Toy Symphony
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TOY SYMPHONY Company B presents TOY SYMPHONY Written by MICHAEL GOW Directed by NEIL ARMFIELD The Company B world premiere of Toy Symphony opened at Belvoir St Theatre on 14 November 2007 With JUSTINE CLARKE Nina/Julie Pearson/Miss Beverly/Lynette McKenzie RUSSELL DYKSTRA Lawyer/Headmaster/Dr Maybloom/Steve Gooding/ Mr Devlin/Tom GUY EDMONDS Nick/Daniel MONICA MAUGHAN Mrs Walkham/Nurse/Crazy Woman RICHARD ROXBURGH Roland Henning Set Designer RALPH MYERS Costume Designer TESS SCHOFIELD Lighting Designer DAMIEN COOPER Composer & Sound Designer PAUL CHARLIER Assistant Sound Designer MICHAEL TOISUTA Assistant Director MATTHEW LUTTON Stage Manager KYLIE MASCORD Assistant Stage Manager JOSH SHERRIN Project Observer GAY McAULEY Set Construction THOMAS CREATIVE PRODUCTION THANKS: Rosie Boylan, Oleg Bychenkov, Chameleon Lighting, Coda Audio, Karla D’Annunzio & Caroline Lee at 3AM Wigs, Marley Dawson, Yvonne Fazzolari, Herkies Electrical, Judith Loxley, Alastair McKean, Kate Mitchell, Slava Orel, Dean Pearce & Andy at DemonLeather.com and Sydney Theatre Company costume department. COVER IMAGE: Alex Craig PHOTOGRAPHY: Heidrun Löhr DESIGN: Tim Kliendienst DIRECTOR’S NOTE Michael Gow and I grew up on boss was overseas, went missing. either side of the same town. He Thus began a chain of events that in Como, me in Concord. We both informed Michael’s play Sweet started infants school in 1960 Phoebe and most recently, Toy and did the HSC in ‘72 at Jannali Symphony. and Homebush Boys’ High School I suppose I list all of the above respectively. At school we were information as a way of saying that both called the same names that I feel very (at times uncomfortably) are given to the gentler boys by the close to the world of this play, footy heroes in the playground, we and, I guess, singularly qualified both experienced the premature to direct it! Ultimately, of course, death to leukaemia of someone this is all privileged information and close to us – for Michael his best the test of the play will be how it friend David, for me my brother stands on its own terms. Ian. At Sydney Uni we fell into the fabulous refuge of SUDS (Sydney In a Sunday Arts interview with University Drama Society) and, Virginia Trioli last week, the great having serious fun doing plays, our comic Magda Szubanski offered professional development began. the comment that we in Australia We acted together occasionally (he fight our suburban past but are also was much better) and I directed defined by it and that any artist Michael in our last SUDS show in at some point has to work from 1979, in that same year we began it because it has made us who we parallel professional careers. In are. And I realised that Michael has 1986 I directed Michael’s great play written a profoundly personal and Away at Melbourne’s Playbox, in honest work about the collapse of 1988 he wrote the screenplay for the suburban dream. A work about I love that. And that the whole pain of the work. It’s exciting and Edens Lost that I directed, and we both the power and the bastardry play works through action which difficult fun. It comes straight from worked together on a mini-series of the artist. What’s fascinating is analogous to the central the heart. from Patrick White’s The Tree of is the way the play apparently experience of the blockage and Man that has never been produced. changes shape, morphing two or flow of creativity. Neil Armfield In 1991 a mutual friend was living three times along the way into what in my house in Leichhardt when her can seem to be another kind of play It’s two weeks before our first boyfriend’s boss’s dog Phoebe, that altogether. audience and we’re still finding they had been minding while the the direction, the humour, the SOME OF MICHAEL GOW’S OTHER PLAYS THE KID was Michael’s first mainstage play. It premiered here on the Belvoir St stage in 1983, produced by Nimrod. It tells the story of four desperate teenagers making their way to Sydney to collect a compensation payment after one of them was hit by a bus. Throughout the play, raging summer temperatures set the characters on edge, the promethean music of Wagner fights against a tinny portable stereo, and the city is ringed in an apocalyptic conflagration of bushfire. AWAY is one of the most performed Australian plays. Its first production was at the Stables Theatre in 1986. Three families in the 1960s head off on Christmas holidays, their frustrations and losses follow them, but when their paths cross they find a kind of ease in a beachside pageant. At the centre of the story is teenager Tom, sick with cancer. The play closes with a schoolkid reading King Lear’s line, ‘Whilst we, unburdened, crawl towards death.’ FURIOUS premiered with Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne, in 1991. It’s the story of a playwright cloyed by the pitfalls of his life and work – awards ceremonies, seminars to young hopefuls, his love for a schoolboy and the mysterious legacy of a deceased fan. The writer’s name in the play is Roland Henning. SWEET PHOEBE had its first production with Sydney Theatre Company in 1994 with Michael directing Colin Moody and Cate Blanchett as an aspirational young couple entrusted with the care of a friend’s dog. When the dog goes missing, their desperate search to find her nearly wrecks their lives. HAYDN’S TOY SYMPHONY The origin of the musical work between versions and usually known as ‘Haydn’s Toy Symphony’ depend on what is available locally is unclear as no original manuscript or at the time. Miniature toy and has survived. It now seems likely mechanical musical instruments were that this popular work (known extremely popular at the time the in Germany as Kindersinfonie Toy Symphony became famous. The – Children’s Symphony and in France Berchtoldsgaden/Tyrol region was as Sinfonie Burlesque) was falsely or in fact a centre of toy production. A creatively attributed to Haydn by an version has also been uncovered to enterprising publisher. be played on an organ producing the sound effects. These organs were Throughout the 19th Century it developed in the 17th Century and was variously attributed to Joseph reached their peak during the silent Haydn, Michael Haydn, or simply film era. Recent performances tend ‘Signor Haydn’. to use instruments found within the It is also likely that the Toy orchestral percussion section. Symphony attributed to Leopold The Australian musicologist Robert Mozart (discovered in the 1950s) Illing, from whose extensive research which includes transposed versions into the history of the Toy Symphony of the three original Toy Symphony much of what is written here has movements may be a pastiche based come, has described the work as “fair on an earlier version put together by game for extensive tinkering.” someone unknown. The edited (or compacted) version The earliest existing manuscript, of the Toy Symphony in this however, dates from 1770 and production uses the original Angerer was discovered in the Cisterciian score but has been arranged to Monastery at Stams in the Austrian be played solely by a collection Tyrol. It is titled Berchtoldsgaden of children’s toys, miniature and Musik and was either composed or mechanical instruments, drums and prepared by the Benedictine monk sampled sound effects. The original Edmundo Angerer. string parts are played by toy piano, The Toy Symphony is arranged for glockenspiel and music box. Berchtoldsgaden Musick, circa 1785 strings and a variety of children’s Edmund Angerer OSB (1740-1794) toys. The actual effects used vary Paul Charlier Held in the music archive of Stams Monastery WHITE PAGE TERROR “Yesterday was my Birthday. So completely has a whole year passed, In 2006 Gabriel Garcia Marquez announced that he was giving up with scarcely the fruits of a month. O Sorrow and Shame... I have done writing. 2005 was the first year in his life in which he hadn’t written nothing!... An indefinite indescribable Terror.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge a single line. “There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes is comes easily and perfectly; William Wordsworth wrote twice as many lines between the ages of sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” 18 and 26 as in the following 36 years. Ernest Hemingway Arthur Rimbaud gave up writing poetry at the age of 19. “No choice, no road, no hope.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, blocked following the success of The Great Gatsby. Harper Lee wrote her first novel, To Kill a Mocking Bird, in 1960 at the age of 34. She hasn’t published a word of fiction since. “Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall.” Joseph Conrad A journalist at The New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell, wrote his most famous piece in 1964. He came to the office every working day for the next 32 “The hard part is getting to the top of page 1.” Tom Stoppard years without filing another word. WRITER’S BLOCK the typewriter sits silent, it’s as if you’ve I write this been betrayed, it’s as if a murder has now occurred. with a ballpoint yet words still run through your brain: pen “the Spanish bird sings!” in a red what can notebook; that mean? I am sneaking up on a poem; at least it’s a ripple, even if unusable. there will soon be something for that frigging when will the keys typewriter beat into the to do! paper again? there is a French expression, “without it’s so easy to die long before the literature fact of it.