La Mama Theatre
Marathon Program 1, 30th
anniversary
Three Old Friends by Jack
Hibberd
Long Time No See by Jack
Hibberd
Robert Fumes by Barry
Dickins with Peter Green
The Mind's A
Wonderful Thing, Margaret Cameron
At La Mama, Wed July
30, 1997
La Mama is celebrating its 30th birthday this week with a
three-day theatre marathon of twenty-three La Mama plays. The first of the lot
is a re-mount of Jack Hibberd's Three Old Friends, the very first play ever
performed in Melbourne's much-loved tiny venue.
This early Hibberd (1967) has all his trademarks: an absurd
situation, Australian colloquial lingo, blokey characters and repetition of
ideas and dialogue. A man (Richard Bligh) who assumes he is with two old
friends (Luke Elliot, Nicholas Crawford-Smith), finds his reality
disintegrating as they deny knowledge of each other, their own well-known
habits and, finally, of him. It is funny and disturbing in an existential way
with has a satisfying pay-off at its conclusion.
It is followed by the premiere of a new Hibberd monologue,
Long Time No See, performed by Evelyn Krape and also directed by Daniel
Schlusser. She plays a theatre 'professional' swaddled in plaster bandages and
hospitalised after an attempt to fly. Krape is in fine form in this addled
character and she makes a comic meal of Hibberd's cascading language and
attacks on a dying theatre industry. 'Where would theatre be without
psychology? Back where it belongs'.
Next is Peter Green as Robert Fumes (1985), a snobbish and
superior expatriate art critic who lives in a clinical loft in New York and
slags off all things Australian while decrying the "cultural cringe."
Written by the inimitable Barry Dickins, this satirical portrait of Robert
Hughes is relentlessly damning of the snobbery and balderdash of the critic who
actually does nothing in art.
The Mind's A Wonderful Thing is another premiere. Margaret
Cameron is a magnetic performer with a honey voice and a monologue of lyrical,
imagistic language. She sits at a table and tells the story of Mabel living in
Northcote with her stroke-ridden Alf. But this is no ordinary storytelling
although it deals with ordinary people.
Cameron's fountain of words has a beauty and delicacy that
feels like the ebb and flow of the tide. Images of the suburban gully trap
weave among the singing trees. Mabel's 'elephant tears falling on elephant
grey concrete' are inter-cut with her thoughts of smothering Alf with glad wrap.
The whole program was a delight but Cameron's brief piece had a magical quality
that is rare. Her mind really is a wonderful thing.
La Mama has shows running from 6-12pm every night until
Friday August 1, 1997
KATE HERBERT
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