Reviewed by Frank McKone
Thursday October 10
Cast:
Player One: Heidi Silberman ; Player Two: Chips Jin
Player Three: Kate Blackhurst; Player Four: Amy Kowalczuk
Player Five: Mark Lee
Contingency: Sarah Nathan-Truesdale
Production Team
Writer: Billy Shake; Director and Verse Nurse: Lexi Sekuless
Sound by Artlist - Designer: "ikoliks"
Costume Designer: Tania Jobson; Scenic Set Designer: Kathleen Kershaw
Scenic Painting: Letitia Stewart; Construction: Mark Lee, Simon Grist
Movement Director: Stefanie Lekkas; Lighting Designer: Stefan Wronski
Apprentice to Lighting Designer: Jennifer Wright
Production Stage Manager: Jess Morris
Apprentice to Production Stage Manager: Emma Rynehart
Front of House Manager: Lexi Sekuless
Photographer: Daniel Abroguena
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| Henry VI Part 2 Mill Theatre, Canberra 2024 |
The audience member seated front left in this photo is where I was placed last night. In-the-Round is not nearly enough to describe the arrangement. In-the-Action is more like it. And how good is that when every noble command, threat, or surreptitious lie; every sexual encounter; every execution; every thunderbolt of rock-band explosion; every strike of lightning; and even every moment of intense silence, hits home? You are in the King’s Chamber, on the battlefield at St Albans, in the Hall of Justice, in the Duke of York’s garden, in the Abbey at Bury St Edmund’s, and a dozen other places – all in the tiny theatre at The Mill.
At last you understand why Shakespeare wrote this play of governmental mayhem. You’re in the thick of it, between a man, Henry, who has ‘inherited’ his ultimate position of power, and the Lancaster and York family heads doing whatever it takes to prove their legitimacy against his – and his French wife, Margaret, a desperate Queen in her own ‘right’.
I think ‘Billy Shake” was offering a warning to his own Tudor Queen Elizabeth: don’t forget the ordinary people. In three plays about Henry VI from a century before she ‘inherited’ her throne, and in his other history plays, he shows what greed, graft, corruption and violence achieve.
As an aside, I remember how, only a few years before William’s 1564 birth, Elizabeth had given royal approval to the very grammar school – to educate the poor – which I attended – Enfield Grammar, near the forest where she used to go hunting.
And with a bit of violence from stormy weather in 1588, the Spanish Armada was defeated. But Shakespeare still had to write, not long before he died in 1616, The Tempest, about Prospero learning he had to give up the symbols of power – a lesson still not entirely put into practice. King Charles III, I’m sure, though, is well aware of what happened to his forebear, Charles I in 1649.
So Lexi Sekuless and Company have achieved in this production her aim, which she had espoused at the Theatre Network Australia Canberra Gathering on Wednesday October 9: to make Mill Theatre a place for “thinking people”. The show is full of energy, the characters’ speech is absolutely understandable; and the story is unfortunately true to the worst of what we see around us every day.
It certainly makes you think – and feel, and appreciate quality theatre, in all its manifestations – acting, movement, costume, set design, directing, and with a little irony in the personal history, as I believe, of the composer and sound designer, whose work creates the source of energy on which the production rides.
His background, coming from Ukraine, heightens the significance of Shakespeare’s work for presentation in the present time, when an invasion becomes merely a ‘special military operation’, taken up, it seems now in other places.
But, finally, the design of the casting makes this presentation work theatrically in perhaps an unexpected way. We are not in all these grand or terrifying places but in a small working theatre space, with just 5 actors – to represent, as Sekuless has told me, some 40 cast members in some standard productions of these three plays. The skill with which the script has been trimmed, costumes designed, selected and changed as the action progresses, and the actors chosen for physical, voice and emotional effect is quite remarkable, and is successful because we, the audience, can see what’s going on as if we are theatre workers in the wings.
Doing it this way, up close in the round, makes the show, for me, as if I were a stagehand when Phillip Henslowe made a diary note that a play called 'Harey Vi' was performed on 3 March 1592 at the Rose Theatre in Southwark. It makes William Shakespeare real – and it rocks!
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| Amy Kowalczuk as Queen Margaret in Henry VI Part Two Mill Theatre, Canberra 2024 |
