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cyphomandraNot remotely connected, but I have just signed up to Spotify on the recommendation of a friend, and am cheerfully wandering through songs I haven't heard for ages. I looked up The Veils to see if their new album was out yet (no) and was deeply amused by Finn Andrews' bio, which I can only assume involved some careful leg-pulling, given the following sentences:
Devonport is a full ten minute ferry ride from central, downtown Auckland.
Anyway. To escape the ho-hum of my own country living (I'm at least another five minutes out), I've been going to plays.
A Night To Disemember, Wil Greenway. Monologue, the trials and tribulations of an Australian teenager who has his arm bitten off by a shark. And then the other arm. And then a meteorite crashes into his back yard (crushing the Hills Hoist) and turns out to be not only intelligent but made of a cheese-like substance that can be used to create fake limbs, and then there’s the mad dingo-riding stranger who steals our hero’s legs, and the grapes, and the attack crows, and the ex-girlfriend who ends up as a head on a skateboard… basically, this balanced surreality with narrative in just the right amounts, and did not at any point decide to let us know that It Was All A Metaphor (go on, ask me how much I hated Life of Pi). I am not a big fan of solo performances, but this worked for me.
Hui, Mitch Tawhi Thomas. In the middle of a storm four siblings reunite at the family house after the death of their father –Pita, ex-Mongrel Mob turned pillar of the Destiny Church, uptight and angry, Tamati, league star in Australia with a secret pregnant Singaporean girlfriend, Tina, trans (MTF) back from London where she fled years ago, and George, the youngest, intellectually handicapped and still at home, and the only one who cares what his father wanted. Which is not a traditional Māori funeral (I had wondered, going in, why this wasn’t called “Tangi”, and it turned out to be very deliberate), and this conflict underlies all the others between the siblings. Bob, the father, is present as well, in ghostly form, watching his children without connecting.
There was a lot of good stuff in here, but it was very close to cliché on a number of fronts. The actors did an excellent job of stopping it from going over, especially George, but the Pita/Tina conflict – which escalates very rapidly and is pretty one-note in conflict and resolution – didn’t really work, and Tina herself felt like a storyline from the 1980s (the play has a contemporary setting, which means she must have left in the nineties), with the running away to be a sex worker and then heading over to London. When it turned out her partner in London had died I had my fingers crossed that it wasn’t AIDS, and it wasn’t, but I’m not sure user junkie dying of an overdose is really that much less predictable.
If they’d toned down this conflict, shifted things around a bit more so that Pita and Tina were allied on some things (I think there was an attempt to do this – they are certainly the two siblings most convinced that their father needs a proper tangi and all the relatives should be contacted) it would have worked better. Also, despite all the emotion and declarations, there’s a lack of catharsis - Tina has a lot to say, but it doesn’t feel like anything shifts, for her, the family or the ending.
What did work really well was the ending. I’d guessed some of it from early on, but not all, and it really did come down with a thunderclap. I will forgive a lot for that.
Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill. Sex, gender and colonialism, with a 25 year gap between the first act and second act in character age but 100 years in stage time, from the African veldt in the Victorian Empire to contemporary Britain. The actors shift as well – Betty in the first act, the ideal Victorian wife and barque of frailty (played, naturally, by a man) is played in the second act by the woman who played her son in the first, the Victorian patriarch becomes Betty’s daughter’s lesbian friend/lover’s enthusiastic toddler daughter, and so on. I’ve seen it before (same venue, actually) about ten years ago, and I have the script somewhere, and despite all that I’d still managed to forget the incestuous orgy in the second act. I remember the staging.
The first act is more structured, a black comedy of oppression (there is also a faithful black servant, Joshua, played by a white actor), and certainly in this production was stronger. They’d decided to make the second act contemporary with now, rather than with when the play was written (1979), and this didn’t work for me; having Lin’s brother, a soldier, be killed in Afghanistan has different associations to Ireland (as is the case in the original), Victoria’s university feminism, with all its Goddess-summoning and harking back to an idyllic matriarchal period, is very much of that time as well, and if Edward were contemporary I think there’d be much less gay angsting and much more gender theory. I am also really unkeen on the incest, which does appear, in this production, to be a kind of “it doesn’t matter as he’s gay and wants to be a woman anyway” treatment.
Betty in the second act, though, is brilliant, and pulls it together. And the whole concept of the play just makes me remember why I love theatre, and how it can make these dramatic conceptual leaps – the casting, the time-skip, the fact that one of the children in the first act is a doll (treated as completely real by all the other characters) and another child invisible in the second (and the scene where this child is lost in the park by the duck pond is possibly more disturbing for not being able to see them), the interactions between African and contemporary versions of the characters – it’s just great.
"[a] move to his grandmother's abode in Devonport, New Zealand (near Auckland) with his mother pointed Andrews in a different direction during his teeenage years. He frequented the local folk scene to escape the ho-hum of country living."
Devonport is a full ten minute ferry ride from central, downtown Auckland.
Anyway. To escape the ho-hum of my own country living (I'm at least another five minutes out), I've been going to plays.
A Night To Disemember, Wil Greenway. Monologue, the trials and tribulations of an Australian teenager who has his arm bitten off by a shark. And then the other arm. And then a meteorite crashes into his back yard (crushing the Hills Hoist) and turns out to be not only intelligent but made of a cheese-like substance that can be used to create fake limbs, and then there’s the mad dingo-riding stranger who steals our hero’s legs, and the grapes, and the attack crows, and the ex-girlfriend who ends up as a head on a skateboard… basically, this balanced surreality with narrative in just the right amounts, and did not at any point decide to let us know that It Was All A Metaphor (go on, ask me how much I hated Life of Pi). I am not a big fan of solo performances, but this worked for me.
Hui, Mitch Tawhi Thomas. In the middle of a storm four siblings reunite at the family house after the death of their father –Pita, ex-Mongrel Mob turned pillar of the Destiny Church, uptight and angry, Tamati, league star in Australia with a secret pregnant Singaporean girlfriend, Tina, trans (MTF) back from London where she fled years ago, and George, the youngest, intellectually handicapped and still at home, and the only one who cares what his father wanted. Which is not a traditional Māori funeral (I had wondered, going in, why this wasn’t called “Tangi”, and it turned out to be very deliberate), and this conflict underlies all the others between the siblings. Bob, the father, is present as well, in ghostly form, watching his children without connecting.
There was a lot of good stuff in here, but it was very close to cliché on a number of fronts. The actors did an excellent job of stopping it from going over, especially George, but the Pita/Tina conflict – which escalates very rapidly and is pretty one-note in conflict and resolution – didn’t really work, and Tina herself felt like a storyline from the 1980s (the play has a contemporary setting, which means she must have left in the nineties), with the running away to be a sex worker and then heading over to London. When it turned out her partner in London had died I had my fingers crossed that it wasn’t AIDS, and it wasn’t, but I’m not sure user junkie dying of an overdose is really that much less predictable.
If they’d toned down this conflict, shifted things around a bit more so that Pita and Tina were allied on some things (I think there was an attempt to do this – they are certainly the two siblings most convinced that their father needs a proper tangi and all the relatives should be contacted) it would have worked better. Also, despite all the emotion and declarations, there’s a lack of catharsis - Tina has a lot to say, but it doesn’t feel like anything shifts, for her, the family or the ending.
What did work really well was the ending. I’d guessed some of it from early on, but not all, and it really did come down with a thunderclap. I will forgive a lot for that.
Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill. Sex, gender and colonialism, with a 25 year gap between the first act and second act in character age but 100 years in stage time, from the African veldt in the Victorian Empire to contemporary Britain. The actors shift as well – Betty in the first act, the ideal Victorian wife and barque of frailty (played, naturally, by a man) is played in the second act by the woman who played her son in the first, the Victorian patriarch becomes Betty’s daughter’s lesbian friend/lover’s enthusiastic toddler daughter, and so on. I’ve seen it before (same venue, actually) about ten years ago, and I have the script somewhere, and despite all that I’d still managed to forget the incestuous orgy in the second act. I remember the staging.
The first act is more structured, a black comedy of oppression (there is also a faithful black servant, Joshua, played by a white actor), and certainly in this production was stronger. They’d decided to make the second act contemporary with now, rather than with when the play was written (1979), and this didn’t work for me; having Lin’s brother, a soldier, be killed in Afghanistan has different associations to Ireland (as is the case in the original), Victoria’s university feminism, with all its Goddess-summoning and harking back to an idyllic matriarchal period, is very much of that time as well, and if Edward were contemporary I think there’d be much less gay angsting and much more gender theory. I am also really unkeen on the incest, which does appear, in this production, to be a kind of “it doesn’t matter as he’s gay and wants to be a woman anyway” treatment.
Betty in the second act, though, is brilliant, and pulls it together. And the whole concept of the play just makes me remember why I love theatre, and how it can make these dramatic conceptual leaps – the casting, the time-skip, the fact that one of the children in the first act is a doll (treated as completely real by all the other characters) and another child invisible in the second (and the scene where this child is lost in the park by the duck pond is possibly more disturbing for not being able to see them), the interactions between African and contemporary versions of the characters – it’s just great.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-20 07:17 am (UTC)