Guy Masterson – CIT, in Association with Smokescreen Productions. Bakehouse Theatre. 5 Mar 2018
He regains consciousness on the beach. There is a woman there. No, she has not rescued him.
Awkwardly communications are established, neither character willing to reveal their identity to the other.
But the mystery woman gains the upper hand, bit by bit drawing his story out of him until it absolutely erupts in a torrent of terribleness.
For he is “The Death Angel” of Auschwitz, the monster Dr Mengele, the Nazi SS doctor whose ruthless mass experiments on Jewish prisoners were among the horrors of the Holocaust.
She, on the other hand, is Azra'il, the Jewish Angel of Death.
This is the third of Guy Masterson's Lest We Forget series running at The Bakehouse. It is performed by Tim Marriott from England and an Adelaide actress called Stephanie Rossi. She has stepped in for this Fringe season and, with only five rehearsals, she has established a commanding characterisation.
It is impossible not to study her as she parries lines on eugenics and euthanasia.
She is an actress with beautiful composure and focus, not to mention a lovely voice for both speech and song.
Mengele is a piece of theatre as gruelling as it is gripping.
It’s very artfully written to give a sense of tension and expectation. Marriott commits his all to delivering the vanity and pure ugliness of the man, one of the world’s true psychopathic narcissists, a man who chose who would live and who would die as they arrived at the concentration camp, who experimented on victim’s eyes, who removed organs from babies without anaesthesia.
Azra'il patiently elicits much of this information, leading him on through a remorseless confession, before she reveals her identity and raison d'être. Then she gives him a bit of his own medicine by using her angel superpowers to symbolically whip him into agonised submission before committing him to death.
In fact, Mengele escaped justice. He died in 1979 by drowning in the sea in South America after many years of freedom. The play’s ending of spectacular supernatural revenge feels like a Mossad dream.
It is questionable but it feels good.
Samela Harris
4.5 stars
When: 5 to 17 Mar
Where: The Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Head First Acrobats. The Flamingo at Gluttony. 4 Mar 2
18
Three swashbuckling pirates in a ship full of shtick.
Well, it is a rubber ducky of a ship and it is more in the imagination than in evidence in the tent at Gluttony. But such detail is incidental to the activities of its crew. They are hapless, hopeless, bickering, boisterous, disobedient, sneaky, entirely silly - and very good at it.
In other words, these pirates know the ropes.
They’re Melbourne acrobats and clowns called Head First. They’re highly trained and extremely personable. Loosely, they cast themselves as the sensible should-be captain, the buffoon, and the loser. They tell all sorts of pirate jokes some of which cross the age barriers and are hard to resist re-telling. What ships do pirates struggle with? Relationships. Haw haw haw!
They tumble, they dance with mops, they do prat falls, they do classic clown routines, ladder tricks, play at Ghost Busters and do wild chases to the Benny Hill theme, juggle knives and do spectacular seesaw stunts. The most fantastic act is with the spinning wheel.
It’s a dauntingly strenuous show, dangerous and funny.
Well worth the family Fringe dollar.
Samela Harris
4.5 stars
When: 4 to 18 Mar
Where: The Flamingo at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Nikki Britton. Gluttony, The SpiegelZelt. 4 Mar 2018
She’s strident. She’s vulgar. She’s not everyone’s Grandma. In fact, she may not be anyone’s Grandma. Comedian Nikki Britton comes up with the gloriously funny concept of her character having been named “Grandma” at birth. Immediately, the imagination is sparked and one’s internal chuckles take on a life of their own.
Britton is a professional comedian and she knows her genres. There is nothing alternative or have-a-go Fringey about her act. She has a well-honed skill set and a well-conceived scenario to both amuse and inspire children.
After a bit of fairly ferocious old-fart farting around and once the world’s biggest communal fart has been wafted from a tittering tent, Grandma hits the deaf-old-lady shtick as she asks the kids their names. She pushes this routine as far as it can go and it just gets funnier. By default, she assigns names to hapless kids: Mushroom, Toiletpaper.
She engages young and old throughout the show. Most importantly, she plays on the positive theme of realising one’s hopes and dreams. To this end, she brings kids onstage whence, invisibly, she has a tech with art skills who draws career environments on the big white screen behind each kid: a veterinary room, a stage, a lawyer’s office. It is charming, clever and generous-spirited.
There’s plenty more to the show, including a messy cooking segment and a science experiment.
The kids love it all. And, when an FA/18 Hornet screams an overhead flyover, Britton shows there are no flies on her by nicely wrapping the din up into a bit of timely improv.
May Grandma never grow up but come back for more Fringes.
Samela Harris
4.5 stars
When: 4 to 12 Mar
Where: Gluttony, The SpiegelZelt
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Glassroom Theatre Company. Noel Lothian Hall. 3 Mar 2018
A new play by a new company. That is always good news. Clanstow was written by Jack Cummins and it won The State Theatre Company & Flinders University Young Playwright Award.
This does not make it a perfect piece of theatre. It is clearly juvenilia but it shines with promise.
It’s a bit of a thriller, a murder mystery in the high school world.
The production by the very nicely named Glassroom, is presented on a sensibly high stage in the compact Noel Lothian Theatre in the Botanic Gardens. A sofa and a park bench are the major set components. They are fairly noisily moved to and fro for very many scene changes. This is one of the youthful errors of the play, a cinematic concept of frequently changing scenes. It is not so easy in the theatre and makes for hard work.
The murder story revolves around a party held by a particularly ill-humoured teen called Jason. There is some interesting negotiation with parents about permissions to go out, particularly for two school peers whose olds are in a second-time-around relationship which presents the awkward threat of a blended family for the students. This makes for some surprising observations on grownups and a sense that the generation gap is alive and well. Then there are the romantic ties of the high school students and who is on with whom and who is cheating on whom.
The challenge for the audience is in keeping track of who is who among the protagonists. And then, it becomes a whodunnit. There’s a psycho in the house. But, who? The conceit of the two students who had been institutionalised for mental issues is interesting but a bit far-fetched. Then again, it weaves extra strands to unravel in the denouement.
The audience is not provided with a program which makes it hard to accord credit but there are some good performances and nice characterisations. Directed by its writer and Grace Boyle, it is given a very naturalistic style, except when it comes to the grownups, only one of whom, the mum, comes across as credible. The detective with his trench coat is inadvertently quite comical.
The cast, strong and well-rehearsed, include Jack Cummins, Zoe Taylor, Alex Whitrow, Olivia Coppick, Brad McCarthy, Henry Turczynowicz, Katherine Silbereisen, Grace Boyle, Alex Spice, Kelland Grigg, Charlotte Beavis and Eva Tudorovic.
For a first show by a new group, Clanstow is a brave and worthy effort and one looks forward to what they do next.
Samela Harris
3.5 stars
When: 3 to 12 Mar
Where: Noel Lothian Hall
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. The Hayloft Project/Belvoir. 4 Mar 2018
Ripping up the basic storyline of Seneca’s Thyestes and scrolling it in LED as the introduction to action and dialogue, scene to scene, is so far away from Ancient Greek (let alone a solid English translation). Yet, it has done more to unleash the fabled fire and fury of Ancient Greek theatre than one could possibly hope to experience in the 21st Century.
Director Simon Stone and literary collaborators Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan and Mark Winter’s evisceration of Seneca’s bloody tale of vengefulness, is a colossally mind bending theatrical achievement rendered in performance and design. It is transfigured with contemporary characterisations, language and a psychological impetus to power, lust, hate and revenge, floating on mystic prophecy.
Claude Marcos’ traverse set in white, with remote controlled curtains each side of the narrow stage, supremely accentuates the banality and terror stringing this tale together.
Stone’s cast of three - Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan and Toby Schmitz - play this fantastic new text with a supremely sophisticated, controlled sway from wondrously absurd comedy to stark deadliness, offering, scene by scene, an ever darkening view of the destructive relationship between Thyestes and Artreus; Royal brothers, exiles, competitors for power and surrender to obscene madness.
Freud let loose onstage.
The clinching mastery of the work’s construction is the scene count back, the missing links, the psychological triggers of savagery.
Thyestes is a grand, noble, powerful Australian work of extraordinary depth and genius.
David O’Brien
When: 2 to 7 March
Where: The Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au