View Details

There always seems to be something unsatisfying about these personal depictions of major historical events. Human dramas with a historical "backdrop" work well enough, but if the huge scale history is in the foreground it can really upset the balance.

Jackie, the first English Language film from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, shows the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination from the point of view of his wife, Jacqueline Lee Kennedy. Mostly it's a psychological portrait of a grieving, widowed mother of two small children who has some very difficult decisions to make. There are countless movie protagonists who've been put in this same predicament, but of course she also just so happens to be the First Lady of the United States, and her husband just so happened to be the President. Because of their positions, any gossip about their private lives is thought of as political fodder and is of great interest to the public. Noah Oppenheim's screenplay works across three separate but very close points in time: the few days after his death, flashbacks from the last few weeks of his life and a press interview conducted in Jackie's new home, after she has left the White House. The journalist (Billy Crudup) says that after seeing how poised she was during her television tour of the White House, he thought she could have a career on the small screen. She's quite offended by this idea, but she does know how the media works. She knows she is going to be asked for a piece by piece, moment by moment account of how it all happened and how she has been coping. She also knows that if she gives them nothing, they'll just interpret her silence however they want (most likely cruelly), so she makes sure to tell him what he can and can't print from the whole exchange. She doesn't want him to publish anything misleading, even if it’s what she actually said. She has no qualms about being slightly dishonest with the world in order to show them her truest self.

In many ways, Larraín and Oppenheim are being driven by the same curiosity as the journalist. This film is an intensely personal account of everything she felt, thought and dealt with over that terrible week, with occasional glimpses at what the rest of the world was going through too. Such a narrow focus in a historical film is always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if you only have 100 minutes it's best not to bite off more than you can chew, but it can also feel like a frustrating waste of all that meaty material from what’s happening around her. In Jackie, people sometimes talk about Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles de Gaulle, Vietnam and the like, but most of what you see and remember are close ups of the First Lady as she is steadily imploding. The character of Jackie, as the title would suggest, basically is the film. Playing her would have been a tall order for any actor that Larraín might have cast. If she'd been someone with a weak screen presence, this would’ve been a trainwreck. Luckily for him, he cast Natalie Portman. 6 years after Black Swan, Portman looks set to take home another Best Actress Oscar for playing a hard-working woman who is slowly falling apart before the audience's eyes (although, unlike Nina, Jackie does manage to put herself back together again). Once again, she fully embodies every bit of pain, pressure, confusion and terror her character is feeling. For much of the film, cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine looks like he's capturing a live theatre performance, and is content to let her powerhouse acting carry the film. Meanwhile, Mica Levi’s musical score is overly theatrical, and seems determined to be the star of the film instead of her.

There's no doubt that as a Natalie Portman showcase, Jackie effortlessly succeeds, but her character does feel at odds with the rest of the film's world. The most intimate scenes with the First Lady have quite a polished and digital feel to them, while all the major "events" in the film (the assassination, the funeral, Oswald's arrest) have more of a grainy period quality, which lends them a lot of credibility. While with Mrs Kennedy you certainly feel like you're watching a high-profile actress take on the part, whenever the brilliantly cast Caspar Phillipson is onscreen, you just feel like you're looking at the real JFK: that’s how much of a likeness he is.

It might have been more effective to film the whole movie in that celluloid style, but as it is, Jackie is a very engaging 21st Century look at one of the most earth-shattering tragedies of the 1960s. I suppose a fair bit of Jacqueline Kennedy's personal journey is emblematic of the global aftermath of her husband's death, and how people wanted him to be remembered. Interestingly, a later exchange with her local priest (John Hurt) is pretty much reflective of Jackie’s gradual success as a film, and not just as a Natalie Portman fan piece. Initially, both the priest and the film are saying what they need to say to justify their presence here – nothing more, nothing less – but eventually they both admit to their own limitations and give honest answers about where they think we should go all from here.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

After the melancholy vampire story that was Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch has delivered an equally meditative human drama with Paterson. It’s a film that shows a week in the life of a lovely artistic couple living in Paterson, New Jersey. Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) is an avid painter, designer and cupcake maker, with a distinctive monochromatic colour scheme in everything she makes, and wears, though ironically she is a very colourful character. Her husband, Paterson (Adam Driver), is a gentle poet who drives a bus for a living, and uses all of his break time to write a few lines in his "secret notebook". While Laura sells her wares at the local farmers’ market, where they're very popular, Paterson won't share his work with anyone other than her. For ages, she's been telling them he should get his poems published, or at the very least make copies of them. Eventually he promises to photocopy them all on the weekend, on one of those last two days that the film shows.

This is hardly a movie that runs on suspense, mostly it's an episodic musing on the little things in life, but there are still a few little narrative arcs that are given a nice payoff. One of these is the question of whether he'll keep that promise in time. Unlike Laura, who shares a piece of her creativity everywhere she goes, Paterson is just happy to watch the world go by. Laura is the one with all the latest gadgets, while Paterson doesn't even have a mobile phone. He's content to just let it all come and go, just like his poems, and his passengers of course. As you’d expect, he hears all sorts of things when he’s eavesdropping at the wheel. People have some very amusing conversations when it looks like no one is listening. There’s plenty of shots of him smirking at them while looking at the road, but these snippets never really make their way into his poems. That would have been too predictable, and far too neat. He mostly writes about what he sees at home, or at the park where he eats his lunch every day. Adam Driver’s voiceover readings of these poems are pleasingly unpolished. Paterson doesn’t sound like he’s reciting them for an audience, he really does sound like he’s writing the words as they come to him.

Jarmusch only overstretches believability when it comes to the couple’s dog, Marvin. He’s certainly adorable, but Jarmusch can’t seem to decide if he wants him to be an anthropomorphised animal character, like Gromit, or a projection of whatever the human characters are going through. It might have been more effective to just let him be a dog, another part of Paterson’s world that he can silently take in.

Paterson is very much a quiet observer who’s surrounded by some very vocal characters. His boss, Donny (Rizwan Manji) is one of those people who likes to answer with complete honesty when someone asks him how he is. Paterson’s favourite bar is also frequented by an actor named Everett (William Jackson Harper) and his ex-girlfriend, Marie, (Chasten Harmon) who Everett can’t seem to let go of and to whom he won’t stop making melodramatic professions of his undying love.

While these figures encourage Paterson to come out of his shell a little and make his mark on the world, they’re never called upon to transform him. Jarmusch isn’t interested in showing how an introvert can turn into an extrovert. Instead, he shows how it’s possible for someone so quiet to navigate a world where it’s survival of the loudest and still remain true to themself.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

The Founder is screenwriter Robert D. Siegel’s scathing portrait of Roy Kroc, the eponymous creator of the McDonald’s Corporation, not to be confused with the McDonald brothers who created, well, McDonald’s. If that sounds as all suss it’s probably because it was. Kroc, as written by Siegel, and played by Michael Keaton, is a shameless anti-hero, an opportunistic businessman who listens more to his motivational tapes than he does to his own conscience, if indeed he has one. The film follows his great ascent (or descent, depending on how you look at it) from a not-so-humble milkshake-mixer merchant to the owner of a giant plagiarised franchise. He’s that kind of smarmy fourth-wall-breaking capitalist who is usually the smartest person in the room. However, Siegel, and director John Lee Hancock, both suggest he might simply be the most “persistent” person working in the food industry, since one of his favourite tapes tells him that neither genius nor talent can ever be a substitute for persistence. In his mind, persisting seems to mean sacrificing your integrity and your personal relationships for money.

This is exactly why Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch), an honest pair of farmers, chose to abandon their first ill-fated attempt at franchising the business. When Kroc first suggests that they give it another go, they tell him they’d rather run one quality restaurant than fifty mediocre ones, especially since that first one in San Bernardino took them decades to build. While the brothers see their popular “Speedee Service System” as a wholesome masterwork of efficiency, Kroc sees it as a cash cow to be fattened, reproduced and milked for all its worth. Still, Mac thinks that Kroc can do a much better job of the expansion than they did, and Dick thinks that with the right contract he can safely keep Kroc on a leash. Even for those who don’t already know the story, there’s never any doubt how horribly this will end for the brothers. After all, Dick and Mac will always be looking out for each other and their legacy on top of the financial state of the business, while Kroc ticks all the boxes for a character who’s only looking out for himself and his bank account.

The most obvious of these, for an ambitious middle-aged man, is the routine long-suffering wife, played here by Laura Dern. A memorable quote from her character in Wild (2014) pretty well sums up much of her recent career: “I've always been someone's daughter or mother or wife. I never got to be in the driver's seat of my own life.” Especially in films like 99 Homes (from the same year) Dern has often played women who’ve had the men in their life make choices for them. Despite her being an incredibly supportive partner, The Founder shows Roy going behind her back to cancel their club memberships, disown their friendship group, mortgage their house, and ensure that she gets no part of McDonald’s Incorporated when he finally divorces her. Her submissiveness throughout most of this makes her one of the least interesting of these characters that Dern has played in recent years, but she makes it work well enough.

Still, she’s definitely not as engaging as Kroc’s second wife, Joan (Linda Cardellini), who Kroc courts when she’s still married to one of his new buyers. Once he’s stolen her away, and bought off the McDonald brothers as cheaply as he could, he quite literally has everything he’s ever wanted. By this point, every single character goal that Siegel sets up for him has been achieved (Given that this a true story, I don’t think this counts as a spoiler). For some reason, the last shot is of his big new bedroom mirror, which he looks into tearfully before going outside with Joan. I never took this character to be the crying type, but I hope they were tears of some twisted joy. If that was meant to be some sudden moment of feeling empty, remorseful or self-reflective, it was far too late to bring that in. The Founder might be a true story, but it’s hardly a human story. It’s actually quite cerebral and subversive in the way it questions the myth of the American dream. It’s essentially a cautionary tale against large scale enterprise, especially when Kroc starts comparing those big yellow McDonald’s arches to the Christian cross, and by extension suggesting that capitalism is America’s new religion, with franchise outlets as the new churches. This link is drawn even more strongly given that last year Keaton starred in Spotlight, the rather forgettable Best Picture winner about the corruption inside the Catholic Church. In its own way, The Founder is an even more chilling and timely reminder of what you can get away with once you have enough money and real estate to bury your crimes under.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Threadbare

Featuring: Fipe Preuss, Elnaz Sheshgelani and Phillipa Russell

Choreographer: Kathleen Gonzales

Producer: Natasha Jynel

Threadbare is a three-part multidisciplinary show that celebrates the diversity of Australian identity through dance, poetry and visual art.

The show is presented in languages including English, Spanish, Tongan, Arabic and Auslan.

Threadbare invites audiences to shift their perspectives and open their eyes with ideas that challenge convention in modern Australian society.

It brings together artists from diverse backgrounds to explore the commonalities of human experience.  

Each artist brings a personal reflection and identity to the show.

In Threadbare, there is poetry featuring Dr Quinn Eades exploring feminist, queer and trans series of the body. His poem The Urge to Speak encourages gender queer people to find a voice.

What does it mean to be in contemporary Australia? How do our languages, culture, heritage and traditions connect us?

As a society, the most difficult thing is to look at ourselves and to ask ourselves what work is still needed to foster healing an inclusion.

Threadbare explores the conflict between the “otherness” and belonging in contemporary Australia.

The show also features Phillipa Russell, the only deaf actress in the show.

Phillipa’s solo is performed entirely in Auslan and alludes to the theme of arriving into an unknown country.

She performs of a curious bystander who arrives in a land inhabited by Indigenous peoples – a young white woman who arrives on the scene completely not knowing what’s going on.

The show begins with the steady sound of a heartbeat, which leaves the audience wondering what will happen next.

The atmosphere felt strangely chaotic, as the entire room is engulfed in darkness, and two women slowly appear dressed in white robes with their faces concealed, chanting an interpretation of Welcome to Country.

Written by Caroline Tung

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Arrival is the latest film by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, written by Eric Heisserer and adapted from a short story by Ted Chiang. It’s a science-fiction film in which aliens arrive on Earth and Dr Louise Banks, a linguist, played by Amy Adams, is asked to help decipher their language in order to find out their purpose on Earth. Over the course of the film we join Dr Banks in solving this curious puzzle, as she races against the worldwide chaos caused by the presence of these creatures. Interspersed with the plot of Dr Banks and the aliens is another storyline involving her daughter, which not only adds emotional weight but also ends up being quite a central element in understanding the film itself.

There’s an absolutely brilliant confluence of visual, emotional and intellectual elements that keep you engrossed and awed throughout the film’s duration. Everything just comes together so well.

First, let’s talk about the visuals. In particular, all the things to do with the aliens are immaculately designed. The aliens are these kinds of seven-limbed knuckle squids which in the film they call “heptapods”, and they land in twelve identical ships which seem like particularly aerodynamic skimming pebbles. You might have seen them on the poster. Inside the pods is a long rectangular room with a groovy gravitational shift, and the first time we experience this gravitational shift is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a film this year. In the room there’s a glass screen behind which the heptapods themselves appear enshrouded in a white mist. Finally, there’s the language that the heptapods use to communicate, the language that our protagonist, the linguist Dr Banks, has been hired to decode. Emanating from a tentacular orifice of one of the limbs of the heptapods, the language is basically a black smoky ink which forms circular symbols or logograms that on first glance look like Rorschach tests made from coffee mug stains but really is a set of unique elements that in each circle create an entire phrase or sentence.

Now, I might be biased in my enjoyment of the film due to being a linguist myself, but if anything I feel like a film that involves one’s specialist subject gets put under even closer scrutiny, and the fact that there’s so much actual linguistic basis for what goes on, which I won’t go into, definitely increased how much I got into the film.

This is not even touching the intriguing way the film deals with the passage of time. Towards the middle of the film, we find out a certain piece of information that changes the way conceptualise everything we’ve seen so far and everything we see thenceforth. I’m hesitant in labelling it a twist, because it feels less like a twist per se and more like another piece of the puzzle that the film represents. Though it’s still totally a spoiler, so I’m not going to say what it is. But it comes at the point where Dr Banks unlocks the secret to the heptapods’ language and in doing so is able to look at time in a completely different way. So essentially, by solving the problem of their language and learning this new way of experiencing time, Dr Banks passes on to us, the audience, the ability to see the film differently. It’s really quite a clever narrative technique.

And what the revelation has to do with involves Dr Banks’ daughter, Hannah, who we see in the first few minutes of the film being born, growing up and then dying. Scenes from Hannah’s life are constantly being intercut with the plot of the heptapods, and this really adds a delicate and grounded aspect to the film. There are definitely moments when the film threatens to move into rather oversentimental territory, but its sentimentality always feels earned, or else it pulls back just before getting too sappy. And regardless, the story of Hannah, without giving anything away, is absolutely essential to our grasp of the story of the entire film.

Overall what impressed me was the scale of this film, the way it tied together a worldwide phenomenon to a personal tale, the attention to detail with giant alien ships and tiny wisps of smoke alike, and above all the flagrant optimism for humanity amidst all the flurry of panic and division going on across the world.

Arrival has captivated my imagination the way very few recent films have, and it relays a message of communication and unity that is always relevant, especially today.

Arrival is out in cinemas now.

Written by Ben Volchok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Hacksaw Ridge is quickly turning into the must-see film of the year: the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a pacifist army medic who saved the lives of 75 World War II soldiers without ever holding a weapon. It's that powerful combination of a visceral war film, a compelling social justice story and a very poignant biopic that always gets people talking.

Audiences all seem to be appreciating a journey into the hellfire of war that leaves them with more than just a feeling of pointlessness. Critics all seem to be praising the juggling act of depicting such huge scale events on such a personal level. As always, I’m sure the Academy will be very generous with a film telling such an important historical true story. Meanwhile, everyone looks thrilled to see director Mel Gibson bringing himself back into the Hollywood good books.

Screenwriters Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight chronicle the personal life, early rejection, spectacular heroics and later veneration of the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honour. As a Seventh Day Adventist, he refuses to ever physically harm a fellow human being, takes the seventh commandment - “Thou shalt not kill" - in its most literal sense, and recognises Saturday as the Sabbath. Throughout his military training, his superiors and fellow soldiers find all of this supremely irritating. They think he's just trying to get an extra day off, that he's doing all this for attention, that he's a coward who’s too scared to fight but too ashamed to stay at home, or that maybe he’s just insane. Sergeant Howell (a surprisingly credible Vince Vaughn) tries both the stick and the carrot, neither of which can persuade him to leave. Captain Glover (Sam Worthington) tries to convince him that the better translation is "Thou shalt not commit murder," which apparently doesn't apply in a time of war, although of course once you start making exceptions it’s hard to know where to stop. That said, Doss has no political sympathies with Japan. Just like his beloved brother, Hal (Nathaniel Buzolic), Desmond is determined to protect his country on the battlefield, even though their jobs in the shipyard would have made both of them eligible for deferment. As Desmond sees it, the only difference between him and his brother, or any of the other soldiers, is that he wants to serve his country by saving lives instead of taking them. In his words: “With the world so set on tearing itself apart, it don't seem like such a bad thing to me to want to put a little bit of it back together.” This is the climax of the speech he eventually has to give in front of a court martial, which is, in the film at least, the tipping point of his stalemate with the military. While they are moved enough to reconsider sending him to prison, they are still far from truly understanding his views. Needless to say, the day after the Battle of Okinawa, after he spends the entire night trawling through enemy territory rescuing mutilated soldiers, they all come to respect him, and his beliefs. As Glover puts it, the soldiers might not all believe the way he does, but they believe in how much he believes. Similar to Chris Kyle, whose life was chronicled in Clint Eastwod’s American Sniper (2015), Desmond quickly becomes the stuff of legend, someone who makes the men feel as safe as you can when you're heading into battle with the ruthless Japanese forces.

Unsurprisingly, given that this is an American depiction of the war, the Japanese soldiers are largely demonised. After being talked about throughout the first half of the film, and having their handiwork shown by truckloads of bleeding corpses, they make their first appearance in a long, gruelling battle scene, one that perfectly balances chaos and suspense. They are essentially portrayed as scary goons to be blown down. Most of their dialogue isn’t even subtitled. There's really only one character among them, the commander who would rather die than surrender, though he appears far too late to really humanise the enemy side. Every atrocity they committed is foregrounded, so as to prevent the morality of the war effort itself being called into question.

Meanwhile, over in the American camp, an array of the usual colourful characters are introduced from the beginning, though fortunately none of the cliches actually end up playing out. They all feel like real people, probably because most of them actually were, but even the invented or composite characters avoid becoming stock soldier stereotypes. Still, apparently it was too much to show any of the misdeeds they would have been party to on the American side of the battle. Even though the action scenes excel at capturing the scale of the conflict, they end up missing quite a lot of the complexity.

However, Hacksaw Ridge was never meant to be a docudrama about the Second World War. Above all else, this is Desmond’s story, and thankfully the complexities of his religious, ethical and personal beliefs are explored much more fully than the intricacies of the war.

The film introduces a harrowing childhood incident where, as he and Hal are fighting, Desmond picks up a brick and strikes his brother over the head with it, almost killing him. It also depicts their father, Tom (Hugo Weaving) as a raging alcoholic, who Desmond comes very close to shooting in the head when he attacks his mother, Bertha (Rachel Griffiths). This might be a fictionalised and exaggerated version of his early life, but it does retain the essence of the part his upbringing played in shaping his values, and later his choices. For instance, he first meets his future wife, a nurse named Dorothy (Teresa Palmer) on the day that he rescues an injured stranger from a fallen cart, drives him to the hospital and makes one of his many blood donations while he's there.

Once he eventually gets to the battlefield, it looks as though this one poignant little story might be swallowed up by the historical monstrosity that is World War II, but it isn't. The battle on Hacksaw Ridge was certainly great and terrible, but to those who knew him, Desmond Doss was even greater.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

The audience at La Mama Courthouse demanded encore bows from the cast of Rust and Bone on the night of its Victorian premiere performance, which they very humbly gave and most definitely deserved. Caleb Lewis’ three-pronged play asks a lot of its actors, and quite a bit from its audience as well. A trio of male performers - Luke Mulquiney, Adam Ibrahim and Glenn Maynard in this production - play out three of the stories from Craig Davidson's collection of the same title. Ibrahim plays a SeaWorld whale trainer whose leg was torn off by an Orca, Maynard a fading boxer in need of someone to fight for, and Mulquiney a crazed dog fighter who's struggling with his infertility. The narratives are all interspersed, such that Lewis needs to carefully choose when to switch from one to the next, director Daniel Clarke has to think carefully about how to transition between stories, and the actors have to be ready to change gears in an instant. As well as that, each of them needs to have the range to play all of the key supporting characters in the other two stories, most memorably a vigorous American boxing trainer, a bouncy surrogate son, a long-suffering wife and a lively new girlfriend. It’s always impressive when actors can play different ages, genders and nationalities without falling into stereotypes or farce.

It certainly changes the equation when multiple stories are being told at once. It can make it harder for the audience to orient themselves at the beginning, and easier for them to drift away in the middle. The strong characterisations certainly help here, as does the very tight choreography by Ingrid Voorendt. For her, a boxing punch, the shattering of rust and bone, becomes a very effective motif to express the torment of these three characters. It definitely makes for the cleanest transitions, and, if nothing else, snaps the audience out of any confusion.

Certain parts of each story feel very similar and almost interchangeable, which often seemed intentional. Of course, all three protagonists are men who are frustrated with the limitations of their bodies, and who loathe themselves much more than those around them ever could. There’s always something exhilarating about watching parallel lives play out in such tantalising proximity, both literally given it’s a small stage but also in terms of their inner experiences, even if their outer experiences might be wildly different.

Making this many hops between the three stories, Lewis doesn't always land gracefully. Not all of the threads get tied securely, and some of the most thought-provoking moments are barely given any breathing space. No doubt, for each audience member, one narrative will probably emerge with all the connections intact while another might have a few pieces missing for them. It all depends on what makes a greater impression on you: the spiritual escapism of the whale story, the primal intensity of the boxer's tale or the urgent pathos of the dog fighter's plight.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Blaque Showgirls is a merciless interrogation of Australian racism in the form of a stage parody of dance movies, including, of course, Showgirls (1995). Written by Nakkiah Lui, the acclaimed Aboriginal activist and playwright who recently worked on the ABC’s Black Comedy, it’s a play that mocks and borrows from film and tv in equal measure. Eugyeene Teh’s set design even resembles a television set as well as a theatre within a theatre, something that director Sarah Giles takes full advantage of. Voiceover abounds instead of theatrical asides. Jed Palmer’s musical score provides the cheese while the cast brings the delicious ham. Humorous captions race above the actors’ heads, and are easy to miss unless you’re paying close attention. Naturally, it ticks of all the obligatory dance movie scenes, albeit with more than a slight twist: a “montage of moderate success”; the arrival-in-the-big-city scene; the audition poster that blows into our protagonist’s face at just the right moment (here the wind is a stagehand carrying a pole); the jealous antagonist dancer throwing a tantrum at her dressing room mirror just before she hatches her third-act scheme.

Lui’s story follows the blundering young Ginny Jones (Bessie Holland) an orphan from the town of Chitole (pronounced shi-toll). She dreams of moving to Brisvegas and joining the Blaque Showgirls. She might not be black, but she refuses to let that stop her, no matter how much people mock her for it. Apparently her mother was the best Aboriginal dancer in the country. She is adamant that she can remember looking up at her brown face when she was a baby, just before she was accidentally killed during smoking ceremony that apparently gave Ginny brain damage. In any case, the local Indigenous community are happy to see her go. One elder in particular, her would-be mentor figure (Elaine Crombie) is fed up with her thoughtless lack of cultural sensitivity and is happy to let Brisvegas knock some sense into her. It doesn’t.

The moment she steps in to audition, she is brushed aside by the indomitable star of the show, Chandon Connors (Crombie again) and her arrogant but airheaded manager, cheekily named Kyle MacLachlan (Guy Simon). This is when the sprightly Molly (Emi Canavan) comes to her aid. She is the Japanese hostess of a club called the Kum Den, and, just like the Blaque Showgirls, she has had to make a living off selling her culture to white people, most of whom assume she’s Chinese and refuse to be corrected on it. She offers to help Ginny if she will later help her.

All Ginny needs now are some culturally appropriative dreadlocks and an Aboriginal dance teacher. She finds one named True Love Interest (Simon again!) with crudely painted-on abs. Of course, all of their scenes together are built from the worst “dramatic” dialogue ever written for the screen.

This part of the satire is probably the most fun to laugh at, since it makes everyone in the audience feel smart and sophisticated. Ginny is just generally good for a laugh right from the beginning, although, for the white members of the audience, the amusement turns to more of a self-reflective cringe once you realise who she really is. She’s not just clueless, she really is selfish and wilfully ignorant. As much as she might seem like one, she’s hardly an underdog, given that all the real power over the Blaque Showgirls is held by the unseen, ghostly white board of directors.

Surprisingly, even True Love Interest has more substance than she does, and unsurprisingly, the formidable Chandon turns out to be much more than just a self-obsessed diva. As the most powerful Aboriginal woman in Brisvegas, poised to rise up through the ranks of the company just before Ginny showed up, she is actually the closest thing we have to a hero here.

However, in writing this sly revelation of our racism past and present, there is one trap that Lui very nearly falls into: she does make more than a few jokes at the expense of Ginny’s supposed brain damage and speech difficulties, enough for the audience to start linking it to her social ignorance. Of course, fighting racism with ableism basically defeats the purpose, though fortunately she doesn’t dwell on it too much. Also, towards the end of the play there is a priceless gag attacking wheelchair inaccessibility that is rather redeeming.

The lasting feel left by Blaque Showgirls is one of utter frustration with the way things have been, still are and probably will continue to be for a while. It’s a hard-bitten, feel-good and then feel-bad comedy that tricks you into caring.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

As fantastic as it is to see Arrival gaining so much traction, I do hope that Amy Adams’ other big release, Nocturnal Animals, still gets enough attention. Tom Ford’s second feature, after A Single Man (2009), sees Adams playing an equally sleep deprived but much less scholarly professional at the peak of her career. Susan Morrow is the jaded owner of a glitzy contemporary art gallery, a realist in a world that is anything but reality. 

She first entered the creative world when she wanted to a bohemian herself, back when she was engaged to Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal). Edward was just the kind of carefree romantic that her mother, Anne (Laura Linney), had always hated, and Susan has always hated her mother. She only has one scene, naturally the one where Susan announces her engagement, but that’s all we really need of her. She's the classic classist, conservative parent that any protagonist would want to rebel against, especially by running off with someone she looks down upon.

Being married to Edward was supposed to stop Susan turning out anything like her, but, just as Anne warned her she would, she soon finds that he isn’t enough for her. The last thing she tells Susan, before they basically never see each other again, is that no matter what they do, everyone eventually turns into their mother. 

All of this is told through flashbacks. The present-day Susan is married to the much more ambitious and money-minded Hutton Morrow (Armie Hammer). They’re the kind of business couple who spend more nights away from each other in hotel rooms than they do at home. The world of the gallery where Susan works is an eerie mix of avant-garde artistry and sterile opulence. Funnily enough, it’s very reminiscent of the modelling universe of The Neon Demon, especially since Jena Malone and Karl Glusman are in the cast of this film as well.

That said, most of the film takes place away from this narrative anchor, as it were. Ford is well aware that those tumultuous years with Edward are much more interesting than Susan’s current life with Hutton, even if the divorce is foreshadowed a bit too overtly. Many more years pass until she hears from him again, with the delivery of his latest manuscript for a novel entitled "Nocturnal Animals" that is dedicated to her. He used to call her a nocturnal animal when they were together, since even then she was a night owl.

The book is a shockingly violent thriller about a family that go out on a camping trip in the middle of nowhere. After they've driven outside of any phone coverage, they are stalked, run off the road and harassed by a local gang. The dad tries to outplay them and get his wife and daughter to safety, but their assailants end up holding him down, forcing the two women into one of their cars and taking them far away, leaving him behind feeling useless and powerless.

This is definitely the most intense, drawn-out and harrowing scene that this film delivers. Understandably, there were quite a few walkouts when it reached its darkest point. Most films only hint at or threaten to show these kinds of horrific occurrences, but this one goes much further with it than anyone was hoping. Still, it's integral to setting up the gruelling revenge story of Tony Hastings, the survivor of the attack, whose wife and daughter were both beaten, raped and murdered, leaving him with nothing but the raging need to find the men who did this to them.

Often when films contain stories within stories they end up feeling quite trite and idle. They're usually told with wall-to-wall narration, an overdone fairytale aesthetic and double-casting that makes for some very overwrought allegory. Sometimes, funnily enough, it's very hard to be invested in a story that you know is fictional inside the world of the main story, even though the whole film is fictional anyway. However, the story of the novel inside this film adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel, Tony and Susan, is definitely not your average meta-narrative. It’s told so straightforwardly and given so much screen time that it almost makes you forget about the central story. In fact, this could have easily been just a single narrative film about Tony, although that would have been incredibly depressing. If nothing else, it's a relief when Susan puts the book down and returns to her unsatisfying but much less traumatic life. Compared with Edward’s novel and the romantic flashbacks, the main plot is pretty stagnant, with a much greater focus on characters than events. It certainly needs the two side plots to give it momentum, but equally both of the side plots rely on the central story to give them a more complex purpose.

There is still a striking resemblance between Edward and Tony, not least because Gyllenhaal plays both of them, but even so their connection is much subtler than you’d expect. In one of the flashbacks, Edward defends himself against a bad review by saying that all authors write about themselves. Indeed, both him and Tony have been called weak by people with varying definitions of weakness, and strength. Eventually, both men decide that people see strength as cruelty, and they are done with being weak.

By the same token, Tony’s wife, Laura, is basically Susan, although this connection is slightly veiled. Laura isn’t played by Adams, but, in a very inspired casting choice, she's portrayed by her startling lookalike, Isla Fisher.

The allegory is there but it isn't being forced under a spotlight. It doesn’t have to match the main story beat for beat to make itself known. This is what makes Nocturnal Animals both a fascinating film to pick apart and a totally engrossing one to lose yourself in.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

F. is a theatre production by Riot Stage, a youth theatre company based in Melbourne. It is part of Poppy Seed Festival, Poppy Seed is in its second year, it aimed producing shows made by independent and emerging theatre companies.

F. followed a lives of a group of teenagers, it was composed of short scenes playing out different stories throughout the show, they sometimes became connected and it all ending in a huge stylised movement and piece.

These explored all sorts of themes around being in the world as a teenager in modern Australia. It focused a lot on mental health, queerness and sexuality, the internet and consent.

F. felt like a devised show, but it was written by Morgan Rose, the writing was very naturalistic, almost as if it was verbatim.

Stylistically it was very beautiful it had a strong and clear aesthetic and mood,  the lighting design was very beautiful and precise, although I liked the sound design, I felt like I wanted a bit more, the space F. was performed in was pretty big, sometimes the space felt empty, I feel like it could have been filled up with a creative use of sound design.

The performances from the ensemble were fantastic; it’s great to see a youth theatre still going strong after the youth arts funding cuts. I was sad to see that only the names of the ensemble were listed in the program and they didn’t get a full bio, I can’t wait to see what these performers move onto next.

I felt very connected with many of the characters, the stories they told were very relatable and very realistic. F. was a delightful, dark and intelligent work by a fantastic ensemble of young people. It gave a great insight into what it is like growing up in Australia today in the age of the Internet.

F. has been the most diverse show in Poppy Seed, the lack of diversity within this festival has been disappointing, I hope to see more diversity in years to come, including cultural background, ability, and it would be great to see Poppy Seed giving space for theatre companies from a rural area. I also feel disappointed in the lack of accessibility to the festival venues, the butterfly club has no wheelchair access and I called the trades hall in Carlton and they said wheelchair access was very tricky. To me, being a theatre maker and artist should mean allowing access to people of all abilities to your shows, this may mean diverting funds from other places to book venues that are a bit more expensive but accessible, making sure there is Auslan interpretation and audio description, these things may be expensive but I think it is important, theatre and art should be for everyone.

These issues aside Poppy Seed is an excellent initiative, should and needs to be supported so that they can afford to make the changes they need to with accessibility and diversity, they give independent and emerging artists a great space to explore and put up work on at a main stage, which is exciting and a great addition to Melbourne’s theatre scene, so let’s keep supporting it and making sure future theatre makers get the same opportunity.

F. is showing at The Trades Hall in Carlton South until December 11th.

Written by Ebony Beaton.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Ken Stone and Irene Silber’s Hard to Believe is a tight 56-minute exposé of an issue that few people like to think about: forced organ harvesting in China. It isn’t exactly a secret that the Chinese government performs surgery on its political prisoners without their consent, but in recent years the media has largely neglected this still very present atrocity. This documentary, which mostly looks at the communist party’s persecution of Falun Gong spiritual practitioners, is Stone and Silber’s great effort to bring this issue back into the spotlight, to push past the compassion fatigue that most Western citizens in particular seem to be feeling. Most of the interviews here have been conducted with American Human Rights Defenders Torsten Trey and Ethan Gutmann, who urge people to realise that these horrific violations will never be stopped if everyone just keeps waiting for someone else to fight the fight. It seems to Trey and Gutmann that if this was happening anywhere other than in China, one of the most powerful global economic players, then the international outrage and protest would be much louder and stronger. They also suggest that the problem feels too large and abstract for most outsiders to really comprehend. The human impact of these practices can easily to get lost in the sea of statistics, or indeed in the literal sea that divides China from most other countries in the world.

While the short running time does make the film easier to digest, and could well encourage some of the more apathetic people to actually see sit through it, it doesn’t really allow Stone and Silber enough time to explore the issue in quite enough detail. On top of that, far too much of this time is spent listening to these two white social commentators, while any interviews with the victims of this abhorrent system of exploitation are something of a rarity. In fact, out of the interviewees who are actually Chinese, the one who is given the most screen time is a perpetrator, not a victim. We hear a great deal about how prison doctors are being coerced into stealing the organs of their patients while they are still alive and fully awake. We also hear some of the telephone calls made by people wanting to purchase these rare healthy “criminal” organs. There’s no denying that these are both crucial things to cover, but this should not be at the expense of the voices that have already been horrifically suppressed. If anyone is going to be made the face of forced organ harvesting, it should unquestionably be one of the victims. While Gutmann doesn’t believe it’s fair to expect these people to advocate for themselves, since most of them don’t have the legal or political expertise, the idea that none of them have the skills or the capability to fight for their own rights is something I actually do find Hard to Believe. Political campaigning might work very differently in the West compared to China, but that does not in any way mean that the Chinese people can’t speak for themselves in the international media, or that they need a white saviour to fly in and rescue them.

In some ways the most, and in other ways the least controversial approach this film adopts is to compare the organ harvesting in the Chinese medical system to the Holocaust. Even though they are both large scale atrocities that were at least initially met with global denial and apathy, we are now unfortunately at a point where this is a very commonly invoked comparison that people have become almost desensitised to. I’m not sure what it would take to shake the rest of the world out of their inaction, but an acceptance of the Chinese people as the leaders of this cause and as the voices of their own national problem would certainly be a start.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Roger Ross Williams' latest feature documentary is about a 23-year-old autistic man who's obsessed with Disney movies - basically, me, if you just wind his age back two years, move him from America to Australia and rotate his sexuality 180 degrees. In light of that, you'll have to forgive me since I can't exactly distance myself from what is pretty much my own biography. Mostly, I was just overjoyed to see a real person that I can relate to standing on the screen in front of me. I feel like I've earned that given how much of my life I've been looking at that screen. Not only is he obsessed with something that is neither maths or IT, he is also not a little kid: he is a self-aware adult, and fortunately Williams knows how to treat him as such. Unlike the subjects of most other autism documentaries, he is old enough to reflect on his own past and current experiences of friendship, love, and coming of age, and he is actually given the space here to share his reflections.

Owen Suskind, the man in question, has watched every single animated film that Disney has ever made, and memorised every single line of dialogue. Most of these stories and characters have been a part of his life for as long as he can remember. They have a place in his heart and mind that goes far beyond their nostalgic value.

Why does he love Disney so much? This is probably the only question he never answers for us. Not that I blame him, I wouldn’t really know where to start with that one. It’s just such an integral part of my psyche, of my personality and identity that it really would require me to step outside of myself to explain where that obsession came from and why it has endured. Owen’s parents talk about the comforting predictability in watching these same movies over and over, not only in that individually they never change but also that there are certain things you can always expect from a Disney animation, such as a happy ending. They also think it might be that the softness of the animation gels well with his sensory hypersensitivities, or the fact that the characters are, ironically, both very colourful and very black and white in their design. It’s a pretty clinical and simplistic explanation, but it’s not a bad start.

What the film itself suggests, even if no one explicitly says it, is that these movies are a thrilling escape into a very different universe, a “whole new world” if you like, filled with endless possibility. The life of an autistic kid in a non-autistic world can be painfully lonely. Of course, Owen himself describes better than anyone else just how crushingly isolating it is. You want to make friends as much as anyone else does, but everyone you meet just dismisses you as the “weird” kid. By the end of primary school, the word “weird” can start to feel like a hateful slur. Everything about you that is unique, everything you love, everything you do, your entire identity is pushed aside and pigeon-holed into this single, meaningless category that no child wants to be a part of.

Both Owen and I eventually gave up trying to play with other children and would play with the Disney characters instead. You still have fun that way and enjoy being a child. They can actually feel like good substitutes for friends. Up to a certain point, they fill that gaping hole. Even when you leave the house, you can spend ages revisiting them in your mind. Owen still likes to recite some of their best lines to himself when he’s out and about, in the way that most other people might sing to themselves.

It’s also satisfying to make your up your own stories about them in your head. It’s the closest you can get to actually bringing them to life, and, until you finally learn to accept yourself and start to be accepted by others, this is the closest you can come to being a hero.

At about the age of ten, Owen had written and illustrated a hundred-page story about all of the wise and quirky Disney sidekick characters, naming himself the “protector of the sidekicks” who kept them safe from the monster terrorising the forest that was their home. It’s easy to see why Owen identifies so strongly with these funny or sage-like side characters. As someone with unusual mannerisms and very specific interests, if this was any other movie he would most likely be a side character. He would be cast as the helping hand to the ‘relatable’ hero, put there to provide laughter when things got tense, wise words when things got rocky, and hi-fives when things turned out well for them, but his own aspirations, fears, goals and longings for companionship would never be considered. You can tell a lot about a person by the characters they identify with the most, especially when they’re not the ones you’re supposed to feel represented by.

In this production, Owen’s story of the sidekick is brought to life in some dazzling animation sequences by the team of Matthieu Betard, Olivier Lescot and Philippe Sonrier. I can easily imagine just how excited Owen must have been to get that rare opportunity of seeing his childhood fantasies on screen. Equally, the scenes showing the Disney club he started with his fellow Neurodivergent friends are some of the most moving and satisfying moments in the film.

I am happy to say that Owen has definitely not been made the sidekick in his own story. One of the many benefits of choosing an adult subject for an autism documentary is that you can show them taking their life into their own hands and making it better. Owen turns what used to be his sorry substitute for friends into a way to meet and connect with like-minded people, real people who will always be there for him. It also turns out to be a way for him to meet Jonathan Freeman and Gilbert Godfried, who pay the group a surprise visit and do a live reading of Jafar and Iago, their respective parts in Aladdin.

Of course, the other important opportunity given by Williams’ choice of subject is that of exploring romantic relationships. Owen’s conversations with his girlfriend, Emily, who is also Neurodivergent, sound unhealthily strained. In many ways autistic people can be said to have their own language, and their own way of communicating. This is why an autistic person who is asked to communicate the way non-autistic people do will sound a bit like someone who is speaking in a language that is not their native tongue. It is quite strange that Owen and Emily would feel the need to speak in a neurotypical way when it is just the two of them, but there is obviously a force of habit at play.

It is interesting that Life, Animated focuses quite a lot on the movie Peter Pan, seeing as there is this tendency view autistic people as children who never grow up, just like the lost boys. Certainly, on the surface, people like Emily and Owen might sound and look like children, but it is hard to know whether that is just the way they naturally carry themselves, or whether it is because they are usually spoken to as if they were children, which leads them to think that that is how other people like to be spoken to. In this manner, a lot of the medical and clinical studies of autism are very chicken and egg.

The only trap of infantilisation that this film really falls into is its suggestion that Owen basically doesn'tknow what sex is. Sex is another thing that can be especially complicated for autistic people, but, unlike friendships at school, it is surprisingly easy, at least to a certain point, to convince yourself that it doesn't exist (after all, non-autistic people pretend that's true all the time when they talk to each other). His older brother and close mentor thinks that Owen actually doesn't understand it at all, mostly because he could never have learned it from watching Disney and because Owen's been very unresponsive any time he's brought it up. However, just because he doesn't like to talk it about with his brother, or on camera (which is far enough) doesn't mean he knows nothing about it.

Nevertheless, Williams does give Owen ample opportunity to speak for himself on camera, and also to express himself through his impressive illustrations, as well as, of course, his favourite Disney scenes. He rounds off the film with some footage of Owen opening an international autism conference: a powerful reflection of the social progress of the past several decades. I can certainly understand how strange it must have felt, to be a 23-year-old who has fast-tracked their way to the big time thanks to their exotic brain. Unsurprisingly, Owen finds it hard to pen down everything he has to share into just one little speech, and asks his father, Ron, what he should say. Ron tells him that it is all up to him, that it's his story to tell, which is ironic, considering this film is technically based on the book that he wrote about his son's life with autism. Even so, by the time he is able to stand up there and present himself as a proudly autistic adult, his family has finally realised that he is not a lost boy, he is a man who has found himself.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

There’s something incredibly uncomfortable about seeing a show about poor people by non-poor people, essential for rich people in one of Melbourne’s most highly regarded theatre venues.

Blessed explores the lives of Maggie and Grey, two poor people who fell in love as teenagers and had heaps of fun, then Grey disappeared for ages and Maggie found him in a disgusting apartment, they talk about their past and what they’ve been up to and then towards the end it turns out that Maggie is pregnant and is the mother of god. The play ends with a beautiful monologue by Maggie about how her son is going to be a kick-arse god.

Blessed has been described as an ‘insight into the lower class’ and as someone who grew up in a family with very little money, I honestly just find that offensive.

It was a grossly one dimensionally portrayal of people from low-socio economic background, it portrays us as drug addict, angry, hopeless people with weird accents, it portrays us as people with no agency and no control over our lives.

Of course that may be the case for some people with a poor background, but what good is it doing putting it on stage that the vast majority of the audience will be from a privileged background? The characterization of Maggie and Grey did no favors to the script, I felt completely unsympathetic towards either of them, in particular Grey, who was played as a ‘crazy’ angry verbally abusive man, an insight into the lower class?  Nope, you’re just further stigmatizing them.

I think Fleurs writing was really beautiful, but I cannot think what the director was trying to do in his interpretation of Fleurs’ script. I think the script really could have worked with the right director. It was a funny play, I could see the humor trying to break though but the direction, set and sound design was forcing the audience to suppress that, it forced us to feel pain, from the scratchy, grim sound design to the aggressively invasive flickering lights during every single scene change. I found myself drifting off and disengaging at multiple points in the play, mainly because I felt like I was just being yelled at and I’m not really interested in being yelled at, but also because I found it so ridiculously unrealistic

We got to see flash back of when Maggie and Grey first met when they were 15, and I had a few problems with this – the same actors played their younger selves, which just seemed silly because they were taking it so seriously and forcing the audience to take it seriously, I wish they had have gotten actually younger actors to play these scenes, I think it would have been a lot more effective, or at least do something drastic to the lighting or costume during these scenes, it was so weird for it to be just in the same setting and lighting but the actors ‘acting 15’.  And on that note, I found the portrayals of 15 year olds really disingenuous, they seemed like they were playing 6 year olds to be honestly, if I was a 15 year old I would be offended.

Blessed is one of four shows part of Poppy Seed a theatre festival for independent theatre makers. Despite my negativity, Poppy Seed Theatre Festival is something everyone should support, and encourage. Check out their website to see what else they have on offer.

Blessed is showing at The Malthouse until the 20th of November.

Written by Ebony Beaton.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

This review contains mature content and language and pretty major spoilers about the show.

Straight up, Anti-Hamlet was one of the best productions I have seen this year. It was absolutely trilling, and so engaging it left me exhausted and unable to get up from my seat, which is always a very special experience that I’ve only felt twice before

I loved it so much that I was it two times in it’s opening weekend, but not only because I loved it, but because it was so complex and intelligent I think I had to see it twice to get a stronger grasp of what it all meant, the first time seeing it was like being a twig thrown into a whirl wind, and coming out the other side with flowers growing all over me, but not knowing how they got there. The second time I saw it, I was able to process the content of the work with a deeper sense of comprehension, which was very rewarding.

That being said, you don’t have to see Mark Wilson’s phenomenal work twice to fully appreciate it as a production. Nor do you have to have a deep understand of William Shakespeare Hamlet, I came to the show not knowing much about Hamlet. My friend I went with gave me a quick recap of story before we were ushered into the theatre. I think knowing Hamlet would be very helpful but not essential, I think having a small knowledge of it would be fine.

Mark and his perfectly picked collaborators took Hamlet, gave it a good shake, tipping out all the language, and political context of the late 1500s, and replaced it with a magnificently crafted contemporary script, filled with references to currently Australian and world politics.

They kept much of the structure of the original Hamlet, but set it in modern Australia, they still called the location they were in Denmark, like in the original Hamlet, but it was very clear that it was a substitute for Australia, I suppose to make it less on the nose.

In this plays reality, Denmark is a constitutional monarchy, a referendum is going to take place, and if passed make it a republic, making Claudius played by Marco Chaippi, the current Prime Minister, the President of Denmark. Claudius seemed to be an amalgamation of Liberal Party leaders. Gertrude was still the Queen and Hamlets mother, played very luxuriously by Natasha Herbert. Hamlet was still the prince, played by Mark Wilson, re-worked to be a Melbourne academic off-the-rails-student-prince, turned anarchist. Ophelia, played by Natascha Flowers was reworked to be a clear headed Rhodes Scholar graduate of Oxford, that works for Claudius in hope to insight social change around the treatment of Asylum Seekers. Horatio, Hamlets friend in the original play played by Marcus McKenzie was still used by name in the play, but he’s character is less of a friend to Hamlet and more of a re-occurring character that helps or interacts with Hamlet, such as a busker Hamlet gives a $5 note to, and a stage manager or Hamlets one man show, Marcus, also plays ‘The Anti-Hamlet”. Two more characters were worked into the show, who replaced characters of the original text. Polonius reworked as Sigmund Freud, played magnificently by Brain Lipson and Laertes reworked as Edward Bernays, played astoundingly by Charles Purcell. Sigmund Freud was played as himself, but as a psychoanalyst for the characters in the play. If I had to choose Edward Bernays was my favorite character, he was a manipulative, powerful 1950’s talkin’ American man who helps Claudius become the president of  Denmark. Like Freud, Bernays was a real historical figure, who basically invented propaganda, and is a very interesting man, look him up.

The ensemble of performers were shockingly good, and just perfectly cast. All the performers had crafted their characters in such an astonishing way, with real depth and meaning.

The set and costume design by Romanie Harper was elaborate, clean and beautiful, the stage was framed with scaffolding with a lusous red curtain around the perimeter. The costumes for each character matched very well, especially Gertrude, who I think, had a different luxurious gown on in every scene.

Amelia Lever Davidsons lighting design beautifully complimented the set, costumes and performances. She created electric atmosphere with her wonderful design.

The sound design by Tom Backhaus was crafted nicely to fit into the show. It worked to the advantage of the dialogue heavy script, and intense aesthetic of the production.  

The story Mark created in his new adaption Anti-Hamlet was so complex and intellectual; I really don’t think I could do justice recounting it. It was beautifully nuanced and at times meta. It had a perfect balance of comedy and seriousness.

Something I really admired about this production was how far the cast and creative team pushed the boundaries. One of the stand out moments in this production was the final scene of the first act, where after being told by Freud that all of Hamlets troubles would be solved if Hamlet had sex with her, Gertrude takes Hamlet into her ‘closet’ and invites him to fuck her. Hamlet succumbs and tries to but can’t get an erection, he tries to masturbate, but can’t. At this point we hear Freud behind the curtain masturbating, Hamlet is filled with rage and naked, runs to Freud, pushes him behind the couch and kills him, covered in blood he screams “I have killed Sigmund Freud!” while holding up his decapitated head wrapped in an Australian flag and then the curtain closes in front of them, I was left dazed and unable to speak.

There is multiple other moment in the play that had this effect on me. The commitment and bravery shown in this play and in this scene in particular are what I love about seeing and making theatre, seeing artists be brave and uncensored in their words and actions is inspiring and beautiful.

Anti-Hamlet presented by Theatre Works and New Working Group is confronting, political, breath taking and thought provoking, New Working Group are shaping up to be one of my favorite theatre groups, the bravery and talent of these artists is incredible and extremely inspiring, particularly for a young theatre maker like myself. Do your self a favor and go see this show, and it runs about 2 and a half hours with intermission, so make sure your well fed before hand. It is now showing at Theatre Works in St Kilda until November 13th

Written by Ebony Beaton.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Derek Cianfrance's The Light Between Oceans is something of an epic, operating on quite a small scale but still putting its characters through some formidable challenges. It's based on TL Stedman's novel of the same name, one that suggests both intimacy and profundity. This story does eventually deliver on both, but in the film at least, the intimacy is there pretty much from the get-go. It sets itself up to be a charming love story about a mild-mannered lighthouse keeper (Michael Fassbender) and his lovely wife (Alicia Vikander) who live on the Island of January between two oceans. It is December, 1918. Tom Sherbourne was a lucky survivor of the Great War, though with no loving family to come home to and no reason to believe that he has any right to be alive after so many have died. As he is first getting to know the sweet young Isabel Haysmark, he tells her he has done some unspeakable things in the years he spent on the front, though he doesn’t go into any detail. For him, the noble occupation of a lighthouse keeper is a way to give something good to the world, to help others when they most need it, but to do so from afar, without having to look into their eyes and receive undeserved gratitude. He never envisioned sharing this new life with a wife and child, but almost immediately after she meets him, Isabel is determined to court him, marry him and give him a family. She manages the first two of those easily enough, but after two miscarriages that final dream of hers is looking unlikely to come true.

Cianfrance doesn't spend too long on their burgeoning romance. He mostly just shows them sharing their different experiences of the war. Isabel lost all three of her brothers, and is now an only child. She notices how, unlike a wife who might tragically become a widow after the war, there is no special name for what a parent becomes if they lose their children, or for what a sister becomes if she loses her brothers. To her, it is a connection that cannot be severed, the kind of love that never dies, even if the person it was for is now dead, or never even had a chance at life.

Conversations like this one are peppered throughout the film, particularly in the initial stages of the plot. This is one of the more well-written deep and meaningful dialogues to be seen here. Others are markedly more on-the-nose, such as Tom explaining all of the mythological symbolism of the island, or one that has a certain crucial supporting character reciting one of the morals of the story: “You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.”

These are all very worthy, weighty sentiments, but some of them are gratingly overstated and seem to arrive just in time for some not-so-subtle foreshadowing.

Unsurprisingly, the film is at its most effective when it communicates its ideas through sounds and images - especially one striking shot that makes the ocean feel just like a desert - and when it simply trusts the strength of its story. After a generous amount of romantic and tragic setup, the real story is carried over the waves towards the little island with those two tiny graves. The couple spot a dinghy drifting near the shoreline, with a dead man and a crying baby girl lying inside it. Isabel is desperate to keep her. For all they know, she has no one. If Tom puts this in the log book, she'll probably be sent to an orphanage. Isabel convinces him to pretend that she's theirs, to Christen her Lucy Sherbourne and literally raise her as their own, an apparently victimless crime that might just rescue all three of them.

Years later, however, when Tom discovers there that there is indeed a victim still suffering from what they did to her, he fears that they have damned themselves to a lifetime of punishment. It turns out that the dead man in the boat, the girl’s biological father, was a German man named Frank Roennfeldt (Leon Ford), the one who later espouses the virtues of forgiveness in a romantic flashback. Unfortunately, his new overseas neighbours weren’t quite as willing to bury the hatchet so soon after the war. He got into that boat out of blind fear for his own life, and even more so the life of his tiny daughter, who he had named Grace. Meanwhile, his wife, Hannah (Rachel Weisz) was left behind to erect a tombstone for both of them on the mainland of Australia.

Strangely enough, that is where the film is set, even though its three main actors are Irish, English and Swedish and use more or less English accents. Cianfrance has tried to create a believable sense of place by shooting some of the scenes in Tasmania  and filling the supporting cast with well-known Australian actors like Jack Thompson and Bryan Brown, who all act in their native accents. It’s a pretty discordant mix, but it still amounts to some very evocative cinematography and many solid performances. Unsurprisingly, Fassbender imbues the world-weary war survivor with a genuine sense of humanity, Vikander brings an unexpected dark streak to the loving mother with no child to love, while Weisz is consistently engaging as the wounded wildcard who stirs things up to an exceptional level of moral complexity.

There are an awful lot of films that start with an excitingly unique premise that then just tapers off into cliché, but, interestingly, The Light Between Oceans begins in a fairly predictable way and becomes more interesting and sure-footed as it goes along.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Julieta is the latest film by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, based on three short stories by Canadian writer Alice Munro. The eponymous lead character is depicted in the present and in flashbacks through a diary she is writing in a sort of cathartic fit. From the flashbacks we learn of Julieta's life, her joys and more specifically her tragedies, of which there are several, spanning everything from her parents to her daughter to her love.

Some have criticised the film for being emotionless, for retreading themes familiar to Almodóvar's previous work  - such as loss, passion and parent-child relationships  - in a lacklustre way. But I would in fact argue the opposite. In the words of Almodóvar, this is a "dry, tearless film". Such was his intention when shooting, so much so that he specifically told the actors not to cry.

So really, Julieta is not so much about the emotions felt when grieving as the lack of emotions felt when grieving. The empty hole you find yourself in. The depressive chasm loss pushes you down. And I thought he captured this elegantly and tenderly. Perhaps the most epitomising image for me was a scene where Julieta is in such a pit of depression that her daughter has to bathe her; there she is, in a bathtub, naked and drenched, and still not crying. Just numb. I was very much moved.

Capping this all off are grounded performances that internalise and consolidate the drama, and a complementary score by Almodóvar regular Alberto Iglesias, as well as the vibrant, evocative and rich colour schemes that Almodóvar is famous for, which here serve to contrast with the resounding emotional absence. Julieta for me is among his finest work, and a truly affecting portrayal of grief. Definitely very much recommended.

Julieta is in cinemas now.

Written by Ben Volchok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

If you’re fan of that strange nostalgia that comes from witnessing old Hollywood glamour, Café Society might just be for you. Complete with a backdrop of wonderfully detailed fashions, an upbeat jazzy soundtrack and in the company of presumably rich, carefree socialites, Woody Allen’s latest venture is a rabbit hole into that bygone era of Hollywood romanticism.

Set in the late 1930s, Café Society details the life of the young and naïve Bobby Dorfman, as he sets foot in Hollywood, eager to make a name for himself. Using the connections of his powerful uncle, he is given a front seat to the glitz and glam of Hollywood life. However, for all it’s glory and lavishness, Bobby finds himself more infatuated with his uncle’s secretary, Veronica, or rather, Vonnie, as she’s called. From here, a messy and bittersweet romance unfolds itself and brings Bobby back to New York, where he runs a high society night club with the support of his colourful and eccentric family.

The film is delivered with a light-hearted playfulness and charming sense of humour.

And through this whimsical setting, Café Society departs a rather sympathetic view towards the fickle and impulsive nature of love and its effect on relationships. Whether or not you agree with the character’s choices throughout the film, it’s clear that Allen isn’t afraid to have them dwell on their feelings and in many cases explain their positions in the form of conversation and argument. There are numerous scenes throughout this film where characters unabashedly proclaim their different ideals and philosophies on life, on relationships and whatever else. It’s here that Allen really shines, able to create incredibly natural dialogue full of conflict and energy, yet never loses its sense of wit.

In this sense, the constant shifting from party, to restaurant, to dinner table really sells the heart of this film: A Café Society obsessed with itself, full of moral ambiguity, mindless gossip – all drenched in a layer of pretention. And what’s not to love? It’s difficult to resist the allure of it all, especially with the detail they have put into the setting. Here, many of the background characters spring to life. Just through little snippets of dialogue and interaction with the main cast, Allen manages to carefully construct many vibrant set pieces that suck you in.

In terms of the performances, Jesse Eisenberg plays, well, Jesse Eisenberg. His stuttery and seemingly perpetually-nervous performance of Bobby is to be expected at this point, and save for a few scenes, it’s acceptable for the most part. Surprisingly, Kristen Stewart sets the bar as the mysterious and ever down-to-earth Vonnie. Though I never thought I’d say this, the muted and generally stoic demeanour that has copped her criticism in the past actually comes off quite refreshing in a sea of endlessly flamboyant characters with rapid-fire speech patterns.

In concluding this review, I’d like to make a somewhat embarrassing and shameful confession: I have not seen a Woody Allen film. There, I said it. Now, whether this discredits my authority on the quality of this film or perhaps, leaves me unclouded to whatever preconceptions his previous works may given me, that is up for you to decide. But I will say for sure, from what I’ve seen so far, I’d like to see more.

Café Society opens to cinemas everywhere on the 20th of October.

Written by Victor Cai

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon would have been, I imagine, quite an easy film to pitch, but a very hard one to describe. Since seeing it I've been explaining it to people as "the Black Swan of modelling,” which might sound very reductive, but given how much it invites comparison with Darren Aronofsky's film, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how Refn had originally conceived it.

Both of them begin by introducing a gifted but naive young woman wanting to enter into a soul-crushing profession, one that they short-sightedly think they can handle without losing themselves completely. This time around, we have 16-year-old Jesse (Elle Fanning, giving, to date, the best performance of her career) a natural beauty who wins over everyone with simply her radiating  personality. At first, she is aware of this great power she possesses, but only somewhat, only enough to know that, as a girl with no real professional skills and no family or friends to support her, her looks are something she can make money from.

Her lack of any personal connections is never explained, but there's no denying it's effectiveness as a writing tool. It makes Jesse a clean slate, a mysterious wanderer with a murky past. Every other character in the film is someone that both she and the audience are meeting for the first time, and so every relationship she forms with them is seen in full, from its very beginning. Two of the most memorable people she connects with are a budding photographer, Dean (Karl Glusman), and a more experienced model, Ruby (Jena Malone) who both take an interest in her, for whatever reason.

Out of all of Jesse’s modelling peers, Ruby is the only one to show her any kindness or to offer her any guidance. Funnily enough, she is also the only one who doesn’t have blonde hair, a choice that’s about as subtle as anything else in the film, which gets more expressionistic as it goes along. When a film opens with a vivid wide shot of a blood-splattered girl lying still in a bathtub, followed by a closeup of a young man coolly taking pictures of her, you certainly get an idea of what you’re in for. True to the name, just about every scene in The Neon Demon is bathed in a fluorescent glow, and just about every frame is filled with objects that catch and reflect that glow.

However, there is definitely more than just one demon to be found here. Most of them are female, with ghostly faces saturated in makeup, who go from discussing the “Red Rum” brand of lipstick in front of a mirror to eventually turning into literal blood-sucking, flesh-eating monsters. Of course, this is all meant to represent the dangers of the modelling industry, all the harmful things it teaches to young girls and the kinds of women they apparently have to become in order to win over the male modelling agents and fashion designers.

Naturally, a lot of this will be common knowledge amongst the audience. While Black Swan took place in the world of ballet, a profession that most people see as benign, respectable and not at all self-destructive, the modelling industry has been under public scrutiny for a while now, so it is doubtful that an emotional, rather than an intellectual film will bring anything new to the table.

Still, as annoying as it is to see yet another production about women fighting each other for a man’s attention, it is a pleasant surprise to see a film that commits to having a female protagonist, several female antagonists and a few male supporting characters that remain as much all the way to the end. That said, you can still tell this was written and directed by a man. While some of the scenes between the models are quite clearly heightened, others feel more like a version of group female interaction rendered more comprehensible for men. If it weren’t for his co-writers, Mary Laws and Polly Stenham, I imagine some of the dialogue would have probably turned out even more stilted.

Still, the five lead actresses always find ways to make their characters convincing, despite the absurd things they might end up saying or doing. Certainly Elle Fanning, and Melbourne actresses Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee, all shine in the most intriguing roles they have ever been offered. It’s particularly interesting to hear the two Australians using their native accents in an American production, a subtle reminder that models, unlike actors, are seen but not heard in their profession. Unsurprisingly, Christina Hendricks portrays one of the better stone-cold industry gurus we’ve seen onscreen in a while, and Jena Malone, possibly taking inspiration from Mila Kunis, is genuinely cryptic as the suspicious Ruby.

Dean, on the other hand, very quickly proves himself to be a true friend of Jesse’s, and apparently the only decent person in sight. He suitably ends up going head to head with the two most despicable male characters: the fashion designer that all the girls want to be chosen by (a curiously uncredited Alessandro Nivola) who gets to say “beauty isn't everything; it’s the only thing”, and Jesse’s vulgar landlord (Keanu Reeves) who embodies every reason why a woman might be afraid to be out alone at night.

Jesse’s power is not just her beauty, but, most importantly, her honesty, her moral integrity, her pure intentions. Initially, she simply wants to make a living and has no wish to step on other people’s toes. Her power comes from the fact that she’s not even aware that this is a power at all. The films presents us with a fascinating paradox when as soon as this neon demon realises how powerful she is, she is rendered powerless, and defenceless against the real demons she thought she could take on.

Her pivotal transformation scene, about 90 minutes in, turns out to be the most stylised, well-paced and hypnotic part in the film. Rather than drag out the inevitable with a series of more realistic scenes, Refn wisely chooses to compact this character change into one fluid, dialogue-free sequence, which would have worked brilliantly as a final or penultimate moment. Unfortunately, though, we then end up spending half an hour with this brand new version of Jesse, which, as it turns out, we might have actually needed more than one scene to get to know.

There soon comes a point where the style turns into excess, the characters turn into caricatures, the commentary just becomes comedy and the macabre expressionism turns into a full-on gore-fest. Strangely enough, I eventually got a little tired of watching the main character die, in many different ways, and slowly stopped caring if this was another fantasy sequence or if this time she had actually died for real. It’s always hard to know, not because of the complexity of the writing but more because it’s unclear what Refn expects us to accept as realistic and what we can safely assume to be fantasy. There are only so many fake murders that one little Stanley Kubrick reference can justify. I’m sure that the multiple death scenes are meant to show how this profession is slowly killing her from the inside, destroying her piece by piece. It’s a valiant effort to shock us all into sharing his anger, but by the end of the film, just before Sia’s ‘Waving Goodbye’ plays over the end credits, it looks like he’ll be getting more laughs than anything else, which is not to say that The Neon Demon fails as an art film, but rather that it succeeds as a late blooming horror flick.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

La Mama Theatre’s The Masque of Beauty seems to have taken its name from Ben Johnson’s courtly masque composed in 1608. However, in Peter Green’s ‘Renaissance Cabaret’ we certainly feel far away from the England court, even if he uses a few Shakespeare passages on one of his literary medleys. Green’s writing, and indeed Faye Bendrups’ directing, both take Australian audiences to very different theatrical territory than they might be used to. True to the form of a masque, this show is a meandering hour of live music, dance pieces, dramatic scenes and chorus style songs, which historically would espouse the most famous figures of the day.

On this particular outing, to the Italian court, we encounter three formidable sisters-in-law – the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, the sharp-witted Isabella d’Este, and the worldly Elisabette Gonzaga – as well as the controversial Pope Alexander VI, his son, and Lucrezia’s brother, Cesare Borgia, the Monna Lisa (“constipated for over 500 years”) and a very nervous young Leonardo da Vinci. This production might have done away with some big hallmarks of the masque – the actual masks, the decorative sets and the audience participation – but aside from that, it really does feel like a journey back to the 16th century. 21st century audiences are very used to narrative-based entertainment, and to more visual forms of storytelling, whereas the figures displayed here are introduced much more through monologue than dialogue. Even the grim ensemble songs feel much more like an Ancient Greek chorus than an exchange played out in song. In these parts of the show, the four voices of the cast - Maria Paula Afanador, Madeleine Field, Claire Nicholls and Jessica Greenhall – seem to blend into the one entity. The dances and the more physical scenes function more as further illustrations of the figures than as a way of driving forward a story. I call them ‘figures’ instead of ‘characters’ because they are far from being active players in a dramatic narrative.

The Masque of Beauty is, throughout, a consciously historical work. More specifically, this is revisionist history, and the sardonic kind at that, based on rumours and re-evaluations. This piece is undisguisedly looking backwards, and makes no attempt to make us feel like we are looking forwards as though we and the performing ensemble don’t know what’s coming.

The cast and creatives are certainly in the know, but unfortunately, for the most part, their audience is probably not nearly as knowledgeable about it all. The commentary on Leonardo and the Mona Lisa works because this is a part of Italian history that is very much general knowledge. As for the three noble sisters-in-law, as fascinating as they seem, and as exuberantly as they are portrayed, they aren’t really part of the public consciousness. The production team might now know almost everything there is to find out about them, and they certainly seemed to find their commentary on them amusing and compelling, but I’m not sure that a lot of their audience will. It’s definitely a more obscure part of history, something the La Mama staff seemed to have picked up on. At the box office, each audience is member is given a Wikipedia blurb on each figure in the story, which helps a little but it still takes more than a couple of hastily read paragraphs to achieve that same level of familiarity.

I’m sure those who know the history of the Italian royals will appreciate what this talented team manage to do with them, but those who don’t are never really brought up to speed at any point here, or at least not in any helpful way. There is often a large disconnect between what you are being told on stage here and what you are being shown. When the exposition becomes particularly intricate and hard to follow, it is very easy to be distracted by the other stagecraft elements and miss certain factual details. You can definitely feel that this is set in a world of seduction, corruption, manipulation and murder, but it’s very hard to be clear on who is doing what to who, and why. Seeing as there is no real narrative movement anyway, or even much thematic movement here, those who aren’t already familiar with all of these people will probably feel start to feel a bit restless. It’s definitely a treat for any Renaissance aficionados but will probably be quite unmemorable for anyone else.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Hell or High Water is a 2016 film written by Taylor Sheridan and directed by David McKenzie. Set in blistering rural Texas, it focusses on two brothers, played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster, who rob banks, and a cop on the verge of retirement who is chasing them, played by Jeff Bridges. There’s action, there’s tension, there’s laughs.

Tonally, the film carries itself with a particular relaxed, laid-back nature that seems to befit the type of life present in small-town Texas. What makes this tone so much more appealing is how well it complements the more intense moments of the film, of which there are plenty, with much of the film’s runtime being taken up by bank heists, car chases and shootouts, and more. Adding to the fun of the plot is a real sense of humour which shows up not just in the banter of the various main characters but also in the dialogue of the various minor or incidental characters that pop up, including a very memorably dismissive elderly waitress in a steakhouse.

The film explores some interesting themes relating to poverty and capitalism, and the central premise of the brothers stealing from the banks that are stealing from them is an irony that serves the film quite well. Unfortunately, it’s an irony that is too often stated rather overexplicitly, meaning the way that the issues are treated is too on the nose to have proper weight. I would have preferred to see a more subtle approach to dealing the social commentary, an approach that can in fact be seen in the film, particularly in the ways that it raises certain moral questions, but it’s an approach which is obscured by the numerous bits of dialogue that make it painfully obvious.

Likewise, the soundtrack seems piled on a bit too high. For some reason the filmmakers felt it necessary to add songs underneath every second scene until there was little room for anything else to tell the story. It’s a pity because there’s an absolutely fantastic central score done by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis which truly gives us a feel for the setting and works with the visuals to create an interesting mood. It’s just not given much breathing space because of how overstuffed the rest of the soundtrack is.

Clever but not quite clever enough, if nothing else this film is a lot of fun and is definitely better than your average crime drama.

Hell or High Water opens October the 27th.

Written by Ben Volchok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

“Sharp, smart and hysterically funny!”… “A cult hit….gleaming with comic polish.”… “A frothy, sill, saucy and spectacular affair.”

These are just some of things critics have said about 5 Lesbians Eating A Quiche, a play written by Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood, currently being performed for Melbourne audiences as part of the Fringe Festival.

And it was the reviews that initially attracted me to the show, although, as I realised afterwards, no words could really describe what I had witnessed.

The year is 1956, right in the middle of the Cold War and the constant threat of a nuclear disaster. It’s in this context that we meet the Susan B Anthony Society For The Sisters of Gertrude Stein – 5 feminist widows who are preparing to celebrate their annual Quiche Breakfast.

The 5 women who star in the play are hilariously drawl and camp, and absolutely obsessed with quiche. They tremble and coo as the time for the first quiche tasting draws closer. At this point I thought the play had already reached peak absurdity, and I was wrong.

Suddenly, right after the first quiche tasting, a nuclear bomb goes off and the women are thrown into survival mode. The good news is that the Susan B Anthony Society For The Sisters of Gertrude Stein centre is bomb proof and they have enough rations to last 4 years. The bad news is that they’ve left the rest of the quiches outside. And as I said, these women really really love quiche.

I’m not going to spoil the rest of the play for you, but let’s just say that the action rises into higher and higher levels of absurdity in such a clever and shocking way that you’re left on the edge of your seat.

The play is flawlessly acted, and sends up the naivety of the white female suffragette with incredible sharpness. In particular, Lauren O’Rourke, who plays a  slightly hysterical and very enthusiastic southern belle, is wet-your-pants funny, particularly when she takes her first bite of quiche and basically has an orgasm.

After the show, I felt utterly entertained, but a little flat. It’s hard to critique this show, but I’d say that the storyline was possibly a little one-dimensional. There was no real tension between the characters – they all had the same motivation – and there was no self reflection within the script.

I think I would have liked this story better if one of the characters, at some point, stepped outside the story world and questioned it, or helped me relate to it to my 2016 perspective.

Then again, that’s perhaps what the show is playing on – the fact that the original American feminist movement, the values and beliefs of these women, can look absurd from a modern perspective. Perhaps, in another 60 years, they’ll be making fun of today’s feminists in absurd comic plays. Instead of a quiche breakfast, it’ll be a feminist club meet up over lattes at a hipster café.

Written by Beth Gibson.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Francofonia is the latest film by Russian director Alexander Sokurov, who is perhaps best known for his 2002 documentary Russian Ark, an ambitious and awe-inspiring one-take trip through St Peterburg’s Hermitage museum during the Russian Revolution. In Francofonia, Sokurov once more returns to the themes of art and war and museums, this time focussing on the Louvre during the Nazi occupation of France.

As someone who doesn’t get on terribly well with documentaries, I found Francofonia rather intriguing as it played with the documentary form and fused narrative with truth and reconstruction, past with present. We see Napoleon wandering the halls of the museum, we see the German officer in charge of dealing with the Louvre meeting with the then head of the museum. Sokurov himself narrates the documentary and appears on screen as one of the film’s central figures, talking to the characters while also being depicted as trying to piece the film together and not knowing how because the nature of culture is too overwhelming.

But the film itself is not a failure – the nature of culture is overwhelming, and this is intentionally presented in the daunting and elusive way that it is. The fragments of history are all woven together in a way that urges us to draw our own conclusions in the way that Sokurov tries to over the course of the film.

While at times disappointingly Eurocentric in its analysis of culture and the significance of culture, Francofonia still provides plenty of food for thought. What is culture? How much is it worth and who needs it? Who has a right to it? Perhaps the most interesting facet for me was the parallel drawn between Germany capturing the Louvre during its invasion in WWII and Napoleon invading other countries during his reign and bringing back countless artefacts to be displayed in the Louvre. Plus there’s a lot of fascinating snippets about the museum’s formation and the particulars of what it went through during the Second World War.

Complex and at times confusing – in a good way – Francofonia has a lot to offer, even if we have to do a bit of work to piece it all together.

Francofonia opens October 6.

Written by Ben Volchok.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Hi, it's Adalya with my second review from this years Man Booker Prize shortlist. This week I'm looking at Deborah Levy's Hot Milk.

Hot Milk follows Sofia and her mother Rose as they travel from England to clinic of questionable merit in Spain, seeking answers to Rose's litany of mysterious ailments. Set in the searing heat of Southern Spain, Sofia undergoes a twisted iteration of the classic beach sexual awakening narrative while Rose undergoes Dr Gomez's treatment. As the reliability of the mother who so shapes Sofia's life and identity becomes shaky, the importance of her relationship to her father and his Greek heritage becomes a new fixation.

Levy's writing is lucid and evocative. Images recur, morph and intermingle in unexpected ways. Her exploration of what it means to form an identity around illness and what it means to form an identity in inverse to somebody else is arresting and important.

We are drawn immediately into Sofia's inner world, a stilted filter on reality. Even the dialogue felt unnatural, characters voices indistinguishable from Sofia's own. At times this claustrophobia was transfixing, but at times it felt like there were links we were missing.

Perhaps it was the many strengths of Levy's work that left me feeling so ambivalent towards the end product. Despite its compelling subjects and beautiful prose, Hot Milk lacked any real sense of cohesiveness. Ideas and narrative were not coherently woven together and the result was just a sense of loss at what could have been. The scenes in Greece, for example, could have occurred at almost any place in the book, so separate they were from any other element. Hot Milk is by no mean's Levy's first work, so I think these failures felt greater than they would have had it been a debut.

To be honest I am surprised and a little disappointed that Hot Milk made the shortlist. I haven't read the full longlist, but for me, The North Water and My Name is Lucy Barton at least were both stronger works than Hot Milk.

All that said, I know there are lots of people who have loved and will love this book. I think perhaps a difficulty in reviewing book and especially books nominated for a prize is that the craft of the work is placed on equal footing to that craft's effect, whereas I think when we read a book without this consideration the effect is our primary interest. Hot Milk did not come together for me, but perhaps it would have if I had not had reviewing it in the back of my mind as I read it.

With last years Booker for example, lots of writers I saw felt that, although they had been profoundly emotionally involved in Hanya Yanigihara's A Little Life, that the strings used to emotionally effect us were too present for Yanigihara to deserve the win. I think this is a reasonable and even important consideration to make, but I guess it does beg the question why or even whether it is worth paying attention to these awards at all if their priorities are so different to that of the average reader.

I guess the very fact that I've undertaken this project means that I must think they are, but I think it is important to act in dialogue with the institutions you give power to.

Please stick around next week as I continue to discuss the rest of the Man Booker shortlist and question the very premise of this project!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Thursday, 1st September marked the seventh year for the Korean Film Festival In Australian (KOFFIA). ACMI hosted Melbourne’s festival and invited guests to share canapés of kimchi, cocktails and listen to traditional music on the Gayageum. This festival boasts twenty newly released and critically acclaimed Korean films, however it was the film titled 4th Place, written and directed by Jung Ji-woo, which opened the festival.

Commissioned by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, 4th Place delves into the brutal world of competitive sports and questions whether, in the pursuit of success, does the end ever justify the means.

Opening with a black-and-white prologue, we are introduced to fresh-faced competitive swimmer, Kim Gwang-su (Jung Ga-ram), who has been tipped as Korea’s future for Olympic success. After returning from practise and looking for dinner, he meets one of the swimming reporters Young-hoon (Choi Moo-sung) and they both partake in a night of heavy drinking. Despite this, Gwang-su swims exceptionally well the following morning and is on track to break records at the International Competitions in the next few weeks. Confident with his progress and times, Gwang-su cuts practise to gamble and drink, missing vital training sessions. His coaches eventually find and punish him for his recklessness, through the method of caning him with wooden pool brooms. After coping several lashes, he storms out of the complex and alerts Young-hoon to write a report about these acts of violence.

The storyline skips sixteen years on, now in colour, and focuses on eleven-year-old swimmer Joon-ho (Yoo Jae-sang). Despite high expectations placed on him by his mother, Jeong-ae (Lee Hang-na), he only seems to place fourth at junior competitions. Through the power of prayer and persuasive donations she tracks down a competent coach with unorthodox training methods. Enter Gwang-su (Park Hae-joon); a husk of the once professional swimmer, and now a worker at the local aquatic centre. It starts out with the common sports narrative; an apathetic coach, whose glory was snatched away prematurely during his youth, meets a competent underdog who has a chance at the success he missed out on. Gwang-su commits himself to the project and, as he becomes more desperate to win, his relationship with Joon-ho gradually becomes violent. He begins beating the boy in the same fashion that his coach did to him when he was a young swimmer. Gwang-su plays both the aggressor and consoler; comforting Joon-ho that it was for his own good and that he’s inspiring ambition.

The relentless pressures to succeed bleed into Joon-ho’s dreams, and it becomes more apparent he only wants to win for the sake of others. His own drawing of a gold medal hanging on the wall above his bed is enough for him, but it cannot satisfy his mother or Gwang-su. Even after his mother discovers the bruises on his back, Joon-ho is pushed to continue training, in light of his recent second-place win. No one steps in until Joon-ho’s father accidentally learns about the coach’s brutality, and even then he only bribes the coach with money to stop caning their son. 

Jung’s artfully constructed film points to our performance-driven culture, unhappy with anything less than first place. Lee’s performance as Joon-ho’s mother perfectly embodies the overbearing and paradoxical weight of society’s expectations for each child to be a winner. Park Hae-joon, playing the older version of Gwang-su, is riveting to watch; he has the ability to both terrify and charm, a technique that works on Joon-ho and the audience.

A noteworthy scene from the film is where the mother is walking back from the church with her youngest son, Ki-ho (Suh Hwan-hee), and he asks what she prayed for for each family member. She prayed for Joon-ho to come first, and for Ki-ho to attend college when he’s older. When he asks about her own prayers she states she prayed for “nothing” for herself. Her children appear to be her biggest achievement and treats their achievements as her own.

Jung navigates the heavy topic of child abuse with sensitivity and grace. It is littered with light-hearted exchanges between all characters and captures the complexity of human nature. It is also beautifully shot, especially the underwater dreamscape scene where Joon-ho tumbles around the shimmering lights refracting underneath the surface of the water. My only criticism is that the relationship between Joon-ho’s father and coach was not fully explored, and as a result Gwang-su’s admission at the end of the film was a little underwhelming.

4th Place will screen in Adelaide’s Palace Nova Cinema on Thursday, 15th September and in Perth’s Event Cinema on Thursday 22nd of September.

Written by Erin Connellan

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

On Tuesday, the Man Booker Prize Shortlist was announced. For those of you not in the know, the Man Booker is a prize given for what the judging panel deems to be the best novel written in English and published in the UK each year. For many including myself, the Booker is the Prize to watch, the AFL Grand Final for nerds.

This year's shortlist consists of: Paul Beatty's The Sellout Deborah Levy's Hot Milk Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen David Szalay's All That Man Is Madeline Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The Booker somewhat controversially opened the prize up to all english speaking countries in 2015 (previously only awarding the prize to those in the Commonwealth), and this years longlist contained notably more american authors than the one that preceded it.

For the next six weeks I'm going to be looking at each of the Man Booker Shortlist picks, with occasional help from some of your other favourite Smitteners, talking about why these might have made the shortlist and who might take out the final prize. I am excited and a little scared and I hope you all enjoy the journey.

Now onto my first review.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing, by Madeline Thien, has somewhat cynically been described by many as the classic Man Booker pick, for its complex, political, intergenerational narrative.

The novel begins in the voice of our youngest character, Marie:

"In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life."

From here, Thien takes us back to the start of the Chinese Communist Revolution, through the Cultural Revolution and up to the Tiananmen Square Riots.

I think from the distance of the West, it is easy to lose the human impact of international tragedies, particularly when they star people of colour. I am one of few people I know who was presented a unit on modern Chinese History in high school, and even this had gaping holes in it. If you do not already know a little about the events Thien is describing you will not be completely lost, however you will probably find yourself compelled to seek further reading once you've put the book down.

Through Thien's characters, the widespread devastating personal impact of these events is impossible to miss. There is an almost folktale like character to the events of the distant past that is slowly stripped away as we are brought through the horrors that her characters sustain.

Thien explores characters that are often not wholly good or evil, but shaped by circumstance. She carefully examines those who are influenced into acts of violence and betrayal, treating them with care but without total forgiveness. Her characters cannot be completely redeemed from what their political context has condemned them to.

Music is heavily weaved through one generation of the families in particular. Studying classical music, I am often wary of novels that invest parts of their narratives in music. To me, it can often feel like pretentious name-dropping at best and often adds little to the story. To get a bit less literary, it sometimes feels like the scene in Pitch Perfect where Beca acts like David Guetta is some underground, unappreciated genius.

To me, Thien was not too heavy handed. The pieces referenced were not the absolute standards and were described in terms of the emotions they induced rather than just as name-drops to remind the reader that the characters enjoyed music. Knowing the works was a bonus but not necessary to understand what she was trying to evoke in mentioning them. I will say some of these references went over even my head, as, as a self-centred violinist, I am less familiar with piano works that were often discussed.

The books one weakness was something common to many works coving such a large time period and cast. Although for the most part, Thien's characters felt remarkably well realised, Marie, whose voice starts and ends the book,  was not as strong as I would have liked. We see small snippets that are supposed to provide character—that she studies maths for instance—however we never truly get to understand her in the way we do her predecessors. When we start to delve well and truly into the past I was not quite content to leave the present, and whilst details of the dual narratives slowly serve to illuminate one another, I never felt like I was quite done witnessing Marie's own experiences.

I think it's also worth mentioning that Thien's prose is impeccable. Although she moves between different styles of story telling, no voice felt less powerful than any other and the choices made in differentiating them did not feel arbitrary. She pushes the narrative forward with a compelling lucidity that makes the book difficult to put down, no mean feat for such a complex work.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a powerful book on an important topic, however it is not for this reason along that I believe it has been shortlisted for the Booker. Weeks after reading it, I still feel profoundly affected by Thien's writing and characters in a way that is rare. Although I am a little disappointed Marie's character wasn't explored more deeply, I would still not be at all upset if this book ended up taking home the top prize.

Written by Adalya Hussein

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Rupert Burns is Kelvin Campervan. Or is Kelvin Campervan Rupert Burns? They seem to get along pretty well in the one body, but can never quite decide who is the artist and who the creation. The one man show explores the nature of a person's relationship with themselves and their history. It is set from the vantage point of mid life, but even at my age of 21 I was inspired to be existential about my own history of years and to ponder their value, as well as the missed opportunities I have already tasted.   

I would have to compare the performance, to any Harry Potter fans out there, to the 'ridikkulus' spell. This magic is designed to defend against the mysterious being called the 'boggart', that tends to hide under beds and in cupboards, and transforms into people's greatest fears when discovered. The spell 'ridikkulus' works by altering this fear, forcing the boggart to take on a ridiculous aspect. For example, if you are terrified of giant spiders, then the giant spider will now be wearing roller skates and slipping all over the place. The thing boggart's hate most is laughter, and when you laugh, it loses its power.

Burns hit flush those existential fears that will attend us all in our lives with his magic.  He has very successfully converted that profound unease at ageing, missed opportunities and faded dreams into  laughter and contentment. He shows us the other side of the abyss, which is still an abyss, as Kelvin reminds us - 'I learned that there was no ceiling to the universe...I also learnt there was no floor'. It is a very true sort of freedom he describes. Burns achieves his aims through the most unusual, hilarious and quietly beautiful ways.  

We witnessed Kelvin levitate before our eyes, contort his body into the most freakish positions, devour his own tongue and order a group of perfectly trained wonderdogs to literally jump through hoops as he willed it. I won't ruin the performance, but know that while these amazing feats are in one way completely flawed, for me, they emphasised a simple and elegant critique on our existence. Such amazing things we dare to aspire too in youth: I wanted to be an astronaut, for example, and an artist that was famous by the time they were eighteen, and also, an AFL star.

I didn't do those things, and yet, even though I essentially dreamed to levitate, as Kelvin does, I did something which was equally as funny, exciting, interesting an engaging for myself and those around me. And that is, as surprising as that is, sufficient. Things will get sad at times, as the best theatre and comedy does. For when Kelvin gets you laughing again, it is so much sweeter.

Kelvin Campervan's Mid-life Crescendo is playing until the 23rd of September showing every day except Monday between then and now. It's a short and highly palatable show at only 45 minutes long, so prepare for a wild and bright adventure that is guaranteed to please.

Written by Jim Thomas.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Phil Rouse decides to introduce his production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with a very peculiar sight: some slides of Elizabethan text hover above our very skilled ensemble as they are all club dancing to ‘Turn Down for What.’ It’s one of those audacious mixes of the highbrow classical and the lowbrow modern that the theatre world can never get enough of. Arturo Ui (played here by George Banders), the fictional Chicagoan crime lord, is of course Bertolt Brecht’s parodic and blatantly allegorical version of Adolf Hitler, rendered comprehensible for an American audience in 1941. Since the play took 22 years to make it to Broadway, it has only ever been performed in front of already well-versed audiences, and never as an introductory education on the history of Nazi Germany. Before they’ve even sat down, this 2016 Australian audience will already hate the infamous dictator just as much as the play’s 1963 American audience would have, but their prior knowledge of Brecht and Epic theatre will be less certain. In this production, Rouse bombards the audience with countless lines of text for the same purpose that Brecht once did: to give the audience all the facts they need to follow the allegory and understand his message, without being “distracted” by the fictional story he is telling. In contemporary theatre making this is known as heavy-handedness, but in the 1920s the idea of using theatre to shamelessly recruit people as political activists was a novel and exciting one. However, even today Rouse gets away with it by embracing this style of alienating the audience from the pathos of the story, and by having his own anti-right wing political agenda to parade around. The text on the screen and a handful of throwaway lines make it abundantly clear that Donald Trump is the politician he is truly taking aim at, with the original Hitler allegory itself becoming an allegory for a much more contemporary issue. There is also another, much more subtle comparison made between the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis, which interestingly is pulled off without the assistance of the fact slides. However, there are times when the three story levels, one literal and two allegorical, feel like they are about to crumble in and collapse on one another. It was also a questionable choice in the otherwise sound set design by Martelle Hunt to put the screen so high above the actors. Much of the opening dance sequence and character introductions will likely go unseen by audience members who are reading the opening text, and likewise, many important pieces of text shown throughout the production will go unread since there is rarely anything to direct people’s attention all the way up there. This is why Brecht would project his text at the back of the stage, so that it was always in view. Also, despite all the text, the self-aware jokes and the intentional breaking of character, there is one Brechtian technique that Rouse uses only very sparingly: bright lighting. There is a brief moment where the entire theatre is strongly illuminated and an awkward false curtain call plays out, but, for the most part, Rob Sowinski and Bryn Cullen’s lighting design is surprisingly traditional, putting the audience at a very comfortable distance and ultimately making the viewing experience too passive for this sort of material. Part of the intention of a show like this is to disorientate the audience, to pull them out of the story and keep the focus on the message, but until the very end of the play, the message within the message tends to make the space outside the story just as murky as the story itself. Fortunately though, each time both the narrative and its social significance become unstable, there are always the characters to fall back on. One of Brecht’s greatest inconsistencies was that, despite his frequent postulations on the importance of emotional distance, he had an irrepressible knack for writing vivid and endearing characters. Here we have the ruthless Ernesto Roma (Peter Paltos), Ui’s tough mentor in crime who turned a spineless common thief into a deadly rabble-rouser with the nerve to eventually kill him. In a “parable play” that draws heavily on Shakespeare, and even goes as far as flat-out copying a few scenes from Richard III, Roma, and his real life counterpart Ernst Röhm, are both the Banquo and the Lady Macbeth in Ui and Hitlers’ origin stories. Paltos not only masters his menacing presence, but, with the right makeup on, he also happens to look a lot like Laurence Olivier. Of course, the other standout characterisation here is Ui himself. Banders certainly has the right stuff and isn’t afraid to get up close and personal with the audience while in character. He consciously breaks the fourth wall in a glorious moment of theatrical self-reference and, in one scene, he impressively manages a dexterous run through the audience. Thanks to the talents of Banders, Paltos, Brecht and Rouse, the great anti-hero and his seedy keeper have a life beyond the confines of the allegories, something they probably weren’t supposed to have in theory, but in practice is really what allows this piece to work as a two-hour play. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

On Thursday night I showed up at La Mama ready to see The Ribcage Collective’s new work of experimental theatre. The Ribcage collective are a collaborative group of young theatre makers from varied theatrical backgrounds. For a second year running they have written, devised and performed works of immersive, sight-specific theatre at La Mama in Carlton. Their previous show was described by ArtsHub as “an intimate theatrical experience enough to reawaken a childhood sense of play”. That sounded pretty good to me. At the beginning of the evening we found out the recent arts funding cuts had just forced the closure of Platform Youth Theatre, the organisation that had brought these performers together. The kind of theatre we were about to see – youth-driven, experimental – is becoming harder and harder to make, even though it seems essential that young people have opportunities ambition, funded work. The show was based around a new Australian myth written by the group. It followed a family through three generations and a lot of hardship – from earth to hell and back again. The myth was told by a woman dressed as the sun; a “very wordy sun” as my viewing companion put it. The sun was so wordy that neither of us were able to follow the story, although that didn’t necessarily matter, we were told, because the three acts that made up the bulk of the work were also designed to be experienced separately. The audience was split into two, each group led by a guide through three site-specific pieces. The stories were vivid, each with a unique sense of place and drama. In one, a woman seems to be drowning in a bath of silver while another woman looks on, calmly smoking a cigarette. In another, a brother and sister quarrel as they are trapped in their dead fathers home. In my favourite story, a young boy philosophises with his fish, only to find the fish has come alive and is gyrating on his bed in a slinky dress. All of the stories had a great sense of playfulness and surprise. Moments like the fish coming alive, or a woman being dunked in silver liquid, were thrilling to watch. The spaces – some more ‘traditional’ than others, were cleverly used. A hole in the ceiling of one space allowed the silver liquid to be dunked secretly, a decrepit staircase became a dramatic entrance way. Some moments in the piece did feel little heavy-handed. Metaphors were either obvious – a chain is passed from actor to actor ‘linking’ the 3 pieces together – or too abstract and complex to be accessible. “What did the silver stuff mean?” someone asked later. Talking to audience members afterwards, there was a general sense of confusion – what did that mean? How did the stories link together? We couldn’t figure it out. It was a relief to slip into the Q+A session afterwards and find a panel of enthusiastic performers keen to answer our questions. It because clear how much thought had gone into every element – the metaphors may have been confusing, but that wasn’t because they lacked depth. Hearing the performers talk afterwards somehow made the work as a whole more enjoyable for me. Their thoughtfulness and passion redeemed the show’s weaker moments. It was during the Q+A that I realised we were in the company of a school group: young girls about to go into Year 12 drama. They asked about the world beyond high school plays and the performers willingly shared their knowledge. It was the innocent being led by the less innocent, a charming moment slightly overshadowed by the recent funding cuts. One performer said “There aren’t many opportunities left, so you’ve really got to put yourself out there.” Another chimed in “but if you do, you will find people willing to help.” And, if there is hope that courageous youth theatre will not only endure, but thrive, the Ribcage Collective are certainly a shining example. Written by Beth Gibson.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Kevin Smith's Yoga Hosers is one of the most bafflingly entertaining films of the year. A part-time cheesy teen movie, part-time goofy horror flick and full-time American satire of Canada, Nazis, Canadian Nazis, ‘kids today,’ and of course yoga, it never really asks to be taken seriously, just to be enjoyed. It's a follow-up to Smith's previous film, Tusk, with Johnny Depp reprising his role as the eccentric Guy Lapointe. However, it still works as a standalone film. Those who haven't seen the first movie will be a bit confused by the odd reference to a man being turned into a walrus, but with a script this off-the-wall those moments will hardly stick out. Yoga Hosers follows the misadventures of Colleen McKenzie (Harley Quinn Smith) and Colleen Collette (Lily-Rose Depp), two best friends who are almost never apart. Together, they are taking yoga classes run by Comic Side Character Yogi Bayer (Justin Long) who teaches a very unusual type of yoga. They also sing in a band together, where they mock Oddball Sidekick Ichabod (Adam Brody) their long-suffering drummer. They rehearse in the back room of the dreaded general store that they both work at. They hate their jobs. They can’t stand the customers, or the fact that they’re working for Daggy Dad Mr Collette (Tony Hale) and his new girlfriend, Evil Stepmother Tabitha (Natasha Lyonne). One day, their daily drudgery is interrupted by the arrival of Hot Guy Hunter Calloway (Austin Butler) and Gross Wingman Gordon Greenleaf (Tyler Posey), two senior students who invite them to a wild house party happening tomorrow night. However, they are gutted when Tabitha whisks her bumbling Bob away on a surprise trip to Niagara falls, purposely leaving the Colleens with the store to run on the very same night of the party. On top of that, Mean PE Teacher, Ms Wuckland (Genesis Rodriguez) has done the unthinkable and confiscated their phones for the day, which of course pretty much puts their entire lives on hold. Until they can collect them from Wacky Principle Invincible (Sassier Zamata), they might as well pay attention to Exotic Exposition teacher Ms Maurice (Vanessa Paradis) as she teaches the class a backstory about Canadian Nazis, one that will become very important once this movie's scary sci-fi subplot kicks in. Even before it does, however, Yoga Hosers doesn't feel like your typical trashy teen horror film. Evidently, as far as plot and characters go, it follows the formula to the letter, but in terms of tone it is much more sardonic than your average high school movie. For instance, the audaciously named Principle Invincible slips some biting remarks on racial privilege in between the standard routine for her character trope. She and the rest of the cast are also all in on the wall-to-wall Canada jokes. This ensemble of mostly American actors speak in a hilarious hodgepodge of their native accents, a touch of Québécois and as many oots as Smith could write into the script. Once the plot starts swerving in all sorts of directions, the fun quickly increases, and just occasionally decreases. Each twist is certainly unexpected, though largely because no groundwork is really laid down for any them before they arrive. They're not exactly believe, but they don't aspire to be. They are mostly there for novelty, not complexity, and the film only truly suffers when that novelty wears off in between the scattered climaxes. If this were an artistic film, it would probably be called an "eclectic mix" of genres and characters, but as a piece of mainstream entertainment it is more likely to be called "a mess," but what a glorious mess it is. Each subplot is basically a vehicle for the surprisingly star-studded cast to engage in some self-parody. It is very satisfying to see Hayley Joel Osment and all of the other young adult stars subverting their usual roles. There are also many memorable pop culture gags. Most of them are very contemporary, such as the uproariously paradoxical reference to Orange is the New Black. Has Collette just never noticed that her dad's new girlfriend looks and sounds exactly like Nicky Nichols? Or the actor who plays her? Oh well, who cares. Meanwhile, some of the more classically educated moviegoers in the audience will appreciate the older references, which all come from Ralph Garman's gallery of impressions. As one of the funnier Nazi caricatures that we've seen recently, Garman does flawless impersonations of actors like Al Pacino, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even the lisping Ed Wynn (best known for Mary Poppins and Alice in Wonderland). All of these are lost on the young Colleens but Guy Fontaine is very impressed by them. It might just sound like Hollywood nepotism to have Lily-Rose Depp share scenes with her mum, dad and even her little brother, Jack, all while Harley Quinn Smith is being directed by her dad, but the Depps really do bounce off each other well, and Kevin Smith does get a good performance out of his daughter. The results here might not exactly be cinematic gold, but they are nothing like the debacle that was After Earth or The Godfather: Part III. It's also very refreshing to see a film with two female protagonists who both remain happily single from beginning to end. Yoga Hosers is silly, lightweight fun that usually knows where its limits are. It doesn't attempt to hold its audience's interest for more than 90 minutes, but it does still expect them to engage with its fight scenes, even though no suspense is ever properly built for them. Sometimes Kevin Smith seems to forget that, although the Colleens are likeable and enjoyable to watch, since there is no emotional investment made at the start, there can be no dramatic payoff at the end, even though there are plenty of comedic payoffs. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Heavily stylised and endearingly quirky, Girl Asleep could be very easily described as “Wes Anderson does Napoleon Dynamite”, but in reality it’s much, much more than that. Sure it’s full of dorky humour and a kitsch yet meticulous 70s aesthetic, but it’s got a unique and very sweet take on the coming-of-age story. The girl of the film’s title is 14-year-old Greta, who’s just moved to suburban Adelaide and is having trouble fitting in at school. She meets another outcast kid named Elliott and the two strike up a nice friendship. Soon after, her parents decide to throw her a 15th birthday party, and reluctantly she agrees. There’s bullies, there’s sibling rivalry, there’s anxiety over appearance and romance, all the standard teenage things. It all sounds like such a simple premise. But that’s basically the point. It all sounds like such a simple premise because it is, and deliberately so: that which is generic is of course universally resonant. It’s a clever touch, as it allows the filmmakers to take this generic story and turn it into something truly original, and it means that it’s the stylistic oddities that shape the film as much as the story and characters. The visual flourishes, such as expositional “later that night” type text appearing on objects in the film or spontaneous dance sequences, are a delight. In addition, it devotes a hefty portion of its refreshingly short runtime to an intriguing dream sequence – the asleep part of the title – which plays out Greta’s insecurities, giving her closure with the people who surround her and helping her come to terms with her own changing existence. The most visually striking portion of the film, it’s also a portion that threatens to break the flow of the film and is a tad too long for what it needs to be. But I nevertheless enjoyed it and thought it matched the general mood and vibe of the rest of the film; like a true dream, it became a heightened version of the film’s reality. This is a film primarily for teenage girls, but though I was never a teenage girl I still really dug this. It’s funny, it’s a bit weird and it’s quintessentially Australian. Girl Asleep opens September 8th. Written by Ben Volchok.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Cattle, contemporaries and canapés, Eddie Perfect’s play; The Beast, promises to touch you inappropriately in all the right places.

By challenging a lifestyle that conceals itself behind a facade of authenticity, the show wastes no time in establishing a humorous destabilisation of friendships; stripping characters down to their inauthentic cores.

With sensitive subjects used as punchlines to boot, it’s no lie to say that The Beast works to attack and offend, although this may not be a bad thing. The larger than life caricatures seek to hold a mirror up to those who consider themselves elite in society. They grow organic vegetables and purchase “ethical” cattle in an attempt to reduce their eco footprint, although this lifestyle definitely comes at a cost when the six friends find that they’ll have to kill their own dinner.

The play embodies almost each and every one of us that invests in a false perception of class. Whether it’s the food we eat, or merely the ways in which we live our lives, Eddie Perfect has constructed a hilariously self-critical comedy in which nobody is safe. No stone is left unturned, and no bourgeois attitude remains uncriticised. The play succeeds in drawing out what we hate most about ourselves and one another in the race to achieve perfection in the modern world.

After having survived a fatal boat accident, Simon (played by Rohan Nicole), Baird (played by Eddie Perfect himself) and Rob (played by Toby Truslove) vow to undertake a life of ethical living. In pursuing a tree change with their respective partners, friends become neighbours and their dislike for one another hastily develops. By conveying a critical view of urbanites seeking to escape the hustle of city-living for the tranquility of the country, these characters embody every stereotype of upper-class suburban snobbery. Despite their best efforts to live an ‘authentic’ country life, their obsession with consumerism and being on-trend shines through the minimalist avant-garde architecture of their homes, acting as a comedic contrast to the regional setting. A general unlikability plagues most of the characters within the play, as they embody a misguided approach to healthy living and cultural superiority that comes all too naturally for those most arrogant in society. What could otherwise be pursued as a humble and positive approach to living is corrupted by the elitism inherent in The Beast’s subjects.

Rob and his wife Sue (played by Heide Arena) are the last to make the move to the country, following Rob’s emotional breakdown from the trauma of the accident. Their arrival acts as a catalyst for the welcome dinner from hell, set up by the other characters. Attempting to face the harsh realities of ‘going bush’ the six are presented with the need to slaughter their own nose-to-tail cuisine, resulting in a bloody and horrifically hilarious display of gushing arteries and wealthy white people trolloping around in the blood of an Angus calf by the end of the first act. Struggling with the ideologies of taking responsibility for what you eat and holding a concern for animal welfare, the cast simultaneously kill and attempt to save the calf after bungling a ‘humane’ slaughter.  

Undeterred by the cattle related events, the characters barely manage to regroup before the darker scenes in the second act unfold. As the narrative progresses, the characters become increasingly uneasy, eliciting a similar response from the audience.

Each of the relationships presented are rife with cringeworthy ignorance, portrayed with a certain uniqueness by each individual character. Struggles with mental health are swept under the rug in a flippant display of uncaring, whilst misogynistic expressions are entirely left unchallenged. Although it could be argued that topics such as these should not be discussed with comedic aspects attached to them, it is important to realise that the humour running alongside the narrative seeks to soften the impact of the harsh reality portrayed. Despite trust and honesty being discussed in abundance between couples, the audience gains a sense of what an unhealthy relationship consists of. These characters inhabit a twisted realm where openly condoning betrayal is acceptable and ‘healthy’, while any mention of personal struggle is shameful and without class. They live in a place where pseudo-psychology has been used to justify disrespect, undermine support, and promote shame. Through elitist comments and narcissistic attitudes, these relationships are then put to the test in order to gauge just how difficult life in the country can be for those without scruples outside their own interests.

The cast carry the themes explored in The Beast with brilliant delicacy, traversing controversial dialogue whilst also grappling with a snobby perception of modernity that falsely champions free-thought and multiculturalism, all of which is easily related to by the contemporary audience.

I advise against, for the narrow minded or faint of heart when choosing to attend the ‘worst dinner party ever.’ Complete with serves of steak tartare and canapés galore, The Beast is sure to captivate the audience by confronting them with a side of themselves that perhaps they didn’t care to sample. Running until the 10th of September at the Comedy Theatre, be sure to consider eating your meal after the show, as this is an event that’s sure to make your stomach turn from sheer laughter and mild trauma.

Written by Thierry Falcone. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

A film that opens with a lens-flared shot of a forest is only ever going to be a particular kind of film, I thought. A twee, wilderness-worshipping kind of film with smug self-contentedness. But Captain Fantastic, written and directed by Matt Ross, is not really that kind of film. Or rather, not entirely that kind of film. Yes, it’s full of obsession over nature and that brand of anti-consumerism that we all learn during our teens that pretty much starts and ends with “stick it to the man” – but it’s a film that’s occasionally and increasingly quite charming and that allows its characters to exist as more than a mere stereotype, delving into their lives and minds. Disappointingly, though, that is only a minor achievement that doesn’t really make up for the overall lack of depth in the storytelling. Captain Fantastic centres on Ben Cash, a father who brings his kids up in the woods, training them up to peak physical and mental ability away from all the aspects of modern, artificial, commercial life. This is the life this family leads, a life that’s all-too-tragically interrupted when Ben calls to find out how his wife and the children’s mother Leslie is doing in hospital and is told that she has died. Ben Cash is played by Viggo Mortensen with his usual rugged, rough-shod manner coupled with an intensely warm paternalism. In fact the whole cast is commendable, especially considering most of them are children; they never reduce their personas into cartoons even while, for example, the eight-year-old kid reads George Eliot, or the eldest hunts and kills a deer. The way he regiments his family and has a cool authoritarian control over them is, let’s be honest, essentially one murder away from a cult. He uses his power over them as a father figure in the same way that the corporations and capitalists that he rails against do. In their world, he is the man. But they never stick it to him. They just stick by him. And it was rather frustrating that this aspect of the film was never truly scrutinised. It’s safe to say that the film’s loyalties never really stray from the side of the ironically-named Cash family. Their lifestyle is never used as a punchline, which is nice, but again not surprising given the film’s on their side. And it’s entirely clear that he loves his kids and they love him too. But their ideological standpoint is pretty much given a free pass, which is both the film’s drawcard and its drawback. On one hand it’s nice to see a film treat a group of people on their own terms, and on that front it paints a detailed and convincing portrait, but on the other hand it means that it’s never fully critical of them and while yes it’s nice as an audience to be able to conduct critical analysis on our own terms it feels like the film itself is not actively inviting of criticism. Of course, there are some moments of self-doubt and self-reflection, and actually the most engaging segments of the film come in the second half, when we start to see the cracks in Ben Cash’s parenting methodology. It’s during these segments that the film is at its best, presenting a moral dilemma and a conflict between Ben and his wealthy “real-world” parents-in-law. Unfortunately it very suddenly shifts back to its original vibe – and, without giving too much away, it seems to suggest that these conflicts were for Ben to overcome, not to learn from. There’s small changes in his attitude as he settles for a favourable compromise and slightly mellows, but on the whole he’s the same Wild Man of the Outdoors as before. Captain Fantastic is a film about a family but is not exactly a family film. I mean, can you call a film where you see Viggo Mortensen nude a family film? I’m not sure. Maybe. But it’s definitely aiming for feel-good and I can see that it will appeal to a lot of people. I just wasn’t one of those people. Captain Fantastic opens September 8th. Written by Ben Volchok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Dangerous Liaisons by Little Ones theatre is a theatrical adaption of Pierre Chodelos De Laclos novel. The story takes place in France in the 1700s, It’s a long winding story of revenge and seduction. Two ex lovers have plans for revenge and humiliation; they try to out do each other in an attempt to dominate one another.  Little Ones theatre originally staged this in 2014 at MTCs Neon festival, since then it has toured across Australia to Darwin and Brisbane and has won and been nominated for multiple awards, and is now being restage at Theatre Works in St Kilda.

The set design and costume design was stunning and striking. It was a beautiful pallet of gold’s and pinks. There were shimmering golden curtains draped from the ceiling surrounding the space, with a sparkly golden floor with golden elaborate period couches. All the other props were consitant witht this colour sceme, all coloured gold, they appeared to be spray painted. The costumes were all period and lovely shades of pink.

The script was very dense and wordy, which the actors and director were up for the challenge. The direction was superb, it was intricate and precise. The actors held together and delivered the script in a phenomenal way, you could tell how well they knew their character and what their intentions were. 

This play spoke about complex issues around gender, manipulation and seduction though the lens of Little Ones camp, raunchy, theatrical style. It was extremely entertaining and fun to watch and be apart of.

Although it was beautifully designed and performed I did take deep issue with part of the story. There is a part in the play, towards the end, were one of the male characters quite blatantly sexually assaults a woman, who to my understanding is quite young. It is played as comedy and is brushed off quite quickly, which I found very uncomfortable and it a later scene it was suggested that it was consensual, which I just didn’t believe, it seemed to be like coercion, which was deeply upsetting. I’m unsure if little ones was trying to make a statement about sexual assault in some way with this scene, but it did not translate to me at all, if you’re going to take a path of making a stamen about sexual assault through satire, which is a rocky path to begin with, it must be overt, and obvious that you are no condoning the actions of person who committed sexual assault.  I don’t have an answer to what Little Ones were trying to say with this scene, but I must say that it did offend me, and I would like to know the answer.

Dangerous Liaisons by Little Ones theatre is showing at Theatre Works until August 20th.

Written by Ebony Beaton. Voiced by Adalya Hussein. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

My Scientology Movie sees BBC presenter, Louis Theroux, attempt to infiltrate the Church of Scientology, an organisation infamous for being shrouded in secrecy. Curiosity about the mysterious inner workings of the church, along with reports of assault committed by leader, David Miscavige, motivate Theroux’s efforts to understand life inside the Church and why it is so confidential. 

Since first approaching the Church in 2002, Theroux’s pursuit to gain access to the Church and interview Miscavige had been denied. Classified under the spiritual state of Operating Thetan (OT) and one of the highest levels within the hierarchy, members of the “Sea Org” also declined to be involved. Without admittance to the Church or interviews with practising Scientologists, one would assume any plans for the documentary would be abandoned. Instead, Theroux sets out to re-enact incidences involving Miscavige, the Sea Org and high profile member, Tom Cruise by holding a casting call in Hollywood, where the Church’s Los Angeles headquarters resides. Theroux is aided by Mark “Marty” Rathbun, an ex-Scientologist who was previously Miscavige’s second-in-command. The casting call sparks bitter backlash from the Scientologist community, resulting in Theroux and his team being stalked and threatened throughout the film.

Casting actors to re-create Marty’s recollections of being a Scientologist works well to gradually introduce the audience to Scientology and awaken Marty’s memories. Most importantly, this approach compels Scientologists to engage with the documentary. Theroux appeals to the quality all scientologists, whether practising or excommunicated, seem to share in the film; an overbearing sense of pride. This could be attributed to the “auditing sessions” all members must undergo, which involve practicing intimidation techniques and dominating your opponent’s mind. Marty helps Theroux conduct a mock auditing session with the cast members to help them understand the harsh treatment within the Church and what motivates their characters. These techniques aim to instil doubt and distrust in the follower, hardening their mind but also weakening their empathy. Marty, despite having left the Church seven years ago, displays a similar type of pride when speaking about his previous role within Scientology, boasting that the “Church was absolutely at [his] beck and call”. Marty is a conflicted character, both reminiscing about former glory and bitter towards his past aggressors.

The main criticism against Theroux documentaries is the presenter tends to insert himself into the narrative, steering away from traditional methods of strict observation. Fans of Theroux will relish the moment he catches his interviewees off-guard with his quips and quirky interviewing style, a trademark of his documentaries. Those intrigued by both the subject and the way the presenter engages with the subject will find this film captivating. However, I can appreciate that those who prefer the traditional style would not welcome his techniques, which often blur the line between conventional documentary and reality tv. This is where the genius lies, though, for the cast of actors play two roles in this film; the fabricated re-enactment of Marty’s memories and their real experiences with Scientologists as they’re hounded during filming.

The switches between official BBC camera footage and mobile recordings suggests the documentary is largely unfiltered, and reinforces the idea of the film’s authenticity. This balances the growing suspicion you may feel when listening to Marty’s stories, a position I found myself in especially when he omits piece of information or becomes agitated without warning. I would highly recommend going to see this film, whether you’re a Theroux fan or not. It sees the talents of director, John Dower, and producer, Simon Chinn, come together and make a thought-provoking and entertaining film.

Written by Erin Connellan

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

La Mama’s P.O.V. Dave is essentially a film noir play about a retiring press photographer who gets more than he bargained for with his last assignment. It definitely shows that most of playwright/producer Noel Maloney’s background is in screenwriting as he takes on the kind of story and genre that is much more acquainted with the screen than with the stage.

Dave’s profession as a merchant of dirty secrets working for his heartless editor, Bronwyn, has finally driven away his beloved wife, Susan (both played brilliantly by Eleanor Howlett) and, now that one of his assignments has driven a young girl to suicide, this job could also destroy his relationship with his son, Jack (the talented young Jude Katsianis) if he should ever find out. He plans to get out after getting one last fat paycheque that will set him up until he finds a more respectable job. He just has to get a few compromising shots of a sleazy priest named Kevin (Gabriel Partingon), although it turns that he and his saccharine wife Kathryn (Annie Lumsden) have been playing this game for some time and have long known how to win.

All of this is depicted in a long series of flashbacks that Dave is experiencing in his dying moments on a train. As such, much of the story is told through narration delivered by Dave, who is both our dying man looking back on how he ended up here and our jaded film noir detective whose gloomy inner psyche the piece is delving into. This is what Maloney turns to whenever he wants to write in a Hitchcockian scene that doesn’t translate so well to the stage. Strangely though, it’s also where he puts many moments that probably would have worked more powerfully if they were played out in full. Even though occasionally it offers a special insight into Dave’s thoughts, it’s still a rather clunky storytelling device, as is the overused framing of the wretched man’s life flashing before his eyes as he faces an untimely death.

What makes it work much better than it probably should is the inspired performance of Keith Brockett as Dave. Brockett is certainly not the typical film noir anti-hero, and as far as dying wretched men go, he is certainly one of the more interesting and entertaining ones. Brockett has such a powerful stage presence and has so finely perfected his characterisations of short, bumbling, amusing yet complex characters that Dave’s overindulgent amounts of dialogue are still a joy and a fascination to listen to. The same goes for the rest of the cast, who populate this familiar narrative landscape with characters that feel wonderfully fresh and exciting. Dave’s family, including his fading father (Peter Stratford) are the true emotional backbone and moral centre of the story. They definitely feel like a family worth fighting for, and their characterisations are much fuller than those of most of their cinematic counterparts. The seedy editor, Bronwyn, whose scenes are all angry phone conversations with Dave, is the kind of boss character you would only hear and never see if this was a film. However, director Beng Oh more than makes do with having Howlett perform her lines with her back to the audience and a cigarette in her hand. Partington and Lumsden, as the creepy priest and his manipulative wife, are two very striking villains and the perfect foil to the naïve Dave and Susan.

The final theatrical touch that enlivens the story and compensates for the clichés is Christina Logan-Bell’s staging and Tom Backhaus’ sound design. Just like the lead performances, the bookending scenes on the train that show Dave’s gruesome death manage are dramatized as an incredibly immersive fusion of the realism of the cinema and the hyperrealism of the theatre, which is what Maloney seems to have been aiming for in his writing.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

There is of course an old adage that comedy equals tragedy, plus time. In the case of Cholai, Arun Roy's black comedy about the Bengali hooch fatalities in 2011, not much time apparently is needed for us to be laughing about the thousands of deaths caused by a bad batch of illegal home liquor. Cholai is the local common name for this strongly addictive, very cheap and very lucrative brew. The Bengali government and law enforcement have been known to turn a blind eye to its distribution, until, as it is told in the film at least, the wife of a manufacturer accidentally tampers with the mixture. She only finds out that the results were toxic after it has sold and consumed across the entire village, killing nearly 200 of its most valued middle-aged male drunks.

Roy is supremely cynical in his depiction of this tragedy. The death scenes themselves are presented in a cold yet absurd fashion, one that suggests that the men had it coming, that they deserve their punishment for poisoning their minds and body with illicit substances. Their deaths are dealt with very quickly, as Roy is itching to get to the crux of the story: the fallout. The government is of course pressured for a simple explanation and a quick response. They are lightning-quick to offer compensation for the victims’ families, which they hope will also stop all of the questions.

The media, of course, spreads this information as far as it possibly can, along with every juicy, gruesome detail about the crisis that they can get their hands on. Where facts are sparse, they clutch at straws to get something that sounds newsworthy.

The movies usually portrays television news in one of two ways: docudrama realism or fanciful parody. Cholai definitely does the latter. It judges the media as cruelly as it lambasts the government, but not without a sense of fun.

Much of the film is very episodic and emotionally detached from its own story. After the effects of the chemical blunder have fanned out far beyond the small village where this all started, every second scene seems to be a self-contained vignette that tears a particular aspect of Bengali society. It would have probably been too messy to squash all of Roy’s criticisms into the main story, so this colourful collection of hit-and-miss subplots feels like the best way to get in some extra jabs at the region’s welfare system, health care, economy and even a confusingly patriarchal women’s protest movement. For good measure, Roy also throws in some scenes on a bus route frequented by a handful of amateur social commentators, who all seem to be the director’s mouthpieces as they express their profound disillusionment with the present state of the region.

There are a few political subplots in particular that leave a strong impression, in terms of both message and story: those that show the families attempting to exploit the bureaucracy around compensation for their own personal gain, and those that reveal the media’s penchant for milking sympathy for a reformed sinner.

However, quite a few of Roy’s statements do get lost in all of the chaos. Without the usual cinematic oxygen of emotional investment, some of the longer vignettes are very quick to run out of fuel. Fortunately, there is a consistent thread in the actions and reactions of the cholai manufacturer, Natah, and his wife, Bishu, who started this entire mess. Funnily enough, the two perpetrators are the characters that come out relatively unscathed by Roy’s fierce social satire. He seems to respect their intelligence more than those of the other characters (which still isn’t saying very much though). As mere inhabitants of this farcically defective society, these two are not painted as shameless opportunists, but more as perceptive people with enough common sense to know that they should take something if it is practically being handed to them by people who can well afford to have it taken from them. Unlike Natah’s honest, hardworking brother, whose decency has never been interesting enough to win him fame and fortune, Natah and Bishu are quick to spot and seize the unscrupulous shortcut to success that is staring them in the face.

Cholai has a lot of fun delivering uncomfortable truths such as these. By not asking its audience to really care about the characters it puts forward, it has nothing to lose by being as exaggerated and ridiculous as it wants to be, except perhaps the consistent interest of its audience.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

The first half of the Melbourne International Film Festival has flown by, and I've already seen some great films like Cosmos, Paterson and The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki. Among the films I've seen, though, there's been a fantastic selection of horror films, and I thought I'd spotlight four of them: three narrative features, all by first-time filmmakers, and a documentary.

First up, The Eyes of My Mother. An American film, but with occasional Portuguese dialogue, it's one of the first films I got to see and it's still stayed with me. One day, a little girl witnesses some terrible violence in her home; an intruder shows up but is subsequently overpowered, and from that moment that violence seeps through to her brain as she grows up and her life spirals into chilling psychopathic behaviour. Shot in black-and-white, there's a wistful, melancholy, poetic tone enshrouding the on-screen horror. With echoes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the film delves into some very dark places, both explicit and not. But despite the disturbing and violent developments the film manages to retain a beautiful, almost meditative atmosphere, and our sympathy for the central character never leaves even though she's doing awful, awful things. I mean, all she wants is a family... in a way... A very promising debut by filmmaker Nicolas Pesce. Maybe hug a loved one after this.

Next up, there's Baskin. Another highly disturbing horror film, this time from Turkey, written and directed by Can Evrenol. A group of police officers receive a distress call in a remote building and head over to investigate. Once there they discover some truly hellish stuff. The film's got lots of graphic gore and screaming, with a shudderingly creepy main villain. The visuals are striking and colourful and the score is particularly vivid. Unfortunately, there's not much of anything else. The pacing is uneven and I didn't really find myself being invested in any of the characters, so despite several really interesting and horrifying sequences it all in all made for unengaging viewing. Some great ideas in this, but not entirely well-executed.

Moving slightly east again we have Under the Shadow, by Babak Anvari, set in Iran in the 1980s, after the Iranian revolution and during the Iran-Iraq conflicts. It centres on a woman and her husband and young daughter living in an apartment block in Tehran. Not only is there the constant threat of missile attacks but some strange, nightmarish things start to occur, and when the father is called away to military service the mother and daughter are left to deal with the supernatural dread that plagues them. Under the Shadow does a fantastic job of channeling serious political and parental fears into a deliciously slow-burning terror, the tension building and building, holding you captive until it explodes in the final ten to fifteen minutes, unleashing full-scale horror. All throughout it stays gripping, then right at the end it starts ripping. Excellently shot with some unsettling camera movements and production design that captures the period as well as the evil closing in. Probably my favourite of the three.

Finally, I saw Fear Itself, a documentary on horror films written and directed by Charlie Lyne. Or rather, it's not so much a documentary as a cine-essay, a stream of thoughts on horror films and the way that they relate to real human fears and anxieties. Impressive in scope and mesmerising in equal measure, the film itself is essentially a collage, in that it consists entirely of edited-together footage from existing horror films, and hypnotic narration over the top that takes you on an engrossing journey through humanity's darkness. The range of films chosen is admirable, encompassing a vast range of horror cinema from across the world and throughout history, even using some films that aren't traditionally considered horror films but which have certain elements that illustrate the points that the filmmaker is trying to make about horror films, which in turn ties back to the points he makes about humanity. And the exploration of the themes is engrossing, thoughtful and at times quite personal. It's transfixing and thought-provoking and highly recommended not just for horror fans but for anyone interested in the depths of the human soul.

And that's all the horror films at the festival that I've been able to see so far, but there's more to come! A few I'm looking forward to are Killing Ground and The Devil's Candy, both by Australian directors, as well as The Lure and The Love Witch, which from what I've heard are very very weird, and I can't wait.

There's still another week left of the festival, so get out there and start shitting your pants in terror. I'll be in the cinema with you, toilet paper in hand.

Till next time, see you there...

Written by Ben Volchok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

234 years after Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's novel Les liaisons dangereuses was published, and 31 years after the premier production of its stage adaptation by Christopher Hampton, this new production from Little Ones Theatre comes to Melbourne as a fresh and lively piece of contemporary theatre. Those who've studied the novel will certainly appreciate how director Stephen Nicolazzo has captured the sardonic spirit of the French aristocracy, while newcomers will surely be enticed into discovering more about it all. Most importantly though, this sojourn amongst the affairs of the French court has a meanly entertaining story to tell and the courage to tell it like it was.

It was a world where wit and amoral intellect was the currency of the day, ruled by those whose minds were as nimble as their bodies and even more adept at vigorous intercourse, but whose hearts were held in as tightly as their bladders. Amazingly, Nicolazzo, and indeed his nearly all-female cast, are daring enough to match the intensity of the vocal sparring with raunchy nude scenes of masochistic intimacy, sights that are capable of shocking today's audiences as much as the sounds of blasphemy would have shocked 18th century audiences. He introduces his audience to this arena with an onslaught of ridiculous wigs, pasty white faces, exaggerated mannerisms, opulent set design from Eugyeene Teh and a robot-like match of Four in a Row. Here the original Connect Four is spruced up with some video game sound effects, just as the rest of the play is peppered with interludes of modern pop music.

While it's certainly been done before, and not always well, the songs are well chosen to illustrate a battle between the two finest players in the great game of courtship. Representing men, we have the seductive Vicomte de Valmont (Zoe Boesen), and on the side of women we have the decadent Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil (Alexandra Uldrich). The two of them look to be evenly matched in cunning, arrogance and education. They court each other for pride and amusement, just as they carry on affairs with countless others as a form of recreation and competition. Their relationship is the classic on-and-off mix of love and hate, of devotion and indifference. Both actors are outstanding as these familiar archetypes that, through the immediacy of live theatre, are given new life. Boesen is as convincing as she needs to be in the part of a man. It turns out to be quite an inspired casting choice, seeing as many of the characteristics that are now considered feminine would have been regarded as masculine in the French salons. On the other hand, the Vicomte's valet, Azolan, is played by Tom Dent, who towers over Boesen as something of a gentle giant at first, before the Vicomte comes to realise how much he underestimated him. As the Marquise, Aldrich somehow manages to switch between, comical, despicable, likeable and moving with the speed of a lighting change. Her endlessly expressive face, richly intoned voice and slick movements make her a consistently fascinating character to watch, even when the main scene is happening elsewhere.

The Vicomte's latest challenge, to court the devoutly Catholic and chronically morose Cécile de Volanges (Brigid Gallacher), forms the crux of a narrative that exposes the naiveties of both characters. The Vicomte believes that his heart can be contained again after it has been let loose, that you can control love and prevent love from controlling you. A parodic performance of Felix Jaehn's 'Ain't Nobody (Loves me better)' succinctly captures the Vicomte's delusions about these two of the many women in his life. While his twisted love for the Marquise is sold successfully by Hampton's writing and by Aldrich and Boesen's peformances, the love he eventually comes to feel for Cécile is not given enough time or breathing space to feel real, and certainly not enough to surmount the trite baggage that this plot line has garnered over the centuries. Fortunately, the Marquise's hard-learned lesson that emotions cannot always be suppressed for the sake of the game is a much more convincing character arc. A playful karaoke of Whitney Houston's 'I'm Every Woman' is similarly effective at signaling the universality of the Marquise's doomed attempt to fight with, and not against, the sexism of her world, to win at a game that has always been rigged against her gender instead of seeking to change the rules.

The only music that doesn't quite fit is the funk tune that plays over a certain duel scene, one that felt like it was meant to be the climax, but ended up being a slow build-up to a fierce contest that never eventuates. One of the most common problems with many tragicomedies, is that they often make promises they can't keep. However, thanks to the talent of the creative team, and the strong establishment of its setting and main characters, Dangerous Liaisons delivers on most of the comedic payoffs it spends time developing in its first act, and remembers to set up most of the dramatic payoffs it launches itself into during the second act.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Not-so-Raging Bull, Juho Kuosmanen's boxing biopic pulls the gentlest punches it can in telling the story of amateur boxer Olli Mäki, hailing from a small town in Finland and aspiring to not much more. It's warm and personable, and its deliberate type of simplicity is one that more filmmakers should aim for.

Affectionately put together, the film has a fantastic grainy black-and-white 16mm aesthetic that perfectly matches its subject. You're immediately drawn into its world when the lovely title music kicks in but, cleverly, that is just about the only non-diegetic use of music in the film. Script, camera, style, editing and mood carry the film on their own.

The narrative focus is always on Olli, and the boxing is always a background, echoing the way he feels about his chosen sport; his heart is never truly in his training until the motivation comes from Raija (the woman he falls in love with). He never wants to be a professional - even his fighting nickname is quite plain: "The Baker of Kokkola". He's in love and that's all he needs.

In English, the title is The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, and it's signalled fairly early on that this his happiness stems not from his future boxing match but from love; the title is introduced, after all, when Olli and Raija are on their way to a wedding. But in Finnish, the title is noticeably shorter, and indeed on further investigation, I found out that its Finnish title - Hymyilevä Mies - translates quite simply to "Smiling Man". Bless.

Olli Mäki is less of an underdog and more of an underachiever. And this film about his happiest day is an unexpected delight. Truly a nice and nicely-made film.

Written by Ben Volchok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

First-time filmmakers seem to either stumble on their feet or find those feet immediately and use them to run away with a superb debut. Such is the case with Bi Gan, a poet-turned-director whose Kaili Blues is a simply staggering first feature.

The plot - in short, an uncle searching for a nephew - is central to the understanding of the film and yet absolutely irrelevant. It's a tale of repentance and guilt, of soul-searching and memory... all themes explored through the plot, for sure, but it's the mood and the technical audacity that drive this one home.

Poetic and hypnotic, the power of this film comes from its deceptive simplicity; it washes over you so easily that its depth and the contents themselves can too easily fall by the wayside. The whole film is a sort of daze and watching it in the uncertain hours of the night I wasn’t sure if I didn't dream it all. But to simply call it a dream would be to discredit the details and quirks - and the effort - of all those involved in putting this together.

No review of this film would be complete without mentioning the 40-odd-minute take, crafted beautifully in such a way that it's barely noticeable and yet right there staring you in the face the whole time. The camerawork in general is to be commended (by Tianxing Wang, another first-timer) but reaches a whole other level in this sequence. There's moments of stillness, moments of movement; one notable movement is when the camera takes a "shortcut" through some buildings as the scooter it had previously been following rides around and catches up with the camera a few seconds later.

I don't think I've caught up with it, though. This will definitely need some further processing. Really highly recommended.

Written by Ben Volchok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

When I read the book [Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos] in preparation for watching the film I was struck by the singular oddness of the writing (albeit a translation) both in style and in content. There were moments when the sheer incessancy of the intricate madness lost me but I battled through and ended up being wholly won over.

Three things in particular struck me: the emphasis on the mundane, the staunch surrealism and the never-quite-referencing of the encompassing void of the eponymous cosmos. It’s vivid and evocative in its deliberately obfuscatory pseudo-dullness - and knowing it was adapted by Andrzej Žuławski, the master of surreal existential mania, made me even more curious to see how it would be turned into a film.

Safe to say my trust in Žuławski’s mastery - based, I must admit, on only two films as of yet (Possession (1981) and TheDevil (1972)) - was fully validated. It fulfils the major criteria of successful adaptations - that is, hitting most of the same beats and details of the source and capturing its spiritual essence - and then adds its own specific touches. And what a source! And what touches!

The film most definitely channels the mundane mania (or… mundania?) of the book but also tops it off with incredible incredulities of its own. All the dead animals are there, the perverse language play is there (made all the more impressive for being translated from Polish to French as well as English in the subtitles), the unrepressable emotional tension, the focus on hands, the frightening absurdity… but there’s also extra discussions of film and literature (including a cheeky self-deprecating namedrop of one of Žuławski’s own films) and the dives into the writing process, as well as a wicked satisfyingly unsatisfying ending.

Žuławski’s Cosmos (without forgetting Gombrowicz’s book - he named the main character after himself, by the way) speaks to my adoration and desire of the profoundly inconsequential, the horror of everyday surrealism, the incomprehensible chaos of minutiae… our mouths are a dark cavern and so is space, we are told. Am I totally out of it or is that a huge insignificant revelation of stupid genius?

Hours after seeing this at the cinema my head was still spinning. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Spinning with the ridiculous, glorious intensity of life’s tedium and the tedium of life’s ridiculous, glorious intensity. Spinning with how much we know and how little we understand. Spinning with the unnecessariness and the importance of existence. It makes at once perfect sense and no sense at all.

The contradictions here are on purpose. I mean, the cosmos is everything, and the cosmos is nothing. And we are all the cosmos…

Written by Ben Volchok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Jerzy Skolimowski's career is defined by a healthy disregard for conventional filmmaking. He has always been a punk of the highest order. And it's with total delight that I report that this pedigree is on full display in 11 Minutes.

From the beginning, we know we are in the hands of an unhinged master. The menacing pre-titles scrapbook of low-res footage from laptop, phone and security cameras clearly signals his anarchic intent. And it also signals the genre we are being propelled into: the multi-character storyline.

Essentially, the film is just that: a glimpse into the lives of several characters over the eleven minutes of the film's title past 5 o'clock, some of which intersect over the course of the narrative and all of which intersect at the end. The short time span means we never get a full impression of who these characters are, but we accept that we were never really meant to. Plus there's more than enough in there to give a rough sense of who they are, and it's surprising how much can actually happen in eleven minutes.

Crammed with pounding music and brazen, in-your-face camerawork, the freewheeling style of this film has annoyed and frustrated many of my fellow cinemagoers, to say the least. And it's not hard to see why; Skolimowski almost tries deliberately to throw us off at every step, like a bucking bronco with an ongoing glitch. But it's worth persevering and holding on. Because the reward you get is the utter juggernaut of an ending that's been lying in wait the whole time.

The ending, like every one of Skolimowski's endings that I've seen so far, is a shocking slap to the face. It’s the culmination of all of the events that take place in the film, the swirling final movement of the strangely melodic cacophony. For the whole film we have been riding on rollercoasters whose screws have been steadily rattling, until they bring us crashing off the rails right at the end of the track. And then the final breathtaking zoom out, telling us that this was only eleven minutes in the lives of only a handful of characters: look at how much else could be and has been going on.

Cue open eyes, open mouths and stopping heart. Holy crap.

Proof that you don't have to get soft when you get old, 11 Minutes is another notch firmly whammed into the belt of a continually unrepentant filmmaker. Just wow.

Written by Ben Volchok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Red Stitch continues their environmentalist theme for the season in Extinction, written by the powerhouse creative talent Hannie Rayson and directed by the critically acclaimed Nadia Tass.

On the International Union for Conservation of Nature and natural resources red list (IUCN), Australia is classed as having 35 of its discovered species extinct. The fraught task of resolving this issue, beneath the ever present spectre of national and international environmental strife, is the primary concern of the performance.

Harry Jewel, played by Colin Lane, is a mining magnate turned mild environmental altruist after hitting and killing an endangered quoll in his four wheel drive. He is the political foil for Andy Dixon-Brown, played by Brett Cousins, a practical yet idealistic man and practising veterinarian who holds the natural world sacrosanct, and is suffering from a terminal illness akin to Parkinson's.

Dix, played by Natasha Herbert, is the director of the CAPE institute and Andy's 50 year old sister. She leans pragmatically towards Harry Jewell's camp, and is passionate about establishing an objective, statistics based approach to the rescue of endangered species - essentially, that if the species numbers drop below 5000, then they're not worth the expense, financially and to the detriment of other species who might still have a chance.  Piper, played by Ngaire Dawn Fair, a  conservation biologist, is her opposite number, the sexy young idealist, who firmly and energetically believes everything can be saved, from her cancerous 12 year old dog Beast to the terminally endangered tiger quoll.

Whether or not the fact of Australian eco-apocalypse is high on your list of immediate concerns, this play is going to put your value system under pressure. In the hour and a half, you will be forced to take a stance somewhere on the slippery, uneven ground of environmental politics, and the moral nuances of the current Australian environmental crisis. The cast tackle many obstacles in their struggle to come to terms with how best to address the situation of a changing country, a changing world, which seems to be gathering momentum on its plummet toward an environmental apocalypse.

Yet this is play is flawed. I do not believe that it conquered the classic perils of the polemic political play, awkwardly failing to be compelling, engaging and subtle as it is so keenly self aware of its own highly political agenda. It felt as if the dramatic relationships between the four characters had been loosely cobbled together to forge a thin veil for what is really just a tedious outlining of all the different arguments currently dominating the environmental debate. 

The characters attempted to convince us of their humanity - mainly via loose plotlines focusing on the shifting sexual (read 'human') dynamics between the group - before switching comfortably back into parroting some lukewarm political sentiments that, delivered with no lack of passion or pathos from the actors. For me, this marriage of the general arguments surrounding the issue of environmentalism and the earnest, chest-beating noble-oratory aphoristic style of the dialogue did not make compelling theatre.

Which is unfortunate, as the cast is not short of talent. Colin Lane showed some classic comedic timing, of which there really should have been more - there are plenty of jokes scattered around the play, and some good, funny, horribly awkward situations. Although the humour of the play is poorly executed, but it is still there, and I could appreciate what was trying to be achieved.

However for some reason there seems to be a total lack of chemistry between them - the relationships that are put at stake in the performance never matter to the audience, because they are never made to matter. Their ostensibly significant motivations of family or love are just thrown in by name and barebones behavioural reference, without ever proving to the audience that these relationships are valuable.

Furthermore, the set is fraught with a multimedia program that starts as an interesting novelty and is halfway abandoned by the mid section, that became more distraction than enhancement. I was disappointed, as the beginning of the play uses music, sound effects and film in a way I found highly moving - the script says it all: 'Introduce the sound of the quoll’s heartbeat softly. This underscores the action to the end of the scene'. There was a profound silence in the audience as the heartbeat that had been present for the last ten minutes, the heartbeat we had all wanted to continue, halted as the lethal injection was given to the badly wounded quoll.

The final scene of the play, where Piper finally confronts Andy, I found a confusing mess, both in clichéd language and melodramatic behaviour, to a degree worthy of The Bold and the Beautiful, not helped by a soppy pop-score playing over the projection of a quoll scurrying around in the bush, thus restoring balance and hope to the universe.

This play attempts to do so much and in my opinion, therein lies it's problem. There is no steady theme, there is no likeable character. Everyone is flawed and nobody is redeemed. The penultimate scene of the play had audience members around me sighing, or even laughing, at a scene not meant to be funny, it was so unconvincing.

And frankly, I don't know exactly where to lay the blame, where everything went so wrong. Was it the writer delivering clichéd dialogue, normative, predictable plotlines and a thematic fiasco? Did the director micromanage the actors into robots? Have the actors failed the script?

Either way - decide for yourself.  Extinction is showing at the Arts Centre every day until the 13th of August. Head over to artscentremelbourne.com.au for more information and bookings.

Written by Jim Thomas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Jump First, Ask Later is an urban choreographic portrait of the streets of Fairfield in Western Sydney, the most culturally diverse region Australia. The show features 5 young street dancers moving between their stories and dance sequences.

Right from the beginning their physical strength and agility is striking and compelling to watch. The opening sequence is a warm up, but unlike any I’ve every seen – it becomes immediately clear that these are very physically strong and talented performers.

The audience was a mix of adults and children and you could see right from the beginning that everyone was amazed by the sheer psychical ability of the performers.

After the warm up, the show settles into its narrative, which is told through casual ‘street’ like conversations between the performers and is based off their real experiences.

While I assume the performers don’t have much acting experience (the conversational moments at times feel a little wooden), they are fundamentally likable  stage characters and the conversations have a raw charm.

All the performers are from immigrant backgrounds, and we learn in snapshots the struggles their parents had in coming the Australia, and the subsequent struggles these 5 performers had finding their place within Australia.  The narrative portrays parkour as a kind of saviour for these young dancers, providing them each with community, purpose, and joy.

While the stories are interesting, they pail in comparison to the dance segments themselves. I’m not sure whether I wanted more from the narrative, or whether the dance segments were so fantastic that the conversational moments just couldn’t speak with the same beauty.

The stage came alive with movement and backflips, beautiful synchronised moments and jaw dropping asks of physical strength and agility. There was a wonderful sense of fluidity, light and shade in the movement – at times the stage was bursting with colour, only to then be parred back to much quieter moments.

Jump First, Ask Later was wonderful – both in it’s artful weaving of narrative and dance, and in the sheer joy the performers got out of their practice, and we the audience got out it in turn.

Although performances at the Arts Centre Melbourne have concluded, Force Majeure will be bringing their production to the Sydney Opera House. Information can be found at their website.

Written by Beth Gibson.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

There will be some mildly sexual language and content throughout this review. If that might be a problem for you, tune out for the next five minutes or so - but, you'll be missing the breakdown of a great show.

A live band of sorts, and performance goes with the music

Duets is a show that will probably take you out of your theatre-comfort zone, unless you usually attend shows that include women performing suggestive acts with a banana and a tomato, or men in sequined morph suits gyrating to music, wearing enormous strap on dildo's. It is the second in a series of productions by performance troupe The Stain. Jo Franklin, in an interview with La Mama, suggested that the Stain's full title and job description should be 'performance art live music ensemble'. Duets is directed by Maude Davey, and the brainchild of the Stain core group Francesca Sculli, Jo Franklin and Gen Berstein. They are accompanied in the show by Harpist Genevive Fry, performance artists Sarah Ward, The Huxley' and Paula Russel. This is complimented with a haunting soundscape from Nat Grant, lighting design by Simon Coleman and set construction and props by Herbz.

The bio for the performance reads that it is set in 'an underground world marred by the spoils of life'. The set reminded me of the party Neo attends in the first Matrix movie, as he follows the figurative white rabbit. Dark, smoky, sweaty, and indeed, this world the Stain are about to take us into with Duet's is very alike to falling into a bizarre wonderland. Plastic sheets, the kind Bateman lines his apartment with in the famous American Pyscho  murder scene, canvas the walls of the small theatre.

The chairs for the audience are essentially a part of the stage. The drum kit and mics are so close to the front row that there is a very vague distinction between audience member and performer, especially when the performers make a point of roaming behind and into the audience at times, demanding your attention.

There is a fantastic light show, and the dancing lasers scramble your conception of any stability or normality in the universe of the show. Francesca and Joe, the key performers and singers, do not merely sing, standing still behind a mike, but gyrate, stare, gesture. There is a comedy to their performance, but also a deep seriousness, and the atmosphere is thick with an almost undetectable tension - I found myself deeply immersed in their world, the world of the steamy club party and exploration of sexuality, interrogating aspects of it constantly.

It is very clear that you are being taken out of your world and plonked down into a place which remembers and mimics things that are present in our own - love, sex, television, pop music, dance - but is not really them, rather, it is a place that subverts them, makes them ugly, beautiful, sad, silly, elegant or deranged, most obvious in their many adaptations of popular songs, warping and moulding music from artists such as Gotye and Rihanna.  It is over the top, confronting, but given that life can so frequently be overwhelming and bizarre in all its aspects, I believe Duets captures and champions this fact.

The show bears watching a second time - I do not think I gleaned too much of their message from the first viewing, perhaps so overwhelmed and engaged with the theatre of it all, and the sheer fun of listening to good, interesting live music. What I do know is that Duets is trying, both lightly and desperately, to examine the intensity of a human connection. And, while I believe they examine this most overtly through a sexual connection, this I can believe is also highly symbolic of other modes of desire, and the accompanying human flaws and compromises that can ruin any fantasy.

The element that moved me the most was Paula Russel's dancing. She dressed in a white flowing garment, and danced wildly around with a silly glint in her eye, beckoning us through the door and to our seats for the evening. She served as a kind of glorified roadie, changing over instruments and clearing the stage in a hyper energetic, twirling fury.

In the dying moments of the play, she appeared on stage, after all the other performers and musicians had vacated it. I only expected her to do something silly, light, comedic, to see us off for the evening. I was so presently surprised when she presented us with a full ten minute, highly choreographed dance, that was elegant, fractured, quietly sad but also defiantly optimistic

It's importance was accentuated given her capacity in the performance leading up to this point had been secondary, a relief character of sorts - a character that had been there from before we had even sat down, a person we had taken for granted and assumed to be unimportant. It was wonderful to have these expectations subverted, in that she proved to be one of the most compelling aspects of the performance, in my mind.

Catch Duet's at La Mama theatre, where it is showign until the 14th of August. Bookings and more info at lamama.com.au.

Written by Jim Thomas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Mill on the Floss is a theatrical adaptation by Optic Nerve of the 1860 novel of the same name written by Mary Ann Evans under the pseudonym George Eliot.

Optic Nerves adaption of Mill on the Floss was a theatrical re-telling of the story of Maggie Tulliver. This adaption is much the same as the book, it is set in 19th century England, and it spans across 10-15 years of Maggies life starting when Maggie was 9 years old. This story is about the oppression of Maggies imagination, intelligence and agency as a woman living in a small town.

It is very clear to the audience from the beginning and Maggie is a very smart woman, she loves to read and learn, but it is quickly stifled by her father, telling her she shouldn’t be reading books. Maggie is left to her own imagination while her brother, unwillingly goes to school, something that Maggie dreams of doing.

Later we see a teenage Maggie, and then an older Maggie, perhaps in her early 20s. All throughout the play we see Maggie struggling to find her independence in a world that is unwilling to accommodate her. It is very clear that if it weren’t for the oppressive society that she lives in she would excel in academia and very easily find the independence she had been trying to find all her life, this is contrasted with the story of her brother, who does not wish to go to school and be in command of the family and his own life, essentially is forced into this role in which he is inept and violent. 

Optic Nerves adaption of this play is set in the same period as the book in England. The audience surrounds the action of the play in a U-shape. The set and costume design is minimal, with a long raised stage at the back of the space, with few set and props used through the play, like tables and chairs and lots and lots of books. The costumes for men were all the same, a light cream shirt and pants, and for women light cream singlet and skirt. 

I had a lot of issues with this adaption. Mainly I fail to understand why it has been set in 19th century England. I felt disconnected by the time period and place it was set, I think this play would have had a much more profound impact on me if it had have been adapted to modern Australia. I connected with Maggies struggle as a woman trying to prove her self in a society that disregards her for her gender, that still resonates today, but I struggled to make any deep connection, this may be because I am not a fan of period drama and putting on accents, but I think placing this piece in modern Australia would have made it a lot more potent because we as the audience would have a clearer look at how these themes still resonate are in modern Australia.

There was one point in the play where it seemed to jump forward in time, Maggie was going to a town dance, and the music was like that in a club, I would have enjoyed this element if it was sprinkled all through the play, but the jump to modernity only happened in this one moment which was very jarring and confusing to what was the significance of this, why was the dance modern? I don’t know.

I also struggled with the length of this piece. It was over 2 hours long with no interval, and very little changed in set, mood and energy, which was very exhausting, especially because I hadn’t eaten dinner. For a lot of the time the audience was at least partially lit, which made me feel tense and like I couldn’t move, and I am a very fidgety person so this was a struggle for me.

The piece was extremely text heavy, and hardly shifted in tone and energy the whole way through, and the acting seemed strained and forced, partially because the accents were so think and loud and strong. The dialogue seemed never ending and I felt like there was no room for me to breathe as an audience member because the content just keep coming and coming and a steady pace, I wanted moments of calm and moments of climax which I only seldom and briefly got, there was only one point of climax which was towards the very end when, seemingly out of no where there was a flood, which in terms of plot confused me, was I meant to know this area of England was prone to flooding? What happened to Maggie and the rest of her family and friends after the flood? I’m not sure, and honestly I didn’t make that much of a connection with any of the characters to have an investment in their fate.

Although I could see what the play was trying to do, I feel like it could have achieved more by setting it the 2000s, dropping a lot of the dialogue and cutting the length of the play – this would have also made the play a lot more accessible for those in the audience who at not as knowledgeable about the themes explored in the piece. I feel like this play was made and directed intellectually and not emotionally, and its so important to strike the right balance, otherwise you may be alienating some of your audience members, partially on the topic of feminism and oppression.

Mill of the Floss by Optic Nerve is being performed until August 13th at Theatre Works in St Kilda.

Written by Ebony Beaton

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

For any fans of the fantasy genre, Bhaskar Hazarika's Kothanodi is a great entry point into this year’s Indian Film Festival. For anyone's who's not as keen on swords, dragons and castles, this adaptation of four classic Assamese folk tales is not that kind of fantasy movie. Taken from a compendium entitled Burhi Aair Sadhu (Grandma’s Tales) compiled by Lakshminath Bezbaroa, the stories all have a maternal relationship at their centre and a different harsh truth to deliver about motherhood.

The story of Malati, and her husband Poonai, is perhaps the harshest of all. They are a childless couple, but only because Poonai's mystical uncle has told his nephew to kill each of the three babies that Malati has given birth to. Poonai promised his father on his deathbed that he would always follow his uncle's counsel, however difficult it might be.

The film's opening scene shows Poonai taking their third screaming infant into the dark forest and burying it alive. It's an unexpectedly horrifying introduction to the world of this film, but one that sets the tone right from the outset. The murder is depicted in a way that is dark and confounding, but not gruesome or gratuitous. It operates within the familiar frame of folk tale logic, and in a very recognisable fantasy setting.

While Poonai and Malati are naturally disheartened by what they've had to sacrifice, they are not as traumatised as they would be if this film was striving for realism. Nevertheless, the once again pregnant Malati is determined to keep this next child, no matter what Poonai's uncle says. However, her feeling changes when he eventually shows her a vision of what would have happened if she'd kept her other children.

While the rest of the stories don't start off quite as gruesomely, one way or another they all end up in quite a violent place.

The tale of Keteki, a woman who has given birth to a fruit, begins less shockingly but just as strangely. A friendly traveller named Devinath tells her that there is in fact a human son inside the fruit, one who loves his mum as much as any child does but who doesn’t fee safe enough to come out of his shell and into the world. As you can imagine, Keteki is simultaneously overjoyed at this discovery and overcome with maternal guilt.

The image of her walking around with her elephant apple rolling behind her is so unashamedly bizarre and eventually so emotionally charged that it works. No doubt much of this production’s local audience would have grown up with these stories and have no impulse to question their believability. As for international audiences such as Australia, surely they will respect a film that feels no need to explain itself too much. 

The stories are told with an effective mix of fantasy and magical realism. When Devinath guides Keteki through a ritual that will draw out her son, she certainly reacts as though she is watching something otherworldly. It is definitely the film's most fantastical scene, and yet we still feel that we are in the same "real" world where more mundane happenings are taking place. Keteki’s neighbours react to her fruit child with surprise, but not disbelief. They think she is a witch, and a dangerous one. If it’s her they’re afraid of, they should really meet the other two mothers we see here.

While Malati and Keteki are the two understatedly sympahetic characters, the domineering Doneshwari and evil stepmother Senehi are our gloriously fearsome villains. Doneshwari, we hear, has been tricked by a cunning python into selling her daughter's hand in marriage.  He managed to conceal his species from Doneshwari until just after the deal was made, but she is not at all aggrieved. She has heard tell of a girl in a nearby village who was also married off to a python. Apparently the morning after the marriage was consummated she woke up dressed in finery and covered with money, so Doneshwari is convinced that her daughter’s marriage will be a very prosperous union. The snake's con happens offscreen, as Hazarika, who wrote and directed the film, very wisely doesn't go so far as showing us a talking snake. The fact that we only ever see him doing things that a real python would do makes Doneshwari appear all the more deluded and self-centred.

That said, the avaricious matriarch has nothing on our evil stepmother, Senehi, who also happens to be Devinath's second wife. She is bitterly envious of the special connection between her new husband and his sweet young daughter. She feels incapable of competing with such a strong familial bond, and decides she wants her stepdaughter gone. The final straw is when the girl borrows , without permission, the dress that used to owned by Senehi's deceased mother. While Devinath is off travelling and helping Keteki connect with her withdrawn child, he has unknowingly left his own child at the mercy of a woman who has resolved to kill her.

The film's title roughly translates to "dark waters" in English. On its surface, Kothanodi simply looks like a dark but entertaining mix of traditional fables. While it does conjure a sense of curiosity about what fates these characters will eventually meet, they are all quite clearly illustrations of different vices and virtues. However, Hazarika manages to infuse most of these cautionary tales with a contemporary relevance. The story of a woman who must decide whether or not to keep her child, and who is sick of having men make that decision for her, is anything but otherworldly. There are also many children who are born living in their own little world that they never want to leave, something their mothers sadly can't help but take personally. Unfortunately, there are also still many matchmaking mothers around the world who will turn a blind eye to an abusive son-in-law if he is rich enough.

The odd one out here is the wicked stepmother, who just doesn't have the same social resonance as the other three. As memorable as she is, and even though the real world does actually have a few resentful step-parents, hers is a story that feels overrepresented, especially in folk tales. Nevertheless, she is a delightful addition to what is still a deep and varied exploration of what it means to be a mother, and how hard it is to be a good one.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

To say that The New Girl in Class is the weakest offering of the Indian Film Festival would be something of an understatement. Amrita Dasgupta's documentary on the life of a 9-year-old autistic girl is certainly never boring, but for all of the wrong reasons. The story that Dasgupta wants to tell and the story that she has actually documented are so embarrassingly different that the end result approaches the so-bad-it's-good territory. It is so perfect a manual on how not to represent autism that it is, in its own way, highly informative.

Roshni is the new girl in question. Her mother, Neeraja, has fought hard to finally get her daughter into a mainstream school. However, she doesn't just want her daughter to get the same opportunities as her non-autistic classmates: she wants her to become them. She wants Roshni to stop flapping her hands, cycling through repetitive actions, and playing with her own saliva (although that last one is certainly justified). She wants her to play ball sports, to play with her toys “appropriately,” just like the other children do.

She describes the feeling of grief that she and unfortunately many other parents feel upon receiving an autism diagnosis for their child. Her husband, Shubhashish, talks about it being one of those things that you know happens to other families but never think will happen to yours, about wondering why it had to happen to his family. Listening to them both, you'd think that Roshni had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Shubhashish says that it gets easier, that the reality eventually sinks in. Neeraja says that she has accepted that autism will be with her daughter for life, that Roshni is not and never will be a typical child, and yet she is trying to make her as close to one as she can. She talks about wanting her daughter to become independent and socially connected, and yet there is never a moment at home, or even at school, where Roshni doesn't have her mother with her. When Roshni isn't at home or at school, she is attending Applied Behavioural Analysis therapy sessions that are designed to make her act like a non-autistic child, whatever the cost.

Of course, it's easy to see where Roshni's parents are coming from. They want their daughter to be happy, healthy and successful, and autism, like many things, is excluded from the mainstream picture of happiness, health and success. Neeraja rejoiced when Roshni was walking and talking sooner than the other children, but panics as soon as her little girl starts falling behind in the race. Autism might now be widely known, but it is still sparsely understood. It is something that Neeraja had probably heard about but never given a second thought until Roshni was diagnosed. Now she is desperately playing catch-up. She is trying do the right thing. She is researching like crazy, but the immense ocean of literature out there is overwhelming, even to those who’ve been learning about it all their life, simply because just about everyone seems to have something to say about autism. For Neeraja, what floats to the surface is what speaks to what she has already been taught to want for her child: for her to be normal, but not average; special, but not "special". Autism research and services is a huge, lucrative business. There is naturally a lot of money to be made in telling parents that their neurodiverse child is broken, and that you know how to fix them. Similarly, there is much acclaim to be won from making a documentary about a heroic mother on a quest to rescue her child from the disability of the week. What is much harder to sell is acceptance, accessibility, and social and systemic change brought about by some long, hard self-reflection.

We do hear at least one person politely challenge Neeraja’s quest. In the closest thing this film has to a climax, where Neeraja finds out if her daughter has passed her first year at her new school, Roshni’s wise school principal reminds her that every child learns at their own pace and in their own way. Sadly though, her tiny bit of screen time is too little, too late.

We see interviews conducted with Roshni’s beleaguered parents, her strict therapists, her bewildered classmates, and even her twin sister, Srishti, who knows about Roshni’s diagnosis, but not one of them is taken with Roshni herself. This means that countless important questions are never answered, or even addressed.

What does Roshni want? What are her interests? What does she enjoy doing? What does she think of her classmates? What does she think of her new school? How does she feel about having her mum at school with her all day, every day? If her sister knows about her diagnosis, does Roshni also know? Did she overhear it? Did she figure it out? How does she feel about it? Why is it hard for her to focus on playing a ball game? Is it really because she has a short attention span, as her father thinks, or does she just not like playing ball sports? Why does she like playing with her toys differently? What stories is she creating in her head? Why does she sometimes lash out at people? Is it because she feels overwhelmed? Frustrated? Threatened? Scared? Does she know that Srishti discloses her diagnosis and life story to anyone who asks about her? Does she mind her doing that? Is Srishti accurate in her accounts of her sister’s experiences and feelings? Are her parents’ accounts accurate?

As both a biography of Roshni and a documentary on autism, The New Girl in Class really shoots itself in the foot, not just by jumping the gun with its production and restricting itself to the first 9 years of her life, but also, more significantly, by not giving Roshni or any other autistic person the space to be heard. Roshni is made the object, not the subject, of what is supposed to be her own documentary. Instead of hearing from actually autistic people about the realities of being on the spectrum, we are stuck listening to closed-minded non-autistic people making uneducated guesses and getting just about everything wrong.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Milk Bars in an installation and performance piece, it is based at The Mechanics Institute in Brunswick by Metanoia Theatre. The installation spread all across the Mechanics Institute, with five spaces and the theatre space being used as a central meeting point and bar that most audience members gravitated towards. 

The installation ranged from abstract to realistic interpretations of ‘a milk bar’ some were very interesting and beautiful, my favorite was the dressing room of the theatre that had been turned into a realistic home, perhaps out the back of a milk bar. Some of the installations seemed under done, one of the rooms had pixilated images of old fashions shelves like you’d see in a milkbar, and advertisements playing on another projector, the space was very white and felt unwelcoming, I did not like going into that space.

Throughout the space and all at different times were short performances by a handful of different actors, musicians and performance makers, and also the Executive Director of the Convenience and Mixed Business Association. The Performance styles were diverse, but I did not find this to be a a good thing, they ranged from avant garde movement pieces to monologues and story telling delivered to the audience, I found the performances to be inconsistent and jarring moving from one to the other.

One of the more confusing performances was Domenic Greco the Executive Director of the Convenience and Mixed Business Association giving a monologue about his childhood growing with his parents owning a milk bar and all the benefits this had to him and his towns community. Parts of his speech were very sweet, but some of it made me feel alienated and offended, he heavily critiqued modern society and the ‘rise of the supermarket’ and how its contributed to a lack of community which to me seemed a bit bias, and he didn’t touch on how supermarkets can be a positive influence, and how with negatives come positives, like the convenience of being able to buy all your goods in one place and employment. I was unsure what he was trying to get across to the audience, perhaps his speech was aimed at people who grew up and rasied their families when milk bars were still around and the main place people went for their goods.

The audience could move around the space as they wish but there was little indication of how the night would play out which left me feeling lost and confused and at times lonely because it was unclear what I was meant to be doing, and the program shed no light on it either.

Perhaps a few more performers acting as ushers to guild audience members around the space would have been helpful, this would also have helped activate the space because at times it felt static and awkward. Milk Bars would have benefited from a larger ensemble of performers with a consistent performing style; this would have made the space feel more friendly, welcoming and joyous.

Milk Bars by Metanoia is showing at The Mechanics Institute in Brunswick until August 6th.

Written by Ebony Beaton

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Guernica is a two-act ballet inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War in the nineteen-thirties.

The Melbourne Ballet Company’s resident choreographer Simon Hoy brought his unique style of contemporary ballet combined with Prokofiev’s powerful original score.

Guernica is part of the Company’s 2016 Premiere Season Intention and Desire. The body of work was inspired by the messages within Picasso’s famous mural of the same name.  

You will not get a cheap version of mainstream productions with the Melbourne Ballet Company.

All of the dancers, handpicked by the directors, developed their skills with the likes of the Paris Opera Ballet, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet New York, West Australian Ballet and the Australian Ballet School.

The Company’s newest dancer and leading lady Gemma Pearse was a highlight on opening night.

Her portrayal of Juanita, a young Basque woman, delivered on the youthful innocence of the original Juliet. Her character came to life with light effortless jumps and exquisite pointe work in the first act, which was a delight to watch.

Pearce along with former Queensland Ballet artist Charles Riddiford as Ramiro, a young Nationalist Officer, formed a convincing partnership as the young lovers with impassioned and beautifully executed pas de deux.

Principal dancer Alexander Baden Bryce gave a superb performance in his role of Tybalt with a look fitting for a villain. Principal guest artist and Australian Ballet alumni Adam Thurlow graced the audience performing the role of a clearly frustrated Paris, who was unable to win the attention and love of Juanita. 

The small cast brought a strong stage presence, with Hoy’s signature lyrical movements brought to life by the brilliant artistry of the dancers. The simple, colourful costumes were a modern take on the era.   

Earlier, I caught up with resident choreographer and director of Guernica Simon Hoy to find out more about his production. In our interview Hoy also discusses how the Melbourne Ballet Company has carved out their own niche as a creative platform that is well on the rise.  

Written by Caroline Tung

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

To anyone who's been holding out for a good theatrical sequel, Roberto Aguire Sacasa's Abigail/1702 is the latest member of that rare species. Picking up 10 years from the ending of its predecessor, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Sacasa plucks out Miller's two-faced antagonist, Abigail Williams, and turns her into a very successful protagonist. The past decade has transformed the jealous young girl into a desperately puritanical young woman. Once a fierce denouncer in the Salem witch trials who sent 20 people to their deaths over a tumultuous affair with John Proctor, the married man she once worked for, she now lives on a farm in Boston. She has abandoned her now infamous name and adopted the new identity of a god-fearing farmer and nurse, which she hopes will drive away Satan's hold on her.

So far she has been successful. After all these years of living in a modest little hut, surrounded by dense forest and countless iron crosses, the Devil has not come to reclaim her. However, the arrival of a handsome wounded sailor, who is ironically named John Brown, is enough to stir up feelings that she has thus far been able to suppress. Their attraction to each other is palpable, as much as Abigail might deny it, but she certainly hasn't forgotten the last time she gave in to a man's insistence on bedding her, and not least because both men share the same first name.

Abigail/1702 reveals that John Proctor, the protagonist of The Crucible, forced himself upon Abigal the first time that they slept together, even though their later encounters were apparently consensual. While John Brown never physically violates her, he is not about to take no for answer. He scoffs at her choice of chastity, and declares, to the shock of the audience, that "a woman who is not a wife or a mother is only half a woman." Although, thanks to Abigail, John's wife, Elizabeth Proctor, is now a widow with no surviving children, and looks at most like half a woman when Abigail comes to see her in a desperate attempt to set things right.

The Crucible's account of the absurd Salem witch-hunt was famously allegorical, with its real target being the anti-communist paranoia that Senator McCarthy was still stirring up when it was first performed. However, Sacasa's sequel does not continue this focus. Its social commentary is much more visible at the surface, but arguably just as contemporary. While it is remarkable how seamlessly our old spiteful villain has transitioned into a sympathetic tragic heroine, there is no denying that she is still up to her old tricks. She is still doing selfish things for purportedly selfless and pious reasons. Her intentions are good, but they are nowhere near as pure as she tells herself. Her interest in redeeming herself, in healing the sick and in caring for orphans only started when she found out that the Devil was in hot pursuit of her.

Swinging between extremes is the only way she knows how to survive. When she is not destroying every life in sight, she is trying to save them all. When she is not entering into abusive love affairs, she is abstaining from all sexual acts. Whatever she tries, it never works for long.

Boutique Theatre has added their own special touch to the play's premier Australian production. At the bottom of the staircase leading up to the theatre, each guest is offered a small wheat biscuit. At the top of the stairs, they are offered a thimble cup full of either wine or blackcurrant juice. As they go through the big double doors to take their seats, the usher collects their empty cup and warns them that this 'communion' "may not save your soul." Just like this play's depiction of the Devil, who surprisingly is present as a character here, this elaborate welcome strikes the right balance between campy and caustic. Abigail/1702 feels just as cruel as its predecessor, but it is also much more playful. Abigail's sins might have been forgiven, but they certainly have not been forgotten. There is a sadistic sense of inevitability to Abigail's great punishment, as it would seem that not only circumstance but also her nature have always been against her.

Under Elizabeth's excellent direction, the cast of this production do a fine job of creating either complex or more cartoonish characters well called upon, just as the special effects team have a good sense of when to make things stylised and certainly know when and how to make things look realistic. Emma Caldwell is particularly impressive as Abigail and Jessica Tanner leaves an especially strong impression as the wounded Elizabeth. Nick Casey's forest-inspired set design is the perfect landscape for these haunting figures to prowl about in and the thrust theatre staging literally gives every audience member a different perspective on the action. Depending on where they are seated, some character reactions may be obscured while others happen in plain view. There is no level playing field for these characters as they each receive their judgement.

Sacasa has also written a fair bit for the screen, which shows here in the way he takes his cues from some of the best cinematic sequels as he crafts this follow-up to Arthur Miller's classic play. He draws on the most interesting story points of The Crucible while still having his own story to tell and his own messages to send. As such, Abigail/1702 is not only a fitting continuation of the original story, but it also works solidly as a standalone piece.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Theatre company 'Make a Scene' alongside the La Mama Learning Company are currently presenting their interpretation of Carlo Goldoni's masterpiece 'The Servant of Two Master's. It is showing at Australia La mama theatre in Carlton until July 31st.

The cast includes Christian Bagin, Sharon Davis, Roby Favretto, Irene del Pilar, Freya Pragt, Lelda Kapsis and Darcy Kent. Many actors play both a primary and a secondary or extra character, and the lightning quick costume changes became just as fun as the play itself, as I tried to keep track of everybody, the frequent use of masks as props making this an even greater and more interesting challenge.

Goldoni's 18th century play has been translated and directed by Rosa Campagnaro, who has studied in depth the nuances of commedia dell'arte, or the Italian tradition of comedic improvisation. While 'The Servant of Two Masters' is not necessarily part of commedia dell'arte canon, given that it is scripted in depth, in her version Rosa has encouraged her actors into acts of improvisation which in my opinion gel wonderfully with the feeling of the play and add exponentially to the wild silliness of the whole affair. 

For example, the night I attended (the 17th of June), Brighella the innkeeper began to recite a menu to the audience, but got his mains mixed up with his entree. Truffaldino the servant, who was sharing the stage, leapt in using his outrageously coy Italian accent, 'come on man, you're a professional. You can't even get this right? Let's start the scene again'. After a quick argument in character, Brighella walked off stage left and reappeared, completely composed, and the scene continued, this time getting the dishes in the correct order.

I can't stress the fact that everyone is in their own roles perform excellently, and throughout the play every character made me laugh out loud with wordplay, physical slapstick comedy, hugely exaggerated ego's, excellently crafted accents and the obvious chemistry the exhibit in their on stage relationships with each other.

For me, the pinnacle of the comedy in the play was Campagnaro's plotting and the actors execution of the famous dining scene, in which Truffaldino is simultaneously serving his two masters unbeknownst to the masters themselves. The direction was ambitiously high, demanding perfect timing, high energy and on the momentum of the scene. That is, if one performer drops the ball, the whole thing loses all its power, but, the quicker, louder and riskier the scene is, the more hilarious it can be. It was perfectly  executed. The audience did not stop laughing for the full five minutes of the scene.

While every performer in this play did a brilliant job, the star of the show was Christian Bagen as Trufaldino , the eccentric, rude, hilarious and endearing Servant. Bagen presented his character as he is meant to be, and stole the spotlight with perfect  comedic timing, improvisation, maturity and charm.

It is a light hearted, entertaining play as a whole. However Campagnaro has  emphasised themes of sexuality and feminism in her version of the play, themes that are partially addressed in the original given a large part of the plot being devoted to a woman, dressed as a man, searching for her lost lover incognito, and the gender-based power she comes to control in her camouflage

The themes have been drawn out gradually over the course of the play, and they include women's sexual libertarianism, the ridiculousness of gender stereotypes, and the sad cruelty of these stereotypes being enforced. Furthermore, the fact that so many of the antiquated social codes designed to oppress women are present in Goldoni's 18th Century play live on in our modern society is another well deserved and well calculated jab.   

So, Campagnaro's 'The Servant of Two Masters' champions the women and condemns the fact that their qualities and capabilities, their power, is negated by a social code that when broken by the women in the play, seems bizarre that it had ever existed. And yet, none of these characters are white-washed. Both the men and women of the play have very real, repulsive human flaws, which somehow makes them that much more sympathetic.   

And indeed, this play opens a discourse on feminism that is based largely in laughter - in the ridiculous, the silly, which can so often help us examine and access serious matters with an open mind.

Once again, The Servant of Two Masters is running until the 31st of July, so not much time left. Head to lamama.com.au for more info and booking details.

Written by Jim Thomas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Retro Futurismus is a sci-fi cabert, created by Anni and Maude Davey along with Anna Lumb, Gabi Barton and Teresa Blake, with new special guest stars performing every week. Retro Futurismus as been shown all over Australia to much acclaim and is now performing a new season at 45 Downstairs this month.

Retro Futurismus transformed 45 down stairs into a feminie sci-fi wonderland. It was a beautiful, welcoming atmosphere, I was greeted by one of the performers and directed to a great seat where I waited and listened to a fabulous soundtrack of songs before the show begun.

Retro Futurismus was a series of sort performances, ranging for dance, circus, and song to avant-garde visual acts, which explored the performers own experience of womanhood.

During the interval we were entertained very sweetly by puppetry, which later in the show was revived and was so beautiful people in the audience began to cry.

It was wonderfully self-aware and at times meta, and also very extravagant and glamorous. It was defiant and strong and tender and sweet. It gave me a beautiful mix of emotions, it was vulnerable while also being playful and fierce was intensely powerful and empowering.

Retro Futurismus is showing Wednesday-Sunday at 45 Downstairs until the 31st of July

Written by Ebony Beaton

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

If you’ve ever felt that your office was one hoop short of a circus, Scott Hollingsworth’s Performance management is the cabaret that will speak to your funny bone. Hollingsworth’s one-man show is an outrageous, unapologetically offensive performance, that highlights the ridiculous in the mundane.

The show came back for one night last Sunday, with minor alterations to last year’s performance. Set at the Southern star observation wheel in docklands, Scotts own SHHH Productions presented Performance management in cabaret for a 90-minute erotic extravaganza. 

Hollingsworth plays the Ringmaster, opening the show with a re-scripted cover of Britney Spears’ “Circus”, the audience is welcomed by an incredible areal hoop act by Jessica Robbins, the scantily clad muscle man, Murat Yilmaz and Joshua Fielding as the larrikin lion.

Scott draws inspiration from his real life day job as an office manager and the employees he faces during the daily grind. The cabaret explores everything from job interviews, to unfair dismissal to the ridiculous white lies on a CV, all of which are topics that will speak to the everyday office monkey.

The creative rescripting paired with costuming and lighting pulled the audience in for a night of laughs and performance interaction.

Although Scott Hollingsworth is joined by his stage “minions” the performance really is a one man show, as the ringmaster manages to switch it up with simple costume changes, voice alterations and cheeky quips that almost make you forget that there simply is one fantastic human holding the piece together.

Scott is a NIDA trained actor who has toured internationally with huge productions such as Oklahoma, West Side Story and Cats and although quite a different production, Scott’s experience shines through with performance management, as he cracks the whip in a killer performance.

Hollingsworth doesn’t shy away from mixing themes either as he appropriates tunes from the little mermaid, Frozen, Mary poppin’s and Chicago, bringing his own cheeky twists that although questionable are wonderfully catchy.

With bits such as “everyone’s a little bit racist” to making jokes about killing co-workers. Though maybe not for everyone, the ringmaster’s colourful charisma had the audience giggling and holding their cheeks. All in all Scott Hollingsworth’s Performance management in Cabaret definitely earned its slot as the Monday morning office gossip.

Written by Ta-lisse Corinne

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Never underestimate the power of a child's imagination. Children often understand much more than we think about our adult world. When confronted with something complex and scary, they seize upon what they do know and invent like crazy to fill in what they don't know. This is something every great children's storyteller understands, and something that I certainly hope first-time feature director Simon Rouby never loses sight of. His debut, Adama, takes on the task of showing the horrors of the battle at Verdun, one of the worst of the entire First World War, to a primary school audience. What helps enormously is that his titular protagonist is the same age as the people who will be watching him. Adama (voiced by Azize Diabaté Abdoulaye) is the plucky adventure-loving hero of this particular kids’ animation. He and his family live in a village in West Africa that is surrounded by lush vegetation, freshwater rivers and towering cliffs. His older brother, Samba (Jack Mba), has been his best friend and playmate for as long as he can remember, but now the time has come for Samba to become a man, with the heavy responsibility of putting food on the family table. However, his initiation ceremony is interrupted by the appearance of a seagull flying overhead, a bad omen. The ritual is halted, and this dark sign turns out to be very prophetic. Samba is offered a bag of cold coins by the recruiting "Nassaras," to travel to France and fight in the army. He accepts, determined to be his own man instead of the man his father has always told him he has to be. He tells Adama, on the night that he runs away, that he'll understand when it's his turn to leave childhood behind, and gives him the bag of gold.

Right now, Adama doesn't understand in the slightest. He hears his parents talking about the terrible fate that awaits all those travelling to the front, but refuses to believe that his brother can't be saved. He too runs away from the village, taking the gold so he can return it to the Nassaras and have his brother back.

An adult audience might view this as a cute but tragic story of a naive boy on a well-intentioned fool's errand, but a child probably has no reason to think his plan won't work. The genius of Rouby's direction of Julien Lilti's original story, co-written for the screen by Bénédicte Galup is that, on Adama's long journey, some of his wonderment will be shared with the young audience while other parts of it will seem very strange to them at first. After he has been walking for some time and arrives at the coast near his village, he thirstily slurps up a mouthful of seawater that he of course very quickly spits back out. This is the very first time that he has seen the ocean, a scene that really drives home to a Western audience how different his life has been from theirs, and yet also how similarly they both would react to seeing something for the first time. The same goes for Adama's first look at a White person, a mirthless military official on board a ship just like the one that would have taken Samba away, a faceless spectre looking more like a mannequin than a man.

This figure is also rendered in 2D animation, along with the backgrounds and the crowds, while the characters in the foreground are animated in 3D. Any character that emerges from the nameless throng sheds their watercolour texture and gains a striking definition that also highlights their facial imperfections. The digital imaging, combined with the skilful clay sculpting by Michel Lauricella,, gives these characters a sharp yet jerky appearance, one that's lifelike without trying to be photorealistic.

By the time we, and Adama, get to Verdun, and start seeing bombs, horrific injuries and lethal gas, the adults and teenagers in the room will definitely know that this storyworld is partly a fantasy, but one that rings true on an emotional level. Young children may not necessarily find the story as fanciful, in fact this may well be the most intense film they will have ever seen, but the animation is certainly a good cue for them not to take this at face value. Whilst they will surely identify with Adama, share his frustration with the adults in his life, feel the urgency of his quest and be just as afraid of its many dangers, I think they will also have a sense that everything is going to be alright in the end. They'll recognise staple kids film characters, like the streetwise sidekick, the eccentric wise old homeless man who is vaguely magical (Pascal N'Zonzi), and that one stuffy grownup that eventually comes around to helping our young hero (Oxmo Puccino, who also writes and performs a beautiful piece of slam poetry that is heard during the end credits). Together, all of them will reassure younger viewers that this is a fable, one where courage and kindness are rewarded, war or no war.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

I had never been to the Mailbox Art Space prior to their current exhibition, Heathen. Of 'Heathen', the promotional shots of the works gave me the impression of huge canvases filled with extravagant, thought provoking watercolours.

After getting mildly lost in my own city looking for a gallery space on flinders lane, myself and a friend realised that we had to go up a flight of stairs tucked away at the 141-143 Flinders Lane Pawson House heritage building. 

The stairs were choked with people talking and drinking wine. We were late - I figured that people must have already gone in and come back out to discuss the exhibition.

Pushing up the stairs apologising, looking for the door to the gallery, jostling almost everyone, we began to get funny looks. We followed the eyes of a few patrons, turned and beheld a set of 18 1930's mailboxes, the kind you have in an apartment building - lots of about 15x10cm boxes, crammed next to each other, with glass fronts.

Within these tiny boxes were not the vast canvases of traditional galleries that I had expected, but miniature works by Belle Bassin, Valentina Palonen and Anna Parry, with work from the curator, Mitchel Brannan's, private collection, interspersed. It is one of Melbourne's smallest gallery spaces.

To quote the exhibition's description, the theme of 'Heathen'  is 'mysticism, the numinous and the unknowable', the goal 'to explore ways of knowing that are beyond rationality and empiricism'.

Parry has included the watercolours, Palonen the intricately detailed sculptures, and Bassin the photography and digital media.

Parry's watercolours are a kaleidoscope of colour, which with inspection seems to shift like sand in the wind before your eyes, solidifying after moments into new forms. Acorns turn into hearts which turn into crystals, pomegranate seeds are in fact perhaps precious jewels, seaweed like tendrils lurk blue like veins. Organism meets mineral meets the abstract, in which a darkness of spirit and light comedy of visual play meet.

Palonin's contributions take the form of mixed media sculptures. Her works that that drew me the most were a series of disembodied hands holding objects. To call these sculptures intricate would be an understatement - the detail is so incredible, accurate down to the fingerprints and tiny creases of the skin.

The hands are painted green on the fingernails, yellow on the fingers, and purple on the palms, implying that each hand might belong to the same owner. Each hand interacts with an object - one holds an acorn, another a seashell, another a rock, another a crystal. As I interrogated the pieces, I began to mime the hand gestures the sculptures were set in. 

Some have the knuckles facing away from where the face would be, delicately holding the object, indicating that they had perhaps just picked the object up and were observing it, curiously. Other hands gripped their objects hard, possessively, tightly, so that it was obscured from view. I began to see the hand less as a dumb tool, but as of extensions of our mind, of our curiosity, able to display love, hate, ownership and fear as clearly as if these emotions had been yelled.

Bassin's digital photography and one minute video installation are perhaps the most difficult to interpret in the exhibition. She employs seemingly simple patterns of undulating line in black and white, which spiral and throb the longer one observes it into a headache inducing maze of complexity. It is not an optical illusion, it is more interesting than that, but I can't help but compare the effect of Bassin's use of shape and time in her still images with the Penrose infinite staircase.

Fascinatingly, the artists were not given the theme of the exhibition - 'mysticism, the numinous and the unknowable' to work to - the pieces were curated by Mitchel Brannan, picked from artists who had, prior to the exhibition, pushed their work to answer the questions of 'Heathen's theme. This is intriguing, as there are some startling similarities and parallels in the works, all the more interesting due to the fact they were not established by communication between the artists. The motif a heart, acorn, shell or crystal shape appear in each artists work. Each holds significance to the unconscious.

The shell, indented with the infinite spiral pattern, which surfaces from deep beneath the ocean to be viewed by the person. The ocean has over time consistently been used as a metaphor for the unconscious mind in art and literature. 

The acorn, symbolic of rebirth, or the circle of life. It is also suspended oddly in time, a snapshot of what might one day be a mighty tree, it also stands in for the child or the embryo from which we all began, either within our parents or our ancestors at the dawn of time.

Finally, the crystal, brewed deep below the ground by forces untold, becoming something wonderfully, staggeringly beautiful, but is for the most part likely never to see the light of day. It is highly symbolic of the innermost workings of the human mind, and perhaps hints at why so many crystals in the images the artists provided oscillate between seeming both organic and mineral, heightening the metaphoric tie between object and abstract.

All said, I had a brilliant time at the Mailbox Art Space, and I can highly recommend the 'Heathen' Exhibition. It's running until the 30th of July. Check out extra details at www.mailboxartspace.com.au, which will also treat you to a digital copy of Anna Parry's watercolour 'Sacred Geometry'.

Review written by Jim Thomas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Christian and Andrew review The Wheeler Centre’s one night only event Revolting and Ridiculous: A Roald Dahl Retrospective. The event took place at the Athenaeum Theatre on July 7th. 

"This year marks the 100th anniversary of Roald Dahl’s birth – so the Wheeler Centre will get revolting and ridiculous on stage with guests including Andy Griffiths, Jess McGuire, Kate McLennan, Tim Rogers, Anna Burke and more. They’ll wax nostalgic, perform extracts from Dahl’s vast body of work, delve into the recurring themes of his stories and discuss the life of this incomparable, sometimes controversial, author." - The Wheeler Centre website.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

The 1966 book Hitchcock/Truffaut was as intriguing and exciting a read as its title suggested. Based on Francois Truffaut's 8-day interview with Alfred Hitchcock, it offered readers the chance to feel like a fly on the wall for the meeting of two of the most avant-garde film directors of the decade. At the time of their meeting at Hitchcock's Universal Studios office in 1962, the British auteur had recently released his fortieth feature, the hugely successful Psycho, while the young man from across the chanel had completed his directorial debut, The 400 blows, only 3 years ago. Hitchcock was arguably more open and generous with Truffaut than he was with any of his press interviewers, which was surely a testament to the depth of their shared love and understanding of the art form they were both dedicating their lives to.

Present day filmmaker Kent Jones is evidently on this same level of cinematic appreciation. His documentary, which shares the same title as Truffaut's book, is much more than just a companion piece. This is partly because it is one thing to read a transcript of this mysterious conversation, but it is quite another thing to hear a recording of the exchange, to absorb the nuances of the interaction that took place through a French-English interpreter. This coupled with the pictures that were taken from the meeting almost make you feel that you are in that office with them.

More importantly though, Jones has invited some of the most interesting, influential working filmmakers of the day to discuss how the “Master of Suspense" has inspired them and what they have admired most about his work. Bringing on board the likes of David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and Martin Scorsese is no small feat. It is unfortunately a very homogeneous group, an all-white, all-male ensemble cast, sometimes saying very similar things. The lack of diversity is certainly felt strongly towards the end, when the conversation turns towards Psycho and Vertigo. As interesting and insightful as these men are, there are some perspectives they simply don't have. French director Olivier Assayas has plenty to say about the New Wave cinema of Truffaut's time, Scorsese is the ideal person to comment on on the history of the crime genre and on the nature of a directing career that spans several decades, but no one seems very well equipped to discuss the characters played by Janet Leigh or Kim Novak. It feels very strange for there to be no thorough discussion of the director's trademark casting of blonde actresses in roles that were much more femme fatale than ingenue. When it comes to Vertigo, the interviewees excel at describing how it harks back to the pure cinema of the silent era and how its impact extends far beyond its mediocre opening weekend, but their examination of the lead female is very a much a male perspective on Hitchcock's male perspective on the Jimmy Stewart character's male perspective of her character. An informed critique of the Hitchcockian blondes should really be sitting alongside this documentary's great sections on the man's famous fear of police and his often quoted belief that "actors are cattle." This documentary is excellent at providing the context surrounding this statement and the background to that very recurrent theme of false criminal suspicion.

Cinema Nova will be screening Hitchcock/Truffaut from July 14, a week before the beginning of their upcoming festival featuring most of the highlights from Hitchcock's filmography. It will be opening with the 1954 drawing room thriller Dial M For Murder, in 3D funnily enough. When this little tidbit was announced at the critics screening I attended, the fellow next to me cried "oh Fuck off!" I wonder if that was Hitchcock's response when Warner Brothers told him to shoot it in 3D, or when he found out that they actually released it that way, or even when they asked him to make it. This wasn't a project he chose, he was under contract, and indeed, it is difficult to imagine him choosing this one for himself, despite it having the word "murder" in the title. Hitchcock/Truffaut purported that you could watch any Hitchcock film with the sound on mute and still understand 90% of what was happening. This film might just be the exception to that rule. It's definitely one of the most dialogue-heavy and dialogue-driven films that he made, with suitable theatrical performances from every member of the cast. It was quite obviously an adaptation of a play, in this case written by Frederick Knott. It follows the diabolical plot of a jealous husband (Ray Milland) to murder his wealthy adulterous wife (Grace Kelly) in order to get her money, a plan that of course goes terribly wrong. As tends to happen with plays, this one takes place almost entirely in one room, inside the couple's apartment. However, rather than being restricted creatively by the setting, Hitchcock of course knew how to work with this claustrophobia rather than against it in this very different medium.

This film is also a prime example of another of his great skills that the documentary points out, his knowledge of when to draw out a moment that would normally fly by an instant, and when to contract an event we are used to seeing being played long. A devastating murder trial is one such moment, naturally because it is this film's centrepiece of the staple false conviction theme, the perfect opportunity to fully demonise the character of Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams), before it is shown that me might not actually be all that bad as far as policemen in Hitchcock films go. The conviction scene appears more like a psychedelic dream than a reality. As such it is one of the few dated parts of this now 62 year old film. As is also observed in the documentary, his films really haven't dated at all since they're very much human stories that aren't focused on any particular time period. Meanwhile, the scene of the pivotal telephone call of the title is markedly extended, to the point where we even see the lines being connected in the control room. The murder scene that immediately follows is naturally of the high standard that you would expect from this director, and was clearly the scene that was most important to him. However, the rest of the film is also well-paced and absolutely engrossing, even as Knott's writing becomes more gleefully convoluted by the second.

This detailed documentary and uproarious crime thriller are both perfect for whetting your appetite before seeing North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window and all the others on the big screen.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

La Mama Theatre is an ideal place to host the Australian premiere production of Lars Noren’s Courage to Kill. This tense two-hander, sometimes three-hander, from Sweden’s most celebrated playwright definitely works best in an intimate venue. It is one of those many plays that take place entirely in a domestic setting, in this case inside a young man’s apartment that he is forced to share with his father. While in some plays this makes the home seem like a bigger, grander place for having been the site of so much drama, Noren, and indeed set designer Charlotte Lane make it feel as though the walls are closing in on its inhabitants, largely because those walls are covered in sticky-taped newspaper clippings that keep being added to. As the audience takes their seats, director Richard Murphet places the son, Eric (Luke Mulquiney) at his desk and has him sort through the clippings while smoking a cigarette, in the manner of the classic film noir detective. He might have the jaded look, the unhealthy lifestyle and the rotating roster of young female lovers, but he’s a self-confessed coward, and a waiter, though a very attentive one apparently. However, none of this hospitality is afforded to his new housemate. His usually absent father, Ernst (Stephen House) has fallen on hard times. With nowhere else to go, Eric takes him in, more as his prisoner than anything else. While Ernst tries to make up for lost time, Eric tries to heal himself by punishing his father for what those years of parental neglect have done to him. Much of the play is a dance between pointing fingers and self-blame, between hurling insults and self-loathing, as the pair of them are sickened by the weakness they see in each other, and even more so when they see that same weakness in themselves.

After the interval, Eric’s new exotic young lover, Radka (Tamara Natt), comes to have dinner with them, an event that Ernst has long been looking forward to. With fresh eyes, she witnesses how harsh Eric is with his father, and how manipulative Ernst is with his son. She hears how quickly calm words turn into snarls, which then turn into barking shouts, which then turn into a silence that is finally broken by more calm but wounded words. Their similarities are what strikes Radka the most. In the heat of the moment, Eric struggles to muster the courage, or the nerve, to do the right thing, while Ernst often can’t, or won’t, control his urge to do the wrong thing. Eric couldn’t save a woman he saw being violated because he hesitated before delivering that punch to the head to the man who was attacking her. On the other hand, Ernst, as Radka finds out, would have more likely been the violator. Either way, the same damage is done. She ultimately realises that she is not safe with either of the two sides of this terrible coin.

All three cast members do an outstanding job. House is perfect as the ageing failure of a parent who invites both pity and scorn. Natt gives an entertainingly exaggerated performance as the siren-like voice of reason who drives the true selves of these two men right out of their self-righteous exteriors. Malquiney seems also a few steps removed from realism in his portrayal of the unhinged son tormented by the need to make his father proud, even one as flawed and wretched as Ernst is.

However, despite the efforts of these fine actors, and the ominous sound design by Adam Casey, this production is inbuilt with a highly melodramatic ending that runs more on poetic logic than character believability, unlike the rest of the play, which is largely realistic. Perhaps it is a fault in Marita Lindholm Gochman’s otherwise solid translation of the original Swedish text, but this play’s abrupt conclusion just doesn’t feel earned. However, if Noren hadn’t forcibly accelerated the proceedings at the end there this production may well have outstayed its welcome. Courage to Kill finishes more or less after it’s said everything it has to say, which is a hell of a lot, and all of it is richly engrossing.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Cut The Sky is a dance theatre work by Marrugeku Theatre. It is in interdisciplinary work combining dance, video, poetry and song. Cut The Sky is part of the ‘Performing Climates’ for the Performance Studies International Conference or PSI hosted by Arts House. This year PSI is in Melbourne and it focus is on making conversations and exploring climate change though the lens of performance.

Cut The Sky is an intercultural exploration of how climate change is affecting the earth. It explores what climate change means for the indigenous Australians and its impact on traditional stories and customs, and it also explores what it means to be a ‘climate change refugee’. The structure of this piece is abstract and chaotic - it flings us forward and back in time. It opens with an apocalyptic version of Australia in the future ravaged by climate change and sends us into a cyclone imagined by the dancers wearing makeshift clothes of plastic and storage bags.

Cut The Sky is highly provocative and emotional. It screams and weeps over the earth and how we are damaging it and asks us "What are we going to about it?!". It’s a beautiful, complex exploration over something all Australians should be concerned about.

Marrugeku have toured this work all over the world, performing in outdoor and indoor venues. It has played at the Sydney opera house and remote communities in rural Australia, as well as being shown in multiple venues across Europe.

Cut The Sky is showing at Arts House Meat Market from Wednesday 6th till the 10th of July. It runs for 75 minutes with no internal. It is part of Performing Climates, an arts program designed and curated for the public by Arts House for the 2016 Performance Studies International Conference.

Review written by Ebony Beaton

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Come Away with Me to the End of the World by Ranters theatre was a series of conversations between nameless characters on stage. The actors seemed to be playing nobody or themselves - they talked of seemingly random things like their trip to Japan or the Italian dance classes they were taking, or meeting someone while going for a morning jog. Some of these conversations were mundane or even boring, some were absurd and surreal, some were long and winding, some were very short, and some conversations ended in song. These conversations were spoken over a soft backing track of ambient instruments and sometimes bird noises, which I found calming and it made the conversations easier to listen to. To my understanding, Come Away with Me to the End of the World was at least partly an one dimensional exploration of culture and/or travel seen though a white lens, most conversations centered around travel and experiences with other cultures while abroad, or experiences with other cultures that happened locally. Of course I felt like that was only one element of the piece, since there was many other conversations centered around things that did not involve travel and other cultures.

The set was confusing and abstract, it began de-constructed and bare – it was made of a purposefully small and simple back drop of a forest, and card board cut outs of something that was indistinguishable and other objects and set pieces on the perimeters of the stage. The set was then built by the performers during a conversation, the cardboard cut outs were small mountains and they scattered the stage, the set design was interesting but I found myself struggling to find meaning from it, I felt similarly to the whole play, although it was entertaining and a lot of the time amusing and funny, I found myself a points bored and my mind wondering off thinking about other things. I did not find a clear or strong message or meaning within the play and I found myself constantly having to fight for it in the beginning. In the end, I just sat back and let it be what it was and had a fun time laughing along with the performers telling their kooky stories.

Come Away with Me to the End of the World by Ranters Theatre is showing from the 5th to the 24th of July at The Malthouse Theatre, Southbank.

Review written by Ebony Beaton

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Our Kind of Traitor may well be the least confusing film adaptation of a John le Carré novel that we are ever going to see. If you enjoy political thrillers but don't exactly the have the head for real, convoluted espionage, Susanna White's film is sure to be the thing for you. Unlike the rather cold and brittle Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, this story of a man about to inform on the Russian mafia has a much stronger human element, one that often even takes precedence over the political machinations, which are explored in unusually sparse detail. Dima (the always brilliant Stellan Skarsgard) wants to defect to Britain, using the central intelligence he has been privy to in order to gain safe passage from the British Secret service for himself, but also, more importantly, his family, whose lives have been threatened by the vengeful new mafia boss, "The Prince" (Grigoriy Dobrygin). MI6 won't officially go anywhere near Dima, but an agent named Hector (a perfectly British Damien Lewis) reaches out to him without official sanction and offers to get him sanctuary, provided the man can give him enough information to bargain with. Dima doesn't want to give the secret service everything he has, everything they need in order to take down The Prince and the treacherous Aubrey Longrigg (Jeremy Northam), only to be left for dead. Hector won't be able to put a strong enough case to the service unless Dima gives him everything he has.

To get things past this standstill, Dima reaches out to the holidaying English couple Perry (Ewan McGregor) and Gail (Naomie Harris), who he's only just met but who have already shown themselves to be trustworthy, principled people. He asks them to be present for all the negotiations, to put their safety on the line to ensure the safety of Dima's family.

Dima's wife and children, and the thorny question of who should be responsible for their survival, is ultimately the heart of this story. The family themselves all look to Dima, who is not just the self-proclaimed patriarch but also the instigator of all this, to protect them all, and put him down whenever he looks to be failing to fulfil this duty. Dima, and indeed Hector, look to the secret service to fulfil their duty to those who are giving them information at great personal risk, to be better than the criminal organisations they are working to bring down and the oppressive political regimes that they fight against. On the other hand, the service, embodied here by the character of Billy Matlock (Mark Gatiss) is looking to Dima and Hector to give them enough to go on that will ensure that this operation doesn't ruin them. Meanwhile, all of these parties are looking to Perry and Gail to offer the independent assistance they so desperately need. At first the couple echoes the words of the service, that they are not the ones who put Dima's family in this dangerous situation and that it is not their responsiblity to get them out of it, until Hector shows them photos of The Prince's terrible handiwork and cunningly triggers their empathy. The lowly agent is certainly very well versed in the power of personal motivation. Much of his determination to finally bring down Longrigg is personal vendetta after his last attempt to expose the big shark saw his son imprisoned.

At least in this adaptation, that particular element of backstory feels a little haphazardly thrown in to humanise his character at the last minute. It's talked about but never really felt. On the other hand, the conflict between Perry and Gail, while very clichéd, is evident visually as well as verbally. White places her two best directed scenes in the first ten minutes of the film. The first is of a grizzly, politically motivated murder by The Prince that perfectly sets up the impetus for the rest of the story, the terrible danger that Dima is fleeing from. The second is a painfully poetic scene of intimacy interrupted by an old wound that Gail is still healing from. It is later revealed that Perry slept with one of his students, and that this trip to Russia was meant to help repair their marriage. There's no denying that this is an overused plot line, but it works because, as with the cruelty of The Prince, we can see it as well as hear about it, and seeing is believing.

Hector's grief might not have the space to be shown, but his rage is palpable, both politically and personally. His only scene with the nefarious Longrigg managed to do the most with the least, and his rant to his peers about the world's complacency in running on black market economies is the flm's great dialogue centrepiece.

Fans of the more cerebral le Carré adaptations will probably be put off by this one's more emotional bent, but ultimately it makes for a stronger and more memorable cinematic experience.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Emma is fascinated with the haunting Australian story Picnic at Hanging Rock, originally a book published in 1967 by Joan Lindsay.  She had the opportunity to speak to Tom Wright, the playwright of Malthouse Theatre’s production of Picnic at Hanging Rock, and to visit the Macedon Ranges, the home of Picnic at Hanging Rock, to experience where the mystery all began. 

Picnic at Hanging Rock is on at the Malthouse Theatre until 20th March. 

Picture: Sourced from Malthouse Theatre website

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Super low-budget and full of charm, the Melbourne-made film Pawno, released in 2015 at the Melbourne International Film Festival to sell-out crowds, is the first feature from director John Ireland and scriptwriter Damian Hill, who also stars in the film.

Pawno takes place over one whole day, and is largely centred around a Footscray pawn shop, referenced in the title. The shop is inhabited by Les, the kind-hearted grouch of an owner (played by John Brumpton) and his youthful dogsbody assistant Danny (played by Hill). As well as these two characters, the film is populated by an assortment of locals who add an offbeat vibrancy to the day's proceedings. There's two women who work in a bookstore, one of whom Danny has a crush on, there's a pair of smart-arse layabouts, there's a violent thug, there's a woman whose son is missing, there’s a trans woman whose visits to the shop are a form of solace from the harsh outside world, there's an Indian taxi driver who was a dentist in his home country... the list goes on. It's not an outright comedy, nor is it an outright drama. There's a healthy combination of both, often at the same time, and there's a sympathetic, unjudging tone that seeps through the entire film.

In a world where so many films are overly preoccupied with a rigid narrative, the film has a refreshingly loose plot structure that nevertheless pushes the drama forward, even if it is sometimes a bit too loose for its own good. It doesn't always concern itself with tying off arcs, which in itself is not a bad thing, but the resulting mix of finished and unfinished storylines does feel somewhat disjointed. While it's nice to see so many characters on screen, the film does sometimes struggle to keep them all corralled in. The main handful of characters get most of the screentime and the rest don't really get enough time to breathe so it does feels like an extended sitcom episode rather than a feature film. That said, however much screen time particular characters get is taken full advantage of, with all cast members giving exemplary performances.

All in all, director Ireland and screenwriter Hill have created a sweet and simple film that's full of life and shows a promising start to their respective careers. Plus, it's always great to see film content come out of Melbourne.

Review written by Ben Volchok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Talisse gave a live review of The Wheeler Centre’s election one-night special event - Stand Up...and be Counted. 

Comedians at the event included: Toby Halligan (MC), Denise Scott, Zoe Coombs-Marr, Sammy J, Aamer Rahman, Mathew Kenneally, Claire Hooper, and Gerard McCulloch. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Albert Einstein is the latest scientific genius to have lured a scriptwriter into the trap of biography. Jess Newman was clearly intrigued by the mind of the famous theoretical physicist when she started to write the sung-through musical Einstein: Master of the Universe. Watching it, you can feel her yearning to see the world as he saw it, if even for a moment, and to understand what he saw. Her audience, I’m sure, is after the same thing, but it quickly becomes apparent that this is something she either cannot, will not or has lost interest in delivering.

This is one of those biopics that gravitates more towards the “man behind the science” than the work itself. The bulk of the story is taken up by Einstein’s younger years at university, starting just after the turn of the century, until he travelled to America in the early 30s. His two marriages are used as a frame for his journey from patent office clerk to Nobel-prize-winning physicist. Mileva Marić, his long-suffering first wife, can only stand his obsession with his theories for so long, and his affair with Elsa Löwenthal is the last straw. Elsa marries the famous man whose mind mystifies her, but the mystery soon loses its novelty as it did with Mileva. There’s only so far you can go with someone who always keeps you on the outer.

Ironically, and perhaps even intentionally, the audience feels the same way. Despite the beautiful projection art and animation from Jack Crosby, and Newman’s impassioned tunes and lyrics, Einstein’s inner world remains inaccessible, and its highlighted connections to our human world are just a little too trite, even for a musical. We understand that this is an underdog story, one about an ambitious young man hoping to prove everyone wrong, because we’ve seen those kinds of stories before. The young academic’s contemporaries and rivals are amusing villains in their own right, but the substance of his conflicts with them, the science itself, is not given the space to be understood and appreciated. Much of it is stuffed into the throwaway lines of babble that fill up the more light-hearted comedic songs.

Most of the big pathos numbers are set aside for an equally expected story, that of the man who was a great genius but a failure of a husband and father. The more refreshing aspect of this subplot is Mileva, who, as a mathematics student, has much more to offer than Albert gives her credit for. Again, rather like the audience, she wants to be treated as an equal, and is tired of being shut out. She can see that her husband’s head is buzzing with thoughts, but, as she tells him repeatedly, her family cannot live on thoughts.

It is not enough just to watch a man sit at his desk and rave about his epiphanies in the vaguest of terms. We need something to take away from it. We want to hear something that we haven’t heard before, or at least something that we haven’t heard so many times before.

In this regard, it seems as though Newman simply made the mistake of picking the wrong years to focus on. While Einstein’s early career might not have offered much original material to work with, his time in America as a refugee, his involvement in the Second World War and in the civil rights movement, his religious writings, and the many other chapters in his later years may well have been theatrical dynamite.

Newman’s compositions, the talents of the triple-threat cast and the skill of the production team are all top notch, all impressively assembled and ready to deliver a fascinating, remarkable story. Unfortunately, it looks like the timeline was being held the wrong way up in the script development process, leading to the expansion of the years that play out more like celebrity gossip than historical biography, and the baffling omission of the meatier material.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

On Thursday the 23rd of June, I went to see Melbourne Playback perform 'On Ours Shores' at the Footscray Arts Centre. The troupe are a many things, or rather, become many different things over the course of one night, being one of Melbourne's leading improvisation theatre companies.

The team consists of actors, organisers and musicians, with the roles interchangeable between the variously skilled artists. As with improv, you can expect that an evening with Melbourne Playback will direct the spotlight from the stage and into the audience at times. However, the theatre group conspires to engage audience participation to a degree I have never before experienced.

You might encounter any selection of their actors on a given night. On Thursday, Ernie Gruner and Karen Berger provided a two piece band. Throughout the show they accompanied the actors with violin, percussion and xylophone. The core cast consisted of Alex Sangster, Allen Laverty, Diana Nguyen, Mike Mc Kevoy, Michelle Hussey and Ananth Gopal, who all conducted themselves with the wit, foresight and perfect timing of improvisation-veterans.

You could expect the duration of the performance to be around two hours.

But it is not time for the actors yet. The evening began with four fifteen minute talks by guest speakers tackling a major issue effecting contemporary Australia, the refugee crisis, and our speakers were refugee and author Mariam Issa, CEO of Asylum Seekers Resource Center Kon Karappanyotiddis, refugee and advocate Mohammed Ali Baqiri, and representative from the Refugee Action Collective and St Albans teacher, Lucy Honin.

They were each eloquent, compelling, brave and shared some painful things while displaying a hope for the future that had survived the incredible test of their pasts. I encourage every listener to go and give them a google - they are an excellent source of highly educated information on the topic of the refugee. In the greater plot of the evening, their function was to grab the absolute attention of the audience and force them, both with kindness and a certain emotional brutality, to engage not only their intellect to the issue at hand, but their senses, memories, emotions - essentially, bringing deeper parts of our humanity to bear on the refugee crisis.

As the final speaker finished their speech, the audience left the theatre for intermission. We staggered around like shell shocked soldiers, surprised at how emotionally exhausted we had become. I had been turning over in my mind refugee or immigrant children I had known in primary school and high school, having grown in the course of an hour closer to understanding the magnitude of their experiences than I had ever had before.

But - it wasn't over yet.

Returning to the theatre, we were met by five actors dressed in black and shoeless, arranged in a single horizontal rank, seated on milk crates, were occupying the space in which the speakers had been. There was nothing else on stage. As the final audience members took their seats, the MC jogged energetically to the crowd and asked for people to call out a word the summarised how they were feeling after hearing the speeches.

After a brief self-conscious pause, he was answered.

'Tearful', 'ashamed', 'sad', 'empowered' came the calls from the crowd.

The MC bounded up the stairs to a woman. 'Tell me' he said into the mic, 'what makes you feel tearful, and why?'

The woman attempted to explain herself, to explain a feeling that was obviously more complex than a single word. After a minute or so of interview, the MC turned to the actors who were still seated silently on stage and asked them to perform a song based on what the woman had just said.

The lights dimmed. A green spotlight switched on, hitting the middle of the stage. One of the actresses danced into the middle of the spotlight and began to sing, joined gradually by the rest, which compounded into a symphony of voices. The cast had picked up on a few key phrases: 'open heart', 'clear mind', 'come here', which they sung layered over each other, creating a tumult of straining voices or calm voices, differing in cadence and strength. It lasted perhaps three minutes.

I was initially confused and embarrassed by the performance, until I realised that they had hit upon something in the audience members words. It wasn't just her words they were examining, it was her tone, her confusion, her sadness. They had interpreted this as best they could, and were reflecting it back to her and the rest of us through performance, creating it again outside her and in a way that was different but the same, to understand again in a new way.

Over the course of the evening, the audience was asked for their feelings, stories and thoughts, inspired by the initial speakers or by their own history with the refugee issue. With this deeply personal information, they made us at times giddy with amusement, then angry, then euphoric, then quiet with sadness. Song and music were not the only weapons of expression they deployed, utilising dance, mime, language and light to perform the things which the audience conveyed. Each act was around 3 to 10 minutes long. We left the theatre that night having examined and gained insight into some human parts of ourselves and our fellow audience members that are not so often brought into the public or the conscious eye.

Melbourne Playback's next show deals with climate change and will be in August this year. Tickets and dates are not yet announced, but head over to melbourneplayback.com.au for more information.

Review written by Jim Thomas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

On Thursday I went to see The Addams Family Musical, a performance by Federation University’s 2016 graduating Musical Theatre class. The musical comedy was written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, with music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa and based on Charles Addams’ iconic characters in his comic strip The Addams Family. It was performed at Theatre Works on Acland St in St Kilda and its closing night was on Saturday.

As soon as the orchestra began playing the overture you knew this play would be a crowd pleaser. Rainer Pollard conducted a talented group of musicians, who were both expressive and controlled, and their performance suggested a strong connection between the conductor and musicians. The play then began with the Addams family gathered around the family tree in the graveyard, a yearly ritual to celebrate life and death, and honour their ancestors. The ensemble of ancestors, portraying figures like Marie Antoinette, a WW1 soldier and a suffragette, were summoned out of their graves for the first number; When You’re an Addams. What a spectacular start to the show. The entire cast were charismatic and the blocking of the dancing was inspired and well planned. Adrienne Chisholm’s set and costume design was fantastic, notably the ancestors looked like spooky spectres as they swanned across the stage.

As the family return to the house, Uncle Fester (Liam Dodds) stayed behind and closed off the gates to the underworld, enlisting the help of his ancestors to ensure a dinner scheduled for that night went smoothly. Wednesday Addams, (Tess Walsh) had suddenly fallen in love with a preppy young man from Ohio, Lucas Beineke (Jack Saunders) and invited him around for dinner so their two families could meet. Two worlds were about to collide, and the couple needed all the help they could get for One Normal Night, the name of another musical number which was spellbinding.

Many of the family members struggled to understand Wednesday’s new found feelings, as she began to favour bursting into song over torturing her brother Pugsley (Mackenzie Pinder). Her parents, Gomez and Morticia Addams (Andrew Thomas, Bridget Mylecharane) are gravely concerned by her new attitude but try to set aside their differences for the sake of their daughter’s happiness. However, Pugsley fears he will lose his sister to the light side and plots to break up her relationship during the dinner. The prim parents of Lucas, Mal and Alice Beineke (Shaune Davis, Cathryn McDonald) arrive and are seated for supper. They end the meal with a game called Full Disclosure, where you slip from a chalice and tell the absolute truth. Pugsley pours a potion into the cup, a concoction which is designed to bring out one’s dark side, and it is intended for Wednesday but is instead intercepted by Alice and she transforms into her less inhibited self.

A special mention goes to Patrick Schnur, who played the butler, Lurch, and to Emma Austin who played Grandma Addams. They were delightful to watch for their comedic timing in particular. A highlight of the night was when the Beineke’s had arrived and the family was trying to be as ordinary as possible. Grandma, returning from the cemetery of ancestors, suddenly bursts through the front door, and seeing them exclaims, “Boy, is it normal out there!” Another highlight was the expressions on all performers faces during the scene where Alice asks whether they have a little girls room, and Gomez replies “We used to but we let them all out.” Liam Dodds should be commended for his convincing and expressive performance of Uncle Fester, a character who is in love with the moon. My only criticism would be concerning the Tango De Amor towards the end of the Act Two, which felt a bit underwhelming on the technique side in comparison to the other dance numbers. However, it was an extremely strong performance by all cast and crew. The director, David Wynen, Musical Director, Rainer Pollard and Production Manager, Jim Austin, should be pleased with their show.

Review written by Erin Connellan

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

On Friday night I danced to the rhythmic genius of Quarter Street, one of Melbourne’s hottest Salsa bands, as they performed in the first of three “House Parties” at the heritage-listed Kew Court House. Spoilt with a dance floor rather than a seated concert, the audience took full advantage of the space in the former courthouse and police station.

Quarter Street champion the gritty sounds typical of the Salsa Dura, a style developed in 1970s New York by the Puerto Rican migrants. Unlike its brother, Salsa Romántica, the Salsa Dura is less polished and demands a more darling sound, especially from its brass section. Quarter Street did not disappoint in that respect. Lazaro Pompa, on trumpet, along with Ben Gillespie and Jimmy Bowman, on trombones, commanded the stage with their explosive fanfare. They jolted the party to life with quick bursts of notes, bending them around the beat.

The boys melted these vibrant melodies with their dynamic rhythms, charming the audience into swaying along with the music. Leo Salvo, on the güiro, Luis Poblete, on the congas, Cris Saavedra, on the bongos and cow bell and Sebastian Orellana on the drums, maintained a tight beat. However, this wasn’t the end of the rhythm section. Cesar Saavedra, on double base, along with a mysterious pianoman reinforced the beat through their melodic instruments and created that distinctive salsa sound. Together, they formed a smooth unit which balanced instrumental breaks and vocal sections.

With that, who could forget the vocals of Sergio Botero, along with Salvo and Poblete. Their deeper tones cut through the higher pitches of the brass section, giving the songs a richness. To suggest they are simply singers would be selling them short; they are best described as entertainers. Botero’s spirited dancing was infectious and drew the crowd from the comfort of the walls to the open dance floor.

Quarter Street closed their two-hour performance with Tumba la Caña Jibarito, or Grave, Beer, Sandwich. They called for the audience to revel in the hedonistic pleasures given to you in the moment, especially due to the inevitability of death. Both the sound and sentiment resonated with the audience, and a majority of the crowd tossed away their insecurities and dared to dance for the final song. The way I moved could only be described as a balter; an archaic English word which means to dance without art or skill, but with great joy and enthusiasm. However, it is important to note for those of you who also balter around the dancefloor, that this did not affect the quality of the night. Whether you are a seasoned salsa dancer or owner of two left feet, Quarter street will persuade you to shake off your inhibitions and allow their beat to flow through you.

The Kew Court House will be having two more House Parties, starring the 8-piece Melbourne band, Papa Chango, who merge together afrobeat and psychedelic guitar, and Melbourne based Mariachi Los Romanticos, who blend Mexican folk and pop with Spanish lyrics and Latin rhythm. Papa Chango will perform on the 29th of July and Mariachi Los Romanticos will perform on the 26th of August, with doors opening at 7pm. Tickets are available online at the Hawthorne Arts Centre website. However, if you’re interested in catching Quarter Street, check out their next gig at Open Studio in Northcote, on the 22nd of July at 9pm or find them playing at The Night Cat in Fitzroy.

Review written by Erin Connellan

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Rachel reviews Nic Green's Trilogy at Arts House in Melbourne.

Triology was performed for a limited season at Arts House in Melbourne. Trilogy was presented across the UK to wide acclaim. 

"Trilogy begins by celebrating women in today’s world – with all their complexities, in their skins and as they are. Honest and adventurous, Trilogy deftly weaves performance, participation, discussion, music and archival material; carving out new space for feminism and rallying the power and strength in women together." - City of Melbourne.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Emma reviews the Malthouse Theatre’s production of The Events DISCLAIMER

The Events was written as a response to the 2011 massacre in Norway. Devastatingly, this story is still as relevant today as it was five years ago. Our thoughts are with the friends and family of the victims of the recent 2016 attack in Orlando, USA.

The Events is being performed at Malthouse Theatre, Merlyn Theatre until July 10th.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Note to listeners: this review contains gun shot sound effects

This year, the Scandinavian Film Festival is leading with what might sound like just another World War 2 movie, but is one that actually turns the tables the tables on a lot of its predecessors. The Danish film Under Sandet (literally Under the Sand), is a drama set in post-war landmine-ridden Denmark and is being released internationally with the English title Land of Mine, a rather unfortunate, hopefully accidental pun on an obviously serious issue.

It's easy to see why the second world war is still a cinematic staple. The Third Reich, and its soldiers, remain the definitive example of what hateful extremism can lead to, and what we all want to avoid becoming. No film has ever had to work especially hard to characterise Nazi soldiers as villains.

It is curious, then, that in Land of Mine, these supposedly evil men appear in the form of scared, defeated young boys who just want to go home. Of course, as prisoners of war from the losing side, some are wondering if they'll even have much of a home to go to once they've been released. The ones that handled the landmines are being made to remove all 2.5 million of them from the beaches that they buried them on. Danish Sergeant Carl Rasmussen (Rolan Møller) is given a group of 14 German soldiers that are to dig up and defuse thousands of unexploded mines before they are allowed to go home. In a damaged country that has just been freed from German occupation, its German prisoners have become the lowest class of people. Sergeant Rasmussen and his fellow officers beat them, starve them, mock them, and deny them any medical attention, until it is too late.

The boys all find various ways to deal with their plight. Ludwig Haffke (Oskar Bökelmann), their leader, appointed while the war was still being fought, has resigned himself to the totality of their defeat and ultimate ruin. Most of the others are more hopeful, and spend their time talking about what they'll do when they get home and the lives that they will lead. Twin brothers Ernst and Werner Lessner (Emil and Oskar Buschow), seeing a country in need of rebuilding, plan to start up a bricklaying business, called Ernst, Wernst & Sons (even though the sons haven't been born yet). As tends to happen with twins, especially identical ones, their connection is strong. Ernst also shares a sort of big-brotherly bond with the little girl from the family farm that is next to the hut in which the boys are locked up every night. For Nazis, they seem to have an incredible capacity to love.

The real, unspoken leader of the group is now Sebastian Schumann (Louis Hoffman), a boy with a quiet maturity that is well beyond his years. He deals with the danger by taking control and becoming the protector.

The sergeant manages to do this dirty work by reminding himself of what these boys were party to and detaching himself emotionally from them, until they have their first casualty, and he sees just how much of himself there is in Sebastian.

As for the other characters in the Danish military, writer/director Martin Zandvliet doesn't quite afford them the same complexity and dynamism. Rasmussen's superiors, namely Lieutenant Ebbe Jensen (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), are painted as the cold, ivory tower authorities in this narrative, while the Sergeant has a very different point of view from working on the ground. However, Zandvliet is not about to deny that Ebbe has a point when he tells Carl "You have no idea what they have on their conscience." Of course, the audience of Land of Mine has much more than merely an idea of what these 14 boys might have done. They can also see as well as anyone that the Danish officers have their own people to protect and a country to rebuild. With not even enough food to feed the people of Denmark, why give any to the Germans? Someone has to clear the mines, so why not the people who put them there? Why risk the lives of people who had no involvement whatsoever with the atrocities committed by the Nazi party in cleaning up their mess?

Still, in cinema, murky misdeeds done offscreen seldom match the raw victimisation that takes place onscreen. The prior actions of these boys is left to the imagination, one that is more fuelled by their heartbreaking pleas for mercy than anything else. One has to wonder how much choice some members of the Hitler Youth generation really had in the part they were playing in all of this. By allowing us to spend time with this small company out of an enormous group of prisoners, Zandvliet makes it very hard for anyone to see a way that placing children in harm's way, even Nazi children, can truly be the answer to anything.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Rachel & Jim were fortunate to attend the exclusive media preview of NGV International’s newest winter masterpiece exhibition – DEGAS: A New Vision.

Rachel and Jim were also lucky to get a few words with Ted Gott, the senior curator of European Art at the NGV.

DEGAS: A New Vision is on at the NGV International in Melbourne until the 18th of September.

Pictured: one of the works showing at DEGAS: A New Vision, NGV International. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

The Honey Bees is a stage play written by veteran playwright Caleb Lewis and directed by Ella Caldwell, starring Eva Seymour, Christopher Brown, Rebecca Bower, Mara (Kat-Marek) Kaczmarek and Katerina Kotsonis.

It is now showing at Red Stitch Theatre on Chapel Street in St Kilda's East, and is running until the 16th of July.

Caleb Lewis' gradually and masterfully details his characters in a dexterous juggling of intersecting plotlines and overlapping relationships. His writing is enhanced by the strong direction of Caldwell, who proves to be a master of the long pause, drawing silences between characters out to a length just long enough to be painful and not tedious, creating an atmosphere of tension from the first interactions of the play.

At the centre of the drama is Joan, a bitter yet charming Polish immigrant, both bee-keeper and now elderly mother, who rules her long standing (yet struggling) apiary with an iron will.

Daryl is her estranged, middle aged son, vulnerable and ambitious, living in his dead fathers shadow.

His younger sister, Clover, remains inert in a life resigned to helping her mother with the apiary in placeof her own ambitions as an artist.

Kerry, Joan's employee and Clover's lover, is a gruff, tough farmhand who dreams of leaving the apiary - a place she perceives full of broken dreams and stagnant lives - and eloping for the city with Clover.

And finally, there is the mysterious Melissa, a teenager from Sydney who enters explosively into this already strained dynamic. She proves to be the moody and abused catalyst for change and highly charged drama.

A void at the heart of every character is left by the long dead but seemingly omnipresent spectre of Harry, Joan's husband, and the father of Daryl and Clover, who's actions in life prove to be the impetus for much of the desperate love and hate in the play

Desperate is the key word to unlocking much at the heart of the performance, and is highlighted in a quote from Clover:

Quote: ' A bee might fly over 800km in their life, and only ever produce less than a teaspoonful of Honey' End quote

To a honey bee, this might be a fine achievement, but to a human audience, this fact sounds unbearably pitiable. So much hard work produces such a meagre teaspoon of positive creation.

And indeed, like the struggling honeybee, all the characters have their own vast, lifelong journeys, riddled with resentment, abuse, sacrifice and lies, for such minuscule moments of sweet honey and happiness.

The play seems to stress that there is only a teaspoonful of sweetness to life at times, a point emphasised in a devastating fashion by the countless tragedies realised throughout the performance, which ultimately bares the ugly truths that lurk hidden within the infinitely subtle and complex relationships that human beings invariably encounter.

The set design is economic and well utilised, with strong unity between lighting and audio creating powerful atmospheres that were compelling and engaging.

Furthermore, there are strong performances by the cast all round, but the standout performance is by Marta Kaczmarek as Joan - a powerful tour de force worthy of the award winning actress.

You can get tickets to a performance of The Honey Bees at redstitch.net/honeybees. Once again, it is running until the 16th of July.

Review written by Jim Thomas

Photo credit: Jodie Hutchinson. Featuring: Eva Seymour, Marta Kaczmarek and Christopher Brown

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Christian reviews the 2015 film Queen of the Desert, not to be mistaken for Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, which features actors Nicole Kidman, James Franco and Robert Pattinson.

Queen of the Desert is the true story of Gertrude Bell, a traveller, writer, archaeologist, explorer, cartographer, and political attaché for the British Empire at the dawn of the twentieth century.  The film was written and directed by Werner Herzog.

Queen of the Desert is now showing at Cinema Nova.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

The Melbourne international jazz festival, now in its 18th year is Melbourne’s premier jazz festival which takes over the city for 9 days in june showcasing local and international talent in different concert halls, bars and occasionally laneways!

This year I was lucky enough to attend three completely different yet equally exiting events: Tomasz Stańko Band, Vince Jones and the astral orchestra, and Jose James.

Polish born Tomasz Stanko has been a jazz trumpeter since the 60s, touring the world time and time again and working on film scores. His performance at the Coopers Malthouse was a true testament to his experimental yet highly skilled approach to jazz. Accompanied by Alexi Tuomarila on piano, Slawomir Kurkiewics on bass and Olavi Louhivuori on drums, the four absolutely filled the space of the theatre unlike any others! Performing a total of six songs, interspersed with extensive improvisation, the band created the classic dizzying jazz atmosphere and had the entire audience bopping their heads, slapping their knees and completely entranced. The band nor Stanko virtually ever stoped throughout the performance, expect for at the beginning to introduce themselves, and seemed to be as captivated by the music they were making as the audiences were listening to that music. Over all this performance was the true epitome of jazz – dizzying and disorientating, yet completely enthralling.

In contrast, Vince Jones and the Astral Orchestra presented a much more rehearsed show as they paid tribute to the music of Van Morison. Vince Jones, who has been an Australian jazz vocalist legend for over 20 years joined forces with the seven piece Astral Orchestra, which was specially brought together for the event by musical director, Matt McMahon. Together they performed, and reimagined the songs of Van Morrison from his albums Moondance and Astral Weeks. This was a very interesting and creative evening as Jones and the Astral Band covered, and put a unique jazz spin on what is typically rock music. It was very enjoyable hearing Morrisons music in jazz form! Arguably the show did justice to both genres, and to both of the legendary artists. for those who are fans of both, or even either artists or genres and want to see rock in jazz form, or jazz with the influence or rock, then Vince Jones and the Astral Orchestra will be performing at the Recital Centre tonight as part of an extended run.

Finally, in a one-off exclusive evening, José Jones presented the music of Billie Holiday. American born, Jones is a well-regarded jazz vocalist but has also had great success in r’n’b and even hip hop, and you could really see this influence coming through in his tribute. Together with a highly skilled band, Jones played homage to the jazz legend that he considered his ‘musical mother’ in the same year that would have been her centennial. Jones did a sensational job performing what were the songs most important to him and his career, but adding his own unique, r’n’b influenced spin on them. His smooth yet powerful voice managed to completely fill the packed Hammer Hall, as he gave offered what was, for a lack of a better word, a sexy rendition of songs such as Yesterday I Had, and God Bless, interspersed with personal anecdotes about how Holiday influenced his career and the careers of his peers. Jones love and admiration of the great Lady Day was extremely evident not only in the way he sang her songs, but also in how he told her stories and the picture he painted of the blues legend. The show culminated in an encore which featured the most enthralling and unique rendition of Strange Fruit, arguably one of Holidays most famous songs, which Jones performed solo with the use of a loop pedal! Not only did this do true justice to an extremely controversial and sacred track, it was a stroke of genius and left the audience in awe.

The Melbourne International Jazz Festival ends for another year tonight! IF you still have a chance then do your self a favour and get down to experience some local or international experimental talent.

Review written by Rachel Iampolski

Review read aloud by Jonathan Calleja & Christian Tsoutsouvas

Pictured: Tomasz Stanko Band, MIJF website

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

In #DearDiary, the Melbourne-based actor Andi Snelling achieves the seemingly impossible. She manages to turn 20 years worth of diaries into an entertaining, highly amusing and climatically moving piece of theatre.

DearDiary is a one-woman show that tells the story of Andi from childhood to now, using only verbatim diary entries. Andi doesn’t speak for the first 5 minutes, but as soon as she enters the stage, your eyes are utterly transfixed by her. Such is the power of Andi’s physical presence, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, given her extensive experience in physical comedy and movement.

The show is a multimedia experience – using sound, screens, song and dance to bring Andi’s diaries to life. It begins lightly – Andi mimes and sings her way through her childhood, leaving the audience hysterical in its wake. Then, we travel with her to France. Andi goes on exchange and her 15 year old self is suddenly plunged into a world of boys and awkward sexual encounters.

Never leaving you bored for a second, the show takes a strange turn midway through – we suddenly find ourselves watching a game show with Andi, now moustache-clad, as our host. Audience members ask questions – eg. what is the point of getting out of bed in the morning? – and Andi answers these questions using only (you guessed it) verbatim diary entries. It is in this section that we really get a sense of Andi’s improvisational skills – she riffs delightfully with the audience, at the end handing out a gift to a selected audience member for, as she puts it, ‘no reason whatsoever’.

Just when I started to think that the show was pure comedy, the final act came, and with it, an intimate look at the darker pages of Andi’s diaries. Andi offers us her darkest thoughts and moments, sharing her experiences of depression and family suffering through painful diary scribbles. By the end the show, Andi is crying and we have made it back to the present day.

DearDiary is a truly wonderful piece of theatre, devised and performed by the talented Andi Snelling. It is on at The Butterfly Club in Melbourne until the 5th of June.

Review written by Beth Gibson

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Ben & Christian did a combined review of ACMI’s exhibition dedicated to award-winning film maker, Martin Scorsese. 

Scorsese will be exhibiting at ACMI 26th May to 18th September

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Experience. Strength. Hope. These words don’t carry much meaning by themselves, but together in the context of Melbourne Playback Theatre Company’s latest performance SticksnStones of the Birrarung Marr - Stories of First Nations Place Making, Culture and Legacy, they provided a pivotal focus for the evening’s event.

SticksnStones was the second public event by Melbourne Playback for the year. The event was split into two parts – a Q&A panel with esteemed First Nation Victorians including Jill Gallagher, Reuben Berg, Monica McDonald, Bruce Pascoe, and Stan Yarramunua, followed by a one-of-a-kind improvised theatre performance by Melbourne Playback. The event took place at Deakin Edge Theatre in Federation square, located on the banks of the Birrarung Marr – the river of mists. The Birrarung Marr is a significant meeting place for First Nation Victorians, and so it seemed particularly appropriate for the event to take place beside the river.

The event also coincided with Reconciliation Week – a week where Australia acknowledges the First Nation people and their history of suffering and atrocities since the White Settlement / Invasion 200 years ago, as well as the ongoing negative impact this hidden history continues to have in the present day. It is also a week where Australia takes the opportunity to celebrate and honour First Nation’s Cultural systems.

Each panelist shared stories and family histories of growing up in Victoria and Australia. Jill Gallagher told of the hardships her mother endured. She was born on country in Victoria’s Western District and lived on a mission. “They were very cruel times” Jill’s mother told her, “I try to forget”. At 13 her mother left school and worked as a seasonal picker. Seasonal work meant Jill attended 19 different schools. However, her mother strongly believed education was a catalyst for change and encouraged Jill to get a good education.

Bruce Pascoe, award-winning author of Dark Emu, Black Seeds, told the audience of the efforts he needed to make to discover the truth about his family history. He discovered that his family was aboriginal and had fled from Tasmania. For many years his family was forced to deny their cultural heritage in order for to be able to stay on the mainland. After years of searching and listening to elders, Bruce began to unravel a complex web of family relations. Bruce realized that ultimately, what connected them all, was their connections to the land.

After interval, the vivacious Ian David from Melbourne Playback Theatre Company welcomed the audience to share words and thoughts that had touched or inspired them from the panel discussion. The improvisation ensemble, or Players as they are called, took these words and created physical images of these ideas through dance, movement and music. Three audience members had the opportunity to tell a personal story that the players transformed from the individual to the universal in ways that resonated with all of us in the room.

These performances were incredibly powerful – the players seemed able to draw out the emotional core of each story. The ensemble worked so well together that it was hard to believe that these were not rehearsed pieces of work. ‘Travelling moments” flowed seamlessly together on stage, everyone playing a part when needed. There were moments when their performances brought me, and many others in the audience, to laughter and tears. I can’t recall the last time a work of performance art had achieved that.

There will be other public events by Melbourne Playback Theatre Company later in the year focusing on: Refugees, Climate Change and Mental Health. Do not miss out!

SticksnStones on the Birrarung Marr took place on Friday 27th May at Deakin Edge Theatre, Federation Square.

Review written by Lauren Klein

Review read aloud by Michaela Jones & Ben Volchok

Photographer credit: Steven Rhall

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Adalya reviews The Wheeler Centre’s author talk event with Hanya Yanagihara in conversation with Jason Steger.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

It was fantastic to hear that The Arts Centre’s season of Sugarland is being targeted at VCE students, but don’t let that make you think that the play itself is mostly for high school students. Fraser Corfiel and David Page’s debut production of Rachel Coopes and Wayne Blair‘s latest theatrical work is one of those stories of adolescence that engages teenagers both past and present.

Lately, Melbourne has seen quite a few ensemble pieces set in remote regions of Australia, usually ones like this year’s Meeka that have used this type of setting as a source of claustrophobia, dread and potent danger. One of the characters in Sugarland, Erica (played by Xanthe Paige) describes the Northern Territory town of Katherine as a kind of Disneyland, a peaceful place where no one is a stranger and everyone can be trusted. However, Erica has just moved here from Canberra, while our narrator, Nina (Dubs Yunupingu), and her friend, Jimmy (Calen Tassone), have lived here their entire lives. They are two aboriginal teenagers, who both express a strong spiritual connection to their land and their ancestry in some beautifully lyrical monologues, but who would both leave this town in a heartbeat if they could. Nina lives in a single share house with 12 other people, one of them being her mother’s abusive auntie. She wants to live in her own house, where she won’t have to be dodging blows and following orders. She wants to go to a school where she won’t have to suppress her academic skill so she can stay in a class with people who understand her. Jimmy isn’t sure what he wants, he just doesn’t want to be living in Katherine. Since he is currently lacking the attendance to finish school and the work ethic to get into a trade, this seems like an impossible dream, but for Nina, there is the shining prospect of winning the town’s Sing Search competition and the grand prize of $5000. She certainly has the vocal talent to take this contest out, but so might Erica. She already has the means to leave, but unlike Nina, Jimmy, and their naïve young schoolmate, Aaron (Narek Arman), she has also already been to the outside world. She has lived where they all dream of living and has had to move many times throughout her life. She knows that a change of place can only do so much, and that childhood neglect takes its toll no matter how much money you have thrown at you. One of the play’s most powerful scenes shows how Jimmy and Erica, two characters from such vastly different backgrounds, have both ended up in this same damaged, dangerous place in their lives.

This is the tone of about half of the show’s total duration, the remainder is just as affecting but a lot more fun. Every member of the cast, which also features Jonas Thomson as their hapless schoolmate, Charles and Eliza Logan as the long-suffering social worker, all have excellent comedic and timing and dramatic skill, and some even get a chance to show some impressive singing skills. The lighter scenes do well to endear us towards these wonderfully drawn characters whose plights, though they are of many different shapes and sizes, are all very compelling and uniquely revealing. Charles is another hopeful entrant in the competition. He has chosen to sing, of all things, Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby,’ and has no desire to tell this to his sport-obsessed father, unless he wins. He is a simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking example of the pressures placed on young white Australian men, just as Aaron, Jimmy and Nina show us what happens to young Indigenous men and women who have no pressures and no expectations placed on them at all. The singing competition, with all of its pitfalls and inequities, is an excellent narrative device for encapsulating the high hopes and crushing realities of these five young people who all want and deserve the same things, love and freedom, but who, for various reasons, may never come to know them.

Sugarland is truly a theatrical marvel, having managed to engage, educate and consistently entertain young audiences without pandering to them or misrepresenting them. It is an authentic, insightful, and artistically precise piece of storytelling.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

Review read aloud by Lauren Klein

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

When I heard Renee Geyer was a famous international jazz singer I was thrilled to get the chance to go and see her sing. As I am an amateur singer with jazzy vocals myself it felt like it was a match made to be.

However Renee Geyer was different to my initial assumptions. If I were to liken the whole experience to dating a person you met online, Renee Geyer would be a date you hade hopes for, only to have the actual date be considerably different to your expectations. Renee’s actuality contrasts considerably to the young pictures you see of her in the programs. They boast she is a proud Australian jazz talent. When I think of jazz, I think of swanky bars, dim lights and a commitment to seriousness to music as a vehicle for creative expression. Therefor, I’d constructed a vague conclusion that she was going to be refined, musically precise and like she looked in the picture. Malvern Town hall was dimmed, with fancy cheese platters on the tables to boot. It felt like the show was going to live up to expectations…But

When Renee finally walked on stage I thought “Is this lady her mother?”. The lady started to sing and a raspy, low tenor voice filled the room. It was undeniably Renee Geyer, reminding me of female version of Tom Waits.

The first song was a slow song. An odd choice, but it caught the audience’s attention. Then the show really began.

A faster, rockier song was played, and Renee’s real experience as a performer shone through. Her vocal techniques began to pulse into the songs, she started to move round the stage, and the room came alive. People left their drinks and cheese platters and started dancing. It was from there on I began to see the real Renee Geyer.

Renee Geyer’s songs are not particularly special. They’re simple, catchy and don’t try to hard to be anything other than a good song to dance or sing along to. If you were to pick up album of her songs, chances are you’d like the album, but you probably just like it. It lacks the prestige people associate with jazz.

Maybe this is why seeing Renee perform is so much fun. Renee breaks the rules, get people to let their hair down and coerces them into having a great time. She is both a performer and a conductor, bringing in her band member’s parts with both dance and sharp movements. She becomes so playful with this technique, she turns it into a hilarious gag, signalling the ban by adjusting her clothing, swishing her hair and other movements that appear to have nothing to do with the music, then looks at the band like they’ve been spying on her. She milks the pauses and silences in her songs to great dramatic effect, and even plays the other band member’s instruments. The look of confusion on the pianist as Renee does a Glissando (The move where you run your finger down the piano), is priceless, yet the professional performer continues the song as nothing happened.

Renee’s own singing technique is obviously honed through years of performing. She trills with ease. She belts with clarity and confidence, even with a clearly aged voice. Her dry, aged vocals suits some of her songs but the songs she sung when she was young she isn’t able to craft like she was once was. She whistles in parts of her songs to reach high clear pitches, which changes the tone of the piece slightly, but this adds to her music in a refreshing way. Undeniably, Renee’s experience and creativity allows her to convincingly convey meaning and emotion in her music. She expresses a diverse array of life experiences through tone, timing, crescendo and other simple musical quirks and techniques effectively, which (to me) is what proves her abilities as a musician.

If you’re looking for a night of tip top jazz, then perhaps you should look for different performers, as Renee’s songs are more like Rock n roll, with Jazz and reggae influences. Though, if you’re looking for a fun night out and an opportunity to dance, Renee and her band will deliver in many wonderful ways. I would highly recommend this show to anyone who enjoys singing and dancing like no one is watching and who doesn’t mind that most of the other people dancing along side you could be old enough to be your parents.

Review written by Jonathan Calleja

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Rachel attended the opening night of Malthouse Theatre’s production of Tennessee Williams' classic 'memory play', The Glass Menagerie. 

The Glass Menagerie is being performed on 18th May to 5th June at the Merlyn Theatre in Melbourne.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Recently I got to visit the Linden New Art Gallery. The current exhibition that is being held at the moment is the ‘Wild Lands’ exhibition with two sections following different artists and there particular styles of different wild life.

When walking into the gallery on the left side is the ‘Wild Lands’ exhibition, featuring the artists: Chris Mason, Bronwyn Hack, Dionne Cazano, Michael Camakaris, Mathew Grove, and Ruth Howard. This section was particularly interesting especially when looking upon the works of Bronwyn Hack. I was immediately drawn to these pieces because of the rawness that they seemed to have. The first thought that came to mind was “why did this person only want to portray wolves?” The closer and longer I looked at the pieces, the information I gathered from each individual work was that it was telling a story of a lone wolf. The pieces may not be extremely detailed, but the pieces themselves express an emotion that can connect too many people.

Another artist that caught my eye within this section was Michael Camakaris. What I found intriguing about Michael’s was the fact it was in black and white, but it had not only detail, but expressed an emotion within each piece. The pieces stood out to me, because they were quite striking in that I genuinely could not look away from the work. Something about each piece made me feel the need to stand there and stare for a while. Out of the five pieces he had on display my favourite would have to be the owl trying to cover up its face with its wings. The reason why this is my favourite is simply because I didn’t know it was an owl when I first glanced at it. It actually looked like a dinosaur with something in its mouth, just the way it is shaped got me thinking it was something different.

An artist that had work within both sections of the gallery was Chris Mason. Chris Mason did sculptures of different animals such as: Buffalo, a parrot, a snake, and a hippo. What I found extraordinary about his work was the amount of detail that each sculpture had. The, I believe it to be a Python, was the largest one. It looked like it was to scale, although I have never seen a python, thank goodness but none the less it was magnificent to see.

The second section on the right side of coming into the gallery was dedicated to Leith Maguire in his ‘Heads or Tails?’ exhibition, connecting to ‘Wild Lands’. Leith Maguire’s work was stunning. It was simplistic and full of detail. When I walked into the room and saw the work, I felt a sense of comfort almost. The gentle lines and the delicate placing of the animals on the paper was so well thought out, that I felt at ease. When seeing the pieces, there is an emotional aspect to them, but instead of portraying the animals in a dimmer light, Maguire illustrates these animals in a way that made me feel like they were not something to be feared. Nothing within this section was my favourite, because I genuinely loved everything in the room.

The exhibition is an arts project Australia exhibition and is curated by Sim Luttin and Melissa Petty, and runs from May 7th up until the 17th of July on 26 Acland Street, Saint Kilda. This exhibition is definitely worth seeing and doesn’t close until July, so you should go check it out.

Wild Lands exhibition is on at the Linden New Art Gallery until July 17th.

Review written by Vanessa Gail Gustilo

Review read aloud by Lauren Klein

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Adalya joins Lauren in the studio to share her thoughts about the Tinnalley String Quartet & Lior concert she attended earlier this month.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Green Room is the latest film by Jeremy Saulnier, an American filmmaker whose two previous films, Murder Party (2007) and Blue Ruin (2013), both explore and analyse violence in various forms and settings. And now Green Room, which premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2015, extends this obsession to even darker territory. It centres on a punk band who goes to play at a small concert venue in the backwoods of Oregon, witnesses a murder, and is immediately taken hostage in the green room of the film's title and not allowed to leave. From then on, things only get worse. We start to find out more and more about the concert venue and the people behind it, the vice-like tension grows and grows and grows, and the blood of many a character is unceremoniously spilled.

The cast includes Anton Yelchin and Alia Shawkat as members of the band, as well as Macon Blair, who's acted in and co-produced all of Saulnier's films. And, in an out-of-type casting, we have Patrick Stewart who excels as the owner of the venue, the main villain of the film. His performance is sinister and sociopathic, and is slightly reminiscent of Ben Kingsley's Don Logan from Sexy Beast, in manner and appearance. It's the type of performance where it's the reserved and contained nature of the character that provides the fear and intimidation, and not the explicit violence. Importantly, he's the type of villain who is never directly violent, but rather manipulates everyone around him into violence.

And yes, the film is violent, but it's the same kind of sad and brutal violence that Saulnier has exhibited in his previous films, the kind of violence that really makes a strong point against it. The film takes no pleasure in its violence - not once in the film is the violence glorified or even shown as something for the audience to enjoy, whether it's being doled out by the "good guys" or the "bad guys", a distinction that in itself becomes increasingly blurred as the film goes on and everyone is forced into a situation of kill or be killed. In this way Saulnier raises many questions about the nature of the violence displayed by the characters, delving into the human psyche and finding out just what they're capable of. (I'm reminded of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1972) where an ordinary teacher, a self-avowed pacifist, played by Dustin Hoffman, is put into an extreme situation and has no choice but to react very violently - and indeed Peckinpah in general is perhaps an apt comparison to Saulnier's work to date - both are directors whose films examine violence and attitudes to violence in impressively intricate detail.)

Green Room is one of those rare films that is able to captivate you and capture that captivation, not letting go for the entirety of the film. It's gripping, horrifying and has just the right doses of very dark humour to tide you through the terror. Not for the faint of heart, but if you want to be taken for an intense, gory thrill-ride, then this is just the film for you.

Green Room is out now exclusive to Cinema Nova.

Review written by Ben Volchok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Earlier this month, Andrew had the opportunity to speak with Michael Williams, head of The Wheeler Centre, about the event: Paul Kelly does Shakespeare.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Australia's first production of The River, by Jez Butterworth, called for a complete revamp of the Red Stitch Actors Theatre. To make a small fishing cabin by the river feel like an arena, the audience is seated on two sides of the stage as they watch a devout fisherman entertain his novice fisherwomen guests. Sometimes you are getting a monologue delivered straight to you, at other times the actor with all the lines is facing away from you, so you're watching much more of the reacting than the acting, as it were.

The action and setting of this play are so markedly mundane that every tiny detail comes under the microscope. At one point, we are simply watching the fisherman clean and cook the fish that his current housemate has caught for a good few minutes. The music playing from his radio hells to lull the audience into an easy, meditative state that is far from boredom. If anything, these quiet and sometimes completely silent moments are a welcome relief in between the deep-and-meaningfuls about life out in the wilderness.

Specifically, much of the conversation being had is about fish, and the sport of fishing. Butterworth, and his characters, are among the countless writers and thinkers to marvel at how spiritual and sensual an act it is, especially in the dark with only the moonlight to guide you. The River features speeches about how quickly such creatures can be pulled from their world into ours; how brown trout are born but sea trout are made; how fleeting, deceiving and humbling that electric tug of the line can truly be. They might have felt self-indulgent if they were not so exotically entrancing, and even so, he indulges his audiences as much as he might be indulging himself.

No doubt during these monologues we are expected to draw parallels between the scene playing out in our mind’s eye and the scene being played out on stage, between both the fish and the women that the fisherman reels in and routinely consumes. The playwright, and arguably the director, John Kachoyan, give us many invitations to follow this line of interpretation, sometimes just short of having a character say “there are plenty more fish in the sea,” but I much preferred to follow the gaze of the characters, to look out at something larger and more ethereal than the oft-portrayed search for that special someone. The strength of the familiar characters and setting lies in their relatability, achieved by the cast – Ngaire Dawn Fair, Dion Mills and Christina O’Neill – the set designer, Chloe Greaves, and the lighting designer, Clare Springett, who bathes the scene in a multitude of gentle, cosy hues. On the other hand, the value of the extended poetic dialogue lies in its novelty, in its distance from the confines of the cabin, the play’s one, unchanging set. While the two worlds certainly take turns at being the entry point to each other at various points in the show, to peer into the wonders of the aquatic world and think only of ourselves and our own world feels like a wasted opportunity. Of course, it is important to see ourselves onstage, but it is also important to step outside of ourselves. Not everything has to be about us. Sometimes a speech about fish can actually be about fish.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Saturday April 23, 2016 marked 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare, and exactly 452 years since his birth. You have to appreciate the perfect symmetry of being born and being taken on the same day of the year, apparently due to some overzealous celebrating at his favourite pub. It also gives his global fanbase a reason to have two big celebrations each century. The latest of these, held at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, is now being screened at Cinema Nova up until Wednesday May 18, accompanied by a short film about the history of these celebrations, which announces an intention to be more than just a collection of the bard's best known couplets and soliloquies. This gala is also a showcase of his extraordinary influence across so many different artforms.

For instance, it was no surprise to get a performance of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, with Mariah Gale as a particularly histrionic Juliet, but what I wasn't expecting was to see that same scene then danced by the Royal Ballet, with a powerful final tableau of both the dancers and the actors locked in a loving embrace. There's also a Shakespeare-inspired hip-hop performance, but not of the forced variety. As we are reminded by our delightful hosts, David Tennant and Catherine Tate, these works were the mainstream popular entertainment of their time, and were performed to much rowdier crowds than they tend to draw in today. The song ‘This gives life to thee’ by Akala, founder of the Hiphop Shakespeare company, is arguably just as lyrical and hard-hitting as the Elizabethan poetry that inspired it, and to have this sitting alongside performances from English National Opera made quite a statement about the equal value of all forms of art.

The other musicals highlights were mostly jazz and blues renditions of some of the ballads from the comedies. All of them struck the right balance between true musicality whilst also supporting the poetry, rather than distracting from it. Whilst almost all of these were pre-recorded, Rufus Wainwright’s electric performance of Sonnet 29 proved to be the strong live vocal performance that the night needed. Fortunately, there was more than enough live acting, especially on the comedic front. A mixture of young, fresh faces and game old faces such as John Lithgow and Dame Judi Dench brought us some of the writer’s best scenes of farcical misunderstandings and absurd declarations of love. All of the numerous big names, which also include Roger Allam, Sir Ian McKellen, David Suchet and Helen Mirren, get brilliant chances to show off their comedic and their dramatic skills, except perhaps for Benedict Cumberbatch, who still felt rather underused.

On the flip side though, the opening act, ‘Tonight’ from West Side Story performed by 19 of the UK’s top performing arts students, got off to a wobbly start as the cast and the orchestra were out of time, although it did eventually manage to pick itself up, especially as Maria’s part began. Henry Goodman and Rufus Hound didn’t fare so well either with the three-part, one-joke song ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ from Kiss Me Kate. There is only so long one can listen to Shakespeare puns and still be amused, and the fluffed line towards the end certainly didn’t help matters. It is curious that while both the music and theatre acts were so strong, the musical theatre pieces were this far off the mark.

There is also a series of short biographical films scattered throughout the acts, presented quite fittingly by Joseph Fiennes, who of course played the man himself in Shakespeare in Love nearly 20 years ago. While some of them are a bit on-the-nose educational, they do serve well to remind us of the humble origins of the legendary wordsmith, and also to contextualize the shift from the comedies to the tragedies, which seemed to occur after the death of his son, Hamnet, who was only 11 years old. At this point, we transition from the cheerful ditties and the comic misdemeanors to the deep, dark tragedies. Most notably, Othello is performed in a magical mixture of jazz and ballet, and, just in case anyone thought proceedings were going to stray too far from all the laughs and smiles, a star-studded comedy sketch surrounding the most overthought and overused line that Shakespeare ever wrote, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” is easily the highlight of the night. Just as predictably, but very fittingly, the final two acts feature the bittersweet final verses of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, two very poignant reminders of the immortality of a good story, despite the sad mortality of those who tell it, and where they tell it.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay written by Virginia Woolf. It is based on a series of lectures Woolf gave at two women’s colleges at Cambridge University in 1928. The lectures employ a fictional narrator and narrative and they explore the idea of ‘women and fiction’. It argues space for women writers, both figuratively and literally, in the world of literature that is often dominated by men.

Sentient Theatre’s inaugural performance of A Room of One's Own is directed by, and translated and to stage, by Peta Hanranhan. Virginia Woolf's essay was beautifully bought to the stage in this production performed by Anna Kennedy, Jackson Trickett, Carolyn Bock and Marissa O’Reilly

The ideas and arguments were successfully portrayed and it was amazing to see how relevant Virginia Woolf's writings are still today. However, I felt it often delved too deeply into the intellectual and the academic in an attempt to make it more accessible to people unfamiliar with the ideas and arguments of Woolf's work.

It was extremely wordy, visually quite still and unchanging, and I often found myself drifting off into my own thoughts. I would have loved to see a change in mood and energy in this piece to keep the audience drawn into the world of the play.

Overall this play was very thought provoking and explored a very beautiful and important text.  

A Room of One’s Own is showing at La Mama Court House in Carlton until May 8th.

Review written by Ebony Beaton

Review read aloud by Janet Kelso

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a film written and directed by Taika Waititi, based on the book Wild Pork and Watercress by Barry Trump. It opened in New Zealand on March 31st 2016 and set box office records, which is no surprise because the film is phenomenal.

It follows the story of Ricky Baker played by Julian Dennison, a young delinquent from the city. He is sent by child welfare to live deep in the country with foster parents Bella, played by Rima Te Wiata, and Hec, played by Sam Neill who Ricky calls Aunt and Uncle.

Bella is very fond of Ricky and they quickly form a strong bond, but Hec clearly doesn’t want to be part of Ricky's life. Shortly after Ricky is settled and loving living with Bella, she is found dead by Hec. Child welfare send them a letter informing them that Ricky will have to be sent to another foster home. Ricky runs away into the bush because he wants to stay, Hec follows him to bring him back. Child welfare arrive to find a house empty and presume Hec has kidnapped Ricky.  A national manhunt ensues.

The film shows the journey Hec and Ricky while they are being pursued by both the police and Child welfare.

The cinematography was beautiful in showcasing New Zealand’s beautiful mountains and rivers.

The film combines a beautiful musical score with odd pacing and clunky, witty humour that reminded me a bit of the Australian TV series Around The Twist. The film was really fun and a joy to watch.  

Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a beautiful film that explores themes about belonging, family and loyalty.

It runs for 101 minutes and is opening in select cinemas on May 26th

Review written by Ebony Beaton. 

Review read aloud by Lee Klein-Butler

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Will had the opportunity to review 3 shows from the Next Wave festival: microLandscapes, Ground Control and Voices of Joan of Arc. 

All shows are being performed at the Northcote Town Hall until May 14th except for microLandscapes, which finishes on Sunday May 8th

Image: Janine Gibson from Voices of Joan of Arc, Next Wave Festival 2016 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Review by Ebony Beaton

Studio Ghibli’s lesser known film Only Yesterday is this year celebrating it’s 25th anniversary and is being re-released in Australia.

Only Yesterday is unlike other studio Ghibli films. It cuts back the magical and child-like imagination that is usually the main premise within their films. It is a realistic drama, it is made for adults and is particularly aimed at women.

It’s set in 1982 and follows Taeko, she is 27 and unmarried, and she grew up and lives and works in Tokyo. She takes a holiday to the countryside to visit the family of her elder brother of her brother-in-law, and is helping them on their organic farm to harvest safflower. She travels on the over night train and on her journey there begins to recall her childhood back in the 1960s. When she arrives at the station she is greeted by her brother in law's second cousin, Toshio, they barely know each other but quickly create a very strong bond. Through the film she finds her self more and more nostalgic of her past and it makes her reflect on her memories, good and bad, the film switches between the present and the past, showing us Taeko’s memories’ about childish romance, puberty and periods and the frustrations of math and boys. The film deals with growing up both as a child and the growing up you do when you’re an adult.

One of the most beautiful parts of the film was when Taeko compared her self now and her past self going though puberty to that of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, and how this time in her life and how when she was going though puberty to be the chrysalis stage of the caterpillar to butterfly, which to me is a really important message in how we never stop growing and learning.

This film is filled with beautiful poetic imagery like this. The end of the film was particularly moving when Taeko was faced with either staying in the country side or to go back to the city, she boarded the train to go back to Tokyo, but before she reached the next station she was provoked by a vision of her past self as a 10 year old and she knew she belonged to stay in the country side.

This film is amazingly beautiful, it speaks to so many themes and issues about growing up and how we never stop growing and how our past informs the present.

Only Yesterday is in Japanese with English subtitles, it runs for 1 hour and 58 minutes and opens May 5th and is showing at Nova Cinema in Carlton

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Content warning: contains swearing.

Review by Ebony Beaton

Fucking Parasites directed by Adam J A Cass, is a grim look into the world of two teenage girls who are imprisoned in an immigration processing centre and waiting to find out if they have been granted refugee status after fleeing from their homelands with their parents. They spend their time playing and parodying adults in their lives, such as nurses, their parents and lawyers.

It is written by Swedish playwright Ninna Tersman, she wrote it about 10 years ago and was inspired by her experience in Sweden with refugees as well has her experiences while traveling New Zealand, and is based on interviews with asylum seekers, refugees, migration board officers, lawyers, doctors and policemen both in New Zealand and Sweden.

I really enjoyed Adam J A Cass’s and this casts interpretation of this text. The set was quite abstract and stark, pastel blue boxes as rooms with small passages ways to each painted on the floor, with furniture and objects in the space being made of Lego-like blocks, and four hanging fluorescent light blubs hanging from the roof. Lots of the props including water and medication were made of Lego which I thought was a very beautiful idea. There was an eerie drone through the whole piece, stopping at different times, creating a moment of intense alertness and tenseness. This all added so much and really spoke to the piece in an interesting way. Weather it was intentional or not the sound scape made the piece feel longer than it was, I wonder if this element was intentionally woven into this piece, to make the audience feel more immersed and speak more deeply to the idea of waiting for asylum, the sound was created by one of the Actors Elizabeth Esguerra. The script was very sombre and does not give the audience the happy ending they want, I felt leaving the play very hard because we did not achieve resolution, but perhaps that was the effect the playwright wanted.

Elizabeth Esguerra and Asha Khan both performed well and matched each other’s energy. Adam J A Cass’s direction and interpretation of the script was simple and clean, and very immersive and consuming.

Fucking Parasites opened the day after the Papua New Guinea Prime minister announced that the detention centre on Manus island was unconstitutional and that the Australian government must make other arrangements for 850 asylum seekers, much like the characters in this play, their fate still unknown. I don’t know if this play can change the views of people who disagree with bringing and settling asylum seekers in Australia, but at the very least I hope it can spark a conversation.

Fucking Parasites is showing until May 8th at La Mama Theatre, Carlton.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View Details

Katie reviews Metanoia Theatre’s production Coriolanus.

Coriolanus is being performed at Heartstring Theatre until May 8th.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.