Adelaide Fringe. Bakehouse Theatre. 9 Mar 2017
Playing an Edwardian lad in industrial Newport, South Wales, Daniel Llewelyn-Williams steps onto the stage rugged up in a heavy woollen suit and swaddled in a great big neck scarf. It is to the immense credit of his dramatic skills that he did not once for a minute appear to be hot working under lights on a warm night in the confined quarters of the Bakehouse Theatre. Sleeveless summery audience members, however, started to sweat just looking at his attire.
Llewelyn-Williams brings this solo piece to the Fringe under the Guy Masterson umbrella - which, for experienced Adelaide audiences, is a strong assurance it will be a quality piece.
And it is.
Llewelyn-Williams is appealing on many levels. The story he brings is of a kid living in poverty in dismal docklands. He seeks nothing more than his father’s approval while knowing that his covert obsession with becoming a magician would devastate his dad for whom a grim labouring job is a respectable achievement. Thus does the boy describe his life and demonstrate his growing prowess at the art of magic, referring to the great Houdini's as the apex of all illusionist achievements.
The lad grows up as we watch. He tells of his dreams and fears. He tells of his hope to impress against the odds with an impossible feat. Audience members hold their breath as the narrative becomes more graphic and frightening.
The performer has us in his spell.
And suddenly an hour has gone and we have been treated to yet another brilliant piece of Fringe theatre.
Samela Harris
When: 9 to 18 Mar
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Restless Dance Theatre. Hilton Hotel. 7 Mar 2017
Restless Dance Theatre’s Michelle Ryan and company have created an extraordinary, technically sophisticated spartan work as truly intimate as the onsite production venue, Adelaide’s Hilton Hotel is gargantuan and imposing.
Intimate Space is a unique journey for a very small audience in which distinctly eye grabbing, against-the-grain, physicality draws the audience closer and closer into a relationship with characters operating a lot like those from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The only difference being, there is no quixotic madness at hand, rather, a deft, almost mystic series of experiences, some gentle in transition of space and emotional timbre, some like a lightning strike shock.
Little things like checking in, the delightful concierge asks which of a selection of lovely personality types you might be checked in as; an attention holding bell hop who’s very uniform holds secrets you find with a magnifying glass; a whippy bodied bell hop who guides the guests on their journey’s beginning; the explosive, fluoro lit white costumed dance in the industrial laundry.
The shifts in place, mood and choreography are endless, and fascinating. Intimate Space achieves something significant, especially within the public spaces of the venue, best summed up in the delightful pair of couples who dance a deftly modified classical form pairing. The contrast of young dancers with and without a disability giving life to a performed expression of emotional intimacy publicly, contrasts with the humorous, nonetheless perceptive, realisation of what it is to be hidden away in basement laundries and industrial kitchens. As signs pointed out make clear though, you never know whose watching.
Such beauty, warmth and uniqueness is gifted in this work.
David O’Brien
When: 3 to 18 March
Where: Hilton Hotel, Adelaide
Bookings: Sold Out
Adelaide Festival. Complicite. Dunstan Playhouse. 7 Mar 2017
Richard Katz’s voice travels round and round in one’s head beneath the headphones. Is he behind me? Ooh, he is blowing in my ear. My ear feels hot. How could it?
It is a perceptional illusion. A trick of the mind. An alternative reality. And what is reality, anyway?
Katz riffs on existentialism moving around the stage which is his London studio. The vast sound-absorbing foam baffle curtain stands behind him. A binaural head stands before him. His five-year-old daughter comes and goes in sound bites we are hearing through our headphones. He’s babysitting. She does not want to go to sleep.
But, he has a story to tell.
There is a table with more microphones, a chair and a lot of plastic water bottles. He introduces the deep American voice of the protagonist, Loren McIntyre, the National Geographic photojournalist who is taken to the Brazilian Amazon to find and record the mysterious Mayoruna tribe. The story begins. Just Katz on stage and us under our headphones. One on one. Five hundred of us... It feels like a radio play on steroids. A boat plane over the river. Sound effects. Voices. Jungle.
Things do not go to plan. Loren follows the tribe into a strange half-village, half-world. He is not a prisoner. Or, is he?
Only the head man can communicate, but it is telepathic. The American is sceptical. Village life, tribal plans, white invaders, the jungle, flesh-eating maggots… The set is dark. There is just Katz up on stage, running around in the dark talking, gesticulating, adding his voice to the layered soundscape which is filling our brains. There is no other reality.
The story unfolds. It is scary and gruesome and yet wonderful. Strange substances are consumed. Altered states. One thinks of Carlos Castenada and The Teachings of Don Juan. Eek he is now licking a psychedelic frog. Loren’s predicament is extreme. Katz, meanwhile, is still babysitting in London.
The two worlds whiz by all contained between the ears.
The sound quality is excellent. The sound technology is superb. The performance is almost superhuman.
This is Simon McBurney’s Complicite. His production is based on a book, Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu. The book is based on a true story.
It makes for a profoundly different experience, a truly Festival-worthy experience which comes in through the ears and imprints upon the mind’s eye.
Samela Harris
When: 7 to 11 Mar
Where: Dunstan Plahouse
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Matt Byrne Media. Maxim’s Wine Bar. 5 Mar 2017
Byrne packs ‘em like sardines into Maxim’s on the Parade, but the audience doesn’t seem to mind! The cosy upstairs venue at Norwood fits about 100, though I’m told it has had up to 130 with standing room only. Such is the draw of Byrne’s home grown shows. Every year now for 20 earthy rotations of the sun he has created a bawdy spoof on a topical theme; this time around it is channel 7’s My Kitchen Rules.
Confession: I’ve been an MKR tragic for 8 seasons, but the format is really wearing thin, and Byrne has identified most of the reasons why in his hilarious two (+) hour show.
The time absolutely flies by, and by the end of the performance one is doubled over with aching ribs from all of the laughing.
The jokes flow thick and fast. There are puns-a-plenty and even more innuendo; but it is the performers' characterisations that steal the show, and they all have more than one standout in their repertoire.
The cast of four – Matt Byrne, Niki Martin, Marc Clement, and Stefanie Rossi – play at least 15 characters including the celebrity chefs and the contestants within the show.
Byrne plays the Gordon Ramsay rip-off, Gordon Ramraid, and almost manages the same level of vocal intensity as the all-swearing, all-shouting celebrity chef. As the ever camp Scotsman, Colin, he finds his pace and slides effortlessly into the role, highland dancing and all. Niki Martin gives us Nigella’s Awesome with sultry style. No melon is left un-creamed in her raunchy rendition, and yet Martin’s Yiayia Moussaka is her standout character and an absolute crowd pleaser.
Marc Clement spectacularly shifts from one character the next and gives each 150%. His Jamie Bolivar lisps and lilts over dialogue with uncanny accuracy. As Byrne’s Scottish partner, Justin, Clement ramps up the camp, and his Master Moussaka is scarily accurate. Stefanie Rossi makes the fab four complete, with a lesser known celebrity chef in Rachel Rayban but still makes her larger than life. Rossi shines as the hippy niece Moonbeam alongside Byrne as Daddy Moontides, and really breaks new ground with her Asian inspired cooking demonstration as celebrity chef, Pooh (with an ‘h’).
The small stage doesn’t hamper the big numbers and choreography and audience participation is full tilt, with an Adriano Zumbo inspired Zorba the Greek dance breaking out. Plenty of other characters make an appearance, including Clement’s python that just can’t resist a good pheasant plucking.
Ultimately the winning team is decided by audience acclimation, and just like in real life it is the personalities that win the day – not the cooking.
With another two weeks of shows remaining there are plenty of opportunities to get a solid dose of potty humour and laugh until you snort inappropriately, so be sure to make the trek up the Parade and don’t miss this, the 20th year of spoof for MBM.
Paul Rodda
When: 5 to 19 Mar
Where: Maxim’s Wine Bar, Norwood
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Sydney Theatre Company presented by Adelaide Festival and State Theatre Company of SA. Anstey’s Quarry. 5 Mar 2017
It was an act of genius by Neil Armfield to locate The Secret River in Anstey’s Quarry.
The Kate Grenville saga is about home but it is also about the lure and significance of the Australian landscape. Armfield has made the landscape star of the show.
Every way in which the mighty open-cut cliff face of the quarry is presented is in some way awe-inspiring.
With Mark Howett’s superb lighting, it adds mood and comment to every moment of the play.
As the audience arrives, the quarry is beautiful in sunlight, showing off the rich veins of warm ochre hues which are so typical of the Australian landscape. Blackened saplings cling perilously to the rock face. Spreading, leafy eucalypts are silhouetted on its crest.
As the sun sets, the piercing blue sky turns to amber and the rocks glow. Then, throughout the night, the rocks play their part in the play, sometimes mottled and cheerful, sometimes playing with the dancing shadows of the actors, sometimes ominous and dark, sometimes sharply illuminated and etched in their own shadows. The stars come out above. Wind rustles the trees.
It also whips through the audience perched on bleachers.
Warm day turns to chilly night. Very chilly. Audience members huddle in rugs and cling together. They suffer for their art.
But they are rewarded.
Grenville’s plot line is well known, here deftly re-imagined for the stage by our beloved playwright Andrew Bovell. It is the tale of naive, barely literate English convicts claiming land with no comprehension that the land is already occupied by Aboriginal people. Thus is it the confrontation of white and black, the misguided concept of Terra Nullius. The audience knows it will not end well.
When William Thornhill gets his pardon and takes his family up into Hawksbury, he lays claim to glorious land which he soon finds is occupied by Dharug people. They don’t understand each other. He wants them to go away. They want him to go away. He wants to grow corn on the land. They have always harvested prized native food there.
The early interactions are tense but slowly, once Thornhill’s young son has befriended the Aboriginal children, an uneasy friendship begins to emerge. Thornhill finally realises that there is much to learn from the original inhabitants.
However, the Thornhills are not the only white settlers in the area.
Bovell and Armfield paint these white settlers as truly ugly people, ignorant and morally squalid. Criminals. Cockney scum, not the sort to respect Colonial decrees about not killing the Aboriginals.
Armfield makes them into caricatures and the actors clearly relish the freedom to ham it up to the hilt, especially Richard Piper as the violent and scary Smasher Sullivan. There’s gravy on his ham.
Bruce Spence with long oily hair and whiteface is rather ghoul-like; shades of Lurch from the Addams Family.
Saggity, played by Matthew Sunderland, is crass and boorish and Dan Oldfield, the convict Thornhill takes on as staff, is fresh blood and a wily wheeler dealer. Then there is the tough old Mrs Herring, a pipe-chewing survivor. It is a fabulous cameo role nicely embodied by Jennifer Hagan.
Most interesting is Thomas Blackwood who has respected and liked the Aboriginals and settled down happily with an Aboriginal woman. Colin Moody is simply wonderful in this role, dignified, powerful and wise. One loves him. His wife is played by Ningali Lawford Wolf who also plays the immense role of narrator. She is a magnificent presence on stage. The sharp clear edge of her voice pierces the night air and not a word is lost, even to the echoes of the cliff face.
The Aboriginal cast altogether is superb. Steven Goldsmith is graceful and stately as Yalamundi, the Elder. Frances Djulibing is both funny and moving as old Buryia and it is pleasing to see that Bovell has allowed the Aboriginal sense of humour to shine brightly through this adaptation. It makes all the more appalling the bloody denouement of the play - and the human tragedy of our colonial history.
The other tribal members are played delightfully by Natasha Wanganeen, Shaka Cook, Dylan Miller, Marcus Corowa and alternating lads as the younger child Garraway. These all are strong, generous and committed performances - and brave, considering their bare skin in the chilly night quarry.
While the white father, William, is the force of the Cockney family central to The Secret River and Nathaniel Dean’s husky voice and Cockney twang emphasise the contrast of the two races, it is his wife Sal and the compassionate performance of Georgia Adamson who delivers the heart and soul of the story. Their two sons are played by a changing cast of young people on alternate nights, and very well too, judging by the Saturday night lads.
Armfield has delivered to this potent work some very special elements, not the least of them the pack of Smasher’s fierce dogs played by the male actors on long pieces of rope. They are almost more believable than the real thing.
The Stephen Curtis set and the Iain Grandage music complement the dramatic entity ideally. However, when it comes to the greatest impact of this Festival experience, it is Anstey and the lighting which will linger forever in mind’s eye.
Samela Harris
When: 5 to 19 Mar
Where: Anstey’s Quarry
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au