review

Terrapin Theatre Company: The Garden of Paradise

Posted by hil

The Ten Days on the Island Festival in Tasmania, which started on April 1st, is drawing to a close. Terrapin Theatre Company, which is one of Australia’s oldest puppetry companies, presented a stage adaptation of The Garden of Paradise, a little known tale by Hans Christian Andersen. It was commissioned by the festival to mark the bicentennial of the
birth of Hans Christian Andersen, and included dancers from TasDance, choreographed by Graeme Murphy.

The bicentennial is being celebrated all over the world this year, and Terrapin has been invited to take their production to Denmark in August.

In January there was a preview in The Age, and a few days ago The Australian has a short review within a general article on the festival. Gentle Curiosity has a more personal and detailed response.

‘The Snail House’ by Allan Ahlberg

Posted by hil

The Stop Laughing This Is Serious Gallery in Blackheath ran a great exhibition of puppetry-related works during One Van, which I hope to get around to blogging about sooner or later. But they also had a small but interesting range of books, and I have been kicking myself for not buying one called ‘The Snail House’, by Allan Ahlberg, as its not generally available in bookshops here.

I’ve always loved Ahlberg’s picture books (‘Peepo!’, ‘The Jolly Postman’, ‘Each Peach Pear Plum’, (all illustrated by Janet Ahlberg, his wife) and ‘Mrs Plug the Plumber’ were favourites in our house), so ‘The Snail House’ caught my attention anyway, but its an absolutely beautiful picture book. Its about a grandmother telling her grandchildren a story about how they shrink until they are small enough to go travelling in the house on a snail’s back, and the adventures
they have.

Snailhouse1

Its charming in so many ways. The adventures are everyday, and yet exciting; for example, an apple falls next to them and it seems like an earthquake or bomb. It has all the joys of contemplating life in different scales and microcosms. The illustrations, by Gillian Tyler, are finely drawn and textured, with lovely soft muted colours, and I’m sure they have lots of secrets in them to spot, as Ahlberg books do. Most intriguing is the manner of the telling: its written so you can see the grandmother reacting and adjusting her story as the kids react imaginatively to what she is saying, just as it happens
in real life.

I like the humour, lightness, and modesty that comes across in interviews with Ahlberg, such as in this one with his readers, or when talking about his poetry (I hadn’t realized he had published verse). Penguin UK’s listing of him as one of their authors goes some way to describing the vitality and connection that must have existed both professionally and personally between him and his wife Janet, who illustrated many of the books. That ‘process of playing table tennis’ with ideas, jokes and visuals is a heady creative experience! Janet died in 1994, but it looks as if their daughter Jessica shares the family talent, as last year she illustrated her father’s book, ‘Half a Pig’.

Its interesting Janet and Allan Ahlberg are the subject of one of a series of books about famous people by Heinemann Library, along with others like Nelson Mandela, Mozart, Ford, and Disney.

Compagnie Philippe Genty’s ‘Vanishing Point’ currently touring Australia

Posted by hil

‘Vanishing Point’ had its Australian premiere in at the Canberra Theatre Centre last week. It is the latest production by Compagnie Philippe Genty to tour Australia, following Stowaways in 1996 and Dedale in 2000.

There were some wonderful scenes, of which I had two favourites. One was a conversation between a man and a dog whose mimed gesticulations extended into visual question marks, arrows, punctuation, aggressive lines and sharp angles that attacked, choked and tickled. It reminded me of Victor Borge’s aural Phonetic Punctuation skit, and also of the great ‘piece of rope’ puppet in Company Skylark’s production of Wake Baby some years ago. My other favourite scene involved a puppet that I particularly liked: a grotesque and huge inflated ogre who several times proceeded to swipe and eat the head of one of the men. In an article by Irma Gold in the current issue of Artlook,

“Genty explains that working through these ideas in Vanishing Point was cathartic. ‘I found that this huge, monstrous thing I had inside myself was actually deflating. Indeed, this is actually what happens on stage. At the end you have a huge monster almost four metres high, which is an aspect of the subconscious of the main character, and finally it deflates in the longest fart in theatre history!'”

I thought the manipulation of a bird puppet that was also eating a person was really good, as were the two scenes where people were floating and diving high in the air, and the tiny shadow puppet crowd at the very end. I also enjoyed the aesthetic quality of the music, lighting and illusions.

There were two themes along the lines of ‘maybe what you are seeing is a little bit of yourself ‘ and ‘the murderer is also the victim and vice versa’, but I didn’t follow any particular development of them beyond that. I understand that part of the idea of the play was to present surreal sequences of interior landscapes that, like dreams or inner conflict, are puzzling. The audience interacts by trying to figure it all out and interpret it like the images in a dream, rather than being given a rational path to follow. Hopefully they find different perspectives on their own inner experiences through recognizing some of the images. I have mixed feelings about the success of that. I think one probably needs to see the show more than once to really explore the images and the connections between them, and few of us get that opportunity.

Here are the dates for the Australian Tour of Vanishing Point:

Canberra: July 6-10, Canberra Theatre
Sydney: July 14 – 31, Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay
Adelaide: August 4 – 7, Her Majesty’s Theatre
Melbourne: August 11- 21, Comedy Theatre

A review:
Vanishing Point, Compagnie Philippe Genty, by Jill Sykes, Sydney Morning Herald

Some pictures (by JoJo):
Canberra Theatre Vanishing Point Photo Gallery

The picture accompanying this post is from the collection above.