★★
Adelaide Fringe Festival. The Bally, Gluttony. 18 Feb 2023
5 Mistakes That Changed History is gentle comedy, but the show doesn’t quite reach the promise of its advertising.
Paul Coulter has researched interesting facts about five historical figures, ranging from Cleopatra to Alexander Fleming. With these facts, he posits that the historical characters made ‘mistakes’ that changed the course of history. Unlike Coulter, this reviewer doesn’t have a history degree (and so won’t argue with him) but humbly suggests that the facts presented are not mistakes but are really poor decisions that either resulted in disaster or in serendipitous outcomes. The distinction is key, because it impacts the nature of the humour that potentially follows: how might the mistake have been avoided, or what might be the circumstances of a different decision.
Some of the stories were more amenable to sharp and cutting witticisms, others less so. In between the sketches, two actors join Coulter on stage and play the roles of the aggrieved historical figures. These interludes struggled to generate any noteworthy humour and generally dragged on the pace and overall impact. The patter from the two actors wasn’t really strong enough and came across as being somewhat forced. They almost appeared to be unsuccessfully improvising.
The basic concept of the show is sound, and the audience was up for a lesson in history and visibly enjoyed learning a few interesting facts. They laughed, but the show fell short and ended up a giggle rather than a belly laugh.
Kym Clayton
When: 18 Feb to 19 Mar
Where: The Bally, Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★1/2 Stars
Penny Arcade. The Pyramid @ Fools Paradise. 17 Feb 2023
Penny Arcade’s take on life memoir as a show has interesting points to it applicable to cult icon Arcade as to us mere mortals.
Arcade builds a philosophical tack to life in progress, applying it retrospectively to hers. There are two tacks to her approach.
Firstly, younger-self meets older-self, regenerating the energy of youthful perspective. For what was lived, in ongoing moments, has accrued in such a way it is a sum total of new possibility.
Second tack, no one wants or desires their identity or life-lived to be captured, contextualised and caged up theoretically. Life and identity is not theory.
That second tack is hugely important.
Arcade’s life has been one as an outsider since birth to her southern Italian peasant immigrant family in America. She was not of them; their culture; their values. So began life amongst outsiders, creative and social life amongst the gay and alternative arts scene, Andy Wharhols’ Factory and more.
Behind Arcade, a large screen scrolls a projection of photos and film snippets of the famous people and places her storied life as pop culture outsider, repeating as the show progresses.
Her ‘life’ is the story of the hip and happening 60s and 70s.
Reality is it’s the life of a rough, tough, vulnerable kid who fell into becoming herself. We venerate the fame bit.
Penny Arcade is not theory. Not a class in pop culture history or sexuality. Neither are any of our own lives.
Arcade’s monologues work too long in establishing this important point. Her stories are engaging, but lose connection to her essential theme as a consequence.
It’s as if she’s really sure, yet not really sure she has this thing all sussed out yet. Nonetheless, this is a production allowing one to ponder the progress of life and identity equal as we all are in our skins, offered up in loose, comfortable fashion belying the thinking you’ll start doing after leaving the venue.
David O’Brien
When: 17 to 28 Feb
Where: The Pyramid @ Fools Paradise
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★★
Holden Street Theatres’ Edinburgh Fringe Award ’22 with Lawrence Batley Theatre, KETCHUP Predictions, and Richard Jordan Productions. Holden Street Theatres. 15 Feb 2023
Hints of the strange are there. Subtle, and not so subtle.
Biggest hint? Boarded up window from the inside with white lacy curtains drawn closed. Smallest hint? Relief shadow on the wall where a crucifix once hung.
Medium hint? This tall young man draped in women’s string tie dressing gown and pyjama shorts who addresses the audience with sunshine bright warm familiarity, raising a glass of champagne announcing buoyantly, “I’m Daniel Valentine, and it’s my 18th Birthday!”
Well, that doesn’t seem so bad. So the audience settles in as Daniel proceeds to tell his story. He’s bubbly, shiny, vaudeville vivacious gliding about the drab room as if to soften the impact of that boarded up window (and what it might mean).
Daniel’s life seems a tough but exciting one, also sad. His brilliant, supportive, dominant, divorced Mother, parish Church life and difficult school life seem in balance.
Along comes the countervailing influence of singer Jane McDonald. Suddenly, Mother and son, devoted Christian believers in the rapture, have a new saviour, Daniel’s story starts turning distinctly grey, charcoal to outright black.
Director/writer Phillip Stokes’ tightly written script is given the most sensational interpretation by Jack Stokes as Daniel, aided by Annie May Fletcher’s subtle sound design and Craig Lomas’s suggestive set and lighting.
Jack Stokes holds the audience with a maturity of stage craft expected of an actor 20 years his senior. He manages giving life to a little boy and a late teen in crisis effortlessly. There is joyousness even amidst the most deranged of experiences and circumstances. It is an utterly hypnotising experience. You want to, but cannot deny the darkness of this life revealed. You stay hooked, right to the end. Because you just can’t look away. Daniel is just too engaging.
David O’Brien
When: 14 Feb to 19 Mar
Where: The Studio – Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★★
Fishamble: The New Play Company in association with Sunday’s Child and Joanne Hartstone. Holden Street Theatres. 15 Feb 2023
Mustard. Intense word. Intense colour. Intense sensation; transformed into a symbol of relationship loss, confusion, grief, addiction, passion and helplessness in Performer/Writer Eva O’Connor’s play.
O’Connor’s writing is unapologetically tough with light moments of softness. The structure is so strong and taut with a poetry of hardness belying vulnerable depth.
Director Hildegard Ryan’s production offers a stark angular approach in performance, stripped back in every way.
Simple lighting with still spots from Marianne Nightingale allied to a focus on the sharp eye-gripping colour of O’Connor’s costume; a red mustard hoodie and track pants. Not to mention jars of bright yellow mustard.
In language redolent with powerful imagery and emotion offered in gutsy stoicism, O’Connor traces a relationship journey spinning around her religious Mother and strong, wealthy, cool and happening English professional cyclist.
The Irish girl trying to sort herself out. The beautiful English boy who lives in a real castle.
A tricky combination. An obsessive athlete capable of momentary deep tenderness. A girl in awe of it. In thrall to hard physicality, deepness of spirit.
It slowly collapses. Rather, turns to mustard.
Illogical that seems. Emotionally it’s so deeply accurate, this obsessive, psychologically debilitating sense of dissolution of self, security and confidence into mustard.
This journey into a poetic, frightening madness is transfixing in its utterly uncompromising certainty and bull headed destructiveness. Never letting up. Never giving an edge away, even in the clarity of moments something must give.
David O’Brien
When: 14 Feb to 19 Mar
Where: The Arch – Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
State Theatre Company South Australia. Dunstan Playhouse. 14 Feb 2023
The Goat brings an opening night to go down in the Adelaide history books.
It was a beautiful warm evening and even though having applauded through countless curtain calls, the audience was not flocking out into it.
Instead, the audience filled the foyer in a deafening crush of wild animation. It had just experienced a benchmark production of one of the world’s most outrageously provocative and devilishly witty plays. It was on a high.
Edward Albee’s The Goat or Who is Sylvia? may well be modern STC’s piece-de-resistance production. Throwing a thesaurus of superlatives at it would not be going too far. Nor would popping director Mitchell Butel onto a plinth.
Of course, there are three major stars involved in this triumph.
Claudia Karvan may shed any fleeting doubt she had about returning to the live theatre. Hers is a breathtaking performance. She portrays Stevie, the hapless good wife dealing not only with the exposure of her husband’s infidelity but the mindboggling fact that “the other woman” is a goat called Sylvia. Karvan produces an impressive palette of emotions, her reactive versatility extending to extremely compelling facial twitching. That’s a totality of physicality from an actor. But, her role also calls for clowning as her character thrashes through incredulity, fury, and heartbreak; Karvan can do that, too. And, with that strong, sharp voice, she etches every word into the auditorium with clarity.
Nathan Page parries, his voice husky with emotion as he delivers confessional torrents in the role of Martin, a husband as adamant about his stance as he is defensive.
It’s a war of incredulity, the passions periodically punctuated by grammatical corrections, stop, shock, and laugh moments in a torrid script. The playwright has drawn these characters as highly educated people with almost OCD pedantic streaks. It is delicious.
The director, meanwhile, has artfully used stillness in Page to heighten crumbling Martin’s emotional interplay, albeit that he is an actor of exceptional physical grace. Mark Saturno brings the bombastic element to the domestic hearth as Martin's TV interviewer-cum-best-friend, Ross. His is the voice of the outside world, while Yazeed Daher, as the gay teenage son, Billy, speaks for the cause of acceptable sexual diversity. Bestiality is not in its scope, and yet, while it appals, it is a thing.
In braving this issue, Albee has created a play which has continued to shock and fascinate audiences since 2002, provoking furious foyer discussions. The play has just kept on reaping awards in all directions. Some people are offended but most have recognised that this is a great classic tragedy, almost perfectly wrought, its dramatic roots reaching back to Greek mythology. And yet it is so funny, bitterly, shamefully, guffaw funny.
State’s expert production values sing their own beautiful song in this presentation. The sophisticated urbanity of Jeremy Allen’s slick New York set, with its with Frank Lloyd Wright-esque modernist chic, reflects the success and erudition of its occupants. Ailsa Paterson’s costumes, similarly, make the right notes with Karvan at first in a stunning pleated skirt which emphasises her femininity and social confidence and then in high-waisted striped lounging trousers which are just-so for the needs of a tortured clown. Again, right on the mark. As is Nigel Levings’ lighting plot, throwing day and night, ease and crisis into artful relief.
If the production continues with this excellence and momentum through its season, it is creating a laugh-and-cry entity which seriously needs to be experienced. From this critic, the message is: Do Not Miss It.
Samela Harris
When: 14 to 25 Feb
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au