1 - Eureka Street

THEATRE: 2Grand toursI. SvoNev, I o.ught ooe of twoShakespeares, Neil Armfield's As You LikeIt for Company Bat Belvoir St; the other, aMacbeth with Colin Friels and Helen Budayfor the Sydney Theatre Company, openedafter I had moved on to Brisbane. Armfieldproductions have been all over Australiathis year. Most centres have seen Th e Juda sKiss, which finished its long tour in Brisbanein mid-July, while the superb Cloudstreetwas in Melbourne in July before travellingto Adelaide in August. So it was interestingto seeAnnfield at work back home at BelvoirSt Theatre; interesting, but ultimately a bitdisappointing.This As You Like It begins on a largewrestling mat covering the whole of thestandard Belvoir corner space, paddedunderneath for the match between Charlesand Orlando. At the end of the first actwhenhalf the cast are banished or planningto leave the court in sympathy-the mat iswinched up to reveal a greensward of forestlawn beneath it and a wonderful Elizabethan' h eavens' painted on its underside.Disarmingly simple, but powerfullyeffective, tricks of this kind are meat anddrink for Armfield.So is unorthodox casting, some of whichworks very well here and some lesseffectively. Rosalind and her father, theexiled Duke Senior, are played by Aboriginalactors Deborah Mailman and Bob Maza,which adds another layer to notions ofdispossessed status. On the other hand,casting Silvius (Bradley Byquar) as anAboriginal forest landowner seemssomehow at odds with this. Aaron Blabey,as a nerdy little Orlando, makes a fine contrastto Mailman's very butch Ganymede,while Jacek Koman's Jaques is a moodystudy in stoic resignation. DiminutiveKirstie Hutton is a smashing foil as Celiaand the wooing scenes surrounding theinterval are sexy, pacy and very, very funny.But there is some casting that is justplain dumb. It is hard to fathom whyIn Sydney and Brisbane in winter, Geoffrey Miln e unearthed some broadcontrasts in Australian theatre.Matthew Whittet's Touchstone is playedas a crotchety, cross-dressed governess orwhy Geoff Kelso's doubling duties includea vaudeville-tarty Audrey; the resultantcoupling of a 'female' Touchstone and a'male' Audrey thus ends up as an ideayielding bewilderingly little substance. TessSchofield's postmodern costuming (whilenot as silly as Judith Hoddinott's for therecent Bell Merchant of Venice) is also amixed blessing. Ganymede is suitablyboyish in a schoolboy suit of Ginger Meggsvintage, for example, but poor old Bob Mazalooks ill-at-ease in a Fijian chieftain's skirtwith flowers in his hair.In short, this is an incomplete blueprintfor a production. When Armfield's playfuldirection, personality-based casting andsimple but insightful stage tricks all geltogether (as in Cloudstreet or the 1983Twelfth Night), the whole isfar greater than the sum of aproduction's disparate parts.When they don't, the resultsuggests that here is a directorwho's doing too muchtoo distractedly.I also saw Kim Carpenter'sTheatre of Image atwork for the first time inSydney. This visual theatrecompany has been producingshows for adults and childrenfor a decade and this year'skids' show, in associationwith the STC at the Wharf,was a revival of a modernisedHansel and Gretel byCarpenter and RichardTulloch first seen at Belvoir St in 1991.Relocating the story to a Sydney family whosefather is summarily retrenched but whosenew stepmother likes to live the good life(which makes it hard to feed their kids) is asound enough idea, at least to begin with.And the visuals-some inspired puppetry,outstanding object manipulation andCarpenter's trademark colourfulproduction design-are mostly brilliant, ifa shade repetitive. But the dramaticdevelopment is too slow too often (it takesan age to set up the fabulous transformationwhich sends the Mother Hubbard-inspired'witch' into the fire, for example), the plotoptions are mostly soft, and promisingthreads remain frustratinglyunconnected at the end.SOFT OPTIONS also seem to be the order ofthe day at the Twelfth Night Theatre inBowen Hills, Brisbane. The long-servingpro-am company which built this theatrein the early 1970s and gave it its name sadlyno longer exists, but the pro-am traditionembraced by the current commercialmanagem ent under Gail Wiltshire sadlystill does. Going to Twelfth Night Theatre(especially to a Saturdaymatinee) is a reminder ofwhat commercial theatrewas like in the 1970s,when British TV starswere brought out to takeleading roles alongsidelocal TV person ali tiesand other amateurs inlightweight foreign plays.This year's July productionpaired Britt Eklandand lain Fletcher (betterknownas DC Skase inThe Bill) in Daphne duMaurier's 'spectacularstage romance', SeptemberTide, ahead of an'Australian Tour'-to theGold Coast Arts Centre and to His Majesty'sin Perth in August.This is one of du Maurier's rare attemptsat stage writing, apart from adaptations ofher own fiction like Rebecca ( 1939) withwhich Twelfth Night had great successseveral years ago. September Tide is set in1948 Cornwall, where theEkland character,Rod Quantock's la st stand46 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1999