The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 21

4 TODAY.REVIEW THE AGE FRIDAY 18 FEBRUARY 2000 Theatre Music Mary Sitarenos (left) rehearses for James McCaugheyS -production of Antony and Cleopatra, while (below) McCaughey directs a scene for his interpretation of Shakespeare's classic1 PIcturwrlERRYOALEA Anna King Murdoch more powerful because it is ancient, yet strikingly familiar." But why this play? "Antony and Cleopatra addresses a world in flux," says McCaughey. "The play is set in a time of change, moving from the chaos of the late republic to the rise of the Roman empire. There is no room in this new order fpr Antony and Cleopatra. That new order is tremendously persuas-'. ive intellectually.

Antony and Cleopatra are these mythic creatures who throw themselves against that' order and are destroyed. "I think we are at the end of one way of understanding ourselves socially and politically. Certainly there is another sense of order' developing, a kind of rational econ' omic model caught up with globalisation which is intellectually persuasive. So you'd think we would be silly not to move forward. Yet what is it displacing?" McCaughey raised the money for the production from a few private investors.

It is a huge endeavor to bring the epic work (there are three battles, two of them at sea) to the stage with a cast of 11. However, McCaughey is working with veteran actors, including Mary Sitarenos as Cleopatra and Ian-Campbell as Antony. "The actors and the space they obscure piano music. inhabit 'are critical," says McCaughey. "The space itself makes you aware of the presence of that actor.

The great adventure Antony and Cleopatra is to configure the theatre that the actors themselves create a world in relationship with a series of strong and simple design materials rope, fabric and Steel. "This was another preoccupation pf the late '60s that has partly been eroded; the sense of the sacredness of the actor's body as the centre of. performance. That sense of theatre being generated off the particularity-of the human body and spirit." Looking" back, McCaughey believes the importance of the Pram Factory, days cannot be underestimated. "It was an exhilarating time," he says.

"The Pram Factory and La Mama seemed so much part of the area that it was like theatre was creeping in off the street into this space. That mixture of ordinariness and specialness, with- ordinary -people taking part was a great preoccupation of theatre at. the time." McCaughey believes the movement simply could riot sustain itself. of the aspirations -of the theatre of the day have passed into many forms in the arts. However, I think we have not Understood the full impact of what was achievable by a group of "The era was defined by the groundswell of theatre rising up out of communities and today we still marginalise community theatre.

was going on was a commitment to people creating their own work. Not as something handed down but to say, if we are really going to have a distinctive Australian culture, it actually- has to rise from the knowledge, the" dreams and the imagination of everyone." Antony and Cleopatra will run 'from' 19 February to 12 March, Tuesday Saturday, at 7pm; Sunday at 5pm, Gasworks Theatre, 21 Graham Albert Park. Bookings: 9699 3253. McCaughey has always had this abiding interest in creating new works and in invigorating the classics. "What I love about Shakespeare's work is its capacity to speak with an astonishing directness now.

An audience ends up seeing something that is both foreign, because of the strangeness of the past, and something that is immediate and that speaks to us. It is all the While not a member of the APG, McCaughey's productions were so popular there wasn't an empty seat in the house (and not because people usually sat on the floor either). And then McCaughey disappeared. Or so it seemed. In fact he has been working on the fringes of mainstream theatre ever since.

However, McCaughey is returning to professional theatre with a production of Antony and Cleopatra. "This notion of being 'back' is odd, because I never really left," says McCaughey. "I have been working with groups of people in the community to create theatre from the materials of their experience." In 1977, McCaughey left Melbourne for Geelong to take a position at Deakin University to create their performing arts course. The university had leased an old wool mill for its performing arts students. McCaughey jumped at the opportunity to create what became know as the Mill Theatre, a professional theatre company.

The company generated new works based on local history, as well as plays by Chekov and Brecht, in the seven years he lived there. name belies French exotica Paris Combo (from left): Potzi, Francois-Francois, Belle du Berry, David Lewis and Mano Razanaajato. Marc-Andre Hamelin seeks Hamelin knows the score VERY few pianists these days, even the best, can be guaranteed a long career just by playing classic works. To survive, they need to find their own unassailable niche. Marc-Andre Hamelin is not only a virtuoso but a sleuth, tracking down forgotten, often-never-before-heard piano music.

"My main hobby is score collecting," says the 38-year-old Canadian who is in Australia for the first time on an ACO tour. "When I get to a new city I always like to look at the second-hand music shops. I have a very, very large collection, I'm never going to be able to play it all." He has also found a lot of music in the Library of Congress in Washington which is "extraordinarily Hamelin's reputation for being able to play, brilliantly, pieces that are technically overwhelming for other pianists has landed him an exclusive contract with Hyperion, which bravely keeps bringing out his CDs of music often by total unknowns. He has made 14 CDs, including concertos by Alkan, Henselt, Korngold and Joseph Marx with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; and four are yet to be released. "I am pleased that Hyperion allowed me to do a Schumann recording.

I was schooled with traditional composers and I still play them. But I'm not complaining because I have as much freedom as I could hope for with any recording company. "Unlike most of the big companies, it doesn't do market research to find out what the customer needs at any particular point. They just take the risk and I really thank them for it. I certainly get enough positive response to encourage me to go on." His latest CD, released a couple of months ago, is the first recording of piano music by Catoire, a Russian composer who lived from 1861 to 1926.

"I don't pretend to rescue someone like Catoire. It's going to take a while because he is a completely unknown composer. I don't think my life is going to be long enough to explore everything that is out there that I think is good. People don't realise how immense the piano repertoire is." Hamelin admits, though, that, "there's tons of junk. I'm looking for things that strike a chord with listeners There is no one reason why a lot of music from the atonal turn-of-the-century, as well as early 20th century Russian music, which most interests him at the moment, has remained unknown.

Many of the composers were ahead of their time, he says, and many of the pianist-composers wrote pieces of such fiendish technical difficulty that few pianists could manage to play them effectively, if at all. "I am attracted to music that's rich, dense, complex and celebrates the possibiiites of the instrument and often that music will be very difficult." Hamelin will perform Beethoven's piano concerto no. 3 with the ACO on Sunday at 2.30pm and Monday at 8pm in the Melbourne Concert Hall. Olsen in Encore ONE of the most talented men in Australian theatre, Dennis Olsen, is continuing his tour of rural Victoria and Melbourne of some of his funniest and most brilliant songs in his one-man show Encore. For more than 30 years, Olsen has been a master of the comic patter roles of Gilbert Sullivan operettas and the enchanting songs of composers such as Noel Coward, Ivor Novella and Cole Porter.

It is a shame that his audiences are mainly older on this tour "There's a lot of grey hair out there," he says since his appeal is timeless and his wit and precision as sharp as ever. Olsen, 62, started his career as a concert pianist and in Encore he pays tribute to Percy Grainger with a "mad arrangement of Country He will be back in The Gondoliers with Opera Australia this year and is in the middle of learning the solid 47-page script of the one-man show Brief Lives, based on the 17th century diarist (ohn Aubrey's gossipy account of the lives of his contemporaries including Francis Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh. It opens in Sydney in April. "It's the sort of show that I hope will have legs," he says. Dennis Olsen performs Encore at the Warragul Arts Centre today at 1 lam, and at the arts centres of Traralgon (tomorrow), Mildura (Monday), Warburton (next Friday) and Ringwood (Saturday).

For love of country AUSTRALIAN composer Richard Mills can still remember how strongly he felt for Australia when he returned from England after eight years away. "I will never forget the light when I flew up to Brisbane just streaming in the windows." This raw feeling for the unique nature of the place has inspired much of his writing, and particularly his new work Emblems, which is having its world-premiere tonight at the Sydney Opera House. The meditative, 12-minute piece, commissioned to open the Sydney Symphony season, is interlaced with excerpts from literary works and speeches by Mary Gilmore, Ian Mundie, Jack Davis and Paul Keating, which will be narrated by actor Jack Thompson. "It's a project that I really wanted to do because the piece is a testament of my feeling for this Richard Mills country," he says. Mills, who grew up on a wheat-and-cattle farm on the Darling Downs in Queensland, spent 15 years in Brisbane before moving to Melbourne in 1997 where he lives now in an old factory in Brunswick.

At 50, his interest in Australia is so deep that he hates the idea of travelling anywhere -else. Mills is particularly attached to Arnhemland since collaborating with the Aborigines in Millingimbi on a commission by the Darwin Symphony for the International Year of Indigenous People in 1990. He is spending time in Arnhemland again this year with-the Aboriginal band, Yothu Yindf on a piece for the Melbourne Federation Festival next year. For a man who loves silence, Arnhemland is a marvellous place. "It's amazing going out to somewhere like that where there are very few motor cars even," he says.

"It's only since the '70s and '80s that we have had a sense, as a nation, of the importance of Aboriginal spirituality And how the landscape can be a story." Emblems will be broadcast live tonight on ABC-FM radio at 8pm. Taste of Scotland may tempt US SCOTLAND Tlie Brave, a celebration of music, song and dance with 100 performers, full orchestra, choir, pipers, Scottish fiddles, Celtic dancers and soloists, produced and conducted by Colin Allstair Harper, will give three performances at the Melbourne Concert Hall tonight at 8pm, and tomorrow at 2pm and 8pm. A third concert was -added because of popular demand. Because of the sell-out seasons at the Sydney Opera House and the Brisbane Concert Hall, promoter Andrew McKinnon is now negotiating a 40-clty tour of the United States. By EVA FRIEDMAN IN THE mid 1960s, James McCaughey was not your common garden-variety classicist.

A lecturer in the Classics Department at Melbourne University, McCaughey believed that to understand the fifth-century Greeks, you had to perform them to unleash their primal power. He would stride into class reciting Homer's The Iliad to a roomful of wide-eyed students. The Greeks had never seemed quite so sexy. It was almost inevitable then, that McCaughey (the son of Davis McCaughey and Patrick McCaughey's brother) would feel the tug of that hot-house of creative expression down the road in Lygon Street The Pram Factory. In the late 1960s, the bedraggled crew known as the Australian Performing Group were inventing a vernacular for a national Australian theatre.

It was a time of fecund experiment into the nature of performance and McCaughey was drawn to it. He formed the Greek Theatre Project and brought works like The Bacchae and The Oresleian Trilogy to life there. Music Lame By JESSICA NICHOLAS THEIR first CD included a tune sung in a non-existent language. Their second, LivingRoom, features underwater trumpet playing. As a band, Paris Combo are nothing if not imaginative.

But when it came to choosing a name for themselves, the five-piece French jazz outfit didn't waste much time or creative energy conjuring up a title that would take them from caf to concert stage. "It must have taken us a full five minutes to come up with 'Paris Combo'," laughs David Lewis, the band's Melbourne-born trumpeter. Their first incarnation, La Belle Equipe, came to an end in 1994 when they found themselves playing a resident gig alongside a band with the same name. "One of us had to change," Lewis recalls. "So, for about a week, we called ourselves Berry Combo (named after the band's singer, Belle du Berry), and then it became Paris Combo." Lewis agrees that calling a French group Paris Combo is a little like The Age Ob-taw IV ITIIM lrv AT WHERE Hanging SUNDAY THE ACE lb gain tha full 500 people to at Hanging This offer applies must be the are not accepted.

Enjoy the best ENTRY Adults Concession access to the and a event. ADVANCE (booking fees also be arranged CROUP (03) 9a86 9571. FURTHER percussive gypsy guitar and sharp brass accents. At the same time they sound unmistakably French, with singer du Berry drawing on the chanson and cabaret traditions of the 1920s and '30s. Lewis, who shares his life as well as his work with du Berry, plays trumpet and piano and contributes compositions to their repertoire.

He says the allure of the band's sound and its potential to appeal to audiences beyond France was something that struck him very calling an Australian group, "The Melbourne But the unintentionally nationalistic slant has worked in the group's favor since it started exploring international markets particularly in the United States, where audiences have responded eagerly to the band's Gallic exoticism. Paris Combo play a whimsical blend of jazz, swing and cabaret, where tantalising hints of Latin or Arabic rhythms collide with madly Special Reader Offer Parenthood pains from Dad's point of view doing, because if you made a mess of if, they'd never forgive you." i'Paris Combo have built up a substantial following in Europe and the US, where they have toured thr.ee times in the past two years. It's not Lewis's first taste of International exposure; in the early '90s he toured regularly with -successful acts like Afro-jazz -saxophonist Manu Dibango, with. whom he also appeared in a weekly music program on French TV. But the experience is eminently more 'rewarding, says Lewis, when you are working with your own band instead of as a sideman.

And how does it feel, after all these years, to be coming to Australia to perform? "it feels great1 says Lewis, with obvious delight "It's really exciting to be coming to play, especially with a band from Paris to feel that we're bringing something that people in Australia haven't heard yet, and to be able to share it with family and friends. ItH be a bit of a strange experience, but I'm really looking forward to it." Paris Combo play at the tomorrow night. 1 fantasy. Geoff Paine's recurring' -scene of trying to get his twins sleep, only to be betrayed again and dgaln by a creaking Boor board, is a Every birth is a drama, and the stories told here make it clear it is pretty tough for the fathers, too. The confession of paternal sins during a -wife's labor going home for a.

sleep, going out for food, bringing the Big Mac back into the labor ward suggest that even sensitive new- fathers can be slow learners. some maternal role- ''playing here, sometimes enacted with fl baffled mixture of sympathy and incomprehension. The Fat Trap, for example, is that hopeless 1 conversation where the wife mourns the loss of her size-10 body and the just can't come up with a much above its origins, a Saturday-' morning bad's group that compares notes oh is' moderately entertaining, all very familiar, occasionally charming and probably of most interest to new in our rhldst i Jhtsprbduclion movesipthet: i 1 flPff early on. "F.ven before we'd made our first album, and we were just playing in cafes and on the river barges in Paris, I had a feeling that people in places like America or Australia might find this music appealing," he says. While the poetic textures of the lyrics are largely lost on non- French-speaking audiences, Lewis says Belle du Berry's dramatic delivery and sense of theatre helps her convey the emotion and wit inherent in the songs.

He is also in the process of translating some of the lyrics mostly written by du Berry into English, with the intention of posting them on a website for interested listeners. But although he is fluent in French (it has been 20 years since he left Melbourne in search of "adventure" in Europe), Lewis has no intention of trying his hand at lyric-writing for the group. "The French are very particular about the way their language is used," he says with a chuckle, "For a foreigner to write songs or poetry in French You'd have to be pretty damn sure of what you were regress or mourn their old lives carefree, blokey, irresponsible. One number in this show composed of many small vignettes, is an emotional farewell to the old car of their bachelor days, to be replaced with something safer and more child-friendly, where baby capsules and seat belts are essential. This is a far more politically correct show than Mum 's the Word, where fathers are mysteriously absent and all the mothers stay "The stories told here make it clear it is pretty tough for the fathers, too." home with baby but, alas, not as funny.

All the performers work hard, and Geoff Paine in particular shines with his considerable acting talent, but the show rarely rises above the level of the personal A few episodes lend themselves well to dramatisation. The ante-natal hirth Hang with Itn mlrlwlfo Nnzl nut to punish the men, has just the right mix of the real and exaggerated HANGING ROCK Rock Reserve. South Rock Road. Woodend 27 FEBRUARY TASTING CLA5SES FREE enjoyment In sampling wines, the first bring this coupon to The Age marquee Rock will receive one tree wine glass. only on Sunday 27 and the coupon original cut from the paper, photo copies at The Age Harvest Picnic.

$13, Children under 15 Free, S10, Croup Bookings $11. Includes rock, car parking facilities, entertainment copy of Th Sunday Agt available at the BOOKINCS Tkketmaster on ph. 136 100 apply). Special coach transport can through Tkketmaster. BOOKINGS For 10 people or more contact INFORMATION (03) 9186 9571 Theatre It's A Dad Thing! Darebin Arts Centre Review Helen Thomson THIS show, devised and acted by Matthew Green, Colin James, Lliam Amor, Michael Fry and Geoff Paine, directed by David Lander, has been advertised as a reply to the popular Mum 's the Word, currently having a return season at the Athenaeum Theatre.

Both shows are about the fleeting joys and apparently endless pains of parenthood, and each, as their title indicates, takes a distinctly gendered view. Both shows rely on the recognition factor for many of their laughs. You don't even have to be a parent in fact to recognise things such as parental exhaustion and a conversational level at morning-tea break that never rises above such questions as kinds of nappies or who had the fewest hours of sleep. This group of young dads is refreshingly contemporary: they're in there from pre-natal classes to finger-painting, some are house-husbands while their partners work. They care, they share, they recognise that their lives have permanently changed, and they hardly ever cotes hmltgaiMMr.