Finally, finally, I have gone back to reviewing theatre. After three and a half years of avoiding crowds and staying out of the city of Melbourne, I could not stand it any longer. I missed going to the theatre and the process of deliberating on the show afterwards. And I missed being able to share my thoughts almost instantly, giving others a chance to experience something entertaining or invigorating or just plain funny.
I chose to see Mary Coustas's one-woman show at the Arts Centre. It was only an hour long; it took a memoir-style look art her life; it was said to be inspirational; and it was funny. Perfect.
The show, This is Personal, was all of that, and more. Check out my review on Australian Stage Online. The Melbourne leg of her show is over, but you can still see it in Canberra (September) or Darwin (October).
https://www.australianstage.com.au/2023/07/02/reviews/melbourne/this-is-personal-|-mary-coustas.htmlCategory Archives: plays
Reading Agatha Christie, An Autobiography
A picture is worth a thousand words. A writer might disagree, but I must admit I devour the photos first if they are on offer. Before embarking on Agatha Christie’s 540-page autobiography, I pored over the pictures of Agatha as a chubby toddler with blonde curls; with Archie, her first husband, and surfboard at Honolulu; with her second husband, Max, excavating in the Middle East. What an adventurous life, where family, friendships, travel and practical work dominated. Writing, it appears, was more of a sideline.
To those of us with literary pretensions, it is absurd that Agatha Christie, the best-selling writer of all time, had trouble thinking of herself as a bona fide author. Maybe writing was too much fun. She would start a book by inventing the characters and hatching the plots in her head, before writing them out in snatches between nursing, photographing archaeological artefacts, running a household, buying and doing up houses, and caring for children, relatives and friends. For many years she had no dedicated workspace and parked her typewriter on any convenient table.
Her motivation to write was often fired by the desire to fund her various projects. In later life, when she had plenty of money, she would make a present of her stories to relatives and friends, who would reap the royalties. During the air raids of World War II, aware of the likelihood she would being killed, she wrote a Poirot book for her daughter Rosalind, and a Miss Marple book for Max. Something to cheer them up after the funeral, she told them.
This autobiography is not so much a literary memoir as the fascinating story of a strong, creative woman whose life spanned the late Victorian era, two world wars and on to the frivolous 1970s. Her memory was prodigious. A large part of the book is devoted to her vivid recollections of childhood, before unfolding through two world wars, when she worked as a hospital dispenser, and two marriages, not to mention the creation of dozens of books. After the war, there was a romantic but gruelling journey to the Middle East with Max, and the start of her work in archaeology. The only time we hear her complain is when she rails at Max for making her ride for fourteen hours across the Peloponnese on a mule!
The tempest of her life abated somewhat around the age of fifty. She welcomed this calmer period, ‘the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations…It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.’ It was at this stage she tried her hand at writing plays. ‘The Mousetrap’ opened in 1952 and is still running seventy years on. Not bad for an amateur.
She wrote the final words of her autobiography in 1965, at the age of seventy-five. Although she was a fast writer, this was a side project and took her fifteen years. It is no-nonsense account of a down-to-earth woman, who faced life with hope and pragmatism. She saw it as, ‘not so much a journey back through the past, as a journey forward – starting again at the beginning of it all – going back to the Me who was to embark on that journey forward through time.’
Songs for Nobodies
My Christmas treat has been reviewing Bernadette Robinson’s encore performance of her show Songs for Nobodies at the Arts Centre, Melbourne. Ten years on from its debut, the show is still wowing audiences, both here and in London’s West End.
I don’t believe anyone else could perform this show, which demands a unique blend of expertise: a talent for accents, an ability to sing in any range and genre, and acting versatility. A born mimic, Robinson excels at all these skills. And who else could switch between the big-sky warmth of country singer Patsy Cline to the existential howl of Billie Holiday’s final years, or between the growling reverberations of Piaf’s chansons to the divine bel canto of Maria Callas?
Check out my full review at Australian Stage: https://www.australianstage.com.au/201912209103/reviews/melbourne/songs-for-nobodies.html
Shakespeare with a difference
Until 5 January, you have the chance to see Twelfth Night, Melbourne Theatre Company’s latest production. This is a hilarious and upbeat version of the more nuanced comedy Shakespeare wrote. It’s refreshing to see an Australian company treat the Bard with confident irreverence without ditching any of the poetry and drama. And the bright lights and dazzling sets of the Sumner Theatre, Southbank, are breathtaking.
I mentioned in my last post that I was weaned on Shakespeare at the Old Vic in the years leading up to its transformation into The National Theatre. I just wish I had kept the programs. I think Judi Dench, Barbara Jefford and John Neville were in the cast when I saw Twelfth Night around 1960. Or was it the production with Eileen Atkins?
Although those historic performances left such deep and fond memories, I can’t help wondering whether Shakespeare wouldn’t have preferred an energetic, crowd-pleasing production like this. I can just imagine him leaping up to applaud Frank Woodley’s show-stopping Sir Andrew Ague-cheek. Or marvelling at the magic technology had brought to his play.
Read my review of MTC’s Twelfth Night here:
Tea with the Dames
On Mother’s Day my daughter, who shares my love of theatre, treated me to a screening of Tea with the Dames, a new documentary directed by Roger Michell that records a conversation between Dames Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Eileen Atkins and Judi Dench, all in their eighties. Four lusty comediennes who may be losing their eyesight and their hearing, but whose resonant, velvety voices are unchanged, as familiar as those of old friends.
One of the roads I almost took in life would have led me onto the boards of the London stage. My theatrical ambition was conceived at the age of eleven, when my mother began taking me to the Old Vic Theatre, to see Shakespeare’s plays. It was there I witnessed Judi Dench’s debut as Ophelia, and later her Juliet. That husky-voice, pert-nosed girl has accompanied me down the years, popping up regularly on cinema and TV screens. As I have zigzagged between my various passions – writing, languages, the stage, music (‘Jack of all trades, master of none’), Judi has stayed true to her first love: the theatre.
The doco is a casual affair, with this great gang of girls sitting round Joan Plowright’s table, in the house she lived in with her second husband Laurence Oliver, chatting, laughing, swearing and sipping glasses of champagne. Prompted by occasional questions from the interviewer, they seem reluctant to talk about their careers, but soon the joy of reminiscing with their close friends takes over, and the anecdotes start flowing. Maggie Smith, with her ascerbic wit, has Judi Dench in fits of girlish giggles, while the astute Eileen Atkins fills in the gaps in their memories. Virtually blind and, at eighty-eight, the eldest of the four, Joan Plowright, presides over all with a quiet authority.
We were shown clips from the early stage shows, the movies, the ceremonies where they suited up for Prince Charles to hang medals around their necks, a few family photos with their children. The videos unleashed a flood of backstage gossip, mostly about Larry (Laurence Oliver), who scared them all.
There is such tenderness between these four women who have all worked hard and continuously for about sixty-five years. They have shared the same stages, played the same roles, appeared in the same films, known the same actors, and are still friends, growing old together.
The film closes with a voiceover of Judi reading, almost whispering, one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. So light, so romantic, after the cut and thrust of his plays. A call to action, to read his sonnets, take comfort and inspiration.
For a day or so, after coming out of the cinema, I was not ready to engage with the mortal souls around. I was still basking in the company of immortals. I wanted to stay buoyed by those familiar voices, those witty and wise women who have, since the 1950s, been holding up the mirror to our lives.
If I envy them, it is in their persistence, their ability to stay on one path all their lives and create a solid work of art, a legacy. No one can forget them.
1984 – are we there yet?
I remember holding my breath for the whole year in 1984, wondering if George Orwell’s dire predictions would come true. I looked around me in December, relieved to find that, at least on my side of the world in England, life was still rosy. I’d read the dystopian novel in the sixties (it was published in 1949), and now I was living in Thatcher’s Britain – not an ideal world, but still innocent enough, with no thought police and no TV programs named after Orwell’s Big Brother.
What did emerge within a few years, though, was the manipulative concept of political correctness, which may have had worthy aims of smoothing out inequality between the privileged and the under-privileged, but which succeeded in mangling the English language and producing gobbledygook. We ended up with ‘political speak’ and ‘business speak’, reminiscent of Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’, designed to eliminate all nuance from language and diminish the power of thought.
When I went back to Orwell’s novel recently, I found it almost unbearable to read. The story is grim, the prose stark. But it is more than just depressing. Reading it thirty years on, in a different and more threatening world, the story fills me with dread.
The latest stage production of 1984 is playing at the Comedy Theatre, Melbourne until 10 June. Check out my review:
http://www.australianstage.com.au/201706038320/reviews/melbourne/1984.html
Carol Middleton 