Doubt: a parable by John Patrick Shanley

Cate Clelland


                

                                                                                                  




Hannah McCann                                                                                          Naoné Carrel

Doubt: a parable by John Patrick Shanley.  Free Rain Theatre Company, directed by Cate Clelland at the Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, April 13-29, 2012

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 13

It’s a great pleasure to see a risky piece of theatre done well.

You may ask why a Pultizer Prize winner (2005) could be called risky.  When it’s all about two people who have an argument.  You might think an argument would be dramatic, but not unless the characters come to a new understanding and change their position.  In this play only a side character, the young teacher Sister James (Hannah McCann), takes a step towards greater maturity, while the central characters – Sister Aloysius (Naoné Carrel) and Father Flynn (Jarrad West) - remain at the end as they were at the beginning.  The only other character – the mother of the Latino boy at the centre of the story, Mrs Ruiz (Ronnie Flor) – comes to the Principal’s office ready to breathe fire, and leaves in full flame. 

And what’s more challenging is that when we have watched the argument for 90 minutes, we can’t decide who won or what the truth was.  And even worse, there’s absolutely no action.  Just talk – even sermons!

The story behind the talk is quite simple.  The Principal expects the inexperienced teacher to tell her of anything she, the teacher, is not sure about.  The teacher reports that Father Flynn had taken a vulnerable recent arrival – the only boy in this Bronx school who was not Irish or Italian – for a private talk, and the boy had seemed disturbed when he returned to the classroom.  The Principal, suspicious that the boy had been molested, goes outside the rules – the Catholic ‘chain of command’ – which places men in charge of the women.  She confronts Father Flynn directly and uses subterfuge to put him in a position where he has no choice but to resign.  We learn, though, at the very end, that the Bishop not only did not accept the Principal’s accusation, but covered up by promoting Flynn to a higher position in another parish, with its school full of vulnerable boys.

So the story is, as the author has called it, a parable.  A very model of a post-modern parable in which nothing can be proven either way, yet we feel that the Principal was right to take action to protect her pupils despite her admitting finally that she had her doubts.  Any doubts we had about Father Flynn’s behaviour were swept aside by the Bishop’s promoting him – yet the truth could have been that the Bishop was correct to protect his subordinate’s career against unsubstantiated accusations.

So how was this production done well?  By focussing on simplicity, in the stage design and the acting.  By not being afraid to use disciplined silences to allow us to think through the implications of what was being said and how each character was reacting.  The drama was happening in our minds, established by the opening sermon where Father Flynn spoke directly to us in the congregation.  The writing is good, but quality presentation is needed to make it work on stage.

Each of the actors made sure that we were made aware of the motivation they had for saying what they did, for not saying what they might have, and for being silent when nothing might be said.  Each took up the challenge, and took us along with them. 

This made a highly satisfying piece of theatre, a great pleasure to experience, even though it revealed the awful side of the rigid male-dominated religious system.  Set in New York in the 1960s, shortly after the assassination of the Catholic President John F Kennedy, the play is not only still relevant today for the issue in the story (as we are now seeing in Victoria where a full inquiry into the abuse of children by priests is being seriously mooted), but is universal in its concern that we often cannot not take action despite never being able to prove the truth.

Cate Clelland and her team have taken the risk, kept their nerve throughout, focussed on the universal, and succeeded brilliantly.



              Ronnie Flor                                                                                                                             Jarrad West

                                    

MIDSUMMER (A Play with songs)

By David Greig and Gordon McIntyre

Canberra Playhouse until March 31^st.

Reviewed by Bill Stephens

                                                     Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon

This gritty little play certainly has coarse language, strong sex scenes and adult themes. It’s definitely not a musical although it does have songs, and it’s astonishingly well-performed by Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon.

Bissett plays Helena, a cynical, lonely lawyer and serial bridesmaid who hangs out in wine bars, and several other characters who inhabit the narrative.  Her rich Scottish accent often makes it difficult to decipher her lines, but there’s no mistaking her body language.  Pidgeon plays Bob, a small-time crook who cheers himself up by reading Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground”.

 After Bob accepts Helena’s offer of a night of unbridled sex, no strings attached, they embark on a frantic relationship which includes a wild weekend disposing of 15,000 pounds which Bob should have deposited into a bank for an associate. The play skips back and forth in time, during which Bob finds himself musing on life after 35, and, at one point, engaged in a long conversation with his penis.

The Edinburgh Festival origins of “Midsummer” are obvious in the messy bedroom set, which, while appropriate, looks unattractive and makeshift on the playhouse stage.  But it’s  the freshness of the writing with its overlaid dialogue and quirky construction, and the skill and unflinching commitment with which the actors invest the appalling lives of their characters with warmth and humour, that make this a satisfying, if challenging, evening for anyone interested in experiencing  current British playwriting.   

This review appears in the digital edition of "City News" from 29th March

Syncopation by Allan Knee

Emma Palmer                                                               Justin Cotta

Syncopation by Allan Knee, presented by Critical Stages and The Follies Company directed by Stephen Helper at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 27 to April 5, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 30

Noel Coward would have called this a ‘nice’ play.  It makes for an enjoyable evening, but it’s the dancing that gives it a feel-good quality despite a predictable, melodramatic and sentimental plot. 

Fortunately the dance work by Emma Palmer (Anna) and Justin Cotta (Henry) carried the day, while the quality of their acting kept our interest through a too long first half and another too long second half.  There was as much a sigh of relief at 10.40pm for the play having finally ended, as there was the inevitable sigh of satisfaction that at last these two determined ballroom dancers had reached the conclusion that they just belonged together.  Si-i-i-igh!

It’s amusing to see in one week two plays with the same basic romantic structure – Midsummer (reviewed March 28) and Syncopation – but with such different degrees of theatrical originality.  Syncopation has in the background something of the same issues of social class (in 1912 New York) as Midsummer (in modern Edinburgh), but the plot – will the seamstress marry the boring but conventional shopkeeper, the rich sophisticated but married man in the cape, or the dancing meatworker – is no more telling than the plot of Out in the Cold, Cold Snow, the well-known melodrama of the late 19th Century.

Considering that by 1912 Bernard Shaw had already written Major Barbara and was about to write Pygmalion and Heartbreak House and in America Eugene O’Neill was busy writing his first plays while convalescing from tuberculosis, I can only wonder where Knee is coming from.  It was nice to hear Anna tell a rather bemused Henry that she wanted women to be allowed to vote, and the idea of freedom from the conventional restraints is played out as the two come together and dance, but, for a 21st Century play, it’s all too predictable.  The characters are cyphers, carrying out the author’s predetermined construct.  Knee needs to study David Greig, the author of Midsummer, to see what I mean.

Certainly see the play, because the dancing is lovely and the sigh factor gets to you in the end.

But there are backstage questions that seem to need answering. 

One is about hype. “Syncopation is the only truly integrated play with dance in the world” says Stephen Helper on the website  http://www.syncopation.com.au/home.html . 

Sorry – not true.  Try Wallflowering by Peta Murray, a much better script than Syncopation, in my view, and an Australian play which travelled to England and the USA.  We saw a revival of this 1989 play, at Tuggeranong Arts Centre, starring Noeline Brown and Doug Scroope, in 2004.  Its original production, after a reading at Sydney Theatre Company, was by Carol Woodrow’s Canberra Theatre Company.

The other concern is about management. Critical Stages and The Follies Company did not supply The Q, at least until four days into the run when I saw Syncopation, with printed programs for the audience.  Some posters for the foyer had arrived, but even if all the audience had gathered around to read them, they might not have been clear about the names of the actors performing that night.  Now that I have searched the website, I see that the cast has changed over time.  The professionalism of Emma Palmer and Justin Cotta was exemplary on the night, with no indication of anything amiss, but if I were one of the actors I would not have been pleased.

Breaker Morant by Kenneth G Ross

Breaker Morant by Kenneth G Ross.  Everyman Theatre, directed by Jarrad West at Canberra Theatre Centre, Courtyard Studio, March 21-31, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 31

Since there has been some mention in the press arguing the toss about the truth of the Breaker Morant story, I should begin by making it clear that I have not studied the history of the Boer War nor any details of the Court Martial and execution of Morant and Handcock.  I look at this play as an interpretation of history, just as Shakespeare’s history plays are.

This doesn’t mean that I think this play is up to Shakespeare’s standard, however.  It is almost entirely a courtroom scene with brief excursions to the defendants’ meetings with their defence lawyer, Major Thomas, and the prison cell housing Morant, Handcock and their co-accused, George Witton, who escaped the firing squad, and to Lord Kitchener’s office.

The Court is represented as a shambles because the accused refused to be subordinate, making it very difficult to avoid most of the play being a shouting match, without much opportunity for subtle emotional developments to be displayed.  The strongest scene – and the quietest – is near the end when Major Thomas confronts Colonel Hamilton to try to have the execution delayed to allow time to contact the Australian and British governments.  Kitchener has already signed the death warrants and left, leaving Hamilton to fob off Thomas.  Dr Duncan Driver played Thomas’s determination and frustration in the face of immutable forces very well indeed, while Colin Gray’s Hamilton was so cold that the atmosphere in the whole theatre silently froze.

Duncan Ley as Morant and Robert DeFries as Handcock successfully presented themselves as men of maturity and authority, but at the same time the script, I think, too often puts them out as too willing to interrupt the court proceedings with obscenities and open attacks on witnesses and the court itself.  It may be that this may have happened in the real court martial (suggesting that British law was falling apart in the wilds of Africa), but too much too often lessens the theatrical tension on stage.  I would have expected the President of the Court Martial to have taken action against them for contempt of court, but all he did was to keep saying he wouldn’t allow them to keep up their unacceptable behaviour.

Though I could see the justification for the director’s desire to make the story ‘timeless’ by using military costume from different eras, having a female prosecutor (Major Bolton played very well by Andrea Close), and removing references to specific dates, I found this distracting rather than making a strong point.  It might have been more bold to do as was done in Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus, and use a recent modern setting, in Iraq, say.  However, I think it would take much manipulation for this to work with this story, though perhaps the Bosnian war would have allowed for summary executions.  In the end keeping strictly to the historical period, when armies did as a matter of course execute their own, would have been the better way to go. 

This production of Breaker Morant, as I saw it, certainly made the point that the executions were politically motivated rather than justified in court, but the sympathy for Morant that was engendered in the film version in 1980 (which was entirely based on this playscript) was replaced by empathy with Major Thomas, who so valiantly tried and ultimately failed through no fault of his own.  It became his play, and in that way became a legal drama rather than a myth about a wronged Australian. 

I’m not sure if this was Jarrad West’s intention, but it still made this a worthwhile production to see.

Midsummer (a play with songs) by David Greig and Gordon McIntyre

Midsummer (a play with songs) by David Greig (writer/director) and Gordon McIntyre (songwriter).  Traverse Theatre Company, Edinburgh, at Canberra Theatre Centre, The Playhouse, March 28-31, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 28

What an interesting play!  It’s like pass the parcel: surprise after surprise at the unwrapping of each new layer, right until the very centre at the end.  Surely it’s a rom-trag?  But no – the last revelation is still to come.  Rom-com after all.

The play, its original structure, sparkling design and presentation by actors Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon, proves the truth of the announcement by the supposed (or is it real in Scotland?) parking ticket payment machine: CHANGE IS POSSIBLE.

The storyline, after all, is no different than Shakespeare’s tale of Beatrice and Benedick or Shaw’s of Bluntschli and Raina.  An unlikely couple meet in highly unprepossessing circumstances and find that love happens regardless of what they think they feel.  For Shakespeare it was all much ado about nothing – except that it was really about the nature of proper governance of the nation.  For Shaw it was really about the taking up of arms between nations.  For David Greig it is about the human disaster of modern urban consumer society.  Com though it might be for the characters as they “dance ere we are married’, give her hand “to my chocolate cream soldier” or board the ferry for Belgium, the fun of realising that love conquers all cannot completely hide the trag behind

My lord, your brother John is ta’en in flight / And brought with armed men back to Messina, or

Time’s up, Major.  You’ve managed those regiments so well that youre sure to be asked to get rid of some of the Infantry of the Teemok division, and

the need for Bob, at the age of 35, to have had to depend on being a criminal’s courier to survive in modern Edinburgh, the pointless lives of the youthful ‘Goths’, the irresponsibility of ‘nightlife’, and the sadness of Helena’s desire for a child and fear that at 35 she may be too late.  Using Bob’s ill-gotten gains to flee to Europe for a few weeks’ fun may not be all that it promises on the Monday after this midsummer’s wild weekend.  We can only hope that the parking machine is right, and change is possible after all.

So, if the plot is traditional, what makes this play original?  The answer is the same as it was for Much Ado About Nothing and Arms and the Man.  It’s in the language and the relationship set up between the characters and the audience.  Change in writing for theatre is possible.  It was Shakespeare who used the soliloquy as a device for a character to speak directly to the audience, it was Shaw who put the bluntness of Bluntschli on stage, and in the last century Brecht who had characters sing songs as singers rather than as the characters they otherwise were playing, while Tennessee Williams wrote characters who separately observed and commented on the action. 

Greig has taken this tradition a step beyond.  Bob and Helena switch moment by moment from being their own character to describing what the other was or is doing or playing out other characters in the other character’s life.  The play constantly shifts the ground beneath us, which is often funny even as it can make us feel insecure.

This is a new style of theatre suited to today’s 24/7 culture, but does not fall into the common trap of using technology just because it is there.  In fact the clever design, by Georgia McGuiness, uses perfectly old-fashioned visual and audio techniques, while the one more modern device which does the trick for the play is the simple continuous roll-along brightly-lit message from the ticket machine.  Change is possible, indeed, but is most effective when introduced sparingly and only to make a specific point.  The script is about a wildly out-of-control weekend, but is tightly written, giving the actors every opportunity to make the most of every minute.  As they do.

As always, discipline and being true to the right style is what makes theatre work.  It certainly does in Midsummer.

Tales from the TARDIS…

LA meets Dr Who

Finding theatre in unfamiliar places is a good sport so although I’d gone to Gallifrey One’s February Dr Who convention in Los Angeles for the fan in me that has loved science fiction ever since H G Wells’ lot and Radio BBC’s Journey Into Space in the 1950s, I kind of hoped that there would be some theatre pay offs. I like the stories actors and directors tell about their experiences and can listen to the yarns and legends all day. 

Top this off with some side gallops into Los Angeles proper to get a glimpse of Hollywood and to have a go at the two Getty museums all complicated by the time it takes to get around such a spread out town and you can see why I did not quite manage to follow up on a chance to see an experimental Richard III (which had had mixed reviews). That I also managed to have a glimpse of President Obama flying past Santa Monica pier in a helicopter phalanx while I was paying homage to Ray Bradbury, the tents of Cirque du Soleil and the end of Route 66 (where a busker was singing Here’s to You, Mrs Robinson) was just plain luck.

In Hollywood the acting starts as you come up out of the train station down the road from Grauman's Chinese Theatre. There’s all these people dressed as everything from Captain Jack Sparrow to Darth Vader and his Imperial Storm Troopers. Their job is to get you to tip them for having your photo taken with them and to make it just that bit more difficult to find Jean Harlow’s foot and hand prints that you’ve promised to find for your 100 year old mother outside Grauman’s. ‘She’s just up from Elizabeth Taylor’, says the man in the kiosk and so she is. Tiny feet, tiny hands and dead at 26 from renal failure, much to the sorrow of fans like my father who wrote to her, got a signed photo back but lost it in the numerous moonlight flits round the Cross in Sydney when the rent couldn’t be paid.

Actually all of the talent seems to have been tiny. I am spruiked into Grauman’s Chinese Theatre by a young Pom offering short tours of the inside (came out to break into Hollywood… well, he’s gotten as far as Grauman’s…) The film costumes on display in the foyer of Grauman’s don’t go above a size 10 and come to think of it the hands and feet in the cement outside are all on the small side too. Even John Wayne’s boots don’t have heft – R2D2’s footprints look bigger.

(Later on, back at Gallifrey One, Paul McGann (Doctor Number Eight, The Monocled Mutineer, Withnail and I) also turns out to be physically tinier than his performances would ever indicate. He has a superb singing voice that would go down a treat at the National Folk Festival.)

Inside Grauman’s it is all red and gold and restored Chinoiserie from the 1920s. That’s not as tinselly as it sounds. Between the wall paintings worked on by performers like Key Luke (a long CV but you might best remember him as the old bloke who passes on the gremlins in Gremlins with a warning) and Xavier Cougat and the silk house tabs and the Chinese gods and the dragons woven into the carpets this theatre that started out as a home to the old silent films has a gorgeous ambiance for film and live performance.

Outside they are getting ready for the Oscars, techie heaven with people in black with mobile phones, lights going up, the street blocked off, the seating going in for the red carpet entrance and a huge sweeping gold curtain set into the archway of the Kodak Theatre. Snapping away with a digital filmless ‘point and shoot’, I am not unaware of the ironies of the name.

Next door is the greatest of follies. I live near to a video shop that actually carries a copy of D.W.Griffith’s Intolerance but I hadn’t realised that the set for the Babylonian section was left up long enough to become a landmark and that the shopping mall next to the Kodak has been constructed as a kind of a homage to it. This means mad Babylonian architectural elements and elephants trumpeting from the ramparts. Encouraging quotations from those who ‘made it’ are immortalised on the pavements. You can walk in and view the HOLLYWOOD sign on the faraway hills from a great height or downstairs next to a sculpture of a huge couch – the ultimate casting couch upon which tourists can now cast themselves for pictures.

You can take one of those topless double deckers for a do it yourself hop on hop off tour. So I do that, being hopelessly out of time for anything else, and we rampage around Hollywood, spotting Hollywood High with its paintings of alumni like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, the old LA police department which was the exterior of Kane’s castle in Citizen Kane and resonant places like the La Brea Tar Pits. I end up eating at a Singaporean place in the Farmers Market where they actually seem to have heard of real food. As it gets dark I manage a snap of the Paramount parking lot’s outdoor sky screen which features in Star Trek IV and in The Ten Commandments when the Red Sea is being parted, get a glimpse of the cemetery where Rudolf Valentino is buried and see all lit up above the city the Griffith Observatory where James Dean carries on like a two bob watch in Rebel Without a Cause. We also glimpse a demo on Hollywood Boulevard on behalf of the Syrians, passed by Snow White and The Flash who are walking the other way, talking on mobile phones, apparently undisturbed.

Next to this the corridors of the Marriott Hotel, thronging with Daleks and people dressed in TARDIS costumes, are positively sedate. I don’t have a costume to put on but I’ve failed to arrive in America with a haircut and so I’m wearing a Harris Tweed flat cap and a bright red Thai silk scarf so I won’t disappear in a crowd of 3000 fans. A genial older bloke setting up for autographs hails me and says, ‘I like your hat!’ It’s the charming Richard Franklin, the slightly tragic Captain Mike Yates from Second Doctor Jon Pertwee's era.

But it’s the origins of the show in the 1960s that draw me and there’s William Russell, one of the first companions ever, now in his late 80s. Courtly and bemused by American teenage fans who stand in the queue muttering ‘What am I going to say to Ian Chesterton?’, he’s done stage and film and television, the Ghost in Hamlet with the RSC at Stratford, opened the New Globe in London in Henry V, has a son (Alfie Enoch) in the Harry Potter films and has a passion for teaching young actors stage work and Shakespeare. (He says ‘I like your hat’ too, which makes my weekend.)

Maureen O’Brien, another early First Doctor William Hartnell companion (Vikki) who has also had a long stage and TV career as well as being a crime novelist, has a fascinating conversation with me, not about liking the hat or the Zarbi or being chased around Nero’s Rome but about the lovely complexities of As You Like It and playing Rosalind despite it being traditionally the part that goes to a tall woman.

Michael Troughton (son of Patrick, the Second Doctor, and an actor himself) is signing copies of his biography of his father and that’s got more actor stories in it. Respected director Waris Hussein, the East Indian from Lucknow who directed An Unearthly Child, the very first episode of all, is gently describing the circumstances that led to Dr Who being born.

(1963 and change was about, even at the BBC. The show’s creator, Sydney Newman, was Canadian, Hussein, despite an English education, was seen as Indian, Anthony Coburn, writer of that first episode, was Australian and producer Verity Lambert was a woman. And Australian Ron Grainer composed the theme tune which was then arranged by BBC Radiophonic’s Delia Derbyshire. True, they’d been thrown a job that no one else much wanted but look what came of this combination of colonials and females.)

Daphne Ashbrook (companion Dr Grace Holloway in the 1996 McGann Dr Who TV movie) turns out to have actually done David Williamson’s The Coming of Stork in Los Angeles, for which the cast had to learn an Australian accent. I laugh out loud at the ironies of all those elocution lessons in the 50s and 60s that were supposed to rid my generation of women of such a thing when she admires the way I speak.

All of this is bloody wonderful but the unexpected bonus comes when I wander over to an older bloke who has a raft of pictures on a table of him in every kind of role from the Civil War to a Klingon prison governor and a rather kindly looking Vulcan.

‘I LOVE your hat!’ he says and he’s got my attention.

I don’t immediately register that he’s the older Canton Everett Delaware III in Dr Who’s The Impossible Astronaut and that the bloke nearby who, on hearing my accent, begins to talk about how good the Dr Who orchestral concert that just ran in Melbourne was, is his son Mark, and the younger Canton Everett Delaware III. (Fancy me having to scramble to keep up in Dr Who territory…) Aha. Penny drops. We are talking to W. Morgan Sheppard, Anglo-Irish, face with the wandering of the world upon it, trained at RADA, worked with Peter Brook and Grotowski, played in Pinter’s The Caretaker (‘Horrible characters…horrible...’) and was in the RSC’s Australian tour…

‘1970? Adelaide Festival?’ I ask.

Saw Judi Dench in Twelfth Night and The Winter’s Tale, I did, and never forgot her voice with that expressive break in it. Nor the bear that pursues Antigonus when, caught between the fires of his wife and his king, he abandons a baby on a sea shore…

It was a bit like that moment in Oedipus when the shepherd says ‘Here stands your baby boy’ except it wasn’t tragic. Here was that Antigonus (and also Antonio from Twelfth Night), calling out to passing Daleks and Tom Bakers,  ‘She remembers! She remembers!’ and going on to remember himself how as Antigonus he would look across the stage at Brenda Bruce’s Paulina and say to himself ‘I love her, she’s so lovely…’ and how that became the drive for the character.

I extend the story by telling him that I’ve just done that very scene with a group of Thai performers in a workshop on Shakespeare in Makhampom’s Chiang Dao theatre north of Chiang Mai and we part with a signed picture of him as the scholarly Vulcan elder because there isn’t one there of Antigonus and somehow this one seems to have the proper gravitas. And that all does not even begin to touch on his knowing the story of Paul Robeson singing to the workers at Sydney Opera House and how that resonated later with singer John McLaughlin who was singing in Sydney when an old bloke in the front row requested Joe Hill and it turned out he’d been an electrician on the building of the Opera House and a car drew up and a big black man got out of it and said ‘I won’t be able to come back and sing here when it’s finished but I’ll give you a really good concert’ and he sang Joe Hill to the workers and it was Paul Robeson…*

I had a go at both the Getty museums and they were quite wonderful, what with the reconstructed Roman theatre in the Getty Villa and the way the bigger Getty museum crouches on top of a ridge overlooking Los Angeles and divides your attention between the art and the views of a city on the shore that will be chaos if a tsunami ever arrives. I rode the buses and the trains and listened to Spanish being spoken and saw how this city is not all glamour and gold curtains. But I reckon it was the actors’ tales that made the trip.

That, and being able to say that Ian Chesterton, Captain Mike Yates and Canton Everett Delaware III all said they liked my hat. 

William Russell (Ian Chesterton) and The Hat.

*  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg7bPgrosAE

By Alanna Maclean

LA TRAVIATA - HANDA OPERA ON SYDNEY HARBOUR

TRIUMPHANTLY SINGING IN THE RAIN.

 Report by Bill Stephens

Photos by Len Power

                                                              Emma Mathews in "La Traviata"

An invitation to attend the final dress rehearsal for a sneak-peek at Opera Australia’s spectacular new production of Verdi’s “La Traviata” was irresistible. Particularly as this new production is being staged under the stars on Sydney Harbour, at a cost, according to Artistic Director Lyndon Terracini of $11.5 million, and stars Emma Mathews, in her role debut, as Violetta teamed with Italian heart-throb  tenor Gianluca Terranova, as Alfredo.

Later in the season, a no less sensational casting has Rachelle Durkin taking over the role of Violetta, with the Korean tenor,  Ji-Min Park as her Alfredo.

As luck would have it, the day of the dress rehearsal dawned overcast, and by dusk, a light drizzle had set in. However, buoyed by the advice from Opera Australia that the performance would only be cancelled if weather conditions made it dangerous to proceed, I invested in a new umbrella and headed for the harbour.

As we arrived, my colleague, who was reporting for Artsound’s radio program “Dress Circle”, and I, along with the rest of the audience, was thoughtfully presented with complimentary ponchos, a practical gesture which certainly enhanced our enjoyment of the event despite the relentless drizzle.

We were invited to enjoy the catering facilities, which included three glamorous, al fresco eating areas and mobile champagne bars, while busy stage-hands mopped the amazing stage, designed by Brian Thompson in the shape of a huge trompe l’oeil painted gilt-framed mirror, secured on pylons drilled into the ocean bed. Resting on the stage was an amazing chandelier, which was raised above the stage for the performance.

At 7pm, the advertised starting time, Lyndon Terracini announced that as weather radars indicated that the rain would soon pass over the site, the commencement of the performance would be delayed.  Canvas coverings were quickly pulled over the stage area to keep it as dry as possible.

However the rain didn’t ease up as expected, and after a couple more postponements, it was announced that the performance would proceed, despite the rain. However, because of the late start, Act 11, the act in which Alfredo’s father visits Violetta to ask her to give up her relationship with Alfredo, would be omitted. The canvas coverings were whisked away, the huge chandelier rose, dozens of guests, dressed in Tess Schofield’s glamorous La Dolce Vita inspired costumes, flooded on to the stage, and Violetta’s fabulous party was underway.  

The Australian Ballet and Opera Orchestra under Brian Castles-Onion sounded magnificent, and the amplified sound balance between singers and orchestra was crystal clear and exciting.

                                                                  Emma Mathews

As Violetta, Emma Mathews was magnificent.  Dressed in a gorgeous 1950’s-style, ankle length, scarlet gown, with a Grace Kelly hairstyle, she looked and sounded ravishing, and despite the huge the stage, was immediately the focus of attention, the perfect hostess, acknowledging and flirting with each of her guests.

When the handsome Alfredo (Gianluca Terranova) arrived at the party, their attraction was immediate and obvious, and even though this was a dress rehearsal, there was no holding back.

                                   Gianluca Terranova and Emma Mathews in "La Traviata"

Director, Francesca Zambello’s flair for staging large-scale spectacles is masterful.   Her staging of both the party scenes, for which she keeps the stage filled with swirling imagery, while carefully maintaining focus on the principal characters is particularly impressive, and the way she has included the fantastic harbour backdrop as an integral part of her production is at times breathtaking.

Stephen Baynes has contributed dazzling choreography which includes lilting waltzes for Violetta’s party guests and a spectacularly costumed gypsy floorshow for Flora’s party.  

 The use of fireworks at the end of the famous “Libiamo” chorus was stunning and remarkably appropriate for such a party. The perfectly-timed final burst of fireworks at the moment of Violetta’s death created another unforgettable moment, as did the sight of Violetta soaring into the night sky in the huge chandelier at the climax of “Sempre Libre”.   

Brian Thomson’s stage setting is a masterpiece of scenic design, holding its own against the magnificent Sydney skyline, and with the addition of elegant props, providing satisfying environments for each of the acts.  The much-heralded chandelier, a particularly spectacular scenic element in its own right, was also integral to the production design, floating above the party scenes or descending to the stage to form a succession of moodily lit backdrops.

At some point in the evening the rain stopped, but I was so engrossed in the opera, that I hadn’t noticed precisely when. The realisation struck me that even though I had expected to enjoy this production as a spectacle, even with an act missing; I had been caught up in the story-telling.

Emma Mathews and Gianluca Terranova were a stunning couple, completely believable as the glamorous courtesan and her young lover.  The combination of Mathews’ stunning appearance, glittering soprano and confident acting, and the good-looking Terranova’s soaring Italianate tenor was both thrilling and moving.

Then there was Jonathan Summers, also in glorious voice, bringing great presence and gravitas to the role of Alfredo’s father, especially in the final scene in which he seeks Violetta’s forgiveness.  The rest of the cast, including the chorus and dancers, had woven their magic so effectively that I had forgotten any discomfort caused by the rain, and simply didn’t want it to stop.

Surely the mark of a great production.

Don’t let the weather deter  you. This is a triumphant production which works on every level, guaranteed to provide you with an opera experience you will cherish for years to come. 

                                                              La Traviata - Opera Australia