Opinion: David O’Brien’s 2023 Top Ten

Sociopolitical theatre/dance loomed large in mind through nationally and locally produced work in 2023. Something there’s not been much of for some time.

The year of the referendum to include Indigenous Australians in the constitution saw Australian Dance Theatre and Bangarra Dance Theatre and Marrugeku present three profoundly significant works. Works exploring historic experiences of dispossession and struggle on the individual and collective level.

 

Then there’s extraordinary productions by Theatre Republic, Lina Limosani and Famous Last Words tackling the personal-is-political thing from a grand baroque historical context to the nitty gritty of strata corporation politics.

 

So here’s the Top 10! (My version is as many as I like.) Get into it!

 

11) Music for Other Worlds – Alex Frayne and Paul Grabowsky/Adelaide Festival. Adelaide’s most renowned photographer’s works were screened to on-the-spot jazz improvisation by the great pianist Paul Grabowsky. A unique, stunning experience, as Frayne’s meticulous photo essays merged and flowed in six phrases. Grabowsky responded to them in the moment. The ear saw as much as the eyes heard. This work opened up a new angle on visual and musical narrative more particular to the language of film.

 

10) The River That Ran Up Hill – Slingsby/Big Dream Festival. Edgell Junior’s story of surviving Vanuatu’s Category 5 Cyclone Pam in 2015 was a significant work of community building and awareness. Relying on the magic inherent in simple stripped back design, direct storytelling and very clever lighting effects. Andy Packer and Clara Solly-Slades’ production addressed a big environmental issue in a beautiful and profound way.

 

9) Tracker – Austrian Dance Theatre/Adelaide Festival. A very personal work. The story of ADT’s Daniel Riley’s Great Great Uncle Alec ‘Tracker’ Riley. A personal history delving into an indigenous man’s life between two worlds. White Australia. Black Australia. Where does identity and loyalty lie? To the land you are made of and from, or the white boss benefiting from your knowledge of your land he has taken? A sharply focused work on the nexus of being skilfully coopted by an occupying force.

 

8) Jurrungu Ngan-ga (Straight Talk) - Marrugeku/Adelaide Festival. Australia’s history since colonisation has been that of an island prison camp. Choreographer Dalisa Pigram and Director Rachael Swain’s production explored this very central historical fact with direct brutality in context of indigenous experience. An explosive, unapologetic and gripping expose.

 

7) Yuldea – Bangarra Dance Theatre. A Great Victorian Desert/South Australian story told, at last, from perspective and firsthand experience of indigenous people who lived and suffered decades of decimation by industrialisation and impact of the Maralinga atomic bomb tests. Frances Rings’ production focused every creative element of the work on the dancers’ bodies. They were the land, the people, the spirituality, the history as never seen or understood by White Australia before.

 

6) Bàrbaros - Lina Limosani. Nightmare baroque, come Gothic dive into the darkest heart of human civilisation since primeval slime crawled onto land and evolved/devolved into a multi millennia parade of subjugations and oppressions. Starkest, most brutal and enthrallingly beautiful choreographic work tackling barbarism at its dark human core.

 

5) Future Present – Theatre Republic. In its second iteration, the one night only project in which short new works on a theme are written, directed, rehearsed, designed, teched and performed in mere days (if not shorter than that) once again proved its incredible value. Democracy was the theme. From inner battles of family needs a female Minister mother and wife is forced to confront, what a name means in body corporate strata politics in securing a home to risking, or not, family connection when international politics is a source of danger. Pressure cooker stuff all round producing work tackling democracy from unique ‘never considered that’ angles. Showed off acting smarts at the sharp end of the scale. Last year’s event provided Emily Steel inspiration for her work The Garden. This is a very important, hugely valuable project.

 

4) Night, Mother – Holden Street Theatre Company. Powerful, profoundly shattering, deeply troubling and insightful production. When a down and out divorced daughter tells her mother she will kill herself in hours, what can be said or done? Martha Lott, Kathryn Fisher and director Peter Goers went where they probably didn’t want, but had to in delivering a deeply truthful work, not a mawkish apologia.

 

3) The Garden – Theatre Republic. Brilliant, thought provoking, darkly funny and very uncomfortable check-your-privilege work from playwright Emily Steel. Australia has a refugee perception problem, and Steel’s work tackled it head on, utilising innate judgemental preconceptions and self-satisfied moral superiority of middle Australia with gleefully deadly comic effect through Elizabeth Hay and Rashidi Edward’s performances.

 

2) Looped – Holden Street Theatre Company. Debut new company smash hit production, directed with sublime panache by Peter Goers and rolling with utterly pace perfect performances from Martha Lott, Chris Asimos and Robert Cusenza. A work which ever so steadily inched towards three significant words uttered by Lotts’s stunning characterisation of Tallulah Bankhead, on which premise the whole drama is turned on its head.

 

1) Proud – Famous Last Words. Understanding, and successfully communicating what this far right Proud Boys thing infiltrating Australian male circles is, was a tour de force achievement from Director/playwright James Watson and actor Henry Cooper. Watson’s writing had gravitas and down to earth sensibility needed to explore and explain, at the most basic human level, a dangerously unsettling movement. Cooper’s performance kept it real, simple, allowing us to see how easy the allure of belonging when in a disenfranchised state of being such extremes become.

 

Hot New Artist to Watch – James Watson

 

One years’ worth of work by Director/writer James Watson with company Famous Last Words pretty much convinced myself and Adelaide Critics Circle colleagues he was worthy of our 2023 Emerging Artist Award. But this year’s work comes off the back of a very long period of training. Most significantly, studying the playwright’s craft under Stephen Sewell, Australia’s most significant writer of political theatre at NIDA, after graduating from Flinders Drama Centre.

Watson’s writing and deft directorial calls on four projects proved remarkable demonstration of a maturity coming into its own. Follow everything he does. He is unafraid to walk outside the box.

 

David O’Brien

Opinion: David O’Brien’s 2022 Top Ten

This year 10 just wasn’t enough; the 2022 Top Ten contains 11. Yes, there could be 50 in this list. In reverse order counting down to 1, read on!

 

11) After All This – Rumpus/Wickedly Good Productions – Playwright Marcel Dorney scored a 2012 Melbourne Green Room award for After All This. Wickedly Good Productions did a brilliant job with the text. Using Rumpus’s building as base, the audience was enveloped and confronted with a history of beliefs in a journey that wound through the building bending from childhood reminisce to death cult apologist affirmation. Never once was being judgemental involved. A huge achievement. An absorbing experience.

 

10) Di, Viv and Rose – Rumpus/The Corseted Rabbits – This trio of women seek to champion women’s issues. Their first chosen work couldn’t have been more perfect. Amelia Bullmore’s play offered Director Rachel Burke and cast everything, all the issues. 40 years of history. Pop culture of the 80s era onwards. Gender politics in evolution. They delivered a sensational interpretation, rich in its challenges to the present day, illuminative of the past they spring from.

 

9) Love on the Left Bank – Adelaide Cabaret Festival/Louise Blackwell – French chanteuse Juliet Greco; who would dare play her life onstage? Louise Blackwell. Francophile of long standing, Blackwell’s chosen creative collaborators delivered with her, a career highlight as champions of French musical culture. Blackwell’s performance was properly beyond mere replication of Greco. It seethed with a truth not to be denied.

 

8) Whatever Happened to Mary Jane? – Freefall Productions – Anorexia. Can it be tackled onstage? Yes! 25 years ago renowned comedian Wendy Harmer wrote a script extolling the experience of NIDA graduate Sancia Robinson. In 2022, Stefanie Rossi took it on under superlative direction from Tony Knight. It was a performance of painfully deep, illuminating, emotional and intellectually aware intensity.

 

7) The Boy and The Ball – The PaperBoats – Sheer innocence and simple technical prowess. Abetted by generous vulnerability and simple cardboard plus tennis balls, made this production an exemplar of how to reach a very young audience in such a way they are both engaged and deeply enthralled.

 

6) Exposed – Restless Dance Theatre – Such beautiful work, helmed by Geoff Cobham’s grand, profoundly considered lighting and set design. Here was exploration and expression of the fear and hope people with disability experience day to day, exquisitely underscored by Hilary Kleinig’s delicate sound composition.

 

5) A Streetcar Named Desire – The Bakehouse – The final production within the hallowed walls of Adelaide’s most famous, beloved black box theatre. Director Michael Baldwin offered a scintillating production. A richly layered treatment of Tennessee Williams’ text, the very poetry of it sidled along perfectly with an equal savagery burning deep within the language. It was given living expression by a cast more than up to the challenge.

 

4) Happy Go Wrong – Under The Microscope/Adelaide Festival Centre/Andi Snelling – The oft quoted aphorism ‘the personal is political’ totally applies to this profoundly, wickedly funny, dark, exhilarating, one hander production. Andi Snelling’s rich, gleeful discombobulating exploration of her battle with Lyme disease is a physical theatre clown class, unfailingly pulling an audience in.

 

3) Something Big – Rumpus/CRAM Collective – Few theatrical debuts by a young company hit heights of shatteringly powerful, sophisticated maturity on all levels of production. Here was a bunch of barely-out-of-drama-school grads tackling an extremely complex text and profoundly dark subject matter worthy of actors a good 10 years into their careers. They pulled it off in a fashion leaving this writer breathless!

 

2) Girl From The North Country – GWB Entertainment/Sydney Festival/Damian Hewitt & Trafalgar Entertainment Group/Runaway Entertainment/State Theatre Company South Australia – An extraordinarily reimagined take on Bob Dylan’s oeuvre within a theatrical structure challenging how his music can be arranged, and his writing expressed. Possibly the best outside-the-box creative programming/investment decision State Theatre Company South Australia has ever made.

 

1) Oleanna – Flying Penguin Productions –Words are weapons, poorly deployed. The early 21^st Century has become such a linguistic battleground, taking David Mamet’s #metoo text beyond that. Director David Mealor understood and realised this powerfully in play. It was a vicious yet introspective production; a power game in which the ugliness of the game was as fascinating as the deplorable players of it.

 

Hot New Artist to Watch – Georgia Laity

Georgia Laity’s performance in Di, Viv and Rose convinced me she could totally take on David Mamet’s Oleanna under David Mealor’s direction, pairing her with the formidably gifted Renato Mussolino her former teacher at Flinders Drama Centre.

Why? Something about her playing Viv’s line “she’s annoying,” totally got my attention.

Not played as a throw away phrase, but uttered with heady, implacable declaration of immutable opposition to Di which, nonetheless, offered a sliver of questioning doubt; doubt battling with a sense of as yet, growing superiority – false or real?

 

Laity took this sophisticated, subtle capability to a whole new level in Oleanna.

The distance between the two productions and characters is vast.

What Laity brought to both was exceptional comprehension of, and capacity to articulate, truths as naive, ugly, painful and disturbing as much as placid. Unravelling the complex with profound assurance.

 

Georgia Laity is going to really fire stages up in her career.

 

David O’Brien

Story: Artists Petition SA Government to increase Fringe Funding

An unprecedented groundswell of pressure has erupted from the direction Fringe artists, summoning politicians to recognise the wisdom and economic benefits of investing in the Fringe.

Stirred up by one of Australia’s most exciting new choreographic talents, one Lewis Major, it calls  on politicians of all persuasions, in or out of power, to support Fringe director Heather Croall and get moving to increase Fringe funding.

 

The letter was penned before the headline Fringe media event where Croall wept with frustration at the state of arts funding. It had been doing the rounds accumulating signatures.

 

Major says he had no experience in political activism. But he didn’t have to look far for support.

“I just reached out to all the artists who have been supported by fringe grants in the last year,” he declares. 

He was stirred to action “witnessing firsthand across so many years just how hard the fringe works to support artists and especially South Australian artists. 

"They are a huge reason why so many local artists who would normally look to greener pastures - either into state or overseas - end up settling in Adelaide. 

 

"To then see how much benefit the fringe brings to other sectors in our state through such a relatively small amount of funding and watch how much of that funding actually makes it into the hands of artists and art venues.” It seemed something needed to be done.

 

Sure, politicians can promise anything when an election is looming. 

But, Adelaide artists and practitioners want to hold them accountable.

 

So far the petition has been signed by over 100 artists and arts producers.

 

Here is the historic petition:

 

 

An Open Letter to all MPs

 

We, the undersigned, write this letter to wholeheartedly voice our support for the Adelaide Fringe under the courageous leadership of Heather Croall and the Fringe team and we call on all state MPs to implement the recommendation in the PwC report and increase Adelaide Fringe’s annual funding from the State Government.

 

The PwC report is clear in its findings in relation to the cost-benefit analysis of funding to our biggest and most successful festival: the gross expenditure given back to our state by the Adelaide Fringe is over 40 times the funding that it receives from the state government.

 

As artists, we are not in the habit of making solely economic arguments for increased support to the arts, although when speaking about the Adelaide Fringe the extraordinary return on investment to the state is impossible to ignore. The benefit of supporting Adelaide Fringe, however, is more far-reaching than the mere numbers that are added to the State’s bottom line at the end of March.

 

Fringe continues to support all levels of creative practice throughout the year and ensures that our sector continues to thrive outside of the actual Festival season itself. Thanks to the tireless work from the Fringe staff, programs such as the Fringe grants, professional development pathways, and mentorships are delivered at an enormous scale.

As our families, colleagues, communities, industry, and nation come to terms with the uncertainty, isolation, and social and economic disruption of the world in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Adelaide Fringe stands as a beacon of all that is good about the arts sector in our state. The Adelaide Fringe is much more than a month-long festival that brings in tourism dollars and a sense of excitement to our city – it is an organisation through which artists are connected to each other, and are supported and inspired by each other… and together, find hope for the future.

 

We urge all SA political parties to commit, as an election promise, to increasing the annual funding to Adelaide Fringe as set out in the PwC report. The return on investment that the Fringe delivers to SA is enormous but it is not just about economics; the Fringe offers great opportunities for creative practitioners, brings immense joy to everyone and uplifts us all.

 

The Fringe is culturally an important part of life in South Australia.

 

Please look after it. Don’t take it for granted.

Russell Starke OAM

Russell Starke OAM.

 

He was one of our own, an early member of the Adelaide Critics Circle and a very fine critic.

 

He stepped away from the Circle when he was no longer reviewing for the media and, despite entreaties from the other critics who admired his deep knowledge of theatre and his eloquent bonhomie at meetings, he said that he felt that unless one was reviewing, one no longer was qualified to be in the Circle. Ethics, dearies.

 

Russell’s death has left Circle members reeling. He was 82, but still in the verve of life until leukaemia struck suddenly and swiftly. 

 

Russell Starke was a man of many incarnations. Critic was just one string to his bow. 

 

He was a Solomontown boy and, at school in Whyalla, his irrepressible thespian inclinations shone through from early on. He was born to perform. 

 

Arriving in Adelaide aged 22, he became a window dresser and soon head of display at the charming old Miller Anderson department store. His talents as an actor were swiftly recognised and mid 1960s he was to get his very first rave mainstream review from none other than a member of this Circle. He had portrayed Biff in Death of a Salesman, a performance so spellbinding that, as theatre critic on The News, this writer could barely contain her effusion. “It was a performance one could not forget,” I was to reflect many decades later when the remarkable Russell gave another such performance, this time playing Biff’s father, Willy Loman, in that same timeless Miller play.

 

Russell's flair for art and design manifested itself throughout his career. He was very good with costumes and he went on to be a high-profile master bonsai exponent. 

He could turn his hand to anything.

 

He also had a high-profile media career not only as a publicist and promotor but also as a radio and television presenter. Many remember his times presenting horror movies on TV.

 

Horror came to him in 1981 when, crossing Light Square, he was hit by a truck and suffered traumatic injuries from which only true grit and some hard years brought him back to full strength.

 

But, through his love for art and jewellery and his association with gallery owner Veda Swain, he moved into a whole new incarnation by taking over Greenhill Gallery in 1997.  He ran the gallery until 2013 with A-lister opening nights and rousing hospitality. He hosted the Critics Circle’s Awards ceremonies there on a number of occasions.

 

Russell was always being urged to get back on the boards as the consummate actor he was. He did so a few more times. But, closer to his heart in latter years, apart from the joys of gardening, there was Shakespeare and sonnets. His last official incarnation was as The Passionate Poet.

He produced Shakespeare at Star Theatres and gave poetry performances around the town; to enthusiastic acclaim. He did these performances with his usual heart-and-soul expertise. He was able to evoke the full gamut of emotions from his audiences: from laughter to tears, with sighs and smiles in between.

 

Meanwhile, offstage Russell Starke always had that thing called “panache”. He was a stylish, handsome man with exquisite, albeit often flamboyant taste. His clothes were ever strikingly elegant and invariably deliciously tactile. He wore spectacular jewellery and never lost an opportunity to support those who designed and created such artworks. Kindness and generosity were among his innate characteristics and Adelaide is crowded with charities and individuals who have, in one way or another, been recipients of his magnanimity. 

 

Russell Starke was a rare example of a true “Renaissance man”.

He adorned Adelaide with his often extroverted affability. He was never afraid of a good drink or a convivial companion.

He knew everything about everyone. 

He claimed to have had many associations in this world but, after his marriage to the talented writer and academic Ruth, he was never seen to have a sole partner, just myriad friends and, perchance, frissons.

What gave him the most profound of all pleasures was the fruit of that interesting marriage. His daughters, Petra and Miranda, were truly the light of his life. He was boundlessly proud of them.

And then he became a grandfather!

 

Not that he put “family man” at the forefront of his public persona. 

He was ever outgoing and interested in everyone around him. He carried his life scars and private world with quiet dignity and was never seen to indulge self-pity or braggadocio. 

 

Or so it seems to this old friend of his.

 

Coming to write about him, I realise all the things I did not know. 

 

Thus does this tribute barely touch the surface of Russell Starke, OAM, decorated for his generous contribution to the visual arts and young artists.

 

But, these words echo the sentiments of so very many - that our Russell was an exceptionally fun, fearless, cheeky, kind, talented, caring, and erudite soul and a valued member of our society. We salute him and, oh yes, we mourn his passing.

 

Vale Russell Starke.

 

Words by Samela Harris