This was the best Shakespeare I've seen in Sydney this century. And now it's back
Seldom performed, the play, here retitled I Hate People; Or Timon of Athens, tells of Timon being so profligately generous that he runs himself into bankruptcy, whereupon his 'friends' turn on him, so he renounces Athens and retreats to live in the 'natural' world in abject poverty.
Now this production – the best Shakespeare I've seen in Sydney this century – returns.
Director Margaret Thanos connected with Ryan, Sport for Jove's artistic director, when, having won the 2023 Sandra Bates Director's Award, she was the assistant director to Ryan on Ensemble Theatre's Mr Bailey's Minder. They found many convergences in their thinking, and Thanos mentioned her love of Timon, pitching her vision as 'Mount Olympus meets the Greek financial crisis', with a strong emphasis on ensemble movement. Ryan was hooked.
Despite being the company's artistic director, he had to audition for the lead role. 'That was really important to both of us,' says Thanos, 'because I can say undeniably he was the best choice … His audition for this production is one of the best auditions I've ever had the privilege of witnessing in my life as a director – and I've seen hundreds of auditions in the past few years.'
Ryan is also Sydney's finest and most experienced Shakespeare director, so he and Thanos arrived at an arrangement whereby in rehearsals he focused purely on his role, and only outside that room did he discuss the show's ideas with his artistic director's hat on.
'Timon is a story of an extremely wealthy man losing everything,' Thanos explains. 'It's almost a fable in its quality. The imagery of Timon stripping down to wearing nothing but little boxer shorts in that second half is extremely indicative of the destitution that he faces.' Indeed, it is as though Timon's naked soul is being mirrored in his naked body. 'We see,' she continues, 'this extravagant imagery at the beginning – the parties, the orgies, the luxury of it all – and then we move into total destitution… It's inherent in the text that he returns to this so-called natural world to reject mankind, which he perceives as un natural.'
The on-site rehearsals before the show opened at Leura Everglades in January 2024 were rained out, so opening night was the first proper run.
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Sydney Morning Herald
5 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
MIFF made easy: 15 films that should be on your viewing list
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The Age
5 days ago
- The Age
MIFF made easy: 15 films that should be on your viewing list
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Except that some of the corpses are said to be coming back to life, a tantalising rumour for volunteers such as Ava (Daisy Ridley) who can't let go of the memory of her dead husband. In his 2013 film These Final Hours, Australian writer-director Zak Hilditch showed us what the end of the world might look like from the vantage point of Perth. This companion piece offers another contained vision of apocalypse, taking advantage of the versatility of the zombie genre to tell a story that is solemn, blackly funny and grisly by turns. August 13 and 15. JW THE MASTERMIND Josh O'Connor is initially unrecognisable as beardy slacker JB, an art school drop-out who regularly wanders his quiet, leafy town's art gallery with his family on weekends. Here he gets the idea for his grand gesture: getting some of his stoner friends together, putting stockings on their heads and stealing the museum's Arthur Dove collection. 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There isn't much plot: the drama is in how the two women look at each other, and in Hadzihalilovic's gift for charged, paradoxical images, such as an ice rink viewed from a distance that is made to resemble both a bare stage and a warm, glowing haven. August 16 and 23. JW SOUND OF FALLING Loading A family farm in northern Germany, seen in various eras, in various states of repair and through the eyes of four girls at different times, is the creaking heart of Mascha Schilinski's extraordinary film, the greatest discovery of this year's Cannes Film Festival. Erika amuses herself walking on crutches belonging to her uncle, who has lost his leg in the Great War; Alma is given a funereal black dress to wear to a party around 1900; Angelika lives with the strange, pinched chill of the Cold War. We slip between different eras, which echo and mirror each other, in this haunting meditation on death and the persistence of memory; meanwhile, the girls struggle against the confines of their different lives. August 20, 22 and 24. SB CLOUD Kiyoshi Kurosawa might be called the M. Night Shyamalan of Japan, although he's been telling uncanny, twisty suspense stories for a good deal longer. There's nothing openly supernatural in this tale of a young man (Masaki Suda) who embarks on a career reselling fake designer goods online, a get-rich-quick scheme that eventually brings catastrophe on virtually everyone around him. But the atmosphere is closer to a horror film than a conventional thriller, with the hero's need to control his environment spreading to the other characters like a disease. Kurosawa is something of a control freak in his own right – and his cool, deliberate style, based largely on emptied-out long shots, is ideal for picturing a world where nothing but profit counts. August 17 and 21. JW ENZO The late French director Laurent Cantet, best known for his Palme D'Or winner The Class, was obliged by his worsening cancer to hand over direction of Enzo to his co-writer, Robin Campillo. Campillo, whose own style in films such as BPM is frantic and festive, here maintains Cantet's stately seriousness in a profile of Enzo (terrific newcomer Eloy Pohu), who has defied his professional parents by taking a job as an apprentice builder. He is terrible at his job; what holds him is the hope of defining himself as a man and his secret crush on Vlad, one of two Ukrainian builders wrestling with the call of duty. Under the ferocious Mediterranean sun, Enzo's romantic yearnings rise like new sap. August 16, 20 and 23. SB CHAIN REACTIONS Marking the 50th anniversary of Tobe Hooper's horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alexandre O. Philippe's documentary is an admirably serious and respectful piece of work, letting us hear at length from five high-profile fans who come at the film from different angles but agree on viewing it as some kind of masterpiece. The line-up includes Stephen King, filmmakers Takashi Miike and Karyn Kasuma, comedian Patton Oswalt – and most delightfully, the Australian horror scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who begins her segment by discussing her childhood memories of Picnic at Hanging Rock. If shock and revulsion aren't what you crave from cinema, you might learn something here about why others feel differently, even if you need to look away from the more gruesome clips. August 9, 12 and 16. JW APRIL Against the majesty and fertility of eastern Georgia's rural landscape, a stoic obstetrician races between patients, trying to deliver babies safely by day and, after hours, giving kitchen abortions to women and girls already overburdened by poverty and patriarchy. First-trimester abortion is legal, but effectively proscribed in a country haunted by priests and monsters. Everyone knows that Nina is an abortionist; many know that she picks up men on the road, the only kind of intimacy that fits into her work schedule. When she delivers a stillborn baby, the authorities seize the opportunity to rid themselves of this doctor for whom the old ways are not good enough. Dea Kulumbegashvili's film is shattering, but also profoundly human. August 19, 21 and 23. SB MAYA, GIVE ME A TITLE A mother who loses an arm while chopping vegetables, a ketchup spill that floods the seas of the world, a 'fake prison' carted off to a prison for fake prisons: these are among the many disconcerting images in this series of whimsical vignettes that director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) devised and animated for his four-year-old daughter Maya, using paper cutouts and an app on his phone. This is screening as part of MIFF's Schools Program, but the bright colours and casual absurdity could appeal especially to viewers around Maya's age, who may not be too worried if they can't read subtitles or understand French, and who will probably take the anxious images of disaster in their stride. August 13, 19 and 23. JW LATE SHIFT With the pace of a thriller and the serious clout of a documentary, Petra Volpe's account of a night in the life of a Swiss nurse is, quite simply, one of the year's most brilliant films. Leonie Benesch, so good in The Teachers' Lounge and as a translator for the US press in September 5, interned in a cancer ward for months to master nurse Floria's skilled ministrations, heavy walk – to carry her for eight hours – and perpetual emotional availability. We watch her deal with a runaway elderly man, with a wild accusation of negligence from three suddenly bereaved young men, and a private patient whining about his tea: everybody is terrified, so nobody is reasonable. August 13, 19 and 24. SB BRAND NEW LANDSCAPE The 26-year-old Japanese writer-director Yuiga Danzuka has described this promising first feature as directly autobiographical. But you wouldn't necessarily guess that from his approach, which is all about emotional restraint. Set in Tokyo, the minimal plot follows three members of an estranged family: a workaholic landscape architect (Kenichi Endo), his daughter (Mai Kiryu), who's starting to have mixed feelings about her forthcoming marriage, and his younger son (Kodai Kurosaki) who keeps to himself when not working for a florist as a delivery driver. The unspoken emotion is in the way Danzuka films motorways, shopping centres, cafeterias, waiting rooms, offices and construction sites: impersonal spaces that could be found in any modern city, but are imbued here with a particular sense of loss. August 14 and 23. JW Loading
The Age
5 days ago
- The Age
This stormy tale set in a Greek restaurant serves up more than drama
A piteous desperation attends Julie's desire for agency, and there's irony in her abusing the unearned power she does have. Meanwhile, John's arc feels depressing and familiar from headlines: the brooding romantic lead has a manipulative streak latent in his performance, allowing Yena's Kristina to provide a window onto what is – however complicated the situation – clearly predatory male sexual behaviour. I'm not sure about the surprise twist at the end. It didn't quite land as tragedy and suffered the same issue as the lurid approach to some of the play's (admittedly blatant) symbolism. Loading In lieu of decapitating Julie's pet bird, for instance, John sticks it in a food processor and presses the button. The audience laughed at the gory substitution – a spell-breaking moment in a production which, at its best, summons the moody extremities and intense performances that make Strindberg's battle of the sexes so compelling. Finally, the restaurant theme has added allure for those who can afford to splash out. Premium tickets include a Greek-inspired immersive dining experience by celebrity chef Conor Curran. Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead THEATRE What's Yours ★★★★ Red Stitch Actors' Theatre, until August 24 To have kids or not to have kids? A newfound sense of urgency in Keziah Warner's play What's Yours is injected into the debate, which is more alive than ever amid the broadening of possibilities that mean more people can have children, even as the ever-deteriorating state of the world complicates the decision itself. The play kicks off decades in the past, the liminal age of youth and opportunity distilled into a moment of carefree drunkenness at a sharehouse party. Lia (Carissa Lee) and Jo (Christina O'Neill) are best friends and housemates. Simon (Kevin Hofbauer) is a stranger who first desires Jo, and then, years into the future, Lia. Obscured by a gauzy curtain, the flashback has an ephemeral, otherworldly feel. When the curtains are pulled back, we're firmly in the present. Simon and Lia are struggling to conceive, and hear through the grapevine that Jo, whom they haven't spoken to in years, has frozen eggs that she doesn't intend to use. They reach out, hoping for a display of magnanimity from someone they've hurt deeply. The result plays out over the course of the next few years as their loyalties, motivations and feelings shift and morph. What's Yours is a meditation on power, desire, mortality, the ethics of friendship, the limits of possession, and the enduring legacy of the choices we make. The minutiae of each of these characters' decisions are placed under the microscope, as they extort one another for answers and defend their right to live the way they envisioned for themselves. Warner's story bypasses familiar beats in favour of something altogether fresh and new. When justifying why they respectively do and don't want children, Lia talks about wanting to feel a love so enveloping it hurts her. Jo wants to do whatever she wants; if that something is nothing, so be it. Perhaps due to the contracted nature of the play, Lia and Jo are necessarily cleaved into neat binaries. Lia's so blinkered that she can't contemplate why someone wouldn't want a child, while Jo is so disconnected from the prospect that she doesn't know how to interact with a parent. The actors expertly inhabit these thorny, complex, highly flawed characters. O'Neill is a highlight as the sardonic, defensive and staunch Jo, while Lee embodies the seesaw of open-heartedness and despair that Lia experiences. Hofbauer, more recently seen in Red Stitch's Comeuppance, brings to life the agitated, morally vacillating Simon. Loading Under Isabella Vadiveloo's direction, the characters pace around a dining table planted in the centre of the stage. No actor is ever completely off-stage; the ghost of their presence a spectre haunting the other two in their absence as they loom behind a curtain. Bianca Pardo's set oscillates between being a domestic space and a public space through minute changes to the onstage furniture. The same could be said for the characters' outfits, which subtly shift as they age and move through different ways of being. Who you identify with in this piece and how you relate to it will hinge on your relationship to the question of kids. What's Yours invites projection as it interrogates the necessary sacrifices and payoffs of modern living. Reviewed by Sonia Nair JAZZ Troy Roberts Quartet ★★★★ The JazzLab, July 31 Sometimes, life has a way of jolting you into the present with a reminder of its fragility and unpredictability. At the JazzLab last Thursday, just minutes before Troy Roberts and his band were due on stage, a medical emergency in the audience resulted in a venue evacuation and plenty of sombre reflection as we waited outside. When the ambulance departed an hour later (with the patient in a stable condition) and we filed back indoors, the mood was understandably muted, drained of the anticipatory buzz that typically greets Roberts before every performance. The Australian saxophonist has called New York home for 20 years now, so his legion of fans jumps at the chance to hear him whenever he returns here. And it's not hard to see why. Any apprehension that the subdued atmosphere might linger was banished within seconds of the band's arrival onstage. A burst of cleansing energy from drummer Andrew Fisenden announced the opening tune – Solar Panels – before the rest of the quartet leapt on board. As a composer, Roberts keeps his bandmates on their toes with elaborate, rhythmically complex tunes. Yet even without a proper rehearsal, Fisenden, Brett Williams (on piano) and Sam Anning (bass) navigated the variable time signatures, tempo shifts and rhythmic fillips with apparent ease, beaming with delight as they moved in lockstep with their animated leader. Loading Roberts' arrangements of standards also contained elements of surprise: The Look of Love was taken at an unusually jaunty pace, the rhythm section conjuring a Latin feel beneath Roberts' agile tenor spirals, while Up Jumped Spring saw the quartet skipping back and forth between a flowing waltz and a breezy 4/4 swing. On Coltrane's Transition, Roberts and guest saxophonist Carl Mackey both offered volcanic solos that tapped into the composer's earthy spirituality. Wise One was gorgeously restrained, with Roberts' majestic, elongated phrases resting on a bed of rippling piano and shimmering percussion. A joyously ebullient calypso tune followed, then – as a coda – a brief but heartfelt ballad, sending us out into the night feeling uplifted and reassured.
