At the Dunsinane
By David Greig
Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School | March 21-24
It’s one of the greatest tragedies ever written; Macbeth is dead, Scotland has fallen to the English, and the story is over. Until now. In a startling reimagining of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, David Greig has given us a ‘what next’ scenario. This is a workshop production, a semi-staged opportunity for the public to check in with the second-year Toi Whakaari training actors and see what they’re exploring. The night I went, the actors were looking forward to taking more risks and working their choreography. Surprisingly, it’s really exciting for an audience to be ‘clued-in’ before a play begins on what the actors are doing that night. Read More
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Mildred Pierce (1945)
Previously at the Wellington Film Society: Joan Crawford as James M. Cain’s desperate housewife.
Given Todd Haynes’s recent HBO mini-series of the James M. Cain novel (starring Kate Winslet as the titular desperate housewife), the classic 1945 Joan Crawford vehicle of the same story made for a topical opening to the Wellington Film Society’s mini film noir season. While Crawford’s version departed considerably from the novel, its success helped continue the momentum of earlier Cain adaptations (including the brilliant Double Indemnity a year prior), and also helped retrospectively make the name of, in particular, his early works. And although the film doesn’t match the resonance of the novel (namely, its explicit Depression-era setting and intricate social commentary), it did feature one of the classic Golden era Hollywood performances: Joan Crawford, in what would prove to be a career-defining, and briefly career-saving, role. Read More
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WCS 2012: The Swell Season
At the World Cinema Showcase, the receding tide of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová’s musical romance.
A deeply intimate experience, Nick August-Perna, Chris Dapkins, and Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s The Swell Season is documentary filmmaking that delivers cohesive interpersonal drama without sacrificing its sense of cinematic artistry. This fly-on-the-wall trio have been afforded an, at times, uncomfortable level of openness which serves to both lift the emotional stakes of the film and attests to the level of trust they were able to build, and maintain, with their new-to-celebrity subjects. Read More
WCS 2012: Under African Skies
At the World Cinema Showcase, Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ is both celebrated and scrutinized.
Paul Simon’s Graceland was a controversial album, and understandably so. On the one hand, it could be said that the album gave voice to marginalised (and in many instances, forcibly silenced) South African artists who (and the music that they performed) otherwise wouldn’t have been heard around the world. On the other, Simon could be criticised for being another in a long line of “white” artists who appropriated marginalised forms of music made by “Others”, took the credit and financial rewards, and went on with his life. To be fair to Simon, he gave equal credit in some compositions, and toured with many of the musicians themselves; he presented the concept as more “collaboration” than “appropriation.” Another criticism of Simon was that, in making the album, circumvented the ANC and United Nations boycott aimed at preventing anything that would legitimise of the situation in South Africa. (While Simon may have had good intentions, another person could have, with less noble intentions, used Graceland as justification to work with an illegitimate South Africa.) Those making the arguments ignored the fact that all three interpretations of the album were arguably correct. Like most arguments, the opposing viewpoints aren’t actually mutually exclusive. Read More
In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)
Auckland Theatre Company
Maidment Theatre, Auckland | March 15-April 7
A mix of incisive intelligence and bawdy, balls-out comedy, In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), is another slam-dunk for Auckland Theatre Company in what is shaping up to be another impressive season from them. An effervescent cast and some impressive design elements anchors Sarah Ruhl’s intelligent, often challenging play in a touching, raw emotion.
The play is set in the late 19th century just after the advent of electricity, and revolves around the treatment of hysteria in women with a modern device—the titular vibrator. The doctor administering the treatment is Dr. Givings (Adam Gardiner), a meek man fascinated in electricity and what it means for the world, but the play largely follows his wife, Katherine (Anna Julienne). Ruhl is concerned more with Katherine’s curiosity about the device, what her husband does, and her inner loneliness. This loneliness is only heightened by her husband’s distance from her and her own inability to produce milk for their newborn child. When one of Dr. Givings’s patients, Mrs. Daldry (Toni Potter), returns for many sessions, Katherine’s curiosity overcomes her and she sets about finding out what both the instrument and her husband really do. Read More
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Berlinale Dispatch #8: Last Words
Reflections on the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival. Read More
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The Life and Times of Germaine Greer
Writers & Readers Week
New Zealand International Arts Festival, Wellington | March 12
It’s hard to deny the impact that Germaine Greer had in terms of cultural dialogue in the ’70s. Today though, after the sensation of 1970’s The Female Eunuch, and a number of scene-stealing performances around the world (including being arrested in New Zealand for the public use of the word “bullshit”), it’s become an easy argument to make that her take on feminism has outlived its usefulness. To use an equivalent comparison, while the Sex Pistols may have been a culturally significant band back in the ’70s, that doesn’t mean seeing them live in a stadium now would be particularly interesting. But to Greer’s credit, she held a capacity Wellington Town Hall audience captive with a humorous and engaging look back at her life and work. She was assisted in a couple of key ways: patsy and insipid questions, and, an almost bewildering ability to contradict herself cheerfully. Read More
The Skin I Live In (2011)
Previously at the Wellington Film Society: Almodóvar’s dark days (contains spoilers).
Pedro Almodóvar’s career, as is often discussed, appears to have gotten darker and darker over the years. And this darkness seems to have coincided with a richer perspective on gender, sexual politics, and characterisation. The Skin I Lived In (La piel que habito) is so dark it’s in danger of being categorised as simply a horror film—one with obvious nods to Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and the novel Mygale by Thierry Jonquet. It’s much more than that. A deliciously subversive piece of narrative trickery, The Skin I Live In may come to be known as one of the more enjoyable films in Almodóvar’s oeuvre. Read More
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Berlinale Dispatch #7: Rebelle, Gnade
Jungle and ice at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival. Read More
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The Winter’s Tale
By William Shakespeare
Propeller (U.K.); Directed by Edward Hall
New Zealand International Arts Festival, Wellington | March 1-4
English all-male shakespeare company Propeller have, over the past 15 years, cultivated a reputation for fast-paced high-energy performances which are both respectfully adherent to the text and rigorously modern in their aesthetic. This year, Propeller brought us a double act of Henry V and The Winter’s Tale.
For those unfamiliar with the story, The Winter’s Tale is a tragicomedy framed by the sexual jealousy, consequent fall, subsequent repentance, and ultimate restoration of Leonties, King of Sicilia. Read More
Eleanor Catton on The Rehearsal
The New Zealand-raised writer talks about the success of her first novel and her forthcoming new work, The Luminaries. Read More
Hamish Clayton on Wulf
Inside the author’s remarkable first novel on 19th century New Zealand, the country’s early explorers, and Te Rauparaha’s conquering of Kapiti Island. Read More
Henry V
By William Shakespeare
Propeller (U.K.); Directed by Edward Hall
New Zealand International Arts Festival, Wellington | Feb 29-March 4
What this assured performance of Henry V gave us above all was a forceful story. A story in which the action and the lines propelled each other forward—a sustained and considerable feat! Both served to present the legendary warrior king of the English narrative in a modern and compelling guise. And to raise old questions about power and violence.
The actors began as they meant to continue, marching down through the audience as grunts singing lustily, before taking hold of the stage, and then morphing into the chorus, and then the ecclesiastics and court attendant on their king. The configuring and reconfiguring of bodies in space, and of roles was dynamic, amped up and up by the impending crisis of the battle ahead. Within the confines of their scaffold (and the proscenium arch of the Opera House), the actors did wonderfully in projecting story out into an imaginary space they shared with the audience. Read More
Bitter Pill: Shame
Watching Shame, the new film by Hunger director and visual artist Steve McQueen, I was instantly drawn back to Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s full-blown exploration of the perils of drug addiction and its corrosion of a person’s physical and mental facilities. However, while Requiem for a Dream dealt mostly with the physical impacts of addiction, such as the mind and body shutting down—and did so memorably, it must be said—Shame is more interested in the place that addiction has in the addict’s life, emotionally and mentally. Read More
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Berlinale Dispatch #6: Pietra Brettkelly and Ngaa Rauuira Pumanawawhiti on Maori Boy Genius
NINA FOWLER talks to the director/producer and star of Maori Boy Genius, one of two Kiwi feature films at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival. Read More
I Loved You The Moment I Saw You
Peter Black has been a consistently active, if under-sung member of the New Zealand photographic community since the early 1980s. His work has encompassed landscape, documentary, and (in a way) still life, but he is most well-known for his street photography—a type of documentary photography that features subjects in candid situations in public places, and a genre not much practiced by New Zealand art photographers. Read More
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Berlinale Dispatch #5: Two Kiwis in Berlin—Maori Boy Genius, Two Little Boys
Hobbits and elfin glades fade from the mind at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival. Read More
Berlinale Dispatch #4: Guy Maddin on Keyhole—and what comes next
At the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival, the cult Canadian director talks film noir, collage parties, and séances with Isabella Rossellini. Read More
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Music Round-up: Bon Iver, Death Cab for Cutie, First Aid Kit
New Zealand International Arts Festival, Wellington | Feb 24-Mar 18
This year’s New Zealand International Arts Festival hit up the indie circuit for many of its big names; artists who have all had considerable success in recent times (quite a contrast from the pension-cashing in performers of previous festivals). Bon Iver won this year’s Grammy for best new artist, despite being around and acclaimed for some time (not to mention at the top of a good number of best-of-year lists for self-titled album). Also at the Grammys, Tinariwen took home Best World Album (and who played a couple of members short, what with them being caught up in the Tuareg conflict in Northern Mali). Long-time indie darlings Death Cab for Cutie were also a hot ticket, as were First Aid Kit, a band mentored by the Knife and discovered playing Fleet Foxes on YouTube. The line-up was bold move by an Arts Festival that has typically relied on well-established and renowned artists. But it worked rather well, all things considered. Read More »