Love at the Bar - witness protection. 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 seems 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 (20-23May, Laureate Productions’ first season at the Sydney Writers’ Festival). You see 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).

And now here I was faced with their new production Love at the Bar and realizing that we were without the benefit of knowing most of the 15 Australian love poems that were being presented. So I jumped up at interval (and my kid’s 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.

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; Sydney’s green harbour gently slapping against the wharf outside.

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

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 the young Australian composer, Ashley Chatto, 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:

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)

There’s a two page statement at the beginning of the program where each member of the crew, Angela Stretch (Producer/Director), Geir Brillian (Sound & Lighting), JD Young (Video Projections), Ashley Chatto (Composer), Kathleen Williamson (performer), David Stephenson (performer) and Katherine Ellis (performer) each give an artist’s statement about the production. Dave 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!)

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).

Before I go, I just have to tell you that the range of compositions which Ashley Chatto has brought to this show is extraordinary. He starts with the playfulness and wistfulness of The Golden Mean by Dorothy Hewitt sung by Kath 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’

Kath Ellis is a 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 Dave Stephenson perform his poem The Bar at the Rock Garden, Covent Garden, November 1981 to Ashley 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’

I would go to this show just to hear Dave Stephenson’s trumpet playing and his scuba diving deep baritone voice, or to see Kath Ellis’s acting or to hear Kathleen Williamson’s singing.

If Ashley Chatto’s compositions for Untitled by Lesbia Harford (a poem written on 5 June 1918) and for Kevin Hart’s '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!

Every Australian who has ever been moved by music and words has to get to know Ashley Chatto’s work and to hear Kathleen 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)

And some more mixed metaphors for you – wear a wet suit! Geir Brillian gets out a fire hose and the music and lighting soak into JD Young’s video mural and wash over the performers all night long. And you’ll want to get wet.
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Cathy Bray is a Sydney poet and student of script-writing. She has been 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' this September, and will be performing at The Sydney Fringe.