Sunday, 27 July 2025

2025: Emerald City by David Williamson

 

 

 

 

 

Emerald City by David Williamson.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, July 18 – August 23, 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 26

Director
: Mark Kilmurry
Asst Director: Tiffany Wong; Set & Costume Designer: Dan Potra
Lighting Design: Morgan Moroney; Composer & Sound: Madeleine Picard
Stage Manager: Lauren Tulloh; Asst Stage Manager: Bella Wellstead
Photography: Phil Erbacher

Cast:
Helen – Aisha Aidara; Elaine – Danielle Carter; Kate – Rachel Gordon
Mike – Matt Minto; Colin – Tom O’Sullivan; Malcolm – Rajan Velu

 

Aisha Aidara as Helen, Matt Minto as Mike

Tom O’Sullivan as Colin, Danielle Carter as Elaine

 

Although I can’t be specific about what changes David Williamson has made to update Emerald City since its first production in 1987, it seemed to me in the Ensemble Theatre’s much more intimate space than the large wide postbox stage in the Drama Theatre at Sydney Opera House, the play full of one-liners about the business of being a playwright, zinged along much more smartly than I remember from nearly 40 years ago.

I think too, though I can hardly imagine it, that this cast could be any better than theatrical icons (Colin) Garry McDonald, (Elaine) Ruth Cracknell, (Kate) Robyn Nevin, (Mike) Drew Forsythe , and now QUT Associate Professor (Helen) Andrea Moor.  

Yet Tom O’Sullivan, Danielle Carter, Rachel Gordon and Aisha Aidara, along with a raucus Matt Minto and so-cool and collected Rajan Velu, captured, I’m certain from Mark Kilmurry’s directing skills, every twist and turn of ironic pronouncements that made each character so distinctive – and seemingly real.  The play stayed in its 1980s period, but now has so much more depth in its implications about being ethical as well as money-making.

Or maybe I’m just seeing more in it now than I could in my state of understanding 40 years ago without a Trump in the deal of my cards back then.

The argument between the Melbournites who read books on the tram against the Sydneyites who just read the morning paper, made the play an amusing comedy – and still does – but the frustrations Colin faces now, and especially the effect he has on his wife Kate, as well as the success of Mike’s pragmatic commerciality, gives the humour, on reflection after the laughter, a new blacker edge.

This Emerald City is a play for our time perhaps even more than it was in its time – and it was truly famous then.  Don’t miss it now.

Rachel Gordon as Kate

Whole cast of Emerald City,
L to R: Colin – Tom O’Sullivan    Mike – Matt Minto    Kate – Rachel Gordon 
Malcolm – Rajan Velu   Elaine – Danielle Carter Helen – Aisha Aidara


Ensemble Theatre 2025

©Frank McKone, Canberra

Saturday, 26 July 2025

2025: Illume - Bangarra Dance Theatre

 

 

Illume – Bangarra Dance Theatre.  Canberra Theatre Centre July 25-26 2025-07-27

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 25 

Choreography: Frances Rings and artists of Bangarra Dance Theatre  

Artistic & Cultural Collaborator: Darrell Sibosado  

Composition: Brendon Boney  

Set Design: Charles Davis; Costume Design: Elizabeth Gadsby; Lighting Design: Damien Cooper. Cultural Consultant: Trevor Sampi. 

Dancers:Lillian Banks, Courtney Radford, Kallum Goolagong, Daniel Mateo, Emily Flannery, Janaya Lamb, Kassidy Waters, Jye Uren, Maddison Paluch, James Boyd, Chantelle Lee Lockhart, Amberlilly Gordon, Donta Witham, Zeak Tass, Edan Porter,Tamara Bouman, Roxie Syron, Eli Clarke.

___________________________________________________________________________________


If I were to tell you about me, I would begin with my grandfather on my mother’s side – a Cockney, born within the sound of the Bow Bells who could read the newspaper upside down and back to front in the mirror (because he was a compositor).  And so I am a Londoner, who went to Enfield Grammar School, a state school approved by Queen Elizabeth in about 1550.  She went riding at ‘Endfield” and supported education for the ordinary people.  That was where I played the part of Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s play when I was in Form 2.

Yet on my father’s side, my grandmother was a Welsh Methodist, and my Uncle Llewellyn in Cardiff played Chopin on the piano and was a Socialist and a Naturopath who told me that “everyone’s the same without their clothes on”.  

And now I have lived in Australia for 70 years and became legally an Australian in 1975. And you think you know who I am.

So when you read in the Illume program that Artistic & Cultural Collaborator Darrell Sibosado  is a "Goolarrgon Bard man from Lombadina, Western Australia, whose multidisciplinary practice reimagines the traditional pearl shell carving practices into contemporary art; and Frances Rings is a Mirning woman from the Far West Region of South Australia and also has German Heritage", you are only just beginning to know who these people are.

A dance for me would have to include Irish (McKone is, I think, West Coast of Ireland from the 18th Century), probably Anglo-Saxon from 1500 years ago, and maybe French or Jewish from up to 1000 years ago (my mother's maiden name was Solly).  

Yet that’s nothing compared to the Australian history of around 600 peoples beginning some 65,000 years ago.

So just as I saw Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, performed in a modern style and interpretation by the Russian-named Chaika Theatre on Wednesday, on Friday I saw Bangarra’s story of the history of the Lombadina and Djarindjin people who live on the North-West Dampier Peninsula, from the rising of the sea-level as the last Ice Age melted and formed King Sound 7000 years ago, in a very up-to-date modern dance style in a very modern highly technical audio-visual setting.

In eleven scenes over 90 minutes, centred on Ngarrgidj Morr (the Proper Path), the dance takes us through all the changes from times of a sense of freedom and positive excitement through times of hardship, focussed on how, to quote the excellent program, “All living things are interconnected in harmony.  Goolarrgon people navigate Country with purpose, changing their behaviours to align with the true rhythm of Country.”

It is like, in my culture, dancing all the scenes you can imagine from Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the French Revolution and Colonialism, with hope for World Peace.  

Bangarra gives us that hope.


©Frank McKone, Canberra 

 


Friday, 25 July 2025

2025: Echo

 

Echo (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen) apparently written by Nassim Soleimanpour and directed by Omar Elerian.  
Co-commissioned by Canberra Theatre Centre at The Playhouse, July 24-26, 2025.

Possible Actors:
Fayssal Bazzi – seen on July 24
Benjamin Law, Nathalie Morris, or Paula Arundell on other occasions.

Other creatives, designers and technicians – no information apparently provided.



Because I could not understand what was going on in Canberra Theatre Playhouse last night, I asked Google AI if Echo is genuine.  It appeared to me that the person on stage wasn’t acting, but was simply responding as himself to instructions and questions being put to him by someone apparently in Berlin, who had migrated there from Iran, on a 90 minute video call.

Here’s the question I put, and the beginning part of the AI answer:

Is the theatre production Echo genuine?  Are the actors live on the internet in Berlin and Canberra? 

Yes, the theatre production "Echo" is genuine, and it does feature actors performing live on stage in Canberra while interacting with the playwright, Nassim Soleimanpour, who appears to be live via the internet from Berlin. The show intentionally blurs the lines between reality and performance, using live video feeds, pre-recorded footage, and live interaction to create a unique and unpredictable theatrical experience.

AI then gives more details under headings:
    Live, Unrehearsed Performance
    Real-Time Connection with the Playwright
    Blending Live and Pre-Recorded
    Uncertainty and Authenticity
    Thematic Exploration

And ends with “While the show plays with the audience's perception of reality, the live interaction between the actor and the playwright, as well as the unrehearsed nature of the performance, are genuine aspects of the production.

So, in fact, I have no play to review.  The early part, when the “actor” was given an envelope and took out a long document which he read out loud about the writer’s process of writing, is monumentally uninteresting.  You couldn’t call this a ‘performance’.

Then when the connection settles down with Berlin (apparently) it is more interesting when it seems that our ‘actor’ is also middle eastern and migrated to Australia to escape the warfare conditions, and so the two of them discuss the migration experience, very much in terms of emotionally remaining Iranian or Lebanese and so never quite accepting themselves as, or not being accepted as, German or Australian.

Though there is no acting going on, since there’s no script for our actor to perform, it’s obvious that at the Berlin end there is a stack of prepared material about the experience of leaving Iran, apparently including some pre-recorded video and what may be live interactions between Nassim and other people. The time difference between evening here and morning in Berlin doesn't seem to matter.

Of course the migrant experience and issues around refugees and the possibility of returning home is of interest, but this conversation has no direction, no dramatic structure, and ends nowhere in particular.  

Since a different ‘actor’ takes part at each presentation, the conversation will be different each night,  So to really see Echo, you would have to go every night throughout the run in Canberra.  Then you should travel to the next venue, wherever it may be in the world, to keep up.

In fact, what Echo is really about is an abstract – and therefore necessarily untheatrical – highly intellectual exposition of a philosophy, which seems to say that human life only exists as a mental construct which each of our brains put together from the remains of memories of our individual pasts.

When I taught Years 11/12 Philosophy, coming up with such ideas was a feature of working out who you were and what you really believed, but philosophising is nothing like creating a drama for an audience to become emotionally engaged in, which is what theatre art is all about.

Perhaps I can imagine writing a song called “Echoes in My Mind”.  Then you can imagine what it might say and sound like, and sing it to yourself.  And write your own review!



 ©Frank McKone, Canberra

Thursday, 24 July 2025

2025: 21 Hearts

 

 

21 HeartsVivian Bullwinkel & the Nurses of the Vyner Brooke by Jenny Davis. Theatre 180 presented at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

July 24/25 | 11am & 7pm    July 26 | 2pm & 7pm

July 31 | 11am & 7pm          Aug 1 | 11am & 7pm

Aug 2 | 2pm & 7pm              Aug 3 | 5pm

WRITER 
Jenny Davis OAM 
DIRECTOR 
Stuart Halusz 

CAST 
Caitlin Beresford-Ord; Rebecca Davis; Michelle Fornasier
Alex Jones; Helen Searle; Alison van Reeken
 
Rebecca Davis plays Vivian Bullwinkel

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 24

L-R:  Caitlin Beresford-Ord, Alison van Reeken, Rebecca Davis, Alex Jones, Michelle Fornasier, Helen Searle
 

21 Hearts is a living breathing documentary with an extraordinary emotional effect, only achievable by live performances, supported by projected historical material.  If you ever wondered if some War Museums may do more than only commemorate wars, by seeming to encourage a fascination with wars past,  you will not doubt the Australian War Memorial’s purpose in presenting this play in its new theatre.

Many times during her service from 1942 to 1945, when she alone had survived the enemy’s treatment of her and her nursing colleagues, Vivian exclaimed, out of a deep sense of guilt, “I should not be here.  I should have died with the others on the beach.”

But always a personal chance of caring for, of supporting, or saving someone else’s life would revive her determination to not give up.  These were the moments which hit home to the heart, especially for me, but I’m sure for everyone in the audience, many of whom were nurses who have faced difficult conflicting circumstances as they often do, even outside the fog of war.




The quality of this production – the acting, singing and movement, the costuming, and the technical audio-visual presentation – is absolutely top-class.  With mood swings from humour in the face of the threat of death, to the horror not only of direct hits but also of their captors’ terrible treatment of them – despite their rights as international Red Cross nurses – directing this play requires a tight discipline to make the drama true to reality, which Stuart Halusz has clearly achieved.

It’s that very discipline that is the creed for nurses everywhere, as it is for these actors in creating these nurses’ stories.  Their teamwork lifts the drama off the stage so we feel as they and their characters feel.

Each of us will have our personal response to this experience.  The play does not make Vivian into the conventional idea of ‘hero’.  Known as ‘Bully’ by all, we come to know her as an ordinary person, like ourselves, getting on with what needs to be done, if that’s possible, and working to help others no matter the circumstances with what I would call practical empathy.

The reason I felt so emotionally affected goes back to my birth.  In January 1941 (in UK) I was named Frank after my mother’s favourite brother had been called up, posted to France and had disappeared – only to reappear when I was 5 years old, having walked across Europe from Poland, where he had been made to work in forestry for the Germans.  Like Vivian and those nurses on Sumatra had to provide their Japanese captors with their nursing services.

Like so many, my uncle never told details of his story, and how he survived.  

Seeing 21 Hearts has made me realise and understand anew why my father had taken the stand as a conscientious objector to being conscripted as my uncle had been; and it has reinforced my own determination, when I turned 18 in Australia, to take the same stand as my father against National Service, which was still compulsory in 1959.

Neither of us were sent to jail for opposing war. The wartime court decided to classify my father’s trade, plasterer,  as a ‘reserved occupation’ so he worked on repairing war damaged houses in London for the war years.  In Sydney, a magistrate rejected my claim, but on appeal to a higher court, a judge ordered I must be put in a medical corps where I would be “saving lives, not taking lives”.  I was allowed to defer going until I finished university – and by then National Service had been abandoned; weirdly not long before the 18th Birthday lottery began sending young men to the Vietnam War.

And still, at 84, I sometimes feel that guilt, when I think of those who did not come back from Vietnam, or continue to suffer the mental anguish caused by their experiences there.

Certainly go to see 21 Hearts – Vivian Bullwinkel & the Nurses of the Vyner Brooke, but be prepared for its highly personal impact on your thoughts and feelings about what in earlier times used to be called Glorious War.


Rebecca Davis as Vivian Bullwinkel
in 21 Hearts Jenny Davis OAM

©Frank McKone, Canberra

Wednesday, 23 July 2025

2025: Julius Caesar - Chaika Theatre

 

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.  Chaika Theatre at ACT Hub, Causeway Hall, Kingston, Canberra, 23 July – 2 August 2025

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 23

CAST

Brutus – Lachlan Ruffy
Cassius – Yanina Clifton
Mark Antony – Colin Giles
Julius Caesar – Michael Sparks
Casca – Karen Vickery
Portia/Calpurnia – Amy Kowalczuk
Metellus Cimber – Sophia Mellink
Decius Brutus – Paris Scharkie
Lucius & Octavius – Joshua James
Cinna the Conspirator – Pete Stiles
Ligarius & Cinna the Poet – Ian Russell

 

PRODUCTION TEAM

Director & Set/Costume Designer – Caitlin Baker
Stage Manager – Sienna Curnow
Lighting Designer – Lachlan Houen
Composer & Sound Designer – Paris Scharkie
Associate Sound Designer – Neville Pye
Props Master – Yanina Clifton
Fight Choreographer – Lachlan Ruffy
Assistant Director – Kat Dunkerley


It is certainly appropriate for Chaika Theatre, based in Australia’s National Capital, to open Julius Caesar just as our 48th Parliament has opened for its next 3-year term.  This very successful production of Shakespeare’s study of the politics of government raises the age-old question: is power in the hands of an ambitious self-adulatory individual better for the country than any, even if limited, form of democracy?

I leave the discussion of what has happened and is happening now, in the more than 200 countries around the world, to others, except to say that watching the honourable Brutus agonising about taking part in the killing of Caesar to prevent Rome becoming a dictatorship, after several centuries of republican parliamentary government, could not help but raise a comparison with the situation in the United States of America, where President Trump was recently very nearly assassinated.

The worst part of Shakespeare’s version of Roman history is the civil war among the conspirators following the assassination, rather than a return to reasonably stable government by the Senate.  

The value of Chaika’s presentation is how clearly they showed the confusion of political positions, before and after the murder, that led to social disaster.  Making the play modern in style and costumes, rather than Shakesperean ‘Roman’, allowed for a highly successful innovation.  Half the usually male politicians and military characters were women – not just played by women, but as women, though keeping Shakespeare’s characters’ names and dialogue.

The effect, at least for me, was that the interplay between the characters was enlivened, and the depths of the feelings they expressed were clarified.  The women generally articulated Shakespeare’s words and their implications with more variety and sharpness of effect – and made the issues real for everyone.

I think Shakespeare tried, but in his time could only manage to go some of the way, in the reactions of Portia and Calpurnia, played with great strength by Amy Kowalczuk, but seeing Cassius, Casca and Metellus Cimber from a woman’s point of view, played forcefully by Yanina Clifton, Karen Vickery and Sophia Mellink, was quite startling and opened up these characters far better than when played conventionally by men.

In addition, the choreographed representations of the stabbings and the warfare, stylised in almost dance form, worked very well.  This allowed the feelings of the characters to become the focus, enhancing our feelings in the audience – the art in the movement made us feel the reality of the deaths.

Lighting and sound, though very hard to describe here in writing, were also a great strength of the production, especially with the audience either side of the central stage.

So, without more ado, I say do see the result of Caitlin Baker’s directing of Chaika, even if you think you don’t need to see again the Julius Caesar you had to study at school.  Chaika will open your eyes, your mind and your feelings in a new way of seeing great Shakespeare.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

 

Thursday, 17 July 2025

2025: La Bohème

 

 

La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini.  Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa & Luigi Illica.

Opera Australia at Canberra Theatre Centre. July 17-19 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 17

Creatives
    Director: Dean Bryant
    Revival Director: Warwick Doderell
    Set & Costume Designer: Isabel Hudson
    Lighting Designer: Damien Cooper
    Children’s Chorus Master: Stephanie Arnold
    Conductor: Simon Bruckard
    Language: Italian with English surtitles
    Setting: modern

Cast
Rodolfo – John Longmuir; Mimi – Danita Weatherstone
Marcello – Andrew Williams; Musetta – Cathy-Di Zhang
Schaunard – Kiran Rajasingam / Michael Lampard
Benoit & Alcindoro – Eugene Raggio; Colline – Eddie Muliaumaseali’i
Parpignol & Chorus – Nick Kirkup; Chorus – Maia Andrews; Sarah Prestwidge Alexander Selton; Benjamin Del Borrell 

La Bohème is a morality play designed to teach a lesson to young men about how to treat young women properly.  Such  a story is inevitably at risk of confronting the listener with injunctions they would prefer to ignore.

Presenting this play as an opera risks creating an overblown sense of its own importance.  This is one reason I have never been a dedicated opera buff.

This production of La Bohème by Opera Australia knows the risks and how to win the moral and theatrical day. Puccini and his librettists are hard task-masters musically and dramatically.  Dean Bryant and the whole team get everything right.

The measure of their success is how they made the change over interval.  The first half is often light-hearted, even comical as the four young men play out their natural fascination with the beauty of Mimi and Musetta – though also revealing their sexist attitudes.  It even seems, for example, that Mimi is not as sick as she pretends to be when she first approaches her next door neighbour, Rodolfo, and can’t find her key to return to her rooms.

The risk is that the shift to being, literally, deadly serious in the second half may not be believable.  But Danita Weatherstone, our Mimi last night, captured our feelings immediately, as she asked a policeman about Rodolfo’s whereabouts to begin Act Two.  Of course, the music – instrumental and voice – help, but it is the acting by all the cast which made her death real to us– from consumption, or tuberculosis, which was increasingly common when the opera was first performed in the 1890s.

Our sense of that reality, 135 years later, lifts our understanding of Puccini’s team’s purpose.  Just as we see happening in our ‘social media’ times, those male ‘conventions’ about women as, to quote, ‘witches’, have to change in the face of reality.

Even if they are, as these young men claim to be, bohemian artists – so self-important.  

This production, by successfully creating true empathy in us, as these characters realise the error of their youthful ways, shifts from being almost a caricature of artists in Act One to making us understand the quality and sincerity of the performances, on stage and in the pit, of these theatrical artists – men, women and even children.

A production not to be missed.




La Bohème Act One
Opera Australia, Canberra Theatre 2025

 

La Bohème Act Two
Opera Australia, Canberra 2025

 

 

 

Saturday, 5 July 2025

2025: The Half-Life of Marie Curie by Lauren Gunderson

 

The Half-Life of Marie Curie by Lauren Gunderson.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, June 13-July 12, 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 5

    Playwright: Lauren Gunderson
    Director: Liesel Badorrek

    Cast
    Rebecca Massey as Hertha Ayrton; Gabrielle Scawthorn as Marie Curie

    Production Concept
: Anthea Williams
    Set & Costume Designer: James Browne
    Lighting Designer: Verity Hampson
    Composer & Sound Designer: Daniel Herten
    Video Designer: Cameron Smith
    Dialect Coach: Linda Nicholls-Gidley
    Movement Coach: Gavin Robins
    Stage Manager: Bella Kerdijk; Assistant Stage Manager:  Maddison Craven
    Costume Supervisor: Lily Mateljan
   
 “The Half-Life of Marie Curie” is presented by special arrangement with Broadway Licensing, LLC, servicing the Dramatists Play Service imprint. (www.dramatists.com)

Director's Note

It is 1912 and Marie Curie has won two Nobel Prizes in different scientific fields. It is almost impossible to overstate her level of international celebrity or, consequently the tempest that exploded after it was leaked to the press that she was having an affair with her married colleague Paul Langevin.

Virtually held hostage in her Paris home by journalists and angry mobs, Marie fell into a deep depression. Her friend, the British physicist, electromechanical engineer and suffragist, Hertha Aryton, took Marie to her house on the English coast for the summer, the respite of which may have saved Marie’s life. Obviously, we will never know the intricacies of this incredible friendship between two extraordinary women….but we can imagine.

The Victorian age was one of incredible change and discovery, particularly in the field of science. Unlike now, the worlds of science and spirituality weren’t regarded as mutually exclusive. There was a feeling that it was possible to reveal the invisible, and know the previously unknowable – in science, nature and even, to quote Hamlet, ‘That undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’.

Like many Victorians, Marie attended seances with her husband Pierre out of curiosity. Could there be any science there? A measurable energy? What have we been and what do we become?
Lauren Gunderson’s play is about Transformation and Discovery – processes which shape both Marie and Hertha as women, as scientists and as friends, in real and transcendent ways.

‘Half-life. The moment an element transforms so fully that it is more other than self.’

Liesel Badorrek 

_________________________________________________________________________________
 

First, the performances, the stage design and choreography make this production of The Half-Life of Marie Curie one of the most imaginative, engaging and even exciting to watch shows that I have ever seen.

Second, but not least, the play, short though it is, has intellectual and emotional power which places it among the greatest theatrical works.

It was simply wonderful to see these two exquisite actors working so completely in harmony together, creating totally believable characters. Rebecca Massey as Hertha Ayrton grabs our attention from the get-go, so focussed on her concern for the welfare of her colleague, equal in scientific achievement, but suffering social contumely as a woman leading an independent life.  

Gabrielle Scawthorn’s Marie Curie pulls us inevitably in to her emotional turmoil as a woman and lover of her dead husband, needing to find new love in Paul, in the context of her almost spiritual understanding of science, working with these men, which enabled her to explain the process by which seemingly unchanging elements radiate energy – changing half-life by half-life from uranium to lead.

Physics and chemistry are brought together in a fascinating abstract circle of light, darkness and transparency, representing in my mind the universe within which, and indeed integrated into, Marie and  Hertha – like all of us – exist, live and die.

Thinking of the experience of such force emanating from the intimate space of the Ensemble Theatre brought to my mind, almost in a funny way, two words.  Marie’s death, probably from cancer caused by the very radium she discovered, though long after the holiday that Hertha provided for her which “saved her life” socially, and gave her love, seemed AWFUL.  Yet her two Nobel prizes are AWEFUL, and rightly show the importance of Marie Curie as a woman scientist.

I am not surprised to find on Wikipedia that Lauren Gunderson's works heavily focus on female figures in history, science, and literature. She is one of the top 20 most-produced playwrights in the country, and has been America's most produced living playwright since 2016. She has had over twenty plays produced including, “I and You”, “Émilie: La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight”, “Parts They Call Deep”, and “Background”.  

Thanks to Ensemble, my hope for American culture is restored.  Ensemble’s founder, Hayes Gordon, would surely be proud.

And, in case you were wondering, Google AI says:
No, Pierre Curie did not die from radiation poisoning. He died in a street accident in Paris on April 19, 1906, when he was run over by a horse-drawn carriage. His death was a tragic accident, not a result of radiation exposure. While both Pierre and Marie Curie were pioneers in the study of radioactivity and exposed themselves to radiation, Pierre's death was not related to that. Marie Curie, however, did eventually die from aplastic anemia, likely caused by prolonged exposure to radiation. 



 Gabrielle Scawthorn as Marie Curie; Rebecca Massey as Hertha Ayrton
in The Half-Life of Marie Curie, Ensemble Theatre 2025
Photo: Prudence Upton

©Frank McKone, Canberra

Monday, 12 May 2025

2025: The Wrong Gods - Belvoir and Melbourne Theatre Company

 

The Wrong Gods by S. Shakthidharan.  Belvoir Theatre co-produced with Melbourne Theatre Company, at Belvoir Theatre, Sydney, May 3 – June 1, 2025.
Supported by The Hive – Supporting emerging talent at Belvoir

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 11


CAST
Nirmala: Nadie Kammallaweera    Isha: Radhika Mudaliyar
Devi: Manali Datar            Lakshmi: Vaishnavi Suryaprakesh


CREATIVES
Writer and Co-Director: S. Shakthidharan
Co-Director: Hannah Goodwin
Set and Costume Designer: Keerthi Subramanyam
Lighting Designer: Amelia Lever-Davidson
Sound Designer: Steve Francis
Associate Sound Designer: Madeleine Picard
Composer: Sabyasachi (Rahul) Bhattacharya
Tabla performed by Aman Pal

Indian soundscapes recorded by George Vlad (mindful-audio.com)
Movement & Fight Director, Intimacy Coordinator: Nigel Poulton
Vocal Coach: Laura Farrell
Stage Manager: Madelaine Osborn; Stage Manager: Steph Storr
Assistant Stage Manager: Mia Kanzaki; Assistant Stage Manager:
Grace Sackman

Digital Program at https://belvoir.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/TWG-Digital-Program_v5.pdf
Cover photography by Daniel Boud
Rehearsal photography by Brett Boardman

The four women at a light moment in rehearsal as
Isha, Nirmala, Devi and Lakshmi
The Wrong Gods by S. Shakthidharan, Belvoir 2025
 

 

We are putting our faith in the wrong ideas. The wrong systems. The wrong gods.  That woman, in the valley. Her gods and our gods are going to need to talk to each other. They are going to have to work together. It will take an openness on both sides. They are ready.
But are we?


This is the ending of the Author/Director’s program note.  It’s where we begin to appreciate his play, written he says, because of his experience more than a decade ago:

She's sitting on the banks of her river, deep in her valley, in the remote heart of India. She's staring at me. I'm brushing off her soil from my lenses, my tripod, my cables. I've just finished an interview with her. As I head back up the mountain, to where my Australian arts colleagues are waiting, she yells: 'make sure you get our story onto that TV!' It's not a request: it's an order. Her cow bellows his [her?] support. 'I'll try, aunty,' I feebly call back down the mountain.

Not on television, but powerfully on real-life stage, The Wrong Gods makes its point in a straightforward manner, in 90 minutes, no interval.

That woman in the valley, with her cow but no man left to work, is Nirmala, a traditional small farmer, needing her teenage daughter to leave school to keep the farm going.  Isha has been told by her teacher, Devi, that she is very bright.  Isha insists on going on to school in the city.

Both mother and daughter are very determined characters.  Though Nirmala is afraid of ‘modern’ influences, after a highly emotional argument, she finally gives in and lets Isha go.

But soon Lakshmi appears, a modern executive, in a program to explain to the villagers how her American company is being funded, including by the Indian government, to dam the valley to supply clean water to the millions living in the city.  This will drown 40,000 people's homes.  In the theatre world, there are echoes here going right back to Henrik Ibsen and An Enemy of the People.  

On the side, I had a picture in mind of the town of Adaminaby, drowned in the building of the 1940s-50s Snowy Mountains water supply scheme in Kosciuszko National Park, not far from Canberra, Australia, where I live.

When Isha returns she is educated in science and sees the necessity of modern development, the new Indian god, while her mother refuses to leave and would rather drown than deny the traditional gods and thousands of years of her indigenous way of life.

I thought then of the sincere acknowledgement of the Gadigal Eora people, original custodians of the land where Belvoir stands,  given by Radhika Mudaliyar just before moving into the role of Isha at the opening of the play.  In the end, as Isha, she reconciles with her mother Nirmala – but as S. Shakthidharan says, are we ready?

And then I thought – in 200 years modern progress has already brought us far worse than the damming of many valleys like Nirmala’s.  Even if we can limit the CO2 in the atmosphere with our net-zero plan by 2050, we are already past tipping-points according to most scientists – like Isha becomes in the play.  Can we ever be ready for a world-wide future so inhospitable as to be incapable of supporting human life?

The Wrong Gods pulls no punches.

Isha and her mother Nirmala
in rehearsal reacting to the inevitability of modern 'progress'
as Lakshmi and Devi explain.
The Wrong Gods by S. Shakthidharan, Belvoir 2025

 


Copyright: Frank McKone, Canberra

 

Saturday, 10 May 2025

2025: Harold Pinter Double Bill - Ensemble Theatre

 

 

The Lover and The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney May 2 – June 7 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 10

Director: Mark Kilmurry
Set & Costume Designer: Simone Romaniuk
Lighting Designer: Matt Cox
Composer & Sound Designer: Daryl Wallis
Stage Manager: Lauren Tulloch; Asst Stage Manager: Yasmin Breeze

Cast:
Nicole da Silva; Gareth Davies; Anthony Taufa


Harold Pinter.org
www.haroldpinter.org › plays › plays_lover offers an interesting view of The Lover when it was first presented at the Arts Theatre UK in 1963.  

‘Richard’ (husband) or ‘Mark’ (lover) both played with precision by Gareth Davies is English upper middle class to a T.  ‘Sarah’ or ‘Whore’ even more so by Nicole da Silva, I thought – partly because I think Pinter gave her opportunities for more varied emotional responses to situations.

But an un-named reviewer in The Financial Times (who perhaps may have attended the same long boring meetings as Richard) wrote in 1963:
Harold Pinter is [by] far the most original, as he is also the most accomplished, of the younger generation of playwrights. And lately he has added to his other remarkable qualities an extreme formal eloquence. This quality will not, I suppose, endear him to the sterner of my younger colleagues, who regard formal eloquence as a sign of frivolity. They are all for ragged ends edges and untidy ends. But for those with any feeling for shape this addition to Mr. Pinter’s range is an uncommon delight.”  

He (I assume all financial journalists were ‘he’ in those days) goes to praise Pinter’s “absolute economy of means to produce a ... precision of effect. The little play works simply beautifully, like a perfectly adjusted piece of miniature machinery; except that machinery is dead and this play is scintillating alive.

Gareth Davies as 'Richard' and Nicole da Silva as Sarah
in The Lover, Ensemble 2025
I was young at 22 in 1963 (Pinter was 33) and could not have agreed with The Financial Times more.  Now I have some doubts.

Mark Kilmurry and his actors, including Anthony Taufa as the milkman in The Lover, have honoured Pinter’s reputation for precision exactly, but what else has Pinter left us with 60 years later?

The idea of risky game-playing between a couple now ten years into their marriage seems to offer a warning – if we feel there needs to be a serious intention behind the play – in just one line.  She asks why does he want to stop, and he replies “Because of the children.”  I’m not clear whether Pinter meant only a plot device – that is, the sons will be home soon from boarding school – or whether he meant that parents need to stay married without having to play such games, to prevent emotional confusion damaging their children.

Today we would perhaps ask for more on this kind of issue from the most original and accomplished playwright of our younger generation.

And I wonder, too, then, about The Dumb Waiter.  Davies and Taufa got their Londoner accents pretty well from the Teddy-Boy parts of the city my father made sure I didn’t go near, and the play makes something out of the idea of political power coming down from above, but my literary studies in its year, 1959, emphasised The Dumb Waiter as a clever writer playing another kind of theatre game – called Absurd Drama.

Not only are the two thugs waiting to kill on the orders from an unknown gangster above their station in criminal society, but they were clearly just a variation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.  Beckett was in his fifties by now, and Pinter barely 30 – and ready to prove himself as good at absurdism.  I still think Beckett was better.
Gareth Davies and Anthony Taufa
in The Dumb Waiter, Ensemble 2025
Ensemble’s production of the two plays as a Double Bill certainly brings up plenty to laugh at, especially with such top-class actors (and an amazing scene change in only 20 minutes during interval); and for people much younger than a stern oldie like me there is much to learn from Pinter’s originality and “extreme formal eloquence”.

I see plenty of being “all for ragged ends edges and untidy ends” on social media today.  Stop it, I say – as I suggest Pinter meant.

Copyright: Frank McKone, Canberra

Thursday, 8 May 2025

2025: When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell

 

When the Rain Stops Falling. Based on the play by Andrew Bovell. Mockingbird Theatrics at Belconnen Arts Centre May 8-17, 2025

Directed and designed by Chris Baldock

​Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 8

Cast:
Gabriel York – Chris Baldock
Elizabeth Law (Older) – Liz St Clair Long; Elizabeth Law (Younger) – Ruth Hudson
Joe Ryan – Bruce Hardie
Gabrielle York (Older) – Jess Beange; Gabrielle York (Younger) – Jayde Dowhy
Gabriel Law – Leonidas Katsinas; Henry Law – Zac Bridgman
Andrew Price – Dyllan Ormazabal

Production Team:
Director: Chris Baldock; Stage Manager: Rhiley Winnett
Assistant Director: Zac Bridgman; Properties: Natalie Trafford and Chris Baldock
Set & Projection Design: Chris Baldock; Projection Realisation: Rhiley Winnett
Sound Design: Chris Baldock
Lighting, Sound and Projection Operation: Rhiley Winnett
Costumes: Chris Baldock and Cast

As Gabriel Law and Gabrielle York


When the Rain Stops Falling is among the most significant Australian plays.  This is because it’s like an Argyle diamond.  Of all diamonds in the world, it has a special character, which is peculiar to Australia.  

The diamond itself at core is emotional as a study in more than 20 scenes of a family in regeneration over a lifetime.  The emotion is centred on Gabriel York’s need to re-connect with his only son after he left his wife some 20 years before when he was 30 and Andrew was 8.

But the diamond is bigger than it first seems.  Gabriel senses a connection back to his grandfather, through a series of family links over 80 years, which finally bring Andrew to find his father.  It is in the playing out of these links of loves, and failures to love enough, full of hopes and ironies, that the diamond shows itself to be Australian, of many colours.

As I wrote about the original Sydney Theatre Company production in 2010, “‘The play is unrelievedly bleak but with a denouement of unexpected hope: a moving, almost revelatory evening of theater’ [Richard Zoglin, Time] while the Australian audience on opening night in Canberra responded to the many moments of ironic humour which are built into our culture.  We certainly found the unexpected hope, but not an unrelieved bleakness.  In fact, without laughter, I suspect, the unexpected hope at the end would have been maudlin and sentimental.  In this production, it was ultimately satisfying to know that Gabriel and his son Andrew, with the help of a fish falling from the sky, could at last enjoy each other’s company after four generations of emotional disaster.

Chris Baldock’s production of When the Rain Stops Falling, in a small scale in-the-round setting, captures Gabriel’s frustrations and final happiness in Andrew’s company, but is more subdued in tone.  This is because there are facets of the diamond which bring to light issues, especially about the natural environment and social behaviour – including the fish falling out of the sky – which encouraged a higher level of Australian ironic laughter on the bigger stage, particularly on the contrasts between the Englishness of the attitudes in Gabriel’s grandparents and the realities of colonial life.

Yet the seriousness, especially of the women’s lack of status as against the men’s belief in going their own way no matter what, certainly comes through as it should, perhaps even more so in 2025 than in 2010, making this production well worth seeing.

And not to forget that Climate Change is the brightest political facet of this play.

__________________________________________________________________________________

For follow-up, I think it’s fair to say that Bovell’s playscript is a twist-and-turn experience in trying to catch on to the stories in Gabriel’s family history.  

If you need help, here is a family tree, based on Cygnet Theatre; ShowerHacks.com. "Genealogy, the ancestry of When the Rain Stops Falling."; and www.sustainabletheatre.org/index.php/narrative/climate-change-generational-influence

 As they appear in their various scenes:

Grandfather Henry Law in his Forties in the 1960’s
Grandmother (younger) Elizabeth Law in her Thirties in the 1960’s
                        (older) Elizabeth Law in her  Fifties in 1988
Father Gabriel Law at Twenty-eight in 1988
Mother (younger) Gabrielle York at Twenty-four in 1988
                (older) Gabrielle York in her Fifties in 2013
                Joe Ryan (married to Gabrielle York) in his Fifties in 2013
Gabriel York at Fifty in 2039
Eliza Price – Andrew’s mother doesn't appear.
Andrew Price at Twenty-eight in 2039
 
The pictures below are from Cygnet Theatre, San Diego, California

 


This was created by the Cygnet Theatre while producing When the Rain Stops Falling to explain the connections of the characters. With this, we can understand the generational repetitive actions that involve the change in climate.  

 

Copyright: Frank McKone, Canberra

Friday, 2 May 2025

2025: Blithe Spirit - Canberra REP

 

 

Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward.  Canberra Repertory Theatre - Season: 2 – 17 May 2025

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 2

Directed by Lachlan Houen
Written by Noel Coward

Cast:

Winsome Ogilvie - Elvira
Alex McPherson - Ruth
Peter Holland - Charles
Elaine Noon - Madam Arcati
Antonia Kitzel - Mrs Bradman
John Stead - Dr Bradman
Olivia Boddington – Edith

Creatives:
Set Designers: Andrew Kaye & Michael Sparks OAM
Lighting Design: Leeann Galloway
Sound Design & Composition: Marlené Claudine Radice
Costume Design: Suzan Cooper; Props Coordinator: Gail Cantle




Blithe Spirit is a satirical farce about the English upper classes in the 1930s, with references to the class structure, marriage relationships, and at a comically deeper level about their capacity to believe fantasies about the nature of truth and falsity.  And about death.

“He wrote it in a week. He referred to it as “An Improbable Farce in Three Acts” and took the name from the first line of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, To a Skylark. The play opened at London's Piccadilly Theatre on July 2, 1941—just six weeks after it was written. On November 5, 1941, it premiered on Broadway.” (Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival - Blithe Spirit:A High-Spirited Comdey...)

I was born in January 1941, evacuated from London to a small village, Coedpoeth, in rural Wales, in the wake of the Battle of Britain.

The reality of war was not a farce.  But Coward’s instantly successful play was a metaphor, making absurd laughter out of the upper class who had not wanted to understand that reality.

At www.bard.org/study-guides/noel-coward-as-the-mirror-of-a-generation there’s a neat article: Noel Coward as the Mirror of a Generation by Lynnette L. Horner (Utah Shakespeare Festival).

So, as I enjoyed the laughter along with everyone else at Canberra REP last night, I was also asking myself why?

Why should REP in 2025 choose this play?  Is it enough to laugh at the cast's excellent reproductions of the mannerisms and accents of Noel Coward’s 1930s, as you notice in the corner the maid Edith peddling away on her exercise bike to keep fit like Elaine Noon's totally energetic Madam Arcati, just for the sake of having a bit of fun?

Or might something more substantial been made of why we should laugh at them – in their time, or in our time of international mayhem?  In 1941 British and American audiences could make the connections for themselves.  Maybe today we need a bit of help – unless like me, you were there at the time.

Don’t miss REP’s Blithe Spirit, which is very stylishly done.  But don’t be afraid to wonder what it means in today’s Trumpian world.


Copyright: Frank McKone, Canberra

Thursday, 1 May 2025

2025: Magic Realism at CIMF - Canberra International Music Festival

 

 

Magic Realism at CIMF.  Presented by TURA, Canberra International Music Festival and The Street, with recorded Soundbed Performers, at The Street Theatre, Canberra.

Part 1        O Spectabiles Viri
Part 2        Mungangga Garlagula

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 1


Because, over my four-score years and four, I have never had formal training or education in music, I respond to the sound of music in an unsophisticated immediate emotional way.

Viewed as offerings in an International Music Festival, both O Spectabiles Viri and Mungangga Garlagula are interesting as examples of unusual music presentations, but from my point of view as a theatre critic they were both less effective than they might have been.

Since there did not seem to be any particular connection between the two items in the evening’s program, I’ll discuss them separately.

In each case, though, I heard not just the music but saw a performer presenting us with a show of their own devising: Jane Sheldon in the role of the early 12th Century European composer Hildegard von Bingen; Mark Atkins in the role of a lonely travelling Aussie bushman camping out on country with a 60,000 year history.

Each had a co-creator/performer in Erkki Veltheim, with backstage support from a dramaturg, Ruth Little; a lighting designer, Niklas Pajanti; and set/costume designer, Emily Barrie – plus a team of recorded musicians from Soundbed Performers; engineers and management from the Tura Production team; technicians from The Street; and overall production management from CIMF’s Joshua Robinson, who gave an introductory speech.

I have read about Hildegard, who was clearly a forceful feisty woman in her day, 1098 – 1179, as a “German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages”, according to Wikipedia.  

She obviously organised everybody in sight, and yet it still took until 2012 before Pope Benedict XVI declared her to be a saint.

I found Jane Sheldon’s performance of Hildegard’s music essentially sad, rather than uplifting, and I wondered if our modern concerns about women’s glass ceiling were influencing what seemed to be Hildegard’s frustration when more expansive moments in the singing more or less died away – often into silence.  Too much in the 15 minutes was time waiting for a new development to happen, which in the end never eventuated.  

I read up more about Hildegard after hearing Jane’s piece, and felt Hildegard would have insisted on more action.  Or perhaps Jane was representing that thousand years’ wait for canonisation.

Mark Atkins’ un-named bushman (I think – or perhaps I missed his name in some of the muffled speaking into the microphone) was a very different story.
 
Though I was a naive invading Pom as a teenager, I was a regular overnight bushwalker most of my life, including in outback Queensland.  But it was in Far-West New South Wales, in Broken Hill country where I actually saw the MinMin lights he speaks of as mysterious spiritual connections to the old country of his traditions.

I saw them one time following down along a station property wire fence.  On another occasion, they were less like a light-bulb, more like a lighted mist, floating down a creekbed in Mootawingee.  And I spoke to a woman who had been frightened by a big bright MinMin following close beside her car while driving towards Broken Hill from the South Australian border.

I’m sorry to say, in response to the spiritual idea, that the scientific story was they are examples of static electricity forming between layers of different temperature air.

Though I found Mark’s characterisation a bit of an odd mix between old whiteman bushman stories and Aboriginal tradition. I heard bushwacker stories around the campfire – sometimes between my mouthorgan accompaniment to Click Go The Shears –  but I could only be amazed at Mark's dramatic performances on the didgeridoo.

The pace of his total presentation, even accounting for the old man bush character, was rather too slow for me, but his sounds of the didgeridoo brought his work to life.

And this is what a Festival is for – to bring out the unusual, where magic and realism meet in a 12th Century chant or the rhythm of an ancient didgeridoo.



Copyright: Frank McKone, Canberra

Wednesday, 30 April 2025

2025: Stars in 3D - Dance Week

 

 


Stars in 3D.  The Stellar Company at Gorman House Arts Centre, Canberra.

Featuring the Chamaeleon Collective with special guests Hilal Dance Australia.

Director, Producer & Film Editing: Liz Lea
Stage Manager: Rhiley Winnett
Technical Consultant: Craig Dear
Social Media: Olivia Wikner
Auslan Interpreter: Brett Olzen

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 30



Stars in 3D is a meditation in dance, audio and video, on our place in the universe.  

Unpretentious in performance and design, yet warm-hearted, intellectually stimulating, and emotionally positive, being present in the moment is much more than merely watching as an audience.  It’s like taking part in an important ritual cultural celebration – of true scientific understanding.

Diversity – even down to the varied number of protons, neutrons or electrons in a simple atom like helium – is what makes our universe what it is; just as we each are individually different yet come together to create new generations.

The story of our universe is represented symbolically in the choreography.  We see the amorphous gas being drawn together by gravity to form stars; the formation of galaxies, twin stars and black holes; culminating in the mathematics of the Golden Ratio in the Fibonacci spiral – the dance of the universe -  in “Legs: A joyful and empowering dance piece performed by a group of mostly senior women. Set to a song that celebrates their resilience and spirit, it’s a tribute to their love of movement, sense of fun, and refusal to stop dancing—at any age.”

The integration of video – from real astronomy, backing, or often surrounding, the dancers on stage, to scenes of the dancers on screen combined with those on stage – accompanied by an enormous array of sounds, music and song, was a highly original approach to using theatrical space (pun intended).

After the show, 3D headsets can take you further, by linking to your smart phone, into experiencing your place in our all encompassing universe.

For me, two important themes come to mind.  

First is the essential place of women in our understanding of living in this universe, as they are the elements of physical change – not just symbolically but in actuality.  The family groups with their children enjoying the dancing in such an enthusiastic atmosphere were a special feature of my experience last night.

Second, and equally significant, is the realisation that Art and Science are unified in our amazing human capacity for imagination.  They work together in this show, placing us thoughtfully where we belong, however briefly, in ‘our’ universe, where we have proven Einstein’s maths predicting gravity waves to be real – with the strong possibility that this universe, of which we can see only some 5%, may return to a singularity and explode again into another different universe in an infinite series.

WOW!  What a show this is!



Creatives and Performers:

Link to the Full Program, with details of performers, films and computer simulations.

 


For an equally fascinating but different angle on our understanding of mathematics, read how we (in this case mainly men in the form of ancient Indian Buddhist monks) 'invented' the idea of 0.  

From a philosophy of meditating in a state of 'nothingness' came the idea of counting needing to include a number in the space between +1 and -1.  Without zero, Einstein could never have made the calculations to prove the existence of the universal force we call gravity.

 The history is recounted from the time of Buddha, about 450 BCE, to the present day in another work of art - The Golden Road, How Ancient India Transformed The World - by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury 2024).

 

The Stars in 3D in action
Photo by O&J Wikner Photography

 Copyright: Frank McKone, Canberra

Sunday, 27 April 2025

Romeo and Juliet, Daramalan College

 

Romeo and Juliet Written by William Shakespeare, adapted by Tony Allan.  Directed and designed by Joe Woodward.

The Joe Woodward Theatre, Issoudun Performing Arts Centre, Daramalan College, Canberra.  26 and 30 April and 1, 2, 3 May at 7.00pm and 3 May at 1.00pm

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 26




William Shakespeare almost certainly attended the King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford-upon-Avon until he was 14 or 15. This grammar school, just like Enfield Grammar School which I attended in the 1950s, was a free school, supported by Queen Elizabeth I, for boys and was located near his family's home.  

Though I studied his Henry IV and played the young Prince Hal when I was 13, William may well have read the story of Romeo and Juliet, about the families and the tragic results of their parents’ enmity in Verona, which was well-known in Italy for 100 years before his birth in April 1564.  

Possibly based on truth, it was first published as a short story written by Tommaso Guardati in 1476, as a novel by Luigi da Porto in the 1530s, in another version by Matteo Bandello in the 1550s, and then translated into French and English, in the form of a poem, by Arthur Brooke: The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), which William Shakespeare adapted for the theatre when he was aged 30 in 1594.

Now in the Internet Age you can begin more research by going to www.veronissima.com/en/romeo-juliet-true-story.html (and have a look at Enfield Grammar School https://www.enfieldgrammar.org )

I tell you this to give the modern Australian young people a sense of the literary and theatre tradition within which Shakespeare wrote his plays 400 years ago (and still in the English tradition of my day, at least, some 70 years ago.)  This is to be in keeping with Drama Teacher/Director, Joe Woodward’s intention that “DTC’s new theatre production of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare is a rare Hermetic presentation to create a total theatre experience of drama, music, media, interactive entertainment, food and drink and visual art.”  

And indeed all these elements were there, with many in the audience seated at cafe tables, and a bar in the foyer beforehand, at interval, and after the show.  I did look up the meaning of ‘hermetic’ – “complete and airtight /  or, relating to occult tradition encompassing alchemy, astrology, and theosophy.”

I’m not sure all of that was covered, but the design, music, audio-visuals, costumes and choreography of movement made for an interesting approach, while the measure of success was very much in the final scenes, where education in and through drama came to full strength.

This was achieved not by too much talk and show-off action in the vein of Romeo’s ‘mate’ Mercutio, but in the stillness and silences of the tomb, the recognition of the tragedy they have caused by the Montague and Capulet fathers, and a very important last image added in perhaps by Woodward as teacher/director – or hopefully by the students in a rehearsal workshop.

In my script, which I guess is the 1623 Folio version (there were 7 versions after William’s first effort), the play ends with no more than a homily from the Prince of Verona:

Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.


But in this presentation, in the silence following this speech, Juliet’s mother – never a pleasant parent before this moment – picks up her now dead daughter, aware now of the poison and the dagger, and lays her down, down stage almost amongst the tables of food and drink, and holds her Juliet there, in tears. As the lights dim to blackout.

William has, of course, castigated the men throughout the play for their insistence on their ‘right’ to win at all costs, but Shakespeare still left those men in charge.  

In this largely gender-blind casting, these modern young Australians have taken up the rights of women in that one powerful ending moment.  This is learning through drama in action of the best educational kind.




Romeo, Mercutio, Benvolio, Tybalt
Act III, Scene 1, Romeo and Juliet
Daramalan College, 2025

 

Mother, Nurse, Juliet, Capulet Father
Act III, Scene 5
Daramalan College, Romeo and Juliet 2025

 Copyright: Frank McKone, Canberra