Melbourne, Australia
National Interest: This new play, commissioned from Aidan Fennessy by the Black Swan State Theatre Company in Western Australia, is based on the infamous case in October 1975 of a five-person Australia-based TV news crew, which died at the hands of the Indonesian military during its invasion of the Portuguese colony of Balibo, East Timor. Indonesian authorities claimed the men had been caught accidentally in crossfire, despite evidence that they had been murdered in cold blood.
Fennessy directs his own play, drawing on a personal connection: 21-year-old Tony Stewart, the youngest of the victims, was his cousin. “This is not a tragedy, this is an abomination,” Fennessy declares in his director’s statement—and yet he chose to write National Interest as an intimate work of fiction rather than scathing documentary theatre. Fennessy sets the play 32 years after the incident, in Tony’s mother’s kitchen, when the results of a coroner’s inquest may at last set the record straight. Prominent stage and screen actor Julia Blake portrays the woman still haunted by the loss of her son, and, though she shares a name with Fennessy’s aunt, the playwright has stressed that the character is his own invention. “I created an avatar to get to the emotional heart of the matter—grief and loss, although the story is co-opted on a national level with propaganda, intrigue and successive governments not coming forward with the facts.”
As for Blake, she recently spoke at a press conference about the project: “Balibo represents something for all of us which is dark and shameful. But this for me is not a dark or an overtly political play—the essence is a human story, the story of a mother.” After premiering in May at Black Swan’s Heath Ledger Theatre in Perth, the co-production is now playing on the stage of the Melbourne Theatre Company, where Fennessy is the associate director. (Through July 21; (61) 3-8688-0800; www.mtc.com.au)
Helsingør, Denmark
Opus Hamlet: Kronborg Castle is already an evocative performance site—brought to life each year during HamletScenen’s annual August celebration of the Bard—but now there will be a castle within a castle on which miniature players may fret their (half) hour on the stage. A new outdoor puppet theatre created by Danish set designer Catia Hauberg, with a 4-meter-wide proscenium, is being inaugurated this summer by puppeteer Adam Walny and composer Lars Kynde’s 30-minute Opus Hamlet, which interprets the tale of the brooding prince for children as young as six years. The creators have jettisoned language entirely to tell the story through sound effects, musical instruments and theatrical touches such as a smoke machine. The “Shakespeare Puppets at Hamlet’s Castle” series will continue at Kronborg in future years, hosting puppet performances from around the world. (Through July 12; (45) 4921-6979; www.hamletscenen.dk)
Tampere, Finland
Tampere Theatre Festival: “Everything we have ever wanted to say about Estonia will be said here,” boasts Teater NO99, one of the guest companies at this showcase of Finnish and international work. Indeed, NO99 has tackled the entire history and identity of its motherland in The Rise and Fall of Estonia—projecting the details of its production on huge screens in a thousandseat hall. A hard act to follow? Perhaps, but director Andriy Zholdak (working with Helsinki-based Klockriketeatern) has managed to incorporate not just a swimming pool but also a mermaid costume into his Uncle Vanya, which Finnish critic Egil Green has called “a theatre experience that will stay with you for the rest of your life.”
Those interested in new Finnish writing have a number of plays to choose from, including Q-teatteri’s Broken Heart Story, written and directed by thirtysomething scribe Saara Turunen, which follows a mustachioed female writer in search of love and inspiration. Among the international visitors you will also find Russian-born director Yana Ross, Yale-trained and currently based in Lithuania, who has directed Mika Myllyaho’s play Chaos, about modern consumers on the verge of a nervous breakdown; Ivo van Hove and Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s latest cinematic adaptation, John Cassavetes’s Husbands; Schaubühne Berlin’s The Talented Mr. Ripley; and the Warhol homage Gob Squad’s Kitchen, by the eponymous troupe based in England and Germany. (Aug. 6–12; (358) 3-222-8536; www.teatterikesa.fi)
In Hard Times, Greeks Look to the Stage
By Ionna Kleftogianni
Crisis. That’s the word on everyone’s lips these days in Greece. Has the crisis affected theatre life? Tremendously—though, surprisingly, not in numbers or scale or desperate cutbacks.
In fact, the number of productions opening this season in Greek theatres numbered more than 300—with 220 of those in Athens alone! In Greece, theatre has always been a means of individual and collective psychotherapy, a fact that could be changed neither by the strictures of the International Monetary Fund nor by the harsh measures of Ms. Merkel. Theatre attendance has also remained high; it’s common for performances to sell out their entire runs. The pessimism that has swept Greek society hasn’t yet paralyzed the theatre. That resilience is remarkable, given that the average base salary in Greece has been butchered to 586 euros a month, and unemployment benefits have plunged to 360 euros. But ticket prices have foundered too; today one can see an Athens production of Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane for only 5 euros.
The recession has changed something deeper in Greek theatre, concerning the repertoire’s overall philosophy and direction. The tone has been set by the National Theatre, where artistic director Yannis Houvardas’s programming addresses such pressing contemporary questions as “What is motherland?” Here he has resorted to 17th- and 18th-century works, to theatrical texts from the establishment of the New Greek State and to adaptations of classic Greek historical novels by writers such as Grigorios Xenopoulos and Alki Zei. At the same time, Houvardas has encouraged the writing of new texts dealing with the harsh historic moment we live in today.
The National’s stages are constantly full. Watching classical satires of political corruption, audiences come to the bitter realization that little has changed in Greece over decades, even centuries. Taking another tack, in Homelands, by Michalis Reppas and ThanasisPapathanasiou, actual immigrants stepped from the margins of Greek society into the spotlight of the National’s main stage to narrate their own histories in the Greece of 2012.
Similar directions have been taken by alternative performance spaces like Bios, whose Unemployed featured actors’ compellingly real stories about being out of work. The shift to a documentary-style theatre—one that speaks about what hurts us, collectively and individually—has contributed to an unprecedented boom in new drama. Dozens of texts by underground troupes and established writers have broached such topics as xenophobia and racism (Aoustras, or Wildness, by Lena Kitsopoulou, for example) and the impairment and disposal of Athens by its politicians (Athens City-State, by the Kanigkounta Group).
Who could have imagined the crisis would lead to a serious shift toward the country’s historical roots and the Greek language? To a renewal of classical pieces of the Cretan Renaissance (which occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries), like Kornaros’s Erotokritos and Hortatsis’s Erofili? To dramatic adaptations of novels (by Viziinos, Pentzikis, Papadiamantis, Roidis and others) characterized by their unique and highly demanding language?
The lack of money and means has also given birth of a wave of collective actions, a leading example of which is the peaceful occupation of the defunct Theatre Empros by the Mavili Collective. The vigorous collective of young theatre groups has organized open classes and panels and staged day-long and hybrid performances, all free of charge.
Ioanna Kleftogianni lives in Athens.
