Friday Five: Recent Theatre Excursions

These are brief reviews of the theatre productions I have seen recently:

1. King of Pigs - Red Line Productions and Critical Stages Touring, The Q, Queanbeyan: King of Pigs is an excellent and important show. We can’t ignore violence in the home. Physical violence; mental cruelty; coercive control. Talk about it; make it stop. We are all responsible. Seventy minutes of tightly-directed well produced storytelling with a strong ensemble and Kate Skinner as a commanding presence in the centre of the maelstrom.
2. Dags - Canberra Youth Theatre, Courtyard Studio: It's amazing to see how people who didn't live through the 80s love it a lot more than those of us who did. The energetic ensemble had great fun with the spirited design elements in this American teen-movie-style coming-of-age story at a high school. Choreography, props (not credited) and costumes (Aislinn King) were vibrant with upbeat pop tunes and hair ballads; Rubik cubes and rollerblades; dresses, playsuits and tops and shorts in bright geometric prints all proving to be highly enjoyable for cast and audience. The functional and movable set (Aislinn King) was in harmony with the Day-Glo colours and abstract, angular art of the period, allowing for flow of action across multiple scenes - bedroom; classroom; school bus - and interaction as the cast moved it into position with choreographed routines. Jade Breen as Gillian developed her character from an annoying brat unsure of her place in the world to a determined young woman with inner strength and individuality. Some of the ensemble work was engaging as the actors split into small groups and came back to a cohesive whole (ones to watch are Lily Welling; Breanna Kelly; Elliot Cleaves; William Best; Disa Swifte), while other aspects looked a little awkward and uncomfortable and were inaudible. Director Luke Rogers could have explored some of the darker themes in more depth (sexual pressure; eating disorders; self-harm) but he chose to play to his audience with refreshing humour and nothing to scare the horses.

3. The Boys - Alchemy Artistic, ACT HUB: This company has set a ludicrously high benchmark for its inaugural production. By placing this work dealing with toxic masculinity and gender violence in the round, director Amy Kowalczuk has embraced a stylish naturalism. Highlighting the pugilistic elements by evoking a boxing ring atmosphere, this is a very immersive experience as the audience are so close to the action. The power play between the genders and classes are embodied through physical movement (choreographed by Michelle Norris), inspired Brechtian alienation devices, and a versatile set that allows for various levels and height dynamics. As Brett, the man released from prison and returning to his family, Alex Hoskison portrays the barely pent up rage of a psychopath with chilling conviction. His brothers Glenn (Cole Hilder) and Stevie (Blue Hyslop) are powerless to choose their own path away from the blindingly narrow beam of his searchlight, while their respective girlfriends Michelle (Meaghan Stewart), Jackie (Indy Scarletti) and Nola (Caitlin Baker) fight for recognition and respect in their own individual ways. As the matriarch, Sandra (Liz St Clair Long), makes excuses for her 'boys' and gathers the 'girls' together, we see in the final silent scream what a losing battle this is. Amy Kowalczuk has produced this piece as the final component of her Master of Theatre and Performance (there is a Q&A and a survey as part of each performance). I would award her top marks. 
4. Hotel Sorrento - Canberra Repertory Society, Theatre 3: Kudos to director, Alexandra Pelvin, for taking Hannie Rayson's script with multiple scenes and settings and creating something harmonious. It's a great modern Australian work involving three sisters, one of whom, Meg (Rachel Howard) has written a Booker-Prize-nominated novel which, although fictional, may border on autobiography and expose some family stories. When she returns from London to Sorrento in Victoria with her English husband, Edwin (Peter Holland), the tensions simmer below the surface and threaten to drag them all down in their wake. Hilary (Victoria Tyrrell Dixon), the eldest, has stayed in the family home to care for their father, Wal (Saban Lloyd Berrell) and her son, Troy (Nick Dyball) while Pippa (Jess Waterhouse) is on a break from her high-powered New York career, displaying all the angst of the middle child simultaneously trying to fit in and stand out. An odd couple of friends, Marge (Elaine Noon) and Dick (Ryan Erlandsen) round out the characters - as written they exist to be the mouthpiece for ideas of gender and cultural politics, but they are acted with enough depth to be more than just the discussion puppets they might be. The creative set design (Michael Sparks) allows room for expression and interpretation of all the moments, and the delivery is kept subtle avoiding the temptation to fall into melodramatic soap opera, highlighting the wry asides rather than full-frontal confrontation. There are many potential stereotypes contained within this play but the admirable direction and acting make these characters seem like real people, and the dinner scene is remarkably convincing. As Tolstoy once wrote, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."



Jess Waterhouse, Rachel Howard and Victoria Tyrrell Dixon as the three sisters in Hotel Sorrento 

5. Three Tall Women - Chaika Theatre Company, ACT HUB: One of the titular women is Karen Vickery, playing a ninety-two-year-old woman (A) who is close to death and reliving her life with senile and interrupted memories. Her audience is her carer, B (Lainie Hart), and a solicitor, C (Natasha Vickery), who attend to her physical and legal/ financial needs when she lets them. At the end of the first act she has a stroke, and then, as a figure lies in the bed throughout Act II, the three women play versions of her aged 26, 52 and 78, none of them wanting to turn into their future version but knowing that inevitably they must. So far; so Edward Albee, who delights in distancing his plays from his audience with overt absurdism. Due to the nature of the play it highlights the individual aspect of the actor and leaves little room for rapport. It is like watching a masterclass - "Look at me; I'm acting!" - and they do it very well with clarity and deliberation, but it feels dispassionate and insular. With the concluding lines, 'That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.', I don't think this play even likes itself.

Casual Cruelty and Deep Unhappiness: The Mystery of Love

The Mystery of Love by Andrew Meehan

Head of Zeus

Pp. 247

Subtitled, Constance and Oscar: A Novel, this reads as if Constance has written it (but in omniscient third person) and Oscar has provided footnotes and comments from prison. Her tone is practical and her writing as in a diary, full of capitals and ampersands. His is flamboyant and full of criticism and narcissism, interrupting her story – as he must have done in life – by suddenly introducing his affair with Robbie as an entertaining anecdote rather than as an admission of adultery to his wife. Constance wants to escape from suffocating existence and sees marriage to Oscar as a way to do this; she is hoping for intimacy but is not blinded by his brilliance and comes to see him as two different people. She refers to OW, the performer, who is intense but exhausting, and Oscar, the man behind closed doors, whom she loves with all his frustrating imperfections. “Oh for goodness’ sake, she said. Clever people are such exhausting company. Thankfully you’re only clever in public. & if you’re here to propose marriage, let’s get on with it.”

Oscar’s mother, Lady Jane Wilde (LJW) knows her son is gay and that his relationship with Constance will be purely for show and for progeny. “The week before the wedding, LJW had invited her for dank tea in a darkened room &, if it were possible to be both cryptic & overly direct, had spoken at length about syphilis & the absence of a cure for it.” Later, Constance has occasion to remark about LJW and her unwanted opinions, “It was impossible to ever know if the woman was being helpful or just plain vicious.” Constance may not be swept up in romance, but she does want to change her life. It’s reminiscent of the relationship between Romeo and Juliet where he spouts the romantic poetry and she is keen to get on with the physical aspects. He seems more interested than her dress than her desires; her appearance rather than her appetites, so she tells him, “Sex isn’t everything, Oscar. But it is something.” She is aware that something might be missing from the relationship but does not question it too deeply at the beginning.

The single-minded need to have children and remove herself from her upbringing causes Constance to sacrifice many idealistic notions. “Better not to consider other weddings in the middle of your own. For this was a gathering with all the vivacity of a queue for meat pies.” Oscar doesn’t enjoy the sex, as she learns on her wedding night, “But it delighted her that he would put himself through something he didn’t enjoy just to please her. How could he bring himself to do something he hated? So many delights in one day. This was how she knew he loved her.” This unlikely prose reads like a man writing a woman who has never actually talked to a woman. Oscar’s foot notes describe how he tried to imagine something interesting when with her, in much the same way as he did when he masturbated, which is incredibly offensive considering OW is meant to have and empathy.

Constance and son, Cyril

Once Constance does have children, she discovers they are not the solution to providing happiness, and she doesn’t adore them as some might expect a mother would. “You couldn’t just squirt out child after child in the hope that it would make you feel better about yourself. What were children for? To make the days so very long as well as fraught with danger.”

Committed to the Rational Dress Movement, Constance is critical of restrictive women’s fashion. “Was it such a crime to be able to move your arm in what you wore? What if she would be required to bowl a ball or paint a picture? But her aunt would not be told that a crinoline was a fire hazard. & what if she were to fall under the wheels of a carriage? It was like walking around with a building attached to you.”

Rational Dress Society cartoon

Forgiveness and humility radiate from Constance, as she is persistent and determined to make things work. “Marriages don’t fail. The arrangements just change.” She has no rancour over her position as a woman publicly humiliated by her husband’s homosexual affair and imprisonment, and reflects, “Oscar is not a bad person. In the eyes of the law he behaved wrongly, & for one so clever he was certainly a bit dim to bring all this upon himself.”

The author tries to steer the reader away from pitying Constance her plight by suggesting that isn’t how she feels about herself and that she was never deluded. There is a myth about the wronged woman that he seeks to dispel with a touch too much protestation. Oscar’s final footnote is to comment, “For I have caused you so much pain & given the chance I would cause you more.” Despite trying to re-balance the narrative and claim the outsider knows nothing about the internal workings of a marriage, Meehan hasn’t imagined a particularly credible character and this remains a miserable book full of casual cruelty and deep unhappiness.

Friday Five: Walks in the Rainforest

Last week we were in the rainforest at Lamington National Park. It rained - a lot. But there were beautiful walks and plenty of flora and fauna to observe. We stayed at O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat, which was rather marvellous, and while we indulged and luxuriated in spa baths, steam rooms, infinity pools and restaurants, we also did some walking. Here is a selection of the tracks.

Five (Six) Rainforest Walks:

1.  Booyong Walk/ Tree Tops and Mountain Botanic Gardens:

This was the first walk on the first day (while we were waiting for our room to be ready) so there are a lot of photos of trees and micro-photos of plants and fungi, as I absorbed all the amazing green! I make no apologies. The Black Booyong Tree (Argyrodendron actinophyllum) is a classic rainforest dweller, native to Eastern Australia, with the most amazing buttress tree roots. Walking past monumentous examples of this species heightens the awe-inspiring feeling of being in a natural place of worship.

As you can see, many of these trees are entwined in strangler figs, the name given to a number of tropical and subtropical plant species, including some banyans and unrelated vines. They share a common 'strangling' growth habit as an adaptation for growing in dark forests where the competition for light is intense. These plants spend the first part of their life without rooting in the ground. Their seeds (often bird-dispersed), germinate in crevices in other trees, then grow their roots downwards and envelop the host tree while also growing upward to reach into the sunlight zone above the canopy.

Strangler figs suck up the nutrients from its victims, causing them to die eventually. When the original support tree dies, the strangler fig becomes a 'columnar tree' with a hollow centre core. However, the strangler fig can also help its support tree survive storms - that's one very complicated relationship you've got going on there, nature! 

The Tree Top walk is an iconic aspect of O'Reilly's, of which they are very proud. It is 180 metres long, consisting of nine suspension bridges up to 16 metres above ground and includes a deck 30 metres above ground in a fig tree over the walkway. It was the first of its kind in Australia (built in 1987) and the unique and innovative structure is free to visitors, allowing them to observe life in the rainforest canopy at close range.

We also walked around the Mountain Gardens, which is through a little gate like The Secret Garden. Once inside it is easy to get lost meandering between the boulders along the twisting turning pathways as there are no signs, but it's a delight to find a garden in a rainforest setting rather than the usual urban setting, and it's intimate enough not to feel daunting. An enjoyable time can be spent admiring the delicate flowers on the robust plants, and it's a photographer's paradise. It isn't actually a part of the resort and operates on donations.

I think this is a corkwood tree with its rough bark, but don't quote me on that.

2. Box Forest Circuit

Opinions appear to differ as to the length of this walk (I've seen it recorded as 10.3km, 14.2km and 18.9km) and the time it takes to complete - it took us approximately four hours, and I suspect the weather has a lot to do with it. On the day we walked it, it had been raining heavily and there was lot of mud underfoot. 'Stepping stones' were submerged leading to river crossings becoming thigh-deep wades through fast-flowing rapids, but the waterfalls and rainforest scenery were magnificent. 

The track leads past impressive stands of smooth, pink-barked brush box (Lophostemon confertus) some of which have been radiocarbon-dated at 1,500 years, making them the oldest ever carbon-dated trees on Australia's mainland.

It wouldn't be a rainforest without a rainbow

Him Outdoors sitting on a giant tree

I spotted two snakes together which raised my heart rate considerably: a slaty grey and a carpet python. I screamed at them and the slaty grey slithered off although the python was unperturbed. I suspect it had recently eaten and couldn't have been less interested in us. 

And here are some of the waterfalls and creeks I mentioned, complete with instructions as to what you shouldn't do. 

Him Outdoors on Picnic Rock

3. The Border Track

The 'fabled' Border Track connects the Green Mountains and Binna Burra sections of Lamington National Park. It is a 21.4 km one-way track (which, of course, you can walk in either direction) and crosses the border several times from Queensland to New South Wales and back again. Right from the start, the sun was attempting to break through the clouds and creating stage hazer effects. Apparently, 'on a clear day, lookouts provide spectacular views' but we just saw the signs for the lookouts with no views at all. We spent a lot of time squelching through ankle-deep mud as the mist swirled around us and we couldn't see a thing!

At the high point (Mt Bithongabel), it was like entering into another world. The forest simply dripped as all the tree-branches were clad in moss and the droplets of water hung at the end of everything green. Shafts of sunlight danced like wraiths before disappearing into the ferns, and paths led to impossible futures.

In case we ran out

Of course there was much hilarity over the potential word confusion of the Queensland Naturalists' Cairn, and Him Outdoors suggested taking his clothes off for  picture (I stopped him; it's okay). The Queenstown Naturalists' Club was founded in 1906, and included Cyril T White, who was the Government Botanist from 1917 until his death in 1950. He was one of a party who camped at Mt Bithongable in 1918 and drew attention to the scientific and scenic value of the National Park. 

Him Outdoors at one of the (alleged) lookouts

We stopped at a point of the ridge with a minor break in the clouds to eat our soggy sandwiches, where we encountered our first other walker - a chap from Brisbane who had come up here on his day off work. He had taken his shoes off to dry out (ha!), and they were those five-finger barefoot running shoes. I realised he would have been leaving large bare footprints in the deep mud and wondered if this might be the origin of the Yowie myth (there is a statue of a Yowie in the resort café). According to a Wikipedia article (so it must be true, right), this region in south-east Queensland has had more Yowie reports than anywhere else in Australia. 

And did I mention it was wet? Up here, if you've been tramping through the rivers, you are going to get leeches. They were very attracted to us (we are clearly so desirable) and became quite attached! A few days after this walk when I had a foot massage at the spa, the woman there told me that I shouldn't worry about a few bites as the leeches were quite harmless - she was from Northern Queensland and used to the much bigger varieties. She was aware that they could be quite confronting, however, and told me she encountered one English bloke who was totally alarmed, having never seen them before until they were wiggling away between his toes, and one fell off his foot into her lap as she was exfoliating his skin. Eeuww!

This is near the end, where we have very nearly made it and I am practically hallucinating with tiredness, but people seem to be smiling, so that's good! 

Koala at Binna Burra

Calamity Sue with bubbles waiting in the bar

4. Balancing Rock and Moonlight Crag

This is a good walk for a rainy day - and there were plenty of them, so that's just as well. The flora is dripping wet, and delicately trembling beneath raindrops.The walk crosses the valley to see similar views from the other side of hills, crags, rocks, waterfalls and (of course) rain-forests.

Looking back across the valley to our villa

The cloud formations over the views at the Moonlight Crag lookout prove how localised these rain showers are, and how those clouds and mist cling to the contours of the hills.

Him Outdoors is not impressed with the beverage options on tap at the bar

Looking back across to Moran's Falls

Balancing Rock

Balancing Him Outdoors

5. Wishing Tree and Moran's Falls

This is a pleasant little walk through the forest to come to the Wishing Tree, a big booyong tree with a hole in the middle that people can walk through. It is an odd feeling when you are inside a tree trunk and I can understand why people are inspired to make a wish. The route takes us across a swing bridge; those are always fun. Once at the wishing tree, there are different options to return - one incorporates the Moran's Falls track. 

Good question; always worth checking

Is is woodland elves?

No, it's Calamity Sue and General Philosophy

View of Moran's Falls

Moran's Falls Creek before it tumbles over the edge

6. (Yes, I know) Python's Rock

The walk to Python's Rock is one of the easiest walks in the park and it is extremely rewarding. We walked along it in the late afternoon just before the sun set and the birds were making their last chirp and squawks before settling down for the evening. It sounded peaceful and the light was amazing. The view from Python's Rock overlooks Castle Crag to the Lost World with Mount Throakban to the left and also more views of Moran's Falls. Beautiful.

Portrait panorama

Typical buttress of a booyong tree

View of Moran's Falls (again)