Wild Honey, State Theatre Company
Those Dear Departed, Stage Company
Stitch in Time, Vitalstatistix
Bazaar and Rummage, Red Shed Company
The State Theatre Company’s final production for 1987 is Michael Frayn’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Wild Honey, directed by Aubrey Mellor. The ur-manuscript of Wild Honey aka Platonov aka A Country Scandal languished in a bank deposit box in Moscow until 1920 before being dusted off and whipped into various shapes by various translators.
Frayn has taken bold liberties with the text, substantially rewriting the latter part of the play in particular, but generally reorganising sequences, cutting whole subplots and introducing new ones. The result is pop Chekhov, but recognisably Anton in its presentation of extravagant disappointment, febrile boredom, wilting ardour and misdirected passion all poised to lurch from comedy to manic violence at any moment.
Frayn has retained Chekhov’s gentle forgiveness of human foibles but despite his claim that he has served the original faithfully, his version is as broad as the side of a bus and about as subtle as a cossack boot. Director, Aubrey Mellor has cheerfully recognised the fact and also reminded us that all that chatter between characters, often earnestly represented in productions of the major plays, is frequently ludicrous, frankly laughable and always absurd.
John Gaden as Platonov gives his best performance for State this year. Glum, mischievous, scathing, self serving and witty, Gaden’s Platonov is a self-confessed swine. But he is made appealing rather than endearing, while Lindy Davies as Anna Petrovna is splendidly comic, providing an heroic vitality that makes her part a star turn .
Others match the principals -Ron Haddrick as the blithering general and Robert Grubb as the doctor (not a flying one this time) give excellent detailing; Grubb perhaps providing the most pleasingly recognisable Chekhovian performance in the production. Julie Nihill (Sasha) and Genevieve Picot (Sofya) offset any enduring notions that Platonov’s courtships are in any sense conquests. As Sergey, Tony Sheldon is half-way over the top but is sufficiently daft, unworldly and sulky to succeed . Don Barker is notably doddery as a landowner with a three-foot name and Terence Crawford is chilling as Osip, the horse thief.
Ken Wilby and Mark Thompson’s set opens up the entire stage area with really real turf and pine trees looming behind the permapine facades of the insignificant human habitation. The costumes are oddly gaudy, but it is a vulgarity suited to the mismatched pretensions of the characters.
State has produced a crowd-pleaser with Wild Honey. Its scope and energy provide an assured end to a mixed season and it is proof of John Gaden’s commitment to recruit actors of high calibre.
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When Max Lambert, Musical Director for The Stage Company’s Those Dear Departed, observed that his score did not have a serious note of music in it, Director John Noble replied that if it did he would take it out. The show, in being openly a piece of fun is a pleasing entertainment from the beleaguered Stage Company. With their funding cut, Stage are showing some style in the face of tribulation , and the warmth of the first night audience suggests that the faithful were more than ready to put the wagons in a circle.
Those Dear Departed is a piece of Rocky Horror style hokum stitched together by Steve J. Spears from bad musicals, loopy revues and the fascinating dross of melodrama. Max Falcon, shimmering star of the Australian showbusiness, has been despatched to the Other Side with a little nudge from his wife Marilyn and a carload of carbon monoxide. In fact, Marilyn, always fetching in black, has already croaked Max’s agent Norda and has plans for two inquisitive members of the constabulary as well.
Then it is time for all unquiet spirits to come to the aid of the departed as they return in lawn bowling outfits to exact a confession from this fatal femme.
The Stage Company has opened the Space as a cabaret with jokey sets garnished with neon designed by John Senczuk. Events are narrated by Jenny Vuletic as Marilyn, who provides a dashing focus to the show. She sings well and vamps so fearlessly through the material that she galvanises everything around her. It is a knowing performance, a fainter heart might have looked at the unevenness of the writing and despaired – instead , Vuletic makes her own audacity that of the show’s as well.
Not that she is without astute support from Tony Mack as the astonished Max, Glen Keenan as her lisping lover, and Tony Taylor and Peter Crossley, resourceful with their rather patchy helloelloello Mr Plod material. John Greene, a ring-in after Roger Howell withdrew due to injury, is suitably pontifical as lead baritone during the obsequious hosannas.
John Noble’s direction ensures that the show moves well, particularly in the first half, and the music, a witty pastiche performed by Max Lambert with accompanists Terence and Kate McKibbin and Daniel Witton , along with Jenny Vuletic’s performance, secures Those Dear Departed as a good night’s work. The Stage Company and Steve Spears have provided a theatrical diversion that is unpretentious and good-natured. The show doesn’t etch itself on to your frontal lobe, but it ‘s fun while it lasts- something we hope also for the Stage Company . . .
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Vitalstatistix is a women’s theatre group based in Adelaide. They first appeared on the scene with their droll investigation of haughty couture in the Fabulous Apron Fashion Parade which was part of the Fringe Festival of Cabaret in 1985. Then in the Fringe Festival this year, they had a go at the tyrannies of body image in Weighing It Up, and watched the weight-watchers in The Dieter‘s Dilemma. These shows toured to regional centres and were co-sponsored by the Health Commission in South Australia.
A Stitch In Time, the Vitals’ newest project is a departure. But, no doubt, they would see it as a consolidation of their work and a more ambitious showcase for their skills. Unfortunately, they have devoted too much effort to plotting and performing the detailed farcical logistics of the play, and not really derived enough fun out of it all either for themselves or the audience.
The story is one of elaborate intrigue and strange happenings at Yestergrange House at Beacon Point. The placid life of the quilting circle is upset for Anna, Cherise and Billie when Dr Coral Castle returns to her seaside haven in mysterious circs. Phone calls late into the night , interference from the X-Factor Corporation, and much covert scurrying make it an amiable spoof of all those tales of the Untoward – and A Stitch In Time certainly leaves no genre unstoned.
Writer, Roxxy Bent has a nicely warped humour. It is reminiscent of Milligan, and, delivered deadpan , has a slow but devastating fuse. However, while A Stitch In Time would make a neatly offbeat short feature film, it has not been made effective for the stage.
The Vitals are very much a comedy team, and director Noelle Janaczewska has not given Margaret Fischer, Ollie Black, Robin Laurie and Roxxy Bent herself enough room to improvise, doubletake and generally go a few rounds with the funny situations – although Bent’s Billie Beaufort is a very daggy indication of what can happen when the actors lighten up.
Designer Cath Cantlon has merged her set thriftily with the pipes and rafters of the Living Arts Centre’s Wetpak acting space and the props and costumes are nicely whimsical without ever quite becoming de trop. Sue Grey-Gardner’s lighting work is as unfussy and accomplished as ever.
A Stitch In Time needs one or two itself to free it from becoming tedious in the process of sending up aU those earnest adventure yams we knew and yawned through. The Vitals have great appeal but their talents a re not fully revealed in this Yestergrange of yesteryear.
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Another venture performed on the smell of a wetpak or an oil rag is the RSC’s production of Sue Townsend’s Bazaar and Rummage. The familiar initials refer to the Red Shed Company who plan to inhabit the Angas St. Red Shed venue for a year of activity in 1987. It is an auspicious project- not least because the Red Shed was the original home for Troupe in its halcyon days nearly fifteen years ago when Keith Gallasch , David Allen, Doreen Clarke and others provided some of the most vigorous and politically pungent theatre Adelaide has seen.
The RSC group are all recent graduates of the Flinders University Drama Centre who have enterprisingly combined forces to display their wares directly rather than wait by the phone for Central Casting to call.
They have certainly chosen a winning play with Bazaar and Rummage. Sue Townsend, intimate of Britain’s most famous Mole, Adrian , has written an acute play about an acute problem – that of agoraphobia and all its attendant indignities and misunderstood terrors.
The play is simple in construction – four women make their variously trepidatious entrances to assist social worker, Fliss to prepare the trestle tables for a jumble sale. They reflect an entire social spectrum Gwenda (Jenny Castles) in twinset and polymers is still tyrannised by the ghost of her father, Katrina (Regina Levkovitch) has been witlessly infantalised by a husband who has imprisoned her in her own home, Isobel (Alison J ones) is determined to step back into city life after the death of a husband , and Margaret (Gina Zoia) has been devastated by incestuous rape. It is characteristic of Sue 1bwnsend that such bleak material could be both comically satisfying and socially trenchant.
Director David Carlin has found the perfect venue with the Red Shed- it was advertising its own jumble sale earlier in the week! – and he and designer Andrew Donovan have wittily capitalised on its virtues.
The RSC has done well with its first production , modest in intention and intelligent in staging. lt suggests that the company has a good eye for progressive material and more than adequate resources with which to present it. This company is one to watch in the new year.
Murray Bramwell
CentreStage Australia, January, 1987, pp.12-13.