Friday Five: More Theatre

These are brief reviews of five theatre productions I have seen recently

1. Jane Eyre - shake & stir theatre, The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre: In the spirit of full disclosure I must point out that Jane Eyre is one of my favourite novels, along with Animal Farm, a play of which shake & stir produced last year - review here. Jane Eyre matches the production company's enormously high standards - the pyrotechnics on the set alone (I'm assuming you know the story so this is no spoiler) are worth the price of admission. The new adaptation featuring original music (written and performed live on stage by Sarah McLeod) is simply outstanding. Nelle Lee plays the titular role with passion and repression from the derided young girl to the dignified mature woman she becomes, guided by her impulses, values and strong sense of inner strength. The three other actors play all the other roles with complete conviction; the blend of Gothic Romance and contemporary gender insights is absolutely perfect and so true to the novel it has instantly become one of my favourite experiences. 
2. Pygmalion - Tempo Theatre Inc., Belconnen Community Theatre: Often overshadowed by the opulent musical, My Fair Lady based upon it, Pygmalion is arguably George Bernard Shaw's masterpiece. Tempo's version is true to the intentions of the socialist polemic, indeed, Peter Fock stands out as Alfred Doolittle railing against middle class mortality rather than as the too-often-seen portrayal as a commitment-shunning buffoon. Adam Salter gives Henry Higgins the necessary academic confidence and boyish glee in 'his' achievements in passing off the flower girl, Eliza, as a well-bred young lady after his elocution lessons, while leaving no room for mature sentiment - this is usually balanced by the gravitas of Colonel Pickering, which is absent in this production. The young man, Thomas Cullen, brings gentleness to the role but removing the title of Colonel changes its focus entirely, with insufficient direction to compensate. The highlights of the play are embodied in the women. As Mrs Higgins and Mrs Pearce, Elaine Noon and Joan White respectively are delightful, providing a calm dignity and reasoned response to Higgins (and, in one scene, to a flimsy set failure). Meaghan Stewart as Eliza Doolittle is stunning, willful, fierce and vulnerable; determined to be her own woman and not a creation of Higgins' to be put on a pedestal or shut in a museum. The audience is with her from the beginning, and contemporary concerns about women's rights in society and their treatment by those in traditional male professions merely accentuate our sympathies.

3. Arsenic and Old Lace, Canberra Repertory Society, Theatre 3: Joseph Kesselring's 1939 farcical black comedy is probably more alluded to than it is seen - most people have heard of the two seemingly sweet spinster sisters (Abby and Martha) who have taken to murdering gentleman lodgers and burying them in the basement. In Canberra Rep's production, the smiling assassins are the perfectly harmonious duo of Alice Ferguson (the acerbic grand dame who plays it straight) and Nikki-Lynne Hunter (who gives it a gloriously dizzy and ditsy turn). Their art critic nephew, Mortimer (a frenetic Jack Shanahan), has to deal with the increasingly odd events while trying to decide whether to marry the girl next-door (Natalie Waldron, who deserves more than yet another looks-in-lieu-of-character role). The cast is rounded out by Robbie Matthews as the barmy brother who thinks he is a former Aussie PM, Rob de Fries playing the murderous nephew brother whose plastic surgery conceals his identity, and Kayla Ciceran as the alcoholic accomplice who performed the operation.  Director Ian Hart acknowledges the script is outdated and attempts to modernise it by setting it in contemporary Queanbeyan, hence the Aussie PM reference rather than the original Teddy Roosevelt, and Jonathan is now meant to resemble Freddy Krueger rather than Boris Karloff (who actually performed the role in the original stage play). Not all of the updates land, however, such as Hart's awkward approach to gender diversity in casting or the Fawlty-Towers-esque anagram gag adds an unnecessarily creaky element to an otherwise excellent set (Andrew Kay once again with a deft and professional touch). The timing is uneven and efforts to overcompensate frequently fall flat in a desperate stretch for unobtainable laughs. 
4. Emerald City - Free Rain, ACTHUB: David Williams' 1987 satire of men behaving badly is all about the dialogue. We are harangued with debates about the merit of art - celluloid and literary - and the inherent differences between Sydney and Melbourne. Sydney, with its unsubstantiated promise of fulfilling dreams is the Emerald City of the title, while Melbourne is for urban intellectuals who are motivated by morals rather than money. If you want to hear 'characters' discuss these topics at witty and acerbic length, you could do worse. The actors all excel in the limited range their characters are constrained to demonstrate, and they deliver the dialogue with excellent clarity: every word could be heard, and there are an awful lot of them. Designers have clearly had nostalgic fun with set and costume (Cate Clelland and Fiona Leach), as it's all chic decor and keen angles combined with silk shirts and sharp suits, while director Anne Somes has softened the edges with sartorial metaphors - her subtle use of shoes is inspired. These people are unpleasant, but it is even more disturbing to acknowledge how 80's ambition seems tame in an environment where the bully boys have moved on from verbal sniping to willfully disregarding laws, contesting elections and invading countries. Who knew we would ever look back on the 'greed is good' mantra as the good old days.
5. Urinetown - Heart Strings Theatre Co., Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre - Yes, it’s a terrible title; yes, it’s truly awful subject matter; yes, it’s utterly ridiculous, but Urinetown is a lot of fun! The band are great; the voices are outstanding and the deceptively simple-looking choreography and staging are spectacular. I'm so glad that Ylaria Rogers has finally brought this dream to life. As a self-identifying non- musical theatre fan, I found this to be an unexpected surprise. Is there any other kind? It self-referentially (and reverentially) mocks the genre of musical theatre (particularly Broadway) and parodies specific musicals: I didn't get all the allusions but Les Mis, West Side Story and The Threepenny Opera were obvious even to me, and the song Run Freedom RUn, brought me out in a cold sweat with a flashback to singing Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat, but it could be any gospel-inspired show-tune. I also recognised the Our Town 'narrated by the stage-manager' trope, but my theatre-going companion didn't, and he loved it anyway. So there really is something for everyone. 

My Newest Favourite Thing: Fiona Hall's Wrong Way Time

I have seen the works of Fiona Hall before. I think she is innovative and creative with an ability to execute her ideas in an engaging manner. In 2015 her exhibition Wrong Way Time attracted global attention at the Venice Biennale, and the following year I was lucky enough to see it at the National Gallery of Australia, complemented by a collection of Hall's works mainly from the NGA collection.

In Wrong Way Time, Fiona Hall brings together hundreds of elements, each embedded with layers of meaning. Together, the works focus powerfully on the intersecting themes of global conflict, world finances and the environment, which Hall perceives as a "minefield of madness, badness and sadness in equal measure."

Sasha Grishin wrote in The Canberra Times, "The exhibition's 800 items are presented within a darkened space, with walls painted black, as part of a deeply immersive installation. It is a troubling, dark, gothic experience, where the artist appears as a shaman who, through alchemy, transforms the materials drawn from a commonly experienced reality into mystical and wondrous creations. Wall-pieces create an outer boundary and vitrines, which are set up as wunderkammer-like cases or cabinets of curiosities, frame the central space that is occupied by the installation All the King's men."

This installation includes twenty sculptures, knitted out of shredded camouflage fabric from military uniforms of various countries. Ghostly vestigial bodies hang from oversized disfigured heads, forming a disturbing group that represents the foot-soldiers who are casualties of conflict regardless of nationality. Teeth, bones, horns and found objects adorn the mask-like heads and their spectral skeletal bodies. 

According to curator of the NGA, Leigh Robb, "It is an exemplary manifestation of Hall's maverick powers of material transformation and is the culmination of decades of conceptual and material investigation... These hollow people of war and conflict represent the many who have fallen and those who are yet to fall in the name of nationhood. Fiona Hall has shaped the course of Australian art history. Her enduring vision will help us to understand ourselves, each other and these uncertain times."

Sasha Grishin continues, "A major artistic strategy in Hall's repertoire is that of 'bricolage', where the artist improvises with the materials at hand. It is a sort of DIY approach to art making, where the artist will take aluminium sardine and fish tins, US dollar bills, as well as other foreign banknotes, old clocks, model aeroplanes and ships, damaged books, a carburettor, car light and radiator hose, light switches, driftwood, pool balls, mobile phones, camouflage military garments, deer teeth, a zebra hoof, credit cards, bones and horns, together with coal, bread, perfume bottles and living spiders and employs these to create alternative realities. The French term 'bricolgae' comes from the verb 'bricoler' (to tinker) and in some ways this characterises this artist's method of work."

In Tender she slices up US dollar bills to become the threads out of which to build beautifully designed and realised bird's nests. The banknotes are woven into an 86-piece installation accurately replicating the nests of extinct birds from areas logged by American interests. The nests are now bird-less, silent and deserted. The title itself plays with an array of associations from 'legal tender' to emotional tenderness. 

To make Tender, Hall paid face value for thousands of US dollars and sliced them up to weave the nests. As the US dollar is the most valued currency in Third World countries, this work suggests people hunting for the dollar like a bird scavenging for materials to build its nest. The artists is also commenting on one of the prices paid for capitalism - the destruction of the environment. 

Speaking about Tender in 2006, Fiona Hall said, "I knew that shredding the American dollar was for me conceptually an act of revenge for the sorry state our world is in. I don't mean to direct my wrath towards that to the United States alone, but it's the inevitability of the globalised world that we live in that the environment is under enormous pressure. Socially and globally suddenly we are aware of that in a way that we weren't five years ago when I was still making that work.

"It's amazing how quickly the tide has changed. The power of the greenback has really faded in the last few years. Now the greenback suddenly has perhaps come to represent a world and a system that is foundering; a system that used to be watertight and isn't any longer. Now with the financial downturn globally and with all the other political events of the last few years that have changed the idea of America as being a figurehead nation for the rest of the world to aspire to - all of that has changed in the minds of so many of us and I think that our regard of the American dollar in that context is different now."

The work explores the complex relationship between the natural world and human systems of value, trade and exchange. Hall combines the empirical knowledge of a scientist working in the natural sciences, the creative associative imagination of the artist, together with an obsessive and manual dexterity and technical precision.

Another example of her work combining the natural world with capitalism is Leaf Litter (1999-2003) in which paper money or bank notes are used as canvases for delicate x-ray-like paintings of leaves. While money is the bottom line in our contemporary economy and overrides crucial environmental concerns, plants are often the raw material for generating income (and money, made from paper, is also produced from plants). Fiona Hall's witty and elegant work captures this perfectly.

Also adding to the Venice exhibition is the earlier work, Paradisus terrestris (1989-90), made from sardine tins and aluminium cans over a fifteen year period. These otherwise discarded materials have been transformed into beautiful objects as each sardine tin has been wound down to reveal within an embossed depiction of the human form. At the top of the tin grows botanically correct representations of flora; the plant and the body interconnected in form. The connection we as humans have with our natural world is emphasised through ideas of fertility and reproduction, growth and natural cycles.

Holdfast (Macrosystis angustifolia; giant kelp)

As seen in Holdfast (Macrosystis angustifolia; giant kelp), part of the object emulates the natural and jagged textures of foliage, seen branching outwards, growing from the unraveling tin can. The text imprinted on the tin is a jarring reminder of the artificiality of the sculpture.

In a similar vein, endangered marine species have been hand-carved out of single sardine tins and each painted with maritime signal flags to comprise the work, Fleet. 

Fleet

Vaporised

I loved the way many of the exhibitions were displayed as items in curiosity cabinets. These cabinets of curiosities (wunderkammer) originated in Renaissance Europe as a way of cataloguing the world (or communicating one version of it). Glass cabinets also recall coffins and embalmed corpses; captured forms that we have killed so we can study. It creates a sombre atmosphere, in keeping with the subject matter. In one case (Vaporised) sits a collection of small glass perfume bottles on which are painted skulls to represent disappeared Tamils in Sri Lanka. Fiona Hall writes,

"The world is a very curious place. It's an amazing place and it's filled with curious things in the best sense of the word. And that seems to be accentuated by the way that objects have been displayed in cabinets; an innocent idea that you could actually put all these things in a museum display and you could comprehend the world. In a sense the museum cabinet makes the world somehow more incomprehensible rather than more comprehensible because you've just taken little fragments of it and conveniently left aside the context. And I find that curious as well; the implications of what's not in the cabinet; that are pointed out because of their absence; because of what has been put in the cabinet."  

I also really enjoyed the section of the exhibition, Crust, in which a series of small sculptures carved from baked bread installed on an open atlas represent various tragedies - environmental, cultural and militaristic - that occurred in the region on which it sits. One bread carving is of intricate barbed wire; another, an exploded village on a map of Syria, with tiny bricks of bread strewn across it. Dr Deborah Hart, senior curator at the National Gallery describes the sculpture as, "one of the great miracles of the show that made it through customs. Even Fiona was quite amazed that these had arrived in tact."

The exhibition investigates global politics, world finances and the environment. Other areas of interest for Hall include post-colonial issues, the relationship between culture and nature and the human condition. Hart describes Wrong Way Time as a "very dense exhibition" as it involves works made from an assortment of media including bread, banknotes, cork, aluminium and cuckoo clocks. These curious configurations speak deeply of Hall's practice, which continues to transcend fluidly without restriction.

The artist's choice of materials is never arbitrary, nor are the newly created forms. The large, dramatic wall-piece, Manuhiri (Travellers), looks from a distance like a collection of bones in the form of a strange organic installation. On closer inspection it turns out to be made from driftwood, arranged in a loose mandorla-like pattern.

The artist explains that she collected the driftwood from a beach at Awanui on New Zealand's East Cape, where the Waiapu River flows into the sea. Over-farming has led to wide-spread erosion and the trees have fallen and been swept out to sea, while the waves and tide have returned them to the shore in the form of driftwood. Manuhiri is like a shrine or graveyard of the forest, or in the artist's words, these bits of driftwood appear like "travellers from a former forest life reshaped by the ocean currents and now journeying to another life back in the world of the living."

Manuhiri (Travellers)

One of the strongest parts of the show is Kuka irititja (Animals from another time), where Hall collaborated with 12 women artists from the Tjanpi Desert Weavers of the Central and Western Desert region of Australia: Roma Butler, Stacia Lewis, Rene Nelson, Takiriya Tjawina Roberts, Angkaliya Nelson, Sandra Peterman, Yangi Yangi Fox, Molly Miller, Nyanu Watson, Rene Kulitja, Niningka Lewis and Mary Pan. These women have  long history of making animals woven from the local grasses and other materials from their country, and Fiona suggested they work together to weave a 40-piece installation representing a group of native animals, most of which are extinct in the wild. 

The work was created in June 2014 at an artist camp at a place near Pilakatilyuru (in the tri-state border region of Western Australia where it meets South Australia and the Northern Territory). The Tjanpi artists have a deep and intricate understanding of their country and were able to incorporate this knowledge into the woven pieces. They drew upon the interrelatedness of people, place and ancestral stories they call Tjukurpa (Dreaming), and from their intimate knowledge of hunting, tracks, and animal behaviour - including that of the predatory feral cat, the top killer of native Australian animals. Fiona as a non-Indigenous Australian brought her own thoughts about the impacts of colonisation on our environment and the animals that inhabit it.

Both the Tjanpi weavers and Fiona Hall share a mastery of weaving with various materials and this shared skill helped to inform the collaboration. The Tjanpi weavers harvested tjanpi (grass) and Fiona supplied Australian and British military printed camouflage fabric to incorporate into the works registering the damaging effects of British colonialisation including atomic testing in the 1950s and 60s on the fragile desert ecosystem and the lives of the Aboriginal people. The artists used each other’s fibres and also added in other found materials to create the final group of work. They are strange, whimsical creations that serve as a commentary on loss and absence.  

A woven helicopter seems incongruous until we read that Hall uses this to refer to the nuclear tests that were carried out at Maralinga by the British Government, with the agreement and support of the Australian Government, between 1952 and 1963. The toxic fallout is believed to be responsible for widespread illnesses across desert communities, the deaths of the weavers' parents and relatives, and the extinction of animal species.  

The exhibition also features several recent works on loan from the artist that were shown in dOCUMENTA 13 (2012). Kassle, Germany. These relate to endangered birds and animals from around the world. Hall reflects on the troubled times we are facing and this concern is ingrained in many of the pieces. The works from Fall Prey incorporate military camouflage material from the country in which the species is found on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) List of Threatened Species, and found objects to create curious hunting trophies; a macabre menagerie of near extinction promoting environmental vigilance.

Macromia Splendens/ splendid cruiser,France (2009-11) IUCN threat status: vulnerable

Polyommatus humedase/ Piedmont anomalous blue butterfly, Italy (2012) IUCN threat status: endangered

Cervus elaphus/ red deer, Europe, North America (2012) IUCN threat status: least concern

Another few works that stand out to me are the coal and aluminium sculpture, Untitled, with its implications of seaweed, branches, and lungs breathing pollutants that have come from natural sources, and the potato print and watercolour on khadi paper, Mob Rot, which speaks for itself in a fundamental earthy commentary on corruption and exploitation.  

Untitled (2015)

Mob Rot (2015)

Another exhibit which was not part of the Vienna Biennale, but which I enjoyed all the same, was Morality Dolls - the seven deadly sins (1984). This series of marionette dolls, based on the theme of the seven deadly sins are grotesque yet captivating, assembled from a variety of photocopied anatomical diagrams. Each figure anthropomorphises a vice, with body parts acting as metaphors for each sin. Hall's use of antique medical imagery alludes to the historic nature of these sins. The fanciful forms satirise basic human characteristics which continue to be relevant in a contemporary context. There is a sense of inexorability as these beasts are controlled by someone else pulling the strings. 

It's hard to explain the visceral hold this art has on me, as it appeals to and repels me at the same time. I will leave the last words to a local art reviewer, Sasha Grishin in the Canberra Times.

"Throughout the exhibition there is a combination of immediate high visual impact followed by a slow release of associative meanings that each individual viewer brings to the experience. Although it has become fashionable to speak of 'slow art' , where beyond the immediate 'wow factor' there lies a rich, slowly developing cultural response, Hall's art creeps along at a subversive pace. The high-[pitched dramatic, emotional and intuitive level in her art is to some extent supplemented by its cerebral and philosophical content. It is art that is simultaneously visually exciting and at times intellectually profound." 

There is one more major part of Wrong Way Time, which is Wrong Way Clocks, a body of work that I feel deserves its own post. So I'll get on to that next.