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Welcome to Cultural Binge
The rating system is simple:
★★★★★ – Terrific, world-standard. Don’t miss.
★★★★ – Great, definitely worth seeing.
★★★ – Good. Perfectly entertaining. Recommended. Individual mileage may vary.
★★ – Fine. Flawed and not really recommended, but you may find something to appreciate in it.
★ – Bad (& possibly offensive).
See more reviews over at The Queer Review.
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Email: chad at culturalbinge.com
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The Lewis Trilogy (Griffin) ★★★★1/2
Summer of the Aliens / Cosi / This Much Is True. Written by Louis Nowra. Griffin Theatre Company. 9 Feb – 21 Apr, 2024.
This is glorious, miss it at your own peril! By staging all three parts of Louis Nowra’s The Lewis Trilogy together, Griffin Theatre Company not only gives you the complete character arc of an Australian man spanning his youth in the 60s, his formative years in the 70s and his latter years in the 00s, they also give us a snapshot of the darker side of Australian lives lurking just under the laughs. Something about that feels quintessentially Griffin!
Philip Lynch and William Zappa in Summer of the Aliens. Photo: Brett Boardman. The revelation here is seeing Lewis’ life played out in a single sitting (you can watch across three evenings if you prefer). Played by Philip Lynch and William Zappa, Lewis is constantly trying to find where he fits in. In Summer of the Aliens, a teenage Lewis begins to see through the lies and hypocrisy of adults. In Cosi, he gets a harsh lesson in the personal/political divide. Before settling into his place as one of the colourful locals in a Sydney pub in This Much is True. Always a bit of an outsider, over the course of the three plays he finds his niche among those mainstream Australia ignores.
William Zappa and Nikki Viveca in This Much is True. Photo: Brett Boardman. Put together these aren’t stories of great triumphs or massive events, but of the small scale tragedies and turning points that add up to form a full life. As older Lewis looks back over his time (almost as if he’s in the Rising Sun Inn from This Much is True, telling the locals with his life story) he sees the building blocks of his adult self in the events of his youth. To Nowra’s credit, Lewis isn’t a good man, or a bad man, he is simply a flawed man with all the promise and disappointment of us all.
Paul Capsis and Philip Lynch in Summer of the Aliens. Photo: Brett Boardman. In telling this story together, it changes the way we the audience approach each tale. Having older Lewis (Zappa) as the narrator in Summer of the Aliens comes full circle when we hit This Much is True. The incidental connective tissue between the plays comes to the fore now. When Lewis gives Roy his Uncle Richard’s scarf in Cosi, it means more as we’ve just seen Uncle Richard give it to Lewis in Summer of the Aliens and there is something circular about the fact both Roy and Uncle Richard are played by the same actor (Paul Capsis) forming a never ending cycle of giving and receiving. After investing hours watching young Lewis grow, and understanding his life, the melancholy of This Much is True hits more deeply.
Philip Lynch and Masego Pitso in Summer of the Aliens. Photo: Brett Boardman. The performances are all terrific with everyone getting to flex their acting muscles in multiple roles. It’s a blessing to have both Paul Capsis and Ursula Yovich on stage at the same time – comic geniuses who can nail an emotional beat like seasoned pros. Nikki Viveca oozes pathos, even in the most ridiculous of roles. Masego Pitso, Thomas Campbell and Darius Williams sit on a knife’s edge as their roles range from “relatively normal” to “deeply troubled”. The diversity of the cast isn’t a gimmick either, it gives each role a malleable quality that reminds us these characters could be any of us, regardless of race, gender or sexuality.
Daniel Herten’s sound and music, combined with an adaptable and impactful set design by Jeremy Allen (one of the best in the biz right now) gives each part a sense of time and place without ever feeling static. Kelsey Lee’s lighting does a lot of heavy lifting (especially in Summer of the Aliens). At only 90 min a piece, each play flies by so if you’re worried about watching all three in a day you can relax. I arrived with only 4 hours sleep and was engaged the whole way through.
Ensemble in Cosi. Photo: Brett Boardman. But The Lewis Trilogy is really Declan Greene’s victory lap. Apart from the excellent direction of each play, it is a mammoth undertaking for a small theatre to stage a work of this scope and a sign of his vision as Artistic Director. By refusing to quietly close the door on the current version of the SBW Stables Theatre before it gets knocked down, rebuilt and expanded, he has given us a theatrical event. Greene has reminded us of how much Griffin has done with so little.
Maybe that’s my lasting impression of The Lewis Trilogy, a melancholic warm hug. As you walk down the stairs after This Much is True, it’s hard not to feel a bit sad bidding farewell to the oddly shaped, scrappy, inventive, Australian space. Sure I won’t miss the seating, or the bottleneck between the front door, the bar and theatre doors, or how hot the foyer gets on a summer evening etc but I hope it doesn’t lose that magic that comes from forcing creatives into a (literal) corner and watching them work their way out.
Ensemble in This Much is True. Photo: Brett Boardman. So while it’s nice to know this Griffin will rise phoenix-like (weird mixed metaphor but I’m sticking with it) from the rubble in 2026 with a new, larger space, I will miss all the memories held in this ramshackle ex-stable.
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Homos, or Everyone in America (New Theatre) ★★★
Written by Jordan Seavey. Australian Premiere. New Theatre. Part of Mardi Gras+. 6 Feb – 9 Mar, 2024.
What makes gay relationships different to straight ones? Set around the peak time of the fight for marriage equality in the US (2006-2011), Jordan Seavey’s play Homos, or Everyone in America looks at tug of war between hetero-normative coupling, polyamory and what life for a gay couple could be like once things become equal. Well it sort of does…
Reuben Solomon and Edward O’Leary. Photo: Chris Lundie. The audience is hit with a case of The Time Traveler’s Wife-syndrome as we are thrown into snippets of scenes from up and down a couple’s timeline. Slowly as we get to understand them both, we can grab onto context and the scenes we saw one way evolve into something deeper (not unlike getting to know someone you’re dating). On stage, this is akin to watching Nick Payne’s Constellations, as our two unnamed leads, “The Academic” (Edward O’Leary) and “The Writer” (Reuben Solomon) quickly alter their performance in short black outs as we jump from moment to moment.
From a coy first date to a jealous argument to an odd encounter in a soap shop, this time-hopping is discombobulating. Once you get to the end it’s clear this jumbled structure does little other than try to distract you from a very straight-forward and trope filled story. Boy-meets-boy. Boy-suggests-threesome. Boy-loses-boy-who-becomes-a-hate-crime-victim.
Reuben Solomon, Axel Berecry and Edward O’Leary. Photo: Chris Lundie. This production at New Theatre has a sharp sense of timing as well as great supporting work from Axel Berecry as “strapping Dan” and Sonya Kerr. The two leads, O’Leary and Soloman, are excellent at dealing with the complexities of their performances. Each transition is quick and clean, leaving no confusion for the audience.
But sound problems make the play feel longer than it is. The actors seem to shout every line, and with a hyper-verbal character like The Writer, it threatens to strip the performances of any nuance and begins to grate as time goes on. This also caused issues as the actors raced through some of their lines making them almost unintelligible. The large open space of the theatre swallows the intimacy of moments.
Reuben Solomon and Edward O’Leary. Photo: Chris Lundie. What is Homos, or Everyone in America saying about gay relationships? Ultimately nothing fresh or different. It lacks the punch of a Torch Song Trilogy, the discourse of The Inheritance, or the specificity of The Boys in the Band which it name drops. Maybe it was written too soon after marriage equality began (it was first produced in 2016), but more recent plays like 2023’s Blessed Union offered more insight.
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Low Level Panic (KXT on Broadway) ★★★1/2
Written by Clare McIntyre. KXT on Broadway. 7 – 17 Feb, 2024.
Three young women in a 90’s house-share trying to find love, or at least good sex, feels like the premise for an easy comedy, but Clare McIntyre’s Low Level Panic is a subtle exposé of the everyday impact of a male dominated culture over the women trying to navigate it.
Jo (Charlotte de Wit) is taking a luxurious bath, daydreaming a sexual fantasy. The kind of sex she’d be having if she was 6 inches taller and not as fat. Mary (Marigold Pazar) is flicking through a discarded issue of Playboy, disgusted and fascinated at the same time. While Celia (Megan Kennedy) meticulously runs through her skin care routine. Outside, one of their deck chairs is on fire. As they prepare to go to a party together, they discuss men, sex, relationships and desire – each of them gripped by a sense of unease and desperation manifesting in different ways.
Marigold Pazar & Charlotte De Wit. Photo: Georgia Jane Griffiths. McIntyre’s script is sharp in its characterisations of these three women. It’s clear Jo and Mary find Celia’s uptight nature as annoying as she finds their slovenly ways frustrating. But as much as there is a level of friction building between them there is the solidarity of three people thrown together by convenience. Each of them is brittle to differing degrees, and it plays out in different ways.
Jo is obsessed with staring at herself in the mirror, or weighing herself, trying to be the sexy woman that the culture tells her she has to be to be desirable. She dreams of men wanting to use her for sex. Mary, who has the willowy figure Jo craves, is withdrawn and shy. A victim of sexual assault she loathes male attention. Celia has a strict routine and upbeat attitude that thinly masks her own fears.
Megan Kennedy. Photo: Georgia Jane Griffiths. This cast inhabited their roles so completely it was easy to step into the world of Low Level Panic and go on the journey with them all. Aided by an excellent and effective set (by De Wit, who is also a producer on the show), these women are likeable and fun to be around for all their foibles. Director Maike Strichow gives the show a naturalistic tone which works well selling the everyday trauma of the characters. A flashback to Mary’s past hits hard thanks to good lighting design by Lyndon Buckley.
However as the show progresses the naturalistic style works against the pacing, it never quite delivers the emotional highs and lows needed to sustain itself. Much like the unnerving sense of fear these women face, there is steady, low level tension that can’t find a suitably cathartic release.
Marigold Pazar. Photo: Georgia Jane Griffiths. It’s almost depressing how the issues of the play are still relevant today, 25 years after it was first written. In a world where women are expected to tolerate daily acts of abuse while being told they are never good enough (cue the “Barbie speech”), the message of Low Level Panic is that things may be tough but you are not alone.
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A Fool in Love (Sydney Theatre Co) ★★★
Written by Van Badham after “La dama boba” by Lope de Vega. Sydney Theatre Company. 6 Feb – 17 Mar, 2024
There’s putting a hat on a hat, and then there’s A Fool in Love – the new comedy that gets so engrossed in its maximalist approach it threatens to lose itself completely. To quote the great poet/philosopher of our age, Taylor Swift, “You need to calm down”.
Van Badham has taken the 17th century Spanish comedy La dama boba and brought it to modern day Australia and the fictional seaside town of Byron Bay, oh sorry, I mean Illescas. Here the two beautiful Otavio sisters, the pretentious & gorgeous poet Vanessa (Melissa Kahraman, Hubris & Humiliation), and her impossibly stupid sister Phynayah (Contessa Treffone, On the Beach), live at home. For all the family’s apparent wealth however, things aren’t going well, and their best chance at rescue comes in the form of a rich, eccentric uncle who has left his fortune to Phynayah on one condition… she must get engaged before she turns 30. As the deadline approaches, her father Otto (Johnny Nasser) desperately throws suitors at her, but her dim-witted ways scare them all off. However, when working class uni student Laurie (Arkia Ashraf) tries his hand he finds her oddly charming and, in a strange way, intellectually stimulating… and maybe she starts to feel the same way.
Contessa Treffone. Photo: Daniel Boud Badham’s script manages to be smart, complex and funny which is no small feat. The laughs come thick and fast like a boxing match, high-brow humour is quickly followed by low-brow jabs as jokes about German philosophy sit next to jokes about fisting by the bins.
Melissa Kahraman and Contessa Treffone. Photo: Daniel Boud. Woven into the fabric of the plot is the kind of commentary on money, class, education and gender you’d expect from the beloved Guardian columnist. As a writer who speaks fluent over-educated left-wing activist as well as fluent bogan, her characters play with your prejudices and poke fun at everyone around them – most notably the rich, the private school educated and the art-loving liberal elites who happen to be in the audience. Badham has taken a predictable, sexist farce and turned it around into a modern, politically aware comedy. It’s the kind of script I’d love to sit down and read because I’m sure I lost half the lines as they were uttered too quickly (more on that later) and because I might need an annotated version to bring me up to speed.
Arkia Ashraf, Aaron Tsindos and Alfie Gledhill. Photo: Daniel Boud. On the stage, director Kenneth Moraleda and designer Isabel Hudson have released a fever dream of Escher-in-Barbieland. The set is a bright pink. There are shimmering blue metallic curtains. There are neon lights around the stage and bright yellow ladders. There’s a “wacky races” chase sequence timed to a needle drop. There are giant oranges and a storm cloud that yells “thunder” instead of using a sound effect of thunder. It’s a lot. It’s a whole lot.
In the midst of this, the actors are reduced to over-the-top “silly acting” and one-note shouting of their lines. For the most part, these aren’t characters, they’re just 2D caricatures in brightly-coloured outfits. It’s hard to appreciate the jokes, when it all becomes a wall of undifferentiated noise.
Johnny Nasser. Photo: Daniel Boud. For all this raging sea of ‘com’ there is precious little ‘rom’ to grasp hold of. You feel more for the exasperated yoga teacher than for the romantic leads. Which isn’t to say the performances are bad in any way, but there is a case of diminishing returns with a number of comedy players giving us identical performances as they did the last few times they were on the STC stage. The production is so desperate to make you laugh, it never lets you stop and care for the characters. And with a running time of over two and half hours… It’s exhausting. That’s way too long for a modern comedy.
Melissa Kahraman, Aaron Tsindos and Contessa Treffone. Photo: Daniel Boud. I knew the play had started to lose me when my brain started picking at little things. The script mentions that Lee (Aaron Tsindos) has really good arms… that we just couldn’t see thanks to his loose shirt and jacket. Otto complains about being lost in the tastefully white interior of his home… when all we can see in an expanse of shocking pink. The script and staging seemed to be at odds with one another. And I’m not even going to get into the token “gay romance” subplot that… nope, I’m not going there.
It’s frustrating because I really like the script (except for the self-referential jokes that came across as smug), and I really like the cast. I even really liked the gaudy set. But A Fool in Love lacked the necessary clarity of storytelling to truly land. You’ll laugh for sure, but it lacks the freshness and unbridled joy of previous STC comedies like Hubris and Humiliation or Blithe Spirit.
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Shitty (Belvoir 25a) ★★★★
Written by Chris Edwards. Belvoir 25a. 7 – 24 Feb, 2024.
Life in your late 20s is hell, and that collective trauma is playing out in three short horror/comedy pieces downstairs at Belvoir 25a under the anthology title, Shitty. Because what’s more horrific than turning 30 and looking for love?
Levi Kenway and Meg Hyeronimus. Photo: Phil Erbacher. Meg Hyeronimus (who was great in Cherry Smoke at KXT Broadway last year) and Levi Kenway open the show as Emily and Ben – two young, hot, self-possessed actors who meet and hook up while in a production of Hamlet. He’s Hamlet, she’s Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, and their sexual chemistry is definitely giving the production a very unusual tone. After a night of karaoke with the cast, the couple start being stalked by text messages telling them they’re shitty people. They arrive every day. But after some amateur sleuthing it starts to look like this isn’t just the work of their bitter exes.
Roy Joseph and Mark Paguio. Photo: Phil Erbacher. In the second, Frankie (Mark Paguio) and Darcy (Roy Joseph) are dealing with their own different trauma and are looking for love in all the wrong places. Frankie’s just returned to Sydney for the first time since his abusive father died, while Roy is heartbroken from the end of his last relationship. Grindr, party drugs, sex and love turn into a messy cocktail as they meet on Oxford St and push through their own pain to hook up. But only one of them will have a happy ending.
Ariadne Sgouros. Photo: Phil Erbacher. And the third piece sees a group of school friends get together on the verge of their 30th birthdays to have a girls-weekend in the country. Told through the eyes of Evie (Ariadne Sgouros – also a stand out in Ensemble Theatre’s Midnight Murder at Hamlington Hall) things get twisted when they play a game of hide & seek after consuming some edibles. As Evie wanders the rental house looking for her friends, she discovers the basement…
There are common threads that connect these three tales of ghosts and the supernatural. Toxic technology and apps are present in everyone’s lives, from text messages to Grindr to AirBnb, our digital lives are gateways for evil in more ways than one. Writer Chris Edwards takes a horror trope and in each instance gives it an extra twist to turn things on their heads. The first and second are variations on ghost stories, while the third plays with “cabin in the woods” tropes. And like the best horror stories, these ones are filled with very human comedy that keeps you swinging from laughter to screams and back again.
Mark Paguio. Photo: Phil Erbacher. Keeping things short (all three hover around 30 min in duration) is perfect for this kind of quick hit of fear and loathing. The middle piece (the longest, told in three short scenes) is the most fulfilling for its double narrative and full arc, although the scene changes where a little discombobulating – it felt like we were starting a whole new story. The two other pieces stumble slightly in their attempts to find a resolution but taken as sketch-comedy-horror they all deliver.
The real strength of Shitty lies in its cast and direction by Zoë Hollyoak. Everyone on stage is a superb comic storyteller and this is a sterling showcase for all of them (the key demographic for the audience should be every casting director in Sydney). The five performers get to play with flirty comedy, domestic drama and screams, a lot of screams. As each of them is essentially giving us a campfire ghost story, the room is transfixed.
Meg Hyronimus. Photo: Phil Erbacher. Also a major shoutout to the other main performers on the stage – the lighting by Morgan Moroney that has its own cheeky and creepy personality from scene to scene and plays well with the minimal set by Hailley Hunt and sound design by Madeleine Picard. Horror is always best felt rather than seen and their work push our imagination into exactly the right places.
As we entered the theatre, I joked to my friend that calling the show Shitty could be tempting fate but instead it’s a sign of confidence. There are thrills and (literal) spills in this furiously funny evening of horror hits. I can’t recommend Shitty enough.
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Mardi Gras Film Festival 2024 (Updating)
This year I’m reviewing films at the Mardi Gras Film Festival 2024 for The Queer Review, so I’ve created a page to collate all the coverage (including reviews and interviews for films screening at the festival). I’ve sorted the reviews into star order so you can clearly see which films The Queer Review recommends. This page will be continually updated as more content lands.
Max Pelayo and Reese Gonzales INTERVIEWS
Max Pelayo & Reese Gonzales on starring in Aristotle & Dante Discover The Secrets Of The Universe
All Of Us Strangers REVIEWS
All Of Us Strangers ★★★★1/2 (by Glenn Gaylord)
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe ★★★★ (by James Kleinmann)
Kokomo City ★★★★ (by James Kleinmann)
The Lost Boys (Le paradis) ★★★★
Mutt ★★★★ (by James Kleinmann)
The Summer with Carmen (To kalokairi tis Karmen) ★★★★
Fireworks (Stranizza d’amuri) ★★★1/2
The Missing (Iti mapukpukaw) ★★★1/2
Summer Qamp ★★★1/2 (by James Kleinmann)
Mad About The Boy – The Noël Coward Story ★★★
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The Inheritance, Parts 1 & 2 (Forty Five Downstairs) ★★★★
Written by Matthew López. Australian Premiere. Forty Five Downstairs. 17 Jan – 11 Feb, 2024
Matthew López’s Tony and Olivier Award winning two-part play, The Inheritance, is a sprawling epic, very loosely based on EM Forster’s Howards End. It was lauded in London, but dismissed on Broadway, in Melbourne it’s back to being adored once more.
Set in 2015/16, it is the story of… well to say whose story it is would be a bit of a spoiler, but let’s just say it is the story of a youngish gay couple Eric Glass (Charles Purcell) and Toby Darling (Tomáš Kantor), living in Manhattan. Eric is the calm centre to Toby’s creative storm. They receive two pieces of news that will change their lives. Firstly, Toby’s semi-autobiographical YA novel is to be adapted for Broadway, and Eric learns that they will soon be forced to leave the rent-controlled apartment that generations of his family have grown up in. For the next six and a bit hours we follow the lives of Eric and Toby, as well as their circle of friends, as seismic shifts happen around them, but mainly, inside them both… oh and EM Forster himself is a character.
The Inheritance. Photo: Cameron Grant. As anyone who’s spoken to me for more than five minutes knows, I love this play and managed to see the original production a number of times with a number of different casts. But this Australian premiere at Forty Five Downstairs, is the first time I’ve experienced a totally new interpretation of the text, unconnected to the original. In a way, it’s like watching your favourite film being remade. It’s hard to judge the work on its own without unfairly comparing it to the big-budget original but I’m going to try. Maybe I’ll write a big comparison piece once the (totally unrelated) Sydney production has happened…
Yes, the length is daunting. Watching it on stage (especially if you watch both parts in one day – the best way to watch it IMO) is like reading a novel or bingeing a whole TV series. Comparisons to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America are obvious but unwarranted. While on the surface they are both stories of gay men in New York and both deal with the impact of the AIDS crisis, the similarities stop there. Angels in America is two separate plays, written years apart, both with very different tones. The Inheritance is one story. You absorb The Inheritance in a different way. As a durational work you settle into the play’s own rhythms of micro-moments and overlapping character arcs. The thought of sitting down in a fringe theatre (that I’d never been to before) was frightening, but thankfully, Forty Five Downstairs is a really beautiful space!
The Inheritance. Photo: Cameron Grant. This cast are terrific in roles that are constantly shifting (acting as greek chorus, minor characters and narrators at various points). Karl Richmond has the biggest hurdle to jump playing two major characters, Adam and Leo, and succeeds in being the emotional core that holds the story together. Tomáš Kantor is magnetic as Toby, even as he pushes the character to his most unlikable edge.
For the lead actors the play is like climbing Everest (that’s a joke for those who’ve seen the play). There are sizable monologues that are mini plays unto themselves. At its worst, The Inheritance gets awfully didactic (Part One, Act Two gets particularly preachy, it’s basically a TED Talk) but at its best these speeches are poetry. I can’t sing the praises of both Dion Mills (as Morgan/Walter) and Jillian Murray (Margaret) enough – both impeccable storytellers who can hold an audience all on their own.
The Inheritance. Photo: Cameron Grant. There is a sort of accepted wisdom that Part One is better than Part Two. It certainly holds the bigger emotional gut punches of the two, but I found Part Two to be more effective here. It gives the supporting players more to do and really highlights the great work of the ensemble. Joss McClelland gets to shine as Jasper, Eric’s politically active best friend, and Javon King’s Tristan is an appealing blend of intelligence, empathy and sass. Rupert Bevan and Alex Thew also come to the fore, playing younger versions of Walter and Henry.
The play’s length brings its own challenges for the performances. It’s hard to keep things consistent but also fresh across the running time. Kantor’s energy gives Toby life, but the chaos-twink vibes threaten to grate as the evening continues and Charles Purcell’s Eric starts to come across as too passive till he explodes. Crucially, I never really warmed to the core relationships. I didn’t see a lot of love between Eric and Toby, despite the script’s protestations. Similarly, Eric and Henry’s attraction felt forced. I don’t think they were helped by the set design which felt mismatched and awkward in its proportions.
The Inheritance. Photo: Cameron Grant. The script itself has started to age in incidental ways. Complaints about “where is the biopic of Bayard Rustin?” fall flat when you can just log into Netflix and watch one right now. Jokes about “when Hilary Clinton wins” don’t quite hit now that we have more distance from the 2016 US election and are faced with another wearying Trump cycle. Also, a joke about long plays “with two intervals” doesn’t really work when this production only has one per part! Conversely lines about Eric’s obscenely low rent get more laughs in the middle of a rental crisis.
The one thing missing (and forgive me a direct comparison here) is tears. The mic-drop, emotional kicks were missing. I’ve not seen this play fail to elicit sniffles and out-right weeping before, especially from men who lived through AIDS. Whether it is because the audience seemed to be an even split between homo and heterosexual, or because Aussies are more stoically uptight than Brits and Americans, I’m just not sure.
It was great to see The Inheritance again in a smaller, intimate venue. The original was never better than when it was first staged at The Young Vic in London (despite the script being a lot less polished), things lost their edge once it moved into the large theatre spaces of the West End and Broadway. Here too, the intimacy gives it an advantage – it makes this very big play feel small and inviting. If you’re holding off buying tickets to this or the Seymour Centre production in Sydney this November, don’t. Get them now. This is a great play and deserves to be seen.
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Ruff Trade (The Motley Bauhaus) ★★★1/2
Written by Steven Dawson. Midsumma Festival. The Motley Bauhaus. 23 Jan – 10 Feb, 2024
Steven Dawson’s Ruff Trade starts off as a sex comedy about a 16th century male sex worker and unexpectedly ends up being a bitter tragedy. Strangely the heel-turn works, making for a satisfying, and gleefully historically inaccurate, short play.
Ned (Matthew Newell) is an affable male sex worker who has a big client on the way. To help “warm up” he’s asked a friend, and former fellow sex worker, Thomas (Liam O’Kane) to quickly screw him to, um, open things up back there. The longer his next client lasts, the more money he gets paid, so he doesn’t want to be too tight. As they fuck, they chat about the old days. Thomas has been gone for a few years and they catch up as best they can under the circumstances. But Thomas is distracted, Ned’s incessant chat doesn’t help much. When Ned’s fancy client arrives, a playwright named Kit (Gabriel Partington) he wants to talk instead of have sex. He has to leave London soon… but maybe Ned would like to join him?
It definitely feels like Dawson started with a comedic scenario and then let his characters run away with the story. Normally that would feel loose and indulgent but with the short running time and three excellent performances Ruff Trade makes it work. The transition of silliness to awkward romance to, well, spoilers… but there’s blood in the end, is strangely smooth when you consider the ground the play covers in 70 minutes.
Newell’s Ned is sweet and charming, and it’s his performance that really carries the piece. It’s not an easy thing to go from Blackadder character to Shakespearean tragedy in three scenes, but he does it. Shakespearean? I guess I should say Marlowe-ian? Is that even a word? Both Partington’s Kit (yes, he’s playing Christopher Marlowe as the programme notes make clear) and O’Kane’s Thomas are melancholy, with the weight of the real world on their shoulders in a way Ned blithely ignores. It’s the collision of gritty truth into Ned’s positive outlook that tears things apart.
Ruff Trade isn’t the silly comedy it pretends to be, but that’s perfectly fine. The story we get has legs and would be interesting to see played out over a full length play.
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Sauna Boy (The Motley Bauhaus) ★★★1/2
Written by Dan Ireland-Reeves. Midsumma Festival. The Motley Bauhaus. 29 Jan – 3 Feb, 2024
Ever wondered what life is like for the people who work behind-the-scenes in a gay sauna? Dan Ireland-Reeves’s Sauna Boy has your answers and, well let’s be honest, it’s probably exactly like you think it is.
Dan (Ireland-Reeves) is a young out of work actor in London who gets a job working at West End Sauna. Cleaning up the cubicles, glory holes, sling and dark rooms and generally looking after the clientele of their little establishment. Between the unpredictable moods of the owner, the bitchy Venezuelan masseuse and the oddball regulars (with one or two genuine hotties) he’s in for quite the year ahead. When Dan (or Danny-boy as he becomes known) is unexpectedly promoted to manager, he gives himself three goals – update the website to the 21st century, get a liquor licence and sell out all 80s lockers.
So what’s a sex-on-venue establishment like when you’re not there for sex? Awful by the sound of it. Mopping up cum, seeing things you wish you hadn’t seen and trying to keep things hygienic, while dealing with a flighty boss and attempting to retain some dignity. It’s also enlightening and a bit desensitising too.
Ireland-Reeves has a cheeky charm to him that’s easy to watch as he narrates his adventures in the dark rooms, mazes and corridors of a London sauna. He’s a good storyteller and gives the audience what they want – a bit of sex, a bit of drama, a bit of tragedy and a lot of comedy. Certain jokes drew knowing laughs from quarters of the audience, whether it was a comment on fisting lube or the communal behaviour of men in bathhouses.
But the story plays out more or less as you imagine it might. Do the staff have sex with the clients? Sure, but not as much as you’d imagine. Is it gross? Definitely, but you get used to it. Is it a viable career choice? Not for most people. There are hints of the kind of community of gay men a sauna can foster and some bizarre sexual exploits, but overall the sauna sounds like just one of the bad jobs you have in your youth that you leave behind when you “get a real job”.
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Iago (Cracked Actors Theatre) ★★★
Written by Douglas Hackett. Midsumma Festival. Cracked Actors Theatre. 31 Jan – 4 Feb, 2024
Two actors meet to rehearse an upcoming production of Shakespeare’s Othello. The older, successful Gold (Gideon Mzembe) playing Othello is welcoming, but seems to assert his power over the less experienced Joe (Willem Whitfield) playing Iago. Over the course of the next few weeks, the two navigate their emotional minefields to find themselves in bed, in love and then out of love.
Much like an actual character, there are the things Hackett’s Iago says it is, things it wants to be and the things that it actually is – and these three things are rarely the same. On paper, Iago is sold to us as a “modern revisioning” of Othello and an exploration of male sexuality in the modern day. Aside from a few speeches there is little exploration of the various shades of sexuality. In fact, I was generally confused about the characters’ sexualities from the off. It’s only rather late in the piece we discover that both men more or less define themselves as straight, albeit rather fluid. Gold chooses not to really define his sexuality while Joe is questioning what his attraction to Gold means for his own life. At first I’d read Gold as being straight and Joe as gay, so I was a little thrown when the play offered a more complex view of both their lives.
There’s room to explore here. There are elements of a clash of ideas as the two men of two generations confront their own sexuality in different ways. Gold comes across as a “I like the wine, not the label” type of classic bisexual, and there seems to be a reticence to define himself in contemporary terms. Joe meanwhile is wondering whether he’s pan-sexual (or fluid, bi, or gay). Both see the spectrum of sexuality in different ways based on their ages and experiences.
This Iago is actually a doomed love story. Two men who are drawn to each other in what will become a “showmance” that doesn’t survive the end of the tour. All the attempts at deeper commentary fall by the wayside and their relationship of convenience comes to a bitter end. What is it like for two actors to be thrown together for months, finding emotional and sexual support from each other, and then for their whole world to alter when the show is over? This could be told with a straight couple, but the queerness gives it an extra edge. That’s something I’d be interested in digging deeper into.
Right now Iago feels like a work-in-progress in need of focusing. There are interesting characters, plot and themes, but the actual story hasn’t been refined enough to hold it all together.
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