The Peking Opera

ANYONE who responds to color and movement, cliche though it may be, would immediately enjor The Peking Opera. The sounds may seem quite strange at first, but after the initial shock of the unfamiliar, one soon comes to terms with the exotic sounding instruments such as the moon mandolin or the mouth organ, a curious mixture between a saucepan and a pipe organ. Often it seemed as though mixture between a saucepan and a miniature pipe organ. Often it seemed as though no-one could raise so much as an, eyebrow without an alert percussionist underlying the movement with a clash of cymblas or other suitable noise.

From the moment the curtain rises, the eye is dazzled by a never-ending kaleidoscope of gorgeous costumes, mindblowing acrobatics, amazing makeup and considerable skill in mime and acting. The ear may not be quite so pleased as the ceaseless cacophony clangs away, and while the vocal technique of the singers may leave one admiring their ability to reach hitherto unsuspected notes, yet one may wish they had not.

Projected on a screen to the left of the stage was a lietral translation of the dialogue, which, like all literal translations, was often wanting in grammar and syntax, not to mention spelling errors which often altered the meaning of the text. All this was evidently typed on a typewriter from the Manchu dynasty on bits of old rice paper cut into strips and held together with bits of unco-operative sticky tape.

The costumes! Not just your usual tule and satin with a few sequins and bits of curtain trim, but richly embroidered in gold thread on vivid silks and linens. At times these exotic fantasies drew audible gasps from the audience as the actor appeared like some unearthly rare and wonderful creature bristling with jewels, banners and pheasant feathers. The makeup is so cunningly applied that it is often difficult to distinguish where costume ends

REVIEWS

in the great Metropolis and enjoying an uncertain relationship. A few other characters, gay and straight, weave in and out of the story, new alliances are formed and discarded, and by the end of the play the gay couple have established a new and more hopeful mutual understanding.

As a piece of writing, A Perfect Relationship exhibits the usual superficiality I've come to expect in an American comedy of manners. While I watched I thought it was the kind of thing that should rightfully be on television. But then, television would probably avoid it because of its gay content. So, the logical place for this chronicle of the gay lifestyle is the live theatre, where the general censorhip is far less strict.

The actors do a reasonable job but their one great difficulty, which dulls the edge of even their best efforts, is that they are Australian actors trying to perform with American accents. The spoken dialogue therefore loses something "in translation". However, in this country we are so generally familiar with American culture (and so poorly acquainted, alas, with our own), that we are able to understand enough of the dialogue to ensure reasonable entertaining evening of

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theatre.

The play is generally self indulgent. But this fault applies to most plays which celebrate a certain lifestyle founded on a rejection of straight expectations. A Perfect Relationship can be forgiven this failing because it is one of the relatively few pieces of theatre which does attempt to record the values and behavior of gay life with a certain honesty, against a background of socio-political awareness.

But, while forgiving the play's self indulgence, I cannot help being disappointed that it does not deal more strongly with some of the nascent criticisms of the gay community, which are there, lurking in the shadows.

Errol O'Neill

and makeup begins. As Time Goes By

The pieces presented gave a sampling of Chinese theatre from the 7th to the 20th centuries. From the realms of gods and demons, to the more prosaic tales of the revolutionary struggle.

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The plot at times may have seemed somewhat trite, such as The Jade Bracelet, a short humorous piece in which decidedly effeminate female, who seems to be not a full yen, makes much fuss over a jade bracelet intentionally 'dropped' by none-too-butch scholar with a curious lampshade hat and sporting a fan evidently a dynastic megatrendy or a Ming punk. The dialogue sounds oddly reminiscent of Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men, and in the more dramatic pieces one feels that at any moment they could break into the Goons' Ying Tong Song.

Battle scenes are many, spectacular and acrobatic. The stage becomes a blaze of color as opposing forces flash swords, knives, staves, whips and lances; leap, spin and twirl, having apparently suspended gravity for a time. All the while, the orchestra rends the air with a clamorous enthusiasm evidently intent on destroyingtheir instruments, as the hero wins. out over his opponents whether they be celestial, imperial or demonic. The custom of the performers applauding the audience can at first be a little disconcerting, then endearing, for it feels as though they enjoyed us as much as we enjoyed them.

Nicholai von Tonslamann

A Perfect Relationship

AN AMERICAN gay play, Doric Wilson's

BRISBANE'S La Boite Theatre is currently staging As Time Goes By, written by Drew Griffiths and Noel Greig of the UK's Gay Sweatshop.

Directing the play is Doug Anderson, a NIDA graduate, who has an impressive list of achievements and work in Australian Theatre. As Time Goes By sets out to show that the persecution of gays is not just a current event, and that history does not mean reeling offf a list of homosexual kings and composers.

Three different events in history are explored. The first act is the time of the Oscar Wilde trial in 1896. The scene is a gay brothel which is raided, and names are taken. Among those are two of Oscar's friends of a similar social peerage.

Act two centres around a nightclub in Berlin of the early '30s. Under the cloud of Hitler's rise to power when gays were still quite free, how many of them could foresee the ultimate horrors of persecution that were to come? It started with the killing of prominent homosexual Roehm, and we know the rest of the story.

The third act takes place in a New York gay bar in 1969. The characters are diverse but not the bad stereotypes created by straights. A policeman enters the bar and harasses a drag queen. This time the others don't stand back, they help thus beginning the Stonewall riots.

As Time Goes By is being presented every other week in conjunction with Gimme Shelter at La Boite Theatre, Hale St., Petrie Terrace. Performance dates 11-15 May and 25-29 May. Times are Wed/Thu/Sat 8pm. Fri 6.30pm and Sun 5.30pm.

Brendan Taggart

A Perfect Relationship, has been chosen The Two Foscari

to open Brisbane's newest live theatre venue, Schonell Downstairs (formerly The Cement Box).

It is a comedy of manners built totally around the presumptions of the New York gay community, and this requires two things of an Australian audience. First, some understanding of the gay lifestyle itself, and secondly some familiarity with New York humor.

The play has a sort of Neil Simon storyline a couple sharing an apartment 50 CAMPAIGN MAY 1983

THE TWO FOSCARI. An opera composed by Giuseppe Verdi. Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, after Byron. Musical Director: Roger Covell. Producer: Bernd Benthaak. Designer: Douglas Smith. Cast includes: Peter Avery, Beverley Bergen, Lyall Beven, Geoffrey Harris. The University of New South Wales Opera. LORD Bryon wrote The Two Foscari in 1821, as a blank verse closet drama. It

is said to be a dark and none too poetic piece, characterised by bitterness and despair.

Francesco and Jacopo Foscari, father and son, lived in 15th Century Venice, and their misfortunes passed into popular legend some historical accuracy being lost in the process. Thus Byron's source had already been romanticised.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Verdi, neurotic, and gloomy in temperament, should have regarded the Byronic account as "a fine subject, delicate and full of pathos." He urged his librettist Piave to follow Byron closely. However, in the necessary compression, detail was lost, explanations were inadequately emphasised, and characters were brought closer to operatic stereotypes.

The telescoping of fact that the stage demands produced some far-fetched situations. Father and son each "conveniently" drops dead when his cup of woe is at its fullest. And a point of absurdity is reached when the bells of St. Mark's ring out to announce election of a new Doge, while Francesco is still in the act of resigning that office.

The story-line is simple enough. Jacopo is brought before the State Council on a charge of murder. The sentence of exile is bitter indeed to an innocent man and a fierce patriot, and he dies of grief when, as a final blow, his wife and children are not permitted to accompany him. Francesco, the aged Doge, could have prevented this by granting his son clemency, but he sees it as his duty not to interfere with due legal process. While he is mourning his son, the Council insist upon his abdication, and he too dies of a broken heart.

In the background is the "villian" of the piece, Loredano, who wrongly regards Francesco as responsible for the deaths of his father and uncle. He goes about muttering that the two Foscari lives should be reparation. If Loredano had been strongly drawn for us, and if we would have seen the Foscaris' deaths as consequences of a vendetta powerplay instigated by him, the opera could have unfolded as a struggle, with some excitement and involvement.

But there is none of this. Loredano is a nonentity, who does nothing except have some influence in Council decisions. There is no conspiratorial hatred, no sense of doom. The Foscaris' misfortunes "just happen". Each of them meets his. fate, not with resolution, but with resignation, lamentation and melancholy.

It is important to realise that The Two Foscari (composed in 1844) was meant to have this gentleness to it, that it was not intended to be an action piece. The sixth of Verdi's 26 operas, it is a forerunner to Luisa Miller, La Traviata and (in some measure) Simon Boccanegra in its intimate, domestic concerns.

Indeed, the action is so thin that there is even doubling up of trial scenes and farewell scenes. The opera would be wellnigh static were it not for Jacopo's wife, Lucrezia, a strong-willed and intensely

emotional woman who seizes every opportunity to plead with the Doge and the Council to revoke her husband's sentence, and who identifies Loredano as an enemy to be denounced with all the considerable vehemence at her command (the male Foscaris, in contrast, respond to him with dignified reserve).

In short, The Two Foscari should be understood as a sequence of feelings rather than of events. Although all characters make their feelings clear from the beginning, the emotional temperature of the opera does not warm up until mid-way, when father, son and wife are together for the first time. Earlier scenes, where character describes feelings for a second to a third, are no real substitute for seeing how characters feel towards one another face to face.

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Looking back over what I have written, I see I have described The Two Foscari as a dark tale of unrighted injustices, with little action and (Lucrezia excepted) with characters who accept misfortune with gentle resignation. This makes the opera sound dull, depressing, and all to reminiscent of those gloomy scenes in Don Carlo and Simon Boccanegra that make heavy going.

But there is another side to The Two Foscari.

It is económically written, and so it keeps moving along. Bernd Benthaak's

production was of great assistance here, as was Douglas Smith's design. A centrestage rostrum was fronted by attractive draw-curtains, which not only, when open, helped adjust the look of the wide stage to the number of people upon it at any one time, but which also, when closed, made it possible quickly to change scene-identifying props upstage while action proceeded frontstage. Thus Benthaak was able to maintain continuity of action between the scenes within each Act, and able to keep up the pace. Smith's red-keyed costuming, seen mostly against a sky-blue cyclorama, created an overall vivid visual impression, forestalling gloominess.

All this was attuned to the character of the music. Sydney's Verdi enthusiasts in recent years have been fortunate enough to have heard his third opera, Nabucco, and his seventh opera, Joan of Arc, so they know that Verdi in his "early period" could successfully treat "grey" subjectmatter (prayers, laments and the like) within a context of surging oom-pah and rum-ti-tum melodies (cabalettas of vengeance, hate or resolve, and wonderful confrontation ensembles). The Two Foscari is blessed with just such a score of immediate appeal, that keeps bursting into life.

I believe the Foscari music is strong enough to carry one with it, regardless of all else. Roger Covell's athletic conducting did it full justice. In this opera Verdi uses the chorus often, for a variety of effects, and I commend the chorussingers for their attention to diction and dynamics. The orchestra also did well, especially in the woodwind writing so prominent in this opera.

Beverley Bergen brought a bright clear voice, and characterisation, to Lucrezia's music. There was some insecurity (tiredness?) in quiet slow passages but the "big stuff" was put across with great assurance. Geoffrey Harris (Jacopo) had the ill luck to be placed upstage for his two solo scenes, so that the voice seemed understrength. When he was downstage, his singing was generous and altogether pleasing. Lyall Beven (Francesco) had attractive reasonance in his voice, yet it had a clear edge to it that saved it from muzziness and greatly aided diction. Perhaps this voice sounded too. young for the Doge's very aged make-up, but no matter, the singing was splendid. Peter Avery (Loredeno) had the sonority required of a heavy villain.

Ralph Aldritch

The Caretaker

PINTER plays a hard game. A slashing forehand and a very jolting backhand when you least expect it.

The game is The Caretaker. The players, three intensely restrained actors exhibiting their theatrical prowess.

duction at the National Theatre at the The credit in this highly acclaimed proPlayhouse lies with the coach, director

James Beattie. It is evident from the first scene as Davies (Maurie Ogden) endeavors to sound out Aston (Nigel Devenport), Mr Beattie has directed a tight and constant rapport of strain and tension between his actors. Maurie Ogden's loose and fluid gesticulations never freeze or become too exaggerated right through to the final scene of confrontation with Mick (Peter Hardy) and you are relieved although they are not quite the right fit when Davies finally gets his pair of shoes, and with brown laces.

Davies is obviously the pivot point in Apart from the fact that the role of The Caretaker, the play is also his for sensitivity and talented insight into the part.

Nigel Devonport's "weakness" sometimes loosens to the point of becoming too insipid and he tends to be overshadowed by the strain and agitation gathering momentum around him.

Each character is a fascinating study in complexity. Ashton as the benevolent magpie who procrastinates on building his garden shed. Davies as the paperless vagabond who procrastinates about going off to Sidcup and sides with the better deal in order to survive. And, Mick the sardonic scene changer with a penchant for nuts and a decidedly agitated reaction to any mention of his brothers questionable sanity. He also tends to procrastinate