In My Hyperbolic Opinion

"Decadence" by Steven Berkoff.
TAP Gallery, Sydney

The TAP Gallery, for those not versed in the independent theatre scene in Sydney, is a small theatre and art gallery in the trendy Darlinghurst area in the inner city. The gallery is spacious and a little bit funky. The theatre is tiny and a little bit hazardous (fire hazardous that is - long dark corridor to a small space full of electrical equipment with only one exit back down said corridor). But this is not the fault of the production in question. However what can undeniably be laid at the feet of Inner City Arts, who produced this abortion, is a show which matched a cast of actors with material much too big for them, terrible accents, atrocious use of Berkoff's rich language, and a near total lack of stylistic cohesion or storytelling.

Now I'm very willing and quick to encourage people with less experience or fledgling abilities to work hard and challenge themselves. But have a realistic sense of what is within your grasp. I'm not normally one to say anything actively nasty about an actor's ability, but just because you've done a million eistedfodds and spent years in private tuition doesn't mean you're necessarily any great talent or authority, just that a tutor was happy to take all that money off your hands. Two of the cast members were graduates of AADA, and I must admit they at least seemed to have some grasp of the theatrical, if a rudimentary one, and that's not taking into account the other major deficiencies of this production. The two males of the cast seemed to be suffering from some kind of neurological disorder for much of the play, their physicality completely dominating every aspect of their performance - possibly an attempt on their, or the director's part to complement the heightened language with heightened physicality - but the mistake there is that Berkoff's words do more than enough work in that department. Overt physicality just completely subverted the writer's linguistic ingenuity - like slapstick in a Noel Coward play.

With regards to the accents, I do have to insert the standard caveat that as an accent & dialect specialist I am overly sensitive to slip ups. However. These were not accents. They were abominations. Especially in the case of one female who, far from the Received Pronunciation she was attempting, appeared to be speaking a language all of her own. I couldn't discern whether her difficulty arose from English being a 2nd language (suggested by the "hip"-"heap"distinction being lost - Spanish? - and by the "cat" vowel being substituted for the "strut" vowel - Spanish or other Romance language possibilities) or from overcompensation from her own underlying dialect, such as American. Another possiblity which could account for the aforementioned phonetic discrepancies (the only consistent thing about the accent) was some kind of Asian language, owing to the rhythm. IN ANY CASE, I could barely understand th emajority of what she was saying. To her credit though, whether by accident or design (I'm inclined towards the former) she was the only actor who really engaged with Berkoff's dynamics and rhythms, and the only actor whose characterisation and physicality had any specificity - even if it was a little over the top (understatement).

Her scene partner very loudly mumbled his way through his lines, completely stripping the words of any story, while the other male was basically attempting an imitation of Berkoff himself (or perhaps Rain Man), while simultaneously trying unsuccessfully for the most part to erradicate his own distinctive speech patterns (sybillant /s/, nasality) - his outrageously overdone physicality also smacked of a desperate bid at overcompensation - a parody of machismo bereft of the threat the audience must percieve from that character. The other female was just all over the place vocally, a very general Cockney with startlingly Aussie sentences popping up. Her attitude was right, but damned if I could tell what she was on about.

Stylistically it leapt from attempted realism to surrealism to hyper-realism to absurdism from scene to scene, and occasionally from line to line. Certainly from actor to actor. Another way to put it could be that there were four actors in four different plays most of the time, and not one of them was telling any kind of story. A lot of the time I was completely lost as to the crux of the scene, and if there was plot (I'm sure there was) I couldn't see it, even from the glimmers which darted into view between the overly pregnant pauses and the hammy Mr Bean antics of the male actors. I couldn't help but hear my first-year acting teacher's old addage about "playing MOOD" - it is DOOM spelt backwards, and the general mood of this whole production certainly spelt doom for an entertaining night of theatre from the first few lines spoken on stage. What was lacking throughout was PURPOSE. Why are these characters here right now, and why is THIS the moment we are invited to watch? And WHY should we care or be interested?

And to add insult to injury, the show was two hours in length, with no interval. To be frank this can only display a lack of experience, or a lack of confidence. If the latter I could hardly blame them because I certainly would have left given any chance, but the space being such as it is, I was literally trapped in there wondering what would happen if a fire broke out in the gallery, and thinking about my car parked in a 1 hour zone, adamant that if I got a parking ticket, I was billing the company. Thankfully both parties were saved the trouble.

Upon reflection that's probably the harshest review I've ever written. But I stand by it. It really was one of the worst pieces of theatre I've been subjected to, rivalled only by "Desdemona" also in the TAP many years ago, and Lachlan Philpott's "Catapult" at the New Theatre, and "Whistle Down the Wind" in London. Honourable mention must go to Barrie Kosky's "King Lear" of about 10 years ago. I would have walked out if it hadn't been a school excursion.

In My Hyperbolic Opinion...

This will be the title of my review posts. I'll tag them as films, theatre, books, etc. Today, one which is on everyone's lips and which I was at first ashamed to admit I was reading...

"Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer.

Remember The DaVinci Code? Remember how everyone read it because everyone was reading it? Twlight is 2008's equivalent. Harry Potter had a similar quality - I only picked up the first book because of the constant talk about it - however the difference is that Harry Potter was more than just a page turner, and JK Rowling knows the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb.

The story in a nutshell: Bella moves to a tiny, rainy, isolated town in Washington state call Forks, in a move which mystifies both her mother in Phoenix, and her father with whom she goes to live, not to mention the reader, who is left in the dark for a while as well. Cue all the same old anxieties about coming to a new school, all the classic experiences of entering a brand new class room, meeting brand new people, making friends, enemies, etc. The difference here, which is probably one of the main strengths of the book, is that Bella is not entirely your confident outgoing girl, nor is she entirely your shy awkward type. She straddles both of these types as someone with a lot of self awareness (but not too much for a 17yo mercifully), which makes the attendant insecurities of adolescence something she strives both to own with pride and get on with things in spite of. Bella is in this way a well rounded inherently human character.

Cue the devastatingly beautiful (and he's rarely described as anything else except "devasating," or "beautiful") and naturally highly mysterious Edward. He and his pose of pale skinned blood-drinkers naturally sit far away from everyone else, and it's only because of the cliched "lab partner" device that Bella and Edward are thrown together. Edward however clearly has some issues with Bella. As the story progresses, and Bella becomes more and more obsessed with Edward's unpredictable moods and cryptic hot and cold statements, we learn that his issues with Bella aren't just her waif like appeal and propensity for falling over things - she is his own personal eqivalent of vampire crack cocaine. And for a "vegetarian" vampire this presents a problem. This is about as deep as Edward's "inner turmoil" gets. He wants Bella, but doesn't want to hurt her. He is essentially a cardboard cut-out of every other boy character with a conflict of interests. He behaves predictably, and when his eventual outpouring of truth occurs, it's pretty out of left field. He also doesn't quite behave like a 100 year old vampire should. Very adolescent indeed. He's not a patch on Angel, I'm telling you. His family is by far much more interesting, and charismatic to boot. Thier motivations are clear and make sense. Edward's are just, as I said, predictable. Far from being the perfect man, he is just like all the rest. Conflicted, incapable of expressing what he really feels, and prone to the same old mistakes as almost every other hero of teensploitation romance.

Add to this the fact that all Edward seems to be able to do with his face is narrow his eyes or make them smoulder, and either press his lips together or curl them into a devastatingly beautiful smile. The language and the descriptions are all incredibly simplistic and frequently repetitive. A good editor could have suggested innumerable other ways to describe things, phrase things (you can't "respond" someone for instance, although you can "respond to" them). Some scenes needed much more time spent on them, and other scenes were patently unecessary. Essentially it reads like a piece of fan fiction, and I smell an online writing forum somewhere in its history. Great story, mediocre execution with one or two saving graces.

"Twilight" isn't a terrible book, but it's certainly not fabulous. The story is very sweet, and there are certainly some very exciting moments (the flight from Forks to Phoenix in particular). As I said it IS a page turner, because you want to know how and if this impossible situation will resolve itself, and what complications will arise. In that sense, it is a great story, and I look forward to finding out where it goes in the subsequent books already out on the market. Maybe, like JK, Stephenie Meyer will have learnt something about writing prose and will build on this foundation, shaky though it may be.

I'll comment on the movie after is see it on Sunday with my date!