All life is fair game out there for the visiting wonderland of Fringe-Festival performers and no subject is out of bounds.
So, into our theatrical space comes a man with a migraine story; a mighty migraine, the epic endurance of which has been transformed into a theatre work.
The man is Oliver Mol and his migraine lasted for ten horrendous months.
It struck him down shortly after Scribe had published his book, Lion Attack, and, looking back on the agonising experience, he has found enough heart and soul and humour to brave the stage and make his debut as a Fringe performer.
Sydney-based Mol, 31, was born in Brisbane and has devoted his life quite passionately and successfully to the written and spoken word.
“I love the written word but it wasn’t until I began performing that I realised how much I enjoyed the spoken word, too”, he explains via email, hot from Tbilisi in Georgia where he just happens to be living and writing in this part of his rather interesting life.
He’s working on his second book which, he says, has similarities to Train Lord, the autobiographical show he is presenting at the Fringe.
“It recalls through essay and story a 10-month migraine, my recovery in Brisbane, and the job I worked on at the railway when I couldn’t do anything else,” he explains.
“I’ve been working on this book for close to five years, ever since the migraine went away, which wasn’t all at once, but gradually and intermittently. For a long time I wanted to seal my hurt and pain onto pages between book covers and send it out to the world. I wanted to make people feel what I felt and see what I saw. More than anything, I wanted them to understand.”
It was his sister who turned him off the notion by saying it was a bad idea, unhealthy and, well, boring.
“I realised that she was right.
“As storytellers, we have a great responsibility because storytelling is magic. Alchemy.
“We are able to take something like pain and mould it, transform it.”
And thus does Mol promise his Train Lord show will be "a story of hope, laughter, pain, relationships, drugs, failed orgies, mothers, fathers and love. Ultimately, it's about f**king up and figuring it out and… finding out you're not alone”.
He has embellished it with music and imagery and previewed it to an enthusiastic reception in Barcelona.
It will come to life for the Fringe in the Bakehouse Theatre from February 17 to 29.
Mol’s track record to date is quite impressive.
He’s been writing for about a decade and says he wants to keep writing for as long as he is alive.
So far, he has been awarded the 2014 ArtStart Grant, been the co-winner of the 2013 Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers, and the recipient of a 2012 Hot Desk Fellowship.
His CV brags appearances at the National Young Writers Festival, Emerging Writers Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival, Sydney Writers Festival, and Brisbane Writers Festival. He has performed at Queensland Poetry Festival and Jungle Love festival, as well as in the United States of America, Canada, Vietnam and Spain.
Not only but also, this very interesting and wildly-travelled writer, has had articles published in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, the ABC, the Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin and The Saturday Paper.
Mol says he grew up living between Texas and Australia which has given him a different perspective on the world and a passionate love for the city of his birth, “the greatest city on earth”.
Reviews for his first book, Lion Attack, note its bright and innovative style and some of its daring subject matter.
Mol relishes the instant response that live performance can give to the storyteller.
“I suppose it is the same feeling anyone on stage receives”, he says. “That instant feedback, that electricity, the laughter, the sorrow, the smiles, the tears.” he explains.
“It’s intoxicating, maybe, because it affirms in real time those questions that the author Alejando Zambra says all literature should ask: can you hear me? And, do I belong?
“A lot of my stories focus on connecting or not connecting, and perhaps that is why I am so drawn to the live experience…because I get to bring strangers together and, if I do my job correctly, perhaps just a few more people will feel less alone.”
Samela Harris
When: 17 to 29 Feb
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
The Dark Master’s creative master is Kuro Tanino among whose claims to fame is that of being a prankster. A notorious and relentless prankster. He does not just admit this. It’s almost a brag. Such an annoying and prodigious prankster was he that his parents sent him away to boarding school.
There, surrounded by yet more incorrigible pranksters, he decided to focus on study and ended up becoming a psychiatrist.
Asked if he took up psychiatry in order to understand his compulsion for pranks, he now says:
“Of course. It is one of the purposes of life.”
Tanino was in Adelaide for OzAsia with the Dark Inn in 2017. Now the renowned Japanese playwright and director returns with The Dark Master, a tale of food and intrigue which fills the theatre with aromas and the mind with surreal notions. It is a work about a hapless hitchhiker thrown into the culinary deep end in a dark and mysterious restaurant.
It is one of the hot ticket shows of the Festival.
Its creator acknowledges that his impulse towards pranking is mirrored in his theatre works.
“Playfulness and mischief in theatre are important,” he explains through an interpreter in an e-interview.
“Mischief is thinking and moving it into action. Even if you come up with it, it doesn’t make sense unless you take action.”
His psychiatric expertise can embellish this process because, as he puts it, “a psychiatric chart shows the history of the individual”.
“It helps to compose the background of the person when writing a drama script.”
One of the things which caught Tanino’s attention as a boarding school boy was surrealism. He had been quite an accomplished artist from early childhood but here, especially inspired by Marcel Duchamp, his fascination evolved and it has become another characteristic of his theatre art. However, he remains also a painter and sculptor above and beyond his theatre art; a multifaceted man on many fronts.
His career in clinical psychiatry lasted for only eight years.
Tanino was 24 when, in the year 2000, he formed his Niwa Gekidan Penino theatre company.
“Penino" turns out to have been his nickname at school. It was derived from a prank, of course.
Apparently, a really violent rainstorm on the way to school made him think of Rambo and he convinced a bunch of schoolmates to join him in defying its power by stripping naked, holding umbrellas in front of them like weapons and charging through the deluge. It was running naked which prompted others to nickname him “penino” or “penis”.
Tanino’s theatre world started in his own apartment which he transformed to a theatre. His plays involved amazingly complex sets, works of art in themselves. Miniaturism has always been a passion. Some of these early works went on be performed around the world. These shows had wonderful names such as Frustrating Picture Book for Adults, The Room Nobody Knows and The Town Where the Sun and Underwear are Seen.
Tanino also has found pleasure in directing the works of other playwrights, Ibsen and Chekhov, for instance.
For all things, he is reputed to be meticulous.
“The rehearsal period is about two months,” he says. “I’m also a playwright, so I write a drama before that. It’s from time to time how long it takes.”
He seems immune to criticism.
“Whatever they say, I am neither angry nor happy,” he says.
He sees his work as more of an open experience, of making different impressions on different people.
Nonetheless, he admits that the worst thing ever said about his work was “boring”.
This word has definitely not been applied to The Dark Master.
It is described as "a captivating, slightly twisted piece of theatre with a stunning set design that stimulates both the senses and the mind”.
It will be performed in The Space from 29 -31 October,
Samela Harris
When: 29 to 31 Oct
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Composer and Producer
Kiah Gossner is the new kid on the block in South Australian music.
And before we go any further in introducing him, that elegantly unusual name, “Kiah”, is pronounced as in “fire”.
Kiah Gossner is already an award-winning musician, producer and composer and his flair has not escaped the attention of the Adelaide Festival Centre which prides itself on cultivating and elevating the up-and-coming creatives who have found new edges with which to cut. Hence, he is working on a major venture called Contact, a multi-art-form piece to be presented in the Space Theatre as part of the inSAPCE program on November 29 and 30.
Gossner’s style has already been picked up by advertising and theatre companies. His motivating TAFE ad music, (link) and his beautifully meditative fashion score (link) are examples.
Of course, he has not just sprung out of the ether. Kiah Gossner studied music at the Elder Conservatorium and threw himself into the Adelaide music scene at an early age.
“I became somewhat of a gun for hire working with lots of different musicians as a session musician,” he explains.
“It was a fairly organic progression from session musician to producer/engineer. From there it was a very natural progression to working on composing and collaborating with other musicians.”
But Gossner also has been mentored by the distinguished Sam Dixon, a Grammy award-winning composer and producer associated with such names as Sia, Adele and Christine Aguilera.
Gossner met Dixon through a Music SA program.
He attributes that program to setting him on the course to be a music producer “and Sam was the person who gave me the confidence to take it on as a career”.
“I had my first European tour a few months after we met, and we ended up at his studio in London where he took me through the process and got me on the right path forward.”
Gossner more recently has been mentored by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson with whom he has been working in LA.
But, perhaps the essence of this 27-year-old's rise to the musical fore really comes from his roots.
He emerges from an Adelaide theatre background. His mother is set designer Jill Halliday and his father lighting designer Peter Gossner. They raised him on a diet of regular WOMADs and “a diverse creative environment”.
As a keen collaborator, he is bringing his parents in as part of the team behind Contact. Halliday will design the set and Peter Gossner will do the lighting. There also will be poetry from Dom Symes and film and projects from Thomas McCammon.
It is a large-scale and ambitious venture, or, as Gossner puts it, “a huge undertaking”.
“The original idea came about on a four-month tour through Europe,” he explains.
“We had a lot of time to kill driving between cities every day. I would often sketch some ideas at the venue then orchestrate them on the drive. It began as a string quartet with a grand piano but soon grew to a ten-piece ensemble.”
Gossner says he is still working on the production. It is meant to be an “immersive” work.
“When I compose a large work, I take a long time as I treat the process very much like a film, often working from a narrative,” he expounds.
“The narrative is usually a very personal experience or something that has touched me.
“Story is very important to me in my work and I try to capture the emotional within said story in my score.”
Since producing work also is a strong element of his career path, Gossner has learned to take a different track when collaborating and “to put my own emotional input to one side and try my best to support the creative narrative of the work”.
He says he loves both aspects of musical work and thrives on dividing his life between creating and producing.
“I go a bit loopy if I spend too much time in one role,” he adds.
He doesn’t wish to ramble about the artists he loves, he says, but just for the record, there’s Mingus, Coltrane and Avishai Cohen in the jazz world and pop/hip groovers such as Christine and the Queens or Fran Ocean.
“If I’m scoring more classical styles, then Philip Glass, Ravel or Einojuhani Rautavaara,” he says, adding Sufjan Stevens, Big Thief and Andrew Bird in for a spot of folky balance.
Samela Harris
When: 29 and 30 Nov
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Thomas Henning is braced for his OzAsia work to be contentious.
In collaboration with Malaysian theatre makers, TerryandtheCuz, he is premiering a play about Adelaide’s founder, Colonel William Light and his father Francis Light, founder of the British colony of Penang in Malaysia. They were a father-and-son phenomenon in many ways, albeit they spent almost no time together.
It is the family saga of Colonel Light which has intrigued the Australian writer and director, Henning, who will be remembered by Adelaide audiences not only for his The Black Lung Theatre company but also for his involvement as performer and co-writer of Thyestes, one of the most heart-stoppingly brilliant Australian theatre works to feature in an Adelaide Festival of Arts.
Henning, who has specialised in challenging rule-breaking theatre, expects this new work of Light to upset a few historical applecarts when it is performed at Nexus Arts in October.
Today he is on the phone from Malaysia where the work has been in creative development.
“It is less Adelaide-centric than people may expect,” he says. “It is primarily about Light’s family. On its first development phase here in Kuala Lumpur, after I’d spent eight months researching, it turned out to be a very long book. It ran three to four hours in a reading. No one could really follow it. It was just straight facts.”
Thus did the development turn into honing and shaping and prioritising until now, says Henning, it is “culturally rich and fascinating”, and down to two hours and 20 minutes with interval.
Henning says the process of researching Light was very demanding.
“I didn’t go to old churches and dig up records,” he says. “I found everything I needed in the library collections at Flinders, the Mayo and Dutton collections. They were great. Really cool.”
Among them, through an archivist he names as Alan Horsnell, he came upon the surprising drawings and diagrams which did not belong to Colonel Light’s considerable oeuvre as an accomplished sketcher and watercolourist. These were period illustrations depicting the life of Maria Gandy, Light’s famous common-law wife.
“These had the quality of Coles Funny Picture Book illustrations,” he enthuses.
And, therein, he discovered that, Maria Gandy, later to become Mrs Mayo, moved around the state “with an entourage of dwarfs.” “Yes, dwarfs. Nasty, aloof and spitting dwarfs. They moved around north of Adelaide and into the bush."
But this strange piece of information is not in his OzAsia production. It was post-Light.
“And I couldn’t fit it in. There was just too much stuff,” laughs Henning.
“Light is principally about Light’s family. The first half is Penang and Malacca-centric. The second is Euro-centric, and, of course, it includes the enactment of the laying out of Adelaide, but a decade of fights and struggles is whittled down into a line.”
The production looks at the world from Light’s inner perspective. It looks at what is perhaps more his world view, and touches on "the values and notions of nationalism".
Its scale has evolved from a broad historic sweep, Light’s life was not long, but it was big in terms of historical scope.
As Henning points out, Light left Penang when he was only six to be educated in Britain. He joined the Royal Navy at 13 and then a few years later the British Army. He fought for Spain in The Napoleonic Wars, under the Duke of Wellington and the Peninsular War and in the 1830s he became close to Mohammad Ali, the founder of modern Egypt under the Ottoman Empire, helping to establish an Egyptian navy.
“He watched the rise of empires,” says Henning.
His private life was difficult. His first wife, only recorded as E. Perois, was said to have died in tragic circumstances. But nothing is known of her. His marriage to Mary Bennet, the rich “natural” daughter of the Duke of Richmond was rich in travel and art. But she abandoned him and, when he came to South Australia, it was with a “companion”, Maria Gandy, who was to care for him in his house at Thebarton. Light had survived serious war wounds and was riven with tuberculosis; hence, his early death aged only 53.
As Henning sees him, despite all the travel and action and his accomplishments (he was reputed to be a skilled people-manager and linguist) he was not really a fulfilled individual.
“In fact, his life was also lonely and drifting.” Henning surmises.
The forthcoming production will draw links between the world of father and son. Light’s father, Captain Francis Light was the illegitimate son of a Suffolk landowner and a serving girl. In Penang, Francis was to marry Martinha Rozells “according to native custom”. She was said to be a princess. Her exact ethnic heritage and position in Malay hierarchy remains a point of debate but she was most definitely Eurasian. It was she and her family who were to somehow lose the considerable fortune Francis Light had established in Penang, a point of disappointment to William when later he sought to recover his inheritance. William Light was their second son.
There are many intriguing threads between the father-and-son narratives, many of which will unravel when the production is premiered at OzAsia.
However, Henning warns and warns again.
It is probably not what Adelaideans are expecting.
“It will be contentious.
“There will be discussion and debate.
“There will be people who want to drum us out of Adelaide."
Samela Harris
When: 17, 18 and 19 Oct
Where: Nexus Arts
Bookings: ozasiafestival.com.au
Words and reflections by Samela Harris.
So much changes and yet stays the same. It was 1960 when Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge first was performed in Adelaide. It was bold and controversial, a cutting-edge piece of American theatre which dared to confront the ideas of incest, homosexuality, and illegal immigration.
Not only but also, it was staged in the round under the direction of Colin Ballantyne whose Adelaide Theatre Group gave birth to the State Theatre Company and professional theatre in South Australia.
Almost 60 years later, that very company reprises the play and demonstrates that its themes of family, class, and immigration may no longer be cutting the cultural edge but they remain fresh and relevant, and that A View From the Bridge is a superbly-written piece of theatre, a contemporary classic.
It was in this context that former STC artistic director, Geordie Brookman, programmed the play, leaving it in the surprised hands of renowned director Kate Champion.
“It was not a play I would have picked to direct,” she says. “I have a strong commitment to new Australian works.”
Now the Sydney-based director is thriving on her immersion in a classic.
“And, it is a relief to direct something so well written,” she reflects.
“Familiarity with this play does not reduce its intensity. The more you get to know it, the more it reveals: the language, how it captures a long-term marriage, how it captures intimacy, how the dominant patriarchy holds sway.”
A View from the Bridge was written and is set in the mid-1950s. It depicts an Italian-American family living in Red Hook, a downscale suburb in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Eddie Carbone, a longshoreman on the docks, has become fixated on Catherine, his wife Beatrice’s almost 18-year-old orphaned niece who lives with them, so much so that marital relations have almost atrophied. Hence, when Beatrice's cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, come to stay, illegally, in the US in the hope of finding a better life, tensions churn up in their confined family living quarters. It seems that the glamorous young Rodolpho has set his sights on Catherine. Eddie fears he is looking for easy citizenship. As the dominant male, he seeks to defend his territory.
The story seems straightforward and, indeed, it is. It concerns jealousy and suspicion, love and loyalty, rivalry and betrayal, innocence and spite, hope, and the risks people are taking when they flee their country and become illegal immigrants, among other very human strengths and frailties.
Thus does it endure.
The play has had a colourful history. Right here in Adelaide, it was something of a sensation, performed in the long lost Willard Hall in Wakefield Street. Colin Ballantyne was king of quality in Adelaide’s prolific and excellent theatre of that period and many distinguished Australian actors emerged from his stable. In this production it was Les Dayman, who went on to become a major national stage and television identity. This performance was to imprint his talent upon the audiences forever. Also in the production were noted Adelaide actors Frank Foster Brown, Neil Lovett, Tina O’Brien, Don Gooding, Bruce Koehne, Judith Symon, Bill Pitman, Dennis Scrutton, Don Tilmouth, Jacques Tarento, and Bernard Walsh.
It was Adelaide’s first-ever production in the round and the theatre world rippled with excitement at how brave and innovative this was.
It worked triumphantly and plays performed in the round became quite fashionable. The Space theatre was built with performances in the round very much front of mind.
This now celebrated piece of American theatre was reprised in Adelaide again in 1993 at The Arts Theatre under the direction of Warwick Cooper. It featured Adelaide actors including Michael Baldwin, David Grybowski, Julie Quick, and Elizabeth Siebert.
Dayman is now well and truly retired and for this new incarnation of A View from the Bridge Champion has cast Bill Allert, Brett Archer, Mark Saturno, Elena Carapetis, Dale March, Malah Stewardson and Antoine Jelk, giving the celebrated Victoria Lamb responsibility for the set.
Where Ballantyne’s boxing ring set featured ropes as thematic, Lamb also has incorporated ropes and boxes. This is not because of the pivotal boxing scene in the play but, she says, to reflect the work of the Brooklyn longshoremen “and a sense of the claustrophobia of the people in the tenements living on top of each other.”
Also, there’s a suggestion that we’re all hanging on, one way or another. "Nothing in life is solid.”
Champion says they are symbolic of the tenuousness and tensions of the play, just as the bridge in the title reflects not only the setting but acts as a metaphor for the bridging of cultures portrayed in the work.
One of the members of the historic 1960 Adelaide cast was Neil Lovett, now retired and living in Queensland. He played the role of the lawyer who also is chorus to the play. He recalls vividly much of the intensity of creating the production with Ballantyne and being coached by fellow cast member Frank Foster Brown in the American accent. Indeed, he says the cast was so focused on preparing the work that it was oblivious to any controversy surrounding it.
“I enjoyed working with Colin Ballantyne,” he says. “He was very histrionic in his form of direction, and it worked.”
The production engendered very positive reviews. “I recall one by Anthony Rendell in Mary’s Own Paper (the precursor to The Adelaide Review). It was positive but a bit arch at times. Young people tended to be a bit arch.” Rendell went on to be a renowned innovator in Australian and British current affairs media. He died in 2016.
Lovett also enjoyed working with Les Dayman, now in poor health, and their friendship endures to this day.
Dayman’s performance in that historic boxing ring in-the-round set was incredibly potent and it made quite clear that Les Dayman was an actor for whom great things lay ahead. I say this with the authority of one who was there and on whom that courageous production made an indelible impact.
Samela Harris
State Theatre Company’s A View From a Bridge plays from the 12th of July to the 3rd of August at the Dunstan Playhouse.
When: 12 Jul to 3 Aug
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au