Your September arts guide: River On The Brink; Andreas Brantelid and Splinter at Stables Theatre
Some of Australia’s most acclaimed artists haved turned their sights on the devastating drought in new exhibition River On The Brink: Inside The Murray-Darling Basin
Arts
Don't miss out on the headlines from Arts. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- Abominable star Chloe Bennet: ‘Every audition had to do with my race’
- Day zero: The dates we will run out of water
*****
EXHIBITION
River On The Brink: Inside The Murray-Darling Basin, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Watson Rd, Observatory Hill, The Rocks; September 20 until November 3, $12 (conc $10, National Trust member $4), shervingallery.com.au
SHE’S an outback Ophelia, lying in a river of sludge and surrounded by dead fish. And if the picture reminds you of British artist John Everett Millais’ famous painting Ophelia, you’d be right. But while Millais showed Ophelia floating through the verdant British countryside in 1852, Adelaide photographer Melissa Williams-Brown’s 2019 version has her marooned in the Darling River at Menindee in far western NSW.
Williams-Brown took the picture in January, just days after the infamous Menindee fish kill when an estimated one million native fish suffocated in an algal bloom brought on by drought and by management practices that have proved environmentally catastrophic. The model for Williams-Brown’s picture is Sydney performance and environmental artist Bonita Ely.
The pair met by chance in Menindee in January, drawn there by a common impulse to see what was going on. “I was thinking, ‘it’s us that caused this’. It’s not the indigenous people’,” Ely says.
Knowing she wanted to reference a famous artwork of the colonial era, Ely decided on Millais’ Ophelia (which, incidentally, was hanging on loan at the National Gallery of Australia at the time). Having arrived in Menindee, all Ely needed was a photographer to make it happen. Enter Melissa Williams-Brown who was staying at the same motel, and hey presto. “It was very random and unplanned,” Williams-Brown says. After they met, Ely and Williams-Brown went down to the river at dawn and took the picture which is now one of the most striking images in a new exhibition at Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery.
Gavin Wilson curated the show, called River On The Brink: Inside The Murray-Darling Basin, inviting top artists to contribute to it. Wilson waited no time at all before Elisabeth Cummings, Euan Macleod, Ben Quilty, Martin King, Amanda Penrose Hart, Guy Maestri, Luke Sciberras and others put their hands up. The show also includes beautiful linocut prints by Badger Bates and startling drought photographs by Nici Cumpston. Bates and Cumpston are Barkindji artists whose country is a large area fanning out from the dried-up Menindee Lakes. Cumpston is also the artistic director of Tarnanthi, the festival of indigenous contemporary art that opens at the Art Gallery of South Australia in October 18.
Wilson says many of the works come from deep knowledge of the Murray-Darling and its stresses. For example, Sydney artist Justine Muller has “embedded” herself in Wilcannia. One of her photographs, Town In Mourning, shows a multitude of fresh graves in Wilcannia cemetery.
“The (local indigenous people) are dying young because they’ve just given up on things. It’s awful,” Wilson says.
Quilty has contributed Wilcannia Zombie, a large painting of a cartoon-like figure in a dry outback landscape. “Ben said, ‘we are the zombies. We created this mess. We stole the country from the people who owned it and desecrated the place’,” Wilson says. “He did it on site in 2013 out at Mount Murchison (artist Ian Marr’s property near Wilcannia).”
Macleod did a series of studies and large paintings of spectral figures lugging empty dinghies along a dry river bed. Amanda Penrose Hart also painted Mount Murchison, capturing the “brittleness of the landscape, how it’s now under such stress, collapsing”.
*****
ORCHESTRAL
Andreas Brantelid in Vladimir Ashkenazy’s Masterworks, September 18-21, Sydney Opera House, $49-$155 (concessions available), sydneysymphony.com
ANDREAS Brantelid made his solo debut at age 14 with the Royal Danish Orchestra, playing Elgar’s hauntingly beautiful Cello Concerto. Now 31, the Scandinavian cellist will play the same piece with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Opera House. The great Vladimir Ashkenazy, who will conduct the SSO in a program that also includes Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
Brantelid, who lives in Copenhagen, named one of his four little daughters Alice, in tribute to Elgar’s wife who passed away in 1920 — one year after the Cello Concerto was first performed. “His wife had such an impact on that work,” Brantelid says. The concerto is a lament for the destruction caused by World War I.
Brantelid will play the concerto on his 1707 Stradivari cello. The rare and valuable instrument was presented to him by a Norwegian art collector. “I’m only the third person who ever plays on it,” Brantelid says. “When I started to play on it, it had been in a closet for 80 years.”
In the 1930s the cello was played in the La Scala opera orchestra. “It’s totally moody, of course, because it’s an old instrument and you never know how it’s going to react to climate changes and so on,” he says. Brantelid has been steeped in orchestral music since he was a small boy. His father is a well known cellist, and Brantelid would sit next to him in the orchestra pit during performances.
*****
THEATRE
Sydney Theatre Company’s The Real Thing, Sydney Opera House; until October 26, $75-$103, sydneytheatre.com.au
When you’re a married person having a torrid affair with another married person, and you each know the other’s spouse, a mobile phone would be quite handy in terms of arranging secret rendezvous. But in 1982 when British playwright Tom Stoppard wrote The Real Thing, people were still using the rotary dial.
And it’s just as well. With a mobile phone around, many of the scenes in The Real Thing wouldn’t work. So say Geraldine Hakewill and Johnny Carr who play Annie and Henry in Stoppard’s “modern classic”, as the Sydney Theatre Company describes it. As it is, Annie and Henry must be creative about organising their affair.
“You’ve got to be a bit more imaginative, how you tell each other where you’re going to be,” Carr says. It’s a feature of The Real Thing that acclaimed director Simon Phillips brought to the cast’s attention. That’s why the show remains set in 1982. Although there’s a typewriter and a clunky old TV set, the design doesn’t go so far as to call for big hair and huge shoulderpads, which Hakewill seems very happy about. “It’s not an intense period piece,” she says.
Stoppard is known for the erudition of his writing and the “Rubik’s cubism of his structure”, as Phillips says. Hakewill says The Real Thing is a very literary play, with references to other dramatic texts. And although it’s one of Stoppard’s simpler plays, it still delights in keeping its audience guessing as to exactly what’s real on stage and what’s not.
“I think Stoppard is getting at art imitating life and life imitating art,” Carr says. In the play, Henry is a playwright with a massive intelligence that he quite likes everyone to be aware of.
Annie is a much “freer” person whose moral choices aren’t what everyone would agree with, although she’s a good person who’s trying to be true to herself, Hakewill says. When the lovers leave their marriages and get married themselves, the play becomes a consideration of what love is and how the couple keeps it alive.
“Weirdly, Henry thinks just making a commitment to someone is enough for a relationship,” Carr says. “But what he’s got to learn, and what Annie demands of him, is to renegotiate that contract on a daily basis. “Heaps of it is just slog, isn’t it? And making sure the other person’s getting what they need and you’re getting what you need and you’re both on the same page about it.”
At which point Hakewill laughs at how romantic Carr is not sounding, and rehearsals are over for the day. It’s going to be an interesting play.
THEATRE
Sydney Theatre Company releases its 2020 season. For full details sydneytheatre.com.au
Glamorous Marta Dusseldorp is returning after 10 years’ absence. Rose Byrne and partner Bobby Cannavale are flying in from New York to be part of the fun. Members of the new guard like Maggie McKenna will be seen again. And the members of the upper echelons like Hugo Weaving and Wayne Blair will be there to lend gravity.
All this and more was revealed tonight when Sydney Theatre Company artistic director Kip Williams announced the company’s 2020 season. Dusseldorp will star as a woman of status who throws it all in to run off with a dashing but feckless RAF pilot in post-Blitz London. The play, The Deep Blue Sea, is Terence Rattigan’s “masterpiece”, Williams said. Williams himself has created a stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s enduringly fascinating novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. He will also direct Eryn Jean Norville in all the play’s roles, thus turning it into a one-woman show.
“It reunites me with a performer I have worked with for many years,” Williams said.
Maggie McKenna, who gained overnight fame as Muriel in the STC’s Muriel’s Wedding The Musical, will star alongside Lisa McCune in the Tony Award-winning musical Fun Home.
“It’s funny and moving, and at the cutting edge of musical theatre,” Williams said.
He said playwright Angus Cerini’s Wonnangatta is an Australian gothic fable that “will haunt you for days”. It will feature actors Wayne Blair and Hugo Weaving.
Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale will headline in Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge.
“Rose is worth the price of admission,” Williams said, while Brooklyn seeped out of Cannavale’s very pores.
Williams said the Olivier Award-winning comedy Home, I’m Darling is “funny and insightful” and will see Andrea Demetriades in full 1950s housewife mode — with a twist.
*****
THEATRE
Splinter, SBW Stables Theatre, 10 Nimrod St, Kings Cross, adult $62, conc $52, until October 12, griffintheatre.com.au
Hilary Bell has only just remembered this, but she thinks something has been lying dormant in her psyche since her teens. It was what her mother, the famous Sydney actor Anna Volska, once told Hilary was her biggest fear.
“I don’t know how old we were then, but I remember her saying her huge fear was that we would be taken as babies,” Hilary says. Even if the baby were to be returned, how (before DNA testing) would the parents know it was theirs?
Sitting in the sun outside the SBW Stables Theatre in Kings Cross, nightmarish thoughts about missing children seem far away. But with William Tyrrell and Samantha Knight in the headlines, the community knows that children can be at terrible risk.
Hilary, whose play, Splinter, is set to open at SBW Stables Theatre starring her sister Lucy Bell, knows it too. Splinter is about a couple whose five-year-old, Laura, is returned to them after going missing for nine months. In the play, we don’t know who took Laura or what happened to her. We do know a doctor has pronounced her physically unharmed — although she can’t speak. Cause for jubilation? Yes, at first. Until the parents take Laura to the coast for time away from the limelight. That’s when the doubts and questions crowd in. How will the couple survive what has happened to them and Laura, even though she has been miraculously restored to them?
“You could almost reduce it to faith versus doubt, when one person commits and the other drifts further and further in the other direction,” Hilary says. “There’s also the pressure of presenting a united front, and the things you can’t say in front of the child.”
Influenced by Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn Of The Screw, Hilary takes the play into the realms of the “almost ghostly and supernatural”. “It’s a psychological thriller,” she says. “There’s nothing scary or violent that we ever see on stage. But what is conjured in the minds of these two characters is something that you can’t even bear to look at.”
Splinter was first staged in 2012 with Helen Thomson and Erik Thomson as the parents, and Laura represented by puppeteers. In the 2019 version, there are no puppets and no actor plays Laura. “We’re conjuring Laura another way”, Lucy says mysteriously.
Lucy and Simon Gleeson play Laura’s parents. As for what Volska confided about her fears, does Lucy remember hearing it too? “I absolutely don’t,” she laughs. “I can’t believe she would say something so disturbing.”
Hilary isn’t so sure. “Our mother’s got a good old dark storytelling streak, don’t you think?”
Lucy nods. “Well, she’s a very deep thinker,” she says.
The thought of a lost child has always haunted humanity, Hilary and Lucy believe. “It’s one of those mythic things, a child going missing,” Lucy says. “We get so invested in their stories and hoping that they’ll end well.”
Even when they do, it’s understandable that people will be damaged forever. “There’s the thing Hilary touches on in her play,” Lucy says. “If someone has taken your child, if someone has hurt your child in any way, you look at humanity in a different way. And I think that’s an incredibly difficult thing for people to deal with.”
*****
VISUAL ART
Making Art Public: 50 Years Of Kaldor Public Art Projects, Art Gallery of NSW; until February 16, 2020, free, artgallery.nsw.gov.au
Contemporary art can be terribly serious, but for John Kaldor, who has worked with dozens of internationally famous contemporary artists, there’s always humour. As the Art Gallery of NSW prepares an exhibition of 50 years of Kaldor Public Art Projects, Kaldor recalls how he and an associate in 1995 registered Jeff Koons’s flowering Puppy installation as a live dog with the City of Sydney. Puppy was then outside the MCA.
“We went to the Town Hall and we said, ‘we’ve got a new puppy, we’d like to register it in case it gets lost’,” Kaldor recalls. “We got a little tag and we gave it to Jeff as a memento. He loved it.” The name on the tag was, of course, Puppy.
UK artist Michael Landy had wanted to build a roundabout half way along Australia’s longest stretch of straight road. “I tried to see if we could make it happen, but the authorities were really against it,” Kaldor says. Landy’s eventual 2011 project was Acts Of Kindness.
In 2007, Gregor Schneider built cages on Bondi Beach. “What’s this shit, mate?” a passing cyclist asked Kaldor. Kaldor told him it was art. “No it’s not. I’m an artist and I know what art is,” the bloke said. “I said, ‘oh, I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t know you were an artist. You must be right’,” the suave Kaldor told him.
*****
THEATRE
For full details of the Belvoir St Theatre season, go to belvoir.com.au
Belvoir St Theatre artistic director Eamon Flack has announced his company’s 2020 season, including a stage adaptation of Miles Franklin’s famous Australian novel, My Brilliant Career.
The production, adapted by Kendall Feaver, will star Nikki Shiels who has been “wowing people” in various stage plays in recent years and is a “pretty glorious actor”, Flack says.
“We wanted to give her a big role that she could go for broke with,” he says.
My Brilliant Career was published in 1901 and tells the story of a teenage female writer living in the drought-stricken Australian bush. In 1979 it was made into a landmark film starring Judy Davis and Sam Neill.
“It’s the story of a very young woman stepping out into the world and going, ‘to hell with this, there’s got to be a different way’,” Flack says. “She writes a new set of rules for herself, and that feels like a very contemporary story.”
Flack says the questioning, ambitious spirit of Miles Franklin and her work permeates his 2020 season.
Another of Belvoir’s works will be Summerfolk by Russian writer Maxim Gorky and adapted by Flack himself. Summerfolk is about a group of well-to-do friends who congregate at a coastal town every year to live it up on their substantial incomes. But are they living in a fools’ paradise?
“Gorky wanted to write about a group of middle class people who swan about in their holiday homes while the world very quietly but persistently begins to tip on its head,” Flack says. “It’s about how that group of people aren’t quite prepared for what’s coming, which seemed to me that’s quite a good way of looking at this country at the moment. We sort of have this addiction to comfort where life can be so good and it sort of means we’re able to choose comfort over reality, perhaps.
“There’s some big decision for this country to make and we’re not interested in making them. There’s a whole set of fronts on which I think Australia is enjoying the sunshine a little too much. We’re not quite realistic about the headwinds that are buffeting the planet at the moment.”
In 2020 Belvoir breaks new ground with the development of a new play by Alana Valentine called Wayside Bride. Inspired by Valentine’s family history, the play will tell the story of the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross and the important role it played in Sydney’s social history. Wayside Bride will be staged in 2021.
“Alana is so brilliant at working with communities to turn real life into a story, which is the best way to honour the struggles of people,” Flack says.
“It’s a very new way of doing things. There will be a series of events that we’ll announce throughout the year so everyone can be a part of making this show together. People can watch it grow from its inception through to its opening.”
People can log on to waysidebride.com.au to stay with the action or contribute a personal story.