Plays Philip performed in Australia in the 90's
Love Letters
- Sydney's Opera House, 26/08/1990
- Written by A. R. Gurney.
Cast:
Philip Quast - Andrew Makepeace Ladd, III
Sarah Chadwick - Melissa Gardner
Synopsis:
Love Letters has proven to be one of the most enduring and beloved works of the playwright.
It is the story of pen pals. Andrew Makepeace Ladd, III who is a young boy born into wealth and privilege and Melissa Gardner who is from a broken family and struggles for identity and opportunity. What begins as a writing exercise becomes a correspondence that lasts a lifetime. They share letters through the years, eventually meeting and building upon their friendship. Time takes them from friends to lovers, but eventually their lives take them to other parts of the country and even the world. The letters they share sometimes keep them up to date while other times they share their most intimate thoughts. They share a brief affair, but again their lives take them in opposite directions. The sudden death of Melissa brings Andrew to write one last letter to her mother... and it is here where he summarises a lifetime of emotions, heartfelt words, and a friendship forever chronicled in correspondence.
It is a unique and imaginative theatre piece, which needs no theatre, no lengthy rehearsal, no special set, no memorisation of lines and no commitment from its two actors beyond the night of performance. A funny, perceptive and moving dramatised reading which traces the 50 year love-affair between two friends whose relationship and lives are observed through letters that pass between them from youth to maturity.
As the actors read from the lifetime of exchanged letters aloud, what emerges is an evocative, touching, frequently funny but always telling pair of character studies in which what is implied is as revealing and meaningful as what is actually written down.
Article:
Actors lost for words
By Monica Heary Daily Telegraph Sydney Australia 24 August 1990
Not having any lines to learn could seem the answer to an actor's prayer. But for two Sydney thespians it is also a source of anxiety. Actors Philip Quast and Sarah Chadwick will appear this Sunday in a production at Sydney's Opera House without having learned a line between them.
Philip, the relentlessly pursuing policeman from Les Misérables and Sarah, formerly from television's GP have been teamed up to appear in Love Letters. It has no formal script as such but is 50 years of letters exchanged between Andy, a lawyer, and his artist friend Melissa. Further constraints placed on the two actors by the A.R. Gurney script are that they rehearse once and only on the day of the readings.
Also that they sit and do not look at each other during the two hours when they share a stage, albeit at two different desktops. Neither actor has ever worked like this before and both admit it will be "difficult' and "a challenge".
In Philip's words it will be a matter of how he and Sarah 'respond to each other on the day' and it is impossible to apply method acting. He says, almost in an atmosphere of 'anything goes' that his and Sarah's version of Love Letters could end up being much darker or funnier than when others perform the work. Or it could depend on the weather or the audience response. Philip's apprehensions about the play are shared by Sarah, who confesses 'When I think about it, my palms start to sweat.'
Philip likens the work to 'an old-fashioned radio play where there were obviously laughs in the studio that they people at home didn't know about.. where the tiniest physical thing could get you a laugh.' On the positive side it provides 'a great experience for actors'. It is something akin to the 'fantastic' experience of 'lunchtime' play reading where you use your imagination and visualise things, like poetry readings.'
The letters start when Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner are five and go on to span their lives. Though Philip is 33 and Sarah 30 neither sees their ages as any problem when portraying the two characters. They think, in fact, that they were chosen to play opposite each other because of their closeness in age.
Sarah and Philip will be the second set of actors to do Love Letters at the Opera House's Playhouse, with Ruth Cracknell and Ron Haddrick starting the cycle off last Sunday. Each week a new couple will play the parts, with June Baler and Michael Craig following Philip and Sarah. Others who will also follow are Diane Craig with Drew Forsythe and Kate Cebrano with Stephen Kearney of Los Trios Ringbarkus fame. It has even been reported that others who have been sent scripts include John Laws, Joan Sutherland, Clive Robertson and Margaret and Gough Whitlam.
But for Sarah and Philip, Love Letters will be a brief interlude for the two graduates from the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA). Philip is back in Sydney in his inner city home after a stint in the UK. He appeared there as a lead in London's Royal National Theatre's Stephen Sondheim production and he has bookings well into the next year with a return to his Les Misérables role when the musical opens in Adelaide early in 1991.
Coriolanus
Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney Opera House 28/07/1993
- Written by William Shakespeare Director Shakespeare
- Directed by Gale Edwards
- Set designed by Brian Thomson
- Costume designed by Roger Kirk
- Lighting designed by Nigel Levings
- Composers: Max Lambert and Martin Armiger
Cast:
- Philip Quast - Tullus Aufidius General of the Volscians
- John Howard - Caius Marcius/Coriolanus
- John Gaden - Menenius Agrippa friend to Coriolanus
- Dinah Shearing - Volumnia mother to Coriolanus
- Simon Chilvers - Cominius
- Heather Mitchell - Virgilia Wife To Coriolanus
- Anthony Phelan - Titus Lartius
- Peter Cummins - Sicinius
- Danny Adcock - Junius Brutus
- Tamara Cook - Valeria friend to Virgilia
- Jake Diggins/ - Marcus Son to Coriolanus
- Mitchell McMahon
- Neil Fitzpatrick - Roman and Volscian Senators
- Carlton Lamb - Roman Citizen 1/Voscan Servants
- John Negroponte - Roman Citizen 2/Voscan Servants
- Fiona Press - Roman Citizen 3/Voscan Servants
- Wayne Pygram - Roman Citizen 4
- Richard Lindsell - Roman Citizen 5
- John Lucantonio - Roman Citizen 6
Company members also take the roles of roman soldiers and senators, Volscan soldiers and senators, messengers, guards and members of the mob.
Synopsis:
Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare's harshest and most challenging studies of power, politics and masculinity, based around the life of Caius Marcius.
The play is set in the early years of the Roman Republic. Its famous opening scene, portrays its citizens as starving and rebellious, and horrified by the arrogant and dismissive attitude of Caius Marcius, one of Rome's most valiant but also political naive soldiers.
Spurred on by his ambitious mother Volumnia, he leads the Roman army to attack the city of Corioles, held by the Volsces, who are led by Lucius Aufidius. Marcius considers Aufidius to be his only worthy opponent. Single-handedly, Marcius defeats the Volscan defenders of the city of Corioles, and nearly beats Aufidius in hand-to-hand combat, though Aufidius flees.
Caius takes the city of Corioles, is renamed Coriolanus in honour of his victory, and is encouraged to run for senate. However, his contempt for the citizens, who he calls "scabs" and "musty superfluity" ultimately leads to his exile. Tribunes Sicinius Velutus and Junius Brutus fear Coriolanus has become too proud and too popular, and may become too powerful. They convince the common people to condemn Coriolanus to death. Coriolanus flees Rome, and forges a destructive alliance with his deadly foe, Aufidius to destroy the Roman Empire.
Led by Coriolanus, the Volsces seize and plunder all of the outlying Roman towns and approach Rome itself. Volumnia uses Virgilia and Coriolanus' own son to play on Coriolanus' emotions and convinces him to make peace. Aufidius, furious because Coriolanus did not attack Rome murders Him in a fit of rage in front of the Lords of the city of Corioles. Aufidius, though pleased that Coriolanus is dead, orders that he be given a noble memorial.
Reviews of Coriolanus:
CORIOLANUS
Review by Rosemary Neill, THE AUSTRALIAN 30 July 1993
WITH its hard, unyielding rhetoric, its lack of a central love story and a protagonist who could freeze the sympathy of Mother Teresa, Coriolanus is often seen as one of Shakespeare's least palatable plays.
But Gale Edwards's production of this rarely staged tragedy is so brilliantly conceived and executed it should stand as a benchmark to which all Shakespearean productions in this country should aspire for years to come.
Edwards's shrewd cutting of the text gives this potentially turgid play the pulse of a political thriller without pawning any of its moral seriousness. But her main achievement is to wring from a broad gallery of characters (from cameo roles to the eponymous anti-hero) a highly individuated emotionalism that belies the inhumanity for which this play has often been criticised.
In Edwards's interpretation, Rome emerges as a factory for human war machines; a place where little boys play with real swords, where mothers revel in their sons, battle scars, and where soldiers score points by making an ostentatious public display of their war wounds.
We thus come to see Coriolanus as a noble but unbendingly arrogant figure whose fascism is sired by a society that asks him to dedicate himself to the autocratic demands of waging war, but punishes him for being spectacularly ill-equipped for civilised political life. (His contempt for the common people results in his banishment from his native city.)
This production makes clear that the moral order of Coriolanus's Rome is so fugitive, the moment he finds enlightenment and brokers a political agreement based on compassion, he is savagely cut down. On stage, this is realised in a frenzy of violence so intense it had some normally reserved first nighters calling out, quite involuntarily, for it to stop.
Brian Thomson's sleek set and Roger Kirk's black and purple costumes (the colours of mourning) suggest a timeless setting where stout classical columns nudge angular modern surfaces and where breastplates are juxtaposed with business suits and the odd briefcase. Nigel Levings's shafts of blood-red lighting add to the production's bleak beauty and its sense of foreboding (a bone-rattling, metallic crunching announcing scene changes further adds to a gathering sense of doom).
As Coriolanus, John Howard bursts not just the confines of his role but the parameters of the Drama Theatre stage. With fire in his belly and flint in his heart, we first see him, helmeted and with metallic shoulder pads, emerging from a fog of dry ice like some ancient Terminator. Yet in that climactic moment when this unfeeling "thing of blood" gives in to his mother and his own sense of mercy, he is so overwhelmed he almost faints. This is not unlike watching a proud, snorting bull brought low by a single bullet.
The duel between Howard and Philip Quast's Aufidius is the most thrillingly physicalised I have seen on a stage, yet when these sworn enemies become allies, they bring to their compact the desperate intimacy of long-parted lovers.
Much of the text's political debate would be hard going, were it not for John Gaden's funny, finely detailed performance as the Roman senator Menenius. Heather Mitchell's Virgilia— Coriolanus's largely silent wife—is here transfigured into a lone pacifist. Her anguish as she imagines herself in the middle of a bloody battlefield makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, as does the swooning horror of Dinah Shearing's Volumnia, when this warmongering matriarch realises that she has helped her son sign his own death warrant.
A man of principle's trail of tears
Review by Bob Evans, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 30 July 1993
It is not one of Shakespeare's great lines: "Before him he carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears". The rhythm is a little off. The words don't have that savoury mix of Latinate elegance and blunt Anglo-Saxon bite which Shakespeare often used to spice up his verse.
But it is a better than serviceable description of Coriolanus, especially as he's played by John Howard. This is not the headstrong, boyish soldier who Olivier conjured up in 1937 at the Old Vic in what has been described as his "first incontestably great performance".
Howard delivered his equivalent as Proctor in The Crucible two years ago, and his performance as Coriolanus indeed, this production directed by Gale Edwards is every bit as good, exciting and rewarding as The Crucible. It deserves the same success.
There is an extraordinary balance in this cast and a forceful, driving clarity in Gale Edwards's direction that builds to a climax more shocking, gory and piteous than any Hamlet, Lear or Macbeth I've seen.
The absoluteness of its themes are rendered in the black and white diagonal of Brian Thomson's set and the uncompromising red of Nigel Levings's lights, punctuated by crashing chordal accompaniment from composers Max Lambert and Martin Armiger.
Up there with Howard, his equal in everything is Philip Quast as Aufidius, the Volscian warrior, who twice threatens the peace of Rome, and who, though bettered in combat, bests Coriolanus in conspiracy. Beside him is John Gaden as the convivial patrician Menenius, with the common touch and the voice of moderation, doomed to go unheard by his bellicose protege. Then there's Dinah Shearing as his mother notorious among the plebs for her love of honour, possessed of an aristocratic dignity that emotion can colour but never crack.
To cap it all, on the flipside of the ethical coin, Danny Adcock and Peter Cummins play the newly elected tribunes of the plebs, Junius Brutus and Sicinius Velutus, their modern-day suits setting them apart from the mixed period dress of the rest, and looking like real estate shysters. Coriolanus dates from around 1608. It concludes the tragedies and can be seen as a companion piece to Antony and Cleopatra, which may have been written immediately before it Having dealt with the decline of the Roman Empire, and perhaps inspired by food riots among the peasantry and the Enclosure Act which dispossessed many tenant farmers, Shakespeare turned to the formative days of the Republic.
The Rome of Coriolanus is a city-state with a patrician autocracy forced to make its first democratic concessions to the plebs who, it transpires, are a rabble, easily manipulated by both their tribunes and their senators.
The ways in which the play personalises the political and the economic issues that it raises give it a distinctly contemporary edge. Especially since Edwards envelopes the action between the image of a boy playing with a sword and having his grieving mother take it from his hand after the horrors we have seen.
Coriolanus: Review by Dennis Watkins The Sydney Weekly 23/08/93
The Sydney Theatre Company production of Shakespeare's rarely performed Coriolanus at the Sydney Opera House has been given electrifying clarity by director Gale Edwards, who allows action and character to reveal what is for some the obscure language of Shakespearn English.
In this production you can witness the great skill necessary to bring a difficult play to life. The design elements from Brian Thomson (set), Roger Kirk (costumes) and Nigel Levings (lighting) are of the highest calibre.
The performance Edwards has drawn from the actors are exemplary. John Gaden has never been better as an upper- class Roman senator, while John Howard's towering performance of Coriolanus is matched with operatic intensity by Philip Quast. Acting this good deserves to be seen.
Grateful thanks to Matt and Elizabeth for their assistance in finding some of
this material.
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