Bubble Soup

Impro Theatre ACT

QL2 Theatre

Jan 28-30

Directed by Casper Schjelbred

Bubble Soup was a three night season of improvisation presented by Impro Theatre ACT, that was the product of a five day workshop with visiting improvisation teacher Caspar Schjelbred from Paris. It used a form that Caspar has created with his company ‘The Improfessionals’ called Organic Improvisation. It was performed by the nine actors who had been in the workshop, including Caspar and Impro Theatre ACT founder Nick Byrne, and a musician.

As I understand it, the idea of Organic Improvisation is that actors alternately dance and freeze, until one is inspired to use the shape they catch their body in to begin a scene from. Other actors do or don’t join the scene as they see fit, and when one actor feels the scene is over, they spin back into a dance until the next scene begins. There is no through line, continuing plot or theme, but a scene may follow on from some previous scene and themes may emerge. The work is partially based on Ira Seidenstein’s Quantum Theatre actor training method. Ira has been one of my teachers and mentors over many years, and I was in Brisbane with Caspar for a three week training led by Ira a week earlier.

I have seen a few Impro Theatre ACT shows, mostly some time ago. Then they were stuck in the one to four minute game competitive format based on Theatresports, with actors desperately playing for laughs. While entertaining in a way, no scenes came out of it that were interesting of themselves. I know that Impro Theatre ACT has been working hard to reinvent itself and the form, as have companies around Australia, and I hope Caspar has given the company an injection to inoculate against the staleness of the two minute game form.

Bubble Soup did not ask the audience for themes, play for laughs, or pander to the lowest common denominator. It had many interesting and intriguing scenes, including an older teenage boy taking a young innocent girl out on a date; a witch brewing magic potions with fingernails donated by a professional manicurist; duelling knights who finally revealed their homoerotic love for each other and marry; a child’s toy collection coming to life, and much more. This kind of work is a beautiful testament to the breadth of human imagination, with so many unpredictable ideas leaping out of the simple shapes of human bodies.

The evening had its faults and dissatisfactions. While every scene started from the physical shape of an actor’s body, too often the physical slipped away as the actors started to speak, and we were again left with talking heads. There was a sameness in the styles and rhythm of the show. There was one musical played over three scenes, and a musical finale, and one touching monologue, but most scenes were two or three actors having a conversation, usually a very serious conversation. Ironically, I found myself wanting more laughs in this show. The greatest and most serious flaw was the reluctance of the actors to go to powerful emotions. We never saw an Othello smother his beloved Desdemona out of jealousy, nor an Oedipus put out his eyes in shame. There were neither tears nor bellows of rage, no achingly tender kisses nor anyone frozen in terror. No scenes were followed through to the emotional peaks that are the stuff of great theatre. This of course is a huge ask for a cast who have studied a form for five days.

Bubble Soup was a daring experiment in the quest to make interesting and moving improvisational theatre, and I hope Impro Theatre ACT keep exploring this kind of work. 

The Nearly Invincible Monkey King

Told by Diane Wolkstein

With musician Jeff Greene

National Gallery of Australia, Wednesday February 2

This show was a story-telling of the first part of the famous Chinese story of the Monkey King, by internationally renowned teller Diane Wolkstein. I went to see it because I am working on a show that is a re-telling of the Inanna myth, working from a translation co-authored by Diane Wolkstein. I had already seen her perform Inanna on a DVD and was curious to see what it was like to see her live.

Diane doesn’t cut an exciting picture when she first enters: an eccentrically dressed old woman with a vague air but bright eyes. Her introduction told us that the monkey king is the greedy part of our personality, and then told us that she wouldn’t interpret the story for us, she would just tell it.

She stood and there was a long dramatic pause and she began.  To my dismay, she began in just the same way she began the Inanna story, in a stilted, artificial voice, with every word over-emphasised and pauses between every phrase and sometimes every word. Jeff Greene, the musician working with her, underscored almost every word with an obvious bang, clack, squeak or tinkle. All this was made worse by the rather muddy sound quality of the mike looped off her ear, unnecessary in a small theatre with passable acoustics. I found it hard to concentrate on the actual story told in this strange way, and started to dread the next fifty minutes.

Luckily, Diane slowly left behind this over-emphasised telling as the pace of the story picked up, and she started to take on the various characters of the story. Like many of my generation, I know the story from the wonderful Japanese TV series Monkey Magic, with its stagey fight sequences, camp costumes, camper acting and smatterings of Buddhist wisdom. The TV series concerned itself only with Monkey’s journey to the west with the monk Tripitaka, the sea monster Sandy and the pig spirit Piggsy. Diane’s story this morning was the fascinating first half of the monkey story, where Monkey grows to become such a powerful being that no-one in Heaven can best him, but fails to grow wisdom or restraint, until Buddha himself imprisons Monkey inside a mountain. The more familiar half of the story was for that evening, which I was unable to attend.

One of the wonderful things about Diane as a story-teller is her use of the original text as much as possible, cut down as necessary to fit the attention spans of contemporary audiences. And the text is wonderful, full of colourful imagery, very human gods and an ambiguous morality.

Diane’s stagecraft, her movement, her use of space and effortless switching between characters was beautiful. But every time the pace of the story slowed, she reverted to an annoyingly stilted style of telling that got in the way of hearing the story itself. With this was a lack of variation in rhythm, continual brief pauses and almost no longer pauses, and a predictable and repetitive use of music. The few longer pauses in the telling when the music went silent were a palpable relief. They gave space for the power of the story to sink in. It would have sunk deeper had there been more of them.

This was a one off performance with an audience of about forty, almost all families with children. For all my criticisms, it is a great pity that the performance did not get a larger crowd, and that the National Gallery did not see fit to advertise the performance more widely. It’s a beautiful tale.

About this Blog

I’ve decided to write a blog of reviews of theatre shows that I see. I'm doing this for several reasons:

• ·      I’m writing a lot at the moment but not really finishing things. So it’s forcing me to write, finish it and put it in the public domain.
• ·      I often want to have conversations about shows that I’ve seen- with the makers of the shows and fellow audience members- but there often isn't time. Hopefully this blog will be a way of having those conversations.
• ·      I hope to inspire more debate about the kind of theatre we make and the kind of theatre we see, what it says, how it says it and why.

I'm giving myself a few guidelines:

• ·      I know that making a show is a huge amount of work, and a risk. Anyone making theatre deserves congratulations for that work and taking that risk. So even if I hate a show I will try to remain encouraging and constructive.
• ·      I think content matters. I don’t want to review as if what a piece of theatre says about the world  is irrelevant.
• ·      I think context matters. Ticket price, the size of a venue, whether the performers are being paid or not, need to be taken into account. I don’t want to pan shows that don’t have the resources to be more than they are.
• ·      I hate reviews that don’t engage with the aims of those who created the work, or what the reviewer thinks those aims might have been. At the same time, I think those aims should be open to be debated.
• ·      I want to review as a conversation with the makers of a work and its viewers, not to say ‘Go and see this show’ or ‘Save your money’. Mostly my reviews will come out after the season is over.

I'm based in Canberra but travel a lot, so many of the performances I review will be in Canberra, but some will be in other places.

It’s my hope people will write comments and debates will happen.