Wars of the Roses
Wars of the Roses by Williams Shakespeare, directed by John Bell. Bell
Shakespeare @ the Arts Centre Playhouse until June 4.
Shakespeare's early history plays have preoccupied many an ambitious
director. The eight plays make an extraordinary epic drama covering five
generations of brutal power struggles. The second tetralogy, Henry VI parts
I, II and III and Richard III, dramatises the ruinous civil wars between the
houses of Lancaster and York that tore England apart before the ascension of
the Tudor dynasty to the throne.
John Bell follows luminaries like Peter Hall, Michael Bogdanov and Adrian
Noble in tackling the second tetralogy. And like Hall ( Wars of the Roses)
and Noble (The Plantagenets), he has elected to adapt the four works into a
single play. To be more precise, he has worked the Henry VI trilogy into a
play, and then appended as an epilogue the shortest version ever of Richard
III, whose Machiavellian ascension to power over a pile of corpses takes the
length of a song.
This is a self-consciously irreverent Australian adaptation of works which
are, to the marrow of their bone, about Englishness. Why, then, should we
be interested in them? Shakespeare's analysis of the tragic, inexorable
cycle of power suggests one answer. But rather than delving into the harsh
morality of Shakespeare's complex political world, Bell sidesteps the
question and plumps for cheap populism.
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Phobia : text and direction by Douglas Horton, music and sound concept by
Gerard Brophy. Chamber Made Opera at Melbourne Town Hall.
wit 1 (wt)
n. 1. The natural ability to perceive and understand; intelligence.
2. a. Keenness and quickness of perception or discernment; ingenuity. Often
used in the plural: living by one's wits .b. wits Sound mental faculties;
sanity: scared out of my wits .
3. a. The ability to perceive and express in an ingeniously humorous manner
the relationship between seemingly incongruous or disparate things. b. One
noted for this ability, especially one skilled in repartee. c. A person of
exceptional intelligence.
Perhaps the chief pleasure of Phobia is its wit. In all senses of the word.
It's a fond and deft tribute to the genre of film noir : the black and
white world of hard boiled detectives, blonde dames, mysterious violent
deaths and high heels clicking down shadowy alleys: a Hitchcockian universe
in which the key to a mystery, instead of comfortably knitting up the world
like Miss Marple, opens up to existential blankness. But here the medium
really is the message.
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Boy Gets Girl by Rebecca Gilman, directed by Kate Cherry. Melbourne Theatre
Company at the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until July 2.
I don't think my ho hum feeling about Boy Gets Girl was entirely to do with
the revolve, but it's fair to say that the orchestration of the play didn't
help. Director Kate Cherry had an idea, and stuck to it grimly. Like so:
scene ends, turn up thriller-type music and industrial lighting effects,
whirl those desks and beds sedately around the theatre, cue hurried prop
preparation by the actors, and bingo! new scene...
Don't get me wrong, I like revolves, they're funky. But as somebody said of
love making, repetition either enhances or deadens. In this case, the
inexorable rhythm set by the revolve had me yawning by half time and longing
for a static stage where lights could just come up, bang, without all this
technological fuss. And although Cherry's direction flattened any dramatic
arc the play might have had, I'm not sure that it had much in the first
place. The only real virtue of this production is that it frames a virtuoso
performance by that fine actor, Belinda McClory.
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
All the best
Alison
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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