In a year when Melbourne Theatre Company has committed to programming mostly new works by local writers, this production of Uncle Vanya by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov bucks that trend a little bit – with a new adaptation by world-renowned Aussie writer, Joanna Murray-Smith.
Murray-Smith has dedicated much of her career to analysing the frailties and blind spots of middle-class Australians and is perfectly suited to tackle this particular Chekhov adaptation – freely adding in the occasional f-word and making concrete the comedy in a play that focuses a lot on boredom.
A play about boredom? Is it a bore?
Chekhov’s work has lived in a complicated space between comedy and tragedy and each production has to give his text a tweak to figure out where it will land each time.
Murray-Smith turns up the comedy, without losing sight of the inherent drama, while also giving female characters like Yelena and Sonya more clear interior lives and agency than the original suggests. This version of the play is masterful, crafting a new vision, without compromising what Chekhov was exploring.
Uncle Vanya focuses on the owners and managers of a Russian estate, dissecting the deep-seated feeling they have wasted their lives. Enter Yelena, married to esteemed professor Alexandre Serebryakov, whose first wife used to own the home. Vanya, brother to Alexandre’s first wife and manager of the estate, and local doctor, Astrov, fall for Yelena and try to seduce her in an attempt to add some...
Sex, death, rites of passage and revolution are set to be four major touch-points for Malthouse Theatre’s 2016 season: launched on the last night of winter by newly appointed artistic director Matthew Lutton.
Having spent the last three-and-a-half years at Malthouse Theatre, first as associate artist, then as acting artistic director after the departure of Marion Potts, Lutton is no stranger to the company. The Perth-born director (who started his own company, ThinIce, in Perth at age 17) has directed nine productions for the Malthouse; the most recent being Declan Greene’s sweeping new work, I Am a Miracle. Many of his subsequent directorial credits are in opera, for companies including Opera Australia and Bavarian State Opera. At age 31, he is the youngest person leading a major Australian theatre company.
Last year, Potts divided the season into three unique chapters: Body // Language, Post // Love and Ritual // Extinction – a different approach to Lutton’s. “I don’t program to a thematic,” he says. “It needs to be instinctual and responsive to the ideas that the artists are bringing. I was hunting for provocations, subversions, entertainment, collaboration. The season is one of sex, death, rites of passage and revolution. All of those involve a moment of awakening. So every show is doing that in its own unique way.”
All of these ideas seem to be encapsulated by Malthouse Theatre’s first show for the year,Meow Meow's Little Mermaid (Jan 28-Feb 14): part two of an outrageous cabaret trilogy in which the very un-Disney mermaid must sacrifice her voice and cut her tail in half to enter a new land.
Malthouse Theatre 2016 will continue a strong tradition of bold new adaptations (most recently, Antigone) with Picnic at Hanging Rock (Feb 26-Mar 30): one of the most anticipated shows of the year, directed by Lutton himself. This world-first stage production, written by Tom Wright for five female actors, will conjure the horror of the unknown evoked by novelist Joan Lindsay through language (Lutton is adamant that there will be no rock on stage). Another deeply influential Australian female author is the late poet Dorothy Porter, and her previously unpublished poems will be brought to life with music composed by Tim Finn in The Fiery Maze (Aug 18-Sep 4).
The season suffers no shortage of great poetics and epic themes: Lutton will also direct a re-imagined Edward II (Jul 29-Aug 21), originally written by Christopher Marlowe in the 14th century, but this time with no Elizabethan language in earshot. Audiences will no doubt flock to the Helpmann Award-winning Glass Menagerie (May 18-Jul 10), starring Pamela Rabe, coming straight from a sold-out season at Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney. Subversive Berlin theatre collective Gob Squad will devise a world-premiere adaptation of Tolstoy’s sprawlingWar and Peace (Oct 18-30) which will see the action break out from the theatre into a series of security cameras set up around Melbourne. “Surprise is one of the most powerful tools that theatre has,” says Lutton. “I wanted us to make sure that we’re doing surprising things in our theatre, and one of those is inviting people and then shifting their expectations.”
Nowhere is this more apparent than with Gonzo (Sep 21-Oct 1): a work that will deal with teenage boys and porn – performed by the teenage boys themselves. “They’re the missing voice,” says Lutton. “It’s a very rigorous process for the six boys that will perform the work, and only [youth arts company] St Martin’s Theatre can do this; they have the expertise of how to work with young people.” Leave your expectations (and your little ones) at the door.
Australian premieres by international artists range from UK playwright Duncan Macmillan’sEvery Brilliant Thing (Mar 8-20) – a critically acclaimed exploration into depression, love and finding the things worth living for – to The Events (June 21-Jul 10), Scottish playwright David Grieg’s response to the violent acts of a Norwegian white supremacist in 2011, which will feature a different Melbourne community choir on stage every night.
Important Australian voices – both emerging names and mid-career artists – are championed on the main stage with Nakkiah Lui’s Blaque Showgirls (Nov 11-Dec 4) and Ranters Theatre’sCome Away With Me to the End of the World (Jul 5-24) as well as in a series of four artist curated events to bring in the seasons. Given that this will involve Malthouse Theatre offering the likes of independent feminist theatre-makers The Rabble free reign over the entire building to create In the Bleak Midwinter (Jun 16-18), it’s best to expect something more than a bit edgy.
“I think the Malthouse is a beacon of alternative ideas," says Lutton. "It’s absolutely needed in our artistic climate, in our political climate, where there’s a real sense of alternate ideas being shut down and more radical voices being silenced. Art is a really important part in expanding that conversation and I think Malthouse is part of that as well. Malthouse needs to be a place that championing thinking, discussion and provocation.”
