On a school excursion, six very different thirteen year olds take a wrong turn. They hurl through a wormhole into the parallel world of Dig Deep Creek – an 1850′s gold mining ghost town.

The wormhole is an unpredictable beast that connects to an infinite number of vastly different worlds. Amazing and terrifying things can travel through to Dig Deep Creek and at any time the wormhole could collapse.

Needing courage, ingenuity, cooperation and hope to survive, the teens are their own worst enemies.

Their daily struggle to find food and water, outwit the bushranger and battle the wormhole’s perils is hamstrung by infighting, jealousy and self interest.

Can they work together to survive day to day – let alone find their way back home?

Have you ever been surrounded by the bush at night – to be engulfed by the extreme darkness of the night sky? It can’t be denied that there is something deeply unnerving and uncanny about it.

As part of the Post Graduate Directors season at the VCA, I’m currently directing Goat Town.

Developed through a process of storytelling and improvisation, Goat Town follows a group of old friends on a camping trip to scatter the ashes of a mate. Grief and nostalgia mix with guilt and tension as they discover how much, yet how little, between them has changed.

It’s an original play by Alexandra Burgess and Loren de Jong and this is the first time it’s been performed outside of the original group of collaborators. The writers have said that they use their theatre to capture the natural rhythms of a distinctly Australian voice.

“We hold a tiny mirror up to the world and hope that audiences will recognise their own words, their own conversations, in our work. There is a certain thrill in that.”

In preparing for this production I’m working with an exceptionally talented third year design student from the college. We are using the work of Australian artist Bill Henson as the starting point for our design collaboration.

There’s something incredibly interesting when you think of the Australian bush as a place of disorientation and death. In many ways I believe that white Australia has actively fought against embracing it’s natural surrounds and has tried desperately to suburbanise as much of our inhabited places as possible. Is this because we think the Australian bush is a scary place?

The bush is untidy. It seems that most Australians would prefer something neat, something edged, raked – something with concrete. I’ve heard people say our obsession with suburbia has something to do with our white convict heritage… something like suburbia gives white Australians status and control.

Maybe this is why people often find Hensons images of Australia disturbing:

“the ambiguity between day and night, nature and civilisation, youth and adulthood, male and female.”

His art lives somewhere that isn’t real and isn’t imagined. He also has an interest in youth isand that transition between child and adult.

This is what we want to start to achieve with our design for Goat Town:

Looking back over my early preparation work and the first few rehearsals, it has become increasingly clear that something has shifted in my energy and focus as a director.

To describe this in a sentence, it would be something like “a director must feel empathy for all characters situations, feelings, and motives.” This empathy is about registering what it is for the character of the Emperor to be at his wits’ end after a terrible battle and to understand, also, where an actor may be on any particular day and at any particular stage of the rehearsal process.

So it can be said that there is the struggle of the text and the struggle of bringing the world of the text into being for  both the actors and the director. Both situations require empathy and incredible attention to detail, not just from an organisational level, but from an emotional place.

What I now know is that the rehearsal room will not be in a position to be fully receptive of the nature and depth of the work of Barker, or indeed any text, without all individuals embracing the true and full extent of their own feelings, thoughts and experiences. The director must sense, feel and name empathy. This may mean that the Director is regularly examining their own personal experiences and vicariously bringing that energy and understanding into the room.

In early rehearsals I was in a sense travelling steadily through the motions of the process.  I was setting activities and introducing the work. In a sense I was doing everything ‘correctly’ by introducing the activities and saying the right things. But I wasn’t fully engaged in the process.  I was being too correct in introducing the activities and not feeling, not involving my own energy in the room.

Things don’t always have to be correct; a creative process isn’t a black and white kind of thing. It can be grey. It can be ambiguous. It can be murky. In a workshop with writer/director Richard Murphett he said “If you have the answers too soon, you might possibly be asking the wrong questions.”

Barker asks us to embrace the chaos of ‘not-knowing.’  Embracing ‘not-knowing’ has made me feel freer in my work as a director. (It must be said, it does also leave you vulnerable to longer nights of reflection and new questions for yourself to consider, but this is a good thing.)

I must continue to be more willing to understand my own energy and subconscious. I have to be willing to accept that a great deal of this may be dark, difficult or sometimes leave me in a vulnerable position in the rehearsal room.  Being vulnerable or “not knowing” is an energy that I have to continue to accept and champion in the rehearsal room, not only from the actors I’m working with, but from myself. There is a hint of this in Barker’s essay writing: “The audience has to share my not knowing, when it was accustomed to being taught. (1993)”

So on reflection there has been something in my past productions that has been about teaching the audience or the actors about what they need to feel or what should be happening.

This was the shift.

Midway through the rehearsals I came clean with the actors. I’d been having personal issues outside of rehearsals with family members. I was tired and deeply emotional.  I’m constantly deeply emotional, often without allowing this emotion to be part of my work. Acknowledging this allowed me to open the scene from that perspective and to sit with the scene in a different light, to feel empathy towards the Emperor.

I was suddenly attuned to a deeper level of transaction between the characters and between the actors. Side coaching became easier, something evolved in the focus and energy of the work.  I could suddenly see and name moments in the rehearsal room: interactions crucial to the scene and in need of framing.

What also became apparent was that the language of Barker doesn’t exist in a naturalistic world. It’s erratic: something can be yelled, or whispered, wept or screamed. The tension is a thing that is always shifting.

The Habit of Art reunites some of the major collaborators of Bennett’s runaway success The History Boys and subsequently doesn’t fail to disappoint us fans of Bennet.  In some ways it’s an extension of the key themes, or perhaps a thematic sequel to The History Boys, by further examining the relationship between homosexuality, loneliness and relationships between older men and younger boys (this time through examined via Benjamin Britten’s relationships with adolescent boys and his fear of the audience’s reaction to him composing a truthful and authentic version of  Death in Venice, an opera which deals with an ageing writers obsession with a young boy.)

We are left wondering if Bennett is saying that the act of older men having sex with teenage boys is not necessarily wrong, a somewhat fascinating argument, made more so by Bennet’s status as a “national living treasure”. It seems that Bennett can potentially examine issues in a very mainstream theatre environment (in this case the National Theatre) that other playwrights would be lampooned and potentially hung for in the mainstream British Tabloid Press. Bennett is daring in the concepts he examines and what he potentially does and doesn’t say in his writing.

In The Habit of Art we witness a rehearsal of an imagined theatre production in which a company of National Theatre actors are rehearsing. The production centres on an encounter in which an elderly W.H. Auden (Richard Griffiths) meets Benjamin Britten (Alex Jennings) in an imagined encounter, in the twilight of their respective years. All of this action is narrated and recalled by Humphrey Carpenter (Adrian Sarborough), a broadcaster who later goes on to write the biographies of the two great artists.

The director is absent from rehearsal, unfortunately stuck at a conference in Leeds (an obvious in-house jibe at the National Theatre Artistic Director Nicholas Hytner), and the stage manager Kay (Frances de la tour) leads a much-needed afternoon run-through, as the writer Neil (Elliot Levey) arrives to observe the proceedings.

For those of who have ever directed a theatre production or simply observed a rehearsal in progress, it’s all an absolute joy from beginning to end. Alan Bennett captures all the dynamics of a rehearsal room: the tension, politics, fractured personal relationships, the actors struggles with the dramatic process of creating fully rounded characters, the remembering and forgetting of lines and the social order of cast and crew. This is all managed by Frances de la Tour, the stage manager who spends a great deal of the play humoring the actors and their respective egos.

But above this it’s also a play about the voyeuristic nature of biography, the artistic process and the nature of creativity, the differences between public and private lives, the role of theatre and the role of the National Theatre.

There has been some conjecture as to Bennett’s use of the “play-within-a-play” device. The New York Times reviewer described it “less a play than notes for one.” This is nonsense. Bennet uses this device as a platform to celebrate and unpack the very notion of collaboration and the artistic process. It makes perfect sense when you consider the notion of the habit of art. Through the choice of Calliaban, Bennet reminds us that someone or something is always left out. That is the process of writing a play, a poem or creating art. It can’t be all things. It is the product of flawed human beings.

In the moving conclusion Kay suggests that the National’s Cottesloe Theatre should be converted into a “Billiard Hall” and plunged of culture and after twenty years “when it’s shabby and run-down and been purged of culture,” then it should casually return to playing theatre.

“Plays plymp, plays paltry, play preposterous, plays purgatorial, plays radiant, plays rotten – but plays persistent. Plays, plays, plays.”

Why do I love Bennett? Because he dares to make arguments, sometimes painfully personal, all which matter deeply to him. In The Habit of Art, he writes about love, art and politics. Almost every line is a miniature argument of epic intellectual proportions. But that shouldn’t scare you. He is funny, accessible and brilliantly honest. My only hope is that I have the habit of art for nearly as long and nearly as passionately as Bennett.

Fatboy

In comparing it with Ubu Roi a review in The Age labeled Fatboy a failure:

“The main problem facing something like Fatboy lies outside the theatre. To a generation raised on South Park, Clancy’s play will be all too familiar. Director Marcelle Schmitz fails to keep the production as transgressive as it should be, precisely because she ignores the degree to which Jarry’s legacy has been absorbed into the Gen Y aesthetic.”

Given that I have grown up with South Park and regularly labeled “Gen Y”, let me endeavor to explain how my experience was all together different from the critical offering of Woodhead.

I thought it was a near perfect piece to introduce and reengage with live theatre. How was this achieved? The unquestionably live nature of the performance was reinforced constantly by actors directly addressing and making eye contact with the audience, or moments of self-conscious awareness in which the actors asked the audience for permission to leave the stage because they require a quick costume change for the next scene, or painstakingly long and purposely unnecessary set changes. It felt like anarchy ruled and the proscenium arch could come tumbling down at any moment.

The Red Stitch space was transformed into an old vaudeville theatre, complete with lush red curtain and fake proscenium arch, opening to reveal a two-dimensional cartoon set. It looked like a living, breathing, grotesque Punch and Judy show. Each actor appeared in stylised white face make up and simple costume to represent the basic status of their character: Fatboy in a fat suit, the Judge with a simple wig. The design reinforced one basic premise: nothing about this performance is pretending to be real or should be taken as a presentation of reality.

Fatboy was written at the height of the Bush era and is a play about lies, political distortions and corporate greed. To introduce the basics of the story: the king, Fatboy, is hungry. He has consumed, killed and enslaved everyone and everything. He stands trial for war crimes alongside his monstrous wife Queen Fudgie, and despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, the court refuses to convict him. In spite of all of this, I loved the fat bastard. Why? Because he is hilariously entertaining: he sings, dances, tells dirty jokes, performs live puppets shows and swears like few theatre characters have ever sworn. Throughout the performance I found myself cheering loudly for him and overlooking his many evil deeds.

In 1896 Jarry’s intention was to challenge the hypocrisy of bourgeois culture. He loved profanities and believed “that the dramatist should use whatever vocabulary he thought appropriate” (LaBelle, 1980). Clancy as a writer also has a clear love of language. His scripted dialogue is crucial in establishing this strange world of monsters, injustice and insults. It’s both obscene and poetic.

Theodore Roosevelt once argued that ‘weasel words’ were one of the great defects of America and “when one ‘weasel’ word is used…. after another there is nothing left.” Fatboy himself almost always uses weasel words, mixed with plenty of profanities. In one instance, Fatboy stands trial for War Crimes and masterfully convinces the court he shouldn’t be convicted using extreme ‘weasel words.’ The Judge replies by making an impassioned speech about basic human rights and then after a long pause, the entire cast roll about the stage in laughter. The audience laughs too, wildly and loudly.

There was a group of secondary students in attendance at my performance, thanks to the inclusion of the play on the VCE list. Unlike the audiences that rioted after the 1896 production of Ubu Roi, these local secondary school students seldom experience theatre which provokes and challenges them to riot or experience anything at all. After the performance it struck me that this was a wonderful introduction to live theatre for them. Fatboy was absurd and compelling, borrowing the best bits of Beckett, Brecht and Monty Python (With plenty of jokes about sex and farting and slapstick).

In the closing monologue all five actors remove their costumes and makeup. They are no longer characters in the play, rather themselves, the acting ensemble of the Red Stitch company. The actor playing Fatboy walked into the audience and directly addressed each of us, saying that we are all ‘arseholes’. He reminded us of our own role during the action of the play and we each became increasingly uncomfortable and aware of the smug part we have played throughout the proceeding performance.

The core argument of Fatboy is not one special or particular to just Americans. If America is Fatboy, Australia is rightfully his wife Queen Fudgie: a sex crazed lunatic who profits from his killings and has a somewhat bizarre love-hate relationship with her ultimate provider.

The audience at Red Stitch may not be rioting; frankly we don’t riot much anymore. But in the final monologue I stopped laughing for just a brief second and saw Fatboy and his excessive gluttony. I don’t think a thirty minute cartoon on television or another inane facebook status update could remotely achieve this outcome.

Joseph Chaikin described presence as “a quality given to some and absent from others…It’s a quality that makes you feel as though you’re standing right next to the actor, no matter where you’re sitting in the theatre.”  Presence is executed and experienced in many ways: the actor needs to be available to himself, he needs to engage his concentration, focus, imagination, his dreams and nightmares, his understanding of the very moment in history that the performance is taking place.

The writings of voice coach Patsy Rodenberg (2009) have been responsible for inspiring my thinking on the topic, including this earlier post.

She has given presence her own label “the second circle” a space where actors are centered, focused and alert.  She says, “it moves out toward the object of your attention, touches it and then receives energy back from it.”  Rodenberg believes presence and the second circle is a quality our greatest actors possess.

But above this it’s not just the realm of trained actors, but something possible for all to achieve as crucial to our humanity. She says it’s something that babies and children have as they watch and interact with the world around them, in a truly positive way.  She believes presence and the second circle is a quality our greatest actors possess.

As a result of reflecting on this information I have become increasingly interested in how actors approach the process of creating and building a character, and how as a director, I can support them in establishing a sense of free energy and playfulness, allowing them to communicate freely and to share the space of imagination with the audience.

However, when I discuss presence or read about the topic, I can’t help but feel slightly concerned that it sounds a little too ‘magical’ and ‘out-of-this-world.’

Take for example Michel Sain-Denis’ description of a performance at the Moscow Art Theatre. “The deftness of the company’s acting was absolutely incredible: without forcing anything, they were alive. They did not seem to touch the ground. Their movements seemed to flow through them as they communicated freely with one another.” He finishes his writing by saying their performances were an enchantment(Saint-Denis, 1982).

It’s hard to define presence, but here are just a few terms I’ve come across: an element of electricity, a chemistry, a magnetism – call it what you will, but notice a common thread in the quotes across my initial research, we often describe a performers presence by borrowing words from the field of science or the mystical. This strikes me as particularly interesting and makes me wonder if presence is something which is truly a gift, a way of being that is absolutely unique to that one very fortunate individual; or is it something the can be learned through training, process and social circumstances.

To put it more succinctly is there a scientific way of measuring an actor’s ability to have presence or to define the quality?

July 2009

I’m directing The History Boys, Gerard Lane is playing the role of Timms. I’ve been intrigued in the way he moulds and develops his character, often through sheer hard work and dedication. I both like him and have a great deal of respect for his craft.

Timms is most often described as the class clown, a lad full of fun and laughter. Gerard understands this, but brings something more to the role: behind that basic loud larrikin persona he has created a boy with strong ideals, often underestimated by his teachers and fellow students and above all of this deeply intelligent.

During downtime Gerard speaks regularly about his idea to bring together a musical about Frankston, his beloved home suburb. I think it is a novel idea, but can’t see how the idea has any life outside of a few cheap shots at a suburb that is the butt of all our Melbournian jokes.

October 2009

Gerard and I have dinner and he casually mentions his idea again. This time I’m listening more closely: in between the obvious jibes and jokes, Gerard is utterly sincere in his love for Frankston and desperately wants to get this idea on the stage soon. He has just finished a one man show and needs a platform.

He tells me that he has adapted about seven songs with our mutual friend Melbourne musical maestro Adrian Portell (a former Frankstonian himself) and has the basis of a number of story-arcs, all mostly to do with warring musical theatre gangs in a strange homage to West Side Story. (For some reason I suspect Gerard is going through a West Side Story phase, maybe it will pass?)

November 2009

Gerard collaborates with Adrian to pull together a ten-minute version for the Short + Sweet Cabaret Festival at Chapel of Chapel. It takes the festival by storm, winning the Most Popular Award and catching the attention of the owners of The Butterfly Club, Melbourne’s premiere fringe cabaret club. They suggest to Gerard that it should be developed into an hour-long piece for the Melbourne Comedy Festival. (I don’t actually see it, because I’m severely hung over. I watch it on video. It’s good.)

December 2010

Gerard formally asks Strange Bedfellow Productions (a company that I manage alongside producer Margaret Fisk) to produce the season. We agree and I ask for a copy of the script. Gerard replies, “There isn’t really a script, just a whole lot of great ideas.” Task one for Gerard: write a script to support an hour-long version of the show.

Reviewing the Short +Sweet performance it becomes clear that we need more sex. Gerard has an idea for one of the characters to be an ecstasy-taking stripper by the name of Shazza. There is only one actress in Melbourne capable of taking on such a role: enter Laura Burzacott. Laura has played many different types of Bogan in the past, most recently in my production of Call Girl the Musical. I think she will be the perfect third collaborator for the show.

Gerard and I meet regularly with the task of fleshing out a story. We agree on a simple premise: an extremist local mayor has banned musical theatre in Frankston. What was once a happy-go-lucky outer-suburban ghetto by the sea, where musical-theatre gangs serenaded teenage mums in the mall, has been transformed into a world where the sun doesn’t shine and it’s no longer legal for straight men to act gay.

Gerard furiously writes the script and one week before Christmas we gather together for our first reading. It’s clunky and there are some dramaturgical problems, but it’s great to see Gerard developing the idea.

I head overseas for a white Christmas. Gerard promises me he will send me an updated script just after my Scottish New Year.

January 2010

I’m caught in a terrible snowstorm and find myself stuck at Cardiff Airport: one of the world’s most boring airports. After twelve hours of being stranded, a document arrives on my blackberry. It’s the new draft of I Heart Frankston. I scream out with laughter at a rap scene between Shazza and Gerard:

“I think we should sleep with other people, I know because I’ve already tried,

I know I said I didn’t, but I guess I lied….

I slept with everyone at Kentucky Fried.”

Back in Australia Strange Bedfellow have signed for a two-week run as part of The Butterfly Club’s Comedy Festival season. We are nervous. Will it sink or swim? Gerard is worried, “should we aim for only a few performances and develop the piece further for the Melbourne Fringe Festival?” he asks.

February 2010

Gerard, Adrian and Laura come together weekly and develop the piece; it’s incredibly fun to be in the rehearsal room. There are many interesting hurdles: some scenes work, others don’t quite hit the expected mark. Some new songs are written, others are dropped. We spend time each week stewing over the script. Can it be funnier? Does the story make sense?

Laura has a challenging role in the show: she has to play a variation of bogan roles in the show. She starts researching, with regular trips to Frankston.

April 2010

With ten days to our opening, it becomes clear that we need an audience to play with. We’ve had enough of the rehearsal room. I suggest to our producer that we need to undertake a preview show. We arrange a secret show with the Butterfly Club, a performance for unsuspecting subscribers.

The lead-up to the preview show is nerve-wracking and we start to seriously wonder if we are remotely ready for a real, living, breathing audience. The show opens at 9.30pm, the audience has no idea what they are seeing. The opening line gets a massive laugh. We have arrived.

We spend the days before opening night refreshing and revising the script. We cut, change and make it more audience friendly.

Margaret arrives to our final rehearsal with some big news. “Our entire Comedy Festival season has sold out.” It seems that the preview shows and our subtle online marketing campaign has worked. Audiences can’t get enough of our celebration of the bogan, we are the first show in the history of The Butterfly Club to completely sell out our season before opening night.

What next:

We have agreed to do a small season as part of the Melbourne Cabaret Festival in July and want to develop the show further for a season as part of the 2010 Melbourne Fringe Festival.

I recently stumbled upon this presentation in which she argues that the world needs actors now, more than ever:

Patsy talks about The Second Circle, a concept based squarely on being in the moment, being present. My favorite acting collaborators embody this in all elements of their existence both within theatre and within their day-to-day life: whether it is a private one-on-one conversation over coffee, sweating it out in a rehearsal room or a performance in front of a packed house; their presence is undoubtedly real and alive. It’s the presence of terrific actors that makes the theatre the greatest place for storytelling.

However the concept of presence isn’t just limited to those on stage. Patsy is absolutely right in her assertion that we have individually and collectively lost our sense of presence. As a director, I have to be honest in saying that I’m not always present in the rehearsal room and in this age of big technology it’s easy to be distracted. I have often found myself in a rehearsal room checking my blackberry or thinking about another element of the production. Being present is taxing work.(This is one of the reasons I’m spending a year at the VCA: I want to become more focused on being present and being truthful as a theatre creator.)

Obviously the issue is broader then just theatre. In life we have lost our sense of presence and we have a great deal to learn from observing actors and how they work. 

My best friend is an actor, her personal presence is almost unparalleled by anyone else I know.  But it must be said that her presence, her training, her discipline comes at a heavy personal cost. Being an actor is emotionally taxing, bordering on almost always being exhausting. Her chosen path is one which is often socially frowned upon. Many times her passion has come under fire: from friends, family and even in her community.

For some reason we don’t respect actors nearly enough. We don’t recognise them for that great presence. People say things to my friends things like “but what if you never get a big break?”

We measure the success of actors in whether they have starred in a box-office smash hit, and not in their presence.

Another actor friend of mine recently drew my attention to the great Geoffrey Rush and a speech he delivered at the AFI Awards. In it he tells, in very honest terms, just how difficult it is to be an actor and the hurdles he has personally faced. It’s a must-watch for anyone pursuing a career in the arts because it articulates exactly why we need to respect creativity and the skills of actors:

However, Incompleteness at La Mama is one of those rare thrilling moments of theatre that neither words nor complicated mathematical equations can explain.

I’ve never personally seen beauty in mathematics, but have always been fascinated when the likes of Pythagoras or Bertrand Russell describe the intense artistry and perfection they see within it.

This production takes this understanding to another level and opens us to the world of mathematics through the eyes of Kurt Gödel, a man who once said that either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.

Over the course of an hour Stephen Phillips opens our collective mind to the depths of Gödel’s genius. It’s through his captivating performance that we begin to understand the very personal and very profound nature of his Incompleteness Theorem, whilst constantly being reminded of the shaky nature of his own personality: of his nervous paranoia and hypochondria.

Director Steven Schiller and designer Christine Scott Young have transformed the Carlton Courthouse into a space of pure logic: a setting of chequered cardboard boxes covering the breadth of the stage in perfect symmetry and order.

The use of space and the senses is exciting, as we follow Phillips around his world of thinking and of beauty.