Postcard from Adelaide

Go Down, Moses; The James Plays; The Young King

I’ve just returned from a whirlwind weekend at the Adelaide Festival, seeing three stylistically very different shows about a legendary Jewish prophet, three medieval Scottish kings and a wholly imaginary fairytale prince. All three deal with biological issues of descent and parentage, and beyond this pose more properly symbolic questions about legacy and legitimacy.

In a post-traditional and globalised culture, these questions tend to be understood in terms of individual or social psychology. Stories about kings, queens, princes, princesses, dukes and duchesses are reinterpreted as stories about parents, children, siblings and relatives; while kingdoms, realms and territories become the external and internal landscapes of the body or the psyche. Even in the case of Moses – a religious prophet-leader (rather than a king) who leads a deterritorialized people out of exile and back into the ‘promised land’ of redemption from slavery – there’s a tendency (at least since Freud) to understand this story in psychological and even anthropological terms in the context of a single, unified theory of collective humanity.

Romeo Castellucci’s Go Down, Moses (created with his company Societas Raffaello Sanzio) takes this tendency to extremes and then explodes it. I saw the show last Friday night at the Dunstan Playhouse in the Adelaide Festival Centre after a three-hour flight from Perth (further addled by the two-and-a-half hour time-difference) – all of which added to the delirium of a work which (as a friend who also saw it observed) was as much about time-travel as anything else.

Castellucci makes theatre that refuses to submit to the logic of narrative or even coherent imagery, but instead unfolds its ideas according to a dramaturgy of pure sensation. Here, this dramaturgy takes the form of a series of tableaux (‘scene’ is not quite the right word), which could effectively be presented in any order, and mostly progress extremely slowly (if they can be said to ‘progress’ at all). Each tableau has its own (often spectacular) visual-spatial design and collection of moving (and occasionally speaking) bodies, and is graced by sublime lighting and Castellucci’s signature use of (frequently deafening) sound. Set and lighting are designed by the director himself (he has a background in stage design and painting), while the music is composed by his regular collaborator Scott Gibbons. These tableaux all take place behind a translucent scrim, which lends a ghostly aura and a pictorial quality to the action and figures that appear and disappear in the space beyond.

In Go Down, Moses the idea being unfolded is not so much the ‘idea’ of Moses himself as that of his maternal abandonment. In a way this is the counterpart of the idea of paternal abandonment as it appears in the Oedipus myth or the Old and New Testaments. Castellucci however focuses less on the archetypal child-hero’s subjective experience of being abandoned – or even the existential or spiritual condition of abandonment or exile – than on the unthinkable anguish of a mother who (for whatever reason) abandons her child.

This is initially developed in a contemporary scenario involving a woman who is first seen (in excruciatingly slow and gory detail) collapsing in a public toilet and bleeding heavily post-partum. She is next seen being interviewed by a police detective about the whereabouts of her baby (an interview which leads nowhere as she gives only cryptic answers to his questions), and is subsequently seen undergoing an MRI body-scan. The baby meanwhile is glimpsed in a brief tableau writhing and crying inside a black plastic bag which has been left in a public garbage dumpster.

This scenario is counterbalanced by the show’s final, most protracted and slow-moving tableau, which is set in a cave and involves a group of naked early hominids (wearing prosthetic ape-like heads). One of them, a female, is seen burying a dead baby beneath a stone and grieving; she then submits to sex with one of the males; finally she picks up some kind of ochre, faces the audience and makes a series of expressive hand-prints on the scrim as if it were the cave’s ‘fourth wall’, followed (somewhat ludicrously) by the letters ‘SOS’. The group then leaves, and after a pause the aperture of the MRI machine appears at back of the cave; the ‘original’ contemporary mother emerges, explores the cave, finds the dead baby beneath the stone and then the anachronistic message on the scrim, which is slowly illuminated and then fades into darkness.

These scenarios are interspersed with two more abstract tableaux. The opening one involves a group of men and women (in elegant but subdued mid-twentieth-century clothes) wandering and posing thoughtfully in an empty space, making mysterious hand-gestures and occasionally stopping to touch and examine each of their number in turn as if performing some kind of measurement or palpation before miming the action of inserting or plunging themselves into that person’s chest (the action being accompanied by an appropriately visceral sound-effect). The second abstract tableau (repeated twice) involves a huge white horizontal cylinder which appears downstage at floor level behind the scrim and begins to rotate (with a deafening noise). A black clump of hair then descends slowly from the flies until it comes into contact with the cylinder (which is now rotating at high speed) and is suddenly and violently wrapped around it. I found this ‘infernal machine’ (as my friend who also saw the show called it) – and especially the moment when it catches the clump of hair – strangely terrifying: a kind of dystopian vision of industrial-scientific technology absorbing or consuming the last remnants of human or organic life.

It’s easy to see Castellucci’s work as a kind of theatrical equivalent to the cold misanthropism of Kubrick; the same friend even described Go Down Moses as ‘2001 in reverse’. Castellucci’s preoccupations however seem to me much more theological (or perhaps post-theological), at least judging by the shows of his I’ve seen so far: Genesis: From the Museum of Sleep, On the Concept of the Face of the Son of God and an adaptation of Hölderlin’s Oedipus which was partially set in a nunnery and featured a Tiresias in the guise of John the Baptist, Creon as the Apostle Peter, a Jocasta who resembled the young Virgin Mary, and Oedipus himself as a female Jesus. Evidently, Castellucci uses the inversion of gender, and the invocation of the feminine, as a form of aesthetic and historical disruption and provocation. As such, his work can be read as having a political as well as a religious dimension; perhaps a more relevant precursor in the context of Italian cinema would be Pasolini.

For me though there’s ultimately something slightly clumsy and even demonstrative about Castellucci’s theatre, in comparison with the great filmmakers mentioned. The sheer visual and aural impact of his work on our senses is literally awesome, but in the end I’m left feeling a little nonplussed, or at least none the wiser, in relation to the ideas being unfolded. It’s almost as if these ideas – maternity, abandonment, exile, history, and even the idea of theatre itself – are somehow reduced and flattened out in the process of their unfolding. Perhaps that’s precisely the intention: to liberate us from the ancient meanings, preserved and transmitted by tradition, that these old ideas contain, and which otherwise continue to enslave us. Or perhaps there’s another, more allegorical way of re-reading and re-staging these old ideas: one which renews them by reading and staging them, as the German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘against the grain’.

*

The next day, I embarked on The James Plays trilogy: nearly eight hours of rambunctious and unabashedly middle-of-the-road historical drama, with a few nods towards the more ‘adult’ titillations of HBO-style TV costume-drama, whether historical or fantasy-fiction inspired (from Vikings to Game of Thrones).

Rona Munro’s three plays – James I, James II and James III – about three generations of eponymous medieval Scottish monarchs were jointly commissioned and first staged by the National Theatre of Scotland, the National Theatre of Great Britain and the Edinburgh Festival in 2014, and directed by the NTS’s Laurie Sansom. Plays and productions have now been revised and revived, and boast an ensemble cast of twenty (this show must have cost a fortune to tour), rousing music (live and recorded), energetic staging, choreography and fight direction, rock’n’roll-style lighting, and Jon Bausor’s elemental but effective costumes and set. The latter features a gigantic sword stuck in an otherwise mostly bare floor, and an upstage drawbridge surmounted by a smaller raised platform-stage. This is flanked by two banks of raised seating for a second, smaller onstage audience which mirrors the larger one in the auditorium of the Festival Theatre: a device which cleverly serves the action by making it at times seem more visibly public (for example during the rowdy Parliament scenes in James III) and at other times more private and even intimate (at least for those sitting onstage, as I was for James II – arguably the most ‘interior’ of the plays, both literally and psychologically).

The original staging of the trilogy in Edinburgh coincided with the Scottish independence referendum in September 2014, and there’s an overall sense of timeliness to the plays’ grappling with questions of political autonomy and legitimacy. One thinks for example of the global resurgence of nationalism and regionalism today, or the challenging of traditional institutions and structures of power around the world. More specifically, James I grew up as hostage in England (specifically as a prisoner of Henry IV and then Henry V) and began his reign in Scotland still under English control; James III was killed by rebels not long after the death of Richard III. The James Plays thus form a kind of contemporary counterpart to the story of the Wars of the Roses as told in Shakespeare’s History Plays, and in many ways mirrors their preoccupation with questions of lineage and succession.

Ultimately however (as with Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 – not to mention The Godfather) there’s a family drama at the heart of these plays, which deal with questions of psychological as well as political inheritance. This is most acutely the case in James II, whose hero (like Moses) is abandoned by his mother and hidden in a box; spends much of his youth in captivity (again like Moses and indeed his own father); and struggles in manhood to reconcile his better instincts (friendship, loyalty, peace, justice) with the pragmatics of power as well as darker, more destructive impulses (fear, envy, hatred, rage). In the end, blood will out, and the play culminates in tragedy, with James killing his self-destructive cousin William Douglas in an outburst of spontaneous violence, which was arguably the dramatic climax of the entire trilogy.

James I by contrast is a more straightforward story about the education of a King (and his Queen) into the necessary ways of politics; while James III (for me the weakest in the trilogy) loses focus and traction, its central character a self-indulgent narcissist who ultimately fails as a king, husband and father, and increasingly cedes power (and dramatic interest) to his wife and son (the future James IV). In the end I wasn’t sure what this final play had to add to the emotional arc of the trilogy – or had to say in terms of its political message.

Perhaps we needed a James IV to complete things: a final two-and-a-half hours of personal and national redemption leading to a Treaty of Perpetual Peace (albeit short-lived) with the new Tudor King of England, Henry VII. I’ve no doubt Rona Munro has it in her; she’s a fine playwright who understands politics and psychology, and knows how to alternate between humour and tragedy, heightened language and rough, everyday speech, in a manner reminiscent of Shakespeare himself. In fact there were times when I felt that the broad brushstrokes of the production and performances didn’t quite reflect the finer nuances of the writing. All in all though there was a sense of all the theatrical elements working in harmony to tell a story from a particular history, geography and culture that forms part of our own background and embraces our common humanity, with all its flaws and flickers of glory.

*

Sadly I can’t say the same for The Young King, which I saw the following afternoon before flying back to Perth. Adapted by Nicki Bloom from a rather rambling story by Oscar Wilde (not one of his best) for South Australian company Slingsby and directed by Andy Packer, this show didn’t achieve lift-off for me, despite some fine atmospheric music by Quincy Grant and an ambitious production and design concept, which included elaborate interactive and immersive experiences for the audience before we entered the performance space and after we left it. Perhaps it didn’t help that the whole thing took place on the commercially abandoned fifth floor of the Myer Centre in Rundle Mall, in what was formerly an indoor amusement park called Dazzeland (no traces of which now remain). In short: the sense of disenchantment that pervaded the building was difficult to dispel.

The Young King tells the story of an heir to the throne of a mythical kingdom. Conceived from the union of his princess-mother with a humble woodlander, the baby is stolen by the old king her father, raised by a goatherd, and eventually brought back to the palace when the old king is dying. The night before his coronation, he dreams of the origins of his royal robe and the jewels for his sceptre and crown in the sufferings and labours of his oppressed people. The next morning, he rejects the robe, sceptre and crown, choosing instead his goatherd’s cloak and staff and a coronet of thorns. 

In comparison with The Happy Prince or The Selfish Giant, The Young King feels like a sententious and cumbersome pastiche of traditional fairy-tale elements, and despite the playwright’s attempt to condense things (and to replace the overtly Christian ending with a more ecological one about returning to one’s roots in nature), I felt she didn’t do nearly enough to transpose the literary nature of the original to a more theatrical form. The same goes for the staging and performances, which seemed mostly stuck at the level of recitation, despite some (rather token) use of shadow-puppetry and object theatre in an effort to augment things.

In short: unlike both Go Down Moses and The James Plays, The Young King failed to tap into that archetypal layer which is the essential foundation for all fairy-tales, myths, legends and stories about kings and prophets – or to find a theatrical form in which to express it. To be sure, it’s a newly commissioned local work rather than an international blockbuster, and is based on a second-rate story by a Victorian aesthete rather than one drawn from the Bible or the pages of history – but beyond that, I sensed a reluctance to engage with this kind of folkloric material beyond the level of sentiment or whimsy. Perhaps this is symptomatic of a deeper reluctance on the part of our national psyche to come to grips with those layers in our cultural heritage – Anglo-Celtic, Judeo-Christian or otherwise – which underlie who we are and where we’ve come from. Until we do (at the risk of sounding prophetic), we’ll never grow up or forge our own sense of identity – which is what all these stories ultimately have in common.

Postcard from Perth 47

Perth Fringe World (Weeks 1 and 2): MKA Being Dead; Zoe Coombs Marr, Dave 2; Maude Davey, My Life in the Nude; Laura Davis, Ghost Machine

I’ve concentrated my Fringe-foraging over the past couple of weeks on the Summer Nights Season at The Blue Room and PICA – with occasional forays to tent-venues nearby – and followed my own personal interest in theatre rather than comedy, cabaret or circus. Nevertheless much of what I’ve ended up seeing has been performed by solo artists and had a decidedly burlesque feel. Perhaps I’ve simply succumbed to the overall Fringe vibe, but the idea of seeing a conventional (or even unconventional) ‘play’ somehow hasn’t appealed to me as much as watching an individual artist expose themselves one way or another and lay it on the line, so to speak, both personally and creatively. It’s made me wonder how much live performance in general – and ‘fringe’ performance in particular – appeals to the underlying voyeurism of audiences (and the corresponding exhibitionism of performers). Certainly in the context of Perth Fringe World – which mostly takes place in and around Northbridge – there's an element of the carnival and even the freak-show which astute artists know how to exploit and subvert at the same time.

The most interesting works I’ve seen at Fringe foreground the contradictions between exposure and intimacy, public and private, persona and self – especially in the context of gender and sexuality. Melbourne company MKA Writers Theatre have brought two productions to this year’s Fringe World: a return season of Mark Wilson’s Unsex Me and Kerith Manderson-Galvin’s Being Dead: Don Quixote. I wrote about Unsex Me when I saw it as part of last year’s Fringe at the pop-up Noodle Palace venue in the disused Picadilly Cinema. Perhaps inevitably I found the impact of the show somewhat diminished on seeing it a second time, particularly in the (comparatively) conventional and familiar black-box performance space at PICA. Wilson and his sofa seemed dwarfed by the dimensions of the space and the steeply raked auditorium, as opposed to the seedy confines of the former flea-pit cinema, where he loomed over us on a small raised dais in front of the screen while we cowered together in the front rows, unsure of where the microphone (or the lubricrant) might go next. In fact the whole experience of going to the Picadilly Arcade – in an area of the Perth CBD which is largely deserted at night – made it seem even more like visiting some kind of weird peep-show. Once again, I found myself thinking about the importance of venue in a fringe context, and indeed the whole notion of having a ‘fringe’ experience.

Being Dead: Don Quixote is in some ways a less ‘accomplished’ work than Unsex Me, but I found Kerith Manderson-Galvin’s deliberately artless stage persona totally engaging and in its own way as provocative as Wilson’s more barnstorming variety of camp. In keeping with the now-established aesthetics of post-dramatic theatre or contemporary performance, this isn’t character-acting or even stand-up comedy, but a deliberate subversion of both. As she admonishes us at the outset (in a style which owes as much to Cervantes as the content does): ‘Remember, there’s no piece of art so bad that it doesn’t have something good in it.’

The text is a collage derived in part from New York novelist Kathy Acker’s punk surrealist take on Don Quixote, and in part from Manderson-Galvin’s own imagination and/or experience (in keeping with Acker’s own literary and personal blend of autobiography and intertextuality, it’s pointless even attempting to distinguish between the two). In Acker’s novel, the Don becomes a post-structuralist, post-feminist, post-heterosexual woman wandering the cities of the world on an impossible quest for love (which neither male nor female partners seem capable of satisfying). Being Dead transplants elements of this story to post-punk suburban Melbourne, and beyond that, into the world of cyberspace and internet dating sites, where gender and sexual identity become ever-more unfixed and fluid.

Like Cervantes and Acker, Manderson-Galvin’s work (and perhaps implicitly her own quest as an artist and a lover) are comic and tragic at the same time. Occasionally accompanied by a guitar-playing male sidekick, she alternates between playing a version of herself, a version of the Don in male drag, and an air-headed female version of Sancho Panza, while delivering audience-patter, making confessions, telling stories, dancing, singing or lip-synching pop songs (which may or may not correspond with the words that appear karaoke-style on the screen behind her) and even leading an audience in an enthusiastic sing-along at the end. There are also some quite beautiful projections of scene-titles featuring paintings, drawings and artwork, presumably by Manderson-Galvin herself.

All in all, it’s a glorious mess with a serious purpose: how to find not just true love but one’s true self (necessarily gendered and sexualized, however fluidly) in a crazy world which is totally mediated by second-hand fictions. In other words: we are all Don Quixote now.

*

Actor, writer, comedian and performance artist Zoe Coombs Marr (who is also a member of Sydney-based contemporary performance group Post) took these questions to the next level with her dizzyingly meta-theatrical clown-show tour-de-force Dave 2: Trigger Warning, which I saw the following week around the corner from PICA in the Deluxe tent opposite the WA Museum. Her drag clown-persona ‘Dave’ is a foul-mouthed but touchingly inept male sexist stand-up comedian; in this show, he claims to have recently returned from a stint doing clown workshops with renowned real-life French theatre guru Philippe Gaulier, who is notorious for his extreme approach to clowning, his provocative teaching style and overarching philosophy of theatre as a form of ‘play’ or ‘game’ (‘le jeu’). A true confession of my own is order here: like generations of intrepid performers before and after me, I too made the pilgrimage to France to study with Gaulier last year as part of my Creative Development Fellowship. As things panned out, for better or worse I spent a month there immediately after my marriage imploded, with the result that my already damaged ego was further deconstructed on the classroom floor: a combined emotional and artistic ordeal from which I’m still in the process of recovering. So I had a vested interest in seeing how Coombs Marr would tackle the subject of Gaulier, and how her alter-ego Dave might have survived the encounter. 

In the event, just as the character of Dave himself functions variously as an object of satire, disgust, fascination, pity and even terror, so Gaulier’s classes and teachings were both mocked and honoured in a manner absolutely faithful to the style and philosophy of Gaulier himself. Indeed, the hallucinatory denouement of the show – when Dave trips and falls, fake blood begins pouring down his face and the party drugs he has taken earlier begin to kick in with demented effect – was pure Gaulier in its senseless and transgressive energy. In fact Dave is less of a ‘clown’ than an instance of that other, very different and highly specialized performance archeytpe which Gaulier teaches under the aegis of ‘the buffoon’ (‘le bouffon’): a kind of medieval fool who is despised and pilloried while also capable of embodying and uttering society’s otherwise unspeakable and unrepresentable truths (Sacha Baren-Cohen and Chris Lilly being two contemporary celebrity practitioners). As such, Dave 2: Trigger Warning goes beyond the realms of both stand-up comedy and political satire and enters a zone of Dionysian ecstasy which on the night I saw it drove the audience wild by the end of the show. For me, though, the most thrilling sequence came earlier, when Dave climbs into and ‘mounts’ a lower-body puppet clown-suit (complete with diminutive false legs dangling from its shoulders) and then does a kind of recursive auto-ventriloquist act in which he impersonates his own ‘boring unfunny feminist clown’, whose name is Zoe Coombs Marr. Self and persona, gender and performance, here become for a moment exhilaratingly reversible. 

*

Earlier that week I ventured down the other end of James Street to see Maude Davey present My Life in the Nude at the Casa Mondo tent in the Pleasure Garden. Like Coombs Marr, Davey is an interdisciplinary artist who has appeared as an actor in theatre, film and TV as well as having led a ‘shadow’ existence for decades as a queer feminist burlesque performer specializing in various stages of undress. Now in her early fifties, and still looking great, she breaks the ice early in the show by casually discarding her dressing gown and performing most of the rest of the show in the nude or with judiciously chosen additions – ranging from high-heels to headgear, wigs, jewellery, nipple-pasties, a G-string (pointedly worn back to front), a gorilla suit (reminiscent of both Cabaret and Marlene Dietrich’s surprise-entrance in Morocco) and – from Maude’s own early career as her burlesque alter-ego Ms Wicked – a surprise-entrance of an altogether different kind by a concealed strawberry. This and other cameo-highlights are interspersed with stories and reflections about her life and times, in what emerges as a disarmingly entertaining, honest, inclusive, thoughtful and personal meditation about performance, gender, sexuality and feminism, especially in the changing context of queer theatre and burlesque in Melbourne and Sydney over the last few decades. Maude is however originally from Perth, and she safely navigated a mostly mainstream, middle-class, middle-aged Perth audience through the material with a reassuring smile even when wearing a beard, stripping down to her cosh and seducing a woman in the front row. 

The closing anecdote was about inviting a performer with Down Syndrome to take off her clothes in the rehearsal room, and seeing the translucent beauty of her skin revealed in all its glory. At that moment, she realised that burlesque was about making a statement: ‘I am beautiful, and I am worthy of your regard.’ It was a tellingly self-reflexive moment in a show that for me at least was as much about ageing and mortality as it was about gender or sexual politics. Or perhaps more simply, it’s a show about the body: her body, other bodies, our bodies.

Maude first performed My Life in the Nude at La Mama in Melbourne in 2013, and I hope she’ll still be doing it – or a version of it – for at least another thirty years. Special mention should also be made of Deborah Eldred as her severely dressed and long-faced onstage ‘helper’, and of Anni Davey as the director of the show.

*

The final show I want to write about in this week’s Postcard is Laura Davis: Ghost Machine, which I saw at The Blue Room a couple of nights after seeing Unsex Me and Dave 2. Davis is another home-grown performer (she grew up in the Perth hills but is now based in Melbourne) whose work combines off-beat stand-up comedy with a layer of abstract visual theatrical design that borders on live art. In fact she spends most of the show under a white sheet with cut-out eye-holes (through which she periodically swigs on a bottle of water), a string of coloured fairy-lights wrapped around her midriff glowing softly beneath the sheet. Her head is also lit from above by a desk-lamp attached to a backpack, and the floor is strewn with a few other practical light sources that she switches on and off during the show.

The text itself is a stream-of-consciousness monologue of existential despair and neurotic anxiety, couched in the language of a typical geeky twenty-something trying to make ends meet emotionally and financially. What makes it interesting is that it’s being delivered by someone dressed as a ghost (though being concealed under a sheet also has other connotations) in an unvarying but not unmusical pitch that borders on a howl of pain but is softened by a wry tone of deadpan humour in the writing and delivery. If this sounds like heavy-going (or even Samuel Beckett), there’s an engaging lightness of touch throughout and plenty of improvisatory comedy, especially in the audience-interaction sections. These included asking us to share our ‘guilty pleasures’ (masturbation was the first answer given, although I’m not sure why guilt was involved) and (later in the show) to consider the question of why we didn’t kill ourselves. I offered ‘fear’ as my first answer, but later regretted not saying ‘love’, which I think for me is closer to the truth.

I enjoyed the gawky, lo-tech charm of this show immensely, and would happily come back to see Laura Davis under a sheet in five, ten, twenty or forty years time (much like Maude Davey in the nude, in fact). Truth be told, something was lost for me when she came out from under it, so to speak, in the final part of the show; not that she wasn’t still totally engaging, but some kind of imaginative spell had been broken. Perhaps it’s the case that what I enjoy most about this kind of work (as with all the shows reviewed in this Postcard) is the role of costume, mask or persona – whether it be cross-gender drag, ‘ghost-drag’ or even nudity itself (which as John Berger once observed is not the same as being naked) – and the way this enhances what might otherwise remain stand-up comedy or confessional theatre. In short: it’s the tension between self and persona that holds my attention and even (in the case of a virtuoso like Zoe Coombs Marr) keeps me on the edge of my seat.

The French psychoanalyst Lacan said that the two fundamental neurotic questions were: ‘Why am I a woman or a man?’ and ‘Why I am alive rather than dead?’ Once again, I’m tempted to answer both questions with ‘love’, but I think the point is that they’re fundamentally unanswerable. Perhaps the role of the performer (if not the neurotic) is to embody these questions for us. And if we’re all to some extent neurotics (apart from the psychotics and perverts among us, who generally don’t need to go to the theatre), then perhaps that’s why we attend live performance – not to have these questions answered, but to see them staged in public, beyond the private theatre of our dreams and fantasies.

*

Perth Fringe World continues until February 21^st.

Humph reviews more Fringe shows next week.

Postcard from Perth 46

Perth Fringe World/Black Swan, Loaded/Gillian Welch

Perth Fringe World is in full swing and has drawn your correspondent back into the fray – at least as a punter if not a performer – from his recent state of hibernation. Now in its fourth year, Perth Fringe claims to be the largest in the world (after Edinburgh and Adelaide) and the largest annual ‘performance-platform’ in the city – at least according to the Fringe World website and its 2015 impact report (which defines ‘largest’ in terms of ‘audience reach’). Certainly this year it feels as if the event has crossed a threshold in terms of the sheer number of acts, venues and crowds of potential audience-members wandering Northbridge, queuing up at the box-office tent, or sitting around drinking and pondering their options at festive outdoor gathering places like the Fringe World Orchard opposite the Art Gallery, the Pleasure Garden and its constellation of show-tents at the other end of James St, or this year’s Fringe World Fairground at the newly renovated Elizabeth Quay down on the Swan River foreshore. Gone is the sense of a small-town, laid-back, boutique fringe experience; in its place, there’s an edge of panic in the air that’s reminiscent of Adelaide and Edinburgh – the scent of dog-eat-dog competition on the part of roving performers touting their wares, and fear-of-missing-out on the part of punters anxiously scouring the nightly white-board listings outside the box-office to see which shows are offering cheap tickets or are already sold-out.

I’ve decided to limit my Fringe intake this year, mostly to the Summer Nights season of theatre shows curated by The Blue Room and PICA – and largely avoiding the plethora of comedy, cabaret and circus acts that now dominate the festival and draw most of the crowds. However, thumbing through the hundred-odd pages of the Fringe World program, I have the impression that while there’s been an expansion in terms of acts and audience, there’s less diversity or innovation in terms of artform or venues. For example, I don’t see anything comparable with last year’s site-specific works like Everything Unknown (a solo-audience immersive experience with headphones on Cottesloe beach), or Strut Dance’s Mi casa es su casa (a promenade contemporary dance suite of works by multiple choreographers that moved through the front courtyard, foyer, rooms and rear carpark of the Riverview Hotel). In short: this year’s Fringe feels less…well, ‘fringe’; at least if the latter term designates not merely a ‘performance-platform’ taking place on the outskirts of a major international arts festival (which begins next week), but one that takes us to the outer edges of familiarity in terms of performance and its possibilities.

*

I began my Fringe experience three weeks ago with Loaded: A Double Bill of New Plays, a Black Swan Lab Production in the Studio Underground of the State Theatre Centre featuring two one-hour works by young local writers – Girl Shut Your Mouth by Gita Bezard and Tonsils and Tweezers by Will O’Mahony – performed by Black Swan’s ‘new initiative’ The Bridging Company. The latter is described in the program as ‘an ensemble of eight graduates from WAAPA’s 2015 acting program’, although the putative ‘ensemble’ is actually split into two separate casts for the two plays, which also have two different directors, Jeffrey Jay Fowler and Will O’Mahony. Both plays do however share the same set and costume designer, Lawrie Cullen-Tait; the same lighting designer, Mark Howett (recently returned to Perth from Berlin, and something of a local legend when I first arrived here in 2000); and the same sound designer, Joe Lui. Moreover, the scripts were developed under the aegis of Black Swan’s Emerging Writers Group; and guns, shooting and/or being shot are central themes in both – hence, presumably, their collective (if slightly cringey) title.

Girl Shut Your Mouth is a dystopian fable about four teenage girls (Shalom Brune-Franklin, Brittany Morel, Stephanie Panozzo and Jessica Paterson) in an imaginary but not unfamiliar society, one of whom was recently shot in an attack on their school, while another was scarred by an acid attack. The girls however mostly behave like stereotypical privileged first-world brats, are alternately jealous or mocking of each other’s injuries, and fantasize about being celebrity victims. The one who was shot (but survived) is being transferred from their school to a mysterious place where (she believes) you can do or have whatever you want, and which seems to function in their collective psyche like a kind of reality-TV-game-show version of Paradise (although the acid-attack victim is more sceptical about the true nature of this mysterious destination, which thus takes on more sinister undertones). Most of the play consists of the typical group-dynamics of teenage pecking-order behaviour, and takes place in an abstract confined space that could be a common room or dormitory in a boarding school; the most interesting scene occurs when two of them venture outside this protected space to a park at night in order to deliberately risk being shot by marauding groups of men (whom we never see).

The world of the play is reminiscent of the imaginary dystopias of Margaret Atwood, and shares their satirical tone and underlying critique of societies riven by violence against women, whether that violence is inspired by religion, misogyny, political ideology or simply the availability of guns. Unlike Atwood, however, there’s a lack of detail or clarity in the hybrid reality portrayed, as well as in the target of its critique – which sometimes seems to be directed less against their shadowy oppressors than the behaviour and delusions of the girls themselves, whose characterizations are as two-dimensional as a Hollywood teen-comedy of the most simplistic kind. The inexperience of the cast contributes to this: there’s a sense of newly-hatched graduates playing to type, where more seasoned young local performers might invest their roles with greater depth or individuality. The slightly flippant, post-Pop aesthetic of the direction, costumes, lighting and sound all heighten this sense of superficiality and make the girls’ situation seem somewhat abstract, leaving the play itself hovering uneasily between reality and fantasy, Brechtian parable and the theatre of the absurd.

More seriously for me, play and production skate over the differences between the causes and manifestations of violence against women in, say, Australia or the United States and Nigeria or Pakistan – differences which have as much to do with history, politics, culture, class and poverty in those respective countries as they do with more abstract notions of sexism and patriarchy as global or universal tendencies. In short: perhaps there’s a danger in ‘essentialising’ the nature of violence against women, no less than in ‘essentialising’ women themselves. The kidnapping of schoolgirls by Boko Haram or the shooting of Malala Yousafzai by the Taliban can’t in my view be conflated with the epidemic of high-school massacres in the US (or more recently Canada), domestic violence against women and children in Australia, or the systemic cruelty and injustice of their detention and treatment as asylum-seekers – all of which are invoked by the playwright in her program note. Nevertheless, the play got under my skin, which was clearly its purpose, and therefore at least one measure of its success.

After interval, Tonsils and Tweezers approaches the issue of violence, and particularly gun-violence, from a very different angle and to very different ends. Indeed, while the plot-point of a prospective mass shooting is raised in the first few minutes of the play, this turns out to be a dramatic device that effectively keeps us on tenterhooks while the rest of the play tells a much more intimate story – namely, how the sense of sadness and guilt that follows a catastrophic emotional loss might underlie the resentment and rage of someone who eventually ‘acts out’. In comparison with Girl Shut Your Mouth, which has a more broadly sociological perspective, Tonsils and Tweezers is more of a study in individual psychology, although race, class and masculinity also feed into the story.

Lewis (nicknamed ‘Tweezers’ and played by Hua Xuande in a powerfully contained slow-burn performance) works as a cleaner at McDonalds and is contemplating the prospect of a high-school reunion at which he might ‘do something’. ‘Tonsils’ (Lincoln Vickery) is a former school-friend, the play’s unreliable narrator, and may not be all that he seems. Another high-school cohort and former bully, Max (Adam Sollis) – who is also attending the reunion, now works in property development, and is rehearsing the role of Macbeth for an amateur theatrical production – and his aptly named stage-partner Beth (Megan Wilding) make up the quartet of characters who verbally spar and dance around each other like planets or complimentary particles in physics (much like the playwright himself, ‘Tonsils’ is fond of metaphors and anecdotes drawn from the realm of contemporary science).

The initial tone of the script and production is playful and even whimsical– to which O’Mahony’s direction and staging lend a welcome touch of the surreal (including a wonderful cameo appearance by one of the actors as a giant toothbrush). However this tone gradually gives way to something more direct and heartfelt in both the writing and performances (especially from Xuande), and the night I saw the show it took the audience on a journey from uncomprehending nervous laughter to the dawning silence of understanding.

In a way the two plays complement each other, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that a female playwright explores the issue of violence from the perspective of its victims, while her male counterpart explores the internal world of a potential perpetrator. As the saying goes: ‘A man’s number-one fear is of being laughed at; a woman’s number-one fear is of being killed.’ Perhaps it’s worth noting, too, that the dystopian outlook of Bezard’s play remains bleak to the end, whereas O’Mahony’s play concludes on a note of redemption.

This sense of complementarity and shift in perspective is supported by subtle changes of tone in the lighting and sound designs, and by the elegant simplicity of the set – a low square wall or frame which is lifted from horizontal to vertical between the two plays. In Girl Shut Your Mouth it suggests an enclosure or protective border between a safe but confined interior and a more dangerous exterior world. For Tonsils and Tweezers it provides a proscenium frame for the amateur production of Macbeth that ‘frames’ the action – and perhaps in reference to that play, a symbolic threshold between reality and hallucination, or the choice between life and death.

All in all then: despite its title, Loaded is a thoughtful and challenging double-bill of new work by local writers, a local creative team, and a cast of locally trained emerging actors - and as such a satisfying Fringe contribution by the local flagship State Theatre Company.

*

More about my Fringe World experiences next week, but I’ll conclude this Postcard with a quick homage to neo-country/folk/bluegrass/Appalachian singer-songwriter Gillian Welch and her regular guitarist and backing vocalist Dave Rawlings, who kicked off their Australian tour with a gig at Perth Concert Hall last Saturday. I’ve been a huge fan of theirs ever since a friend introduced me to their 2001 album Time (The Revelator), a dark masterpiece of minimalist Americana. I’ve now got to know all their recordings, from their 1996 debut Revival to their most recent 2011 release The Harrow and the Harvest, for which I have a special fondness after listening to it over and over on a recent road-trip with someone special. Welch writes haunting lyrics and melodies (especially for her mostly tragic character-based ballads) and has a voice that caresses, croons and drawls without ever becoming sentimental or straying off-pitch. Rawlings is a mesmerizing acoustic lead guitar player (Welch plays acoustic rhythm guitar and banjo, which she occasionally swaps with Rawlings along with her harmonica) and his ghostly backing vocal harmonies are as intricate as his guitar work, but he remains discreetly supportive of Welch as the dominant presence, despite his trademark cowboy hat and his dazzling smile.

Onstage their musical and personal symbiosis was even more compelling, especially in a venue like the Perth Concert Hall, which despite its size has a unique sonic warmth and intimacy. As a classical venue, it can feel a little formal for popular gigs, but here the acoustic and visual focus was perfect, as Welch and Rawlings play and sing without amps or fold-back speakers, but simply stand and deliver in front of two mics, their performance-style as bare-bones as their instrumentation or the sound production on their recordings. The set includes a generous selection of songs from most of their albums, but especially The Harrow and the Harvest; highlights for me were the heart-rending love-loss ballad ‘The Way It Will Be’, the plaintive nostalgia of ‘Down Along the Dixie Line’, the epic ‘Hard Times’ (about a farmer and his mule) and the elusive quicksilver mystery of ‘Six White Horses’ (complete with outbursts of thigh-slapping and folk-dancing from Welch accompanied by Rawlings on banjo and harmonica).

They’re one of the great duos of our time, and if you can still get tickets over east – well, as another inveterate cowboy-hat-wearer used to say: do yourself a favour.

*

Perth Fringe World runs till February 21^st.

Loaded: A Double Bill of New Plays closes this Sunday 7^th February.

Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings play at The Palais in Melbourne this Friday 5^th and Saturday 6^th and the following fortnight Friday 19^th and Saturday 20^th; The Enmore in Sydney next Monday 8^th, Tuesday 9^th  and the following Tuesday 16^th ; the Tivoli in Brisbane next Thursday 11^th and Friday 12^th ; the A&I Hall in Bangalow next Saturday 13^th and Sunday 14^th; and the Playhouse in Canberra on Wednesday 17^th.

 Humph reviews more Fringe shows next week.

Postcard from Perth 45

PTC in crisis; Black Swan, Extinction; Yirra Yaakin, The Fever and The Fret; Spare Parts, Fox 

In the last few days I’ve seen new productions by three of Perth’s remaining theatre companies.

I say ‘remaining’ because Perth Theatre Company has recently lost both its artistic director and executive producer, shortly after announcing the cancellation of its two remaining shows this year precipitated by the loss of a major sponsor as well as a box-office shortfall for its preceding shows.

The crisis at PTC is in part due to the end of the mining investment boom, which has directly affected corporate support to the arts (especially by mining companies) as well as indirectly affected consumer spending (and thus audiences) in WA more than anywhere else in the country. However, it also reflects a deeper crisis in terms of the future of theatre companies across the country, and indeed internationally.

This crisis is at once economic, social, cultural and technological. How can a heavily subsidized industry like theatre survive in an era of austerity? How can the artistic identity of particular theatre companies surivive in an era of increasingly generic corporate branding and marketing? How can the profoundly localized nature of theatre companies, venues, artists and audiences survive in an era of globalisation? And how can theatre as a medium of collective presence survive in an era of increasing technological mediation and social atomisation (i.e. watching flatscreens and laptops at home)?

PTC already had its back against the wall when I moved to Perth fifteen years ago. In those days it was the personal fiefdom of founding artistic director Alan Beecher, as opposed to Black Swan’s Andrew Ross; the former’s undeniable gifts as a director (especially in small-scale contemporary work) were arguably overshadowed by the latter’s vision for a distinctively Western Australian (and particularly Aboriginal) theatre. This sense of rivalry became more pronounced after Black Swan moved into residence at the new State Theatre Centre, became the official State Theatre Company and secured permanent funding status as a Major Performing Arts Company with the Australia Council, while PTC lost its former home venue with the demolition of the Perth Playhouse, was relegated to the bowels of the State Theatre in the Studio Underground and became increasingly starved of both national and state funding.

Over the last seven years, despite Mel Cantwell’s considerable talent and vision as a director, PTC has struggled to find or communicate a consistent artistic identity. Broadly speaking, it has pitched itself as a more contemporary alternative to Black Swan; but it has essentially lacked the resources (in terms of funding and venue) to consolidate this, or to connect its grassroots base of Perth independent theatre artists (from which Mel herself emerged) with a more mainstream audience constituency. In short: Perth doesn’t have the cultural demographics of Sydney or Melbourne, and so it’s a lot harder (though equally vital) to sustain a Belvoir, Griffin or Malthouse here. Ironically, PTC somehow managed to put together an impressive looking program this year featuring no less than seven shows, and comprising a mix of curated independent work, Mel’s own work as a playwright, devisor and director, and more mainstream fare (a revival of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, starring Australian Hollywood star Jai Courtney). Unfortunately reviews and audiences for the former categories of work weren’t as strong as might have been hoped (I was overseas so didn’t see any of them), and it’s the Steinbeck that’s now been cancelled (apparently because it was tied to the corporate sponsorship that has now fallen through), along with another new work by local independent artist James Berlyn.

All eyes are now on the future and indeed the survival of the company. Here’s hoping that the funding bodies and the company’s board in their collective wisdom find a way to keep it going. For my money, Perth desperately needs an alternative mainstage company, preferably one devoted to contemporary theatre and performance, and in whatever form or organisational structure works best – artistic director-led, ensemble-based, curatorial or some combination of all three. Watch this space.

*

Yirra Yaakin’s The Fever and the Fret, Black Swan’s Extinction and Spare Parts’ Fox are all stories about love and death as well as dealing with broader themes of social and ecological change. In fact all three work best on the personal level despite certain thematic and conceptual weaknesses, and I found all three emotionally moving works despite some reservations about their content and execution.

Nyul Nyul/Yawuru actor, writer and film director Jub Clarc’s first play The Fever and The Fret is a homage to her grandparents who raised her. In the first half of the play, Lizzie (Ebony McGuire) lives with Iggy (Kelton Pell) and Ruby (Irma Woods) in their family home in a mining town up north during the early years of the resources boom. Lizzie’s mother is absent, her whereabouts unknown; her father is scarcely mentioned. Iggy works for the local mining company but has had a privileged education, loves poetry and has aspirations for a better life, all of which he seeks to instill in his granddaugher, who goes to the local school. The company has made him an offer on the house so that they can expand the mine; and the chief conflict in the play is between him and Ruby, who wants to keep the family home. Iggy also drinks and bets on the horses, and there is more than a suggestion of the anger, bitterness and frustration and that underlies this. There is also a background of incipient conflict at school between Lizzie and her peers, who discriminate against her because of her family situation. All of this simmers away beneath a loving and mostly peaceful domestic life presented in short vignettes, although tensions gradually build to a climax, the fallout from which we never actually witness onstage. The second half of the play takes place some years later: Iggy now has dementia, Ruby is dead, and Lizzie is now her grandfather’s carer, living with him in the new house which he presumaby bought from the sale of the old one, and which is haunted by Ruby’s ghostly presence.

The overall tone of The Fever and the Fret is gentle, low-key and valedictory. This mood is set by the writing, and supported by Kyle Morrison’s sensitive direction, warm if slightly sentimental lighting and sound designs by Chloe Ogilvie and Joe Lui, and an impressive set by Matt McVeigh wedged into the natural corner-stage configuration of the Subiaco Theatre Centre, which effectively conveys both the characters’ sense of entrapment and their capacity to make do with the given circumstances. In the first half it represents the slightly chaotic living area of the family home – periodically invaded by cascades of red dust through the ceiling – and in the second half transforms into Iggy and Irma’s cramped kitchen.

All three performances have great inner strength, even though I felt the actors struggling at times with a lack of finesse in the writing, and perhaps some occasional uncertainty about pace and energy. Kelton Pell coped best with this, great actor that he is, and also had the most complex and fully realised character, which he instinctively underplayed. Irma Woods is also a fine actor whom I love watching onstage, but she had less to work with in terms of the writing, and had to carry the bulk of the play’s emotional charge. Ebony McGuire had the hardest task of all, playing both the teenage and adult versions of an inherently less developed character, but she lit up the stage with a natural and unflagging energy.

Structurally, I found the set-up in the second half of the play much more interesting than the first half, and wondered if it couldn’t in fact have framed the entire story, with hallucinatory trickles of dust letting flashbacks of the past into Iggy’s damaged mind, as for me he was the central consciousness of the play. Nevertheless, it was an affecting night at the theatre, and rapturously received by the audience when I caught it on the final performance of the season.

*

Black Swan’s Extinction is a new play by prolific Melbourne playwright Hannie Rayson. Her plays are in many ways Shavian dramas, comedies or dramatic comedies of ideas (depending on the mood the play), pitting characters against each other as the vehicles or spokespeople of social or moral forces or points of view. Behind this lies a peculiarly English-language understanding of Ibsen (facilitated by Shaw himself) which emphasises naturalism, domestic space and verbal dexterity, as opposed to the more deeply psychological and symbolic layers of landscape, character, speech and action that underlie Ibsen’s work.

This tendency in Australian theatre – which is also manifest in other popular playwrights like David Williamson or Joanna Murray-Smith (their respective differences notwithstanding) – points I believe not only to our still dominant (but perhaps increasingly residual) English-language cultural heritage, but also to a more profound internal division between what might be called our intellectual and our emotional selves, and to our collective alienation from any deep local-historical connection with indigenous myths, traditions and rituals (and by ‘indigenous’ I don’t necessarily mean Aboriginal). Ibsen after all was writing against a native folkloric background of trolls, vikings, pine forests, fjords and avalanches, a primordial realm which lies beneath even the most middle-class Scandinavian drawing rooms.  Where are the Australian playwrights who have sought to plumb similar depths – or perhaps span similar chasms across internal and external geographies? Patrick White and perhaps some of the early plays of Louis Nowra spring to mind; it’s also what excites in the work of an Australian theatremaker like Barrie Kosky, regardless of the cultural provenance of his raw material. In comparison, so much mainstream Australian theatre is like watching TV (and I mean the old-style, interior-of-a-studio-set-bound TV, which itself was a small-sceen copy of the dominant mode of theatre at the time). There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this – depending on the execution of course – but the limits of the form are encountered whenever larger emotions or themes are tackled.

In fact the most interesting and unexpected scene in Extinction occurs after interval, when we are suddenly (and disappointingly briefly) plunged into the forests of Cape Otway. It’s a great reveal – and very late-Ibsen – in terms of the journey of Bryan Woltjen’s excellent stage design, which otherwise frames the action inside cold, stark, artificial and impersonal interiors, which shift subtly from vet clinic to high-rise apartment to university office primarily through the sliding and shifting dimensions and height of the wide single window that provides the backdrop for all three rooms. I only wished we had stayed in the forest for the rest of the play, and that it had been allowed to infuse the action and characters with something of its elemental power. Instead, we and they returned to domestic and workplace interiors, and to an increasingly uneasy blend of drama and comedy bordering on bedroom farce that hardly seemed to do justice to the themes – life, death, extinction – that the play purported to raise.

Within these confines, cast and director do their best to keep the stakes high and navigate the sometimes contradictory demands of eco-drama, relationship comedy-drama and personal illness tragedy that the play yokes together – not altogether successfully, as they sometimes seem to be pulling in different directions. Hannah Day as the conflicted young zoologist who is also at the centre of the play’s chief romantic triangle copes best with these shifts in gear. Myles Pollard as her more single-minded environmentalist vetinarian boyfriend creates a touching if rather emotionally stunted figure whose mysterious illness seems somewhat grafted onto his character. Matt Dyktinski and Sarah McNeill in supporting roles – as the recently divorced mining executive with a somewhat implausible soft spot for the survival of the near-extinct spotted quoll, and as the (also recently divorced) conservation director who is all-too-easily susceptible to the former’s devious charms – both have a harder job navigating the inconsistencies in their characters and the more farcical elements of the plot, including an entirely implausible and arguably superfluous second romantic triangle intersecting with the first one. By the time the play reached its inconclusive conclusion, with zoologist and vet improbably reunited over live footage of a spotted quoll wirelessly transmitted to her smartphone (and projected onto the rear wall) – echoing the opening scene with its clumsy device of a robotically animated quoll making unconvincing noises on the vet’s operating table – I felt my sympathies and intelligence had been stretched beyond breaking point. In the end, neither Woltjen’s elegant set (coolly and unobtrusively lit by Trent Suidgeest and framed by a clean-edged acoustic guitar score by Ben Collins) nor the actors’ committed performances (supported by Stuart Halusz’s clear-eyed direction) could compensate for the structural weaknesses of the script and the ultimately superficial treatment of the play’s themes.

*

Spare Parts Puppet Theatre’s new production Fox is adapted from the beautiful and heartrending children’s book written by Margaret Wild and illustrated by Ron Brooks, who together also co-created one of my favourite children’s books, Old Pig. If the earlier book is unambiguously about death and loss, Fox is a more elusive but equally challenging fable about relationships. Like all great writing and art created specifically for children, it demonstrates that the mysterious inevitability of pain as the corollary of love is something that children and adults alike are capable of dealing with.

Spare Parts Associate Director Michael Barlow has directed and co-created the show in collaboration with former Artistic Director and long-term company mentor Noriko Nishimoto and choreographer Jacob Lehrer, and it's performed by three dancers inhabiting and manipulating elements of costume that consist of removable headgear and flowing pieces of silk to represent the three animal characters in the story. The eloquently minimal costumes and set are designed by Leon Hendroff, who has created a fluid and tangible world of ‘puppetry without puppets’, so to speak, that wisely avoids trying to represent the natural environment or its creatures in any literal or even consistently solid way. Unlike Inheritance, this is a symbolic and psychological response to the Australian landscape and its fauna (native and introduced) as the setting and figures of an archetypal story that has much in common with the tales of Grimm or Andersen, or even the more primordial realm of myth and dreaming. As such, it speaks across ages, generations and cultures, in a language of images that intrinsically requires little in the way of dialogue or narration. 

The aesthetic of this production is subtle: silk is the unifying fabric that binds costumes and set together. In fact there is an airy lightness about the design and performances that doesn’t quite sit for me with the earthier and harsher images and tones of the book; the same goes for the gentleness of Graham Walne’s lighting and the sweetness of Lee Buddle’s score. In short: I felt that the show avoided or softened some of the pain of the original story. This disjunction wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t also made visible and audible to the audience, as the original illustrations are projected onto a screen backdrop and the original text is reproduced in voiceover by Kyle Morrison (from Yirra Yaakin) throughout the action. I couldn’t help wondering what the show would have been like if it had been liberated from these visual and verbal references completely, as the latter seemed to compete at times with the mood of what was happening onstage. I was also doubtful about the occasional lines of dialogue and vocal sounds uttered by the dancer/puppeteers, which sometimes sounded forced and unconvincing.

In short: I had the feeling that this was a tale that could have been told purely through the movement of bodies and objects, using the strengths of the performers and scenography to maximum effect. The disjunction between forms of storytelling was especially jarring for me at the end of the show, which seemed to come to an abrupt halt with the words ‘Slowly, yippety-hop, she begins the long journey home’ and the image of the crippled magpie lost and abandoned in the vastness of the desert, while consoling music seemed to suggest an unlikely happy ending; whereas the book ends with a more ambiguous final image of the riverbank where Dog and Magpie have made their home, but with neither character visible.

Nevertheless, I found Fox the richest experience of the three productions under review. The power of the original source material and the suggestiveness of the visual design stayed with me long afterwards. Spare Parts is arguably the oldest surviving theatre company in Perth (founded in 1981, a decade before Black Swan, Yirra Yaakin, Perth Theatre Company or Barking Gecko) and one of the most distinctive in terms of its artistic history and identity (Noriko Nishimoto being the creative spirit who has accompanied or guided it throughout most of its journey). That sense of tradition is palpable onstage, but there is also a sense of the company continually evolving. Long may it continue to do so.