★★★
Adelaide Fringe. The Arch at Holden Street Theatres. 12 Mar 2022
An Unseasonable Fall of Snow is a problematic script. It initially purports to be a detective story with a young man accused of a heinous crime being harshly questioned by an interrogator who does not appear to be entirely expert at his job in what is essentially a game of cat and mouse. Then the storyline ‘turns on a dime’ and whatever we thought that was going on no longer appears to be the case: the power dynamics between the interrogator and the accused are suddenly reversed. The story then ends in quite an unexpected way, and we appear to be locked in an ever repeating loop. It’s almost a case of make up your own ending, and while your about it, invent your own theory about what it’s all about, although there is nothing wrong with that.
Playwright Gary Henderson is coy about what his play is about, and in interviews has never really given anything away, but he is quoted as saying he became interested in experimenting with “…How long could I tease [the audience] along and keep them guessing without annoying them.” Unfortunately, Henderson annoyed this reviewer but the clearly partisan large audience who saw the show with me were not. They lapped it up and their final applause was loud, sustained, and heartfelt. I guess that’s the joy of theatre – we all respond to the same thing in different ways, so go along and make up your own mind.
The performance is staged on an almost bare stage: a table and a few chairs, a whiteboard, a coffee station, and some doors. The lighting is a basic uniform wash of interior light. There is no soundscape. The cast (Gavin Cianci and Jacob Houston) are dressed in civvies. There is nothing really to suggest mystery or menace, and the play’s momentum therefore needs to come from the text – the play’s the thing, spake Hamlet! – as well as the skill of the director and the actors. However, Henderson’s script doesn’t reach any significant dramatic height, and it noticeably lacks ebb and flow of tension, and, in the emotionally heightened sections of the script, director Darrin Redgate has his cast shouting and shoving more than anything else, and it becomes a bit ….well, annoying.
Redgate, Cianci and Houston work hard to try and overcome the limitations of what is arguably an overwrought and overwritten script.
Kym Clayton
When: 13 to 20 Mar
Where: The Arch at Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. The Peacock at Gluttony. 12 Mar 2022
‘Out of Office’ is Karen from Finance’s award-winning one-woman debut show, and it is voluptuous!
Karen from Finance, aka Richard Chadwick –but only when not out-and-about strutting her stuff and ruffling feathers in the dizzying world of high finance – is a Melbourne-based drag queen who rose to national prominence when she made it to the final four of the inaugural RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under. Of course, Karen was a force of nature before that, especially in the corporate world, but now she’s a household name! And…the engaging video footage shown during her performance demonstrates just how well-known and popular she is: there’s not one sleezy bar or back alley or shop front that she doesn’t know. She has downed lines of shots (and other substances) in all of ‘em! Even though she’s a glamorous icon who wears the best labels and whose make-up is impeccable, that doesn’t stop her from getting ‘down and dirty’ and beating you around the head with her designer handbag if you get in her way or try to muscle her out of her limelight!
‘Out of Office’ is a well put together drag show that instantly puts a wide smile on your face. There is a clear storyline, and Karen struts her stuff and confidently works the crowd with fluent and clever patter and antics. To help the narrative along, she belts out songs from the divas with lip sync perfection and struts choreography that goes beyond mere death-drops and other gymnastic jerks. She’s intelligent about it and ‘word paints’ almost every phrase with hilarious gesture and movement that leaves the audience in stitches. It’s clever, funny, tastefully titillating, and never relies on gratuitous smut for its laughs.
It's a shame that Karen from Finance’s season is so short, and that her shows are in the matinée timeslot, but the logistics of this Fringe have been a real drag to manage!
Karen, next time your ‘out of office’ message is on, please come back to Adelaide so that many more can enjoy your werk!
Kym Clayton
When: 12 to 14 Mar
Where: The Peacock at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Samara Hersch. Secret Location. 11 Mar 2022
This is an interactive and immersive theatre that can challenge you to the core, if you want. Pretty much as described in the program, you are invited to a one-on-one with an older perfect stranger via computer. Your conversation is structured by alternatively asking each other questions that appear from a digitised card draw. You don’t have to answer the questions. But if not, a question you might want to investigate with yourself if you wimp out is why not.
There are several parts to your 40-minute show but 30 minutes are devoted to question time. After an introduction via headphones of eight-to-eleven-year-olds answering questions about ageing, you are ushered down a dark corridor and confronted with the picture of you that you submitted beforehand and your elderly interlocutor stranger. I thought the questions asking me to articulate events or outlooks deserved my attention, and if not now, when? I was intrigued by my internet companion’s answers and each answer begat more questions. You can ask them, or stick to the format, or do whatever you like, you paid for the 30 minutes Q&A. It was like a session with a psychologist with the meter ticking. And what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
Creator Samara Hersch might be “based” in Melbourne, but she has been funded in Europe for a huge body of work that explores “the intersection of contemporary performance and community engagement.” Sex and Death… began life as an intimate encounter led by performers in their seventies and has been adapted to its current format thanks to Covid.
I came out of my session, refreshed, calmer, wiser through some thoughtful articulation about myself and from the ancient art of listening. A wonderfully intimate and fear-free experience.
David Grybowski
When: 9 to 20 Mar
Where: Secret Location
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
★★★★★
Wil King. Holden Street Theatres. 10 Mar 2022
Venus in Fur by David Ives has won Bank SA’s Week 3 Fringe award for Best Theatre, so don’t just take my word for it that this theatrical offering is a knock-out. Venus… is a showcase for a female and a male actor going head-to-head in performing psychological warfare in an increasingly escalating sexually charged environment of innuendo and intrigue.
Situation: New York City somewhere off Broadway. A playwright/director has been unsuccessfully auditioning for a female all day and is packing up when a whirlwind of manic energy barges in and demands an audition, even though she is late and not even actually on the list. The playwright’s play is an adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel, Venus in Furs. To give you some insight into the attendant theme, the word masochism was derived from Sacher-Masoch’s name.
The auditionee Wanda appears a bit air-headed yet mysteriously compelling, so much so that the director relents, and they role-play the script. He is beguiled and utterly captivated by her skill and flattery, and their reality is excruciatingly subsumed by the sexualism of the play.
The theatrical juice must be absolutely gushing in all respects to create 90 minutes of inexhaustible sensual tension. The script is loaded with razor-sharp changes in hierarchy and not just the switcheroo between the dictatorial director and female auditionee, but numerous quick changes into the play’s characters and the role reversal goes into dangerous and lascivious overdrive. This ain’t gonna work unless you have superb talent like Wil King and Bridget Gao-Hollitt. Director Daniel Lammin is a NIDA graduate of Directing and he is responsible for so suggestively coordinating their ample body language with the text. Lighting designer Matt Ralph and sound designer KAK use their skills so subtly you don’t realise the mood-altering effect until long after you are entrained. Rain, lightning and thunder are co-ordinated with explosive moments on stage. Designer Sam Hastings enhanced the experience of locking onto Gao-Hollitt’s characters with some sexy fancy dress and a fetching purple outfit with the eponymous fur.
Playwright David Ives is steeped in the New York performance scene and he serves up a masterpiece where he takes the director-auditionee relationship and hyperextends it into something even more slavish and sexually overt with Sacher-Masoch’s Venus….
Double Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 1 to 20 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Samara Hersch. Secret Locations. 11 Mar 2022
The critic’s role flies to the four winds for this Festival production. While art experiences are always personal, in this case they are many-personal and no-two-the-same personal. They are one-on-one with different people. They are tailored to each individual.
Once tickets are issued for Sex, Death and the Internet, the ticket-holder is asked to supply a photograph of themselves.
The location of the performance is not revealed until nearer the performance time.
In this case, Adelaide University’s Union Building was chosen and very well signposted, thank heavens.
Inside its 4th floor corridor, Festival staff members meet and greet, checking vaccine status and leading ticket-holders to a series of well-spaced chairs beside which freshly-sanitised headphones and a boxes of tissues lie on small tables. Why the tissues, I ask. Some people find the encounters emotional. They’re different, you might laugh or cry, I was told. Put on the headphones and press play. The recording lasts about six minutes.
And thus, for this critic at least, the voices of children were to be heard answering questions about their ages and how they feel about being children and what ages are ideal. This grandmother was charmed. It is a nice tidbit which reminds us to respect the innate wisdom of the very young.
One is then led to another area and another chair. One is asked to remove shoes, if able. Pleasant conversation and instructions are imparted by one of the Samara Hersch production team. It is soothing and personable.
Following said instructions, a long, black velvet curtain is parted and one steps into a very long space wherein everything is black except for a broad white plastic pathway leading brightly to a desk, a chair and a computer screen. Box of tissues. Notepad. Pen. How thoughtful.
Two photographs are on the screen. One is the photo I was asked to supply of myself taken a few decades ago, the other is another woman, also taken a few decades ago. Another woman appears live on the screen.
Delia. I like her immediately.
She is all my favourite things. Like me, she is grandmother vintage. She is attired in the colour of women’s power with purple-rimmed glasses, purple clothes, amethyst necklace and pleasantly unruly short hair.
She instructs me on the cards which appear to one side of the screen and how to shuffle and show cards. We are to take turns in doing this and answering questions shown on the card. Thereafter we have a 30-minute exchange telling each other how we feel about sex, death, and life experiences. We do not discuss the internet albeit we are using it in this Facetime-like live interaction.
It is just like sitting down and talking to a friend. It is frank and unhurried, despite its timeline. The “show” has a 40-minute duration.
So, what is it all about?
You may well ask.
I am a very seasoned netizen. I have met a lot of people online since it was first possible in the pioneer days of the CU-SeeMe, the application which preceded Skype which preceded Facetime.
The interactive program used for this encounter employs question cards which are read by one player and then flicked to be visible to the other player, and is effective for that purpose.
Its purpose includes confiding in a stranger and exploring one’s own response to crucial questions. Some of them are a bit confronting. But, for me, Delia’s frankness about herself, her gentle face, her ready smile, and easy laugh were encouragements to respond in a similarly uninhibited way. I learned quite a lot about Delia, but never enough. I so badly wanted to ask my own questions of her. But I stuck to the rules of the game as I understood them. Of course I took notes on the notepad. What journo wouldn’t? It turned out that it was there for its own purpose. But this was not a judgemental experience - except insofar as one judges oneself.
It was more a reminder to pause for a moment and look at life as we pass through it, to recognise benchmarks and aspects one may wish could have been otherwise, and to do so together with a virtual stranger.
It was a pleasant exercise and a brush with a lovely fellow spirit on this strange path between birth and death.
Samela Harris
When: 11 to 20 Mar
Where: Secret Locations
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Production Image Credit: Roy Vandervegt