Andre de Vanny – Theatre Press

Tense, difficult, wonderful drama

By Margaret Wieringa

The house lights have been brought down slowly. The audience remains in the quiet and dark for a long moment before the lights snap on and three actors stand, staring off stage: inert, but not quite frozen. Then banging and shouting from offstage, fear flashes on their faces, and the tension of the next hour or so is set.

Premiering in Australia after winning awards as a radio drama and during its season at the Edinburgh Festival, Glory Dazed by Cat Jones is the story of a soldier returned from serving in Afghanistan who cannot settle back into life in Northern England.

It is Andre De Vanny as ex-soldier Ray who carries this performance, capturing all of the anger, fear and vulnerability of a displaced young man who feels hard-done by his circumstances – but demands to be acknowledged. It is a familiar character, the type of man who you may see in a pub or stumbling down the street and you know to avoid because his emotions are expressed through aggression and derision. In the tiny theatre at Red Stitch, it is impossible to escape, and De Vanny made this a wonderfully difficult play to watch.

While Ray is a man I don’t want to encounter, it is the other characters that I empathise with, trapped with this unpredictable time-bomb. Jonathan Peck captures the vulnerability of Simon who is no physical match for Ray, yet needs to find a way to stand up to him. Then there is Leanne, played by Laura Jane Turner, the young staff member who is naïve enough to flirt with the handsome, charming Ray and be taken into his games even when his darker side is revealed. And then Carla. Oh, Carla. Emily Goddard broke my heart as the ex-wife who needs to be free from this animal, yet can see the broken man beneath the bravado.

It was as much the space and the silences that made this performance: director Greg Carroll let the story unfold slowly, with all the pain that this involved. Sometimes, theatre hurts.

Venue: Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Rear 2 Chapel Street, St Kilda East
Season: 23 July – 23 August
Tickets: $20-$39
Bookings: 9533 8083 or boxoffice@redstitch.net

A fierce clash of power and art

By Brad Storer

MTC’s new production, John Logan’s Red, opened last night inside an artist’s studio with canvases and paints strewn everywhere. What is not so apparent at first is the artist himself, hidden in a solitary corner silently appraising the work laid before him.

The play is based around real-life painter Mark Rothko (Colin Friels) and his (fictionalized) relationship with young assistant Ken (Andre de Vanny). Any chance of this play turning into an sentimental and clichéd depiction of intellectual exchange between aging artist and younger apprentice is smashed in the very first scene when Rothko coldly remarks to his newly-arrived helper that he is not father, mentor or psychologist – ‘You are my employee’.

Red is foremost a play of ideas – scenes mix discussion of the works of Pollock with Nietzschean conceptions of the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses of the human psyche, and ancient myth with Andy Warhol and Pop Art. The tempestuous conflicts between Rothko and Ken debate the fundamentals of art and what it means to be an artist, as well as the relationship between a work of art and its observers. This is reinforced by the two staring out at us, supposedly at a painting hanging on the fourth wall, but this serves as a continual reminder of our status as consumers and observers of art and to re-evaluate our relationship with what we see.

Although there are two characters onstage at nearly all times, the real duality which becomes apparent is between Rothko and his mammoth and ferocious ego. Rothko declares at one point that ‘stasis is death’, and Friels clearly takes this maxim to heart in his characterization – his portrayal is a magnificent whirlwind of bravado, fierce pride, high intellectualism, pained bitterness and staunch idealism, often co-existing simultaneously or changing without warning. His character resists easy designation: bellowing his fury at the crumbling standards of modern artists one second, the next filled with tender paternal care over his own artistic creations.

De Vanny is given a role which could easily become merely a sounding board for the ramblings of the more flamboyant Rothko, but De Vanny emphasizes from the very first Ken’s spine and own intellectual strength. This culminates in a brilliant and hilarious scene where the assistant turns his repressed anger against his employer, who is so stunned he is forced into silence for what seems the first time in the play.

De Vanny and Friels make a fantastic pair, each filled with their own artistic fire and vision, driving the play towards its breathtaking conclusion, where in an inspired use of lighting the play’s reoccurring motifs of colour and light return for one final moment, now charged with infinite meaning after the events we have seen, creating a theatrical coup-de-grace stunning in its intensity and simplicity.

22^nd March – 5^th May, 2012

Tickets: www.mtc.com.au