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25th September 2022
 
Dear <<First Name>>

Reviews! Reviews! Reviews!

By the time you read this, if you didn't see Citysong then you missed out as it's just had its final performance and all involved are marvelling at the sudden influx of time that has appeared in their week.  But we've got you covered with not one, or even two, but THREE reviews! 

So, if you didn't see this show, perhaps they'll convince you to come and see our next show (tickets on sale 1st October!) and then that's our year!  I don't want to jinx anything, but look at that, a whole YEAR of theatre!


Your editor,
Melanie
 
Shauna Stanley was unable to be at the last two performances of Citysong.
Rhys Carter very ably and almost seamlessly read in for her on those nights.
The team welcomed him and appreciated his hard work.  
Thank you Rhys!
Citysong

Reviewed by Cate Dowling-Trask for the Victorian Drama League
Director: Shirley Sydenham
Performance: Tuesday 13 September 2022

'Citysong', written by young Dublin-based playwright Dylan Coburn Gray, was first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s National Theatre, in 2019. Shirley Sydenham’s program notes for this production included, “The story is, in essence, a series of moments and those moments can be now or they can be anytime in the past. All told to us in a twenty-four hour span by six storytellers”.

As I watched the performance piece, because it is not a traditional play, I was reminded of Dylan Thomas’ ‘Under Milk Wood’. The cast of six worked as a choreographed ensemble, flowing between representing the characters in a family tale or background players, and narrating lyrically poetic descriptions of life and the city. ‘Citysong’ is an ode to the City of Dublin, mentioning its suburbs and localities, its streets and gathering places. The storyline meandered from early morning taxis to a hospital labour-ward, birth and miscarriage, casual racism, religion, stay-at-home mothers, the beach, ageing, Dublin rain, the city at night, homelessness, clubbing, drinking culture, until finally a taxi at dawn again.

Among the cast, Kaila Michaels portrayal of Kate was warm and empathetic which contrasted with Katherine Hubbard’s performance as her widowed mother Bridget, a woman slowly succumbing to dementia. Gilbert Gauci and Shauna Stanley worked well in delivering their roles and linking monologues. Rhys Carter, the actor stand-in, was not required at the performance I attended, but in these uncertain times his involvement was appreciated.

Marti Ibrahim, having joined the cast late to fill a sudden vacancy, gave a confident performance in both narration and character, including a truthful portrayal of Fionn, a 14-year-old boy. David Runnells’ portrayal of the taxi-driver at the dawn of the journey set the style with a soft Irish lilt. The dialogue contained Irish vernacular and alliterative descriptions that were occasionally delivered at a pace in which I lost the meaning, if not the mood. The cast’s accents may not have always been consistent, but the overall tone of the production retained its sense of place.

I commend the talented creatives who supported their director in bringing ‘Citysong’ to life. Tony Tartaro’s costume design, dressing the cast in neutral relaxed casual clothing, was practical and flexible, although attention could have been given to the fit of some pieces. Blake Stringer’s soundscape was subtle but effective with soft musical interludes and pelting Irish rain. Lighting was designed by Jason Bovaird. The set, designed by Leah Downey, had as its backdrop an abstract map of Greater Dublin, hand-painted in white on a dark ground; two rostra were painted as extensions of the backdrop; and two scaffold ladder-like structures to which were attached three LED screens. The screens displayed photographs of Dublin featuring The Spire of Dublin, a monument shaped like a giant pin, set on O’Connell Street and visible from across the city, as well as scenes reflecting the stories being told. The images were clear, bright and easily viewed thanks to the intimate size of WLT’s auditorium.

With ‘Citysong’, Shirley Sydenham, her cast, crew and creatives have produced a work that is entirely new to Australian audiences, but which should speak to us as its stories are universal. My companion and I came away smiling as we discussed both the play and production. Personally, I was reminded why Dublin is one of my favourite cities.

This was my first returning visit to Williamstown Little Theatre post Covid lockdowns and the grand renovations at their theatre. I was impressed by their new front-of-house amenities. Thank you to all at Williamstown for your warm welcome and a good night out!

Reproduced with permission of The Victorian Drama League
 
Citysong

Reviewed by Frances Devlin-Glass for Tinteán
https://tintean.org.au/ 

 
Dylan Coburn Gray: Citysong, Williamstown Little Theatre, directed by Shirley Sydenham, 7 September 2022

Twelve hours after leaving the theatre and I’m fully pumped by what I saw at Williamstown Little Theatre. Citysong is theatrical epic performance piece (running 90 minutes without an interval – great decision) that mesmerised its audience (I eavesdropped in the foyer later and on the way back to my car). All praise to the daring of Williamstown’s play selection committee for staging the Australian première of a show that will, I believe, become a classic. It’s an urban updating of Under Milkwood (its closest equivalent), but with a focus less on the village than on the family over time. Despite its literary legacies (Joyce gets in there too), it is utterly original, very Dublin, and entirely universal in its concerns.  

Dylan Coburn Gray (could he escape the Dylan Thomas legacy with such a moniker?) is young. The play was written when he was 22, in 2017, and by then he was a veteran of youth theatre, having graduated from Trinity in 2014. It premiered at the Abbey in 2019 and went on the West End and garnered prizes and admiration. This very young man knows youth culture, but that does not exclude him from the culture of older generations, and the miracle of this play is the maturity that a lifetime of eavesdropping in cafes and buses and trams confers on him. The image of the taxi-driver with which the play opens casts some light on Dylan Coburn Gray’s scripting methodology – ‘oneshots’, ‘not-much-more-than-ten-minute-or-a-fiver-fares’. What the play offers is the writer’s absorption in the day-to-day realities of the residents of Dublin, through the taxi-driver’s speculations about the back-stories and meanings of the minute slices he is dished up in the back seat of his cab in delivering a patron to a date or home misery-sodden after a break-up. The foreplay he observes that is more like five-play in the turbulence of modern Dublin.

The play luxuriates in language, over-the-top excess, mellifluousness and charged poetry, and at the same time is grounded in bodies, sex, sweat, performance anxieties and failures, the gritty realities of a city in perpetual flux and recurring crises, the Global Financial Crisis being the latest. It piles on linguistic richness, is intentionally wordy, convoluted, fast and more than the sum of its parts. It revels in language itself, and Dubliners’ enjoyment of it for its own sake, what he calls in his notes to actors, ‘Embracing the Fact You’re a Wanker’, but it is emphatically not stage-Irish. ‘Commentary without ridicule’. It’s a deep immersion in the Liffey of Life and its many languages.
Left : WLT Citysong Dress Rehearsal.  Right : Younger Generation parents, played by Kaila Michaels and Gilbert Gauci
Photography by Caroline Oxley

The play is performed by a chorus on a rudimentary stage design (a map of Dublin, a box, some stairs and some symbolic scaffolding, supplemented by three video screens – all praise to the designers, especially Jason Bouviaird’s lighting). The chorus is not given character names, though they might have been, and that’s because they play many characters across three generations, both male and female. How they learnt such an overloaded script (the programme credits three rehearsal prompters) moves back and forwards in time and is adamantly non-linear, but they were primed and ready by opening night and will ease deeper into their grooves progressively during the season, and become ever more joyful. It was a monumental team effort, beset by illness and late replacements, not that you’d know.

The play is a palimpsest of three generations of a family, repeating the cycle of life in somewhat changing circumstances, and having to work out how it goes generation by generation. It works in telling cameos. An early one has four women labouring side by side (on said box) in a maternity ward, while a young doctor peers into vaginas offering descriptions of degrees of dilation while the women, in extremis, curse him and know far more than he does about the process, having done it so often, while the men are ‘outsidely time-minding’ (carefully avoiding their wives’ ordeals). Coburn-Gray foregoes the soft-focus of the Johnson & Johnson lies about new motherhood, as Kate, a new mother complains of feeling like ‘a cored apple’ or ‘a cat that’s been …tiretrackedly flattened… its visible guts on the tarmac’. This young writer is aware that husband and wife both speak English but it’s no longer a language comprehensible to the other: birth is ‘such an abnormal enormity’ that even sympathetic men can’t bridge the gap and fear of conception insurmountable. Brigid’s need for a girl-child after three boys becomes clearer: she needs a tribe that shares her experience.

Another wonderful cameo was of the female gossips enthusiastically trading information about how to get on the pill in an era in Ireland when ‘nice doctors’ and bogus claims to ‘irregularity’ were the only way. This, of course, is not so easy for an honest, plainspeaking woman with sexual needs and affection for a husband.  His ‘scrotal psychosis’, ‘testeria’ and gonad madness’ have answering needs in her desire to be kissed and more, but their needs are unspeakable. Despite the avalanche of expressive words in this play, it tracks brilliantly the pressures inarticulacy and an inability to voice sexual needs put on relationships. And the ways in which these reticences haunt subsequent generations, down to the third. 

The play agilely leaps from comic considerations of ageing and nostalgia to Fionn’s inept first steps into his unfolding sexuality at a city nightclub in Temple Bar. The play ends benignly at a beginning (very Joycean) hedged around with fear and doubt on his parent’s part: ‘Just let him be safe, and happy, and safe….and not be dead and come home not dead by eleven’. This starting point is interestingly different with Jude in the initiating role and the dancing very less couth than their parents’. It seems that guidance into the ways of loving is still as opaque, despite increasing secularisation in Ireland, as the various ‘teen tribes’ that exist, even within a single family.

This was, for me, a deeply energising playscript and performance. Warm congratulations to the players – David Runnalls, Shauna Stanley, Gilbert Gauci, Katherine Hubbard, Kaila Michaels, Marti Ibrahim, and Rhys Carter –  who did not let the pace of the liquid words and action falter. In addition warm plaudits to the huge team, led by Shirley Sydenham that let this coruscating script loose in Australia. Dylan Coburn Gray is a major talent to watch and Citysong is a play I’d see over and over, given the chance. I hope we get the chance.

Frances Devlin-Glass
Frances is a member of the Tinteán editorial collective and a theatre-reviewer of many decades.

 
Rain 'heavy enough to navy pale denim' and make taxis 'sudden celebrities' in a sequence celebrating rain. 
Dress Rehearsal photography by Caroline Oxley
Citysong
 
Reviewed by Jennifer Paragreen for WLT
Director: Shirley Sydenham
Performance: Tuesday 13 September 2022
 

The 39 year old, Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, completed his magnum opus, Under Milk Wood, in 1953. Aired posthumously on BBC radio in 1954, it was later adapted for the stage. 

That “play for voices” was set over a twenty-four period in Llareggub, a fictional Welsh seaside village, with a focus on the thoughts and daily activities of the quirky locals. The playwright’s instructions dictated that the actors must play multiple roles and issued the actors with just one stage direction, ‘Love the words, love the words’.

Over 60 years later another Dylan, the Irish poet, theatre-maker and spoken word artist, Dylan Coburn Gray, wrote Citysong. Like Under Milk Wood, its activities take place in a very specific location over one day with actors playing multiple roles and a script so poetic it would be impossible not to ‘love the words’.  The big difference is that while Dylan Thomas peopled his imagined village with eccentric characters, Dylan Coburn Gray chose typical denizens of his home city as the protagonists. 

Coburn Gray was only 22 when he was wrote Citysong as a commissioned piece for the 2017 Lingo Festival of the Spoken Word.  It is a love letter to Dublin, with references to its landmarks and admiration for its residents as they go about their daily lives with all the joys and sorrows that entails. 

The language is poetic, blessed with potent imagery and word play. At the onset, the Storyteller introduces us to the city’s architecture with "Look, the spire's a spindle or axis, and while it's not vinyl, the city is a record of all that has happened to us, is happening, or will."  It’s a fascinating example of the Coburn Gray’s brilliant language skills, use of metaphor and juxtaposition of ideas to create visual images and ultimately a poetic celebration of the cycle of life.

Citysong traces the interactions of three generations of a Dublin family over a 24 hour period which includes the birth of a grandchild. It is about change and transformations with memories of past events, present happenings and future hopes and fears interwoven in a poetic journey through time and space. 

The epic script takes us back and forwards in time from 1955 to 2015 with six actors playing sixty characters. It is a theatrical masterpiece in which very little happens on the actual day but there is a huge amount happening with dozens of little vignettes revealing tantalising glimpses of moments in lives. 

In its Australian premiere production, Citysong comes to the Williamstown stage directed by Shirley Sydenham with six fine actors who, between them play sixty characters, and a supportive production team who inspire the imagination and emotions of the audience.  It is a cleverly staged production with a versatile cast who move fluidly between characters. 

The older generation is represented by Frank and Brigid, played luminously by David Runnalls and Katherine Hubbard. Both actors make the most of the poetic dialogue with a well paced delivery complemented with lilting Irish accents.  At different life stages, they are randy teenagers, a married couple, frazzled parents and, ultimately, the lonely widowed Brigid slowing falling into dementia. 

Kaila Michaels and Gilbert Gauci play Brigid’s daughter, Kate, and her long term partner, Rob, who have just produced the first member of the next generation without bothering to get married.  They also take on multiple other roles with vivid characterizations as do Shauna Stanley and Marti Ibrahim who impressed with a humorous monologue from a boy explaining why he doesn’t dance.

Occasionally the rhythms of the script are rushed, making it hard to follow the poetic imagery, or the Irish accents disappeared but the momentum of the action and the beauty of the language kept the audience enthralled.

The city of Dublin is an important character in the play. The abstract set design by Leah Downey was equipped with two separated panels of horizontal metal bars with three LED screens attached. Everything else was painted black and, welling up from behind the bars and spreading over the floor, was a map of Dublin hand painted in white, a visceral interpretation of the life blood of a living, breathing city.

Lighting design by Jason Bovaird made the metal bars reflect and glow in the dark. Lighting approaches varied to suit the mood of each scene and the projected photos of Dublin landmarks served as location indicators and provided extra detail to enhance the mood. 

Every actor plays multiple roles without changing attire so costumes by Tony Tartaro were androgynous, rather baggy but practical for the situation with a colour palette generally limited to grey with a bit of cream.  

The sound design was absolutely crucial to Citysong’s success. Blake Stringer had assembled a huge variety of effects, all of them impeccably attuned to the stage action. We began with the very Irish sound of a bodhrán, pips in the maternity hospital, a harp playing ‘Morning Has Broken’ for the arrival of the baby and on it went with appropriate sound grabs and snatches of songs until the play ended with a screeching taxi and the cast finishing with a high kicking dance.

The combined might of the design team was very much in evidence in the production’s spectacular ‘Poetry in the Rain’ scene, a Dublin thunderstorm at night complete with thunder claps, the lights raining down and umbrella wielding actors in yellow plastic capes.   

Congratulations to all involved in bringing this remarkably poignant and lyrical play to the Williamstown stage, keeping us enthralled, entertained and inspired for 90 sublime minutes. We loved the words!

WLT’s season of Citysong was overlapped by the premiere of Dylan Coburn Gray's latest play, Absent the Wrong, at the Dublin Fringe Festival 10 to 24 September 2022.  
When?
Currently any Thursday or Saturday that you can make it.

Why?
To help us put together the sets you see on stage.
Learn about the mystery of the theatre - no, that's NOT really a working stove but yes, that might be running water - and watch how quickly you could help transform a bare stage into a 1920's den of iniquity or an Irish cottage or a New York apartment!
For some, it's a chance to learn some handy life skills like how to paint a wall and use a cordless drill and for others, it's a chance to teach and use those life skills.

What else?
Wear comfortable clothing and sensible shoes.  You might be asked to lift or carry dirty/dusty things or paint a flat - don't do it in the outfit you want to wear out later that night!

 
If you do want to help the Set Construction Team create the next world for our cast and crew to play in, please email our Set Construction Manager Alex Begg at abegg@wlt.org.au to let him know you're interested!
Wasn’t Citysong by Dylan Coburn Gray, a beautiful time in the theatre? Congratulations to Shirley Sydenham and her cast and crew for gifting us with an evening to remember. The lyrical sounds of the play linger and haunt. It was originally reviewed as “a poetic celebration of the cycle of life” (Guardian) and “An Irish family’s entrancing journey across generations…nimble and vivid…sumptuous and sinuous.” (Irish Times). It was indeed all these things. I hope you managed to catch it.

As is our custom at WLT, the auditions for the next show occur during the run of the previous show. Peter Newling is lining up an amazingly talented - if not small - cast for Around the World in Eighty Days.  It is sure to be the perfect finale for our first full year in the theatre since our refurbishment and 'dark' nights due to the pandemic.

It seems that many things are continuing to be getting back to a new normal. I was lucky enough to catch John Bell’s performance of A Man in his Times at the Fairfax Theatre. It was a wonderful connection with Shakespeare and a man who has spent most of his career in the thrall of the bard. 

Being 'up in Melbourne' gave me the opportunity to make the most of having the dog minded and spending time in the city and traveling to see the Archibald Prize at Bunjil Place in Narre Warren. I always enjoy the Archibald Prize - seeing and hearing about Australians from all walks of life. Bunjil Place is absolutely gorgeous. If you have the opportunity to go there do! The building, the gallery, the library and the 900 seat theatre are gorgeous. It was a little out of the way for me but so worth the effort.

I’m making the most of being able to get around the country and had a quick trip to Canberra to see the Every Voice Counts Exhibition that explores suffrage in Australia, the role of the Federal Parliament in electoral reform and Australia's influence on overseas suffrage campaigns. The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 granted most Australian women the right to vote and to stand in federal elections. The exhibition is a celebration of the 120th anniversary of suffrage in Australia. I also went to the National Photographic Portrait Prize where I also learnt more about ordinary Australians. We went all that way so had to get in some theatre and Opera Australia were performing The Barber of Seville which I thoroughly enjoyed but have to say I think our lighting designers and operators were needed in the Canberra Theatre. 

I guess I was doing a very brief version of Around the State in less than eighty days . . . which prompts me to remind you all to make sure you have your tickets for our final production for the year which hits the WLT stage Wednesday November 16 until December 3.

Until next time,
Celia
Brothers Update

Some of you will remember that earlier this year Brothers was previewed at WLT.  The incredible support we received helped us take Brothers to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.  We are now back from Edinburgh and what an experience that was!  Brothers was one of 3,415 shows at Fringe year so competition for audience was fierce.  The weather was perfect and Edinburgh was packed!  The team spent their days flyering on the Royal Mile, posting on social media and seeing other shows before heading to ZOO Playground (our venue) each night. Brothers was a success with very appreciative audiences and wonderful reviews.   

Practically everyone in the Brothers team is well known to the WLT family. Written by Kerry Drumm, Brothers stars Daniel O'Kane and Liam O'Kane, is Directed by Peter Newling, Costumes by Tony Tartaro, Lighting by Craig Pearcy, Sound Design by Mark D’Angelo (Backlot Studios), Stage Managed by Rosalin Shafik-Eid and Produced by Emma Hunt (Little Red Fox Productions). 

Brothers now goes on to the Melbourne Fringe Festival to complete its Fringe tour.  For those that haven’t managed to see Brothers yet, you have 5 more opportunities! For those that saw the preview, why not see it again and join the team at Melbourne Fringe?  After successful runs at Adelaide Fringe and Edinburgh Fringe, Daniel and Liam have taken this rollercoaster of a play to new heights.

But don’t take our word for it. Long time WLT regular and Life Member, Laurie Gellon, has this to say about Brothers:

“I saw it here in Adelaide and thought it the most brilliant piece of theatre. The premise, the play, the production, the performers, the direction, all a joy and so much into one hour. Again, Do yourself a favour, sell the house, sell the cat - get there!"

We are also very excited to announce that for the first time on Wednesday Oct 12 Brothers will be Auslan interpreted by Ilana Gelbart.

Brothers is a rollercoaster, heart-wrenching, laugh out loud play.  It tells the story of two estranged brothers, Matt and Jay, in their early 30s, who reunite as one fights testicular cancer and the other battles addiction. Fearful of their survival, Matt and Jay revisit their dysfunctional childhood and the night that impacted their once unbreakable relationship.  

Brothers is a play that explores grief, fear, love and questions if keeping secrets in a bid to protect can do more harm than good.

Oct 11-15 | 8:30pm | Gasworks Arts Park Studio


Tickets:  https://melbournefringe.com.au/event/brothers/
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