Oxenham, who are both Indigenous WA artists, as well as significant contributions from white collaborators, including set and costume designer Zoe Atkinson, dramaturg Kate Mulvany, and Bell Shakespeare Consultants and Associate Directors Peter Evans and James Evans.

The show is performed entirely in Noongar language (without surtitles), but a detailed synopsis in the program reveals that the plot mostly follows Shakespeare’s play almost scene-by-scene. The most significant change (as indicated by the title) concerns the character of Hecate (Della Rae Morrison, who also plays Lady Macduff), who in the original play is the traditional goddess of witchcraft, but only appears in two scenes that are usually cut. Here she becomes the central figure: a matriarchal spirit of kaartdijin (knowledge) seeking to restore the boodjar (land or ‘Country’) to health from a mysterious sickness that afflicts it. 

A key element in this process is karla (fire), which burns but also heals; and a central feature of the set is a ngarma or hole in the floor from which unseen flames cast a flickering light, like the mouth of a cave or underground passage that leads to the centre of the earth – or possibly hell itself. Perhaps it’s worth noting here that karla is also the theme of this year’s Festival, and has acquired an eerie resonance in the light of what’s occurred this summer across the continent. 

Other characters in the play have been modified accordingly to correspond with this change in the status of Hecate, and the shift in underlying themes that accompanies it, to encompass a primordial realm of chthonic powers and matriarchal spirituality. The Witches become a kind of Greek chorus (played by the rest of the ensemble) of male and female trickster figures or ‘Mischief Makers’, who serve Hecate, but are also reprimanded by her for going beyond their brief in their dealings with Macbeth (Maitland Schnaars, who gave what was for me the performance of the night, as a deeply introverted and tormented warrior/husband/regicide/tyrant).

The other significant change is that Banquo’s son Fleance (a radiant Cezera Critti-Schnaars, who also plays Macduff’s son and other roles) becomes a young woman, who is saved and protected by Hecate, and whom the goddess finally (and invisibly) crowns as a kind of female co-regent with Malcolm (a similarly luminous Mark Nannup) at the end of the play, just as in Greek myth the goddess Hecate assists the earth mother Demeter to find her lost daughter Persephone, and becomes Persephone’s companion and minister in the Underworld.

Admittedly this strand of the plot was ultimately a little unclear to me – but then again, it’s also the most obscure aspect of the original play, almost like what Freud calls the navel of the dream. I also had to remind myself that in the final analysis (as the absence of surtitles indicates) Hecate is not a work that is primarily made or intended for a wajdela or whitefella audience, but for Noongar people, theatre artists and audiences to reclaim and celebrate their language and culture, through an act of what might almost be called a kind of reverse cultural appropriation (with the proviso that there is and can be no such thing, since cultural appropriation like racism itself is structurally always only ever one-way).

Apart from these changes most of the action and (as far as I could tell) much of the dialogue (or at least its content) remains surprisingly faithful to Shakespeare’s play – or at least a condensed version of it. In fact I found Hecate less satisfying on this level than when (as with the figure of Hecate herself) it swerved or departed and took off from the original to become its own autonomous (and autochthonous) work (and even when it did so at the cost of ‘white’ intelligibility). At times however it felt less like a fully-fledged adaptation or even translation than a kind of summary or illustration of key scenes and speeches. These were often made comprehensible to non-Noongar speakers through non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and gestures, recognisable word-patterns – ‘benang, benang, benang’ (‘tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’) being a notable example – or even the names of the characters (which remained in English). This impression was reinforced by an acting style that in some instances seemed reductive and even stereotyped. Perhaps this was intended as a kind of homage or (conversely) parody in relation to ‘Shakespearian’ acting or Elizabethan humour, for example in the case of more broadly comic characterizations like the Murderers or the Mischief Makers. For me however such moments undermined the production’s overall integrity.

This leads me to the visual design of the show, which restricts itself to a minimalist aesthetic verging on abstraction. Most of the characters (with the notable exception of Hecate) wear contemporary street-clothes (hoodies, jeans, t-shirts), with swords or daggers being replaced by martial-arts style movement and hand-chops (fight choreography is by Rubeun Yorkshire, who also plays Banquo, and makes a formidable Ghost). Neither the physical nor metaphysical world of the play (with the exception of Hecate herself) is transposed into an imaginary historical version of traditional Noongar culture – along the lines for example of Kurosawa’s medieval Japanese cinematic re-imaginings of Shakespeare. Perhaps such an approach was rejected in order to frustrate white expectations or clichés of ‘noble savagery’; or conversely to reinforce the fact that such a world has been lost or suppressed by colonisation (which is perhaps the underlying sickness from which the land is suffering).

Nor does the production invent a post-modern or hybrid world like ‘Verona Beach’ in Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet, which might here take the form of an ‘alternative historical’ version of the present (or vision of the future) in which colonisation has never taken place (or somehow been reverse-engineered) – in other words, a world in which the fact of the characters speaking Noongar (or even reconstructing a Noongar version of Macbeth) might somehow ‘make sense’. But again, perhaps this begs the question: ‘Make sense for whom?’

Without some such (imaginary or alternative) contextual grounding however, I found didn’t quite know ‘where I was’, or where the story was taking place – other than in a theatre: in other words, a traditionally ‘white’ cultural space, which has historically excluded Aboriginal people (at least until the advent of Aboriginal theatre, through the work of pioneering white companies like Black Swan or First Nations companies like Ilbijerri or Yirra Yaakin). Indeed it largely continues to do so, whether through covert segregation in the form of predominantly white programming, casting, ticket prices and cultural protocols, or architecturally by abstracting from any real sense of place (regardless of pre-recorded Welcome to Country announcements, even when these are in Noongar). Especially given the play’s content and form of expression, I felt almost oppressively as if I were still in a ‘white’ space, and found myself wishing I were outside and more literally ‘on Country’.

In this regard, the strongest element in the set design – apart from the ngarma holes in the floor (more of which were revealed in the course of the play, perhaps suggesting some kind of ‘chthonic invasion’ or reverse-colonisation of the space) – is a scrim at the back of the stage, onto which is projected what looks like a digitally realised landscape featuring the silhouettes of trees against a night sky filled with stars. As well as being reminiscent of Macbeth’s reference to the ‘rooky wood’ in which ‘light thickens’, the image suggests the presence of boodjar (land) and djinda (cosmos) as spiritual entities, and implicitly situates the play against a background of Noongar cosmology. The technology and aesthetics of its realisation however evoked for me a visual simulation of Nature, rather than the cultural framework (whatever form this might take) through which Nature is tangibly experienced. As such it remained for me an illusion, and ultimately an image of loss.

In contrast, the prologue and epilogue to the show take place in actual Nature – mediated by actual Noongar culture – in the form of Hecate Kambarnap, a gathering place amongst the trees outside the theatre in the Subiaco Arts Centre gardens. The pre-show ceremony takes the form of a storytelling event around a campfire that concerns the mythical origins of the land’s custodianship by human beings. The story is told (in English) by Noongar elder Mitchell Hutchins (dressed in a traditional animal skin cloak), and I loved the event’s simplicity and inclusiveness. 

Similarly at the end of the show we went back outside for a healing ceremony involving cleansing smoke. Here I felt the spiritual weight of the play being addressed, once again primarily on behalf of Noongar audience-members and (especially) cast-members. The text and performance of Hecate invoke powerful forces and traumatic associations. The former includes the traditional raising of spirits through whistling (which interestingly is also considered bad luck inside a theatre – much like saying the name ‘Macbeth’– in traditional Western theatre lore) and the summoning and sleepwalking soliloquies of Lady Macbeth (a chilling performance by Bobbi Henry); the latter extends to the historical massacres of Aboriginal women and children by white men across the continent, evoked by the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her son, and even more powerfully for me in the scene that followed, when Lennox (in an almost unbearably anguished performance by Morrison) broke the news to Macduff (an intense Ian Wilkes). 

Above all however Hecate attests to the ongoing dispossession of Aboriginal land, culture and language that continues today. The impact of this last and most insidious form of cultural genocide was the most powerful aspect of the show for me. This was made palpable during a Q&A after the performance I saw, when Schnaars told the audience how Bracknell announced at the beginning of rehearsals that no English would be spoken for the first hour of every day, and he walked out (and almost didn’t come back) because of the rage and shame it brought up in him that his parents had chosen to raise him speaking English, and not Noongar. 

The other telling moment for me during the Q&A came when Yorkshire said that his greatest sense of achievement during the entire production came when his father (a dawn-to-dusk working man who had never been to the theatre in his life) came to see the show on opening night. Then he told the story of how his father arrived late, and the ushers wouldn’t let him in until a suitable break in the performance, even when he explained to them that he had come to see his son onstage. Eventually he was let in, and after the show he told his son that he was proud of him. He also told him that the show was good, but that it would have been even better if they had done it down by the Swan River, so that everyone could come.

Letter from London

Cyrano de Bergerac, adapted by Martin Crimp, directed by Jamie Lloyd, with James McAvoy, Playhouse Theatre

My Brilliant Friend, adapted by April De Angelis, directed by Mellie Still, National Theatre 

In two London theatres (one commercial, the other state-subsidised) last month I saw a new translation-adaptation of a classic 19^thcentury French verse drama about a 17^thcentury poet by a contemporary British playwright; and an epic two-part adaptation of a contemporary Italian novel-quartet (which has also been translated into English). Each reveals some of the characteristic advantages and pitfalls of adaption as a theatrical form – one that for various reasons (both artistic and commercial) is currently sweeping main stages around the world. Despite their historical and cultural differences, both productions also surprisingly complement each other as excavations of masculinity and femininity respectively, regardless of era or nationality.

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Everyone can identify with the brilliant but disfigured main character in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, because the play makes a commonplace experience (to love and to suffer in hopeless silence) feel special. I first read it as a self-absorbed and romantically challenged teenager; many initially encounter it on film, perhaps in Jean-Pierre Rappeneau’s lavish French swashbuckler with Gerard Depardieu, or Fred Schepisi’s 1980s Hollywood rom-com Roxanne with Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah. I’ve also seen it on stage at least three times, including an ambitious student production (whose Roxane I duly fell in love with) and an elegiac staging by Terry Hands (autumn leaves floated down throughout Act Five) with Derek Jacobi for the RSC in 1983, in an elegant translation by Anthony Burgess. 

Frankly however it’s a play I ultimately prefer reading or daydreaming about rather than actually watching. Perhaps this is due (as with Peer Gynt) to its inherently preposterous and even arguably unstageable plot, which includes duels in crowded theatres, large-scale battles and a nocturnal garden-balcony love-scene derived from Shakespeare and Mozart, but lacking either precursor’s sublime lyrical or musical artifice. Then there’s the challenge of representing Cyrano himself in the flesh: not only his famous nose, which has to be both large and convincing enough to render his predicament plausible, but also his unparalleled prowess as a swordsman and spontaneous wordsmith. In this regard the play suffers from the inevitable weakness that typically afflicts most dramatic representations of genius, especially when the latter has to be demonstrated onstage. In short, as the lead character in Educating Rita bluntly observes in reference to Peer Gynt, the best solution is probably to do it on the radio.

In fact Jamie Lloyd’s minimalist production of Martin Crimp’s ‘free adaptation’ of Cyrano (which is currently playing on the West End at the Playhouse Theatre) does something more or less along those lines. In doing so however – and despite some outstanding performances – for me it ultimately falls short in realising the potential of Crimp’s brilliant translation.

As with his earlier version of Molière’s The Misanthrope, the playwright renders Rostand’s neo-classical Alexandrines as a form of irregular rhymed verse that resembles spoken-word street poetry or rap. Lloyd’s production underlines this by having the actors use detachable microphones mounted on stands to deliver almost all their lines (with occasional live beat-box accompaniment from a fellow cast-member). This gave me the slightly jaded feeling that I was watching the fashionable West End equivalent of the latest production by the Berlin Schaubühne – an impression reinforced by set and costume designer Soutra Gilmour, who places the action (such as there is) on a bare stage inside what looks like a plywood box furnished only with a few chairs, and dresses the mostly young, culturally diverse and talented cast in modern-day street clothes. 

Critically (if not fatally), there’s a notable absence of swords or contemporary forms of weaponry. The duel in Act One is literally fought with words alone – although the ‘palpable hit’ with which Cyrano skewers his rival Valvert at the end their improvised face-off is implicitly visceral as well as verbal. Nor are there any visible cakes (or any other forms of merchandise) in ‘Madame’ Ragueneau’s barren café-bar-bookshop-patisserie where Cyrano has his rendezvous with Roxane in Act Two while its owner (played by a droll Michele Austin) runs her cookery and creative-writing class. As for the love-scene in Act Three where a concealed Cyrano feeds Christian his lines to Roxane and then impersonates him in the darkness, this takes place on a fully illuminated stage with neither garden or balcony in sight. The Siege of Arras in Act Four is likewise rendered abstractly through dialogue alone; even Christian’s death is represented by having him simply sit on the edge of the stage, where he remains like a ghost throughout the final Act.

To be sure, Rostand was a poet (like Cyrano himself) as well as a dramatist; and the play certainly celebrates language more than fighting or arguably even love. Nevertheless I found Lloyd’s overall strategy of favouring verbal over physical action curiously cerebral and even bloodless – rather like watching a moved reading or semi-staged recitation rather than a fully fledged production. Interestingly Crimp’s adaptation (a copy of which I bought at the theatre) doesn’t indicate the same level of ‘conceptual’ staging; and there’s no mention of microphones or beat-boxing. Indeed the stage directions in the text specify that Cyrano ‘wounds’ Valvert (‘who staggers back, bleeding’); and the visceral impact of the battle in Act Four is emphasized by stage directions that refer to ‘gunshots’, ‘mortar fire’ and ‘explosions’ (none of which were audible in the production). In fact Crimp’s text is arguably at its most distinctive in this use of historical mash-up, in which jokes about 21^stcentury identity politics jostle with arcane references to the eclipse of poetry by prose in the later 17^thcentury, the niceties of swordplay give way to the horrors of industrialized warfare, and the Siege of Arras in the Thirty Years War (which provides the original context for the play) implicitly becomes the Battle of Arras in the First World War nearly four centuries later. I found myself wanting to see this composite, messy world concretely realised onstage, even in a theatrically stylised or artificial form – fake blood, swords, guns, explosions, noses and all. In short: for me Lloyd’s production lacked the corporeal (as well as linguistic) outrageousness that is essential to the theatricality of Rostand’s play – and is at least latent in Crimp’s adaptation. 

As for the lead performances: Scottish actor James McAvoy (State of Play, The Last King of Scotland, X-Men) gives Cyrano an undeniable injection of star power, as well as possessing the requisite stage charisma and bravura acting chops, especially in his crisp delivery of Crimp’s sparkling text. In this he’s well-matched by Anita-Joy Uwaje’s dazzling Roxane (as intellectually scathing as she is beautiful, making the depth of Cyrano’s devotion to her all the more plausible). The play’s central love triangle is completed by Eben Figueiredo’s gentle, sensitive Christian (who is likewise no fool, but simply out of his depth as a recent arrival in Paris, and tongue-tied when it comes to the language of love). 

In keeping with the production’s aesthetic, however, there’s no big nose (fake or real) to be seen. Perhaps the point is simply that beauty is in the eye of the beholder (including the ‘I’ of one’s own self-consciousness); but the lack of a visual ‘objective correlative' reduces the pathos of Cyrano’s situation, as well as the dramatic stakes whenever his enlarged appendage is mentioned – not to mention its unavoidably comic and even potentially phallic associations. Without it, McAvoy’s Cyrano is just as good-looking as Figueiredo’s Christian – and emphatically more macho. In this regard, one of production’s funniest (and most revealing) moments occurs in Act Two, when Cyrano’s army comrades tumble onstage into Ragueneau’s shop, chant their admiration for their leader (‘Who’s the man we always back?’ / ‘Cyrano de Bergerac!’) and proceed to strip and cavort around him like football team-mates in a change-room – a display of hyper-masculinity which Cyrano’s effete arch-enemy De Guiche (a caustic Tom Edden) describes with comic distaste as too much ‘vigorous male nudity before breakfast’. It’s almost as if the properly phallic quality of being excessive or de tropthat usually attaches to Cyrano’s nose is here displaced onto what it means – symbolically and literally – to ‘be a man’. The result however is to make his sexual introversion with Roxane seem less due to any actual physical ugliness than to some kind of neurosis or even phobia about sex or women – an impression reinforced in Act Five by Roxane’s understandable rage on discovering how she has been manipulated by both men when Cyrano reveals the truth about his authorship of Christian’s letters and secret lifelong love for her. 

Indeed Crimp departs from Rostand’s text most substantially in this final Act by making Roxane an alcoholic who haunts Ragueneau’s café-bar and has become De Guiche’s sexual property after losing both the love of her life and her former independence of spirit (rather than having withdrawn to a convent as in the original). Even more controversially, Crimp changes Cyrano’s famous last words: instead of invoking his own ‘panache’ (the French term refers equally to his flamboyant style and to the tuft of feathers on his cap), he dies in mid-sentence – ‘Have you not heard? / The hero always has to have the final…have the final…have the…’ (Lights dim) – echoing the dying words of that other great archetypal stage neurotic, Hamlet: ‘The rest is silence’.

As this meta-textual ending suggests, Crimp is a highly ironic and formally self- conscious playwright. As such he is decidedly out of step with the literalism, naturalism and political correctness that afflicts so much British and English-language theatre, at least on the main stages (including in the US and Australia). In this regard, as with the character of Alceste in Crimp’s earlier adaptation of The Misanthrope, his Cyrano could almost be construed as a self-portrait – and certainly an obstinate contrarian, defiantly at odds with his era, both as a writer and a man. Indeed McAvoy is at his most anguished when Cyrano is railing against the political, social, cultural and commercial forces that would limit his freedom as an artist, perversely insisting that he ‘needs’ the fuel of ‘their hate’ in order to ‘create’. Significantly however this outburst occurs in Act Two just after Roxane has unwittingly rejected him by innocently revealing that she loves Christian instead of him. Consequently there’s a sense that his need for rejection is as much psychological as it is artistic. Perhaps – again like Alceste in The Misanthrope – there’s even a touch of misogyny as well as misanthropy here. 

In fact Crimp’s ‘free adaptations’ are arguably at their most revealing as double-edged critiques of political/artistic correctness and contemporary masculinity. This might explain the otherwise anomalous moment in Act Four (most certainly not to be found in Rostand) when Christian suddenly asks Cyrano seemingly out-of-the-blue: ‘Is there a version / Of life where two men can live as one person?’ – and then unexpectedly kisses him, before hastily backing away and exiting to die in battle. Reflecting on this moment afterwards, it didn’t strike me so much as one of revelation about either man’s sexuality, as one of fleeting realisation about the constraints and distortions of gender-identity. It’s almost as if they were both half-men, like the mythical split-beings of desire evoked by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, each seeking a missing part of themselves in the form of an idealised love which they share for the same woman. Perhaps this condition of ‘half-manhood’ is one of the most valuable insights Crimp’s version of Cyrano has to offer us as his (I mean both Crimp’s and in a sense Cyrano’s) contemporaries. 

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If Crimp’s Cyrano can be read as a playful deconstruction of masculinity in its baroque, romantic and contemporary guises, then April De Angelis’s epic two-part five-hour adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (directed by Mellie Still and currently playing on the vast open stage of the Olivier Theatre at the National) is a comprehensive and penetrating exposé of the traps and contradictions that beset women, femininity and feminism in post-war Naples that speaks directly and urgently to contemporary women and men everywhere today. 

Di Angelis is a British playwright of part-Sicilian heritage who began her career as an actor; several of her plays are based on historical research and feature female protagonists. My Brilliant Friend was originally commissioned by the Rose Theatre in Kingston-Upon-Thames in 2016, and premiered there the following year with a cast of ten actors (expanded at the National to twenty-four) playing a total of forty characters from ten different families who mostly live in a working-class suburb of Naples (later scenes take place elsewhere in Italy as the story unfolds). The multiracial British cast use their own accents, and play multiple roles with the aid of simple costume changes, wigs, animated or exaggerated physicality and the especially effective use of puppetry (designed and directed by Toby Olié, who also worked on the National’s production of War Horse) to represent the two main characters’ childhood dolls – and later their actual children – as well as in key moments of physical violence. Set and costumes are designed by Soutra Gilmour (who also designed Cyrano) and feature multileveled mobile towers of scaffolding and wood equipped with stairways and platforms that the cast wheel around, reconfigure, race up and down or perch on to observe or act out scenes. The dynamic staging and sense of ensemble are appropriate to the epic story of a lifelong relationship between two women that is also the portrait of a community (arguably the third main character is the unnamed neighbourhood of Naples in which most of the action takes place) – and beyond that of an entire society convulsed by change in the post-war era of reconstruction that extends from the late 1940s to the present.  

Pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante’s ‘Neapolitan Novels’ (My Brilliant Friend is the title of the first instalment, followed by The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child) have attracted a global following since they were first published in Italy between 2011 and 2014 (and subsequently translated into English by Ana Goldstein within a year of each novel’s Italian release, as well as into many other languages since). The powerful grip they exert on their readers (myself included) is primarily due to their visceral evocation of female experience under the combined onslaught of capitalism and patriarchy, and in particular the intensity with which they convey what De Angelis has referred to (in an interview with The New Yorker) as ‘women’s anger made real’. 

Undoubtedly their fascination is also attributable to their author’s scrupulous effacement of her real-life identity. Ferrante insists in written (and carefully guarded) interviews that this is a deliberate artistic and critical strategy (and perhaps even an existential choice) designed to place herself (and her role as an author) outside the circuit of publicity and to let her works ‘speak for themselves’. Intentionally or not, however, it also promotes an aura of mystery, as well as the paradoxical illusion of autobiography (an impression which is explicitly and painstakingly dispelled by Ferrante herself). This ‘reality-effect’ is heightened by the fact that the novels assume the form of a first-person memoir, whose narrator shares the author’s (pseudonymous) first name Elena (though she is mostly called ‘Lenù’ by the other characters) – and who herself becomes a successful writer, in the course of what is effectively a Bildungsroman or roman-fleuve (as Ferrante acknowledges, the novels were conceived and written as a single work).

Unlike its generic precursors however (from Goethe’s archetypal ‘novel of development’ Wilhelm Meister to later novel-sequences by Romain Rolland or Proust), the ‘Neapolitan Quartet’ is not primarily a story of (typically male) artistic formation, but rather one of tormented friendship between two women. Lenù and her counterpart Lila grow up together in a poverty-stricken outer suburb of Naples, but their educational, marital and professional paths increasingly diverge, while the emotional bond between them becomes correspondingly more and more fraught. In part this is due to their respective parents: Lila’s traditionally sexist working-class father won’t allow his preternaturally gifted daughter to continue her education beyond primary school (and even throws her out of a window when she secretly takes the middle-school entrance exam); whereas the similarly driven but less self-confident Lenù goes on to high school and university despite the opposition of her embittered and jealous mother. However their divergence also reflects a difference in temperament and perhaps even a kind of primordial splitting or division of personality-traits between them, which results in a (conscious or unconscious) assignment of roles in each other’s lives, in the world, and in the unfolding drama that awaits them. As such they are more like counterparts or soul-sisters than friends, with all the frustrations of love, hate, rivalry and obsession that such a complementarity entails. In essence, Lila is the rebel, and Lenù the conformist – although neither role fits comfortably, and both women suffer equally though in different ways from the strictures of a society that is deeply divided by class, gender and sexuality (the one explicitly gay character in the story – who also transgresses social norms in terms of their gender-identity – is eventually murdered by their gangster-lover). Underlying all the conflicts that drive the story is a bedrock of violence – its permanent threat, its regular enforcement, its irregular outbursts – in a culture that has been variously traumatized by Fascism, organised crime, religion, corruption, impoverishment, and deeply rooted misogyny and homophobia. 

The challenge to dramatizing the novels is that they are entirely written from Lenù’s point of view, and events are largely refracted through her consciousness. Ferrante’s deceptively lucid but at times febrile prose primarily communicates the heaving crosscurrents of her protagonist’s thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations, most of which (as befits her character, in contrast with Lila, and apart from certain key turns in the plot) remain internalized and even unexpressed. Theatre on the other hand demands externalisation in the form of action and dialogue. In fact there’s very little of the latter in the novels, and a preponderance of exposition, description and reflection, none of which inherently lend themselves to the stage. In other words, a radical act of adaptation is required; and neither play nor production is entirely successful in achieving this.

The show works best when embracing its inherently rough-and-ready aesthetic as a form of physical and image-based storytelling derived from Brechtian epic theatre and more recent British and European companies like Shared Experience, Theatre de Complicité, Theatre de Soleil or Peter Brook’s productions at the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord. The most effective moments involve a heightened theatricality and materiality, such as the use of puppetry or stylized physicality (imaginatively choreographed by movement director Sarah Dowling) – notably to represent Lila’s borderline psychotic episodes of distorted perception or ‘dissolving boundaries’. My favourite moment in the whole show was the orgy of dismemberment (involving fake limbs and eyes being ripped from their sockets) that is wreaked in fantasy by the two protagonists on their male betrayers and tormentors during Lila’s wedding at the end of Part One, which went way beyond the literal staging of the novel that dogged so much of the dramaturgy elsewhere, while effectively communicating the Bacchic frenzy of Ferrante’s prose at its most delirious.

Special mention must also be made of the two riveting central performances: Niamh Cusack as the more cautious, controlled and conciliatory (but nonetheless deeply divided) Lenù; and Catherine McCormack as the more direct, defiant, and wilfully destructive (but perhaps ultimately more vulnerable) Lila. Watching them seal their Faustian pact of loyalty at the start of the show by swapping dolls was a thrilling epiphany (for this reader of the novels at least); indeed I found myself wanting the entire adaptation to be structured around them as a minimalist two-hander, with the two protagonists playing all the other roles, regardless of age or gender. As it was, I found most of the rest of the unnecessarily large cast to be grievously underused, and in most cases under-par in terms of their performances, frequently reducing their characters to two-dimensional stereotypes (in part this was due to the writing and direction, both of which tended to reduce the story to a whistle-stop tour of the main plot-points; while much of the dialogue was clumsily expositional and devoid of dramatic thrust or genuine characterisation). Two signal exceptions to this were an amusing and touching performance from Justin Avoth as Pietro, Lenù’s well-meaning but irremediably clumsy, unwittingly oppressive and ultimately pathetic academic husband, and a mesmerizing turn from Colin Ryan as Alfonso Carracci, Lila’s geeky schoolboy admirer who later becomes her cross-dressing alter-ego, before finally falling victim to the perverse attentions of her nemesis, the sadistic Michele Solara (an insufficiently menacing Adam Burton).

In sum: like watching the theatrical equivalent of an HBO miniseries, My Brilliant Friend offers a compelling visual and dramatic world, at least two great performances and enough thrilling moments to deliver a cumulatively satisfying and compulsive five hours in the theatre, either seen (as in my case) over two days, or (as is possible on weekends) at a single sitting. Whether it ultimately transcends its status as a staging of the books to become an autonomous work of theatre than will inspire future productions remains to be seen.

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My Brilliant Friend is currently running at The National Theatre until February 22.

Cyrano De Bergerac is at the Playhouse Theatre until February 29.