In May (that indicates what my backlog is like) we went to the Roslyn Packer Theatre for a performance by the Pinchgut Opera company of this baroque oratorio about the brothers Cain and Abel.
I had high hopes for Scarlatti’s music. Fratricide, murder, damnation, expulsion, guilt, punishment, and exile seemed dramatic and dynamic subjects for some stirring music. Instead I watched some depressed and morose people mill around a sandpit like it was an unwelcome day out with the in-laws in sunny Strineland.
The critics praised it, I read later after seeing for myself, but I fear I am not on that wavelength and found it barely held my attention. I noticed more than one other in our seating area nodding off (though no names will be mentioned) as the glum proceedings crept on, and in the second half there were many empty seats in front of us, as others had decided to cut their losses and leave long before the curtin. Do reviewers take note of the audience reaction?
N.B. for future visits to the Roslyn Packer Theatre, try for seats H 32 & 33, J 32 & 33, K 33 & 34m, and then enter via the wheelchair entrance to the left of the men’s toilet on the street level. Best for leg room for me and my inflexible knee.
Good meta-data is 208 pages, rated 4.03 by 474 litizens.
Verdict: Predictable.
Tagline: The probe did nothing and that was enough!
Another title in the series of studies of human reaction to the reality of an alien, in this case an inert object plonked down in front of the United Nations building on East 42nd Street in New York City. In the main the story concerns the human reaction to the irrefutable realisation that this is an alien object.
Irrefutable or not, Fox News talking heads deny its reality until it can no longer be denied then blame in on the Obama Biden Triangle. Sock Puppets never change.
It all began as an elementary school science teacher, whose turn it was to escort a tour, took a small group of students to see a United Nations session when the anomaly appeared before their very eyes. The story is told from his perspective as he gets caught up in the reactions.
The responses are many, and largely predictable, though entirely credible.
First is the public irritation at such a major disruption to the ebb and flow of the city at mid-morning on a working day. Much horn honking, cursing, and the like. Only gradually does the realisation bloom that this is no normal SNAFU of a broken down bus, a geysering fire hydrant, or chain fender bender. No! This FU is an Abnormal Situation: ASAFU.
Second, the police cordon off the immediate area and re-route traffic. Contingency plans for demonstrations in front of the UN are applied.
Three, gawkers arrive en masse with selfie sticks and the police are stretched to keep them away from the site. (N.B. Since the advent of selfies eight people at least have fallen backward into the Grand Canyon, according to the Park Service, trying to get a selfie. None survived but they, their sticks, and phone cameras were eventually recovered, perhaps preserving a record. Others have backed into volcanos or boiling mud. Natural de-selection.)
Four, officialdom descends from Washington D.C. in the person of the director of the National Security Agency. (The FBI director was tanked.) He arrives with a platoon of Marines and a gaggle of scientists. The scientists are giddy with excitement trying to analyse the whatever it is. The Marines stand around looking like Marines in desert camos.
Five, the entrepreneurs appear first to sell coffee and donuts to the gawkers, police, officials, scientists, newshounds, and Marines. They later offer T-Shirts and hats as souvenirs.
Six, the representatives of several member states of the United Nations declare their possession of the thingamabob (because it might be valuable) and they saw it first. They take the matter to the World Court which with much bluster convenes with empty solemnity. Likewise the United Nations Secretariat claims sovereignty over the whatsit. The USA refuses these bids but is pressured into transparency in its investigation of the thing. To be transparent just means taking extra precautions for secrecy, or so the NSA director thinks.
Seven, the god squad goes bonkers in the company of the National Inquirer readership of conspiracy theorists, UFOlogists, and neural divergent Fox News-oholics. The god squad blames science while denying the object is alien. Yet the object is certainly not of this world as is made abundantly clear in the text in ways that would be spoilers to repeat here, but which might penetrate a brick brain though not the present President.
Eight, for many this advent heralds the end of the world with attendant riots and such. Once the chaotic reaction in New York City is broadcast by Fox News to the world at large in the most sensational way possible, the disorder spreads to other places – Paris, Rome, Beijing – far from the anomaly; they all go up in flames. Of course, Fox News blames the Obama-Biden cabal for this disturbance and its talking heads all agree with noddies. These latter sock puppets demand that Hillary Clinton testify for hours about her use of the semi-colon.
Nine, the National Security Agency Director decides it is a threat, though it is inert, and calls for more Marines. And more. The coffee sales go up.
Ten, around the world humans continue destroying things and each other. Meanwhile the whateveritis sits inert. It is a mirror in which we see ourselves as we truly are confused, ignorant, myopic, hostile, selfish, paranoid, aggressive, divided, impatient, destructive, and stupid. (Reminded me of that big shiny silver bean in Chicago.) Meanwhile, the alien object remains silent and still. It doesn’t take much to bring out the worst in us, right Brother Hobbes?
The science teacher is an everyman (and there is an everywoman, too) who is a participant-observer on all of this. For readers he translates the heavy duty science into comprehensible doses.
Peter Cawdron
I took liberties above to avoid spoilers but get the idea across.
As usual with Peter Cawdron, the research into locale is meticulous, the characters are diverse, different, and well drawn. The prose gets the job done. Chapeaux!
On a nippy Sunday afternoon we took the 428 Bus to the Flight Path Theatre (aka the Sidetrack Theatre) to see ‘Death in the Pantheon’ by James Hartley. Someone had spiked the ambrosia that makes the gods of the Pantheon immortal and one of them has…died. Well, it was Hephaetius and that lightning bolt sticking out of his back suggests he was MURDERED!
The surviving gods don’t know which is worse, mortally or murder, but they do know they need help.
Who ya gonna call? The Owl symbol is sent forth and Athena, god of wisdom, is on the case. She looks. She thinks. She looks some more. She questions. She questions again. She does move fast this god.
While she is investigating another god dies and it looks like poison.
Never one of say ‘No’ the grieving widow Aphrodite remarries, briefly.
These are the Greek gods of Homer: bickering, bored, squabbling, boring, spoiled, none too bright — Except Athena! Who sets a traps for the murderer, leaves her own false trails…and…!
***
It is fun, and the governing theme that the gods need worshipers more than worshippers need gods emerges. See Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001) for the another treatment of that theme, if you like dense and self-indulgent prose. I commented on this novel on the blog in 2016. Click on for the enlightenment needed.
The performers are each committed to their roles. We enjoyed the energy of the petulant Ares, the Tennessee Williams glamour of Aphrodite, the solemnity of Athena, the insouciance of Zeus, the practicality of Hera, the persnickety Hades, the preening Poseideon, and reeling Dionysius, the sarcastic Hermes whose reading of the wedding apologies was a notable.
The theatre was chilly but I suppose there is nothing to be done about that. It is after all a tin shed (which was once an Army tin shed). The program notes said 75 minutes on one web page and 80 minutes on another without an interval. OK. The reality was 120 minutes without an interval. Too long. That is the more annoying when I realise this play has been staged several times so that the timing should have been fixed. Grrr.
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Steve Canny and John Nicholson directed by Richard Cotter at the Genesian Theatre on Kent Street.
A rip-roaring, rip-snorting take on that damned dog! Europe’s third greatest detective – ‘Sniff!’ – is hired to pick up after a gigantic hound at Grimpen Mire. Yuck! But a job is a job, and in doing it there will be vindication of the claim to being the first greatest detective in the world!
The pace is fast and furious with stage props flying this way and that, but Act I draws to a close, and the entranced audience is free to move around, but then ‘Lo!’ when we returned to our seats after the interval Sherlock breaks the fourth wall….. [To say more would be a spoiler…]
Suffice it to say that the production won over one and all with its wit, its energy, its humour, and its joie de théâtre.
Live theatre at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta (May 2021) with Jane Phegan, 55 minutes with no break.
Described as a verbal essay by a woman whose lifelong dream was to see the Amazon River (page 132 on her schoolgirl atlas) and voyage along the great river, as if into the unknown. That dream come true segues into a metaphor for her father’s parallel voyage into the unknown lands of dementia. Sounds grim perhaps but it is punctuated with wit and insights that relieve the doom and gloom of the inevitable.
There is even a reference to Fordlandia and Henry Ford, and one does not hear that everyday, and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Hank and Fitz were not alone in their failed attempts to conquer the Amazon, but there is no reference to the other Amazon that is a contemporary fact of life, and seems alike impervious to time and tide. I have read about Fordlandia and commented on the books linked below for those who must know.
Something caught my eye and interest when I read about this one-woman play, maybe it was a reference to Fordlandia, and after due diligence I got tickets on-line for a Saturday matinee and on the appointed day off we went by Metro train via Strathfield. We have been largely bunkered and hunkered down for more than a year like everyone else and it was a treat venturing to distant Parramatta, strolling the streets for a light lunch, dining, and crossing the river to the theatre, and then returning home in the fading sunlight. Though rain was in the forecast it missed us.
Noëlle Janczewsk
The stroll was more like dodging around a construction site as the Parramatta tram line works seems to have totally taken over Church Street.
While that production has come and gone, it may be revived again. Take note. The writer’s website is linked below.
In 2019 we did the Sydney Festival with Renaissance Tours and were tourists in town, staying at a hotel and letting Renaissance select what we saw. That was a good experience and we thought to repeat it 2020, and signed up for the Renaissance Sydney Art and Culture Long Weekend again, but for reasons unknown it was cancelled. Sacré bleu! Tabarnak! We had to decide for ourselves.
Studying the program we picked five things and I proceeded to book them. Too slow I was for our number one pick, which was William Barton playing the didgeridoo. We had seen him perform with the Song Company nearly ten years ago in Darwin and found it enchanting. But by the time I hit the keyboard, it was sold-out and I accepted waiting listing. (Later I got an email about a few last minute tickets but when I tried to purchase the web site was down – collapsed under the demand I supposed.)
My timing was better for the other four and we got tickets on the days and at the times that suited us.
First up was Life – The Show at Spiegeltent in Hyde Park, produced by one of the fabulous Davey sisters from Melbourne. It was marvellous. Wet, dry, hot, cold, sad, deliriously happy with anti-gravity aerialists, cabaret music, and a flying saxophonist shown in the centre bottom of the image above.
Next up was the Albury-Wodonga’s Flyings Fruit Fly Circus show Time Flies at the Seymour Centre, University of Sydney. It was presented as a School Captain’s report with droll humour, and with exuberant energy.
Adding to cabaret and circus was drama in Black Ties at Town Hall. It was great fun though the antics of one of the characters was disproportionate, we thought.
But seldom have so many had so much fun in the Town Hall theatre, which is frequently the site for some acrimonious back-stabbing when political parties use it for annual meetings.
We capped off our Festival with the songs of the a cappella Tenebrae Choir from Old Blighty at the City Recital Hall where we saw several others from Kate’s choir, from Newtown, and from days gone by. Such precision, such clarity, such blending of voices, such emotion made it a riveting performance.
It is Eva’s show first and last, dead and alive, Eva and Evita. It’ll about Eva. Tina Arena nails the performance. Chapeaux!
The use of archival film was interesting and we wanted more of that, and that it be integrated into the story rather than merely wallpaper.
There is some clever choreography with the martinet toy soldiers.
But….
Yes, there are a number of them and they concern the narrative and the music. Me, I know nothing about music, so I will clear the air on that first. I found it to be repetitive. Even I could tell that. And it was shallow. The performers made the best of it, to be sure.
Moving on to the narrative.
It’s only a show. Why does it matter? Because, as with movies, many viewers will suppose it is accurate and after seeing it conclude they now know the Perón story. Aaaaargh!
Tomás Elroy Martínez called it an abomination and I can see why.
The narrative reflects the arrested development of a Hollywood script writer, whose idea of a sophisticated man of the world is Silvio Berlusconi. None of the depth and complexity of the principals and the circumstances are present.
The program notes comment that while driving the author heard ten minutes of a radio program about Eva and that set him onto the trail. Ten whole minutes of preparation! From a shallow medium itself. Yes, I know the notes go on about his subsequent research. Oh hum.
This is not the time and place to go into any of the details, though previous reviews on this blog about the Peròns are there to be seen.
In this rendering there is too little of the man himself, Juan Perón, and too much a man who was not there Ernesto Guevara. (Ernie was a teenager at time, by the way, and still living at home). The latter is a narrator of sorts, reeking of cynicism, wreathed in cigar smoke, and running with sprayed on water. Intrusive and pointless to this observer.
How can a story of Argentina have so little tango in it. While the dancers do as told, it is hardly tango. But its absence reminded me of Carlos Saura’s masterpiece ‘Tango’ (1998).
The telling is stocked with the usual tropes that preoccupy boys with arrested development, sex and money alternating with money and sex, leavened by sex and money.
As is to be expected in such tripe, there is also in the program notes (which are not paginated) a reference to Eva’s ‘Machiavellian management’ of her career. One stereotype is thus trotted out to explain another, and neither connects with reality. By the way, when a woman manages her career it is blackened as with that adjective ‘Machiavellian,’ but when a man does likewise it is the habit of a successful person to be emulated by others.
The screen cover over the stage depicted Perón rising on the corpses of hapless workers, guarded by intimidating soldiers, protecting plutocrats, and luxuriating in riches. It is quadruple play of error. And indicative of the intellectual and historical veracity of what followed.
In this case the reference is to the stage play by Frank Gauntlett performed at the NIDA playhouse in Kensington, NSW. It is a one-man show with Mark Lee, directed by Gareth Boylan. The season is 11 April to 2 May 2018.
In short, we liked it.
The adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel is coherent and well written. The set design stimulates the imagination but is understated. Much is accomplished with lighting and sound. Though most of all there is the performance that carries the day.
Our traveller starts out a smug, erudite, confident Victorian know-it-all and ends a broken man. In between he knows wonder, fear, love, remorse, terror, and regret.
The Year 802,791 A.D. shows the devolution of human kind with the layabout fruit-eating Eloi and the dark meat-eating Molochs. In Wells’s heavy hands this situation is the division between capital and labor carried to its logical conclusion.
Though quite how cannibalism fits into that equation is never made clear, nor how it is that the Eloi benefit from the labor of the Molochs.
That Eden might rest on slave labour is a recurrent theme in literature. There is a striking passage about this symbiotic relationship in Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ (1924) where the mutual dependence is made very clear without the didacticism of Wells.
It takes just over one hour, and was worth the bus ride virtually door-to-door on the 370.
While sojourning through the historic gold fields of Central Victoria we visited M.A.D.E. in Ballarat. It is located on the site of the Eureka Stockade of 1854, and in part recounts that story for those who missed the Chips Rafferty film. It is named on the premiss that the Stockade founded Australian democracy.
The museum is purpose built and very well designed and attractive. We particularly liked the symbolic rendering of the Stockade outside. Inside it is circular and so draws along the visitor, while mimicking the circular stockade outside. The centrepiece is the tattered remains of the homemade Eureka flag, which is surprisingly large. The curator at work shows the size of the flag.
Ought not that to be the national flag? (And ‘Waltzing Matilda’ the national anthem; the 1977 plebiscite be damned?) Around the museum are artefacts from the days when Australian political practices developed and more general displays about the nature, value, and exercise of democracy, or so it is alleged.
But, and it is a large ‘but’ I found it as confused about what ‘democracy’ means as the rival museum in Old Parliament House in Canberra, though I thought MADE had more intellectual content and was less puerile that the Canberra version. There are comments on this latter museum elsewhere on the blog for those looking for trouble.
By the way, I typed it as MADE and not M.A.D.E. because I cannot fathom the point of the periods after the capital letters that stand for single word in an acronym. After all NASA and NATO have gotten by all these years without four additional and superfluous periods, as did the USSR. Yes, pedant that I am I did look in style guides for an explanation of that accoutrement and found none.
What the museum seems to be about is liberalism, that the individual is an autonomous being and that social and hence political arrangements should recognise and respect that. This liberty of the person is based on the capacity for autonomy and in turn that justified endowing the individual with the political rights to express and defend that autonomy. Rather than leaving individuals to defend those rights in a combative state of nature, political institutions develop to protect them in an orderly and predictable manner making social life peaceful. The foregoing is a gross gloss on Immanuel Kant who best explains this concept of autonomy with some seasoning from Thomas Hobbes.
The point to bear in mind is that persons may have social, economic, and moral liberty without political rights. A benevolent government, say a monarchy, may permit this, and in fact that is the evolution of political rights in England. But that evolution was contingent not necessary.
The Goldfields Diggers were, moreover, good John Lockean liberals and mixed their labour with the soil to create property. That term ‘digger’ took on another meaning in the trench warfare of World War I.
MADE makes no mention of Kant or Locke, but implicitly that concept of autonomy best unifies its exhibits. Some of this concept is masked by a smokescreen of jingoism according to which what is on display is Australian democracy, not democracy, but AUSTRALIAN democracy. Is it like invoking Singapore democracy when harassing journalists? Is that like dropping an apple and explaining it as the work of AUSTRALIAN gravity?
In contrast, there is little or nothing about the practice of democracy and the institutions, formal and informal, that embody it, still less any critical perspective on any aspect of it. The extension of the franchise gets a mention, but not systematically enough for this pedant. The property, racial, and gender discriminations that limited the franchise for generations was also Australian but it is passed largely in silence. Slavery in the Queensland cane sugar fields that compromised Federation from day one is likewise omitted. Indeed Australian history books coyly even now do not use the word ‘slavery’ for this quaint far north Queensland practice but maybe this is a tangent.
The evolution of the secret ballot seemed to be absent, yet as a school boy on the distant Platte I learned that the secret ballot was the (South) Australian ballot. A little jingoism on this point might be in order, or is that out of bounds because MADE is about VICTORIAN democracy? Once begun parochialism does not easily end.
Still less was there anything about the peculiarities of the hybrid Australia assembled by shopping in both Westminster and Washington for institutions. Nor is there anything about the oddities of the methods of voting and vote counting that run through Australian politics, from that Hare-Clarke system in Tasmania where everything must always be different to the endless rumours that the thirty-eighth preferences were not counted on upper house ballots in New South Wales. Some suppose this obsession with convoluted voting systems reflects a low level of social trust, which hardly fits the triumphal message of the Museum. Alan Davies used to say that.
Nor is the strange case of Queensland, speaking of differences, mentioned which has gotten by without an upper house for all these years and, despite the implications in MADE, has not been noticeably more democratic than the other states for the absence of the check on the democratic lower house.
Then there is the oddest thing of all: compulsory voting, which was legislated in 1924 as a convenience for political parties and is now a sacred totem seldom discussed rationally. When combined with the preferential ballot it produces strange results yet it is worshipped as OURS.
To many intellectuals the very word ‘liberalism’ is anathema and to the popular mind it is often associated with the political party of that name. As to the latter, set that aside. After all one can talk about labor without invoking that party, so surely one can talk about liberty without limiting it to Liberals. They do not own liberalism any more than the ALP owns the concept of labour.
As to intellectuals the story inevitably is longer though simple. The short version is the liberal-democracy has been regarded as the root of all evil for two generations. That mantra has made many a career, Think Noam Chomsky and all the little wanna-be little Noams out there, often citing incomprehensible French and German thinkers to clothe the nostrums they spout. Against that bulldozer of opinion it is a brave scholar who proclaims allegiance to liberalism. This ground has been trod in previous posts, the most extensive being on a CBC program; I forebear from repeating here not out of consideration for the bleader, but because it is too depressing to recount.
Suffice it to say that during the Cold War, complacent and secure intellectuals made it a career to attack and undermine their own society, and they did such a good job that their spawn now is the President of the Electoral College, the Twit in Chief.
Getting back to MADE, there is intellectual content. The analysis of the speeches on audio and video was very fine and well worth doing, though neither that analytic content nor the speeches themselves were integrated into the meaning of democracy. Yes, speeches can be influential. Adolf Hitler knew that, and by the way he participated in and won elections without the bedrock of liberalism. Likewise the video parade of books was well done but was not integrated into the theme of the Museum. What Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ has to do with AUSTRALIAN democracy is anyone’s guess.
Outside is a symbolic replica of the Stockade and that is imaginative, informative, and interesting. It is located on the original site, and it gives some idea of the scale of events. Well, I assume the scale is relevant. It is small though inside the rhetoric is large.
As homework for this visit, I read Clare Wright’s ‘The Forgotten [Women] Rebels of Eureka’ (2014).
I got a lot of the context of the Victorian Gold Rush from it, which was all new to me, despite the agony of reading all six volumes of Manning Clark’s vastly overrated ‘History of Australia.’ (That Clark hatred Australia was very apparent to this reader and also that he resented the fact that he lived here.) The explosion of the population and the attendant confusion was food for thought. The population of the colony of Victoria doubled in weeks, and then doubled again, and again. The flood of gold-fevered immigrants was so great that a FULL sign went up and they were turned away from Port Phillip in Melbourne. To circumvent that prohibition passenger ships landed many in South Australia who then walked a thousand kilometres to Victoria.
Most of these feverish get-rich-quickers were young men. Half the population was under twenty-five, burning with the brassy impatience and dangerous inexperience of youth. Thousands and thousands were Chinese and this influx was one catalyst for the later White Australia policy which was born in Victoria. Many Chinese had been displaced by the aggressive British Opium Wars in southern China. (For the fraternity brothers who cut the class, the British fought the Opium Wars [plural] to force the Chinese to accept in trade British opium from Afghanistan. From this chapter of history was born the mythical Chinese Opium Den [British owned].)
The vagabonds, freebooters, refugees, gold diggers, and others who flocked to Victoria were polyglot. Some were late Forty-Niners from California, including some riff-raff thrown out of San Francisco. (Imagine what it took to get thrown out of San Francisco at that time.) French escaping the turmoil of 1848, as well as Hungarians, Jews, Croats, Italians, Venetians (who then, as now, do not regard themselves as Italians), Irish, Rutherainians, Ottomanis, and the like found passage to Victoria. Those who missed California in 1849 were not going to miss out again!
It is some indication of scale of the gold rush that these centuries later that two of Australia’s largest and most substantial inland cities were built from scratch at the time and remain, Ballarat and Bendigo. Each still evinces the wealth that abounded in their past in the scale of their streets, the monumental public architecture, the grand houses, and the art in galleries.
This human assortment at Eureka had nothing in common but gold lust. They were not Englishmen out to (re-)claim the traditional rights of Englishmen as were the American revolutionaries. They were not Europeans bent on toppling the privileged and exploitative ancien régime, though MADE draws a straight line from these uprisings to Eureka, leaving aside the pogroms the accompanied many of them. They were not intellectuals inspired by Thomas Paine’s ‘The Right of Man.’ They were greedy individualists. Period. Sorry, Chips, but it is the obvious truth. None of them was there to make a better world, serve humanity, cure cancer, or anything else, but to feather their own nests. They wanted secure property rights for individuals, not majority rule.
Here is an irony. If this human soup was the origin of Australian democracy, the practice of democracy in Australian for the subsequent century and half was partly dedicated to straining that soup. It had started earlier with the near extermination of the aboriginal population. White Australia kept out the Asians. The oppression of the Catholics kept the Irish and later Italians in their place well below stairs. The reluctant acceptance of Post World War II refugees, known as refos, from Europe was only slightly preferable to Australian democrats than the Yellow Peril from the north.
The point is that Australia was no better. albeit no worse, than other European societies.
Performances until 5 August. Recommended.
A one act play of 90 minutes, this is a family drama. Three years ago Henry died in the garden and his widow-wife, Sue, soldiers on with her three adult children, Erin, Naomi, and Daniel. Sandy Gore as Sue carries the burden, and does so marvellously. The others are fine, but she is the centre around which they turn, albeit reluctantly.
Much is told in flashbacks to fill in the gaps.
Erin, Naomi, and Daniel have lives of their own and are too busy for more than brief and ritual visits to Sue, hastening in and out. Erin is the leader of the pack on some measures. She is married with two children, and a budding career as a literary agent. (Some knowing in jokes there from the playwright.) She has the least time for anyone else, the mobile phone constantly ringing, the off stage children demanding, the husband to be placated. Naomi, the youngest, is a drifting dreamer with pot smoking interfering with her work at the call center. Boy, does that explain a lot. While she is not pressed for time, well pot smoking keeps her busy. Daniel is on an upward trajectory at school, now department head. Poor sod. Daniel under constant pressure to mark papers, attend meetings, complete budget spreadsheets. He is in a relationship with Kim or is it Tim, I could not tell. Whatever the name, it is a man. They whirl individually in and out of Sue’s house.
She has found that she cannot communicate with them. Talk, yes, but communicate, no. It is partly their preoccupations that block the signal, but Sue also has trouble putting her thoughts and feelings into words. She is not quite sure what she wants to say, and that uncertainty together with their noise discourages her.
By chance she starts talking to a plant, as in the title, ‘The Plant,’ as a lonely person might talk to a pet, a dog. She finds that helps. As Georg Hegel would say, she objectifies her thoughts by speaking them into the world, and that is relaxing. It also helps her come to terms with the situation. Then she takes in a border, Clare, who takes the place of The Plant. See it to believe it.
This intruder rings alarm bells with the children who find enough time to chasten Sue, to warn her, to threaten the border, to spy on Sue.
By the end all three children are back at home. Erin was so successful that did not notice her husband’s departure until it was too late. Naomi has lost yet another job and spent all her dosh on dope when the rent is due. Tim/Kim splits from Daniel who is lost.
The play is the thing, and now that I know the name Kit Brookman, I want to see more. Though he looks like a child in the publicity photographs, the script has insights to go with the wit and zest.
The players live up to the words, and we loved Clare’s shoes.
The staging is minimal. A few cardboard boxes and one chair. When there is something to be said, few props are needed. Though there is Clare’s gear.
We drove to Kirribilli over the Bridge and parked on the street to see the play, and then had lunch there on a fine winter’s day, bright, clear, and 18C with views of the Harbour while we talked about what we had just seen.
The curator at work shows the size of the flag.
