Latest news with #YaelStone
ABC News
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
How a boy from Balmain made caring cool
Jack Manning Bancroft is the founder and CEO of the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME). Jack's mother is Bundjalung artist, Bronwyn Bancroft. Growing up in inner-Sydney, he was intimidated by her artistic drive and threw himself into sport, because that was the only way a young Jack thought a man could have influence in the world. When he was ten the family moved to Bundjalung country to spend time with his mum's side of the family. The local kids refused to accept that Jack was Aboriginal. He escaped into fantasy books and wrote long letters home to his dad, Ned Manning, in Sydney. Jack received a scholarship to St Paul's College at the University of Sydney and vowed to use his opportunity to increase the number of Indigenous kids at university. The Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) was born and Jack has since used his position to forge connections between communities to foster understanding across the world. Further information Watch Australian Story featuring Jack and his partner, Yael Stone on iview. Listen to Jack's dad, Ned Manning, on Conversations in 2022.
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mother Play review – Sigrid Thornton is terrific as a gin-soaked, monstrous matriarch
Poisonous and heavily self-medicating mothers are a standard in the theatre, from Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night to Violet Weston in August: Osage County. Self-absorbed, vain and hypercritical, they tend to stalk their stages like injured lionesses, their own offspring the convenient targets of their abuse and cynicism. US playwright Paula Vogel adds Phyllis Herman (Sigrid Thornton) to this list, as monstrous and brittle as any of them. While Mother Play (the subtitle is A Play in Five Evictions) flirts with the toxicity and histrionics of those antecedents, it feels closer in spirit to Tennessee Williams' 'memory play' The Glass Menagerie. Where Williams created the character of Tom as an authorial surrogate, Vogel gives us Martha (Yael Stone), who is likewise desperate to escape her mother's clutches while trying to understand what makes her tick. There's a deep melancholy working under the play, a sense of all that's been lost to the ravages of time and forgetting. Like Williams, Vogel is mining a lot of her own biography here – her mother was also named Phyllis, and worked as a secretary for the Postal Service after the breakdown of her marriage – and she traces the outline of a family in slow decline with poignancy and skill. The rot sets in during the first eviction, as Martha and her elder brother Carl (Ash Flanders) move boxes and furniture around while Phyllis drinks herself into a state of grotesque self-pity. The kids are only 12 and 14, and yet already they seem like the parents to a stubborn and petulant child. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning As the play progresses and the narrative moves inexorably through the decades – it opens in the early 60s and ends in the present day – this parental imbalance only worsens. Gin-soaked and combative, Phyllis alternately berates, guilts and clings to her children like resented support structures; one moment she is rejecting them for being gay, the next grasping for their approval. She's fiendish and cruel, but Vogel also lets us see the damage done to her, the ways in which she is shaped by the casual cruelties of others. It isn't so much a cycle of abuse as a long sputtering out, levelled by great reserves of forgiveness and stoicism from the kids. Thornton is terrific, constantly alive to the character's gaping flaws without once losing the central pathos that keeps us engaged and sympathetic. She has a harsh, steely quality under the gaucheness and impropriety that softens as the play progresses, eventually reaching a kind of weary dignity and poise. Stone finds great depth and complexity in Martha, pained by her mother's sadism but determined to see beyond it. Flanders is solid in the lesser part of Carl, and together the cast paint a convincing and intricate family dynamic. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Director Lee Lewis gets many things right, which makes the ones she gets wrong seem more egregious, somehow. Those performances are beautifully calibrated and expertly pitched, but Vogel's startling tonal shifts and narrative longueurs seem to trip Lewis up; too often the production falters, pitching into silliness and camp. One scene in a gay bar – where Phyllis starts dancing a conga line with her adult children – feels desperate, and the less said about a giant cockroach that waves at the audience the better. This reticence seeps into Christina Smith's design, which is surprisingly banal and unwieldy – although not her costumes, which are little treasure troves of period wit and personality. The family's five different abodes are simultaneously underdone and overly complicated, necessitating some clunky transitions. Niklas Pajanti's inventive lighting helps, pitching from glamorous to desolate as the family's fortunes change. Kelly Ryall's compositions are similarly mercurial, jaunty one minute and plaintive the next. Vogel is a fascinating and idiosyncratic playwright, and if this production of Mother Play doesn't quite coalesce, it still achieves moments of beauty and quiet awe. That temporal scope allows the actors to track the emotional beats of their characters' lives like pins on a map, and if political and social events tend to disappear into the background, their effect on the family's interpersonal relationships is forcefully underlined. The moral battle between liberalism and conservatism, those ideological polarities currently tearing the US apart, are depicted here as fissures of the self and the family unit, a long time coming. Memory plays are by definition fragmentary and elliptical, so perhaps the staccato rhythms and jolting tonal shifts are necessary. The cliche of the monstrous feminine, where the mother becomes the repository of all the family's sickness and perversion, is subtly but surely unpacked and debunked. What we're left with is a mother and a daughter tremulously reaching for care, compassion and connection. In this way, it feels vital and contemporary. Mother Play, by the Melbourne Theatre Company, is on at the Sumner theatre until 2 August
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mother Play review – Sigrid Thornton is terrific as a gin-soaked, monstrous matriarch
Poisonous and heavily self-medicating mothers are a standard in the theatre, from Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night to Violet Weston in August: Osage County. Self-absorbed, vain and hypercritical, they tend to stalk their stages like injured lionesses, their own offspring the convenient targets of their abuse and cynicism. US playwright Paula Vogel adds Phyllis Herman (Sigrid Thornton) to this list, as monstrous and brittle as any of them. While Mother Play (the subtitle is A Play in Five Evictions) flirts with the toxicity and histrionics of those antecedents, it feels closer in spirit to Tennessee Williams' 'memory play' The Glass Menagerie. Where Williams created the character of Tom as an authorial surrogate, Vogel gives us Martha (Yael Stone), who is likewise desperate to escape her mother's clutches while trying to understand what makes her tick. There's a deep melancholy working under the play, a sense of all that's been lost to the ravages of time and forgetting. Like Williams, Vogel is mining a lot of her own biography here – her mother was also named Phyllis, and worked as a secretary for the Postal Service after the breakdown of her marriage – and she traces the outline of a family in slow decline with poignancy and skill. The rot sets in during the first eviction, as Martha and her elder brother Carl (Ash Flanders) move boxes and furniture around while Phyllis drinks herself into a state of grotesque self-pity. The kids are only 12 and 14, and yet already they seem like the parents to a stubborn and petulant child. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning As the play progresses and the narrative moves inexorably through the decades – it opens in the early 60s and ends in the present day – this parental imbalance only worsens. Gin-soaked and combative, Phyllis alternately berates, guilts and clings to her children like resented support structures; one moment she is rejecting them for being gay, the next grasping for their approval. She's fiendish and cruel, but Vogel also lets us see the damage done to her, the ways in which she is shaped by the casual cruelties of others. It isn't so much a cycle of abuse as a long sputtering out, levelled by great reserves of forgiveness and stoicism from the kids. Thornton is terrific, constantly alive to the character's gaping flaws without once losing the central pathos that keeps us engaged and sympathetic. She has a harsh, steely quality under the gaucheness and impropriety that softens as the play progresses, eventually reaching a kind of weary dignity and poise. Stone finds great depth and complexity in Martha, pained by her mother's sadism but determined to see beyond it. Flanders is solid in the lesser part of Carl, and together the cast paint a convincing and intricate family dynamic. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Director Lee Lewis gets many things right, which makes the ones she gets wrong seem more egregious, somehow. Those performances are beautifully calibrated and expertly pitched, but Vogel's startling tonal shifts and narrative longueurs seem to trip Lewis up; too often the production falters, pitching into silliness and camp. One scene in a gay bar – where Phyllis starts dancing a conga line with her adult children – feels desperate, and the less said about a giant cockroach that waves at the audience the better. This reticence seeps into Christina Smith's design, which is surprisingly banal and unwieldy – although not her costumes, which are little treasure troves of period wit and personality. The family's five different abodes are simultaneously underdone and overly complicated, necessitating some clunky transitions. Niklas Pajanti's inventive lighting helps, pitching from glamorous to desolate as the family's fortunes change. Kelly Ryall's compositions are similarly mercurial, jaunty one minute and plaintive the next. Vogel is a fascinating and idiosyncratic playwright, and if this production of Mother Play doesn't quite coalesce, it still achieves moments of beauty and quiet awe. That temporal scope allows the actors to track the emotional beats of their characters' lives like pins on a map, and if political and social events tend to disappear into the background, their effect on the family's interpersonal relationships is forcefully underlined. The moral battle between liberalism and conservatism, those ideological polarities currently tearing the US apart, are depicted here as fissures of the self and the family unit, a long time coming. Memory plays are by definition fragmentary and elliptical, so perhaps the staccato rhythms and jolting tonal shifts are necessary. The cliche of the monstrous feminine, where the mother becomes the repository of all the family's sickness and perversion, is subtly but surely unpacked and debunked. What we're left with is a mother and a daughter tremulously reaching for care, compassion and connection. In this way, it feels vital and contemporary. Mother Play, by the Melbourne Theatre Company, is on at the Sumner theatre until 2 August
The Guardian
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Each night, a 14-year-old tasks two actors with playing her parents. They haven't seen the script
One evening in June last year, actor Ewen Leslie rocked up at Sydney's Belvoir St theatre to find out what show he was performing that night and meet his fellow actors for the first time. All he had was an email telling him to prepare his best Werner Herzog impression, to wear comfortable clothes, and to expect content around 'childhood, parenthood and mental health disorders'. A couple of hours later he was on stage, script in hand, being directed by a 13-year-old in front of an audience and struggling not to cry. The assignment was POV: a micro-budget, 70-minute show which follows a teenager named Bub, who is making a documentary about her parents. Each night, two adult actors who have not rehearsed or seen the script before step into the role of the parents, guided on stage by the young actor playing Bub. Actors who have played Bub's parents include Orange is the New Black star Yael Stone and Play School presenter Zindzi Okenyo. Leslie has gone toe-to-toe with actors including Richard Roxburgh and Nicole Kidman, and scaled peak roles such as Hamlet and Richard III – but POV presented a unique challenge. 'You have no control over it, and there was nothing I could do to prepare for it because I had no idea what I was about to go through,' he says. 'There's something scary about that, but also strangely empowering.' When actor Geraldine Hakewill asked him if she should participate in the show's upcoming season at Melbourne's Rising festival, he didn't hesitate: 'Do it'. Leslie had been hearing 'for years' about the show's creators, re:group: a collective of performance graduates from the University of Wollongong who have been using live cinema on stage for more than a decade, in shows such as Coil, a tribute to small town video stores in which they made a movie in real time. In POV, the teen and two adults 're-enact' Bub's experience as she tries to make a documentary about her parents but is stymied by their reluctance to participate. At the top of the play, the actor playing Bub (alternated by 14-year-olds Edith Whitehead and Mabelle Rose) explains the show's concept to the audience, then proceeds to direct her adult co-stars in a series of scenes. She's often filming the action at the same time, with a mixture of the live camera feed and pre-recorded footage screened on video monitors on either side of the stage. It's a slippery, meta-theatrical show, and between pondering the layers of artifice, enjoying the Werner Herzog references, and watching two unrehearsed actors thrown in the deep end, it's tremendous fun – and exhilarating, in the same way that watching good improv or a high wire act is. As in all the best theatre, there's something going on beneath the surface. Halfway through POV, it becomes apparent that Bub's parents' reticence about the documentary stems from her mum's mental health, which her dad doesn't want to talk about. It's what the show then reveals about adult-child dynamics and conversations about mental health that makes it particularly fascinating – and emotionally powerful. As POV's playwright Mark Rogers puts it: 'To put adult performers in that vulnerable position, where they're unrehearsed, mirrors the way in which you're unprepared, as a parent, to talk to your kid when crises happen.' As an audience member, the adult actors are your proxies: none of us are prepared; all of us are processing challenging scenarios and conversations at the same time, thinking: how would I – or have I – had these conversations in my own life? Experiencing this communally, within the safe structure of a show, is a special kind of magic unique to theatre. The genesis of the play was Rogers' own experiences and anxieties around parenthood, and his conversations with the show's director, Solomon Thomas, about growing up with a mum with bipolar. The resulting mix is a fictional story infused with lived experience. 'For a while the play was just about this fictional family who had a mum who was going through depression,' says Thomas, who was initially 'really scared' to expose this part of his life to the creative process. 'And then we kind of chipped away at it, and slowly I began to feed Mark parts of my life.' The key ingredient for the show was Edie Whitehead, one of the two Bubs, who re:group enlisted during early development. 'As soon as we saw her in the space with the camera, Sol and I just looked at each other and were like, 'This is it',' Rogers recalls. 'We were extremely lucky to find Edie.' Whitehead and Rose are the steady hands guiding the adult actors and audience alike through what is an emotional and cathartic experience. For Leslie, a father of two, the play's most challenging moment was a monologue in which he reads a letter to Bub. 'I found myself getting very moved by it. And because I wasn't prepared for it, I started to get quite emotional,' he says. 'I had this weird impulse to stand up and jump up and down – so I did that, to get out of my head for a sec so that I didn't start crying.' In another performance, the actor playing Bub's mum did burst into tears. How does Whitehead feel in those moments, encountering big emotions while being the person in charge? 'I actually really liked it,' she says, 'because it meant that they were really listening to the show and experiencing being that mum or dad. I thought that was really cool.' POV is on as part of Rising festival, Melbourne (4-8 June); Heartland festival, Parramatta (2-5 July); Bondi festival, Sydney (10-12 July)
