Holiday by Raimondo Cortese
Ranters Theatre and Griffin Theatre Company
SBW Stables Theatre
I've now had the fortune of seeing Holiday by Raimondo Cortese both at its Melbourne premiere last year and once again in a remount now playing at the Stables Theatre.
From a staging sense, it's always interesting to see a show in a different space and what the current production proves is how diverse and beautifully intricate this play is.
In a white space, a babies wading pool sits centre stage with two toy life rings and a beach ball. There are also two stools and a chaise lounge to the side.
Two men enter the space - two men who are relaxing by a wading pool.
The silence of their presence is broken by the singing of a baroque song as they share the harmony and the verse. With warm eyes they look out into the audience, inviting us to listen and share in their presence on the stage. It's a beautiful opening which quietly slips into another silence.
The slightly older and greyer Arno (Patrick Moffatt) then begins his conversation with the taller and more lanky Paul (Paul Lum).
Arno: My mum sent me this parcel the other day.
Paul: What's that?
Arno: My mum sent me this parcel the other day.
Paul: In the mail?
Arno: Yeah.
Paul: She spot something... out shopping?
Arno: You know those plastic thingummies?
Paul: No.
Arno: The ones you used to find in the cereal.
Paul: The funny creatures?
Arno: She sent me a whole bag of them.
Paul: Why she send you those?
Arno: I don't know.
And so it begins.
From here a conversation takes us through ninety minutes of simple reflections, simple anecdotes all with the desire to fill a void of silence and be civil to one another. For the most part its amicable between the two men but as they start to get to know each other over the course of the play the tension slowly rises until it is broken by catholic guilt driven Arno who questions a statement made by the exaggerator Paul.
What made the evening even more interesting for me, was to see how the two shows evoked such different reactions from the Melbourne and Sydney audiences.
Spatially, the two shows are quite different. In Melbourne the play was performed under a white tarpaulin type shelter within the larger space of the North Melbourne Town Hall. The audience was seated in a proscenium formation and looked on through a fourth wall at the interaction.
In the unique and intimate space of the Stables, a fourth wall is not possible and instead, the audience is included within the space with designer painting the entire theatre white.
The change of space has had quite a profound affect on the play. The audience in Sydney found themselves more included in the action with the thrust stage and responded to the humour far more than the Melbourne audience. Add this to the fact that the black clad Melburniuns saw the play on a windy, cold and wet winter's evening and the happier Sydney audience were at the premiere on a balmy sub-tropical evening and the difference was palpable.
The loss of the fourth wall also meant directorial changes to the staging. Those long dramatic pauses between the bits of dialogue have been shortened substantially and the beach ball being hit into the audience to break the wall is also gone.
This is all replaced by a familiarity and constant interaction with the audience which didn't occur in the Melbourne version. Certainly this means the heights of tension are diminished, but what you receive instead is a closer look at the bare bones of each character as they expose themselves not only to each other but to fifty pairs of eyes looking on from two sides.
Holiday is one of those rare pieces of theatre writing rarely seen on Sydney's small stages. It is a play you just wouldn't see come out of our independent theatres for a number of financial, marketing and cultural reasons. It delicately flicks off the cloak of the overly dominant Anglo-culture and embraces the theatrically experimental writing of Eastern and Central Europe, housing it within the strong history of the universally-themed writing coming out of Melbourne's fringe sector.
In a recent interview with Currency Press, playwright Cortese explains in one sentence why he loves the theatre replying it is because "in theatre there’s nowhere to hide".
Every emerging playwright and director in Sydney should see this play if only to see how simplicity can fascinate. There's certainly nowhere to hide which means there's endless possibilities.
The silence of their presence is broken by the singing of a baroque song as they share the harmony and the verse. With warm eyes they look out into the audience, inviting us to listen and share in their presence on the stage. It's a beautiful opening which quietly slips into another silence.
The slightly older and greyer Arno (Patrick Moffatt) then begins his conversation with the taller and more lanky Paul (Paul Lum).
Arno: My mum sent me this parcel the other day.
Paul: What's that?
Arno: My mum sent me this parcel the other day.
Paul: In the mail?
Arno: Yeah.
Paul: She spot something... out shopping?
Arno: You know those plastic thingummies?
Paul: No.
Arno: The ones you used to find in the cereal.
Paul: The funny creatures?
Arno: She sent me a whole bag of them.
Paul: Why she send you those?
Arno: I don't know.
And so it begins.
From here a conversation takes us through ninety minutes of simple reflections, simple anecdotes all with the desire to fill a void of silence and be civil to one another. For the most part its amicable between the two men but as they start to get to know each other over the course of the play the tension slowly rises until it is broken by catholic guilt driven Arno who questions a statement made by the exaggerator Paul.
What made the evening even more interesting for me, was to see how the two shows evoked such different reactions from the Melbourne and Sydney audiences.
Spatially, the two shows are quite different. In Melbourne the play was performed under a white tarpaulin type shelter within the larger space of the North Melbourne Town Hall. The audience was seated in a proscenium formation and looked on through a fourth wall at the interaction.
In the unique and intimate space of the Stables, a fourth wall is not possible and instead, the audience is included within the space with designer painting the entire theatre white.
The change of space has had quite a profound affect on the play. The audience in Sydney found themselves more included in the action with the thrust stage and responded to the humour far more than the Melbourne audience. Add this to the fact that the black clad Melburniuns saw the play on a windy, cold and wet winter's evening and the happier Sydney audience were at the premiere on a balmy sub-tropical evening and the difference was palpable.
The loss of the fourth wall also meant directorial changes to the staging. Those long dramatic pauses between the bits of dialogue have been shortened substantially and the beach ball being hit into the audience to break the wall is also gone.
This is all replaced by a familiarity and constant interaction with the audience which didn't occur in the Melbourne version. Certainly this means the heights of tension are diminished, but what you receive instead is a closer look at the bare bones of each character as they expose themselves not only to each other but to fifty pairs of eyes looking on from two sides.
Holiday is one of those rare pieces of theatre writing rarely seen on Sydney's small stages. It is a play you just wouldn't see come out of our independent theatres for a number of financial, marketing and cultural reasons. It delicately flicks off the cloak of the overly dominant Anglo-culture and embraces the theatrically experimental writing of Eastern and Central Europe, housing it within the strong history of the universally-themed writing coming out of Melbourne's fringe sector.
In a recent interview with Currency Press, playwright Cortese explains in one sentence why he loves the theatre replying it is because "in theatre there’s nowhere to hide".
Every emerging playwright and director in Sydney should see this play if only to see how simplicity can fascinate. There's certainly nowhere to hide which means there's endless possibilities.
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