How can we deep dive into insightful exploration about the human condition – how one’s past can affect one’s future, how innocence can be easily lost, and how challenging it is to get in touch with – let alone salvage – one’s better self ...
12,345,679 x 8 = 98,765,432
The central conflict is between Celia Constanti (Aileen Huynh) and Vicki Fielding (Claudia Barrie), who attended NIDA together. Williamson’s message appears to be that in industries with ruthless competition true friendship is not possible.
The agent Nelli Browne (Zoe Carides) felt so authentic it felt like she had just walked out of Shanahan’s management.
The Big Time
By David Williamson. Ensemble Theatre. Directed by Mark Kilmurry. January 18 - March 16, 2019
The question posed every year by David Williamson’s annual World Premiere productions at the Ensemble Theatre is has his latest play earnt its stripes on the quality of the work or his famous name? The answer in 2019, for play number 54, is that The Big Time is one of his best in recent years, likely to delight the company’s traditional audience.
On opening night the audience and cast were at one, laughing at the jokes which bounced off the walls from the unique scenario of actors playing actors and other creatives. It did not feel like naval gazing but came across as fresh and witty.
It’s a field that Williamson (now aged 76) has intimately lived in for decades and it felt very comfortable for him to write about. For those in the Performing Arts, however, the play is at times uncomfortable viewing, as several of those characters were penned caustically.
The central conflict is between Celia Constanti (Aileen Huynh) and Vicki Fielding (Claudia Barrie), who attended NIDA together. Williamson’s message appears to be that in industries with ruthless competition true friendship is not possible.
Celia is coasting along as a star in a soapie which she prefers to call an on-going drama series. Vicki has been doing her time in independent theatre and challenges her friend to stretch herself.
The rivalry between the two spills over into fireworks which has jaw dropping intensity.
Apart from the poisonous NIDA alumni the other characters are very likable. Rohan Black (Jeremy Waters) is a struggling writer who hilariously blows a chance to pitch a script to a producer because he is insulted at the venue for the meeting. Nate Macklin (Matt Minto) adroitly moves from asshole producer to wise counsel.
The agent Nelli Browne (Zoe Carides) felt so authentic it felt like she had just walked out of Shanahan’s management.
But the most likable character is the only one not in the industry. Rolly Pierce (Ben Wood) is a middle aged man who has suffered every conceivable calamity when he pitches his friend a script idea. Williamson’s surgical knowledge of the writing industry shines through as does the warmth of Wood’s acting.
Director Mark Kilmurry achieved his ambitions to cast the play well and let the words fly.
David Spicer
Photographer: Brett Boardman
Finally, after 51 (or is it 52?) plays and the same number of years, David Williamson has turned his satirical blowtorch onto his own industry in this latest offering at the Ensemble Theatre on Sydney’s lower North Shore.
He says, “If you’re a struggling writer or actor who hasn’t made ‘The Big Time‘… being near the bottom of the entertainment ladder is one of the most miserable existences on earth.”
This is the life his leading character Rohan (Jeremy Waters) has been living for 15 years while his partner, the much younger Celia (Aileen Huynh), has supported him through her role in a soapie, which she prefers to call a “continuing drama.”
Rohan’s best mate Rolly (Ben Wood) hands him an untidy manuscript, wanting his friend to comment on it. When Rohan finally does, he realises there is a sellable idea in its pages and considers not giving his friend any credit or recompense for his effort.
Complications arise with the entrance of Celia’s rival Vicki (Claudia Barrie), Zoe Carides as the agent Nelli, and the producer Nate (Matt Minto), all of whom are ruthless in their struggle to make money and/or get to the top.
Although the pace of the first half is a little slow, the betrayals and backstabbing come thick and fast in the second half, leaving the audience gasping at Williamson’s rapier wit.
Director Mark Kilmurray evokes terrific performances from his cast and, once again, Williamson’s satire can be applied to life beyond the world of the theatre.
Until Mar 16. Ensemble Theatre, 78 McDougall St, Kirribilli. $38-$80+b.f. Tickets & Info: www.ensemble.com.au
David Williamson’s trademark satirical pen finds razor-sharp form in this clever, stylish and sophisticated comedy set in the ruthless world of celebrity. ...
Aviaries by Zuzana Brabcova The central figure in Aviaries is Alžběta (Běta) despairs of this world around her, beginning with the politics: the novel opens right after the death of Václav Havel. The lost idealism of the post-Communist Czech Republic is a constant in the background, not least in the reactions to Havel's death -- notably also in the form of Alice's first-grade teacher, Marta Semelová, now leader of the Prague Communists, who: "congratulated the nation on ridding itself of a pest". (Semelová is a real-life figure, and she was indeed a teacher before becoming a politician; she crops up repeatedly in the novel, someone whose baneful influence on her daughter Běta had to nip in the bud.)
Entries include scenes of interaction with family and others -- both realistic and tending to the absurd, such when she encounters her hockey-obsessed former boss, fully decked out in all his gear, including skates, in front of the Academy of Sciences while The Rite of Spring is being performed at the National Theater (and Alice explores a dumpster). Other entries offer titbits of news and information, not entirely random but connecting to her story and life often only in the broadest sense:
At Deutsche Welle Sabine Peschel has a Q & A with Alexander Skipis, the CEO of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, about the future of books, Strategies to help bookstores survive reader atrophy.
The insolvency of Germany's largest book distributor is just one of the current bumps in the trade.
Interesting also to hear that:
Takis Würger's latest work, Stella, recently came out in German -- and has caused quite a stir; see, for example, the Deutsche Welle report, Novel based on Jew 'catcher' Stella Kübler stirs controversy.
At Scroll.in Mallik Thatipalli profiles Haziq and Mohi, explaining Why a tiny Hyderabad store with tattered old books has been attracting scholars for decades.
The store has gotten quite a few mentions over the years, including The Hindu articles on Death of a book connoisseurand explaining how A year after Awad Bafanna's death, his brothers still sorting books.
At The New York Review of Books' weblog Tim Parks wonders Does Talking About Books Make Us More Cosmopolitan ? -- which includes this depressing titbit:
If Bharathipura and Samskara-author Ananthamurthy can be considered too strange for an Anglo-Saxon audience .....
Forget stage and screen, all the best drama happens off-stage. That's the premise of David Williamson's new play examining the world of celebrity and the pres.
Williamson delivers yet another hilarious and incisive theatrical experience with The Big Time.
If Attention Is Currency, Critics Need To Reconsider How They Spend It
“It’s time for arts writers, critics, journalists, gatekeepers, and arbiters of culture—anyone whose job it is to bestow attention onto others—to reconsider how to allocate that currency. More specifically, the most responsible thing we can do, as people who professionally dole out attention, is to withhold it more often than not. But hear me out—there’s more to it than that.” Oregon Arts Watch
“And she had ignored, too, the cement in her soul. Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine—“ You are the absolute love of my life,” he’d written in her last birthday card— and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.”
At Radio Praha Ian Willoughby has a Q & A with translator-from-the-Czech Alex Zucker: I don't want to translate books, I want to translate authors.“I wondered how the wife I had known when Daniela was first born— the quiet, sunken woman who read the Czech newspapers in the library every morning and then wrote long letters to her mother in Prague, letters Katka had known would be swallowed by security— could have become this confident voice on the line.”
Aviaries by Zuzana Brabcova The central figure in Aviaries is Alžběta (Běta) despairs of this world around her, beginning with the politics: the novel opens right after the death of Václav Havel. The lost idealism of the post-Communist Czech Republic is a constant in the background, not least in the reactions to Havel's death -- notably also in the form of Alice's first-grade teacher, Marta Semelová, now leader of the Prague Communists, who: "congratulated the nation on ridding itself of a pest". (Semelová is a real-life figure, and she was indeed a teacher before becoming a politician; she crops up repeatedly in the novel, someone whose baneful influence on her daughter Běta had to nip in the bud.)
Entries include scenes of interaction with family and others -- both realistic and tending to the absurd, such when she encounters her hockey-obsessed former boss, fully decked out in all his gear, including skates, in front of the Academy of Sciences while The Rite of Spring is being performed at the National Theater (and Alice explores a dumpster). Other entries offer titbits of news and information, not entirely random but connecting to her story and life often only in the broadest sense:
More than half the Russian population has a favorable opinion of Joseph Stalin's role in Russian history.Thoughts of mortality figure prominently, and a nostalgic sense bubbles to the surface at times too:
Thirteen boys shot dead by ISIS extremists in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul for violating the ban on watching soccer.
The plastic bag ripped.
The needle disappeared in the fabric.
Near and far, the last leaf in Prague fell to the ground.
I lift the pot lid and stare at the bottom of those days. Where have they gone, where are they now, at this moment, those angels of ours ? The spring sun bears down on the freshly painted iron bars of my window, as if it -- a country-fair strongman -- wants to bend them into a horseshoe.
At Deutsche Welle Sabine Peschel has a Q & A with Alexander Skipis, the CEO of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, about the future of books, Strategies to help bookstores survive reader atrophy.
The insolvency of Germany's largest book distributor is just one of the current bumps in the trade.
Interesting also to hear that:
Earlier, a title was called a bestseller if it sold 4, 5, or 600,000 copies. Nowadays, a book is a best-seller if 100,000 copies are sold.
Takis Würger's latest work, Stella, recently came out in German -- and has caused quite a stir; see, for example, the Deutsche Welle report, Novel based on Jew 'catcher' Stella Kübler stirs controversy.
At Scroll.in Mallik Thatipalli profiles Haziq and Mohi, explaining Why a tiny Hyderabad store with tattered old books has been attracting scholars for decades.
The store has gotten quite a few mentions over the years, including The Hindu articles on Death of a book connoisseurand explaining how A year after Awad Bafanna's death, his brothers still sorting books.
At The New York Review of Books' weblog Tim Parks wonders Does Talking About Books Make Us More Cosmopolitan ? -- which includes this depressing titbit:
I recall a discussion on the jury of an international prize in which it was felt that the work of the great Indian writer U.R. Ananthamurthy would simply be too strange for an Anglo-Saxon audience. Which tells us volumes about what we mean by "international prize": foreign writers who make sense to us.(The prize in question was the 2013 Man Booker International Prize (when it was still a (biennial) author-prize, rather than the (annual) book-prize it has since been turned into); the judges that year, beside Parks, were Christopher Ricks, Elif Batuman, Aminatta Forna, and Yiyun Li; they gave Lydia Davis the prize .....)
If Bharathipura and Samskara-author Ananthamurthy can be considered too strange for an Anglo-Saxon audience .....
