Presented by TJ Dawe. Bakehouse Theatre - Main Stage. 14 Feb 2015
Did you ever notice how utterly impractical is the layout of the typewriter keyboard? It could be so much simpler. TJ Dawe has pondered this and why the keys fall beneath such inappropriate fingers. This is not what his monologue is about, but it is an interesting sidetrack. He comes back to it a few times before he really hits his straps with the story of ‘Medicine’.
TJ Dawe has made his living studying and performing his own life. He's a Canadian and he says his one-man show career happened because he was lousy at auditions. He's a bit of an oddball, anyway. His parents were very strict. They met at church. His father was the principal at the school he attended.
He says he's always been a bit of an outsider. He has been in therapy and he has read a lot about psychology and human behaviour. He met one of the authors he admires and had the opportunity of going along to a retreat, to sleep in a yurt and have ayahuasca psychedelic medicine treatment. Here, in group therapy, he found himself admitting to things he had never broached before. And then there was the drinking of the opaque brown liquid and what transpired as it took effect.
Dawe is a lean and gangly bloke. Bespectacled. He stands alone, dressed in black, on the black stage of The Bakehouse. There are just the lights, rising and dimming for mood and emphasis. There's a snatch of soundtrack to illustrate backgrounds of the ayahuasca ceremony. Mainly, it is just Dawe talking. He talks for 75 minutes. He talks fast. Audience members are glued to their seats. He tells us things so raw and personal, so very different, and so desperately revealing. His intensity becomes such that he seems to be reliving those experiences - and we are right there, living them with him.
Reality is that TJ Dawe has become extremely accomplished at what he does. Not only does he present with extraordinary observations and recollections but also he is highly informative. Perhaps a chip off the old headmaster block that he teaches his audiences so much. But we go away richer for the new knowledge and dashing off to Google to learn more.
Samela Harris
When: 14 to 21 Feb
Where: Bakehouse Theatre - Main Stage
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
McArts. Producers Warehouse. 13 Feb 2015
It looks like a hospital, but it's really a nursing home. The residents are a pair of Elvis impersonators showing the symptoms of cerebral palsy, a condition acquired at birth or early childhood. They both dress up as the fat Elvis in the white jumpsuit and red scarf. The nurse is a bitch from beginning to end - screaming, ranting, sulking, plotting - one of the most unlikeable characters I have seen in theatre. Oh, yes, Elvis hates her. After a few crude remarks on disability and racism written by Philip Stokes that sets the tone of the show, the Elvises begin to animate in Elvis-like fashion.
Craig Antony McArdle (McArdle/McArts - get it) is more than a good actor. Not only did he do a fetching impersonation of the shy "Yes, ma'am" Elvis, he merged his own body language with that of the King to come up with whipping novel hip gyrations that knocked my eyes off into the scaly walls of the Producers Warehouse. Bravo! And he threw in a minute or two of Johnny Depp's interpretation of Hunter S. Thompson from ‘Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas’, which was equally good eye candy, but irrelevant.
The other Elvis, Aaron Broomhall, was less appealing but cute in his own way. Susan Cilento as the nurse was definitely Return To Sender. Where was director Craig McArdle when you need him? Oh, he was right next to her on stage!
Your critic has to confess he did not get the plot, even though the show flyer foreshadowed that "an unhinged nurse (I got that bit) [would be] planning to destroy them but her dirty secret may result in the greatest comeback ever!" Bugger the plot or what I can make of it, I thought, what I was seeing was the Elvises going in and out of cerebral palsy like it was a bad dream, one of them getting helplessly trapped under his wheelchair, and interesting and sharp changes in the mood of the absurdist script directed with some crispness by McArdle.
The show has crazy legs...it's been around the traps since 2008. Maybe playwright Philip Stokes is the next Harold Pinter, and some critics like me rubbished him, too. I didn't have a burning love for this show.
David Grybowski
When: 13 Feb to 27 Feb
Where: Producers Warehouse
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Rock Surfers Theatre Company. Tuxedo Cat – Cusack Theatre. 13 Feb 2015
Sign of a fine writer is diversity, fearlessness and, in Caleb Lewis's case, perhaps one should add, shamelessness.
Lewis is celebrated for his play ‘Death in Bowengabbie’ which scored rave reviews at The Bakehouse last year. To the Fringe he brings a semi-autobiographical work which is so original and out-there that it has no peers or comparisons.
It is all about his breakup with girlfriend, Lauren. It is about how they meet, how he gets his first unsettling uncertainty about the relationship when choosing videos in a video library. She wanted ‘Ice Storm’ and he wanted ‘Godzilla’. The relationship went downhill from there and they had rows. They were not ordinary rows. Lewis employs no less an example of their conflagratory nature than Little Boy and Hiroshima. And there, corollary to the plot are the characters of Nakajima and Oppenheimer who are doing their own thing there on stage with Godzilla and bombs, life and death and all that.
Lewis, in welcoming the audience to the quaint but comfy little Cusack Theatre in Tuxedo Cat, warns that it is a preview and he might stop the show. So, when he stops actors Phil Spencer and Rebecca Mayo in the middle of a tense scene to make Bec play it again, and then play another scene, the audience initially assumes that it is indeed a preview. However, it is a scripted interruption and as the play progresses, the playwright's discontent with the way things are working out between the characters, they being he and his ex-girlfriend, becomes more exaggerated.
The actors start expressing concern about him and his unresolved issues with Lauren. The playwright is not only the subject of the play but a player in the play. Of course, he's very believable as himself - a rather manic self, too.
Spencer and Mayo carry the action and the script and the introduced characters of Nakajima and Oppenheimer on one hand and Caleb and Lauren on the other. Spencer plays it rather over-confident and ho-hum since, he brags, he has been playing this part for ages. Mayo has to deliver it as an audition piece as well as the play she is in, since part of the playwright's mania is that he can't stop auditioning for the perfect Lauren. Yes, it is a play about unresolved issues.
There is one other character in this work. It's Lewis's mum, Gay. She appears on film being interviewed by Lewis as she cooks some sort of mince and potato bake at home. In episodic takes, interleaved with the drama on stage, Lewis asks her what she thought of Lauren when first she met her and what she thinks they would be doing now if they had not broken up... Gay, pausing at stirring the pot, spoon in hand, patiently gives a mother's caring responses. She adored Lauren. They may have had children by now...
Ever so subtly, Gay becomes the star of the show.
Of course, there is a dramatic denouement. No clues. It's worth popping along for this interesting Fringe oddity.
Samela Harris
When: 13 to 28 Feb
Where: Tuxedo Cat – Cusack Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Penash Productions. Holden Street Theatres - The Arch. 13 Feb 2015
Live and direct from the Land of the Long White Cloud storms Penny Ashton and her musical mash-together of the Jane Austen cannon of romantic mannered novels. In this impossibly accomplished one-hander, Ashton invigorates her very own script with a panoply of personalities oozing idiosyncratic individualism. From the get-go, you realise Ashton is a person of exceptional comic talent - throwing away glances, gestures and asides with breathtaking pace. Boiling in layers of cotton in the dependable Adelaide Fringe heat, she prances through portions of ‘Pride And Prejudice’ and switches to ‘Sense And Sensibility’ seamlessly in a rather new narrative - although she claims to attempt a surprise ending, all's well that ends well in Austen fashion.
The mesmerising single-handed dialogues and thought bubbles are complemented by a few equally energetic songs of contextualised lyrics put to new instrumentation and recording - originating from the likes of Strauss and Beethoven and Bon Jovi - by a musical chum from Otago. A timid audience member even got an invitation to the ball scene. I also loved her observations on how many things haven't changed (for women) in 200 years and the use of local place names.
Ashton has already won Best Performance in a Comedy at the 2013 Auckland Fringe, and Best Female Solo Show at the Victoria, British Columbia, Fringe with this hit show. While some knowledge of the Austen oeuvre would be a pleasure-enhancer, you'll be absolutely enchanted and hilariously entertained without it. Double bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 13 Feb to 8 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres - The Arch
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Offending Shadows Productions, USA. Gluttony – The Bally. 13 Feb 2015
There in a tent amid the jubilant good spirit of Gluttony, we find ourselves in Berlin under a hail of bombs with a terrified teenage girl cowering in a cellar. Tantalising scents of sizzling satays waft through the tent flaps. There's music out there somewhere.
But, there, inside the tent called The Bally, it is Germany. We are riveted and entirely captivated by a young American called Ingrid Garner who is taking us through the extraordinary experiences which befell her grandmother, Eleanor, in WWII.
Hers was the experience of Nazi Germany as a German-American girl.
Eleanor was nine in 1939 when her father decided that a job offer back in his native Germany was too good to refuse. The family left their happy life in Stratford, New Jersey, but were only half way across the Atlantic on the German ship, SS Hamburg, when Hitler invaded Poland and it was clear this trip was a bad idea. The ship changed its funnel colours to protect its course and the family landed in a very troubled Germany with no choice but to make the best of it. They could not go home. Thus did young Eleanor learn to salute Hitler and, in due course, join the Hitler Youth, because it was the fun thing to do if you were a kid in Germany. Thus did she experience the evolving misery of a country gripped by paranoia, fear and deprivation.
Ingrid Garner seems genetically coded to deliver this unusual war story. Such power and conviction does she bring to the role that one forgets entirely that it is not her own story, that she is not Eleanor.
She is a very beautiful young woman with a good voice and excellent dramatic discipline. She performs wearing a very simple but exquisite frock and scant makeup. Her props are just a travel trunk and two chairs and there is a small screen on which a few crucial images are projected to illustrate the history she is describing.
Her audience emerges from the plush little tent theatre into the hot early evening still misty-eyed from the seeming immediacy of her bomb-shattering vignettes and just a bit in love with this marvellous American girl for being no less than the sacred keeper of her grandmother's story.
Samela Harris
When: 13 to 28 Feb
Where: Gluttony – The Bally
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au