Hannah Norris Presents. Holden Street Theatres - The Manse. 12 Feb 2015
We sit on uncomfortable chairs lined up along two walls facing each other.
The lights go out. It's pitch black. Silent.
Far from sensory deprivation, one becomes highly aware of the proximity of the people sitting beside one.
Loud, loud sounds suddenly erupt. Industrial.
Finally, a dim light reveals a woman with a soft voice. She begins a stream of consciousness.
For the next hour, we meet her over and over again, emerging from bursts of blackout and torrents of sound.
She is an air stewardess. She runs us through the on-board routines. “Do up your seatbelt... In the unlikely event of an accident...”
But interspersed with the humdrum of work and behind the toothy smile she is dealing with a stark fear. She believes she has a stalker, a man with eyes the colour of ash. He is never far away, always trying to get closer. She maintains the air crew facade but her lipstick smile is a mask.
Bright light falls upon her as she gives safety instructions. It snaps to grey and we dip into the zone of her inner fear.
Hannah Norris makes these abrupt transitions with the precision and effectiveness of the professional thespian that she is.
Duncan Graham may have written the show, but it is Norris who must make the audience commit to it. She is sole performer in the black room with its two aircraft runners of safety lights. Audience feet must be kept behind these lights, especially when they're out for this is the passage along which Norris moves from scene to scene. She does it swiftly and silently in the blackouts, emerging here under a pin light and there under a spotlight, always in another world.
Even in this intimate space, she asserts a strong fourth wall. She walks down the aisle between her "passengers" but we are silent witnesses in the dark. "Chicken or beef?" she purrs.
The tale is episodic. There are digressions. Sometimes she is playing to a huge glass "window". Sometimes she is on top of her service trolley. Sometimes she looks young and pretty. Sometimes she looks old and harsh.
For, there is another crucial player in this strange, experimental work. It's the lighting designer, Sam Hopkins. This play in the dark is all about light. It is about the darkness within versus the person we put forward to the world. This is a play which pokes its action out of the darkness, weaves its message in and out of the soundscape and lighting. The sound is a din in the head.
The audience must determine if the woman's stalker is real or a nightmare.
Norris's performance is superb. Her disconcerting inhalation of air becomes yet another of the tools of this unusual drama - startling gasps growing in scale. It is highly effective and will linger in the mind's ear as the most vivid impression of the work.
‘Cut’ is one of those "experiential" theatre pieces which showcase talents and off-mainstream ideas.
This is what a Fringe is all about.
Samela Harris
When: 10 Feb to 14 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres - The Manse
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Spooky Duck Productions. Holden Street Theatres - The Studio. 12 Feb 2015
The aptly titled 'Kinski and I' is a largely solo work from writer and performer CJ Johnson, with direction from Michael Pigott.
An award winner at the 2014 Sydney Fringe, the piece is inspired by Klaus Kinski's 1988 auto-biography 'All I Need is Love'. In the book's original form, it provides an uncensored account of a man plagued by a life-long sexual addiction. Though the veracity of the more extreme content has been challenged, there is little doubt that Kinski survived a difficult childhood to become one of the most celebrated and notorious actors of his generation.
Found under the generic category of 'theatre’ in the Adelaide Fringe guide, it is worth noting that the non-traditional performance is more accurately described as platform theatre. Delivered as a narrative monologue it draws entirely from the actor's auto-biography, with Johnson alone on stage playing the character of Kinski. Reading from a tablet device strapped to a stand, Johnson only looks up periodically to meet the audience's gaze. Occasionally, Johnson moves out of character and to stage right providing his own reflections on Kinski and the events of his life.
In a supporting role, Jess Bush is offstage but features via video as Kinski's eldest daughter, Pola. Also reading extracts, her dialog is taken from Pola's own 2013 autobiography in which she details the sexual abuse suffered at the hands of her father.
In a testament to Johnson's talent and his grasp of the character, you are soon immersed in the man and suddenly, the bare stage feels much less so. A video scape of Kinski's most iconic work plays behind Johnson cleverly connecting the audience with the real Kinski and his most transformative film characters.
The language and content are shocking and confronting. Kinski's insatiable and perverted sexual appetite is described in explicit detail, but the sheer volume of smut and its constant presence in his life seems more psychotic than pornographic. You are drawn into his psychosis, feeling both intrigue and revulsion at the brilliance of the actor and the simultaneous addiction that destroys his life and the
lives of his loved ones.
Johnson is clearly a fan of Kinski's body of work, and you can’t help but imagine his own internal conflict in discovering the actor's sordid personal history. It draws parallels with the seemingly unending list of well-regarded actors now being publically accused of sexual crimes against minors. The mix of adoration for their talent and disgust for their heinous acts presents a challenge to us all.
This piece is not pretty and definitely not for the easily offended, but it is a performance that is worth checking out.
Nicole Russo
When: 13 Feb to 22 Feb
Where: Holden Street Theatres - The Studio
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Matt Byrne Media. Maxim's Wine Bar. 11 Feb 2015
Matt Byrne and Co. once again at Fringe-time take over Maxim's Wine Bar in downtown Norwood for a brand new vaudevillian comedy-variety act. Following a similar format, these shows in the past have taken the mickey of one group or another of otherwise unsung local working class heroes, such as hospital staff or teachers, or people just like us - barrackers, wives-and-girlfriends, or the computer-illiterate dateless.
Byrne himself can't understand the infatuation with the criminal class, and in this clever show he satirises the media for their role in this phenomena as much as the hapless antisocialism of the crims themselves, but it's clear we are viewing TV crims, or is it?
No joke is too obscure, no smutty comment too low, no micro-second gesture too base, to not be in the show. Byrne feels that if he made one person laugh, he made somebody laugh - that's what it's about. It does counter the trend of one hour shows, but the theatre is right in the wine bar for convenience.
What I love about Byrne's Fringe world premieres is that they are always about us - if not as the subject class, at least in our reactions to them. Through reworded karaoke of 70s and 80s tunes, we are introduced to a cavalcade of characters from the Port area - the criminal Moron family, their nemeses - the Gelatoes, a chopper gang, crooked coppers, and the lesbian interlopers of Semaphore. That's a heady mix!
Needless to say, the actors are very busy switching characterisations faster than they can hotwire a car. Brendan Cooney's demonic eyes shine like diamonds whether he's hallucinating dolphin songs or fantasising murder. His lama (or is it alpaca) was one of the best studies of animalisation I have ever seen (yes, I made that word up). Marc Clement possesses deft moves and more comic irony than a crow bar. Matt Byrne (writer, director, and producer) is of the Bob Hope and Red Skelton School - a kind of humour that's love and fun all rolled into one. Kim York, a long-time Byrne-Fringe regular, is a consummate performer and her criminally matriarchal Judy Moron would make Jackie Weaver blush.
‘Chunderbelly’ is what the Fringe is all about - high energy, originality, loads of laughs, audience participation, songs, heaps of funny lines, and a greater understanding of ourselves.
What more could you ask for?
David Grybowski
When: 11 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: Maxim's Wine Bar
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Penn State Centre Stage. Holden Street Theatres. 11 Feb 2015
Provocative, contemporary American theatre. A showcase of bright, young American stage talent. Just because of these factors, ‘Blood at the Root’ is a pretty hot drawcard.
But this work, emerging from a distinguished US School of Theatre program which puts students to work among professionals, also is a daring piece of theatre which confronts the tinderbox of racial sensitivities on a Louisiana campus.
The characters are a cross-section of campus stereotypes: the loud, friendly black girl activist with a hope for positive change; her white sidekick who walks between two cultures; the black footballer brother for whom brawls are not unusual; the rational black campus newspaper editor; the over-zealous student journalist; and the outsider, a white transfer footballer student.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that people should just be left alone to identify with their own kind, for the catalyst which tips university life upside down is simply the one black girl who, running for class president, decides to go and sit in the shade under a certain tree among the presumably white students who usually sit there. The next day, nooses hang from the tree. Then violence breaks out and a white student is hospitalised.
This play, written by Dominique Morisseau, is based on fact - an incident in which six students were jailed for attempted murder, so it is all the more chilling.
It makes one very aware of the levels of anger which underlie so much of American society, the desperate dangers of life on the edge of racial tension. To some extent, it explains why incidents such as Ferguson ignite as they do.
The production is embellished simply by a rough ink backdrop of the territorial tree and a few strong, high-backed wooden chairs.
The chairs create locker rooms, newspaper office or campus yard while the cast, looming large and in-your-face in the immediacy of The Studio, creates the powerful intensity of the piece. There's hip hop and shouting, debate and some nice scenes of tentative friendship between the new white jock and the big-hearted black student politician. There also is a wonderful soundscape wherein beautiful American birdlife sings on in the background, oblivious to all the human bedlam.
The cast in its entirety is notable - Stori Ayers as the brave activist, Brandon Carter as the sensitive newspaper editor, Allison Scarlet Jaye as the stressed and strident student journalist on her quest for justice, Kenzie Ross as the white girl in the middle, Christian Thompson as the angry black footballer and, most especially, Tyler Reilly, as the reticent new white student who ends up at the core of it all.
The play is a little overwritten and didactic. But it is a brave and stirring work which puts one of the great sorrows and dilemmas of the USA right there on the table - two sides, two worlds, one problem. It brings home the repercussions of racial violence on family life, the emotional and psychological carnage of racial difference and, in its way, it calls on people to think twice, to seek social justice, to be better.
In its fleet 75 minutes, it very artfully explores deeply perplexing issues straight from its good American heart.
It brought its youthful full-house Adelaide audience straight to its feet in cacophonous acclaim.
Samela Harris
When: 12 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres – The Studio
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Holden St Theatres. 11 Feb 2015
Don't believe the ageist title. This is Shakespeare for everyone with a functioning funny-bone. For the youngies, it condenses the plot neatly as a foundation upon which they can draw when later they study the real thing. For the oldies, it simply throws the play itself into anarchical merry mayhem.
There's a group of actors. There's a script. There's a hat rack. There's a lot of shtick.
There are not enough actors for the cast of ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ so they double and triple up, using hats and capes and props to leap from character to character. Sometimes a character without an actor is represented by a prop left onstage - or balanced on the back of the narrator's hand.
The narrator is the secret to the success of this madcap interpretation of Shakespeare. At first pretending that she can't read at all, Martha Lott embodies the narrator, helping both actors and audience to keep track of who is doing what and with which and to whom. It's not easy. The actors are coming and going in all directions.
She has added puppets and props to compound the chaos - and the demands of her role. She's impish, funny and it is always good to listen to with that marvellous voice.
She is also the director of the two kiddie Shakespeare shows. The other one is ‘Romeo and Juliet’ ,both deriving from a 200-year-old adaption written by Charles and Mary Lamb as ‘Tales from Shakespeare’.
This is explained to the audience as the cast lurches into the action. They're noisy, crazy, confused and comical. That the storyline emerges bright and pristine from their general mayhem may be credited to the quality of the actors. They're pros. Nic Krieg boldly brags that he's had the real Stratford training. Hjalmar Svenna delivers the rich stage voice. Joanna Webb is picture perfect in her Titania's bower with its wonderful lighting by
Tony Moore while Amy-Victoria Brooks is as captivating as she is comic. She's an actor with "presence".
It's not a glamorous show. It is costumed in dress-up rack style, just as children would do it.
But it is coherent. It is recognisably Shakespeare - but just very silly and very entertaining.
Samela Harris
When: 6 to 8 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres – The Studio
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au