"Keeping Your Kitsch In Sink"

The Needle And The Damage Done

Benito Di Fonzo
Metro, Sydney Morning Herald, November 30, 2007

Fiona Scott-Norman uses her collection of vinyl atrocities to educate as well as entertain.

Fiona Scott-Norman puts a comic spin on her collection of trash vinyl.

Genre

Comedy

Location

The Studio

Address

Sydney Opera House, Sydney

Date

5 December 2007 to 8 December 2007

Tickets

$28/$20 plus booking fee.

Phone Bookings

(02) 9250 7777

Online Bookings

www.sydneyoperahouse.com

Preview

"It really is is shockingly bad," says Fiona Scott-Norman of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival hit she is bringing to the Opera House. "The whole show is full of shockingly bad stuff."

At first appearance it seems a strange way to entice audiences but, in the case of The Needle And The Damage Done, bad is kitsch, and kitsch is good.

Over 75 minutes, Scott-Norman counts down a top 10, or should that be bottom 10, of the worst albums of all time. She trawls through the collection of just-plain-wrong vinyl she has amassed over the years, starting as a teenager in England when she shoplifted a Rolf Harris LP. It was strange preparation for her move to Australia at 18 but great grounding for her Melbourne radio program Trash Is My Life.

"This is the thing," Scott-Norman says. "I'm a good DJ, but I also have a large trash collection. It's like the evil side of me, the dark side. At some level I'm programmed for kitsch."

As comically kitsch as much of Scott-Norman's albums are - be they John Laws's spoken word LP In Love Is An Expensive Place To Die, or her most recent acquisition, a collaboration between the London Philharmonic Orchestra and romance novelist Barbara Cartland - there is certainly a dark side to this malodorous menagerie, as seen in categories including Swinging Sexism and I'm Not Racist But, in which even old Rolf takes a fall.

"I concentrate on the '60s and '70s because there's a big gap between what was acceptable then and what is now," Scott-Norman says. "I play a bit from Rolf Harris' Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport [which goes] 'Let me Abos go loose, Lew, let me Abos go loose, they're of no further use Lew, so let me Abos go loose.' By our standards that's appalling [but] he wrote that in 1957 and at that point Aborigines not only didn't have the vote but their deaths on outback stations were recorded in the livestock records."

Scott-Norman uses these vinyl atrocities to educate as well as entertain.

"It's cultural archaeology," she says. "It's drawing attention to things and reminding people how far we've come. It's celebratory, my show."

She has also found a rich vein in the vintage work of various Christian singers.

"A lot of it's simple in that what's funny is that it's so daggy or structured because, man, they go for a lot of hairspray those Christians. But what I find interesting about Christian music is the hypocrisy. They pose as being about love and Jesus and Christian values but so much of it is propaganda and it's manipulative."

There is a jaunty Christian sing-a-long (or should that be sin-a-long?) to a song called Oh Buddha.

"It's a categorical slagging off of all other religions," Scott-Norman says. "It's passive-aggressive."

Has she thought of evening the score with some Islamic, Hindu or Buddhist kitsch? Some duets between the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere perhaps?

"If the Dalai Lama put out a record of songs, I'd be there."

Scott-Norman brings her unique comic analysis to the albums, something that comes naturally to her after parallel careers as a DJ and a theatre and comedy critic for publications including The Age and The Australian.

"A couple of comedians have gone, 'Ooh, gamekeeper turned poacher,' " she admits of her first forays into stand-up after 15 years as a critic. "It's different doing it to writing about it. The stuff that seems obvious from the outside is not so easy when you're on the inside. It's like you're on different sides of the membrane. I was lucky in bringing all my interests together and it struck a chord with people. It's like going to a fun fair, on a roller-coaster or ghost train: we all enjoy being terrified. I think there's a lot of that in my show, people being appalled but also delighted."

Scott-Norman, whose vinyl library will be featured in a coming episode of ABC TV's Collectors, admits the reason she has been able to amass such a cornucopia of crap is that most people consider them rubbish and chuck them out.

"I've got most of my stuff from op shops over the years," she says.

How does one decide if an op-shop find is kitsch, and therefore cool, or daggy and bad?

"What you're looking for is something that has that extra edge," she says. "Something that catapults it into the spectacular category. It's a lot to do with the intention of the artist, the self-awareness."

Cover art is also important, says Scott-Norman, hence her section Men With Stuff.

"Basically that's an album cover art section, the props that men use to make themselves appear more masculine on their album covers."

After Scott-Norman's show, you'll no doubt be scouring St Vinnie's for Bernard King's A Man Of Style, John Laws's You've Never Been Trucked Like This Before or Charlie Manson's folk album Lie.

Alternatively, you could search for Olympic skaters Torvill and Dean's collection of embarrassing duets.

"They do Saturday Night and I Ain't Got Nobody," Scott-Norman says. "They're so white, they make Leonard Nimoy sound like 50 Cent."

Peter Helliar in conversation with Benito

Hellraiser

Benito Di Fonzo
Metro, Sydney Morning Herald, November 22, 2007

Expect role-playing, bad mime and jokes about produce from Peter Helliar.

Peter Helliar goes bananas.

Genre

Comedy

Location

Enmore Theatre

Address

130 Enmore Rd, Newtown

Date

23 November 2007

Tickets

$32.60/$28.60

Phone Bookings

02 9550 3666

Online Bookings

www.enmoretheatre.com.au

Details

Two shows, 7.30pm (sold out), 9.30pm.

Preview

Bananas pushed Peter Helliar over the edge. "Global warming I could handle," the blond comedian says, "but paying seven bucks for bananas was a bit full-on."

This produce-based epiphany became the seed for Hellraiser, his show looking at the comedic possibilities of some of the more serious issues of our day.

"When I started writing it, there was a foiled terrorist plot at Heathrow, North Korea was testing missiles, global warming was more on the agenda, petrol prices had skyrocketed. Then bananas got to seven bucks a kilo and I thought,

'OK, it's time to get involved now.' "

Helliar guffaws regularly during our chat. He appears not to be laughing so much at his own jokes as at the ludicrousness of life in general, a gift that would have proved invaluable earlier this year when hepatitis C support groups attacked him.

"Who'd have thought a Pamela Anderson joke could get you into hot water?" Helliar says.

Helliar made a public apology but the controversy was reported in papers around the world, including London's Daily Mail and The New York Post - which can't have hurt his notoriety, surely?

"No, there's nothing wrong with that," Helliar says.

Eschewing any future hepatitis C humour, Helliar has stuck with making fun of the intrinsically unfunny.

"It's a challenge to take an issue that on the surface isn't funny and make it, find something in it. There are only so many jokes you can make about the same target. I don't want to do any more jokes about Shane Warne, I'm bored of that. You're always looking for new stuff to find comedy in. But I don't want people to think they're going to learn anything by coming to this show. It's not preachy."

Less An Inconvenient Truth than A Mildly Informed Possibility? "Mildly informed, yeah. Half-baked opinions."

Helliar is happy to stray from the script, which lets him swerve into pet topics such as the corporate patriotism of McDonald's or his strange affection for Bunnings employees. This has led to some dangerous audience encounters.

"I once had a saucepan thrown at me," Helliar says.

Who goes to a gig with a saucepan?

"I was thinking, 'Was this pre-planned? Was there some controversial stir-fry routine that I had?' I guess they would have brought a wok if that were the case. But it was a footy club, so there was a kitchen at the back. I said, 'Hey Cranbourne, heard your footy team had a win today.' Cranbourne's a suburb outside of Melbourne. Someone up the back - obviously he didn't play that day - threw kitchenware at me."

One thing that won't appear in Hellraiser is Helliar's AFL alter ego Bryan Strauchan. With his fame from TV's Before The Game, Strauchnie is more famous than Helliar in the AFL states.

"When I'm in Sydney, I still get people yelling out for the character, which puts a strange vibe in the room for a couple of seconds because it's hard to go into any of that kind of stuff, and I don't like to. If I'm doing Hellraiser as myself, I don't like to sponge off that character."

Much of Helliar's appeal, particularly through Strauchnie, is the self-deprecatory humour of the plain, unfit, everyman against superstars.

"There are too many comedians who have come about in recent years who are too good-looking, so we have to balance up the ledger a bit."

Surely Helliar's boss, Rove, is among those tall, handsome, young comedians?

"I'm taller than Rove," Helliar says. "I'm 5 foot 11 [180cm] and he's about 5 foot 2 [157cm]. He's got those telephone books he's sitting on, but he's got the looks on me."

Did he ever call him "shorty"?

"For the first three or four years," Helliar says, "then he won the Gold Logie."

What can punters expect from him live? "I'm a lot more physical, reasonably high-energy on stage. I use the whole stage. I like role-playing, bad mime ..."

Mime? "I'm up there with your worst comedy mimes but I give it a shot. I've become a kettle on stage, a paper clip.

I talk about global warming, drought ...

A lot of people I talk to after the show say it was their first stand-up gig. I was lucky enough to discover stand-up quite early and I think it's the perfect night out."

interview with Uncle Semolina (& Friends)

Gilgamesh

Benito Di Fonzo
Metro, Sydney Morning Herald. November 9, 2007

Plastic wrestling greats and a seven-metre mudpit help re-enact the world's oldest written story.

Back in the pit ... actor Mark Tregonning from the production in England.
Photo: Tristram Kenton

Genre

Theatre

Location

The Studio

Address

Sydney Opera House, Sydney

Date

15 November 2007 to 23 November 2007

Tickets

$20-$28 plus booking fee.

Phone Bookings

02 9250 7777

Online Bookings

www.sydneyoperahouse.com

Preview

"We try to use the qualities of dirt," says Phil Rolfe of the decision to stage the 5000-year-old Sumerian epic Gilgamesh in a seven-metre mudpit.

"At times [the dirt's] playful and at other times it becomes like a burial ground. By the end of the play the actors are literally covered in dirt, caked in it."

"The dirt is a real character," says co-creator Christian Leavesley, who admits to feeling "quite suffocated by cleanliness".

Mess is an important part of the work of Melbourne theatre troupe Uncle Semolina (& Friends), who have also re-enacted parts of the Old Testament and Greek myths using their childhood love of soiled plastic superheroes. As we speak they are making a mess of London's auspicious Barbican Theatre before wiping down their Iron Sheik and Sergeant Slam figurines for the Opera House. The 1980s toys play the respective leads of the original superhero Gilgamesh, born two-thirds god and one-third human, and comrade Enkidu, born half-man, half-beast.

They suspect their mudpit in the Opera House will arouse the usual mix of reactions to what they admit is, dolls aside, not a show for children.

"It's pretty violent," Leavesley says. "There's quite a lot of darkness in some scenes which counteract the child-play aspects. [In London] we had three curtain calls, which they told us is extremely rare, but at the same time we also had a couple of people who just thought, 'I don't understand what this is about and I find it annoying,' and left. I'm assuming that's what they were thinking. There is a level at which you [must] understand the imaginative vocabulary that the show is built on, which is the way that we played as children."

Leavesley, 33, and Rolfe, 35, feel their combination of intense toy-play and mythology appeals to generations that spent the 1970s or '80s in sandpits with Star Wars and World Wrestling Federation figurines. Rolfe and Leavesley saw in this the roots of storytelling and returned to the mudpit when the time came to stage their own shows.

"I had the whole Star Wars set," Rolfe says. "I used to play in the backyard, flood it with water and just crash and bash through all sorts of stories with my brother. Christian had a similar suburban Australian upbringing."

Leavesley: "We had more Lego at my place."

"From a psychological point of view," Rolfe says, "when you are a kid playing with these toys you're playing out versions and possibilities for the world. That kind of re-imagining of stories and creating epics out of miniatures is part of the inspiration for the show."

The actors hold the figurines, like dolls or puppets, and then do their voices for them as they play-fight each other. The figurines are the leads, but the audience can see the actors who are doing their voices and throwing them around.

The story is that of King Gilgamesh fighting and then befriending Enkidu who, after offending the goddess Ishtar, among others, is destroyed, leading Gilgamesh to a violent existential struggle with his own mortality.

This archetypal tale is the oldest surviving written story and from its 12 stone tablets later stories such as Noah and the flood and Homer's Odyssey arguably emerged.

Rolfe and Leavesley saw lessons relevant to our time in the work.

"When we first started it," Leavesley says, "the US was invading Iraq and [there was] the idea of a literal but also lateral sense of the US being at the height of its powers ... but now being somewhat of a Gilgamesh, of how different societies deal with a sense of mortality and of crumbling."

The tale of a tyrannical ruler convinced of his own invincibility carries specific messages for today's kings.

"It relates to that moment when you're a child and completely self-obsessed and then you realise the world's bigger than you," Rolfe says. "I think [world leaders] are still very much little boys, in that all the big geopolitics are actually little-boy stories if you boil them down."

Live at The El Rocco Jazz Cellar, Oct. 2007

For those who were too lazy, poor, or indifferent to come to my gig at Wordjammin' at The El Rocco, underneath Bar Me last month you can now hear some of the tracks at www.mp3.com.au/benitodifonzo

Alternatively you can just click on the title of this blog entry, cheers.

the tracks are - "Whore of Babylon", "The Perfect Local", "Her Name was Champagne", and "She Chucked A Sickie".

the personnel are Benito Di Fonzo (guitar, poetry) Ash (piano) and Ben Eadie (drums).

Yes, I am playing those muzaky jazz chords, crippled walking bass and cheesy pentatonic scales whilst performing poetry, but they did let me sit down.

Half A Person: My Life As Told By The Smiths.

Half a Person: My Life as Told by the Smiths

Benito Di Fonzo
Metro, Sydney Morning Herald. September 21, 2007

The songs of the miserable Morrissey inspire a stage show.

Genre

Theatre

Location

Newtown Theatre

Address

Cnr King & Bray Sts, Newtown

Date

20 September 2007 to 29 September 2007

Tickets

$31/$21

Phone Bookings

1300 306 776

Online Bookings

www.newtowntheatre.com.au

Preview

Who would have thought that inside Alex Broun - playwright, rugby journalist and long-time director of the Short & Sweet theatre festival - there was a Smiths tragic bursting to get out. The melancholic love songs from singer Steven Morrissey so mirrored his own adolescent existence he was inspired to recreate it on stage in Half a Person: My Life as Told by the Smiths.

The show tells the story of William, the protagonist of the Smiths song William, it was Really Nothing, and the unrequited love he has for fellow Smiths tragic Salome, a femme fatale reminiscent of her mythical namesake.

"Salome is a perfect example of a Smithian love," Broun says. "In unrequited love for John the Baptist she got Herod to cut his head off."

In a twist, William discovers that his best friend and mentor, older writer Rick, is in love with him.

"I really tried to capture that Morrissey tone," Broun says. "There's a longing in Smiths songs for this unattainable love, this magical love that's going to transform you and change your life and make everything perfect and wonderful.

"That's a very romantic gesture, a very classical gesture. If you look through the ages it's there in Dante, Shakespeare, Keats. That's what Oscar Wilde wanted, that unattainable love for Bosie that eventually undid him, and it's the same for Morrissey. If you look at that last [Smiths] album and substitute the one wanting the love to be Morrissey and the one rejecting the love to be [guitarist] Johnny Marr, you can see what happened to the Smiths."

So the play reflects the band's history as well as Broun's own?

"Exactly, we wanted to capture the essence of the Smiths not only in story but in the dialogue and characters as well."

William's tale is told and sung by David Forster, accompanied by arrangements of 13 Smiths classics by former Big Country keyboardist Colin Berwick.

Forster is somewhat of a cabaret enfant terrible, having written and performed his own one-man show at 18. Now 23 - born only a year after the Smiths formed - Forster admits to not being a fan until Broun and director Robert Chuter approached him.

"They said, 'We've got this play and you'd be great for it.' I said, 'OK, who are the Smiths?' They were disgusted but I think they understood. They just handed me a bag with about four DVDs and seven books in it and said, 'Come back in two weeks.' "

Forster, who has since become a fellow Smiths tragic, feels the play captures Morrissey's comic melancholia.

"If the Smiths were ever writing and singing about someone it was William, this misunderstood young man who has a good heart but just doesn't seem to be able to put a foot right, and doesn't want to be lonely."

Surely Smiths fans revel in their loneliness?

"Morrissey does, and William as well, but I think there's more to that. You've got to want to revel in it for a reason and I think this play is a great way to explore that."

Smiths drummer Mike Joyce and bassist Andy Rourke gave their blessing to the project when cornered by Forster and Chuter in London last year - but no one has any illusions as to what Morrissey or Marr would make of it.

"Morrissey would probably puke," Broun says.

"If Morrissey came to see it," Forster says, "I would be absolutely terrified but I know he'd probably just get drunk and throw things and walk out halfway through."

Not that that would necessarily mean the patron saint of social alienation disapproved.

"There's a lot of humour in Morrissey," Broun says.

"It can be black and profound but there's always an ironic twist that stands it on its head and says, 'Don't get so serious because it just doesn't matter.' "

"Deeply Offensive & Utterly Untrue"

Deeply Offensive & Utterly Untrue

Benito Di Fonzo
Sydney Morning Herald. August 24, 2007

Would you bribe a dictator to sell grain? Our biggest corporate scandal comes to the stage.

David Williams and Jane Vaile in Deeply Offensive & Utterly Untrue.

Genre

Theatre

Location

CarriageWorks

Address

245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh

Date

24 August 2007 to 8 September 2007

Tickets

$20-$30

Phone Bookings

1300 438 849

Online Bookings

www.carriageworks.com.au

Preview

"It's a happy story about Australian successes," says Stephen Klinder from Version 1.0.

He's talking about the performance group's adaptation of the Royal Commission into the Australian Wheat Board's (AWB) rorting of the oil-for-food program. The Cole Inquiry found that AWB kicked back about $290 million into Iraqi coffers via a Jordanian trucking company while it made Australia the biggest seller of wheat to Saddam's regime. Bad politics, yes, but surely good business?

"Iraq was their most profitable market," says another Version 1.0 member, David Williams. "They were able to charge whatever they wanted."

Deeply Offensive & Utterly Untrue follows earlier Version 1.0 works in a genre called documentary theatre. CMI: A Certain Maritime Incident used transcripts from the "children overboard" inquiry, while The Wages Of Spin used Senate proceedings about the Iraq war.

Turning the 8500-page transcript from arguably the most boring of political scandals into something entertaining seems a mammoth challenge. Isn't it just a room full of lawyers talking about wheat contracts?

"It's a fair question," says Version 1.0's Kym Vercoe, "but we were about to go to war against Iraq and, meanwhile, one of our biggest corporations had given them $290 million, a company monitored by the Government gave our archenemy money. That's not boring, that's shocking!"

Surely it's all in legalese, a language designed for somnolent obfuscation rather than entertainment?

"Sometimes it's like a farcical courtroom drama," Klinder says. "We have interviews with Alexander Downer and he's really a parody of himself. I think there's a lot of comedy in Alexander Downer."

The play's title comes from Downer's response to accusations that Australia went to war to protect its wheat market.

"He'll be a great loss to the artistic world," Williams says of the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Taylor says: "The only parallel I can think of is extreme sports. This is extreme theatrical sports - how do you [make it entertaining]?"

Members of Version 1.0 find using real transcripts lends rhythmic veracity to the dialogue.

"You've got people like [David] Mamet and [Harold] Pinter, who struggled their guts out to make [dialogue] sound like the stuff people say and in the way they say it," Klinder says.

Cognisant that they couldn't just have people sitting in courtroom chairs for 90 minutes, Version 1.0's members use sound, video - even live mice - and physical theatre to bring the concepts to life, such as a "living diagram" of just how the kickbacks worked.

Taylor says: "When we go onto the floor we have to physicalise it, that's why I called it an extreme sport."

So it won't be like watching question time?

Vercoe says: "We've done this because we trust that most sane people wouldn't want to read the entire Cole Inquiry. We think, as much as we forced ourselves to read it, we have particular skills - whether they fail spectacularly or not - of making that information digestible, entertaining and something that people can take away and think about."

With so many witnesses apparently suffering memory loss during the inquiry, there shouldn't be a problem if they forget their lines.

"You do get the feeling that they've had a big meeting and said, 'Let's see how far we can push this, how far we can pretend we just don't remember,' " Vercoe says. "If I forget my lines, sooner or later someone in the company's going to say, 'Get your lines down, we open tomorrow night.' That's pretty small in comparison to giving Saddam Hussein $290 million. It doesn't work when you get a parking fine - you can't say, 'I didn't have time to read the sign.' "

Another performer, Christopher Ryan, says: "We're human beings, we all f--- up. With the AWB, you've got somebody who's incredibly belligerent at one end going, 'I did nothing wrong, get off my case,' and you've someone at the other end having a mental breakdown. It's a huge classical thematic of human greed. It's fantastically meaty, ballsy stuff."
The timing is certainly fortuitous.

Williams says: "I don't know that political scandal will die if the present government isn't re-elected, [though] I'd hope there'd be fewer of them."

Preview - Survival Tactics

Survival Tactics

Benito Di Fonzo
Sydney Morning Herald, August 6, 2007

Is hip-hop theatre more valid for today's generation than Shakespeare?

Wire MC in Survival mode.
Photo: Bryan O'Brien

Preview

Back in the mid-'80s, talented young actor Morgan Lewis was performing mime at the Opera House and playing Romeo for the Australian Theatre For Young People. Meanwhile, streetwise B-boy Morganics was beatboxing and breakdancing to Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa outside Hoyts and at Circular Quay.

Lewis and Morganics were the same person and, through the emerging genre of "hip-hop theatre", they've come together - not that the paradox was ever more than geographical to Morganics.

"I moved from Circular Quay doing mime and popping and breakdancing routines to, at the age of 14, doing a 45-minute white mime show in the Opera House, so it just moved up the road a little bit," he says.

The 36-year-old has performed in shows such as Crouching B-boy Hidden Dreadlocks and Stereotype. He was in arguably Australia's first hip-hop theatre show, The Bridge, as part of the Metabass N'Breath ensemble in 1996. Reviewers in the US, where hip-hop theatre has become large enough for an annual week-long festival to be held in New York, have noted that the genre in which people speak in tight rhymes is reminiscent of Shakespeare's poetic Elizabethan language.

Morganics agrees with this observation.

"Iambic pentameter, yeah," he says. "I came up doing Shakespeare since I was 12, you're doing your bars and your counts. As artists today we have a new vocabulary and this vocabulary is now being put in a theatrical context.

"I think it's as valid, if not more valid, for us than Shakespeare. For us this is the stuff that we listen to, live, breathe, eat, sleep ... this is what's going on in our lives and we're trying to put it on the stage so people can feel it."

Despite starring in stage productions opposite Toni Collette, Morganics originally moved away from acting out of creative frustration.

"I found that actors didn't have any ideas of their own, which is not entirely true, but I found that if you had your own ideas you'd become a performer, and you'd start making your own work."

Morganics is currently performing in, directing and co-producing Survival Tactics with the Opera House Studio through his company, Invisible Forces. The cast is filled with some of Australia's finest B-boys, rappers, DJs, dancers and singers, including Sista Native (Bounty 75), B-boy Jay (Wicked Force), Wire MC, Nick Power (Gravity Warriors) and Triple J Hip Hop Show and Channel [V] host Maya Jupiter.

"Everyone [in the cast] generates their own work and has their own ideas," Morganics says.

The cast also represents the multicultural heritage of inner-city Sydney. Marrickville-raised Tongan soul singer Seini Taumoepeau, also known as Sista Native, says: "We've got myself, some Anglo-Australians from various backgrounds, an Aboriginal man, a Turkish-Latino woman, and a Maori-Romanian who's also part Polynesian."

Sista Native sees hip-hop theatre as a welcome move away from the materialism of much of the hip-hop scene.

"Hip-hop theatre is an area where we can just tell the story, where it's not about your CD or DVD," she says.

"It's a bit more simple in terms of, 'It's theatre, it's the story, and here's our story in this format,' and I think that people really dig it. And it's good getting off the mic, it's a bit more like hip-hop on the street in that sense."

Each performer has created his or her own character, whose story intertwines with the story of other performers. The result is a narrative about life in inner-city Sydney that culminates in a moment of violence.

"Some characters are very close to the performer and some are very different," Morganics says. "I'm not an ice junkie but in the show I am, because that's what I wanted to look at. Once you scratch the surface of that you become aware of more people who are doing that shit everywhere in this country."

Rapper and guitarist Will Jarrett, also known as Wire MC, plays Swerve, an angry young Aboriginal man who has to learn to give and accept trust.

"He's based on where I was at a young age, not letting go of anger and bitterness and letting that consume my life," he says, adding that reading helped him to escape that phase.

"I read a lot and I met a lot of people and I realised you can't blame people, you have to blame actions. That's what [Swerve] learns."

In conversation with some Chaser cats.

(unedited version of article for Sydney Morning Herald)

“The Chaser’s War on Shakespeare” by Benito Di Fonzo.

While awaiting Dead Caesar composer Andrew Hansen’s emergence from an ABC editing suite I watch the play’s author Chris Taylor and Chaser cohort Craig Reucassel rehearse links for that evenings show. Reucassel is confused by Taylor’s joke concerning the Dalai Lama’s MySpace site and it’s ubiquitous creator Tom.

Taylor tells Reucassel not to worry, “the kids will find it funny.”

His approach to writing his debut play was not a million miles away.

“I went to a whole lot of plays in a row that were just hard work,” says Taylor, “It struck me that there was a hole in the market for a good crowd-pleaser, so I wanted to put on something that was very undemanding of it’s audience, and just a bit of silly feel-good nonsense. Even I was surprised at how Revue-like and unsophisticated it is. It’s the most undergraduate thing I’ve written since Uni. I grew up loving Life of Brian and the Python stuff and I’ve never been able to write that type of humour for the Chaser because [it’s] set in the real world, it just wouldn’t work, whereas I could do it on stage.”

Rumour has it the idea was first mooted by Wharf2Loud Artistic Director Brendan Cowell in the early hours of a bender.

“The way he recalls it is I was begging him to give me a slot, as I actually recall it was somewhere between the two. We were definitely in The Abercrombie Hotel, that has been verified by at least four barmen and a cleaner. [Cowell] and I write very different shows but we have a mutual interest in getting young people to the theatre and convincing them that it needn’t be a hard night out, it can be enjoyable and engaging.”

Taylor chose to satirise Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as a way of commenting on both politics and theatre itself.

“I’d always had the idea, even back in Year 9, that it was a great story, but Shakespeare made the fundamental mistake of making it a tragedy. Even back then I could see the potential for quite a satirical political fable in there, these guys running around stabbing each other wearing togas. I play up the whole analogy between Caesar as toppled dictator and Saddam Hussein. The Roman plotters are like the Coalition of The Willing, particularly Bush and Rumsfeld, the way they thought they were doing a good thing by getting rid of a dictator but actually plummeted a country into civil war. I was keen to make that analogy without laying it on too thick.”

Taylor discovered writing for the stage a very different process to TV and radio.

“No one ever really analyses the lines I write in a Chaser script, whereas it was fascinating to see these NIDA trained actors torturing themselves in analysing what essentially amounted to a knob joke. I thought I could just break their habits and convince them to work my way but what happened was the reverse and eventually I saw method in the way they’d been trained and it made me a lot more disciplined with the rewrites. You still get to the knob joke but you’ve got to be a bit smarter about how you get there.”

Andrew Hansen, who along with a kazooist is the live orchestra for the show, admits he was worried when he first heard Taylor was writing a play.

“In the Chaser group I tend to play the more low-brow stupid stuff,” says Hansen. “Chris is good at writing dry, satirical, clever stuff and I was terribly worried that Dead Caesar was going to be dry and clever, it was an enormous relief when I discovered that it was this drunken bawdy farce.”

Hansen also had his fear of his fellow actors to confront.

“There was a moment with the dress rehearsal where Ben Borgia [who plays Brutus] said to me ‘I’ve brought 20 friends, all NIDA graduates,’ and when I heard this my bowels loosened. I thought god they’re going to go ‘what is this upstart comedian doing in the theatre? Get out!’”

Does he appreciate the political allegory?

“I’m told there are some allegorical moments, audience members have told me, I haven’t spotted them myself. It’s just a huge amount of fun and incredibly entertaining, to me that’s meaning in itself.”

#

“Dead Caesar”

By Chris Taylor.

Composer Andrew Hansen.

Directed by Tamara Cook.

With Ben Borgia, Alan Dukes, Andrew Hansen, John Leary, Ewen Leslie, Toby Moore, Monica Sayers.

Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company.

4 July – 21 July.

$15 - $34

Bookings (02) 9250 1777 www.sydneytheatre.com.au

Finishing a manuscript is a deeply emotional moment. Printing it out and sending it off into the world even more so. It's like sending a child off to school.

You weigh it in your hands.

You look at what was until now only pixels on a screen. A damn lot of pixels but pixels nonetheless. Now it's three hundred and eight pages of hard copy.

You flick through them.

You just know the judges of the competition you're sending it off to won't love it like you do, won't understand this strange little retarded infant you spawned, but you always will. Or will they? Who knows.

Here are some photos I took before I sent my child out into the big bad world. For three years I carried it in me in various forms, and I carried in that strange incubator known as my laptop. In fact it outlived two laptops, two Toshibas, and I carried it unharmed into a third, a Dell, only a month ago.

This morning it was spat out, all three hundred and seven pages of it.

I was unsure my printer would cope with it, whether the sides would split and it would bleed black blood, but it didn't. Sure it had a minor panic halfway through the labour but a restart soon fixed that.

When it was all out I dried it in a towel, looked over it to make sure it was all there, and naturally as one does with a newborn after a long labour, photographed it with my laptop camera.

Then I casually printed out the placenta-like Synopsis.

My hands were shaking as I filled out the entry form for the ABC Fiction Award 2008 and a stray tear of black blood left my laptop I'm sure.

Then it was off to the post office.

I felt like I was putting it out for adoption, betraying it almost, but no - I was sending it out into the world, hopefully to be judged less harshly than me, who knows.

So here it is, hopefully you'll hear more of it. Either way they say it's the journey that matters anyway. Not that a journey to a book deal isn't always better than a journey to the Dole office, but...

I call it Molochio Leather.

I Was Attacked By A Bush Poet!

Here's an old poem that I've just put this here for Wednesday Kennedy in response to an on her blog at http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=149802788&blogID=280206981&MyToken=5b9b6d02-01a8-4216-8dc2-71f48d589800

It's a true story incidentally.

I Was Attacked By A Bush Poet.

I was attacked by a Bush Poet it's true; he looked like a rabid Orson Welles

as his porky fist popped buttons off my collar & his face grew pink as a dingo’s bits on heat.

Yeah, I was attacked by a Bush Poet at the peak of a Spring Writer's Festival

after consuming the sponsor's fluids in the stale starchy air of the poetry marquee.

The gaggle of poets had gathered around to do what they did best; compete,

for a minuscule monetary prize,

and a rare shot in the bloated blue veins of their egos of the finest uncut kudos.

And then I was attacked by a Bush Poet,

sure, some would say I was asking for it

with my smart-ass dago mouth and threads and my 'Stop Jabiluka' badge.

I'd actually quite liked his verse;

a mild departure from the Lawson like rants about

horses and hills and sunburnt bullock trains,

and hard blokie homo-erotic fantasies about raping the land for a Queen -

all as alien to my existence as that sad Union Jack in our flag.

So I congratulated him, sincerely if not soberly,

as he pulled back his Akubra scalp

and continued to guzzle at the barrel of Guiness which explained his stout physique.

As his bloated face came down all that he seemed to notice

was the bold black and gold of that Jabiluka badge pinned to the rim of my ethnic leather

and so he began a tirade supporting uranium and sprouting mad Menzies wisdom.

Naturally, I didn't agree.

In fact, I'd just come from the ERA embassy,

and heard of the ferals risking their lives against the dumb ugly evil of Darwin police.

What I actually said to him is beyond me,

but I'm sure it was delivered with the silk like bite of a polite chardonnay

and an accenting flick of the wrist.

Then it happened; his porky fist flying towards my collar like a logger on acid,

then pulling it towards his plump matronly features as he began to bellow;

"You macchiato sipping inner city smart asses,

you dole bludging, drug addled, commie, hippie, poofter, scum.

Pauline’s right; you should all be gassed, you Greenie Wog Asian Jew Blacks."

All around me writers turned, poets even halted tugging dumbly at their drinks

and sat silently in the amphetamine air of violence awaiting my baited reaction.

Now, I'm a runner not a fighter

and while I'm not averse to thrusting the blade of a sarcastic word

into the Achilles heel of an enemy's sole,

I've never been in a fight in my life and I plan to keep it that way.

Like Ghandi said, You can't fight fire with fire, only water.

So responding in kind to his primate violence was never in the equation.

Besides, I'm a card carrying coward, and for all I knew, this yob wrestled crocs

and I couldn't fight my way out of a yeeros bag.

So in the end all I could to do was wave my hands in the air

and place my fingers in victory as I began to recite John Lennon's "Give Peace A Chance".

Before long the pacifistic logic of the lyrics

caused the old bush bard to have a cerebral haemorrhage

and begin to fall t'wards the floor like a hard wood

only to be caught by his ‘mates’ and dragged quivering to the tune of "God Save The Queen"

into the annals of history

(where, some would say, he belonged.)

©Benito Di Fonzo. Oct, 1998.

Beyond The Valley of The Summer of The 17th Doll

After the beautiful failure of my combining the literary styles of Raymond Chandler and Lewis Carroll (see www.jabbernoir.blogspot.com) my latest idea for a cultural mash is a blend of the cinematic style of Russ Meyer (Beyond The Valley of The Dolls, Vixen, Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill, Beneath The Valley of The Ultra Vixens) with the seminal Australian theatrical work Ray Lawler’s Summer Of The Seventeenth Doll. Just think of it – 60s psychedelic soft-core porn blended with the rough elegance of the Australian outback. I could bring out all the sexual undertones of the outback and blend Strine with 60s hipster speak. I’m going to call it Beyond The Valley of The Summer of The 17^th Doll. Discuss.

BDF

The Loneliest of Cities?

I just read a reviewer refer to London as “that loneliest of cities,” but I wonder, is it really? Surely the loneliest of cities would have to be an Australian town, even Sydney – those sparse, empty spaces, be it the landscape or the never-ending suburbia. Sydney does not even have that sense or artistic community of, say, Melbourne.

Sydney is an empty town where empty people leave their single flats to sit on vast, hot, salty beaches and not talk to one another, the loneliest of cities easily no? Discuss.

In conversation with Marton Csokas (Romulus, My Father)

Romanians of the day

Latest related coverage

• Director's video diary: Romulus, My Father
• Trailer: Romulus, My Father

Other related coverage

• Proud father

Benito Di Fonzo, Sydney Morning Herald.
May 25, 2007

In Romulus, My Father, Marton Csokas (Lord of the Rings, xXx) takes a break from playing elves and villains to assume a role closer to his heart. The son of a Hungarian immigrant plays Hora, the Hungarian voice of hope and sanity opposite Eric Bana's troubled Romanian in Richard Roxburgh's directorial debut.

It's based on philosopher Raimond Gaita's memoirs of the country Victorian shack where his father raised him with the help of Hora. Meanwhile, his German mother (Franka Potente, Run Lola Run) disappears to the city with her lover (Russell Dykstra), who is also Hora's brother. Romulus, My Father encapsulates the seldom-told struggle of the Eastern Europeans who came to Australia after suffering both Nazi and Soviet occupation.

"There are certainly similarities to the stories that my father and friends of the family told me," Csokas says.

"They shared the shock of the new, coming from an old established culture and what it was to arrive in a very foreign land. My father was the only person left in his family, and off he went from 12 years old. The story of Romulus is not dissimilar to that. The boy at the centre of the story, Raimond, has the wisdom of the old world in a burgeoning new land, and that's what struck me as the most wonderful thing about this story."

The film explores how young Gaita (Kodi Smit-McPhee) deals with the tragedy that unfolds in his life as his extended family try to survive and stay sane in rural post-war Australia. This bleakness is balanced by the optimistic Hora, who introduces the future philosopher to the works of Bertrand Russell as they watch the sun set.

"He's the light in the darkness, which is why I loved playing Hora," Csokas says. "He's full of sun and life. I could do with a lot more of Hora in my life."

Romulus, My Father
Directed by Richard Roxburgh
Stars Eric Bana, Marton Csokas, Franka Potente
Rated M. Opens Thursday.
There is a Q&A and screening of the fi lm with Bana at the Cremorne Opheum on Tuesday at 6.30pm.

In conversation with director Denis Dercourt (The Page Turner)

Reprise of revenge

• Trailer: The Page Turner

Benito Di Fonzo
May 18, 2007. Sydney Morning Herald.

Hell hath no fury like a child prodigy scorned, or so it would seem in writer and director Denis Dercourt's intelligent psycho-thriller The Page Turner.

Most of us struggle with one career, but 43-year-old Dercourt has excelled in two: writing and directing films while teaching and playing viola in the French Symphony Orchestra.

His latest film, The Page Turner, was selected for Cannes and was the most successful French film in 2006. It tells the story of Melanie, first seen as a talented, precocious child pianist attempting to enter the Conservatorium. When her ego is shattered by examiner and famed pianist Ariane (Catherine Frot) signing an autograph during her audition, she gives up music forever, carrying a chip on her shoulder the size of the Arc de Triomphe.

Fast forward 10 years and fate finds the adult Melanie, played by Deborah Francois and reminiscent of a young Catherine Deneuve, working as a nanny for Ariane, who now suffers performance anxiety due to a hit-and-run accident. Deciding revenge is a dish best served cold, Melanie endears herself to the ageing pianist and becomes her page turner, confidante and indispensable companion.

The subtle build-up to Melanie's revenge, foregoing the obvious avenues, marks The Page Turner as a tour de force in filmmaking, moving with a musical dynamism to its crescendo.

"The main mechanism in classical music is that of the cadenza," Dercourt says, "a tense chord resolving in another chord; tension, resolve, tension, resolve, and often the release of tension is [creating] another tension. It's the same in a film, especially genre film, and I liked writing this film because I hadn't done that before. That was a real discovery for me."

Dercourt's musical background gave him a unique insight into musicians' minds.

"It's a very tiny village, the world of musicians. We are very few, especially at a certain level. Playing music is really difficult, hard work."

Are musicians particularly prone to becoming psychopaths, then?

"Like actors, like painters, like all artists they are more aware of their feelings. Also they must be like sports people - they must be always perfect. You cannot fail when you have a concert, you must be aware of your state of mind."

Who is more dangerous, the child prodigy or the failed musician?

"That's a good question," Dercourt says. "When they both are one single person you have to be very afraid."

The Page Turner
Director Denis Dercourt
Stars Catherine Frot, Deborah Francois
Rated PG. Out now.

In conversation with Adam Hills

Adam Hills: Joymonger

Benito Di Fonzo
May 17, 2007. Sydney Morning Herald.

The Spicks and Specks host is having a car roof moment.

Adam Hill's deliriously positive dial has beamed at us from ABC's Spicks and Specks and stages from Enmore to Edinburgh. His new show, Joymonger, promises more uplifting humour. Someone once said "never trust a man that doesn't drink or is always smiling", so I decided to find Hills's dark side. What makes him angry?

"What makes me really angry is myself," says Hills, "my own shortcomings."

That's just too nice.

"No, I get really shitty at myself - if I forget somebody's birthday I really take it to heart."

Move over, Satan!

"All this 'nice guy of comedy' malarky is never really something I've cultivated," Hills says.

I remind him that his show is called Joymonger.

"Well, there's that," he says. "I was trying to think of something like 'militant joy' or 'joy warrior,' this idea of living in a cynical, jaded and very frustrating world and therefore trying to dance on the roof of my car."

The analogy, Hills says, comes from a friend in Egypt.

"He told me that whenever there was a traffic jam it was so frustrating - 45 degrees, no one could move - people would get out and dance on the roofs of their cars. I liked the fact that purely out of frustration people would dance on their cars, not because everything is great but because everything has turned so bad that the only way to deal with it is to dance on your car."

Is he sure they were dancing, not jumping? "Pretty sure. I believe in putting positive vibes out into the world and when you're frustrated and angry that's when you most need to put positive vibes out."

Joymonger is partly "improvised joy," such as in Edinburgh where Hills conducted a gay wedding, held an impromptu job interview and became godfather to a three-month-old in the front row.

"I like to create something special that audiences are going to remember," Hills says. "It's not about me showing off, it's about making sure they're enjoying themselves and often that entails 20 minutes of chatting with them because I want to get to know them."

Hills will be bringing his sign-language interpreter for Joymonger.

"I did a show in Adelaide a few years ago for a disability art conference and they provided a signer and two things happened. First, deaf people in the audience were connecting with my material, and second, I was getting laughs out of the sign-interpreter because the hearing people were fascinated. Now I have hearing people who will only book [for signer shows.]"

Hills was raised in Sydney's Sutherland Shire, where he had a "pretty happy suburban life, pool in the backyard, cricket on the road ... I was so happy when I was 10, 12 years old, and the rest of my life is trying to recapture that."

Happy despite the fact that he was born without a right foot, something that makes him feel almost lucky as it pushed him to achieve his goal. Hills has been determined to pursue a career as a stand-up comedian since he first heard Victor Borge on a plane at the ripe age of eight.

"That one person was making a room full of people laugh - I liked that idea. [Also] our family used to listen to comedy on holidays; Bill Cosby, Billy Connolly, Peter Sellers. Comedy was something that bonded our family. I like stand-up because it bonds people; again maybe it's me trying to recapture the happy days of being a 10-year-old."

Hills admits he has been driven to anger, such as when he abused a punter in an Adelaide beer garden who attempted to tell him a racist joke.

"I don't deal well with negative energy," he says, "If something bad is going on around me I wither and freeze up or yell at people inside my own head. One of the points of [ Joymonger] is to find a way of dealing with that."

Also, the man who wrote on disability website Ouch! that he feared becoming a "one-legged Anthony Robbins" does worry he takes life too seriously.

"I think a lot of stand-ups take life incredibly seriously; that's why they do stand-up. [So] I wouldn't say I have a dark side, but I certainly take life ridiculously seriously and I need to lighten up."

"The Italian" preview.

No place like home

Benito Di Fonzo, Sydney Morning Herald.
April 10, 2007

Inspired by the orphans that Russian director Andrei Kravchuk saw scamming on the local streets in the '90s, The Italian is a dark and moving journey about a heroic little boy.

Along a dirty and remote snow-ridden road, a childless Italian couple arrive at a rundown Russian orphanage to adopt Vanya (Kolya Spiridonov). Vanya's peers, envious of his escape from the rule of the orphanage's drunken, melancholic headmaster (Yuri Itskov) and their own harsh hierarchy, christen him the Italian.

"When I was a student I shot a little documentary about [a] children's house and I thought about this problem," says Kravchuk, whose film has won several international awards. "[When scriptwriter Andrei Romanov] told me about the little article in newspaper, about [a] six-year-old boy who decides to find his mother, I realise it is a very good story for [a] movie."

Many of the cast members are actual orphans, injecting the film with a level of realism that Kravchuk set out to achieve. "I want that the people see it like a real story," he says.

Learning of the suicide of another adopted child's mother, Vanya escapes his comfortable life in Italy to search for his own mother. The Italian then becomes a neo-realist chase film as Vanya is pursued by orphan traders (Mariya Kuznetsova and Rudolf Kuld).

Learning important life skills along the way, such as how to glass a man with a broken beer bottle in a street fight, Vanya is hindered by as many people as he is helped.

Kravchuk sees Vanya's struggle as a parable of hope for his homeland.

"We have [a] heroic little boy who lives like a real man, yes? He lives like he feels in his heart and I think that when you have that kind of hero in our time in Russia, yes, we have a future."

The Italian
Directed by Andrei Kravchuck.
Starring Kolya Spiridonov, Yuri Itskov, Mariya Kuznetsova.
Opens April 25.