Joanne Hartstone & Gavin Robertson. Treasury 1860. 7 Mar 2018
There's literary earnestness at Writers’ Week and rowdy theatrical hi-jinx at the Unearthly Garden.
But in the quiet centre of town in a rather streamlined and elegant bar where people can sit in comfort with a fine wine or cocktail and some yummy hot nibbles, there is Greg Byron, performance poet.
He’s a wonderful wandering bard and, of course, there’s no better bard space than a bar space.
Byron rolls up in a wonderful costume, waistcoat and long buttoned dress coat, very period and English and also very warm.
He’s here from the UK under the umbrella of the Joanne Hartstone season so one knows he has class.
He has a little black book which is full of his poems. He picks and chooses among them, sizing up his audience and the mood of the moment. He skips over Brexit poems and things he deems dark and dull. The US election, there’s a spot of fun. He reads a poem about the orange man. He has a poem about British political apathy, but he can’t be bothered to read it.
The audience is liking him already.
He’s a personable poet and has something of the actor about him. It turns out that he has had an acting career but that he has chosen life as a troubadour of rhyme and perhaps reason.
His poems have a bit of a satiric edge to them. A political whammy sometimes. Whimsy. Wit. Nostalgia. Surprise, surprise, even a Fibonacci poem. That feels like a first. It’s a ripper.
There’s an Attenborough poem, an eco-poem on the polluted sea, a Postcard from the Beach in Spring and there are recorded sound effects operated by Anna Thomas, behind the bar of Treasury 1860.
Just for variety, he throws in some prose.
It is easy to settle back and let Byron regale with his North England accent.
Greg Byron is his character name. The actor behind it is Gavin Robertson and one just has to admire the very essence of him, wandering the world with nothing but a talent and poetry. It’s a perilous living.
But he certainly breathes good and mindful air into the Fringe.
And. methinks, he may just be first poet ever to rhyme “Aristotle" with "golden wattle".
Samela Harris
4.5 stars
When: 7 to 18 Mar
Where: Treasury 1860
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Also at Stirling Fringe - Coventry Library 9 to 11 Mar
Anya Anastasia. Queen's Theatre at The Lab. 8 Mar 2018
Social activism, politics, varied media and popular culture of many modes have commingled as long as humans have created social structures. Anya Anastasia’s The Executioners is one sharp and very subtle satirised blend of such elements in our times, built to leave you seeking the genuine article from cravenly false bullshit.
Pairing up with fellow musician Gareth Chin, Anastasia’s cabaret polemic finds delicious voice through her super hero, super hi tech, super white costumed, snarky activist/futurist character. She struts her stuff on a set design screaming ‘I’m a star activist,’ in the mould of your least favourite such celebrity.
She is engagingly smug. A bitchy songstress of popular causes against the eroding influences of social media, climate change politics, people power, freedom movements – you name it, she’ll have a rant to fit. Yet this star is as trapped by the alluring dangers she sings against, as much as she figures herself an executioner of evils. At the forefront of her, is her iPhone with torchlight on, shining the light on her and the audience in modern collective solidarity, supported by an iPad attached to the microphone stand. Social media sharing in collective algorithmic ensnarement.
But behind the extreme modernist front, exposed through costume and fantastic film projection work by Underground Media, lies the music and in that, the trick of this production if you know your history.
Listen closely. You’ll hear the styles of folk and 60s protest songs written for piano, ukulele, and piano accordion along with the lilting strains of the peace movement embodied in the sitar. You can’t pick a song of the era, but the style Anastasia links her cracking lyrics to is unmistakable.
This tack brilliantly marries past and future takes on politics in which the urgent heartfelt, blood-and-sweat, passion infused activism of the past meets socially pretentious and selfish causes rallying of today.
This is one show political junkies with a cause to scratch definitely need to see, and embrace its musically sharp one, two, jab right, upper left, to flaky activism.
David O’Brien
5 stars
When: 8 to 12 Mar
Where: The Lab at Queens Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Gluttony & Highwire Events & Entertainment. The Octagon at Gluttony. 7 Mar 2018
Red is the colour of power, passion and sensuality, and Rouge has all of that. On entering The Octagon there are warning signs about adult themes, and this show has them in buckets. There is much flesh on display: tight chiselled men and voluptuous lithe women. There is ambiguous sexuality. The show is cheeky and lusty, but its not sensationalist or gratuitous. It’s just plain fun but it’s not a complete winner, because there is unrealised potential.
Circus has become a significant part of the Fringe program, and over the years there have been some exceptional acts. Rouge is good, but it doesn’t rise to the same heights as say La Soiree or Soap. Rouge comprises an eclectic range of acts: fire eating, balancing, aerial, tumbling, dance, burlesque and singing. It’s fast paced with all acts set to a toe tapping suite of up tempo songs that form both a backdrop and a quirky but intelligent rationale for the acts. When this works, the show is at its best, and most naughty!
The red diva singing coloratura soprano lines while harbouring an androgynous guy and a voluptuous woman beneath her skirts is a case in point. It was titillating and naughty and edgy! (What were they doing to her?!)
The small amount of audience participation was risqué, thankfully, and it was oh-so-funny and well scripted. We wanted more of that, and less of the traditional circus acts. (Why bother with fire eating when Fuego Carnal is just around the corner in another venue doing the same stuff but a hundred times better and more spectacularly.)
The hard stuff is always in the title. It’s Rouge. It should be sexy and edgy and fun – all of it.
Kym Clayton
3.5 stars
When: 7 to 18 Mar
Where: The Octagon at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Ha Ha Comedy Pub Crawl with Scottish English & Irish Comedy Awards. Pig Tales at Gluttony. 7 Mar 2018
Gary Little is certainly not little. He is a big strapping bloke who hails from Glasgow, and his humour is uncompromisingly self-mocking. If you met him on a dimly lit street you’d probably fear for your safety and walk the other way, but in in front of an audience he is something else.
There is an ordinariness about him – he could be the guy who lives next door. He talks about ordinary things, but as quality comedians do, he sees the droll side of almost everything and you just have to laugh. This is in fact quite unsettling because you find yourself laughing at serious topics like depression and poverty, and laughing heartily at frivolous things like ‘spooning’ (and getting excited!) and dog walking!
Little’s style is anecdotal and conversational. He doesn’t try to make profound political statements, or, thankfully, gather cheap laughs by making fun of his audience or dragging them up on stage. He just holds a mirror up to us all and gets us to laugh - good honest laughing. It’s refreshing!
Kym Clayton
3.5 stars
When: 7 to 18 Mar
Where: Pig Tales at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Brink Productions. Dunstan Playhouse. 6 Mar 2018
There aren’t enough superlatives with which to crown this Adelaide Festival production.
It creates for its audience one of those lifetime experiences, all at once beautiful, transcending, sensual, original and relevant.
It is epic in its scale in every way. Never have so many bare feet padded quietly across the Playhouse stage, a stream of humanity, an ebb and flow of bodies and voices over a theatrical grassland. Aloft, an orchestra and soloists deliver music, dramatic, ethereal, effervescent, and ethnic. Joycelyn Pook’s composition complements, heart and soul, one of the great epic sagas of history, Homer’s Iliad as reinterpreted by English poet Alice Oswald. And, her considered words are delivered with consummate expertise by illustrious Australian actress, Helen Morse.
All this comes from Adelaide’s Brink Theatre under direction of the peerless Chris Drummond.
Two hundred and fifteen people, old and young, lanky and portly, straight and stooped, tall and tiny, even a babe in arms, are onstage for Memorial. They are The Soldier Chorus. They represent the number of soldiers named in Memorial and they represent the human worlds from which all soldiers come; families and friends and communities.
Drummond has contrived this production exquisitely, his huge chorus dressed in understated street garb, not so much choreographed as designed in their placements upon the stage, their fluid movements, their pace, their circuits and crossings, ever with passive arms, has been beautifully coached by Yaron Lifschitz. Their voices at first seem incidental but as the saga evolves, their choral presence grows until a mighty roaring climax.
All the time, gracefully in their midst, her slim presence defined by a burgundy patchwork sheath dress, is Morse. And she brings that splendid voice of the theatre. It is a voice so perfectly modulated. She is never shrill. She is strong. She is subtle and passionate and every word arrives clear and entire to convey utter understanding. She lifts forth the beauty of Oswald’s poetry to linger in mind’s eye. She lists, exhaustively, the names of the soldiers, so many of them hard to pronounce, and yet enunciated clearly, potently, each one a tribute to a life, to an identity. One could not imagine a more difficult script for an actor to master and one can only be in awe of Morse for her embodiment of it all; her voice, with and without the music, rising and falling with the love and death dramas of the Iliad.
In one passage, from the rivers of people swarming around her, a bowl is carried respectfully across the stage and proffered to her; a merciful sip of water to lubricate that wonderful voice. In itself, this is a gracious and elegant piece of theatre.
Then there are the singing voices coming from the great orchestral shelf above the stage: counter tenor, Jonathan Peter Kenny, who is also the musical director; sopranos Kelly McCusker and Siobhan Owen; mezzo Melanie Pepperheim; plus Macedonian and Bulgarian singers, Tanja Tzarovska and Belinda Sykes.
The orchestra segues between the cultural references from soulful reflection to pulsing folksy exuberance. The music is simply exquisite and one hopes there will be a recorded soundtrack somewhere.
Also important in the realisation of this magnificence of theatre is the technical artistry of Jane Rossetto’s sound and Nigel Levings’s mighty lighting. All this professionalism and intelligence, this phenomenal massing of humanity for this iteration of significant war history recalled in the honour of the centenary of Armistice, is embraced under our South Australian Brink banner.
Standing ovation.
This is what Festivals are all about.
Samela Harris
When: 1 to 6 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed