Theatre review: Because the Night @Malthouse Theatre

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Theatre set showing office desk with light on a diamond motif carpet. There is a trussed up Zebra replica in one corner.

I saw a great promenade theatre show in New York in 2015. Sleep No More was a silent riff on Macbeth performed inside the McKittrick Hotel. The massive space over five floors was transformed into theatrically designed rooms through which the audience wandered interacting with the set and observing the actors perform.

Writing on a wall beneath a replica shot gun: She was trapped under a fallen tree Looking up into the shadows of the branch She said she saw the future In the movement of the leaves Hamlet and Ophelia sacrificing their daughter Old King Hamlet Hacked to death by his wife Royal Princess Murdering for the throne Ophelia's dear father Slain by Hamlet's knife Crowns and blades blood and arms circling for eternity As the forest splinters to dust

Slow to emerge from Melbourne lockdown IV, other than a couple of dinner parties I have mostly stayed home. The temptation of an immersive theatre performance motivated my first foray out into the wilds with the general public and it was definitely worth it. After all what is a Melbourne Winter for if not beanies, dinner parties and theatre?

Because the Night runs from March to September 2021 so grab some tickets and get out and support the arts. You will not be disappointed. The entire Malthouse Theatre space has been transformed into a labyrinth of interconnected spaces for the adventure.

Text on theatre wall: The trees were screaming the people fleeing the king flung and flayed I fear that if my daughter learns the true ordeal of the forest and speaks it aloud at school she will be beaten

The audience gets divided into three, each group led into a dark foyer and instructed to wear identical dark robes and Donnie Darko masks that transform the crowd into macabre giant black rabbits. We were also intersected to remain silent.

A room with a dining table set for a dinner party with fairy lights. There is a very large replica pig standing in the middle of the table amongst the crockery

My adventure in Elsinore, a 1980s logging town, started in the Palace bedroom (others were taken to the Royal Office or the Gymnasium) where Gertrude lay prostrate on her bed mourning the kings death. The ancient forest was restless for blood…

This is choose your own adventure theatre. You can stalk one actor, go in search of different scenes or focus on exploring the space during the 1.5 run time. You are invisible to the actors so don’t worry you won’t suddenly find yourself being dragged into the action.

Three theatre goers dressed in dark cloaks and wearing black Donnie Darko masks

I started out following Gertrude, then got sidetracked by other dramatic scenes, following the loudest voices. After a while I broke off from the crowd and went in search of hidden rooms (of which there were many) and props that provided insight into the story – discarded notebooks and writing scrawled on walls. I simply soaked up the sensory experience until joining the actors again for the final dramatic scene. And pigs, there are lots of pigs.

The script is loosely based on the story of Hamlet with a bit of gender bending and it helps to have the general gist of Shakespeare’s play before you start. The show is designed in such a way that you won’t see the entire performance in one visit, though of course there is nothing to stop you from going more than once…

Postscript: lucky I went because we’re back in lockdown again…

Book review: Digging Up Dirt by Pamela Hart

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Thought I’d lighten things up a bit this week with a cozy mystery. Cozies are an easy read that can be gobbled up without any uncomfortable feelings, whilst still offering satisfying twists and turns. Digging Up Dirt also includes a splash of simmering romance.

Nothing like the builder digging up bones to halt the work on your renovation. TV researcher Poppy McGowan needs to find out if the bones are human or animal so she can get on with finishing her house. When archaeologist, Dr Julieanne Weaver, whom Poppy doesn’t like, interferes and slaps a heritage order over the property because she thinks the bones a significant Poppy is really annoyed. But then Julieanne is found murdered onsite, face down in the excavation dressed in heels and an evening frock, and things get really complicated.

Pamela Hart is a prolific author who has written more than 35 books and successfully crosses the genre divide. She is best known for her historical fiction (The Soldiers Wife, The War Bride, A Letter from Italy and The Desert Nurse).

Hart has also penned speculative fiction (Ember and Ash)and children’s books under the name Pamela Freeman as well as being an accomplished scriptwriter for ABC kids. I’ve done a few of the online courses she has written for the Australian Writers Centre as well, which have all been of good quality. She’s no slouch!

Digging Up Dirt is Hart’s first mystery novel and it’s a fun Australian read (or listen to the audio book). 

Book review: Hinton Hollow Death Trip by Will Carver

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The devil made me do it.

Fear is my greatest tool. It can be used to make a person do almost anything. You can take education, information, motivation and throw it all away, fear is the only thing you require. It is a slow and deadly poison. And it is effective.

Detective Sergeant Pace flees London to return to his hometown of Hinton Hollow for some respite after the trauma of his previous case. Pace’s shadow follows him, enveloping the idyllic small town in darkness and creating disarray in the community. Hinton Hollow Death Trip is the third Carver novel featuring Pace (see Good Samaritans and Nothing Important Happened Today) but could also be read as a stand alone.

The story is a noirish pulp meditation on what can happen when we abandon our values and give into our darkest parts, unleashing the monster within driven by our disappointments, bitterness, resentment and jealousies.

This is how evil works. I just have to get you started. What you do with that feeling is entirely down to you.

The unique twist in this tale is the narrator. Evil. Evil takes great pleasure insinuating itself into the cracks of people’s goodness, prodding at their insecurities and encouraging them to indulge the more selfish, destructive and violent elements of their nature. The message here is that we all have this capacity for destruction in us, but we make choices in response to experiences that determine whether we indulge our malevolent sides or keep turning toward the good in ourselves and others. Evil encourages the characters of Hinton Hollow to indulge their blackness and cheat, steal and kill.

Where everything happened for a reason. A leap of faith. Detective Sergeant Pace is no good. Detective Sergeant Pace is a footnote. Detective Sergeant Pace is a small story. 

In keeping with Will Carvers style, Hinton Hollow Death Trip, its cast and their behaviour leave the reader feeling queezy, despite the macabre content being tempered with equally dark humour. The characters are outrageous but believable and the narrative has a way of making the reader reflect on their own dark corners. 

This is not a story for the squeamish so if you can’t stomach a bit of graphic violence, stick with the cosies. It seems the writing of the story was also uncomfortable for Carver. Apparently the manuscript landed in the bin twice before Carver felt it was good enough to call complete. 

Some people are more comfortable in the dark. Some seek it out. Some thrive there…

Emerging again…

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Adversity is often cited as a spur for creativity – Shakespeare wrote some of his best known plays during, and in the aftermath of the plague. Hardship may get the creative juices flowing but it doesn’t mean its easy.

The arts and cultural sector has been one of the hardest hit by the impacts of COVID. Crowd events are the first to be cancelled and the last to be re-opened when the virus gets loose in the community. Hundreds of thousands of gigs and events have been cancelled over the last 18 months, each one evaporating the livelihoods of artists and resulting in the loss of millions to the sector.

Ever adaptive and experienced at living on the edge, the arts sector was one of the first to adjust to the new world order using technology to revolutionise the way they work, eking out some kind of living and keeping the rest of us entertained and stimulated during our closed in locked down lives.

A number of events I’d planned to attend in recent weeks had to be cancelled. Some pivoted to an online format, including the Emerging Writers Festival.

I purchased tickets to the National Writers Conference and attended via zoom last Saturday whilst I re-caulked my shower. Yes, you did read that correctly. I find it easier to concentrate on online events if doing a manual activity that doesn’t require much thought. During work hours I often get out the mindful coloring book. On the weekend domestic maintenance tasks are ideal.

There were some great sessions including writers waxing lyrical about their writing practice, editors reflecting on their unsung role in making a writers work sing, debut authors discussing their differing paths to publication, world building and character development. The festival also has a YouTube channel with loads of free writerly content that you can watch at any time or check out the festival program for links.

Meanwhile I’ll go and enjoy a freshly sealed shower…

Book review: Exit by Belinda Bauer

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I used to love old British cop shows like The Bill, Inspector Morse and Taggart. British crime shows are memorable for slow-moving mystery plots and complex characters. Belinda Bauer’s crime novels are similar.

Despite sounding like a juxtaposition, Bauer’s most recent novel, Exit, is a hilarious crime thriller.

Amanda was at his shoulder now. ‘What is it?’ she said, but Felix couldn’t speak because all the words he’d ever known seemed to be whirling around inside his skull like bingo balls.
The ones he needed finally dropped slowly from his numb lips.
‘We killed the wrong man.’

Seventy-five year old widower Felix Pink is a member of the Exiteers, a secret group that supports the right to die by baring witness to the suicide of terminally ill patients then disposing of any evidence to ensure their deaths appear natural. Everything goes horribly wrong when Felix and new young Exiteer, Amanda, accidentally help the wrong patient to die.

The second voice in the story is PC Calvin Bridge, a small town policeman, and in his own eyes a failed detective. Calvin has no confidence in his own abilities. He also hoards a shameful secret past.

Even now, if she spotted Calvin from any distance, Shirley made a point fo glowering at him. And if she were with somebody else, she’d turn to them and say something, and then that person would glower at him too, which made him feel like a bad person – which he knew he wasn’t – so if he ever spotted Shirley before she spotted him, he always just hid.

A comedy of errors unfolds as Felix tries to find out whether he is guilty of murder or something more sinister is afoot, and Calvin finds himself doing the detective work he’s been avoiding.

According to British author Bauer, crime novels are about how the stories of our lives can be suddenly changed by the misdeeds of others. Life is a river and crime the rocks – it is when our lives hit a rock that we find out if we are life’s swimmers or sinkers. Bauer’s novels focus on survival and recovery after a calamity.

Baur has a knack for crafting original, oddball characters that endear the reader to them. Exit is a delightful, hilarious and farcical look at life and death, the invisibility of ageing, friendship, morality and loyalty.

Exit is Bauer’s ninth crime novel. I have written about the author before. See my review of The Shut Eye here

Book review: Nothing Important Happened Today by Will Carver

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Creepy. Lets face it Will Carver knows how to write a creepy, mesmerising, noirish thriller – remember Good Samaritans?

London Detective Sergeant Pace returns in Nothing Important Happened Today, a story about a cult in which perfect strangers commit group suicide by jumping off bridges after receiving a white envelope containing the words ‘Nothing important happened today’. This message tells the receiver they have been chosen to become part of the People of Choice and off they trot calmly to meet their maker.

At its heart Nothing Important Happened Today is a story about human psychology, vulnerability and the power of suggestion. Carver splashes the narrative with reflections on the damaging effects of social media, how it provides a mechanism to airbrush our lives and foster an insatiable need for validation that can be really damaging to one’s self confidence. It makes you pause and take stock of the madness of the online environment and its mirage of connection.

We are so connected that we have become disconnected. We can’t have a thought, we have to have an opinion. Freedom of speech has gone too fucking far when we feel the need to share everything. When we filter the image of ourselves but feel no need to filter what we say out loud, hidden behind a new status and picture of ourselves when we were twenty pounds lighter.

There is something mildly detached about Carver’s writing style in this novel, written in the third person and collective first person, that fits neatly with the mindset of a cult leader. It shows the chilling lengths some people will go to get others to do their bidding. The cult leader in Nothing Important Happened Today sends person after person to their death to satisfy their own need for power and a twisted idea of their sense of importance in the world. Each victim is simply seen as a number by an anonymous person operating with the aim of making themselves the best cult leader ever, measured by the number of casualties they can motivate to initiate their own demise.

The fictional story is interspersed with facts about real life cults, how they came about and what drove their leaders. This addition helps lead the reader to ponder whether the actual story, which hovers on the edge of believably, is real or fiction, it’s a mind bending narrative.

Carver is clever at crafting a tale to make the hair on your neck stand up and leave you feeling a little discombobulated and disorientated. He causes you to pause and reflect on reality, illusion and what holds real value and meaning in life.

Here we go again…

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Melbourne is back in lockdown due to another coronovirus outbreak…

Anxiety induced panic buying has led once again to emptied supermarket shelves and toilet paper shortages as supply chains fail to keep up with the surge.

It’s tough, particularly for those who have had to close businesses or can’t work because their workplaces have closed. I planned to go to a couple of shows at Melbourne’s Rising Festival this weekend but the arts are one of biggest casualties of lockdowns. The Festival has been cancelled, as have restaurant bookings. I feel for the artists, businesses and hospitality staff who are impacted and pay the biggest financial and emotional price to keep the rest of us safe.

I wrote about my joy at being able to re-engage with the arts after the last lockdown concluded and look forward to doing so again after this one.

  • lockdown dog
  • mindfulness colouring
  • homemade gnocchi with pine mushrooms and burnt sage butter

Meanwhile in my shrunken world I writer, cook, garden and walk, and feel very fortunate that these pleasures remain. I have also been enjoying my new mindfulness colouring book which helps me concentrate in zoom meetings. Stay safe people and see you out the other side…(hopefully next week).

Best ever gnocchi recipe

600g potatoes unpeeled (choose big old white-skinned ones high in starch and similar size)

150g flour

50g Parmigiano cheese, freshly grated

1 dessertspoon salt

extra flour

Scrub potatoes clean and boil whole in their skins in salted water. As soon as cooked, drain and peel whilst still hot. Hold with a tea towel to protect your hands. Mash potato thoroughly in a large bowl making sure there are no lumps. Incorporate the flour, Parmiagiano cheese and salt into the potato. Flour your hands and knead the mixture like bread with the heel of you hand for about five minutes folding the dough in on itself until it is velvety to touch.

Cut the dough into four pieces, covering three with with an inverted bowl whilst you work on one. Roll each section into a long sausage shape about 2cm thick on a floured surface. Use a sharp knife to cut into 2 cm lengths. Make each section into a gnocchi shape. You can do this by rolling each piece over the prongs of a fork or I just flatten them and round the edges off with my fingers. Lay them out on a piece of kitchen paper until all the dough is done.

Bring a large pot of water to the boil and drop in enough gnocchi. Only add enough to fill the base of the pot without crowding. As soon as the pieces start to float to the surface, scoop them out with a slotted spoon and into a colander to drain. Repeat till all the gnocchi is cooked.

My favourite gnocchi toppings are burnt sage butter, pesto or a tomato sauce. For the sage butter simply toss some fresh sage leaves into a small fry pan with a slab of butter and cook until the sage starts to crisp and pour over the gnocchi – it’s decadent, but delicious.

If you have more gnocchi than you will eat, they are easily frozen in single layers divided by kitchen paper for a later meal. Simply take out of the freezer and boil in a pot again until they float to the surface, or try them fried for something different.

What it means to be human…

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(There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.”)

Ok, so I confess I binged listened to the entire Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells last week – all five after last weeks review of All Systems Red. I could probably just stop there. Declaring that fact is review enough, but stopping would leave a lot of white space in this blog post…

So the plan wasn’t a clusterfuck, it was just circling the clusterfuck target zone, getting ready to come in for a landing.

At their heart, the Murderbot Diaries are about a machine coming to understand what it means to be human. Murderbot is a construct, part-human part-robot, designed to be owned, used and discarded by humans. The novellas are simple stories with complex themes and characterisation. I could draw parallels to issues of slavery, racism, gender and sexuality, as well as the role of artificial intelligence.

As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

The Murderbot Diaries are also bubbling over with brilliant one liners delivered from the SecUnits point of view. I have included some of my favourites scattered through this post.

I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can’t just stop.

The series reminds me of studying transhumanism and the likes of Turing, Huxley, Putnam and Searle in philosophy at university. Philosophers who made us grapple with the idea that we could create a being that is equal to human, even replace humans, using artificial intelligence.

Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency. I’d rather climb back into Hostile One’s mouth.

Could a convergence of human and machine consciousness result in a superior being? AI that could think and therefore by definition reduce humans to nothing more than machines. It was mind bending stuff but I fell squarely in the camp of AI being a tool for humans, not being capable of replacing us.

It was very dramatic, like something out of a historical adventure serial. Also correct in every aspect except for all the facts, like something out of a historical adventure serial.

As a decision making tool AI and the use of data have myriad benefits, including the capacity to remove human biases from decision making in some circumstances. But in many respects I believe the essence of our humanity is our fallibility. That we can become overcome and driven by our fears and anxieties, anger, sadness or elation is a unique characteristic of organic sentient beings. Perhaps even more important is our capacity for creativity. Our emotional worlds and imaginations are at the essence of being human, characteristics I do not believe can be replicated by AI.

Disinformation, which is the same as lying but for some reason has a different name, is the top tactic in corporate negotiation/warfare.

That central question in the Murderbot Diaries of what it means to be human is something that all of us actual humans must grapple with throughout life – either consciously or unconsciously. We do this every time we make judgements and decisions because those acts determine the kind of person we want to be, in relation to both ourselves and others.

They were all annoying and deeply inadequate humans, but I didn’t want to kill them. Okay, maybe a little.

Murderbot expresses an irresistible blend of deep love for its humans and angry, pessimistic, exhausted cynicism because he believes the world is a terrible place and humans are hopeless. Part-robot, part-organic beings such as Murderbot were built after all to have superior performance and prevent stupid humans from making stupid decisions and getting themselves killed. Yet Murderbot is driven by a passionate sentimental commitment to do the right thing by them. No wonder he’d rather zone out binging on his favourite show Sanctuary Moon than engage with the world.

I hate having emotions about reality; I’d much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon.

Book Review: All Systems Red by Martha Wells

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Whenever I visit my GP we talk about books and writing. She once filled an entire appointment telling me about the crime fiction novel she was writing about a GP who murders people. Lucky I’m a crime writer as well or I might have been reticent to accept any more scripts from her. On my last visit she got very animated about Martha Wells’s The Murderbot Diaries so I borrowed the first one to find out what her excitement was about.

All Systems Red is a 2017 science fiction novella and the first in The Murderbot Diaries series. For a simple story, it packs a powerful punch – I listened to the audiobook in one sitting whilst gardening, giggling to myself as I pulled weeds. The premise is simple: Two groups of scientists on an alien plant; something terrible happens to one lot and the others have to work out what, before the terrible thing happens to them as well. So what’s so good about it? …Murderbot…

I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

Murderbot is a part organic-part robot SecUnit – a security guard of unspecified gender for hire to protect explorers of the universe. Murderbot is a little bit different to the other SecUnits because they have disabled their governing programming unit, giving them agency. The sulky Murderbot keeps this secret, along with their addiction to binge-watching soap operas. They just want to be left alone.

Murderbot is a kind of coming out story because this SecUnit feels like they need to hide an essential part of themselves from everyone else – those who are more powerful than Murderbot and wouldn’t understand.

Wells has given Murderbot, who is essentially a killing machine, extraordinary vulnerability as they struggle with their fears about their robot and human parts. They are trying to work out how to be comfortable in their own skin, and their efforts to hide this from those around them are touchingly hilarious.

The best part? There are five more books in the series.

Environmental crime fiction

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I woke up to a startlingly beautiful sky filled with hot air balloons this morning. After doing some writing I set out with the hound on a long walk. It is a stunning Autumn day. Already I have been squawked at by some cheeky galas and said hello to an echidna going about its day.

Now, I have stopped for a moment and I am squatting on a rock looking at the river scene in the the photos include in this blog post as I write it on my phone. The intermittent sound of birds play a tune over the background base of the swollen Yarra River waters spilling across rocks on their way to the city. It is peaceful and soothing and my mind turns to my writing.

My current manuscript is a crime fiction novel with a backdrop of the environmental movement. One of the underlying themes is climate grief and I have taken much inspiration from my local environment as well as from a period living in East Gippsland.

The idea for the story came to me during a writing workshop I attended with Angela Savage, former CEO of Writers Victoria, at the Terror Australis Readers and Writers Festival (TARWF) in October 2019 and I commenced work on the manuscript in November that year (TARWF will run again this year in November and I hope to go again as it was a hoot last time – I delivered spoken word piece at their Noir at the Bar event. You can listen to that here.)

The story for my current manuscript is set in 2018, before the Victorian bushfires and the pandemic. Whilst the premise pre-dates our recent disasters, the story has certainly been shaped by them. It is a lament to Victoria’s beautiful disappearing landscapes and humanities seeming collective inability to do what needs to be done to save them from the impacts of climate change. There have been moments when I considered abandoning the endeavour, particularly after the terrible bushfires in Victoria that consumed much of the landscape in which the story is set. Instead I made some changes to include a foreboding of disasters such as the fires and the pandemic so that the story does not seem dated.

I entered the first few chapters into a competition for a Varuna Fellowship last year and was chuffed to be shortlisted. I hope to take up the opportunity for a supported residency later this year.

My writing has been interrupted a bit over the last year, but I have now crossed the half way mark of the first draft at just over 40,000 words and am feeling inspired to forge on into the home stretch so I can set myself to editing.

For now, I must continue on my walk as the hound is getting restless.