State Theatre Company. Space Theatre and Scenic Workshop and Rehearsal Room. 26 Feb 2015
Irishman Samuel Beckett is said to be one of the last modernists, and because he is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of last century, he also is considered one of the first post-modernists. Isn't that absurd? Not really - he picked up the 1969 Nobel Prize for literature. He is thus famous for redefining the theatrical event.
On offer by the State Theatre Company are three short plays. 'Krapp's Last Tape' was written in 1958 - five years after his most famous play, 'Waiting For Godot,' established his reputation. 'Eh, Joe' comes ten years later, and 'Footfalls' fourteen years before his death in 1989. The Beckett machine prescribes strict adherence to the stage notes and consequently one may think of these plays as museum pieces. So this becomes your opportunity to see for yourself authentic productions perhaps similar to those that caused all the fuss almost 50 years ago.
What Beckett is famous for is stripping away the noisy trappings of theatre and exploring the essence of our consciousness, or what it is to be human. In each play is a single character on stage, who, I would say, is interacting or reacting with their inner voice. Eckhart Tolle calls it the voice in your head. Landmark Education calls it the all-ready always listening. Imagine, if while you were talking to someone, your arm at your elbow started to swing wildly. You're quite used to this and explain, "Oh, just ignore that. I can't control it. It just happens." Your companion would rightly think you have a serious affliction. Yet nearly everybody has an inner voice that seems to happen all by itself and sometimes won't stop. We have conversations with it - it's so common, we think it's normal. But it frequently dwells on the past - some lost relationship, or old grief or missed opportunity. While no-one sees your inner voice, unlike your out-of-control arm, if you act on figments of your inner voice in dangerous ways, you would be diagnosed with a psychosis.
It's very easy to see ourselves in these plays. Pamela Rabe plays with world weariness a haggard woman in conversation with the disambiguated voice of her mother, who recognises the problem when she says, "..will you never have done revolving it all [in your mind]?" And like a lot of us today, the woman is dealing with the issues of old aged care and wondering when enough is enough. She walks a line, back and forth, afflicted, with heavy footfalls.
'Eh, Joe' was actually a play written for television, the new medium of the time. Poor Joe locks himself up in a bedroom which is physically further confined by the utilisation of a false perspective (this is a perspective where size actually recedes in the distance). He simply sits on the bed. The room is behind a screen and we see increasing close-ups of Joe's face projected on the screen - each element of the projection specified in the script. Joe is moved to tears listening to what seems like an ex-wife's voice tormenting him about his past relational tragedies with women. Paul Blackwell's slow disintegration was extremely moving and this was my favourite play for its technical virtuosity and Pamela Rabe's sophisticated voice work.
Some humour creeps into ‘Krapp's Last Tape’. Krapp, played with similarity to a grumpy old engineer by Peter Carroll, is surrounded by mountains of his life's debris as he sits at a tightly lit desk. After some funny business with bananas, Krapp will torment his mind with Spool 5 from Box 3 - an audio tape he made some thirty years ago, when he recorded himself as saying he was at the height of his powers but also we learn he is in the last throws of a dying relationship. It didn't look like anything good happened since. Regrets, I had a few.
Geordie Brookman (Footfalls), Corey McMahon (Eh, Joe) and Nescha Jelk (Krapp's Last Tape) direct and co-design (with Alisa Paterson) their plays with clarity and simplicity, as they were told to do by Beckett and his estate. They give terrific explanations of their aims in their director's notes so don't even enter the theatre without a program. Chris Petridis and Jason Sweeney heighten the mood with their light and sound contributions using modern technology in a way I'm sure Beckett would be pleased.
In the plays, a single character struggles with only their anguishing voice, which can make for soporific theatre if you don't know what you are looking for, so it would be best to bone up. But this is likely a once in a lifetime opportunity to see these three plays, together, and observe a genius's work just as he intended, by a loving and thoughtful creative team. Bravo!
P.S. By the way, who's that listening to the voice? It's you. The voice is just some rubbish your mind makes up and you can stop it.
David Grybowski
When: 20 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
by Van Badham. Ayers House Museum. 25 Feb 2015
It was a Van Badham play, ‘Notoriously Yours’, which won the 2014 Adelaide Critics Circle IAF Award for Innovation, it being a terrific thriller presented by five.point.one with ground-breaking originality involving lots of iPhones and high-tech.
Van Badham is back with a play which could not be of more dramatic contrast.
Late Night Story is a spooky old ghost story.
It is also a ghost story with a fresh feel and a real zinger of a twist.
It is classic for its genre but original a la Van Badham whose rise in the theatre world has etched her out as one of the most able and exciting playwrights in the land.
As the title suggests, ‘Late Night Story’ is a late-night production. It is most aptly and, indeed, superbly presented in the ample bay window space of the Ayers House Museum. It seems made-to-order for the play's grand old Adelaide estate setting. The audience finds itself in a sumptuous room, albeit sitting on particularly hard white chairs with very dubious sightlines. The lighting is dim and exquisitely eerie. Long pink curtains dress the windows through which the external shutters are seen in stark silhouette. An iron cot and a pile of books furnish the stage. There is a table with two chairs and a lamp. A grand piano is attended by an enigmatic bearded pianist. He is Richard Wise and his score for the show could not be more evocative and aesthetic. A metronome ticks loudly.
Xaviera Grace begins her story. She needs a job desperately. She is interviewed by a strange woman stooped over a walking stick. The woman does not reveal her name or anything other than a governess is needed and there are two children in a house with a strict routine. The governess may not touch anything in the house and must remain in her room throughout the nights.
Xaviera is played by Claire Glenn, fresh-faced with rich caramel hair in a 30s bob. She "is" the hapless heroine and the audience takes to her straight away. Glenn is a glorious actor to watch and hear. Her skill and focus are key to the thrill and tension of the play for, out of the entirely unbelievable, her character must deliver innocence and credibility. Tamara Lee looms, large and angular as the potential employer. She gives away little except the job.
What ensues through the days and nights in that strange place cannot be revealed. There is another character potently embodied by John Maurice. He's the man of the house. He may or may not be who and what he says he is. Indeed, nothing may be what it appears to be. Or it may.
Badham, writer, director and designer, does not attempt to make the story logical or believable. It is a ghost story. It is a story about fear and superstition and about meddling with minds.
It is a story well told and wondrous to behold. A five-star show.
Samela Harris
When: 24 Feb to Mar 1
Where: Ayers House Museum
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Gobsmacked Theatre Company. Holden Street Theatres – The Studio. 25 Feb 2015
There's nothing upmarket about the name Gobsmacked for a theatre company, so keep expectations low for its Fringe production of ‘Anna Robi and the House of Dogs’.
This play, written by Queenslander Maxine Mellor, is vulgar, gross, over-the-top and somewhere way out there.
It opens with the fairly graphic sounds of a man masturbating over phone sex and then takes us into the world of the woman on the other end of the line - Anna of the House of Dogs.
She is a very annoying young woman hell-bent on losing her virginity.
The problem is that she shares a bed with her sick and nasty old mother and the rest of the house is a sea of squalor dominated by faeces and fecund dogs. Housekeeping consists of adding layers of newspaper to cover the last layer of newspaper.
Hence there is a wonderful set designed by director David McVicar. It is dominated by a double bed with ugh-beige sheets. The floor, of course, is a mass of newspapers which have their own aesthetic. Fake dog turds lie here and there. The backdrop is a wall of cardboard cartons labelled "Catalog". The horrid old mother is addicted to catalogues and home shopping.
That vile old bitch is played by Emily Branford who milks the laughs by taking the character as far as she can. She uglies up and does a lot of grimacing - almost to the gurning point. She is loud and mean and generally repulsive. She is a nightmare version of the bedridden grandparents of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’.
Then comes the dream sequence and Branford transforms to a 50s Home Beautiful mother complete with birthday cake. There's music and mime, and a bit of a dance. It breaks the ugliness and shows another side of Branford's comic spirit.
But all too soon, it's back to bed and torrents of sexual fury - much talk of lipstick penises and stinking vaginas.
If one is supposed to have any sympathy for the frustrated daughter, played to gawping and gawking excess by Hannah Nicholson, it fails. She comes across as shudderingly deranged.
There is humour, however - quite a few titters and one or two laughs. It is, after all, so absurdly crass. One might call it a "grotesquerie".
The arrival of the fantasy man is a high spot. The arrival of the phone sex fellow is not. Both characters are versions of Roger and he is colourfully played by Phil Marker-Smith.
If you are into the possibly humorous depths of pissing in the bed, dog-mating and squalor, this is your show.
Samela Harris
When: 23 Feb to 8 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres – The Studio
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Strut and Fret. The Garden of Unearthly Delights – Rymill Park. 24 Feb 2015
As home to the premiere season of this new Strut and Fret show, Adelaide is being treated to the most highly anticipated (and priced) show of the 2015 Adelaide Fringe.
Billed as an evening of “visual and edible wonderment”, ‘Fear and Delight’ asks that their audience “shed their inhibitions and experience an interactive feast of theatre and culinary wonder…”
The Complete Experience finds the addition of an immersive, ritualistic, cult-like initiation in which audience members are lead on a culinary and visual journey through Adelaide’s Rymill Park. Guests are confronted by characters participating in unconventional acts as well as theatrically prepared appetisers which tickle the imagination and challenge the taste buds.
On the menu are selections like ‘Oyster Black Seafood with Edible Sand’ served from a clam shell; ‘Beef Jerky with Ant Mayonnaise’ presented on a cow skull; and martini cocktail glasses filled with a ‘Jelly of Seaweed, Water Plants, Frog Spawn, Roasted Meal Worms and Fried Grasshopper’.
In some instances the descriptions are theatrical only; but in the case of the ants and meal worms – that is exactly what you’re eating!
After our brief, interactive ceremonial jaunt, we are seated for the main meal. As VIP guests at the ‘Fear and Delight’ show our table is formed from the sides of an enormous raised stage, 25 seats long on each side, on which the performance will later take place.
This front row location proves to be one of the key draw cards of ‘The Complete Experience’, experience.
Carefully prepared by internationally renowned chefs Didier Prince and Roy Wiggers of ‘The Dutch Food Slingers’ the main meal is as experimental and theatrical as the actors serving it. Whilst Heston Blumenthal might look twice to see what interesting creations this duo has delivered, I doubt that he would try them twice. Much of the food is over-cooked in concept and a tad underdone on flavour. This is not to say it doesn’t taste of anything but one does struggle to finish most of the offerings available. The ‘Roast Chicken Leg with Claw’ is, however, both notable and delicious.
The official wine sponsor, d’Arenberg, turns out a great selection to accompany the meal including ‘The Money Spider Roussanne’ and ‘The Derelict Vineyard Grenache’. These wines are excellent choices and continue to be enjoyed by ‘The Complete Experience’ guest’s right through the show.
When the show begins, all that came before is forgotten. The performers have us transfixed as they move through the delicate choreographed performance that is ‘Fear and Delight’.
British musicians, ‘The Correspondents’, provide a live soundtrack to the evening with vocals in the supremely capable hands of Mr Bruce, and musical direction by his partner in musical crime, DJ Chucks. The electro swing stylings of Bruce are intoxicating and he is ably supported by Australian-born Simone Page Jones on female vocals. What this performance has, that others of its kind seem to be lacking, is a theatrical narrative which is intrinsically tied to both the soundtrack and the choreography.
‘Fear and Delight’ is more dance than acrobatics and this is its strength. Renowned French dancer, Anne-Caroline Boidin, provides much of the contemporary dance flair and her commitment and energy is outstanding. She is not alone though. The whole cast, whether comedian, acrobat, aerialist or dancer, collaborates on the movement that ties the performance together.
The acrobatic trio‘15ft6’ of the Netherlands are technically superb. Spending most of her time in the air, or at the mercy of her trusted colleagues, acrobat Tain Molendijk stuns the audience with both her agility and aerial beauty as she flips and flexes all over the stage.
Aerialists Saulo Sarmiento and Nick Beyeler turn the heads of female audience members (and some of the males) with bodies many would kill for.
At the conclusion of the performance, the audience is invited to dance the night away at ‘The Devil’s Lighthouse’ with cocktails specially designed by Bompas and Parr.
‘The Complete Experience’ is complete. The show is absolutely worth a look and I encourage you to check it out. Love or hate the prequel it is a unique and memorable experience - albeit not a cheap one for those considering the purchase. Either way, there is something here for everyone and it must be seen to be believed. Go, for the fear and for the delight.
Paul Rodda
When: 13 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: The Garden of Unearthly Delights – Rymill Park
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Black Cat Theatre. The Kings Hotel. 24 Feb 2015
Black Cat Theatre - an ensemble of students and young adults - doesn't think theatre in Adelaide is highbrow enough and thus have dedicated themselves to the noble cause of putting the classics on stage. I had a crack at reading Franz Kafka's pre-WWI novel, 'The Trial,' but dropped it before the end, having found it a bit turgid. I didn't feel that bad because Kafka didn't finish writing it. In fact, he never finished any of his novels, so there.
So I have great admiration for Hugh Scobie for writing an adaptation of an incomplete novel and resuscitating it in this world premiere production. And for Veronica Jefferis for her evocative and thematic illustration.
In 'The Trial,' we witness Joseph K's bewilderment as he is arrested for a never-specified crime and confronts bureaucracy, idiocy and indifference as he navigates a labyrinth court and justice system that doesn't make any sense. Almost any lay person caught up in the courts would immediately sympathise with K. But the play operates on many levels through its use of court metaphors for other meanings, and the fear and anxiety created by the sinister authoritarian regime behind the whole thing.
Scobie's adaptation is pretty good. He focuses more on the absurd and less on the sinister and violent elements of the text, yet makes K's frustrations palpable and accessible. Scobie himself plays Joseph K, looking a little bizarre with his Rastafarian hair bundled up back of his head. No sacrifice should be too great for theatre, Hugh. The remaining cast of five take on the major roles of the novel with Adam Bates adding interest to his Examining Magistrate by channeling Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. The short play includes a long interval that was in fact longer than the second act. And it's the first time I've seen a play without any actors.
David Grybowski
When: 24 Feb to 5 Mar
Where: The Kings Hotel
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au