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Episode 2: Theatre, text and adaptation with Toby Malone
73 Plays2 months ago
In this episode, we chat with the person that has lived the same childhood as me, was there for all of my earliest experiences and led me into my career and obsession with theatre. My brother, Dr Toby Malone.
Toby is currently the Research Impact Librarian at Toronto Metropolitan University, a career move he took after 10 years as an academic and Dramaturg. Toby started his career as an actor before moving to Toronto and completing his PhD at the University of Toronto. Toby has been in Toronto now for 22 years and has a beautiful family including my superstar niece, Bridie and nephew, Cormac.
Most recently, Toby has undertaken the task of creating WAKE: A Cold Reading of Finnegans Wake from beginning to end. A highly entertaining podcast that has Toby and his writing partner slogging through the text. It’s well worth a listen.
Toby and I go through a wide ranging chat in this episode and I’ve added all the links to my substack: https://heregoesnothingpod.substack.com. Enjoy.
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Transcript
Theatre's Evocative Experience
00:00:07
Speaker
You enter the dark room. Take your comfortable, velvet-covered seat. The conversations around you turn to murmurs as the house lights are dimmed and the curtain is raised. The lights on stage come up and the performance starts. It's a well-known idea, but you're enthralled, sitting with a crowd but having your own personal experience.
00:00:31
Speaker
There's nothing more evocative, personal, and connected than being at the theatre.
Theatre's Historical and Cultural Significance
00:00:37
Speaker
As an audience member, you play your role. You applause, you gasp, and sometimes you cry. Theatre as an art form is thousands of years old. It is present in most cultures and has prevailed over time. The experience of a live performance is like no other. Most can remember their first time at the theatre and how it moved them.
00:00:59
Speaker
Our connection to the performing arts is at the core of connection to creativity. As a child, we perform for our parents, made up plays or dances, and as are adults in the workplace, some may say we're always on show.
00:01:13
Speaker
This episode gets to the heart of the performing arts and what it means, of how text and adaptation can ensure a work can live on for centuries.
Introducing Dr. Toby Malone
00:01:23
Speaker
Welcome to Here Goes Nothing. I'm your host, Georgia Malone. Today we talk to someone who shares my long-held connection to the arts and was alongside me throughout my childhood, my brother, Dr Toby Malone.
00:01:37
Speaker
Toby, former actor of stage and screen, enthusiastic late 90s mascot for the Fremantle Dockers, and leader of the University Dramatic Society's much lauded netball team, joins me to discuss what he knows best, theater.
00:01:53
Speaker
Toby has been living in Canada for over 20 years, developing an impressive back catalogue of performances, plays and dramaturgy work, and most recently has entered the world of library services. Join Toby and I for the next hour as we explore our involvement in the theatre and how it has shaped us.
Impact of Theatre on Personal Lives
00:02:10
Speaker
Anyway, let's get started. Here goes nothing.
00:02:18
Speaker
In this episode, we discuss theatre, plays and text with former actor, former academic, dramaturg, and now librarian, Toby Malone, who also happens to be my brother. Welcome, Toby. Thanks, Jordy. Nice to be here. Toby is based literal on the literal other side of the world in Toronto. So it's very early in the morning for me and very end of the day for you. What better time to have a chat? Exactly. Exactly. I will skip dinner for you anytime, Jordy.
00:02:49
Speaker
and So Toby and I have both fallen or leapt into creative industries as our careers. ah For me, it didn't feel on purpose, but rather as just as a given, as it's always been part of our lives.
Early Theatre Memories and Family Influence
00:03:00
Speaker
For you, Toby, what was the first or most meaningful experience that you've had in the with the arts?
00:03:06
Speaker
Oh, well, the first and most meaningful are different things. um I had memories of being taken to the theater a lot when we were kids. I had this very distinctive memory, and I can't have been any more than three or four, of showing up at our grandmother's house on Lyon Street in Cottoslow and being told we were being taken to the Pirates of Penzance at His Majesties, where we sat right in the garden. It was 1984. That was in 1984, so.
00:03:32
Speaker
Oh, OK, so I was six. OK, fair enough. So yes, so I have a very distinctive memory of being shown showing up and and being told we were going to see the Pirates of Penzance and being thrilled by by that. um And it was always something that was around. Mum always had CDs of musical music musicals that she she liked, like Chess and Les Mis and Fan of the Opera. And that was always playing in the cast. So theatre was always part of the deal, um but it wasn't until I was about 11 or 12 that I got actually into it. I liked doing it at school, but it was we were living in Canberra and we both got involved with Canberra Youth Theatre. And that really felt like a really nice creative outlet and ah my first real time performing in front of an audience. And that ah felt like I was able to create something and then was able to
00:04:29
Speaker
really focus my personality in on that and so then that was. I remember, I remember the Cadbury Theatre and yeah the work, the the devised work that you created. Yeah. With your friend, I can't remember who it was.
00:04:42
Speaker
That was Damon Rayner. Yeah. And the the crazy thing is the first theatre I ever did on stage in my life was a a mime,
00:04:54
Speaker
a slow motion mime about a man having a really bad day and everything that was, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. And and it did badly. And we ended up being this little interstitial moments in between a longer place. And but I can't quite believe that was the first thing I ever did, but we created this thing and were given free reign to do whatever we want. And so it was, um yeah, the theatre kind of grabbed me pretty early on, but I think it was inevitable because our grandmother was was a theatre person. She was involved in repertory theatre and then mum was involved in the arts and our cousins and our uncle and aunt and everyone, they're all musicians. I i think it was kind of inevitable that the arts was going to get us.
Significant Theatre Experiences
00:05:38
Speaker
Yeah. And mum mum would talk about how she'd save up money and take us to shows. i We take, you know, one at a time. So buy two tickets. So she'd take one of us to see different shows. And then the big thrill or the treat of being all taken to see Cats in 1997 in Sydney. I remember that being an extremely big deal.
00:06:02
Speaker
ah seminal moment in my life, eight-year-old, that show was just everything. I'm talking about it the other day and about how dated it is and it's so 80s and it's just, but it's such an important, I mean, a work that was the most, it's the longest-running show on Broadway, wasn't
Adaptation and Relevance in Theatre
00:06:19
Speaker
it?
00:06:19
Speaker
it I think it's been broken now. It was broken my fan of the opera, but it was, um yeah. And seeing it again, seeing it more recently, yeah, it is a little bit tired, ah but it's of its time and it's it's important. and And those, I mean, getting In terms of adaptation, ah what Katz was able to achieve in terms of taking a T.S. Eliot book of poems and turning that into that amazing dance piece with all of the costumes and and makeup and and all that kind of stuff, you can look past the fact that it's all a little bit cheesy now and and just enjoy it. so And then I remember you you ah
00:07:00
Speaker
All I remember about that really was was was two things, was you went and patted a cat. Do you remember that? Victoria, the white chinchilla. They got handed down the row and patted the cat. And then apparently, later you later on, Mum told us that we sang at the top of our lungs all the way through. We just weren't aware. Which is quite topical now that with Wicked coming out and people being banned in the movie movie theaters from singing. Right. Yeah. It's actually like, you know, PSAs is before the film starts. Do not sing. Wow, that's, that's not, that's against the the spirit of of what the theatre is, I think. Exactly. So yeah, I mean, theatre, I love theatre. And if I was ever to kind of talk about what art form for me is kind of the central one, and it's been, it is theatre. um Mostly because, yeah, went to it from a very young age and
00:07:55
Speaker
double performing in it it from from high school. um And there's nothing greater than really good theater and there's nothing worse than really bad theater. I've seen a lot of really bad theater.
Toby's Theatre Background
00:08:07
Speaker
So in this conversation about theater, what makes you most qualified, Toby, to have this discussion?
00:08:16
Speaker
were qualified. I mean, I think I'm mostly qualified because I'm your brother and you decided to um put me first. um I think you spoke to plenty of people who are p plenty qualified in lots of different areas. I mean, I have a long background in theatre, I ah jumped around in lots of different ways. And so I spent a lot of time at high school doing, I took it very seriously at high school, I was captain of drama at Scotch College and in theatre and I was in the school musical every year. And I did school musicals at all the girls' schools around town, including one with you at your school when you were in year 10, I think. Yes, music version of As You Like It. That's right. Written by Ian Grandage. Ian Grandage.
00:08:55
Speaker
and um ah Yeah, and so I took it very seriously. And then when I left high school, I decided that I wasn't going to do theater anymore. I wanted to take university seriously, but it took me about 10 minutes to at university before I got dragged into UDS. And and that time at UDS, the University of Germanic Society at UWA, was kind of this golden era where There was Tim Minchin and there was Toby Schmitz and there was Genevieve Hegne and then there was ah Belinda Bromelow and Christian Barrett Smith and David Riding and all these people who wound up, you know, Jimmy Evans, people who had just incredible careers afterwards. And so all of
00:09:33
Speaker
all of the work that was happening then was pretty special. And so being able to be thrown into that, which wasn't exactly professional, but kind of felt like we were taking it professionally in terms of how seriously we took the shows, meant that I ended up graduating with, I think I graduated with an English degree, but I did a lot of theater throughout my time at UWA. And toward the end of my time at UWA, I went away on exchange to Canada and did, spent my year away ah on exchange in the theater department.
Challenges of a Theatre Career
00:10:02
Speaker
where I met my wife who is also involved in the theater. And so we kind of ah set each other off and really egged each other on to make careers out of theater. So yeah, I mean, so the professional acting thing happened for a while. um And then after that,
00:10:20
Speaker
sort of fell down. I mean, it just became a lot of lot of extra hard work. I mean, the theatre is, yeah, David Mamet says that if you can think of a single other thing to do, other than theatre, then then you shouldn't do theatre because um because the only way to to really make it is to be fully obsessed by it. And, you know, I don't like listening to David Mamet very much, but he's right in terms of the idea of saying that just about everything else you choose is going to be easier than this because theatre is rejection all of the time. Unless you're like, unless you're a good stage manager when you're going to be working all the time. Yeah. ah Being backstage is is a different thing. But being on stage, it's so competitive and so hard that um I didn't really have the starch for it to really have a go at it.
00:11:10
Speaker
And that's why I made that choice very early. it's right In um first year, out of I think I auditioned for one show and went, what am I doing? And then ended up stage managing.
00:11:21
Speaker
Well, you were very organised, and so that really fit into what the theatre needed for that. And so you you got you got into stage management and then producing, and those really felt like the perfect uses for your skills. Whereas I was much more of the person who liked to be in the in the spotlight when it came to our family. For better or for worse, I mean, it was just one of those things where we had a performer and we had a ah Yeah, and we had the same thing in in my family now my son is is the star who is out front and wants everyone to look at him and and my daughter is much more
00:11:59
Speaker
conservative in terms of she's, she's so a little more shy and she's, but
Toby's Academic Journey in Theatre
00:12:05
Speaker
she's brilliant. She's brilliantly talented, but she also doesn't like anyone looking at her. So different personalities and people have different kinds of strengths. So, so so yes so i saw it's been theatre nonstop since I was about 12 years old. I ended up doing a PhD,
00:12:23
Speaker
um in theater studies and then into the teaching theater for a long time. I worked as a dramaturg. I mean, there's all sorts of different ways that I've gone in my career, but the theater's always been at the center of it, I think. i've And I've never really liked acting on film. I've done some playwriting, but that was never really it for me, but the theater was always that consistent. Did you ever direct? ah Not really. I directed as one show. to what I was teaching theater history at a university in New York,
00:12:53
Speaker
And I directed a show, one show, we did a live comic book, which is, you know, ah yeah ah i you know we don't have time to talk about it now, but we I directed this one thing, which ah ended up being quite successful, but that show opened on February 20th 2020. So week and a half later, the whole world closed down. So um ah luckily, that was a short run and that happened and then it went away but and I quite liked it. But ah ah no, I never really directed properly.
Community Theatre Dynamics
00:13:31
Speaker
I always thought that I probably should but it was never really a thing that I got towards.
00:13:36
Speaker
I thought lately they'd be interested in getting back into kind of theatre and what to just for something to do in my spare time. um And I was like, you know, I could act and I could go to community theatre and I just think,
00:13:53
Speaker
that That ship has sailed, like for most mostly living in a relatively small town. um Yeah. I know most people who work in the theatre. I don't know if it would be just it would drive me up the wall. It might, it might. I mean, you would have to put your ego aside a little bit. And I mean, the ship has sailed in terms of certain kinds of roles that you'd be eligible for. For me, I'd be going, if I went back to the theatre, I'd be less auditioning auditioning to play Hamlet and more auditioning to play Claudius. I think i I'm sort of at that point now where I go, OK, I think I'd be moving into a new casting demographic. And, yeah ah you know, you'd have to be patient with people because some people are just doing it for fun. Some people are doing it for fun, but aren't very good at it.
00:14:41
Speaker
I spent a lot of time in Perth doing community theatre ah at places like up in the Quarry Amphitheatre and ah places like that and quite enjoyed doing those musicals. And there were a lot of people who were very good and there were a lot of people who were just, you know, they were working they were working day jobs and then they're coming to do something in the evening and they were all in their 60s and we're just sort of having fun and they weren't ever going to have a career. But they were having fun with it. And now that was also a big part of it is that it was so inclusive. And so some people were coming to audition and would never had a hope of getting a lead role because that's not who they are, but they were just really happy about it. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think this for me, it would be like, just the relationships I have in the sector now and the people I know and I just I don't think I could get away with it anonymously. um Well, probably not anonymously. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Meghan and I talk often about about, oh, maybe when the kids move out, maybe we can go and join a community theatre group and stuff. But I think I would like to go back to Shakespeare. I think I would like to perform Shakespeare again. ah I'm not sure about being in South Pacific again or something. no I think I did Follow Spot on that show and I was terrible at it. I never knew how to do it. never No one ever showed me how to do it. I just made it up. it's not mean That's so interesting though, isn't it?
Chaos and Improvisation in Theatre
00:16:08
Speaker
Because that's so much of what theatre is, is that sometimes you'll be an apprentice to someone who knows what they're doing, but sometimes you just sort of pitched in and said,
00:16:16
Speaker
go over there and when, when the lights go down, run out there and grab that set and bring it back here and put it here and then go over, you know, and so and I remember doing, um ah yeah being an ASM at the Quarry on a production of Juicify Superstar that Tim Inchin was in, and um And having no idea what to do as an ASM, just running around being told what to do and and moving things and stashing things. And um it really gives you a great appreciation for people who know what they're doing. or Or doing like UDS, that was so good about what UDS was, was I did ended up doing sound design a couple of times on some really small things that I had no idea what I was doing. And it made me very clear that sound design was not for me.
00:17:01
Speaker
ah But you had a chance to do a lot of different kinds of things or try different kinds of roles or acting in roles where you go, oh my gosh, I was 19 years old and I got to play the lead in Importance of Being Earnest. And I was at least 20 years to too young for that role. But now I'm like, what? I've got this incredible opportunity.
00:17:21
Speaker
And I think that there's a photo of you still on the wall at the Dolphin Theatre on that show. I hope it's always there. I believe it's a load-bearing photo now. think the gophin The dolphin needs it to stay upright. Take it off and the whole thing just collapses.
00:17:39
Speaker
I remember doing a show we did. ah It was a UDS show, but it was one of the first ones off-site, off-campus at the Racobites. Proteus Unleashed, it was a chaotic show um during Art Rage Festival in 1998, I think. um And I had to operate as well. um And we were doing all the audio cues, we were on cassette.
00:18:05
Speaker
And no one, no one told me, I don't understand how things were. Um, so it was using the numbers the as cue points, but of course you reset those numbers on a cassette. So then during a show, I use those numbers and it was complete chaos. They were completely out of, out of whack and it was just a disaster.
00:18:24
Speaker
But that's what theatre is, right? Is that kind of chaos that, I mean, there were so many artists like Brecht or Charles Marrowitz or, you know, Alfred Jarry or ah or the futurists, like all these these guys for whom chaos was the point. And at the point was to ah to show, say to the audience, feel something, feel, feel, feel. And if you're sitting back, like the the the the futurists, Marinetti and the futurists in the 1920s in Italy,
00:18:52
Speaker
that For them, they felt like the worst sound you could hear in the theater was the sound of docile applause. And if people were sitting there going, very good, yes, well done, then you failed because no one's felt something. But what they wanted to hear was they wanted to hear people booing. They wanted to hear people throwing things. They wanted to hear yeah enrage the audience. And so they would do things like smear glue on the seats so that the people couldn't get out of their chairs or that they'd hide rotten meat around the audience and then like, like give everyone the same ticket number and so make them fight in the auditorium beforehand. So but by the time the show was on, they would just go at each other. And for him, he was like, yes, feel something, feel something. And then that's what the theatre is supposed to be. And so the idea of Proteus unleashed with the wrong sound cues, which probably at the time felt like the world was going to end because you messed up a thing, probably made it more interesting. Or it gave it, yeah it I mean, that's why we do it live, right? I mean, if we it otherwise you would
00:19:51
Speaker
All going to a room and record it on ah on a ah video camera and then everyone would go to the pub and then you would say to anyone who wants to see it, I'll watch this video. I mean, that's why live theater still exists because you could perfect it in a studio and then show everyone. But what's the point? The point is the liveness.
Teaching Theatre History
00:20:11
Speaker
The point is the immediacy. and As you can tell, I'm getting excited because this is how um and I used to teach theatre history and this is how I used to go at my students, like trying to convince them that theatre was important. um But yeah, that that kind of chaos is is part of part of the ah point. I mean, it's where it all came from. Ancient Greece is chaos. Yeah. that I think that show I won my only
00:20:35
Speaker
It was the only Dolly award at the UDS awards night, which is still going. I saw photos up on the UBS Facebook the other day of the Dollies. It wasn't quite as raucous as I think ours was. Jim Litchin gave me that award because that was his show. Produce and Least was him and Justin. His show. Yeah. Yeah. I won a Dolly for MVP of the Knitball team.
00:21:06
Speaker
It was a great team. really you We won the championship one year. We did. yeah but what What was the time of the team? The UDS maulers. Maulers, that's right. So dumb. I think you won MBB because you used to just like convince and flirt with the umpires. The umpires. When two of the umpires came and played for our team. Such a charameter. It's all theatre. It's all theatre. It's all theatre. I mean, we thought we're the wimpiest club on campus. Let's play netball.
Shakespeare's Textual Evolution
00:21:38
Speaker
And we did. That kind of chaos is the point.
00:21:42
Speaker
Yeah, so you you said before that, you know, come back to Shakespeare a lot. And so that was what your PhD was on, was textualisation. Richard III, is that correct? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's it's it was I got kind of really interested in the way that because we have a live script.
00:22:02
Speaker
ah e an audience who sees the play on Tuesday is ah seeing a different play to the audience who sees it on Wednesday, because an actor forgets a line or an actor interprets a line in a different way. I mean, it's one of those things where if you interpret the same lines in the same way every time,
00:22:17
Speaker
then you'll drive yourself crazy over the run. So you need to keep yourself new. So you have to change it up a little bit. And so that's going to change a whole bunch of things. Audience will laugh in a different time, different spot. An audience will um ah give you a round of pause at a certain moment and it'll change the timing.
00:22:32
Speaker
So it's essentially a different play. And so I became interested in how plays changed over the course of time ah throughout a a run of a production. And so that's hard to quantify. There would be some. So at the Stratford Festival in here up here in Canada.
00:22:49
Speaker
they have a very strong stage managerial department where in the archives they actually keep track of all of the line changes and things like that over the course of ah of ah of a whole run. I was doing it, what I was doing is I was looking at different interpretations of the same play over the course of generations and sort of saying, okay, what was cut? And if something was cut, did that reflect uh what people were interested in at that time in that generation and you know is is it more uh complete or is it uh you know in in the uh in the restoration period uh the play Richard III was essentially rewritten uh to become a whole new play because it was seemed to be
00:23:29
Speaker
too depressing and too mean and and ah the the character of Richard was ah impossible to sympathize with. So ah this a comedian and colleague Sibber rewrote the play to make him a heroic with Beth kind of character.
00:23:44
Speaker
um And so, yeah, so I wrote on about 13 or 14 different versions of Richard III over the course of 300 or so years. I took these things and so and really analyzed the the scripts. And for me, the minutia was always the point. It was always the tiny differences. And so I got really fixated because Shakespeare was never published in a single monumental edition. there's it was and the the the thing that we The mistake that we make about Shakespeare is that we always try to put him into the box of modern playwrights and modern playwriting process. And the modern playwriting process is usually a playwright sits alone in a room, writes down their play, sends it off to a dramaturg or a director. Maybe they'll workshop it. The play exists at the end. Whereas Shakespeare was not writing alone. like
00:24:33
Speaker
britain In in ah Shakespeare in Love, you see Josephine sitting by himself in a room writing perfect, perfect iambic pentameter and then delivering it scene by scene and saying, I'm not sure how it'll end, but here's Act Two, Scene Three, Go, which is nonsense. I mean, it's fun. it's I love that movie. but um But it's not how it worked, it was very collaborative and these plays would change over the course of time and so they would perform it one day and then they'd find a joke that worked and they'd and and then add it in and then it depended on when they wrote it down, when did they write it down to say okay this is a version and so sometimes people would write down a copy version and sell it illegally and it would be kind of incomplete and and inaccurate and so they'd have to publish another version to make it
00:25:16
Speaker
um to say, okay, this is the official version. And then sometimes they would change things, take things out. Sometimes they would perform a version in court that would be different to the version in the playhouse because the king was ah or the Queen was interested in different things to the playhouse audiences. um And sometimes the clowns would go out on stage and would make stuff up. And so they would just Improvise, and they would go and riff. I mean, Hamlet says it in the advice to the players, those of you who have played the clowns, speak no more than to sit down for you. And so it's very clear that he was saying that to his own actors, saying, dudes, write, say the things that's written down, stop improvising. Because then sometimes, like if you look at, you know, certain ah speeches by some of the clowns, like in As You Like It, Touchdown comes on and has this whole speech about how he got into a duel with a man over the length of his beard.
00:26:06
Speaker
And he went through the seven stages of dueling and you read the reader and you think this is absolute like what is happening here? This is these are funny old jokes. What happens if you cut this speech? But if you cut that speech, Rosalind doesn't have time to change into her dress. So she needs time to change into her dress. She's left. She needs time to change. your So clearly Shakespeare has said to one of the clowns, go out there and do your beard.
00:26:31
Speaker
stand up piece and just cover and cover this time and it's likely Shakespeare had his hand obviously I'm not saying he didn't write Shakespeare but but the idea that um that I found it fascinating that Shakespeare could be defined by just happened to be written down that day because scripts didn't exist the way they exist now. And so, yeah. And is that why there's so much, you know, challenges or conspiracy theories around whether Shakespeare has actually wrote Shakespeare? Yeah, absolutely. Because we continue to think of it as a single man writing every single word. I guarantee you, Shakespeare didn't write every single word and in in the folio, but he wrote
00:27:12
Speaker
a hell of a lot of them, and he was definitely there the whole time. I mean, there's no coincidence that Shakespeare's plays stopped being written three years before the man William Shakespeare died. If it was a whole company who were just putting all these things together, then they would have continued doing them after Shakespeare went back to Stratford in 1613. So Yeah. I mean, I think the the authorship um conspiracy is nonsense because I think if someone said, oh, we discovered Christopher Marlowe wrote Shakespeare, everyone would be like, that's very interesting. And there'd be a whole lot of Shakespeareans who'd be out of, it you know, out of a job or would be very sad. And there'd be a bunch of Marloweans who'd be very pleased because there are plenty of things to write about. And maybe the tourist industry in Stratford-on-Avon would take a hit. But I mean, what does it change? We've still got the plays. yeah You could maybe read into them and find new stuff. But
00:28:01
Speaker
The point is the plays are the place and that's the point and so so yeah so I spent a lot of time working on. On how these plays were cut and changed and what changed over the course of time and but she's always been my guy I've always
Family Achievements and Dramaturgy
00:28:18
Speaker
really found a fascination I think I backed it in.
00:28:22
Speaker
I don't know, 12 or 13 of the plays ah to varying degrees of success. um My one, but maybe my greatest, ah we we keep mentioning them, but one of my greatest um ah claims to fame is that I was asked in 2002, Claire Hooper asked me to play Hamlet in her production of Hamlet.
00:28:42
Speaker
and I couldn't because I was moving to Canada, so she asked Tim Minchin to do it and then- He wouldn't have the career that he has today. Exactly. I don't think that's the case, but when he performed at the Royal Albert Hall with all of the other all the other Hamlets with David Tennant and all of those guys, and he was like, I played Hamlet back in Australia. I was always like, oh yeah, so you did. Because I couldn't, so well done. I don't know, that may be a profitable bit. You're welcome.
00:29:06
Speaker
ah And so, yeah, so going, you know, that kind of interesting that the cutting of plays that you have, you like, every member of our family has published a book, every member but me. I've published a couple of books. I've written a couple, yeah. yeah um um One yeah specifically around cutting plays for performance. What was the kind of driver to do that? That's a fun one, because I...
00:29:35
Speaker
i When I was at grad school, when I was at U of T at University of Toronto, um one I was in a dramaturgy class and I didn't really know what dramaturgy was. i sort of I showed up to dramaturgy class thinking, maybe this class will teach me what dramaturgy is because I can never get a straight answer out of anyone about what dramaturgy is. And so the first day, we showed up in the first class and this and the professor said, so what is dramaturgy? And she looked around the room.
00:29:59
Speaker
And one person put their hands up and said, oh, it's like ah research. And she went, yeah, it could be. And someone else said, oh, it's say it's helping playwrights. And she went, oh, yeah, good idea. And then someone else said, oh, it's ah analysis. And she went, oh, interesting. And we went around the room and everyone gave their opinions. And at the end of the class, someone said, OK, but what's the answer? And she went, oh, I don't know.
00:30:19
Speaker
yeah And i was so mad I was so mad by that at the time, I was so frustrated that she didn't tell us the answer. But of course, the the reason she didn't tell us the answer is because there is no one answer. The answer is the dramaturgy is developed and and defined by the specific dramaturg. And so every dramaturg does things differently. And part of that, and I didn't really know what that was going to mean, but part of that class was we had to do a an internship at a company somewhere. So we had to go and find a company who would give us 20 hours worth of work on something in the city. And I reached out to Canadian Stage Company, which is one of the companies here in the city who do um it's Shakespeare in the Park. And so I went in there and I i' know i'd worked there in the past in front of house. And so I kind of knew some of the people.
00:31:07
Speaker
And they brought me in for this production of Comedy of Errors, and which is a play I hadn't worked on at that point. And they were like, okay, come in, you're gonna meet the director and the dramaturg, and we're gonna cut the play. And I was like, oh, okay, interesting, because I hadn't been involved with that process before.
00:31:22
Speaker
And so she we sat down and she said, OK, this is what I want it to look like. We need to cut 700 lines or whatever it was. It was was some number. And it needs to come in at one hour and 45 minutes without an intermission. And we need to make sure there's only eight actors because that's all we're going to have. So we're going to have to do some doubling. And so they printed out a script for each of us and then we went away. And she said, just go away and just um cut the first act or fight or whatever it was. Maybe cut the whole thing, but just try. And so I came back to that. um
00:31:54
Speaker
to that to to that company the next week with my cut and thinking, oh, well, they just gave it to me just to sort of keep me busy. But there's not really any job here. And the director said, OK, well, the first scene is really long because this is all exposition and it's all about this guy who got arrested and he's telling the story about his kids got um ah separated or he's looking for his kids. What are we going to do? You know, this is too long. What do we do? And ah and the director said, this is what I did. And the du drama and the dramaturg is like, oh, that's interesting. and That's very different to what I did.
00:32:23
Speaker
um And for both of them were like, yeah, it's not quite right. And they both looked at me and they said, well, what did you do? And I went, oh, you're actually interested in my opinion. I didn't. Okay. So yeah, what I did, I took what I actually thought it to be interesting to move these two lines from down here up here. Cause then that gives us a way in. It turns it into a bit more of a dialogue as opposed to this big slab of text. And I changed this and deleted this amount, but you know, and they both went, oh, that's great. Yeah, let's do that. And that, and suddenly it was in the script and I was like, what?
00:32:49
Speaker
you're listening to me. And then after about an hour, the dramaturg says, I'm going to get to another meeting, but you've got this, all right? ah you you you You can cover this, right? So it was me and the director cutting this. And I think, I mean, I was, I don't know how old I was, I was young and and stupid and, and so but I got a lot of confidence from that. And i cut so I cut the comedy of errors. And then the following year I came back and cut Midsummer Night's Dream, which was the first time I'd ever actually written Shakespeare, which is a production where i needed we needed a line.
00:33:17
Speaker
um to to to cover something. There was some cut that we'd made and we're like, we need to make Block A and Block Bocking work together. We need a new line. Can you write a line of ionic pentameter fit in there? And I was like, oh, crikey. Okay. And so I wrote, so I wrote this line of ionic pentameter and no one noticed it.
00:33:34
Speaker
And then the reviews, and then we ended up cutting like 40% of the script, like just like shredded it, yeah but did it in such a way that went i ah there was a a review that came out in the newspaper that said the um the The script has been trimmed, but not butchered. And I cut that out. I was like, this is this is all I need because I cut 40 percent of the script, but you think it was only been trimmed. I must have done my job right. Yeah. And that was so successful that the following year they just remounted the same production. So I cut myself out of a job because the following year I was like, oh, OK, there's nothing for me to cut. So then I talked to a friend of mine at another theater company who was doing a production of once say Romeo and Juliet.
00:34:14
Speaker
And I said, you want to cut? And so I gave him this like really out there cut. And so I was just basically having fun with, because I think the Shakespeare's in the public domain, you can do whatever you want to him. Do you get credits and and royalties from once you do that sort of stuff? Or is that? You can. You just kind of. hand off I did a new version of Hamlet, um which has been produced, and and i and I collected royalties on that. But generally, I can't... I mean, it's an interesting thing. So cutting plays as a relatively informal process. No one really knows how to do it. It's just like what you're talking about before with your tape deck, is that no one teaches you how to cut. It's... Everyone's just like, well, just go over them and try it.
Cutting and Adapting Shakespeare
00:34:53
Speaker
And so I cut for this theater company, you know, four or five times and then
00:34:59
Speaker
um Yeah, so so it was just about learning and I think I i had completed a number of different kinds of cuts and I did one cut, the end of that, that I ah went to but to Scotland and and produced this Hamlet cut that I had done um and was performing, you know, just just ah working on these different approaches to the cuts and trying to challenge myself and do different things and do interesting things.
00:35:23
Speaker
um And then I was, when I was a professor, I was teach i was ah the dramaturgy coordinator at the American College, the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. And I was there at this ah meeting and this woman came up to me who, she knew me, I didn't know her. And she said, I hear you like to cut Shakespeare. And I went, oh, yeah, i do you know i i of course. And she said, I'm doing a production of Richard III and I'm thinking of cutting Pomfret.
00:35:50
Speaker
And I went, what are you talking about? You can't pomfret. And pomfret is this scene where the ah relatives of Queen Elizabeth get executed and they reflect on how sad it is that they got executed. And, you know, it's this this little scene that sort of shows how Richard is taking more and more power. And we got into this big debate about how Well, you have you you can't cut that scene. If you cut that scene, then you lose this. and But yeah, i read but we have a bunch of high school students who are in our audience. They don't care about Pomfret. We're going to cut it for time and things like that. And so she was she's mostly a director. So we got got talking about what cutting plays meant to each of us. And someone's next to us said, you guys should teach a workshop on this. And we went, oh, good idea. And so we so at that college theatre festival, we taught a workshop on on
00:36:36
Speaker
on um on how to cut plays, we call it the first thing we do, let's cut all the lawyers, which is which is a reference to Henry the sixth part, <unk>s three three, two, Henry the sixth part, three, maybe, I don't know, probably part two, actually it's Jack Cade, you know, in in a but where they say the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. So we decided we were going to, um And we so we taught this workshop and went very well and we went back and forth about different cuts and what we disagreed on and everyone loved it and at the end someone said this was so fun. Is there a book you can recommend about how to cut Shakespeare? And we went, yeah, yeah, of course there is. I don't know what it is. We've never actually read it because we haven't. But let me get back to you. So we looked it up.
00:37:20
Speaker
And there was no book. No one had written about it. So I said to Ili, my co-author, I said, um do you want to write this book? ah We could write this book. This is um pretty easy. yeah it's So we um ended up ah pitching it to Routledge, who then bought. And we we ah ah We wrote this book in in the during the pandemic. We're never in the same room. We just wrote this thing. But yeah, just as a guide of how to cut Shakespeare, or how to cut theatre, how to cut plays. Because the thing is that's in the public domain, which is over 80 years old, depending on where you are, 80, 100 years old, you can do whatever you want with it. ah Whereas things that are more recent, you cannot. You have to.
00:38:06
Speaker
and there Do you feel like that process of cutting an adaptation allows that work to become relevant again and kind of like seen in the environment of today and kind of concerns around gender equality and intersectionality and all those kind of things that in enable of those works to become relevant? That's what I love about Shakespeare is is it's it's this canvas that you can paint on and figure out where you can interpret whatever you want through it because the texts are timeless. um So Yeah, absolutely absolutely. I mean, when Richard III was adapted by Colin Sipper in 1700, he did it because the play was essentially obscure, like it was obsolete. No one wanted to perform it because it was seen as a bad play. So why would we have this bad play? And so he adapted it to be relevant to the restoration audience and it became hugely successful through the performance of David Garrick, who performed that that version of the script. And
00:39:05
Speaker
after 150 years of performing this sort of more sanitized version of Richard III, they were able to return to Shakespeare and people were ready for the Shakespeare version again. They did the same thing with King Lear. Name Tate rewrote King Lear to give it a happy ending. They were happy ending Romeo and Juliet. There was a version of the Tempest called The Enchanted Island, which was completely there. did People would just go crazy rewriting these things. There was no copyright.
00:39:33
Speaker
But they were writing to what their audience wanted. And that was really important because it kept it alive. And that was one of the major yeah points of my my dissertation was that adaptation is often seen as a dirty word. It's often seen as, well, you've adapted it, so it must be worse. Or that whole thing of, well, it's it's not as good as the book.
00:39:52
Speaker
You know, and we've all said it. we've all We've all gone into a movie and then said, well, you know, I like the book better. You know, but you know, all the. It's a different work of art, technically. Same source material. It is. It is. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't call the film the Netflix adaptation of all the light. We cannot see any kind of work of art. I know that should never exist. Yes. it Piece of work, I would call it. Yeah. um But it sometimes you you need things that are able to exist in different media. And so, you know, to suggest that, you know, the Phantom of the Opera, Gasola Rue wrote that.
00:40:25
Speaker
novel, which isn't much of a novel, but then it was turned into horror films and then it was turned into Awesomeness. And then Lloyd Webber doing what he did with it. I mean, all these different lives. And we were talking before about how Cats was ah was of its time. Fan of the opera is exactly the same thing. It's all those synths. It's very clearly written for the early 80s. And you listen to it now and you go, oh, that's. But at the time, that was very cutting edge and very trendy.
00:40:51
Speaker
Yeah. um and But it was written for that time, whereas if he had written something that was true to Gaston LaRue, it wouldn't have hit and people wouldn't have been interested in it probably. And so I think adaptation is necessary. to and And like I said, in my thesis, the main point I made was adaptation, rather than being a dirty word, adaptation is actually necessary for the survival of text. It's very much like,
00:41:15
Speaker
um Richard Dawkins talks about the the selfish gene the and he he coined the word meme ah within that book where he talks about its cultural ah passing down this cultural information with shifts and shifts as if and I always say I'm gonna say to my kids all the time is that every single thing that you think is cool today.
00:41:36
Speaker
will be completely daggy to your next generation. Everything. Every single thing. It might come back. It's a very good chance that it'll be trendy and retro again. Is that because your son's listening to 90s music? yeah Oh, sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And ah ah and to the in the good and the bad, he because he'll listen to the Smashing Pumpkins and and Pearl Jam and they'll all smug and then he'll put on Limp Biscuit and I'll go, oh no.
Cultural Evolution and Theatre
00:42:00
Speaker
so um Yeah, I mean, but it is very much the idea like I don't think anyone's ever looked at a photo of themselves for 10 years and thought 10 years ago and thought, gee, I'm look at what I'm wearing. I look great. Yeah. You know, and it's just because the things that we wear and you go, wow, well our jeans are really high back then. That was weird. um like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so and so it's the same thing with culture. If you say this version of culture is the only version of culture, then then your audience might come with you you might get some audience who goes oh thank goodness we're doing the same old version of love om that's been done forever um but like i mentioned david garrick before and he was so revolutionary in the 18th century because he
00:42:49
Speaker
does He dared to change the style. And there was a style of acting that everyone did. And Garak came and he actually internalized character and sort of said, no, no, the inside, you can put the character inside and we can actually feel this character as opposed to just bellowing the words out. And within months of Garak appearing in London,
00:43:09
Speaker
everyone was doing his style and all these old dinosaurs were going, whoa, no, it's not the way it's always been done. And eventually they were all pushed out or all the silent film actors in the 1920s. Some of them could transition, but some of them couldn't speak. Yeah. So some of them had very thick accents and then and in ah the sitting in the rain. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, there's, um,
00:43:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think adaptation is absolutely necessary for the survival of text, because if you just say this version is how it's gonna... Like you look at Laurence Olivier, who was the greatest actor of the 20th century, without any doubt he was the greatest actor, but you watch him perform now and you think, Skye, this was the best.
00:43:52
Speaker
Yeah. But but hearing people who saw it in person, he was magnetic and he was so powerful. And what he did was was change the whole world. But if you see him perform now, you would be go you'd go, oh, come on, Grandad, just stop it. This is too much. Whereas because we're we're so used to the current acting style of everything is so internal and so minute.
00:44:15
Speaker
I think that they kind of that's also reflective in dance and and ballet and and those those ballet dancers of the early 20th century that were like still considered you know the best, amazing, yet their style and how they dance compared to ballet dancers of today or contemporary dancers. It's just, yeah, it feels like skill level or think you can know it it's hard to compare yeah these days because you know as things evolve,
00:44:42
Speaker
I'm talking about text and you're a little pat project pet
Exploring Joyce's Finnegan's Wake
00:44:48
Speaker
project. A little project that you're doing at the moment um is a little podcast called Wake, a cold reading of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. First question, are you mad? A little bit. ah little bit i mean I think I'm a bit of a completist. I was the kind of person who likes to just have read all the things. So I've read all of Shakespeare.
00:45:09
Speaker
I mean, that's not that's only 37 plays. But, you know, a lot of people will go, Oh, I didn't read Henry VIII. Well, I've read Henry VIII, just to say that I read. It's not a very good play. um It's fine. But and so for me, it was the same thing. Whereas James Joyce, we have Irish heritage going back. I mean, it's 150 years since our family lived in Ireland. But ah Still, yeah can we can still claim it a little bit. um but and So I've read ah Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist's Young Man and Ulysses all in its ascending order of difficulty. But Finnegan's Wake was the one that I hadn't read before and i it was um i had it I had a copy of it. I ended up donating a copy to Goodwill because I was like, I'm never going to read this thing because it's too hard. I tried reading it.
00:45:52
Speaker
And then I thought, no, I really do want to have read it. So I went and got a better copy ah with notes because I thought maybe I need ah was something that has good annotations. And I found that and tried again too hard. And then I thought I need to read it aloud, maybe to keep myself um accountable. But that never really worked. And so then I thought, actually, no, what I really need to do is put myself out there and into the world. And so along with my writing partner,
00:46:18
Speaker
we, I said to him, i I called him up and said, I think um I need to do this project and I think it needs to be a podcast because I don't think anyone will listen to it, but the point is going to be that I'm going to have to keep myself accountable. Cause if I know that if I do three episodes and then quit, then I'll know that I failed and then I'll, and that, that will bother me. So if I, if I record it, then I will finish it. Um, and so we started doing that in May of the, of 2024 and I mean, blow me down if people didn't start listening to it. And so we've we've got hundreds of listeners, which is crazy. I mean, i I understand why we have listeners, not for the quality of the reading, because the reading is horrible, because we are just cold reading and so we make mistakes, crazy or whatever. And we're not analyzing it. It's not in any kind of it's no great shakes, but
00:47:09
Speaker
What it is is it's an document. It's a document of us navigating this text and we talk a little bit about it and then we read and it's a cold read so we don't do any prep. We had a guest on last week who said, have you read this book? This is this an analysis of Finnegan's Wake and we laughed. with Of course not.
00:47:25
Speaker
yeah Why would we have done something as as as thoughtful as that? No, we're just reading it cold. And then we just tend to point out all the dirty jokes or all the funny noises or or whatever. um And yeah, and we're we're rolling our way through it. But the thing is, I think people like it because there is no complete copy of Finnegan's Wake in podcast form, because who would do this? It just happens to be in public domain in Canada, so we're not getting in trouble. And so it's one of those, whereas it is and but it it is under copyright in America right now. So yeah I think there probably will be more wakes that exist once it comes into ah public domain everywhere. But we're the first ones to really finish it as a podcast. I think other people have started and there may be other podcasts that, I mean, if they are, they're not very well indexed because I can't find that.
00:48:13
Speaker
um And there are books on tape versions and things like that, but we're 35 episodes in or something and we've read 500 plus pages of the book and we're probably going to finish it ah within the next month or so. Amazing. And then it's done. When you first started, I'm like, oh, this is going to go on for two years.
00:48:30
Speaker
Yeah, it could have it could have but I got kind of obsessive about it. And do you feel that you've read, as you said, to kind of get into it reading out initially thought about reading out loud is reading out loud actually you' now enabling you to find things in it? Yeah, 100% actually follows it.
00:48:47
Speaker
He's very good, this joy. yeah Someone should tell someone because, you know, I think I've uncovered a talent here. like he's He's brilliant. He's brilliant in the way that he works with the words, in the way that he finds these double meanings in he's working in multiple languages. And the fact that he wrote it all in hand, he was blind. He was blind by the end of his life. yeah he The thing things that were going on inside of his brain were incredibly remarkable. And he was, you know, he he um he's written this monumental thing that can be studied for the rest of all time and no one will come close to digging down to the the core of it. And I think that's what he wanted for immortality. but And that's possible with art, is that immortality is possible. Is that idea of writing the thing or doing the thing?
00:49:36
Speaker
is that you're contributing to this canon, this canon that we interact with. And so my reading is in no way a good reading of this script, but it doesn't matter because it's another approach to this, this tech. It's like saying, well, you can't perform Hamlet unless it's perfect and go, well, then no one will ever perform it. Everyone's got to have a shot at it. And sometimes there'll be good things and sometimes there'll be bad things. And That's kind of the part of it. Whereas us discovering, I often think to myself that Joyce would be very pleased with wake.
00:50:09
Speaker
my past, I don't think he, I think he would shake his head sometimes at some of our pronunciation or the mistakes we make or the fact that we, you know, make, we don't even, but we never make fun of it. We just, we, we, we kind of, we love the fact that it's this, I mean, and you appeared on wake, you read a chapter with us. How was that for you? Yeah, it was fun. It was kind of, yeah, it was, it was chaotic and and interesting. And I, yeah.
00:50:35
Speaker
I mean, you know, I'm, as I said, I haven't been a in a performance role for many, many years. So it's sometimes being able to kind of um do those things is like, oh, I kind of enjoy that. I'm actually not that bad. You you know him and you may not be a performer, but you're a reader.
Art's Transformative Power
00:50:52
Speaker
Yes, try to. um We were talking in the in episode, the first episode with Mum, I had a conversation around and and part of the reason why this podcast is called Here Goes Nothing. it's um There's this book that I read called Here Goes Nothing by Steve Topps and it's, well, it's complete chaos and I love it. But what drew me to it, to kind of talk about in this context, is the way that a piece of art and a piece of work can
00:51:23
Speaker
depending on where you're at in your life and when you're what how you're feeling or or what's going through your your life at that time, how the different impact that that work can have on you, di very different to what the author or the creator ever intended. But it is becomes a seminal moment that you um that really kind of transforms you and you can't stop thinking about it and kind of how that explores different ways.
00:51:47
Speaker
which is, you know, if you ever mention that to the author, they'd be like, oh, that's not, that's not really what I was thinking, but go for gold. um yeah And I found with that book, you know, it just kind of, I've listened to an interview with Steve Tolts, and he's very much talked about creating that book was about the process of writing the book. It wasn't necessarily about um the transformation idea around the afterlife and life and death and all these things that, you know, I read into it and kind of have taken from it. And um yeah, do you find is there anything, any kind of main, like a piece of work that you kind of can think of that really was transformative for you in that way? Yeah, i I think it's kind of inevitable that a piece of work is going to change depending on your own experience, like reading anything at all about
00:52:38
Speaker
um children after you've had kids, you're going to interpret through the eyes through the lens of your own kids. Or if you've had a bad breakup, then you know listening to Pearl Jam's Black is going to make you feel a certain kind of way, right? I mean, it's just that that you weren't feeling the previous week. um So we tend to latch on to meaning.
00:53:00
Speaker
in that way. um And for me as an expat, I mean, I've been away from Australia for 22 years, I've been gone since we moved back to Canada. So for me, the Australian stuff really gets me and that really In probably, I mean, I don't know, Australia is an incredibly, incredibly jingoistic country, where everyone's very much about, oh, we're Australia, and we're better than everyone else, and that's great. But when you're away from it for a long time, and then a lot of the idiom, and a lot of the phrases, a lot of the tone, I've, you know, having a chance to read Trent Dalton the last couple of years.
00:53:38
Speaker
um really sort of hits me in a different way, I think, than if I was living there. And it was around me all the time. And so a lot of what, and being able to watch, you know, adaptations, like Boy Solid Universe, the adaptation, really, really, I wasn't expecting much because I i enjoyed the book. I didn't, I liked Lola in the Mirror more, but I, um but I enjoyed Boy Solid Universe. And then the adaptation, I was sure they're going to mess it up and they didn't. And and it was, it was great. But yeah, I i think,
00:54:09
Speaker
You can interpret it however you need to interpret it and take from it the lesson that is going to be there for you. And if you were to say to the playwright or the author or the or the director, oh, this is what I got from it. Is that what you meant? They're nearly always going to be like, no, no but I mean, I mean, there's a part of a reason why it is That art is palimpsestuous, is that we are marking and remarking and gouging out our own meaning from what it is. um Every time you do something and you can, you know, you have a book that you love and you give it to someone and they didn't like, I know that I think my mum, I think mum said, had said that Here Goes Nothing was a book you struggle with.
00:54:54
Speaker
you know, and so you you're hitting it in a time that means more to you. um And being able to show that someone's like, Oh, my God, you got to read this, the best thing I've ever read, and then they read it and go, Oh, yeah, okay, it's all right. But I'm not concerned for me, I think. Yeah, Steve talks is especially, um, you know, in that talk conversation around Trent Dalton, I feel like, yeah, Steve talks as book refraction, the whole um is very similar.
00:55:22
Speaker
in construct to Boy Swallows Universe, but in a much more ah chaotic, um dirty kind of way. I'll put it on my Christmas list.
00:55:36
Speaker
Yeah, I'll say, oh, yeah, I'll just buy you all his books for Christmas and make read them. There's a great one in Here Goes Nothing. There's a scene. So they're in kind of In the Nothing, which is ah not purgatory, but like the afterlife. And one of the things he's seeing this woman and she's decided she wants to be an actor in a community theater show. And she he has to rehearse with her and describe this idea of purgatory or like where you're stuck and you can't get out. It's nothing worse.
00:56:06
Speaker
than sitting through a community theater show with someone you're involved with and you have to be nice about it. And he's like, what is his line around? There's nothing worse about the empty applause of people who just hated what they watched. yeah And it's just this whole scene of him going to see theater. And it's sort of the idea that you know he's put that of what the idea of purgatory is and and and something so awful and drinking flat champagne in the foyer afterwards, having to have those conversations of meaningless conversations. it was yeah But it's so interesting,
Audience Engagement in Theatre
00:56:43
Speaker
isn't it? Because the audience's role changes from person to person. I mean, it takes a certain kind of person to be a good audience member, someone who goes to see, you know, when the festival's on, who sees everything. And I think our mum is a pretty good example of a good audience member who is
00:57:00
Speaker
It's very rare to hear mum say, well, that was terrible. it's gen She you will find something. I mean, but my kids call her Polly because ah that's what our dad calls her sometimes because she's such a Pollyanna about everything because she's everything's positive. And that's set her an incredibly good state over the course of her lifetime and in all sorts of challenges.
00:57:21
Speaker
but Yeah, I think that there's a real buy-in that's required. And if you if you don't buy into it, if you go into the theatre and you sit down and then people start talking to each other and you stop and you and you're in the audience, you go, oh, that's not real. They're not even married in real life. ah they're just pretending Oh, they're just Oh, that's not a surprise to them.
00:57:40
Speaker
um But why is he crying? He's not really sad. If you go into it like that, then you're not, there's a social contract that we assign to say, we will be a good audience member. We will sit here silently in the dark, and when the lights come down, we'll clap. And if we liked it a lot, we'll stand up. And if we didn't like it a lot, well, we we could boo, or we could not clap, or we could pretend. um But it it takes a real and real investment, which is very different to now where you can watch TikToks in 10 second increments and just go, I don't like that, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, and find the thing you want or Instagram on. And I mean, you know I don't want it to just turn into a old man shouts at cloud kind of moment in that, um but
00:58:30
Speaker
It's, yeah, I mean, it's changing the way that people's brains are shifting in their attention spans. Theatre, when you say to some, like when, when I turned 40, Megan and I went down to San Francisco and saw both parts of Angels in America at Berkeley Rep. And it was eight and a half hours long. And it was, you know, obviously two, two, maybe it wasn't eight, maybe it was seven, but it was long. It was too long.
00:58:59
Speaker
plays with a dinner break in between. And and people, but we have friends who say to us, why would you do that? Sounds terrible. Why? You know, and understandable. It does sound like, or there was a production of Not I, which is Samuel Beckett's production, Samuel Beckett's play about the floating mouth um with a mouth floating 10 feet off the of yeah feet stage and um and speaking essentially what sounds like gibberish for an hour. Again, I would say show it to my students and I'd show them two minutes of it and they'd be like, oh my God, I can't believe you i that was so hard to watch. And I said, well, it takes an hour. You can watch that. And I saw it. I paid $100 to see that. And they were like, why would you?
00:59:41
Speaker
And it takes a certain kind of person who is willing to be patient with that. Meg often talks about the intakes of breath that she hears from me when she watches theatre with me, particularly Shakespeare, is that someone will start speaking and I'll go, because i'm very I have a very hard time ah holding it in.
Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet
01:00:03
Speaker
and and tend to hide a lot of stuff that I've seen. um i remember I remember very clearly, you know, a very, very well-loved Romeo and Juliet, Basil and his Romeo and Juliet, that a whole generation of us love deeply. All I remember is you saying, yes, but Leo, but what does it mean? oh Well, I believe I was 18 when that came out. And so that sounds like um an 18 year old's opinion because that that has wheedled its way into my top three movies of all time um easily. I love i love it dearly. And the thing that, but going back to my thesis work, that is the most textually faithful version of Romeo and Juliet we have.
01:00:50
Speaker
way more textually faithful than Zephirelli's version in terms of the length, in terms of the cut, and in terms of the fact that there isn't a single word in that adaptation that is not Shakespeare's. Whereas Zephirelli's is full of ad libs and boys chatting away and whatever, and and then the version that Julian Fellowes did, which is just appalling, the one which is highly Stenfield.
01:01:14
Speaker
um it pulls giomadi yeah oh yeah yeah miss it It's terrible. terrible just terrible um um Yeah, that was the one where he changed all the language because he thought people wouldn't understand it. So so the nurse comes in and instead of saying, Fire, how my back aches, she says, Oh, my back is killing me. Oh, God.
01:01:35
Speaker
Yeah, because Shakespeare is like idiots and it's like, give people the benefits. and that Yeah, I mean, you could go, OK, this this um production of Tosca is is the kids don't like it. So we're going to take out all of the.
01:01:49
Speaker
um all of the old music I'm going to put in Taylor Swift songs. You go, well, okay, but it's not the same thing. The point is the fact that it's this elevated style. is It's elevated. and That's the point. The point isn't just to avoid what's hard. The point is to do what's hard. And that's why I'm doing Finnegan's Way, because like I could just not do it and live my life. But I was like, I'm going to challenge myself and do a thing that's hard. And so sometimes going to the theater, engaging with live theater,
01:02:15
Speaker
performing live theatre, getting that rejection. It is hard, but that's why we do it. We do it because we have those moments, the moments of silence sitting backstage in an empty theatre or being on stage when you nail a line. Yeah. And those shows, not durational works, but those long, epic works, some of the best things I've ever seen, like those moments of having seen many, many things in my life. I just remember Robert Lepage's Dragons trilogy that came to the 2004 Perth Festival. It just was transformative. And watching the Gabrielle's at Subi Art Centre during the festival, the festival always does this, brings these shows that are just epically long because it gives you an opportunity to really immerse yourself for six hours into other people's lives or into an environment that is being created for you. And it weeds out the tourists. And I don't know what it means to say,
01:03:10
Speaker
you know, that that tourists shouldn't be watching. And I say tourists, I always mean tourists in the sense of people who aren't really that interested in theatre, but will go to a theatre because, well, this is, you know, I'm going to New York, so I'm going to see a Broadway play. Which Broadway play should I see? I'm going to see Wicked on Broadway because that's that's what's on. And you go, really? That's been running for 20 years. Go see something new and interesting. um You know, or or we're talking about going to New York this summer with the kids for the first time. We haven't taken them before and we're talking to my kids about it. and My daughter is incredibly theatre focused and really, really excited about seeing musicals and singers. And she was like, so how many shows will we see? And we looked, Meg and I looked at each other and said, well, you usually see five or six. She was like, we're only going to be there for three days. And we're like, yup. Yes. Buck it in, kids. This is what we do. But whereas most people would go, oh, no, I went to New York, but we didn't go and see a play. And we're always like, OK. What's the point? So, yeah, it's
01:04:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's a special thing. I think I think you kind of need to get infected by it. And a lot of people catch the bug. ah We knew a lot of people who caught the bug at UDS, who, you know, not really interested in doing other things. And then they ended up falling into theatre and finding it. And some people don't find it until they're in community theatre in their 60s. Some people get exposed to it by their mothers when they're.
Recent Theatre Experiences
01:04:30
Speaker
When they're four, two. i so When I started dance classes at two.
01:04:35
Speaker
ro hat um So finally, before we wrap, um just wanted to to have you seen anything recently that really excited you or i excited about things coming up or new approaches to things? you'll you'll you'll be You'll be surprised when I say this and I've already mentioned it a couple of times in this this recording, but the the Wicked movie?
01:04:58
Speaker
o Oh, Christ, Dad, just I just wept, wept openly throughout. I took the whole family ah with the kids and Cormac's girlfriend and Cormac and his girlfriend sat up behind us and she rose away and she knew nothing about about it. And I was like, you need to see this. you listening know so ah This is the test. It's family.
01:05:24
Speaker
But genuinely, I think it's maybe the best music movie musical I've ever seen because it's it nails the assignment, which is the design is spectacular. All of the performances are wonderful, but it's also a really good movie. It's also a well-paced film. It's only the first half of the musical. We've got to wait another year for the rest. but um But yeah, i i that sort of really reminded me that there is creativity out there. There's things out there that that people create that. that I mean, if we could could have been a pedestrian kind of...
01:06:00
Speaker
Paint by numbers, movie movie musical. um And I get the feeling that it was going to be that and the the creators, the directors just kept delaying it until it was right. and Yeah, it was it was kind of stunning. I did i did love that.
01:06:16
Speaker
um hope for whatever, yeah, I mean, it's been a long time since I've seen, we we haven't been, we don't go to the theater very often um anymore. And when we go, it's it's to see, you know, the big musicals that are in town. So it's been a while since something really knocked me over in theater wise. i'm and I'm very sad that ah this week, Sleep No More is closing in New York, which is maybe the like the most life changing theater experience of my life. And that was,
01:06:46
Speaker
pretty stunning. And so, you know, pouring out to, to sleep no more. And then, you know, War Horse also, um as that was what my first book was about. and Literally no one read that book. um but I think Mum did. I bet she didn't. I bet she skipped through some bits. She owns it and she gave me a copy. guys Yeah, and you use it as a doorstop. So yeah, but then other things like, like I love Cloud Cuckoo Land. like I think that really kind of rocked my world um as for for
Impactful Books and Shows
01:07:23
Speaker
a book. ah and um What was the other one? oh The Bookblinder of Jericho. Did you read that, um Williams? It was the sequel to the Dictionary of Lost Words. oh Yeah, which they adapted to Stage Show at Sydney Food Company. Yeah. Right. and so that one i was I was fine with Dictionary of Lost Words, but Bookblinder Jericho was set at the same time,
01:07:46
Speaker
with a different family. um and And so that that they that kind of crossover, but not very much. But it's all about the book binders at the Oxford University Press and how these women would fold and and bind these books. so And so their whole job was folding the sheets that were going to be sent off for stitching.
01:08:03
Speaker
And just that, that insight into that little world really just blew my hair back. I was really just like, oh my God, I love this. I love this. Whereas the dictionary building stuff didn't interest me very much. And so that previous book, I was like, okay, that's fine. But the book binding stuff, I really love that. So, yeah box and then The Bear. Oh God, The Bear. What a great show. You've watched season two now. What's season three? Season three, yeah. No, I watched everything that's come out. And you know, it's, I,
01:08:33
Speaker
I always said, it's going to take a big ask for someone to write to make a show better than Barry, which is the greatest show. like I was always like, well, there' no one's ever going to be Barry, it's the greatest show I've ever made. yeah and i And we got to the end of the third season and I said, to me i said I think.
01:08:49
Speaker
I think the bear beats Barry. I think this is is it. So so yeah, what's lots of different things. That first episode of that third season, that beautiful, stunning piece of art, really. Oh, yeah. A standalone on its own. It was just so great.
Family Discussions on Art
01:09:04
Speaker
It just got me so excited that, yeah, such a good show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, but I, i yeah, I do appreciate the the question of getting the opportunity to stop and think about what is exciting or what is inspirational. And because there's so much, there's so much going to keep keep exposing myself to all the things and yeah seeing it through my kids' eyes, that's always the really fun part. Yeah.
Conclusion and Recommendations
01:09:30
Speaker
Well, great. Well, I better better wrap up. Thank you, Toby. It's been fun. It's always good to talk to you about these things. Yeah, absolutely.
01:09:43
Speaker
Thank you you to my guest, Toby Malone, passionate as always when talking about theater. It's always such an animated conversation when Toby discusses his favorite topics. One of those being his own podcast, Wake, a cold reading of Finnegan's Wake. Make sure you check it out. For links to everything that has been mentioned, check out my sub stack at heregoesnothingpod.substack.com and make sure you subscribe. Thanks to everyone who's already listened to the first episode. I've had great feedback and I can't wait to make more for you.
01:10:13
Speaker
Next time we talk to Vernon Guest, CEO of Tendays in the Island, a biennial international arts festival in Tasmania. We discuss how he, a farmer's son, fell into the arts straight out of school and has since produced some of the most significant festival events in the country. Till then. This podcast was made on Wojak Noongar Wojza, a place I'm very privileged to call my home.
01:10:36
Speaker
And I acknowledge and honour all Noongar people that have been making art on this land for tens of thousands of years and will continue to do so for generations to come. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
01:10:49
Speaker
original music by lin and blue this is a gm productions