Adelaide Fringe. Louise O’Dwyer. The GC. 4 Mar 2017

 

Never base your identity on your job, is advice often handed out. Interestingly, for performing artists, that’s a bit of a bind, given so much of who they are is actually bound up in that core sense of being one, and so much of the self is expended in being so.

 

Louse O’Dwyer’s smooth running 50 minute one act piece allows her to offer an audience of non-performers the unique experience of being on the end of the question every actor hates at stages of their lives. “How’s your acting going?”

 

A series of friends, relatives and side player characters pop up to give their momentary take on that actor friend or relative, and it’s not really very pretty, if at times delightfully funny.

 

From the harshness of a caring rellie at a family BBQ, to the unseen, unheard director auditioning Louise, it becomes brutally clear how little anyone really cares for or understands this acting thing.

 

The sweet irony of an actor creating a series of characters – who represent experiences in which said actor’s whole sense of self respect as a human being is overlooked because they’re an actor – is not easy to ignore.

 

O’Dwyer’s creations are quirky, fallible, cracked people, delivered with disciplined restraint. What animates all of them is an unfailing desire, conscious or not, to actually care about or understand the actor in the same way they might ask in earnest of someone else, “how’s your career going?”

Think about that.

 

David O’Brien

 

When: 28 Feb to 11 March

Where: The GC (The German Club)

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au