The Genesian Theatre Company’s new theatre at Rozelle certainly has some elegant touches – a rich dark teal colour scheme, plush seats, good sightlines and a lovely traditional red curtain. What it doesn’t have is sterling acoustics, nor a stage with any depth. These deficits may be the inevitable outcome of converting an old church hall.
To launch its new building, the company has staged J.B. Priestley’s classic drama, An Inspector Calls (1945). This period piece – English Edwardian, monied northerners (the Birling family) – commences with a warm-hearted engagement celebration and proceeds via the slow dissection of upper middle-class hypocrisy, with an outcome that pits Edwardians (the parents) against their post war inheritors (the children) via complicity in the suicide of a young woman.
Directed by Ali Bendall and Mark Bull, this production tries to insert a sense of gothic horror – demonic, strangulated vocal interventions and the flickering candles of hell – that undercuts the dark, sinuous and rigorously logical interrogations of the Inspector, he who makes a sudden interruption at the festive table to announce the horrific death. It felt like children’s theatre had invaded this classic play. As Charlotte Sleigh argues, Goole is almost “a scientist, tracing out the facts of the case …He calmly goes about discovering the true facts, making explanations of the past … and predictions into the future.”
As Inspector Goole, Vincent Andriano is devilishly handsome, but his sudden outbursts of
extreme shouting, accompanied by the flickering wall lights, cheapens the slow build that Priestly has conjured. This is a production that doesn’t trust the writer, so feels the need to signpost its mood shifts in a very heavy-handed way. On stage right, individual family portraits, strangely coloured, are spotlight when it is their subjects turn to be interviewed (just in case we hadn’t worked out whose turn it was). By Act 2 the full family portrait on the back wall has fallen to a rakish angle (the decline has begun), as do the stage rear curtains and pelmet at the beginning of Act 3 (disorder is complete). The directors seem afraid to let the audience work things out in their own time, following Priestley’s clarifying words.
The Inspector constantly checks his watch (Priestly makes one such mention) as though god and the devil have only allotted him so much time to unmask each character’s guilt. He is in a scarifying hurry to dole out his pre-ordained justice for those who contributed to the suicide of the poor young woman. When the pendulum of the grandfather clocks drops awkwardly inside the base of the grandfather clock, we know that time is up! Andriano couldn’t quite pace and reverberate the gravity of his final speech - “One Eva Smith has gone…” - reminding us that this role had been trusted to the eloquence of a young Ralph Richardson in the first English production (1946).
The patrician of the Birling family – self-made industrialist Arthur – often seems hewn from the earth – compact, grounded in his success and wealth – but in this production, David M Bond was very uncomfortable in Act 1, failing to deliver the gravitas of this character. His ill-fitting costume didn’t help – channelling as it did images of Batman’s opponent The Penguin and possibly Uncle Fester. Mannerisms crept into his assumption – including the excessive petting of his lapels as he ambled across the dining room. He did, however, spring to life in Act 3 when, seated and drinking the port, his calculating mind began to obsess on the possibility that the family’s horrendous evening might have been a mirage, a prank, even though everyone present has admitted to monstrous behaviour. There were some minor cuts to his Act 1 speeches.
His daughter, Sheila, the younger generation confounded by the evening’s confessions, was given with grit and excellent diction by Rebecca Liquorish. She tackled the character’s self-awakening with a trajectory that was believable – as were her interactions with each member of the festive table – all expertly nuanced. Her feistiness hinted at the possibility that she could potentially emerge as an upper-class suffragette.
Gerald Croft, her fiancée – was played by Simon Pearce. He looked dashing in his tight-fitting tails, and presented an interesting portrait of the young, entitled man (“easy, well-bred”) who is caught unaware by his emotions when he learns that his former mistress is now dead.. If he couldn’t quite establish the Edwardian sense of entitlement that his class would have exuded - he did enact with clarity some of fraught interchanges with his potentially ex-fiancé. Unfortunately, the acoustics and his soft voice didn’t always project fully into this small auditorium.
As Sybil Burling Annabel Cotton had a strong clear voice, but didn’t quite capture the stance of being “her husband’s social superior” nor the corseted energy of her character (“a rather cold women” who must be coaxed into sipping a small glass of port) – though her heightened denunciation of the cad who had made the working-class girl pregnant built momentum nicely. She could also essay the smugness of her class when the threat of public humiliation seems to evaporate in Act 3 – though she couldn’t quite discover the relief below the bravado. She and her daughter played well against each other – as the unmasked Sheila tried to warn the masked Sybil of her impending fate under the forensic attentions of the Inspector.
Her son Eric (Harry Charlesworth) was boyish and handsome but lacked insight into the essential anger and alcoholism of his character. His shirt fronting of his mother in Act 3 was dramatic but needed to be embedded in the shifting sands of an unstable personality (“half shy, half assertive”) The fact that we only saw the back of head at the beginning of Act 1 when he is over-imbibing did not help establish his character. And, again, the poor acoustics of the theatre seemed to defeat many of his soft grained words. This character needs a more deeply febrile quality, enacting the brooding desperation at the heart of his experience.
The maid, Edna, was simply played - with due deference and clarity - by Meredith Blee.
The staging was extraneously odd. The furniture was early 20th century, as were the costumes (rich hues for the ladies), but the portrait of each family member was almost bizarrely post-modern in photoshop mode, hanging awkwardly and garishly lit, as though this might be a metaphorical House of Ussher.
There were a few timing mishaps with telephone rings, while the tableau that opened Act 2 and Act 3 seemed to take forever to be lit. Unlike some other productions of this work, music or soundscape did not play any important role. The ultimate denouement, when the telephone makes one final intervention, was unfortunately a little sluggish. Arthur Birling couldn’t quite manage the panic-stricken note – nor could the others give us a sense of being “guilty and dumbfounded”.
All over, a modestly enjoyable production of a classic play, but hardly the trumpets blazing production that a new theatre might have deserved, and what a pity about the acoustics.
Genesian Theatre Company, Packer Theatre, Rozelle Sydney, January 12, 2025
Gar Jones
To launch its new building, the company has staged J.B. Priestley’s classic drama, An Inspector Calls (1945). This period piece – English Edwardian, monied northerners (the Birling family) – commences with a warm-hearted engagement celebration and proceeds via the slow dissection of upper middle-class hypocrisy, with an outcome that pits Edwardians (the parents) against their post war inheritors (the children) via complicity in the suicide of a young woman.
Directed by Ali Bendall and Mark Bull, this production tries to insert a sense of gothic horror – demonic, strangulated vocal interventions and the flickering candles of hell – that undercuts the dark, sinuous and rigorously logical interrogations of the Inspector, he who makes a sudden interruption at the festive table to announce the horrific death. It felt like children’s theatre had invaded this classic play. As Charlotte Sleigh argues, Goole is almost “a scientist, tracing out the facts of the case …He calmly goes about discovering the true facts, making explanations of the past … and predictions into the future.”
As Inspector Goole, Vincent Andriano is devilishly handsome, but his sudden outbursts of
extreme shouting, accompanied by the flickering wall lights, cheapens the slow build that Priestly has conjured. This is a production that doesn’t trust the writer, so feels the need to signpost its mood shifts in a very heavy-handed way. On stage right, individual family portraits, strangely coloured, are spotlight when it is their subjects turn to be interviewed (just in case we hadn’t worked out whose turn it was). By Act 2 the full family portrait on the back wall has fallen to a rakish angle (the decline has begun), as do the stage rear curtains and pelmet at the beginning of Act 3 (disorder is complete). The directors seem afraid to let the audience work things out in their own time, following Priestley’s clarifying words.
The Inspector constantly checks his watch (Priestly makes one such mention) as though god and the devil have only allotted him so much time to unmask each character’s guilt. He is in a scarifying hurry to dole out his pre-ordained justice for those who contributed to the suicide of the poor young woman. When the pendulum of the grandfather clocks drops awkwardly inside the base of the grandfather clock, we know that time is up! Andriano couldn’t quite pace and reverberate the gravity of his final speech - “One Eva Smith has gone…” - reminding us that this role had been trusted to the eloquence of a young Ralph Richardson in the first English production (1946).
The patrician of the Birling family – self-made industrialist Arthur – often seems hewn from the earth – compact, grounded in his success and wealth – but in this production, David M Bond was very uncomfortable in Act 1, failing to deliver the gravitas of this character. His ill-fitting costume didn’t help – channelling as it did images of Batman’s opponent The Penguin and possibly Uncle Fester. Mannerisms crept into his assumption – including the excessive petting of his lapels as he ambled across the dining room. He did, however, spring to life in Act 3 when, seated and drinking the port, his calculating mind began to obsess on the possibility that the family’s horrendous evening might have been a mirage, a prank, even though everyone present has admitted to monstrous behaviour. There were some minor cuts to his Act 1 speeches.
His daughter, Sheila, the younger generation confounded by the evening’s confessions, was given with grit and excellent diction by Rebecca Liquorish. She tackled the character’s self-awakening with a trajectory that was believable – as were her interactions with each member of the festive table – all expertly nuanced. Her feistiness hinted at the possibility that she could potentially emerge as an upper-class suffragette.
Gerald Croft, her fiancée – was played by Simon Pearce. He looked dashing in his tight-fitting tails, and presented an interesting portrait of the young, entitled man (“easy, well-bred”) who is caught unaware by his emotions when he learns that his former mistress is now dead.. If he couldn’t quite establish the Edwardian sense of entitlement that his class would have exuded - he did enact with clarity some of fraught interchanges with his potentially ex-fiancé. Unfortunately, the acoustics and his soft voice didn’t always project fully into this small auditorium.
As Sybil Burling Annabel Cotton had a strong clear voice, but didn’t quite capture the stance of being “her husband’s social superior” nor the corseted energy of her character (“a rather cold women” who must be coaxed into sipping a small glass of port) – though her heightened denunciation of the cad who had made the working-class girl pregnant built momentum nicely. She could also essay the smugness of her class when the threat of public humiliation seems to evaporate in Act 3 – though she couldn’t quite discover the relief below the bravado. She and her daughter played well against each other – as the unmasked Sheila tried to warn the masked Sybil of her impending fate under the forensic attentions of the Inspector.
Her son Eric (Harry Charlesworth) was boyish and handsome but lacked insight into the essential anger and alcoholism of his character. His shirt fronting of his mother in Act 3 was dramatic but needed to be embedded in the shifting sands of an unstable personality (“half shy, half assertive”) The fact that we only saw the back of head at the beginning of Act 1 when he is over-imbibing did not help establish his character. And, again, the poor acoustics of the theatre seemed to defeat many of his soft grained words. This character needs a more deeply febrile quality, enacting the brooding desperation at the heart of his experience.
The maid, Edna, was simply played - with due deference and clarity - by Meredith Blee.
The staging was extraneously odd. The furniture was early 20th century, as were the costumes (rich hues for the ladies), but the portrait of each family member was almost bizarrely post-modern in photoshop mode, hanging awkwardly and garishly lit, as though this might be a metaphorical House of Ussher.
There were a few timing mishaps with telephone rings, while the tableau that opened Act 2 and Act 3 seemed to take forever to be lit. Unlike some other productions of this work, music or soundscape did not play any important role. The ultimate denouement, when the telephone makes one final intervention, was unfortunately a little sluggish. Arthur Birling couldn’t quite manage the panic-stricken note – nor could the others give us a sense of being “guilty and dumbfounded”.
All over, a modestly enjoyable production of a classic play, but hardly the trumpets blazing production that a new theatre might have deserved, and what a pity about the acoustics.
Genesian Theatre Company, Packer Theatre, Rozelle Sydney, January 12, 2025
Gar Jones