WHITE MEN
BATS Theatre, The Random Stage, 1 Kent Tce, Wellington
23/09/2021 - 02/10/2021
Production Details
White Men, directed and performed by women, highlights the absurdity of the patriarchy.
Abby Howells (Benedict Cumberbatch Must Die, HarleQueen) is on a roll. After winning Best New Playwright at the Wellington Theatre Awards in 2019 for her one-woman show HarleQueen, she’s been on a whirlwind tour around Aotearoa, celebrating female comedians and how the stand-up industry is still a pretty toxic place for women. For her next play, White Men she’s tackling the patriarchy with a different lens, highlighting how damn absurd it all is.
Five men (all played by women) are sitting on the top of a mountain. The sea laps at their feet. The rising tide has engulfed the whole world and only the most privileged remain. Soon the sea will envelop them, if they do not figure out a plan.
Director Carrie Green has assembled a cast that feels representative of the full range of female practitioners working in theatre today. Featuring an all-star cast including Sameena Zehra, Jane Waddell, Greer Phillips, Emma Katene and Mycah Keall, White Men allows these wāhine to explore the full breadth of clowning and farce as the men squabble, bicker, hold pointless meetings and debate the need to panic.
Zehra, whose toured her solo shows all over the world, including Edinburgh Fringe, found that the play represented “an absurdist allegory for the times we live in by an amazing playwright”. Younger practitioners like Mycah Keale and Emma Katene, fresh from touring the country (Whaddarya and Sing to Me, BATCH respectively) go toe to toe with New Zealand legend Jane Waddell and Greer Phillips, stars of a recent film adaptation of The Turn of the Screw.
Director Carrie Green relishes the opportunity to dig into directing again after 2019’s He Kura Kōrero for which she was nominated for Most Promising Newcomer (Directing) at the Wellington Theatre Awards and launching Capital E’s 2021 season of Story Studio Live, touring all throughout Aotearoa. With a history of bringing a comedic streak to shows at Circa, Capital E and Centrepoint, Green is the perfect person to bring this anarchic farce to life.
This production is the fourth production to be selected for BATS Theatre’s exciting new initiative, the BATS’ Co-Pro 2021, ensuring that the iconic theatre can better support practitioners with longer pack in periods and assistance across all elements of the production. “To be selected for this new Co-Pro initiative is such a blessing” says Producer and Artistic Director of Red Scare Theatre, Cassandra Tse. “When this production was postponed due to the pandemic last year, none of us knew if it was actually going to come back. It’s the perfect return for White Men, allowing this hilarious production to be realized the biggest and best way possible.”
White Men offers an opportunity for women to go full tilt; throughout Howells’ career, she’s worked to ensure that her female peers have the opportunity to stretch their comedic muscles. Frustrated at seeing women “wasted in roles where they just set up punchlines for a male counterpart to knock down“, Howells was “inspired to create characters that showcase the incredible talent of the women I know, and the women I know are out there.”
White Men
BATS Theatre
23 September – 2 October 2021
8:30pm
The Difference $40
Full Price $25
Group 6+ $22
Concession Price $20
BOOK TICKETS
Cast (in order of stage position)
Greer Phillips
Mycah Keall, Jane Waddell
Emma Katene, Sameena Zehra
Director: Carrie Green
Writer: Abby Howells
Set Designer: Lucas Neal
Lighting Designer: Molloy
Sound Designer: Oliver Devlin
Costume Designer: Emma Stevens
Make-Up: Aimee Smith, Emma Katene
Stage Manager: Samantha Burnard
Producer: Cassandra Tse
Marketing Manager: James Cain
Producing Intern: Jeremy Hunt
Marketing Intern: Amy McLean
Photographer: Roc+ Photography
Graphic Designer: Aimee Sullivan
Theatre , Clown ,
1 hr 20 min
Simultaneously shocking and hilarious
Review by John Smythe 24th Sep 2021
Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned but today’s ‘top dogs’ just keep having meetings while the world drowns. That’s the apt metaphor playwright Abby Howells plunges into with her satirical take-down of the patriarchy and its failure to stem the tide of rising sea levels.
Her quintet of White Men – played by women – are no longer fixated on the economic imperatives of growth, profits and market shares that have driven us lemming-like to this fate. Now they are perched on their little rocks of privilege in the ocean, stuck on their petty positions and in their mindless routines as they repeat the motions that sustain their delusions of power.
Lucas Neal’s oceanic set design – lit by Molloy and featuring a burning sun that periodically sets beyond the horizon – allows for a semblance of hierarchy to be maintained. Emma Stevens’ costume designs, and the excellent array of props, reach back through history to signify the trappings of status. The black-on-white-face clown make-up,* designed by Aimee Smith and Emma Katene, heightens the comedic style embraced with Buffo gusto by the cast. Given the difference between the publicity shots and what we see on the night, I imagine an evolutionary process throughout rehearsals has produced their truly emotive cartoon expressiveness.
The characters have no names, so I have to use those of the actors, with no intention of confusing their variously venal performing personae with their good selves. I will use male pronouns …
Claiming the presidential position up top is Greer Phillips, rising from his complacent torpor to assertively pronounce, celebrate or castigate. Being rich and greedy has given Mycah Keall his place at the proverbial table which he relishes. Jane Waddell reeks of inherited privilege and insularity. Emma Katene keeps the books and uses surveys and statistics to justify inaction. Only Sameena Zehra has any notion of the danger they’re in but requesting the right to speak takes up his allotted time. Peer group dynamics afflict them all.
Directed by Carrie Green, the light-and-shade pacing and comic timing are exemplary. Each character has a signature physicality and navigates a range of emotions. It is salutary to see what their arrogance hides. And it’s painful to witness what remains most important to them when the end is nigh.
Oliver Devlin’s sound design speaks to the reality beyond what the White Men acknowledge. And the final image is simultaneously shocking and hilarious, in the best tradition of satirical comedy.
White Men is another offering from the prolific and impressive Red Scare Theatre Company and, as a BATS’ Co-Pro 2021 event, a wonderful welcome back to live theatre. Nothing beats breathing the same air as performers – even when we are wearing masks (of the protective rather than expressive kind).
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
*The make-up and clowning style, not to mention the satirical focus, reminds me of Barbarian Productions’ White Elephant, presented at the Hannah Playhouse in 2014. Australian comedian Roy Rene’s Mo McCackie vaudeville character, popular in the 1920s, also used black-on-white-face make-up. Does anyone know of an earlier origin of that convention?
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
Comments