Below is a link to as well as a full version of an early article I wrote on Lally Katz for the AUSTRALIAN DRAMA STUDIES JOURNAL published in 2004. I am publishing in 2 posts as it is a bit lengthy.
Talking about Lally Katz
Lally Katz is one of Australia’s most prolific young playwrights. As she enters now her 26th year, into that murky territory from young to emerging playwright, there is no better moment to review the work of this multi-award winning playwright, and the profound impact she has had as a young writer, both on the youth audiences she engages and the broader impact that this unique and exciting voice heralds for the future of Australian theatre.
It is early 2004. Lally Katz is in London. Wimbledon, in fact. She is living with another young writer whom she met whilst at the World Interplay Youth Playwrighting Festival. She is currently studying at The Royal Court and she is writing a play, The Eisteddfod, that in July 2004 will be performed at The Storeroom in North Fitzroy, a curated venue that supports new Australian writing. This play will be performed whilst Lally is still in London, but she’ll speak almost daily to the director, Chris Kohn, as she works on the play and he prepares the production. Their last collaboration, The Black Swan of Trespass, won four Greenroom awards and will shortly tour to the New York Fringe Festival where it will win more awards.
Lally might not be present for the production of The Eisteddfod, but she’ll be in it, as Lally the puppet, who steps in to lend a hand when one of her characters loses his way. And she’ll offer a pre-recorded post-script to the play, in which she’ll wonder what the characters she wrote and created are up to now and why they don’t keep in touch. Welcome to Lallyland, as director and friend Melinda Hetzel refers to this world that is generated both in Lally’s plays and in her waking life.
Katz’s writing pays homage to the capacities of the imagination. Her theatre is vibrant, intoxicating and pushes itself to the limits of performance language. She might be dealing with the normal issues of a young person trying to come to grips with the world, but she does so in such an enthusiastically peculiar way that you wouldn’t be the only person walking away from a production shaking your head. Hetzel believes Lally’s writing operates on many levels at once. In 2000 she directed Tabitha to Saturn. ‘…It was really interesting, it was the first play I had where people wanted to come back sometimes up to three times to see this show and try and work it out…’
A look at the titles of Lally’s work alone is enough to give you a sense of something quite strange and wonderful occurring. Pirate Eyes, The Last Episode of the Bubble Teens, The Starlet Twins, Henrietta’s Last Safari, Roadkill Girl and Guts on the Outside Boy, Horse-Girl Vs Captain Brap, Dead Girls are Fantastic and the list goes on. Katz is as abundant as she is inspired. Having participated in, as she describes it, ‘…lots of fringe festivals,’ as well as the Next Wave Festival and Mudfest, Lally is a tour de force in youth theatre. For a young writer, she has wasted no time in garnering a lot of attention for herself. Lally has had four commissions; Pirate Eyes for Melbourne University's Union House Theatre, The Starlet Twins for PACT in Sydney, The Last Episode of the Bubble Teens for St Martins Youth Theatre Company, and she co-wrote Outlookers for Arena Theatre Company with Rosemary Myers. Outlookers has toured Victoria, had a sell-out season at the Opera House, was performed in the Out of the Box festival in Brisbane and will tour to New Zealand.
Recently she was invited back to Melbourne University’s Union House Theatre to speak as part of their esteemed alumni that included Santo Cilauro and Michael Kantor. Without a doubt, this young writer has not let age stand in the way of her success.
The Eisteddfod is not Katz’s most recent production. Appropriately, as she emerges into playwrighting ‘adulthood’ Katz wrote one third of the Aphids project A Quarrelling Pair, directed by Margaret Cameron for the 2004 Melbourne International Arts Festival. This is the first time Katz’s writing has been staged in an environment that is not considered ‘fringe’ or ‘youth’.
And yet, whether it is a matter of time or age or not, Katz is not represented in the mainstream of Melbourne or Australian theatre. Even A Quarrelling Pair was performed at the well-known independent theatre venue La Mama. She has been heard (heard being the operative word) at the Malthouse Theatre (formerly Playbox Theatre) multiple times for the now defunct Theatre in the Raw readings, designed to assist the development of new playwrighting. But her oft-uncategorisable writing seems unable to pierce the skin of the bubble that separates Melbourne’s mainstream from its ‘other’ theatre. Lally’s plays skirt the fringes of the theatre establishments of Melbourne. Perhaps it is her age. Perhaps not. Perhaps it is that there is something going on in her writing that does not neatly fit into mainstream Australian theatre at this time. Both she and director Chris Kohn are committed to making the kind of theatre that resists the stymieing of any of their creative impulses. In a recent article in The Age, Katz stated, ‘"All great companies probably start off with a group of crazy people and little money," she says. "But everything settles down and they begin catering to an audience's tastes, which in the end leads to the death of anything new out of fear of chasing people away."’
In regards to this Featherstone states, ‘…Mainstream culture will always catch up with particular avant-gardes and incorporate them into dominant ideologies because that is their socio-political destiny at their inception, that is what it means to be avant-garde’ (as qtd in Kershaw 1999: 61). )
Both writer and director are more interested in maintaining the independence of their ideas and not defining themselves in relationship to mainstream theatre. As Chris Kohn says, ‘"I prefer to describe it as independent theatre because that is a better way of suggesting that it represents a whole other culture."’ (THE AGE)
This confidence in a ‘whole other culture’ appears not unwarranted in Melbourne theatre today. As an article that appeared in The Australian in November 2004 surmised, ‘Away from the bright lights of the Arts Centre and from reassuring government subsidy, Melbourne's independent theatres are thriving. The city is experiencing a resurgence of small, gritty, politically motivated groups, comparable to the activity of the 1970s and early '90s.’ These companies are, according to The Australian, ‘…redefining Australia's theatre aesthetic. Theatre historian Julian Meyrick calls it the "beginning of a new sensibility"’.
Katz is mentioned in this article alongside Ben Ellis as one of the local writers exploring the issues of, ‘…desperation – powerlessness, even paralysis…The helplessness is reflected in stories about childhood and themes of perpetual adolescence – of never reaching maturity and self-determination.’
This is certainly an appropriate interpretation of Katz’s play The Eisteddfod. This play, about brother and sister Abolone and Gerture, is set entirely in a world of the sibling’s own making. Both in their thirties according to the stage directions, but with no more ability to control their lives than small children, Abolone and Gerture are trapped in their Angela Carter-esque bedroom playing out the alternative fictions of their own invention. It is only in the subject matter of these invented lives that it becomes apparent that these two are not children. Abolone ‘plays’ Ian, Gerture’s abusive boyfriend; Gerture ‘plays’ Mother to the needy Abolone; and together they play out scenes from their own childhood as their now deceased parents, who happened to die in a tree pruning incident.
Rather than being victims of a system they cannot control, Katz is, in my opinion, saying more about the choices young people in theatre in Australia are making today. Katz is not waiting to be accepted by the mainstream. She like many other young writers, and with Kohn as collaborator, are making their own way to where they want to go. But there is more at work here than the active rejection of a system that appears to have no place for unique and original writing. I locate Katz’s theatre in the space that Baz Kershaw identifies as one of the most productive for performance.
…Some approaches to making performance do not simply ‘model’
ideologies, or ‘reflect’ the politics of their context; but rather that
they are actively engaged in widening the bounds of political
processes, in opening up new domains of political action, usually
through excessive performativity, the creation of absences.
(Kershaw 1999: 84)
No comments:
Post a Comment