Adelaide Fringe. Stamford Plaza Hotel. 16 Feb 2019
They have it down to a fine art. And so they should. It’s 20 years since the Faulties started touring the world with their high-energy interactive dinner show.
It’s a hoot.
They have braved a number of Fringe Festivals and are back again, this time in the Stamford Plaza where an incongruously elegant three-course dinner accompanies a thoroughly madcap show.
It is just a cast of three but they generate mayhem and hilarity while at the same time ensuring that everyone gets fed their proper three course meal; plus bread rolls, of course. Bread rolls make for heaven on a schtick and have the audience in hysterics at the general anarchy of the service. Professional wait staff glide discreetly through from time to time just to keep things tidy and streamlined.
This is not the Fawlty Towers TV script by John Cleese and Connie Booth. It is a faulty Fawlty performed by quick-witted impersonators. With a thematic plot line, they use their considerable improvisational skills to interact with audience members while recreating the spirit of that hopeless fictional guest house set in the English seaside town of Torquay. The cast astutely identifies key punters who will provide grist for the comic mill as they work the room very thoroughly, over and over. They are relentlessly vigorous. The show is alive with Manuel’s wild translation errors, Basil’s imperious bossiness and Sybil’s endless efforts to pour oil on the troubled waters of Basil’s bad behaviour. It is a well-conceived and well executed take-off, an homage if you will.
Audience members are kept on the edge of their seats but they are unthreatened, albeit on the night this critic attended, Manuel was so worried that Sybil would see one young man’s vividly tattooed arm that he fetched gaffer tape and wrapped the arm securely in a table napkin.
Interestingly, there are people who have never heard of Fawlty Towers who buy tickets to this show and they not only get the gags but say they also enjoy the air of love in the room.
Playing the Adelaide Fringe are Rob Langston, a very tall and impeccably English Basil who shamelessly bullies Manuel, fearlessly dives under tables, goose steps, and has crack- ups. Nicholas Richard is an hysterically convincing Manuel, all naiveté and hapless willingness. Rebecca Fortuna, in a perfectly terrible wig, plays prim Sybil, ever riding shotgun in the wake of her husband’s abominations. She’s a breath of sanity. Just a breath. The show is generally off the wall and deliciously crazy.
And, there’s an excellent bar.
Samela Harris
5 Stars
When: 16 Feb to 3 Mar
Where: Stamford Plaza Hotel
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. The Balcony Room at The Griffins Hotel. 15 Feb 2019
Grrr! ‘Doesn’t’, not ‘don’t’! Grammar doesn’t matter on a second date! Bad grammar grates we pedants, and that’s the whole point of the show!
Mark Butler is an English lit. graduate – we assume he finished his degree – and he is a sucker for a pretty girl, but if she splits an infinitive or misplaces an apostrophe, then she is dead to him. And this probably accounts for why he is still single in his forties!
In a reasonably brisk fifty minutes, Butler lets us into his love and gives a girl by girl description of how not to win the girl. His obsession with correct grammar is humorous and is the backbone to many an amusing anecdote. A misused apostrophe that signals a plural noun puts a fledgling university romance to the sword. The persistent use of ‘yeah / nah’ and the love of irritatingly bad rap brimming with poor English puts pay to a flattering romance with someone half his age!
Poor Mark! He regales us with stories about one failed romance after another, and it is engaging, and intellectually cute, but the material is not really as strong as it needs to be. If one wants to appeal to the humour of a pedant, then the humour needs to be unrelentingly clever and witty.
This show has its moments, but it doesn’t pack nearly as hard a punch as it promises. That said, the story about his date with a spiritualist is worth the price of the ticket!
Performances most days, finishing on Sunday 24 February.
Kym Clayton
When: 15 to 24 Feb
Where: The Balcony Room at The Griffins Hotel
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. The Bally at Gluttony.
Two Brunettes and a Gay - God save the Queens! is a high energy homage to the divas that have graced the stage and screen over the last few decades.
Two gals and one guy strut their stuff in bright sassy sequined costumes as they belt out covers of hits made famous by the likes of Madonna, Whitney Houston, Lady Gaga, Arethra Franklin, Tina Turner and more.
The whole act oozes sexuality and the ‘gay guy’ nearly bares all as he grinds his way through Rocky Horror and even gender bends ABBA! The front row of the audience didn’t pay nearly enough for their tickets!
The capacity audience lap it up and enthusiastically join in when encouraged to do so. It’s a good night out but one can’t help think that the impact could be so much greater if the song choices better suited the vocal strengths of the trio.
The highlight of the night is a terrific rendition of Tina Turner’s 1989 hit The Best. It perfectly matches the vocal registers of the performers and made one ponder how much better the show would have been if similar songs were chosen.
This trio have a strong and loyal following, and have performances most days, finishing on Sunday 24 February.
Kym Clayton
When: 19 to 24 Feb
Where: The Bally at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Gilded Balloon and Redbeard Theatre in Assoc. with Holden Street Theatres. Holden Street Theatres. 13 Feb 2019
Henry Naylor is a gifted story-teller.
That’s a lavish and timeless compliment. And, once again, he’s a five-star story-teller at the Adelaide Fringe.
Following the triumphs of Borders, Angel, Echoes, and The Collector, he brings Games - another highly political play based on historical truths.
The “Games” are the Olympic Games of 1936 which were held in Berlin and for which, under the Nazi regime, Germany’s Jewish athletes had been marginalised and banned from state training facilities and thus any chance to gaining a competitive edge.
To flesh out his riveting story, Naylor has selected two Jewish female athletes of the day, a fencer called Helene Mayer and a high-jumper called Gretel Bergman, and traced the travails they might have faced under the escalating Nazi persecution. He has breathed life and character into them, setting them in unlikely but historically credible conflict. Helene is the prim, smug established champion, a local pin-up adored as The Little Hay. People keep her statue on their mantlepieces. Certainly Gretel does. She is a proud Jew and highly motivated by the idea of proving Jewish supremacy in sport. Helene, on the other hand, wishes to deflect from her Jewish background and identify herself exclusively as a fencer. Gretel is aghast at this and the two spar on the subject over the course of several years as Hitler’s reign grows stronger and the racial divisions and Jewish persecution strengthens around them.
Playwright Naylor's supreme skill shines both with his astute use of language and in establishing dramatic tension as this story evolves. Most importantly, he has created two complex characters who command the audience’s interest and emotions. Of course, the two actors, Sophie Shad as Helene and Tessie Orange-Turner as Gretel, are a vital ingredient in fleshing out those characters and bringing Naylor’s play to vital life. Their performances ring with passion and clarity. It is a riveting piece of theatre.
Directed by Louise Skaaning, the production is staged in the intimacy of The Arch theatre where the high stage is dominated by long red banners of the Nazi ilk draped over black curtains. Simple and dramatic. Shad is neat and restrained, wearing a crisp white fencing uniform, her blonde hair in looped plaits. In track shorts, long-limbed Orange-Turner is all passion and pent-up energy. Adversity has fired her on a mission. The performers switch and swap, neatly patching together the narrative. The suspense grows. Soundscape throbs through the theatre. Smoke hisses forth. And, the denouement descends with the inevitability of history and, perhaps, the underlying suggestion that there are no guarantees that other evil regimes may be lurking in the wings of this troubled world.
It is a Fringe must-see.
Samela Harris
5 Stars
When: 13 Feb to 16 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
The Holden Street Theatres' Edinburgh Fringe Award 2018 in Assoc. with Stephen Joseph Theatre and Tara Finney Productions. Holden Street Theatres. 13 Feb 2019
Naivete, stupidity, vanity, and inadequacy; many are the reasons schoolgirls find themselves pregnant and rarely do they find a happy chappy willing to take on responsibility for unwanted progeny.
Hence Yasmin’s utter anguish when her pregnancy test is positive. She’s a vapid Scarborough teen, a bit trashy with low self-esteem and an alcoholic mother. She knows she’ll have to go it alone.
No end of education has slowed this sad phenomenon. It has transcended generations. It is all around us. These ubiquitous schoolgirl single mums even sustain cable TV series.
Now, with a play written in the UK by Christopher York, the theme is re-iterated as a one-woman drama.
In the blackness of Holden Street’s Studio Theatre, Yasmin is spot-lit on a static playground roundabout. This is her arrested childhood, her cruelled innocence. She writhes, she leaps, she proclaims, she has sex with a DJ and gives birth on the box core of this structure. She paces around it, darts around it and lurches around it as she swings through character changes, fleshing out the unkindness of a tough working class world and the psychological acrobatics an ill-starred teen must be able to perform to stand against the tide of her own misfortune. Love sneaks in for baby Jack, but it is serrated by regrets and fear of dispossession.
London actress Serena Manteghi embodies this hapless girl, giving her a strident, shrill voice and a strong Yorkshire accent. Her delivery is so piercing and rapid-fire that one often struggles for clarity. She feels like Julie Walters on steroids. She seems inexhaustibly frenetic. Volume is her weapon. She assaults the audience with her pain and anger. She shouts. She screams. She confronts the hearing as much as the emotions. Hers is not a performance for sensitive ears.
Manteghi is lithe and lean and fit, wearing gym gear, swearing and flailing against the onslaught of Yasmin's plight. She has a wonderfully elastic face which she contorts into the characters of Yasmin’s world, into crude sods and sneering contemptuous outsiders. Her transformations are striking.
The playwright has given a classical edge to Yasmin’s tragic tale with threads of poetry and has equipped Yasmin with the symbolism of Icarus and Dedalus as she rallies to the values of motherhood. Ah, for a rocket to the stars.
The power of human optimism finds a path and little Jack is perhaps born to be her saviour. Or not. It is a tough, unsympathetic world out there.
Samela Harris
4 Stars
When: 13 Feb to 17 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au