War Horse

I am a firm believer of the theatre as a space of unlimited imagination. As the lights go down and the stage is left as the only “living” space in the auditorium, the audience is gradually drawn into a constructed reality that drives their emotion as the characters unfold their stories before their eyes. This is the beauty of the theatre. Everything is live and alive. There is no touch up or second takes as it is with life.

I have heard great things about War Horse since its debut overseas. After a long period of waiting, it finally comes to Sydney. As such I would not pass on this great opportunity to see what the hype is about. And the end result? Not only it did not disappoint, I was reminded once again why I love live theatre so much.

The story of the play, based on the same novel by Michael Morpurgo, was not overly complicated. A boy got a horse, they bond, the horse went to war, the boy followed the horse to the war, and both the boy and the horse experienced the cruelty of war first hand in their own way. The selling point of War Horse was the realistic puppetry that recreated the animals in the play. You got a first taste of the fantastic puppetry skills with the opening scene when the pony was being auctioned. And then you saw the goose (I love that goose), the swallow, the vultures, and subsequently other warhorses that were involved in the war. The fascinating part of the production was the fact that you know they are puppets, but the amount of work that was put into the puppets that they actually made you believe that they are real animals with real personalities. Because of this, the interactions between the animals and the human characters became very convincing. This is true not only for the horses, which were manned by three actors on stage, but also the smaller animals, such as the goose (with one actor only) that completely stole the first few scenes. This is a make believe executed at its highest level.

Apart from puppetry, the set also installed a huge hanging white space in the shape of a torn out sketchbook. During the progress of the play pencil sketched animations were projected onto this space to inform the audience the change of time and space in the story. I personally believe the choice of pencil-sketched animation was incidental as the torn sketchbook was referred to in the story time and time again. Not only this tied in neatly with the story, it also offered a great amount of flexibility for scene changes without involving a huge number of set props.  Also the sketches were so nicely drawn that they became pieces of artworks themselves.

The play also came with a brilliant soundtrack that reflects the time and events of the story perfectly.  An actor who acts as the storyteller sang narration connecting individual scenes to the audience to inform them of additional information. As for individual scenes, there are lots of other songs that identify the time, space and characters relations in the story. There were no real individual arias as such as they are mostly choruses. Nonetheless, these choruses added a lot of weight and musical colour to the warring and unresting tone of the story.

War Horse is a piece of theatrical work perfectly weaved together. It is a powerful exhibition of great skills working together to completely immerse the audience into the world of the story. There were many occasions during the show that I could hear people around me blowing their noses, wowing, and sighing. It is a show that deploys a huge amount of puppetry while successfully convinced you that they are not puppets on stage but real characters, just like all the other actors on the stage. If you are looking for a perfect or near perfect piece of theatre to spend 2.5 hours with, War Horses could probably be one of your best options. 

*War Horse currently running at the Sydney Lyric Theatre until 30th June 2013

Asian Australian Actors? Myth or Reality?

Recently read an article by a prominent British theatre critic Lyn Gardner on the lack of British East Asian actors in UK, which consequently could be a factor that led to a recent Royal Shakespeare Company of “The Orphan of Zhao” with only 3 East Asian actors in the cast.  The article investigates the reason behind the lack of East Asian actors in the British acting scene, and encourages agencies to put forward more East Asian actors for casting so they could be seen and known. Reading the article got me thinking about the situation in Australia. Are we sharing the same issue?

I don’t know about other cultures, but for Chinese families, Chinese parents do not usually encourage their kids to take up performing arts, or basically any arty profession as a career. I experienced this the first hand and is still at times being discouraged by my parents to think about taking up acting as a career. This could be part of the reason why we do not have a lot of Asian actors in Australia initially.

However, looking at the past 10 years or so, I do think that there are lots of changes in the Asian acting scene. My first gig was in an all Asian cast musical “Flower Drum Song” and that was the first time I thought, “hey there are lots of us around, so why I didn’t see them on stage or on screen before?” So I started looking into this whole “lack of Asian actors” claim in the industry.

Even now, at different occasions, when I questioned why there aren’t more Asian actors on the Australian screen and stage, I was informed that there aren’t enough Asian actors around to do the jobs, which at times I found it absurd. Just judging from the casting sessions I went to when they were looking for stereotypical Asian characters, I always run into a bunch of Asian actors.  Then there is a question of whether there are enough trained Asian actors in the industry. For this I thought about the NIDA graduates I knew and could easily find a bunch of Asian background graduates. Lily Ji (2012), Jenny Wu (2010), Harry Tseng (2010), Pearl Tan (2005), Gareth Yuen (2005), Jason Chan (2001), and Monica Sayers (2004). And these are just some of them. There are also other acting graduates from other acting schools such as Jonathan Chan, Stephanie Son and Ivy Mak. I myself am a graduate from the Theatre School of UNSW. So the claim of no professionally trained Asian actors seems to be a bit thin in my opinion.

So what went wrong? Sometimes I do think because there are not many writers who can write materials for Asian actors. Debra Mailman in one of her interviews last year did acknowledge that even for Indigenous actors, roles tend to be more segregated when it comes to general productions. She cited her role in Offspring as an example in the interview. So maybe Asian actors and writers should work harder to put out materials to tell our stories on stage and on screen. But then I also thought, we might have different traditions and cultural background, should this really play such an important part in productions when we are just talking about generic characters? I have Asian Australian friends who were born in Australia and they are more Australian than Asian. Their parents maybe Asian but my friends speak and act like Australian nonetheless. They are as Aussie as you could expect. So is it that important that Asians have to tell Asian stories, as compared to the Australian stories? Would this approach be actually further segregating the industry into smaller and less rewarding sectors? These are some of the questions I do have.

For me, I do think we should continue to write and put our work out there. However, this should be the bridging process of putting our talents and abilities out there, instead of letting it becoming the only venue for us to showcase ourselves. Writing our own materials should be a gateway to open up the market to us and not to be limited by it. I do look forward to one day I would be called for a “character” in a major production as compared to an “Asian / Chinese character” in a stereotypical context. But until then I would continue to write my materials and hopefully get them produced and put myself out there.

Performance4a - where you find Asian Australian actors 

In Time

Recently got a chance to catch up with a few high school friends. One of them was on sabbatical and decided to come to Sydney to live for a year. I totally envy him as I would lo—ve to have a year off like that. But that is not the point. When old mates come together the usual “time flies” topic would inevitably come out. Some of them are still very actively in touch with the high school and they talked about all the things happening there. The competitions we used to participate in and how some people still take days off for the finals etc. etc. As the conversation continued, I wondered how did all these used to be part of my life activities became part of my history? Really where did time go? And when someone mentioned that another person whom I haven’t seen for years remembered me as a sprinter for the school, I nearly did not know how to respond. I have gone from a teenager who tried to outrun wind to a guy who ponders what vitamin tablets would be good for my health…

It is a strange feeling catching up with old mates. During the years apart we had all gone different directions. Quite a number of us were even scattered across the world and living in different time zones. Getting back together and then trying to fill in all the empty pages within the span of a dinner is by no means an easy task but somehow we always managed to do it. However, the notion of time has gone beyond our notice was far from infrequent. I remember when I was a kid I dreaded the time between holidays and wondered why time passes so slowly (probably also because I did not like school as a kid, or maybe any structured life in general). However as I grew up time seems to have accelerated with it too.

Meeting my high school friends forced me to take a real look at my life. I wonder what have I accomplished and also how much more time do I have to accomplish what I want to achieve? Recent events at home put a very different perspective on how I see things and especially life itself. However, as my own clock is ticking, I do wonder whether I have lost part of my life in time without even knowing it. I always wanted to be in the entertainment business. Somehow I knew it consciously or unconsciously. I just feel alive performing. However, looking back at my work history, performing is not a very large part of my working life. I am not complaining about anything because I did have a lot of opportunities in my non-performing line of work, and I earned pretty decent income. But then have I traded passion for comfort to a certain degree?

It is hard to judge one’s own life, as you can never be completely objective. Without trivialising my own work, I did feel that I did the right thing in the past doing a few leaps of faith, including moving country and becoming an Australian citizen. But then as I worked through my life, which seems to be accelerating to the final stop, every move seems to be a lot scarier as I do not know whether I would have sufficient time to make things right. The recent decision to move on from my current job without anything lining up scares me still but I convinced myself this is the right decision. The question here is what’s next? Do I have the time and the opportunity to eventually accomplish what I set out for? Or would I be just falling back in to a similar but different pattern? I certainly have grand schemes and plans for this change but then at the end of the day, nothing is under your control and you just need to have that faith in God that something would happen, while at the same time dealing with all those “what if not” thoughts that pound your head like thunder storms.

In the movie “In Time” people tried to buy more time after 25, in some sense I feel like the same. We certainly cannot buy more time but then we become more and more cautious about our actions and decisions so we wont’ waste time. Some people may say we can live a pretty long life nowadays, but what I am thinking is it is not just about living a long life. For me living a life that I am happy with and proud of is more important. And by that I would need to make every of my decision count. But then it is a chicken and egg situation – how do you know whether a decision is correct without making it? For this I mean you can think and think and then make the decision, but what happens after the decision is made is still a whole cloud of uncertainty.

I think I might have got a bit too sentimental of late because of all the things happening around me, but then I do sometimes think after working so hard for so many years, is it worth it? Or am I getting anywhere near where I want to be? Or even am I just one of the many lives in this world that would just pass on with time without a single memorable note? These are questions I yet to find any answers for.

                                                                     陀飛輪 - 關淑怡