Review of Honey Spot

Posted by Tracy

(This is a review of a recent production John originally wrote for a newspaper but it didn't end up being used because it was filed at the end of the production's run.)


This warm play of reconciliation from 1985, written by Jack Davis for younger and older audiences, was energetically staged by the Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company (Perth) under Kyle J. Morrison’s direction.

Davis was able to treat serious themes without didacticism. In Honey Spot, a 12-year-old Wadjela (“whitefella”) girl and a 13-year-old Noongar boy find friendship and creative affirmation in W.A.’s south-west forests.

The play is adept at touching on all potential issues of appropriation and disrespect without ever compromising the integrity of Noongar culture.

Peggy (Katya Shevtsov), and Tim (Ian Wilkes), develop common expression through dance, combining European ballet moves with Noongar corroboree dance. They brought a liveliness and energy to their interaction that rippled through the audience.

Lynette Narkle as Mrs Winalli, Tim’s mother, was a guiding light, while Peggy’s father, the forest ranger, forced to confront his own racism, was ably depicted by George Shevtsov.

But the finest moments came with Phillip Walley-Stack’s turn as the resistant, confrontational William, Tim’s cousin, underscoring seriousness with humour and verve.

Tristen Parr’s music, using cello played by Emma McCoy and didgeridoo mainly from Walley-Stack, skilfully ranged from subtle to bold. Dance, music and drama merged with ease.

Fluid scene-changing through the actors moving in and out of the circular performance area was especially effective. Keeping it simple was key.

Davis’s plea for Wadjelas to engage in genuine listening conversation and respect for Noongar language and naming persists long after the show is over.

Activist Poetics

By Tracy

John's got a new book out: Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley.

It's a collection of his essays edited and with an introduction by Niall Lucy.

John Kerrigan on the back cover describes it as an "exhilarating constellation of interview, essay, polemic, lecture, memoir, apologia and verse".

The book is published by Liverpool University Press and you can read more about it here.

Wheatbelt full moon

By Tracy

A few hours before lunar eclipse a couple of days ago...

Trying something new

By Tracy

Last week I heard novelist and musician Willy Vlautin talking on the radio from the Sydney Writers' Festival, and decided to try one of his books.

I wanted to partly because I get tired of novels limited to privileged or middle-class characters, and he's more interested in what reviewers keep calling "the dispossessed".

He's published three novels -- Planet Books only had two of them. I wasn't that interested in the new one, Lean on Pete, because of the horse-racing motif, so instead I chose his second, Northline (Faber and Faber, 2008).

It's a fast read. At first I found it quite annoying -- too much dialogue, phrasing too staccato for me, and the sense that the so-called "low-life" aspect is self-consciously on display for the reader. I couldn't tell if it was simply over-edited, stylistically, or if it was running on the assumption that people can only read very, very pared-back flat language. Some great writers of course have used a simple approach to style, but here it's frequently clunky, stilted.

Yet I kept reading, and it grew on me a little: there's a strong sense of compassion in the novel, and although it veers into being too sentimental (the Paul Newman fantasy-sequences, for one), it does leave you with a distinct feeling of atmosphere and some memorable characters.

Not the protagonist, however -- Allison -- who seems, perhaps intentionally, little more than an outline. It's the people who befriend her on her desperate downer -- like Penny, who trains her in phone sales, and Dan, a trauma survivor -- that seem vivid and durable creations.

The story is set in Las Vegas and Reno, among the drinkers, gamblers and workers of those places (Vlautin comes from Reno, according to the radio interview, though he now lives in Oregon).

He's singer-songwriter with the band Richmond-Fontaine, and there's a soundtrack for the book too.

All in all a bit disappointing -- certainly not the new Steinbeck or Carver that publicity led me to expect -- but still not a bad read.

Stendhal's heirs (2)

By Tracy

I recently finished Theodore Dreiser's monumental novel An American Tragedy (1925). I'm not the first by any means to notice its indebtedness to Stendhal's The Red and the Black, though the two novels are also extremely different. I was reading it as part of the "parvenu" or "upstart" thematic list I've set myself.

The protagonist (anti-hero rather than hero) is Clyde Griffiths, a young man raised in poverty and relative ignorance by well-meaning street preachers. Clyde has a longing for a better life in every material sense, and a sensual nature he has difficulty controlling.

Taken into employment at his rich uncle's factory, Clyde finds himself in a social no-man's-land: forbidden to mix with the women workers he supervises, but too lowly for acceptance among his uncle's set. Good-looking and sartorially-minded, he attracts the attention of wealthy young Sondra, but not before he has entangled himself -- compromisingly -- with Roberta, whom he now wishes to be rid of.

The story echoes Stendhal's only in its outlines -- the pride and social ambition realised through a woman's love and attentions, the abandonment of an earlier love -- the crime and trial and the question of capital punishment.

What's more, Dreiser took his plot from a real-life news item, as did Stendhal in his own time, so that both were to some degree fictionalising fact... although to say only that is to misrepresent the phenomenal fictional achievement of both authors.

Dreiser's novel is much less readable than Stendhal's. There were many passages I had to force myself to read simply because of over-telling. Dreiser seems to think he has to state something, then state it again, then re-examine for other ways of stating it. For a modern reader this is excruciating -- but it's not just a matter of being stylistically dated -- plenty of novels of similar age are more readable. It seems to be a deliberate stylistic choice, his own kind of realism.

Most credible critics seem to agree it's a masterpiece, but a flawed one.

Film-makers have made several attempts at it. The only one I've seen is George Stevens's A Place in the Sun (1951), with Montgomery Clift in the lead role (character names are all different, and half the story is missing, but film adaptations have to do that sometimes). A very young Elizabeth Taylor plays the rich love interest, and Shelley Winters the cast-off working-class girlfriend. The film is highly watchable and very disturbing.

The Beat that My Heart Skipped

By Tracy

I watched this film recently for the third or fourth time because -- despite an unsatisfying ending -- it has a lot to offer. (In French its title is De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté, made in 2005.) It's apparently a remake of an American film, Fingers (1978), which I've never seen.

Like many of the 'parvenu' narratives,  it's another story in which the protagonist's two worlds clash, but here the two worlds are more about modes of living than exactly class, though that's not unconnected...

'Thomas' (Romain Duris, excellent in the role) is a young man whose now-deceased mother was a concert pianist. His father, still very much in the picture, is a moneyed thug, and Tom has followed him into a life of violence and brutality in shady real estate dealing. 

Tom is not a likeable character, and the film sets this out very clearly. Yet when he glimpses the possibility of changing direction -- becoming a pianist like his mother -- you can't help identifying with him and hoping he will come good through music. There's a strong feeling of potential sensitivity and power of expression barely contained in this taciturn and often sullen individual.

But it's never that easy to switch tracks, and the patterns and entanglements of the life Tom has led till now pose a dramatic challenge to his 'ambition'. Violence is not easily left behind...

The last section of the movie (to me) feels tacked-on, but the rest of it is still worth watching. I have also caught part of an earlier movie by the same director, Read My Lips (Sur mes lèvres, 2001), that had me on the edge of my seat -- again, a clash-of-two-worlds story -- but I've not managed to get a copy so as to watch the parts I missed. 

The director, Jacques Audiard, has also made the more recent film A Prophet (Un prophète, 2009), which I missed at the cinema -- will have to watch out for the DVD.

Morning views near Jam Tree Gully

By Tracy

This is where I walk Tim to the school bus in the mornings. It's hard to capture the depth, the distance of those hills...