September 2012
Monash Academy of Performing Arts
Director Bryce Ives
Music Directors Adrian Portell
Choreograher Zoe McDonald
Designer Rob Sowinski
Costume Designer Eugyenne Teh
Photography Jodie Hutchinson
Directors Notes
This is a story dominated by men, requiring a particularly old-fashioned square jawed classical masculinity.
In stories like Forbidden Planet the female is a helpless damsel in distress, physically attractive and provocatively dressed, but mostly dumb and in need of “saving” by the male hero. It’s no accident that we open tonight with the misogynistic classic It’s a Man’s World. In 1956, it really was.
At the Globe Theatre a boy actor would simply adorn a costume and transform into Lady MacBeth, Desdemona or Beatrice. It was an understood and accepted convention.
It was also illegal for women to be actors, a consequence of the patriarchal sex-gender system that dominated for so long and penetrates its way into this Forbidden Planet story.
If I were a woman
I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased
me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I
defied not: and, I am sure, as many as have good
beards or good faces or sweet breaths will, for my
kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.
ROSALIND, As you like it
These words were once uttered by a boy, dressed as Rosalind. Of the thirty-eight surviving plays attributed to Shakespeare, about one-fifth involve cross dressing. At any moment the boy playing the girl can unmask the convention and remind us it’s only performance.
When we decided to cast only women, the complexities of gender and modern performance challenged us. Are they women playing men? Have the characters changed gender? Or are they transgender? Drag kings?
Theatre doesn’t have to be concrete and absolute. It can be contradictory and full of possibilities. Tonight we ask you to imagine everything and nothing. Gender is ambiguous: our women are men and women, masculine and feminine.
With our troupe of women (and a token male for good measure), we can inevitably ask larger questions on artifice, illusion, performance, genre and narrative.
We started in an empty room. A collaborative theatre making process followed, demanding a very active approach to the making of this work. The cast trained in Viewpoints and Composition training, and have gone above and beyond in their journey of questioning, shattering and building the work of tonight.
The epilogue of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will end our space journey this evening, and act as a timely reminder to us all. We mean no offense. If this story seems whimsical or silly, think of it as a manifestation of your own subconscious, nothing more and nothing less.
Synopsis
O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention,
A galaxy for a stage, spacemen to act
And a robot to behold the swelling scene!
On a stormy night way back in the spring of 2012, mad scientist Doctor Prospero worked late in his laboratory, aided only by his wife, Gloria, as he developed the elusive formula with which he would change the world. The apparently faithful Gloria, however, duped him and sent him off into hyper-space in an old spacecraft. Unknown to Gloria, her infant daughter, Miranda, slumbered peacefully in the craft and was now catapulted light years into the future in her father's company.
Fifteen years later, a routine survey flight under the command of the chisel-jawed Captain Tempest leaves earth's orbit with a new Science Officer aboard - a hard and bitter woman. As a shower of meteorites hits the ship, the Science Officer flees, and the craft is pulled inexorably towards the plant D'Illyria - the Forbidden Plant.
Behold!
All the world is outer space, and all the men, merely women.
Review
Return to the Forbidden Planet is a synthesis of Star Trek, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Shakespeare set to the a jukebox soundtrack that’s so contagious it’s irresistibly addictive.
Based loosely upon Shakespeare’s The Tempest and cult science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet, Return to the Forbidden Planet illustrates the story of Captain Tempest’s valiant crew who become stranded on the Forbidden Planet of D’Illyria after a meteor shower. Here they meet the ‘misunderstood scientist’ Doctor Prospero and his daughter Miranda. Yes, we know the names have Shakespeare written all over it, but that’s how far it goes.
The show commences with an upbeat number as the actors prance around the stage in Mad Men-esque white underwear. With bravado, and still in their underwear, we are introduced to the characters, before they begin lift off, into Return to the Forbidden Planet.
Stella Young, Ramp Up editor and occasional Sunday column contributor, documents and summarises each act via a televised reading on the multiple screens positioned on either side of the stage.
As the musical unravels, one of the first things that becomes obvious about Return to the Forbidden Planet is how out of the ordinary it is.
Maybe it’s the combination of androgyny, the outrageous make-up provided by Eugyeene Teh, or how the audience is privy to the stage direction, band, and stage crew as they move conspicuously about in the background... mostly it’s the androgyny.
“Gender is ambiguous: our women are men and women, masculine and feminine, it matters and it doesn’t matter,” wrote director Bryce Ives in the program booklet. It was part of the MUAPA’s own homage to Shakespearean theatre, which was only performed by males.
Return to the Forbidden Planet already heralds the paradigms of Shakespearean theatre, with Cookie the Cook’s poetic sonnets, while Gloria, portrayed by triple J featured artist Jess Palmer, speaks with contemporary intelligence. It’s this juxtaposition of poetic and contemporary paradigms that elicits laughs within the play, coupled with the android Ariel.
One of the impressive qualities of Gerard Lane, who portrays the maternalistic android, is the phenomenal amount of accents he can adeptly shift between — Scottish, English, American, even mimicries of Yoda and Darth Vadar. It’s humorous, confusing and impressive.
Coupled with the backlog of experience among the cast, Michelle France has a physical theatre entitled My Pet, My Love for the upcoming La Mamma Explorations season and Zoe McDonald is part of theatre company Present Tense, MUAPA create a credible performance that illustrates love, heartbreak, dysfunctional relationships and human existentialism.
Overall Return to the Forbidden Planet is a richly humorous, feel good musical about science, love and relationships. Profoundly tragic in some scenes, the cast tribute Shakespeare, Forbidden Planet and a plethora of other things with a cadence worthy of a larger theatre.
Beat Magazine