HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

Written by Kurt Vonnegut

Directed by Cate Clelland

Canberra REP at Theatre 3 to 4 August.

Reviewed by Len Power 20 July 2018

Kurt Vonnegut wrote 14 novels and five plays, but he is best remembered for his novel ‘Slaughterhouse 5’, which also became a memorable film.  ‘Happy Birthday, Wanda June’ had a short run on Broadway in 1970 and I must be one of the very few people who suffered through the now disappeared 1971 movie of it.

Very much a product of its time, the play is a wacky rant about masculinity with all the things that are wrong with human nature and society thrown in as well.  You can probably find some relevance in it – nothing really changes – but it doesn’t alter the fact that the play’s a dud and by the end of the first act, it has said all it has to say.

Director, Cate Clelland, has given it a sumptuous production with a highly detailed and amusing period set and Helen Wotjas has had a lot of fun designing the hideous 1970s costumes.

Rowan McMurray, Jess Waterhouse and Peter Holland

In the 1970 movie, ‘Myra Breckenridge’ the action is intercut with clips from old movies to comment on the action or just for the hell of it.  Clelland uses the same idea in this production with snippets of period music while the cast freezes.  It was amusing initially but the frequent interruptions to the flow of the play started to pall very quickly and the pace overall was too slow, anyway.

David Bennett and Michael Sparks

Performances by the cast were uneven.  The usually reliable Michael Sparks and Peter Holland started out well but needed more help from the director to give their increasingly boring characters more light and shade in the second half.  David Bennett was very effective as Colonel Looseleaf Harper, adding a human warmth and sadness to a basically crazy military man.  Jess Waterhouse and Nick Dyball were fine as mother and son and there was good support from the other actors.

The most interesting thing about ‘Happy Birthday, Wanda June’ is what motivated Canberra REP to stage it.

This review was first published in the Canberra City News digital edition of 21 July 2018.

Len Power’s reviews are also broadcast in his ‘On Stage’ performing arts radio program on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3.30pm on Artsound FM 92.7.

SEE YOU UP THERE

Review by © Jane Freebury

A sensitive young soldier, an artist in civilian life, is wounded at the front during the final hours of war. It is a cruel irony that hostilities are officially over, and that the incident during which he sustains his devastating wound is engineered by a commanding officer who doesn’t want the fighting to stop. 

The soldier, Edouard Pericourt (Nahuel Perez Biscayart), was one of many thousands of demobbed soldiers who returned home to find they were good for nothing. Yet with acerbic wit style and humour, See You Up There reflects on the cost on a generation of young lives lost or destroyed by the war that was supposed to end all wars, World War I.

The book that the film is based on is only recent. Au Revoir La-Haut won its author, Pierre Lemaitre, the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2015. With participation by Lemaitre, it has been adapted for the screen, by the marvellously talented Albert Dupontel, who also directs. As Albert Maillard, the narrator, he is in the key role of former bookkeeper who cares for Edouard after they return to civilian life.

On the battlefield, Edouard had saved Maillard’s life by hauling him out of a bomb crater. In the same instant the young man is hit by mortar and his own life ruined when his lower jaw is blown away. This eventually leads him to fake his own death.

When the two men return to Paris, joining hordes of returned soldiers, wounded, disabled and deranged, French society does not seem to know what to do with them. Plus ca change? After months of disillusionment trying to make an honest living, Maillard agrees to become Edouard’s business partner on a daring swindle. As dull foil to the Edouard’s mercurial brilliance, he is also staunch friend, and a father figure.

Edouard’s real father, Marcel (Niels Arestrup), is a beastly capitalist who had no time for his son’s artistic leanings. In the novel, Edouard was also gay, something the film has chosen to elide.

It just isn’t possible for Edouard to wear the grotesque mandible he has been issued with, so he creates beautiful masks, from the flamboyant to the minimalist, to express himself. He retreats from the world, behind elaborate creations that hide his disfigurement, and his despair.

The young Argentine actor, Biscayart, is wonderful as a man who can only communicate with the expression in his eyes and gestures. It is as though he is the sole silent actor working in a sound medium.

Although Edouard cannot bear to face his family again, his lovely sister is determined to find out about the circumstances of his ‘death’. This leads to revelations about her marriage to Pradelle (Laurent Lafitte), of all people. Pradelle is the very lieutenant who, in a fit of spite when he heard the unwelcome order to lay down arms, organised a ruse that sent his men, including Edouard and Albert, over the top.

While dad is the subject of his son’s satiric drawings, a ‘gros con’, it is Pradelle, decked out in a bit, black vaudevillian moustache, who looks precisely like what he is. The out-and-out villain, the only character who is irredeemable and egregiously evil

See You Up There is bookended by scenes in Morocco, postwar. Here and elsewhere, the action is captured with terrific cinematography.

The early war scenes, beginning during an eerie lull when everyone is exhausted and fed up with fighting, we are told, even the German troops. A messenger dog runs across the deserted battleground, a sequence that is as contemplative and suspenseful an introduction to war as you could imagine.

This elegant film with its eloquent anti-war message is very accomplished in many ways. Ravishing to look at, by turns bleak and cynical but entertaining, it will find resonances for many in the mood of our own difficult age.

4.5 Stars

Also published on Jane's blog

See You Up There is screening in Canberra at Dendy and Palace Electric cinemas

‘Retiring’ Louise Page joins the critics

Louise Page as Brian's mum, photo Peter Hislop

BY HELEN MUSA

THIS winter’s “In Conversation with the Canberra Critics' Circle" sessions at the Canberra Museum and Gallery got off to a cracking start on July 16 when soprano Louise Page joined the critics for an informal talk at Canberra Museum and Gallery.

The idea of the conversations, now in their fifth year, is to inform the critics (from all art forms) and to have them rubbing shoulders with practitioners and thinkers in the arts to broaden their perceptions and experiences.

One of Canberra’s best-loved artists, Louise Page was named Canberra Times Artist of the Year in 2007.

Over the years she has performed in opera, operetta, oratorio, cabaret, recital and radio broadcasts throughout Australia and Europe. In recent years she has been in everything from Chris Latham’s World War I project The Flowers of War to the comic oratorio inspired by Monty Python's Life of Brian – she played Brian’s Mum  –in the Canberra Choral Society and National Capital Orchestra production at Llewellyn Hall.

Page has given back to Canberra by performing for many community events over the year and told critics of her long love affair with Canberra. Although raised and initially trained in cello in her home town, Perth, she made her home in Canberra and, often with difficulty, but always with the support of her husband John, found a way of making music while raising a family and enjoying the life the National Capital has had to offer.

She has recorded ten CDs of music varying from Lieder to operetta to premières of Australian music and Christmas songs. She is also a teacher, adjudicator and arts facilitator, and in 2013 was awarded an OAM for services to the performing arts.

Page graduated with distinction from the Canberra School of Music and then, after a short stint in Germany, joined the Young Artist Program of the Vienna State Opera, performing in operas, oratorios and concerts in Austria, Germany and Belgium, where she won the ‘City of Ghent’ Prize in the Belgian Radio and Television Opera en Bel Canto competition.

A past vocal grand finalist in the ABC Young Performer of the Year competition, where her performance of the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra earned a ‘MO’ Award nomination for classical performance, she was also the inaugural winner of the Mietta’s Song Recital Competition, a ground-breaking initiative by Melbourne restaurateur Mietta O'Donnell to put sophisticated classical song into a cabaret milieu.

She has appeared as a soloist with the Sydney, Queensland, Canberra and Central Coast Symphony Orchestras, the National Capital Orchestra and the Canberra Youth Orchestra. She was also as a soloist in the Voices in the Forest concerts at the Arboretum.

Now after a life in music, Page has announced her retirement in late November,when she will appear for Art Song Canberra with her long-time associate artist, pianist Phillipa Candy.
Questioned by the  sceptical critics, she was quite definite that she would ‘cut off’ completely from engagements and spend time with her family, for the time being, at least.

But first she will be singing in her last Flowers of War event, The Lost Jewels, a concert of musical and artistic treasures lost to the Great War, at the James O. Fairfax Theatre, National Gallery of Australia, Friday 10 August 7.30pm and Saturday 11 August 2pm. Bookings to theflowersofwar.org