The Crucible

University of Adelaide Theatre Guild.  Little Theatre.  6 Aug 2016

Director Geoff Brittain has exorcised a devilishly intelligent, tense and driven production from Arthur Miller's The Crucible.  Miller wrote the play in 1953 in response to the activities of the US Congress spearheaded by Senator Joe McCarthy in their hunt for Communists.  Miller thought it must have been life imitating art imitating life when he himself appeared in front of the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956.  In short, it's a witch hunt, which actually sort of happened as presented in the play, in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.  The Crucible is also one of the great four of Arthur Miller - the others being A View From The Bridge, All My Sons, and of course, Death Of A Salesman.

Brittain sets the action in what could pass as a manger - a plausible metaphor copasetic with the religious background of the play and Miller's penchant for grand language.  I got all that from some straw on the floor and a wooden door.  The action starts juicily enough with some girls undergoing wild gyrations in a psychedelic romp led by a Barbados slave (played with exotic abandon by Rhoda Sylvester).  One thing leads to another, and before you know it, the girls are accused of flying, etc., and are egged on by the elders to name which good townspeople are doing the bewitching.  Miller creates thrilling predicaments of moral hazards which are excellently dramatised by this wondrous cast of character actors.

It's not easy to pretend you're in 17th Century Salem using Miller's turn of phrase, but the vernacular was music to my ears.  Trudi Williams' costumes and Richard Parkhill's lighting were a huge help, as were some projected period woodcuts of Satan's mischief, but the absence of a crucifix on the wall or around a reverend's neck was noted.

The young girls, led by Zoe Dibb as Abigail, were quite spooky at times.  There was terrific eccentricity on offer from the likes of David Haviland, John R. Sabine, Esther Michelsen, Philip Lineton, Jean Walker, and Deborah Walsh playing the elderly local yokels.  You could imagine the beads of sweat appear on Steve Marvanek's brow as his Deputy Governor Danforth (chief prosecutor) exquisitely felt the pressure of condemning to death as the witchery unraveled.  Ben Todd was the weirdest Reverend Hale I have witnessed and it kinda worked.  The protagonist farmer John Proctor as played by Kim Clark was wonderfully understated and contrasted nicely with others who were less cool and shouted a bit too much.  Cheryl Douglas as John's wife, Elizabeth, also rendered a beautifully measured performance.  Notwithstanding the above, there was some drama left on the table by these two and Danforth in the climactic scenes at dawn in the dungeon.

This is a very real and exciting Crucible indeed.  Bravo!  

David Grybowski

When: 6 to 20 August
Where:  Little Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com

Biography: A Game

Bakehouse Theatre. 6 Aug 2016

Swiss dramatist Max Frisch’s Biography: A Game, delves deeply into this need we have to believe it might be possible, somehow, if we could, to change our lives to improve it from the moments it tanked. We all want our life biography to be perfect, without regret.

Life has goals and obstacles, and is competitive; much like chess. Director/Designer Joh Hartog’s set references this, with its raised chess set platform in wood tones on which sits a coffee table, with a chess set with pieces as if a game’s already been played. A couch, glass top wooden cabinet, desk, chair, leather lounge chair and floor lamp shade offset the coffee table. It is cosy, middle class, theatrical.

Frisch’s human chess game with five human pieces takes place on a theatre stage. Biography: A Game is a play within a play. The tension generated between the sense on one hand, we seem to be watching a rehearsed theatre work, on the other, a real life relationship unravelling, is key to the gripping power of this production.

Hannes Kürmann (Tim Lucas) arrives home at 2am to find his partner Antoinette Stein (Krystal Brock) has just arrived before him, not in bed as expected. There’s confusion. She wants to stay up, pours a wine. Mild disagreement plays out. He has to go to work in the morning.

Stage right is a desk at which the Director (Adam Carter) and his assistants (Lisa Harper Campbell and Patrick Clements) sit. At the Director’s command, the scene stops. He replays it himself as Hannes, allowing Antoinette a different mode of play, all in demonstration for Hannes. The scene resumes. It ends badly. Hannes is not happy.

So begins a ‘game’ in which Hannes battles, more than works, with the Director to make changes in his relationships and professional life in such a way things will be pleasing, secure, worthy.

The struggle to control events, control people, control the story Hannes embarks on becomes a never ending trail of confusion, fearful introspection, fear, regret and longing. However Hannes works to stop/start or rewind events he cannot control; consequences springing from his choices.

Can we as an audience dismiss all this as a mere play, or should we allow ourselves a deeper, scarier relationship with Hannes’ genuinely frightening, emotionally crushing experiences, lightened as they are by superbly timed comic moments?

Is this life as we live it? Frisch’s essential question asked in this play, alongside, is there anything we can really do?

Hartog’s cast is a gutsy one, offering powerfully rich performances in which that delicate line between the comic and deeply tragic is maintained with exquisite perfection. Tim Lucas’s Hannes and Adam Carter’s The Director play off each other in a perfect devil-tempting-the-innocent relationship. Krystal Brock’s Antoinette burns with subtle energy and intent, while Patrick Clements and Lisa Harper Campbell’s stage hand/bit character roles enliven the dark pall of Frisch’s writing beautifully.

David O’Brien

When: 4 to 20 August

Where: The Bakehouse Theatre, Main Stage

Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com

Quick Fix

One Point 618. 5 August

Quick Fix is a wonderfully rare thing in contemporary dance. It presents as a brilliant meld of pure theatre and pure dance, a superbly engaging exploration of the lure we call the ‘quick fix’, for our many needs and desires in text and movement.

Choreographer Katrina Lazaroff and creative collaborators/dancers Andrew Haycroft and Rebecca Bainger fashion a work where the set challenge is to balance the psychology of craving, needing things to be ‘perfect’, and how those things play out physically.

The greatest desired quick fix of all centres on the body; to be fitter, faster, thinner, smarter, and more attractive. Lazaroff’s choreography doesn’t merely focus on obvious physical tropes alluding to gym workouts, with assistance from two brilliantly used stepladder stools. There’s a dark and furious undertow to the sharp and angled energetic movement interplayed with rapid fire barked promises of media produced offers, promising to sate desire.

It’s as if Haycroft and Bainger are a couple drifting apart, as the male seeks more of what he wants promised by commercial media, and the female shrinks from it, during the middle phrases of the piece. Bainger’s expressed physical ease with fitness workouts can’t be matched by over large hulking Hayrcoft.

Which brings Haycroft and Bainger to the powerful core of Quick Fix. The deadening desire to shape others to meet unrealistic ideals is driven with superb power by Haycroft. He bends, twists, twirls and pivots Bainger’s body into representations of the ultimate male fantasy of the ‘perfect’ woman. In doing so, Bainger gives great expression of the false, plastic nature of this desired perfection. Haycroft’s body jerks and shakes like a junkie who just can’t get the fix right. He keeps telling us what he wants, tries creating and it and fails.

Is there an escape? Maybe.

David O’Brien

When: 5 August

Where: Marion Cultural Centre, Domain Theatre

Bookings: Closed

The Red Cross Letters

State Theatre Company. Space Theatre. 3 Aug 2016

Over the last couple of years during this centenary of World War I, we have had the opportunity to ponder on the woeful and astonishing project of Australians at war. The more personal the narrative, the more emotionally charged it has been for me. I won't soon forget the exhibition of primitive prosthetics in the Spirit of ANZAC Centenary Experience that was in Adelaide last March, or the morsels of sacrifice and pain written on the ridges and in the gullies of the Gallipoli battlefield. In State Theatre's The Red Cross Letters, another fascinating facet is revealed. The State Library of South Australia has a collection of over 8,000 packets of inquiries by loved ones as to the health or even whereabouts of their soldiers overseas, and replies from the relevant state branch of the Australian Red Cross Information Bureau. Most of the stories are South Australian, and the ringing of local towns and suburbs of Adelaide in the correspondence brought a faraway and long ago war to the here and now. The library entrusted local playwright Verity Laughton with twenty packets and she has incorporated eleven of these lives in this show.

It would be a stony heart indeed unmoved by this poignant material. A man drowns in the sea off Egypt saving other soldiers it's unlikely he even knew. Four brothers sign up to the same battalion; three are killed in France within hours of each other, how the fourth soldiered on to be wounded six months later is testimony to fortitude and courage beyond belief. But it is the desperation of those at home, pathetically yearning for scraps of information from the tyranny of distance, only to be drip-fed information over months or a year, that is most heart-rendering. And the replies, made with great patience by the bureaucracy in an attempt to be personal, had to be repeated not in 20 packets, or 8,000 packets, but for the more than 200,000 Australian casualties of that war.

The dramatic danger of the raw material is numbing the audience. Director Andy Packer's world premiere production looked no more sophisticated than a high school experimental effort that produced nothing new. The cast - comprising Matt Crook, Lizzy Falkland, Elizabeth Hay and Rory Walker - worked hard with about a dozen chairs, most unusually standing on them for some variety, and sometimes deftly maneuvering them like puppet masters. But there was not enough of the latter. Deliveries of the text were too often shrill - which was unattractive at length, and sometimes mechanistic with insufficient warming naturalism. I feel the letters need more help than Packer and Laughton provided.

More context would have enriched the experience. The portraits of the diggers was good, but the map of the Mid-North - thoughtfully centred on the home of one of Australia's most noted WWI veterans, Sir Hubert Wilkins, at Mt Bryan - was closer to what's needed. An association of the names of the sacrificed with their local town monuments, or the location of their demise in the theatre of war, were missed opportunities. And while showing a packet of sorts to the front row was good for the front row, the rest of us might have benefited from screen projections of some of the correspondence. I was often uncertain whose voice I was hearing. Matthew Gregan's haunting composition and live performance greatly enhanced the experience.

While I believe the raw material might have been better dealt with, it was a great and necessary project for these letters to be presented on stage with such reverential care, and you can't possibly leave this show the way you came in.

David Grybowski

When: 3 to 20 Aug

Where: Space Theatre 3-6 August, then on South Australian tour 8-20 August

Bookings: bass.net.au