Final week of 'Godot' and call for Expressions of Interest

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Waiting for Godot is playing to packed houses. It closes this weekend, so this is your last chance to see what The Melbourne Stage Review calls a ‘superbly performed… funny, affecting and completely absorbing’ show. Only a few tickets are left, so don't miss out!

In this newsletter we share The Saturday Paper's review, have a Q&A with one of Godot's youngest cast members, and ask whether you'd like to work with The Ravens.

Waiting for Godot — Phee Broadway Theatre, 212 Barker Street, Castlemaine. 18th September – 3rd October.

The reviews are in!

Last week we shared Australian Book Review's four-star review of Waiting for Godot. This week we bring you The Saturday Paper's review, which highlights how important theatre is as a communal experience.

When I took my seat at the Phee Broadway Theatre in Castlemaine — a modern mid-sized black box theatre attached to the library — for The Ravens Theatre Company's new production, and saw the bare, solitary tree at the back of the almost empty stage in a dim blue light throwing its shadow onto the white curtain behind, my heart sank a little. I remembered how tightly controlled creative expression is in productions of this play, so I was patient. And I was rewarded.

Director Janice Muller is a veteran independent theatre-maker with experience producing, directing and teaching nationally. Her Godot, while adopting the mandated aesthetic, leans into the comedy, and the production works like a machine. The play is mainly constructed out of language games, non sequiturs and patter modelled on vaudeville. When its productions are not laden with long silences and tortured emotional expression, they are entertaining as well as poignant.

Godot remains a living work. It is a still lake and the human condition is reflected there, gently distorted by the waves on the surface. Its joys are in its minutiae, the differences in presence from actor to actor, the emotional weight and balance of gravitas versus the scatological.

Beckett packs both acts with as much of humanity as he can. He pushes aside conventional things such as narrative, exposition and resolution… Here are two people waiting. We see some things happen to them while they wait. They pass the time, so do we. A world now staring at screens that show content designed to be deleterious to our social capacity and promising endless paradise and apocalypse at the same time presents the same ontological crises as the wasteland where the consummation of a promised meeting never materialises. The saviour is definitionally not in the now.

The things that happen take the form of encounters, first with Pozzo and Lucky and then with a boy messenger. This sequence of encounters recurs in the second act, though with some variation in incident. Though they are denuded of context and follow a simple pattern, they are like the rhythms of our own lives: wake, work, sleep, repeat. Godot is in effect a diagram of human life onto which we as modern audiences may map the masks and names of our own existential horrors du jour.

I find myself drifting towards seeing Pozzo through a Trumpian lens. Bluster, demand and cruelty pulled like a rug (toupee? Too much?) over an endless void where a heart should be. A lot of this is due to Tim Rogers' performance. Aside from being the frontman of legendary '90s alt-rock faves You Am I, Rogers has done some respectable theatre work, including Michael Kantor's production of Woyzeck at Malthouse Theatre. He's a very enjoyable Pozzo: there's a marionette-like quality to his physicality and a pantomime dame aspect to his characterisation — which is what reminds me of Trump — and he seems to be having a blast.

Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi), played by Gus Read-Hill and Tim Heath (co-founder of the company along with Shelley Krape) are the eternal innocents: the one reticent, the other forward; the one smiling, the other frowning. They seem to approach each moment as amnesiacs as if, once lived through, a moment has never existed. This lends the characters the childlike quality that is not uncommon to their interpretation.

Lucky (Luke Lennox) only speaks once in a long torrent of mostly nonsense. Lennox handles it admirably, finding rhythms and rhymes throughout to carry us through its maze of faux-academic verbiage. As Lennox concludes, the speech gets a round of applause, reminiscent of how an audience applauds a feat of strength or agility. After all, this speech — like Hamlet's soliloquy “To be, or not to be” — is one of the biggest challenges for any serious actor.

The audience for this production — and for this independent regional company — is one of the most interesting things about it. The co-founders describe their mission as “creating opportunities for local artists to pursue their work and to bringing outstanding theatre to our region”. A laudable goal that would gather much more support if the financial infrastructure around government arts patronage were not decaying as surely as our roads.

Pushed out of the city by rising prices or attracted to a more regional life as they approach retirement, many of Melbourne's independent artists, writers and performers of the 1990s and 2000s have moved to regional Victorian cities. Castlemaine, Bendigo, Ballarat and others are experiencing significant population growth outside the metropolitan conurbation. Companies such as The Ravens are indispensable for cities this size.

As communities grow, they benefit from the social rituals and interactions centred on storytelling and cultural interrogation, both international and local, that foster empathy and support inclusion. Like Godot itself, the work of companies such as The Ravens is an important tool to slow — and perhaps even reverse — the contemporary collapse of meaning into relativism and absurdity. Like Gogo and Didi, theatre — and humanity — are faced with a choice between waiting for a saviour and striking out to where the audiences are, to revisit the physical presence of each other.

Q&A with Jackson Spicer

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We asked Jackson Spicer, one of the two young actors sharing the part of Boy, what he loved about being part of Waiting for Godot.

Tell us a little bit about yourself — what year are you in at school and what are your favourite things?

I am in Grade Five, and I enjoy drawing, creating characters from my own imagination, making up stories, reading, and entertaining people who actually think I'm entertaining.

What have you enjoyed most about being in Waiting for Godot?

I have really enjoyed being part of a cast, and just acting and performing with really nice, lovely actors, who make me feel like I am the character that I play.

What do you like most about acting?

Performing, and just enjoying rehearsals with people.

What sort of acting have you done before?

Performing at the Capital Theatre at the end of each year with my acting class, which is full of kids from nine years old to twelve years old.

What have you learnt about yourself?

That I really like acting and how fun it is to act with people in front of people.

Has Waiting for Godot given you ‘the acting bug’?

Definitely, I cannot wait to do more shows later in life!

penny ryan photography

Would you like to work with The Ravens?

The Ravens is a not-for-profit professional theatre company. That means all profits from our productions go back to pay the cast, creatives and crew. Our mission is to make the best theatre possible for our community with professional practitioners based in our community. As such, we're always pleased to find out who is around and who might want to get involved in the company.

The Ravens is calling for Expressions of Interest from experienced professional practitioners in the following areas:

• Directors
• Actors
• Stage Managers
• Production Managers
• Set Designers
• Costume Designers
• Sound Designers
• Lighting Designers

If you have training and/or professional experience in any of these areas and would like to get involved in future productions with The Ravens, please contact Jane Montgomery Griffiths at eoiravens@gmail.com, including your theatrical CV and, if you're an actor, headshot and/or showreel. We'll endeavour to get back to you as soon as possible, and will always keep you in mind for future productions.

We got merch!

Tote bags — $30. Printed by local legends Oni Streetwear in Hargreaves St, with two designs to choose from. Sturdy, with an internal pocket. Postage or local pick up.

Ravens pin — $8. Put a bird on it! Make those winter coats sing (or croak) with a show of support for Castlemaine's newest theatre company. Postage or local pick up.

Message us via our contact page with your order.

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From Castlemaine, with love —

The Ravens