Dead Man Talking + Flip the Script
Rounding out Lumière's ignite05 coverage, JONATHAN ROTHBERG arrived late to Jeremy Baumung's one-man performance of Dead Man Talking, while TIM GRAY joined the chorus of "yeahs" at Flip the Script.
Dead Men Walking
By Jeremy Baumung | Reviewed by Jonathan Rotberg
I WALKED into the Herald Theatre to see Jeremy Baumung's Dead Man Talking, part of ignite05 arts festival. I was a little late, thinking that like most performances, this would not start on time. I was wrong and informed by the theatre staff that after the door closes there would be a lock out. So I was ushered into a small soundproof black box with a glass window where the sound was piped in through a speaker. Now you might think this would spoil a play for someone, but because of the caliber of Jeremy Baumung's performance and the content of the play, seeing his personal tale of salvation from inside of a coffin-like room did not detract from my experience at all.
The first thing I noticed as I sat down was the sparsity of the set design. It consisted of a hospital bed on stage right (with a telephone down stage), a wheelchair in the center, and a toilet bowl on the left. Jeremy used the space created by this set, along with the help of creative lighting and his precise acting skills, to bring us into his mind and tell us his story.
His story is something we can all relate to. I'm not saying that all of us have had a near-death experience, because that's not what the play is about. It is about the problems a boy has growing up, like having an alcoholic father, and how these issues affect our relationships with everyone we meet as we grow older. Then something may happen to us to remind us of how precious our one go at this world is and that holding onto grudges and hates only leads to our own self-destruction.
Most one-man shows can feel like a short tour of hell, where there is one person who you don't like and find annoying playing many different people while you are a stuck in your chair unable to move in the horrifying darkness. This was not so with Jeremy. His sincerity is apparent from the get go when he shows the audience his missing toes (a battle wound from his fight with death). This simple action shows us that this person on stage is not afraid to appear vulnerable in front of his audience and this sets them up for an introspective show. Jeremy's myriad of voices and his ability to jump seamlessly from character to character – playing himself at different stages in life, playing others that are speaking to him, and playing both in the same scene – helped the audience weave in and out of his past and present life. The play's climax exemplifies Jeremy's passionate sincerity where he reenacts the night that he went to the hospital after experiencing excruciating pain and helplessness alone in his apartment. Even at this emotional highpoint of his pain, he manages to switch character to his brother who is frantically looking for him at the same time. This both helped to break up the long, frightening scene while at the same adding to his sense of helplessness. It is this type of careful construction that makes this play so enjoyable. None of these character and setting changes were disorienting or confusing, but were instead like an intricately woven blanket with many different colored threads that all together makes a whole piece of art.
Flip the Script
Reviewed by Tim Gray
THE LEAD-UP to ignite05 invariably billed Flip the Script as "NZ Idol meets playwright slam", which was enough to cast aspersions on the event as a personality-driven bastard child of its British mother, conceived in the Contact Theatre, Manchester. Limited to young playwrights between the ages of 16 and 25 to match the ignite demographic, the event was a topical hybrid of tragedy and comedy – largely concerned with issues affecting the young and (par nécessité) socially-disillusioned. The concept was simple: a pool of 4 actors perform 5 minutes of over twenty scripts to be considered by the audience, who could elect to rate the plays anywhere between "Yeah", "Yeah, Nah", and "Nah", and culminating in the "final grand slam" in which 4 of the most 'yeah'd' scripts would be extended for a full run of ten minutes before an eventual winner was chosen.
While the premise sounds simple, the execution came with just a couple of complications. The 5 minute teasers meant that most scripts were geared towards creating the suspense and intrigue that would force the audience to "yeah" them, if only to find out if their favourite dispossessed youth did indeed meet a sticky end in the final five minutes. To give texture to the voting process, MC Jan Maree would stalk the audience and proffer lollipops to any audience member brave enough to offer their opinion on the preceding piece. This was at best involving, but at worst hilariously banal. After a play dealing with two teenage girls wrestling with their sexual awakening and the social pressures of coming out, a male audience member remarked of the intimate encounter "That was awesome... any straight male who didn't give that a 'Yeah' can't be straight, aye!" He was rewarded with an orange-flavoured lollipop.
This was symptomatic of the bigger problem of audience participation – Billy T Comedy Award-winning MC Jan Maree seemed to struggle without the aid of lollies, and the psychological chasm between her and her ignite 'youf' audience was no more evident than in her constant toilet humour which was repeated night after night like some kind of horrifying ongoing-reference-gone-wrong, much to the cringing embarrassment of her teenaged audience. The addition of charming UK arts-dilettante Lemn Sissay at the grand final added a new dynamic to the MC'ing, though far from his meditative, somber yet inspirational demeanour exhibited in Something Dark, Lemn's presence was marked by self-deprecation and racial quips – something apparently more palatable to the audience than Maree's "poos and wees".
With this said, the plays themselves were of an exceptional standard. While they could roughly be categorized by thematic content as dealing exclusively in "sex and religion", "familial disjuncture", and "disillusionment with society", it's clear that these are the issues that concern young people. In this sense, Flip the Script was wholly successful in tapping the vein of "youf culture", and even if these ideas might seem like well-worn paths for some, they also made good fodder for tragicomic intrigue. Indeed, the plays tended towards being overwhelmingly dark, and most angled for the awkward laughs provided by confronting issues close to their audience. The grand prize, however, was scooped by "Spilt Milk", an irreverent but self-reflexive rumination on the creative process as the components and ideas within a play find themselves swirling together after their burnt-out author spills coffee across her script.
Similarly the actors showed flexibility and determination, hammering out over 20 scripts during the 5 nights with which they had little familiarity and which frequently required them to portray characters of different backgrounds, sexualities and even species.
Overall, Flip the Script made for five nights of engaging free entertainment throughout ignite05, and was a worthy exercise in encouraging amateur playwrights to express themselves in a relatively informal atmosphere. Yeah, nah, s'good mate.
Dead Men Walking
By Jeremy Baumung | Reviewed by Jonathan Rotberg
I WALKED into the Herald Theatre to see Jeremy Baumung's Dead Man Talking, part of ignite05 arts festival. I was a little late, thinking that like most performances, this would not start on time. I was wrong and informed by the theatre staff that after the door closes there would be a lock out. So I was ushered into a small soundproof black box with a glass window where the sound was piped in through a speaker. Now you might think this would spoil a play for someone, but because of the caliber of Jeremy Baumung's performance and the content of the play, seeing his personal tale of salvation from inside of a coffin-like room did not detract from my experience at all.
The first thing I noticed as I sat down was the sparsity of the set design. It consisted of a hospital bed on stage right (with a telephone down stage), a wheelchair in the center, and a toilet bowl on the left. Jeremy used the space created by this set, along with the help of creative lighting and his precise acting skills, to bring us into his mind and tell us his story.
His story is something we can all relate to. I'm not saying that all of us have had a near-death experience, because that's not what the play is about. It is about the problems a boy has growing up, like having an alcoholic father, and how these issues affect our relationships with everyone we meet as we grow older. Then something may happen to us to remind us of how precious our one go at this world is and that holding onto grudges and hates only leads to our own self-destruction.
Most one-man shows can feel like a short tour of hell, where there is one person who you don't like and find annoying playing many different people while you are a stuck in your chair unable to move in the horrifying darkness. This was not so with Jeremy. His sincerity is apparent from the get go when he shows the audience his missing toes (a battle wound from his fight with death). This simple action shows us that this person on stage is not afraid to appear vulnerable in front of his audience and this sets them up for an introspective show. Jeremy's myriad of voices and his ability to jump seamlessly from character to character – playing himself at different stages in life, playing others that are speaking to him, and playing both in the same scene – helped the audience weave in and out of his past and present life. The play's climax exemplifies Jeremy's passionate sincerity where he reenacts the night that he went to the hospital after experiencing excruciating pain and helplessness alone in his apartment. Even at this emotional highpoint of his pain, he manages to switch character to his brother who is frantically looking for him at the same time. This both helped to break up the long, frightening scene while at the same adding to his sense of helplessness. It is this type of careful construction that makes this play so enjoyable. None of these character and setting changes were disorienting or confusing, but were instead like an intricately woven blanket with many different colored threads that all together makes a whole piece of art.
Flip the Script
Reviewed by Tim Gray
THE LEAD-UP to ignite05 invariably billed Flip the Script as "NZ Idol meets playwright slam", which was enough to cast aspersions on the event as a personality-driven bastard child of its British mother, conceived in the Contact Theatre, Manchester. Limited to young playwrights between the ages of 16 and 25 to match the ignite demographic, the event was a topical hybrid of tragedy and comedy – largely concerned with issues affecting the young and (par nécessité) socially-disillusioned. The concept was simple: a pool of 4 actors perform 5 minutes of over twenty scripts to be considered by the audience, who could elect to rate the plays anywhere between "Yeah", "Yeah, Nah", and "Nah", and culminating in the "final grand slam" in which 4 of the most 'yeah'd' scripts would be extended for a full run of ten minutes before an eventual winner was chosen.
While the premise sounds simple, the execution came with just a couple of complications. The 5 minute teasers meant that most scripts were geared towards creating the suspense and intrigue that would force the audience to "yeah" them, if only to find out if their favourite dispossessed youth did indeed meet a sticky end in the final five minutes. To give texture to the voting process, MC Jan Maree would stalk the audience and proffer lollipops to any audience member brave enough to offer their opinion on the preceding piece. This was at best involving, but at worst hilariously banal. After a play dealing with two teenage girls wrestling with their sexual awakening and the social pressures of coming out, a male audience member remarked of the intimate encounter "That was awesome... any straight male who didn't give that a 'Yeah' can't be straight, aye!" He was rewarded with an orange-flavoured lollipop.
This was symptomatic of the bigger problem of audience participation – Billy T Comedy Award-winning MC Jan Maree seemed to struggle without the aid of lollies, and the psychological chasm between her and her ignite 'youf' audience was no more evident than in her constant toilet humour which was repeated night after night like some kind of horrifying ongoing-reference-gone-wrong, much to the cringing embarrassment of her teenaged audience. The addition of charming UK arts-dilettante Lemn Sissay at the grand final added a new dynamic to the MC'ing, though far from his meditative, somber yet inspirational demeanour exhibited in Something Dark, Lemn's presence was marked by self-deprecation and racial quips – something apparently more palatable to the audience than Maree's "poos and wees".
With this said, the plays themselves were of an exceptional standard. While they could roughly be categorized by thematic content as dealing exclusively in "sex and religion", "familial disjuncture", and "disillusionment with society", it's clear that these are the issues that concern young people. In this sense, Flip the Script was wholly successful in tapping the vein of "youf culture", and even if these ideas might seem like well-worn paths for some, they also made good fodder for tragicomic intrigue. Indeed, the plays tended towards being overwhelmingly dark, and most angled for the awkward laughs provided by confronting issues close to their audience. The grand prize, however, was scooped by "Spilt Milk", an irreverent but self-reflexive rumination on the creative process as the components and ideas within a play find themselves swirling together after their burnt-out author spills coffee across her script.
Similarly the actors showed flexibility and determination, hammering out over 20 scripts during the 5 nights with which they had little familiarity and which frequently required them to portray characters of different backgrounds, sexualities and even species.
Overall, Flip the Script made for five nights of engaging free entertainment throughout ignite05, and was a worthy exercise in encouraging amateur playwrights to express themselves in a relatively informal atmosphere. Yeah, nah, s'good mate.
Dead Man Talking and Flip the Script featured as part of the ignite05: new voices_new pathways festival.
renee wrote: