Family Values, Griffin Theatre Company, Playhouse, Canberra Theatre.

David Williamson arouses weird sensations in a lot of theatre critics. He has been an institution in Australian Theatre for 50 years, from "The Removalists" through to tonight's show - with most of his plays giving a semi-comedic view of the issues of the day (from domestic violence and police corruption in "The Removalists" through to our current border policies and a grab bag of other issues in "Family Values"). And, yes, like most prolific playwrights, there's probably about five plays that I'd prefer went back into the "never to be seen again" drawer, and it's difficult to avoid the thought that a few of the last two decades worth of plays could have been improved by rewrites that would have been imposed if it wasn't for the fact that he's guaranteed box office so why bother fiddling with the winning formula. And even that the emphasis on him has not always been great for other writers who have fallen into the trap of being considered "the next Williamson" (and, inevitably, found wanting because they don't particularly want to be him, they want to follow their own muse).

But for all that, I own pretty much every play he's ever had published, and enjoy reading them. He's the kinda playwright that can be relied on for a reasonably speedy plot, some good jokes, a dramatic confrontation and a solid ending. And with solid direction they can provide an engaging night out. Lee Lewis is more than a solid director (I'm sure I've mentioned before how strong I find her work), as well as having prior form in keeping Williamson interesting (both with "Rupert" and with Griffin's production of "Emerald City" a few years ago, that solved some of the issues with Williamson's overly long rants by ensuring action continued during them). Yes, this one does have some clunky introductory dialogue, and it's true that in this family of mum, dad, and the three kids, one of the kids does seem to be distinctly underwritten. But it's a play that confronts some urgent issues - as Lee Lewis says in her director's notes "This play is not perfect, but it is necessary" - and while it wraps the standard Williamson tropes around it, there's no mistaking the passion with which Williamson shows his outrage at how successive Australian governments have treated asylum seekers. There's some great performances here as well - particularly from Belinda Giblin's mum showing her inner strength, Sabryna Walters as the person most effected by the issues, and Jaime Oxenbould finding some dimensions to a persona who could very easily be thin caricature. Sophie Fletcher's simple but useful design ensures the cast have a number of interesting areas to congregate, and there's a general sense that this has been handled with loving care to realising every bit of potential that the script has. Good stuff.

American Song, Red Stitch Actors Theatre and Critical Stages Touring, The Q

Joanna Murray-Smith's plays seem to rise and fall for me based on whether she's using a pre-existing character or not - in the plays tied into someone already known ("The Female of the Species", clearly inspired by Germaine Greer, "Switzerland" with Patricia Highsmith), there's a strong and solid presence which draws my interest. In the others, where she has to create people from scratch, I never quite find that they feel fully formed, so much as an abstract series of familiar tropes (I've read one of her more famous peices, "Honour", a few times, hoping this time it'll grab me, but it never really rises above the familiar for me). She's got a good line in dialogue, with a poetic bent ... but nothing in the plots really ever get to me.

And alas, for me, "American Song" suffers the same way. There's a good visual metaphor (as our monologuing character builds a dry-stone wall) and the thread as he examines his life to try to determine the moment when the flaws emerged and led to an initially un-named tragedy is an intriguing set-up. But the life feels, for me, like it's made up of things I've seen before, with no new insights or particular surprises. Joe Petruzzi does good work with what the script offers, but ... this all felt very distant from me. I'm not sure whether it's that everything turns on an examination of American gun culture (which isn't really where my life centers), or that it's a story from the point of view of a hetrosexual father (I'm neither). But I never really found myself sufficiently engaged by this - it felt too much like an exercise, a demonstration, rather than the emotional catharsis I was hoping for.

Spamalot, One-Eyed Man Productions, Playhouse, Canberra Theatre

Eric Idle's loving ripoff/financial brand extension of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" has been seen a couple of times in Canberra before, most memorably in theatre lore as "that show where Max Gambale Stabbed Dave Smith By Mistake".  It's quite a fun piece - yes, to a certain extent, it is a weird case of watching a covers band do all your favourite bits of the movie in a slightly rearranged form, but much of the rearrangement (at least in act one) serves to tie together the plot of a film that, fun though it is, does play a bit as a series of sketches.

And this production brings with it a good mix of the epic-and-the-micro-budget emulating some of the spirit of Python, with a cast of 8 playing on a deliberately-reduced stage, with much of the stage magic done very much with the strings showing and the stage manager popping up to help out. There's all kinds of fun in the performances, from Craemer Crain's imperious King Arthur, his loyal servant/horse Patsy (Amy Hack), all kinds of odd service from Blake Appelqvist (with several silly voices and some equally silly dancing), Abe Mitchell (going from bloodthirsty to weirdness with a side order in eccentric),  Rob Johnston (from stoic historian to romantic prince Herbert, via some silly miming), Marty Alix (largely the wimpy Sir Robin but also popping up in odd spots) and Jane Watt (nominally the flatulent Sir Bedevere but with plenty of her own side roles). Plus there's special guest Diva Josie Lane to power through the power ballads, nominally connected to the plot but often off in her own show.

This does suffer a bit from the "runs out of invention a bit in act two" (to a certain extent, once the knights split off into their own section plots, it becomes a random collection of good-bits-from-the-movie-then-finale), there's a lyric substitution in one of the second act songs that doesn't really work (the original lyric is very Broadway-centric, but this one's not as much fun), and in general the staging doesn't quite have the creativeness that the first act does (where a simple set turns out to have a bunch of bonus surprises). There's also occasionally a few cases of over-telegraphing the joke (the staging of "I'm all alone" foregrounds Patsy earlier than it should if the audience is going to find the responses funny). In short, of the two Hayes-theatre-tours that came through Canberra and its surrounds, this is probably the not-quite-as-good-one, but it's still pretty fun.

HMS Pinafore, Hayes Theatre Co, The Q

"HMS Pinafore" has been delighting audiences pretty much from the point where it opened in 1878 - the first big Gilbert and Sullivan hit, it's locked in its immortal status by, like most great pop culture, getting referenced in "The Simpsons" ("Cape Feare", where Sideshow Bob performs a one man production for the family). And it retains a lot of its delights, some 140 years later, from Sullivan's gorgeous score and Gilbert's jokes that still retain relevance and hilarity ("When I Was a Lad" will forever be hilarious as long as men with no qualifications better than an ability to say "yes" the right number of times get to head national institutions). The simple story of a humble sailor in love with a captain's daughter plays with ideas of class, responsibility and romance in delightful ways, with an ending as brisk and hilarious as possible (just don't look at the logical implications too hard).

Kate Gaul's production brings out all these delights and a few bonus ones. After a couple of years of enjoying the Hayes productions in their own venue but not necesarily on tour (sound issues with "Little Shop of Horrors", intimacy issues with "Sweet Charity"), it's a delight to see they've worked out how to tour these - a simple stage-within-a-stage is the toybox a tight ensemble of 12 get to play in (many of them both as performers and as musicians - there's no pit, just a case of performers picking up a violin or a trombone or guitar to accompany the action, alongside Musical Director Zara Stanton, who also accompanies on  piano (or clarinet, or accordian, or whatever else she has nearby).  There's a slight panto-quality to it (with Thomas Campbell playing Little Buttercup as panto dame, and Bernie Palin as Ralph Rackstraw as principal boy) that helps, adding a bit of eyebrow glitter to glam up the occasion, and using the excuse of Sir Joseph Porter's arrival for everybody to get into party gear that they keep for much of the rest of the evening, it lets cast members bounce muck around with genders quite happily.  It's careful to keep the one serious bit (the emotional too-and-throwing between Palin's Rackstraw and Hanna Greenshield's Josephine as she first rejects him for his class-inferiority, then rejoins him) to true emotional effect - for the first time in a while, I actually did get caught up in the usually tedious stuff between tenor-and-soprano (oh, just ask me how I feel about Marius and Cosette, I'm sure I'll ramble on for a coupla hours).

This is fluff, but it's quality fluff expressing joy, wit and charm, and is absolutely worth catching.

The Grapes of Wrath, Canberra Rep, Theatre 3

Steinbeck's classic novel isn't entirely a natural for theatre adaptation (in the way that, say, "Of Mice and Men" absolutely is) - it moves over one and a half thousand miles from Oklahoma to California, it splits focus between a number of different members of the Joad family, and much of it takes place on a small overladen truck. And Frank Galati's adaptation doesn't entirely solve this - there's still a lot of Joads to keep track of, not all of whom really get fully fleshed out. There are also a couple of places where it feels repetitious - the Joads are warned twice what will await them on the California fruit farms, then it's enacted on them - and having ensemble members play similar roles in each of these sequences only emphaises it here - it doesn't come across so much as foreshadowing as "haven't we seen this scene before?"

There's moments of glory in this production, but there's also moments of messyness. Much of the ensemble work is unfocussed - action happening everywhere that means whatever the main story is gets lost  - and there's a lot of physical props that means that, when actions require miming (in the burial and flood sequences, for example), we're stuck in a no-man's land between literalism and symbolism. The Joad's truck takes up so much stage space that there's no sense these people are crammed in together - everybody has plenty of space to spread out in comfort.

At the same time, there are moments that do play like gangbusters, particularly the famous "I'l be there" sequence between Tom and Ma Joad late in the play. Plus you get Amy Dunham singing "Down in the River to Pray" in that heartbreaking voice of hers. And those are both worth seeing. I just wish the rest wasn't so damn scrappy.

The "Well I Liked it" awards 2019

It's that time again to do the "Well I liked it" awards, or WILIs for short. It's the 8th WILIs and, yes, that innuendo has managed to stretch that far and will keep on giving what it's got.

It's been an interesting year in theatre blogging, my full year of blogging with my name on it (which has meant ... a grand total of one freebie ticket that may possibly be related to the blog! Clearly I'm raking in those big blogging bucks). It's also meant I've been a tad slower in the blogging than I used to be, and a tad more careful. There's two shows I saw that I didn't review at the time because they were both in previews, though both were in pretty solid condition and among my favourites of the year otherwise ("Caroline or Change" at the Hayes, which combined some great performances with a stunning physical production for a show that I'd never have expected to see in Australia, and "Fangirls", which had a freshness and wit about it, albiet perhaps about half an hour too long and with a couple of early-preview sound problems which meant multiple witty lyrics went a little unheard).

But of the biggies:

Locally, "Assassins" was probably my favourite show of the year that I hadn't seen a previous production of, with the return of "Playhouse Creatures" my favourite show I had. I have an obvious bias towards the one I production managed, "A Doll's House", and particularly the lead performer Susannah Frith whose performance grew during the show from the apparently frivolous girl to the clearly capable and strong woman willing to seize her destiny.

Of the touring shows, "Prima Facie" was my favourite thing I saw - an astonishing combo of writing, performance and direction as one woman broke down the brutal effects of the legal process on victims of sexual assault in a gripping presentation. It looked so simple yet was spectacular in its effects.

Interstate "The Wolves" captured my imagination early and never really let go - I strongly believe it's a major work that, with any luck, we'll be seeing all over the place, and Belvoir's production, picked up from an independent season elsewhere, gave it a cracking good production. And "Come From Away" was every inch as good as everybody said it was, a stunningly good mix of show, cast and production.

Hoping to get out and see more this year, and for there to be much skillful work from our local teams as well as the wider interstate productions. There's strong seasons coming from both the CAnberra Theatre and the Q, and good potential elsewhere - here's hoping there'll be great works to see.

First Love is the Revolution, Griffin Theatre Company

This is an odd combination of fantasy, romance, comedy and brutal drama, set among a colony of urban foxes and the household of a boy who befriends one of them. Looking at nature, humanity and with a fair chunk of surrealism, this plays like gangbusters in the tiny Stables space (converting it into a small suburban hill completely covered in fake grass, with a few surprise spots for cast to jump out of). Leading the cast are Sarah Meachum (back after "The Wolves" in another role that's a physical workout as well as an emotional one) as the youngest of the foxes, and Bardiya McKinnon as the boy - both a very appealing pair as they bond further despite the obvious divisions in their natures. This is the second time I've seen a play at Griffin that's been pre-tested in the UK before getting an Australian audience (despite being by an Australian playwright) and there's a robustness in Rita Kalenejais' script that plays confidently with the mixture of anamalistic fantasy and brutal realities delightfully. The supporting cast of four ramble between ten roles between them, including various other species of animal (Rebecca Massey scores as both the fox's mother and as a distinctly kiwi chicken, while Matthew Whittet has a trio of chicken, mole and the boys's dad, Guy Simon as another fox and a guard-dog, and Amy Hack bouncing between fox, cat and human). Lee Lewis shows a sure sense of pace and style giving this fantasy an appealing sense of reality and place. A delightful end to the year.