Adelaide Fringe. Casus Circus & Cluster Arts. Ukiyo at Gluttony. 8 Mar 2019
You & I is a must see. It is outstanding entertainment.
It is intelligent physical theatre, circus, dance, acrobatics, trapeze, and magic all rolled into one through the narrative of a touching story about being in a loving and sustaining relationship. But not one word is spoken.
Jesse Scott and Lachlan Mcaulay are the co-founders of Casus, a highly successful and popular circus company. In You & I they bare their own real-life relationship and give us a glimpse into themselves as individuals and also into their partnership – domestic and professional. They are masculine, good looking, and sensitive. Yes, this might be thought of as a ‘gay story’, but lazy labelling like that is to diminish it.
Scott and Mcaulay’s physical feats are impressive and their lithe and toned bodies are tough, very tough. There is much visceral strength in their performance and, as is often the case in circus, one needs to unreservedly rely on the other for one’s very safety. The potential for disaster is never far away, and physical danger threatens at every turn. Is the risk of a different nature because your on-stage partner is also your real-life partner?
There is also great delicacy and sensitivity in the performance. Moments of strength and physicality are contrasted with precise choreographed routines that are deft and intimate. Indeed, they are beautiful.
As audience, we are left in no doubt there is unconditional trust between Scott and Mcaulay. You can see it in the way they look deeply into each other’s eyes, the way they smile and sometimes frown at each other. The depth of their communication is palpable. One senses their relationship is rock solid and will endure all that life can throw at it.
Their show is engaging on a number of levels. The set is simple, as is usually the case for a Fringe event where everything has to be assembled and then stripped away with great speed, but is carefully prepared and designed. It imitates a cosy household setting, with the usual furniture and ornaments. There are books, clothes trunks, glasses of wine, and evidence of hobbies. All these things are used to give a glimpse of Scott and Mcaulay’s daily lives and are used to play out the narrative. Nothing is wasted. The sound scape is appealing as well. Every backing song is carefully chosen and assists in telling the story. The lighting is simple but sharply draws attention to the kernel of activity on stage.
This show is one of many circus acts on offer in the Fringe, but it stands apart. It is exceptional and deserves the long and enthusiastic standing ovation it received from the entire audience.
Highly recommended
Kym Clayton
When: 8 to 17 Mar
Where: Ukiyo at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Verbatim Theatre Group. AC Arts – Main Theatre. 8 Mar 2019
Teenagers’s lips were sewn together in protest. Reza Berati, a 23-year-old Iranian Kurd asylum seeker, was clubbed to death by two Manusians in 2014. Iranian Omid Masoumali self-immolated in April 2016 in detention in Nauru in protest of conditions and delay. He died a few days later. Violence and self-harm were said to be daily occurrences in Australia’s poorly run detention centres as a consequence of the Pacific Solution – a policy where no asylum seeker by boat, refugee or otherwise, would set foot on Australia. These and other stories illustrate the shameful and cruel reality of Manus Island and Nauru detention and are starkly realised in this production by Verbatim Theatre Group.
Nazanin Sahamizadeh formed the company in 2013 specifically to inform her fellow Iranians of the appalling conditions of illegal immigration to Australia. She and her seven fellow cast members use rotating monologue to recount in verbatim the words of asylum seekers and refugees which had been smuggled out from the camps. The main character is Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian-Kurd who fled Iran after his colleagues were arrested. Picked up as a boat person and sent to Manus, he has managed to regularly report to The Guardian using a mobile phone. He is still on Manus Island where he was taken in 2013.
Each actor inhabits a main story of misery, starting with their reasons for illegal immigration. Conditions of near starvation and fearing each day will be your last during the sea crossing in leaky boats, and finally being swamped by stormy waves are imaginatively represented with raining water and a flotilla of jerry cans. However, the camps are not conjured as well. The declamatory and shouty deliveries from the cast are unchanging. The idea of verbatim text precludes useful and dramatic interaction between characters and the result is something like eight simultaneous one-person performances. Persian audiences can easily cope with the often hurriedly delivered text, but for the rest of us, the constant effort to refer to the surtitles took our gaze and empathy away from the performance; more non-verbal communication would alleviate this. Even so, gut-wrenching performances realise the mental and physical breakdown caused by lack of control, gnawing uncertainty, and poor conditions. Indeed, the production is so successful in conveying the miserable and harrowing journey of illegal immigration by boat to Australia that it might even act as a deterrent, which of course, is government policy.
Manus is an uncomfortable truth-telling and to hear the word Australia associated with perpetrator is embarrassing and shameful.
David Grybowski
When: 7 to 10 Mar
Where: AC Arts – Main Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Wielding Theatre. 8 Mar 2019
Gravity Guts takes this enormous thing called the universe, in which we all feel as an inestimable, inadequate, barely-there grain of nothing, and turns that on its head.
In an endearingly direct, highly sophisticated comic performance, playwright/actor Sophia Simmons’ early teenage character Sophia eagerly showers us with tales, knowledge and enthusiasm for space.
This witty, delightfully cheeky being sparks laughter with astonishing ease. Sophia is a child possessing an extraordinary ability to see the universe from pre Big Bang to now, with a hook into humanity that makes a warm, comprehendible connection between us all and the great unknown.
There is a purpose to this, one in which the singular power of Simmons’ writing, supported by the finest direction of a solo work seen in some time from Milly Cooper, offers a big emotional turn to the work.
Sophia’s family life is not an easy one. It has turmoil and stresses, which find themselves intertwined and expressed through the seeming chaotic order of forces governing the universe.
With utmost ease and extremely precise craft, Simmons and Cooper’s production becomes an extraordinary, deeply affecting meditation on the space between hearts and minds more fully considered and understood in light of the awe that is endless space; all it contains.
Gravity Guts is a remarkable achievement as theatre for all ages. Simmons, originally from Adelaide, has built well on the promise shown when winning Flinders University Young Playwright Award (2013), then Pioneer Playwright Award (2018).
David O’Brien
5 Stars
When: 6 to 10 Mar
Where: Tandanya, Live From Channel 9, Tandanya Arts Café
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Matt Byrne Media. Maxims. 7 Mar 2019
I can assure you that no marriages were consummated in the making of this show, but out of an audience of a hundred, maybe two marriages were saved and a lot more saw something good about it. Producer and director Matthew Byrne’s intention may have been to savage Nine Network’s Married At First Sight for its risk of ritual embarrassment, but maybe he realised that the original couldn’t be any worse, or why kick a dog that doesn’t know any better. His spoofs of scenes from the series too closely resembled the worst of the real thing. What he has written instead is a compassionate, thoughtful, and wryly humorous love letter to marriage, following the formula of all his other Fringe shows and the affections of 2014’s dateless.com and The Luv Boat of 2016. One is beginning to think that as well as being a fine actor-comedian-producer in the manner of Benny Hill and Bob Hope, Byrne is also a sentimental bloke.
The fans of Byrne’s Fringe shows – and there are many or he wouldn’t be gifting a new show every year for 16 years - will recognise the routines that seem so constant and formatted, but the excoriating fan mail would flood in if he left anything out. Two couples, one young and one ageless, will have to cope when the masks come off. We follow their feelings from the reasoning of going on such a crazy show to reflections on the outcome. On the journey, joker Irish priests, rapacious wedding planners, go-with-the-flow celebrants, nervous parents, crappy vows, and the worst wedding parties possible are encountered.
Jokes are sometimes borrowed, sometimes new. What’s the difference between a wife and a girlfriend? 20 kilos. Marriage isn’t a word, it’s a sentence. She jumped out of a wedding cake, but then she got bulimia, and the cake jumped out of her. The thing is there’s so many, possibly a couple hundred, and once your first laugh comes, the rest come easier. Besides Byrne himself, two other entertainers return from last year’s Hott Property. Amber Platten is precious in her dumb blond mode, and is objectified mercilessly. Brad Butvila presents more sides to the human condition than a Hindi god. Rose Vallen is as warm as a hot water bottle on a winter night.
Annually, my resistance to the two hour format retreats from a vaudevillian onslaught of laughter and love.
David Grybowski
3 stars
When: 13 Feb to 23 Mar
Where: Maxims, Norwood
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. 29 King William Street, Adelaide. 7 Mar 2019
The shop premise at 29 King William Street has the squeaky clean, white-gleaming clinical look of a High Street cosmetics retail outlet or maybe a surgery. The host turns your gaze to a bag of human fat and then to a display of package soap labeled, Self Human Soap. “Would you like to try the soap?” Handy is a sink and said host helps you lather up and experience the feel of soap made with the by-product of liposuction. Your questioning reveals there were only 2000 bars of soap manufactured in 2016 – each made by hand and individually numbered. I have No. 0875 occupying my desk as I write.
Schuld is German for an amalgam of guilt and debt. Let’s just say you owe something and you’re feeling guilty about it. But it’s a soap business and fabrik means factory. By now you are flabbergasted and intrigued, or if you are thinking of Auschwitz, maybe you should go home, or stay to learn that it’s only a show in an arts festival in 2019, and maybe German-born Dutch creator Julian Hetzel is on to something radically new. Your small party is escorted out of the shop and onto King William Street, around the corner, and into the bowels of the building. Thus begins an incredible education into the particulars of human soap and Hetzel’s virtuous circle to fund the sinking of water bores in a Congo village.
You should experience what happens next without the forearming of my précis. After a disorienting hour in the building, our little group ejaculated through a final door and spilled onto the alleyway. We looked at each other with wonder and couldn’t stop talking about it.
P.S. One can’t wait for the sequel – a vitamin drink made from human blood. Just kidding.
David Grybowski
When: 1 to 17 March
Where: 29 King William Street, Adelaide
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au