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The Age
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Melbourne doesn't give up its secrets easily. This festival is delving below its surface
Swingers gave us a free lesson in the feminist history of minigolf, founded in 19th-century Scotland by ladies unamused at being excluded from golf courses (through constricting fashions as much as the misogyny of the age). The more traditional performing arts program held its own, too. International theatre threw up some creative engagement with Shakespeare. Peru's Teatro de la Plaza offered a fierce and joyful deconstruction of Hamlet from an ensemble of actors with Down syndrome, on par with our own Back to Back Theatre, while the experimental UK company Forced Entertainment pared Shakespeare down to the bone, condensing the plots of the Bard's complete works into hour-long episodes, narrated by a single performer using only household items. I found the disarming break-up show Heartbreak Hotel from Aotearoa New Zealand oddly comforting in its curated messiness and was pleased to see some hotly anticipated Australian theatre. The follow-up to Counting and Cracking, S. Shakthidharan's The Wrong Gods, didn't have the same epic sweep as the previous play, but it certainly held the stage with poised intensity. Set in a remote valley in India, this tale of environmental and economic disaster, and resistance to it, laid bare the incommensurable values of global capitalism and indigenous ways of life with dramatic economy and four charismatic performances. It had a gravitas that the hell-bound comedy of cultural collision from Merlynn Tong and Joe Paradise Lui, LEGENDS (of the Golden Arches), did everything in its power to avoid … with flamboyant lo-fi success. Performance from Latin America had been radically underrepresented in Melbourne until Brazilian artist Carolina Bianchi's searing Cadela Força Trilogy (Bitch Power Trilogy) at last year's Rising. That work found a radical companion in Kill Me, from Argentine choreographer Marina Otero – a piece of autobiographical avant-garde dance theatre which transformed naked outrage and mental ill-health into a frenetic carnival of deranged theatricality. Contemporary dance shone as a vehicle for otherwise silenced or inexpressible lived experience. Botis Seva's BLKDOG combined street dance with haunting and vigorous modern choreography, embodying the struggle against abjection in the face of the surreal recursions of childhood trauma. Indigenous resistance was powerfully alive in Joel Bray's MONOLITH, a brilliant work for five women that played with the pareidolia of seeing human figures in ancient rock formations. Starting with hallucinatory living tableaux of bodies slowly writhing and intertwined with each other, suggesting connection between ancestors and Country, the piece shifted to embrace steely defiance in the face of colonialism and discrimination, with an ambiguously symbolic, yet sensual, finale that returned us to a vision of shared humanity over atomised individualism. Our dance critic, Andrew Fuhrmann, gave it five stars. He wasn't wrong. It is impossible to see everything at Rising – I was out almost every night and barely touched the sides of the huge music program – but I did catch Beth Gibbons at Hamer Hall. Best known for her work with trip-hop pioneers Portishead, the ethereal Gibbons held us spellbound with a set from her 2024 solo album and indulged fans with the Portishead classic, Glory Box, at encore. My bucket list is shorter now. Loading No one could deny that Rising has experienced growing pains. It was interrupted by the pandemic, which wreaked havoc on Melbourne , and looked like the awkward child of Dark Mofo and some half-realised international arts festival as it tried to find its feet. It is true, too, that Rising doesn't have the same clear raison d'etre as arts festivals in cities such as Perth or Adelaide. Remote places tend to have bigger and more distinguished festivals out of cultural necessity. Still, in 2025, Melbourne can be proud to embrace a festival that gives every sign of having matured into an assured, aesthetically distinctive and culturally diverse event, with both popular and underground appeal.
Sydney Morning Herald
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Melbourne doesn't give up its secrets easily. This festival is delving below its surface
Swingers gave us a free lesson in the feminist history of minigolf, founded in 19th-century Scotland by ladies unamused at being excluded from golf courses (through constricting fashions as much as the misogyny of the age). The more traditional performing arts program held its own, too. International theatre threw up some creative engagement with Shakespeare. Peru's Teatro de la Plaza offered a fierce and joyful deconstruction of Hamlet from an ensemble of actors with Down syndrome, on par with our own Back to Back Theatre, while the experimental UK company Forced Entertainment pared Shakespeare down to the bone, condensing the plots of the Bard's complete works into hour-long episodes, narrated by a single performer using only household items. I found the disarming break-up show Heartbreak Hotel from Aotearoa New Zealand oddly comforting in its curated messiness and was pleased to see some hotly anticipated Australian theatre. The follow-up to Counting and Cracking, S. Shakthidharan's The Wrong Gods, didn't have the same epic sweep as the previous play, but it certainly held the stage with poised intensity. Set in a remote valley in India, this tale of environmental and economic disaster, and resistance to it, laid bare the incommensurable values of global capitalism and indigenous ways of life with dramatic economy and four charismatic performances. It had a gravitas that the hell-bound comedy of cultural collision from Merlynn Tong and Joe Paradise Lui, LEGENDS (of the Golden Arches), did everything in its power to avoid … with flamboyant lo-fi success. Performance from Latin America had been radically underrepresented in Melbourne until Brazilian artist Carolina Bianchi's searing Cadela Força Trilogy (Bitch Power Trilogy) at last year's Rising. That work found a radical companion in Kill Me, from Argentine choreographer Marina Otero – a piece of autobiographical avant-garde dance theatre which transformed naked outrage and mental ill-health into a frenetic carnival of deranged theatricality. Contemporary dance shone as a vehicle for otherwise silenced or inexpressible lived experience. Botis Seva's BLKDOG combined street dance with haunting and vigorous modern choreography, embodying the struggle against abjection in the face of the surreal recursions of childhood trauma. Indigenous resistance was powerfully alive in Joel Bray's MONOLITH, a brilliant work for five women that played with the pareidolia of seeing human figures in ancient rock formations. Starting with hallucinatory living tableaux of bodies slowly writhing and intertwined with each other, suggesting connection between ancestors and Country, the piece shifted to embrace steely defiance in the face of colonialism and discrimination, with an ambiguously symbolic, yet sensual, finale that returned us to a vision of shared humanity over atomised individualism. Our dance critic, Andrew Fuhrmann, gave it five stars. He wasn't wrong. It is impossible to see everything at Rising – I was out almost every night and barely touched the sides of the huge music program – but I did catch Beth Gibbons at Hamer Hall. Best known for her work with trip-hop pioneers Portishead, the ethereal Gibbons held us spellbound with a set from her 2024 solo album and indulged fans with the Portishead classic, Glory Box, at encore. My bucket list is shorter now. Loading No one could deny that Rising has experienced growing pains. It was interrupted by the pandemic, which wreaked havoc on Melbourne , and looked like the awkward child of Dark Mofo and some half-realised international arts festival as it tried to find its feet. It is true, too, that Rising doesn't have the same clear raison d'etre as arts festivals in cities such as Perth or Adelaide. Remote places tend to have bigger and more distinguished festivals out of cultural necessity. Still, in 2025, Melbourne can be proud to embrace a festival that gives every sign of having matured into an assured, aesthetically distinctive and culturally diverse event, with both popular and underground appeal.
ABC News
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
The unbearable intimacy of voicing someone's words — with Forced Entertainment
Words can mean everything, or nothing at all: it all depends on how they're delivered. This relationship between writer, script, actor and audience creates a particular tension that lies at the heart of performance. Who gives meaning to the words, interprets the creative material, who holds the power? This is a lecture, but not as you know it, by members of the multi award-winning British theatre company Forced Entertainment. The 15th annual Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture was delivered at the University of Sydney on Tuesday 18 March, 2025. Speakers Terry O'Connor Performer and co-founder, Forced Entertainment Tim Etchells Artistic Director and co-founder, Forced Entertainment Ian Maxwell (host) Chair of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney Further information: Complete Works: Tabletop Shakespeare - Forced Entertainment at Rising Festival 2025
The Guardian
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Is this a cheese grater I see before me? This is Shakespeare as you've never seen it before
It opens with two flashlights, standing on a tabletop, nervously awaiting the arrival of a cheese grater. Or rather: the ghost of a grater, with a thirst for vengeance – and a slender glass-bottle son who may or may not get the job done. This is Hamlet, as you've never seen it. Instead of a stage, a table. Instead of players, humble household and supermarket items: a canister of flea powder standing in for the murderous usurper King Claudius; a pepper grinder for Queen Gertrude. Instead of the usual three to four hours, just one. Instead of Shakespeare's poetic prose, a single performer delivers a narrative re-enactment. 'To be or not to be' – one of drama's most vaunted soliloquies – boils down to: 'Hamlet comes along and he's thinking about death – again.' This pared-back Hamlet is one of 36 tabletop versions of Shakespeare's plays performed by UK theatre mavericks Forced Entertainment, who will bring the series to Australia for the first time this month in Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare. A full set will be staged across eight days at the Adelaide festival, and an abridged set over three days at Tasmania's Ten Days on the Island festival. (You can even watch them for free on their website.) Table Top Shakespeare has proved immensely – if not universally – popular, touring Europe and the US to acclaim over the decade since it premiered. 'Occasionally you get somebody who's unhappy that we've stripped the Shakespearean language out of the pieces,' says Forced Entertainment's artistic director, Tim Etchells. 'But there's plenty of productions of the full plays. It just wasn't what we were interested in doing.' Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Forced Entertainment, an ensemble of six that turned 40 last year, has built a reputation for experimental and often absurdist durational work, building marathon productions from improvisations rather than using existing texts. In the 24-hour performance Quizoola!, one performer improvises answers to an apparently never-ending stream of questions asked by another, while audience members are free to come and go. In the six-hour improvisation And on the Thousandth Night, eight performers jostle with each other to tell a story that never ends. They were never going to do 'straight Shakespeare', says Etchells. 'There was a subversive impulse there – to take these high-culture texts that are so revered and to play them as this kind of lo-fi puppetry on the tabletop,' he adds. 'And I think it also chimed with our interest in the way that spoken language conjures images, makes things happen.' It's true: under the spell of the performer's narration – and careful hands – even a grubby, half-empty bottle of linseed oil seems haunted by some dreadful dilemma; over the course of each show's duration (45 to 75 minutes) you find yourself inexorably absorbed into the drama. Watching the plays reveals something about Shakespeare's craft, too. 'It's like taking the car engine apart and putting all the pieces on the driveway; it makes you see the mechanism a little bit more clearly,' says Etchells. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion 'The comedies are really interesting because they often work on pairings – so on the tabletop, they're very beautiful; they have this endless symmetry. But something like Cymbeline is a bit of a mess on the tabletop, because it's an inelegant structure.' Each of the performers, assigned six Shakespeare plays apiece, took different approaches to 'casting' their productions: Cathy Naden used objects from her late mother's house, while Richard Lowdon used items from his cellar – including a grimy jar, a tin of paint stripper and a crusty old faucet handle – to conjure a dank aesthetic for his Macbeth. Some choices are delightfully tongue in cheek: Iago is played by a pack of cigarettes; he will kill you. All of the performances are unscripted, giving each the quality of a pal telling you the plot of their favourite film at the pub. Some performers are chatty; others adopt a more dramatic, campfire delivery. It's this 'theatre in the everyday' that continues to excite Etchells a decade into the series. 'This magical transformation of space and time is not the sole province of the big stage with the fancy lighting rig,' he says. 'You can do it right here on the tabletop with a few everyday objects. It's a human capacity for transforming and narrating.' Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare runs 8-16 March as part of Adelaide festival, and 21-23 March as part of Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania.
