Love at the Bar: witness protectio - a review by Cathy Bray

Love at the Bar – witness protection.
A review by Cathy Bray.*
(May 20-23 season, Sydney Writers’ Festival 2010 – The Sydney Dance Café)

So it appears that in a previous lifetime I may have been a cockney spruiker. This realization came to me on the opening night of Love at the Bar (20-23 May, Laureate Productions’ first season at the Sydney Writers’ Festival).

I had already seen the light with this mob last year, when Wordjammin’ put together their 5-night tribute to Kenneth Slessor, An Evening of Darlinghurst Nights (upstairs at the Tap Gallery in Darlinghurst, 2009 Sydney Writers’ Festival). That evening evoked the real 1930s of Darlinghurst and Kings Cross (more familiar to young audiences today through the latest Underbelly series).

So here we were in the gonads of the 2010 Sydney Writers’ Festival, also known as The Sydney Dance Café, which for 3 nights had been converted to a wonderful waterfront bar; slap up against Sydney’s green harbour and the old wooden pylons of Wharf 4.

Suddenly, a voice arrived and we were frantically searching to find out who owned such a mellifluous beauty. The poet Russell Erwin asked me ‘Who owns that voice that could sink ships?’ Erwin had come to Sydney from Crookwell, to hear John Carey’s recording of Erwin’s poem Awaiting Resolution. On the opening night Angela Stretch (Producer/Director) stayed out of sight but before we could get annoyed, the music started and out came three amazing young performers: Kath Ellis, Dave Stephenson and Kathleen Williamson.

Now as Laureate’s new production progressed, I began to realise that we were without the benefit of really knowing most of the 15 Australian love poems that were being presented. So I jumped up at interval (and my kids won’t even blink when you tell them this) and I started working the room, going from table to table like a Jehovah’s Witness saying, in effect,

“Listen idiots, you need a program so that your brain can keep up with what you’re hearing and not get in the way of your listening. And so that when you go home, you can read and re-read the poems while the music’s still fresh in your head and the video is still projecting across your eyes. Get one now - $15! With little taster CD of 3 tracks in the back! $15 a program. Amy Winehouse eat your heart out!”

They pulled the lights on me then and I found myself back at our table and had to sit down and behave myself.

There’s a two page statement at the beginning of the program where each member of the crew, Stretch (Producer/Director), Geir Brillian (Sound & Lighting), JD Young (Video Projections), Ashley Chatto (Composer), and the performers, each give an artist’s statement about the production. Stephenson (singer and trumpeter / trombonist) says

“Within this production lies a beautiful problem: making these poetic constructs meaningful to the crowded ear. Re-reading of each beautiful poem is a luxury given to the company, but not to the audience.”

(Madwoman/Witness (up the back): 'Thank you! Get your programs here! Only $15! Thank you!)'

The poet Martin Langford (let’s call him ‘the selector’) researched and found about 40 Australian love poems for this season of Love at the Bar (mainly contemporary poems and 10 of the final 15, by women writers).

“With both men and women exploring love in searching, risky ways, the poetry of relationships was enjoying a particularly strong period – and Love at the Bar is an attempt to tap into that,”
says Langford, who is one of the directors of the newly established Laureate Productions and whose latest collection, The Human Project, has been published by Puncher and Wattmann.

Langford took the poems to Chatto, the young Australian composer, who sat in the beer garden of the Convent Garden Hotel in Sydney’s Haymarket one warm evening last December and quickly sorted out the 20 that he sensed had musicality. From these he went away and wrote the music for the 15 poems which make up the program for Love at the Bar**.

Chatto’s music starts out with the playfulness and wistfulness of The Golden Mean by Dorothy Hewitt sung by Ellis who captures every glint in the poem

‘nobody said You’re girls
You can’t do these things
so we did them
fragile as cabbage moths
our white dresses flicking in sunlight’

Ellis is a Sydney singer, performer and visual artist and perfectly described as ‘a perpetual bridesmaid out for revenge’ as the front woman for Sydney bands Hubris and Kathellisism.

The poet Julian Croft came down from Armidale on the second night of the show and saw Stephenson perform his poem The Bar at the Rock Garden, Covent Garden, November 1981 to Chatto’s The Clash-esque composition,

‘It’s really the girl behind the bar at the Rock Garden
Covent Garden
November 1981, this poem is about. Don’t believe titles’

Before I go, I just have to tell you that the range of compositions which Chatto has brought to this show is extraordinary. Every Australian who has ever been moved by music and words has to get to know Chatto’s work and to hear Williamson sing

‘He looks in my heart and the image there
Is himself, himself, than himself more fair.’
(first two lines of Untitled by Lesbia Harford)
And
‘For when you truly fall in love
The sun comes closer by a mile:
It is enough to make you sweat
It is enough to make you strip.’
(last verse of I think that hardly anyone/Has ever fallen very far by Kevin Hart)

I won’t go on much more because you, dear reader, have been given a second chance and saved me from having to give you a reminder call. Love at the Bar will be continuing its season, this time at RAVAL upstairs at the Macquarie Hotel (just down the hill from Whitlam Square and Oxford Street in Wentworth Avenue). And later Laureates will have a season at The Sydney Fringe with their production ‘City Nights’ at the Sound Lounge in the Seymour Centre.

I would go to this show just to hear Stephenson’s trumpet playing and his scuba diving deep baritone voice, or to watch Ellis’s acting or to hear Williamson sing.

If Chatto’s compositions for ‘Untitled’ and for 'I think that hardly anyone/ Has ever fallen very far', do not end up as major hits, then I will probably need to go into witness protection because I was there and I saw and heard everything!

This is the future of Australian poetry.

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* Cathy Bray is a Sydney student of poetry and script-writing. She has had poetry and reviews published in a number of anthologies and journals and has just had her first chapbook of poems, The Owl, published by Picaro Press. She has been selected to 'be a black sheep' at The Sydney Fringe this September, and will be performing at Madam Fling Flongs in Newtown.

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** The program for Love at the Bar:

Chapter 1:
The Golden Mean - Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002)
Why I Like You - John Jenkins
untitled - Lesbia Harford (1891-1927)
Love Poem - John Forbes (1950-1998)
Sassy - Kate Llewellyn
You Are My Absurdist Angle - Marcella Polain
Sleeping Together - Geraldine McKenzie
I Am In Love - MTC Cronin

INTERVAL

Chapter 2:
The Specifics of Love - MTC Cronin
I think that hardly anyone - Kevin Hart
The Bar at the Rock Garden - Julian Croft
Finished - Kate Llewellyn
There is No More Time - MTC Cronin
Awaiting Resolution - Russell Erwin
The Owl and the Pussycat Baudelaire Rock - Gwen Harwood (1920-95)

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