2012 Sydney Festival (theatre)

Image source: Sydney Festival

L'Effet de Serge
11 January (Seymour Centre)

Blurb: Meet Serge. Every Sunday he entertains his friends with a parade of homespun spectacles, animating everything around his basement and putting some magic back into their lives. With a nod to Jacques Tati, Samuel Beckett and Mr Bean, L'Effet de Serge is a haunting and humorous tribute to the pleasures and necessity of making art.

A disclaimer: I received this as a complimentary ticket for being a good little volunteer. I'd had it on my original shortlist, but it was knocked off due to limited funds so I was glad to be able to see it.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to name Tati, Beckett and Bean in the L'Effet de Serge blurb, even as a 'nod'. I'm not familiar with Tati, but Beckett is much more profound and Bean is far more slapstick than Serge turned out to be.

Which is not to say that the play isn't funny. The gentle humour of Serge is testament to Gaetan Vourc'h's performance as the titular character: a deadpan walkthrough that makes the audience do the work to find the humour in his actions. These days, so much is handed on a platter to the audience, everything is overplayed, that this was a welcome respite from being told what to think and when to laugh. How very European.

The pace was correspondingly slow, which would border on boring for the less patient audience members, but there wasn't much I didn't like. The premise was simple: weekends in the life of Serge, who wants to entertain his friends. His friends are enlightened by what he can do with simple household objects. C'est ca. Whether on not the audience is similarly enlightened is for each individual to say. Serge is what it is.

What I did enjoy immensely was the intro and the outro to the piece. It seems director Philippe Quesne's signature is to sandwich his productions with the end 'credits' of the previous one and an overview of the next, as if in a TV show. The preceding play was D'Apres Nature, so we first see Vourc'h don a spacesuit as if exploring Serge's apartment; the next play is something funny involving invisible people and wigs (perhaps La Melancolie des dragons). Here Vourc'h overtly plays for laughs and the effect is a counterpoint to the subtlety of Serge.

Play rating: 7/10 – placid piece of theatre requires input from audience
Enjoyment rating: 8/10 – enjoyed it more than I realised

*** *** ***

Image source: Sydney Festival

A History of Everything
14 January (Wharf 2) 

Blurb: Inspired by Darwin and Dawkins on the theory of evolution, by cosmology and the realisation that we're but a tiny dot on the timeline, A History of Everything spins backwards to the first fiery bang before leaping to our possible hereafters. A profound rollercoasting journey, this production will make you treasure your place in the history of everything.

This was an extraordinary piece of theatre. Starting with the news of the day, which I've totally forgotten now, the play exponentially cycles backwards in time to events of the past that have had an impact on humankind and then beyond that to when dinosaurs populated the earth and then beyond that to life's amoeba beginnings and the Big Bang in reverse. All on a large world map.

It is conceivable that the idea is not original, but the choice of what to represent (and the changing news of the day in each performance) was key to the effectiveness of the message: that not only are we just a blip in the history of the earth, we place far too little emphasis on how the past can teach us about who we are.

There were plenty of laughs, in particular the periodic Apple product announcements highlighting a revolution in technology in reverse chronological order: the iPad, the iPhone and then the iPod, and light-hearted look at politics and entertainment history. The performers also interwove their own personal histories, each saying a few words about the circumstances of their birth, which had the curious effect of breaking down the fourth wall while effortlessly integrating it into the piece.

As the days, months, years, decades, centuries and millennia cycle back the performance becomes more profound. Most affecting was the indication of war across the continents and across the centuries, all showing that despite numerous conflicts it seems we've never learnt our lessons. I enjoyed this trip very much and was highly impressed with the performers' energy and insight into our past, which carried well across the theatre.

Play rating: 10/10 – energetic, profound, perfectly executed
Enjoyment rating: 9/10 – highlighted my ignorance of history

All Wear Bowlers (play)

All Wear Bowlers
Parramatta Riverside Theatre (9th Jan, 2006)

Physical comedy is both difficult and rewarding. The rewards come from excellent timing and an audience willing to follow a joke, however perplexing. Perplexing is probably the best way to describe the premise of All Wear Bowlers where characters Wyatt and Earnest are thrown out of their comfort zone (a film on a lonely, seemingly endless road) onto the stage. The intro is a brilliant piece of film interaction where the comedians pass between the stage and the screen until they are finally forced to confront the audience... and boiled eggs start playing tricks on them.

It's hard to tell how much of their performance is scripted and how much is ad lib, but there are some stand-out moments including a sketch involving a fight over a newspaper, the regurgitation of the boiled eggs and a partially creepy ventriloquism act. The two also regularly enter the fourth wall of the audience for several laughs at others' expense.

Not quite sure what it all means - absurdism, Samuel Beckett and Charlie Chaplin come to mind - but an entertaining way to spend about an hour.

*** - not without its humorous charms

The Andersen Project (play)

The Andersen Project
Sydney Theatre (8th Jan, 2006)

A Canadian writer goes to France, the Paris Opera having commissioned him to adapt 'The Dryad', a Hans Christian Andersen story, into a children's operetta. And so begins a wonderfully interwoven tale of three characters; the writer, the director and a janitor at a sex shop, above which the writer resides.

Robert LePage plays the three characters each haunted by the pathetic nature of their lives but who all react in different ways. In essence, the play is about coming to terms with sex. The Andersen story underscores a longing for sensuality but each of the characters are more or less faced with a callous version of the act; the writer in escaping his lover's longings to procreate, the director in the inevitability of his wife's infidelity and his addiction to pornography and the janitor faced with the unending drudgery of having to clean used sex booths.

There is a simplicity in the storytelling that ironically emphasises the complexity in humanity and LePage uses this well, scoring laughs at regular intervals. Some of the humour is cultural such as the recurring motif of French workers' willingness to strike, while other laughs come from the characters themselves, like LePage's mostly caricature French director playing against his insecure, self-deprecating writer.

The interaction with props and the film backdrop was especially engaging to watch. I often felt I was watching a 3D movie rather than a stage play at points. There was a certain poignancy in Andersen's dance/disrobe with his would-be lover ('played' by a mannequin in 19th century period costume) and also when the director tells his daughter a bedtime story, Andersen's 'The Shadow', casting shadows and making silhouettes using a lamp.

The close of the performance is purposely anti-climactic and open-ended as the writer inconclusively ends his tale (that he began to the opening night audience in the beginning) and only then is the loneliness, the sparsity of the one-man show evident. Life goes on. LePage illustrates it well.

P.S: The janitor goes on strike.

**** - tight, human, visually splendid