Rock Surfers Theatre Company. Tuxedo Cat – Cusack Theatre. 13 Feb 2015
Sign of a fine writer is diversity, fearlessness and, in Caleb Lewis's case, perhaps one should add, shamelessness.
Lewis is celebrated for his play ‘Death in Bowengabbie’ which scored rave reviews at The Bakehouse last year. To the Fringe he brings a semi-autobiographical work which is so original and out-there that it has no peers or comparisons.
It is all about his breakup with girlfriend, Lauren. It is about how they meet, how he gets his first unsettling uncertainty about the relationship when choosing videos in a video library. She wanted ‘Ice Storm’ and he wanted ‘Godzilla’. The relationship went downhill from there and they had rows. They were not ordinary rows. Lewis employs no less an example of their conflagratory nature than Little Boy and Hiroshima. And there, corollary to the plot are the characters of Nakajima and Oppenheimer who are doing their own thing there on stage with Godzilla and bombs, life and death and all that.
Lewis, in welcoming the audience to the quaint but comfy little Cusack Theatre in Tuxedo Cat, warns that it is a preview and he might stop the show. So, when he stops actors Phil Spencer and Rebecca Mayo in the middle of a tense scene to make Bec play it again, and then play another scene, the audience initially assumes that it is indeed a preview. However, it is a scripted interruption and as the play progresses, the playwright's discontent with the way things are working out between the characters, they being he and his ex-girlfriend, becomes more exaggerated.
The actors start expressing concern about him and his unresolved issues with Lauren. The playwright is not only the subject of the play but a player in the play. Of course, he's very believable as himself - a rather manic self, too.
Spencer and Mayo carry the action and the script and the introduced characters of Nakajima and Oppenheimer on one hand and Caleb and Lauren on the other. Spencer plays it rather over-confident and ho-hum since, he brags, he has been playing this part for ages. Mayo has to deliver it as an audition piece as well as the play she is in, since part of the playwright's mania is that he can't stop auditioning for the perfect Lauren. Yes, it is a play about unresolved issues.
There is one other character in this work. It's Lewis's mum, Gay. She appears on film being interviewed by Lewis as she cooks some sort of mince and potato bake at home. In episodic takes, interleaved with the drama on stage, Lewis asks her what she thought of Lauren when first she met her and what she thinks they would be doing now if they had not broken up... Gay, pausing at stirring the pot, spoon in hand, patiently gives a mother's caring responses. She adored Lauren. They may have had children by now...
Ever so subtly, Gay becomes the star of the show.
Of course, there is a dramatic denouement. No clues. It's worth popping along for this interesting Fringe oddity.
Samela Harris
When: 13 to 28 Feb
Where: Tuxedo Cat – Cusack Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Penash Productions. Holden Street Theatres - The Arch. 13 Feb 2015
Live and direct from the Land of the Long White Cloud storms Penny Ashton and her musical mash-together of the Jane Austen cannon of romantic mannered novels. In this impossibly accomplished one-hander, Ashton invigorates her very own script with a panoply of personalities oozing idiosyncratic individualism. From the get-go, you realise Ashton is a person of exceptional comic talent - throwing away glances, gestures and asides with breathtaking pace. Boiling in layers of cotton in the dependable Adelaide Fringe heat, she prances through portions of ‘Pride And Prejudice’ and switches to ‘Sense And Sensibility’ seamlessly in a rather new narrative - although she claims to attempt a surprise ending, all's well that ends well in Austen fashion.
The mesmerising single-handed dialogues and thought bubbles are complemented by a few equally energetic songs of contextualised lyrics put to new instrumentation and recording - originating from the likes of Strauss and Beethoven and Bon Jovi - by a musical chum from Otago. A timid audience member even got an invitation to the ball scene. I also loved her observations on how many things haven't changed (for women) in 200 years and the use of local place names.
Ashton has already won Best Performance in a Comedy at the 2013 Auckland Fringe, and Best Female Solo Show at the Victoria, British Columbia, Fringe with this hit show. While some knowledge of the Austen oeuvre would be a pleasure-enhancer, you'll be absolutely enchanted and hilariously entertained without it. Double bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 13 Feb to 8 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres - The Arch
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Offending Shadows Productions, USA. Gluttony – The Bally. 13 Feb 2015
There in a tent amid the jubilant good spirit of Gluttony, we find ourselves in Berlin under a hail of bombs with a terrified teenage girl cowering in a cellar. Tantalising scents of sizzling satays waft through the tent flaps. There's music out there somewhere.
But, there, inside the tent called The Bally, it is Germany. We are riveted and entirely captivated by a young American called Ingrid Garner who is taking us through the extraordinary experiences which befell her grandmother, Eleanor, in WWII.
Hers was the experience of Nazi Germany as a German-American girl.
Eleanor was nine in 1939 when her father decided that a job offer back in his native Germany was too good to refuse. The family left their happy life in Stratford, New Jersey, but were only half way across the Atlantic on the German ship, SS Hamburg, when Hitler invaded Poland and it was clear this trip was a bad idea. The ship changed its funnel colours to protect its course and the family landed in a very troubled Germany with no choice but to make the best of it. They could not go home. Thus did young Eleanor learn to salute Hitler and, in due course, join the Hitler Youth, because it was the fun thing to do if you were a kid in Germany. Thus did she experience the evolving misery of a country gripped by paranoia, fear and deprivation.
Ingrid Garner seems genetically coded to deliver this unusual war story. Such power and conviction does she bring to the role that one forgets entirely that it is not her own story, that she is not Eleanor.
She is a very beautiful young woman with a good voice and excellent dramatic discipline. She performs wearing a very simple but exquisite frock and scant makeup. Her props are just a travel trunk and two chairs and there is a small screen on which a few crucial images are projected to illustrate the history she is describing.
Her audience emerges from the plush little tent theatre into the hot early evening still misty-eyed from the seeming immediacy of her bomb-shattering vignettes and just a bit in love with this marvellous American girl for being no less than the sacred keeper of her grandmother's story.
Samela Harris
When: 13 to 28 Feb
Where: Gluttony – The Bally
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Hannah Norris Presents. Holden Street Theatres - The Manse. 12 Feb 2015
We sit on uncomfortable chairs lined up along two walls facing each other.
The lights go out. It's pitch black. Silent.
Far from sensory deprivation, one becomes highly aware of the proximity of the people sitting beside one.
Loud, loud sounds suddenly erupt. Industrial.
Finally, a dim light reveals a woman with a soft voice. She begins a stream of consciousness.
For the next hour, we meet her over and over again, emerging from bursts of blackout and torrents of sound.
She is an air stewardess. She runs us through the on-board routines. “Do up your seatbelt... In the unlikely event of an accident...”
But interspersed with the humdrum of work and behind the toothy smile she is dealing with a stark fear. She believes she has a stalker, a man with eyes the colour of ash. He is never far away, always trying to get closer. She maintains the air crew facade but her lipstick smile is a mask.
Bright light falls upon her as she gives safety instructions. It snaps to grey and we dip into the zone of her inner fear.
Hannah Norris makes these abrupt transitions with the precision and effectiveness of the professional thespian that she is.
Duncan Graham may have written the show, but it is Norris who must make the audience commit to it. She is sole performer in the black room with its two aircraft runners of safety lights. Audience feet must be kept behind these lights, especially when they're out for this is the passage along which Norris moves from scene to scene. She does it swiftly and silently in the blackouts, emerging here under a pin light and there under a spotlight, always in another world.
Even in this intimate space, she asserts a strong fourth wall. She walks down the aisle between her "passengers" but we are silent witnesses in the dark. "Chicken or beef?" she purrs.
The tale is episodic. There are digressions. Sometimes she is playing to a huge glass "window". Sometimes she is on top of her service trolley. Sometimes she looks young and pretty. Sometimes she looks old and harsh.
For, there is another crucial player in this strange, experimental work. It's the lighting designer, Sam Hopkins. This play in the dark is all about light. It is about the darkness within versus the person we put forward to the world. This is a play which pokes its action out of the darkness, weaves its message in and out of the soundscape and lighting. The sound is a din in the head.
The audience must determine if the woman's stalker is real or a nightmare.
Norris's performance is superb. Her disconcerting inhalation of air becomes yet another of the tools of this unusual drama - startling gasps growing in scale. It is highly effective and will linger in the mind's ear as the most vivid impression of the work.
‘Cut’ is one of those "experiential" theatre pieces which showcase talents and off-mainstream ideas.
This is what a Fringe is all about.
Samela Harris
When: 10 Feb to 14 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres - The Manse
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Spooky Duck Productions. Holden Street Theatres - The Studio. 12 Feb 2015
The aptly titled 'Kinski and I' is a largely solo work from writer and performer CJ Johnson, with direction from Michael Pigott.
An award winner at the 2014 Sydney Fringe, the piece is inspired by Klaus Kinski's 1988 auto-biography 'All I Need is Love'. In the book's original form, it provides an uncensored account of a man plagued by a life-long sexual addiction. Though the veracity of the more extreme content has been challenged, there is little doubt that Kinski survived a difficult childhood to become one of the most celebrated and notorious actors of his generation.
Found under the generic category of 'theatre’ in the Adelaide Fringe guide, it is worth noting that the non-traditional performance is more accurately described as platform theatre. Delivered as a narrative monologue it draws entirely from the actor's auto-biography, with Johnson alone on stage playing the character of Kinski. Reading from a tablet device strapped to a stand, Johnson only looks up periodically to meet the audience's gaze. Occasionally, Johnson moves out of character and to stage right providing his own reflections on Kinski and the events of his life.
In a supporting role, Jess Bush is offstage but features via video as Kinski's eldest daughter, Pola. Also reading extracts, her dialog is taken from Pola's own 2013 autobiography in which she details the sexual abuse suffered at the hands of her father.
In a testament to Johnson's talent and his grasp of the character, you are soon immersed in the man and suddenly, the bare stage feels much less so. A video scape of Kinski's most iconic work plays behind Johnson cleverly connecting the audience with the real Kinski and his most transformative film characters.
The language and content are shocking and confronting. Kinski's insatiable and perverted sexual appetite is described in explicit detail, but the sheer volume of smut and its constant presence in his life seems more psychotic than pornographic. You are drawn into his psychosis, feeling both intrigue and revulsion at the brilliance of the actor and the simultaneous addiction that destroys his life and the
lives of his loved ones.
Johnson is clearly a fan of Kinski's body of work, and you can’t help but imagine his own internal conflict in discovering the actor's sordid personal history. It draws parallels with the seemingly unending list of well-regarded actors now being publically accused of sexual crimes against minors. The mix of adoration for their talent and disgust for their heinous acts presents a challenge to us all.
This piece is not pretty and definitely not for the easily offended, but it is a performance that is worth checking out.
Nicole Russo
When: 13 Feb to 22 Feb
Where: Holden Street Theatres - The Studio
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au