Every Breath | Belvoir
- April 8th, 2012
- Posted in Reviews & Responses
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Yes it’s unusual. Unusual for me to take so long to write a response to a new work. But I felt I needed to take my time on this one. Mainly because I think this is yet another highly controversial production from team Belvoir.
And it is controversial not for the obvious reason – Benedict Andrews at the helm usually triggers a hot-collared response from the conservative punters – (I was told recently his Marriage of Figaro stirred some outrage from those who saw the jovial humping of a dead elk/deer pre-interval to be too much.) Again, the mainstage has attracted attention in its staging of yet another “new Australian play” which is seen as under developed.
This show was always going to attract attention. Benedict Andrews directing, but more than that Benedict Andrews directing his own piece of writing. A piece of writing which was shortlisted by the Sydney Theatre Company for the Patrick White Award. There’s a huge mass of top, professional support and auctoritas behind this show.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the role and rise of the auteur director in theatre. I think it’s worth reading Michael Billington’s thoughts in the UK Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/apr/14/auteur-theatre and the inherent dangers about it’s promience in theatre. “The danger of the auteur theory is twofold. It creates idols who, to their acolytes, can do no wrong… The other danger is that the interpreter becomes bigger than the thing interpreted.”
On the otherside of the northern hemisphere – and some years earlier (1985)- Frank Rich writes about the “rise” of the auteur director – sighting Kantor, Grotwoski, Peter Brook and the teachings of Meyerhold and their effect on the new wave of directors… http://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/24/theater/auteur-directors-bring-new-life-to-theater.html?pagewanted=all “Like some of their prototypes, some of our current auteur-directors form cults and practice unchecked self-indulgence.”
And so this current interest in the “bright young things” making “shocking” art is nothing new. Kosky, Andrews, Stone… yeah yeah yeah. We know what you’re doing… you are staging radical interpretations of classic texts/classic stories. So we sit back and fold our arms and anticipate blood/gore, stark sets, blinding lights/strobes, opera smashed together with contemporary music favourites.
But is this really shocking? Well, not really. It’s now fairly expected. We know what to expect from our “auteur directors.
Many of the shows hail from the artists who tumble out of the same schools and institutions. And those designs come from scholarly designers. There is a fine education showing us EXACTLY what was being discussed and developed as a “director’s theatre” thirty to fifty years ago. And, please, don’t get me wrong – I don’t mind this aesthetic – in fact, I find architectural simple design very satisfying. I have nothing against this current flavour being presented on stage.
I do mind, however, when the content does not engage me to the same level as the design (that is light, sound, costume and set). I do mind when the writing not only suffers in content, but in flair, in originality, in personality.
I have recently been informed that the title of auteur has been wrongly attributed to directors such as Andrews and Stone… as they are not authors in their direction of work – but interpreters of classic texts. And when you look at the work of Castelluci for example – Check out this example:
Or this:
The argument is: What we actually have in Australia is a set of highly aesthetic text interpreters, who adapt work – not devise work – thus making them interpreters not auteurs in the strictest sense.
I’m still thinking about this.
Anyway, on the topic of Benedict Andrews’ offering to assert his true label as an “auteur” he has authored a piece of writing (which is now published by Currency Press via the Belvoir Program), which he has also directed.
Just incase you haven’t already, here are some links to other responses on this work:
Brad http://blogs.crikey.com.au/curtaincall/2012/04/01/review-every-breath-belvoir-st-theatre-sydney/
Mr Blake http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/bad-bad-belvoir-20120329-1vzxs.html
Lady Diana: http://www.stagenoise.com/review/1827
What I can add to this discussion is a point which was raised on the facebook group I created about a year ago for playwrights to share perspectives, opportunities, information and advice called TOWARDS A WRITERS THEATRE. The discussion has accumulated a range of voices in response/ in disgust and in defense of Andrews. The most compellign piece of information shared was an observation how close the story itself is to that of “1968 Italian film Teorema in which Terence Stamp plays a mysterious figure who appears in the lives of a typical bourgeois Italian family.”
SYNOPSIS: “Terence Stamp plays a mysterious figure who appears in the lives of a typical bourgeois Italian family. He engages in sexual affairs with all members of the household: the devoutly religious maid, the sensitive son, the sexually repressed mother, the timid daughter and, finally, the tormented father. The stranger gives unstintingly of himself, asking nothing in return. Then one day he leaves, as suddenly and mysteriously as he came. The subsequent void created forces each family member to confront what was previously concealed by the trappings of bourgeois life. ”
Details can be found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teorema_%28film%29
Now, I don’t particularly mind if this is an adaptation of Teorema. I don’t care if it is Andrews’ own take on it at all – I just wonder why there is no acknowledgement of this.
Additionally – I am curious to how a work such as this- which is so highly derivative, slipped the attention of those reading for the Patrick White Award?
That issue of originality aside – I just don’t find the actual text – the writing very compelling to listen to. Besides the very casual/rushed way in which the actors rattle through the dialogue, I must say that I found listening to the play, tiresome. And this speaks to my personal prejudice and preference of course. BUT in addition to that – if this is a play which wrestles with the ancient and epic concerns of fulfillment of the characters (both artistic and sexual fulfillment) – AND it speaks of ancient and epic stories such as that of hermaphroditus – why is the language also in this scale and tradition: is this the grand experiment of Andrews? The spoken words seem instead too domestic, too pedestrian, too everyday all grandeur is left to the spectacle of a shifting floor/roof which seems highly contrived by the time we finally reach the last image: a sharp and dark version of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
Reading and re-reading and triple-reading the script. Ruminating repeatedly on the production, I have come to the conclusion that it would have been much better as a series of images accompanied by sound/light/design than with text.
Additionally there seems much talk about the sex and masturbation scenes. To that I say a bit of a “(Yawn) So what? Who cares?” I have read that since the first week of shows, the masturbation and sex scenes have been diminished – it appeared that second night after opening John Howard’s sex and masturbation scenes were cut or cutailed. I don’t know if this is true – but if more of the sex content has been withdrawn, I say again “uh, so what?”
Here’s two phrases:
“Content is king.”
“The play’s the thing.”
Unfortunately I didn’t care for the content of the piece. The content of the play seems to be centred on the struggles that success brings – and how unsatisfying it is. And so it was very hard for me to empathize with the characters – after all, I’m not an uber-successful globe-trotting auteur. Perhaps the programmers and the award shortlisters of this piece did connect with these characters, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. However, I didn’t. I’m also not from the middle or upper classes – nor am I a hermaphrodite. In short, I felt completely disconnected from the characters, their life concerns, their lifestyle, their philosophy. It all felt completely and deeply irrelevent to me and none of my concern nor interest. The characers weren’t interesting or exotic enough to me, for me to feel like I need to learn from them, their choices, their lifestyle, their successes or their failures, and so, I sat there yawning and distracted. I began listing things I could be doing, not reflecting on things in my life I have done/want/might do.
And so, for me, this was an utterly pointless night at the theatre.
EXCEPT…
I do think that Andrews might be smarter than this – and I thought – what if his plan was to fail MASSIVELY. What if he decided he would show just how dull, selfish and misguided and flawed our play development and award system is. Now THAT would be true provocation. Exposing us to the vision of John Howard masturbating- well – whatever. BUT exposing Belvoir’s lack of dramaturgical/development rigor – uncovering the problems with the label of ‘auteur director’, stripping bare our clumsy obsession with celebrity directors and theatre companies, spreading out before us the awkward fallacy that failure is impossible when a season is curated by committee. AND using Tom Holloway’s conceit of naming the play after a song lyric – genius. This highly mechanized production has come off a conveyerbelt of paint- by numbers, templated theatre-making. And to expose the industry’s failure –
Well, THAT is genius.
Is the text an act of genius? No.
Are the performances an act of genius? No.
Is the design an act of genius? No.
Is the concept an act of genius? No.
Is the plot an act of genius. No.
Are the resulting criticisms/ the can of worms he’s opened by failing so publicly? YES!!!!!
What Andrews has done in this production is not shocking on stage – but what it reveals about the backstage/off stage processes is incredible.
And he has succeeded in failing.
And isn’t that what everyone encourages artists to do? And then when they do, completely – what happens then? A whole bunch of silence, or finger pointing, name calling, speculation, publicity. How do we handle failure as an industry? Is Andrews to be forgiven or outcast?
What is the risk in supporting failure? When the play itself is about the torture of success (Even Chris’ life is more interesting when s/he fails at his/her job) – wouldn’t it be more powerful if the great successful auteur Andrews failed utterly in this self-referential artistic mess? Infact – I now think that Every Breath was designed to fail – for this VERY reason.
Ha!
And if we for a second took Andrews seriously, when the whole play is about the burden of successful writing, well then, the jokes on us.
A response worth waiting for. Just when I thought there was nothing left to say – you said it all.
I’ll start by clarifying the cutting/diminishing of sex and nudity. I have now seen the play twice; I saw the second preview and there was MUCH more sex and nudity than when I saw it a few days ago. Most of it was just random scenes of masturbation, plus a very overwrought scene where Howard and Milliken engaged in simulated sodomy – didn’t seem to serve a purpose as I’m sure you can imagine. For the second half of the play, John Howard was completely shirtless, so purely for production sake – I wonder what the reason behind changing that was. Was Howard uncomfortable maybe? Also – The second preview ran at 1 hour and 40 minutes, and now I believe that the play runs at a slenderer 80 minutes. And in Benedict’s pre-show speech he’d said that the first preview had run at just over 2 hours.
I draw attention to this not only because I can only IMAGINE what that additional 20 minutes cut contained (20 minutes is a very large amount of material for my money), but also – could this possibly highlight the play’s lack of dramaturgy and rewrites? Was this RUSHED to the stage? I remember a similar conversation arose on James’s blog in regards to Belvoir’s ‘The Business’ (coincidentally programmed exactly this time last year). From reading the program notes, and various articles, a very smart reader was able to determine that the play had been put together in about 7 months – from Sved’s original premise to production (Jonathan Gavin’s script heavily rewritten until, it seems, previews started). It was agreed that this is generally NOT enough time for a script to be revised/rewritten/workshopped/etc. It’s also a slap in the face to writers; most of whom wait an excess of 2-3 years to see their hard work reach the stage, which even still is not a guarantee. Yes, I guess this is a major criticism of auteur directors, or interpreters as you more kindly called them.
While I’m sure Andrews’s script had a longer gestation period than 7 months, if team Belvoir, or at least Ralph, really saw this as a ‘perfect’ play (not to mentioned the Patrick White shortlist), then I am almost certain it sat for several months on a desk somewhere in the Belvoir office completely untouched, BECAUSE IT WAS ‘PERFECT’ (the fact that Andrews’s has had other commitments internationally, as well as unforeseen work at STC might have something to do with it).
Now, I should point out that I did like this production, defending it on TOWARDS A WRITERS’ THEATRE, but it has become apparent to me, now having seen it twice, read it again, and read many of responses to the work, that I think I like the production a lot more than I like the play. The set has been criticized – Although a reported technical stuff-up on opening night probably didn’t help it’s cause, I don’t see why, I think it’s marvelous, beautiful, and has proved to me that theatre-makers haven’t exerted all the possibilities that the Upstairs Theatre has to offer. The performers have been pitied – silly. I’ve seen much more potentially humiliating demands on actors, and I think they do a stunning job with the material they are given.
What I will admit is that the play needed more works. It’s an intriguing concept, it certainly raises lots of fascinating theatrical questions. The characters are largely undeveloped, some dialogue clunky, the last 15 minutes – perplexing, and rather jarring considering the clipped, intense, crystalline fragments we have witnessed before it. Maybe this will be a wake-up call to Belvoir. They need to spend more time with their writers, more time picking their scripts and commissions to pieces. As a reader on TAWT said, ‘I’ve seen scant evidence of dramaturgy at recent Belvoir productions.’
I hope I’m still making sense.
Jack
So many grammar errors in that post above. Forgive me. I hang my head in shame, it’s been a long day.
I wish I had seen Every Breath, so I had some point of reference. I haven’t, and won’t, so I don’t: I have no opinion about Andrews’ play, aside from a suspicion that it may be hubris to think that an ability to direct is the same as an ability to write: they are both very different skills, with very different demands. Although I’ve followed the reactions closely, I have no idea what I would think if I saw it: the truth is that the reviews I’ve read have, on the whole, given me little idea of what it was like. A couple of points, though, that have nothing to do with the play.
I wouldn’t use Frank Rich, “The Butcher of Broadway”, as any kind of argument against the gigantic achievements of Grotowski, Kantor, Brook or Meyerhold. All of them, aside from being important and influential 20C directors, differ so enormously from each other in approach and aesthetic that it seems idiotic to put them crudely together in one little pot and accuse them of “self indulgence”. Self indulgence is so often the conservative argument against the new that it becomes pretty meaningless, and is usually code for anti-intellectualism. Grotowski and Brook are, in different ways, totally actor-centred; Meyerhold and Kantor may, at a stretch, be thought of as architectural, but it would be a determinedly eccentric view of their work. In other words, historically speaking, autuer direction is not necessarily, or even mostly, about design: Meyerhold, Brook and Grotowski, in fact, are mostly noted for their innovations in techniques of performance.
It seems worth pointing out, too, that Kosky’s company Gilgul produced a series of works that were by no means adaptations of classics.
Secondly, I do worry that the major reason given here for lack of interest is that the characters in the play are too different from you for you to be interested in their concerns. Is theatre really a forum for narcissicism? Or is one of its virtues the way it makes an imaginative bridge to possibilities different from ourselves?
I agree that failure is something we have trouble parsing in Australian theatre. There’s sometimes a savagery in the damning of those who fail that suggests an unacknowledged hostility to art itself. If we choose to support art, we take the risk of supporting failure, otherwise that support is meaningless: are we really calling for guaranteed “success”? That way lies the hell of comfortable, conforming theatre. Or is “risk” only “risk” if the gamble wins?
Hi Jack,
Thanks for writing/weighing in – on all fronts: blog and facebook – I’m always glad of your perspective, even when we disagree.
And grammatical errors like spelling errors are always forgivable – everyone makes mistakes.
Thanks also for the update on what may be referred to as “nude watch.”
I have to add that I sincerely doubt that Belvoir’s seven month development period is merely within the time the writer/show is announced in the program launch and the actual production. I would assume and hope there is a longer conversation/development period BEFORE that point – and not just with Belvoir but with the writer.
Additionally, let’s not forget the staff at Belvoir and the commissioned writers are PAID all this time – unlike so many Australian writers (certainly for many writing/developing their first full length play WITHOUT a commission) are squeezing the writing and development of a play around paid work and domestic duties and well, life in general. So a fully commissioned writer, with the support of money, a company – complete with in house “resident playwright” and literary manager AND an Artistic Associate who WAS known as the “New Work Director” creates a work which is outed as a failure. HA! Is it a case of “who sank the boat?” or is it by design?
Interesting to note that whispers around the traps (foyers etc) is that Andrews refused to “develop” (aka change a word of) the piece.
Also Blake’s comment “Belvoir’s dramaturgical department has been caught sleeping here and this play seems to have been given the green light on Andrews’s reputation alone.” has some truth in it – only that the literary manager has been away (as is necessary) on International and domestic duties (the former with development with Tom Holloway in the UK and the latter with PWA’s Play Festival/APAM) -but there is one thing about being a dramaturg/literary manager: you can’t force a writer to take your notes/advice… and if the writer doesn’t want to listen to advice or to direction: it could be hubris OR it could be a desire to fail.
Though the show only goes for 90 minutes, I have spent hours reading, writing, talking, responding about this production. It’s been a high topic of conversation. Regardless Belvoir has yet again created controversy – and created dialogue about what makes a good /ready Australian play… and even if the play is boring, that’s certainly worth the money.
Hi Alison,
Thank you for taking the time to write… I know you are busy at the moment with your own creative pursuits and your perspective is absolutely valued and appreciated.
I take your point about using Rich – failure of clarity on my part there: What I was trying to express is that the concept of the auteur director is not a new one and it comes in many forms, the most recent and local “form” or identifier is very design heavy.
I’m glad to hear Kosky’s done something other than classics – I’ve just never witnessed one clearly I’ve sometimes been in the wrong place at the right time – so again, thanks.
It was a fairly glib explanation of my lack of attraction to the characters as they are nothing like me. (My failure to express articulately what I mean as I see the word count go up- and me think: who’s going to read this anyway…) Hedda Gabler is certainly not like me… BUT she is, in that she has many facets to her past, her wants, her desires. Chris or Oliver or Olivia in Every Breath are VERY basic, surface characters – there’s not a lot to them – they are functional characters not quite fully “realised” people. I feel like I am… and so when some one is and the dialogue is, and their action is seemingly uncomplicated, explicit, obvious – I do feel like there is nothing for me to connect to: no interest for me to delve deeper – no reason to engage.
I think we watch and attend theatre to understand our world and ourselves – a successful piece of theatre invites us to explore ourselves and our world through an invitation of engagement – the message or question or the provocation of a piece absolutely relies on the spectator to be present, but also engaged. I wasn’t engaged with this piece. I don’t agree with the idea that characters need to be “likeable” – I believe they have to be relate-able: and for me that is about having a human empathic traits: the performances AND the the text is written so mechanically that the style pushed me away from the content. For me to see tragedy or the joy of a characters’ situation I need to care about them. And I didn’t care what happened to them at all. Not just because they have no superficial parallels to me – but because they seemed overly simplified functional characters. I agree though Alison – that was ill expressed: as is this paragraph… and you are right to question this.
It is an immature and conservative and insecure art scene that can’t handle failure. And it worries me. There is a term bubbling up in foyers and in emails which refers to “Belvoir Bashing.” That worries me too. Add to that an ambivalent relationship we seem have with success (tall poppies versus our love of/with celebrity) AND the fickle ego/mood swings of people “defending their jobs” and their legitimacy – it doesn’t really make for a healthy culture of experimentation.
You are completely right – we don’t know how to handle failure – we don’t know how to support it – we don’t know how to encourage it.
I personally think in the case of Every Breath that Belvoir has given a huge boosts to the playwrights of Australia by showing them how DESPERATELY they are needed, and how essential their mind, craft and development is. I think that Playwrights should view the programming of Every Breath as a sign to RISK BIG, THINK BIG, BE PROVOCATIVE…
If our playwrights behaved like our auteur directors do… I wonder what plays would be written.
I guess my thoughts on writing in the theatre are complex, probably too complex to write out here. I have often thought that playwrights need to be more arrogant and have more faith in their discipline as a literature, and this has often been misunderstood as my saying that theatre ought to be, well, prosy, or, worse, “academic”. I don’t mean that at all.
If you want to write something, you have to have a pretty profound understanding of its form: in a playwright’s case, that form is theatre. (This is the argument that says that a director should be perfectly poised to write a play). Too often the culture of workshops and so on (of the kind known as “development hell”) works to infantilise authors, making them subject to the ensemble, rather than an equal partner within it. This is in part the fault of theatre itself: as a culture it is often not literate enough, and certainly it – including audiences here in the theatre culture – often seems deaf to the formal properties of writing. Generally speaking, the practitioners who have been most literate here, in terms of their actual reading, have been the directors: Kosky is an awesome reader, of philosophy, history, culture, literature (including plays), music, and this feeds into the work he makes. Andrews too. If writers aren’t keeping up – and I hasten to say I’m not saying this of all writers, by any means – then that’s a problem. That broad and voracious reading is as essential a part of play writing, or any kind of writing, as knowing what a stage direction is.
Some other questions – about the place of Marx’s ideas about alienation in Andrews’s text and how that might have played into the alienation of the performances, and especially the alienation of the sexuality portrayed there – I actually don’t know how to shape, because I didn’t see the play. I will say that it’s one thing to think, however intelligently, about an idea, and quite another to shape it into plastic, expressive form that can have meaning to those who don’t necessarily know the original thinking; that’s where writing becomes an art and not a craft. And that might be where the problem is in Andrews’s text.
Hi everyone – I am packing for Thailand – leave in two days. Once settled I’ll throw in my threepence worth, I hope. Meanwhile Sam Strong’s Le Liasions ay STC Wharf one – sits at the far opposite end of the ‘directorial’ spectrum. Opening night it like a perfectly bred foal, exquisite if a little overwhelmed that it was now in the world – and I have no doubt, even by now, it high-stepping around the paddock and humans are gawking in delight at its beautiful proportions and confident character.
I don’t know… I feel like every Belvoir play opens to at least SOME criticism, I can’t remember the last thing they produced that opened to unanimous RAVES (Thyestes was close?). HOWEVER, people still subscribe. There was an INCREASE in subscriptions this year, after what I would call a very lackluster season last year. I don’t understand. I feel like I mustn’t understand theatre business and politics at all.
I doubt Mr. Andrews is meta-failing in the way you suggest he might be, though there is the possibility that he stopped himself making certain changes that may/may not have been suggested by Belvoir as a sort of self-defence mechanism (that is, if I don’t create conditions that allow for the work to be the best it can possibly be, then it doesn’t hurt me and my ego as much when no one likes it, as I know it’s not my best work – something I think a lot of writers could identify with, often leaving things to the last minute so there’s no time to polish and make the prose shine, and so forth).
But then again I don’t think he failed, or at least not anywhere near as spectacularly as most everybody else (apart from Jack – we should start a “wasn’t the best play I’ve seen but still I liked it” club). You and I saw it on the same night, Augusta, so we don’t have to worry about possible changes in the script when talking about it. (I remember Elissa Blake on Twitter saying that Belvoir called her, when there were rumours going around of scenes being cut post-opening, to tell her that nothing had been changed. Plus, cutting seems to be no problem to me pre-opening, anyway – isn’t that what Stone does rather regularly (didn’t Thyestes have an hour taken off it in the last week?)?)
But I feel myself rambling. The point I wanted to make is, at the moment, I’m assuming, somewhere near the beginning, precisely when you no doubt were feeling disconnected, I made a physical effort to involve myself in the play. I literally leant forward, elbow on knee, chin on hand, and ‘engaged’. And I get the feeling this may have made all the difference. (I know, for instance, if I had been seeing a similar play that didn’t have any names (such as Mr. Andrews) that I admired attached to the production, I most likely would not have been so generous with my engagement.)
I didn’t really see the play so much about success as it was about channeled neediness – each character, threatened, reaches out to their protector. (And I knew there must have been some funny business going on, so that stopped me from rejecting the play straight away like I assume most of the audience did, as I waited patiently for the explanation.)
I think it’s pretty clear that Mr. Andrews utterly misjudged what the reaction of most of the audience would be, and how much patience they would have, but then again, he’s not an uber-experienced writer. (And perhaps Belvoir didn’t make him change much – though if he’s been cutting himself pre-opening then surely he doesn’t find his own text sacred – because surely if any director in Australia could make the most out of a defective-text at the moment, it is Mr. Andrews.)
Personally, I’m interested to wonder what the response to this play would have been if it was staged in the intellectual Holy Land that is European Theatre that I read so much about – would the audience, for instance, have laughed at the ‘serious’ bits? (Not that I’m accusing anyone here of mis-responding (if that’s even possible), but I’m curious to know if a different setting might have provoked an entirely different response.)
(My review, by the way, if anyone is interested, where I assume (though I can’t entirely remember what I wrote) I was somewhat more eloquent than I am here: http://www.theatrepeople.com.au/reviews/every-breath)
And that link should actually be this: http://www.theatrepeople.com.au/reviews/every-breath
I’m really running out of things to say about Every Breath at this point, but as I am strangely compelled to defend it, I will say that on the topic of responding, specifically humor, I had to stifle my laughing a few times out of fear that everyone in the theatre would think I was some kind of idiot. On both occasions. I thought Every Breath was BITINGLY funny.
I don’t wanna say that I’m right and everyone’s wrong, but I definitely think that this play is/was a lot funnier than what the audience gave it. I was also struck by the different responses received on both occasions that I saw it. The line about Chekhov’s gun for example practically stopped the show the first time, while it barely got a smile the second time. But then, the second time the audience seemed to find the whole premise of Chris sleeping with everyone, and all the sex for that matter, to be a lot funnier. Judging from the polite applause at curtain call, compared to the longer,louder applause at both curtain calls at the preview though, it is likely that they were laughing at the play in general because they thought it was ridiculous and implausible.
I ALSO THINK that Olivia’s very odd masturbation scene at the end might have been something better laughed at. It is ridiculous. And I’m sure Benno knew that. He wrote it, and it looks ridiculous on the page. We’ve scene Andrews’s work before. His plays are almost always funny in one way or another (Even Figaro managed to make seemingly the most snobbish of Opera crowds laugh at some points). Could we be taking him a bit too seriously this time?
Another possibility, is that the play tapped perfectly into my sense of humour, and no one else’s. But I’m cool with that.
Excellent conclusion Gus. If there’s one thing I’ve always said (and there isn’t) it’s that failure is its own reward.
I’m glad you have acknowledged Teorema. Many writers are tempted to do their own version. Most have the discipline not to. There is something so lazy at the heart of this from the writer and the company. It recalls the Angry Young Penguins episode. Did he deliberately write a bad play in order to have it celebrated as a masterpiece in order to expose our contemporary theatre as a fraud? I think not. I think he just wrote a bad play. And he and Belvoir thought it was good. They thought it was easy. They though that’s how it was done.
I did note there were a lot of empty seats when I saw this on Good Friday, so presumably the word has got around that this is a bit of a turkey.
Having said that, I didn’t think it was all bad, although there were definately moments where Andrews the Director did not serve Andrews the Writer well (in the middle when various characters had to be shuffled on and offstage to have their scene with Chris, in particular, the pauses in between scenes were deadly). And the gratuitous “let’s sing something in german” moment was a mistake. I also thought Eloise Mignon stood out as particularly unvaried from her performance in “The Wild Duck” (although to be fair, she’s gone straight from the revival in Melbourne into this, so it may be a case of not shaking the character out properly).
Having said that, there were some triumphant moments. And particular bitching of the current Belvoir management for presenting a dud play seems to ignore the number of dud plays presented under the Neil Armfield reign (in particular I recall Beatrix Christian’s “The Governor’s Family” as being spectaularly poor, and Stephen Sewell’s “The Gates of Egypt” being no better). There is a certain sense of “let’s smack the new guys” going on here that isn’t entirely fair.
The playwright Andrew Bovell has raised some questions about the curatorial approach of the main companies to Australian work in the latest issue of the AWG Storyline. Worth looking at in the general context of this discussion.
I will not be buying a ticket to any play BA writes. And maybe not to anything he directs…I cannot stand corruption in the arts…who pushed the button and funded and produced this rubbish…